August 5, 2025 • 54 mins
We are on holiday in Europe at the moment. Of course there will be a full account on return.
It was almost two years ago that writer and public speaker Lord Hannan was in NZ, and we recorded an interview which provided much food for thought.
Having visited the country on numerous occasions, Daniel's opinion on politics and the economy was valid.
A couple of years later is a good time to check on his ‘predictions’ as to where several controversial issues might be headed.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:09):
You're listening to a podcast from news Talks B. Follow
this and our Wide Ranger podcast now on iHeartRadio. It's
time from all the Attitude, all the Opinion, all the information,
all the debates of the US now the Leyton Smith
Podcast powered by news talks it B.
Speaker 2 (00:28):
Welcome to Podcasts two hundred and ninety six. For August six,
twenty twenty five, Lord Daniel of Kingsclear has backed a
great deal into his life. He was born September one,
nineteen seventy one in Lima, Peru. A member of the
Conservative Party, a member of the European a member of
(00:48):
the European Parliament and in twenty twenty one, the House
of Lords. He's also known as Daniel Hannon and as
a British writer, journalist, and well plenty else. He guested
on podcasts to twenty three. At the end of As
It Happens twenty twenty three, I listened to a little
of the interview while sailing from a Palermo to Malta. Well,
(01:11):
actually we've just left Palermo, but I dug it out
and played a bit back just to get the.
Speaker 3 (01:18):
Feel of it.
Speaker 2 (01:19):
It was a good interview, including the decadent West sharing values.
What we've learned in the past few years, have you
really learned much? And I'm talking overall and his thoughts
and predictions regarding immigration into the UK. His reference to
the Mediterranean and illegal immigrants crossing it rang something of
(01:45):
a bell because that's exactly where we are at this
particular point of time. But maybe best of all, Daniel
Hannon is a brilliant speaker. Whether you've heard this conversation
or not, I trust that you'll get something out of it,
because there's plenty in it, So enjoy. Muckelan is a
(02:08):
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Protection becomes effective a few days after you take buccolan
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(02:53):
be used along with the flu vaccination for added protection.
And keep in mind that millions of doses have been
taken by Kiwis for over fifty years. Only available from
your pharmacist. Always read the label and users directed, and
see you doctor if systems persist. Farmer broker auclumb Layton
(03:20):
Smith Daniel John Hannon was born on the Versus September
nineteen seventy one. He's a British writer, a journalist to politician.
He's a lot more than that and more extensive than
each of those areas. He is the founding president of
the Initiative for Free Trade and was a Conservative Member
of the European Parliament for Southeast England from nineteen ninety
(03:41):
nine until the United Kingdom's exit from the EU in
twenty twenty. I saw him on numerous occasions on television
for eclips taken from the European Parliament, and I was
in the audience of a commentary that he gave at
Auckland's University a number of years ago now and one
could not help but be impressed. So the Right Honorable
(04:04):
Lord Henden of Kingsclear, welcome to the Latensmith Podcast.
Speaker 3 (04:08):
Glad to have you here. Thank you very much, Lay,
what a generous introduction we try.
Speaker 2 (04:13):
I want to acquote you something to begin you said
prior to the EU referendum. You said, being a nation
means that we are not just a random set of
individuals born to a different random set of random individuals.
It imposes on us the duty to keep intact the
freedoms that we were lucky enough to inherit from our
(04:36):
parents and pass them on securely to the next generation.
How are we doing well? I think you guys are
doing pretty well, honestly. I mean I find myself saying
this every time I come to New Zealand, which I've
been doing every five years or so throughout my life.
I always find myself having to say, you guys don't
know how lucky you are.
Speaker 3 (04:56):
The rest of the world would swap their problems for yours.
Not because everything is perfect here, but because you know,
taking everything together, it's going pretty well. But globally, I
have to say I am a lot more pessimistic than
when I said that, And I think what really altered
my outlook was not just the lockdowns, but the clamor
(05:18):
for harder and stricter lockdowns in what I had thought
were free, open and liberal societies.
Speaker 2 (05:25):
So why was it then that we followed the Chinese?
Speaker 3 (05:27):
Do you think? But we did it.
Speaker 2 (05:29):
The Anglo sphere did it very willingly and seemed to
convince people that they were doing the right thing. When
I say people, I mean the bulk of people.
Speaker 3 (05:40):
Yes, I mean, there's no getting away from it. It
was a public opinion driven process as much as it
was a science driven process. You know, we had contingency
plans in place, and in none of our countries did
they envisage the mass incarceration of a chunk of the population.
And yet in the panicky days that followed the lockdowns,
(06:03):
in first in China and then in Italy, it became
very difficult to make those arguments, and politicians were pushed
into doing things out of I suppose there was a
fear that the slightest error on the side of caution
would be career ending. But you could go as far
(06:24):
as you like in terms of excessive intervention, and no
one would hold it against you and by the way,
that was accurate. That's how it turned out. But in
the end it turned out to the incorrect way to
do it. Well, I don't see how else you can
read the figures, because at the time we were told, look,
wait until all the results are in. Countries measure this
(06:46):
in different ways. You know, did you die with COVID
or of COVID And some countries can't even measure that
because they didn't have the facilities. Now we do now
have all the figures in and the measure that is
consistent and that you can't fake, and that is the
same methodology the world over is excess deaths. You know,
how many people would you expect to die, how many
(07:07):
people died in the last three is versus how many
actually did. And that's something which the whole world measures
in the same way. And you know what do you find?
Obviously New Zealand does pretty well because you know it
had the advantage of geographical isolation, But the country that
comes at the top or close to the top, however
you measure it of those lists is Sweden, which didn't
(07:29):
have a lockdown, And at the time we were told
Sweden was inviting a kind of civilization or collapse by
being an outlier and refusing to go beyond banning a
few large meetings. Well, you know, I mean, if you look,
just compare New Zealand with Sweden. Right, New Zealand virtually
nobody died of COVID because of the geographical advantages. But
(07:52):
there was a lockdown, by the way, a lighter one
than in Britain or in most places, but there were
still a lockdown, and it was it was prolonged. Sweden,
no lockdown, but everyone got COVID right at the start.
Sweden seem to come out with a lower excess mortality
over all the New Zealand and I cannot see any
way of reading those figures other than to conclude that
(08:13):
the lockdowns killed more people than they saved.
Speaker 2 (08:15):
I somehow think, well, that one of us has got
off track, and that would be me, because you're arguing
the way that I would have, and somewhere we've got
a crushed wire. When I said, when I said it
was wrong, then I was referring to the fact that
they the lockdowns were wrong. The imposition of virtually compulsive vaccinations,
(08:39):
or any words you wish to substitute for vaccinations was wrong,
was incorrect of the lack of freedom in not being
able to make decisions based on our own belief in
what was going on and what we thought and the
conclusions we came to, which is the essential aspect of
a democracy. Was totally the wrong thing to do.
Speaker 3 (09:01):
Yes, but I'm afraid ninety percent of people were clamoring
for those freedoms to be taken away, which reflects has
made me really rethink how our societies work. I mean
that most Brits, and I suspect most key Wes would
have gladly had microschips, you know, injected into their arms
if it meant that the pubs were open. And it's
(09:22):
the idea that we were a freedom loving set of people,
that we were free countries in the phrase we used
to use, I think has taken quite a knock. But
I mean, I think, knowing what we now know, I
was a very lonely critic from day one of the lockdowns.
I mean, you could almost count on your fingers how
(09:42):
many of us there were back in March of twenty twenty.
A lot of people joined in April and May, but
there were you know, those and it's the most unpopular
position I've ever taken in a lifetime of punditry. In politics,
I've never had so much abuse because people were frightened, Oh,
you're killing my granny, you know, in order to put
the economy before lives or whatever it was. And yet
(10:06):
looking at the figures i've first of all, I just
I don't see how you can avoid the conclusion that
non pharmaceutical interventions were ineffective, that the lockdowns didn't work. Also,
touching on what you just just brought up, which is
the mass vaccinations, just think about what we now know
about the efficacy of vaccines. Okay, they were good at
(10:27):
keeping you out of hospital with COVID, they were very
good at keeping vulnerable people alive. It was a very
good thing that they were made available to people who
were at risk, and the countries that did that quick,
as you know, were saving lives. But we now know
that they were of almost no use, maybe none at all,
(10:49):
as a way of preventing transmission. So they were good
at keeping you out of hospital, they weren't really preventing
you from infecting your granny, and certainly not if you've
already had COVID and so just think about the consequences
of that. Think about the implications if vaccines were not
much use in transmission. Then the whole edifice that we
(11:11):
constructed of passports and travel restrictions and apps and all
the stuff that went further in New Zealand than in
a lot of places where you almost couldn't live a
full life as a citizen unless you had the approval.
All of that was based on a lie. Because we
now know that both Pfizer and the WHO knew at
(11:32):
the time that the vaccines, however good they were at
preventing illness, were not good at preventing transmission.
Speaker 2 (11:40):
So we could go on and talk about this further,
but we'd be we'd be treading on familiar territory. Let
me then just ask you an associated question, what would
it take for another round of something to cower the
populations of our countries into much the same sort of approach, right?
Speaker 3 (12:00):
And that is the question that I keep asking myself.
We are having, as you are, an appalling inquiry, sort
of inquest into what has happened. I say appalling because
it's obvious that they have begun with their conclusion and
that the you know, instead of asking the only question
that we want answered, which is what was the efficacy
of lockdowns? That they are assuming that lockdowns were a
(12:21):
good idea and focusing on why didn't we do it earlier? Right,
and so on the one level, you think, actually, what
I've wasted opportunity. We should find out whether all these
things other than the vaccines were of any use, because
what if there's another pandemic? And actually, though I was
thinking about this recently and I thought, you know what,
it doesn't really matter what they conclude, because what we
(12:44):
learned in twenty twenty is that whatever contingency plans you
have in place, they will be ripped up in a
panic as soon as there is pressure from public opinion
and shrieking broadcasters. So we had a contingency plan. We
had protocols that have been drawn up in cooler headed
times that did not envisage lockdowns, that provided for gradual
(13:05):
spread so that the NHS wouldn't be overwhelmed, that we
get to a period of collective immunity, and that did
not sustain, you know, people taking the most extreme scenarios
and going on TV and saying, why doesn't Boris Johnson
care about keeping my grammy alive. So I'm afraid whatever
our inquiries conclude, that is going to keep happening, because
(13:28):
what we've really learned is that in a crisis, the
government will snatch for power. The instinct of every regulator,
every civil servant, and every advisor will be to ban,
to regulate, to impose restrictions and prohibitions. And we've learned
also that the bulk of the population will be cheering
and demanding more. That's I'm afraid. So, you know, I
(13:50):
was like, you know what, I was a real you know,
Matt Ridley, you know, Johann Norberg, Steve Pinker type rational
optimist until twenty twenty. It's very difficult to be as
cheerful now, given what we've seen of how contingent and
how fragile liberalism is.
