Nigel Farage & My Introvert Business Partner 😳

I've got an extra special podcast today and guest Nigel Farage. I feel really, really honored. I watch Nigel, 7 o'clock, it's a staple for me every evening, GB News, on to Talking Pints. You know, his politics really, really chime with me. Nigel, welcome.

Thank you, and thanks for being a fan of GB News. I think we are— it's very interesting, isn't it? Since GB News launched We're seeing all the other broadcast channels changing their formats, getting more presenter-led opinion shows, getting more genuine debates. I think actually GB News already is beginning to change the landscape of British broadcast.

And I understand your viewing numbers are really starting to reflect that.

Yeah, and they're much more consistent across the day. I mean, it's not easy to measure because, you know, BARB is the official rating, and I always think, well, Would you have a spy box in your living room?

Oh, you have to have that.

Yeah, yeah, that's how the official figures are done. So I always think to some extent it's difficult to completely trust the figures, but the figures are the figures. That's the industry norm. But as you well know, you know, people watch it on the app, they watch it on catch-up, they can now listen to it in the car, you know, it's on DAB, GB News Radio. So how do you measure? You know, 25 years ago it was who was watching it live, and that's still very, very important. For the business model of GB News. But there are so many other ways that people now consume news. But look, you know, it launched last June, it had some hiccups to begin with, but then, you know, name me a startup that doesn't have difficulties and hiccups. But no, I, I feel the content that it's putting out now across the shows is interesting, it's varied, and I think you genuinely do get both sides of the argument.

And I think you've got a whole swathe of sort of maybe the silent majority who are watching it. You know, I have my stepfather at home, you know, and quite a few of the friends who would tune in 7 o'clock every night, they, you know, and various other times during the day. And they're, I suppose, a little bit like talk radio. They're getting, you know, an alternative or maybe something that chimes with their views.

Well, I think one thing that is for certain is that on the NHS mandate You know, the idea after we— what we'd seen in the care homes where 30,000 to 40,000 people left the care industry, and when it was mandated that all the NHS staff would have to have the vaccine, it's about 100,000 people who hadn't had it. And it was a very famous exchange between Sajid Javid and a doctor at King's Hospital. I watched you, you had him on and had him on the show, and there were numerous presenters at GB News albeit again giving both sides of the argument, but personal opinions strongly suggesting this was a mistake, it was wrong. We then saw, you know, over various COVID measures, 100 backbench Tory MPs rebel. There's no vaccine mandate and all restrictions have been lifted. And I think, you know what, for once a free press and our parliamentary system has actually worked. It's rather nice, isn't it? So, so yeah, I do think, I do think that I think broadcasters have a great responsibility, but I think if they get it right, they can have a very significant influence.

But of course, you've done this with a few issues, haven't you? You've, I don't know, you have this uncanny knack of being able to sort of sense which way the political wind will be blowing in, say, 6 months, 12 months' time.

You know, this is not pure base opportunism, you know, I can assure you of that. These are about things that I believe, but timing of campaigns, when you really push hard, that's about judgment. And yes, that is about not just thinking what are people thinking now, it's what are they going to be thinking a few months down the road.

So, you know, you've got the sort of EU, the— I don't know, were the public that against the EU, I don't know, maybe a decade ago? You sensed, you know, there was discord and it was going to grow?

I did. I did. I, you know, if you were a small manufacturer, you know, making small electrical goods, the EU had already made your life a nightmare. If you were one of Britain's under 10-meter fishermen, the EU had already impacted directly on your life. But many other people, you talk to them and say, well, look, I get it, you know, we shouldn't really be run from Brussels. But you know what, my job's okay, I'm fine. And it's only— there was a moment when it changed. And that was the unconditional opening of the doors to 8 and then 10 former communist countries. And I thought, you know, these government figures of 13,000 people a year, I mean, baloney. And that was the moment people saw rapid change in their communities. People working in a lot of industries suddenly found that their wages just weren't going up year after year. So that was the moment, and I did see that and predict that, and that made a huge difference.

And of course, there's the sort of energy crisis, which, you know, I mean, I was watching you, you know, people often say after the event, oh, this person predicted X, Y, and Z, but I watched you, you know, this was way ahead, you know, you talk about the green lever, you were talking about this looming sort of increase in energy costs that were coming and the political backlash that would stem from it. And we're all— well, we're here with the energy costs, and I suspect, yeah, you know, there's going to be a groundswell of public opinion. People are going to— people are going to get upset. Their bills are just about to go up a lot once the cap comes off, and then they're probably going to get upset with, I don't know, zero, you know, green levies and, and, and sort of—

I first kicked off on this really properly in 2013. It was the English local elections, and government was compulsorily purchasing land all around the country, putting up wind farms. Other rich landowners were only too pleased to get £1,000 a day or more.

