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In a sense, what you have is a foundational division between the way that ordinary people think and the way that they represent to the world. Because when you talk to most people, they would be hostile to the kind of ideals to do with your biology to history that are being codified in law by successive governments. But fundamental divisions that exist remain often unarticulated. That's the challenge that we all have of making sure that it comes to the surface.
And people are able to sort of understand that they're not alone in thinking the way that they do. Hello, welcome back to the Brendan O'Neill show with me, Brendan O'Neill and my special guest this week. Frank for AD. Frank, welcome to the show. Pleasure to talk to you again. So Frank, let's talk about politics and especially about the upcoming general election in Britain coming on the 4th of July. It's a bit of a surprise election.
We knew there was going to be one this year, but people are quite surprised that it's going to be so early. And I just wanted to get your thoughts to begin with on whether there's anything interesting about this election, anything that strikes you as possibly even exciting. The fact that they're finally coming out to the people and asking our opinion on who should run the country.
Is there anything about this election that is making you feel quite in-live and or are you finding it a little bit dull? Well, I'm finding it very interesting, but not exciting. What I mean by that is that there is nothing to be excited about in a sense of interesting policies. There is no real difference between political parties that allows me to get excited and get my teeth into certain candidates or support certain kinds of people.
But it is very interesting because the election seems to have the character of, oh, we're going to go through the motion of having a general election because we have to. And there's a kind of resigned sort of ritual here where this is what elections used to look like 20, 30, 40 years ago. And we're going to do our best to imitate what those elections looked like. We're going to have candidates, we're going to have people doing interviews on radio and on TV.
We might even have an out debate, but that seems to be very little content, very little kind of enthusiasm that's driving any of the candidates forward. So in that sense, it almost seems like an indication of an important term within our political system whereby the deep politicized dimensions of public life have acquired an unprecedented degree of support. And that's a kind of significance. I've been thinking along similar lines where it feels almost like an imitation of democracy.
You know, it's democratic in the sense that two parties are putting themselves forward. Well, a bunch of parties are putting themselves forward for our votes and for us to make a decision. But it does feel a bit like going through the motions of it rather than a substantive choice that would really bring mean into our democratic vote and to our right to choose who leads the country.
In relation to the Conservative Party themselves, just to focus on whether it's good or bad we're having an election. It seems a long time ago that we voted Boris Johnson's party into power in December 2019. Since then we've had two other Prime Ministers, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunag, neither of whom was expressly chosen by the general public. Don't you feel that it's time that the Conservatives came back out to us at least to say, look, do you still want us in charge?
Do you like Rishi Sunag? Do you approve of what we've been doing? It does feel like they need some kind of connection with the public in order to justify any more measures that they might decide to take. Well, in principle, yes, I mean, they would have to make that kind of connection. But it's very difficult to envisage how this group of politicians who are not really suited for interaction with everyday life and ordinary people.
Probably the most sorted feature of the election is just the way in which members of parliament have decided that they're going to bail out of politics. They basically said, well, I was an MP for one or two terms. I can put that on my CV and I can move on to my next assignment. And it's like, parliament being a member of parliament now becomes like an internship towards something very, very different.
And that kind of lack of duty, lack of loyalty, lack of identification with any particular cause is really, really coming to the fore in this election. And that's why you have what are essentially these two called them placement. But I'm not even sure whether that doesn't give the word placement a bad meaning because there is that kind of super political stupor that's mixed with opportunism. And unfortunately, an intense level of duty or version.
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, they are dropping like flies at the moment. In relation to the Conservative Party itself, many of their MPs are not going to stand this time. They are kind of fleeing a sinking ship, one might say. But it does sometimes seem to me that the tensions and divisions within the Conservative Party are in some ways even more profound than the tensions and divisions between the Tories and Labour.
They often go unspoken and I'm sure they will try to put on a united front to the best of their abilities in the run up to the election. And of course, the Conservatives have always promoted themselves as a diverse church, you know, mix of different groups, different peoples. And that's been true for some time. But the tensions this time do seem pretty significant over huge questions, constitutional questions to do with Brexit.
Even questions to do with biological truth, the reality of sex, wokeness history, all those issues, there seem to be pretty severe divisions within the Tories party itself. I wonder if you think that there's a possibility that the Conservatives will unravel further, either in the run up to the election or certainly after it when they're trying to get their house back in order.
