What's your assessment on the state of the uk at the moment?
Um, at the moment i think it's, i really do um, i you know i i love this country.
I really do.
But at the moment i feel like, have you ever heard that mickey flanagan joke about going to brighton?
So Mickey Flanagan's a very famous, very successful British comedian.
And I remember he did a show in Brighton and he talked about you know the contrast between London, the big city, and Brighton, the seaside town that he comes in.
And he went.
You know, you get on the train in London you're really stressed and you just you get on the train, it's full, it's packed, it's uncomfortable.
And then you, just you, get off at the station in Brighton.
You smell the sea air and you can feel the ambition just draining out of you.
It's kind of how I feel about the UK.
And I know that, and the reason I say that is that all the bright and talented people that I know are leaving.
Anyone who can is.
All the rich people are leaving.
This country has lost more millionaires than any other country except China.
Now, if you compare the populations, that tells you something.
3%.
Right.
So we're losing the people who have created the jobs, who are going, who are creating the jobs and who are going to create the jobs, and one of the reasons is they look at the environment that we're operating in.
We've talked about high energy prices, but this government has decided that the people who it needs to tax are the businesses basically, particularly the smaller side businesses, which is where so much creativity really happens.
And then there's all sorts of other things about infrastructure housing, demographics that are going on.
We talk about net immigration figures, and what no one really talks about is the fact that what we're actually doing is we're chasing out all the people who create wealth and have wealth, who pay the taxes.
And we're replacing them with people coming in towards the bottom of the jobs market at best, if they're actually working at all.
And so your net immigration figure of 900000.
That includes you having lost some of your best people and replace them with people who are not contributing.
That's very interesting.
Yeah, net doesn't account for the cohorts that have gone and the cohorts that have come in.
And it's probably not like for like.
Yeah, and so everyone I know who actually had a successful business that's portable.
They're moving to Dubai.
They're moving to America.
They're moving to all sorts of other places.
And what they say is very simple.
Well, look, I want my kids to go to a school where they're not taught that they're trans.
I want to pay reasonable taxes, which in some places is like 0%.
I want clean, safe streets, which you do not have.
I don't go on the tube very much these days.
I'm not in London that often, actually.
And I went on the tube the other day.
During daytime, it was like five, six o'clock.
And there was kids running absolutely rampant all over it, jumping over barriers, not paying, pushing each other on the escalators, smashing the stop button, like really causing genuine nuisance.
And I watched the staff watch them jump over barriers and do nothing.
I got some data.
Recent data reveals a 56 increase in tube crime, with thefts up by 83 and robberies doubling in 23 24.
And this extends more broadly.
I saw the, the labor government's talking about, you know, they're gonna reduce crime.
Um, well, street crime is up very significantly.
And one of the reasons it's up is that it's not really being dealt with by the police.
I mean anyone who.
I had my car broken into a few years ago uh, window smashed.
There was a CCTV camera right above it.
I called the police.
You can't call.
I had to email the police because they don't answer the phone unless it's like someone's been misgendered or something.
And they emailed me back saying, we've investigated.
We can't find anything right under CCTV camera.
Here's your crime reference number.
There was a viral video that you probably would have been seen of a guy who deliberately left a bike on the street with a geolocator.
Directly outside of Scotland Yard.
Yeah, you got nicked.
Uh, they tracked it down to the house where it was being stored.
They gave the police the information.
The police said we've looked into it, here's your crime reference number, we can't do anything.
And then, once the video caught sufficient fire, they got an email back from the police saying we've reopened your case.
Great news, exactly now.
By the way, i i don't want this to come across as if i'm criticizing police officers, because i know police officers and i know that a lot of them really are working very, very hard uh, but the priorities and the resources they have for set from above don't seem to manifest themselves in this kind of low-level crime being addressed.
Now you might say well, you know, there's some kids not paying for the tube.
Who cares?
Well actually, the broken window series is entirely correct.
If you are observing people engage in low-level criminal behavior.
It makes people feel much less safe about the overall experience because they know that.
Well, if they're not going to enforce this well, what reason do I have to think that if my phone gets stolen?
The subtext is that more serious things also won't be looked at with care.
And they aren't.
And they aren't.
I know people who've left because of single incidents.
