- Like vlogging and stuff.
All right, in field.
- Hello, how you doing?
It's your place.
We're invading your space here today.
- (indistinct traffic noise)
Good, you following any of our stuff?
- Sure.
I have actually on Instagram.
- Really?
- Yes
I'm quite into politics myself.
- Oh you are?
- Yes.
I was a
- Really?
Congratulations.
- Thank you.
- Are you still in politics?
- Uh I'm not into it but I do follow it.
Yes and I do actually have some questions for you.
- Really, perfect!
I'm so glad I came across you.
- What's your name?
Everett. You work here, here, Billy here.
Hey, what's up Billy.
Here. Are you filming me?
- Yeah
- All right, you can film me, it's okay.
Now tell me, I'm curious.
- I actually want to know, you know, I think you
created your own, started your own party?
- Correct.
Yeah. So I want to know what your agenda is and what your
what you're imposing you can do
for London because previous mayor of London was Boris.
- Yes.
- So I don't really support for Boris.
I think those are Sadists.
So I do want to support honestly, the next Mayor of London.
So I do want to know your agenda, what you're...
- Okay, great.
Great question.
- What you're promising us!
So, first of all
I'm not in politics is the first time I've ever
considered running for office.
I've lived in London for 21 years.
I have a funny accent.
I'm actually, born in the States.
But I'm a Londoner. I got my citizenship in '07.
My kids were born here.
I've been in business for 30 years.
I've had a show called London real
for the past 10 years, we broadcast conversations
on YouTube to probably 1,000 really cool people.
And about six months ago, I was looking
at London and I thought these people are running our city
into the ground.
And I love this city. Like I said I have children
in this city, and it made me angry.
I thought, I better do something about this.
So I started researching what was wrong with London?
Londoners care about four things, in my opinion.
They care about their jobs,
and their businesses being open more than anything.
They care about knife crime on the streets
which is horrendous proportions.
They care about transport,
nobody wants to pay congestion charges
and high transport charges.
They care about housing.
Well, I don't know about you, but my housing costs
are too expensive.
So those are the four things I've focused
on, everything through the lens of business, you know.
In the business world, you have to hold people accountable
or you go bankrupt.
You can't ask for billions of bail outs.
You can't blame Boris Johnson if something doesn't work out.
You have to do it right.
So first the economy I want to get London back to work
and rebuild the economy proactively!
And that means I want to abolish the congestion
charge for the rest of the year.
And get as many people in London as possible
we want to zero out business rates.
So a place like this
doesn't have to pay tax on top of barely making it.
And I want to hold something called the great celebration.
August 31 days, street fairs during the day music festivals
at night, 20 million people in London like a big event.
- If we can.
- Yeah we do it safely, safely as well.
But like we crushed the Olympics,
were you there in 2012? I was here, they crushed it.
And I'm talking about a big event,
like the great exhibition in 1851 brought people all
over the world here.
Tens of millions of people that ran for profit.
So that's what I want to do with the economy.
I really want to be proactive to build the economy.
And get people back to work!
I mean, there's safe ways of working.
Like you guys are doing.
I don't like locking down for the sake of locking down.
I think our leaders need to have innovations about how
we get back to work.
So that's the big one.
Knife crime is absolutely killing us.
Like it's just, it's horrible to watch.
It's a shame.
It's a shame we need two things.
- To be honest, knife crime,
I'm from Scotland, you should know the area pretty well,
it is disgusting.
- Yeah.
It really is.
- I was in Croydon in a couple days ago
and we have a charity for lives, not knives.
There was a woman there at Alisa,
and she's like dedicated her life to this.
It's like terrible.
I think you need two ways to solve knife crime.
And I've spoken with senior community leaders,
senior members of the metropolitan police.
First one, more officers on the street period.
But no one knows how to pay for it.
I do.
- But do you think more officers on the street
is gonna help us some how?
- Bear with me, I'll tell you why.
You should be dubious at first.
So two things, first of all, many more officers
on the street and we need more money
for communities and I know how we can do both.
So first of all, officers on the street.
First of all it's ma massively underfunded.
There's not enough officers on the street
which means they can't train their officers
which means stop and search has done really poorly right now
because they're not trained
to the communities because they don't have enough officers.
So actually more officers
on the street gives each officer two days
per month to better train the officers.
And don't digitise the officers.
I'm not done, one second.
But, officers on the streets don't solve knife crime.
If you're not investing in the communities.
And what would you expect
some of these young children to do?
