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Good evening. I'm Mark Steyn on a Friday Farage this Guy Fawkes Night... Let's set it all alight: Is it too much to expect politicians to take a little time off from saving the planet to saving the more modest jurisdictions they're actually responsible for? There are record numbers of strapping young fellows arriving on the shores of England; there are record numbers of rapes in England and Wales. Meanwhile, Boris is bulking up his carbon footprint flying private planes to dinner engagements. All that plus I'll be talking to Douglas Murray, bestselling author of The Strange Death of Europe and The Madness of Crowds.
And all your comments and questions – shoot me at [email protected]. All coming up on a Friday Farage – right after the news with Karen...
[NEWS REPORT]
What a week, what a week. If you believe the drivel coming out of COP-26 – or the G-26, as Joe Biden calls it – Boris Johnson is very concerned about rising sea levels washing away the Maldives in the year 2200. He's not, last time I checked, the Prime Minister of the Maldives. He's purportedly the Prime Minister of an entirely different island nation, and he has not the slightest interest in the tide washing up on English shores right now. So far this year almost three times as many quote-unquote "migrants" have landed in England as did in the whole of 2020. This week a record number crossed the Channel in a single day: 853.
If that were to become the norm, that would be a third-of-a-million a year – or about the population of Belfast. I'm not suggesting they should all be resettled there – I have no idea whether they incline toward Sinn Féin or the DUP, but simply in demographic terms the answer to the Irish Question may well be Somalia. I'll bet Gladstone never saw that coming.
The Mayor of Calais presides over a town ruined by this human tide. She has men dead of hypothermia on her beaches and drowned in overloaded boats. Last night fifty Eritreans bound for the United Kingdom via the SNCF railway track were hit by the Calais-Dunkirk train. At least one is dead. England is a convenient fifteen-nation stroll from Eritrea, and that Calais mayor, Madame Natacha Bouchart, has no doubt who's to blame for the traffic. She says Britain's quote "soft touch" on migrants has inflicted trauma on Calais residents for over 20 years by luring an unending torrent of human misery to one French port town that is the gateway to free housing and free money in what she calls the El Dorado of England. El Dorado is the mythical city of gold. We're not quite there yet, but, as Priti Patel has said, these so-called asylum seekers just want to live in British hotels. Which are a bit hit and miss in my experience, but probably compare reasonably favorably with the Eritrea Holiday Inn.
The point is we're gonna need a lot more hotels. At COP-26, Boris is gonna have to kick some of those African dictators out of their presidential suites to make room for the guys from back home fleeing their beneficent rule.
853 quote-unquote "refugees" per day is about half the number of all babies born in England and Wales that day, which averages currently at about 1,682. So you might think that's good news, given the collapsed Anglo-Celtic fertility rate. Evidently a lot of young women and young men – I don't want to be transphobic – are reluctant to give the ol' birth canal a workout and might find it more appealing simply to adopt a strapping young lad or fetching lassie wading ashore at Folkestone. Except that 87 per cent of all the quote-unquote "refugees" are male. Under the Geneva Convention on refugees, all of these young men have to have a reasonable fear of persecution if they were to be returned to their homeland or indeed to any of the 27 countries they passed through between here and their homeland. Their homeland is apparently no place for young men – but everything's hunky-dory for their sisters, girlfriends, wives, mothers, grandmas, and baby daughters they left behind. When civil war breaks out, toss your machete to Auntie as you head for the door and leave the fight back to her.
So, on this week's numbers, Britain is going to wind up with a greater male-female demographic imbalance than China after forty years of its one-child policy. Guys who can't get any action is not a recipe for social tranquility. If you're a young lady in, say, Rotherham, you might want to buy a new pair of running shoes.
Let me go back to the Mayor of Calais. Madame Bouchart thinks UK law is nuts and is what incentivizes this great tide of humanity. She says quote: "The British Government does not have the courage to review its legislation."
