TRIGGERnometry - Mike Graham on the Problem With MSM

Episode Date: April 12, 2020

Mike Graham is a British journalist and host at talkRadio.  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 (@failinghuman) 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

Hello and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantine Kissen. And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people. Our brilliant guest this week is a journalist and broadcaster. Mike Graham, welcome to Trigonometry. Thank you very much indeed. Thanks for inviting. It's a very nice beju little place you've got here. I don't know if I'm allowed to say where it is in case you have sort of people that might come here and do you harm. But it's a very nice part of North London. I took a little time to find it,

but it's an amazing part of the world this. I really like it. I actually did He used to do a show with a guy called Mike Parry called The Two Mikes. And we actually started our comedy career at Hen and Chickens, which is not a million miles away from it. And it went from bad to worse, basically. And now I don't work with him anymore. So that's another story. We got there very quickly, didn't it?

But, I mean, you've described me as brilliant and fascinating already. So I hope I can be that. I don't know if I can be. But for anyone who doesn't know who I am, I do a show on Toul Radio every day, Monday, Friday, intense one, up against James O'Brien. who's not one of my favorite people. I knew him when he was a sort of an apprentice journalist

during the period of his life when he used to say, he read what he says now in his book that he was a failed journalist, which is entirely correct. And he used to be like a showbiz sort of runner, effectively. He used to turn up at parties and try and get quotes from people, and he didn't do it very well. Now he claims to be this kind of great thinker,

and I'm not quite sure how he managed to make that leap. But my mission in life is to get him off the air, basically. By being better than him and stealing his audience. He's got much bigger audience for me because he's working for a station that's been going, you know, for a lot longer. So, yeah, so before I got his radio, I was a newspaper guy. I was in Fleet Street for... So you're Rocky. 25 years, really.

When it was hot, when it was great, when it was amazing, when you could basically get away of murder. And obviously, we couldn't do it now, some of the stuff that we did then. But I can personally say that when I was a journalist, and I worked in America for 10 years, I never did anything that was in any way illegal or unlawful. and there was nothing that I couldn't defend doing and I think a lot of other, where it all went wrong was a lot of people started to do that. And you better stop me at some point.

No, no, no, we're about it. But I was just thinking like you're describing your fight with James O'Brien, you're like Rocky and he is Apollo Creed. Yes, I suppose so, yeah. He's not as classy as that. He just keeps punching you. And I suspect he hasn't got a very good punch, but that's a little story, you know. He's so miserable is the thing.

People have come to listen to my show, not least because, you know, obviously I tend to be more of a break, Exeter even though I actually didn't vote in the referendum at all because I don't vote. It's one of the things that I choose not to do I mean in order to be a proper journalist. Why not? That's really interesting. Because in order to be a proper journalist, I think you actually do have to be neutral and you can't be neutral if you vote And when people say to me, yeah, but hang on, you know, surely you need representation. You need to, you know, put your kind of mark on a piece of paper and become part of the the population. I say not really because I think if I voted conservative or if I voted Labor, if I voted leave or I voted Remain, I couldn't honestly kind of, you know, carry on a conversation about what should happen.

But you do have strong views, though, don't you? I mean, you are pro-Brexit, for example. I am pro-Brexit, but one of the reasons I'm pro-Brexit is because the people voted to leave the European Union. So that's my motivation for it. If they had voted to remain in it, I would have said, well, then that's what we have to do. So you're pro-democracy is what you're doing. I'm pro-democracy. You know, a lot of people think that that's just me hiding behind,

you know, a banner. But it's not, you know. And also, as I started to talk more and more about Brexit, I got more and more fed up with the kind of remain sort of elite the people that ran the newspapers, the people that ran the TV stations and all of the kind of nonsense that was coming from the program main lobby. And I had many, many rows with lots of MPs. We had this tent down in Westminster and they would come in. And some of them were just so condescending about, you know, how everything was going to be terrible. And basically what they

were really saying was that the stupid people have somehow voted for this. You know, they don't know what they're doing. And we know better than they do. And I started to get really kind of wound up about that. And so it seemed to me that I should be one of the standard. Now I'm sort of seen as one of the standard bearers of Brexit, which is fine with me, because it also, I think, was a really important moment, you know, for the country to actually have the people deciding what to do rather than all of those people sitting in Westminster because they would have loved to have stayed in the European Union. And I still actually don't know why.

I mean, I know which way you guys voted, but I don't understand those people who say to me, it's a great thing to be in the EU. I don't, you know, I don't get it. What's so great about it? Well, we both voted Remain. Because we're good people. Yeah, obviously, and obviously very intelligent, too. But that was a running joke on our show for such a long time because we voted Remain,

but we are very much in your camp in a sense that people vote, man. And that's it. And democracy is far more precious than if you, even if you think that Brexit will be economically damaging, which I'm not sure about. I don't think it will be. I mean, it could be. But any number of things could be. I mean, coronavirus could be a lot more damaging than Brexit.

But also staying in the EU could be incredibly economically damaging too. And no one ever thought about that. But anyway, my point is, you know, just we voted Remain, we lost. Yeah. That's it. There's never been, in my experience, a more kind of collection of bad losers. I mean, I've never seen anything like it. We were sitting in Westminster on a day-to-day basis.

And at one point, actually, a guy called John Rental, who you probably knows, the independence political commentator sat down. And I literally said to him, you know, I've actually run out of questions. I can't think of anything to ask you, you know, because, you know, what are we going to do? I thought we were going to be stuck in this kind of horrendous hellhole of nothingness, going nowhere, not being able to do anything, not be able to pass any bills, not being able to get any votes through. I honestly didn't see an ending. I thought we'd just be doing this forever. But, as it turns out, everybody else didn't agree.

And so when the election time came, I mean, I didn't expect Boris Johnson to win by that much. But it was fantastic. I mean, I just remember because I'm, I wouldn't say terrified of Jeremy Corby becoming prime minister, but I wouldn't like a Labour government. I don't think I would enjoy a left of centre Labor government because apart from anything else, they would probably shut down the bits of the media they don't like. They would certainly not be very pleasant to parts of the group of Murdoch Emperor, I'm sure, because already, you know, a lot of them don't speak to anybody in the building that I work in. You know, so I'm very concerned that what happens next to the Labour Party will be more of the same.

Because, you know, if they were ever to get into power, because Boris Johnson screwed something up, you know, where would we be then? I don't think we don't worry about that too much in the future. No, probably not. But it's good to see you remaining politically neutral anyway. But Francis... Well, you see, I don't have to do that.

I mean, I have to do that on the radio. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because I say to Pia, it's on my Twitter. It says it's the most balanced show on the radio. And so whenever anybody says it's not, I say, well, look, it says it on Twitter. I must be the most... But we wanted to talk about media independence and balance.

Yeah, media independence and balance. Because what I think Brexit exposed, and we touched on it, was the fact that there seems to be this schism between the media class and the average working person on the street, man, woman, and how actually more and more people are becoming less, more and more disenfranchised with the media. Why do you think that is? Well, I think a lot of it is because of the individuals who are working in the media,

because, you know, I'm old enough to remember when, when I first went into newspapers, newspapers were not full of public school boys and girls. You know, it was a trade. A lot of people went into local newspapers because their father was in it, or because, you know, it was quite a good apprenticeship. you could go and do a journalism course when you were 16. You could become a reporter indentured by, say, the local newspaper in Hastings or in Cardiff or somewhere like that.

And they were just ordinary members of the community. And they'd then go and work in the community. They'd cover the local council meetings. And then they'd sort of move up to Fleet Street and all that. But what we've got now, it seems to me, is some very highly educated people who have all been to Oxford at some point or other. And if not, they've got a degree in something or other. You know, and they've all become part of this same establishment.