Speaker 2 (14:09):
We would like to think that we would approach something
similar differently, but I think what you've what you've stated
is probably more accurate. The other aspect of people being
as compliant as they were even demanding, as you've put it,
was that the media sided with the government pretty much,
(14:30):
pretty much one hundred percent. The media would not print
anything that was that was alien to the to the
government instructions. And so there was a lack of alternative information.
Now I the I did one of the very first
interviews with an Australian doctor who had a vast experience
(14:51):
with hydrochlorocon. He was trying desperately to get the message
out and he got nowhere, and no Australian politicians would
talk to him, even though he had support in the
medical sphere. I wonder why that is. Why was it
that the media compplied. The investigative journalism that that you
(15:11):
and I would both appreciate greatly was non existent.
Speaker 3 (15:16):
Well that again, that's a very good question. I think
people took the view that they had to go with
what the experts were telling them because they were not epidemiologists,
they were not virologists, and therefore listened to the official advice.
But so I was a skeptical journalist throughout. I have
a Telegraph column, and even before the lockdown, I was
(15:37):
writing pieces saying do not lockdown. There is no justification
for it. And as I say, it was a very
very unpopular position, and the Telegraph was a real outlier
in allowing pieces like that to be printed. No other
mainstream outlet was doing so in the UK. But I
learned something, so the first time in my journalistic career,
I really had to go to source and start reading
(16:00):
the primary sources, the actual medical studies. Normally, you know,
sorry if this is going to upset any listeners, and
I know that you can normally just read the new
scientists and summarize something for the second reason, but during
the pandemic, you couldn't do that. You really needed to
get on top of the detail. And what I found,
and it really shocked me, was that on almost every
(16:23):
aspect of the response to the pandemic, you could find
good faith, serious academic surveys and studies arguing diametrically opposite things,
not with any obvious agenda, not funded by big Farmer
or anything, but just honest disagreements. You know, did face
masks work, could children infect adults? What was the impact
(16:47):
of closing schools? Did it make any difference if you
to get vaccinated, if you'd already had natural immunity, et cetera.
You could find half a dozen things on each side
of those, all perfectly well argued. And that meant two things.
First of all, it meant that it was very difficult
for the advisors or the politicians to know what to do,
and they therefore tended to default to all let's err
(17:09):
on the side of caution, let's you know, let's not
take any risks, and all the incentives pushed them into
doing that, and it really was erring. But also it
meant that every critic could then find some perfectly good
study and cherry pick that and say, look, this shows
that it was all nonsense. And so I had some
sympathy with the decision makers as a result of that experience.
(17:31):
But I'm afraid, nonetheless, that when you put it all together,
you can't get away. Having said that I have some sympathy,
you can't get away from the fact that, certainly after
the first lockdown, I give them a pass on, look,
don't take any risk until we know what we're dealing with.
It wasn't my position at the time, but I don't
blame the people who disagreed with me about that. But
by the time that we knew that infections were already
(17:54):
falling before the lockdown had been imposed, then to repeat
it and repeat it a third time in many countries,
and a fourth time I think in some countries that
I think is almost unfigivable. Because that was unscientific. It
was driven by pure fear. And here's the thing. We've
got all these bad effects of long lockdown. We've got
(18:15):
the bad economic effects. We've got the debt levels we've
got in my country, no government worker is ever going
to come back to the office, and a big chunk
of the private sector of basically given up on on
work as well. We've got higher rates than ever before
of absenteeism from school. We've got mental health problems. We've
got all the undiagnosed, unscreened cancers and all of that.
(18:36):
We've got all these elements, if you like, of long lockdown.
But we've got one other one which is never mentioned,
which is the rise in conspiracy theories caused by governments
saying things that then turned out to be untrue. I
have seen again and again, perfectly clever, respectable people going
from asking correctly, asking quite justifiably, why were youngsters who
(18:58):
were at no risk forced to take a vaccine when
it was when they were not a threat from COVID,
asking that perfectly reasonable question, the thing or actually, maybe
all vaccines are a plot by big farmer. And while
we're on the subject, you know, why is the w
why is the why is the World Economic Forum trying
to you know, pursue us with microschips and why are
(19:21):
we believing what we're told about Ukraine and Song? All
of that is a consequence of the government saying things
that turned out to be untrue, and that I think
they knew was untrue at the time, but they were,
you know, they were in this in this state of
pull any lever, you never know, something might just work,
all right.
Speaker 2 (19:37):
So what we what we're left with is a lack
of skepticism, and skepticism has been done more damaged by
what took place or otherwise, well.
Speaker 3 (19:48):
I think we instead of instead of healthy skepticism. You know,
in a in a healthy democracy, you have debates and
you have people saying, we don't know this, but here
are the facts that suggests this, and you know what's
the balance of probability We didn't have that we had,
you know this this rather authoritarian insistence of the worl
only one truth that as justinda, I don't infamously say
(20:12):
that if we haven't said it, it's not true, which
is a scary thing to say. And then it turned
out that a lot of what they were saying wasn't true,
you know, they having assumed this monopoly on truth, a
lot of what they said turned out to be mistaken.
So instead of skepticism, we've pushed people into paranoia, into
you know, outright conspiracy. And I you know, I've seen
(20:34):
this happen to two particularly good friends of mine, one
a politician and one a writer, and journalists who you know,
have gone from asking good questions about mistakes that the
government's genuinely made into you know, chem trails and nine
to eleven conspiracies and moon landings and the works, because
(20:56):
they've given up on believing anything.
Speaker 2 (20:59):
I reluctantly, but I have to ask you your whether
or not you travel the same road with regard to
and I'm talking about skepticism and in fact, with regard
to climate change, as in men, let's accept there is
climate change, but.
Speaker 3 (21:16):
Men made climate change. So I mean, I hope we
can all accept that there is climate change. I've never
understood what the phrase climate change, denia or climate change
kept me. I've yet to meet anyone positing climate stasis.
Put it like that right now, I think that So
I think that I think the world at the moment
is heating, and I think that human activity is playing
(21:39):
a part in that, although not as big a part
as some of the catastrophists claim. But I think there's
a really important distinction to be drawn between the science
of meteorology and climatology and the political question of what
you do about it. So, you know, I don't have
any expertise in climate science. You know, I haven't done
(22:05):
any science since the age of about sixteen. But I
do know a little bit about the trade offs that
you have to make in politics, and that is if
you like my sphere as somebody who spent you know,
more than two decades as an elected representative. So if
you think that there is going to be X or y,
(22:26):
a bad consequence of a changing climate, leaving aside whether
or not it's man made or the extent of which
is man made. If you think, okay, there's going to
be rising sea levels, or there's going to be you know,
this area is going to dry out or whatever, you
then have a policy choice of Okay, what are the
range of options. How much do we spend on adaptation
or how much do we spend on trying to slow
(22:47):
it down a bit? Who pays? You know, if there
is a if there's good reason to believe that advances
in technology will mean that this is much cheaper if
we leave it for a bit, then is that a
reasonable thing to do? Now, those questions generally are not
being asked because the whole thing is being approached in
a spirit of kind of Tunberg millenarianism of you know,
(23:08):
if you don't agree with all of this, you want
the world to fry. I'm going to do something that's
very rarely done. But he deserves a shout out. The
first senior governing politician in Britain to challenge this and
to interrogate it is Rushie Sunac, who's said, hang on,
wait a minute, some of these figures seem a bit pessimistic.
(23:28):
You know, is it really so bad if we change
some of these time tables, some of these time scales on,
you know, phasing out car engines or whatever. The green
Blob exploded because nobody has ever questioned them before. But
actually his questions were completely reasonable, and they were not
about the science. They were about what is the most
effective way when you have limited resources of responding to it.
(23:50):
And that's one hundred percent of his job because, unlike them,
he's been elected to.
Speaker 2 (23:53):
Something and for that he deserves eccolades. Let's talk about
some other matters. You mentioned the NHS, and I don't
want to spend too much time on it. I came
back from London earlier in the year with the critical
why the NHS has been betrayed by doctor Julia Grace Patterson,
and it bothered me a great deal because we were
(24:15):
going through then a discussion, an argument, a battle over
the health system in this country. Now, what's taken place
since virtually since you've arrived in the country, post the election,
but pre the announcement of the structure, is that we
are now pretty much i think, off the hook for
(24:36):
so many things that we were being dammed with that
I'm feeling the sort of positiveness that I haven't felt
for a long time that you I think indicated you
you were missing.
Speaker 3 (24:49):
Yeah, I mean, what did I misinterpret? No, I think
I think you're quite right. I mean our NHS is
I think probably the single biggest constraint on growth, both
directly and indirectly, both in the sense that it is
a massive version of resources into inefficient outcomes and in
(25:12):
the sense that it's quite bad at getting people to
be well again and Therefore, we have a lot of
people taking time off work when in a system where
they were short of waiting times and so on, you know,
we'd have much more productivity. We've tried. You know, for years,
it's been obvious that this was a bad system, but
people always took refuge in claiming that the real problem
(25:36):
was underfunding and if only more taxpayers money was given
to it, things would get better. Well, you can't argue
that anymore. La're massively, massively increased spending on healthcare, the
Tory coalition continued. Boris continued the NHS. We're now spending
more on healthcare than most comparable countries and were still
(25:56):
getting worse results. I mean, they're not the worst results
in the world, but they are. They are very poor
given what we're spending. So, you know, I think we've
One of the things that a labor government may be
able to do is to fix some of that. They
I think the labor just as it was Blair who
introduced such minimal reforms as we've had in healthcare, if
anyone can go further, it'll be starmer because a left
(26:17):
of center government can do this without being suspected of
trying to sort of murder the poor or whatever. The
other big constraint we have, by the way, is housing.
It's almost impossible to build things in the UK. I
find it amazing when I fly over New Zealand to
think there's a housing crisis here. I look at the
plane window and I think, how can there possibly be
a shortage of housing in a country that they do well.
We'll leave that to one side, but I I, you know,
(26:39):
I've we're talking on the day after the Coalition agreement
was reached. I'm really really bullish. As I read down it,
I'm thinking, wow, you know, uh, you know, although most
of my key we friends, being Tories, are quite sort
of grumpy about the state of affairs, they've really got
nothing to be grumpy about compared to the rest of us. It's,
(26:59):
you know, we've we've had We've had great problems to have.
