What The Right Is Getting Wrong - Darren Grimes | Modern Wisdom Podcast 361

Were I to do a protest right now, I'd stand up with a sign saying, "Steady. Steady on. Steady as she goes. Should we really be doing this? Think again?"

Very exciting.

Very exciting.

Riveting, riveting.

There's hardly anyone on the street that's gonna be like beeping their horn at me, is there? And saying (laughs) , "Well, maybe to get out the way." But not to actually say, "I wanna join this person's movement." And that's a problem conservativism has. (whoosh)

Darran Grimes, welcome to the show.

Thank you very much for having us. I'm dead excited about this one, I must say.

Two northern boys today.

Exactly.

The way it works. #BrexitReality is trending at the moment and people are upset. Is this, is this your fault? Have you done something here?

Do you know what? I don't think it is my fault this time. I can't say I've spent that much time on Twitter today, but I don't think it's me. There, there's always some form of Brexit reality, right? Despite the fact there's a global pandemic sort of wreaking havoc across the globe as we speak, and, uh, supply chains are being through, it's fair to say, a little bit of rough and tumble, that Brexit gets the blame. It's just the way things work on Twitter. It's a cesspit of FB, PE, remain sort of circle-jerkery, I'm afraid, Chris. That's the be all and end all of that.

It feels like you're still kind of one of the big public enemies-

Mm-hmm.

... around the Brexit debacle. I still had my head up my ass when Brexit was happening. I was actually flying back from some foreign country while the vote was going on. I was watching it live 'cause there was nothing else at 4:00 in the morning th- the timezone that I was in. What was your role in this? Why do people have sort of distaste, or some, some circles of Twitter have distaste for you when Brexit comes up?

So I, um, set up a campaign from my bedroom in Brighton. I was at Brighton University at the time, and that was 2015, December of 2015. And I set up a campaign called Believe. And it was a liberal-minded Brexit arguments that was there to cater to a younger audience, which I thought was being sort of a little bit left out of the debate and the argument. I thought there were actually legitimate arguments to make from a classical liberal perspective that simply weren't being made by the, the Vote Leave campaign. So anyway, I set this up, and I had just recently left the Liberal Democrats after that 'cause I thought I, I cannot get away from the fact that this party is unapologetically pro-EU, and I couldn't understand why, frankly. I, I just, I think there are legitimate liberal arguments for leaving the EU. I certainly think in many ways the EU, uh, on the world stage has been pretty damn protectionist and not very internationalist in its outlook. You know, the whole idea of, uh, I remember one advert in particular where they had a, there was a man dressed up in, in Asian garb, uh, uh, and there's this woman who's fending them off, and a sort of man who looks like he's in sort of, I don't know, Saudi ar- aristocrat dress fighting off this EU superwoman. And that was an advert calling, it's basically to try and parrot this idea of the EU as the protector for, of the EU, from, of EU countries, of the EU 28 at the time, from the rest of the world. And I thought, "Hang on a minute. How the hell is that compatible with any of the arguments that, you know, the Lib Dems parrot every two minutes about being inclusive and all the rest of it? If anything, that's exclusive." So I thought about this and I thought, "Well, this is entirely incompatible with everything that I've heard so far." I thought I was a liberal at the time. Uh, I, I'm not, um, but I didn't know that. I was quite sort of in, in my infancy of my political journey at the time, I would say. Um, and anyway, I set up this campaign, and I think it was pretty quick, actually, the, the venom and vitriol. I remember the day after the vote, I'd had precious little sleep. I had been campaigning for the d- official campaign for the last two days, out and about, you know, handing out leaflets and knocking on doors and all the rest of it to try and get out the vote. And I went into the Channel 4 studio the day after, and, uh, I was met by Sarah Morrison, who used to be... She was under Ted Heath, former leader of the Conservative Party, former Prime Minister of this country. She was his vice chairman of the Conservative Party. And I met her and I thought, "This is very exciting, you know, meeting such a, a, a d- a grand character within the Conservative history." And, uh, she was utterly vile. I'm afraid there's no other way of, of putting it. She said, they basically a- across that panel said I am thick, uneducated, I don't know, I didn't know what I was voting for, I, um, clearly have, I guess, betrayed my generation, and that my arguments weren't worth hearing. And that, I think, I'm afraid to say, has been what the last, what, five years now have all been about, which is this sort of contempt for those of us who are conservative-minded, who quite like our country, who quite like our monarch, who quite like our flag, who quite like the fact that we should make decisions in this country and that we, we champion that around the world, that sort of message of being the Mother of Parliaments, that democracy. And yet, all of these things I think just sort of... You're, you're derided as being a complete Neanderthal, you know, an idiot that doesn't know what's good for them. "Let us decide for you. That's what you've been doing all along. That's what you've been voting for. You did that with Blair, you did that with Cameron. You've been doing that for years and years. How dare you think you know what's good for you and your community."