Our community centres have been defunded
by the current mayor, he's fired youth workers,
so we need to put money directly in the community centres.
This is where my business hat goes on.
We call up the CEOs.
I can call up the CEO of Amazon,
Barclay's, Uber, HSBC, and say, guess what?
It's your time to win.
You're going to help us put money right
into the community centres.
So I'm working with a guy named Jamal Edwards.
Do you know him?
He did SBTV this big grind YouTube channel
that he built about eight years ago.
He's done this, an active
he's raised a couple hundred thousand pounds
from Google and a couple other corporates.
And we're going to take it to the next level.
So 250 community centres, a hundred million pounds
per year to give these kids something else to do
from 3:30 PM until 8:30.
When their kids, when their parents come home.
- What do you think would be the best to
do what you're saying?
Give them something to do.
What can you give them?
- We teach these kids entrepreneurism.
You know, they like, even when I do someone said
you'd be a good person to go show up because I would.
I mean, I built a YouTube channel from nothing.
I'm a little older than them, but well
I built a business from that out of nothing.
And I think these kids see these gangs,
and they see the flashy clothes.
I mean Eliza from knives at night
she said "these days, you have to wear Gucci.
You can't even wear it anything else if you're in the gang,
you're showing off." But it's a losing proposition,
because you go to jail, and you don't ever make
the money that it implies.
Why not teach them entrepreneurship?
Teach them about health and wellness,
teach them about all sorts of internships.
We can do that with these community centres
but don't ask the mayor for the budget.
They'll never find him.
That's why I want to get it straight from the corporates.
So I spent a lot of time thinking about this stuff.
It frustrates me because these things aren't being solved.
But right now we could find the money
for the police officers.
We can find the money for the community
straight from corporates, and that will actually
do something about our knife problem.
The current mayor is doing nothing about it.
- He isn't.
It's getting worse every year.
Every year, it gets worse.
You see his campaign now for your vote.
He's not saying anything about knives, nothing.
That's, that's, that's an insult to all of us.
I think.
So, anyway, tell me what you think.
I'm here to listen.
I came all the way to ... to listen.
- My personal opinion, I think more officers
on the street isn't going to help them because even
if more people apply for it- I personally have
applied for the met myself as well. I got turned away.
Personally because of my tattoos. That was-
- They probably don't have the budget either.
- Coming from a suburban area, myself,
people don't like seeing many officers on the street,
they get more annoyed about it, people that are
involved with crime, my area is full of crime, people
in gangs, I mean-
- But what if they were trained with the communities.
You know, what, if they had more time and more budget?
- I think more opportunities for the young people.
- I agree, that's why we want them in communities.
- More than, because they see the police as a threat,
as you know that there has been police crime
against the community.
I guess the public as well.
Lately, especially that's the only thing that's
going all around the news.
So I don't think that's going to be of any help,
to be honest.
I think more to include them into society.
- Yeah.
- Like more like youth clubs,
apprenticeships that they can apply
for, people that have no other opportunity and
think the only opportunity for them is gang life.
They need to be supported with other opportunities,
saying look, you don't need to do this.
You can apply for this. You can do this.
We're supporting them.
We're supporting you with this.
You've got more opportunities.
- That's what the, and that's what this focus with
these communities is supposed to do,
250 community centres where
they can actually see these options in a practitioners.
But I know what you're saying about police.
Okay? And I spoke with this lives
on nice charity and kids on the street with police officers.
And they both admit they both need to...
The police right now, they don't have much budget.
You can't train these young officers.
They don't pay very well, as you probably know
when you went to apply. They pay horribly,
they don't hire from the community,
and they actually don't treat the citizens
very respectfully, and they're not trained
with the communities.
I talked to one police officer and he said,
we used to train the new officers with the communities
all together on a weekend.
Or they would literally see how to treat people,
how not to treat people,
that people in court and said, they're disrespectful.
We're stocking search.
They said, we understand you have to do it.
And it keeps us safe, but don't do so disrespectfully.
And the police officers, okay.
They said, they'll give me two days more, a month training.
And I'll train these officers to be more respectful.
So I understand a lot of people look
at the police and they don't do it right,
be`ut they, they, they just need more support.
And I think more budget
and more training to do a better job.
And you can get held accountable and they
should have people representing their communities, like you.
And they should be forced to have people
in Croydon who live in Croydon, and police the people.
That's what I think you need both approaches.
And, but right now, in one sense, there's no money.
So let's just last time I talked about the money.