We've got a biomass boiler.

Yeah, you know, well, but here's the irony of all the net zero stuff is the biggest biomass boiler is called the Drax Power Station, where they burn 7 million trees every year. I've never understood it.

We run this biomass boiler in a block of flats and a load of wood pellets come in in a lorry once a month and they fill this huge top hopper up and then we burn it and there's a huge chimney and that sort of goes into the—

Oh, we call that green? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't get it. It's been very difficult, some of this stuff, because you argue that net zero is a ridiculous objective, it's an act of national self-harm. And you're told, because everybody's been riled up by this Swedish teenager, is it Saint Greta? And you're told that actually you're a denier. You know, all these things get thrown at you. Actually, I mean, I've been an environmentalist, a sensible environmentalist, all my life. But when you actually look at what we're now doing, You know, just because you export the production of coal, gas, steel, chemicals, much of our refining, because you export all of that to another country and then import the goods back in, the net effect on global CO2 is up, not down.

It's nuts.

And it's nuts, and it makes no sense at all. And we're beginning to understand, I think, that the more wind farms we build, the more gas we need. As a backup. And I think there's a strategic argument, which is we take 9% of our electricity comes from France through an interconnector. 50% of our gas comes in from Qatar, Norway, a little bit from Russia. Increasingly oil we're importing because some big developments in the North Sea, the Cambo oil field was scrapped recently. Why? Well, because The administrations in Edinburgh and London are increasingly against the industry.

But I guess that's about to sort of change a little bit.

Well, you'd have thought logically with what's happening in Ukraine that it would change and there'd be a rethink. So I'm arguing strategically we should not be a net importer of energy. We've actually got all the resources to be a net exporter of energy. So self-sufficiency, frankly. Whether it's fracking or whether it's another method of natural gas extraction, it seems to me we've got an industry here that could provide in the northwest of England tens of thousands of well-paid jobs. Now that, Boris, is what I call leveling up.

Is he really interested in that though?

Is he?

Because I—

See, the thing is, I don't know what he's really interested in. You know, we know he likes being the boss, and we know he loves all that. What does he really believe?

Nobody seems to be able to tell me.

Least of all him. You know, I mean, he is your classic, you know, sort of chameleon career politician, but he's very good at spreading a bit of optimism. He's very good at the right time spreading a bit of joy. And given how joyless so many of our leaders have been over the last few decades, you know, I kind of get it. And I think in 2019, he was the right person for that moment. Somebody needed it. It needed a Conservative majority. We needed to leave the EU. We can argue about whether we're taking the full benefits of it as a separate debate. But he was the right man for then. Whether he's the right man going ahead, I very much doubt.

So weeks before, months before, sort of, we had the lockdown. With the latest lockdown with Omicron. You had the South African head of the Medical Association on, Angelique Coetzee, who I watched her on your show and on others every week, you know, almost every night she was coming on, she was saying this is mild, this is not going to be, you know, we've got loads of cases here, we're way ahead, we've got the data. She was completely ignored.

It was astonishing. I mean, I also thanked her. I said, because unlike the Chinese, who took a long time to tell us what was going on, the South Africans identified this, informed the world exactly what it was, what its profile and makeup was. And then, as you— yeah, as I say, in a country that was 75% unvaccinated, she explained how mild its symptoms were. And the one or two intelligent people in Britain said, well, actually, in a way, you know, maybe Omicron— I'm talking back November, early December— you know, maybe Omicron becomes sort of nature's way of actually us getting through the other end of this. And the odd thing was, within a few weeks of me talking to her, Boris Johnson addressed the nation on Sunday night and used the word emergency 4 times. Remember it? You know, they were all getting ready to lock us down again. And then the rebellion began. And the rebellion began through some outspoken people in journalism just saying, whoa, this is bonkers. And some very principled Conservative backbenchers, 100 of them, standing up and protesting. So, so, you know, do we give Boris credit for the fact that all restrictions in England have been lifted?

Well, well, he sort of ignored the naysayers in the end.

In the end, he did, you know, because they all start—

the scientists, they Yes, all right, they are worried about a public health emergency, I'm sure they are, but you have to wonder how much of this is them wanting to sort of bolster their position, you know, gain some sort of importance. This is just leverage. As soon as this sort of thing starts— and she was there with, you know, you gave her the—

I know, no, she got it absolutely right.

She was bang on.

