How EU Elites Are Silencing Dissent and Replacing Voters | Jacob Reynolds

But if you raise concerns you're also branded as one of the people pushing uh undermining the integrity of elections. etcetera etcetera. So there's a the the narrative that they built is as it were designed Impervious to criticism. Jacob Reynolds talks about the European censorship complex and how it threatens the most basic democratic freedoms. The intervention in the election in Romania, the effective outlaw.

Popular politician in France, Marine Le Pen from running in the next presidential election, the talk, constant, incessant talk in Germany about banning the AFD, that everywhere you go, there's a desire to just ban the party. Jacob says European politicians are openly discussing the replacement of their native populations. They're too old, too racist, too lazy, not uh au Fae enough with Palestine, not supportive enough with gender ideology, whatever.

And that these voters are the problem. And so the logical conclusion is then, well, we need to replace these voters with other voters, with other people, with a better population. And we talk about life under a hostile British state. State is not operational. Not operated for the benefits of ordinary people who are British or live and work or legally residing in Britain. It's operated for something.

Welcome to British Thought Leaders. I'm Lee Hall. Today I'm sitting down with Jacob Reynolds, Head of Policy at MCC Brussels. Jacob, welcome to the show. Thank you very much.

I wanted to start talking with you about freedom in Europe. America said the EU are operating this sophisticated censorship. I know at MCC you've been reporting on this for a while. Can you talk us through what's going on? Yeah, of course, and you're right to know that this has been a major topic area for us at MCC. set up MC C Brussels, we really wanted to get to know the kinda EU's censorship system.

uh in some way hidden behind a maze of loads of different similar sounding pieces of legislation. Digital Services Act, the Digital Market, the AI Act, there's all sorts of uh semi voluntary codes of conduct. There's it's basically an impenetrable wall and maze of legal And so we really wanted to understand it. And the I I guess the most important part of the story is to go back to where it began, which was very much uh thought control clamp down on social media really began

election to Donald Trump and with the Brexit vote in the UK. And that was a huge shock EU leaders, the EU elite, and they realized, and there were lots of stories at the time, as we'll all remember, of the role that social media and digital marketing played, and the role of Russian interference supposedly played in these momentous events. And so they very much took the lesson. the uh the digital space is what they now increasingly call the wild wild way.

regulation needs to be uh really tightened. And there have been organizations like ours that have been trying to expose this for quite some time, but it received obviously a huge shot in the arm with the work that's been done by Republican Party as a whole has put a lot of effort into getting their hands on the information that make this conclusive.

In Europe, every time people wanted to expose it, you were met with a wall of silence. Uh very if you wanted to file kind of transparency requests, they would always be denied. And it took, unfortunately for Europeans, it took the American Really, kind of uncover the decisive evidence, even though we all knew you could see it operating, you could hear the way that EU leaders spoke about.

online but these recent revelations have really kind of uh been decisive. So is the main way it's operating using the kind of tech companies to stop free speech online. Yeah, so there's a um kind of unholy alliance of various different parts of the system. So one part, as you say, is working with Forcing

tech companies to work in a way that's amenable to the to the EU Commission. So as I said alluded to earlier, they set up these various uh kind of working groups, forums, code of conduct, joint w task force and all these And they would put lots of pressure on the technique.

go slightly beyond the letter of the law and the letter of the regulation. They would steer them in in certain ways. And so they hoped to get the tech companies on side so that they could as it were outsource the the management and also the accountability. uh to the tech companies themselves. And we know from Elon Musk's revelations that lots of the tech companies were offered deals where they wouldn't receive extra regulation or they wouldn't receive fines if they went along

But that's just one part of it. Another really important part of it is obviously the legislation itself. Mae'n ymwneud ymwneud ymwneud ymwneud ymwneud ymwneud ymwneud ymwneud ymwneud ymwneud ymwneud ymwneud ymwneud ymwneud. they're kind of forced to by how broadly defined all of the terms like hey.

