Ben Habib - Why I Marched On London With Tommy Robinson To Protect Free Speech

Full transcript: Why I Marched On London With Tommy Robinson

3:50 Brian Rose: This is London Real, I am Brian Rose, my guest today is Ben Habib, the politician, businessman, and leader of the new political party, Advance UK. You were elected as a member of the European Parliament in 2019, where you became a vocal supporter of Brexit and a fierce critic of the EU’s grip on British sovereignty. Today, with Advance UK, you’re challenging the two-party system and calling for real change on issues from immigration and free speech to economic reform. As a successful property investor and entrepreneur, you bring a business perspective to politics, warning that Britain will dangerously decline unless it confronts uncontrolled immigration, government failure, and the silencing of dissent.

4:43 Brian Rose: Two weeks ago, you were the only politician who took part in the March on London political rally alongside Tommy Robinson, a massive event that sparked controversy and debate about free speech, protest rights, and the future of British democracy. Ben, welcome to London Real.

5:00 Ben Habib: Well, thank you very much for having me on, Brian. It’s a pleasure to be here. I was just saying earlier, what a wonderful studio you’ve got and this backdrop for these terrific, 19th century looking Union plagues. Union Jacks, actually, they look like, they look like they’ve come off the back of a ship, don’t they?

5:16 Brian Rose: Yeah, we’ve had these for 10 years now, you know, flying them proudly here.

5:22 Ben Habib: They’re great.

5:23 Brian Rose: I never saw anything wrong with that. In fact, a lot of people know these flags because they’ve seen this show. The show’s been watched over a billion times. So I’ve had people come in.

5:33 Ben Habib: A billion times.

5:34 Brian Rose: A billion times, yeah. So I’ve had people that come in and they’re like, I know this show because the flags, the backdrop. And it’s called London Real. Because when I started this show, I knew that I believe London is one of the greatest brand names in the world and one of the greatest cities in the world. And even though I was born in America, this city has just given me everything. I’ve always had tremendous success here and it’s really a city I love and really care about. I guess as do you.

6:07 Ben Habib: Yeah, and me. I mean, I came to England in 1979, went to boarding school, then went to university. And I came to London in 1987 as a graduate recruit at what was then called Shearson Lehman Brothers, but you know his Lehman Brothers. And I remember being quite in awe of London, almost overwhelmed by London when I first came at the age of 22. And then I had a three month stint in New York. And coming back to London was like coming to a village. And I’ve absolutely adored London ever since.

6:41 Brian Rose: That’s fascinating, because I had the same experience. I was in New York after college. I went to MIT, got an engineering degree, went to Wall Street for four years. And when I came to London, I was like,

6:52 Ben Habib: phew, this is a suburb.

6:55 Brian Rose: Yeah, and so I’ve been indoctrinated to the extreme and so I can operate here freely. And you’ve got the Hampstead Heath, you can jump on the pond.

7:04 Ben Habib: I know, when I came back from, I lived in Manhattan for those three months and you can’t even see the sky really because of all the tall buildings. And if you want to go for a run on the pavement, you’re dodging people all the time. And I came to London and thought, wow, we’re so lucky to have London.

7:18 Brian Rose: And yet I have tourists that come here and they say, this place is so intense, I can barely handle it. And I’m like, really? So yeah, I know what you mean. And so many people come to London and they just compliment, you know, maybe how it used to be, but friendly people. And you know, it’s still one of the great metropolises, but we can talk about where London is along that way. You know, I had this burning question that I’m trying to get my head around when I saw you on stage on that protest with Tommy. And I had Tommy in here a few weeks ago.

7:49 Ben Habib: I saw, yeah.

7:50 Brian Rose: And I had an amazing conversation with Tommy and it’s the first time I spoke to Tommy, even though he’s been on my radar for a long time. And one of the crazy things is, Ben, is that I’m in the media business and yet I still have media biases towards people, which is crazy, because if anyone should know that the media never portrays someone correctly, it would be someone in this business. And yet, still, people walk into the studio and I have all these preconceived notions about them because of the headlines that I’ve read. And yet, almost always, when I sit there and talk to them for a couple hours and what’s that old proverb, walk a mile in a man’s shoes, I realize why they’re the person that they are.

8:30 Brian Rose: And that really helps a lot to understand why they feel that way in the journey they’ve been on. And that’s what I got from Tommy. And so, I wanted to have you here, but when I saw you on that stage, I said, here is Ben Habib, right? And as you said, you were born in Pakistan. You didn’t move to Britain till you were 14. Your father’s Muslim. And you’re on stage with Tommy Robinson, a British nationalist, who in some way, shape or form, believes the plight of England is due to Muslim rape gangs, right? And I’m sitting there thinking, these are two opposites, and yet you’re getting on like a house on fire and the crowd is cheering for you.

9:05 Brian Rose: So Ben, please explain to me this conundrum.

9:08 Ben Habib: So, my dad is Pakistani, and he is Muslim. My mother is English, blue-eyed blonde from Isilworth, and her father fought in World War I, and my great-grandfather was a vicar. So I have two different sides from which I was born. And I was born in Karachi in 1965, which was post-imperial India, if you like, Pakistani side of India, but post-imperial India, with the tailwinds of British Empire still, you know, going through the streets of Karachi. And so we grew up with a very anglicised, you know, in a very anglicised way. And the school I went to in Karachi, which was the Karachi Grammar School, was a school set up by the British when they were there. It taught an English syllabus. It was the, it was the time in history when we actually had pride in the United Kingdom across the Commonwealth. The Commonwealth was relatively new back in 1965 through to 79. And the British, the sense of former British rulers was a positive one. Everyone was proud of the fact that we were part of the Commonwealth

10:23 Ben Habib: and that Pakistan had had an imperial British past. And just like in the United Kingdom our history is being rewritten. It has been rewritten in Pakistan too. So I find that Pakistanis, whom I grew up with, and were very pro the West when I was a child, less pro the West now. But there’s been a form of indoctrination taking place, particularly in the Muslim world, and we can talk about Islam if you’d like to, but particularly in the Muslim world. And the other thing about the sort of period in which I was born was that Islam was going through a kind of enlightened period. I’m sure you’re familiar, Brian, with photographs of Iran, Tehran, Baghdad, Beirut, Karachi, Islamabad.

11:09 Ben Habib: From that era, 1950s and 60s, all the women have their hair open. They’re all wearing skirts and cosmopolitan. Cosmopolitan, and Islam has regressed. We’ve jumped straight into Islam, but Islam has regressed since then. And when I left Karachi in 1979, it was still relatively enlightened form of Muslim practice. practice. But during the 80s, vahabi is in this more fundamentalist form of Islam, which by the way, I think Islam has a tendency to head back towards. Every time it gets enlightened, it gets yanked back to fundamentalism. You know, this vahabi fundamentalist form of Islam was exported out of Saudi Arabia with petrodollars and so on. And we seem to have taken some of the worst forms of that into the United Kingdom. And Tommy Robinson, to give him his due, you know, many of us are, um, Johnny come late least to waking up to what’s been going on. And as a working class, this is how I understand it, as a working class lad in Luton. And I remember going through Luton in the 1980s and thinking this looks like

12:21 Ben Habib: Downtime Karachi. Really? Back in the 80s, because I used to go through Luton. I was at Cambridge University. My parents lived up, my parents had a house in Berkhamsted, so I used to take the A505 through Luton. And I used to think this place looks like downtown Karachi in certain places. So I can see what Tommy Robinson grew up with. And if you’re experiencing a foreign culture, a culture that is proselytizing, which is muscular, which doesn’t hold itself to itself, and is very fundamental and unforgiving in its ideology, you’re going to feel that coming into your community. And so someone like Tommy Robinson, I’m sure he’s not alone in having experienced it, would have seen it much earlier than I did.

13:04 Ben Habib: I was in the ivory towers of Cambridge, then Lehman Brothers in the city, living in comfortable suburbs, not even suburbs, central London. And so as I was saying to you, Brian, before I came on, I’ve been on a journey, and I think Tommy Robinson has been on a journey ahead of many of us. And he’s been made the Voldemort of British politics For some reason, as you rightly point out, media can grab someone and they can mold him into this person they wish him to be. Look, he’s no saint, as far as I can see. He comes from Luton, he’s working class, he’s got tattoos, but he’s a straight-talking, straight shooter, from what my experience of him is.

13:46 Ben Habib: And they’ve turned him into the Voldemort of politics. He is the bad boy of everything. And I think if he’s been on a journey, It’s not for me to opine on his journey, but I think the journey he’s been on is himself trying to understand how the hell did this country go from what I was born into to where it is now, how the hell did it get here? You know, we all ask ourselves that question. And getting to the answer of that question, by the way, I think is a critically important step because if you can’t answer the question, it manifests itself in anger and you want to hit out at whatever it is that’s caused this.

14:25 Ben Habib: But if you can get to the root causes of the problem, and this is where politicians need to really exercise their focus, get to the root causes of these problems, be brave in revealing what the root causes of these problems are. How did the United Kingdom become as it is now, precisely, and therefore what are the solutions? And that is our job. You know, there were, what, well over half a million people who came to that march, some say a million. I know many people tried to come to the rally and couldn’t make it and had to go back on train. There were two and a half million people watching.

