that's what we have to do, we have to say, yes, we should have dealt with the climate change act from tony blair, we should have dealt with the equality act which embedded all these woke policies, dual corporations, institution we put our hand up, but please don't vote for keir starmer. things will get a lot worse. that that's we've got to say and what would your message the prime minister today be that the uk should immediately withdraw from european convention on human. yes, yes, yes but. but that's not enough. yeah, it's not enough. and we should learn the lesson. what happened when we left the european, but kept all the european laws on our statute books? yeah. the problem is, we got rid of the bureaucracy in brussels. we didn't get rid the bureaucracy in britain. so yeah, it had a lot of our problems lie at home. yeah. and they lie with fact that we've outsourced to unelected

too much decision making and that is what we have to address. if you were still prime minister liz would there be any eu laws still the books in the uk the the the present administration has declined to remove vast numbers of them under your leadership. would you have completely put them the bonfire. well, yes. and i promise do that in a leadership election that i'm somebody who makes promises and seeks to fulfill them. i don't believe you can make promises in a leadership election, not deliver. that's why even, though i knew there were negative forces towards what i was seeking to do in in the mini-budget on corporation tax and fracking. i promise to do that and we should do that and it does require taking on quite a major

bureaucratic forces to get rid of those eu laws. institutions like the treasury they didn't like brexit in the first place, they wanted to keep as much of the eu regulations as possible and they have be challenged. is hope for the future of the conservative party. do you believe the party will return to thatcherite roots? are you optimistic about the long future of the conservative party, even though the the immediate term looks very looks very grim and sad? i think there are quite a lot of what we would call in the uk wets running around in key in positions. are you hopeful about the thatcherite who really are returning to take back control of? what has been the most successful political party in history? i think is possible, but i think

we will have to fight for it. it's not going to be easy and, you know, americans are very experience with brutal battle that go on within the republican party for the heart and soul of the party and that is we what what what is happening britain and the difference i would describe between people in the conservative party is that some people who explicitly say yes it's true these institutions in britain have moved to the left. yes it's true that they've adopted these extreme change policies locally. a human rights isms, etc. but we have accept that because as conservatives believe in institutions. i don't agree with that. i think we have to reshape our institutions to reflect values that the public want vote for. and i think that is that is a bold a bolder agenda that conservatives need to back.

and i do believe that britain will return to economic dynamism return to success until we do that i think it's just a question of how long we have to wait it very well and we just just a couple of minutes we're nearly out of time but liz, perhaps a final message for us. audience about about why why you believe that there is hope for for and and why you believe that the united really is the is the hope for the for the free world. so you the hope for the free world this this election place in 2024 is, i think, one of the most consequential election as we already have seen what is happening when is an absence of

united leadership. and by that, i don't just mean security in the world. i also. cultural and social leadership in the conservative world. and that is what we need to see. and my message is that you are going to have to fight for this. i think this is presidential campaign is a is a done deal at all. and they will the energy the commitment and the determination of to win. and it's not just about winning the election in 2024. it's actually about winning the administré mission in 2025. great. well, been a tremendous discussion. thank you. thank you very much. and and your book is a it's a wonderful read. and i think it has a very powerful message for for the united states and a very

powerful message for also for the uk as well both sides of the of the atlantic and most grateful to les for joining us and we have come to the end of our program unfortunately were unable to do the books on due to supply chain issues. your books been incredibly popular actually it's already sold in the uk and it's being re published i think second, third, third time and we you did not get the the the copies in time due to the intense competition for them and but it is a it's a it's a thrilling read it's a tremendous a tremendous book. and i hope that all of you will be able to read this this this wonderful message to to the american and the british people. and this were most grateful to you for for joining us today. we look forward to hopefully see you again soon here in.

the united states, we wish you all the best as well with your very important work on the ground in the united kingdom at this time. your efforts to save the conservative movement in uk. it's a very, very worthy cause and a big thank you to everybody for joining us here in person and and online. i would like to ask the the audience they could remain in the seats while, well, the former prime minister. exits the stage. but but very big warm thank you to everybody for joining us today. thanknow it's my particular plee

to introduce my old friend ali velshi, who is an award winning journalist and msnbc host. many of you know him from your screens over the last 30 years. he's an immersive on the ground reporter who previously was an anchor correspondent and he is everywhere, not just with msnbc, but prior with al jazeera and cnn. ali was born in nairobi. he was raised in toronto, a critical and his new book, the small of courage a legacy of endurance, the fight for democracy, traces his family's courageous journey from freedom to freedom. starting in india, then to south africa, where they escaped apartheid and later emigrating to kenya and ultimately moving to canada and the united states. ali, welcome. thank you. and so the the longer piece of