And no one's talking about it now. Yeah, no, no, I mean, she really does deserve a medal actually. She really does, you know. I just hope we've seen our last ever COVID press conference. I can't bear the thought of the Brothers Grimm, witty imbalance, I can't bear the thought of seeing this again.

Bloody see it all this winter again.

Well, we'll see. I think we've reached a point now with this.

No more lockdowns? Oh, it's not gonna happen again. You think we don't know?

And the great thing is Well, credit to Ron DeSantis. You know, Ron DeSantis in Florida proved there were different ways of doing this, far more than Sweden did even. So DeSantis deserves great credit. But of all the countries, we are the first now to come out of restrictions. And this just a few days after Justin Trudeau has behaved in the most authoritarian way in Canada. Oh, horrid. Yeah. You know, threatening to take people's pets and euthanize them. Really? Yeah. Freezing bank accounts.

What?

Smashing the windows of lorries to actually get into the lorries. To tow them away and get the protesters out. So, I mean, this is— I mean, these people that call themselves liberal are actually the most illiberal people. So I think we can say, yeah, you know, there were lots of mistakes made over the course of the last 2 years, and at times the government looked like it was following far more than it was leading, and it was sort of zigzagging all over the place. But in the end, we've got it right and we are leading the way, and we should be pleased.

And you think that when we look back on this, you think you know, sort of, I don't know, the court of, um, the final analysis will say that loads of mistakes were made, lockdowns actually were not the right thing to do.

Oh, I think that— I think the long-term view will be that the initial lockdowns, we had little choice. You know, we saw what was happening March 2020. Yeah, we saw what was happening in Milan. Uh, we had no idea about this virus, it was completely new to I don't think history would judge that badly or harshly. The fact that it went on forever and kept coming back, uh, and no, I think the long-term effects that we have seen— the Johns Hopkins University study suggesting that actually people's private behavior did more to reduce transmission than any government diktats— and I think the long-term health effects, uh, the millions of people who've not been screened for diabetes the vast numbers of people whose cancer diagnoses have been missed, the number of kids whose normal development and education has been seriously hampered by this.

It's never on the screen, you know, you get this sort of graph, it shows all the people in, you know, who've got the virus and all the people who are in hospital and all the deaths, but where's the cost-benefit analysis?

Well, lying down the screen, it's not that easy to do because we're dealing with subjectives. You know, I talk about children's development as young human beings. Quite difficult to measure things like that. You know, how do you measure mental health? I sometimes think we overuse the term mental health, but I think out of this pandemic, there are a lot of people who've been through a desperately difficult time.

What is it, a quarter, 30% have a phobia now? Or something? Because of lockdown?

There were two types of lockdown, weren't there? I mean, for those of us lucky enough to have gardens, not to live in the center of busy cities.

Boris.

Yeah, but I'm being honest. I mean, that first April, the weather was amazing. Yeah, but if you were stuck on the 19th floor of a high-rise block in East London with 3 kids, I mean, it must have been pretty blooming awful.

I can't imagine.

So I think the long term, you know, when we look back in the long term at this, we'll say it did more damage than good.

So you're often right about this stuff. So where does this ability, this crystal ball gazing ability, where does it come from?

Well, I'm not much good at anything else. I mean, the skill in life— I think the great thing in life is to try and find what you're good at, and if you're lucky enough to find what you're good at, stick to that. But I do think on a good day, I do have a reasonable sense of how, if you like, Middle England— how you want to put this, um, no offense to Welsh voters or anybody else, but you know, but you know what I mean. I think I have a— generally have quite a good sense of how people are thinking about things and will think about things. And, you know, you're not going to be right every time, but I do have a good sense of it. I also understand, after 20 years in the European Parliament, I completely understand how vast the disconnect between the Westminster political classes and their colleagues in the media. By the way, they're all interchangeable. You know, one minute you're a journalist, next minute you're a politician, and, and kind of back and forth. Um, they're all interrelated. The number of intermarriages that go on, relationships, extraordinary. Um, they spend their weeks together, they spend their weekends together. Nobody has a hobby. No hobbies. No one plays golf or collects stamps or has a huge passion. No, no, no, no, no. I believe they're really, really, in the main, a pretty dull bunch of people, in my opinion. And they are part of something called groupthink. They finish up agreeing with each other on virtually everything. I just don't think we'd have got to net zero as a modern example, if that wasn't the case. So I think I understand that disconnect, and perhaps it's that more than anything else that I got right once or twice.

We've got other friends elsewhere.

