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Yeah. And that's something which surely is a lesson we should have learned after airport. The police just really do not know how to manage social media. They don't like people speaking freely on this. They see it as a threat. It's really...
clearly put the wind up Keir Starmer. He's having to go around constantly talking about his background, as we hadn't heard about that before. And in response, you've got Farah challenging him to a debate in a working men's club, which I would pay good money to see. I think you see the same trends in the US. I think Donald Trump has similar instincts. I mean, he's okay with spending. It looks like Doge might be dead.
Hello and welcome to the Spike Podcast. I'm Fraser Myers, delighted to be joined as ever by Spike's editor, Tom Slater. And with us down the line, returning fan favourite, Candice Holdsworth. Hello. So today we'll be discussing the horror in Liverpool, Reform UK's surge in the Red Wall and the police force that thinks you're a Nazi if you believe in biological sex.
But before we get on to all that, I just want to thank all of you who came to our fantastic event last night to celebrate the launch of Andrew Doyle's book, The End of Woke. We're going to be doing loads of events coming up in the future. If you want to get involved, if you want to join us, the only way you can do it is by becoming a Spiked supporter. So if you're not already a Spiked supporter, then please, please do sign up. Go to spiked-online.com.
forward slash supporters. Tom, do you want to say anything else? Persuade them to join us. No, absolutely. It was great to meet so many of you last night. The event was a hit. Andrew was on fire. And as Fraser was saying, we're going to do much more with these supporters only.
events and more public events come soon as well but if you want to come along to one of those sports events definitely do sign up because now is surely the time now that we're getting out there and doing much more things out in person in the real world again
and there will be a video of the event coming soon but it's not the same as being in person you don't get a free drink when you're watching the video so make sure you sign up to become a spike supporter so liverpool was rocked by a terrible tragedy this week car plowed into a crowd injuring over 50 people at the time of recording 11 people are still in hospital with injuries Tom
Immediately, people wanted to know, understandably, who this was, what the motive is. What was interesting is that the police were very quick to tell us that this is a 53-year-old white man. from the local area the car stopped at the scene and a 53 year old white british man from the liverpool area was arrested we believe him to be the driver of the vehicle
Now, there's been a lot of discussion about this, about what that means. What's your take on it? No, the contrast between the speed with which the information on this alleged attacker... and the murderer in Southport is something that's been front and centre in many people's minds, obviously, if you contrast the speed with which that information came out on Monday to Southport, where there was this big information vacuum that opened up, I believe, on the...
The day itself, the few details we got was that this was a 17-year-old British-born individual and that not much else was elaborated upon. Clearly stands in stock.
There's obviously the caveat that in the case of Axel Rudakobana, he was a minor at the time, and so therefore they couldn't reveal anything explicitly about his identity or... anything that would waive his anonymity but there was certainly probably more that could have been done to put to bed a lot of the wild outrageous in many cases purposely provocative and hate-filled speculation that was going on there.
The problem is that when you look at the information that was provided here, where we essentially got more than usual, the fact that his ethnicity was there, I think it's not unfair to draw the conclusion that...
In both cases, Merseyside police are demonstrating a kind of fear and loathing of the public. In this case, we're going to give you much more information than we usually would a lot quicker because we're worried about how you're going to respond. And in Southport, we're going to hold on to a lot of this information because we're worried.
about how you will respond. And it's worth remembering with Southport as well, that continued on when finally these charges around having the Brycin toxin as well as the Al-Qaeda.
training manual a few months later when those charges were eventually brought there was a two week gap between those charges being filed and them actually being announced to the public and it was quite clear that a motivating factor there was again the concern about continued unrest and surely the lesson of Southport that was precisely because of this fear of public response actually created the conditions in which a tiny fraction of the public but are quite menacing.
fraction of the public were able to be influenced by that information vacuum, to be kind of egged on by the nonsense being put around by various influence, creating the very disorder that they claimed they wanted to get rid of. It's one of those things where, of course, there's people that can have different positions on that. Some people even praising Merseyside Police for being more upfront in coming forward with this information, but you can't help.
feel that essentially what information we're going to be provided with is going to shift depending on the attack and depending on how much the police are gripped by this fear that people are going to respond to that information in the wrong way. In a sense, lessons are learned, but in a sense they haven't been learned at all. Yeah, exactly. The motivation for the different actions is the same. It's still that fear and loathing of how the public might react. Candice, what have you made of this?
