Why Britain's on Benefits - Fraser Nelson

What we're doing is basically writing them off and discharging ourselves as a society, any sort of duty towards them beyond sending them a cheque. The problem is not those claiming, the problem is the system. You actually get more money. And you'll never get checked upon again. And there's an 80% acceptance ratio. So is the system being abused? Of course it is. But the fault lies with a system that's so wide open to abuse.

Our system is robbing work of its economic purpose and denying people the dignity and the ability to improve their lives. By the way, no other country's got anything like this problem. Really? We can't keep doing this, can we? It seems like everyone is either starting a side hustle or becoming their own boss. And you know what they're hearing a lot? It's the sound of another sale on Shopify. The all-in-one commerce platform to start, run and grow your business.

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With their 24-7 help and extensive business course library, Shopify is ready to support your success every step of the way. Go to shopify.co.uk slash sell23 to take your business to the next level today. That's shopify.co.uk slash sell23. Fraser Nelson, welcome to Trigonometry. It's a great honor to be here. It's great to have you. We've been keen to speak to you for a long time. You had a very, very, very busy job when you were editing The Spectator and never could make it, but you're here now.

And actually, there's several things we want to talk to you about, the media landscape, demographic decline, all sorts of things. But you made an absolutely fantastic documentary about the benefit system in this country, which we both really enjoyed.

Really, really interesting. So it's an issue you've been investigating for a long time, actually, from what you talked about. What did you find in making the documentary and doing your investigation? What should people know? What I found was that we have now a country within a country. It's amazing how we've lost sight.

of a system which absorbs the lives of something like three and a half million people now, or a long-term sickness benefit. As soon as you get put on that, you disappear from the unemployment figures. So you become like an un-person, really. So you can now have Boris Johnson on his last... day in office boasting about how unemployment was so low. It's only so low because so many guys have been recategorized as sick. And then you go and you find out there are places in the country where

A third of the community are on long-term sickness benefits. It's really concentrated in certain areas. And the lives of those around them are trapped in this kind of Orwellian system that they'd like to break out of. but they can't. Now, they're hardly ever mentioned in debates. That's because back in the day, about sort of 20, 30 years ago, To be too sick to work was a category everybody acknowledged, but it seemed to be pretty niche. But now 2,000 people a day are being added to this.

category. And that's set to continue. It's set to be 4.1 million in three years time. So right now, the trajectory we're on is to lose the equivalent of the working age population of Birmingham. to sickness benefits by the end of this parliament. So we're looking at a system that is inflicting huge damage on communities, on the economy, and most of all, on the lives of people who once they get onto the system, they find it very difficult to get out.

Now, what I wanted to do was, because I've been writing about this in The Spectator for a while, and... My colleagues would tease me about it. 20% of Manchester are on attribute benefits, 20% of Birmingham. They reeled off these figures, which to me are shocking. They just come across as boring figures. And when I left The Spectator, I'd... I had a great chance from Channel 4 to spend a long amount of time producing something like this. And I thought to myself, right.

How can you try to make this more real? And the way you can make it more real is to find the people involved and to get them to tell their story. Now, finding them is pretty difficult because not everybody in that position wants to go on camera talking about it. And also, you don't want to, there's a sort of genre of welfare porn, if you like, like De Ho Wan Ba, look at these terrible poor people kind of thing, gawping at them. So to get the tone right was really important.

I wanted to find people where if the viewer saw them, they'd think, hang on, if I was in that situation, I'd probably make the same decision, act in the same way. And so what you find is that they feel isolated, they feel... abandoned because they have been. I met one guy, he'd been, you know, he applied for sickness benefits.

He had mental health issues. He got the benefit very quickly. A year on, still no contact from the health services. So what they expect is to be given coaching, to be given the support they need to get back to work. Instead, they get given a check and they are forgotten. So it's expensive, but what we're doing is basically writing them off and discharging ourselves as a society of any sort of duty towards them beyond sending them a check.

I want to delve into all of that, Fraser, but I think that you alluded to it, and I think it's right to bring it up right at the beginning and just get it out there, which is that a lot of people's... who are not familiar with all of this stuff, instinctive reaction. We keep hearing about scroungers and people taking advantage of the system. And in fairness, in your film, you did speak to some people who used to work in the system who did feel that it was being...

taken advantage of. Do we have a sense of what percentage that represents? How much benefit fraud is there going on? So we can deal with it and then talk about why this is... Of course, it's really important to do this because insofar as people do discuss it...

They seem to think, look at these scroungers, they're abusing the system. Now, Labour and Tory politicians have found that when you go into a focus group of people who are working, especially low-paid work, and you mentioned guys who are claiming benefits, it's a very good whipping boy.

You can say, look at me scroungers, look at this, I'm going to crack down on them. It always pulls very, very well. So cracking down on welfare scroungers is something that's always going to get a politician lots of easy points. Of course, the media tends to go for it as well, because who in the media really knows anybody on sickness benefit? It's like another country, you know? But when you look at the actual abuse of assistant fraud...

Fraud actually means pretending you're somebody else, using a fake name, trying to get with money you shouldn't. We're talking like criminality. That's really, really small. What most people mean by that is something different. Somebody who basically is not too sick to work, but pretends that he is. Now, that is a grey area. What is too sick? Now, these people, by the way, have not defrauded the system. They've gone through it. Absolutely.

letter by letter. They might have exaggerated a little bit. They might have made out what their worst day is, their average day, but they haven't defrauded anybody. The problem is not those claiming. The problem is the system. I spoke to people who do the assessments. And so remember, 2,000 people a day are put new on the system. 1,000 people a day are kept on it. So that's 3,000 in total via these assessments. Now, the assessors.

will say, but they can't believe how shoddy it is. It's a basic 30, 40 minute telephone call. You don't see them in person. And on that basis, how are you really supposed to tell? if the person on the other end of the phone is too sick to work or not. So you go for the safe option and that's to write them off as being too sick to work. Now, I spoke to a doctor who says that she speaks to, like, say you're an alcoholic, for example. I'm too drunk to work. You know, that person needs help.

They don't need a big welfare check. But nonetheless, she wasn't able to give any help. All you can do is make them tick the box. The worst thing she said was when you speak to young people, especially women, say 25 years old, who've never really worked.

basically will probably never work when they get on the system, but nonetheless say, I'm too anxious, I'm too depressed to work. But if you know that certain phrases, you get an automatic payout. Not difficult to find these phrases. They're all online. Again, can you accuse these people necessarily of being fraudsters, of taking advantage of the system? I'm not sure I'd go that far. Well, that last example you gave does sound like fraud to me.

Well, it depends. Frog, you're sitting there saying, you know, because, I mean, people who do go through mental health episodes, depression, anxiety, might genuinely think. that they can't hold down a job, they're too sick to work. It's very subjective. And this is the gray area of mental health.

So now you and I might say, look, to be honest, I'm sure if this person didn't have an option, put her in a job, she might work. But it's supposed to say these people genuinely believe that they can't work. Now, there, what they need, of course, is proper occupational health support, proper assessment. We don't need a sort of cursory interview down the line. Yet, that's what we're doing. Something like half a million under 35s now are on long-term sickness benefit. You get guys who leave.

university who goes straight on to long-term sickness benefit. And we have a system that allows this in two shakes of a lamb's tail. It's a very cheap system, but bizarrely has ended up with a massive bill. So here, what is corrupt? What is rotten? What is outrageous? Isn't the people making the claims. It's the system which is giving them every incentive.

to sign on to sickness benefit and very little incentive to go to find a job or to actually even say you're a job seeker because then you get sanctions, you get a regime. It is quite tough. And so in that environment, I think that you're going to have, of course, people are going to play the hand that's dealt to them. And if the government says, look, here's the option of work.

It's pretty tough. Minimum wage, not very much, but here you are. However, here's the option of sickness benefit. You actually get more money and you'll never get checked upon again. And there's an 80% acceptance ratio and you can cite mental health. That is the option that we're putting in front of people right now. Is it any surprise people, especially when the cost of living crisis starts, are taking the second option? So is the system being abused? Of course it is.

The fault lies with a system that's so wide open to abuse. It's almost an invitation. They're almost begging people to take this road and just disappear off the radar, never to be referred to or spoken of again.

