TRIGGERnometry - Tom Slater "A Second Lockdown Will Be Disastrous"

Episode Date: November 1, 2020

Spiked's Tom Slater joins us in the studio. Support TRIGGERnometry: Paypal: https://bit.ly/2Tnz8yq https://www.subscribestar.com/triggernometry https://www.patreon.com/triggerpod Find TRIGGERnometry on Social Media:  https://twitter.com/triggerpod https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod About TRIGGERnometry:  Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@francisjfoster) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantine Kisson. And this is a show for you, if you want honest conversations, with fascinating people. Our brilliant and returning guest today is the deputy editor of Spike. Tom Slater, welcome back to Trigonometry. Thanks for watching. Yeah, it's good to have you. We were just sitting here before the interview started, very relaxed talking and now all three of us have gone really serious. Thanks for much, I'm having me. But it's good to have you back, man. It's been a while. It's been a couple of years since we first have. had you on. And as I was saying to you before we started, we really didn't know very much about anything at the time. And we were kind of using guests like you who had thought about the stuff we were interested in in detail more carefully, who had a history of writing about it and

sort of debating stuff like that. And the first time we had you on, we were talking about freedom of expression. I think we talked about students banning some reros and all that sort of silly stuff. Two years have passed, I think things have gone a little bit more sinister, haven't they? particularly with stuff we've seen recently, Darren Grimes, obviously. What do you make of the state of our ability to discuss ideas and issues and societal issues freely now? I think it's incredibly bleak because, as you say, a lot of the things that we were talking about previously, a lot of it's very similar to what we've seen explode in recent months, but it almost feels quaint by comparison.

Again, we were talking about sombreros, you know, the biggest campus controversies were about inappropriate fancy dress and all these kinds of ridiculous things. What I think we've seen recently, it was already there, but was this kind of, attack on freedom of speech from all sides, almost it feels like. There's state censorship, which I'm sure we'll get onto in relation to the Darren Grimes case. Again, kind of ongoing issues with locking up tweeters and offensive Facebook posters and all the rest of it. We see those stories proliferate all the time. You've got the big tech censorship, which again has exploded, particularly in relation to the COVID stuff. I know you've had a taste of that

yourselves with the shadow banning in your Peter Hitchens' interview. And that's something which is becoming more and more alarming and being more and more supported, you know, by a lot of people, strangely on the left increasingly. And then also you've got this council culture stuff, which is almost like the informal mob censorship, the way in which that people, without necessarily, you know, using the state or using the power of big corporations, just putting pressure on people's employers to, again, sack them if they uttered a heretical thought. So you put all of that together and you're in a pretty bleak place, I think. And again, even though a lot of these issues have been going on for a long time, it's been writing about them, talking about them for a

long time, it's definitely accelerated in the last couple of months. And what, Why is it you still think that, I mean, I did it, I tweeted it yesterday about how, you know, the BBC and their unwillingness to even discuss the Darren Grimes case. Why is it people still think that freedom of speech isn't an important issue in the UK and the West in general? I think they just bought the consensus, which is basically that free speech isn't an unfettered right. It's legitimate to restrict it. And therefore these things aren't necessarily issues. I mean, you see this refrain time and time again whenever there's a big campaign. cancellation campaign, whenever there's one of these state censorship cases, where even in response

to this, people still maintain this line, there's no free speech crisis. It's something that us three made up, you know, just to give ourselves something to talk about. I think a lot of that censor in the fact that they don't really support free speech. They don't really understand what it is. And that's why you get in a situation where you've got people like Keir Starram, a leader of the Labour Party saying, we should have tolerance for free speech, tolerate it in the way you tolerate and irritating relative or something like that. But at the same time, there is a line. And in the case of the Darren Grimes interview, the line seems to be someone interviewing someone who says something that turns out to be quite offensive. So I think, again, the reason that you've got

the Darren Grimes case not even being picked up by the BBC, etc., they kind of don't see it as an issue, whereas people like us, I think see it is one of the crucial issues of our time, because if you can't even talk about some of the problems going on in society today, or if you treat a view that you dislike with an attempt to silence it rather than attempt to challenge it, you can saw up a lot more problems for the future. But I think a lot of people just don't even recognize that as an issue. You see, I would maybe push back on that a little bit because when I turned down that safe space contract two years ago or whatever it was, that was a major story on the BBC. That was the day that Theresa May had nearly been removed from power by her

own party. And the story about some unknown comedian turning down a contract was the second story on the BBC News website. So they clearly thought it was an issue then, or someone did at least. So I find a very odd that the BBC News team have not covered the Darren Graham story at all. But the point I would agree with you on is we've obviously done an interview

with Darren, we promoted it quite heavily. And all of the pushback we've received has literally been as sort of moronic as, well, the guy's an idiot. And it's like, well, you're entitled to that view. That does not mean he shouldn't be allowed to interview people.

He should be investigated by the police. People are allowed to have opinions that you don't like. So it seems like, as you say, the people who are saying there's no crisis for free speech, they don't actually believe that we need free speech. How do we get there? That's weird. It's very, very strange. I think on the one hand, the people who have the luxury of being able to say there's no free speech crisis, it's because they've never uttered anything which could be remotely offensive. They never had a particularly interesting thought in their head. Or the other thing is that whether they realize or not, they're part of the consensus. A lot of the kind of identitarian politics, which seems to

rule the roost these days, tends to have a lot of sway at places like the BBC, universities, a lot of businesses increasingly. That is the new kind of orthodoxy. That's the new kind of cultural elite values, as it were. And so when you glean to those values, when you're not really a threat to those values whatsoever, it's very easy to think that everything's just fine. On the other hand, they don't really understand freedom of speech. And they just play into what is the most basic kind of trap that you fall into, which is that you support free speech, but only for yourself and other people who agree with you. That's the most basic, ridiculous kind of response to have to these things. It's me speech rather than free speech. And so whilst they kind of dress it up as,

oh, Darren Grimes, it's just a grifter, or it's just an idiot, or it's just a whatever, again, that's just an evasion of the fact that they, the reason they dismiss these issues, because they don't really want to admit that you're not in favour of free speech. It's like admitting you're not in favour of democracy or, you know, apple pie. It's just one of those things they can't bring themselves to say it, but I think the evasiveness proves the point that they just don't care about this stuff whatsoever, because they're not threatened by censorship at this point in time. And going back to the BBC issue, do you think their unwillingness to address it, to talk about it, shows a fundamental bias at the heart of the BBC, or do you think it was just an editorial decision?

