Welcome back to the voice of war.

Today, I once again welcome Dr. Mike Martin, now also Mike Martin MP. I think this is Mike’s sixth appearance on the show, and he’s been a regular voice in helping us unpack conflicts and geopolitical tensions around the world, especially in Afghanistan and Ukraine.

Our last conversation was about two and a half years ago. And since then, Mike has become increasingly active in UK politics and was ultimately elected as the member of parliament for Tunbridge Wells, representing the Liberal Democrats.

For our newer audience, Mike is a former British army officer who served in Afghanistan, and he holds a PhD in war studies from King’s College London. He’s also the author of several books, including Why We Fight and An Intimate War, both of which have shaped how many of us think about conflict, identity, and the stories we tell about war.

Mike, good to see you, my friend, and welcome back to The Voice of War.

Hey, Maz, I can’t believe this is the sixth one.

Sixth one and the last one was two and half years ago that when I checked today that blew me away.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s been a busy couple of years.

Yeah, well, certainly for you it has. And for that reason, I also know our time is short because you’ve got you’ve got lots of things to get on with. But in the past, you and I used to speak lots about conflicts overseas. Like I said, Afghanistan, Ukraine. What I want to talk about today is I want to focus on the UK because well, at least for us in Australia, many people describe the UK as a powder keg marked by deep polarization over migration, of course, economic stress and declining trust in institutions. From your new vantage point, how do you see the situation?

I certainly don’t see it as a powder keg. I think that the view that you see online ⁓ and a lot of what happens online then drives traditional media. So in a sense, things have been inverted, right? Something will happen on social media first or get surfaced on social media. And then that will drive ⁓ traditional or legacy media or whatever you wanna call it. And that view,

does absolutely paint the UK as a powder keg. I can tell you it absolutely isn’t a powder keg. ⁓ There are definitely ⁓ tensions and you mentioned around immigration and specifically actually in the UK we have a problem of small boat arrivals. people, at its narrowest point, the channel between Britain and France is about 20 miles and ⁓ groups of migrants from as far afield as Bangladesh and Vietnam, but particularly from those conflicts near the UK, like Syria, Afghanistan, maybe some Iranians, Iraq, Sudan. They get into small boats, literally rubber dinghies with 20, 30 people, then float across with a small outboard engine or otherwise across to the UK.

And this year we’re sort of touching 40, 50,000 of those coming from abroad. So that’s a problem absolutely that the government has to deal with. you know, in politics, you learn very quickly that a problem with visuals is 20 times the problem of a problem without visuals. And this problem, which is a problem in and of itself, is massively magnified by the visuals that it creates. But that’s not to say that the UK is a powder keg. It’s not. We’ve got an economy that’s kind of flatlining and in malaise, and we’ve had a long period of sort of quite unsuccessful government and turbulence. We had Brexit and we had the war in Ukraine, which caused big energy shocks in Europe. So prices went up hugely for energy just to your household. energy bills to heat your bills.

We had the pandemic, so we had a number of shocks all the way going back really to the global financial crisis in 2008. And so the economy hasn’t really recovered from those. So that’s the background to where we are. And of course, when you have an economy that’s not great, you end up with public services that are underfunded. And I think some of the some of the way that our public services are structured and not fit for the 21st century.

You know, the last government didn’t really get to grips with it because it was fighting itself about Brexit and you what our relationship with Europe’s like. And this new government’s come in and they came in really without much of a plan. They just had a plan to win the election. They didn’t really know what they wanted to do with the country. And so that sense of deep kind of disillusionment with politics and politicians ⁓ has continued. And that’s really the background to what’s going on.

I don’t think that equates to Britain being a powder keg, but there are certainly issues that we need to get to grips with.

Yeah, I mean, I think that’s that kind of echoes a lot what we’re seeing in Australia as well. I mean, when you look at social media, you think that, you know, World War Three is about to erupt. My issue with all of that is that it seems like it’s actually catching on because of social media. I mean, people genuinely do believe it. And it’s almost a little bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy. But I do want to narrow in a little more on the on the migration issue, because I think, mean, as you rightly pointed out, it’s the illegal migration that’s an issue. Legal migration has dropped off significantly since post COVID. I think there was a big spike and now it’s, I guess, recovered almost to what are traditionally normal levels, I guess, for the UK, except, like you said, ⁓ the boats, ⁓ illegal boats arriving. And I think even using the Australian catch-cry of stop the boats, kind of in the political narratives that are being fought out. There was another layer over the top of that and that is that there’s a conflation of illegal immigration and Islam. And again, that’s something that’s being seen in Australia as well. ⁓ The kind of narratives, at least to me, appear that illegal immigrants equals Islam, loss of culture, identity, what it means to be British. How do you see that from your view?

I mean, I don’t really see that as a mainstream narrative. ⁓ It’s certainly, as you say, ⁓ a conflation and it’s a device, it’s a conflation that certain politicians will use, right? And, ⁓ you know, actually the most recent thing that happened in the UK kind of exposes how kind of…

⁓ outrageous that conflation is. So a couple of weeks ago on a Saturday night there was a train coming from Peterborough into London and suddenly across all the news networks was train makes emergency stop in this place called Huntingdon because somebody has gone on a knife spree and stabbed people on the train. And there are 10 people who are critically injured in hospital, there are forensic police everywhere, armed police everywhere, all the rest of it. And announced that night, two people have been taken into custody. And now the police release sort of basic biographical details. They said, both black, ones of I think Caribbean descent, and both British, but one was born here and the other was of Caribbean descent, I think. And of course, queue X and all the rest of it going wild and making exactly the point that you’ve just made. And then the story unfolds and it turns out that ⁓ it’s not two people actually, it’s one person, it the perpetrator. And ⁓ then it turns out that he’s actually gone and stabbed some other people or threatened, got into a barbershop and threatened people and you can then you see the video and it’s like this guy’s kind of obviously he’s going through court so I don’t want say too much but it appears from this video that he looks pretty mentally unwell and and then it turns out that ⁓ one of the train guards you know the guy who your tickets and all the rest of it ⁓ took this guy on he had a huge carving knife and unarmed this train guard protected his passengers and took him on. And then they released the name of the train guards and he’s an Algerian immigrant.