She's right. It IS a question of courage. All these chaps are going to be staying permanently, and running up the room-service tab because, as in Rotherham, no one wants to take the heat of being called racist by drawing attention to it. That's why Boris is off in Glasgow saving the planet. Because saving the planet is easier; it's the soft option. Why you would want lessons in saving the planet from a guy who lives on an island and can't control his borders at a time of global pandemic is beyond me. But, if you ask the political class about enforcing the national frontier, they'll say, "Oh, it's all very difficult, old boy, lots of complicating factors, entirely unreasonable to expect us to do anything about it... But recalibrating the global climate, changing the very heavens, THAT we can do."
Saving the planet is where politicians go to preen and posture because they're useless about the things that are their actual responsibility, like saving your country, saving your county, saving your town... COP-26 is being held in Glasgow, which has the lowest male life expectancy in Western Europe. All these prime ministers and celebrities yakking it up are just two miles from Calton, where, as the WHO pointed out a few years back, male life expectancy was 53.9 years, which is a smidgeonette higher than the Central African Republic, and in fairness to the Central African Republic, their numbers were depressed for many years by the cannibal Emperor Bokassa having quite an appetite and keeping a well stocked freezer. But saving Calton lacks the glamour of saving the planet, doesn't it?
What's the best way to save the planet? Well, why not get a sitcom actor from the American adaptation of "The Office" to fly in an iceberg to melt all over the floor of the COP-26 conference? That's how they ended this first week of it and that's how bad global warming is, folks. You can have your interior decorator install an iceberg in the living room of your Tuscany holiday home and next thing you know it's dripping all over the parquet.
Speaking of large inert lumps dripping all over the floor, Boris Johnson is being berated for taking a private plane to have dinner at the Garrick Club with Charles Moore. Charles was my editor at the Telegraph and Boris was my editor at The Spectator and so I'm understandably bitter and resentful that I wasn't invited. But this is the world our leaders are making for you: you'll be on your Boris Bike pedaling through streets of human misery while he's high above you cruising at 30,000 feet en route for cocktails with Greta Thunberg.
As the Mayor of Calais says, what's missing is courage. Let me know your thoughts, what's the solution to this crisis and who is to blame? The French or as the French say, the British. [email protected]... Looking forward to what you have to say.
Kevin Saunders joins us. He knows Calais very well, because he was Her Majesty's Chief Immigration Officer there. Kevin how many of these 854 people who landed in one day, how many of them are ever going to leaving the United Kingdom?
Kevin Saunders: None. Not one single one under the current legislation we have at the moment.
Mark: So all these people are basically here to stay. Now tell me your view, as we say you were the head of British immigration in Calais. What is the actual reality there? Is the mayor of Calais right and this is just the United Kingdom's fault for incentivizing this traffic?
Kevin Saunders: No, the mayor of Calais is completely right. She is 100 percent right, we made the UK too attractive to asylum seekers, illegal migrants, and basically everybody wants to come, so she's dead right. I've got a lot of sympathy for her, I lived near Calais for five years, I've seen what it's like, it's awful. It is absolutely awful. I wouldn't allow my wife to walk out in Calais at night time, it's just too dangerous.
Mark: Well the government says that it does deport people, Kevin, and so they evidently feel--I take it—relatively relaxed because however long the process takes, they intend to send these undeserving people back.
Kevin Saunders: Right. To send somebody back to the country that they came from you need a document, you need to be able to prove to the country that you're sending the people back to, that they are a resident of that country. What these people do is they destroy all documentation before they jump on the boat to come across the Channel. So they arrive in the UK undocumented and that's the way they do it, so we then have to go to countries like the Sudan or whatever to try to get a travel document out to them for that person, who may not have given us his right name, who may not have given us his right date of birth, who may not have told us anything that's true. So no we can't send them back.