I mean, we don't know. I mean, it could well just be, I mean, there's a lot going on in the world at the moment, of course. But if you think about how significant that case was, obviously, we have had hate speech legislation in this country for a very long time. do flare up from time to time. This is involving one of our most prominent historian, now very much in disgrace, I've given his own comments. You've got a young YouTuber and commentator,

who again has been in the press a lot over in recent years. This is not a marginal story. So even if it's not necessarily a case of them going out of their way to cover this up, the fact that they don't think this is that big of an issue, at least, if that's the case, that seems to me to be quite worrying, at least to indicate some sort of,

whether it's bias or whether it's group think or whether it's just not recognize this thing, there's a big issue. There's got to be something like that at play, surely. And in terms of civil liberties, which free speech would be only one of, you know, we seem to be in a position now where they're sort of disappearing quite quickly with majority consent, by the way. You know, people are very much in favour of what's going on. What's been your take about the impact of the coronavirus, the response to it, on our basic freedoms? I think it's been appalling. And it's really sped up, as I'm sure we'll talk about a lot of these

kind of a liberal trainers that existed previously, the willingness to just throw fundamental freedoms under the bus at the first sign of trouble. And we've seen that with the coronavirus crisis time. And again, you know, first of all, in relation to the question of the lockdown and in terms of the kind of suspension of civil liberties, it almost doesn't matter what you believe and what you think happens to be the truth about the efficacy of lockdown as a policy. The way in which it was done, the way in which our freedom to move around who we associate with, how many can gather our ability to protest, the way in which that was sustained. The way in which that was suspended the way in which it was done, I think, should really raise alarm bells because all of the

lockdown restrictions that we've been suffering under for the past, was it seven months now. This was never passed with the approval of Parliament. It was passed using the Public Health Act, 1984, funnily enough, who's delegates huge powers to ministers, has very few of the safeguards under that you get in other pieces of legislation which could easily have been used. It's never really had explicit approval from Parliament. Only recently have they been able to, rebels in the Tory Rebentons in particular been able to get the government to concede some votes on some measures so far. And so you have this remarkable experiment in authoritarianism, which on the one hand hasn't really been openly debated. It was just rushed straight into. It was a crisis in the early days you could

argue there was a justification for that. But at the same time, it's been basically becoming indefinite and yet with very little parliamentary scrutiny and again without any of that support. So whilst it's just been really, really shocking how quickly that can happen. And again, how little pushback if there was that now. Things seem to be changing a bit now. Again, it feels like the die has been cast at least for, it feels like the next six months in relation to these restrictions. But most people are still in favour of lockdown. Now, I've got my own particular thoughts about this. Why do you think people are still in favour of lockdown?

I think it's a bit of a complicated picture. I mean, first of all, is the fact that if you look at, for instance, some of the studies, King's College, I believe, did a study recently, of what people actually do in practice, even in relation to things like quarantine rules, which actually are quite important, you know, aside from some of the other slightly more questionable restrictions, shall we say. I mean, we should just inject here that none of the three of us thinks that coronavirus is a hoax. None of the three of us thinks it's not infectious. None of the three of us thinks it's not killing people, obviously. Exactly. Which isn't Bill Gates, his mastermind. Injectus from the way.

So it's good to get that out of the way. Unless you're offering Alex Jones money, in which case. No, joking. Yeah. So what we're talking about is how do we deal with what is a public health emergency? Exactly. Which it is. I just wanted to put that in it. No, no, I think that's definitely worth noting. And again,

it's, so what you see people do in practice is obviously a little bit different. And so, and I think we all see that anecdotally in our lives anyway. You know, again, you see these surveys suggesting that if anything, people think the restriction should always be stronger, but people are bending the rules here and there because these rules are very inhuman. The idea that you wouldn't necessarily go and see friends or family, particularly in the parts of the country, which are already under stricter restrictions. These are things people in practice find very difficult to uphold, even if they still normally support. them. I think we also live in the moment in a bubble of kind of consensus, which is quite

stifling. You know, if we've talked in previous years about, you know, the shy Tory phenomenon in relation to polling or the shy Trump voter, and if you think the shy lockdown skeptic, the pressure heats on them to when a pollster calls up or when their vox popped on the street by a television journalist to say, yes, the restrictions, if anything, should be harder, is quite intense. All that being said, I think it's fair to say that even despite all of that, that wouldn't suggest that actually everyone's against it. Of course, that would be a absurd to say. But nevertheless, I think after that initial very fearful period when a lot of us didn't know what this was, we didn't know where things are going, opinion is starting to shift. I think

the proportion of people who are concerned about the economy over public health, that is increasing in relation to a lot of polls, because I think the reality of a lot of this is dawning. So I would question the strength of that kind of public support, because I think it is under pretty extreme circumstances, even where, you know, public life has been shut down. We're not discussing these things in the pub in a freely way, in ways we would previously. But at the same time, I think that opinion is starting to shift. And I think especially as the economic consequences of lockdown, are really going to start to be felt.

You're going to see opinion shift more into that column than we have seen previously. And what do you think are going to be the implications of a second lockdown? Well, I think it's going to be disastrous. I mean, if you think about the impact it's going to have on so many different sections of the economy, if you think about hospitality, I mean, there's even something like pubs, which is not a trivial thing. First of all, because it employs a hell of a lot of people, but also really important for community life.

a lot of pubs were barely hanging on even before coronavirus. You know, in recent years, loads of them shutting down because of a combination of factors. And, you know, again, coronavirus accelerating a lot of that. That's going to be a huge impact. The impact on jobs is going to be huge. We are facing the biggest recession for 300 years. And all of this is only going to have more of a damaging impact on all that stuff. From a civil liberties point of view, what really concerns me is it's the, again,

it's the prolongation of this period that we have anyway, which is the idea that civil liberties can be indefinitely suspended. And I think we really need to make the point quite strongly that things like freedom, as well as democracy, our ability to have some impact on these rules, to make sure our representatives at least have an opportunity to scrutinize them. These values aren't just for the good times. They're not just for when everything is nice and rosy and there's not threats that are challenging us. If anything, if you're in a situation where the public are being asked to give up their lives, to give up their liberties in that sort of way, you need more open discussion, not less. And I think from a civil liberties perspective, the fact that lockdown is continuing on, even as it's been failing in some respects, particularly in relation to the local lockdowns,

it's pretty much accepted that, if anything, case numbers have gone in the other direction where that's been imposed. From the perspective of freedom, it's just continuing that idea that basically these things can be suspended indefinitely for our own good. And if we say anything about it, then we're just a troublemaker. That, to me, is particularly concerning impacts. You mentioned our representatives, which I think is a big part of this whole picture. First of all, it's quite clear that when it comes to lockdown, we're living in a one-party state, right?

