Nigel Farage on mass immigration & Putin's warlord Prigozhin | SpectatorTV

[Music] thank you [Music] hello and welcome to the week in 60 minutes brought to you by spectator TV and broadcast on this Thursday the 18th of May 2023 my name is Freddie gray I am the deputy editor of The Spectator and I will be your host today on the show this week we have migration nation the cover of The Spectator this week is about the news that the government is about to announce that there will be 700 000 net immigrants into Britain legal immigrants into Britain this year Fraser Nelson has written that covered piece he'll be talking to Nigel farage who probably needs no introduction we will then talk about a related subject which is conservatism and the national conservative conference which was held in Westminster this week I'll speak to two speakers at that conference that's Mary Harrington of unheard and Tim Stanley of the telegraph and after that we'll move to Foreign Affairs and I'll talk to Paul wood about evgeny pregozin who is emerging as the potential rival to Vladimir Putin in Russia or is he you never know when it comes to Russia news and lastly I will talk about artificial intelligence and dating which is a very weird weird world I'll be joined by Jake Kozlowski who runs an AI dating service called keeper before we get going I must thank our brilliant sponsors can a continuity wealth management they are experienced wealth planners and investment managers who offer you unwavering support through challenging times visit can do wealth.com for more information to begin let me hold up uh this week's spectator again migration nation is the cover piece and it's about the news that the government is expected to soon announce or even admit that legal migration net legal migration is somewhere around 700 000 immigrants coming into this country uh it's a lot higher than was expected and Fraser Nelson explores the possibility that it may be being used to cover up the large number of British people who are on benefits he joins me now to explain his thesis along with the politician turned broadcaster Nigel farage Fraser I think what people find most striking about your piece is that brexit seems to have meant more immigration not less because that was not what we were told it would do now during the campaign both the leave and remain campaigns argue that brexit would mean significantly less immigration you couldn't find any economic analysis of brexit but didn't assume that my net migration would go down quite significantly now you heard some people on the relief campaign were saying you know what this is what we need fewer migration and therefore scarce workers have become more scarce therefore the salaries go up and on the remain sides there was a moment where Stewart Rose the former m s Chief was in question time and he rather famously said yes and there'll be fewer migration that means more content for Laborers and labor costs will go up and that's not a good thing so you had the two sides agreeing on whether it was disagreeing on whether it was good or bad the end that you would end up with less migration and perhaps higher salaries with a low paid and you could argue yeah people will be paying more money for the pizza the way to paid more you know that kind of argument but nobody disagreed that brexit would significantly lower migration and it would be a better way of managing globalization that they basically it's got a bit out of control under the Blair period in many ways almost the whole point of leaving the EU was to Take Back Control of Border policy so we would exit the system of free movement and being able to decide how many we'd want what we now find is when they've taken back control the government's giving almost 500 000 visas a year and when you include the students who nowadays apparently have got one and two dependents until the number Hits 700 000 or probably more we're going to get that next week but this isn't an accident because Richardson neck has now got complete control you can decide whether to issue a Visa or not so this is deliberate policy but one that hasn't been announced and one that hasn't been explained and I think it should be well we should say that by spectator office standards you are something of a dove on immigration you'll certainly a dove compared to the man sitting on your left but you still find this very troubling because because of unemployment because of long-term sickness because of the fact that a lot of British natives are in a welfare trap essentially yeah I think the mass immigration has been overall quite a stunning success for Britain and we have had a massive and demographic change one in five of our workers now is Fordham born and I think in London um half of all children have got an immigrant mother including I should say my own three kids I'm contributing to this phenomenon um and I think that we've Managed IT in an incredibly successful way if you look at the coronation for example a couple of weeks ago we had a Hindu prime minister a Buddhist Home Secretary Muslim mayor of London Muslim first minister of Scotland and no other country in the world would you have had this picture of successful integration so it pulled off very very well and I think we continue to pull it off well we're finding out of either statisticians that we're getting three quarters of a million net migration that hasn't been riots in the streets about it there's no populist party I mean while again Nigel was running the brexit party talking of immigration they were used to becoming first in the European elections only a few years ago now there is nothing nothing to the right of the conservatives Richard Tyson's lot if you lived 500 candidates of the locals they've got something like five or six candidates through a dreadful success rate so we don't have any what you might call anti-immigrant populist party or anything approaching my description either in Parliament or in the opinion polls so the public seemed to be quite happy with this if there isn't happiness it hasn't expressed itself politically now where I'm concerned is I think although immigration works very well it can perhaps work too well the Temptation politically to use this to cover up the failures of the welfare state is very great like earlier on this week we had figures coming out showing 5.3 million Brits earn out of work benefits we would really notice this if it wasn't for Mass immigration because we wouldn't have anybody to run the economy but when we can cover it up with mass migration it works Nigel you've made some waves this week by saying that brexit has failed because of what the government's done with it yes you know number one we haven't actually helped business businesses are leaving we've got a brain drain going on for the first time since the 1970s secondly there's an absolute breach of trust with the electorate over immigration which is absolutely perfectly clear the only reason we won that referendum were people turning out on Council Estates in the Midlands of the north thinking you know what this is the one time my vote can make a difference and thirdly uh brexit is failing because it's actually turned out that our politicians are about as useless as the European commission now you know that doesn't mean voting to get back sovereignty was wrong far from it but in the minds of ordinary brexit voters this isn't working and I'd remind Fraser there were a third group of people in that referendum uh talking about immigration those that didn't want to talk about it at all I remember being told you know by Hanan and Boris Johnson no no no no don't discuss immigration in the referendum we'll lose the referendum you know some of our very Posh friends don't like this sort of thing in the end they were forced to talk about it reluctantly but they never ever Boris never intended to reduce the numbers of people coming into this country so the First Fundamental question to address is that breach of faith I think it's very strong and very real and secondly let me say this the electorate assumed with brexit that immigration had been dealt with and they're now beginning to understand that it hasn't been dealt with and you may well say there's no populist party in British politics at the moment there will be it's coming disconnect the disconnect is bigger now than it was in 2010. I could see in 2010 that the political media class in London just had no idea what everybody else in the country was talking about and I think we're heading back to that and quite quickly let's get on to the future of properties politics in a moment because I think that's where they should go and for now it's fair to say polls suggests that immigration has dipped in in terms of the