"We Live in the Age of Delusions" - Peter Hitchens

19:53Konstantin Kisin:I mean, there's still, look, I mean, this is a relatively small sample size, but where I live, which is a, you know, a shishi borough of North London, it's covered in green placards. Well, that's, the enthusiasm for the Green Party has been, really since official communism collapsed, has been the resort of the left all over Europe. And that's what they do. When you see that the Labour Party is in government, they're no longer able to deliver because it can't. If you still want to pretend that someday there might be a government that would do what the left want governments to do, then Green's your party, isn't it?

20:32Francis Foster:Can I just come back to something, which is, you know, you talked about the collapse of the Soviet Union. You and I both witnessed it with our own eyes, and those scenes are very memorable. And Francis, his family background being from Venezuela, I think it's one of the things that separates us from many people because we know that the status quo is not remotely permanent and can only be maintained by good policy. And if good policy ceases to be practiced, then cataclysm is what will follow. Most of the things which happened, happened to people who five years beforehand would never have imagined that they could possibly have.

21:10Francis Foster:They were university professors. They were university professors three days ago, and now they were selling their belongings on the street. Yeah, that's what happened. That's it. That's what happened. It also happened, interestingly, not so much in Britain, but it happened in the United States during the Great Depression. Yes. The highly qualified professional people were begging from door to door. Yes. And they had no conception of this lay ahead. But the reason I bring this up is Russia is not the best example, because with Putin in charge, it pollutes people thinking about this. And he's obviously, in my opinion, a terrible person.

21:44Well, in mine too, so I agree on that.

21:46Francis Foster:Good. But if you take a country like Poland, or indeed, like you say, the United States after the Great Depression, there is the possibility for recovery. There is the possibility to fundamentally change course and to let go of the terrible policies that have taken you to the place you've ended up, to accept the pain and the suffering that comes and out of that to have clarity about how to move forward in a different way. Sure, but you don't know how, and it might turn out badly. What I wish people would do would be to see the possibility of catastrophe and act accordingly. Me too, but it's not going to happen.

22:22Francis Foster:It's not going to happen. Well, that's my fear. We know it's not going to happen. That's my fear, and it's not... If I had some way of entering the minds of people with speech and thought and writing, then I would. Look, I'm in my mid-70s. I have nothing particular to gain left in life. I haven't got all that much longer to live. If it were possible for me to do anything to prevent this from happening, then I would do it, but I've tried. And people don't listen. but they prefer to listen to more seductive voices. And I don't offer seduction at all. I can't. It would be dishonest, but people would prefer to be seduced than to be told the truth.

23:13And it's only after catastrophes happen that it's possible. So there are other people, I'm sure, in this country who feel the same way, that things are going very badly and something ought to be done to stop it. But where are they? Where are they? They're not in the civil service. They're not in senior posts in the universities. They're not leading the political parties. They're not by and large prominent in the media, particularly the broadcast media, which is to anybody remotely informed or with any historical knowledge, listening to our broadcast media is torture.

23:43Francis Foster:Yes. Yes, it absolutely is. I guess what I'm trying to ask you is, and look, I completely appreciate your perspective. And I think if you're looking at it in a 10-year time frame, I don't see this country being better in 10 years. No, but I can't. It might in tenure still have managed to teeter along like the train in the USS film. No one will actually manage to get it off the rails. It might still survive. You can't tell. What I'm getting at is something else. Predictions are easy in general, but they're hard in terms of how long it's going to take. What I'm getting at is something else, which is my hope, and I only express it as a hope, not as a belief about what's likely to happen, is that the inevitable cataclysm can produce the conditions for recovery.

24:34Francis Foster:Not necessarily recovery, but the conditions from which recovery is possible. That's very Marxist. Tell me more. All my comrades in the late 60s and early 70s were rather hoping for a collapse out of which might arise the longed-for revolution with the leading role of the party and the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat. That was the theory. It was all going to go wrong. And I have to say, Ted Heath in the early 70s made it look very much as if we were right. Kept trying to shut the country down, pick huge fights with industrial unions and say nothing worked. Blackouts. Fantastic.

25:10He was a great... I remember the recruits pouring into the International Socialists in the early 70s about that time. Ted Heath was a great recruiter for Marxism and Leninism. But in the end, he let us all down.

