TRIGGERnometry - "Politicians Ignore Most Issues People Actually Care About" - Mike Graham

Episode Date: June 20, 2022

Mike Graham is a UK broadcaster, journalist, and host of The Independent Republic of Mike Graham on TalkTV. Join our exclusive TRIGGERnometry community on Locals! https://triggernometry.locals.com/ OR Support TRIGGERnometry Here: https://www.subscribestar.com/triggernometry https://www.patreon.com/triggerpod Bitcoin: bc1qm6vvhduc6s3rvy8u76sllmrfpynfv94qw8p8d5 Buy Merch Here: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/shop/​​​ Advertise on TRIGGERnometry: [e-mail] Join the Mailing List: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/sign-up/​​​ 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

Unfortunately, these do-gooders have this view that everybody's got goodness in their heart. Sorry, to disappoint you, everybody hasn't got goodness in their heart, you know? And some people are coming here because they want to make money, they don't want to pay tax, and they want to make use of whatever it is that's here that they want, that they can't get it at home. Hello, and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantine Kishen. And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people.

are brilliant and returning guest today as a journalist, radio and TV presenter. Mike Graham, welcome back to Trignology. Thank you very much. I guess you must have liked the last time. We did. But you guys have gone up in the world a bit. Thanks to you, Mike. It was your appearance.

Listen, Joe Rogan talks about you, you know, what more can you want? Yeah, we're very pleased with how it's going, and you're doing very well as well. We are. Before we get into that, just for people who are new to the show who didn't see our first interview, tell everybody a little bit about your backstory. Who are you, how are you where you are? What has been your journey through life? Yeah, I mean, I came to broadcasting via newspapers

when they used to be dangerous and they used to sell an awful lot of papers and we used to drink an awful lot. And, you know, it was great fun. So I sort of got into journalism, straight out of university. I didn't finish university. I just kind of decided to go into it. Never learned shorthand.

Never really learned all the things you were supposed to learn now. Never studied media. I didn't, I don't think they had media studies when I was around. Did economics and politics for a bit. Got into Fleet Street just by. making a phone call to the right person at the right time, got a shift, worked in America for 10 years, came back, got fired a few times from various different organs,

including the Daily Express and the Daily Mirror, worked for Pierce Morgan for a while. He's now back in the fold. We're both working now for the same company again. And I sort of ran out of road with newspapers because it was around about, I guess, the start of the century, which sounds like a long time ago now, right after 9-11, sort of 2005-ish, I suppose.

and I was offered a job in radio and I thought, okay, I'll give that a go and now I've gone from working in radio initially with a place at Scotland, went through TalkSport, ended up in Talk Radio and now we're a Talk TV station and you know, the rest is history I suppose and here I am.

You'll have to keep interrupting me. No, that's fine. Well, you're used to, you just do three hours shows and just talk endlessly, don't you? It's true. I mean, I do have this, I suppose I was born to do this job because I find it very difficult to stop talking as opposed to start. We'll stop you, but before we get into some of the stuff that's going on now,

you've obviously, like you say, you've chronicled quite a long time in journalism. How has the whole world of media changed in your lifetime and in the time that you've been there. Well, do you know, last night I was watching, there's a great documentary, and I don't normally give the BBC any credit for anything, but BBC 4, I've got this great documentary series about Margaret Thatcher, and I watched the first one last night. And the amazing thing is partly to see how politics is covered back in those days. And they start with when she was in opposition.

So it's before she won the election in 1979. And, you know, it's just a lot more old-fashioned looking. You know, all the interviewers are men. They're all white. The good old days. Yeah. I mean, you know, listen, there are some people that like that. I mean, now, of course, if you're a middle-aged white man, you've got no chance at the BBC.

You know, but, you know, she was very much more direct. I think the world has become a much more sophisticated place. I think the voters are more sophisticated. The public are more sophisticated. They have the benefit of seeing guys like yourselves. They have the benefit of seeing all sorts of other things in different media. But back then, you know, the BBC was kind of it. You know, if you were not being interviewed by somebody on Panorama

or you weren't doing, you know, the news, there was really nowhere to go. And I think Fleet Street particularly was a very much more important place. I mean, they still got the ability, I think, to influence the way people feel about things, but to a much smaller extent. And I think now we're in the age where politicians can kind of present themselves to the public

in such a different variety of ways that they can kind of direct the narrative, if you like. I mean, Boris Johnson, you know, has been, I think, an incredible lesson in just how to do whatever the hell you want and keep getting away with it. Because I think the actual substance of journalism, I think, has disappeared to some extent. You know, it's all about a 24-hour news cycle now, whereas it was never like that.

Now, you know, I said on Monday when Boris was going through this vote of no confidence, he's going to get through it, he's going to turn. I mean, there were still people pundits, talking heads, talking on all sorts of different outlets, saying he's done, he's finished, he's toast, he'll be out by the end of the week. Some were even saying he's going to lose the vote. None of that happened. I think they're getting it wrong more often now and they get it right. Why do you think that is, Mike?

I think it's because they're out of touch. I don't think, you know, I can't be the only point. person that talks to ordinary people, but we do talk to a lot of ordinary people on on talk TV. And, you know, you get a sense of how people feel. And in London, it's a very different world. You know, London has become a little island of sort of wokeery to me. It's a labour stronghold. The only place Labour won an election result in the general election in 2019 was Putney. And you think, really? You know, Sadiq Khan won another term. Labor will probably win the next one. And I just think that the journalists,

They're all now more and more from private education, they're from Oxbridge, particularly the broadcast one. And they're all sort of cut from the same cloth. I don't think they would know a working class person. They fell on one. You know, maybe they've had a cleaner who's probably from Romania or something, you know. But they don't, I don't think they understand the British public at all. No, and that disconnect seems to be happening more and more,

particularly when you look at places like the BBC, where you just think, how do you represent ordinary people in any shape or form? No. And they talk about diversity, but actually they haven't got any diversity, you know, because all the black and brown people in the BBC are all middle class. They've all been to the same colleges, the same schools. You know, Rita Chack-Rabati is, it doesn't matter what color she is. She's the same person as Hugh Edwards is, you know, even though they come from different places.

They have the same outlook. And now they're talking about actually finding a space for underprivileged white male kids. You know, maybe they're going to bring some in. I don't make the toast, maybe, if they have toast. But they have such a disdain, I think, for ordinary people because they think if you are in any way right wing, you're just a racist or you're just stupid. If you wanted Brexit, you must be an idiot.

You know, they've got this incredibly sort of entitled view. And I don't know where this came from, that only they have got the right answer. I was listening this morning to the Today program, which I've started doing recently because they hit the kind of interviews at a certain time, about 20 past 8 in the morning, and they had Michael Gove on.

