Hi, this is Potsay for the UK. I'm Coco Carn. And I'm Nish Kumar. Today, it seems our young people have lost faith in democracy. A poll this week found that 52% of them would favour an authoritarian government. It's scary stuff.
It really is, but it's not surprising, and I'm not just saying that to continue my mission to make people think I'm younger than I am. Well, look, we thought it was prime time to get inside the heads of these people, and were joined by a very special guest who found himself sucked into the alt-right wormhole that came out the other side. We'll be speaking with YouTuber Jimmy The Giant.
And the government is sending out the bulldozers in pursuit of its growth agenda. But what's at risk? Let's hear from the Chancellor. This is a government on the side of working people, taking the right decisions to secure their future, to secure our future, stepping up to the challenges that we face.
ending the era of low expectations, putting Britain on a different path, delivering for the British people, and I am determined this government is determined to do just that.
That's the chance of Rachel Reeves laying out her latest plans for cutting down on government spending and kick-starting growth. So, how are they going to do it? In an op-ed in the Times on Tuesday, Kia Starmer wrote, we'll cut the weeds of regulation and let growth bloom, which is very poetic. But what does it mean? Reeves has announced subsequently that she plans to streamline environmental obligations, calling the example of the HS2 bat tunnel,
that cost 100 million pounds, an example of regulation going wrong. They're going to limit legal challenges and the number of people who can veto projects and particularly infrastructure projects and streamline consultation that would otherwise drown builders.
elsewhere, she has announced investments in new transport links in the north of England. They're talking about creating Europe's Silicon Valley in between Oxford and Cambridge. It's aimed at driving new investments in science and technology. They also want to go hard on building new homes, particularly around those travel hubs. And they say that they will curb regulator overreach. So the government is already putting its rhetoric on that last point into action. So last week, Rachel Reeves forced out the chairman of the UK's competition watchdog
the competition and market authority. Reeves' justification for the removal of CMA chairman Marcus Bockering was that they didn't see eye to eye on how the UK can achieve growth. That's the magic word. So she's appointed Amazon's former UK boss, Doug Ger as interim chair. And we all know how concerned. That's the right word, isn't it? Amazon has been in regards to healthy competition.
In her speech, Reeves paid particular attention to our economic links with the US following a reportedly positive conversation between Keir Starmer and Donald Trump. But when it comes to slightly less mad trading partners, when asked on Sunday whether the UK would consider joining the Pan-Euro Mediterranean Convention, which is a tariff-free zone with Europe, Reeves didn't rule it out, saying that she would consider anything that might attract growth so long as it didn't cross any of her Brexit red lines.
Don't call it a Brentree. I mean, really done. It's a terrible one. And the G word growth is on everyone's lips in Westminster. So starmer told business leaders at a Bloomberg event on Tuesday that what Rachel and I have done is to make it clear to our cabinet colleagues
that in each of their briefs, growth is the number one mission. So it's not just a mission for the chancellor, a mission for me or for trade and education, but every single group has to go through the question, is this pro growth? Did you ever used to watch the day today? Yeah. There's like a really famous segment in that with Steve Coogan playing a kind of early Alan Partridge character is doing a skit about driving fast and causing accidents. And he says this thing over and over again, is this cool? So set it up, he says,
I'm driving through the rail. I'm driving 100 miles an hour. I feel great because I'm cool. But is this cool? Then shows a picture of someone who's been bloodied in an accident. Next picture. Is this cool? And this is how I feel. I want to speak to Kirsten. I just want to show him. Is this growth? Is this growth? An air pollution mask around the airport. Is this growth a high street just dead of any culture? Is this growth?
Listen, you're right. And I imagine people who listen to this podcast would be concerned about things like whether we can breathe air or whether buildings are safe to live in, you know, cuck shit. But and I can sort of appreciate that people of ours or political persuasion might be a bit antsy about this. So obviously there's a progressive concern around defanging regulators in the name of growth and sacrificing everything in terms of growth.
But there is real concern from economists that the plans don't fully add up. And it seems to have attracted criticism from everyone. Yeah, no, exactly. And we watch all of Reza's speech before this show. The two things that stood out to me is that she talks about how actually Labour had delivered on growth.
You know, not as much as I expected, but there had been some growth. I thought to myself, well, that is definitely not felt by the general public. Actually, you can keep talking about growth, but I'd really love to hear how that would be redistributed, because I think that's the main question. And when she also kept talking about Europe, Silicon Valley, all I keep thinking about is deep-seak and how just overnight it's like turned the tech world upside down. I just thought maybe Silicon Valley isn't the model we should be going for.
