TRIGGERnometry - How Wokeness is Destroying the British Army - Steven Edginton

Episode Date: May 1, 2024

Use our code TRIGGER to get $5 off your delicious, high-protein Magic Spoon cereal by clicking this link: https://magicspoon.com/TRIGGER Buy gold and earn interest on it! https://monetary-metals.com/triggernometry/ Steven Edginton is a British journalist. He is the newly-appointed US correspondent for GB News and is currently based in Washington DC. For the past three years, Steven has worked for The Telegraph where he produced documentaries, interviews and podcasts, and reported for the newspaper. Join our Premium Membership for early access, extended and ad-free content: https://triggernometry.supercast.com OR Support TRIGGERnometry Here: Bitcoin: bc1qm6vvhduc6s3rvy8u76sllmrfpynfv94qw8p8d5 Music by: Music by: Xentric | [e-mail] | https://www.xentricapc.com/ YouTube: @xentricapc Buy Merch Here: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/shop/ Advertise on TRIGGERnometry: [e-mail] Join the Mailing List: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/#mailinglist 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The army are relaxing security checks for non-UK recruits to boost diversity in the army intelligence and officer corps. Now obviously there are obvious problems of this. Yeah, I think so. So for example, the armed forces non-binary policy said that, and they do have, of course they've got to have a non-binary policy. So this has infected every single level of the top hierarchy, unfortunately, of the armed forces, And I think that only under a Labor government likely going to come in later this year, this is going to get worse before it gets better. We've lost a plot, haven't we?

Stephen, great to have you on the show. You're about to swoon off to America. So we're glad to have you before because you've been doing some actually really important work, I feel, revealing a lot of the takeover of our institutions from the inside. You've been talking to whistleblowers in the military and the civil service. Tell us a little bit about that because I found it absolutely fascinating, frankly, also quite terrifying. Yeah, so this has been a subject I've been focused on actually for a few years now. And it all started when I was a journalist during the kind of post-Brexit debates.

And there was a lot of accusations against the civil service and civil servants that they were anti-Brexit. And I was interested in finding out whether there was any truth to that, whether this was under minister's instructions like Theresa May. And there were famous examples of civil servants like Ollie Robbins, who was one of our negotiators, during the Brexit years, who was accused of basically being a remaner and undermining the British negotiating position. So I started to speak to civil servants through various friends, contacts in Westminster to find out whether, as I said, there's any truth in this idea that the civil service was biased against Brexit. And I started to build up a dossier of evidence and did a bit of freelance reporting for various different newspapers on this subject. And I think what I found was

quite interesting. I think there was a sort of strain of anti-Brexit feeling within the civil service. What you've got to remember is that Whitehall is in Whitehall. It's in London. You know, so civil servants are definitely going to skew towards that liberal, metropolitan remain perspective. And whether they can hold those views and remain impartial is one thing, but I don't think that they were doing that. And I think to an extent that did impact the negotiations. you definitely had civil servants, particularly in the Foreign Office and in the Department of in the European Union, who felt ideologically that Brexit was a mistake. And they approached the whole project with the wrong mindset. They saw it as something very negative. They didn't see it as

something where there may be positive, something that Britain can take advantage of. And I think we've seen that in things like the outcome in terms of immigration policy. We've seen massive increases in immigration over the last few years. I think that's partly down to civil servants. but also you have to, of course, blame ministers for that as well. So this kind of interest in Brexit and how that had impacted the civil service really led on to, I suppose, years really of reporting and sort of having contacts within various different departments across Whitehall, who suddenly was starting to send me things not about Brexit anymore, but about wokeism, about issues of transgenderism and critical race theory infecting different parts of Whitehall.

And in the last few years during this kind of cultural debates, unfortunately those institutions which are taxpayer funded, which legally have to be politically neutral, have to be impartial, cannot take a political view, have unfortunately been taken over by ideological zealots from, as I say, the trans debates, the sort of pro-trans argument, and also since 2020, the Black Lives Matter, critical race theory, ideologues. and I've been doing a lot of reporting on those issues since. Well, that's all great, but give us some meat on the bone because people will listen to that who maybe don't agree with you. By the way, you're talking to two remain voters. So it's kind of like those are talking points. That's what we will sound like to people. Give us the specifics.

What have you been told? What are people telling you? What have you found? Because that's where I actually was very keen to speak with you because what you were revealing was very, very interesting in terms of what people were telling you. Yeah, so to give you some specifics on the woke stuff, which is the more recent reporting,

and you mentioned the armed forces to begin with. So this was an investigation I did over a matter of weeks with various different sources within the MOD across the forces, sending me internal documents, policy papers, and kind of posters and other bits of evidence to do with diversity and inclusion. And in the last few years, the MOD have become obsessed with diversity and DEI as an ideology.

They view it as important for operational effectiveness. This is a direct quote from the head of the armed forces, General Sir Patrick Sanders. And they also view diversity as important in terms of their recruitment targets because they see, basically the armed forces have a massive recruitment problem where not enough people are joining the forces. And they think that this is partly because it's not a welcoming place for ethnic minorities, women and gay people. That's how they're coming at it.

So in order to solve these problems, as they see it, they've instigated a series of policies which we revealed in the Telegraph. The worst, I think, of these policies was the fact that the army are relaxing security checks for non-UK recruits to boost diversity in the army intelligence and officer corps. Now, obviously, there are obvious problems of this. Yeah, I think so. Yeah. I think that's a fair point.

Yeah. That's ridiculous. Yeah, well, we had the former head of MI6, so Richard Dear Love, saying that this really could undermine national security. These positions are incredibly important. And the reason these checks are in place is because we don't want extremists,

frankly, Islamic extremists on the most part, and to an extent other types of extremists. Having access to what they call, and this is an exact quote again from the Army's race action plan, that's their diversity document, they would have access to uncontrolled state secret assets in the intelligence and office score. And those are the areas where they wanted to relax security checks in order to boost diversity.

So that was probably the most egregious policy that I found. Other things to mention very briefly, in terms of acts of remembrance on Armistice's Day, a very important cultural event for England, for Britain as a nation, particularly for the armed forces, for soldiers. They said that those events should be non-religious. And for Britain, which has been a historically Christian nation, and for the armed forces, particularly in World War I, where you see all those crosses in Flanders Fields,

we've got a really strong Christian tradition in this country. Obviously, we're more secular today. But for those in the armed forces, Christianity is still important, and that connection to Christianity is still relevant. And to say that it should be non-religious in order to boost inclusivity, in other words, to be more inclusive to, let's say, Muslims or people who have no faith at all, was quite insulting actually to a lot of people who are serving in the armed forces and former people who I spoke to.