And that is sucking in now. This equivalent of the working age population of Scotland will be effectively living in this system. And it's a waste of money, of course. £100 billion is going to cost when you... take the widest definition of all this, including all the carers, 100 billion, way more than we spend on defense and things like that. But to fix it is probably the toughest job in politics because you get accused of being heartless. You'll have a...

Ken Loach film made about you. Do you remember the I, Daniel Blake one? Politicians hate that. So when you look at what's the easiest political thing to do, the easiest thing to do is do nothing about this. Let them be written off. And don't try to reform the system because if you try to reform it, somebody's going to call you cruel and heartless and you absolutely will get some cases wrong.

So it has been a conspiracy from both the left and the right, from Labour and Tory, not to talk about this because nobody wants to embark upon the really hard job of fixing it. The words that kept coming into my mind when I watched your documentary... are learned helplessness. And it seemed to me this is a system...

which takes away people's agency, people's ambition, but most importantly of all, people's self-respect. I actually found it profoundly moving for that reason. Yeah, and it just absolutely breaks my heart to talk to these guys. I mean, they...

So there was, I mean, there was one guy spoken to who had been on sickness benefit for years, and he had worked out that if you train as a plasterer, there was actually a big deficit of plasterers. You can be on serious money, like 50, 60 grand, if you get the training.

And he'd done a bit of cash in hand work previously. And he thought, OK, here's a way out. Now, what he needed was a way of keeping the wolf from a door when he did his training. Obviously, anybody would. But on day one, when he did his course.

He called up the Job Center, just before I do this, can I check? I'm going to be okay. And he was told, no, if you do this, you're going to lose all of your benefits. And then he pulled out of the course. And there is somebody who'd been through a lot of mental health problems.

It's taken a lot for him to get to that stage, to apply for the course, to get a place on it, to think I'm finally going to pull myself out of this orbit. But then the system said, no, if you try, we're going to slap you down. Now, when we looked into this... Technically, he was incorrect. He wouldn't have lost his benefits, but he would have been liable to be reviewed for it. But it's so complicated, the system, that even the welfare advisors were getting it wrong. So...

That's the other thing about how they're trapped by complexity as well, because it's not clear to them how they can get out. What they do know is that this is a crazy system set one foot wrong, and you might end up right at the bottom of the snakes and ladders.

An nephew, I spoke to a single mother with two kids that reckons that she would have needed, sorry, one kid, she reckons she would have needed to earn something like 35 grand to replicate the benefits that she was on. Now, you might say, and a lot of people would, That's outrageous. Imagine getting so much money, etc. And I get that, but...

In her situation, would you really come off all of these benefits if you've got a seven-year-old boy to support in a pretty ropey council estate? She's able to give him stability. I sat in her house seeing she created this island of stability which she'd never had growing up. Now, in her position, would anybody really do that much different? But if she wanted to take a road to work, it was incredibly hazardous for her. She might lose everything she wouldn't be able to provide for her son.

So, the learned helplessness is absolutely the case. So many people, when they try to, when it worked out, yeah, financially, I can keep on going forever, but I don't want to. I've got things to give. I've got, like the single mother I spoke to, she wanted to train as a teaching assistant or a therapist. She was a really smart person.

But she found out she was in a system where her skills would not be able to lead to a better life for her and her son. And when we create a sub-economy like that, we condemn everybody inside it. to a kind of system where they're permanently disconnected from society as well as from the rest of the economy.

I like to think the left should be angrier about than the right. You think, how is this progressive? You might say that money is going from the rich and being given to those guys. So in a redistributive way, maybe it works. is this really what we call a good society? Surely social cohesion matters. And I just can't work out how there's not more anger about this, how this isn't more of an issue, especially in these politicians who've seen it absolutely surging in their constituencies.

These guys tend not to vote. That's the other thing. And if you don't vote, you're quite easy to ignore. And as a result, we've ended up... By the way, no other country's got anything like this problem. Really? Yeah, yeah. When you look across the developed world, we see Sweden has gone down, and Austria. If only Denmark has gone up a little bit, and the UK...

its sword. So other countries have managed to find a way out of this. So it's not as if this is beyond the wit of man. It's certainly the case everywhere that mental health, which is now responsible for 70% of claims that they mention mental health.

That is very difficult right around the world to ascertain, to properly diagnose. Are you really too depressed to work? But other countries manage it. We haven't really tried. Why is that? Why is it that they've managed it and it's such a huge problem in this country? I think it's just the way that our welfare system works. We've got this stupid system where you go to the GP for a fit note.

Now, the GP will decide, okay, is this person sick or not? Now, the GP isn't going to deny anybody a fit note. I think he gives them 95% of cases. That's because if you don't, the person will keep on making appointments until you give them one. The GPs don't regard themselves as a welfare police. They should never be put in that position. But you do that, and then you've got this welfare assessment down the line.

which is, again, as I was saying, 80% success rate, pretty good. No other country, are there fewer steps to sickness benefit? No other country is the working road. as hard as ours and the welfare road as easy. It's that juxtaposition. And people, whether they're rich or poor,

are going to act in their economic self-interest. That kind of sounds cruel and heartless, but it's as true for the millionaire as it is for the, I spoke to a window cleaner out there, whose son was on way more than him because he was on sickness benefit. And he thought to himself, well, why shouldn't I claim? And I completely get it. If you're busting yourself work doing, cleaning windows for 20 hours a week, and you see your son significantly better off, you think I'm a mug to work.

So basically, our system is robbing work of its economic purpose and denying people the dignity and the ability to improve their lives through work. That's why I think this is more of a moral scandal than an economic scandal, but it's certainly a scandal. At Trigonometry, we value expertise and integrity in everything that we do. That's why we've partnered exclusively with Augusta Precious Metals in America. Having met them personally, it's obvious to me why they're the best in the business.

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When I was watching it, another word that kept popping into my head was methadone. And it just seems that you're just giving these people methadone for people who don't know as a substitute that you give to people when they're trying to recover from... a heroin addiction. But it is the methadone of, here you go, here's your money, and that's it. Don't worry, don't come back to us in any shape or form.

And you look at the guy, the poor guy who was an alcoholic, and he also had other issues with addiction, talked about his mum passing away, losing five siblings, and you're going, this guy needs help. He needs help. What he doesn't need is somebody fueling his addiction. And when I spoke to him, I was really sort of...

sort of shook by that. Of all the people I saw in the documentary, that was the one that shook me up the most because I then went to look up the figures for alcohol-related deaths. Because thinking to myself, if that's the way we treat alcoholics, right? Okay, terribly sorry.

Here's some money. What do we think that alcohol is going to do with that money, right? So where's the help? Where's the intervention? Nothing, just the money. And then I looked for the alcohol-related deaths, so absolutely surging in Britain, pretty much double what they were 10 to 12 years ago.

That is not a sign of a society that cares about those at the bottom. That's a sign of a society which is giving them conscience money so we can just forget it. And the conversation about mental health is interesting to me because... It's the conventional wisdom that mental health is getting worse and blah, blah, blah. And actually, in your conversations, I think it certainly comes across that that isn't necessarily the case.

And the thing that struck me was there was a couple of people who said they had PTSD, which it's a very serious condition, and I'm sure they do. It just occurred to me that, say, in the wake of World War II, for example, this country would have been filled with people who had... what we now call PTSD, but perhaps the roots that are now...

Do you see what I'm getting at? Yeah, yeah, of course. I mean, there's been a massive escalation of mental health. When you look at the number of antidepressants handed out by GPs in Britain, it's soaring when you look at the reported mental health amongst young people and indeed older people again.

rapid deterioration. But that's if you look at sort of self-reported and also people going to the GP. There are some other metrics. If you talk to psychologists like Simon Wesley, they will say to you that there are other studies that show...

Objectively, no, it's been pretty standard. What's happened is that people are talking about it a lot more now, maybe. That's a good thing, certainly. But because they're talking about it a lot more, you're a lot more likely to medicalize the kind of ups and downs of human existence.

a lot more likely to go to the doctor and ask for a happy pill, basically, if you're feeling miserable. So there is a big debate at the moment about how exactly you managed to... medicalise or put any sort of scientific label on something which is usually just verbally expressed. is obviously you can't physically diagnose somebody with mental health or depression there's some cases where you absolutely can but a lot of cases how can you really tell the difference so that is um

That is a problem all of society is grappling with. Now, you might say, okay, is this really a problem right now? And if you also, I looked at some of the, what you might call the hard metrics for this, how many people are killing themselves or coming into hospital with self-harm, that hasn't particularly been rising.

