Englishness Debate, Migrant Protest Leader Arrested & Burnham's Ministry of Truth - Off the Fence

30:20Winston Marshall:That's true. But this is why it gets complicated. This is my point. There's a tradition of hating it as well.

30:28Tom Slater:There's an English tradition of hating your country and denying your country exists. Well, exactly. So you saying your ethnic minority friends love England doesn't make them English.

30:39Winston Marshall:It makes them culturally, they are culturally English because, and their loyalty, their patriotic loyalty is to England over any other nation. And so that's another component to it. There's a couple of things that the Conservatives have been getting wrong on this side, which is, this debate has been very interesting to me. So a famous one is Roger Scruton, who's tied it to the land. A lot of his concept of English is tied to the land. And as you just said there, Constantine, if the land of England was conquered or invaded or taken over by people who are entirely from the Asian subcontinent or something like that, and the English were all moved to, I don't know where, Brazil.

31:23Winston Marshall:Is England England or did England move to Brazil? and by the way this happened with Armenia and my you'll know this one but Armenia as a nation has moved all over the place over the last two millennia because the people the tribe moved all over the place or the more famous example the Israelites Israel is referred to as Israel as a noun even when they're not in Israel when they're roaming around the desert the Israel is roaming around the desert because it is the tribe it is a people and and and I think that that and Israel another interesting example because it's not that there are people brought into that tribe who aren't necessarily ethnically Jewish as they move along it's like Moses's wife is a is a Ethiopian or Abyssinian so so anyway the point is it's complicated it's metaphysical not all tribes have the same concept so that when people like this guy the video you played said well if I'm Chinese clearly I'm not Chinese well obviously he's not ethnically Chinese but if the Chinese decided that he was like the Americans have decided that African Americans are American then the tribe decides that they are American and they are American but I have some issues

32:32Tom Slater:with bringing up America Canada and other new world nations because they didn't have what they did and they basically found a way to get rid of them but they didn't have a native people the difference with England with Ireland with France with Germany is that there is a long established in this country for a thousand years effectively native population that has existed here and by the way the interesting example you give about you know we talked about afrid the great but also the formation of a nation i didn't know this until i started traveling around italy a country that i'd really love do you know what the greatest problem the italian army faced in was that the italian army faced in world war one they didn't have a common language because there was no italy it was a collection of tiny city states that spoke their own languages that came together and that the italians only come together for football they they well that's the only time they have but no they have a common language they have a country with foreign borders there is an italian identity that has each other sure in the same way that northerners hate southerners and southerners hate northerners and working class people hate the middle classes and vice versa but they they They formed an identity in a place in which there wasn't one.

33:48Tom Slater:And what I'm saying is people are not going to like this on both the ethno-nationalist right and elsewhere. But we have now put ourselves in a position. People will talk about re-migration on the ethno-nationalist right. You're going to round up millions of ethnic minorities and get rid of them because that's the way to. But it's never going to happen. It's just not going to happen. we're going to have to deal with the reality that what's happened to this country has happened now we were all against it but that is what's happened we have to find a way sorry go ahead let me just

34:22Winston Marshall:do a thought experiment for you sure to use your scenario earlier let's say that south asians took over all of the island of britain yeah would you still be against remigration then well i wouldn't because we wouldn't have any power to deal with it.

34:38Tom Slater:I'm not saying I'm against remigration in and of itself. You mentioned Alfred the Great.

34:42Winston Marshall:Alfred the Great remigrated the Vikings. He said either you assimilate into being English or off you trot. And that's what he did. So right now it's not...

34:51Tom Slater:No, you're comparing a military invasion with people our government has brought in this difference, right? This is actually why it's in some ways more difficult to deal with. If we had an enemy army on the doorstep, actually be pretty easy to get people of this country to get together and go and fight it the reason we're having these debates is what's happened to this country has happened as a result of the actions of its politicians who uh officially uh lead us uh by consent uh these are people that we elected who did this to the country and so it's not the same as a military invasion but my point about re-migration is i am all in favor of deporting all the up to a million illegal immigrants who are in this country and by the way i'm very much in favor of creating the conditions where people who've come from elsewhere who are not contributing who are net takers uh are that we effectively there is no welfare for them here and so they're forced to either up their game or to go back to uh the country from which they've come these are all reasonable measures and they're workable measures hard as they will be for any incoming government to do but the idea that you're that some people on the right believe, it boggles the mind for me, that you're simply going to deal with the consequence of mass immigration by what?

36:10Tom Slater:Stripping nationality from millions of people because of their skin color and shipping them back to where they came from? Are you telling me that that's what the British public are going to get behind?

36:19Winston Marshall:It wouldn't get through the British public as well, which is something that maybe some of the more honest people on that side of the argument would at least accept, which is why they tend to flirt with authoritarianism are all kind of different but you know the diversity of this country such as it is um is a is a fact that needs to be reckoned with and whilst there's been certainly a lot of discomfort about the speed of change over the past 20 or 30 years there are also people across britain white english people if we're going to go back to that category who are were up to a point very comfortable with the level of quote-unquote diversity that we had the problem is it's sustainable at a certain level it's not sustainable at another level and it's certainly not sustainable when you have a policy of state multiculturalism combined with that level of mass immigration and i think going back to the kind of ethnicity and culture and culture and ethnicity question this is something which is really fundamental because clearly there is a relationship between those two things people of one discernible ethnic group will bring with them and will transmit to future generations a certain set of cultural values religious denominations outlook sensibility and it's important to note and it's just a again historical fact that the institutions of this country that broadly speaking the sense of self of this country has been born out of the pretty stable english ethnic majority that has existed for as you say constant a thousand years so to completely deny that seems to me to be a denial of just fact aside from anything else but also i kind of return to this point which is that if you want to maintain a notion of national identity whether we're talking about british or whether we're talking about english which is not purely ethnically exclusive exclusive which will allow people to buy into being a member of this society however defined provided that they do subscribe to the culture that they love the culture they're a part of it they're almost shaped by even without realizing it this is not about them being given a powerpoint presentation or told to go off and read shakespeare it's something that they live and breathe almost without realizing um then you need to be concerned about hyper diversity and you need to be concerned about mass immigration multiculturalism and the sort of demographic challenges I say which sort of flow from it it's almost like to to rescue civic nationalism you need to recognize that these issues matter I suppose is where I'm coming from in this particular question and something that gets lost I think a lot of the time and also I think people on the people are just trying to pretend that these issues aren't really a problem or want to refight the arguments over migration and racism that we might have had in previous generations you're precisely fueling the more explicitly hardline racist tendencies that you claim you want to combat you are surrendering the territory to them you're giving them a script and i just wish more and more people would recognize that i suppose is that if you see your ex mentions and think where the hell are these people come from or where the hell are these arguments come from it's not representative of the british public but it's clearly a growing tendency you should take these matters seriously and want to focus on how we remedy them but at the moment there's a kind of doubling down into as i said denialism of the fact of english ethnicity on the one hand or a crude um simplistic and quite authoritarian measures to combat it on the more ethnic nationalist hardcore ethnic nationalist side so yeah surely without saying too centrist about it we've got to plot a course between those two particular options i i think one of the major challenges when we're talking about this debate is that we've never had to encounter it before we're all feeling our way through we don't know because none of us are completely certain we think we might know but which the reason we're having this debate is that we're simply not 100 certain on or on this topic because we've never had to confront it because the reality is as a result of successive government immigration policies we've been forced to confront it if you look at spain i mean people were talking about italy i think spain is actually a far better example of this.

40:09Winston Marshall:Spain isn't really a country. If you look, if you ask a Catalan if he's Spanish, the answer would be no. That would be reflected on in its football team, Barcelona, famously hating Real Madrid, who is seen as the team of the royalty, Royal Madrid, and the same with the Basques, etc, etc. And I think one of the real challenges that we're going to have to come to grips with is how are we going to move forward? Because not having this conversation is simply not an option anymore. We have been forced into this and we are going to have to come to a consensus. Because if we don't come to a consensus pretty soon, then what we're going to see and what I really fear is a balkanization of our country where people go, I'm not English, I'm this.

41:03Winston Marshall:I'm not English, I'm that and what we can see but that's already happened no no no no but it's going to happen on a mass scale Winston it's already happening on a mass scale it's I disagree it hasn't happened on a mass scale it hasn't happened on a mass scale because the average person that I talk to right it hasn't happened on a mass scale because the people that I talk to and I go around in London and other places it is happening and it's happening at a rapid scale but I don't think it's happened on a mass scale. Okay, so what exactly is the inflection point that it's suddenly a mass scale? I mean, London, Birmingham, Manchester, or the English, ethnic English, ethnic British, whatever that means, are a minority, albeit the biggest minority.