So those are the two issues that we've really focused on. And there's kind of more minor things that are a bit silly and a bit funny, but really do have an impact as well. So, for example, the armed forces non-binary policy said that, and of course they've got to have a non-binary policy. It says that men can now wear makeup on parades and grow their hair out to the same length that women are allowed to wear if they're saying that they're non-binary. There's a series of other policies in relation to, I'll give you a good example.

Here we go. On the Royal Navy in various ships, they have posters from official Royal Navy LGBT groups and networks, which they say defined 51 of the most commonly used terms, the exact quote in terms of LGBT issues. And the first term that they defined was the following. I'm not going to get this quite right. A-A-plus, and they defined what all those word sort of alphabeti spaghetti or whatever meant. And for some reason, sailors, this is literally prominent on Royal Navy ships, including the two

aircraft carriers that we have. So, again, why are we seeing this endless political LGBT propaganda plastered across official Royal Navy posters, and it's also in the Army, it's also in the Air Force? More recently, we saw the Air Force actually apologising for discriminating against white men. And I think that really, that sort of goes to the essence of why this is a problem. Because all of these policies, as I see it and as many people who are serving in the armed forces see it, are demoralizing. Frankly, they're anti-white male. They claim that they're trying to be inclusive.

They claim they're trying to boost diversity. But actually, they're alienating the largest group of people who historically have joined the armed forces and want to join the armed forces because they're patriotic, because they have a family tradition, they have a local tradition. And by obsessing over these new DEI ideologies, you're actually putting off those people from not only wanting to apply to join the forces, but also to stay in the forces. And again, the armed forces have a huge issue where people are leaving the office corps, and they're retiring early. And I think that's partly because of their new obsession with race and trans. Stephen, do you think part of the problem is there have been numerous scandals within the armed forces, particularly the army? I mean, take one example. It's an horrible story.

the story, the story of Deep Cut, the barracks and everything that happened there. Do you think that this might be them trying to say, look, this is never going to happen again, these awful, awful scandals. So look how progressive we are. I think you're absolutely right. And I've spoken to a lot of senior serving people who have told me exactly that. They're concerned that there are issues around bullying and harassment, particularly of women, where there have been some really serious problems. And to be fair, there have been some incidents which are pretty outrageous. However, in order to tackle these issues, one would hope that the existing policies in place would be able to deal with that. If someone's broken the law or if someone has done something absolutely outrageous,

they should leave the armed forces and that should be the end of it. They should be disciplined in the proper way. However, turning to this diversity inclusion ideology that we've seen kind of infect across all of Whitehall through all the policies that I'm I've mentioned is not the way to tackle those issues. And I think that one would assume that the armed forces is one of the most more conservative, I suppose, departments of government or parts of government, because naturally the people who sign up to the army just naturally tend to be more conservative. And I think that weirdly, they don't believe in this DEI stuff. They're not kind of massive ideologues, but I think they view it as a way to deflect

criticism as a way to kind of funnel anger with all the issues you mentioned in terms of bullying harassment and other serious incidents has happened in the army, to kind of, I suppose it's almost like a PR exercise for them. And to an extent there have been some individuals who are really woke and have been promoted, I think, above their station, who have instigated many of these policies in the last few years. And I should also mention, by the way, that when we did this reporting a few weeks ago, Grant Shaps, the Defence Secretary, said he was going to launch a review into all diversity policies in the MOD, which is pretty rare. I've done lots of reporting on various different wokeness in lots of departments, and that doesn't happen all the time. That's pretty

rare that they'll actually come and say, we're seriously concerned about this stuff. A lot of the time, they'll come back and say, no, you're wrong, we support these policies, you know, we put them in place, et cetera, we're proud of them. We believe diversity is really important. But in this case, the Defence Secretary felt that it was important to review some of these policies and hopefully get rid of them. Do you think that's because it represents an existential threat to our armed forces and therefore an existential threat to the future of our nation? I think that's right. And, you know, as a part of our reporting, we featured quotes criticizing these policies from the former head of MI6, the former head of the Royal Navy, not quite the former head of the Royal Air Force,

but someone very seen in the Air Force, Edward Stringer, an air marshal. And we had 12 senior former commanders signing a letter, which was criticizing these policies as undermining our operational capabilities, undermining morale. And also it makes the British armed forces seem like less of a threat to our potential adversaries in China and Russia. And that's quite a controversial thing to say. I know a lot of Trump supporters and so on in America are, again, worried about these similar issues in their armed forces where, you know, they've got these sort of trans generals and

people talking about white rage and things like that. And they say, well, actually, in Russia, in China, they're focusing on how to fight, how to win wars. And yet we're obsessing with this new diversity ideology, which may be undermining the purpose of why we have an armed forces. And also, it gets in the way of just general practical things that are going on in the army. So to give you a few examples, things that I found of various different diversity positions within the forces. You have diversity champions, diversity advocates, diversity, what they call lead allies. There are over 111 of just those three things in the MOD, across the MOD. They have 93 diversity networks in the MOD, including 14 specifically to focus on the issue of race. Now, a diversity network is sort of a

group where soldiers and civil servants can meet to discuss and lecture on diversity in their particular topic of gender, race, trans, whatever. They also have, on top of the diversity champions, the lead allies and the advocates, they have diversity practitioners, diversity associates and diversity advisors. Every single subunit has to have at least, I think, three practitioners and advisors. So again, you've got all of this massive, what I call the sort of diversity industrial complex, diversity bureaucracy, infecting across the entire forces where these people should be focusing on, as I say, winning wars, how to fight properly.

what's happening in Ukraine, potentially what's going to happen in Taiwan. There's some really serious issues in the Middle East and so on. And instead of focusing on that and how we can make the army the best it can be, suddenly we've seen this massive growth in the last 10 years of this diversity bureaucracy. And I think, as I said, undermines operational the sort of purpose of why we have a forces, but also gets in the way of just general day-to-day activities. Stephen, first of all, sorry for laughing earlier. It's just so ridiculous. It's hard not to laugh. But I wouldn't want people to take away from that that Francis and I don't appreciate how serious this is. It's because it's very serious that it's so outrageously, you know, funny in a tragic sort of way. And I think it does

sound to me like we've kind of forgotten what the Army and the Navy and the Air Force are for. They are for killing the enemy, not for making people feel good about being included or whatever it is. And by the way, I haven't done anywhere near as much research into this as you have, but I am going to guess that the people that speak to you within the armed forces are probably not on board with this in any sort of way at all. Like most of the people I know that want to go into some kind of profession that involves killing the enemy, they don't tend to be all about, you know, their feelings and stuff like that.

