TRIGGERnometry - The British State Hates its Own People - Dr David Starkey

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00:01:54.940 Something had gone structurally wrong with Britain.

00:02:01.380 We are a state which has turned against its people.

00:02:05.380 All three parties of the right are realizing

00:02:08.400 that they're not dealing with a series of separate problems.

00:02:12.760 You're dealing with a single central issue,

00:02:16.380 which is that the British state has stopped working.

00:02:20.180 We are genuinely, I think, at a moment,

00:02:22.840 I would argue of a national crisis which is comparable only to the First and Second World Wars.

00:02:29.140 There has to be a reunion of the right, and that the only basis for that reunion is policy.

00:02:36.140 But they're fighting each other.

00:02:37.940 And I despair.

00:02:42.560 If Britain survives, why did you say that?

00:02:47.080 Because I think it is possible that it won't.

00:02:49.420 Dr. David Starkey, welcome back to Trigonometry.

00:02:54.840 A pleasure to be back.

00:02:55.980 Well, it's a pleasure to have you on the show.

00:02:57.720 You've been on the show a gazillion times,

00:03:00.040 typically to talk about your great area of expertise,

00:03:03.300 which is, of course, history.

00:03:04.620 Always fun and fascinating,

00:03:06.140 and we will do more of those episodes in the future, I hope.

00:03:08.460 But today we wanted to talk about the present

00:03:11.600 and what's happening in this country today,

00:03:13.540 and particularly what's happening on the right of British politics.

00:03:17.220 we are recording this shortly before the by-election

00:03:21.640 we don't quite know what will happen

00:03:23.780 although there is some inkling as to what will happen

00:03:27.520 which is likely a Labour victory

00:03:28.760 you know all the players involved

00:03:31.700 on all sides of this conversation

00:03:33.660 you yourself I think is a Conservative

00:03:35.720 who's now moved in the reform direction

00:03:37.920 is that fair?

00:03:38.500 I remain a nominal member of the Conservative Party

00:03:43.260 I am friendly to everybody on the right

00:03:46.100 And that being the case, what do you see as happening?

00:03:50.980 You mean in the by-election?

00:03:52.680 No, not in the by-election.

00:03:54.100 More generally.

00:03:55.200 What are the big tectonic plates and how are they moving?

00:03:59.540 What I think is striking is they're moving in two completely different directions.

00:04:04.900 If you look at the level of personalities, there is increasingly radical division,

00:04:09.800 typified by the campaigning that's taken place in the Makersfield by-election, in which, as it were,

00:04:18.540 it's a war, it's Hobbesian, it's a war of all against all, and that Restore is yapping at the

00:04:26.100 heels of reform. Reform continues to denounce the Tories. You'd almost think that they weren't

00:04:31.520 actually fighting, that they weren't fighting Andy Burnham, but just fighting each other.

00:04:36.240 And there are vicious personal hostilities between those who've gone over to reform, like Robert Jenrick and Suella Braverman, and those who remain within the Conservative Party, and even those like Katie Lamb and Jack Rankin, who I think there isn't a sheet of paper between them, and Jenrick or indeed Farage as to what they think.

00:05:03.080 profound personal hurt was done by the way and the timing that Robert went over. So there's a

00:05:10.700 series of profound, profound bad blood. On the other hand, if you look in the other direction,

00:05:19.080 Francis, and you look at policy, what is very striking is how close everybody is moving to

00:05:26.460 each other. And this, I think, is this for me is the really important thing. When you ask me the

00:05:32.680 question of where do I stand. My own view is, and it's also very much the view of Jacob Rees-Mogg,

00:05:40.920 that there has to be a reunion of the right, and that the only basis for that reunion is policy.

00:05:49.020 And what I'm struck by is, as you know, we've actually talked about it on the show way back

00:05:57.380 in late 2003

00:05:59.660 and developed over

00:06:01.520 into the spring of

00:06:03.020 sorry

00:06:05.140 2023

00:06:06.300 when you're a historian decades

00:06:09.200 especially when you're my age

00:06:11.900 and into the spring of 2024

00:06:15.880 remember that

00:06:17.680 extraordinary historical

00:06:19.520 episode when Sunak was prime

00:06:21.580 minister, it seems

00:06:23.000 roughly, I'd say

00:06:24.700 middle, middle ages

00:06:26.900 Anyway, I developed this idea that something had gone structurally wrong with Britain.

00:06:34.260 And everything that's happening seems to me to confirm that.

00:06:38.520 So when I say that they're all moving towards each other in policy, what do I mean?

00:06:43.800 I think in a rather fragmentary way, and still approaching it in different directions,

00:06:49.940 all three parties of the right are realizing that they're not dealing with a series of separate

00:06:57.440 problems, which are financial, which are judicial, which are immigration, which are education and

00:07:03.880 whatever. You're dealing with a single central issue, which is that the British state has stopped

00:07:11.360 working. The British state is suffering from autoimmune disease. Its machinery is eating

00:07:19.120 and consuming itself.

00:07:21.240 And it seems to me this is the great divide in politics.

00:07:25.060 If you look at what's going on on the left,

00:07:27.780 there's an extraordinary blindness.

00:07:31.240 What on earth is Burnhamism?

00:07:33.500 Well, it seems to be faintly reheated.

00:07:38.220 Reevesism, you know, do you remember?

00:07:40.820 She's Chancellor of the Exchec.

00:07:42.200 I never quite worked out what it was, but I do remember it.

00:07:45.260 Well, shall I explain it?

00:07:46.360 Because Rachel Rees is only capable of copying, it's a reheated version of what Janet Yellen did in America. 0.84

00:07:54.040 So it's called Securonomics here, or Bidenomics there.

00:07:58.800 And it was actually Jason Cowley of the form of the New Statesman who summarized it brilliantly.

00:08:04.020 What we have on this side of the Atlantic is Bidenomics without the bucks.

00:08:09.420 In other words, you can't borrow enough money to do it.

00:08:12.800 It's traditional Keynesianism, lightly disguised as investment in public services, this, that, and the other.

00:08:19.960 And you can just about make it work, as happened in America with Biden, if you borrow enough.

00:08:24.940 But you send inflation through the roof, which is why America's had much higher and astonishing levels of inflation.

00:08:31.480 But here, the only way we can do it is by financing it through borrowing.

00:08:36.860 So what you're doing is you are literally trying to pull yourself up by your own bootstraps, you know.

00:08:41.400 And as many of us discovered when we were about two years old, Rachel Reid is a very, very slow learner.

00:08:47.700 You can't do that.

00:08:49.360 Burnham seems to be about to reinvent this with the benefit of yellow buses, you know.

00:08:55.040 Presumably, well, now, the great symbol of Burnham, I imagine, will be London buses will be repainted yellow, you know.

00:09:02.920 And we will spend, and serious.

00:09:06.100 This is the symbol of Manchesterism, you know, his bus network.

00:09:10.460 So the left is completely blind to what's going on.

00:09:15.540 And I'll do something else.

00:09:16.900 I predicted on the day that Starmer was elected that he would fail.

00:09:22.120 There is a recording of it.

00:09:23.480 I did it not with you, but with the New Culture Forum on the actual morning after his election

00:09:28.460 victory.

00:09:29.180 I said he will fail because he represents this failed system, this system in which political

00:09:36.960 power has been hived off judges and to so-called experts in quangos, and it's strangling everything.

00:09:43.240 The right is slowly beginning to recognize that. So there's some hope. 0.59

00:09:50.060 There is some hope in the sense that you are talking about policy alignment. But I also think

00:09:56.860 that given the personality clashes that you described, and I think they go beyond actually,

00:10:01.600 the defectors. I mean, I think Kemi Badenoch and Nigel Farage don't particularly like each

00:10:08.660 other personally. Farage has obviously been scathing about the Conservative Party.

00:10:12.620 And now, of course, why don't we sitting here don't know exactly how impactful it will be in

00:10:17.520 this particular by-election. You have another party on the right, which is Restore led by

00:10:22.660 Rupert Lowell, who hates Farage, perhaps some might argue with some reason, given their personal

00:10:29.380 history. But on top of that, hates the Conservative Party, and they all hate each other.

00:10:34.420 Actually, the relations between, again, let's be much more precise about this,

00:10:38.800 the relations between Rupert Lowe and the Conservative Party seem to me to be surprisingly

00:10:43.980 good. After all, they made him a member of the Public Accounts Committee. The Conservative Party

00:10:50.380 actually appointed him to that. The relations between Rupert and Kemi, I think, are good.

00:10:55.860 And it's very important.

00:10:57.540 Remember, Rupert is this bizarrest of things.

00:11:00.700 He's presenting himself as the ultimate outsider

00:11:03.580 with all of these extraordinary young men on the web.

00:11:07.880 Do you know what they're all called?

00:11:09.240 It's a wonderful term.

