TRIGGERnometry - The Warning Signs Britain Ignored - Colin Brazier

Episode Date: August 19, 2026

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Growing up in Bradford, which I think shapes you. And growing up there has given me an early warning, clanging in my ears. It's massively segregated. There was a tolerance because people didn't think it mattered. I think the British state dropped the ball by allowing people we would later call Islamists to burn the satanic verses. We now have a de facto blasphemy laws. It was a scene of the biggest race riots involving British Asians

if this country's ever seen. They were an expression of territoriality, in my opinion. I know you had some small attempts to raise issues of this nature when you were at Sky. What was your experience? Organisations like Sky News can't tackle these subjects. Why not? Because they don't give a sh** about their customers anymore. I think Bradford is a very powerful and cautionary tale about future.

Many of you have commented that you're seeing too many ads in our videos. We've listened to your feedback and disabled YouTube ads in the middle of interviews. Can we ask you a favour and reasonable? turn. According to our analytics, most of you who watch our show aren't subscribed. Please help us to continue to bring you fantastic content by subscribing today, hitting like and leaving a comment with your thoughts on this video. Colin Brazier, welcome to Trigonometry. It's lovely to be here. It's great to have you. We've really both been enjoying your work of late, particularly some of the monologues you're putting out. Before we get into opinions and views and recent events and

future events and so on. Tell us your story. What's been your journey through life that leads you to be sitting here talking to us? It includes growing up in Bradford, which I think shapes you. It's a really big city. It's got the youngest demographics in Europe. It was the place where I think the British state dropped the ball by allowing people we would later call Islamists to burn the satanic verses. We should have jumped on them. We didn't. We now have a sort of de facto blasphemy laws. It was a scene of the biggest race riots involving British Asians if this country's ever seen. It's the 25th anniversary this summer of the Bradford riots of 2001. So a really important city.

And growing up there, it doesn't sound like I grew up there, I did grow up there, has given me an early warning, clanging in my ears that something needs to be said and done about the direction of Britain today. What else has shaped me? Being widowed 10 years ago, and then 8 or 9 years ago with 6, still quite young children, shaped me a lot because adversity is apt to concentrate the mind and it's certainly concentrated mind, but it also makes you a bit braver because you've seen horror. You've gazed into the abyss a little bit. So that was hugely shaping. My Catholic faith shapes me a lot. I'll give me three.

That'll do. And why don't you sound like you grow up in Bradford? It's a really good question and what I'm uncomfortable talking about. I didn't upgrade deliberately. I still say last and fast. Was it Alan Bennett talked about when he was Oxford, he lived in fear of being ambushed by the letter U? You know, people, I think people who are trying to put it on will come unstuck. It's funny, we believe in flexibility in all things. People can move in lots of different ways, but actually when it comes to transitioning to speaking a different way, people are quite uncomfortable. I, aesthetically, I like to enunciate what I say. I think it's inclusive.

I never get recognized by people, with one exception. It happened to me last week at a hospital. A Tanzanian guy came on to him. I was there with my son. He said, your dad, he used to be on. The number of African men who've come up with you, because they watch, they used to watch Sky News, or I worked 25 years,

they would watch Sky News as a way of improving their English and the way that people just listened to the BBC World Service to improve their English and the vernacular. And these are people who've learned English, people who come to the UK, from books very often. And I think the gap between how we speak English and how we write English

needs to be as close as possible. But actually, if you've come from Africa or Asia or South American, you know, live in London, you won't hear English spoken in the way, in the one way, that RP way. I'm not RP, but I try and speak clearly because I think it aids clear communication. I don't like Glotton stops either.

I think it's ugly. Well, I think one of the reasons that sort of adjusting the way you speak over time and over geographical I worked at the BBC. That was where it started. What I also think is there is a you talk about how it's very accepted now for people to transition in all sorts of things.

So what I was looking for, thank you. But I think the one thing that people are always very suspicious about in this country as someone who wasn't born here in a sort of semi-outside observer is transitioning class-wise as seen as the great, you need to stay exactly. You need to be Bradford, right or die. Roger Scruton, the great, late, Tory philosopher said.

The bravest thing that many people in Britain will do these days is overcome class snobbery. And I think he's, I mean, that's quite a claim, but I get it. I guess what I'm getting at also is, I think in your case, the background from which you've come, as you alluded to yourself, gives you a perspective on the world and this country in particular and the changes we've seen in this country that is less represented in Westminster

and the bubble and the media bubble. We were just talking before we started actually about the late Rod Little, who passed away recently, which was a very sad event. And we were talking about the fact that Rod Little used to edit the Today program not that long ago in historical terms, 20 or years ago, something all of that. And we're now at a position,

and I know you have experiences with Sky News, which perhaps we'll talk about, where you literally, I don't think you could be a cleaner at the BBC and hold publicly the opinions that Rod Little had, who was an editor of the Today program, a flagship program on the BBC 20 or years ago. It's funny you mentioned cleaner, because cleaner for some reason always comes into my head when I think about the people at Sky TV,

the crowning turd in the water pipe, for me, the nail in the coffin, just before GB News launched and gave me a lifeboat, was an inclusive language guide that the corporate high ups that Sky issued, it recommended you don't use words like mother, father, sister, brother. And I thought, if they put this democratically

to the shop floor, if they put this to the Nigerian security guards and the Filipino cleaners, how do you feel about using this kind of language? They fuck off. But it's not them, these organisations are not democratic. They're straying into politics, increasingly, of course, with no democratic mandate.

But just to answer your question, your original question, I've got a couple of sisters. One's a headmistress in Yorkshire. The other still works. She left school at 16, went straight to working the same textile mill that my mum and some of her mum was one of nine. Her sisters worked in, her mother worked in.

And my sister still works 16 hours a week at the co-op checkout, you know, meeting people. And she's my window on life as it really is, right? She sees white flight. sees people in their increasingly shrinking enclaves. She's on the receiving end, not often, but sometimes, of racial abuse from an angry Pakistani heritage man, calling her a white bitch. So this is my window on a world that the people I used to work with at Sky and at the BBC don't even know exists by and much.

And that's such an important point because it's been said time and time again, but I don't think these people really understand what it's like to live in a city like Bradford as it is now. So what is it like to live in Bradford now? What is Bradford like? I don't know, because I don't want to live there. I know for my sister, but gentlemen, I don't. I've written about it, and I'm trying to write something longer about Bradford.

But I don't want to, why would I want to... I was talking to somebody the other day who was talking about to live in Twicken, and I said, mate, how lovely. to be able to go back to the place that you grew up in. And I could go back to live in Bradford. I don't want to, you know, people watching this, we maybe come from Bradford, we're thinking, mate, it's got great things going on.

It's a, it's a city that's regressing. It's undeveloping as a city. It's massively segregated. There are no-go areas. You've got, as I used to tell it, you know, when I went to came back from university and I'd listen to my relies, banging about, you know, being quite racist.

