 This is Carbon Mike. Godfrey Bloom has been there and done that. A soldier in the British Yeomanry who later became a colonel in the Dragoons, and later a logistics officer in the 4th Armored Division. An investment manager in the City of London, later a chief executive. A staunch Brexiteer and member of the UK Independence Party who went on to represent his country as a member of the European Parliament. Love him or hate him, and there are many people in both camps. Godfrey Bloom has come down, in every political struggle I can remember, on the side of liberty and sovereignty. On the side of ordinary people against the overreaching bureaucrats who would be their masters. Recently, I had the pleasure of speaking with him about a variety of events, both historical and current, on dangerous space. I wanted to start off with a quote, and those who follow my content know that I'm always resorting to GK Chesterton, which was one of my favorite Englishmen of letters, and I believe this was in eugenics and other evils. And the quote is, the state has suddenly and quietly gone mad. It is talking nonsense, and it can't stop. I'd like to just use that as a jumping off point for you to give me your take on the current political madness. Well, it's interesting you should use that quotation. In 1918, on the anniversary of what we call over here the Great War, I gave a lecture to the London School of Economics on how Great Britain could have stayed out of the war to the benefit of all Europe and broken a peace. And I think if there's one demonstration of how the world went mad, it was in July and August of 1914. That's when the world went mad. When we got involved in a war, which was the most ghastly and costly in both blood and treasure for, well, in the history of humankind. Because you have to accept, as my grandfather once, I referred my grandfather was badly injured on the machine ridge in 2017. And I referred once to the Second World War, and he looked over his newspaper, it was a dry old stick, and he said, boy, there was only one war. It came in two parts. And, of course, he's absolutely right, and that's been my view basic ever since. I've been a student of that war ever since, and lectured and written on that particular subject. As I say, it was the worst thing in human history, because if you add up the casualties in the Great War, and then you add up the casualties in between the wars, the purges from Stalin and so on and so forth, and then into the 1939-1945 phase and the tragedy that that brought in deaths, we know that that was positively ghastly, and it was done with, over the Austrians, having an argument with Serbia, which dragged in Russia, which dragged in Germany, which dragged in France, and eventually dragged in Britain, totally unnecessarily, stupid, but we got ourselves involved as well. The war was nothing whatsoever to do with us. There's a wonderful example in my view of 1914, where the whole world went mad to great cost, and I see now we seem to have a major problem. Do we not? When we look at what we've seen in the so-called fake pandemic of the COVID hoax, we saw people walking around even on beaches and walking around country lanes with face masks, an absurdity you simply couldn't believe, believing that some sort of piece of cloth over your face could stop a respiratory virus. You couldn't think of anything quite so stupid. My wife's a medic, and my wife, her final dissertation before she qualified was on the dangers of masks. Correct. And she qualified in 1984, not without some irony in that particular date. But there we are, madness. And now we're dealing with the side effects which nobody will admit to on the implications of the spike protein, experimental spike protein therapy, which nobody even now in government is prepared to acknowledge. So that's madness. So we had a whole world masked up submitting to experimental spike protein, quite extraordinary. Yet here in the Ukraine, when we talk about the Ukraine and the Russian Federation, people seem to have no fear, no fear of a nuclear war. Correct. Why are they so frightened about something which was no more than a flu bug, but seem to be totally at ease on the abyss of a nuclear war? Quite extraordinary. It is quite extraordinary. I mean, I grew up in, around the tail end of the Cold War. You know, I was a kid in the 70s. And in the 80s, I remember, I remember that was this kind of pervasive dread that someone would quote unquote push the button. And later on as I started studying these things, I found out that we'd had quite a number of close calls over the years. The Cuban Missile Crisis, kind of replaying itself in an interesting way right now in Ukraine. The Cuban Missile Crisis was kind of only the most, how can you say, the most visible close call that we've had, but there have been others. And I'm with you. I can't understand why, what it means that we have a political class that is so cavalier about nuclear war. We just touch off a couple of tactical nuclear warheads to show that we mean business. It's a theater of madness. I've been particularly interested in the roots of our current problems. Like you, I'm kind of obsessed with the First World War. My ex-sister-in-law is a physician, a somewhat prominent one. And we used to talk often. We'd talk about medicine and her craft. And I remember one thing she told me, one time it might have been over lunch, was that the difference between a good doctor and a great doctor is not technology, it's not imaging, it's not instruments, it's not pedigree. It's the ability to take a patient history. And I found that fascinating. I never forgot that exchange. And reading one of your essays in which you talk about the run-up to World War I and the kind of the missed opportunities and the lack of political imagination, you said, I would make the study of modern history compulsory for world leaders. It might stop it repeating itself. Indeed. You, like me, will look at these people and just wonder how we can continue to make the same mistakes time and time again. I think we have a problem in that there is a really serious lack of what I would call a traditional education amongst our politicians. They might have a piece of paper that they put in a frame and they hang in their downstairs laboratory to say that they got a two, one from Oxford or whatever it happens to be. There's pictures of them with their mortarboards getting their degrees at whatever university they went to. But I would not regard them. I would not regard them as men who are educated, men or women who are educated. And I've met lots of these. I've been on platforms with lots of these. I've been on chat shows with these people. And their ignorance is really quite astonishing, not just about history, but almost about anything. Yes, correct. There was one, it's sort of slightly off the wall, but it was quite interesting on question time, which was one of our big question things. I mean, it's very stereotyped. It's got a left-wing audience. It's got a left-wing panel. It's got a left-wing everything. But somebody in the audience actually said, there's about five people on the panel who are supposed to be the great and the good, if they could quote any poetry. And they couldn't. None of them could quote any poetry. Don't you find that not just amusing in some sense, but absolutely terrifying. It is, yes. The fact that somebody can be on a TV panel and not be able to just be able to quote some poetry. I would expect people would have necessarily to be quote much poetry, but I mean, I've quoted poetry on the programme for most of the programme, if I'd wanted to, and I don't consider myself to be any way an expert on poetry. And it's just one of those things that, that's how badly educated they were from a traditional perspective. And they didn't even seem embarrassed particularly by it. No, no. Well, they almost, you almost get the sense that they wear their ignorance like a badge. And it's, I mean, I say ignorance, but it's worse than that. It's a kind of, I don't know if I could get your take on this, but it seems to me like looking at these people, try to reason about matters, and I use the word reason charitably. It seems to me that it's a kind of radical ignorance combined with a radical adherence to a handful of epistemic templates that they then use to make sense of everything. So they have the wrong instruments and they're using them in the wrong way to make sense of a scenario that they don't have the tools to even understand, the cognitive tools, the reasoning tools to understand. I find that extraordinary. I mean, especially, you know, people in Great Britain, you would think that especially because Great Britain bore more of the cost of this colossal waste, as you say, this great world war with an intermission, you would think that your political class had a little or would have a little bit more sense, but I think you're quite right. It goes right back to kind of foundational education, the lack thereof. When, what was his name? Cameron. Our Prime Minister Cameron was in America a few years ago. He was on a sort of program. He was being interviewed. And I'm not quite sure how it came into the conversation, but Magna Carta came into the conversation, of