So the legislation itself is really important. But then you've got this layer of what um in many respects the kind of worst part of this whole system, which is the role that's assigned to serve especially through a sc a scheme called the Trusted Flagger scheme where the EU Of designate certain NGOs as having a privileged status so that they get to uh flag certain material online that has to be treated as a priority by the tech companies. So you're essentially handing over the operation.

directly to NGOs which are one, completely not accountable, even if they genuinely do represent civil society, they're not accountable. But in most cases, these NGOs are receiving funds from the EU or from U the US under USAID. So they're not even independent, they don't even represent civil society. So you've got this kind of closed loop of and other governments funding these NGOs to both lobby for more

and then be involved in the policing of the speech. And all of these things, the NGOs, the legislation itself, the tech companies, uh national regulators and met all of these things come together to form a pretty

The EU says what it's doing is protecting elections from interference. I mean is is that kind of happening as well? Um so th the interference narrative has been really one of the most important. driven the impetus for censorship especially by the EU and as I said in twenty sixteen there Russian interference, that concern has grown and grown and grown ever since then. And it really culminated in the a saga surrounding the Romanian presidential election.

took place or rather didn't take place because after the first round of that election where a kind of uh a NATO critical, EU critical leader, a guy called Kalin Chousescu, he came first, he went went to the runoff, he was gonna face left-wing candidate for the presidency of Romania, and the Romanian courts, the uh egg-don by the Romanian civil secret service and elements of the Romanian deep state, but then also importantly

As well, cancelled that election. And they cancelled that election because they claimed that they'd uncovered this mass interference operation of Russian bots, which nobody's presented. They've got this there's this enormous dossier that's compiled by the Romanian Secret Services and it just i it just is a few screenshots.

And in and one of the major ones that they relied on it turned out to have been funded by one of the opposition parties in Romania anyway who were looking to discredit the candidate by having so-called Russian bots. kind of go after him. So anyway, so th every time the uh the kind of tension over Russian interference is amped up and amped up and amped up, in absence of any uh significant widespread

threats. Now don't get me wrong, I'm sure that there are uh geopolitical actors out there who would like to try and do what they But nowhere is any genuine evidence. These things are not even decisive, but even kind of material, right? We have to rec most people go to the polling station, they decide based on their assessment.

And sure they might have seen a TikTok, they might have seen something on Twitter, they might have read the might have seen the government spokesperson on television, right? You could be influenced in a whole number of ways, but to say that there's this kind of overwhelming threat of Russian interference or any other Always or voices that the mainstream Not they're kind of watchdogs or regulators that are kind of watching this and should be raised.

One of the main challenges is that lots of the civil society groups and regulators right, they're either involved in or are on the payroll of the EU Commission. So the kind of traditional uh Transparency institutions like Transparency International or kind of vaguely rights-oriented NGOs, all of these have large

commission and they they they see their job very much as to clamp down on the kind of populist spirit, the supposedly racist, transphobic, etcetera, etcetera voters that that they were kind of worried about. So they Doing the opposite, enforcing calling for more regulation. So, I mean, as a slight counters list, we at MCC Brussels. Democracy Interference Observatory. We're going to be looking in detail at the

and these NGOs surrounding election time. But basically, to answer your question, no, there isn't really any kind of serious sustained pushback except from the United States.

Yes, so well we'll love to keep you informed on it. But yes it's a big programme of work. Our first objective will be to look at the upcoming Hungarian election which itself designated as essentially critical in every report or uh kind of speech by They see their number one job is to unseat Victor Orban so that they can push forward with European unification, European expansion, all the things that they want to do and currently Orban.

So they're gonna go all out on the Hungarian election to uh try

This seems quite a big issue. We hear very little about it in the media. I mean why do you think that is? Well yeah, it's been really astonishing that the I mean the the most recent revelation

from the Republicans in in the House in the United States, which have captured a lot of attention. If you're on social media, you know all about this. But if you just read the legacy, so-called legacy media, you wouldn't really know much Um shows on the one hand a lack of curiosity about what's going on, but also they've kind of quite f quickly folded any attempt of anybody to raise concerns about

They've folded that into another interference narrative. So if you're raising concerns about the operation you're now branded as anti European, you're on the side you're Trumpist, you're looking to undermine Europe, or maybe you're even a Russian agent. Trump, they claim, is also a Russian agent, so Russia's kinda somehow everywhere. And so to even raise questions, be a European is a lot

loads of them in our work and most ordinary people are kind of shocked when you explain the scale of this to them. But if you raise concerns, you're also branded as one of the people pushing misinformation. Of elections, undermining European security, etc. etc. So there's a the the narrative that they built is as it were designed.