41:48Winston Marshall:You've got enclaves in London where people don't speak English. You've got towns in the north, like Bradford, where people are completely sort of different loyalties. You've got parts, you see videos, is it Manchester, where people are hoisting the Pakistan flag? Likewise in Birmingham, they've got these allegiances to other countries. Even in Parliament, you've got five or six Islamo-commie independent MPs. As far as I can see, we're already in the middle of it. And that's not going... I don't think we're in the middle of it. I think if when you're in the middle of it, it's when these things as when it openly starts breaking apart.

42:33Winston Marshall:And I think we're on the trajectory. That's why I agree with you. But we haven't reached where it's the peak and the peak is where it gets really dangerous. Yeah, but those are two things, the peak and when it openly starts breaking apart. We don't know. We won't know where the peak is until we're looking back at this all. But it's openly it's definitely openly breaking apart. look at what's going on in the streets it's not just what's happened since October 7th and we're seeing all the sort of violent far left stuff and and politicians being assassinated by the far left literally this year but it's also which a topic we're going to discuss here is now the patriot side are engaged in direct action not just protest direct action trying to do stuff as far as I'm concerned it's already falling apart well I think what Francis is saying there's levels to this game

43:21Tom Slater:And if we don't deal with this, which is why actually we're having this discussion, because my contention, if you remember from the very beginning, is if you want to save Britain from serious civil unrest, you have to change everything we're doing. And part of the thing that Tom is talking about is addressing the demographic concerns, because what people feel about identity is determined by what else is going on. When I came to Britain in 1995, we weren't having these debates because we didn't need to, because you had a country that was overwhelmingly confident in itself still, had an idea of what it was still, that English, Scottish, Welsh, and Northern Irish ethnic groups were not being treated as some sort of lepers whose history is evil and to be denigrated.

44:13Tom Slater:and they were overwhelmingly the majority of the country and when you walked around london it was an english city in a way that it simply is not visually today and you can people can cringe and argue and say that's racist and whatever the fact of the matter is i have people who are friends of mine coming from the middle east coming from africa coming from eastern europe who all arrive in heathrow and all say the same thing what happened that's what they all say right So this thing has changed. And my view is the only way to avoid continued Balkanization and getting to a Yugoslavian type of situation is to find a way to say what is an identity that is not controversial by virtue of being inclusive enough for everyone.

45:03Tom Slater:can we can a you know other than the very fringe of the ethno-nationalist right and the very fringe of the far left can we all agree that everyone on this call is british yes can we all agree that almost everybody in this country go ahead but okay what exactly is it to be british i mean

45:28Winston Marshall:you've not offered something there i have actually if you read my article more nebulous

45:32Tom Slater:than englishness well this is where i was going to argue with you about the values argument because i know people struggle to define it but actually it's only difficult for people who have not lived in other countries you talk about fair play being this vacuous thing i don't think it's vacuous at all i mean one of the things that francis and i have talked about since the very early days of trigonometry we miraculously discovered that the culture in venezuela where his where his family are from is exactly like the culture in lots of the countries i've lived in like russia ukraine in Armenia, where if I screw you over because you left the door open for me to screw you over, I'm the good guy and you're the idiot, right?

46:12Tom Slater:The fact that in Britain, we don't see things like that is actually extremely unusual by world standards. The civility with which this country conduct itself. When I think about England and Britain, I kind of think of it as the Shire. it's a place of calm uh comfort where people get on with their lives and they're able to enjoy things because it's a safe place it's a high trust society and the reason it's a high trust society is that people generally act kindly and respectfully towards each other with a level of respect and understanding and and mutual kind of respect and interest

46:49Winston Marshall:sorry you're just falling around values this is rishi values ism no no no no no what i'm saying

46:55Tom Slater:is there are what my prescription for all of this is is is what i wrote in my article which is this uh britain uh is a country that recognizes the different ethnic groups that make it up the english welsh scottish and northern irish ethnic groups exist they are the founding ethnic groups of this society uh and they are the most central part of its beautiful diversity that is the starting point after that we have to do what katherine burblesing does with her kids at her school which is we have to inculcate ourselves and our children with the idea that they all belong to the nation of britain right we don't have an english passport we don't have a welsh passport we don't have an irish passport we don't have a scottish passport we all have a british passport and it's up to us the citizens of this country to feel our way towards towards what that means resting on the shoulders of the giants who came before us, which you alluded to, which is our history and what it means to be British throughout the ages.

47:55Tom Slater:And that's why we're having this debate, isn't it?

48:01Winston Marshall:Yes, it is. But unfortunately, Britishness is a harder history. Firstly, it's a much shorter history. Secondly, it's a harder history to define. Jacob Rees-Mogg, bizarrely, this week, said that Englishness, that there's no such thing as an ethnicity of Englishness and Scottishness. It's like, what on earth are you talking about? Like, he's obviously not looked into it at all. And he then says that through time, that Englishness and Britishness have been conflated, and they mean the same thing, which I think is just his Victorian bias. Because if you actually go any way further back, you can see, like we've talked about Alfred, it was Rex Angolorum.

48:38Winston Marshall:So Englishness is a thing. Britishness actually technically is older than even Alfred, because I think the first word to describe Ireland was some...

48:48Tom Slater:Well, actually, the Angles displaced the Brits, believe it or not. So the English displaced the original Brits. But these are all historical and fairly boring arguments that won't be of interest to people.

49:01Winston Marshall:Well, the reason I bring it up, sorry, is because I think history is what unites us. I loved what that black lad you had at the beginning saying, you know, he fought in the armed forces. is he actually said that the black people came after the war to rebuild britain actually they came during the war and fought with the british against the nazis and actually that's quite that's maybe a quite as the indians starting point well the indians a million million people army fought for the british empire yeah exactly and maybe and maybe that's a kind of history we can latch on to a unifying that whilst whilst we are sort of correcting people on the other side of this argument is also you have to become some sort of bleeding heart liberal to recognize those contributions to recognize the sense of cultural buying and also to recognize that when we're having this discussion about the demographics of a country and what that might mean for its social cohesion whatever going forward that is not necessarily to make an entirely exclusionary or at all exclusionary argument because of course ethnicity and culture are connected for reasons that are pretty obvious but it's not mutually exclusive i mean one example that i've seen many people on the more ethnic nationalist side get tripped up by is the question of who is more English, Bob Marley or King Charles?

50:12Winston Marshall:Because if you're going by sheer ancestry, it would have to be Bob Marley, because one of his parents was of entirely British ancestry, whereas Charles, primarily German, a bit of Danish in there, and Scottish and what have you. So it's one of those things where clearly this is something that people should and should be encouraged to buy into, and the more hard line we get, that you remove any incentive towards integration at all. You know, which is something that surely no one should want to support. But at the same time, these are big problems which have been foisted upon us and need to be dealt with precisely to rescue the kind of cohesive society that everyone at least claims to want to have.

50:48Tom Slater:All right, guys, we budgeted half an hour for this thinking that's what it would take and we would overrun. We've actually done an hour just on this debate itself. So let's move on. I'm really grateful we had this conversation. I think it's worth carrying it on over time and thinking about what it means actually to unite in our country, which I think is the most important thing. Before we move to our next story, a load of people in the comments were asking when I was in my previous home studio about the map behind me. That map is by a fan of the show called J.G. Fox. And if you want to buy a copy, he's offered for, because so many people were asking, he's offered a 10 discount using the link in the description of this video if you want to get yourself a map they come in different sizes it is a map of the culture war and it i believe it has all our faces in it um my my son funnily enough uh who's four years old he looks around it and uh uh he he could he uh he picks out all the different people that he's met on it anyway uh moving on to our second story and actually not entirely unrelated since we're talking about uh the demographics and and immigration and so on is a poll has come out this week showing that reform uh would get fewer seats than both labor and the tories but it's more complicated than that isn't

52:13Winston Marshall:it francis well it is more complicated than that so you gov which are one of our most most respective pollsters have done a large scale seat by seat poll and what that means is they've gone to every seat in the country. They've polled people and then they've collated the results and they've published them. So we're going to go through it. It says number one, we're heading for a hung parliament. Labour are going to get 241 seats, Tories 130, reform 123. So what that would mean is we have a hung parliament. So Labour would need the Lib Dems and the Greens. Lib Dems, by the way, got 71 seats. Greens got nine seats to declare an overall majority and be able to rule.

