TRIGGERnometry - Britain Is Headed For A Financial Meltdown - Allister Heath

Episode Date: September 14, 2025

Allister Heath is a French-British journalist and commentator, known for his free-market views and sharp critiques of UK politics. He’s the editor of The Sunday Telegraph and a former editor of City A.M., with a background in economics from LSE and Oxford. Triggernometry is proudly independent. Thanks to the sponsors below for making that possible: - Hirsch Organic Grass Fed Beef Organ Supplement: get 10% off at https://hirschorganic.com/pages/trigger - Protect your wealth with The Pure Gold Company. Get your free investor guide at https://pure-gold.co/trigger - Book your tickets at battleofideas.org.uk. Use code TRIGGER25 for a 20% discount on all tickets. Join our exclusive TRIGGERnometry community on Substack! https://triggernometry.substack.com/ OR Support TRIGGERnometry Here: Bitcoin: bc1qm6vvhduc6s3rvy8u76sllmrfpynfv94qw8p8d5 Shop Merch here - https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/shop/ Advertise on TRIGGERnometry: [e-mail] Find TRIGGERnometry on Social Media: https://twitter.com/triggerpod https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod/ https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod/ About TRIGGERnometry: Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@francisjfoster) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians. 00:00 - Introduction 07:15 - Things Have To Get Worse 14:15 - People Don't Understand The Level Of Debt We're In 19:42 - We're Going To Have Real Austerity 27:24 - Labour Isn't Capable Of Reducing Spending 35:41 - The Left Doesn't Understand Economics 41:25 - What Does Reform Need To Do To Succeed? 48:29 - How Much Of An Impact Can Jeremy Corbyn's Party Make? 53:52 - Words Matter! 01:00:14 - What's The One Thing We're Not Talking About That We Really Should Be? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It's impossible to be anything other than extremely pessimistic about the future of Britain. We've destroyed what used to be the best economy in Europe, and it's been destroyed by disastrous government policy from both Labour and the Conservatives. The political establishment has affected it lied to the public by selling them a vision of this country that can't be afforded. And that is a ticking time bomb. The House of Cards will crumble because of the debt crisis. When you travel to America, they can't believe how poor the British.

middle classes are. They cannot believe what the average wage in Britain is. And they look at us and it's pathetic, frankly. In other words, the government can't keep the peace and can't put criminals in jail, but it can put you in jail. Relax. Relax. This isn't an ad. If you're not a fan of ads but love trigonometry, join the thousands of trigonometry members who get extended interviews, no ads, early access, and the ability to submit questions for upcoming guests. Sign up now at Trigapod.com.com.uk or click the link in the description of this episode. When you fly with Hawaiian Airlines, the whole family enjoys free access to Starlink, the fastest Wi-Fi in the sky, thanks to T-Mobile.

Stream, scroll, message and game while sipping a passion orange guava juice. Everyone stays entertained and your vacation gets a head start. Enjoy every moment of your trip, even before you land. Hawaii starts here. Alistair, welcome Trigonometry. Well, thanks for having me. It's great to have you on. You are one of the most interesting commentators in British journalism for my money.

I love reading your column. You have a French accent. We won't hold that against you. Thank you. I really appreciate it. Most people do, you know. Or they think I'm Belgium or something. Yeah.

Well, I would hold being Belgian against you, but having a French accent is tolerable. particularly given some of your interesting opinions. So it's great to have you on the show. You've been writing a lot about something that our former guest Liam Halligan has been writing about as well, which is that economically things are just heading in this country in a very bad direction. Most people aren't aware of this because most people don't look at bond yields and all of these other things. But I think you make a very credible case for why we're actually heading for a financial meltdown. Yes. I mean, I think the situation is grave. I think it's very, very bad. it can be summarised very simply. Public spending is growing and growing and growing and on all trends

is going to explode in the coming years in Britain. But revenues, the amount of money the government can raise is hardly going to go up. And that is a short road to something that's very close to national bankruptcy. Now, governments don't technically go bankrupt, especially a government, like the British government which has its own currency. But you can get quite close. And it's impossible to be anything other than extremely pessimistic about the future of Britain because we are wedded to some ridiculous, obsolete model which basically says you've got this thing called the NHS, the national health system, which is basically a state-funded, socialised medicine, and the money needed for that keeps all going up and will rise and rise and rise. All the forecasts are that it will hugely

increase over the next few decades because the population is getting older and older. So that's what you go on one side. You've also got a welfare state that's a state that's totally out of control. You've got six and a half million adults on out of work benefits, six and a half million adults on out of work benefits. We've basically introduced universal basic income without telling anybody. It's possible to not work in this country and to be able to survive on benefits. So you've got those two problems on the spending side and on the revenue side, you've got an economy that's basically been destroyed by a 25 years slide into soft social democracy, disastrous, managed population, and

policy, disastrous regulation policy, disastrous tax policy. The entrepreneurial spirits of the economy has basically vanished. You know, there's no Elon Musks in Britain. Companies are leaving, entrepreneurs are leaving, rich people are leaving, the incentive structures completely wrong. So you've got this economy that's barely grown, and you've got the demands from the public sector on this shriveling private sector that keep going up and up and up and up. And that's a recipe for total disaster. And by the way, you even have mainstream economists now saying, things like that. And, you know, the official fiscal watchdog, the Office of Budget Responsibility, all these sorts of people agree that there's going to be an explosion in public spending as a result

of the structure of the welfare state, as a result of the fact was still stuck in 1945 or 1946, whenever the NHS was invented and whenever the modern welfare state was invented. And at the same time, the economy is knackered, right? We've destroyed what used to be the best economy in Europe, the best economy in Europe, and is being destroyed by disasters. government policy from both Labour and the Conservatives. And when I moved to this country in 1995 from France, when I left France, I was 17, I came here to study. When I left France, used to be a socialist dump, right? There was no opportunity. It was a disaster. I came here, I moved to London. It was like a complete different universe. It was like El Dorado.

