The Warning Signs Britain Ignored - Colin Brazier

22:16You don't get that BAFTA because you've done a report from Bradford on how, you know, you get your report, you know, you don't.

22:23Francis Foster:You get a knock on the door from the police, potentially. Right. And nothing sums this conversation up better than that tweet that I think it was Kay Burley did, your former... I can't. Dan wouldn't ask me about Kay Burley. No, go on, go on. I'll let you finish. And it was... I can't remember the exact wording, but it was talking about the illegal migrant crossings. And there was that picture of that. It wasn't a dinghy. It was a mega dinghy. coming over these people illegally and what her basic argument was, oh, it's not that many people, what's the problem? And I remember reading that and I go, you couldn't come across more out of touch if you actually were doing this on purpose.

23:08My difficulty is that Kay was very good to me when my late wife was dying and we were struggling to get Sky to pay for some of the medical bills. And in that situation, I'm sorry if this sounds melodramatic, but it's true. She was very good. She shook down the sort of high-ups at Sky, and some of those medical bills were paid. It will be ignoble of me to respond to your question. I'll leave it at that. I mean, you know what my views are on the big boats. It is an invasion, period. We need to take much more robust action to stop it happening. It's a slow-motion catastrophe. The media have been complicit.

23:48I've seen that myself. in 2015. Well, you know, one of the kind of red pill moments for me was 2015, the migration crisis. I was in Serbia, Hungary, Greece, these places. And watching my colleagues from the media, all TV media especially, who would always single out the woman with the long hair, speaks great English, you know, she lives in a nice part of Damascus, they'd ignore the guys who didn't speak English and they were just out of prison or whatever. So there was this determination then to see only good things from the future engineers and lawyers and doctors who are coming to the UK.

24:20Francis Foster:And why is that, Colin?

24:25Because people, because the media has become more leftish, because it's become, and we can talk about the reasons why that is, but once you're more leftish, you believe in the perfectibility of human nature, you're naturally a fairly utopian bent. You want to believe the best of things at all times of all people. You're constantly relativising. You don't want to make harsh judgments. And it does loop back to where a lot of our journalists come from now, literally come from. You know, I don't want to sort of... There was no golden era of newspaper journalism, but it was true that time was when newspapers in particular were filled with 60...

25:05You know, kids who left school at 16, they didn't go to university, they certainly didn't do a media studies course. They were hefted, their locality. They had no ambitions even to go to Fleet Street. They wanted to serve their community. I mean, they were still, you know, in possession of rat-like cunning and scumbags, because journalists are meant to be scumbags. But they were scumbags who believed in their community and felt they weren't looking for the next job in London. They wanted to tell the truth about what was happening in their local community. That doesn't happen anymore. Most of them, a lot of newspapers, local newspapers, are closed down.

25:35And the effect in terms of who's going into, you know, who is staffing Sky News, BBC, ITV, Good Morning Britain, all these places, Channel 4 News. it's self-replicating the people who do the hiring are looking to replicate themselves and the people they hire and also the other thing that happened i saw it latterly at sky is that you were starting to get a degree of newsroom activism as well around things like trans issues you know i got i remember um seeing a script i haven't thought about this for a while let me try and dredge it up it was a script my co-presenter and i who will remain nameless lived in terror of having to uh misgender somebody.

26:13You know, it was the train coming down the track. And we had various stratagems. Let's just only use the name. Let's not get into somebody's gender. And then Sky News, the website, did a story about Sam, who's the singer, Sam Smith? Yes. And how he was, now... They. They. And I read the article. I read the article in good faith. I read it, and I read it in good faith. And I got lost. Because I didn't know, who's the fucking they they're talking about now? Because, you know, maybe my kids would say to me, Dad, it's just because you're an old bastard and you just need to be... You know, now you're on the lookout for they, they would be fine.

26:52But I read it and it was an impediment to a lucid copy. It was just opaque, it was obfuscating, it was confusing. And I raised it with a senior figure at Sky who just, in so many words, told me to fuck off. Why? I think at Sky in particular, there was a corporate impulse that came down from the corporate place. And this is why in a sense Sky was worse than the BBC, because at least the BBC had on the shop floor some dissenting voices. I think at Sky, as it became the sort of paramilitary wing of Channel 4 News, that it was from the corporate high ups. There was also a sense of embarrassment, I think, about the Murdoch connection.