Mark: There are those who do have documentation, Kevin. I mean the problem seems to be very basic, doesn't it? At a time when there are huge restrictions on landing at Heathrow. For the last year and a half for people who have all the paperwork, at the same time whether you have paperwork or not, if you land on the shores of England, it's a completely different system than if you're a businessman from New York flying into Heathrow. Why is it....we're told when we ask why it is that more of them can't be sent back, that it's because of the Geneva Convention on Refugees and yet they have passed through maybe 6, 7, 8, 9 countries that also subscribe to that convention and are perfectly safe. They're coming here from France, which is a First World nation, even though many in the United Kingdom might dispute that, it is a First World nation, it's a member of the G.-7, it's on the big 5 of the Security Council. Why is it that France doesn't seem obligated to keep them and the United Kingdom does?
Kevin Saunders: Because under the European conventions that we've had, the only two countries that ever played by the rules were the United Kingdom and Ireland. None of the others would play the game, they just said no. And in fact the French would say to us, well if you don't like what we're doing, take us to the European Court, we'll see you there in 5 or 6 years, because that's how long it's taking to bring a case against them. So forget the Geneva Convention because the Europeans will not play that game with us. They are quite happy, the Europeans are quite happy to say the United Kingdom is that way, off you go.
Mark: Why is it though that the United Kingdom is a more desirable resting place? The UK has traditionally had a broader sense of British national identity and has operated on the principle that anyone can become British, more or less. Is that simply more appealing than rather narrower definitions of nationality on the continent?
Kevin Saunders: No. What the people want—you know I've worked there, I've spoken to these people. They want to come to the UK because everything is free and they're gonna get housing, they're gonna get education, they're gonna get health care, and we're gonna give them money as well. Now to you and me the amount of money that we're actually giving them a week probably doesn't sound a vast amount but it's an awful lot more than they're getting anywhere else, so that's why they're coming. I mean what really annoys is these people are sleeping in the jungle or what's left of the jungle in Northern France. They're then coming to the UK; they're complaining about Napier Barracks, they're complaining about being in the hotels. They're even complaining because we're dispersing them to other parts of the UK.
Mark: No they're not the only people who have complained about Napier Barracks, it has been broadly condemned, Kevin, but you have seen this situation. You were a quarter century basically with UK immigration. Is it just getting irredeemably worse and is then no political will to solve this situation?
Kevin Saunders: It's certainly getting worse. Whether there's a political will or not, I don't know. I like some of the things the Home Secretary is saying in the Immigration and Nationality Bill. Basically if it was me, if I was the Home Secretary, I would be setting up reception centers offshore to deal with these asylum claims, because that's way to do it.
Mark: That's something closer to the Australian model but the Australian model has not been taken up by many people in the Northern Hemisphere. Thank you for that, Kevin.
Your reactions to migration and more, plus the latest on the disgraced ex-MP Owen Paterson, all that straight ahead on Farage.
Welcome back to your Friday Farage. As you surely know, the former cabinet minister Owen Paterson is out of Parliament. He was Secretary of State for Northern Ireland a decade ago, and subsequently a Northern Irish company decided to put him on the payroll for a little light consulting work. That proved a very lucrative signing for the company in question, Randox, because it wound up getting various government contracts without any competing bids, culminating in half-a-billion quid for Coronavirus tests from HMG – thanks to Mr. Paterson pitching it to the relevant minister, Lord Bethel. Paterson's toast, he's history, he's gone, after a rough couple of years: last year, his wife hanged herself on his birthday, and he has accused MPs of mocking his late wife and her death, and essentially giving that as the reason for his departure. The Father of the House of Commons, Sir Peter Bottomley, says the only way we're going to stop MPs bulking up their salaries with all this lobbying work is to pay them more. So they can make just as much money but without the tedious chore of having to call ministers of the Crown and shake them down for half-a-billion's worth of County Antrim COVID kits.
Well we have with us Andre Walker, great to have you with us, Andre, and what do you make of this?
