They Tried To Cancel Me But Now I'm Free - Mike Graham

So what happened, mate? They didn't like something that appeared on my Facebook page. Do you know what happened with that Facebook post? I really don't. I said I didn't put it there. They wanted to investigate my phone. I decided it might not be the greatest idea to give my phone to a company that's been known to hack phones. They wanted access to bits of my phone that I didn't think they should be able to look at. As soon as I started talking to lawyers, they were like, don't give them your phone under any circumstances. I speak to people who are moving out of London now because London to them has become unrecognisable it's different because it is now full of people from somewhere else and it didn't used to be and the difference for me with New York and London was that all of the immigration in New York was people who wanted to be American in London and in other parts of Britain we've got these communities which are not British and they don't want to be British it's hard not to notice it This episode is sponsored by Avocado Green Mattress. They make certified organic mattresses, pillows and solid wood furniture, all created without harmful chemicals and with carefully chosen materials designed to support healthier living and better sleep. I've realized over time how much my sleep affects everything else, from my focus and energy to my mood during the day. When sleep is off, even small things feel harder than they should. 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They said, well, you're going to have to prove it that you didn't put it there, because we've got a complaint from inside the building, effectively, from somebody at TalkSport who tweeted out that I was a racist, effectively, or that I'd said something racist. And that sort of began a whole chain of events which went on for about a month, during which time I tried to prove to them I hadn't done it, which they weren't satisfied with. They wanted to see my phone, they wanted to investigate my phone, they wanted to investigate my iPad. I decided it might not be the greatest idea to give my phone to a company that's been known to hack phones with the hope that they wouldn't look at bits of my phone that I didn't want them to see, which was not anything to do with my personal life, but was everything to do with my work life, everything to do with people I had conversations with. So it became a kind of a fight between two sets of lawyers in the end, which never goes whether it's a divorce or whether it goes well for the lawyers goes well for the lawyers they did very well out of it i can tell you yeah um still paying them off um and so so just to get back to this thing about something was posted on your facebook thing which was a bit of a racist comment it was a bit of a racist comment it was basically it was a picture of some people on a tube train which i didn't take um and another picture which i had taken which looked like it had been somehow doctored and put on the same facebook post it also went on instagram because my facebook and my my Instagram are linked. And it was all about, you know, why there's so many non-white people on the tube. Words to that effect, you know, and, you know, a couple of swear words. And it was pretty offensive. But you didn't post it. But I didn't post it. And I was made aware of it on the morning of Monday the 20th, I think, of October. And I looked in and I thought, Christ, I don't know what that is. So I just deleted it. So it wasn't even really there for very long. And then I got a call after I'd finished my show, went home, got a call from my boss saying, you know, there's been a complaint about this Twitter post, you know, anything about it. And I said, well, I saw it this morning, but to be honest, I was doing my show right in the middle of when I was, you know, told that it was there. And I just got rid of it. And I didn't even see when it was posted. I didn't really investigate it. But what I can do is show you that it wasn't anywhere in my log, that I didn't, you know, my log proves that I didn't post it. I haven't got the picture in my cache of pictures, which I showed them. I was called into a meeting. I showed the head of HR and I showed my immediate boss. that part of my phone but then they wanted to go further and as soon as I started talking to cyber security people and as soon as I started talking to lawyers they were like don't give him your phone under any circumstances that's not I don't you don't work for them you know I'm an individual contractor I'm not on their staff they didn't pay me a pension they didn't pay me for being off sick you know I was a contractor they said you're under no obligation to do that and And they were asking eventually for access to my WhatsApp messages, for my emails. They wanted access to bits of my phone that I didn't think I should be able to look at. And I thought to myself, you know, they're going to hold all of this information. They're going to basically mirror the whole phone, forensically examine it. And they will be able to look at that, no matter what they say to me. There's plenty of that stuff on there to get you fired anyway, I imagine. And some of the people I was talking to that I'd had conversations with on WhatsApp were people that, shall we say, they don't like very much. because that's the business we're in. I'm a journalist. And aside from all of that, there are sources, people I talk to, people who give me information. My cyber security expert that I hired said, they can find this stuff. They can look on your phone and see what's been deleted and what hasn't been deleted. They can still find it. So there's no point in even deleting stuff. So I then went and got my own forensic investigation done by a completely independent team up in Manchester at the advice of this cybersecurity guy that I had. And they do stuff all the time. They work with the police. They work with law enforcement agencies. They're very reputable. I gave them that, and it wasn't enough. They said, no, we want to do it ourselves. And I just thought, you know, when we got to the point at that stage, it was like two, three weeks in, and I could just see there wasn't really any point. And from what was being said to the newspapers, there was a cohort of people at TalkSport and also in the building who thought I was a bit of a bigot, a bit of a racist anyway, and they weren't very happy with some of the things I said every day, which I'd never been told about, you know. So it all kind of came to an end. And eventually I actually asked them to fire me effectively because I was like, you know, you're going to, you know, shit or get off the pot, if you pardon the expression, because four weeks had gone by, I wasn't making any money. And according to them, I wasn't suspended. And so my lawyers were going, well, if you're not suspended, you should be paying him. Do you know what happened with that Facebook post? I really don't. No. I mean, the best I can imagine is that somebody accessed the account somehow remotely. We managed to find a few kind of logins from a year before, six months before, from places I hadn't been. I didn't have two-factor identification. the cybersecurity guy brought in said, I can't believe how unprotected your account was given how high profile you are and how high risk you are. You know, somebody from the cyber team at News UK gave me a memo when I was called in to say, this is how you can secure your account. And I was like, I was a bit fucking late now. You know, maybe you should have given me that last year. So I really don't know. And nobody knows. I mean, everybody on Twitter, you know, the land of experts, like it's easy to prove that you didn't do it. Just show them the login. and that somebody will be shown to have logged in. Well, there wasn't anybody there. And I don't understand enough about cyber hacking. I do know that people get hacked all the time. People are always going, I mean, people are getting their Twitter accounts hacked all the time. At the moment, you keep getting these messages from people saying, please vote for me on this podcast. And then something terrible happens, you know. Major companies are getting hacked every day. And, you know, if I was to be a conspiracy theorist, I would say somebody was out to get me. Because, you know, a couple of weird things happened to me in the previous two months. I had my back window smashed in my car and nothing was stolen, for example. And there was a case of wine in there, which, you know, might have been heavy for people to carry, but you'd think they might have taken a couple of bottles. It didn't take anything. It took an old jacket out of the back of the car. You know, stuff like that. And you just think this is all a bit strange. But it's so interesting when we're talking about that, because I used to work for TalkSport. Yeah. And for people who don't know, TalkSport is a radio station And that goes out to predominantly working class men who, in their vans, driving around, etc. Or in factories, warehouses, all the rest of it. And the idea that talk sport would be progressive, that they would be offended by something you said, just boggles the mind, really. Well, that would have been true maybe 10 years ago. But not now. Because now, the business of media is absolutely riddled with wokists. you know, people who have gone in who have completely changed the face, particularly of big companies. You know, I mean, that building is full of very, very different people. There's the Wall Street Journal, which has got some pretty left-wing people working for it. The Times is now a very left-wing newspaper. HarperCollins, the book publishers, also riddled with kind of, you know, Gen Z, Gen X, whatever they're called, Gen Z, I suppose, who complained once about my radio station, my show, which used to be pumped out in the elevators, in the lifts. They actually complained about it because they said all he does is talk about migrants and we find it offensive. So they stopped broadcasting it in the lift, in the building. And they started putting Virgin on instead, some nice music. And these were people who didn't work for like 18 months while COVID was on, just didn't bother coming to the office. And they're all these kind of trust fund kids. They're all kids who can work for hardly any money. And they're all woke. and I suppose that's what's happened to talk sport, you know. And yeah, you can understand people not wanting to work with a racist. But I mean, I've been working there for 18 years and nobody's ever called me