They Tried To Cancel Me But Now I’m Free w/ Mike Graham (Transcript)

You know, my cybersecurity expert that I hired said, you know, they can find this stuff. They can look on your phone and see what’s been deleted and what hasn’t been deleted, they can still find it. So there’s no point in even deleting stuff.

So I then went and got my own forensic investigation done by a completely independent team up near Manchester, at the advice of this cybersecurity guy that I had. And they do stuff all the time. They work with the police, they work with law enforcement agencies. They’re very reputable. I gave them that. And it wasn’t enough. They said, no, we want to do it ourselves.

And I just thought, you know, and we got to the point at that stage, it was like two, three weeks in. I could just see there wasn’t really any point. And from what was being said to the newspapers, there was a cohort of people at TalkSport and also in the building who thought I was a bit of a bigot, a bit of a racist anyway, and they weren’t very happy with some of the things I said every day, which I’d never been told about.

So it all kind of came to an end and eventually I actually asked them to fire me, effectively, because I was like, you know, get off the pot, if you pardon the expression. Because four weeks had gone by, I wasn’t making any money, and according to them, I wasn’t suspended. And so my lawyers were going, well, if you’re not suspended, you should be paying him.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: But do you know what happened with that Facebook post?

MIKE GRAHAM: I really don’t, no. I mean, the best I can imagine is that somebody accessed the account somehow remotely. We managed to find a few kind of logins from a year before, six months before, from places I hadn’t been. I didn’t have two-factor identification. The cybersecurity guy brought in, so I can’t believe how unprotected your account was given how high profile you are and how high risk you are.

You know, somebody from the cyber team at News UK gave me a memo when I was called in to say, this is how you can secure your account. And I was like, it was a bit late now. You know, maybe you should have given me that last year. So I really don’t know. And nobody knows.

I mean, everybody on Twitter, you know, the land of experts, like, it’s easy to prove that you didn’t do it. Just show them the login and that somebody will be shown to have logged in. Well, there wasn’t anybody there. And I don’t understand enough about cyber hacking. I do know that people get hacked all the time. People are always getting hacked. I mean, people are getting their Twitter accounts hacked all the time at the moment. You keep getting these messages from people saying, please vote for me on this podcast. And then something terrible happens.

You know, major companies are getting hacked every day. And, you know, if I was to be a conspiracy theorist, I would say somebody was out to get me because, you know, a couple of weird things happened to me in the previous two months. I had my back window smashed in my car and nothing was stolen, for example. And there was a case of wine in there, which, you know, might have been heavy for people to carry, but you think they might have taken a couple of bottles. Didn’t take anything. Took an old jacket out of the back of the car. You know, stuff like that. And you just think this is all a bit strange.

TalkSport’s Audience and Culture

FRANCIS FOSTER: But it’s so interesting that when we’re talking about that, because I used to work for Talksport.

MIKE GRAHAM: Yeah.

FRANCIS FOSTER: And for people who don’t know, TalkSport is a radio station that goes out to predominantly working class men in their vans, driving around, or in factories, warehouses, all the rest of it. And the idea that TalkSport would be progressive, that they would be offended by something you said, just boggles the mind, really.

The Woke Takeover of Mainstream Media

MIKE GRAHAM: Well, that would have been true maybe 10 years ago, but not now, because now the business of media is absolutely riddled with wokists. You know, people who have gone in who have completely changed the face, particularly of big companies. I mean, that building is full of very, very different people. There’s the Wall Street Journal, which has got some pretty left wing people working for it. The Times is now a very left wing newspaper. Harper Collins, the book publishers, also riddled with kind of Gen Z, I suppose, who complained once about my radio station or my show, which used to be pumped out in the elevators, in the lifts.

They actually complained about it because they said, all he does is talk about migrants and we find it offensive. So they stopped broadcasting it in the lift, in the building, and they started putting Virgin on instead. Some nice music, you know. And these were people who didn’t work for like 18 months while Covid was on. Just didn’t bother coming to the office, you know. And they’re all these kind of trust fund kids. They’re all kids who could work for hardly any money. And they’re all woke. And I suppose that’s what’s happened to TalkSport, you know.

And yeah, you can understand people not wanting to work with a racist, but I mean, I’ve been working there for 18 years and nobody’s ever called me racist. Nobody’s ever said I was a racist. I’ve never done anything. I’ve had a few run-ins with a few organizations and I’ve had a few spats with people on social media. But, you know, I’m not a racist. I’m sorry, you know, but it got to the point where I suddenly thought, if they say you can come back to work, what will happen then? You know, what kind of safeguards will they put on me? You know, will they give me a series of things I can’t talk about?

Pressure from Ofcom and Downing Street

You know, the station was under a lot of pressure from Ofcom. We were kind of moving the station further and further to the right every single morning. And I was pissing all over Keir Starmer every single day. And they didn’t like it. Downing Street used to complain about me all the time, you know, officially, and say, would Mike Graham please stop calling the Prime Minister a liar? Well, no, because he’s a liar. I’m sorry.

And so then I started asking other people if he was a liar. So I got Kemi Badenoch in and I was like, do you think Keir’s a liar? She said, yeah, absolutely. Then every single guest I got in, do you think Keir’s a liar? Yeah. So, you know, there were kind of things going on that were suggesting to me that we were not going to be as free perhaps as I wanted to be anyway.

And so, and sometimes you just, you know, I’ve been fired five times in my life from various different jobs, you know, never for being a racist. And in fact I always say to people, well, actually I didn’t get fired for being a racist. I got fired for not giving them my phone.

The Phone Controversy

And they put out a statement which was pretty brutal actually, after 18 years, which basically said that they were gravely concerned that I didn’t want to help them out with their inquiry. And I reneged on it and I didn’t renege on anything. You know, they say that I agreed to go and see somebody to give them my phone, which I never actually did because we never ever got to the point where I said, I’m happy with the parameters of this.

You know, I didn’t want them to have my phone for, they wanted it for nine hours to basically, you know, they didn’t want to give me a substitute phone so that I could use that while they had my phone. And I’m thinking, so you’re now going to give me another phone, which once I give it back to you, you’re going to go through as well, because that’s what you do, right?

So I felt like they were sort of out to get me and none of that was helped by the fact that they weren’t paying me. And they sometimes would take days to respond to emails from my lawyers, you know, and I think they were in a real quandary. I think there were people that didn’t want me to go because I was 50% of their output, you know, in terms of the money. I was making a lot of money for their YouTube channel. And all of that’s gone now. But the woke is won.

FRANCIS FOSTER: Isn’t it bizarre in a way that you see media companies and a lot of companies as well, they prioritize what certain parts, very certain minorities of their employees think over profitability. You just look at Talk Radio now. It’s been undeniably damaged by you leaving.

MIKE GRAHAM: Yeah.

FRANCIS FOSTER: And you just think to yourself, this doesn’t make any sense from a business point of view.

The Brexit Era and Talk Radio’s Golden Age

MIKE GRAHAM: No, I mean, what makes sense from a business point of view is to make it into a right wing outlet, you know, which is what it started out as. You know, we kind of made our bones initially with the Brexit referendum and then the subsequent rows and, you know, the summer of, I guess it was 2019, you know, that stalemate summer when we went down into College Green and we were literally like the rebels, you know, we were like the bad boys of Westminster.

We had this tiny little tent, I called it the tent of shame. And we had these two really good looking Spanish producers who would stop all the politicians as they were walking towards the great big edifice that was the BBC and Sky and, you know, all these foreign outlets. And they would sort of manage to get them to come and sit in this tent where I would give them an absolute roasting, you know, which they would never, I’d never seen anything like it, you know, and it was great and it was fantastic and they had to walk past us both ways, you know.

At one point, Alastair Campbell, I was actually broadcasting and I was sitting with my back to Parliament and I heard and I saw Alastair Campbell and he leaned in and shouted in my ear, “Stop talking bollocks.” You know, so we were really getting to these people. Michael Heseltine accused me of being impertinent and I said, well, I’m sorry, Lord Heseltine, but if I’m going to be impertinent to you, then you must be superior to me, which I don’t think you are. And he looked at me like, nobody’s ever spoken to me like that.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: The plebs are talking back.

MIKE GRAHAM: And I kept saying to them and I had a great argument with Lisa Nandy about whether or not we had a, you know, all this stuff still on YouTube. So we kind of made our bones by being a bit punk rock, I suppose, when it came to politics, you know, which was brilliant. And that was where we made our name.

