'A WHOLE GENERATION LEFT BEHIND!' | Lord Elliott SLAMS Sadiq Khan's 'APPALLING' housing failure

Hello, I'm Alex Armstrong here at the Art Conference with Conservative peer Lord Elliott. Lord Elliott, thank you very much for joining us here on the show today. Pleasure to be here. Fantastic. Well, let's start with Brexit because you, of course, have a long history with Brexit. First of all, tell our audience what role you played during the Brexit referendum. So I was the co-founder and CEO of the Vote Leave campaign, the official campaign in the referendum. I've been campaigning on the Eurosceptic cause for many years before that, so it's a culmination of lots of activities, and I still campaign now. Yes. Well, let's talk about Brexit. Shall we? Because it doesn't seem to go away. We are a decade on from the historic vote of which many people chose to leave the European Union, but successive governments after Brexit haven't seemingly implemented the people's will. We've had mass migration under Boris Johnson and successive governments, you could argue afterwards, still bringing in hundreds and thousands of people. Has Brexit been a failure? Well, I think it's been a success. There are three things to start off with. First of all, you know, we have taken back control over our laws. So UK MPs now decide UK laws. It's a really important point. Secondly, we're not paying the membership fee, which would now be about £28 billion a year. And thirdly, we've got some great trade deals from it, particularly with the US, India, great trade deal with the Asia-Pacific countries. So some good things have come from it. Can we do a lot more? Yes, of course we can. And the point I often make is Brexit was a bit like, you know, buying a gym membership. You have your gym membership, you've actually got to go to the gym to exercise, to get fit. So we need to do a bit more of that. What do we actually do need to do that? So because it's Boris Johnson before and some others, and we were talking about, you know, Singapore upon Thames, that sort of style country where we can be very competitive in tax and business. But we seem to be just cosying up more to the EU, particularly under the Labour government. Well, one area it's worth looking at is tech. With the EU bringing in the AI Act, they've become highly regulated in tech. And that's one reason why the UK tech sector is really taking off. It's the third biggest in the world. So that shows that when you actually depart from regulations and cut regulations, you get growth. So with building, for example, I wish we'd scrap the Habitats Directive, which we have, which has really stalled up house building in the UK and led to the spiralling costs of HS2 in the UK. So again, if you deregulate, you get more growth. So if you look at other areas, you can do that. Here's what most people don't realise. Your personal data isn't just floating around. 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Click the link in the description or scan the QR code now. It works out at less than a coffee a month. It's also totally risk free for 30 days. Take back control of your personal data today with Incogni and a big thanks to them for supporting the channel. Indeed, artificial intelligence is absolutely fascinating, but it's playing a huge role. If you don't mind me pivoting a little bit onto social media, because it's a big part of this government's plan now to ban under 16s, particularly when it comes to social media. The leave campaign really dominated ex Twitter used to be Facebook. And that was a big part of the victory. Do you think in the future that this is a bit of a cynical ploy from the government? Or do you think we do need to be tougher on social media? Well, political campaigning is changing so fast now. So we're in 2016. It's revolutionary to find Facebook groups and target people who perhaps liked Nigel Farage as your skeptics. That was revolutionary at the time. That's now completely old school and out of date. And as you say, with AI, it allows a lot more targeting of people for politics. So we have a hyper focused and hyper targeted politics coming from the US and that will come to the UK as well. But I actually think that we shouldn't be burdening, whether it's social media companies or indeed broadcasters with too much regulation. I often see that as something which actually is the state getting too involved and try to influence the debate. Small C conservatism across the board. We need less less states involved in our lives. I totally agree with you, Lord Elliott. Let's talk about house building. I'm 35. I've been born and raised in London most of my life. And it's become impossible for an entire generation of young people to afford a home and to buy a home. Why is that? We haven't been building enough houses and Sadiq Khan's had an appalling record on this. The government came in with a very good programme wanting to have 1.5 million new homes, but without the actual detailed policy behind it to liberalise planning certain areas, perhaps set certain areas aside for new model homes, for example, and model towns and that sort of thing. Put the infrastructure money in there as well. That could have all been done. But as we saw with many other areas of Keir Starmer's government, very little planning ahead of time and very poor execution. And that leads me on to jobs, something you look after. Tell us a little bit about what you're doing in the jobs market. So I now head up the Jobs Foundation, a new charity, which looks at the whole role of business and society in terms of helping people into work. That's a crucial part. And when you have the challenge of, for example, the needs crisis, young people finding it difficult to get work, we need more businesses setting up more jobs, more training schemes to be able to get people into work. But to