racist. Nobody's ever said I was a racist. I've never done anything. I've had a few run-ins with a few organisations and I've had a few spats with people on social media. But, you know, I'm not a racist. I'm sorry, you know. But it got to the point where I suddenly thought, if they say you can come back to work, what will happen then? you know what kind of you know um safeguards will they put on me you know will they give me a series of things i can't talk about you know the station was under a lot of pressure from offcom we were kind of i was moving the station further and further to the right every single morning um and i was and i was you know pissing all over keir starmer every single day and they didn't like it down the street used to complain about me all the time you know um officially and say you know would would Mike Graham please stop calling the Prime Minister a liar? Well, no, because he's a liar. I'm sorry. And so then I started asking other people if he was a liar. So I got Kevin Bednock in and I was like, do you think Keir Starmer's a liar? She said, yeah, absolutely. Then every single guest I got, do you think Keir Starmer's a liar? Yeah. So, you know, there was kind of things going on that were suggesting to me that we were, you know, we were not going to be as free, perhaps, as I wanted to be anyway. and so and sometimes you just you know i've been fired five times in my life from various different jobs you know never for being a racist and in fact i always say to people well actually i didn't get fired for being a racist i got fired for not giving them my phone and they put out a statement which was pretty brutal actually after 18 years which basically said that they were gravely concerned that i didn't um want to help them out and with their inquiry and i reneged on it and i I didn't ever know you got anything. You know, they say that I agreed to go and see somebody to give them my phone, which I never actually did, because we never, ever got to the point where I said, I'm happy with the parameters of this. You know, I didn't want them to have my phone for, they wanted it for nine hours. So basically, you know, they didn't want to give me a substitute phone so that I could use that while they had my phone. And I'm thinking, so you're now going to give me another phone, which once I give it back to you, you're going to go through as well, because that's what you do, right? So I felt like they were sort of out to get me. And none of that was helped by the fact that they weren't paying me. And they sometimes would take days to respond to emails from my lawyers. You know, and I think they were in a real quandary. I think there was people that didn't want me to go because I was 50% of their output, you know, in terms of the money. I was making a lot of money for their YouTube channel. And all of that's gone now. But the wokest won. Isn't it bizarre in a way that you see media companies and a lot of companies as well, they prioritise what certain parts, very certain minorities of their employees think over profitability. You just look at talk radio now. It's been undeniably damaged by you leaving. Yeah. And you just think to yourself, this doesn't make any sense from a business point of view. No. I mean, what makes sense from a business point of view is to make it into a right-wing outlet, you know, which is what it started out as. You know, we kind of made our bones initially with the Brexit referendum and then the subsequent rows and, you know, the summer of, I guess it was 2019, you know, that stalemate summer when we went down into College Green and we were literally like the rebels. You know, we were like the bad boys of Westminster. We had this tiny little tent. I used to call it the Tent of Shame. and we had these two really good looking Spanish producers who would stop all the politicians as they were walking towards the great big edifice that was the BBC and Sky and, you know, all these foreign outlets and they would sort of manage to get them to come and sit in this tent where I would give them an absolute roasting, you know, which they would never, I'd never seen anything like it, you know. And it was great and it was fantastic and they had to walk past us both ways. You know, at one point, Alistair Campbell, I was actually broadcasting and I was sitting with my back to Parliament and I saw us to come and he leaned in and shouted in my ear, stop talking bollocks. You know, so we were really getting to these people. Michael Heseltine accused me of being impersonate. And I said, well, I'm sorry, Lord Heseltine, but if I'm going to be impersonate to you, then you must be superior to me, which I don't think you are. And he looked at me like, no one's ever spoken to me like that. The plebs are talking back. And I kept saying to them, and I had a great argument with Lisa Nandy about whether or not we had all this stuff still on YouTube. So we kind of made our bones by being a bit punk rock, I suppose, when it came to politics, which was brilliant. And that was where we made our niche. And then GB News came along and they kind of took an awful lot of our people away, a lot of the producers, some of the presenters, tried to set up in a similar way, but they've now had to kind of calm themselves down a bit as well. and they've gone a bit kind of vanilla, it seems to me. I'm still glad they're there. But, you know, as time went on, then we got into COVID and we were really, before GB News was even thought about, we were the only people saying, you know, what's this lockdown all about? You know, why have we been told to wear a mask? Why, when you stand up in a pub, is it different to really sit down? You know, what's a scotch egg? You know, all of that stuff. Nobody else was asking the questions. Not anyone. I mean, you guys might want to be. We were. You mean not in the mainstream? In the mainstream, nobody was doing it, you know. Well, this is an interesting part of the conversation because I see you've been forced out or whatever, not renewed, whatever the fuck the term is. Yeah, they fired me, basically. Right, right. But now you've got your own YouTube channel. It's crushing. You're doing really well, mate. We're doing so well. And I mean, I'm in awe of you guys because I don't really know much about YouTube, you know. Neither do we, mate. We have younger people. You don't need to worry about it. I mean, your numbers are spectacular. And when I first met you, I don't know how many years ago it was, you had that little studio in Highbury. And I remember coming up there to talk to you. And I just remember thinking, this is really a cool thing. But you have the kind of arrogance, in a way, of the mainstream media when you're in it. And now I'm learning from the other side what it's like to build something. It's actually really exciting. I'm loving it. I mean, you guys have done spectacularly well. And I take my hat off to you because I can see also how difficult it is as well um but yeah i mean i can't quite believe how quickly we shut up we go you know it's again nothing compared to some of the numbers that you guys do and others yeah but but i've been at it for eight years yeah so i mean we've we've we've got nearly six million views in four five weeks you know um we've got 128 000 i think uh subscribers we're working on trying to build up you know there's tricks of how you build all that up but the reaction has been amazing you And I know that Talk has got different outlets, not just YouTube, so it's not really fair to compare. But we're doing four or five times what they're doing, just on the live shows. And so I'm really excited about it. Well, this is the thing is, you know, talent is talent. And the big platforms, the big mainstream media organizations, they used to have this lock on, well, it doesn't matter how talented you are, if we don't put you on our show, you're not going to get seen and you're not going to get heard. It's not really the case anymore. And so this whole thing about, like, cancelling people, it's just like, huh? Is it like, I'm sure you saw with me in Question Time, there's all these morons on Twitter running around trying to say, oh, I can't believe they've had him. Like, Question Time need people who have an audience. Well, you've got a bigger audience than Question Time, right? You know, and these people, these bozos who kind of see themselves, I don't know what they see themselves as, as kind of media commentators going, you know, why have they got him on again? He's always on. And well, because he's actually rather good and entertaining to watch and he has a view. He doesn't just sit there worried about what, you know, his party's going to say, you know, when he gets back to the office, you know? And Question Time needs people like you. I mean, I was watching some sort of promo the other day for, I can't remember why I was on ITV, but they put this promo on for some new game show they're doing, hosted by Rob Brydon. And you go, you know, is he the only guy that works in television? You know, everything seems to be involving Rob Brydon or that other bloke, Bradley Walsh. You know, it's all the same people. You know, how Ed Balls has got a job working on breakfast television, I'll never know. And they're so, they're just so shit, really. I mean, I can't think of a reason to watch regular TV, and I really don't. You know, I'd rather watch an old episode of Vera, which says a lot more about me probably than I should give away. But, you know, there's literally no reason to watch breakfast TV in mainstream media. There's no reason to watch. I mean, I watch Laura Kunzberg just because it's kind of cringe and you can't quite believe what people are saying on it. And, you know, this week's was particularly funny with old Zach Polanski, you know, and I've never had a drink and I've never taken any drugs. He runs in a very weird way is all I know. But you're absolutely right because, you know, now the ordinary people because of COVID, because of the Brexit sort of fit up, because of the way that politicians now lie to us all the time as a matter of course, people have seen through all that. And they've seen through the mainstream kind of Westminster bubble. And they're not interested in watching the questions that come from journalists anymore Because I mean I was on Liz Truss show the other day And I was saying you know they not curious Journalists aren curious anymore They don ask questions that people want them to ask They just kind of parry things and kind of knock things around and it all like a bit of a kickabout and then they'll go to the pub later. You know, they're all mates. I don't want to be mates with politicians. I really don't. I don't really like them. I'd rather just ask them difficult questions and watch them squirm, you know. And it's quite funny because there's, you know, an awful lot of MPs who used to come on my old show who are still kind of nervous of coming on the new one because they're not sure if I'm a racist or not. And it's like, well, maybe you can make up your own mind. You know, you used to come on my show. What's the difference? The news doesn't just tell you what's happening. It often tells you what to think is happening. And these days, the biggest red flag isn't what's said, it's what gets left out. That's why I use Ground News. It's the only app that compares how the same story is covered across the political spectrum and show you what whole audiences are not being told. The Blindsport feed is one of my favorite features. Every day, it flags upwards of 20 stories that are being ignored either by the left or the right. Follow along at ground.news slash trigonometry. Like this, a new study from UC San Diego found that climate change cost almost twice as much as we thought because earlier estimates left out damage to the oceans. That's a pretty big update and yet no coverage. literally zero, came from right-leaning outlets. All this, a recent Gallup poll found trust in the media has hit a record low, with just 28% of Americans saying they trust newspapers, radio, and TV to report the news accurately and fairly. 