Now, that doesn't need to say there's no real mental health crisis, but I think what there is, there's a far bigger willingness in people to save their struggle with mental health. But then again, perhaps people have always done this throughout history.

from the war, wouldn't really have said, I'm struggling with mental health. They said, I've got shell shock, perhaps. They wouldn't really call themselves mentally ill, even if by today's standards, they would have been. So I think that what we're going through is a strange combination of a good trend. People are more likely to open up about how they're feeling, more likely to seek help. And then a bad trend where doctors are more likely to say quite often to the children, OK, you're sick.

Here is a medicine, and it's a medicine you're unlikely to ever get off. Yeah, I think that's a really important point, Fraser, because I think, I don't know about you, but I've been depressed at times. I'm sure Francis has likewise addiction, etc. All of these things are part of the human experience. And what worries me about this is that...

Like if you think that everyone who has a job is not depressed, that's just factually incorrect, right? There are lots of people who deal with all sorts of challenges that do then go to work, right? And on the other hand, it worries me that people who are going through really difficult things, there are answers to anxiety. There are answers to depression. There's CBT. There's all kinds of interventions that are available.

are not that expensive. I imagine 10 sessions with a CBT professional is a lot cheaper than putting someone on permanent sickness. Yeah, there's lots of apps now, like Headspace and stuff like that, which can, and basic meditation, it may sound silly, but it has been demonstrated to, if you just change the way you perceive the problem.

To cover that word you're using earlier on, agency, that you do have agency over this. And there have been lots of studies looking at, for example, even CBT for insomnia can be a lot more effective than putting people on sleeping pills that might not work. So there are...

But then that comes into how healthcare treats it, because the GP under our system is more likely to think, okay, you've come to me, I'm going to give you a pill. It's like that sort of, this is what I do, I'm a doctor, rather than say, I'm going to put you in a course of CBT. So I think that's an interesting healthcare question, but I think the medical profession hasn't really caught up with the huge increase in likelihood of people to identify.

as anxious or depressed. I think that there will be a sort of a reckoning in that, I think, because I do think antidepressant usage is going to hit crisis levels in Britain, not so much for costs, but, you know, in terms of efficacy, like you might be giving somebody a pill of medicalization if it never needed to be on that pill. in the first place. And I suspect further down the road, that's another difficult question that will be grasped. But right now, the terrible thing is, it's more likely

to be the upper middle class people with depression and anxiety who are told about the CBT and can afford the sessions. Because CBT is not expensive. Well, it depends. It's not expensive if you're a middle class person, if you're a minimum wage. And there's no way you could afford these sessions. And good luck to you ever getting it on the NHS. But as a taxpayer, I would gladly pay twice the amount that we spend giving people money to live off.

to get them on their feet. I'd love nothing more than for people to have that opportunity. As someone who's, I haven't done CBT, but I've done other stuff like it at times in my life when I've really needed that support. And actually, it just takes you to the next level of capability. You're literally better at the things that you do and at living life. That's what I'd want to see. But this is where I was going to ask you about how much this is about.

the stultified bureaucracy that we now have, where really, you know, if you talk to people who have dealt with the civil service, and we've had numerous of these people on the show, as you know, what you get is that there is no innovation. There's no creativity. There's no risk taking. It's just about keeping the current system ticking over. And of course, then you're not going to get the intervention approach coming in.

where you're teaching people skills, you're helping them with their mental health, etc. How much of it is to do with the fact that we just have a government bureaucracy that isn't able to deal with the challenges of the 21st century? I think in Britain it's especially acute because of the way we nationalise healthcare.

I mean, the NHS is the slowest moving vehicle in government. I mean, they're still using fax machines in places. Really? Yeah, they are. I had a situation recently. Yeah, they are. They use Windows XP, I think, as well. What? Yeah, I had a situation recently where I was staying in holding and my mum came to join me and she needed medication and she went to the pharmacy and she said, no, we need to get in the fax.

I'm like, how can you... Sorry. Jesus Christ. I hadn't heard the word fax for 15 years. But there are still places. I think NHS is Britain's number one possessor of fax machines. But suffice to say, if you're talking about something with the workforce bigger... than any organization in the world apart from the Chinese Red Army, then reform is going to come slow.

But here's the thing. This is changing for the rich, but not for the poor. A lot of these private schools now are teaching mindfulness and CBT as a basic tool. So these kids can go into the world. Okay, kids, you're going to encounter difficulties. And when you do... Here are some tools that you can do. So getting in the education system. Now, again, when you look at the

I would call it, perhaps it's a privileged thing to say, but the affordable private healthcare system, when you, I don't know, £100, £120 a session, you can easily get all the CBT you want there. There is lots of evolution. what people call medicine 2.0, which is more preventative. So you can see a trend there for those with the money, spending a lot more on their own mental health and non-medical interventions to help it, is those who don't have that.

who are stuck with the system, which is very much still, let's give them a painkiller, let's give them antidepressants, let's prescribe whatever they want. So I think we're going to see a sort of rich versus pure way of approaching mental health. And as you say, it's not the cost. But the NHS takes a long, long time to turn around. I mean, in Scotland, I think, the NHS there did start using CBT for insomnia.

I think there's talk of doing the same thing in England. I mean, that's not going to cost simply because it's got a better record. And also, these sleeping pills, as any insomniac knows, are not a solution for insomnia, not long-term anyway. But for the rest of it, it's so anti-innovation, the NHS. And at a time where medicine is changing quite a lot, that means effectively we love a two-tier system. I think a lot of people who can afford to opt out to the NHS are already doing so.

and they will be getting the next generation. I think what that will lead to will be differing a life expectancy gap as well for the rich and the poorer quality of life gap, all because of innovation. I think it's so funny seeing the Labour government now talking about

innovation of the NHS. I mean, Matt Hancock was doing exactly the same when he was here. Now, there's a man you can trust. Yeah, but the funny thing is that all of them talk about it like they've just discovered something amazing. And it's not. It's basic modernisation. which isn't going to happen if you run your whole health service in one massive top-down bureaucracy and don't give agency to the doctors, don't let the doctors innovate. Any GP that innovates is more likely to be struck off.

than they are to actually to be rewarded. And I think the way that certainly the innovative doctors... are treated quite a lot. You can see some of them are given disciplinary hearings quite often. I forget the names now, but there is a... There's, I think, a guy called Michael Muse, a dentist who'd been disciplined. There's a high Justin Strobinger, a cancer doctor as well. I mean, you can get people who...

And it makes me think, what other sort of field of work would somebody be struck off for innovating rather than awarded? I'm not saying we should get rich on it. But, you know, innovation involves trial and error. And say these guys got something wrong. I don't know the cases in detail, so I perhaps shouldn't have invoked them here, but say they did.

That should be seen as just part of the innovation process, as long as there's no abuse of patients going on. So the system in our healthcare does seem to be biased against innovation. And we do see places like South Africa, actually, where you do get more innovative techniques. But it's a problem because if we're medicalizing so much of human emotions, if we're putting such a huge chunk of our children on antidepressants.

then I think there's a case for finding better ways of helping them. And Fraser, we've talked about the human cost, and that's obviously highly important. But there's also the other part of this equation, which is the financial cost. That was left versus right in one sentence. The people matter, but really it's about the money. Yeah, exactly.

Thank you. Everybody already thinks I'm right wing, so you might as well. But let's look at the financial element of it, which is because we can't keep doing this, can we? Of course we can. We will be, look, even if you couldn't care less about the lives of those involved, if you couldn't care about the morality, if you couldn't care about these communities.

We cannot afford £100 billion for sickness benefits and all of the associated costs. It will bankrupt the country the way it's going. So that's why I think the Office for Budget Responsibility is doing a great service at the moment in making these four... forecasts. Because if it wasn't for the OBR, you can guarantee the Department for Work and Pensions would not admit to the trajectory that they're going on. So the OBR here is the kind of ghost of Christmas future here. It's saying, look,

As things are standing, your bill right now, it's like 60 billion now, it's going to be hundreds in a few years' time. And that forces them to think, okay. If we're going to spend, either we reform welfare or we need to find an extra 40 billion. So how are we going to do that versus the tax situation? So I think that will be focusing minds right now. I think Liz Kendall has got a big job as DWP secretary.

because she will have to embark on something that even Dean Duggan-Smith didn't dare to do. IDS didn't really go for sickness benefit, it was more unemployment. So she will have to think of basically reassessing all 3.3 million people. more than this, for what work they can do and what help they need. And it is like glasnost. This isn't your normal reform. This is like...

