TRIGGERnometry - Julia Hartley-Brewer: "This Lockdown is Insane"

Episode Date: November 8, 2020

Broadcaster, Journalist and talkRADIO host JuliaHartley-Brewer joins us for a chat. Support TRIGGERnometry: Paypal: https://bit.ly/2Tnz8yq https://www.subscribestar.com/triggernometry https://www.patreon.com/triggerpod 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

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Get started today at IPVanish.com slash audio and take control of your privacy with IPVANFANF. Hello and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantine Kisson. And this is a show for you. If you want honest conversations with fascinating people. A fascinating guest we have for you today. She's a broadcaster, journalist and the radio talk show host, Julia Hartley Brewer, welcome to Trigonometry. Thank you very much indeed. I hope I am fascinating. I'll do my best. Well, we'll find out very quickly. But there are many fascinating things to talk about just for the disclosure for our viewers and listeners. We're recording this on the Thursday after the Tuesday

on which the election happened in the US and the first day of lockdown here in England as well. Obviously, things are going to change by the hour, so we won't get into the nitty gritty of it. But let's talk about the US election first. It was a very unexpected result, no matter who wins the election, just in terms of how the vote broke down. And it seems to me that, you know, the pollster's got it run again, didn't they? Well, you say unexpected. I have to say every single guest I'd had on my show for the last few months talking about the upcoming election, I said, what about the shy Trump voter? And they all poo-pooed it and everyone said, oh, no, no, no. The pollsters have dealt with that. They're not going to get it wrong like they did in

2016 with Trump versus Hillary Clinton. And I just kept thinking, I've just got a funny feeling about this. I was watching everything that was going on with Black Lives Matters and there's running street battles and all of the ongoing insanity of diversity politics and trans this and trans there. And I just thought, I mean, I spent a couple of years of my childhood in living in America, in the Midwest. And I've always had an interest in American politics. And I just thought, I'm not sure this is going to be going down very well with the ordinary American voter in the same way that telling a load of British people, you're all nasty, horrible racist, and the country's terrible, and everyone's having a terrible time, and we're all going to die. I just don't think

that's how most people think about their country. And certainly not. Brits and Americans who are very proud of their countries, like most people of their country. So I always thought that there was a very strong possibility that Trump could do it. I didn't want him to do it. I'm not a Trump fan at all. If I was an American, I'd vote Democrat. No question at all. I'd struggle with Joe Biden, but I'd hold my nose and do it anyway.

So I wasn't that surprised. If we had to put our money on it right now on Thursday afternoon, it's Joe Biden, isn't it? And if I'd had to put money on it before election day, I'd have said Joe Biden, but I would have been terrified out of my life that I was going to lose that money. And when it looked like at one point in the early hours of Wednesday morning that Donald Trump was going to win, I have to say I was the least surprised person on the planet. And, Julia, why is it that in particular the liberals, they don't seem to be learning their lessons? It's time and time again.

It's the election of Donald Trump, or it's Brexit, or it's Jeremy Corbyn, losing. to Theresa May, the loss of the Red Wall. Why are they not learning the lessons? They're not learning the lessons because their view is, and we know this all the way along from Brexit in 2016 onwards, is that they fundamentally think that the voters are stupid. Everyone other than them, you know, God forbid people who don't even have a university degree. We've had that snotty attitude since the 23rd of June 2016, haven't we? And their view is that, you know, it's like Hillary Clinton, the deplorables who voted for Donald Trump, they despise ordinary people. They think they're not

as good as they are. They think they're uneducated, idiot, racist, nasty people who need to be told what to do and who need to be educated in what the right thing is to think. And when you start from that attitude, you're going to find it impossible to understand people's point of view. Now, I grew up on the liberal left. I'm constantly told I'm a right winger. I don't think I'm right wing. I think I'm right. I mean, these liberals, I mean, these are the people that think someone is far right.

I've had that people use that term about me. They think these people are far right because they think maybe it's not a good idea to have hundreds of thousands of migrants coming to the country and even illegal immigrants coming on boats across, you know, from France or from Mexico into America. They think these are terribly, terribly extremist views when they're not, as we know. These are incredibly mainstream views. And I think the reason why the liberal sort of wokeocracy in America and in Britain have so many similarities, they have the same attitude towards voters in that way, but they also, they don't get it.

It's not how they think they don't understand that people think that way. They don't know why they think that way. They think it's impossible to comprehend why anyone would vote for Donald Trump or, or would vote for Nigel Farage or Boris Johnson. And that's because always they don't want to listen to what those people are saying. And what those people are saying is, we don't want to be patronised by you lot anymore. We'd like to be free to live our own lives and make our own choices

and run our own businesses and do what we want to do without you interfering nanny state in our lives. And that's just a message that the liberal left are just unprepared to hear. They've just put their fingers in their ears for four. old years, and they're going to keep doing it. I don't think there's going to be a single Democrat who, even when, you know, Joe Biden is being inaugurated and Donald Trump is still shouting from the sidelines on Twitter about how he's been, you know, defrauded of a second term. The fact that Donald Trump got three million more votes than he got in 2016, despite everything

he has said and done and tweeted since 2016, Not a single Democrat is going to learn that lesson and think maybe we are not actually putting out a message that can reach middle America. And I think the Labour Party exactly the same in the UK. They are going to lose election after election after election. And at no point are they going to say, maybe it's not them that's the problem. Maybe it's us. Julie, you know, one of the interesting points you bring up there is that there's been a sort of narrative that essentially the future is left in the sense that the Democrats. graphics of the United States and the UK are changing in such a way that essentially will

