Peter McCormack Show: w/ Frank Wright – Restore, Reform and Britain’s Breaking Point (Transcript)

Second, it will actually undermine your personality to some degree. And third, you’ll have to realize you’ve been cheated all your life. And you have.

So if you do try to talk to people who’ve been captured by that system, so that they recognize nothing but a false reality, and real reality to them seems like a hostile extremist message — try and have a sense of being something like a social missionary. Look at them as the sick and the wounded. They’re casualties on the battlefield, and that battlefield is the attempt to destroy our civilization by this mad liberal system. And these people are the wounded in that battle. And though it may be extremely difficult to see what you see as your bitter political enemies like that, these are our people too and we must help them. And that’s better than a permanent state of antagonistic vengeance with which there’s no way forward but increasing division.

Feminism, Childcare, and Market Worship

PETER McCORMACK: Man, I tried it the other day. We had Nirvana in here.

FRANK WRIGHT: What happened then?

PETER McCORMACK: Well, we had a good chat and we agreed that feminism in certain areas has had pretty detrimental outcomes for women.

FRANK WRIGHT: Well, it’s liberated women from womanhood.

PETER McCORMACK: Yes, into an office to put things on screens while somebody else looks after their children.

FRANK WRIGHT: Yeah, one of the phrases that I came up with a while ago was this: “I go to work to pay for the childcare so I can go to work to pay for the childcare.”

And it’s just — but again, look, here’s a good example of that, right? If you see a woman who’s got a very young baby, like we did once, we went out with the kids and I’ve got two little kids and my missus, and we saw this one with a little baby, and obviously they’re delightful. I was like, “Oh, look at your little baby,” and, “How old is it?” The baby’s a few months old. And then she immediately said, “I’m going to go back to work,” and the baby’s a matter of weeks old. And then you just thought, how sad, how sad, because that baby’s now going to be looked after by a stranger and you’re going to work to pay for that childcare.

And if you look at how much that childcare costs, those wages are probably likely commensurate to that childcare and the costs of transport and so on. And so that’s what you’re doing. You’re paying to outsource your own motherhood. And this isn’t just a political opinion. The first 3 years of life, it’s vital that babies have mummy and dad, ideally, as much as possible. And you don’t get that time again. And there’s nothing to replace that maternal bond.

So when you look at it a bit deeper, this is part of the broader replacement culture that we live in. The idea that there’s actually no essential value to anything, not even to a mother’s bond with her own child. That can be replaced as well by another transaction that sloshes money around our consumer economy. And that’s why I’m so much against market worship, because it destroys every single value.

Finding Common Ground

PETER McCORMACK: Well, me and Narinda had a good chat on the economic side of things. I did try and explain to her, because I try and come at everything from economics or the law. That’s why I just come there. A lot of our shows we base on economics, we base on inflation. And one thing I keep trying to explain to people is inflation is the enemy of everybody apart from the super rich, because the super rich benefit from inflation and everybody else has their entire life hollowed out. And so we made some progress on that, certainly. And then we got a little bit trapped in the “everyone’s a racist” doom loop. But I think we made—

FRANK WRIGHT: I did.

PETER McCORMACK: I think we made some progress.

FRANK WRIGHT: Oh joy.

PETER McCORMACK: Yeah, I think we’ve got to do it. You know what the truth is? I quite liked her as a person. We had a good chat beforehand. She was very friendly, very nice. We chatted about our kids. And then I just think when the cameras came on, it becomes a little bit performative and some of the incentives at play played out. But I think we’ll do it again. And I think if we had no cameras on, we’d probably agree on even more.

FRANK WRIGHT: That’s very likely. I mean, you’d probably be very much aware, “Oh no, what are my comrades going to think of me talking to this bigot?”

PETER McCORMACK: Yeah, talking to this fascist.

FRANK WRIGHT: Well, of course, of course.

Where Did It All Go Wrong?

PETER McCORMACK: Yeah, so where did it all go wrong, Frank? You seem pretty well read on history. Where did it all go wrong?

FRANK WRIGHT: Well, one of the things that you find that’s very unusual about living in our times is that people don’t notice how much propaganda there is in the so-called free West. In fact, we’re the most heavily propagandized nation in the world. Your flat pack furniture, your breakfast cereal, your internet experience, your entertainment — it’s all got basically an ideological international rainbow Bolshevism message somewhere in it. It does. And when you realize that practically everything in our mass culture is politically coded that way, you realize, hang on a minute, that’s not an accident.

So I would say there are two things to say about that. There’s the development and installation of what you would call the international liberal system in the 1920s, directly after the Great War. And that wasn’t an accident. And the reason why we tend to think that the system we have now is just naturally evolved — which it certainly didn’t, it was deliberately created — is because it’s everywhere.

There’s a great quote from the Slovenian communist Slavoj Žižek, whose name I can pronounce correctly but refuse to do so. And he says something like this: “When ideology is total, it is invisible.” And so he’s right, right? Because this ideology is everywhere. You don’t see it and you just think, “Oh, it’s normal,” which tells you one big thing about humanity, that men believe what’s in front of them. And if all that’s in front of you is this all the time, you can’t imagine it ever having been any different. And so you can’t imagine any different future or any political or economic alternative. And so that’s why the system is so effective. And so that’s why it doesn’t tell you that it was actually created and that’s where it came from.

The Origins of Globalism

PETER McCORMACK: Why, though, why was it created? With good intentions?

FRANK WRIGHT: From the point of view of the elite that did it, they would tell you it was good intentions, and they would say to you things like, “Oh, we need to create an international financial and world government system because it’ll end wars.” And that’s what they did. So yes, today you would call these people globalists, but if you look at who they were — from the beginnings of the Federal Reserve to the setting up of the Council on Foreign Relations — they call themselves internationalists, which is a very nice way of saying, “We’re going to dissolve you all into our utopia, whether you like it or not, and then we’re going to make you believe it’s all for your best interests,” which is what elites do.

PETER McCORMACK: You’re talking about the creature of Jekyll Island, aren’t you?

The Global Order, Liberalism, and Its Contradictions

FRANK WRIGHT: Well, no, I’m talking about these things are in the Congressional Record. These issues that I’m talking about are a matter of public record. They’re not in speculative works of kind of grievance fiction or even what you might call fringe history. These are just basically established facts.

Now, Walter Lippmann, who was probably the greatest pioneer of 20th century propaganda technique — he was even better than Bernays — he wrote a book about public relations in 1923, I think, and he helped to found the Council on Foreign Relations in 1921 with people like John Dewey, who was a man who said — he was an educationalist and a pragmatist — and he said, “We need to create a common faith, basically a godless international religion to unite the people.” And this is how we do it. He did a series of lectures in the ’30s about this.

And then you had people like, obviously the big bankers named, the people like J.P. Morgan and later on the Rockefellers, who were very interested in moving people towards compulsory public education and undermining the family and very involved in the liberation of women. Because the family is basically prior to the state in its existence. It was there before the state and in its rights. Its rights are prior to those of the state. So it’s an obstacle. So what I try and help people to do—

PETER MCCORMACK: Obstacle to what?

FRANK WRIGHT: It’s an obstacle if you’ve got a project where you want to make this international standard political economic order the only thing in the world that has no competing explanatory power, then you’ve got to get rid of institutions and beliefs and traditions and culture and religion that stand in that way.

So I try and get people to understand that that was the idea. That what you’re really looking at is you’re not really looking at what people call woke. You’re not really looking at people who genuinely believe in progressive causes. If you look at it all — what the actions are at scale, economically, politically, and socially — it is to produce an internationally standard culture. It’s to standardize the globe under one system, one ruling elite that has one set of beliefs and one, if you like, placeless architecture, which you can see emerging around you. That translates somewhere into everywhere and therefore nowhere.

PETER MCCORMACK: Like an international bourgeoisie.

FRANK WRIGHT: An international nowhere land. That’s where we live whilst these people live in their shining penthouses on the hill.

PETER MCCORMACK: But this is to protect themselves as an international bourgeoisie and extract the resources.

FRANK WRIGHT: Well, you had a bunch of people, some of them seemed to be well-meaning. You had people like Bertrand Russell who advocated for a one-world government. I mean, I don’t agree with him on many things, but he was certainly not an international financier or anything like that. But he genuinely seemed to believe that the answer, that there could be an answer to conflict and that that answer could be final. And that was one world government.

But he was the kind of rationalist that believes in human perfectibility, which I think is a liberal delusion because history is rather like a practical joke at the expense of that idea when you look at it. So, men aren’t perfectible and it’s liberals who tend not to see the limits of mankind. And it’s liberals who can’t see the limits of liberalism or their own point of view, which is largely why the liberal system and our politicians and so on — because conservatives are just right liberals, of course — they can’t understand why people don’t like them anymore because some of them genuinely believe, “Oh, this is the perfect system. How can you say that?” Because that’s the limits of liberalism. It believes in its own beliefs, but in no others.

And a lot of them can’t actually see beyond that. So this goes back to what you said earlier on — why can’t people see the problem when the problem’s everywhere? And it’s from practical to moral, financial, spiritual, it’s a crisis, it’s an omnicrisis. How can you not see an omnicrisis? Well, they don’t live in that world.

PETER MCCORMACK: Or do they live in a world where they see us on a journey towards what they believe? And we’re just not there yet, and if we just — “If we just get Zak Polanski in, or Andy Burnham, or whoever, we will be one step closer. We just need to silence the fascists. We just need to remove the fascists out of society.” Is it that? Is it like that utopia you never get to?

Factists, Fascists, and the Utopian Delusion

FRANK WRIGHT: Oh, that’s a brilliant way of saying it. But first of all, I’d like to say I prefer the term “factist,” because the people who they really hate are people who basically point out facts. If your descriptions correspond to the awful reality, then they’ll call you a fascist.

PETER MCCORMACK: Of course.

FRANK WRIGHT: Because you’re just reality-based. That’s what they’re against. If you understand that, then you see the trick. This is an acid attack to disfigure anyone who dares to name the real effects of this utopian system.

But a lot of people put the boot in to Peter Hitchens. And I have irresponsibly said on the internet — you’ll probably find it on Twitter — I think I even made a meme about it: “Behead those who insult Peter Hitchens.”

PETER MCCORMACK: I like Peter Hitchens.

FRANK WRIGHT: I mean, look, he’s like our granddad, right? There are things that he said I’m not going to put the boot into him for, and I’ll stand up for him. One of the things he said which was brilliant was — what was it he said — “You row across an ocean of blood to get to utopia and you never arrive.” Now that’s an extremely intelligent remark because he encapsulates the kind of idea that you’d see in John Gray’s Seven Types of Atheism, which isn’t really about atheism. But that is the most comprehensive demolition of the liberal idea that I’ve ever read, and no one will ever better him.

John Gray used to be a professor of European thought at LSE, and he’s still alive, and he’s a northerner, and he’s pocket-sized like me.

PETER MCCORMACK: John Gray — did he write the book, the one that’s critical of libertarianism?

FRANK WRIGHT: I can’t remember.

PETER MCCORMACK: I think he did.

FRANK WRIGHT: He did one called The New Leviathans, which might have put the boot into that.

PETER MCCORMACK: Yeah, no, there’s another one, because I’ve been having my flirtation with libertarianism for a while. And somebody recommended I read his book. I’m pretty sure it’s him.

FRANK WRIGHT: Well, I suppose having a guns and dope party has a broad popular appeal, but it’s not for me.

PETER MCCORMACK: I don’t think of libertarianism — because libertarianism is also another utopia, right? There’s no or minimal government, and we all operate with the non-aggression principle and have our guns and live our free individual life and have free trade with each other. I think a libertarian is more like a trajectory. I think at the moment I want smaller government, a lot smaller government.

John Gray, Isaiah Berlin, and the Death of Liberal Democracy

FRANK WRIGHT: Well, it’s an understandable reflex when you’ve seen the terrible things that they pay your taxes on, that they wasted on you. Basically, you’re paying taxes to destroy your civilization because the large-scale regime program amounts to national suicide.

Now, if you look at the work of John Gray, he was educated by Sir Isaiah Berlin, who was a Russian Jew whose family fled the Bolsheviks in 1917. His first piece of writing is his childhood memory of seeing someone dragged off by the secret police. So he ended up in England and he ended up being like an Oxford professor. And he was the greatest champion of 20th century liberalism.

And John Gray got taught by him a bit, and he tells some quite fond anecdotes about it, which is why when John Gray tells you — as he has been doing for over 10 years — that the liberal idea, liberal democracy is finished, it’s just finished, all that stuff’s over, no one believes in it anymore, it’s run out. Patrick Deneen from Notre Dame, a Catholic philosopher and academic, said the same thing in Why Liberalism Failed. And it’s not just them. And it’s not just this speculative point of view.

He tells you this is because of the ideas of utopianism, because the contradiction between the liberal idea and reality and its cult-like beliefs — and why people like Auguste Comte in the French Revolution could tell you that they have this belief in inexorable moral progress and human uplift — and that’s simply a cult. There’s just no evidence for that.

But most people do believe — when people say, “Oh, we’re progressives,” if you ask them what does that mean — does that mean you believe that everyone in the world, all humanity, just gets better morally and intellectually because the calendar flips over? That’s what you believe. That’s a cult.

So John Gray pointed that out as well, and he wasn’t the only one. But he was a pioneer and he’s given you the briefest explanation, the most concise one in Seven Types of Atheism — why the liberal idea is dead, where it came from, how mad it is, why it produces these fanatics, why it makes people divorced from reality, and why utopianism generally is a disastrous belief system to be captured by. Because of Hitchens’ example — that you do end up justifying any amount of destruction because you’ll always have your eyes fixed on this shining horizon that you will never reach. And that’s just insane. But you can see the appeal.

PETER MCCORMACK: Of course. I mean, look, I’ve got a lot of liberal friends, as you probably have, and a lot of them are very good people and have nice ideas, and they do want to be kind, and they do want to help people, and they do want to live in a nice, protective, happy world where everybody is equal. They’re not all dangerous lunatics.

Human Equality and the Contradictions of Reality

FRANK WRIGHT: But that’s the fundamental problem. People aren’t equal. Human equality is a little myth. It’s just a fact, right? And it’s a fact that’s been — I’ve been made painfully aware of when that giant ambushed me, which is the reason why I’m here. And also when I came here, which caused some laughter in the studio, did it not? My little feet couldn’t touch the ground because you’d had another giant sitting in this chair. Human equality is an obvious contradiction of basic reality, physically, intellectually, individually, generally. And on the group stage as well.

PETER MCCORMACK: Frank, you speak like a giant.

FRANK WRIGHT: Maybe I should get some stack heel shoes to bigger myself.

PETER MCCORMACK: Speak like a giant.

FRANK WRIGHT: Yeah, yeah.

PETER MCCORMACK: No, I’m a half-wit.

FRANK WRIGHT: Well, I’m a half pint, so I suppose we all have our cross to bear, don’t we?

PETER MCCORMACK: Yeah.

FRANK WRIGHT: But the thing that I’m on about there is that that’s another example of the contradictions of reality. But here’s the thing — when we get into things like this, it’s easy to overlook that there’s a good ending to this, right? And we’re living in it.

But as you see this kind of omnicrisis develop, don’t be sad about it. The system really has the techniques by which you’re ruled and the mad policies and so on. They really do amount to evil. And you really are ruled by what’s effectively just a gang of crooks. And the state really isn’t legitimate. And if you look at John Gray, who’s our most respected political philosopher, he’ll explain to you that that’s not a radical point of view, that’s a statement of fact. The state does not discharge its duties. It doesn’t provide prosperity, security, and it can’t supply meaning to your life. And it gives you no meaningful options either.

The Limits of Progressivism

PETER MCCORMACK: Is the problem with progressivism that if you’re always looking for progress, you’re eventually going to arrive at some of the most crazy lunatic ideas possible? But you know what? There’s obviously some great things that did happen in history that came from progressive civil rights and some kind of form of acceptance and civility around homosexuality.