People were running around, you know, earning money, people were ambitious, you know, these things called investment banks, you had the city, it was incredibly excited. And Britain was an outlier. Britain was a Hong Kong of Europe, right? It was this incredibly strong performing country that had been turbocharged by the Thasher Revolution, which had just changed everything. And he was attracting the best and brightest from all over the world. You didn't have the levels of immigration gone now, but you had very talented people coming here. And all of that's been eroded, not just eroded actually, throttled and destroyed. And it's a tragedy. And I blame the politicians.

of both parties. I think we had this unique opportunity in the 80s where we were lucky. We stumbled on a great leader, Margaret Fletcher, and there are some good people. They saved this country from oblivion, which is where we were going in the 1970s. But tragically, Blair came along, and he was a false promise. Blairism was a false promise. It was this idea that you can gradually embrace more, more government intervention and regulation and so on, but not actually, you know, throttle the actual economy, the underlying private sector. But slowly by surely, slowly by shorni, we became Europeanized in our public spending, in our tax system, and in some ways, were worse than parts of Europe.

We're not quite as bad as France yet, but we're quite similar. And our rate of growth is pathetic. And GDP per capita, which is the amount of money the economy produces per person is barely going up or even forning. And the pie, therefore, is not really going up. But the number of people, because of extremely large mass of immigration, has gone up, which means there's less for every person, which means society is changing. And instead of society accepting capitalism and growth and all that,

has become a zero-sum game. People are fighting for the same or smaller pie. And when that happens, you get sort of the rise of left in populism, the rise of Corbynism, jealousy, envy, you know, demands for wealth taxes, you know, wars and private schools, all the kind of stuff that you hear about today. And therefore, unless we have a massive, massive change politically, culturally, psychologically, philosophically, this country, our fear is now in a decline that's going to be very difficult to reverse.

Well, this is one of the reasons that I don't know if you agree with this, but I'm becoming a bit of what I call an accelerationist, which is essentially I think things are very bad and heading in a bad direction, but most people don't know it yet. They feel it, and they don't quite know where to place their blame, therefore, you know, they'll be told by some people, well, it's all Britain's problems are to do with illegal immigration, for example. Now, illegal immigration is a problem that needs to be dealt with, but I keep saying to people, you do realize that when we deal with illegal immigration, that isn't going to change the economic reality of this country, even one bit.

Yes. I mean, it might change it slightly, but it wouldn't change a big picture. And likewise, you know, on the left side of populism, it's sort of the bank. I remember this famous, I think Harry and Paul sketch, The Bankers, the Wankers, the Bankers, the Wanker's the Wanker's the Wanker's The Bankers, right? It was all that. Yes, well, firstly, if the bankers, the bonuses, the bankers, the bonuses, it's disgusting. And secondly, if the Tories are really serious about it, they tax the bankers, the bonuses to 90%. And this is what we've ended up in. But actually, I almost think things have to get a lot worse for people to realize that neither of these two populist messages of what the truth is.

The truth is you have to grow the economy and we're not doing that. Yes. I mean, the fundamental problem of this country is that we're living beyond our means. We're living as if we're rich country. We have expectations of the public sector of the National Health Service, of the state pension, of the benefit system, of everything. that we're a very prosperous country, but we're not anymore, right? We have barely grown for years. Our expectations have continued rising, but the reality hasn't caught up. And this gulf is growing and growing and growing and growing. And as you say, we do have an illegal immigration crisis. I think

that's going to be a catalyst for radical political change. But that ultimately is not the fundamental problem, though we are spending far too much money, for example, on on welfare benefits for immigration, immigrants, but we're also spending far too much money on benefits for UK-based people. In fact, we're predominantly spending too much money on UK-based people, and that's the issue. Alison, you've used the words, we're not a prosperous country.

What does that actually mean in real terms? It means that the amount of money available for each person is barely going up anymore. It means that when you travel to America, you'll see that they're living in bigger houses, they've got more cars, they've got aircon, They're able to spend a lot more money. They can give massive tips in restaurants.

They can buy a lot of stuff. And we look at these people and we think, hey, wait a second, look how rich these people are. And it used to be the case, you know, if you're a British and you went to America in the 1950s, 1960s, you couldn't believe it, right? They were eating steak and they all had two cars and all that sort of stuff. And then the gap narrowed. We became more like America in terms of being prosperous. But in recent years, that gap has grown again quite dramatic.

And, you know, the top 25% of Americans, even the top 50% of Americans, are much wealthier than the richest people in Britain. In fact, they can't believe how poor the British middle classes are. They cannot believe what the average wage in Britain is. They cannot believe how their top 10% or top 5% live in this country. They live much better. We have been left behind. And the reason is their productivity has gone up.

They've got incredible companies. They've got entrepreneurship. They've got problems. Of course they've got problems. And it's not great being the bottom 5 or 10% in America is terrible. But, you know, if you're the middle class, the upper middle class, the top 25%, top 50%, you're much, much better off in America. And also the Americans, you know, they've got massive amounts of savings for their

retirement, all that sort of stuff. And they look at us and it's pathetic, frankly. And we need, you know, there's no reason why we can't be much richer. There's no reason why our economy can't grow much faster. But we've fallen into this ideological trap. And also a form of stasis where vested interest groups block all change. So a combination of this, you know, you can't really change anything, you can't build anything in Britain, you can't change any laws, you can't change any rules.

You've got that on the one hand, and on the other hand, you've just got a ruling class which believes, is either a defeatist and doesn't believe that we can change, or it's just completely wrong about everything. And I think it's a combination of those two things. We've got a very, very bad ruling class in Britain at the moment. We've got an elite that's failing this country. Their economic views are wrong. Their philosophical views are wrong.

The views on free speech are wrong. You know, all of that. And we need a new counter elite, really, that can introduce the source of radical reforms that are required. I like the fact that you said the word ideology. Now, there'll be people, Alistair, who's going, look, how much of the 2008 economic crash is to blame for this? Because wages haven't risen in real time since that event?

How much of this crisis stems from that particular moment? Yes, well, a lot of it stems from that, but it didn't need to stem from that. That's a key point. So the Americans at that crisis, you know, but what did they do? They purged the system. They reformed the banks very quickly. They just moved on. They did what Americans do.

You know, you file a lot of people, you start some institutions, you change everything very, very quickly, you fire CEOs and so on. And you just move on. And we got stuck. You know, we nationalized banks. And then we passed all sorts of stupid laws. I blame the Conservative Party for that. The coalition government of 2010-2015 fell out of love with the city.