Yeah, I had the same instinct. I thought the reason they've done this is because they have a poor opinion of the public. Some people were even saying it openly, like we have to now release. information about the identity of the perpetrator to prevent racist rioting breaking out. I mean, this is what people think is going on. They think that the general public...
are just there irrationally milling around, something happens, and then they'll just react. I mean, look, absolutely, there are bad actors who spread misinformation. Sure, that happens. And there are people who will respond to that, but that's not the general reaction of the public. And I did feel that fine, okay, it was good. It was good to get information out early.
But I just thought the nature of it and the specific wording of it, I mean, that is just like treating the public as if it's some sort of, you know, psychotic person that needs to be managed with very careful language. the way people were talking about the crowd in the video I mean the crowd to me was quite brave you know they rushed in they tried to stop the car
They didn't, you know, completely maul that individual when he was pulled out of the car. Yet everyone was saying that, you know, that, oh my God, look at that mob, look at how they were behaving. I mean, there is just that attitude and I think it's palpable. Yeah. And it's interesting.
you know some of the people some of the bad actors have managed to seize on this incident anyway which i find quite telling um there was paul golding from britain first he said that once it had been announced that the you know the suspect was white this must have been part of a cover-up um now his obviously his uh line is inexcusable but you can also understand that a suspicion has been sown
by the police's action, by their reticence to speak openly about. No, absolutely. I think we've got to kind of hold two thoughts in our head at the same time, which is there is clearly a kind of online ecosystem now, particularly on X, but not exclusively.
of a kind of hard right far right conspiratorial set of influencers who regardless of the circumstances of any attack are going to try and pin it on whoever they want to pin it to push whatever anti-migrant or anti-Muslim bigotry that they're trying to promote and that's something which is impervious to the facts as we've seen as soon as that information was actually released it was suddenly about this is some kind of cover-up crazy speculation about maybe it wasn't
Because the police hadn't explicitly said that it was the driver, who was the 53-year-old, who was arrested. Maybe here they were trying to get one over on us. You're never really going to stop that. That nonsense should certainly be... confronted these people should be exposed for the divisive nonsense peddlers that they are and also i think in the same way that people have grown um unfortunately skeptical
of what the police say about certain things and at certain times and what they might be withholding there needs to be the most utmost skepticism of people who in some cases you know you might never have come across who suddenly with complete certainty telling you that everything is not
as it seems. Again, this is a small and marginal thing, but it's certainly a feature of social media in the wake of attacks like this now, where it's instantly folded into a particular kind of narrative, sometimes understandably, but sometimes very clearly with...
an agenda which doesn't always marry up. I think about the Magdeburg attack in Germany over Christmas which because of the fact that it seemed to fit the profile as in some respects what the horror in Liverpool seemed to fit the profile of a kind of islamist car ramming attack the sort of which we've seen in nice the sort of which we've seen in berlin um that it was instantly presented as islamist even though by the time you know morning came it was clear that this was a very bizarre
murderous individual who was actually an ex-Muslim who mounted this attack as part of some bizarre campaign against the German state for presiding over the Islamification. So I think it just shows that from the perspective of looking at things in a clear-eyed way and also allowing justice to run its course, whilst people should be free to discuss and debate and air their concerns about certain things.
It always does pay to wait for all the information to come in. But unfortunately, because the police in the UK, say, have done so much to damage the trust of the public with things like this. are concerned. It doesn't excuse the fact that there are people putting out bogus narratives and it doesn't completely explain the fact that there are some people willing to buy into those narratives.
you can't help but see that that's a key part of the problem now, that because this distrust exists, and often because those information vacuums exist, that it's going to be filled. And that's something which surely is a lesson we should have learnt after Southport. This episode of the Spike Podcast is sponsored by Shopify.
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And Candice, I mean, it feels like there's obviously a lot of reporting restrictions on... instance like this. Those kinds of restrictions kick in when someone's been charged and no one's been charged for this particular Liverpool incident at the time we're recording this. But it does seem sort of out of date in the social media age that you can essentially tell people that they can't.
speculate on things, they can't express a view on motive or things like that. These are discussions that people should be able to have, you'd think. Yeah, I mean, that's what the police said straight after this. They said, don't speculate on it. But I mean, we had images, like you say, instantly of what was happening. I mean, everyone has access to information now.
