Hello, welcome to UK column. I'm Ben Rubin and I am very
excited today to be joined by someone who I think is one of
our most important writers and commentators on contemporary
British society. Morgoth, welcome to the show.
Thank you very much for having me.
I've been, I've been a fan of UK column for a long time actually.
So it's nice to, I think I've been mentioned on the site a few
times. So it's it's nice to be like
formally on here. Fantastic.
Well, it's great to have you. So we have got a lot to talk
about. There's quite a bit going on in
the country at the moment, but we set ourselves a little bit of
homework to provide some context, which I think hopefully
should be quite, quite useful. And we've been away and we've
read an essay by George Orwell written in 1942 called England
Your England. And this was, as I'm sure pretty
much everyone listening to this will know, slap bang in the
middle of the Second World War. And it starts with the most
incredible opening line, which says, as I write, highly
civilised human beings are flying overhead trying to kill
me, which is quite, quite a good way to start an essay.
And he talks about England, the English and the British more
broadly. And one of the lines that I love
in it is that he says England is continuous.
It stretches into the future and into the past.
And I suppose my first question is more golf.
Is England in 2025 continuous with the England All Well wrote
about 83 years ago? No, I don't think it is.
I think it's something entirely different.
And, and I think the it's, it's, it's all it's becoming.
It's all it's all is or is in the process of becoming a break.
And we could get into this because all we'll see is of
course, change happens over time.
But I think what, what people refer to, I don't know if you've
seen this, but they call it the UK and it's like, YO, OK, AY.
And it's, it's kind of a funny sort of meme on the Internet.
There's people been writing about it, people have done some
surprisingly kind of deep esoteric takes on it.
But I think it, it describes something, which is the reason
why it's called that reason why it resonates with people is
because it's, it's a fundamental break with what Orwell was
describing. And it's, it's this new place,
It's a non place, like a kind of squalid airport, which doesn't
have the kind of characteristics, uh, it doesn't
have the feel of the, of the things that all was describing.
And funny enough, I, I actually think in Orwell's essay, the
reasons that we ended up at the UK are actually dotted in there
in, in what he's saying as a kind of warning.
You know, it's kind of strange. It's almost like a subplot which
came to overwhelm the entire saga, which which he alludes to
then passing a few a few times, which I'll be so that that's how
old that's that. I could expand on that quite a
bit with Orwell and and it what, 1984 and all of that.
But yeah, that's well, we can come back to that.
Yes. Now I, I, I would tend to agree
with you actually. I, I, I think that the old world
is still there, bubbling away beneath the surface, but there's
definitely this kind of facade that's been placed on top of it.
I like that idea of a non place and you talked about a squalid
airport and I remember going into Luton airport once a few
years ago and it just looked horrific.
It was basically like going into a set of Rd. works.
And actually on the news yesterday, Brian Garish was
talking about a trip he took to A&E last week.
And it it was this horrific, brutalist 60s building that's
being extended. I think he's Derriford Hospital.
And basically he was stuck in A&E in this kind of in between
place with junk food in the vending machines and BBC
propaganda on, on, on the the TV screen, keeping people sort of
semi comatose while they're sitting there for 10 hours.
And that to me, that sounds like the kind of UK place that you're
talking about. Yeah, it's, it's kind of like
there's, I mean, just demographically it's so foreign
now. And in many places where you
don't even have one of the things that I've noticed is that
people don't even really care where people come from anymore.
Where it used to be, well, this person's from India or this
person's from Jamaica and they had their own sort of
distinctness and their own sort of heritage which they come
could come with them. And whether it was for good or
bad was kind of like, OK, whatever.
But now the difference with the UK, the UK non place is that
none of that even seems to matter anymore because there's
no rudeness or heritage anywhere to be found.
Even the immigrants end up just becoming the sort of drifting
sort of transient consumers or the the, the high streets of
vape shops and these American candy stores and, and this kind
of thing. So there's that one place
becomes the same as another becomes the same as another.
And the people in it are just sort of wandering around
completely disorientated. It's, it's, it's utterly
alienating and, and depressing. And one of the things about it
that there was this, this, I mean, where one of the places
this came from was a Twitter account.
And he would just post out of context photos.
So for example, you would see, for example, like a, a Muslim
family standing outside of like a traditional English pub in, in
Canterbury or something. And that was it.
There'd be no context. That would just be that.
And then the mainstream newspaper, I think it was the
Guardian or the New Statesman or something, they carried an
article on this and they didn't like it because they could, they
knew there was something insidious about this messaging,
but they couldn't actually explain why without standing on
their own land mines. They because it's implicit.
You, you get it. And this is, this is not the way
people are supposed to think. It's supposed to be woven in to
a narrative. You, you have, you have to have
a, a data set and all of the rest of it you.
And, and that wasn't what it is. It was hitting people in the
gut, which they knew intuitively to be off kilter and, and not
quite right. And, and so this is, This is why
I think it's interesting. And and that sort of not quite
rightness that the uncanny valley feeling to it is, is why
it resonates with people who are looking at this.
And unfortunately, you know, in times gone by, we could have
this as a national conversation in the media, but we can't
because we can't address what's actually going on.
So we live in this non place that denies itself and it's
utterly confusing and demoralising for everybody.
Yeah, I like that idea that it's alienating to everyone actually.
You know, this, this kind of multicultural mush where
identity is essentially denied to the majority, but as an
extension of that, it has to be denied to everyone else as well.
So it just ends up being a compromise.
Yeah, I, I, I find it, I find it bizarre that somebody would
leave like the hills of Pakistan to live in it, like above a flat
in Hull or something like that. It's bizarre.
I find that strange. Yeah.