Then GB News came along and they kind of took an awful lot of our people away. A lot of producers, some of the presenters tried to set up in a similar way, but they’ve now had to kind of calm themselves down a bit as well. And they’ve gone a bit kind of vanilla, seems to me. I am still glad they’re there. But, you know, as time went on then, then we got into Covid and we were really, before GB News was even thought about, we were the only people saying, you know, what’s this lockdown all about? You know, why have we been told to wear a mask? Why, why when you stand up in a pub, is it different? So when you sit down, you know, what’s a scotch egg? You know, all of that stuff. Nobody else was asking the questions. Not anyone. I mean, you guys might want to be.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Not in the mainstream.

MIKE GRAHAM: In the mainstream. Nobody was doing it, you know.

The Rise of Independent Media

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Well, this is an interesting part of the conversation because I see you, you’ve been forced out or whatever, not renewed, whatever the term.

MIKE GRAHAM: Yeah, they fired me basically.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Right. But now you’ve got your own YouTube channel. It’s crushing. You’re doing really well, mate.

MIKE GRAHAM: We’re doing so well. And I mean, I’m in awe of you guys, because I don’t really know much about YouTube, you know.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Neither do we. We have younger people.

MIKE GRAHAM: You don’t need to worry about it. I mean, your numbers are spectacular. And when I first met you, I don’t know how many years ago it was, you had that little studio in Highbury. And I remember coming up there to talk to you and I just remember thinking, this is quite, really a cool thing, you know. But, you know, you have the kind of arrogance, in a way, of the mainstream media when you’re in it, you know, and now I’m learning from the other side what it’s like to build something. It’s actually really exciting.

You know, I’m loving it. I mean, you guys have done spectacularly well and I take my hat off to you because I can see also how difficult it is as well. But, yeah, I mean, I can’t quite believe how quickly we shot up, you know. It’s again, nothing compared to some of the numbers that you guys do and others.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Eight years.

MIKE GRAHAM: Yeah. So, I mean, we’ve got nearly 6 million views in four or five weeks. You know, we’ve got 128,000, I think, subscribers. We’re working on trying to build, you know, there’s tricks of how you build all that up. But the reaction has been amazing. You know, we look at the, and I know that Talk has got different outlets, not just YouTube, you know, so it’s not really fair to compare. But, you know, we’re doing four or five times what they’re doing just on the live shows, you know. And so we’re, yeah, very, I’m really excited about it.

Talent Finds Its Audience

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Well, this is the thing is, you know, talent is talent and the big platforms, the big mainstream media organizations, they used to have this lock on, well, it doesn’t matter how talented you are. If we don’t put you on our show, you’re not going to get seen and you’re not going to get heard. It’s not really the case anymore. And so this whole thing about, like, canceling people, it’s just like, is it like, I’m sure you saw with me in Question Time, there’s all these morons on Twitter running around trying to say, oh, I can’t believe they’ve had him. Like, Question Time need people who have an audience.

The Decline of Mainstream Media

MIKE GRAHAM: Well, you’ve got a bigger audience in Question Time, right? You know, and these people, these bozos who kind of see themselves, I don’t know what they see themselves as. It’s kind of media commentators going, you know, why have they got him on again? He’s always on. Well, because he’s actually rather good and entertaining to watch and he has a view. He doesn’t just sit there worried about what, you know, his party’s going to say, you know, when he gets back to the office, you know.

And Question Time needs people like you. I mean, I was watching some sort of promo the other day for, I can’t remember why I was on ITV, but they put this promo on for some new game show they’re doing, hosted by Rob Bryden, and you go, you know, is he the only guy that works in television? You know, everything seems to be involving Rob Bryden or the other bloke, Bradley Walsh. You know, it’s all the same people. You know, how Ed Balls has got a job working on breakfast television, I’ll never know.

And they’re so, they’re just so really. I mean, I can’t think of a reason to watch regular TV and I really don’t. You know, I’d rather watch an old episode of Vera, which says a lot more about me, probably, that I should give away. But, you know, there’s literally no reason to watch breakfast TV in mainstream media. There’s no reason to watch. I mean, I watch Laura Kuenssberg just because it’s kind of cringe and you can’t quite believe what people are saying on it.

And, you know, this week’s was particularly funny with old Zack Polanski, you know, and it’s, I’ve never had a drink and I’ve never taken any drugs. He runs in a very weird way, is all I know. But you’re absolutely right, because, you know, now the ordinary people, because of COVID, because of the Brexit sort of fit up, because of the way that politicians now lie to us all the time as a matter of course, people have seen through all that.

And they’ve seen through the mainstream kind of Westminster bubble and they’re not interested in watching the questions that come from journalists anymore because I mean I was on Liz Truss’s show the other day and I was saying, you know, they’re not curious. Journalists aren’t curious anymore. They don’t ask questions that people want them to ask. They just kind of parry things and kind of knock things around and it’s all like a bit of a kick about and then they’ll go to the pub later, you know, they’re all mates.

I don’t want to be mates with politicians. I really don’t, you know, don’t really like them. I’d rather just ask them difficult questions and watch them squirm, you know. And it’s quite funny because there’s, you know, an awful lot of MPs who used to come on my old show who are still kind of nervous of coming on the new one because they’re not sure if I’m a racist or not. And it’s like, well, maybe you could make up your own mind, you know, you used to come on my show. What’s the difference?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: You know, the news doesn’t just tell you what’s happening, it often tells you what to think is happening. And these days the biggest red flag isn’t what’s said, it’s what gets left out. That’s why I use Ground News. It’s the only app that compares how the same story is covered across the political spectrum and show you what whole audiences are not being told.

The blindspot feed is one of my favorite features. Every day it flags upwards of 20 stories that are being ignored either by the left or the right. Follow along at Ground News Trigonometry like this. A new study from UC San Diego found that climate change cost almost twice as much as we thought because earlier estimates left out damage to the oceans. That’s a pretty big update. And yet no coverage, literally zero, came from right leaning outlets.

All this, a recent Gallup poll found trust in the media has hit a record low with just 28% of Americans saying they trust newspapers, radio and TV to report the news accurately and fairly. That’s a staggering result. But if you only read left leaning news, you likely never saw it at all. Go to Ground News trigonometry to get 40% off their unlimited vantage plan, the same one we use, and stop being managed by the media.

From Fleet Street to Irrelevance

FRANCIS FOSTER: But Mike, you, someone who’s got has had a very privileged position in the media. Because I knew you from way back when you did talk sport, but you started off as a Fleet Street journalist around four decades ago. The golden age of newspapers, the tabloids to what they have now become, which is, let’s be honest, a bit of an irrelevance. Why do you think that’s happened and how did you see the change happen from the moment you started to where we are now?

MIKE GRAHAM: Well, I think a lot of it has to do with the different kinds of media and the way that people now consume it and the fact that you don’t really buy a newspaper now unless you’re probably over 60. I mean, my kids who range in age from, you know, 19 to 35, they don’t buy newspapers. You know, they wouldn’t know. I mean, I think a newspaper putting in the fire and lighting it, you know.

And I think also the nature of the power of those newspapers has kind of rescinded. You know, the Sun used to be the paper that made prime ministers. Now it’s not really politically particularly powerful because the whole business is fragmented and different people are in it as well. You know, when I started, it was a very working class job to be a newspaper reporter. You know, you didn’t go to Oxford, you didn’t go to do a PPE degree and come out with, you know, a load of your mates and end up working for newspapers with a very posh accent.

You know, people were tradesmen, they didn’t go to university, they went to, they left school when they were 16. They went and trained to be journalists. They’d go to a journalist college, they’d learn shorthand, they’d learn the law, they’d learn, you know, all sorts of other tricks of the trade that they would have to then use. And they’d be paid as a kind of slave, practically. It’s an indentured, you know, slave.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: It was a better time.

MIKE GRAHAM: It was, it was. But they learned about how to do the job properly, you know, and they’d get sent out with, say, the chief reporter. They’d go and cover the local courts. Nobody does that anymore. Right. You know, literally there are no local newspapers. You know, when my kids grew up down in Sussex, the local newspaper office is now one of those storage units, you know, for putting your stuff in when you get thrown out of your wife’s house.

And middle aged, those are the early people. Although my daughter actually once had to put stuff in. She broke up with a boyfriend and she was moving. And I heard some amazing stories from the woman who was running the storage facility, including one where a guy used to come in every Friday night into his storage unit, open the door, go inside, come out dressed as a woman and then go out and then come back sort of in the early hours of the morning, dress back into a man and go home. Anyway.