00:11:10.440 Let me share it with you. 1.00

00:11:11.540 They're called the Lomosexuals.

00:11:13.900 What does that mean?

00:11:16.320 Robert Lowe.

00:11:17.700 Oh, I see. 1.00

00:11:18.260 So they're the Lomo. 0.99

00:11:19.420 So, you know, you've got Harrison Pitt and Charlie Downs 1.00

00:11:22.840 and Conor Tomlinson and whatever, 0.98

00:11:24.500 All the young toughies of the right are wickedly known as the homosexuals, so they're presenting themselves as these extraordinary outsiders. 0.94

00:11:33.460 But what is Rupert? Rupert is a member of Boodles, you know, the second smartest, next only to whites, of the St. James's clubs. 0.99

00:11:43.880 He's hunting, shooting, fishing. Look at that Rubicon complexion. He's a farmer. He shoots pheasants, I imagine, as hunted, and presenting himself as this extraordinary outsider. 1.00

00:11:59.620 So I think there's a series of really increasingly ridiculous postures being struck that do conceal fundamental agreement on policy.

00:12:12.240 And I don't know whether I have you read, because what's happening now is each one of these three parties is starting to produce serious written stuff.

00:12:23.120 And if you look, Harrison Pitt wrote one of the most impressive documents on how we deal with immigration and how we deal with illegal immigration for Rupert Lowe.

00:12:34.580 And if you look at the central section of that document, it takes my idea of the great repeal, the undoing of the Blairite constitutional settlement as the absolute necessary step.

00:12:48.440 It calls it the great clarification or something.

00:12:51.100 And it, you know, it likely rechristens it, but it takes it as central policy.

00:12:56.560 Look at what Bedanoff has done.

00:12:58.660 She has just got the conservative shadow attorney general, Lord Wolfson, to write a detailed

00:13:04.060 paper on repealing the central piece of legislation, which will be covered by the great repeal,

00:13:10.680 which is the Human Rights Act.

00:13:12.820 She's also now come out in favor of repealing one of the most important sections of the

00:13:18.940 Equality Act, the public sector equality duty, the PSED. If you again look at, even more strikingly,

00:13:30.500 Chris Philp, the shadow Home Secretary, has come out with saying, we will bring in legislation

00:13:37.940 to remove all forms of judicial intervention in the process of appeal against asylum,

00:13:46.560 against the failure to grant asylum.

00:13:50.300 In other words, you will remove that judicial oversight,

00:13:53.600 which is primarily why, as Rishi Sunak recognized,

00:13:57.760 along with everybody else, Tony Blair recognizes in his memoirs, 0.65

00:14:01.540 you can't actually get rid of asylum seekers. 1.00

00:14:04.680 We could stop the boats tomorrow if the lawyers said yes. 0.91

00:14:11.120 The lawyers will say no.

00:14:12.820 And as I pointed out, when I heard Zia Yusuf talk about this at the IEA,

00:14:18.600 even Nigel went into Downing Street and ordered the First Sea Lord to deploy the Navy

00:14:23.780 and persisted in ordering him, he would find himself arrested for contempt of court.

00:14:30.700 But they're all recognizing this.

00:14:33.680 Every one of them is recognizing this.

00:14:36.560 Nigel is fully committed to the repeal of the Human Rights Act.

00:14:41.960 He's fully committed now to the repeal of the Equality Act.

00:14:46.000 Suella Braverman wrote a very interesting introduction,

00:14:51.020 preface forward, or whatever it's called,

00:14:53.300 to a paper published by the Prosperity Institute,

00:14:57.400 again on the terrible problems of the Equality Act.

00:15:00.800 They're all recognizing it, but they're fighting each other.

00:15:05.380 And I despair.

00:15:09.300 and it's a suicidal folly and if you look at the alternative in terms of the nation of going down

00:15:19.080 the current route that we are now it is simply a catastrophe that that what we've seen with this

00:15:27.540 with the current starmer government is we have complete stasis nothing can be done you are

00:15:35.880 pursuing a policy in which you are taxing more to pay more people welfare, which makes the country

00:15:42.520 poorer. It is a vicious downward cycle. And there is no way you can break it without doing these

00:15:50.460 fundamental changes to what's happened, what happened to Britain between 1997 and 2010.

00:15:58.300 Otherwise, we're tied to a wheel. And that's basically a scenario, because come the next

00:16:03.960 election, the people who might get elected from the left may be worse than that.

00:16:09.520 They will be worse than that. I mean, we are genuinely, I think, at a moment,

00:16:15.100 I would argue, of a national crisis which is comparable only to the First and Second World

00:16:21.180 Wars. I would possibly go even further. I think we are, which is why I've been using when I've

00:16:28.100 been talking about what needs to be done, the language of grand constitutional change.

00:16:33.360 I think we are at the stage of the equivalent of the reign of Charles I or the reign of James II.

00:16:40.980 We are a state which has turned against its people, a state which has become the principal

00:16:48.840 danger to the survival of the nation. I mean, the thing that's most striking about the Starmer

00:16:53.980 government, it basically hates Britain. It basically hates the British. Look at Lord

00:17:03.120 Herman, the Attorney General, and this absurd obsession with giving away the Chagos Islands,

00:17:09.900 this absurd obsession with making concessions to IRA terrorists. We had John McTurman today

00:17:16.480 talking about after Al Cairns in the House of Commons

00:17:22.940 in his resignation speech said that one of the reasons he'd resigned

00:17:26.580 was the legislation which the Labour Party has been pushing through the House

00:17:32.100 to make veterans who had served in Northern Ireland

00:17:37.720 judicable for what they'd done,

00:17:40.180 whereas, of course, all the terrorists are exempt.

00:17:43.020 It's monstrous.

00:17:44.720 It is simply, simply monstrous.

00:17:46.940 But what does a leading member of the Labour Party say, John McTernan, what does he actually say?

00:17:53.840 This is why the Brits thought, the Brits, what the IRA call the British as a term of hatred and contempt.

00:18:02.100 A leading member of the Labour Party talks of his own people in those terms.

00:18:07.780 The language, again, which is used, which favours emigrants over the native population,

00:18:15.000 it is truly, truly astonishing, which is, I think, again, I don't know whether you saw

00:18:21.880 the New Statesman published, which has become, in many ways, immensely impressive under its

00:18:27.220 current editorship, and published a report on the makers' field constituency, pointing out that

00:18:33.140 burning, seething sense of things have been taken away, what we have lost, what we want back,

00:18:42.580 that inchoate sense of mounting rage, which, you know, bursts forward with the events in Belfast,

00:18:50.480 bursts to the surface with the events in Southport.

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00:20:09.860 support trigonometry and check them out at hexclad.com forward slash trig make sure to let

00:20:16.020 them know we sent you david how much of where we are do you think comes down to

00:20:23.700 like you said, legislation, but also the weakness and spinelessness of our leaders and our political

00:20:30.420 class? The two things are very closely related. I don't believe that the, again, you've got to,

00:20:36.440 it's a central point. I mean, there are different ways you could explain the current situation. I

00:20:41.180 mean, I explain it systemically. I think that the actual machinery has gone wrong. Other ways of

00:20:48.160 explaining it, are to look at a single big issue. And people who I've been citing as agreeing with

00:20:53.800 me, people like Harrison Pitt or Rupert Lowe, obviously put immigration, and particularly

00:20:59.440 illegal immigration, at the head of the list. And other people say, actually, it is due to the

00:21:06.060 shocking quality of our leaders. And there is the evidence. I mean, we're about to have our

00:21:10.920 seventh prime minister in 10 years. There has been nothing like this since the invention of

00:21:18.160 the office of prime minister in the 1720s by Robert Walpole. When you were saying at the

00:21:25.860 beginning, I was very struck, you said, you know, Stark is a historian. We're not going to get him

00:21:29.400 talking about the present. What we're living through is an episode of astonishing historical

00:21:35.440 importance. The reason that I've involved myself in it is precisely because of my historical

00:21:42.080 understanding of how all this stuff was put together. So the moment when you can actually

00:21:47.220 witness what, unless we do something about it, is its dissolution, is one of peculiar fascination.

00:21:55.640 But there is a reason why we've had this succession of failed premierships. The job is,

00:22:01.560 OK, many of them were inadequate. Some of them were there for absolutely no purpose

00:22:08.140 whatever. Some were there with trying to do the right thing in the wrong way, which is

00:22:17.120 Liz Truss. I like Liz, but Liz has this terrible problem. In early middle age, she now has 0.99

00:22:24.080 this large label hung around her neck, which says, I give good ideas a bad name.

00:22:31.300 It's contaminating and tragic.

00:22:35.520 Boris, of course, had one good thing and then a series of catastrophic things.