DeepSeek is a Chinese AI company whose kind of emergence into the AI space caused a massive, massive drop in the share price of various American tech companies because
Deepsea appears to be able to offer a service similar to things like open AI or chat GPT, but at a fraction of the cost. And so it's done some real damage to the American stock market. Again, it sort of exposes the fragility of basing your entire economic strategy around AI and growth. But again, I just think it's really, really important to stress this point. Continuing to talk about economic growth.
is fine as long as you find a way of joining up wider economic growth with policies that are actually going to improve the lives of people living in the country on a day-to-day basis. And I'm much more interested to hear from the Labour Party and hear from Rachel Reeves and Keir Starmer how this economic growth actually joins up with benefiting people in the long term. I think the loose idea is that economic growth provides jobs for people and also
puts money into the via taxes into the government that can then be redistributed and spent. But I think how does that money get funneled into the economy and how does that money get funneled into the pockets of ordinary people living in Britain?
That's the thing that the Labour Party is struggling to articulate at the moment. She kept returning to this line, like, we want to make Britain the best place for an entrepreneur. And all I kept thinking was, I mean, it's a pretty good place for entrepreneurs as it is. But I'd love to hear, we want to make Britain the best place to be a child, the best place to be a nurse. You know, those are the things I want to hear, but I'm not going to think that it was a speech for us. Fuck the best place. I would like to get on a train. I would like to see a doctor.
A fine okay, please. I would settle for we want to make Britain an acceptable place to live again. Like being like, make Britain okay, I guess, again. Just like anything. So amidst all of this sort of bulldozing for growth and cutting of red tape, there's one hugely contentious decision. The government are giving political support to add a third runway to Heathrow Airport.
So as our guest on the show last week, Greens co-leader, Carla Denier said, airport expansion doesn't necessarily improve the lives of your everyday Brit, and it certainly will not lead to positive environmental outcomes. The government is already struggling to justify the decision actually. So here's business secretary, Jonathan Reynolds, speaking to BBC Radio 4's Emma Barnett. I would say there is no tension between the ambitious on climate and being ambitious on climate. There's no tension. How is an extra runway? No tension.
Well, frankly, if people use Dubai or to, for instance, give the example of Chippellas as the UK as to Hubei port, that's still the same emissions. What we are absolutely clear on. Sorry, how's it going? Do you look at the emissions? I don't follow that. Well, if people are flying to a different Hubei port, they're still going to fly. You don't expect emissions to go up with an extra runway.
I think people will fly in regards to whether they use it in different countries, they hope or not, but the point is we are committed to decarbonising aviation as a whole industry there, but it does make sense.
Just again, like with a lot of Labour policies at the moment, it just seems to be a lot of people contradicting themselves within the same sentence. Look, we should say that the co-founder of Extinction Rebellion and a former guest on the show, Claire Farrell, has had a been her bonnet about this so much though that she's actually dropped us a video message. We're always thrilled to hear from Claire. Here she is.
In 2018, I went on a two-week long hunger strike against the expansion of Heathrow Airport, which was on the table to become government policy at the time. Shortly after that, we went on to launch Extinction Rebellion. The litigation and the legal cases go backwards and forwards for a long, long time over Heathrow expansion.
And just recently the call again for like people to recognise that 10,000 people will lose their homes through this. At the same time as the recent report from the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries said that by mid-century billions of people would lose their homes and their lives to the climate crisis. We have to look at this kind of expansion of carbon heavy infrastructure in these contexts as intentionally destroying organised life on earth because that is what it's going to do. And quite frankly that's
rather more disruptive than any just of oil protests. This is a huge concern and Claire isn't alone here. Rick Parfett, who's the WWF's climate policy specialist, said to boost growth, Rachel Reeve should put pounds back in people's pockets by insulating homes, decarbonizing power and investing in public transport. The UK's net zero economy grew by 9% in 2023 compared to 0.1% for the economy overall.
Spending over 50 billion pounds on airport expansions that will take decades to build is a non-starter. They would send carbon emissions skywards to leave growth stuck on the runway and suck money out of the UK. There's also been opposition from Labour's biggest donor. So that's green energy magnet, Dale Vince. He tweeted that if we don't get on top of the climate crisis, the economic damage will drown out any gains from marginal projects like Heathrow. No amount of runways will save our economy.
Reeves isn't being shy about the fact that she's prioritizing.
economic concerns over environmental ones, telling the world economic forum at Davos that growth not net zero is the government's number one mission. Right. And I mean, even in the her speech today, she talks about she takes a swipe at bats and nukes. Well, they've ever done to you. You know, and it's interesting because obviously if there was a long time, well, they were saying we are the true green party. It's just all been unraveled before our eyes. Also, Kia Starmer voted against the expansion of the airport in 2020.
Yeah, and we can't forget that only a couple of weekends ago, we had that massive storm that battered Northern Ireland and Scotland. You know, the climate catastrophe is here. I kind of want to have a picture of it so I can ask close Kia Stama, is this growth? Is this growth?