course, of which there is a fair copy in Washington. Yes. And whenever I'm in America, when in Washington he has always proudly pointed out to me. Of course, the Magna Carta was only enshrining the basic laws, Anglo-Saxon laws. It was enshrining them. It was documenting them, if you will, codifying them. So the depth of that law has gone back to before Magna Carta in 1215, well before. And it was so good, the system of law, that the Normans actually adopted it when they invaded. They could see that it was ever good, and of course the Americans, the same, that the Americans adopted as well in much of its original form, which really is the form of natural justice, if you will, locally provided with 12 Good Men and True, and so on and so forth. Your local jury, all of this, all of this is fundamental to both our nations. Cameron couldn't really discuss it in any depth. He looked frightened and bewildered when the subject came up. He then, we got on then, the conversation then drifted into the Second World War, where he, to quote him, he said, well, of course, we were the junior partner. And I thought, this country stood alone when the Nazi Soviet non-aggression pact was signed. The Americans didn't come in till significantly later. All of which I understand, and this is not a criticism of anybody involved, but not to know that, to not to know that in a British prime minister is terrifying. It was hushed up here. His ignorance was hushed up here. And of course, if you look, I think it was coming up, it was the D-Day celebrations. June 1944, D-Day celebrations. Now, interestingly enough, when it comes to junior partnerships, actually there were more British Empire troops on the invasion of Normandy on that day than there were Americans. We had three, there were three, there was a Canadian army, two British armies, and there were two American armies. And of course, they were fighting in the Pacific. And when the war went on, of course, American manpower came to the fore, big style as you would expect it to be, and I understand that, and we all understand that as historians. But to come out with a question that was derogatory to our own country, derogatory to Great Britain, which was also untrue, what prompted him to make... Did he think that sort of ass-licking of an American integer would somehow, you know, make him popular in America, or popular at home? It's the crass ignorance, and this man got a first at Oxford. He got a first at Oxford. In what? Yes, he got a first in PPE, which is economically philosophy, and so on, so what I know is what is the new subject. Well, that explains a lot. Cameron is an economic philosopher, yeah. He's not a proper subject. And of course, we all know from the pictures and all the rest of it. He spent the entire time getting drunk. Right. Nothing wrong with that. I'm drunk half the time as well. But there we are. But this guy is what... Really, if he... Outside politics, he'd be one of life's losers. He was a loser. He looks like a loser. Yes. And he was followed by Theresa May, the British Prime Minister. And it's a pouringly hopeless woman who really, really should be managing, perhaps at best, a tea shop in Chippincamden in the Cotswolds or something like that. Miles above. And then blow me down. Blow me down. We get Boris who blusters towards a good story but doesn't know anything at all about anything. And hopes it'll be all right on the night. Right. You can't really run a country like that. He boasted, I don't do attention. I don't do detail. Well, of course, that's when that's your manipulated. If you're a politician or a president or a prime minister who doesn't do detail, that is how you are manipulated by people who do. That is correct. That is correct. And by the way, look, I can even, I could even forgive someone who kind of unabashedly says they don't do detail, provided, provided that they have the foundations right. And you see, the real problem I have with these people is they don't even have the foundations right. For example, they don't understand what law is for. And you see, when Chesterton was talking about the anarchy of the state, the idea that you have an out of control state that doesn't know what law is and therefore doesn't know where law should stop, where law should leave off. This looks very much like what we have. And again, you know, it's interesting that you went right back to World War I as being the beginning of a long downward slide. From this same essay that I was reading of yours, you said, war is always the arch enemy of personal freedom. The pre-Great War British and American societies by today's standards were enormously liberal. Rules, regulations, identification documents, that abomination, conscription, the inevitable rise in power of the petty officialdom, the abandonment of principles of law, all these are claimed as vital for the common good, moreover deceitfully claimed as temporary. It started in all its ghastly evil in August 1914. So to your point, I don't think it can be overstated. The big smoking hole we blew in our own foundations as so-called democratic nations, as nations that they're supposed to... Supposed to have a law-governed... Well, supposedly law-governed nations with some degree of liberty for their citizenry. These people talk a great game, but again, they have no foundations. You're absolutely right. We have drifted so far away from it. And the principles of English law, the same principles broadly speaking in America, are very, very good. And of course, the concept came in 1930. I'm just trying to remember the judge who said, it doesn't matter anyway because the principle is wonderful, is that the law should be what is deemed to be fair by the man on the Kratomomny bus. Or you might call him Joe Sixpack. What does he deem to be fair as a fair-minded man? And that is the principle, that is the basic principle of law. The presumption of innocence is absolutely vital, which is not, of course, in Europe. That does not apply in Europe. And we had our principles of English law subsumed by the European Union with a different set of law, a different kind of law, which was fascinating. And of course, that was a major principle. The concept of habeas corpus, which of course I know that the British and the Americans from time to time suspend quite wrongly and badly, but they do. But the principle that you have to bring a man to justice or let him go, you can't have it both ways. You can't bang him up in prison without bringing him into trial. Well, that doesn't follow in Spain or France. They don't have anything like that in Spain or France. The legal systems are completely different. And so we've always regarded the principles of English law for being a shield for the citizen, not a stick with which to beat him, which is what it's manifested itself into. And this, of course, this is quite wrong. So what we should have in school as well, going back to school, it should be learned to Grandma's knee, as it were. The principles of English law, because every generation has a stewardship of law, of English law and American law. And the stewardship of your constitution, for example, and the stewardship of our constitutions, which are not formulated in the same way as America, but they're nevertheless, the 1688 Bill of Rights, the 1688-89 Toleration Acts, these should be taught at school, because if children don't know that they have the stewardship of these things and they're theirs by birthright, it makes it so easy for people, politicians, to take it away. If you don't know you have it, it's so easily stolen. And this is the problem. We have a whole generation, I would argue a second generation now who are so woefully ignorant of what they've got that it makes them susceptible to the Roman kind of system that they had of bread and circuses. They watch their TV. They don't go to the barricades because they don't have an empty belly. And consequently, you're dealing with whole vast millions and millions of people who have obviously no idea how their rights as individuals are being trespassed upon by these ghastly individuals. Well, that's right. As you talked about English law, English common law, I thought about the Napoleonic codes. People aren't even aware that there's a fundamental difference in these two bodies of law because there are fundamentally different concepts of what a human being is and what a man is and what a man is for. And fundamentally, the English common law from which we Americans inherit says, well, what are the rights of man? Well, all of them accept. As opposed to the Napoleonic codes, which more or less say, well, what are the rights of a man? Let me check and see what the book says. Now, starting from these two different foundations, you get a fundamentally different construction of, again, what the law should be, what it's supposed to be, and where it should leave off, where the law should have no power, where the law shouldn't speak, where there should be no jurisdiction. And so the undermining of foundations, which is something we often talk about in the foundation of society, and the blurring of boundaries and the elimination of hierarchies, these are just fundamentally destructive things and kind of we're living with