00:22:40.640 But fundamentally, all of them were confronting the same problem, that the system works against

00:22:48.820 them. This is what Dominic Cummings, you know, Boris's right-hand man for a period of time,

00:22:56.280 I always said it was terribly like the court of Henry VIII. Dominic was very, very, aspired to do

00:23:01.880 the same sort of things as Thomas Cromwell. So I wrote a nice piece on Dom and Tom, and they both

00:23:07.200 came up, of course, against an uppity woman who was, you know, actually third wife rather than

00:23:12.720 second wife, with Carrie playing power politics. But Dominic's analysis is exactly mine, that the

00:23:20.960 structure of government makes it impossible to do anything. And of course, even Starmer. I mean,

00:23:28.360 Starmer, rigid, authoritarian, unimaginative, a complete product of the system, and indeed

00:23:36.200 somebody who invented it. And I think it's important that we realize just how much guilt,

00:23:41.280 and I use that word, there's going to be another volume written in 10 or 20 years. It will be like

00:23:48.400 Michael Foote's volume on those who advocated appeasement. It will be called The Guilty Men.

00:23:56.520 And they will beheld, if Britain survives, those headed by somebody like Blair and Brown and with

00:24:03.280 Starmer very high on the list. They will be held in the same contempt and hatred as those who were

00:24:12.080 responsible for appeasement. And I think, in fact, those who were responsible for appeasement were

00:24:16.200 actually sensible, but that's another matter, because they were just making sure we could

00:24:19.820 actually fight a war when we actually declared it. Whereas what Brown and Blair and Starmer did,

00:24:25.860 Starmer, right at the beginning of the enterprise of imposing a completely alien notion of law, which is human rights law, and the Brown Equality Act.

00:24:41.400 I mean, the problem is, Francis, you're doing your usual suite, I'm not completely understanding 0.95

00:24:48.400 and I'm a bit bottled frown, which is your essential role on this show.

00:24:53.100 You do it absolutely wonderfully well.

00:24:59.300 I've often wondered just quite how much rehearsal is called to keep it up for the length of

00:25:06.120 time that you do.

00:25:06.940 But the essential point is that we've had this world in which, and it's really remarkable, if you go back and you look at Blair's memoirs, I mean, I got very interested in how all this happened.

00:25:25.020 And it's perfectly clear Blair, and particularly Jack Straw, the Home Secretary, who was responsible for so much of this, didn't really know what they were doing.

00:25:39.020 They thought all this was zingy modernizing.

00:25:42.320 We're a new country, or indeed exactly the same with David Cameron, modernization.

00:25:51.700 But there were people like, exactly like Keir Starmer who knew what they were doing, who knew what the introduction of the Human Rights Act would do, that would actually make it that we completely stood our system of government on its head and that we replaced a political constitution with a legal constitution.

00:26:16.320 And again, many people will think, well, isn't that a really good thing? But the problem is law cannot adjudicate satisfactorily between the individual right and common public safety.

00:26:31.780 And it cannot deal either with budgets.

00:26:36.340 I mean, let's give you an example.

00:26:38.460 What the Equality Act does is to introduce this notion that there is a right wage separate from the market wage and that a judge can determine it. 0.76

00:26:50.440 So you have this lunacy in which, because one group of people who happen to be women do a job like being dinner ladies for Birmingham City Council, and another group of people who happen to be men, chaps, do dustbin collecting, and dustbin collecting is much harder and much heavier and much more unpleasant work than sitting around, you know, serving slop to school children. 0.72

00:27:15.280 And therefore, they're paid more. 0.82

00:27:19.600 And the argument was put to the judges, well, actually, the two jobs are really equivalent.

00:27:26.940 That demands Lee Day, the dreadful firm of solicitors who have been responsible for pursuing so many of these absurd actions said, well, what that demonstrates is the market rate is not a defense.

00:27:43.620 Can we just say this again? The market, if you as an employer pay the market rate for a job, that is not a defense against a judge saying that's wrong. That is guaranteed to bankrupt any company. And it's guaranteed it has already bankrupted Birmingham and it is going to bankrupt next. It is insane.

00:28:07.620 And in other words, what I think is really striking about this,

00:28:11.500 this is why suddenly Jack Swar, having introduced all of this stuff,

00:28:15.960 is saying, ooh, um, uh, I think it's possibly gone a little bit far.

00:28:20.360 And what we've gone ourselves into is a situation in which you can actually,

00:28:25.500 that wonderful phrase, you know, I'm quite fond of the Bible,

00:28:28.260 although I don't believe in God, but that wonderful phrase,

00:28:32.620 by their fruits ye shall know them.

00:28:34.680 You can judge things by their consequences. We can see what the consequences of this sort of

00:28:42.300 thing have been, and they're all bad. Let's take another interesting example, English Nature,

00:28:49.840 which has been in the news an awful lot recently. This thing costing whatever it is, two billion a

00:28:55.380 year or more to run, what has it done? It is responsible in its most recent manifestation

00:29:02.040 for saying, wouldn't it be a terribly good thing to kill the ponies on Dartmoor? Because we believe 0.92

00:29:08.640 in going back to some notion of, isn't it odd? We're not allowed to have an indigenous population,

00:29:15.920 but we're allowed to have indigenous flora and fauna. Isn't it really odd? You know, the notion

00:29:20.840 that they're the natural inhabitants of this island is perfectly acceptable if you're talking

00:29:25.700 about buttercups, but really isn't acceptable if you're talking about human beings. I mean,

00:29:30.160 the whole madness. But in order to restore the alleged original vegetation of Dartmoor,

00:29:35.560 hadn't we better kill the ponies? Well, of course, the English, because we're terminally 0.95

00:29:40.940 sentimental people, get wildly excited about that. But what else has English nature done?

00:29:45.900 English nature has inflicted on HS2, if it wasn't already a bad enough mess, an extra 1.00

00:29:52.880 hundred million pounds for a bat tunnel. It is calculated that it might save 1.00

00:30:01.000 about six bats. You laugh, but it's not funny. This is your money, it's my money.

00:30:09.160 It's why nothing can get done. Even worse, we're facing this astonishing power

00:30:14.720 shortage. What a vast soaring cost of electricity. What have they done to

00:30:20.060 contribute to that. Our nuclear power station, which has already taken 10 times as long as

00:30:27.120 equivalent structures in China to build, they have imposed costs of £600 million in order to

00:30:35.920 protect fishes against getting a little bit overheated in the discharge waters. And do you

00:30:42.500 know what? They've decided that's not enough. And what they're going to do is they're going to insist

00:30:48.560 that we reconstitute the salt marshes.

00:30:51.640 So you're going to look at adding

00:30:53.120 approximately another billion pounds.

00:30:58.160 This is insanity.

00:31:00.360 We've given a group,

00:31:02.140 all headed by Tony Juniper,

00:31:04.160 these people are fanatics.

00:31:06.520 You give single-issue fanatics

00:31:08.920 executive control.

00:31:11.260 Now, all of this,

00:31:13.140 you give judges power over money.

00:31:15.400 Why is SEND?

00:31:16.680 Why is special educational needs completely out of control?

00:31:20.660 Because you set up a tribunal structure.

00:31:23.800 If you declare that children with special needs have rights, there can be no budget. 0.99

00:31:30.560 Law does not have regard to a budget, as anybody who's been stupid enough to sue in a court knows. 0.98

00:31:36.400 Costs are of no order. 0.99

00:31:38.160 There's no consequence.

00:31:39.420 You know, the standard principle of Roman law is let the skies fall.

00:31:43.780 Justice must be done.

00:31:44.880 But that's not how you manage a society. The only way you can manage how much we spend on children

00:31:52.920 with special needs against everybody else's need is by politics. But we deliberately remove the

00:31:59.720 final decision from politics, which comes straight back to your point. We're in this terrible paradox

00:32:05.780 that the standing of politicians has never been lower. But we desperately need the political

00:32:13.120 process somehow to be revived, because that's the only way you can balance properly the individual

00:32:20.500 against the group. Otherwise, you have Singapore, or MBS, or Saudi Arabia, or China. You have a

00:32:30.260 dictatorship. So we've got to recover that. The experiment of handing it to experts on the one

00:32:36.640 hand and judges on the other, which is what Blair did, though he didn't fully realize what he was

00:32:42.360 doing has been utterly, completely, and demonstrably catastrophic. And the fact is now

00:32:50.060 obvious, the left cannot admit it. The left created this. It's become its Bible. Because

00:32:59.000 remember, the reason that all this happened, why did all this happen under Blair? It happened

00:33:04.680 because people like Peter Mandelson had already realized that the kind of Labour Party that

00:33:11.680 Burnham wants was stone dead. New Labour happens because the intelligent people like Blair,

00:33:18.540 like Campbell, like Mandelson knew socialism didn't work. So they've got to come up with

00:33:25.060 something else. And this hyperactivity where they literally pluck down ideas from the shelf,

00:33:31.160 these strange notions of international law and whatever that had been cooked up by people like

00:33:35.960 Herman, people like Tom Bingham, people like Starmer, they just latch on to them.