25:25Francis Foster:Sadly. By losing an election. Harold Wilson. I mean, I am not hoping for... I, like you... No, no, no. I'm just telling you this is the formula. I don't myself believe that catastrophe is justifiable. No, I'm not saying it's justifiable. Or desirable or even conscionable. I think you have to say, if it looks as if there's going to be a catastrophe, do whatever you can to prevent it and warn against it. But Peter, you and I have to be honest. We have all been making these arguments. We've been trying to say we're heading towards a cliff. No one wants to listen because they're much more comfortable spending money we don't have.

26:07Francis Foster:So they're not going to listen to us. Okay, so we'll go and build a shelter in New Zealand. We are going off the cliff. I don't know what you're supposed to do. We're going off the cliff. We'll go up and find a monastery in a high mountain, Shangri-La. I don't know if you can't influence it, but I very much doubt whether catastrophe will produce at the end of it by some kind of baptism of fire a better world than the one that was before. But the examples you gave, like we said, the collapse of communism, it had been very beneficial to many, many countries in Eastern Europe. The collapse of communism has, but on the other hand...

26:46Francis Foster:They've had a recovery. The US after the Great Depression had a recovery. They have had a recovery. Even World War II, terrible as it was, there was a recovery after that. Well, that's true. All these things are true, but this is a different thing. Why? Well, first of all, everybody knew, everybody knows when you start wars that there will be terrible destruction and everything will change as a result. And there is an opportunity for reconstruction. Though I have to say that there were quite a lot of peoples in the world who'd been affected by World War II who didn't get all that much reconstruction afterwards.

27:17Lucky old Western Europe did quite well. A lot of other people didn't. Everybody knew the... I've just been reading Robert Service's book about the August 1991 push. Everybody knew in the Soviet Union it could not go on. They knew it had to be fixed in some way, politically and economically. Gorbachev, alas, was not an economist or even runnily skilled in economy. He tried to do what he could in ignorance. And also, he was faced with Western leaders who continued to have a profound mistrust of him as a Soviet leader, and so would not help. He would repeat it. It comes up very much in the service book.

27:57And the number of times he goes to Western leaders It says, look, we're on the verge of economic catastrophe. What we need is some sort of new Marshall Plan. They're saying, well, not until you've denationalized the sugar industry or some such. And they kept making conditions. They never did. And one of the reasons for the piratical rape of what was left for the Soviet economy was the unwillingness of the West to enter into a proper serious reform program. I think you won't find that in Poland. I think a lot of effort was made. It has been a fantastic success, I might say, to turn Poland into a modern, well-off, civilized, law-governed country, which I think the world should be really pleased about.

28:39But I do often wonder why the same thing wasn't done in Russia. Could have been, I think.

28:44Francis Foster:Well, but this is my point. Fantastic resources, incredibly well-indicated people. Of course. But thrown away and the place turned into a declining slum and a dictatorship. Very good point, but a bit of a side point. Well, you mentioned it. My point is something else. So material things have, to some extent, recovered. They're not by any means for everybody, I don't think. I think there's still people living very badly in Russia. Yes, there are. What I'm saying is there is, in a cataclysm, which you and I, well, I think the three of us think is kind of inevitable, there is the opportunity for recovery.

29:21Francis Foster:The opportunity for recovery. Okay. I accept that. You do? Yeah, of course. You can't be certain about the future. There you go, a note of sunshine from Peter Hitchens. We got there. No, you can't be certain. I would think it's unlikely, but it's possible. No, you can rule things out which are plainly impossible, but what you can't rule out is something which is theoretically possible. Why do that?

29:44Konstantin Kisin:Don't you think part of the issue with our culture and our society as it is, and the politics as a result of that, is we live in the age of delusion? Yes. And people have been encouraged to be deluded. It's been going on for a very long time. This is part of the point where I harp on about my Bolshevik training. I mean, the fundamental thing that we were told, apart from some basic Machiavellianism, and how many people in the modern world have read Machiavellian's The Prince? It's very short. It didn't take long. But they think they know, but they haven't read it. There's so many books of that kind.

