TRIGGERnometry - "We Live in the Age of Delusions" - Peter Hitchens

Episode Date: July 25, 2026

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Just combine your car and home insurance with Bel Air Direct and save. Get a quote at bellair direct.com. Don't you think part of the issue with our culture and our society as it is, and the politics as a result of that, is we live in the age of delusion? Yes. And people have been encouraged to be deluded. The problem that Andrew Burnham faces is that he's trying to do things which will fail because they're fundamentally unworkable. The most likely thing has got to be the currency,

which is losing value hand over fist as we speak. The great fear that I have, the money which we used simply ceases to exist. I don't know how a country in our current state will cope with that. The country is obviously finished. It's just a question of how and when this will become over to everybody. I sort of laughed when you said the country is finished because of the way you said it.

But actually, I'm afraid both Francis and I, over time, come around to the idea that Peter Hitchens was right. This episode is sponsored by our friends at Hillsdale College. Right after this episode, go check out the incredible online courses, which are absolutely free at hillsdale.edu slash trigger. Peter, it's always a pleasure to have you back on the show. I always look forward to it immensely. When you're looking at the UK at the moment,

what is your diagnosis? Where are we? How far do we have to go to all? you know, your predictions come true? Oh, I couldn't. Predictions are very easy to make, but it's not so easy to say exactly when they're going to happen. The country is

obviously finished. It's just a question of how and when this will become evident to everybody. The most likely thing has got to be the currency, which is losing value hand over fist as we speak, but at a sort of normal rate, but if it actually gets into a really serious

inflationary spiral, then that will make it evident. Because Everything we do at the moment is based upon an overestimate of how rich we are. And if the currency shrinks to the point where you can't make that pretense anymore, then everything, all the things that people don't dare reform, particularly the enormous amount of government spending, will shrivel away and will be blown away in a wind of inflation. And I think it's quite possible that that will be the end of it,

but there might be other things. There's a great determination in our elite to get us embroiled in a European war. And some people still want us, I think, to get embroiled in a war with Iran. So these also could tip us off the tracks. So there's a film, a very interesting film, which was made by the four runs of the CIA, the OSS, during the later years of the Second World War showing how to derail a train, which is something they were then interested in doing rather than stopping. And it's quite difficult. It's much harder than you think. I won't give you any hints.

But as Alan Smith said, a country has a lot of ruin in it. So it can take quite a while. But definitely the direction is downwards at an accelerating pace. What makes you say that? So there's the currency element of it? There's the economic element of it? First, first simple fact, this is a country, which is where the government is borrowing money to pay the interest on its debts.

If you knew somebody who was doing that, you'd expect trouble. Secondly, it's a country which has. has very little power of recovery because we destroyed largely in the Thatcher era, at other times as well, our industrial capacity. So the ability to rebuild is very, very limited. Then we have trashed our education systems. So the talent pool and the proper use of the talents of the country is almost impossible. We haven't got the people who are trained either to do things or at the elite level to think rationally. So there's an awful lot of irrationality and ignorance. Then we have a criminal justice system, a police force, which might as well have been abducted by aliens and may well have been.

I don't know when did he last C-1 and a criminal justice system which is obviously unable to cope. The length of time people wait for trials and the quality of the trials when they get them is atrocious. These all contribute to a general feeling that nothing works. And then on top of that, of course, the transport system which is utterly congested and falling to pieces. what more would you ask if someone had cursed the country with a number of horrible things which would happen to it

that those things would be quite near the top of your list then you find it quite strange that when people were blaming it seemed to me look Kirstama was not the best of prime ministers I think we can all agree on that but he did seem to be blamed for every single thing that was happening

when if you look at it you just go if you're in any way objective If you go, are problems preceded, Kirstar? Yes, but his claim that he made things better, which he made the other day in Parliament, is, I think, a bit of a nerve. And I am confident that Britain is now stronger and fairer than it was two years ago.

Our economy is stronger. Our public services are on the up with the biggest fall in waiting times for 17 years. Children are being lifted out of poverty every single day. Immigration is down significantly. Our defence and security are on a far stronger footing and our international reputation is greatly enhanced. So no, I think we sat and talked about the problems of Kirstar and my problem was that people thought that he was a sort of blank sheet on which they can project their desires when in fact he was and remains a dogmatic person

leading a dogmatic party which is determined to do things which will fail. And the problem that Andrew Burnham faces, that he's trying to do things which will fail because they're fundamentally unworkable. You can't carry on behaving like that when there's no money. Can you flesh it out because I think it's a really important point and it would be worth somebody who's as thoughtful about these issues as you are to breaking it down in a little bit more detail. When you say that the Labour Party and Andrew Burnham, as you call him, are determined to do things. What should I call him? Well, Andy Burnham, he wears t-shirts for that very purpose.

I don't know him. I realize the other day. I had, in fact, met him once, but he had forgotten it. But I don't claim to know him, why shouldn't I call him by his name? What is Mr. Burnham likely to do and why is it likely to fail? He's likely to spend an awful lot of money he hasn't got. He has to satisfy a new set of backers who will desire a different pattern of spending, but fundamentally similar. But the real problem that besets this country is twofold.

The first is it's extraordinary belief that it's much more important, much richer and much more powerful than it is, which causes us to, first of all of all kinds of foreign policy, which is dangerous and expensive. And also to spend money on defending our islands, which is frankly misspent. There's this call for us to spend more. The question is not how much you spend, but what you spend it on. You spend it on a coal-bore superpower, submarine-launched intercontinental ballistic missile deterrent force, then you will bankrupt yourself if you're a small country off the northwest coast of Europe without many resources, and it won't work. So that's problem one.

And most conservatives live in that deluge. The other thing which governments have been trying to do really since the late 1950s and particularly since the late 1960s, is to substitute the state for the family. Yeah. To, the two things have gone on together. I think very few of the people involved have realized that they're even linked, but they are.