TFL is going bankrupt
and London's running at a profit right now.
Does that make any sense?
- London itself is going bankrupt.
Okay but if you look at the city of London,
the financial centre, the property in central London,
they're making a lot of money right now.
The last year has been a struggle,
but it's going to be back.
So how come TFL is going to bankrupt, but Canary Wharf,
the city of London, where I used to work,
is making massive money amounts of money.
It doesn't make sense.
So that's why I think you need something
called an infrastructure tax.
So look at the '02 arena
and all the buildings around there.
The only reason they exist is
because the Jubilee extension line went in.
Right? it probably cost you about a couple of million.
Did they ever get paid for that?
No, but tens of billions
of pounds with me about these developers.
So I'm going to incorporate something called
the infrastructure tax.
It's 3% on any gain they see from their building.
If they're within 500 metres of a tube stop, that's it above
and beyond normal gains.
And they give that back to the police
for hiring more officers like you, I hope.
And we're also investigating, and that could be billions
of pounds.
So that CFL doesn't run bankrupt have to have
these congestion charge, extensions that you guys
charge extensions and outs.
We'll talk about that.
So again, I see a business solution here that doesn't
make sense.
London's making a lot of money and then
TFL is being bankrupt and we're told there's not
enough police to keep our kids safe?
We should be embarrassed about knives in this city.
- Not just that but,
the thing is, how would they make him that amount
of money, when every other small business that you
probably see here, we're all going bankrupt?
- Yeah.
- So what, what, what can we do about that?
- Well, part of the problem obviously is progressive tax.
So any flat tax for et cetera.
- Tax is a big problem.
- So even the mayor, the mayor is supposed to be
a labour guy. He says, Oh, I'm sorry
it's a regressive tax just in case council taxes, right.
He just recently extended the congestion charge,
OTNs, it's this flat rate.
So if you make minimum wage or you're struggling
it takes a big chunk of your income.
And he's like, yeah, I know.
And it's like, well, what are you doing for these people?
So again, why not tax these big corporations
that are making the money out there?
I used to work for a corporation.
We've already spoken with some
of the developers and they said, we're not happy about this
but we're willing to have this conversation
because what they do now is they wait, they find
out a tube size is going to be built there
and they bought up all the land and then develop it.
That doesn't sound fair to me.
So I think the corporations can pay a percentage
but I'm also pro-business.
I want everybody to try to work.
We're all employed and everybody wins.
I don't think that their business.
- Yeah. I agree.
So it's like those four things and also affordable housing.
He hasn't built any houses in five years, he promised
80,000 new homes per year. He's built 12,000 new homes.
So I worked with his top architect in London.
It's called Modular Momes, I just dropped my manifesto.
I'll show you what they look like.
These are homes that you actually design
actually in a factory, you can make a three bedroom,
four bedroom, five bedroom.
And then you can literally construct them
in weeks on TFL land.
And this is a site- I've gotta find my housing process
in Hackney Wick, where we've scoped
out what these buildings look like.
It's called it's modular housing.
They're four stories, tall.
You can design them. They're really nice on the inside.
They're about a hundred thousand pounds each.
And this is actually built on TFL land in Hackney Wick,
to where we already own the land.
They can construct this within a few weeks.
You custom design it in the factory it comes out,
it's super green.
The people can have these beautiful house to live in.
I suppose these politicians, they just keep talking
about more affordable housing, it just frustrates me.
The more I learn about the system... affordable
housing which will help everybody's house.
Every one in London struggles. I'm going to
build 50,000 new homes by Christmas, but I know exactly
what I'm putting in every borough as well.
They can literally spring up even in bad areas where
you see just used areas that turned to like gang crime.
You can build beautiful houses there.
So those issues that we care about, I really think
that I have good solutions. My flight team spent
8 months researching this.
It is our manifesto by the way, we just dropped this.
It's on our website. You've never seen this before.
- Do you have a spare one?
- We're just printing them right now,
I'll give you the website link.
This is literally my last one.
All my notes were up here.
Well, we just dropped it today, but it's like 48 pages.
And it goes into like exact detail of what we want to do.
Some people said it's the best manifesto they've ever
seen. So-
- To be honest, I was quite confused because I keep seeing
on Instagram sponsored #BrianForMayor.
How many times I even have conversations
with my sister, say, I'm not quite sure
about his manifesto because it's not quite out there yet.
I don't know who he is, I don't know where he came from,
I don't know I didn't know anything about you,
to be honest. Even though you've got a lot of
spots at adverts, you've got a lot of information on
your Instagram, I don't know this much in detail.
