Ben Elton Laments For Simpler Times & Tries Not to Despair About The Rise Of Fascism

Added: 2026-05-11

[00:00:00]I don't feel the urge to do kind of party political stuff in the way I did in the 80s. Thatcher was a genuine phenomenon. All that has followed, the 80s made modern the modern West.

[00:00:11]>> I'm always interested to hear the musings of Ben Elton and I've plucked out some tasty morsels from this interview he's done with Time Radio.

[00:00:19]Ben's general disbelief at the current state of politics is certainly an opinion I share. In in the image of the glorification of the individual, the end of seeing the community as the savior. I mean, after the Second World War pretty much all the Western democracies recognized that following hard men, looking for easy answers had failed the world spectacularly and pretty much all of them, the post-war consensus, even America started to focus on the community as the way to solve problems. Like, it takes a village to run a village. Don't go looking for some hard man and suddenly after Thatcher and Reagan sort of reinstated the glory of the superman, the individual. It's It's individuals, be they Musk >> I think the problems of the world are now so existential that it it it doesn't it feels like, you know, shooting fish in a barrel and then it's just another load of fish. I you know, I never imagined my I come from a generation whose parents beat fascism globally. Some of my generation think they did it. They didn't, their parents did it. I'm the luckiest generation in human history. I was born in the West in the in the late 50s, so I had it all. Student grants, a Anyway, and I never thought I'd die with I'd be approaching old age with fascism on the resurgence. I'm definitely a glass half fuller. I got to tell you, I find it very hard not to despair. I've never ever imagined I would live in times so dangerous. The The fact that we now accept the words post-truth as if it's, you know, a given. The fact that we have literally sacrificed the entire glory of the enlightenment, those wonderful 300 years that destroyed the the middle the the the dark ages where where the idea that argument argument was you had to have facts, you had to back it up. And now we live in an age where we're embracing superstition and bigotry all over again.

[00:02:07]And we just seem to have just let it Of course it's the internet. I knew it was going to happen and it has happened. I think most people did. But we have politicians who gleefully think it's a game to to to publish lies and things like Look, some of your listeners will probably be supporters of Trump. I think he is He and Johnson were were the were the moment when the dam broke, when it became possible for politicians to simply lie with absolute impunity. It's simply to say what you like, tomorrow you can just divert attention to something else. You know, all honor is gone. I mean, you know, you mentioned Thatcher earlier. I mean, one thing I have always credited her for is being a woman of principle. I disagreed with her fundamentally on almost everything she said and did, but I never denied that she acted entirely in good faith. She said what she was going to do and she did it. I didn't like it, but I do admire her for having been a politician who did not seek popularity for popularity's sake, was not driven by venal vanity like a Trump or a Johnson and and and grotesque self-interest and sense of privilege. Click here for Ben Elton talking about stupid people.