Now, the city is the most important part of the British economy, the financial services industry, the banking industry. But the Tory is regulated to death as a result of the financial crisis. They thought they needed a kind of, it was revenge almost against the financial system for the crisis. And that was a disaster for this country. So the economy never recovered. We've never recovered from the financial crisis in terms of the economy, unlike America, which is just bounced back, and like most other countries, just bounced back. And we haven't recovered philosophically and ideologically because that crisis was pinned in Britain by self-serving politicians on the capitalists, right? Everyone said, oh, this is a crisis capitalism, capitalism is rotten, doesn't work, look, we've had to bail out all these people, it's corrupt, you know. Well, wrong. This was largely actually, the crisis of central banks, getting it all wrong with interest rates and manipulating money-ship policy to try and create permanent growth, which you can't do. And it was also a crisis

of regulation, failures among regulators, and of course, banks made mistakes, companies make mistakes and fail. But there was a different way of doing that. You could have done it without all these handouts with far, far fewer bailouts. And I think bailing out the city was a disaster philosophically for this country. And the thing you said at the very beginning, I think I don't think people understand the levels of debt and the speeder which is rising that we're in. I think I was reading Liam's column, 81% of new borrowing is now spent on paying off previous borrowing. Yes. So this is absolutely, you're absolutely spot on.

So people realize they're not getting richer, right? Right. So people realize, you know, their wage is not really going up because of inflation and higher house prices and all that sort of stuff. They also realize more and more people on benefits. And they realise nothing's working. They realise the hospitals are working, the prisons are working, you know, or freeing criminals early, it's crazy. The courts aren't working, nothing's working.

That's broken Britain. But what they don't realise is that on top of that, the debt is spiraling out of control and the government's got a massive hole in the public finances. It has to borrow more, more money just to stand still. And that is a ticking time bomb underneath this whole rotten edifice, right? the House of Cards will crumble because of the debt crisis. And we must hope somehow that there's a silver lining to that, that this coming implosion will at least force political change.

But there's a big danger. There's a really big danger because when you have a fiscal crisis is not always the conservative parties with a small sea that triumph, right? It's often the populist left. So if you want to turbocharge the growing far left in Britain, which is probably already at 15% really, if not more, well, wait until the fiscal crisis comes along. We'll have all these guys are Jeremy Corbyn, the far-left leader,

the Green Party, which is basically a socialist revolutionary party in Britain. You have all these people blaming business, blaming capitalism, blaming banks, as they always do. And I think the anti-capitalist sentiment will start rising yet again. And so this is quite dangerous. So on the one hand, this kind of crisis will help the forces of opposition, primarily Nigel Farage's Reform Party. On the other, I think they'll also help the far left. And Alistair, can you, these are all words and words and realities are different things.

Can you explain to people what a fiscal crisis looks like? What does that mean if you're an ordinary person who goes to work, comes home, has dinner with the wife and kids, etc.? What does a fiscal crisis mean for our country? that happens. Yes. So, I mean, a fiscal crisis is when the government has to either pay more and more and more money to borrow, or it simply can't borrow anymore. And let's say you have to pay more and more and more money.

Let's say you end up paying 10% a year on your debt. Well, the problem of that is, first of all, you run out of money to spend on anything else. So you're forced to make cuts to public spending just to pay your interest payments. But at the same time, mortgages and other forms of debt, credit card debt, everything goes up together, right? because it all sort of follows in some way the government's interest rate. So suddenly you're going to have a massive housing crisis. You're going to have people who,

when they roll over their mortgages, mortgage rates will be much higher. You know, people who borrow money on their credit cards, or they're going to have to pay more. So it's going to be a catastrophe for everybody, basically. But there'd also be these huge cuts to public spending. And it could be even worse than that.

I'm sorry to interrupt just on the cuts. I think a lot of people have been convinced that what we had was this great period of terrible austerity in which budgets were slashed. And look, there are individual areas where that did happen. There were some budgets that were very significantly cut. But broadly speaking, we barely reduced our expenditure

during this great era of austerity. What you're talking about is going to make austerity look like a walk in the park. Well, you'd have to have real austerity, right? Organ meats are some of the most nutrient-dense foods on the planet, rich in B vitamins, iron and bioavailable nutrients that most modern diets are missing. But let's be honest. Most of us aren't about to start pan-frying liver every day.

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So it goes to the markets and say, I need to borrow 20 billion pounds this week and the market say, no, sorry. So a combination of those two things has to trigger one response, which is massive cuts to public spending, right? If you have a fiscal crisis, you have to have massive cuts to public spending.

So maybe you've got to cuts of state pension, dumb the triple lock, obviously, maybe cut the wages of public sector workers, you know, 5% cuts across the board, that sort of thing. You know, here's five billion cuts to this and five billion cuts to that. And most likely, what governments do in these cases

is also to put up taxes. Now, I hate putting up taxes. Taxes already are a record high in this country. But anyway, that's probably what would happen. Maybe VAT value added tax would go up, maybe 2%, 2.5%. Maybe income tax will go up. You know, so you have those two things at the same time. So obviously you have a recession in year one before the economy then starts to kind of restructure itself and recover. And the last time we had a fiscal crisis in this country, it wasn't actually during the financial crisis, really. It was in 1976 when the Labour government at the time was forced to ask for bailout from the international lenders led by the International Monetary Fund, which is basically the IMF, this body that normally lends money to poor countries that go bankrupt. Now, this time around, the UK debt is so large that the IMF would not be able to bail Assad, or too large. And in any case, you know, there's other reasons why they might not do it.

But we are getting closer to that sort of crisis. So what will happen? If the IMF can bail us out, what will happen? We'll make all these cuts and we'll have to borrow from the private sector. And, you know, we just have to hope that the interest rate is not too high. But why wouldn't it be too high? Who wants to lend money to a bank? Because when you slash public spending by 50 billion pounds in one day

and put up taxes by 30 billion pounds in one day in your emergency budget, then they might believe you. Yeah, they might. Isn't that a recipe for social unrest? It is, of course, a recipe for social unrest. And the reason it's a recipe for social unrest is that the political establishment has effectively lied to the public

by selling them a vision of this country that can't be afforded. This is why I say we've been living beyond our means. We cannot afford the NHS as it currently is. We cannot afford the state pension as it currently is. We cannot afford all these benefits. We cannot afford this stuff. We just can't, right?

There's not enough money. were borrowing huge amounts of money just to pay for this spending. It's absurd. It's utterly absurd and entirely reckless that at this stage in the economic cycle, we are still borrowing this amount of money. So just wait until there's a real crisis.

So the public is going to be very, very angry. And they're going to start looking for scapegoats and you can have all sorts of issues there. But I think the Labour Party, if it happens under Labour's watch, the Labour Party would be annihilated. I just don't think it's going to survive. And so,

Really, Labor have inherited this crisis. Is Rachel Reeves helping? So, Labor have inherited this crisis, yes, but they've made it much, much worse. So the previous concert... I've got a lot of criticism of the previous Conservative government. I think it failed. I think it's, you know, what it did to the country was on balance very bad, apart from a couple of things.