30:20But the other thing we were told was how to tell pretexts from motive and distinguish pretexts from reality. And we're constantly bombarded with politicians giving us pretexts for actions they're undertaking, which is fundamentally unbelievable, particularly in foreign policy. People don't see through them. Then again, we have an education system, which is, instead of challenging the intelligent of all classes to understand more and know more, encouraged them in a child-centered myth of unknowing. They're never actually compelled to learn things they didn't know, to find out that the books they've heard of contain things they didn't realize were in there.

31:06And so we have a huge number of untrained minds. That's one of the reasons why it's so easy. It's one of the reasons why it's so easy to fool people into doing absurd things. The COVID panic was such a warning of the general level of skepticism and trained minds in our society. If the government had decreed that to reduce the spread of the disease, everybody had to wear a five-inch long pink extension on their nose, people would have done it. They very nearly did. I mean, those masks that they wore, which, how should I put it, were of doubtful use, were also, the other thing about them, to me it was forced conformism.

32:02If you instructed everybody in the country to wear a Make America Great Again red baseball cap. They said, well, I can't do that. I don't agree with it. By wearing one of those masks, you were, especially under pressure, you were endorsing an attitude towards the COVID panic, which a lot of people didn't share. One of the reasons I objected to it so much was forced conformism to an opinion, not just a silly action. But the level, I mean, there were people, I mean, a lot of them got in touch with me and some people still do come up to me in the street about it. There were people who resisted it, but enormous.

32:40A majority of people were happy to accept it.

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34:04Konstantin Kisin:So you're not running back into the kitchen every five minutes. Over a million customers, more than 50 ,000 five-star reviews. Gordon Ramsay uses this at home and in his own restaurants. And that man is not easily impressed. Every piece comes with a lifetime warranty, so you're not replacing this next summer. Don't spend another season fighting in your grill. For a limited time, our audience gets 10 % off with our exclusive link. Head to hexclad.com slash trig. That's H-E-X-C-L-A-D.com forward slash trig. Tell them Trigonometry sent you. The thing that COVID and more broadly, all of these hysterias that have inflicted our society, impacted upon it.

34:52Konstantin Kisin:The thing that I found most shocking, above all, was the British public's desire for big government and to be looked after. I thought that was fundamentally un-British. Well, it used to be. But Paul Convent, who was the French ambassador in London before, during and after the First World War, said after it was over that he believed that between 1914 and 1918, this country had undergone a revolution as profound and significant as the one France had undergone in the 1780s and 1790s. And that was the moment at which government became big and interfered in everybody's lives in almost every conceivable way.

35:38His second dose, 1939 to 1945, of course the third dose of the anti-government, has completely changed that. The idea that the British are fundamentally independent-minded, stand up on your own two feet quite like the Americans, is actually not true.

35:50Konstantin Kisin:And that's a very dangerous place to be, because we've seen that big government simply doesn't work, and what we have now is we're going broke, but yet people have been indoctrinated to believe that big government is what is needed, and they need to be looked after. And ultimately, we're going to come in for a pretty rude awakening, aren't we? Big government isn't always wrong. In wartime, you need big government to be effective for a start. There's some things, when I used to argue about nationalization and privatization with conservatives, I said, well, you say you don't want state control of anything.

36:26Do you actually think you can privatize the Royal Navy? That could run. Some of them, to my amazement, said, well, yes, of course, all you need to do is hire a lot of people with privateers. I said, OK, well, then we're in the realm of madness here. But they resisted the idea that anything was better run by the state, though some things are. So I'm not a let the free market rip person. I mean, for instance, I would really like it if they properly re-nationalized the railways rather than the ridiculous porridge they're making over at the moment because I think there are some things which are just better run that way.

37:01So, yeah, no, but there's no point yearning for British people to be as they were before 1914, because amongst other things you have to remember, until 1916, the British army, which went to France and was mown down in the mud, was composed of volunteers, and these volunteers were people who had been persuaded that this was a vital war for civilization in which every man and spirit had to take part as a matter of conscience. So what did you do? You lost the best people in the country, in many cases, before they could get children. So it didn't just change the way that people behaved. It actually changed the nature of the whole British population.