15:04 Ben Habib: Now, let’s say there were three, four million people interested in what was happening on the 13th of September. If the politicians only response to that is, these are a bunch of lunatics who are far right, troublemakers, nationalists, and so on. If that’s their reaction, then those people will feel vilified. They’ll feel that the political class who should represent them have turned their backs on them. There’ll be no route for those people to give effect to the changes they wish to see in the country, democratically and peaceably. And therefore it falls to politicians, and I think it’s critical and important that that’s why I spoke at the rally, it falls to politicians to engage, find out what the issues are that’s troubling these people, get to the root causes of these problems, reveal those problems, and through revealing them, find the solutions, propose the solutions, and put a proverbial arm of friendship around the people and say, we get it, we are going to sort this out

16:04 Ben Habib: for you. But even after that march, Starmer came out and said, well, this is a bunch of far-right people who’ve gathered in London and they’re hijacking the flag and we’ve got to reclaim the flag, he doesn’t get it. And one thing I wanted to say in my speech on that day, which I didn’t say, was that now Parliament – we’re in the 1980s when I first came to London – Parliament had no protection around it. You could literally see all the parliamentary buildings from the road. And then we had the IRA bombs and they put barricades up and then we started bombing Iraq and doing all sorts of stuff abroad, and so we needed more protections around Parliament.

16:43 Ben Habib: And I was horrified to go there the other day. I don’t know if you’ve been there recently, but now they’ve got a nine-foot-tall metal fence all the way down the front of Parliament. That is the best optical revelation of how Parliament has now turned its back on the people. Parliament doesn’t represent its people. It’s sitting separately from its people, and because it sits separately from its people, it feels the need of this massive metal fence. It has literally put a fence in the way of its own obligations. And we must, as politicians, now understand what the hell is going on in this country. And we’ve got to, and I think this country is facing an existential threat, I think if we don’t get a grip of the problems and start resolving them quickly, I think the United Kingdom, in Europe, Western civilization I think will cease to exist in the way that you and I remember it through most of our lives.

17:41 Brian Rose: Yeah, I honestly don’t see how it reverses at this point unless there is some drastic action. I don’t see a Trump of Europe. I don’t see anyone that can turn it around and let’s be a reminder ourselves that Trump almost didn’t make it and maybe could have not been elected. And that’s a point of potential reversal of that trend, but I don’t see it in Western Europe.

18:03 Ben Habib: So, I mean, I disagree with you, actually, if you don’t mind me saying so, Brian. I mean, I think five years ago, ideologically this country was in a much worse place than it is now. You know, the million people or whatever it was, two and a half million people online, wouldn’t have felt able to come out five years ago and show their support. The so-called Overton window, the center of gravity of acceptable political discourse has undoubtedly shifted in favor of the nation state of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, borders, policies being made for the nation state, et cetera, rather than this extreme form of what I call liberal global ideology that seems to have infected our political class.

18:44 Ben Habib: The reason they turn their back on the British people is because actually they do hold the British people in contempt. They think their job should be done on the world stage, governing for the globe. That’s why we have so many policies that are so detrimental to the United Kingdom. And because they’re governing for the globe, they don’t actually recognize our own borders. Starmer can’t even bring himself to call those who’ve entered this country illegal migrants. He calls them irregular migrants because he’s completely hijacked by this global order. He’s pro-EU. He’s pro-EU. He even said, I think, when he was being interviewed by Emily Maitlis when she asked him, would you rather be in Davos or Westminster?

19:21 Ben Habib: He said, I’d rather be in Davos. This was a guy who was standing to be prime minister of this country. rather be in a foreign place with a whole load of foreign leaders than with his people in the United Kingdom. But I think that’s changing and it’s evidenced by the march, it’s evidenced by the way Reform UK is doing so well in the polls and the way Advance UK will do very, very, very well in the polls in the future once we’re registered as a political party. So I think we can save the UK. I think the British people want the UK to be saved.

19:54 Ben Habib: They know in their hearts what’s required to save it. But you make a very powerful point, Brian, and you said that the steps required are going to be drastic. How do you get out of a rat race? How do you create wealth, not only for yourself, but also for the generations to come after? I am absolutely amazed with the quality of companies that we’re getting exposure to.

20:15 Brian Rose: We go on to Zoom calls with the innovators and the folks who are building new applications in metaverse blockchain artificial intelligence decentralized finance what’s going on everybody thumbs up if you can see me we are focusing on early stage investment and the quality of people that we’re getting exposure to whether it be dan tapiura with one rt jason ma from open yatsu from

20:39 Ben Habib: animoka this been a phenomenal experience thus far it has far exceeded my expectations we are focusing on cutting-edge technologies. I view it now as the best investment I’ve ever made. The upside, I view, is unlimited.

20:55 Brian Rose: And as a retail investor, I would never get this exposure anywhere else outside of investment club.

21:01 Ben Habib: See you in the investment club. And the steps required are gonna get ever more drastic if the political class don’t get a grip of the problem quickly. It’s already the 11th hour and 59th minute. It is already very late in the day, but they have to grab it. And if they leave it longer, then the steps become more drastic, more draconian. And what we don’t want, what we want to avoid at all possible cost is a solution that isn’t peaceful. We must take the support of the people, give it a voice, and have a peaceable outcome to this for everyone involved.

21:41 Brian Rose: And that’s why you got into politics.

21:44 Ben Habib: Well, that’s not why I got into politics. I’ve been on a journey, as I mentioned, and I got into politics simply because I thought the political class were lying about leaving the EU. They lied when they said that simply voting to leave the EU would mean we’d have a massive recession, a million jobs would be lost, 75,000 jobs would be lost in the city. Mark Carney, who is the hapless governor of the Bank of England said that there’d be a run on the banks. I don’t know if you remember that. He said in 2016 there would be a run on the banks if we voted to leave the EU, and therefore he was putting aside £250 billion to save the British banking system.

22:26 Ben Habib: Now, there’s nothing more likely to get the British banking system into trouble than the governor of the Bank of England saying it might get into trouble, and therefore I’m putting money aside. He was actually perpetrating project fear, and I thought something is wrong with our political class. He shouldn’t even be opining on politics. Correct. He’s the blooming governor of the Bank of England. And that was the beginning of my journey that I’ve been on. So my first battle was with the EU. And as I engaged with the EU, I realized actually the EU is one manifestation of a global order that is seeking to take control of countries, denude them of their domestic democracies.

23:05 Ben Habib: And when you denude a country of its democracy, you denude it of its national identity. If you’re not making laws in your own country for your own people, you’re no longer a nation state. If you take down borders, if they have done in Europe with the Schengen Zone, you’re no longer a nation state. And then I saw this manifestation actually being applied much more broadly across the globe. Lockdowns were a wake-up call for me. You know, a totalitarian response initiated in China was adopted wholesale across the West. In the late 60s, we had a virulent form of flu and there was no lockdown. People just had to ride the wave.

23:45 Ben Habib: We all know that viruses evolved to settle down and become endemic as opposed to in the form of extreme epidemic. We had an epidemic which would have become benign and endemic and we had to get through that. But we had this top-down control of the British people and then we had vaccinations and vaccinations are great if they work, but they should never be mandatory. And it was shoved down our throat. Normally it takes 17 years for a drug to go from origination to market. They got this thing out in a year and they were forcing it down our throats. And so I’ve realized that the threats facing the United Kingdom, facing Western Europe and Western civilization more generally, obviously from the EU and organizations like the EU, but they’re manifold.

24:32 Ben Habib: And they all come from this kind of liberal global order, mass migration being one example of the way they’ve allowed nation states to be set aside, borders being taken down. And we need to fight against all of this. We need to reinstitute the nation state. We need to reinstitute freedom of speech because in the pursuit of propagating their extreme ideologies, the way we’ve been governed with net zero, open borders, our culture being set aside, The only way you can shut the people up is by shutting down speech. And so we’ve got to fight against the shutting down of freedom of our speech, which is the cornerstone of democracy.

25:15 Ben Habib: We’ve got to throw off the shackles of international law so that we can actually do what we need to for our people in this country. And fundamentally, we’ve got to find again, equality before the law. Because having practiced all these extreme policies with mass migration and putting a protective blanket around foreign cultures and setting our own culture aside, we’ve effectively also undermined our criminal justice system. You know, we will throw the book at white working class people, but we will protect ethnic minorities. And even the sentencing council, for example, that guides courts on the kinds of sentences that they should set for particular crimes was advising our judicial system to treat ethnic minorities more leniently then they treat white people, why?

26:06 Ben Habib: Since when did Lady Justice have her blindfold removed? The whole point about law and its application is that it should be blind, that if you do the crime, you do the time. And so all of these things have conspired to undermine our place in Western civilization, undermine Western civilization itself. And I’m still learning more and more of what has been done and therefore what must be reversed in order to get us back to a safe place.

26:37 Brian Rose: All right, so you started in 19 as a member of the European Parliament to keep pushing Brexit through, from what I understand.

26:43 Ben Habib: Which is quite a binary thing. Right, yeah. But it’s a much bigger battle than just Brexit.

26:48 Brian Rose: Right, okay, and then you joined reform last year.