impervious to criticism. Now it's coming apart slowly because it sh the and this is the important positive thing, is that uh one of the reasons they're having to intensify their efforts is precisely unravelling for them. So if you look at the rise of populist parties all across Europe, UK knows about the rise of reform, the collapse of the two main parties in the UK. That trend is very much repeated in different ways, but in general.

across Europe and the mainstream centre and left politicians in Europe are terrified have an answer to it other than to clamp down even more, which just provokes even more of a reaction because the kind of abuses of the system are gett

extreme so that out as I said, the intervention in the election in Romania, the effective outlaw The pen from running in the next presidential election, the talk, constant, incessant talk in Germany about banning the AFD, that everywhere you go, there's a desire to just ban the party.

So I wanted to just go back with you there to the uh pressure on the tech companies. In Europe says the codes of practice are voluntary. Do you think that is the case or do you think that the tech companies So I think on the one hand, I'm sure there have been plenty of executives at the tech companies from time to time who felt very flat. invited him for a meeting with the office of the

uh national governments. And maybe even some of the people at the top of these tech companies might have agreed with lots of these positions. They too maybe were worried about the f rise the kind of rise of populist voices. So I'm sure that lots of this was But at the same time, there were lots that weren't and ultimately.

So they're shareholders, more regulation, by and large, bad for business, although the big companies are more likely to be able to withstand the regulation than the smaller companies. But in general, one of the other things that's become clear.

And joining them wasn't voluntary. Um, because firstly it was always, uh, we're gonna offer you the opportunity to do self regulation, but if not And and then when they're part of these organisations as from America, they would get pretty direct information when particular moments here, such as around the COVID pandemic, where they were almost literally on the phone to the major politicians. day by day instructions on how to massage the narrative, for example, around

to provide reports and steer the conversation in a certain way. So lots of these things really weren't voluntary because they're always back And do you think X is kind of singled out or at least kind of the on the front? Yeah, I I think that's exactly the case as we've seen in the last few weeks that uh there's been an intensification of pressure against Elon Musk. Uh sometimes they talk about the rise of disinformation, sometimes they talk about

Of boosting of populist voices. Now they're concerned about the use of AI and the kind of the the deep fake. elsewhere. But it's clear that Musk is an ex is singled out because when he took over they made this concerted effort to be known as a place where you could have slightly more free of speech than elsewhere and that terrifies regulators. The best example of this I always think was when Elon Musk uh hosted a conversation with Alice Vider

some German elections. And it was incredible because the EU released a press release with like a picture of a room, I don't even know if it was AI generated or not, but it's a picture of a room and they said, we've got hundreds of people watching

Services Act. And if they were prepared to invest that much effort in just one conversation that Elon Musk was holding with one politician, you have to imagine what have they got in store for other It's clear that Elon Musk X is for them the embodiment of this Wild West, unregulated, dangerous space where ideas circulate without the official.

European Commission and that people are free to mock European leaders as much as they like. And I mean in Germany for example, like there have been plenty of cases of people being arrested, fined or sent to jail simply for insulting politics. So it's clear that this is a both a Europe wide phenomenon, but that m X is like singled out for being associated as the place where you can have slight

Is there also a strand to this censorship where young people are kind of being pushed out of the digital square? Well yeah, the most recent conversation uh as we're recording this has been a flurry of activity recently talking about Minors I don't usually mean minors, they usually fifteen, sixteen year olds, young people.

