The Path to Political Realignment

When 6% of the population is following Islam in Britain, then what will happen when 25-26% of Britain will be following Islam in the coming years? It is a belief that showing tolerance and empathy to others is more important than prioritizing your own people and they are willing to do that even if it results in the destruction of their own nation. What I saw during that campaign was terrifying, but it was basically the corruption of our democracy. John, this does not look like democracy to me. This does not look like liberalism or freedom to me. This does not look like Britain to me. This looks closer to something like Lebanon or Sierra Leone. So finally Matt, is it entirely possible that there might be a reform UK government after the next election? Well Matt, uh not for the first time. Thank you for giving us your time and joining us. Well thank you for having me, John. It's always a a real uh honor to be having a conversation with you. Well that's kind of you. Now uh you've just written the book, uh which we've acknowledged. Can I put it to you this way to kick the ball off? If someone was to ask you to list the most important problems in Britain caused by immigration , what would you say I think first and foremost, the loss of identity, John. What I write about here is what's going to happen to Britain within just one generation, within just one lifetime. And I think it comes back to the question of what is a nation . And a lot of people who watch your show will have reflected on that question and they really will have interro And I think a nation is a place that is defined by a shared history, a shared culture, a shared way of life, a collective memory, and a people, at least a majority group, that has been in that nation for a long period of time, has built that nation, has crafted it, has cultivated it, has looked after it. The reason I wrote this book and really stuck my neck out is because if you look at all of the official census data that we have in Britain, if you look at where the country is going over the next 74 years, just one lifetime, that identity will not just be eroded , but I think will essentially be displaced by a demographic revolution. And we can get into the stats later on. But for me what we're seeing with mass migration, open borders and this this demographic revolution that's underway is really about a loss of identity. It is to go back to Samuel Huntington in his book, it's about that question who are we? And over the next seventy four years, John, that that notion of we in the who are we will become much less clear. Um I'd I'd have to make the observation because it's very germane to my own thinking here, is how do we find the balance between us and I'm including you know, broadly speaking the West surrendering our identity and how much of it is us being subject to those who actually want to demolish it and change it. But we'll come back to that. Uh well I've got thoughts on that one too. We might well let's hold that thought. Now you say in your book, and I'm quoting directly here from the first few pages, what we are witnessing is the deliberate and sustained transformation of the only majority the country, that's Britain, of course, has ever known, the white British people, and hence the transformation of the country itself . Now some might read that and say , well, isn't the most important thing that the British people have is British values rather than white skin . Yeah. Well firstly w what do we mean by British values, right? That's a very thin centered approach towards citizenship. I've often uh been of the view that citizenship is not the same thing as belonging and, belonging requires more than a piece of paper. And what I mean by that, again, building on people like Edmund Burke and Roger Scruton, is that being part of a nation is not just about having a set of legal document s and a stamp on a passport. Being part of a nation is also sharing that emotional bond that you have to the moral community. That you feel a sense of obligation to that nation and a sense of responsibility , and partly that's shaped by your connection to the past and your sense of ancestry. Now, it is also true that people from minority backgrounds who integrate, who work hard, pay taxes, and also develop that emotional bond to the nation, feel that sense of belonging just as strongly as, say, in my country the white British do. I know this for a fact because I've met many of those people and uh one in three Brits from minority backgrounds we tend to forget also voted for Brexit because they believe in our national sovereignty and they believe in our in preserving our way of life. But what we're going to see over the next 74 years will really tur n that emotional bond, that sense of belonging on its head. And if I can, John, I'll just give you three key stats off the top, because I think this will bring it home for people maybe in Australia around the world. I know you've got lots of uh listeners and viewers around the world. If you look at where Britain is going in the next 74 years, the share of our population that is white British will collapse from 74% today to 33% in 74 years. The share of our population that was born overseas, so-called foreign born, or the immediate children of uh the foreign born, will rise from nineteen per cent today to over sixty percent, six zero. And the share of people who are following Islam will rise from roughly six percent today to over one quarter of the population by the end of this century, about one third of young people. So So again, all of this is based on official UK census data, based on projections using official data, and it is a reflection of the policy of mass migration that has been pursued in Britain since the late nineteen nin eties. All of this is really unprecedented. So what it's going to do, I fear, and the reason I wrote the book to try and spark a national conversation about what is happening to our country, and that conversation is now happening. I wrote the book because if we're just going to fall into this very thin civic notion of who we are, that all you need is a piece of paper and we're not going to entertain that deeper bond to our community, then how on earth are we going to sustain this rapidly diversifying popul ation? How how on earth are we going to hold this nation together. Because one of the examples that I use is if you look at all nations around the world, uh seventy per cent of all nations have a very clear majority group, and 80% of all nations, John, have a majority that represents at least uh 70% of their population. Now, by the end of this century, Britain will have neither of those things, and that puts us in the same bucket as nations such as Sierra Leone and Lebanon. Now you might say that sounds a bit um that sounds a bit