00:00Delighted to welcome my next guest, Chief Political Writer at Spiked. We love him, Brendan O'Neill.
00:05Welcome to Monday. Have you got your makeup ready? Got your makeup ready?
00:10I don't know where to start today. Let's start with that.
00:16Whilst the world teeters on the edge of real trouble, oil going through the roof, the impact it will have
00:22on people's lives,
00:24army chiefs are busy launching a review into whether male soldiers can wear makeup.
00:30Changes could see our servicemen and women wearing makeup with long hair, hair extensions, painted nails and earrings.
00:35I just like your response to that, Brendan.
00:37I mean, what can you even say?
00:39You know, the world is in flames as wars are breaking out all over the place,
00:44including a war that we are supposed to be involved in at some level.
00:48And yet we're talking about soldiers putting on lipstick and eyeliner, male soldiers.
00:52You know, it's preposterous.
00:53But the exact same thing happened when Russia invaded Ukraine.
00:58And around that time, three years ago, there was some army consultation about pronouns,
01:03why you should use the correct pronouns for gender fluid soldiers.
01:06I mean, we really have gone to rack and ruin.
01:08It demonstrates how much wokeness has infected our institutions and destroyed them from within.
01:14Couldn't agree more.
01:15And you look at that and you look at priorities.
01:18Let's talk about flags in a minute.
01:19But the show started this morning, bud.
01:21People say to me, oh, you know, you're being anti-Trump.
01:24No, I'm not.
01:24Anti-Statman.
01:25I'll tell you what I'm being, right?
01:27There's a growing opinion in this country, and I'll give him this.
01:31Polls are showing that a majority of people did not want the UK involved in those initial strikes, right?
01:36That's a view.
01:37And that is an absolutely held view by many people, which is fine.
01:41What he does, though, is if that was his view, Brendan, I would really respect him if he stuck to
01:47that.
01:47But over the weekend, every paper is reporting his humbling phone call to Trump.
01:52So he gets on the phone for 20 minutes and tries to crawl where other people don't want to go.
01:56This is on the back of Trump calling him a user, a loser, incompetent, we don't need your help with
02:01boats.
02:02But if you so believe your position, and, by the way, you're buoyed by, you know, a poll, and over
02:09the weekend, Tony Blair comes out and says, I'd have supported Trump, I'd have thought if I was in comms,
02:15I'd have gone, yeah, that's why I'm not doing it.
02:17That's why I'm sticking up for your interest, because Tony Blair got it wrong.
02:20But he doesn't.
02:21He toadies up to Blair, he toadies up to Trump, and you end up going around in circles with this
02:25man.
02:26Yeah, he toadies up to whichever powerful man is closest to him.
02:30That's what he does. It's ridiculous. It's despicable, actually.
02:33And you're right. If he actually believes this, if he actually believes that Britain should be hands-off in relation
02:38to this conflict, don't help America, don't be America's poodle, as they like to say, then he should say it.
02:44But he won't say it, because he's a moral coward.
02:47Let's be honest about this.
02:48The reason he is not helping in Iran, and also the reason he is not taking his firm position that
02:54he apparently holds, is because he's a man who is just driven by cowardice.
02:58And he hides that cowardice behind legalism.
03:01He will always say, is this legal?
03:03Does this abide by international law?
03:05Have we filled in all the right forms?
03:07That's not how war works.
03:09That's the opposite of how war works.
03:11There's this constant hedging his bets, refusing to take a position, refusing to stand with his allies, refusing to stand
03:18up for Britain,
03:19refusing to stand up for the 18 British citizens who were killed by Iranian proxies on 7th of October 2023,
03:26refusing to take a stand for anything.
03:29That's Starmer.
03:29And that's the point.
03:31You're so, you know, leadership.
03:33We said it earlier.
03:34Leadership is about making decisions that might not be universally popular, because it's in your DNA, and it's in your
03:39gut, and it's what you believe.
03:41But he's hamstrung.
03:42In fact, he's hamstrung out of his own stupidity.
03:44The Parliamentary Labour Party won't let him, I said it the other day, far without asking their permission.
03:48It's true.
03:49The Parliamentary Labour Party won't let him do anything about anything.
03:52Now we're in a situation in terms of our allies.
03:54I mean, I know I sound particularly British here, and I apologise.
03:59We can't even send a goddamn ship.
04:03I don't know if you heard the reason, the reason HMS Dragon, right, Drag-On, which I think is really
04:08funny after this morning, is still in Portsmouth, is union rules state in that dockyard.
04:14We can only work nine till five, Monday to Friday.
04:16So on Friday, despite the fact that we need to get the boat out there to protect British people, everybody's
04:20got home, because union rules stipulate that.
04:22And on top of that, you've got this ludicrous example of how, we were reading this morning about this aircraft
04:27carrier, HMS Prince of Wales, would have to be followed by the French,
04:31because you have to have a boat follow you because of, you know, missiles and torpedoes.
04:37We're not even up to speed on that.
04:39Now, we, you know, I'm not ranting, but we look like a laughingstock on the international stage, not much better
04:46than we look at home now.
04:47You're dead right, Jeremy.
04:49And this is the thing.
04:50People can have all sorts of opinions about the war in Iran.
04:52Lots of people are worried about it.
04:54Lots of people are opposed to it.
04:55Some people support it.
04:57That's absolutely fine.
04:58But Britain has to be able to defend itself.
05:01It has to have a good working military with ships that can leave port and sail across the world without
05:07the assistance of anyone else,
05:08where soldiers actually know how to fight rather than knowing how to apply eyeliner.
05:13We need a military.