But at least they were proposing freezes to publishes to public. spending or even cuts in some areas, that would have stabilized the public finances. When Rachel Reeves, the current Labour Chancellor, came to power, she massively increased public spending immediately and then massively increased taxes. And that led to an explosion in the black hole of the heart of the public finances. She wrongly blamed the Conservatives for that. That was wrong. It was her fault. It was her doing. The taxes she raised and all these warnings around the taxes and the talking down of the economy and the endlessly blaming the Conservatives and so on, had a real effect on growth, further depressing growth, further reducing tax revenues

compared to what they would otherwise have been, and you've ended up in a very bad fiscal place. I blame Labour for that. It's Labour's fault. Now, they're preparing a new budget where they're going to put up taxes again by another massive amount of money. And I can guarantee you we are already on the wrong side of this so-called Laffer curve, basically we're at a place where when you put up taxes, you get very little extra money, sometimes you can even get less money than you would have had you actually cut the taxes. This is where we are in this country. We are in a very dangerous place where you can't really just put up taxes and put up taxes and put up taxes and hope to just collect more and more money. The economy is at breaking point.

We're reaching the maximum amount of taxation that you can extract from a very, very weak private sector. So what you're saying sounds, and this is pretty much what I've thought, and I've got no, I don't have any training in economics, in business or whatever it is, but to me, what you're saying is common sense. Eventually, there's only so much juice you can get from the squeeze in the orange, pretty much. So then I look at Rachel Reeves and I look at the Labour Party, and I think to myself, why don't they understand this? Is this incompetence? Is this ideology, or is it a mixture of the It's a mixture of the two. So when they arrived, they were incredibly arrogant. They thought they were morally righteous people. They were holier than thou. They were better people. So therefore,

by definition, everything was going to work much better. They just walk into the government and they just tell the civil service and the civil service was cheer, hooray, finally some good people and we all work together and the economy will start booming and we suddenly stop bidding all these new houses and all that sort of stuff, you know? Obviously, completely delusional nonsense. So that's the first problem. Secondly, ideology. The current ideology, the current dominant ideology in this country just does not deliver growth, right? So what do you have?

You've got net zero. Net zero is a complete disaster, complete disaster. We are producing, we're shutting down all our oil and gas fields, you know, we're producing less and less electricity, we are burning ourselves with this obsessive desire to reduce carbon emissions at any cost, and the cost is vast. And this is crippling the economy. So that's the first problem. You can't return to proper growth

without ditching at zero, right? First thing. Second, regulation. Everything is regulated. There's far too much regulation, far too much red tape on every aspect of life. Third, tax.

You can't be waging war on the so-called rich when it is a rich that basically deliver all the innovation, all the new companies, the growth, and so much,

such a disproportionate chair of tax revenues. The Tories and Labour have been chasing away the so-called non-doms, which are these rich people who base themselves in the UK, they've been chasing away entrepreneurs, they've been discouraging risk-taking and entrepreneurship. You know, where's Elon Musk?

Where's the British Elon Musk? You know, every day almost you hear of another company that's decided not to invest in Britain or another British company that's decided to move to America to list on the New York stock market, not on the London Stock Exchange. This is a complete disaster, and this is ideology. And then, it's this generalized climate in this country, right? There's too much crime. There's too much disorder.

Everything's messy. Prices are too high. You know, nothing works. The public sector doesn't work. Why do you want to live here under all these circumstances? Yes, obviously, Britain remains quite a civilised place, and, you know, parts of the UK are still beautiful, and, you know, people enjoy the arts and the culture and all that sort of stuff.

But there comes a time when these sorts of advantages pale in comparison with the hard reality, which is, why do you want to come here and pay so much tax? You know, makes no sense. Well, and you mentioned Francis and you, by the mentioned ideology and incompetence, but I think there is a much more powerful third force that you alluded to earlier, which is, I believe the reason the Labor government is only using one of the levers, which is trying to increase taxes, the other levers are not available to them.

They know they cannot reduce public spending because for them that's electoral suicide. And so when they even attempt to do any of that or even hint at attempting or even talk about attending any of that. The entire left wing of the Labour Party comes out and says, you know, you're going to kill the poor, you're going to do this, you're going to do that. And so the fact that you say we're living beyond our means, they can't go to, let's reduce spending, which, you know, if you think about it on a household level, if you come home to your wife tonight and say, you know, sweetheart, my salary's been cut in half, so we're going to have to tighten our bells. She might not be happy, but she probably understand and you'd work together to work things out.

But if you came home tonight and said, my salary has been cut in half and she went, I'm entitled to the lifestyle that you've provided me to this point, you've got a problem. And that's where I think the Labour Party is. The person that they've got at home does not want to recognize the consequences of the salary being cut in half. Yes, I mean, that's, I'd say, a combination of ideology and self-interest and political and self-interest. And you saw that, the current Chancellor Rachel Reeves, was trying to cut taxes. Sorry, was trying to cut spending, I mean, obviously.

She was not trying to. Wishful thinking creeping in here. So she was trying to cut a bit of public spending, and she was defeated by the Labour MPs who just rebelled, basically. They just said, no, sorry, we're never doing that. And now they're going to try again, by the way. They can have another go at trimming some forms of public spending. But the reality is, there's going to be a fiscal crisis,

and suddenly they're going to have to do this. And their base is going to loathe them for it, right? And the public is going to hate them because they've been lying and saying, you don't have to do it. But you're right, yes. Electoral self-interest is a major problem for the Labour Party if your voting base is basically people who are net tax consumers. You can divide the country into two groups. Net tax contributors, people who pay more tax than they take out in other benefits or services, and net tax consumers. And the problem in Britain is there's too many consumers. Too many people are taking out more than they put in. It's that simple. And the mathematics of that is toxic. it basically means that both the centre right and the centre left end up becoming a proponent for an ever larger welfare state.

Which is what we've got. Which is what we've got. So the question then is, I mean, I don't know your politics exactly, but I imagine based on what you've said, you're not a fan of Labour, you're not a fan of the Conservatives, that only leaves for someone with... I supported conservatives at the last election than previous elections. We forgive you.

