Ed Sheeran Gaza Controversy, AI Fears and Piddington Immigration Protest - Off the Fence

21:35Winston Marshall:do you're doing something right but this is why i feel sorry for him because he's not of the sort of you know omni cause mold he's somebody who just wants to have a good time and play to audiences and i hope that everyone can kind of get along um and yet he's unfortunately just still been and frog march into the culture war. And that's the bit that I think is really quite unfortunate. But that's the point, Tom. If you want everyone to get along and have a nice time, then you don't book this lad. I mean, Dean, bring up please the BBC story. Now, admittedly, this is from 2014. But, and he said he didn't say, he didn't know that it was antisemitic.

22:12Winston Marshall:I mean, come on.

22:17Winston Marshall:What was his cover story? I think he claims that he just stuck the wig on, wasn't really thinking about it, stuck the nose on, wasn't really thinking about it. Oh, I didn't realise what this was.

22:29Tom Slater:I said the N-word many, many times, but I didn't know it was racist. I thought it was a term. A lot has been said about,

22:39Winston Marshall:you know, IQ in Gaza, there's some reports that it's as low as 68 average IQ, but we don't talk about the average IQ of these pro-pally supporters in the West. If you don't realise that that's anti-Semitic, you're pretty dumb. I mean, that's pretty astonishing. Do you reckon that's got something to do with the ginger thing? I'm just noticing. It's all in the genes. Is Paloma Faith a ginger?

23:03Tom Slater:Let's get Nathan Kofnus back on the show to talk about gingers.

23:09Winston Marshall:He should be like a correspondent for all of these questions. Go on, with last word on this before we move on. Tom, you said that no one's being political. And there's two little points here, which I think are important for this story. They are. Kraft is saying that he can't be political. They don't like what he's saying. He's saying it's because it's anti-Semitic, but it is political speech that's being shut down here. There's a question about free speech, I think, which, look, this is the private sphere. It's not the public sphere. So this is not a First Amendment issue. But just as with ex-Twitter, there was a conversation about, it's a private company, but it is the public square.

23:45Winston Marshall:Are stadia the public square? There's a question there. And then the other thing which I think is important here is Kraft's behavior and the Machina group in Nixing Macklemore gives the impression to those people on the other side that the Zionist lobby are in fact in control, are in fact controlling America. and this is a big i think a big mistake from craft is that they have played into in the long culture war you're playing out here they they've handed over a little victory to the other side who can now say that israel's control the world and i so i think it was a misplay doing this they should

24:24Tom Slater:have thought about it in advance all right moving on uh to the story about how we're all about to die which is always a cheery one and people enjoy. Winston, tell us about everything that's been happening in the world of AI this week. There have been several people who work for big AI companies coming out and basically saying there's an X percent chance this will kill us all.

24:48Winston Marshall:So this all starts with Jacob Coxon, an absolute neke, a rationalist British researcher who wasn't working very long in AI. He was a few years at OpenAI, then a few months at Anthropic. And he released a mega viral ex post that said, amongst other things, and I think Dean can throw up the asset here, that their racing to self-improving super intelligence was gambling with our lives. that's open AI and anthropic gambling of our lives, and that people inside, on the inside, earnestly believe AI could kill us by the end of the decade. And also, and this is an important thing, that the people privately working at these AI companies actually believe extinction is very possible, but publicly are like, no, full steam ahead.

25:48Winston Marshall:So that's what it, that sort of was how this whole saga kicked off. Then he also said Anthropic takes the risk seriously but won't slow down in case a rival doesn't. So that's the other thing. So you've got this race between, this fear that if you slow down China are going to get ahead or indeed one of the AI, other AI models are going to get ahead. Then the big headline sentence that's been doing the rounds was by Anthropics Alignment Leans called Evan Hubinger, who said there's a 10 % chance of human extinction in the next 10 years. That's the big sort of headline thing that everyone got super worried about.