It's a sort of separate establishment to the establishment. But the media for me should be anti-establishment. You know, you shouldn't be part of it. You shouldn't be sitting there going, oh, I'd really like to end up, you know, running a quango. I'd really love to end up in the House of Lords for services to journalism. I'd rather be sticking two fingers up to them. You know, I don't want anything from them. I want to hold them to account.

And I don't think enough people really do that. And somehow there's been this kind of cult of personality where you look at people like Paul Mason, you know, who's a great example of someone who was meant to be an economics, journalist. I mean, I think he worked, I see if he remember he was economics correspondent for the Channel 4 News. And then he suddenly became this Labour activist. And he kind of go, well, what is, which one of these things are you? And actually, at least you knew where he was coming from. He seems to have gone completely mad. I mean, he's out with placards, warning about this and the other. He's now, left have now turned on him for being not left enough.

Paul Mason. Yeah. She's not left enough. No, apparently he's not. No, because apparently he's been talking about Kirstama being the answer. Right. So all the people that want Rebecca Long Bailey to get the job, or, you know, or, you know, he's not. were rather keen on Jeremy. I think he's basically come out against Corbyn. Paul, Mason's the left of Stalin. I know. I know.

Well, something's gone wrong. You know, the wheels have come off. But I think, you know, when you watch people like Adam Bolton and you watch people on Sky generally, you know, they're very remaining, you know, whether they think they are or not. They absolutely are. You know, and the news agenda that they choose to follow tends to be very much driven by that. And I think that's the problem.

Unlike, you know, genuinely sort of people who try. to be, and I know that people accuse me of being, you know, a Tory and all of that. But actually, if the Tories do something wrong, I'll criticise them for it. I won't find reasons not to. I won't find another story to do, you know. But there were so many cases during the Remain campaign and the Leave campaign where after the referendum, you know, I remember the BBC doing a story about Northern Ireland saying that basically all the cattle would have to be slaughtered, you know, if this agreement went

through with Boris Johnson and with no backstop. And they actually had to apologise for it the next day, because it turned out of to be complete enough to nonsense. The NFU came out and said, I don't know where you're getting this from, but it's complete rubbish. We will not have to slaughter all the cattle. You know, just stuff like that.

Basic politics and basic journalism, getting it wrong like that. Question time as well. I mean, you go to question time and I watch it now just to get annoyed. You know, I literally can't see any merit in it really at all. And they're so desperate to try. The other thing about balance, I think.

I can't remember who said this. There's somebody in America who said, you know, balance is not about giving equal time to absolutely everyone because there are some right nutters out there you don't necessarily want to equate one person's thought process with another and so the person who said this in America said you know if you're trying to be balanced

if somebody says to you it's raining you don't get somebody on who says it's raining and somebody on who says it's not raining you look out the window and you decide whether it's raining or not and then you tell the people whether it's raining you know you don't necessarily take every single view and just repeat it as if it's you know gospel because we know that the people who want to be in the media now are on the media are very

sophisticated now you know people are very good at spinning stuff and do you think the media's hit this point of crisis now you look at the mainstream media and we i mean we were talking you know the sun declared record losses of 68 million pounds what is the purpose of the mainstream media do we need it anymore well i think politically speaking it's nowhere near as influential as it used to be i mean i was watching prime minister's questions the other week and having a conversation with someone saying even parliament is actually less relevant now in a way than it used to be. You know, Prime Minister's questions is no longer what it used to be. You know, the debates in Parliament are no longer what they used to be because you feel as though everything's kind

of already preordained. It's already stitched up. You know, all the decisions are being made now in Downing Street. They're not really going to Parliament to debate them. They now don't even have to because everything's going to be passed through. I think it's, I don't, I mean, I can't imagine any newspaper being responsible for Boris Johnson and getting that incredible 80 seat majority. I don't think you could point to any one columnist that was formerly powerful. You know, I think as entities, they're still, you know, part of something. But they won't last forever. And I think you guys doing what you do, me doing what I do in a smaller way, perhaps, but also we're doing a lot of stuff on YouTube now. You know, there's many more people

watching YouTube now who have just been turned off TV altogether, really. Because actually, you have to ask yourself why do you watch the news at 10? I mean, I watch Channel 4 news, generally speaking, also just to kind of get annoyed. I've been very happy to see that John Snow has been self-isolated. Apparently he went to Iran to cover the elections and he came back and he's now self-isolated

and he doesn't present the news anymore. They just crossed to him every time that the news is on and he talks from his kind of, you know, hellhole wherever he lives, probably somewhere around here and looks, doesn't look very well. You know, so, but I mean, I don't really watch it to be informed about anything. Oh, no.

And I don't finish watching it and think that was a really, really interesting, you know, item about something. And I've got a lot of time for a lot of journalists, and particularly the ones who go into war zones and, you know, individuals who actually are people that I respect. And there's lots of them, and don't get me wrong, there's lots of them that work at the BBC. There's lots of the work in Fleet Street. There's lots of them that work it all over the place. But the entities themselves, I think, are sort of confused as to what, as to where they go next. because they can't do what you guys do and they can't really do what I do.

Because, you know, they don't know how to. Well, the thing, the reason they can't do what we do is because they're on the leash. Yeah. We don't have a leash on us. We can talk about... Well, not at the moment, but I mean, Offcom would very much like to put a leash on YouTube

and on social media as well, wouldn't they? Which is actually quite terrifying. It is. It is. And YouTube itself would like to put a leash on everybody. And we've talked about that a dozen times. But I think in terms of what you're talking about is it really looks to me like the mainstream. media kind of, they keep clutching at things quite awkwardly because they, they're dying.

And they're like trying to grab on. And that's why you get these things like the Kathy Newman and Jordan Peterson interview where it's just worthless. Right. It's absolutely worthless. Yeah, because she's basically talking to a guy who has a massive following, who those people who follow him think he's great. She's kind of introducing him to everybody else who doesn't know about him because they don't go on YouTube and they don't really know who he is. And in the space of the short interview time that they've got, they can't really work out who he is. And as you say, I don't think anybody learned anything from that. Well, the only thing people learn is that he was good at arguing and she looked like an idiot. Yeah. That's it. And I don't think that's worth

half an hour. It's not the only place you can look for that particular conclusion. But talking about the mainstream media, I mean, you brought up the BBC a couple of times. That was one issue that we really wanted to talk to you about. Obviously, Boris Johnson is looking at removing the license fee, making it a subscription-based model. What, you're quite critical of the BBC, are you not? Well, I think the BBC's too big, apart from anything else. I mean, what, what it's meant to do and what it was invented to do was to produce, you know, broadcastable material either for the radio or for television.

At a time when that was really, they were the only people that could do it, you know, when they invented, you know, the Radio 4 when it was called the Home Service, and I used to listen to it. My mother used to listen to the Arches, you know, every night. And the Today program, you know, it was good because there wasn't much else to listen to. There wasn't much else out there, you know, and it was very well done, and the news, everybody watched the news at six o'clock because that was how you found out what was going on. But now you don't, if you don't know what's going on at six o'clock, you must have literally been asleep all day, you know, because everybody now knows they're getting alert on the phone when something happens. I mean, you know, during the coronavirus scenario, you're getting alerts going on all the time, you know, well, this has happened, or that's happened, a few more cases over here.

I mean, if you're really not able to see any of that, and you get to six o'clock and you go, oh, my God, you know, there's a coronavirus going on. You literally have to be living in a cave or something. And also, I've looked at what it is that they do. They employ 22,000 people, right? They've got 61 radio stations. Now, one of my incarnations was running a radio station in Edinburgh, the first speech license that was given out since LBC back in 1973. And it didn't work in the end because it was smothered by BBC Scotland.

BBC Scotland is this massive, huge organisation with a great big office on the banks of the Clyde in Glasgow, employs hundreds of people. And so commercial operators can't get a look in. You know, you cannot run a commercial radio station for speech in this country because of the BBC. You know, they've got BBC Sussex, BBC Surrey, BBC Kent, you know, all in a very small part of the southeast of England. Three different stations, completely different programming, completely different presenters. I mean, it's a nonsense. And for me, that should all go.