That’s progressive. Yeah, very by the by. But and so I think as newspaper barons, I mean, you know, the Murdoch empire, for example, is still incredibly powerful, but not really because of newspapers anymore, because of the Fox TV network, you know, basically that makes so much money both from the football and also from, you know, the news and the politics.

You know, the British operations become slightly irrelevant. You know, it’s still there, but the Sun isn’t as powerful as it used to be. The Times seems to me to be a kind of apologist for the Labour government. Doesn’t really ask very many questions at all. And it’s all become a bit middle class and it’s all become a little bit kind of twee, I would say.

And I think most people in Britain don’t like that. Most people in Britain, and I don’t actually mind Giles Coren, you know, he’s quite a funny guy and says some quite outrageous things. But most people would not like Charles Coren if they met him. If you saw him in a pub, you wouldn’t expect to have a long conversation with him because he’s quite posh. You know, he comes from, you know, quite a wealthy background.

And all the people who work for those kind of broadsheet type newspapers and even some in the tabloids now have been, you know, over educated. They’ve never really experienced much in terms of life. I mean, when I worked even at the Daily Mirror, they had a massive operation in Manchester, you know, because the north of England was important place. Now they have hardly anyone. They probably got one person in north of England.

And so, you know, it’s all become a very London centric. It’s all very kind of managed decline. Feels like managed decline. It feels like they’re just kind of trying. Every year there’s more budget cuts, they sack more people, they try and save more money. You know, they just, their business is dying.

The Question Time Experience

KONSTANTIN KISIN: It is dying. And one of the things though is they, you talk about the middle class thing. I think there’s so much of that. Like when I was on Question Time, the thing that actually shocked me the most was there was a point at which one of the panelists said, well, America is a democracy, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And, like, a good third of the audience just openly laughed.

FRANCIS FOSTER: China is a dictatorship.

MIKE GRAHAM: The US is a democracy.

FRANCIS FOSTER: It remains. It is. It remains our closest military ally.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: And I go, well, you probably don’t like Donald Trump if you’re acting that way. Fair enough. People are allowed to not like President Trump, but he won the last election with winning the popular vote, the Electoral College, every swing state. I mean, it is a democracy. Yeah, but in their heads, they’re so brainwashed into this way of thinking.

And then there was another girl who was like, oh, yeah, no, we shouldn’t do business with America. We need to do business with China. I’d rather be looking at China right now than I would America. At least China, we know what’s going on with them. America, it seems like Trump, especially every day something wacky comes out, you know, whether that’s buying Greenland or the stuff happening with ICE. So, personally, I’d much rather be in China’s bed at the moment than America’s.

MIKE GRAHAM: Like, but is that a generational thing as well, with maybe these younger people? I mean, there was, you’ve probably seen it. There’s, there was a thing going around yesterday on Twitter from America where they were asking youngish women, supposedly feminists, you know, whether they thought that women’s rights were better in Iran or in America. And without question, they all thought Iran.

And you’re going, I mean, I used to say when I was doing the old talk sports show that I think that the world is actually evolving in reverse and people are getting stupider instead of getting more intelligent and more kind of, you know, sophisticated people, who’s really stupid and thick because they’re driven.

There’s an old George Carlin clip, which you’ve probably seen, where he says, if you’re driven, if you identify yourself by an ideology, then you’ve already lost the plot because you’re no longer actually being true to your own self. You don’t really have any beliefs. You just kind of have read some and you think, oh, that’s good, because all my friends agree with that. So I’ll just say that.

And there’s a bit of that in the media. I think that’s, again, where you get, you know, I would go on, I would go on the radio and piss all over the Times front page because they were talking about some kind of clean air campaign, you know, which everybody knows is a complete con, right? And I would say so. And, you know, that didn’t make me very popular in the Times building, you know, and people didn’t like it.

But I was like, I’m not going to be part of this media conglomerate where everybody’s supposed to think the same thing. Obviously, you’re not going to be really awkward about it and start, you know, dissing the products and all of that, but surely, Christ, you can have a disagreement about what they’re saying, you know.

The Power of Ideology

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Well, you know that the thing about ideology, I always say ideology is how you know what to think about things that you don’t understand, about everything. That’s the, but especially about things you don’t understand. It gives you a template for what you’re supposed to believe about something as complicated as climate change. Right.

And by the way, that’s an interesting one, because net zero, I mean, the tide is turning so quickly on and suddenly everyone’s talking about how net zero is total stupidity. Industrial suicide. Call it like that. That whole agenda is going away in a heartbeat.

The Economic Reality Check

MIKE GRAHAM:

Yeah, but yet so many politicians like Douglas Alexander, who was on with you, are still clinging to it like it’s some kind of wreckage going over a cliff. And they’re kind of going, yeah, but this is what we have to do. Because everybody knows. I mean, I was listening to, because of the time I get up now, Farming Today because it’s probably better than Times Radio that time in the morning.

But they had some woman on talking about how there’s a problem with raspberries and strawberries. And she said, you know, obviously the thing that’s most important is we have to know what the carbon footprint is of growing fruit in this country. And I’m kind of going, well, it isn’t actually. You know, what’s important is how much fruit you’re growing and how much fruit you can grow and whether you can be competitive.

You know, the carbon footprint of strawberries is ridiculous. What are you talking about? But if you try and tell them that it’s all about sustainable this and sustainable that and driving electric car. I mean, it’s fury now about people who are having to pay road tax for an electric car, I find hilarious. Because we said it at the time, you know, when people stop buying petrol cars, they’ll be out of pocket, so they’ll need to come after you for the money. Well, I’m still getting an electric car because it’s the right thing to do. And now they’re all going, you know, so I’m getting taxed. Welcome to the real world.

FRANCIS FOSTER:

You know the thing that I find particularly frustrating, look, net zero and all of this, but it’s also as well, it’s just a very powerful symbol of how they ignore ordinary people’s concerns. Yeah. Most people in this country do not care about net zero.

MIKE GRAHAM:

No.

FRANCIS FOSTER:

That is a preserve of the upper middle class who, quite frankly, don’t have enough to worry about. I talk to ordinary people, regular people who watch Trigonometry, they come up, they always want to have a conversation with me. When they talk, what they’re concerned about is they can’t afford to buy meat in the supermarket. They’ve got a family of three, they have a regular job. Both people are working. Once you paid rent, once you paid gas, once you paid your bills, your council tax, the road tax, what are you left with? That’s what actually concerns people. And we’re not having an important conversation, which is affordability.

The Cost of Living Crisis

MIKE GRAHAM:

Well, I say this a lot. You know, nobody talks about food inflation and when they do, they say, oh, you know, food inflation is really bad. That’s 5%. Is it bollocks? You know, if you look at the prices, just as I just go to the supermarket, things that used to be, I don’t know, a packet of pasta for 50p, it’s now like 125. And you go, well, when did that happen? You know, it’s literally gone up by a factor of more than twice what it was.

And it’s things like that that people say to me, and they used to say it to me a lot when I was on Talk, you know, the sort of weekly shop has gone from 100 quid to 200 quid and they’re not buying anything extra. In fact, they’re buying less. And so you’re right. And, you know, one of the things that one of the great Labor lies is, you know, we’ve got wages going. Wages have gone up since we got in. Well, no, they haven’t, they’ve gone down.

Unless you happen to work in a public sector, you know, if you’re a train driver, if you’re a nurse, if you’re a doctor, if you’re a copper, all of you have been given a pay rise. But, you know, in the private sector, people are worse off than they’ve ever been. And everything costs more and more. More and more people are contributing nothing to the economy and fewer and fewer of us are paying tax to pay for all of them. And it’s not sustainable. I mean, talk about sustainable economy. That is not sustainable.

FRANCIS FOSTER:

And that’s it. And that’s what ordinary people feel. They feel as if their concerns are not being addressed. So the elites are talking about net zero and bringing and being carbon neutral. The guy who drives a van, he just wants to be able to pay his bills on time and make sure his kids don’t go hungry. And more and more ordinary people are looking at their wages, looking at their outgoings and going, the maths, they’re not mathing.

MIKE GRAHAM:

And look at Rachel Reeves, you know, the world’s most useless chancellor today. And I don’t know when this is going out, but this week anyway, is the beginning of a new alcohol tax. The alcohol tax has gone up. We talk to pub owners quite a lot. And on something like a 7 pound 50 pint, your landlord’s making about 47 pence, because everything else is going out, either in tax or in overheads or in supplies or in staffing. You know, all of the things that contribute to you running a business.

