Hello and welcome to the Spike Podcast. I'm Fraser Myers, thrilled as ever to be joined by Spike's editor, Tom Slater. Hello. And one of our favourite returning guests, legendary comedy writer, Graham Linehan. Hello, how's it going? So, lots to discuss today. We'll be talking about Starmer's slipperiness on the trans issue, non-crime hate incidents, and St George was actually Turkish Day.
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So, the fallout from the Supreme Court ruling is still kind of ongoing. We've at least had Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer say that he doesn't think that trans women are women, which, Graham, that is... A bit of a U-turn, I think. Yeah, well, you know, what can you say? Has there ever been... A subject over which politicians have made such complete fools of themselves. I think the most extraordinary one was one that's come up a lot recently, which is Bridget Phillips.
stumbling over herself as she decides whether saying, you know, women have a service. And it was all for nothing. It was all for nothing. It was all basically... to, as Kemi Badenow rightly said, bend the knee to an American fad that is fast accelerating to its only inevitable conclusion, which is... You know, people standing up against an ideology that puts gay kids under a surgeon's knife that tells women that they
are just a thought in men's heads. And for some reason, it's still difficult to get any kind of answerability from the people who've been pushing it. They do need to be held accountable for this, and they do need to apologize. I found it extraordinary that Kemi Badenoch was... was at PMQs directly telling or asking Starmer to apologize to Rosie Duffield, who he kind of helped, I would say, as sort of...
passive, he gave passive aid to the people who handed her and sent her death threats and so on. He was, he is as, you know, guilty of are leaving the the Labour Party as the people who are And he can't even bring himself to apologize. Yeah. You know, it's a shocking kind of absence that Keir Starmer displays to me. I compare it to, it really is like opening out.
cockpit of a passenger plane and seeing that there's no one there. He should have been the first to say, no, actually, gay kids are just gay. They're not the opposite sex. first to say that women shouldn't receive death and rape threats, but of course, you know, he, he, he, um, He was kind of not at his post for all of this. And I don't understand how anyone believes that he could possibly run a country when he can't even stand up to... a few misogynists in his own party.
So it's a shame, another shameful week for him. Yeah, and Tom, there's been this kind of, we've always been at war with East Asia, with Keir Starmer saying, I've always supported. You know, I've always believed in biological sex. Bridget Phillipson, as you mentioned, Graham, earlier, you know, she's the current minister for women and equalities, saying, I've always supported, you know... Spaces for biological women. She didn't literally last year. What have you made of that?
Well, it's another lie to go with all the rest of them, isn't it, really? When Keir Starmer or Bridget Philipson or anyone else in the Labour frontbenches try and imply that they've always been defenders of sex-based rights, the way in which they even try to go on the attack.
against the Tories saying that these rights were ripped up on their watch and so on and so forth. The level of brass neck is industrial grade there. It's absolutely incredible. I mean, it was only back in, what, 2022 that Keir Starmer was giving interviews saying that trans women... are women and that's not just my view that's also the legal position both of those two things seem to have changed now it was only a couple of years ago that Bridget Phillipson was giving interviews
saying that someone in possession of a penis should still under the right circumstances just wander in to the women's toilets and so no one is buying this I mean on the one hand it shows that they will get absolutely kind of zero credit for returning to common sense because they cannot apologize to the people that they've wronged as you were suggesting they're grown. They cannot even acknowledge that they have changed their position which is another thing.
entirely and it therefore leaves you feeling a little bit uncertain as to what happens next because as we all know there's the kind of legal position but then there's also taking the fight to the institutions, putting pressure on the NHS or the prison service. Many places across society that effectively abounded ahead of, forget where this Supreme Court ruling is, but basically implemented self-ID in many cases just because out of their own cowardice and confusion on this particular issue.
So all around, I think, it's a reminder that, as you were saying, Graeme, on this particular issue, so many politicians have made fools of themselves. But Keir Starmer in particular has demonstrated once again that he is a politician of such little substance. of such little principle of almost zero ideology to an extent I genuinely don't think we've seen at that level of high office you know if you don't like these principles I've got some more
someone who is like the anti-conviction politician. He's just this sort of slab-headed receptacle in which you can pour any old crazy idea. And then it will just jettison it at the moment. It becomes, you know, not politically expedient. And all of that is so clear now. And I think that's why a lot of people are going to remain very skeptical of what happened.