I'm quite happy for them to keep the news operation because I think some of it's still very good. But, you know, why the hell do they do strictly, for example? What is the BBC doing making a program about dancing in which they pay loads of money to individuals to appear on it? I don't get it. You know, that's not what the licence is for, as far as I'm concerned. And why do they have such a massive website? You know, what are they doing, making children? They do they have 10 TV stations, 10 channels, which they don't need.

They were supposed to have shut down BBC 3, still seems to be going. They're commissioning stuff now just for the eye player. And it's just too big. I think it just needs to be broken down. So you want to make it leaner, but I don't. Are you saying we should abolish the license? Yeah, absolutely, yeah, definitely. But do you not think that...

And you should pay for the bits of it that you want. Right. That's how I would do it. The reason I ask is like, and I'm someone who's gone on the BBC a number of times, usually to criticize the BBC. So I'm not a huge fan. Right.

On the one hand, on the other hand, I do think that we do need one national broadcaster where in a very polarized politically society, we can all come together. And what they need to do is kind of be more balanced. which they haven't been. They've taken the piss on some things. But if they could be more balanced on that,

I think they could actually bring people together into a common space. Otherwise, we just all disappear in a Toronto. Well, certainly, Andrew Neil made that point. He came back from America, I think it was sometime last year. And he said, you know, I watched TV when I was there, and he knows America.

He worked over there and all that. And he said, I watched a program on MSNBC, which was a four guests talking about what a horrible man Donald Trump was. And then I went over to follow. And there was four people talking on a chat show there about what a great guy Donald Trump was. He said, here's what you should do. Why don't you take two of them out from each side, put them in the same show, and they can have a proper argument?

And you're right. I don't want to see British media becoming polarised so that only some people watch this and other people watch that. But the problem is, is that, you know, who decides what the BBC does, right? I mean, if you were to be the guy that said, now we're going to make X number of shows, we can have this many channels, we're employ this many journalists. I mean, what is it, what is it, though? Is it an entertainment vehicle? Is it a news vehicle? You know, what is it?

How would you change it? Well, it's a combination of a few of those, isn't it? Which is maybe why you say it's too big. Well, I mean, in my view, when I was growing up, I'm a lot older than you guys. I was watching things like porridge and Dad's Army and all of that. There was literally nothing else going on. I mean, there were three channels. I remember when there was only two channels, you know, and long before they brought four and five in.

And you didn't have a massive choice. And Saturday night, the family sat down. And you basically watch TV from about 6 o'clock at night till matches the day finished, you know. But people don't do that anymore. And variety comes in many different ways. You know, people will watch your show rather than watch TV. You've got smart TV now.

You can watch YouTube on it, and it's just as good, you know. You don't need to spend a fortune on making peaky blinders. Somebody else can do that. You know, Netflix can make peaky blinders. Why is the BBC spending a fortune doing it? You know, so I just think that the model of basically telling people that you must buy this, otherwise, will put you in prison.

You know, it's supposed to be fun, right? You know, can you imagine somebody from Netflix turning up and going, you don't have a Netflix subscription, so we're going to arrest you now. You know, you can't, in this day and age, I don't think it's justified. And it is quite a regressive. If you look at it as a tax, it is very aggressive. Right. And it's, you know, people, you know, on the one hand will say,

oh, but it works out at, you know, about £12 a month or something like that. Well, that's quite a lot of money, actually, for a subscription. You know, I pay, I think, $11.99 for Netflix, because I've got all sorts of members of my family in disparate parts of the world watching it. But you can get a subscription, I think, for about $5.99 a month, which is less than half.

And that's the other bit I don't get. They've now launched this thing called Brit Box, which is basically their version of Netflix. They started in America, and it's BBC and ITV together. They're supposedly going to be commissioning shows for it, but they're also carrying old shows that would otherwise have gone to places like Netflix.

So they're actually asking you to subscribe to something. You've already paid for it. So you can watch Peky Blinders, you know, as a box set. But you've already paid for that. Why would you pay again to watch it somewhere else? It's just, it's all wrong, it seems to me. It's too big. It's a bit like the NHS.

You know, bits of it work very well. Lots of it doesn't work at all. And they need to just, you know, trim those bits off, I think. And if they say that the people want them, and a lot of people say, oh, but local radio is really important. Well, local radio is important, but it should also be commercialized. You know, I think a commercial company should have the opportunity to start up a radio station if they want to in Birmingham. But you've got BBC West Midlands there. And you know,

you've probably got BBC Shropshire coming in from the side. You've got, you know, BBC Bedford. I mean, you know, you can't, literally BBC York, the BBC Derby. I mean, go on and on. Mike's just showing up his knowledge of British geography at this point. Well, I've looked into this. This is the thing. And I mean, 61 radio stations, it's a joke. I mean, you cannot, you cannot possibly justify that. I don't think, you know. And they've also killed off the local newspaper industry as a general rule as well. because they have now kind of taken over as the thing that local people go to

if they want to look at stuff, they've got local websites, you know, they've all they've all got websites. And so all the news that's happening in your local area if you live in Derby is on the BBC local website. And, you know, so newspapers can't get any traction there either. 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.

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and make that time in isolation fly by. And where do you stand on the BBC, the bias within the BBC? Do you think it's a fundamentally biased organisation? No, I don't actually. I mean, I think some individuals have got, it's a bit like like, sort of Noam Chomsky says, you know, nobody

is unbiased, you know, no matter where you come from, you have a kind of inbuilt bias. So there's no point in pretending that we're all sort of these pure people who don't have any prejudices or don't have any kind of, you know, leanings. Speak for yourself, mind. Who don't have any leanings. Well, we'll get on to that, but everybody has a view of the world, right? Now,

if you try and disguise that in some way and try and make out that, you know, your view of the world is this pure thing which has come from your ability to be completely not as neutral. I would say he's talking absolute bollocks, you know. But I think there are certainly different ways of interviewing that different people do.

I mean, I'm a big fan of Andrew Neals, for example, but I don't think that what his, you know, when he did that sort of piece to camera about Boris Johnson not coming on his show, I didn't think that was necessary. I thought that kind of slightly demeaned him. Really? Yeah.

I thought that was really good. Yeah, see, a lot of people did. I thought that it was unnecessary because the reason for doing it was slightly petulant, slightly self-obsessed, slightly going, you know, how is he not coming on my show? You know, everybody knows that my show is the most important show during any election period because I'm the only person that can hold him to account.

And he made a series of allegations about him without him being able to answer them. Now, you might argue, well, Johnson should have gone and done the interview, but I don't think it's the BBC's place to kind of do that. Like, they're all kicking off at the moment because the ministers are not going on the Today program because they've said the Today program is very biased and they don't want to do it. So they've become slightly less relevant now. You know, the day program, when I was a journalist in Fleet Street, was always the show you listened to in the morning, driving into the work,

because it was the one that would give you all the stuff you needed to know, and that's where all the ministers were. Now that they're not doing that, people are listening to other stuff. But that speaks to Francis' point about bias, because in those days, that program would have been edited by Rod Little. Yeah. Right? And that would never happen now?

Yeah, but I mean, would you say if you listened to the program where Rod Little was editing, that somehow it was biased towards the Tories? I don't think you would. No. Well, Rod Little is a guy who can actually be reasonably neutral in his job. You know, he writes what we would be considered a right-wing newspaper come on. And he's a pro-Brexit guy. But, I mean, I spoke to him about Brexit a long time ago.