this and the reason why i'm doing this, you know what? you just ask, why is canadian consul general interviewing ali velshi on the stage just because ali and i go back, god. but 38 years, i think we might yeah population and and we are a kind of a specie of people who emerge on canadian shores and know the 1970s and 1980s and you know your you see sort of residents of in the united states of species of people as well which is the, you know, broader a particular generation of people who draw their lineage back to the indian subcontinent. and this story that ali tells this book and, you know, it's part memoir obviously sort of going through remarkable family history, but it also touches on sort of many of the thematics that most of us care about over the course of the last century, which have been, you know, how

has democracy evolved? what have been the fights for individual rights and collective and group rights, pluralistic societies? and how can we keep those pluralistic societies together? and, you know, you ask. and so we were at university together and was somebody who, you know, is as you see him and wonder, how does a 20 year old, you know, come this well formed? how does a 20 year old come out with this set of ideas and this sort of of of of for change and? the reason is this remarkable back story. and and so maybe we can start that remarkable back story, ali. thank you, my friend. yeah, it's a i couldn't believe my good fortune that. you know, i had asked the consul general for his address to which i can send book and he he texted back and he said, so anything we can like, can i can i do anything to to be helpful? and in that moment i thought, well, yeah, actually you've lived a lot of the story, so why

don't we why don't we have a little conversation about the two of us talking about it together as opposed to sort of a traditional interview? so thank you. it means a lot. and it's i bet you this audience is going to get something different out of this than other rooms i've spoken to, because you can prod things that you you know the other side of so i appreciate that my family started like a lot of people in the indian diaspora leaving india in the 1800s mine left at the end of the 1800s but the 1800s was a period of remarkable economic in india, largely because it was actually these were climate refugees. it was mostly because of drought. in india. and my family fell, fell victim to that. now, in a big country, in theory, when you have a number of climate issues, this is very relevant to today. you should be to mitigate them in some fashion, it's becoming harder and harder to do so, but the thing about india was that the india that was taken over, that was colonized by the british was a massive, massively important country was it was

almost a quarter of global gdp at the time that the colonialists took over. by the time colonization ended in india 1948, it was down to about 2% of gdp. so the country been denuded of its ability to be resilient in. the face of these droughts and people left by the millions. now, if you're in india, you went where the boats took you and they weren't, generally speaking, coming here work, but most weren't. they were going to either further east into asia or africa or the west indies. and so my family ended up in south africa where compared to being in drought stricken, stricken gujarat, it was it was the promised land. it was the streets were paved with gold they came from a colony which was racist and unfair. but remember that in india there were very few british officials at the height of the british raj was not. it was generally run at home. so the average indian was not getting a fair shake

economically, but they weren't feeling the the, generally speaking, the daily brunt of racism that you got in south africa, south africa, a whole nother kettle of fish. so my family were merchants. i thought that meant they were business people, were literally merchants who were selling things from and small carts, vegetable or whatever the case is. but that led to them having small shops and as their shops got a little more prosperous, my great grandfather needed an accountant. so he found this gujarat. the bookkeeper. the gujarat bookkeeper had. another gujarati client whose name was and he introduced them and the two became friends. gandhi lived in johannesburg. my great grandfather lived in pretoria. the government was so gandhi would have to with his constant agitations and the negotiations with the government, he'd constantly have to come to pretoria. my great grandfather would give him a place to stay because in those days in south indian non white people couldn't at hotels or anything like that, and he would give him use of his horse and cart to go back and forth to

meetings. and so one night they're sitting like we are, they've friends. and gandhi says to my grandfather, the indians in this country have do not have the courage, the backbone to fight the injustices. so i'm going to start an ashram a commune to, give them the strength to do that. and i would love your son. that's my future grandfather, who was seven year old, seven years old at the time. i would love your son to come be my student. and my great grandfather looked at gandhi thinks is is a terrible idea because he's a businessman. why does he want to get involved with this agitator? so he says to gandhi the only thing that comes to mind and that is that we're muslims, you're hindu. i can't send my son dear school. he's got to learn his religion. to which gandhi says, i will your koran and i will teach him your religion, which you did. and that was not unusual for gandhi. he had read hindu scripture, had read christians christian scripture, and of course, he understood hindu scripture very well. so that was first of all, gandhi was pluralist at the time and was, you know, becoming much