05:16Do you remember a few years ago, the army in this country, I'm not making this up, they advertised for
05:21snowflakes.
05:22They said, if you're a snowflake, we want you, because the whole campaign was about wanting more emotional intelligence in
05:28the army.
05:29And I remember thinking Russia and China must just be looking at us and thinking, you bunch of lunatics.
05:35Your military is a creaking machine.
05:37You have become a second rate power, sadly, especially that's intensified under Keir Starmer.
05:42That's concerning for all British people, regardless of where they stand on this current war,
05:48because if we can't defend ourselves, our territory, our energy, then we're in big trouble.
05:53I couldn't agree more.
05:55I need to bring it on to the other story.
05:57In the midst of make-up and ships that don't go, the government's new Social Cohesion Strategy Department
06:05has announced that flying the St George's or Union flags on streets has been linked to tools of hate.
06:11It warns that the flags were used to exclude or intimidate, and that the extreme right has turned to turn
06:18the symbols of pride into tools of hate.
06:19It comes also, as they announced, the appointment of an anti-Muslim hostility czar,
06:24to which I've only been saying one question all morning.
06:27No anti-Semitism hostility czar, then.
06:30Yet again, in this country, we aren't able to put anti-Semitism in the same racist hole that we quite
06:36rightly put other racism.
06:37Disgusting.
06:39Really disgusting, especially given that anti-Semitic attacks have been spiking,
06:43and we've even seen anti-Semitic killings in this country last year.
06:47This is an incredibly serious problem, and the government never treats it with the seriousness that it warrants.
06:52But, you know, the whole problem with the whole Islamophobia idea,
06:56you know, of course there is anti-Muslim bigotry,
06:58and of course it's the responsibility of all of us to tackle that.
07:01You know, if you or I were to see a woman in a veil being harassed in the street, we
07:04would intervene.
07:05Yes.
07:06Stop that from happening.
07:07Yes.
07:07Of course, all decent people would.
07:09But Islamophobia is a different idea.
07:11That really basically means criticizing Islam, criticizing the Koran, criticizing Islamic practices.
07:18But we should be absolutely free to do that.
07:20You know what the government needs?
07:22The government needs a Tsar on radical Islam, on Islamist extremism,
07:27on this poison that is coursing through the veins of our society,
07:29which is causing violence, causing division, causing hardship for white working-class Britons
07:35and working-class Muslims as well who don't want this stuff in their communities.
07:40That's what we need a Tsar on.
07:42That's what we need a government focus on.
07:43But instead, they want to clamp down on anyone who dares to raise a peep of criticism of Islam.
07:49And cynically, if you look at so much of what he does at the moment,
07:53you can only believe that that is all about buying a political class and a community.
07:58I'll say what I've said forever, bud.
08:00You know, any form of racism is a horrid.
08:03But quite how my Jewish friends get put at the back of the queue,
08:06who get abused, as you quite rightly say, and attacked and vilified,
08:11you might disagree with what Israel's doing.
08:14You don't have to make the lives of 240,000 Jews in this country so utterly, utterly difficult.
08:20And I'll say this about Muslims.
08:22There are millions of good Muslims.
08:25Why don't we ever hear from them then?
08:27Why don't they stand up?
08:28Why don't their leaders stand up and say,
08:30we don't agree with extremism?
08:32I've got a government that's too busy pandering to a minority
08:35because they fear that that speaks for the whole Muslim community.
08:39No, it doesn't.
08:40So you know what, Muslim community?
08:41Jump up and decry the extremists because that would help the situation, wouldn't it?
08:47Absolutely right.
08:48They need to speak up more.
08:50There's no question about that.
08:51You know, over the past 20 years or so,
08:53nearly 100 Brits in Britain have been killed by radical Islamists.
08:57We've seen radical Islamists on the streets praising the leaders of the Iranian regime,
09:03praising Hamas, celebrating the mass murder of Jews in Israel.
09:07We've seen so many expressions of the Islamist poison in our society.
09:11The government refuses to take it seriously.
09:14Moderate Muslim spokespeople need to speak out against it much more firmly.
09:18And we as a society really need to get to grips with it.
09:21I mean, look at the scenes that you're showing there, burning the Israeli flag, singing the praises of the tyrants
09:27in Tehran.
09:28I don't want this in my country.
09:30And I want people clamping down on this and making it clear that these are alien moral positions that British
09:36people do not welcome.
09:37And this is what, I mean, just to finish, I'm so with you.
09:40You can be arrested now for flying the Union Jack or the Cross of St. George because certain people have
09:47decided that they're tools of hate.
09:50But you can set fire to an Israeli flag.
09:52Whatever you think of Nessun Ahu, wave the Palestinian flag and everybody in government's going to say,
09:56do you know what, we don't want to upset you.
09:58What about the British people who are being upset on a daily basis?
10:01What's wrong with saying that?
10:02Yeah, you know, calling the Union flag or the St. George's flag tools of hate is disgraceful.
10:08And, you know, there's a class element to this.
10:10The reason they're scared of those flags that went up last summer is because they went up in working class
10:15areas.
10:16And there is this prejudice that thinks that working class communities are racist bigots.
10:20It's so disgusting.
10:21But, you know, the best example of this is Tower Hamlets in London, where they ripped down all the Union
10:27flags within 48 hours last summer.
10:29This is a place where the flag of Palestine flew for months after 7th of October.
10:35So there are parts of Britain where it's easier to wave the flag under which a thousand Jews have just
10:41been murdered than it is to wave the flag of Britain itself.
10:44That is deeply worrying.
10:45We can't stop the fight, mate.
10:47It's great to have you on.
10:59It's great to have you on.
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