And I'd say, please don't, please don't do that, you know, my sort of prissy way. And I used to think, well, you know, it's sort of a broken business model, Bradford. It had these massive textile mills. It was one of the richest cities in Europe 150 years ago, incredibly. All the textile bills closed. And you had a fairly xenophobic, Yorkshire, indigenous people, and unequally, as it turned out, xenophobic Mapuri, Kashmiri community, who were very much led by the Baradari. clan system, deeply regressive. And you put those two people together and never the twain

shall meet. And that whole idea that, you know, but I went to school with people who were, actually interesting, when at the school, which was sort of 50, 50% white, the school I went to, my non-white friends said he'd be Sikh. I didn't really have, you know, I was a kid, I was an ingenue. Why did that happen? I don't know. I still can't answer that question. But even then, you were starting to see some of the problems that would come through around grooming, and a sort of self-segregating impulse not to integrate. But at least there are people, you know, Pakistani heritage people who were working with, you know, indigenous white people.

Now they don't even, their paths never cross. I think it's possible to grow up in parts of Ransford and go days without seeing people who don't look like you. And that's regression, isn't it? Completely. And you said that there's no go areas. I mean, I've got no, I've never felt myself, but other people have said that.

I mean, clearly. And my sister would say that there are parts of Brantford she wouldn't go to or her children wouldn't go to. And I'd take her on trust. I mean, that sort of, the 25th anniversary of the Bradford riots this summer, happened in July 2001, were an expression of territoriality, in my opinion. You know, it was about young Pakistani heritage men saying to the forces of the state, in this case, the West Yorkshire Police, our RIT runs here, not yours. So, and we shouldn't be surprised,

by that. I mean, you've got a parallel society which has its own de facto legal system, which has imported customs and values from a very different part of the world. You know, and the level of naivety to think that, for instance, you could import a whole community from a country like Pakistan. I've worked in Pakistan a few times over the years. And, you know, how many people pay, what's a proportionate people who pay income tax in Pakistan? It's about one and a half percent. Now, I'm not saying that the Pakistan Heritage people of Bradford, have imported that laissez-faire attitude towards paying tax into this country. But on one level, it would be surprising if they didn't bring a little bit of those values.

You just have a sort of stunning in curiosity that we have as the host community, there's assumption that people won't bring their values with them en masse, and that those values won't harden when a point of critical mass is reached, which is what you've got in place like Bradford, Bradford and Leicester and Manchester and parts of London. A really good mate of mine is actually from Bradford. It doesn't sound like me. He kind of does a little bit, but he's an academic. But his partner at the time was, when they were talking about things to do with race or Islam,

she was always kind of baffled. She was like, but why are you talking like this? And then... You're catastrophizing. Yeah, all of this stuff. But I don't understand, you know, immigration, blah, blah, blah. But then when I was talking to her the other day, she went, Francis. And then I went to Bradford, and I went, oh, I get it.

Yeah. And that's someone from a Muslim country herself. Oh, really? Yeah. Yeah. And I was talking to somebody recently who, I won't name the company, but it's a company with lots of outlets across the country, and his brother, sorry, correction, his brother runs a company which has lots of different outlets across the country, and he said that Bratford was the worst city he'd ever been to. I mean, it's not a beauty contest that one city should lose.

It's just that I think Bradford is a very powerful and cautionary tale about the future. You know, I used to think Bradford was just Detroit without the music. It was a one-off. It was an outlier. It had this broken business model. But it was, you know, I used to solve my conscience by thinking, it's just Bradford. But that's not, you know, it's Bournemouth now. It's, it's Belfast now. You know, for Bradford, read many, many parts of the country. And we've not even got started yet because of the changing demographics of this country. And that's the problem is that Bradford is no longer an outlier, like you said. It has now become symbolic of the decline of our country.

but also what happens when you have unfettered mass immigration into a particular city, it changes everything. And a lot of the time, those changes aren't necessarily positive. No, they're not. And I think it's what happens also when you don't grasp the nettle, and you keep kicking the can down the road. And again, this is why I think Bradford imparts also really important lessons. Nineteen 87, eight, nine. The Salman Rushdie, the fatwa was issued against the British author, Savan Rushdie, for his book, The Satanic Verses, a group of people we would later learn to call Islamists gathered outside the City Hall, the magnificent City Hall of Bradford, which has this clock tower based on the clock tower in Florence,

these Victorian burgers who had this incredible self-improving desire, nothing was too good for them, we were as good as a renaissance, in the lee of this magnificent building, people who had learned later. learned to call these Lamiss burned Salman Rushdie's satanic verses publicly, and the pictures were beamed all around the world. The state at that point should have said, fuck you, this is not how we do things in this country. We don't burn books. You don't do that somewhere else. And we mass arrests sending out a really clear signal. But at the time, Bradford, Labour on Council, also at Labor on then, there was a policy that came down from the council level

of multiculturalism, of all cultures being equal. We, you know, leaflets go out in Urdu. We don't mind if you take your kids off halfway through a term back to Pakistan from an arranged marriage. There was a tolerance because people didn't think it mattered. And of course, now we realize this stuff like drawing a line against blasphemy or saying to people, you can't take your kids away to Pakistan halfway through a school term. We now realize it does matter, but it's too late that horse has bolted. And what did you, I know you tried to cover these issues when you were at Sky News. Not hard enough. I wasn't blowing smoke up your ass. I was more curious. I was more curious about why the media were not able to give these issues the due attention and investigation.

Because I think one of the things, you know, we've had the horrific experience of having to sit across from grooming gang survivors on a number of occasions to try and raise further awareness of that issue, of course, along with lots of other people. And it's horrific to listen to their stories, of course. What they went through is infinitely more horrific. But what One of the things that I think is really angering, not saddening, not you feel compassion, but angering is that the state, the offices of the state, the police, social services, in some cases doctors within the NHS, and media and politicians were afraid. They were not willing to address it.

And people in the media I know and we know who tried to talk about things that were not even that controversial as that was simply not able to do so. Why do you think that is based on your career and your experiences? I'll come at it from a slightly different direction. I think what's astonishing to me, sort of reassuring as well, is that individuals, when it comes to something like grooming, individual journalists, individual former police officers can make a huge difference. I remember interviewing the Labor MP, Anne Cryer, a widow of Bob Cryer, Firebrand, left wing MP in her home in Shipley outside Bradford. She was the MP for Keithley. She was the first parliamentarian to try and really draw attention to what was happening in some of these northern

mill towns and cities like Bradford. It's not a town, this city, it's a big, blade place. And, you know, she was routinely denounced by people like, not Dawn Butler, Diane Abbott, as a racist. You know, this was an MP doing what an MP should do, which is drawing attention to a significant problem in her constituency that was completely ignored and invisible to many people and for which she was rubbish and denounced. By people within her own party? People in her own party. And there were consistently, the grooming

stories, a story of individuals who made a difference. Individuals, and we should all take comfort from this. Individuals, whether it's Elon Musk at the most profound level, individuals can still change history. I know historians don't believe this, I think he's massive seismic changes. They can. Whether it's the former, you know, Maggie Oliver, the former detective, whether it's

the journalist at the Times, I'm to give Andrew Norfolk, who used to work at the York Post, my old newspaper. These individuals can actually make a difference and bring that story to light. The news doesn't just tell you what's happening. It tells you what to make of it. And the real red flag isn't what's said. It's what gets left out. That's why I use ground news.

