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00:00:47.900tonight a feature interview with a leading british scholar and historian you're not going
00:01:03.100to want to miss this david starkey is one of a kind it's september 25th and this is the ezra
00:01:08.840LeVant Show. Shame on you, you censorious bug. Well, I'm delighted to introduce to you today
00:01:27.840a great thinker. There still are some of them around, a public intellectual. David Starkey,
00:01:34.700The CBE, Commander of the British Empire, is a British historian, author, and television presenter who taught at the London School of Economics for 26 years and is best known for his books and documentaries on Henry VIII, Elizabeth I, and the history of the British monarchy.
00:01:51.060So what on earth could he have to say about today?
00:01:54.460Well, a great many things, because if you forget the past, you're doomed to replay it, or at least it's failures.
00:02:02.240I think one of the whole points of being conservative is that you learn that other people have gone through these things before you.
00:02:08.720And maybe they fought a battle to give us a freedom that we take for granted.
00:02:44.740If you are a conservative, you believe that the present is a product of the past,
00:02:50.100that we are rooted in our very specific past, in our specific national past,
00:02:57.880if you are British or English, in your Canadian past,
00:03:01.040which is, of course, an aspect of the great British diaspora and so on.
00:03:06.840And for me, without that grounding in the past, I would feel, I'm going to use an odd word,
00:03:15.500I would feel illiterate in the present.
00:03:18.460And I've been profoundly influenced, as so many of us have been, by modern thinkers like Roger Scruton,
00:03:24.640But much more by the, you talked in your introduction about the past having dealt with the problems of the present, what we are undergoing in Britain at the moment, or have undergone, is a quasi-revolution, an extraordinary change in our customs, our manners, our constitution, our way of living, the nature of our population,
00:03:48.540which corresponds directly to the events of 200 years ago,
00:03:54.380the French Revolution, also crucially important
00:05:27.760You know, you're not born free, as the great St. Augustine, and I am no Christian, said
00:05:32.540very explicitly, you are born and you will forgive me if I use a good direct translation0.99
00:05:37.560of his words amidst piss and shit.0.99
00:05:39.640You as a baby are this creature which is absolutely dependent on your literal inheritance of your parents, your family, the world you're born into.1.00
00:06:23.360Yes, I mean, but remember the great message of the French Revolution and those American thinkers to the south of you who were so profoundly influenced by it.
00:06:33.160I mean, the Jeffersons and whatever of this world, many of them thought quite the opposite.
00:06:37.620They think society is what makes us barbarous and brutal.
00:06:42.660And instead, we are born this wonderful, perfect creature.
00:06:47.360And all human beings, of course, are fundamentally the same.
00:06:51.120And, you know, we've experienced the truth or otherwise, it's very much otherwise of this notion, Ezra, with some of the imports we've had recently.0.70
00:07:00.000You know, the kindness of our heart opened the doors of Great Britain to, for example, ex-Afghan soldiers, you know, and we very politely removed their Kalashnikovs, you know, presumably giving them a kind of certificate of authority and an agreement to pay them back for it.0.98
00:07:18.520And we trimmed their beards up and we brought them here and we sort of put them down in Richmond on Thames and encouraged them to go to the Dog and Duck and drink half a pint of cider.0.88
00:07:28.220And, you know, the women of Britain, until unfortunate things happen to them, think those men just like us.1.00
00:07:52.420And I think that you have an important role.
00:07:54.820But you've also had an amazing privilege to spend your time studying and thinking when ordinary people don't have that.
00:08:04.280And so here's my question. How can an ordinary person, how can a interested but busy person live a life that is true to history and the philosophies you describe if they either don't have the time or the ability to bury themselves deep into thinkers like Burke?
00:08:23.920How do you transmit a national mindset, a national sense of values?
00:08:31.420You are a keeper of, you're a dealer of intellectual ideas.
00:09:56.440It's easy to wring hands and say we're at the end of times and there are some sides that we are.
00:10:01.820But equally, one of the things that strikes me, and I've just returned,
00:10:05.520and indeed I didn't think I was going to make this interview in time,
00:10:08.680Because last night I was speaking in the sleepy countryside, the sleepy English countryside still exists on the Welsh border called the Marches outside a wonderful town, tiny little city called Hereford Cathedral City.
00:10:26.700And there, there was an audience of about 100 people who were prepared to listen to myself and my colleague in popular conservatism, Mark Littlewood, talk for an hour and a half, including really vigorous, detailed questioning on what has gone wrong with the British Constitution since Tony Blair.