But look, as we've laid out here, the political messaging from the government clearly leaves a lot to be desired and is leaving a lot of us feeling pretty grumpy. After the break, we're going to find out how this can be taken advantage of with someone who's gone through the alt-right wormhole and come out the other side. We'll be speaking to YouTuber, Jimmy The Giant.
Now, as we mentioned at the top of the show, earlier this week came the news that young people are, to put it bluntly, fucked off with the status quo. Channel 4 poll of 3,000 Gen Z as that's 13 to 27 year olds, found that over half would prefer an authoritarian leader to a democratically elected one, which is absolutely wild.
That's right, 52% of the people polled agreed that the UK would be a better place if a strong leader was in charge who does not have to bother with parliament and elections. And nearly half agreed the entire way our societies organised must be radically changed through revolution.
The study also found that influencers like Andrew Tate and Jordan Peterson are trusted by 42% of young men. 45% of young men also said, we have gone so far in promoting women's equality that we are discriminating against men. While a similar proportion agreed, when it comes to giving women equal rights, things have gone far enough.
All of this suggests that Gen Z is lurching to the right and disengaging in democracy, with the pied pipers of alt-right influencers helping them along the way. So with that in mind, we wanted to talk to someone who was once in this very position, but Doug, Shawshank style, his way out of the alt-right shit pipe. Welcome to Fox Save the UK. Jimmy, the giant. That was the best intro. Amazing. Thank you very much. I love it. Thank you very much. I love it.
Yeah. God, I saw that poll the other day. What is that age bracket? That's 13 to 27. Yeah. Yeah. That's more worrying. I thought it was like zero to like 15 or something. No, no, that's Generation Beta. Oh my. What a terrible name to give them. Yeah, yeah. The beta. Do you know what I mean? It's the rise of the baby. Generation cup. People. They're going to say that's part of the conspiracy. It's Generation Alpha then. What happened to Alpha? Oh, they're like 11, aren't they? Are they? They're under 13. Oh, so there's another generation
Oh my God. So Ben just started this year. Right. Oh, right. Fine. Okay. Right. Okay. So that makes sense. Right. Okay. Well, either way, it's bad. Yeah, that's me. Yeah. That's worried me more. Cause when I first read that, I was like, I was just really young people up to 27. That's kind of fucking crazy. Well, that's where it's right.
Yes, you can say whatever you want. It's on the internet. Unregulated media. Very unregulated. You're more experienced at broadcasting on the internet than any of us, because you started out as like a sort of parkour, extreme sports, YouTube. You've really been involved in the business of doing stuff on YouTube. Yeah, I've been deep in it, but I grew up
you know, video game and watching YouTube. So I was like, I've always, I followed YouTube from its kind of 2008. Yeah. I think it was started in 2005, 2006. So I've seen the whole industry change. Yeah. And like how it went from just guys in their bedroom, making stupid videos to now it's like what it is now, which is, it's wild. But yeah, it's sort of around 2016, the kind of political side started popping. Before then it was always like the young Turks, maybe you'd see an odd Alex Jones video. Yeah. But it was so interesting. I said this in that alright video. It was like,
Back then, I wouldn't have even really been able to tell you what right and left was. You were just being fed stories and like, you know, who did 9-11 and all this sort of stuff. And it was like very different to now. Now it's very much categories and there's two camps. It's like, I mean, it's just so easy of mine. How old are you? I am 30.
Yeah, so I'm sort of, I'm nine years older than you. And for me, YouTube was always like, we'll talk about early YouTube. I'm like, oh yeah, the Natalie Portman rap that the Lonely Island did on Saturday Night Night Night Night Night Night Night Night Night Night Night Night Night Night Night Night Night Night Night Night Night Night Night Night Night Night Night Night Night Night Night Night Night Night Night Night Night Night Night Night Night Night Night Night Night Night Night Night Night Night Night Night Night Night Night Night Night Night Night Night Night Night Night Night Night Night Night Night Night Night Night Night Night
for the elder millennials, YouTube is like, I think about my finger. Yeah, I'm trying to get my finger exactly. It's like a much more like innocent and probably like apolitical place. But I mean, so the video that you referred to, which is it's just such an interesting like long form video essay, right? If I can make it sound
Incredibly boring. It's about you talking about, you know, as somebody who was making stuff, making content in the YouTube space, it's almost your kind of, I don't know, de-radicalization is the right way. It's like your sort of arc of going from somebody who was watching
sort of videos that exist outside of a left-right political binary, but exist in a kind of conspiratorial space. They're like almost like a political conspiracy theory videos. So then sort of traveling down through kind of Jordan Peterson into a kind of alt-right headspace and then sort of traveling back. I think you sort of date it as pretty much post 2016, right?