And this guy, I don't know who even know it was, it wasn't Robinson, whoever his mate was, really badgering Michael Gove, as if, you know, he was some kind of war criminal. You're kind of going, sorry, what's wrong with you? If you want to ask questions to be challenging, that's one thing, but to continually kind of badger the guy, it's not good radio, it's not a good listening. It's like, it sounds wrong. Where does that come from, Mike? Because in terms of what we do, that is actually one of the things we're doing the opposite of, and I think part of our success is that we try to talk to people with different opinions and we, you know, we politely challenge them where we disagree, but generally, we want

to get out of you what you think. Now, we may disagree with what you think, but we want to just get it down, crystal clear. What do you actually believe? And the best way to do that is to let the person say it. So where does this idea come from that someone has to be like interrupted every three seconds and challenged all the time? I think it comes from their own sort of psyche where they have meetings where they maybe give each other gold stars for, you know, putting, pinning Michael Gove out making him look stupid or making him, you know, feel nervous or sweaty or something. But yeah, it's true. It's what they do. They were kind of saying things to him about the cleaners, for example. I mean, you know, at one point, I found this hilarious. At one point during the Sue Gray

report aftermath in the Commons, you know, Kirstama accused Boris Johnson of making the cleaners clean up. And you go, that's actually what they do. You know, they had to come in and clean. And you go, well, yeah, there was vomit. Okay. there was wine. Well, you know, people are employed as cleaners. I don't wish to be disparaging about cleaners, but if you're a cleaner, you clean, and that's your job. So I'm sorry if you don't like what you're cleaning,

but, you know, that's kind of what you do. And they were saying to Gove, you know, how does it feel to be part of the ruling class that was horrible to cleaners? And I thought to myself, you know, if I was Gove, I would have said, have you got a cleaner? I bet you have. I bet somebody cleans your house, don't they?

Have you ever been rude to anybody? Are you telling me nobody? And they were literally admonishing him for having a culture of rudeness inside of number 10. And it's like, one, that's not a new story. Two, it's done of your business. And three, just actually piss off.

I mean, that's what I would have said. And it's not... That's why you're not a politician, Mike. I suppose so. Well, in the old days, press got used to thump them, didn't they? They did. Yeah, well, I mean, lots of them did. Bernard Ingram, who was the statute's press secretary,

thumped a BBC guy once for asking the wrong question and it's punched him in the stomach, you know? It was great. Nobody got hurt, you know? I think somebody might have got hurt, Mike. But not much, though. Listen, if you're a journalist, you haven't been punched by someone, you're not doing your job. There we go.

But Mike, it's not just a BBC to give them their due. It's also Channel 4. They're even more to the left of the BBC. Channel 4, which unusually for me, has somehow ended up in the reverse situation with the football. Because I was watching the football the other night, and Channel 4 were covering it, right? This ridiculous, I don't even know what's called. Nations League, League of Nations, Football or something. and before the Hungarian game,

which was equally hilarious for different reasons. They had some bloke I'd never seen in my life before on the pitch with some woman who apparently is a female footballer called Knobbs, I think her name is, somebody Knobbs, Jordan Knobbs. And I'm going, how did Channel 4 end up with this? The BBC have got women's football,

Channel 4 have got real football, and you're kind of going, how did this happen? Channel 4 is supposed to be the people that represent the underrepresented, instead of which we've now got mainstream Gary Lineker and people saying, isn't it great, you know, here's the new Chelsea manager, and you're going, sorry, who?

No, it's the women's Chelsea manager. You're not allowed to say it's women's football. You just have to say it's football because you have to pretend that it's as good. But everybody knows it's not. And it's like, you know, surely Channel 4 should have the women's football and the BBC should have the other stuff, shouldn't they? I don't know. Yeah, it does feel like that.

But if you look at their news reporting, it's so disgracefully biased. Oh, it really is. Yeah. I mean, John Snow was a joke. I mean, he literally, I used to watch Channel 4 when he was just to get annoyed, you know, because not only was he not very good, but it was so biased and so ridiculous. And, I mean, I don't even know what's happening with Channel 4. Everyone's worried it's going to be sold off and taken over by some horrible evil,

you know, Elon Musk type figure. Good. Hopefully, that will happen. But now it seems to be happening in all directions. So, for example, G.B. News and talk TV, arguably. would be a right wing, a right of centre, and again, sort of just kind of doing what they do, right? And we seem to now end up in this position because I think the mainstream media slid in a sort

of leftward direction for so long. Well, now we've created a world where there is no balance. It's just right and left, right? And I think that's actually healthier because in the end, I mean, Noam Chomsky once said there's no such thing as not being biased because wherever you come from, you have the training or the kind of upbringing or, you know, you bring with you wherever it was you came from. You cannot be unbiased. So you might as well not pretend that you are, I think.

I mean, I would say to people when they go, you're supposed to be unbiased. I'm like, who told you that? I'm not supposed to be unbiased. I am who I am. If you don't like what I'm saying, ring me up and argue with me. If I want to get somebody on who disagrees with me,

then that's what I'll do. But there's no point in me pretending that I see everything the same way. I mean, not to pick on Rita Chakrabati again, she said at the end of one of the Jubilee sort of segments that they did on Thursday or Friday of Jubilee weekend, she said, we realize this is not everybody's cup of tea.

And it's like, what would you say that for? Would you have said that if you were covering the Glastonbury Festival? Because that's not my cup of tea. I don't want to see 400 BBC people sent to Glastonbury's over jolly and take a lot of ecstasy and pretend it's public service broadcasting. Because it isn't, you know, it's like ridiculous, totally mad. So they kid themselves that they're balanced. I think they actually genuinely believe that they are.

But they're not at all. They're middle class, most of them sort of champagne socialists. and they think all Tories are evil. You know, I don't know where they get that from. And it just, and the thing is, it's like you said, they don't seem to realize it. No. And then you watch the content that they produce

and the way they question people. And you go, this is so openly, nakedly biased. And I don't even consider myself right of centre. I don't. But I'm watching this and going, you're patronising me. You're telling me what to think. Why not treat me?

like an adult, interview the person, and then I'll make up my own mind. Right. I mean, only the BBC would have conversations with their audience, you know, is it wrong to fly the flag? You know, well, no, it's not wrong to fly the flag. That's the end of the debate, isn't it? So you'd be okay with the Ukrainian flag, though, but you can't fly a union jack because obviously that would make you a racist. It's a very perverse way to approach the world, you know? Especially from the national broadcast. Yeah. Are you tired of using bulky old wallets giving you a bulge where you don't want it to be?

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go to ridge.com forward slash trigger. That's ridge.com forward slash trigger and use our special code, which is, of course, trigger. Particularly as an immigrant to this country, I find it very odd how in my lifetime, particularly in my lifetime, I know this has always been a British problem.

Like, I think it was Orwell that talked about this as well, how the intelligentsia in Britain would happily talk down their own country. But it's sort of, in particular in my lifetime, since I came to this country in 95, suddenly like being proud of your country in any way has become this deeply shameful thing.