The one is to enormously weaken the married family as an institution, so that it almost ceased to exist in large parts of the country. And the other, to concentrate more and more and more on state provision for the raising of children and indeed for looking after the old, which of things of state is not actually very good at doing.

And it's also fantastically expensive. End of life care is enormous expensive, as we see. And the schools and the nurseries and everything, which we provide substitute for the mothers who've now all been conscripted into the workforce, don't bring up children anything like as well as a family and home used to do. So it's both expensive and bad.

So those are the fundamental millstones grinding together, may running this country impossible until anybody turns around and said these things mistakes, we must stop doing them. And also until there's somebody with a political courage to say to the people in this country, these things that we need to do will be difficult. They will mean that there is less of a lot of things that you become used to and you will have to do more and the state will have to do less. And that is a hard thing for anybody to say and doesn't tend to win elections.

No. And this is why, you know, I sort of laughed when you said the country's finished because of the way you said it. But actually, I'm afraid both Francis and I, over time, sort of regularly as we're talking about something else, eventually come around to the idea that Peter Hitchens was right when he said, you know, people should leave. Most people do get it in the end. It often, as always, I can't communicate my experience of life in the world to other people. I've had a uniquely privileged life, not in terms of being rolling in money, but in terms of being able to see things, seeing how this country has run at close quarters when I used to be a political reporter and other things, and seeing the country from outside when I lived abroad. And so I just happened, and also having a marchist-clowness training. So I'm just simply not credulous.

in the face of propaganda. So I see things differently from other people. It takes them a while to realize that I'm not joking. I'm not. I'm just not joking. Quite. And I suppose one of the challenges you described there is, and I think it was partly cultural,

but partly also technologically driven, you talk about that, I don't want to overstay the case, but I think it's definitely true if you look even at their opinion polling in terms of what women say they would prefer to do given the opportunity. Even in our society,

now, which has this sort of girl boss feminist ideology, lots and lots of women nonetheless say that they would prefer to spend lots of time with their children if they could. The challenge is, as you say, rightly, that even if you were at an individual level, you literally have to be as a man in that situation, earning way, way above the average income in this country to be able to provide that. For most people, I think that's true. But even if you were to find some way of doing that you'd end up with you know your GDP would go down rapidly and all the other problems that that do you know i don't i don't know whether it's even reversible it was the most cynical pact since the malsoff ribbon trap act 1939 when when the ultra left feminists

to the sort of betty free dan type and big business got together and said right let's get every woman in the country we can out of the home and into the workplace yeah turn them into wage slaves and convinced them as was successfully done by the whole array of women's magazines and television programs and everybody else who preached on and on on it's it work outside the home is the only is the only respectable form of work working inside the home is demeaning slavery tied chain to the kitchen sink and that idea has been so successful and i think a lot of women have found in practice that it's that it's not true but it's too late now because of the The conscription of women, and I regarded it as conscription of women, into the workforce,

is now more or less complete, and it's very hard to escape from that cycle. Yeah, absolutely. So I was... Also, it's also possible for men to discuss it. Immediately you're accused of wanting to oppress women. If women want to go out to work, that's fine by me. None of my business if people want it. But if they come under immense social and economic pressure to do so, then that's different.

Well, that's exactly why I made the point. All the polling shows that when asked, women consistently say that many, many women, not all, of course, but I think it's something like 80% say they would prefer more time with their children. And like you say, that seems to me difficult to reverse, particularly in the current economic life. I wish I could think of a way of making it possible to reverse it, but at the moment I just look at it and think, oh, heck. And the other point you make, which is something we've talked about a lot, which I think is undeniable, is, you know, we're living way beyond our means. People want to pretend this isn't true. And yet at the same time, actually the reasons you also articulated so well, you have a situation because government is seen

as the ultimate provider of all things, if people feel poorer or are poorer, it's then automatically assumed that, well, that's the government's. That's the government's fault so they don't vote for them. And the government should fix that. So they don't vote for somebody else without checking very carefully what they're going to get. When we last discussed British politics, what I was trying to explain to people was that voting reform in large numbers was voting for the Labour Party, which turned out to be true. I think in a fairly clear way, it wasn't very difficult to work out, and it was absolutely the case.

How could anybody have thought, especially those people who voted for reform, that putting the Labour Party in office was going to solve any of the economic or political, social, educational or law and order problems which the country faces? I don't know. It's voting is so irrational. I mean, those people would say to would counter with, well, hang on a second, people. We've had 14 years of Conservative government. They've effectively led us to where we are. Oh, sure.

So why would I vote from them again? Tell me about it. I've been arguing against the Conservative Party since the early years of the 21st century, begging people to dump it. But the point came when the alternative was so bad that it was worth going down to the seashore and hauling the thing out of the, of the, the sea where it had been done because it was better than what was coming. And I couldn't explain that to anybody.

My fundamental principle now, which I put to people, is if you understand what's going on, you must learn the art of voting against what you don't want, not try to vote for what you do. You will never get what you want. But you might stop what you don't want or some of it by voting cleverly. And speaking of avoiding things you don't want, you mentioned the currency, potential currency crisis.

I mean, the fact that there's a looming fiscal crisis is something people have talked a lot about on our show. Most recently, Nigel Farras made that point in the interview, we just did. We had lots of people explain the mechanics of it. One of the hopes I know exists within some people is, and I sort of am tempted by this idea without being an expert on it, is it feels to me like if there is a chance to turn something around,

I know you'll say there isn't, and I'll probably eventually agree with you 10 years from now, but nonetheless humor me for now. If there is a chance to turn things around, it's that moment when we are forced by the external circumstances of reality to confront the massive spending that we can't afford because we have a fiscal crisis and basically the people who actually own this country, which is the people we borrow money from, say, you can't do this anymore, you've got to do this, and then we're forced to confront that reality.

