UK Riots 2024: British Peer Explains What Really Happened and Why Civil War Risk Is 3/10

Claire Fox [00:00:00] You go to any university campus in the UK or the US and say, I'm a free speech absolutist. And they think that you are a far right white, Aryan loving, white supremacist, right? And if you say that you support Israel's right to defend itself against Hamas and what he did on October the seventh, they'll say you are pro settler that you want to murder all Palestinians. And if the government is then going after people in

Vance Crowe [00:00:23] Social media that that, like you're, you're like, what in the world are you doing? These are actual

Claire Fox [00:00:28] Physical crimes that people are committing. What is my responsibility as a British citizen then? Because they tell me, my citizenship doesn't matter because anyone can come here and do anything they want. And so we have completely devalued what it means to live in a democratic society where politicians are accountable to the voters, where people vote people in, who are then answerable to ordinary people.

Listener intro (station ID) [00:00:52] I'm Danica Klu, a grad student living in Fort Collins, Colorado, and you are listening to the Vance Crowe Podcast.

Vance Crowe [00:01:01] Welcome back to the podcast. I'm glad you're here. Baroness Claire Fox returns to the podcast today. Longtime listeners know that I invite Claire on whenever I wanna know what's going on with either free speech or the uk. It just so happens this week that that is all in chaos right now. Are there race riots going on in the uk? Are there two-tiered police systems? What's going on with the government clamp down on social media? We're gonna get to all that in this fascinating conversation that may blow your mind. And you're gonna get to see me be humbled when my understanding of the situation gets flipped upside down by Claire. We're gonna get to that interview in just a moment, but I had three housekeeping items I wanted to talk about. First, if you have ever wanted to see a field day where somebody is doing modern agriculture in this very innovative and different way, then you should consider coming on August 24th to Buffalo Center, Iowa, where the stock cropper system, this is that system where they raise pastured animals in between rows of crops, is gonna be showing his system. The best part about this is not just seeing Zach's whole system and his farm and how he does it, but it's that there are some of the most interesting characters in all of agriculture show up to talk with one another, share their ideas, and really push the envelope of this concept they call farm weird. If you're interested to learn more, go to stock cropper.com and fill out the Eventbrite so he knows you're coming. I'll be there and I would love to see you there. Item number two that I want to talk about is the ag tribes report.

Vance Crowe [00:02:35] Listeners of the podcast may know that for the last few weeks we've been recording, actually live streaming a podcast where we talk about what's going on in agriculture based on what are the different tribes think. So we bring up a new host that tells me about this is the news that matters to my ag tribe, whether they're dairy or cattle or grain farmers. And I have been astounded by the growth of this podcast Thursday night. We run it live. The guests have told me over and over again that it is very intense to be on this show because we do four stories, bang, bang, bang, and then we go through and talk about who is a worthy adversary that they listen to on social media and what is an idea that they have been kicking around that not everybody agrees with them on. So check out the Ag Tribes report live on Friday at 6:00 PM Central or you can get the recording of it on Friday morning. Finally, I want to touch on Legacy Interviews. If you have ever thought about having your family record their life stories so that future generations can know their family history, consider getting them a legacy interview. I've had a chance to interview hundreds of people telling their stories. And when we are done, people are so grateful that they have these. I know that for me personally, I got a chance to record my mentor telling his life stories. And after he passed away, it was so comforting to know that I had this recording, to know that I could hear his voice, that I could listen to these stories. And probably most importantly, I'm gonna be able to share them with my children when I want them to know about the person that shaped me.

Vance Crowe [00:04:12] So if you've ever thought about doing this, go to Legacy Interviews dot com and consider booking one for your family members. It will give you tremendous peace of mind and one day it may be one of the most valuable things that you own. Alright, without further ado, let's head to the interview with Baroness. Claire Fox. Claire Fox, welcome to the podcast.

Claire Fox [00:04:34] Great to be back with you, Vance.

Vance Crowe [00:04:37] Well, we are in a wild time all around the world. I know in the United States we're going through crazy stuff with our elections and what's gonna happen in the future. And this is drowning out what I think is maybe an even more important story, which is what is going on in the uk. So what I thought I could do is maybe kind of summarize the way that I think things are going on in the UK and then you can give me an update as to where I got it wrong, where the facts are, and we can go from there. 'cause this is a huge story that when I ask people in the US about it, they don't know anything about it. So couple of weeks ago, a man that I believe was an illegal immigrant from Rwanda came into a little girl's dance studio and stabbed a bunch of little girls in a poor working class white neighborhood in London. And as a result of this, the families and the people living in that community went out and held anti-immigration rallies saying, this is crazy. Why do we have somebody in here that would do this to us? And as a result of that, there were backlash protests. So Muslim protestors, which there are many Muslim specifically young men living in, in, in the in London, came back and they started having real clashes. I understand from a long distance away that there were a bunch of men housed in a Holiday Inn and a bunch of people surrounded these refugees and made threatening comments and threw rocks through windows.

Vance Crowe [00:06:09] And now the UK government, specifically the government of London, is pointing the finger at the, the people that were upset about the immigration and saying, you're saying hateful things. So we're gonna clamp down on free speech because we think that is one of the primary drivers of this. So from all the way across the ocean, how much of that story did I get right? What, what should people know in order to understand what's really going on in the uk?

Claire Fox [00:06:37] Okay, quite a lot of that is wrong, to be fair. So let me, let me run through it. First of all, the, the events that took place in relation to the Taylor Swift dance class of little girls happened in Southport, which is a seaside town in the north of England. Secondly, and very, very, very importantly, the eventual person who was arrested for that terrible heinous crime was in fact a British born, Welsh born in fact, young, 17-year-old, raised and reared in the uk. His parents are from Rwanda, or at least one of his parents of Fr Rwanda. It's got nothing to do with illegal immigration, got nothing to do with the fact that he's a migrant or any such thing. And in fact, what you, the story you told was exactly the kind of story that got shared on social media that originally led to which the government are calling miss or disinformation, which has stirred up some trouble, which I'll go into in a minute. Actually, the people of Southport did not rise up and riot at all. They were in shock. Can you imagine a bunch of little girls and somebody goes in and flails around and stabs 'em?

