We need a conspiracy of silence on my former friend Neil Oliver

“Where there’s chaos, there’s brass,” Oliver prognosticates sombrely, as he invites us to like, share and subscribe to his chaotic ramblings.

“When events unfold…as peace feels like it’s receding in the rearview mirror and conflict looms closer, we surely owe it to ourselves and to our children to ask who benefits from a mess like this.”

We had to wait another week to discover the answer to his question, and it appears to be the Jews. It always comes down to the Jews.

At this stage, I should declare an interest, that Oliver and I were previously friends. Earlier in my career as a journalist, we worked on rival local newspapers and we later shared a flat together.

Carlos with his former friend Neil Oliver (Image: Carlos Alba)

Since the end of the pandemic, his audience – which appears to consist entirely of angry men aged over 50, who still live with their mothers – have been deprived of a proper conspiracy theory, one that can really get the veins on their necks pulsating.

Now, thanks to a guest on his latest podcast, Whitney Webb (no, me neither), they have one – and it’s that the “Jewish mob” is helping an international syndicate to run the world.

Needless to say, her comments were too much for YouTube, which promptly blocked the podcast from its platform.

Lest Oliver should miss out on an opportunity to benefit from such incendiary drivel, he promptly transferred it to Rumble, an alternative platform that critics say is less squeamish about hosting far right and conspiratorial content, before posting about the attack on his “freedom of speech”.

Central to the circular, impenetrable logic of conspiracies is that they are inherently self-perpetuating. Anyone who gets in their way or questions their integrity simply adds fuel to their legend.

Conspiracy theories exploit a self-imposed weakness in science and factual study – that a negative cannot be proved absolutely.

Just as we cannot say beyond any doubt that climate change is not caused by natural phenomena, or that the universe was not created by a flying spaghetti monster (credit: Professor Richard Dawkins), nor can we claim absolutely that every area of our lives is not controlled by a small, elite group of powerful actors, working in concert.

In contrast, conspiracists observe no such limits to what they can claim with self-appointed impunity.

Read more Carlos Alba

• Neil Oliver: The man I knew – and the man he became
• What do you do with a friend like Donald Trump?
• Must we all be in thrall to the noisy minority?

Take a look at Nigel Farage, who has learned the value of avoiding hyperbole and of keeping his theories deliberately vague, to ensure they can’t be properly scrutinised or disproved.

Far from being an expert in politics or economics, the Reform UK leader always ensures he is at least one vague statistic ahead of his rivals, allowing him to successfully spar with other party leaders, such as Nick Clegg during the Brexit referendum campaign.

Farage made an uncharacteristically crude misstep when he questioned “whether the truth is being withheld from us”, after three girls died in a stabbing at a dance class in Merseyside last month.

He was accused of stoking the violence that followed, after baselessly claiming the attacker may have been on a security services’ watch list.

Donald Trump appears to have pulled off the neat trick of promulgating conspiracies that are demonstrably untrue without it affecting his popularity. He was memorably humiliated after he led the notorious 2008 “birther” conspiracy, which suggested Barack Obama was not born in the US, and was therefore ineligible to stand as a presidential candidate.

Trump made the elementary mistake of basing his claim on something that was easily disprovable, as when Obama produced his birth certificate.

More recently, he has claimed that the US is overrun with dangerously psychotic illegal immigrants, wilfully released from “lunatic asylums” in other countries. Practised decoders of lingua trumpa believe he has confused asylum seekers with people from mental health asylums.

Oliver, it seems, either doesn’t care or seriously underestimates the intelligence of his audiences on his YouTube channel and his weekly slot on GB News, which appears to have no editorial oversight of his deranged musings.

Seeking to protect one’s freedom of speech is an admirable ambition but it presupposes one’s speech contains a semblance of objective truth.

Oliver’s past howlers have included suggestions that the BBC measures the temperature of the ground, rather than the air, to overstate the scale of global warming; and that net zero targets equate to a wholesale ban on carbon dioxide generation, as though Black Marias full of plods will soon be sent to arrest entire fields of Friesian heifers.

In his recent podcast he suggested that, due to uncontrolled illegal immigration, the population of the UK could now be 80million. Let’s just investigate that claim for a moment.

Neil Oliver rose to prominence on the BBC (Image: Carlos Alba)

The most recent figures published by the Office for National Statistics, in 2022, suggest the UK population is 66.97million. For Oliver’s claim to be true, it would mean almost 13million – one in seven – people living “in these isles”, as he habitually refers to the UK, are doing so illegally. Wow, that would be something if it were remotely true.

What he and his podcast guests say attracts attention not because it has any truth or value, but because he was previously a successful broadcaster of, mainly Scottish, historical documentaries on the BBC.

The row over his latest podcast was reported in newspapers because of the number of institutions – including the National Trust for Scotland, the Royal Society of Edinburgh and the University of Abertay, Dundee – that previously cosied up to him, presumably in the expectation that some of his celebrity sheen would run off on them.

Not that they can be held entirely to blame as, at the time, the most contentious claim he was likely to make was that one in seven people living in Scotland in the 10th Century was an illegal Viking immigrant, or that Ranald the Unsteady led his forces to defeat by the Picts at the Battle of Stoneyburn Bog in AD836, because he was suffering from neurosyphilis. And who are we to say he was wrong?

Carlos Alba is a journalist, author, and PR consultant. His latest novel, There’s a Problem with Dad, explores the issue of undiagnosed autism among older people