Well, once we'd achieved the main aim, I went into politics with a purpose. I went into politics with a mission, whereas most people— not all, but most people in politics— are there And it's, you know, when they're at university, it's what they want to do as their career. They do it for their lives. It's actually quite a relief to see some of the 2019 Conservative intake aren't from that background. There's some quite interesting—

I didn't realize that.

Oh, there's some quite interesting characters that have come in. There's a guy called Lee Anderson, Ashfield, up in Nottinghamshire. He's now an MP. He was a coal miner. And he said he was a Conservative MP.

Was he on last night?

He intervened in the debate in the House of Commons. Yes. Yeah. And he said, with no more lockdowns— he said no more lockdowns. Lockdowns, he said, in future, the only people that should be protected and kept away from society are the vulnerable, the elderly, and the Labour Party. Now, it was great, and it said something. Here was somebody who'd come into politics with a passion. It wasn't scripted. It was off the cuff. Well, you might have thought about it before, but it wasn't reading off a sheet of news, a sheet of paper. He was actually getting up and doing it, and it was just such a relief to see.

So you touched on the European Parliament. In 2010, you stood up and you said that the President of the European Council had the appearance of a damp rag and the charisma of a damp rag and the appearance of a low-grade bank clerk.

Where did that come from?

And in 2016, the 'You're Not Laughing Now' speech. What sort of You know, I can't imagine after something like that, you're standing at the water cooler with all of these sort of colleagues, if that's what they are.

No, they weren't colleagues.

No?

No.

You know, I mean, do you end up in the boiler room cupboard as an office? You know, are they spiking your drinks?

What?

How can you then coexist with these people?

There were, of course, people. There were, of course, decent people who were European federalists. Who accepted I had a different point of view, but they were in the minority. In the main, this was their religion, you know, and I was there in the temple daring to blaspheme in this way. So generally, the behavior of the other MEPs towards me was beastly. Um, the behavior towards me in Brussels, I mean, astonishing. There was a shop opposite the Parliament. I used to go in there quite regularly, half 7, 20 to 8, get a takeaway coffee to cross the road, go to the office. And for years I popped and got a coffee and sometimes got a sandwich. Um, and it was one day in 2016, I went in there, ordered a coffee. No, we're not serving it. So the coffee shop wouldn't serve me. My favorite pub, it was a good pub. We've had a great little pub, small pub, um, and I mean, you could spend a lot of money in there. We really did. And one day the boss just said, I'm sorry, you can't come in. We've been threatened. We've been threatened that if we continue to serve you, you know, we'll lose all the business from all the European institutions. Yeah, restaurants wouldn't serve me. So I mean, really, it really was. And the police have been told— and this is not a conspiracy theory— after that Van Rompuy speech that caused uproar, and I was fined for it, you know, 4 or 5,000 euros. Best PR bill ever. 3,000 euros, thank you very much. Um, I was tipped off. I was tipped off by somebody who worked close to the bosses of the institutions and told, 'Do not be out downtown at night. The Brussels police have all got your photograph. You will get picked up and they will find drugs in your pocket.' Really?

It's quite sinister.

And I remember 2 or 3 years later, a big European summit was on. I was going into an interview and the foyer of this building was the restroom for the off-duty police officers. And I walked through the door and 300 police officers all turned around and stared at me. It was extraordinary. So, so it was, you know, it wasn't nice over there. It was, it was, it did feel like combat of a kind. But you know what? I loved it.

You don't care, do you?

I know, I couldn't care less.

You're pretty thick-skinned.

Yeah, it's funny, you know, there's been a book just written about me by Michael Cricke. He spent 2 years working on this book. And, you know, he's interviewed a few people who've said disadmiraging things, um, nearly always political people who perhaps thought they were better than me. It didn't work out the way they wanted. Um, from what I can make out, the book's fair because it says this person says that about Nigel, this person says the other. You're the reader, make your own mind up. And yesterday everyone said to me, oh, have you read the book yet? 'You know, you've read all these reviews, isn't it?' I said, 'No, you know, I couldn't care less.' 'No, come on, come on, you have bought a copy really, haven't you?' 'No, I couldn't care less.' And I think there's something in all that. There is something in this about just being true to yourself. And I first picked this up in 2014. I was leading UKIP into the European elections. And with about 5 weeks to go, we hit the lead. We were topping the opinion polls.

I remember this.