00:33:43.100 And so New Labour itself was a testament to the failure of the old Labour Party.

00:33:49.600 What's now happened, of course, is that the Starmer government shows the failure of New Labour,

00:33:56.280 that these things do not work. And what is the Labour Party going to do? It's going to try to

00:34:01.740 go back to a double failure of old labor. So the right, Francis Constantine, never has more open

00:34:10.420 goals. But there's been an extraordinary failure to explain. I cannot imagine a political situation

00:34:22.100 which should be more favorable to the right than the one that we're in at the moment,

00:34:27.100 with one very important point,

00:34:30.380 which is, of course, that unfortunately,

00:34:33.380 thanks to the folly of David Cameron,

00:34:35.820 the even worse folly of George Osborne,

00:34:38.760 the absurd folly of Boris Johnson,

00:34:41.580 the Conservative Party and Theresa May, 0.99

00:34:44.240 I would shoot. 0.97

00:34:45.760 No, I'm quite serious. 0.90

00:34:47.240 I think, I think, I, no, I'm being really serious.

00:34:51.160 After a trial, presumably, right, David?

00:34:53.260 Yes.

00:34:54.500 Presided by yourself, David?

00:34:55.860 I believe in due process, but I mean, seriously, when you look at what that woman did, 0.96

00:35:02.580 she is directly responsible for the full out-of-control nature of non-crime hate incidents,

00:35:10.620 which begin under Cameron and flourish under her, the extraordinary activities of the College of

00:35:16.680 Policing. She carries through the non-legislation. It was barely discussed for legislating net zero

00:35:24.540 by 2050. And that, again, Francis, means that judges determine whether you can drill in the

00:35:32.460 North Sea. Even if Starmer and whatever, and Burnham, this extraordinary series of somersaults

00:35:40.540 he's performing, have been talking about doing this, they will immediately, until they repeal

00:35:45.660 that, they will be taken to court. And judges determine whether or not you can fact. This is

00:35:53.340 utterly insane. We get asked this all the time. Which VPN do you use at Trigonometry? The answer

00:36:02.200 is simply CyberGhost VPN. CyberGhost isn't some fringe tool. It has 38 million users and over

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00:36:22.940 school or anyone else on public Wi-Fi cannot see what you're doing online. It roots your connection

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00:36:46.220 devices at once, phones, laptops, tablets, even your smart TV. You can share it with your family

00:36:52.580 if you want. We rely on it when we're traveling for the show because it's simple, fast, and it

00:36:57.140 just works. Right now, you can get CyberGhost for about two bucks a month with four months free,

00:37:03.740 a 45-day money-back guarantee, and 24-7 support. That's protection for your browsing data and

00:37:11.320 access to blocked content online for two bucks a month, totally risk-free. To grab the offer,

00:37:17.360 go to cyberghostvpn.com slash trigonometry or click the link in the description of this episode.

00:37:23.360 It's completely risk free. So check it out today. I think I finally understood what you've been

00:37:29.840 trying to tell us for a very long time, David, what you're really saying. Correct me if I'm

00:37:33.620 misrepresenting. But what I what I'm hearing is what you're really saying is New Labour

00:37:38.100 legislated their political opinions into actual law and then the Conservatives effectively carried

00:37:45.880 it on. Well, it's even worse than that. What you do is New Labour legislates its prejudices

00:37:51.820 into an alternative legal system. Right. You introduce absolutely foreign principles. There's

00:37:59.800 a marvellous, you know, Thomas Sewell, who is this extraordinary, impressive man, the Sewell

00:38:05.540 Report, that argued... Tony Soule. Tony Soule. Pardon? Tony. Tony. Thomas Soule is an American

00:38:12.740 economist who I love. And he spells S-O-W. Both equally impressive. And in a very, very similar 0.99

00:38:18.180 way. But when he wrote the preface to the report, which I've just mentioned now,

00:38:25.180 from the Prosperity Institute, attacking the Equality Act, he came up with this wonderful

00:38:31.420 phrase. He said, a foreign body of law, an alien body of law. And that's what's happened.

00:38:39.180 So, as I said, it's why I've been using these medical analogies that is like, you know, autoimmune disease or a cancer.

00:38:50.120 You know, you use the word constitution of your body as well as the state.

00:38:55.660 And that's what's happened.

00:38:57.080 So it's not simply policy.

00:38:59.640 It's that this fundamental change happened.

00:39:02.280 You see, again, just looking back to the business of the so-called expert committees, I mean, English nature is one of them. The Climate Change Committee, the insane policies we've been having on this, both Churchill and Theodore Roosevelt, Teddy Roosevelt, the great American president of the first years of the 20th century, they were both fascinated by the role of experts.

00:39:27.180 They're both fascinated by scientists.

00:39:30.040 Churchill has Lord Charwell, he's not yet called that,

00:39:33.300 sitting around his dinner table at Chequers in his wilderness years of the 1930s.

00:39:39.240 He becomes a major figure in the Second World War.

00:39:42.060 But the two of them fight for the ownership of that wonderful phrase,

00:39:46.400 you want your scientists on tap, but not on top.

00:39:51.580 And what we've done, of course, with this multitude of quangos, 400 and odd of them, you know, effectively spending nearly a third of the state budget without any form of democratic control, you've put the expert on top.

00:40:10.080 That's why Michael Gove said, you know, we've had too much of experts. 0.95

00:40:14.700 He didn't explain it.

00:40:16.380 You see what I'm trying to get at?

00:40:17.280 All sorts of people are beginning to understand the problem,

00:40:21.440 but they're understanding it in a fragmentary way.

00:40:24.220 Similarly, Sunak, Rishi Sunak, in one of his Times columns,

00:40:29.380 actually admitted when he talked about the Rwanda scheme.

00:40:33.240 And he said, well, in retrospect, what we should have done

00:40:36.780 was change the law before we tried to introduce the scheme. In other words, that the legal

00:40:43.460 structures that I've been talking about made absolutely guaranteed its failure. So what they

00:40:48.660 did was something profoundly stupid. They, again, it was likeness to us. They adopted what's a good 1.00

00:40:54.420 policy. Rwanda is something like Rwanda is the only way we're going to deal with it. It's how 1.00

00:41:00.300 Australia dealt with it. It's how Italy is beginning to deal with it and so on. But they

00:41:06.020 did it without making it possible. In other words, they walked straight into an open trap.

00:41:13.560 And repeatedly, British government is doing the same thing. Mahmood is going to find all the sorts

00:41:19.740 of things she wants to do will face unless she does what I think will be unthinkable, which is 0.93

00:41:26.480 reversing great slices of this new Labour legislation. She will find not simply that her

00:41:32.360 backbenchers won't do it, but that immediately the legal jaws will snap shut.

00:41:38.420 And so, again, what we should also be talking about is why do we seem to be in such an impossible

00:41:47.440 mess? I think one of the reasons is that because, OK, I used, I'm afraid Theresa May gets me very

00:41:54.440 Cross, just because I think she was so... I hate stupidity. When you ask on the quality 1.00

00:42:06.260 of politicians, when you see transparent stupidity, particularly being a teacher for a long time, 1.00

00:42:13.920 you learn to control your reproving of it. But when it's on that huge public scale, 1.00

00:42:22.120 that, and again, it's really important,

00:42:24.960 that inflicts such terrible, terrible damage.

00:42:29.820 This quest for the legacy.

00:42:33.140 You do something off the cuff

00:42:35.120 and it inflicts damage on your country

00:42:38.280 which you can quantify, I would argue, in the trillions.

00:42:44.100 That is serious.

00:42:46.820 That's why the term guilty men and guilty women really comes in.

00:42:50.720 But why is the Conservative Party, why is it in the mess that it is, why is Kemi, who is quite impressive in her way, I don't think she was going to be, but she's performed reasonably well, why has she failed so badly? Because they haven't admitted what went wrong.

00:43:09.800 until the Conservative Party does a full-scale mea-cum.

00:43:15.020 I mean, you see, it's analogous to the situation

00:43:17.660 that we found ourselves in in the 1970s.

00:43:20.340 In the middle of the 1970s,

00:43:22.500 the entire post-war structure was collapsing.

00:43:25.980 From 1945 onwards, you had,

00:43:29.100 if Britain was a 90% socialist country,

00:43:33.500 it was arguably more socialist than East Germany

00:43:36.380 or as socialist as East Germany.

00:43:39.280 And what was striking in 51 is that Churchill's conservatives went along with it.

00:43:45.820 So from 45 through to about 75, there were two parties that, you know, in the phrase of the day, the current phrase of the web, it was a uni party.

00:43:59.900 And it didn't really make all that much difference.

00:44:02.620 The conservatives were mildly more financially competent than Labour, but not much.