And he said to me, you know, when the morning after the referendum result, his wife went to take kids to school. And they live in a sort of leafy part of the country. And she said, yeah, I came back from the school gates. And she said, everyone was saying, we can't believe this is how. happened, you know, because we don't know anybody that voted to leave. Oh, really? Well, that's surprising. You know, that's because you're in a Volvo. You're in Kent, and you're in a very nice affluent part of the country where you've got your kids in private school. Well, it's not very surprising, is it? You know, but they literally didn't get it. And I think that's part of

the problem at the BBC, that they, because they live in this kind of rather nicely upholstered world, you know, whether it's in London or elsewhere, they're all paid ridiculous amounts of money, by the way. I haven't even mentioned that. There's a guy called Stephen Nolan, right, who gets 500,000 quid a year. He works in Northern Ireland. He occasionally covers for a Radio 5. But, you know, it's ludicrous money. I mean, I can say that because I'm not on 500,000 pounds a year,

but I'm actually better than he is. You might say he's got a bigger audience, but, you know, that's not the point. How does he get half a million quid? That is not in any way, shape, or form market value. If he left the BBC, he would not get that money anywhere else. You could buy much of Northern Ireland for that. I fucking out.

Yeah, right. You could certainly buy all the cattle. Slosible. A dead cattle. But it's become, it's been sort of knocked out of kilter with reality. I think that's the problem. And so I think they all sit around talking to each other. Fiona Bruce is a good example.

I think Fiona Bruce is probably quite a good presenter of the Antiques Roadshow. But what the hell? How does she end up doing the best and supposedly most interesting political show as well? You can't, you know, how can you do that? She was a news reader, okay? So I've got nothing against Fiona Bruce. But, you know, when she presents question time, she interrupts people who tend to be from the Tory party far more.

then she interrupts me from the Labour Party. And it's very irritating. And they all do it. The interrupting thing is really awful. One of the things that I like about these kinds of shows is that you're not sitting there trying to interrupt me all the time. And I'm not trying to interrupt you. You let people talk. And I know that they don't have perhaps the time that we have.

But there's a lot of sort of nitpicky type journalism that goes on where they get somebody on. And they've clearly got, Andrew Marr is the king of this. He's clearly got one question that he wants to ask. He's very proud of it. And that's what they're all hoping to make the bulletin. You know, they're all hoping to get somebody to admit to something or to screw something up, you know, or to, you know, to tell a lie. And it's kind of what I would call kind of hijacking journalism, you know. It's sort of trying to ambush people all the time.

I think what they don't understand, sorry, Francis, about that. To talk about interrupt. Yeah, stop interrupting you. Yeah, shut out, mate, fucking up. But what I think they don't understand. This is just a quick point before. Is that they're damaging the brand. Yeah.

The brand of their company, whether it's a being. or is Channel 4 with Catherine Newman, or whether it's the broader brand of journalism. They're damaging the brand by doing that, and they're contributing to their own death spiral. And I think actually, I mean, if you look at what Trump's done, and I'm no particular fan of Donald Trump, and I've found it very distasteful when you would see those press conferences that he would have with his supporters at them, they're all kind of doing this, you know, to the journalists and, you know, threatening them and stuff and making out the journalists of the enemy. And he really fed into that and he really made the people.

who were there feel that way that the journalists were definitely the enemy. And I think there's a bit of that going on at the moment with Downey Street because I think Dominic Cummings is very much about making the journalist appear to be the enemy. And I think he's been quite successful. And if you watch the way he operates in terms of those little snippets you get

of people following me around in the street and he just says something ridiculous. You know, like you said, that thing about the kids show, the masks, and you know, he looks at it. You're going to ask me stupid questions all night and he's walking away from them. And he's treating them really with absolutely nothing disdain. But I've never been a fan of politicians being allowed to have, you know, these kind of staged events.

But they're all doing it now. I mean, the Labour Party were doing it as well. And they would boo when the BBC would get up and speak. You know, it's a really, it's a sort of, it's a kind of nasty atmosphere that's been created, I think, largely by the fault of the journalists for being too biased, but also the fault of the politicians for encouraging, you know, their supporters to feel, you know, kind of aggressive against journalists. And so it's a really good point that you're making because you do see that and that is a relatively recent phenomenon. And we've come to this point

where we seem to be polarised and you get people openly booing journalists and both sides of the argument saying the BBC are fundamentally biased. Brexit BBC, you know, Brexit Broadcasting Corporation, all the rest of it. How do we bring some kind of unity

back to journalism? Well, you see I'm not one of those. You hear this all the time now from those who defend the BBC well if they're being attacked by the left and the right for being biased, they must be doing something right. No, they must be doing something fucking wrong, actually, because everyone thinks they're doing a shit job.

If you're a painter and decorator and everybody's criticizing you, you don't go, see, shows you what a great painter and decorator I am. No, it means you're not doing it right. And I think the BBC needs to stop being quite so pompous. I think they could do with giving their journalists, their senior journalists anyway, a kind of a shake-up, because I think they all think that they're God's gift

to everything, you know, and they're the only ones that know anything. And they're very snobby about everybody else. I mean, if you're not in the BBC, you know, people just look at you and go, oh, what, you work for Murdoch? Oh, God, you know, how awful must that be? Or, you know, you work for the mirror, or you work for the Express, or you work for ITN. You know, there's a kind of snobbery. I think that they, I think they have to just strip it all down and start again, and have a real conversation, an honest conversation with themselves about what it is that they think they should be doing. And they should realize that actually the majority of people in this, country are ordinary sort of lower middle class individuals who work for a living who don't

really care that much about the transgender debate. They don't want to hear about it ad nauseum. They don't really care that much about LGBT. They don't want anyone to be horrible to anybody, but they just don't want to have stuff talked about endlessly, which is a minor issue, or which is what most people would consider to be, you know, a minority issue, shall we say. I mean, there was an interesting study that came out the other day about LGBT and BAME representation on broadcast media and on television. It turns out that it's actually overrepresented. Of course. You know, it's not actually in any way representative of the percentage of the population.

It's overrepresented by a factor of about double. Right. Which, again, I don't really care about, but somebody's doing that. Yeah. Somebody's making that happen. You know, like when you have a transgender character in Coronation Street, right? you're kind of going, okay, well, that's fine, but you know, why did you have to do that? You know, why did you have to have a transgender character?

You know, and it just feels a little bit forced all the time, and I think that's the problem. I think everybody's been trying to be too inclusive, and they've forgotten what the majority of people actually are quite like. And the majority of people in this country are not racist, they're not horrible, they're not nasty, they're fair-minded, and they just want, I think, their television to represent, you know, their lives. And I think it's moved so far away from that. that they don't really feel that it's for them anymore.

It's like we don't know where to stop, right, with all this stuff. So I remember there was an article about how the BBC plans to make sure that, I think it was like 20% of on-screen talent are gay, lesbian or whatever. And I was like, why on earth would they want to reduce the number of gay people in TV? I mean, so it's not to say that making sure that people are properly represented is necessarily a bad idea, but you've got to make sure, as you say, that it's representative of the population. as opposed to an endless drive to just make sure that everyone on TV is LGBT.

Yeah, right. Well, I mean, funny enough, Christopher Biggins came on Tilt Radio a while back around the time Paul Schofield came out, you know, the shocking and brave... Philip Scottfield. Sorry, Phillips, Gilbert. Yeah.

And Biggins was hilarious, because he's basically saying, you know, when he started working at TV, you know, you couldn't be gay. There was absolutely no way you could admit to it. He says, now, if you're not gay, you've got no chance to get even getting on it, you know. But I've been told by various people in the business,

Well, you know, forget about getting on TV because you're white and you're, you're, you're, you're male. You know, it's not going to happen. And so, you know, like you, I've appeared as a sort of talking head from time to time. But, I mean, nobody's ever going to give me a TV show at the BBC. Nobody's ever going to give me, you know, a job reading the news or anything like that because I'm not the right sort of, you know, concept for them, you know, because I might have a few views that they don't agree with. You know, this is the other thing, of course, that people now are much less tolerant of other people's views.