The people involved here, they're actually EU member countries with smaller populations than people we've got in sickness benefits. So to do something as big as that will be absolutely huge, and it will be strewn with danger. But the one thing that gives me hope that it might be reformed is, as you say, it's unaffordable. That 100 billion is money which this country just doesn't have. And it's also the fact as well that you're looking at this Labour government and you're going...

Are you really going to have the balls to tackle this? If the right didn't have the balls to tackle it, are the left going to be able to do it? That's such a good question. It is the £100 billion question. Because... If Saylis Kendall personally wants to do it, she thinks, okay, I'll take the flack, then can you get that past the cabinet? Can the cabinet get it past a Labour Party who has spent the last 15 years attacking with Tories for welfare reform?

When it goes wrong and you get the first person who genuinely is too sick to work, has got cancer diagnosis, has been told by the department to work, because statistically that's bound to happen, when that goes in the headlines, will they be able to get past?

that stage. Because if you look at one of the things that stopped the reforms last time around, there were a few cases of suicides amongst welfare claimants who would be given the wrong advice. Now that really shook up the system, by the way, as it should.

But the lesson we learned was, okay, maybe it's time to drop these reassessments. Maybe it's time to basically dial down the reform. So the system lives in fear of a kind of post office versus Mr. Bates kind of thing, where you will get... the system being as lazy and as cumbersome as it is, it is almost impossible to do reform that isn't going to include some sick people being deprived of the help that they need.

So do you, if you list Kendall, say, okay, I'm going to do this. I'd like to prepare you now for hundreds, perhaps thousands of people who are going to be wrongly treated by the system. But this is the only way that we can proceed if we're going to save everybody else. That is an incredibly hard argument to make politically. It's one the Tories never dared to make. And I think a lot of it depends on whether Liz Kendall and perhaps Keir Starmer.

managed to describe this as a progressive mission, that this is the beverage reform of our days. This is what we're going to take to heal. society and to stop this kind of social apartheid that we're inflicting right now. But it's so difficult. And I really don't, I really have my doubts. Perhaps Liz Kendall will surprise me, you know. Liz Kendall and Wes Streisinger.

The two people I've got the most hope for in this government. Because I think both of them are facing, both of them realise just how calamitous. the welfare and the health system is. Both of them realize what will happen if they don't fix it. Both of them want to fix it, but both of them are in charge of the mother of all bureaucracies. So even if you give them the 10 best special advisors in the world,

Could they really turn it around? And it's also as well, do they have the moral fortitude when the Guardian inevitably runs the pieces? And they will be true about some poor, unfortunate person who was diagnosed with cancer. The Daniel Blake scenario, yeah. Yeah. And the meltdown from the Labour backbenchers. Yeah. But there are solutions to eliminating 99% of something like that. You know, you create an appeals process or some kind of hotline where you get...

assessed by a different thing if you, you know, something. There are ways to mitigate that risk. if you're creative and willing to take a risk and willing to do things differently, right? Yeah, yeah, there are, absolutely. But will you be able to eliminate it to zero? I mean, look at, we just have the Ofsted school inspection regime changed after the tragic suicide of...

of a teacher. And it's always being linked. There used to be convention that you would never really read political meaning into a suicide in this country, but people are absolutely politicizing that that teacher's death. And I think we're now living in the era where the single person can actually change policy, like the single body of a boy on the Turkish beach changed her immigration policy, because it's not so much the Guardian, it's social media.

When social media can now magnify one person's case and make a huge thing over it, and it can create a furore, which is almost unanswerable. Now, say after that tragic death on the beach, if Angela Merkel had said, look, we can change a policy because if we do, we could cause a lot more harm than we do good. And in the end, she didn't. She went along with it.

It is difficult, and not impossible, by the way, but I think you would need to do more to persuade people that this reform needs to be made and the things that are as bad as they are. It's a lot easier for everybody just not to talk about it and keep spending the money. Well, I'm glad we have you here talking about it because I suppose the obvious question is, if you were Liz Kendall, what would you do?

Avizos Kendall, first of all, to raise awareness of the problem, because right now people just find it very hard to imagine what's happening. For example, I spoke to a taxi driver who'd said that he'd called them up and said, look, I'm not sick anymore. I want to come off benefits. Three years later, he's still waiting for somebody to reassess him. So you need to understand how many more people there are.

in that situation. And also, I mean, you need to do a lot more work to think, okay, if you are in sickness benefit, statistically, what are the chances of you ever coming out? What is your sort of life trajectory likely to be? Nobody's done that work yet. So there will not be support for the solution until there is understanding of the problem. And I think that an imaginative left-wing politician...

could absolutely go out there and say, look at this sort of decay, look at how, say you politicise it, look at how the Tories abandoned it. Look at the great James Purnell. Frank Field reforms. When you look at sickness benefits, it started going down in 2002 quite significantly. So Labour does have a track record in managing to use a language to talk its progressive mission, to say, well, this is about saving lives, not saving money. They've done it before. They could do it again.

But that would, I think, require the Labour Party collectively to become... a lot more bitten by reality than it is right now. Okay, let's say you've done that, you've established that the problem exists, you've convinced... Oh yeah, but what practically would you do? I think that's relatively straightforward.

Right now, you would first of all take the assessments, end this half an hour down the phone nonsense. You would need medical evidence to be provided, and it should be seen by an occupational health specialist. not somebody down the other line of a phone with a script, not by a GP with a 10-minute session, by an occupational health person who's genuinely got the patient's best interests at heart. So that would get the on-flow.

down quite a lot. Number two is the reassessments. We used to reassess literally hundreds of thousands of people on sickness benefits and say, actually, you better know you can work. Right now, That's barely 10 a day at the moment. The reassessments have almost entirely stopped. So simply by starting reassessments. Why did they stop? They stopped in lockdown. Because my guess, I don't know, they won't admit it, my guess.

is that they thought to themselves, okay, there is lots of political risk in us getting it wrong, so let's minimize the political risk and just keep everybody on the system. I think the department lives in fear of a scandal, and it's the Treasury that worries about the payments. That's one theory. The other theory is that they thought, okay, the system is so decayed and so rotten, it's going to be replaced.

Because for about a year, two years now, everybody left and right has been saying, this is terrible, it needs to be replaced. So they just leave everybody on the system thinking, okay, it's going to be replaced. Now, Liz Kendall says you're going to replace it, but when? This is, we're 2025 now in February. I think it's probably going to be 26, 27 before a new system comes in. So you change the admission systems. You would restart the reassessments.

But then, of course, you would come up with a system where everybody on these benefits can see exactly what would happen if they were to train, go into training, or go into work. I take the guy I spoke to who got a job training as a plasterer. Now, he was given what I believe to be wrong information, that he loses benefits. But then again, if I was him, I googled around, I couldn't see how he could have got proper advice.

It just doesn't exist. So what you need is an online portal that people can check. They can basically be given advice saying, no, you can train as a plasterer. You won't lose a penny of benefits for at least a year. And by the way, print out this paper and this will be your proof that we will not go back on our word. I mean, you can do that. For example, self-assessment. You can ask, you know. So you need a simple way of getting advice. I need advice that you can trust.

So it shouldn't be beyond the wit of man to tell people, because right now, I didn't speak to a single person who wasn't completely baffled about the various combination of benefits they were getting and what would happen to them in various scenarios. They weren't just baffled, they were afraid.

And they were deeply suspicious of anybody in authority. They just completely lost trust. So if you've got a way that you can actually get advice as to how you can get out of this situation you're in, and that's reliable, and you can do that with tech, then that's good.

And the third thing I would do, which is expensive, but I think it needs to be done, is you need to have the same way that somebody unemployed can be given a kind of back to work advisor, somebody on sickness benefits should have a point of contact as well. a kind of work coach, a life coach, somebody making sure that they're getting the CBT if they need it, that they're getting the kind of the back to work advice.

that somebody that is liaising with companies who are willing, in the same way you get companies who are willing to take on people who've come out of jail, for example, you know, a bit of a higher risk, but you want to be like Timson, socially responsible.

