Lembit Öpik: Freedom of Speech? It’s Become a Badge of Honour to Silence the Opposition

NTD’s Lee Hall sits down with broadcaster and former member of Parliament Lembit Öpik.

Lembit talks about the state of freedom in Britain, why debate and discussion are so important, and the obstacles he’s faced in disagreeing with the mainstream climate change narrative.

If you believe in democracy you believe in the capacity of each individual voter to make an informed judgment and to make an informed judgment you have to hear all the SS in an argument coming up on British thought leaders lamit opic on the state of freedom in Britain and why

We need to stop cancel culture Britain’s in a par State when it comes to freedom of speech now it’s almost a badge of honor to silence the opposition lit talks about the difficulties of challenging the mainstream climate narrative you get cowed and you get uh threatened you get intimidated and you

Get dismissed if you challenge the arguments even though I say with unequivocal certainty that the climate Fanatics the catastrophes are 100% Wrong welcome to British thought leaders I’m Lee Hall today I’m sitting down with lamber opic broadcaster and former member of parliament lber thanks for joining us pleasure you’re probably best known for your 13 years in Parliament but since then you’ve been involved in various social issues I wanted to start

Talking with you about Freedom really what do you think about the state of freedom in Britain today I’m not sure what I am best known for but I’m not known as a Libertarian and ironically that’s the reason I got into politics I can’t stand authoritarianism I can’t understand it when people get

Squashed into Conformity just because the other side isn’t comfortable with having the argument turning to your question Britain’s in a par of State when it comes to freedom of speech now it’s almost a badge of honor to silence the opposition two examples with the green agenda you’re called a climate

Change denier if you say that you don’t think human beings are wrecking the planet now there are two things wrong with that I actually think think that the climate change deniers are the people who think that we can stop climate change I think it’s a naturally occurring process but instead we’ve got

This Holocaust illusion to people who like me think that the science just doesn’t support the climate agenda and yet even the BBC the state sponsored station has said we don’t have to have balance on this we’re not going to take the contrary view a second example would

Probably be the woker agender where uh sexual and gender politics has occupied Center Stage for a lot of the time you’ve got a man who wants to be prime minister K starm who says that 99.9% of women don’t have a penis it’s an awkward statement to begin with but secondly I

Think well how did he do that research and more than anything what does he mean by it now I used to be one of the judges on the UK transexual Awards and I have no issue with anyone’s gender but I do have an issue when British politics becomes a virtue signaling woke

Situation where it’s almost impossible to express a contrary view without being canceled what some of the big erosions of Freedom that we’ve seen in recent years you think are are real problems now there there are three really big problems I think in terms of free speech

In the UK the first one is about gender Politics the Tavistock Institute which seemed to be trying to condition people to think in a different way about gender has done in incalculable damage but seemed to be on the side of the authorities for a long time until it was

Called out by people like Amy Gallaher who’s one of the leading campaigners against that kind of thing the second example is the green agenda where the government has bought hookline and sinker a scientifically illiterate claim that carbon dioxide generated by human beings is Wrecking the climate it’s impossible due to technical things like

Logarithmic Decay and spectral absorption and so on they are very technical things but the politicians haven’t even heard of that so we’ve got this economically significant self-destruction going on on the basis of something that most people don’t even understand and the third example I think is in terms of international Affairs the

Most infamous example from when I was an MP was the fake uh justification for a war in Iraq we now know it was an illegal war no one’s gone to prison for it no one’s been prosecuted for it but one and a half million Iraqis are dead

Because of it and I think that carries on now with with how we present the Ukraine situation it’s never really presented in a holistic way wherever you stand on it you should hear both sides before you actually take a position how important is it do you think to hear the

Other side and for both sides of a story to be add it’s absolutely vital that both sides of a story and sometimes more than two sides of a story are heard why because if you believe in democracy you believe in the capacity of each individual voter to make an informed

Judgment and to make an informed judgment you have to hear all the sides in an argument if you don’t believe in democracy it’s fine you don’t really need to have a free press you don’t need to have a free debate you can cancel people who don’t go with the Zeitgeist