become harder and harder for right-wing parties to win. One of the things we saw with this election is actually Donald Trump increased his vote share with everyone except white men, which seems to shatter that whole narrative. It's something we've been talking about on the show for quite some time. On the wall behind us, we've got pictures of our former guests. Several people of color there who are very critical of woke politics, the way that the left has shifted over the years. think this election signifies a shift in that sort of narrative as well? Well, I mean, one would hope so. Again, I find it very, I think, I think very sinister and unpleasant that people will talk about, you know, the Latino vote, the African-American vote, even the women's vote. The idea

that you should be voting because of, I don't know, having fallopian tubes or testicles, in particular shade of your skin, I think is really quite a bizarre idea. And I'm absolutely, also a surprise to me, again, that many African-Americans, evangelical Christians, very much more on the conservative right in terms of a lot of their values. We're talking about Latinos, again, Catholic, very much on the conservative right. This notion that the Democrats have got, you know, the black and the ethnic minority votes, they're theirs. They're theirs. They're there's. They're not because they're the right representatives for them, but they're theirs by right. They own those votes. And the criticism they give of those who,

don't conform. The attacks on women Republicans, you know, Latino or black Republicans or gay Republicans are off the scale compared with those on, say, white male Republicans. And we see the same in the UK as well. I mean, there's Margaret Thatcher not included. And I remember a guardian list of the 100 most influential women in the United States. We didn't include Margaret Bloody Thatcher, first female Prime Minister and regarded widely. I wouldn't have voted her. I was, she was far too right wing for me, when am I in my teens and 20s? But I mean, the idea that she shouldn't be on that list in, I don't know, top three is absurd. But she's just discounted, because she's not a proper woman, because she's on the right. And we've had the same with

Theresa May. We've had the same with ethnic minorities in the cabinet, Rishi Sunakas, Chancellor, Priti Patel, and the Sediqq, Javid, before him, and Priti Patel as same secretary. Well, they don't count. I mean, they've got darker skin, but they're not really, I think minorities because they've got the wrong political views. And again, it's a liberal left not getting it. You don't bloody own a vote because of the colour of someone's skin, and they're going to have to get used to that. But, Julia, I don't think they're going to get used to that. And do you think there's going to be this attitude amongst a liberal left? Let's say Biden does win. We've solved the problem. We're never going to face it again, and we're all going to go back on as we used to be.

Yeah, see, we got it right. Yeah, exactly. I think, yes, there are an awful lot who are not going to, as I say, they're not going to get the real message there. I mean, yet again, the Democrats have won the popular vote in the United States. Whatever happens in the final few states, the battleground states that are going to declare, they will have won the popular vote. Is it seven times out of the last eight elections and not very often actually getting the White House as a result? But they are going to have to understand.

that you need to have a sort of coalition, you can't just win within the East Coast and the West Coast and certain ethnic minorities or the young who largely don't go out and vote, you are going to need to bring along, you know, all those middle states as well. And it's the attitude, it's not that sort of, oh, well, look, they're never going to vote for us. It's we don't care almost whether they vote for us or not. And that, I think, is a very strange attitude because that, you know, there are many millions more of them. those people, as we've seen in the Rust Belt, you know, that they are now the deciders of the elections. We know how New York's going to vote and how California is going to vote. It's those

swing states where it really matters. Again, I just don't see the Democrats once they're in office realizing what's gone wrong and bearing in mind, look, even Biden wins. And then, you know, maybe after a year or two, he stands down through ill health. Kamala Harris is president. You've still got a lame duck presidency. The Republicans are going to, keep control of the Senate. They've got huge control for decades ahead of the Supreme Court, a six to three conservative majority. It doesn't matter who's in the White House to a certain extent for quite a long time. The agenda's been set for decades ahead. And the Democrats, it's their fault. They did that. They created Donald Trump in the same way the left Tony Blair

and, you know, Blairism. They created. Nigel Farage and ultimately Boris Johnson's premiership, you know, if they don't like it, well, they should look at themselves in the mirror first. Yeah, they're very good at that, aren't they? But were you keen to carry on with the election? Yeah, yeah, there was one thing that I really wanted to touch on. And for me, we always seem to, you know, never get into what this attitude actually is. And for me, it's contempt of white working class people.

That's what it is. There is it is exactly what it is and it's funny because it seems to have wavered from the sort of the worker oh these fine the miners the you know how wonderful the factory workers and being raised of gongho to now these ghastly ghastly people who who are you know they're neanderousals they just drink beer and and mutter about immigrants in their working men's clubs I mean this is you actually The only sort of working-class people that most of these sort of Islington Labor people come across is their cab drive. You know these people always go, oh, well, my cab driver today said, is that literally the only person who hasn't got a law degree that you've spoken to this? It's really, really strange. A lot of them are just totally out of touch.

But if you're going around despising a large amount of your electorate, you've got a problem. And, I mean, and again, and I think it's on both sides of the Atlantic. it. This idea that, you know, that white working class men in particular have got this incredible, this magical privilege that they're born with, you know, even on a housing estate, you know, in the east end of London or in the or in Middlesbrough or in Stoke-on-Trent, the idea that you are born with this innate privilege because you're a white man. Well, you know what? Tell that to them when they're down the job centre. Tell that to them then when they've got two, you know,

grade DGCSEs from the rubbish schools that they've gone to. I mean, it's an absolute load of nonsense. And if you don't understand your voters and you don't like your voters and you don't respect your voters, you can't really be surprised when they feel the same way back. It's such a good point because I think a lot of people respect someone who disagrees with them, honestly, on an issue of policy. But it's the contempt that we've seen over the last four years that I think is the driving factor behind it. But let's move on a little bit, Julia.

