But, uh, Reem, w-with you, can we start on the, on the morality of inheritance tax? Do you agree with Kemi Badenoch that it's immoral?

I do, but I would extend that to most taxes, if not all taxes if I, if I'm being honest.

I think that if you argue that the government's stealing pe-people's money and spending it how they please is immoral, then you must also extend that to many other taxes.

And I think that fundamentally the m- the moral question about inheritance tax is whether or not is ac- it is acceptable to tax people at the point of death when that wealth, that income, that money has already been taxed before.

So a lot of people call it a double tax.

It is effectively a death tax.

It is a tax on somebody dying.

Uh, Reem, your thoughts on the politics of this.

Right

And I do think that that is really important to make that point.

I also think that, I mean, I disagree with, uh, with Liz on the sort of ethics and morality of this stuff.

I think it's completely fine if, if somebody like Jane Doe or any woman indeed wants to have, uh, promiscuous sex, if she wants to, uh, get drunk, do drugs, and have sex.

I think that's completely within their right to do so.

I do think that what isn't right is the social shaming that clearly came afterwards, and, uh, clearly she wasn't sort of well equipped to do so.

I mean, Jane Doe is, she was 20 in 2024, so she's exactly my age today.

Go ahead.

What is it from, what is it in your background that even sparked the idea of libertarianism? And it might even be worth, like, from your perspective, what would you define that as?

Yes.

Yeah, that's a great question.

So libertarianism is a very, very broad umbrella.

And I would define it as, generally speaking, wanting the state to be smaller.

And, you know, in some instances that could be in different aspects of that, you know, whether it be in health care, in education, in education.

economic prosperity and innovation and AI.

Do you think that's because of regulation or do you think that's because of evil landlords?

This village is apparently a Lib Dem voting village.

Ah, well, they are especially nimby then, aren't they? Because the Lib Dems are especially known for blocking housing development.

And so they very likely do not want housing development in their local area regardless, let alone an enormous number of potentially illegal migrants.

And so...

You've got the perfect concoction of people to oppose a particular development, and they have voted to leave the United Kingdom.

I mean, it's so fascinating to see the way in which those people live, especially in sort of these interviews, saying, I love Britain, I love the United Kingdom, but you know what? I'm sick and tired of people in Westminster telling me what I'm allowed to have in my own country.

And look, I am very pro-immigration.

but if either of you two were a resident of the village of pittington um would you be relaxed about this camp

familiar, could you tell me what the A-levels were?

They're sort of like SATs, but more important is how I'd describe it.

So you pick about three or four in your final two years of high school.

And I did politics, English literature and history.

And in politics, we were also listening to conversations about different thinkers.

And I first came across the term classical liberalism.

And I remember hearing it and thinking it was interesting because I had never heard that people could believe in social liberalism.

Was there a tipping point or a moment that led you to change? Was it more kind of this elongated process that you knew, okay, eventually I want to do this, and then it just kind of happened naturally? Yeah.

What were your reasons for moving? And with people, friends of yours, your kind of age, are they also thinking of moving to other countries and why? So

great to see you as always, Ian.

And yes, I mean, I left the United Kingdom in February of this year.

I am on a five-year visa in the United States.

And, you know, it's interesting when you're here talking about the sort of labour market and the opportunities that you have.

I do think that in you know politics and journalism it's a slightly different industry than some of the other experiences that people are having but of course as we know there are so many people in the uk that are now leaving and i'm actually writing a piece about this so i've been talking to quite a few young people that have decided to leave and it's been really interesting to hear what they've had to say so a lot of it is about taxes a lot of it is about starting a business and for them if you are trying to start a business in the united kingdom the bureaucracy actually was the biggest barrier.

And so a lot of those types of people are moving to places like Dubai and the UAE.

But I think more generally, a lot of people who move to other countries, even countries that are English speaking, they do sort of end up thinking, well, you know what, I kind of miss the British lifestyle.

But like Reem, what do you what do you make of this sort of distancing statement coming out of leadership in the Democratic Party, out of prominent senators?

Well, that's them wanting to get elected, right? I mean, that's them effectively saying that I am separating myself.

Politicians wanting to get elected and keep their jobs, what? Yes, that is them trying to separate themselves from the DSA.

And I think that it's interesting in this particular instance because the entire conversation about trying to tax billionaires and trying to make sure that all of those particular evil people are then having all of their money taken away.

I mean, even the richest 400 Americans in totality, if you take all of their businesses and all of their wealth, they total up to about $6.6 trillion, which is a drop in the bucket compared to what the DSA are promising.

And I think that what's interesting is you always on the left, and especially within the Democratic Party, have this particular debate.

And it's a sort of ideological battle for what it means to be a the world to be a better place and therefore that your goal to get there is slightly more conversations about policy.

So I sort of wanted you to sort of help us understand, like, is this a thing that happens in Europe? Do they arrest parents for letting 10-year-olds go pick up groceries or, you know, walk across the street, play at the playground by themselves?

Mm.

And I think that a lot of people on the right that care partic- particularly about family formation and particularly about declining fertility rates, which is affecting everywhere in the world...

I mean, I think it's really worrying when you've got countries like India that are now below replacement rate, where they have such enormous populations and yet even their population will soon be dying out.

And this is a global problem.