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But Mike, you're someone who's got, has had a very privileged position in the media. Because I knew you from way back when you did talk sport. But you started off as a Fleet Street Journal around four decades ago, the golden age of newspapers, tabloids, to what they have now become, which is, let's be honest, a bit of an irrelevance. Why do you think that's happened? And how did you see the change happen from the moment you started to where we are now? Well, I think a lot of it has to do with the different kinds of media and the way that people now consume it. and the fact that you don't really buy a newspaper now unless you're probably over 60. I mean, my kids who range in age from, you know, 19 to 35, they don't buy newspapers, you know. They wouldn't, I mean, I think a newspaper's put in the fire and lighting it, you know. And I think also the nature of the power of those newspapers has kind of rescinded. You know, The Sun used to be the paper that made prime ministers. Now, it's not really politically particularly powerful because the whole business is fragmented. And different people are in it as well. When I started, it was a very working class job to be a newspaper reporter. You didn't go to Oxford. You didn't go to a PPE degree and come out with a load of your mates and end up working for newspapers with a very posh accent. People were tradesmen. They didn't go to university. They left school when they were 16. They went and trained to be journalists. They'd go to a journalist college. They'd learn shorthand. They'd learn the law. They'd learn all sorts of other tricks of the trade that they would have to then use, and they'd be paid as a kind of slave, practically. It's an indentured slave. It was a better time. It was. It was. But they learned about how to do the job properly, and they'd get sent out with, say, the chief reporter. They'd go and cover the local courts. Nobody does that anymore. You know, literally there are no local newspapers. You know, where my kids grew up down in Sussex, the local newspaper is now one of those storage units, you know, for, you know, putting your stuff in when you get thrown out of your wife's house. And I say we're the only people... That's a middle-aged comment. Those are the only people. Although my daughter actually once had to put stuff in. She broke up with a boyfriend and she was moving. And I heard some amazing stories from the woman who was running the storage facility, including one where a guy used to come in every Friday night into his storage unit, open the door, go inside, come out dressed as a woman and then go out and then come back sort of in the early hours of the morning, dressed back into a man and go home. Anyway, that's very by the by. And so I think as newspaper barons, I mean, you know, the Murdoch Empire, for example, is still incredibly powerful, but not really because of newspapers anymore, because of the Fox TV network. You know, basically that makes so much money, both from the football and also from, you know, the news and the politics. You know, the British operation has become slightly irrelevant. You know, it's still there, but the sun isn't as powerful as it used to be. The Times seems to me to be a kind of apologist for the Labour government. Doesn't really ask very many questions at all. And it's all become a bit middle class and it's all become a little bit kind of twee, I would say. and I think most people in Britain don't like that. Most people in Britain, and I don't actually mind Giles Curran, you know, he's quite a funny guy and says some quite outrageous things, but most people would not like Giles Curran if they met him. If you saw him in a pub, you wouldn't expect to have a long conversation with him because he's quite posh, you know, he comes from quite a wealthy background and all the people who work for those kind of broadsheet type newspapers and even some in the tabloids now have been, you know, overeducated. They've never really experienced much in terms of life. I mean, when I worked even at the Daily Mirror, they had a massive operation in Manchester, you know, because the north of England was an important place. Now, they have hardly anyone there. They've probably got one person in the north of England. And so, you know, it's all become very London-centric. It's all very kind of managed decline. It feels like managed decline. It feels like they're just kind of trying. Every year there's more budget cuts. They sack more people. They try and save more money. You know, their business is dying. It is dying. And one of the things, though, is you talk about the middle class thing. I think there's so much of that. Like when I was on questions time, the thing that actually shocked me the most was there was a point at which one of the panelists said, well, America is a democracy, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And like a good third of the audience just openly laughed. China is a dictatorship. The US is a democracy. It remains our closest military ally. And I go, well, you probably don't like Donald Trump if you're acting that way. Fair enough. People are allowed to not like President Trump. But he won the last election with winning the popular vote, the Electoral College, every swing state. I mean, it is a democracy. Yeah. But in their heads, they're so brainwashed into this way of thinking. And then there was another girl who was like, oh, yeah, no, we shouldn't do business with America. We need to do business with China. I'd rather be looking at China right now than I would America. At least China, we know what's going on with them. America, it seems like. Trump, especially. Every day, something wacky comes out, you know, whether that's buying Greenland or the stuff happening with ICE. So personally, I'd much rather be in China's bed at the moment than America's. But is that a generational thing as well with these younger people? I mean, you've probably seen it. There was a thing going around yesterday on Twitter from America where they were asking youngish women, supposedly feminists, whether they thought that women's rights were better in Iran or in America. And without question, they all thought Iran. I mean, I used to say when I was doing the old talk sports show that I think that the world is actually evolving in reverse and people are getting stupider instead of getting more intelligent and more kind of sophisticated. people is really stupid and thick because they're driven there's an old George Carlin clip which you've probably seen where he says if you're driven if you identify yourself by an ideology then you've already lost the plot because you're no longer actually being true to your own self you don't really have any beliefs you just kind of have read some and you think oh that's good because all my friends agree with that so I'll just say that and there's a bit of that in the media I think that's again where you get um you know I would go on I would go on the radio and and piss all over the Times front page because they were talking about some kind of clean air campaign, you know, which everybody knows is a complete con, right? And I would say so. And, you know, that didn't make me very popular in the Times building, you know, and people didn't like it. But I was like, I'm not going to be part of this media conglomerate where everybody's supposed to think the same thing. Obviously, you're not going to be really awkward about it and start, you know, dissing the products and all of that. But surely, to Christ, you can have a disagreement about what they're saying, you know? Well, you know the thing about ideology. I always say ideology is how you know what to think about things that you don't understand. Yeah, about everything. But especially about things you don't understand. It gives you a template for what you're supposed to believe about something as complicated as climate change, right? And by the way, that's an interesting one, because net zero, I mean, the tide is turning so quickly. And suddenly everyone's talking about how net zero is total stupidity, industrial suicide, as I call it. Like that whole agenda is going away in a heartbeat. Yeah. But yet so many politicians like Douglas Alexander, who was on with you, are still clinging to it. Like it's some kind of wreckage going over a cliff and they're kind of going, yeah, but this is what we have to do because everybody knows. I mean, I was listening to, because of the time I get up now, you're like this, farmers farming today because it's probably better than the Times radio that time of the morning. But they had some woman on talking about how there's a problem with raspberries and strawberries, and she said, you know, obviously the thing that's most important is we have to know what the carbon footprint is of growing fruit in this country. And I'm kind of going, well, it isn't actually. You know, what's important is how much fruit you're growing and how much fruit you can grow and whether you can, you know, be competitive. You know, it's not, you know, the carbon footprint of strawberries is ridiculous. I mean, what are you talking about? You know, but if you try and tell them that it's all about sustainable this and sustainable that and, you know, drive an electric car. There's fury now about people who are having to pay, you know, road tax for an electric car. I find hilarious, you know, because we said it at the time, you know, when people stop buying petrol cars, they'll be out of pocket. So they'll need to come after you for the money. Well, I'm still getting an electric car because it's the right thing to do. And now they're all going, oh, shit. You know, I'm getting taxed. Welcome to the real world. You know. But the thing that I find particularly frustrating, look, net zero and all of this, but it's also as well, it's just a very powerful symbol of how they ignore ordinary people's concerns. Yeah. Most people in this country do not care about net zero. No. That is a preserve of the upper middle class who, quite frankly, don't have enough to worry about. I talk to ordinary people, regular people who watch trigonometry, they come up, they always want to have a conversation with me. When they talk, what they're concerned about is they can't afford to buy meat in the supermarket. They've got a family of three. They have a regular job. Both people are working. Once you've paid rent, once you've paid gas, once you've paid your bills, your council tax, the road tax, what are you left with? That's what actually concerns people. And we're not having an important conversation, which is affordability. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I say this a lot. You know, nobody talks about food inflation. And when they do, they say, oh, you know, food inflation is really bad. That's 5%. You know, is it bollocks? You know, if you look at the prices just as I just go to the supermarket, you know, things that used to be, I don't know, a packet of pasta for 50p, it's now like 125. And you go, well, when did that happen? You know, it's literally gone up by, you know, a factor of more than twice what it was. And it's things like that, that people say to me, and they used to say it to me a lot when I was on talk, you know, the weekly shop has gone from 100 quid to 200 quid, and they're not buying anything extra. In fact, they're buying less. And so you're right. And, you know, one of the things that one of the great Labour lies is, you know, we've got wages going, wages have gone up since we got in. Well, no, they haven't. They've gone down unless you happen to work in a public sector. You know, if you're a train driver, if you're a nurse, if you're a doctor, if you're a copper, all of you have been given a pay rise. But, you know, in the private sector, people are worse off than they've ever been. And everything costs more. And more and more people are contributing nothing to the economy. And fewer and fewer of us are paying tax to pay for all of them. And it's not a sustainable, I mean, talk about sustainable economy. That is not sustainable, right? And that's it. And that's it. And that's what ordinary people feel. They feel as if their concerns are not being addressed. So the elites are talking about net zero and being carbon neutral. The guy who drives a van, he just wants to be able to pay his bills on time and make sure his kids don't go hungry. And more and more, ordinary people are looking at their wages, looking at their outgoings and going, they're not mathing here, mate. And look at Rachel Reeves, you know, the world's most useless chancellor. Today, and I don't know when this is going out, but this week anyway, is the beginning of a new alcohol tax. The alcohol tax has gone up. We talk to pub owners quite a lot. and on something like a £7.50 pint, your landlord's making about 47 pence because everything else is going out either in tax or in overheads or in supplies or in staffing. You know, all of the things that contribute to you running a business. And yet what she's doing is squeezing it even more and then making out that she's doing them all a favour by not imposing extra business rates on them. And some of the business rates now are outlandishly ridiculous. You know, people running businesses are saying to me, I think I'll just chuck it in and just not have a business anymore because it's too complicated. It's too expensive. And the tax is ridiculous. You sum it up in the two parts of what you said there, because say the government puts a tax on sugar and cigarettes and alcohol with the claim. I mean, it's about raising money, obviously. But the claim is if we put up the tax on these things, consumption of these things will go down. Right. So what happens when you put a tax on business? what happens business goes down yeah the economy goes down yeah and the reason as you say the reason that all of this is happening is and more and more taxes will carry on is because we actually can't afford the lifestyle that we have we can't afford the welfare spending we can't afford to have millions of people not working we just can't no and the highest unemployment figure in five years is going to be announced this week right right because more and more people are getting laid off fewer and fewer young people are able to get jobs um i was listening to uh something on the way down here, the student loan business is now also in crisis. There was a woman saying that she'd gone and done a degree, taken a loan out for $39,000, done another postgraduate degree for another $11,000, so $49,000. She finished in something like 2022, but she now owes them, despite having paid them back money since she had a job, $67,000. And you go, well, how does that work so you are now owe them more money than you did when you finished your university sort of you know education and yet you've been paying them so they're literally ripping everybody off every single stage and i'm i'm you know i'm old enough to have been fortunate enough to go to university when it was free um and i didn't even take advantage of it because i only did two years i got kicked out of there as well um but you know um i my youngest son isn't going to university he's got a job he came back on Friday night with a new BMW Z4 and I went where did you get that from he said I just traded he had a mini traded it in he's got a job and all of his mates who have gone to uni are going I'm the one getting education you seem to have all the money you know how's that working and he's not making a fortune but he's working and so in three years time when his mates are all coming out of uni with £50,000 loans that they own and they're going to start jobs for nothing they're all going to be in the crap, you know? And he's going to be flying high probably by then he'll have a better car. I don't know. But, you know, if I was advising anyone's teenage kids, don't bother going to university. What's the point? There are some subjects where, you know, if you're going to do advanced mathematics or whatever, there's definitely some subjects that you would. But Blair's idea that you need half the country to go to university to do fucking media studies. Well, he just made it into a business, didn't he? I mean, that's effectively it. And then when the foreign students stopped coming because they couldn't bring seven members of their family with them, they pulled the rug. And now they're all moaning that they haven't got enough money. Right. Well, how about you don't pay the vice chancellor, you know, $700,000 a year for doing bogger all? The whole country just doesn't work. I mean, I've never seen it so bad. It's absolutely hopeless. 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That's R-A-L-S-T-O-N dot A-C forward slash apply. Speaking of which, I mean, that is, if you want a ray of sunshine and hope, I don't know, a ray of sunshine definitely doesn't apply to one word to say, but some hope is things are so bad, now you see politically, I mean, it's all moving in one direction, isn't it? It is. Yeah. And I find it fascinating how it's kind of fragmenting up as well, because you've got the left fragmenting up into the Greens, who are probably the most bizarre party I think I've ever seen. I don't even know. I mean, it's all about net zero. They never mention it. You know, especially the Green Party. You go, well, haven't you got some policy on climate change? It's mostly about Gaza now. It's mostly about Gaza and it's mostly about the rich and, you know, giving everybody free drugs and a free house, you know, and you kind of go, really? Okay, then. And then the right is interesting. What about your party? Your party? Yeah. I mean, that's hilarious, isn't it? I love them. Is that still around? They're adorable. Yeah, they are Is it still around though? It must be. Yeah, but nobody knows who's running it though. I don't even know if it still exists. I think it does. It does. Yeah. Well, Zahra Sultana still exists. She exists. And she still gets up in Parliament and talks absolute rubbish, which she did, I think, a couple of weeks ago. And I think she was, was she not booed somewhere where she got up and said something? I can't remember. Your point is the left's fragmenting. The left's fragmenting. So Labour are basically finished in my sense. I mean, Pekir Starmer reassured us all at the weekend that he's not going anywhere, to which there was a collective groan around the country. But the guy is literally an out-and-out liar. He went to China, nobody knows why. He said that we've got billions and billions of pounds worth of investment coming into Britain, which isn't true. He went to Japan to see the motorcycle-riding former heavy metal drummer, who's now the Prime Minister, and didn't seem to get anything out of that. I don't know what he's four they're going to lose they're not even going to come second in the by-election uh up in manchester um and these young people like there was that sort of smelly looking woman on question time who came out and said that she was for the green party right sitting next to another bozo who was also looked like he did a good wash and um these young people you can see why they sacked them they think it's the answer though they go yeah you're rich so we're going to take your money and we're going to give it to these people who haven't got any money and we're going to take the house that you rent out to some people because, you know, it's a little bit of extra income for you. We're going to make that impossible for you to rent out. So actually there's going to be a housing shortage before anything else happens. But Labour haven't got any answers here. You know, watching Douglas Alexander