26:51 Ben Habib: I joined reform in March 2023.

26:55 Brian Rose: 2023, okay.

26:56 Ben Habib: And reform was the new manifestation of what I had been a part of, the Brexit party.

27:01 Brian Rose: Right, okay.

27:03 Ben Habib: But I was reluctant to join Reform for various reasons which I can bore you with, but I was reluctant to join. Well, I’ll bore you with it because-

27:12 Brian Rose: And let’s talk about Reform. What has it done and what hasn’t it done? Because otherwise there would be no advance UK unless Reform had done what you thought it should do.

27:22 Ben Habib: Yeah, exactly right. And so another sort of journey I’ve been on is that many of the people on our own side of the fence, side of the debate who I thought were solid, actually are not solid, and I can’t talk about this frankly unless I talk about it frankly. And I had thought Farage had a political philosophy similar to mine, which was nation state first, borders, sovereignty, freedom, et cetera. What I have discovered over time is that Farage, who is reform, reform is Farage, he’s He’s such a big persona. He is reform and constitutionally it’s virtually impossible to remove him from reform. Farage doesn’t have a political philosophy.

28:09 Ben Habib: Farage is part of the political class that pursues expediency over principle. And he will pivot this way or that way to curry favor with whomever he thinks he needs to curry favor with. So for example, even though it was clear to anyone who was prepared to think about it from first principles and to think about it objectively, Tommy Robinson undoubtedly, in my mind, was put in prison last year for political reasons. It was a politicized attorney general who threw the book at him. But Farage couldn’t bring himself to call that out. He’s got an antipathy to Tommy Robinson, which I think is born out of his belief that Tommy Robinson is kryptonite in politics and therefore he cannot in any way associate himself with Tommy Robinson and he will throw Tommy Robinson under a bus.

29:03 Ben Habib: But if you’re looking for someone to save the United Kingdom from the forces of cancel culture to promote freedom of speech, then you’ve got to be brave and look, Tommy Robinson as I’ve said before is no saint, but it was clear that he was put in prison for political reasons and it was incumbent on Farage to call that out. Farage was also a coward in my view when it came to the post-Southport protests. You know, he first was brave and he said that, I think he said something about how the protests were justified. The facts had been hidden and therefore people were protesting and I completely agree with that.

29:46 Ben Habib: Then they called it the Farage rights and he went completely quiet on it. He had a parliamentary position. He could have spoken up in parliament where he has privilege, where he’s protected. He could say what he wanted in parliament. He didn’t say it. Only recently has reform come out and started banging the drum for Lucy Connolly, you know, who was wrongly incarcerated. They only did it when it became acceptable to do it. They still don’t talk about Peter Lynch, for example, who went to prison for the same reasons as Lucy Connolly but hanged himself. And Farage has moved, for example, from a position last year where he thought talking about mass deportations of illegal migrants would not be acceptable in the political spheres in which he mixes. So he denounced mass deportation. He said it’s impossible. When he was asked whether he had an ambition for mass deportations of illegal migrants, he said, no, I don’t even have an ambition. And the other day he came out

30:43 Ben Habib: with a policy talking about mass deportation. It’s because the Overton window shifted, the centre of gravity shifted, so he’s following it. But the centre of gravity is shifting because of people like myself and others and Tommy Robinson, no doubt. And so Farage isn’t the Churchillian figure. He’s not the brave figure that we need to save this country. He will follow where he thinks it’s safe to go. But we need a leader, someone who will take the bold steps and call things out as they are and do it in a responsible way. I’m not suggesting there should be anything other than a peaceable approach to this but do it and provide the solutions at the same time.

31:25 Brian Rose: Now if I were to play devil’s advocate would I say Nigel is trying to make the right political move because if he supports Tommy he might alienate Muslim voters or Muslim sympathizing voters and lose an entire chance to go head-to-head against conservatives. Is that a real political decision that he has to make?

31:45 Ben Habib: I think that is a flattering understanding, I think, of what he’s up to. But let’s just walk through that possibility. Let’s say he wanted to challenge the conservative party, that he actually recognizes, he should recognize, that under 14 years of conservative government this country has gone down the tubes. If he recognized that properly, he would not be recruiting former Tory MPs, and he’s now got one current MP, but former Tory MPs, many of whom stand against the apparent political philosophy that reform should have. Like take Jake Berry, for example. Jake Berry voted to stay in the EU. Jake Berry was pro-lockdown. Jake Berry was pro-net zero. These are all things that reforms say they’re against, but they took Jake Berry into their bosom.

32:35 Brian Rose: Because they want clout to show they’re getting Tories.

32:38 Ben Habib: But if you’re infected with the problem, you’re not going to be the solution to the infection.

32:43 Brian Rose: Why is he doing it?

32:44 Ben Habib: Because he is in the pursuit of power. It’s old-fashioned politics. And he hasn’t taken on board, or if he has taken it on board he doesn’t care, that the country is being fundamentally threatened right now. We are, listen, there isn’t a war going on, but the threats we face are no less than the ones we faced in 1939.

33:07 Brian Rose: It’s a bold statement.

33:08 Ben Habib: No, it’s true. Suella Braverman said it all in 2023 when she was Home Secretary. She made a fantastic speech in Washington. I don’t know if you recall this, Brian, and I will always hold her in high regard for making the speech. She was Home Secretary. Yeah. And she said things which I’ve never heard a sitting member of the Cabinet say, but she concluded by saying Western civilization is threatened. And we are threatened. We are threatened. When it becomes offensive to the political class that you fly your flag, you’ve got a problem. And that’s where we are in politics.

33:48 Brian Rose: So reform is a power grab, is what you’re saying, even though much of their platform is combating some of these things, but you’re saying it’s lip service.

33:57 Ben Habib: It’s lip service. The persona of Farage makes you think that that’s what he’s doing. But if you look and try and follow what he actually says and does as political obsessors like I do, you know that he’s not there. He’s definitely not there. Even take his deportation policy, for example. Do you remember, two weeks ago, he came out and he said, we will now deport all illegal migrants. They will be detained and they will be deported. Great, we all thought. The next morning he said, except women and children will be excluded. Now that basically has two immediate impacts. The first is that any single male illegal migrant in the UK is going to get shacked up and have children, for want of a better way of describing it, and even in a post-European convention of human rights world.

34:51 Ben Habib: No court is going to be very reluctant to separate women and children from their father. So anyone wishing to avoid Farage’s now mass deportation program just needs to get married and have children. The other effect of that will be that he would encourage less single men to come over and more women and children to cross the channel. It was an encouragement, an inducement, his policy for women and children to come across the channel. But the other thing he did, which I found absolutely an affront, was he said that we We would have to revoke the European Convention of Human Rights, good tick, tick in the box for that.

35:30 Ben Habib: But we won’t revoke it in Northern Ireland because Northern Ireland is part of the Good Friday Agreement and the Good Friday Agreement provides for the European Convention of Human Rights staying in place. Instantly, what he did was basically say that any illegal migrant in the United Kingdom wishing to avoid deportation simply needs to go to Northern Ireland because we won’t be able to deport them from there. So in that one step, he also revealed, Brian, that he doesn’t stand for the nation-state of Great Britain and Northern Ireland because he was prepared to throw Northern Ireland under the ECHR bus and export all Great Britain’s illegal migrants to Northern Ireland.

36:15 Ben Habib: That is the effect of his policy. So he’s either not thinking it through or he doesn’t get it. And I don’t think he gets it. I don’t think he cares about Northern Ireland. He’s also on the record saying a united island is inevitable. So Farage is this way and that way, and I’d like to stop talking about Farage if that’s all right,

36:35 Brian Rose: but- Was it a difficult decision to break away and create your own party? Because now you’re taking something that had mass, that had momentum, the reform party, and it’s impressive what they built, and now you’re gonna splinter it, probably the wrong term in your opinion, and go another way. Did you have reservations? That’s a big decision to make.

36:54 Ben Habib: So I knew a new political force was needed, and if you believe, as I do, that the country is threatened, its existence is threatened, then you have very little option but to do something even if it’s low probability of success.

37:08 Brian Rose: Why I ran for mayor, I was just, I was angry at the way they were treating my city and I wanted to change it and I didn’t really care about the consequences.

37:15 Ben Habib: You know, I’d rather be on my deathbed knowing I tried than lying on my deathbed thinking I didn’t try and look at the United Kingdom now. If I fail, I fail, but I’ve tried. And initially I thought, initially I thought when a new political force was needed that it was too big a task. In fact, I can reveal it now because I’ve revealed it a couple of times. I had a conversation with Elon Musk in January and Elon Musk said, you need a new political party because reform isn’t it. And I said to him that, you’re right, but I don’t think it’s possible in British politics, you know, to get reform on the table was massive.

38:01 Ben Habib: To get yet another political force on the table would be virtually impossible. And so I kind of said, no, I don’t think it was gonna work, Elon. But then reform sacked Rupert Lowe, you might recall, in March, and that unfolded. And I thought that created the opening for a new political party. And I was actually in discussions with Rupert. Then I called, I didn’t, I texted a DMed Elon Musk and said, I think you’re right. I take back, I was in error. I was in error in January. You were right. I’m going to have a go at putting together a new political party and I hope you’ll be able to support it.