37:49Hundreds of thousands of men who were the best of their generations of every class were just mown down by a German machine gunfire and eaten by rats before they could marry and have children. And this affects the country. You have similar catastrophic effects, of course, in the European countries. They're not quite the same because of the volunteer nature of the British army. I'm absolutely sure that the post-1917 civil war in Russia either drove out of the country or killed huge numbers of the best people, and it made it very, very difficult. And then the great purges of Stalin, by their nature, also selected the best people.

38:31So you do make it difficult for a country to recover when you kill so many of your best.

38:38Konstantin Kisin:And that's a real concern. And that was a shocking for me from COVID and, like I said, everything else. I expected more people to stand up and challenge and push back. I remember being a kid in the classroom and being taught about Nazism. I mean, I understand the chronology of events. I don't understand how so many people could fall for this. And then you see, I mean, the trans hysteria was one example. You know, people saying, you know, you can change your sex, and we both know that is palpably and scientifically false. And I just, and I saw this happen. I was like, oh, I get it now. I get it how you could deny a fundamental reality.

39:18Yeah, but propaganda can be very effective if it's well aimed and if it targets the right discontent. And a lot of German people were simply told that this is this period of unemployment and chaos and fighting in the streets must come to an end. And they were told this, we are the people who will do it. And in many cases, they didn't ask too many questions about how it would be done. In many cases, you can easily understand how people you know could have done that, I think. People pretend now that they would all have seen it coming, but from what we know, I'm fairly sure quite a lot would not.

39:52Konstantin Kisin:And it's also as well, and, you know, with all of these things, there's always an element of self-interest. There was nothing wrong with self-interest. People have to be interested in themselves to some extent. It's just it can be taken too far.

40:06Francis Foster:Peter, you touched on something very important about which you wrote a book actually. Was it called The War We Should Never Fought? Well, the war we never fought is the one about drugs. No, that's right. I meant the one about World War. The phony victory. Yes. Which people keep telling me is called the phony war, which absolutely is not. That's a different subject. The phony victory is, I was trying to be too clever. It does, if you think about it, explain what's going on. We came, everybody's heard of the phony war, and we sat around doing nothing for the first, what was it, nine months of war, and then suddenly we were engulfed in blitzkrieg, and the next thing you know, we're the victors at Potsdam.

40:46And I thought, how do you get from the phony war, a defeated country, Dunkirk, bankruptcy, How do you get from there to being one of the victor countries? And you don't, the truth is. And we and France began the Second World War by declaring war on Hitler. You could say he began it by invading Poland, but it was a positive decision on our side to make that the issue. But we weren't prepared for the war that we declared, particularly France. We would all rely, people don't realize now just how much people believed in the strength, the military strength of France in 1939. They thought that it was colossal and unchallengeable, this vast army which had been victorious in 1918 and was the army of a great and valorous country.

41:38They were amazed that it collapsed. It was like some great cathedral being wiped off the map. People had no idea this could conceivably happen. And we certainly didn't. We were left with a war which we were not equipped to fight. And so we ended up handing over the war to other people. We handed over the war to the Soviet Union and the United States. And we were on the winning side. But in my view, we were not the victors.

42:03Francis Foster:Well, I was going to ask you to go broader than that. And you've written so much and spoken so much and thought so much about Britain and its history, particularly in the 20th century. What is Peter Hitchens' sort of, the Peter Hitchens' take on the 20th century for this country and the trajectory of it during that time? Oh, the gravest mistake ever made by any British government was to enter the First World War in 1914. We should never have done that. There was no reason why we needed to and many, many reasons why we should not have done it. It cost us almost everything we had, and we continue to pay the price for it.

42:41Francis Foster:But flesh that out for people who may be less familiar with the argument. You mentioned, obviously, losing hundreds of thousands of the best people. We did, yeah. But beyond that, how did we get from World War I to where we are today? Well, at the beginning of World War I, we were a creditor country. We had huge foreign investments.

43:03We spent what we earned, and we had, as it were, savings as a nation. We were also a stable, more or less contented country. I mean, there were problems, problems with Ireland, and a number of other things. But we were a solid society, likely to last. We were a Christian country. Whether you liked that or not, it was important to the existence of the shared morality. We were a country which, in which, in which, People were monoculturally one. Everybody knew the same things. Everybody had read the same Bible and prayed the same prayers, sang the same hymns, read the same novels, the works of Charles Dickens from a university.