with you, you just think, you don't know what you're talking about. You're so far off beam. And he's one of the good ones. Yeah. Douglas Alexander. He's not a stupid guy. No, he's a small guy, very talented in many ways, I would say. But I guess what I think Francis mentioned that when you were in his show, Francis Foster Sorts Your Life Out, which you should check out. That was great, by the way. I really enjoyed that. You enjoyed that? Yeah, I did. I was a bit worried, though, because when I sort of got home, I said, I didn't say anything bad. I don't think I did. Not as bad as the things you've already said. No. Yeah. But he mentioned that you were talking about how basically the left's given up on the country. The left hates, basically, the country and the West. They think we're all evil, racist, bigoted, whatever. Yeah. But the right's also given up because, you know, it's had so much mass immigration, the country's fucked, country's ruined, whatever, which, to be fair, the country's in a bad shape. But I guess your point is we can still recover. I hope so. I mean, I think if you take the view that we can't recover, you'd have to be one of those people who just leaves, you know? And I know a lot of people that have, and a lot of people that are planning on doing it, and a lot of people who are just going, you know, I can't take it anymore. And there is, you know, the only kind of, The only thing that can save it, I suppose, is for people who do pay a lot of tax to stay here. But the only kind of insulation from the madness is to make a lot of money. And the more money they take, the less you feel like hanging around, you know. But yeah, I mean, let's face it. I mean, there's no doubt the Conservative Party ruined Britain, you know, from the 14 years when they got in. I mean, Blair had set it up pretty well for ruination. and he recreated all of these, you know, kind of shibboleths, you know, the Supreme Court over here and closest to the EU and all of these migration sort of targets and all of that. And the Tories came in and just completely fucked it even worse, you know, for years. And people say Boris Johnson was, you know, a great prime minister. Do they? Yeah, they still do in the Tory party. Oh, yeah. Some of them still say it. In the Tory party. Yeah. And they think, I mean, at one point when he wrote his latest book, I think it was a couple of, maybe six months ago or so. Anyway, he was knocking around and people were saying, maybe it's time for Boris to come back. And I was going, no, the ordinary people who actually voted for him and liked him actually think he ruined the country. You know, he screwed up on immigration, he screwed up on Brexit, he screwed up on lockdown. Everything he did basically just turned to shit, you know. And so when Starmer got in, I mean, I have some sympathy for him, which you'd be surprised to hear, because everything was broken. There's nothing working. The Home Office doesn't work, the NHS doesn't work, the trains don't work, the roads are crap. There's literally nothing. But they're making it worse, making it far worse. And so I think people see reform as the only kind of saving grace. I mean, yes, there's that splinter off to Advance UK and there's the Rupert Lowe people. But, you know, reform really are the only hope. and I don't even know if that's going to work. I think we have to give it a chance. I think you have to kind of, I mean, I'm not party political. I never really have been. I've only voted once in my life and that was in 1979 and I voted not for Margaret Thatcher, believe it or not. I voted for Labour because I was at university at the time. And so I've never voted because I think actually, it's a bit like, what's his face? He used to say it, voting only encourages them. but so I'm not happy I'm not a sort of bedfellow of fandom, I don't like to go these people are the answer, you know they must get in because that's the only future we can have, I do think they're the only thing that are likely to be the answer and I think Nigel Farage genuinely is a decent guy and I think he's a great leader and I think he would make a great Prime Minister but I sometimes wonder if he even wants to be Prime Minister because, you know, he talks about his life now being completely impossible. I don't know if you saw those idiots up in Newcastle at the weekend, you know, banging on the window of the restaurant he was in. And, you know, he gets death threats every day. He's got security detail. I have to go check out everywhere he goes before he goes in there. You know, when James Whale was still alive, he went down to see him and was going to go to this pub. And they had to send these security guys in two hours ahead of time to make sure he was going to be safe in the pub. So, I mean, you know, and you do worry because the leftists are so deranged. You saw those people in Newcastle, a bit like in America, you know, they're violent, they're nasty, they're horrible. They genuinely believe that they're on the right side of God and anyone on the right is somehow satanic. They actually believe that. And I worry about that as well, you know, in terms of my kids' future, what it's going to be like here in 20 years. I don't know. But I thought, if we look at causes for optimism, I think that the emergence of reform is a good thing. I'm going to be honest with you. I think the emergence of the Green Party is a good thing. There is that side of the political left, who I think are nuts, whatever else, but at least their politics are being catered to. And I think what we're seeing now, actually, with the emergence of these news parties, is a more representative form of politics. Because in the old days, you had Conservative or Labour. And you go, how much does, I don't know, a right wing libertarian have to do with an old school traditional, dyed in the wall Tory? And, you know, the old school lefties with progressive liberals. So maybe what we need are these more kind of smaller parties, as it were, but are actually more representative of people in general. Yeah, well, you might say that if they get in, though, because, you know, they'll have this place off you. You know, you'll be full of illegal migrants living here. You might be able to have the recording studio, everybody don't make any money, you know. Yeah, I mean, it's interesting. I mean, I saw Jeremy Corbyn as one of the people leading the charge on facial recognition cameras, which would be something I imagine that we would agree with him on, that, you know, we don't want these facial recognition cameras all over Britain, you know, because that gives an awful lot of power to people that probably shouldn't have it. I don't agree with Jeremy Corbyn about pretty much anything. But, you know, maybe there is that kind of, you know, genuine place where if people are proper politicians and they do believe in something, trouble is I don't think Zach Polanski is the answer. I don't think he believes in anything. I mean, he's a very strange character. But yeah, I mean, I don't have a problem with having a wide choice. And I think that the two-party system doesn't work. I think we know that. I saw it in Scotland, actually, interestingly, because I worked in Scotland for about five or six years, maybe more. And Labour had had a lock on Scotland forever. I think the Tories had one MP famously every now and again. But before the Scottish National Party came along, Labour basically guaranteed that they would always get minimum 48, 52 MPs, almost all of them, for Scotland. There'd be a couple of Lib Dems, you know, what's his name, Kennedy, Charlie Kennedy, was up in the very yellowy, huge area, but hardly even lived there apart from a load of cows and sheep. But they took it for granted. You know, the people who came from the Scottish Labour machine, people like George Robertson, you know, had constituencies in Glasgow, some of the poorest places in the world. And they did nothing for them because they just took it for granted that every day when they went down a polling station, they'd vote Labour. And then suddenly the SNP came up with the idea of independence and they suddenly went, oh, I know, let's have devolution. That would be good. And then they lost control. And now Labour in Scotland are in a terrible place. You know, not least because Westminster Labour are doing so badly, but because the SNP are now the sort of main power in Scotland and they're not very good. But you can see that things can change. And, you know, if reform manages to bust open the two party system, who knows what happens after that? Well, that's an interesting question. I saw Jeremy Clarkson wrote a piece. I never thought I would say the words. Jeremy Clarkson wrote a really interesting piece, but he did. No disrespect to Jeremy, by the way. I just don't think of him as a writer primarily. But he wrote a piece which I thought was really interesting. He kind of said a lot of people think if reform get in, they think the day reform get in, Britain is going to turn into an Enid Blyton postcard. It's not going to happen. No. Well, Britain, again, it's too far gone for that, to be honest. I mean, I speak to people who are moving out of London now because London to them has become unrecognisable. You know, you probably also saw the piece of video from Richmond at the weekend. we played it out this morning on the show, of these two guys, one's got a hammer, smashing in the window of a jewellery shop, and they literally just tear the window out and just start lobbing a load of jewellery into a bag, and then they run off down the street. And, you know, yes, of course, and people will say, oh, but, you know, there was always that kind of thing going on. And yes, there was, you know, crime was always a thing in the middle of London. And, you know, the first time somebody tried to mug me, I think it was, you know, it was in the 70s, I was walking home from seeing my girlfriend. But it's different now, and London is different. How is it different? It's different because it is now full of people from somewhere else. And it didn't used to be, you know? It used to always have, as every big city has, it had an attractive kind of immigrant aspect to it. But now, white people are in the minority. 