Um and on one level this is deeply ironic because for a long time in Brussels and other European capitals you would hear incessant talk about how we need to engage the next generation, how it's really important that we promote political literature. Lower the voting age on the more And now those very same people who they were planning to lower the voting age for are now locked out from public conversation or will be locked out from public conversation because they'll be banned

social media so it's it's kind of ironic on one level. On an another level, in lots of European countries, to some degree replicated in the UK, younger people are tending to vote increasing younger men but young people in general are d edging further and further right.

standards of living, the kind of craziness they see in their schools, all the rest of it. The lack of just I mean the lockdown had a big factor as well. But and so I there are definitely people in Brussels and elsewhere who are worried that this cohort have been hoodwinked, have been subject

clamp down on social media and they sometimes talk about mental health, they sometimes talk about bullying, they sometimes uh talk about sexually explicit content. They have a whole range of different things, but it's clear that what they're most that young people are out there without the kind of paternalistic view of the state.

you say this amounts to whether we like it or not I happen to quite like it other people dislike it social media is the is the contemporary public sphere it's where political debate happens where And to say to young people you're not allowed to be on these services is amounts to lock I hope that there'll be a campaign among young people. Internet but uh it's clear the direction of travel

Ban the social media for young people. It's been quite unusual to see America get involved in this way and calling for European freedom. be focused on. Do you think that w will have much impact? Um I think it's really quite important that um the America or the Trump administration more generally is kind of deciding

debate the mainstream media as much as they would like to can't ignore this when it's like a a broadside attack from the American president or vice president if kinda forced to cover it. The elites themselves are forced to react to this as they were forced to react a year ago So they're four. And America has the power to make revelations that were otherwise inaccessible.

in case uh politicians in Congress in the States were able to use legal powers to demand information from some of the tech companies, which revealed some of the things that we've all been talking about but haven't had direct access to it. at the same time, it's provoked what you might call a kind of anti American backlash.

The old foreign interference narrative was very much about Russia. How dare Russia be interfering in our elections? Putin's behind Brexit, Putin's behind Trump Russia. Whereas now they've got a new narrative which is that it's Trump It's Trump and J.D. Vance and Marco Rubio and Sarah. evil group of people that are desperate to undermine the the the beautiful, safe, uh kind of stable ecosystem that we built in Europe. And so there's a new anti American narrative em emerging in Europe.

It's clear that they think this is a bit of a winner, especially after Greenland. They think that they can cast themselves a little bit more legitimacy by posing as we're the ones to defend. I think most ordinary people see right through this, but for the elites especially it's a quite It seems as part of this there's even talk of European sovereignty and uh rearmament of Europe.

Yeah, so well the the the funny thing is is I mean what there's almost four years of the the war uh the Russia's invasion of Ukraine scale invasion and we've been hearing European rearmament for four years and just now the Four years later. Which to be fair is like not an easy question, but still you would have thought if

conjure something up by now. So the rearmament discussion is both indicative of the kind of failing model of the European Union, where the answer to everything is more More power at the centre, less regard to national objections. that f model has become kind of exposed as a as a bit of a bit of a failure, a little like the uh way in which the European Union's joint

process was exposed as being slower than countries like Britain or America were able to be kind of fast acting on their own interests. So so on the one level the real momental exposed At the other, it provides a little bit like the anti American narrative, it provides a bit of a narrative for European elites. Ukraine. So it's provided a bit of a narrative for them. We are here, we're defending European freedom, the European way of life, um, but with European sovereign.

provided some kind of rhetorical boost for them. But I think that's kind of unraveling us well a bit now. And at the bottom of both of these issues around the rearmament I've spoken Is the fact that there is no such thing as European sovereignty. There's certainly no such thing as EU sovereignty. There are lots of sovereign or

Semi-sovereign countries in Europe, they're the proper place where there could be sovereignty. You could talk about French sovereignty, British sovereignty, Hungarian sovereignty, whatever, you could talk about the sovereignty of these countries. You can't talk about you because there's no European people who could actually

Territory. But even more importantly than that is that the people in charge of European institutions and most European countries don't believe in the concept of sovereignty ever anyway. So when they say we're supporting Ukraine's sovereignty, Those words are completely hollow because they don't believe in sovereignty. They've spent ages undermining sovereign decisions, they spent ages trying to pull uh power in the centre at the in Brussels rather than let

States, they presided over a system where the borders of European countries are leaky to the extent of being almost non-existent. So they don't believe and never have believed in sovereignty. So they certainly can't be the ones who now are kind of great.

this issue of borders, I wanted to talk to you a bit about immigration. We had a little while ago this uh Great replacement theory and then it was labelled a far right conspiracy. But recently we're seeing politicians in France And they're openly talking about replacing natives with immigrants. Can you kind of fill us in on what's going on? Yeah, so I mean the the initial context, I guess, to this was this incredible uh decision by the very much embarrassed

socialist president uh of uh socialist prime minister of Spain, Pedro Sanchez to uh grant an amnesty to five hundred thousand, maybe more, it could well be more five hundred thousand That's a i incredible a stroke of a pen, uh a city the size of like Lyon or Lisbon, like that's a new population.