you know pushing things too far, but but that is the scale of demographic change that is happening in Britain right now, and that is where we will end up if we don't change course. So that notion of belonging, a shared language, a shared culture, a shared sense of collective memory, a shared way of life. That sense of belonging I worry will fragment uh and collapse. Friends, it's good to be able to announce my new sub stack, which will be known as our civilizational moment. The substack will explore the pressing issues facing countries like ours, loosely called the West, the democratic countries, and how they're playing out in the country that I love and hope you do too, ours, Australia. I'll offer thoughts on the events and trends alongside contributions from some very knowledgeable friends and people I respect. Click the link in the description, subscribe , and share the essays with your friends and family. Let's do everything we can to bring back the Australia that we love but which we're losing. There'd be many people who would want to attack you, of course, for those views. But one trite line would be, well, you're just being a racist. Another might be, from those that David Goodhart might call the Anywares, well the idea of a nation has gone anyway, we're all international citizens now, it's a melting pot. How would you respond to those to I'm sure you get them criticisms? Well the first is, as I as I'm very careful to say and I've always said, um this is not this is not really about pitting a a racial group against another group or wanting to even uh necessarily prioritise a racial group, many members of minority communities feel the loss of the majority as acutely as the members of that majority. A lot of demographers, for example, a lot of scholars of nationalism like Anthony Smith, Eric Kaufman, among others, have long argued that the reason majority groups matter is because they provide a core or an anchor for the nation that holds it together, and those majorities become symbols of that nation, and they help hold it together. That is why, for example, you saw Latino Hispanic voters in surveys in America expressing such concern about the decline of white Americans in that society, and it's why you've seen many minority uh communities in Britain express very strong concern about mass migration alongside their white British counterparts, because that question of who are we has long been wrapped up with the majority group. So once a majority slides into minority status, as it already is in London, in Birmingham, in Bradford, in Luton, um, in Slough, in Watford, as that carries on across the nation, it won't just be white Brits saying, Well, well, who are we and what holds us together? It's going to be, I think, a broad coalition of people saying we don't really want this speed and scale of demographic change. And on the anywhere's the elites who have lost touch with their nation . I've been quite influenced by the work of Canadian psychologist Gad Sad, who has argued quite persuasively, I think, that what we are have what we are living with is not so much a ruling class that identifies with anywhere. And I and I I agree David Goodhart's work is very good and he's a friend and I would recommend everybody engages with his book The Road to Somewhere. But Gad Sad, I think, goes further in saying : what unites the ruling class today is a worldview that he describes as suicidal empathy, that it is a belief that showing tolerance and empathy to others is more important than prioritizing your own people, and they are willing to do that even if it results in the destruction of their own nation. And we see this time and time again. The most obvious example here in Britain will be open borders and the arrival of nearly two hundred thousand illegal immigrants from outside of Europe on the small boats and most people in the ruling class just shrug their shoulders. And I think what we're living through, and this is probably a conversation that we might want to revisit at some point, but what I think we're living through is a radicalization of the liberal ruling class. I think liberalism was always based on notions of um protecting people from harm, protecting minority groups especially. And I think today's politicians have been radicalized to such an extent that they put those notions of empathy and harm ahead of the things that used to unify the ruling class, which was the need to preserve their own nation and act as custodians of their own nation. And that's certainly something that I've seen. And it would explain why both, on the left and the right of our established politics here in Britain, uh every political party has continued with the policy of mass uncontrolled immigration, despite having no democratic mandate from the people for doing so because they view themselves as being morally righteous and essentially superior to the people who have elected them . It's my personal view that and listeners will have heard me say it before , that one of the s the the things that history screams at us is that the most effective organizing structure for Prosperity and freedom is the nation's state drawing on an involved and educated and vibrant citizenry. And indeed, after the horrific Bondire massacre here , I found myself thinking that actually the premier problem was not guns, as some people said, and it wasn't even anti-Semitism, evil as that is, or radical Islam, which is hardly new, it's the fact that it's arrived here now on our watch, and it's arrived here now on our watch. Cause we've not defended our values, our foundations, our traditions, our commitment to uh if you like, um the things that set us free in the first place. We've created a vacuum. So it goes back to that point I was sort of touching on earlier. Where do you draw the line between us sort of surrendering the foundations of our culture uh and and decide at what point well it's collapsing because others are actively attacking them ? Yeah, I mean I think it's a great question, and many of the things that we've witnessed in Australia obviously have parallels here in Britain, where around the same time as a Bondi uh massacre we had a similar attack on British Jews in the city of Manchester. Um and we also had the police thwart the la what would have been the the biggest atrocity against Jews in the Western world. Two um Muslim men had been sto ckpiling guns and explosives, uh, preparing to launch an ISIS-style attack on British Jews. So , of course, all of this is ignored by the ruling class, because under the mantra , diversity is our strength. They don't really want to interrogate um the symbols of the way in which this regime is no longer working for ordinary people. On the tension between surrender versus let's say a deliberate strategy , I've had a very interesting experience of actually