that destruction now. You mentioned the EU and I wanted to get into that a little bit because you have some history, obviously, going toe to toe with the great and good in the sausage factory of the EU. You were a member of European Parliament for the UKIP party, for Yorkshire and Lincolnshire. That's quite right. And I wanted to get your take on this because I started paying attention to British politics around the time of the Brexit debate. I thought it was one of the most exciting things that had happened in politics for a long time. On either side of the Atlantic, I thought it was very interesting that imaginative politicians could go into places that were, that had been kind of historic labor strongholds and persuade people that the party their grandparents knew was no longer serving them and then could put together a kind of a political coalition where you could have someone like a Claire Fox and an Anne Whitcombe on the same stage. Talk to me about your experience as an MEP, your inside take on the EU, why you think the people who are trusted to govern are so afraid of governing that they're willing to hand over that power to a bunch of bureaucrats and Brussels. Fascinating, isn't it? Absolutely fascinating. I don't understand it myself. I've never really understood the psychology of it. I would really love to be Prime Minister in order to do things, change things, roll back the state, roll back taxation, bring forward libertarianism in its true form. I'd like to do all these things. I don't want to be Prime Minister. I don't want to get to be Prime Minister just to be Prime Minister. And we've had Prime Ministers now You'd have to go right back, I think, to Margaret Thatcher. Everybody after Margaret Thatcher just wanted to be Prime Minister. It was their ambition at Oxford or wherever it was to be Prime Minister. But not to do anything. Nobody ever asked them on the television set or an interview. If you become Prime Minister, what is it what you want to do? I knew you're going to live in number 10 Downing Street. You're going to have a lovely car driven by a chauffeur at the expense of the taxpayer. Absolutely marvellous. And you're going to run around the globe shaking hands with the President of the United States of being photographed. And obviously, that's all marvellous. But what do you actually want to do? And they had no ambition. They still have no ambition. None of them have an ambition to actually do something for the country. They couldn't wait to actually get rid of the responsibility so they could pose on the world stage but not do anything. And sooner we got out of the European Union where we'd handed over the responsibility of government to the European Union in Brussels and Strasbourg. And now, of course, we won Brexit and we've handed it over to the world economic forum. So we're still not governing ourselves. And it's absolutely quite extraordinary that politicians want to get rid of... They want the trappings of power and government but they don't actually want the responsibility to do anything and I've never fully understood people like that. But then, of course, I think... I'm sure you would probably agree with this. Mike, there's something wrong with politicians. Why would you want to be a politician? Well, there's sort of people that politics attracted. I mean, I was a city fund manager. I was a businessman in the city. I was an investment manager. And I finished my career as the chief executive of a life insurance company of all things. And that's me. But I wanted Brexit so I went to politics for 10 years in order to do something which was actually Brexit. I went to do something and as soon as that was finished I was out of politics. And coming back to that, interesting, I worked for the Warburg Empire, Mercury Asset Management in the city which was one of the world's leading investment banks by a long way. A very, very posh investment bank. A European bank, a global, but I mean European in that sense of the word. And I was dealing with people who were unbelievably clever in every respect and well informed and well read. And when I got into politics, fascinatingly, I couldn't believe the people were so hopeless. The people were so stupid. And this was really quite astonishing. I thought that when I got into politics we all know that politicians do the most stupid things. That I would be taken behind some Green Bay's door. Yes. And politicians would point out why they do these things. And I would say, gosh, I didn't know that. I understand now why you do this. But there isn't a Green Bay's door. No. These people really are exceptional and he's stupid. And when I was in Washington, I visited all sorts of places and did all sorts of things when I was there. But one of them was the Brookings Institute. I went to see some people at the Brookings Institute and they all had their wonderful Brooks Brothers suits on. They were immaculate, well groomed, very articulate. But when I asked them what their war aims were and the great thing about America is there was always a war. So I might ask that it's always a war aim. And they looked at me absolutely bewildered. Bewildered. I do know what the response was. I think it was in the second Iraq war. I can't remember. It really doesn't matter because it could have been Syria. It could have been anywhere. What was the war aim? Do you know what the response from the Brookings Institute guys was? It was, well, we'll cross that bridge when we get to it. I just stared at them. These people have the levers of power. So they're controlling one of the greatest navies the world's ever seen. One of the greatest economists the world's ever seen. And these people are inherently stupid. That's extraordinary. We'll cross that bridge when we come to it. I still gauge in wonderment how these people get there. What's even funny about that is the Brookings Institute is supposed to be a conservative think tank. These people are supposed to have some sense of history. I got no whiff of conservatism in the Brookings Institute at all. That's correct. And that brings me to another thing that I have in my notes to speak with you about is that it does seem that one of the fundamental problems we have in politics on both sides of the Atlantic is that we no longer have either a true conservative party or a true conservative contingent in government or a true liberal contingent. On your side of the water, you may say liberal in a Gladstonean sense. Indeed, we would. I would. You simply don't have that. And so this is a problem. I have a theory that I'd like to run by you which is that just as, for example, Peter Hitchens talks about World War I as the beginning of the end for Christendom in the West because the people in power and the clergy were in lockstep in this war and they sent off so many young people who were glad to fight and there was all this mythology of it being almost a holy crusade and this is going to be the war to end all wars and it was such a colossal waste and a colossal slaughter and then this war that was supposed to end all wars, of course, ended and then after about a generation you did the same damn thing all over again. So Peter Hitchens talks about World War I as being that kind of watershed. I think that the Cold War was a similar kind of watershed in terms of our ability to even articulate a proper conservative politics or a proper liberal politics. What we got at the end of the Cold War, it seems to me, was two camps of neoliberal hacks wearing different cultural paint jobs. What's your take on that? No, I totally agree with you. I mean, we're talking here about it doesn't make any difference whether you vote red or blue or your side of the fence because it's still red or blue outside of the pond here. But no, it doesn't make any difference. You're dealing with a form of neo-socialism and statism and that is what has transpired and if you look and it's interesting you make the observation Gladstonean liberalism, which I totally would endorse at this side of the pond, we regard liberal as being liberal in the dictionary sense of the word, not in the political sense of the word, which of course in America liberal means extreme left wing if you will and so that's an interesting concept. But everyone talks about Gladstone but I did write an article. I don't know whether you spotted it. It's on my website. I wrote it with going postal on Lord Salisbury. Now Lord Salisbury in the latter part of the 1800s was the last true real conservatives who ran the most successful government, conservative government in history and that's not just my assessment. That's the assessment of Clement Attlee, the socialist post-war prime minister. Lord Salisbury was a libertarian and when I was going to give a talk to the conservative association at Cambridge University and I was de-platformed to talk about the administration of Lord Salisbury in the 1890s which was obviously too rich for the average Cambridge University undergraduate. They couldn't be exposed to me and I was told at the last minute that it was just not going to happen because they had to consider the safety of their students. I wonder what they thought this little old man Godfrey Bloom was going to do when he turned up and