Robert Peston

The white majority in this country being discriminated against.

being suppressed, their rights being put as second order or second tier, two tier by comparison to the minority.

Now, these threads have always sort of existed under the surface to some extent in British politics.

That was basically the argument of Enoch Powell in Rivers of Blood in 1968.

But in 1968, he lost his job on the front bench of the Conservative Party.

Today, he'd probably get a more senior job of whatever party that he happened to be leading.

And, you know, let's see, we saw Nigel Farage literally last week take to his new sub stack where he wrote six thousand words, six thousand word thesis all about this idea that white people are now being suppressed in their own country.

Now, when politics starts to look like that and is being algorithmically driven because that did extremely well, as you as you might expect,

then what you start to get is a politics where it's not just the case, as it used to be, that it was basically about left right economic bargaining.

It's not just the case, as it used to be, that people would treat their opponents as that political opponents.

Now it seems our politics is driving us to political enemies.

I was thinking about a quote from Roger Scruton, the conservative philosopher dead now.

He once said, so paraphrasing slightly, he said something along the lines of, you know, the left problem, they won't talk to me because they think I'm evil as a conservative.

I'll talk to them because I just think they're mistaken.

Now, what I think has happened in politics in this algorithmic age is basically everyone has become a bit like the old left, as Roger Scruton was describing.

Everyone has come to believe that everybody is not.

There are people who disagree with them.

are not just wrong, but they're malign, and they're seeking to destroy your, or our, or their way of life.

And I think it's leading us into a politics, which as Kim Leadbeater is saying, is much darker than it was even 10 years ago.

And I think it's got worse as well.