53:06Winston Marshall:So what will we get is a left wing coalition. This is also where it gets really interesting because last year reform were on 27 percent of the vote and And they're now on 22%. Now, this is possibly due to Restore and the financial scandals. Restore is taking more than 3 % from Reform's votes, which is a massive blow to Reform, particularly in those marginal seats where it's neck and neck and people are unsure whether to vote Conservative, Reform, Restore. and the split on the right means that those marginal seats reform are simply not getting across the line and those seats are either going to conservative or they're going to labor labor Lib Dems Greens SNP Plaid Kim Roo which is the Welsh party and SNP's over the Scottish Nationalists and those are broadly left-wing in their outlook, win 60 % of seats.

54:14Winston Marshall:Right-wing parties, which are obviously reform, conservatives, restore, win 47 % of the vote. So as it stands, and bear in mind, this is a snapshot of how things are at the moment. This is not a prediction. I'm going to come on to Kaoshi, which is a prediction market which has a slightly different picture. And in the immortal words of the late, great Scott Adams, if nothing changes, and it will, then that's where we are at the moment. Now, if you could bring up the prediction markets, please, Dino. And just for clarity, the Conservatives are the orange, Labour are the blue, navy blue, and Reform are the turquoise.

55:03Winston Marshall:And we can see that reform, and this is a prediction market, so this is what Cauchy predicts will happen at a general election, which is the reform party have a 37 % chance of winning a general election. Labour have a 33 % and Conservatives have a 27%. But where they do agree is that the vote for reform is going down and the vote for Labour is going up in that Burnham bounce. And as well we can see the Conservative Party are starting to get momentum. So as well it changed overnight. So last night, it was saying that Labour were more likely to win. Overnight, it has changed and it's now saying reform.

55:59Winston Marshall:So where we are is this, I think, is really, really, really tight. And it shows some of the damage that the recent financial scandals have made on reform. It has shown the impact Restore is having on the chances of reform getting elected. And it also shows that in a purely tactical sense, maybe the Labour MPs were correct in ousting Keir Starmer and getting Andy Burnham in as they start. But as we all know, a week is a long time in politics. And I'm just putting it out there to the people what they think. Do they agree? Do they disagree? do they think this is a moment in time or do we think this is more representative of a broader

56:46Tom Slater:trend over to you gentlemen and what worth correcting one thing as well it's the calci prediction markets is not what calci predicts it's what the cumulative sum of the bets that are placed and one thing that's worth pointing out actually uh is that one of the possible reasons for the discrepancy between polling and prediction markets is the prediction markets uh don't give you the option for a hung parliament and so people are choosing a party that will win it's very possible that no party will win um and so that's that's another feature of it as well um yeah i just

57:22Winston Marshall:thought i'd throw that in before people yeah exactly i also think before we go and we should apologize to the welsh viewers for france's horrific pronunciation applied cymru which um would no less raise hackles in that part of the country um this is really fascinating i think it's been clear for some time that we were potentially heading towards a hung parliament but there's a few things that we always need to take into account in the new political era that we find ourselves in one of which is that volatility in political preference is a higher scale than we've seen for about 100 years so the willingness of people to switch parties to shop around to tactically vote which is something which is increasingly going to come to the detriment of reform it seems like is is higher than we've previously come to expect it plus we're in this very strange situation where we have multi-party almost european style politics but within a two party first pass the post system and what that means is is that making predictions and even really doing mrp polls is a bit of a mugs game because in the run-up to an election small percentage changes in voting intention could have vastly different effects across the country uh the willingness again to vote tactically could have vastly different effects to the detriment of one party and to the benefit of another so without wanting to just dismiss any of this because obviously I think it is an indication of certainly where Labour are now relative to a year ago and where reform are now relative to a year ago it's hard to make kind of hard and fast predictions off of it one thing is absolutely clear is that Keir Starmer was a gift to reform that maybe they didn't fully appreciate at the time as well as to the Green Party it was a bit of a sort of truism about a year or so ago but I think it more or less held which is that if the next election was whether or not you wanted Keir Starmer to be Prime Minister reform could quite definitively win that but whether or not the next election was one about do you want Nigel Farage to be prime minister by the fact that he does remain a quite polarizing figure in the country whether that's fair or unfair that could well be reformed uh campaign to lose and with the rise of um the an appetite for tactical voting on the left of british politics meanwhile you have the breakdown of um the right wing votes in british politics between the conservatives reform and to a lesser extent restore that just builds in a kind of advantage to the Labour Party which is sort of unthinkable the only thing I would say um suppose which is slightly in in um in reform's corner in all of this is that expectations were risen for them to such a stratospheric level there was always going to be difficult for them a stratospheric level I should say it was always going to be difficult for them to measure up to it even if reform went from you know what was it five MPs at the last election to north of 100 at the next election that would have been a political achievement the the likes of which arguably we've never seen it i mean it took the labor party 22 years to get to over 100 mps in the 1922 election so partly because you saw this collapse of the labor party you saw this collapse of the conservative party this kind of unique opportunity that was lent to the reform party and also the sense amongst right of center voters reform supporters that the country was in such a mess that really reform needed to take the reins of power as soon as possible the country's finished it created a situation of what might in retrospect look like kind of slightly unreasonable expectations placed on any political party um and i generally have the view that if you want to even if you want to be quite radical that requires um a combination of urgency and patience which is not always easy to square but no it has shown that andy burnham he's not single-handedly revive the Labour Party's fortunes.

1:00:51Winston Marshall:The burn and bounce has been pretty modest, I think it's fair to say. And in whatever MRP poll we're looking at or whatever projection we're looking at, it seems to me pretty nailed on that the Labour Party at the very least will lose a significant amount of seats at the next general election, which is worth bearing in mind. They're still kind of from a relative position of weakness in light of 2024. But yeah, everything is still to play for to be frank so in the same way that it would be absurd to write off um the labor party given that the fact that their fortunes have recovered um similarly those who are willing to say you know it's just over for reform now and they are just doomed to kind of entropy i think doesn't take into account just how volatile things are out there and also how let's face it the issues that animate the reform vote are roaring back into focus once again because they can't not whether it's illegal or mass migration so yeah all remains on the table i would say There's two things that interest me here.

1:01:45Winston Marshall:One is that if you look at polling since the last election and you group the left-wing parties, Labour, Lib Dem, Greens, as one block, and you group the right-wing parties, Reform, Conservative, Restore, as one block, basically it is 47-47. and that hasn't changed and when reform had that massive spike after it was just after southport i don't think they were getting left-wing voters particularly they might have had a few red wallers but what's astonishing to me is everything that we've seen everything that we've seen on the south coast of illegal migration everything we've seen even after axel rudy kibana those horrors all of the the downsides of migration is so abundantly clear that actually people don't move across that that divide and so either it's because we're in completely different information ecosystems now and we're just we're not even hearing each other or we're not sort of getting each other's information or maybe there's something else going on and uh you know maybe ideological capture or maybe you guys have got insight here but that shift is not actually happening it's very marginal of at all when it does happen and the other thing which is which is the conversation in westminster where my studio is is like is there going to be an election is there going to be election and so this polling comes out comes up from the times who by the way it's basically the anti-reform paper at this point that is they're the ones who've they they barely criticize the tories it's they barely criticize burnham it's almost entirely directed at reform um so i i know i take what they say of a pinch of salt but there are serious questions about is there going to be an election and whoever it is that mentioned that the hung parliament is the most likely hung parliament with labor winning i think is what looks more likely and given that i don't think burnham would give up three years of being in parliament as prime minister in a majority and he would probably back himself think he's so he probably thinks he's likable that he's brilliant and he's smart he's got a vision and i mean i don't think he has got a vision but he goes so back himself he's like let's do this for three years he'll look back at theresa may and be like well that was a mistake because remember she wanted a mandate and then she got a hung parliament and it was a nightmare for her she'll look back he'll look maybe back at Gordon Brown, who also decided not to run and not to call an election, rather keep the majority.

1:04:20Winston Marshall:I think he's going to back himself and stay. We've got him for three years. That's the things that pop out of this story for me.