talked about Lord Salisbury. But there we are. But he's got some absolutely wonderful quotations and I quoted them and I was going to quote them to the audience that night which sadly I couldn't do but I did put it in my interview on Lord Salisbury, my article on Lord Salisbury. Fascinating, he was a true, he was a true libertarian conservative and some people think you can't be a libertarian conservative. Well I can tell you, you can be. You can be. They're not mutually exclusive at all. So it's a great shame but of course after the war, after the, in 1945, we had a socialist, a really rabid socialist government, a really rabid socialist government in Britain under Clement Attlee and in his own way it wasn't a bad bloke. He wasn't a bad bloke, Clem Attlee. He was just hopelessly misguided and an electorate which is understandably misguided of having in 1945 an attitude that they were just about fed up and this government came along with this political party, Labour Party said everything we're going to take care of you from cradle to grave, you're going to be looked after. Your education, your pensions, your social welfare, your health. The government was pretty attractive if you've been in the desert getting your head shot off for the last five years, isn't it? I mean I'd have probably voted for the buggers and this is, and therefore we've had socialism, we've had this and it's the same in Europe who are very prone to socialism, of course the Europeans are very prone to socialism. And the state will look after them regardless of circumstance. And we now have the second generation who believe that it is the state's responsibility to look after them, not themselves. There's no sensitivity what will the government do? The government should do something. There isn't this or this, this, this and this. Whatever it happens to be the government should do something. Not I should get off my bum and do something myself and of course once you're taxed as a socialist government we're now the highest taxed as a nation with highest tax in 50 years. You can't break free because you can't save your own money. You can't pay for your own education unless you're wealthy. You can't pay for your own health because the government is taking so much money you've lost your independence and so you're dependent on NAMI all the time, sucking at the deed and hoping you'll get some droppings from the table and all this kind of thing and that's one of the problems that we have. People have come to believe that the state is their saviour and the state which is now crucifying the west with their net zero policies their green policies, their high taxation their socialism, what will happen is society will break down. Now what will happen when society breaks down? Well history tells us what happens when society breaks down. They won't turn around and say we have too much government. We have too much government. This is the government's fault. They will throw out that government and bring in another government who will be even more draconian because the last one wasn't draconian enough. That's what people respond and that's where you get your fascism and your communism in 1919. When society broke down in Europe they didn't say what we need is a libertarian society. What we need is more power for the individual. What they actually said was we need more government and they turned to Hitler they turned to Stalin they turned to Mussolini who was offering them the firm hand. Daddy and mommy will look after you again and that's what people 80% of the population want and I don't know I don't know where we go from there I don't know how we move away from this most people believe that it's the state's responsibility to look after them and they're quite happy. Well it's even worse than you say because the problem one of the problems with a state that assumes the responsibility to look after people is that pretty soon for ordinary understandable political reasons that state takes it upon itself to try to avert all bad outcomes. No state can avert all bad outcomes and if you try all that will happen is that the state will end up averting good outcomes that you actually do want and so you definitely see this in your country I mean I've heard lots of horror stories from my friends over there about people trying to do things on their own and some jumped up local council member saying well actually you can't do that so you get this kind of thing where everything that you would want to do every initiative that you might take ends up being illegal so not only are you kind of starving the economy not only are you taking away confiscating an income that people might use in interesting ways but you're also kind of squashing the the native creativity and the native kind of hustle of ordinary people in the street who really can if given half a chance figure things out and kind of make something of what they have here in New York City Airbnb was kind of disruptive for the hotel industry because what people found was that rather than go and stay in some $200 room hotel in Manhattan they could actually stay in someone's home when they came to the United States to visit and you could have a better experience and spend less money and the system was kind of self-regulating now our supposedly conservative government went to war that is the municipal government went to war against Airbnb you may not rent your house to lodgers now that's extraordinary because then we're coming up against the question well what is property actually then I mean this is my house and I can't do with it what I want then is it really mine and again that comes from this idea of no we have to protect people against the possible negative implications that are happening so it's even worse than what you say and while I'm not discouraged I'm often dispirited at the current situation the same of course with Uber there's exactly the same principle and here's the funny thing is it's done by the lobby groups the hotel lobby groups the cab drivers and if you've paid in New York $100,000 or whatever it is to get your yellow cab license to drive a cab that's your lobby group and of course this is the problem it's pork barrel as you say over there it's pork barrel politics all the time isn't it now here's the funny thing here's my experience for example Uber in London now we all know the London black cab service is actually one of the best in the world for what it is they know what they're doing they're very good at what they do it's not cheap but the person they say oh well it will kill the black cab drivers think that Uber's a bad thing because it's taking away their bread and butter but that's not true because people who use black cabs will always prefer black cabs Uber is much cheaper however your Uber customer is the customer not from a black cab he's the customer that would normally take the tube or subways you call it over there he would say I can get home I can afford to get home with Uber I can't get home on the black cab I can't afford it so what you have is much better than any form of taxi service which they couldn't otherwise afford if you're going to New York for example if I'm visiting New York I stay at the Lotus Club I'm a member of the Lotus Club so I stay there and it's just by Central Park and it suits me it's very expensive but I'm an old geezer and I can afford it so people who go to New York say for a holiday who stay in Airbnb are people who would otherwise perhaps not go to New York it doesn't really take any bedrooms away from the Waldorf does it? or the plaza or the Lotus Club it brings people in who would not otherwise perhaps have visited that city so it doesn't even work but the people doesn't even work in forms of pork barrel politics that's correct that reminds me of a quote from some British politician who was responding to a socialist to the socialist slogan about needing to break eggs to make an omelette and say well this and that, this has whatever side effects but if you want to make an omelette you have to break some eggs and what he said was well very well right, I mean we so in other words you don't even get the good effects that are promised and this is a problem yes, it's the same here with education, I tell you what's quite interesting a few years ago home schooling was very difficult you had that little man from the council around sniffing about making a nuisance of himself now incidentally that's rather changed over here now a lot of people, a lot of my friends are taking my younger friends are taking their children out of school because they're fed up with the sort of wokery they're being taught whatever the piece of wokery could be trans is the latest thing and all that kind of stuff and the denigration of British history so they're taking their kids away now they take the kids away and they don't hear anything from the system at all the system can't be bothered just think oh that's one piece of less responsive idea the kids gone and those parents are then taking their children to museums they're still getting their sport because they play sport at the local football club or whatever it is for children so they're not missing out on anything they go to dance classes or whatever it happens to be