27:32They felt soiled by that Murdoch thing. So there was a determination to wash him right out of their hair. I just think Sky became woker than the BBC. And that's been replicated right the way through the media. And it's just accelerated their decline, hasn't it? Yeah, and part of the problem is even... I'm trying to think of some employer I haven't slagged off yet, but even at GB News, which is a good thing, I remember I was one of the large presenters at GB News, I was there for 18 months they fired me, my figures weren't good enough and they I remember I used to watch Nigel Farage walk in when his show was on and thinking my god mate, a lot of the people here don't like you not because they don't know you but they don't like what you stand for, this is GB News because they've still got to put the shows out and there's a lot of you know, it's a lot of production.

28:32And there aren't many people who are ideologically aligned with GB News who know which buttons to press and which cameras to work and all that sort of stuff. So I would guess at least, at least in the early days, at least half of the people who were working at GB News were really not digging it ideologically. And it made for a lonely setting for someone like Nigel, as he used to walk in. So it's not just the usual suspect in GB News. And one of the themes that you actually talk about very eloquently on your monologues, which I really recommend people to go and watch, because I think they're genuinely is this idea of social engineering.

29:03So let's talk about that, because media is part of that, but also government is as well. So what do you mean by that, Colin? It's such a massive catch-all. I scarcely know where to begin. It can be nudging people to making certain decisions. I mean, I was writing recently about the work of a shady civil service department, which tries to... It sounds conspiratorial, but it's true. I mean, which tries to shape public opinion in the wake of, say, an Islamist atrocity by... We're not very far here from Westminster Bridge. I remember covering that attempt to mow people down, successful attempt, if I can put it that way, to mow people down by an Islamist some years ago.

29:41And within hours of that attack happening, posters started to appear saying, you know, hashtag love will win and all this sort of stuff. There is a small, small department within government that seeks to massage public opinion to make sure that the family liaison officers who have gone to talk to bereaved victims of an atrocity will, as we've seen recently following events in Belfast and elsewhere, you get these very anodyne statements stressing the benefits of mass immigration. I don't know whether they're written by the bereaved victims. I suspect some of them aren't. So that's social engineering.

30:21That's engineering anger, suppressing anger, and you can argue there's a very good case for that. That's social engineering. That's just one tiny example among many. And that's the, I think the department's called RICO, isn't it? RICO, the Research and Information Communications Unit. I mean, it sounds as drab and boring as it could be, but actually when you think about what it's doing and how freedom of information requests have been routinely denied and where a lot of its work remains classified. And again, you know, I'm no fan of the Daily Mail. because of stuff in my own history. But the Daily Mail dug that story out.

31:00So the mainstream media, bits of the mainstream media, newspapers, I know it's fashionable to disdain what they do, but they still matter.

31:08Francis Foster:Oh, the media is very important. It's something we've always said on the show. The new media is important, but so is legacy media. And it just needs to be much better. But yeah, I mean, in terms of the families of the victims of horrific atrocities, it is surely not a coincidence that they all basically come out with exactly the same state. And by the way, in the case of the mother of Rhiannon White, who came out and basically didn't say diversity is our greatest strength, but actually said, can you please deal with this issue because our children are paying the price? No one cares. And her words are not used to justify government policy, whereas the words that we suspect are being coached out of the family members of victims of crime are being used to justify the suppression of the debate.

32:00Francis Foster:We'll get back to the interview in just a moment, but first let's talk about something that might change the way you see the world. Many of you will know that Christianity has been a subject of fascination on this show, and its role in shaping the modern world is something we explored in detail with historian Tom Holland last year. Christianity isn't just a religion. It's been the bedrock of Western civilization, all the way from our legal systems to why we feel slightly guilty about having that extra biscuit. Maybe that's just me. But understanding Christianity in today's complex world can be a challenge.

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33:06Francis Foster:It's a chance to see the world from a different angle and who knows, you might even find yourself nodding along with some unexpected insights. So why not check it out? It's free, there are no hidden cost or spam. Just head over to 321course.com slash trigger. Sign up with your email, choose a password and dive in. That's 321course.com slash trigger. And let's not forget first principles here. I'm not saying it doesn't matter what the family want. It just doesn't matter as much as some people think it should do. When Henry Novak's family stood on the steps of Southampton Crown Court and said, you know, we're very critical of the police, but then also said this case mustn't be used to stoke divisions.

33:45I don't know to what extent they were coached to say that. And Keir Starmer then used that against Nigel Farage. Nigel Farage, don't stoke division because the family don't want you to, as if it was some trump card to gag people. It wasn't. And people need to go back to first principles. The case against Henry Novak's killer was brought by the Crown. It was brought by the state, paid for by taxpayers on all our behalves. It wasn't a civil suit. It wasn't a private prosecution. I remember, you know, people get confused about these things. When I was at Sky, I used to regularly, fairly regularly, interview a woman called Debbie Purdy, who's now dead.