1:04:30Tom Slater:All right. Well, one thing I would hypothesize about why the country has basically stayed exactly where it is politically, even though we've been having these debates, is because all of these issues, the key issues, are so well ventilated at this point. like no who is undecided about illegal immigration you either think it's a terrible problem or you think no human is illegal right you the the same with everything else the same with net zero you either think you're saving the planet or you think you're destroying the economy at this point those issues have been sufficiently debated that everyone kind of has a position on it uh and we could carry on down the list you know do the rich need to pay their fair share quote unquote or or do we have an unproductive economy that you can't make productive if you don't create jobs and to create jobs you need to take the boot off the neck of of business and job creators you know what all of these things have been talked about so much you kind of know where you stand number one number two because we have the constituency system 10 people or 100 people even a thousand people changing the mind within a safe uh safe constituency makes absolutely no impact on the election outcomes so So that's also another reality to contend with.

1:05:43Tom Slater:The one thing I would say about this is I think we've got to keep in mind that polling and prediction markets as well are very, very good measures of very short-term things. And the reality is that there probably is a long time until the next election, even if Burnham, of course, an old one. And here is where I think I actually disagree with both Tom and Winston's analysis here because the fact of the matter is Andy Burnham's popularity right now is a temporary blip on a long-term decline in the fortunes of the Labour Party as long as it remains in government. And I don't even think that it's necessarily a huge amount to do with the Labour Party per se, because this decline was going on just the same under the Conservatives.

1:06:24Tom Slater:The reality is we're poorer today than we were in 2008 on a per capita basis. The country's economy is miraculously outstripping our European competitors, France, Germany and Italy but it's sort of you know an intellectual quiz in a care home type of thing you know no one no one's at their best whereas there are countries that are pulling ahead because they have a totally different approach to the one technology that is actually going to generate pretty much all of the growth of the future which is of course AI so we've got the highest industrial electricity prices in the world while in the meantime america is allowing individual people to build power stations of their own something that like you know uh not people but companies right so um our economic stagnation is is much of the reason we are where we are he's not going to fix illegal immigration he's not going to fix the cultural issues that we're talking about the economy is going to continue to tank over time the war in iran i know you're a big fan win but the rest of us not so much and the reality is it's having an economic impact which will continue as long as it's going so the economy is going to get worse the welfare system which he can't reform is going to carry on being a massive drain on on on on the on the bit on the uk plc if you like and then on top of that you've got all these cultural issues that they just can't fix because they're ideologically opposed to doing the things that necessary my point being andy burnham will never be as popular as he is again is my prediction and so if i were him i would think you know what i actually am going to be in charge of a lib lib lab green coalition that it's going to allow me to go further left and i actually am allowed i'll tell you why you're wrong i'm gonna tell you why

1:08:17Winston Marshall:you're wrong straight away tell me because he won't see it like that he thinks he's brilliant you don't run for part of a prime minister if you don't think you're brilliant and backing yourself he's not going to think oh like i'm going to get less popular as it goes on no he's actually going to think i wait till the british public find out what i'm going to do about this yeah he's going

1:08:38Tom Slater:to think he's going to yeah no we don't disagree i no no we don't disagree i was saying what the sensible thing for him to do would be i don't think he will do it i agree there's a very strong probability he follows the path that you're following what i mean is if he was smart and playing purely the percentages the smart thing might be to go well i'm going to get the greens and the lib dems and then i can take the country to beautiful socialism that i've always wanted to um whereas now i've got this sort of right-wing labor party which is a thing people in the labor party always you know the right of the labor party certainly but i actually don't disagree

1:09:14Winston Marshall:with you constantin about the fact that um the idea that andy burnham is you know going to sort Conqueror before him is obviously a nonsense. I think it's just quite clear that he is an obvious improvement on Keir Starmer, who led them to sort of dole drums, which were such a gift, not just to reform, but also to the Green...

1:09:30Tom Slater:But hold on, Tom, but is that really true, though? Is he an obvious improvement, or is it more like...

1:09:34Winston Marshall:For now, yes, not longer term, but you're absolutely right about that. He's a comms improvement. Yeah, I mean, it's one of those things, but for the moment, absolutely. Because I think you're right insofar as this is a blip, primarily. And it's also a smaller blip than they were hoping for. I mean, they were hoping that this would single-handedly kind of transform their fortunes, make a majority at the next election more likely. It's been much, the burn and bounce has been much more modest. And also, if you just look at the kind of structural issues affecting the country, the Labour Party, to say that it doesn't have an answer is an understatement.

1:10:04Winston Marshall:It wants to do things that will make all of those matters worse. It wants to soften. It's already quite soft position on migration and asylum. It wants to double down on debt and spending. It wants to, yeah, maybe kind of moderate the net zero policy around the edges. But I don't think that the Labour Party, the parliamentary Labour Party certainly is constitutionally incapable of doing things that would be necessary to get the country on the right track and also to win over a significant amount of voters. And it's almost resigned itself to just being one party amongst many in a multi-party system.

1:10:37Winston Marshall:The sorts of, you know, potentially reaching up to 40 percent of the vote. That is not something that Labour Party is realistically expecting to do anytime soon. and I wouldn't be surprised. Yeah you're both wrong. Yeah it's just it's just not going to happen but I suppose the difficulty is partly because of our system is the fact that depending on when you call that election depending on how disorganized your opposition is depending on how split the vote is on the other side of politics on the right versus how potentially unified it might be on the left of British politics under the right conditions you can still ride that high 20s to maybe percentage of the vote to a higher seat share than you otherwise might have and i think the only thing burnham doesn't strike me as like a gambler necessarily he's actually a bit of a prevaricator we've seen that on various positions that he's taken over his time and also the everything from the kind of prison release scandal to what have you just sort of flip-flops from one thing to the other but you know various politicians particularly unelected prime ministers get to a point where they get a bit high on their own supply and they think that they can just go for it saw that with Theresa May, and we all know how that panned out.

1:11:39Winston Marshall:So I don't know if he's going to call an early election. It's a simple answer. But sometimes there can be these things, maybe a win in the Holborn and St Pancras by-election that makes him think, screw it, we'll probably be in a worse position. But there's no better time than now. That could easily be the calculus, I guess. On the contrary, if he wins Holborn and St Pancras, they're running this hijabi girl Somali it's it's completely playing and placating the Green Party side and this is what happened he showed he could do it in Makerfield he swallowed up the Green Party vote Green's got absolutely quashed if he beats Polanski in Hoban and St Pancras with an unknown Somali refugee he is winning the the Green Party vote it's he's shown that he can take back that and create another majority of the left with the far left.

1:12:30Winston Marshall:He's won back the far left. And if he can do that, he won't worry about coalition with these other parties. He's like, oh, look, I've proved it. I can actually bring that. He would use that as proof to think I should go to the country because I've dealt with that threat to my left. Yeah, I can just talk to

1:12:44Tom Slater:them about Nigel Farage being evil and then I get all the left wing vote for me. But that's been their strategy right uh guys francis unless you want to jump in before we move on uh let's there's

1:12:56Winston Marshall:there's one point final point i want to make very quickly to me this will eventually come down to personality politics who are the people who are most likely to want to form alliances and the ones that do will eventually i think be the ones that win and will be the ones that be able to form a coalition government my concern is is that i look at relationships on the right now Now, Kemi doesn't particularly like Nigel. I believe the feeling is mutual. You look at Restore, you look at Rupert Lowe. We don't need to go into that because I think everybody knows where that stands. So at the moment, the right is so divided that unless they're prepared to overlook their differences and work together and form a coalition, as things stand, And look, going back to Scott Adams, you know, if nothing changes and it will, I think we're looking at a left wing coalition.

1:13:53Yep.

1:13:54Tom Slater:It's hard to argue with that at the moment. I mean, I remember Francis and I were walking around London after some interviews yesterday and he was like, you know what, I think this, you know, this, you know, this woke thing might be kind of, you know, moving. I was like, what are you talking about? Look at our politics. My sense is the left is much more likely to be elected now, which is interesting because the right of the country is clearly moving to the right, and the center feels like it's moving to the right. But when it comes to election time, you're not necessarily going to see that in election results.

1:14:28Tom Slater:And then the country will carry on on the trajectory that it will, and it makes you wonder. And in fact, very much ties into our next story, Winston, which is the anti-migrant protest that we are now seeing. And you called it direct action. And it is because you're now having people slashing boats and things like this. So tell us what's been going on.

