Transcript: Britain Is Headed For A Financial Meltdown – Allister Heath on TRIGGERnometry Podcast

We’re not quite as bad as France yet, but we’re quite similar.

And our rate of growth is pathetic. And GDP per capita, which is the amount of money the economy produces per person, is barely going up or even falling. And the pie therefore is not really going up. But the number of people because of extremely large amounts of immigration has gone up, which means there’s less for every person, which means society is changing.

And instead of society accepting capitalism and growth and all that, it’s become a zero sum game. People are fighting for the same or smaller pie. And when that happens, you get sort of the rise of left in populism, the rise of communism, jealousy, envy, demands for wealth, taxes, rules and private schools, all the kind of stuff that you hear about today. And therefore, unless we have a massive, massive change politically, culturally, psychologically, philosophically, this country, I fear is now in a decline that’s going to be very difficult to reverse.

The Accelerationist Perspective

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Well, this is one of the reasons that I don’t know if you agree with this, but I’m becoming a bit of what I call an accelerationist, which is essentially, I think things are very bad and heading in a bad direction, but most people don’t know it yet, they feel it and they don’t quite know where to place their blame, therefore, you know, they’ll be told by some people, well, it’s all Britain’s problems are to do with illegal immigration, for example.

Now illegal immigration is a problem that needs to be dealt with. But I keep saying to people, you do realize that when we deal with illegal immigration, that isn’t going to change the economic reality of this country even one bit.

ALLISTER HEATH: Yes. I mean, it might change it slightly, but it won’t change the big picture.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: And likewise, you know, on the left side of populism, it’s the bank. I remember this famous, I think Harry and Paul sketch. “The bankers, the wankers. The bankers. The wankers.”

ALLISTER HEATH: Yeah, “the bankers, the bonuses. The bankers.”

KONSTANTIN KISIN: “Bankers, Bonuses,” Right. It was all that.

ALLISTER HEATH: Yes.

FRANCIS FOSTER: Well, firstly, if “the bankers, the bonuses. The bankers, the bonuses. It’s disgusting.” And secondly, if the Tories are really serious about it, they tax the bankers, the bonuses, the 90%.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: And this is what we’ve ended up in. But actually, I almost think things have to get a lot worse for people to realize that neither of these two populist messages is what the truth is. The truth is you have to grow the economy and we’re not doing that.

Living Beyond Our Means

ALLISTER HEATH: Yes. I mean, the fundamental problem of this country is that we’re living beyond our means. We’re living as if we’re a rich country. We have expectations of the public sector, of the National Health Service, of the state pension, of the benefit system, of everything, that we’re a very prosperous country. But we’re not anymore, right?

We are. We have barely grown for years. Our expectations have continued rising, but the reality hasn’t caught up. And this gulf is growing and growing and growing. And as you say, we do have an illegal immigration crisis. I think that’s going to be a catalyst for radical political change. But that ultimately is not the fundamental problem, though. We are spending far too much money, for example, on welfare benefits for immigrants, but we’re also spending far too much money on benefits for UK based people. In fact, we’re predominantly spending too much money on UK based people. And that’s the issue.

What “Not Prosperous” Really Means

FRANCIS FOSTER: Alice. So you’ve used the words “we’re not a prosperous country.” What does that actually mean in real terms?

ALLISTER HEATH: It means that the amount of money available for each person is barely going up anymore. It means that when you travel to America, you see that they’re living in bigger houses, they’ve got more cars, they’ve got air con, they’re able to spend a lot more money, they can give massive tips in restaurants, they can buy a lot of stuff and we look at these people. And we think, “hey, wait a second, look how rich these people are.”

And it used to be the case. If you were British and you went to America in the 1950s, 1960s, you couldn’t believe it, right? They were eating steak and they all had two cars and all that sort of stuff. And then the gap narrowed. We became more like America in terms of being prosperous. But in recent years, that gap has grown again quite dramatically.

You know, the top 25% of Americans, even the top 50% of Americans, are much wealthier than the richest people in Britain. In fact, they can’t believe how poor the British middle classes are. They cannot believe what the average wage in Britain is. They cannot believe how the top 10% or top 5% live in this country. They live much better. We have been left behind.

And the reason is their productivity has gone up. They’ve got incredible companies, they’ve got entrepreneurship, they’ve got problems, of course they’ve got problems. And it’s not great. Being in the bottom 5 or 10% in America is terrible. But if you’re the middle class, the upper middle class, the top 25%, top 50%, you’re much, much better off in America. And also the Americans, they’ve got massive amounts of savings for their retirement, all that sort of stuff. And they look at us and it’s pathetic, frankly.

The Need for Change

And there’s no reason why we can’t be much richer, there’s no reason why our economy can’t grow much faster. But we fall into this ideological trap and also a form of stasis where vested interest groups block all change. So a combination of this, you can’t really change anything, you can’t build anything in Britain, you can’t change any laws, you can’t change any rules. You’ve got on the one hand, and on the other hand, you’ve just got to ruling class, which believes our ruling class is either defeatist and doesn’t believe that we can change or is just completely wrong about everything.

And I think it’s a combination of those two things. We’ve got a very, very bad ruling class in Britain at the moment. We’ve got an elite that’s failing this country. You know, their economic views are wrong, their philosophical views are wrong, their views on free speech are wrong. You know, all of that. And we need a new counter elite, really, that can introduce the source of radical reforms that are required.

The Role of Ideology and 2008

FRANCIS FOSTER: I like the fact that you said the word ideology. Now there’ll be people, Alistair, who’s going, “look, how much of the 2008 economic crash is to blame for this because wages haven’t risen in real time since that event.” How much of this crisis stems from that particular moment?

The American Recovery vs. British Stagnation

ALLISTER HEATH: Yes, well, a lot of it stems from that, but it didn’t need to stem from that. That’s a key point. So the Americans had that crisis, but what did they do? They purged the system, they reformed the banks very quickly. They just moved on. They did what Americans do. You fire other people, you start some institutions, you change everything very quickly. You fire CEOs and so on and you just move on.