running for office recently for a uh conservative political party in northern England and I personally knocked on seven door seven thousand doors. So let me just share one observation from that 'cause I think it speaks to your question. mainstream and being imposed without any democratic mandate . I think apathy has become one of the one of the big political parties, if you like, or one of the big political movements that now sits in the centre of our politics. I remember Robert Putnam, the Harvard scholar, writing a paper 15 years ago called Epluribus Un um, where Putnam made the observation that diverse soci eties also happen to be less trusting societies and they also happen to be societies where people, in his words, hunker down. They hunker down and they turn away from other people because essentially demographic change erodes the social and cultural capital that used to hold nations together. And I think that is what it is. It's not so much a sense of people surrendering. I think it is a complete loss of agency, a collapse of belief in the idea that citizens can change the destiny of their nation. And on top of that, it is this notion among the ruling class that they now they now derive their entire sense of meaning and purpose and social status from projecting this worldview of suicidal empathy. The great example of this, and I know you've talked about it many times, so I won't elaborate too much, but the grooming gang scandal in Britain where white working class girls were sexually assaulted, still being sexually assaulted by Pakistani Muslim uh clan-based networks that have been basically imported from Pakistan and they targeted white working class girls because they were vulnerable, and because they were white and because they were non Muslim. Um what what was so uh interesting um what was so interesting was the extent to which the ruling class ignored it for 30 years, 40 years. Uh, they simply did not want to engage with this story because it turns that notion of suicidal empathy on its head, that by showing empathy towards others, those others can return that generosity by essentially helping to destroy your country from within. So I d there's part of me, I you know, whenever you start talking about demographic transformation, whenever you start talking about you know notions like demographic replacement, people do their back their back goes up and they say, Well, actually I can't really uh I can't really um you know, discuss this or it's a conspiracy. My view is it's a it's a general mix of incompetence among our political class. It's a it's a mix of this suicidal empathy that now defines their entire worldview, and and it's a mix of in some cases radic radical ideologues who are invested in trying to dismantle the West. I'm interested to you make the point about this uh observation that politicians we've just had our prime minister trot it out. Uh our diversity is our strength. I must say I expect the doctor to know his business or her business. I expect a an engineer who builds a bridge to understand metallurgy . A politician who doesn't understand that excessive diversity breaks trust and that trust is the key to a prosperous society. A harmonious society and a prosperous society ought not to be in the game . I think the underlying assumption too is that multicultur alism is always good . And that assumption in turn is based on the idea that all cultures are equal. That's us denigrating our own again, not believing in our own culture. Yeah. I mean I talk about this notion in the book of asymmetrical multiculturalism, or or what we might call more more easily two tier multiculturalism. Which which you're absolutely right. Essentially it's a policy framework that has evolved to priorit ise the cultures, identities, histories and ways of life of minorities who are told to celebrate those things. Uh we just had a visible expression of that in Britain with a large number of Muslims publicly praying in Trafalgar Square in London, which many British people found profoundly unsettling. Anybody who has read their history on the Muslim Brotherhood knows what was going on there. It was about the physical visible demonstration of power and an attempt to intimidate uh other people . But the point I'm making is at the same time as encouraging minorities to preserve and protect their distinctive identity, the majority is either told to jettison who they are, is told to uh replace who they are with a celebration of global liberalism, a celebration of diversity . And in that way, multiculturalism becomes profoundly imbalanced because the majority is now told to either apologise and feel ashamed of who they are or reshape their entire identity around cosmopolitan ism. And as Fran Francis Fukuyama, who is not known as being a right wing scholar, has said himself in his book Liberalism and its Discontents , when he says that to ask a people to celebrate diversity is fine, but it cannot be the basis of your entire ident ity because it is the same thing as saying you have no real identity of your own. If the only thing that you're doing is celebrating other people, then who are you as a distinctive people? You don't really exist. And I think that's the point in the narratives that we now have coming from the ruling class. A great example of this, of course, was the raising of the flags across many towns and cities in the UK where, spontaneously last summer people began to raise the St. George's Day flag and the Union Jack from lampposts and public buildings. And I'm not just talking about a handful, I'm talking about entire streets covered in the national flag , you have to ask yourself the question, why did people do this? The similar outpouring uh took place after nine eleven, of course, and that is how Samuel Huntington opens his book on national identity, Who Are We? Because he says it's an outpouring of national identity, of national pride. But when I saw the flags going up here in Britain and England, I actually saw it rather differently. I saw it as an act of resistance. An act of resistance among people who simply said, No, we are going to reassert who we are because we belong here too. We have an identity. In fact we built and crafted and cultivated this nation. This is who we are . And they were so bewildered and sidelined by the demographic changes that have been going on that they felt the need to fly a symbol of who they are on their own street, which tells you something about the psychology in this country. It tells you something about the mood in this country. Now, of course, municipal government, local government rushed to take the flags down. Although interestingly they did, not rush to take down the Palestine flags. So again, you have a two-tier multiculturalism that is saying to the majority time and time again, you are not allowed to preserve