38%, I think, of white English in London, you know? And I would say in the last five or six years, it's become noticeably a different city. And not just because of the colour of people's skin. But, you know, I mean, I live in South East London, and I'll go to the big supermarket there, and I can walk through the entire supermarket and spend about 30 minutes there and not hear anybody speaking English. You know, they could be speaking Lithuanian. They could be speaking, you know, Ukrainian. They could be, you know, it's not a question of whether they're all not white. But you don't see very many English people there anymore. and a lot of people find that difficult to cope with because it's you know you look at the old shows like um you know the Beatles for example from the 60s and this is when I started when I when I first was aware of you know what London was like and when they filmed that show on the top you know they filmed Let It Be or whatever on the top of the Soho rooftop you know and you see all the people down below and everybody's white and I know that that might be an unfair comparison to make. But, you know, I went to New York in the 80s. And the difference for me with New York and London was that all of the immigration in New York was people who wanted to be American. You know, it was people who said, if you asked them, you know, where are you from, they would say New York. You know, famously, I got in, I used to know, I used to work for the murder organisation back then, and we used to use these cars called Skyline Cars. And quite a lot of Russians used to drive them. And I got in, there was a guy called Charles Bremner, who had been the Moscow correspondent for the Times and he and I got in one of these cars and he was very kind of quite pompous because at times people tend to be and he obviously you could tell by the way this guy was speaking that he was Russian and so Charles Bremner said to him so where are you from and he went you're Jersey and that was where he was from he wasn't from Russia anymore and so their kind of the American dream for them was to go to America become American you know get a house get a car put your kid through college, put a flag of the stars and stripes outside your house, and it didn't matter where you were from. Whereas now, I think in London and in other parts of Britain, we've got these communities which are not British, and they don't want to be British. And it takes us back to that argument you made about Rishi Sunak on Question Time. Yeah, but the distinction is good, though, because, you see, I'm, for example, my parents are both Scottish, right? So I don't really see myself as English. I was born in London, but I do see myself as British. But I kind of see myself as Scottish and British, rather than English and British. And I think that's an interesting distinction. Well, see, one of the... I mean, there's so... First of all, there's so much lies about it. So first of all, I didn't bring up Rishi Sunak. I don't go around going, he's English, he's not English. That's my job. That's right. Exactly. Right. Fraser Nelson brought Rishi Sunak up. And he said, well, I think Rishi Sunak's, like, the most English thing that's ever existed. Is he... He's a British Prime Minister. No disrespect to him. He's a pretty terrible Prime Minister. He's British. He's very, very culturally British. I totally respect that. And I am British too. I wasn't even born here. I am way more British than I am Russian. I mean, Russians look at me and they go, who the fuck is that guy? So that's the first thing. The second thing is they keep bringing it up like out of context. And they keep saying... They keep acting as if I was trying to say Rishi Sunak doesn't belong. So this proves that you're a racist, in other words. Exactly, right? Whereas I said in that very same conversation, my son, born to two immigrants in this country, is also not English. Am I being racist against my son? So they're taking an opinion about the difference between ethnicity and cultural identity and nationality and making it into a race thing, right? But I think your point is, and look, the thing is, when someone who looks like you says it, everyone sort of goes, ooh, cringe. I have friends from all over the world who land at Heathrow. I go and pick them up at the airport. They're black, white, brown, and they all say the same thing. Yeah. What happened? Yeah. That's what they say. I'm sorry. I'm sorry that offends people, but that is what they say. Absolutely. I mean, I go to a gym, believe it or not, now. This is hell. Hell, man. What's going on? I know. Well, I thought when I was making seriously good money, I thought it would be really, really rude of me to drop dead and not be able to spend all that money on my kids. So anyway, so I started going to the gym last May, ran the back of Selfridges. And Oxford Street now is actually more Arab than Dubai. I literally, and I mean, you know, these are all law abiding people. I'm not complaining about the fact that they're here. It's an observation, right? You see more and more Arab families. You see groups of women wearing the full burqa, you know, five wives walking behind a guy. you know it's there as it's for everybody to see yeah always walking behind um and it's there for it's hard not to notice it and i'm sorry if people don't like it but i'm not going to live in a world where i'm not going to say something about it because when i used to go to oxford street when i was a teenager it didn't look like that you know people were walking there were always foreigners they were always my parents used to used to delight in taking us to you know different foreign nationality restaurants. Once every week, we would go to a Polish restaurant, we'd go to an Italian restaurant, we'd go to an Indian, various swamis we went to in the old days. You know, we'd go to Chinese restaurants, go to Jewish restaurants. You know, it was great because that was part of being in London. It was a melting pot. But now it's not like that anymore because now it's a kind of, it feels oppressive to me that there are so many people here from somewhere else. And what people don't realise is when we're talking about immigration as somebody who was born in London, lived in London, grew up in a fairly working class part of London and has seen it change. The area that I grew up in is now very much more, way more middle class. But you lose something when you have that amount of immigration come in because that sense of community, that social cohesion, it changes. It dies when you have that level of immigration. And people don't seem to accept that or want to accept that because I'm going to be brutally honest, it's because is not their communities that are being affected. No, exactly right. Although that may happen soon, because apparently there's a plan from the Department of DEFRA, Environmental Fisheries and whatever they're called now. They want to make the countryside more diverse. They say that it's too white and that they want to put more people from different nationalities and different ethnicities into the country. And they particularly want to populate the Chilcot Hill area because it's around Luton. and they literally have said, we want to put more Muslims into the Chilton Hills. We want to put more Muslims into the Cotswolds. It's a story in the Telegraph today. And you're kind of going, why are they even doing, what's it got to do with the government department? They're not supposed to be changing the demographics of the country, but that's what they're actively doing. And people don't like it. And they've got every right not to like it. Look, let's talk about an unpleasant subject, the Cockneys. Yeah. Do Cockneys even exist? Very unpleasant. Well, look at Whitechapel. I mean, Whitechapel, which used to be, you know, home to a very big Jewish population. That was where the Krays used to hang out. You could still go to the blind beggar. People will say that's where they shot him, you know, over there. Bullet holes still in the wall. Bullet holes still in the wall, you know. But it's, yeah, it's unrecognisable. And, you know, I get the fact that things change. But as I say, I lived in America in the 80s under Ronald Reagan when it was a very, very interesting and wide-ranging and changing place, but it always changed with one sort of, you know, central tenet, which was, this is America. You know, you want to come to America, you become an American, you recite the, you sing the Star Spangled Banner, you know, you pledge allegiance to the flag, and your kids will pledge allegiance to the flag every single day when they go to school That doesn happen here And I think that a problem And it is and what it seems to be as well is a sort of tacit acknowledgement that what they doing is obliterating a culture And not only that they celebrating it They're going, diversity is our strength. And you go, well, what about the previous communities? They live there, their culture, their heritage, like the Cockneys. Well, no, that doesn't matter. Get rid of them. And you go, well, I mean, do you want to actually understand what you're doing to the literal fabric of this country. Yeah. And if they start making it sort of, you know, a kind of blanket situation, at the moment, it's mostly cities, isn't it? I mean, you know, if you go, even as I say, to where my kids went to school in Sussex, you know, it's a very white area, and it's a very English area, and there's not that many foreigners there. But even that's now beginning to change, and you're starting to see the old vape shops popping up, you know, organised crime, which is nothing to do with ethnicity, as far as I'm aware, but it has everything to do with, you know, an awful lot of people coming from foreign countries and setting up drug businesses and setting up, you know, the Albanians, for example, biggest drug dealers in Europe, you know, pretty much have a lock on every single part of the cocaine business from here to Turkey, you know. And it's been allowed to happen. And nobody really knows why. But the thing is, this is... And suddenly there's a bunch of barbershops and there's a bunch of, you know, clearly, you know, money laundering businesses. And nobody's stopping them. And nobody voted for this. And this I find frustrating because, you know, as you know, I'm an immigrant myself here. When I came to Britain, none of it was like this. This has all happened in my lifetime. It's accelerated massively in the last 10 years. And it's not my fault. I didn't do it, even though it has happened in that time. But, you know, so many things, I always say this, are a question of speed and scale. Yeah. I like ice cream, but if I had ice cream every day for breakfast, lunch and dinner, I'd be fucked. Yeah. And immigration is the same. If you choose very carefully the types of people that you allow in, if you're very selective, if you're careful, if you say, well, we've got to make sure you're