34:24She had multiple sclerosis. And she would appear, and I would interview her, and she was an early and very good, very shrewd and compelling advocate for assisted suicide. And I would never treat her like a victim, because it was clear to me she was an advocate, she was a campaigner. But I had colleagues who would really soft-soap her, because she was a victim. She was dying. She was in a wheelchair. And I remember getting emails from people saying, you can't treat this woman like you're treating her. You can't talk to her that way. And I was thinking, fuck you. She's here to advocate for a major change in the law.

34:52And she's here as a campaigner. I'm not going to patronize her by sort of being, you know, going easy on her. So we're becoming more sentimental as a society. We need to be really clear-eyed about where the threats are. We need to be coherent and logical as well. And the problem is, though, this is the real problem with this, is that you can continue softening the statements. But all the while, there is this well of anger and it's building and it's building and it's building. And you can keep using this tactic, but very rapidly, we're getting to a point where that tactic simply ain't going to wash.

35:32And if anything, that tactic is just simply going to inflame tensions even more. because people know what's happening. They're not stupid. I agree. I agree. And the extent to which, I mean, I did a monologue recently on David Betts' war historian. No, sociologist. What is David? How would you describe David Betts, the King's College?

35:52Francis Foster:Inaccurately, probably, if I did it from memory. But he's a guest on the show and he's someone, for people who may not remember, there was a very popular interview we did with him, who talks about the probability of civil war in Britain from an academic expert. So there are certain tests that need to be met, and we've met four out of five of them, whatever it is. And I did a monologue about it, partly because of what David Betts had said, but also just because, as I'm sure you found as well, people whose judgment you trust, they're not cranks, they're not nutters. I can think of one friend in particular, you know, amateur historian, read history at university, not a headbanger, saying to me, you know, in hushed tones at the end of an evening, oh, it's going to be a civil war, isn't it?

36:34And, you know, and I don't think it's catastrophizing. I don't think it's just somebody pissed at the end of a long night trying to be interesting. I think it's people with children and a stake in the future looking rationally at what's happening to the country and thinking this is where this ends up, right?

36:50Francis Foster:And see, in a country where these things were terrible but were likely to be solved, you would have political leaders emerging who were willing to, number one, just for starters, acknowledge the problem. That'd be nice. Then they might want to address the problem. Then they might have the caliber to be able to do so and perhaps the wherewithal to withstand the inevitable criticism that would come. And I thought one of your best recent monologues was about the caliber of the politicians. And it's a challenging one to talk about because on the one hand, I think we've all seen it with our own eyes, the decline in that.

37:28Francis Foster:On the other hand, I guess it's the eternal complaint of the sort of, you know, the disgusted of Tunbridge Wells and all the rest of it. I say this as someone who lives in Tunbridge Wells. Increasingly disgusted, of course. it's the eternal complaint through the ages, you might say. So, make the case for us that the decline in the standards and calibre of politicians is part of the reason we're here. I'll try to, but let me just finish that point about civil war. Kemi Badenock, who implicitly authorised me to write a monologue about civil war, because she raised it in an interview. She said it's not impossible.

38:12It's the leader of the opposition saying, civil war is not impossible. We mentioned Rod Liddle earlier. Rod Liddle's final column said that Kemi gives me hope. She gives me hope, actually, but anyway. The rest of her party are shit. She, I think, is formidable and increasingly impressive. Separate story. But she is an MP, and the people she's surrounded by increasingly are woeful. They lack a hinterland. If you look at this particular intake, I think there's a special problem with the fact that so many of those 232 MPs, new Labour MPs who came in, had very little experience in what any of us would consider to be real life.

38:5372 of them, I think, have backgrounds in the charity sector, learning how to spend other people's money. I think it's...

38:59Francis Foster:It's very good training for government. But it's demonstrable on some levels. I mean, the US networks used to take prime minister's questions live. You know, such was the standard of the back and forth rhetorically. I don't think they would now MPs read their questions and look the ability to memorise or extemporise is not necessarily the only guide to somebody's intelligence or competence as a parliamentarian but it's not that guide and now MPs who used to be shouted down howled down reading, reading if you were reading a question or a point of order and now they just routinely read they lack the confidence of self-assurance to be a presence in that chamber there were instances I mentioned in my monologue where literally within days of the American attack on Iran and the Middle East is in flames and Brits are cowering in bunkers in Dubai and just over the road from where we are here in Portcullis House the overflow building for the Palace of Westminster 40 plus MPs, Lib Dems Labour, Tories were doing a raising awareness session for obesity they were having fun because they are essentially increasingly frivolous.