Mmm.
Yeah, okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So, so I guess there is that conflation, but it is a conflation that is often made when, and then suddenly all of those people who were saying, well, we must know who’s done this the night before. Suddenly all went silent when it turned out that it was Samir from Algeria who had been the hero, right? And he’s now going to get a medal from the king. So.

Hmm. Yeah. Yeah. He saved the day. Yeah, but I think it’s a battle of narratives. I mean, my bigger question is who is behind these narratives, right? So, if you look at somebody like Tommy Robinson or whatever his actual name is, which is not his name. I mean, he’s one of the biggest.

Steven Yaxley Lennon,

That’s it, right. But he he’s one of the biggest names outside of the UK speaking about the UK. And if you look at his profile, I mean, he’s got a lot of followers and he’s quite prominent, he antagonizes, that’s part of his brand, I guess. The problem is, you know, there are kernels of truths in all of these narratives, but then they’re kind of, you know, I mean, he’s being paid by all sorts. A lot of them, in fact, happen to be, you know, Jewish Zionists who take advantage of this battle, right? Who was it? Oh, yes, Robert Shillman, right? He’s a prominent Zionist in the US, a tech giant billionaire, but he’s funding him as well as other anti-Muslim narratives all around the world. So my bigger worry and concern is that these narratives exist for a reason and there’s a separate war being fought that we’re not necessarily aware of. How do you see that? Do you do you discuss this? Is this something that’s in your purview? Is there something that’s discussed politically?

Yeah, I mean, it’s interesting. I sit on a couple of committees in parliament, the defence select committee and the joint committee on national security. And we have actually had a look at this kind of grey zone space and I’ll come back to, to what we found later, but just to deal with the specific points that you made there. So Stephen Yaxley Lennon, by the way, just to be completely clear as a criminal, right? He is regular, he’s regularly in and out of court.

Yeah. It’s had like seven different pseudonyms that he’s been used, that he’s used. Yeah.

and charged and convicted and all the rest of it, right? He’s been, he’s collapsed trials. He’s been done for contempt of court. ⁓ There’s, ⁓ I don’t know whether this has come to trial yet, but recently there was a video released of him assaulting someone on the tube. mean, the guy’s a criminal. And as to your point about the driving of narratives, I mean, I think the most obvious and the biggest shift that’s occurred has happened with Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter, right? And there’s loads of, and you just Google it, there’s loads of analyses of what has shifted, how the discourse on X, as it’s now called, has shifted once Elon Musk bought Twitter and then tweaked the algorithm and the reason that’s important is not necessarily because of Twitter in and of itself like only a tiny percentage of people are on Twitter but it’s who’s on Twitter. Twitter’s still, I mean it’s garbage now right, but it’s still the premier kind of text-based information sharing social media hub and it has all the politicians and all the journalists and all the rest of it.

And as social media has gobbled up all the advertising revenue that used to go to traditional media,  journalists are, you know, it’s a different world now being a journalist. Instead of being able to work on a story for a week and have lots of long lunches and have an expense account and then you push out your article and that was it. You’ve now got to do five articles a day, no lunches and you’re kind of, and so there are less of you and you’ve got to produce more news and it moves much faster and the way you hang out on Twitter, right? Loads of journalists hang out on Twitter because that’s where your lead starts. I mean, there are journalists for, you know, particular publications who they don’t, they just work from home and they just scrape social media. And then they turn that into stories. know, a tweet gets turned into a story. And this is really is an idea. This is a sort of a model of what’s happening across the media where something will start in the social media space, not necessarily true, right? In an ideal world, there’d be an event that happens, it gets captured on social media, then that drives the traditional media. But often something starts on social media that is a photo that’s taken out of context or actually doesn’t report to show what it shows, and then that drives. And when we saw that in the Southport riots in the UK, that was actually incorrect what was happening. And that drove the traditional media.

And both social and traditional media then drove activity on the ground and we had riots in the UK. And, ⁓ you know, to your point about who’s funding stuff, yeah, it’s people like Elon Musk who are ⁓ skewing the algorithm, which skews the bias in the social media channel. But increasingly what’s happening, you know, come back to where we started this conversation, increasingly what’s happening in the online world doesn’t match the realities. mean, everyone experiences this. You go on Twitter, I have to be on Twitter for work, right? And you go on that and you’re like, this is wild stuff. And then you go and talk to your neighbors or, know, I obviously speak to thousands of people as part of my job, you know, whether they’re constituents or opinion formers in London or whatever. you know, speak to MPs, speak to wide varieties of people. I go door knocking every week and just knock on people’s doors and go, right, what’s going on, right?

And increasingly, the conversations I have face to face are dissociated from what you see on social media. And that gap is getting wider and wider. And I don’t think that’s sustainable. don’t think that’s sustainable for, you know, human societies tend to have to tend to find their own equilibrium. Right. They tend to find.

Okay.
Wait, wait,
sorry, let me just confirm as it’s different to what’s on social media. Is that what you mean? Right, OK, that’s positive. That’s really positive. OK.

That’s the point I’m trying to make is that increasingly, increasingly what you see, particularly on a site like X, right, which is, you know, as we discussed, has kind of sharply changed its political bias. That increasingly doesn’t match the lived experience of what you see just walking around and talking to people. And that’s what people tell me and that’s what I see in my own personal life.

Hmm. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Right. Okay.
That’s.

And that, you know, the more extreme that Twitter gets, you know, as you said, as you started it, you you started this conversation, we said, it looks like the world’s burning down or Britain is a powder cake or whatever. But we know that that’s not actually what’s happening. And that’s not what our lived experience tells us. And those are becoming more and more dissociated. And I do wonder whether, know, ultimately social media pays for itself through advertising. But if no one’s willing to advertise on it because people don’t go there because it doesn’t reflect what their lives are about. Then one wonders whether that advertising model is gonna break down.