issue which voters consider most important I think it's now fourth or is it Fifth what if it's not being discussed that's not surprising I mean if there is no coverage of the issue and people don't know what's going on that's not surprising the reason the reason that immigration became the big political issue that it was is that people in their minds linked it to membership of the European Union that was what the ukip surge was all about that's what you successfully did yes and it took me years yeah it took me years to make that connection and I from 2004 I said to all the people working with me once I can make this connection this political part is going to a different place I think over the course of the next year or two people will start to make the connection that the reason there's a housing crisis is mass immigration the reason they can't get a GP appointment is mass immigration the reason their lives are more miserable than they were 10 years ago their quality of life is diminishing is because of the population crisis an explosion in this country but in what way is it a crisis you're living in London earning good money living in a lovely house talking about rich Hindus who happen to be our prime minister go out onto the council Estates meet people I think you'll see the audience you know my driver my driver my driver's kid didn't go to school last year the school's too full 13 years old not at school right so your driver what you're saying that the local authorities refused to provide this child with the police because they're in education places that's right it's happening all over the country doesn't this illegal for your councils to refuse people no home education has been given online no place at schools you go to Lincolnshire for example you'll find four and a half five-year-olds maybe 20 miles on a bus to get to school you there is a population explosion that is damaging and diminishing the quality of life of ordinary folk in this country if you don't see it now I promise you you will see but why is it well I can't work out is this if there is this um this anger then why hasn't got no political expression why does um why the reform party do something incredibly badly just a few weeks ago if we polled a thousand people in Stoke on Trent now and asked who the Reform Party was I wonder how many would know that it even exists you know that's the problem you know we may know because we live in this world ordinary folk don't know and actually establishing political movements is not an easy thing to do and reform is effectively you know it may be a follow-on from the brexit party but effectively it's a new political party so two things I would say number one the reason we're not seeing this expressed more is because it's not been given voice but it's beginning to be we're having this National debate now about numbers and number two there's not a political leader that people can see at this moment in time voicing their concerns once those connections are made between I mean everything even travel even travel even even the length of Journeys potholes in the roads these are all symptoms of a population crisis and it's going to dominate British politics over the next 10 years is it not a problem then if as you say for because of brexit well brexit came about because people linked the European Union of mass migration now people will say well we've had brexit and we still have mass migration no we don't know what they'll say is they lied to us yeah they lied to us but maybe they wanted control over immigration and that's the big difference can it build it to United before there was probably no control um free movement that's what it means right you cannot draw it now right now if you look at this coming in there are different people but not the pools the Indians are now number one Follow The Thing by Australians then you have Nigerians then you have Americans now to get a visa for this country you need to be over a certain salary threshold you need to speak English you need to be getting a job in a certain profession this was wait a second I got a second I mean the salary criteria when Australia does this it says we're short of Engineers we're short of people in these sectors we will open up spaces in this sector in nearly every single case those that go to Australia are earning more than the average wage what this government have done is they've lowered the thresholds the most unimaginable levels where actually the threshold to come in is eight to ten thousand pounds lower than the average wage that's why the numbers are where they are they have deliberately engineered this and of course they've got their big business friends encouraging it but equally as you point out in your article there is this massive welfare is a problem of 5.3 million people and it appears at the minute that no political party's got the courage to take that on so it's all well and good to say you have to pass these tests to come in but we've set the threshold so low in terms of qualifications and income as if as for it to almost be meaningless maybe this is making it more palatable though maybe that is why when there's a recent poll asking people all over the world what do you think of immigration Britain emerged as the most Pro country in the world other than I think Norway and I wonder if that's because we see the migration differently now now the brexit has come along we know that to get a Visa you need a job nobody's really talking about lazy foreigners who aren't really you know these are people who are by and large more likely to work and then Brits now nobody was ever talking about lazy foreigners that was never the argument the argument was about wage compression the argument was about difficulties getting onto social housing lists the argument was about fundamental changes in community the argument was about the fact well why is never speaking English a mystery they were very very different arguments and they were arguments very firmly rooted around Community around family and of course the ironic social conservatism of so many labor voters you know which actually is still there I mean you know those red wall voters are surprisingly small C conservative and patriotic people in many many ways so no I think that the idea that well we've got back control we've chosen not to use it but we've got control so we're all happy is I think it's for the birds friends I mean you've focused a lot on illegal migration in your in Immigration yeah in your journalism and so on yes uh do you think the fact that that is such a media uh preoccupation distracts from the the issue of legal migration which as you say is the reason I did that the reason I went on this illegal immigration thing back in sort of late 19 early 20s is because nobody else wanted to talk about it was literally being buried under the carpet so I thought well I'm going to you know cause a bit of noise on this and get because it was obvious to me in 2020 there were numbers that came would explode because virtually nobody was being deported anywhere else and you can come in be put in a hotel you still and you literally stay in a four-star hotel and go to work every day in the black economy and earn cash it's happening all over the country so I pushed that because I wanted it I wanted it to become a big issue also because you know my fear from 2015. and the reason that I use that Breaking Point poster that's so upset the Metropolitan Elite is that the EU have made the same mistake with the Mediterranean um and I feared I feared that unless we got a grip through brexit that we'd face a similar wave now it may not be the same numerically but symbolically the boat's crossing the English channelism but the way the numbers that are crossed into Europe so far across the Met is trouble last year so there's more of this coming but ironically yes everyone's now become so focused on what's been happening illegally with 45 46 000 people last year that you're right it's it's it's it's kind of stopped us talking yes about legal net numbers I remember you accepted an award at The Spectators parliamentarian of the Year Awards a few years ago and you said you'll never hear from me again okay well I have to ask you do you think there's obviously a space opening up to the right of Richard now particularly on the issue of immigration will you be going back I think it's I think it's bigger than that I think the absolute betrayal of the five and a half million men and women who were sole Traders and self-employed I mean you can't believe the anger in that Community out there they loathe the conservative party they fear labor will be even worse but they load the conservative party the complete lack of understanding of how the ir35 