they're not missing anything not by being at school and you can of course teach more to a child in a few hours one to one under those circumstances and a child will ever learn in a huge classroom and you've got the like-minded your parents people pay for public schools here of course as you know that's what you would call a private school over there and people pay a fortune for that and they only pay for that because they've got the same values all the parents have the same broad values that they share but that's now not translating into the school room school teachers in your private school are just as woke as they are in the state school and for that you're paying $6,000 $7,000 a term and people are going no I'm not going to do that and then they go to university where they learn absolutely nothing except wokery now I was in Arizona a couple of years ago it could have been anywhere and we were just waiting by a bus stop it was a sort of in the middle of nowhere sort of bus stop in a park some kind of park and it was very hot and two children were in the shade sitting on a bench there had been about 11 or 12 and one of them came over and said to me and my wife would you like to come in here and take this seat to be a lot more comfortable the shade how very nice I thought how charming is that and I sort of scratched my head I was so one is so unused these days to that kind of behavior from children and a lady turned up a bit later to pick them up in the shooting wagon and all the rest of it they were home school and I should have realized that they were articulate they looked you in the eye they were lovely couple of kids because they'd never been near a bloody school you know it's funny I'm an enormous fan of home schooling and I mean my experience has been the same as yours in that when I find young people who are unusually well-mattered and well-behaved knowledgeable and courteous and what have you very often I find that they've been home school and this goes back to what we were talking about before the state has taken upon itself the responsibility to educate children now if you think about it that's actually pretty unusual in terms of I mean for most of human history education meant showing your children how the world works that was education showing how to do everything that was education and we've gotten used to the idea of education being this phase of development where you send your children to be spoken to by strangers okay fair enough but the problem now is that we don't even get again you know we've broken some eggs to make an omelet but we're not even getting the omelet I'm always talking about home schooling to people anyone who will listen and I'm hoping that more people do that because the system needs disrupting and again not just in what we call K through 12 you know elementary education but also as you point out higher education I mean here in the United States you can pay a quarter million dollars or more for four-year education now that's madness that's madness and if all you get out of that is a graduate who's learned to hate his country and hate everything his parents stand for and hate everything that's good and normal and decent then that system needs to go I mean I'm sorry you're quite right in pointing out that this is a new phenomenon the state running education is a relatively new phenomenon yes you know the church is there's all sorts of different forms of education but which weren't involved in the state and the old grammar schools in this country of course were producing they were selective they selected bright kids and they taught them in a face the front and learn this kind of way and it's fascinating that if you look at the greater the good of yesteryear who were educated at grammar schools it's not all eaten and harrow and all this sort of business it's from fairly humble backgrounds you know humble class backgrounds where the kid can get on and go ahead and get to be the top of their professions and of course the great entrepreneurs none of the great entrepreneurs in great Britain that I know of anyway went to university all the really successful businessmen and I don't mean in the huge civil service like BP and Shell I'm talking about somebody who actually built a business out of nothing like a company or a S&P 500 out of nowhere they never went to university hardly ever did they go to university and so consequently one does beg the question what are you getting out of this the answer is not very much and here is the same with health we have this wonderful health system which is free at the point of delivery the only problem of course it isn't free and it isn't delivered this is do you know how much it costs this is pretty amazing it's £2,400 let's call it $3,000 for your people $3,000 per head of every man, woman and child in the country annually now of course when you think that ok babies young mums and stuff but generally speaking most people go for years without needing the health system you'll fit from 20 to 30 to 40 to 50 you don't really have much wrong with you so consequently these people aren't even using it so we are paying a fortune and I think it was it was an American whose name just slipped my mind for a moment but I know he said if you think health service is expensive wait until it's free I like that and this is the point we're paying a fortune everybody's going private now if you can afford it if your middle class can afford it my sister in law needed a hip replacement £15,000 they paid for it out of their savings because she was in great pain and there was nothing that could be done the waiting list was a year there is no health service here I'm private I'm having to deal with the national health system and I tell you another reason I don't have anything I don't want to be on their computer do you want to be on a health computer in Britain with the national health when we've handed over our health system to the WHO the World Health Authority who are sooner or later going to make certain sorts of experimental drugs compulsory I don't want to be on the computer I don't want a policeman knocking at my door saying he's going to take me away unless I submit to experimental spike protein therapy yes that's correct I don't want to be I haven't left for better service I haven't left for better doctors they're the same doctors that you pay for they're the same doctors they just go on every once a week to the private clinic I'm not getting better treatment I'm getting off I'm getting off that computer yes it's funny years ago when I was on the left you know I was of course in favor of of nationalized health care and what have you and even when I started toward the right I was still open to the idea that something like a national health care service could possibly be good here we we would call it Medicare for all for example but you know the last couple of years the great viral freak out as it were that pretty much sealed the deal I said no way like imagine you know here in well as far as the covid freak out is concerned you all had it a lot worse than we had it in terms of the the misery that your government was able to inflict on you here it wasn't quite so bad simply because we have 50 different governments and the federal government even though it overreaches regularly is it doesn't have doesn't have that much authority and still a great many people have been harmed by this response just imagine what it would be like here in the United States if if most of our doctors worked for the government yeah so once again we have an example of we've got these broken eggs but where is the omelet whenever I tune into or whenever I get some news from the UK on my feed I always hear these politicians you have over there and they're always saying this thing that I just find so intensely stupid it actually infuriates me they say we have to save the NHS you've heard them say this before well you know people we need women to lock down the population or people have to wear masks again or whatever because you have to save the NHS what are you talking about you know I mean for God's sake the point of a national health service is to save you it's extraordinary it's incredible to save the NHS it's just absolutely amazing I think yes I thought we'd pay all this money so they saved us and of course the other institutional things have gone out of the window as well and there's nothing this being exposed by the experimental spike protein therapy what happened to the Hippocratic Oath the doctors doctors are administering this and they're getting $20 a jab or whatever it is and I spoke to my private doctor who's NHS really but I'd see him on Fridays by appointment for 80 quid and that works out quite well because you know I get seen when I want to be seen if I want to be seen which is very often and he does what I want but 14 months ago I sent him some reports I was getting because I got a web page on this I was the first guy in pointing out all this in Britain that the experimental spike protein therapy was not all it's made up to be I was the first person that said just a minute this co is about to go to bed with a glass of whiskey and lie down for a week and say you'll be alright I was the first person that's