um now i really enjoyed listening to if enjoyed is the right word your last monologue or your second last when this goes out on france and what's happened in france with these student riots that we've seen uh if you watch the bbc of course you think that this is solely about uh a decline in school dampened classrooms and damp classrooms and you know asbestos in the ceiling but you say there's something much more profound going on here and that there are implications for the uk can you explain a Well,

the other thing I did when I left GB News, when GB News left me, was I took up with the Salzman Review, just volunteered for that august conservative periodical, which has been going for over 40 years, founded by the late Roger Scruton.

And it's currently edited by a former teacher.

As a former teacher, he looks at what's happening in the classrooms of France with more of an acute eye than many of us.

But also, he's married to a French woman, and he spends a lot of time in France.

The Salisbury Review, which comes out four times a year and publishes long, quite scholarly articles, yes, publishes stuff about America, but publishes a lot of stuff about the continent as well, and particularly writers from France.

Recently, a long interview with Renaud Camus, he who coined the phrase, great replacement theory.

Do you go back to Bradford? How does it make you feel? What was it like when you were growing up compared to today? Well, like a lot of people,

And in a sense, it's quite hard for, for

forFor pronatalists like me who are quite happy to debunk, say, Paul Ehrlich, who was the guy in 1968 who published The Population Explosion, which was... actually had real world impacts.

It may be that the Chinese Politburo decided to impose their one-child policy having read Paul Ehrlich.

You know, but the whole point about the population ex- explosion was that actually we found ways technologically to feed all the mouths that Paul Ehrlich said couldn't be fed in a world of rapidly increasing population.

So on, on the one hand, I want to believe that technology will provide solutions.

I just don't...

I think a world of more robots and fewer people isn't necessarily a great place to be.

Yeah.

So why is Brigere so critical of a government trying to lower the temperature?

Well, because Brizier believes they aren't actually lowering the temperature.

They're just breaking the thermometer.

Suppressing debate and forcing unity doesn't make the underlying anger evaporate.

It drives it underground where it ferments and metastasizes.

Yeah.

He cites academics like David Betts and politicians like Kimmy Bednock, who have both issued stark warnings about the increasing probability of serious civil unrest or even civil war if these underlying societal fractures aren't openly debated.

A hierarchy.

So what is it like to live in Bradford now? What is Bradford like?

I don't know because I, I don't wanna live there.

I mean, I know for my sister...

Do you know what I mean? I don't.

I mean, I, I've written about it, uh, and I'm trying to write something longer about Bradford, but I don't wanna...

Why would I want to...

I, I was talking to somebody the other day who, who was talking about going back to live in Twickenham.

And not only does it go back to the politicians, it also goes back to us as a public, where the moment you are honest with us about a particular issue, we have a meltdown, and the toys come out of the proverbial pram.

Why do you think that is?

Uh, numbers, critical mass.

If, if, you know, the, the people are...

I went to a school in Bradford, which was sort of half and half white, non-white, and, um, I had Sikh friends.

Um, a- and I...

You know, a mixture of friends.

But today, that same school would be, is 98%, 99%, um, Kashmiri heritage, Pakistani heritage, certainly non-white at the very least.

So when it was, when you were in school, was there tension between these two groups?

And, well, I suppose, in a nutshell, for those who don't know who you are, what's a minute of brief your background?

Yeah, working class lad from Bradford, was a paperboy during the Falklands War, looked at the front pages of British warships being blown up, thought, that news is interesting, isn't it? News is really interesting.

Wasn't convinced I was clever enough to do anything important like being a lawyer or an accountant, so became a local newspaper journalist post-university, worked at the Yorkshire Post, news editor said, no future in papers, go into broadcast if you can, BBC local radio.

Thought about saying the BBC, found it too, called my civil service, jumped to Sky 97.

So there when Sky was the new kid, upstart on the block, still lots of Australians working there.

And it became something else.

It became a corporate bauble to some degree.

But they had opinions as well, because they were crying about Brexit.

So in 2005, I went back to Bradford with a Sky camera crew.

And some of this stuff never made it to the final report that I did.

But I went back to the church that I was baptized in.

And charming priest.

And there was still a faint tang in the air.

The church had been firebombed on the night that the US Air Force started bombing Taliban targets in Afghanistan in 2001.

Were there times when you were dissuaded from reporting honestly about Islamism, for example?

Well, I think in the interest of self-preservation, and I was deeply conscious of that.

eBay Live, things people love.

So in 2005, I went back to Bradford with a Sky camera crew.

And some of this stuff never made it to the final report that I did.

But I went back to the church that I was baptized in and a charming priest.

And there was still a faint tang in the air.

The church had been firebombed on the night that the US Air Force started bombing Taliban targets in Afghanistan in 2001.

I was actually in Pakistan, and then I was in Afghanistan afterwards, sort of seeing what was going on, little knowing that the war actually, in a sense, was having these extraordinary repercussions.

Were there times when you were dissuaded from reporting honestly about Islamism, for example?

What do you think?

Well, there are differences.

I mean, I remember Andrew Neil tweeted something about Sky's coverage of the Middle East and Gaza, which I think has been execrable.

I think Sky, like the BBC, like Channel 4... are intrinsically anti-Israel.

We can talk about that separately, perhaps.

And I retweeted what Andrew said and described Sky as becoming the paramilitary wing of Channel 4 News.