If we do the same for people in sickness benefits, and I think there is social capital in this country to do that, and we put it through a coordinating center, then we can link those who want to get back to work, and there are plenty of them. And then the final thing you need to do, of course, is to create a tax.

incentive, because right now the government takes away far too much of people's money when they're just starting out and work again. So I think they need to be demonstrably better off. It shouldn't be too much to say to somebody, that if you want to leave sickness benefit and take a path to work, we can arrange things where you can credibly be financially better off, maybe not immediately, but in two or three years. I mean, right now, that kind of way out.

which used to be the basis of a free society, of a just society, has been destroyed by a whole bunch of things. And if that is repaired... then your rational person, and remember all these guys, all these 3.3 million, with a few exceptions, rational people, if they see that their efforts can get them out.

that there is an alternative and they can rebuild the lives for themselves and for their families, then they will take it. But the system needs to be built. But to do all of this, you need to start seeing the problem from their perspective.

And right now that's not happening. We're just seeing statistics. It's a top-down thing. Ah, they're getting this benefit, that benefit. Nobody sees the way these benefits pile up with each other. You're getting hostiles that are exploiting people by taking people on sickness benefits, filing the paperwork themselves.

so they can get the accommodation money and keeping them basically as little money printing machines. I mean, the system needs root and branch reform, but you just need the political capital to care enough. about this country within a country that we've managed to create and just to give them what everybody else has, which is the ability by your own efforts to improve your own life. Gentlemen of the Trigonometry audience, let's address something important.

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They offer a 30-day money-back guarantee. So there's no reason not to try it. Manscaped, trim your chesticles with the besticles. It makes no sense. And the really good thing that your film did as well is that it looked at the effect it's had on employers, where you had one company who was advertising a job which offered training, progression.

a decent starting salary, and they literally couldn't find anyone. And this was in a place where they had something like 22% of people were in out-of-work benefits. Unbelievable. And that was, again, this is...

Because right now we're talking about, when we spoke about the cost, we're talking about the welfare cost. What we're not talking about is the cost of the economy, of having these millions of people who could be out there in the economy. Now, I asked a consultancy, the CEBR, to run the figures. say, okay, let's do counterfactual. Let's imagine that a number of sickness benefits hadn't started to surge in 2018. Let's say it just stayed where it was. What would have happened?

The answer is, by now, we would have the fastest growing economy in the G7. That's simply by using the human talent that we've got. As it stands, you've got the sheet metal worker, you're saying, quite right, can't get a trainee. So what are they going to do? They're going to hire an immigrant.

Because they need to, this is of course, I think this is very much related to immigration, because we are talking about how the welfare state has created a vacuum in the labour market, a massive vacuum, where workers are desperately needed. So first of all, people blame Brexit. That wasn't it. Oh, we can't get the workers. That's because all the EU guys have left.

figures come out and find we've pretty much got the same number of EU nationals as we had earlier on. And they've been joined, by the way, by a record number of non-EU nationals. There's no shortage of immigrants in this country. What there is a shortage of... is British guys looking for work. And that's because so many millions of them have been paid not to work. So this vacuum, I think, created

and the immigration sucking in of people in a way that even the Conservatives didn't work out. So I think you can fix so many things by getting this right. You can, first of all, get people's lives back on track. You can cut the welfare bill. You can get the economy to grow. And you can control immigration numbers by simply cutting the size of that vacuum. Well, I'm really glad, actually, that you brought up immigration because you wrote about it in your latest.

And you got a little bit of pushback. Always do. There were some people who were really quite miffed about it. Can you explain why? Yeah, I have got... I've just given you a very bleak version of what I think is going wrong in Britain right now. But overall, I am quite optimistic about us as a country and about what I call the project of the United Kingdom.

Now, when you look around the world, you see there is a lot of people grappling with the crisis of human shortage. You might call it that. You have Japan's prime minister who was last year saying that Japan is on the brink of whether it can function as...

society or not because the birth rates are so low. You've got South Korea that spent $200 billion in various initiatives trying to persuade women to have more babies, and they succeeded only in beating its own record for the lowest birth rate in the world year. after year, after year. You've got Georgie Maloney, who is in full-on panic. She's created a ministry of birth rate or something like that.

Because Italy is set to lose 5 million working-age people in 25 years' time. You've got France is going to lose 1.6 million working-age people. Macron is talking about the need for demographic rearmament. calls it, he's having free fertility tests. And then you've got Spain, which is also about 3 million people, working-age people. Now there, the Bank of Spain did a report a while ago saying that

Sure, they're about to get lots of immigrants, but you would need three times that in order to keep the working age pension age balance correct. So country after country, we can see in a panic.

about the coming human shortage and what that means. What it means, by the way, is if you're young and paying into a pension, then that's a joke because they've got absolutely no way, even in theory, of working out who's going to pay that pension by the time you get to pension age. Simicron tries to change. Egypt, the French have riots in the streets and we can see the problems. Now, switch to Britain and we've got the exact opposite.

conversation. We alone in Europe are going to have a significant working age population increase in 25 years time. We're going to have 5 million people more. Italians are going to have 5 million more people less. Now, by our standards, that isn't particularly much. That's about the standard kind of working age population increase. So it's not as if we're going to have an overpopulation crisis. We just don't have the opposite.

My position is this, that there's two, if you look at the birth rates crisis, and I think you can call it that, right around the world, we can see that nobody has managed to find any way around. You can bribe people to have more kids, but by and large, if women and young people are taking different lifestyle choices, it's difficult for the government to really... sort of change that. So if you've got an underpopulation crisis, either now or coming down the road,

I mean, China, for example, is going to lose 25% of his working age people by 2050. I mean, they can kiss goodbye to fears about China dominating the world with those demographics. You're going to end up as a country where the playgrounds are empty and the care homes are full. Same of Japan, same of Korea. Now, not China, not Japan, not Korea with all its money, not Italy. Nobody's found a way of increasing this. But of course.

If your problem is immigration, then you can decrease this. We can do it. So our demographics are pretty strong. I think the UK is managing demographic change probably better than anybody else in Europe right now. Now, that's not to say we don't have problems, but we don't have the sort of problems. Our problems are fixable.

They require the right policies, but you can fix them. But our birth rate is very similar to other countries. It's the same predicament, isn't it? Yes, but let's take... So what you're saying is we're able to compensate for it with immigration? There are different sorts of immigration. Now let's take Germany. more immigrants as a shared population than we do. That was one of the reasons for Merkel letting in the three million. She thought, okay, we're going to need workers. Now, Germany...

is also facing a sharp decline in working-age people. So the integration issues economically have been way worse than ours. So they've taken in all of these people. They've got far bigger problems than we do. In migrant crime, I think something like 40% of all criminal suspects in Germany, if it's hardly calculated, are foreign nationals right now versus 1% of the German population. You can see this reflected in the rise of the AFD and the despair of East Germany.

where they look to the future, they see decline, they lost in a way a good chunk of the population after reunification, and they just see the whole society going rotten. Now, my point is... If it were as easy as immigration, then any country could pull it off. Germany would not have the demographic decline that it's got right now. But it is not as easy as that. We have managed immigration in a way that has brought huge challenges. And for a second...

minimize those. But by and large, we have done it under this model of Britishness, which as integration works, has worked pretty well. We could be, in a few decades' time, the kind of United States of Europe, as it were, because the US has got the same kind of demographics as us. It turns out a lot of these ethnic minorities are voting for Donald Trump to, in a way, people thought the opposite a few years ago.

I think that Britain's problems are the problems of demographic success and demographic growth. And we can, of course, at any moment, now we've left the EU, we can cut down to zero the number of immigrants if we so want to. But what no country can do is mandate an increase in population. So between these two problems, ours is the better one to have. The problem is, Fraser, is when you have the level of immigration that we do.

The cohesiveness of society really does suffer. And also the other problem is when you have an electorate who election after election after election goes. We want it lowered. Yeah. And the government, quite frankly, ignore that. Yeah. Well, the government don't ignore it. They promise to do it. Yeah, they promise to do it. They did the opposite. And then they gaslit them, basically. Yeah, and then they get chucked out. I put that novel...

matches, but I put that down more to incompetence than cynicism. I mean, I think the Tories had these new Brexit controls and they thought, oh, isn't this great? Immigration is not an issue right now. All the opinion polls say that people don't worry about immigration because we've now got Brexit. We've got complete control. But it's set the bar way too low. And by the time when you worked out what was happening, there were like two million people coming in off the scale. That's quadruple.

level of net migration. So we're having this conversation now in the context. of a country which has just completely lost control of immigration under Tories who campaigned to take back control in Brexit. And they got kicked out of power and they absolutely deserved to do that. But what we're also seeing now is you can guarantee...