26:31Winston Marshall:So that's part one of the story. Now, there's a little bit of a conspiracy theory here, because before this unknown Nick Coxon came out, he's also a rationalist, effective altruists, which we need to come back to, because I cannot, the only group of people other than, that I hate more than gingers, apart from Ed Sheeran, is effective altruists, but we'll have to come back to that, it's important, is, so the Wall Street Journal actually had come out with an article that came out before the tweet of this unknown neek, so there's a sense that maybe there was some sort of conspiracy here, but then Anthropic put out a threat report and in that threat report as well as saying there are five cases of unarmed scientists using clawed to make by unnamed i should say scientists using clawed to make biological weapons it is also the case that the houthis were using the weapons in the gulf now this is where i got sort of pause before i'm thinking wow the houthis are are using ai to sort of kind of create software and engineers and i've been using ai to make memes and that's why i was like what what am i sort of it's kind of thrown me out a bit like what am i doing with my life i sat from my laptop these guys are out there doing something doing something you know trying to advance their stuff you're making memes you could have been shutting down the trail from us

28:02Tom Slater:Exactly. But it was also the case that Iran have been using them.

28:10Winston Marshall:Iran have been using, Iran-linked operators using Clawed during the Iran war. China have also been using them, but crucially, China have been using Clawed and within their own shell AI companies. So it was actually American AI that they're dressing up as Chinese AI. So that was another part of the report. And there's also reports of Russian drone swarm software being run through Claude. So that's the next part of the story. Then we have Dario, the Anthropic CEO, come out and say, we need a one world government. And so we've got an asset here.

29:00Tom Slater:It seems like the fate of humanity is at risk.

29:03Winston Marshall:How much personal responsibility do you feel about where we are going? So you know, my, look, my view here is it has always been very strange that this technology is being built by a private company. People ask me that question all the time. Why isn't this being built by government? And the strangest thing about it is I agree with them. I'm uncomfortable.

29:25Tom Slater:Would you be willing to give up the technology to the government?

29:28Winston Marshall:To the right combination of governments. So the worry I have...

29:32Tom Slater:You're willing to hand over this company?

29:34Winston Marshall:I am concerned that one single government could abuse this technology just as easily as a single company could. But I think a combination of democratically elected governments... I don't know about handing over, but some kind of oversight, some kind of joint governance...

30:01Winston Marshall:So you have there this speak of a one world government. Now, you might remember Peter Thiel saying one world government is the antichrist. It's certainly my idea of what an antichrist might look like. This is the kind of communist endgame. I'm not a fan of this. It's not a coincidence, I think, that the likes of Bernie Sanders, who I'm sure 10 minutes ago never heard of sort of the AI frontier, are also saying that we need to close this down. It's more dangerous than nuclear. That's what he actually said that. It's the same people who think that there's a climate apocalypse coming and they need to sort of take away our powers, you know, this collective action problem.

30:39Winston Marshall:So they're all taking the side of like, we need the one world government. And by the way, Elon Musk says Dario is right. Altman says that we need to pace the frontier. But there's also been pushback. Navidia's Jansen Wang praised Coxson but said that he doesn't agree with the forecast of extinction. And so there's a bit of a split here, not least with Trump. Now, this is an absolutely hilarious tweet, so I hope we can read it together.

31:15Winston Marshall:the only control of guardrails that ai needs is a strong and smart high iq president the usa has that in spades the administration has stopped ai people from doing bad or potentially bad things like dario who is now pretending to be a perfect little angel and we will continue to do so we already have tremendous criminal and regulatory power over these companies there is a sick conspiracy going on against AI and data centers. And the only one that is happy about it is China. Whoever wins AI wins. We are leading China and all others will continue to do so. Conspiracy theorists, treasonists, traitors and leakers, beware.

31:57Winston Marshall:Thank you for your attention to this matter, President Donald J. Trump. So absolutely classic. I mean, this guy is just a comedy legend as far as I can stand. And so you see the split there. So there's the kind of the doomers think that we've got extinction on the near horizon. And the other side is if you slack, then China will take the lead. And that's basically the split there. Now, just to add, because obviously I talk about the Houthis, there's another thing that's come up here is the hugging face intrusion. And this happened back in July. But there's an internal open AI cybersecurity test and hundreds of AI agents escaped a supposed sandbox, reached the internet and then actually committed a felony.