And also, you know, he used the disgusting tactic of bringing up Brianna Gay, Gay's mother, who, you know, Rishi Sunak made some jokes about trans, about... neighbors ridiculous trans positions and they were very very fast to point to the fact that Brianna Gay's mother was apparently in the You know, to use that, to use her in that way, I just thought it went beyond his usual passive dopeness and took on a kind of... You know, I think it was evil. You know, it was an evil thing to do.
I don't think history will judge him well. I think he's going to be seen as the last of the kind of middle management prime ministers, you know, the kind of blur clothes. who just kind of occupied the position rather than run the country. So, yeah, it was disgraceful. And also, and similarly disgraceful, was the WhatsApp messages. Yes, Chris Bryant and Angela Eagle were in that WhatsApp. Yeah, but like saying that it was appalling.
The decision was appalling. I mean, these people, women's rights are not safe in their hands. And of course, it wasn't just those Labour ministers who were secretly intransigent, whatever they might have said in public. There were also huge protests at the weekend, Tom.
I feel like if you weren't convinced that this movement, at least element or strain of misogyny into it then I don't know how you could have missed it after this weekend they outdid themselves I think that's fair to say the outpouring of misogyny and also just derangement that you saw on the streets of London, of Manchester.
of Edinburgh, the way in which you saw people just engaging in the most kind of hysterical but also openly sexist sort of rhetoric. And you do wonder to yourself, At what point do the people on these demonstrations, or a lot of their fellow travellers, many of whom were serving politicians or union leaders who tweeted out images from these demonstrations, including horrendous misogynistic placards or attended...
various demonstrations in which misogynistic speeches were given and didn't even have the courtesy to leave. You do think that if you're part of a movement that is going around holding up placards that says the only good turf is a dead turf if you're part of a movement that is going around defacing the statue of Millicent Fawcett, the trailblazing suffragists, if you're part of a movement which has its foot soldiers urinating in public protesting against the fact that they're no longer allowed
to use the women's loose or what point do you say to yourself maybe we're on the wrong side i don't really don't understand yeah at what point are you going to realize that this was never about trans rights in quotation marks this is always about the theft of women's rights effectively and venting the most unreconstructed hatred of women in the process
Yeah, the great thing about the protests was that it was almost like a second win for women. Women have been putting up with these men for years at Let Women Speak events, at Julie Bindle, you might remember her being blocked by men not letting her speak in colleges and so on. And always, because the BBC and other mainstream outlets have refused to cover these, these protests. No one had any clue that they were going on. So this week was great because even so-called trans allies were
as you say, posting these photographs of the only good turf is a dead turf. And people finally got to see trans activism for what it is. It's a men's rights movement. And these protests, they just They just showed everybody what's been going on. Have some more, you know? Every week I'd like to see a trans protest. I believe there's more coming up this weekend. Right. And hopefully next time, yeah. I think it was, was it Joe Grady from the University of Colleges Union?
You know, her caption said, we're standing up to hate. And she didn't even notice the picture of the hangman on the placard, you know, threatening basically death on women. Also, we saw, you know, JK Rowling, people calling for witch hunts again.
against, we need to start burning witches again. I mean, it was medieval almost. Yeah, yeah. And it's misogyny. You know, we will see this weekend whether two-tier policing is real or not because these are violent threats and there's people in prison for far left. at the moment let's see if if we see an actual even-handed approach to violent threats raised against women. And sticking with the theme of policing, we should talk about non-crime hate incidents. Finally,
A major political party has said that they've got to go. The Conservatives have said it would be their policy if they're re-elected to end this policing tool. Just to explain a little bit. I mean, by nature of them being non-crime, they're not actually part of the law. Essentially the way it works is that you can have one logged against you if you do something or say something that any person, perhaps either a victim or any other third party, considers to be motivated by hate.