Do you think there's any chance of that? Well, I suppose it's possible. The sun might rise in the west, but I don't see any likely. of it and I don't see anybody in British politics and I who's capable of a saying it and B winning an election on that basis that's why cataclysms happen you I saw in the in Moscow when I was living there in the 90s after the collapse of the Soviet Union the middle class professional people standing by the red side remember those little there's little fake wood veneer tables everybody had only too well Peter exactly they were characteristic of the

whole of the communist blog, and on them were displayed shoes, ornaments, cutlery, all the stuff of ordinary life on sale by the roadside to pay for bread. That's what people were selling their possessions to pay for bread. And these were people who, five years before, thought themselves secure in their jobs, their children secure in their education, they thought that they were secure in their accommodation, they saw a life ahead of roughly what they previously enjoyed. and it came to an end. The problem with catastrophes is that rather than being like

that amazing painter who has his pictures and take gallery where the sky falls in and everything turns red and the huge earthquakes and floods for lava and everybody dies, the categorism happens, you're still alive, but you're living in the ruins of your former life as a ghost

of your former self. And that's what happens. And this is generally when money dies, which is the great fear that I have, that the the money which we use simply ceases to exist really. It's just becomes paper and binary code and it doesn't pay for anything. When money dies, then that's what happens.

But the problem is this is also accompanied by social disorder and is very hard to control. And I don't know how a country in our current state would cope with that. It's not something I look forward to. But if a modern Jeremiah was saying this is what's going to happen, We're not all going to be carried off by the Babylonians for servitude, but we might well find ourselves in a state of severe hyperinflation and imposed poverty of a sort we simply never thought we'd see. And also what we'll see in that kind of instance is the rise of political extremism.

Well, it's already rising, isn't it? Are you the people willing to listen now to people they ought never to listen to? Who are you talking about? You can spend three hours in a cinema watching Christopher Nolan's movie adept. of the Odyssey. Or you can spend that same three hours understanding the actual poem for free guided by a Hillsdale College professor. Hillsdale College runs free online courses on the books that shape the Western tradition taught by their own faculty using the same material their students study on campus. The newest course covers home as the Odyssey. Professor Benedict Wayland

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And also what we'll see in that kind of instance is the rise of political extremism. Well, it's already rising, isn't it? Are you the people willing to listen now to people they ought never to listen to? Who are you talking about? You can care. I mean, it's not even worth raising names. I mean, there are people now becoming, I would say, prominent but influential on the edges of politics who are very worrying indeed. I don't want to help them at all even by naming them.

You're talking about both the far left and the far right? I don't think the far left has much to say, frankly. What about Zach Polansky, for example? Well, he sort of imploded, didn't he? I mean, there's still, look, I mean, this is a relatively small sample size, but where I live, which is a, you know, a she-she borough of North London, it's covered in green, green placards. Well, that's a nice.

The enthusiasm for the green parties has been, ever since official communism collapsed, has been the resort of the left all over Europe. And that's what they do. And when you see that the Labor Party is in government, they're longer able to deliver because it can't, if you still want to pretend that someday there might be a government that would do what the left,

what governments to do, then greens your party, isn't it? Well, can I just come back to something, which is, you know, you talked about the collapse of the Soviet Union, you and I both witnessed it with our own eyes, and those scenes are very memorable. And it's one, and Francis, you know, his family, background being from Venezuela. I think it's one of the things that separates us from many people

because we know that the status quo is not remotely permanent and can only be maintained by good policy. And if good policy ceases to be practiced, then cataclysm is what will follow. Most of the things which happened happened to people who five years beforehand would never have imagined that they could possibly have. University professors. They were university professor three days ago and now they were selling their belongings their belongings in the street. Yeah, that's what happened. That's it. That's what happened. It also happened, interestingly, not so much in Britain, but it happened in the United States during the Great Depression.

Yes. A highly qualified professional people were begging from door to door. Yes. And they had no conception of this lay ahead. But the reason I bring this up is Russia is not the best example, because, you know, with Putin in charge, it pollutes people thinking about this. And, you know, he's obviously, in my opinion, a terrible, a terrible person. Well, in mine too, so I agree on that.

Good. But if you take a country like Poland, or indeed, like you say, the United States after the Great Depression, there is the possibility for recovery. There is the possibility to fundamentally change course and to let go of the terrible policies that have taken you to the place you've ended up, to accept the pain and the suffering that comes, and out of that to have clarity about how to move forward in a different way. You don't know how and it might turn out badly. What I wish people would do would be to see the possibility of catastrophe and act accordingly. Me too.

It's not going to happen. It's not going to happen. Well, that's my fear. We know it's not going to happen. If I had some way of entering the minds of people with speech and thought and writing, then I would. I would look I'm in my mid-70s I have nothing particular to gain left in life and I know I haven't got all that much longer to live if if it were possible for me to do anything to prevent this from happening then I would do it but I've tried and people don't listen

but they they prefer to listen to more seductive voices and I don't offer I don't offer seduction at all I can't it would be dishonest but people who would prefer to be seduced than to be told the truth. And it's only when after catastrophes happen that it's possible. So there are other people, I'm sure, in this country, you feel the same way that things are going very badly and something ought to be done to stop it. But where are they?

Where are they? They're not in the civil service. They're not in senior posts in the universities. They're not leading the political parties. They're not, by and large, prominent in the media, particularly the broadcast media, which is to anybody remotely informed or with any historical knowledge, listening to our broadcast media is torture.

Yes. Yes, it absolutely is. I guess what I'm trying to ask you is, and look, I completely appreciate your perspective. And I think if you're looking at it in a 10-year time frame, I don't see this country being better in 10 years. I just... No, but I can't. It might in 10 years still have managed to teeter along, like the train in the OSS film. that no one will actually manage to get it off the rails.