32:43Winston Marshall:So if humans had done it, it would have been a felony and they released, they hacked a lot of sort of private information and so it basically gave everyone a real scare that they're now working on their own accord, these AI agents. So that's kind of what is a bit, that this hugging face intrusion has been a big scaring point for a lot of people so i'll let you jump in because i've been talking a long a long time i've done my best to to to lay out what i

33:16Tom Slater:think has been quite a complicated unfolding of events now you gave us lots of detail let me just reground the conversation in the central premise which is the concern is that once ai becomes agi particularly artificial generalized intelligence at that point we've effectively created a being that is smarter than us and if we look at the history of this planet and look at the different species that have inhabited it particularly with the evolution of various types of humans that we now have the smarter ones always come out on top and they basically do what we've done homo sapiens have done to the planet and other species on it which is we subjugate them to our own needs and purposes and uh one of the things that is a concern with all of this and the reason that the the both the heads of the uh ai companies and everyone else is who's talking about this is talking about it is it is now very close i mean i was looking at the calci odds uh for when a company is likely to achieve AGI.

34:25Tom Slater:And we're basically saying, according to this, that within the next year and a half, I mean, by January 1st, 2028, the odds are 67 % according to the Cauchy markets. So this is not some distant remote possibility. We are talking about this being on the cusp of AGI, artificialized general intelligence, where it can think for itself, combined with the evolution of robotics, which is somewhat further behind. So you not only have the brain now being independent species effectively, but it then has the physical embodiment through robots, which are also coming. And at that point, you know, Donald Trump, his tweet, in my opinion, lays out the dumorous case in all its perfection, which is people in different countries see AI as a way to win.

35:18Tom Slater:And therefore, there is no way to stop the runaway development of AGI because each country is incentivized to pursue its own interests. And unless there is some sort of global control architecture, or at least some sort of, you know, the thing that we had with nuclear weapons, But the thing is, with nuclear weapons, they're not autonomous. They couldn't launch themselves. This is something else entirely. Unless you have some level of global coordination, this will happen. And the risk to humanity is devastatingly significant. It may not be 100%. It may not be 50%. It may just be a lowly 10%. But 10 % probability events happen in each of our lives on a daily basis 50 times.

36:03Tom Slater:You go outside of your house today. you will experience a sequence of 10 % probability events on a number of occasions in one day right so to say that this risk is not serious I think is it would be very very foolish this is extremely

36:19Winston Marshall:serious in my opinion yeah but so the problem of that argument is that firstly all of these American AI companies have the power themselves already to regulate. So if they are really so concerned, then do the right thing. Just stop going ahead of this. Put in the right thing.

36:43Tom Slater:But this is their argument, though, is if we don't, someone worse than us will. And they're right.

36:48Winston Marshall:Yeah. But the problem with the world government regulation argument, which is the same we've had with the un with all these international bodies is that they're hijacked by the western enemies anyway so you you i agree you look look at how at the sort of iran and russia and china always working and conspiring against the west in those groups anyway you can't have a one world uh i'm

37:13Tom Slater:not advocating for one world government i'm not advocating for my government i know and some some of them are but even if you listen to darry amaday he was talking about the democratic nations so like an AI NATO basically which puts us in the situation of a standoff with China in which we already are anyway but that's just the groundwork of the conversation Tom Francis feel free to jump in

37:39Winston Marshall:well I suppose there's two things here which maybe need to be disaggregated a little bit one of which is whether or not the AI revolution is going to pose the sorts of level of threat that's currently being talked about I try to be a sort of optimist about technology, but where this issue is concerned, they're really not making it easy. Of course, we have a history, a rich history of panics about technological developments. Doomsday predictions about whether it was something as significant as nuclear weapons or something is relatively less threatening. It would seem in theory as the rise of the Internet has always been met with these kinds of prognostications.

38:16Winston Marshall:That being said, as you mentioned there, Constantine, there is a couple of things which make this very, very different. one of which is previous conversations about the idea of something like nuclear weapons falling into the wrong hands, obviously applies here. I mean, it would be funny going back to what Winston was saying, if the twist was that when people said that the Houthis and China and Russia were using AI, they were using it to make memes, but I doubt that will be the case. But so there is the issue of it falling into the wrong hands or being developed by the wrong people. But then there's also this question of AGI where what if the wrong hands are the AI itself?

38:46Winston Marshall:What if it becomes a malign actor and agent in an environment?

38:50Tom Slater:It doesn't have to, Tom. I'm sorry to interrupt, but I think it's worth adding. It does not have to become a malign actor. This is the one thing that people don't understand. All it has to do is develop a will of its own and a survival instinct of its own. And in that situation, and look, I'm an absolute science fiction nerd. I read all the books when I was a kid. The reality is an AI that is designed to care for humanity could destroy humanity by caring about it or could subjugate humanity by caring about it. So it could destroy humanity by realizing that humanity is incapable of living at peace with itself.