Every day, they gather thousands of stories from across the political spectrum. Compare how different outlets are covering the same story side by side and contextualize it, including specific differences in how each side is reporting it. That's how you see what whole audiences are not being told. My favorite feature is their blind spot feed. Every day, it flags upwards of 20 stories that are being ignored by either the left or the right. Let's look at some examples. Follow along at ground.news slash trigonometry.

Take this story. A pure research survey found that 56% of Americans now support banning social media for anyone under 16, with a majority of Republicans and a majority of Democrats behind it. Genuine bipartisan agreement is rare enough to be newsworthy on its own. And yet, coverage came almost entirely from the right. The left barely touched on it. On the other hand, look at this. An AP poll found that 66% of Americans now say democracy is central to what it means to be American,

down from 80% five years ago. That is a serious story about how the country sees itself, especially on its 250th anniversary. and it got three times more coverage from the left than it did from the right. Ground News puts all of this in one place. Headline comparisons, bias breakdowns, ownership insights, and context so you can actually understand what's going on, not just react to what you're told.

Go to ground.com slash trigonometry or click the link in the description of this episode. Get 40% of their vantage plan, the same one that we use, and stop being managed by the media. Yes, but I think. within you put a good slant on it and I think that's a good thing to do but on the other hand I think the story you just told is actually terrible I think that's a horrific story of course it's a horrific story you're right it's absolutely horrific and and in a small way I don't want to trivialize what happened to the victims of these grooming rape gangs it's a small reflection

of exactly the thing I was pointing to which is if you try to challenge any of this the full powers of the state will actually be applied to you, not to the rapists, not to the traffickers, not to the people who are committing the crimes. And so come back to the media with me because I'm interested in, I know you had some small attempts to raise issues of this nature when you were at Sky. What was your experience? Well, I was 2007, 2006, I was doing some longer films at Sky. So I wasn't yet in a studio and I was sort of off the road and back in, I'd been abroad for a while,

came back and um i took a film crew to brantford and we went for instance to the church where i was baptized uh it it had been fire bombed um the the the the priest there you know some local hotheads i think father you know really this the fire bombing happened on the night that the american air force started bombing the taliban in afghanistan in 2001 you don't think that was a that was a maybe a coincidence. No, no, no, no. So it was breaking fresh journalistic ground, telling new stories. That story, the report that the firebombing against that church some years earlier hadn't been reported in a way that I imagine a firebombing against a mosque, for instance, would have been reported. So there was that disparity there. I managed to get that into my story,

but the elements of the story that just, I did an interview with one guy, a former newspaper report on the local paper. And it was, I can't remember if it was taken out, but I was left an impression, I can't get, I can't remember this specifically at this distance, but the piece through conversations and through the final edited version of the piece that went to air was much less strong than I would have wished it. It was still

broaching some of the subjects, but it was much, much weaker. Look, we'll, this organisations like Sky News can't tackle these subjects. Why not? Because they don't give a shit about their customers anymore. Because they're not,

their business model is broken, nobody watches it. What they want to do is impress their friends at other media institutions, and in particular they want to impress people who award gongs, awards, BAFTAs, RTS, all Television Society awards. Because when your viewing figures are in terminal decline, because people now get their news from phones, not from TV channels, you need another metric to prove your success. And that's my BAFTA. You don't get that BAFTA because you've done a report from Bradford on how, you know, you get your report, you know, You get a knock on your door from the police, potentially.

Right. And nothing sums this conversation out better than that tweet that I think it was Kay Burley did. Your former... I can't. Dan wouldn't ask me about Kay Burley. No, go on, go on. I'll let you finish. And it was, I can't remember the exact wording,

but it was talking about the illegal migrant crossings. And there was that picture of that, it wasn't a dinghy, it was a mega dingy, coming over these people illegally and what her basic argument was, oh, it's not that many people, what's a problem? And I remember reading that and I go, you couldn't come across more out of touch if you actually were doing this on purpose.

My difficulty is that Kay was very good to me when my late wife was dying and we were struggling to get Sky to pay for some of the medical bills. And in that situation, I'm sorry if this sound melodramatic, but it's true. She was very good. She shook down the sort of high ups at sky and some of those medical bills were paid. It will be ignoble of me to respond to your question. I'll leave it at that.

I mean, you know my views are on the big boats. It is an invasion, period. We need to take much more robust action to stop it happening. It's a slow motion catastrophe. The media have been complicit. I've seen that myself. 2050 well you know one of the kind of red pill moments for me was 2015 the migration crisis i was in Serbia, Hungary, Greece, these places and watching my colleagues from the media all TV media

especially who would always single out the woman with a long hair who speaks great english you know she lives in a nice part of Damascus but ignore the guys who didn't speak English and they were just out of prison or whatever so it was this determination then to see only good things from the future engineers and lawyers and doctors who were coming to the UK And why is that, Colin? Because people, because the media has become more leftish, because it's become, and we can talk about the reasons why that is. But once you're more leftish, you believe in the perfectibility of human nature.

You're naturally a fairly utopian bent. You want to believe the best of all things at all times of all people. You're constantly relativizing. You don't want to make hard judgments. And it does tie, it does loop back. to where a lot of our journalists come from now, literally come from. You know, that I don't want to sort of, there was no golden era of newspaper journalism, but it was true that the time was when newspapers in particular were filled with 60, you know,

kids who less school at 16, they didn't go to university, they certainly didn't do a media studies course. They were hefted their locality. They had no ambitions even to go to Fleet Street. They wanted to serve their community. I mean, they were still, you know, in possession of rat like cunning and scumbags. because Germans are meant to be scumbags. But they were scumbags who believed in their community and felt they weren't looking for the next job in London.

They wanted to tell the truth about what was happening in their local community. That doesn't happen anymore. A lot of newspapers, local newspapers, closed down, and the effect in terms of who's going into, you know, who is staffing Sky News, BBC, ITV, Good Morning, Britain, all these places, Channel 4 News. It's self-replicating.