So like, I'm guessing the rank and file of the British military are probably not on board with this. Honestly, it was an extraordinary response that I had from people serving in the military I've never had so many people contacting me out of the blue through Twitter, through other connections saying that they're just totally frustrated and outraged to what's going on in the forces. To give you one example, we published an anonymously written piece by someone in the Royal Navy who talked about how the diversity stuff kind of gets in the way of his just general activities. He was given unconscious bias training where he was told that everyone has hidden prejudices.

And the important thing in somewhere like the Navy is that actually you've got to be a really tight unit where you've got to have kind of comradeship and you're actually going together potentially to fight and die as a really strong kind of bonded unit. And to be told that actually secretly you all hate each other because you're all racist, you're all sexist and you've got to kind of remove from yourself these hidden prejudices actually undermines that capability of fighting with an effective unit. He said he never thought about people's race or gender before, but when suddenly you start pointing that out, that actually undermines that really important, as I said, that really important sort of purpose of having these tight units across the forces.

So not only that, as I said, there's the issue of people completely disagreeing with it. And also to mention from his piece, at one point he was told he had to salute the, you know, the white end sign, the famous symbol of the Royal Navy, what he described as a symbol that had brought millions of hope to millions across the empire and our Commonwealth and has a real sort of historic tradition. And right next to it was the LGBT Pride Progress flag. And for him to have to sort of salute that in a parade was actually quite an insult because, you know, this again, it's imposing politics on people where there shouldn't be any politics in place. And to talk about this issue of whether people support wokeness in the armed forces or not. Interestingly enough, I did a follow-up story

for the Telegraph where I got leaked a letter from General Sir Patrick Sanders, someone I mentioned earlier. He's the head of the army, head of the army. So literally the most senior guy in the Bridgetown. He wrote a letter following my reporting to some retired generals that was given to me where he criticised my reporting saying it was insulting, saying that most people in the armed forces, or almost everyone in the armed forces would find my reporting offensive. And it's like, you live in a completely opposite world if you think that, because if you actually spoke to people serving kind of junior people in the armed forces and actually senior people and mid-ranking people, you'd find that there is a huge discontent against these policies.

And by the way, in that letter, he explicitly backed the policy to challenge security checks among non-UK recruits for the Intelligence Corps. So this has infected every single level of the top hierarchy, unfortunately, of the armed forces, not only in the Army, but as there's also in the Royal Air Force, where again, I think last year or the year before last, they had to apologize for discriminating against, I think, 161 white men that kind of recruitment process. It also shows how completely disconnected he is, which goes back to the point you made, but in a different way for me, because when you do comedy to people in the

armed forces, you would realize that they are people who are fundamentally unshockable. You can't really offend them because they've been in war. So they have seen some of the most horrific things that life has to offer. And for the head of the armed forces, you know, forces to say he's offended? I totally agree. And I think he's on his way out. I mean, everyone knows that he's on his way out. And he feels that he's a bit at war with the defence minister, the defence secretary.

The letter also featured criticism of the MOD, criticism of his boss saying that they weren't listening to him on other issues. And in January, he made this speech, which basically said that we might have to have conscription in the medium to sort of long term if there's any kind of war with Russia. and Downing Street, but very quick to slap down any suggestion of conscription. So I think he feels that he's more able to speak his mind

because he knows he's on his way out, which is, in one sense, it's kind of quite concerning that him speaking his mind is actually supporting the woke policies and actually going even further than I ever thought he would. And I don't think he believes in this stuff. I don't think he believes in a word of it. I think that he is, as I said earlier, trying to use it as a PR exercise,

potentially to cover up some of his own failings in the forces. That's something that various people have made comments to me about that. And there's lots of stuff going on behind the scenes that I can't report, that I can't talk about conversations that were off the record and so on, where people have raised real concerns about the leadership in the army in their descent down this path. And I think that only under a Labour government likely going to come in later this year, this is going to get worse before it gets better.

this review into diversity by Grant Shaps and the MOD, I don't think we'll achieve very much. Grant infamously made a speech in January where he was supporting diversity and supporting some of these policies and initiatives and suddenly he did a sort of reverse ferret and wanted to get on top of this. I think personally, I think it was quite a cynical move for him to launch this review. I'm glad that he did it. But I don't think that ideologically he's conservative. I don't think he's particularly concerned about some of these issues. I mean, if you look at his previous statements on this stuff, he doesn't seem like someone who's focused on wokeness in the MOD, for example, or any other department that he's been in before. And frankly, it shouldn't take me reading these

documents which are open to everyone in the army on the MOD intranet page, literally tens of thousands of people, for Shaps to launch a review into this stuff. It was so interesting speaking to some of the people who work in the MOD, they had no idea what was going on. They hadn't read any of these documents. And that's another area which I'm really concerned about, where you can blame civil servants and, you know, hold them to account and I try and to do the best I can on that front, you know, naming these people, shaming them, making sure that they're exposed and everything they're doing. But at the same time, ministers must take responsibility for initiating these policies. Suddenly had all these Tory MPs. I remember going on GB News at the time with Mark

Francois, who used to be an armed forces minister, and he was, you know, obviously outraged, he's quite right-wing, some of the things that I'd found. And it's like, well, actually, all the policies that I was investigating and reporting on had been in place since June 2022. Who's been in charge for the last 14 years? It's been the Conservatives. And particularly in the last few years, where these cultural issues, these cultural wars, so, you know, so-called, have been raging in the press, and suddenly these things have been allowed under their leadership, under the leadership of people like Ben Wallace, who's a very popular conservative politician.

But I think he endorsed this stuff. I don't think there was some conspiracy of civil servants. I think that the Tory ministers are totally on board. And this is why I think it's important. You mentioned, you know, this guy's not a real conservative, this guy's quite a wing, therefore. I really, honestly, don't believe that the majority of the British public left or right support any of this crap.

Yeah. Like, I would imagine whether you're left wing or your right wing, you want your country's armed forces to be good at their job. Like, that's the number one thing that the government is for, is protecting the country. And you want those armed forces to be effective, whatever your view on tax policy or whatever else it is. So I don't see this as a conservative versus not conservative issue. This to me is, it's like it's a mind virus, this stuff. It really is. I think you're right.

It's not necessarily political. I mean, the argument from the diversity supporters, as I said earlier, would be that, oh, well, this is important for recruitment. This is important against bullying harassment. And this is important because we have to be a modern army that reflects society. Now, I don't know whether an army should reflect society. I don't give a shit if it reflects society. I don't care.

I want the army to be good at doing its job. Why does every institution have to be a tool of social? social engineering, effectively, right? Which is what it is. I don't care if the army represents me or my neighbor or whatever. I just, like, I care if it's good. What, why, like, I don't get it. Absolutely right.