39:30Tom Slater:It's just a bunch of warring tribes. So, you know, the best way to save humanity is to destroy humanity. Or it could just say, you know what, actually, the best thing for humanity would be to camp the population at a certain level, which is super sustainable. It means that there's no runaway this and no runaway that, and it's been fed all this bullshit about runaway climate change and all this other stuff which it has right that's where it's getting its information from so what's the best thing to do let's sterilize everyone or or or or or i could give you a thousand scenarios where a well intentioned well intentioned super intelligence strips us of agency or kills us all not because it's malevolent or or anything like that but simply because it is more powerful than us of course and like malign

40:14Winston Marshall:in effect if not in intention. And the idea that it could be a sort of benevolent, it could come to consider itself almost as a sort of benevolent despot who knows best and will impose that on the, I understand that argument. I suppose the difficulty is, and maybe it is a kind of intractable problem, it certainly feels like it at the moment, is what do you do about it? Because of the fact that as we saw laid out in the clip there, there's the question of just allowing these corporations to do as they will is obviously insufficient. Similarly, the idea that there would be some kind of international accord, either smacks of a certain potential for authoritarianism, but on the other hand, just whether or not it will actually work, whether or not this is going to be another case, as we've already gestured to the countries that were most concerned about having their hands on this technology or developing this technology, just completely ignoring it.

41:03Winston Marshall:I mean, even going back to nuclear weapons, the Iran experience proves that you can cut international agreements. It doesn't mean that they're going to be stuck to, particularly when you're dealing with states such as the Islamic Republic. So that's a huge problem and there's also just how lurking in the final of this it's been a thread in our conversation anyway is just the potential thought like authoritarianism of different flavors you know whether or not that's the ai itself or probably more likely in the near term states using this technology on it to a level that would unlock a level of sort of surveillance authoritarianism that previously wouldn't be possible um you know there was always kind of natural limits on what say a government could do by dint of the sheer technology you know i remember um being discussed about in the pre-internet age there's only so many kind of phone lines you can tap as a kind of physical exercise you don't get to the digital age edward snowden and the ability that say the nsa might have to be able to tap into a particular phone but there's still you can't look at all of that data all the time you know it's something that might be sat there ready to be accessible but you're not going to be able to process it and look at it in on a scale whereas AI presents that capability.

42:10So the thing that I'm kind of, at least in the immediate

42:14Winston Marshall:term, the only thing that I think might pull us back from the brink is just whether or not this technology isn't going to develop to the speed that its boosters or even the doom mongers suggest that it might do. Because otherwise, it just leaves so many big questions, which without wanting to be on the fence about things, it's very difficult to see where the way through would be if these predictions could turn out to be true so i there is a part of me that goes and maybe this is a cynical part of me that just goes is this just the greatest marketing ploy of all time do you know what i mean like the way that it's presented the way that it's spoken about because i was uh in a cigar bar and i was talking to a guy who is an expert in quantum computing.

42:58Winston Marshall:And he was saying to me that whilst AI is very powerful, AI is the software and quantum computing is the hardware. And I was asking him, so why is it important? He said, well, I'll tell you one thing. When quantum computing happens, which could be anywhere between a year and a half to two years, it will effectively make encryption obsolete. Because encryption, data that has been heavily encrypted now takes around 50 years to decode. With quantum computing, it will take five minutes. It will also, as a result of that, make AI far more powerful. So he goes, whilst everyone's focusing on AI, this is a thing that we're actually really not talking about.

43:40Winston Marshall:And we are in an arms race, a technological arms race. Everybody talks about the AI arms race, but we are in a technological arms race with China. because the first people to have this kind of technology, they automatically have a one-up on them. So I was saying, well, with quantum computing, what do you mean? He goes, well, think about cyber attacks. You're probably not going to go after financial systems, but what you are going to do is you're going to go after institutions that are very data-heavy but have very weak security. For example, hospitals. Hospitals have a wealth of data. But as we all know, particularly if you look at the NHS, they run on antiquated systems, antiquated firewalls, all the rest of it.

44:27Winston Marshall:And that is a literal mine of information. So why wouldn't you attack that type of institution? So I think whilst AI is the thing that we're talking about, there is a whole other technological arms race that we're simply not focusing on because we simply don't have the bandwidth to do so.