And the intelligentsia, of course, used to be quite a small part of Britain. It was kind of, you know, you'd run into these people very rarely. They didn't really have much importance. They were kind of slightly curious oddities who would sort of pop up on, you know, question time once in a while.

But Peter Hitchens makes this point a lot. under Tony Blair, all of our institutions became kind of honeycombed with these so-called intellectuals and these kind of, you know, left-wing ideologues who were generally speaking privileged people, mostly white people who had somehow got to the top in their

university level, they somehow got put in charge of quangos and they somehow got put in charge of political organizations. And now we've got a massive problem because they're running everything. From the metropolitan police to the NHS to the NHS to, you know, the border force, civil service, all of the people that run these things are intrinsically left-wing intellectual ideologues.

And they think that, for example, we shouldn't have borders. We should just invite anybody in that can come. You know, we should teach that four-year-old children living in Scotland can become, you know, transgender, if they wish at the age of four. I mean, it's madness. It's totally mad. And you see it everywhere. You see the police now where every one of their cars,

especially the Metropolitan Police, they've all got rainbows on them. And rainbows on the level crossings. And you're going, no, this should be apolitical. Right. It should be apolitical. Why is it that they're embracing an ideology? Yeah.

And it just turns people off. I mean, I put a tweet out the other day about, I think it was, I don't remember who it was, Nottinghamshire Police or somebody, who put out this sort of LGBTQIA plus, whatever. I don't know, it's becoming like, just put the alphabet in different order and see where it goes. and they put at the end of the tweet we will be watching

the response to this in case of any hate crime and I went so what you're now like actually you know kind of asking for people to say things which you can then prosecute them for and I just commented you know

what if we're just laughing at you is that a hate crime probably isn't it? And of course I got a lot of crap from a lot of you know gay activists and all that but you know you're not even allowed to laugh at them you know they haven't come from me yet I mean they might come bursting through the door you know, as we sit here.

But you do worry that there are some people in the police who would quite like to come bursting through the door because of something you thought or something you said or something you laughed at. And you kind of go, I mean, I got things like from people saying, why would you laugh at people because of their sexuality? And I'm like, well, that's not what I was doing. I was laughing at the fact that the police think it's important

to put out a tweet that shows them all holding up a rainbow flag. It's not what they do. I'd like them to put up pictures of them beating somebody, you know, with a rubber truncheon who had committed a crime. That's what I'd like to see. Or, you know, chasing that guy off the bridge who they tasered, who was apparently threatening people, and he's now unfortunately dead.

But, I mean, that's what the police should be doing. You know, they shouldn't be holding up a rainbow flag and going, would you like, you know, would you like me to come and talk to you? No, I'd like to arrest some bad guys. You know, I'd like to stop people burglaring, you know, burglying my house. How old fashion, like.

I know, isn't it, ridiculous. I'd like you to stop women from being attacked to the street at midnight when you don't seem to have any cars driving around making sure it doesn't happen. You know, it'd be really good if you had nobody in your own fucking police force who actually started, you know, killing people. That would be good. 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?

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ideology, which is about how a World Cup in fucking Qatar. In Qatar. Right. Where the FIFA organization actually put out again on Pride Week, whatever it was, a tweet saying, you know, we're looking forward to Qatar, 2022, it will be a festival of diversity and equality. I'm like, are you sure about that? I'm not sure that, you know, where are they going to start throwing some gay people off buildings? You know, is that part of the celebration for the final? You just kind of go, sorry?

And then Gareth Southgate the other day comes out and says that, you know, it's going to be very complicated when there's a penalty shooter because he has to consider whether or not to ask Marcus Rashford and some of the other players who happen to be black, and whether they should take a penalty because they got a load of abuse. And it's like, well, maybe if you taught them how to take penalties, they wouldn't get any abuse. And I'm sorry that they got abuse.

But the point is that people who play football get abuse all the time. Look at Beckham. Remember Beckham back in the day. I mean, they were hanging, you know. They were saying, we're going to murder your kids. Effigies. Yeah, they were hanging effigies of them from lamp posts. Unfortunately, football fans are not very nice.

You know, as much as we'd like them all to be nice. Unfortunately, you know, Massachusetts United fans sing songs about Liverpool fans, Liverpool fans do the whole air crash thing from Munich you know it's not very nice but it goes on you can't police that you know it's like walking into a room and going I wish everybody would just be really nice

but that is the point we want to police everything now and look nobody is condoning idiots on the internet saying horrible racist thing obviously that shouldn't happen and it's disgraceful but this idea that we have to police every single little thing online

it's become an obsession. You know, you hear about people online making horrendous offensive jokes. I don't know if you followed the case of that bloke who built a model of the Grenfell Tower, then set fire to it. And he's obviously a dickhead, let's be honest. He's a dickhead who's not particularly bright. But when did it become illegal to become a dickhead? Yeah, but why are you going to put the guy in jail?

Exactly. And having his life ruined as a result. I haven't actually seen the absolute details, but there's some TikTok story going around about a guy who has been suspended from his job. He works for TikTok in London because he made a speech at which he said he didn't think it was a very good idea

to give people maternity leave. And you go, okay, well, that's a view. You know, it's not the world's most modern view, but, you know, it's a view. But no, he's been suspended from his job because people were outraged by it. And it's like, why are you outraged by that? You know, there is actually a law that gives people maternity leave.

People are protected by that. And so there's already a... situation in place where if you, like you say, if the guy's a dickhead, he's a dickhead. You know, just leave him to it. Doesn't mean he's a criminal. So my, one of the things that we, I can't remember which guest of us it was, but we've talked about quite a bit, is this idea that as, as we increasingly see government as a solution and answer to all problems, more and more of this stuff starts to happen. Because if anything is wrong in our lives, or our experience of interacting with other people or, or anything that is wrong in our lives, it's, it's, you know,

the job of government to fix it. So if someone's saying something we don't like, well, it's the job of government to fix it. Somebody should come from over there and tell them to stop. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I think COVID was to blame for a lot of that. I think people got used to the fact that, you know, they couldn't do anything because the government said they couldn't. I mean, I think sensible people were slightly less rigid about that. I mean, I think it reached kind of peak madness when Beth Rigby at one point from Sky asked the prime minister in one of those god-awful, you know, news briefings. you know, well, you say we can sunbathe on Monday, but can we sunbathe on Sunday?

You're kind of going, actually, Beth, I'd rather you didn't take your clothes off at all. But if you want to, I'm pretty sure you'll be okay sunbathing on Sunday and not waiting until Monday. And you kind of go, why are you asking permission for that? What's wrong with you? Why do you need to be given an instruction as to whether or not you can do something? Just do it. You know, and I think there are a lot of people in this country who quite like being told what to do. Unfortunately, I'm not one of them.