I think what that speaks to, though, is just a total fear of social media. And I know we've all spoken about this a lot, but the police just really do not know how to manage social media. They don't like people speaking freely on this. They see it as a threat. They don't think that people can discuss these kinds. things rationally. They think all type of speculation is just fueled by misinformation. That's why they focus so much on social media in the last few years. I mean, they see it as...
There's something ungovernable that they have to get control of. It just seems to me that the answer to this is to just be consistent and to trust the public. If there's a certain set of information that you fill with both, you are legally able to...
That should be the same set of information in every circumstance. It shouldn't be something that you're fiddling with because of the prejudices that you hold about the audiences. You might take in that particular bit of information. And at the same time, I think it's quite...
clear that in the wake of an attack we've got this very unseemly response now which is not entirely explained away by the desire to not collapse trials and so on and so forth it's gone far beyond that where the police seem inordinately
preoccupied with how people are talking about a particular atrocity, attack, what have you, rather than the attack itself. I mean, it's one of those things where the desire to try and kind of manage the narrative online becomes... all-encompassing and of course when you've got people fueled either by misinformation or just plain bigotry or just plain wanting to go out and cause carnage those people should meet the full force of the law but to just again treat that as carte blanche.
to police the speech of everyone who would never dream of doing anything like that. And to actually, as we saw in the wake of Southport, to terrify everyone into keeping their mouth shut by foghorning the words, think before you post out from...
government, social media accounts and whatnot. It's just so striking that on this issue and so many others, they just see the public as a... as a sort of tinderbox all the time and a problem to be managed that's not to downplay what we saw last summer but that wasn't an expression of public sentiment if allowed to run riot that was a very
that was a criminal bigoted fringe who unfortunately managed to cause a hell of a lot of trouble and carnage. So they just need to stop, you know, if a mob forms deal with it, but don't assume that the public is just a mob in waiting at all times, would surely be a...
sensible and much more pro-public position for them to take on all this. Definitely. So Reform UK is on the rise in the red wall. Nigel Farage is parking his tanks on Labour's lawn. I mean, we could talk a bit about this, but he gave a major speech. Earlier this week, saying that he would reverse many of the changes that Starmer has brought in on welfare, particularly the winter fuel allowance, reversing also the Conservatives' two-child benefit cap.
The two-child cap is the right thing to do. Not because we support a benefits culture, but because we believe for lower-paid workers, this actually makes having children. just a little bit easier. The polling seems to bear out this new message is popular. I mean, prior to that, he was talking about re-nationalising steel as well, sort of these tacking to the left.
New polls suggest that he is more than 11 points clear of Labour in the Red Wall. Another poll suggests that he's the most popular candidate for Prime Minister in the Red Wall. Tom, what have you made of? I think that last one is really fascinating, this Merlin Strategies poll, which puts Farage as having the highest net favourability of various different politicians in the country. I mean, there's only four in that survey who are in the...
positive, and three of which are normally on the right of British politics. You've got Farage out in front. You've got Andy Burnham coming a close second, the single kind of centre-left character there. You know, he's great at Manchester, Mayor, kind of makes sense. And then... Kemi Bay knocking Robert Jenrick. So it really just sort of is telling how, despite the fact that many kind of Red Wall constituencies did fall back to Labour, it's not as if this was a...
clear return to the flock of Labour's heartlands that it's quite clear that it's not Labour which is speaking to, broadly speaking, their concerns. And it's really... clearly put the wind up Keir Starmer. He's having to go around constantly talking about his background, as we hadn't heard about that before. And in response, you've got Farah challenging him to a debate in a working men's club, which I would pay good money.
To see. So we can only hope that that will actually come to pass. I doubt that it will. But it's a reminder that when reforms say that we are the party of workers, they've got a point. Certainly much more than the Labour Party, which, you know, really someone should take the trading standards, given it hasn't...
represented the interests of people who labour for some time now but it's just fascinating how much things have shifted and how now really for now at least it's a two horse race with the Conservatives barely even in the picture in many respects. Definitely. I mean, yeah, I'd like to see Keir Starmer's debut in a working men's club. Probably the first time he's ever been to one.