No, I completely agree. I completely agree.
So you talked a little bit about seeing the seeds of the of this
transformation, this decimation of our national story throughout
this essay. And I'm guessing that one of
those might be the the liberal intelligentsia and you've
mentioned the Guardian. Is that is that what you were
thinking about? Well, I would say what he's
describing there is there's the bourgeoisie.
And I actually posted this on Twitter because I'd read it this
morning. And then I kind of went on
Twitter and I did AI posted it. And it's got, it's getting quite
a bit of traction. And he said the the working
man's heart does not leap when he sees a Union Jack.
But the famous insularity and xenophobia in courts of the
English is far stronger. And the working class, Southern
and bourgeoisie in all countries, the poor are more
national than the rich, but the English working class are
outstanding in their abhorrence and foreign habits.
And what, what I think's interesting about that is is,
you know, you just need to look at people standing outside of
these migrant hotels. But fundamentally it's a war
being waged on from on bourgeoisie on the, the working
class. So you could say this was a sort
of it's, it's an old and implicit part of English
identity. But again, to touch on what we
were saying about the, the UK vacation you, I think we're
reaching a breaking point. I think it's become something
existential. But what I, I think the, the
real sort of what Orwell is really hinting at as well is
when he mentions and I, I, I cut this bit out.
Moreover, the tendency of small businesses to merge together
into larger ones rob more and more of the moneyed class of
their function and turned them into mere owners, their work
being done for them by salaried managers and technicians.
This is actually quite a deep point for Orwell, because in
there was a This was an essay in 1941.
In 1942, a thinker called James Burnham wrote a book called The
Managerial Revolution, and Burnham before that had written
other book such as the he was very much a realist in his
approach. And in my copy of the Managerial
Revolution, there's a lengthy introduction by George Orwell
himself. And what's fascinating just
reading that is that there's a, there's a few things, but one of
them is 1984 is actually a, a parody of the managerial
revolution and O'Brien in 1984, people say it's supposed to be
James Burnham. And what they mean by the
managerial revolution is that the future would be dictated to
by as he says there. I mean, this is this is this is
Burnham's sort of view on where the revolution of the world was
not going to be fascist or communist.
It was going to be a revolution of the managers.
And it's interesting to look at what Orwell says here.
You know, he says the tendency of small businesses to merge
together into larger ones, rob more and more of the money class
of their function and turn them into mere owners, their work
being done for them by salaried managers and technicians.
And this means that if you take something like, for example, the
the Ford Foundation, you would normally have thought that
there'd be a kind of a Rob a Baron or Aceo or a kind of Elon
Musk figure at the top. Musk is a kind of, he's kind of
like revenge of the ownership class.
He's a, he's a bit weird in our current age because what we see
in these giant firms and these foundations and eventually these
NGOs is that they are all run by managers and technicians.
It's so it's as if the middle management has taken over
everything. And you can see this in, I mean,
obviously something like the United Nations or the World
Health Organization or all of these bureaucracies, all of them
are managers and technicians and they all rule the world today.
And in the old days, of course, you would have a kind of
charismatic boss at the top who would be almost like a
sovereign, like a king. And then you'd have the, the
work, the, the small businesses as well and the, the workers at
the bottom. But what the managers do is
almost like take over the, the running of the firm.
And so you get these strange things where resources are
allocated to things which the man at the top just knows
nothing about woke and all of the, the, the kind of all of the
funding of woke, it just, it just sort of passed them all by.
This is how you can get these weird things where Amazon or all
these massive corporations are just funding subversive
political movements and NGOs all over the place.
And it's all these kind of Midwick managers in the middle
because society became sort of too complicated for one man to
to to you needed specialists. You needed the technicians and
the managers. And that is what Burnham said
would come to dominate the rest of the twenty 20th century.
I mean, I think we are coming to the end of that system now.
I I think it's beginning to fall apart all around us.
I mean, one of the the perfect examples of would be where
Twitter was a kind of of the managers.
It was of that class. They took it over from Jack
Dorsey and then you what you saw Elon must come in like a
sovereign and just fire them all and get rid of them all.
And so this is a kind of thing, a schism which is going on
across the West and an emerging. But I also think so much of what
we see is a result of the managerial revolution.
You can just see it everywhere you look.
One of the examples would be just last week with the sort of
the Afghani, the Tory party covering up this, this data
breach, which was a sort of malfunction of the bureaucracy.
And they, they all think just sort of like computers.
They, they've got no sort of agency outside of the
bureaucracy. And so they tended to come to
the conclusion that what we're going to do is just carry on the
logic of the system and an important entire army and their
families mean this is the best case scenario.
The other scenario is that you could say it's just completely
malicious. But sticking with the theme
here, you can see that this is all just the system working as
intended by these managers and technicians.
They run, they run everything. And I think they're running
everything into the ground and it's falling apart because they
aren't real thinkers. They don't have any kind of
spiritual element to the more philosophical curiosity.
They are just pen pushing sort of dead swilled bureaucrats.
And, and this is what Burnham predicted was going to happen in
1942. He said that fascism and
communism were both very similar because they they were both just
managerial systems in essence. The thing with Burnham is that
he wasn't, he didn't really believe in ideologies.
He would first and foremost, he was a realist and a
Machiavellian. So the ideology would just be a
kind of post talk justification for what power wanted to do.
And this is essentially when you come to the managerial side of
it, you can see that the systems are actually more similar than
what they're not of the way they function.
And in 1984, of course, this is exactly what you see.
You see this again where you it's this kind of hollowed out
dead soul bureaucracy with a few people at the top, but Big
Brother like doesn't really exist.