And there in lies a contradiction because the people who tell us that oh it’s wrong to question the climate emergency also tell us they believe in democracy you can’t have it both ways folks I find it almost impossible to get green fundamentalists to engage with me in the mediate environment because I

Think they know they’re going to lose well that tells you everything you need to know the problem with oppression is it’s normally the people with a weaker argument who are doing the oppressing do you think the public are kind of aware of the the freedoms that

Being eroded or are we the frog in the water that’s being heated and we’re not realized we’re being cooked we the frog in the water I would say that by and large the kind of things that you and I are discussing aren’t the direct purvey of the general public who are just about

Managing who are dealing with a tripling of their mortgages who are worried about their kid being bullied in school they don’t say now let’s talk about the libertarian agenda and free speech and that’s why the authoritarians get away with it it’s only when it makes a practical difference to the reasonable

Person on the Clapham Omnibus that they begin to notice give you an example most people in Britain don’t realize they’re not going to be allowed to buy a petrol engined or diesel engineed vehicle after 2030 if K starma gets elected and keeps his his idiotic promise on that once

They realize that they won’t say let’s review the environmental motivation for this they’ll simply say you want to take my car away I’m taking my vote away and that’s why there’s such a big disconnect this high moral Purpose By The Green Fanatics means nothing to most people until something is lost of course

Everyone’s paying higher energy bills because of this stupid policy but they don’t make the connection with the green agenda they make the connection with something that’s happened if they really didn’t understand that politicians are D directly responsible for essentially a tripling of energy prices they probably

Wouldn’t vote for them let’s go a bit more into this green agenda you’ve talked quite a bit about it in the media and what are your thoughts on the mainstream climate narrative there is no climate crisis climate changes has done ever since the earth was formed the atmosphere in its approximately current

State came about 2 and a half billion years ago we’ve had very warm periods about warm maybe 49 Celsius even which is a lot warmer than now very cold periods where the Earth itself has Frozen snowball Earth if you like maybe with a bit of slush on the equator

This is the normal process of the earth if carbon dioxide was a determinant that could create a runaway greenhouse situation it would have happened long ago not to get too technical about it when the dinosaurs around the atmosphere is much denser and there’s much more carbon dioxide it was warmer it wasn’t a

Lot warmer and we’ve had ice ages the big problem here is the public doesn’t realize that if carbon dioxide goes below a certain level which technically is 150 million everything dies the plants die and then we die we haven’t got a problem with carbon dioxide it’s

Our friend now my father was a nuclear physicist my grandfather was an astronomer I had my first thing published on this in around 1980 so I think I know what I’m talking about the problem here r large in terms of the oppression of free speech is I’m

Not allowed to say that in a lot of the mainstream Media or the lam stream media is often called now why because they haven’t got a response but they want to conform perhaps some of them will think they’re going to lose their funding if they don’t conform I’m liberated to say

The science as I see it and also to tell people if you’ve got a better argument Come Back to Me Explain why I’m wrong that’s the essence of free speech and it’s missing in the climate CH argument even more so you get cowed and you get uh threatened you get intimidated and

You get dismissed if you challenge the arguments even though I say with unequivocal certain that the climate Fanatics the catastrophist are 100% wrong why is that such an aversion to having a debate if these people think they’re right why they’re not happily debate it where does it come from the

Push against the discussion there are three reasons why the climate debate is so perverted in its uh abandonment of free speech first of all massive vested interest there are lots of people who are making a lot of money by creating essentially economically unviable technology to cut carbon dioxide the second reason is political

Influence where people who really didn’t have a chance of having an influence are now wagging the dog of Politics the green party’s great achievement is getting the two main parties to buy into their arguments Hook Line and Sinker and I having been a politician myself I can

See that power is a great motivator for a lot of people third reason is people who can’t be bothered to church go to church want a religion and that religion is the climate emergency this isn’t new we’ve been to seeing people walking around with the end of the world is nigh