And we got stuck. We nationalized banks and then we passed all sorts of stupid laws. I blame the Conservative Party for that. The coalition government of 2010 to 2015 fell out of love with the City. Now the City is the most important part of the British economy – the financial services industry, the banking industry. But the Tories regulated it to death as a result of the financial crisis.

They thought they needed a kind of revenge almost against the financial system for the crisis. And that was a disaster for this country. So the economy never recovered. We’ve never recovered from the financial crisis in terms of the economy, unlike America, which has just bounced back and like most other countries just bounced back.

And we haven’t recovered philosophically and ideologically because that crisis was pinned in Britain by self-serving politicians on the capitalists. Everyone said, “Oh, this is a crisis of capitalism, capitalism is rotten, doesn’t work. Look, we’ve had to bail out all these people. It’s corrupt.”

Well, wrong. This was largely actually the crisis of central banks getting it all wrong with interest rates and manipulating monetary policy to try and create permanent growth, which you can’t do. And it was also a crisis of regulation failures among regulators. And of course banks made mistakes – companies make mistakes and fail. But there was a different way of doing that. You could have done it without all these handouts with far fewer bailouts. And I think bailing out the City was a disaster philosophically for this country.

The Debt Crisis Reality

KONSTANTIN KISIN: And the thing you said at the very beginning, I don’t think people understand the levels of debt and the speed at which it’s rising that we’re in. I think I was reading Liam’s column – 81% of new borrowing is now spent on paying off previous borrowing.

ALLISTER HEATH: Yes. So this is absolutely, you’re absolutely spot on. So people realize they’re not getting richer, right?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Right.

ALLISTER HEATH: So people realize their wages are not really going up because of inflation and higher house prices, all that sort of stuff. They also realize more and more people are on benefits and they realize nothing’s working. They realize the hospitals aren’t working, the prisons aren’t working. Freeing criminals early is crazy. The courts aren’t working, nothing’s working. That’s broken Britain.

But what they don’t realize is that on top of that, the debt is spiraling out of control and the government’s got a massive hole in the public finances. It has to borrow more and more money just to stand still. And that is a ticking time bomb underneath this whole rotten edifice. The house of cards will crumble because of the debt crisis.

And we must hope somehow that there’s a silver lining to that, that this coming implosion will at least force political change. But there’s a big danger. There’s a really big danger because when you have a fiscal crisis, it’s not always the Conservative parties with a small “c” that triumph. It’s often the populist left.

So if you want to turbocharge the growing far left in Britain, which is probably already at 15%, really, if not more, well, wait until the fiscal crisis comes along. You’ll have all these guys like Jeremy Corbyn, the far left leader, the Green Party, which is basically a socialist revolutionary party in Britain. You have all these people blaming business, blaming capitalism, blaming banks, as they always do, and I think the anti-capitalist sentiment rising yet again.

And so this is quite dangerous. So on the one hand, this kind of crisis will help the forces of opposition, primarily Nigel Farage’s Reform Party. On the other, I think they’ll also help the far left.

What a Fiscal Crisis Actually Looks Like

KONSTANTIN KISIN: And Allister, can you – these are all words and words and realities are different things. Can you explain to people what a fiscal crisis looks like? What does that mean? If you’re an ordinary person who goes to work, comes home, has dinner with the wife and kids, et cetera. What does a fiscal crisis mean for our country if that happens?

ALLISTER HEATH: Yes, so I mean, a fiscal crisis is when the government has to either pay more and more and more and more money to borrow or it simply can’t borrow anymore. And let’s say you have to pay more and more and more money. Let’s say you end up paying 10% a year on your debt.

Well, the problem with that is, first of all, you run out of money to spend on anything else. So you’re forced to make cuts to public spending just to pay your interest payments, but at the same time, mortgages and other forms of debt, credit card debt, everything goes up together. Because it all sort of follows in some way the government’s interest rate.

So suddenly you’re going to have a massive housing crisis. You’re going to have people who, when they roll over their mortgages, mortgage rates will be much higher. People who borrow money on their credit cards are going to have to pay more. So it’s going to be a catastrophe for everybody, basically. But there’d also be these huge cuts to public spending and it could be even worse than that.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: I’m sorry to interrupt. Just on the cuts, I think a lot of people have been convinced that what we had was this great period of terrible austerity in which budgets were slashed. And look, there are individual areas where that did happen. There were some budgets that were very significantly cut, but broadly speaking, we barely reduced our expenditure during this great era of austerity.

ALLISTER HEATH: Yes.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: What you are talking about is going to make austerity look like a walk in the park.

ALLISTER HEATH: Well, you’d have to have real austerity, right.

The Reality of Government Bankruptcy

ALLISTER HEATH: The second element of a fiscal crisis is if the government literally can’t borrow at all. So it goes to the markets and says, “I need to borrow £20 billion this week.” And the markets say, “No, sorry.”

So a combination of those two things has to trigger one response, which is massive cuts to public spending. If you have a fiscal crisis, you have to have massive cuts to public spending. So maybe you’ve got to cut the state pension, dump the triple lock, obviously, maybe cut the wages of public sector workers – 5% cuts across the board, that sort of thing. 5 billion cuts to this and 5 billion cuts to that.

And most likely what governments do in these cases is also to put up taxes. Now, I hate putting up taxes. Taxes are already at a record high in this country. But anyway, that’s probably what would happen. Maybe VAT would go up maybe 2%, 2.5%, maybe income tax would go up. So you have those two things at the same time.

So obviously you’d have a recession in year one before the economy then starts to kind of restructure itself and recover. And the last time we had a fiscal crisis in this country wasn’t actually during the financial crisis, really. It was in 1976, when the Labour government at the time was forced to ask for bailout from the international lenders, led by the International Monetary Fund, which is basically the IMF, this body that normally lends money to poor countries that go bankrupt.