It might still survive. You can't tell. What I'm getting at something else. Predictions are easy in general, but they're hard in terms of how it's going to take. What I'm getting at something else, which is my hope, and I only express it as a hope, not as a belief about what's likely to happen, is that the inevitable cataclysm can produce the conditions for recovery. Not necessarily recover, but the conditions from which recovery is possible. That's very Marxist. Tell me more.

All my comrades in the late 60s and early 70s were rather hoping for a collapse out of which might arise the longed-for revolution with the leading role of the party and the establishments of the dictatorship of the proletariat. That was the theory. It was all going to go wrong. And I have to say, Ted Heath in the early 70s made it look very much as if we were right. Well. Kept trying to shut the country down, pick huge fights with industrial unions and so nothing worked.

out. Fantastic. He was a great, I remember that the recruits pouring into the international socialists in the early 70s about that, about that time. Ted Heath was a great recruiter for Marxist and Romania. So. But in the end, he let us all down. Sadly. By losing an election, Harold Wilson was. I mean, I am not hoping for, for, I like you. No, no, no, I know. I'm just telling you, this is the, this is the formula that I don't myself believe that the catastrophe is justifiable, I'm a, I don't, I don't, or, or even, or desirable or even, or even, conscionable. I think you have to say, if it looks as there's going to be a catastrophe, do whatever you

can to prevent it and warn against it. But Peter, you and I have to be honest, we have all been making these arguments. We've been trying to say, we're heading towards a cliff. No one wants to listen because they're much more comfortable spending money we don't have. so they're not going to listen to us okay so we're going to go and build we are going off the cliff we are going off the cliff I don't know what you're supposed to do we're going

off the cliff we're going off and find a monastery in a high in a high mountain Shangri Laa I don't know it's if you can't if you can't influence it but I very much doubt whether catastrophe will produce at the end of it by some kind of baptism of a fire a better world

than the one that was before so but the example As examples you gave, like we said, the collapse of communism, it had been very beneficial to many, many countries in Eastern Europe. The collapse of communism has, but on the other hand, the- They've had a recovery. They have had a recovery. They have had a recovery. They have had a recovery.

Even World War II, terrible as it was. There was a recovery after that, right? All these things are true, but this is a different thing. Why? Well, first of all, everybody knew, everybody knows when you start wars that there will be terrible destruction. and everything will change as a result and there is an opportunity for reconstruction though i have to say that the there were quite a lot of peoples in the world who'd been affected by the world war two who didn't get all that much reconstruction after us lucky old western europe did quite well a lot of

other people didn't uh the everybody knew the i've just been reading robert's services uh book about the august nineteen ninety one which everybody knew in the soviet union it could not go on They knew it had to be fixed in some way politically and economically. Gorbachev, alas, was not an economist or even really skilled in the economy. He tried to do what he could in ignorance. And he also, he was faced with Western leaders who continued to have a profound mistrust of him as a Soviet leader. And so would not help.

He would repeat. It comes up very much in the service book. And the number of times he goes to Western leaders and says, look, we're on the verge of economic What we need is some sort of new Marshall Plan. I'm saying, well, not until you've, not until you've denationalized the sugar industry or some such. And they kept making conditions, they never did. And one of the reasons for the piratical rate of what was left for the Soviet economy was the unwillingness of the West to enter into a proper serious reform program.

I think you won't find that in Poland. I think a lot of effort was made and it's been a fantastic success, I might say, to turn Poland into a modern, well-off, civilized, law-governed country, which I think the world should be really pleased about. But I do often wonder why the same thing wasn't done in Russia. Could have been, I think. Well, but this is my point. Fantastic resources, incredibly well-indicated people.

Of course. But thrown away and the place turned into a declining slum and a dictatorship. Very good point, but a bit of a side point. Well, you mentioned it. It doesn't, it's, it's, it's, it's. My point is something else. So material things have to some extent recover. They're not by any means for everybody, I don't think.

I think there's still people living very badly in Russia. Yes, there are. What I'm saying is there is in a cataclysm, which you and I, well, I think as a three of us think, is kind of inevitable. There is the opportunity for recovery. The opportunity for recovery. Okay. I accept that. You do.

Yeah, of course, you can't, you can't be, you can't be certain about the future. There you go. No, sunshine from Peter. We got there. No, I can't be certain. I would think it's unlikely, but it's possible. But never rule, no, you can rule things out which are plainly impossible, but what you can't rule out is something which is theoretically possible.

Why do that? Don't you think part of the issue with our culture and our society as it is and the politics as a result of that is we live in the world and the age of delusion? Yes. And people have been encouraged to be deluded. It's been going on for a very long time. time this is a bit part of the point where I harp on about my my Bolshevik training I mean the fundamental thing that we were told apart from some basic Machiavellianism and how many people

in modern world have read Machiavellous to Prince it's very short it didn't take long but they do people don't read it so they think they know but they haven't read it so many books of that kind but the other thing we were told was was how to tell pretexts from motive and to distinguish pretext from reality. And we're constantly bombarded with politicians giving us pretext for actions that I'm taking, which is fundamentally unbelievable, particularly in foreign policy. People don't see through them. Then again, we have an education system, which is instead of challenging the intelligence of all classes

to understand more and know more, encourage them in a child-centered myths of unknowing, They're never actually compelled to learn things they didn't know to find out that the books they've heard of contain things they didn't realize were in there. And so we have a huge number of untrained minds among us. It's one of the reasons why it's so easy. It's one of the reasons why it's so easy to fool people into doing absurd things. The COVID panic was such a warning of the general level of skepticism. and trained minds in our society, if the government had decreed that to reduce the spread of the disease, everybody had to wear a five-inch long pink extension on their nose, people would have done it.