And all of the rules at the bottom, it's the ones in the
middle, the the it's, it's a kind of civil war amongst the
managers themselves in the middle.
And so this is what I thought was fascinating about All's
essay was that there's a lot of other things which are nice and
interesting to get into. But I was just quite struck that
this is a year before he would have had his back and forth with
Burnham, and I think about six or seven years before he
published 1984. And it was just fascinating to
see that in, in the article, in the essay.
Yeah, I agree. He he's well predicted many
things, right. But that this, this
transformation of the economic and political systems, that was
one of the things that really jumped out on me too.
I think we were describing that I, I talked about this on the
news yesterday. There was a, a report that came
out last week from an organization called Mooring
Common, who you might be familiar with is run by Brendan
Cox, the widower, widower of Joe Cox.
And they've basically done this big national survey, 20,000
people. And they've broken down the
country into these different segments basically based on
their attitudes towards various different things.
Lots of questions are asked and they got this one segment that I
was fascinated by that they called established liberals,
which is 9% of the population. And these established liberals,
I feel look at them as default liberals, right?
Because if you're a default liberal, that's something I need
from Andrew Breitbart. He used to talk about this.
Basically it just means you don't have to think about
anything too much. Yeah, just default liberal.
Whatever. I won't.
I'll go along with the flow. But that's basically what you
were describing. That's the managerial supposedly
elite. They're the people running the
civil service. They're the ones at the top of
the consulting firms. They're the ones in the the kind
of mid management in the the corporations and actually they
are very happy with the status quo.
Even as the country is going up in smoke all around them.
They just kind of sat there and they think everything's going
fine. That it is in in sort of our
era. It is the consensus forming
apparatus. They dictate and decide what is
allowable and what is not allowable.
What opinions you can have, what you can protest and what you can
stand for. I, I do think it's in crisis
across the board, though, because the, the chronic lack of
agency, the chronic lack of anybody.
I mean, you know, you often find that if, if you work in some of
these, these places, there is this kind of the conformity
become suffocating and you need somebody to come in.
It's it's crazy because I've worked in places like warehouses
where the their way of doing things was just so chronically
inefficient. That the event have instead of
thinking for themselves, they hire another branch of
managerialism to come in and do the thinking for all them.
But it's it's it's the managers like sort of policing the
managers on their own efficiency and it ends up going on and on
forever. I think this is AI do think this
is a good and interesting way of understanding the world around
us. A lot of people would sort of
push as Orwell did find that Burnham's just so cynical that
it it becomes almost like nihilistic in a way.
And I think he parodies that well in of course, I mean,
Burnham was saying this is not what I want.
This is just what will be regardless of I, I don't, I'm
just saying this is where we're going.
I mean, he got a few things wrong.
He assumed Germany would win, but by the end of it, you did
see that sort of Western capital itself would become just
completely managerial, if for no other reason than they had to
produce so many tanks, so many jeeps and bullets, they had to
form all these bureaucracies to ship men around for the war.
And then after the war, when we head into the Cold War, you'll
see that what you've really got is 2 sprawling giant managerial
bureaucracies facing off at each other.
And it always seems to be that something more esoteric or
metaphysical, it always gets squeezed out.
And, you know, to go back to sort of Orwell's essay on, on
Englishness, you will see that a lot of what he's talking about
you can't easily put down on a spreadsheet because it is
something felt and something intuitive.
But that this is this is exactly the, the conversations and the
arguments people have every day on Twitter.
You know, there was something the other day on, on LBC where
there was a little old lady rang in about this situation with
Afghanistan. Who, who are they?
They do have the highest sort of that the data we have got.
They do have the highest rates of like sexually assaulting
people. But this woman was saying like
this is not right. This is.
And Ian Dale was pushing back on it and his sort of, I just think
this is typical of what you see because the old woman, she felt
that something was not right. She, she didn't have the
language, she didn't have the all of the correct phrases and
whatnot, but she was trying to impart something that there's
something not right about this and I don't like it.
And Ian Deal was asking her, for example, his, he was asking to
explain what she meant. And the premise of his argument
was that, well, the Afghans that are coming over were against the
Taliban. And therefore they are like us.
Therefore they are just like the liberals.
They they, they, these people are from like the most backward
place on Earth, are literally just liberal managerial types
waiting. They're all Guardian, they're
all potential Guardian readers and, and all now it's so absurd.
It's so ridiculous. But the problem is the the sort
of the bureaucracy as it stands and the incentives are set up
such a way that that opinion gets rewarded and amplified.
And the little old lady who is actually correct is seen as some
kind of nut job heretic from the orthodoxy and non personed and
all of this kind of thing. And this is how we arrived at
this this because of this system.
Yes, she's been asked to articulate something that
shouldn't need to be articulated, right.
It's just intuitively. Understood.
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, it's interesting.
So you. Yes.
So he's these kind of spreadsheet people, data, they
love data, talk about data. It's all about numbers.
If they haven't got a graph in front of them and they can't see
what's going on, it all has to be quantitatively evidenced in
some way. You know, sounds like Dale's in
that in that category. It's a funny thing because when
you draw that to its logical conclusion, a lot of things
begin to break down and make no sense.
And one of them was there was an example when there was one of
those sort of Astroturf green movements and they put some kind
of spray paint on Stonehenge a year or two back.
And I remember the, the, the kind of the, you know, the, the
Lib tapes asking, well, it doesn't matter.
It's just a pile of rocks. And, and another, another
example would be when those, those two idiots cut down the,
the tree at the Sycamore gap and you're, you're left, you're left
with just this. It's tragic.
I mean, it's my part of the world.
I love it up there. I've been there many times.