And that is hitting a nail on the head. And what I've been surprised at, a conservative government have come in since 2019. Yeah. I mean, I don't think there's anything concerned about them, is there? No. No, they've been encroaching into everybody's lives, particularly during the pandemic.

They've put in laws about protesting, which I find incredibly worrying. Spaffing money up the wall. Spaffing money up the wall. And then we've got this cost of living crisis, which is obviously awful. terrible, and their solution is just to throw money at the problem, and we've got spiking inflation. I mean, here's some money to pay your, to pay your interest bill.

I mean, that's ridiculous, right? They're supposedly taking the money back from the windfall tax, but in the end, don't pay people money and keep the price high so that these people can continue to make money as profiteers, and then we're all paying for it. It's completely mad. And the one thing they come up with today, to give people on housing benefit, the ability to buy their own home, you know, whereby in one fell sort of, swoop, you stop the ability of people to get into a house because they can't afford to buy one

because you've reduced the stock. And two, you're then giving them the ability to buy a house with money given to them by people who can't afford to buy a house. You're kind of going, sorry, what is the point of any of this, you know? Instead of building some houses. They claim they're building houses, but they're clearly not building houses. And if they are building houses, they build them sort of willy-nilly without any thought to the pressure on schools, the pressure on hospitals, the pressure on hospitals, on doctors. You know, we've got a lot of people in this country now more than we had, and nobody wants to talk about it. Nobody wants to say, we've got 10 million more people here

than we should have had. We've got, you know, a million people here probably over the course of the last 10 years who've come here illegally, who are now living here. Nobody wants to talk about that, because that's racist, apparently. But since we've come on to the government, what have you made of, we mentioned it earlier, that Boris Johnson being able to literally get away with what, to me, are like, the cardinal sin of politics, which is you're saying everyone must do something and you're not doing it. How is that happening? Yeah, I mean, I think it's partly because he's just very stubborn. And nobody really knows how to deal with somebody who doesn't follow the rules.

Because we've now constructed this kind of, you know, I don't know, ectoplasmic sort of surface where if you break the rules, nobody knows what to do with you. You know, rather like Tommy Robinson for a long time, kept doing whatever he was. wanted to do. And every time they arrested him, it didn't really stop him doing what he wanted to do. And he kept doing it. And, I mean, he's now disappeared up his own ass, I think, because he's just a bit of an idiot. But at the end of the day, Boris will not be told to conform. And because he doesn't do what he's meant to, they don't understand what to do with him. You know, they all said, well, any decent person would have resigned by now. Well, guess what? He's not going to resign.

So you might as well forget about that. So maybe he's not a decent person. Who cares? Doesn't really matter. you know, these people who criticize them for being, you know, immoral, you know, I hope they haven't got anything in their lives which could be pointed to as, you know, perhaps moralistically, you know, dodgy. Most people have, you know, most journalists certainly have. But they're all, you know, wholly than now saying he's a terrible individual, he's a ghastly person, he's a liar, you know, he cheats on his wife. I mean, you know, what's that got to do with anything?

The point is that he will continue to do his job until such time as he's literally stopped physically from doing it. That's kind of my question, Mike, though. Do you not think that it is a problem that someone can behave as he has done and not be removed? And I think part of the reason I would argue, I argued in my recent substack about this, that we have a dearth of high-quality candidates to replace him. The Conservative Party, I don't know who would be. What, Jeremy Hunt, who was screaming down the phone, shut it down, we need quarantine camps.

Is that who we want? No, absolutely not. Like, who are these people that's supposed to replace them? The problem we've got, I think, is we've got this dearth of quality because we've encouraged the sort of political class to become very much self-fulfilling, if you like. So you can only really become a politician now if you play this game whereby you're somebody's special advisor

that you then get given a sort of safe seat or maybe not a safe seat to lose before you get given a safe seat to win. And, you know, it's all about patting each other on the back. There's no real ideology anymore. I mean, this is what I suppose I should have said earlier when we were looking at Thatcher. Thatcher believed in things.

You know, she believed in crushing the unions because she thought they were too powerful. She believed in having a certain economic kind of policy because she wanted to give people genuinely the ability to make more money. I mean, she created the situation for my generation to make money, you know, because before that, you were born into a sort of,

what I would term a sort of, you know, lower-middle-class household. You weren't really going anywhere. you probably weren't going to university. My sister ended up working in the city because of the big bang and stock markets opened up. If you weren't in the old days the son of a stockbroker,

you couldn't get into that. In my day, you could still get into newspapers without a degree, which I was able to do. And you had the ability to make bucket loads of money. Now, I think social mobility is as bad as it's ever been. If you don't have rich parents in this country, you can't really do very well. You can't get a decent job.

You can't probably get a decent job. in education because your parents can't afford to put you through university, and you're kind of stuck where you are. And I think the political class now is so far and away removed from ordinary people. I don't think they even know what ordinary people do. I mean, they all get their bills paid. They get expenses, they drive around in cars,

they don't have to worry about paying for. I think it's just become such a soft world, you know, and it's all about ambition. It's all about what job can I get, rather than what do I want to change about society. I can't name anything that Keist Stahma wants to change about society. I can't name one thing that Angela Rainer wants to change about society, or Boris Johnson or Rishishish Sunak,

or, you know, I just can't think of anyone who believes anything. It's so true. And it's not just that. It's just a complete lack of vision as well. Like if you ask Johnson, where do you want this country to be in four years' time? I mean, he'd probably hit you with some platitude. Oh, yeah. He'll go on about British pride and the flag

and we're the greatest country in the world but it doesn't mean anything. You know, it really doesn't. And I think a lot of people in this country don't really know what Britain stands for anymore other than if it's Boris Johnson it's just getting away with it, I think. And that's a real problem because people look at him

and he's not a serious individual. No. He's not serious. He doesn't command respect with his own voters, let alone overseas. So what does that say about us as a country? Yeah.

I mean, I don't know that that's true about what happens overseas. I think there is still a respect for the Prime Minister of Great Britain overseas no matter what. I mean, Zelensky's been quite complimentary. Yeah. And, I mean, he's done a really good thing. And, I mean, at his best, he is that guy. But like all kind of flawed domestic politicians,

you know, his kind of arena of excellence is overseas, aid, it's overseas policy, it's foreign policies, what the American Presidents always do, whenever they're getting stooped domestically, they start a war, or they invade somewhere, or they do something which makes it look like they're kind of straddling the world stage.

And he does that very well. You got lucky in this case. But, you know, I mean, my dad used to say about people that the first time you meet some people, that's the best you get. And I think Boris is a bit like that. The more you get to know him, the worse it is. You know, he's quite impressive when he walks into a G7

meeting, probably. But by the of it, you're kind of going, really? Is this the guy? You know? But he can look. And first impressions can be important. And I think first impressions he can do the business. But I just don't think he stands for anything. Yeah. And like I say, I am not a fan of Boris Johnson at all. But my bigger worry is there's no one who's a credible threat to him on his own side, most of whom, in my opinion, are equally useless. And they also like the charisma that at least he has. He's quite charismatic. He is. And he can be very funny.