Yes. Well, I supported them because I... Repent. So, well, I spent my whole time criticizing them, and then I supported them. And the reason I was criticizing them was not because I disliked them. I liked a lot of them individually, but because I thought they were going terribly wrong because they were turning them back on free market principles and on genuine conservative philosophy. And I thought that was a catastrophe.

And I was convinced that Labour government would be a complete disaster. I wasn't one of those people who claimed totally wrongly, in my view, there's no difference in conservative than Labour. There is a big difference. And I think these Labour governments have been a catastrophe. I understand, but I think part of the way you framed there is interesting because of the question I was about to ask you. Abandoning free market principles and yes, there's a difference between labor and conservatives, but a lot of people would say the difference between labor and conservatives is the speed at which they arrive at the same destination.

That's exactly what happened in recent years, yes, after the conservative party embraced Blairism and basically gave up on its previous belief system. Okay. So we are now where we are. if your projections are correct, which I have no reason to think they're not, we are going to arrive in a fairly radical moment. And as you say, there are two possibilities. There is the rise of the far left. You know, the fringes of the labor movement, the Green Party, you know, jazz bala, whatever you want to call it. And then on the other side, you've got reform. Now, my looking at reforms commitments at this point, those free market principles, which I know Nigel for us holds very dear, they don't seem to be super present either. I mean, there's a lot of all things to all men going on in reform as well, don't you think? I think there's, I think a few, a few weeks ago, reform started putting out some left-wing policies to try and outgun labor to try and grab more of the old working class electric. I think that was probably a mistake. On balance, though, they are talking now about cutting welfare spending quite heavily. They've just announced

it to be working on a project to look at that. And they also generally, Generally speaking about cutting public spending, I think they are now much more aware of this possibility of a fiscal crisis, which is why they are now, for example, preparing for an election in 2027, which would be two years earlier than the data which it has to happen. So I do think they are aware that they need to have another rethink and get back to basics, I think, on all of that stuff. But look, the bottom line is this. Reform are massively ahead in the polls at the moment, right?

On current trends, reform is the most likely to win the next general election. which obviously would be an earthquake in British and in world politics. But I think we mustn't underestimate the chance of the left somehow managing to pull a rabbit out of a hat. You know, Jeremy Corbyn is going to eventually launch a new party, and it doesn't matter how chaotic it is and how contradictory and whether they don't have a name or whatever. That doesn't really matter. They've got at least 15% of the population that are immediately going to back a sort of Corbyn Green alliance. That could grow to 20%.

But isn't that good for reform? In the short term, that's excellent for reform because it's basically destroying the Labour Party. So the Labour Party is just sinking and fragmentation the left. And it's fragmenting the left, yes. Completely fragmenting the left, because the Liberal Democrats are also gradually growing. There's a high chance that the Liberal Democrats

become the official opposition after the next election. You might have a reform government, a Liberal Democrat opposition. On current polling, that's what it would be. But this is where I think things get slightly more exciting. I think the Corbyn Party could yet have a higher share of the vote than the Liberal Democrats at the next election. So I think the left is fragmenting.

The right fragmented massively, which meant that Labor won the last election. But now, paradoxically, the right is less fragmented than the left because reform is so dominant. But the Conservatives are still at about 18% or so in the polls. So that's a question. Let me introduce you to the people I work with to protect my family against financial instability, inflation and turmoil. For me, one of the best ways to safeguard your wealth is by investing in gold, and that's why I trust the pure gold company. Here's a smart tip. If you buy UK minted gold coins like sovereigns, you won't pay VAT when you buy them or capital gains tax when you sell. All the profit is yours to keep. And the best part, gold is a completely private investment.

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Click the link in the description or go to pure dashgold.com slash trigger to get your free copy of the investor guide. That's pure dash gold.com slash trigger. Take control of your financial future today. And how much of this which we see with people supporting hard left parties is ideological? You've always had your social, socialist workers parties. And how much of this is just economic illiteracy? Like people don't understand what it means to run a country or how you effectively have to balance the books. Yes. I mean, the far left support the Omnichores nowadays.

So they're no longer purely economic. You know, the old Marxist parties were very kind of materialistic. It was only about economics, really. In a way, it was a nice message. It was, you know, we're going to make sure the poor become rich. That's quite nice. In reality, it led to catastrophe, death, dictatorship and so on, right. Everyone was equally poor, is the ultimate.

That's what happened, yes. And equally unfree. But the left now has mutated. It's woke. It's got all sorts of hatreds. And it embraces what I call the Omnic Cause. Other people call the Omnic Cause, which is this ever-changing set of left-wing beliefs, now it's hatred of Israel, but before that it was hatred of bankers, it was BLM, you know,

it just changes depending on the moment, as you can see Greta Thunberg, basically switching from being a net zero advocate to being an anti-Israel activist. So they are kind of fueled and fired up by quite a lot of stuff. And those people genuinely believe that there's no difference between the Tories and Labour, which is why they're willing to vote for a far-left party, regardless of what that means as a general election. Of course, they'd hate the Reform Party. But they really don't care if Labour win or not anymore because they've become so left-wing, so disengaged. By the way, there are, of course, lots of economic reasons for the growth of the firelapse.

So it's part of a cultural thing, but it's partly an economic thing. The cultural thing has also got to do with changing belief system among younger people when it comes to the environment, which they prioritize above everything else. You know, even they say they don't have children, for example, because they care so much about the environment. But also you've got the whole cultural rejection of nation states. So these people are believing open borders. They believe that you should have unlimited immigration, that citizenship is meaningless. So all those sorts of things.

But then you've got the economics. The economics is probably largely about two things. One, housing availability. There's just not enough homes built in this country given the explosion in the size of the population and also other forms of social change, like people living longer or people living as singles and stuff like that. And secondly, wages. Wages have just not kept up. So because these people see that and they don't really have an economic theory of how the world works, they just assume capitalism has failed, well, not, you know, in late-stage capitalism

or something like that, or they assume that the rich are taking all the money or something. I was going to say it's worse than what you say. It's what they assume is they've been robbed. Right. And there are a lot of commentators who will tell them that. The reason you are poor is the rich, the rich, the rich, the rich. And I do think that inequality is a massive problem in this country. We can't deny that. Yeah, so I don't call it inequality, because I don't have a problem in inequality. I think inequality is normal.