Very difficult to know because a lot of people that are in a sense disillusioned by the direction of the party, by the party leadership, nevertheless want to stay within the party and have chosen not to raise the stakes. It would ask a couple of years. So even people who are quite good on questions like Brexit, follow up to the Brexit deal or who are much more patriotic, much more committed to the promises that the Conservatives have made over the years.
They've kind of moaned and groaned and gave those speeches here and there. Threatened the party leadership with starting a new leadership campaign, have nevertheless stayed within the party. And I think that there's a reason for that, which is unlike anywhere else in Europe or most places in Europe, it's very difficult for these people to follow through their sentiments and follow through the consequences of their beliefs, believing the party and starting maybe...
A new old school conservative kind of party. That's very difficult to do that in a parliamentary system that we have here in Britain with the first pass the post kind of system. So I think that has really tamed them and has meant that only a very few mouth contents were able to bail out or are going to bail out. Probably some will bail out over the next few months.
It's a bit of a contradictory era we're living in. On the surface of things, it looks like there isn't that much difference between the parties and the choice between starmaids. Starma and Sunak is an uninspiring one. It often feels like you're choosing between bank managers more than between political leaders. But at the same time under the surface, there are these pretty profound tensions about the future of the country itself, the past of the country.
What we teach our children, how we conceive of ourselves as a nation, what values we adhere to as a nation. There are all these tensions bubbling under the surface of contemporary debate, of conflict in society more broadly. You've just said there that some of the Tories who might be on the right side of those questions haven't had the gumption to set up their own party or their own institutions.
And that's very true. But beyond that, why do you think those big, important and sometimes actually quite exciting questions aren't finding expression in the political mainstream, even in a general election? When you would think those things would come to the fore and people would have it out in public?
That's a very, very good question. It's a question I kind of struggle with because as you imply, there are lots of people around who feel pretty much the same way as you and I do, or alternatively have a background within conservatism for decades and decades and decades who can really see that the party has totally left them behind.
And yet, nothing seems to happen, what gives a few small parties coming to the fore, who appear very isolated and who at the moment are not in a position to make any significant gains for a variety of reasons. So what we left with is a situation where there are thousands, hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of people looking for a voice.
And there's no way in which they're finding a medium to which that voice can be expressed. So all that I can think of is that it's got to do with our electoral system because all that I know is that anywhere else in Europe, if we were in this kind of situation, that would have been a new party by now.
A party who would have been able to at the very least begin by getting 15, 16% of the vote and then gradually move on and if they gain momentum could become a much more significant force. But that is not really possible here at the moment. And I think that's what's a lot of people off from taking their risk.
It is so striking when you look at Europe and you do see the in some countries, the bubbling up of these new parties. And as you say, they sometimes start out getting 10 or 15% but they can very often grow from there. Whereas in the UK, because it's first passed the post because we don't have any form of real proportional representation, it can be very difficult for newer parties to break through.
So would you go so far as to say that electoral reform is a precondition for flourishing of politics or for the arrival, the emergence of newer parties and newer voices. Do you think electoral reform needs to be a focus of those who would like these bigger questions to be at the forefront of political life?
Yeah, if you look at last, I don't know, 50, 60 years, the only party that seemed to have broken through in parliamentary terms, not in European elections, I think was the green party. And I think they go one candidate anywhere else in Europe, the green party would have been more significant as a parliamentary group.
Just because there is a constituency for that, but in Britain, that couldn't really go very far and still hasn't gone very far. And under these circumstances, when even a party that's kind of a natural constituency can't really make it, it's even more difficult for a party that is coming out of the world who hasn't got that natural constituency, but got to galvanize people to be aware of the fact that there's a need for a new British party that's more patriotic, more identifying with the nation.
More able to stand up for the historical traditions of society, prepare to fight the kind of culture wars on all the issues to do with biology to history. That would be a really big challenge. And I think what has happened in Britain is that whenever there's the beginnings of a group of people getting together, they tend to become caricatures of themselves.
It's almost like they feel, well, we'll go over the top and sound like the characters that our opponents make us sound like a racist and homophobes and all the things that you get caricatured with. And therefore, they almost revel in their isolation rather than find ways of using or breaking out of that.
Absolutely. I've noticed a lot of not just parties, but a lot of political persuasions that do sometimes revel in their isolation rather than trying to make genuine connections with people who share their beliefs.