38:39 Ben Habib: And I hope Rupert will be part of it. I wanted Rupert initially to lead it, but for reasons of his own, he doesn’t want to. And so here we are with Advance UK. And what I do think is that the political landscape is extremely febrile. The British electorate are searching for something that will save them. I think many, many, virtually everyone at that march and the two and a half million people online know that reform’s not the answer. They’ve already woken up to that because if reform was the answer, Farage would have been at the UTK rally. He would have spoken to his own people.

39:19 Ben Habib: He didn’t speak to his people. So they know that he’s not the answer. And I think Advance UK is going to surprise people with how well it does.

39:27 Brian Rose: When did you partner up with Tommy? Is that the right word? And what is your relationship with Tommy? Did he know you were creating this party? When he saw you created it, did he reach out and say, I wanna support you?

39:39 Ben Habib: So, I mean, like many others, I saw Tommy as the Voldemort of politics as well. So, as I say, I’ve been on a journey. In 2019, three weeks into my political career, when I was still quite taken by Nigel Farage, the Brexit party line was Tommy Robinson is anti-Islam. He’s an extremist. We can’t associate with UKIP because Tommy Robinson and UKIP.

40:03 Brian Rose: Peter Thiel took a half a million dollars and turned it into a billion dollars using the exact same techniques we’re using inside the industrial public. He met a CEO, his name was Zuckerberg. He pitched him the deal and he said, okay, I’ll give you a half a million dollars. Mark went public and sold the shares to people like you. Well, what happened to Peter? Well, he exited and got a 2300 extra turn. The wealthy invest in early stage companies, folks. The public markets are for suckers. It’s a rigged game. By the way, this happens in crypto as well. It’s called pre-sale tokens. This is Solana.

40:33 Brian Rose: Does anybody know this chain? They sold pre-sale tokens for four cents and you can see the date on there, April 5th, 2018. Look at Solana today, folks. That thing’s up over 1000X. The media and Wall Street and all these hype people get you to buy the top. Meanwhile, they put their clients in at the bottom and they use you for liquidity to make their clients rich. You can play this same game. You just have to have the financial education and the deal flow, that’s it.

41:02 Ben Habib: A very closely aligned, and people chuck it back at me now. I said in, I think, May 2019 that I couldn’t be with UKIP because Tommy Robinson is there and so I’ve been on this, my own journey and I think the political, my calling out his incarceration as a politically motivated imprisonment I think resonated no doubt with Tommy Robinson, I think he saw at that point that even though I hadn’t been, I don’t need to be an apologist for Tommy Robinson or any other individual in politics. The people I need to be an apologist for, the British people. And Tommy Robinson’s incarceration was a manifestation of how this country has gone wrong and therefore it was worth calling it out because the British people would benefit from me calling that out. And Tommy Robinson could see, I think at that point, that I was brave enough to identify the issue or sensible enough to identify the issue and then brave enough to call it out. And so I think, you know, I came probably on his radar at that point. And then when

42:12 Ben Habib: I set up a new political party, I was in touch with the number of people who he knows, Tommy Robinson knows and I know, and perfectly good people, very brainy people, some superb people who now are on Advance UK’s College, in Advance UK’s College. And so, you know, we sort of came to know more of each other through that way. And then Tommy Robinson, who by the way does not want to be a politician, he said that publicly and he said that to me privately.

42:42 Brian Rose: But that could change.

42:43 Ben Habib: What? That could change. That could change, of course that could change. But he said he joined the party, then he advocated for the party, and he’s one of 35,000 members. But obviously I’m delighted that he’s joined the party and I’m delighted that he supports the party, as I am I that Elon Musk endorses the party. Now there will be people who don’t like either Tommy Robinson or Elon Musk, but what I say to them is it’s not about Tommy Robinson or Elon Musk. It’s about identifying, as I’ve said repeatedly in this interview now, it’s about identifying the issues which are challenging the United Kingdom, calling them out bravely and then finding solutions and making the case for those solutions so that the United Kingdom, so the people who are concerned about the United Kingdom have a voice and so that we can actually settle the UK.

43:32 Brian Rose: Right, you’re very principled in that sense.

43:34 Ben Habib: It’s absolutely got to be the way.

43:36 Brian Rose: Yeah, you’ve seen the bastardization of that in reform and that was clearly not okay with you and that’s why you left. It’s not like you need to call everything the way the principles are. So if Tommy’s been wrong in political persecution, no matter how you feel about him, you have to call that out.

43:51 Ben Habib: You’ve got to call it out. And maybe there was a time 30 or 40 years ago to be a career politician and go this way and that way, because fundamentally the UK was in a safe place. You know, all you were doing in the political landscape was one or two degrees of marginal correction required here or there. And the UK could tolerate bad politicians. We’re not there now. As I said, you know, the threats facing the country of a nature that may set us aside, set our existence aside. It may not come through war, like it threatened us in 1939, but the threats are very, very significant.

44:30 Ben Habib: And we could end up like Venezuela in five seconds. Let me tell you, the economic policy, I’m sure you know this as a finance guy, the economic policies being pursued by Rachel Reeves could render the UK Venezuela. We don’t want to be there. We’ve got to stop this stupidity. We’ve got to start deregulating, getting rid of net zero, cutting taxes, liberating British working class, liberating the middle classes, putting aspiration back into society, promoting our small and medium-sized businesses. None of this is being done by the Labour Party. And sadly, none of that was done by the Conservative Party either, who practiced the same basic political economic management as the Labour Party, not just simply just not as extreme as the Labour Party.

45:13 Ben Habib: But we need to go in the opposite direction. We need a revolution to save the country.

45:19 Brian Rose: And when you look across the pond, you see two things. You see Mamadami about to take over New York City with socialist slash communist policies that sound a little bit like maybe what Reeves is proposing with potential wealth taxes, et cetera. And then you have Donald Trump in office who seems to be doing the complete opposite of that. You have these two kind of dichotomies over there. What are the chances that the UK can take either one of those paths?

45:45 Ben Habib: So on our current trajectory, there’s no hope of a Trumpian kind of path. But what I’m really hoping for is a few things. I’m hoping that the center of gravity of acceptable political discourse continues to move in favor of a sovereign, proud, prosperous United Kingdom. And I’m hoping also that we get advance presidency or at least of that ideology in the US in 2028 because come our general election, which I think is more likely to be in 2029 than in any other year, come that general election, We need, we will need the protection. The United Kingdom will need the protection of the United States if we make the determined move back to a nation state, because the EU is gonna cut out rough with us.

46:34 Ben Habib: The international community is not gonna like it. The vested interest in all the supernational institutions will be against the UK as it tries to preserve itself, as it implements policies to preserve itself. It won’t like it. the international organism will hate it. So we will need a patrician protective blanket of the United States. Sadly, Trump has come four years too early for an Advance UK government. One thing I will say, if I may, is that whether or not Advance UK forms the next government, the next government that is formed in the United Kingdom will be a pro-British government. It just depends on, of that I’m 100% certain, because there’s no way reform, the Conservative Party in advance will allow another period of extreme hard left Labour Party governance and.

47:31 Brian Rose: You think they’re done?

47:32 Ben Habib: They’re done, oh my God, they’re so done.

47:34 Brian Rose: They’ve got four years left?

47:36 Ben Habib: They were done by October.

47:39 Brian Rose: I know, but four years is a long time.

47:41 Ben Habib: Yeah, no, they can’t come back. Okay. They can’t come, come on, after the UTK march, he’s still calling them far right. He doesn’t get it. He needed to pivot. He needs to pivot hard.

47:53 Brian Rose: He can do a lot of damage in four years.

47:55 Ben Habib: They can do a lot of damage, but they’re not gonna come right. They can do more damage, and we’ll put the damage right. The next government can put the damage right. And what advance UK will do if it doesn’t form the next government? And by the way, there’s every chance we could form the next government. Okay. I know that sounds, I know that sounds absurd.

48:12 Brian Rose: I want you to take me on the path of how that happens.

48:14 Ben Habib: Yeah, okay. So well, I’ll take you now.

48:16 Brian Rose: Well, you have some impressive stats. You went on for 68 days, you generated 30,000 members. I think that’s a record-breaking achievement.

48:23 Ben Habib: You took reform five years to get 30,000 members. That’s what they had at the beginning of the general election, 2024.

48:29 Brian Rose: All right, you put 100,000 pounds so far in the party, and based on what I spent for mayor of London, you know, that’s cheap, you know, so far. But I mean, I guess there’s probably more to come. Two reform candidates announced they’re going to defect to the UK, the advance UK. Tell me if I’m wrong there.