The people who do the hiring are looking to replicate themselves. and the people they hire. And also, the other thing that happened I saw it latterly at Sky is that you were starting to get a degree of newsroom activism as well around things like trans issues. You know, I remember seeing a script,

I haven't thought about this for a while, let me try and dredge it up. There was a script, my co-presenter and I, who will remain nameless, lived in terror of having to misgender somebody. It was the train coming down the track. And we had various stratagems,

you know, it's just only use, the name. Let's not, let's not get into somebody's gender. And then Sky News, the website, did a story about Sam, who's the singer, Sam Smith? Yes. And now he was, now, uh, did they. They. And I read, I read, I read, I read, I read, I read, the artist, I read, honest, guys, I read the article in good faith. I read it, and I read it in good faith. And I got, I got, I got lost. Because I didn't know, who's, who's the fucking they they're talking about now? Because, you know, maybe my kids would say to me, dad, you know, it's just because you're an old bastard and you just need to be, you know, now you're on the lookout for them. They would be fine.

But I read it and it was an impediment to a lucid copy. It was just opaque. It was obfuscating. It was confusing. And I raised it with some, you know, a senior figure at Sky who just, in so many words, told me to fuck off. Why? I think at Sky in particular, there was a corporate impulse to, that came down from a corporate place. And this is why in the sense, Sky was worse than the BBC. Because at least the BBC, the BBC you had on the shop floor, some dissenting voices, I think that Sky, as it became the sort of paramilitary wing of Channel 4 news, that they, it was, it was from the corporate high ups. There was also a sense of embarrassment, I think, about the Murdoch connection. That was, they felt soiled by that Murdoch thing. So there was a

determination to put, you know, wash him right out of their hair. Um, but no, I just think Sky became woker than the BBC. And that's been replicated right the way through the media. And it's just accelerated their decline, hasn't it? Yeah, and part of the problem is even, I'm not, I'm trying to think of some employer, I haven't slant off yet, but even at GB News, which is a good thing, I remember, you know, I was one of the Lord's presenters at GB News.

I was there for 18 months. They fired me. My figures weren't good enough. And they, I remember I used to watch Nigel Farage walk in when his show was on. and thinking, my God, mate, a lot of the people here don't like you, not because they don't know you, but they don't like what you stand for. This is GB News, because they've still got to put the shows out.

And there's a lot of, you know, it's a lot of production. And there aren't many people who are ideologically aligned with GB News, who know which buttons to press and which cameras to work and all that sort of stuff. So I would guess at least, at least in the early days, at least half the people who were working at GB News were really not digging it ideologically. And it made for a lonely setting for someone like Nigel, as he used to walk in. So it's not just the usual suspect, even GB News with it. And one of the themes that you actually talk about very eloquently on your monologues,

which I really recommend people to go and watch, because I think they're genuinely excellent. Thank you. Is this idea of social engineering. So let's talk about that, because media is part of that, but also government is as well. So what do you mean by that, Colin? It's such a massive catch-all. I scarcely know where to begin. it can be a nudging people to making certain decisions.

I mean, I was writing recently about the work of a shady civil service department, which tries to, it sounds conspiratorial, but it's true. I mean, which tries to shape public opinion in the wake of, say, an Islamist atrocity by, I mean, we're not very far here from Westminster Bridge. I remember covering that attempt to mow people down, successful attempt, you don't put it that way, to mow people down by an Islamist some years ago. And within, you know, hours of that attack happening, posters started to appear saying, you know, hashtag love will win and all this sort of stuff. You know, there is a small, small department within government that seeks to massage public opinion to make sure that the family liaison officers who have gone to talk to bereaved victims of an atrocity will, as we've seen recently, following events in Belfast and elsewhere, you get these very anodyne statements stressing the,

the benefits of mass immigration. I don't know whether they're written by the bereaved victims. I suspect some of them aren't. So that's social engineering. That's engineering anger, suppressing anger, and you can argue there's a very good case for that. That's social engineering. That's just one tiny example among many.

And that's the, I think the department's called RICO, is it? RICO, the research and information communications unit. I mean, it's made it sound as drab and boring as it could be. But actually, when you think about what it's doing and how freedom of information requests have been routinely denied and where a lot of its work remains classified. And again, you know, I'm no fan of the Daily Mail, but because of stuff, you know, stuff in my own history,

but the Daily Mail dug that story out. So, you know, the mainstream media, bits of the mainstream media, newspapers, I think, I know it's fashionable to disdain what they do, but they still matter. Oh, the media is very important. It's something we've always said on the show. The new media is important, but so is legacy media. And it just needs to be much better.

But yeah, I mean, in terms of the families of the victims of horrific atrocities, it is surely not a coincidence that they all basically come out with exactly the same state. And by the way, in the case of the mother of Rihanna and White, who came out and basically didn't say diversities are great or strange, but actually said, can you please deal with this issue because our children are paying the price? No one cares. And her words are not used to justify government policy, whereas the words that we suspect are being coached out of the family members of victims of crime are being used to justify the suppression

of the debate. We'll get back to the interview in just a moment. But first, let's talk about something that might change the way you see the world. Many of you will know that Christianity has been a subject of fascination on this. this show and its role in shaping the modern world is something we explored in detail with historian Tom Holland last year. Christianity isn't just a religion. It's been the bedrock of Western civilization all the way from our legal systems to why we feel slightly guilty about having that extra biscuit. Maybe that's just me. But understanding Christianity in today's complex world can be a

challenge. That's where the 321 course comes in. 321 is a free online video-based course that provides a compelling introduction to the Christian faith without assuming any prior knowledge. Over four engaging sessions, you'll explore profound truths about God, the world, and your place in it. All brought to life with stunning animation. The course is presented by Glenn Shriverner. You might remember me appearing as a guest on a show a few years ago. Glenn has a way of making these deep, complex ideas accessible and thought-provoking. Whether you're just curious about Christianity or want to understand the foundation of so much of the modern world,

three-to-one offers a perspective that's hard to find elsewhere. It's a chance to see the world from a different angle. And who knows, you might even find yourself nodding along with some unexpected insights. So why not check it out? It's free. There are no hidden cost or spam. Just head over to 321course.com slash trigger. Sign up with your email, choose a password, and dive in. That's 3 to1 course.com slash trigger. And let's not forget first principles here. I'm not saying it doesn't matter what the family want. It just doesn't matter as much as some people think it should do. When Henry Novak's family stood on the steps of Southampton Crown Court and said, you know, we're very critical of the police,

but then also said this case mustn't be used to stoke divisions. I don't know what to what extent they were coached to say that. And so, you know, Kirstama then used that against Nigel Farage. Nigel Farage don't stoke division because the family don't want you to, as if it was some trump card to gag people. It wasn't. And people need to go back to first principles. The case against Henry Novak's killer was brought by the Crown. It was brought by the state, paid for my taxpayers on all our behalf. It wasn't a civil suit. It wasn't a private prosecution.

I remember, you know, people get confused about these things. When I was at Sky, I used to do regularly, fairly regularly interview a woman called Debbie Purdy, who's now dead. She had multiple sclerosis. And she would appear, and I would interview her. And she was an early and very good, very shrewd and compelling advocate for assisted suicide. And I would never treat her like a victim because, it was clear to me she was an advocate, she was a campaigner. But I had colleagues who had really soft-soed her

because she was a victim. She was dying. She was in a wheelchair. And I remember getting emails from people saying, you can't treat this woman like you're treating her. You can't talk to her that way. I was thinking, fuck you. She's here to advocate for a major change in the law. And she said it was a campaigner. I'm not going to patronise her by sort of being, you know, going easy on her.