You mentioned that a lot of people you feel are not fans of the nanny state, are not fans of being told how to run their business, are not fans of being told how to live, where to go, what to do. Well, what I put it to you, that we're now in a position where the government has gone quite beyond that, and they're now telling us not to run a business, not to go out, not to do this. It's an issue you've been a hammering quite for some time now.

So for people who haven't been watching your brilliant shows every morning, what is your view of lockdown? Look, I spend a lot of time telling you what's wrong with the world. So let me tell you about something that's actually right. Sleep, specifically getting more of it, better quality, the kind where you wake up and feel like a human being rather than someone who's been thrown down a staircase. Most mattresses are just layers of synthetic foam and crossed fingers.

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It wasn't the handling of the pandemic. It was the economy. It comes back to that Clinton life. It's the economy stupid. There is no need to have a lockdown for health reasons. Infection rates are not exponentially rising. I'm not saying it's not my opinion. I'm not an epidemiologist or a statistician, but I don't know. I'll follow quite a few who are actually doing that and looking at the official data that's in the public domain, and it tells us quite clearly across loads of different formats that there is no big rise in infection rates in either the elderly or the young anymore in and sort of 2% increase in the last week, just 2%. I mean, nothing like the sort of exponential rising doubling every four days that we were seeing back in March that justified the first lockdown,

which I absolutely did support. We had a new disease, didn't know what the earth was going on, didn't know what the death rate was, absolutely terrifying. You know, let's just build up capacity, you know, flatten the curve, and then we'll know where we are. Months and months later, of course, we know that actually infection weight went down two weeks before we went into lockdown. The death rate was going down before we went into lockdown.

It wasn't really necessary. Voluntary measures would have been sufficient. and as we've seen from Sweden as well. So going into a second lockdown when we are looking at normal seasonal increases in respiratory illnesses, 10%, less than 10% of beds in the NHS are currently being occupied by COVID patients.

And most of those are not people who have got COVID and they're ill there in hospital because they have COVID. They have simply tested positive for COVID. COVID is now endemic in our hospitals. Most of the infections now are happening in our hospitals, which is exactly what happened back in March as well. So I think it's an insane policy.

I think the cost to the economy is going to be just off the scale. The numbers are just silly, silly. They're not telephone number numbers. They're international, including the dialing code telephone number. But also, crucially, people have made this a battle about healthy wealth or lives versus livelihoods. As if someone losing a business that they spent 20 years building up, doesn't really matter, as if someone losing their job that they've done for 20, 30 years,

or even a year doesn't really matter, as if kids not getting a proper education, well, it's only a few months, doesn't really matter. This stuff matters. It matters to those individuals, to their families, to their children. People losing jobs often end up losing their homes. They end up losing their marriages. The children have to leave their schools because they have to move. We end up with higher rates of suicide, higher rates of ill health. The children's outcomes over their entire lives are hugely affected by this. We know people aren't getting treated for cancer, not getting treated for heart disease.

We know that we've got tens and tens of thousands of patients in hospital, elderly people in their 70s, 80s and 90s with dementia, who have no contact with their loved ones with their families in person or unable to understand, you know, how to converse with them on an iPad, as the government seems to suggest they can. I think this is an absolute disaster, economically, health-wise, physically and mentally.

And I think when history judges this and when the public inquiry judges this, I think heads will roll. I think this is borderline criminal what we are doing to our country and what we're doing to the people. So, Julia, let me ask you then because you're intelligent. Sorry, is that?

No, that's great. It's great. It's great. It's something Francis and I've been talking about in this show for some time. but you're an intelligent woman. Between the two of us, we're probably about as intelligent as you. So the three of us can see it.

Why is it the government, who I assume I know some of the people who work in government, I imagine some of them are intelligent people. Why are they doing this? God, if I knew, and I'm lucky enough to sort of have the mobile numbers for most of the cabinet and can text them. We don't think they haven't been getting texts from me. There are some, the likes of the Chancellor,

Cisinaac, that they absolutely do get it. He can read a spreadsheet. He knows what he's doing. He's looked at the numbers. He's looked at the data. And he can see that this isn't the right thing to be doing, not just for the economy, but for the health of the nation as well in terms of how many lives will be saved in the long run and which lives are going to be saved. I think that Boris Johnson, I know we say he doesn't do detail. I think he's clever enough, he's old enough and ag enough to know the war he's doing isn't right. And certainly, Sir Patrick Valence and Chris Whitty, the Chief Scientific Advisor and Chief Medical Officer of this country, of England, certainly.

They absolutely know. They absolutely 100% know what they're doing. Now, I watched that press conference on the Saturday night when we just had the last minute press conference, hours and hours after it was supposed to have happened, telling us that we were going to go into lockdown. I mean, I have to say, I watched it on the Sunday because I decided to drink through it.

It's the same thing to do. I was bugging if I was going to have my Saturday night room by them as well as the rest of the Sunday. next month. But watch it the next morning. It was really obvious to me that those two men felt very uncomfortable in what they were saying. And that 4,000 deaths a day, again, they never say it's a prediction, do they? They always say, you know, it's a scenario. Well, if that's the one scenario you choose to use, then you're choosing that deliberately and knowingly. Now, when Boris Johnson used that scenario, I mean, he's got Patrick Valence and

Ritty standing next to them, standing next to him. And the three, of them together, the three sort of horsemen of the apocalypse, you know, you're assuming that, you know, if they don't go, oh, actually that's wrong, Prime Minister, that they are, they are validating what he's got to say. Now, we knew on Sunday that that four thousand a day deaths, which would have been, by the way, you know, four times the work we saw on our worst days in April, would have been a higher death toll per day than Brazil, India, or any other country that had a terrible death toll and didn't even have a lockdown. I mean, off the scale, ridiculous nonsense nonsense scenario.