I know a really wealthy guy who left the UK because she was walking out of a restaurant in Mayfair with a nice watch on his wrist and his pregnant wife.
Three guys jumped out of a van with balaclavas on, smashed him to the floor, punched him a few times, pushed his pregnant wife aside, got the watch off him, got back in their van.
Police don't give a shit.
No real investigation, nothing.
Why?
Why are these crimes in the UK?
Why is this sort of social fabric disintegrating like that?
I think it's partly because the economy isn't growing and so there's not a lot of money to be put into policing.
And when you think that net zero is the way to prosperity, ie driving up energy prices because you want to feel green or whatever.
You want to reduce Britain's contribution to global climate change from 2 to 1.
That's the great ambition.
Well, then you're not going to have money.
And when you don't have money, you can't pay police officers.
And when you don't have police officers, people engage in crime.
I mean, this is just to add additional context for the northerner in the room.
This is in London.
Yeah.
I think the UK has the sixth biggest economy in the world.
I heard this really phenomenal explanation, which is the UK is not the sixth biggest economy in the world.
UK is a very poor country attached to a very rich city.
London has the sixth biggest economy in the world.
No one gives a fuck about Newcastle.
No one cares about Carlisle or Wrexham, except for Ryan Reynolds.
Manchester, like a little bit, like a tiny, teeny, tiny little bit.
Birmingham, a teeny, tiny little bit. everywhere else can go and get fucked.
Anything basically north of Birmingham can just fall off a map.
I wrote this thing after the riots that occurred a few months ago.
I read it.
Yeah.
If you can remember that my thesis was, I saw some videos of my old hometown Middlesbrough, and there were street marches.
These people hadn't joined.
It looked like they were maybe walking to the place where the main march was going to go on, but it's kind of classic, sort of British leery, louty behavior.
Um, these people weren't carrying slogans, they weren't chanting anything.
It didn't seem like they were there for a particular purpose and there were houses that looked like they'd been recently built a classic working class british street, you know terrace terrace terrace terrace, terrace all the way along.
This was a house that had those pieces of um stickers still on the windows that looked like they were.
They were sort of freshly created.
You see one of the people pick up a big brick, just throw it through the window of this house.
That doesn't have anybody in.
It's not like it's the house of an immigrant or the house of an enemy, or the house of somebody from the other political party.
It's very difficult to describe this to somebody that didn't spend half of their life 18 years in a northern working class town at a state primary state, secondary state, sixth form college.
That was me.
I spent 11 years no, 13 years in full-time education right around these people.
I know these people.
I know the way that they feel and it's this ambient malevolence.
They're disgruntled, they're unhappy, they feel stuck and they don't know why and they're mean.
They're mean about it and The synopsis that I came up with was that immigration wasn't the reason, it was the excuse for this kind of antisocial behavior.
And we don't even remember ASBOs.
I haven't fucking heard ASBOs in ages, Antisocial Behavior Order for the Americans.
And it was the youths on street corners that would sort of push and jumble granny as she tries to go to the corner shop to get milk and stuff like that.
They'd be issued with an antisocial behavior order, which meant they sort of couldn't leave the house and they shouldn't go to certain areas.
It's kind of like a weird sort of curfew type thing.
And that culture in the UK, and I'm sure it's everywhere.
I'm sure that working class towns and all the rest of it, people don't necessarily have much way of upward mobility.
They don't have much to distract them.
Maybe they're a little bit despondent.
Maybe they haven't had the right role models, fatherless homes, all of these things.
I understand.
But that culture culture in the uk is so self-defeating because it is a gravitational well that keeps people stuck to the floor as much as possible that this is as good as things are going to be.
And the best use of your agency and self-authorship is to break things, not to build things, and i know that intimately well.
This ambient malevolence it's like the air before a thunderstorm starts.
Yeah, And that was what I saw in that video really got to me.
It's the first time that I've seen something on the internet that really got to me and that really fucking got to me.
So, yeah.
Well, I know what you mean.
And I think the answer to that and I know I keep banging on about net zero in this conversation, but the answer to that is to scrap net zero, because what those people need is meaning and purpose.
And for the vast majority of working class men, the primary source of meaning and purpose is going to be a job.