The Philosophy of Rights and the Case for Restore

FRANK WRIGHT: I wouldn’t agree with any of that. I think these are social solvents. If you look into people like the contest between people like W.E.B. Du Bois, who became extremely famous and was the first Black man to get a degree from Harvard — lifelong communist, bitter grievance merchant, but very well known and died a rich man.

And then if you look at someone like Zora Neale Hurston, who actually came out — she was the head of a Harlem literary school in the 1920s — and she said her grandparents were slaves. And she said, “Slavery was the price I paid for civilization. If I’d stayed in Africa, I’d have died in my 30s and never written a word.” But there’s a reason why you’ve never heard of her, but everyone’s heard of the grievance narrative, right?

PETER MCCORMACK: No, look, I’m with you, but what I’m saying is I think it’s obviously a good thing that we don’t have Black people put at the back of buses, have to drink from different fountains, and it’s good that gay people can walk the street and not get beaten up just for being gay. I think a certain amount of progress — that I think you may disagree with.

FRANK WRIGHT: I disagree entirely with the complete foundational belief system of liberal rights. I disagree with John Rawls. I disagree with John Stuart Mill. I disagree with Bentham and his utilitarianism, because ultimately what you’re doing here is you’re reducing people to a description, and that description comes from the right or power to determine or define what a right is. And as you’re probably painfully aware, if you disagree with these people enough and they pay attention to you, suddenly your rights — poof, they’re out of the window.

PETER MCCORMACK: So what rights should we have?

Liberal Rights and Their Contradictions

FRANK WRIGHT: There’s a difference between — what I’m saying is that these are descriptive or nominalist rights. Your liberal rights depend on what liberals say your rights are. And if you’re not a liberal, you don’t have any. That’s basically how it works. If you don’t disagree with them, they’ll probably respect your rights to a degree. But your rights rely on them saying you have them according to their descriptions of what rights are.

And if you notice over time, those descriptions are liable to change, which means they’re unstable, which means they’re contingent. And they would say, “Oh well, due to progress, that’s why our description of rights have changed.” But there are various mechanisms that make that progress happen, such as, for example, the expansion of rights to transgender rights. Now, that’s partly a result of technology, of surgery, and of pharmaceuticals and of the viral transmission of the craze — which is how they admit it’s social contagion, if you like. And they’ve admitted themselves, people who are advocates for that, so that’s how it’s reproduced. So this is a kind of cultural production process that’s also an industry.

PETER MCCORMACK: Sure. But if you —

FRANK WRIGHT: But when you look at how those rights have been expanded, you see where there’s an essential conflict. And that comes down to the description of what things are. On the one hand, you’ll have a man who is basically impersonating a woman, insisting he is a woman, and then you’ll have some women who’ll object to that and say, “Well, I don’t want you in my toilet or in my women’s prison or in my hospital because you’re fundamentally not a woman.”

And the question of rights then becomes again, as it always is, a question of who gets to define what a woman is, who gets the right. That’s a particular instance of the universal idea of liberal rights. It’s basically what they say it is and it’s liable to change.

PETER MCCORMACK: But hold on, isn’t that what I was saying? That this is where progressivism has maybe gone too far. But rights also come from the law and the law is established by government. But sorry, if we just go back far enough, we wouldn’t advocate for a world where we still have Black people enslaved for being Black.

FRANK WRIGHT: I don’t think that’s a very interesting way to frame this discussion. If you look at what Patrick Deneen said — his book Why Liberalism Failed — he said that when you start off with defining rights like this, you’re always going to end up with a paralysis. And I just use the transgender example because it’s obvious where you have a conflict of one rights-based group with another, and it’s effectively insoluble because they’re demanding their priority, and they’re saying that we have the privilege to define who gets the right to do this.

And where there’s a conflict, that conflict becomes insoluble when it’s a question of equal rights, but from antagonistic factions, and it can’t be resolved. And he said that’s one of the paradoxes of liberalism, because the question of whose rights become prior can’t be answered by that system, because of course everyone’s rights are equal, but it shows you that they aren’t. You have a bunch of people here saying that one thing is true and then the other people saying that’s false, and the system simply can’t compute that.

And so you have conflict, and that’s because those rights depend on the power to define reality in words. And that’s related to the way that we are ruled — and that’s the creation of this pseudo-reality that’s basically made out of words and images to make you feel good.

PETER MCCORMACK: I understand the point you’re making, but what then — what rights should we have?

FRANK WRIGHT: Well, I’m an essentialist. Life, liberty, and property. No, no, no — I’m an essentialist. There are things in the world that the basis of reality and being doesn’t change, that man is changeless across time. He doesn’t progress, he doesn’t develop morally and intellectually because the calendar flips over.

PETER MCCORMACK: And what I’m trying to understand is, what does the world look like that Frank Wright wants to live in?

FRANK WRIGHT: You see, this is the thing.

PETER MCCORMACK: Because you went to Makerfield to campaign for Restore. So there’s something in what Rupert Lowe is doing with Restore that you believed takes the country in a direction that you want.

FRANK WRIGHT: Yes.

PETER MCCORMACK: And as I said, I’m a bit of a halfwit. I read —

FRANK WRIGHT: That’s brave of you. People usually pretend to know everything.

PETER MCCORMACK: No, do you know what? I think it helps with the job I do. I said before, there are 3 types of podcasts that you can listen to like this: 2 smart people together, a moron interviewing a smart person, and 2 morons. And so today is a moron with a smart person. And I get to ask dumb questions. The 20% smart people watching will go in the comments, “Yeah, Pete’s such a dumbass.” And then the other 80% go, “Oh, I had that question too. I don’t understand.”

I think there are a lot of people out there now sensing there’s a lot wrong with this country, that things aren’t going well, but what is it we want?

Britain’s Breaking Point and the Case for Restore

FRANK WRIGHT: When you ask me that question — what do I want to see — it genuinely isn’t about what I want to see personally. I mean, I’ve got a lot of ideas about things. I’m a traditional Catholic. I have a very, probably a tediously detailed understanding of political history and political economy. I’d go on about that forever until you do finally get an audience-funded shock collar that can be remotely operated by viewers so I can just be tased into the compliance sack.

But that’s not about what I want to see. The reason why I am so motivated to do anything I can to help Rupert Lowe’s Restore is because Britain must be restored and we cannot do with any more mad political vision. We can’t have any more personal ambition projects, vanity projects, enriching your friends, insane ideologies. This really is a dire national emergency, and I believe this is the last chance we have to save the nation.

And that is a serious duty — a duty of the state. It’s a duty to our families now, it’s to our people now, but to our future. We don’t have a future as a people if we don’t save the nation now. We’re going to go gradually extinct in our own homelands. My children won’t have a home. And not only that, the entire economy will fall apart because of the dependency culture, because of various problems we have. We really are looking at an extremely bleak and disturbing future in which we probably lose control of the ability to contain events — maybe within our lifetimes, if we don’t stop now.

And this is about basically an emergency situation which needs responsible action to be carried out by genuine men and women of demonstrable integrity and capability, not some mad vanity project, not some personal ideological vision or other. But if you talk to people, they want common sense. They want to return to reality. Some dignity to our lives would be nice. The fact that we need things that work. Maybe we won’t have everything that we have right now because we’re facing a dire economic crisis. But what we do have will function and we can look to rebuilding it over a reasonable timescale.

Now, one of the things that Restore has that is so markedly absent from practically any dimension of politics in the West anywhere — it’s been absent for the last 3 decades — is long-term strategic planning. You’ve got politics now that just looks at 2-year, maybe if you’re lucky, 4-year election cycles. And to be honest, most of it’s to do with the Twitter cycle. It’s just the speed of information. You can’t plan and you can’t make a nation prosperous and secure on that frivolous timescale where you care more about the headlines tomorrow in a bunch of newspapers or on some app than you do about the fate of the nation, the people that you are nominally there to represent, govern, and whose lives you’re shaping.

That needs long-term strategic planning in things like the economy, industry, energy, national security, and diplomacy. There’s a difference between politicians and statesmen. And it was said in the 19th century that that difference was that politicians think about today, tomorrow, and the next election, whereas statesmen and diplomats think about the survival of their civilization into the coming centuries. And we need a bit of that now because the time is short and the emergency that we’re facing is deep, but it can be stopped and we can save the nation. And it is a duty. It’s not a matter of what I want. It’s not a matter of what anyone wants.

I don’t even want to do this. I despise most people on the internet. You must be glad that I haven’t seen you because I don’t have any respect for the kind of grifters and things like that.

PETER MCCORMACK: And I’m not saying that you’re one, but you’re a bit of a grifter to me.

FRANK WRIGHT: Look, I suppose I may have to one day say, “Look, I’m not like the other grifters.” But the thing is, you can see why you’d be suspicious of the media sphere because it’s been so toxic and it’s been so full of lies and it’s so venomous and it permits so much damage in our lives. That’s why I say that. And also about the political system, because despite whoever you vote for and whatever they promise you, the same mad policies get continued and the country goes down the toilet, right? Everything gets worse while the line goes up, and we can all see that happening. So you can see why people would be despairing and disaffected of the entire media-political complex.

But that is the reason why I’m doing this now. I don’t want to be in the media. I don’t want to be a part of that system. And I certainly don’t want to be in politics because of the abominable reputation that politicians have given it throughout my life. They’re worse than the journalists. It’s a question of how many lampposts do we have, really.

But the thing is, you have to do it. And that’s why I’ve met so many people in Restore. They’ve been so nice to my little son as well. They’re just genuinely motivated by a duty to save the nation. And it doesn’t matter who they are or where they come from or what they’ve got or what they haven’t got. That’s why they’re all there.

Frank’s Turning Point

PETER MCCORMACK: What was the turning point for you? When did you realize — I’ve obviously, like you, seen things go to s* for more than a decade, but there must be a moment you said, “Okay, this is it, I can’t take this anymore. I’m going to get involved.”

FRANK WRIGHT: Well, I don’t know what — well, I’m going to get involved in politics.

PETER MCCORMACK: No, like, what was — was there a particular moment where you were like, “This is — I can’t sit and stand by and just watch this anymore, I have to do it?”

The Army, Radicalization, and the Destruction of British Values

FRANK WRIGHT: Yeah, there was actually. It was when my kids were little and my missus had a job as a lecturer, and so they get like holidays and things like that. And I would’ve gone and had to do something like, maybe in education or something like a kind of private— but I was offered a job to do some kind of school improvement consultancy stuff.

And I was thinking about doing that and I really profoundly didn’t want to do it because what you’re basically doing is you’re being paid quite well to reinforce institutional failure. So basically this is just a way of grifting off the taxpayer and that’s just morally wrong and I didn’t want to do it. So I came up with a brilliant idea of joining the Army Reserve.

Now, at that time, I was a self-identified transmummy. I invented that term because my missus would go to work and we had two little bairns, and I would look after them, papoose and backpack and toddlers and stuff. And when I joined the mob, it was— it’s the infantry, so they’re quite punchy. And the sergeant’s saying to me like, “What’s your occupation?” I said, “Transmummy.” He goes, “I’m not writing that down.” Let’s chuck the pen. And I said, “Give us it here.” And I did, I put it down. I put it down on my attestations. Well, yeah, I’ll show you if you want.

But yeah, no one argues with that nowadays because, you know, because of progress, right? That’s it. I even did— there were some harsh words exchanged when I put on the black woman’s wig that I found on the 53 bus instead of my helmet whilst we were doing a section attack. I said, when he’d stopped bellowing into my face and threatening to kill me, because he’s a terrifyingly huge color sergeant, I said to him, “Look, it worked for General Butt Naked.” Because if you look into his war, he used to send his troops into— such as they were— semi-naked, wearing ladies’ wigs and handbags and things, and they believed it made them bulletproof.

PETER MCCORMACK: Was that in Africa? Was it General Butt Naked?

FRANK WRIGHT: Yes, yes, it was. Yeah, it’s Liberia.

PETER MCCORMACK: Liberia, yes.

FRANK WRIGHT: Yeah, yeah, he’s called Joshua Blyee. Actually, now he’s gone on to become a preacher, to be honest, and goes on. And so he’s successfully had a kind of career transition. There’s like a kind of second act to his life, which is fascinating in itself. But yeah, he’s a real person.

And so, you know, I was quite satisfied that I managed to insert his somewhat memorable soubriquet into this exchange with this kind of fuming color sergeant who clearly wanted to kill me for the wig, by the way. I discovered it on a 53 bus once and it was as if I heard the voice of the Lord telling me to pick up the wig and put it on, and I said, “Who am I to disagree?” And magical things happened to me ever since.

PETER MCCORMACK: But come on, what radicalized you?

FRANK WRIGHT: I decided to try and go in the Army full-time, and I did, and I saw what happened to it. I saw what happened to it as a kind of serving soldier, and I saw the demoralization, the misery, and the gradual capture of this institution that I love, the Army.

And what they’ve done to it, it’s just heartbreaking. It’s genuinely heartbreaking, so demoralizing. It’s so impoverished and it’s being gradually destroyed by these insane values where, you know, you will see adverts for new hairstyles, transgenderism, you can no longer refer to people by their names, you’ve got to use their rank, you’ve got to call them ‘infanteer’ instead of ‘infantryman’ because it might offend people. You have kind of pronouns days and things like that.

And ultimately I just realized and thought, “I cannot serve. I’m not serving the Crown, I’m not serving my country here, I’m serving an ideology, and it’s the rainbow ideology, and that’s not mine.” And that’s a very sad thing to say, and there are many like me as well who are actually real soldiers and not just some, you know, dress-up dolly, as I prefer to refer to myself, not some just kind of occasional mascot.

But there are a lot of serious people who’ve left the fighting arms because of this. And again, when I was going on about the other day about people of genuine talent and commitment being forced out for ideological reasons, that includes our fighting men who are there to defend the nation nominally, and many of the armed police as well, because I’ve met quite a few of those.

And you remember after the shooting of Chris Carver and the prosecution of the police officer that shot him, because he was an armed criminal who’d just shot someone with a pistol that he had in the car at the time, that police officer was convicted of murder. And after that, I think around 400 of our senior close protection officers, people who protect the King and the government ministers, they just resigned and went back to their normal jobs. Because you don’t get— it’s not like a designated job, but they didn’t take the risk. It was a disgrace.

Increasingly, people in the special forces like the SAS and so on are realizing that when they do get sent into war and then they’re kind of privately congratulated, several years later, the same state that did that will have you prosecuted for war crimes or something. So there really is a kind of mad disconnect between this— the state doesn’t— the state’s so mad now that it will actually throw its own protection in jail or persecute them, and then wonder why they’ve got no competent armed police to protect them when they’re walking around Westminster.

And they’ll wonder why they haven’t got any special forces to send off in these mad wars we shouldn’t be fighting anyway. And that’s because they’ve prosecuted them and they’ve basically persecuted them out of wanting to do the job anyway. Because if you look at why people do these things— these liberals don’t understand this, but we do— that kind of thing. There’s not a great deal of money in this. There is a risk, like, that you die. Men do this because they have a sense of duty.

But if you don’t recognize duty, you don’t recognize honor and loyalty and so on, and you can just discard them, or when it’s politically convenient, you can just throw them under the bus and prosecute them because it doesn’t mean anything to you what they’ve done. Now, first they were useful to you, but now they disadvantage you. Do you see where that Utilitarian— the idea of morality from use and preference and the avoidance of pain and the promotion of pleasure— comes into it?

That’s a moral decision for these people. “Oh, well, it makes me feel good. Oh, it keeps me away from disadvantage. Oh, it’s morally good then.” Well, that’s just nihilistic. It’s despicable. And that’s how despicably these men have been treated.

But if you go through every institution, from education to health, the civil service, anyone who really is motivated by a higher sense of purpose than themselves, who has a sense of obligation to our people, to their communities, to the nation— we’re effectively punished and marginalized and even prosecuted for doing your duty. I mean, that’s evil.

PETER MCCORMACK: It’s the destruction of all the values that made us British.