Claire Fox [00:08:11] We've got no idea what drove or motivated the 17-year-old to do that. Originally what happened was, was that somebody put out on social media some bad faith actors, genuinely from racist, far right backgrounds put out a statement that this was an illegal immigrants and Muslim, and that inflamed certainly the atmosphere in the uk. And there was then a number of things that happened struck, first of all in Southport, one, one thing was the prime minister went to Southport to kind of lay a wreath for the, for the little girls. And there was some heckling, that's all. But then later on there was in fact a protest. Although what then occurred was that the protest turned into a riot, pretty vicious riot as well of, you know, quite violent, hostile, completely nihilistic, antisocial behavior. And it seems that that was less people from Southport as an area, but more people who had kind of come in from other areas. But the thing that's complicated to, to understand is that subsequent to that, there have been a large range of protests that evoke very quickly turn into riots around the rest of the country.

Claire Fox [00:09:47] And what I think is probably difficult to untangle from afar is that these are in a way no longer directly linked to the Southport murders, although that was the spark, because there's been a range of other issues that in a way have led to discontent. One of those has been that we have a situation, we had had a situation in a place called Harehills Estate in Leeds, a Yorkshire town, which there had been a riot a couple of weeks before, and the police almost absented themselves from that scene. It was said that they ran away, but there wasn't very much of a clamp down. And that had involved a Roma family. And then there was, you know, wants and destruction and violence they set on fire a bus, and people were scared and in their homes, and the police didn't seem to act. Whereas when the Southport riot occurred, the police were all over the place. And it, it wasn't just Southport, there was also a demonstration outside Downing Street in London where the prime minister lives, and the police just went in and just arrested everyone. So that, that led to a situation where people said, this is two tier policing, as they call it, you know, that you police some communities differently than other communities. That's one thing that had happened recently. Another thing that happened was, was that a British soldier in uniform got violently stabbed on the streets in broad daylight, and nobody knows very much about who that attacker was.

Claire Fox [00:11:24] But when people ask the question, is this an a a a, an Islamist, a radical Islam terrorist attack, they're effectively accused of stirring up racial hatred, of being Islamophobic, of, of asking questions that would make matters worse. And people really resented that because it's perfectly legitimate to ask if a British soldier is assaulted in that way. And also because we know that both the armed forces then advise people not to wear their uniforms in public. And partly because there's a memory of an actual terrorist attack with somebody in prison as a consequence of a soldier called Lee Rigby, who had actually some years ago, I mean, I think it's over 10 years ago, had his head hacked off by an Islamist. And so people were fearful that this was more of the same. And then finally, on the immediate things that led up to this, there was a big fight at Manchester Airport, and we saw this horrifying footage of the, of the British police, the airport police stamping on the head of a, of apparently, you know, a prone young Asian man. And they stamped and he said it was really unpleasant to watch. And that had led to a lot of aggravation with people saying not exactly like George Floyd, but, but people saying this is the police outta control attacking people just because they're Muslims. And then of course, when the, the footage became available, the full footage became available.

Claire Fox [00:13:00] It was clear that what actually happened was, was that these, this group of people at Manchester Airport who happened to be Asian, had assaulted the police quite violently, including breaking the nose of a female police officer and hurting another one. And then were, were, you know, tasered and got to the ground. And that's no excuse, of course, of the police officer who stamped on this young man's head. But nonetheless, you suddenly that it, it all added up. This all happened in the two weeks prior to the Southport stabbing. So I'm, I'm just trying to give you a flavor of the immediate sense in which people felt that we weren't being told the truth, that there was more going on, that there was this two-tier policing that maybe the issues around race were clouding the ability to know what was happening. And the broader background then is, is finally is that there's like everywhere else actually in America, all throughout Europe, there is great concern about illegal immigration into the country and what we call in the uk the small boats crisis in which every day, hundreds, and it's adding up to thousands of people arrive on these small boats illegally on the coast of the UK and end up being, staying here. Right? And the, the previous government, the conservative government had brought in this piece of legislation known as the Rwanda bill or a Rwanda Act, and the new government, which was, which was supposedly to act as a deterrent to send these illegal immigrants or these illegal alleged asylum seekers, these migrants to Rwanda.

Claire Fox [00:14:50] It was a bit of a stupid piece of legislation, if I'm honest. But nonetheless, the first, one of the first things that the new government, the new labor government did was to cancel that legislation. And one of the crises in relation to illegal migration in the country is that all of these people have been arriving on small boats, have been housed in hotels in local areas, often in very poor areas where, you know, people feel real sense of, of social deprivation, economic hardship. But if you are one of the migrants who staying in these hotels, they're not having a luxurious time, but they are, for example, have, do, have access to free healthcare, free dentists and so on. And, and as you can't in the UK at the moment, get to see your doctor and people can't get access to a dentist that's created resentment. And so one of the reasons for the focus of some of the riots being outside these hotels is because of that piece of information. The final thing I could say is what's confused things even more is that of course when I was watching one of the protests outside one of the hotels, it was very distressing to say, Louis is there were people in this hotel, it doesn't matter who they are, it doesn't matter whether they're illegal migrants or not. They, they broke into that hotel. They were firebombing it and it went on fire at one point.

Claire Fox [00:16:20] It's a miracle people weren't killed. I mean, in a real miracle it got completely outta hand. And so you can see that. And then also we have had explicit racism where people are just saying, deport them all, anyone who's not born in this country, even people who are born in this country, like the, the, the young man who create did the stabbing as it were, but it's actually a British citizen, even if his parents were originally migrants. Well, that's a lot of people in this country, to be fair, you know what I mean? And it's, it's, it takes a racist to say, anyone who's black who lives in the UK should be deported. I mean, it's obviously not a good thing, but that then gets confused and, and, and, and, sorry. And there are people on the hard right, and I mean the hard right, you know, properly radicalized racists on the hard right. A small number of them who've exploited this situation completely exploited it opportunistically. The, the problem is that the British government's response to this has been to say that anybody who is concerned about illegal migration, anyone who's concerned about another aspect of this, which is a lack of integration into British society, the growth of real separate societies, different communities living completely differently, the growth of, and the real, I'm afraid, a support for radical Islamism, which we've noticed particularly in relation to demonstrations against the war in Gaza and the antisemitism we've seen on the streets and had become apparent, viscerally apparent during the buildup to the election when candidates were being hounded off the streets if they didn't support or say if they didn't denounce Israel and abused and tired, slashed, and a lot of candidates really frightened, and canvas is frightened to go out.

Claire Fox [00:18:21] That was the kind of context. And to say that anyone who complained about that was a far right racist, which is almost the way that the Prime minister when he spoke, implied that has then aggravated things even further and led to even more dissatisfaction because a lot of the things that we've seen on the streets are based on far deeper roots than what happened in Southport, even though that was the trigger for them.