The European elections. And I can tell you something, the only thing in life worse than being behind is being ahead. Because your head's up over the parapet and everybody's firing at you. And there was a morning, Sunday morning, it was the first time for at least a month Well, I wasn't up in London doing Sunday morning shows. I was at half 7, and I had my fix Sunday morning. It's my lawyer. Oh, goodness gracious me, what's this? He said, Nigel, if you haven't, you know, turned the computer on, if you haven't been out and bought the newspapers, just don't. Just don't. Just don't do it. Just ignore everything. Don't answer the phone. Have a morning off, have a day off, just ignore everything they're writing about you. So he said, if you read this stuff, it'll really start to damage your confidence. And that was the first time— before that, I kind of, you know, thought, what do they mean by that word? And that was the first time I've been given that advice, and it was actually very, very good advice. That doesn't mean that you close your ears. There are people around you who will say, well, you know, maybe didn't get that quite right or whatever, and that's fine. You know, trusted people that say those things to you, trusted people that you listen to. But if you reach a level, particularly in this country, you know, where we do have a much more combative press— but that's a good thing because we have a press that express a big range of opinions. I don't know what you do, I'm sure, you know, I'm sure if you're a Premier League footballer You know, after a roughish day, the last thing you should do is read the Sunday papers. So, you know, I just don't let it worry me.

So lots of what you do is, you know, sort of generating some public discourse. I know you might jump onto something and use it as a platform. So, you know, people coming over the Channel, you know, living in hotels, obviously these vaccine mandates, This was a big thing. I remember the doctor, uh, Medjokovic, in Australia.

Yeah.

Um, I remember you went to— you went over to—

I went to join the family. I did. Yeah. Was he— was he incarcerated in Australia? The general thing is interesting. So it was right at the start of lockdown, and it was clear to me the numbers that were coming were dwarfing the numbers that had come in 2019 and 2018. And yet literally there was no coverage. It was not being covered. At all by the broadcasters and others. And I could see that effectively we put a sign on the White Cliffs of Dover which said, 'All welcome, anyone can come,' you know. And, and so I got on to that because nobody else was doing it.

But it has— that, that is now in the mainstream now. You know, she's got pressure to— I don't know whether she is dealing with it, but she at least it's been talked about because of your coverage.

I did help make that a proper issue. Yeah, I did. And where I went, the mainstream media followed, to be honest. And it is a huge issue. And this year, goodness only knows what the numbers will be unless something really radical—

How many are coming across? I mean, that we know of?

Well, the official figure last year was 28,400. That's across the Channel. In the back of lorries, about 9,000 that we know of. Likely with the lorries, a lot, lot, lot more than that came. Um, with coming across the Channel, I would think a few hundred would have escaped. I don't think it's more than that.

Oh, okay.

Um, but it's a major issue. I've checked the figures. It's 87% young men, undocumented. Don't tell me these are refugees. This is part of it. This is part of a criminal trafficking trade, and it's getting these young men into Britain, many of whom will finish up in criminality, and many of whom will finish up in modern-day slavery. And no one seems to worry. No one seems to care.

It's just perpetuated by the sort of useful idiots.

Yeah, well, I mean, I believe that too. This year, is it going to be 50,000? Is it going to be 60,000? Is it going to be 70? I've no idea. It's going to be enormous unless something radical happens. But I think we need Brexit 2.0. I think Brexit 2.0 is we have to leave the European Court of Human Rights and completely change the incorporation of all of that into the Human Rights Act by Tony Blair in the late 1990s.

Who's going to do this? I mean, Jacob Rees-Mogg with the Brexit Opportunity Ministerial role?

No, it's not for him to do.

Boris interest?

It's not for him to do, but I'm pleased that Jacob's got that job, by the way. Very pleased.

And you think he's going to do stuff?

Well, I mean, for example, there's the Brexit dividend. I mean, for example, well, it hasn't existed particularly, although in geopolitics it has. The AUKUS deal with Australia being a very good example, the vaccine rollout being a very good example, the fact we're the first out of all restrictions. Brussels would have said, please don't do this. Had we still been members.

We would have been subservient and had to listen to them, I presume.

A degree of cooperation on European policy is the way they would have put it. In many of the economic areas, no. But it is interesting, I mean, just a week into Jacob Rees-Mogg getting that job, we're now talking about radically reforming some of the directives that hang over the British insurance industry.

I've seen that.

Over capital. There's one little example of something where it does actually at last appear. We're having a proper conversation about it, so we need to crack on and do that. When it comes to, as I say, the European Court of Human Rights, European Convention, all those things, this has to come from the Home Secretary. It has to come from Priti Patel, but it needs the boss to agree.

Is he interested? No, he's I mean, is he interested in any of that stuff?

No.

Was it not just a platform?

He's a metropolitan liberal. He is the metropolitan elite. You know, when he was Mayor of London, he even talked about amnesty for illegal immigrants. Um, and for all those watching, you know, you think, you know, we shouldn't even be discussing this subject. What's really interesting to discuss, but a really large number, increasing number of people and their families who've legally come to Britain and gone through the hoops and paid the money, they feel more strongly about this than you and I do.