Now, this time around, UK debt is so large that the IMF will not be able to bail us out. It’s too large. And in any case, there’s other reasons why they might not do it, but we are getting closer to that sort of situation.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: So what will happen if the IMF can’t bail us out? What will happen?

ALLISTER HEATH: We’ll make all these cuts and we’ll have to borrow from the private sector and we just have to hope that the interest rate’s not too high.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: But why wouldn’t it be too high? Who wants to lend money to…

ALLISTER HEATH: Because when you slash public spending by £50 billion in one day and put up taxes by £30 billion in one day in your emergency budget, then they might believe you. They might.

The Recipe for Social Unrest

FRANCIS FOSTER: Isn’t that a recipe for social unrest?

ALLISTER HEATH: It is, of course, a recipe for social unrest. And the reason it’s a recipe for social unrest is that the political establishment has effectively lied to the public by selling them a vision of this country that can’t be afforded. This is why I say we’ve been living beyond our means.

We cannot afford the NHS as it currently is. We cannot afford the state pension as it currently is. We cannot afford all these benefits. We cannot afford this stuff. We just can’t. There’s not enough money. We’re borrowing huge amounts of money just to pay for this spending. It’s absurd.

It is utterly absurd and entirely reckless that at this stage in the economic cycle we are still borrowing this amount of money. So just wait until there’s a real crisis. So the public are going to be very angry and they’re going to start looking for scapegoats and you can have all sorts of issues there.

But I think the Labour Party, if it happens under Labour’s watch, the Labour Party would be annihilated. I just don’t think it’s going to survive.

Labour’s Role in Worsening the Crisis

FRANCIS FOSTER: And so really, Labour have inherited this crisis. Is Rachel Reeves helping?

ALLISTER HEATH: So Labour have inherited this crisis. Yes, but they’ve made it much, much worse. So the previous – I’ve got a lot of criticism of the previous Conservative government. I think it failed. I think what it did to the country was on balance very bad, apart from a couple of things. But at least they were proposing freezes to public spending or even cuts in some areas that would have stabilized the public finances.

When Reeves, Rachel Reeves, the current Labour Chancellor, came to power, she massively increased public spending immediately and then massively increased taxes. And that led to an explosion in the black hole at the heart of the public finances. She wrongly blamed the Conservatives for that. That was wrong. It was her fault. It was her doing.

The tax increases and all these warnings around the taxes and the talking down of the economy and the endlessly blaming the Conservatives and so on had a real effect on growth. Further depressing growth, further reducing tax revenues compared to what they would otherwise have been. And you’ve ended up in a very bad fiscal place. I blame Labour for that. It’s Labour’s fault.

Now they’re preparing a new budget where they’re going to put up taxes again by another massive amount of money. And I can guarantee you we are already on the wrong side of this so-called Laffer curve. Basically we’re at a place where when you put up taxes, you get very little extra money. Sometimes you can even get less money than you would have had you actually cut the taxes.

This is where we are in this country. We are in a very dangerous place where you can’t really just put up taxes and put up taxes and put up taxes and hope to just collect more and more money. The economy is at breaking point. We are reaching the maximum amount of taxation that you can extract from a very weak private sector.

The Reality of Britain’s Economic Challenges

FRANCIS FOSTER: So what you’re saying sounds, and this is pretty much what I’ve thought and I’ve got no training in economics in business or whatever it is, but to me what you’re saying is common sense. Eventually there’s only so much juice you can get out from the squeeze in the orange, pretty much. So then I look at Rachel Reeves and I look at the Labour Party and I think to myself, why don’t they understand this? Is this incompetence? Is this ideology or is it a mixture of the two?

ALLISTER HEATH: It’s a mixture of the two. So when they arrived, they were incredibly arrogant. They thought they were morally righteous people, they were holier than thou, they were better people. So therefore, by definition everything was going to work much better. They just walk into the government and they just tell the civil service and the civil service was cheer hooray, finally some good people and we all work together and the economy would start booming and we suddenly start building all these new houses and all that sort of stuff. Obviously completely delusional nonsense. So that’s the first problem.

Secondly, ideology. The current ideology, the current dominant ideology in this country just does not deliver growth. What do you have? You’ve got net zero. Net zero is a complete disaster, complete disaster. We are producing, we’re shutting down all our oil and gas fields. We’re producing less and less electricity. We are burning ourselves with this obsessive desire to reduce carbon emission at any cost. And the cost is vast and this is crippling the economy. That’s the first problem. You can’t return to proper growth without ditching net zero. First thing.

Second, regulation. Everything is regulated. There’s far too much regulation, far too much red tape on every aspect of life. Third, tax. You can’t be waging war on the so called rich when it is the rich that basically deliver all the innovation, all the new companies, the growth, and such a disproportionate share of tax revenues.

The Tories and Labour have been chasing away the so called non doms, which are these rich people who base themselves in the UK. They’ve been chasing away entrepreneurs, they’ve been discouraging risk taking and entrepreneurship. Where’s Elon Musk? Where’s the British Elon Musk? Every day almost you hear of another company that’s decided not to invest in Britain or another British company that has decided to move to America to list on the New York Stock Market, not on the London Stock Exchange. This is a complete disaster. And this is ideology.

And then it’s this generalized climate in this country. There’s too much crime, there’s too much disorder, everything’s messy, prices are too high. Nothing works. The public sector doesn’t work. Why do you want to live here under all these circumstances? Yes, obviously Britain remains quite a civilized place and parts of the UK are still beautiful and people enjoy the arts and the culture and all that sort of stuff. But there comes a time when these sorts of advantages pale in comparison with the hard reality, which is, why do you want to come here and pay so much tax? Makes no sense.

The Political Constraints on Economic Reform

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Well, and you mentioned Francis, and you both mentioned ideology and incompetence. But I think there is a much more powerful third force that you alluded to earlier, which is, I believe, the reason the labor government is only using one of the levers which is trying to increase taxes. The other levers are not available to them. They know they cannot reduce public spending because for them, that’s electoral suicide.