There is no dissent from the opposition, the opposition who should be challenging, criticizing, taking a different view, exploring different ideas, not doing any of that. And so it almost doesn't, this is the thing that troubles me most about the lockdown versus even the culture war, which you know we care about a lot. With the culture war stuff, there's some hope that, you know, right-of-centre, party, which at the moment seem to be the repository of liberal values to some extent. They've got majorities there in power. They'll fix this, right?

They'll start doing things. On the lockdown, well, it doesn't matter what the three of us sit and talk about. The reality is the Conservative Party led by Boris Johnson with the Labour Party led by Kirstama are going to continue down this path as long as they want. And there's nothing we can do about it. That is what's really concerning about it. Because, again, talking about some of the issues with Parliament and the lack of scrutiny there, all of that is important, obviously, but at the same time, if there's no one willing to scrutinise,

if there's no one willing to oppose, that formal ability to oppose is almost ridiculous. It almost just completely evaporates. I think the Keir Starma point is actually quite important in the position that the Labour Party are taking, because it's just become intuitive at this point in the kind of culture war over coronavirus that is erupted, that it's a kind of mad, uncaring, right-wing libertarian thing to be concerned about lockdown. And the caring people basically want us to batten down the hatches until we get a vaccine. and just pump everyone up with money in between times and hope for the best.

And that seems to me to be a really strange state of affairs. First of all, I don't think it perfectly reflects it because, as you say, there's a very firm consensus in party politics and a lot of these restrictions. But also you've got a Labour Party led by a human rights lawyer, no less, who said nothing about the suspension of our civil liberties, said nothing about the suspension of parliamentary scrutiny. And is, if anything, demanding that the government go further in a policy, which is already has and is very much likely to deepen further the inequalities in society that already

exist. That's the thing about lockdown. It does disproportionately impact working class people. And the fact that we find ourselves in a situation where it's the Labour Party, if anything, of the more enthusiastic backers of this policy, I find very, very strange. Why the Conservatives have completely given up on freedom in the midst of this, I'm not entirely sure. I think there's a bit of a problem with the Johnson administration full stop. It's never been entirely clear that you ever believed in anything. I mean, he was often kind of written up as this libertarian, but the evidence for that I've never seen. I mean, the first thing he didn't remember when he was mayor of London was ban people from drinking on the tube. I feel like he likes to

sense where the wind is blowing on a lot of these issues, there's not necessarily a lot of grip. Luckily, there are a few people, particularly in the Tory party, some elsewhere, who are pushing back against this stuff. But as you say, that consensus is incredibly stifling because there's just no real opposition to this, political opposition to this, that it feels like a shift a dial. Look, I spend a lot of time telling you what's wrong with the world. So let me tell you, about something that's actually right. Sleep, specifically getting more of it, better quality, the kind where you wake up and feel like a human being

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dot UK and we will do our very best to help your product stand out. And when we say stand out, what we really mean is get cancelled. Tom, you're on the left. Were you hopeful when Magic Grandpa was eventually replaced with Keir Stama? Did you think, I don't imagine you were, but did you think, well, at least it's not that bad? Or were you hopeful in any way for his leadership? Well, the thing is, a left way, but also I'm a Brexiteer.

So the thing about Kea Stama, I think, was that he is the man basically responsible. at least in large part for that huge election loss in 2019 back in December. Because obviously the last election was lost on the grounds of Corbyn himself is, you know, dodgy associations, the anti-Semitism he seemed to have an incredibly high tolerance for, as well as a kind of sense that he wasn't, you know, sticking up. He's an open-minded man, come on. He's a very open-minded man in particular, in relation to Islamism, anti-Semitism. In the absence of anything else.

But the other part of that was the Brexit issue, which Kiyosarman was the architect of that policy. And I think was, again, the other half of that question, the thing that really drove that wedge finally between, particularly the Northern Working Class and the Labour Party, was the fact that the party in Parliament that was supposed to be the voice of working people was actively campaigning to overturn millions of their votes. And again, that was the thing which, what I think has been interesting to see

whether or not Kiyosama could make up for that. I mean, coronavirus has scrambled everything in relation to the previous kind of political realities. But again, I don't think in many respects, Kiyosama was much better. And I think especially as we're seeing with his responses to some of the Darren Grimes stuff, as a liberal as well as anyone on the far left, it would seem, which is, again, a huge problem with the left these days. You know, it's something that they share across the board. They are very skeptical of freedom, and that's something which I do care about.

Well, were you not sort of enthused by his, like he was obviously picking fights with the far left of his own party. He was clearly trying to get rid of the anti-semites. He was clearly trying to get the dawn buttless to say something typically far left and then smack her down for it. Like he was trying to clean up his party's act. Did you see any promise in that at all? Well, I think on the issues of in relation to anti-Semitism,

obviously, someone needs to get a firm grip on that because that was a horrendous thing which stogging the party. And obviously the extent to which he was effective in that is a good thing. You need to make a very firm line about that. The fact that the Labour Party became synonymous with being light on anti-Semitism is a historically terrible thing. It's fascinating that they went down that road. But in relation to the cultural war stuff, I think it's quite interesting because he's really just trying to triangulate on the question of the cultural.

It's kind of very Blair-right way of trying to put himself between what perceived to be the two extremes. He takes them one day, but then he gives a speech about patriotism and the other. He's just kind of trying to talk about, talk out of both sides of his mouth at this point. For me, in particular, I've long given up on the Labour Party in various different kinds of its iterations. I think the extent to which it could claim to be a progressive, positive movement for working people was long since past. I think, if anything, Corbyn was kind of just dancing on the grave line in respects. He kind of was able to take control because it's legitimacy, he was so worn away. But whilst I think a lot of people are talking about how canny Kirstama is being,

a lot of it feels like PR, feels like triangulation. And all the while, I think, actually, the sense which the Labour Party remains a kind of repository for a lot of these identitarian, divisive kinds of ideas that we're all concerned about. I think it's still going to go on this by the last. And do you think it's got any long-term future? Well, again, the coronavirus has just scrambled everything. And I think what Kier Saam has effectively been able to repose the argument as quite effectively, at least in the media sphere, is the fact that is on questions of competence, is on questions of delivery. On that basis, he could well have a decent next election. Who knows? Again, the kind of things that went on in the past couple of years that really annoyed people in relation to Brexit in relation to any of these other issues. Maybe that will start to fade a little bit. But I just don't think. think it's a firm basis on which to hold a political party. We're back to that kind of dry, technocratic kind of approach of the kind of Blair years, which again can be effective for a time,