more worldly guy by week. but my great grandfather, my grandfather either became his youngest student at the age of seven on this ashram, where they had no they fundamentally grew up hindus, so they had no meat, but they also had no hot water and no beds. they on the floor, they gave him two blankets. you slept on one and you had one to cover you. this a precursor for, you know, a for how, you know, you would endure conditions in prison. in fact, prison sounds like it might have been better, but that exactly the point that folks needed to toughen up and in order to fight you needed to have the courage understand that you would get arrested and and the result the way they would offer you they would often offer a chance to pay a monetary fine. but the design was to turn the find down and take the jail time and then to leave. after your 30 days in jail, these essentially misdemeanors and right back to where you committed the so-called crime, which was going in the wrong of the bus station or the train

station, and get arrested again and fill the prisons to get the media attention on to the story of of racism. but you also raise in the in those chapters of your book this idea that gandhi was not at that stage you know the gandhi you know the richard attenborough sort of hieroglyph of gandhi that we know now he was somebody who was asking for set of very prescribed rights within, a british colonial system within, the system he saw indians as citizens within the british colonial system. and he did not think that as citizens indians were being afforded their rights, he did not at the time think something his his design was not to undo the british colonial. i don't know whether he would have liked to or he just thought that's too big a fight, but he didn't want to do that. nor did he think. everybody had equal rights. he was arguably a racist. he his views in his writings about black africans at the time, arguably were they were

actually racist things that he said he just wanted the to be closer up in rank to the british and he had been educated in the uk. that was the early gandhi early on, early on and he then evolved in south africa. gandhi often said, i was born in india, but i was made in south africa. he took the lessons of south africa took them back india and succeeded in india. but yeah the early gandhi was was not who we have come know. and that's a great story of evolution that. people evolve. he subsequently understood until everybody has justice and equality, liberty, we cannot count any of ourselves as having those things. and which is which is quite illustrative in so many ways. and and of course, you know, i was just you know, we were speaking earlier about i read that, jonathan, i great biography of king important read people and absolutely and the amount of inspiration that king

took in the early civil rights movement from gandhi course and and it was a great struggle this issue of you know do we work within the system or do we work to you know, overthrow the system? right. and which was the crux of the 1960s within the civil rights movement battle. within the civil rights movement. and so but family, you know, from you you you you obviously your great grandfather comes over from india. and there was a bit of a there was a great story about jumping shark infested waters. so all immigration, by the way, is not always, you know sort of as as prescribed sometimes are slight detours and. this one took a detour to, shark infested water. it was it was interesting because it was right around the time of the end of the boer war and there was no internet. and for poor people. there was no no phoning either. so my great grandfather on his

journey back to south africa wasn't clear who had won the war. and this played out differently. if he pulled a south african port and the afrikaners won the war, he is now coming in as an indian british subject. he's now the enemy. and all this dream of coming to south africa to to create a new life would be would end at the end of that gangplank on the at the border if the british had won the war it would be fine. he would be a british, but he didn't know what had happened. so he figured it would be better to not take the boat all the way to south africa. as soon as he saw land, which was at the time portuguese, east africa, mozambique, he got off jumped off into the shark infested waters and swam to the shore where he ended up in portuguese africa, in which he could go through the jungle into

going into south africa without crossing at a border. and so he know what would have saved him a lot of trouble if he had realized the the british had won the boer war. but that's the importance of news then of course you know. yeah. rana's question to me is, you know, because i my my fascinating is that i didn't know anybody in my family could swim. and he was wondering whether that's still the case. yeah. yeah. you know, so you but these are small acts of courage. i mean, yeah, that was a big, big other thing with the the sharks that only tell you that that i'm not getting to that yet, but moving immigrating is tough. yeah right. i think we have to remember that as the conversation immigration in this country gets tainted the way it has, it is important to remember that whether you think about it as a as a economic imperative or you think about it as a imperative, which you really shouldn't, that's not

useful. it is hard to make decision no matter how much better america might be for you than wherever is you're coming from. it is a hard decision to make. these people were not multilingual. many cases. they were not educated in a formal way, and they didn't know what. on the other side there would be a letter that would have come from somebody who had gone to south africa to say that everything's fantastic. and here's some money. so they're sending money back thinking must be good. he's got enough money. you've got more money to send back than we were earning here. but those are decisions that everybody in this country has made or their parents may have made or their grandparents have made? and it's to honor the fact that that is small decision. and because of these these big decisions that people make to come to these countries, our countries benefit as a result, they literally benefit from the addition of these people because. we don't have enough children to to populate our own societies. so we're in south africa in the 19 tens through thirties and forties and of course, you know, apartheid doesn't become a thing