48:44 Ben Habib: We’ve had lots of reform candidates

48:46 Brian Rose: people already defect already okay so you’ve started off with a bang yeah and then Tommy endorsing came right after that and obviously this incredible March and I’m assuming you’re seeing lots of inbound and yeah I’ve seen lots of it

49:00 Ben Habib: inbound is in terms of criticism and attacks you mean yeah and people

49:04 Brian Rose: signing up and wanting to support yeah okay and we have the Elon factor and again I want to hear the path to advance in the next government but let’s talk about the Elon factor really quickly first of all why does Elon care so much about Britain and British politics. I know he identifies with some British heritage via South Africa, of course. I know he cares about the world. I know he cares about the woke mine virus, which he calls it, but enough to be as invested as he is here, you know, to help pay for Tommy’s legal bills, to you know, support you. Why does he care so much? So you have to ask Elon that

49:40 Ben Habib: question. But the impression I have in the 20-minute conversation I had with him is that a couple of things. He recognises, like I do, that Western civilisation is facing existential threat and he has a love of the United Kingdom in a way that I think many millions of people right across the globe have. There is a love of the old UK, the stable UK. Nothing dramatic ever happened in the UK. You could always rely on the United Kingdom to be on the right side of geopolitics. It was basically a force for good. You know, we fought Nazi Germany for two years before the Americans even decided to get involved. We had the same issue with World War I. So many of our former colonies joined the Commonwealth instantly, not because we forced them to, but because they loved the United Kingdom.

50:36 Ben Habib: The British Empire, for whatever, the what do you call it?

50:41 Brian Rose: The wine virus.

50:42 Ben Habib: Yeah, yeah. In fact, they hate the British Empire, but the British Empire was a fantastic force for good in many, many ways. And I’m a product, in some ways, of that empire.

50:53 Brian Rose: In many ways.

50:54 Ben Habib: In many ways. And so, Musk’s, I think, sees that. And if you want a stable United States of America, it is very helpful that the mother of modern democracy, the United Kingdom, this bastion of former stability, finds itself, that it finds itself again. We need the UK back.

51:14 Brian Rose: Yeah, it’s a foothold, and it’s geopolitically very significant for Europe. And the Americans, deep down inside, probably on a subconscious level, feel the same way about the British Empire. They might not know it. They don’t know what the Commonwealth is. But when they see Britain falter, something inside them knows that we are…

51:33 Ben Habib: Yeah, they strayed a little bit at the beginning of the 19th century, siding with the French against us. But, I mean, they could still be a British colony if they chose. True, true, true. I thought I’d be happy to take them back.

51:44 Brian Rose: I don’t know, that’s gonna work. We’ll see if Trump says that.

51:47 Ben Habib: That’s a joke, by the way.

51:48 Brian Rose: Yes, I know. And so, all right, and also how important has Elon’s liberation of X been as well? I think it’s huge.

51:58 Ben Habib: People say to me, do you want Elon’s money? And I would never ask Elon for money. I think that would be churlish and wrong. If he offered it, of course, you know, we would look at it. But the endorsement is massive. There are 536 million people on X. 225 million of them follow Elon. So if he retweets, or reposts rather, something that I’ve posted, a couple of hundred million people have seen it. That’s huge.

52:27 Brian Rose: And without him, we might not even be having these conversations. And I know this because we were taken off of all the social platforms, and if it wasn’t for X, you would not see Google recently saying they’re gonna reverse accounts. You wouldn’t see Zuckerberg of Facebook taking out the fact checkers a year ago. You wouldn’t see any of that without what Elon did with X. We would be in a pretty dark place for freedom of speech, I believe.

52:54 Ben Habib: I don’t think they wouldn’t have a Trump presidency if you hadn’t taken over X. I think it’s been a relief. It’s been a valve for nation states across Western civilization to find themselves back. And so I’m obviously thrilled to have his support and I’m pleased that he sees that Advance UK is not a weak source.

53:17 Brian Rose: That’s what he called Farage, weak sauce. Why didn’t he like Farage? He got the same vibe that you did?

53:23 Ben Habib: He must have done.

53:24 Brian Rose: Okay, basically the same thing.

53:25 Ben Habib: But let me just take you on the journey why Advance UK stands a really good chance. Show me. I haven’t taken you on that term.

53:31 Brian Rose: You’ve got four years.

53:32 Ben Habib: How do you get there? So when I joined reform, reform was polling at 6% in March, 2023. By the general election, we were polling at 16%. We took it 10% up in the polls in a year. The British people are looking. And the British people now are also seeing reform is not the answer. There have been many polls where they have none of the above as one of the options. And even in polls where reform is featured alongside none of the above, none of the above is the majority vote. People recognize that there’s an issue. Now the challenge we’ve got, we’ve got a number of challenges.

54:10 Ben Habib: Like you, the minute I launched Advance, I was taken off air by GB News, I’ve been taken off air by talk, I was on GB News twice a week, maybe three times a week, I was on talk virtually every day, you know, I did a stint, if not every day, certainly every other day, and I was stopped like that.

54:30 Brian Rose: How does that happen?

54:31 Ben Habib: I’ve got no idea. Well, with GB News, I’ve got a clearer idea because Farage is an asset for them. You know, he’s obviously influential at a senior level.

54:41 Brian Rose: And their owner is an active supporter of one.

54:43 Ben Habib: Of reform. Right. But what I would say to the owners, and I suspect GB News wants to be able to say they created the next prime minister. You know, that’s what some people’s view is, and that could be what they want. But if GB News really stands for the United Kingdom, I would urge the management at GB News, and maybe this clip can be sent to them, I would urge them to look at the dangers we face as a country, they set up GB News because they recognize the danger, and then look closely at what Farage is saying and doing, particularly the people he’s taking into the party, from across the putrid pool that has got us into this problem in the first place.

55:23 Ben Habib: And recognize that’s not the answer and give me a voice. Let me come on GB News and discredit myself by what I say. Don’t try and discredit me by taking me off. And I say the same to talk. Talk is slightly less obvious, but I’m gonna reveal it now because I’ve given talk an opportunity to come true on it. I received a text on the 5th of September at 8 p.m. from a presenter who is on talk, 8.20 p.m. on the 5th of September, obviously having had a few drinks, saying that you’re a narcissist, you’re damaging reform, reform’s the only answer, talk have banned you.

56:04 Ben Habib: Talk then went public. When I said I’ve been banned by talk, they went public and said, no, you’re not banned. But I have a set of texts from a presenter at talk saying I’m banned and saying Farage is the only way forward. And that’s not open debate. That is not, we’re not gonna get to the right answer by shutting me down. I haven’t gone on talk or GB News and been misogynist or homophobic or racist, none of that. But yet, they’ve shut me down then. And that is cynical politics. That’s precisely what they accuse the BBC of doing.

56:40 Brian Rose: Isn’t that antithetical to a news organization to ban you? Are they supposed to be objective?

56:46 Ben Habib: I’ve been on Time’s Radio more often than I’ve been on Talk in the last… I haven’t been on Talk since the 1st of August. I haven’t been… I have not been on GB News since the 30th of June, not once.

56:56 Brian Rose: And Talk will tell you they’re not having you on because Advance is a party that is never polled and therefore they do not have to have you on.

57:03 Ben Habib: Well, I mean, I wasn’t even part of a party before and I was on, you know, virtually every day. No, it’s because they want to control the political discourse. But I’m going to… I have reached over Talk’s head. We have reached over their heads, we’ve reached over the heads of GB News. We’re on the map. They can’t stop us. We are coming. We’ve applied to the electoral.

57:24 Brian Rose: They’re censoring you. They’re censoring you. The people that were being censored are now censoring you. And now the right is censoring. Where they’re always complaining, it’s the left that’s censoring.

57:33 Ben Habib: So you know they’re not the solution then?

57:36 Brian Rose: Definitely not. Very well said, Ben. The censors are never on the right side of history. Period.

57:44 Ben Habib: Yeah. They need to wake up and they need to get me back on and be honest about it. And I hold no grudges, I’ll go back on because I need to get to speak to the people.

57:55 Brian Rose: It’s pretty alarming that something like that happened. You have, I think you have an event coming up in the north tomorrow that originally was being blocked. I think it’s back on.

58:05 Ben Habib: Yeah, so we booked the Crowne Plaza Hotel about a month ago and I could see, we weren’t gonna launch the party until we could see that we’d reached our self-imposed hurdle of 30,000 members. I needed to know that there was demand for a party, not just in my head, but tangible demand. So we got to 30,000 members, and as I saw that we were getting there, we organized the launch for tomorrow. We booked the Crowne Plaza Hotel. I was at pains to make sure the Crowne Plaza knew that we were a political party and that they wouldn’t shut us down at the last minute. And then, two or three days ago, I got a call from our northeast chap, former reformer, who’s joined us, and he said, he’s just had a call from Crowne Plaza, and they’ve canceled, and we paid upfront.

58:51 Ben Habib: We paid everything, we put it in writing, we directed them to our website, check us out, et cetera. They canceled, and I thought, oh God, what’s happened? And so I called the manager at the Crowne Plaza Hotel, and I was about to give him, you know, the best of my anger.

59:13 Brian Rose: The Habib treatment.

59:13 Ben Habib: The Habib sort of upset treatment. But he spoke and I let him speak. And he was shaken. His voice was broken. And he had had threat after threat after threat. And he said, look, I just can’t do it.

59:27 Brian Rose: An anonymous threat.

59:29 Ben Habib: No, people had been calling him up and saying, we’re going to do this and do that.

59:33 Brian Rose: Reform people.