Spain and with Spain as in many respects quite permissive naturalization laws anyway, so some of these a great number of these people could very quickly become Spanish citizens, could get free travel across and free right to work and all the rest of it across Europe. European problem as well as a Spanish problem. Um and then in defending this policy. defending uh and then in a different context of France, but we start Explicitly that one of the reasons they want to support

bring in more migrants, form a a kind of diverse coalition of migrants rather than the old left wing working class vote. They want instead this group because they believe that the traditional vote old, too racist, they even say too lazy, despite the fact that lots of these migrants will not be working

populations are they're too old, too racist, too lazy, not uh au fay enough with Palestine, not supportive enough of gender ideology, whatever. And that these voters are the problem. And so the logical conclusion is then well we need to replace ...with other voters, with other people, with a better... population. And whilst these are still to some degree kind of marginal politicians, they're not like sitting at the top of the of the order of the world like puppets.

But it's clear that they reflect a long standing concern among lots of that uh immigration was a way of making the country, as we will say, like richer and more diverse.

The culture was in need of updating uh in need of replacing if if you like. And so these extreme left wing politicians are in some ways just the logical conclusion of policies that Brittany New labour where it was suddenly became you wanted we wanted lots of migrants, not just because we have jobs to fill or anything like that, but because, oh, isn't it so nice?

Food shops in your town, and that when you're no longer eating kind of fish and chips, you're eating all of these uh uh kind of spicy foods and Malaysian foods and all the rest of it. And so it's clear that on many levels, some silly elites of all stripes have thought there's something embarrassing about their own population That they needed to be updated, replaced if you like, by different group of people. some better values. And really that's what's at the heart of this great replacement.

theory or great replacement narrative, which is not as I think some people were presenting, it's not like some kind of organized conspiracy. But it is reflective of a desire to change the habits and often the population. the racists who voted for Brexit, who support Trump, who voting for Vox in Spain, the right That's what's going on in the left of now the far left especially in France we saw this with Jean Mélenchon in uh Spain with with this party Podemos. They're making a virtue of it.

Saying it. And so this represents a kind of what was the implicit narrative of elites. Elites has now become very so this um spanish decision to give five hundred thousand illegal immigrants, not just immigrants. How do you see that as a kind of security?

Yeah, well as I say it's got immediate European implications. Um not just because these people could inevitably or could likely become regularised in a Europe wide sense able to move around Europe but also just'cause the way that the European system is set up is that it's supposedly you have strong external borders and therefore you have uh even if lots of these people who've been naturalised in Spain don't have the official right to move around in certain European countries.

By definition, people have arrived here illegally are or in o are they've already make made a choice to break the law. So you've already got like a self selecting population people who are more likely than others to to break the law. But also in in the case of Spain

The point is is that they're asking for proof that someone has been resident in a country when they've been resident illegally. So that means that that they can't provide any real legal proof, because in theory you can't have had a job without the proper status. status in theory you can't open a bank.

etcetera etcet. So it's what that's meant is that they're looking, as one Spanish politician explained it to me, looking for literally anything. If you've got like some bus receipts in your pocket from a few months ago that showed you were here, then that can kind of be enough. right now uh uh it's being reported people are travelling from all across Europe to take part in this uh regularisation in Spain.

threat and s and just the numbers, there's no way that Spain can adequately vet, assess, consider, do background checks on fire probably no country in the world that could really serious uh all of these people where they really come from, are they fleeing criminal past in another country? Have they destroyed their documents? Have they obtained fake documents? There's is almost impossible.

As a result it poses a huge challenge for Spain now and it's uh there are people of course in Spain who are fighting back against it. The politicians from Vox who have already spoken about they're gonna do their best to um fight back against this, but it's really a remarkable, remarkable blase over.