rules in practice are working in the building industry Etc so it isn't just on immigration there is a I think the sense of detachment the the conversations that are happening in Westminster are so far removed from older people's lives I mean what I campaign with the brexit party in 2019 quite successfully we got rid of Mrs May and I'm rather proud of that but the slogan we campaigned on wasn't even about brexit it was change politics for good there was a hope and a feeling that a different kind a more engaged kind of politics would come from brexit none of that's happened so they asked you a question is very simple the Gap that is opening up in British Politics on the center right um is potentially bigger than it was with UK yeah I mean I mean it's a very very big gap you very skillfully didn't listen to the second part about my question which is will you try and fill that game I haven't finished yet sorry give me a moment I was ignoring you I can be accused of many things ignoring questions so the potential is there and something or someone at some point is going to fill it you know I I sort of call it an anger Gap now it depends who fills that anger Gap I hope and believe what I did before was a positive way of filling it by saying let's get our sovereignty back as a means of dealing with these problems before I came along the already came to prominence the anger Gap was being filled by Nick Griffin and it's very easy to forget between 2005 and 2010 the extent to which the BMP were laying down Roots you know in those Northern Town councils Etc I I haven't decided what I'm going to do I mean I'll be honest with you um I I do feel that a large chunk of the country deserves some representation and deserves a voice equally um I still pretty bruised by the 2015 general election how can you get four million votes in one seat it makes it a very difficult thing to do I I haven't decided what I'm going to do but something's going to come along if it's not me it'll be it'll be a Nick Griffin Mark too you know we will we will have a rise of something way out on the right it's happening as we speak all over Europe albeit aided by proportion representation system something is going to change something is going to crack and I think coming back to UK politics uh you know I think I've got a better understanding of those Rebel voters than than pretty much anybody frankly um they were the people that were the backbone that built ukip up into being a major party in British politics and if the conservative party on its current course thinks he's got any chance of winning a single one of those seats that that I'm afraid they're deluded the only thing that might save us is this the one thing the conservative party is really good at is survival you know it's been around for a couple of hundred years it exists to attempt to get power and to hold power so they've still got time I guess if they chose to be genuinely radical but I can't see it happen by radical you mean cutting a number of visas issued versus your definition because the funny thing is we've just had local elections and how many parties are various Stripes not a sign not a sniff of the sort of anger that you're talking about because is it real or might it be because there's no way but but that was like that that was the same effectively before 2010 you know other than the BMP you were just selling it I think Griffin was getting a huge number palpable anger then the BMP in the north but they had a big presence at the moment if you want to vote that way there's nobody giving a voice to it that's the Gap in the market but it looks like a lot of those verses are going back to labor now yes I've met them this weekend yeah I've met them this week why do you think they're going back to it is it because Kirsten was talking to the right on some things no I just I think this Tory party they don't identify with these conservative politicians at all they briefly did with Boris for a bit he seemed rather fun uh he seemed rather normal identify with cure Stone right no not really so why are they going back to labor because they're tribal labor that's where they come from they've been their families have voted labor since 1918. you know the the sort of the gateway drug of ukip and the brexit party took them to the conservatives in 2019 and that was on a brexit let's get this thing sorted out let's get back control of our borders um but they're going back to labor because that's where they're from and the concern and and I think there's also a profound sense of disappointment that the brexit thing has not worked out the way they really wanted it to I think we'll wrap it up there but uh thank you very much thank you for coming in and thank you very much for talking about your cover please now speaking of opportunities opening up on the political right there's been a big conference in London this week in Westminster the national conservatism conference which is a an American Import um but starred lots of Tory MPS and various conservative figures from the anglo-american community um and two of the speakers at that conference join me now um Tim Stanley of the Telegraph and Mary Harrington of unheard um Tim perhaps you could start by telling our viewers a little bit about what national conservatism is what this particular movement is and what they're trying to do and could you also tell us whether they succeeded in doing it in London this week put it to me brilliantly that this conference was a seminar masquerading as a rally so some academics put on a seminar in the center of London they invited politicians and the politicians then turned it into a platform to make it a debate about the future of the conservative party so to back up a little bit there is an academic who's Israeli called uran hazoni who is an expert on conservative political Theory a little bit of Zionism blended with some nationalism with some American exceptionalism and of course he's got a profound interest in Britain as well because Britain is the home of Enlightenment era conservative thinking and has only wrote a couple of books about conservatism and about nationalism and came up with this uh well I wouldn't say I want to say came up with the idea it's been around for a while but he he helped to uh to make concrete this idea that at the center of conservative thinking should be the life of the nation not the individual not free markets not getting rich but actually making your country a better happier healthier place it's about re-routing the individual within their community uh he also argues that because it's about the nation conservatism will look different from one place to another it's National conservatism has managed to get a big intellectual audience in the United States it's got some money behind it and they have been traveling the world for the last couple of years holding conferences in various places uh they've been I think to Italy they've been to Belgium they've been to America and now they're here in Britain and in each case the reaction and the response has been different and the nature of the conference has been different in a way that reflects that idea that conservatism will vary from one country to another so as I said National conservatism came to London they invited politicians and they happened to do so at a moment in which the conservative party is cracking up and uh a sort of a section of the Parliamentary conservative party which is socially conservative I'd say quite a quite a small section and which is grouped around sowella Braverman took this as an opportunity to get a platform to lay out their ideas about nationhood and of course probably in this country right now the most potent conservative national issue is immigration and that was the one that came up repeatedly but as I say there's a slight tension between what some of us were there to do at the conference which was to share ideas discuss hazoni's work provide criticism and there was a lot of criticism as well and what politicians did which was turn up and make speeches that got headlines which was fantastic for building the brand of national conservatism because even though uh it's not terribly well known and a lot of people still don't know who Professor hazoni is uh that phrase is now on everyone's lips in Westminster Mary you were talking about biology and feminism and not Party politics do you agree with Tim that though I mean I thought perhaps it was I came and saw some of your speeches uh I thought it was a shame in a way that this sort of potentially quite interesting subject to debate obviously controversial Liberty makes headlines and so on but it did also become a sort of uh it felt a bit like Tory Party Conference the the right-wing version perhaps a