On on their backs and on their fronts for decades and really that that’s happened long before even the birth of Jesus so we do seem to have a catastrophist mindset that there’s going to be a moment of Revelation and so forth maybe it’ll happen but it hasn’t

Happened yet uh so I think that there’s a almost a theistic reason for it as well you put all that together there’s this monolithic um slavish adherence to this belief these uh green agender items they tend to affect the pockets of the ordinary person if you look at the ulas

Charges um obviously the various n zero agenda requirements Scotland’s even Consulting on making heat pumps mandatory you were a politician for a long time you understand how all this stuff works do you think the public have been properly consulted and properly informed the public have been neither consulted nor warned more

Than informed more more warned of the consequences heat pumps just aren’t going to make your house as warm as a gas boiler or a cold fire boiler or frankly a wood burner and the changes that are being required in this incredibly authoritarian way totalitarian way uh are just being being

Imposed the public accept it to an extent because they don’t see an alternative or they haven’t until recently labor and conservative pretty much completely aligned on the same idiotic ludicrous green agenda which isn’t going to save a single life but it will cost a few lives because some

People were priest who would have otherwise survived particularly the elderly but they get away with it again because it’s a technically very complicated subject if I was to explain to you how internal combustion engine works number one you probably lose interest number two you might be a bit

Baffled about it why does compression matter what’s the four stroke cycle but you drive a car so you depend on if youve got a normal an oldfashioned car you depend on the internal combustion engine to work without necessarily needing to see how it works under the Bonnet what the government’s doing now

Is it’s messing with the engine so your engine’s going to work worse and it’s going to cost you more and as a non- mechanic you’ll notice it’s worse without maybe noticing why but they’ve got away this far because it’s a very technical subject and most people do lose interest when you start talking

About the details so what can we do I mean you’re obviously very passionate about this subject what do you feel we can do to make things better there are two things we can do one is the moral High ground and the other is the Practical campaigning reality the moral High

Ground is to engage with the people who are trying to impose all this rubbish on us and demand that they justify it they can’t and that’s where the cancellation comes uh because they simply say the science is settled the science is never settled anybody who knows about Carl

Poer who’s a great philosopher about this knows the science is never settled uh the second so we can talk about all those things that I mentioned and the the logarithmic Decay and the spectral absorption of CO2 and the main greenhouse gas which is of course water vapor people aren’t that interested in

It they more interested in who’s in the jungle and whether Nigel farage is going to be leader of the conservative party and and that sort of thing the second thing is much more practical and much more applicable if you go along with this particular agenda here are the consequences to you as an

Individual yeah you won’t Financial yeah Financial you won’t be able to buy the car you want you’ll have a car which if it’s secondhand will probably do 80 miles and you won’t be able to go and see a granny in Wales without stopping for three times

Uh and if you go along with this agenda mate you’re going to be paying three four five times more for your energy and there could be power Cuts because we won’t have enough power to keep the country going and on top of that we will give the economic keys of the world to

The countries that don’t give a damn about this or at least they don’t apply it China we’ve exported all our CO2 to China and then we buy everything back from them they’re still making CO2 when they manufacture our products that makes more sense to people and even that last

Point isn’t so important do you really look at the label on your shoe made in made in Brazil made in Britain most people don’t so it’s really when it begins to hurt people’s pockets and begins to restrict their freedoms like low traffic Z neighborhoods restrict people’s freedoms like cycle Lanes which

Jam up almost empty cycle Lanes by the way which jam up the proper traffic the meaningful economically and socially significant traffic where you’ve got two kids in the back and you taking granny to the doctors do you feel enthusiastic that we’re going to see some kind of change soon I am enthusiastic that

Things are going to change why because I’ve been campaigning on this for a decade I’ve been studying it for most of my life now people are beginning to notice that actually a hybrid vehicle may be incinerated an entire car park at loten airport why haven’t we been told the

Brand of that vehicle I think I know what it is and I think it was its 50 kilo battery that was UN inextinguishable once it started burning a known fault I think in the particular brand that meant that you had essentially a great big incendiary

