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Unknown A
Okay, so now you studied systems engineering, but then you went to law?
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Unknown B
Yes, so after I finished my university degree and I did a longer degree, I did a four year engineering degree rather than a three year one.
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Unknown A
De where was that?
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Unknown B
At the University of Sussex, which is on the south coast of England. And know after university everybody disappears. You all go off to different places, you get different jobs, different parts of the country. And I just had this feeling of unfulfillment and I thought I made a mistake, maybe I shouldn't have done engineering, maybe I should have done something else. And everybody says, you know, I speak very well and I make good arguments, I should have been a lawyer. So I went to, it was really night school. I went to the University of London, but they have a college called Birkbeck where the classes are in the evening. And so I went to night school while working about 2005, so I'm about 25 and I do a law degree part time, which was fascinating because I learned so much about the principles of all of the things we talk about, you know, the rule of law, jurisprudence, but also a lot of the history of the uk which I would have learned had I gone to primary or secondary school here.
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Unknown B
I learned in my law degree and it was just so amazing. And at the end of it I thought I don't wa want toa be a lawyer, definitely don't wan toa be a lawyer. But I love having this stuff in my head and I'd become quite political by that time and I was more interested in helping to make good law, so being a legislator than being, you know, a corporate lawyer or something like that.
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Unknown A
Okay, so how did you become political and why did you decide that you weren't going to be a lawyer?
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Unknown B
Well, I think. Do you know the term the quarter life crisis?
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Unknown A
No, no, I'm not familiar with that. But it sounds like you had one.
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Unknown B
Yes, I think I had a quarter life Cris, sort of 25 and I've done everything I'm supposed to do. You finished prime school, you finished secondary school, you do your A levels, you get your degree, you get a job. I had a good job. I was working in consulting and I still wasn't happy and I was looking, I didn't know what I was looking for, but I knew I was looking for something and I thought another degree would give it to me. And what I really was looking for was the vocation which I found in politics. And it was a long journey over, probably from age 16 onwards having that experience of the, you know, that low expectation culture which I thought was very race coded and looking back on it, it was extremely race coded. If I was, I think a white child I would have been treated differently.
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Unknown B
And again it was sort of left wing teachers who were trying to be helpful but actually creating a lot of destruction along the way. That experiences at university where I think I met my first sort of proper left wing stud students, culture type person and I did not like it. I thought they were very ignorant. They because by this time of course I know a lot about Africa and they talked about Africa as this place where they would come in and help the people you who were just these helpless people, no agency whatsoever. They were not interested in the real problems and it was really a way for them to virtue signal. And I found that so aggravating. And that also semi radicalized me around what we do with aid, for example, and how we let a lot of, you know, African countries get away with things that they shouldn't do.
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Unknown B
An irritation with what I call moral colonialism where rather than focusing on growth and how to make these countries self sufficient we sort of preach values which the west has come to after a long period and try and impose them in places where there's no. They're not ready to receive them or interested and not engaging with people on that level. So I have that radicalism, that radicalization process and that was actually my first work with the Conservative party. So it's 2005, I'm 25 2006. David Cameron sets up these policy commissions and one of them was called Globalization and Global Poverty. And I really cared about this subject because I thought a lot of money was being wasted and to places where it shouldn't be sent to when actually what people needed was partnerships, business, more sen. More sensible ideas. And it was supposed to even back then in 2006 onwards it was how do we tackle globalization?
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Unknown B
How do we make sure it works for everyone else. But these things end up getting co opted always by, you know, vested interests, which is a real shame. So many things took me on the journey to conservatism. I think also culturally I am a Christian. I don't believe anymore. I used to. There was something changed and Something happened about 2008 which changed my views on Christianity. But still I'm..urally a Christian. My grandfather was a reverend in the Methodist church. I went to a Church of England school. And many of the things that were formative in my experience singing hymns and you know, knowing them off, you know, off by heart and just a Lot of the stuff that you end up doing in an African country, almost all of which are very religious, can shape you. And I find the interpretation of Christianity in the UK quite interesting compared to certainly Africa and Nigeria.
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Unknown B
People believe that it's not just something you do on a Sunday. The Bible is a living word of God and you have to do all these things. And of course they're inconsistent and there are all sorts of hypocrisies. But you growing up in a country that was genuinely multicultural, half the people were Muslim. We had both Christian and Muslim prayers in my school. You look at the behaviors and so on, you just get a lot of insight into religion as an aspect of culture. Religion in my view is downstream of culture, it's not upstream. And I think people not understanding that is why there are a lot of. I have a lot of critiques about the way people speak about religion, Islam in particular in this country. I don't think they understand it. I think that they miscategorze a lot of people in a way that should not happen.
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Unknown A
Okay, well we're definitely going to, we're definitely going to return to that. And so you're at law school now, you're doing that at night. What are you working, what are you doing as a job during the day?