It really is heartbreaking. But the problem is from the
perspective where everything is just this sort of data sheet and
everything has to be quantified and put down like that, there's
not really any way that you can like.
So what's the problem exactly? There's still plenty more
Sycamore trees. Why is that part of the world?
Why do we treasure the Sycamore gap, that dip in the Roman wall
with that tree there? Why is that objectively like
more important than Terminal 5 at Heathrow?
Why do we appreciate one and not the other?
And the problem is the, the, the system as it stands now and the
intelligentsia and the, the, the, the intellect who get
platformed, they can't answer that question, yet they somehow
still sort of their own values negate even the question
because, well, it's just a tree. Just as in, in the same way
Stonehenge is just a pile of rocks because that's what
they've reduced identity to, which is, and that's how you end
up with the UK vacation of everything.
Because what does it matter if everybody's just a consumer unit
that then it doesn't matter where they come from.
It doesn't matter what the shops look like.
It doesn't matter what the so all this like aesthetics,
metaphysics, it's all just crushed under the Gears of of of
the system. Indeed it is, yes.
Whatever happened to those two fellows?
You got caught doing that for doing that?
Did anything actually happen? You got?
Yeah, they went to jail for, I think it was four years.
OK, But there wasn't actually anything particularly, as far as
I'm aware. I didn't look too much into it,
but I think we're just a pair of drunken idiots.
I don't think there was much. And they snitched on each other
as well. And like it all fell apart.
I don't think it was some kind of insidious plot or anything.
I think it was just a pair of clowns.
And, and you know, they've taken seedlings from the tree and
they've got they've, they're trying to resuscitate it and
bring it back and, and all of the rest of it.
I was thinking about writing something on this because you
just think, well, what, what is this, this kind of painful
effort where they've got all of these curtains and they've got
them in nurseries, tree nurseries all around the
country, painstakingly trying to get the memory to live on.
And, and I just think, but why can't we extend that to the
nation and the people in general instead of doing it in this
symbolic sense? Because unless you, if you,
unless you hold that sort of consistently, it's it's kind of
just performative. Like can we not?
OK, fair enough. I get it.
That's fine. Like let's let's do that.
Let's put more meaning on the Sycamore tree stump week.
That's great. But let's draw that out a little
bit. Let's let's keep going.
But of course they wouldn't. Sooner or later they'll run into
something that they don't like and that will be that.
Yeah, just gets bulldozed out of the way.
I'm reminded now that you've brought up the Sycamore tree.
I found out recently that Epping Forest, not far from where I am
right now, is actually managed for the nation by the City of
London. Did you know that?
And so if you go to the Epping Forest website, the City of
London talks about Epping Forest and it basically says we look
after Epping Forest, which is an ancient, ancient woodland.
It's been there for thousands of years.
It's priceless national asset, an amazing place to go, just on
the edge of London. And they basically describe it
as a national asset that is worth £1.5 billion and it's
worth £1.5 billion because the City of London takes £50 million
a year from various people who want to hold events there or
film things there, whatever it might be.
And then they times that by 30 years.
And therefore, that's what Epping Forest is worth.
So they've reduced it down to an asset on their balance sheet and
that's how they talk about, it's how they think about it.
They've stripped all meaning away.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's, that's exactly it.
Yeah. That's the kind of grand
aversion of of the Sycamore tree cup and you get this, this is
how you'll get people. One of the, I think I may have
learned this on UK column actually, and it's the way they
get around planning permission laws where they invented like a
new thing called grey belt. And I remember I was in, I was
on the South Downs in Sussex some years ago now.
And they obviously the downs themselves, they had the, the
sort of protection you couldn't build on them rightly.
And but what they'd done was to so that you could stand on all
of these downs and then you could look out.
It was an ancient sort of Woodlands were there and then
you could look out across the English Channel and things.
And, and what they had done was at the foot of the Downs, They'd
they'd got these kind of new build kind of plastic houses
just right up to the very border where where they were allowed.
Like they, they got as close as they possibly could now.
And now technically they weren't building on the South Downs, but
the problem is when you were standing on the top, you were
still seeing all of this stuff. You, you could still see like a,
a little warehouse and all, the, all the rest of it.
And it, it kind of now this is, this is sort of how they get it,
because then they'll say, well, we didn't build on the South
Downs. And I think, well, no, you
didn't. But it's still been destroyed,
hasn't it? If we're honest, it's, it's the
view and and that fear, that ambience, it's, it's still gone.
Yeah, You know, it's, it's and it's this kind of this little
wiggle room which they always use.
Yes. It's just it's cold compliance.
It's the letter, not the spirit of the law, if you know what.
I mean, yeah, the, the this idea, especially in a country as
old as England where, well, there was something that was
like a mill built on a riverbank like 300 years ago.
So technically, yeah, that that gives us carte blanche.
Just put like a a block of flats up there.
It's so ridiculous because all these old buildings are just
part of the language. And so again, it goes back of
what I was just saying earlier, it's, it's the technicians
looking for technicalities to just sort of reproduce
themselves and their own kind of soullessness across the land.
Yes, completely agree. And actually this kind of
dumbing down, I mean, you touched about it before, right?
Dead sold bureaucrats, I think is what I wrote down.
I believe that's the phrase that you used.
And actually, one of the things that Orwell talks about in the
essay is the fact that people who elevate within the system,
the people that the actual ultimate controllers and owners
of the whole thing actually put into positions of authority are
are are are are not the most intelligent.
You don't want intelligent people, well motivated people
with initiative in place. You want just cogs in your
machine. And that's how you end up doing
things that we're talking about here, right?
They don't have the capacity to think laterally about anything.
They just do things to the letter of the legislation.