Speaker 2 (27:02):
We've had plenty of grumpiness, entitlement up and up until
now for the last three years minimum six years maximum.
But it's amazing how things can change. If I had
lunch with a very good friend of mine who spent
a long time living in London, not that that's got
anything to do with it yesterday and He brought along
the print out of the new appointments, and he said,
(27:26):
I brought this so you could see why I have
got a lot of faith. There's a lot of talent
on this list. And I looked down it and for
the because I hadn't I hadn't caught up with the detail,
I looked down that list and I thought, hell, he's right.
There is talent here. It's a matter of whether the
(27:48):
talent can combine itself with progress and carry out what
it intends to carry out, because with three parties anything
can go wrong. But in the meantime, I think, I
think there's a lot more people who are feeling much
more positive about where things might be.
Speaker 3 (28:08):
I could just get rid of it. I found myself.
I found myself at dinner last night. I was sitting
between the new Attorney General and one of the two
new defpms, and I was incredibly cheered up. Not by
how solid they were, which I already knew, but just
by how enthusiastic they were to get going, and what
(28:29):
an understanding they had of what the institutional and bureaucratic
resistance was going to be and how they intended to
get around this. And I just think it's this is
a you know, this is just a great time to
be in New Zealand.
Speaker 2 (28:41):
I'm going to make a transition from from housing shortages
to immigration because we we have or in the process
of absorbing something like one hundred and twenty thousand people
in the last twelve months.
Speaker 3 (28:56):
You where you come from, have.
Speaker 2 (29:00):
A flow that nobody can seem to stem, but nobody
can seem to stay. And there is a it appears
a massive shortage of housing. But why is it that
we have come in our countries to accepting the invasion
that we have. And I've always been in favor of immigration,
(29:22):
They've just got to be the right people. Right cultures
is especially important. But why is it that we have
been inundated and doesn't seem to be anything that can
be done about it, especially when it comes to Britain
and Europe.
Speaker 3 (29:39):
Well, I mean, I think there is a there are
substantial differences. So our countries are of comparable geographical size,
but you know, our population is seventy million, so there
are issues of space and crowding that happily New Zealand
(29:59):
doesn't face. The other difference is that Britain is constrained
by a bunch of treaties with you know, either European
or international treaties that make it very very difficult in
practice to prevent people arriving or to deport them, because
we have a judiciary that has just taking it upon
(30:20):
itself always and everywhere to oppose every repatriation order. New
Zealand is quite lucky, and that it's surrounded by sovereign waters,
so it can keep people out. It's not people if
you like crossing here from somewhere else. Having said all
of that, you know, I actually think you guys have
done pretty well, not perfectly, and there are things that
I would have done differently. And I'm particularly puzzled by
(30:43):
the way in which you don't seem able to screen
migrants from authoritarian countries to see whether they are supporters
of the ideology of the country that you know. I mean,
I'm always thrown when I bump into people of Chinese
origin here who turn out to be enthusiastic supporters of
the Chinese Communist Party, for example. That's the kind of
(31:06):
you know, it shouldn't be beyond the wit of man
to to filter that. But I think I think immigration
generally here has been very good news you've taken people
who are ambitious, who are you know? I mean, it
takes a hell of a lot to trow That noise,
by the way, is some immigrant looking guys working very
hard unloading furniture out of the window. But think of
(31:29):
what it takes to leave everything behind and come to
a place, which, gorgeous as it is, is remote. You
know you're not going to be seeing your family very often.
The time zones are not great. You know, that's all
wonderful self selection to get ambitious, resourceful and optimistic people, and.
Speaker 2 (31:49):
Yet there is a there is a problem that nobody,
nobody's really picked up on. And my raising of this
comes out of a conversation my wife had with a
with an Asian restaurant a couple of days ago, and
she went to pick up dinner and the owner and
she were having a chat and she asked how business was,
(32:12):
because he'd been through some tough times, etc. And he says, well,
it's much better than it was this time last year.
He's Chinese.
Speaker 3 (32:19):
And she said, what about staff?
Speaker 2 (32:21):
Because he had major problems and he wasn't opening on
some days like Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday because there was no staff.
He said, well, still the staff problem. It might be better,
but it's still a problem because the government is letting
in people and they can't speak English and the pot
the point being that there is no time for integration
(32:43):
and assimilation at this point, which is something that takes
a period of time. You want people coming into the
country that can actually fill roles and do jobs.
Speaker 3 (32:52):
Yeah, yeah, well yeah, although I mean because you've until
now been pretty good at taking people from a wide
variety of sources and therefore jumbling up in a way
that militates against the formation of these big ethnic and
linguistic ghettos. That has been much more successfully done here
than in all most anywhere in Europe. I would say,
but okay, I'll match your restaurant story for one of mine.
(33:13):
So I had. I had lunch yesterday at a little
place in Takapuna owned by a Colombian guy who is
your model, your model immigrant, you know, family run place,
he works every hour. And I said, how do you
feel about the election? And he said, I am overjoyed,
(33:34):
partly because I think the nationals are on the side
of people like me who want to work and get ahead.
But mainly I thought sort said, I had my pay
with Colombian. So I had my parents here last year
their first visit, and they were robbed and their passports
was told and that's never happened in Colombia, and it
(33:57):
happened in New Zealand. So he said, I'm in favor
of any government that's going to crack down on that.
Speaker 2 (34:02):
Well, I think, like most countries, Australia's one, Britain's one
crime as miracles Canada is another. I think I've covered
the roster that there has been a massive increase in
crime over the last few years, and in many places
the authorities don't want to do anything about them.
Speaker 3 (34:24):
Well, I think the reason I mentioned my Columbian friend
is he was, without saying it, he was reminding us
of something, which is that immigrants aren't disproportionately victims of crimes,
you know, because it happened because they live in the
areas that are the most crime written and therefore quite
responsive to any political party that will do something about it.
(34:44):
And the other thing that is striking about a lot
of the countries you just mentioned is that we could
still go further in allowing qualified people to work without
needless constraints put in their path by kind of guilds
and gatekeepers, right, So it's not so much of an
issue here as it is in some places. But you
(35:04):
still have occasionally the phenomenon of the you know, the
heart surgeon working as a nuber driver because he's waiting
to be allowed to practice, and that's and that's not
in anybody's interest.
Speaker 2 (35:15):
There is plenty of that, and it's gone on for
years and years. Economists and dentists are too that I'm
familiar with who ended up house cleaning and the other
other civilar tasks. One couple were both doctors. She she
went and spent the time doing the whatever you call it,
the catch up court course over a couple of years.
(35:38):
He was not going to do it. He was a
top top surgeon and he wasn't going to do it.
So he went and just did some ordinary laboring jobs.
It was really quite and there are straw So.
Speaker 3 (35:50):
One of the politicians who I'm really excited about at
the moment, I think probably my favorite center right politician
in the world is the leader of the Canadian Tory Party, Everett,
and he he is picking up huge support from immigrant
and Canada has an ambitious immigration policy three hundred and
fifty thousand a year, and they are pretty good. I mean,
(36:13):
you get all the same complaints there that you get everywhere,
but actually they're pretty good at managing this. They're pretty
good at sorting people out, getting the ones who really
want to be there, who are going to be patriotic
and grateful and going to contribute, and they're pretty good
at at not having ethnic blocks taking over one part
of the country. But his stick with all of those is,
(36:34):
I am going to remove the gatekeepers. I'm going to
let you work from day one. And he's getting huge
support from those communities as well as because he's going
to make you know. He's going to try and constrain
the Central Bank so that it no longer acts as
an ATM for spencer of government and allows people to
get on the housing ladder, which again is a pretty
(36:55):
popular message with newcomers. With mentioned of Canada. Just a
while ago.
Speaker 2 (37:00):
This morning, funnily enough, no more than an hour ago,
I came across a video that was made by a
Telegraph UK reporter who went to Canada. This was just
a few weeks ago, went to Canada and he went
to investigate why things were the way that they were
(37:23):
under Trudeau. Jordan Peterson made some opening comments about how
bad it is. He said, amongst other things, he said,
I don't think I've ever heard a true word come
out of Trudeau's mouth, And there were some other comments
along similar lines. Why is do you think Canada being
so tortured by this individual? Well, I don't think they
(37:47):
will be for much longer.
Speaker 3 (37:48):
I think the last poll the Tories are like eighteen
points ahead or something, and I'm very, very confident that
Canadians will ditch him. But why did they re elect him? Yes, well,
I think they re elected him for the same reason
that your countryman re elected Jacinda, which is that if
you call an election at the height of the crisis,
at the height of the COVID crisis, when you are
(38:11):
on TV every day giving these press conferences and looking
authoritative and you know, looking as you're in command, it's
very hard to dislodge an incumbent. Once the bills come
in and the hangover starts very different picture, Which is
why I wouldn't be at all surprised if just Intrudeau
does a just Cinda and leaves rather than having his
(38:32):
ass kicked in the polls. Yes, well, the new opposition
leader is brilliant. We agree on that. I think, I
really do. I mean, I think he is. He's such
a great communicator, he's very much one of us, and
he's just I've known him for it, for it for
a while since he was a new MP. And I
(38:55):
can barely think of anyone who is more focused and
more energetic than he is. And he's just a terrific patriot.
I mean, he's in politics for all the right reasons,
driven by a terrific sense of service. He's surprised that
Geeth Will does God got where hed No? I think
this is this is going to happen in other places.
I think it's only a matter of time before it
(39:15):
happens in Germany. If you if respectable politicians can't get
on top of immigration, then politicians from outside the mainstream
will own that issue in a way. Actually, I think
it's got a lot to do with why why Trump
is so difficult to unsea by other Republicans. There is
(39:36):
a general feeling that no one is listening on this subject,
and it may be that in Europe, as in the UK,
there's just not much that can be done. You know
that the the the electorate would not countenance the kind
of measures necessary properly to control borders in countries like that,
(39:59):
and so hence you get you get these politicians who
get elected saying that there's a simple answer, but you
it's very very you know, at the height of the
height of the migrant crisis in the Mediterranean twenty fifteen,
I went and volunteered in the south of Italy where
they were all arriving in a hostel for underage migrants,
(40:24):
so unaccompanied kids who come mainly from West Africa. And
these were bright, ambitious, resourceful boys who were doing what
you or I would do in their situation. But they
were not refugees, not as we define that word legally, right,
so that they were fleeing from poverty and corruption, they
were not fleeing from persecution and impression. And what I
(40:48):
noticed is that even if they didn't have shoes when
they arrived, because we met quite a lot of the
boats as they were being landed, even if they didn't
have shoes, these kids had smartphones. And the smartphone was
the key to the whole thing. The smartphone is what
had allowed them to make the journey. I mean, it's
a hell of an odyssey to cross first the Sahara
(41:08):
and then the Mediterranean. But the phone is what allowed
them to transfer credit transfer information and make a journey
that their grandparents could not have contemplated. And this is
why I just think that this problem is or this
this this phenomenon is going to increase how whatever we
do about it the most, the easy fascile and false
(41:29):
thing to say is, oh, if we gave these countries
more aid or whatever, then we'd remove the need for
them to leave. Actually that's the opposite of the truth.
