 The news over the past week has been consumed by this terrible nightclub shooting in Orlando, but now we turn our attention to another important news event, the upcoming Brexit vote in the UK, which is scheduled for this Thursday, June 23rd. And some polls are suggesting that the Leave campaign holds a 19% lead, perhaps, over the Stay campaign. So here to help us break it down and discuss it all is Godfrey Bloom, the great un-PC former member of the European Parliament who is infamous or famous among libertarians for often quoting Murray Rothbard on the floor of that not too-agust legislature. But he'll help us sort out the actual odds of Brexit prevailing, whether other EU or even Eurozone countries will necessarily follow suit if Brexit passes, and what Mises had to say about secession movements generally and self-determination. So stay tuned for a great interview with Godfrey Bloom. Well, first and foremost, Godfrey Bloom, thank you so much for joining us this weekend. I have to get right into this because I'm seeing today that the Remain camp appears to be using this tragedy of this bizarre stabbing of a labor MP yesterday or the day before yesterday to generate support against the Leave folks. Do you think this will work? Well, I don't know. There's absolutely no connection whatsoever to the Leave campaign. And the eyewitnesses are saying, there's absolutely this guy had nothing whatsoever to do with it. He didn't shout anything, but he is a disturbed individual. He's a madman. And I didn't think, I know politics is a low game. I've been in it for 10 years or wasn't in it for 10 years. I didn't think it could get any lower. It's a terrible tragedy. This relatively young member of Parliament has been murdered by a psychotic and people are using it for political capital. I don't believe this could have happened in my country 30 years ago. I think this is the sign of a moral decline in Western democracies, which astonishes even me. I wonder if it says more about the Guardian that will actually backfire on them. So far, everything that the Remain camp has done has backfired. They've suggested, fascinating me, that almost everything will happen to us if we leave the European Union. Asteroids crashing into Earth, all our firstborn children will die of the plague. They virtually left nothing unturned. And of course, most people, most Brits are still relatively down to Earth, common sense people, and they've just lasted all off. And of course, we've had five weeks of this and the whole campaign's been turned around. Remain started this campaign ahead and now it's Vote Lead that's moving ahead. And it's because I don't think you can continue lying to people on the scale that the Remain camp has lied. Well, you have to understand, in the U.S. are polling information secondhand. We're seeing some polls that sound very favorable towards leap. We're looking at lab roaks. If you had the handicap today, Godfrey Bloom, apart from the merits of Brexit... I would say it was even money. As a betting man, as a horse-rating man, and I do occasionally bet on horses, I would say this was as close to even money as you can get. And if you get better odds than even money, it's not a bad value bet. So that would be my take at the moment. But of course, as you know, and we're not that much different from the United States, a lot can happen in the next five days, can't it? A lot of funny things can happen in five days. They could be in Leeds' favor or they could be in Remain's favor. We don't just know. Do you think that the mess that the ECB has created, the sovereign debt crises in crisis in Greece, for example, do you think the fact that the euro and the ECB are both a mess influences Britain's on this? This has been another very interesting five weeks. I think possibly the most interesting five weeks in politics I've ever spent. And that is we are now finding the real problem of having had 90 years or so of Keynesianism. We've had 90 years of failed economic theory who would have thought that it could have gone quite so long. And now we have a situation across where there are no politicians, none of the media, no journalists actually understand that the reason we are in this appalling mess across the globe, not just Europe, it's across the globe because of a pursuit of an economic theory that is deeply flawed. And this is one of the problems. I've been at lecture halls, I've been at town halls. I've been trying to explain to people the sort of things that we Austrian economists take for granted. People seem to think that exports are absolutely vital to their well-being. They don't seem to understand that the economy, their economy, the economy that they live in and the Americans, too, are the butchers of the baker, the candlestick maker, the hairdresser, the cab driver. This is the economy. I shouldn't think more in this country, more than two people in a hundred have anything whatsoever to do with exporting manufactured goods to the European Union. And yet they're being told the sky will fall if we're not not member of what is not a free trade organization. This is something some of my friends on Wall Street don't seem to to understand that this European Union is not a free trade area, per se, to customs union, which puts tariffs on goods coming in from the rest of the world. This isn't about free trade. This is about protectionism. And I don't think this is fully understood. Certainly your side of the pond. No, it's not. Just the way NAFTA was misinterpreted by a lot of supposed capitalists. But when you talk about the sky is falling argument, I wonder if those of us who favor Brexit aren't equally overstating the case. In other words, is this really part of a bigger, anti-globalist trend that includes Trump, that includes secessionist movements around the world? Are we overstating this? I mean, after all, the UK is not leaving Europe. It's just leaving this unholy or potentially leaving this unholy European Parliament. So are we are those of us who favor Brexit? Are we also overstating the meaning of it? I think perhaps we probably are. The average Brexit here