and promote your distinctive identity, you you must reshape that identity around globalization, basically, around d divers ity. And you must join us in ensuring that minority groups can preserve their identity and their culture. And the end game of that, as we all know, is going to be a deep resentment. And the end game of that is going to be a complete political realignment, which we're now seeing across the West , I think with President Trump, with the rise of reform in Britain, with uh Marine Le Pen and Jordan Bardella in France, where the politics is now being reshaped around that majority who are sick and tired of being maligned uh in promoting freedom. And I guess the four freedoms that I would define freedom of conscience, belief and religion, uh, freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, and freedom to own and trade property. Uh the four legs of a stool. But actually one came first, really, it was freedom of conscience. It probably came if we're really honest out of the ugliness of the religious wars, essentially between different parts of the Christian community and the recognition that that was barbaric and had to stop. But here's the point. Having established freedom of conscience and belief and religion, uh there would be those and that they do and there are those who argue, well , um uh Matt, uh you say Muslims will go from representing just one in seventeen Britons to one in four or one in three amongst the young. Um isn't this just the fruit of freedom a British value in itself, working itself out ? I think it was Macaulay, the historian who said the history of England is the history of liberty. Uh and I think you're absolutely right to to to point to the critical importance of that. Um my instinctive reaction to that is that That tradition , well-meaning tradition, free speech, free expression, freedom of assembly , has also been used to import religions and people who do not tolerate that tradition in return . And I think that legacy of liberty is under attack on two fronts. One is uh by a ruling class that is over the last twenty years has become absolutely focused on trying to control and censor the public square so that its project cannot be challenged or overturned. Things like what I'm pointing to would include things like the expansion of hate la ws, the expansion of non-crime hate incidents where you can have a police report filed if you express unfashionable views, um online safety laws, um over time the public square has gradually been narrowed as mainly left-wing politicians have basically tried to curtail genuine free speech. We even have a program in our UK government home office, uh prevent program, it's called, which is a counter-terrorism program, which includes in its guidance, and people can go and Google this just to double check, uh expressing culturally conservative views is on a spectrum, they argue, uh the same spectrum, uh of terrorism. Uh and so the state has clearly come to the view that holding views that twenty five years ago, forty years ago, fifty years ago would have been entirely mainstream is now somehow tantamount tantamount to extremism. The bigger threat, arguably, is coming from Islam in the sense that those traditions of free speech, free expression, I would also argue freedom for women, are increasingly under strain from a religion that clearly struggles with the separation of church and state, with criticism and free-flowing debate, with ensuring that women are given the same protections , rights and respect as men . And we have some very real world examples of this, John. We still have a schoolteacher in this country from a place called Batley, who is in hiding today. Five year in fact, actually, as you and I talk , this is the fifth anniversary. It was yesterday, the fifth anniversary of when a teacher was forced into hiding because they happened to offend local Muslim parents by showing different images of religions , and five years on, that teacher is still in hiding, is unable to work, terrified for their life. And where is the free speech in that case? Where is the free expression? We have a Labour government that depends heavily on Muslims for votes, which has just passed uh a definition of anti-Muslim hostility giving Muslims special protections that are not given to other groups in society . And the definition of anti-Muslim hostility in this case is engaging in what is called prejudicial stereotyping. So if you and I were to have a conversation about the grooming gangs, or we were to have a conversation about Islamist terrorism perhaps, or we were to have a conversation about female genital mutilation, or we were to have a conversation about the role of Sharia courts or cousin marriage, under this definition, which will now be imposed on our schools, universities, and local government, it is actually not a stretch at all to see how free speech and free expression will be shut down as people become reluctant to even have these debates in case they are tarred with that brush . Now, as I say in the book, if this is happening when six per cent of the popul ation is following Islam in Britain, which which is what it is today, then what will happen when twenty-five, twenty-six percent of Britain will be following Islam in the coming years? And that is why I am profoundly concerned about the direction of travel I understand there are something like eighty five Sharia law courts in Great Britain today . And many, many major cities have Muslim mayors. Now we want to avoid the trap of assuming that all Muslims are political Muslims or political Islamists. I understand that. But Sharia law courts seem to me to be deeply incompatible with the much respected concept of common law in Great Britain . How are these courts operating? Are they legally recognized? Are their judgments binding when they uphold Sharia law that conflicts with British common and civil law ? Well Well, essentially we're talking about the emergence of a parallel legal structure uh within a democratic Western state. That's the only way that you can view it. Now those decisions and rul ings uh would would not dominate, would not prioritize over uh UK law. Um but what it is doing is creating a segregated environment where people who are subjected to those rulings, for example, will most likely not view the British state as a legitimate credible arbiter of those decisions. There was a report very recently in France, you might have seen it maybe about a year ago, by the French government, which warned that large parts of municipal government and local arenas and local communities were basically being infiltrated by parallel Islamic structures, by parallel Muslim communiti es, uh many of which had been influenced by Muslim Brotherhood, and it specifically warned about the extent to which public spaces were now being