Has he got a point? Am I being too dismissive of him? Or has there just been a lack of clarity as to why the government is asking us to do what we should be doing?

Well, this is the home of common sense.

And I'm sure that people very sensibly, and I, you know, are was a girl guide a million years ago.

And be prepared was the motto, right? So one tends to think, oh, it's raining outside, I'll bring a raincoat or keep sufficient provisions in your house that you're not going to starve and so on, et cetera, et cetera.

But this is the most irritating advice.

It acknowledges on the one hand that we face some serious challenges.

And I want to just turn it around and say to the government, but you're not prepared.

with a

Claire Fox.

So I only know this because he said it, but the Prime Minister said on a podcast that one of the first questions that he asked when he arrived at Number 10, I mean, he said that, was, um, whether Russian interference had influenced the Brexit vote.

So if we can just untangle a number of things.

I don't think that it is necessarily just a discussion about Russian interference.

I, like the people who s-before have said, I think that there's a real problem in terms of Russia's threat to the security of Europe and Western Europe, of democracy.

[laughs] One only has to look at Ukraine.

The, it doesn't take a genius to work that out, and the examples have been given.

Clare?

Are you having conversations with colleagues about this? Are there other peers who feel equally uneasy about this growth in undemocratic legislation? I

think so, yeah.

I mean, I think that there's an awareness of a kind of degeneration and even corruption of the lawmaking process that's wider than just me.

I mean, one thing that's really changed, when I first went in the House of Lords, we briefly mentioned that awful period of mask wearing and the... lockdown period and so on when i went in it was actually during lockdown so it was a very peculiar atmosphere anyway and a lot of fat mask wearing going on and all the rest of it entirely performative by the way you know even in the chamber i mean the whole thing was ludicrous right um but nonetheless i had made this i was embarrassed about the fact that i was going into an unelected chamber and i had been very ambivalent about whether to accept the peerage at all And so I made this kind of completely faux performative, it has to be said, promise that every time I spoke, I would put it up on social media so that people could hear.

I was trying to find some mechanism for accountability.

And I did this kind of weekly vlog called Inside the Lords, which I've kind of...

Ended up kind of not doing very regularly anymore because people got a bit bored of hearing my detailed account of what was happening in the Lord's.

Please tell us a bit more about it and if people are interested, how they can get tickets.

Is it a lot of it just that it's so much easier to scapegoat this minority that everyone sort of builds the boogeyman around it? Or is there something deeper, do you think?

I don't think, I mean, the consequences are that there's the growth of a very visceral anti-Jewish hatred, but that's not the driver in a way.

I think you have to go back a bit.

I mean, let's think what Israel represents.

You know, at a time in which Western society has become consumed by self-loathing over some of the aspects of Western life that I consider to be virtues, but which everybody who runs Western society considers to be problematic.

Israel is almost like...

the last bastion of holding out, right? So let's just go through some of those.

So is there any limits that you would put on speech? What does constitute organization that does things? How do you outlaw organizations, if at all? So can you talk a little bit about where the UK is and what should be the limits, if at all?

Um, what have you, what have you made of it?

This started off as a tragic accident as far as the friends were concerned.

I was getting messages saying that she'd died.

And because various of us had seen her relatively recently, you just...

And she was fit as a fiddle.

You just thought it was a heart attack or a, you know, a stroke or something.

And so that was tragic enough because these days 78 is young to die, especially when somebody's quite so lively and vivacious and active on the political scene, somebody who was sharp as a tack in all of the interviews she did.

Claire, what are your thoughts on the, uh, impending, um, coronation of Andy Burnham?

it

felt like an anti-democratic coup against the people.

And in order to pull that off, the establishment said out loud what they'd presumably always thought about ordinary people behind closed doors.

But then it came out of their mouths and they basically said things like, you lot are not educated enough to vote.

Look, we've got the figures and lots of you haven't got degrees or A-levels.

And the franchise, the whole notion of equality before the law, you know, at the ballot box, we're all equal.

1832 Reform Act, anyone? Yeah.

Andy? So

So just to kick things off, Clare, what do you think this vote means, and do you think it's striking the, the margin by which Andy Burnham won in this case?

That's a very, uh, existential question.

What does this vote mean? Um, but anyway, um, I suppose the first thing to say is that the, the vote is likely to have an impact on the future of the country for all the reasons that everybody has already said, so I won't be unoriginal.

But it's one of the reasons why the vote was so large, in my opinion, because, you know, if you're in the Makerfield constituency, no disrespect to the people of, um, Wigan and surrounds, but you know, it's like suddenly the whole world says you're responsible for something big happening, right? And they then say that you could vote the future prime minister of the country.

So it's not just like a local by-election anymore and it's attractive for a number of reasons.

You might have the prime minister [laughs] as your local MP.

Never, you know, a bit glamorous.

What do you make of all of those claims?

Hey.

Was Brexit a mistake? No.

However galling we leavers find the endless betrayals of the possibilities of Brexit, it remains one of the greatest democratic accomplishments of the modern era.

So here are four reasons-

[laughs]

A reminder of who voted leave.

Millions who'd previously felt patronized and ignored, who felt their opinions, lifestyles, and values were derided and were resentful of technocratic policies done to them.

In 2016, those people took a gamble and forced themselves onto the stage of history, and for many, it was their first taste of being game changers.

So why are they allowed to get away with it?

A number of things there.

I mean, let's start with the Girl Guides.

I think that you're absolutely right.

First of all, there was a safeguarding issue because it meant that Girl Guides leaders could have been, and in many instances were, men identifying as women working with predominantly young girls.

But if that isn't a safeguarding issue, I don't know what is, right? Because as you rightly described, you know, I was like, you know, like lots of people, I was in the brownies and the guys and it's, You know, the first time you go away from home is you go camping.

It's probably the first time I went away from my family, stayed the night, and you're kind of like cooking baked potatoes over a fire.

And that leads me to wrap up on, I always like to end on a positive, Claire, like, what can we do about this rot? You know, I always think, try and seek out long form conversations every time I speak to you, because I actually didn't know all of that about the the social media because I've been very conflicted with that because I don't like things being banned and then I think oh you know should we hand this to tech companies or will it be easy for parents but you're right we mustn't you know we mustn't allow it so what can we do what can we tell people to do yeah well

People get really upset, don't they, when they hear that?

Yeah, because I think, you know, first of all, it's made a mockery of the term far-right.

It destroys language.

I mean, you actually get to a point where you can no longer accurately describe some people who are far-right, because if you've called everybody far-right, then you've got people at Epping, the pink ladies, walking around saying, you know, we aren't far-right, or more mockingly, we're all far-right because we're right, because it's become a joke, you know, and you'll get... lefty feminists who were gender critical saying yeah I'm far right Nazi you know because therefore the words become meaningless because you just know that it's used to demonise you and to shut you up but the danger with the way that the government I think or with Keir Starmer dealt with the Unite the Kingdom march was that he basically tried to imply that it led to violence against the police and I just think it was a complete mischaracterisation I mean I actually think And from all accounts of people I know who were there, that there was far more than 150,000.

I think the three million is a bit overstating it.

But I think there could well have been up to half a million people.

It was a huge demonstration.

I know, but isn't it? You need to get a 30 2% in the ballot.