You know, if you disagree with me, that's great. We can have a conversation about it. You know, it's called a debate. But now, if you go on television with views which are considered to be, you know, horrible, even though they might not be horrible, they don't want to put you on. They will never, for example, Calvin McKenzie, more or less never allowed now on question time. He used to go on it quite a lot. Now, you can take a view of Kelvin McKenzie of what sort of a guy he is.

But, you know, why should he not be able to go on TV? The reason is because so many interest groups have said, this is a monster, you know, we can't have him. He's responsible for all the horrors of the world. And so the BBC just goes, you know what? It's easier if we don't put him on. And I think there's a lot of that going on. There's a lot of kind of pushing of certain agendas, a lot of pushing of certain, you know, cultural yeas and nays.

And so the BBC try and kind of keep to what they think they should be doing to attract the least sort of anger from groups, you know, because there are certain groups of people who are much more vociferous than others, right? And so if you do have, I mean, I think one of the greatest things that ever happened, for example, was when that guy from the BMP went on question time. Nick Griffin. I mean, that was the end of him. He went on question time.

He made a complete fool of himself, didn't know what he was saying. And his political life pretty much ended that night. So I'm all for showing people like that up, putting him on the air, making them look idiotic and making everybody realize that actually this is not a very clever guy after all. and maybe he's not really worth listening to. And literally that was it for him, you know. Hi guys, we've got a returning sponsor this week, which is Beer52. That's Beer52.com.

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is go to www.bore52.com forward slash trigger and you'll be able to get eight delicious beers delivered to your door. That's www.bibir52.com forward slash trigger and you'll get those eight delicious beers direct to your door. What else are you going to do? Mike, we were talking about all these, you know, LGBTQ, BAME, all the rest of it, and we talk a lot about diversity. Yeah.

But isn't one of the major... of problems that we don't actually have diversity because real diversity is diversity of opinion yes and we don't seem to have it particularly at the BBC I think a lot of it is diversity of class as well which we don't have I mean one of the things you see with almost every black and an ethnic person on major broadcasting shows they're all very middle and upper class you know they've all been to private school you know you're not getting the equivalent of Stormsy you know coming on the one show and presenting it you're getting the equivalent of

you know basically Andrew Ma, who went to school privately and who went to nice universities, who happens to be brown. You know, so they're not actually representative of anything other than the same class of people. And you're absolutely right. And if you don't have diversity of opinion, I mean, I was laughing at the Oscar ceremony, right? Because suddenly this movie from South Korea wins called what's it called Paris, which is meant

to be a brilliant film. Sure it is. But everyone's raving on about, isn't it great to have all this diversity at the Oscars? And I'm looking at them all standing on the stage. And they're all South Korea. And I'm going, well, how are they diverse? Just because you've let some South Koreans in, I'm sorry, that doesn't make you diverse. And they've sort of got it all wrong.

Yeah. You know? It's a crazy time. But let's move on to the political landscape, kind of in broad brushstrokes. Obviously, as we mentioned and joked about the Labor Party is kind of disappearing. Yeah. Well, they're more and more irrelevant, it seems to me. It doesn't really.

One, I don't really know what they stand for. And they don't either No, I don't think they do And it's actually frightened of saying What they stand for Yeah I mean the thing I find most amusing about them Is whenever anybody asks them about

You know, who was your favourite Labour leader And they're also desperate to avoid saying Tony Blair You know So they kind of dance around all this I mean, poor old Rebecca Long Bailey They said to her, you know Who's your favourite for the last 50 years And she named Clement Attlee

Who died like 60 years before So if one of them would actually come out And say with some honesty Look, we can't, we should say Tony Blair because he won three elections, but we can't say Tony Blair because he basically betrayed us and he took us into this illegal war and therefore he will never be regarded as a great man. But they don't do that. They kind of talk around him like he didn't exist, like he was never there, you know? Well, look, we've talked to Labour Party to death on the show,

but let's look at the Conservatives because Boris Johnson's obviously been elected on a large base of working class people from former Labour heartlands. How do you see the kind of, the job that he's doing, you'll get a lot of those kind of people calling into your show, I imagine. Yeah. Well, actually, I mean, we've got an audience of what I would say are more Brexit party types, right? People who were driven to vote for Brexit in whichever way, shape or form they could. Some of them are Labor, some of them are working class, some of them are Northern. And I think a lot of them are still, for them, the jury's out on Boris.

They're going to wait and see how it all goes. And I think, I mean, I think he's doing better than people thought he might do, certainly before the election when he became prime minister and we were told, you know, this is a man who, you know, would basically sell his own mother, you know, he's not to be trusted. I mean, I found it quite distasteful that they were talking about how terrible he was with women. I mean, I don't really care what he's like with women. I thought he's beat them up. You know, the fact that he's left a couple of wives does not mean he's not going to be a good prime minister. And again, you know, people like to sort of point fingers at guys like Boris Johnson and say,

oh, but look how horrible he is. Look what he did. You know, he doesn't even know how many children he's got. to me none of that really matters. What matters is what he does. I've been a bit disappointed that he's been so sort of green because I call them the eco-planks, you know, the extinction rebellion crowds, the people that want to, you know, stop everything and make everybody just walk around and cycle everywhere

and not actually get in a car, not get on a plane. And I'm really disappointed that he hasn't kind of been a bit less enthusiastic about that. You know, the fact that he's now talking about doing away with cars that are not electric by 2032. That's not that long away. I mean, there are some ordinary people. who buy a car and keep it for 10 years.

So there'll be people now thinking, well, I was going to get a diesel, but I better not now because it's not going to be worth anything. And so I've been disappointed with that, but of course, that's a very unpopular view because that makes me, you know, some kind of dinosaur. I don't know how that's unpopular because the thing with the diesels, by the way,

that pissed me off is I've always had a diesel. The government kept pushing diesel to people. And then suddenly they're like the worst thing ever. Well, you know, it was Ed Miliband that told everybody that diesel was the right way to go. So we should have known then. that's the greatest idea. But you're absolutely right.

And the fact remains that, you know, he has this majority. And the only kind of, I suppose, impediment to him being as successful as he wants to be is his own party. And him himself. And him himself. I mean, I think one of the reasons why when we've had to floods recently that he wasn't going out there is because he's worked out that one, if he does it, he's likely to run into another of those Labour studios. He's going to turn up and say, you know, my son's dying in hospital. What are he doing about it?

and then miraculously recovers the next day and they go home. Or he does something really idiotic. Like either he falls down a hole or he says the wrong thing or somebody overhears him, you know, he has his sort of, you know, that bigoted woman moment or something like that. So I think they've worked out as they did during the election, keep him sort of quite a far away from the press. Because he's actually, people said, you know, Boris is a brilliant orator.

I mean, people do like him, but he's not a great orator. He's not a brilliant debater. I mean, the debates he had with Corbyn. I didn't think he was that good. No, and to me the one thing that is going to define Boris's term, well, his four year, five year term, whatever it is, is going to be the question of immigration. And that is what a lot of people voted for with Brexit.

Pretty Patel has come out and said they're going to be incredibly tough on immigration. Do you think he's actually going to commit to it, or do you think he's going to fudge to the issue? I think it's going to be a fudge because the problem is that an awful lot of businesses have already kind of turned their backs on it and said, well, hang on, it's all very well for you to say, as Pretty Patel did. Well, you know, just hire some local people and pay more money.

And people are going, well, you know, I can't do that because I won't make any money then. And what I do make, you'll be taxing me. And one of the greatest errors, I think, that they ever made the Tories was giving the Chancellor's job to George Osborne, I think it's probably the worst Chancellor of all time, who's put taxes up massively. I mean, I run a small business.