It is rising wealth and rising aspirations in those countries
that is driving this this mass movement, and I don't
see it ending anytime soon. Now. When you've got that
(41:49):
level of sort of of push and pull factor migration,
the steps required significantly to reduce it will be pretty unpalatable.
And I think that's that's a choice that Europe is
just shying away from. Let me just finally make some
quick suggestions of things. I'd like your briefest comment on
(42:13):
if you if you can the decadent West, is it
at the end of its dominance? Yes, I think so.
I think you might be familiar with the headline. Yeah,
I mean, I just I look at the lineup of
how countries were voting on the Russia Ukraine war. I
look at how they are lined up on the Israel
(42:34):
Garza thing, and I look at how they put the
two things together. Countries that were previously quite well disposed,
and who say, oh, just imagine how on wait a minute,
imagine if if if Russia was behaving how Israel has behaved.
They'll say things like, you know, imagine if if if
Putin ordered the Ukrainians out of half of Ukraine. Imagine
if Russia had bombed two Polish airports in the way
(42:56):
that Israel bomb too Syrian ones. You know, what would
you say if put In cut off the energy supplies? Well,
we know what you said. You called it a war crime,
and you know, so we've what we've learned in the
last few months is that a lot of countries that
we thought would be in our camp because they were democracies,
a lot of countries that we thought would be kind
(43:16):
of drawn to Ukraine and to Israel because they would
see them as democracies under attack from authoritarian rogue regimes,
actually were only in our camp transactionally contingently, because we
were the sort of the dominant power, and as soon
as they think that we are no longer the dominant power,
(43:38):
it turns out that they don't really share our values
in the way that we thought.
Speaker 2 (43:43):
History hating Britain. Is it the WORKUS country on the West?
Speaker 3 (43:48):
Yeah, I mean I think the well, no, I think
the US and Canada are probably inching ahead of us.
But definitely there is a lot of wokery around and
it's infectious. You know. One of the things that I'm
really struck by is how much more anger there is
about British colonialism now than at a time when it
was still going on, or when it was a recent memory.
(44:09):
A lot of you know, there were a few countries
where the end of empire was a nasty, brutal and
bloody affair Kenya, India, Palestine, Ireland, Cyprus, but they were
actually the exception. In the vast majority of places, countries
(44:29):
were brought to independence without a shot being fired in anger.
And yet if you go to those countries now, in
the Caribbean or Malaysia or Ugandra or whatever, people like
they really wish there had been an independence war, and
they've kind of convinced themselves that there was right And
where have they picked that up from They've picked it
up from us, you know, And so there is now
the rage against an imaginary version of colonialism that there
(44:52):
never was when it was a real extant force.
Speaker 2 (44:55):
I picked up a book from my bookshelf recently, early
a week ago, and it's by Simon C. Beeg Mataveori,
The Biography of Jerusalem, and I started reading. I've had
I've had it for reading for ever since it was released.
And I started reading the prologue, and before I got
(45:17):
too far, I realized from the descriptions that he that
he writes of the fall, of the fall of Jerusalem
to the Romans, not a lot has changed in that
part of the world.
Speaker 3 (45:29):
It's a pretty grim, you know history. There has been
a series of unpleasant and bloody and depressive episodes and
punctuated by a lot of kind of genocide, you know,
and and collective sort of vendettas. So what what's alarming
(45:51):
to me about this current conflict is how much that
is affecting other countries. So we're having as you are,
but I think we're having it much more. A lot
of sort of public unrest about you know, these demonstrations
about the Gaza war. Now that. Okay, this is not
(46:13):
the first time that a foreign war has divided people.
You know, a generation ago it was Iraq, and a
generation before that it was Vietnam, and a generation before
that it was Spain. Right, So that isn't new, but
the intensity and rage is unprecedented. We've until now been
pretty good at encouraging people to leave their quarrels at
(46:35):
the door, and something really profound has changed later. And
so I was thinking about this. We just we recently
mark the seventy fifth anniversary of Indian independence. Right, The
crimes that accompanied the intercommunal violence at partition were more numerous,
(46:56):
went on for longer, and affected many more people than
the abominations in the southern Kibbutz of Israel. I mean,
they are things that I don't really like to think about,
let alone talk about, you know, in front of your listeners,
you know, but just just appalling men, women and children
being mutilated, blinded with chili powder, you know, trains pulling
in at stations with every single person murdered and blood
(47:18):
coming from every aperture, and you know, the messages scrolled
on the side. I mean's just appalling. Now here's the
extraordinary thing. Most of the South Asian population of the
UK came from the areas that were most affected by
that into common Ather Islands above Orpanjab, but also to
a degree goodj'ar at, you know, Kashmir, Bengal and so on.
(47:40):
And many of them indeed arived because their families had
been directly touched by it, and yet they managed to
leave it at the door. The descendants of the victims
and the descendants of the descendants of the perpetrators settled
in the same towns, settled in the same streets and
put it all behind them. Now, in India and Pakistan,
that didn't happen. They were so traumatized that they fought
three and a half further wars. That is the most
(48:01):
militarized border in the world. And in a way, that's
the understandable thing, right, The extraordinary thing is that in
the Anglos, seek and Hindu and Muslim people from the
areas that were the most affected managed to overcome their
quarrels in Britain and Canada and the other places that
they'd settled. Now, why did they do that? How was
that possible? And possible also for you know, Greek and
(48:25):
Turkish cypriots who wouldettle in the same streets in North
London or whatever, or serve some croats or whatever it was.
How was I think it was possible because the ruling
ethic of our societies was individualism. We in our legal
system and in our morality we elevated the individual above
the collective. We said, you are not defined by birth
or caste. It doesn't matter what your grandfather did. You know,
(48:47):
you can't blame somebody for what their family did. We
are all ultimately answerable for our own actions. And that
was such a strong ideology that newcomers were able gratefully
to accept it and put the past behind them. Now
that's the thing that has changed because in the last
ten years we've had this obsession with identity politics. We've
(49:08):
had a return to these kind of pre modern ideas
of you know, people being defined by ancestry, so that
if you, you know, if if you're if some remote
ancestor of yours owned a plantation or something, it's fine
to take it out on you. Or if you you know,
the color of your skin links you to some crime
from hundreds of years ago, that's fine. Well, once you
(49:29):
start doing that, is it any surprise that some people
are going to start groping back towards these old feuds,
these old send these old resentments over blood guilt. And
in a way, it's not so different from saying all
white people are guilty because of X, to somebody saying, Okay,
(49:51):
I can't find the perpetrator of whatever crime I'm upset
about in Gaza or in Israel, so I will take
it out on another Muslim or another Jew. Right. It's
the same dreadful thinking, and it defined our species until
a nightlink ago. We are. We're a tribal species, the
human race. We are. We're programmed and to think in
terms of my tribe good, your tribe bad. Vendetta is
(50:12):
a very old ethic. The miracle of the West, the
miracle particularly the anglosphere, was to overcome that and replace
it with the idea of personal responsibility. And if we
move away from that in the name of woke, then
look at what we open the door to. And I'm
really more nervous about community relations now in the UK
than I've ever been in my life before, precisely because
of that background.
Speaker 2 (50:32):
May may it not turn out the way that you
are thinking it might, But I will. I will just
add one more thing. There has been a swing and
a very large swing or away from individuality in this country,
and I'm very hopeful that the election that just took
(50:53):
place and the people now in the seats of power
will hit us back in the direction that we both
we both obviously agree on.
Speaker 3 (51:02):
Well yeah, I mean, I'm really optimistic about that, and
you know them better than I do. But the ones
I know, both both in national and in act, I
think you know, we all grumble about our politicians, but again,
you're really not doing badly compared to most places.
Speaker 2 (51:16):
Indeed, the very last thing I want to get a
word from you on is the Telegraph and the Spectator.
I have to say that the Spectator has been a
breath of fresh air in this country over the last
few years because because of what it delivers that wasn't
being delivered in any other way. But they're both for sale,
and you have had a lifetime of association with both
(51:39):
of them. Are you concerned.
Speaker 3 (51:44):
I think that anyone who bought them would need to
respect their existing readership just for straightforwardly commercial reasons. They
have a brand and they have a place in national life.
You know, the Telegraph has read. You know, I live
in it. I live in a small village on the
Hampshire Barkshire boarders. All of my neighbors take the Telegraph.
(52:05):
It speaks to and four a certain constituency of sort
of Shia Tories, and any owner who was unaware of
that would be embarking on a sort of ruinous course.
So I think whoever takes it over, they'd need to
be aware of that. And something similar is true of
the Spectator. I think there are opportunities to grow, you know,
I think there are opportunities to grow online overseas in
(52:29):
both cases, and to monetize that more efficiently, especially if
if you had a proprietor who was prepared to invest.
But you know, the Telegraph has been around for a
long time. It's never changed its political affiliation, and I
think there are just solid commercial reasons for that, and
so I'm pretty I'm pretty relaxed. Whether it ends up
(52:49):
being brought by an existing UK media group or by
a foreign investor, I don't think we'd see huge changes.
Speaker 2 (52:56):
I am going to get abused somewhat after this because
I can tell you what's coming my way when this goes.
When this podcast goes out, why didn't you keep talking?
And the answer is to try and curtail that objection
is that you have places to go, things to do, responsibilities,
and that's why you're here in the country. Daniel Hannon,
(53:18):
It's been a pleasure. I want to thank you so much.
Speaker 3 (53:20):
I have promises to keep in miles ago before I sleep.
Thank you very much lady, and lovely to catch up
with you. I've really really enjoyed it, and I wish
you and your listeners every possible success.
Speaker 2 (53:48):
Well, I trust that you've got something out of that now.
The way we're doing this is something of a little
adventure and we're enjoying it, and we've got quite a
few stories already up our sleeve and a couple of
interviews that came out of almost nowhere. Anyway, we shall
return in a week with what is it to ninety seven?
(54:12):
Doesn't time for flying, So thank you for listening and
we shall talk soon.