I saw a Spanish person saying on social media, statistically you're more likely to be robbed by an immigrant than by a Spaniard. And a Spanish politician responded, we just naturalize everyone, they'll all be Spani it's I mean what what do you think drives this thinking and what do you think the end

Yeah, well they they at least these Spanish politicians, unlike some other politicians, but they're saying the quiet part out loud, they're kind of honest. Very honest. Yeah, they're honest about their insane So but yeah it's it's clear that there's a very large group who they have no attachment to the concept of citizenship, proper concepts of citizenship. For them, anybody is potentially a citizen. Like there's nobody who they'd kind of rule out de facto

Whatever. And that more than that, they think that Spa and in Spain's case, the politicians will say, Well, given that Spain participates in colonial It now has this obligation to use Spanish citizenship as a way of making amends. So anybody from around the world can come and essentially very quickly become a Spanish citizen.

Because that's Spain's way of making up for its colonial past. So the the one hand they don't have any attachment to Spanish citizenship, they're kind of embarrassed by it. And at the same time they want to use what's left of Spanish citizen. in order to provide kind of reparations for the supposed wrongs of of Spain's past. So th it's an incredibly dangerous mix of wild disattachment but also this m fundamentalist moral

Do you think the end goal is just kind of completely open borders, everyone's Spanish? Well yeah, though of course as soon as everyone becomes Spanish and no one becomes Spanish, so the Spain loses it Qualities, its distinctive way of life in this process. And that's precisely what lots of these politicians are noting. That's one of the things that's driving the backlash. So yeah, for lots of these politicians they would love a completely open

the o obviously the the only border that they talk about is the border between Israel and Palestine. That's not the only border that they care about. But for for them, yeah, it's the question is how many people can you fit into Spain? And the answer is basically

Do you see Britain as being in a in a similar situation? Well, the Britain I think is in a slightly different situation, although the continent Obviously for a a long period of time a similar softish consensus kind of prevailed with the in the sense that politicians wanted to enrich, diversify Britain through immigration, so they had a kind of similar ambition. And they liked this idea of Britain.

melting pot of the world. It was very cosmopolitan, people were coming and going all the time. And to some degree, especially in places like London. the circulation of capital and of rich people depending on that I mean kind of some people have their different opinions on London, but they've kind of broadly worked for a period of time in London. But um certainly what's happened in more recent

I think in part because of a complete lack of understanding about what sovereignty and borders mean, about why it's important. You've had this almost We've seen the incredible been allowed in in the UK. say for good reasons, some of them you can say were taking advantage of the system. In many cases it just looked like nobody who was in power knew what was going on. And to the degree that they did, they were kind of forced to concede it because the

But in a lot of cases it just it looked like uh policies were created and they had no idea. It's a bit like when Britain enjoyed. The official Home Office predictions about how many people are coming will be in the tens of thousands of people when some of the Eastern countries joined the EU. than that. And similarly after Brexit you had the loosening of various kinds of visa visa regimes or the decision not to enforce them properly. So for example students, care worker dependence, all these

Britain, the numbers just exploded. It was like nobody was in control. And that sense were wild out of control.

irritates lots of people in Britain. You see it both at the border with regards to the channel crossings where nobody seems to be able to control it. But also with regards to legal migration, nobody seems in control. It just seems that the It seems with some of these decisions, either the recent migration or even say the Chagos Islands thing, not really made with the interests of the people that live here as their priority.

I mean do you think we're living to some degree in a kind of hostile state? Yeah, well I uh thanks for using the question. I had a speech a a little while ago which I called the hostile state'cause I th something of it but I think your comparison with the Chogo silence is actually really really important because in the case of that and in the case of migration it seemed that British politicians a lot believed their primary responsibility was not to British

but to something else, whether that be human rights legislation, whether that be to the oppressed peoples of the world, w whether that be simply to the kind of chums and mates And other countries across the world. But the idea that their job was to put British interests first, put the interests of British people first, is completely alien.