until 1947 or so. but prior to that, you know, there was a settlement in south africa where, you know, there was already extremely racially divided. there was a coming of age of sorts of a movement in, south africa during that period. and your family is quite in that. yeah. as well. and at time there were different movements. the were involved in a particular movement, the had a movement and it wasn't that in many cases and this happened across africa, there were many africans, black africans who they needed to do this without the asians. at one point in the movie gandhi, you see gandhi telling his white best friend or a preacher who was a white man. we need i need to do without you, you know. so these were interesting times. but what happened is the the black africans had the numbers to be effective in trying to

fight what was going to become apartheid. the asians had more money so a number of smart people in both communities why don't we combine these asian were always very small and because they were a moneyed group of people didn't really didn't see themselves as demonstrators and did want to get involved thought it would wreck their businesses but they did feel that these laws were unjust and they would like to support the overturning of them. so that's how it came together. and they came together in other ways, too, because there were not many non-whites who were trained to be lawyers or doctors or things like that. but south effectively trained a few of them. so they could, you know, say to the world that they actually have a black lawyer here he's right here. so there were there were some black lawyers and there were a few more indian lawyers. there were a good number of south african white lawyers who played a very, very part in the anti-apartheid movements. but these coalitions started to come together and work together to overcome, ironically the

response from the government, from the 19 tens, all the way to the apartheid became a real thing in 1947 was just to be more and more harsh. at no point did anybody gain any meaningful concessions. it only got worse as the years went on, and to some people's surprise in 1947, in the national elections of 1947, remember, 1948 is when india won its independence under under gandhi and has a spinning wheel on the on the flag because is what gandhi said your self-sufficiency be the way you gain independence in that very same year apartheid laws were coming in that prescribed everything. i mean the the first it was you can't marry somebody who's not same color that you are then it was you can't have any sexual relations with them and how everybody lived in the ways in which divided people into race. so it was to see gandhi left south africa in 19 1314 thinking he had failed and went on to success in in india. but he had grandfather and his

brother stayed. they stayed. they and things got better them as business people but worse for them as as indians as of color and ultimately by the early 1960s, it all came together and it was just ultimately worse now. and after south africa, you're you speak in the book about how your family had a successful bakery business, a commercial bakery business, and 4000 loaves of bread a day, an hour, yes. yeah. a lot of bread and a lot of bread and so you have all this, you know, this, this, this, this big industrial concern and and then, of course, you know, your grandfather and your grandfather's brother were quite involved with movement. yeah and, you know, the state then steps in and, you know what the state does. yeah, the apartheid state and it makes it very uncomfortable for them. yeah. they basically make it impossible for them to do business because if 4000 loaves

of bread an hour, this is not a corner bakery. this is a bakery that packs all of its bread into trucks. the trucks then go into into know areas where all race rights are went into a particular area in which wholesalers would then take the bread, get it to bakeries because bought their bread in the morning and initially were allowed to do their business like any other bakery. but they were the only nonwhite bakery in the country. and so what in exchange for in to penalize my family for supporting a financially anti-apartheid stuff were you know bailing people out of jail all of their workers who would get arrested. it was routine get arrested if you were black in south africa, literally the crime was being and walking around. but the interesting thing about being black, you if you got arrested, there was a fine. so in the case of my grandfather was five pounds or 30 days in jail with the with black

workers. it was five pounds or you work on a farm. so it was labor, just like the american south equivalent of chain gang. so monday my grandfather and my father be at court getting these guys out of jail who did nothing. so what? so this is just an example of the byzantine things that happened in apartheid africa. they started telling my family, you can't have a standing permit, you'll have to get it renewed. two times a year. and then it became, you know, four times a year and monthly and then it became weekly. you have to get your to go to distribute the bread renewed weekly, which meant mondays were a write off because you're going to a government office to get a permit done so you can't clearly be inside the the place you have to sell your bread before. 6 a.m. and then it became daily. so at that point, i mean you can't by the time you got your permit the permit office opens at nine. all bread is sold by 7 a.m. and that in that culture people bought their bread fresh and it put them out of business so my tried to they created a bread

war they tried to take a few down on the way out and they did, they succeeded in taking four, four bakeries out, bankrupting them, at which point the government had had it and, and my dad and my grandfather were together on the day 1961, where they bulldozed ovens, which were the central part of the bakery. and my dad says it was the only time he'd seen his father cry. my grandfather was 58 years old, and he died a week later and and the but here's the good part about the book, he died thinking this is the man who was on gandhi's farm. he died thinking he failed in his efforts fully. he saw his bakery come down. this is the business that they had built that they used to finance the anti-apartheid struggle. what he didn't know is that his as you and i know, because we got to witness it, his son would become the first the first south asian muslim elected to major office in