So we're becoming more sentimental as a society. We need to be really clear-eyed about where the threats are. We need to be coherent and logical as well. And the problem is, though, this is the real problem with this, is that you can continue softening the statements, but all the while there is this well of anger and it's building and it's building and it's building. And you can keep using this tactic, but very rapidly,

we're getting to a point where that tactic simply ain't going to wash. And if anything, that tactic is just simply going to... inflamed tensions even more. Because people know what's happening. They're not stupid. I know. I agree. I agree. And the extent to which, I mean, I did a monologue recently on David Betts is the war historian, no, sociologist.

What is David, how would you describe David Betts, the King's College? Inaccurately, probably, if I did it from memory. But he's a guest on the show, and he's someone for people who may not remember. There was a very popular interview we did with him, who talks about the probability of civil war in Britain. From an academic expert. So there are a certain test that need to be met, and we've met four out of five of them, whatever it is. And I did a monologue about it,

partly because of what David Betts had said, but also just because, as I'm sure, you know, you found as well, people whose judgment you trust, they're not cranks, they're not nutters. I can think of one friend in particular. You know, amateur historian, read history at university,

not a headbanger, saying to me, you know, in hushed tones at the end of an evening, oh, it's going to be civil war, And I don't think it's catastrophizing. I don't think it's just somebody pissed at the end of a long night trying to be interesting. I think it's people with children and a stake in the future looking rationally at what's happening to the country and thinking this is where this ends up, right?

And see, in a country where these things were terrible but were likely to be solved, you would have political leaders emerging who were willing to, number one, just for starters, acknowledge the problem, that'd be nice. Then they might want to address the problem. Then they might have the caliber to be able to do so and perhaps the wherewithal to withstand the inevitable criticism that would come. And I thought one of your best recent monologues

was about the caliber of the politicians. And it's a challenging one to talk about because on the one hand, I think we've all seen it with our own eyes, the decline in that. On the other hand, I guess it's the eternal complaint of the sort of, you know, disgusted of Tumbridge Wells and all the rest of I say this as someone who lives in Tumbridge Wells. You're increasingly disgusted, of course. It's the eternal complaint through

the ages, you might say. So make the case for us, the decline and the standards and caliber of politicians is part of the reason we're here. I'll try to, but let me just finish that point about civil war. Sure. Came me bad knock. Came a bad knock. who implicitly authorized me to write a monologue about civil war, because she raised it in an interview. She said, it's not impossible. It's the leader of the opposition saying, civil war is not impossible.

We mentioned Rod Little earlier. Rod Little's final column said that Camille gives me hope. She gives me hope, actually. But anyway, the rest of a party are shit. She, I think, is formidable and increasingly impressive, separate story. But she is an MP, and the people she's surrounded by increasingly are, woeful, they lack a hinterland. If you look at this particular intake, there's a particular, I think there's a special problem with the fact that so many of those 232 MPs, new Labour MPs

who came in, had very little experience, or any of us would consider it to be real, you know, real life. 72 of them, I think, have backgrounds in the charity sector, learning how to spend other people's money. It's very good training for government. It's, but it's demulterable on some levels. I mean, the, The US networks used to take prime minister's questions live, you know, such was the standard of the back and forth rhetorically. I don't think they would now. MPs read their questions.

And look, the ability to memorize or extemporise is not necessarily the only guide to somebody's intelligence or competences of parliamentarian, but it's not bad guide. And now MPs who used to be shouted down, howled down, reading, reading, you know, if you were reading a question or a point of all or anything, and now they're just routinely

read, they lack the confidence of self-assurance to be a presence in that chamber. There were the instances I mentioned in my monologue where, you know, literally within days of the American attack on Iran and the Middle East is in flames and Brits are cowering in bunkers in Dubai. And just over the road from where we are here in Port Cullis House, the overflow building for the Palace of Westminster, 40 plus MPs, Lib Dems, Labour, Tories were doing a raising awareness session for obesity. They were having fun because they are essentially increasingly frivolous. It's not their fault.

We're all increasingly frivolous. We've lost a tragic sense of life to a great degree. And that's wonderful because, you know, my mum was one of nine, two were dead before they reached adulthood. Times was hard. It's one of the reasons it strikes me absurd when people say, I can't possibly have children. these are such awful times. They ain't. And the NPs that used to fill that place,

Margaret Fatscher's first cabinet, had three war veterans who'd won the military cross. But they also have these, I think about Stama, I think I said in that monologue, a fish rocks from the head. His statement

when he stood down was particularly egregious. You know, I'm leaving with good grace. you know, it's clever. Having improved the country, I think, having this clever. You know, it's a clever guy. He's a lawyer.

He understands that words are freighted with semantic meaning. Keir, is for everybody else to judge whether you left with good grace. Not for you to say whether you left with good grace. It's just a mark in how he didn't get it. And was so conceited. And people thought he was a sort of managerial type. No, it was fucking vain. The vanity of the man to tell us all after those two hideous years,

comically inept years, that history would be kind to him. No, you fucker. You're about the worst prime minister we've ever had. And compared to some of his predecessors, Labor predecessors, every bit as much as, you know, other parties, that absence of a hinterland is particularly strong. He went on the BBC's Desert Island discs,

Kea Starma, and at the end of it, they say, you know, what's the book you take to the Desert Island? He says, I'm like an Atlas. And I thought, you know, Michael Foote, you know, very left-wing Labour leader, maybe even a KGB-Stuge, who knows, wrote books.

Dennis Healy had a huge library. You know, this is a, you know, Ted Heath, concert pianists, sailed around the world. You know, we had leaders of this country who had real hinterlands. You know, they were intellects and they'd done stuff. And that's a real issue. They'd done stuff. You looked at previous cabinet ministers. they were accomplished people.