This time next year, immigration will be about a third of what it was last year. Because we can actually cut down the visas. The Tories started to do this. It will take time to come through. And I would support, for example, net zero migration. for the next two years or something like that. I mean, Sweden's managed that right now. It's saying, okay, as you were saying, the integration has become a bit of an issue.

we're going to start to pay people to go back to the country they came from, is one of the things that Swedes are doing. But Sweden has shown that net zero immigration, in other words, people coming in is equal or less than people going out, is achievable. even under the EU, even under the ECHR. But this is what I call a short-term problem, the long-term 25-year forecast. It seems that the British model...

is something that the world's most discerning immigrants still want to come to. Well, there's no dispute about that. In a way, that's not true for Spain and not true for Germany. Okay, but I think what people might say to that, and I'm one of those people, so I will say it. is that famous line, in the long term, we're all dead. In the short term, the problems that we see now, you say integrate, blah, blah, blah. And what I see and what people will tell you is...

Up to 50,000 people a year, perhaps more, coming into this country illegally every year. Oh, yeah. Right. That's the small boats. You can get to that figure alone. God knows how many other it is. Right. So we've got illegal... Yeah, a collapse of border control. Yeah. The illegal immigration should be zero. I think any sensible person can agree on that, right?

Then on top of that, let's not paper over the cracks. We've got ethnic riots, effectively, and they're ethnic from different directions. We had the riots by people who were upset about the stabbing in Southport. There was a counter-rioting from Muslim communities. protecting themselves by wielding knives and machetes and whatever, running around, having fights. That's...

If I'm a normal person looking at that, I'm going, that's not integration. When I talk to people in various other countries, they look at what's happening and they're going, the government of your country is irresponsible and they're going to lead to civil war. That's what people will say.

That's what Elon Musk has said. I think he said civil war is inevitable in Britain, yeah. Well, and I think inevitable is perhaps putting it strongly. But what I would say is we're not on a path from an integration perspective to what they have in America. It's very different in America. they have a uniting vision. What is the British dream exactly? Well, the British dream is...

It's funny. It might be whatever drove you and your parents to come here in the first place. My parents didn't come here. My parents sent me here. And the reason they sent me here is they wanted me to receive a good education. That's why they did it. That's a British dream. Yes. And look at Sajid Javid's parents. They came here penniless. Their son ended up home secretary. His illiterate mom would make sure he sat in the library after school every day.

because they wanted him to have an education, believing that that education would lead him to a better place. That is absolutely a British dream. And I think one of the problems we've got in Britain is that the British dream is working out a lot better for those who arrive here than it is... for some of the white working class. Yeah, completely.

But you're saying we need more immigration over the long term? No, no. What I'm saying is that, of course, given that right now we've got tens of thousands of Brits leaving the country, even if we wanted to hit net zero, we would need mass immigration to keep... it at net zero. A lot of those people would stop leaving if they stopped feeling the way they do about this country Yeah, of course. I mean, that's true for every country handling these things. My point is that they...

The debate about immigration can get so polarizing right now, and it's difficult to try to say, for example, that the integration failures are real, they're serious, they're there for all to see. But we also have integration successes. Now, let's take the king's coronation. We're sitting here just overlooking Westminster Abbey. In that abbey, you had a king and his Hindu prime minister.

his security arranged by a Buddhist foreign secretary. You had a Muslim mayor of London, a Muslim first minister of Scotland, both in attendance. You had... the chief rabbi who was a guest of Buckingham Palace, so we wouldn't have to break the Sabbath coming over. That ceremony, I thought, said a lot about our country, because I can't think of another country in the world where that sort of...

cohesion would have been imaginable. We're talking, I get it, this is the elite, this is the politics, but can you imagine ever being an American president sitting in the Oval Office with a Ganesh idol on his desk, as Rishi Sunak had on his desk? Now, how many Brits cared about Siddhartha Ganesh Idol? Zero. Nobody cared at all. We're like that. We're like that as a country. It is, Kemi Beidnik says that this is the best place in the world to be black.

Very controversial when she said that. But when you look at other countries and the integration issues they've got, usually it's immigrants falling behind educationally, economically, they're a subset that never quite manages to catch up, and creating social problems. that leads to riots. I think that in Britain, our employment differentials are very strong when you look at how more likely. In Sweden, for example, immigrants are way less likely to be employed.

but a native speaker. Nonetheless, they take in lots of people and they lead to this society within society. And every day this year so far, there has been a domestic bombing in Sweden. I mean, terrible problems that we simply don't have. My point is that we can get it right.

quite a lot. We can get it right. That's reflected in our politics. It's reflected in not just football teams, but football supporters. It's difficult to point to any kind of serious team of people in this country. That doesn't reflect. some kind of signs of our integration success. Now, my point is, it's become almost verboten to say that now. If you point to, if you basically say the project of the United Kingdom is broadly speaking a successful one.

But our successes and integration, broadly speaking, outnumber our failures. That we have got more reasons to be optimistic about our future than we might like ourselves to admit. I mean, the column that I really wrote that caused everybody to go bananas was one simply at the end of last year saying that journalists do, and so we should do, and so you guys should, in your podcast, focus on what's going wrong.

But that can lead to a negativity bias, because what's going right happens in smaller increments. So you would never know, for example, that surveyed crime suggests that violent crime is halved in this country in 20 years.

your average person would flat out refuse to believe that. And yet that's the best evidence that we've got pointing out what has happened. That the number, you know, everything from the number of road deaths to, you know, there's never been a better time to be young, for example, than right now.

That's not how young people feel. Exactly. It's not how they feel. What about the housing crisis? It's not because of the media, Fraser. Come on. Let's stick with immigration. Let's stick with immigration. So, the point you're making...

is entirely correct, which is Britain is very good at absorbing people from other places. And better than most of the European countries. I've made this point my entire public career. I've said this is the best place to be an immigrant in the world. And that's not to say we don't really see... And what I would say to you is...

The reason we're having the conversation about immigration is not that people feel that me or Frances's mother coming here has been a disaster for this country. There are people who feel that way. The reason people feel strongly about immigration is they see the numbers that we have had over the last two decades.

They naturally, people will, I think, quite reasonably project that into the future for the reason that Francis gave, which is it doesn't matter what politicians say. They're not dealing with this issue. That means. are we going to have millions and millions and millions and millions more people coming? And then they go...

What is the impact of that scale? It's not about immigrants and our willingness to welcome them. It's about the scale. What is the impact on our infrastructure? What is the impact on societal cohesion? You bet. Look, this is something that no one wants to talk about, especially in these kind of places. But I, as an immigrant, can say it. At what percentage of the native population does England cease to be England?

Is it 50 percent? Is it 40 percent? Is it 10 percent? When there are no English people left, is it still England? Right. That is a thing that no one wants to talk about. But I know millions of people subtly feel and not just English or British people. My relatives from Russia or Ukraine or Armenia or whatever, they come to Heathrow and they go, is this still England, right? Now, you could say that shows the success of our society. There's a hell of a lot of people who don't agree with you.

That's right. I mean, do we regard Rishi Sunak as English, for example? I've always said, this is a very unpopular thing, that I'm not English, I will never be English. I don't think Rishi Sunak is English. We're both British. But we're not English. You weren't born here. You were an immigrant. No, but my son was born here. I don't think my son is English.

Right. He's born to a Russian and Ukrainian immigrant. Again, that's the definition. I would say that Rishi Sunak is as English as Tizer and Y-France, right? He is absolutely English. He was born and bred here. And I wouldn't say that the colour of his skin makes him any less. He's a brown Hindu. How is he English? Because he's born and bred here. So by being born here, you become English, in your opinion? Yeah. English.

Because there's a difference, right? I don't think English is national. Look, I'm Scottish, right? Yeah. Now, are my kids English? I would say they are. How? Because they were born here. They're Scottish. Nope. By blood. No, they've hardly ever been to Scotland, unfortunately. So what? By blood. My son is born to a Russian and a Ukrainian, right? How on earth is he English? Because he was born here.