is one for a number of reasons. People want to leave the European Union for all sorts of different reasons. There are left wing, those on the left, the severe left, you know, the rabid socialists are for leave because what they want is a UK highly protected nationalized economy. So they're for leave. There are people like me, of course, Austrian complete global free traders who want to leave. We've all got our own reasons. And so, yes, there is that dynamic. And of course, the other thing, and I've said this on many a platform as well, Brexit isn't a silver bullet. Most of the problems that we have are in our own politicians who are generally speaking these days meant a very limited education, traditional education, who don't understand the law. They don't understand economics. And they've devoted their life to politics, but they have never really been involved in anything other than politics. So it isn't a question of us being over-regulated by Brussels. We're over-regulated by Westminster. This government, the British government, a so-called conservative government, agonizes over too much sugar in drink. They worry about so many tiny aspects of our lives. And of course, Brussels worry about light bulbs, vacuum toasters. The whole economy is so tightly regulated. And what we should be saying is, yes, leaving the European Union is one small step. It's only a small step in the right direction. It's not going to solve all our problems until we have a government in Westminster that doesn't believe that they should regulate everything, not Brussels. We don't want any regulation, please. And along the street, I've been out on the stump campaigning, and ordinary working people have said to me, why can't they leave us alone? If I want to smoke a cigarette with a drink in my pub and it's all right with the landlord of my pub, let me do it. I don't want, if I want to drink sugary drinks, that's nobody's business, but my own. And this is coming from ordinary people now. And I think they're just saying, leave us alone. Stop over-regulating us. Do what you're supposed to do, which is defense of the realm. Mild administration of the country, public spending by at least half, and leave us alone. But of course, as you know, Jeff, nobody knows better than followers of Austrian economics, that it doesn't matter much whether we leave the European Union or not. It's doomed to failure, and it's doomed to failure through the banking system. The ECB is broke, three trillion pounds. The Germans have 900 billion pounds owed to them by shadow banking. The ECB are buying 80 billion pounds worth of junk bonds every month. They've already bought something like 380 billion. You certainly can't go on like this forever. And our own government in the UK, and nobody's talking about this, Jeff. Nobody is talking about this. We are the second most indebted nation in the world after Japan. And I see pundits talking about our debt being 80% of GBP, but they're not taking into consideration unfunded public pensions and public funding initiatives, which would be running for about 10 years. If you take everything into consideration and of course the businessmen listening to the cast will know that if you leave off under international accounting standards, your liability for your pension fund and anything else, it's an illegal, it's illegal, it's a criminal offence. And it'd go to prison. And yet the chance of the exteker and financeness is to it all the time. Same in America, of course. So this game's over anyway. Well, it doesn't really matter what we vote on Thursday. The clock is ticking and the whole thing will collapse in a few years. Well, we certainly agree with that that the game is over with central banks. You think that a leave vote might actually hasten a Eurozone nation leaving the Euro? Yes, it isn't just the British. So sometimes the spin from the left-wing British press, the Eurozone press and the press on the continent try and make this look like it's a British thing. The French, the European Union is deeply unpopular with the French, for different reasons, admittedly, deeply unpopular with the Germans and naturally unpopular with the countries in the Pacific Rim. If we leave, we will leave a massive exodus and there will be demands for a referendum all over northern Europe, certainly probably southern Europe. And out of it will come something which is more practical, more pragmatic. And it will be based, I suspect, on what might have been known as the old Hanseatic League, the northern German states, the northern European states, which are much richer and whose economies function much more in line. And the southern economies can go their own way. And this is the natural progression. But whether or not we do that will depend on Brexit. If the British vote for Brexit, that will follow. The French and the Dutch and maybe the Germans and the Danes and possibly the Swedes will follow very quickly. Well, indulge me in this. You spent a little bit of time in Brussels. You were a member of the European Parliament. So you've seen some of these folks up close. Do you take a little bit of pleasure in the thought of them losing a bit of turf in the form of the UK? I mean, wouldn't it gall them if Britain actually did this? Yes, it would. But I'm of a generation now. I'm 66 years old. The chitin Freud, as it were, is not so sweet on my palate. It's the fact I've saved my country or I've helped in some small way save my country because I was a founder member of the movement back in 1992. So this is a culmination of 25 years' hard work. And quite a significant amount of my money because we've had no money. The out campaigns never had any money. So people of my age of the professional class have done nothing but dig into their pockets for many years on this. Yes, I wouldn't mind rubbing their noses in it a bit, but that feeling is only going to last perhaps over a few beers in the pub. What we need to do if we do get out is just construct how we're going to move forward from here. And of course, you may or may not know, you probably do, that they have a vote. They have a poll in