Absolutely. You know? Sometimes intentionally. But on the other side, on the other side, you don't have a credible threat either. And frankly, like, I would really struggle to vote for the Tories at the next election. But the only thing that might make me consider it is the quality of the opposition. Yeah.

Well, Kirstarmer in Prime Minister's questions this week, an absolute open goal to rip Boris Johnson to shred. and he missed it. Just didn't do it. You know, didn't even... I said today, if you'd kind of come down from Mars and landed in the Commons

during Prime Minister's questions, you wouldn't have even known that Boris Johnson had been the subject of a vote of no confidence in his own party. You know, it took Ian Blackford to bring it up, who actually was quite funny for the first time.

You know, I quite... You know, I... But the trouble is, I'm torn, you see, by being a journalist and a broadcaster as well as being a citizen, because I kind of quite like the chaos. I quite like the...

absolute disaster that is the government and the way that the country's going. You know, the petrol crisis is something that we can really get pine, get our teeth into. The NHS being completely hopeless is something which kind of, you know, works well for me as a subject to talk about because we get incredible stories from people. You know, if everything was really going well, I don't think we'd be doing quite as well as we are, you know? There's a part of that of me which kind of is wedded to that. I hear you, but I also think, as you know, speaking to ordinary people every day,

this is hurting people. Oh, sure. Very bad yet. I've got two teenage sons, right? I have no idea what they're going to end up doing with their lives, and it's going to be very difficult for them, I think, to, you know, chart a course through their education and then into employment, you know,

because even if they knew for sure what they wanted to do, it's a very uncertain world we live in now. It's a very unusual place for anyone. I mean, I don't remember that much about my 20s, but, you know, I kind of just did what I wanted to do and I kind of did all right. I think it's a lot harder now for kids, you know. And that will be reasonably well advantaged

because, you know, their parents have got some money. If you're a kid growing up in a place where there's nothing in the north of England or even in the south, people forget that, you know, this leveling up stuff is not just about the north of England. I mean, there's plenty of parts of Britain in the south of the country, which are in really bad ways, you know. And if you're growing up in a poor community,

somewhere in Dorset, you know, you've got no chance of getting anywhere or doing anything, you know, you're too far from London to get a job, you can't probably live in London because you can't afford it, your parents can't give you any money because they don't have any, and what are you going to do, you know? Yeah, it's, and what I'm really worried about, Mike, is you're looking at things like inflation, the cost of living crisis, and you think things are going to get quite ugly, aren't they, potentially? Yeah.

Because if people are working and they can't meet their basic needs, and they're working a full-time job, that's a recipe for disaster. It really is. It really is. And, I mean, we're being taxed far too much, you know, more than we've ever been taxed in my lifetime. By a conservative government.

Yeah, well, you've got to tax people if you're going to give everyone loads of money. Well, that's what we're told. But now we're told that they're going to give us some back. But how are they going to do that? I don't know. You know, this windfall tax supposedly is being used to give everybody, you know, a council tax rebate. But that's not really going to help many people.

I mean, I've seen 150 pounds as a council tax rebounds for my council tax, and I'm not saying I need the money, that's a month and a half's council tax out of a year. You know, what the hell is the point of that? And, you know, they need to make things cheaper. And I don't know how they do that. You know, we seem to be stuck in a spiral of just everything's going up. I mean, today we were having calls from people about the most expensive petrol in Britain, and it turns out that it's somewhere in there was between one point it was

somewhere on the M6 and we ended up with somewhere in Chelsea £2.20 for a a litre of petrol. And you're just going, and it's going up literally by the day for no reason. Suddenly it's jumped 5P from yesterday and you go,

well, why? How is that possible? And people say, oh, well, you know, it's market forces. It's not market forces. It's profiteering, surely. Why do you think that might? Why do you think it's not market force? Because I don't believe that the cost of petrol and diesel and oil

at wholesale level has changed. In fact, it's gone down. And yet the prices at the pumps are going up. Somebody put this to me. How about this? And I haven't investigated it. I can't say that it's true. But there's one major chain of service stations in this country,

which appears to be owned by a university pension fund. Now, whenever you're looking for profiteering, you know not so much the actual market forces, but you look at the futures markets, you look at commodities, I mean, for example, all the prices that are going up because of the wheat problem, that's all being driven by commodity markets. It's all been driven by speculators in New York, Hong Kong, Singapore, London,

who are betting on the price of wheat in the future. That's costing you and I, you know, two quid on a loaf of bread. And I think that's the problem. I don't know it sounds like a communist here, but, you know, some of these market forces are market forces which are manufactured, in my view, capitalist sort of market forces. in very strange and convoluted, you know, a bit like the mortgage fallout from 2008

when the banks were all failing. It was because of these ridiculous packages of investments that were being put together by these rocket scientists in Wall Street who were packaging up, you know, risk and saying, I'll take your mortgage and I'll sell it to him, but I'll also package it up with 500 other mortgages because the price of property is always going to go up. As long as that happens, we'll all make money.

And then the profits started to go because the price of property went down, and they all went, oh shit. suddenly we haven't got any money. And suddenly the banks are all collapsing. And, you know, there's a lot going on, which I think we don't know about. Yeah. And so you host your show and people call in.

What's the thing that the ordinary bloke or woman on the street talks about? The things they care about the most are the net zero crap, which nobody wants. Nobody wants to buy into that, especially now more than ever. The migrants who come illegally and the cost of living. Those are the three things. And those are the three most important issues in Britain today. regardless of what, you know, politicians will say.

And the first and the third are entirely correlated by the... They are not correlated, they're related directly. Of course. They are. Because if it wasn't for this kind of net zero obsession, we would not be, you know, paying so much money for the energy that we've got. I've always said to people,

look, if you want to buy an electric car, then sell me a cheap electric car. If you want to convince me not to drive a big gas-guzzling four-by-four, sell me the same car for less money. And if it's electric. But instead of that, you buy the electric version in my car, it costs twice as much. Why would you bother?

And he's got half the range. Yeah, half the range. And also I was watching, there's a great video, which is out on Twitter today, from Ford in America. And the CEO of Ford is a woman, is out like, you know, extolling the virtues of this new electric car.

And somebody says, what's currently charging your charge points? And she's like, oh, I think we're getting it from the local Lansing Energy Company. They go to the Lansing Energy Company, and they say, where's your energy coming from? They're like, it's 98% coal. And you go, so you're charging electric cars with electricity generated by coal.