get that you need to be helping businesses. So when you lay them on top of things like the employers and I going up, the minimum wage going up, the employment rights bill, all of these are job destroying measures, cutting off a whole generation from opportunities to find work. And this is the thing for young people. The reason why I started with house building is that there seems to be this culmination. GDP per capita hasn't grown very much in the last 10 years. That's being very much felt by young people, particularly in big cities who are moving into very small apartments, which is then playing a place in our birth rate, which then leads into migration, of course. Are we heading to sort of a stagflation for our young people in Britain? The jobs aren't paying what they should be paying for them. We've got an influx of very cheap labour coming into Britain. And of course, then young people can't buy houses. Are we basically giving these young people over to the Labour Party who are going to promise them more benefits? Well, there's a big picture point. It's the first generation where young people aren't richer than their parents. That's historically never happened before. We used to have to equal growth underlying that. So that's a big picture point. We need to get growth going. Otherwise, we're falling behind. We're certainly seeing that. With young people, you mentioned too, house building, lack of jobs, university tuition fees is a big one as well. And then, of course, Covid. Covid really hit them, whether they're at school, having to learn from home or at university, rather than socialising with people or getting to know other people, studying from their small bedrooms and on Zoom and that sort of thing. They've really been let down. I actually think politicians of all parties should be thinking, how can we give that generation a break? If you're watching, you'll probably see I'm sweating, everyone here is sweating, because it's one of the hottest days of the year indeed. And part of the reason why I wanted to ask you about this, no, no, it's horrendous. There's no AC here because of net zero, actually. But the reason I want to ask you about this is that many places today have said, don't come into work, don't go into school. It's 35 degrees. It's too hot. Or it's just psychologically training children from school age that if it's a little bit extreme in temperature, you need to stay at home. Well, of course, there are many other summers in the past, which were this hot back in the 1970s. So it's not a new thing that happens. It's something we're not prepared for as a country. And I think we should be having a bit more AC in our homes to help us all cool down. But this all comes back down to the cost, as well as the cost of energy. A really important point. Why has America grown so fast? When I was at university in the early 2000s, roughly the same GDP per capita, now it's 40% richer. The key driver of that is cheap energy costs. We need that in the UK. Kemi Badenoch, she wants to drill baby drill in the North Sea. Do we need to do more than just the North Sea? Do we need to look at nuclear? Do we need to look at other areas of the energy market that we can increase our supply in? We need to do a whole bunch of things. North Sea, nuclear, many other areas. Kemi's onto a good thing here. She understands if you cut down the cost of energy, you allow businesses to thrive. You allow people to have air con at home, not worrying about boiling the kettle or putting the tumble dryer on. These are fundamental things that people should be able to do in a civilised world. And the Conservative Party, is there now a rebounce for the Tories? Are they coming back into fashion? Of course, Aberdeen South just a week ago, with a stonking victory there for the Conservative Party. Can you see a revival of the party in the next few years? That was a really good victory for the Conservatives, and it was because it was on a very good message about North Sea. So I'm glad they've ditched the whole COP26 agenda, and moved on to a much more practical one. That was great. I'm also really pleased that, generally speaking, the, should we say, the centre-rights, the people who sort of generally supported Brexit and that sort of big push there, they're on the way up. So if you combine sort of Reform UK and Tories, that's the biggest blocking party at the moment. So I hope we'll get a change of government in the next election. And final question for you, Lord Elliott. I know these are quite wide-ranging topics we're talking about here, but uniting the right is a thing that many of us are passionate about, because we don't want to see more socialism in Britain, which we think is stopping all the things we've just been talking about from growing Britain. Can you see Kemi Bainock and Nigel Farage working together? Well, if I can give a plug to my book. Yes, please. Can I do that? Of course you can. So book out this week, 10 years on the untold story of Brexit from Bite Back. So please buy the book. I talk in the final chapter there about the next election, and how the next election will be really, in a sense, a rerun of the referendum, the Brexit referendum, with the Tories and Reform saying, stay out, Labour, Lib Dems, SNP, et cetera, saying, you know, move back in. So we'll see a rerun of that. I actually trust the wisdom of the British people. They will know in their constituencies which MP, which candidate is most likely to win. Yes. Well, let's hope so indeed, because I've been saying for a very long time, viewers who watch me on GB News will know, I have a feeling another referendum is creeping towards us if there's a Lib-Lab coalition. So that's deeply terrifying to me. Lord Elliott, thank you so much for joining me on GB News here at the Art Conference. Pleasure to have you here. Pleasure. Thank you.