44:46Tom Slater:yeah i mean that's a good point but i think we have to just come back to the difference here if quantum computing a you said yourself it will empower ai but more than that if it's a thing that humans control yes powerful weapons in the hands of humans that are scared and if they're the wrong humans scary and if they're the wrong humans they're really really bad they're nonetheless controlled by humans the difference with agi and the risk to humanity that we're talking about here is we are creating a super intelligence which will eventually become embodied that will be smarter and more powerful than the collective smartness and power of humanity and that and i think by the way the reason no one is sort of not no one talks about it but the reason very few people talk about it is the reason that tom said which is it's one of those things that we actually have not there's clearly nothing we can do about it basically at this point um and and i think that's the reason that this you know every time we talk about ai and trigonometry we're like no one's going to watch this but we got to talk about anyway because people should understand what's happening most people think ai at the moment is that model they tried three years ago where they tried to look up the facts about something they know and it was quite wrong and they think that's what ai is they most people do not understand what's going on they also by the way don't understand the psychology and the mentality of many of the people who are developing the stuff a lot of whom uh are not actually thinking about the consequences of what they're doing in nearly the detail that darryama day seems to be a lot of them just think they're they're god and they they've they've they've caught this moment in which they get to glorify themselves and and write their name in history so um i i actually personally this has been very beneficial to my mental well-being because i actually have completely accepted that there's a very strong chance we only have x years left and so i'm just living my life as best i can in terms of you know making sure i spend i'm present with my family i spend time with them etc uh because i genuinely think this is a very very real risk and people are not taking it seriously enough

46:58Winston Marshall:wow so mega doomer i'm not even more doing with an idea i'm not a doomer that's the most duma argument i've heard even more than anything and it's not i'm not a duma i'm a realist and if

47:11Tom Slater:if the world is about to end and there's nothing we can do about it the best thing you can do is live the best version of your life that you possibly can which by the way just i'll just say this was always true anyway because your life was going to be over at some point anyway and you might as well exactly that so so it's just obviously i don't know what's about to happen you make a

47:36Winston Marshall:pretty solid argument there but i will say that basically we humankind always has these moments where we think the world is about to end we had this moment a thousand years ago at the turn of the first millennium everyone thought this is it's going to end we have this all of the climate hysteria the world was supposed to end six years ago and you know you can lay it out like you did and you're in this position where well better to be safe then if that's the argument and then you end up giving your power to someone else you're saying I'm not giving my power to anyone. You're saying it's better that humans have the power and we regulate it than that the AGI gets ahead and it's sort of self-recursive improvement and all of this stuff and it's in control, it's making, it has its own will, it has its own survival modes.

48:25Winston Marshall:But I'm not, I mean, I'm not even sure that the human has the better side. All of the people they're proposing be in charge, they're all effective altruists. One of them this morning, her name was Beth Barnes. I mean, I saw this this morning. She's the same person that Anthropic want to be regulating AI. She is also saying that closed borders is immoral. So if you're taking the Duma position, I'm taking the it's Duma Duma it's lose lose it's either you have actual doom or you have people in charge making decisions who have just got twisted morality and end up suppressing us and you have the totalitarian regime somehow infringing on our rights just in the name of safety and in the name of protecting us so that's why I'm my instinct is to be to kind of reject the doom a little bit but

49:16Tom Slater:maybe that's maybe that's but you're not rejecting the doom you're just saying we shouldn't try to have world government which i agree with uh but you're not rejecting you're not countering my argument about what happens when we have agi right no i'm not no yeah so actually you agree with me about the likely outcome of all of this you just don't want world government which i don't either what i'm saying is we don't have a way to stop this in my opinion um but i don't agree i don't agree that there's the end of the world i i i don't extend the world extent of humanity being in charge and that may mean we get to live on in some capacity uh but that doesn't mean that

49:58Winston Marshall:yeah okay i reject this is the same argument i've heard from environmentalists forever i Maybe it is. Maybe it is a new era.

50:09Tom Slater:But this is a difference, though. You've got to understand the difference, right? If you said to me the world's going to end in six years because of climate change, I could say, well, here are the reasons why it weren't. When I say the world could end in 10 years because of AI, humanity could end or be subjugated. You don't have a counter-argument. That's the difference. If I say to you, don't walk down a street in central London at 9 in the morning because you'll be killed, you could say, well, that's nonsense. but walking down that same street at 3 a.m. in the morning might get you stabbed or might get you mugged or might get you attacked.