You think that being born in a country makes you of that? So if your children had been born in Japan, would they be Japanese? If they were born there? Look, you get white Caribbean people, for example. Hold on. Just the Japanese example. Would they be Japanese? If they were born there and lived their life there, then yeah.

The imperial identity I get, and I've said this, right? People should be able to come to this country and they buy into the imperial overarching identities. We're all British. That's fine with me. But pretending that my son is English, what? Come on. It depends if you think English has got an ethnic undertone. Of course it does. Well, I disagree. And by the way, you might say it's not my country. What about Japanese people? I would say Hamza Yusuf, for example, is Scottish.

Right? So you might disagree with me. People have different definitions of this. But in my opinion, if you're born in a country, you are of that country. And I can look at my, do my sons of half Scottish, half Slavic blood. right? If you do one of these ancestry.com tests, they might say that, but in what meaningful sense are they half-checked?

Really? I mean, they don't know the first thing about the Czech Republic. I mean, they know everything about England because they were born here. They cheer for England's football teams now. It took them a while, but they do. And so that's the way I see nationality. Now, I know that not everybody does that. Most people don't. The overwhelming majority of people don't see nationality. In every country in the world.

But I'm giving you my answer. And I think that, take, for example, my wife. Now, she was born to refugee parents. They fled the Soviets. And she brought up in Sweden, but she never felt Swedish. because she felt that the word Swedish, the way that people used it,

did have an ethnic undertone. If he looks a little bit dusky, right? If you look a little bit foreign, then you would not be seen to be Swedish, right? Now, it's very strange because I don't look at her and see somebody looks a bit foreign.

But only if you do it for the Swede's eyes. You might look at you for it. You might struggle to pass yourself off as a Swede. I don't know. It's not something I don't think we really spend much time in this country looking at somebody looking. Look at Constantine, right? Is he, you know, I don't know. You might guess. but it wouldn't be that much important. Here, she does not feel like an alien. Now, perhaps she is, because she's an immigrant.

But weirdly, she felt more of an alien in Sweden. That makes sense to me. But she does hear... Because we have, as I said, an overarching identity. It's the same in America. It's actually a very... to a lesser extent, but very similar in Russia, where, you know, Armenians can be Russian, but Russian in an overarching sense. No one would think they're ethnically Russian, right? The point I'm trying to make to you is...

A country is what a country is. And when that country changes over time in a way that's both visually and culturally different, that is a discombobulating... thing for the vast majority of the people who live in that place. Maybe not for you, maybe not for lots of people in the media, maybe not for lots of people in the building across the road and in Parliament, but for the vast majority of people in this country.

Their sense is that when the country ceases to be visually the same as it was at some point, there is a level when it ceases to be that country. Well, the country's always changed. You had the Gael, the Pict, the Saxon, the Dane. I mean, you have got patterns of the... By the way...

I don't want for a second to seem to be disparaged or diminished people who feel that way. These are hugely important, and I think we make a grave mistake if we say, oh, they're all racist, let's not talk about it. And when you boil down the concerns, they usually are very practical ones.

like, how's my kid going to get to school? Or they're going to be up against the world's workforce. This is going to make their life tougher. Or where are they all going to live? It's all overcrowded. Now, that would be true if they were a whole bunch of, you know, like...

people coming down from Dundee or somebody, right? So it isn't necessarily an ethnic thing. Now, I understand the ethnic thing as well, especially is true with Muslims, for example. That typically is where you hear, is Islam really compatible with the West? we've got six million Muslims in this country. Is it time we started seeing them as kind of fifth columnists? Now, that is where I really disagree, because I think that the debate, especially around Muslims, is getting...

really quite toxic, I think. And I think that Islam is absolutely compatible with Britishness, with Western values. In the same way that I'm a Catholic, for example, there was a time when people were saying people like me were a threat to...

society that we shouldn't be allowed to do. Some people still do. Yeah, they do, exactly. You know, when JFK ran for president, that was a big thing. He was a Catholic. Can you really trust him, right? But I think, so there are always kind of demographic changes that can move where there always brings...

questions. These questions deserve answers, but we usually find a way of muddling through. I'm talking about long term. That isn't for a second to say that we don't have huge... questions which need and deserve answers, and people do, especially if we're heading for a period that we are, where the birth rate is low in order to keep the economy moving, we're going to become a country that's going to be taking...

probably, certainly six figures of immigrants every single year. We need to do that probably just to say still. But the ONS projections are that we're going to be taking, broadly speaking, 300,000 immigrants a year for the next 25 years. Now, that's a lot of people.

So I think that does raise a lot of questions. It should be like, one of the questions would be, what have we stopped? What if we did what, like Nigel Farage says, and what has net zero every single year? Is that an option? Absolutely. We've got the tools.

What will be the implications of the option? Well, we can look at it. Now, you might say that AI is going to come along and everybody's going to be making so much money that we don't need people to keep the economy going or to pay the pensions. That's an argument. But these are all... I think it's possible to have this conversation, I hope, in a way where people aren't accusing each other of being racists or globalists or fifth columnists for George Soros and stuff like that.

It's becoming, as you say, a really important question that isn't going to go away. Now, I could perhaps be wrong in saying that Englishness is a multi-ethnic concept. Perhaps I'm wrong in saying that I regard Rishi Sunak as being as British as me or as English as my children. British? English, right? I understand. And also you might say...

I'm an immigrant to this country myself. If I voted the other way around in the referendum, perhaps I would be a foreigner. And so who am I to talk about who's English and who's not? But, you know, there's a phrase in Scotland that there are many strands in the tartan. that we're all Scotland's story. We're all worth the same. And that applies to you of any religion or ethnicity.

And, you know, I guess it's, you know, I don't know if you were to do an opinion poll of Scots and ask them, is Hamza Yusuf Scottish? Perhaps I'd be the minority in unhesitatingly saying, yes, it never really occurred to me that he'd be anything less than that. But I guess this is going to be, these are all important questions, but I am on the side of the optimists who think that Britain as a country, the concept of Britishness and the project of the United Kingdom.

is one that is more likely to get this right longer term than get it wrong. So forgive me if it sounds like I'm picking you. What is the concept of Britishness? The concept of Britishness? Well, one of the funny things about it is that it's almost impossible to define. But, you know, because we don't have a National Day, really, of Remembrance Sunday. We don't have a little list of mission statements or values.

Okay, you used to be in charge of a pretty significant operation of The Spectator, right? If... If I came to you and I said, what is the mission of the spectator? And you went, well, the thing about the spectators, it's really difficult to define. And, you know, we don't have a national, we don't have this, we don't have that.

I think this guy doesn't know what he's doing. I would, look, I, of course, and I could tell the spectators there to inform, entertain, delight, bring humor, whatever, right? Right. Now, but my point about Britain is that people can define it different ways. I don't think there's a right or a wrong way, but I would. regard it as the world's.

The first and most successful multi-ethnic state through empire, number one. Number two is we are the country that pretty much invented the notions of liberty and democracy and exported them to the Western world. I would say it's the home of democracy. Although when you look at how few young people actually are into democracy, you wonder if it's going to stay that much longer. But I would say that's a fundamental part of it. Rule of law, I think, is importance. Tolerance.

And also defending liberty, which we've done pretty much better than any other country in Europe. Now, hopefully, we will not have to do that again. But it's the kind of place, I think, where Britain as a country is the... cradle of opportunity is a place which is recognized world over as being the place where, if it's done properly,

then you can make whatever you want of your life. And quite often, actually, it's people like you, Konstantin, or people like Kemi Badenak, who grew up in other countries, who can describe Britain better. than those here, because it was, I think, Kemi's maiden speech, she was saying as an African girl.

She looked at Britain as a kind of shining light on the hill, the kind of place if you managed to get there, you can make whatever you wanted of your talents. And the way that simply wasn't true of her in Nigeria or other countries in Europe, because we stood out because of nurturing the way that people get on here.

and the notion of common sense. Now, perhaps if you've grown up in a country, you can't really see it how others see it. But I think the British light has never shone brighter than it does right now. And that, of course, every successful democracy is self-critical. So we're living in this country. We're going to point to these problems and we're never going to shut up about them quite right too. But we should ask yourself why it is.

that so much of the rest of the world holds Britain in such high regard, which would cross the opinion polls that they do. And why, of course, the reason that we are, for the foreseeable future, going to be trying to manage down the number of people who want to come here. This is very different to the...

the European situation where they're going to be crying out for immigrants and not able to get enough in quite a lot of other countries. And China's losing people all the time now. It's negative net migration for a while.