Yeah. Ultimately, this is I think
where we are today and why the system struggles is because you
you get this sort of, you can see what like Tony Blair brought
in, who was the arch technocrat and managerialist and there's
somebody just pulling up here. Postman's pulling up.
Sorry about that. We've got a we've got a very
jovial postman who who likes to make a song and dance when he
arrives. I lost my pain and thought and.
We were talking about the the managerial, yeah.
What what what you saw coming in is the overproduction of
managers, the overproduction of educated professional types to
go into the system. Now what happens is, and I think
we're there now is that eventually it becomes two top
heavy and you can't keep filling up.
You can't keep creating all of these useless non jobs that you
see these make work schemes with.
So you end up having to say it to many people.
And this with the advent of AI, if it actually comes, I mean,
we're still waiting to see how that goes.
What you're going to have with there's a massive amount of
people on the outside of the the system who should be in, but who
are dispossessed. And I don't mean the the kind of
the working class in this, but actual sort of the bourgeoisie,
as Orwell would have it. There's not going to be a place
at the table for them that's a problem because they begin
milling around outside of it with resentment, being resentful
of weather, of being left in the cold.
And there's a lot of that going on at the moment, which is why
sort of dissident groups become more professional, more slick,
better educated, and this kind of thing, as you can see in the,
in the sort of the hope not hate panic, They, they are in their
own kind of incompetent and stupid way, touching on
something which is real from their perspective.
Yes, Now that is the digitization and particular,
particularly AI now is having some very interesting social
effects. Because you were talking earlier
about this idea that we've had a war by the bourgeoisie on the
working classes in this country for decades now.
And actually, the bourgeoisie are now getting taste of their
own medicine because these new technologies that they're all
rushing headlong into are actually destroying their own
jobs and any possible jobs, future jobs that could come
along. And actually we're going to see
this kind of social collapse. Ultimately.
We've got people who've had established positions in the
social hierarchy for generations, hundreds of years
even, all of a sudden now are on the outside.
And who knows where that leads? Yeah, usually it leads with a
counter elite to to kind of to come in and you can see this, I
think, I think where the where the system is at the moment is
in this kind of desperate mode of throwing up, sort of holding
pens. I would say Reform UK in in in
the UKI think Nigel Farage and Reform are a kind of containment
zone. People may not like that, but
that that that's how I view it. And, and usually it's kind of
like buying themselves a bit of time by throwing up roadblocks
after roadblocks for ultimately there's no direction.
There's no, they don't know where to go because it's not in
their frame of reference. One of the things about Burnham,
I think Orwell wasn't idealist, but James Burnham absolutely was
not. And I think you end up just
almost like this, the Borg where everything just has to be
subsumed. And one of the things that
you'll find as well, which is I know Auk column has touched on a
lot, is this idea that viewing everything as a problem that has
to be solved. And the obviously the, the
biggest sort of example of this would be the COVID sort of
thing. Or you can look at the, the
resettlement of the Afghanis where all of a sudden the, the
system has the, has created a problem through its own
incompetence, its own increasing incompetence.
And then, well, we've got a problem that we have to solve.
And we'll, we'll go on the only solution that we know, which is
the most ridiculous and absurd and destructive one, because
they aren't actually again, tethered to any organic sense of
peoplehood or the land or a poetic sort of Orwellian in a
positive way. Normally you would say in the
context of England, your England Orwellian wouldn't be dystopian.
It would be something quite positive for a change.
But usually we're used to talking about that in the
context of 1984. So it's kind of strange.
You could see from both sides. But more famously, we are in the
dystopian Orwellian age for the time being.
Yes, that's certainly true. That's certainly true.
So there are, there are there are some parallels here though.
So we've said, we said at the start that the UK is is
discontinuous with England as all well understood it, but
actually there are some similar patterns emerging, right.
So we've talked a bit about the liberal intelligentsia and these
are the people to quote from the essay that he describes as
European eyes. They take their cookery from
Paris and their opinions from Moscow.
And I'd say I don't know where the current intelligentsia, as
they like to think of themselves, get their cookery
from, but they probably get their opinions from Brussels
rather than Moscow. But they're pretty much the same
opinions, I would say. But the, the, the counterpart to
that on the right is the the blimp, the kind of regimental
Sergeant major type, red faced, you know, still wearing his
medals down the pub in the 1960s kind of thing.
And I think that Farage and that crowd probably fit quite neatly
into that bucket, wouldn't you say?
I think yes, I do. Well, I think I think he the the
Colonel blimp type for God did he did he pretty much went
extinct. What what I would say about what
I've called before, like sort of bulldog nationalism is, is where
you what you have is a kind of pastiche of a postmodern sort of
spin on this kind of identity where it's you know, you know,
you look at somebody like Mike Graham and all of these
characters, they've all got this aura of I, I am sort of doggedly
speaking my mind as it is and I won't sort of cave in for this
work nonsense. And and it's a certain set.
It's all it's all rooted actually in the post war
mythology. But it is this kind of I'll say
it as it is. I'm not going to put up with any
political correct nonsense. And it's, it's all just stale
and it's all kind of controlled. Boris Johnson's kind of the
perfect example of, of a this, this kind of pastiche of an
older form of, of like this lingering vapour of an older
form of, of English identity. And the people are so bereft and
so desperate for some kind of champion in the elite.
To represent them, which is something that all touches on in
the essay as well, that they'll, they'll at least in recently
they've, they've glommed onto that.
They've latched onto it and thought, yeah, I'll if if you're
willing to stand there with the paint and sort of laugh with
about Muslim women in their burglars or whatever, then
you're my guy. Because that speaks more to me
than Gordon Brown or Keir Starmer or whoever.