little bit I mean my sense um from from spending some time in the in the breakout conversations and and really in the in the speeches as well is that there are great many parallels with um with with some of the national conservatives and conferences that I've attended elsewhere actually and on on this in the sense that if you if you have a conversation about conservative invariant conservatism invariably there are going to be some politicians there and politicians are going to politics that's what they do um so invariably you're going to get some stunt speeches and you're going to get some people who are thinking very concretely about how this is going to place your electorates and and really singing singing a tune in that key um but there are a great many other reasons to attend a conference like that and one of the things that came across very clearly to me was that there's a much as much as I've written about this before much as on other similar occasions even elsewhere there's there's quite a noticeable difference between the way they typically typically older politicians making stunt speeches are thinking about these questions and and the way some of the younger attendees of which there are surprisingly many I mean when I I was when I 20 years ago if you went to a conservatism event it was mostly sort of across the old buffers in corduroy and there was a sense that you get in some Anglican provincial Anglican churches that there's really nobody there under pretty much under retirement age and that it wasn't like that at all I think something like 40 of the attendees at the event in London that just finished were under 30. um you know start uh really for a for a conservative event a surprising number of them were students I spoke to a great many 22 23 year old young men and women who are really grappling with you know the big questions and I think and there was a there was a very noticeable Gulf between the way those young people were approaching these questions and the way the stump speech makers who who are really engaging with a Westminster political audience were were approaching these questions now I think it's it's good and healthy and right that we're going to have different approaches and different different priorities you know within within an overall umbrella but it was it was very interesting to bring those groups together and to begin to tease out where some of those some of those blind spots are and I think there are there's potentially some some reflection to be done on on that on those gaps um that that might be beneficial overall to people within Westminster going forward Tim you've written a lot about American politics and I'm sure you've been to uh American conferences like that about conservatism and there's there's a lot of that in America you know with the conservatism is a big question that the right has been asking itself for ages do you think it suits uh British tourism to have these uh sort of sometimes quite intellectualized conversations does is it something that American movement conservatives and can sort of adapt into British conservatism yeah a lot of the media pounced on the idea that this is an American Import and even an American infiltration and takeover of the conservative party uh but Freddie you've been to U.S conferences and as you know they always begin uh with smoke machines with the eye of the tiger and with a woman and a man coming out and saying hi thank you for coming whoa there was none of that in fact there were barely any American speakers uh and indeed there was a great deal of media misrepresentation of the conference and the people who spoke at it uh this was in some regards one of the most multi-ethnic Multicultural multi-religious conferences that I have been to in this country and some of the speakers who attacked for individual things they said so the speaker who said we're not having enough babies was a woman um Sue Ella Braven and the speaker who said we need to do more to control immigration is a person of color uh yoram hazoni uh is himself Israeli there were a large number of Jewish delegates there so so the idea that this this was some kind of right-wing ethno-nationalist thing I found really quite Preposterous and was based upon one or two tweets which were put out by the by the organization's media team who obviously themselves took no offense at those particular tweets um but does this is this does this go down well well I think if they don't do this there's really nothing else uh you're right by the infrastructurally in America there are things like Heritage which do this sort of conference all the time and they bring people from across a very much larger country who wouldn't otherwise not meet and they get to share ideas and they get to promote candidacies and things like that um we hadn't really been doing that in Britain and that helps to explain why there's a paucity of fresh ideas and some of the ideas coming out of this conference we really went against the grain of British conservative thinking and in some ways the conference was more left-wing than it was reported and was understood so for example Danny Krueger gave a speech where again people jumped upon the fact that he referred to the normative family we can have a debate about whether or not that is an accurate or fair or kind description of families but if you read the other 99 of the speech he was essentially saying that many of the problems of Britain are down to conservative economics and have been down to the legacy of thatcherism and individualism and atomization so actually some of the speakers at this conference are on a journey towards the left not towards the right and it was very frustrating that people didn't look beyond the tweets and actually noticed that Mary do you not think this has been talked about in in the media and in uh perhaps highbrow circles at the right you could call them uh for a long time uh post-liberalism red tourism blue labor there's a there's an there's long been a feeling that something new has got to happen in politics Beyond uh the the you know the Thatcher Reagan neoliberalism if you like that's not a great word for it but I think that's what most people use and yet it never really has materialized beyond the odd conference the odd sort of moment where people get excited about it it doesn't really speak to electorates I think you're right I mean it's it's too early to tell I think as as a Chinese Premier once said about the French Revolution whether or not it worked it's it's too early to tell whether this is never going to materialize one of the things actually I thought was interesting about the the really very strong media reaction and I and I agree with Tim when he says that I think it's been that there have been some bad faith representations of what was discussed I mean one of the one of the standout speeches for me wasn't was an economist who was making the case that capitalism is structurally antenatalist and this is not simply an effect of bad policy this is not simply an effective you know real factualism has never been tried this is structural and and they and they're they're great many other social ills that it propagates besides which is a profoundly profoundly left-wing idea and I think the The Thinker that was referenced most frequently in that speech was Karl Marx and this is not something that the guardian is ever going to report about National conservatives and Conference because it just doesn't compute but I think one of the things that was that was interesting about this conference and about the very intense and sometimes bad faith media representation of it is that up until now as you say post-liberal ideas or you know this sort of caucus of I did the upper right hand quadrant I think as as the Nerds call it you know the economically left and and socially right um quadrant of ideas has been sort of kicking around amongst politics nerds for some time um but has hasn't has yet to gain any sort of mainstream traction I think part of the issue there is that there has been a great deal of um amongst the respectable people it's there's a certain amount of effort that's gone into making sure that those ideas are non-you and in as much as they appear at all and it's they've been they've been fairly methodically coded as low status and there's not there's just not something that ever gets discussed amongst respectable people in in zone one it just doesn't happen and I think part of the reason the media's been so upset about this conference is that this that's just not manifesty not the case you know here's a conference where really those ideas are being discussed and it's happening in Westminster um and and furthermore there are there are some quite there are