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Unknown B
I'm working as a systems analyst for a company that no longer exists. It was called Logica. It was quite big at the time. It was a sort of dot com boom software software company. And it was fine and I was earning good money and saving. I had enough, earning enough to save for a house deposits. It was okay, but I wasn't there in the, you know, hierarchy ofill fulfillment.
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Unknown A
Right. And so you went to law school and you part time and you found that compelling intellectually. But you also. Is that where you ran across your leftist nemesis and first started to understand what the pathologies of, of postmodernism, that kind of sly Marxism that's a part of that. And why did that strike you so intensely? Like you tangle that together a little bit in your self description with that bigotry of low expectations that you encountered with the more leftist teachers. And so that's all percolating. But it sounds to me like there was some actual striking experiences that perhaps you had in law school that politicized you. And it also sounds like your politicization in part was at least initially. I definitely don't want that. Right?
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Unknown B
Yes, very, very much.
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Unknown A
Well, so let's walk through that. So. Cause I'd like to disentangle that there's the bigotry of low expectations that you described and that deviation that you had in your academic striving in consequence. And now you're at law school and what are you seeing among the leftist students there? And why is that raising your hackles?
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Unknown B
So actually what I saw started before law school, but I just couldn't define it. It was the stuff that I saw when I was studying engineering with those students. That was the first degree. And I had just a very dim view of a lot of the students studying the humanities courses because they didn't need to work as hard as those of us studying engineering. I think I had about 26 hours of teaching time and lab time. You know, we were in the laboratory all the time. And then you had these people studying arts and they were all sort of, you know, just messing around all the time. They were acting plays and having lots of fun and going on demonstrations and protests. And I thought, where do they have time for this? And they were all so sort of smug and condescending. So I realized, well, I don't like this.
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Unknown B
And because I have the self confidence of growing up in a relatively wealthy family, I don't feel intimidated by them and I challenge them. I have arguments with them and they lose and they get angry. And I think that they are just very weak people who don't like arguments. And they say things like, well, you can't say that. Or can you? How can you say that you're black? You should know that, you know, all these people are racist and we're just trying to be helpful and so on. And they were so condescending. So I know I don't like that. I also know that I don't like teachers who just set very low expectations. I'm learning that family has actually been the most important thing in making me who I am. And I didn't realize that long enough. So all of these things are taking me on the journey to conservatism.
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Unknown B
Then I do the law degree where I'm reading about John Stuart Mill and Edmund Burke and you know, how the rule of law is so critical to, you know, the west, but how this country functions and you learn the power of institutions. You see how you need to preserve institutions from generation to generation. You then compare with what happened during the colonial era where institutions are brought and, you know, dropped in a place. And so yes, there's now a common law tradition, but the culture hasn't really changed. And eventually the culture erodes it. So a lot of it is personal experience and observation and Lots of arguing. So I loved arguing, loved debating. And I remember when I was in that job working as a systems analysis, there was a lefty French guy who worked with me, and he kept saying, you are so right wing.
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Unknown B
You are so right wing. And I didn't know enough then. And I said, no, I'm not right wing. Because right wing, as I had been taught, was a bad thing. You know, the media, the cultural establishment always used right wing as a pejorative term. So I would say, no, I'm not right wing, but I was. And I remember when I really sat down and read the canon in the text, and, you know, you read Hayek, and of course it's Thomas Owell, who I love very much. I realize, oh, my goodness, I'm very right wing, and I'm proud of that. This is not something to be embarrassed or ashamed about. And my being very much on the right is that mix of the cultural conservatism, because I want us to preserve the things that are amazing here. And one of the things that is amazing is the classic liberalism, not the postmodern, you know, sort of corruption of that.
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Unknown B
And a lot of what I see that has gone wrong is the corruption of liberalism. And I gave a speech in December where I said, liberalism has been hacked, that people have found the weakest points and are twisting it to do things it shouldn't be doing. And you need muscular liberals to defend their turf. And instead what they've been doing is giving away their turf. And that is how we ended up with a lot of the extreme gender ideology coming into play, because it wore the clothes of the gay rights movement. It's nothing like that. And that's how we saw a lot of the craziness of critical race theory. The BLM movement set race relations in a terrible negative territory, but it wore the clothes of the civil rights movement. And you need people who are in touch with reality, who can say, no, this is not real, this is not true.
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Unknown B
And I think that is something which I am lucky to have, that I just don't get detached from everyday life. I know what is real and what isn't. And I am amazed that we have politicians, including the British Prime Minister, who will say things like, 99% of women don't have a penis, as if 1% of women do. And if a politician is prepared to tell you something that we all know is not true, then what else will they tell you?
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Unknown A
Even creatures without nervous systems can distinguish between the sexes. And so, yeah, it's. There's something very pathological going on there.