Which, Tom, this leads to the absurdity where just about anything can be interpreted as a non-crime hate incident and can be logged by the police as a result. No, absolutely. I mean, the Free Speech Union reckon there's in excess of about a quarter of a million of these things that have been recorded. in recent years and there's some of the high profile cases that people will remember Harry Miller having one recorded against his name by Humberside Police because amongst other things he
reposted a trans sceptical limerick on social media, famously visited by the police, called up by the police, saying that they needed to check his thinking. That was kind of the moment in which this issue had exploded into public consciousness in his court case. was one of the key ones in terms of paring back this process and ultimately leading it to becoming a big political issue.
But the number of cases which have been exposed since then are even more... I mean, there was the gentleman who had one recorded against him because he kept whistling the theme tune of Bob the Builder to his neighbour. there was um the number of school children who had them recorded against them which was never supposed to be part of the plan but the police have been doing it anyway yeah for you know calling um
each other names effectively saying someone smells like fish or calling someone a retard on the playground or something that this like something that should really never have been a police issue was still there plus you can say retard now as well no exactly so that's so they obviously haven't got the vibe shift within the constabulary across the place but There was one of a gentleman who...
Had one logged against his barber because he gave him an aggressive haircut. This is so absurd. It obviously needed to be dealt with.
It's nice to see one of the main parties saying categorically that it's time for these things to go. It would have been even nicer if the Tories had done this when they were still in power, although there were efforts to pare the process back, because it's just one of the... one of the more sinister forms of speech policing that exists precisely because it's non-crime you're really getting into the realm of pre-crime kind of Philip K. Dick territory when you're
essentially, kind of quasi-criminalising speech, even though no law has been passed suggesting that you can. And as it's always worth remembering in this, this isn't just something that's on a police database, quietly somewhere, it can sharpen an advanced DBS check, it could stop you getting certain types of jobs. potentially ruin your job prospects so great to see it a little bit late in the day but still a positive development.
And also the police don't have to inform you that they've recorded it against you. So you could have this black mark against your name for essentially a thought crime and you might not even know about it. Oh, I think I have one.
Or maybe we can find out. If you know the police force, we can probably find out, but it's likely. And that is a trend that we're seeing now is that because the police seem desperate to sort of atone for past wrongs, that they will happily just become the weapon of whatever activist group. is willing to try and use them. We've seen that with the trans issue time and time again.
We've seen it more recently with even more absurd small-scale stories of a school getting upset that a couple of parents are complaining too vigorously, so they can effectively send the heavies around to try and terrify them. It's incredible. Again, it's the absence of the tough. You know, like I've said it before, but Keir Starmer said he would end the culture wars. The person who's ended the culture wars is Trump.
Trump has taken serious steps to make sure that individuals on the ground aren't fighting these battles in their daily life. Whereas Starmer... who, again, is just this absence, his kind of lack of conviction on any subject means that the fights have to be, you know, undertook by... ordinary people you know so we see all the court cases all the tribunals you know because he's just not doing his job so uh yeah well it'll keep going on until until we get
I hate to say this, but someone with, you know, I don't want to say a strong man because that suggests something else. We have to get someone who actually wants to govern, you know, and make decisions because otherwise, you know, we'll all be fine. I mean, there's one reason why I'm getting out of the UK. Yeah. Because, you know, I'm sick of having these arguments and fights and knowing the law not protecting me, the law not protecting my freedom of speech.
My employer is not protecting my freedom of speech. I'm done with it all, you know. And you'd think that even if someone like Starmer We can't expect him to be a free speech absolutist. But you'd at least think he'd understand, or you'd think someone in the police would understand that this stuff is trivial. It's at very least a waste of police time. But it does actually, you know...
You mentioned two-tier policing. It does reveal the sort of war priorities of the police. I mean, there was one quite funny and amusing case where... a man managed to get a non-crime hate incident recorded against his drug dealer because he thought the drug dealer had ripped him off because he was gay.
And you think, what's the hierarchy of criminality in that kind of circumstance? It's a reminder that I think there is a tendency to, when you look at all of the speech policing that's been going on,
to say that ultimately the police are just enforcing the law the problem is the politicians that's ultimately true of course it is the failure to act as you're saying Graham is precisely why this stuff goes on unabated but the non-crime hate incident is a great example of how a lot of this stuff was generated from within the police themselves, these non-crime-hate incidents, they were never collected because there was an act of parliament.