Yeah. Okay. I mean, that’s interesting to be honest with you. That’s surprising because, uh, you know, what, I’ve read and what I’m seeing at least in Australia, I mean, is, know, under 40, et cetera, that they really no longer engage with, know, legacy traditional media, whatever, uh, it’s mainly, know, Youtubers.

I didn’t say legacy media, I said what their conversations are like with people that they meet through their work, during their day, all the rest of it, their friends.

Interesting. Interesting. I I’m just bringing that point up because in Australia, there’s a real big push. And you feel it it’s being echoed in the dominant narratives, in the mainstream media as well, particularly about Islam being a problem, right? It’s being discussed in parliament. It’s being discussed that our culture is changing. I’ve got army mates who are basically saying, no, we need to ban Muslims in Australia, right? You know, there’s no distinction between radical Islam and Islam.

Yeah, you do that in the UK. So, for instance, I’ll give you some examples, right? In UK politics you do get UK members of parliament saying that. So, the Reform Party, right, which is like our kind of right wing, I don’t know what you want to call them, far right or whatever, Nigel Ferage the guy who brought us Brexit.  Incidentally, by the way, Brexit is a large cause of the small boats problems, right, because we had a returns agreement with the EU, right? So this massive wave of immigration, both irregular and legal. No, no, but the beauty, no, no, but under Brexit.

Under the EU, it was a circular flow, right? People came for a bit and then left and then came, you know, they came for a bit, learned English, but then went back and all the rest of it, right? And it was a circular flow. Whereas now, and the reason it was circular flow is because if you were Polish, you wanted to come and learn English and get some money and get some coils or whatever, but then you wanted to go back to Poland, right? Because Poland was getting richer in the EU and all the rest of it, right? So there were kind of equivalent standards of living.

But as soon as you shut off migration from the EU and replaced it with migrants from other countries that were more culturally dissimilar and were often a lot poorer, then it turned it into a one way flow of migration. Right. That’s to do with legal migration. And then the irregular migration on the boats, we had a returns agreement with the EU. Right. And when we’re in the EU, if you’d been turned down for asylum in any European country.

If you got to the UK and tried it, there’s no point in coming to the UK because we just look at it and go, you’d have been fingerprinted, right? So we’d know who you were. And they go, no, no, you’ve already been turned down. See you later. Bye bye. Right. Whereas now we’re locked out of those databases. So the reason everyone comes to the UK is because they try it in Europe. And if it doesn’t work, the UK is the last chance saloon to get your asylum status. Right. So Nigel Farage, who brought us Brexit, which destroyed the British economy, created years of division also created the immigration problem that he’s now purporting to solve. Anyway, back to your original point, is, you know, there’s reformer of this odd collection of libertarians, ethno-nationalists and kind of outright racists. And the one who is the most outright racist does go on this kind of, we need to ban Muslims or we should ban them. Then she’s banning, it’s hard to keep track, but I think she wants to ban the burka.

And the other day she said on the TV that, you know, she basically disagreed with the number of black and brown people on the TV. And, you know, queue horror and outrage from across the political spectrum, right?  And then even her own party leader, Nigel Farage, disowned her and said she shouldn’t and she had to go out and apologize, right? So there are, of course, in this world of polarization and division and you know, there’s lots of problems in the UK. I’m not saying there aren’t problems.  People are always pushing the boundaries, right? We’ve got someone else doing it on the left, right? We’ve got Zach Polanski saying we should leave NATO, get rid of nuclear weapons and have a wealth tax and all the rest. Right, so you’ve got the same stuff going on the left. So those people are again in a very fast media environment. You need to have an extreme line to catch the news cycle and stay in it right and those guys are responding to that information environment and coming out with mad stuff.  Is it gaining traction? No, not mainstream traction.

So the poll numbers and the elections aren’t, I mean, in Australia, the elections are, I mean, the numbers of, know, One Nation and stuff. mean, they’re increasingly getting more and more votes and it’s getting a lot more. Yeah, basically. Yeah. So yeah, it is. Yeah, exactly. It’s Pauline Hanson. mean, it’s a, you know, she was, she’s always been quite vocal, particularly about Islam. But I think it’s catching on. There’s now a surge in Australia about amplifying Australia as a Christian nation. And why I’m concerned about this is not because I’m alarmist, it’s because I’m from Bosnia. This is exactly what happened in the Balkans. As soon as you draw lines around tribes and you start pumping money into those narratives, which is exactly what happened in the Balkans, people start fearing their neighbor.

And that’s happening in Australia. I’m not being alarmist. We’re not about to start ethnically cleansing each other. But there’s a  change tone in our discussions, in our narratives, in our protests, in which flag is okay, which isn’t. What does it even mean to be Australian? The narrative is getting louder and louder and louder. And of course it’s being funded in some cases by rogue actors like China, Russia, whatever. They’re paying, this is costing them nothing, right? To amplify social media narratives. They’re not ideologically driven. I had Carl Miller on not long ago and we talked about this.

This was what we found in our parliamentary committee is Russia funds a huge amount of Gaza thing in the UK. Russia funded both sides. Russia funded the Zionist side or just played and boosted the Zionist side and the, and the, you know, pro-Gazan side or whatever. Like

Yeah. Yes, exactly. It doesn’t matter. Exactly. I mean, look at what’s happening in the US right now. Actually I do want to ask you one question. Is there a problem with Islam in the UK?

What do you mean by problem? How can you have a problem with a religion? We’re a tolerant pluralistic society, so how does a religion create a problem?

Okay. What I mean by the problem is that, wonderful, great, great. No, that’s music to my ears because that’s obviously my same position, right?

In general, you can’t think…there’s a difference isn’t there between Bosnia and the UK and there’s a very obvious difference which is that Bosnia or the Balkans has for centuries been controlled by outside powers right whether it’s the Ottomans or, you know so on and so forth right Russia you know the Austro-Hungarian we’ve had all of these different empires who have controlled the Balkans and as you know

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Austria-Hungary, et cetera, yeah, yeah.

the way that empires, outsiders maintain control is they do a little bit of divide and rule, right? It’s very helpful for them to have defined groups so they can play off against each other, right? And now that the Balkans have become, you know, first in Yugoslavia as an independent country, then all of these independent countries in the post Yugoslav space, history’s not very far back, right?