Yeah, I would say so. I've sort of become a lefty as the left of like really fucked up and failed. Yeah. And I'm really optimistic. You know how like trends happen where you have like the hipsters will find something or like the nerdy kids will find something. Then the hipsters will get on it. Then the popular kids get on it. And then by that point, the sort of.
the nerds and the hips to stop engaging with it. And I sort of feel similar-ish about right-wing politics. In the beginning, it was like interesting difference. It was counter what you were being told in school and stuff. And then now it's so mainstream. I think those people originally, the natural desire to be a little bit contrarian or just sort of explore different viewpoints, they've now sort of been self-reflective. So I think there is a percentage of people that were trapped in that kind of pipeline who have come out of it or are starting to come out of it. So I'm a bit more optimistic than a lot of people are.
I would say I was very much curious to find out about these topics and stuff. And it was never coming from a place of hate or anything like that. It was just I'm being told that the reason the gender pay gap doesn't exist is because of these facts and figures. It's not because women suck or something like that. And the mood and the vibe has definitely changed now. When you see Andrew Tate, it's because women suck. And so it's like,
I think the people who do have some intellectual curiosity, they will now be seeing that this is kind of bullshit. And they might start like what I had with Ukraine, which was like, where I was seeing how the right we're talking about Ukraine, it made me go, well, hang on a second, I know they're full of shit on this. So then it made me question. Well, because it's very personal. It's your home, your wife is Ukraine. Exactly. And I was like, because I had, I don't know, like, yeah, a lot of people got married and then obviously became a lefty. I was like, I met a woman.
But it was sort of like it wasn't in the way that people would perceive that that she was some lefty and it was just because it was a topic that showed me a different angle than what the sphere of content was telling me about. So like I think I don't know if people need like an individual topic where they see that they're chatting shit on. Because a lot of it is just like they build a whole like
a jenga tower of like bullshit. It sort of loosely stays together, but if you pull out a few pieces, then it falls down. And that was it. Ukraine was one of those pieces where I was like, they're just chatting complete shit about Ukraine. Yeah. And then what else are they chatting to? Yeah, exactly. And then it makes you question.
everything. It's like the gender pay gap, then it's like, you know, crime and like this whole they they're obsessed with culture. They think like everything comes down to individuals making bad decisions. They never talk about systems or like structures that cause bad outcomes in society and never talk about that. It's always are these people are just bad people and they've just decided to be bad because Cardi B is telling them to shake their ass or something. Yeah.
It is a really compelling and interesting story of somebody who almost like programmed their brain in a certain way and then was able to deprogram their brain in a certain way. There's just always this idea that you essentially move towards the political right as you get older. And so I think all of that stuff like you aging into left-wing politics is interesting and compelling because it's an unusual story, I think. But also, I'm just interested in what was appealing to you
about the, what was, what felt counter-cultural to you about the right and the sort of political right? Yeah. Yeah, there was that feeling, because they, I remember they said it's so cringe now, but they're like conservatism is the new punk. And it's like very cringe. But there was an era where it was just you were the different guy. If you, if you're a right wing, you're in a group of people your age, you're the one that when they start complaining about, I don't know, or they start talking good about Jeremy Corbyn, you're like, well, actually, you know, nationalization is inefficient and, you know, blah, blah, blah.
You sound fun. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh God, I have to anyone who went to a party with me. I'm so sorry. I do want to come back to that question though. What was it about them that you found alluring? I just think I've always liked new ideas. And that's like something as I've got older, I've realized is it's not a problem. It's just part of my personality that I'm attracted to ideas that contradict what I think. But when I was younger, I put trust into that where I was like, that must mean it's correct.
There's a thing, it's called like the Galileo's Gambit. I think because Galileo, he obviously thought the world was circle. I think if my history is not fucked.
But he thought the world was circle whilst everyone thought it was flat and he was right and everyone was wrong and they already cooled him. And so a lot of like conspiracy theorist people will use this one situation that happened maybe once or twice in history to basically come to the conclusion that anyone who believes in anything that's different in the mainstream is always correct. But it's like apart from the conspiracy theories that are flat earthers. Yeah. Galileo is their worst nightmare. Yeah. Yeah. It's like level D.
In this video, you talked about like a Joe Rogan and Shapiro. The one British one that stood out was Tommy Robinson. Oh, Tommy. Yeah. Yeah. And I was really interested in your thoughts when you said I had a connection to Tommy Robinson, but I wasn't a racist because my understanding, we would you talk about that? Because what they've done is so fucking clever because they reskin, they repackage racism.