They wrote, they were academics, or they'd run businesses, or even on the left, they'd be, they would have worked in minds. They would come from a really poor background, worked their way up, joined the trade union, done this, done that. You look at these long, you go, what have you done? I know. I mean, I mentioned in the monologue that, I mean, I'm not sure how many people are even aware of this. Ernest Bevin, who was orphaned, orphaned at eight,

and then was a farm labourer at 13 in Somerset, Ernest Bevin. Nye Bevan went down the pit, coal pit like his father, at 13. Ernest Bevan founded NATO and Nybevin founded the National Health Service. This idea that you get from, I've heard it's particularly true of some Labour MPs, that the world's a Guinness, you know, Angela Rayne, you're having a crack at me because I'm from the wrong side of the tracks. No, I'm having a crack at you because you're shit. you know, and this poverty of low expectations that somehow because you came from a poor background,

you can't possibly achieve as much as the person who came from a good background, it's belied by the history of your own bloody party, Bevan and Bevin. Well, I think what it speaks to is we now live in the age of victimhood, and it's not left or right, there's plenty of people on the right now

who really want to be victims as well. Yeah. But with politicians, it's a very, in a society that thinks a victim is the greatest, the greatest, sanctity that's available to all of us, victimhood, it's a very good tactic to deflect criticism and to say, well, you're only criticizing me because I'm a victim of life. I've been underprivileged or whatever rather than criticizing you because what you're doing is not good. We've got to call it out,

though. We've got to call it out. And that's really, really hard. I mean, I think that one of the jobs that somebody's, I mean, this is big stuff now. I mean, one of the jobs that somebody, maybe it's Nigel Farage, maybe it's coming about not, but somebody, for instance, has to, when dealing with welfare, level with the country. And I'm sorry if this is what I'm about to say is going to offend some people. But that message would be something like this. Our welfare is now completely under control. It means that the means we have to defend ourselves as a country, you know, welfare over warfare means that we can't defend ourselves. The welfare budget is so massive. And that means people who have striven and been brilliant citizens all

their life will not, will die. Their children will die because we can't defend ourselves, because the welfare bill is so bloated. So what we're going to do is we're going to really crack down on welfare dependency. And I've got to level with you, the British people, that there will be people with depression and autism and the people who are saying that if you cut my budget, if you cut my funding, my mental health will suffer and the charities will say, and people might kill themselves. I'm saying to you, the British people, that this is a price we may have to pay. There will be victims. There will be victims. Similarly, we're going to stop the boats. There may be victims. But I'm going to give you loads of warning. I'm going to give you months of warning. But if you

try and come across the channel, you're a very large dingy, we're going to push you back. And you might drown. It's horrifying. I'm a Christian. I don't want to say that. You know, all men are my brothers. But we are not, there's such a mismatch between our willingness to really grasp the nettle and what happens if we don't. A while back, I pushed myself in training because I'm a legend, but ended up with a strain that took far longer to recover from than it ever used to. Nothing dramatic, just one of those moments where you realize your body isn't snapping back the way it once did. And as you get older, those moments start adding up. Turns out there's a reason for that, and it's not just getting older.

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For an extra 15% off your purchase. Your older self-will thank you. And thanks to Qualia for sponsoring this episode. I completely agree. And I think this Christian point to me is very interesting because I think a lot of the Christian ethics are so valuable and so important. I say this as someone who's sort of semi-practicing and semi-believing, I guess. You know, a religious person will probably scoffer that, but it's how I feel.

I would never scoffer it. But all men are my brothers must apply to your brothers first. They must. They must apply to your own people first. If you privilege foreign citizens, and I say this as someone who lived in this country is a foreign citizen for many, many, many years, at the expense of your own brothers, you're not doing right and you're not actually practicing or implementing the claim you make when you say, all men are my brothers, because you are acting against the interest of your own actual brothers by privileging people who are in, as you said, it's a controversial term, but I think after, particularly after we saw in, how do you pronounce that? You're the Spanish speaker here.

Sweater. Sweeter. Oh, sweater. Sweeter. After you see those scenes and you just go, look, I don't like when people call what's happening in invasion. I don't know that it's an accurate term. To me, an invasion is people storming the beaches with swords and guns and whatever. But what you saw in sweater was an invasion.

It was. It's a fact. You can pretend, you can say, oh, most of them have gone home as if the fact that people have, you know, come into your house without your permission and then most of them have left that somehow makes it okay well you can't place the interest of those people against and above the interest of your own citizens there's nothing christian about that i would argue well i have doubts about whether 25 years and tv was worth it i do i do remind myself that footage and video and images are still what really changes minds yeah and it was i agree those images from suitor have of kick started a conversation in brussels

even about this. All one of my brothers, and some of more my brothers and others, there was a brilliant book and a brilliant article, actually, written by an amazing Anglo-Iranian guy called Bidjaman Rani. I don't know if you've come across Bidjamun Rani. He wrote an amazing book called God is an Englishman. And he wrote a piece for the Salisbury Review, which is a quarterly conservative magazine.

I'm one of the volunteers who works on that magazine. And in his article, very learned scholarly erudite article, He's a church, he's Oxford educated, but works as a church warden in Exminster, very improbable character. And he gives, he takes you through the Bible verses that explain why your first recourse is to your neighbour. And it's not controversial. You know, there is a brotherhood, brotherhood of man. You know, someone like Tom Holland's amazing book, Dominion reminded all of us 10 years ago that so much of what we take for granted around human rights and individual autonomy,

is lifted directly from Christianity. And we just take so much for granted in our lives today that cut springs from Christianity. Tom Holland paints a very dark picture about what happens when you take those struts away. I agree with him. So, yeah, people misunderstand that. And particularly, I remember there's brilliant David Goodhart,

you may have interviewed. Yeah, we have several times. And, you know, he recounts a conversation in his groundbreaking book, The Road to Somewheres, some words, anywhere. He was at a dinner. he may have told you this story. He's at a dinner on this Mark Thompson, then the head of the BBC, and Gus O'Donnell, cabinet secretary, head of the civil service. And they're,

and they're both Catholics, as I'm and they were basically saying that their first duty, as they felt it, was to everybody, to the global welfare, not national welfare. And I think that that view amongst our elites is pretty common. And the other, the problem is, this prioritization of the global, the everywhere's, but that is also mixed with an outright contempt for white working class people in particular. And that's a very dangerous combination because white working class people in this country are the majority.

And if you are openly contemptuous of them, that's only going to raise the temperatures even further in our country. And the issue is, is that when people from those communities then start to air grievances, particularly around things to do with race, with immigration, it doesn't go anywhere. And if not, it's met with actual contempt. And we've seen that for so long now. And my concern is we've got to a point where you're looking at the rise of certain individuals and certain organizations and you're going, This is going to get ugly pretty quickly. We're very lucky in this country.

The average Brit is quite temperate. We're not prone to extremism. But what I'm seeing, and maybe it's spending too long on Twitter or whatever else, things are fibriled at the moment. My late wife, who was an ardent Brexiteer, but actually started out on the left. At Bristol University, she was a member of the Revolutionary Communist Party. She used to say to me, we'll be all right in this country.

because we take the piss. It's what we do best. We take the piss and you know, you recognize this more than anybody. And and I used to believe that was true. I think it's less and less true that I parked that. One thing that's coming across to me really strongly at the moment and, you know, when we zoom back, if I live another 25 years, I think we'll care far less about COVID, we'll care far more in terms of it being a punctuation mark in history, and we'll care far more and we'll see much more damage that should be laid at the door of the George Floyd terror. You know, when I go back to Sky, seeing the reaction of big organizations like that to the George Floyd killing, by the way, it was footage again. It was TV footage that

did the persuading. And if you look at what's happened in the education sector, the charity sector, and this idea that people could stop taking responsibility for their own shortcomings, their own lack of persistence and blame it on, you know, whiteness or, you know, just blaming other things rather than maybe looking at yourself and thinking, do we have a problem here with fatherlessness? You know, is there a cultural problem here? And Francis obviously is alluding to the civil war on the right, you might say politically in this country to some extent.

