I would argue, and I
guess I'm a lone voice,
that this has a lot to do
with wealth inequality.
I know that most of the
mainstream pundits are saying,
"Oh no, this is a populist movement.
"It will fizzle out, it will fizzle out."
But if you look at what's happening,
we've had an absolute
collapse in global growth,
gross domestic product,
and so what people are doing,
they realize the
politicians who are saying,
"Oh well no, it's not that bad.
"Everything is great, you'll be fine."
But what's happening is the
rich are getting richer,
the poor are getting poorer,
and the middle class
is getting eviscerated.
It's not being dealt with.
So that's not really changed in the course
of the last year as a
result of these things.
So as I say, the underlying
reasons for the votes last year
was still there, they were
probably getting worse.
To me, it leads onto a debate
that we're not yet having.
The first 2016 was about the reassertion
of the nation state as being...
That's what the history
books are gonna say
in a 100 years time.
What we haven't got to, on
our side of the argument,
we haven't yet got to the
fact that it isn't capitalism
that is causing all these miseries.
It's the fact that capitalism
has almost disappeared
and being replaced by corporatism.
Political, corporate,
transnational corporatism.
That's the debate we have yet to have.
But you see I think back to the 1980s,
to a time when free market
capitalism was being encouraged
in Britain and America where barriers
were being lifted off the
backs of ordinary folk.
Who were encouraged to
go out and create wealth
know what? the middle class
has advanced hugely in 1980s.
It's this new form of government.
It's this new form of
multinational business
that is holding people back.
So I would like to see the
second wave of this revolution
be more identification of
the over-regulated world
that we've come to live in that
make it so tough for people
to get up off the ground and get moving,
and of course the bigger the corporation,
the more laws are made,
the better it is for them
because the cost of entry to
anyone new becomes too high.
That's right, the barrier to entry.
That's an important, key factor,
but when we have the
European Central Bank,
the Bank of Japan, the United
States Federal Reserve,
and the Bank of England
actually controlling and
manipulating asset prices,
property prices have gone
through the stratosphere
in the UK.
In New York the same thing is happening.
The real wages along the
same times have been static.
Yes, quantitative easing
has made the rich richer.
But it hasn't helped people,
and I think that's what-
I agree with that.
So we're seeing this
massive wealth inequality
gap get bigger and bigger.
This is the elephant in the room
that nobody wants to discuss.
Yeah, I agree with that and you know that
I find it extraordinary
that in the United Kingdom,
we had a general election
a few months ago,
quantitative easing was barely discussed,
national debt barely discussed.
Conservatives say,
"Vote for us, we're doing a
wonderful job reducing..."
The deficit.
The deficit.
But this is the difference.
And they've clouded it
so most of the public now
I don't think understand
the difference between debt and deficit.
It's not been explained,
and I bring myself back
in the UK context to the BBC.
We're paying the BBC.
It's their job to tell
us what's going on here,
and they're not doing it.
Nobody does that.
I think the best example
of the difference between
the debt and the deficit is
your wife comes home, I don't
have one, but she would say,
"Honey, I went to Prada today,
"and we saved $20,000 dollars."
(chuckling)
And I'm like, "Oh, that's excellent.
"How did we save $20,000 dollars?"
Cause I only spent 10.
You didn't buy anything?
No, God forbid.
"No, not that I didn't buy anything,
"but I bought a dress
that was reduced from
"$50,000 to $30,000,
so you saved $20,000."
I said, "But wait, you
didn't have that $30,000
"to begin with."
That's the prime example.
So they're spending less
than what they don't have.
It's just not being addressed.
In a period from 2010 to 2015,
David Cameron fought that
next election saying,
"Vote for us, we
understand in this country
"that you can only have things
if you can pay for them."
And in his five first
years as Prime Minister,
the national debt had doubled.
Doubled!
I know.
I bet we've been running
this thing up since
we fought Napoleon,
and he managed in one term as
Prime Minister to double it.
We're not having these conversations.
At some point in time we will.
Well, we need to also have
them in the United States.
It's gotten frightening
under President Obama,
the debt has skyrocketed to 20 trillion.
But that doesn't include
all the liabilities.
Social security, Medicare, Medicaid,
and underfunded pensions.
The total of that is
probably 240 trillion.
Now I have to ask you, we're
gonna jump a little bit here,
but Hillary Clinton.
Ah, yes wonderful.
What happened?
Well, so in August last year,
I was invited to appear on the stage
with Trump in Mississippi,
Jackson, Mississippi, which
I was very pleased to do.
I had a story to tell.
The story was that look
what we overcame in Brexit.
Look at the negative opinion
polling we were told,
look at the fact we were
told, "You can't win."
Every attempt was made
to demoralize our voters,
to say to them, "Don't bother
to go and vote on Thursday
"'cause you're gonna lose anyway."
That is what was going on.
There was an opinion poll
released on the morning of Brexit
at 11am which got mega
headlines everywhere
showing the remain came
10 points in the lead.
Yeah.
Yeah, every trick, every-
So I was in Jackson saying
to, whatever it was,
18,000 people or whatever was there,
"Look, you know, I'm here.
"I bring a message of hope.
"I'm the living proof
that the little people
"can beat the establishment.
"All you gotta do is believe, stand up,
"put your walking boots on, and
get out there and campaign."
But I was supposed not to
endorse Trump, you see,
'cause I was supposed
to sort of be neutral,
but I thought, "I'll tell you
what, I'll tell you what."