00:44:07.420 The same policies, prices and incomes, boards, the nationalized industries, all of that stuff, Keynesian economics and so on, the determination to maintain full employment even with feather bedding, failing nationalized industries, all of that continued whoever was in power.

00:44:30.940 And it was only after Edward Heath's defeat in the elections 73-74 that you get Keith Joseph coming along and saying, I've called myself a conservative. I haven't been. I've sat in conservative cabinets who've done nothing conservative.

00:44:51.600 And you get that reinvention of, well, it wasn't, unfortunately, what they invent, what he and Margaret Thatcher invent, isn't really a conservative party at all.

00:45:01.200 They're Gladstonian liberals with, you know, Manchester School economics, the old Manchester School, the good Manchester School, not Burnham-esque.

00:45:10.240 But at least you get a difference.

00:45:12.020 There's then an actual, there's actually a political debate in Britain.

00:45:16.860 And unfortunately, what happened in 2010 is that Cameron and Oswald, and it's easy to see why.

00:45:24.220 You look at William Hay, you look at those terrible years in which Blair just ran rings around.

00:45:29.740 And they decided if you can't beat them, you join them.

00:45:33.000 But that, of course, means you've got an albatross hung around your neck.

00:45:37.760 Every time Bedanoff gets up in the House and sort of says, look at the number of illegal crossings, all Starmer needs to do is, oh, well, the relevant legislation you passed, there were even more illegal crossings when you were there than we have now.

00:45:56.220 And what I do not understand, unless Bedanoff is so frightened that half the party, half the parliamentary party, will leave and join the Lib Dems, which I think may well be the reason, she has never explained why the Conservative Party got it so badly wrong.

00:46:18.760 What she's done, interestingly, is take a tip from you, which is probably a bad idea, and she said the only reason that the Conservatives got it wrong was because I wasn't leading them, you know.

00:46:32.480 In other words, a narrow personal point.

00:46:34.820 Whereas, of course, the answer is, very simply, they got it wrong because they followed the wrong policies as established by the Labour Party.

00:46:45.140 That's the answer.

00:46:46.060 And until they say that, and of course, Thatcher had the enormous advantage, she'd no need

00:46:51.500 to say it, because Edward Heath threw his big salt.

00:46:55.320 So he made completely clear that there was a fundamental difference.

00:47:00.120 And Bedienbach hasn't been able to do that.

00:47:02.960 And I think, again, with all the things, all the very promising things, and remarkable

00:47:09.840 if she really has managed to screw the leftish members of her party up actually to leaving the

00:47:16.460 ECHR. Somebody like Jesse Norman, who is the son-in-law of Tom Bingham, who was the leading

00:47:23.420 legal brains behind all of this stuff, actually wrote a book with Peter Oborn on the conservative

00:47:29.660 case for human rights. So if you persuaded him to repudiate the act, that's pretty good going.

00:47:35.920 But she will get no credit, and she will not have a ground with which to deal with Farage.

00:47:43.620 In other words, and again, I spent much of the last, whatever number it is, two and a half years now,

00:47:51.900 touring around the country with my friend Mark Littlewood, ex-TIEA.

00:47:56.400 And we've been going around reform associations and conservative associations.

00:48:01.540 The first thing that I do when I go to a Reform Association,

00:48:05.820 Constantine, you know, so much of this game is pantomime,

00:48:08.980 which is one of the reasons you're a very good public speaker.

00:48:12.020 And it's pantomime.

00:48:13.960 And I always begin by saying, well, I've got to make a confession.

00:48:17.360 This is a Reform Association.

00:48:19.420 I remain a member of the Conservative Party.

00:48:22.220 He spoke.

00:48:23.240 You know, and then what I do is, that's fine.

00:48:28.980 I've been honest with you.

00:48:30.400 you will be honest with me. Come on, hands up. Everybody was a member of the Conservative Party.

00:48:36.680 Half the hands go up. I say, right, keep them up. How many of the rest of you have voted Conservative?

00:48:42.260 Virtually every hand goes up. So what we're dealing with, we're dealing with a genuine war

00:48:48.680 within Conservatives as to what it actually is, what it means, what its relationship with the

00:48:57.920 past, what its relationship with the desired future, what it thinks is worth carrying forward,

00:49:05.520 what it thinks has gone wrong. It's exactly the kind of debates that happened in the middle of

00:49:10.460 the 1970s, and even more so in the middle of the 19th century after the Great Reform Act,

00:49:16.280 the great clash between Robert Peel and Benjamin Disraeli.

00:49:20.360 David, that was magnificent

00:49:23.620 and despite my facial expression

00:49:27.320 I understood everything

00:49:28.320 however, there's one thing that you said

00:49:30.700 where a chill ran down my spine

00:49:34.020 it was three words

00:49:36.120 where you said

00:49:36.840 if Britain survives

00:49:39.000 and you're not a man

00:49:41.480 to use hyperbole

00:49:44.920 or to say words

00:49:46.600 when you don't mean them

00:49:48.320 why did you say that?

00:49:50.360 Because I think it is possible that it won't. If we head down the route that we are doing now,

00:49:57.760 we face national bankruptcy. That's one thing. In other words, we face, if we're lucky,

00:50:06.240 something like the IMF intervention of 1976. Although I think our situation is very, very

00:50:13.100 much worse. The level of our indebtedness is much greater than it was in the 1970s.

00:50:18.920 And that's not nice. If you look at what happens with Greece, you deal with enforced cuts in public sector salaries of 20% and more. You deal with confiscation of elements of bank accounts, you know? Right? That's one thing we face.

00:50:35.340 We are playing profoundly dangerous games with Russia.

00:50:41.460 We are challenging Russia publicly, led, of course, by that ass Boris Johnson, 1.00

00:50:47.620 who is asinine in this regard. 0.99

00:50:49.780 And we're doing it without the strength. 0.98

00:50:52.460 Again, go back to Theodore Roosevelt, who seems to me to be one of them.

00:50:57.380 He's one of the first politicians of the era of mass democracy.

00:51:01.060 And he really understands.

00:51:02.960 hands. And he's also got a marvellous gift of praise. He is the one who says, you know,

00:51:08.700 speak softly and carry a big stick. And we do the opposite. We yell from the housetops and we have a

00:51:15.100 bent twig, which is the state of the British Armed Forces. This is profoundly dangerous.

00:51:22.540 At the same time, we have a demoralized population. We have, thanks to the left,

00:51:28.160 We have spent the last 50 years saying that British history is to be ashamed of, that patriotism, constantly, constantly citing Dr. Johnson, who meant something different, is the last refuge of the scoundrel.

00:51:44.220 We've spent time denigrating our armed forces with people like Lord Herma and Keir Starmer himself,

00:51:52.900 imposing ludicrous conditions in which you effectively say war is an act of policing.

00:51:59.880 What?

00:52:02.400 The absurdity of judgments that a lad in 18 or whatever under the threat of imminent death,

00:52:11.720 does he pull a trigger or not?

00:52:13.160 You know, some fat judge or overfed and overfeed QC, KC, 40 years later, decides whether it's legal or not.

00:52:22.360 Intolerable.

00:52:24.060 So we've, in fact, destroyed the social basis of our army.

00:52:30.100 We've destroyed the ideological basis of our army. 0.81

00:52:33.000 We're in the ludicrous position that we support the Ukraine. 0.99

00:52:36.340 Well, yeah, very nice.

00:52:37.740 What is the war in the Ukraine?

00:52:39.560 It's a war of national identity.

00:52:42.220 People are fighting to belong to one tribe or another.

00:52:46.280 A country that wasn't quite sure whether it was Russian or Ukrainian,

00:52:50.760 people are being forced to choose.

00:52:52.720 They're forced to choose a language.

00:52:54.500 They're forced to choose a historical myth.

00:52:57.000 You're fighting to defend absolute frontiers.

00:52:59.460 Why the fuss about the Donbass and all the rest of it,

00:53:02.500 or whether the Crimea, we can't even protect our frontiers.

00:53:06.600 We make no attempt at protecting our frontiers.

00:53:08.780 So, we've got ourselves into a mess in which we somehow imagine that if you utter nice

00:53:16.280 words and belong to elaborately titled international organizations, the world will run, you know,

00:53:23.540 like a prayer hall.

00:53:25.840 And I'm afraid it doesn't.

00:53:29.100 There's that phrase of Cardinal Wolsey, naked to his enemies.

00:53:34.680 We've left ourselves naked to our enemies, and we've met him.

00:53:39.960 And there's just this refusal to contemplate.

00:53:45.740 The first duty of the state is to defend and to administer justice, and we've failed hideously.

00:53:54.360 The resignation of Healy, the former Secretary of State for Defense, with that excoriating

00:54:13.020 series of resignation letters, and then a clown like Lammy as head of the judicial system. 0.79

00:54:24.320 One despairs. Government failing. It's two central duties. But unfortunately, the failure really begins under the conservatives. This is the catastrophe. The worst cuts. And again, Thatcher not escaping.