40:13It's not their fault. We're all increasingly frivolous. We've lost a tragic sense of life to a great degree. And that's wonderful because, you know, my mum was one of nine. Two were dead before they reached adulthood. Times was hard. It's one of the reasons it strikes me absurd when people say, I can't possibly have children. These are such awful times. They ain't. And the MPs that used to fill that place. You know, Margaret Thatcher's First Cabinet had three war veterans who'd won the military cross. But they also had these, you know, I think about Starmer, I think I said in that monologue, A Fish Rocks from the Head, his statement when he stood down was particularly egregious.

40:56You know, I'm leaving with good grace. You know, it's clever.

41:02Francis Foster:Having improved the country, I think. You know, he's a clever guy. He's a lawyer. He understands that words are freighted with semantic meaning. Keir, it's for everybody else to judge whether you left with good grace. It's not for you to say whether you left with good grace. It's just a mark on how he didn't get it and was so conceited. And people thought he was a sort of managerial type. No, it was fucking vain. The vanity of the man to tell us all after those two hideous years, comically inept years, that history would be kind to him. No, you fucker. You're about the worst prime minister we've ever had.

41:35And compared to some of his predecessors, Labour predecessors, every bit as much as, you know, other parties, that absence of a hinterland is particularly strong. He went on the BBC's Desert Island Discs, Keir Starmer. And at the end of it, they say, you know, what's the book you take to the desert island? He says, I'll take an atlas. and I thought you know Michael Foot you know very left wing Labour leader maybe even a KGB stooge who knows wrote books. Dennis Healy had a huge library you know this is a Ted Heath concert pianist sailed around the world you know we had leaders of this country who had real hinterlands you know they were intellects and they'd done stuff and that's a real issue.

42:24They'd done stuff. You looked at previous cabinet ministers. They were accomplished people. They wrote, they were academics or they'd run businesses or even on the left, they would have worked in mines. They would come from a really poor background, work their way up, joined a trade union, done this, done that. You look at these, you go, what have you done? I know. I mentioned in the monologue that I'm not sure how many people are even aware of this. Ernest Bevan, who was orphaned, orphaned at eight, and then was a farm labourer at 13 in Somerset, Ernest Bevan. Nye Bevan went down the pit, a coal pit, like his father, at 13.

43:10Ernest Bevan founded NATO, and Nye Bevan founded the National Health Service. This idea that you get from, I've heard it's particularly true of some Labour MPs, that the world's a Guinness, you know, Angela Rayner, you're having a crack at me because I'm a poor, I'm from the wrong side of the tracks. No, I'm having a crack at you because you're shit, you know. And this poverty of low expectations that somehow because you came from a poor background, you can't possibly achieve as much as the person who came from a good background. It's belied by the history of your own bloody party, Bevan and Bevan.

43:38Francis Foster:Well, I think what it speaks to is we now live in the age of victimhood and it's not left or right. There's plenty of people on the right now who really want to be victims as well. Yeah. But with politicians, it's a very, in a society that thinks a victim is the greatest sanctity that's available to all of us, victimhood, it's a very good tactic to deflect criticism and to say, well, you're only criticizing me because I'm a victim of life. I've been underprivileged or whatever, rather than criticizing you because what you're doing is not good. We've got to call it out, though. We've got to call it out.

44:13And that's really, really hard. I mean, I think that one of the jobs that somebody's... I mean, this is big stuff now. I mean, one of the jobs that somebody... Maybe it's Nigel Farage, maybe it's Kevin Van Gogh, but somebody, for instance, has to, when dealing with welfare, level with the country. And I'm sorry if this is what I'm about to say is going to offend some people, but that message would be something like this. Our welfare is now completely under control. It means that the means we have to defend ourselves as a country, you know, welfare over warfare, means that we can't defend ourselves.

44:43The welfare budget is so massive. And that means people who have striven and been brilliant citizens all their life will not, will die. Their children will die because we can't defend ourselves because the welfare bill is so bloated. So what we're going to do is we're going to really crack down on welfare dependency. And I've got to level with you, the British people, that there will be people with depression and autism and the people who are saying that if you cut my budget, if you cut my funding, my mental health will suffer and the charities will say, and people might kill themselves. I'm saying to you, the British people, that this is a price we may have to pay.

45:20There will be victims. There will be victims. Similarly, we're going to stop the boats. There may be victims. But I'm going to give you loads of warning. I'm going to give you months of warning. But if you try and come across the channel and you're a very large dinghy, we're going to push you back and you might drown. it's horrifying i'm a christian i don't want to say that you know all men are my brothers but we we are not there's such a mismatch between our willingness to really grasp the nettle and what happens if we don't a while back i pushed myself in training because i'm a legend but ended up with a strain that took far longer to recover from than it ever used to nothing dramatic just one of those moments where you realize your body isn't snapping back the way it once did.