59:34 Ben Habib: I don’t know. I don’t know who it was. And he said, I just can’t do it. And I believed him, because you know how you can sense in someone’s voice that he was troubled. So I don’t blame the Crowne Plaza, but I do blame the people who threatened the Crowne Plaza Hotel. And I do blame people like Kim McGinnis, who’s the Labour mayor of Northeast, and Labour councillors who then went on air saying Crowne Plaza were right.

1:01:00 Ben Habib: To cancel the event on health and safety grounds, they didn’t explain that the health and safety grounds were because Crowne Plaza had been physically threatened. They just said, and again they used the Voldemort-Tommy Robinson line, you know, the part, Tommy Robinson’s party has been cancelled on health and safety grounds, as if we are creating health and safety issues. We’re not the ones creating the health and safety issues, it’s those threatening. But we rang around a lot on social media, not social media, we rang all the venues in Newcastle, and we eventually got a venue, and so a brave people who are prepared to put free speech in front of perhaps their own commercial interests.

1:01:45 Ben Habib: And we’ve paid up, and they have assured us that we will be welcome tomorrow, and we’re going tomorrow, and I will be in Newcastle tomorrow. And I hope we will have, as I said in a post when we secure the booking, I go with just peace and love in my heart. That’s what politics, someone tweeted back, posted back at me, he said, what do you mean peace and love? Well, isn’t politics about peace and love? Ultimately, that’s what we want to deliver, isn’t it? Prosperity, peace and love. If you’ve done your job, that’s what you want to deliver. So I go to Newcastle with love in my heart for the Geordies, with love in my heart for the North East, with love in my heart for the British people.

1:02:24 Ben Habib: And I will make my case to my membership tomorrow, of which I think over 400 are turning up, not withstanding the shutdown. I’ve been inundated with emails and texts of support. And we will talk boldly as our party, and if someone wishes to attack us, we will not respond. And if they wish to damage us and physically impair us or kill us, go ahead, do it. You’ll make Advance UK.

1:02:49 Brian Rose: You’re channeling Gandhi there.

1:02:50 Ben Habib: Well, I’m not gonna respond physically. I’m gonna go, as I say, in peace. If they wish to be violent, on their heads, be it.

1:02:59 Brian Rose: I don’t think a politician has ever said the words peace and love in the same sentence before, in British history.

1:03:05 Ben Habib: Isn’t that right?

1:03:06 Brian Rose: But you’re right. I guess that is what politics is about.

1:03:08 Ben Habib: Isn’t it about that?

1:03:09 Brian Rose: Giving people that feeling of safety and peace

1:03:13 Ben Habib: and that they’re government. Yeah, we all get angry. We all are in politics because we’re angry, but we’re angry because peace and love is not being delivered.

1:03:19 Brian Rose: Correct.

1:03:20 Ben Habib: And so, you know, that’s what our mission is.

1:03:24 Brian Rose: I would have never expected you to say that. And so the next four years, are you growing the party into where you take the general election in 29?

1:03:35 Ben Habib: So I would be surprised if we don’t do very well in the polls.

1:03:41 Brian Rose: Okay, because people are craving something else.

1:03:43 Ben Habib: People are craving something else.

1:03:44 Brian Rose: So in a weird way reform might have helped this because people saw something different and then they found out that by supporting something different that was a viable option because it wasn’t before with the two party system. Now they see it and then they say, but this isn’t the iteration we want. We want what Ben’s talking about. So you use that momentum and give them what they really want.

1:04:04 Ben Habib: Absolutely.

1:04:05 Brian Rose: And you think there is a path to that over the next four years.

1:04:09 Ben Habib: I think so. I think we will do much better than people think. I think there’s a more than sporting chance that reform will implode because it is now infected with characters from opposite pole, opposite ends of the political spectrum. You know, you’ve got people who are gonna find each other, find themselves completely at odds with each other in the party, because he’s taken on labor, Lib Dem. He took on someone who’s apparently part of the Fabian Society the other day, a labor counselor from Stevenage or something. He is absolutely in the pursuit of being all things to all people. He’s nothing to anyone. And so there’s a sporting chance reform will collapse.

1:04:52 Ben Habib: And what mustn’t happen is that conservatives then become the only option. Advance has to be there.

1:05:00 Brian Rose: You supported the conservatives back in the day. Do you think they will ever change and come back?

1:05:07 Ben Habib: At the moment, what I hear about the conservative party is that they are still in the grip of this liberal global order lot, that Michael Gove, Dougie Smith, if you know who I mean, these people who are part of that infected pool, they are still in the grip of, they still grip the Conservative Party. Kemi has said a few things that are ostensibly to the right of Farage, but that’s not difficult nowadays. Robert Jenrick has said many things that are more bold and more promising than what comes out of Farage’s mouth. But you have to wonder about the organism that is the Conservative Party. Is this smoke and mirrors that they’re now espousing to garner your support and they’ll go back to being that liberal globalist kind of party if they win office, or is this gonna be a real reinvention of the Conservative Party?

1:06:01 Ben Habib: If the Conservative Party, by the way, reinvents itself, if it becomes a genuine Conservative Party and it gets on people who are evidently part of what we believe in, great. We’re done, right?

1:06:18 Brian Rose: You just want the solution.

1:06:19 Ben Habib: I want the solution, right.

1:06:20 Brian Rose: Talk to me about freedom of speech because it doesn’t exist very well right now in the United Kingdom. And people all around the world now point to this place and I get messages all the time saying Brian, be careful about what you post on social media, look at this happening, look at this happening. We’re not the shining bastion of free speech and you’ve spoken about it many, many times here. How important is it for people to know that that must be fought for in this country? And are people resonating with you when you talk about that?

1:06:50 Ben Habib: So, I can only go on the anecdotal evidence I have, but the best anecdotal evidence was the Unite the Kingdom march, you know, which was a free speech march. The rally was a free speech rally. That’s what it was labeled. And people get it. And I think people do see free speech and democracy is synonymous and people want democracy.

1:07:12 Brian Rose: How was that march based on what you expected versus what you saw? And what did you see that day when you went home that night and you called a friend or said something to someone. You know what I saw today? I saw this happen and that was incredible and it surprised me a little bit but it also confirmed I’m on the right path. I wonder if you could share a couple details of that day because it wasn’t obvious what was gonna happen, okay? And Tommy had been here a couple weeks earlier and he was out there pleading for people and he really wanted to show the world that we could show up, not as hooligans and not as what you think we are.

1:07:43 Ben Habib: See, he wants peace and love.

1:07:45 Brian Rose: Of course he does. Yes, he does.

1:07:47 Ben Habib: That’s what we all want, yeah. So I went to that march, not knowing what, the rally. I called it a rally rather than a march because everyone congregated in a particular place, or tried to congregate. There were far too many people to be able to make it. But I didn’t know what to expect. I’ve spoken to millions of people, but I’ve always done it through a lens. I’ve never had to actually face people. And facing people can be quite scary because you get feedback straight away if they don’t like what you’re saying. And then you end up going, oh my goodness, you know, I’m in trouble here.

1:08:21 Ben Habib: And so I didn’t know what to expect. I’d never spoken to so many people. I didn’t know whether there was gonna be violence. I knew that there were gonna be the so-called anti-racists up the road as if I could possibly be a racist. And there were so many people, by the way, of different ethnicities in that march, in that rally. So I didn’t know, is there gonna be violence? Am I gonna make it out of this? My mother kept saying, get a stab vest. She said, Ben, are you better wear a stab vest? And my mother who was 91 initially wanted to come and I wanted to present my mother actually.

1:08:54 Ben Habib: It was this funny story. Can I digress into my mother’s story? So I was taking my mum for a coffee a few weeks before the march. And I said, mum, do you know who I mean by Tommy Robinson? And she looked very pensive and she said, Isn’t he the guy who had a squabble with Nigel Farage? And I said, yeah, yeah, they had a bit of a squabble. And she said, well, he must be a very sensible person then. So I wanted to feel mum on the stage and tell that joke, because I thought it was brilliantly put by my 91-year-old mum. And it was also her birthday and she always says she wants to be part of what I’m doing.

1:09:34 Ben Habib: But she was tired and I was a bit worried about what might happen and so on. So anyway, she didn’t go on the day. But, so I went up, slightly trepidatious. I never write my speeches, Brian. I just always just get up and speak.

1:09:48 Brian Rose: Okay, I watched and listened to your speech.

1:09:51 Ben Habib: Yeah, so, I mean I kind of know what I’m gonna say. But I was nervous and I got up and I was amazed by the cheer I got when I went on stage. And at that point I was settled. It’s a bit like, have you ever box or done any combat? Yeah, so before you go in the ring, you’ve got butterflies in your stomach. The minute you’re in the ring, you’re just on, right? So once I was on the stage, I got the roar of the crowd, and I was, then I was just a piece with myself, a piece with the people, and I spoke from the heart and said it as I saw it.

1:10:24 Ben Habib: And there was a moment of levity when people on my left interrupted, they wouldn’t let me speak by, they wanted to say Keir Starmer’s a wanker.

1:10:31 Brian Rose: Yes, yes, you addressed that, yeah.