Andre Walker: Look the first and most important thing is I think the behavior of the standards committee in the Labour Party has been absolutely appalling in this case. Let's just make something really, really, clear to start with. Every single Brexiteer that I know has been investigated by one or other organization, whether that be the National Crime Agency in the case of Arron Banks, whether that be the electoral commission in the case of Dan Grimes, or whether that be the Standards Committee in the case of Owen Paterson. Time and time again we see people on the political right being attacked. Now I don't know whether it was right that Owen Paterson should have been personally paid by Randox and that also, allowed a think tank that he run to also be funded by Randox. But the fundamental point is this: why is it that this so called independent committee of the House of Commons is run by Chris Bryant? Remember him of underpants fame? Well actually most people remember him because of that but actually the reason you should remember it is because he is a factional remainer in the same way that people on the electoral commission are factional remainers. I think what we have to say here, more importantly than anything else, is what's good for the goose is good for the gander. Now my question to anybody watching this program is how is it that one company, the cooperative, is able to run and finance its own political party? And that it deemed to be wholly appropriate and yet a member of staff at Randox, namely Owen Paterson, is not allowed to run a think tank financed by Randox. If you want to abolish it, abolish it, but why is it only our side that ever comes under attack, ever comes under scrutiny, is ever criminally prosecuted or attacked by the Election Commission, that is the fundamental question here and I think the cowardice of Conservative MPs to back down on this is simply staggering.
Mark: Well since you brought up this idea that the only one type of Member of Parliament is prosecuted, we should mention that a Labour MP has in fact been convicted for threatening to throw acid at her love rival. She's still sitting in Parliament, she doesn't seem to be.....she's got a criminal conviction for serious violent threatening and yet apparently she's still sitting in Parliament surrounded by MPs she could be throwing acid over if she wanted to. Is there a double standard with her too?
Andre Walker: Yeah and I just want to be clear, the reason I laughed there was not because of the instant, which is actually incredibly serious, the level of harassment that she meets that which she's been convicted for. I'm laughing because of the sheer double standards, we see all the time, you know if you look at the case of Arron Banks versus the Electoral Commission. The National Crime Agency was effectively saying that his company, which had all British customers, was registered in the United Kingdom, because he had a parent company that owned companies in multiple jurisdictions based in Jersey or the Channel Islands or wherever it was specifically. That made it a foreign company. That is simply not true in terms of legislation. Similarly the idea that Darren Grimes, one of the most egregious offenders against the Electoral Commission and against British democracy is similarly for the birds. One thing that Owen Paterson has said, that he was wholly unable to give proper evidence to this committee, you know we saw Chris Bryant the arch remainer stand up in defense of it and there is no appeal whatsoever. But the other thing is it is a perfect right of Members of Parliament to overrule the committee and I just think that there is another problem here. We have so many people within the Conservative Party who are such supine wet on these issues, totally unwilling to stand up for what is right and decent in the face of screeching from The Guardian, they basically wet their knickers at every opportunity when a left wing journalist comes on the phone.
Mark: Let me let me just get a clarification on that, because you're basically saying that, you know, MPs have business interests. I agree with you that if you've got some business interests in Jersey, in the Channel Islands, in a Crown dependency, that that is some kind of nefarious murky foreign thing, but we're now saying okay we're not just going to crack down on your business, on your business interests, legitimate business interests, but if after office, you know, you attempt to leverage the only thing you've had, you've been secretary of state for Northern Ireland. That's a job that until recently you could get killed over, people were trying to kill you. By the way the guys who were trying to kill Owen Paterson, Sinn Féin, are running the biggest criminal operation on the island of Ireland right now, which appears to be no problem for serving in politics, being elected to Parliament, being elected to Northern Ireland Assembly, so there's a huge double standard here and you're blaming it essentially on the supine nature of the Conservative Party.
Andre Walker: Oh without a doubt. Now let me make another point to you about the disconnect between people and politics. Look Members of Parliament traditionally were unpaid. Now I grudgingly accept that Members of Parliament have to be paid although I have to say what I would pay them is 90 percent of an average of their past 5 years salaries, so they didn't benefit financially, but okay we can agree on this. But time and time again what happens is it's being turned into a fulltime job. Now being a Member of Parliament was a full time job, how could you be a government minister at the same time? And actually what we're doing, and the reason why Sir Peter Bottomley is so desperate to hike up MP's salaries is because he wants to create effectively a political class, an elite. You basically....you become a House of Commons researcher, then you work at a trade union, then you become a Member of Parliament and earn 200 grand year for life, you have no engagement with the real world, you understand nothing about business, you don't give a toss.