We knew that that had been debunked on Sunday. No question at all. On the maths, it's not a question of opinion. On the maths, that was a three-week-old bit of data, and it was looking at the scenarios with certain ridiculous assumptions in, and it had predicted that by that weekend, last weekend, we would have had a thousand deaths a day by then when we were having roughly 200.

So we already knew it was wrong. And they had since that had been published, a few days earlier, they had actually already published a subsequent piece of data with a far, far lower, more realistic desktop. And yet Boris Johnson, Chris Witty and Patrick Valence chose to use that information. And the Prime Minister used it again in the House of Commons on Monday. Now, I don't think it's possible that they didn't know it was untrue. I don't think it is possible that they thought that was a valid number. And that number was used to scare us. Why do they want to scare us? I think because they know that the actual numbers

that are available, publicly available on Public Health England, NHS England, government websites aren't scary at all. They are showing infection rates around the country are going down, where they're not going down, they are going up at a much, much slower rate. I mean, really, really slowing down many parts of the country that have been hardest hit. They are levelling off, even in Liverpool, the hardest, one of those hardest hit areas. No question at all. The hospitalisation, ICU infection rates are all going down. So they must know this because I'm not an expert and I know this. And it's not because someone who works in a hospital unit is telling me,

the official national figures collated by the estate tells us this. So something is going on. And for the light of me, I've never been a conspiracy theorist in my life. But for the life of me, I cannot work out what it is. Are you tired of using bulky old wallets that give you a bulge where you don't want it to be. If you are, Ridge wallets are an incredible solution. This is mine. Sleak. Look at the industrial look as well. It's great. You can have 12 cards in it and cash on the back with a clip or strap. They're incredible. We've got one for the whole team. Francis has one. I have one.

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and use that code, which it will not surprise you, is also trigger. But the problem isn't it as well, Julia, is that we've effectively got a one-party state because the Conservatives are putting forward this, and Labour are backing them. Well, no, no, Labour aren't backing them. Labor want it to be sooner, harder, longer, deeper. There is no lockdown. They don't want to pornography by this nation. Right.

But that's a real problem for democracy, isn't it? it because when you've got a lockdown about, well, it's just been unleashed. And what's happened to a lot of people, and they're going to lose their jobs, their health is going to be affected, mental health. It seems nobody's standing up for them. No, well, I'm going to have to say, we at Talk Radio are trying very hard to do so. And what's interesting is all of our, all of the presenters are sort of come to this conclusion completely separately.

We've never had a meeting. We've never been told to say it. On the contrary, I think quite a lot of people are in charge of it. guys, can you own it in a bit? But we are all so passionate about this because we're clever enough and sensible enough to look at the actual numbers. I'm, you know, I'm a political editor for 10 years of a national newspaper. I know when I'm being lied to, but I know when I'm being lied to by a government minister or advisor. I really do. I mean, we've got Nigel Farage, the Brexit Party. They've said they're going to relaunch as reform UK, which is all very well, except, of course, we don't have,

you know, general election until 2024. got local elections, we assume they're not going to be cancelled again in 2021 in May, and they say they're going to stand in those. Now, that may focus a few minds when it comes to particularly the Conservatives who voted for this, but certainly not the Labour Party. They love it. They think that that will just take Tory votes. This is the issue, even the MPs I've spoken to on and off air, who I say, look, why are you voting for this lockdown? Why do you think there should be one? And they'll say, you hear it again and again, I do it with a heavy heart.

I wouldn't be willing to vote for another one. If on December the 2nd, you know, they want to go into another one, another lockdown, I would not be willing to vote for that. But, you know, we're going to come out on December the 2nd into Tier 3, which is pretty much a lockdown to one terms of purposes. And they keep saying that, well, you know, I'm just not sure about things. Now, well, I keep saying, well, let me send you, let me send you the information that you can then be sure about.

some random on Twitter who's sending this stuff. I'm talking about, you know, conversations with Professor Carl Hennigan, the Professor of Evidence-Based Medicine of Oxford University. He's not a crank. He's one of the most eminent in his field. And he is tearing his hair out, not wanting to get involved in the politics, but sort of can we just, he doesn't, I don't care what the policy is, but can it be based on the facts as opposed to spin? That's all he wants. And that's all I think we It is what we want, Julia. But you mentioned December the 2nd, which is formally when this lockdown is supposed to end. Do you think there's any chance of it ending on December the second at all? Well, the legislation that was voted for by MPs, although not by 38 MPs who voted against it

in 60 who abstained heroes all, by the way. History will judge them very kindly. The legislation automatically falls on that day. That was the only way, I think, getting that through. it depends what's happening, doesn't it, with the R-rate and with infection rates, we know there's a time lag in terms of death. If you are testing every single person who comes into hospital, and if you've got a PCR test for COVID, which is so, it's just, I'm trying to think of the correct word here, but it's so useless, frankly, that it will pick up the remains of a viral infection from six months ago when you're not even infectious at all, and it's certainly not causing you any illness. then I'm afraid, you know, we're probably not going to see those death rates going down because right now, I mean, if I get, I had the virus back in March. Who knows? Maybe I would test positive in a PCR test for COVID right now. If I get hit by a bus tomorrow and I go into hospital and while I'm being treated, they test me and I come up positive for COVID and I then die. I will be in those daily statistics a couple of days later as a COVID death. I mean, that is how insane our statistics are all right.

now. So I'm not confident that the numbers are going to look sufficiently low by December the 2nd. The government's going to feel they can release us back into the wild. But Julia, sorry to interrupt. I mean, there's a problem of the public. Because I have people tweeting me all the time saying, one death is too many. No, it isn't, is it? One death isn't too many. The death of a 95-year-old who's been in a care home for two years and has been bedridden with dementia, who has had on off respiratory diseases and got six other underlying conditions, dying of COVID a couple of months earlier than they would, is tragic for their family. But the idea that we should shut down the country because of that is absurd.