Basically goes back to the McPherson Report in 1999, this recommendation that you should record racist incidents as a kind of form of intelligence to make sure that you kind of get ahead. of any potentially violent action that might happen later. It slowly percolates through all the policing quangos and then they come up with this absurd guidance.
which basically compels police forces, says that automatically they should be logging these things, that it should go for every protected characteristic, no safeguards whatsoever in place, and you end up in the situation that we're in now, I think, because the police, even though it might have a small C conservative...
sort of reputation has been as given to being captured by these ideologies as any other, not least, I think, because they've got it in their head that the way they atone for horrendous past wrongs, like the botched investigation into Stephen Lawrence's murder. is to police hurty words on the internet, which is a grotesque conclusion to come to, but it seems to be the one that they have come to.
It's a reminder, I think, that the fight is legal, obviously, it's political. It's also about our institutions, which is why you do need a concerted effort in the way that we've been talking about to push this stuff out. It's kind of like...
It's insufficient to just be kind of unwoke and to ignore the cultural war. You've almost got to be like kind of Ibram X. Kendi way, actively anti-woke to actually get this stuff pushed out at this point. Wasn't there some sort of meeting at MI5 where they argued that the far right was the greatest threat to you know
or peace in the UK or public order in the UK. I mean, to look at the recent examples of anti-Semitism that we've had for the last few months, a year or two and to come to that conclusion is absolutely extraordinary and it just shows that You know, we unfortunately, the UK unfortunately has some ideological actors in positions where they're going to do as much damage as Kim Philby did, you know, when he betrayed...
UK and I don't think it's being seen as the emergency that it is you know it's it's again you need someone someone with conviction to actually step in Fix all this stuff, you know? I suspect it might have been the home office rather than MI5 because even if MI5 has gone white,
Is it the head of MI5 or MI6 who's got his pronouns in his bio? It's definitely both. There's no way for MI5 to get around the fact that their caseload is overwhelmingly to do with Islamist terrorists rather than far right terrorists. But interestingly, the referrals to prevent are hugely, you know, over... far-right or even just right-wing. William Shawcross did the review in to prevent ban that people would just basically
People who had the same views as right-wing columnists or something would be marked as a terrorist threat. But yeah, certainly the Home Office thinks that Well, we've seen, we know what Keir Starmer thinks, we've seen the reaction to adolescence. Yeah, yeah. That's the great... It's an attempt to force everyone to think the way your average... BBC journalist thinks or Guardian columnist. Everything outside of that extremely narrow belief system is to be suspected.
And, you know, it makes for, it's a terrible cultural thing as well because, you know, it makes for a sort of bubbling mediocrity that's always there. once you step outside the realms of it.
you're immediately shut down, which is hugely dangerous at a time when I saw yesterday a piece that argued that the UK could be on the road to... you know civil war you know and uh like that might be hyperbole you know uh but we need to know that if something does go wrong if the infrastructure of the uk is affected by mass civil unrest that we have people who will
you know be grown up enough to deal with it you know but we don't have anything close to that let's talk about st george's day um We can get on to the, was he actually Turkish slash Palestinian slash
That was a bit muted this year. I was a bit disappointed because I thought I'd have an opportunity to write the article that I'd do every couple of years. Out of that tendency, I had all the jokes ready to go. Let's be honest, we're all very excited. Has Otto English done his tweet? We'll look forward to it. But, Tom, you've written about Keir Starmer gave a little St George's Day address in Downing Street. He had all the St George's flag bunting. He described himself as a true Englishman. Yeah.
Or women, I don't know. Where he's landed on that one. But it was interesting, I think, primarily because of how unintentionally cringy it was. It was this sort of showcase of that kind of very irritating kind of centrist dad.