FRANK WRIGHT: Yes. And this is what I get back to you about. Look, when you look— I’m doing this kind of series about how the liberal system was created. I’ve written a book I haven’t got published yet. It’s called A Brief History of Liberal Democracy. It explains to you this isn’t just some mad idea I’ve come up with. It’s just we’re not taught this in our schools, but it is all very well documented. And there were very great speeches. It was an obvious movement.

So when you look at it, this is to supply a system where you believe in only the beliefs it’s made you believe in fundamentally. And not to question them. And gradually you find that there are penalties attached to questions— if you ask the wrong questions, then, you know, like an alarm goes off and the ejector seat fires you out into the gulag.

PETER MCCORMACK: Well, it’s the friend-enemy Marxist doctrine. That’s, scare people off.

FRANK WRIGHT: I think it was a German jurist, Carl Schmitt, who talked about that being politics being about friend and enemy.

Restore, Reform, and the Political Establishment

PETER MCCORMACK: So I want to talk about Restore a little bit more, but also I want to talk about Reform because there was a period of time— I just hate the establishment. I just generally hate establishment, authority, people in charge, people telling me what to do. I wasn’t very good at school at listening to people. I just don’t like it.

FRANK WRIGHT: Did you get good at being insubordinate? I did.

PETER MCCORMACK: I’ve always been a bit of a rebel, listened to punk rock and skateboarded. Just, you know, I was just one of those kinds. So I like telling people with unearned authority to f* off, basically. And the reason I really hate the current political class is that, as I commonly say on Twitter, every 5 years we have a personality contest and we elect the most unimpressive people to make the most consequential decisions for our country.

FRANK WRIGHT: Well, that’s machine politics, of course.

PETER MCCORMACK: But you look at this, which is evil, by the way.

FRANK WRIGHT: Oh, I agree.

PETER MCCORMACK: I mean, Ian Dunt wrote this great book, How Westminster Works and Why It Doesn’t, just exposing the incompetence and stupidity of these people. And you look at— I mean, Keir Starmer to me is— I’m sure people say he’s a good guy. I just see a beige, unimpressive man with no real insights, no strategy, nothing of intelligence to say. He’s just limp, leading a country to be replaced by potentially Andy Burnham, who is just like another high-tax socialist, or Angela Rayner, who is interesting as a character but not as a politician. Ed Miliband— I look at all these people and think, in business I’ve met some impressive fing people, some people who’ve grown some amazing companies, people where I just sit and listen. These people are impressive, yet we have these people elevated above them to make even more important decisions, which is fing morons.

FRANK WRIGHT: Well, I mean, what you’ve seen here— obviously Tony Blair’s the Dark Lord.

PETER MCCORMACK: Yes, of course.

FRANK WRIGHT: You must be aware of that. And did you see that fantastic video of him where he pulled the rug on Keir Starmer? About the days after the election, and it was like, you know, you never cross the Dark Lord. It was just so long. I’ll send it to you, it is hilarious.

But the point being is that Blair is evil, of course, but what he did was he created Western machine politics. And what does that mean? It means the Labour Party just became a brand. It had no connection whatsoever to its origins or its principles or anything like that. It became a brand, and it became a new brand— New Labour. New, new, good, new and improved. What does that mean? It means it’s become a machine for gaining and retaining power, and that’s it.

So the people you pick, they’re just components, even the leader, because the meaning of the whole thing is the machine. There’s no more meaning to it than the machinery of power. “We’re going to get into power and we’re going to strip away everything that makes it difficult.” Anything like principle or talent, or flair or character— these all just make the machine less efficient.

PETER MCCORMACK: What are the risks?

FRANK WRIGHT: If you look at the idea that I said to you earlier on about— if you look at the kind of international liberal global project as basically just a project to standardize the world, you can see why machine politics fits into that so well, because that standardizes the candidates, the policy, the process, the media, the message discipline, everything like that.

I mean, for example, by contrast, if you’re in a modern political party now, you will have a communications director like, you know, the Prince of Darkness, Peter Mandelson. I mean, it came as such a shock to people that he was such a baddie, like such an Epstein criminal. The man has been called the Prince of Darkness for decades. Who knew that he wasn’t a goodie? You know, who knew? Like, lol.

But you get someone like Mandelson, some suspicious looking character who’s turned up from nowhere with a moustache. And they would tell you, “You can’t say this, you can’t say that.” That’s called message discipline. So after I left the Shire and disastrously had my sausage face broadcast across the world, I contacted some people in the party and I said, “Look, do you want to give me some message discipline guidance, what I can and can’t say?” And they said no. Harrison Pitt told me last night, he said, “No, just carry on as you are.”

PETER MCCORMACK: Well, I think the most effective thing that Rupert Lowe has done is establish the brand of don’t care. “I don’t care what you think.”

FRANK WRIGHT: But it’s so liberating.

The Overton Window and Political Freedom

PETER McCORMACK: It’s wonderfully liberating. And somebody said to me recently, the thing, one of the things about political leadership is there’s a difference between what you can say and what you can think. When you enter the ballot box, it comes down to what you think. No one’s watching. What do you really think? But in certain walks of life, it’s very difficult for some people to say what they think. They face cancellation and their career being sabotaged or being attacked, with words or with fists. Some people just cannot say the things they really want to say. Maybe in their family environment they don’t upset somebody.

FRANK WRIGHT: This comes down to the fundamental question of how free are our lives, right? There’s a reason why they no longer refer to it as the free world, and that’s because there are obvious penalties attached to anyone’s actions or words that are deemed to be inappropriate.

PETER McCORMACK: But Rupert Lowe’s “don’t care” message has shifted the Overton window to allow people to question things that were unquestionable before.

FRANK WRIGHT: Well, they were always— look, I think it’s interesting to look at that point of view. You can think of it like the cop in the head, that really you’re probably not going to suffer immediate consequences for just noticing basic facts about reality. If you’re rude, if you’re offensive, if you’re nasty, then you probably deserve to face those consequences. But if you’re just saying, “Hang on a minute, this is all wrong. There’s a serious problem here. We’re all being harmed and somewhat being deceived along the way about it,” that’s fine. Those kind of things are actually punished. And that’s a problem.

But when you realize that you can actually say things and your life doesn’t immediately fall apart, that shows you that sometimes there is more fear than danger, and that’s a means of political control. And so if you liberate people from an understandable but essentially unreal fear where there’s no real danger, they realize, “Oh, I see.”

PETER McCORMACK: Well, there are certain dangers. Some people, some walks of life in the media.

FRANK WRIGHT: But some of that danger is definitely self-policed.

PETER McCORMACK: Sure, but there is some risk.

FRANK WRIGHT: However, as more and more people realize, “I can say these things and not disappear in a puff of smoke. I can notice basic facts about reality,” and other people are doing it, it encourages people to say that. And that changes the culture because fundamentally what we’re talking about here isn’t a question of good and evil. This is a question of who has the power to do what.

Does the state and its ideological bureaucracies have the power to tell you to be afraid to basically notice the awful conditions of your life honestly, or not? Shouldn’t we have the power to say what’s right and wrong about our lives because it is our lives? I think we should. Why do we tolerate a system that makes us all censor ourselves because we’re terrified of being unable to feed our children if we simply notice what’s wrong with our lives?

PETER McCORMACK: Well, I think that’s what’s happened. It’s breaking and people aren’t tolerating it anymore.

FRANK WRIGHT: But this isn’t a great watershed of tolerance. This is the fact that the reality that we inhabit is so awful that the costs of saying nothing are higher than the costs of speaking out. We have to say something now because it’s getting so bad. Reality everywhere is making the case for people.

The Trans Debate and the Limits of Make-Belief

PETER McCORMACK: But it comes back to your long-term planning. Because there were, for example, the first people who came out against trans people in sports and trans people in prisons and trans people in women’s changing rooms were attacked, viciously attacked, were cancelled, were aggressively stalked and harassed. And they opened the door for other people to actually say, “Actually, this is wrong.” And so it takes a bit of bravery and courage sometimes.

FRANK WRIGHT: I think it was Mumsnet that really moved the needle on that, because I remember I was being babooned by my very small kids at the time in this kind of static caravan up north, and I had a minor epiphany, and I went in and said, “Look, Mumsnet’s mobilized. There’s like 2 million women now saying no, we’re not going to have Theresa May’s Gender Recognition Act.”

You can’t just say this into being. That law, if you don’t remember, would legally protect you if you just said, “I’m a woman,” then you are one. I mean, that’s mad, but that’s transanity, that’s transane. So that’s a differently sane view of the world, if you like.

It is exactly the same, categorically, as a man from Western Africa turning up in Ireland and getting a passport and saying, “I’m Irish.” That’s exactly the same thing. It’s exactly the same as an Algerian or a Pakistani coming to England, getting a passport, saying, “I’m English now, I’m British.” No, you’re not. You’ve got a passport, you’ve got a document. But that’s an essential question. Being a man, being a woman — changeless. That’s an essential question. Being English, being an African, being an Irishman, that can’t be changed by description. There are limits to that.

Liberals don’t like it when you recognize the limits of the power of make-belief, because these are make-beliefs. It’s all makeup. It’s makeup, right? And if you remove the makeup, it’s very ugly underneath. And that’s why they love makeup so much.

Reform, Restore, and the Hope for Change

PETER McCORMACK: So I was getting to the point I was going to ask you about Reform, because there was a period of time—

FRANK WRIGHT: Vade retro Satana.

PETER McCORMACK: Yes, there was a period of time where they were the only hope. And it felt like they had the momentum. It felt like they had the anti-establishment. They were kind of like a ragtag bunch in the Commons. And then there were a couple of incidents — one with Rupert himself, and then—

FRANK WRIGHT: What do you mean, when they tried to get him arrested?

PETER McCORMACK: Yes. And also just the period of the last few months when they’ve tried to recruit anyone who will come from the Conservative Party, where—

FRANK WRIGHT: Or indeed from anywhere in the world.

PETER McCORMACK: Yeah. And it just felt like, “Here we go again, it’s the same.”

FRANK WRIGHT: It looks a lot like the NHS, doesn’t it? We’re basically being sold this thing as a kind of national institution of salvation, but it’s increasingly staffed by migrant labor. But the reason why people attach so much hope to that is because they’ve been so demoralized by a political deadlock that’s taken place throughout our entire lives, you and me.

We’ve lived through a time where we thought there’s no realistic possibility of any change. There’s just no way out. We’ve all seen Adam Curtis’s The Trap. You know that this system was intentionally created to create that belief that there is no alternative. TINA is the acronym for that, like Francis Fukuyama. All that stuff, that this is the end of history, that this is perfect, that there’s something stable and permanent about the liberal system as it imagines itself — when it’s not, in fact. It’s a system of permanent change. Like you said, if you’re a progressive, you have to keep progressing, which means naturally that what you do next year will be more extreme than this year.

PETER McCORMACK: Never get to the point where you go, “Well, we’ve progressed.”

FRANK WRIGHT: But if you use the argument to create turmoil in people’s lives through these mad social movements and current thing crazes, then people get this sense of constant turmoil and instability and disorientation. And so they can never really respond to the power that’s creating all this. Because they’re baffled by the effects, so they’re blinded to the cause of it.

Well, the effects are all so bad now that the sum total of that is to produce the most horrifying consequence for any political elite ever, and that’s to mobilize the common people in recognizing and taking interest in political power, in how they’re ruled, because they can now see the cause of all those bad effects, and it’s the system that rules us.

Do enough people see it? The reality that we inhabit is mobilizing people to do that. Now, it’s not just about the fact that your shopping’s going to go up, that your fuel’s going to go up, heating your house is going to go up whilst the value of your money is going down. It’s not just the fact that many households who actually work have to find several jobs just to stay afloat. They’re not getting on, they’re not investing.

That’s the kind of reality that’s radicalizing people, if you like. They’re saying, “Look, my life isn’t working. How do I make my life work? Why does nothing work? Why does everyone, if I work, talk like a Dalek? Why does customer service culture come out of that terrible telephone tree that treats you like some kind of antibody to be isolated and neutralized?” That culture’s everywhere now. It’s pervasive. If you act like a human being, you’re seen as a threat in that customer service culture.

And so that’s the culture that we have where you live as this kind of alienated individual consumer unit with diminishing rights, no real aspirations, as if you’re lost in this wilderness now, where you just think, well, most people are trying to survive. They haven’t even got any idea about how to get on. It’s desperate. It’s a dignity-free environment, modern life, and in every dimension — from meaning to morality, to what kind of future we have for our children, to whether people even have the time to think about the world when they’re exhausted from just trying to pay the bills.

A Real Crisis That Affects Everyone

PETER McCORMACK: Well, then maybe it’s understandable that people do think short-term like the politicians. If I just—

FRANK WRIGHT: Just one more vote. No, not at all. What this is producing is a deep sense and a real sense of reality, which is that this is a very real crisis and it affects everyone. And that’s why people are taking such an interest in politics, and more and more of them will, because most people would very sensibly spend their entire life never having a single political thought. And that’s a good idea because politics is usually a sewer.

But the reason why people are getting interested in it is because of the damage it’s done to their lives. It doesn’t leave them alone. There’s an ideological message in everything. It’s telling you that everything that is bad for you and your nation and your people and your body and mind is actually good for you. And people have noticed this and they’ve noticed it’s ruining their lives and that the economy and politics aren’t working for them, and so they’re going to do something about it.

PETER McCORMACK: Yeah, look, I’m not sure on that. I think pretty much my whole life I’ve had a recognition of people’s interest in politics, and this back and forth between the left and the right has gone on. I remember my brother and my dad arguing when I was a kid about it. I think it’s always been there.

I think what’s different right now is there is a feeling of existential crisis. And we’re finished if we don’t fix it. But I think that feeling of existential crisis is coming up in both a left and right-wing kind of populist movement. You do have a left-wing populist movement under Polanski and his gang of nutters, and you do have it under Reform and also Restore. And funny enough, I actually think the left-wing populist and the right-wing populist are kind of recognizing the same thing.

Populism, Political Economy, and the Restore Party

FRANK WRIGHT: They’ve just got different answers. I don’t think that populism is a politics. It isn’t. It’s a spasm.

Populism was just basically a reaction against— what populism is and was, and it’s almost played out now because you can see that it’s just fraudulent and it doesn’t have any depth and there’s no point getting interested in it. It won’t help you.

What populism is, is a spasm of rejection of the liberal consensus, the forced consensus of our politics since the end of the Soviet Union, if you want to say that. So you can vote for left liberals or right liberals or extreme liberals, but that’s it. And you’re going to get the same stuff whoever you vote for. That’s it. So it’s a rejection of that system because of the awful reality it’s produced. And people can see that those awful effects, they’re their lives now, and that’s the cause of it.

So they don’t like that. So then you get people like Nigel Farage and you get Donald Trump turn up and they say, look, we hate the system, they hate us. And there’s this big jamboree of kind of genuine hope. Because people are so demoralized, like, oh, thank goodness someone’s finally turned up.

And that’s where it’s really pernicious — that’s where populism really is pernicious — because they don’t deliver and they don’t help you and they don’t help their populations. They make a lot of empty promises and then suddenly you realize they’re not doing anything for you at all. And they won’t, because they’re not genuine people of integrity and they don’t have a politics. They don’t have a serious political economy.

And if you want to know what that is, that’s the relationship between the politics and economic ideas that you have. And one of the fundamental questions of that is one question we’ve never heard all our lives: what’s the economy for?

Now, under the economy that we’ve had, that we’ve lived through, you and I, we have been increasingly for the economy. We’re basically there to be consumed by it, and our lives are meaningful to it to make the line go up and so on. Fundamentally, the economy isn’t for us, we’re for it. And it’s an international model too. It’s a global economy, remember that.

So you don’t really matter as a person or a place or as a culture or a people or a history or tradition or a religion or meaning or even a civilization. We’re just a global, borderless bazaar of increasingly mutually hostile strangers all hunting a bargain. And that’s the system. That’s what the economy is. That’s where the politics comes from for that — to tell you that that’s utopia. Well, it isn’t. It’s a nightmare.