It's good to look into the history of these movements and how their rhetoric changes. It's like the BMP, Nick Griffin, when he came in, he realized that if you stop talking about ethnicity and ethnic purity and started talking about cultural preservation, that's way more palatable because ethnicity is inherent. We don't have a choice in our skin color, but culture, you could argue like, if you live in this country, you're following the ideas, the beliefs, the
the sort of attitudes of that country and that can change. So there's this sort of separation in someone's mind where you can separate culture from race and you feel like you're not a racist anymore. And maybe arguably you're not a racist, you're xenophobic, like that's effectively what it is. And I think xenophobia is much more marketable. It still has the
liberal idea that these are the individual decisions and choices without it being like tied to their ethnicity. So when it comes to Robertson, he, although now I've looked back, he did say some racist shit, but the way they would frame it themselves was like, they were just talking about ideology. So like radical Islam to them is literally all Islam. But their market in it, so smart. What's
So interesting about that is you've really identified something that's incredibly important here. A lot of these things are not new ideas. They're just repackaging. I mean, this idea of preservation of Western culture, it sort of, it contains within it the sort of old seeds of white supremacy and white supremacy. And those ideas that drove the British colonialism project, because there was an idea that these were inferior cultures that needed essentially saving from their own savagery. That's very true.
And we're seeing it all the time at the moment in terms of the way that Elon Musk talks about the grooming gangs in this country, which he has no idea about. He does no specific knowledge about the cases that he's talking about. But you can still see the seeds of all of it. But it's just been repackaged. Someone like Tommy Robinson has realized that he can't do what the national front did in the 70s and 80s when our parents came here and said, we want to get rid of the package. He can't do that anymore.
Right-wingers were so busy getting scared about Muslims affecting their Western Christian values that they forgot to tell their kids why dictatorships are bad. Surely that's more worrying. Right-wingers love to be scared of the shadows. They're not scared of the thing that's in front of them. They're like all these like things like potential threats. In the video you talk about reading Chabs are in Jonesburg about the kind of cultural demonization of the British working class and that being a real eye-opening moment for you, right?
Yeah, yeah. That again, it was kind of the Ukraine thing where it kind of shifted my perspective where my personal relationship to chavs was going to school. There was like the chavvy kids, you'd have fights with them. You've got to co-op and throw harry bows at you. So my perception of chavs was that. This is what I like about the left is it's
more interesting. It's not just people are bad. That's such a boring way of looking at things. It's like, well, this thing happened with social housing, where they changed the makeup of how social housing, the types of people that were allowed in certain areas. You'd have the people that were more troubled, putting these social houses, the people that were better off, putting these ones. That started making a divide. You then had this process. They called it like residualization, which meant certain more troubled backgrounds.
pulling together and they didn't get the support they needed. And then like, there's like an actual story there. There's like an obvious starting point, which was at some point, we had these good council houses that brought communities together. They made really connected communities, people had more opportunities. And then over time, that changed. We neglected lots of the community and then
And then you get a whole culture from it. And then it's interesting that culture, they start wearing a certain type of hat and a certain type of like tracksuit and listen to certain type of music. It's interesting. The right wing answer to that is that they're just people that are lazy and, I don't know, workshop, whatever. And that's so boring and like, uninteresting as a...
infantile, isn't it? It's like a children's story. They're a good people and they're a bad people. And the good people always do good and the bad people always do bad. Whereas actually, it's a much more sophisticated thing to say. That's what makes a good film. What's a good film? It's when the bad guy has a reason why he's bad.
Yeah, that sort of leads you into kind of reading backwards and going in and doing research around the post-war consensus and the collapse of the post-war consensus as engineered by kind of Thatcher and Reagan in the UK and the US. And then we now in this sort of crisis point that gain is kind of engineered by a moment of economic collapse, you know,
2008, the financial system essentially collapses and plunges us into a kind of black hole that we still are yet to emerge from. This is why I'm interested in this idea of what line of thought is counter-cultural or anti-establishment, because for people our age, you define yourself as being
counter-cultural by being left wing, because to be left wing meant to be against the banking system that plunged us all into one's mind. That is what left wing is. And so like, that's the big shift that happened. So you have like your social left and right and then you have your economic left and right. They don't actually have to marry up like clean. But it's like, it's that thing where I guess socially, at least in media, and at least like overtly, we're quite left wing as a country. It might be shifting now. I can feel it's like shifting on certain issues, but
In general, we're quite left wing socially. We certainly moved in a more progressive direction, within my lifetime, we certainly moved in a more progressive direction. And so society can appear to be socially liberal, or at least in the media. When it comes to economics, which in my deep opinion is the driving force of everything,
is we'd so right wing. And it's like, you can't argue that. And so they have to push the conversation onto the culture issues. So this is their last bastion to sort of prey on people's end of, you know, like prejudices and stuff like that. That's all they got.
Can I ask you just particularly about young men and why young men, not young women are being targeted by the right? You know, look, I'm a woman, I'm a millennial, I grew up in a Muslim family. So I know that I'm not the target audience. I don't think any of their messaging is going to work on me. Why do you think it has captured so many young men?