As everyone knows, any conversation about politics in the Balkans starts in 1320 or whatever. And so that history and that narrative, everyone knows that. But the UK, luckily for me, who was born in 1982 or for my children or whatever, the UK hasn’t been in that position. We haven’t been in that position for, well, a very, very long time. I mean, the last power that came in and played constituent groups off each other with the Romans, right? If you read Julius Caesar coming into the UK in 50 BC, yeah, 50 BC, he actually played the tribes off against each other, right? He knew what the tribes were and he played the tribes off against each other. And that was probably part of how the Romans maintained control. But that then effectively, Britain then formed itself, England formed itself into a polity that the Normans then just took over and the Normans just replaced, know, in 1066, the top layer of the aristocracy with Anglo-Norway, you French aristocracy and just kept the English polity underneath it. So I guess what I’m saying is England and the other constituent nations, Wales and Scotland have been unified for a much, for a far longer period than in this case, we’re talking about Bosnia and the Balkans, but we could apply it other countries around the world. And that’s just, know, for those of us who were born in the eighties, that’s an accident of history that you were born with in Bosnia and I was born, know, in the UK.  But I think that it, guess what it means is that, unfortunately, one area, Bosnia, is more fertile to that kind of rhetoric than the UK. And I’m not saying that that rhetoric doesn’t inflame a section of our society in the UK. I’m not saying, you know, and it creates an opposite reaction, right? Some people are very inflamed by, know, small boats and migrants. And it is a deep concern. I don’t want you to minimize how they feel about it. It is a problem that must be dealt with, right? And equally, when flags go up, you know, we have a similar Union Jack thing, St George’s Cross, which is the flag of England, we see them appearing on lamp posts. That then other people on the other side of the political spectrum feel slightly unnerved, a bit like you’re describing how you feel. And that’s equally valid, right? How you feel, how they feel about this, what does this mean? But I guess what I’m saying is the wide tolerant middle of UK society looks at this and goes, nope, that’s not who we are as a country. And there’s relatively broad agreement in the centre of the political spectrum about that. to the point that, you know, come back to Sarah Poochie, and he said that there’s too many black and brown people on the TV and Nigel Farage, who’s, you know, pretty far off the scale, had to slap her down.

Hmm Yeah, which you went too far. My only worry there is I mean, yes, I can hear what you’re… well, there’s a good quote I think that I’ll quote here: ‘What luck for leaders that men do not think’, right? And that was said by none other than Hitler and he knew a thing or two about this That and that’s my worry, right? Obviously, I’m not praising Hitler but I’m the quote I think has a lot to say in it because just again to take the Balkans as an example, Yugoslavia up until Tito died, up until the country was in debt and there was an economic crisis and the pressures came in through the Washington consensus. IMF, still the biggest debt by the IMF is to Tito, Tito Yugoslavia. So the economic pressures started coming in. Then you had different factions, Milosevic, was in New York, a banker, he came back and he started building a kind of narrative of the Serb national identity, right? Then you had the Croat national identity, then you had the Bosnia slash Muslim, which of course came later. And that almost happened overnight, right? This is not something that people in Bosnia, I never knew, none of my parents, no one knew who was what. We were a secular nation. know, it was socialism, it was class war, right? Rather than religious war. But when the back pockets were hit, and you needed an enemy, that tribalism that you described from the Romans, happened overnight, right? And in many ways, I see echoes of that across the West. I spoke to Sami Puri also on this very topic of this kind of division and the tensions within the West, the West eating itself ultimately in competition because it’s with other blocks around the world. And it hasn’t really, it’s not able to really establish its own vision. And I think that we really see that in the US right now, which…

I’m not sure how closely you get a chance to follow, but the MAGA camp is falling apart. Trump is in real trouble on so many levels, mainly because of this kind of loss of trust. Yeah. Absolutely. And it all comes down to…

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And these movements tend to eat themselves, right? Because they get outflanked. Elon Musk used to support Farage and Reform, and now he’s supporting Tommy Robinson, who’s further to the right. And don’t worry, someone else will come along and outflank Tommy Robinson. And the further you go, the further these people get away from the kind of liberal with a small L tolerant mainstream.

Well, never let a crisis go to waste, right? Yeah. That’s that that’s that that is my worry. Right. And that’s, you know, whilst I understand that there’s a big middle in the middle, you know, that doesn’t want any of this. But when push comes to shove in,  yeah.

But so what’s our job as politicians, right? Our job is to, you know, you’ve got to hold the line and call this stuff out, right?

Yes, absolutely. Absolutely.

So that’s job number one. And job number two is you’ve actually got to not overreact and overdramatize this because you know physics, every force has an equal and opposite reaction, right? So you’ve got to give it the seriousness that it deserves because people are concerned, but equally you’ve got to not overdramatize it, right? You’ve got to be statesman-like, right? And

Yeah.

If you want to run your mouth because you want to get some headlines, because that’s what you need to do in the current media environment, fine. But those of us who don’t seek to do that need to have the confidence to know that speaking, you know, in a calm way about these things actually, ultimately is what’s best for the society that we all live in, right? You know, and I’m recording this in my front room as like I live in my constituency, you know, I meet my constituents when I go and buy milk in Tesco’s, right? These are all my neighbors. You know, my kids were born here, they go to nursery, etc. Right? We all live in the communities that we represent. But then back to what you were saying earlier about the link between, I guess, kind of economic deprivation and extreme views. And actually, we have, the way that play or one way that that plays out in the UK is obviously this happened all over the world. The internet’s happened and town centres are suddenly getting hollowed out, right? Because you don’t go to the town centres to buy anything anymore. You go to, you buy on Amazon and then your town centre is kind of like hollowed out. And so all town centres everywhere are going through this shift from a place where you go to buy something to a place where you go to do something, get a coffee. Browse a shop, know, meet some mates, go to the cinema, whatever, right? So it becomes a totally different thing. And that obviously requires town centres. It’s not an essential part of it. Well, it is in the sense that we all need social connection. Like that’s an essential part of our life. Social connection is essential. But if your town centres get up to sell stuff and then all the shops are closing down because they can’t make money and they’re replaced by betting shops and charity shops, then that town centre, A, looks rubbish.