They very nearly did. I mean, those masks that they wore, which, how should I put it, were of doubtful use, were also, the other thing about them was, to me it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was. was forced conformism. If you instructed everybody in the country should wear a make America a great again red baseball cap, they said, well, I can't do that. I don't agree with it. By wearing one of those masks,

you were, especially under pressure, you were endorsing an attitude towards the COVID panic, which a lot of people didn't share. One of the reasons I objected to it so much. It was forced conformism to an opinion, not just a silly, action. But the level, I mean, there were people, I mean, a lot of them got in touch with me,

and some people still do come up to me in the street about it. There were people who resisted it. But an enormous majority of people were happy to accept it. I'm going to be honest with you. I used to think grilling was simple. Meat goes on. Meat comes off. You look vaguely competent in front of your mates. Jobs are good, and then I tried to grow anything that wasn't a burger or a steak. My frustration before Hexclad was that while the actual meat takes 20 minutes,

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For a limited time, our audience gets 10% off with our exclusive link. Head to hexclad.com slash trig. That's h-e-x-c-l-a-d.com forward slash trig. Tell them trigonometry sent you. The thing that COVID and more broadly, all of these hysterias that have inflicted, you know, inflicted our society impacted upon it,

the thing that I found most shocking, above all, was the British public's desire for big government and to be looked after. Yeah. I thought that was fundamentally un-British. Well, it used to be, but the Paul Convon, who was the French ambassador in London before, during and after the First World War, said after it was over that he believed that between 1915, 14 and 1980, this country had undergone a revolution as profound as significant as the one France had undergone in the 1780s and 1790s. And that was the moment at which government became big and interfered in everybody's lives in almost every conceivable way. In a second dose, 39 and 45, of course, the third dose of the active government has completely changed that. The idea that the British are fundamentally independent minded stand up on your own two feet quite like the Americans is actually not true.

And that's a very dangerous place to be because we've seen that big government simply doesn't work. And what we have now is we're going broke, but yet people have been indoctrinated to believe that big government is what is needed and they need to be looked after. And ultimately, we're going to come in for a pretty rude awakening, aren't we? Big government isn't always wrong. In wartime, you need big government to be effective for start. I mean, there's some things, when I used to argue about nationalization and privatization with conservatives, I said, well, you say you don't want state control of anything. You actually think you can privatize the Royal Navy. That could run. And some of them, to my amazement, said, well, yes, of course, all we need to do is hire a lot of people with privateers. I said, okay, well, then we're in the realm of madness here. But they resisted the idea that anything was better run by the state, although some things are. So I'm not a, I'm not a, I'm not to let the free market rip person. I mean, for instance, I would really like it if they properly re-nationalize the railways

rather than the ridiculous porridge they're making always at the moment. Because I think there are some things which are just better run that way. So yeah, no, but there's no point yearning for British people to be as they were before 1914, because amongst other things you have to remember, until 1960, the British army which went to France and was mown down in the mud was composed of volunteers. And these volunteers were people who'd been persuaded that this was a vital war for civilization in which every man and spirit had to take part of a matter of conscience. So what did you do?

You lost the best people in the country in many cases before they could get children. So it didn't just change the way that people behaved. It actually changed the nature of the whole British population. Hundreds of thousands of men who were the best of their generations of every class were just mown down by German machinery on fire and eaten by rats before they could marry and have children. And this affects the country. I mean, you have similar catastrophic effects, of course, in the European countries. They're not quite the same because of the volunteer nature of the British army. I'm absolutely sure that the post-1917 civil war in Russia

either drove out of the country or killed huge numbers of the best people and it made it very, very difficult. And then the great purges of Stalin by their nature also selected the best people. So you do make it difficult for a country to recover when you kill so many of your best. And that's a real concern. was a shocking for me from COVID and, like I said, everything else is I expected more people to stand up and challenge and push back. I remember being a kid in the classroom and being taught

about Nazism and going, look, I understand the chronology of events. I don't understand how so many people could fall for this. And then you see, I mean, the trans hysteria was one example. You know, people saying, you know, you can change your sex and we both know that is palpably and scientifically fall. And I just remember and I saw this happen. I was like, oh, I get it. I get it how you could deny a fundamental reality. Yeah, but propaganda can be very effective if it's well aimed

and if it targets the right discontents. And a lot of German people were simply told that this is this period of unemployment and chaos and fighting in the streets must come to an end. And they were told this, we are the people who will do it. And in many cases, they didn't ask too many questions about how it would be done. in many cases that you can easily understand how people you know could have done that, I think.

People pretend now that they would all have seen it coming, but from what we know, I'm fairly sure quite a lot would not. And it's also as well, and, you know, there's an, with all of these things, there's always an element of self-interest. There is nothing wrong with self-interest. People have to be interested in themselves to some extent. It's just, it's, it's, it's just can be taken too far. Peter, you touched on something very important about which you wrote,

a book actually that I think was it called the war we should we should never fought whether it's the war we the war we never fought it's one about drugs no that's right i meant the only the phony victory yes which people keep telling me it's called the phony war which is absolutely is not that's a different subject but the phony victory is is i'm afraid i was trying to be too clever it it does if you think about it explain what's going on we came everybody's heard of the phony war and we started around doing nothing for the first what was it nine months of war and then suddenly we were engulfed in blitzkrieg and the next thing you know we're with with the victors at potstown and i thought how do you get from the phony war a defeated country

dunkirk uh bankruptcy how do you get from there to being one of the victor countries and you don't the truth is and we and france began the first the second we in france began the second world war by declaring war on hitler you could say he began it by invading poland but the the the It was a positive decision on our side to make that the issue. But we weren't prepared for the war that we declared, particularly France. We would all rely. People don't realize now just how much people believed in the strength, the military strength of France in 1939.

They thought that it was colossal and unchallengeable, this vast army which had been victorious in 1918 and was the army of a great and valorous country. They were amazed that it collapsed. It was like it was like some great cathedral being wiped off the map. People had no idea this could conceivably happen. We certainly didn't. We were left with a war which we were not equipped to fight. And so we ended up handing over the war just to other people.