1:10:33 Ben Habib: And I looked at them and I thought, you know, and they wouldn’t stop. So I thought, well, let’s get it out of our system. and I went with it, and I said, come on, let’s get it out of our system. Keir Starmer is, and I think that went down quite well that I’ve received from some criticism for it. But I’ll tell you what was really interesting after the march, after the rally. I got calls from friends of mine in Pakistan, who said, Ben, I’m impressed with what you’re doing. I said, you’re not upset with me? You know, you’re not upset with, you know, me being on stage with Tommy Robinson, no.

1:11:05 Ben Habib: If anyone tried to do to Pakistan what they’re trying to do to the UK, they would be absolutely dressed down. You know, if Christians came to Pakistan and said we want to turn this into a Christian country now and you better protect us and give us lots of churches and do this and do that, we’d go, what are you talking about? This is a Muslim country, sod off. They get it. People get it across the globe, people get it.

1:11:31 Brian Rose: That’s interesting, because a lot of people wouldn’t think that.

1:11:33 Ben Habib: No, but they get it. I also have friends in Pakistani law enforcement And I’ve had discussions with them about the rape gangs. And they say to me, it’s your own bloody problem. We have a treaty. Pakistan, they say, has a treaty with the United Kingdom called the Pakistan Prisoner Transfer Treaty, pursuant to which Pakistanis who’ve committed misdemeanors in the UK can be deported to Pakistan. Never once has that treaty been invoked. It’s been in place since 2018. Never once has it been invoked. And they say to me, the reason it hasn’t been invoked is because you put the criminal’s interests ahead of the victim’s interest.

1:12:13 Ben Habib: How are you going to expect a criminal justice system to work if you protect the criminals? And at the heart of the Pakistani rape gangs, at the heart of the rape gangs, is the protective blanket our institutions have put round, not just the rapists initially, though they have now faced trial, but all the component institutions that turned a blind eye to it, the component culpable through being a component part of it if you’re with me, you know, the police, social services, local community centers, orphanages where some of these, I don’t know if you call them orphanages, but where children who have without parents, you know, are being cared for, they were being prostituted out of these homes by the people who were in charge of their care.

1:13:06 Ben Habib: Charges haven’t been brought. We have a criminal justice system that favors the criminals. So how are we going to protect our victims? These underage white girls were thrown under a bus. And Pakistani law enforcement sees that. Our own law enforcement doesn’t see it. So when they see me speaking for the United Kingdom at the United Kingdom march, they get it.

1:13:34 Brian Rose: I spent time in the Emirates and my friends there say Brian Islam’s not the problem because it Islam works here and so they get upset when people point to figure it Islam and they say that’s the problem in Britain but I that’s not

1:13:52 Ben Habib: really what you’re saying so there are two I think there are two the United Arab Emirates for example recognizes the challenges Islam poses the United Arab Emirates has a very tight grip, but we don’t have a tight grip in this country. At least until Tony Blair got hold of it, we had a very delicate, advanced, subtle, unwritten constitution which could only survive if it was delicately handled and protected by those that are in charge of guiding it through to future generations. It’s not suitable for a muscular ideology which is given protection. And the form of Islam, I’m afraid, that is practiced in the United Kingdom, significantly practiced, I’m not saying holy practiced, but significantly practiced, is of a very fundamentalist Wahhabi form of Islam, if you know what I mean.

1:14:53 Ben Habib: And the UAE has proscribed Muslim groups in the UK that were originated in the UK and that are accepted in the UK. You can look it up. There are about a dozen odd Muslim groups that the UAE proscribes and we allow to practise in our own country. And we haven’t fully understood what we’re dealing with. There is a challenge at the heart of Islam. There is a challenge at the heart of Islam, which is that the Quran is the word of God as transcribed by the Prophet Muhammad, dictated to him by the angel Gabriel. And because it is the word of God, it is perfect and incapable of improvement.

1:15:41 Ben Habib: And therefore, it is incapable of being debated. It is not open to challenge. And it is that fundamental inclination not to allow the Quran to be challenged, that is anti-free speech, that makes that fundamentalist form of Islam very difficult for that subtle open democracy that we have. And then when you combine our open, subtle democracy, sensitive democracy with the protective blanket we give ethnic minorities and minority religious beliefs, you know, diversity, equity, and inclusion, progressive discrimination is what we practice. When you protect it, then of course it’s very muscular compared to us. We’re not allowed to challenge it and now we’re bringing in the Islamophobia laws so we won’t be able to have a debate about it.

1:16:35 Ben Habib: And that is antithetical to our system. And so whilst the UAE and Saudi, even Saudi now is coming to grips with fundamentalism. It started in Saudi and they’re coming, you know, getting a grip of it. They can deal with it because they have a very robust political system. We don’t have a robust political system.

1:17:01 Brian Rose: Right, okay, understood. And so to move forward and do everything you wanna do, what do you do about the second and third generation very dominant Muslim communities throughout? How do you integrate them? Because you have to do that ultimately, right? The immigrants, maybe you can throw out and the people on the boat you can send back and the DEI you can reverse. maybe a la Trump and try to push back. What do you do with the people that are not integrating or some of the accusations you make of some of those communities? How is that way forward?

1:17:31 Ben Habib: So if we have to make it clear, we have to make it clear and reinforce the Christian constitutional framework of the United Kingdom. Starmer wants to remove the bishops from the House of Lords. You might be aware of that. He wants to remove the bishops because he wants to stop. He wants this country to cease to be a Christian country. He wants this to be a multi-faith country, multiculturalism. That’s what he buys into. Because he doesn’t buy into the nation state, the history of this country and so on. He’s part of that global order. The easiest way to give effect to the global order is to embrace mass migration and multiculturalism because it does away with a sense of belonging.

1:18:13 Ben Habib: It does away with homogeneous integrated society. He likes that. We have to reverse all of that, so we have to repeal the Equalities Act, we have to repeal all the regulations which go around the Equalities Act. We need to repeal the Human Rights Act, which doesn’t preserve human rights, but serves to protect criminals and set aside British citizenship. We already had human rights in this country, we’ve had human rights in this country for longer than any other country in the world, and people’s human rights were protected through the entire body of our law. We didn’t need a specific act to do it. We don’t need the European Convention to do it.

1:18:54 Ben Habib: We can set all that aside. We need to set all of it aside, go back to where we were in 1996. And we need to make it clear to people who are in this country that if you’re here and you’re not a British citizen and you don’t like our Christian constitution, our Christian and roots and our imperial history. And if you think Winston Churchill was a white supremacist, you’re welcome to leave the country. We’re not holding you here against your will. But if you are going to be here, if you are going to be here, then you have to recognize and accept all of that.

1:19:31 Ben Habib: And I’m afraid the time also has come, Brian, for us to be less shy about who we are. When I grew up, even in the 1980s and when I went to school from 1979 to 1984 to rugby in the Midlands, even then, we never banged the drum for the country. We took the country for granted. We all had a pride in the Union flag. I’ve had a pride in that flag all my life. Every time I look at that flag, it does something inside me. And I don’t know if it does the same to you, but it does it to me. Maybe the Stars and Stripes do it for you.

1:20:12 Brian Rose: They both do.

1:20:12 Ben Habib: Yeah, they both do. And so you know what I mean. Yes.

1:21:04 Ben Habib: And we just took that for granted. And it was a mistake to take it for granted. And we are now going to have to be more vocal about it. There are some like Dr. Starkey who say, no, it’s not British to be banging the drum for Britishness. But I think I’m afraid where we’ve reached a point now, this comes back to your thing about drastic measures, not that this is hugely drastic, but I think we need to sing the national anthem at schools. We need to sing rule Britannia at schools. We need to sing Jerusalem in schools. We need to sing the flower of Scotland in Scotland.

1:21:40 Ben Habib: We need to reacquaint ourselves with our Christian, Christian national roots. One of the reasons I think that people try to claim that this is a racist flag, is because it’s overtly a Christian flag.

1:21:55 Brian Rose: Because of the St. George’s Cross.

1:21:57 Ben Habib: St. George’s Cross, the saltire of St. Patrick, and the saltire of St. Andrews. They’re all our saints. And so people, it’s a Christian flag. So if you stand against Christianity, you won’t like that flag. It’s an affront to you. So we’ve got to be much more forceful of who we are, and I think we’ve got to teach correctly that the wealth of this country wasn’t as a result of the slave trade, but as a result of us being one of the originators of the agrarian revolution, of being great pioneers, being intrepid in the way that we went across the globe, having a form of law that actually people we visited wish to adopt and has been adopted wholesale across the globe.

1:22:43 Ben Habib: that we were the significant part of the Industrial Revolution, that we had some of the best scientists. And all of that, by the way, came through freedom of speech, freedom of thought and the ability to express that freedom of thought. And we will be a lesser society, we’ll be economically hollowed out if we lose touch with all of that. So we need to be much more self-confident in our history, in our pride, in our nation. And we need to teach that to our children. We need to reverse the long march of the Marxist teachers through our institutions and teach children history the way I was taught it.

1:23:23 Brian Rose: And that’s what advance is gonna do.

1:23:25 Ben Habib: Advance is gonna do all of that. And I don’t think it’s too late. I really don’t think it’s too late.

1:23:29 Brian Rose: I don’t think so either, but it’s close.