And when you have a job that is a meaningful job, that you're making something, you're building something, that you're making good money, that you're providing for your family, that you feel like you have upward mobility,
And upward mobility doesn't have to look like i grew up in newcastle and then i started a youtube channel.
Now i live in austin, texas.
Mobility might be.
You know, i made 30 grand a year for 10 years and now i'm making 35 and now i've got a promotion at work and now i own a home.
I own a home, right.
Most people really don't need very much to be happy, to be honest, and it's a tragedy that in most of uh, the western world, and especially in the uk, The thing that we used to consider like then, what is the American dream?
The American dream is you arrive with nothing but the shirt on your back and your kids go to university.
You have a house, maybe a small business.
You pass it on to them and their children are, you know.
Better off.
Really better off.
Well, if those people that you're talking about, where I agree with you, there's an underlying malevolence, and it's not malevolence, it's anger, really.
It's frustration.
It's frustration and anger.
And what is that anger about?
Well, the anger is about the feeling that you're not going to be able to do the things that you thought you would.
And what are they?
Well, you get a job, you get a house, you have some kids.
They're gonna be slightly better off than you.
You're gonna have dignity, you're gonna have community, you're gonna be respected.
Meaning, mastery.
Right.
Now, if you have a society which has effectively said, we're going to do a green accounting trick.
We're going to take your jobs, We're going to put them in India.
We're going to put them in China, where they're going to make the same steel or the same cars or the same whatever they used to make.
They're going to do it dirtier.
Of course they are because it's a much less developed country.
And then we're going to import that steel and we're going to import those cars back into the UK, so we can pretend that we're green.
Well, you combine that with this person no longer having a job and our economy, as I said, we're poorer now than we were in 2007.
What did you expect?
Just grand told.
There's this feeling there was always this feeling, but I can never put my finger on it of kind of being forgotten in the northeast of the UK.
It was like, like on the outside a little bit, even within a community, on the outside of culture.
Even little things like the way that you were represented in media.
Like a story about Newcastle that hit the national press was like a whimsical fucking cottage industry piece or something like that.
I said I was going to show you this video.
Can we do one more thing on just that?
Absolutely.
So one of the things that we've talked about in the UK is like well, we need to build infrastructure.
We need to build transport links.
And it's like, why do you need a better train line to know where?
Um and and so what you really have to do is you have to, and that's why you know I was talking to Mary Harrington, who I know you're a fan of too, at our Christmas party actually.
And she was saying something I really have been thinking about as well, which is, I think, if we're in the offering solutions space, the solution for the UK is to accept the reality.
That's always.
The first bit of the solution is to accept the reality that a slogan of make Britain great again isn't going to work because we're not going to recolonize India.
Do you know what I mean?
We're not going to rebuild the British empire.
What I think we could do if we really wanted to but this would require both a political and a cultural shift on a level that would be extremely significant would be to recognize that over the 20th century, Britain went from being the center of Western civilization to being the provincial part of it.
We're on the periphery now.
Yep.
The center of Western civilization after World War II.
During World War II, I would say, shifted from Britain to America.
We are now effectively the European outpost of American civilization.
It's a great point.
That's what we are.
Now, what does that mean?
Well, what that means is we have to lean in to that.
That means we have to download the right memes from America.
Instead of downloading the hands up, don't shoot meme.
What we should be downloading is okay.
We want economic growth memes.
How do you do that?
Well, you're going to have to make energy cheap slash regulation, et cetera.
You're gonna have to do the right trade deals with that world, right?
That means all sorts of other things that we borrow from them and apply to ourselves, as opposed to thinking that we know best.
We clearly don't, otherwise our society wouldn't be as screwed up as it is.
And part of that is you're going to have to give people in deprived parts of the country work.
And you're going to have to find ways of employing them and actually creating things that are of value.
And that means yes, we in the UK may end up paying more for some of the things that they make, but that money is going to go to your neighbor instead of a perfectly nice guy in India doing the same job.
But if we want our society to hold cohesively together.
Some of the extremes of the globalization process is the reason why those people in Newcastle are angry and malevolent and mean and nasty.
We're going to have to find ways to actually give them jobs and employment.
And that means not chasing out the people who are job creators.
And that means not pricing them out of the country by making business impossible.
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