Yeah.
It’s not an essential part of your life anymore. Yeah.

but doesn’t provide that social connection, right? In the way that it used to. And in the UK, so if you look at shop vacancy rates, it’s a very simple metric of like how degraded your town centre is. A high vacancy rate means that you’ve got loads of shops that are shuttered up, right? A high vacancy rate leads to a higher vote share for reform, right?

And so to come back to take that idea and then we’ve got these two things. You’ve got to hold the line as a politician. You’ve got to not overreact and you’ve got to speak, you know, in a statesman like tolerant way. And the third thing you’ve got to do is actually solve some of these things, right? Solve some of these problems. So if you’re a politician in an area where you’ve got a high vacancy rate, you’ve got to do whatever you can to make, to rejuvenate your town center, right? And in different places that will mean different things. I’m lucky enough that Tunbridge Wells is relatively affluent on the scale of the 650 constituencies in the UK. So the solution here looks different to what the solution looks like in somewhere that’s not as affluent. But there are solutions in both of those places. And it’s actually, you know, come back to this disassociation between what’s happening on social media and what’s actually happening when people walk into the town centre to meet their mate for a coffee you can improve that and I’m just talking about town centres there are lots of examples of the things that we need to do at national level and local level but actually making that change and improving people’s lives whilst holding the line and speaking in tolerant fashion will enable this wave to pass us right this wave will pass this too shall pass right it is a phase and the reason it’s a phase that’s happening at the moment is because as you said the west has post financial crisis has slightly lost its confidence. That’s happened at the same time as China has become much more powerful. And by the way, it’s not that the West has become less powerful, it’s that relatively speaking, China has become more powerful, right? That’s what’s happened. And obviously you guys in Australia really see that in a way that perhaps we don’t in Europe. ⁓ And I think what we need to realize is that the post World War II era, of Western dominance has clearly broken down, right? And we need to adapt to this new international wiring, if you like. The UN is not wired for this world. The IMF, all these other organizations are wired on the kind of Washington Consensus. That’s not, we’re in a new world now. So what does this new world look like? We don’t know yet, right? And the other thing is domestically, the way that, you know, if I just speak about the UK, the balance that we had, the consensus that we had between political parties or between political parties and unions or between business and public services, that balance, right, that’s broken down as well, partly because, you know, if I speak in the UK, we want we want European levels of service provision and we want American levels of tax, right, and they don’t work, right, you got to got to choose one or the other and know, we haven’t necessarily as politicians led that honest conversation with the public. And so all of these kind of decades long consensus are breaking down at the same time as the internet and social media has happened and all these narratives are springing up. But the solution is not to jump on those narratives or to respond forcefully necessarily to those narratives. It’s to hold the line, point out mad shit when you see it.

It’s to be tolerant and statesman-like and it’s to just diligently go about fixing the problems that you see in front I’m speaking as a politician here, just diligently go about fixing the problems as you see them, right? It’s amazing the difference, you know, I find as a local MP that you can make to people’s lives problems that villagers have had for 20 years that with a fresh pair of eyes, you can come to it and actually you can figure out how to solve that problem. And then they just go, oh my God, how, and it’s not because my team is, you know, I and my team are particularly brilliant. It’s just because we come to it with a determined focus to try and solve people’s problems at a local level. And if you’re a national politician, you’ve got to do that at national level and so on and so forth. But just that sustained focus on trying to solve problems does what coupled with holding the line will eventually see us through this. We will, we will get through this. The world is not ending.

Yeah. No, I look, obviously you’re a friend and I know you and I know that you actually diligent and you care and you competent, right? I can’t say that about every politician I’ve met and I’ve met quite a few in my life. Right. So that, that, that, that, that, that’s another issue. Right. ⁓ but let me just, let me just pivot to the U S because I think what, you know, as the saying goes, you know, yeah, yeah, please go.

Sure, that’s very true. Yeah, that’s very true. Can we just pick up on that very quickly, right? Because my observation in getting elected to the House of last year, there were, you know, one way of categorizing MPs is there’s MPs who want to be MPs and there’s MPs who want to do being an MP. And you can very quickly figure out which one’s which. And…

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it’s like in every other
sector, right? It’s every other sector. You’ve got 68%. The bell curve applies 68%. I just keep in the boat of float. know, you’ve got, know, 14 % upfront pulling one direction, 2 % high performers that are getting things done. And you’ve got the same in the back. It’s the same in every, in every, in every, in every sector.

That’s it. That’s it. So yeah, and for me, like the impossible demands that this job puts on my family life mean that I’m only going to do this job while I’m actually able to do stuff and change people’s lives. The kind of hanging around in the Palace of Westminster and, know, whatever, whatever, like, it literally just makes no impression on me. And I think the problem is actually…

But again, you’re unique. You’re unique. That’s that’s the point I’m trying to make. I you are unique. You’ve got a background. You’ve got, know, you’ve been an army officer. You’ve got a PhD. You’ve traveled the world. You’ve you’ve hiked across Africa with your with your with your shit box car, right?

Sure, sure, but loads of MPs have got very impressed. mean, some MPs are extremely impressive. I mean, some are dullards, right? But some are extremely impressive, extremely impressive. I think there’s something about what kind of people are elected seek election in parliament, right? Because, know, just speaking personally, I had spent two years without pay campaigning to win Tunbridge Wells. Now that was quite a difficult seat. The Conservatives have held it for 115 years. It used to be the third safest Tory seat in the country, right?  And we won it convincingly, but I had to, you know, kind of do a bit of consulting on the side and, you know, get, pull money to Sarah and I pulling money together to, you know, get bread on the table whilst I effectively spent two years building a campaign and getting 400 volunteers and raising hundreds of thousands of pounds and all the rest of it. What that is to say is that normal people don’t do that. That’s a risk appetite that to have that risk appetite it marks me out but all MPs have that sense of because when you put yourself forward for election. You are gonna become an MP you’ll probably lose your job at 3.30 in the morning in the sports hall somewhere and then have to give a speech and you, there’s huge risk involved, you putting yourself into the, you know, we were talking about before this, we were talking about what it means to be a public figure. That puts huge stress on your family and all the rest of it, right? So I guess what I’m saying is politicians are kind of odd and actually it surprises me that we get so many normal, high-quality politicians in that space.