And so when they even attempt to do any of that, or even hint at attempting, or even talk about attempting any of that, the entire left wing of the Labour Party comes out and says, “You’re going to kill the poor. You’re going to do this, you’re going to do that.” And so the fact that you say we’re living beyond our means, they can’t go to let’s reduce spending, which, if you think about it on a household level, if you come home to your wife tonight and say, “Sweetheart, my salary’s been cut in half, so we’re going to have to tighten our belt.” She might not be happy, but she’d probably understand and you’d work together to work things out.

But if you came home tonight and said, “My salary’s been cut in half,” and she went, “I’m entitled to the lifestyle that you’ve provided me to this point.” You’ve got a problem. And that’s where I think the Labor Party is. The person that they’ve got at home does not want to recognize the consequences of the salary being cut in half.

ALLISTER HEATH: Yes, I mean, that’s, I’d say a combination of ideology and self interest and political self interest. And you saw that the Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, was trying to cut spending. She was trying to cut a bit of public spending. And she was defeated by the Labour MPs, who just rebelled, basically. They just said, “No, sorry, we’re never doing that.”

And now they’re going to try again, by the way, they’re going to have another go at trimming some forms of public spending. But the reality is there’s going to be a fiscal crisis and suddenly they’re going to have to do this and their base is going to loathe them for it. And the public is going to hate them because they’ve been lying and saying, “You don’t have to do it.”

But you’re right. Yes. Electoral self interest is a major problem for the Labour Party. If your voting base is basically people who are net tax consumers, you can divide the country into two groups. Net tax contributors, people who pay more tax than they take out in other benefits or services, and net tax consumers. And the problem in Britain is there’s too many consumers. Too many people are taking out more than they put in. It’s that simple. And the mathematics of that is toxic. It basically means that both the center right and the center left end up becoming a proponent for an ever larger welfare state.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Which is what we’ve got.

ALLISTER HEATH: Which is what we’ve got.

The Conservative Dilemma and Reform’s Rise

KONSTANTIN KISIN: So the question then is, I mean, you’ve. I don’t know your politics exactly, but I imagine based on what you’ve said, you’re not a fan of labor, you’re not a fan of the Conservatives. That only leaves for someone.

ALLISTER HEATH: Well, I suppose the Conservatives at the last election and previous elections.

FRANCIS FOSTER: We forgive you.

ALLISTER HEATH: Yes, well, I supported them because I repent so well. I spent my whole time criticizing them. And then I supported them. And the reason I was criticizing them was not because I disliked them, I liked a lot of them individually, but because I thought they were going terribly wrong, because they were turning their back on free market principles and on genuine Conservative philosophy. And I thought that was a catastrophe. And I was convinced the Labour government would be a complete disaster. I wasn’t one of those people who claimed totally wrongly. In my view, there’s no difference in Conservatives and Labour. There is a big difference. And I think these Labour governments mean a catastrophe.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: I understand, but I think part of the way you frame it there is interesting because of the question I was about to ask you. Abandoning free market principles and yes, there’s a difference between labor and conservatives, but a lot of people would say the difference between labor and conservatives is the speed at which they arrive at the same destination.

ALLISTER HEATH: That’s exactly what happened in recent years. Yes, after the Conservative party embraced Blairism and basically gave up on its previous belief system.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Okay, so we are now where we are. If your projections are correct, which I have no reason to think they’re not, we are going to arrive in a fairly radical moment. And as you say, there are two possibilities. There is the rise of the far left, the fringes of the labor movement, the Green Party, Corbyn, whatever you want to call it. And then on the other side you’ve got reform. Now my looking at reform’s commitments at this point, those free market principles which I know Nigel Farage holds very dear, they don’t seem to be super present either. I mean there is a lot of all things to all men going on in reform as well, don’t you think?

Reform’s Political Prospects

ALLISTER HEATH: I think a few weeks ago reform started putting out some left wing policies to try and outgun labor, to try and grab more of the old working class electorate. I think that was probably a mistake. On balance though, they are talking now about cutting welfare spending quite heavily. They’ve just announced they’re going to be working on a project to look at that. And they’re also generally speaking about cutting public spending.

I think they are now much more aware of this possibility of a fiscal crisis, which is why they are now, for example, preparing for an election in 2027 which would be two years earlier than the date at which it has to happen. So I do think they are aware that they need to have another rethink and get back to basics, I think on all of that stuff.

But look, the bottom line is this Reform are massively ahead in the polls at the moment. On current trends, Reform is the most likely to win the next general election, which obviously will be an earthquake in British and in world politics. But I think we mustn’t underestimate the chance of the left somehow managing to pull a rabbit out of a hat. Jeremy Corbyn is going to eventually launch a new party and it doesn’t matter how chaotic it is and how contradictory and whether they’d have a name or whatever, that doesn’t really matter. They’ve got at least 15% of the population that are immediately going to back a sort of Corbyn Green alliance that could grow to 20%.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: But isn’t that good for reform in the short term?

ALLISTER HEATH: That’s excellent for reform because it’s basically destroying the Labour Party. So the Labour Party is just sinking.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: And fragmenting the left.

ALLISTER HEATH: And it’s fragmenting the left. Yes, completely fragmenting the left. Because the Liberal Democrats also gradually growing. There’s a high chance that the Liberal Democrats become the official opposition after the next election. You might have a reform government, a Liberal Democrat opposition. On current polling, that’s what it would be.

But this is where I think things get slightly more exciting. I think the Corbyn Party could yet have a higher share of the vote than the Liberal Democrats at the next election. So I think the left is fragmenting. The right fragmented massively, which meant that Labour won the last election. But now, paradoxically, the right is less fragmented than the left because reform is so dominant. But the Conservatives are still at about 18% or so in the polls. So that’s a question.