And unfortunately, they just get ripped off and backstabbed over
and over and over again. Because it's kind of easy to
package that and sell it and dupe them over and over again.
But I think what we see now was with the general deterioration
of the country, it's people who are willing to go further and
further. Somebody like Rupert Low, for
example, is, is quite surprising.
He's all again, he's almost like a rogue elite in a way.
He's he's he's I'd say he's more of a a Trumpian figure than
Farage, though then again, Trump himself seems to have when the
chips are down, yeah, he'll he'll actually sort of dam up
the deep state and stand guard on a pile of what we're seeing
now. But this is the general
direction. And you think, are we, is
something going to change or is it all going to fall apart?
The, the other, the other view that people have on it, of
course, is that there's already these kind of technocratic
solutions waiting in the wings, such as digital ID and all of
that. I actually think that'll just
make things worse. The putting everybody on a
control grid is just going to make life even more miserable
and dystopian. And the violence on the streets
will carry on regardless. It's I think, you know, the, the
people in coming across in the boats and things there, there.
I think there is a case that this could be all used to bring
in a digital ID, but I don't think it'll keep those numbers
down. And so the, the UK vacation,
it's, it'll, it's weird because on the one hand, sort of AI and
drones and digital technology, it's coded in this sort of slick
way, this futuristic way. But really, it'll still be the,
the, the squalor and the and the and the depression of Great
Britain as it is now, except with more surveillance and and
more sort of control over the population.
Yeah, I do wonder quite how much actual control they'll be able
to implement now, if you think about, you know, if, if if
there's a storm at sea, can you stop the waves from breaking?
You know, is that not a bit about what we're talking about
here? Have they kind of underestimated
the potential for chaos? Like, what does that actually
look like? You know, just because you've
you've told someone to do something on your little
computer screen, it doesn't mean you're going to get compliance.
Yeah. And it's, it's, I mean, the
thing that I've noticed this summer, I, I was thinking about
writing an article on this, I was just doing some notes
before. Is that everywhere you look,
there's this talk of, of, there's these kind of analogies
of, of like Tinder and kindling where the, the, the, the, the UK
is a, is a Tinder box and, or, or people are heaping up like
was it David, Betsy, the dry wood is just getting bigger and
bigger and bigger. We don't know where the spark is
coming from, but it's coming. And these these kind of these
comparisons where the, the, the, the, the country in the summer
of 2025, like what I'll remember for it is everybody talking
about it in terms of something which is just going to explode.
And I'm not sure if that's going to happen, though.
We've still got, you know, six weeks left or whatever it is
before we get into the safety. But but yeah.
And there's people on the streets, there is people on the
streets. There's it is, it is reaching
boiling point out there. Yeah.
And so if you bring in on top of all of that, I think the idea is
these more sort of these, these technocratic surveillance
systems, hooking everybody up with the iPhones on the digital
wallets, all of this kind of thing.
I think the idea is that the, that would be the equivalent of,
of pouring a bucket of cool water onto the kindling, whereas
it could just be adding more kindling onto the kindling,
waiting for even more sparks. So that remains to be seen.
I, I, I I don't think there's a way out of this which is not
unpleasant. No, I, I tend to agree.
I, I don't think that there is an inevitability of the Civil
War. That's the term it's getting
used a lot at the moment. I don't know if Ben's used it,
I'm sure he has done in other interviews, but it was one that
came out a few days ago which you might be referring to.
But if you go onto YouTube, all the kind of right wing
influences, they're all talking up civil war.
It's been going on for about 6 months now.
Yes, very noticeably. They're trying to speak it into
existence. I think some.
Of them. It's strange that it's strange
how this is a thing that just seems to be getting pushed.
Yeah, but even what does that even look like, right?
Like, could you even conceive People say these things so
flippantly? But an actual civil war?
That's an organised conflict. Like who are the protagonists in
this? I, I, I don't know.
I mean, I don't, I don't, I also don't know why.
I mean, I've listened to bets talking about this, but it's,
it's this insistence on the term civil war.
And I know that he's given his own kind of definitions, which
tend to be quite academic. But I, I don't, I got to, I got
to understand if people were going to call it sectarian
strife or something like that, or there were more comparisons
made to Northern Ireland during the Troubles, which could
happen. But when, when it's the like
more incendiary language, like Civil War I, I yeah, I don't
know. I don't know where this is
coming from. I have, I have noticed that
there's a certain sort of network of podcasts that, that,
that, that seem to be really going in on this and who share a
lot of opinions, the same opinions on things.
But yeah, I, I find that bizarre.
And I mean, I would certainly advise people to be very careful
about in the way that they talk about civil war and conflict in
the country, because it seems like regardless of the intent
for people to begin talking up that way, it could very well be
a trap. You have to be careful.
I think I. Completely agree.
Yeah. Because we, we know like when
we're talking about the surveillance day, it is already
here to a large degree. And if we arrive at a situation
where you've got all of these people running around talking
about the Civil war, the the that's going to put the system
it, it kind of justifies aid of exception where where we move
into special territory like what we had to to some degree in
COVID, where they say, well, we're going to have to have
special measures. If you've got thousands upon
thousands of people talking about civil war and violent
conflict. We like this is this is not to
put it on bets or these podcasters or who any just an
outcome of this, whether intended or not could be
justification for the state to clamp down on people.
I'll be very careful about using that kind of language.
Yeah, no, I completely agree. I completely agree.
So, but what about the the working class?
If we could talk about the working class in the UK for a
moment. And I will just pick up on a
quote where she read out earlier which talks about the working
class being outstanding in their abhorrence of foreign habits.