Mark: And you have a political class that's completely disconnected from their constituents but Andre, isn't that simply a function of the way government has changed in the last 150 years. In a big government society, doesn't that mean that you will automatically have a professionalized political class?
Andre Walker: Well I used to work as a House of Commons researcher and let me tell you a thing that was incredibly frustrating. The number of letters that used to come into us about legislation were absolutely tiny; it was constantly about benefit claims, immigration claims, and all this other stuff. Effectively people right up and down the country in political parties, specifically the Labour Party and the Liberal Democrats who beat the SMP. They want a social worker for every constituency. These people don't do legislation. Let me tell you what happens, your average Member of Parliament hears the bell, the phone goes and it says vote yes by text message or vote no by text message. They're corralled through the voting lobbies not knowing what they're voting for. If actually we had people who were more connected to business and less social workers, I think that we would really improve the legislation being made in this country.
Mark: A parliament of social workers, that is the problem as you see it, Andre. Thank you very much for your opinion and you're right about the bell, the 3 line whip that Boris used with that Mister Patterson just a couple of days ago.
Last year almost all crime fell, because all the ne'er-do-wells were in lockdown. But one crime soared to record levels: rape. In the twelve months up to June this year, there were 61,158 rapes in England and Wales, that's the highest number ever recorded, and the rate accelerated through the spring. What's going on here? Peter Bleksley is a former detective with Scotland Yard and we're grateful to have him. Peter, what is the reason for this staggering number?
Peter Bleksley: Well first of all may I apologize to you and the viewers because if it sounds like I'm speaking from a war zone, I'm in south London of course, it's Bonfire Night, so there's a lot of fireworks going off but I've closed all the windows, closed all the doors and I'm doing my best. So forgive me. Back to your question.
Mark: You're not in Helmand province I take it, that's great Peter. What's going on with these rape statistics?
Peter Bleksley: Well there are a number of factors at play here, I think. These figures were compiled, generally speaking, before the tragic and awful murder of Sarah Everard and Sabrina Nessa, so there is an element of people at that point having greater confidence in coming forward and reporting crimes of a sexual nature. Now there had been a trend of that and of course that is to be welcomed, albeit of course on the flip side, there is a woefully low conviction rate in terms of the number of rapes being reported, and that has been recognized by the government as a matter of serious concern and some steps I hope are going to be taken to try and address that. It's a complex matter how the police investigate and how the Crown prosecution present the cases and how in fact the court deals with it. There are problems there. Another aspect of crime, which soared throughout the lock down, was of course fraud, and that is really at epidemic proportions because so many criminals being confined to their homes actually turned to their laptop to commit crime and that level of crimes is off the Richter scale. So many millions of people are becoming victims of fraud as well.
Mark: Yeah that's becoming an increasingly common problem simply by the nature of the world we live in, where we open up a computer and give it all kinds of information that we wouldn't necessarily give to a human being, but the rape statistics are interesting. You talked about the relatively small number of convictions and feminists always say, for example, only about an eighth of rapes are ever reported. A couple of years ago the official statistic for those rape complaints that were ever criminally prosecuted was 1.7 percent, so isn't it entirely rational if you're inclined that way, in the modern United Kingdom, to be a rapist, because if only a sixth get reported and if only 1.7 percent of those that are reported get criminally prosecuted, you've literally got a 99.9 percent chance of getting away with this.