Speaker 1 (54:25):
Thank you for more from News Talks at b Listen
live on air or online, and keep our shows with
you wherever you go with our podcasts on iHeartRadio
You're listening to a podcast from news Talks B. Follow
this and our Wide Ranger podcast now on iHeartRadio. It's
time from all the Attitude, all the Opinion, all the information,
all the debates of the US now the Leyton Smith
Podcast powered by news talks it B.
Speaker 2 (00:28):
Welcome to Podcasts two hundred and ninety six. For August six,
twenty twenty five, Lord Daniel of Kingsclear has backed a
great deal into his life. He was born September one,
nineteen seventy one in Lima, Peru. A member of the
Conservative Party, a member of the European a member of
(00:48):
the European Parliament and in twenty twenty one, the House
of Lords. He's also known as Daniel Hannon and as
a British writer, journalist, and well plenty else. He guested
on podcasts to twenty three. At the end of As
It Happens twenty twenty three, I listened to a little
of the interview while sailing from a Palermo to Malta. Well,
(01:11):
actually we've just left Palermo, but I dug it out
and played a bit back just to get the.
Speaker 3 (01:18):
Feel of it.
Speaker 2 (01:19):
It was a good interview, including the decadent West sharing values.
What we've learned in the past few years, have you
really learned much? And I'm talking overall and his thoughts
and predictions regarding immigration into the UK. His reference to
the Mediterranean and illegal immigrants crossing it rang something of
(01:45):
a bell because that's exactly where we are at this
particular point of time. But maybe best of all, Daniel
Hannon is a brilliant speaker. Whether you've heard this conversation
or not, I trust that you'll get something out of it,
because there's plenty in it, So enjoy. Muckelan is a
(02:08):
natural oral vaccine in a tablet form called bacterial licate.
It'll boost your natural protection against bacterial infections in your
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of immunity against bugs which cause bacterial cold symptoms. So
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(02:30):
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Protection becomes effective a few days after you take buccolan
and lasts for up to three months following the three
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not intended as an alternative to influenza vaccination, but may
(02:53):
be used along with the flu vaccination for added protection.
And keep in mind that millions of doses have been
taken by Kiwis for over fifty years. Only available from
your pharmacist. Always read the label and users directed, and
see you doctor if systems persist. Farmer broker auclumb Layton
(03:20):
Smith Daniel John Hannon was born on the Versus September
nineteen seventy one. He's a British writer, a journalist to politician.
He's a lot more than that and more extensive than
each of those areas. He is the founding president of
the Initiative for Free Trade and was a Conservative Member
of the European Parliament for Southeast England from nineteen ninety
(03:41):
nine until the United Kingdom's exit from the EU in
twenty twenty. I saw him on numerous occasions on television
for eclips taken from the European Parliament, and I was
in the audience of a commentary that he gave at
Auckland's University a number of years ago now and one
could not help but be impressed. So the Right Honorable
(04:04):
Lord Henden of Kingsclear, welcome to the Latensmith Podcast.
Speaker 3 (04:08):
Glad to have you here. Thank you very much, Lay,
what a generous introduction we try.
Speaker 2 (04:13):
I want to acquote you something to begin you said
prior to the EU referendum. You said, being a nation
means that we are not just a random set of
individuals born to a different random set of random individuals.
It imposes on us the duty to keep intact the
freedoms that we were lucky enough to inherit from our
(04:36):
parents and pass them on securely to the next generation.
How are we doing well? I think you guys are
doing pretty well, honestly. I mean I find myself saying
this every time I come to New Zealand, which I've
been doing every five years or so throughout my life.
I always find myself having to say, you guys don't
know how lucky you are.
Speaker 3 (04:56):
The rest of the world would swap their problems for yours.
Not because everything is perfect here, but because you know,
taking everything together, it's going pretty well. But globally, I
have to say I am a lot more pessimistic than
when I said that, And I think what really altered
my outlook was not just the lockdowns, but the clamor
(05:18):
for harder and stricter lockdowns in what I had thought
were free, open and liberal societies.
Speaker 2 (05:25):
So why was it then that we followed the Chinese?
Speaker 3 (05:27):
Do you think? But we did it.
Speaker 2 (05:29):
The Anglo sphere did it very willingly and seemed to
convince people that they were doing the right thing. When
I say people, I mean the bulk of people.
Speaker 3 (05:40):
Yes, I mean, there's no getting away from it. It
was a public opinion driven process as much as it
was a science driven process. You know, we had contingency
plans in place, and in none of our countries did
they envisage the mass incarceration of a chunk of the population.
And yet in the panicky days that followed the lockdowns,
(06:03):
in first in China and then in Italy, it became
very difficult to make those arguments, and politicians were pushed
into doing things out of I suppose there was a
fear that the slightest error on the side of caution
would be career ending. But you could go as far
(06:24):
as you like in terms of excessive intervention, and no
one would hold it against you and by the way,
that was accurate. That's how it turned out. But in
the end it turned out to the incorrect way to
do it. Well, I don't see how else you can
read the figures, because at the time we were told, look,
wait until all the results are in. Countries measure this
(06:46):
in different ways. You know, did you die with COVID
or of COVID And some countries can't even measure that
because they didn't have the facilities. Now we do now
have all the figures in and the measure that is
consistent and that you can't fake, and that is the
same methodology the world over is excess deaths. You know,
how many people would you expect to die, how many
(07:07):
people died in the last three is versus how many
actually did. And that's something which the whole world measures
in the same way. And you know what do you find?
Obviously New Zealand does pretty well because you know it
had the advantage of geographical isolation, But the country that
comes at the top or close to the top, however
you measure it of those lists is Sweden, which didn't
(07:29):
have a lockdown, And at the time we were told
Sweden was inviting a kind of civilization or collapse by
being an outlier and refusing to go beyond banning a
few large meetings. Well, you know, I mean, if you look,
just compare New Zealand with Sweden. Right, New Zealand virtually
nobody died of COVID because of the geographical advantages. But
(07:52):
there was a lockdown, by the way, a lighter one
than in Britain or in most places, but there were
still a lockdown, and it was it was prolonged. Sweden,
no lockdown, but everyone got COVID right at the start.
Sweden seem to come out with a lower excess mortality
over all the New Zealand and I cannot see any
way of reading those figures other than to conclude that
(08:13):
the lockdowns killed more people than they saved.
Speaker 2 (08:15):
I somehow think, well, that one of us has got
off track, and that would be me, because you're arguing
the way that I would have, and somewhere we've got
a crushed wire. When I said, when I said it
was wrong, then I was referring to the fact that
they the lockdowns were wrong. The imposition of virtually compulsive vaccinations,
(08:39):
or any words you wish to substitute for vaccinations was wrong,
was incorrect of the lack of freedom in not being
able to make decisions based on our own belief in
what was going on and what we thought and the
conclusions we came to, which is the essential aspect of
a democracy. Was totally the wrong thing to do.
Speaker 3 (09:01):
Yes, but I'm afraid ninety percent of people were clamoring
for those freedoms to be taken away, which reflects has
made me really rethink how our societies work. I mean
that most Brits, and I suspect most key Wes would
have gladly had microschips, you know, injected into their arms
if it meant that the pubs were open. And it's
(09:22):
the idea that we were a freedom loving set of people,
that we were free countries in the phrase we used
to use, I think has taken quite a knock. But
I mean, I think, knowing what we now know, I
was a very lonely critic from day one of the lockdowns.
I mean, you could almost count on your fingers how
(09:42):
many of us there were back in March of twenty twenty.
A lot of people joined in April and May, but
there were you know, those and it's the most unpopular
position I've ever taken in a lifetime of punditry. In politics,
I've never had so much abuse because people were frightened, Oh,
you're killing my granny, you know, in order to put
the economy before lives or whatever it was. And yet
(10:06):
looking at the figures i've first of all, I just
I don't see how you can avoid the conclusion that
non pharmaceutical interventions were ineffective, that the lockdowns didn't work. Also,
touching on what you just just brought up, which is
the mass vaccinations, just think about what we now know
about the efficacy of vaccines. Okay, they were good at
(10:27):
keeping you out of hospital with COVID, they were very
good at keeping vulnerable people alive. It was a very
good thing that they were made available to people who
were at risk, and the countries that did that quick,
as you know, were saving lives. But we now know
that they were of almost no use, maybe none at all,
(10:49):
as a way of preventing transmission. So they were good
at keeping you out of hospital, they weren't really preventing
you from infecting your granny, and certainly not if you've
already had COVID and so just think about the consequences
of that. Think about the implications if vaccines were not
much use in transmission. Then the whole edifice that we
(11:11):
constructed of passports and travel restrictions and apps and all
the stuff that went further in New Zealand than in
a lot of places where you almost couldn't live a
full life as a citizen unless you had the approval.
All of that was based on a lie. Because we
now know that both Pfizer and the WHO knew at
(11:32):
the time that the vaccines, however good they were at
preventing illness, were not good at preventing transmission.
Speaker 2 (11:40):
So we could go on and talk about this further,
but we'd be we'd be treading on familiar territory. Let
me then just ask you an associated question, what would
it take for another round of something to cower the
populations of our countries into much the same sort of approach, right?
Speaker 3 (12:00):
And that is the question that I keep asking myself.
We are having, as you are, an appalling inquiry, sort
of inquest into what has happened. I say appalling because
it's obvious that they have begun with their conclusion and
that the you know, instead of asking the only question
that we want answered, which is what was the efficacy
of lockdowns? That they are assuming that lockdowns were a
(12:21):
good idea and focusing on why didn't we do it earlier? Right,
and so on the one level, you think, actually, what
I've wasted opportunity. We should find out whether all these
things other than the vaccines were of any use, because
what if there's another pandemic? And actually, though I was
thinking about this recently and I thought, you know what,
it doesn't really matter what they conclude, because what we
(12:44):
learned in twenty twenty is that whatever contingency plans you
have in place, they will be ripped up in a
panic as soon as there is pressure from public opinion
and shrieking broadcasters. So we had a contingency plan. We
had protocols that have been drawn up in cooler headed
times that did not envisage lockdowns, that provided for gradual
(13:05):
spread so that the NHS wouldn't be overwhelmed, that we
get to a period of collective immunity, and that did
not sustain, you know, people taking the most extreme scenarios
and going on TV and saying, why doesn't Boris Johnson
care about keeping my grammy alive. So I'm afraid whatever
our inquiries conclude, that is going to keep happening, because
(13:28):
what we've really learned is that in a crisis, the
government will snatch for power. The instinct of every regulator,
every civil servant, and every advisor will be to ban,
to regulate, to impose restrictions and prohibitions. And we've learned
also that the bulk of the population will be cheering
and demanding more. That's I'm afraid. So, you know, I
(13:50):
was like, you know what, I was a real you know,
Matt Ridley, you know, Johann Norberg, Steve Pinker type rational
optimist until twenty twenty. It's very difficult to be as
cheerful now, given what we've seen of how contingent and
how fragile liberalism is.