Understanding Far-Left Support

FRANCIS FOSTER: And how much of this with which we see with people supporting hard left parties is ideological? Like you’ve always had your socialist workers parties and how much of this is just economic illiteracy. Like people don’t understand what it means to run a country or how you effectively have to balance the books.

ALLISTER HEATH: Yes, I mean, the far left support the Omnicorps nowadays, so they’re no longer purely economic. The old Marxist parties were very kind of materialistic. It was only about economics really. In a way it was a nice message. It was, “We’re going to make sure the poor become rich.” That’s quite nice. In reality, it led to catastrophe, death, dictatorship and so on.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Right, but everyone was equally poor.

The Rise of the Far Left and Economic Inequality

ALLISTER HEATH: That’s what happened. Yes, and equally unfree. But the left now has mutated, it’s woke, it’s got all sorts of hatreds and it embraces what I call the “Omnicorps.” Other people call the Omnicorps, which is this ever changing set of left wing beliefs.

Right now it’s hatred of Israel, but before that it was hatred of bankers, it was BLM. You know, it just changes depending on the moment. As you can see, Greta Thunberg basically switching from being a net zero advocate to be an anti Israel activist. So they are kind of fueled and fired up by quite a lot of stuff.

And those people genuinely believe that there’s no difference between the Tories and Labour, which is why they’re willing to vote for Far Left party regardless of what that means as a general election. Of course they’d hate the Reform Party, but they really don’t care if Labour win or not anymore because they’ve become so left wing, so disengaged.

By the way, there are of course lots of economic reasons for the growth of the far left. So it’s part of a cultural thing, but it’s partly an economic thing. The cultural thing has also got to do with changing belief system among younger people when it comes to the environment, which they prioritize above everything else. You know, even they say they don’t have children, for example, because they care so much about the environment.

But also you’ve got the whole cultural rejection of nation states. So these people believe in open borders. They believe that, you know, you should have unlimited immigration, that citizenship is meaningless. So all those sorts of things.

But then you’ve got the economics. The economics is probably largely about two things. One, housing availability. There’s just not enough homes built in this country given the explosion in the size of the population. And also other forms of social change like people living longer or people living singles and stuff like that.

And secondly, wages, wages have just not kept up. So because these people see that and they don’t really have an economic theory of how the world works. They just assume capitalism has failed or not, you know, in “late stage capitalism” or something like that. Or they assume that the rich are taking all the money.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: That’s what that’s. I was going to say it’s worse than what you say. It’s that what they assume is they’ve been robbed.

ALLISTER HEATH: Right.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: And there are a lot of commentators who will tell them that the reason you are poor is the rich, the rich, the rich. And I do think that inequality is a massive problem in this country. We can’t deny that.

Good vs. Bad Inequality

ALLISTER HEATH: Yeah. So I don’t call it inequality because I don’t have a problem with inequality. I think inequality is normal. I think inequality is good even when it emerges.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Why is it good?

ALLISTER HEATH: It’s good if it emerges spontaneously from differential contributions. If you’re an incredibly successful sports star and tens of millions of people are willing to pay, you know, your YouTube channel, whatever it is to watch you, then I have no problem that person being very, very rich, much, much richer than somebody else. So that form of inequality doesn’t bother me.

But there’s an artificial kind of inequality that’s created via fake policy, and that’s what I object to. And that artificial malign form of inequality comes from terrible education systems that drag down the poor in this country, in the UK, especially the white working class, which is terrible at school. So therefore their future prospects are massively limited.

You’ve got a welfare state that’s basically a trap. The welfare state encourages people not to work, in many cases, encourages people to exaggerate their lack of health, for example, especially mental health. So that’s creating poverty.

There’s monetary policy. That is what central banks do. So you’ve had years and years and years of monetary manipulation by central banks. Central bankers think they’re like this new elite class. They’re almost godlike in their beliefs. They think that they can just stop, they can create perpetual economic growth just by fiddling with interest rates or printing money, quantitative easing, that sort of stuff.

I think that’s been hugely disruptive to the economy over the last 20, 30 years. It’s put up the price of certain assets, it’s put up the price of housing. It’s made it much less likely for young people to be able to afford to buy their own homes. So that’s another reason, another policy creating the wrong kind of inequality.

You’ve got another. The wrong kind of inequality simply caused by lack of economic opportunity. Right. If there’s a lot of economic opportunity. Social mobility can be maximized so people can climb. You know, if there’s not much social mobility because there’s not much opportunity, if there’s barriers to entry, there’s closed shops, there’s laws that prevent you from entering a particular business area, well clearly that’s going to also maximize inequality. It’s going to freeze the society in aspic, and again, that will hurt the poor.

So there’s good inequality, which is the byproduct of a real free market. You know, if you work hard, you can make money, if you’re lazy, you don’t make money. But there’s bad inequality that’s caused by stupid public policy, flawed ideology, flawed economics, that kind of thing. And that is a problem here. And that is clearly one of the things fueling the rise of the anti capitalist far left. Fueling the Omni cause is fueling malcontent and social chaos.

Reform’s Potential Impact and Challenges

FRANCIS FOSTER: Imagine. So let’s just do a little thought experiment, Allister. Let’s say reform. Get in a sizable majority and then we have 20%, your party, Jezebel or whatever you want to call them, how much of an impact can they make? How much of an impact can they make on reform, on public policy, on spending, etc.

ALLISTER HEATH: It all depends on the professionalism and organization of a reform government if that were to be what materializes at the next election. Because for reform government to succeed, there’s two very big challenges for Nigel Farage, right?

First challenge, win the election. That would be an astonishing thing for him to win the general election. People are starting to speak about it as if it’s normal, obvious. It’s not normal, it’s not obvious. It’s a massive challenge for him. At the moment it looks like he might be able to pull it off.

But the second massive challenge is that he’d have to seize control of the British state and actually impose the sort of change, you know, once in a generation, frankly once in the hundred year level of change, the kind of stuff you saw in the 1940s, a more radical, more compressed period of change than even the 1980s under Thatcher.