And what you see when you get to parliament is that there’s three groups of people. One is like superstars, genuinely really impressive people in whatever their field is. they’ve dedicated, they’ve set their minds for becoming a politician because they want to make a difference. And they’re amazing. You’ve got a lot in the middle who are extremely competent, want to do well for their constituents. They’re not superstars, but there’s no scandals. They’re diligent. They’ve got integrity. That’s the vast majority. And then there’s this rump at the bottom who are like basically mad right? Scandal prone, all over the place, wild political views and that’s true of every political party, that’s true of absolutely every political party and that’s kind of the political space. So you know…

Yeah, I mean, it’s just ultimately, it’s a gathering of humans, right? I mean, that’s why I say it applies to every other sector, right? I’m not surprised to hear that.

Yeah, I guess we saw it in the army as well, Army was like that. Superstars.

And you look left or right, sometimes you’re like, seriously? We’re the best?

Yeah, yeah, and there’s a large array in the middle who are fine and there’s a mad bit, absolutely insane. But the difference is, in politicians, they all go on the TV. So get to see them all in front of you, whereas in most sectors, they…

They do it in the background. The influence is not felt as much, obviously. Let me just pivot to the US because I think what we’re seeing in the US right now is, know, I think it’s quite important actually, because, as the saying goes, US sneezes, the rest of us catch a cold.  You know, Trump is, think, in real trouble, on many accounts, but his base is splitting. I mean, you’ve got…

Mm, Epstein, it’s mad, isn’t it?

Epstein, Charlie Kirk’s assassination, all of them. And of course, know, the MAGA voices of Tucker Carlson and Candice Owens and Megyn Kelly, right? The three pillars of his success have all turned hard. I mean, totally turned against Trump.

Mmm. Bannon hasn’t, but yeah.

Bannon hasn’t, but he’s even he’s been now pushed out and he’s been, know, accused of of turning and all of them have turned on Israel. That’s the single issue that’s really divided the base. It’s no longer make America great again, there’s now a split to America first. So there’s a clear separate…

America alone. Where MGT was saying, America first and that for me means America only or something is what she’s saying.

Look, I can actually empathize because that’s what Trump’s base wanted, right? In many ways I can empathize. No more foreign wars, drain the swamp, etc. Right, he promised,

It’s the old isolationist,

it’s the old American isolationist streak,

Right, exactly. And from a voter’s perspective, where you’re on handouts to buy food, I can sort of see why people voted for him. They had an appeal and you obviously know my view of Trump as a person and his policies, et cetera. I’ve never really agreed with him. I was in a way hopeful once he got elected, okay, maybe let him drain the swamp, whatever that means. But of course, now we’re seeing that that’s absolutely not happening. And the whole Epstein thing. this is not even about conspiracy theories anymore. I some of this stuff is really, you kind of go hold on a minute, but really what’s happening. So, what is the view of Israel? And firstly, credit to you for actually bringing up a question. saw it on YouTube that you brought it up in question time, whether the UK still should retain its support of Israel because of collective punishment in Gaza. So full credit for that. But generally speaking, is the view of Israel slash Zionism. not Jews, right, which is the conflation, immediate conflation. You talk about anti-Zionism and I’ve been accused myself of being anti-Semitic. I mean, seriously.

Mm-hmm, bit like Islamism and Islam, right? It’s the same conflation. Except the difference here is that many Israeli politicians have deliberately conflated criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism. Yeah.

Exactly, it’s the same thing, right? That’s part of the narrative. Next week I’m interviewing Ilan Pappe the most prominent Israeli historian, very much an anti-Zionist. But what’s the state of affairs of the UK-Israel relationship and how is that playing out in the UK?

So for context, to answer that question, I mean, because I know your listeners are kind of from all over the world. The current government in the UK is formed by the Labour Party and under their previous leader, the Labour Party’s previous leader was a guy called Jeremy Corbyn, who was the leader from 2015 to 2020, very early 2020. He was widely considered to be not personally anti-Semitic, but he turned a blind eye on anti-Semitism in the Labour Party and the left fringe of the Labour Party, of the Labour Party is a kind of traditionally, and it’s all over the place now, but traditionally spanned kind of centre left all the way to far left. And the far left definitely has some anti-Semitic kind of fringes in it, but like far right has anti-Islam, know, tropes.

And Jeremy Corbyn was a kind of a sort of a 1970s socialist, right? His views haven’t changed. And so he all the kind of far-left people, the union, he’s sort of reads the Morningstar newspaper, stuff like that. He sort of turned a blind eye, which meant that, for example, the Equalities and Human Rights Commissioners in the UK, which is kind of the Crown body that looks at equalities and human rights in the UK, esteemed body published a report that deemed the Labour Party, it’s one of the two main parties in the UK, was institutionally anti-Semitic under Jeremy Corbyn. Disaster, not just for the Labour Party, but obviously the Jewish community, but disaster for British politics writ large, right? You can’t have a kind of major party be anti-semitic. So Keir Starmer, who’s the current Prime Minister, leader of the Labour Party, whose wife is Jewish, by the way, obviously came in and the first thing he did when he became leader was said we are dealing with this right and he dealt with it very effectively by basically expelling anyone you know just he just dealt with it right

And fast forward to October the 7th. I think what initially started as a desire to, obviously no one knew what was gonna happen on October the 7^th, and I think we understood that there’d be an Israeli counter reaction. Obviously they would be going into Gaza. So I don’t think anybody understood at that point quite how extreme, quite how illegal, you know, quite how despicable the Israeli state’s response would be. Not just in Gaza, but also what they’re doing in the West Bank. But the Labour Party’s position at that point in opposition, bear in mind, they weren’t the government at that point, and they’d just come out of this row where they’d been accused of anti-Semitism, they’d just shaken that off, was to take a very, very pro-Israeli stance, right? And obviously everybody is supportive of Israel, it’s right to exist, it’s right to self-defence, it’s right to a reaction after October the 7th. I don’t think anybody questions that. But I think that the Labour Party, and in particular Kier Starmer probably went a bit beyond that. And I’ll give an example.