Peter Bleksley: The courts, the prosecution service and the police have struggled on this front, despite police setting up specialist sexual offenses units and that's something that we should welcome but still these prosecution and conviction levels are at stubbornly low figures. Something clearly has to be done, but this is across the criminal justice system that this is an issue. Is there an issue about witnesses being believed? I think that is also a factor but whatever it might be I would urge anybody who is the victim of any kind of crime whatsoever to please set aside the current trend of a lack of confidence in the police and please step forward and report that crime. It is only by crime being accurately reported that the police can get some kind of picture as to what priorities they should focus on and of course policing priorities is a hot potato because the British police in recent times are become a one stop shop for all of society's ills and in many regards some major crime is not getting the focus I believe it should have.
Mark: Well that's a very polite way, Peter, of putting what to many people is a big complaint about the police, that if you make a transphobic tweet they'll send 3 officers around to your house but if you're in one of these miserable communities, where they have all these euphemistically called grooming gangs, the police won't do anything. I mean surely at a certain level, you don't need to have more reported crime to figure that a policeman should be taking rape more seriously than an ill phrased joke about Nelson Mandela's death on Twitter.
Peter Bleksley: Crime is crime and I understand some crimes will be perceived as being and indeed are, more serious than others, but hate crime is on the statute book, it's something that needs to be prosecuted, and of course is a policing priority but our British police are really at a crossroads now I feel and we do have of course, the inquiry into the standards of the Metropolitan Police, the findings of that will be extremely interesting, but I revert to what I said not so long ago, insomuch as the police are now that one stop shop for all of society's ills from people ludicrously dialing 999 to report the fact that they've had the incorrect pizza topping delivered to them. And I'm not being flippant here. Unfortunately because of a decade of austerity, many other public services were cut back almost as much as the police were. So out of hours, for example, if somebody is in a mental health crisis it is probably going to fall upon the police to have to deal with that person and really the police shouldn't be. So much time is hoovered out with dealing with mental health crises that they really are detracted away from crime.
Mark: No, but Peter with the best will in the world, it's not just the public turning to the police for that, the police have embraced that role. They had all these vans out, I think it was in Merseyside a few months ago, saying that being offensive is an offense, which actually isn't true in English law. I mean all kinds of people are offensive, I'm offensive routinely, you may have been offensive to people, but they're driving around as if they're trying to drive up traffic about, you know, rude Facebook posts with huge vans saying being offensive is an offence and at the same time, as we've seen in Rotherham and Telford, basically the local grooming gangs become institutions that take young English girls as child sex slaves for years on end. At a certain level the police seem to find it easier just to go around the policing everybody's Facebook posts.
Peter Bleksley: Well firstly let's deal with that Merseyside situation. It didn't take that police force very long to realize the folly of their ways and there was a quick retraction and apology and I hope that they focused more on tackling crime than something that quite frankly....
Mark: But Peter some idiot chief constable or assistant chief constable signed off on that and paid money to some graphics design company to come up with that idiotic slogan, so there's a problem in some ways right at the top with British policing right now, and meanwhile at the bottom there is this very real situation of rising sexual assaults.
Thank you for joining us tonight, Peter, I'm very grateful to you. Coming next on tonight's Farage, one of the most incisive analysts of the scene, Douglas Murray. We're going to wind him up and let him go. That's next on GB News.
Happy Bonfire Night. No Farage to barrage tonight, but you can Stump the Steyn... Shoot me a question [email protected].
We have had some reactions to our top story about the migrant situation and in particular about Boris taking a private plane to have dinner with Charles Moore, my old editor Charles Moore, my old editor Boris. Tom King says: "The PM and other leading people in the world need to travel at speed because that's their job. You calling them out for doing that while sat on your bottom in the studio is pathetic."
You know less something Tom? The reintroduction of serfdom might actually solve some of the problems you're worried about, that would enable Czar Boris to go travelling around in luxury and at speed while you just labor below of no consequence. You know something? The former prime minister of Australia, Tony Abbott, flew coach from Sydney, economy class from Sydney on Qantas to his ski vacation a couple of years ago. He was in row 58 D and the guy next to him was taking some cell phone footage--that's a long flight Sydney to the Swiss Alps, and he was able to travel economy to do that. There is no reason other you're your craven posture, Tom King, that Boris Johnson or John Kerry or any of these other people need to go around on private jets and it just means that Boris is going to become even more disconnected from you, Tom King than he is at the moment.