And that is because there's something kind of magical and wonderful and successful, but also indescribable. I think when I say the project of the United Kingdom, it's not something you can get a marketing guide to come up with a mission statement. You kind of know it when you see it. And there is something about respect, tolerance, that's the other thing.

Tolerance, I think, is, again, fundamentally British. Other than the Civil War, you know, we didn't have much of a track record of turning on each other. Not really. We love the riots now and again, but they're sporadic.

we have a habit in this country of making things work through shared values. Now, if we're going to be absorbing people and the rate we've, hopefully not the rate we've been the last few years, but in the way that the next 10, 25 years come, then you need to put in a lot more work when it comes to the Britishness ceremony. I don't know. Have you had to go through one of those? Yes. Right. We know you've got these little tests about Englishness and Britishness. And I think we'll...

You had to be through it, and I should be asking you if you thought you learned much about Britain in that process. You learned nothing about Britain in that process, but I don't think you're going to learn about it through reading a book and passing a test. I know, exactly. It's much more... This is why, forgive me if it sounds like I'm grilling you. I'm trying to work these things out in my head too. And the reason I am grilling you to some extent is that...

Freedom of speech, sorry, you should have added that one there. Of course. But I don't know how much of all of the things you listed are actually, in my opinion, deeply a threat, including freedom of speech in this country. So...

When people are being locked up for tweets, it's harder than say Britishness is about freedom of speech, right? And democracy itself, I would argue, is facing lots of challenges, especially amongst the young. So here's me saying it's a fundamental part of being British. Well, it won't be.

if enough people don't want it to be. Well, exactly. And then the third thing, I used to live in Tower Hamlets, which is a part of London, where if you go to your GP surgery, there are leaflets in every language in the world, pretty much, in that surgery, right? That's not what integration looks like. It just isn't. When people don't have a way to communicate with each other because they don't speak a common language, integration is not possible.

So the reason that we're having this agreement, I think, is you actually said right at the beginning, you know, net zero immigration for a couple of years, perfectly reasonable. I think there are lots of people who...

of putting forward the views I'm putting forward that would agree with that. So it's a reasonable point. I think the point I'm making is, unless we are very, very clear about what it means to be British, what we expect of people who come here, this is something we've been terrible at. Absolutely woeful at communicating to new people who come into our country that there are certain things that you have a duty to do. It's a duty.

You were given an opportunity, as Kemi said, and as I've said many times, to come into a place that offers you infinitely more. than you would have had in the place that you've come from. And that opportunity comes with responsibility, right? You have a responsibility to... adjust your mentality to the local mentality. Not bring your own, adjust. You have to learn the local language. You have to do lots of other things to make yourself part of this thing.

instead of bringing your thing and insisting that this thing becomes more like that thing. And I would add to that, if you break these rules in a significant way, you get chucked out. I think we should be doing a lot more deportations than we're doing right now. And I completely agree with all of that. And I think that the difference between us and America is America set out to become.

a kind of multi-country stage we set out to become a melting pot we've accidentally become a melting pot now i'd argue probably the most successful one in the rest of europe but still we've got our problems now we've also accidentally created the world's most successful multi-faith democracy as well. We didn't set out to do it, but take that scene from the King's coronation. That's what a multi-faith democracy looks like.

We did this really without sort of codifying it. But I think what we're going to have to do now is insist on a lot more of these rules. We can't rely on some kind of natural melting thing because there are so many places, especially in like Bradford and Alderman places.

where the integration isn't happening and things are getting worse rather than better. So we're going to have to be a lot more demanding on that. And I think people are going to want to see a sense of fairness and established in a quite muscular way. I think right now, the small boats crisis, for example, is the most visible sign of the authority to simply losing control. And you might argue as some do, oh, it's only 50,000 versus the million people are going to come in, but it doesn't matter.

I mean, set aside the amount of money it costs, which is huge. The fact that it's happening at all just sends a huge message that we are not, this project of ours is not being properly defended. that people who are skipping the queue by coming via illegal people smugglers are getting the better of our system. And I don't think it's to do with Koska. I think the problem there is that our legal system is so kind of decayed.

that they get caught up in appeals and protests for months and months. They should be dealt with very, very quickly. Right now, the Germans are having a debate about kicking out the illegals immediately. And this is a company which is in the Schengen area. And if you look at some of the German debate, they are saying now that if liberal democracy cannot defend itself in this way, it can expect to be supplanted. Now, this is a country where a democratic project has faltered, to put it mildly.

over the last few decades, I wouldn't say that we are immune from that kind of pressure at all. I think there are lots of threats to British democracy and to what I would regard to be our liberal country. I would say that I'm a liberal ahead of being, I wouldn't call myself a right-wing, I wouldn't reject the label either, but fundamentally I'm a liberal in the kind of British tradition of the word.

But I think that is under huge threat right now. Unless you can be shown that this will work, unless you can prove to people that this is not being taken advantage of, then you can expect support for liberal democracy to be undermined. I think there was a poll last week showing that 52% of under 28s would think things would be better if they were a strong man who was in charge of everything.

Now, you know, you fled, not fled, but you left a sort of Soviet country. I grew up an era where you can remember what the alternative to the liberal democracy looks like. We're getting a whole bunch of young people now with no real memory of what the alternative liberal democracy looks like. So that's why I do take seriously.

the support, which you see not just in that Channel 4 survey, but Pew will ask it again. And Jonathan Sumption makes one of his essays, he's got a new book coming out where he talks a lot about this, about how Britain could end up on the list of countries like...

Brazil, like Russia, of countries that simply aren't democracies anymore. They've got the shape and form of it, but they aren't. If you look at the way that he thinks of the way the courts are ruling so much of our lives, it's taking power away. from democratic parliaments and putting it more into an illiberal system. But here's the thing he thinks is happening, not because the lawyers are grabbing power,

but because people are so risk averse now that they want the government to protect them from a growing list of things. And the more you want the government to protect you from, the more liberty you need to sacrifice and let the government put down laws. So in this way...

We're not talking about the end of democracy as being a kind of explosion or a coup. We're looking at the slow decaying of these values that I would describe as fundamentally British. All these things I say about my country, I talk to them as if they're as natural as the weather, but they're not.

They're there. You can never stop fighting for democracy because the battle is never won. And I think for Quail, especially after the Cold War, we thought it was. And now we see it being eroded in a way that we didn't expect. So to go back to welfare, that is a sign of our economy fundamentally and our society not working out for a whole bunch of people. We see for the vacuum that carries in immigration, a demographic shock that we can't quite respond to.

And then we see people asking serious questions about that, but not being given serious answers and instead being called racist or xenophobes because the authorities don't quite know what's going on. This adds up to the British project in some danger. a lot more danger, I think, than people commonly accept. And I think it's absolutely there to be fought for and defended, which those of us who believe in it can try and do as best we can, but the government absolutely needs to defend it.

by addressing people's concerns. Fraser, it's been an absolute pleasure to have you on. Thank you. Final question is always the same. What's the one thing we're not talking about that we really should be? The one thing, you guys talk about everything under the sun. I think the fate of Scottish traditional music is much underappreciated. What's happening to it?

It is basically not flourishing the way that it should be. It's doing better in Canada and other countries than it is. This is a great, indigenous, beautiful art form. I wouldn't go that far, Mike. I could take you to some places in Emberness that would change your mind on that.

But thank you, Fraser. Thank you very much. I nearly made the joke about Humphrey Yusuf taking on the mantle. Anyway, Fraser, it's been great having you on. We've debated for so long. We've run out of time, so we won't be able to do any sub-site questions. But hopefully it's been worth it for having that.

Very important discussion, actually. And thanks for playing along. It's been great having you on. Congratulations on the Channel 4 documentary. It was really, really good. And all the best with everything you're doing in the future. Thanks very much. Remember to like and subscribe so you don't miss any of our incredible interviews. If you want ad-free and uncensored episodes that are too spicy for YouTube, join our sub stack by clicking the link in the description.

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