Vance Crowe [00:18:53] You know, I'm so glad I asked. I thought that I had done a pretty good job of kind of listening to different podcasts about this and watching it on Twitter, but I'm always open to the idea that, that you can get a story ter you know, totally wrong without context. And I saw it when I was living here in St. Louis, Missouri, and the Ferguson riots were going on, and you'd hear other people talk about it from the outside, and you'd say, no, no, no. Like, you're missing key important things. You're switching around details. When you think about the average Londoner or the average person in the uk, do they have the same narrative that you have? What are they telling themselves about what's going on in the uk and how bad is it? What are they really worried? Is this something people think will just blow over at the end of the summer? Well,

Claire Fox [00:19:40] There is an that, well, what I've told you is accurate. So, so regardless of the narrative is an accurate truth. I think one of the, the things which you've referred to the potential assaults on free speech, sorry, I've got to cough by the way.

Vance Crowe [00:19:57] Oh, good. Sorry.

Claire Fox [00:19:59] You've talked about the potential assaults on free speech that are coming outta this from the government. And I can go on and explain what's happened in relation to that. But one of the issues is undoubtedly that social media information just flies about very, very quickly. I think most, for most people seeing violent outbursts or rioting all over the streets of the uk. And this is not confined to London. In fact, London's almost not in the, the, the, the, the picture here, it is much more likely to be riots outside of London actually in these northern towns, often where migrant communities living in great numbers, but but also in sometimes places that are, you know, less privileged than the great cosmopolitan London. So you've got a kind of geographical difference there as well. And you know, America's got that in, you know, spade loads more than in the uk but even in the UK, depending on where you live is how you experience things. And you can feel like your part, the forgotten places if you live in certain places, and therefore you'll get the resentments are even greater. But I think that the thing about social media is that when these kind of stories are rushing around the place, then people can too quickly develop narratives that are not true. And that is a, a, a feature of social media. And in fact, the, the original grievance that the government have used to clamp down on free speech, which I'll go into in a minute, was that very quickly after the Southport stabbings a story went out naming the individual stabber, but with a made up name as a, you know, Ali, so and so, you know, so it was a Muslim name and they said he was an illegal immigrant.

Claire Fox [00:21:50] And of course this inflamed as you can imagine, and already quite emotionally raw population. And that was then used very fairly quickly because he's under 18, this young man, the police didn't name him, but eventually after a couple of days they did. So then we knew that in fact he was not a illegal migrant, he was a Muslim, but from a second generation randan most likely Christian from a, from a family that where everyone else in the family are fully integrated in society. So we don't know what's gone wrong with that young person who's obviously, you know, done such a barbaric act. So that's how, of course the government can then say, oh, this is all caused by diss and misinformation online. So we are now going to clamp down on it. But the problem that we've got with this is, is that they have a rather selective view of which kind of diss and misinformation they clamp down on. Because if I can give you an example, it's undoubtedly the case. And, and the UK has got a huge look.

Vance Crowe [00:23:00] Wait, I wanna, actually, I'm gonna pause you for a second. Yeah. Because I think that people in the United States that are not following this don't have any idea when you say that the government is clamping down on social media. I, maybe I take this chance to read something that I saw on, on Twitter just the other day. The director of public prosecution, Steven Parkinson, said the offense or incitement of racial hatred involves publishing or distributing materials, which is insulting or abusive, which is intended to or likely to start racial hatred. So if you retweet that, then you are republishing that and you are committing an offense. We have dedicated police officers who are scouring social media. Their job is to look for this material and then follow up with identifications and arrests. Now, I can understand somebody saying, if you try and incite people to violence, we're gonna track that down. But a lot of that has to do with interpretation and what you, you know, whether, whether or not it's abusive is determined by the eye of the beholder. So to an American like me, this is an extreme overreach that you would show up based on what somebody said on Facebook to their house and arrest them. Is that what's going on right

Claire Fox [00:24:13] Now? Well, that's what they're threatening. And can you imagine? I mean, it doesn't, it's not just to an American, I mean to a British person, it sounds pretty authoritarian too. And it's a real knee-jerk reaction. And the, the threat to people in terms of, remember, it's not even what you write yourself, but if you retweet something, if you retweet something, which somebody else then decides somebody in authority, and it was posed by this director of public prosecution, you know, as, as a direct threat to people. And this is in a context by the way, where the criminal justice system in the UK is falling apart in many ways. And we've been told, 'cause this is another part of the story for your listeners to take on board, which is that the prisons here are full. And so there's a crisis in the prisons. And the government had just announced that now that they are going to release people who have only served 40% of their sentence to get people outta prison. Also, a lot of police forces had said, well, because the prisons are full and because the courts are all clogged up, this is partly as a consequence of lockdown measures. But it's not just that as also 'cause they keep creating more crimes for people to break by way of, you see what I mean? Then there's been all these statements over the last year or so in which the police forces have said things like, well look, we are not going to be able to arrest people if they steal your mobile phone or if they, if there's a burglary at your house.

Claire Fox [00:25:51] We can't, we can't arrest people for low level shoplifting. So you've got a kind of sense of lawlessness in society, which is quite frightening and it's quite difficult to get the prosecution service to prosecute people for a whole range of things. You know, sexual assaults, these crimes that I've just mentioned, nevermind antisocial behavior so similarly to have this party

Vance Crowe [00:26:15] And if the government is then going after people in social media that, that, like you're, you're like, what in the world are you doing Exactly these, these are actual physical crimes that people are committing.

Claire Fox [00:26:24] And also when they say we've got police officers dedicated to scouring social media, I mean, my response to that was, we know you have, because one of the problems has been is that the police who never seem to be present on the streets in many instances and certainly have not been present on the streets during the big Gaza demonstrations, which have been very intimidating, particularly for Jewish people living in the UK or any of us who just don't like people shouting Islamist antisemitic slogans and, and a kind of general climate to antagonism to anybody who's been sympathetic to Israel defending itself in relation to the October the seventh pogrom against Jews. You know, all of those things which I know are reflected in, in, in the US as well. You know, the police say, oh, well, you know, they appear to not be, oh,

Vance Crowe [00:27:15] The US has right now. I I would, I would push back on the, like the video I have seen from the UK of the size of the demonstrations and the level of aggressiveness was so strong that it is like, it makes you gulp, right? Yeah. It makes you say like, oh, that's going on in a western civilization. Yeah. Where there are people that are talking in a completely different language with flags that some of them you recognize and some of them you don't even know what they mean and they're marching down the streets. It's a whole bunch of young men. And I mean that is, it's one of the most intimidating things I've seen in western culture. Full stop. Yeah. And the fact that you have all these other things going on, it, it's, I mean, incredibly confusing to somebody like me, how it seems like the UK is burning.

