France is on Fire & Is Zionism Racism? - Off the Fence

Konstantin Kisin (0:00)

Hello, everybody, and a very warm welcome to this week's Off the Fence with me, Konstantin Kisin, my TRIGGERnometry co-host, Francis Foster, Winston Marshall of The Winston Marshall Show and Tom Slater from SPIKED. We have four stories, as always, for you this week. We hear directly from Winston, who's just returned from France, about the riots over there.

We will talk about the Holborn and St. Pancras by-election and the division within the Greens over the Zionism is racism motion. We will talk about ADHD and Autism being fueled potentially by the availability of benefits, with ADHD among teenage boys rising by a factor of 13, 13-fold since 2000, and Autism rising by a factor of 23 And finally, the Cornell 7 story, where seven men are accused of rape in the United States in a case that has reignited the debate around consent and rape culture on American universities. So welcome, gentlemen, Winston, let's get straight into it. You have just returned from France. What did you see and what is going on?

Winston Marshall (1:04)

I think it's hard to fathom just how massive these riots and protests are. So we're talking 40 cities across the nation, as well as towns, villages. It started about three weeks ago, 17th, 18th of September. And it has spread across the whole country of the 3700 lices in France. The highest single day count of affected schools was over 1000, including 220 blockaded. Although there are student unions that put that closer to 1800 lices. By the way, we're talking 24 lices, which have been either set on fire or ransacked.

At its peak, there were 260,000, and this is on the 6th of October.

This is a street turnout of protestors. I actually can't think of a British equivalent to this. It's all started ostensibly about conditions in schools. That was initially on the 17th of September, a school outside of Paris, and some teachers were on strike for conditions. And there's a conversation about the state of education in France, which I'll get to. But before I get into that detail, just to add to how much this has grown. So you have left-wing media, like The Guardian saying, it's mainly peaceful protest. The video you're just seeing there, that's actually in Belgium. So this is spread out of France now and into other countries. The left-wing media is saying, sort of taking the classically, taking the side of the school protesters. But you also, we're seeing Palestine flags, there's reports of anti-Semitism, there is free Palestine chanting. It is being reported on the right, not just the media, but including people like President Trump saying that this is all about mass migration and Islam. And if you look at a lot of the videos, it does seem like there's a preponderance of people of immigrant heritage. But it's also the case that there are a lot of white kids involved in this, which I'll come to my theory about what that tells us about what's going on a little bit later.

But I think it's also just worth going into the state of education.

So why is it that they are originally protesting? Well, curiously, the French actually spend more on education comparative to their GDP. Per student, they spend an annual equivalent of $16,600.

And that's compared to in our country, in Britain, $13,178 for six forms. So there's a staggering difference. They spend more of their GDP, 4.5% of their GDP on education. We spend less than that. We spend 4.3%. So they spend more. And they seem to have worse results. It is true that their French results on the PISA scoring system shows that they are lagging behind the rest of Western Europe. And schools, classes are over, over, there's too many students, they're much fuller. The condition, a lot of teachers are not turning up. So the education system itself has got problems. But the idea that burning down schools is the solution, I think we'll all agree, doesn't quite add up. So it's blown out. And so I went to France to try and work out, is this just France being France? Is this just, they love a riot, the French. And there's an adage I heard out there is like, when the French and the Italians riot, so what? When the Germans and the English riot, then you've got to pay attention. And that was my question. Is this actually a sign of French integration, integration success, all of these immigrant heritage people doing the French way of having a riot? The scale of this for me suggests something else. And I have a phenomenal interview that just came out last night with Charles Gav, which I filmed in Paris. And we get into the deeper roots of what's going on. But before we get to that, I'll bring you guys in on this and you guys tell me what your impressions have been from the outside.