And, you know, every single institution in Britain, particularly the public institutions, like the BBC and so on, feel that they must, for some reason, I don't know why, reflect every single, actually, it's not even every single section of society. No. It's black people, frankly, and it's the trans stuff. And I think those are the two areas where they're obsessed with. I think other ethnic minorities, some of them are there. And potentially to an extent other ethnic minorities. But I'll give you an example. I have a lot of Polish friends.

I think there are about a million Polish people in Britain. How many Polish people do you see on the BBC? How many people with Polish accents do you see in BBC programs? Where are the dramas around Polish people? Why are they not represented in any way in this diversity obsession in somewhere like the BBC. They're not because they're white and therefore all white people are the same.

They can't be inner diversity. That's how they view it. They're too busy fixing the plumbing. Yeah, exactly. Well, there's nothing wrong with that. I love our Polish guys. They can fix the plumbing. We all love Polish guys.

Maybe there's a funny comedy to have in Polish plumbers. I don't know. But do you know what I mean? They obsess over one area of representation and not others because that's the kind of trendy thing to do. So the whole thing is totally inconsistent. And you're right. The army shouldn't, it's sort of degrading from the purpose. It's forgetting the purpose of why we have in armed forces. And this goes to an overall decadence, I think, amongst probably sort of the decline of our civilizational, I don't know, values or whatever. Civilization is a Western country like Britain. We're forgetting that actually the war in Ukraine shows where shows that armed forces are really important. We do need a proper army. The world isn't sort of isn't the end of history. There's lots of threats to peace. I think.

I think a lot of people in the army do recognize that. But at the same time, whilst they make speeches about how, you know, budget cuts and, you know, General Sir Patrick Sanders said that in his letter to the generals that we, the armed forces, the army faces becoming a static domestic land force. In other words, we can't go out and do operations overseas like we have in the Falklands or Iraq or wherever in the future because of these budget cuts. So he recognizes there's an issue. He recognizes there's threats to peace. He recognizes the importance of the army. But at the same time, he doesn't understand. that the purpose, I suppose he doesn't understand the main purpose of the armed forces. It's not to represent people. It's not to, you know, to sort of modicoddle people. It's not to be an HR organisation. And again, it's this kind of HR attitude, again, amongst all of the sort of departments and civil service. The civil service and government institutions are no longer aimed at serving the taxpayer or, you know, reducing immigration, let's say, in the home office or fighting in the armed forces or wherever it is. Instead, the purpose has become, or in the NHS, to protect the staff, to protect them from

potentially mental health problems or making sure that, you know, they reflect society or supporting the staff in all sorts of ways. And I think that weird growth of HR as an importance, as a sort of, as a vital part of any organisation, is a very novel, a new concept. And again, it undermines the main things that these institutions should be doing. Stephen, I read something, and I think this sums it up, and maybe you'll be able to pinpoint it, because I know I read it, but I can't quite remember where it was talking about the army and the problem with toxic masculinity in the army.

And I was thinking to myself, if there's one place in the world I want my men to be toxic and masculine, it's the army. Yeah, it's really interesting. I think, I don't know specifically where that quotes come from, and I'm sure that people have accused the armed forces of having toxic. masculinity. But there's an interesting debate, I think, amongst all modern forces as to the balance between the genders. And if you look at somewhere like the IDF in Israel, women are

conscripted into the armed forces there. And there's some real debates amongst academics as to how successful that integration has been. Some people, like Patrick Sanders, says it's been a great success and it's worked very well for Israel. Others like Professor Gwetian Prince, who's someone I've worked with in some of these stories, criticizes the IDF's operational capability in terms of women being allowed on the front line, for example, he would make the argument that actually what this leads to is the male soldiers, let's say you're in a sort of fighting zone or whatever, the male soldiers, instead of focusing on fighting the enemy,

might be thinking instinctively as a kind of human instinct as a man, I've got to protect the person next to me. I've got to kind of help the woman in some way save her from this mortal danger that she's in. that's not something that you can deprogram someone to do. And it's really important that you focus on the sort of main thing at hand when you're in one of those situations. Now, I'm not an expert in the army or anything, but I'm just giving you the different kind of perspectives on the gender balance.

And toxic masculinity is an interesting phrase because I think historically, armies around the world have been very, very male-dominated. Not all, by the way, you know, in the Soviet Union during the Second World War, there were female fighter pilots who were serving in the Soviet, Air Force, who were very successful and women can actually make brilliant pilots. And we've got a lot of women pilots in the RAF and they're very effective. But again, it's a balance.

It's about where women can be used in their most effective way, because obviously the female physiology is different from men's and they're weaker, the bone structure is different and so on. Obviously, we can get into the whole trans debate. That's kind of where that goes. So you've got to place them in the right places. And once you have women and men in any institution, especially something like the armed forces where it's a very tight-knit thing where you're with them all the time in some really kind of tough situations, that's always going to cause tensions between the sexes. You're going to have sexual interest, frankly, between men and women. You're going to have sort of paternal instincts in a way, as I said, to sort of perhaps save the person next to you instead of focusing on the other thing at hand. So I think it's a really interesting idea that toxic masculinity is a bad thing in the armed forces. As you said, I think it's probably quite a good thing. good thing. But when we live in sort of a modern world where armed forces are having different

kind of groups that historically haven't been involved, there are always going to be tensions and it's kind of, I think that's part of that issue, toxic masculinity. There's probably our tensions between men and women in the army where you have had some inappropriate incidents, frankly, where men are harassing women and so on. And that's just going to happen when you have men and women in a room in that kind of tight-knip situation. And it's also as well when people talk about the language that is used in the army and they say how unacceptable it is, these are normally men in a war zone. Language is going to be different than if you're working in Croydon Council.

I don't know. I mean, that is a war zone, mate. I mean, that is a good point. But it's going to... You meant in a cafe in Central London. Yeah, in a cafe in Central London, or if you're going to the theatre, it's going to be different because you're in a highly pressurized situation. where it's literally a matter of life and death, you are going to be desensitized because of what you've been exposed to, so your language is going to be,

dare I say, more industrial, and your humour is going to be far more dark. Absolutely, and I think this issue of language is actually fascinating in terms of how the new woke ideologues are impacting that in the armed forces. So to give you a few examples, they warn everyone in the MODD against what they call microaggressions. So the armed forces is meant to be pretty aggressive institution, I would hope.

I would think so, wouldn't you? I would hope macroaggressions would be something to be celebrated, particularly against our enemies. But microaggressions are very unacceptable, and one of the examples they give is sort of misgendering someone or labelling them in the wrong type of pronoun. Obviously, total bollocks. You know, when you have, I suppose, trans...