So I am glad I got to meet you.
- I'm glad I got to meet you too.
I'm glad you got to listen.
And what did you learn from those videos?
Like, just didn't know what I was doing?
Did you learn anything from those?
- I just knew more about you.
I knew okay, he's running for mayor
but I didn't know what exactly you wanted to do for London.
But now that I do, I think I may have changed my
mind for the voting,
- You weren't sure about me before?
- I wasn't.
- Why? Tell me, be honest.
- Because I didn't know much about you.
I mean, not everyone would get to meet you in person
like I did-
- That's true.
- so not everyone's going to be able to change their mind
like how did as well.
So I think what I impose or no, I've got no right to sorry
but if you, I don't know if you're ready to do this
but more like interviews like this and post it on Instagram.
So people from the public have questions, like, you know
more realistic questions.
And if they can get the answers to their questions,
I probably asked you questions that they wanted to know.
- Definitely.
- So if they could know the answers to that as well,
I think more people would be on your side to be honest.
- That's really good advice, I appreciate it.
And I know it isn't
that's why we're kind of out here filming this stuff.
And I love talking to you, people like you.
I honestly think if I could spend 20 minutes
a very long dinner and give you this document,
I think everyone would vote, I really do.
Because then they get to see like
I'm really passionate about this, actually.
So this isn't just a bus. It's actually a digital
battle bus. And I have a studio in the back
and I just live stream for an hour and 12 minutes.
My voice is almost gone,
and I answer questions from Instagram and YouTube.
And I presented this whole manifesto and stuff.
A lot of this information is on the website.
But if you didn't know then that's my fault
because I haven't communicated it correctly to you.
So, I'm glad I got the chance.
- It may have been my fault because I have to get time
to research anything about it.
- Yeah. But I mean, that means I need to do my job better.
Because you need to know what I'm about.
So last thing is I got all these digital networks.
I want to take up to city hall.
I want to be live streaming city hall every day,
taking questions.
I think politicians should be on Instagram.
Like really on Instagram.
And actually answer questions.
- Yeah.
- But not nowadays, they don't.
- Another point about that, I did really like the fact
that you're so active on Instagram, because it
makes you more relatable, because the current
anyone at any politician right now, it's like
they're up there, we're here, we have no idea what
they're doing.
Right. Right now, you're like here with us.
We, we know who you are, we see what you're doing,
we know where you're going, you're meeting everyone,
you're more relatable than any other politician out there.
I can just say that.
- That makes me really happy.
And I agree.
I see the current politicians in every picture on Instagram.
So it's like a photo op, like a press release.
You don't get to know what they're really like.
I've been told I shouldn't post some things.
Sometimes I posted me hitting that, punching a bag
and people will make fun of me, but that's okay.
Now that's me. That's me.
- It makes you more likeable.
- It's like, it's real.
So I appreciate you saying that.
Actually you made my day.
By saying that, but I agree.
I think our politicians need to be more transparent.
So I'm trying to here.
I've been to every single borough in London
we drove this bus 4,000 miles.
Because I, I come out here and talk to people.
Not everyone is as nice as you, but some people, I
like your hard questions to make me know what I need to do.
So we're going to get this lady a copy of this in the link.
In the meantime is Brian For Mayor, our website
and then manifesto's right at the top.
There you go.
Can we get you a button or anything?
You got buttons can get a little swag.
Thanks for the time, by the way.
Nice to meet you.
Thanks. What's your name?
Okay. Is it good to be back in business?
- Yes
- Feels good, right?
- Yes.
- That's good.
- Four months, it has been a very long time. Very long time.
- I know. And I just, it's up to me.
We'll always find a solution.
- Off camera, do you know anything about another lockdown?
- Thank you.
- Got to get the badge, got to get a wristband!
- Get a red one? Red is good.
- Yeah. The band's going on.
Oh yeah that's a band and a key chain.
Oh, there you go.
- It's be a terrible decision.
- Oh, I was actually going to ask you, can we
take a selfie?
- Yeah of course, let's do it,
do you want the bus in the background?
- Do you mind if I do it as well?
- What's your name?
- Want to get close to the bus?
Right? Okay.
- Brian for Mayor on 3!
1..2..3 Brian For Mayor!
- Everybody smile.
- Perfect. Awesome.
Thank you so much.
Appreciate the support.
Yeah. Very nice to meet you.
Take care, bye-bye.