Ladies and gentlemen, can I please have your attention.

Can you digger?

Greetings and your listeners.

This is Jonah Goldberg, host of the Remnant podcast, brought you by the dispatch and dispatch

media.

I'm very excited, or I was very excited, because I'm recording this intro a few days later because

we had technical issues and I was under the gun on a deadline and we had all sorts of other things and I had to get home to make the sauce and I had to drop off the guns at Robert De Niro's house and if you don't get the reference, watch more movies. But I'm always excited to have Daniel Hanan, my friend from across the pond, a friend of the podcast, a friend of the

colonies. He is the author of many books. My favorite, or the one I at least rely on the most,

is inventing freedom, how the English-speaking peoples made the modern world. I'd give you a more

in-depth recap of everything that we talked about,

but this was so long ago and so many drinks ago, it's hard for me to be sure. But we definitely

talked about the fact that he was a member of the House of Lords. We talked about the state

of free speech in the UK. And we talked about how things are going awry on all sorts of other

fronts as well and did a good bit of English history

to boot. So I think people will enjoy it. He's always popular with the listeners and let's just get

to it. Are you a lord now? How about that? Yes, member of our upper house. Yeah, well,

that's weird, but cheapest upper house in the world, I think actually, because we're... And it's a really great model this. We're not paid anything. Uh-huh. So it's kind of a bit like the Texas Assembly or somewhere. You get a tiny stipend for turning up, but nobody does this for a living with the result that we are sort of citizen legislatures. We have to do something in the real world. Okay, so this is not where I intended to start, but I'm curious. I mean, I know Blair kind of

gelded a big chunk of the House of Lords, but like what is the most concrete power that

the upper chamber has? Delay. Delay and amendment. We ultimately can't veto, and although we can initiate, it never really goes

anywhere without the government's support. But under our system, because we don't have the division

of power, if you're the prime minister and you have a majority in the commons, then basically

you are guaranteed to win every vote there or almost every vote there. So the only real opportunity

...