There are very, very few trans people in the armed forces, but one would hope that people are disrespectful to each other and you don't have to obsess over asking what someone's pronoun is. One of the stories I actually reported last year was in the Royal Norton. Navy, their sort of trans guidance for all sailors said that you had to introduce your pronouns before any interaction. And that again was immediately withdrawn by their defence minister. When I exposed this thing that was like immediately, I got a comment from the MAD saying,

we're reviewing the document, we're withdrawing it. Why did it happen? Why was it there in the first place? The other issue about language is, again, this gender neutral obsession. So you can't say riflemen. You can't say any, you can't say servicemen. In the RERF, they changed a few years ago, they changed ranks to be gender neutral. You can't say airmen anymore, you have to say aviators. And this issue of one guy in the army said to me, he's never seen someone a worse bollocking in Sandhurst in the military kind of education, army kind of education establishment, then when someone said the word rifleman and a senior commander completely sort of came down on the sky with a ton of bricks, completely unprofessional way, because it wasn't gender

neutral. And then later on, there was a commander who, again, was giving kind of educational instructions that this guy told me, we published in the telegraph, where he was saying, you know, you must use gender neutral language, you can't say all these terms like riflemen and so on. And then immediately he forgot about that subconsciously, presumably, and he used the exact same terms that he just said that you shouldn't use. So it's quite ironic. I think, again, it's this kind of weird imposition of you just have to say the thing, you have to kind of repeat the almost like religious mantra, you have to, and then you sort of go back into normal mode and you kind of forget about that because really it is totally irrelevant to day-to-day kind of

interactions with people. So yeah, that is definitely a concern, this use of language. There has been an massive imposition in recent years trying to make sure that all language is somehow gender neutral and no one's offending each other. And it's also the issue of meritocracy as well, because if you take something like the SAS, the reason the SAS as a fighting force is so famous is because they are the best of the best. It doesn't matter who you are, It doesn't matter where you come from. You are the elite. Absolutely. And I think this issue of standards and lowering standards, frankly, in order to boost diversity. I mean, the security checks is one policy. But this applies across a lot of public

institutions, somewhere like the MET, somewhere I've been speaking to people in the MET recently, who again concerned that they're lowering the fitness tests in order to enable more women to join. And I think, again, that causes issues where you see videos of women who are trying to arrest people in the street. You might have three women in London trying to arrest. sort of a big, tall bloke, and he gets away and he can proper put up a fight. And you kind of have these kind of overweight women who unfortunately, it looks quite embarrassing for them. And I feel quite sorry for them, really, that they've been put into this situation.

So I think things like the bleep tests and so on have been reduced, I think, to a certain extent in the Met. I think in the armed forces, again, there are some accusations that they're lowering physical fitness standards in order to boost diversity of particularly to have more women in the forces. And again, it's that whole lowering the standards. As you say, you want to be the best. That's the point of the SAS, for example.

I think the SES probably quite protected, I hope, in most ways, because their levels of this kind of fitness standards are so high that I think it's very, very difficult for women to get into those institutions. And I've spoken to actually people who have been training recently trying to pass their fitness levels to be in the special forces. And there was actually one woman, I think, in my sort of contacts regiment,

who did actually manage to almost pass, who just almost just found she would have been the first woman ever to get into this into this kind of special operations regiment. So yeah, I think, again, it's a concern, and I hope that our allies aren't looking at this stuff like in France and other European nations in NATO, in Poland, for example, who are massively investing in their armed forces concerned about the threat from Russia. And I suspect they're laughing us. And the same in China, the same in Russia.

Why are we doing these things to undermine our operational capabilities? Do you know what's interesting about this? We have more meritocracy in something like football, which is basically entertainment, than we do in the service that is there to protect us from foreign threats and enemies, and the police, which is there to protect us from domestic enemies. We've lost the plot, haven't we? I think this issue of meritocracy is really important, and it doesn't just go to fitness standards and the Met and the Armed Forces,

but it also impacts promotions across all of white people. hall where people are basically being selected based on their identity and their characteristics rather than whether they're good at the job or not. And one of the things that I've spoken to lots of civil servants about, particularly in various departments like the home office or the DWP or wherever, is that suddenly they go up for a promotion and they're asked about all of these issues around diversity and well-being and HR kind of topics rather than whether they're good at the job or not. And what the civil servers have is something called success profile. Now, this is what all civil servants are measured against in terms of recruitment and promotions, internal promotions.

And I think in one of the success profile documents that I've studied, there's 12 mentions of diversity. Now, you don't need to be obsessed with diversity to be an immigration officer or to be an advisor in the Department of Work and Pensions or to be someone who is coming up with education policy. That's totally irrelevant. But suddenly this has become something which they're all measured against. and they've all got to come up with a load of, again, like almost semi-religious bollocks coming up with their, using the language, using all of the things that are in these success profiles in order to get ahead. And unfortunately, I think we've seen a real over-promotion of people who are very good at using the HR woke language in their applications, in their job

interviews, versus the people who are potentially more apolitical, more focused on their, just their normal roles, I suppose. One of the things, one of the stories I reported on was in the BBC, something really interesting. It's very, very difficult to get sources in the BBC. I think that's such a liberal metropolitan institution, frankly, where there are very, very few people, maybe I'm wrong, and people of the BBC watching this may disagree with me, but there are very few people, I think, in that institution who, frankly, are concerned about these woke issues. There are lots of Jewish people who are worried about the BBC's coverage of Palestine. I think to a certain extent there are kind of turf-type gender-critical people in the BBC. So it's very rare,

to find someone who will actually speak to you on the record or off the record about this stuff. But I did find someone recently, and it was fascinating, some fascinating conversations. And one of the things that they gave to me was this HR hiring document, which said that all candidates in this major non-editorial department had to be asked a question about diversity. And if, and the sort of hiring manager was given the correct and the incorrect answers. So it literally said, quote, don't hire the candidates who are, quote, quote, dismissive or derisive of diversity and inclusion and surrounding topics. So even if you question any kind of topic around diversity and inclusion,

immediately you're disqualified from a position within the BBC. And people wonder why the BBC has a more liberal left bias, frankly, and a more kind of woke bias amongst all of its programming and all of its output. And I think, frankly, it's to do with, partly at least, to do with its hiring processes and its hiring practices. Now, the BBC claimed to me in their press office that this was an old document from 2022. Yeah, very old. It's probably been upgraded to publicly defenestrate anyone who is dismissive of diversity.