Device in the middle of the car park it shut down an airport for a day probably did about 90 million pounds worth of damage that’s a pretty expensive Insurance claim if that happens again and there are fatalities people begin to think differently and this is a gr

Gruesome Prospect but it could be the damage that these decisions make that causes a change of heart in the decision makers not perhaps because they particularly care but they care about their Futures and their votes and if you can prove that we have a fatally injurious green agenda the people won’t

Tend to vote for that I wanted to talk to you a bit about wokeness and can you start by telling us you know what is wokeness and why do you think the public should be opposed to it the word work was invented about 100 years ago in the United States and it

Was a worthwhile and worthy Endeavor the idea was to be aware of so social circumstances and cultural differences and to respect them nice idea the word’s been hijacked because now if you are not a green catastrophist you’re not woke if you’re not in favor of uh unlimited

Immigration you’re a racist not woke if you dare to say that there’s a disproportionate focus on gender politics you’re not woke so it’s been it’s been weaponized by people who claim to be woke people who fly around the world in private jets telling us not to

Fly 70,000 of them going to Dubai for a conference where I bet you just about everyone flew to say that we’ve got to cut our CO2 production the problem with woke for me is that the people who are its primary practitioners aren’t actually uh walking

The talk they tell us what to do without doing it themselves Emma Thompson a actress I used to respect flew to the UK to join a climate demonstration I don’t really need to express the irony Joe Biden took a Boeing 747 one of the biggest planes in the

World all the way to Tel Aviv to hug Benjamin Netanyahu other people might have used Zoom if they were really concerned about the 150,000 kg of CO2 that his individual flight created wasn’t even a Business Jet it was a fullsize jumbo that’s where it goes wrong because the woke Advocates aren’t woke

Themselves who do you think is behind this kind of Rise of the W culture we’ve all seen it over previous decades I think there are a number of interest groups who are read pushing the work of gender back to vested interest again if you haven’t really been in an economically or politically profitable

Situation but you get the opportunity to have that control by altering the the game plan why wouldn’t you do it uh so I think there are a lot of people who’ have been on the outside who are now on the inside because they’re the woke priests

So who are the power groups there’s an economic group people who are into the the green sustainable energy agenda uh can now make money or with technology which essentially isn’t economically viable when you compare it to fossil fuel Alternatives like coal you got a political Elite who think mistakenly in

My view they’re going to G of votes by talking about this stupid green agenda and then thirdly you you’ve got zealots who genuinely believe and want to believe that human beings at the heart of the end of the world the same people who probably thought that the Universe orbited around the

Earth a few thousand years ago on top of that you’ve actually got vested interest in other countries countries that want to see the West uh masculate itself economically and that for them the greens are useful idots who I suspect they sponsor and amazingly they have inroads into decision makers

As I say laring Western countries you were an MP for 13 years you were kind of on the inside if you like these MPS when they talk about the work stuff do they really believe it would you say or is it something they’re just saying to because they think you

Will get them support most politicians don’t really embrace the work agenda but they won’t say so publicly it’s awkward because we’ve now got a media which has been so cracked by these conversations that uh A Member of Parliament or maybe even a member of the

House of Lords is loath to hand in their opportunity to be on the media by being accused of being unwoke this is totalitarianism very large really so say to me yeah well I know it’s a bit stupid but we’ll have to go along with it thenit no one’s being harmed by it no

They’re wrong the whole society’s being H harmed by this idios idiocy uh but that there’ll be a small number of people who really try to cling on to it as as genuinely uh serious Advocates of wokeness but most of them aren’t uh why are they doing it why why

Don’t they collectively stand up against it well this group thing and everyone’s waiting to see who jumps first ironically back to Nigel farage again he doesn’t he doesn’t go along with it he calls it out he took on the establishment and he won brexit happened because the establishment was woking its

Way towards Germain well Nigel faras whether you like him or not was speaking more like the cow the um oppressed public who then voted quietly to leave the European Union a complete clear primeasia example of what happened if you overwork politics L op thank you for joining us thank You