saying all this kind of stuff three years ago I was coming out with this and it's now becoming like everybody's beginning to say but I sent him this I sent him a lot of expert opinion which I was getting from all over the world 14 months ago and he wouldn't have it he would not have it he clammed up he wouldn't talk to me there was no eye contact and it's the same with all general practitioners doctors now we're getting oncologists we're getting cardiologists again you say just a minute this is but this is three years in three years in far too late by the way an awful lot of pregnant women and women of child bearing age have been administered this thing and it's extraordinary I mean you talk about doing no harm but I mean this is just basic ethics you look at the insert slip that you get if you open a traditional vaccine even that insert has warnings about administering this thing to pregnant women and here we have this thing that was brought on the market in a huge hurry with legal indemnity granted to the manufacturers by legislative fiat for the amount we pay for healthcare in your country and mine our healthcare professionals should have been on the ball three months in three weeks in not three years in I mean this is madness it's quite insane and we get this crazy situation do we not with pregnant women they mustn't eat shellfish they mustn't smoke they mustn't drink alcohol there's a whole list that a pregnant woman cannot do and what kind of nurse or midwife sits down and administers an experimental spike protein for an almost zero risk for a young healthy woman in 30 or 28 or whatever it is her chances are zero as close to zero as you can get dying from this when they go home at night what are they thinking they go to bed at night with their family the midwife or the nurse or the doctor the GP what are they thinking what are they thinking can they sleep at night they don't seem to care they don't seem to care it's rather extraordinary I think I'm into politics it's not what I do for a living but I find it interesting and I like a good fight I like a good argument I'm nostalgic for old fashioned political corruption that is to say everyone gets the idea that politicians will do some self-dealing everyone gets the idea that people will occasionally skim off the top everyone gets that but this is something different this is I mean the kind of the casual cruelty of this healthcare regime the idea that you're not just giving these experimental substances which have not been fully tested out to young women of child bearing age to pregnant women and you're suppressing news of injuries and then you did more than that with these interventions with these lockdowns with this quarantining there's no quarantining at all there's no quarantining means that healthy people stay away not that everyone decides to be afraid of air the idea of consigning old people to die alone without human contact surrounded by strangers wearing masks there's a there was a documentary that I was watching World War II and this was near the end when they had started to open up the camps what was going on and I believe it was Winston Churchill said we are in the presence of a crime without a name and that's the feeling I get when I watch these people absolutely it's very depressing and my wife who is a medic is also equally depressed by it she was right on the beginning she was the same and a lot of my friends when it came to lockdown and this is what we all have to do we took as little notice as we could I have a small holding in East Yorkshire a few chickens a few horses a few bits and pieces like that we just built a pub we just built a small pub on the back of a barn and the village came round and we just carried on as best we could we took absolutely no notice of any of it what's funny is you know by now I'm a big fan of Chesterton and I'm thinking about what Chesterton would have thought about the closing down of pubs as far as British politics are concerned I have the feeling that the pub as such the institution of the pub is this kind of reservoir of common sense and argument and skepticism and what have you and a part of me thinks that this whole regime would never have gone down if you had had the pubs open do you know what I'm saying you make an interesting point and I did a video on this a couple of years ago when Boris Johnson said he was closing this and closing that and the lockdown was happening and he said pubs did not deliver an essential service and I thought this is a man who is so out of touch with reality it beggars belief what if you're a widow you live alone and your only pleasure was going to the pub maybe once a week or maybe twice a week just to get human contact with other people discuss other people and this to suggest that it wasn't an essential service so he had his bar, he had Annie's bar they all went to the bar, the cheap subsidized bar they have in the house of Westminster and we know now how much notice Boris Johnson took of it he was called out partying he didn't believe any of this but it was for us ordinary people we had policemen arresting women walking their dog in the park and again it makes a question what does the policeman say when he goes home when is daddy daddy what did you do today it was an interesting day I arrested a young woman for walking her dog in the park daddy you're such a hero what's wrong with the procedure well I mean this is we could have a whole other conversation on how far from the peeling and model of policing you've departed I mean they are at this point your police are pretty much a politicized weaponized arm of the government and that's it it's no longer police being the people that's long gone but yeah this is again we seem to be coming back to this pattern of having made all these sacrifices and not even getting the benefits one would expect you make an excellent point mate because I've often said this let's take Singapore I've worked all over the world here and everywhere so I know plenty of places Singapore now Singapore is a very authoritarian state you know you can't spit gum you can't do this and you can't do that well you know fair enough it's a very sort of tough environment however it's very successful commercially and GDP per capita goes all the time and it's over taking everywhere else and it's and all that's fine now if you're going to pay tax and live in a fairly authoritarian environment they are delivering the omelette it may not be the omelette that you want it might not be the flame that you thought but by goodness me there's an omelette on the table there's very little crime it's the same with Dubai there's no crime you're living in a society Switzerland to a certain extent you don't drop litter you're next and you don't go over the speed limit it's not optional these authority kinds of regimes are not my cup of tea as a libertarian but at least at least you're getting something for it we're getting nothing for it we're living in a very very tough authoritarian kind of style but we're not getting good education good health we're not getting low crime figures we've got an island covered in litter we're getting nothing for all this I could exchange I could live in Switzerland or Singapore without too much trouble without too much trouble but at the moment they're delivering nothing for us here in this country we're getting absolutely nothing and that's the problem but the other problem is of course people people people don't simply care they moan they win but they deep down they don't really care you wouldn't find more than one person in ten in this country who's even ever heard of the world economic forum honestly nobody would know I spoke to a big landowner the other day a very charming man I've known him for years big landowner in Yorkshire and he said oh you know who will get the premiership you know will it be Sunak Charles and I said it doesn't matter we're governed by the world economic forum he said who are they wow he's one of the richest biggest landowners in the north of England and he didn't know but then of course if it's we have friends who've taken the booster jab number four because they want to go to Las Vegas for a holiday why anybody would dream of going to Las Vegas but they have and when we said my goodness me that's a bit brave you know it's a bit dangerous you know getting a fourth jab in your booster people are dropping dead all over but she didn't know she didn't know all they do is watch the BBC maybe for half an hour in the evening while they're having a cup of tea or something and of course they're getting fed that it's the same with the Ukraine it's the same with the Ukraine I can assure you that nearly everybody in this country in Great Britain imagines that Putin woke up one morning was bored, hung over didn't quite know what to do and he suddenly had a brainwave I know I'll invade the Ukraine purely on a whim that's what they truly believe I'm not talking about idiot people I'm talking one guy who believes that is a mathematics graduate from Cambridge University and I could name a whole list of people like that really really highly educated people who imagine that to be the case worse Mike you try and explain that there's another side of the story