00:54:42.720 The reason that the Falklands happens is we make foolish reductions to the Navy and to the practice, sending ships to the Falklands.

00:54:53.480 And the Argentinians draw the obvious conclusion.

00:54:56.840 Similarly, it is George Osborne in his transcendent folly that imposes so-called austerity across the board, apart from foreign aid and the NHS.

00:55:09.540 I mean, this is what I mean about the Tory party adopting the values of the left.

00:55:15.060 The only things that were protected from austerity were foreign aid and the NHS, the totems of the left by the Conservative Party.

00:55:25.440 And instead, you begin this catastrophic programme of cutting back on criminal justice and legal aid.

00:55:32.600 And all of the things you described, David, nobody, I would put it to you that there's probably a handful of people in the country that understand them at the level that you are describing them at.

00:55:43.380 But the ordinary person at this point, and I'd say this from talking to people in all kinds of walks of life, hasn't worked out what's happened.

00:55:52.100 But what they really have worked out is something very bad.

00:55:54.880 Something very bad has happened.

00:55:56.040 That's exactly what the article about Makersfield is about in the New Statesman published today, saying exactly that.

00:56:10.660 And again, with what you expect, how on earth do ordinary people, who most of the time rightly don't greatly care about politics,

00:56:20.120 But they have an instinct. They know. They see. They see everything from the potholes, to the tips, to the fly-tipping, to the extraordinary things that they hear their children say that they've been taught in school,

00:56:37.080 to manifest the two-tier horrors of what happened in Southport

00:56:44.660 and of what happened, unimaginable, what happened in Belfast

00:56:52.060 and what happened in Southampton.

00:56:56.180 And all of them are the same.

00:56:59.280 The same issues are involved.

00:57:01.960 But you see, what again, both of you,

00:57:04.380 people find it difficult to understand. So the term two-tier is very useful.

00:57:11.620 But it suggests something sort of, oh, well, it's probably just you've got a woke chief constable

00:57:18.820 or something like that. You see, it's not. This is what is terrifying. It is embedded in law.

00:57:27.040 And this is what has gone so terribly wrong. The law has turned against itself. And it was done

00:57:33.880 with noble motives. So often, you know, again, one becomes old and hackneyed. The road to

00:57:42.040 hell is paved with good intentions. The intentions were good. Yes, they were. I belong to a

00:57:47.880 minority. I'm a puff. No, no, no, no. But no, no, I know because I was in, I've been 0.99

00:57:55.020 on the receiving end of nasty policemen. Right?

00:57:57.840 And you also saw the AIDS crisis.

00:58:00.180 And I indeed lived through it, and terrible consequences.

00:58:04.840 And I fought for the equalization of the age of consent,

00:58:07.960 but I fought through it through the political process,

00:58:11.900 not by claiming abstract right,

00:58:14.800 which is why I think it's stuck in Britain.

00:58:19.080 In other words, why it's not been challenged.

00:58:21.060 Whereas Roe versus Wade, where you used to secure

00:58:25.820 so-called abortion rights in America, fell to bits

00:58:29.120 because it was on the basis of extreme legal construction.

00:58:32.940 You were straining the legal argument.

00:58:37.820 But if you go back to, I mentioned one man,

00:58:41.240 and I want to focus on him again because I think he's so important.

00:58:45.000 There was serious, genuine, really brilliant,

00:58:49.960 and I think in many ways noble lawyer,

00:58:52.200 a man called Tom Bingham, or Bingham,

00:58:54.300 who was the senior law lord before it was turned into the Supreme Court.

00:58:58.580 And he is the one who really reconceives of law in this different way.

00:59:05.540 And he delivers a lecture in Australia, possibly wise to do it in Australia, rather than here.

00:59:13.460 And this is what he says, and it's really important that we all understand this.

00:59:18.760 He says quite explicitly, human rights law is anti-democratic.

00:59:24.440 It is counter-majoritarian.

00:59:28.620 It protects the minority as against the majority.

00:59:33.200 And do you know what? 0.50

00:59:34.200 He lists the minorities.

00:59:36.540 Do you know what's at the head? 1.00

00:59:38.380 The mentally sick. 0.99

00:59:40.680 Ruda Cabana, Karol Kahné. 1.00

00:59:43.980 Racial minorities, gypsies. 1.00

00:59:48.680 All the problem groups. 1.00

00:59:50.600 So when you look at why the state completely failed to incarcerate Ruda Cabana or Calocane, the presumption of the law is you don't. 0.93

01:00:03.720 In other words, what we can see is when it comes to the balance between the individual right and public protection, the legal doctrine of embodied right is disastrous. 0.86

01:00:17.460 Again, this notion that their rights means prisoners have got the right to vote, which was forced on Britain by the Human Rights Court and Transports. 0.83

01:00:30.620 It is an absurdity. 0.98

01:00:33.640 You see, again, human rights, it is also the wonderful capture of language by the left.

01:00:40.180 They sound wonderful.

01:00:42.600 Paddington bears.

01:00:44.220 I always say it's sort of Paddington bears.

01:00:45.820 again, equality, who could possibly object? But you see, the problem is what you do with those

01:00:53.260 ideas. Traditionally, I mean, again, the great contrast is between the French and the American

01:00:59.360 revolutions. If you look at the French, the French are the first people to come up with a declaration

01:01:06.200 of, it's called the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen. But of course, the moment you

01:01:11.760 do it, you have the terror. So you put it in the box and forget about it. And by the way,

01:01:16.040 when it comes back, because of the very loose nature of Napoleonic law, which is a series

01:01:21.540 of general principles anyway, yet another set of general principles get lost in it,

01:01:26.780 it's when you embed that stuff in the common law system where words are taken seriously,

01:01:32.900 that you have the disastrous consequences.

01:01:37.000 But if we go back to what Bingham is saying there,

01:01:45.560 the law itself is turned against its principal purpose.

01:01:52.380 The principal purpose of the law is to protect the law-abiding citizen.

01:01:58.440 and also the principal purpose of the state is to protect itself if you constantly go on about

01:02:06.860 oh our duty is to the world you know the man who has just been made a knight of the garter

01:02:12.060 uh the king being of course you know as soaked in this stuff as as as as the leftist leftist

01:02:20.080 lawyers and gus o'donnell um who was the head of the treasury there's the famous conversation

01:02:25.920 which is reported by David Goodhart

01:02:29.140 when they were in conversation

01:02:31.520 and I think it was Mark Thompson

01:02:34.520 who was the director of the BBC

01:02:37.660 and then went off to run the New York Times

01:02:40.140 and David Goodhart

01:02:41.260 and the conversation was

01:02:42.580 well, what is the actual purpose of government?

01:02:45.900 And O'Donnell, oh, you know

01:02:47.100 I didn't think my purpose was just to pursue

01:02:49.320 the prosperity of Britain

01:02:50.600 it was the well-being of the world

01:02:52.180 and that's what's gone wrong

01:02:55.000 and conservatives again had no defense

01:02:59.600 because people like Churchill

01:03:01.580 Churchill was a liberal really

01:03:04.540 remember he crosses the floor of the house twice

01:03:07.720 and Churchill in that expansive post-war phase

01:03:12.480 after 1945

01:03:13.480 conservatism bought this stuff

01:03:15.880 it was defenseless

01:03:17.480 and one of the things we've got to do on the right

01:03:21.920 is to retrawl our past, re-explore our past,

01:03:27.140 to find out what left us so vulnerable.

01:03:29.960 How did we lose the principle, the main...

01:03:33.220 What is so terrible, that question you asked me?

01:03:37.480 We were the world's best-governed country.

01:03:42.260 Why does everywhere talk about a parliament?

01:03:45.580 Because they were copying ours.

01:03:48.020 Still the role of common law as the world's best system of commercial law, however, catastrophically, it's gone wrong in terms of public law and criminal law in Britain itself.

01:04:03.180 And the just quality of the British public service, the civil service until very recently, things have gone wrong very, very recently.

01:04:17.040 The roots are deeper, but we need to explore that past to find out what we need to recover.

01:04:24.260 Because, again, the temptation is revolution.

01:04:30.780 The temptation is faced with this mess that I described that we say,

01:04:35.760 OK, knock it all down and start again.

01:04:37.800 That is the infinite catastrophe.

01:04:40.520 The attempts at doing that are invariably failed. 0.51

01:04:43.800 The only reason, the American, there's only been one successful revolution, and it's the American Revolution.

01:04:50.680 And that was successful because it wasn't a revolution.

01:04:53.660 I've always thought that. It's a war of independence. It's not a revolution.

01:04:56.880 It's a rebellion. It's a rebellion.

01:04:59.660 And rather than, you know, when the French, with their revolution, they tried to alter everything from the system of weights and measures

01:05:06.580 to the actual areas of government, to the names of the days of the week, for heaven's sake.