What do you make of that? as someone who I assume wants the right to succeed. I do. I really do. And because if they don't, we really, where do we go? I didn't know this is happening until a friend of mine who used to edit the Jewish Chronicle said to me, Colin, you need to be aware that, you know, that anti-Semitism is coming back in a big way. So, you know, look at this guy, Nick Fuentes. And I didn't really believe him.

And then a couple of things made me realize it is a new fissure. And I think for me, that will become totemic. You know, there will be people watching this thinking, I like you until you said that. I'm going to say it. I love the idea of Israel. I've worked in Jerusalem for months on end. I think that what happened on October the 7th is staying on humanity.

And if people feel it was, you know, start saying it's a old flag operation. I just can't go there with you guys. I just can't go there with you guys. So these are where these divisions are creeping in. I don't see how you heal those divisions once you've created them or allowed them to be created. And the problem is, is these divisions are then creeping into politics quite significantly. I found a very interesting one of the first things that West Streeting did when he came to power was talk about the way that the Kier-Starmer in particular had handled that situation,

October 7th, incredibly badly. West Street, or Andy Burnham? Oh, Andy Burnham. Andy Byrne, sorry, Andy, I misspoken. You skipped ahead two years until the future, mate. I don't take so. Well, but you go, I don't remember, I thought Kirstama was actually quite measured.

I thought he was strong on a very important issue, which was the slaughter of Jewish people. Yeah. But this is a party now, which is so in hoc to its Muslim voting bloc, which is terrified of them deserting their traditional blind allegiance to the latest. party, which isn't perturbed as it should be by the fact that there are people willing to be

much more preoccupied with what's happening to their co-religionists 3,000 miles away than what's happening to their neighbours whose religion they don't share down the road. That's nuts. That's really nuts. You know, MPs saying, I've got voted on a Gaza ticket. What? What? And, you know, it's certainly happening in Bradford. I've seen Palestinian, you know, the last time I was there, and it is a couple of Palestinian flags. The flag is. matter, by the way, because the white working plants have decided they matter. How do we express our frustration, our anger? Put some flags up.

It's that's such a, don't you think it's such a test of our people? I see St. Crohn's to St. George on a Lampost, and I think Freedom Fighter put that there. A lot of people I used to work with would just look at it as, you know, a completely unpalatable act of civil disobedience by people who are trying to wreck the country. Well, it's interesting because you bring that up, because the last time I saw Rod Little was at a private dinner where he was a speaking. And he talked about the fact that he actually saw flags and he talked about his experiences in many countries around the world.

When people are putting up flags on mass, he saw it as a symptom of insecurity. I agree, that's exactly what it is. And when he saw the flag of St. George going up in the numbers that it did, he was not offended or horrified by the way that people in the media were, neither was I, by the way. But I think what it signals is that these are the reasons. It's a creed occur. That is a term that's far too sophisticated for a peasant. It's a cry from the heart.

Russian peasant like me. It's a cry from the heart. It's a cry from the heart. But I think it's a crime from the heart that is signaling to something rather specific, which is the destruction of identity and also the demographic situation. People talk about demographic replacement of the native population. replacement hasn't happened because you haven't replaced the existing population. But what has happened is you've added masses of new population, which is diluted.

So you haven't replaced these people. Those people are still here, but you've changed the nature of the country and the face of the country. And as you may know, I've got into trouble for talking about ethnicity and all of these things, trying to work my way through thinking about these issues. But as a foreigner perhaps, and someone who's, you know, olive-skinned or whatever, I'm sometimes allowed and sometimes not allowed to say this. There are parts of Britain today, including in this city in London and in other places, where visitors from other countries that I show around, simply walking through London, say, what has happened here? And I think those flags going up

across the country, in posh parts of the country, as well as in poor parts of the country, are a symptom of people saying, like, we want to have our country. in some way at least look like the country that it is, or that it's supposed to be, that it was when I was 20 years younger than I am today. And I think, you know, you talked about Israel, which to me, you know, I think anti-Semitism is obviously a terrible thing, like all forms of racism are.

And, you know, given the history of the Jewish people, I think we're naturally extra sensitive about it. But that's not actually what I meant. I really do care much more about Britain than I do about any other countries. And I think, as you talked about the Gaza ticket, I think all British should, all British people should care more about this country than others, including Jews about Israel, by the way. I think it applies to everybody. But when I was talking about the civil war on the right, I'm actually talking about the fact

that I think you see that the success of parties like Restore and Rupert Lowe is about the fact that they are articulating something that no one has been allowed to say in public for a very long time, which is, and you know, you get people who talk about this crudely and inarticulately and badly and in a racist way. Doesn't mean their voices are inauthentic. But it doesn't mean that they're not raising something that's important. Britain has changed. You know, I came here in 1995, the country does not look like the Britain that it was.

It just doesn't. And it pains me to say. And you know, I say that as someone who came from another, but I didn't come here to live in Pakistan or in Bangladesh or in Russia from where I came. If millions of Russian people were coming here and making it more like Russia, I would be on the front line saying, this is wrong, right? But what we've had is the changing of the country.

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Tell them we sent you. A couple of things. I get spooked occasionally by what I see on the right. I'm delighted the energy is there. I worry sometimes whether energy has been directed. I'm a sort of burkeying conservative at heart. I believe in institutions. Because otherwise spasms, you know, if you're, if you're gobbing off,

I don't mean gobing off. It's one thing to have a popular social media presence like Rupert Lowe has achieved this amazing presence and voice. But you've got to, for it to endure, it's got to be within an institution. He would say, restore Britain as that institution. But there is a discomfort with institutions now on the right, which does spook me, you know. I get why people think the monarchy is woke.

I get why people think the cops are woke. I get why people think the army's woke, because they all are. But you don't blow them up. You rebuild, you reform them, right? So there's that aspect. Changing Britain, I did a monologue recently, which, you know, people don't watch

because it's so dull as a subject, but it's like some dull things, it's really important about demography. I think people, for one thing, we're only in the foothills at the moment. I think there was a tsunami of childlessness, not inadvertent childlessness. I'm talking about childlessness by choice. A tsunami coming at us. It's not even started yet.

But people of my generation now who are maybe, I'm 58, people who are just entering that phase in life where they're thinking, you know, are my kids going to have kids? and you know you talk to people and nobody's kids nobody's kids are having kids right and there's never been a time in human history and people say you don't know what the answer to this is well let me pose the question has there ever been a time in history where whole communities of people have aided and abetted by the likes of science had families large families as big as they wanted to have whilst other people voluntarily have decided to stop having children this amazing asymmetry

between different communities has to create tensions that have never existed before. You know, we've been able to manage waves of immigration before. Other countries have been able to manage waves of immigration before because the people who generally speaking move to that country were having families and replicating themselves broadly in line, broadly in line with a few differences with the host community. That's not how it is anymore, you know.