here oh no don't do that yes I've had that response I mean this is well what this tells you going back to what you said earlier about education is that we have too many people too many highly credentialed people but on the whole we have just too many people who have been educated as to what to think as opposed to how to think I think that the whole west the whole of the western countries there's no critical thinking there's no challenge there's no risk assessment there's no risk assessment involved here and you see that wouldn't be so bad except that we also like for example one could argue that 500 years ago okay in in England you didn't necessarily have a huge critical mass of people who knew the trivium and the quadrivium and what have you but the problem is that this our radical inability to reason honestly about these things is coupled with this kind of radical desire on the part of our political class and our elites to interfere with these things do you see what I'm saying in other words it wouldn't matter so much if we were dead wrong about Russia vs Ukraine except for the fact that we insist on being in the middle of it well you could argue that my country is the one that really initiated the thing we're the people who kind of it launched those provocations even back before 2014 and what have you but the point is that there is a political class that has an almost well that has an almost socialistic stated desire to prevent bad outcomes but the problem is that intervening in a crisis and genuinely helping people is precision work it requires you to get up close and really understand the underlying system and going back to my sister-in-law's point to be able to take a history to understand the context and this is something I'd like to get your take on this but it seems to me that I'm kind of going back to Chesterton again and thinking about what he had to say about modernism and modernists and fatists and how precisely because they had cut themselves off from history they lived in a very narrow slice of time and maybe that's it I'm not sure where that comes from but it's a very dangerous combination and we've come around to Ukraine at the right time because I wanted to get your take on this you yourself again I've been following you for a while and I did some research I found out that you had gone to the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst, you graduated in 1976 you were a logistics liaison officer with the 4th Army Division and you you were an associate member of the College of Defense Studies and you've given talks and things like that particularly being a logistics man you have more of a sense of the essence of what war is than most people who think of it as a giant gunfight yes you can tell the way our State Department which doesn't do foreign policy anymore clearly the sense in which they talk about wonder weapons the sense in which their acolytes in the media kind of gleefully repeat these stories about wonder weapons and all they need is this many more howitzers and this many more tanks and I'm here thinking how are you going to train on how are you going to get this equipment there what's your training regime where are you going to train these people how are they going to train in a maneuver warfare context so they understand how to not just how to flip the switches but how to actually use this and maneuver and actually engage on it where are you going to do this and in what time frame but so many of our elites again they lack that context they lack the mental discipline they lack all of those things and that would be fine if they were happy to be isolationists but they're not happy to be isolationists they really really want to get involved I just like it a sound off on that given your background and given that once again given that in this talk we've been talking about these systems which are very expensive and from which we don't even get the stated benefit I'm thinking now of NATO and the so called kind of security apparatus that exists at great expense supposedly to provide some form of security what would you take on all this well two questions you got there two questions, funny enough I put out a video last night on this very business of logistics which was published overnight which is still up on my website just picking up on these particular things I actually started as a young man as a trooper with light armoured reconnaissance and of course as a young soldier I didn't think anything it didn't occur to me that something had to come the ammunition or the petrol had to come from anywhere I just assumed it would be there you see as a yes fellow and I transferred to logistics after that where of course the whole game is how do you get how do you get your stuff where your stuff want to be and of course the art of logistics is what do you need how are you going to get it there what are you going to do and you've got there and of course this is what most people don't understand and I have to say that most senior generals don't understand and Douglas McGregor made this point and it's the same in England you can't get above one star rank in this country unless you're politicised you can't be a chief of police unless you're politicised and so once you get above the rank of colonel you're selected for promotion if you're okay with all sorts of wokeism you know trans in the army and women at sea all this kind of thing that's how you get promoted now the problem is we're now talking everybody's talking about particularly back bench MPs with no military experience whatsoever and if they do have military experience they're extremely rare and it's only at regimental level they were a captain in the guards or something like that that's not real military experience when it comes to strategy it might be a jolly good chap a very brave chap getting a head shot off somewhere useless like Afghanistan but that doesn't make you an expert on warfare so what we're saying is now the British are going to give them the Challenger 2 tank well the Challenger 2 tank doesn't have the same ammunition as the Leopard tank the Leopard tank is diesel the Abrams is petrol so consequently you've got all different things you've got to deliver and then of course you can't put tanks in theatre without back up from infantry the infantry has to clear the way you don't just have armour you have to have infantry supporting you have to have artillery support which is extremely sophisticated these days it's all computerized you're not putting a cannonball down there and touching off it's long gone those days people it's long gone and then you've got your patriot missiles where you need to take months and months to train somebody to fire these sophisticated things correct and then you need workshops they break down and they do believe me they break down all the time you need workshops you need forward workshops quite close to the front line and then of course you need air support you need air support and the Germans found out in Normandy in the fillets gap in places like this they don't know how good their tanks were they had the best tanks some of the best soldiers without doubt and some of the most disciplined soldiers the most experienced soldiers but you can't because you don't have air power it's all terribly integrated you can't just give a guy a tin hat and a gun those days have long gone indeed if they were ever here correct you could go back to the British archers we beat the French time and time again much bigger armies now because we had highly trained archers this isn't a new concept and then you've got to get the you need the soft you need the transport you need to get the petrol there they've got to be fed you need ammunition where's all this going to come from all we're doing is pouring money into the Ukraine at the moment and we're sending fairly useless obsolete equipment and no good will come of this all we're doing is extending the war and one of the questions at staff college somebody asked Field Marshal Montgomery was giving the final lecture and somebody said and I'm going back many many years can you give us one tip give us one tip a one-off sentence as staff officers what should we bear in mind and the response was from Field Marshal Montgomery never march on Moscow and we've got all these people saying are we going to win the war we've got this and if we give the UK you don't beat the Russians on their own doorstep they are impossibly they have limited resources and they have space and what people don't understand the strategic aspects of this war is that the Russian army has withdrawn and their strategy their doctrine is to beat the Ukrainian army in the field they're not going to hold ground they're not going to do what we did in the first one hold deep in the salions and lose lots of men for a piece of useless ground grant work this out in your war yes sir it wasn't a civil war but that's another question it was a war between the north and the south not the same thing at all grant said I'm not going to try and capture Richmond I've got to beat the confederate army in the field and that's what they did and once the Russians break out across the frozen ground an armour can come into its own and air they will almost