Rather, I said, "I'm
not allowed to tell you
how I would vote if I
was an American citizen,
but I can tell you how I wouldn't vote."
(chuckling)
I said, "I wouldn't vote
for Hillary Clinton,
if you paid me."
They all erupted.
I said, "In fact, I wouldn't
vote Hillary Clinton,
if she paid me," which was a bit naughty,
but anyway there you are.
She the next day at the press conference
where she absolutely lambasted
me she said how Trump had now
sunk to new depths because of me-
Oh, she called me a white supremacist.
There was no form of abuse she didn't use,
and blow me down, last
weekend she was in London
'cause she's got this book
called "What Happened"
published by Simon and
Schuster, 20 pounds a copy.
Clearly the Clintons haven't
made enough money yet.
And she was being interviewed
for the Sunday Times about it,
and she describes why she hates me.
She thinks I'm an
unacceptable human being.
That's a good thing though, isn't it?
Well, I was told, you
see, I was told in school
by my headmaster that when
you get older in life,
it's a very good thing to be
judged by who your enemies are.
If Hillary Clinton is my enemy,
I'm pretty happy with that.
That's fantastic.
So, if you look at what's happened,
especially with Hillary
Clinton and the liberal left
and the way that the left
has framed everything,
it's a message of "We're
tolerant, we're inclusive,
we're diverse, we're accepting,"
until you disagree with that viewpoint
at which point they become
intolerant, violent fascists.
And here's the problem I have.
Its horrendous, horrendous.
what happens, though,
with groups like Antifa?
Nobody's come out speaking against them
because if they don't
like you, you're a Nazi,
you're a racist, you're a
homophobe, you're an Islamaphobe,
you're a phobe of some sort.
I saw this in eerie similarity
when one of the MEPs,
the Dutch MEP I think it was...
Wilders.
Yeah, during Brexit compared
some of your UKIP posters
to Nazi propaganda.
This is an old school fascist tactic
to suppress your opposition's
ability to express
their viewpoints by
calling them, name calling.
What do you think about that?
I am very disturbed by it.
I'm very disturbed that
the very basic principle
of what a liberal democracy ought,
and I mean that in the old
fashion sense of the word,
small "l," but the old
fashion sense of the word
that the point about liberal
democracy is that you live
in a system where you
understand and appreciate
that other people have often
diametrically opposed opinions to you
and you argue those opinions,
but you ultimately respect
the right of the other person
to have those opinions because that's why
there are lots of white crosses
all over Belgium and France
from two world wars,
millions of people, you know,
sacrificing everything they
had for us to be free people.
When I was younger growing up,
I mean, sort of family
meals or in my village pub,
I'd see violent disagreements
between people on policy,
but the next day everybody
was friendly with each other
because they ultimately respected the fact
that other people have that right.
Through college, university,
through the education system,
young people were taught
critical thinking.
They were taught, "Look, here's
an issue, here's a problem,
"here are two potential
solutions to that problem,"
"and you are an intelligent
18 year old, 20 year old,
make your own mind up,
which side of that fence
you sit on."
That was teaching critical thinking,
and I absolutely believe
that something throughout
our further education systems
of the West right now stinks,
that we are not teaching young
people critical thinking.
We're teaching young people,
"This view is correct,
and this view is evil."
And that I think has lead to
so much of that phenomenon
that you've just described.
So now if I were to tell you in the 1980s,
back when I was, 70s and
80s, when I was in uni,
the ratio of the northeastern colleges
of conservative professors
to liberal professors,
there were five, out of a pool,
there were one out of five conservative,
one conservative professor
to five liberal professors.
Now it would be one to 20.
It's actually one to 35.
I wasn't far off.
(laughing)
But is that absolute?
Now what we've gotta examine in America
and nobody wants to talk about
is that this becomes a point
where now on the media,
you don't have reporters
reporting news.
What you have is political advocacy
and a scripted narrative
designed to move forward
a political agenda.
When do you reach the
point where people say,
"Indoctrination, this is indoctrination."
We can do something about it
because how universities are
managed, run, is something
that through the elections
we can make a real issue
and through government
we can deal with it.
This is not something that'll
be turned around overnight,
but it is a massive, massive problem,
and it's a threat to the
very principle of democracy.
And liberty.
And liberty, well of course.
Absolutely, and that's a
word, interesting isn't it?
That's a word that the
Founding Fathers hear.
They picked out the best of
systems they saw in Europe,
but that was a word they
valued very, very strongly,
and I think that concept is,
I'm afraid, being degraded.
It's a problem, it's problematic.
None of the politicians today want to take
the position about against
Antifa or stand up and say,
"Look, what this group
stands for is wrong.
"You can't go out and
punch people in the face
"because you disagree with them."
What we're trying to do,
like at Storia the whole concept behind it
you can have opposing viewpoints.
I might disagree with
you, but we can sit down
and have a logical,
respectful conversation,
open the narrative up, and
have a group discussion
in a reasonable way.
All I can say is I absolutely
wish you well with that
because in my own media
role in the UK at the moment
with LBC radio, I take callers
with all points of view
and I'm very, very
happy to get somebody on
with an entirely different
viewpoint who argues it,
and if they're polite and nice, I say,
"Look, I don't agree with
you, Bill, but you know what,
"you've made a good case."
That's the way it should
be, but so often, so often,
those who come on the
radio with me to debate me
and are on the other side
are frankly just abusive,
and this is where we've got to.
There is a lot of work to be done.