00:10:53.460There is, I think there's an appetite for knowledge.
00:10:56.160I mean, specifically in the area of history, I am constantly, I'm stopped so many times in the street by people saying, you know, usually a bit shy.
00:11:10.020Yes, I have a couple of work, you know, please keep on.
00:11:13.700And then some of them will, if I've got a bit of time and indicate I have, will want to talk.
00:11:18.340And I think very often, you know, people develop a passion for a subject like history as they get older themselves and they realize they have a history.
00:11:29.620I think also this extraordinary sense of rootlessness, which has happened partly because of social and economic change, partly because of emigration, partly because of the triumph of the radical left.
00:11:43.780It leads people to ask the question, where do I come from?
00:11:48.340I'm not really as ruthless as these people claim.
00:11:50.960I have memories that tell me there was a different world.
00:11:55.020And so I think that there is, there's a self-correction.
00:11:58.240And the thing that most strikes me, just to again, Ezra, end on an optimistic note.
00:12:04.160If you look at one of the great dystopian novels, that's to say, the 1984 and the world of George Orwell.
00:12:14.740What is striking is that those who are corrupted, those who are in the party, those who have to believe the lies of Newspeak, they are the highly educated.
00:12:27.420The backers of all the great revolutions have been the ultra-educated.
00:12:32.940And ordinary people, you know, and this sounds terribly patronizing, but do remember, with my posh accent and my Oxbridge background, my father was a toolmaker.
00:13:50.520Let me ask about something you indicated about history.
00:13:56.280I like referring to the indigenous peoples of the United Kingdom.
00:14:02.620I like thinking about the centuries of the history, because everywhere else around the world, there's great care taken for indigenous culture.
00:14:14.880Here in Canada, it's an enormous struggle session.
00:14:21.340We have, you know, that the land exists.
00:14:23.340There's a kind of indigenous title to the land.
00:14:26.800And we don't actually own land, even though most of it was seated in treaties of surrender.
00:14:32.620So I think when you look at the United Kingdom and Ireland, too, for that matter, and look at the centuries or millennia of life, I think it's interesting that the only indigenous culture that is not respected or respectable by this new thinking is that of the West.
00:14:50.940But of course there's an indigenous history in the UK. I think that they need to destroy that legitimate land-rooted nationalism before they can attack the UK. Give me your thoughts on that. I don't know if I articulated myself clearly.0.68
00:15:08.960You do articulate yourself very clearly. I mean, let's again look at the conventional narrative, the conventional narrative on the left and indeed the center left and indeed, in some ways, our official narrative is we are a nation of immigrants.
00:15:24.340Well, in one sense, it's true. And a very large part of the population, modern DNA analysis suggests, has in fact been here since the Bronze Age or earlier, maybe much earlier.
00:15:38.960But there were waves of invaders, there were Romans, and there were Anglo-Saxons, and there were Danes, and there were dribbles of French Huguenots, and there were occasional Jews, and there were lots of Irish at various points, and so on and so on.
00:15:54.200But the thing that is really striking is that all those groups meld into one.
00:16:01.560We develop an extraordinary and unique fused language in the age of Chaucer in the 14th century, which has dominated the world.
00:16:17.040I mean, the immigrations of French Huguenots, the immigrations of German Jews and whatever,
00:16:24.020Russian Jews, the refugees from the terrible pogroms of the 19th century.
00:16:28.760There were a few tens of thousands at the most.
00:16:32.080And what happened was, I mean, think about it.
00:16:35.620When the Norman conquest happened, the Norman invaders, there weren't terribly many of them,
00:16:41.080were a vile, foreign, oppressive force.
00:16:44.560It was colonial conquest of the most brutal sort.0.97
00:16:48.120But the two groups meld and fuse and become one.
00:16:52.640And the influence of Anglo-Saxon England is fused in this most extraordinary way
00:17:00.560with the systematization, the high Christian culture of the Normans.
00:17:06.380Similarly, the French immigrants, the Protestant immigrants, the fleeing from the Catholic persecution of Louis XIV and the Huguenots, become English in time.
00:17:24.300And this is one of the things we've forgotten.
00:17:28.120So we have somebody. It's rather wonderful. You've got this in France, except your French population has deliberately maintained this distinction because, of course, of numbers and the fact that they occupy a large specific area, the area of Quebec.