1,700 people die every single day in this country. COVID ain't even in the top 10 killers, right? even right now, while we've got apparently a COVID crisis and a second wave, we have got to get this a perspective. And I think the British public needs a little bit of education about, you know, how many people die every single day where we don't have a pandemic. Julia, just very quickly on that point about the extension of the lockdown. I mean, I don't think I'm putting words in your mouth if I say that you believe the government have already been lying to us about the figures. Right. So what's to stop them doing it again?

what's the incentive for them not to lie to us again? I just don't see it. This is the thing. I question what their incentive is right now. As I say, I'm not a conspiracy theorist at all. I'm a cock-up theorist. The think of it is a very accurate representation. And yes, Prime Minister, very accurate representations of how things do work in

government rather than big conspiracies behind the scenes that Russians or whatever. I think a lot of this is about, frankly, ask covering. we are talking about, we have a higher per capita death rate than a lot of other countries. That's actually got very little to do with government policy and dates and kinds of lockdown. It's more to do with our demographics, the obesity, the ethnic minority population, big cities, having a major, you know, big hub airport like Heathrow, all of those other reasons and why that's probably happened. But I think there is a real feeling that the public inquiry is going to be very, very harsh in a couple of years' time. And people are starting to cover their backs.

And when you've got the likes of Keir Starmer and others say, oh, all these people are dying, isn't this terrible? Isn't this terrible? There is a rush to be seen to be doing something. Doesn't matter what it is, do something. And I think the idea has been all along, we'll do a lockdown, we'll do another new set of measures. And then at the time when infection rates will be going down anyway, we will come out and it'll look better and then we'll have Christmas. because the Prime Minister knows full well is not a chance in hell that he's going to be able to keep to lockdown, even the rule of six for most families on Christmas Day. I haven't met a single person who has the tiniest inkling of a plan to keep to that rule.

So we're going to have to be out of lockdown by Christmas Day. And we're going to have to be out of rule of six at least for a few days over Christmas because you cannot have a law which 60-odd million people break on one day, because that makes the law look like the asset really is. That's my only hope that we will come out of it. But the fact that Rishi's enact the Chancellor only this morning has announced an extension of the furlough scheme to March, I mean, what do you need a furlough scheme to march for?

If we're coming back out on December the 2nd would be my first question. Do you have a business? Do you want to make the most of your business? Do you want to advertise online? But don't know where to do it. Well, how about you advertise with Trigonometry? We have over 200,000 subscribers across the different platforms. We sometimes get up to 3 million views a month for our videos,

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Brexit, isn't it? It's divided people. We've even got epithets being held. COVID-Its, I think, is the term being used for people who are skeptical about lockdown. I thought the virus was meant to bring us together. And I've said, I mean, I've said, I'm not. I've said, I'm I was ill with the virus. I caught the virus on the 40th. I know which event I caught it at. And I was ill by the 16th of March, so a week before we went into formal lockdown and I'm sick as a dog for three weeks. And I know it's not a hoax. I know it's real. One of the things I kind of did hope, though, after all the divisions over Brexit, and 2019, I mean, that was worse than 2016 in terms of those divisions in terms of getting that through in the election. And Jeremy Corbyn and the anti-Semitism. I mean,

There was so much horrible stuff around. And I did think in March, you know what? There's one good thing that's going to come out of this. It's going to bring the country together. First, we've got a real problem and we can all unite about what the real problem is. And second, you know, we're all in this together. You know, I love the announcements Rishi tonight made about, you know, the help of the business and the furlough scheme. And yet, taxes are going to go sky high.

But you know what? We are all in it together. And since then it really, doesn't it? It really, really has changed and it doesn't feel like that at all. And it's fascinating because you say how much the dividing line actually, an awful lot of it, has come down on very similar lines to the main leave debate. And I think a lot of that is down to two things. One, private sector v public sector and two, middle class, be working class.

Because if your experience of lockdown is that you get to keep your job or you're on 80% pay and furlough and you've got a nice home and a garden. and your kids are at a half-decent school where they provided lessons, and you've got to spend some lovely afternoons in the park over the summer, probably not that worried about lockdowns. If, however, you're in the private sector, or you're living, you know, three kids and you in a block of flats in the city, no outdoor space, you're going to feel rather differently about it. And I think the public sector, private sector divide very much,

and working class, middle class divide very much in evidence on Brexit as well. And I think we are, yeah, we're back into that territory yet, go. And do you think as well, I just find myself so worried about the economy and the long-term implications of it. We don't seem to be discussing it all that much and how we're in my show. We discuss it every pleasure. But why is it? Why is it that your show is one of the few places that it's being discussed and it's not a bigger issue? Because a lot of people are going to come back after the furlough and their jobs or even certain industries, dare I say, might not even exist anymore. I mean, leisure industry, travel industry, tourism industry, pubs, restaurants, film, theatre.

I was doing a BBC show this morning, Politics Live after my radio show, and they were talking, everyone was talking about the furlough scheme and, oh, 80%, and wasn't that better than 67% for Tier 3 in terms of helping people on their wages. And I was sitting there thinking, you're all insane. Most people can't live on 80% of their pay. They struggled through in the first lockdown. And by the way, they didn't have to have the heating on during that lockdown, did they? Because it was all lovely and sunny, wasn't it? And also, you know what?