Claire Fox [00:28:06] Well, it's, I don't want to overstate it 'cause it's not quite right, but, but it is true that it feels on occasion like that, what I was gonna say was you get, just like you have in the us you get huge, massive demonstrations of pro Gaza demonstrations. And within them, a small minority of people are explicitly pro Hamas, pro ht waving the flags around. And what I wanted to explain for context is that many of the, the, the migrant communities who live in the UK are from Asian, the Asian subcontinent, and they are Muslims, but the majority of those people are fully integrated into the uk, right? Like they're not, you know, they're Muslims, they've just got a different, they're not Christians, but they're Muslims, like they're Sikhs, like, they're all sorts of, you know, it's a melting pot in that sense. Something peculiar has occurred around the Muslim community, which has been big divisions, which have particularly come to the fore in relation to the Israel Gaza demonstration issue. But I've also been prevalent in relation to the rise of radical Islam in the world, right? So there are splits within that community, but there's probably, as a proportion of migrant community, there's more Asians, there are anyone else. And of those Asian communities, many of them are Muslims. And therefore you get into this muddle about who is threatening what.

Claire Fox [00:29:37] But I don't want anyone to imagine that every Muslim who lives in the UK goes along with this. That is not true. They are as intimidated by that, this as anyone else. But on the other hand, there's not a massive denunciation from maybe leaders of the Muslim communities against other Muslims who are radicalized. So you've got that slight complication adding in. But what I was gonna say was that Well,

Vance Crowe [00:30:04] And what, sorry, go on. Oh, go ahead.

Claire Fox [00:30:06] No, go on, go on.

Vance Crowe [00:30:07] Well, I was gonna say the, the intimidation that you're talking about, and I am completely comfortable saying what I see on Twitter is not accurate, right? But what I'm watching is they're saying, look at these knife wielding, machete wielding groups of people with bats. They are chasing down people that went to the anti immigration rallies. And so you have this sense that what's going on is there's one group of people that they have such a large mob that they're able to show up, shout their slogans, advocate for their point of view, and then the other group that's saying, Hey, this is making me uncomfortable. I'm gonna show up to an anti-immigration protest. They get chased down by, by mobs of people with bats and machetes. Well, is this going on?

Claire Fox [00:30:52] Yeah. Yeah. So this is why we have to untangle it because it is true that if you were somebody for living in a particular area and you were about to encounter one of these big demonstrations of people who are self-identify as, as white nationalists, right? Driving people out, you might be frightened and you would well be frightened. And so then you get a reaction back in this instance, people organizing and taking out their, their, their, you know, weapons and their bats and so on to defend themselves. Right? Now, I'm not saying that's right. What I'm saying is it's, it's a toxic mix and it's a very febrile situation. The row, if you want politically is that sometimes it can appear and it has appeared to people that the police, whereas they're clamping down on the white nationalists, may potentially over on one side, they're playing softly, softly with these gap. One of the groups is called the Muslim Defense League when they're walking around threatening people with the baseball bats. And there was some frightening scenes of that, although I don't want you to think that is the kind of nor now I, I wanted to explain something that that happened last night, which just hot off the presses it were because it, it, it illustrates how mis and disinformation is treated in particular ways. So yesterday we were told throughout the day by an organization called Hope Not Hate. And then this was picked up by, you know, an anti-racist organization called Hope Not Hate.

Claire Fox [00:32:25] And this was picked up by all of the major media outlets and all of the politicians that there was going to be a hundred riots last night. And people were absolutely terrified, right? A hundred riots would be far too many for the police to deal with that. We were told these far right mobs were descending them from all around the country. They listed the places in many parts of the UK including parts of London. But all around the UK shops were closing early, people were staying inside, you couldn't go to the doctor, your hospital appointments were canceled because there was this notion of this huge conflagration. What then happened was that, that the anti-racist counter-demonstrations came out. You know, you could say, well, LA I'm an anti-racist and I can understand that. But they came out in big numbers in certain places. No one from this far right organizations or nobody who they could even label far right did turn up. And then today it's, and so now we live in a world of peace and harmony. If you read the headlines, it basically says now, oh, isn't this fantastic? The decent people have won all these kind of lunatic fringe groups are sidelined. We are, we, we've we've driven them off the streets. But they've also admitted that the list of a hundred demonstrations was probably a hoax. So hope not a hate circulated what it consider what is now admitted to be a hopes list terrified the nation into thinking that there was about to be riots everywhere.

Claire Fox [00:34:04] But apparently that kind of misinformation is okay because it led to the nice people coming out on the streets. And therefore one of this, this point about this notion of two tier policing is broadened out now to two tier governance. This notion that the, you know, you, you can, you can lie on social media or make the mistake or you know, use a hoax and no one is gonna come down. This director of public prosecutor is not gonna send the police down to arrest the hope not hate guys. Oh is he? Right? And similarly, something else happened the other night in the middle of the febrile real riots, a story went out again put forward by well-meaning no doubt, you know, right. You know, respectable anti-racist that day was gangs of white nationalists going around throwing acid over Asian women's faces over Muslim women's faces. And I thought, oh my God, this is terrible. 'cause I had watched them try and burn the hotel down, by the way. So that wasn't made up. I watched it out in real time and you, you thought, oh my god, this got completely outta hand, but said over their faces, can you imagine? Anyway, the next day the police said, oh, that wasn't true. So I asked the question, well if that wasn't true, was that an inflammatory piece of disinformation? Should someone be arrested for that then? Because it's certainly inflamed things because one of the reasons why the Muslim Defense League argued that it had gone out with its baseball bats or whatever they were right, was because they'd heard that their sisters and their mothers and their daughters were being threatened by acid attacks.

Claire Fox [00:35:45] Well, you know, then you just say, well, but of course nobody meant that kind of misinformation that everybody just said, oh, that was a mistake, sorry. So that gets forgotten. And so I think that all the time you get this sense that society's being fractured and that certain people have been demonized beyond redemption and are gonna be locked off for a very long time. Whereas other people who act in bad faith but on the right side of history are allowed to get away with making mistakes or even maliciously putting out information or, you know, inadvertently sharing misinformation. So this clamp down on free speech is very, very dangerous because it creates an excuse without it, it's not not being conspiratorial for a government not sure what to do to restore law and order to bring in without any legislation happening. And with parliament's not sitting at the moment, I'm usually in parliament and now some laws bit it, no laws are being passed, but it's given the, the government, the Prime Minister has given the police the, the right to exert authoritarian powers in relation to our speech rights. And these things can be normalized. You know, this isn't just like a state of emergency moment. This is something which they're now discussing in a far, you know, as having far reaching consequences. And that is a very nerve wracking and worrying side to this.