1:14:48Winston Marshall:So Danny Tomo has been arrested and charged in Basingstote and his supporters, I think most of whom are the black clad balaclava lads of the Patriot platform, were protesting outside the station last night. But this comes after a big week for him. So presumably, you can see the videos here of them outside the station. Presumably, you will have seen he was in the channel. And he was, this is an amazing image, actually, of a clipper taking over from a French shadow vessel, escorting a migrant boat over to Britain. Now, earlier this month, we had this kind of shocking news that migrants are now coming up, shadowed by the French from Normandy.

1:15:40Winston Marshall:So much further, further down, further west down the coast, the French coast and taken across. And then Danny Tomo, having done his Dover protests, rushed across to East knee. So you have along with him standing trying to literally block the boats. You have then the protesters trying to block the coaches. the British government it seems have organized all of this in advance because the coaches were there so there's some coordination with the French then they're then coached over back to Kent to the processing plant whatever whatever they go through the processing building and so the significance of this escalation though is is the propaganda win for Don Danny Tomo so whilst what's happening on the coast isn't necessarily something that's new.

1:16:29Winston Marshall:There's definitely new things that are happening, like the RNLI are turning off the transmitters so they can't be tracked. It's the case that there's different locations being tried by the British state to land these people. It's seemingly like they're trying to test which towns are going to react and which towns are going to react badly. And, you know, imagine if they dump them in Brighton, they might get a different response to dumping them in the easterny um but there's a propaganda win here for danny tomo which is that you have had these images this week some of which we're going to see of the british state police forces a motorcade escorting these illegal immigrants so they're all criminals by dint of the fact that they came here illegally and there's a huge amount of protection and taxpayer money going to protect them from the British public who are ostensibly or claiming to protect the British state.

1:17:26Winston Marshall:If I put it more cleanly, the British state's main responsibility is to protect the British people, territorially and otherwise. Here, they have failed. The British people are now trying to protect British territory, and the British state is protecting the invaders, the illegal criminals who are coming here, from the British people. So it's a complete moral inversion and these images that are coming. I mean, I don't think it's actually anything that's new, but these images are huge propaganda wins for Danny Tomo and the sort of Patriot Direct Action side of things. So that for me marks a pretty significant moment.

1:18:07Winston Marshall:Well, it's probably worth mentioning

1:18:08Tom Slater:he's been arrested for uh slashing this bow and has been charged with a bunch of offenses that's why the men are in basingstoke yeah yeah yeah so um propaganda when maybe but he he may be convicted of these criminal offenses now which uh you know obviously is is going to be an issue for him and his group uh but we'll find out i've seen different commentary some people say that the things he's been charged with are going to be thrown out and others say not we will see yes we will see i guess

1:18:43Winston Marshall:the the question is and this is what i put to you guys this is the difficult moral question i think i certainly have been saying stop the boats for a long time and i think it's an absolute moral imperative for us to stop the boats there's a lot of people on the right who are saying you've got to do it at the ballot box the question is if the state aren't doing it and there is not going to be a vote for three years are you guys prepared to accept three more years of illegal boat crossings across the country and so those people who are condemning danny tomo are they prepared to accept more illegal immigration because that's that seems to be the alternative i mean i don't think he's actually going to literally be able to stop the boats but he is forced these propaganda winds are hopefully going to force the state towards something and and so this is the this is the difficult question for those of us who want to stop illegal migration legal entrance what what position are we really into in how we condemn dammitomo we can we might be able to criticize aspects of what he's doing and say maybe this and that is sloppy but are you guys against what he's doing i think it sets a very dangerous precedent winston because what it effectively means is that if you believe an injustice is being created it is and you feel that it is not being dealt with now we can all agree that illegal immigration is happening.

1:20:21Winston Marshall:I mean, that's indisputable. We can agree that the government is not doing what it should be doing. Do we really want a position where essentially people then feel that it is incumbent upon them to take it into their own hands? Because once you do that with one issue, once you open that proverbial Pandora's box, you are going to be opening it for a number of other issues because people are going, well, hang on a second. If you can do this when it comes to illegal immigration, why can't I do this with X, Y and Z? Why can't I? So for instance, the Me Too movement, which was exposing, you know, which was exposing men who had behaved badly, badly, some of them indisputably so, some of them, I mean, who got thrown on the proverbial bonfire who hadn't really done a lot wrong as in the case of Aziz Ansari for example who had behaved worse in an ungentlemanly fashion with a woman that he had a one-night stand with would we then feel would certain people will then go well actually Aziz or somebody like that needs to have some justice happen or foisted upon him because the legal and the you know the courts aren't going to do anything.

1:21:38Winston Marshall:This is where I become really uncomfortable because of the precedent that it sets. I understand people's anger. Okay, so your position is more boats, more illegals. What about Tom then? Well, I think this is the... Sorry, Francis, if you wanted to... That's very unfair. That is very unfair. Francis is therefore pro-boats, which is obviously not the case. But in a way, I think that the experience of sort of just stop oil and insulate Britain, and those irritating, quite militant, direct action groups, has almost led us to a situation where it almost was suggesting that any form of disruptive protest is, by definition, illegitimate.

1:22:12Winston Marshall:And that's just obviously not the case. The calculation one is always making is, are the tactics proportionate to the goal? Is there public support for what is taking place? Do we support their cause? And do we think that their tactics are ultimately legitimate? So it's not as if... In an environment in which people tried to vote for the borders to be controlled, and that was just ignored, if anything legal and legal migration sword in the other direction, in an environment in which people have been arrested for raging against illegal migration online and in which a very rough hand is shown towards anti-migrant protesters to a degree that is genuinely radicalising a section of the population, then in some way, shape or form, protest is going to be the inevitable consequence and in some circumstances ultimately supportable.

1:22:57Winston Marshall:And this goes before Patriot Platform, or Patrick Platform I should say. The Pink Ladies protests of last summer which I know are being talked about in kind of right-wing activist circles is not going nearly far enough now had a significant impact on government policy it led to this absurd sort of literal minded response which was oh you don't like the migrant hotels do you? we'll take them out of the hotels but nevertheless it really what happened in Epping and what happened in other parts of the country put down a marker in a way that simply hadn't happened purely by Epping returning Conservative MPs or people voting for Brexit or what have you So clearly there is a role for protest.

1:23:33Winston Marshall:Does that necessarily mean we have to row in behind one individual who for many of us has crept on the scene relatively recently and kind of uncritically endorse him or his group and everything that they're doing? Of course not. So that's the kind of position that we find ourselves in. And it's one of those issues where I think clearly there is a role for protest. Clearly that is going to change things. and if nothing else the government needs to take as a message from all of this which is that if you want to stop these protests there's a very simple solution to that it's not locking them all up it's not another crackdown on social media it's not a new ministry of misinformation as we've been talking about a little bit later on if we've got time it's stopping the boats and hopefully at some point the penny will drop but as i said i don't think it requires us to whilst we might recognize the legitimacy of protests of direct action in certain circumstances um and in even lead us to endorse some of those groups does that mean we need to uncritically support some of these individuals no i suppose is where i'm coming at on this particular and also i wonder whether

1:24:29Tom Slater:the the idea that their behavior is likely to produce produce the outcomes that you want is true as well i think it's inevitably true that the government will be forced to respond but i suspect what you will find winston is far from stopping the boats which they all believe you can't they would much rather stop the protest and they believe they can and will and so what you're likely to see as as a response to this is people being arrested being prosecuted uh and then the entire opposition to illegal immigration being uh tarnished with the brush of these are the sorts of people that will stab migrant boats as they're coming in to the country these are thugs these are people with a criminal record which this guy has etc etc and the the reality is I mean you say there's a moral inversion going on I completely agree with you of course but I also think you have to be looking at the reality of the situation yes it's true that the government is currently protecting illegal migrants as it buses them from wherever they've landed on the shores of Britain to their migrant you know detention facility if you can even call it that what would you would you rather they just landed them on the on the beaches and then let see who wins against British people I mean like what what are they supposed to do this is why Tom is entirely right you have to stop these people from ever landing here because once they do in the current environment we're in it's just an impossible problem to solve we can't seem to deport them but we also don't want you know people being dumped on the shores of Britain and people smashing their heads in with bats do we so you know this is where the conundrum you have once you allow them in and that's why

1:26:14Winston Marshall:we've got to not allow them in the conundrum is for burnham because burnham in his ideology and trying to pander to the green party he cannot not accept them it's so against them you know the idea of repeating the human rights act is just so fundamental to their ideology that they can't actually do anything so they're not going to do anything about it now these people should never touch British soil. I think I've said this now on every episode we've done. They should never touch English soil. And seeing as we started talking about English history and British history, you say that this is going to look bad for people, bad representative of people on this side of the argument.