43:48People could quote them to each other. And we were a society of people holding together. So economically and culturally, we were also a very peaceful society. because of the huge success of Robert Peel's policing reforms of the 19th century and also because of the huge success of the Sunday schools, which had spread morality right through society. So we had all these enormous advantages. We were also militarily strong in the only way it was counted, that is to say no one could attack our islands because we have the strongest navy in the world. And we then entered, for reasons which remain baffling, a Russo-German war, which was basically about Ukraine.

44:32Hang on a minute. Sounds familiar. Now, why did we do that? It's very difficult to find out. And there was a strong war faction, but it was quite a few people, like Sir Henry Wilson, who were trying pretty much to get us into war. But most politicians were unaware of the planning that had taken place. Most of the cabinet, most of Asquith's cabinet didn't know how much military planning had taken place. Joint military planning between Britain and France, for instance, before 1914, it had been kept from them. As for Parliament, it was completely ignorant. And then the thing advanced with immense speed.

45:12And people will say, well, what about Belgium? Well, that is very sad about Belgium. But the truth is that Britain, when confronted with the conflict between its own interests and morality, has in the past dumped other people in the mud. And most particularly, we did so in 1864 when Prussia attacked Denmark and we promised to go to their aid. And Parnston said, oh, actually, sorry, we're busy at the moment. We're not coming. And it's a horrible thing to do, but it was a very wise decision. Because there's nothing we could have done to save Denmark. Most people in 1914 believed when war was declared that it would be a naval war, that we would just enter it as we would send the Navy to help the French in various ways.

45:52And that would be that. They never had any idea we were going to create a huge, continental-sized army and lose hundreds of thousands of people to have conscription and rationing. It never crossed their minds.

46:02Konstantin Kisin:Doesn't it speak to also the arrogance of the political class at the time? Because the... I can see you're going to disagree with this, but wasn't the narrative that... I don't think we've ever said anything that Peter had disagreed with. Political classes are always arrogant. That's why they do it. But the narrative at the time... Who should know better than I? One of the most arrogant people I know. So that's not in itself necessarily a criticism. You have to be a bit arrogant if you want to do some things. And politics is one of them, I think. But then there's a fundamental disconnect from reality or getting a decision so disastrously wrong that hundreds of thousands of people die.

46:38Konstantin Kisin:Because the narrative at the time was, well, this is all going to be done and dusted by Krimbo. Well, some people said that. I think there were three people in the cabinet who were worried about it. Two of them were John Burns. John Morley, probably the most intelligent person in British politics at the time, who actually resigned secretly, Asquith asked him to keep it secret over preparations for war, trying to prevent it. But Asquith, I think, had serious doubts about it himself, because, again, he was a clever man. But he was afraid that if he didn't declare war, then his government would fall and a pro-war coalition was formed between the pro-war elements of his own party and the Tories, and that he was panicked into it.

47:23It wasn't a rational decision. It was largely a panic, and made partly on the grounds that things had got out of control, which they did very rapidly. Barbara Tuchman's The Guns of August is probably the best description of how this happened. No one sleepwalked into war, absolutely not at all. the Germans quite deliberately encouraged Austria into a confrontation with Russia in the hope that it would lead to war. And that was an accident. It was untrue. But the diplomatic events which followed, particularly between Britain and Germany, basically matters getting increasingly out of control because we didn't realize that we were talking to a Germany which was absolutely set on war.

48:12Fritz Fischer's great book makes this quite plain, there's no doubt in my mind, Germany wanted a war, but they wanted a war with Russia. They felt they would have to knock out France. France was also frantic for war. They wanted revenge for 1870. And they conducted the war in the initial months of war, almost insanely, sending waves of men in bright red trousers to get straight into German gunfire. The casualties were colossal, and the military effect disastrous. It was a crazy war, and we got involved in it. And for what? What was our interest if Russia and Germany and Austria-Hungary have a conflict?

48:55Konstantin Kisin:What was the conflict between those three nations? Basically, Russia, with the backing of Austria-Hungary, sorry, Germany, I started to get Germany, with the backing of Austria-Hungary, wanted to expand eastwards, particularly to what is now Ukraine. And you can see the shape of the ambition in the 1918 piece of Brest-Litovsk, which Germany signed with Bolsheviks, which actually created modern Ukraine, amongst other things, one of the things that it did. And also it transferred all the Baltic states from Russia to German control and shifted Poland. That is the crucial, people think of it being Belgium and France, But that's gone.