And yet what she’s doing is squeezing it even more and then making out that she’s doing them all a favor by not imposing extra business rates on them. And some of the business rates now are outlandishly ridiculous. People running businesses are saying to me, I think I’ll just chuck it in and just not have a business anymore because it’s too complicated, it’s too expensive, and the tax is ridiculous.

The Tax Burden on Business

KONSTANTIN KISIN:

Well, you sum it up in the two parts of what you said there. Because the government puts a tax on sugar, on cigarettes, on alcohol, with the claim. I mean, it’s about raising money, obviously, but the claim is if we put up the tax on these things, consumption of these things will go down. Right. So what happens when you put a tax on business? What happens? Business goes down, the economy goes down. And the reason, as you say, the reason that all of this is happening is, and more and more taxes will carry on is because we actually can’t afford the lifestyle that we have. We can’t afford the welfare spending. We can’t afford to have millions of people not working. You just can’t.

MIKE GRAHAM:

No. And the highest unemployment figure in five years is going to be announced this week.

KONSTANTIN KISIN:

Right? Right.

MIKE GRAHAM:

Because more and more people are getting laid off. Fewer and fewer young people are able to get jobs. I was listening to something on the way down here. The student loan business is now also in crisis. There was a woman saying that she’d gone and done a degree, taken a loan out for 39,000, done another postgraduate degree for another 11. So 49,000. She finished in something like 2022. But she now owes them, despite having paid them back money since she had a job, 67,000.

And you go, well, how does that work? So you now owe them more money than you did when you finished your university education, and yet you’ve been paying them. So they’re literally ripping everybody off every single stage. And I’m old enough to have been fortunate enough to go to university when it was free and I didn’t even take advantage of it because I only did two years. I got kicked out of there as well.

But, you know, my youngest son isn’t going to university, he’s got a job. He came back on Friday night with a new BMW Z4. And I went, where’d you get that from? He said, I just traded. He had a Mini, traded it in, he’s got a job and all of his mates have gone to uni again. I’m the one getting education. You seem to have all the money. How’s that working? And he’s not making a fortune, but he’s working.

And so in three years time, when his mates are all coming out of uni with 50,000 pound loans that they owe and they’re going to start jobs for nothing, they’re all going to be in the crap. And he’s going to be flying high. Probably by then he’ll have a better car, I don’t know. But, you know, if I was advising anyone’s teenage kids, bother going to university, what’s the point?

The University Trap

KONSTANTIN KISIN:

There are some subjects where, you know, if you’re going to do advanced mathematics or whatever, there’s definitely some subjects that you would. But Blair’s idea that you need half the country to go to university to do media studies and…

MIKE GRAHAM:

Well, he just made it into a business, didn’t it? I mean, that’s effectively it. And then when the foreign students stopped coming because they couldn’t bring seven members of their family with them, they pulled the rug and now they’re all moaning that they haven’t got enough money. Right, well, how about you don’t pay the Vice chancellor 700,000 a year for doing bugger all. The whole country just doesn’t work. I mean, I’ve never seen it so bad. It’s absolutely hopeless.

KONSTANTIN KISIN:

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Speaking of which, I mean, that is if you want a ray of sunshine and hope. Ray of sunshine definitely doesn’t apply to one, but I’d say, but some hope, yeah, is things are so bad now, you see, politically, I mean, it’s all moving in one direction, isn’t it?

The Political Landscape

MIKE GRAHAM:

It is, yeah. And I find it fascinating how it’s kind of fragmenting up as well, because you’ve got the left fragmenting up into the Greens, who are probably the most bizarre party I think I’ve ever seen. I don’t even know. I mean, talk about net zero. They never mention it, especially the Green Party. You go, haven’t you got some policy on climate change?

KONSTANTIN KISIN:

It’s mostly about Gaza now.

MIKE GRAHAM:

It’s mostly about Gaza and it’s mostly about the rich and giving everybody freedom, drugs and a free house. And you kind of go really? Okay then. And then the right.

FRANCIS FOSTER:

What about your party?

MIKE GRAHAM:

Your party? Yeah. I mean that’s hilarious, isn’t it?

KONSTANTIN KISIN:

Is that still around?

FRANCIS FOSTER:

They’re adorable.

MIKE GRAHAM:

Yeah, they are adorable.

KONSTANTIN KISIN:

Is it still around though?

FRANCIS FOSTER:

It must be, yeah.

MIKE GRAHAM:

But nobody knows who’s running it though.

KONSTANTIN KISIN:

Because I don’t even know if it still exists.

MIKE GRAHAM:

I think it does.

FRANCIS FOSTER:

It does, yeah.

MIKE GRAHAM:

Well, Zara Sultana still exists. She exists and she still gets up in parliament and talks absolute rubbish. Which she did I think a couple of weeks ago. And I think she was, was she not booed somewhere where she got up and said something, I can’t remember.

KONSTANTIN KISIN:

Your point is? The left’s fragmenting, so.

The Left’s Fragmentation and Labour’s Future

MIKE GRAHAM: The left’s fragmenting. So Labour are basically finished in my sense. I mean, Keir Starmer reassured us all at the weekend that he’s not going anywhere. To which there was a sort of collective groan around the country. But the guy is literally an out and out liar. He went to China, nobody knows why. He said that we’ve got billions and billions of pounds worth of investment coming into Britain, which isn’t true. He went to Japan to see the motorcycle riding former heavy metal drummer who’s now the Prime Minister and didn’t seem to get anything out of that. I don’t know what he’s for.

They’re going to lose. They’re not even going to come second in the by-election up in Manchester. And these young people like that. There was that sort of smelly looking woman on Question Time who came out and said that she was for the Green Party, right. Sitting next to another bozo who also looked like he needed a good wash. And these young people, you can—

KONSTANTIN KISIN: See why they sacked them.

MIKE GRAHAM: They think it’s the answer though. They go, yeah, you’re rich. So we’re going to take your money and we’re going to give it to these people who haven’t got any money and we’re going to take the house that you rent out to some people because it’s a little bit of extra income for you. We’re going to make that impossible for you to rent out. So actually there’s going to be a housing shortage before anything else happens.

But Labour haven’t got any answers here. You know, watching Douglas Alexander with you, you just think you don’t know what you’re talking about. You’re so far off beam.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: And he’s one of the good ones. Yeah, no, smart guy, very talented in many ways, I would say. But I guess what’s—I think Francis mentioned that when you were on his show, Francis Foster Sought Your Life Out, which people should check out.

MIKE GRAHAM: That was great, by the way. I enjoyed that. Yeah, I did, yeah. I was a bit worried, though, because when I sort of got home, I said, I didn’t say anything bad, you know, I don’t think I did.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Not as bad as the things you’ve already said, no. Yeah, but he mentioned that you were talking about how basically the left’s given up on the country. The left hates, basically, the country and the West. They think we’re all evil, racist, you know, bigoted, whatever. Yeah, but the right’s also given up because, you know, it’s had so much mass immigration, the country’s ruined, whatever. Which, to be fair, the country’s in a bad shape. Yeah, but I guess your point is we can still recover.

Can Britain Still Recover?

MIKE GRAHAM: I hope so. I mean, I think if you take the view that we can’t recover, you’d have to be one of those people who just leaves, you know. And I know a lot of people that have. And a lot of people that are planning on doing it, a lot of people are just sadly going, you know, I can’t take it anymore. And there is, you know, the only kind of—the only thing that can save it, I suppose, is for people who do pay a lot of tax to stay here.

But the only kind of insulation from the madness is to make a lot of money. And the more money they take, the less you feel like hanging around, you know. But yeah, I mean, let’s face it. I mean, there’s no doubt the Conservative Party ruined Britain, you know, from when—from the 14 years when they got in. I mean, Blair had set it up pretty well for ruination, and he recreated all of these, you know, kind of shibboleths, the, you know, the Supreme Court over here and closeness to the EU and all of these migration sort of targets and all that.

And the Tories came in and just completely made it even worse, you know, for years. And people say Boris Johnson was, you know, a great Prime Minister.

FRANCIS FOSTER: Do they?

MIKE GRAHAM: Yeah, they still do in the Tory party. Oh, yeah, some of them still say—

KONSTANTIN KISIN: It in the Tory party, yeah.

MIKE GRAHAM: And they—I mean, at one point, when he wrote his latest book, I think it was a couple of—maybe six months ago or so anyway, he was knocking around and people were saying, maybe, maybe it’s time for Boris to come back. And I was going, no. The ordinary people who actually voted for him and liked him actually think he ruined the country. You know, he screwed up on immigration, he screwed up on Brexit, he screwed up on lockdown. Everything he did basically just turned to, you know.