some household names there and so and so in that sense I mean it it's probably too early to tell whether any whether it really this is just going to end up being recouped as some critics from the right have suggested by you know the sort of neoliberalism in a in a fancy dress you know with some with neoliberalism plus culture war is the worst case scenario really you know that this this just gets recouped and we get more of the same with with occasional diatribes about work um but it's it's too early to tell otherwise whether it's going to go that way or whether in fact some of the some of the more interesting thinking and the more creative thinking which which I I agree is still is still Fringe relative to the stump speech stuff but there's there's still a chance that some of that might percolate through um and and I think it's if it does so it will be in the teeth of all the respectable people working very hard to code it as low status and there's just not something which is even within the Overton window but the fact that this conference happened in Westminster was a it was a fairly a fairly forceful shove against the parameters of the Overton window and I think that's a that's a positive step it really is Tim we just had Nigel farage uh on spectator TV and he was talking about um how the Tory party always survives somehow because uh despite uh the fact it's probably going to face uh an election loss in in the coming months uh do you think look at the way British Tory politicians treated this conference do you think the conservative party is going to adapt to this movement um or is it going to shun it how is it going to adapt and survive some of the biggest pushback against the conference came from what you might call liberal conservatives many of whom did not attend it didn't pay attention to what was said I was just out on a side note by the way I was struck by the things that were not discussed at this conference no one said bring back the British Empire no one said ban abortion there's a whole host of old issues which are totally off the table now and everyone's moved on from and yet they're the things that there's often an assumption right-wingers are saying and they're simply not part of their narrative at all anymore but there was a big pushback among liberal conservatives who are very powerful influential within the party that said I think a way away from the conference there is a growing and influential group of people who feel that the economic policy approach has been wrong we need more industrial policy I wouldn't say protectionism versus free trade that's a very that's a silly way of simplifying it but there's a sense that there's got to be a move away from the idea that the job of government is simply to get out the way and and that I think is the most significant shift in conservative things and you might even find it among some liberal conservatives some Tories are starting to say we have an idea of how people ought to be living they should be having families they should be buying homes but the economic situation doesn't actually allow them to do that so how do we create the material circumstances under which people can do those things uh and some of that might involve creative government action now they're so fought to give a concrete example uh the debate around the best way to do child care we all know that one reason why people are not having children well when people are not settling down is because of the extortionate cost of raising a child and now I think almost everyone's recognized that within the conservative party that that's a failing and that's a failure that's happened under the Tories the debate is should it be through the state sponsoring child care where you leave your kid with someone or as people like Miriam Cates and some of the national conservatives would prefer the state making it more making it easier for women to stay at home and raise the child themselves so there's a cultural Clash over what do women want but actually I think conservatives are coming around to the idea that there are areas of policy that government has to take an interest in even if it starts to sound a bit like socialism because if they don't do it you end up with a very unconservative outcome which is people not having babies or dropping out of the workforce which is bad for the hallowed word growth where you you spoke about uh women the body biology uh but I noticed there wasn't a lot of talk about the NHS or the National Health Service do you think that's because it's not a policy um conference it's a it's an ideas conference or do you think it's because nobody really wants to tackle the NHS on the right one way or the other it's a very interesting question you know I hadn't actually it hadn't actually struck me until you pointed it out just now that nobody was really talking about the NHS at the conference but you're absolutely right nobody was talking about the NHS and to be honest I think it's almost certainly the case that nobody is tackling it because it's just too big it's just too big and and it touches on too much stuff I mean I I forget who it was who quit that you know we're now a Health Service with a sort of vestigial country attached and there is a there is a sense of that and nobody nobody quite knows what to do about it and I mean I think in as much as it was referenced it was probably obliquely um in the several several talks actually who spoke about the impossibility of continuing an abundant welfare state with a collapsing population which is which is the the existential issue for a lot of things and is an extremely uncomfortable Wicked problem um when you start looking at the Confluence of you know the where where social solidarity converges with high taxation converges with support for the welfare state support converges with population growth or shrinkage you know there's a real Wicked problem there which which we're already confronting I mean if you're unless you're unless you're pregnant or very old where I live in a small town in small town England you know you can you you'll be lucky if you get a GP appointment within six weeks that's just that's just the reality in a lot of places now um if it's if people are if if people weren't talking about it almost certainly just because it's too big and too radioactive I mean you can't you can't do it in a 15-minute speech and and people people are trying to but maybe trying to zoom out a little bit and thinking about the structural questions which have brought us to the point where where a Health Service with a vestigial country attached and and trying trying a few different angles to see if we can see if we can come at some of those some of those thorny issues from from different perspectives and find creative ways of thinking about it Tim you made uh the point of yours but you did mention the National Health Service because you said that people who are uncomfortable with the national in National conservatism should should think about the National Health Service yeah yeah obviously people are uncomfortable about the word national being involved being attached to a political label because in their mind uh it all typically goes to national socialism and I joked that uh if that is the case then we're also going to crack down on the National Trust the nspcc and the NHS um but Mary's right the NHS didn't come up I think that's partly because this is an academic audience because there was some transatlantic crossover and it's not a debate which I think some of our guests would have particularly understood or enjoyed in the same way that I'm I'm not sure if you had this kind of conference it would have been appropriate to discuss Medicare and the very particular debates around health insurance in the United States the other issue we did not discuss is Ukraine which I think was partly a conscious decision by the conference uh because if you open up a conversation about Ukraine I don't think you'd get anyone who says Vladimir Putin's great but you're always terrified someone's going to turn up to speak who is Russian adjacent right uh who is sympathetic in some way uh and I think there's a little bit of political control there the conference didn't want to go down that rabbit hole but I think it might also just be that uh there's another issue that we didn't discuss because it's not something that's part of the British rights vocabulary There is almost 99.9 support for Ukraine among British conservatives and so there was no real need to touch it because we are pretty much United on that subject well uh it's not that I don't want to go down that rabbit hole but we do have to wrap that up so um thank you very much Tim and thank you Mary [Music] today's Trailblazers now