So the question that I would pose is, do you think populism has an answer to that? And it doesn’t. It’s basically just a bunch of grifters. So I’m not a populist. Restore isn’t a populist party. It has a serious political economy that is looking immediately to rescue the nation, if you like, put the fire out. But then to build a system that genuinely does restore the national resilience of the infrastructure, industry, and energy basis of the country, and thereby providing real jobs and real dignity to people’s lives through long-term strategic planning.

Reform vs. Restore: The Voter Confusion

PETER MCCORMACK: No, I look, I agree, but there’s a lot of voters out there who are confused between the difference between Reform and Restore. There are a lot of people who are now Reform voters are looking at Restore and saying, you’re going to split the vote, you’re going to hand the election to the Labour Party, you’re going to hand it to Burnham. They can’t fundamentally see the difference between Rupert and Nigel, and they can’t fundamentally see the difference between the policies because they look similar to somebody who’s looking at surface level.

FRANK WRIGHT: I think the party’s 80 days old, and I think what I found by talking to people like working-class scum like myself, they very much take to it when they realize, even if they have never heard of you before, a lot of people will be like, oh wow, really? This is it. They immediately do see the difference.

PETER MCCORMACK: But my son, if he was here, he would be voting on the Conservative side of things. But if you speak to one of his friends who’s maybe enamored by Zak Polanski and you ask them why they’re voting or why they like these leaders, their complaints about what’s wrong in society are generally the same. Cannot get a house, everything’s too expensive, society seems unfair, it doesn’t matter how hard you work, the state takes more. They’re basically saying the same things. And it’s how do you convince those who think Polanski and more of the same be kind socialist movement is the answer? How do you convince them no, actually what we actually need is—

The Green Party’s Politics of Vibes

FRANK WRIGHT: What you can tell them — you can see why Polanski is doing well because, as someone said — I think I’ll try and remember who it was because it’s a comment deserving of attribution — “you lost to a bunch of hippie women” was what someone said to Matt Goodwin about the Gorton and Denton by-election. It was a really cutting remark because it was true. It might have been Parvini. It was very funny. I love Nima. Well, he does come out with bangers on the daily, as he says in his little bio, and it’s fair enough. That was a banger and it was lol, but it’s also true.

Now, why do you lose to dancing hippie women? There’s a serious point in there, as there often is when he makes jokes. And it’s this: the Green Party’s mobilized vibes. When people feel bad because of bad things, if you offer them feel-good but really a program that’s going to make everything worse, they won’t think about the program, they’ll think about the vibes.

As I said to you before, one of the reasons why that technique works — let’s have people dancing, let’s have bright colors, let’s have a party atmosphere — our political economy is insane and it will destroy the nation by collapsing the borders. We’ll just be overrun with billions of people from the Third World. We will die out.

As Éric Zemmour, who I think coined the term Rémigration, said, “le tiers-mondisation de notre monde” — the Third Worldisation of our world. Now that’s not an invidious remark, it’s just a statement of fact. And that’s what the Green Party’s policies would do. And I don’t want to live in that.

I don’t see the wisdom in unscrewing my front door and applauding a horde of strangers from every part of the world into my house to loot it and make it their own and eventually expel me and my children. That’s effectively what we’re doing to the nation under those policies. It’s mad.

Furthermore, if you look at the standard rate of increase in violent crime, sexual crime against women and children across Europe, which directly correlates to unlimited legal and illegal migration, then you can see that there’s a serious danger to exactly those women who were out there dancing in their hippie skirts celebrating policies that will see them much more likely to be raped and murdered. That’s an ugly thing to say, but it’s true.

Why do they do it then? Because it’s obviously clearly irrational and it violates the policies of, if you like, the essential idea of nations. Now, if you believe in God as I do, that God created the nations, and obviously they’re distinct from one another. And the social teaching of the church and the moral justice of Aquinas and Saint Augustine says that you have a duty to defend your people and keep your nation secure. Which is a principle that also comes from Aristotle. So that’s the kind of classical 2,000-year wisdom of, yes, we need to look after our people. It is a just thing to do, and God blesses it. It’s not evil at all. It’s just sane.

The fact we’re in a position having to defend sanity, basic sanity — no, I don’t want my country to be overrun by people who see it as somewhere to plunder, and understandably they’re out for themselves.

PETER MCCORMACK: Are you talking about the politicians? Are you talking about the—

FRANK WRIGHT: I’m talking about the extremely attractive opportunity for people from very distant, less functional nations to come here and make good for themselves, probably at the expense of the people who are here. What about our rights? That never gets mentioned either. That’s obviously mad if you’re going to let that happen.

If you’re going to celebrate the idea that yes, I want violent crime rates against women and children to go up — which is an obviously uncomfortable but ugly fact, but a fact nonetheless — that too is mad. Who says, “I want to destroy my nation and I want more crime against children and women”? That’s what these women are effectively dancing for when you take away the vibes. So you can see how dangerous that is as a political economy. That’s the kind of world it’s going to produce.

And yet, why does it work? I’ll tell you why it works. Because if you turn the music off, those women feel bad. They can’t have their vibes anymore. And if you say, oh look, that’s going to destroy the world that permits you to go and dance in the street in the first place without being raped and murdered, and they say, oh, you’re a terrible person for saying that. But by the time they realize that’s true, it’d be too late.

Now what you’re doing there is you’re robbing them of an illusion by which they live. Part of the meaning of their lives and their idea of themselves as a good person — it gives them status, it gives them purpose in their lives. That’s what a belief system does for people. So you must be gentle and kind to them when you tell them, no, what you believe in here is not going to produce the feel-good vibes outcome that you want to live in. In fact, it’s going to destroy it.

Family, Motherhood, and the Cost of Delayed Choices

PETER MCCORMACK: Whereas if you’d have just been at home and looking after a baby, that maybe would have given the feelings that you look—

FRANK WRIGHT: Even that’s a terrible thing.

PETER MCCORMACK: I know I’m not meant to say that, and I probably get it.

FRANK WRIGHT: No, I’m going to tell you the truth about this. We had kids late in life because we were people like that who were misguided fools at one point, and thank God we had them when we did because it would have been terrible. But in my wife’s life now, there are lots of women around her age who have now lost the ability to have children, and it is an unspoken but obvious tragedy in their lives.

Now, this isn’t about insulting women or anything like that. It’s just awful. It’s just awful. It’s heartbreaking. You look into a woman’s face — it’s not every woman, I’m not saying it’s every woman, but I’ve seen this often enough in my wife’s personal friends and people that I know myself, women that I know myself — you can see it’s too late now. What have I got, you know?

PETER MCCORMACK: Well, look, Frank, when I was in my late 30s and I was single and I was dating, I was also dating women in their late 30s.

FRANK WRIGHT: You were just looking for the right man.

PETER MCCORMACK: They didn’t f* around. On very many dates — I haven’t had that many dates, but a large percentage of the dates — they’re asking you on the first date, will you have more children and will you get married again? Because they don’t want to go — they don’t invest in a second date, third date, fourth date if you’re, by the way, saying I don’t want any more kids.

And you try and get to the bottom of this. Why don’t you have kids? Well, I went to uni and then I wanted my career and I got my career and then I left it a bit late and didn’t meet the right guy or met the right guy. And we — you know, we’ve taken that away from them.

I’ve already said to my daughter, and that pisses some people off, if you want to have kids, you need to be thinking about that in your early 20s and be ready for it. And I, as your father, will support you. And don’t wait until your 30s. It could be too late.

And even just having that conversation, there’s going to be some women who won’t listen to this, but just say they stumbled across this or this gets cut and put on TikTok, they’re going to go, that’s a man, shouldn’t be talking about women. You don’t understand. You don’t understand what women have fought for, blah blah. I know what’s going to come, but I’ve seen what you’ve seen. I’ve seen in the eyes of people I’ve been on dates with, and I had two kids and I didn’t want anymore.

FRANK WRIGHT: And it’s like, no, look, there’s something fundamentally poisonous and evil about the redesignation of family life, motherhood, fatherhood, as some kind of prison to be escaped from. The reason why I’m so interested in being a critic of the liberal ideas — I was a liberal, right?

The Liberal System and Its Discontents

PETER MCCORMACK: I didn’t believe in it. You’re a reformed liberal.

FRANK WRIGHT: Oh, look, I mean that in the broader sense, yeah, actually from the spectrum. But also, I would remind you that conservatives are liberals too.

PETER MCCORMACK: Oh no, I’m saying it coming from this— I came from the same place.

FRANK WRIGHT: But that’s why I take an interest in that. Now, if you look at this, if you look at the way that our lives have been formed and our values have been shaped, they haven’t produced the paradise on earth that the liberal ideology said it would. Liberation in the sense of women’s liberation— women have been liberated from womanhood. You know, you’ve got this idea of the family as a prison, that children are a ball and chain, that you should farm them off to some stranger immediately, that they can be translated into another series of consumer transactions because nothing should get in the way of you and what you want to do. And then you realize suddenly there’s no real meaning in your life.

Surrogacy, Commodification, and the Common Good

FRANK WRIGHT: Well, there is that sense of pathological altruism, and I’ve come across this in this campaign that I’ve been doing internationally to criminalise surrogacy, because surrogacy is basically the hire of women to produce babies for sale, which is obscene. And it came about because in 1993, a court case was conducted in California, in the United States, to establish the right to buy a human life. Now, as mad as that sounds, that’s why surrogacy is possible now. All forms of it are basically commercial, despite what people tell you. The United Nations report established that, saying there’s no difference between paying costs and buying them because they’re effectively the same amount of money.

So that’s what’s going on. And when you look into that, you see, well, look, where’s the bottom? Where do we say, oh, look, we’ve fallen this far, we can’t go any further? There is no limit. There is no limit to the degradation of human life if the only right is fundamentally the right to buy. If you replace the value of human life with price, that’s it.

And you can see that when I do these campaigns, I talk to feminists. I talk to people who wouldn’t be my political friends, who look at my problematic haircut, and they see my terrible timeline on Twitter, and they see me as a religious bigot and extremist. But nonetheless, they and I, the sane ones in my camp and their camp— because there are people who object to this on both sides of the argument, people who criticize me from my side, there are people who criticize those campaigners from theirs— for us talking to each other. I said, look, this is a common evil. “We all recognize it’s evil, if we come together we can stop it.” That’s a pragmatic common good and I believe in the common good.

I don’t believe in making bitter enemies from people who I profoundly disagree with. I believe that we should make realistic compromise with anyone that we can to stop obvious evils happening to people that degrade people’s lives generally. And if you permit— this is a very important point— if you permit human life to become a commodity, something to be bought, sold, hired, and traded, then our lives, all of our lives, are meaningless. They mean nothing. I mean nothing but money.

Hasn’t it become that already though?

PETER MCCORMACK: Yes, it has. Aren’t we all servants of the banks now?

Sovereignty, the Deep State, and the Liberal System

FRANK WRIGHT: Yes, we are. The liberal system was effectively created by the same kind of people who instituted the Federal Reserve to create the debt system so they could print endless money and finance mad social revolutions in your country to replace your civilization with itself. That’s what the liberal idea is. It’s a political economy that replaces everything else with itself in every area of life. And that’s why they love this consumer idea, because it is amoral, acultural, ahistorical, anational, and a-religious. It’s got absolutely no meaning anywhere.

It’s the chickenability of the human condition. You know, the reason why chickens are universally popular is because it doesn’t violate anyone’s cultural or religious prohibitions. And so it’s like the universal meat. And that’s what we are being turned into, a universal meat in a universal sausage machine to be pumped into little casings through a series of light industrial sheds that we are born in, eventually expire in as well.

PETER MCCORMACK: “You’ll own nothing and be happy.” Well, that’s utopia, isn’t it?

FRANK WRIGHT: But you remember most of this stuff came from the corporations too. Look at Larry Fink of BlackRock, sponsoring DEI and ESG and so on. They quietly wound that down a couple of years ago, but it’s private energy now. The damage has been done, as it were. But as I said to you, these rights are apt to change. What they say is morally imperative changes from one time to the next, and the reason it changes is because it becomes more or less convenient to the ruling elite to promote these ideas at the time.

PETER MCCORMACK: Well, so who has more power? Is it Larry Fink or Keir Starmer?

FRANK WRIGHT: Well, of course it’s Larry Fink.

PETER MCCORMACK: So who really— I mean, does this Parliament even get to run our country, or are they running it at the whims of the asset managers?

FRANK WRIGHT: Again, the question of sovereignty is fundamental to any serious project to take up the duties of the state and to save the nation. Now, one of the Blairite things that happened was that you found the sovereignty of the parliamentary power— so the sovereignty of Parliament, Cabinet Office, the Prime Minister’s Office— was dissolved into a series of NGOs. Largely, the power of the state now exists outside the state, and it exists in these, if you like, liberal ideologies that are NGOs, non-governmental organizations. And the purpose of doing that is to make sure that your political ideology survives every election.

So no matter who actually gets elected, you’ve got institutions like the Bank of England, and you’ve got institutions like policy groups and so on, and the public bodies that are never going to listen to you, they’re not going to work for you. And as you saw with Liz Truss, will turn around and actually sabotage the highest office in the land because they want to get rid of you.

And if you don’t think that’s true, there’s a serious and credible threat of this happening in France and perhaps even in Germany, with people adjacent to the European Central Bank and the National Bank saying that their last resort to defend the liberal system from the Rassemblement National and the Alternative für Deutschland is to cause a bond run in the markets to collapse confidence in these people and try and get them out, because the liberal system’s obviously finished. It can’t win elections fairly. And the reason why it’s unpopular is because of the deeply unpopular things it’s done to all our lives.

And so they’re trying to do two things. There’s Tony Blair’s digital ID nightmare, and he said for a number of years now, oh, the real reason for this is to stop populism. So basically to stop parties, stop you voting for anyone but us.

PETER MCCORMACK: Yeah, and doesn’t his son have a digital ID company or some involvement? And doesn’t his daughter-in-law get the job?

FRANK WRIGHT: Are you politely suggesting there might be a bit of business double dealing in this?

PETER MCCORMACK: I’m not saying these people are corrupt. I’m just saying there are some coincidences that seem to be popping up.

FRANK WRIGHT: Do you know what? If you look at Tony Blair’s extraordinary fortune, I think there was a conversation between Ehud Barak and Jeffrey Epstein that remarked upon his unusual ability to create money. Now, if Jeffrey Epstein and Ehud Barak are saying that you’re a bit dodgy in the way you make money, what does that say about you?

PETER MCCORMACK: I wonder what is his net worth?

FRANK WRIGHT: Tony Blair. Look, let’s not make any allegations about the Dark Lord. Let’s just leave it at this. It’s a mysterious mystery that can never be solved.

PETER MCCORMACK: I want to know his net worth. It’s estimated that generally brought around £60 million. Not bad for a Prime Minister.

FRANK WRIGHT: Nonsense. He’s got more money than that, hasn’t he? I mean, that’s what they were going on about.

Restaffing the State and the Deep Bureaucracy

PETER MCCORMACK: But therefore, for someone like Rupert Lowe, he has to do more than just win an election. He has to root out a cancer at the heart of the establishment.

FRANK WRIGHT: This is the point. Now, if you look at people who were— there were serious people involved with Donald Trump, especially around the second election. There were people who did things like the Center for Renewing America, the Heritage Foundation, and they have this project of recruiting, I think, up to 70, maybe 80,000 people to restaff the state because they knew that if they didn’t get rid of the civil servants and, if you like, the deep state bureaucrats, then they wouldn’t be able to govern. And you have the same problem here.

The same problem here is that our ostensibly impartial civil service is not impartial, they’re highly politicized. And that’s more obvious in some departments than others. And you can see how heavily involved they are, if you like, in the kind of rainbow Bolshevism. They openly display it. And most of the lanyard class have kind of Bolshevist-coded lanyards on, don’t they? Usually kind of rainbow hues and so on. So you can see that that’s just interchangeable with the identity of these organizations.