captured under a very specific strategy of infiltration, right? Non-violent infiltration. It is that is without doubt happening also in the UK. Yet unlike France, we are not even uh brave enough to hold an investigation uh into it. So we're in this absurd situation of on the one hand insisting that everybody is integrating, while on the other hand, allowing things such as parallel Sharia courts, also cousin marriage, uh, John, uh, which has been shown to be uh empirically connected to the grooming gangs, that cousin marriage is also connected to election fraud, by the way, because we have Klan networks, predominantly Pakistani networks, though not always, that are engaging in democracy through bloc voting, which is organized along family lines, um, and we can perhaps come back and talk about that. But we're also not even able as a society, we're not even courageous enough as a society to prescribe organizations that have been prescribed across much of the Arab world, like Muslim Brotherhood. That neither the left nor the right, neither David Cameron nor Keir Starmer, and certainly not Tony Blair, were ever willing to entertain a ban on Muslim Brotherho We can't even bring ourselves to ban the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. And again, this is an example of two-tier multiculturalism because the political class is so upset of offending minority communities it's the only explanation for why it won't do it. It is the they are so upset uh so so obsessed with not offending minority communities that they would rather harbour people who are wholly focused on dismantling Western states and our nation state. And I the only exception to that, and I should hold my hands up and say I do have a political bias in this respect, just so the readers and viewers are aware, but the only politician who has come out and said he would actually ban the Muslim Brotherhood and crack down on Islamism, uh, and who's also said one of the first things he would do is pass a law so that churches can no longer be converted into mosques is Nigel Farage, a leader of Reform UK. No other frontline politician has been willing to say that. And the reason I bring that up is not just to display my own political bias, but to say that as Western nations, we have to start drawing some lines in the sand around those traditions of liberty and freedom and democracy that have guided our nations for much of the last you know hundred , two hundred years, if not longer. Otherwise, we are going to um lose them. Uh and we're going to lose them sooner uh than we think Matt, let me drill into these uh Sharia law courts a little more. Uh I'm reliably informed there are about eighty five in Britain. That's a lot. Uh what transparency is there around them? What cases do they hear? Do they hear many cas es? Are the proceedings uh transparent uh and and in any way covered in the media so that the public knows what is going on? No we know next to nothing about them. We also we we n we essentially know ne next to nothing about what is happening within highly segregated communities. Uh that that that is the reality. Um Because people don't want to look. There are a whole host of you know we don't know about the Sharia courts, how they're organized, how they operate, who's involved in them, what decisions are made, and what judgments are made. We don't know about um the links between established charities and Islamist networks. We don't know about the relationship between independent so-called pro-Gaza uh uh campaigners, uh politicians , uh, and some of those networks. Uh we don't monitor funding anywhere near as closely as we should do. Now there is a view among some policymakers who I think understand the urgency of the situation , who say that what we really need, aside from an enormous clampdown on um some of the things that allow this to really operate, we can get into that welfare benefits, social housing, and and so on. But more fundamentally, we need an enormous uh uh piece of work yearly, annually, um, that is actually showing how these networks are operating and how they are evolving uh from one year to the next. Because what you often find, John, is is certain charities or organiz ations that have documented links to let's just say people with very unsavory views who are not who do not have the West's um uh uh future uh in mind, um they are often also receiving taxpayer funded assistance from the state in in the form of government grants, in the form of subsidized social housing, in the form of extensive welfare benefits. So it's not just that we are demonstrating suicidal empathy through immigration policy, allowing people in while essentially dismantling who we are, it is also in some cases that we are actively directly supporting people whose sole mission is to destroy our way of life. The examples would include senior Hamas lieuten ants being given social homes in the heart of London, or leading Islamist preachers living on welfare benefits to the tune of forty to fifty thousand pounds a year. I mean this is these are and I talk about these examples in the book, these are all examples of a nation state that is now actively participating and encouraging its own demise, and nobody seems willing to call that out . You mentioned the um the Brotherhood, the uh which Which in essence seems very little understood. Uh, the Muslim Brotherhood came about really because of a couple of men who were deeply aggrieved with the ending of the Ottoman Empire, if you like, the collapse of the second caliphate. You had an early caliphate, a second major caliphate. This time round, the Muslim Brotherhood have managed to convince many donkeys in the Western press, for example, in Egypt, that they were on the side of democracy. In reality they were not. They were pursuing a a regime of the sort that even Iran might have been powerful of proud of. So there are many Arab leaders who understand how dangerous it is, and yet I suspect in the West it's simply not understood. Well I completely agree with you because n I d I think nobody really wants to explore uh and look at these issues. I mean I give you another example, John. You know, you're you're you're m much more well read than than most people. Um take for example, the use of mass uh mass prayer, uh mass ritual prayer in public places, which we just saw in Trafalgar Square in London, and people can go and Google the scenes. Uh at the end of uh Ramadan, you know, we had thousands of people, uh tens of thousands of people in cities like Birmingham and London essentially taking over the public space to exert their dominance, basically, is what it was. And several Arab states have specifically banned , knowing that it is part of the playbook for um Islamist um groups trying to intimidate and trying to exert their dominance. Now we had one politician, a