My taxes have more or less doubled in the time that, you know, I've been running the business in the last, say, 10 years, you know, because they've changed the way that they tax small business. They've gone after individuals who are the wealth-creaties. of this country and they're the Tories. You know, this is why I'm terrified of the Labor Party getting,

because I mean, this lot of done that done that in there we are. But I think that, you know, for example, the fruit pickers that would come in from Eastern Europe on an annual basis, sometimes maybe would stay for the rest of the year. You know, you're not going to find people indigenously here in this country who are living here, who are going to want to do that kind of work.

So they're apparently, they're going to give some dispensation to the fruit growers so that they can import these people. So you can forget that one, right? first of all, they're also now going to forget the 30,000 threshold for people coming in. So if you work in the NHS, you can come in, so you can forget that one. And so, you know, I think it's a good idea to have a points-based system, but whether it actually practically means anything, I don't know. And every single government that said they're going to crack down immigration somehow fails to do so,

and it ends up with more people coming in. That's why I think will happen with this, because the way they've set up the point system, I mean, I think it allows a lot of people to come into this country. which I personally don't have a huge problem with, but there are people who do. And people voted to have it reduced, you know? I think the interesting thing is that, you know, it's categorized and framed by the Labor Party as a racist issue, right? Which it really isn't, because most of the people who voted to control the borders voted about people coming from the EU, particularly from Eastern Europe. You know, that was their main concern.

They're not that bothered about the family of Asians who've been there for three generations living down the road. I mean, there are racist people in this country who might be against people with different colored skin. But by and large, it was the Eastern European sort of influx of people that came. Because, of course, the European Union is now a very different animal to what it was. You know, when you, when, I mean, I remember, I used to, before I got a dog, he used to go to Calais quite a lot from Sussex. We'd go and take a day trip over to Carthor and buy some wine and paté and pretend we

be European. So isn't it great, you know? Typical Brexit. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, coming up back on the ferry one time, there was a group of Romanians, and they were standing on the deck. And when the White Cliffs of Dover came in, they literally were jumping up and down, cheering, because, you know, this was their kind of, you know, Nirvana. They suddenly found the place they wanted to get to. And they all got

into a van with Romanian plates and drove into Britain. They're probably still here, you know, because there's nothing wrong with that. There's nothing illegal about it. But I think the problem is, is that if you look at countries where people live, where the standard of living is so poor that they want to come here, even to do a terribly, you know, labor-intensive job for not very much money, but it's still better than where they live. Of course they're going to come, and they're going to want to stay. And the reason that people want to come to this country is because it's a great country. And the people who are already here from the EU are all asking for settled status. You know, two million of them. I mean, we were told by the remains

that they were all going to leave. No, they all want to stay because they love it, you know. And I'm happy with that. But living in London, it's a very skewed prospect. I mean, I hear from people in place like Peterborough, and I've never been to Peterborough, so I don't know whether it's true, but, you know, apparently Peterborough's got a very big check contingent of people that went and lived there. That wouldn't bother me, but I mean, I could see how other people might think, you know, oh, it's not my town anymore. And I think that's what the government has to be careful about. They have to be, they have to be aware that some people think like that. But isn't Boris aware, and to use his own words, that the vote was borrowed?

not given, and that he really needs to tackle this. Because if he doesn't, then, well, actually, who else are they going to vote for them? Well, I mean, that is the problem. I mean, you know, I've obviously got to know quite a few people in the Brexit party. I don't think there, I mean, there was some talk that Nigel Farage was going to have a sort of, you know, reform party. They were going to try and reform politics. That's not going to happen. I mean, that's all going to go away because all of their funding is going to disappear.

But you're right. You know, yes, people will expect Boris to improve their lot in life. But I've always said, and I said this during the whole campaign of the referendum, you know, people shouldn't be, you know, relying on politicians to make their lives good or bad, because in the end, you know, it's up to you what you do with your life. You know, yes, a politician can ruin it by making you pay too much tax or by, you know, making you move to another country, well, you know, but by and large, your own life is your own destiny and it's how you sort yourself out, how many children you have and all of that.

It's nothing to do with them. So you shouldn't expect to be handed money, I don't think. I don't think you should be expected to be provided with a job. And I know plenty of people who live in the northeast of England who are perfectly happy with their lot. It's not as if, you know, there's this huge swathe of poor people wandering about, you know, without any clothes on their back and no food to eat. You know, this is Britain.

You know, it's not, you know, Siberia, for want of a better place to pick at random. I'm deeply offended. I'm sure. Sorry. See, I'm just somehow, I'm nation. Trust me, you can't wander around in Siberia naked for very long. No, I can imagine. But do you know what I mean?

I think we sometimes. times think that the people's experiences are worse than they really are. I mean, I'd have row with Laura Pidcock before the election about poverty, you know, because we have this figure of something like 14 million people living in poverty in this country. It's not true. It's relative poverty as designed by the UN because, you know, they take the average income and they look at what people are making. You know, there are not 14 million people living in poverty in this country. She accused me of peddling right-wing myths, you know, and then she didn't get elected, funnily enough. But there are lots of parts of the north of England, which are very

prosperous, which are full of very reasonable people, making a reasonable living, running businesses, you know, and yes, but it looks already, one of the things that Boris has apparently promised to do is to siphon more money up to northern parts of the country. But we've seen all that before. I mean, look at what happened in Salford when the BBC relocated to Salford. They spent most of their time faring people backwards and forwards from London, because nobody wanted to move north. You know, in fact, Susanna Reid ended up leaving the BBC as a result going to ITV because she just didn't want to live there. And that's just to put up with Piers Morgan.

I know. That's how much she was, that's how much she hated it. Yeah. And I think, yeah, I mean, it's difficult to know how much the government can improve the society in which we live, you know. I mean, HS2 is another thing I think was a massive mistake. I don't really see the point of HS2. And they're going to spend 100 billion plus.

It will probably be 200 billion by the time they're finished. So basically get from Birmingham to Shepard's Bush in 20 minutes less than, than you would normally have got to Houston. Two dreadful places. Exactly. And how long do you think it's going to take to get from Sheffler's Bush into town? Yeah.

You know, I mean, and they talk about, you know, cross rail this. And I mean, I do agree that we have been very bad in this country for the long time. Infrastructure that nobody's looked more than five years ahead. And maybe in that case, it's a good thing to build this fast train. But, you know, I'm going to be dead by the time it's ready, frankly. And I know it's not all about me, but, you know. It's mostly about it.

Imagine how much technology will have moved on in 20 years time. You know, people might be in flying drones, you know, being moved around by, you know, air Uber or something. You know. There's still going to be cancellations on air Uber and delays and whatever perhaps. Of course. You know, you're still going to be there. What do you mean you cancelled my air Uber? Yeah.

Yeah. You went to, we mean went to the wrong streak. Yeah. I mean, you know, the point is that you can't imagine something that they think is going to be absolutely, you know, cutting edge technology now. is going to be cutting-edge technology in 2040. It just isn't, you know? Absolutely. Well, I suppose that argument could always be made at any point.

That's what people say. And they go, oh, there, that's what they said about flying. And that's what they said about flying. Actually, it's not what they said about flying. Because before you could fly it was revolutionary. You know, flying was pretty fucking amazing, actually. And so you could get from here to New York, you know, in less than a week. Yeah.

You know, which you'd have to take on it. You know, so it's not like that. No. But what I'm saying is that, I mean, bizarrely, as well, the green party are against it, which all strikes who is slightly odd since they're meant to, to be against, you know, for public transport and against, you know, car travel. But the Green Party are against HS2. Yeah, why?

Apparently because it goes through too many areas of wetlands or, you know. Too many badges in the way. Too many badges and otters in the way or something. But, you know, it's kind of mad. And if you're going to spend that kind of money, it seems to me, how about you build some houses for people, because people do need houses, build them places where they're not going to get flooded. And in the places where they are going to get flooded, do something about the flooding.