1:26:52Winston Marshall:But people who love their country and who know their country's history, they see what's happening and they know exactly how to place it in its historical place, this sort of invasion. They see it exactly the same way as bringing up Alfred isn't crazy talking about the Vikings. You might think I sound crazy bringing up here, but what do you think they were doing? These people coming up, the Vikings were coming over, pillaging, raping.

1:27:14Tom Slater:So are you saying we should all get our shields and swords and march down to the cliffs of Dover? Like, what are you saying?

1:27:20Winston Marshall:At a certain point, I'm saying, yes, if the state aren't going to do anything, we have to protect Britain. If the state completely fund, look, we might not agree about when that time is, but let's say we have a situation where it's like it's not just 6 ,000 people have come since Burnham's been prime minister. And it's something like 200 ,000 since 2018 across the channel alone. That doesn't include legal entrance, but over illegal overstaying their visas or lorry entrance. um but if if you say take the money take the thought experiment experiment up to uh let's say a million there's a million illegal coming across the the channel every year just to kind of kind of to give a big number just for the sake of the thought experiment and the government did nothing would you then say yeah well no we've got to just let let the millions in let the millions

1:28:16Tom Slater:it's a ridiculous it's a ridiculous example winston which is why you're using it's not a

1:28:20Winston Marshall:ridiculous example. Yes, it is.

1:28:23Tom Slater:I completely agree with you, but we would never have a million people coming in illegally every year. It just wouldn't happen.

1:28:28Winston Marshall:Okay, but I'm trying to say to you, at what point would you, I'm asking you, at what point would you be, actually, I will go down and try and protect the country?

1:28:34Tom Slater:I don't know, but my point to you is if you're calling for people to pick up weapons and head down to the cliffs of Dover, you're certainly outside of my Overton window at this point.

1:28:45Winston Marshall:Well, I'd like the Navy to go down and they would have weapons.

1:28:49Tom Slater:Yes. Well, we totally agree then he just sort of said when i said so we should pick up our shields and swords and head down when you talk about the viking these guys have already got there these guys

1:28:59Winston Marshall:have already got there and obviously i'm not doing that i'm not going down there and doing that but i'm i'm saying at a certain point we would i i don't know what that point is i'm trying to get it out of you but we would try and protect our country and the fact that we're even having this conversation is proof of what catastrophic state failure has taken place you know because it's one of those things where going back to that image of that motorcade of the police cars and the ambulances escorting those coaches like such a kind of perfect example of how a british state which has become a kind of bioware for incompetence and inability to dispatch even its most basic responsibilities towards the life and limb of people in this country leaping into action at a moment's notice in order to try and escort illegal migrants from their illegal landing to the migrant processing centre.

1:29:47Winston Marshall:I mean, it's just, it's one of those things about this issue is that we often talk about it, understandably so, as an issue of national security, the safety of women and children, social cohesion, all of those things. Totally legitimate to talk about that. It's also something a bit more fundamental. It has raised this question about who the British state is actually for, who it actually serves. And the problem, to Winston's point, about the human rights mindset that exists amongst the Labour Party in particular, but the political class in general, is that they can bang on about their legal obligations to these people, as in the illegal migrants, as much as they like.

1:30:21Winston Marshall:Yes, on paper, they do have a responsibility to help vessels in distress in the channel. Yes, on paper, they do have a legal responsibility to allow them to apply for asylum. Yes, on paper, they do have a legal responsibility to prevent them from falling into destitution whilst they're applying for asylum. But first of all, you can change those laws, number one. Number two, certainly the domestic ones. And number two is that to all intents and purposes, you are still facilitating illegal migration at the expense of British citizens, whether that's in terms of cost or the democratic wishes. They need to recognise that this is a certain point.

1:30:55Winston Marshall:The public are just not going to wear this. And so far that has manifested in them defecting to other political parties, making their preferences shown at the ballot box. Now we're seeing this new wave of protests, which even if we're taking out these direct action forms of it, whether it was the flag raising or whether it was the Pink Ladies or whether it was the Unite the Kingdom demonstrations, you're seeing a whole new form of largely working-class protest on the scale which we haven't seen for a very long time. So at some point, the penny's got to drop. But I understand the frustration of having to basically just wait for someone within government to finally realise that they cannot carry on as they have.

1:31:34Winston Marshall:The extremists are the government. extremists of the government for letting this continue and it's harder for a lot of people to see that because it takes a bit of a mind shift but if you actually look at their behavior what the government doing is unforgivable absolutely unforgivable and it's destroying our country and we wouldn't even have conversations about what it is to be english and what it is to be british if this kind of crap hadn't been going on so all of this the condemnation of danny tomo and everyone on question time was was slagging him off but ultimately it's burnham it's labor it's the 14 years of tory government it's blair before him they created this mess and then yeah yeah yeah

1:32:14Tom Slater:that's fine we all agree on that but the problem is that two two things can be true at once you're saying the extremists of the government well you can have more than one set of extremists and sure and so you can it's perfectly possible to recognize that you for example would have condemned direct action of this type by extinction rebellion but you you because it's based on a lie because it's based right and okay so then all that all there is no truth and there's only power what right because we get to decide whether there's no principle about do we accept this kind of behavior or do we not we accept this type of behavior when it's in a cause that you support but we reject this type of behavior when it's on a cause that you reject right so we would say extinction rebellion blocking roads is illegal and therefore the police are correct to take them away when they block roads right it's illegal but it's also based on a lie I know it's based on a lie.

1:33:18Tom Slater:What I'm saying is it's also illegal when it's based on the truth. Right. And so we have to have some consistency about how we treat people who protest or engage in direct action when it comes to causes that we agree with and also causes that we disagree with.

1:33:37Winston Marshall:right which is why i opened up this dialogue by saying at what point do you guys break with that principle that you have of of that like at what point is this situation so serious that you go actually okay i'll give you another example outside my house in london i've had drug dealers going on on my front door and i've called the police and this has happened a few times over the last couple weeks i've called the police several times they've never come to deal with it And then I bumped into a policeman, policewoman, I should say, and explained the situation. And I said, I've got to protect my family.

1:34:12Winston Marshall:And if you guys won't do it, I don't give a shit. I'm going to take things into my own hands. She said, I totally understand. Fair enough. The police get it. There is a there is a more like it's morally my responsibility to protect my family over obeying the law. I have to do that. And at some point, it's morally our responsibility to protect our country. when it's been recklessly vandalized like this.

1:34:39Tom Slater:Well, then there is no rule of law anymore.

1:34:43Winston Marshall:Sure, but this has been done by the government.

1:34:46Tom Slater:I know. We all agree with you on that, Winston, but what we're discussing is how to respond to it. And what you're saying is, do you want to live in a society where we don't obey the law if we don't like it?

1:34:56Winston Marshall:No, I'm not saying that. I'm saying the government are the ones who have betrayed their duty, their moral duty. I think we all agree on that. At a certain point, and obviously I'm not on the South Coast to do anything about it, but at a certain point I would be. As an example, if there were literally hundreds of thousands coming every single day, the English people would come together and go like, now, if the government are not going to do anything about this, we're going to do something about this.

1:35:25Tom Slater:Well, we'd all have to work out who's English and who's not and then get down there together, yeah. uh yeah all right uh it's it's an interesting debate and i think tom is right it it shows you the the point to which the country has come when we're having to discuss these things which i think all of us would prefer not to have to discuss because we prefer not to have the problems that we do uh let's move on to our final story which is actually making the point that i made earlier which is i'm not remotely convinced that the response to protests and direct action from people like the ones you're describing Winston will be to address the issue it may well be to create a system of restricting people from being able to talk about it Tom yes exactly so

1:36:09Winston Marshall:this was Andy Burnham's excuse me Andy Burnham's big announcement at the UN General Assembly which is that he wanted to set up this new national center for information defense to combat what he saw as the scourge of disinformation he was talking primarily or explicitly about the threat posed by Russia, particularly noting that Russia and hostile foreign states were interesting in pushing notions of national decline in Britain. Of course, that everything is absolutely fine here and it's purely because we've been brainwashed by bot farms that we even countenance that particular view, but that seems to be the drive of it.