if you've been reading the news about the war in Ukraine you've probably come across the name evgeny pregotin he is the leader of the Wagner group The Mercenary group that Russia is using for its fight in Ukraine and he is also known as Putin's Chef or at least he was but the two men appear and we stress the word appear to have Grown Apart in recent days and pragosan has been quite critical and he's also emerging it seems as a Potential Threat to Putin's Authority to discuss this interesting figure I'm joined Now by Paul wood who is a former world affairs correspondent for the BBC and he's also working on a very long profile of pragosin Paul let's start with the uh basic question who is evgenie forgotten well in a curious way he reminds me of another figure that we're both quite obsessed about and that is Donald Trump the personality is quite trumpian he's full of bombast bombast he doubles down whenever he's confronted he's a master at trolling just like Trump and this is quite important when it comes to taking or not taking his statements at face value the big difference is that while a lot of people assume Trump is a criminal pregogin actually was a criminal he got convicted of some quite serious offenses in his youth he did some burglaries age 18 then while he was on a suspended sentence he did a lot more burglaries and him and a gang a gang that he appeared to lead um snuck up on this uh poor woman pragodin choked her this is according to testimony from others in the gang he's always denied it but according to the testimony he choked her while somebody else pulled her boots off and then as she fell unconscious to the ground he pulled her earrings off so for that he got 10 years in a Soviet prison and Soviet prisons are not like nice friendly gentle British prisons or even American prisons these are penal colonies huge barracks-like structures where these are really quite rough places now he survived and apparently prospered in this environment to emerge just as the Soviet Union was undergoing perestroika and then of course it collapsed and Leningrad becomes from Petersburg and some Petersburg is the wild west if Chicago was somebody put it to me and he manages to start a very successful restaurant business there first he starts with hot dogs hot dogs are not apparently widely sold in Saint Petersburg at the time then he moves on to luxury restaurants and then he has his big break which is that the deputy mayor of Saint Petersburg who happens to be Vladimir Putin comes in one day and likes the food and then decides to bring his important guests George Bush President W bush twice for instance and this all sounds quite trivial and he's got this absurd nickname Putin chef but um as one analyst explained it to me if it's some Petersburg in the early 90s and everything's uh just a little bit rackety and there isn't even a reliable food supply but Putin can show his foreign guests look we can put on this huge show of of magnificent food and there's a bit of pageantry and there's a bit of theater that was actually quite an important function for pragosian but of course people who know this in Petersburg restaurants in the 80s say well you'd also had to been pretty well connected in the criminal world to survive there and to get your food supply and not to have to give over all your um profits and takings uh your um profits and protection money so this is this is the figure that everybody knows at Putin's Chef he becomes the kremlin's caterer and off the back of that he becomes the caterer to the entire Russian army and becomes a billionaire and then this thing called the Wagner group emerges and it's all very mysterious nobody knows why it's called the Wagner group one theory is that an early field commander a man called Dmitry udkin loved Wagner for his love of the Volk and and this idea of a resurgent nationalism that may or may not be true who knows um several figures called udkin have popped up and there's a suspicion relayed to me by some Petersburg journalist that forgotten is actually finding people called udkin and making them employees of Wagner just so he can perpetuate this idea of a figure called udkin who's somehow related to it all another Masterpiece of trolling but during all this time um pregosian gave almost no media interviews he gave one talking about the hot dog stall and he always denied having anything to do with Wagner did he Sue journalists for it until suddenly in September of last year he emerges as this very important figure in the war which brings us right up to date the British Ministry of Defense thinks that 50 000 Wagner office are fighting in Ukraine or were at the height of it and they're really quite important for the war effort and this has propelled pragosian who has no official position in Russia um into the very front rank of the people fighting this war he might even be after Putin the face of the war in Ukraine the Russian face of the war and he's presenting himself uh as a military figure which is does he have any military background before this war other than the fact that he led the Baldwin group does he have any military training or anything well as far as we know the only uniform he ever wore was a prison uniform um but over many years the Wagner group were active uh when the Ukraine war started in 2014-2015 they've been in Syria they've been in Congo he likes to appear in full battle dress in uh flak jacket and Helmut there are no Badges of rank there and certainly he has no official position and he's been involved in an extraordinary Public Power struggle with the Russian Ministry of Defense these things normally take place behind closed doors in the Kremlin but he's been publicly attacking them um even appearing to criticize Putin although we can get into that in a minute I don't don't really buy it nobody can really get away with criticizing Putin and one there's a a former MI6 officer in London who prepares reports for private clients on Russia and he showed me one of those reports a few months ago now which said there's only one topic of of conversation in the upper east of the Kremlin that's what to do with the progression problem uh and this former MI6 officer was claiming there was several active plots to assassinate him which sounds like something out of a spinal but a number of Russian officials have taken unfortunate falls out of their balconies on the fifth or sixth floor so this is not a known in Russian politics so he he's certainly skirting a very dangerous area in these public pronouncements but whether this is sanctioned by Putin and Putin running things you have this image of the sort of Mafia Dawn encouraging his employees to be of each other's throats in order to get the maximum out of them that could be what's going on here as well well let's go with that working theory that it is somehow these criticisms of Russia are somehow sanctioned by Putin what would be the thinking there would it be to to tie into a western narrative about Russian disharmony as a sort of smoke screen for actual military advances um pick your theory really um Steve Bannon the American political consultant had a way of describing how he dealt with the media which is flood the Zone with I think that's what precaution is doing one of the things I left out of the truncated biography at the beginning is the fact that he was the guy running the so-called troll Factory in 2016 which put out fake news onto Facebook and other places uh allegedly to throw the election for Donald Trump although you look at what they put out and it was both for Trump and against Trump flood the Zone with confuse the electorate undermine the legitimacy of the process so it could be that that's going on it could be that Putin you know who is in a losing War wants to embarrass the ministry of Defense into doing certain things it could be as simple as they don't the ministry of Defense the the defense minister the chief of staff don't like this upstart precaution haven't as pregosian claims given him the ammunition he needs and he is desperate to do something about it the the surface explanation might be the correct explanation uh we simply don't know um somebody described to me what pregosian wants as somebody who knows pregocian but it's only a theory that he wants to step into the role um uh vacated by the far right politician Vladimir jaronovsky who died last year which is kind of a licensed Court Jester you say these extreme things and everybody knows they're extreme but then Putin can point to you and say look if if not me this is the alternative and so precaution is licensed to do a lot of things which will get other people thrown into jail and bear in mind people are being thrown into jail in Russia for criticizing the war and