I think equality is good even when it emerges. Why is it good? It is good if it emerges spontaneously from differential contributions. If you're an incredibly successful sports star and tens of millions of people, are willing to pay, you know, your YouTube channel, whatever it is to watch you, then I have no problem that person being very, very rich, much, much richer than somebody else. So that form of inequality doesn't bother me. But there's an artificial kind of inequality that's created via fake policy, and that's what I object to. And that's artificial, malign form of

inequality comes from terrible education systems that drag down the poor in this country, in the UK, especially the white working class, which is terrible at school. So therefore, they're future prospects are massively limited. You've got a welfare state that's basically a trap. The welfare state encourages people not to work in many cases, encourages people to exaggerate the lack of health, for example, especially mental health. So that's creating poverty. There's monetary policy, i.e. what central banks do. So you've had years and years and years of monetary manipulation by central bank. Central bankers think they're like this new elite class. They're almost godlike in their beliefs. They think that they can just,

stop, that they can create perpetual economic growth just by fiddling with interest rates or printing money, quantitative, using that sort of stuff. I think that's been hugely disruptive to the economy of the last 20, 30 years. It's put up the price of certain assets. It's put up the price as housing. It's made it much less likely for young people to be able to afford to buy their own homes. So that's another reason, another, you know, policy creating the wrong kind of inequality. You've got another, the wrong kind of inequality simply caused by lack of economic opportunity, right?

if there's a lot of economic opportunity, social mobility can be maximised so people can climb. If there's not much social mobility because there's not much opportunity, if there's barriers to entry, there's closed shops, there's laws that prevent you from entering a particular business area.

Well, clearly that's going to also maximize inequality is going to freeze a society in Aspeg. And again, that will hurt the poor. So there's good inequality, which is the byproduct of a real free market. You know, if you work hard, you can make money. If you're lazy, you don't make money. But there's bad inequality that's caused by

stupid public policy, flawed ideology, flawed economics, that kind of thing. And that is a problem here. And that is clearly one of the things fueling the rise of the anti-capitalists far left, fueling the Omnic causes, is fueling malcontent and social chaos. Imagine, so let's do a little thought experiment, Alist. Let's say reform get in a sizable majority, and then we have 20% your party, Jezbollah, whatever you want to call them. How much of an impact can they make? How much of an impact can they make on reform, on public policy, on spending, etc? It all depends on the professionalism and organisation of a reformed government

if that were to be what materialises at the next election. Because for reformed government to succeed, there's two very big challenges for Nigel Farage. First challenge win the election. I mean, an astonishing thing for him to win the general election. People are starting to speak about it as if it's normal, obvious. It's not normal, it's not obvious. It's a massive challenge for him. The moment it looks like he might be able to pull it off.

But the second massive challenge is that he'd have to seize control of the British state and actually impose the sort of change, you know, once in a generation, frankly, once in the 100-year level of change, the kind of stuff you saw in the 1940s, a more radical, more compressed period of change and even the 1980s under Thatcher. You'd have to change everything, right? Scrap tons of laws, restructured the Constitution, completely change of civil service, which is completely broken, you know, get rid of the Human Rights Act, quit the CHR,

quit all these international treaties, right? And you'd be declaring total ideological war on the blob on the ruling dominant ideology of this country. and that's going to be very, very tough. So that is Farage's massive challenge. Prepare. How can you prepare? How can you find lots of very talented people outside of politics to bring them in so that they can effectively launch a hostile takeover of the British state after the general election

and actually pushed through change rather than be defeated? Liz Truss came along and she was crushed. She was gone within weeks. How do you avoid that sort of scenario? Trump won in America. was largely defeated by the blob, by the civil service and so on. And Trump, too, on the other hand, has seized control of the machinery of state. He was very well prepared in advance.

You know, he had orders that he was just ready to sign on day one, day two, day three, and so on. That's how you do it. But you need quality people. And there's not enough quality of people currently in British politics. There's some quality people in the Conservative Party. We must hope that everyone on the right kind of unites in some sort of way. So that at least there's enough. to a lot of people in both reform and the conservatives, it's my, I think about these things

logically, which usually fails me because a lot of the human behavior is not very logical, but logically I would think if reform continues to do well and the conservatives continue to struggle, you would imagine that many of the people within the conservative party would jump ship because it would be the logical thing to do. Do you sense that is what will happen? I think it will happen, but it's not really happened in any major way yet. No. The reason is they're just biding their time. I mean, their strategy is that they think there's no need for them to move fast.

They don't think there's a first move of advantage in doing that. They think there's a first mover cost because, you know, everyone would hate you, your old friends will hate you, that sort of stuff. It's better to wait until other people do it first. There's a danger there because Farage is trying to bring in people from outside politics, so if you're not careful, he's going to have found new. people before those tories actually join him. But I think on balance, his big challenge now is to further expand his share of the vote, and that now means further shrinking the Tory share

of the vote, which remains still quite high at about 18%. So I think, yes, more Tories will probably join reform. The problem of the Conservative Party is basically one third of the Conservative Party are real Conservatives, you know, free marketes, conservatives, coalition of those kinds of people. A third are centrist. They're basically careerists. They do whatever the party leader tells them to do. And a third of basically liberal Democrats, social Democrats,

who basically are not conservative, you know, who were against Brexit, who like international human rights, treaties, who like all that sort of stuff. So that party was always a completely unstable coalition, which is basically were ruined the last few years of their government. But, I mean, every party is an unstable coalition in some form or another, surely, Alice.

I mean, Labour is an unstable coalition. Yes, no, you're right about that, but I think there was really, really striking ideological differences within the Conservative Party on essential questions. If you go to the Labour Party, they all believe that the state is good, that the NHS is good,

the government needs to grow, paying taxes is a good thing, right? But they disagree about the details. In the Conservative Party, they literally disagreed about everything. They disagreed by first principles. They disagreed about philosophy. You know, do you join the EU? Do you leave the EU? Should you put it? Should you have a wealth

tax? Yes, some tories believe in a wealth tax. You know, or do you not have a worth tax? You know, should you cut tax? Should you put up tax? I mean, these are hugely consequential differences. I think there are non-reconcilable differences, which I think if reform want to have any chance of succeeding, they need to make sure that they are united on all the basic principles at least. But you know, you look at reform. Is it Jake Berry, who's who has transitioned over to reform? And you go, this is guys a proponent. of net zero. You know, he's a big fan. You go, well, what's happening here? Surely that's fundamentally incompatible. You've got to hope that he was in the second category, the centrist,

careerist category in that he's saying his mind. Isn't that worse? Right, well, look, that is, well, reform faced two problems. Reform face a number of possible risks. One of the risks is that they become the concerted party, you know? And I, so, you know, they better not do that. And other risk, of course, is they don't find enough competent people, you know, and there's other risks, or that they inadvertently attract some dodgy people, which Farage is obviously very keen not to happen. In an era when free expression feels under threat, the Battle of Ideas Festival stands out. Its motto is, conversations for the public with the public in public.