So we are in really uncharted territory, really, really uncharted territory. And I don't even think we're in the footholes. I think that that demographic change hasn't even started yet. And it's, the worrying thing is, is that we just don't talk about these things as plainly as honestly as we should. And that goes back to the politicians as well.

And not only does it go back to the politicians, it also goes back to us as a public, where the moment you are honest with us about a particular issue, we have a meltdown and the toys come out of the proverbial plan. Well, so the best, I agree, and the best example for me, is the monologue I did recently about demography.

I mean, I wrote a book about demography 15 years ago. I've done programs about it. I tried to set up a think tank about pro-natalism, encouraging people to have all the children they want. And I knew, because I've noticed before, that people on our side of the aisle, I can call it that, people who are, you know, not parts of the liberal establishment, I knew that this was not a message, as I framed it,

that would go down well. And sure enough, people, take it personally, you know, because it's the most personal decision lots of people ever make. For one thing, very often, it's a tragedy. And, you know, I always try and preface anything I say about demography with, you know, this tragedy. If you want children, can't have them. You know, I'm not talking about you. I'm not talking about you. I'm talking about a society which is making it, you know, as Mary Wakefield, the deputy editor of the spectator put it recently, a society which has now created conditions where people can say,

I'm now child-free by choice in the way they used to say, I'm fucking dairy-free by choice. That's where we're getting to. And the catastrophizing about the environment, there's lack of confidence in their ability to become parents, this unfocused sense of threat for the future.

Every generation, mine grew up with four-minute warnings and nuclear missiles. A thousand years ago, it was a plague. Don't pull that it's never been harder than this. I can't possibly have been children into the world. So it remains the most, important message. If your next question is going to me, what the fun do we do about it? I fear, I don't think money works really, and this is why I'm a little bit obsessed with Israel,

because Israel do seem to have cracked it, but only be demography, but only because they're under huge historical pressure, the Holocaust, and today in a very naughty, bad neighborhood. So, you know, as Paul Mawland, you've had a friend of mine, Paul Moulin, the demographer says, in Tel Aviv, if you're in a dinner party, you're on the beach, and you haven't got three kids, people want to know why. You know, these are not, it's not Haredi Jews. These are, you know, ordinary, easygoing, free-wheeling types. So I, in terms of what you do, I, the great question for me is, do you stigmatize? Do you anathematize? Do you say to somebody pushing a dog and a pram, it's not a baby, stop? Do we, do we stigmatize? That's, that's, do politicians

stigmatize it? Do you signal to people that they're not pulling their weight? You say if you don't have children, you can have children, we're going to tax you more because you're not providing for the future, like people who are bothering to have tomorrow's, soldiers, nurses, and taxpayers. I don't know. I just know these are really sticky questions that nobody wants to address. And look, I mean, it was only a couple of days ago, at AOC, the American senator, she showed Congresswoman, sorry, she shared on her social media, she's 36 years old, her injecting herself because she's freezing her eggs. And you know, one of the things, we haven't yet had a chance to address it properly because we're working on the right person and there are a few people we want to bring on.

Do you know the one conversation, Francis and I meet people for dinner, we go to events, whatever, the one conversation that no one's having in public, but everyone is having in private is women in their 30s, mid to late 30s, early 40s who are talking about doing IVF. trying to have kids and having miscarriage after miscarriage, et cetera, et cetera. And they're going, we were all lied to. We were all, feminism lied to us. Technology lied to us. Science lied to us. Society lied to us and told us we can have everything. We can wait.

We can defer. We can delay. And we really want children. And now we can't. And coming out of the mouth of a man, it's the most great. a test and offensive thing and everyone gets upset. But a lot of women are now privately saying this. And there's no getting away from it. Society lied. We lied to women. It's a fact. And the education system as well. I agree. And when Dorothy Byrne formerly, I mean,

I hate to say it, but she was formerly the boss at Channel 4 News. She's now a head of an Oxford college. She got in a lot of trouble three or four years ago when she lectured her young female students and said, don't forget the graphs. Don't forget to have children. fertility graphs are against you. My late wife was a freak. She, we had, she can't, she can't sue me. She's dead.

She, we had our first child. She was 36, on the cost of turning 37. Don't try this at home. She had five children in her 40s. Yeah. Yeah. And unfortunately, my, I have five daughters. We had five daughters and a boy.

I think, I fear that my daughters will look at that and think that's relatively normal. It's so freakishly abnormal. So my job, one of my jobs in life is to say to my daughters, you need to be, you need to have your ducks in a row by 27, 28, because, and it's awful, isn't it? I mean, we don't, I didn't worry about it. But if you're, you know, if you ain't got that mortgage in place,

you haven't got a bloke in place and you're 33, you're clock, clock, clock, clock, clock, clock, clock, clock, it's a nightmare. But we need to have the conversation because what's the alternative that we live in a fantasy world, which is currently what we're doing, in more ways than one. And then, unfortunately, you've got to wake up at some time. And by the way, if you're concerned about the changing nature of the country, of all the tools available to you personally,

other than the pencil in the voting booth, which doesn't strike me as particularly effective these days, you only have one other option. I agree. And by the way, as you hinted, there are communities that have absolutely no problem with this. They have no problem having children. They are having them.

And, you know, if you play that movie forward. It's the most passionate thing you can do is to have children. You give yourself a stake in the future. You answer the question. You balance the equation, which is you don't want to rely on immigration to make this country work. So what are you going to do? There's got to be people feeding into hospitals and shops and schools and all that, wiping the arces of the arces of the elderly. Who's going to do it?

Zach Polansky isn't? Not going to do it. Colin, on that happy note. It's been a genuine pleasure for us. Me too. We really appreciate. And it's a proper conversation. Yeah, we really really appreciate you coming on the show. Before we ask you our final question

and before we go to questions from our supporters on Substack, tell everybody where they can find your way. On Outpost, please have a look at it on Substack because you get paid on Substack. Please subscribe if you're willing to do that will be hugely generous and appreciated. YouTube is building nicely, as is Facebook and Twitter. They follow me, but follow Outpost Studios as a place to go. Outpost pictures.

We keep changing our name, but you'll find it. That's not helpful. And final question is always the same. What's the one thing we're not talking about that we really should be? We're not talking about demography. We're not talking about tomorrow's people. We're not talking about how the country looks if you can't be bothered to have children. Stop carping about the state of the country if you're not prepared to take a

stake in its future. There you go. Right, guys, join us over on Substack where we carry on the conversation and you get to ask Colin your questions. When people say do not want kids or they don't have them, it because of reasons aren't the economy of climate change, do you think they're being honest with themselves or do they simply not want the responsibility of parenting?