especially when, as we saw in the 90s, the conservative party just collapses, you know, and it just And the economy is booming. Exactly. These things, these things are fine at that sort of point, but it's not the sort of thing that sets pulses racing. So again, who knows in the near term, but I think in the longer term, the Labour Party in terms of working out what it is and who it's for, I think all of that remains to be seen. And we've seen the culture war go into hyperdrive as a result of the coronavirus. First of all, why do you think things have got so tense at the moment and so polarised? It's a difficult one because I think there was some kind of people who were hoping that the onset of coronavirus,

that the onset of the pandemic, Constantine included. Yeah, naive and stupid. When in doubt, go with the depressive pessimism. That's what the last year has shown is. that it would put a break on all this stuff because a lot of this stuff, even though it is very important and because these ideas are so divisive,

they're so toxic and they're everywhere. A lot of it is arguments about nothing a lot of the time, which is about trivialities. It's about someone used the wrong turn of phrase. It's about someone allegedly culturally appropriated, jerk rice or whatever it is. It's ridiculous things a lot of the time. And so being faced with a genuine public health threat,

we're not only clear away a lot of that rubbish, but we'll remind us that basically we are, you know, one group of people, that we don't need to be splintered down these identitarian lines were all there to look out for each other. But then very quickly, it was clear that that wasn't the case. These ideas were very bedded in. And then in the wake of, obviously, the killing of George Floyd, the explosion of the Black Lives Matter movement, I think just proved that those ideas definitely weren't going away. And just, I think, prove that you can't kind of just

hope these things will be defeated by events, that it really is a case of trying to take on these ideas in society, more importantly, in these institutions, which is where they're really hardwired in it, at this point. And with the Black Lives Matter movement, because Constantine and I have this discussion about it. Do you think that the George Floyd incident would have had the same resonance if it happened in another period of time, or do you think that what had happened because of lockdown was there was just emotional tinder just waiting to be lit and George Floyd was a perfect flame for it? I think there's definitely a big element of that because if you think about when the Black Lives Matter movement first kicked off what was in relation to the shooting of Michael

Brown in Ferguson, various other shootings which went on over those couple of years, that was kind of the original kind of high watermark of it. And it was a big story. Obviously, it was a big discussion, particularly for America. But it didn't go global. It didn't explode. It didn't lead to people toppling statues in Bristol and Netflix pulling down the mighty ocean. It's kind of absurd cultural revolution that unfurled in its wake. And I guess it's a combination of, on the one hand, lockdown people being, you know, locked in their homes for a very long period. Again, tempest starting a fray. I'm sure that played a bit of a role in it. I think the other factor, of course, is Donald Trump. Because the last time the Black Lives Matter movement really erupted, when

really started was under the Obama years, which I think reminds us that a lot of these issues were not created by Donald Trump. But at the same time, his presence, I think, unfortunately, has lent credence in some people's minds to the more extreme claims of this movement. The idea that this is that America and Western society in general is kind of irredeemably racist. Trump is held up as an example of why that's true, because this horrendous fascist, as they would put it, I don't think he is one, but still is allowed to be in power. So I think, again, the combination of Trump, the combination of a horrendous killing, which there was no, you know, we all knew what that was and we saw it. And the coronavirus, I think, just led all of this to explode.

But why it suddenly became a discussion about speech and statues and all the rest of it, I have no clue whatsoever why so quickly went to that. But on that, actually, let me ask you this, because when you had me on the Spike podcast, a couple of months back or whenever it was, we were talking about BLM. And I think you and I were about to get into a disagreement, which is always fun, about whether that I was saying to what I'm seeing in this is there's a neo-Marxist agenda, which is a term that got bandied about quite a lot. I think Spike sort of pushed back against that. And I think you were keen to take issue with that, but you didn't have the space to do so then. So here it is.

Yes. So this is obviously, I've heard you make the argument of many people point out that if you look at, for instance, Black Lives Matter, Black Lives Matter, if you go on their website, if you look at some of the policies they're advocating for, they do talk about, you know, they do talk about overturning capitalism. They also talk about various things, which I wouldn't say traditionally Marxist, but certainly some of that kind of nubo-Marxist identityitarian-tinged obsessions

in relation to decolonization or in relation to the nuclear family or in relation to all these types of things. So there's things like that where, if you take them at their word, as it were, you could see that they're calling themselves Marxist, if nothing else. I think the two points of the same response to that is, first of all, there is a big difference

between the movement such as it is and the organization, if we can call it that. Because I don't think anyone would really be taking to the streets and the numbers that they have if they were paid up members of this organization, if they were 100% signed up to the toppling of capital. There's just not the electric support of this sort of thing. You don't think so. With the housing crisis, with the fact that young people increasingly feel like they can't participate in this capitalist utopia, they're squeezed out of the future, the coronavirus has come

along, they're definitely, definitely going to have a worse time than their parents. You don't feel that there is a sort of feeling that, quote, unquote, capitalism is not working? I think there is a strong feeling that capitalism is not working. And as you say, a lot of these issues kind of pre-exist the coronavirus even in terms of the failure of it to actually produce the kind of growth and the kind of better life for people that people actually wanted. But at the same time, I feel like the issue that really animated people was the question of racial injustice, full stop.

I think all of the baggage that came with it was kind of an afterthought. I'm sure you had this experience. either talking to friends or going and observing some of these demonstrations. People weren't really talking about that manifesto. There was a big group. And I actually think particularly in relation to the UK, where as far as I can tell, it's kind of old SWP stand up to racism types

who have claimed the mantle of the Black Lives Matter organization here, they just kind of latched onto it. It's good for them. They get to go on the radio. They get to talk about the things they've always cared about. But in terms of the average person who is inspired by the movement, I don't think it's from this kind of red-blooded, old-fashioned Marxism. At the same time, I think it also gets into this question

about what these people say. when they say that they're Marxists. Because fundamentally, I think they're identitarians, which I think is, again, the antithesis of Marxism, again, putting the question very much on the issue of class and also not wanting to ossify society. Because that's the thing about identity politics is it wants to put us into all these individual boxes, whereas the point of Marxism and its focus on class was that it could be transcended, that you could abolish the working class, whereas these people in their possession of identity, not only they increasingly uninterested in the class question, you bring it up and actually think it's like a,

kind of racist dog whistle and you only want to talk about the wildworking class or whatever. But also they fundamentally want to keep those distinctions intact. They genuinely buy into the idea that society can be broken up along these lines, that we can't really overcome them, that all we can do is come to terms with them in that kind of sense. So whilst it's certainly true that a lot of these people think of themselves as terribly radical, left-wing Marxist even, I think that at best it's wearing that label but actually means something very different. And what was really interesting as well with that Black Lives Matter movement as they were talking about race,

and when they were going on their marches, it was the third anniversary of Grenfell Tower, and no one seemed to mention that. Yeah, I mean, it was interesting, because there was some attempts to, you saw it some marches, I guess, in attempts to kind of bring things like Grenfell in, as well as attempts to kind of bring issues like that in.