Well, I talked to quite a few of them, and that's exactly what they say to me.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. We've got to get this right. Uh, Boris, all the while he's PM, I can't see it.

So with a lot of these sort of issues, the mainstream media, the BBC, the Channel 4s, they're not going to want to cover it. You, I know, have used— you've You've got GB News now, but prior to that you were really into social media. I think you've said YouTube has really pushed you on. How much has social media, YouTube provided the platform for you?

I'll tell you what, there was a period between 2004 and 2009, my second term in the European Parliament. There was a period in the middle of that, sort of '06-'07, '06-'07, when I seriously considered packing it up. I seriously considered walking away because I wasn't making any impact. Getting on Question Time once a year just wasn't enough to make a serious impact. And then suddenly YouTube arrives, the financial crisis of '08 comes, and suddenly speeches I'm giving— because I'm by now a group leader in the European Parliament— and suddenly speeches I'm giving in the European Parliament are appearing on the laptops and dealer screens of traders sitting in the City of London. And that was because a firm called Zero Hedge, big financial markets website, had picked up on the stuff I was talking about, picked up on the crisis. We're turning these into YouTube films and putting them out. And by the time we got to Herman Van Rompuy and the charisma of a damp rag speech, YouTube was flying. And without it, to be honest, I could never have done a quarter of the things that I've done. So social media really was the way that all of this happened. There's no question about that. Equally for Trump in '16, you know, Twitter was his way of getting around the back of the New York Times and CNN and all these people and reaching directly to vast numbers of people. But it is now those very social media companies who've now become tech giants on the most astonishing scale who are now horrified by what their inventions have led to. I mean, you know, democracy and free speech, very dangerous disease. Something's got to be done about it, clearly. They're controlling it all. They are now so powerful.

They're canceling.

They're now so powerful. And to think that Nick Clegg, you know, is now in this position is almost beyond belief.

Head of policies, you know, Facebook.

Well, he's basically joint second in the whole shooting match. Um, so it is disturbing, it is worrying, you know, the fact that whether you like Trump's style or not, but the fact that, you know, he was banned from Twitter on the same day that Kabul fell and the leadership of the Taliban was still tweeting is one example of what's gone wrong.

There are challengers still tweeting now.

Yep.

And they're still alive.

I know, I know, I know.

It's bizarre, isn't it? You would have been the equivalent, you know. Oh, Trump, the insurrection.

We've got these challenges, you know, we've got these challenges Rumble, we've got these challenges Parler, we've got these challenges Getter, we've got these challenges Trump's Truth Social. There are challenges now coming into the marketplace, but whether any of them are heavily capitalized enough to really take on the big companies Well, time will tell. I just don't know. But I'm deeply concerned about the impacts on free speech. And I think really, I mean, during the pandemic, so anybody that questioned lockdown policy, questioned jabs over the way— fifth jab's on its way for the over-75s, fifth jab, but the autumn is on its way— you can make of that whatever you want to. Um, but anybody that even questioned this stuff found themselves getting suspended, taken off. But that is worrying.

The whole thing is bizarre. Um, so, you know, I'm not, I'm not suggesting that, you know, for one second that illegal immigration is the way forward. Um, you know, we, we, we've just talked about all these people coming over the Channel. We had a lot of legal migration prior to Brexit.

We stopped it.

That's interesting. However, let's say there are 30 million people in the employment market, around that figure, in this country. According to the ONS, about 1, 1.3 of them have gone. Now, lots have retired, lots have decided through the pandemic that they're not going to do it anymore. I guess some have gone home, you know, back to, I don't know, where, wherever they came from in the, in the EU. What are we going to do to fill this big hole? You know, we've got a business, we're— let's say we're a small employer, maybe we've got 70 staff. Wages are rising sharply, we cannot find the right people, we can't find marketing people, we can't find salespeople, we can't find property managers. You know, we're having on our— in our construction company, we're having people problems finding you know, labor on site. You know, I've got— I'm friends with a daffodil farmer, um, you know, and he, he used to get sort of a lot of EU migrants to, to, to pick his fields. He cannot get— and, you know, a sort of somebody, a native, an English person— he can't get one of them even whilst offering them £400 a day to pick daffodils. He's had to let loads of and go to waste. How do we fix this?

What do we do? We can't go on. We can't go on relying on mass foreign labor. British population has risen by 8 million since 2000. 8 million. It's almost incomprehensible. 84% of that is down to immigration.

So 15%.