And so when Starmer got in, I mean, I have some sympathy for him, which you’d be surprised to hear, because everything was broken. There’s nothing working. You know, the Home Office doesn’t work, the NHS doesn’t work, trains don’t work, the roads are crap. There’s literally nothing, but they’re making it worse, making it far worse.

Reform UK: The Only Hope?

And so I think people see Reform as the only kind of saving grace. I mean, yes, there’s that splinter off to Advance UK and there’s the Rupert Lowe people, but, you know, Reform really are the only hope. And I don’t even know if that’s going to work. I think we have to give it a chance. I think you have to kind of—I mean, I’m not particularly political, I never really have been. I’ve only voted once in my life, and that was in 1979. And I voted not for Margaret Thatcher, believe it or not. I voted for Labour because I was at university at the time.

And so I’ve never voted because I think actually it’s a bit like, what’s his face? He used to say, voting only encourages them. But so I’m not happy. I’m not a sort of bedfellow of fandom. I don’t like to go, these people are the answer. You know, they must get in because that’s the only future we can have. I do think they’re the only thing that are likely to be the answer.

And I think Nigel Farage genuinely is a decent guy and I think he’s a great leader and I think he would make a great Prime Minister. But I sometimes wonder if he even wants to be Prime Minister because, you know, he talks about his life now being completely impossible. And if you saw those idiots up in Newcastle the weekend, you know, banging on the window of the restaurant he was in and, you know, he gets death threats every day. He’s got a security detail. They have to go check out everywhere he goes before he goes in there.

You know, when James Whale was still alive, he went down to see him and when he was going to go to this pub and they had to send these security guys in two hours ahead of time to make sure he was going to be safe in the pub. So I mean, you know, and you do worry because the leftists are so deranged. You saw those people in Newcastle, a bit like in America, you know, they’re violent, they’re nasty, they’re horrible. They genuinely believe that they’re on the right side of God and anyone on the right is somehow satanic. They actually believe that.

And I worry about that as well, you know, in terms of my kids’ future. What it’s going to be like here in 20 years, I don’t know.

The Emergence of New Political Parties

FRANCIS FOSTER: But I thought if we look at causes for optimism, I think that the emergence of Reform is a good thing. I’m going to be honest with you, I think the emergence of the Green Party is a good thing. There is that side of the political left who I think are nuts, whatever you, whatever else, but at least their politics are being catered to.

MIKE GRAHAM: Yeah.

FRANCIS FOSTER: And I think what we’re seeing now actually with the emergence of these new parties is a more representative form of politics because in the old days you had Conservative or Labour and you go, how much does, I don’t know, a right wing libertarian have to do with an old school, traditional, dyed in the wool Tory and you know, the old school lefties with progressive liberals. So maybe what we need are these more kind of smaller parties as it were, but are actually more representative of people in general.

MIKE GRAHAM: Yeah, well you might say that if they get in though, because you know, they’ll have this place off, you know, be full of illegal migrants living here, you know, might not be able to have a recording. You’re not going to make any money, you know.

Yeah, I mean, it’s interesting. I mean I saw Jeremy Corbyn was one of the people leading the charge on facial recognition cameras, which would be something, I imagine that we would agree with him on that. You know, we don’t want these facial recognition cameras all over Britain, you know, because that gives an awful lot of power to people that probably shouldn’t have it. I don’t agree with Jeremy Corbyn about pretty much anything, but you know, maybe there is that kind of, you know, genuine place where if people are proper politicians and they do believe in something.

Trouble is, I don’t think Zack Polanski is the answer though. I don’t think he believes in anything. I mean he’s a very strange character. But yeah, I mean, I don’t have a problem with having a wide choice and I think that the two party system doesn’t work. I think we know that.

The Scottish Example

I saw it in Scotland, actually, interestingly, because I worked in Scotland for about five or six years, maybe more. And Labour had had a lock on Scotland forever. You know, I don’t think—I think the Tories had one MP, famously, every now and again. But before the Scottish National Party came along, Labour basically guaranteed that they would always get minimum 48, 52 MPs, almost all of them for Scotland. There’d be a couple of Lib Dems, you know, old—what’s his name? Kennedy. Charlie Kennedy was up in the sort of the very yellowy, huge area, but hardly anybody lived there apart from a load of cows and sheep.

But they took it for granted. You know, the people who came from the Scottish Labour machine, people like George Robertson, you know, had constituencies in Glasgow, some of the poorest places in the world, and they did nothing for them because they just took it for granted that every day when they went down a polling station, they’d vote Labour. And then suddenly the SNP came up with the idea of independence and they suddenly went, oh, I know, let’s have devolution, that’ll be good. And then they lost control.

And now Labour in Scotland are in a terrible place. You know, not least because Westminster Labour are doing so badly, but because the SNP are now the sort of main power in Scotland and they’re not very good. But you can see that things can change. And, you know, if Reform manages to bust open the two party system, who knows what happens after that?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Well, that’s the interesting question, isn’t it? I saw Jeremy Clarkson wrote a piece. I never thought I would say the words, Jeremy Clarkson wrote a really interesting piece, but he did. No, no disrespect to Jeremy, by the way. I just don’t think of him as a writer primarily, but he wrote a piece which I thought was really interesting. He kind of said a lot of people think when Reform get in, they think the day Reform get in Britain is going to turn into an Enid Blyton postcard. Yeah, it’s not going to happen.

London’s Transformation

MIKE GRAHAM: No. Well, Britain again, it’s too far gone for that, to be honest. I mean, I speak to people who are moving out of London now because London to them has become unrecognizable. You probably also saw the piece of video from Richmond at the weekend. We played it out this morning on the show of these two guys. One’s got a hammer smashing in the window of a jewelry shop and they literally just tear the window out and just start lobbing a load of jewelry into a bag. And then they run off down the street.

And, you know, yes, of course. And people will say, oh, but, you know, there was always that kind of thing going on. And yes, there was, you know, crime was always a thing in the middle of London. And, you know, the first time somebody tried to mug me, I think it was, you know, it was in the 70s. I was walking home from seeing my girlfriend. But, yeah, but it’s different now. And London is different.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: How is it different?

The Changing Face of London

MIKE GRAHAM:

It’s different because it is now full of people from somewhere else. And it didn’t used to be. It used to always have, as every big city has, an attractive kind of immigrant aspect to it. But now white people are in the minority—38%, I think, of white English in London. And I would say in the last five or six years, it’s become noticeably a different city. And not just because of the color of people’s skin, but I go, I live in southeast London, and I’ll go to the big supermarket there, and I can walk through the entire supermarket, spend about 30 minutes there, and not hear anybody speaking English. They could be speaking Lithuanian. They could be speaking Ukrainian. It’s not a question of whether they’re all not white, but you don’t see very many English people there anymore.

And a lot of people find that difficult to cope with because, you know, you look at the old shows like the Beatles, for example, from the 60s. And this is when I started, when I was first aware of what London was like. And when they filmed that show on the top, they filmed “Let It Be” or whatever on the top of the Soho rooftop, and you see all the people down below, and everybody’s white. And I know that that might be an unfair comparison to make, but I went to New York in the 80s, and the difference for me with New York and London was that all of the immigration in New York was people who wanted to be American.

It was people who said if you asked them, where are you from? They would say, New York. Famously, I used to work for a medical organization back then, and we used to use these cars called Skyline cars, and quite a lot of Russians used to drive them. There was a guy called Charles Bremner, who had been the Moscow correspondent for the Times. We got in one of these cars, and obviously, you could tell by the way this guy was speaking that he was Russian. And so Charles Bremner said to him, so where are you from? And he went, New Jersey. And that was where he was from. He wasn’t from Russia anymore.

And so the American dream for them was to go to America, become American, get a house, get a car, put your kid through college, put a flag of the Stars and Stripes outside your house, and it didn’t matter where you were from. Whereas now, I think in London and in other parts of Britain, we’ve got these communities which are not British and they don’t want to be British. And it takes us back to that argument you made about Rishi Sunak.

KONSTANTIN KISIN:

Thanks for bringing that up on Question Time.

MIKE GRAHAM:

Yeah. But I didn’t even make it. So the distinction is good, though, because, you see, for example, my parents are both Scottish, right? So I don’t really see myself as English. I was born in London. But I do see myself as British, but I kind of see myself as Scottish and British rather than English and British. And I think that’s an interesting distinction.