1:23:32 Ben Habib: It’s close. It’s close. And what I want to avoid, what we must avoid, is leaving it so late that the measures become drastic. Right. Too drastic. We want to do it through peace and love.

1:23:42 Brian Rose: Right, so violence doesn’t come in.

1:23:44 Ben Habib: Yeah, I don’t want violence. No one benefits from violence. Then the danger there, Brian, is that the means will defeat the end. You will never be able to find that wonderful settled place that was the United Kingdom if you use violence to try and get there.

1:24:01 Brian Rose: Okay, okay. But when a million people are ignored when they march by the politicians, then if they continue to ignore that, then that does result in some type of violence.

1:24:14 Ben Habib: It may.

1:24:15 Brian Rose: And that’s why you need to give, you need to listen, you need to give them a voice. You do. You need to find out. I think you said that when you first came here, it’s like they have a democratic mandate if people show up in that way, in that force, by a definition they have a democratic mandate. And you’re right, you have to listen to those people because that’s a significant portion of your voters. Absolutely. And when you ignore them, you’re just asking for trouble.

1:24:42 Ben Habib: You’re asking for trouble. And then you will have to build a nine foot tall metal fence outside parliament.

1:24:48 Brian Rose: Yeah, you’re kicking the can down the road. And one of my mentors once said there’s never an easy time to make a hard decision. And they’re just ignoring, ignoring, ignoring, because it’s not convenient to talk about these things.

1:24:59 Ben Habib: They need to get a grip quickly.

1:25:01 Brian Rose: Okay. And you will promote the flag. And the flag is now being flown everywhere. Which is great. And that’s great because it’s people believing in this country again and believing in the values that makes this place British.

1:25:12 Ben Habib: You know, Starmer said he had to reclaim the flag from the far right. The flag has never been far right. The flag belongs to the British people, or the English people if it’s St. George. It’s never been far. The flag cannot be divisive. How can our flag be divisive?

1:25:29 Brian Rose: I’m with you, I’m with you. It’s just another thing that is weaponized by the left. They can almost weaponize anything, and then they chose something not as benign but as something that would seem as obviously representing us as a flag.

1:25:47 Ben Habib: You know, our national anthem, our national anthem is a Christian hymn, God Save the King. It’s Christian. We’ve got to get a grip and remind ourselves who we are.

1:25:59 Brian Rose: We have four more years of labor. Today, Mr. Starmer asked for mandatory digital IDs. There’s a playbook here of this globalist playbook you’re talking about. are executing it almost step by step. What do people do?

1:26:13 Ben Habib: We’re gonna revoke all of that. Okay. Every single thing, I’m gonna say this again and again and again between now and 2029, so that everyone is on notice. If an Advance UK forms a government or is part of a government, we will revoke everything that Stalmer has done. Indeed, our aim is to revoke everything that any government’s done since 1997. Okay, pretty much.

1:26:39 Brian Rose: Okay, okay. And do we have to resist it in the meantime? Because it’s hard to undo digital ID, isn’t it?

1:26:45 Ben Habib: You can undo, we’re gonna undo this. We’re gonna undo this stuff.

1:26:49 Brian Rose: Okay. What do you make of Trump? You obviously said it’s important that we have that party in the White House around 29, because that special relationship is important to maybe get Britain right up, right?

1:27:03 Ben Habib: I mean, Biden was terrible for us because he gave cover for all this crap. That’s going on and he did no favors for the UK. He did no favors. He threw Northern Ireland under a bus, right? You know, he wanted he bought that narrative or he perpetrated the narrative That there would be violence on the island of Ireland if the United Kingdom was whole That we had to divide ourselves by putting a border down the Irish Sea to prevent violence Well that is giving into the threat of violence again I go to Newcastle in peace, but I’m not going to give in to the threat of violence.

1:27:38 Ben Habib: I go there because they’re threatening me, and I’m going there because I was going to go there. But they’re not going to stop me from going there because of the threat of violence. And we gave in to the threat of violence when we put a border down the Irish Sea. That’s how far we’ve fallen. You know, the United Kingdom technically doesn’t even exist at the moment. There is a border down the Irish Sea. The Acts of Union, Article 6 of the Acts of Union, which state clearly that every part of the United Kingdom must be on an equal footing with every other part of the United Kingdom and free to trade with every other part of the United Kingdom in an equal way and no sovereign has the right to sign an international treaty which sets that aside.

1:28:23 Ben Habib: That is Article 6 of the Acts of Union written in 1800 and we’ve set it aside through an international treaty. We’re gonna revoke that international treaty. The EU is going to hate it. They’re going to have to wear it and that’s why we need

1:28:40 Brian Rose: someone like Vance as president. And Trump is good friends with Farage but he changes his mind sometimes. Let’s see what happens. Do you miss being a property developer sometimes and think maybe I’d go back to the old days Or is this really your calling? Will you, is this your whole life built to do this job? Do you ever feel that way?

1:29:09 Ben Habib: I have no political ambitions, I swear that. I know all politicians say they don’t have, I swear I don’t have any political ambitions. I’m 60 years old, I’ve made enough money for me to live very comfortably for the rest of my life. My brother, who loves this country, who has also made a lot of money, has left. Lots of people of my brother’s peer group and my own peer group have left because of what’s going on in this country. They’re in Milan, they’re in Dubai, some are in Abu Dhabi, some have gone to Portugal. Many of them are calling me and saying they want to come back.

1:29:46 Ben Habib: Can they support Advance UK? What can we do to help them come back to the UK? It is a chalice I hold at the moment, and I will hold it, dear, and I will keep swinging. I’m going to mix metaphors here, but I’ll keep swinging that bat and I’ll stand bloodied on the battlefield until either I prevail, we prevail, or I fall on the battlefield. It is the role that has presented itself to me. It doesn’t matter to me whether I make it into government or not. What matters to me is that the next government is pro-British and stands by principle, not expediency and will deliver this country from the perils in which it finds itself.

1:30:36 Brian Rose: How can people sign up to be part of Advance UK?

1:30:39 Ben Habib: Well please sign up, because we can’t do it on our own. We need people to stand up and come behind us, all the two and a half million people who watched online and the million people. Please sign up, if we can get a million people signing up we will form the next government. And you can do it by going to www.advanceduk.org.uk. That’s www.advanceduk.org.uk. Click on the membership button. It’s only £10 until the 30th of September. It then goes to £20, which is still cheap compared to the other political parties. And you get a much better bang for your buck. You get a politically solid philosophy at the very least with Advance UK. Sign up.

1:31:18 Ben Habib: Give us your support, offer up your support to campaign, come with us on our journey, advise us on policies, come and join our college if you wish to, come and offer yourself up to be a candidate. Let’s save the country together.

1:31:32 Brian Rose: Do you have to be a registered voter?

1:31:34 Ben Habib: You have to be a British citizen and on the electoral roll.

1:31:37 Brian Rose: And on the electoral roll, okay.

1:31:38 Ben Habib: And not a member of another political party.

1:31:40 Brian Rose: Okay, gotcha. You can quit the other party and come to you.

1:31:44 Ben Habib: You’ve got to give us your support, you’ve got to marry us.

1:31:46 Brian Rose: Okay. If you get a million people, then you win the next general election.

1:31:49 Ben Habib: Oh my God, we will win. We will walk the next general election if we get it.

1:31:52 Brian Rose: That’s your slogan then.

1:31:52 Ben Habib: Yeah, a million people join. We’ll win the next election.

1:31:55 Brian Rose: 970,000 to go. If people knew that, yeah, and you got all of those people and all those eyeballs and all of that support on that September 13th rally, then this is within reach.

1:32:06 Ben Habib: We’ve walked the next election.

1:32:07 Brian Rose: Yeah. Can you imagine? You know, I’ve spoken to a lot of people over the years, Ben, but I’ve really enjoyed my time with you. You clearly are a man on a mission with real sincere purpose. And to walk away from reform means that the proof is in the pudding, right? Like you want the principles stood up for. You want people to follow those principles. You wanna bring Britain back unashamedly. Let’s bring it back. And the whole world wants it back.

1:32:39 Ben Habib: The whole world wants it back. We were loved.

1:32:41 Brian Rose: Yes, it’s an important part of the world. It’s interesting, you were talking about the accomplishments of Britain, and Trump stood up out at Windsor Castle and gave a similar brief of what all the great things the British Empire did, and he was rattling these things off, and everyone is watching and listening, and they’re captured and enraptured, and somehow then the whole world needs the UK to be on the stage as a player again, and everybody needs it.

1:33:10 Ben Habib: It needs to know we’re at peace in ourselves, and that we can be relied on as a sovereign state that will always cooperate for peace globally, but not get subsumed into the global order. There’s a difference. And that India, Pakistan, the Caribbean Islands, South America, Africa, they can all rely on British justice, British sense of fair play. We need to get back to that position.

1:33:40 Brian Rose: Yeah, well, 60, you’re just a young kid. You got plenty of room left, man, plenty of room left. Thank you so much for the time. No, thank you. It was incredible to hear, and I’m wishing you all the best on this journey.

1:33:52 Ben Habib: Thank you very much. Thank you for having me on, Brian.

1:33:53 Brian Rose: Appreciate it.

1:33:54 Ben Habib: Yeah. Thank you.