But it's interesting that it just became kind of just more ethereal very quickly. It wasn't really, because of the fact that this is something that went on in America, people had to almost go grasping around for things to make it relevant, which is why, I think,

we got into this bizarre situation, that it quickly became about inanimate objects. It became about statues, it became about history, this desire to reckon with history in some sort of weird, abstract, almost spiritual sense. But I think a lot of the time, as you say, it's a general feeling, and it's often decoupled from more concrete things

that we should be talking about, often in the British context, because those things were a lot better, actually, in relation to race relations in particular than a lot of these people would like to make it. And why do you think it seems that we have imported whole-so, American politics, especially American identity politics, to these shores, when in the case of things like Black Lives Matter, of course, George Floyd's death was awful, but it doesn't seem to be

particularly relevant at all to this country. I mean, it's fascinating. In many ways, Black Lives Matter is like America's great export of recent years. It's gone completely international. You know, you're seeing marches in every nation across Europe, all across the world, and yet this is a movement not only started in America, but it's addressing a very specific issue in relation to police killings, sit there's a lot of unarmed black people. There's a lot of discussion in the US is to the extent of that, but it's still a very distinct issue which a lot of people have been concerned about for a long time. To try and apply that to the UK context makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. We have our issues with inequality as any other nation does, but it's not at all the same.

And I think it kind of, in a way, if we're being slightly uncharitable about it, I think with so much kind of identitarian politics. It's about claiming the oppression first and working out the kind of justification for it later. And I think that's why again we saw the conversation shift so quickly onto cultural grounds, because all of that you can just speculate about it. You don't have to prove anything. You don't have to show any data. You can just claim

that this particular sitcom is a resonance of some sort of horrendous oppression that we need to tackle it. So yes, the exporting of it has been very strange, very fascinating. I think a lot of it's, I'm sure a lot of it's got to do with social media and the internationalisation of a lot of these campaigns. campaigns. But at the same time, I think there was just a desire to kind of latch onto it

because it felt like it gave fuel to a lot of the previous concerns and campaigns of these people. Well, we gave the opportunity to put the boot into labor a little bit. I think Black Lives Matter is a good example of somewhere we could certainly look at the Tory party with a bit of skepticism as well in terms of the response to what we saw in terms of police being attacked, police being chased around the streets, et cetera. Do we have a conservative of government, Tom? It's hard to see any evidence of that at this point. On the one hand, because as you say,

it's not as if the Conservative Party has had a neat relationship or an always strong relationship with say a lot of the values around freedom, full stop. You know, that's something which is not always existed in their midst. Well, there are two schools of thoughts within conservatives. There's a sort of more classical liberal

and then there's a sort of to characterize it sort of caricature, sort of hanging and flog of type, and those are always in conflict, aren't they? And we were told Boris Johnson, Johnson was very much on the classical liberal side of things. Completely. And yet we've seen no evidence. I think actually one thing that's worth pointing out is that a lot of this cultural war stuff,

and Andrew Doyle, who writes for spite, it's obviously been on your show a number of times, comedian, the guy behind Titani McGrath. He makes this point that a lot of the cultural war stuff is really a battle between kind of liberalism and authoritarianism. Really, that's what a lot of it boils down to. So on those standards, it seems like the Tory party been very incapable of kind of sticking up for a lot of those values it feels like. But given the fact that, as I said, they've got the conflicted relationship with liberal freedom. Well, they shouldn't surely have a conflicted relationship with is kind of conservatism in so far as culture, in so far as conserving historical memory, as far as saying that this

country has good things about it in its past, that there are certain national heroes that you can stand up for. And whilst the government did make some noises about that, Boris Johnson made his little intervention about statues, particularly after the statue of Churchill was targeted and spray painted. It was very partial, it was very cautious. And I can't quite work out what that is. just the case that there, as so many other previous recent conservative leaderships have been, have been terrified of the kind of liberal media set, feel that if you mention utter any kind of genuinely conservative thought that you'll be set upon for doing that, or whether or not they just aren't that bothered, it's hard to tell. But as you say, they have been oddly absent from

a lot of these issues, even though I suspect they would have a big proportion of the public with them if they took a firm stance against all this stuff. And do you think that's that there's an element of cowardice to it, that they're worried about the media backlash and what the people in charge of the institutions would say? I think there's a huge element of that, definitely. I think you saw that actually with the kind of oscillation on the question of the Gender Recognition Act, because of course this was something that was originally mooted by Theresa May's administration, again, kind of loosening up the rules around how you could basically change your gender identity,

doing it by self-definition. The Tories originally coming in under Boris Johnson saying, we were going to look at that. It now seems like they are going down that point, but there was a point in the middle where they were concerned about stirring up the culture, that was something like the kind of briefed quote that was doing the rounds. And I think it does speak to the fact that they are very cowardly on a lot of these issues. It might be the fact that some of them, particularly in the kind of higher echelons in the party, maybe do glean to some of these

precept. But I think it actually speaks to the cowardice of them, but also the strength of this ideology, the fact that it does very much inform the media, the fact that it will enrage a lot of different sections of the kind of great and good. And I think that cowardice, whilst it's doesn't justify it, I think it's definitely a response to it. They know the kind of pearl clutching that is met with even the mildest kind of criticism in a lot of these trends. And do you think that weakness in cowardice is perhaps why you're starting to see a couple of new parties emerging, which are trying to sort of do to the Tories on culture, what UKIP did to them on the EU and on other things? Do you think that there's a connection there?