I think young lads, they want to feel like our life progresses. So like we want to feel that we put in hard work and we build something. And I think that that is a pressure that's put on lads to like make somebody yourself be something, like move out of your hometown, go to the big city, do something like that's kind of a rhetoric that sold to us a lot.
is if you have that mentality of like self-betterment, self-improvement, then you have to buy into like meritocracy. And if you buy into meritocracy, you kind of have to be right wing, because it's like the only way to believe that there's a meritocracy in this society is by not looking into like the systemic things and critiques and capitalism. So I think that's why it allures in men a lot. Because maybe we have this sort of insecurity, like, I think being a man, you do not want to feel powerless. Like you want to feel like you're not vulnerable, you're not a victim, you're not weak. You want to be powerful and in control.
And when the right wing talks about the left, they talk about like these people that have just flopped over in the road and they've just given up and everything sucks. I don't believe that is a true, accurate depiction of the left, but that's what they get told about it. I think dating plays into it. I think a lot of young lads want to meet a girl. So they like,
read to watch some videos on YouTube, how to talk to women, how to be more confident. All of those videos are wrong. If you are listening to this, please do not take advice from the one single bit of advice. The one good bit of advice they can give the only bit and you should turn the video off after they said this is speak to women. That's the only bit. And I often don't even say that anymore. They just complain about women. But like, that's the one bit of advice.
I'm fascinated by this idea that all of the, like, dating experts, especially counting straight cis men, like, are all men. And I'm like, I would definitely take some advice from a woman. Like, I would one, just, just even if you look at it objectively, strip everything away for a second. If your goal is to impress a woman, surely your first port of call is to go to a woman and say, how do we
That's what's mad. That's where the misogyny gets pushed into it because really like the dark side is they would say women don't know what they want. Yeah, that's right. They'll be like women will tell you one thing because women are very empathetic. Yeah. And they'll tell you that they want this type of guy, but actually they want Chad. Yeah. A lot of it gets in this dark, strange territory. And again, that'll push you into the right. All these things are like they're just these pipelines that just pull you into right in politics. So then how can progressive people or the left or whatever nebulous term we want to put on it, how do
as a group, we speak to young men. Because like, I'll be honest with you, there's just this lazy idea of people by age that like, we all thought that a lot of the sort of movements around 2016 were a kind of death rattle of conservatism, really. As the millennial generation ages into positions of leadership, the population would move left on social issues and economic issues.
But obviously there's a severe wrinkle in this. If the generation that comes behind us is starting to turn towards social conservatism. Yeah. Well, no, no young person wants to fucking be 20 and think I have no chance. And I think stacked and shit.
Yeah. But I'm a Christian. I don't literally think that like Jesus walked on water and shit like that. But it gives me like this faith that there's like something good in the universe and there's something that like, even if it's bullshit, it doesn't matter. It gives me a good frame to like operate my life toward. And I think that that's something that the left really could do better with. Because the one thing the right does get correct is that the left doesn't give a very optimistic outlook because it's not a lot to be optimistic about. It's very fair.
But like so fucking what like that will never help like you cannot sell Cadbury's ain't gonna make a chocolate advert when they say it's all right. It's it's chocolate Yeah, it has to be this thing's gonna change a fucking life. So I just think like The right gives that message of self-improvement and betterment even if it's bullshit a young 20 year old wants to get hopped up on some bullshit to improve their life And they want to have something to kind of like aspire to it So I like I'm and I don't know if it's because I'm not been left for very long. I'm super optimistic. I think like
The only way, like, I think the way that we achieved like the post-war consensus was by people, working class people, who were in a worse scenario than we are now, coming together, finding strength in like the bottom where they could have possibly been, like living in slums and squalor, being like overworked in these factories and shit. And they all just went, fuck this.
We're going to do something. They did something. They fucking changed the world and made it a million times better. They did incredible things. It was just by people like coming together and realizing they have power. And I think the left needs that message, like an optimistic message and not give up because what fucking Corbin lost a couple of times. Bernie Sanders lost a couple of times. Like Nigel Farage has been in the game like 30 years. He's a failure until now. So it's like people need to be more motivated, not give up because we lost a couple of elections.
I'm glad you said that because I feel my left-wing politics are entirely based on optimism. It's entirely based on this feeling of like my fellow man is inherently good and with the right conditions can be the best. We're all going to be the best. I feel like I'm sort of like it's a motivational company. We've all got it in us guys. That's why the right do all that. That's why they love all the motivational speakers. But you need that energy. You need that.