Speaker 2 (14:09):
We would like to think that we would approach something
similar differently, but I think what you've what you've stated
is probably more accurate. The other aspect of people being
as compliant as they were even demanding, as you've put it,
was that the media sided with the government pretty much,
(14:30):
pretty much one hundred percent. The media would not print
anything that was that was alien to the to the
government instructions. And so there was a lack of alternative information.
Now I the I did one of the very first
interviews with an Australian doctor who had a vast experience
(14:51):
with hydrochlorocon. He was trying desperately to get the message
out and he got nowhere, and no Australian politicians would
talk to him, even though he had support in the
medical sphere. I wonder why that is. Why was it
that the media compplied. The investigative journalism that that you
(15:11):
and I would both appreciate greatly was non existent.
Speaker 3 (15:16):
Well that again, that's a very good question. I think
people took the view that they had to go with
what the experts were telling them because they were not epidemiologists,
they were not virologists, and therefore listened to the official advice.
But so I was a skeptical journalist throughout. I have
a Telegraph column, and even before the lockdown, I was
(15:37):
writing pieces saying do not lockdown. There is no justification
for it. And as I say, it was a very
very unpopular position, and the Telegraph was a real outlier
in allowing pieces like that to be printed. No other
mainstream outlet was doing so in the UK. But I
learned something, so the first time in my journalistic career,
I really had to go to source and start reading
(16:00):
the primary sources, the actual medical studies. Normally, you know,
sorry if this is going to upset any listeners, and
I know that you can normally just read the new
scientists and summarize something for the second reason, but during
the pandemic, you couldn't do that. You really needed to
get on top of the detail. And what I found,
and it really shocked me, was that on almost every
(16:23):
aspect of the response to the pandemic, you could find
good faith, serious academic surveys and studies arguing diametrically opposite things,
not with any obvious agenda, not funded by big Farmer
or anything, but just honest disagreements. You know, did face
masks work, could children infect adults? What was the impact
(16:47):
of closing schools? Did it make any difference if you
to get vaccinated, if you'd already had natural immunity, et cetera.
You could find half a dozen things on each side
of those, all perfectly well argued. And that meant two things.
First of all, it meant that it was very difficult
for the advisors or the politicians to know what to do,
and they therefore tended to default to all let's err
(17:09):
on the side of caution, let's you know, let's not
take any risks, and all the incentives pushed them into
doing that, and it really was erring. But also it
meant that every critic could then find some perfectly good
study and cherry pick that and say, look, this shows
that it was all nonsense. And so I had some
sympathy with the decision makers as a result of that experience.
(17:31):
But I'm afraid, nonetheless, that when you put it all together,
you can't get away. Having said that I have some sympathy,
you can't get away from the fact that, certainly after
the first lockdown, I give them a pass on, look,
don't take any risk until we know what we're dealing with.
It wasn't my position at the time, but I don't
blame the people who disagreed with me about that. But
by the time that we knew that infections were already
(17:54):
falling before the lockdown had been imposed, then to repeat
it and repeat it a third time in many countries,
and a fourth time I think in some countries that
I think is almost unfigivable. Because that was unscientific. It
was driven by pure fear. And here's the thing. We've
got all these bad effects of long lockdown. We've got
(18:15):
the bad economic effects. We've got the debt levels we've
got in my country, no government worker is ever going
to come back to the office, and a big chunk
of the private sector of basically given up on on
work as well. We've got higher rates than ever before
of absenteeism from school. We've got mental health problems. We've
got all the undiagnosed, unscreened cancers and all of that.
(18:36):
We've got all these elements, if you like, of long lockdown.
But we've got one other one which is never mentioned,
which is the rise in conspiracy theories caused by governments
saying things that then turned out to be untrue. I
have seen again and again, perfectly clever, respectable people going
from asking correctly, asking quite justifiably, why were youngsters who
(18:58):
were at no risk forced to take a vaccine when
it was when they were not a threat from COVID,
asking that perfectly reasonable question, the thing or actually, maybe
all vaccines are a plot by big farmer. And while
we're on the subject, you know, why is the w
why is the why is the World Economic Forum trying
to you know, pursue us with microschips and why are
(19:21):
we believing what we're told about Ukraine and Song? All
of that is a consequence of the government saying things
that turned out to be untrue, and that I think
they knew was untrue at the time, but they were,
you know, they were in this in this state of
pull any lever, you never know, something might just work,
all right.
Speaker 2 (19:37):
So what we what we're left with is a lack
of skepticism, and skepticism has been done more damaged by
what took place or otherwise, well.
Speaker 3 (19:48):
I think we instead of instead of healthy skepticism. You know,
in a in a healthy democracy, you have debates and
you have people saying, we don't know this, but here
are the facts that suggests this, and you know what's
the balance of probability We didn't have that we had,
you know this this rather authoritarian insistence of the worl
only one truth that as justinda, I don't infamously say
(20:12):
that if we haven't said it, it's not true, which
is a scary thing to say. And then it turned
out that a lot of what they were saying wasn't true,
you know, they having assumed this monopoly on truth, a
lot of what they said turned out to be mistaken.
So instead of skepticism, we've pushed people into paranoia, into
you know, outright conspiracy. And I you know, I've seen
(20:34):
this happen to two particularly good friends of mine, one
a politician and one a writer, and journalists who you know,
have gone from asking good questions about mistakes that the
government's genuinely made into you know, chem trails and nine
to eleven conspiracies and moon landings and the works, because
(20:56):
they've given up on believing anything.
Speaker 2 (20:59):
I reluctantly, but I have to ask you your whether
or not you travel the same road with regard to
and I'm talking about skepticism and in fact, with regard
to climate change, as in men, let's accept there is
climate change, but.
Speaker 3 (21:16):
Men made climate change. So I mean, I hope we
can all accept that there is climate change. I've never
understood what the phrase climate change, denia or climate change
kept me. I've yet to meet anyone positing climate stasis.
Put it like that right now, I think that So
I think that I think the world at the moment
is heating, and I think that human activity is playing
(21:39):
a part in that, although not as big a part
as some of the catastrophists claim. But I think there's
a really important distinction to be drawn between the science
of meteorology and climatology and the political question of what
you do about it. So, you know, I don't have
any expertise in climate science. You know, I haven't done
(22:05):
any science since the age of about sixteen. But I
do know a little bit about the trade offs that
you have to make in politics, and that is if
you like my sphere as somebody who spent you know,
more than two decades as an elected representative. So if
you think that there is going to be X or y,
(22:26):
a bad consequence of a changing climate, leaving aside whether
or not it's man made or the extent of which
is man made. If you think, okay, there's going to
be rising sea levels, or there's going to be you know,
this area is going to dry out or whatever, you
then have a policy choice of Okay, what are the
range of options. How much do we spend on adaptation
or how much do we spend on trying to slow
(22:47):
it down a bit? Who pays? You know, if there
is a if there's good reason to believe that advances
in technology will mean that this is much cheaper if
we leave it for a bit, then is that a
reasonable thing to do? Now, those questions generally are not
being asked because the whole thing is being approached in
a spirit of kind of Tunberg millenarianism of you know,
(23:08):
if you don't agree with all of this, you want
the world to fry. I'm going to do something that's
very rarely done. But he deserves a shout out. The
first senior governing politician in Britain to challenge this and
to interrogate it is Rushie Sunac, who's said, hang on,
wait a minute, some of these figures seem a bit pessimistic.
(23:28):
You know, is it really so bad if we change
some of these time tables, some of these time scales on,
you know, phasing out car engines or whatever. The green
Blob exploded because nobody has ever questioned them before. But
actually his questions were completely reasonable, and they were not
about the science. They were about what is the most
effective way when you have limited resources of responding to it.
(23:50):
And that's one hundred percent of his job because, unlike them,
he's been elected to.
Speaker 2 (23:53):
Something and for that he deserves eccolades. Let's talk about
some other matters. You mentioned the NHS, and I don't
want to spend too much time on it. I came
back from London earlier in the year with the critical
why the NHS has been betrayed by doctor Julia Grace Patterson,
and it bothered me a great deal because we were
(24:15):
going through then a discussion, an argument, a battle over
the health system in this country. Now, what's taken place
since virtually since you've arrived in the country, post the election,
but pre the announcement of the structure, is that we
are now pretty much i think, off the hook for
(24:36):
so many things that we were being dammed with that
I'm feeling the sort of positiveness that I haven't felt
for a long time that you I think indicated you
you were missing.
Speaker 3 (24:49):
Yeah, I mean, what did I misinterpret? No, I think
I think you're quite right. I mean our NHS is
I think probably the single biggest constraint on growth, both
directly and indirectly, both in the sense that it is
a massive version of resources into inefficient outcomes and in
(25:12):
the sense that it's quite bad at getting people to
be well again and Therefore, we have a lot of
people taking time off work when in a system where
they were short of waiting times and so on, you know,
we'd have much more productivity. We've tried. You know, for years,
it's been obvious that this was a bad system, but
people always took refuge in claiming that the real problem
(25:36):
was underfunding and if only more taxpayers money was given
to it, things would get better. Well, you can't argue
that anymore. La're massively, massively increased spending on healthcare, the
Tory coalition continued. Boris continued the NHS. We're now spending
more on healthcare than most comparable countries and were still
(25:56):
getting worse results. I mean, they're not the worst results
in the world, but they are. They are very poor
given what we're spending. So, you know, I think we've
One of the things that a labor government may be
able to do is to fix some of that. They
I think the labor just as it was Blair who
introduced such minimal reforms as we've had in healthcare, if
anyone can go further, it'll be starmer because a left
(26:17):
of center government can do this without being suspected of
trying to sort of murder the poor or whatever. The
other big constraint we have, by the way, is housing.
It's almost impossible to build things in the UK. I
find it amazing when I fly over New Zealand to
think there's a housing crisis here. I look at the
plane window and I think, how can there possibly be
a shortage of housing in a country that they do well.
We'll leave that to one side, but I I, you know,
(26:39):
I've we're talking on the day after the Coalition agreement
was reached. I'm really really bullish. As I read down it,
I'm thinking, wow, you know, uh, you know, although most
of my key we friends, being Tories, are quite sort
of grumpy about the state of affairs, they've really got
nothing to be grumpy about compared to the rest of us. It's,
(26:59):
you know, we've we've had We've had great problems to have.