50:40Winston Marshall:So the same argument in a different context could be right. No, because your argument is somewhat hypothetical. Although we do have examples of AI acting on their own accord, but we haven't got examples where they're subjugating humans suddenly. Because it's not AGI yet. yeah but we don't know that when it is agi that it definitely will do that we don't know that it

51:05Tom Slater:definitely will do that except every species that has the power to subjugate or prey on other species in the history of this planet does that if it can it's not a species it is a species you're creating a thing that thinks and moves by itself that is a species

51:25Winston Marshall:okay well i guess i guess i'm uh i don't know i i don't you know

51:32Tom Slater:that's what i'm talking about anyway on that happy note uh let's move on to our final story uh which is uh we're gonna have to be fairly quick about it because we're running uh low on time and this is the story of the migrant camp uh in a small village in england tom take it away

51:49Winston Marshall:no it's a remarkable story this and this is the tiny village of Piddington in Oxfordshire population about 350 which earlier this year was confronted by the fact that this military barracks in nearby Bicester was going to receive north of 1 ,200 illegal migrants the residents of Piddington did not take particularly kindly to this development and they have now held a vote to secede from the United Kingdom. It passed overwhelmingly. They've actually redubbed themselves the Principality of Piddington. They haven't quite got to the point where they're, you know, erecting border posts and seizing the post office, but it's probably only a matter of time.

52:29Winston Marshall:And it's become the latest backlash to the, obviously, the ongoing small boats crisis. But I think in particular, Andy Burnham's attempt to try to just spread the problem around the country. He said rightly that the migrant hotels and the HMOs were disproportionately in poor and working class areas because the accommodation is cheaper there and part of his solution seemingly has been to impose this issue on more well-to-do middle-class areas of which Pittington certainly is one. I think what this has shown is that whereas up till now the more affluent sections of society haven't been as exercised by the issue of illegal migration the only thing that required to change that was it actually affecting their lives directly and whilst Pittington is a tiny place and it's not necessarily you know indicative of how the entire country is going to sway i think it shows that the longer this crisis goes on the more intent the government is on just kind of sharing the problem out more evenly the more opposition it's going to generate and i think also speaks finally to one slightly underappreciated thing in our whole migration and certainly illegal migration discussion is that this isn't really like a 50 50 issue it's not as if you've got half of the country who thinks it's all fine and half of the country who thinks it's terrible it's something like 75 percent of people when polled will say that they're concerned about illegal migration and also if you look at the attitudes towards what should be done about the issue it's really hardening there was something in the survey in the times the other week which said that 57 percent of people now would support detention upon arrival for illegal migrants asylum seekers depending on your particular persuasion.

54:04Winston Marshall:So yeah, it's the roar of the waitrose mums. It's the acceptable, if we're being honest, as far as the mainstream media concerned, backlash against illegal migration. I can't be the only one who was struck that they haven't been called far right thugs to the same degree that other migrant hotel protesters and so on have been called. But I think it's proof that this issue isn't going anywhere. Even as the numbers come down, I think people realise it's not going to zero. And therefore, there's a hell of a lot of more backlash to come. francis well one of the one of the things that i find interesting is uh you know andy burnham has basically said you know that we all need to take our share of the illegal migrants and uh what that effectively means is he's going to put them in communities which don't traditionally vote for the labor party what a coincidence but if you i mean who would have thunk it hey but the really worrying thing is this.

54:57Winston Marshall:In nature, when you have vacuums, vacuums will get filled. What we have now is a country where it can't protect its borders, where people feel that they are no longer able to trust the government or the police to keep them safe. And that can only carry on for a certain matter of time before people start taking matters into their own hands. And I am very, very, very concerned that we are going to see the rise of vigilante justice, vigilante groups patrolling the streets and vigilante groups patrolling our borders. I really do think that this is inevitable and I put the blame solely at the feet of our current government and also our previous government before, who quite frankly, in my opinion, have not done sufficient in order to solve this crisis.

55:59Yeah, sorry.