Yeah, it's a big number when it comes to getting GP appointments, when it comes to buying houses, when it comes to getting kids in primary schools, when it comes to— why have they put smart motorways in? Because the three-lane motorway with a hard shoulder can't cope with the number of cars on it. All this stuff. So the impact on our way of life has not been positive. It may well have been positive for many businesses, and it may well have been positive for many migrants who've come to Britain and done well, and good for them. But you can't have an unlimited flow of this. Look, I do think shortages of labor, shortages of materials, rising prices. This is part of the inflationary spiral that we're in. We basically massively increase the money supply with the same amount of underlying product, and that does include labor.

We've also shut half of the productive capacity, you know, of, you know, all the factories around the world, the offices, work from home, you know, there's all these— a lot of these supply chains have broken cars manufacturing, you know, that has to have an impact.

But look, it does, of course it does. But look, let me say this to you, you know, if you absolutely can't get daffodil pickers on the City Isles or the West Tipperary, Lincolnshire, fine. Um, if you absolutely can't get them, then I've no objection to you being able to get work permit labor. But that means no Social Security benefits, no health benefits. That must all be covered. And if it's a strict contract for 6 months or whatever it is, that, that's fine if we absolutely need foreign labor. But I do think there are two things we need to do in this country, uh, and they're both difficult. The first is we need to have a different conversation with young people about what they do with their lives aged 18. I have been a constant critic of this move just to send more and more young people to university. Tony Blair. Yeah, and supported by the Conservatives.

50%.

All the way through, all the way through. And so a large number of youngsters in their middle, late 20s feel horrendously let down by being promised this was the ticket to a great job and a great life. And in many cases, it simply hasn't been. So a reorientation towards trades, skills, jobs, things like that would be really important. I mean, take engineering for argument's sake. Quite difficult to run an engineering firm on British Labour.

I get it.

I do get the point you're making because we've de-skilled. We've de-skilled. We went for mass imported foreign labor. We drove wages down to the floor. The minimum wage in a lot of jobs became the maximum wage. And with that driving down of wages came a driving down of productivity. Our productivity fell below that of France and de-skilling. We have got this all completely and utterly wrong over 20 years. So a sense of reorientation of where young people go and what the merits of university education are. And that can be done. The second one is much harder. I don't get it, but there seems to be a very large number, significant minority of young people that don't want to work, that don't have material ambitions, that don't want to have a car. I want to have a car. I'm 18, 19, I want to have a car. I want to go to work and have money and have a car, you know. I want to buy some nice clothes, whatever it may be. But what about your mental health? Oh gosh, yeah, I'm probably the wrong witness on some of this stuff, but, but I don't get it. And I do talk to young people.

It's confusing, isn't it?

I talk to young people and they want to be happy. And they think a 4-day week maximum is a great idea.

But doesn't happiness— doesn't that sort of stem from fulfillment or from achievement?

Well, that's an incredibly old-fashioned idea. You're clearly a dinosaur. Look, I mean, of course there are different types in life and there have always been. You know, the hippie type, if you like, who's happy dropping out, not doing too much. And that, fuck it, if that's what they want to do and they're not causing harm to anybody, that's fine. But I do think there's a very large, a significant minority of young people who just do not have that work ethic, do not have the ambition to get on. And that's a huge cultural thing. And quite what we're going to do about that, I just don't know. I guess One thing we can do— I probably should wash my mouth out with soap and water after this— but is make it much more difficult to get benefits if people who are able-bodied and minded don't want to work. But can you imagine? Oh, can you imagine if anybody tried?

Um, yeah, you know, this is, this is going to lead somewhere, isn't it?

We—

yes. You know, wages probably haven't risen at the right rate for a long time, for a significant period, and productivity's dropped. I mean, there's—

that really worries.

Maybe there's a few reasons for that. Maybe there's been a lack of investment in mechanization and technology and all that sort of stuff. But yes, cheap, cheap labor coming in will be a big factor. But at the end of all this, industry is going to keep pushing the government. Big business, you know, the corporates, in the end the pressure is going to build and build. They're already talking to India about, you know, giving them sort of special visas. Something is going to give, and we're probably going to end up taking a lot of people from something— they're fine if they're on a— yeah, Dubai, they sort of ship them in on a visa. Yeah, I mean, and then, yeah, yeah, is that—

is that— I think we need to— I think we need to sort of, you know, think about different compartments here. One compartment are work visas and that is what they should be, not permanent, not permanent tickets to remain. The second are those who legally want to come and settle, sometimes with families, and that's great. And the fact we're going to have a non-discriminatory policy now, namely we won't favor EU citizens over Indians or Canadians or whatever, or Australians or whatever it may be, um, is good. And thirdly, it is what is a refugee? And what is somebody gaining the system? So they're the 3 areas and they're very important. We've got to get them right. We will need to use work permits in the short term. Clearly, your daffodil mate in Lincolnshire, is it £400 a day?