01:05:13.540 and transform law and everything else.

01:05:16.540 The Americans keep it all. 0.99

01:05:19.200 And what you finish up with,

01:05:22.040 too, by the way, the absolute fury of radicals like Tom Paine

01:05:25.760 is a very lightly modified system of the British government.

01:05:30.800 You know, the president is an elected king.

01:05:33.360 The Senate is a version of the House of Lords.

01:05:35.920 The House of Representatives is a version of the Commons

01:05:39.880 with a speaker.

01:05:40.960 and, as I always tease my American friends,

01:05:44.140 the administrative, I'm going to test you,

01:05:45.860 the administrative officer of the House of Representatives.

01:05:48.780 What's he called?

01:05:49.980 I don't know.

01:05:50.720 The Surgeon at Arms.

01:05:52.380 Americans have the faintest idea of a Surgeon at Arms.

01:05:55.700 But it's there because the British Parliament has a Surgeon at Arms.

01:06:02.080 So what I am trying to do,

01:06:06.480 which is why I slightly bridled when you sort of said,

01:06:10.160 Oh, you're a historian, but now we're talking about the present.

01:06:13.100 It seems to me the only way that we can get out of this mess

01:06:16.940 is by realizing that our present has erred terribly

01:06:23.200 precisely because it's repudiated our past.

01:06:26.400 And what we have to do is to reconnect.

01:06:29.680 We have to realize, whereas people like Blair or whatever,

01:06:32.520 or they talk about the hand of history,

01:06:34.300 they clearly regard it just as, you know, fuddy-duddyism,

01:06:37.920 old-fashioned, you know, just to be thrown away. But in fact, properly, the history of the people

01:06:45.200 is an organic thing. It's like a fertile soil. You need that fertile soil of the past for things

01:06:53.900 to grow. It's not surprising all of these things went wrong under Blair, because what he effectively

01:06:59.580 did was to tear everything up by the roots. And then you're very surprised 20 years later when

01:07:05.120 they've all withered because you pull them up. Look, I'll be honest with you. I was skeptical.

01:07:11.860 A green powder that claims to do everything sounds exactly like something I'd tear apart.

01:07:17.160 I've seen enough people pushing miracle solutions to know what that looks like. But I take AG1

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01:07:37.900 trying to stay sharp enough to hold my own in the conversations we have on this show, that foundation

01:07:43.720 matters to me. I'm not dragging myself through the afternoons the way I used to. With AG1, I feel

01:07:49.160 like I'm actually running on a full tank and this isn't just marketing copy. AG1 is clinically

01:07:54.880 backed. Every study on their website is openly available for you to read. If you're a trigonometry

01:08:00.400 listener you don't take things on faith so go and look at the evidence yourself that transparency is

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01:08:11.260 try ag1 for yourself at drink ag1.com slash trig and for 59 pounds instead of 79 pound for the first

01:08:19.780 month plus vitamin d3 and k2 a free five count travel pack and a free welcome kit give it a go

01:08:27.320 Well, David, first of all, let me ask you to unbridle yourself, because I was not remotely suggesting that your expertise in history is not relevant to the present moment.

01:08:35.800 No, no.

01:08:36.180 On the contrary, it's one of the reasons we love having you on the show.

01:08:40.780 And we've often talked about the present.

01:08:42.720 And you mentioned the revolution.

01:08:44.620 On the way in to have this conversation today, I revisited our first ever interview.

01:08:49.820 And it opens with the phrase, Starkey's, it's you saying Starkey's rule of revolution is

01:08:55.360 that every revolution reproduces the worst features of the ancient regime.

01:09:01.040 But I would put it to you that the rise of Restore in particular shows you that in this

01:09:07.960 country now, at a fairly low level, but nonetheless, there's a rising spirit of revolution.

01:09:14.080 There's a rising, let's throw this whole thing out and start again.

01:09:18.820 I mean, I don't think it's an accident that Rupert Lowe's favourite historical character is Cromwell.

01:09:24.440 And much of the language and the rhetoric is of that nature.

01:09:29.500 And that, I think, is also part of the reasons why I bridled in your suggestion that the right is united around policy.

01:09:35.800 I don't think it is. I don't think it's united around policy or personality.

01:09:39.820 Now, of course, there are some areas on which they increasingly agree.

01:09:43.940 But I think you articulated the problem beautifully in terms of the right.

01:09:47.600 you said it's the most fertile opportunity for the right to fight back. But what you have is

01:09:53.300 the Tories who are tarnished by their time in government. And like you say, they have not made

01:09:58.380 the mayor calper that they need to be able to move on. You have reform. But I think part of

01:10:05.240 the issue for reform is just time. It's like people are very fed up, but the next election

01:10:08.960 is three years away. And so increasingly, the rhetoric is amplified, which is where you have

01:10:13.500 Restore come in as a personality clash with Rupert and Nigel, obviously. But there's also now a

01:10:18.860 feeling like this whole thing doesn't work, which clearly it doesn't. I mean, objectively, it

01:10:23.680 doesn't. But I think the conclusion from some is now actually we just have to throw away the whole

01:10:29.960 thing and we have to go in an almost radical revolutionary route. And that to me is also part

01:10:38.960 of why I think it's more difficult for the right to unite around all of these things. Would you

01:10:42.280 Agree? Sorry, go ahead.

01:10:43.820 There's also one element that I'd like to add to that,

01:10:46.700 which is there is a faction on the right

01:10:48.760 who not only want to tear everything down,

01:10:51.180 they want revenge for what they feel

01:10:54.420 that has been inflicted upon them.

01:10:56.020 I think on that latter point,

01:10:58.000 I am not entirely unsympathetic.

01:11:00.380 I'm very sympathetic.

01:11:02.080 But let me distinguish.

01:11:03.680 I think that what we must recognise

01:11:08.520 is that we did one really important thing in the early 18th century.

01:11:15.460 This is after the fall of the Tory government under Queen Anne

01:11:19.000 and the coming to power of the current royal house, the House of Hanover.

01:11:23.880 We, at that point, looked as though we were going to continue impeachment,

01:11:28.880 which in the form of impeachment, so with Robert Harley, the Earl of Oxford,

01:11:32.800 it looked as though we would do what had always happened up to that point,

01:11:36.500 that when a leading minister falls, you get confiscation and execution. We didn't do it,

01:11:43.460 and we haven't done it from that point on this, and I don't want to do that. What I think would

01:11:48.600 be legitimate, because I think there needs to be a measure of public disapproval, that point that I

01:11:55.360 made about the guilty men, I would do it by the stripping of honours. It seems to me that it is

01:12:02.080 entirely appropriate that people like May be stripped of her peerage. I think it is entirely

01:12:07.560 appropriate that Blair be stripped of the garter. And there needs to be an act of public shaming. 1.00

01:12:15.580 But there is always the risk of that, of course, that it just becomes tit for tat,

01:12:19.980 which is what it did before. And also, the pursuit of vengeance is a foolish one, 0.93

01:12:27.400 because it does terrible damage to people.

01:12:30.660 I mean, I know I experienced cancellation.

01:12:34.080 There is a risk that you simply let your hatred

01:12:36.800 of those who did it consume you, and it destroys you.

01:12:39.920 And it's a foolish thing to do as an individual or as a person.

01:12:43.740 But to go back, I do not believe that Restore has got...

01:12:48.900 And look, why is it called Restore?

01:12:51.260 It's called Restore precisely because Rupert Lowe

01:12:54.780 was one of those who first accepted my analysis.

01:12:58.980 Because if you remember, the point that I made

01:13:01.540 is there's this gigantic shift under Blair and Blair Brown.

01:13:05.380 What we need to do is a great act of repeal

01:13:08.160 in which we undo it, and then we restore.

01:13:11.160 We have a new restoration.

01:13:13.280 And I think the problem with Rupert,

01:13:16.360 and he will forgive me saying this,

01:13:17.740 I think he is not the most coherent of thinkers. 0.76

01:13:21.340 And he's, of course, got a group of radical young men and some rather sillier middle-aged men who are supporting him, middle-aged men in particular, going off and playing with rather silly bits of pseudo-political philosophy which have been dredged up from Germany and whatever at various periods.

01:13:45.060 But I don't believe it amounts to anything very serious.

01:13:48.100 If you look at their actual policy recommendations, they pretty much fit the same.

01:13:55.960 So the debates are the same if you read Harrison Pitt's paper.

01:13:59.680 And the only way they will be able to do anything is by winning a majority in parliament.

01:14:05.300 Where I think there is, where I think things are going wrong at the moment,

01:14:10.860 and it's even the game that's being played on the right,

01:14:13.160 It goes back to your point, Francis, about politicians.

01:14:16.860 This weird business and maker's field demonstrates it really interestingly.

01:14:23.700 Both Robert Kenyon and also the reform candidate and Andy Burnham themselves,

01:14:31.520 they're playing the ordinary chap routine.