culturally compatible, the numbers are kept to a level where people, as you say, come, they integrate, they become British. Rishi Sunak is very British. He's totally integrated. I'm going to make that clear, right? Just like myself, I've done the same thing. It's perfectly possible for people who come here to integrate. What is not possible is for millions and millions of people to come in the space of a few years and then for us to expect them, for them to integrate, especially when we are incredibly shy about, A, what it means to be British, and B, about insisting that you do actually integrate. And these are, like, these are just, they're not even controversial things to say. there are things that everyone around the world, including billions of black and brown people too, just go, yeah, of course that's true. Yeah, exactly. Of course it's true. For anyone who has got any nationality of any kind, you go to any country in the world, if they were going through what we have been going through in the last 10 years in terms of immigration, they'd be up in arms. They'd probably be taken to the streets. Yes, of course, Brazil is a multi-ethnic society. It's quite a racist society as well, depending on what colour Brazilian you are, right? But I can be pretty sure that there aren't thousands and millions of people coming there from European cultures to change the way that they live, whereas we've got that situation here. And I think also the other sort of major part of why it's happened is the welfare system here, because the welfare system has encouraged more and more Brits not to work. It's also encouraged more and more immigrants to come here because they can also get welfare. We are now going to be, I think, the biggest G7 country for spending on welfare. I think it's 2% of GDP that we will now be spending this year on welfare of one kind or another. And, you know, again, it's a failed political system. It's a failed political kind of theory that's been propagated ever since the days of Tony Blair, then into David Cameron, you know, where hug a hoodie was a thing. You know, you didn't want to punish anybody for doing anything bad. talk down to people, make out that they're too stupid to understand the machinations of the state, let the state take over and become bigger and bigger and bigger, which is what it's done. And all of these things have conspired, I think, to just ruin the country. And it's not just one thing. It's not just immigration, but it's a big part of it. And to me, it comes down to something. I went to a dinner where there was a very famous politician being interviewed by journalists, and it ties back into what you were talking about. All the questions that the journalists gave the politicians, they were just nice questions. And I thought to myself, everyone in this room has had a better education than me, no doubt they're smarter than me, but there's no courage or balls. They don't want to shake things up. Why is it that we just don't want to be uncomfortable? We don't want to have an uncomfortable conversation. We don't want to have conversations where we go, look, we need to limit immigration. And it just seems that this has just been pervasive for our society to the point that we avoid discomfort for so much that we find ourselves now in the most uncomfortable of places. Yeah, because people are frightened to be seen as wrong. They're frightened to be seen as, you know, right wing. And again, this is the establishment. The establishment is now in no way, shape or form right wing. The establishment is now left-wing, and everybody who runs this country is effectively left-wing, from the civil servants to the politicians to the people in the media to the school system to the educations, the higher education, to the universities, even companies. I mean, look at what the banking sector is like now. You know, my sister worked in the Big Bang days of the 80s, you know, and funnily enough, Nigel Farage was working there as well. she worked with him at Drexel Burnham Lambert before they got done for Michael Milken's chicanery where he went to jail for insider trading. But it was balls out, it was going to make as much money as you can. Piken used to call it piking when you'd get somebody to have to do a deal that they didn't really want but they'd have to buy something off you and then you'd sold it to them and they'd have to take delivery of it and people would... It was like the Wild West and it was unregulated to some extent. But they were very far from left wing. Whereas now, you go to the Bank of England and it's, you know, where are the gender neutral toilets? They're on the seventh floor. Oh, that's all right then. You know, and they debank people like Nigel Farage for having views that they don't like. And it's all very kind of nice. It's changing back again now in Wall Street. Wall Street has kind of given up. Under Trump, they've kind of come back a little bit and they've reclaimed a bit of that kind of, you know, right wingery, if you like. But, you know, I don't know when it all happened. People in the release of the trust asked me, she said, when did it all happen? And I said, I don't really know. It kind of happened in the last 20 years. And maybe we're all to blame for not seeing it. I'd say 30 years. I think what people didn't realize, because Blair was fresh-faced, you know, the conservatives were tired, he came in. And also, before the war in Iraq, it sort of felt like everything was great because they pumped a lot of money into public services, they improved education, they put money into healthcare, blah, blah, blah. But what nobody realized is, in the background, they were introducing all of this legislation, which has been with us for the last 30 years, which has ruined absolutely everything. And it was kind of almost time-bombed, wasn't it? That's right. So that nobody would really see it happening, and it would only be suddenly when the Supreme Court popped up. Yeah. And everyone went, oh, when did that happen? Yeah. You know, I thought, you know, when I was studying politics, you know, the House of Lords was the highest court in the land. You know, we didn't even pay any attention to Europe at that point. And now suddenly, you know, the House of Lords, It's pretty meaningless as a legal entity, you know? Well, the same thing with the whole diversity agenda. Under the Labour government, they basically made it legal to discriminate against everybody who wasn't a minority. That's what they did. They said there are protected characteristics, which means that these groups of people, because they're minorities or women as well, they get to have special treatment. So then the diversity agenda flows from all of that. If you look at the boats coming across the channel, that's all to do with the Human Rights Act and the fact that basically you're not allowed to deal with people who are coming into your country illegally as illegal immigrants. Right. Right. All of this stuff. So it's been happening. But the thing is, as you say, the Tories came in and I don't think they realized what the hell had happened. No. And then before they knew it, there were balls deep on Brexit. Right. And then, you know, that took years. And then the moment that's finished, you get the war in Ukraine. You get COVID, sorry. The moment COVID's wrapping up, you get the war in Ukraine. And before you know it, 14 years have gone and nothing's changed. And Putin sits there laughing at the West and going, you know, well, you're weak and this is why we're doing what we're doing because you're not going to do anything about it. That's right. Because you're too busy making sure that the soldiers that you're now recruiting don't use words like manpower. Because, you know, I actually had a call from a soldier who said that he was asked, he got a phone call, He was in a barracks, got a call from sort of the Department for Defence, and he was asked to go around every single notice board in the barracks to make sure the word manpower wasn't used anywhere. And that's what they're doing, you know. And equally, you've got this whole situation where Cameron and then Theresa May tried to make the Conservative Party nicer, you know. I remember when she said, you know, we're known as the nasty party, we need to change that view. and, you know, suddenly hostile environment was a thing you couldn't say about the immigration police, you know. Well, we want a hostile environment so these illegal immigrants don't come here and they don't want to come here. It should be a hostile environment. You know, if it's not a hostile environment, more of them are going to come. It's a pretty straightforward equation. And yet the Tories have spent the best part of the last, I don't know, probably 14, 15 years trying to be nice. And it's backfired horrendously because they've been shtucked, basically, by everybody else. Or I might, well, let's hope Zach Polanski can fix it. I mean, I keep expecting something just very odd to come out about him. Because, you know, one, we know it's not his real name, even though he claims that it was his family name before, you know, the Second World War, blah, blah, blah, so he kind of reclaimed it. I just think he's, he clearly is not what he says he is. He's meant to be coming from quite a wealthy family when he and he pretends to be this kind of, you know, crusader for justice. And I just, I just, my prediction for the year is that Zach Polanski was self-destruct. How about that? That's interesting. Yeah. That's interesting. I actually studied hypnotherapy, so I'm very familiar. They're all fucking, oh, mate. Well, again, he claims that that's a sort of made up story by The Sun. Oh, is it? I didn't know that. He says that, you know, they kind of took a story that he was talking about and kind of ran with it. The thing is, there is a video of him talking about it. So he can't completely deny it. But he's sort of saying that the son kind of took advantage of him and kind of put that question to him and he ended up coming back. But, you know, the trouble with it, you know, he's managed to fulfil the first law of politics, which is to tell lies, you know, if somebody catches you out. Just deny it, like Lord Mandelson. I mean, one of the interesting things actually touching on Polanski is just his economic illiteracy. Yeah. And when he was asked about what should Britain do about the debt, He said that we needed to be more like Japan, which is to effectively double our national debt. Yeah, Japan is 200% of debt to GDP, if not more. Yeah, and he was saying that's how we get better public