Is Paying for Air the New Normal? | Jerm Warfare

Jerm (0:30)

My name is Jerm, this is Jerm Warfare, the Battle of Ideas. Last time we spoke, we were standing on the hoe.

And now I'm back in my studio in South Africa after a lengthy trip home. And I haven't stopped talking about this, but I can't get past the fact that when my friend dropped me off at Heathrow, he had to pay a drop off charge. I've never in my life heard of that or seen that. And apparently this is normal.

Mike (1:03)

Look, Britain is the asset stripping nation. It does everything it can to pull as much money out of people as possible. In fact, this week, Jerm is the Labour Party conference and Andy Burnham is claiming that he's going to reinvigorate social care and whatnot. There's a whole big debate between, in fact, it's been a massive division point between older people and younger people. And the reason, I believe, that this division point has been created is because along in parallel with this, there are multiple efforts, there have been multiple efforts to get a assisted dying bill through. And really what the attempt here is to put in younger people's minds, the idea that older people don't deserve to be on the planet because they are simply sucking the life out of them, the lifeblood out of them. And so the narrative goes that older people require social care, younger people have to pay for that social care, and that that's unfair in some way. Now, I think it is unfair because those older people have been paying into the tax system for their entire lives. And then what happens when they get to a certain age is they are asset stripped by the state to pay for social care, because the state didn't make proper preparation for this.

But what younger people don't seem to be able to grasp is, because they think that this is a good idea, that people should be paying for their social care when they get older. What younger people aren't grasping is that actually that's their inheritance is being stolen. And so it doesn't matter whether they're paying it out of taxes or whether they're paying it out of inheritance, they're still paying for it.

And there's no getting away from that. It's an incredible psychological operation has been done on the young to convince them that the old are a burden. And ultimately the goal here is to persuade them that really the old should just be killed off.

Jerm (3:07)

Well, I mean, it's funny you say that because there's an interesting dichotomy.

Mike (3:11)

Sorry to start so darkly, but that's one of the things going on.

Jerm (3:13)

No, but there's an interesting dichotomy there because you say the elderly are a burden. And if you look at the increase in abortions, the young are also a burden. So there's this weird polarization of young and old. And basically everybody in the middle who's a useless eater is essentially the desirables.

Mike (3:32)

But the point that you started off with was the fact that people are being charged for dropping people off at airports. The fact of the matter is, particularly the middle classes in the UK are absolutely being taxed and stripped at every opportunity.

So various people have done various calculations, but how much of our incomes we actually pay in some form of tax, and I've seen various estimates, but around 80% seems not unrealistic by the time you take an income tax and VAT and all the various taxes on alcohol and petrol and fuel and all these kinds of things. And so we have seen this massive flow of cash from ordinary people to the oligarch class, the Epstein class, whatever you want to call them. But aside from that, we are, the vast majority of our incomes is going to pay for the wars and that's a realization people need to grasp, I think.

Jerm (4:39)

But I mean, I don't get it, though. Are people not standing up against it or are they just entirely demoralized?

Mike (4:48)

Charles, answer that.

Charles (4:51)

Well, if we just go back one, there is nothing normal about paying to go into an airport. So let's just clear that.

Mike (5:00)

Okay, it's been normalized.

Charles (5:02)

It has been normalized, but there is still nothing normal about it.

But it is pretty staggering. I might be wrong, but I think Bristol Airport was one of the first to do that. And I'm not sure quite which order it went in. It may have happened at the same time, but they are so overzealous with it, that when you are within, I don't know, say 200 yards of the airport building, because obviously the thing is, if you're going to take someone in, it's going to be five pounds or more to drop them off. So I mean, we'll just stop a little bit short, I'll let you out here and you just walk. And at Bristol, they have signs saying, you may not stop. If your vehicle stops at all, you'll find 100 pounds, 200 pounds or something.