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That's Battle of Ideas.org.org.uk. Let's go back to my original question, which is the 20% your party, Jezbollah. How much of an impact and effect can they have on UK politics and the way we run this country? They can have a very large effect on bridge politics, but not necessarily on what happens in terms of public policy and in terms of the government. If you've got a strong, well-organized majority government, the government could ignore those people, fight them on the airwaves in terms of argument, set the debate, shifts, you know, shifts sentiment in the more right-way, right-wise direction, that kind of thing. But if you've got a far-left part at 20%, clearly it will make a big impact in terms of grassroots movements and in terms of the long-term political structure

of this country, yes. So let's, I love your articles, Alistair. I really do. Yeah, I think they're really well written. They're a little bit spicy, slightly provocative at times, which I like. That's great. Which I very much enjoy. There was one article in particular that stood out, which was, you use the phrase, anarcho tyranny, and you were saying this country is descending or is in the process of descending into a state of an anarcho tyranny.

James O'Brien was frothing at the mouth, which personally made us all very happy. Yeah, no, I was quite happy about that. So explain what you mean to me, what you mean by that, because when I wrote, read the article, was like, oh, this is a bit far. And then the more I read, the more my blood started to chill slightly. Obviously, I was tongue in cheek slightly. Yeah. But the serious point is this country is a weird mix of chaos, lawlessness, hardworking, law-biting people, being criminalised because of some dumb tweet that they might have put out or something they've said, that sort of stuff. You know, massive amount of shoplifting, people getting a mobile phone stolen,

that sort of thing, graffiti, litter, nothing's working. So that's the chaos bit, the anarchy bit. And the tyranny bit is basically that this kind of increasing oppression in certain areas. And obviously the warm free speech is a very important part of that. In other words, the government can't keep the peace and can't put criminals in jail, but it can put you in jail if you're Graham Lindenham. Yeah, well, that is exactly right. And that is a tragic situation.

It's a study in contrast and it's not one that I like. I don't think that's a direction this country should go in. I think it's very, very dangerous. I think the free speech thing isn't a joke. I think it's very serious. I think it's a travesty and there's so many people are being prosecuted for what they're saying.

I think the whole world is noticing things have gone wrong over the last 20 years, basically. Some of this stuff was originally well-intentioned, bad-de-blah, right? Clearly. But I think, unfortunately, it's gone terribly wrong. And I think the only solution is to adopt a US-style protection for free speech, by which I mean the kinds of rules. I don't mean the First Amendment, because you can't do that in Britain. We don't have a written constitution.

You can pass a law, but it's never going to be part of the Constitution. But you should pass a law in protecting free speech. You should basically copy the rulings of the US Supreme Court, their guidance when it comes to what should be legal and what should not be legal. Because obviously in America, yeah, even in America, some forms of speech, if that's not, inciting immediate and likely violence. Obviously, you can't do that. You can't shout fire in a crowded theatre, that sort of thing. But other than that, all speech should be permissible.

But what's really worrying is talking about free speech. We saw Zach Polanski, the new head of the new leader of the Green Party, on, I think it was Newsnight, and they were talking about the arrest of Graham Linnon and he said he's supported it. Now I accept proportionality of police response is a conversation we need to have. Well, do you think this was proportionate?

I think it was proportionate to arrest him. I think there's a pattern here. Five armed police officers turning up. Well, that's for a bit that I don't understand why they were armed. And again, I'd need to hear about the police response. And why they were five, presumably. I mean, this is a new phenomenon,

which is left-wing political operators openly being authoritarian, openly calling for the arrests of people who say things they don't like. And let's be clear, Graham-Lennon said nothing wrong. It was not offensive. There's absolutely nothing wrong in what he said. That was a case of persecution.

That was entirely unfair. It was entirely wrong. There's no defense for this. And obviously in America, you'd be laughed out of court, right? Obviously, that would never be prosecuted. And I think it's very worrying that the far left is becoming so authoritarian. But it is, right? You know, what starts with speech goes on with other things, you know.

I mean, the far left wants to shut down private schools. They don't want to allow people to educate their children the way they want. They want to, you know, tax them, expropriate their property. They want, you know, a wealth, confiscate their wealth, that sort of stuff. up and they don't want them to be allowed to say what they want. That is not a liberal movement, right? The woke infused far left is a very dangerous, is a very dangerous set of people and very dangerous set of parties. I mean, don't forget, on free speech, the work believe that speech is basically violence, and they believe on inherently racist and oppressive society,

and that the only people who got the ability to say anything are actually oppressors. And this is a very, very twisted way of looking at the world, and it's a total rejection of Western values. The far left is anti-Western. Now, by the way, there's the growth of fascism on certain fringes in America, for example. I totally against that also. That's also very, very dangerous. I agree with you completely. And I think one of the things that's in stark relief for us all today, because we're recording this the day after Charlie Kirk was murdered in America's, and we don't yet know, and we may know by the time this episode is released, who it was that killed him, what they were motivated by. But the one thing that I think,

is we've all given this linguistic shenanigans a pass. We've all said, oh, you know what? Some students are saying words of violence, but they don't really mean it. And they're calling us these people Nazis or those people not. They don't really mean it. But I think we're now we're now through the looking glass and we now have to actually recognize the reality of where we are, which is when people say that someone is a naughty or when people say, that language is violence and therefore logically you are entitled to defend yourself against that language with violence. We are in a very, very bad place. And I think it's time where I really, really agree with what you've said today is it's time to stop pretending that these words don't

mean what the words mean. I'm a journalist. I'm going to tell you words mean what they mean. Words matter, right? It's all in the words. And the far-left ideology that is generally known as wokeism or whatever you want to call it is a very bad set of beliefs. It's a belief that completely demolishes every single foundation of Western society, and it was designed to do so, right? Marxism only destroyed part of society. This is a comprehensive destruction of all aspects of Western society, everything. and it needs to be fought.

It needs to be taken very, very seriously. The idea that the war and woke has been won is wrong. Yes, Donald Trump is in the White House, but that doesn't mean that the war and woke has been won. In Britain, wokery is still a very dominant ideology. It's still the official ideology of the public sector. The police are arresting people for having said something that someone thinks isn't very nice.