We handed over the wars of the Soviet Union with the United States. We were on the winning side, but in my view we were not the victors. Well, I was going to ask you to go broader than that. And you've written so much in sports. spoken so much and thought so much about Britain and its history, particularly in the 20th century. What is Peter Hitchens, sort of the Peter Hitchens take on the 20th century for this country and the trajectory of it during the time?

Oh, the gravest mistake ever made by any British government was to enter the First World War in 1914. We should never have done that. There was no reason why we, why we needed to and many, many reasons why we should not have done. It cost us almost everything we had. And we continue to pay the price for it. But flesh that out for people who may be less familiar with the argument.

You mentioned, obviously, losing hundreds of thousands of the best people. We did, yeah. But beyond that, how do we get from World War I to where we are today? Well, at the beginning of World War I, we were a creditor country. We had huge foreign investments. We spent what we earned and we had, as it were, savings as a nation. We were also a stable, more or less contented country. I mean, there were problems with Ireland and none of other things, but we were a solid society likely to last.

We were a Christian country. Whether you like that or not, it was important to the existence of the shared morality. We were a country which people were monoculturally one. everybody knew the same things everybody had read the same Bible and prayed the same prayers sang the same hymns read the same novels

the works of Charles Dickens from university known people could quote them to each other and it was we were a society of people holding together so economically and culturally we were also a very peaceful society because of the huge success of Robert Peel's police

reform of the 19th century and also because of the huge success of the Sunday schools which had spread morality right through society. So we had all these enormous advantages. We were also militarily strong in the only way which counted, that is to say, no one could attack our islands because we have the strongest navy in the world. And we then entered for reasons which remain baffling a Russo-German war, which was basically about Ukraine. Hold on a minute.

Sounds familiar. Why did we do that? It's very difficult to find out. There was a strong war faction, but it was quite a few people, if you were, so Henry Wilson, who were trying pretty much to get us into war. But most politicians were unaware of the planning that had taken place. Most of the cabinet, most of Asquist cabinet, didn't know how much military planning had taken place joint military plans to be Britain, France, before 1914, it had been kept

from them. As for Parliament, it was completely ignorant. And then the thing advanced with immense speed. And people will say, well, what about Belgium? Well, it's very sad about Belgium, but the truth is that Britain, when confronted with the conflict between its own interests and morality, has in the past dumped other people in the mud. And most particularly, we did so in 1864, when when Prussia attacked Denmark and we promised to go to their aid and Plansden said, oh, actually, sorry, we're busy at the moment, we're not coming. And it's a horrible thing to do, but it was a very wise decision. Because there's nothing we could have done to save Dover.

Most people in 1914 believe when wars declared that it would be a naval war, that we would just enter it as a, we would send the Navy to help the French in various ways, and that would be that. It never had any idea we were going to create a huge, a large-sized army and lose hundreds of thousands of people who have conscription and rationing, never crossed their minds. Doesn't it speak to also the arrogance of the political class at the time? Because I can see you're going to disagree with this, but wasn't the narrative that...

I don't think we've ever said anything. Political classes are always arrogant. That's why they do it. But the narrative of the problem... Who should know better than I, one of the most arrogant people I know. So that's not in itself necessarily. Criticism. You have to be a bit arrogant.

You want to do some things. And politics is one of them, I think. But then there's a fundamental disconnect from reality or getting a decision so disastrously wrong that hundreds of thousands of people die. Because the narrative at the time was, well, this is all going to be done and dusted by Crembo. Well, some people said that.

I think there were three people in the cabinet who were worried about. Two of them were John Burns and John Moley. John Morley, probably the most intelligent person in British politics. at the time who actually resigned secretly asked with us and to keep it secret over preparations for war trying to prevent it but they and asked with I think has serious stats about himself because again he was he was a clever man but he was

afraid that if he didn't declare war then his government would fall and a pro-war coalition was formed between the the pro-war elements of his own party and the Tories and that he was panicked into it it wasn't a rational decision it was it was largely a panic and made on partly on the grounds that things had got out of control which they did very rapidly Barbara Suckerman's the guns of August is probably the best description of how of how this happened it wasn't no sleep walked into it's absolutely not at all the Germans quite deliberately deliberately deliberately encouraged Austria into a into a confrontation with Russia in the hope that

it would lead to and that was the the the the it was an accident his untrue, but the different events which followed, particularly between Britain and Germany, basically matters getting increasingly out of control because we didn't realize that we were, we were talking to a Germany which was absolutely set on war. Fritz Fischer's great book makes this quite plain. There's no doubt in my mind. Germany wanted a war, but they wanted war with Russia. They felt they would have to knock out France.

France was also frantic for war. They wanted revenge for 1870. And they conducted the war in the initial months of war, almost insanely sending waves of men in bright red trousers that gets straight into German gunfire. The casualties were colossal and the military effect disastrous. It was crazy war. And we got involved in it.

And for what? What was our interest in, if Russia and Germany and Austria, Hungary have a conflict? What was the conflict between those? Basically, Russia with the backing of Austria-Hungary, sorry, Germany, Germany with the backing of Austria-Hungary wanted to expand eastwards, particularly to what is now Ukraine. And you can see the shape of the ambition in the 1918 piece of Brest-Dosz,

which Germany signed with Bolsheviks, which actually created modern Ukraine, amongst other things, stuff, one of the things that it did. And also it transferred all the, the Baltic states from Russian to German control and shifted Poland. That is the crucial, people think of it being Belgium and France, but that's gone. The actual cockpit of war in 20th century, Europe, but now in 21st century remains Ukraine. This is a hugely important piece of territory, and that's what they were worried about. Do you know where Lenin is when, do you know when Lenin was when the war broke out? No. Paris, wasn't it?

No. He was in Austro-Hungarian-controlled Poland, where he was quite valued, as it turned out, by the Austro-Hungarians because of his role in fermenting anti-Moscow sentiment in what was to become Ukraine. He was arrested by the local policeman because he was obviously Russian and an alien and he looked sinister anyway. But within a couple of days of him being arrested in this small country town, he was hoiked out of prison. prison by the Austrian government intervention, I think, of the army high command, and put on a train to Ziri. So, Peter.