Speaker 2 (27:02):
We've had plenty of grumpiness, entitlement up and up until
now for the last three years minimum six years maximum.
But it's amazing how things can change. If I had
lunch with a very good friend of mine who spent
a long time living in London, not that that's got
anything to do with it yesterday and He brought along
the print out of the new appointments, and he said,
(27:26):
I brought this so you could see why I have
got a lot of faith. There's a lot of talent
on this list. And I looked down it and for
the because I hadn't I hadn't caught up with the detail,
I looked down that list and I thought, hell, he's right.
There is talent here. It's a matter of whether the
(27:48):
talent can combine itself with progress and carry out what
it intends to carry out, because with three parties anything
can go wrong. But in the meantime, I think, I
think there's a lot more people who are feeling much
more positive about where things might be.
Speaker 3 (28:08):
I could just get rid of it. I found myself.
I found myself at dinner last night. I was sitting
between the new Attorney General and one of the two
new defpms, and I was incredibly cheered up. Not by
how solid they were, which I already knew, but just
by how enthusiastic they were to get going, and what
(28:29):
an understanding they had of what the institutional and bureaucratic
resistance was going to be and how they intended to
get around this. And I just think it's this is
a you know, this is just a great time to
be in New Zealand.
Speaker 2 (28:41):
I'm going to make a transition from from housing shortages
to immigration because we we have or in the process
of absorbing something like one hundred and twenty thousand people
in the last twelve months.
Speaker 3 (28:56):
You where you come from, have.
Speaker 2 (29:00):
A flow that nobody can seem to stem, but nobody
can seem to stay. And there is a it appears
a massive shortage of housing. But why is it that
we have come in our countries to accepting the invasion
that we have. And I've always been in favor of immigration,
(29:22):
They've just got to be the right people. Right cultures
is especially important. But why is it that we have
been inundated and doesn't seem to be anything that can
be done about it, especially when it comes to Britain
and Europe.
Speaker 3 (29:39):
Well, I mean, I think there is a there are
substantial differences. So our countries are of comparable geographical size,
but you know, our population is seventy million, so there
are issues of space and crowding that happily New Zealand
(29:59):
doesn't face. The other difference is that Britain is constrained
by a bunch of treaties with you know, either European
or international treaties that make it very very difficult in
practice to prevent people arriving or to deport them, because
we have a judiciary that has just taking it upon
(30:20):
itself always and everywhere to oppose every repatriation order. New
Zealand is quite lucky, and that it's surrounded by sovereign waters,
so it can keep people out. It's not people if
you like crossing here from somewhere else. Having said all
of that, you know, I actually think you guys have
done pretty well, not perfectly, and there are things that
I would have done differently. And I'm particularly puzzled by
(30:43):
the way in which you don't seem able to screen
migrants from authoritarian countries to see whether they are supporters
of the ideology of the country that you know. I mean,
I'm always thrown when I bump into people of Chinese
origin here who turn out to be enthusiastic supporters of
the Chinese Communist Party, for example. That's the kind of
(31:06):
you know, it shouldn't be beyond the wit of man
to to filter that. But I think I think immigration
generally here has been very good news you've taken people
who are ambitious, who are you know? I mean, it
takes a hell of a lot to trow That noise,
by the way, is some immigrant looking guys working very
hard unloading furniture out of the window. But think of
(31:29):
what it takes to leave everything behind and come to
a place, which, gorgeous as it is, is remote. You
know you're not going to be seeing your family very often.
The time zones are not great. You know, that's all
wonderful self selection to get ambitious, resourceful and optimistic people, and.
Speaker 2 (31:49):
Yet there is a there is a problem that nobody,
nobody's really picked up on. And my raising of this
comes out of a conversation my wife had with a
with an Asian restaurant a couple of days ago, and
she went to pick up dinner and the owner and
she were having a chat and she asked how business was,
(32:12):
because he'd been through some tough times, etc. And he says, well,
it's much better than it was this time last year.
He's Chinese.
Speaker 3 (32:19):
And she said, what about staff?
Speaker 2 (32:21):
Because he had major problems and he wasn't opening on
some days like Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday because there was no staff.
He said, well, still the staff problem. It might be better,
but it's still a problem because the government is letting
in people and they can't speak English and the pot
the point being that there is no time for integration
(32:43):
and assimilation at this point, which is something that takes
a period of time. You want people coming into the
country that can actually fill roles and do jobs.
Speaker 3 (32:52):
Yeah, yeah, well yeah, although I mean because you've until
now been pretty good at taking people from a wide
variety of sources and therefore jumbling up in a way
that militates against the formation of these big ethnic and
linguistic ghettos. That has been much more successfully done here
than in all most anywhere in Europe. I would say,
but okay, I'll match your restaurant story for one of mine.
(33:13):
So I had. I had lunch yesterday at a little
place in Takapuna owned by a Colombian guy who is
your model, your model immigrant, you know, family run place,
he works every hour. And I said, how do you
feel about the election? And he said, I am overjoyed,
(33:34):
partly because I think the nationals are on the side
of people like me who want to work and get ahead.
But mainly I thought sort said, I had my pay
with Colombian. So I had my parents here last year
their first visit, and they were robbed and their passports
was told and that's never happened in Colombia, and it
(33:57):
happened in New Zealand. So he said, I'm in favor
of any government that's going to crack down on that.
Speaker 2 (34:02):
Well, I think, like most countries, Australia's one, Britain's one
crime as miracles Canada is another. I think I've covered
the roster that there has been a massive increase in
crime over the last few years, and in many places
the authorities don't want to do anything about them.
Speaker 3 (34:24):
Well, I think the reason I mentioned my Columbian friend
is he was, without saying it, he was reminding us
of something, which is that immigrants aren't disproportionately victims of crimes,
you know, because it happened because they live in the
areas that are the most crime written and therefore quite
responsive to any political party that will do something about it.
(34:44):
And the other thing that is striking about a lot
of the countries you just mentioned is that we could
still go further in allowing qualified people to work without
needless constraints put in their path by kind of guilds
and gatekeepers, right, So it's not so much of an
issue here as it is in some places. But you
(35:04):
still have occasionally the phenomenon of the you know, the
heart surgeon working as a nuber driver because he's waiting
to be allowed to practice, and that's and that's not
in anybody's interest.
Speaker 2 (35:15):
There is plenty of that, and it's gone on for
years and years. Economists and dentists are too that I'm
familiar with who ended up house cleaning and the other
other civilar tasks. One couple were both doctors. She she
went and spent the time doing the whatever you call it,
the catch up court course over a couple of years.
(35:38):
He was not going to do it. He was a
top top surgeon and he wasn't going to do it.
So he went and just did some ordinary laboring jobs.
It was really quite and there are straw So.
Speaker 3 (35:50):
One of the politicians who I'm really excited about at
the moment, I think probably my favorite center right politician
in the world is the leader of the Canadian Tory Party, Everett,
and he he is picking up huge support from immigrant
and Canada has an ambitious immigration policy three hundred and
fifty thousand a year, and they are pretty good. I mean,
(36:13):
you get all the same complaints there that you get everywhere,
but actually they're pretty good at managing this. They're pretty
good at sorting people out, getting the ones who really
want to be there, who are going to be patriotic
and grateful and going to contribute, and they're pretty good
at at not having ethnic blocks taking over one part
of the country. But his stick with all of those is,
(36:34):
I am going to remove the gatekeepers. I'm going to
let you work from day one. And he's getting huge
support from those communities as well as because he's going
to make you know. He's going to try and constrain
the Central Bank so that it no longer acts as
an ATM for spencer of government and allows people to
get on the housing ladder, which again is a pretty
(36:55):
popular message with newcomers. With mentioned of Canada. Just a
while ago.
Speaker 2 (37:00):
This morning, funnily enough, no more than an hour ago,
I came across a video that was made by a
Telegraph UK reporter who went to Canada. This was just
a few weeks ago, went to Canada and he went
to investigate why things were the way that they were
(37:23):
under Trudeau. Jordan Peterson made some opening comments about how
bad it is. He said, amongst other things, he said,
I don't think I've ever heard a true word come
out of Trudeau's mouth, And there were some other comments
along similar lines. Why is do you think Canada being
so tortured by this individual? Well, I don't think they
(37:47):
will be for much longer.
Speaker 3 (37:48):
I think the last poll the Tories are like eighteen
points ahead or something, and I'm very, very confident that
Canadians will ditch him. But why did they re elect him? Yes, well,
I think they re elected him for the same reason
that your countryman re elected Jacinda, which is that if
you call an election at the height of the crisis,
at the height of the COVID crisis, when you are
(38:11):
on TV every day giving these press conferences and looking
authoritative and you know, looking as you're in command, it's
very hard to dislodge an incumbent. Once the bills come
in and the hangover starts very different picture, Which is
why I wouldn't be at all surprised if just Intrudeau
does a just Cinda and leaves rather than having his
(38:32):
ass kicked in the polls. Yes, well, the new opposition
leader is brilliant. We agree on that. I think, I
really do. I mean, I think he is. He's such
a great communicator, he's very much one of us, and
he's just I've known him for it, for it for
a while since he was a new MP. And I
(38:55):
can barely think of anyone who is more focused and
more energetic than he is. And he's just a terrific patriot.
I mean, he's in politics for all the right reasons,
driven by a terrific sense of service. He's surprised that
Geeth Will does God got where hed No? I think
this is this is going to happen in other places.
I think it's only a matter of time before it
(39:15):
happens in Germany. If you if respectable politicians can't get
on top of immigration, then politicians from outside the mainstream
will own that issue in a way. Actually, I think
it's got a lot to do with why why Trump
is so difficult to unsea by other Republicans. There is
(39:36):
a general feeling that no one is listening on this subject,
and it may be that in Europe, as in the UK,
there's just not much that can be done. You know
that the the the electorate would not countenance the kind
of measures necessary properly to control borders in countries like that,
(39:59):
and so hence you get you get these politicians who
get elected saying that there's a simple answer, but you
it's very very you know, at the height of the
height of the migrant crisis in the Mediterranean twenty fifteen,
I went and volunteered in the south of Italy where
they were all arriving in a hostel for underage migrants,
(40:24):
so unaccompanied kids who come mainly from West Africa. And
these were bright, ambitious, resourceful boys who were doing what
you or I would do in their situation. But they
were not refugees, not as we define that word legally, right,
so that they were fleeing from poverty and corruption, they
were not fleeing from persecution and impression. And what I
(40:48):
noticed is that even if they didn't have shoes when
they arrived, because we met quite a lot of the
boats as they were being landed, even if they didn't
have shoes, these kids had smartphones. And the smartphone was
the key to the whole thing. The smartphone is what
had allowed them to make the journey. I mean, it's
a hell of an odyssey to cross first the Sahara
(41:08):
and then the Mediterranean. But the phone is what allowed
them to transfer credit transfer information and make a journey
that their grandparents could not have contemplated. And this is
why I just think that this problem is or this
this this phenomenon is going to increase how whatever we
do about it the most, the easy fascile and false
(41:29):
thing to say is, oh, if we gave these countries
more aid or whatever, then we'd remove the need for
them to leave. Actually that's the opposite of the truth.