You know, we don't need another bloody train. It's funny when you were talking about Boris Johnson messing up during the floods, I just had this image of him just like standing over some kind of lever on a damned and he accidentally fires it off and like the whole town gets flooded. That's the kind of thing that you can imagine him doing. Although, I mean, I think he's actually less accident-prone than he appears to be. And those people that I know who... That's not what the women say, mate.

Well, I can tell you something. Well, that's not interesting. Oh, hey, come on, let's do it. No, it's not quite ready for release this one. But he is a guy who is very good at stage managing things, right? I know some people who work very closely with him as the mayor. And, you know, the ruffling of the hair before he goes on TV, you know, the kind of slightly disheveled look. It's all quite well manufactured.

It's not normal. And if you look at his hair, I mean, nobody's hair looks like that. The way that his hair kind of goes in different directions, he's got to be putting something in it to make it do that. I mean, I know that I may not have the greatest head of hair, but, you know, quite old now. I'm not ashamed of him, is it? But his hair does not look normal. And it doesn't grow like that. I'm sorry, it just doesn't.

And, you know, I just think he's much less spontaneous than everybody thinks he does. Do you remember, in fact, there was there not a... He did a speech. Somebody was telling this story. I remember if he was telling it to me, or I heard it on the radio, talking to somebody else. He basically went to do a sort of after-dinner speech,

and he turned up late, and he kind of shuffled around. And he just went into this kind of random story about something or other, which was quite amusing and nothing really much to do with the people that were there for the night. Somebody then saw him at another event where he did exactly the same thing. He told exactly the same story

and it was all rehearsed. It wasn't in any way spontaneous. It wasn't like I've forgotten my notes. I've left him on the train, which was what he was saying. I'll just have to do it from scratch. This was a routine that he had memorized. It's like a stand-up comedian.

Yeah, exactly. And you know, you guys, I guess, do a bit of that. So you know what that's like. I mean, there's nothing wrong with it. You know, if you have to do an act And you have to, you know, I mean, Talk Sport made a massive error once, and I can talk about this because it was a long time ago, and the guy's not working there anymore.

But they booked Russell Brand to do a show. And, you know, it was when Russell was kind of riding very high in the popularity ratings. And he was basically on tour. And so the program director at the time said, this would be great, you know, because we can put him on at 10 o'clock on a Saturday night and we'll just run it live every night, not live, but, you know, the Friday night recording, whatever. So the first one went out and they were, oh, this is great. You know, it's fantastic, brilliant.

The second one came in, and he had to listen to it first, and he rang the agent up, and he said, I think you've sent me the wrong one. It's a bit of a problem here. He says, it's the same as last week. And he went, yeah, that's the show. And he went, what do you mean? We've booked this for 10 weeks. He does the same show everywhere?

Yeah, he's a comedian. He goes to places, and he tells basically the same jokes and does the same routine. And they went, oh, Christ. You know, so they had to kill it. And they paid him all this money, but they could only have one one episode, because all the others were the same. Sounds like a great gig, mate. Yeah, it sounds... Well, if you find where this guy's working now, I'll tell you his name.

And maybe you can sell him something. We can sell him something again. Finance a show, finally a way to monetize it. Yeah, absolutely right. No, no, no. As you well know, we're well funded by the pro-Israel lobby. Do you get those accusations as well? Oh, May, you have no idea.

It's amazing how people think you're funded, isn't it, when you actually aren't funded by anyone. No, we're funded by fans. That's only people that give us money. And Constantine's overdraft. Yeah, well, that's very... good. But yeah, I mean, the sort of the difference in the media landscape now is really quite interesting for me because it's even just in five years it's changed. And I think it will continue

to change, which is why to go back to the BBC, I don't think their model is sustainable. You know, because they can't possibly, if you were setting the BBC up now from nowhere, you would not get to where it is now? It's just like would you join the EU now if you're in independent Britain, probably not. But just before we wrap up, I guess, and on the political side of things as well. Sadie Kahn is somebody you're not a huge fan of. No. We wanted to talk about it. I mean, look, one of the, there is a couple of issues that are

happening in London right now. They're just dreadful. I mean, number one is obviously knife crime. And number two is the amount of rough sleeping and homelessness that you see. Like, we walk around this very wealthy area and there's literally people with tents in the middle of the road.

That's quite a recent thing, isn't it? Very recent. I'm a Londoner and I've lived here the majority of my life. I don't remember that happening when this city was actually poorer and there was a less wealthier. I mean, there was always, like you say, they were always kind of tramps, as we used to refer to them then.

There were always people that slept on park benches and normally they wanted to, you know, for whatever reason they were, you know, not all there, they were probably suffering from some kind of mental problem, but, you know, but it was kind of their choice. Then, I mean, sort of down at Charing Cross, it started to get bad, I guess, about 20 years ago,

but it's much worse now. And I agree. There's money coming supposedly from the government. I spoke to a guy not long ago about all of that and who goes around helping particularly homeless veterans because there's quite a lot of them as well. And it's very hard to know what is going on. I mean, I think there is a problem with the sort of culture of begging as well, which I think has meant that a lot of the people that you see begging are not homeless, but they then impact on people wanting to give money to

the real homeless people, you know. And certainly I know that there's been sort of influxions of people, is that the right word, from, you know, from some of the poorer parts of Eastern Europe living, I mean, I think there was a whole sort of tented village around Marble Arch at one point, which I never saw, but I saw pictures of. And I don't know what, I don't know what you do about it, but London has become also a very busy city for me. I mean, it's now never quiet, right? I used to do a show that finished at 1 o'clock in the morning on Friday, going to Saturday, and I could come out of the office and be in a traffic jam in the middle of the new cross at 1 in the morning, you know, and I'm not sure that Sadiq Khan can do much about that. I think what he's done,

I think he's messed up the transportation system. I think the roads are a terrible, terrible state. He's completely discouraged anywhere from driving, but yet he's got 35,000 Uber's driving around any given time, you know, you know, the tube trains that used to be really good and very efficient and no longer that, you know, and I think he is a figure who sees himself as, you know, the job's too small for him. He thinks he should be Prime Minister. He thinks he should be President of the United States or something. I just don't think he takes London seriously enough. And from looking at the way he operates in the City Hall Chamber, he's very arrogant. He doesn't like people questioning what he does. We've asked him numerous times to come on our radio show. He's refused. Never does.

Goes on James O'Brien show all the time because he quite likes him. But he doesn't want to come anywhere where he's going to be asked some serious questions. And you're right about the knife crime. He could have spent a lot more money on police in London, but he chose to spend it on his PR machine. He chose to spend it on trips abroad. You know, he was over in Europe, wasn't he? Not for long ago, asking people if they could become honorary or associate members of the European Union, citizens of London and citizens of Europe. You know, what's that all about? You know, we voted to leave, you know, get lost. And I think, I think he's, I just don't think he's very good at bit, but I think he'll probably be re-elected because the labor machine in London is very,

very good, you know. This episode is brought to you by Netflix's remarkably bright creatures. What if a Pacific octopus held the key to a mystery that could heal your heart. Well, that's Tova's reality. An elderly widow working at an aquarium. Tova forms an unlikely friendship with the crumudgeonly Marcellus, whose remarkable intelligence leads her to a life-changing discovery. Watch remarkably bright creatures with your remarkable moms this Mother's Day weekend, only on Netflix May 8th. But it's not just knife crime. I think there's a crisis with policing. Yeah. Like my parents' house got burgled last year. Yeah.

And they reported it. A lot of very valuable things got stolen. And then they didn't even investigate it. They just went, the case is closed. Yeah. Yeah, they don't. I mean, I don't know what that's all about, to be honest. I mean, I was the victim of a crime, which, when I tell you what it was, will make you

laugh. Somebody actually went into, you know, I'm laughing thinking about it, went into my local dry cleaners and stole my shirts. Right? I mean, it's the most ridiculous thing you've ever heard of, right? Maybe it's just like your fashion. Yeah, the police wouldn't leave me alone, though. Yeah.