Shortly after, I think maybe in the months after October the 7th, Keir Starmer was being interviewed on camera and he was asked, and bear in mind that Keir Starmer is a human rights lawyer, right, before he became a politician, was asked, is it okay for the Israelis to withhold food and water in this campaign? Now we know that the answer to that is no. That’s not okay, you have to look after the civilian population whilst you’re prosecuting your military aims, right? This is kind of basics 101 of like the rules of war, right? And he said, yeah, that’s fine.

Right? And this clip obviously spread like wildfire. This was the leader of the opposition then saying that it’s okay for Israel to break the rules of war in prosecuting its war aims, right? And, you know, whether he misspoke or whatever, like, doesn’t really matter. And it took, and his MPs, many of who are now kind of friends of mine, many of his MPs were texting madly, ringing up the leader’s office going, no, no, this is, you’ve got to, got to issue a retraction. You’ve got to, this is, absolute disaster and it took five days to issue a retraction rather than immediately going I’m sorry, I misspoke, I didn’t know, I was tired I didn’t hear the question properly, what I meant was, this is my position…it took five days to issue a kind of a bit of a retraction 

Yeah, it’s five days too late. Yeah.

And that clip still circulates right and I think that kind of set that they decided what their position was. And then they just sort of that just bled into government, right? And frankly, they didn’t really want to, you know, they’re dealing with all this stuff and they didn’t really want to be dealing with Israel. And they’re sort of stuck between yes, the UK does some intelligence sharing with Israel. But which is, and the government would say, that they were doing that for the purposes of finding the hostages, which, you know, I take them at their word on that.

Also did like 600 flyovers, surveillance flyovers over Gaza. I just read that today actually.

Well, no, I take them at their word on that. The problem is that here’s the problem. All right.

You know I’ve got a chuckle at that. I’ve got to chuckle.

The leadership was not focusing on this problem, right? Parliament was in uproar. The population was in uproar about Israeli actions in large part. And several prominent Labour politicians lost their seats in the general election against pro-Gaza independence. We have four or five pro-Gazan, they literally ran on the Gaza ticket in the general election and they defeated Labour politicians. West Streeting, who is the health secretary who is tipped to be the next leader, the next prime minister has a majority of 600. He almost got taken out by a pro-Russian independent, right? So it’s a huge problem in the country, in the Labour Party, in parliament, but the leadership is kind of tin into it. And frankly, I don’t think they wanted to deal with it. So they did some stuff, like they sort of some weapons and they sanctioned some Israeli ministers, but they’ve always been dragged kicking and screaming to that by parliament.

They recognize Palestine. Like these are all demands that the Lib Dems set out on, you know, in November after the October the seventh. And so they, because of that position of not wanting to, I think it stems from not wanting to be anti-Semitic. It stems from wanting to stay close to America as well, Trump and Keir Starmer. And it stems from frankly, not wanting to have to deal with this problem.

And I think that, and each time they’ve had to be dragged absolutely kicking and screaming to make whatever change it is. And I think it’s been hugely damaging for the UK’s reputation.

Yeah. I think you’re right. And I think that speaks to that earlier point we talked about, right? I feel like our politicians in the West, broadly speaking, often don’t necessarily hear or see what the constituents are actually saying to them. And I often think it’s because of interests, right? And you and I have talked about this before, interests vs values, right?

Governments run on interest and militaries deploy in support of interest. It’s not for the values. We went to Afghanistan, et cetera, to build democracy. You, me and our peers, et cetera. But that’s not why Australia, for example, went to Afghanistan. It’s now been publicly disclosed. We went there to wave the flag. And the mission of the Australian Defense Force is not to defend Australia, but it’s to defend Australia’s interests, national interests. And this, guess, is a conflict for me.

You know, when we’re pursuing interests, oftentimes they’re short term interests, political interests, not necessarily in line with what we want. They’re not necessarily representative of our values. And again, the US is a prime example. We’ve got a former Al Qaeda fighter, ISIS commander, who’s now in charge of Syria, going into the White House.

Yeah, in the White House, going to the White House.

Whereas Zoran Mamdani, now the Muslim mayor of New York, he’s being targeted as, you know, an Islamist, a communist. Right. So these are these narratives that I’m talking about. Whilst I’m impressed by your optimism and I’m glad that you have it because of the position that you live in right now and the role that you live in right now. I’m so encouraged by that optimism. My bigger worry is that there is a distinct separation between the narratives lived up here and the narratives live by the everyday person. And there’s a clash. US is a prime example now. There’s a huge clash in the US to the point where Trump will have to start another war. He has to start another war. How else does he rally around the flag? That’s why Venezuela.

Mm. Mm.

Caribbean, yeah. Yes, yeah, yeah.

And I actually saw, and I think, is it correct that UK has stopped sharing? I just saw that literally half an hour before we came.

Stop sharing intelligence with the US. Yeah. Because it stops sharing it’s just for your listeners, know, stop sharing intelligence with the US relating to the Caribbean and South America. So obviously there’s a lot of British islands and interests in the Caribbean. So, yeah, because we think they’re committing war crimes. Yeah, exactly. I mean, but you know, why didn’t we stop sharing intelligence with Israel when they were committing war crimes. It’s wild. It’s wild.

But that’s my, that is my point, right? That is my point, right? So, so just like I asked you earlier, is there a problem with radical Islam slash Islam in the UK? Is there a problem with Zionism and radical Zionism in the UK?