Sticking with a Conservative Party for a bit longer before we talk about Labour and Labour's prospects, what strikes me about the Conservative Party today, and this kind of echoes what you've just been saying, is that if you think back to the divisions that were in the Conservative Party in the 1980s, between the Wets and the Dries, so you had Fatcher with her pretty severe monetary policies and cuts to public spending and war with the trade unions and so on.
And then you had the Wets who were quite critical of some of what she was doing. And these were really important divisions. They were largely over questions of how to organise the economy, how to relate to sections of the public, but they were pretty big divisions. But it seems to me that the divisions in politics today, if anything, are even bigger than that, including within the Conservative Party, although they don't find expression in public life for the reasons you've just outlined.
But it seems to me that the divisions in public life today are almost civilizational. They touch on the meaning of British civilisation and Western civilisation itself. Who are we? What do we stand for? Do we look to history for inspiration? Do we have faith in the future? These huge sweeping questions which make the Wets versus the Dries and those economic clashes of the 1980s and earlier seem almost like small fry in comparison.
The divisions in public life, even though they're often hidden or unspoken or not had out, they do touch upon really, really huge questions, don't they? What do you do? And that's why we're living such interesting times because in a sense what you have is first of all a foundational division between the way that ordinary people think and the way that they represent the tips see the world. I think that's really quite important.
Because when you talk to most people on many of these issues, they would be hostile to the kind of ideals that are being codified in law by successive governments. And then within that, within the Conservative Party, there's a group of individuals who actually see that what's at stake is the very foundational, for lack of a better expression Western civilisation. And you understand that the values and beliefs they identify with are being undermined and corroded every single day.
And who feel that something needs to be done, and I can name some names, when you look up from the Red Wall MPs, acquire like many of them in the way that they react to things. But there is a lack of consistency and there's no real strategic vision that kind of binds that group together so that they could be more than the sum of their parts.
There is the irony wall that the kind of fundamental divisions that exist remain often unartilculated. That's the challenge that we all have of making sure that it comes to the surface. And people are able to sort of understand that they're not alone in thinking the way that they do. If you're a regular listener to this show or a regular reader of spiked, why not become a spiked supporter?
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Yeah, I often find myself thinking what happened to factionalism in politics because in the past you used to have genuine factions in parties. In the Conservative Party, there were two clashing factions in the 1980s. There were obviously different factions in the Labour Party for a long period of time between the left and the right or however people wanted to refer to them.
There were actual factions within parties and sometimes it could grind politics to a halt because they spent so much time fighting amongst themselves. But at other times factionalism could be quite a clarifying process. It was a way through which a party decided on its political priorities, its ideological direction, which ideas should hold sway over the party and therefore be presented to the public.
It was a battle of ideas very often. And what I find in politics now, both in the Conservative Party and the Labour Party, is that there are lots and lots of divisions and tensions and arguments but not really any serious factions.
It's like every man is a faction to himself. And if you think about when Boris was ousted by the Conservative Party a couple of years ago, more like a group of individuals all just signing pretty boring letters saying we've lost trust in the Prime Minister rather than a faction making moves for power or trying to push its own agenda to the forefront,
would you say that it's not even possible to have genuine factionalism and factions in an era in which ideas seem to be disappearing from mainstream political life more broadly? The other side of ideas disappearing in the way you describe it is the individuation of party politics. So as you suggest, you know, it's no longer the case that there are different coalitions striving for power watching each other's back.
You get the impression that we have a group of individuals who perceive their role as parliamentarians in very, very individual terms. And as a result of that, their behavior is very arbitrary, very often get the impression if they feel really good and they behave very differently than if they feel a study had failed.
That's why you have this very kind of disturbing process of leaving politics of basically suddenly out of the blue attacking the Prime Minister because they woke up that morning and feel that they must get some headlines by attacking a particular Prime Minister. At the moment, the way in which different Tory MPs are reacting to Sunak's proposal for national service, in the case there isn't any sense of either keeping things to yourself.
Rather instead, in the individual's just going at them briefing newspapers about their own individual views. And when you have that kind of breakdown of party politics to the point at which it's not even sustaining coalitions that have a common vision of something, then you realize just how optimized public life has become.
Absolutely, that's a very good example of it. And I did actually want to ask you for your thoughts on the national service proposal because in principle, I'm not opposed to some form of national service for young people, but it doesn't necessarily mean they go off and fight in some war, but it might mean that they do some uniformed community service. They might work with nurses or firefighters or assist in some other way.