that technically private military companies mercenary groups are illegal in Russia and yet this is a man supplying 50 000 mercenaries to the front lineup crane so um I'm not sure he's gone Rogue I think this is a kind of Rogue Behavior that's licensed yeah we should apologize uh about Steve Bannon not your language Steve bannon's language to spectator TV viewers yeah I'm sorry quoting Mr Bannon um another another set of reports have come out suggesting that bregozin was attempting to strike deals with the ukrainians um for strategic Advantage but again do you think that could be fake news on the Ukrainian side it's very hard to know what to believe about anything in this world yeah I mean there's a lot of fake news on both sides and the story you're talking about here is that pragosan allegedly offered to give away Russian positions of the army not his own fighters in order for the ukrainians to seize uh to cede bakmut this town that has been at the center of a grinding War of Attrition and very high losses by the wagon group for many months so some background here somebody who knows precaution told me his ambition is to enter politics but to do that he has to come away from Ukraine with something looking like a victory there was another town which the Russians um managed to seize back from the Ukrainian counter offensive a few months ago prakashian tried to take the credit there but it wasn't credible because regular Russian troops were involved so he kind of said that he was going to take bakmut and Bachman was his and there were no other army forces there so he kind of has to take this town if he's going to be credible it has no strategic value they could just go around it it's purely or it appears to be purely about giving precautions something he can call a victory so if all of that is true and he really needs this and he's prepared to sacrifice the lives of his men to do it then perhaps it is credible he'd make this offer and after all he doesn't really care so much about the regular Russian troops if you believe people around him but on the other hand could be Ukrainian propaganda could be propaganda from the Russian Ministry of defense against precaution could be progression Zone propaganda who knows I mean trust no one believe nothing if um if if it is sanctioned by Beauty in this this road Behavior does that suggest that uh butane burgosian have uh on Putin and the Wagner group have a better understanding than Putin in the Army and that in fact that's the split there is between the ministry of defense and Putin and and Wagner group when the Wagner group is useful in a number of ways one they were allowed into prisons to recruiting does have a lot of credibility with prisoners he can say as he did say look I was you once and look at me now I'm a hold of the hero of of Russia metal you you too could follow in my footsteps and he did manage to recruit a lot of people 40 or 50 000 of them uh to go to Ukraine um there's another way that wagon is useful for the Kremlin which is the line of command isn't clear if if somebody from Wagner commits war crimes or they seem you know some of them are not the most upstanding citizens to have been doing a lot of raping a lot of killing a lot of looting somebody does that or even if there's a large-scale massacre which carried out for strategic reasons and at the beginning of the war it appears the Russians were literally trying to terrify the ukrainians into a rapid collapse of morale and a rapid surrender all of those things are much easier to deny if it's irregular forces I mean everybody assumes it's pretty fredbear deniability everybody assumes that Wagner is getting its orders and its money and its weapons from the Russian States but you can't it's more difficult to prove so those are two very useful functions that are already taking place it doesn't mean they're the main part of the war effort and presumably the actual generals and the actual minister of defense is quite resentful of all this um this just seems to be how Putin runs the Kremlin I once spoke to a former Russian intelligence Colonel who said you know it's like a medieval court with with different sort of Barons and and Putin sets them against each other or like as I said a mafia Dawn where the boss says I want this to be done and he just lets people get on with it and the person who comes back having done it gets certain rewards in future that may be what we're seeing here or it could be that pregozian is just as crazy as he looks and it's certainly crazy in Putin's Russia to even appear to be criticizing Putin and some of his com comments recently well not naming Putin but seem to have been skirting on trying to blame people right at the very top and that is very dangerous for bigrojan because even though he's got this Army he doesn't pay the wages the wages come through the Kremlin the wages come through one of the intelligence agencies it's not like he's got 10 000 or 30 000 brand shirts who are personally loyal to him that he can call to Moscow and even if he did there are a lot of forces in Moscow at President Putin's behest so um I I don't buy and a lot of people I've spoken to don't buy this claim that he's challenging Putin and could be the next Russian president he's challenging the people below Putin for Putin's favor so you don't think I mean a lot of people would have said the same about Donald Trump in in 2012 2013 written off you don't think we could be seeing a trump-like figure uh emerges Putin's successor well perhaps his most significant asset is not these tens of thousands of of Fighters but it's the hundreds of thousands of Fanboys and fan girls on social media that Wagner has built I mean it's quite frightening if you look at for instance reverse side of the medal which is a telegram and Twitter Channel um where people who appear to be fighting in Ukraine post these videos of themselves in Ukraine and then lots of people in Russia say how wonderful it is and that presumably is an electoral asset for precaution if you did run for national office or tried to get into the Duma it's presumably a fundraising asset indeed I've been told they've already been raising funds some of which have gone to Ukraine but the big difference between Russia and and the United States is that that you can do all this in Russia and somebody will still push you out of a balcony if you get too big for your boots um so I think that precaution can only remain as a national figure it can only enter the Doomer or take over a political party or even take over some Petersburg which is one of the things it's allegedly trying to do you can only do that with Putin say so Paul wood thank you very much for coming on to spectator TV now barely a day goes by without a news story about how AI or artificial intelligence is going to disrupt something massive uh in our society um we had an interesting piece on spectator life this week suggesting that AI is in the process of disrupting dating apps and will particularly unseat Tinder which is the giant of dating apps I'm delighted to be joined by Jake Kozlowski who is the co-founder of a dating app that uses AI called keeper um Jake tell us a little bit about keeper and how AI can enhance online dating definitely um so Keeper at a super high level you know you you called it a dating app we actually uh we we like to talk about it as a family formation app not a dating app um the reason for that is uh you know dating apps are great for get getting you on dates for for uh you know helping you meet new people but that's not actually the goal that most people have right most people don't want a a Litany of dates uh they don't want to spend all their Time dating what they want to do um and even match group who owns Tinder has released surveys that that back up this claim they really want is just to find that one person that they want to spend the rest of their life with and start a family with right 81 of of gen Z's uh uh say that that's their top goal right now um is is in terms of the dating landscape is to you know find a long-term committed relationship in this year um and so keeper is built all around that we're we're not a dating product or a product that you uses AI to introduce you to that one person who is the most ideal fit for you in every Dimension that you have and so we use AI to do it a traditional Matchmaker would do basically learn about who you are as a person both physically personality wise you know everything about you your preferences and then disambiguate you with all the other people in our database and see okay you know who is the absolute strongest fit on every Dimension every preference completely open-ended that you tell us and then we introduce you to that person once we have