49:37The actual cockpit of war in 20th century Europe, but now in 21st century, remains Ukraine. This is a hugely important piece of territory, and that's what they were worried about. Do you know where Lenin was when the war broke out?

49:51Francis Foster:No. Paris, wasn't it? No. He was in Austro-Hungarian-controlled Poland, where he was quite valued, as it turned out, by the Austro-Hungarians because of his role in fermenting anti-Moscow sentiment in what was to become Ukraine. He was arrested by the local policeman because he was obviously Russian and an alien. He looked sinister anyway. But within a couple of days of him being arrested in this small country town, he was hoiked out of prison by the Austrian government, intervention, I think, of the Army High Command, and put on a train to Zuri. So, Peter... From which eventually he went, as you know, with huge tons of German gold to overthrow the Russian government.

50:40This is what was really going on. This is what we bizarrely got ourselves involved in.

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53:01Francis Foster:And you described Britain, the British Empire, in the terms that you did solid, economically stable. I was talking about Britain. The empire is a different question. How much longer the empire could have survived? The empire had weakened itself quite badly with the great folly of particularly the Second Boer War, in which we'd hugely lowered our international standing by behaving extremely brutally towards a small country. I mean, no one has any sympathy for the Boers now because obviously they were the people who brought the world apartheid, but at the time, quite a lot of people did. And also, we established the famous concentration camps in South Africa, which were not...

53:41I mean, the phrase is the same. The reality is not by any means identical, but they were horrible. and Emily Hobhouse exposed their horror and the world knew that we'd done a terrible thing. We'd done enormous damage. It was, in some ways, the Second World War was Britain's Iraq War, the moment at which our world power began to decline. Empires come and go. It would have been perfectly possible for this country to quietly relinquish most of its empire, much of which was expensive to maintain and brought us no benefit, and become a major country in its own right. We were still a huge manufacturer and exporter with enormous foreign investments, especially in South America.

54:22And all that went. We could have managed the transition to being a secondary power much more readily and successfully if we'd stayed out of that stupid war.

54:34Francis Foster:And what happens, this way we started this portion of the conversation with, Britain, as you describe it, is very solid economically, culturally, etc. You have this war that takes the lives of hundreds of thousands of the best men. It also cost us all our money. And it cost us all our money. By, I think, late 1915, we were in severe debt to the United States. War is fantastically expensive. The same thing was true in 1939-1940. It took no time at all for us to be in debt. And do you know we've never paid off our debt to the United States in the First World War? I did not know that. Most people don't.

55:10In fact, when I tell them, they say, no, it can't be true. We paid it off the other day. What we paid off the other day was actually our Second World War debt. The First World War debt, we stopped payments in 1934, and we haven't paid a penny since or any interest. We actually defaulted on it. It's one of the most undiscussed scandals of modern history. The Americans absolutely remember. You can get the Treasury to admit it if you try. There has actually been a book about it, a rather good book, called The Long Shadow of Default, which I recommend to anybody. but we actually remain in debt to the United States for the First World War.

55:46And... A hundred and more years later.

55:48Francis Foster:Soon after... Good, eh? Fairly soon after you get into World War II, which we've already talked about. And what happens in your assessment in the post-war period that contributes to where we've arrived at today? Well, it's all one road, isn't it? Once you go to war in 1914 and you cease to be rich, you cease to be powerful. And again, look at, there's another tremendous book, I can't recommend it highly enough, called The Deluge by Adam Tooze, which describes amongst, it's full of stuff about the First World War, which most people don't write about, but it describes what happened between Britain and the United States over naval power, which this was our power.

56:30And it was the equivalent of nuclear power at the time. And the Americans forced us to limit our naval forces. They forced us to both limit the size of our navy and the size of our ships. They forced us to break our crucial alliance with Japan, which enabled us to remain secure in the Pacific. And the arguments between the admirals of the US Navy and the British Navy grew so tense that at points fistfights nearly broke out between them over this. And that was again an aftermath. And you see from this the long slope lying ahead of decline, which was dictated to us by our voluntary bankruptcy, of 1914.