Patients drive up to any major hospital, you’d be lucky to see our national flag outside any of them. But you’ll probably see the pelican crossing, you will see the banner of Satan outside there, the one with the— I don’t know what it means, but there’s the kind of rainbow flag and it’s got that triangle on it, and then there’s this kind of circle at the thing, and I’ve never dared ask what the brown circle’s for, but for me I just like to think of it as the pitiless eye of Sauron himself.

So you see the institution that’s ostensibly there for the nation, it’s a national institution, it isn’t. It’s flying an enemy flag. It’s flying the flag of an enemy ideology that is itself actually deeply unhealthy, that involves the mutilation and sterilization of children and so on, and the various other things about that lifestyle that you can read in Gabriel Rotello’s book.

If you ever want to read a book that so harms you that you feel like Lady Macbeth, you will never be clean again, read Gabriel Rotello’s book, called Sexual Ecology. It’s a gay man’s account of the AIDS crisis and what happened, and it is a serious corrective to the misleading narratives of that, and it’s absolutely— well, you won’t be the same again. It’s a truth bomb written from the point of view of a man in the lifestyle, and he wrote it as a warning to his fellow gay men.

So that’s a foundational book, and it was a man called Kevin Michael Grace, a Canadian Catholic and journalist, a very wise man, who put me onto that. And put me on to a lot of things actually. Very helpful. I’ve been fortunate to have— blessed with some very good friends who are far less foolish than I am.

On Liberty, Identity, and the Future of Britain

PETER MCCORMACK: I’m intrigued to see your bookcase. Frank, I buy a lot of books, I read a lot of books. I have no ability to recall and re-quote from these books the way you do. It’s a very— oh, I’m not, I just make it all up. No, you don’t. And the way you’re able to build strong arguments that clearly span a lot of different texts that you’ve read to give yourself an understanding of the world where it is. It’s an impressive quality and take the compliment.

FRANK WRIGHT: My life has been a series of humiliating mistakes and realizing them and realizing that I was profoundly mistaken in the way that I saw the world. And of course, that comes at some great cost. And then if you develop a sense of principle, then you realize, well, I have to now adhere to what is true rather than these misguided beliefs that I have. And that comes at a financial and a career cost. And then eventually, you either sink or swim.

And so what happened to me was when I realized that I couldn’t in good conscience continue to basically bilk the taxpayer by becoming an education consultant, and when I was profoundly heartbroken— and it really did upset me what happened to the Army— I just thought, I can’t do this.

PETER MCCORMACK: But is it also liberating? I listened to this interview Owen Benjamin did with Tucker Carlson recently, and I found Tucker’s— I did an interview yesterday, I mentioned I found his not interested. I feel like he’s starting to see the world for what it is. Well, but Owen Benjamin was canceled, and his life since he’s been canceled seems pretty good. He seems pretty liberated. I think it’s liberating to be able to say whatever you want.

FRANK WRIGHT: Oh, it is. But I said to my wife at the time, I said, look, there’s a chance they will keep my commission open for 2 years because I was a soldier and I went for a commission and I got it. I just Dick said, well, we’ll defer it for you. So I said, look, I’m going to try writing, and I will give it a good shot. And she says, okay, what are you going to do? And I said, well, if I’m going to do this, I don’t want to contribute to the slop wave. I will tell the truth and shame the devil.

So there’s obviously going to be— and she was delighted to hear that when I said the word— then I may be arrested. She’s like, oh no. But bear in mind, this was about the time that the Ukraine war had just begun, there’s COVID just winding down. We knew people who— obviously it was a terribly febrile time and it was very uncertain, very dark, very icy time, very chilly atmosphere about the intrusion of the state, and a dangerous time really to be a bit of a dissident.

And so if you’re not a fan of the politics of national suicide and you come out with things like that at that time, you probably expect to get a knock on the door. Did you? No, not at all. And that’s another thing, it didn’t happen. Might do now, don’t care. Because I developed the idea that you have a duty. Not everyone is at liberty to discharge that duty because of the significant risk to their livelihood. But if I’ve got myself into a position where I can speak for my people and their real concerns and I’ve resigned myself to the fact that I don’t care what it costs me. Someone has to do it. But then you are liberated.

PETER MCCORMACK: You’re probably— you’re a free man.

FRANK WRIGHT: Yeah, but it comes at the recognition that people may destroy you, in every way.

PETER MCCORMACK: But an ideology might destroy your soul. If I don’t—

FRANK WRIGHT: There’s no real time for the kind of luxury of reflection. We have to do this now or we’re finished. And so that’s why I’m doing it.

PETER MCCORMACK: And what does finished mean?

FRANK WRIGHT: What does finished mean? It means that within— by the time my son is my age, he’s 9 now and I’m 52, he will be living in a country where he is an ethnic minority. And that will continue on that trajectory if the policies that have produced it aren’t stopped and reversed. And then eventually we’ll just die out.

The Ethnic Minority Question

PETER MCCORMACK: Explain to me why that matters, because this is— I’ve had this conversation in a couple of pubs now where I’ve opened with the conversation about how do you feel about immigration? And I’ve walked step by step through to the point of becoming an ethnic minority. And even saying those words to some people frightens them.

FRANK WRIGHT: This is because to acknowledge that reality it sets an alarm off in their heads where they think, oh, I’m a racist, I’m a bad person, people might hear me, someone might record me on their phone and then I’ll lose my job. These are all real concerns, but some of them aren’t real concerns. Some of them are because of the cop in the head, or if you like, what Walter Lippmann called in 1921 the pseudo-reality by which the elites rule you.

And this is what he said, he said about doing this— in an increasingly democratized and liberalized world, we can create a pseudo-reality, a picture to put into people’s minds, and we can change that picture, and that’s how we’ll rule them, and we’ll create their desires and their beliefs and their concept of good and evil. And that is what you’re seeing in the pub.

Whereas if you recognize that that is simply a means of making your elections look legitimate when there’s no real choice on the table, ever. If you realize that’s a means of just selling you a series of false gods, which it also does, sells you idols. Then you realize that that’s unfortunate. And although I feel for you and I think you’re a casualty, you’re mistaken.

And this is too late to entertain those mistaken beliefs because these aren’t beliefs, they’re facts. And if you have to explain to someone why it matters that you, your people, your ancestors will be wiped out in your own homeland, if you have to have that conversation with them, it wasn’t really worth having the conversation. Because if you cannot recognize the significance of that, that is an inevitable reality if we don’t reverse what’s been done to us. If you don’t see that that’s significant, then I don’t think it’s worth talking to you about it. I think we should step over you and act regardless.

PETER MCCORMACK: Well, let me push back on that, because stepping over you and marching on regardless might require us to end in a situation of conflict. If you don’t build— just bear with me— a big enough tent. The reason why I think it’s worth having those conversations, the reason why I invited Narendra Kaur— by the way, I’ve invited plenty of people from the left. They either do not reply or I’ve had 3 agree to— we’ve agreed the date and they’ve not turned up for various reasons.

But the reason I think it’s worth pursuing it is because I think this level of conversation where you are discussing the ethnic rights and the ethnic people of the country, I don’t think there’s a big enough tent that will vote for that in the democratic system tomorrow. I think the Overton Window is shifting, but I think if you can explain it in a way and also explain the way you say, by the way, they do this in other countries, in Pakistan, they have 10 seats in their parliament for minority religions. You start to explain why.

FRANK WRIGHT: Pakistan’s gone about removing 2 million people from Pakistan. They have a large-scale mass deportation program. That doesn’t get any press in the West because if you talk about large-scale mass deportations, you’re a kind of terrible white man who wants to do awful things to brown people. But when you realize that people who aren’t white do this to preserve their own people as well, you realize it’s just sane.

PETER MCCORMACK: Yeah, but I think that’s why you need to try and have this conversation.

FRANK WRIGHT: Oh yeah, I understand what you mean. But what I’m saying to you is that if you— I think that it’s quite an extreme position that somebody would simply refuse to recognize that there’s any significance at all in me and you and our people vanishing. I mean, that’s really quite far gone.

PETER MCCORMACK: If we were a rhino, they would protect us.

FRANK WRIGHT: Well, perhaps they would. Perhaps they’d protect Tufty the red squirrel. But by the way, what I mean to say by step over and march on, I don’t mean to violently suppress people. And I do not approve of people who advocate violence or talk of civil war. These people are usually people with no direct personal experience of fighting or violence. No one’s ever tried to kill them. They haven’t seen anything like this. I understand their concerns, but that’s reckless talk and that is the kind of thing that responsible politics is there to prevent ever happening.

It is a serious threat over time. We’re not there yet. But one of the reasons why we need to take sensible, managed, moderate, and humane action is to prevent the worst possible outcomes from materialising. Because if we simply act like the Three Wise Monkeys— oh, we won’t see this evil, oh, we won’t hear that evil, oh, you can’t speak that evil— then evil will be everywhere and it’ll be too late and we’ll inhabit it and then you won’t have any political order or control.

Why Culture and Identity Matter

PETER MCCORMACK: Well, there’s arguably evil is everywhere at the moment and there are solid arguments that it is too late. Can you turn this around? And let me even ask you why it matters, like, why does it matter? Why does it matter that we preserve the culture of this— why can’t it evolve into something multicultural? I’m not asking you because I need convincing, I’m asking you to tell other people.

FRANK WRIGHT: First of all, it’s not going to evolve into anything.

PETER MCCORMACK: That’s an egregious phrase that I’d reject. You understand the question I’m asking.

FRANK WRIGHT: Change. Why is it not— why is it better to have your own home than it is to have a bazaar full of strangers? I think that makes its own argument. I think that if you want to have a home, then I think that’s a sensible and sane thing to want.

PETER MCCORMACK: But some people want a home full of strangers.

FRANK WRIGHT: The simple thing that I would say is this, is that from the point of view of being sane, if they don’t go home, our children will never have one.

PETER MCCORMACK: What do you mean they won’t have one? How will they not have a home? They’re here. Because, because—

FRANK WRIGHT: Being here— if being here is almost interchangeable in every dimension with being anywhere, then you’re nowhere, and then there is no place like home.

PETER MCCORMACK: So it’s actually about maintaining a culture and an identity of a country.

FRANK WRIGHT: This is who we are. This is our people, this is our land, it belongs to us. This is something that we don’t own. We are the stewards of our homeland and our nation, which was won for us by our ancestors, where our civilization took root and was fostered.

If you take little samples from people, from their DNA, even to this day you can find out where they come from, to a very precise degree, regions of the home nations, like Ireland and Scotland and Wales, and which part even of Wessex or North Yorkshire or Lanarkshire or Carmarthenshire you come from. And that’s possible even today, and that’s possible because we’ve been here for thousands of years. This is who we are.

There’s a concept called autochthony, right, which auto is like yourself and chthonic means from the earth. And there’s a dimension of human meaning that is about being connected to the soil and the place, and that that’s who you are. It’s not just about some irrational feeling or a sense of sentiment for postcards. This really is our land, and this is where our people come from.

And if we start to degrade that, and then it just becomes, if you like, some kind of safari for illegal sexual adventures for some people, or a land of economic opportunity for another bunch of people, if it’s just a sort of bargain to be consumed by anyone who can get here, then that isn’t really a— as I said, I want to live in a nation, not in a market. There’s a difference. That’s the difference.

PETER MCCORMACK: How do you sell that to a big enough tent?

The Meaning Behind the Movement

FRANK WRIGHT: Everyone likes to have a home. And if we all try and live in each other’s, it’s going to get rather unpleasant, isn’t it? It’s a basic fact of life.

The reason why I think it’s not going to be a difficult sell is because it isn’t people like me, it isn’t people like, even like Restore, that’s going to have to sell. The reason why Restore is surging so much, the reason why it’s so full of people, people from all walks of life, people who are so obviously sincere and dedicated to a higher purpose than themselves — they’re genuinely motivated by servant leadership duty, and by their sense of obligation to the future and to the past. They’re people who aren’t selfish. They’re good people, right?

The reason why those people exist, the reason why the party is doing so well, the reason why it’s becoming so popular, and it will continue to do so in my belief, is not because of people like me. It’s because we can see that these things that are valuable in life are being destroyed, and once they go, they can’t be replaced. And that’s what gives meaning to our lives.

It’s not political propaganda or little adverts on the news that’s going to do that. It’s reality. People can see what they’re losing now, and they know that when it’s gone, it’s gone forever. And that means more to them than whether or not they’re going to even be able to keep their job, because their reputation might be at stake for being seen handing out leaflets for this. They might be framed as an extremist. They might be pilloried. There’ve been people who’ve been threatened with assault in the street for simply knocking on people’s doors and talking to them about a registered political party. I’ve seen that myself. It’s terrible.

But people are willing to take these risks because there’s far more at stake than their own personal interests and even their own lives. This is why I trust that party, because it thinks about things in terms of the civilizational timescale, not what’s in it for me, not what’s in it for us, but what’s going to happen to our beautiful nation and to the people that come after us if we don’t stop this now. And that’s an argument that’s being made by reality, not by me.

And it’s a critical time. Yes, but that’s that. It’s that realization by people. Look, it’s not working. Not only is the economy and the politics not working for us, it’s destroying everything of value in our lives. And it isn’t extremist. It’s not even right-wing to say this. It’s just basically saying, so let’s stop the politics of national suicide. That’s a decent idea. If you like, it just looks like, let’s restore some sanity and reality and common sense to our lives.

And I would strongly advocate for the return of dignity to the lives of our people, especially to the long-neglected and demonised white working class, which is where I come from. Because I’ve seen people, my friends, wounded, killed in wars, and left to die deaths of despair from drugs and dereliction in desolate places that were once not just okay but nice places to live, and now they’re awful, and we’ve just been forgotten.

And you go through these empty, wind-blown, desolate town centers just full of filth and strangers, and there’s nothing there for you. There’s no meaning or control in your life. There’s a great song by Morrissey I went to see the other month, and it was really quite striking because I loved him when I was younger. And he’s got this song called Nobody Loves Us, and it’s heartbreaking. And there’s no one like him that’s consistently written, if you like, rhapsodized the isolation and, if you like, almost good-humored permanent despair of the plight of the working class in this country than Morrissey. He’s our poet, and he’s sung our song for years.

PETER MCCORMACK: Wasn’t that who Labour were meant to be there for? Wasn’t that who the Labour Party were meant to be?

The Betrayal of the Working Class

FRANK WRIGHT: I joined the Labour Party when I was 15. My dad was in a mine and he obviously did things like that, and I believed in it and I thought it was for us, and I got into the history of it and everything like that.

When you saw people like Mandelson come on, you saw in 2003 he transferred the funding of the Labour Party from the trades unions to billionaires. You’ve got people like Trevor Chin and so on now, they’ve obviously got foreign interests as well, the Zionist billionaires. Mandelson did that, look it up. That happened at the same time as the cash-for-honours scandal of Lord Levy. So that was who got to say what the Labour Party was about and what it was for.

And they said, oh well, we need to modernize, we’ll get rid of the block vote and stuff. But basically that party was made for the working man. That’s why it’s called the Labour Party. And this party went on to remove the industry. It continued the kind of Thatcherite destruction of industry and the concentration of our lives into these miserable, lanyard-policed make-work email jobs with no dignity in them, instead of real jobs that would’ve really built the country, where you have developed the kind of skills that can never be taken away from you.

Like my uncle was a fitter and he could make fittings out of pipes, like proper copper pipes and that. To watch him do it, and he was proud of his work, you know, when he’d set it all out. Plastic now, anyone can do it. Everything’s replaceable. There’s no skill, there’s no trade.

There was an Oakeshott lecture between John Gray and Maurice Glasman, and I met Maurice Glasman at that ARC thing. He was the only decent man on stage. And John Gray said, “The problem with our economy is we’ve got a knowledge economy in which no one knows anything.” And Glasman goes, “Yeah, no one knows how to make anything either.” The enshittification of everything.