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47:40Francis Foster:I completely agree. And I think this Christian point to me is very interesting because I think a lot of the Christian ethics are so valuable and so important. Let's say this as someone who's sort of semi-practicing and semi-believing, I guess. You know, a religious person would probably scoff at that, but it's how I feel. I would never scoff at it but all men are my brothers must apply to your brothers first they must they must apply to your own people first if you privilege foreign citizens and I say this as someone who lived in this country as a foreign citizen for many many years at the expense of your own brothers you're not doing right and you're not actually practicing or implementing the claim you make when you say all men are my brothers, because you are acting in against the interest of your own actual brothers by privileging people who are in, as you said, it's a controversial term.

48:41Francis Foster:But I think after, particularly after we saw in, how do you pronounce it? You're the Spanish speaker here. Sueta. Sueta. Sueta. After, after you see those scenes, and you just go, look, I don't like when people call what's happening an invasion. I don't know that it's an accurate term. To me, an invasion is people storming the beaches with swords and guns and whatever. But what you saw in Soweto was an invasion. It was. It's a fact. You can pretend, you can say, oh, most of them have gone home as if the fact that people have, you know, come into your house without your permission and then most of them have left, that somehow makes it okay.

49:23Francis Foster:Well, you can't place the interest of those people against and above the interest of your own citizens. There's nothing Christian about that, I would argue. Well, I have doubts about whether 25 years in TV was worth it. I do remind myself that footage and video and images are still what really changes minds. And it was, I agree, those images from Souter have kick-started a conversation in Brussels even about this. all men are my brothers and some are more my brothers than others there's a brilliant book and a brilliant article actually written by an amazing Anglo-Iranian guy called Bidja Manrani I don't know if you've come across Bidja Manrani he wrote an amazing book called God is an Englishman and he wrote a piece for the Salisbury Review which is a quarterly conservative magazine I'm one of the volunteers who works on that magazine and in his article, very learned scholarly erudite article, he's a church He's Oxford educated, but works as a church warden in Exminster, very improbable character.

50:22And he gives, he takes you through the Bible verses that explain why your first recourse is to your neighbor. You know, and it's not, it's not controversial. You know, there is a brotherhood, brotherhood of man. You know, I, you know, someone like Tom Holland's amazing book, Dominion, reminded all of us 10 years ago, that so much of what we take for granted around human rights and individual autonomy is lifted directly from Christianity. And we just take so much for granted in our lives today that cut springs from Christianity. Tom Holland paints a very dark picture about what happens when you take those struts away.

50:58I agree with him. So yeah, people misunderstand that. And particularly, I remember this brilliant David Goodhart, who you may have interviewed. Yeah, we have several times. And he recounts a conversation in his groundbreaking book, The Road to Somewhere, Somewhere to Anywhere. He was at a dinner. He may have told you this story. He's at a dinner and there's Mark Thompson, then the head of BBC, and Gus O'Donnell, Cabinet Secretary, head of the Civil Service. And they're both Catholics, as am I. And they were basically saying that their first duty, as they felt it, was to everybody, to the global welfare, not national welfare.

51:38And I think that view amongst our elites is pretty common. And the problem is this prioritisation of the global, the everywheres, but that is also mixed with an outright contempt for white working-class people in particular. I agree. And that's a very dangerous combination because white working-class people in this country are the majority. And if you are openly contemptuous of them, that's only going to raise the temperatures even further in our country. And the issue is, is that when people from those communities then start to air grievances, particularly around things to do with race, with immigration, it doesn't go anywhere.

52:28And if not, it's met with actual contempt. And we've seen that for so long now. And my concern is we've got to a point where you're looking at the rise of certain individuals and certain organizations and you're going this this is going to get ugly pretty quickly the we're very lucky in this country the british the average brit is quite temperate we're not prone to extremism but what i'm seeing maybe it's spending too long on twitter whatever else things are febrile at the moment my My late wife, who was an ardent Brexiteer, but actually started out on the left. I mean, at Bristol Uni, she was a member of the Revolutionary Communist Party.

53:10She used to say to me, we'll be all right in this country because we take the piss. It's what we do best. We take the piss. And, you know, you recognize this more than anybody. And I used to believe that was true. I think it's less and less true that I parked that. One thing that's coming across to me really strongly at the moment, and, you know, So when we zoom back, if I live another 25 years, I think we'll care far less about COVID. We'll care far more in terms of it being a punctuation mark in history. And we'll care far more and we'll see much more damage that should be laid at the door of the George Floyd terror.