Oh, definitely. I think if you take Lawrence Fox's a reclaim party, which is obviously launched recently, it's definitely an attempt to try and put that back on the table. And to be realistic, it's to put it back on the table parties. The Labour Party are, broadly speaking, lost on a lot of these issues. I'm skeptical, I've got to say about how a kind of political party can really be that effective on just kind of cultural issues, full stop. I also think it's important that we don't just frame this as a question around kind of tradition, because I think, again, a lot of this boils down to. In the way, you can build a broader kind of coalitions around questions of freedom, which is what a lot of it boils down

to, you know, people shouldn't be able to topple a statute because that shouldn't just be outsourced to a small group of campaigners who shout out the loudest and have brought their kit with them that day and put it over. All of that, I think you can bring people together on. But I think, again, the reason that you're seeing movements like that pop up is in response to a very real lack in party politics in the same way that Euro-Skepticism was something which just wasn't really allowed,

it felt like, in mainstream politics for a long time. Very full-throated defence, not only of liberal values, but also of some aspects of tradition, which people are concerned about, is entirely lacking. And it would be interesting to see if they can, kind of exert some pressure on the Tories in that respect. And do you think there should be, because they've got sort of reclaim, which you could argue is the new UKIP in many ways,

do you think that we need something else on the left, to a socially conservative left-leaning party? I know there's the SDP, but something with more presence in order to really challenge Labour? Well, that would be interesting because it felt, this is something that obviously Matt Goodwin has made this point many times on your show, I'm sure, about how the missing demographic for a very long time

in electoral politics was that mix of social conservatism, but also left on economic issues, which is where a lot of the country are. It's where a lot of the Red Wall are. And what the Tories very effectively did at the last election was to occupy that space in one way or another. We can talk about how genuine that was. We can talk about whether or not that's actually going to transform their lives. But they've very clearly sent a signal that they were standing up for those kinds of voters and those kinds of concerns.

But I do wonder, given all that's happened, whether or not in many people's eyes, particularly in the Red Wall, who also hold a lot of these socially conservative views, were also very concerned about a lot of this woke politics stuff, whether or not they're going to feel like the Tory party has actually gone away from them on those kinds of issues. So the question about whether or not there's a socially conservative, more left-wing kind of blue-labour-type movement, which could emerge, which could actually put pressure on labour. On the one hand, I'd say that territory has kind of already been occupied a little bit,

but also I just don't think labour can change in relation to that kind of thing. And it doesn't necessarily come down to a question of being socially conservative necessarily. they've basically vacated actually representing the working class people who tend to be quite socially conservative on those issues. They are the party of the metropolitan middle class. That was confirmed by the last two elections. Those are their values. Those are the people that they really speak to. Those are the people who staffed their party and who are their representatives. The idea that you can kind of shift the dial on that, I'm very, very skeptical about because it just feels like now they recognize that is their constituency. Those are the values that they have to uphold. How do you shake that? All right, so in summary then, the Tories are useless, the Labour are useless, nine of them can be changed, the challenge from now, and we have an election in four years. Yeah. I'd say we're pretty fucked, don't we?

Feels like that. One tries to be more positive about these things. I don't. No, thanks. Look how happiest he's been for years. I have been proved. Everything I've said has been proved to be correct. I'm genuinely thrilled.

It's a bleak picture. I don't think any of us can say that. I mean, even, for instance, at the last election, I didn't vote for the Conservatives. I've been very skeptical of Boris Johnson. I'm also just not a conservative on a lot of these issues. So therefore, I didn't back them. But at the same time, I was kind of cheered by what it felt like they represented when they won that election, not only because it felt like it drove a wedge between the working class and the Labour Party,

which I think had to happen because they'd taken them for granted for too long. They didn't really deserve their support. They'd been ignoring them. And also because obviously it meant that Brexit in one form or another would be implemented the toxin of that vote not being implemented would be removed from our politics. We could talk about again what kind of society we'd like after all of that. And my concern is that the society we've ended up with, particularly in the midst of lockdown, it just feels increasingly bleak.

So where this new movement comes from, you know, what new kind of political alignments pop up, all of that again has been scrambled by the crazy last seven months. But I'm sure something eventually will happen. It just feels like we're in a particularly strange period in the moment, I guess. And don't you think of a major issue is, and we've, talks about it with other people who talked about it with George Galloway, we've talked about it with Peter Hitchens. Isn't it due to the fact as well that we've got just an absolute dearth of talent at the top level of politics? I mean, it certainly feels that. If you think even

on the question of competence, which I don't think competence is everything in politics, obviously it's important, but you shouldn't fetishize it. You know, they're not just technicians. They are supposed to have some principles. They are supposed to have some ideas. But if you think about the mishandling of this crisis, and again, aside from a lockdown question, like, again, the myriad mistakes of Matt Hancock, the fact that he's still in post, despite the crisis in care homes and the mishandling of all those issues, I think there's just a fundamental, first of all, just an inability of the state to be able to actually deal with these crises. I think there's obviously been a lot of fraying there over many years, but also just the

dearth of talent there. I think the bigger thing that does concern me, though, on that flip side is the fact that the lack of principle is more worrying than anything else. The fact that it took so long for anyone in Parliament to be concerned about this mass suspension of civil liberties because no one really, it felt like, had strong enough of a principled basis in those ideas in the first place. That feels almost more concerning to me at this point anyway, because despite the fact that the Tory party, particularly in recent years, as the left has become more a liberal, were talking a good game on freedom of speech or on any of these other issues, on tolerance, a lot of that civil libertarian bent just went completely out of the window as soon as

and particularly on the left actually, this is something that surprised, well, why do I say it surprised me? Of course it didn't surprise me. But, You just saw so many people on the left go, oh, what? You've locked down? Absolutely. Yes, we should be spying on each other. Yes, if your neighbour does manage to meet up with someone for an illicit cough, we should put them in a strait jacket.

In the Soviet Union, that's exactly what we do with you. It's a very left-wing policy. But why is it the left seems to have embraced this authoritarianism? It's really, really strange. And as you say, as we were talking about earlier, it's really strange because the obvious consequence of these policies is going to be more poverty. It's in relation to the lockdown itself.

That's obvious to anyone. There was this kind of line that was coming out from kind of Corbynese's at the beginning, which is that they don't, you know, it's only the billionaires that want, that don't want lockdown, which is absurd because the people have done the best out of lockdown. If you look at the amount of money

that Amazon and all these different companies have made, has been the billionaire class, it has not been working people. On the one hand, I think it speaks to a kind of level of opportunism and just kind of cultural war positioning, for whatever reason in a lot of Western countries, it's fallen into this dynamic, which is that to be skeptical of lockdown

is to be some mad right-winger and to want to be kind of zero COVID and just batten down the hatches for months and then is the responsible left-wing thing to do. You don't see it in every country, places like Sweden, quite interestingly. It's actually from the kind of populist right who were at least at one point agitating

for a far more authoritarian policy. So how that fell in relation to it just being partisan could be one factor of it. But I think, and you pick up on this point as well, is the fact that what passes for the left these days is completely authoritarian. There was always that authoritarian bit of the left, of course. And of course, there has been authoritarian left-wing governments throughout history and even

remaining today. But there was always a tendency within it which rejected a lot of those kind of principles, which did believe in freedom of speech, which didn't believe in this kind of unending state authoritarianism, state control of everything. I think the problem is, and the reason that Spikes found itself increasing isolated and people don't even want to take us seriously when we say that we come from the left-wing tradition is because the left has completely jettisoned that part of the tradition, shall we say. The bit that was concerned about freedom, the bit that was concerned about liberty,

the bit that was concerned about freedom of speech. That is almost nowhere to be seen at this point. And I think that's part of the reason to explain why they all went into lockdown so quickly. That and the fact, if we're being, again, slightly uncharitable, a lot of these people, when we talk about prominent left wingers, we're talking about middle class, quite well-paid, broadsheet columnists. You know, we're not talking about people who are organising workers in factories. We're not talking about people who are really experiencing and seeing the impacts a lot of these policies in their day-to-day lives.