What’s been subtracted from our lives — you pay for these work permits for nonexistent jobs that probably don’t, maybe even shouldn’t exist. That’s your degree. You pay for that with debt by becoming a debt slave. You become indentured when you’re 17, 18. And so you become habituated to being in debt all your life. And what have you done that for? Because they’ve made the degree be, if you like, the barrier that you can’t pass to get a job. But once you get that degree, you realize there aren’t the jobs that you hoped for. And so where are you then? You’re still in debt. And then you realize they haven’t actually transferred you any useful knowledge in your life. Oh well, I don’t really know anything, can’t really do anything. Oh dear, can I make anything? Do I have any practical skills? No.

What’s been subtracted from our lives by our political economy is so much knowledge, so much understanding, capability, self-respect, dignity, the meaning of our lives. When you look at it like that, you see this is a huge crime against us. It’s a civilizational crime. It’s so big that you can’t even name it. We used to lead the world in industry and innovation and human capital and so on, and it’s impoverished us to this point where we’re in debt. We get in debt to end up knowing nothing and being incapable of doing anything. And it’s astonishing when you see it on that scale.

And that’s our people, and I care about that. And it’s heartbreaking because I’ve watched people’s lives spiral down without any meaning or control into an endless void. And then they end up dead from a drug overdose, or someone smacks them in the face like they did to a lad at school. I remember him now, in the Scouts. It’s heartbreaking. And he died because his skull got broken for nothing because he had nothing better to do with his life than try and sink himself into drugs and booze. And he was a good lad and I loved him.

PETER MCCORMACK: We lost meaning.

FRANK WRIGHT: Yeah, there’s nothing for him, there’s nothing there, nothing at all, nothing whatsoever. And so this isn’t just about I want to look good in the polls or let’s get a great public image or that. If you come from somewhere like that and you know people like this and you’ve seen that with your life, like I don’t own a house. You know, I’ve got no meaningful chance of doing that. There’s just no chance of it. You just give up. It’s just unrealistic. It’s not going to happen, right? And that’s just the way it is for a lot of people like that. Most people are just trying to survive, and it’s not good enough, and it didn’t have to be like this.

PETER MCCORMACK: But fighting that economic machine, that debt machine, the distraction system of the asset managers around the world —

The Coming Crisis and the Opportunity for Change

FRANK WRIGHT: Well, you see, the happy days are here because if you look at the crisis like this, the crisis is going to get worse. The economic crisis is going to get worse. Political crisis is deadlock and paralysis. They know they’re finished, right? And this means, yeah, it’s going to be hard for us. But what this means is the depth of this crisis is going to be so bad that it gives you the opportunity to change it, because people will see for themselves this is just not what — it’s probably going to collapse.

Everyone’s got that sense now. There’s an increasing looming black cloud on the horizon and there’s some storm coming. They don’t know what it is, but they have this terrible feeling. That’s the feeling that’s precipitating the moment for large-scale, profound political and economic change, because we will all be realizing very soon that something’s very seriously wrong. And if we don’t change, we’re finished. And it doesn’t matter whether you like me or not, whether you agree with what you think my politics are or not, because I genuinely am for the common good and not for some mad political ideology.

PETER MCCORMACK: You’d get on well with my Bitcoin friends.

FRANK WRIGHT: Well, you see, the thing is, that’s what we need. We need a rational, sane, decent, humane, and genuinely long-term plan to rescue the nation and rebuild it. Not some vanity project. Not some personal ideology. Not some reaction. Not some spasm in the polls.

To just say, oh look, we’re not them — it’s not good enough to come before the people of Britain at this point, at this serious crisis when we’re threatened really with collapse and even annihilation. It’s not good enough to come before the people and say, oh look, vote for us, we’re not Labour, we’re not the Tories, isn’t that great? That’s empty. It’s another empty promise and it’s not going to deliver for us. And we’ll just fall further down.

There’s a book from the mid-20th century by T.S. Eliot called Notes Towards the Definition of Culture, where he attempted a very difficult project of trying to define what a culture is. And he was good at it, but in it he said this one thing. He said, “In my life I’ve seen the standards of our culture intellectually and morally fall so far,” and he’d heard people often remark that, oh, surely it can’t go further, as if it’s just going to hit some bottom. But Eliot made a very important point. He said it’s not going to bottom out. There is no bottom. There is no limit to how far down man can fall if he doesn’t choose to stop it himself. And we have that feeling of free fall building in the population now, and we know that if we don’t stop falling, we’ll disappear.

PETER MCCORMACK: What did you see on the streets of Makerfield when you spoke to people? Genuinely, like, the mixture of people you spoke to?

Canvassing for Restore: Doorstep Conversations

FRANK WRIGHT: Well, to be honest, I was surprised, given how febrile life can be, that people didn’t come out howling at us and so on. You know, one or two people were unwilling to tell you who they’d vote for because, you know, that’s what you do. You say, “Hello, have you heard about us? Are you going to— do you know there’s an election on? And have you thought about voting for anyone? Would you mind telling us who it is?”

And there’s like, well, sometimes they’re quite free and easy about it, sometimes they’re not. But you found that there’s a lot of people, even who— because it’s the North, and I’m going to say this, people are nice. Yeah, you know, so they’ll tell you. And even if they said, “Well, listen, love, I’m going to vote, I’m a Labour voter, but I’m going to tell you this.” And a lot of them said this, right? I didn’t prompt them or anything. They said, “Well, basically Andy Burnham’s just using us.” And they don’t like that. And I’d say something like, “Well, that’s just machine politics, isn’t it?” And they’d say, “Yeah, well, it’s not good enough, is it? So I’m undecided now.”

So there’s a lot of that. I don’t think the numbers for Labour are as hard as they would be, because Labour’s a very highly developed— even though they’re not really Blairites, a lot of them anymore, because it’s full of— you’ve got like a kind of Green faction. You’ve got like a Maurice Glasman faction with McSweeneyites and so on, Shabaniites. And you’ve got like the kind of old Blairites still left, you know, Burnham’s a bit of a Blairite. You’ve got a collection of factions and they don’t really agree with each other either. So there’s a kind of internal power struggle going on, but like they’re still very good at this kind of electioneering.

So they’re not going to tell you that their vote’s softer than it really is. But what I think they’re doing is they’re showing you the people that would traditionally vote Labour as the actual lead figure. But when you talk to those people on the doorstep, they are much more hesitant to commit to voting Labour now because they think they’re being used. And they’ve said, “Well, what’s he going to do for us? He’s done nothing for Wigan whilst he’s been the mayor, you know.”

PETER MCCORMACK: They didn’t get the £2 bus fares.

FRANK WRIGHT: There’s a sense that this is just a cynical move as a career progression for a man who isn’t interested in them, which is what it is. And again, you know, if you’re white working class, you’re used to being lied to and used. They’ll knock on your door once every 4 years and they’ll tell you you’re great and that, but really they take your vote for granted. And they’re not going to do anything for you. So there’s a lot of that perception as well.

There were a lot of people who— I was honestly surprised how many people would come out and say immediately, “Yeah, we’ve heard of you, yeah, we’re definitely voting for you.” There was one bloke washing his car, and me and my son were red hot, and I said to him, “Oh, give us a spray, will you?” And he thought I was joking. I tried to get him to douse me, but he wouldn’t. And then he saw the leaflets in my son’s hand and he said, “Oh yeah, love Rupert, love Restore.”

So there was a lot of that too. There’s also a lot of people who just don’t know who we are, and when you talk to them about it, they’re really interested, like genuinely, like, “Oh no, this is different.” And that’s one thing I think represents enormous potential for growth.

I am going to say this because I thought it was a bit suspicious. I’ve got a habit of investigating positive-sounding claims because I mistrust them, right, you know, never mind about this, but everything. But I heard people say to me like, “Oh yeah, there’s a lot of people from Reform who are coming to us.” I’m like, “Oh yeah, that sounds a bit— I expect that’s why you say that.” But it turned out to be true. And there are people who said that too. There’s also a lot of solid Reform voters, and there’s a lot of people who say, “Oh well, you are splitting the vote.” And we would have that conversation with people and say, “Well, look, do you think you can trust this man? Are you really splitting the vote between a genuine alternative or not?”

Restore’s Political Earthquake Potential

PETER MCCORMACK: Well, look, even if the vote does get split to the point where Andy Burnham wins, I don’t think that’s a disaster. I mean, look, if Restore win Makerfield, that is going to be a political earthquake. It’s a political earthquake for Reform. And I think it’s been quite interesting just scouring social media for the last 2 days, seeing how anyone associated with Reform is attacking Restore.

But look, my point is, even if Restore get 10, 15% of the vote, it means that they’re in the race and it means more people become aware of them, and then more people are going to be asking, “Well, who is Rupert Lowe and what does this party stand for?” So look, I don’t think Restore have to win Makerfield. I think if they do, it’s the end of Reform.

FRANK WRIGHT: You’re seeing the emergence of a party that’s gone from nothing. I think the party’s 80 days old. With very little public awareness.

PETER MCCORMACK: The mainstream isn’t covering them at all.

FRANK WRIGHT: Well, you’ve been excluded from that deliberately. But even then, a good 10% of the people are solid for you anyway before they’ve even heard of you. And that’s grown exponentially now— I think there’s at least double that on average. So you can find that, like I said, it’s reality that’s making the argument and people are going out and finding out about themselves. And the popularity of the party is growing visibly, palpably, and it’s doing so outside the established networks of the manufacture of public opinion that created the forced consensus in our politics that’s put us into a crisis today, where people are looking for genuine change and people they can really believe in, people like themselves, people who care, people who have a sense of duty to them, to their people, to the nation.

But how will the machine turn against— well, you see, I think that what you’ve begun to see is that because Restore’s there and we have policies that are clearly set out, we’re not going to deflect from them. There’s not going to be any softening of the position on these. It’s been well thought out. And Reform are beginning to be very worried, I think, because I think even Dan Hodges said recently on the Twitters that they appear to have gone into some form of disarray. I think they’re rattled.

Right, for example— you mean Reform? David Bull’s disappeared. Yeah, where’s he gone? Who knows? There’s been a lot of dissent and difficulty about it, and this is because— here’s the question— I think Reform is a protest vote, which is basically, “Look at us, we’re not them, look at us, we can give them a bloody nose.” But when you look underneath, what you’re getting from these people is not what you think you’re going to get. And people realize that, and they realize that we’re the party that’s actually going to get it.

PETER MCCORMACK: You’re getting the same of what we’ve had for the last two decades.

FRANK WRIGHT: But that’s some bullshit. That is translating into political pressure on the party structure and the personalities at the head of Reform because they haven’t had a challenge. They’ve coasted upon this wave of disgust and disaffection against the Labour Party, the Liberals, and the Conservatives, obviously. And that’s been fine for them. They’ve done very well and they’ve soared in the polls. Well, they’ve now— and they’re probably going to continue to go down as people realize, “Oh, hang on a minute, this is continuity, not change.” And of course, if you have people like Jenrick and so on in charge, who are the architects of a lot of the misery that we’re in now—

PETER MCCORMACK: Osborne in the background.

The Epstein Files and the Network of Power

FRANK WRIGHT: Oh dear, oh dear. Yeah, Osborne. Yes, well, I’ve done some quite extensive work on the scandal that radiated from the Epstein files, and he’s adjacent to that. And that again is not just about the obvious— that basically shows you how you’re ruled by whom, and how extensive that network was is astonishing. So I just say that about that, but I did go into that about Peter Mandelson and his appointment as the ambassador and so on.

And this is a network that goes back a very long way, and there were meetings in exotic locations involving Peter Mandelson where George Osborne was present with the Rothschilds and so on, and that is documented and it’s in the files and they openly admit it. In fact, Mandelson still lives in a house in Wiltshire that is owned by Nathaniel Rothschild, for which he says he pays rent. It’s not a council house. So nothing to see here.

PETER MCCORMACK: Sometimes don’t you think they’re just f*ing laughing at us?

FRANK WRIGHT: Yes, but the thing is, you get occasional flashes of the man behind the curtain and it’s obscene. And what that means is that people generally who, like I said, most sane people would spend their entire lives ignoring politics because it’s a terrible business. But now you’re beginning to see, “Hang on a minute, my life’s wrecked, who did this? Oh, it’s them. Have a look behind the curtain. Good grief, I wish I never looked.”

Sometimes it is horrible, sometimes it is obscene, it cannot be unseen— terrible, right? What these people are up to, what they believe, what they’re actually like. And so, if you like, when the spotlight’s turned away from the hated establishment— and it’s not the limelight that Nigel’s in but the spotlight— when that starts to search them out, it becomes a searchlight, if you like, and it shows what they’re really there, and they feel very exposed by that because there isn’t really much there.

And that’s why I think you’re going to see that their vote, their support, is extremely unstable, and I think it will decline. And that’s what they’re terrified about, because they had once again fallen into the obvious political machinery trap of taking the votes for granted. “Oh look, we’re going to cut it, we’re going to have a dictatorial supermajority. Look how they hate Labour, look how they hate the Tories. It’s a done deal.”

Conservatism as a Doomed Ideology

PETER MCCORMACK: What’s the mistake Pierre Poilievre made in Canada?

FRANK WRIGHT: Well, yes, but also he basically betrayed any serious policy platform whatsoever and was effectively just an embarrassment. But I mean, I would say personally, I think conservatism is a doomed ideology. And if you want to know why that is, look at what they’ve conserved, which is precisely nothing. Sweet f*er all. There’s a great meme where on the left hand you’ve got the rainbow flag and then on the right hand you’ve got the rainbow but the trans flag, and it just says “conservatives, progressives.”

Will Frank Run for MP?

PETER MCCORMACK: So you’re going to run for MP?

FRANK WRIGHT: I wouldn’t go that far. I think you are.

PETER MCCORMACK: I think you will. You might not want to discuss it yet because it’s something you’re thinking about, but if you do want to discuss it, I assumed you were.

FRANK WRIGHT: Well, did you just assume my pronouns as well? You’re such a bigot.

PETER MCCORMACK: I am, right? Don’t you think you’re taking liberties?

FRANK WRIGHT: Look, I will do whatever I can.

PETER MCCORMACK: The challenge is finding 400, 500 people of the right caliber to run for Parliament to give a chance that Restore would win. Because if you say this is our last chance— the one risk with Burnham is he wins the by-election, there is a leadership contest, he— I think he’s already been ordained— should he do that, he would call a fast election because the longer this goes on, the less chance Labour have. I think that’s a risk. I think Reform could win. I think they could probably beat them in the election.

But either way, if it’s an election in 3 years’ time, the big challenge they will have is finding 3 to 400, possibly 500 people. And of which one of those, you’ve now put yourself in the running. And wherever we are, 2 hours into this— go to the comments, 2 hours, people— they’re going to be saying, “Frank, you’re going to be an MP. Frank, you’ve got to be in the cabinet.” You’ve put yourself out there. Somebody else has put you out there as a candidate. They asked you some questions on the street, not knowing who they were going to get, I assume. And they have created the— they broke the internet that day. You were the main player, and now people— I’ve seen the comments already. I’m just saying it’s out there as a thing.

The Counter-Elite and the Dysfunction of Power

FRANK WRIGHT: The thing is, one of the greatest things I took from the Army is the officer’s manual, which is Serve to Lead, and it’s something that, thank the Lord, they have not yet ruined. And it really is the best document on servant leadership I’ve ever read. And it says that the best leader, the only real acceptable leader, is someone who is a servant, who understands and really does the best for the people that they are not only nominally but actually there to serve. And that’s what leadership is, right?

So if I end up doing that, that will be what inspires me. My own personal sense of duty is, if you like, limitless. I’ll do anything. I’ll put leaflets out, I’ll phone people up, I’ll go knock on doors, I’ll do anything. I’ll be a willing ask donkeys, so whatever they want me to do, I’ll do it.