53:50You know, going back to Sky, seeing the reaction of big organizations like that to the George Floyd killing. By the way, it was footage again. It was TV footage that did the persuading. And if you look at what's happened in the education sector, the charity sector, and this idea that people could stop taking responsibility for their own shortcomings, their own lack of persistence, and blame it on whiteness. Just blaming other things rather than maybe looking at yourself and thinking, do we have a problem here with fatherlessness? Is there a cultural problem here?

54:24Francis Foster:and what francis obviously is alluding to uh the civil war on the right you might say politically in this country to some extent what do you make of that as someone who i assume wants the right to succeed i do i really do uh and because if they don't we're really where do we go uh i didn't know this was happening until a friend of mine who used to edit the jewish chronicle said to me Colin, you need to be aware that, you know, that anti-Semitism is coming back in a big way. So, you know, look at this guy, Nick Fuentes. And I didn't really believe him. And then a couple of things made me realize it is a new fissure.

55:03And I think for me, that will become totemic. In my, you know, there'll be people watching this thinking, I liked you until you said that. I'm going to say it. I love the idea of Israel. I've worked in Jerusalem for months on end. I think that what happened October the 7th is a stain on humanity. And if people start saying it's a false flag operation, I just can't go there with you guys. I just can't go there with you. So these are where these divisions are creeping in. I don't see how you heal those divisions once you've created them, or allowed them to be created. And the problem is, is these divisions are then creeping into politics quite significantly.

55:47I found it very interesting. One of the first things that Wes Streeting did when he came to power was talk about the way that Keir Starmer in particular had handled that situation October 7th incredibly badly.

55:59Francis Foster:Wes Streeting or Andy Burnham? Oh, Andy Burnham. Andy Burnham, sorry. I misspoke. You skipped ahead two years. I don't think so. Well, but you go, I don't remember. I thought Keir Starmer was actually quite measured. I thought he was strong on a very important issue, which was the slaughter of Jewish people. Yeah. But this is a party now which is so in hock to its Muslim voting bloc, which is terrified of them deserting their traditional blind allegiance to the Labour Party, which isn't perturbed as it should be by the fact that there are people willing to be much more preoccupied with what's happening to their co-religionists 3 ,000 miles away than what's happening to their neighbours whose religion they don't share down the road.

56:46That's nuts. That's really nuts. You know, MPs saying, I've got voted on a Gaza ticket. What? What? And, you know, it's certainly happening in Bradford. You know, I've seen, you know, the last time I was there and it is a couple of Palestinian flags. The flags matter, by the way, because the white working class have decided they matter. How do we express our frustration, our anger? Put some flags up. It's, that's such a, don't you think it's such a test of how people, I see St. Crosses of St. George on a lamppost, and I think Freedom Fighter put that there. A lot of people I used to work with would just look at it as, you know, a completely unpalatable act of civil disobedience by people who are trying to wreck the country.

57:25Francis Foster:Well, it's interesting because you bring that up, because the last time I saw Rod Little was at a private dinner where he was a speaker. and he talked about the fact that he actually saw flags and he talked about his experiences in many countries around the world. When people are putting up flags en masse, he saw it as a symptom of insecurity. I agree, that's exactly what it is. And when he saw the flag of St. George going up and the numbers that it did, he was not offended or horrified by the way that people in the media were. Neither was I, by the way. But I think what it signals is that these are the reasons...

58:06It's a cri de coeur.

58:08Francis Foster:That is a term that's far too sophisticated for a peasant. It's a cri de coeur. It's a cri from the heart. Russian peasant like me. It's a cri from the heart. It's a cri from the heart. But I think it's a cri from the heart that is signaling for something rather specific, which is the destruction of identity and also the demographic situation. is people talk about demographic replacement of the native population. Replacement hasn't happened because you haven't replaced the existing population. But what has happened is you've added masses of new population, which is diluted. So you haven't replaced these people.

58:43Francis Foster:Those people are still here, but you've changed the nature of the country and the face of the country. And as you may know, I've got into trouble for talking about ethnicity and all of these things, trying to work my way through thinking about these issues. But as a foreigner, perhaps, and someone who's, you know, olive skinned or whatever, I'm sometimes allowed and sometimes not allowed to say this. There are parts of Britain today, including in this city in London and in other places, where visitors from other countries that I show around, simply walking through London, say, what has happened here?

59:17Francis Foster:And I think those flags going up across the country, in posh parts of the country, as well as in poor parts of the country, are a symptom of people saying, like, we want to have our country in some way at least look like the country that it is, or that it's supposed to be, or that it was when I was 20 years younger than I am today. And I think, you know, you talked about Israel, which to me, you know, I think anti-Semitism is obviously a terrible thing, like all forms of racism are. And, you know, given the history of the Jewish people, I think we're naturally extra sensitive about it, but that's not actually what I meant.