It is rising wealth and rising aspirations in those countries
that is driving this this mass movement, and I don't
see it ending anytime soon. Now. When you've got that
(41:49):
level of sort of of push and pull factor migration,
the steps required significantly to reduce it will be pretty unpalatable.
And I think that's that's a choice that Europe is
just shying away from. Let me just finally make some
quick suggestions of things. I'd like your briefest comment on
(42:13):
if you if you can the decadent West, is it
at the end of its dominance? Yes, I think so.
I think you might be familiar with the headline. Yeah,
I mean, I just I look at the lineup of
how countries were voting on the Russia Ukraine war. I
look at how they are lined up on the Israel
(42:34):
Garza thing, and I look at how they put the
two things together. Countries that were previously quite well disposed,
and who say, oh, just imagine how on wait a minute,
imagine if if if Russia was behaving how Israel has behaved.
They'll say things like, you know, imagine if if if
Putin ordered the Ukrainians out of half of Ukraine. Imagine
if Russia had bombed two Polish airports in the way
(42:56):
that Israel bomb too Syrian ones. You know, what would
you say if put In cut off the energy supplies? Well,
we know what you said. You called it a war crime,
and you know, so we've what we've learned in the
last few months is that a lot of countries that
we thought would be in our camp because they were democracies,
a lot of countries that we thought would be kind
(43:16):
of drawn to Ukraine and to Israel because they would
see them as democracies under attack from authoritarian rogue regimes,
actually were only in our camp transactionally contingently, because we
were the sort of the dominant power, and as soon
as they think that we are no longer the dominant power,
(43:38):
it turns out that they don't really share our values
in the way that we thought.
Speaker 2 (43:43):
History hating Britain. Is it the WORKUS country on the West?
Speaker 3 (43:48):
Yeah, I mean I think the well, no, I think
the US and Canada are probably inching ahead of us.
But definitely there is a lot of wokery around and
it's infectious. You know. One of the things that I'm
really struck by is how much more anger there is
about British colonialism now than at a time when it
was still going on, or when it was a recent memory.
(44:09):
A lot of you know, there were a few countries
where the end of empire was a nasty, brutal and
bloody affair Kenya, India, Palestine, Ireland, Cyprus, but they were
actually the exception. In the vast majority of places, countries
(44:29):
were brought to independence without a shot being fired in anger.
And yet if you go to those countries now, in
the Caribbean or Malaysia or Ugandra or whatever, people like
they really wish there had been an independence war, and
they've kind of convinced themselves that there was right And
where have they picked that up from They've picked it
up from us, you know, And so there is now
the rage against an imaginary version of colonialism that there
(44:52):
never was when it was a real extant force.
Speaker 2 (44:55):
I picked up a book from my bookshelf recently, early
a week ago, and it's by Simon C. Beeg Mataveori,
The Biography of Jerusalem, and I started reading. I've had
I've had it for reading for ever since it was released.
And I started reading the prologue, and before I got
(45:17):
too far, I realized from the descriptions that he that
he writes of the fall, of the fall of Jerusalem
to the Romans, not a lot has changed in that
part of the world.
Speaker 3 (45:29):
It's a pretty grim, you know history. There has been
a series of unpleasant and bloody and depressive episodes and
punctuated by a lot of kind of genocide, you know,
and and collective sort of vendettas. So what what's alarming
(45:51):
to me about this current conflict is how much that
is affecting other countries. So we're having as you are,
but I think we're having it much more. A lot
of sort of public unrest about you know, these demonstrations
about the Gaza war. Now that. Okay, this is not
(46:13):
the first time that a foreign war has divided people.
You know, a generation ago it was Iraq, and a
generation before that it was Vietnam, and a generation before
that it was Spain. Right, So that isn't new, but
the intensity and rage is unprecedented. We've until now been
pretty good at encouraging people to leave their quarrels at
(46:35):
the door, and something really profound has changed later. And
so I was thinking about this. We just we recently
mark the seventy fifth anniversary of Indian independence. Right, The
crimes that accompanied the intercommunal violence at partition were more numerous,
(46:56):
went on for longer, and affected many more people than
the abominations in the southern Kibbutz of Israel. I mean,
they are things that I don't really like to think about,
let alone talk about, you know, in front of your listeners,
you know, but just just appalling men, women and children
being mutilated, blinded with chili powder, you know, trains pulling
in at stations with every single person murdered and blood
(47:18):
coming from every aperture, and you know, the messages scrolled
on the side. I mean's just appalling. Now here's the
extraordinary thing. Most of the South Asian population of the
UK came from the areas that were most affected by
that into common Ather Islands above Orpanjab, but also to
a degree goodj'ar at, you know, Kashmir, Bengal and so on.
(47:40):
And many of them indeed arived because their families had
been directly touched by it, and yet they managed to
leave it at the door. The descendants of the victims
and the descendants of the descendants of the perpetrators settled
in the same towns, settled in the same streets and
put it all behind them. Now, in India and Pakistan,
that didn't happen. They were so traumatized that they fought
three and a half further wars. That is the most
(48:01):
militarized border in the world. And in a way, that's
the understandable thing, right, The extraordinary thing is that in
the Anglos, seek and Hindu and Muslim people from the
areas that were the most affected managed to overcome their
quarrels in Britain and Canada and the other places that
they'd settled. Now, why did they do that? How was
that possible? And possible also for you know, Greek and
(48:25):
Turkish cypriots who wouldettle in the same streets in North
London or whatever, or serve some croats or whatever it was.
How was I think it was possible because the ruling
ethic of our societies was individualism. We in our legal
system and in our morality we elevated the individual above
the collective. We said, you are not defined by birth
or caste. It doesn't matter what your grandfather did. You know,
(48:47):
you can't blame somebody for what their family did. We
are all ultimately answerable for our own actions. And that
was such a strong ideology that newcomers were able gratefully
to accept it and put the past behind them. Now
that's the thing that has changed because in the last
ten years we've had this obsession with identity politics. We've
(49:08):
had a return to these kind of pre modern ideas
of you know, people being defined by ancestry, so that
if you, you know, if if you're if some remote
ancestor of yours owned a plantation or something, it's fine
to take it out on you. Or if you you know,
the color of your skin links you to some crime
from hundreds of years ago, that's fine. Well, once you
(49:29):
start doing that, is it any surprise that some people
are going to start groping back towards these old feuds,
these old send these old resentments over blood guilt. And
in a way, it's not so different from saying all
white people are guilty because of X, to somebody saying, Okay,
(49:51):
I can't find the perpetrator of whatever crime I'm upset
about in Gaza or in Israel, so I will take
it out on another Muslim or another Jew. Right. It's
the same dreadful thinking, and it defined our species until
a nightlink ago. We are. We're a tribal species, the
human race. We are. We're programmed and to think in
terms of my tribe good, your tribe bad. Vendetta is
(50:12):
a very old ethic. The miracle of the West, the
miracle particularly the anglosphere, was to overcome that and replace
it with the idea of personal responsibility. And if we
move away from that in the name of woke, then
look at what we open the door to. And I'm
really more nervous about community relations now in the UK
than I've ever been in my life before, precisely because
of that background.
Speaker 2 (50:32):
May may it not turn out the way that you
are thinking it might, But I will. I will just
add one more thing. There has been a swing and
a very large swing or away from individuality in this country,
and I'm very hopeful that the election that just took
(50:53):
place and the people now in the seats of power
will hit us back in the direction that we both
we both obviously agree on.
Speaker 3 (51:02):
Well yeah, I mean, I'm really optimistic about that, and
you know them better than I do. But the ones
I know, both both in national and in act, I
think you know, we all grumble about our politicians, but again,
you're really not doing badly compared to most places.
Speaker 2 (51:16):
Indeed, the very last thing I want to get a
word from you on is the Telegraph and the Spectator.
I have to say that the Spectator has been a
breath of fresh air in this country over the last
few years because because of what it delivers that wasn't
being delivered in any other way. But they're both for sale,
and you have had a lifetime of association with both
(51:39):
of them. Are you concerned.
Speaker 3 (51:44):
I think that anyone who bought them would need to
respect their existing readership just for straightforwardly commercial reasons. They
have a brand and they have a place in national life.
You know, the Telegraph has read. You know, I live
in it. I live in a small village on the
Hampshire Barkshire boarders. All of my neighbors take the Telegraph.
(52:05):
It speaks to and four a certain constituency of sort
of Shia Tories, and any owner who was unaware of
that would be embarking on a sort of ruinous course.
So I think whoever takes it over, they'd need to
be aware of that. And something similar is true of
the Spectator. I think there are opportunities to grow, you know,
I think there are opportunities to grow online overseas in
(52:29):
both cases, and to monetize that more efficiently, especially if
if you had a proprietor who was prepared to invest.
But you know, the Telegraph has been around for a
long time. It's never changed its political affiliation, and I
think there are just solid commercial reasons for that, and
so I'm pretty I'm pretty relaxed. Whether it ends up
(52:49):
being brought by an existing UK media group or by
a foreign investor, I don't think we'd see huge changes.
Speaker 2 (52:56):
I am going to get abused somewhat after this because
I can tell you what's coming my way when this goes.
When this podcast goes out, why didn't you keep talking?
And the answer is to try and curtail that objection
is that you have places to go, things to do, responsibilities,
and that's why you're here in the country. Daniel Hannon,
(53:18):
It's been a pleasure. I want to thank you so much.
Speaker 3 (53:20):
I have promises to keep in miles ago before I sleep.
Thank you very much lady, and lovely to catch up
with you. I've really really enjoyed it, and I wish
you and your listeners every possible success.
Speaker 2 (53:48):
Well, I trust that you've got something out of that now.
The way we're doing this is something of a little
adventure and we're enjoying it, and we've got quite a
few stories already up our sleeve and a couple of
interviews that came out of almost nowhere. Anyway, we shall
return in a week with what is it to ninety seven?
(54:12):
Doesn't time for flying, So thank you for listening and
we shall talk soon.
Speaker 1 (54:25):
Thank you for more from News Talks at b Listen
live on air or online, and keep our shows with
you wherever you go with our podcasts on iHeartRadio
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