Claire Fox [00:37:17] It's also the case that they talked about introducing facial recognition technology. That was one of the things that the Prime Minister said using facial tech, racial facial tech recognition technology that by the way, even the European Union, and I'm no fan of them, even they think that's a step too far out of just banned it and said, no, we can't have that AI doing that. They also talked about introducing travel bans, which is a kind of pre-crime, a piece of orders, which means that you are not allowed to travel if they think you might be going to somewhere where there might be a riot. So these are serious attacks on civil liberties. And although it's been a very serious matter, and I, to be honest with you, I'm glad that the police have now gone in and started policing. 'cause I was worried when they didn't police that, that Harehills rising in Leeds that I told you about where they kind of ran away. I do want the police, of course, to throw the book at arrest and throw the book at people who were threatening life and limb and breaking the law because that's what the police are supposed to do. But if it's only been directed at one group of people, people don't feel it's fairly applied or they feel that the police have been given powers that disproportionately will attack the civil liberties of anyone and everyone in society, especially if you get labeled far right or hard right, or a racist. And it's very easy to have that label attached to you these days because you could just have it because you say, actually, I've discovered that the government, the previous government and this government and the previous government before that lied about the even the legal migration we have and we've now discovered that there's millions of extra people that we didn't even know were in the country and they never told us.

Claire Fox [00:39:02] If you raise concerns like that, then you could be labeled far right racist and victim of these authoritarian illiberal laws.

Vance Crowe [00:39:14] So Claire, you have been on the forefront of free speech running the Battle of ideas. We've talked about this many times on the podcast before, but there's something that, you know, a chilling effect where you talk about people that may have their social media monitored, somebody show up at their door and arrest them when somebody's civil liberties are at threat. Our kind of model here in the US is, oh, will you push back on that? And then, you know, you maybe do some civil disobedience and maybe you go to jail for a little while, but eventually the the right righteous path prevails. And then you get out of jail and you were the hero. But if you're actually staring down at a culture that seems to be going down the authoritarian wing, now civil disobedience might not just get you locked up for an evening, it might get you labeled the way that you're describing, you know, you're, you're ultra right wing or you're some kind of hate monger. People throw you away into a jail and now you're there and who knows what can happen to you while you're there or for how long. So in your free speech experience, what should people be doing to push back on this? Is civil disobedience not the right path? Well,

Claire Fox [00:40:26] I-I-I-I-I at the moment, anything that looks like civil disobedience, anything that's taken to the streets is likely to not end well to be frank. But I do think that there are, there is much more consciousness maybe is a way of explaining it, that free speech is under attack. And that is a very positive thing. We have a, a newly growing and thriving free speech union, a a an organization that I think you you with led by Toby Young, but which has a group of lawyers in, in a way it's like the kind of original ACLU in America. But, you know, we hadn't got anything like that here. That was before the ACLU went weird. And it's more like FIRE now and FIRE by the way, just to say I i I take my hat off to them and in fact they are, you'll be glad to know involved as one of the partners of this year's Battle of Ideas Festival. I'm, I'm, I'm pleased we, we are doing our hands across the sea in that way. But anyway, we've got a free speech union. We, we hope that we at the Academy of Ideas through work such as the Battle of Ideas Festival, can act as a a and do act as something of a kind of mothership for all free speech organizations or anyone who cares about free speech to get together and show solidarity, not just with each other, but to plan and organize what we do. And I, and I don't think, and there's other organizations such as Big Brother Watch another one that's very interesting to, to see. So there are organizations that are not just the usual NGO talking shots, but they're actually much more actively engaged in campaigning actively for free speech, which I think that means that the government can't just get away with this quite straightforwardly.

Claire Fox [00:42:11] But what one of the confusing factors is that it's a new government and the government got elected even though it didn't get elected by a, a, a convincing number of voters, it got elected because actually I think only about 33% of the population or, or certainly voted for them, but they've got a huge majority of mps. And that's because the disillusion with the prior, previous conservative party completely justified disillusion for many of us because they were so hopeless and then, you know, abandoned any kind of sensible rule. They have been punished by this huge majority labor government and they got elected just before Parliament was suspended for the summer, which means that we can't quite yet understand how, how this will play out when normal politics raise, as it were resumes in a couple of weeks. But we do know that there is an issue, which is that, for example, the conservative party have got heart, just really got a massive reduction of mps. There are five new populist mps in the form of reform uk, which is kind of right-leaning populist organization led by Nigel Farage. There are also five Islamists supporting Independence mps who've been elected.

Claire Fox [00:43:43] So goodness knows what's gonna happen in the Chamber of the Commons when it gets, when it resumes. But politics is definitely not as, it was one of the worrying things about this labor government, it's not directly a free speech issue, but it relates to it, is that the Labor Party as is now, it's not the old Labor party that had deep roots in the working class and represented ordinary working people, but it's very much based on an ideological commitment to, for example, identity politics, you know, DEI, you know, diversity, equity and, and inclusion or it's like second name, right? It kind of has built itself on those kind of divisive racializing, often agendas, but also in relation to everything from the gender wars and the trans versus biological women, ros and so on and so forth. The low party are all embroiled in that. And so one of the worrying things is that it cannot face down even its own, its own diversity among in its mps, right? And the identity politics is one of the factors that's led to where we are because actually maybe unlike in America historically, racism in certainly in the last 20 years is just not a feature particularly of UK politics. But because of the stirring up of identity politics, people have become much more self-conscious about their racial identity.

Claire Fox [00:45:17] Because after all, if you say to the majority of people who live in the uk, you have original sin because you are white, it's the color of your skin. You actually create the material basis or the ideological or, or, or shift towards creating a white nationalist movement, right? I mean you, you, I've seen it happen in, in many countries and it certainly happened here. So whereas it wasn't before, now people do are asked to see every social, economic and political problem through the prism of race and skin color and ethnicity. And now guess what? We've got the worst aspect of that, which is, is a white backlash amongst the, it might only be a small minority who have embraced that, but nonetheless it's created the kind of tensions in society and in different communities that has led to this particularly horrible standoff. And the, and because the labor party can't deal with that by basically arguing for a universal British values that cut across identity, do not have anything to do with that, but stand for freedom and democracy and, and get us all to unite around what it means to be British. They go quiet about that. So all they're left with is repression, is free speech, assaults on free speech. They kind of, they're frightened of going anywhere near some of those more thorny cultural questions.