That doesn't really seem not quite like the green dream, does it? You know, and as much as we want electricity to be clean, I don't have a problem with that. But it's not practical. It doesn't work. And, you know, most ordinary people can't afford a bloody Tesla. You know, it's too expensive. And if you did have one, you can't charge it. And people go, don't worry, you charge it the night before.

Well, fine, if you've got something you can charge it with or two. but if you're parked in a street where there's a lot of flats in the middle of London, where are you going to charge it exactly? It's not happening. And so let's touch on the migrant crisis. Is that really a very big issue for most people? Yeah, because again, it's not simply about people arriving on beaches and walking into Britain without any reason to do so.

It's about pressure on the NHS. It's about pressure on the economy. It's about what they're doing here. nobody really knows. It's about the millions, it's five million pounds a day this is costing this government to house them all in hotels.

You know, I'm not going to be one of those people that says, you know, they're all potentially criminals or terrorists. I'm not saying that. But they shouldn't be here. We shouldn't be paying them to be here. And we shouldn't be charging the taxpayer. You know, the equivalent of 30 million on quid a week

to help them to come. So, Mike, how is it that a government that essentially was elected for one reason, which is a promise to deliver Brexit, right? Yeah. Which was promised to people as a way of controlling immigration because we take back control of our borders, right? Where's the fucking control?

There is none. Why not? Why is our government not doing that? I don't know. Because, look, I don't understand the logic here, because if you say this is what people care about, and I'm sure that all those people voted for the Tories at the last election, then surely, electorally,

it must be an open goal for the... Tories to fix that problem. You would think. So why are they doing? Because again, I think it's something that they physically don't know what to do to stop it. You know, a bit like they don't know how to stop Boris Johnson and breaking the rules and getting away with it. They physically don't know how to stop them. I mean, I've actually said there's a very simple way to do it.

And it would be simple. And you might laugh at this. But I would literally go to France with one of those Rambo knives. Every time I see a dinghy, you just stick the knife in it, the dinghy can't go into water. It's that simple. And they, you know, then they're not. coming, right? People look at me like you're looking at me going, it can't be that simple. What I'm thinking inside of my head is maybe a little bit more

complicated than that. I don't think it is. If you can't get in a, if you physically can't, no, if you physically can't get in a boat, you're not coming. I've just got this image of you in a wetsuit just going around doing that to dinghies. Seriously. If you can't get in a dingy, you're not coming. I've got like a movie image on my head, Mike, like, just comes out of the water with like a camera pain on his face. Yeah. But I mean, they've got this, I mean, We're talking that kind of level of madness. Yeah. Because everybody knows who these people are.

Everybody knows where they're coming from. Everybody knows how they're getting here. Surely you just stop them from doing that. And now we're sending them all to Rwanda. Sorry, mate. Yeah. Yeah. I'm not being sent to Rwanda.

Yeah. Unfortunately. Well, I've said to Downing Street, if you, the first flight to Rwanda, I want to be on that. So we can do a show from Rwanda, from Kigali. But it now looks like they're saying, oh, well, you know, the first flight might be difficult because there's lawyers in the way.

Why can't you send them back to France, mate? That's what I don't understand. Well, because we're frightened of doing that. You know, whenever you say turn the boats back, people go over, but people might die. Not that many people die. We've had 10,000 people have come already this year. I don't think anybody's died so far this year.

It's pretty, I mean, I go down the South Coast pretty much every weekend. It's like a mill pond. The serpentine is busier and, you know, more rough than the channel at most of the times of the year. And, you know, there's no reason why we owe these people anything. You know, when we get to, told by the lefties, oh, they're fleeing, you know, war and trauma and disaster.

Well, they look pretty happy when they get here. They've all got phones that they're able to throw into the river. I mean, I wouldn't throw my phone away. I've paid a lot of money for it. But they apparently don't seem to care about that. My belief is that many of them are coming here as part of a criminal enterprise because they're being paid to do so by human traffickers who want them to come here, not because they're going to, you know, commit horrible, awful, heinous crimes,

but they'll work in the black economy, you know, whether they're washing cars, whether they're running brothels, whether they're running, you know, money laundering schemes. I don't know. But it seems to me that that's the aim. They're not coming here to become doctors. You know, they're not coming here to join the police force. They're not coming here because they like the look of Highbury. You know, they're coming here to do a job of work. And I think it's for the human traffickers who run criminal gangs.

It's more lucrative now to smuggle people than it is to smuggle cocaine. And that's what they're doing. Do you have a website, or do you plan to have a website? Because if you do, then EasyDNS is a company for you. EasyDNS is the perfect domain name registrar provider and web host for you. They have a track record of standing up for their clients, whether it be cancelled culture, de-platform attacks, or overzealous government agencies. He knows about that.

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Use our promo code, which is also triggered, and get 50% off the initial purchase. Sign up for their newsletter, Access of Easy, which tells you everything you need to know about technology, privacy and censorship. Mike, why can't we have honest conversations about this? Why is it that I turn on my TV and we're not going to have an honest conversation about this on the BBC or Channel 4? Because people are either squeamish or deluded or completely and utterly kind of wedded to this idea of a global world that literally doesn't have any borders. And if you live in a place where, you know, ethnic minorities have taken over the part of the world that you're, you know that didn't used to be like that,

you're going to feel pretty weird about that. You're not going to be in favour of it. You're not going to be happy about it. You know, there are parts of London, which I drive through from time to time, and you can see that it's full of people from Eritrea or full of people from Ethiopia. Now, I've got no problem with that, but I don't live there.

But if you're some white guy who lived there for 40, 50 years, and you look around and you see everything's changed, you go, there's something a bit odd about this. This is not what I recognize as my place. I'm as much in favour of multicultural cities as anybody. But I think the problem is, is that one, because it's out of control, you don't know what's going on. People feel helpless.

I mean, I was listening to Nick Ferrari the other day, and he said, well, maybe we should just let them come. It's quite a small number of people. It's not really going to have an impact on most of the country. You're going, sorry, what are you talking about? You know, if you're talking about 30,000 people a year, that's a small town in Britain every single year. You know, and that's going to have an impact on everything.

But this is the thing. The people on the left who refuse to talk about this don't understand that actually that has an impact, like you said before, on public services, on schools, on the NHS. Absolutely. I mean, it so happens that most of the people who come on the boats have brown skin.