them so it's a very different experience than you know here's 10 000 profiles swipe right or left and based on like photos and a couple couple lines of text it's interesting you say that about gen Z because I suppose that suggests again that that generation and moving away from what we think young people are supposed to do which is play the field uh have a fun time trying to figure out who's right for them and so on for sure I mean I you know I I think uh there's a couple components to this covid definitely um uh gave a lot of people uh feelings of isolation and loneliness and so it's sort of uh you know there's been a reaction to that of like a realization I guess among the younger generation that you know actually meaningful relationships are very important and and finding deep connection is is something that they desire um at the same time though you know there's there's a lot of good research on like family formation and tension uh fertility intention for example um over the last hundred years and it actually hasn't changed that much uh uh on average people today want about three kids um and that's been that was the same for our grandparents generation right um what I think has changed is uh uh the means by which people achieve that um you know there's a lot of social scaffolding sort of cultural norms around how you would date how you would find a partner which have gone out the window um and you can't you know in my opinion at least you can't sort of turn the clock back on that but what you can do is is move forward uh and use the technology that we do have today to help people achieve uh what they want in terms of those goals I'm going to be incredibly simplistic uh and you can tell me that I'm wrong let's say I tell keeper as a somebody who wants to find a match uh that I would like in the future to have three children would keep it then automatically matching with with someone who also wants three children or is it a lot more complicated than that um yeah so I mean you know typically it it would be more than just a single preference that people provide uh but if that truly was you know your only preference then that would be the one that we met you based on um but yeah I mean a number of kids uh is is something we we collect from everybody so there's sort of two categories right there's things we ask everybody and then there's uh we we give our users the opportunity to just tell us what they want um uh and so that's where you know things get really interesting that's where you have uh natural language processing like GPT style uh AI kind of handles that in the way a human would um but yes if if you know your one of your preferences is to have three kids uh we'll typically only match you with people who also want three kids um there is some gray area with with this stuff so you know if if we have your your dream woman on 99 of your criteria but this one thing is off and maybe she wants two kids instead of three or something like that you know there is room to kind of uh uh have the AI generate a question for her you in terms of like how flexible are you on this or if we did find your dream person but they only wanted two kids instead of three like would you still want that so uh that is the challenge of it right is is um people are are not black and white in terms of their preferences but they do generally want what they want and so threading that needle is is uh uh you know what what we're focused on on building from an automation standpoint do you think that the the AI or the algorithm whatever it is knows uh what people want more than they know so does it work on information beyond what they are telling you and how does it do that yeah for sure that's a great question so um the short answer is yes uh uh it will get much better at that in the long run you know the bigger our data set is the more information we have on uh successful matches and failed matches in the past um this is something that incumbent dating apps uh actually do have quite a bit of data on and um you know that's an advantage that they have um but uh we we do use uh basically like psychology research um uh there's a lot of research on uh you know what traits indicate successful long-term relationships there's also a lot of research on uh what traits men and women on average are tend to be attracted to and in a partner um and some people you know are very upfront about these preferences or they understand themselves and some people uh you know are more shy to kind of share them and so um we'll make some assumptions uh basically if you don't share them uh we'll also we also might give you some pushback right if you're a six foot three woman and you say you want a five foot two man like maybe but you know that on average that's typically not the norm and so we'll just make sure that that's actually what you want um so there it's again it's it's a very uh it's none of this is black and white um it's sort of handling different scenarios uh based on what comes but we do you pull a lot from the research the research literature in the long run uh we're gonna gonna be making assumptions based on our own data set and what our AI learns from it and I mean is it sort of cheesy of me to say uh that you do people object to the idea that computer science can can solve the mysteries of the heart yes for sure um I think uh you know there's something there's something that feels uh you know human or or you know literally romantic uh in what we're doing and so the idea that you know you can mathematically address these things I think is is understandably unappealing to a lot of people right um uh at the same time like I I sympathize with that I I you know emotionally or spiritually uh uh understand where they're coming from um but I think ultimately uh it is solvable uh with with this stuff and you know I I don't think the the emotional negative reaction to it is is a strong enough justification to not do it like I I would rather live in a world where you know you can sign up for a product and be matched with the love of your life at any point immediately um like I think that would be an amazing world uh one that I would rather live in and what's your emotional response to because you're doing the type of AI that connects people uh but of course there's another AI that's connected to the world of dating which is to come up with um AI that actually is the partner um so that you can have a partner who's a bot and will tell you all the things you want to hear um right how do you respond to that do you find that creepy um yeah I I think you know my emotional response to that is is just it's kind of sad I I think uh there's a lot of men today who are already sucked into kind of that world uh with you know porn video games sort of these these uh uh hyper stimuli that allow us to escape from from The Real World uh and yeah I mean I I think you know those it's kind of uh there's a lot of lost souls out there who who get trapped uh in that um so yeah I think it's really sad I think um you know I there might be very specific edge cases where you know somebody's just in such a bad situation physically or what have you or like okay maybe you know putting them on morphine is better than better than forcing them to suffer but I think uh there's you know far more 99 of the guys that are in that situation are not uh in that category and so yeah I think it's really sad it's not something that um I would spend my time focused on building I think uh you know real world real real relationships are are the meaningful route and the one that most guys should Aspire towards and do you find uh the preponderance of your clients are men and am I right in saying that you you charge men for using them but you don't charge women is that right um yeah so 55 of all of our users are female uh we do charge um some women uh right now we're set up to to mostly focus on acquiring men as the paid users we're kind of still exploring that so it might change uh here pretty soon um but for now uh most of the matches we make are are the men paying Jake I think we'll end it there but uh thank you very much for uh coming onto the spectator TV that's it for uh the week in 60 minutes this week I hope you've enjoyed watching it and found us to be your perfect match uh don't forget to subscribe to our YouTube channel again do that by clicking that button at the bottom of your screen and then tapping the Bell icon to make sure you never ever miss an episode thanks very much for watching come back next week [Music]

Channel: The Spectator

Views: 43,616

Keywords: The Spectator, Spectator, SpectatorTV, Spectator TV, SpecTV, The Week in 60 Minutes, TWI60

Id: YvSs6amEa3c

Length: 68min 3sec (4083 seconds)

Published: Thu May 18 2023