Claire Fox [00:46:48] So they then just go, if we can shut everyone up, it'll all go away. And of course it won't, it'll just feer.

Vance Crowe [00:46:56] Yeah, I think that it's, it's Saul Alinsky wrote that book, you know, rules for Radicals where it's all about the, the most important thing is to split people up and just do not allow them to reform in, into a cohesive group. And the more you can keep them fractionated, and I remember when I was living in Kenya and you saw when they would have elections come up, people would become totally inflamed about your tribal affiliation. That was really the only thing that mattered. And what you realized by being an outsider is this tension can never be resolved. There's so many tribes, they all have their own interests. If you back them all into a corner, they're gonna fight for themselves. And so people didn't view themselves as Kenyans, they viewed themselves as luo or you know, any, any of the other tribes. And like to see that happen in a western culture. It was unthinkable 10 years ago, probably even five years ago, that you could get people to be so divided on on racial lines. Where do you think this goes over the next two years or five years?

Claire Fox [00:48:00] Well, I think, well the problem with the way that the governments at the moment are dealing with it is that they think that if they can just calm things down on the streets, that that means that this situation is being diffused. But actually it misses the really underlying problems, which is that these tensions exist beyond the riots. Most people I know, ordinary working people are as horrified by the riots as anyone else, right? They don't want yobs work going around threatening life and limb. They don't want a load of white races go around wearing their swastikas and skinheads and all the rest of it threatening people. But that doesn't mean to say that they aren't very preoccupied about the problems of mass migration in a situation where you haven't got integration or nobody's even clear what you should integrate into. It doesn't solve the problem at all of the illegal migration in terms of the small boats. It doesn't solve the problem either of the growth of support for these radical Islamist extremists, which are, you know, I dunno if you've kept up with this, but last night in Vienna, the concerts of Taylor Swift were canceled three concerts because they caught two supporters of ISIS who were about to bomb them with chemical bombs.

Claire Fox [00:49:32] And they had all sorts of, you know, they'd been caught. They'd been caught. I mean, thank goodness that the Vienna police were on it, right? And, and it could have been mass murder. So we know that Islamist violence is not, you know, is not like in the past, right? It's a real and present danger to western civilization. And what I think we need to do is to, to fight even harder. I mean, it, it might sound really ridiculous, but we have to convince particularly younger generation of the virtues of western civilization, of con and find new arguments in defense of what democracy really is. And I don't just mean in some technical sense of voting that ballot box, but the responsibilities that come with democracy, what it really means to be participants in society. And the virtues of course of free speech, which as you know, have been sullied. I mean, you know, you go on onto any university campus in the UK or the US and say, I'm a free speech absolutist. And they think that you are a far right white Aryan loving, white supremacist, right? And if you say that you support Israel's right to defend itself against Hamas and what he did on October the seventh, they'll say you are pro settler at colonial state that you want to murder all Palestinians, that you are child killer pro genocide and so on. You, you know, and if you argue against them, then they, they they just doubled down and saying, and the irony here is I have defended the free speech of the pro-Palestinian protestors on university campuses in the UK using the very arguments that they so despise to come from the western tradition of enlightenment thinking, John Locke toleration and so on.

Claire Fox [00:51:23] I've defended their right to argue the most heinous and hateful arguments through those free speech prisms. So we've got to carry on. I mean, and, and the main thing is not to be coward.

Vance Crowe [00:51:36] Yeah. I think that you, it's, it's easy for us to see that on college campuses. The ideas of free speech are not, they're not as anywhere near what they were when I was in college. But something I think that's more insidious or more hidden is that there are people that are my age or even older that are starting to deeply question democracy itself. I mean, I have have had conversations with people that say, you know, maybe the only way you can rule people is by having a monarch. You know, maybe the only way we can do this is to have an authoritarian dictator in order to be able to get our, you know, our freedoms. And it's because even the people that lived in a world that was supported by things like free speech, and they just, they aren't, they don't believe in it anymore. And so I think it's gonna be very difficult to bring young people into this. And I think even, you know, you, you mentioned that people not really even knowing what does it mean to be British? What does it mean to be somebody that's a member of the UK that's going on in the United States right now? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there's very few people that view themselves, you know, first, second or third as an American. And if they do, they mean something very, very specifically by being American. And they, and they, and they don't include those people over there.

Claire Fox [00:52:50] Yeah. Well, I mean you obviously you are, you are describing the crisis of the moment. I mean, I, I, I don't want to be over melodramatic, but I do think this is a civilizational, you know, a civilizational crisis if you want. And we are talking about fighting now for Western civilization, which is why I was saying to you that we got FIRE involved in the battle of ideas. 'cause I think at the very least, there needs to be far more trans, you know, transatlantic not just conversation, but unity. I think that, that the west has, and enlightened, I consider myself still a liberal of the old school, but, you know, enlightened thinkers or who believe in freedom need to, you know, get real right and realize the stakes are very high here. I I completely recognize what you are saying about the disillusion with democracy, by the way. And I've noticed that myself amongst my own peers. And it's very frightening because what's happened is that, and I, and I can, I can really genuinely understand this, you know, for ex just to use the immigration issue again, you know, time and again, governments are elected and in their manifestos they say, we will reduce all control, migration. So to a manageable numbers. Yeah. And then they just don't do it. Not only do they not do it, but they, they don't tell the public that there's massive increase up to a million more people.

Claire Fox [00:54:23] They just don't tell them. Right? And, and so what you get is not just million, millions new or suddenly it's revealed that through a range of backdoor methods, they changed the way that they counted students bringing their dependence into study at university and so on and so forth, all this sort of stuff. You then find this out. And so one of the kind of very mainstream commentators Matthew Syed wrote in the Times at the weekend in the, in the London Times at the weekend, and he, he, he's not the kind of person who would usually say this, but he said they just have lied to the public, lied and lied and lied. And what that means is that you have this complete collapse of trust in the government. And, and something that was very close to my heart is also when you had the largest democratic vote in the history of the United Kingdom, which was in 2016 around leaving the European Union in a referendum that was called by the government. Then all the people who ran society just said, oh, well they voted the wrong way, tried to undermine it and overturn it and promises were then made. Oh, well no, we won't do that. We, we will now, eventually they agreed we'll honor it, but they have done everything to avoid it. So if you have a kind of pension movement that's anti-democratic, you, you've got people who just say, tear up that vote, who, who run it, establishment figures who say, that was a democratic vote, but we didn't like it, so we shouldn't do it. And then bottom up, you've got people who say, what is the point in taking democracy seriously? Because we wrote for things, we wrote for individuals, we wrote for parties who ignore us anyway, right?