conservative politician, Nick Timothy, who was courageous enough to say in Parliament the call to prayer, the uh uh the specific call to prayer that was used in in London in a very public place was was about exerting dominance, was about um uh projecting power. The response to that intervention by our Prime Minister Keir Star mer , and this is exactly what happened, was to call for Nick Timothy to be sacked. Was to call for a man who had stood up in Parliament and said, I don't think this should be happening in Britain. This call to prayer is not about tolerance. It's not about respecting other views. It is saying there is only one God and it's our way or or the highway. And Nick Timothy is a mainstream Conservative politician, okay, he was an advisor to Theresa May, the Prime Minister. This is not somebody way out on the fringes. And Keir Starmer's response was to have this person to try and have this person removed from public life . That is where we are now as a country. We are not even capable of debating seriously what is happening in our society. Exactly the same response, by the way, that followed the Grooming gangs when our Prime Minister Keir Starmer said that if you were talking about the Grooming Gangs or wanting a national inquiry into the Grooming Gangs, you were and a direct quote jumping on a far right bandwagon. So what concerns me almost just as much as the demographic trends that I talk about in the book, John, is our complete and growing inability to even have a serious conversation about what is happening to our society. All of those social norms and taboos, racism, far right, Islamophobia. I've watched this in real time since the 2000s. They've been expanded and we've had enormous concept creep, so that the national conversation is now so limited and controlled that you cannot really say anything that challenges that dominant, let's call it a liberal progressive worldview that's probably held by ten percent of the population. And if you do challenge it, you are immediately uh you immediately face calls to be removed from public life. And that concerns me just as much, John, because as I say, the symbols of uh the demographic changes that are about to arrive in the coming years, um, if we can't debate those now, we're not going to be able to debate them in the future Well let's look at look at who's jumping onto the radical political Islamist bandwagon. Progressives. You touched on it earlier. You were a candidate in the Gorton and Denton by election, you saw an unholy alliance at work there between the Greens, the left, the hard left, really, and and and political Islamists as I understand it, uh correct me if I'm wrong, but what on earth do they have in common other than a loathing of Western civilization ? It's a very interesting coalition. It's not a sustainable one as we all know. But to give you an example, I did run for office where I was faced with an alliance of woke progressives who were financi ally comfortable, in some cases students, but in alliance with a very large, very large Muslim communities. The un the point of unity for them was Gaza, had nothing to do with Britain, certainly had nothing to do with the local seat. That they both held similar views around Gaza. I think they basically both held the same uh worldview of repudiation, what Roger Scruton would have called the culture of repudiation , uh rejecting the West as a way of asserting their their sense of identity, uh rejecting everything about us. But I was absolutely shocked by what I saw on the campaign trail, John. The Greens were campaigning in Urdu, campaigning in Punjabi, campaigning um to try and whip up Muslims against Hind us, pointing out that our Prime Minister had sat down with uh India's Modi . There were direct attempts to whip up communalism by the very party that proclaimed it's the bastion of fairness and tolerance and empathy . And I even found myself in a somewhat strange position. If you really want to understand, you know, what Elon Musk and others have called the woke mind vir us, and I think viewers will find this very interesting. I had a debate with the Green candidate about Manchester, which is our third biggest our third city. Many people in Manchester feel it should be the second city. But everybody was telling me Manchester's strength is diversity, at which point I said, you know, it wasn't that long ago, 2017, that a young British man of Libyan descent called Salman Abeidi walked into an arena, an Ariana Grande pop concert, and blew up twenty-two people, including children and their parents. So I I think we need to talk about what's going on in areas like this, and we need to really be serious about what's happening. And during that debate, the response of the Green candidate was to say the reason things like that happen is because of divisive politicians such as yourself. It was a it was a and people would be able to watch that on YouTube. It was a great example of cognitive dissonance of projecting a worldview onto somebody so that the reality is never really confronted. And what I saw during that campaign was terrifying, but it was basically the corruption of our democracy. Because on the night of polling day, I we finished second, Reform UK finished second, we beat Labour in Manchester, which is a historic achievement. Nobody's done that for decades. The Greens finished first. But on the night of polling day, as the polls closed, two minutes after, an independent impartial um uh organiz ation called uh voluntary uh democracy volunteers they took the unprecedented step john of releasing a report a few minutes after the polls close. They'd never done this before. They'd had activists inside all of the polling stations, and the reason they released a report is because they saw so much coercive family voting, which is where a father or a husband walks in with the family and tells them how to vote, and they found out that they they by their estimate this was affecting sixty eight percent of all polling stations uh and was influencing about one in eight voters at this by-election. They were so concerned they they released a report on the night of the election. And this is what is happening to our democracy. You have mass tribal bloc voting in areas where you have very large Muslim communities. I was told halfway through that campaign a deal had been done between the Greens and uh elders from the Muslim community . John, this does not look like democracy to me. This does not look like liberalism or freedom to me. This does not look like Britain or England to me. This looks closer to something like Lebanon or Sierra Leone. This is not the whinings of a political candidate. People can go online and they can Google the Democracy Volunteers Report and they can see what we are witnessing is the mainstreaming of sectarianism in our politics