And that quote continues to say that nearly every Englishman of
working class origin considers it effeminate to pronounce a
foreign word correctly, which is completely true still today.
Actually, I found that brilliant when I read that read that line.
But one of the other things that he talks about in in the essay
is the idea that the middle class and the working class are
becoming much more like each other.
Do you think that that's still true today or is do we still
have a very distinct working class culture as distinct from
the middle classes in this country?
I think no. I think it's kind of lingers on
here and there. You'll find it in one of the,
one of the, the things that the, the middle class despised about
contemporary Britain is Wetherspoons.
And, and the reason for that is that because he, he and I went,
I've been in Wetherspoons and I actually think it's great.
I, I think it was really lively. I think you there was a nice
array of cheap beer and that was, it was a bit rowdy and it
reminded me of going out in the big market in Newcastle in the
90s. You know, I'm getting on a bit
and I'm old enough to have like gone properly out, you know, in
the age of like Brit pop and all of that.
In the late 90s I was old enough to go out drinking with all my
mates. And then you genuinely really
had the working class sort of culture and I think it became
kind of softer and what held it together begin to dissolve and
this kind of thing. But I think it lingers on in
places like Wetherspoons where it's still rowdy, it's still a
bit of a laugh and you can get a lot of like cheap paints and
it's a good deals. And it's interesting the way the
middle class just absolutely despised Wetherspoons.
And it's become this another one is Greg's.
They, they, they've got this thing where Greg's is, is like
the, the, the, the slop of, of the lump and proletariat.
Now this, this, all of this would be fine.
This would be fair enough. But when you bring in other
things he talked about these, these asylum seeker hotels and
things it takes on and just historically things like
grooming gangs and whatnot, it, it actually takes something on
very sinister. There's, there's, there's
something so dark that I think George Orwell would have been
horrified by the outcome, by some of the things that's gone
on with it. And, and in that way it, it
genuinely seems something sick and vindictive rather than we're
all well painted, we're all right, we'll pick out and we
don't like each other, but there's a national emergency and
we're all going to club together and we're going to go off and
fight Johnny Foreigner. That's no longer the case
because we can't even properly define who Johnny Foreigner is,
Meaning the sense of the other has become like completely
muddied. And so the the US and the them
that will have to sort of bring club together itself is a
problem. I think it's very dark, very
sinister. Yeah, I agree with you.
I completely agree with you. And I also think one of the the
problems that they've got is that it seems universally
accepted now by all of the, if for want of a better word, lower
strata of society that the people on the top level have
abandoned them basically. So there's another interesting
quote here where he says at any normal time, the ruling class
will rob, mismanage, sabotage, lead us into the muck, but let
popular opinion really make itself heard.
Let them get a tug from below that they cannot avoid feeling
and it is difficult for them not to respond.
And I think that that has been broken now.
Yes, yes, I agree with that, that that is the problem.
There's there's a lot of pulling going on, but it doesn't seem to
ring any bells in the halls of power.
And so you end up where who, who ultimately is representing the
working classes now reform are there to pretend they are.
They are there to occupy that space.
And it's it's not good enough. And there's to be honest,
there's there's not much time left when you when you look at
where things are going. And but it's to give the
impression that. So maybe again, it's it's not
like all doom and groom, though things are very grim.
But the overproduction of the Leeds is is part of the reason
why I think you're seeing a general shift.
You know, you the whole woke stuff and then the all the stuff
that you saw a few a few years ago has largely been sort of
dialled back a bit. And I think this is an attempt
1/2 hearted and useless attempt to rectify this situation.
I mean, to be honest, much as it's you can kind of talk about
sort of because I think Labour and Kia Starmer and left Liberal
types are in our minds here. But let's not forget, I mean, I
absolutely despise the Tory party and I find that the Tory
party have probably done more damage to this country than than
Labour because the betrayal is just so greater and and it was
all just so dishonest. People will say, well, yeah, but
you, Tony Blair set the thing, the whole thing in motion, the
quangocracy and all of this back in 97.
Now that's true, but the Tories, never all they did was add to
it. And and you know what?
What we saw just last week putting on a super injunction to
conceal their treachery. That is the problem that that
mainset and they they can pass it off because they lop as
Colonel blimps from from the essay.
Yes, yeah, I completely agree. At least Labour are honest about
the fact that they hate us rather than the Conservatives
and the reform types who pretend that they still end up in going
in the same direction ultimately.
So there's, there's a quote actually just from the final
paragraph that I think is particularly powerful.
And it'd be great to get your thoughts on this right, which
says it needs some very great disaster, such as a prolonged
subjugation by a foreign enemy to destroy a national culture.
Now, given that we're talking about the destruction of
national culture that's been happening for decades now, does
this, is this what it feels like?
Does it feel like we've been subjugated by foreign enemy?
Have we been? Are we being attacked by the
system? Yeah, I, I, I don't think
there's any doubt about it. One of the, one of the things
that comes up a lot, which I've discussed and, and you will see
people say it's, it's incompetence, not malice.
And it goes back to Hanlon's razor.
Don't, don't ascribe to malice that which can be accurately
described as incompetence or something like that.
And I think that's a bit of a cope because the, the, the way
that it works and it's not the reason.
Firstly, the reason we know it's international in nature is that
it's happening everywhere. I just think that Britain is, is
probably the worst sort of affected by it.
But it the if, if it was just incompetence, if it was just
that the people who the incentive structure was created
in such a way that the people end up who are running the
system, or at least you know, the the bureaucrats at the top,
Keir Starmer and all the rest of them.
If they were just morons, then you would expect the outcomes to
swing in our favour sometimes. If it was just incompetence,
there would be now and then when that incompetence meant that the
normal kind of Brit got got a got a piece of the pie.