As for the larger problem, there is a technique to this. There’s a technique to how you can find out people and say, “Look, we need to staff the institutions, we need to find men and women of the right caliber with the right idea who really are for the nation to do this.” I believe that’s going to be a simple task. I think I’ve seen that the vetting procedure within Restore is very thorough and it’s carried out by people with serious military backgrounds as well as serious public service backgrounds that put my weekend warriorhood to shame.

But here’s the point, right? I’m not that special, okay? It’s not about me. It’s the reason why I think I became so interesting to so many people. It’s like, “Oh wow, look, that’s just some bloke on the street.” There’s millions of us, you never hear from us. We’ve all been excluded from that. We have millions of decent men and women in this country who are not only capable of serving at every level, but who would be proud to do so. And I’ve met so many of them in that party and in my wider life that I’m convinced that it’s going to be no difficult task to find people who volunteer to do it, and that they will be good enough for it too.

And I’ll tell you why. The system we live under hates anything good. If you’re competent, if you’re talented, if you’re morally good, if you’re principled, if you’re a decent human being, it persecutes you. It does. And it marginalizes you and it shoves you out. And so all those people whose lives have been parked or indeed punished by this mad system, those people have created what you might call a very credible counter-elite. We have the ability, we have the intelligence, the capability, and certainly the human capital to pull this off and to do the job, because we all see it not as an opportunity but as a duty.

PETER MCCORMACK: But we have an independent media as well. We can take on the BBC.

FRANK WRIGHT: We do indeed. Welcome. Yeah, we do indeed.

PETER MCCORMACK: Yeah, no, but we can. I mean, that last but one previous one I did with Rupert Lowe is something like 1.2 million views. And look, that seat was available to Nigel for a year. We talked about him coming on, never did, just never did. Back and forth, back and forth. That seat’s available. Does that Polanski come? I’m not mean to anyone. I mean, I’m mean to them on Twitter, but not in person. I’d happily have the chat with him. Kemi spoke to her team. Oh yeah, couldn’t get it over the line. They just— and the thing is, what that annoys me about is not my own personal ego. You have an opportunity here to speak to the public, not through the BBC, the filtered people who’ve already probably made this— because I think the people who listen to a show like this are the apathetic, the ones who have been left behind, who’ve had their dignity destroyed, who’ve got no one to speak for them, who want to hear something else. It’s not the Question Time folks where you get that parade of f*ing idiots from every party.

The Manufacture and Policing of Belief

FRANK WRIGHT: But what you’re talking about here, what you’re explaining to the audience now, is very important. You’re explaining to them how the controlled environment of media and belief actually works. And one of the things I write about a lot and have done for a number of years now is the role of belief in political power, in political technique, the manufacture and policing of belief, how it’s made, how public image is presented to you is a significant and even foundational factor in how we are ruled. It is, if you like, the animating spirit of political power. It’s how you are ruled.

That is why they’re not just reluctant to do this. It’s impossible for them to do this because then they lose the control of their own public image and the message and everything. Because you’re not looking at a free press, you’re not looking at an impartial state broadcaster. This is a highly refined technique with a machine designed to produce these results that can reliably produce the standard result they want. But if they talk to you, there’s a danger that they’ll be compromised in some way and that people will find out actually who they are, and that’s bad.

PETER MCCORMACK: Well, I just don’t think their handlers allow them. I think the machine sits above them because, yes, it’s not working out for anyone. 7 prime ministers in how many years, of which only one I think was credible, which was Liz Truss. Look what happened to her. But Keir Starmer is going to be destroyed by this process. He’s going to leave office as one of the most despised, poor performers. Exterminate. Just like— I mean, he looks a shadow of the man he was when he went into power.

FRANK WRIGHT: But you look at him from any angle and he looks less and less convincing as a human being and more and more like a kind of insulting parody, like an animatronic insult to himself. The way he talks, the way he acts, he just looks odd.

PETER MCCORMACK: But he will leave political office as a broken man. If Andy Burnham does replace him, he will leave political office as a broken man because none of them can deliver something that is positive enough for enough people in the country. They can’t seem to break this debt problem. We saw the record borrowing. We see the $3 trillion of debt. We know the unfunded liabilities. Everyone is experiencing the inflationary pressures of the printing press, but also the increased costs of things due to war. Like we’re all experiencing this life. None of them are willing to break it. And it makes me just wonder, I don’t think it’s that difficult.

A Government That Cannot Govern

FRANK WRIGHT: Look, Whitehall works as a series of factions as well. When people talk about the civil service and the government, in reality, the different departments, they’re at war with each other for political influence, money, power, and so on. And they’re always trying to do each other down. At the same time, Keir Starmer presides over a Labour Party that is completely disunited. There’s various factions vying for power. I’m not personally convinced that the Labour Together, Blue Labour, New Labour people are dead in the water. I think you might see something from Shabana yet. I’m not convinced that Andy Burnham’s got a clear run of it, and I think she’s a very canny operator, and the machine behind her, I think, is better than his. You’ve got the Greenies, you’ve got the welfarists, you’ve got people basically— what this really shows you is that no matter who was in charge of the Labour Party, even if you had the most highly competent individual that you could ever have, right, those factions are so antagonistic that you can’t move anything, you can’t change anything, you can’t address the financial crisis or the industrial crisis or anything like this. Because if you do, you’ll infuriate a powerful minority faction in the party that will paralyse your government.

So that’s why the government actually can’t govern. Now, the former head of the Civil Service came on the telly about a year ago saying he thinks the government’s going to grind to a halt. And like, he’s nominally not a political person, but for him to say that is astonishing. I think his name’s Simon Case, right? And he said that basically it’s just going to stop functioning because of this antagonism, because there’s no room to maneuver, for political reasons, because if you do anything significant to address the national crisis, one-third of the party will paralyse your government, and then another third will fight them instead of supporting you, and nothing will get done, and you’ll just be humiliated. So you’re trying to create the impression that there isn’t a shambles, that you aren’t all arguing behind closed doors, and you actually are a serious and stable government, while meanwhile nothing’s getting done to put the fire out.

PETER MCCORMACK: This is what it comes back to, what I think Keir Starmer should do. Like, if I was Keir Starmer— what a dreadful thought— if I was to wake up tomorrow implanted in Keir Starmer’s body, do you know what I’d do? I’d get out my mobile phone and I would record a message to the nation, and I would tell them exactly how dysfunctional it is and why it’s dysfunctional, why he can’t do his job, why when you pull one lever it has all these first, second, third order effects. I would just say, “I can’t do this job. We are dysfunctional as a nation.”

But they carry on like they’re all carrying it on. They all live it. They’re all in Westminster. They see the dysfunction. They’re aware of it, but they all carry on the charade. He’s going to leave the office a broken man without any reputation left at all. It’s just a destroyed man. Yet he could leave as a legend, as a hero, just to record a video and say, “I’m quitting. This is why I’m quitting. Government is completely dysfunctional. We don’t serve the people anymore. You have to, as a nation, come back and take your country.” I mean, what that would do, that video, it’d be the most shared video in the history of this country. And it would make people wake up and realize it actually is us and them. That’s what I’d love him to do.

The Island of Strangers and the Limits of Honesty

FRANK WRIGHT: Well, he did try it once, and I think it’s because of McSweeney and the Blue Labourites. And if you read Glasman’s book and you talk to him—

PETER MCCORMACK: He talked about the Leavers, didn’t he?

FRANK WRIGHT: Glasman talked about— basically, Glasman’s project is a kind of soft nationalist socialism. It is a non-progressive, non-woke form of rational industry and reality and so on, and getting rid of all the mad policies. Glasman’s the man who came on the telly recently and said the Labour Party is effectively seen as a kind of criminal cabal of pedophiles and perverts, and there’s a lot of credence to that. Well, he’s a lord, a Labour lord, you know, you listen to him.

But look, these people are very pragmatic, and so they’re behind that “island of strangers” speech that Keir Starmer gave, which spoke to the nation in a way that would really have brought down a lot of the temperature over the migration crisis and the crime and the misery and the terrible sense that this is going to inexorably get worse and no one’s ever going to even recognize it. So when he did that, that made everyone breathe a sigh of relief, that, “Oh, finally, even he notices it. Great.” But he was pilloried by his own side so much for that, and his own power was threatened in the parliamentary Labour Party because of the backlash. He never did it again.

So basically, you can’t even speak to the problems. And obviously, that’s one of the most incendiary ones. If you even just mention it, you don’t even say you’re going to do anything about it. “Oh look, here’s part of the problem. Oh dear, this hysteria.” That’s how bad it is, right? It’s hysterical, it’s dysfunctional. The lunatics have made an asylum of our nation. We’re just not obliged to go mad along with them.

PETER MCCORMACK: Are they going along with it? That’s the problem with these election cycles. That’s why this Restore thing is kind of interesting because I know this. I mean, I’m going to have personal consequences for— I own a football club. Do you? Yeah, I own a football club. Yeah, non-league. I didn’t know that. Yeah, that’s what the Skull and Crossbones— people keep going in the comments, “I thought you were a pirate.”

FRANK WRIGHT: They’re like, well, that’s—

PETER MCCORMACK: We are called the Pirates.

The Pirates, Football, and Britain’s Economic Doom Spiral

FRANK WRIGHT: Get away! We’re called the Pirates. Yeah. Do you know what, I’ve had a really bad leg injury like a year ago, and it was— my knee went up. I routinely engage in risk-taking behavior, so it’s my fault, but it was a really bad one. I thought, that’s it. And I don’t go to the doctor anymore because I do weightlifting and martial arts and stuff. So I know how to fix myself. So I just thought, get better or it won’t. And then this woman I know who’s a physio, she said to me, do you have a look? I said, no, I’ll be all right. I said, well, it won’t. She said, well, what are you going to do if it isn’t? I said, I’ll tell you what, I’ve got a brilliant idea.

PETER MCCORMACK: I’m going to become a pirate.

FRANK WRIGHT: I’ll take it off at the knee, right? And then I’ll finally get— because I’ve got— because of consumer feedback, if you like, because of my interests in traditional Japanese martial arts, I do have a few teeth missing and occasionally I’ve got to get them replaced, right? This one, for example. And you know, I’m not the best at it, but you know, it’s the taking part that counts, you know. So I just thought I’ll finally be able to get the golden teeth, right? And then the thing and the wooden leg. Yeah. And I said, but there’s a stumbling block and it’s the parrot, because I’ve realized that if you look at pirates with a parrot, the patch is usually on the parrot side and that’s rather a dark equation, isn’t it?

PETER MCCORMACK: I learned something recently about pirates. So I always saw the patch and assumed in my idiocy they’d lost an eye in combat.

FRANK WRIGHT: Yeah, that’s what I thought. Yeah, I thought the parrot had had it.

PETER MCCORMACK: No, it’s to do with keeping the vision. Oh, light and dark. Oh God, what was it? Yeah, to navigate at night. What? Yes. Ah, can you double-check that, Kurt, what the actual fact is on that?

But yeah, no, so we bought this football club 4 years ago. It was in the 10th tier of English football. I was like, a f*ing mad idea. I always come up with mad ideas. Well done! I was like, I’m going to buy a football club and get in the Premier League. I’m going to buy a team at the—

FRANK WRIGHT: Do you turn up in a car coat with a cigar?

PETER MCCORMACK: No, well, yeah, no, so I was like, I’m going to buy this. All right, I’ve found a team at the bottom of the English pyramid, right? We’re going to do it, we’re going to get into the Premier League. We actually won the league 3 years in a row. What? And then this year we’re in the playoff final, we’re 2-1 up in the 92nd minute, and the ref gives a penalty. It was— I’m not just saying it because my club, it was just never a penalty. Went to extra time, we lost, which was devastating.

But anyway, I bought this football club and it’s been growing. It’s been fantastic. But over the last year, as I’ve got involved in the town a little bit more. I put in private security into the town because we had a plague of crackheads and alcoholics that were making people’s lives a misery. Oh, good man. Got attacked for that. I had the— yeah, I had the Bedford Islington elite come after me. Counsel me, refuse to use my coffee shop, things like that. I’ll tell you all that another time. We’ll have a pint and I’ll tell you about that. But anyway, oh dear.

But this comment started to come on. “Oh, the owner of Real Bedford is a racist. I can’t go and watch their football team anymore.” There are these professional consequences that exist, but I don’t give a f. F them because I know I’m not racist.

But the reason I like Restore is because I always come back to the economics. You can deal with the immigration problem, but if people are still impoverished at the end of it and they cannot afford a holiday or they cannot feed their kids, they’re still going to be miserable. If we do not fix the economics of this country, yes, we’ve got a big problem. And Rupert’s the only person who’s come out credibly. He said, “My policies will make Millais blush.” And he’s the one person who’s come forward who said he’s going to deal with the economics of this country.

The Dependency Economy

FRANK WRIGHT: Oh look, I have to speak to that, I have to speak to that, right? I’m not an economist.

PETER MCCORMACK: You understand enough about the—

FRANK WRIGHT: One of the important things about people who are to be, I think, taken seriously is they’re willing to say, “I know about this but I don’t know about that,” right? And I’m not like an omni-smartass, you know. I know what the limits are of my own capability, but I do know— I’m not going to mention his name, he’s a very serious economist in Britain. Is he called Gary?

PETER MCCORMACK: He’s not Gary Economist.

FRANK WRIGHT: No, no, he’s not, but I’m not going to drop him in.

PETER MCCORMACK: Tax the billionaires!

FRANK WRIGHT: Because I don’t know how many people are going to watch this. It’s probably a lot of people, but nonetheless, I can phone him up and ask him about economics. And one of the things I get from his extremely— well, he’s got a gift for giving you the precise detail of where the money is, what you can cut, what you can’t, what’s this, what’s that, every last penny, if you like. Astonishing. He’s done this all his life. He’s a major economist.

One of the takeaway pictures he gave me, which I’ve never forgotten, is the amount of people in the country who are directly or indirectly dependent on an ever-expanding state and how, within a few years’ time, we are going to see the dependency overtake the productivity, which means more people will be taking money off, if you like, the taxpayer than people are actually paying taxes. That’s an economic doom spiral. Even I, with my admittedly rudimentary grasp of actual economics, can understand that that’s suicidal. And he’s telling me this is how this has been produced. We have a dependency culture.

So I went to a meeting with him and I went to a meeting with him with a woman who runs a major recovery agency across Scotland who’s been enormously successful in rescuing the stricken working class of Scotland from lives of drug-induced death and despair. And I said to them both, “Look, partly the reason for this is because our system is a series of dependencies, addiction economies, and a welfare state that basically pays you not to work with money that we don’t have.” And that is killing the nation. It’s killing the nation.

And what is pernicious about this is it makes us dependent on the state. So it’s good for the liberal state because if you criticize and then suddenly your benefits get digitized, oh dear, no Mackie D’s for you. CBDC. Yes, there you are. But also it gives you a dependency leverage.

So when you really look at the dependency economy, which is what we’ve got, it’s not really an economy. It’s a form of state sponsorship of people’s livelihoods directly or indirectly. That’s politically dangerous because it means then that you’ll be very uncomfortable to make any serious political or economic changes. Because you’ve become a sort of parasite on that system. Your livelihood depends upon that system never changing. It’s a way of buying the electorate. Of course.

But furthermore, you then find that it increasingly generates jobs that really shouldn’t be there and gives power and influence to people whose only qualification is their fanatical loyalty to that system. And this is why we’re all getting increasingly hectored. By the lanyard class. And you find that anyone who usually wears one of those brightly colored lanyards— and we know those wonderful rainbow hues that those lanyards come in— you can reliably suggest they’re probably going to be differently sane as well, and they’re going to make your life very difficult if they detect any sanity in you whatsoever.

So we are really bullied by these apparatchiks who run our civil service and our public institutions. But really they don’t. They run them as a kind of ideological club that provides livelihoods for themselves and their friends. And this is why they screech hysterically if you ever say, “No, we have to cut dependency on the state, otherwise the economy dies and the nation dies, and we can’t move that money into real investment for real jobs, real industry, and a real future for our people.” I’m not a smart guy.