That's not really the issue. There's plenty of Albanians coming as well. There was a load of Albanians that came the other week. And unfortunately, whether you like it or not, a lot of people who come from Albanians. are hooked into the drugs culture, into the criminal culture. There's a lot of gangs in Albania. You know, they're not coming here legally

because they don't want to come legally. They want to come illegally, so they're not traceable. You know, people, unfortunately, these do gooders have this view that everybody's got goodness in their heart. Sorry, to disappoint you, everybody hasn't got goodness in their heart, you know? And some people are coming here because they want to make money, they don't want to pay tax, and they want to make use of whatever it is that's here that they want,

that they can't get at home. You know, even in a place like Poland, the average salary is 50% of what it is here. Of course they want to come and work here and want to live here, but we can't just keep saying that's not a problem. And most people in this country give a shit about that. Well, no, I agree with you. And the thing is, as well,

is we are now quite plugged into that immigrant labour to the extent that, for example, we had James Cavarini in here who runs a restaurant in West London. And he made the point that whether it was Brexit or whether it's COVID and whatever, we've got to a position, actually, we're very sure on staff in certain, like airports are getting flights cancelled, restaurants are really struggling to hire staff, you know, farms, etc.,

because we've come to rely on people. And now the arguments become we need these people to do the jobs that we don't want to do. How much truth do you think there is to that? I think there's truth to that, but I think you've got to think about the reason, the second part in that sentence, which is the jobs that we don't want to do. The problem in this country is that people are paid not to work. And there's an awful lot more people on benefits than it should be on benefits. And for a lot of people, it makes no sense to go to work because they're better off.

If you're on a sort of minimum wage scenario and you've got two or three kids, you're better off not working because you get to have more money and you get to have more liquidity and more cash to spend if you just stay on benefits because you get your housing benefit, you get your council tax paid, you know, you get whatever it is that tops up even small amounts of money that you might make if you do a bit of part-time work. But there's no reason for you to become a waiter. in James Keirvary's restaurant because you're better off not doing it.

And it's also quite hard work. So I think we've got a class of people in this country who don't want to work, but it's not really their fault. It's the government's fault for paying them not to. In America, for example, and I know this from living there, you get six months unemployment.

And if after six months you haven't found a job, you don't get any more money. And I think that's a great system because if you can work, you should. And a lot of people in America work because they want the health care that goes with it. You know, you need to incentivise people to work.

And I'm not going to buy this bullshit that, you know, all the people have gone back because of Brexit. I mean, some of them have. Five million, I think, stayed. So it's not true to say they all left because it didn't like Britain being an isolationist country. But in the end, they were working for less money than British people were willing to work for.

And you have to up the wage. The whole point of Brexit was to pay people better to make more money. And if that, if that, was to happen, I think more people would be working for James and other people, you know. Mike, moving on now, we talked about the past of journalism. What do you think is going to be the future of journalism? We've just, you know, talk TV. You should obviously be talk radio, now it's talk TV.

So what do you think is going to be the future with the media landscape? Well, I think as we move forward, there will be more kind of fragmentation of it, and more people will watch less of one thing. so they will be given a bigger sort of menu of what it is that they want to see. At the moment, there is still a large amount of dominance in terms of the BBC and ITV, less so channel 4, less so channel 5. But what I have seen recently is a move towards more opinionated programming. So Sky have now got an interest in putting out personality-led programs,

although their personalities aren't much to write home about, unfortunately. And you've got Sophie Ridge and sort of, you know, Beth Rigby and what's his name, Trevor Phillips. Much of a muchness, you know. Trevor's a great. Trevor's a good guy. I'm a big fan of Trevor. He's a good guy, but, you know, are people going to watch him for him?

They still don't quite know how to do it. You know, I prefer the American model where people are much more opinionated. There's a lot of journalists in this country, you still can't quite get their heads around that. You know, there's nothing wrong with being opinionated. You know, as long as you're willing to take the flag and you're willing to listen to people who might disagree with you, I think people are much more. you know, savvy now about that. And they'd rather watch somebody with a decent opinion

than somebody who just tells you that, you know, there's an earthquake in Krakatoa. You know, here's a news program about it and, you know, here's the rest of the news. I think people are liable to be much more kind of specific about what they like. And it won't just be on television. It will be on YouTube. It will be on, you know, different platforms. Podcasting is obviously, you know, still a very popular thing. So I think the major powers like the BBC and ITV will become less powerful over time And I mean the BBC is already wrestling with itself

They don't even really know where they are anymore You know, they tried to hire Matthew Stadlin Which was probably the stupidest idea anybody ever had And then they decided not to And you kind of go, well, what was that all about? What, didn't you know that he was a massive, you know, labour right? Did you not know that he'd been basically having a nervous breakdown on Twitter

for the best part of the last two years? I mean, where have you been? and at least have the courage of your convictions and hire him, and we can all have a good laugh. You know, I don't even know what Radio 5 Live is about anyway. I haven't listened to it for so long. I don't even know what they do, you know? Am I, when I say you, I mean TV people.

Are you... I've never been described as TV people before, but listen, I'll take it. You are now. You are now. Are you, do you consider us a threat? Are you worried about YouTube and podcast and all of that coming to take care? I don't consider anybody a threat, but, you know, it might just be me. No, I think the more of the matter. I think the better the landscape is for the more different opinions.

And, you know, I respect you guys for what you do. I think what you do is great. I don't listen to everything that you do because nobody's got the time. But no, I think, I think absolutely, the more diverse opinion out there, the better. You know, and I, you know, I can't imagine anything worse than people just agreeing with me. I don't want anyone to really agree with me. I have much better time when people don't agree. But what I would like to see is a bit more tolerant.

of different opinions, you know, all round, whereby, you know, I know personally people who have never been asked to appear on the BBC because they consider it to be, you know, toxic or, you know, you couldn't possibly put them on. I mean, I don't even watch Question Time anymore. Question Time used to be Thursday night fodder for me, no matter what. Same. I would always watch it. I can't remember the last time I watched it because it's so dull, you know. Panorama now is kind of boring. All of the old style stuff has gone. And I think you guys and we maybe to a lesser extent

can just be more innovative and we can do things. I mean I've said to my bosses, I would love to do like some documentaries. I'd love to do some in-depth, you know, investigations of, you know, stuff that nobody else is really doing. Because at the moment, it's kind of, if it's not on the BBC or dispatches on Channel 4,

there's not really much of that going on. And it's hard to do because you need resources, you need a team of people, you need to be able to get things right. like I said, you know, this business of whether or not pension funds are driving up the price of fuel, that's a great story. But you have to really dig into it for a while. And it takes a bit of time, it costs a bit of money. And I think that the one thing I would say I probably do regret is the sort of upsurge of what I would regard as kind of shill, dodgy types on YouTube, people who sell themselves to people as if they're telling them some kind of conspiracy theory.

and we get a lot of this now. It's a lot more frequent than it used to be. You know, like I've had the, you know, the Russian bots after me, you know, for, you know, being too pro-Ukraine. I've had, you know, the anti-vax crowd saying to me that we should be covering, you know, people who are injured by vaccines.

You know, all of which we've, you know, we've covered all of these things, but you get sort of labeled as, you know, I'm in the pay of Bill Gates, the World Economic Forum. And you're just kind of going, come on, guys. Yeah, you're controlled opposition just like us, man. Yeah, when did you take the under?