They are cushioned from it. And I think that is something as well that's worth bearing in mind when you see them being so willing to put us into lockdown again as we've seen in the last couple of days. It's a good point. And as someone who's extremely promiscuous when it comes to voting, I've been a floating vote all my life. I was going to go another way, mate. No. As somebody who loves shagging, let me tell you. Yeah.

Well, if we were going to have that conversation, Francis, we would. would not be having it on camera. Now, happily married, thank you very much. But I should reiterate that. But you've completely thrown me here. But I was going to say that as someone who's voted for everyone from all the way from the Lib Dems to even voting respect at one time, labor a couple of times, eventually voting Tory for the first time in my life, very reluctantly at the last election. The one thing I think a lot of people feel now is you're getting a cat in a sense. You're getting a cat in a sack, whoever you vote for, because you vote for Boris Johnson. He's supposed to be a liberal Tory. He locks the country down, right? And there's very little pushback from him, certainly,

in terms of other civil liberties, Darren Grimes, being a prime example of that. You vote for the Labour Party, you're supposed to be the party of the worker. They're not standing up. Look at their recent intake of MPs. These are all sort of critical race theorist in their 20s, right? picked, it seems, primarily based on who they are, not what they think. And so you're not really, whoever you vote, the liberal Democrats are neither liberal or democratic anymore. And just you go down the list. There's actually nobody where you go, I know what the, I hate that person, but at least

I know what they stand for. You don't seem to have any of that anymore. And the main issue that you bring up, and I think whether you're left, right, center, up, down, whatever, the problem that is the most toxic issue for our society when you strip away COVID, when you strip away free speech, when you strip away all of that, is rising inequality. And that is an issue that no one seems to have a solution for. And I don't see how it gets better with the recession that's coming. So what do we do about that? Well, that's the million dollar question, because why is this not front and center? Because again, we've had issues with the failure

of the economy for many, many years. You know, it has been kind of dwindling. There has been an inability to actually solve what was often called the productivity puzzle, the fact that we can't actually seemingly produce the kind of, again, the quality of life that people expect and to grow into the future. This is something that we've all known about. We've kind of been insulated from it. Coronavirus has obviously accelerated all of that and made it impossible to ignore, not at least because we've made it a million times worse by the kind of policies that we've ended up pursuing rightly or wrongly. The fact that that is so distant from the conversation, I think is really strange. The thing is, going into next year, you won't be able to ignore it. You know, we're looking

at the worst recession for 300 years. Unemployed. Jim Rickards will be happy. Yeah. But unemployment we haven't seen since 1980s. These are things that are really impossible to ignore. And yet, from the moment, it's off the agenda. It won't be off the agenda for too long. But I think you raise an important point about the failure of political labels in all of this stuff. And I think the Labour Party, again, a very good example of that.

Because again, even during the Corbyn years, they were kind of talked up as being deeply radical and this party that was very much more for the workers. But this was a time which workers were abandoning them in unprecedented numbers, but also they were fighting to stay in a European Union that would make a lot of their policies completely inert. So a lot of this stuff feels like it is, again, just kind of performance. A lot of it is kind of pantomime. And it's using labels which long since seems to have kind of exhausted themselves, you know. And I think the struggle right now, especially given the political status it feels like we're in, the kind of deadening consensus around a lot of these

lockdown policies, is where we were at beforehand, which is trying to find a new language in which take up a lot of these issues, partly to deal with the economic issues, which are very considerable, how we get out of that is going to be the big question in the next. few years, but also a lot of these issues of freedom and a lot of these issues of identity, which have crept up into the scene. And for the moment, it feels like there's no one, particularly in mainstream politics who are able to deal with that. But that's why I think it's going to come from it's going to come from outside at this point, whether that's political movements or whatever, but also just people talking about these things more, just try and kind of

kind of more pushback against these kinds of things. And are we in crisis as a country? 100%. I mean, you can't overstate it, can you? On every single front, we do have an ongoing public health crisis. We have this huge economic crisis looming, which is going to have a huge impact, not just in this country, by the way, but in terms of the lockdown pursued as a kind of global policy, it's going to have a horrendous impact, particularly on the developing world. This is something that isn't talked about at all in this discussion. We're quite kind of parochial when we talk about these policies, understandably. But, you know, Oxfam had a report out in July, I think it was, talking about 120 million people could be pushed into really extreme

poverty because of all of this stuff. And then you ladle on top of that, all this identitarian bullets, which we know is really toxic, we know is really divisive. And yet, over the past few months, as a consequence, partly of lockdown, but also the explosion of this Black Lives Matter movement, has completely cemented itself within all of our institutions, it feels like, to the extent they weren't cemented already. So it's hard not to be bleak at this point, because things are just really quite shit on many different factors. But at the same time, I feel like it's just all the more reason to, you know, redouble efforts to push back against this stuff because these things aren't just going to magically go away as a result of coronavirus

or anything else as we've seen. You mentioned the identitarian bollocks, quote. It does seem to have gone to a different level now. I mean, when COVID hit off, it was sort of like no one really talked about it, but we kept being told like the black and other minority people are more affected by code, which is fair enough. Of course they would be. But that was almost presented as like a racism issue.

Yeah. like the coronavirus is racist. I don't even understand that. And now people are going into work and being told that, you know, they need to do training, which tells them how racist they are and everybody's racist. And like, it seems to have gone to a different level. And as someone who, as we talked about at the very beginning, naively hoped that we might actually dial some of that back as a result of having some

kind of external threat to unite us all, it's very worrying. Do you see any sort of unwinding of that path? Because, I mean, the long-term trend is not good. And I think people are starting to wake up to the end game of where that takes you. No, completely. And I think, as you say, it is difficult to see how you can push back against this at this point. Because it has become so much more powerful, you know, every institution it feels like. And again, in response to the George Floyd killing and in the weeks after that,

the fact that you even saw huge corporations really getting in line to pledge their allegiance, basically, to not the Black Lives Matter movement, which are all the goals of trying to tackle police brutality, but this broader kind of identitarian idea, the idea that Western societies are white supremacists, not that they have problems with racial inequality and racism, but they are fundamentally hardwired, historically almost, to be these horrendous places. This is very extreme and bonkers and a historical view of the world, and yet it's become something which is just the kind of orthodoxy. at least in polite society. And as you say, the way in which it's trickling down into workplaces,

I'm sure you guys get emails all the time I certainly do, about people being put through these training classes, microaggression training. Got one telling me they went through allyship training the other day. What the hell that's supposed to be? You should go on that, mate. Mate, speaking about you're the one that's very keen to go out of brown women. So you're doing all the ally you possibly can.