The Rishi Sunak Controversy

KONSTANTIN KISIN:

Well, see, one of the—I mean, there’s so much lies about it. So first of all, I didn’t bring up the British, right? I don’t go around going, he’s English, he’s not English. That’s my job. That’s France. Fraser Nelson brought Rishi Sunak up, and he said, well, I think Rishi Sunak’s like the most English thing that’s ever existed.

MIKE GRAHAM:

Yeah.

KONSTANTIN KISIN:

Is he? He’s a British Prime Minister. No disrespect to him. He was a pretty terrible prime minister. He’s British. He’s very, very culturally British. I totally respect that. And I am British, too. I wasn’t even born here. I am way more British than I am Russian. Russians look at me and they go, who the f* is that guy?

MIKE GRAHAM:

Right?

KONSTANTIN KISIN:

So that’s the first thing. The second thing is they keep bringing it up, like, out of context, and they keep saying—they keep acting as if I was trying to say, Rishi Sunak doesn’t belong.

MIKE GRAHAM:

So this proves that you’re a racist, in other words. Exactly right.

KONSTANTIN KISIN:

Whereas I said in that very same conversation, my son, born to two immigrants in this country, is also not English. Am I being racist against my son? So they’re taking an opinion about the difference between ethnicity and cultural identity and nationality and making it into a race thing. Right.

But I think your point is—and look, the thing is, when someone who looks like you says it, everyone sort of goes cringe. I have friends from all over the world who land at Heathrow. I go and pick them up at the airport, they’re black, white, whatever. And they all say the same thing.

MIKE GRAHAM:

Yeah.

KONSTANTIN KISIN:

What happened? Yeah, that’s what they say. I’m sorry, I’m sorry that offends people, but that is what they say.

MIKE GRAHAM:

Absolutely. I mean, I go to a gym, believe it or not. Now this is how I know—well, I thought when I was making seriously good money, I thought it would be really, really rude of me to drop dead and not be able to spend all that money on my kids. So, yeah, anyway, so I started going to gym like last May, run the back of Selfridges and Oxford Street now is actually more Arab than Dubai. Right. I literally—and I mean, these are all law-abiding people. I’m not complaining about the fact that they’re here. It’s an observation, right?

You see more and more Arab families, you see groups of women wearing the full burqa, five wives walking behind a guy. It’s there for everybody to see. Yeah. Always walking behind and it’s there for—it’s hard not to notice it and I’m sorry if people don’t like it, but I’m not going to live in a world where I’m not going to say something about it because when I used to go to Oxford Street when I was a teenager, it didn’t look like that.

People were walking, there were always foreigners, they were always—my parents used to delight in taking us to different foreign nationality restaurants. Once every week we would go to a Polish restaurant, we’d go to an Italian restaurant, we’d go to an Indian, there are swamis we went to in the old days, we’d go to Chinese restaurants, go to Jewish restaurants. It was great because that was part of being in London. It was a melting pot. But now it’s not like that anymore because now it’s a kind of—it feels oppressive to me that there are so many people here from somewhere else.

The Loss of Community

FRANCIS FOSTER:

And what people don’t realize is when we’re talking about immigration, as somebody who was born in London, lived in London, grew up in a fairly working class part of London and has seen it change—the area that I grew up in is now very much more, way more middle class. But you lose something when you have that amount of immigration come in, because that sense of community, that social cohesion changes. It dies when you have that level of immigration. And people don’t seem to accept that or want to accept that, because, I’m going to be brutally honest, it’s because it’s not their communities that are being affected.

MIKE GRAHAM:

No, exactly right. Although that may happen soon because apparently there’s a plan from the Department of Defra, Environmental Fisheries and whatever they’re called now. They want to make the countryside more diverse. They say that it’s too white and that they want to put more people from different nationalities and different ethnicities into the country. And they particularly want to populate the Chiltern Hills area because it’s around Luton. And they said, they literally have said, we want to put more Muslims into the Chiltern Hills and we want to put more Muslims into the Cotswolds.

It’s a story in the Telegraph today and you’re kind of going, why are they even doing—what’s it got to do with the government department? They’re not supposed to be changing the demographics of the country, but that’s what they’re actively doing and people don’t like it and they’ve got—

FRANCIS FOSTER:

And they’ve got every right not to like it. Look, let’s talk about an unpleasant subject. The cockneys.

MIKE GRAHAM:

Yeah.

FRANCIS FOSTER:

Do cockneys even exist?

MIKE GRAHAM:

Well, look at Whitechapel. I mean, Whitechapel, which used to be home to a very big Jewish population. That was where the Krays used to hang out. You can still go to the Blind Beggar. People will say, that’s where they shot him, over there, bullet hole still in the wall, bullet hole still in the wall. But it’s unrecognizable.

And I get the fact that things change, but as I say, I lived in America in the 80s under Ronald Reagan, when it was a very, very interesting and wide-ranging and changing place. But it always changed with one sort of central tenet which was, this is America and you want to come to America, you become an American. You recite the—you sing the Star Spangled Banner. You pledge allegiance to the flag and your kids will pledge allegiance to the flag every single day when they go to school. That doesn’t happen here. And I think that’s a problem.

FRANCIS FOSTER:

And it is. And what it seems to be as well, is a sort of tacit acknowledgment that what they’re doing is obliterating a culture.

MIKE GRAHAM:

Yeah.

FRANCIS FOSTER:

And not only that, they’re celebrating it. They’re going, diversity is our strength. And you go, well, what about the previous communities that live there, their culture, their heritage, like the Cockneys? Well, no, that doesn’t matter. Get rid of them. And you go, well, I mean, do you want to actually understand what you’re doing to the literal fabric of this country?

MIKE GRAHAM:

Yeah. And if they start making it sort of a kind of blanket situation, at the moment, it’s mostly cities, isn’t it? I mean, if you go, even as I say, to where my kids went to school in Sussex, it’s a very white area and it’s a very English area, and there’s not that many foreigners there. But even that’s now beginning to change. And you’re starting to see the old vape shops popping up, organized crime, which is nothing to do with ethnicity, as far as I’m aware, but it has everything to do with an awful lot of people coming from foreign countries and setting up drug businesses and setting up—the Albanians, for example, biggest drug dealers in Europe, pretty much have a lock on every single part of the cocaine business from here to Turkey, and it’s been allowed to happen. And nobody really knows why.

KONSTANTIN KISIN:

But the thing is this.

MIKE GRAHAM:

And then suddenly there’s a bunch of barbershops and there’s a bunch of clearly money laundering businesses.

Speed and Scale of Immigration

KONSTANTIN KISIN:

And nobody’s stopping them, and nobody voted for this. And this I find frustrating because, you know, as you know, I’m an immigrant myself here. When I came to Britain, none of it was like this. This has all happened in my life.

MIKE GRAHAM:

It’s accelerated massively in the last 10 years.

KONSTANTIN KISIN:

And it’s not my fault. I didn’t do it, even though it has happened in that time. But so many things I always say this are a question of speed and scale. Yeah, I like ice cream, but if I had ice cream every day for breakfast, lunch and dinner, I’d be sick.

MIKE GRAHAM:

Yeah.

KONSTANTIN KISIN:

And immigration is the same. If you choose very carefully the types of people that you allow in, if you’re very selective, if you’re careful, if you say, well, you know, we’ve got to make sure you’re culturally compatible, the numbers are kept to a level where people, as you say, come, they integrate, they become British. Rishi Sunak is very British. Yeah, he’s totally integrated. I’m going to make that clear. Right. Just like other, you know, myself, I’ve done the same thing. It’s perfectly possible for people who come here to integrate.

What is not possible is for millions and millions of people to come in the space of a few years and then for us to expect them, for them to integrate, especially when we are incredibly shy about A, what it means to be British and B, about insisting that you do actually integrate. Yeah, and these are like, these are just, they’re not even controversial things to say. They’re things that everyone around the world, including billions of black and brown people too, just go, yeah, of course that’s true.

The Welfare State and Immigration Crisis

Yeah, exactly. But of course it’s true for anyone who has got any nationality of any kind. If you go to any country in the world, you know, if they were going through what we have been going through in the last 10 years in terms of immigration, they’d be up in arms, you know, they’d probably be taken to the streets. Yes, of course. Brazil is a multi-ethnic society. It’s quite a racist society as well, depending on what color Brazilian you are. Right.

But I can be pretty sure that there aren’t thousands and millions of people coming there from European cultures to change the way that they live. Whereas we’ve got that situation here. And I think also the other sort of major part of why it’s happened is the welfare system here because the welfare system has encouraged more and more Brits not to work. It’s also encouraged more and more immigrants to come here because they can also get welfare.