00:17:46.420But in Britain, people like de la Billière is a good Englishman, indeed he's an English general, but he's time.
00:17:56.140And the biggest example of it is actually our royal family.
00:17:59.840Those who are malicious constantly describe King Charles as a German.
00:18:04.960Well, indeed, by his ancestry, before the beginning of the 20th century, apart from that tiny little dribble of Stuart blood that comes via the daughter of Charles I, he is indeed German.
00:18:24.380And the British royal family kept itself German for 200 years by constantly marrying back to Germany.
00:18:31.000But you know what happened? At the beginning of the 20th century, they decided to become, and they decided they had to become, because of the new sense of powerful sense of nationalism engendered by the First World War, they decided to become English.
00:18:46.260They changed their name, Ezra, from whatever it was, Saxe-Colbert-Gotha, to Windsor.
00:18:53.060They changed the rules of the house, though they marry Englishmen and Englishwomen.
00:18:58.560They identify in a dramatically different way.
00:19:05.200I mean, you mentioned my CD, which is a bit of a joke.
00:19:08.420And remember, back in the time of my cancellation in 2020, it was a very determined attempt to remove it, which I fought to the death, not because I particularly value it, but because I won't let anybody steal things from me, particularly on bad grounds.
00:19:23.800But the order of the British Empire is founded in that same year that you changed the name, function, and really the nationality of the monarchy.
00:20:46.360okay you're not going to get it and nobody does ibrox park football stadium at glasgow
00:20:55.080no i wouldn't guess that in front of an audience of thousands and thousands of munition workers
00:21:03.060and and and soldiers and so on and that that was the so in other words what we've got to look at
00:21:10.320When we're looking at this question of indigeneity or Englishness, we do in fact have a settled, a population that was settled for the best part of a thousand years, which is actually quite a long time.
00:21:23.980If you look at your so-called indigenous people and that agitated question of which tribe occupied where, you will usually find that they were there for about four decades before they were, because they were constantly moving.
00:21:38.780that they're highly mobile and so for the people to be the broad mass of the people because the
00:21:45.780large-scale invasion stops a thousand years ago with the Norman conquest and even then the number
00:21:52.180of Normans wasn't all that very great but you have a settled people for a thousand years in which
00:21:57.380important groups of foreigners arrive are seen as being foreign to begin often very much dislike
00:22:04.500But then assimilate and become as English as everybody else.
00:22:10.040And the big question, Ezra, is going to be whether, you know, in one of the questions being agitated at the moment, I can see you follow things online in Britain pretty closely.
00:22:21.480You may remember there was this tremendous debate about whether our former prime minister, the Indian extraction, and the Hindu, a practicing Hindu, the Rishi Sunak, can be called English.
00:22:33.380Now, my answer to that clearly at the moment is, despite the fact he's an exquisite English accent, that he is in culture, behavior, in everything apart from religion, a passion for cricket, his utter decency, since he's the only one of our prime ministers that's actually bothered to stay on in parliament and actually to serve.
00:22:55.800In other words, a man imbued with that old-fashioned English concept of public duty.
00:23:01.900But he can't be English at the moment because not enough time has gone by.
00:23:07.200Now, it may very well be in, I don't know what, two generations, three generations,
00:23:13.400because we have rather a lot of very decent, highly civilized Hindus, British Hindus and British Indians settling in Britain.
00:23:22.280We may decide, just like the French Huguenot beforehand, they have become English, but it's not yet.
00:23:29.660And it's one of the problems, of course, with modern attitudes to immigration.
00:23:34.140We somehow think that just by giving a little document, here's a British passport, here's a Canadian passport,
00:23:40.860miraculously, you are just as British as Canadian or somebody whose family has been there for,
00:23:46.420well, in the case of Canada, six or seven generations.
00:23:49.500In the case of Britain, 22 into the recesses of time.
00:29:50.580And again, you know, one of the great problems, again, about the hyper-liberal movement is that it makes this terrible error.
00:30:00.500I began with the joke about the Afghani.
00:30:02.880because we're all the same and of course we're not all the same this is not particularly to say
00:30:09.820though I actually believe it that we in the west or particularly being an Englishman you may
00:30:15.700remember that it always used to be said that if you were English you know you've been you've been1.00
00:30:20.180born with the ultimate silver spoon in your mouth and I still by and large believe that's true but
00:30:26.680But it's simply we've got to recognize human difference, that culture, religion, tradition really do make us different, and that those differences are absolutely fundamental.