57:11Konstantin Kisin:And I think part of the problem as well is that we still, going back to the idea of delusion, we still have this idea of us being this kind of great nation which has a huge impact across the globe. And the reality is there are much bigger nations who are much more powerful, who have a far more significant impact, who don't necessarily care what we say or do. Oh, lots. One of the first things you discover if you're going to live in the United States, Of course, you expect to find a special relationship and everybody loves us. But I found myself being accused of being Australian. What's that accent?

57:47And also, I found that you would read the American newspapers and watch the American newspapers, and our country, it wasn't mentioned.

57:55Francis Foster:Well, no other country. It might as well have been the Falkland Islands. It just wasn't. Nobody cared. And I searched Washington, DC for two years for any sign of the special relationship. And not really was the none. I actually watched this country being ruthlessly squashed on the Irish issue by the US government. They just crushed us like a beetle over that. And if there is a special relationship, it's a specially nasty one. It was amazing to watch. But this is a fantasy. So we're neither important nor much liked. And it's important for people to realize this. But they won't. they want to believe.

58:37It's the great compensation, actually, for having made, and it was the colossal sacrifice of the Second World War as a country, years of rationing, privation, the deaths of many of the bombing of our cities. Surely we had to have something as a result of all that sacrifice and pain. And people really wanted to believe that it was our finest hour and that we had emerged from it as a great and powerful nation. Well, it was our finest hour. I don't dispute that. And we fought very bravely and movingly against very large and dangerous forces, and we suffered a great deal. And my parents went through it, but we didn't emerge from this as a great path.

59:17But people don't, it's like your own manhood. People don't like admitting that.

59:24Konstantin Kisin:And it's also like, you see it with the policy on net zero, where people go, well, you know, we're going to set an example to the rest of the world. Britain should lead the world by blowing up all its coal-fired power stations. China is building about 10 a month. Yes, I know. It's a insanity. We blow them up, too. We don't cautiously say, oh, this might be a mistake in Mothball. We blow them up. Millions of pounds worth of valuable plant, blown up, dismantled. So no possibility that anybody might admit it was a mistake ever.

59:55Francis Foster:Peter, when you started making some of these points initially, were you more optimistic than you are now? Yes. You've been ground down by the reality that no one listens to your warnings. When I wrote my first book, The Abolition of Britain, in 1999, I did so in the belief that it was possible. What I began to think was writing, I then wrote for the Daily Express, writing a weekly column, frankly, in the Daily Express was not going to have much influence. What I really wanted to do particularly was to get into national broadcasting war. I was advised by a friend that you can't get anywhere very much in national broadcasting.

1:00:31if you haven't written a book. And so I wrote the book with the purpose of extending the reach of my ideas. And in fact, it was quite interesting. Some of the initial reviews of it, although uncomplimentary, accepted that something serious was being said. In general, it was very hard to get it published. I had struggled very hard to get it published. Most publishers refused to have anything to do with me. And a major agent who I approached wouldn't touch me, let alone the book. And eventually I got it published. and actually published so small that my family had to do all the work of getting into bookshops.

1:01:07And it ended up, it still sells even now, what is it, 27 years later, but it was a real struggle to get it out. But some of the reviews understood that something was being said, and I thought, wow. And I did begin to get a certain amount of opportunity in broadcasting. At one point, I'm in Channel 4, let me make documentaries, and I would get on the big opinion programs. And I thought there is some point at which there might be the sprockets of what I think and of what is talked about in politics will mesh with each other and we'll get somewhere. And then it became more and more obvious that this wasn't so.

1:01:52And the time went by and the crucial moment for me remains. when David Cameron took over the Conservative Party on behalf of the Blairites. I can put this more clearly now than I could then, but I was quite clear about it at the time. If people allow this to happen, if people endorse this Blairite takeover of the only major opposition party, then it is the end. You mustn't do it. Don't just vote Tory because you want a Tory government, because you won't get a Tory government. One of the points I can make now more clearly than then was actually Gordon Brown was probably more conservative than David Cameron, particularly on things like the European single currency.