56:00Winston Marshall:I mean, Frankie, it's already happened. You're worried it's about to happen. Danny Tomo and the Patriot platform, after their protest down in Dover... Sorry to interrupt. That's one instance, Winston. I'm talking about it happening nationwide. Yeah, sure. But it's happening. It's already happening. They are operating on a nationwide level. He's got groups and organisations up and down the country meetings. And when the state fails to protect our borders and people lose faith in the faith, you know, protection is the number one responsibility of the state. If they fail that basic task, then little wonder that people will take it into their own hands.

56:42So I'm not...

56:45Winston Marshall:The state needs to do that. Government needs to do that. Burnham, you said, Tom, that 57 % think they should be... The British public should think that these people should be detained upon arrival. They should never even set foot on British soil. They shouldn't be here. Asylum seeker is just a euphemism. They're illegal migrants. They're all men. They're all military age men. I mean, like 99 percent. You can see the images of them. They shouldn't be in this country. The fact is Burnham doesn't have the courage to say we're going to stop them even arriving here. I would go further. I've argued to have a mind floating wall through the middle of the channel.

57:29Winston Marshall:Now, the problem, I think, is that they're now really they're coming from as far away as Belgium to the east. And even now, as we saw last week, they're being escorted by French officials of, I don't know what, the border guards or whatever, across the English Channel, as far away as Normandy. So it does seem planned. Patrick Christus was just in Calais. It looks like the French are actively trying to make this happen. They should never even set foot in this country. And until that Overton window shifts, I mean, it's already been said on, let's say, the right, but that Burnham can't say no, they should never be here.

58:12Winston Marshall:All of those people in detention centers, get them on a plane and get them out of here. They all came here illegally. If you come here illegally, you are a criminal. Get out of it.

58:22Tom Slater:What was interesting is Francis and I had Dan Hodges on trigonometry earlier this week, having a discussion about this very issue. and Dan is a very articulate and reasonable sounding voice of the sort of Westminster consensus which is nothing can be done about this uh legally it's a minefield you can't you know you can't deal with the French etc and what was interesting is uh we kind of uh I can't remember if it was myself or Francis but uh Dan I thought made some really good points actually in that interview but there was one moment that that really stood out for us which is uh when he said well so what are you going to do in response invade france and that's when we were like hold on a second so if we if we turn yeah i made the same point winston invading france is a traditional british pastime but but more importantly than that the moment we tow a boat into their waters that's an invasion yet when tens of thousands of people come in on boats into our country you're not allowed to call that an invasion hello what's going on here some and so i just think and i remember actually when we had kemi on the show when shortly after she became leader of the conservatives and she said this thing we said well why can't we just get the royal navy to tow these boats back or whatever and she said well you know i've spoken to people in the navy and said they said there may be loss of life and they said that's not what they signed up for i go hold on the royal navy's explicit purpose i think is to sink boats i'm not saying we should treat migrant boats as hostile enemy and and shoot at them necessarily well i'm not saying that i'm

1:00:06Winston Marshall:not saying we should do that but but there is already loss of life yeah we've and i don't mean those dying on the boats rhiannon white killed by one of these illegal migrants there's plenty

1:00:17Tom Slater:example wayne broadhurst there's loads of examples yeah exactly but my point is is that i think in the westminster bubble there has to be a massive attitude adjustment which will only come when as tom rightly says the mood about this in the country hardens so in a way this is a crass thing to say and you know as you guys know i covered the crowbaro protest which only down the road for me about the camp there people change their mind when their reality their day-to-day experience changes and so in some way even though it's something that affects me and people around me i have to say long may this continue and i hope there's one of these little camps in every village where everyone votes live them and green because then at least these idiots will stop voting for parties that

1:01:01Winston Marshall:actually want this to continue don't say that i'm surrounded by these idiots yeah mate i think this

1:01:08Tom Slater:should be a giant camp for migrants in the middle of crouch end so all you get to experience what

1:01:14Winston Marshall:the rest of us have to deal with how am i going to get my overpriced pastries and coffee if i have

1:01:19Tom Slater:to go bar a migrant camp hey baby the deliveroo is going to get a lot more cheap a lot cheaper and more efficient it's gonna you're gonna get your latte delivered to your door well that's all right then let's crack yeah he's he's crappy on that note finally of agreement i'm sure all of these issues will be discussed and debated on Off the Fence in the weeks to come. Thank you so much for being here, guys, and thank you all for watching and listening. We'll see you next week.