00:30:38.900And so when you import large numbers of people, you will remember Boris Johnson's brutal words of women who wear bin bags, you're importing something which is radically different.
00:30:53.280They do not have an individualistic culture.
00:30:56.140Ours is an individualistic culture with all the institutions of state, law, education, religion and everything else designed to cope with that.
00:31:05.840If you import people who have a radically different view, which is essentially communitarian,0.97
00:31:12.000is based on either the religious group or much more dramatically in the case of a typical immigrant in Britain.
00:31:20.140I know nothing about Canada, a typical immigrant in Britain from Pakistan or the Punjab or whatever.
00:31:26.140You're part of a clan. You're part of a tribe. Your loyalties are fundamentally to the tribe.
00:31:33.740So in the famous rape gangs, the infamous rape gangs we have in Britain, they're not gangs.
00:31:39.660They're extended families. The rape is done by father, son, uncle, cousin, brother-in-law,
00:31:47.020and so on, but they operate like a mafia, which is often based, you know, the mafia again
00:31:56.140are called a family, and because we refuse to acknowledge these differences, because
00:32:02.360we croon away all the same, I mean, remember, the very notion of universal human rights
00:32:09.360assumes you have a universal human being, which is self-evident in nonsense, but it
00:32:16.720has led to our abandonment of frontiers, our abandonment of the notion that the first duty
00:32:23.120of the state is to distinguish between the citizen and the foreigner and to protect the
00:32:28.160citizen if need be from the foreigner. We've literally lowered our guard, shattered our0.99
00:32:35.520frontiers. There's so many interesting things you've said. I think your point about the clans
00:32:40.640being behind the rape gangs is one reason why the West has had such a difficult time of
00:32:46.340understanding them because i don't think any of us could call up 10 friends and say
00:32:53.340you know we are going to rape a girl all night why don't you come and help keep this crime a secret
00:33:01.140like it's unthinkable it's contrary to to everything our culture has taught us and we0.92
00:33:07.760don't even know it it's so we take it for granted like a fish doesn't know it's in water
00:33:11.900and the idea that there could be cadres of men
00:33:17.340who would commit these horrific crimes
00:33:38.840And the fact that not even an archbishop is permitted to touch an imam, these are countries where there is simply no notion that a woman has any rights.0.98
00:33:51.660I mean, the only reason you can rape a woman is because either she or her husband has got rights.0.86
00:33:58.140The only right that they would recognize if a woman is raped is the fact that her husband or family would be dishonored, or her brothers would be dishonored.
00:34:09.040And we, again, just are incapable of imagining ourselves into that world with the result that we fall victim to it.
00:34:18.920Because, again, going alongside that clan structure, there is also a structure of finance.
00:34:26.740There's a complete political structure, there's a takeover of political institutions, to which we are vulnerable, because we will not acknowledge the difference, we will not acknowledge the distinction.
00:34:40.420But you see, again, you also asked me a question about the claim that we as whites, and particularly British or English, don't have a culture.
00:34:52.100It is very typically made by somebody, black or brown, dressed up in funny clothes.
00:34:59.640You may remember there was the famous incident where an extraordinary woman dressed really rather like a bar stool in Las Vegas and had an interchange between Lady Hussey at court.
00:35:17.620And Lady Hussey, confronted by this woman dressed like a bar stool in leopard skin and assorted feathers and whatever, and knowing a bit about Africa, asked where she was from.
00:35:27.600And the woman, of course, took huge outrage, proclaiming that she was British, whilst having a very funny name, which turned out to be completely confected.
00:40:54.180That's hate speech and you're just a hate preacher.0.98
00:40:56.800And let's call out the hypocrisy, free speech has become a convenient shield for anti-muslim0.97
00:41:02.340hostility and vilification with no consequences.
00:41:06.120The moment that anyone uses that same free speech to attack other faiths relentlessly
00:41:10.900like Judaism, they are called out, labelled anti-semitic and exposed across national media.
00:41:16.420And when the target is Islam, suddenly it's just all satire.
00:41:20.880speech in this country is applied selectively. It only seems to extend to the groups that0.88
00:41:26.320elites deem acceptable to vilify in order to meet their agenda. And to the Birmingham
00:41:32.080Town Hall for hosting a so-called comedian that actively promotes prejudice against a
00:41:38.080major segment of Birmingham's community which undermines public trust and local cohesion.
00:41:44.000We ask the Birmingham Town Hall align with the duty of community respect and cancel the show.