And it's like, you know, guys, and I know they're probably not as big of a deal as they make out, but there's a lot more of them than they were. And I think they get encouraged to be the way they are by certain unscrupulous people who make money out of it, you know. And I think that would be nice if they would disappear. But equally, it's not for me to say who should be disappearing. You know, they have to stand on their own merits. But I'd like people to be slightly more, I suppose, thoughtful about who they believe and who they don't believe, you know. Mike, do you not worry in this fragmented media landscape that that's just going to mean

we're all going to be in our own little silos and we're going to talk to each other less and we're going to share ideas less as a result because if you want right of center content you're going to go to this broadcast. If you want left wing content, you're going to go to this. If you want kind of a more libertarian content, you're going to go over here. And really, the ideas aren't going to cross-pollinate. Well, there's a danger of that. But then that's up to us, isn't it? I mean, it's up to us to make sure that that doesn't happen by making sure that we encourage others who maybe we don't believe. Like you were saying, Constantine earlier, you know, you get guests on here who you don't necessarily think would fit into your world or in your particular frame of reference.

And then the people that like you will have a chance to look at that, you know, and I think it's up to us all to do that. You know, I mean, there are certain things that I have said, like I will not have, you know, these eco-nutters, you know, on the... shows that I do just because I don't think they deserve to get the oxygen publicity, but people know they exist, and there are plenty of people who argue with me about it on Twitter. I think it's down to us not to become too insular and to make sure that, you know, we continue to bring things to be. I mean, I genuinely have been surprised at how sometimes I'll say something, and people go, I didn't know that.

You know, I had no idea that that was the case. And, you know, I think it's about education. It's about information, certainly not about misinformation. It's not about censoring things. I think the more people know the better, because I think I trust people to make sensible choices. The one worry that I have, Mike, and we are constantly battling against this,

is that you do see some channels that are captured by their own audience. Like the BBC again, we talk about. Yeah, exactly. I don't even know that that's true about the BBC. I think a lot of what their audience used to be is actually switching off, and they're losing massively in terms of license pairs. That's true.

Actually, they're not captured by their audience. What they are is they're captured by a small group of elite in inverted commas at the top. Well, there's an awful lot of them. I mean, I'm always constantly amazed at the numbers of people who appear on the BBC news shows. And you go, who's that? Science editors, it's like, never seen them before. You know, they come. You know, Washington correspondent.

You know, incredible. So you mean, like, smaller things. Yeah. So, you know, they're doing very well. And they become, in a sense, captured by their own audience. they're never going to give anything to their audience, which contradicts their worldview, because they don't want to antagonize, alienate them

and therefore make less money. I mean, I think that's right. And I mean, I've come up against that, as I say, in the last couple of years, because part of our audience for a while, because during the lockdown, we were very anti-lockdown, we were very anti-s sort of, you know, being told what to do by the government.

People then expected us to be sort of in some ways anti-COVID, and they expected us to come out and say that COVID was a hoax. And, you know, people shouldn't get vaccinated. and we didn't do that, they didn't like it. But I think you've got to stay true to what it is that you believe. You know, you have to take the path, which sometimes means you're going to be losing people. I mean, I lost something like 2,000 followers one weekend on Twitter

because I made a joke about, you know, not a joke exactly, but somebody went, don't you think it's important to do vaccine damage? You know, I went, not really, literally a throwaway line, you know, and they all went, actually disgrace, you know, he's in the pay of Bill Gates. And I'm like, well, you know, the fact is we've vaccinated, 40 million people and 400 people have had a problem. And yes, there are issues with that. But you've got to be very careful how you do it.

And we have actually covered it. But, you know, what I won't say is that this is a, you know, deliberate ploy to somehow, you know, microchip people so that we can be told what to do a week on Saturday, you know, when you go out. It's not true. You don't need a microchip for that, mate. We've got the police to come out of you. But that's what I mean.

You know, I think you can be sensible and you can have your views and you have to not be scared of losing your audience. I think there are some broadcasters, I'm not going to name any, who kind of, I would say, exploit their audience by continuing a narrative which they know isn't true and to talk about things like, you know, the WEF and Bill Gates and to talk about this is the biggest, you know, grab of personal data

that anybody's ever seen, what do they want to do with it. You know, and we should be vigilant about it, you know, of course. But, you know, don't frighten people. a lot of people out there are scared to death because they genuinely believe that, you know, Klaus Schwab's coming for them. You know, he's not, is he?

Yet. See? You see what you did. But that's the thing, you know, and I just think it's really dangerous that, you know, let's not lose the fact that, you know, logic is, generally

speaking, the best place to be. It's spoken like a true Bill Gates chill there, Mike. Of course. Thank you. to have you back on the show. Always a pleasure chatting with you. We're going to do a couple of questions for our supporters only after the interview. But before we do that, we've got our final questions, as always, which is what's the one thing that we're not talking about as a society that you think we should be? Now, that's interesting. Because it's hardly anything we don't talk about

that you can find where nobody's doing anything. I think one of the things that we don't really say often enough is that most people don't give a shit about trans. No one. Most people I know who are sensible, ordinary citizens of this world, you know, not only that they not know anybody who's trans, but actually they don't care about what they think. And that's not for me to say that I'm therefore going to try and get your window smashed in by trans activists. But, you know, we had a survey the other day in which it said, you know, people think there's a lot more trans people in Britain and there really are a lot more minorities because they get fed this constant diet of kind of, you know,

the gay movements, the, you know, the queer movements, the curious movement, whatever the fuck they are. You know, they're all, you know, having a great impact on our world. They're really not. You know, I think the truth is that the trans community is something like 0.005% of the actual population. And it doesn't really, you know, all of this crap about JK Rowling,

about, you know, whether or not trans people can be played by people who aren't trans in movies, you know, it's really nobody cares, and people don't talk about that, I don't think. Thank you so much. If people want to find you online, where is the best place to do that? Well, Twitter is where I'm mostly,

which is at IROMG, the Independent Republic of Mike Graham. Some people mistakenly think it's Iron Mike, which they call me, which have never been called, and they have a go and me going, what sort of conceited asshole calls himself Iron Mike?

It's not a name. I don't call yourself. There's a UFC fighter, calls himself Iron Mike. Well, there was Iron Mike Tyson. Yeah, and Iron Mike Chandler, I think. There's probably a few of them, but I'm certainly not one of them. I'm on Facebook as well, but better or worse,

and just find me on Talk TV, which is why I'm pretty much all the time. Perfect. Thank you very much, Mike. Been a pleasure as always. And thank you for watching and listening. We will see you with another brilliant episode like this one in a few days. Thanks for watching. We'll see you soon. And for those of you who like your trigonometry on the go,

it's also available as a podcast. Take care and see you soon, guys. Listen, I'm a great believer in owning nothing. You know, rent everything because that way nobody can come after you.