1:36:44Winston Marshall:But really, I think, seems to fit this established playbook we now have with anti-disinformation efforts, which is it's presented as dealing with some kind of hostile foreign threat, threats such as they are, which do exist, there are attempts to you know influence the information space that have always gone on and particularly in the social media range but really I think it's just a kind of code for trying to police discussions domestically. So whilst we haven't got a lot of meat on the bonus what this new organisation, what this new institution would do, I think from very recent experience we can work under the assumption that this is going to be as much about policing the opinions of citizens of this country as much as it is trying to keep the fake news of foreign states at bay during covid i think we saw this pretty clearly a big brother watched it some great reports on this pointing out that these these organizations within government the counter disinformation unit the rapid response unit were drawing up reports on just critics of the lockdown people like carl hennigan and also seem to have this kind of hand-in-glove relationship with the social media companies where they had trusted flagger status to flag up their posts so that in the end they might be in some ways squashed de-boosted or ultimately de-platformed there's also been a lot of discussion in recent years about the quite shady role that an organization called the it's called Riku which is within the home office has been playing in terms of trying to shape public discussion in and around terrorist attacks trying to push certain narratives liaising with families and family liaison on offices in the wake of high profile terror murders or racially aggravated murders and kind of feeding into what the the family statement should be trying to kind of calm tempers and what have you so the kind of very recent track record of these organizations has been not with the threat posed by russia in mind or iran or whoever but the threat posed by people in the country able to voice opinions that the establishment disagrees with and one thing that is fascinating is that is really a, whilst that's potentially always been the case, that is a very distinct trend you see over the past 10 years.

1:38:47Winston Marshall:To the extent people can report on this, you have anti-disinformation capabilities within government, which previously might have primarily concerned themselves with external actors, found themselves in the wake of about 2016, and there's probably some reason for that, shifting their attention towards their own populations. And I think it's become clear now that it's almost impossible to disaggregate this war on disinformation with just a war on political positions that the establishment happens to dislike. So, yeah, there's not much we know at this point, but prior experience would suggest that we'd be pretty alarmed and sceptical about this new organisation.

1:39:20Winston Marshall:If people don't mind...

1:39:22Tom Slater:Go ahead, mate.

1:39:23Winston Marshall:Oh, yeah. If people don't mind, I want to pose a question, and it's related to this, and it's also related to what we've been talking about before. Does everybody know the term anarcho-tyranny?

1:39:34Tom Slater:Yeah.

1:39:34Winston Marshall:So for those people who don't, it's where we have a tyrannical government in charge who is oppressive to its citizens. But on the on the day to day level, there's people living in anarchy. There is no there's very little rule of law. It's chaotic. There's there's you know, there's a lot of crimes will go unpunished, low level crimes, etc, etc. And I remember talking to a lot of people about this and people have come up and talked to me and wanting to discuss this topic with me. And originally I thought, well, this is a bit far. this is a bit extreme. But looking at a lot of what we've talked about and talking about this, are we not entering a state of anarcho-tyranny or is that hyperbolic?

1:40:18Tom Slater:Well, no, clearly. I mean, the government's response, as we were talking about with the previous story, the government's response, it's easier to solve the problem of a few hundred balaclava protesters down in Dover than it is to solve the problem of tens of thousands of illegal immigrants on small boats so if you are the government the rational thing for you to do is to say these people are all bad they're all racist and what we've got to do is uh crack down with the full force of the law as they've said uh arrest the people who commit any sort of criminal offense uh and then try to decapitate those protests that's a much easier fix than solving the actual problem likewise dealing with public sentiment and the way that it's shifting and the strength of feeling particularly on the center and center right and now that you know further on the right uh about these issues that's a very hard fix because even if you stopped all illegal immigration tomorrow the sentiment would remain because you still have illegal a million illegal immigrants in the country and the consequences of two decades of mass immigration which people are obviously also angry about much easier to just say you're not allowed to have these opinions anymore uh you know we're going to be in the words of the great jacinda adern we're going to be your single source of truth as she famously said during covid uh and all the rest of it uh because we we good people like andy burnham and others can obviously all agree that asylum seekers are poor people fleeing you know war uh abroad and anyone who seeks to you know damage their boats well that's obviously quote-unquote thuggery and that's obviously racism and that's obviously obviously obviously obviously what do we do with thugs and racists well we'd all agree with the thugs who you know break the law need to be cracked down on and before you know it the opinions uh you know i've thought for example the debates we've had today are really important and healthy but you know you winston may be considered to have strayed over the line in in the course of this and and it will be people like that who are seen as giving some sort of tacit approval to these things which people are perfectly entitled to do if that's what they believe.

1:42:30Tom Slater:But it will be opinions like that that are prevented from being expressed in public because if you have two decades of mass immigration, illegal immigration through open borders, and the ideology of diversity, equity, inclusion, multiculturalism, and identity politics, then this is all the natural government reaction to this situation. And so to me, it almost feels inevitable. And by the way, Toby Young of the Free Speech Union pointed out that far from being some sort of breakthrough new thing, there's like eight or nine of these types of units in government already that are trying to manipulate and restrict public conversation in order to shape the narrative out there about all of these issues.

1:43:14because the government, and I think in probably all of our opinions,

1:43:19Tom Slater:I won't speak for everyone, but I certainly speak for myself, the government rightly understands that if you simply step back at this point, you actually open up the door to hell because the reason they're having to escort illegal migrants in buses with dozens of police cars is, let's be honest, there is the possibility that if they didn't do that, violence could erupt. That's why they're doing it. And they know that because that's the situation they've created. And so if you are concerned about protecting British people from violence, at this point, if you're the government, you have every reason to jump in and say people shouldn't be able to discuss things because we have messed things up so badly that even saying out loud how much we've messed them up has the potential to cause violence.

1:44:07Tom Slater:That's where we are.

1:44:12Winston Marshall:Yeah, I mean, yeah, I don't, seeing as you've pointed at me and sort of straying out of the Overton, I think that Britain and England is a gift literally from God. It is done unfathomable good and spread it in the world. And it is precious and must be protected. And frankly, that is what, that's why I even do media. I do media, not because I want to do media. I do media because I love my country and I think it must be protected and bestowed to the next generation. And media is just a means for me to do that goal. And so if protecting our borders, which is now outside of the Overton window, even if it means the methods we've been discussing, right, fine, so be it.

1:45:09Winston Marshall:I don't care. I love my country and it must be protected. And it's just, I actually quite like what Tom was saying about this sort of history and the context of this, but I would stretch even further back. And this is something Trigonometry have been fantastic of covering, not just through COVID, but before, but a lot of what we're going through the last few years is sort of against the post-war consensus. And it's, there's been these elites since 1945 and it's been various issues that they've been trying to push the West in a certain direction. And it really starts with Obama. He is using a lot of infrastructure that was originally set up to fight Islamism.

1:45:50Winston Marshall:He then turned it on populism around 2014, 15. And so it's the same sort of all of this stuff is exactly how both of you have been describing. It's taking this old infrastructure and turning it against the people. And I suspect we're going to see a lot, lot more of this kind of stuff. it's not going to stop anytime soon because they're not going to go out without a fight unfortunately for them those of us who don't have their worldview are also not going to give up without a fight um i think one of the really dangerous things that we we need to address is to talk about relationships uh the number one predictor for a marriage breaking up as some of you may know some of you may not is contempt it's contempt the number one foundation for any relationship is not love, affection.

1:46:38Winston Marshall:I'm talking about respect. I'm talking about all relationships, whether it's a colleague, whether it's a partner, whether it's a friendship. I'm also talking about the relationship between a government and its people. And for a long time now, it feels like the government holds its people in contempt. And by that, I mean, they simply have lied to them, gaslit them, whatever way you want to talk about it. And it's gone on for a long time. And I think what we're facing now is the breakdown of trust and respect between a government and its people. And if there is no relationship, what you're effectively seeing is the breakdown of a society.

1:47:23Winston Marshall:And that to me is where we are rapidly heading towards. it's we're seeing we're on the path to something absolutely disastrous and I think we've been covering it and we've been talking around it in this particular episode but what fundamentally we're talking about is the death of a people giving believing that its government can represent them and serve its best interests. And where we go from here is, quite frankly, terrifying.

1:48:01Tom Slater:Well, look, I actually think we have to be honest and maybe we have to recognise that we live in a left-wing woke country populated by left-wing woke people. I mean, the election results bear that out, right?