You’d have to change everything, right? Scrap tons of laws, restructured constitution, complete a change of civil service which is completely broken. You know, get rid of the Human Rights act, quit the ECHR, quit all these international treaties, right? And you’d be declaring total ideological war on the Blob, on the ruling dominant ideology of this country. And that’s going to be very, very tough.

So that is Farage’s massive challenge. Prepare. How can you prepare? How can you find lots of very talented people outside of politics to bring them in so that they can effectively launch a hostile takeover of the British state after the general election and actually push through change rather than be defeated?

Liz Truss came along and she was crushed. She was gone within weeks. How do you avoid that sort of scenario? Trump won in America, was largely defeated by the Blob, by the civil service and so on. Trump too, on the other hand, has seized control of the machinery of state. He was very well prepared in advance. You know, he had orders, he was just ready to sign on. Day one, day two, day three and so on. That’s how you do it.

But you need quality people and there’s not enough quality people currently in British politics. There’s some quality people in the Conservative Party. We must hope that everyone on the right kind of unites in some sort of way so that at least you.

Conservative Party Defections to Reform

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Talk to a lot of people in both reform and the Conservatives. It’s my. I think about these things logically, which usually fails me, because a lot of the human behavior is not very logical. But logically, I would think, as reform, if reform continues to do well and the Conservatives continue to struggle, you would imagine that many of the people within the Conservative Party would jump ship because it would be the logical thing to do. Do you sense that that is what will happen?

ALLISTER HEATH: I think it will happen, but it’s not really happened in any major way yet. The reason is they’re just biding the time. I mean, their strategy is that they think they just. There’s no need for them to move fast. They don’t think there’s a first mover advantage in doing that. They think there’s a first move of cost because, you know, everyone will hate you, your old friends will hate you, that sort of stuff. It’s better to wait until other people do it first.

There’s a danger there because Farage is trying to bring in people from outside politics. So if you’re not careful, he’s going to have found new people before those Tories actually join him. But I think, on balance, his big challenge now is to further expand his share of the vote. And that now means further shrinking the Tory share of the vote, which remains still quite high at about 18%.

So I think, yes, more Tories will probably join reform. The problem with the Conservative Party is basically one third of the Conservative Party are real Conservatives. You know, free marketers, Conservatives, libertarians, whatever coalition of those kinds of people, a third are Centrists, they’re basically careerists, they do whatever the party leader tells them to do. And a third are basically Liberal Democrats, social Democrats, who basically are not Conservative, you know, who were against Brexit, who like international human rights treaties, who like all that sort of stuff.

So that party was always a complete unstable coalition, which is basically what ruined the last few years of their government.

FRANCIS FOSTER: But I mean, every party is an unstable coalition in some form or another, surely. I mean, Labour is an unstable coalition.

ALLISTER HEATH: Yes, no, you’re right about that. But I think there was really, really striking ideological differences within the Conservative Party on essential questions. If you go to the Labour Party, they all believe that the state is good, that the NHS is good, the government needs to grow, paying taxes is a good thing. Right? But they disagree about the details.

In the Conservative Party, they literally disagreed about everything. They disagreed about first principles, they disagreed about philosophy. You know, you joined the EU, do you leave the EU? Should you have a wealth tax? Yes, some Tories believe in a wealth tax. Or do you not have a wealth tax? Should you cut tax? Should you put up tax? I mean, these are hugely consequential differences. I think they are non reconcilable differences, which I think if reform won’t have any chance of succeeding, they need to make sure that they are united on all the basic principles, at least.

FRANCIS FOSTER: But, you know, you look at reform, is it Jake Berry who’s who has transitioned over to reform, and you go, this is guy’s a proponent of net zero, you know, he’s a big fan. You go, what’s happening here? Surely that’s fundamentally incompatible.

ALLISTER HEATH: You’ve got to hope that he was in the second category, the centrist, careerist category, and that’s.

FRANCIS FOSTER: Isn’t that worse?

ALLISTER HEATH: Right, well, look, that is. Well, reform faced two problems. Reform face a number of possible risks. One of the risks is that they become a Conservative party, you know, and I hope so, you know, they better not do that. Another risk, of course, is they don’t find enough competent people, you know, and there’s other risks. Or that they inadvertently attract some dodgy people, which forage is obviously very keen not to happen.

FRANCIS FOSTER: Let’s go back to my original question, which is a 20%. Your party, Jezebel are how much of an impact and effect can they have on UK politics and the way we run this country?

The Impact of Far-Left Politics on British Democracy

ALLISTER HEATH: They can have a very large effect on British politics, but not necessarily on what happens in terms of public policy and in terms of the government. If you’ve got a strong, well organized majority government, then government could ignore those people, fight them on the airwaves in terms of argument, set the debate, shift sentiment in a more rightwards direction, that kind of thing.

But if you’ve got a far Left party at 20%, clearly it will make a big impact in terms of grassroots movements and in terms of the long term political structure of this country. Yes.

Britain’s Descent into Anarcho-Tyranny

FRANCIS FOSTER: So let’s… I love your articles, Allister, I really do. Yeah, I think they’re really well written, they’re a little bit spicy, slightly provocative at times, which I like. I very much enjoy. There was one article in particular that stood out which was… You used the phrase “anarcho tyranny” and you were saying this country is descending, or is in the process of descending into a state of anarcho tyranny. James O’Brien was frothing at the mouth, which personally made us all very happy.

ALLISTER HEATH: Yeah, no, I was quite happy about that.

FRANCIS FOSTER: So explain what you mean to me and what you mean by that. Because when I read the article I was like, oh, this is a bit far. And then the more I read, the more my blood started to chill slightly.

ALLISTER HEATH: Obviously I was tongue in cheek slightly.

FRANCIS FOSTER: Yeah.