And in the case of the Chagos Islands it seems that Keir Starmer and the Koter of people around him were driven by the idea that whatever international law says To do because for them, and this is a hard point to sometimes explain, but to them, there's no moral difference between the claim that someone in British. So to them, because of the framework this is how basically this is how human rights legislation works. Human rights are rights for all humans as such, no national

So for them, if somebody in Sub-Saharan Africa's got a problem or someone in Britain's got a problem, these things just have to be weighed up one for one against each other. And it will often be the case that someone in Sub-Saharan Africa will have a greater moral Britain and as a result the job of the British state should be to in our case facilitate their travel

to the UK and allow them to either claim asylum or become an migrant or whatever, right? But this just points to the thing underlying it, the state is not operating British or live and work or legally residing in Britain. It's operated that sense that's why I termed it a hostile state, because it sees its job as to often pursue goals that are directly opposed to the goals

See Chief, there's the very famous quote of the chief of the Cabinet Office uh in the New Labour era and a little bit after. He says I see my job as maximizing global wealth. And that sense is that's the heart of the way that the British state has been operating. Their job is not to care about British people, not to put British national interests first, but to have a free flow.

global issues, whether that be about migration, climate change, race It seems maybe in the eyes of many British people, putting Britain first is the the key thing that any leader should have, and the idea that British people are no more important than all the other people is surely not a very good

idea for a leader of Britain to have. Yeah, well it people at least up until now thought they elected their politicians to do that. history of the British parliamentary system was kind of very much grounded in that that idea that I mean, even the constituency system that we still have in the UK is the idea that the first responsibility of the a member of parliament

party or anything. So the the purpose of the system and of any democracy really is the the interest That was turned into uh the concept of the national interest, which can be really, really important, the idea that pretty

But then that was slowly diluted into the idea that the national that the national putting uh national interest first was kind of diluted in a way that therefore they could claim, Oh, I'm putting Britain's interest first, even if So we're gonna Britain's interest demand that we're going

And that might mean that we achieve that through lots of migration. And each individual person becomes a little bit poorer, but overall And so they could still kinda claim for a while even then that they were putting Britain's interest first, even as lots of individual people were losing

And now that whole thing has come crashing down. They can no longer even claim to uh kind of grow the economy, fix big national problems. And so they don't even have that to fall back on it. So it's become quite naked now the way And civil servants don't even pretend to put bread in first. But, as you say, this is becoming tolerable. the key development of the last decade or so.

began or was kind of found its expression in Brexit and has been bubbling away in different forms ever people have had enough of this and they won't put up with it and they will uh turn to politicians increasingly who will openly say, I will put First, I will make difficult choices if Britain's interest is not if the say environmentalism runs or the ideology of net zero runs directly. uh national well being and and economic growth or brish interest.

stopping immigration uh in the kind of form that we've seen it then that will be addressed too and so people have as I say the history of the last ten years in Britain is that people have fed up and they won't take anymore and we're waiting for the moment where that finds its decisive

Election, it might not be, but the the anger, the discontent, the sense that people want the system to fundamentally change, to be fundamentally rewritten, the social contract to be completely changed. That's I think the positive.

It feels like quite an angry and kind of gloomy time. I mean do you do you feel positive? Do you think we will reach this point where things can get better? Yeah, I I think as I say, but precisely because of how widespread now is and I think anybody in Britain would have noticed the mood of conversations changing over the past years. Certain things that um you had to have previously had a very thick skin to raise, such as questions about migration, questions about environmental

which you used to better you might raise them but people that know he's the he's the crazy guy's always going on about migration. Um uh which would or or I Um and but now you just hear there's something in the air. People will voice these concerns spontaneously. People would have probably had

over Christmas dinner or something, the peop the very people who would have never raised certain issues before are now starting to raise them. And I think that's uh really important. We said growth both official alternatives such as reform, but also in grassroots movements of all kinds. UK, from Free Speech Union to the Together Movement, there's all kinds of different organizations cropping up and gaining lots of traction that point to the fact that there's a hunger.

Battle of Ideas Festival, which takes place I mean we're recording this in Westminster, it takes place round the corner and will take place again uh this year. And the energy at those events is remarkably different and that there's now a sense that people are like, We're here, it's our time, it's our job, we've got to change this country'cause we might not get another opportunity.

Sense of that something is now possible that wasn't possible before is really inspiring. Jacob Ranos, thank you for joining us. Thank you very much. Thanks very much.