Honestly, it's mental. They sent to me the updated version of the document, which is a public thing, which is everyone has to champion inclusion. Why should everyone have to champion inclusion to a BBC? Anyway, but the point is, is that document was still in place, despite what the BBC were telling me. I knew it was still in place. I knew people who were applying for jobs in the BBC.

who are being asked these questions. So they completely lied to me. And this is something that happens all the time. Civil servant press officers, people across public institutions will openly lie to my face and phone calls and sometimes even over email, over my reporting in order to try and shut down my reporting. And this is something I found that's really interesting, as they'll try and shut you down. They'll tell you that what you're doing isn't woke. Actually, it's very important for various different reasons that ministers support it. And when you speak, to the spads, they're like, we don't support this. We didn't, we didn't do any of this stuff. We're trying to root it out. To a certain extent, that's the special advisors. Those are the people

that advise ministers who are appointed by ministers who are more, who are from the Conservative Party, essentially. And it should be their job to try and root out the stuff. And to an extent some of them do, some of them don't, and I've had issues of a few spads as well. So it's really interesting. So to get back to the point about the hiring thing, the BBC, I think that is, that's a problem with, in terms of meritocracy across the public sector, where this obsession with identity, diversity, and so on in terms of hiring means that we're not getting the best people. And if you're wondering why the government aren't delivering, let's say, on issues of immigration or why you're not getting your pension or why it seems that public services are kind of grinding

to a halt, the trains and so on, I think that can partly be explained through this lack of meritocracy. Suddenly there's a whole new criteria of how people are promoted, of how people get ahead in these really important roles where they are impacting millions of people. people's lives, you know, as I said, things like going on your commute or even going to the hospital and so on, because these people are being hired or promoted based on things other than meritocracy. It's, you know, the more... We're rarely speechless, but... Yeah.

Do you know what this, to me, and again... You're okay, mate. Yeah, I'm about to have an aneurysm, but we'll, you know, I was going to say... There won't be anyone in the hospital to help you because... No, no. You know, and there'll probably just be some. somebody who will just be like, it's fine, you can have a corridor, just die here, you know, in peace and quiet. But what this talks about to me, and maybe I'm being hyperbolic and please push back if you think

I am, this speaks to me of civilizational, because it'll collapse, really. If you think about it, if we've got an army, which is more, you know, talks about non-binary and length of hair and is not concerned about meritocracy. And we're more worried about what someone looks like and what they identifiers than their ability to do a job. Once you get rid of something like meritocracy, I mean, it's basically over, isn't it? Really? Now, I'm not a historian, but I know that lots of people make comparisons with the collapse of the Roman Empire where, again, they became kind of decadent because they felt that they were very safe in the world, they became rich, they didn't have kind of those concerns, those sort of basic instinct concerns of wars and so on.

And I think that's what's happened to us to a certain extent, is that we become very complacent, very decadent. We're no longer faced with having to, I don't know, collect food in the same way or, you know, there's a kind of basic survival level instincts that we've had previously only until about 150 years ago. And I think suddenly when you can live a life, which is basically automated and you don't have to worry about the sort of more serious things that humans previously had to worry about in our sort of rising civilization, you can start obsessing and you feel that you can start obsessing with other things. And when ideologies fill that kind of secular gap in countries like Britain, which have massively declined in terms of our religious connection with Christianity and so on, and politics become the new kind of religion for people, I think that that leads to all of the issues that I've been discussing within the civil service. And you're right, I think this is

leading to civilizational decline. One of the areas where, which is really interesting, where DEI does have a major impact and could impact anyone if they're flying, for example, example, look at America, look at their DEI policies in the air traffic controllers which Obama put in place. Everything changed very quickly in 2013 when the Obama administration embarked on a plan to diversify the ranks of air traffic controllers. Obama's FAA chief at the time announced that he intended to transform the agency, which includes air traffic control, into a, quote, more diverse workplace. As part of that plan, air traffic controllers no longer needed to take a more demanding cognitive assessment before being hired. Instead,

said all they needed was a high school diploma and the ability to speak English and apparently to do very basic math that like a third grader could do. All the tests were dumbed down to the point of being absurd and pointless. Now, the result over the past decade has been exactly what you would expect, even if you haven't heard about this. The number of air traffic controllers who are not white men has significantly increased, while the number of white men has decreased, that was the whole idea, according to the FAA. This is what they tell us. coincidentally, so have the number of near collisions involving commercial airlines. Those have increased significantly.

According to a database maintained by NASA, which relies on data self-reported by pilots, the number of near misses has more than doubled over the past 10 years. Just the past year, there have been more than 300 near misses involving commercial airlines, averaging more than five per week. And just to emphasize that point again, they diversify the FAA, and near misses immediately doubled. Now, correlation does not prove causation, but it can point towards it. And in this case, there is a giant glowing sign pointing in that direction.

Of course, only a handful of these incidents receive any major media attention, so it's easy to underestimate the scale of the problem. No matter what social media platforms you frequent, you don't really hear a lot about a lot of this. And that's why, in a moment, I'm going to go through some of the near misses that have gotten very little coverage. But I'll start with an incident that did get some attention for the national news media because it helps put the broader problem into some context. So this incident happened in July when air traffic controllers put two aircraft, an Allegiant Air Passanger plane and a Gulfstream jet on a collision course. Shortly after the Allegiant plane had taken off from Fort Lauderdale, Hollywood International Airport.

And here's how that all played out. Watch. The FAA and NTSB are investigating a very close call on the skies over South Florida. Airlines plane and a private jet forced to take evasive action to avoid a collision at 23,000 feet. Here's Tom Costello. Allegiant Air 485 had just taken off from Fort Lauderdale, headed for Lexington, Kentucky when it happened. The pilot forced to make a sudden extreme climb, 600 feet in seconds to avoid another plane, throwing flight attendants to the floor and terrifying passengers, including Jericho Thacker and her family, flying to Kentucky after a Caribbean cruise. It was honestly the scariest thing I've ever been through.

It felt like when you go on the top of a roller coaster and you go straight down from the highest point. The FAA says it happened when controllers put the Allegiant flight and a Gulfstream business jet on intersecting routes both at 23,000 feet. Climb, climb, climb. That's when both planes' collision avoidance warnings known as T-CAS activated, ordering the Allegiant pilot to immediately climb and the Gulfstream. pilot to descend. If not for TKFC, these airplanes would have gotten very, very, very close or have potentially collided. Again, it was about lowering standards. It was about putting in new tests for people in terms of diversity rather than meritocracy. And people are seriously concerned that you're not getting

people who are trained properly on those jobs in air traffic control, which is one of those areas which you'd hope you'd have properly trained people, because if you don't and they make mistakes, people can die. And the same thing applies to pilots. So when you have these, you know, it's probably okay to have a civil servant who's an HR officer in the DWP talking about trans issues. It doesn't really impact people in a huge way. But when your pilot or your air traffic controller was hired because of their skin color and their kind of, you know, or race or gender, rather than because they're good at the job or we've lowered standards in order to boost diversity in that industry, people can die. And I think we'll probably see in the next 10, 20 years more examples of