You know, and I know stories like yours, which is proper, you know, proper victims of crime. I then eventually, they called me in for an interview at Bermansy Police Station, which is now closed, by the way. Because when I went there, we were like stepping over these. The guy was like, I'm really sorry, it's a bit of a mess. We're moving out. I'm like, where you're moving to? He's like, well, we're not moving anywhere. We're just shutting it down and selling it.

And I sat there with him for about an hour talking about this crime and how I felt about it and how it made me feel and did I feel victimized by it. And I'm like, he stole my shirts. I said, I've already done a deal with the shirt guys. They've already now, they're guaranteeing they're going to give me free dry cleaning for as long as I want because I'm going to have to replace 10 shirts. It's fine, you know. But yeah, I don't know what's going on with the police.

I mean, they seem to have the capability, as they have done recently, to do these raids on the county lines gangs, and every now and again, that seems to work quite well. The armed police in London, I think, are brilliant, whenever there's any kind of a terrorist problem. They're so quick now. I mean, I was in London Bridge the last time there was an attack. And, you know, the speed with which the rapid response guys get to things now is really amazing. And I'm very, very sort of impressed with that. But yeah, but the ordinary just, you know, making yourself feel safe in a city, which is what you should feel, I don't know what's gone wrong. But I don't know, again, whether that's a national problem, whether it's

a Sadiq Khan. But I think Sadiq Khan could be much more proactive. doing something about it. He should be saying this is the most important thing that affects everyone in the city instead of going off to Europe and trying to get some kind of, you know, associate. Do you think he's more interested in his image than he is in helping him? I think so. I think he's the worst kind of politician, which is why I just don't have any time for him. I think he's only interested in sound bites. He's only interested in kind of appealing to his base, the people who vote for him. He's not that interested if you don't vote for him in what you think. You know, he doesn't really care about your parents unless they vote for him. Yeah. You know, maybe that's what they should have done.

They should have called up and said, you know, we vote for Sadiq Khan. Can you come and help us out. You might have got them around a bit quicker. So, Mike, the last question we always ask is, what's the one thing we're not talking about that we should be talking about? But maybe before we get to that, you obviously take a lot of calls from members of the public. What do you think is the one issue that people are really concerned about or interested in the kind of broader spectrum of things at the moment? that you feel like, oh, this is an issue that's getting a lot of traction? Well, I think there's two, really.

And I would say the environment is a very big one, because there's an awful lot of people who hate the whole idea that everything is turning green. And, you know, we've been told to stop eating meat and driving around in cars and not allowed to fly anywhere. And the hypocrisy of all of that. And I think there's, you know, there's a big backlash now against the kind of woke generation of people, I think. And a lot of ordinary people have just said, enough already.

You know, let's just like live our lives. You can be nice to one another, but we don't need to. But there's a lot of people telling us how to live. And I think there's a lot of distrust and distaste about that. And I think we've already touched on the other one, which is immigration. I think people are genuinely worried that this country is basically full up. Now, you and I both know that parts of this country are completely desolate. You know, if you go down to the West Country, for example, you know, it's very white and there's quite a lot of room.

You know, same as parts of Scotland. I mean, the Scots are all talking about how, you know, we need to have an awful lot of immigration because we've got a falling birth rate. You go to parts of Scotland, there's literally nobody there. There's more sheep than there are people, you know. So for anyone to say that, you know, the country's overrun with anybody, whether it's immigration or not, it's just not true. But I think there are certainly parts of the country where people feel, you know, somehow that it's hostile. And whether that's right or wrong, that's one of those are the two things I'd say that they get most worked up about, you know. And crime as well.

I mean, you know, if you count probably the numbers of callers on any given subject, there's always a lot of callers like you who would say, well, I reported this to the police, nothing happened. You know, I even, we had a guy once who said he had his motorbike stolen. He knew exactly where it was, and he was behind, it was in a garage, he was in a lockup, and he basically found it because he had one of the tracker device. They wouldn't go there and open it up. They were like, we don't have enough evidence.

Here's the evidence And they wouldn't do it Yeah But it does make people angry I mean you talk about Doing an hour interview with the police About some shirts Right

I had my car broken into I got a fucking email Right Yeah I got an email saying And a crime number And a crime number Yeah

That's it You need You need That's what you need Yeah that's the pulling power You know I mean it's just It's just bizarre

And you know Other people have Nice stories to tell About the customers I think you've got to be very lucky now Yeah to have a cop

actually come around to your house and visit you and actually investigate what may have happened, you know, because... By the way, there's not criticism of police officers. I don't think it's anything to do with them. I think my experience with police officers in general is that incredibly conscientious, decent, hardworking people who are in it for the right reasons. There's obviously something going on structurally that prevents... Well, I mean, I was asked the question, you know, when they say,

oh, we haven't got enough people, you know, but when there's a... You know, in the days, you remember those days when people used to march for Brexit or march for Remain or whatever it was, there was always loads of cops. Yeah. And they all somehow managed to find 20,000 police who were willing to do overtime. So, I mean, you know, there's something not quite right. There's enough police.

I think they're just not being, you know, policed in the right way themselves and given the right job, you know? Do you think Peter Hitchens is a big fan of this? They should be out on the beat? I think seeing them is a good thing. Yeah. You know, I don't expect them.

I mean, again, I remember the days when they used to drive around those little panda cars, you know, and actually that would be better than what they do now. Because even if you see the odd police patrol going, if you're going to commit street crime, you're probably going to not commit it where they drive around. I'm not a big fan of them just walking around.

I think that's probably a bit naft. But I am a big fan of them walking around with machine guns like they do in Parliament Square. I mean, I was down in Parliament not long ago. And I love to see police with big fuck-off machine guns, you know, in case somebody wants to do anything dangerous. I mean, I think most people feel the same way. You know, they feel safe, you know.

So, you know. All right, well, we've got time for one more question for you. Which is always what's the one thing that we're not talking about as a society that we should be? I would say it's not Manchester City being banned from the European Union at all, even though they've just hired Lord Panic to try and keep them in it. I think it's Trump probably. It's the American election because, you know, that's coming up later in the year. And I think he's going to win it.

Oh, he is. Which will drive all the lefties completely utterly mad, which will be very funny. But it's also, it's the death of, again, any kind of reasonable opposition, which is the wrong way to run a country. You know, I mean, my sister lives over in America and she's a Democrat, and she's absolutely in despair about the fact that they can't seem to find anyone

who can beat this guy. That's because they've gone off the deep end, man. They've gone so far off the deeper. I don't know. I mean, I lived in New York for, you know, nearly 10 years back in the 80s until 92. And, you know, I don't know what's happened to America. You see these videos on Twitter of the Antifa crowd

fighting each other and, you know, turning up with balaclavas on. I don't know. I mean, there was none of that when I lived there. I don't know where that's come from. I really don't. And it's very disturbing, I think. And I think we need to worry about that a little bit

because Trump for another four years. I mean, I don't think he's doing a terrible job, actually. But I just worry that he's creating this kind of hatred and he's fueling, you know, more of the same. So it won't get better. I think it would get worse. And on that uplifting note, thank you very much. There you, there's a problem.

But Mike, thanks for coming on. Thank you, not at all. Really appreciate it. If people want to tune into your show, how do they do that? Well, talk radio is on DAB. We're also on YouTube every day. And you can look for the talk radio message there. We do podcasts.

You know, just type talk radio into Google and you'll find us. And if they want to find you on Twitter, it's at IROMG, which is not anything to do with me being Iron Mike, which some people seem to think. It's the Independent Republic of Mike Graham, which is the name of the show. And also, MG was taken. Okay, fair enough. We'll put all the links in the video, as always.

Thanks for tuning in this week. We'll see you in a week's time with another brilliant episode. Take care. See you next week, guys.