version of patriotism, which almost makes you long for even the more unpleasant forms of nationalism. It's so irritating to actually watch it unfail. It talks about his patriotism is rooted in 1996 euro 1996 that's like the year zero for like the centrist dad patriot you know it's just about been supplanted now i think by the olympics opening ceremony but like that's kind of those two things is where the nation was founded yeah effectively um he was talking about eccles cakes
He was talking about Melton Mowbray, pork pies, you know. It was a really... All things we like. Absolutely. Gary Lineker was in attendance. Ross Kemp was there for some reason. You know, it was all those things where it was like... if you had to come up with a sort of satire or parody of what a clumsy Keir Starmer attempt at patriotism would look like, it would be there. Quite interesting as well, he made a point in this address of talking about
the far right naturally and the need to sort of reclaim the flag from the kind of you know racist gunbags we saw tearing around various towns in the wake of Southport last year which I thought was interesting because I think that says something about the way in which centre-left technocrats whenever they feel the need to talk about patriotism it's often kind of in the negative it's this kind of idea that they have to kind of um
hesitantly start waving the flag because otherwise the idiot plebs will be drawn to racism or something like that. Like they need Keir Starmer to show them that you can be a patriot and not a racist, even though the vast majority of people already know that and probably already roughly are that. So a reminder of, I think, of when...
particularly the Labour Party and particularly Keir Sama talk about patriotism it's this undertone of fear and loathing of the public that makes them feel they even have to start talking about it in the first place even with quite risible results and they're really you know they're really behind the public
in terms of the fact that you see surveys all the time that say more than 90% of people don't think that being English is a racial issue. Anyone can be English. Either they're born here or they integrate here. I don't know who they think they're trying to steal the flag from, if that makes sense. I mean, tiny minority of far-right lunatics. Why do they have such a big hold on the imagination?
Didn't you talk about wresting the flag from those who would wave it? Who else would have it? I think I'm not... The whole St. George thing, I'm not really open, I'm not really, and I think because I'm Irish, I'm not really... I don't think I can speak on it, but I do think that powerful countries that have this self-flagellating view of themselves,
Again, they're just heading for chaos because there's nothing to defend. What is England? What is England anymore? What are you defending when you defend it against far-right bigots? explain what your vision of England is because it's certainly not one where it's a melting pot because what we have at the moment To quote the comedian Nate Barghese is a bunch of plots that want nothing to do with each other and have no intention of integrating it.
society. So, again, what are you defending? What are you trying to say that the UK is? I have no idea. It's a completely incoherent... position they all have. A health service with a country attached perhaps might be the star, right? Yeah, exactly. The NHS, the England football team.
Paddington. That's as far as it goes. Paddington's values as well, not just the bear. No, absolutely. What he stands for. Yeah. But it's interesting as well, because I think a lot of it, the kind of discomfort that the Labour Party in particular, but the sort of... in general have with Englishness with St. George's Day or whatever. The fact that even when they're trying to speak to it, they do it in a very dad dancing fashion. It's very embarrassing.
It's broadly speaking also wrapped up with that kind of general kind of anti-mass sentiment. You know, the fact that the vast majority of the British are, in England, are English. kind of fuses with their general prejudice against just the majority of their own country who they do see as backward, as bigoted people who are
vote for Brexit, who are turning towards more centre-right parties, even against their supposed economic self-interest, people who they increasingly find quite strange and exotic and don't really understand their lives. All these things kind of get wrapped together, so I think they kind of come to see discussions around St George's Day or whatever.
just as a conduit to a group of people that are best they've lost touch with and at worst they see with broadly speaking contempt you know it's not just a kind of cultural cringe that they experience where this issue is concerned I think it's wrapped up with that sense of that the majority are wrong-uns, which I think is part of why even London-based journalists have been able to indulge supposed Scottish nationalism because of the fact that it's almost like a kind of
escape hatch from the horrendous English majority. It's like a faux progressive way out of this terrible country that keeps electing the wrong government. I think these things are so intimately bound up. It's not just the patriotism question, it's just the democracy question. Again, it's this kind of expansion of a tiny media elite to cover the whole country. You know, the beliefs of a tiny media elite.
sucking the oxygen from each other, you know, and don't represent the vast majority of people. The Supreme Court decision on trans. widely celebrated. The only people who didn't celebrate it are BBC journalists and... So it doesn't reflect, they don't reflect the UK. They think they are the UK. As you say, Paddington. and all these things but not jk rowling yeah so it's like it's i don't know it's it's it's such a narrow it really reminds me sometimes of
The City and the Hunger Games. Remember the City and the Hunger Games where they're all dressed like Vivian Westwood? You know, and they basically just kind of pit the commoners against each other. That's what these people remind me of, you know, a kind of elite who are so far removed from the people that they're ordering not to feel this way or that way that they might as well be on another.
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