where tribal religious religious allegiances dominate over loyalties to the nation state. This is very, very Today's powerful elites have driven it, allowed it to happen dr more than that, driven it. Is it just the suicidal empathy that you refer to, the desire to be empathetic to people who are need I think it's to be honest, I think it's a bit of I think it's a bit of both, with some general incompetence put on top. I think it is I think it is liberal politicians wanting to be seen as the good guys, wanting to be seen as morally righteous, wanting to engage in suicidal empathy, engaging in what Gad Saad has called the parasitic mind, basically destroying their countries from within by showing empathy to others. I think it is also partly fueled by a faction within that group who simply hate the West, hate Britain and hate everything about us, who see no issue at all with these policies that are being pursued. And then I think it's about the state, which is generally incompetent and is pursuing these policies, losing control of the borders, losing control of the asylum process, not even being able to even think about things like pro family policies, for example, which is then exacerbating these trends. So I have a final chapter where I talk about how to save Britain. I talk about the need to completely reform the state, to lop off the top tier of the state. I talk about the need to replace the old established politics. I talk about the need to leave the European Convention on Human Rights, end mass unc ontrolled immigration, end welfare for people who aren't British, end social housing subsidies for people who aren't British, ban the Muslim Brotherhood, crack down on Islamism, defend our Christian heritage and promote it . I I've put out a manifesto, if you like, of things that we need to be doing. Um many of which, by the way, are advocated. I don't this is not a political book. It's still you know, my former academic hat is on as I'm writing it, but many of the policies that I advocate in the final chapter are reform policies, a party that is number one in the polls. And I do actually think that at the next general election, if reform do win that general election and on the current polls they look set to to to do so, um that's the only chance we have of really pushing the country in a different direction. I understand why people might throw their hands up and say, it's too late, you can't turn all of this around. But I'm old enough to have lived through the Tony Blair Revolution in 1997 , where sometimes if you have a majority government that is so focused on how to use political power to achieve a much wider reconfiguration of the country, I think there's a lesson in that for conservatives who have always handled power, at least in recent years, terribly. Obviously , 1979 was an in was a was a different uh example of how conservatives use power. But I think the next election scheduled for 2028 or 2029, I think it might come sooner if we have a financial crash this year, linked to the war in Iran, I think that would give us the final opportunity, if you like, to really tilt this country in a different direction. And everything that Nigel Farage is saying and reform is saying is is essentially what we need to do very quickly if we're going to return to some kind of stable ordered nation You mentioned Tony Blair then. I remember uh Tony Blair being quite strong on the idea, I think sometimes a little naively, that Britain, together with America under Bush, could be great extenders of democracy and freedom to the rest of the world. Didn't he believe in democracy? Uh and yet you have reservations about uh his role uh in beginning uh this uh if you like, um uh misguided approach by the great and powerful well I uh Tony Blair had specific views about democracy. Um he was a fanatical pro-European. He wanted us to the heart of the European Union, which I've never believed is a democratic organization. It does it has no meaningful competition for executive office. He wanted us to join the Euro. He wanted us to surrender our financial independence. He pushed a pedal down on mass migration. You know, he set up an entire layer of kwangos and nongovernmental organiz ations. He basically fast-tracked the managerialism that we now see in politics, removing power from the people . I think in many ways, and I've argued this in previous books, I think in many ways Tony Blair was the archite ct of Brexit. That was partly a reaction to the Blair regime. And I think in many ways Tony Blair is the architect of the political changes and certainly the demographic changes that we're seeing today. I it's interesting, I re I reread his autobiography recently and I mention it in the book, about seven hundred pages, and he barely mentions immigration at all. Just doesn't see it as a really a big significant issue for him. He's not. I think Blair is a classic progressive. He's a classic progressive who simply has a blind spot when it comes to demography and culture. Doesn't really want to engage with it. And when they did try and redefine Britishness around the celebration of diversity and they tried to have us believe that being British or being English was simply about the celebration of fairness, tolerance, um, this very thin centered civic notion of who we are, it clearly, in the aftermath of 9-11 and 7-7 , it clearly was an insufficient view of citizenship and belonging. We need something deeper and stronger that taps into that emotional bond that I referenced earlier on. Uh, and we need to move past multiculturalism. Just perhaps as we draw to the end, John. One of the things that that I I'm always struck by is in twenty ten at the end of the Blairite regime, David Cameron, yeah, rightly had the courage to say multiculturalism has failed. Angela Merkel then said it, Nicola Sarkozy then said it. That was sixteen years ago. And I don't think anybody in the West has figured out what is the successor program to multiculturalism. What comes after multiculturalism? Are we going to actually move into a more robust model of assimilation? Which is to be honest, where I think we need to go, which is at a bare minimum, everybody has to speak the language, they have to make a net economic contribution, they have to respect the rules, uh rules of the uh the land, the rule of law, uh, they have to integrate uh into our culture, they have to meaningfully contribute to our society, genuine assimilation, uh and they need to put the interests of our country ahead of tribal allegiances. Or are we going to remain in this very um I think quite childish place where we're not allowed to entertain any criticism at all of the status quo and if anybody dares to suggest that mult multiculturalism as a policy isn't really working anymore, they're immediately shut down or or told that they should be