Capital Flows and the Destruction of the Middle Class

PETER MCCORMACK: I’m just a hard worker, right? I learned some very basic things, which is that the more you regulate people, the more you stand in the way of entrepreneurial people, the less business you will have, which will mean less jobs. Also, the good, the smart, the brave, the courageous will leave to other countries. It’s like water. Capital’s like water. It flows where it flows. They’ll leave.

And now we are in a situation where we are destroying the middle class. There’s no incentive to be an entrepreneur. We are basically just feeding the bankers. Most people are going to work and they get to the end of the month, they’ve got f all left because they spent all month paying off the bankers. And if we keep doing this, the state only has one answer, which Rachel Reeves has been happy to use, which the Conservatives were happy to use, which Zak Polanski will have to use, which Reform will use, which is the money printer. And if they use the money printer— sorry Zak Polanski, but the money multiplier doesn’t fing work— they’re just going to get more inflation. It’s going to get a lot worse. And I wish people would understand these f*ing basic concepts. Can I borrow your pen? Oh, sorry, I thought you wanted to—

Rachel Reeves and the Absence of a Plan

FRANK WRIGHT: No, because I’ve just got to write Reeves down. And I’m going to tell you a very unlikely story, okay?

So, after that unacceptably tall Will Coleshill had ambushed me and put me on the internet by mistake, he came up to me in the car park the next day. Me and my son are getting out of Jeff— Jeff is my 21-year-old Land Rover Discovery who mysteriously develops a range of issues from time to time, but he’s all right now. So the plan was we were going to sleep in Jeff because you put the back there, we’ve got a mattress and stuff like that, and he’s come up to say hello and we’re just having a chat.

And then at that time, this guy drives up in a Range Rover and he’s got the windows down and his missus is in there. And I said to him, “Look at you. There’s me with like, you know, bargain basement Jeff, but there’s you in your mobile throne room living the dream.” And he’s got those automatic footstep things that come out. And he said, “Oh, it’s nice.”

Guess what? These people have moved to Switzerland, right? They’re successful, English, lovely man and wife, really chatty, great people to talk to. I said, “Why have you moved there?” Nice place, by the way. And he said, “The insane tax regime.” He said, “So that’s what we’re doing, and we’re just persuading my mother-in-law to come with us as well. And we probably will do.” He said, “But no, there’s no way I’m coming back.” And it turned out he was a really successful businessman, thoroughly decent bloke, lovely fellow, the kind of person that we need to be in the country, who’s being exiled by insanity.

Now, here’s the thing that I maybe shouldn’t mention here, but there’s a fellow that I met before the election, and he came around to my house. He’s kind of a family friend, and he turned out to be an advisor for Rachel Reeves, a young very clever man, blue Labour tie, Oxford. And I said to him, “Well, you know, you must be very happy because it looks very likely you’re going to win. What are you going to do?” And he actually put his head there, he said, “We’re finished.” I said, “What do you mean?” He said, “No, it’s going to be disastrous.” And everything he said would happen would come true.

And I said to him, “Why is that then?” And he said, “Well, I had to put together the Reeves vision, and I sat down with Rachel Reeves to try and work out what it would be for the country and the economy.” And I said, “What came out?” He said, “Well, there isn’t one.” And I said, “You know what, there’s no idea, there’s no idea, there’s no money, they don’t know what to do. It will be terrible. We’ll be out of power for a generation at least. It’s going to finish the party nationally. There’s really no plan.”

PETER MCCORMACK: Now, well, what in Rachel Reeves’ history suggests to you that she has the right ideas to manage a trillion-pound economy?

FRANK WRIGHT: Look, look, look, as you know from Dominic Cummings, the cabinet’s basically a pantomime. These people get their statements written down for them. It doesn’t really matter who it is. I mean, for goodness’ sake, David Lammy’s not there on merit. Let’s just say that as well. You know, I mean, I personally want him to be the Prime Minister because I think he’d be the best advert for our—

PETER MCCORMACK: You’re an accelerationist.

The Paralysis of Policy and the Failure of Liberal Democracy

FRANK WRIGHT: These people are clearly just put there. They’re non-entities. They’re not going to rock the boat. They’re good for the machine and they don’t really make the decisions. The really frightening thing is that the people who usually do make the decisions have no ideas either. Those people who will provide the public figures of the cabinet usually with said, “These are the strategies we’re going to do, this is the vision we’re going to have for the country, this is how we’re going to set it out for the nation, this is where we want to be, this is why we’re doing this.” They’re not doing it either. No one’s doing it. There’s nothing.

All there is is this paralysis of policy where the country’s in a serious state of emergency and none of it’s even being basically addressed, because the second you even mention that fact, there’s a chorus of shrill outrage at the mention of reality. These people are counter-reality fanatics, and this is where we’ve ended up. This is why the economics are mad, the foreign policy is insane. This is why the domestic policy is non-existent, why we’re in an energy crisis, why we’re not just dependent on the state as citizens and members of the state here — the ruled are dependent upon the rulers to throw them a few crumbs. That’s increasingly the case.

But we’ve also made the unforced error of becoming dependent on an increasingly volatile international global trade and energy system. When we live right on an island that’s basically made out of coal, surrounded by oil and gas, next to an ocean stocked with fish and seafood and so on. And we used to be the world’s most, well, inspirational pioneering trading power. How talented do you have to be at disaster to squander all that into this mess? I mean, you’re just some kind of suicidal genius.

PETER MCCORMACK: I just don’t understand how more don’t see it. I mean, sometimes it just — I bang my head against the wall.

FRANK WRIGHT: Yeah, but if you’re constantly trained into believing in this pseudo-reality by a series of Netflix Star Trek-themed utopian paradise things in which people like you are always the bigoted foolish enemy and the villain, then you can see where that comes from.

PETER MCCORMACK: But even in this scenario where I saw the first poll up in Makerfield and they put Burnham at 43%, and I — of course I don’t believe it, but at the same time there are Labour voters out there who know that this Labour Party has been an absolute f*ing disaster, who are now thinking, “Ah, but if we just vote harder, we just vote harder this time for Andy Burnham, things are going to change.” And they’re not. Like, this country needs a fundamental shift in how it approaches productivity, regulation, investment, training, industry. And it’s just like, I look across the entirety of the political class and go, actually, who gets it? Who gets it?

The Breakdown of Political Tribalism

FRANK WRIGHT: Well, one of the things that’s interesting about this moment is that traditional tribalism — “I would never vote for the other party, I’m always for the Tories, I’m always for this, we’re a Labour family” and so on — that’s breaking down because of years of betrayal. These people have got together and betrayed us. This is a consensus. They don’t change anything. The large-scale policies continue regardless of whether men and women in blue or red ties are conducting them, or even the Liberals.

So you’ve even seen that these policies aren’t in the national interest. Everybody’s now getting interested in what the national interest is, except the corrupt political establishment. And that’s what we’re really talking about here. What’s the national interest? What’s the economy for? What’s our politics for? Well, that politics doesn’t work if it’s producing this disaster, and it isn’t interested in that. It’s interested in international interest and international mad schemes and counter-reality utopian nonsense that we’re all paying an enormous cost for. And it’s not just in terms of money, it’s in terms of the value and meaning of our life and our culture, history, tradition, in the religion that built our civilization.

If you look, as I do, at Kenneth Clark’s beautiful series Civilization — I mean, he was a toff and obviously I’m a commoner, but he stands there and he magnificently says, “I find it very hard to say what civilization is, but I know what it is when I’m looking at it.” And he was looking at the Apostolic Palace in Rome or something. And later on in that series he says the civilization that we know as European civilization was founded between the 9th and 11th centuries by the monastic system of the Catholic Church that put together our communication in trade, animal husbandry, the settled societies, settled organization. That’s where it came from. And from that civilization, out of that grew the nations and empires of Europe — the leading civilizing powers of the world. Like it or not, that is what they were.

And with the liberal system, if you look at that with a revisionist eye, as I do, the purpose of the liberal system was to sweep that away and replace it with itself. And if you read people like A.J.P. Taylor or Wyndham Lewis, you will see a history of the early 20th century that shows you that not only was the Great War the common disaster that we’ve all come to understand it as, but it was a sort of violent industrial revolution that swept away the old civilizational order and gave the opportunity, by that massive crisis, for a profound fundamental change — and that was the liberal system.

That’s basically the subject of Jean Renoir’s film, La Grande Illusion, where there’s a conversation between Erich von Stroheim and Frenchmen, and they say, “Look, the world that we belong to — it’s gone. These European noblemen and the settled civilization we had for centuries, it’s gone, it’s finished, it has no use for us anymore. A new world is coming.” And they said, “Yeah, that’s right.” So even then, even in a brief interval after the Great War, there was an understanding that this is going to sweep everything away. And that’s what that system did.

Liberalism: The God That Failed Twice

And the fascinating thing about the liberal political economy, the liberal system, liberal democracy itself — around 10 years after it was installed, after the Great War, it collapsed. Liberalism is the god that failed twice. It did it once before, 100 years ago, and you don’t remember that because you’re not taught that in school, because that militates against the illusion of the invincible eternal power of the system to which there’s no alternative.

But it did. There are over 20 liberal democracies installed across Europe, from Argentina, as far away as Japan, with bicameral systems where you could vote for a left liberal, a right liberal, or an extreme liberal, or even a Bolshevik and a communist, but no one else. And why did it collapse? It couldn’t answer the financial crisis that the Federal Reserve created, which was basically the banking power of the international system. Because it’s a system. Liberal democracy is a global system. It’s a system with international ambitions to standardize the world under its own standards. So it couldn’t answer the financial crisis it created itself, and it couldn’t counter the violence of Bolshevism either. And so all these liberal democracies folded, or in our case, were suspended for 10 years. We didn’t have elections from 1935 to just after 1945, understandably, but the rest of them simply dissolved.

PETER MCCORMACK: And that’s what we’re having happen here. And it hasn’t happened here.

FRANK WRIGHT: So even though things — we are in a crisis and the economic crisis is going to get worse — remember this: it didn’t win. The system is failing. It’s disintegrating now. It failed to break us all. England lives and we are going to win because our cause is good and just. And that’s why we’re going to restore Britain. We’re 3 hours in.

PETER MCCORMACK: I think we’ve done a good — yeah. We’ve done a good here.

FRANK WRIGHT: We don’t want to go in. Oh no.

A Warning to the People

PETER MCCORMACK: Look, I mean, I just wanted to meet you and listen to you because of that wonderful 13 minutes I saw on Twitter this week. And look, there’s some of the things you say are going to make some people feel very uncomfortable. I mean, I’d have to go and get the transcript and get the bits, but — no, because you’re trying to warn. I think what you are is you’re a warning. You’re a warning to people about the reality of the future we face.

FRANK WRIGHT: I mean, there’s a thing in elite theory — elite theory is about the idea that democracy is just an illusion and there’s always a permanent elite. And that’s true. So elite theory has this concept in it called procedural inevitability. And what that means is that things happen — you don’t notice this is going to happen, but it means that other things inevitably will happen, just like knocking over a series of dominoes. So some of this stuff you can say, “Well, if we don’t change the procedure, this will inevitably be the result.” So that’s just a rational and sane appraisal of the nature of reality and consequence.

But as we said, when you point it out, it’s alarming because we’ve all been trained to live in a pseudo-reality, in an imaginary world where there are never any consequences for bad actions. But we live in a time of consequence that’s inescapable. And what we can do now is mitigate those consequences. We can’t avoid them, but we can mitigate them. We still have an opportunity to take decent, humane, and sane action, but the time to do so is limited.

PETER MCCORMACK: Yes, that illusion people have lived under for however long — whether they’re a youngster who’s lived in it for 5 or 10 years and they’re coming up to their first election to vote, or somebody who’s lived in it 35 or 40 years — you are helping people understand that there’s an illusion. You are warning people about what is coming.

Look, I see it from the economic side. I think — I know this country’s f*ed. We’re under a weight of debt we can’t pay off. We spend more on debt interest than we spend on education, which I think should be a crime. And it’s the fault of every weak politician who’s lived on debt to give money away. I hate it all. But I’m just saying some people will feel uncomfortable with this, and that’s okay. Because if this is the reality we’re facing, we need to be uncomfortable so we can make some correct decisions. I predict we’re going to see a lot more of you, whether you like it or not.

Wrapping Up

FRANK WRIGHT: We’ve had decades of giddy dreams of world domination and so on, like the 30-year regime change regime that has basically left America financially and morally bankrupt and accounts for at least a third of its national debt, maybe more on some estimations. What’s it delivered? It’s broken the economy.

Most— that was an attempt to expand the influence of the West worldwide through the promotion of social revolution at home and abroad and kinetic warfare. And it’s failed. And it’s actually broken the international institutions that were largely set up to produce that effect and to secure it, things like NATO and so on and the international agreements. These things are breaking down and they’re not going to come back because that world is gone.

We’ve spent all our money on a dream that was impossible, and now we’re going to realize it. It’s not people like me on the internet that’s going to make this case for you. It’s reality. This false reality we’ve lived in is disintegrating rapidly now. It will no longer supply the beliefs that you’ve relied on that’s informed your personality.

There’s a risk that you might go a little bit dotty. The degree to which your personality relies upon the products supplied to you by a system that’s going out of business — that’s the degree to which you might become personally psychologically unstable and emotional. But you’ll have to get over it because that business is shutting down. The business that supplied the beliefs that made you believe in these beliefs is shutting down. It can’t afford to do it anymore. It’s a very big business.

But think about it like this. When you go into the supermarket and so much of the stuff in the aisles isn’t even food, in fact, it’s kind of toxic trash, which is some kind of byproduct of an increasingly efficient industrial process. That’s the kind of food for thought we’ve been supplied as well. That’s also toxic trash upon which we’ve become dependent, and in fact it’s quite addictive as well. And it’s quite a shock then to have a glass of clean water and some real food and something that actually nourishes you. But of course, if you don’t change that diet, well, you’re going to get sick and die. And that’s the decision that we’re faced with now.

So it’s why it’s very intelligent if you use the word existential, because it does concentrate people’s minds. When there’s real immediate costs attached and consequences. Because of course, the consumer system, the political system, it encourages this idea that you can act without moral limits, you can act without any limits, and there’s never any consequences. And you can always make up a good-sounding excuse, whether it’s in launching wars or mad policies or indulging in your consumer addictions. And you can always get away with it because, hey, everybody’s like the same, and we’d all do it if we could, and so on.

Well, no. Now there are hard consequences and the limits set to political action and indeed the behavior of our people and everything are being set by hard reality. And it doesn’t really matter whether we disagree with reality. It’s still there when we’ve stopped talking and having tantrums.

PETER MCCORMACK: Frank, keep doing your thing and be out there and be noisy because I think you can have a big influence on people. And thank you for a wonderful 3 hours. We don’t often record this long.

FRANK WRIGHT: Oh dear, I did kind of make a little promise not to go on too long, but I’ve done it again.

PETER MCCORMACK: No, it’s good. I mean, I had a choice. I can wind this up at any point I want. I just sat here listening and thinking, how do I even remember the books I read? Because I don’t. I don’t. Frank, keep doing your thing. You’re a wonderful man. Take care. Tell people your Substack. Oh God, if they’ve got this far, if they’ve listened for the whole 3 hours — surely they don’t want any more.

FRANK WRIGHT: Thank you ever so much for having me on. It’s very gracious of you, and it’s been a pleasure. If you do wish to hear more of me, I do do Faith and Reason for LifeSite News on Wednesdays. And I’ve got a new series coming out for them which is about the 20th century history of liberal democracy, what the system was that produced the state we’re in today, where it came from and how we get out of it. And finally, you can see me on the Twitters, which is Frank Righeter, R-I-G-H-T-E-R. I got that wrong last time. And Frank Righeter at substack.com, which is my inevitable Substack. And I think that’s depressing because everyone’s got one nowadays.

PETER MCCORMACK: I will pimp the f* out of it. Thank you, Frank. Thank you everyone for listening. We will see you all soon.

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