I mean, Candice, clearly Keir Starmer is rattled by this. He gave a speech on the day we're talking, warning that Farage would crash the economy like Liz Truss. And that's the question you have to ask about Nigel Farage. Can you trust him? It was quite a short speech, and yet Farage's name seemed to come up multiple times, which...
Obviously, we know that if you're looking at the parliamentary arithmetic purely, it does seem slightly mad that Starmer's got this record large majority. Nigel Farage has five MPs. But that's who he's attacking, not the Conservative Party. That's who he feels most threatened by. He is, and I think the local council elections must have rattled them just to sort of maybe see what...
could define the next election. Yeah, I think Farage, I think reform, they're being quite shrewd. I think they realise there's a very underserved constituency in this country, most of it in the Red Wall, where you sort of get small-c conservatism. But people who are quite economically left, I mean, they don't have a problem with state spending. They really don't. They completely reject a lot of what Thatcher brought in when she sort of broke with the post-war consensus of Keynesianism.
They don't like that. In fact, she's hated in the North. I mean, she's really hated. A lot of people will never, ever, ever vote Conservative because of Thatcher. Also, it's not just here. I think you see the same trends in the US. I think Donald Trump has similar.
instincts. I mean, he's okay with spending. I mean, he tried in 2018 with his big infrastructure bill. It was defeated in the Congress. You even see with what he talks about now. I mean, it looks like Doge might be dead. You know, Donald Trump is happy to add to that.
The deficits, I mean, these are the sort of the trends that we see. And a lot of it is to do with these new populist leaders trying to bring together these two coalitions, you know, the new working class coalitions that are being served more by the right. than the left. And it's so new in many ways, yet it's bringing in historic traditions. And I think that Reform UK has spotted that. They are capitalising on it.
I think Keir Starmer has no idea because I don't think he has any ideas really. I mean, it's a very hackneyed thing to say about him, but it's true. Yeah, I mean, it's definitely a broader trend, isn't it, Tom? I mean, you look at France as well, Marine Le Pen very much attacking to the left on the economy. Protectionism as well is a big feature of these populists. Clearly Keir Starmer is trying to make signals rightwards with his immigration speech.
It's clear that he's really uncomfortable when he's talking about Britain becoming an island of strangers, whereas Barrage will happily pal about with the people outside the British steel factory. say that he wants to nationalise steel. It sounds totally authentic when he says that, even if he was previously a sort of Thatcherite. To coin a journalistic cliché, Farage has parked his tanks on Labour's lawn. No, absolutely. And I think it's so clear as...
been talking about, that this is the gap in British politics, the gap in Western politics, in many respects, that different parties are looking to pursue. It would be an overstatement to say reform because of some of these announcements.
This week are going to become, you know, blue Labour or anything like that. But nevertheless, it's an attempt to show that they're different to the kind of caricature that might be made of them by Labour, who are very keen to dismiss them as that rights and a bunch of... public school boys. I think it's telling how rattled Starmer is, that he's not only constantly calling Farage out by name, but constantly talking about...
his own background as the son of a toolmaker, if anyone hadn't heard that so far, and contrasting that with Farage's background, you know, the son of a stockbroker going to Dulwich College and so on. And on the one hand, that's just incredibly... insulting you know it's not as if working-class communities in the red wall or anywhere else are voting purely on the basis of this person's childhood was more like mine and therefore even if their policies
are completely against my views, are completely against my interests, will be bad for my community, I'm just going to vote for them anyway. It's an absurdity and that's clear on the face of it. But on the other hand, if Labour were to start talking about, you know,
the working-class representation in Parliament, that's an argument that they're going to lose. I mean, you've seen over the years, certainly before Brexit, I think, people who were previously in manual professions being members of Parliament crashed something like 3%.
And that's in large part down to the fact that the Labour Party has become the party of lawyers, of people who work at NGOs. And to the extent there are some people who managed to make it through, who actually managed to be from a working class background, it's often... people who have gone the more university white-collar route rather than people who have made their way through the trade unions as was more typical, even various former union figures who end up.
in Parliament these days, you know, did trade union studies at university, got a plum job at Unite and then ended up in the party that way. So it's fascinating and it's telling that Labour are so rattled on this front because as we all know, they haven't been the party of... people who labour for many decades now so it was revealed this week that police scotland were circulating an internal memo that compared gender critical feminists to nazis now i'm not they didn't just call them
fascists or semi-fascists or any of these other euphemisms. They're talking about outright Nazis. One of the really interesting phrases from this memo was the idea that the sex binary, which is this idea, well, I should say the scientific truth. there are two biological sexes, was a core pillar of the Third Reich's ideology. Candice, this is the kind of comment you might expect to hear from a sort of blue-haired, purple-haired student.