Tolly Boy says: "There will be a lot more Rotherhams with all these thousands of young migrant men seeking female company. I'm surprised more women can't see the pending danger to them."
That's the sentimentalization of immigration. We don't look on it as a rational public policy, whereby immigration is meant to benefit the people who are already here, we just think oh isn't it nice, there's all these nice strapping young men washing up on the shores of Folkestone and what could possibly go wrong with that?
Douglas Murray is the international bestselling author of The Strange Death of Europe and The Madness of Crowds, both of which are cracking reads. It's always great to see you, Douglas. I think just going back to the first time I met you. It was at a conference not long after 9/11, I think you were just down from Oxford, I think that's how they say it, and at that time I did my usual the glass is 15/16th empty routine and you were the optimist, Douglas. Are you still optimistic having written The Strange Death of Europe and the Madness of Crowds?
Douglas Murray: First of all it's great to be with you, Mark, a huge pleasure and an honour. And by the way I can top your comment, I was just guffawing here in the studio about what you said your listener, Tom. I can cap that, I've actually flown economy with Tony Abbott. I know he flies economy, so there I can back up your story, you got a source here.
Mark: I can't think of anything worse than a long haul flight sitting between you and Tony Abbott wedged up in economy class seats.
Douglas Murray: That's the way politicians travel, you know. It's a strange American and now increasingly British thing that we have this sort of presidential style of you know of traveling around. As for the optimism-pessimism, half glass full thing, you know it changes doesn't it, depending on first if all who's in power, who's in charge and secondly on private acts of courage. One of the things that stunned me in recent years and was so depressing that it led me to write about the strange death of Europe, was this situation which nobody knows better about than you, in which everybody could see things happening and nobody was meant to say anything about it, or certainly not to say anything that was objecting to what was going on. In the 2015 migrant crisis, which we're seeing this little echo of now still in the south coast of England. In the 2015 crisis you know, you were only meant to say hurrah, look at how many people have arrived and never look at it from the other end of that and that's the same in question after question in our era, and the things you've been talking about on the program this week. These are all examples of things that that we've been told there's only one thing we're meant to think about them, and you got to just parrot that thing and people are terrified about objecting, they're terrified of saying are there any downsides to this even? So it's a long answer to your question, but the answer is I always become optimistic again when I see even one person standing up, and that doesn't have to be a famous person, it doesn't have to be you know somebody on a private jet jetting off to COP28-32 or any other meeting. It can just be any individual in society. Recently there was an academic, there's an academic in England who has been very brave. That just gives me hope.
Mark: Well that's how we used to think about it, all you need is one man or a woman with courage, a cis woman with courage, standing up and then others will follow them and you will then have a genuine back and forth. I sense that actually something different is happening, in that on one issue after another, people are just falling silent because to them it's more trouble, why take the hit to your career for expressing an honest view? We've seen JK Rowling in the UK and we've seen Margaret Atwood in Canada but they are the two most successful novelists of their respective societies. JK Rowling is one of the wealthiest women on the planet. I mean you really have to be at that level to withstand the heat now?
Douglas Murray: It is one way to withstand the heat, to be mega rich, that's certainly one way through but I'm not sure that that's necessary these days, because figures like the academic I just mentioned, Kathleen Stock, she is a professor of logic and she has just been sticking to her ground, which is that chromosomes exist and that they matter and it's true you have to walk through a certain amount of fire sometimes, but I really encourage people to do that, whatever their role. First of all because it's the right thing to do, secondly because quite often it doesn't require as much bravery as is sometimes said. Thirdly, because you'll find much better friends and a much better reception committee on the other side. Who wants, you know this is a really important point who wants to be just another person kowtowing to the boring consensus of your time, with all of the sort of pathetic cowardly people who just keep parroting what they're told? Who would want to be in that group? Much, much more fun on the other side of that, when you've walked through that, when you say what you see in the world, when you are honest with yourself and with others. You'd find a much merrier gang of people; they're all the people you'd want to be with anyway. I mean I hate to make the comparison but it's a bit like the old thing when the smoking ban came in, it was more fun on the curbside with the smokers than it was inside, you know?