Yeah, absolutely. And she said, even just in terms of numbers, there's more of us than there are of there. Like we are going to win this battle at some point, you know what I mean? Oh, yeah. Just think about the NHS, you know, like in 1945, in like a country that was just had been bombed to shit. Yeah.
an action of a government, basically, I mean, it's obviously a lot more complicated than that. But effectively, in one stroke, just turned around to an entire country and said, you all have free healthcare. Yeah, that's insane. That's the single most significant transformational step for the average British person. It's incredible. And I think that should be inspiring to people. And like the left has wins under its belt. Like if you look at history, like the biggest continuous growth period of economics was under Keynesianism.
Whereas the right had a few good years, maybe in the 90s, where everything was being sold off, so there was a bit of an economic boom. But those good years were a spike in unemployment and a spike in poverty. But years felt good because everyone was on drugs. Yeah, from the 80s. We know what the 80s was like. As opposed to the 60s and 70s.
But those are introspective. Just feel good, please. We're just talking about cocaine. Everything went bad when loads of people started taking cocaine. I remember watching a different video of yours where you talked about, and I'm going to quote you because you said it yourself. It just felt like the left were pussies. I find that really interesting because
obviously a different life and you know when I was growing up I wasn't surrounded by loads of political people but the few that I were obviously I'm a woman of colour and so the few that I were it was often like anti-racism activism and the guys in that didn't strike you as like although they weren't fucking about like they didn't strike you as weak or yeah like to be completely honest like it's a dumb stereotype it's not true but like I think this is all they've got they've got a few guys to take steroids and talk about
neo-liberal economics and then all of a sudden that's the image but I really loved that era to be honest like looking back on it and I was right-winger at the time but looking back on like the the Jeremy Corbyn when grime got like the kind of sick that like Stormzy was like pretty political it was more like diverse it had all the sort of range had academics it had like sort of
Yeah, and I think that's what it kind of needs. It just needs people with like different personas and different energies to come and push a positive message. But the means now is the next point, right? And it is the most important point because like for years, you know, when we were growing up, we existed under these kind of press barons like, you know, Rupert Murdoch, Robert Maxwell, basically everybody that is an inspiration for Logan Roy in succession.
And then when the internet, the sort of advent of the internet, there's a part of you that thinks, well, this is incredible. This is like, this is going to democratize information and democratize media. And then movements start to spring up that are oxygenated by the internet and by social media, like, you know, occupy Wall Street, the kind of anti-capitalist demonstrations, the Black Lives Matter movement, the Me Too movement, you start to see lots of these progressive movements that are oxygenated by social media. But now we're in a space where it feels like social media
and that all the sort of unregulated forms of the new media have been harnessed by the same forces that controlled the old media. And so my question for you is, how do we harness the information dissemination systems to spread a progressive message when a guy like Elon Musk can look at Twitter and say, that's an interesting way of spreading information. Obviously, yeah. Odds are pretty fucked. Realistically,
I'm sorry to defeat my whole point that I made earlier. But what I'm saying is like, it's like four, three, and there's like 10, 20 minutes left on the clock. So it's like, we're not in a fantastic position like right now, but it's not over. The right has co-opted it, which is worrying, but it's not like over. It's like, we have to look at what did we not deliver on. And it's like, whilst we were talking about all these nice things about like Black Lives Matter and all this sort of stuff, it never was gonna actually fix the fundamental core problem of incoming equality.
So there's always been that elephant in the room, which is income inequality, which is what left these need to talk about. And that has to be what we push because that's what actually fixes it. If you fix income inequality and you make a better. But there's so many thinkers that have pushed both of those things at the same time. You know, Martin Luther King was a sort of a vowed critique of capitalism. Fred Hampton was building a rainbow coalition that existed under the nay, you know, under the umbrella of economic socialism. The union of those two things
It has always been incredibly important. But I think there has to be forefront now. And it's to say, I think also class, I think talk about class more than ethnicity and gender, I really do think. I know 100% understand that your average, I think it's something like your average African, like Sub-Saharan African and Britain makes 10p to every one pound of white British person does.
So I understand there is that deep problem. But I think in this landscape, we're in, we have to focus on class as the connecting factor. Because when you split it all into these categories, that's when the right goes, well, look, they came all about the black people, they came all about the gay people, they came all about the feminists or whatever. And it's like, really, no, the left wing people would actually just say, look at this problem, look at this problem, look at this problem. But if we unite it as a message just on messaging as being more about class and inequality, I just think that's going to
bring people more together. There's more solidarity in that. I do understand why feminists and anti-racist activists have previously felt a little bit sort of squashed under just only class matters. I get it, yeah. You know, particularly if you look at trade unions, they've always been, until recently, it's been quite bad in representing women, for example, because there's a sense of like, just be quiet, you lot. And then, eventually, when we sought the class issue, you will naturally become liberated. And I'm sure you would
become more liberated, but it hasn't changed about that you have unique problems to you now and you need sort of solidarity to help that. The more you pull at that thread, the more it starts to say, you're like, so what you're saying is a rising tide lifts all boats. Like it starts that kind of thinking, I absolutely agree with you that like,
economic classes at the core of all of these problems, but I think it's important to also make space because it is about establishing solidarity and it's about understanding that like marginalised people are all on the same side. How do you think you can avoid the right picking apart at those divisions? Because that's all, because I fundamentally agree with you, but it's like the right is so opportunistic. A lot of us had hopes that, you know, as you moved away from
Essentially, these kind of media moguls owning the ways in which information was disseminated. If you look at the newspapers when I was going up, it was basically like the Guardian and the Independent and the Mirror at points.