ALLISTER HEATH: But the serious point is this country is a weird mix of chaos, lawlessness, hard working, law abiding people being criminalized because of some dumb tweet that they might have put out or something they’ve said, that sort of stuff. You know, massive amount of shoplifting, people getting a mobile phone stolen, that sort of thing. Graffiti, litter, nothing’s working. So that’s the chaos bit, the anarchy bit and the tyranny bit is basically that this kind of increasing oppression in certain areas and obviously the war on free speech is a very important part of that.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: In other words, the government can’t keep the peace and can’t put criminals in jail, but it can put you in jail if you’re Graham Linehan.

The Need for US-Style Free Speech Protection

ALLISTER HEATH: Yeah, well, that is exactly right. And that is a tragic situation. It’s a stunning contrast and it’s not one that I like. I don’t think that’s the direction this country should go in. I think it’s very dangerous. I think the free speech thing isn’t a joke. I think it’s very serious. I think it’s a travesty that so many people are being prosecuted for what they’re saying.

I think the whole world is noticing things have gone wrong over the last 20 years. Basically, some of this stuff was originally well intentioned, but I think unfortunately it’s gone terribly wrong. And I think the only solution is to adopt a US style protection for free speech, by which I mean the kinds of rules. I don’t mean a First Amendment, because you can’t do that in Britain. We don’t have a written constitution. You can pass a law, but it’s never going to be part of the constitution.

But you should pass a law protecting free speech. You should basically copy the rulings of the US Supreme Court, their guidance when it comes to what should be legal and what should not be legal. Because obviously in America… Yeah, even in America, some forms of speech have done inciting immediate and likely violence. Obviously you can’t do that. You can’t shout fire in a crowded theater, that sort of thing. But other than that, all speech should be permissible.

The Authoritarian Left and the Graham Linehan Case

FRANCIS FOSTER: But what’s really worrying is talking about free speech. We saw Zach Polanski, the new head of the new leader of the Green Party, on, I think it was Newsnight, and they were talking about the arrest of Graham Linehan and he said he supported it.

ALLISTER HEATH: “Now, I accept proportionality of police response is a conversation we need to have.”

FRANCIS FOSTER: But do you think this was proportionate?

ALLISTER HEATH: “I think it was proportionate to arrest him. I think there’s a pattern here. I think there were five armed police officers turning up. Well, that’s the bit that I don’t understand why they were armed. And again, I’d need to hear about the… And why there were five, presumably.”

I mean, this is a new phenomenon which is left wing political operators openly being authoritarian, openly calling for the arrests of people who say things they don’t like. And let’s be clear, Graham Linehan said nothing wrong. It was not offensive. There’s absolutely nothing wrong in what he said. Right. That was a case of persecution. That was entirely unfair. It was entirely wrong. There’s no defense for this. And obviously in America you’d be laughed out of court. Obviously that would never be prosecuted.

And I think it’s very worrying that the far left is becoming so authoritarian. But it is right? What starts with speech goes on with other things. I mean, the far left wants to shut down private schools. They don’t allow people to educate their children the way they want. They want to tax them, expropriate their property. They want a wealth tax, confiscate their wealth, that sort of stuff. And they don’t want them to be allowed to say what they want. That is not a liberal movement.

The woke infused far left is a very dangerous set of people and very dangerous set of parties. I mean, don’t forget on free speech, they believe that speech is basically violence. And they believe in an inherently racist and oppressive society and that the only people who’ve got the ability to say anything are actually oppressors. And this is a very twisted way of looking at the world. And it’s a total rejection of western values. The far left is anti Western now, by the way, there’s the growth of fascism on certain fringes in America, for example. I’m totally against that also. That’s also very dangerous.

The Reality of Linguistic Violence

KONSTANTIN KISIN: I agree with you completely. And I think one of the things that’s in stark relief for us all today because we’re recording this the day after Charlie Kirk was murdered in America. And we don’t yet know, and we may know by the time this episode is released who it was that killed him, what they were motivated by.

But the one thing that I think is we’ve all given this linguistic shenanigans a pass. We’ve all said, oh, you know what, some students are saying words of violence, but they don’t really mean it. And they’re calling these people Nazis or those people, they don’t really mean it. But I think we’re now through the looking glass and we now have to actually recognize the reality of where we are, which is when people say that someone is a Nazi or when people say that language is violence and therefore logically you are entitled to defend yourself against that language with violence, we are in a very bad place.

And I think it’s time, where I really agree with what you’ve said today is it’s time to stop pretending that these words don’t mean what the words mean.

The Comprehensive Threat of Woke Ideology

ALLISTER HEATH: I’m a journalist, I can tell you words mean what they mean. Words matter. Right? It’s all in the words. And the far left ideology that is generally known as Wokeism or whatever you want to call it, is a very bad set of beliefs. It’s a belief that completely demolishes every single foundation of Western society. And it was designed to do so.

Marxism only destroyed part of society. This is a comprehensive destruction of all aspects of Western society. Everything. And it needs to be fought. It needs to be taken very seriously. The idea that the war on woke has been won is wrong. Yes, Donald Trump is in the White House, but that doesn’t mean that the war on woke has been won. In Britain, Wokery is still a very dominant ideology. It’s still the official ideology of the public sector. The police are arresting people for having said something that someone thinks isn’t very nice. This is very dangerous.

Is Wokeness in Retreat?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Let me challenge you a little bit on that though, Allister, do you not think, though, the way I was just on with my very good friend James Orr and his new podcast, which everyone should check out, and we talked about this and he was asking me about this. My sense, though, is that wokeness was metastatic. It was a metastatic cancer. There was a central tumor. And then you’ve got all these other tumors that have spread into other parts of the body, politicians.

But I do think the central tumor has been removed, more or less, which is the ideology is bankrupt. It’s discredited. Which is why when Graham is arrested by the police, you have the police coming out saying to the politicians, you need to change the law. And you’ve got labor politicians saying, yeah, I think we need to change the law because the power of the central tumor is no longer there. These other tumors are starting to fall out one by one. Do you not think that’s true?