It's only for three weeks. And then it's only for another three. And then another three. And it's only for a bit. But we'll all cope. We're all in it together, all of that. But people, you know, they've used up their savings. They've, you know, the middle classes are like, well, we've all done very nicely out of it

because we haven't spent so much from foreign holidays. and we've barely gone out to a restaurant. So frankly, we've got more money than we normally have. Well, bloody bully for you, but millions of people haven't. And there are millions of small business people. They have worked for 20, 30 years to build up their businesses. And they're just gone now. And offering people, you know, 80% of their pay,

and this is, by the way, only up to 30 grand. Well, okay, that's average earnings in this country. But if your mortgage and your outgoings are based on more than that, you're going to be in very, very tight financial circumstances. very quickly. So the idea you can pay these people's wages and everything will be fine and somehow at some point in December or in January or March, they'll just go back to their full-time job. Well, we already know that's not what happens because it wasn't what happened after the first lockdown. People didn't come out from lockdown and then just go straight back to the shops and straight back

to the restaurants and the bars and back to work. The government was virtually begging people to get back to work. And that was in the summer. What are the chances of getting them to go back to work in the middle of winter, in the rain and the sleet and the cold? You can put these jobs on furlough schemes as much as you want. The question is, is there a job at the end of it? And I spoke to Paul Johnson, the director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies today, the very eminent, independent, respected economic think tag. And I asked you me, how bad would it be? How bad would the second lockdown be? Would it be better or worse? And he said, Well, it won't be the worst thing that's happened ever. It won't be the worst thing that happened ever since the Black Death,

which is what the first lockdown was, but it may well be the second. And that was the cheeriest thing he could say. So all these, frankly, idiots, MPs and others, who think that it's just for a month. It's a circuit breaker. A, there isn't such a thing as a circuit breaker for a virus. All you do is push the deaths later. World Health Organization has been telling everyone that for months,

but people only listen when they're saying something they want to hear. So we won't have any lives saved more than we would otherwise. We'll just push those deaths a little bit further on. But we will see millions of jobs and tens of thousands of businesses go under. I mean, if people like Marx and Spencer's can't make a profit, John Lewis start laying off people, even Sainsby's. The supermarkets, the one set of shops that have been open throughout all this, they've laid off three and a half thousand staff this morning. Now, if supermarkets are laying off staff, how on earth do we think other businesses are going to be able to keep going when they can't even open their doors?

This is the thing that really bothers me about it, Julia, because I fit very squarely into your middle class identify. The lockdown was very good for me. I spent more time with my wife, lovely walks, all the rest of it, the government. helping everybody. But I don't understand the lack of critical thinking on the part of our politicians and media because as I look at it, it's good for me. But there's no question that paying people not to work for the best part of a year is not a good long-term strategy. It's just not going to work economically. Why aren't more people talking about this in that way? I just don't get it. I don't get it. I mean, if I'm going to think, you know, bad thoughts about a sky, bad motives,

I think that, well, I think the Tory party you don't get it. And again, they're going to learn their lesson because I'm telling you in 2024, there are going to be very few people who are going to be thinking about and worrying about the fact that way back in 2020, someone they knew, dentists, nieces, grandmother, who'd been in a care home for two years, died a couple of months earlier than she otherwise would have of COVID. That's going to be the level. Most people, I mean, I've had a friend who died of COVID, or with COVID, a, a, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, rather than off. And I know other people who have so, but I'm very much in a minority. Most people won't know anyone who's died of COVID or know anyone who knows anyone who's died of COVID. We may actually put, you know, going around four years time, but they will know people who've lost their jobs. It may be them. It may be a family member. They'll have, you know, children who are in their 20s, you still can't get a job since university. There'll be people who've lost their businesses. There will still be boarded up shops on the high street. They, you know, there'll be far less choice of, say, for instance,

even just things like foreign holidays, the local pub will have closed and not reopened. They are going to see that and remember that and feel that. Now, Tories should probably know that right now because they're going to be the people who get blamed. None of the Labour MPs who voted for lockdown are going to get blamed because the Tories are the ones in power. For the Labour MPs, of course, it's not necessarily a bad thing. They don't get blamed for any of the COVID deaths. They don't get blamed for any of the other deaths, people who don't get treated for cancer. Tory is responsible for the failures of the health service, not them, and they don't get held

responsible for any of the unemployment and any of the businesses that have gone under, or indeed any of the taxes which are inevitably going to go up and not just for the top 5%. There ain't enough of them. They're going to go up for everybody across the board for decades. And the Labour Party can happily vote for these measures and say, oh, should have been sooner, should have been longer, should have been harder, should have been whatever. They can do that as much as they want, and they don't have to have any, there's no cost for them at all, and they will be reaping the benefits of all the damage that is done. So I do wonder sometimes that Keir Stama, who's a very intelligent man, as you remember,

that actually he knows exactly what he's doing in calling for these measures. And it may not all be about a concern for life, and it may be more about a concern for the next general election. And it seems what we're talking about when we're talking about both the conservative attitude lockdown, but also the labour attitude to lockdown, is that we're in a political crisis? Do you think we are? I think we've been in a political crisis for a number of years, don't you? With all of this,

I suppose we're not in a political crisis in one way, simply because right now, the majority of the public, according to the polls, say that they support these measures. But if you say to someone, everyone's dying and you're going to die and your grand's going to die, And it's awful, but don't worry, we'll pay people 80% of their wages to not work, and it'll be fine in a few months.