From which eventually he went, as you know, with huge tons of German gold to overthrow the Russian government. This is what was really going on. This is what we bizarrely got ourselves involved in. Let me say this, because I know I'm not alone. At some point, your body just stops bouncing back the way it used to. You train hard, you travel, you push yourself, and suddenly recovery takes longer. You wake up stiff, joints complain, skin, hair, nails, things don't look or feel quite right anymore.

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or click the link in the description of this episode. That's B-U-B-S-Natrules.com. code trig. And when they ask where you heard about them, tell them trigonometry send you. Once more for 20% off. Use code trig at bubs naturals.com. And you described Britain, the British Empire, in the terms that you did, solid, economically. I was talking about Britain. The Empire is a different question. How much longer the Empire could have survived? The Empire had weakened itself quite badly with the great folly of the, particularly the Second Boer War, in which we'd hear. hugely lowered our international standing by our, by behaving extremely, brutally towards a small

country. I mean, no way has any sympathy for the Boers now, because obviously they were the people who brought the world apartheid, but at the time, quite a lot of people did. And also, we established the famous concentration counts in South Africa, which were not, I mean, the phrase is the same. The reality is not, by any means, identical, but they were horrible. And Emily Hobhouse exposed their horror in the world knew that we'd done a terrible thing. We'd done enormous damage.

It was in some ways the Second World War was Britain's Iraq War, the moment at which our world power began to decline. Empires come and go. It would have been perfectly possible for this country to quietly relinquish most of its empire, much of which was expensive to maintain and brought us no benefit, and become a major country in its own right. We were still a huge manufacturer and exported with enormous, enormous foreign investments, especially in South America, and all that went. We could have managed the transition to being a secondary power

much more readily and successfully if we'd stayed out of that stupid war. And what happens, this is why we started this portion of the conversation with, Brutonis, as you describe it, is a very solid economically, culturally, etc. you have this war that takes the lives of hundreds of thousands of the best men of the also costs us all our money and it costs us all our by by i think late 1915 we were we were in severe debt to the united states it took very quick once war isn't fantastically expensive the same thing was true with 193040 it took no time at all for us to be in debt and do you know we've never paid off our debt to the united states the first world war you did i did not know that most

people don't in fact when i tell them they say no it can't be true we paid it off the other day what What we paid off the other day was actually our Second World War debt. The First World War debt, we stopped payments in 1994 and we haven't paid a penny since or any interest. We actually defaulted on it. It's one of the most undiscussed scandals of modern history. The Americans absolutely remember. You can get the Treasury to admit it if you try.

And there has actually been a book about it, a rather good book called The Long Shadow of Default, which I recommend to anybody. we actually remain in debt to the United States for the First World War. And... And... And... And... And...

Soon after... Good, eh? Fairly soon after you get into World War II, which we've already talked about. And what happens in your assessment in the post-war period that contributes to where we've arrived at today? Well, it's all one road, isn't it? Once you go to war in 1914 and you cease to be rich, and you cease to be powerful. And again, look at...

There's another tremendous book, I can't recommend it highly enough, called The Deluge by Adam Too's, which describes amongst, it's full of stuff about the First World War which most people don't write about. But it describes what happened between Britain and the United States over naval power, which was this was our power. And it was the cruins of nuclear power at the time. And the Americans forced us to limit our naval forces. They forced us to both limit the size of our navy and the size of our ships. They forced us to bring. break our crucial alliance with Japan, which enabled us to remain secure in the Pacific. And the arguments between the admirals of the US Navy and the British Navy grew so tense

at points, the fistfights nearly broke out between them over this. And that was again and after one, and you see from this the long slope lying ahead of decline, which was dictated to us by our voluntary bankruptcy of 1914. And I think part of the problem as well is that we still, we're going back to the idea of delusion, we still have this idea of us being this kind of great nation which has a huge impact across the globe. And the reality is there are much bigger nations who are much more powerful, who have a far more significant impact, who don't necessarily care what we say or do. Oh, lots. So one of the first things you discover, if you're going to live in the United States,

of course, you think you expect to find a special relationship, and everybody loves us, but I found myself being accused of being Australian. What's that accent? And also, I found that you would read the American newspapers and watch American newsletters. And our country usually wasn't mentioned. Well, no other countries were mentioned. It might as well as being the Falkland Islands. It just wasn't, nobody cared.

And I searched Washington, D.C. for two years for any sign of the special relationship. Not really was the none. I actually watched this country being ruthlessly squashed on the Irish issue by the US government, Bill Clinton. They just crushed us like a beetle over that. And if there is a special relationship, it's especially nasty one. It was amazing to watch. But they don't, this is a fantasy.

So we're neither important nor much like, and it's important for people to realize this, but they won't. They want to believe. It's a great compensation actually for having made, and it was the colossal sacrifice for the Second World War as a country, years of rationing, privation, the deaths of many of the bombing of our cities. Surely we had to have something as a result of all that sacrifice and pain. And people really wanted to believe that it was our finest hour and that we had emerged

from this as a great and powerful nation. Well, it was our finest hour. I don't dispute that. We fought very bravely and movingly against very large and dangerous forces and we suffered a great deal. And my parents went through it, but we didn't emerge from this as great power. But people don't, it's like your own manhood. People don't like admitting that. And it's also like you see it with the policy on net zero where people go, well, you know,

we're going to set an example to the rest of the world. Britain should lead the world by blowing up all its coal-fired power stations, which China is building about 10 a month. Yes, I know. It's a necessity. But it is. We blow them up too. We don't, we don't cautiously saying, oh, this might be a mistake of mothball. Blow them up. Millions of pounds worth of valuable plant blown up, dismantled. So no possibility that anybody might admit it was a mistake ever. Peter, when you started making some of these points initially, were you more optimistic than you are now? Yes.