And I'm not opposed to that, but I wonder if it's a bit of a sticking cluster for the fact that the nation does seem to be in decline or the idea of the nation, the idea of a coherent nation with unifying values that's been withering for some time. So is the idea of national service an attempt to rehabilitate the nation in a way that might not be particularly convincing and might not work?
Possibly, I think it's interesting because I'm a big believer in national service, very simple reason that it brings different classes of people together. It creates the kind of solidarity amongst a generation that is manifest still lacking in our society. And there's an argument for the fact that a lot of things need to be done from defense to community service that are not taking place at the moment.
So it's a really good idea, but it depends on the context and it depends on who's doing it and for what reason. And I think my fear is that the kind of proposal that has been put forward by the prime minister resembles the Rwanda proposal. You know, if by some miracle the conservatives got reelected, there may be 10 years from now, you would have the first organized group of people involved in national service because they just cannot organize anything or deliver anything like that.
There's already a fundamental flaw in the proposal, which is that it's not obligatory. So basically, if it becomes an entirely voluntary project, then it loses the fact that there's an element of duty in law. And you can't simply bail out of duty, something that you have to assume. And that says the very ethos that you need to make a national service or a national unified volunteering organization work is missing from it.
Okay, I want to ask you about labor and the prospects of prime minister Kierstahmer. It's difficult to work out at the moment. I did want to get your views on this, just how well they are likely to do because one minute you'll read a poll, which says that they're going to get the biggest majority ever and it's going to make even Blair look like a small time politician in 1997.
And then the next week you might read something asking, well, how big is labor's lead really, you know, are they going to get a majority? Well, they need to form a coalition. It can be difficult to work out, but it seems to me that there isn't very much enthusiasm for labor. There isn't a groundswell of excited voters who are just biting at the bit to get Kierstahmer into Downing Street.
So even if they win, it doesn't feel like it's going to be a huge outpouring of determination for these people to be running the country. So it does feel different to Blairism. Whatever one might feel about Blairism in the mid 90s through to 1997 when they got into Downing Street. It does feel different to that, doesn't it? It's something else going on right now. Yeah, because there was a bit of a magic when Blair ran for the job and you felt there was a kind of dynamism there.
That was driving that kind of labor party, a very different labor party to the one we have now. Whereas what you've got now is basically a process of decomposition on the part of the conservatives, which allows labor to make significant headway. And I think that's a very different process than we've seen in the past. You often have elections when people vote against a government rather than for an opposition.
So that's nothing new in there, but this time around there is a kind of resigned going to the motion kind of process where a lot of people that I talk to who tell me how they feel and how their friends feel are more fed up with the conservatives disillusioned with the conservatives disillusioned with the way they messed up Brexit, they disillusioned with the fact that they cannot simply keep their promises on migration. All these things are kind of cumulative process.
Those people aren't interested in the labor party or feel that the labor party is going to change the world, but nevertheless feel that the authorities need a real kicking because they've let the country down. And people who would never vote for labor are now seriously thinking of voting for labor for the very simple reason that they're the lesser evil in their eyes.
Absolutely. One thing that I find quite creepy actually is that there is a lot of nostalgia now for 1997, which is understandable in a sense if politics feels a bit drab and uninspiring. People will look back to moments that felt a bit more exciting and interesting and impactful. You know, when Rishi Sunak was making his speech calling the election and in the background those weird Ramonas were playing the D-ream song, things can only get better, which was obviously Blair's song from the 1990s.
And it is this attempt, I think, to rehabilitate that moment in 1997 when there was an interesting coalition of voters that backed labor, at least with a sense of purpose that they wanted to eject the Tory party and they wanted this relatively fresh party or at least a party that was led by relatively fresh people to take the reins of power.
There was an element of a movement back in 1997, whether one would have agreed with it or not, and there is an attempt to present Starmarism as occupying the same ground, which I find very, very unconvincing. So do you think there's going to be a moment when the Starmarites and the people who are enthusiastically supporting him in the media class, whether it does seem to be an element of enthusiasm in certain sections? They're going to be disappointed because there isn't a rerun of 1997, is it?
Well, they're not going to get disappointed until after you get selected. I think that one of the things that's happening under the surface and a kind of a behind the scene kind of a way almost spontaneously is a situation where you have the convergence of what you call the media class with the public sector managerial class, who are very heavily invested in the Labour Party, for whom this is a very important role. This is a very positive step forward.