00:41:49.040Now, in the end, they were not successful, which surprised me because this same group was the pressure group that had the Tel Aviv Makabe football team banned from bringing any of its fans.0.99
00:42:29.400There is a kind of pounding rhythm about the whole thing.
00:42:33.960There is an essential sense of we have power.
00:42:41.300We're not going to talk about violence, but you will realize it's actually there, that we have the power, maybe physically, but at the moment, we've got the power to cancel you, to deprive you of your living.
00:42:58.040Of course, if you're a comedian and you can't actually perform,
00:43:01.860like John Cleese who had an awful lot of wives, which is terribly expensive indulgence.
00:43:07.480And even at his age, you need to keep on performing, destroy your livelihood.0.97
00:43:12.020I think it is, again, this notion that Islam demands special treatment.
00:45:24.460So alongside the Palestinian flag, sorry, alongside the Irish tricolor, you will see the Palestinian flag.
00:45:31.640And alongside the Union Jack, you will see the Star of Israel. And the risk that's happening in Britain, again, look at how those men were dressed.
00:45:45.000Last weekend and the weekend before in Portsmouth, a man called Danny Tomo, Daniel Thomas, organized a group of people called the Patriot Platform to resist immigration, to resist particularly the landing of an unusually large, one of these inflatable class,0.54
00:46:12.260but carrying a hundred and a lot of people, a huge, huge thing,
00:46:15.720taking an unusual route across the Channel,
00:46:19.220sailing from Normandy, the actual beaches,
00:47:06.200You may remember back, because, again, you are well informed on Britain, back at the time of the Southport riots, which, of course, were protesting against immigrants and immigrant violence violently.
00:47:24.840And there were counter protests, particularly when moving again to Birmingham, Birmingham Sparkbrook.
00:47:31.100And in Birmingham, Sparkbrook, a particular pub that allegedly, well, it was occupied by some of the white protesters, was surrounded by a very well-organized gang of Muslims wearing masks and carrying baseball bats.
00:47:51.420And somebody was beaten up so badly that his liver was ruptured.
00:48:53.720Put your base backs away in the vestry of the church.
00:48:58.260Do not disturb the copes and be especially careful of the processional cross.
00:49:03.440But you see, there is a risk that that will happen.
00:49:09.340Because if the other is allowed to happen, and also there's something else which is even more important, Ezra.
00:49:14.620The law actually specifically protects religious minorities.
00:49:19.740In the same way that it specifically protects the transgendered, it specifically protects people of color, it specifically protects women, it protects anybody but a white man.
00:49:34.540And again, it goes even further than that. It protects, again deliberately, the mentally sick. It protects the gypsy. These terrible cases involving people like Ruda Cabana and Calocane, who in a sensible world, once it became clear that they were violent, either sociopaths or whatever else they were, from early teens, would have been incarcerated in a mental hospital for life.0.96
00:50:03.620But, oh, no, they have special rights.
00:50:07.240And again, it's the problem of the rights culture.
00:50:11.020The man who did more to shape it worldwide, apart from Simply Britain, a man called Tom Bingham,
00:50:17.660in the essay that he wrote on the rule of law and the very notable lecture he gave on it, again, Commonwealth in Australia,
00:50:27.360he actually formulates this completely clearly.
00:50:30.100He says human rights law is anti-democratic.
00:55:00.720You have to cling on to what all the three people we've mentioned, the possibility of language, the possibility of understanding, the possibility of persuading.
00:55:15.280And it was very easy for all of us, you know, you to accept your banning from Britain, me to have accepted the cancellation of 2020.
00:55:26.660But I believe, and I think all three of those people in their very different ways, Kipling, Chesterton, and even the very mild-mannered T.S. Eliot, they believed in one essential thing, which was courage, which they showed in very different ways.
00:55:44.920And that seems to me to be the essential one.
00:55:48.020The only thing, the only public virtue that acts, there are lots of public virtues.
00:55:53.100There's reason, there's eloquence, there's good intention, there's an awareness of the kind of good and all the rest of it.
00:56:00.020But none of them really get persuasiveness, but none of them matter unless they're coupled with courage.
00:56:07.000And as the world collapses round us, let's shake hands on a bit of courage.
00:56:13.060Dr. David Starkey, what a pleasure and an honor to spend the last hour with you.
00:56:16.980And you are a man who shows great courage.
00:56:20.400And I hope our viewers will be inspired by you.