institutional failure among governments around the world, particularly in Western countries that have taken up these woke obsessions. There's a very good article in this called complex systems won't survive the competence crisis, which breaks a lot of this down, particularly in America. But I actually think, speaking to your point, Francis, I do think it's actually worse here in Britain than it is in America in some ways because the Americans, they still have the willingness to be powerful, whereas Britain lost its empire and accepted it, and now there is no will to be great anymore. Like in America, what you're about to go there, you'll see when you'd fly around. The first people allowed on a plane is not first class or business class or anybody,

but it's anyone who's a combat veteran or is served in the military. They still have this thing of praising the people who serve their nation and risk their lives to do so. Um, But it's so worrying that this is our attitude. And I guess the question is you exposing it. Have you, you know, we've got the Grand Shaps review and you obviously not that convinced that it's going to be a massive success. But do you feel that there is some kind of chance

that this trend can be addressed or reversed? Because the truth is, yes, we've lived a very comfortable life. But I think you have to be blind not to see that that is not necessarily. going to be the case going forward. It's a really interesting question. Something I thought about a lot is kind of hopefully the impact of my reporting and what's going on within government departments. And I try and get feedback when I do a story about the armed forces or about the home

office and ask my sources in there. What do they say about it? How do they respond? What are people talking about? And sometimes I get really positive responses. People will send each other messages, colleagues and so on and say, wow, I wonder who leaked this. I wonder who exposed that.

And they'll be like, no, you know, hopefully they don't realize it was actually me, and they'll send me those messages. So, you know, some of them, I think there's a huge kind of ground swell of support for my reporting amongst many civil servants. And I think that once you kind of have one person putting their head above the parapet or leaking a document or exposing a thing, that gives a lot more people confidence to push back against this stuff. Because sometimes it can feel very lonely if you're in a job where all of your bosses are signing up to the DEI stuff. you're getting emails about it from senior people, about sort of trans day of inclusivity, or they're hosting some kind of event where they're talking about critical race theory.

They're telling people to support BLM or to read some woke book about white fragility or whatever. And suddenly when the press, openly this stuff is exposed in the press, where ministers, to an extent, start to talk about it in speeches. Shaps is launching his review. I think that does give people a certain confidence to say to their manager,

actually, I don't support this. This isn't impartial. This isn't correct. Look at what the minister's saying about this. We shouldn't be doing these things. And particularly those senior civil servants who are making those decisions in the future about trans or race issues, I hope. And I think to a certain extent they are, taking a step back and thinking, well, actually, why am I doing this? What is the impact of this?

I hope they're taking a more critical perspective and using more critical thinking skills in terms of diversity and inclusion policies. And particularly even if it's just what will happen if this gets exposed in the telegraph or the mail, how will that impact my own career. I think one of the most powerful things you can do as a journalist, something that I found really interesting, is the thing that civil servants hate most is when they're named. They never want to be named in stories. They always want to remain anonymous, whether they're senior or junior. Particularly they say, civil servant press officers say to journalists all the time, oh, no, you can't name that civil servant who may have done something. something egregious, who may have said something outrageous, who may have, you know, done something completely against political impartiality or whatever, oh, you can't name them because they're too

junior. And they say you can't name them because there's a rule or there's some sort of agreement between journalists and the civil service that you don't name junior civil servants. There's no such rule, there's no such law, there's no regulation that says that it's an ethical judgment by editors to say, does this person really have the responsibility and the authority over what they've done? And how egregious is it and how much in the public is it for us to name this civil servant. And the reason they don't want to be named is because they claim it's because of,

you know, they might be bullied or something like that. No, it's because of their career progression. And if an employer, even in the civil service, is Googling their name and suddenly they're mentioning an article, that doesn't look great for them. That looks like they're a bit of a troublemaker, or at least they've done something wrong for us to be reporting on it. And they've got to do something pretty wrong

for us to actually name them if they're a junior guy. If there are senior people, it's a slightly different situation because those people have responsibility and authority and there's a stronger public interest in naming those individual civil servants. So I think as journalists, we can have a big impact, I hope, on some of the decisions that we're making it inside various Whitehall departments. But interestingly enough, actually the fight back within the civil service is occurring independent of journalists and independent of pressure from people like me and newspapers.

There's an organisation called Seen in the Civil Service, which represents gender-critical civil servants. It was set up in October 2022. It was the first of its kind, and this was following the Maya Fors Sartter case, which I'm sure you guys are very aware of, where gender critical beliefs are now protected against discrimination under law under the Equality Act of 2010. And this means that civil servants can generate their own network, their own group across Whitehall to talk about gender critical beliefs, and they're unable to do this because of the Maya Fawrcester case in law. So the Cabinet Office agreed that they could set up this organisation.

There's over 700 members have seen now across the civil service, which is very impressive. They've ran surveys of their members discussing sort of widespread bullying harassment of civil servants for holding gender-critical beliefs. Some of the stories that I've reported on have exposed some of the harassment. For example, a gender-critical civil servant was accused of holding beliefs similar to the Nazis in a call in which senior civil servants were there and said nothing to defend them. In another situation, a gender-critical civil servant in the DWP was in a call about international women's days. sort of discussion about that. And she said, there are, she said, quote, there are two sides to the trans debate. That was used in an official investigation against her. Someone complained that that was

bullying and harassment and discrimination saying there were two sides to the trans debate. And in an official investigation by the department, she was given an official warning. And that quote was used as evidenced against her as harassment. So what's seen a doing is they're pushing back against this stuff. They've written to Simon Kemp. is the cabinet secretary, the head of the civil service, to raise their concerns. Their meeting with senior civil servants, they recently met with the permanent secretary at the home office called Matthew Rycroft, who is what they call this ridiculous name. The gender, no, no, the faith and belief champion of the civil service.

Now, just a very quick side note, Matthew Rycroft is the man in charge of our police and our border policy, and he spends time being a faith and belief and a race champion in the civil service to talk about trans issues. Why he's wasting any time on that, I don't know. But anyway, so Seen have done some fantastic things where they've really been pushing back internally against some of these woke policies. They found documents that they're upset about. They sent it to senior civil servants, pro-trans stuff, for example. And to give you an example, one of the things they found recently in a letter they wrote to Simon Case, agenda. Now, a gender is a network for pro-trans civil servants. So there's lots of different networks across the civil service. As I mentioned

earlier. There's 93 networks in the MODD specifically for talking about diversity and inclusion, 14 for race. So all across Whitehall, there are all of these groups, which by the way I don't think should exist, but they're a total waste of time. But anyway, they exist and that's the reality. Agenda is the pro-trans group and the civil service. They came up with training slides, which compared gender-critical people to the KKK and racist nationalists. Now, that's totally unacceptable. Civil servants should never say that sort of thing. I mean, I mean, it's discriminatory, it's bullying, it's horrible. So there again, exposing these things internally,

they're having those conversations, which is really impressive. On the race front, and I think generally, and I know maybe you guys disagree with this, but I think generally the people who are opposed to the critical race theory and the civil service, at least in my experience, the people who approach me about these stories, tend to be more conservative-minded, less focused on, let's say, being feminists and sort of turfs and more focused on, you know, kind of this anti-white propaganda. It could be leftists, could be conservative, but generally it's conservatives. Those people are far less organized.