If you're a member of the civil service, and most members of the civil service have become really anti-conservative government, if you are working in a public sector, you know, the media kind of been brought up in that kind of visceral, anti-conservative kind of a way, then for you, what's happening is really good because what you're interested in is getting rid of the Tories by any means possible.
And you don't particularly care what the complexion of this new government looks like, as long as it's a Labour government who are going to affirm and validate your way of life, they're like your mates without necessarily knowing them, they're kind of spiritual mates, because these are the people that think the same kind of a way.
And finally, they don't have to worry about the fact that they got individuals in government who have not fundamentally but an important difference in their outlook upon the world, the different moral universe, then your public sector managers. Yeah. The other thing that I wonder about the current Labour Party, as led by Stammer and his rather wooden shadow cabinet, I do sometimes find myself wondering if they are so technocratic and so safe.
They're playing it incredibly safe at the moment for obvious reasons, whether they will be the woke nightmare, some people think they will be because in order to push the broader woke agenda, whether it's in relation to race, sex, gender, history, the values of the nation and so on, you do need to have a bit of ideological zeal or a little bit of ideological drive.
And we've seen that manifested in various different ways over the past couple of decades. I wonder if Labour is going to be more technocratic than woke, more managerial than ideological, but at the same time, of course, the very fact that they're in power. And as you say, they're backed very much by the media class and the public sector world, whether that in itself will give a green light to the more zealous woke activists in society.
So how do you see that playing out, whether Britain is going to move towards being a pretty bland, post-third-way technocracy, or whether there is still the capacity for the woke wars to continue in different ways? The way that I look at it is that it's not the governments who promote the woke agenda. They're the ones that either become reconciled to it or occasionally validated. So in a sense, this Labour government is likely to avoid controversy as much as possible.
That seems to be their main home or their very risk-overs in their attitude. Occasionally, they will make some symbolic gestures here. But the point is that they will allow the dynamic that's already in place between the civil service within the different cultural and public institutions to have greater momentum. So I see that regardless of what the government does, it's these institutions who will expand the empire of walkeness even more than is the case at the moment. I don't see any halting.
A lot of people write all these articles about the end of the woke or people had enough of this. So there's a backlash here and the point is Scotland or elsewhere. I think that's an illusion because underneath it all, despite the government making pronouncements about what should be said and not said in schools or what should be said and not said in universities or in the civil service, things are pretty much the same but are getting even worse with the passing of time.
So I think that we have to be prepared for the fact that this culturally disillute movement that's a foot in British society is going to gain more and more influence in the years ahead. Unless we are in a position, you and I and people like us on the ground to fight it and to counter it in serious effects.
I just wanted to remind you that you can still buy my book. It's called a heretics manifesto essays on the unsaible and I've really been blown away by the response to it from readers, reviewers, spike supporters. People really like this book and I think you're going to like it too.
It covers all the insanities of our time from climate change hysteria through to COVID authoritarianism through to the trans ideology and it basically makes the case for more freedom of speech, more debate and more heretical thinking to challenge the conformism of our times. So what are you waiting for go to Amazon right now and order my book a heretics manifesto essays on the unsaible and now on with a show.
Yeah, and I think one issue that provides a good example of what you're describing is the gender question. So the Labour Party were not exactly at the front of the barricades demanding all these new gender ideologies to be enforced, but they did roll over and allow it to become a common belief among their sections of society that it's possible to change sex that some women have a penis.
I mean, we've all seen Keir Starmer struggle on radio and TV to even define what a woman is so they acquiesce to it and as a consequence in flame it. So there are good examples of how that you know the role of the kind of boring technocrat is to allow the woke section of society to have free reign on these questions. You mentioned there the more culturally disillusioned movement that is pushing these agendas and it's taking place away from parliamentary politics away from the mainstream parties.
Does that not make you feel frustrated about the general election itself because it does sometimes feel and I'm sure many people feel like this. That whoever we install in power all the crap in society will continue you know the kids will still be taught stupid things in schools. The turn against British history will still take place at some level. The gender madness will continue for a period of time even though there is some very positive push back against it particularly in Britain.
On what playing field do you fight the culturally disillusioned movement if it's not really possible to do it through the ballot box? You got to fight it culturally in the first instance because culture is not reducible to politics. Obviously if you have political influence you could be in a better position to fight back but even if you and I got elected you know you were the prime minister and I was the minister of education.