1:48:16Winston Marshall:I mean, is that the case, though, when we separate out the political system and the results and elections from what people actually believe because the elections unfortunately maybe get boiled down to maybe one question or maybe two questions what do you want to do about cost of living what do you want to do about immigration and really that's going to be the story the next election is which one of those framings wins um which could also lead to a violently different outcome but i do think that so many of the issues that animate us that animate our audiences that um are clearly going absolutely wrong illegal migration there's a basically a super majority in the country who is against what is going on currently uh the nonsense around gender again you poll even labor voters they know that a lot of this is complete you know woo and the fact that it's going back to our disinformation discussion the fact that you've got a labor party which has just been flatly either lying about what it believes to be the reality about gender for the sake of trying to look good or actually believe in complete nonsense um the fact that these are the people trying to police our speech is absolutely fascinating but you know you keep going down the list um what the story of the past 10 years is that our elites have gone insane whilst the public have remained remarkably commonsensical and also remarkably patient that's not going to hold the latter half of that is certainly not going to hold for much longer and it just feels like the gap that exists is how is that going to get proper political representation that common sense majority which i think still does just about exist on a lot of these questions even if i think that's a lot of extreme is becoming more extreme that's certainly

1:49:41Tom Slater:true i do think that's true on a lot of these questions but if we come back to the idea that the economy is central to to the next election for example uh i don't know your views on tax tom but i imagine winston francis and myself are not in favor of pushing taxes up further but that is overwhelmingly a minority position in this country and again it's one of those things

1:50:02Winston Marshall:where it is depending on how you frame it because people obviously don't want their own tax to go up but the idea of you know squeaking the pips out of people who make a hell of a lot of money is something that when you poll is quite um broadly speaking as public support so there there is there is of course nuance in all of this and maybe the economy is the one that is the sort of elephant in the room but even there i mean you can still see the people are persuadable on these matters i think they're just also in a situation where they have economically and cost of living wise been suffering for quite a long time so any argument which sounds like more harsh medicine is one that isn't going to land but this is exactly what i'm saying though this is what i'm

1:50:37Tom Slater:saying though because to me all of these issues are important all the cultural issues we've discussed are really important but i don't believe they would have remotely the salience that they do if it was not for the continuous decline of britain's economy and people's living standards for the last 20 years i just don't and that's the reality because you take if you take the most extreme far-right position that you can think of which is uh you need to make britain white again Let's say that you take that position and you click your fingers and that happens. Is this country going to, is our living standards in this country going to improve tomorrow as a result?

1:51:16Tom Slater:They're not. They're not. And in fact, in the short term, things would get a lot worse economically, right? So addressing the immigration part of this is very important in dealing with illegal immigration, in making sure that the mass immigration we have is people who are benefiting this country rather than taking things from it. But the reality is, until you address the economic piece of this, all of these other issues will continue to have salience simply because people are really, really frustrated about what's happening to the living standards. And on the whole, British people believe that the solution to their plummeting living standards is a mansion tax, is inheritance tax, is higher taxes on business is higher taxing on the super rich which you know dan hodges when we interviewed talked about private jets while talking about top rate of tax which is like 55 grand so plumbers and electricians and you know people running small businesses are paying it right but but most people in this country when polled feel that the reason they are poor is quote the rich the rich the rich which is the way to more poverty and the way to more lack of productivity to fewer jobs and so i i question those of us who are in this part of the the public debate how in touch we actually are with the average british person when it comes to a lot of these issues and i worry when we sit here and say you know the british people want this ah the british people are very split you know uh francis and i were at a at someone's wedding a friend of ours wedding which was kind of split down the middle in these two different directions you talk to people who don't have our views they have very different views and they hold them just as strongly as we do and there's a hell of a lot of them too so and by the way they don't like me no no uh and so what did you do with my face mate yeah with his evil right-wing face my point being is this is why we were talking about you know extinction rebellion versus anti-immigrant protests i don't think either side has the right to say we speak for the country therefore we are entitled to behave an x-way x-way we all have to obey the law we we all have to engage in the democratic process and ultimately you have to win at the ballot box you have to win at the ballot box

1:53:42Winston Marshall:oh yeah it's obviously the case we have to win the ballot box just on the economics though if you look what happened on the continent with rassemblement national rassemblement national and alternative for deutschland they are both left-wing economically they're actually both rassemblement national certainly are national socialist here i it hasn't the right hasn't kind of gone that way exactly although reform want to keep flirting with the nationalization of steel yeah and they have talked about nationalizing water so there is a left-leaning side to reform and they've got the red wall base which is kind of represented by lee anderson somewhat um but i i think that whether it's on the continent or here the politics is no longer economically split like it used to be.

1:54:32Winston Marshall:Now it's more about identity, I think. And that's the new paradigm. And so, yeah, of course, you know, what's that numpty Gary's economics? You know, he can go and talk about wealth tax for all day long and get loads of airtime and he's very popular amongst sort of Gen Z people. It's also the case that wealth tax will be popular even bizarrely amongst wealth conservative voters. I've seen statistics. So I think you're right, Constantine, that even on the right in Britain, what I'm saying there is a a popular feeling towards more tax in certain domains uh but I I think that that's not the overarching I think I think politics now is now a sort of a battle for the not for economics but for the soul of of our nation and that's a little bit of a cliched statement to to make but it's not quite the paradigm it used to be what if our country

1:55:24Tom Slater:was growing at five percent a year and jobs were abundant and salaries were increasing all the time do you think we'd be having all these same debates about immigration in this way i don't think so yes i'll tell you why we will

1:55:38Winston Marshall:Of course we would, because of the Pakistani rape gang scandal, because of the various people murdered by illegal entrants, because of the two-tier system that you have. It's not just that there's different policing standards, depending on your identity, there's different justice standards. Someone from the protest this week has been given a two-month prison sentence for throwing a bottle. Compare that to some of the crimes that you've been getting. It's just not comparable. There's definitely a sense of two-tier in this country. So, yes, absolutely. We agree on all of this.

1:56:20Tom Slater:But I think it wouldn't be at the fever pitch that we have it now. It just wouldn't.

1:56:25Winston Marshall:well I suppose that people wouldn't people wouldn't be quite as scratchy and infuriated as they might otherwise be but nevertheless a man in the women's toilet is going to be a problem in good times or in bad an illegal migrant rapist being allowed to run amok is going to be a problem in good times absolutely or in bad and also I think these things are just sort of interconnected um and also I think the general drift over the past 10 years is that there has been a chunk of the British electorate to some extent the sort of silent majority who has felt pushed out of the democratic process which has been in various different ways reasserting itself.

1:56:56Winston Marshall:Brexit, defecting to the Conservative Party, whether it might have been reform, of course, now. And I think people start by a more democratic politics. We can also get to the heart of a lot of these economic issues as well. Because whilst, of course, if you look at some of these individual policy measures, things like a mansion tax, things like a wealth tax poll particularly well, that's in the absence of a proper debate about them, I think it's fair to say. But other things like one of the core issues that this country faces, both in terms of spending but also in terms of the drag anchor on growth it represents the welfare bill there is a very sensible majority who say that this is at hand and actually if you go further down the income scale working class people in particular are very aware of the issue of welfare dependency i think it should be dealt with similarly net zero is starting to go in that direction as well so yes i mean it's one of those things where at the very least we can probably agree on the fact that we need more discussion about all these issues more aeration of them because whilst we might have spent a lot of time focusing on the cultural side there is also this economic side which can occasionally be neglected in the midst of all this no absolutely i think constantin posed the question which is do we live in a left-wing woke country and i think to everybody here and to constantin i think next general election we're going to find out if we do because if we continue down this same trajectory if we're seeing the problems that we talk about if we're seeing these threats, which I consider to be existential, and they still vote for Labour and they still want a left-wing government, then that will show where the public ultimately stand as a whole.

1:58:29Winston Marshall:And even if it's a coalition, it shows that yes, we do. And I think at that point, it will become undeniable. We're right.

1:58:38Tom Slater:We've done two hours and we've got to wrap up. But I will just say if you come back to our earlier conversation pretty much all of us predicted that the next election could well be a labor and possibly left-wing coalition um so that would say that we maybe do live in a country that at least with you know the way democracy works constituency system etc um this is this is the reality so uh get get get ready to pay more tax and love your new neighbor.

1:59:12Winston Marshall:Absolutely. Get ready to learn Arabic. Yeah, fantastic.

1:59:17Tom Slater:And we will all be friends. On that happy note, gentlemen, it's been Off the Fence, has been extra spicy and long this week. Thank you for watching. Thanks for being here, everybody, of course. Thanks for watching and listening. Make sure you like, subscribe, and tell us what you think about the show. We love hearing from you, and we'll see you again next week.

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