Will you vote for lockdown? Well, of course they will. Why wouldn't you? It sounds like a terrible situation could be averted and there's not much cost. I think if people were given more of a nuanced argument about what the reality is of the decisions that are currently being made or what the costs are rather than just the benefits that we might save a few 85-year-olds next week from, from, of COVID. And I'm not being harsh. I'm just being realistic there. I think they would feel very,

very differently. Well, on the government's own estimates, I mean, the government's own numbers project that the first lockdown may end up killing up to 200,000 people, which men will. 20,000 excess deaths that are definitely non-COVID related. Right. But over the next few years, in terms of, because cancer doesn't kill people immediately, their estimates are, the government's own figures are 200,000. Now, if this lockdown lasts as long as I think it's going to last, which is until the end of March, quite possibly. Maybe there'll be a break for Christmas. You end up probably killing way more people than you've saved. And the difference is, as you say, COVID is killing older people who may already have lots of other health issues. But you're trading, saving their lives

for a few months for a father of three in his 40s that doesn't get a cancer diagnosis. How does that make any sense? It's insane. Well, but I've heard people say to me, and again, not only every life matters. Well, yes, but we do make choices. I mean, given a choice between saving my own life or saving my daughters. I know which life I'm going to save. I'm going to make sure she's safe. And it's what we all do. It's what human beings do. It's what the health service, it's what the government does. Every single day, they choose between lives. People say, you can't put a cost on a life. Oh, that's exactly what nice the National Institute for Clinical Excellence does. I think it's about $230,000 as a max they'll pay for any life-saving drug. Each one of those COVID deaths has cost us

probably about a billion, as far as I can tell, doing the amount. But this is, this is, the thing is we are not for the next five years going to have news readers on the BBC and Sky and I TV every night at 6 o'clock saying, and now the latest deaths from heart disease and cancer as a result of the lockdown in 2020. We're not going to see those figures. They're going to be hidden. They're going to be wrapped up in all the other 16,700 deaths every single day. It's not the same as another 34 people have died of COVID. It's just not going to be noticed. It's going to be written off.

And it's only silly wants like me who are going to look at those graphs that looks at five-year averages and say, hold on a minute. We didn't actually see excess deaths in 2020. But my God, we're going to see them for the next few years. They're just not going to be on the front page. IP vanish protects every device you own, your phone, your laptop, your smart TV. If it connects to the internet, it should be protected. IP Vanish encrypts your connection and masks your IP address, helping keep your browsing private at home and on public Wi-Fi.

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But we've been focusing a lot on physical health. really discuss mental health. I remember reading a report from the OSFA National Statistics that said that the rates of depression literally doubled over lockdown. And that is, you know, I think that's the very tip of the iceberg. Yeah. I'm generally the view that we, I don't think we've gone from a point where people didn't talk about mental health at all to whilst also saying, we should talk about mental health. I think you can't get it off my TV screen or my radio. I'm largely, of the view that an awful lot of the normal human emotions, sadness, grief, anxiety,

that these should not be classed as mental health problems. If they are appropriate to the scenario, if you'd be locked in your home on your own without a job without being able to see your family members for a couple of months, the appropriate emotion, I think would be sadness and anxiety and fear and depression. I don't think that's necessarily a mental health problem. I think that's you being sane, frankly. But no doubt at all, London Ambulance Service. I think they were saying something in the region of 60% extra callouts to,

either suicides or attempted suicides over the lockdown period. I think it's been absolutely devastating. And I think particularly for younger people, I think the interesting thing is that we were all worried about older people, not just for keeping them physically alive because of the risk to them from COVID early on, but also the idea we knew, you know, we knew there were all these elderly people living alone. And I'm sure you, like I did, you know, I've got neighbours, who I just, you know, I knocked on the door, I sent emails and foot calls and just want to check

you're okay, anything you need from the supermarket, give me a call if there's anything you need, you know, my husband's, you know, you can come and, you know, lift things for you, anything you need, let us know. And I've got elderly aunt and a care home and other friends in their 70s, regular calls to just check they're okay, you know, and like, but I think everyone did forget about young people. I think, I think people forgot how many young people live in bed sits or flat shares with complete strangers for years and years on end. A lot of them in low paid jobs which suddenly disappeared, you know, no money, no outdoor space, no family support unit.

And I think that has taken a terrible toll on people's mental health. Julia, you listed your, you had your list of appropriate emotions. There was one of them which was missing, which is anger. Oh. And I wonder whether you feel that, you know, if we look at what happened during the first lockdown, obviously the killing of George Floyd and the explosion of protest as a result of that and all of the stuff, you know, I've talked about it when you had me on your show. But do you think we are going to see as a result of this, particularly if it lasts beyond the 2nd of December? People stuck in their homes for months on end in winter. It's dark.

It's raining. It's depressing. And people increasingly frustrated about the future. we may see, do you feel we will see social unrest of some kind? I'd like to see people getting angry. I don't want to see law. But I think, again, as you say, anger would be an appropriate response to that. And again, it's not just that it's not, you know, it's not sunny and nice and relaxing.

Well, people are now beginning to feel the sort of, hold on a minute. Have I got a job to go back to? Am I going to be able to get a job in the next few years? I think the real concerns have come in and more doubts about whether all this is not down actually would work and save lives. So, you know, there may be a sacrifice, as we had in March and April, but we thought, you know, that's a sacrifice to save hundreds of thousands of lives. That makes sense. If it's not going to save lives and may cost lives, then you're sacrificing for nothing. And that's a different issue. Also, I mean, on a purely clear, no,

I think there's not that much more to watch on Netflix. I've seen all my whole there. There's not a cupboard or a drawer, a bit of paperwork in my home that has not been sorted out. I don't need to do more, but I think people are going to start saying, hold on a minute, now what do we do? Yeah, I think people are going to start getting angry. And I think those polls are really going to turn very, very quickly when people realize that this lockdown is not what they thought it would be. And phrases like circuit breaker, there's no circuit to break. The virus is going to be sitting there.