Claire Fox [00:56:01] So that piner movement of disillusion or giving up on democracy on both sides is very dangerous because, you know, we know where it goes. And it either takes a form, as you say, of saying, we need, you know, what authoritarian strong person in, I mean, you know, whether you had that strong man rhetoric before you get that side of it. Or you get people saying, well if the ballot box doesn't get you what you want, we'll take to the streets. And we've seen what that's been like in the UK for the last few weeks, right? So either of those things are a very frightening prospect. But what I realized is that when I actually ask people to explain to me why they think democracy is important, what is it about democracy that matters? Very few people really have a sense of the importance of the demos, of the importance of people being allowed to have a say in the society in which they live. That's how you develop a stake in it. That's why you don't trash it, by the way, when you know, if you are part and parcel of a society with, by the way, national boundaries that clearly defined, then you are less inclined to say, oh, I don't care about, I've got no bother about what's happening. That's one of the reasons why national sovereignty and controlling your borders matters. Because if the government of the day say that anyone can live in the UK and we don't even know who the people are who are coming in undocumented and it doesn't really matter, then what's the point in saying you're a British citizen whose vote counts or something because you are basically saying, oh well, you know, these people might not have any documentation.

Claire Fox [00:57:37] They could be from anywhere. There could be a security risk, but they've told us that they're fleeing war and pros persecution, so we'll let them in any way. And anyone who argues against it must be a racist, heartless scumbag who wants them to die. You know? Then you just think, well, what is my, what is, what is my responsibility as a British citizen then? Because they tell me my citizenship doesn't matter because anyone can come here and do anything they want. And so we have completely devalued what it means to live in a democratic society where politicians are accountable to the voters where people vote people in, who are then answerable to ordinary people. That bit gets trashed in amidst this sort of less a fair, open the borders. It doesn't matter and you can't talk about it or you will be demonized. So I think they are all the more reason why we have got to find better ways of making the case for democracy with our fellow citizens.

Vance Crowe [00:58:37] Well, you, you might chuckle at this 'cause it's something every few months, I poke you on your dms about this, but to me, I do not think you can bring the government to heal and, and to actually represent the people if you don't control their ability to print money. Because as long as they don't actually have to go to the citizens and say, we're gonna, you know, we made these decisions and you elected us, so now we're gonna extract taxes to cover all of this. As long as they can just say, well, we're just gonna print more money and that's gonna to devalue your money, but that's gonna enable us to be able to put migrants up in hotels and to be able to offer social services that we're not offering you. So to me, the only way out of this is to stop the printing of money, which is, is the use of course, from my perspective is of of Bitcoin. It is to create a Bitcoin standard and to make it so that our money is not tied to our government, and that our government is not allowed to do that. They're not allowed to say, oh, well we, we will just go to the printers and, and issue more money so that way we can do these things. Because once they're brought to bear that, that the citizens actually have to pay the taxes to cover the bills, they're gonna start behaving differently. And without it, I think almost every other measure we take won't work.

Claire Fox [00:59:48] Well, I I what

Vance Crowe [00:59:49] Do you think of that?

Claire Fox [00:59:50] I I I, I know that's your particular bug bet, or, you know, and fair enough. And I know that more and more people are looking at Bitcoin in that direction. I mean, ironically, in relation to this new government that we have, they have managed to tie themselves into a slightly different problem, which is that despite being a, you know, originally from a social democratic, you know, social democratic party, they have made this promise that they won't increase taxes. And they've also said they won't print more money, and they're kind of gonna be so fiscally responsible that we are now facing huge austerity when actually there's no flexibility whatsoever in terms of, you know, what they might do. So they're in a very tangled position. But I, you know, there will be people who will be looking at Bitcoin and I, I, it's not, this is not my particular, I don't think that's necessarily the solution, but I, I do think that one should of course, be able to have those discussions. And, and certainly we are at a historic turning point. And I, and I say that because I think if what was happening in the UK was just happening in the uk, then you could just say it's a bit of a blip. Britain's having a moment. Right? But, you know, Europe has been a flame for many a year in many ways. You look at each European country, look at what just happened in France recently. And of course, you know, there we saw, just to use the example that you did get a populous vote, a big populous vote for Marine Le Pen's party.

Claire Fox [01:01:22] And immediately, rather than having democracy, all the other parties got together, even though they had nothing in common to just to get in the way of what the people wanted. And that when, the more that these things happen everywhere, I mean, obviously there's a kind of rous about what's gonna happen in the American election, and there's always been an element of that mood in relation to being an, the anti-Trump side, you know, anyone but Trump type of thing. But it's like, it's it, when you see these things happening internationally, you realize that the post-war relationships and parties that we had after the second World War, you know, the 20th century political arrangements are not holding. I mean, they are, you know, they are, we are, we are at the tail end. I mean, we won't, I mean, you might well be, but I probably won't be alive to see how it unravels. But what we're talking about now is a new political period is struggling to emerge. And the problem with that is that there's a fight and there are forces of reaction. There are dark, dark forces. I mean, I, I, I, I'm, I'm rather pleased that Elon Musk owns X and I quite like his kind of cheeky free speech and so on and, and so on. But, you know, he also, like you, like you made the mistake of a narrative at the beginning of this, a good faith mistake, you know, saying what you'd seen, Elon Musk has been doing the same. And sometimes people can say, oh, you know, Tommy Robinson, he seems like a nice chap, you know, I'll just retweet if he's not a nice chap.

Claire Fox [01:02:58] Should the, I of course know the UK bad guys, and I also know some of the American bad guys. It's like sort of saying, oh, Candace Owens is reflective of every black woman in America. It's like, no, she isn't. Do you know what I mean? She's the lunatic. And like, I've no idea whether your listeners love Candace Owens or not, but she has gone a bit peculiar, and I'm making that point because you do get bad faith actors, and part of what's gonna happen in this tussle for the future is you'll have a row, not just a row, but there's a new things are going to emerge. The old parties can't hold conservative party in the UK feels like a decrepit finished model. The Labor Party, which has taken over in government did not get a massive popular vote. It's just there because they're not the conservatives. And they didn't get a big turnout of voters. And they themselves are not the party that the Labor Party historically was. And as I say, become the identity politics party. So they could easily crumble and split and so on in, in, in the next few years. And so I'm suggesting that then there'll be another fight and another argument, and it's, and it between the bad faith actors and the God faith actors, but foreign new political settlements. And I think that what my, what I'm trying to do is to, is to organize the troops intellectually, at least to have the kind of arguments that we will need to fight off those people as much as anything else, you know, in the, in the forth, in the forthcoming, not, not, not quite civil war that that, that, that Elon Musk has described it as in the uk, but in the kind of civil war intellectually about what's gonna happen.