I mean, not as far as I see. I see effectively you’ve got a relatively stable, tolerant center. That’s disillusioned, right? I hear this, when I go door knocking, you the beauty of door knocking is that it’s random, right? It’s not people who email in, who are self-selecting. It’s totally random. I just pick a few streets and just do everyone on those streets. And you just…You know, never know. The beauty of canvassing is you never know who’s going to answer that door. And I see all the time. Oh, just a bit disillusioned, mate, to be honest. And it’s place of apathy, right? It’s a place of apathy. It’s a place of, ugh. And most people would accept that things have been good before and they’ll be good again.

But at the moment we’re a bit of a mess, you know? And brackets, I’m pretty busy in my life. I’ve got two kids and a job and whatever. Like, hose guys, I don’t have really time, but you know, people are always like happy, surprised that the MP knocks on their door. Quite happy, very happy to discuss it. It’s extremely rare that someone says, I don’t want to speak to you. Extremely rare. Even people who wouldn’t vote LibDem if I put a gun to their heads, they’re still very, very happy to chew the cud, you know? And to tell me their views. But this is not, but people are not, there’s no revolution brewing, you know? And I get that this is my constituency and all the rest of it, right? But I have areas of my constituency that are extremely deprived, right? There’s 15 % of my voters are extremely deprived, right? On a par with kind of national deprivation in the UK, right?

Hmm.

There is not a revolution brewing. There is disillusionment and annoyance and apathy and a kind of, God, politicians are completely useless. But there’s also always a huge gap between, you if you look at kind of when you ask people, what do you think of politicians? They’re like completely rubbish. And when they say, well, they say, what do you think of MPs? And they go rubbish. And they go, what do you think of your local MP? And they go quite good. Right.

Yeah.

And that tells you something, right? That tells you that nationally they think we’re going to hell in a handcart. But locally, where they look around them, come back to our dissociation between the lived, people look around and go, it’s all right. My kids go to a pretty good school. You know, got a good job. Wife’s happy. She’s got a good job. You know, grandparents are in a nice care home, whatever it is, right? Like, and most people look around and go, yeah, it’s okay. Right?

Yeah.

There’s a lot of pride in people’s local, know, pride and happiness in people’s local lived, built experience, right?

Yeah. I mean, that’s great. I’m really pleased to hear that that’s the case, at least for your constituents. Really, I am. I think you made the point, yours is a rather affluent, comparatively affluent one, but I do hope that it is reflected more broadly in the UK because I, again, I just have to…you know, perhaps I’m too far in my own bubble and I’m too deeply engaged and, through the podcast, I speak about all the horrible things that go on in the world. So perhaps I’m too, pessimistic maybe, although I’m not, I’m an optimist by nature. But I just see too many echoes of this tribalized, you know, balkanisation, tribes, tribes, tribes, us and them, us and them and so forth. And you’ve written about this in, in, Why We Fight, quite eloquently, about how that division actually happens and why we embrace our ethic against someone else’s ethic. So, I’m pleased to hear you being so optimistic.

And I know that that’s not you just being a politician because I know you. So, I really am pleased to hear that. My last question to you. You’ve now been in politics for over a year. What has aligned with your expectations kind of getting into behind the curtain and more importantly, what has surprised you most?

I didn’t, before I got elected, I didn’t really have huge ideas about what it would be like because I was fighting a highly competitive seat. And frankly, any time I spent thinking about after polling day was a waste of time. And if I’d lost by two votes, I’d have been kicking myself that I didn’t, know, go and knock on some more doors.

So, I kind of have two buckets, right? I do. I’m the local MP and I try and solve problems with my team basically that we have in our local area. And I’ve actually enjoyed that much more than I thought I would. You know, it’s extremely frustrating at times trying to get local bureaucracies to move, but the beauty of it is when you solve a problem, you know that there’s a thousand people who’ve been looking at that problem or whatever for 15 years and your team, you and your team have solved it. And that’s actually very, very rewarding. So I enjoy that stuff a lot more.

And then the other bucket is, I kind of do defense and international affairs and all the rest of it. And that is a totally different kind of space where you’re using narrative power rather than problem solving power, right? Because the government ultimately don’t think they can do whatever they like, right? But you can make arguments and represent and try and shape that debate. So that’s a totally different set of skills to be part of the national conversation on defense and foreign affairs and all the rest of it. And then there’s this sort of space in inside, which is parliament and it’s quite hard to get stuff done in parliament. It’s because the government’s meant to come and, you sort of imagine you stand up and ask a question in parliament and the government responds, but if they don’t want to respond to you, they’ll just give you another answer, right? They can never lie. If they get caught lying, they’re in big trouble, right? They’ll lose their positions, but they just don’t answer the question. And that can be incredibly frustrating. figuring out how to make change at a parliamentary level doesn’t happen on the floor of the chamber of the House of Commons. That in a sense is theatre, right? It’s theatre for a purpose. You’re reflecting what people are saying in your community, you’re representing Tunbridge Wells So it definitely has a purpose and that’s really important. But it’s not where you solve problems. If you want to solve problems, you have to grab the minister or get introduced to the minister and go, how do we solve this problem? It’s a totally different kind of what you imagined, what you might imagine, I guess, before you get elected, where you sort of imagine you stand up on the floor of the House of Commons and say stuff and they, know, the minister writes it down and says, I’m going to do that. It’s not like that at all.

The House of Commons is a theatre and it’s a necessary and a useful theatre. But the sooner you realise it’s a theatre, the sooner you can get on with working out how to actually solve problems and yeah, yeah, yeah, how to improve your constituents lives.

Yeah, yeah, which levers to pull. On that note, Mike, it’s a pleasure as always, mate. Thank you so much. I really do appreciate it, especially given how busy you are right now to carve out some time for an old channel where you still hold the most, most certainly after today, most appearances on the show. So thanks for that. Number six, mate.

Yeah mate, thank you. Amazing.

I really appreciate it. We’ll be in touch, mate. Thank you so much for time.

See you next time.