I don't think it would be in a position to do very much except alert the public to the dangers that society faces within all the institutions that have more or less emerged in the last 25-30 years that in effect run society. But it's not just simply public institutions look at the private sector the way they operate look at the legal profession. I mean every single area that's got influence and power have been captured by this kind of influence and doesn't take the majority of people.
People always tell me most university students are not really pro-Hamas or pro-Palestine but that doesn't matter because if the minority committed individuals have decided that they are going to set up a party. They go into set up a camp in Oxford that will shut down everybody else and they can enforce their views for a very simple reason that everybody else feels either scared or powerless to know exactly how to react to something like that.
And the same thing happens within all the different institutions of society every single day you don't need to have a war in Israel for similar sentiments to come to the surface. So under those circumstances the really important battle is a cultural one what Spiked is doing is really important. We need more institutions like Spiked who are influencing particularly younger generations.
And you have to remember that that's doable because although at the moment young people support the wrong ideals on the European continent a growing number of young people are voting for parties that are quite clearly unambiguously against the woke agenda. And they're voting for them precisely for that kind of reason. So there is a lot of hope but we just got to be clever and smarter and more demanding on ourselves in the way we conduct the struggle against their kind of cultural ideals.
Yeah I did notice that the polls that find that young voters in Europe are more likely to vote for quite openly anti woke parties that's very interesting and quite different to the UK for the most part anyway. I did want to ask you specifically about the Israel Hamas war and the likely impact on it. Of the election coming in the UK now I don't think Britain wheels huge influence in the Middle East but it is an ally of Israel ostensibly at least.
And it does look like the next government if it's the Labour government is going to be one that started off relatively good on this question and was defending Israel's right to exist to defend itself. Against the fascists of Hamas in the aftermath of their pogrom on the 7th of October.
But seems to be now influenced by different ways of thinking and it seems to have really wobbled on this question and one of the reasons it's wobbling is because there is this presumption that large sections of the Muslim community in Britain will not vote Labour because they're worried about it being too friendly to Israel to pro Israel.
So there is now a backtracking taking place. I wonder what you think the impact of the election and the new government itself will have on that conflict and how people understand it. That's the one area where there's a very big difference because I think the Labour Party is much more likely to encourage the Islamisation of British society.
And it's much more likely as a result of that to basically change sides even or at least implicitly change sides and be much more pro Hamas than any of the other political parties at the moment except for the Green Party.
So I think that is a problem that I am worried about that may well take place sooner than we expect and that's a different discussion because we have to at some point have a serious discussion in the way that culturally speaking British culture is mutating into something very different than it used to be.
And where in a sense what's happening in Britain that kind of tensions and conflicts within a party like the Labour Party mirror the conflict within the Middle East and that is a very disturbing development. That was going to take place regardless of who wins the election that dynamic is already having a very deleterious effect on British society.
Okay, Frank, I want to ask you about the fortunes of populism. So one of the things I've been very keen on in recent years I know you have as well has been the populist pushback against the old regime against politics as we knew it against technocracy. You know, there has been a sense of ordinary people being very fed up and wanting to take a punt on a different kind of politics and we've seen it in America. Of course we saw it with the vote for Brexit in 2016.
We've seen it across Europe in various different ways just looking at the British context Europe is slightly different and there are still very interesting things happening in Europe. And America is different too in some ways and the Trump movement there seems still relatively well organized and very keen on returning to power. But in Britain it does seem that populism is slightly on the back foot at the moment.
Talk to ordinary people around the country and you will often hear a real strong disgruntlement with what's going on in politics. So the reasons you said earlier it doesn't have very much public or political manifestation. It's difficult for the populist idea to really push through and break through and explode into public life. How much longer do you think that situation can continue before the populist urge disappears or withers away or just feels well what's the point?
Is there still hope for populism in British politics do you think? There's always hope. The trouble at the moment is that there is no medium through which those aspirations can find an expression. One of the things I find quite striking is that when you talk to people you find that that sentiment is still there but it's a disillusioned sentiment because people feel that they've been let down, they feel frustrated.
Nothing seems to happen and they are being even more ignored today than yesterday. But nevertheless that is there. That's the good thing that people are still sufficiently intelligent and smart to see the way the world works.
And are sufficiently smart to understand that at some point something will have to give but it feels completely at a loss to know how the next few steps can be taken and as long as that dynamic is in place there is definitely a possibility of a way forward for populism, even in British society. Thank you very much. Pleasure, nice talking to you. Bye bye. Thank you very much.