Switzerland. And 70% of the Swiss said that they hope the British vote for Brexit. They hope they vote out. And they hope we join the economic free trade, the European free trade area with Switzerland to create a whole new idea of free trade, which is not based upon protectionism or tariffs like a customs union, but we can work together for free trade within Europe, but also trade with the rest of the world. And of course, another thing my Wall Street chums don't seem to understand is that we would get our seat back on the WTO. The British are in the top 10 of major economies, global exporting economies. We don't even have a seat on the WTO. I don't know a single American who would push up with what we are having to push up with at the moment. I often find over many years, and of course, as you know, I've spoken in America many, many times and have a lot of American friends, just how woefully ignorant the average American is, even the American businessman, is about how Europe actually works. And indeed, European history. Well, it leads us to a cultural question. If a Texan travels the world and is in the Far East and someone says, where are you from? He probably says, Texas. And he might say, I'm an American, I'm a Yank. When you travel the world, I assume you say I'm an Englishman or perhaps you say you're a Brit and you don't say I'm a European. Of course you do. But it seems like these people in Brussels hate national identity. Let's just be frank. Would you agree? Yes, I do. Because the problem that we have here is that the European Union is a secular union. It's an ideal. It's a political ideal, which is almost dealt with with a religious fervor. And these people are true believers. And when you interrupt, and I've been thrown out of the parliament on many occasions, for actually stating the truth or cross-examining people who I think are lying to the parliament, you get thrown out. It's not the English parliament, but that's all part of the parcel. The European parliament, you actually get thrown out. So in the same way that you would be thrown out of a cathedral if you interrupted mass, that is the reaction that you get. It's unreligious fervor rather than either common sense or pragmatism or realism. All that is not part of the European Union. They don't feel it to reform, Geoff. It isn't a question of people saying, oh, well, it can reform. I've worked out there for 10 years. I was a member of the Economic and Monetary Affairs Committee. They do not feel they need to reform. You have regulations being made or amended, for example, on things like hedge funds by a committee that consists of Danish housewives, Romanian trade unionists, or trying to regulate or put a regulatory book to get the hedge funds. And that's only when somebody stood up, usually me, and explained what a hedge fund is, that you tell them what it is, and within an hour, they're regulating it. These people are absolutely stark staring bonkers. And on my website, she's a conservative, I explain the concept of fractional reserve banking to her. And these people don't even understand the fundamentals. And this is part of the problem, of course, and we both know this. Every member of the Mises Institute notes this, that only Keynesian economics is taught in schools and universities. So they think there is one type of economics that they're unavailable. Nobody's looking for an alternative system of fear currencies, the reform of central banks, getting rid of central banks, hard currencies. All the things that are second nature to you with me, Jeff, are the witchcraft as far as they're concerned. Well, I can only add that there are many members of the US House of Representatives who sit on committees that have jurisdiction over subjects they know nothing about. So I will leave you, Godfrey Bloom, with one last question. Mises talked about the right of self-determination and secession. If it were practicable down even to the individual level, he was speaking in the abstract there in theory, do Britons see this Brexit vote as something having to do with self-determination, or are they just focused on the economics? I think it's a mixed bag. When it started, it was just about economics, and the Brexiteers didn't field anybody who could really make the economic case because the Brexiteers don't have anybody who has really two things. The first edition of Economist, point one, they are not television-friendly. There are only about two people in the entire country who understand economics and understand money, who also know how to perform on TV and I am one of them. We just didn't do the right things. So what actually happened, the campaign then moved to immigration, which is a big problem here, because you can't have an immigration policy without welfare reform. And one of the problems that we have, of course, you can't have an open door immigration policy unless you have some form of welfare reform. We believe as Austrian economists in the free movement of labor, but it can't work if you have state-run education, state-run health, cradle-to-grade welfareism. You can't run it on that basis when people from Eastern Europe are living on maybe $10 a day. So you can't do that. And nobody's quite had the nerve to talk about welfare, both social welfare and corporate welfare reform. So it's swung around now to being mainly a fear of immigration, which is leading the game, and add that to people are beginning to realize now after five weeks of campaign that they have lost self-government. The average person didn't really understand that, but they're beginning to understand it now. So it's been a bit of everything, really. It's been a little bit of everything. Well, we appreciate your time on this so much. A very fascinating subject, a fascinating interview. Ladies and gentlemen, if you wanna know everything that's happening with respect to Brexit, good, bad, and ugly, I suggest you follow Godfrey Bloom at Goddard's Bloom on Twitter because I'm finding your Twitter feed Godfrey to be an excellent source of information on this. We appreciate your time. Ladies and gentlemen, have a great weekend.