versus the sun, the male, the express, the telegraph, the times, you know, that in terms of like the, that were owned by newspaper moguls who had financial and vested interests in not disrupting the economic status quo. So then you get the internet, you go, this is, this is great. This is amazing. Every, it's just going to be the value of your ideas. And the reality is that we all have to fess up to this idea that conservatives were much smarter and savvier in how they use the internet and how they used YouTube and how they use social media.
So do you still believe in the power and value of being on YouTube being on Twitter? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And is it really important that progressives get into those spaces? I think you have to get into those spaces. That was one of the things I said in the video, like one of the people who pulled me out of it was Destiny because he was literally... This is a YouTuber who went on and argued with conservative YouTube. Yeah. And I don't like...
fundamentally massively agree with Destiny. I like his critiques on some of like, MAGA and stuff like that. But like, he was the only guy going into those spaces. Like, the only guy going in, because everyone else took the sort of like, principled stance of your platform in them. So I think, yeah, you just have to get into those spaces. I don't know if it's something I would like to do as debating, because there's a lot of pressure. But I think it could be done. I think it could be done. I do have one related question though.
And I think maybe it comes back to that idea of solidarity and maybe, you know, solidarity is a muscle that we all need to train a little bit harder because I think sometimes when we talk about the left, we talk about a need for likable characters. What is a content creator other than someone who's very compelling? That's why you watch them on YouTube, right?
If you don't have personality, does it matter? And also, should we withdraw solidarity from people that we think are kind of dickheads? You know what I mean? Like, if you want to have a coalition, there are going to be people in there that you don't actually like. This is like, yes, I've been wrestling with is like,
They call it like a relationship of convenience, you know. So it's like sometimes you have to think about everything strategically. And it's the same of what I was saying about focusing on class over like minority and like gender and stuff. It's just strategically, if we're looking at like a board game, the position we're in currently, that makes more sense to do something unifying and then move on. I get your critique. I think it makes sense what you're saying. Like then it's the rising tide for it's all boats.
But I think sometimes you have to think strategically. So like me and my mates play board games a lot. We play like Catan. Yeah. And like there will be a time in the game where you're ahead, you're winning. And I have no idea what is Catan. Set the best game ever.
What is it? Settlers of Catam. OK, so you have a board of Monopoly. I need something. You have this map and you're trying to fight for control of certain things. OK. So you're winning. Actually, you're winning. And me and you are sort of working together. Take him down. But at some point, you start winning. And me and you are now working together.
At the end of the game, I don't want to either of you two to fuck them when I was winning. But we have to work together in certain moments in order for the game for me to have a chance of winning. I would say sometimes when you have people that you don't necessarily agree 100% in, I don't know. I'm not saying this is what I think for sure, but I just have a feeling it makes more strategical sense. I'm in the right to do it all the time. That's why they want. And that's why now that they're in power, they're having friction and stuff because that's what will happen. So when you do the relationship of convenience, you might win, but at some point you will start fighting each other.
If we're trying to arrest this, like, slide in, like, faith and democracy amongst young people, you've got to be practical, be assertive, and also be hopeful. Yeah. Yeah, 100%. That's it. And I think, like, I, yeah, I don't know, I'm just... Practical, assertive, hopeful. Yeah, bow. I like it. Um, Jimmy the Giant, thank you so much for joining us on Pots over the UK. Listeners, do check out his channel on YouTube. What's your latest video on?
If the sponsors approve it tonight, then it will be Elon Musk's War Against Britain, which is my longest video I've ever fucking made. I rewrote it in god damn time. Literally, when I started the video, it was when they, he was saying about the hundred million donations. So like, that was where it started. And a lot has happened since then. It was like three weeks ago. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But that should be out tonight. Yeah, Jimmy, the giant on YouTube.
And that's it. Thanks for listening to Pod Save the UK. And as always, we want to hear your thoughts. What do you make of the government's newest plans for growth? Email us at psuk at reducelistening.co.uk. Don't forget to follow at Pod Save the UK on Instagram, TikTok and Twitter. And if you want more of us, make sure you subscribe to our YouTube channel. And while you're there, don't forget to check out Jimmy the Giant. Pod Save the UK is a reduce listening production for Cricut Media. Thanks to senior producer James Tyndale and assistant producer John Rogers.
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