You've been ground down by the reality that no one listens to your warnings. I wrote my first book, The Abolition of Britain in 1999, I did so in the belief that it was possible. What I began to think was writing, I then wrote for the Daily Express, writing a weekly column, frankly, in the Daily Express was not going to have much influence. What I really wanted to do was particularly was to get into national broadcasting war. And I was advised by a friend that you can't get anywhere very much in national broadcasting if you haven't written a book. And so I wrote the book with the purpose of extending the world.

my reach of my ideas. And in fact, it was quite interesting. Some of the initial reviews of it, although they aren't complimentary, accepted that something serious was being said, in general, it was very hard to get it published, had struggle very hard to get published. Most publishers refuse to have anything to do with me. And a major agent who I approached wouldn't touch me, let alone the book. And eventually I got it published.

And actually, by a publisher so small that my family had to do all the world. work of getting into bookshops and it ended up it still sells even now what is it 27 years later but it was a real struggle to get it out but some of the reviews understood that something is being said oh wow and I did begin to get a certain amount of opportunity in broadcasting at one point on channel four let me make documentaries and I would get on the big the big opinion programs and And I thought there is some point at which there might be a, the sprockets of what I think and of what is talked about in politics will mesh with each other and we'll get somewhere. And then it became more and more obvious that this wasn't so.

And the time went by and the crucial moment for me remains when I was in the fourth, when David Cameron took over the Conservative Party on behalf of the Blairites. I can put this more clearly now than I could then, but I was quite clear about it the time. If people allow this to happen, if people endorse this Blairite takeover of the only major opposition party, then it is the end. You mustn't do it. Don't just vote Tory because you want a Tory government, because you won't get a Tory government. One of the points I can make now more clearly than then was actually Gordon Brown was probably more conservative than David Cameron, particularly on things like the European single currency.

and he was it was and is a more conservative person but I was just trying to say no you it's vital that this that this doesn't succeed and I couldn't get anybody to listen to me and I remember going around some other supposedly right-wing columnists and saying if I keep saying this alone I'll get nowhere if anybody else joins in it might actually make some impact and they wouldn't and it was at that point that I despaired And once the Cameron government came into office and everybody imagined that the Tories had won the election which they haven't even done and the coalition settled in, I thought, that's it.

Isn't that quite dementing in many ways? You must, I mean, it's a hack comparison. It's not the word I choose. It's dispiriting. But for me, what is above all because I have that kind of temperance is furiating. And there are two ways of reaction to it. if you're furious. And one is just to have total content ever afterwards

for everything, everybody involved in what resulted from what I tried to prevent. So I do. But it's also because what you're fundamentally talking about is it's a tragedy. I think so. I think it might have been avoidable. It would have been worth trying as,

I think 2010 was the last moment at which it might have been doable. But it was just, it's just got me nothing except abuse. Well, and plenty of appearances of trigonometry, of course. Well, that, of course, is a great compensation. Your sarcasm is much appreciated. No, no, no, no, no, you should hear me being sarcastic. It doesn't sound like that at all.

Peter, it's always wonderful to talk to you. We're going to ask you some questions from our supporters. the second but the last question as you know is always the same it's on the mug that you were looking at earlier what's the one thing we're not talking about that we should we haven't really talked about the attempts to create war when I wrote the the phony victory my purpose was actually to make to make a strong case against what seemed to me at the time a drive for war which i thought would emerge either in iran or in russia and i thought these countries were both being prepared to become enemies.

And I thought if I could only spread the idea in some way, a mature idea that this is, that as a country we shouldn't be beguiled into war by this constant repetition of the idea that every single world conflict is a repeat of 1938. Therefore, that anybody who opposes it is Neville Chamberlainble, Anybody who continues to oppose it after it started is Lord Hawaugh, that everybody who's in favor of it is Winston Churchill.

This is, I thought, first of all, I show that what we thought about Neville Chamberlain was not absolutely true. And also that the whole development of war in late 1930s Europe had no parallels with what's going on in the Europe of today. And for all the good it did, I might as well have stayed at home. But that's, it does alarm me. There is, we're constantly talking, we're constantly coming. Intelligence chiefs come out and say, we have to prepare for war.

Russia is a great threat. Well, you can believe that if you want, though I find it a struggle. I always remember going to Moscow. Was it in 2008? I know it was the first big parade of the new Russian army. They decided they're going to restart the Red Square parades. And I'd watch the last one in November 1990. And so my officer said, why don't you go out and watch it?

And I watched it with my old friend, Igor Monashchath, whose father had been a Soviet nuclear submarine commander and he knew his military staff. And we stood on the balcony of the hotel watching it as close as we could get. And I enjoy a good parade as much as the rest. And at the end of it, Igor turned to me and said, what did you think of a great display of strategic scrap metal? And he was quite right. I mean, it was the big new weapons they probably had two or three of.

Most of the stuff they were able to put out was probably old, much of its Soviet era. We knew, we still know the Russian military is fantastically corrupt and incompetent. And the training of soldiers is a disgrace. It's a terrible army. and it can't after four years, they haven't managed to take Kharkov 20 miles from the border. So to turn this into a great bogeyman, which is about to turn up at Dunkirk with its tanks pointed at the British coast, just doesn't seem to me to be realistic. But the intelligence people, retired generals, ex-defense ministers, NATO chiefs are constantly trying to prepare us for war.

And the last thing I noticed was some suggestion that we might all start hoarding food and medicines in case that was a war. There's a real attempt to try and get the British people who become war-minded, which I think can only end sadly. Peter, it's been an absolute pleasure. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Make sure to join us over on Substat, where we carry on the conversation and you get to ask Peter your questions. I've always greatly admired Peter's books. finishing them always end up feeling rather hopeless about Britain's future. Is Britain doomed to disintegrate?