This is like going inside and locking your door and just sitting there and then coming out, a month later, you're going, ta-da! Well, the monsters are still out there, folks, they haven't gone away. So if you are scared of the virus, then, you know, that fear shouldn't, shouldn't abate while you're on lockdown. I would, I would like there to be more public protests. But the important thing is it does need to be, and is to be within the law. And what you don't want is, and I've not attended any protest marches, because I can't trust that they're not going to. to turn violent. I don't want to be at the same protest march as someone like David Ike or people shouting or it's Russia or it's a hoax. It's not a hoax. It's a real virus. It kills real people

and we do need to be worried and concerned about it. I wash my hands. I do the social distancing. I get it all. I do get it. But I would like it if just a load of other just ordinary thinking people, just look at the evidence, look at the actual evidence. It's all available on. online. Don't trust the Russian bots on Twitter or anything like that, but the actual evidence from the official data and can see that this is a travesty, this lockdown, it's a travesty. And we talk a lot about the polls, about people being in favour of lockdown, but I put this question to you. The polls, they weren't particularly accurate with Brexit. They weren't particularly accurate of the last two general elections. And they certainly weren't accurate with the American

election. Are these ones accurate? Yeah, I mean, that's thing. I do ask around, everyone I know, I would say, who do you know who supports the second lockdown? Because so many people apparently do. I know one couple who do, but they're a couple who, frankly, even the rule of six wouldn't bother them. They don't go out. I've got to be honest to you, I mean, I don't go to the pub after 10 o'clock very often, because I get up for work at 440. But I'd like the pub to be open for other people. I think it's strange how many people are quite happy to take away other people's freedoms, ones that they don't use and say, well, this doesn't matter. And again, it's this idea, isn't it, that, oh, well, you know,

what you're all right to have a pint of 10, 15 at night, it doesn't override the right of granny to live, which is a nonsense thing to say, utterly meaningless. But also, it's not, it's about the right of the person pulling the pint to still have a job and pay their rent the next day. I mean, it's more significant than that. Yeah, I think, as we know with polling, you can get a 70% majority for anything if you ask it the right way.

And if the four questions you ask before the do you support lockdown are about losing your job, are you willing, are you willing to have a lockdown if it meant that you and your friends and family are highly likely to lose your job? And if you don't, that you will be paying much higher taxes for years to come to pay for all those who've lost their jobs and the furlough schemes and everything. And it may not save a single life. Do you now support lockdown? I don't think you get to 70% very quickly. And also the other thing there is there, there seems to be quite a significant inconsistency between the number of people who apparently support lockdown and then equally the number of people who say that they don't

comply with lockdown themselves. So there's a big gap. Oh, no, that is that. It's perfectly consistent because everyone else is irresponsible. But what your is very sensible. I couldn't agree with you more, Julia. I am indeed very sensible. It's no risk for me to see my brother or my best friend, almost because we're being sensible. Those other people over there, they're granny killers.

And people ascribe negative emotions about other people breaking exactly the same rules they're breaking. I can honestly tell you, other than this couple, I'm thinking of, I don't know anybody, anybody at all. who is sticking to the letter of the rules currently. And I mean that from Tier 1 to Tier 2, 3 and the lockdown. Not a single person. Well, there you go, Julie.

The police now know who to arrest. All of my friends, yeah. All of you and your friends. That's exactly it. I didn't say I was breaking. I have the misfortune of being enough above the parapet that I've got to stick to the letter. That's fair enough. Julie, listen, we know you've been broadcasting for about six hours straight today.

Thank you so much for coming on. We'd love to have you back when all this craziness is over in studio and we can chat about some other more interesting things. But in the meantime, thank you so much for coming on. And we've got one more question for you. Which is what is the one thing that we're not talking about, but we really should be? Oh, God. What you know, actually, I was thinking it's all the things that we've been talking about. It's about the jobs that are going to be lost and the reality. The one thing people should be talking about more is, is mass testing the answer. Everyone thinks that test and trace is the answer, is mass testing the answer. If you've got a test that's not actually very accurate, is actually mass testing going to create more of a problem than a solution? That I think is the next thing we should be talking about. Fantastic. Well, before you go, Julia, tell people where they can follow you and watch the show that you host.

Yeah, well, I'm hosting the breakfast show on Talk Radio. We're on DAB Plus on our app and online. We live stream actually through on video. Most of my interviews are on video. So it's almost like watching a TV show. It's all rather glitzy and glamorous. They make me put lipstick on and everything. 6.30 a.m. to 10 a.m. every weekday.

And I mean, every week day. And also you can follow me on Twitter at Julia HB1. I think I'm on Instagram as well. But frankly, I never get around to posting on there except when I'm on holiday. So, yeah, Twitter is where you're mostly finally. Fantastic, Julia. Thank you so much once again for coming on. And thank you for watching and listening.

We will see you very soon with another episode or a live stream. All of them go out 7pm UK time. Take care and see you soon, guys. This episode sponsored by IP Vanish. IP vanish protects every device you own, your phone, your laptop, your smart TV. If it connects to the internet, it should be protected. IP vanish encrypts your connection and masks your IP address, helping keep your browsing private at home and on public Wi-Fi.

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