This is very dangerous. Let me challenge you a little bit on that, though, Alist. Do you not think, though, the way I was just on with my very good friend James Orr in his new podcast, which everyone should check out. And we talked about this. And he was asking me about this. My sense, though, is that the wokeness was metastatic. It was a metastatic cancer. There was a central tumor and then you've got all these other tumors that have spread into other parts of the body politic. But I do think the central tumor has been removed, more or less, which is the ideology is bankrupt, is discredited. Which is why, we're, when Graham is arrested by the police, you have the police coming out saying to the politicians, you need to change the law,

and you've got Labour politicians saying, yeah, I think we need to change the law, because the power of the central tumours is no longer there, these other tumours are starting to fall out one by one. Do you not think that's true? So I think that's slightly too optimistic for me. Okay.

I'll tell you why I agree and why I disagree. So I think the anti-work forces have run a massive victory when it comes to gender ideology. Yes. And I think, by the way, That only happens because of the sensible left. So it's not the right that won it, it's a left.

It's J.K. Rowling. She's a hero, in my view. Rosie Duffield. Yes, and all these people. We can go down. They got together the few people on the right, and they managed to defeat gender ideology. In America, Trump has really pushed that. And gender ideology, when normal people actually understood it,

was hated because, you know, people realized how demented it was, anti-natural and all the rest. So that aspect of the woke revolution is in retreat. On speech, I think Britain is just a crazy outlier. So the restrictions on speech in Britain are so ridiculous that they've overreached. So there is going to be a backlash. But I don't really think that the overall ideology has been properly damaged. Because when you look at the arguments of the people, they're okay, fine, in this particular case, we shouldn't have arrested this person.

But nonetheless, in all these other cases, it's still valid. And I don't think that's a proper defense of free speech. That's just a sort of recalibration. It's the work overreach, so now they are kind of slightly moving back. And then I think there's other areas where the work ideology is still completely out of control. For example, this whole idea of colonialism and settler states and exploitation and paying reparations for slavery and all that sorts of stuff. That is still growing. That has not been defeated.

And the entire left-wing hatred of Israel, for example, is based specifically. on that ideology. That ideology defines Israel as a settler state, which by definition, axiomatically, is committing a genocide. You don't have to prove it. You don't have to show any evidence. It's just happening by definition. And those people also think that America, in Australia, New Zealand, and Canada are invalid constructs. And that stuff's gaining ground. And so, you know, I look at the world and I see, okay, the world can not winning every battle, and they're being pushed back in some areas, even defeated when it comes to work ideology, but they're not one, our side is not winning on everything. And also, by the

own economics, right? I think more and more young people in America, in this country, elsewhere, or describe themselves as socialists. And that's, of course, you know, Marxism, traditional Marxism is basically the economic wing of the work movement. That's how it all started, but that still remains essential. In New York, you've got that socialist candidate who's probably going to win. Zoroam Darni. Indeed, yes. And he's a woke revolutionary, basically, and he's now going to launch it on economics. On crime, even on crime, you know, of course, has been pushed back and, you know,

everybody realizes many people now realize that defunding the police is literally uttered idiocy. I mean, madness. But nonetheless, you know, there's a lot, there's still a lot of work to be had, I think. So, yeah, I think it's a mixed picture. It's a mixed picture. Before Alistair answers the final question,

at the end of the interview, make sure to go to triggerpot.org.com. UK to hear him answer your questions and see this. What's the most high-impact reform the UK could make today that we'd still thank ourselves for in 10 to 20 years? Do you think it would be viable for the UK to create a sovereign wealth fund using shale gas and why do you think that net zero energy and security has taken over the West? Alistair, it's been an absolute pleasure.

Thank you so much for coming on the show. Last question is always the same. What's the one thing we're not talking about that we really should be? I think we're not talking enough as a society about the return of antisemitism in Britain and the West. I think that an incredibly dangerous, toxic, hateful belief that a lot of us thought had been vanquished. But in fact, it turns out it hasn't been vanquished. There's a recent poll, a UGar poll in the UK, which shows that 21% of the population

now are basically anti-Semites in the sense that they believe in at least four anti-Semitic tropes. 35% of the population believe that Israel is treating Palestinians in the same way as a Nazis treated the Jews, which is obviously completely absurd. And there's more and more acts of violence, more criminal antisemitic acts that barely go reported anymore. They've been normalized. And there's been this normalization across the middle class and across the elites.

And I think there's no country ever that has survived unscathed from allowing anti-Semitism to grow in this country. And by the way, this is not just anti-Semitism. Any country that turns against successful, integrated patriotic minorities is a country that's going down the drain, basically. Do you think this is an Israel-specific phenomenon, though? Or do you think it's more to do with the economic realities that people are struggling and so they're looking for an explanation?

I think Israel is a lightning rod, but I think it has lit up, underlying beliefs that hadn't really gone away. And I think what we see is very ugly. And of course you can criticize any country. I criticize Britain all the time, right? I criticize the British Prime Minister all the time. It doesn't mean I hate Britain. I love Britain. But what the criticism of Israel we see is not fair.

You know, it's not grounded in reality. It's hysterical. It's incredibly biased. There's incredible doubles, triple, could jupil standards, is almost demented. And that form of hysteria is prejudice. It's not the rational criticism of a particular set of policies. And that's all feeding into ancient hatreds, both traditional ancient hatreds that have always existed in Britain, and Britain invented the blood libel 800 years ago or 900 years ago in Norwich. And of course, also more recent arrivals that are sometimes anti-Semitic. So you've got that combination of things.

And what's most scary, I think, is the levels of prejudice that have crept into, I think, the upper middle class again and the ruling elites. And I'm very, very worried about that. I think that is, there's a red light flashing here. And, you know, I used to be an optimist. I used to be like Matt Rilly, a rational optimist, but I now consider myself a rational pessimist. I think there's a lot of things going terribly wrong in this country and in the world. and I think human nature tends to revert to the mean and that's not a particular good place to end up.

Well, there you go. That's your positive message for the day. Head on over to Substack where we ask Alistair your questions. As an experienced editor of a non-French media publication, could Mr Heath offer an honest opinion of the political landscape in France, how we got here and what to expect in the near future? Hey, honey, it's mom. Did you know if we switched to Verizon, we can get four phones for $0.

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That's the one we're talking about. I'll send you text. America's Best Network based on Root Metrics, best overall mobile network performance, U.S. second half, 2025. Four new lines on a limited welcome and auto pay. See Verizon.com for details.