It is a problem that a lot of the environmental fanatics have got wrong because they've always thought that, "Well, the population will just continue growing and the world is gonna burn and things are gonna be terrible." Actually, in reality, that hasn't happened, and we've had the opposite.

Mm

...

the socialist policies that she proposes, the idea that all of the DSA are sort of proposing, that you need a larger government, you need universal family childcare, you need all of the government programs to be able to promote the family, I think is an antithesis to what the family and what family formation actually does.

It seems to

me...

They reported it themselves! Well, it seems to me like regulatory capture.

So of course, if you are Sam Altman, you're going to be saying, well, I have the best AI.

My AI is so powerful, it can even infiltrate everybody else's AI.

So therefore, the American government must make sure they regulate everybody else away and make sure my AI is the best.

I do think that there is an element of open AI using this kind of information and using this kind of abilities in order for them to say, actually, I want my AI company to be the monopoly.

going to get into it.

But how do questions like this play out in Europe where the kind of history of land ownership or lack thereof is quite different?

Well, I think it's exactly what Catherine said.

The better argument for immigration is not nobody owns anything and therefore it should just be a complete free-for-all.

The better argument is you own yourself as an individual and those rights are inherent and they come from natural law and therefore...

Our current property rights system is one that we have conceived as a result of various conversations about what that should look like as a system.

And it does not mean that because hundreds of years ago land acquisition was sometimes illegal and immoral and sometimes involved death and war and violations of the non-aggression principle.

That doesn't mean that now every single property rights conception is bad.

Help us understand the European mind here, because it seems like, yes, there's a bunch of regulations, but it's also a lot of Europeans just don't want air conditioning.

And really, ultimately was more about feeling a loss of national identity, which they ended up, you know, compounding in a way that they should have seen coming and didn't.

Yeah, I will say that the people that campaigned in Vote Leave wanted Brexit, and I wanted Brexit, for very different reasons to why the British people voted for Brexit.

So I think, Nick, you're absolutely right to say that post-2008, the UK really has not recovered.

But if you're looking at before 2008, living standards between the UK and the US were basically on par with one another, and now they're not.

And part of the problem is the British government is has over-regulated the financial sector so stringently.

There is this fear, there is this panic around what the markets would do and the idea that we cannot be at the behest of these crazy mystical bond markets.

And so we must regulate them in order to protect ourselves from them.

Even conservatives don't like it when you actually put it into practice.

... for the next year's budget.

Yes, and the, the point is also we don't know how many mothers will then be eligible for this program, right? They, they've already said that this is the amount of money they're going to use for this, this year's budget.

But next year's budget, I believe, was $12.5 million in addition.

We've also got to say Baby2Baby has had so many different federal contracts.

Uh, and we've also seen various different government contracts within particular states.

So the New York s- New York State gave them an enormous budget to fund maternal kits, so sort of, like, nice, uh, kits for mothers to have.

And again, it's sort of more and more money.

Sure.

and this is what's happening now in America?

It's extraordinary.

You actually just c- entirely read my mind there, Peter.

It's exactly what I wanted to say.

I think what's interesting is the hypocrisy from the Trump administration.

So you're absolutely right, the vice president went to Europe and said those exact things.

He said, "Free speech in Europe is under threat.

Um, but this seems like part of what is happening is that America is pulling away, separating itself from the rest of the world, and the rest of the world is looking around and going: "Okay, I guess that's what you're gonna do, and we're just gonna go- we're gonna go have our own club." And, like, Canada's Mark Carney, the prime minister there, is setting up a new, uh, trade regime with the EU and a bunch of other countries here and basically saying, "We're gonna go it alone." In some ways, that seems like a very bad thing in terms of trade, but it- I wonder if there is any upside to this in terms of, uh, of Europe sort of thinking about its own defense, about sort of not being, I don't know, kind of vassal states of, of American power.

So what's this about?

Exactly, like you, like the United States government already has significant power, especially when it comes to, um, sort of for national security reasons.

I mean, the US does, i- i- in large part, fund a lot of NATO, and so a lot of that support does come from that perspective.

But from a European perspective, what's really happening is, you know, the approach has always been with Trump, that we want to be friends, that we want to be friends with the Americans, especially the UK.

The special relationship is so important.

You know, post-Brexit, we're now 10 years on from the EU referendum, where the UK voted to leave the EU, and a lot of it is our relationship with our American cousins.

And yet, this entire situation has really soured the relationship.

Yeah.

Maybe there's a real problem with ninja sword crime, but, like, what strikes me here is, even in a country with incredibly d- tough gun control laws in place, you still have politicians making a show of being tough on crime basically by trying to access res- uh, like restrict access to tools.

Hmm.

Yeah, you're absolutely right.

And if anything, it's a huge warning to Americans that actually if you think all of these restrictions and these calls for restrictions will stop at guns, that isn't the case at all and actually these restrictions will continue and they'll continue to no end.

The nanny state has no end at all, and it's really interesting when it comes to knife crime in the UK in particular, because it's a great example of what a country looks like where instead of targeting the actual criminals or addressing all of the different incentives for very, very violent crime, the powers that be instead obsessively focus on the specific tools that those criminals choose to use and then tighten the screws on them.

So, I mean, as you just said, the fact that the government are looking at restricting, uh, the use of that is basically as a result of the amount of young people that are dying as a result of knife crime.

Now, I live in London.

Hmm.