Mark: Well you say that Douglas, but isn't it the case that we have we just seen this extraordinary thing, representatives of 100 and whatever it is, 180 nations, all gathering in Glasgow to say and apparently think exactly the same thing, and even Her Majesty the Queen, God bless her, whose remarks I thought were a constitutional abomination, and I see have driven prominent Australians and Canadians to announce that they're now republicans. But even Her Majesty the Queen just says, I just want to think the same thing about the climate as everybody else does, as all these 180 other nations are all going to say the same thing and be thrilled for two weeks, by all thinking alike.
Douglas Murray: Yes. I mean that unbelievably wasteful exercise in Glasgow is just another example of it. I feel sorry for the Queen having to release such a statement, whether she believes it or not I don't know but you're right, I mean it's terrible that people should think there's only one thing they can say about this. If the world----I mean I'm so fed up, as I'm sure most people are with these ridiculous climate summits. You know, send for the actors, great! Leonardo DiCaprio's arrived, now we can get down to business. Send for the school truant from Scandinavia, great now we're going to solve some global problems. You know and the ridiculous ramping up of the rhetoric ever. This time, I mean like you....I mean we've all heard for years being told we got 10 years left until we all burn to death, or we got 20 years until we all drown and now Boris Johnson this week really upped the ante and gave the British taxpayer our dues by telling us you've got one minute left. I'm sorry at that point I think most people just turn over the channel.
If the COP26 world leaders were serious, they would have got on the stage this week and they'd have talked about things that they're going to do in terms of new technologies, which would change this. They didn't focus on that, they did that the same thing they always do, they tried to terrify the public some more in a direction which I think the public is rather dubious about, with good reason.
Mark: Well then let me since you brought up this, you know, we've only got 10 years to save the planet. I'm not a big fan of the Prince of Wales but a few years back he actually was more specific and I think he said we have eight years and two months to save the planet. And he also around that time said that the red squirrel was gonna be extinct. I think it was due to be extinct in 2016. I saw a red squirrel outside my house this morning, so the Prince of Wales was wrong on that. How do these guys get away with it? He can't even get the extinction of the red squirrel right, why should he know the death of the planet?
Douglas Murray: Yeah when St. John the Divine was writing the Apocalypse, I bet he never guessed that the gray squirrel would be the sign of Armageddon. He didn't see that one coming. We will all shriek in terror every time we see a grey squirrel from now on.
Mark: Well he does actually.
Douglas Murray: It's so ludicrous, isn't it? They've been doing this for years and as I say I mean it's really striking that there's just a gap between the politicians and the public. The rhetoric is unbelievable. Let me give you a very quick example. I'm in the United States at the moment. President Joe Biden has promised that America is going to go basically entirely, very nearly carbon neutral by 2050. I mean no one's going to be around remembering that in 2050, anymore than they're going to remember Prime Minister Modi in India promising that India in 2070 will be carbon neutral. I'm sure we'll all be around to hold him to that promise and I'm sure there's a court we can take him to. There's a serious point here, which is that Joe Biden says that they're going to go carbon neutral in America by 2050. That's going to cost every American household something like $11,000 a year. You know how much the American public have said that willing to pay per year for this? $24. $24, not $11,000, nobody's volunteering $11,000 per household but everyone just agrees, everyone says yeah yeah we'll go along with the rhetoric. I don't see why we should.
Mark: Yeah for three macchiatos. Yeah that's about three macchiatos with butterscotch topping and whipped cream, 24 bucks.
Thank you for that, Douglas. It's always great to see you. And that will do it for tonight's show. Nigel, the man himself is going to be back on Monday and I will see you next week. Have a spiffy weekend and stand by for the indispensable man, the one and only Colin Brazier, coming up right after the weather.