This is being said by the armed wing of the state. What the hell is going on? I know. They seem to think they're looking at themselves now as sort of social justice activists. I mean, this happened with the retired policeman, Julian Fulkes. when the police officers turned up at his house after a tweet he wrote. I mean, I think he had 25 views, but they didn't like it. So they went to his house and they were looking at his bookcase and saying that it was very Brexity.
I mean, they seem to be making value judgments about what people say. It's a politicized police force. And I don't think it's hyperbolic to say that. I think that's 100 percent true. I mean, you see it with Lucy Connolly as well. You know, they were the police released.
information about her police interview saying that she had racist views. Yeah, she just expressed her views on immigration, whether you agree with it or whether you don't. She was just expressing her opinion that they were like it is racist and therefore she is punishable in some way.
Also, can I just say it's very dumb. It's very, very, very dumb. And I think that's what everyone thinks when they see this. You know, this is not intelligent. This is not intelligent. Yeah, you got the sense reading that memo that the police really... almost see themselves in a battle with this emerging fascism. Like they want to be on the right side of history, or to use that hackneyed phrase. And it's one of those things where, at what point are they going to...
have to admit that they have been captured by this ideology at various different points in time. I mean, how can you police without fear or favour if you have internal memos like this doing the rounds? Is it really such a shock, therefore, that there have been so many?
gender critical campaigners who have found themselves arrested often eventually let off because they've done nothing criminal even with our pretty extensive hate speech laws when you know on monday you've got officers you know going through their gender training encouraged to use their pronoun badges or what have you when there's been there's been myriad cases of this being reported um of course that's going to corrupt an institution which is supposed to approach every
every case and every crime in an impartial fashion. So I don't know how they can shake off this idea that they've been in some respects sort of captured by this ideology. It's also just fascinating what a kind of, it's wokeness in its most absurd. sixth former-ish form it's not even a particularly sophisticated thing it's the sort of thing that it sounds like when you read this story that like one of us made it up to have something to talk about like it's so ridiculous like this open comparison
between gender critical campaigners and the Nazis. It's got a historical continuum drawn between those two things. This is crazy stuff, but I think it... It's a telling way in which there's almost no institution, it seems like, in society, even one as nominally falsely conservative as the police force, that wasn't susceptible to this stuff and continues to be susceptible to this stuff, even as they make arses out of themselves time and time again.
Definitely. And Candice, this memo was circulated actually ahead of what was due to be quite a high-level meeting between gender-critical campaigners and the police following the Supreme Court verdict. But we've seen clearly, you know, this is not an institution. Police Scotland probably not going to follow the Supreme Court verdict. Lots of people have said openly that they're going to defy it. What do you make of that backlash? I mean, it is, you know.
We now know that it is the law that people should not be using self-ID. Institutions shouldn't be operating under self-ID. And yet, will anything change because they're so captured? Yeah, it depends what they choose to act on, right? So what they deem worthy of arrest or a police visit, because we all know that in many parts of the country where there's rampant crime, I mean, like...
soaring crime rates. Maybe they'll knock on your door if you said something about your child's school. You know, it's that sort of thing. What are the priorities? And, you know, when they become captured by these sorts of ideas, these very woke ideas. You see, they take on those characteristics that we've seen of the left for so long. They become incredibly censorious.
a real characteristic of the modern left. It is incredibly censorious. It becomes obsessed with what people are thinking and tries in some way to manage it and restrict it. And that is very sinister when you are the police and you have the full power of the state behind you.
I don't think we fully got to grips with that yet. I mean, we talk about it being silly, but it's actually very sinister. It's something that needs to be challenged. Thank you so much for watching the Spiked podcast. We'll be back at the same time next week. In the meantime, why not subscribe to Spike's YouTube channel and then click the bell so you're always alerted whenever there's some new content.
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