And that's kind of what they've become.

And I guess until GB News popped up, was there no other alternative?

What's the most shocking example of bias you witnessed?

The thing to remember, Andrew, is that most of the bias is incremental and barely visible.

It's the way you arrange the running order that day.

It's the people you choose to be guests on your shows.

I'll give you an example, which is not an obvious one, but I think you might agree when you look at it, it's really quite telling.

And it would have been height of COVID.

I was called in to cover a story, a show rather that wasn't my regular show.

And I guess until GB News popped up, was there no other alternative?

Were there times when you were dissuaded from reporting honestly about Islamism, for example?

Well, I think in the interest of self-preservation, and I was deeply conscious of that.

My late wife died in 2018, and for a while I was a single parent with six still quite young children.

And that's apt to concentrate the mind when you're broadcasting live and conscious that if you... take a semantic misstep, it could be game over.

So I was careful.

I mean, I think most people try to be careful when you're on the police tape at the scene of an Islamist atrocity.

But I became very conscious of how far that envelope could be pushed.

Do you know Jonathan Pye? He plays off of that because obviously that's the more interesting part when the camera's off.

You know why I said Newsnight.

Well, because Newsnight did something around the Trump speech.

It later emerged, and it slightly...

What Newsnight did, I hope I'm right, let me qualify that.

I think it was Newsnight.

And what that revelation did about Newsnight's doctoring of a clip...

it sort of completely exploded any idea that this was just a one-off panorama.

Where the hell are they getting those people from?

Well, you're from Bradford, aren't you? I mean, Bradford is just unrecognizable from what it might have been 50 years ago, I imagine.

It is, and I wrote an essay for Substack when I joined Reform, which I did six weeks ago.

Reluctantly, actually, because I voted for Kemi Badnock, and I think she's showing a lot of promise.

I like her.

But the problem is, Bradford...

I used to go back to Bradford, and Bradford's always a much bigger place than people think.

It's sort of a northern mill town.

But

What's the most shocking example of bias you witnessed?

The thing to remember, Andrew, is that most of the bias is incremental and barely visible.

It's the way you arrange the running order that day, it's the people you choose to be guests on your shows.

I'll give you an example, which is not an obvious one, but I think you might agree when you look at it, it's really quite telling.

And it would have been height of COVID.

I was called in to cover a story, a show rather, that wasn't my regular show.

So I tended to be on in the mornings and I came in to cover an evening show.

Yeah, how can you stand up doing that? And then the next day you go, well, what's the bad side of the NHS? Sorry, go on.

More generally, on the subject of apologies and writing them or otherwise, my lowest moment at Sky was when the Russians, I mean, I'm making this about me.

There were 300 dead people when the Russians shot down the KLM flight over Ukraine.

And we were scrambled to go and cover that.

This was 2014. and uh it was it was hideous it was a real charnel house there were you know body parts everywhere rows of seats on the ground and just all that was left was a sort of pelvic girdle and the stench of rotting flesh and kerosene and uh We'd traveled overnight from Kiev without sleeping, exhausted, and therefore not necessarily thinking straight, but quite angry, because this was two or three days after the plane had been shot down by the Russians.

And because it was in the middle of the Civil War, there was no police tape.

It wasn't a crime scene.

And you, most journalists, as you know, don't get past any, they don't ever earn any money.

And it's a necessary evil, the death knock.

You in? Must be 21 to enter.

More generally, on the subject of apologies and writing them or otherwise, my lowest moment at Sky was when the Russians, I mean, I'm making this about me.

There were 300 dead people when the Russians shot down the KLM flight over Ukraine.

And we were scrambled to go and cover that.

This was 2014. and uh it was it was hideous it was a real charnel house there were you know body parts everywhere rows of seats on the ground and just all that was left was a sort of pelvic girdle and the stench of rotting flesh and kerosene and uh We'd traveled overnight from Kiev without sleeping, exhausted, and therefore not necessarily thinking straight, but quite angry, because this was two or three days after the plane had been shot down by the Russians.

And because it was in the middle of the civil war, there was no police tape.

It wasn't a crime scene.

They don't

What was he like? He looked like Michael

Jackson.

Without the spangles.

He looked like he had way too much Botox.

Wow.

months before he met his particularly unpleasant end at the hands of insurgents who captured him inside a construction tunnel and tortured him before they killed him, as I remember.

But he was a sad and pathetic figure.

I guess they've got to read stuff, don't they?

Mm.

And in those years that followed, and I was in places like Afghanistan and Iraq and, and then in the studio, and you f...

I felt that it was possible in the early days to really interrogate some quite difficult subjects, and people, I mean, people like Amjen Chowdhury, who later went to prison, Islamist radical, and you could really interrogate the ideology.

And over the years, and I, you know, lost count of all the police tapes I stood behind at the scenes of Islamist atrocities from, you know, uh, Islamabad to Istanbul, Suus, uh, Nice, Paris, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, Manchester, Glasgow, London.

Uh, there was a change in tone and, and I felt that Sky became a sort of organ of reassurance, the whole don't look back in anger thing.

Um, and, and certainly around about two, 2015, the migrant crisis, that was the moment when I thought, "I'm looking around at my colleagues," not just at Sky, elsewhere too, "and not...

I can't work out where the skepticism has gone," that, that sort of questioning curiosity.

What's the most shocking example of bias you witnessed?