But that actually never happens. It never happens that there's a
positive outcome at all. And so the very best you can
hope for is that they are indifferent to your suffering.
I just, I just think we can take incompetence off that, that this
idea that they're well meaning idiots.
I don't think that, I don't think that stands up to
scrutiny. I don't, I don't think you can
get there by that. But then you get this.
So then the best they can hope for is that they're criminally
negligent. That that is the best outcome
where there's all of this suffering, all of this pain, all
of this misery going on, all the people being reduced to poverty.
The the idea that you cut old people's heating allowance, but
then like squander 22 billion on carbon capture schemes.
That that is what is that is, is that like really is can can we
now that that would you can only the very best case scenario for
that is criminal negligence yes. And so you can then deconstruct
that as well and you can think, well, how can how can they be so
negligent all of the time and sooner only in that you're going
to end up where the only rational sort of conclusion you
can come to is that actually it is malice.
That's that's all it can be the idea that Oh well, I'm going to
stop the small boats and they've been saying this for like 5
years and they still come across every day in their hundreds Now
is it incompetence? Is it I mean, come on.
So it ends up where you have to think actually, yes, it is
malicious. Hanlon's rears or is wrong, or
at best the very best they can hope for is that their criminal
totally negligent. Yeah, and, and, or some of them
think that they're doing it for your own good, which I think was
CS Lewis. He talks about omnipotent moral
busybodies who just want to be up in your business telling you
how to live your life. Yes, it's, it's funny because we
mentioned earlier about the, the, the, the Sycamore gap tree
and, and this, these kind of symbols and ideals and things
which transcend the data sheet. Of course, CS Lewis, what was
big on that when he was talking about men with no chests And I
think it was a fountain or a waterfall that he described.
And he, he had the, the, the, the, it was a young boy.
It was this the encroachment of technocratic thinking.
And in the, in this, in this sort of what he's describing,
the teachers tell the boy, describe the, the waterfall, I
think it was. And he says it's, it's
beautiful, it glows, it's got an aura and all of that.
And the teachers are saying, no, that's what you think about it.
What is it like what? And, and, and in the end it's
oh, well, it's HO 2 falling over hard granite and that's it using
gravity. So everything gets reduced to to
its raw components. You can't have any higher ideals
or transcendental sort of symbolism.
This is pure left brain reductive thinking.
Yeah, it's purely materialistic. Yeah, exactly.
OK. So just to, to, to close up,
we've talked about the weaponization of the state.
You've had a a bit of an experience of this recently,
maybe not directly from the state, although by proxy, as I
understand it, you had a bit of a run in with hope not hate.
How has that been for you? What was that experience like?
Because I'd imagine it was fairly dramatic.
Well, most of what they dug up on me was a 10 years old and out
of context and some of it I just don't recognize at all People.
Yeah, I'm not, I'm not crazy, I'm not a nut job.
I'm just, I've just right. And I've seen me thoughts on the
things and they wanted to Take Me Out for I don't know that I
must be too popular or something.
So they, they, they, you know, and it was what I was shocked by
was just the lengths that they went to and how they got some of
the information which speaks to which I can't prove.
So I'm just going to say that I'm not saying it is so, but it
does. I get the impression that
they've got this special calve out in the Home Office to go
through people's passports. There's rumours that Harry
Shuckman travelled around Europe on a fake passport.
The restorationists have done good stuff on this.
And still, the initial sort of thing was that the, the fear was
what I'm going to end up with the police coming to the door
here because that's just how we live.
And this is going to be this is, this is, this is just how we
live. We have to expect it didn't
actually happen. It didn't actually work out that
way at all. Really nothing happened, Nothing
changed. I think if it was 5 or 6 years
ago, it would have been worse. But I think their social capital
is squandered. I think the the system is is
kind of exhausted with all of this stuff now.
What are you going to chase around a Blogger for things that
he said or may not have said 10 years ago?
And like, is anybody actually care about that when all of this
things go in the country? So I'm hoping that hope not hate
are a busted flush. But I mean, ultimately, I'm only
sort of describing what's happening in the country.
I don't have political power. I don't have any influence in,
in the halls of power. So when, when we look at the
state of the country, what I find fascinating is that they
want to somehow project that onto people like me.
The, the, the destabilising factor, the, the, the danger to
our home, harmonious and wonderful multicultural society
with all these freedoms and all of these things accountable
democracy and everything. The real danger to that is not
hope, not hate. People like hope not hate or the
Labour Party or the Tory Party. It's people like me and I just
think that fascinating. It's like, no, like you, it's
your fault the system is like this.
You can't say that people didn't warn, you can't say that people
didn't express anger about this. All this, what was happening 20
years ago, they did. It's just that you silenced
everyone and you shut them down just as you wanted to do to me.
And ultimately, when you know, when all is said and done, it is
these sort of shady NGOs which are killing the the civilisation
and the ideas that they hold within them and the political
power they can have. That is what the that's the
destabilising force. That's some Blogger from North
Tyneside. Yes, I completely agree.
They are the destabilizing force.
And actually I think that'd be a nice place to wrap it up with a,
with a final quote from the essay, actually, which is one
that really stuck with me, particularly in the context of
what's happened to you over the past few months, which says,
talking about the British people, that no politician could
rise to power by promising them conquests or military glory.
No hymn of hate has ever made any appeal to them.
And I think that that it remains true today.
So Morgoth, absolute pleasure talking to you.
Thank you so much for taking the time all.
Right. Thank you very much.
And everyone listening at home, thanks for tuning in.
I've been Ben Rubin at UK column Take Care.