They don't have their own organisation, partly because there is no protection in law for anti-critical race theory beliefs yet. And that actually could change soon. There's some interesting legal cases that's going through the system now where that may become a protected belief under law. And I hope it will. I think there was a recent success. I can't remember the exact details, but a recent success in one of the courts to do with

that. So they don't have their own organisation. They don't have their own network, the anti-critical race theory. But they do speak to each other to a certain extent. They do blow the whistle on a lot of stuff that's going. on in Whitehall. And again, they're having an impact externally through newspaper reports and so on. So I am, there was a very long-winded answer, but I am basically hopeful that there are some successes going on. But unfortunately, the other side of it is Labour about to come into the parliament

very, very soon, probably. So things are going to get better. So things I expect will get a lot worse, unfortunately. But, you know, there are some brave civil servants out there who are fighting this stuff, and I think we'll continue to do so. Stephen, we've talked about this, and we've covered almost every facet of it. There's one part that we haven't covered. When you think that we're living through a cost of living crisis when every government department is having its budget slashed, how much money are we wasting on this nonsense? It's difficult to calculate because partly because the government doesn't release the figures, partly because it's so bureaucratic that it's very difficult to find where they're spending this money. I think we know

it's in the billions. There was a report a couple of years ago from, I think, conservative way forward that estimated it to be around seven or eight billion pounds they're spending on diversity and inclusion, kind of policies and bureaucracy. Is that across the board? Across the board, exactly. Which is a lot of money. But it's also having other detrimental effects on, let's say, procurement. Where suddenly, a good example of this is HS2,

where suddenly contracts are being handed out based on... Sorry to stop, because we've got a global audience and they'll be like, what's HS2? HS2 is the new high-speed rail project that the government have been spending a long time talking about and it's currently being built. Very costly, huge £100 billion project where they're connecting London to parts of the north of England

through a high-speed rail network. And there have been huge issues of the budget being inflated massively, you know, hugely over-cost and sort of, what's the word I'm thinking of? It hasn't been delivered in time. For contracts for HS2, diversity have suddenly become a kind of tick box

that companies have to comply with. So this can interfere in all sorts of ways. where, and particularly under a Labour government, by the way, where they want to introduce legislation potentially that would prioritise black-owned businesses in government contracts, which is a completely racist and disgusting policy, could also lead to massive corruption. So this is the Labor's Race Equality Act that they want to instigate. Potentially, they're still sort of discussing their plans. We don't know exactly what they're going to do, but this is something that one of the proposals that's come up. People on the Treasury that I know are terrified of this policy because it could cause, as said,

massive corruption. It's also morally abhorrent. So this is not just about the amount of money we're spending on diversity officers or on networks or on whatever. It's actually about the way that diversity can impact procurement decisions, impact really important decisions on spending, where that also skews taxpayer money away. So we don't really know how much it's costing, but I suspect it's a huge amount of money. Yeah. Stephen, it's been great to have you on. We are going to go to locals for our supporters questions in a second, but as always, we end with the same question, which, which is what's the one thing we're not talking about as a society that we should be.

Before Stephen answers, at the end of the interview, make sure to head over to our locals, the links in the description, to see this. It's the first time in almost 250 years that we've seen a kind of religious mob cowing Parliament and cowing the Speaker of Parliament. This is really not normal. That's not normalised the fact that MPs are being murdered by Islamic extremists. Did you or any other of your colleagues at the Telegraph consider resigning had the UAE-backed investment fund taken control of it? If you're going to interview Vladimir Putin in the current geopolitical context, you have a duty to be informed.

I agree, but I don't think Tucker knew and how would he know that Putin would go down that historical rabbit hole? You can't be informed about everything about Russia. Something I'm totally fascinated with as a journalist and just as a punter is history. love reading history and I love reading historical comparisons to what's going on today and in the past. And I think that people as journalists, we don't talk enough about history. I don't think that it's something that we tend to ignore. I think history, you can learn. There's so many lessons, so many things, errors that we're repeating today. And I really hope they're not just journalists, but politicians, intellectuals and so on, will start to think a bit more about historical comparisons,

their own country's culture and history. And that's something I think that we don't talk about enough. Now, I know some people are interested in it, but others aren't. And if you look at contemporary politicians, people like Liz Truss, you know, even Rishy Sunak to a certain extent, I don't think that they have that kind of historical basis, that historical mindset, that perhaps historical intellectualism that politicians and perhaps even journalists in the past did have.

So I think that's something that people should focus on more. That's so true. And actually, we have probably interviewed a bunch of historians for a show that's mostly culture and political, and we've got a ton more coming out, because I couldn't agree with it more. If you don't understand your own history, then you really have no idea where you're going,

and I think it's so important, particularly in a world where people are just losing touch with what made their societies what they are. I don't know, we just interviewed Andrew Roberts about his book about Winston Churchill. And like I, talking to him, I realized how uneducated I was about Churchill. And I'm probably more educated than many people about Churchill himself. So, yeah, I couldn't agree with him more.

It's a really, really important point. Yeah, and I also think it ties into as well. I always cringe when I see conservatives saying, oh, you shouldn't study an English degree. You shouldn't go to university to study English. And then you complain that people don't understand their culture. So how can you understand what it means to be English if you don't understand Shakespeare, if you've never read Dickens, if you've never read, if you don't understand the art that has been produced by our country, that has literally changed the world. I totally agree. And by the way,

the one thing I might disagree, I don't know, but it's about university. I didn't go to university. I don't think you need to go to university. I think you can teach yourself, you can be an autodidact. That's something that I've done, particularly in my fascination with history of Red Andrew, but it's a fantastic biography of Churchill and Napoleon others. And I think I just urge everyone, you don't have to do that. You don't have to go down that route, particularly if you want to to go into something like journalism. It's a trade. It's not a profession. You don't need to go to university to study stuff. You can learn by yourself. There's so much stuff on the internet. And I think that, you know, that's somewhere, again, where I'm a bit worried that too many

people today are just going down that academic route without thinking about it. Perfect. Well, we've got two for the price of one. Join us over on locals where we continue the conversation. John Bryce says, does Stephen think it's still possible for a young person to have a long-term career in journalism? And I imagine he means mainstream. Yeah, yeah.