59:57Francis Foster:I really do care much more about Britain than I do about any other country. And I think, as you talked about the Gaza ticket, I think all British people should care more about this country than others, including Jews about Israel, by the way. I think it applies to everybody. But when I was talking about the civil war on the right, I'm actually talking about the fact that I think you see that the success of parties like Restore and Rupert Lowe is about the fact that they are articulating something that no one has been allowed to say in public for a very long time, which is... And, you know, you get people who talk about this crudely and inarticulately and badly and in a racist way.

1:00:36It doesn't mean their voices are inauthentic.

1:00:38Francis Foster:But it doesn't mean that they are not raising something that's important. Britain has changed. You know, I came here in 1995. The country does not look like the Britain that it was. It just doesn't. And it pains me to say. And, you know, I say that as someone who came from another... But I didn't come here to live in Pakistan or in Bangladesh or in Russia from where I came. If millions of Russian people were coming here and making it more like Russia, I would be on the front line saying, this is wrong, right? But what we've had is the changing of the country. And that's where I think a lot of these concerns are now rising.

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1:03:31I don't mean gobbing off. It's one thing to have a popular social media presence like Rupert Lowe has achieved this amazing presence and voice. But you've got to endure. It's got to be within an institution. He would say Restore Britain is that institution. But there is a discomfort with institutions now on the right, which does spook me. You know, I get why people think the monarchy is woke. I get why people think the cops are woke. I get why people think the army's woke because they all are but you don't blow them up you reform them so there's that aspect changing Britain I did a monologue recently people don't watch because it's so dull as a subject like some dull things it's really important about demography I think people for one thing we're only in the foothills at the moment I think there's a tsunami of childlessness not inadvertent childlessness.

1:04:30I'm talking about childlessness by choice. A tsunami coming at us. It's not even started yet. But people of my generation now who are maybe, I'm 58, people who are just entering that phase in life where they're thinking, are my kids going to have kids? And you talk to people. And nobody's kids are having kids. And there's never been a time in human history and people say you don't know what the answer to this is. Well, let me pose the question. Has there ever been a time in history where whole communities of people have aided and abetted by the likes of science, had families as big as they wanted to have, whilst other people voluntarily have decided to stop having children?

1:05:14This amazing asymmetry between different communities has to create tensions that have never existed before. You know, we've been able to manage waves of immigration before. Other countries have been able to manage waves of immigration before because the people who, generally speaking, moved to that country were having families and replicating themselves broadly in line, broadly in line with a few differences with the host community. That's not how it is anymore, you know. So we are in really uncharted territory, really, really uncharted territory. And I don't even think we're in the foothills.

1:05:44I think that that demographic change hasn't even started yet. And the worrying thing is that we just don't talk about these things as plainly and honestly as we should. And that goes back to the politicians as well. And not only does it go back to the politicians, it also goes back to us as a public, where the moment you are honest with us about a particular issue, we have a meltdown and the toys come out of the proverbial plan. Well, so the best thing, I agree. And the best example for me is the monologue I did recently about demography. I mean, I wrote a book about demography 15 years ago. I've done programmes about it.

1:06:23I tried to set up a think tank about pronatalism, encouraging people to have all the children they want. And I knew, because I've noticed before, that people on our side of the aisle, if I can call it that, people who are not parts of the liberal establishment, I knew that this was not a message, as I framed it, that would go down well. And sure enough, people take it personally, because it's the most personal decision lots of people ever make. For one thing, very often it's a tragedy, and you know I always try and preface anything I say about demography with you know it's tragedy if you want children can't have them you know I'm not talking about you I'm not talking about you I'm talking about a society which is making it um you know as as Mary Wakefield the deputy editor of the Spectator put it recently a society which has now created conditions where people can say I'm now child free by choice in the way they used to say I'm fucking dairy free by choice That's where we're getting to.

1:07:23And the catastrophizing about the environment, this lack of confidence in their ability to become parents, this unfocused sense of threat for the future. Every generation, mine, grew up with four-minute warnings and nuclear missiles. A thousand years ago, it was the plague. Don't pull the, it's never been harder than this, can't possibly bring children into the world. So it remains the most important message. If your next question is going to be, what the fuck do we do about it? I fear, I don't think money works really, and this is why I'm a little bit obsessed with Israel, because Israel do seem to have cracked it, but only demography, but only because they're under huge historical pressure, the Holocaust, and today in a very naughty, bad neighborhood.