sacked, as we saw with Nick Timothy in his exchange with Keir Starmer , w we have to move on from where we are urgently, because where we are is clearly not going to give us the answers that we need. And that again is one of the reasons I wrote the book, because somebody, to be frank, needs to be honest with the British people about first ly what is happening to their country, secondly, where their country is going to be in the immediate years ahead if we do not change course. And thirdly, my my sort of naive hope , you might say, in that by connecting with people we might be able to shift the Overton window and actually start having a much more mature and serious debate about what the options are to turning things around or at least pushing them in a different direction. Two last questions if I may, conscious of uh time . Firstly, what is the biggest obstacle to radical immigration rule You know, is it Britain's political leaders? Is it the European Court of Human Rights? Is it an activist civil service? Is it the mainstream media and the whole that progressives have Well I think it's all of that, but primarily it's the political class, because it's the political class that doesn't want to do the things that are required for us to regain control over our borders and have manageable immigration. We need to leave the European Convention on Human Rights, the ECHR, which Tony Blair embedded into UK law through the Human Rights Act. If we do that, we'll be able to deport illegal migrants , deport foreign criminals, uh, and we'll be able to basically disempower an activist class of lawyers who use the ECHR to stifle what the British people want. That's one thing we need to do. But also fundamentally, we need to reform the tribunal system in the UK, the immigration tribunal system, where again you have lawyers and judges that basically consistently go get go against the wishes of the British people. And we need to elect politicians who are much closer to where the average voter is on these issues. If we do those things, and it is entirely possible to do those, let's say you had an anti-establishment government that was elected, let's say a reform government, we could submit notice that we're leaving the ECHR on day one of entering government and leave more or less within six months. It's entirely possible to reshape the constitu tional settlement in our country like Tony Blair did. It's entirely possible to process asylum seekers offshore on our own territory, away from the British people, if we wanted to do that. We could have deterrence to stop their moral code. So finally, Matt, uh is it entirely possible that there might be a reform UK government after the next election? Well, obviously I I'm now in the trenches and I have a dog in the fight, so you know I, would urge everybody to to to be aware of my uh emerging political bias. Um I left the universities to become more outspoken in the public debate and with an eye to becoming uh a political campaigner and I left the universities just briefly, John, because I always believed that you cannot remain in higher education and be a political activist. I just think it's about integrity. And you can't have those two hats on at the same time. Now, many of my colleagues on the left um are uh not so focused on that question of integrity and will happily continue working within taxpayer funded institutions as political activists, but there we are. If you apply the swing that we achieved in that by election in Gorton and Venton to national politics and we'll have a reform majority government at the next election, reform is currently number one in the polls. There is a lot ob,viously, that could happen, the war in Iran being one of the big ones. But let me leave you with one prediction. I think Britain is on the cusp of an enormous debt crisis. The amount of debt that we have is through the roof. We're paying now about a hundred and forty billion pounds a year just servicing that national debt. A lot of that debt is inflation linked, and as the energy shocks come through as a result of the war in Iran, I genuinely think the markets are going to start calling time on the Labour government, which will then be plunged into a political crisis, which will then at some point have to face the same question that faced Ted Heath, which is who governs? And I think the answer will be nobody is governing and the calls for a general election will be overwhelming. Now in that environment I could see the British people saying, well we get we've given the Conservatives a go for fourteen years and that was a disaster. We've given the Labour government a go and that was a disaster, we might as well throw these guys in and they'll elect a reform government. Not because they necessarily love reform, not because they necessarily agree with Nigel Farage . But because we're now at a point in in in this country where people can see the fundamentals are so wrong, we have no consistent stable energy supply, the borders are wide open, growth is basically z ero, productivity is declining, GDP per capita is at its weakest, the cost of living is higher than it's been since the second world war. The tax burden is now higher than at any point since nineteen forty-five. I think people are just looking around saying, okay, I don't even agree necessarily with these guys, but they seem slightly different from these guys, so we'll put them in. And I think that's how you basically end up with a reform government in potentially the next twelve, eighteen months. Nigel Farage's view is that we could have a general election as early as twenty twenty seven. I think he's correct in that analysis. I can't see how we can carry on like this. And that is how you end up with potentially uh one of the most significant political moments in this country, not just since 1997 and the election of Tony Blair, who, as we've discussed, changed the fabric of our country . But also I think since 1979 and the rise of Margaret Thatcher, who again ushered in a very different political zeitgeist. And it might be that in the decades to come, historians look back at 2027 or 2028 as one of those years that ushered in a different zeitgeist politically and culturally, much like we now look at 2016, even though we didn't appreciate it at the time, twenty sixteen will come to be seen somewhat in a somewhat similar way with President Trump, and the realignment of American politics. I do think we are on the cusp of something enormous in Britain because the forgotten majority really are united in believing that we cannot go on like we are . Intelligent and well-informed and reasonable people like you will be able to carry the day. It'll require enormous courage. But thank you for your time, and I wish you and your fellow countrymen well. I'm a big fan of your show, so thank you for giving me