1:02:31And he was, it was and is a more conservative person. But I was just trying to say, no, it's vital that this doesn't succeed. And I couldn't get anybody to listen to me. And I remember going around some other supposedly right-wing columnist and saying, if I keep saying this alone, I'll get nowhere. where if anybody else joins in, it might actually make some impact, and they wouldn't. And it was at that point that I despaired. And once the Cameron government came into office, and everybody imagined that the Tories had won the election, which they hadn't even done, and the coalition settled in, I thought, that's it.

1:03:12Konstantin Kisin:Isn't that quite dementing in many ways? Oh, you must, I mean, it's a hack comparison. It's not the word I choose. It's dispiriting, but for me, what it is above all, because I have that kind of temperament, is furiating. And there are two ways of reacting to it if you're furious. And one is just to have total contempt ever afterwards for everything, everybody involved in what resulted from what I tried to prevent. So I do. But it's also because what you're fundamentally talking about is it's a tragedy. I think so. I think it might have been avoidable. It would have been worth trying. I think 2010 was the last moment at which it might have been doable.

1:04:00But it's just got me nothing except abuse.

1:04:06Francis Foster:Well, and plenty of appearances of trigonometry, of course. Well, that, of course, is a great compensation. Your sarcasm is much appreciated. No, no, no, no, no. You should hear me being sarcastic. It doesn't sound like that at all.

1:04:22Francis Foster:Peter, it's always wonderful to talk to you. We're going to ask you some questions from our supporters in a second, but the last question, as you know, is always the same. It's on the mug that you were looking at earlier. What's the one thing we're not talking about that we should be? We haven't really talked about the attempts to create war. When I wrote The Phony Victory, my purpose was actually to make a strong case against what seemed to me at the time a drive for war, which I thought would emerge either in Iran or in Russia. And I thought these countries were both being prepared to become enemies.

1:04:58And I thought if I could only spread the idea in some way, a mature idea that this is, that as a country, we shouldn't be beguiled into war by this constant repetition of the idea that every single world conflict is a repeat of 1938. Therefore, that anybody who opposes it is Neville Chamberlain. Anybody who continues to oppose it after it started is Lord Haw Haw, that everybody who's in favor of it is Winston Churchill. This is, I thought, first of all, I show that what we thought about Neville Chamberlain was not absolutely true. And also that the whole development of war in late 1930s Europe had no parallels with what's going on.

1:05:49in the Europe of today. And for all the good it did, I might as well have stayed at home. But that's, it does alarm me. There is, we're constantly, people are constantly coming, intelligence chiefs come out and say, we have to prepare for war. Russia is a great threat. Well, you can believe that if you want, though I find it a struggle. I always remember going to Moscow. Was it in 2008? I know it was the first, big parade of the new Russian army, they decided they're going to restart the Red Square parades. And I'd watched the last one in November 1990. And so my officer said, why don't you go out and watch it?

1:06:31And I watched it with my old friend, Igor Monachef, whose father had been a Soviet nuclear submarine commander. And he knew his military staff. And we stood on the balcony of a hotel watching it as close as we could get. I enjoyed the parade as much as the rest. And at the end of it, Igor turned to me and said, what did you think of our great display of strategic scrap metal? And he was quite right. I mean, it was the big new weapons. They probably had two or three of. Most of the stuff they were able to put out was probably old, much of its Soviet era. We knew, we still know, the Russian military is fantastically corrupt and incompetent.

1:07:14And the training of soldiers is a disgrace. It's a terrible army, and it can't. After four years, they haven't managed to take Kharkov 20 miles from the border. So to turn this into a great bogeyman, which is about to turn up at Dunkirk with its tanks pointed at the British coast just doesn't seem to me to be realistic. But the intelligence people, retired generals, ex-defence ministers, NATO chiefs are constantly trying to prepare us for war. And the last thing I noticed was some suggestion that we might all start hoarding food and medicines in case there was a war. It was a real attempt to try and get the British people to become war-minded, which I think can only end sadly.

1:08:04Konstantin Kisin:Peter, it's been an absolute pleasure. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Make sure to join us over on Substack where we carry on the conversation and you get to ask Peter your questions. I've always greatly admired Peter's books, but on finishing them, I always end up feeling rather hopeless about Britain's future. Is Britain doomed to disintegrate?

1:08:42We'll see you next time.