We are now going to be, I think, the biggest G7 country for spending on welfare. I think it’s 2% of GDP that we will now be spending this year on welfare of one kind or another. And you know, again, it’s a failed political system. It’s a failed political kind of theory that’s been propagated ever since the days of Tony Blair then into David Cameron, you know, where hug a hoodie was a thing, you know, you didn’t want to punish anybody for doing anything bad.

You know, talk down to people, make out that they’re too stupid to understand the machinations of the state. Let the state take over and become bigger and bigger and bigger, which is what it’s done. And all of these things have conspired, I think, to just ruin the country. And it’s not just one thing, it’s not just immigration, but it’s a big part of it.

FRANCIS FOSTER: And to me, it comes down to something. I went to a dinner where there was a very famous politician being interviewed by journalists. And it ties back into what you were talking about. All the questions that the journalists gave the politicians, they were just nice questions. Nice. And I thought to myself, everybody, practically everyone in this room has had a better education than me. No doubt they’re smarter than me, but there’s no courage or balls.

They don’t want to shake things up. Why is it that we just don’t want to be uncomfortable? We don’t want to have an uncomfortable conversation, we don’t want to have conversations where we go, look, we need to limit immigration. And it just seems that this has just been pervasive throughout our society to the point that we avoid discomfort for so much, that we find ourselves now in the most uncomfortable of places.

The Left-Wing Establishment

MIKE GRAHAM: Because people are frightened to be seen as wrong. They’re frightened to be seen as, you know, right wing. And again, this is the establishment. The establishment is now in no way, shape or form right wing. The establishment is now left wing. And everybody who runs this country is effectively left wing, from the civil servants to the politicians, to the people in the media, to the school system, to the educations, the higher education, to universities, even companies.

I mean, look at what the banking sector is like now. You know, my sister worked in the big bang days of the 80s, you know, and funnily enough, Nigel Farage was working there as well. She worked with him at Drexel Burnham Lambert before they got done for, you know, Michael Milken’s chicanery, where he went to jail for insider trading. But, you know, it was balls out. It was going to make as much money as you can. You know, piking needs to call it piking. When you get somebody to have to do a deal that they didn’t really want, but they’d have to buy something off you, and then you’d sold it to them and they’d have to take delivery of it and people would, you know, it was like the Wild West.

And it was unregulated to some extent, but they were very far from left wing. Whereas now you get the Bank of England and it’s, you know, where are the gender neutral toilets? They’re on the seventh floor. Oh, that’s all right then, you know, and they debank people like Nigel Farage for having views that they don’t like. And it’s all very kind of nice.

It’s changing back again now in Wall Street. Wall Street has kind of given up under Trump. They’ve kind of come back a little bit and they’ve reclaimed a bit of that kind of, you know, right wingery, if you like. But, you know, I don’t know when it all happened. People like, people in the real estate asked me, she said, when did it all happen? I said, I don’t really know. Kind of happened in the last 20 years and maybe we’re all to blame for not seeing it.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: I’d say 30 years. I think what people didn’t realize, because Blair was fresh faced, you know, the conservatives were tired, he came in and also before the war in Iraq, it sort of felt like everything was great because they pumped a lot of money into public services, they improved education, they put money into health care, blah, blah, blah. But what nobody realized is in the background they were introducing all of this legislation which has been with us for the last 30 years, which has ruined absolutely.

MIKE GRAHAM: And it was kind of almost time bombed, wasn’t it? So that nobody really saw it happening. And it would only be suddenly when the Supreme Court popped up.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Yeah.

MIKE GRAHAM: And when did that happen? Yeah, you know, I thought, you know, when I was studying politics, you know, the House of Lords was the highest court in the land. You know, we didn’t even pay any attention to Europe at that point. And now suddenly, you know, the House of Lords is pretty meaningless as a legal entity, you know.

Blair’s Legislative Legacy

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Well, the same thing with the whole diversity agenda under the Labour government, they basically made it legal to discriminate against everybody who wasn’t a minority. That’s what they did. They said there are protected characteristics, which means that these groups of people, because they’re minorities or women as well, they get to have special treatment.

MIKE GRAHAM: Yeah.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: So then the diversity agenda flows from all of that. If you look at the boats coming across the channel, that’s all to do with the Human Rights Act and the fact that basically you’re not allowed to deal with people who are coming into your country illegally as illegal immigrants.

MIKE GRAHAM: Right.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: All of this stuff. So it’s been happening. But the thing is, as you say, the Tories came in and I don’t think they realized what the hell had happened.

MIKE GRAHAM: No.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: And then before they knew it, they were balls deep in Brexit. And then, you know, that took years. And then the moment that’s finished, you get the war in Ukraine, you get Covid. Sorry, the moment Covid’s wrapping up, you get the war in Ukraine. And before you know it, 14 years have gone and nothing’s changed.

MIKE GRAHAM: Putin sits there laughing and going, you know, well, you’re weak, and this is why we’re doing what we’re doing. Because you’re not going to do anything about it. That’s right, because you’re too busy making sure that the soldiers that you’re now recruiting don’t use words like manpower.

Because, you know, I actually had a call from a soldier who said that he was asked, he got a phone call, he was in a barracks, got a call from the Department for Defense, and he was asked to go around every single notice board in the barracks to make sure the word manpower wasn’t used anywhere. Right. And that’s what they’re doing, you know.

And equally, you’ve got this whole situation where Cameron and then Theresa May tried to make the Conservative Party nicer, you know, from when she said, you know, we’re known as the nasty party. We need to change that view. And, you know, suddenly hostile environment was a thing you couldn’t say about the immigration police, you know, well, we wanted hostile environment, so these illegal immigrants don’t come here, and they don’t want to come here. It should be a hostile environment.

You know, if it’s not a hostile environment, more of them are going to come. It’s a pretty straightforward equation. And yet the Tories have spent the best part of the last, I don’t know, probably 14, 15 years trying to be nice, and it’s backfired horrendously because they’ve been stuck basically by everybody else.

Zach Polanski’s Economic Illiteracy

KONSTANTIN KISIN: All right. Well, let’s hope Zach Polanski can fix it.

MIKE GRAHAM: I mean, I keep expecting something just very odd to come out about him because, you know, one, we know it’s not his real name, even though he claims that it was his family name before the Second World War. He kind of reclaimed it. I just think he clearly is not what he says he is. He’s meant to be coming from quite a wealthy family when he pretends to be this kind of, you know, crusader for justice. And I just, my prediction for the year is that Zach Polanski will self-destruct.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: That’s interesting. Yeah, that’s interesting. I actually studied hypnotherapy, so I’m very familiar.

MIKE GRAHAM: Oh, mate. Well, again, he claims that that’s a sort of made up story by the Sun, says that, you know, they kind of took a story that he was talking about and kind of ran with it. The thing is, there is a video of him talking about it, so he can’t completely deny it, but he’s sort of saying that the Sun kind of took advantage of him and kind of put that question to him and he ended up coming back. But you know, the trouble with, you know, he’s managed to fulfill the first law of politics, which is to tell lies. You know, if somebody catches you out, just deny it. Like Lord Mandelson.

FRANCIS FOSTER: I mean, one of the interesting things actually touching on Polanski is just his economic illiteracy.

MIKE GRAHAM: Yeah.

FRANCIS FOSTER: And when he was asked about what should Britain do about the debt, he said that we needed to be more like Japan, which is to effectively double our national debt.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Japan is 200% of debt to GDP if not more.

FRANCIS FOSTER: Yeah. And he was saying that’s how we get better public services.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Oh yeah. Print more money.

FRANCIS FOSTER: Yeah.

MIKE GRAHAM: Well, that’s what we’ve been doing though. That’s why we are where we are. Well, when he was on with Laura Kuenssberg on Sunday, he was asked about this whole business of fair rents and how to make it easier for people to rent for less money. And he said, well, obviously, you know, what we need to do is look at countries where it’s been a success. And Laura said, well, all the countries that have used it, it hasn’t been a success. And he said, well, that’s not entirely true.

But then he couldn’t name a country whose system he would adopt because it would work better for landlords and for tenants. There isn’t one. Because as soon as you put, you know, the so-called Fair Rent Act in, landlords will just pull the properties, there’ll be more shortages, there’ll be more homeless.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: But in terms of your plan, then.

FRANCIS FOSTER: You would not dictate rent controls.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: You would give the power to mayors to set rent controls if they wanted.

FRANCIS FOSTER: That would be the way you would do it.