ALLISTER HEATH: So I think that’s slightly too optimistic for me. I’ll tell you why I agree and why I disagree. So I think the anti woke forces have won a massive victory when it comes to gender ideology.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Yes.

ALLISTER HEATH: And I think, by the way, that only happens because of the sensible left. So it’s not the right that won it, it’s the left. It’s J.K. Rowling. She’s a hero, in my view.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Rosie Duffield.

Mixed Results in the War Against Woke

ALLISTER HEATH: Yes. And all these people, they got together, the few people on the right, and they managed to defeat gender ideology in America. Trump has really pushed that. And gender ideology, when normal people actually understood it, was hated because people realize how demented it was, anti natural and all the rest. So that aspect of the WOKE revolution is in retreat.

On speech, I think Britain is just a crazy outlier. So the restrictions on speech in Britain are so ridiculous that they’ve overreached. So there is going to be a backlash. But I don’t really think that the overall ideology has been properly damaged because when you look at the arguments, people say, okay, fine, in this particular case, we shouldn’t have arrested this person. But nonetheless, in all these other cases, it’s still valid. And I don’t think that’s a proper defense of free speech. That’s just a sort of recalibration. The woke overreached. So now they are kind of slightly moving back.

And then I think there’s other areas where the woke ideology is still completely out of control. For example, this whole idea of colonialism and settler states and exploitation and paying reparations for slavery and all that sort of stuff that is still growing, that has not been defeated. And the entire left wing hatred of Israel, for example, is based specifically on that ideology. That ideology defines Israel as a settler state, which by definition, axiomatically, is committing a genocide. You don’t have to prove it, you don’t have to show any evidence. It’s just happening by definition.

And those people also think that America and Australia, New Zealand and Canada are invalid constructs and that stuff’s gaining ground. And so, you know, I look at the world and I see, okay, the woke are not winning every battle and they’re being pushed back in some areas even defeated when it comes to woke ideology. But they’re not won. We, our side is not winning on everything.

And also, by the way, on economics. I think more and more young people in America, in this country, elsewhere, are describing themselves as socialists. And that’s of course, you know, Marxism, traditional Marxism is basically the economic wing of the woke movement. That’s how it all started. But that still remains essential. In New York, you’ve got that socialist candidate who’s probably going to win.

FRANCIS FOSTER: Zora Mamdani.

ALLISTER HEATH: Indeed.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Yes.

ALLISTER HEATH: And he’s a woke revolutionary, basically. And he’s now going to launch it on economics, on crime, even on crime. You know, of course there’s been pushback. And everybody realizes, many people now realize that defunding the police is literally utter idiocy. I mean madness. But nonetheless, you know, there’s still a lot of work to be had, I think so. So yeah, I think it’s a mixed picture. It’s a mixed picture.

Final Questions

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Before Allister answers the final question at the end of the interview, make sure to go to triggerpod.co.uk to hear him answer your questions and see this.

FRANCIS FOSTER: “What’s the most high impact reform the UK could make today that we’d still thank ourselves for in 10 to 20 years?”

KONSTANTIN KISIN: “Do you think it would be viable for the UK to create a sovereign wealth fund using shale gas? And why do you think that net zero energy and security taken over the West?”

FRANCIS FOSTER: Allister, it’s been an absolute pleasure. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Last question is always the same. What’s the one thing we’re not talking about that we really should be?

The Return of Anti-Semitism in Britain

ALLISTER HEATH: I think we’re not talking enough as a society about the return of anti-Semitism in Britain and the West. I think that’s an incredibly dangerous, toxic, hateful belief that a lot of us thought had been vanquished but in fact it turns out hasn’t been vanquished.

There’s a polling, a recent poll, a YouGov poll in the UK which shows that 21% of the population now are basically anti-Semites in the sense that they believe in at least four antisemitic tropes. 45% of the population believe that Israel is treating Palestinians in the same way as Nazis treated the Jews, which is obviously completely absurd.

And you know, there’s more and more acts of violence, more and more criminal antisemitic acts that barely go reported anymore. They’ve been normalized and there’s been this normalization across the middle class and across the elites. And I think there’s no country ever that has survived unscathed from allowing antisemitism to grow in this country.

And by the way, this is not just antisemitism. Any country that turns against successful integrated patriotic minorities is a country that’s going down the drain, basically.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Do you think this is an Israel specific phenomenon though, or do you think it’s more to do with the economic realities that people are struggling instead of looking for an explanation?

ALLISTER HEATH: I think Israel is the lightning rod, but I think it has lit up underlying beliefs that hadn’t really gone away. And I think what we see is very ugly. And of course you can criticize any country. I criticize Britain all the time. Right. I criticize the British Prime Minister all the time doesn’t mean I hate Britain. I love Britain.

But the criticism of Israel we see is not fair. You know, it’s not grounded in reality, it’s hysterical, it’s incredibly biased. There’s incredible double, triple, quadruple standards. It’s almost demented. And that form of hysteria is prejudice. It’s not the rational criticism of a particular set of policies.

And that’s all feeding into ancient hatreds, both traditional, ancient hatreds that have always existed in Britain, and Britain invented the blood libel 800 years ago or 900 years ago in Norwich, and of course also more recent arrivals that are sometimes antisemitic. So you’ve got that combination of things.

What’s most scary, I think, is the levels of prejudice that have crept into, I think, the upper middle class again and the ruling elites. And I’m very, very worried about that. I think that is there’s a red light flashing here.

And you know, I used to be an optimist. I used to be, like Matt Ridley, a rational optimist, but I now consider myself a rational pessimist. I think there’s a lot of things going terribly wrong in this country and in the world, and I think human nature tends to revert to the mean and that’s not a particular good place to end up.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Well, there you go. That’s your positive message for the day. Head on over to Substack, where we ask Allister your questions. As an experienced editor of a non French media publication, could Mr. Heath offer an honest opinion of the political landscape in France, how we got here and what to expect in the near future?

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