Claire Fox [01:04:37] We need to be better, our side needs to improve up its game massively. And we do have to,

Vance Crowe [01:04:43] Yeah. Because if win

Claire Fox [01:04:44] Hearts and minds of young people, that's part of the deal.

Vance Crowe [01:04:48] Because if you don't win with hearts and minds, the, the only other response to mobs of people will be to form up in your own mobs. And I think that, that this is what I see going on in the future. And when you describe bad faith actors, you know, I don't know Tommy Robinson or Candace Owens, whether they're bad or good faith actors, but I can say they frighten me because they have the ability to garner the, the intense emotions of people. And like, they could get people on the side that feel like, Hey, we're being targeted. Hey, this is unfair. We need to, to get ourselves up, you know, worked into a mob. And once mobs start fighting, there's no telling what will come out of it. And, and good will not necessarily prevail. It will be violence everywhere. And the only thing that that comes up after that is what didn't get killed. As the mob tramples over, everything burns down, buildings, destroys economies, breaks off into civil war. And the, the only way to stop mob action, this is why I'm such a big supporter of you and what you, what you do with the battle of ideas is to have people talk and to have people that talk that vociferously disagree, but have them talk as opposed to show up on the streets and fight.

Claire Fox [01:06:00] Yeah. I I mean that, you know, it always, there is always a danger of it sounding so sort of slightly odine and wimpy to say, you know, we should talk. But, but ultimately the history has been moved and changed by ideas far more actually than it has been by mobs. Because mobs are a react. I mean, mobs, it's a bit difficult, but because, you know, I sometimes they can just be ordinary people defending themselves as, so I don't want to overstate it, but, but in ultimately these are, they are knee jerk spontaneous actions. Whereas what's really changed the world on every major issue, you know, and this can be from, you know, scientific breakthroughs to, you know, the, you know, the fights for, you know, women's have the vote, there are any kind of intellectual breakthrough has always been through in the end convincing the majority of people that you are, right, right. Rather than imposing from on high. Right. Free speech didn't just like emerge as a sort of thought. I mean, it emerged as an intellectual idea in response to actually a real civil war as civil war, you know, partly in relation to the wars of religion, but also the Civil War in the uk. And people start saying, well, this is like, we've gotta be able to live with each other. You know, Catholics have brought, we can't just go around cutting each other's heads off and, and, and, and so on and so forth. And, and, and, and, you know, and doing very crude history, and then great thinkers emerge. People like Tom Paine emerge, right. And then articulate and say in a compelling way things which people go, yes, yes.

Claire Fox [01:07:34] That's what I'm prepared to, to, to, you know, defend and argue for. Right? And that's what we need, and what we need is some more Tom Paines, but we need some great thinkers to emerge. And all the rather modestly we tried to do in the UK at the Academy of Ideas is to create the space for those great thinkers to emerge. And, you know, we have to do this because, you know, I I I feel very strongly that, you know, if we just kind of sit back and, and allow people to get away with saying that Israel should be destroyed, just like that, just like wiped out, right? And then we wonder how it could possibly be that we had the antisemitic pogroms of the Nazi period. Well, you know, it's like, because nobody argued back, right? I mean, Jew hatred is, we've discovered just under the surface of Western societies, and somebody ought to say something. And we can't be frightened of saying that because that's an argument and an idea as well as, you know, in some instances, you know, obviously it's taking the form of a war in relation to the borders between Gaza and Israel, and I know that, but for the rest of us, we have had to watch young people just spout the most backwards, you know, anti-Jewish bile. And, and, and, and, you know, university administrators look the other way, rather embarrassed, you know, not know what to say. Well, you've gotta argue back, right? And very often, by the way, one of the things that's refreshing is that, you know, you get a big group of young people together and they're very sure of themselves, and they, you know, so they, you know, like we all were, you know, oh, I'm right.

Claire Fox [01:09:13] What I've realized is that in, in, you know, 2024, in the 2020s, they haven't heard another argument, right? We haven't lost the hearts and minds of this generation. They've just never heard anything else, right? Because everyone's been carrying frightened to say anything that goes against the, you know, the EDI or DEI, you know, orthodoxies, what have you. And when you actually put an alternative point of view, when you shake them up completely, just argue with them. I don't mean they suddenly go, oh, Claire, you're so right. They suddenly look at you and they think, maybe I'm not right. May, maybe I need to rethink this. Maybe I should read the odd book. Maybe I should look at it again. And once you get that intellectual thirst for realizing that the superficial meme, like slogans that they've been spouting but don't really understand, might not have a very firm foundation to them. And once you get them a bit excited about the possibilities of changing the world for the better, if they really understood what the world needed to do to Jade to the better, then actually you'll find that they are actually open-minded, more open-minded than everybody thinks they are. And that, for me is part of the task of the present period.

Vance Crowe [01:10:31] Well, Claire, as we've been talking, I just came up with, I think a new question I'm gonna start asking guests for, for the foreseeable future, which is on a scale of one to 10, 10 being the, the world is on fire. How close is the UK to a civil war where there's actual battling in the streets over the next government?

Claire Fox [01:10:51] Oh, it's no nowhere near, but, but I think it's, I think it's depressing that I would say three, right? I think that at

Vance Crowe [01:11:02] Three, okay, three,

Claire Fox [01:11:03] That's, yeah. But that's depressing. 'cause I, you'd have asked me two years ago and said, no, don't be silly. Right? Right. We are not near a civil war. But there off, there's that feeling that you under, I'll tell you what is weird. I now feel as though I understand how civil wars happen. Yeah. And that's because you suddenly think, my God, things are so polarized and so fractious, and we don't even talk the same language as each other. And we are talking past each other. And some people don't want to even talk past each other. They're absolutely convinced that they need to stay in their bubble and, and in their echo chamber. That is the basis on which you can see that society could easily go into a civil war mode. But no, we are not there yet. And we are not gonna be there on my watch. Let me tell you.

Vance Crowe [01:12:01] Well, Barness, Claire Fox, thank you so much for coming on the podcast.

Claire Fox [01:12:05] It's been a pleasure. I hope I've shone more light than, than, than depression.