certainly have air superiority and the Ukrainians can't get any reserves can't train reserves the war will be over by Easter yes and the Russians will be in the driving seat and they will be saying this is how it's going to be and since it doesn't matter, Merkel said that the Minsk agreement was fake and we were only doing it so we could to give us breathing space it won't stop the man you argue with in the pub who's pro-Ukrainian waving his arms and foaming at the mouth he won't have it he can't believe it any more than if you tell him that if he has the booster he's quite likely to drop dead no he can't deal with it people can't deal with it I've noticed a lot of foaming a lot of foaming in the Ukraine matter and what's funny is I've had an interest in Russia for some time I was beginning to pay attention to politics and the world affairs right around the time the Cold War ended and at that time I saw the experiment that Russia conducted in pure capitalism and it was of course it was a disaster and Russians who lived who were alive in those years will tell you it was just and then Vladimir Putin came on the scene and established order and I noticed that at first he was supposed to be the kind of he was Bill Clinton liked him apparently talked about him in glowing terms until he began to insist on certain things that went against the globalist doctrine of the time I think my working I think the plan for Russia was that it was supposed to be a weak state that got caught up and sold for scrap by the currency speculators and people of that ilk and when that plan got derailed when the neoliberals found that they could not carry out that plan in Russia then the leader of Russia became he had to become the devil incarnate and I was around for the Kursk disaster and I understood a little bit of what that meant in terms of how dysfunctional their systems were you can't even maintain your peroxide field torpedoes and so on and so forth and I was around for the I was paying attention to the reforms that Putin put in place in the navy in the army and so on and so forth and so this many years later a country that actually has paid attention to fundamental matters a country that actually has had an industrial policy as opposed to just mouthing platitudes about the free market and exporting all their factories to other countries a country that has done all those things and has checked all those boxes can now withstand a sanctions regime that I don't know it may be unprecedented as many sanctions put on a country at once and fight off this proxy NATO army that was trained and equipped by the US and it's extraordinary and people are in denial about what that means what are the problems with the sanctions which we didn't understand because politicians are just stupid people what can you do simply stupid people that was and I could have told them this and I could have told them it was going to be a mistake because we get fertilizers and gas petrol and all these things that we import from Russia into Western Europe in order that we need that we must have they must have now the only things that the Russian buy for us they like, or from the west they like how it is they like BMWs they like all that kind of stuff of course they do but they don't need them they're not a must for them so we shot ourselves in the foot it always reminds me if you remember Blazing Saddles the film Blazing Saddles when the black sheriff if you remember he rides into town in a lynching and he puts a gun to his own neck and says one pace forward here and I pull the trigger he's not kidding and that's what the west have done they held the gun to their own head and then pull the trigger and so consequently you couldn't believe and what's happened of course world markets know the ruble's gone out since the beginning it's gone out 8% against the dollar everything against the dollar and markets are telling you what you need to know and of course instead of getting the peace dividend that we should have got the peace dividend if you look at the targets the targets that the Soviet Union were using on the rifle ranges the faces that they had were Chinese the threat that was perceived by the Soviet Union was the Chinese through it Russia is the Chinese because they've got 2 million men or 3 million under arms on their own border and that was the threat now our post cold war policy has managed to actually give them an alliance the Chinese and the Russians an alliance how stupid have we been to get that, that's not a natural alliance Russia and China aren't natural allies they're natural foments we've managed to do that you couldn't invent all this stupidity and then of course this business about we get from the mainstream media all the time is that Russia is isolated well no you have to look at the Shanghai Co Co cooperation sphere you have to look at Bricks you have to look at Africa you have to look at the Stans you have to look at the globe Russia isn't isolated we're isolated and we're becoming more and more isolated this is just not and of course the standard of mainstream media now is so low you're over here we have defence correspondents from major newspapers and the BBC Nick Beal is the BBC defence correspondent the Holy BBC he doesn't know the difference between even and the colour sergeant up until quite recently the defence correspondent of the London Times was Lucy Fisher now Lucy's a really nice lady and she's really good on handbags but you know come on not the kind of person you want when you've got a world crisis on your hands is she we used to have John Keegan we used to have Claire Hollingsworth going back 30 years John Keegan was a correspondent I think the Daily Telegraph of the London Times he was a military history Don at the Royal Military Academy we had people who really knew their stuff I mean really really really knew their stuff asking the right questions we don't have anybody capable in mainstream media asking the right questions never mind finding the answers you made a point at the beginning actually you put your finger on it we live in a society now where people don't know what questions to ask never mind trying to find the answers you don't know what questions they ought to be asking right and it gets worse and it gets worse you know we have to work out where are we going if I'm right and the Russians win and the Russians get to Kiev and it's Endex in much the same way that happened in Vietnam in Afghanistan wherever you want to name what happens then because are they going to find a war somewhere else because we're now in a state of permanent warfare are they going to find a war somewhere else or are they going to determine and a sort of got a damerung scenario, a Wagnerian scenario a sort of Berlin 1945 this area where we'll all go down together Doctor Strange Love or you can find any analogy you like are the West going to resort to tactical battlefield nuclear weapons I don't know but it would be madness and putis made it quite clear that the only concept for nuclear weapons for him is retaliatory and that's always been the mutually assault destruction thing we were safer when the Soviet Union was there correct we were safer under the Ancien Régime because everybody was so frightened of a nuclear war everybody was going to sit around a table and talk and we seem to have people now and I don't whether it's because the people in Washington and that's where it starts is Washington are they so deep in the ground in concrete bunkers that they really genuinely don't care what happens I mean I don't know it's a it's not a thought that lends itself to a pleasant night's sleep I'll say that it certainly doesn't absolutely not Godfrey Bloom you've been very generous with your time thank you so much just before you go tell people where they can find you online and where they can view your your work if you're interested if you're interested in anybody listening my website carries absolutely everything I ever do videos, books, you know the lot it's all there and it's simple it's Godfrey Bloom smallcasegodfreybloom.uk excellent and perhaps might you just tell us where my followers this is going out on my net hold of you sure my website is www.futurad.io and that has many though not all of the videos I've done the podcasts I've done it's also got the foundationist manifesto and kind of what our organization what we believe as an organization and then on Twitter I'm futureradiocast and you can just do a search on YouTube for any videos that you don't find on our website just search for Carbon Mike and the name of my podcast is Dangerous Space well my my techie will put that on and make sure that people can press it immediately the link to you as well because well perhaps it'll be nice to Mike we got back together again round about Easter absolutely and see whether we've been right or wrong on this absolutely I'd love to if we're not some smoking hole in the ground cause some asshole in Washington pressed them up that's right well let's hope they withhold their hand from your lips to God's ear but yeah I'd love to get back on with you and and see where we are come Easter absolutely okay good luck to you and a belated happy new year Mike and to all your listeners till then bye