Absolutely. Primarily in the bedroom. Do it buffer all of us. But in a way, I tend to think, because it's overreach, that has to engineer a kind of response. And this is why I think people do need to be braver in relation to a lot of this stuff, which is not an easy thing to say.

And that's one thing which I think is important to point out is that a lot of this stuff, you know, council culture. It's an easy thing to say. It's not an easy thing to do. No, exactly. Especially when you work at somewhere like Spite where it's my job to be anti-woke, let alone something which could actually risk my employment

for those kinds of opinions. So it's a very easy thing to do. It's also important to underline, which is something that gets lost in the identity politics and council culture debate because the people who criticize, again, the atmosphere of intolerance and censorship who say that you can't speak out,

they're often dismissed as, oh, they're just people of a platform or powerful people who are just complaining about being criticized. But the people who are most badly hit by this stuff, are the people without those platforms, people like Brian Leach, the guy who worked in ASDA, who lost his job because he shared a Billy Connolly routine that took the Mick out of it.

From a DVD they sell in ASDA. Exactly, which is insane when you think about it. Or it's people like, again, J.K. Rowling became this big focus for a lot of the campaign saying it's absurd for her to talk about council culture. She's got 40 million Twitter followers and more money than all of us combined. But then you see a couple of weeks later, Gillian Phillips, she was a Scottish author, just said she supported J.K. Rowling on Twitter and she got dumped by a publisher. It's people further down the pecking order.

So on the one hand, that reminds us that it's easy for us to say, be brave as it were. But it's also, I think, demonstrates that this stuff is reaching into ordinary people's lives now. This isn't an academic discussion about what trends are going on in intellectual thought on universities and how nuts it is and how XYZ newspaper columnist wasn't allowed to speak at some Oxford College. This is in people's lives now. And I think on the one hand that makes it more serious and more pressing that we do something about it. But I think hopefully we'll also engineer some kind of response to it because it's not an academic discussion. Well, I had a hilarious example of this when I did BBC Sunday morning live. It was me

three other panelists. And they asked me, you know, why I'm concerned about cancel culture. And I went to give examples. And I made this very point that it's not. about necessarily J.K. Rowling, although that's obviously a good example. There are people like, and I started to go into examples of ordinary people like Nick Buckley, who we've had on the show. And I got immediately interrupted by the presenter who said, we don't have time for examples. So I sort of made the best of it. And then the very next speaker, when, well, cancel culture only affects the rich and famous. I was like, I just tried to give you examples and I'm not allowed to. And then the next person is unchallenged in arguing this point.

Now, we get emails all the time from people talking about this very thing. And, you know, there are people who send us money by post with anonymous letters saying, I'm so terrified of even in any way leaving any digital footprint of supporting your show. A show that is very much middle of the road, in my opinion, we talk to people from all over the spectrum about these issues. And they are so terrified. They won't even give us their name. or they won't even risk having their name in a letter in an envelope that they sent to us, because that's how terrified many people feel about what's going on.

The idea that this is some kind of elite obsession is a joke, and it's maintained, as I say, by people like the BBC who don't actually allow people to make the point you've just made, which is it's about ordinary people not being able to speak their mind, which is why I think every time something like this happens, it creates a big social stir, not necessarily one in the... the elite institutions, but it affects a lot of people because they go, I see myself in that story of J.K. Rowling. I see myself in that story of this guy or that guy who's getting canceled. And I think it's a really important point that you've made that. No, definitely. And I think that's

one of the things, which is, again, not to just use any opportunity to put the boot in the left, but I think it's so fascinating that they've just hitched their wagon to cancel culture. What cancel culture is effectively is, is believing in the rights of bosses to sack people for their opinions is bosses' rights. They used to go on about workers' rights and they'd go on about bosses' rights. And it fascinates me that they've been so willing to not only just claim that cancer culture isn't a thing, but actually, let's face it, be active participants in it all the way through.

So, yeah, the shamefulness of that is pretty striking. And Tom, thank you so much for coming to show. It's been an absolutely brilliant interview. We always finish with the same question every time, which is, what's the one thing we're not talking about as a society, but we really should be? I think I would say the kind of social impacts of lockdown, which we do talk about a bit, but I think just needs underlying a little bit more because we talked a lot about the economic effects of lockdown. We talked a lot about the civil liberties effects of lockdown.

We talk a lot about the mental health impacts, again, which I think is serious, but just the kind of broader way in which society could fray during this period, I think is really quite important. I mean, there was an ONS Office for National Statistics, Bulletin put out in February, I think, so a month before this crisis here, pointing out the issue with, again, kind of social atomization, people were spending far much more time online, but much less likely to know their neighbours. I think a line in it was they feel safer walking around their neighbourhoods, but they feel less likely to feel like they belong to their own neighbourhoods.

A lot of these kind of long-standing issues with, again, communities feeling like they were fraying a little bit, people living more kind of atomised and separate lives. And I think in a situation where we'll spend what looks like the best part of a year, if not more, being encouraged to be apart from one another, being encouraged to be more suspicious of one another, being encouraged even to snitch on one another, really concerned me. obviously, I think, as I was saying earlier, I think the economic impacts of all of this has got to be everyone's mind front and centre, but I do worry, as we were talking about, lockdown and coronavirus, accelerating various trends.

Again, that kind of coming a part of civil society and coming a part of communities, I think could definitely be a quite awful, long-term consequence of this period if we're not careful. Great stuff. Very positive show today. Thank you for watching. Tom, where can people follow you? So I'm on Twitter at at Tom underscore Slater underscore and Spites publishes every day. also got a bunch podcasts, Spike podcast every week, which I do with my colleagues, Fraser Myers

and Ella Wheeler as well as a bunch of others. Both former guests of the show, both great, and the podcast is brilliant. Tom, thanks for coming back. Thank you for watching. We will see you at 7pm with a live stream or an interview the very next day after today, unless it's Monday when we have a day off. Take care and see you soon, guys.