That's what he's trying to pay people.

He can't get them to pull it out of the ground. I'll find him a couple of people, they'll write that down.

We've had problems with brickies at £350 a day. Yeah, I mean, it's getting easier now, but, you know, during You know, so the lockdowns, obviously materials were difficult.

It's actually been a very good time for tradesmen and women, hasn't it? Yeah, it's been brilliant for them.

It's been brilliant.

If that's not an example—

the brickies, the roofers—

if that's not an example to lots of young people that actually getting a skill that lasts you through your working life can be a great ticket, I don't know what is.

So the Irish, Nice, Lisbon, they rejected both. But sort of later on, I think they went to Lisbon. You went to Ireland. How much do you think the presence of an Englishman had on that sort of final result?

Here's a story for you. So the constitution— this was the EU constitution, right? That's what it was called. Valéry Giscard d'Estaing drew it up, and the French had a referendum on it. And guess what they said?

No.

The Dutch had a referendum on it, and guess what they said? No. And I reckon most countries in the European Union would have said no. So they repackaged it as the Lisbon Treaty. They even boasted that by calling it a treaty not a constitution, it would avoid referendums apart from Ireland, who voted no. I was involved in that first referendum. I was involved in the support, and to some extent production, of a little booklet that went to every household in Ireland through the Irish equivalent of the post office. And the day The Irish voted no to Lisbon. The Taoiseach got up and said, Nigel Farage has hijacked Irish democracy. Um, and then Lisbon 2—

was it helpful?

Oh, oh, oh, look, Lisbon 2— by the time Lisbon 2 came, there was no tolerance. They were going to win that referendum. It didn't matter what they had to do. There was literally no media balance. Of any kind at all. And it was pretty tough, but fine, they got it through a second time. But what legitimacy? What legitimacy does it have? And then they thought, with their friends here, that they could do the same to us. And we've held out.

I didn't think it ever happened. I wasn't just— I wasn't for Brexit, you know. I'm a Remainer. I, you know, your other view you know, I'm completely on board with, you know, the economics, the sort of, I don't know, trade. And I think for you it's maybe more— there are other—

of course there are bigger factors. I mean, you know, the right to govern yourself, the right to live in a system that you can call democratic, I think is absolutely fundamental. We won't dwell on it, but what I would say to you on the economics is this: The Eurozone is 15%, 1.5% of global GDP. It'll be 14% next year. By 2030, it'll be lucky to be 7 or 8%. It is a diminishing, declining little backyard.

No, it was smaller.

Oh, absolutely. Yeah, it has been. But when we joined that, I don't know, because they're not all in recession. Well, two reasons. Two reasons. Countries like Italy I mean, just look at the decline, the level of economic decline in Italy, the level of economic decline in Greece.

Surely their GDP is growing, but just more slowly than—

It hasn't grown for 20 years. Has it not?

Italian GDP has not grown for 20 years.

And Greece is down 25% since 2008.

Is it really?

Yeah. And you can see even Germany, even Germany now looks vulnerable as we go ahead. Germany which was this great sort of post-war modern industrial country, begins to look a bit out of date. When you look at investment in tech, just for example, we are getting the lion's share, massively the lion's share of tech investment this side of the year.

Why do you think that is? I mean, you know, okay, you've got the Anglo sort of—

their models are out of date, they're out of date, the thinking's out of date, language Time zone? Language doesn't help them. Language doesn't help them. As English increasingly becomes the dominant global— or it could be Mandarin soon, but for now we have a huge advantage with that. They're falling behind. So the world's changing, plus you've got this massive transference of wealth, money, power, and influence from West to East that is going on. Now, some of it is worrying, but it is going on. So the world's changing very, very quickly indeed. Even places like South America, you know, where economies are so much bigger than they were 2, 3 decades ago. So I think outside the European Union, economically, we're in a much better position to be flexible and adaptable to some of those changes.

Well, let's hope that, you know, Jacob Rees-Mogg sort of—

well, but you know what, ultimately with Brexit, I said this all the way through, my entirety of my career, and through the referendum, I never ever wavered on this. I never said that Brexit was a guarantee of a land of milk and honey. What I did say was our destiny would be in our own hands. And I thought we had a better chance of getting it right for ourselves than big decisions being taken by someone you can't vote for and can't remove over half a 28.