services. Oh, yeah, yeah, putting more money. Yeah. Well, that's what we've been doing, though. Yeah, we've got to do more of it, mate. It's working really well. And that's why we are where we are. Well, when he was on with Laura Kunzberg on Sunday, he was asked about this whole business of sort of fair rents and how to make it easier for people to rent for less money. And he said, well, obviously, you know, what we need to do is look at countries where it's been a success. And Laura said, well, all the countries that have used it, it hasn't been a success. And he said, well, that's not entirely true. But then he couldn't name a country whose system he would adopt because it would work better for landlords and for tenants. There isn't one. Because as soon as you put the so-called Fair Rent Act in, landlords will just pull the properties. There'll be more shortages. There'll be more homeless. But in terms of your plan, then, you would not dictate rent controls. You would give the power to mayors to set rent controls if they wanted. that would be the way you would do it. Exactly, based on local incomes, based on affordability, based on housing stock, because we need to build more houses too. I should say, though, if national government wanted to do this on a national level, I wouldn't oppose that either. Just someone needs to do that, and whether it comes at the most local level or the national level, that's a conversation I'm open to. But the problem that we need to fix is the spiralling rents that are getting more and more expensive. The only system that works, it may not be perfect, is capitalism. You can't do it any other way. and that's the real issue is that and it's not just zach there are plenty of people in politics who are just they're just not serious no and you saw that on question time you i was looking at these people and they were talking you're going you're just not serious politicians you're just not serious they're just peddling narratives they're just saying things that sound good and make you feel good but the unfortunate unpleasant reality is they're not gonna the ideas aren't going to work. And if they're not going to work, then they're pointless. Well, this is one of the things that people say about reform, isn't it? Some of the people that have, you know, kind of, you know, defected from the Tory party, if you like. And that guy, Jake Berry, I think he's got a mention on Question Time, didn't he? Yeah. But you're bad for him, because I've gone at him pretty hard. It's not because it's personal towards him. He's not a bad guy. But he was in the Conservative Party, arguing with me on Question Time, saying net zero is brilliant. Yeah. He's now part of reform. Yeah. You can see why people have questions. Exactly right. I remember having James Cleverley on once, and I was taking the mickey out of, I think it was Rachel Reeves, who, it was revealed, had charged her electricity to the taxpayer from her second home, you know, even though it wasn't that far away from London. And I could see him kind of squirming a little bit. And I said, it's outrageous, isn't it? I said, especially if you don't live that far from London. I said, you live in Essex, don't you? Yeah. Well, you don't charge your second home electricity to taxpayer do you james and he went well um actually yeah i do and i was like well then you shouldn't be doing it just stop you know you're making a pretty good living you don't have to just because it says in the book that you can do it you don't have to do it same goes for that sort of you know hatchet man that they've got um pat mcfadden you know who's also an ex blairite he actually moved house to this house next door from the one that he owned because he couldn't claim mortgage relief anymore since they changed the rules and he moved into the house next door so he could rent it so he could claim the the mortgage on that so he could claim the rent on that therefore could pay the mortgage i mean because he rented out his his other house right so he sort of did a double dip and when i had him on i said you know how do you explain to people that they should trust you and he just went everything i did was within the rules and that's what they say and it's ridiculous Well, see, this is, I mean, I am actually, believe it or not, a little bit sympathetic on that because what happened for many decades is we basically never were allowed to pay MPs properly relative to what you want someone, the caliber of the people that you want in power or in those positions. So what happened is they said, well, you can't be paid properly, but we will give you this like expensive slush fund where you can make as much money as you want. So really, it's double the salary that we're paying. and then they all got caught when the expenses scandal came out. My view is, actually, I think MPs should be paid way more than they are at the moment. I'd pay them a quarter of a million pounds a year. But if you get caught fiddling the books, it would chop your fucking head off. Yeah. Would you give them expenses on top of that, though? No, no, no, no. You just give them a flat amount, and then you do whatever. But what I'm saying is you just need proper salaries, because then that's how you attract proper people, like in any business, right? If you want to hire somebody to do a talk show, you're going to have to pay them a lot, right? Or even if you don't, if they get a big audience, then you're going to have to pay them a lot, right? So if you want to attract the top caliber people to politics, you have to pay them well because it's a shit job, let's be honest. Yeah, I mean, I wouldn't want to be a politician. People keep asking me if I want to. I'm like, are you insane? Why would I want to do that, right? But on the other hand, no expenses and very, very, very severe accountability if you misbehave. Right. But those two things together, it's a good deal. Well, people, ordinary people in this country who have never seen a salary like 96,000, which is what they get now, will say, but they already are getting a load of money. I know. And I know that for people living in London, they'll say, well, actually, that's not a massive amount, blah, blah, blah, blah. But they're not badly paid. Let's face it. It depends what you want, Mike. If you want a bunch of mediocrities. Yeah. Well, that's what we've got. But what I'm saying is, look, if you were running a business, right, and that business was the most important business in the country. It was important for national defense. Yeah. It was important for planning. It was important for running the NHS properly. It was important for all sorts of things. You would hire the top people. That's why the person, the chief executive of the NHS, I don't know how much he or she earns. I would guess it's millions. I would imagine so. Right. Certainly, certainly six, big high six figures. I would think so, right? So you want the people who are running the country to be that well paid as well. Otherwise, you're going to get this bunch of non-entities that we have. But unfortunately, that disproves your theory, though, because the people running the NHS don't know what the fuck they're doing. And so I don't know why they're getting paid the amount of money they're getting paid. That's fair. You know. And the other thing is, I just want to mention this, is I don't know if you saw it the weekend, the Sunday Times had the list of people who pay the most tax in this country. Yeah. And I would show that to Zach Polanski and go, you know, you talk about, you know, people not paying their fair share of taxes. Rachel Reeves says it all the time. It turns out she's going to now punish the people who make about 48 grand a year. They're going to get taxed the most by proportion. But when you see the likes of some footballers, you know, sort of captains of industry, hundreds of millions of pounds worth of tax they're paying. And so they may count, and, you know, the top 1%, I think, account for something like nearly 50% or 60%. No, 30%. It's the top 10%, isn't it? So the top 10% is 60+, and the top 1% is 30+. And so, you know, that is a massive, you know, sign, I guess, that the system works because they collect much more tax from the people who make money than they do from the people who don't. And you might say that's as it should be, but I don't see any reason to change it, is what I'm saying. They don't need to pay more because if you make them pay any more, they'll just disappear. Which they are. Yeah. Which they are. Mike, great to have you on. Glad to see that you're doing really well. Thank you. Where can people find your show? It's the Mike Graham Show on YouTube. We've got a sub-state, which I don't understand, but we're working on that. That's the mikegramshow.com. And yeah, we're hoping to do more shows as time goes on. We're a pretty small operation at the moment. So we're just kind of running, you know, constantly running ahead of ourselves trying to get stuff done and trying to improve. We're trying to get to a point where we can take calls, trying to get to a point where we can do voice notes and things like that, and really replicate what a mainstream morning breakfast show could do, you know? And I think it's going to be a very exciting year. The last question. Yeah. What's the one thing we're not talking about that we should be? The one thing we're not talking about that we should be? Now, you see, you always come up with a good question at the end, don't you? the one thing we're not talking about yeah yeah well i've told you a few things that people don't know about me there are things that people will never know about me i suppose um i wonder if we should be talking about um iran and where that all goes because it's going to go somewhere bad i think um i think trump's going to drop some bombs on it or something and i think that'll kick off so i don't know what that's going to mean for the rest of us but the thing that worries me about Iran is that, and I know that many people have escaped the Iranian regime because it's so horrible, but, you know, it takes that long to get 30,000 Iranians out on the street demonstrating. How many Iranians are actually living here? And what will happen if the regime gets removed? Will they all go back? Or will they all stay living in Hackney? You know, I don't know. We shall see. All right, head on over to Substack where we get to ask Mike your questions. she says the one thing that she doesn't agree with you on is your animosity with tommy robinson he's been proven right on so many fronts could there ever be a treat a truce between you