1:08:04So, you know, as Paul Moreland, I mean, you've had a friend of mine, Paul Moreland, the demographer says, in Tel Aviv, you're at a dinner party or on the beach, and you haven't got three kids, people want to know why. You know, these are not Heredia Jews. These are, you know, ordinary, easygoing, freewheeling types. So in terms of what you do, the great question for me is, do you stigmatize? Do you anathematize? Do you say to somebody pushing a dog in a pram, it's not a baby, stop? Do we stigmatize? Do politicians stigmatize it? Do you signal to people that they're not pulling their weight? You say, if you don't have children, you can have children, we're going to tax you more because you're not providing for the future, like people who are bothering to have tomorrow's soldiers, nurses and taxpayers?

1:08:49I don't know. I just know these are really sticky questions that nobody wants to address. And look, I mean, it was only a couple of days ago, AOC, the American senator, she showed... Congresswoman. Congresswoman, sorry. She shared on her social media, she's 36 years old, her injecting herself because she's freezing her eggs.

1:09:11Francis Foster:And you know, one of the things, we haven't yet had a chance to address her properly because we're working on the right person and there are a few people we want to bring on. Do you know the one conversation, Francis and I meet people for dinner, we go to events, whatever. The one conversation that no one's having in public, but everyone is having in private, is women in their 30s, mid to late 30s, early 40s, who are talking about doing IVF, trying to have kids and having miscarriage after miscarriage, et cetera, et cetera. And they're going, we were all lied to. We were all, feminism lied to us.

1:09:52Francis Foster:Technology lied to us. Science lied to us. Society lied to us and told us we can have everything. We can wait. We can defer. We can delay. And we really want children. And now we can't. And coming out of the mouth of a man, it's the most grotesque and offensive thing. And everyone gets upset. But a lot of women are now privately saying this. And there's no getting away from it. Society lied. We lied to women. It's a fact. And the education system as well. I agree. And when Dorothy Byrne, formerly, I mean, I hate to say it, but she was formerly the boss at Channel 4 News. She's now a head of an Oxford college.

1:10:31She got in a lot of trouble three or four years ago when she lectured her young female students and said, don't forget the graphs. Don't forget to have children the fertility graphs are against you um my my late wife was a freak she we had uh she yes she can't she can't sue me she's dead she um we had our first child she was 36 on the cusp of turning 37 don't try this at home she had five children in her 40s yeah yeah and unfortunately my i have five daughters we had five daughters and a boy uh i think i fear that my my daughters will look at that and think that's relatively normal. It's so freakishly abnormal.

1:11:09So my job, one of my jobs in life is to say to my daughters, you need to be, you need to have your ducks in a row by 27, 28, because, and it's, it's awful, isn't it? I mean, we don't, I didn't worry about it. And, but if you're, you know, if you ain't got a mortgage in place, you haven't got a bloke in place and you're 33, you're clock, clock, clock, clock, clock, clock. It's a nightmare. But we need to have the conversation because what's the alternative that we live in a fantasy world, which is currently what we're doing in more ways than one. And then, unfortunately, you've got to wake up at some time.

1:11:44Francis Foster:And by the way, you know, if you're concerned about the changing nature of the country, of all the tools available to you personally, other than the pencil and the voting booth, which doesn't strike me as particularly effective these days, you only have one other option. I agree. And by the way, as you hinted, there are communities that have absolutely no problem with this. They have no problem having children. They are having them. And, you know, if you play that movie forward... The most patriotic thing you can do is to have children. You give yourself a stake in the future. You answer the question.

1:12:19You balance the equation, which is you don't want to rely on immigration to make this country work. So what are you going to do? There's got to be people feeding into hospitals and shops and schools and all that. wiping the arses of the elderly. Who's going to do it?

1:12:37Francis Foster:Zach Polanski isn't. He's not going to do it.

1:12:43Francis Foster:Colin, on that happy note, it's been a genuine pleasure for us speaking with you. For me too. We really appreciate it. And it's a proper conversation. Yeah, we really, really appreciate you coming on the show. Before we ask you our final question, and before we go to questions from our supporters on Substack, tell everybody where they can find your way. On Outpost, please have a look at it on Substack because we get paid on Substack. Please subscribe if you're willing to do that. It will be hugely generous and appreciated. YouTube is building nicely, as is Facebook and Twitter. Follow me, but follow Outpost Studios is a place to go.

1:13:15Outpost Pictures. We keep changing our name, but you'll find out.

1:13:18Francis Foster:That's not helpful. And final question is always the same. What's the one thing we're not talking about that we really should be? We're not talking about demography. We're not talking about tomorrow's people. We're not talking about how the country looks if you can't be bothered to have children. stop carping about the state of the country if you're not prepared to take a stake in its future there you go right guys, join us over on Substack where we carry on the conversation and you get to ask Colin your questions when people say they do not want kids or they don't have them is it because of reasons like the economy or climate change, do you think they're being honest with themselves or do they simply not want the responsibility of parenting Thank you.