MIKE GRAHAM: Exactly. Based on local incomes, based on affordability, based on housing stock. Because we need to build more houses too. I should say, though, if national government wanted to do this on a national level, I wouldn’t oppose that either. Just someone needs to do that. And whether it comes at the most local level or the national level, that’s a conversation I’m open to. But the problem that we need to fix is the spiraling rents that are getting more and more expensive. The only system that works, it may not be perfect, is capitalism. Can’t do it any other way.

FRANCIS FOSTER: And that’s the real issue, is that, and it’s not just Zach, there are plenty of people in politics who are just, they’re just not serious.

MIKE GRAHAM: No.

FRANCIS FOSTER: And you saw that on Question Time. I was looking at these people and they were talking, going, you’re just not serious politicians. It’s not serious. They’re just peddling narratives. They’re just saying things that sound good and make you feel good. But the unfortunate and unpleasant reality is they’re not going to, the ideas aren’t going to work. And if they’re not going to work, then they’re pointless.

Reform UK and Political Defections

MIKE GRAHAM: Well, this is one of the things that people say about Reform, isn’t it? And some of the people that have, you know, he’s kind of, you know, defected from the Tory Party, if you like. And that guy, Jake Berry, I think it’s got a mention on Question Time.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Yeah. I feel bad for him because I’ve gone at him pretty hard. It’s not because it’s personal towards him.

MIKE GRAHAM: He’s not a bad guy.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: But he was in the Conservative Party, arguing with me on Question Time, saying, Net Zero is brilliant.

MIKE GRAHAM: Yeah.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: He’s now part of Reform.

MIKE GRAHAM: Yeah.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: You can see why people have questions.

MPs and Expenses Scandals

MIKE GRAHAM: Exactly right. I remember having James Cleverly on once, and I was taking the mickey out of, I think it was Rachel Reeves who, it was revealed, had charged her electricity to the taxpayer from her second home, you know, even though it wasn’t that far away from London. And I could see him kind of squirming a little bit. And I said, this is outrageous, isn’t it? I said, especially if you don’t live that far from London. I said, you live in Essex, don’t you? Yeah. Well, you don’t charge your second home electricity to the taxpayer, do you, James? And he went, well, actually, yeah, I do. And I was like, well, then you shouldn’t be doing it. Just stop. You know, you’re making a pretty good living. You don’t have to. Just because it says in the book that you can do it, you don’t have to do it.

Same goes for that sort of, you know, hatchet man that they’ve got, Pat McFadden, you know, who’s also an ex-Blair. Right. He actually moved house to this house next door from the one that he owned because he couldn’t claim mortgage relief anymore since they changed the rules. And he moved into the house next door so he could rent it. So he could claim the mortgage on that. So he could claim the rent on that, therefore could pay the mortgage. I mean, because he rented out his other house, right. So he sort of did a double dip. And when I had him on, I said, you know, how do you explain to people that they should trust you? And he just went, everything I did was within the rules. And that’s what they say. And it’s ridiculous.

The Case for Higher MP Salaries

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Well, see, this is, I mean, I am actually, believe it or not, a little bit sympathetic on that, because what happened for many decades is we basically never were allowed to pay MPs properly relative to what you want. Someone the caliber of the people that you want in power or in those positions. So what happened is they said, well, you can’t be paid properly, but we will give you this, like, expensive slush fund where you can make as much money as you want.

MIKE GRAHAM: Right.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: So really it’s double the salary that we’re paying. And then they all got caught when the expenses scandal came out. And my view is actually, I think MPs should be paid way more than they are at the moment. I’d pay them a quarter of a million pounds a year, but if you get caught fiddling the books would chop your head off.

MIKE GRAHAM: Yeah. Would you give them expenses on top of that?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: No, no, no. You just give them a flat amount and then you, you know, do whatever. But what I’m saying is you just need proper salaries because then that’s you. That’s how you attract proper people in it. Like in any business, right. If you want to hire somebody to do a talk show, you’re going to have to pay them a lot. Yeah, right. Or even if you don’t, if they get a big audience, then you’re going to have to pay them a lot. Right. So if you want to attract the top caliber people to politics, you have to pay them well because it’s a job, let’s be honest.

MIKE GRAHAM: Yeah, right. I mean, I wouldn’t want to be a politician.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: People keep asking me if I want. I’m like, are you insane? Why would I want to do that? Right. But on the other hand, no expenses and very, very, very severe accountability.

MIKE GRAHAM: Yeah.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: If you misbehave.

MIKE GRAHAM: Right.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: But I mean, that’s a good deal.

MIKE GRAHAM: People, ordinary people in this country who have never seen a salary like 96,000, which is what they get now, of course, will say, but they already are getting a load of money.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: I know.

MIKE GRAHAM: And I know that for people living in London, they’ll say, well, actually that’s not a massive amount, blah, blah, blah, blah. But they’re not badly paid, let’s face it.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: I mean, it depends what you want, Mike. If you want a bunch of mediocrities.

MIKE GRAHAM: Yeah, well, that’s what we’ve got that.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: But what I’m saying is, look, if you were running a business, right, and that business was the most important business in the country, it was important for national defense, it was important for planning, it was important for running the NHS properly, it was important for all sorts of things. You would hire the top people. That’s why the person, the chief executive of the NHS, I don’t know how much he or she earns. I would guess it’s millions.

MIKE GRAHAM: I would imagine so. Right, certainly, certainly big high six figures.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: I would think so. Right, so you want the people who are running the country to be that well paid as well, otherwise you’re going to get this bunch of non-entities that we have.

Tax Fairness and the Wealthy

MIKE GRAHAM: But unfortunately that disproves your theory, though, because the people running NHS don’t know what they’re doing and so I don’t know why they’re getting paid the amount of money they’re getting paid. That’s fair, you know, and the other thing is, I just want to mention this is, I don’t know if you saw it the weekend the Sunday Times had the list of people who pay the most tax in this country.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Yeah.

MIKE GRAHAM: And I would show that to Zach Polanski and go, you know, you talk about, you know, people not paying their fair share of taxes. Rachel Reeves says it all the time. It turns out she’s going to now punish the people who make about 48 grand a year. They’re going to get taxed the most by proportion. But when you see the likes of some footballers, you know, sort of captains of industry, hundreds of millions of pounds worth of tax they’re paying and so make out and, you know, the top 1%, I think, account for something like nearly 50 or 60, isn’t it?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: So top 10% is 60 and the 1% is 30 plus.

MIKE GRAHAM: And so, you know, that is a massive, you know, sign, I guess, that the system works because they collect much more tax from the people who make money than they do from the people who don’t. And you might say that’s as it should be, but I don’t see any reason to change it, is what I’m saying. They don’t need to pay more because if you make them pay any more, they’ll just disappear, which they are. Yeah.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Which they are. Mike, great to have you on. Glad to see that you’re doing really well.

MIKE GRAHAM: Thank you.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Where can people find your…

MIKE GRAHAM: It’s the Mike Graham Show on YouTube. We’ve got a Substack which I don’t understand, but we’re working on that. That’s the mikegrahamshow.com. And, yeah, we’re just, we’re hoping to do more shows as time goes on. We’re a pretty small operation at the moment, so we’re just kind of running, you know, constantly running ahead of ourselves, trying to get stuff done and trying to improve. We’re trying to get to a point where we can take calls, trying to get to a point where we can do voice notes, things like that, and really replicate what a mainstream morning breakfast show could do, you know. And I think it’s going to be a very exciting year.

Final Thoughts

KONSTANTIN KISIN: The last question.

MIKE GRAHAM: Yeah.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: What’s the one thing we’re not talking about that we should be?

MIKE GRAHAM: The one thing we’re not talking about that should be. Now, you see, you always come up with a good question at the end, don’t you? The one thing we’re not talking about. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I’ve told you a few things that people don’t know about me. There are things that people will never know about me, I suppose. I wonder if we should be talking about Iran and where that all goes, because it’s going to go somewhere bad, I think. I think Trump’s going to drop some bombs on them or something, and I think that’ll kick off. So I don’t know what that’s going to mean for the rest of us.

But the thing that worries me about Iran is that, and I know that many people have escaped the Iranian regime because it’s so horrible, but it takes that long to get 30,000 Iranians out on the street demonstrating how many Iranians are actually living here. And what will happen if the regime gets removed? Will they all go back or will they all stay living in Hackney? You know, I don’t know.

FRANCIS FOSTER: We shall see.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: All right, head on over to Substack, where we get to ask Mike your questions.

FRANCIS FOSTER: She says the one thing that she doesn’t agree with you on is your animosity with Tommy Robinson. He’s been proven right on so many fronts. Could there ever be a truce between you.

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