01:14:34.680 We're just completely ordinary people.

01:14:37.540 And somehow the fact that we're just ordinary people,

01:14:40.600 you know, do it with a different accent.

01:14:42.740 I'm now forgotten to do Northern. I've been away.

01:14:46.740 Well, people like Andy Burnham was at Cambridge, for God's sake, you know.

01:14:51.760 Read English literature at Cambridge.

01:14:54.280 You can't have anything much more South and Ponzi than that, can you?

01:14:58.700 But playing this game of being an ordinary person,

01:15:02.340 this idea that the solution to what's gone wrong with our politics

01:15:06.220 is a house of commons of completely inexperienced people,

01:15:10.740 It's a madness. It's a madness that they will be just chewed up and spat out by this judicial legal expert civil service machine that we've been talking about.

01:15:26.600 But it's very easy to see why. And it's also, of course, one of the myths of democracy.

01:15:32.200 We want our politicians to be just like us.

01:15:35.920 Please, God, no.

01:15:37.000 No, no, but you can see at a moment like this the power of that.

01:15:42.760 Yeah, of course.

01:15:43.560 But also, there is a tragedy, and I think again it's a tragedy, particularly at the moment of Farage,

01:15:53.080 that you can see what he's trying to do. I don't know whether you read

01:15:57.960 read the long-form essay that he published on Substack on Two-Tier, it wasn't terribly

01:16:08.200 well-written. It was very rambly. It repeated itself. And although everything in it was

01:16:15.660 very good sense, anybody reading it who wasn't like you and me would just go straight to

01:16:20.680 sleep. Whereas he has got real rhetorical gifts. He's not using them. He's not yet stood on that

01:16:32.180 platform. Maybe he can't. Maybe he doesn't have the confidence to do it. Maybe he doesn't have

01:16:37.980 sufficient interest in ideas. Let's go back to Thatcher. Or indeed, Blair. Blair was passionate

01:16:47.180 about ideas. Everybody's saying that what is so catastrophic about Starmer is even though

01:16:54.580 he is one of those who formulates the ideas of the current miasma,

01:17:03.040 he can't articulate them. He can't explain them. And the only way we will get out of this

01:17:09.800 is by people who can clearly articulate,

01:17:14.140 A, what's gone wrong,

01:17:15.640 B, what needs to be done to begin to put it right.

01:17:19.560 And then, even more importantly,

01:17:21.880 I mean, I'm not pretending anything I've been saying is a panacea.

01:17:25.660 It is simply the first thing a new government

01:17:28.800 that wants to do anything will have to do.

01:17:32.700 It's the first step.

01:17:34.180 In other words, you've got to strike up. 0.62

01:17:36.460 It's like one of these slavery liberation films.

01:17:41.000 It's the moment at which you cut your fetters.

01:17:44.760 Or Samson pulling down the pillows of the temple.

01:17:47.940 That's not a very welcome analogy.

01:17:53.720 But you have to strike off the fetters before you can do anything at all. 0.98

01:17:57.900 But that requires what Thatcher was able to do.

01:18:01.860 Articulate ideas. 0.99

01:18:03.780 Explain why.

01:18:05.620 Carry people with you.

01:18:08.460 And again, I think that the population is ready for it.

01:18:12.540 This sense of, this sense of, I mean, there's a sense of,

01:18:18.600 there's a terrible sense of nostalgia, of loss.

01:18:22.140 And it can go in one of two directions, can't it?

01:18:24.500 It can go to the violence and people like David Betts

01:18:28.240 talking about the evident risk of small, low-scale civil war.

01:18:34.600 it can go in that direction. Or if there is somebody who can seize that moment, can explain

01:18:40.720 to people what's gone wrong, why it's gone wrong, who was responsible, what's got to be done to put

01:18:47.320 it right, it can then be turned round. It can become positive. It can become a moment of genuine

01:18:53.240 restoration and revival, as has happened very frequently in the Anglo-British past. You've

01:19:00.780 termed what could have been the disaster of Magna Carta, the ensuing French invasion and whatever.

01:19:07.700 You had a man, William the Marshal, Earl of Pembroke, with the imagination, with the capacity,

01:19:16.500 with the combination of political and military skill, able to turn it around. You had that

01:19:22.300 extraordinary moment in 1689 when both the Conservative, when both the Tories and the

01:19:28.520 weeks came together to remove an impossible king and to do so in a fashion which you were

01:19:35.740 able to, wonderful, pretend nothing had happened. You'd removed a king in a dynasty and you

01:19:41.240 pretended nothing had happened. The kind of non-revolutionary revolution that we were

01:19:48.760 describing with America. But there's that terrible hole in the landscape.

01:19:53.280 it. Well, this is why I'm honing on the right, because I think on the divisions on the right,

01:19:58.840 because for a long time, it looked like Nigel Farage is the man to do it. He's still in prime

01:20:03.440 position out of the pole position. Yeah, it's the right time to do it. But look, I can sort of see

01:20:12.080 the Tories doing some kind of pact with reform towards their next election. But the enmity

01:20:16.340 between restored reform is such that I don't see that happening. And I think there's a very real

01:20:21.080 chance that the vote is split and therefore you get actually a different form of a red-green

01:20:29.520 coalition. God help us. Right. So in terms of your perspective, what do you think should happen

01:20:37.440 between those parties on the right? I want a miracle, don't I? Yeah. Well, this is why I keep

01:20:44.480 coming back to this issue. Come on. Please, I'm quite good in an analysis, but I'm not God.

01:20:50.320 yet. I haven't undergone an apotheosis. But one just hopes a sense of what is at stake

01:21:04.880 penetrates their minds. These are people who claim to be acting for the benefit of the country.

01:21:13.960 Can they not just think and reflect

01:21:16.360 and look at what the possible consequences of their choice,

01:21:21.140 when indeed the certain consequences

01:21:23.420 of some of their choices will be?

01:21:26.040 I don't think they can, though, because if I...

01:21:28.340 They're so blinded by...

01:21:29.600 Well, if I sit in each of their chairs,

01:21:31.400 here's what I would say to what you're saying. 0.53

01:21:32.780 If I'm Kenny Baden-Ock, I'd say to you,

01:21:34.520 I mean, Rupert Lowe is, you know,

01:21:37.100 we agree with him on some things,

01:21:38.340 but he's way out there and not a big party,

01:21:40.920 not a serious person to do business with.

01:21:42.960 Nigel Farage has no experience of government.

01:21:45.100 He's good at talking, but we can't work with him.

01:21:47.220 And he hates us, keeps talking down our party.

01:21:49.340 How can I do a deal with him?

01:21:50.740 And by the way, the thing she will never say publicly,

01:21:52.900 but we all know, like you said, half of her party are Lib Dems.

01:21:55.860 In fact, most of her party are Lib Dems

01:21:57.660 because the other Tories either got voted out or are now in reform.

01:22:01.740 And if you're Nigel Farage, you say,

01:22:03.160 how can I do a pact with the Conservatives,

01:22:06.560 who I've been saying have ruined the country for the last 15 years and did,

01:22:10.500 and how can I deal with Rupert Lowe

01:22:12.920 who keeps, you know, with all the history that we have,

01:22:16.020 who is an extremist and all the rest of it.

01:22:19.540 And from Rupert Lowe's perspective,

01:22:21.400 he's saying, well, look at reform.

01:22:22.900 They've become, I mean, they keep saying

01:22:24.020 the reform is now the establishment,

01:22:25.500 which seems a stretch, but there you go.

01:22:27.760 So from each of their individual positions,

01:22:31.220 there is a reason why this infighting is going on.

01:22:35.320 It's not accidental.

01:22:36.660 No, no, no.

01:22:37.340 I've never suggested it.

01:22:38.340 I know, I'm not saying you are saying that.

01:22:39.760 And so, therefore, I agree with you.

01:22:42.800 My hope is everybody understands what's at stake.

01:22:46.120 But I think the individual circumstances of which leader that we're talking about

01:22:50.940 are such that the incentive structure drives them in the exact opposite direction.

01:22:53.840 I think that's true if you look at the party level and personality level.

01:23:00.540 I think in view of the magnitude of the issues, this is why I was emphasizing policy.

01:23:06.860 And I think, again, that I think party members, I think party members in many ways have a higher wisdom than their leaders.

01:23:19.240 And this is one of the reasons that I'm so keen to push saying look seriously at policy, because the plain truth is on the big questions, there increasingly is not a sheet of paper between them.

01:23:34.100 What there is is a difference of rhetoric.

01:23:36.340 In other words, if we look with Restore, yes, the lads, the lomo-sexuals, play, play, play

01:23:42.580 fanta— they need, frankly, the best way is slightly to giggle at them.

01:23:47.920 I mean, they're, you know, they're, they're, they're, they're cosplaying revolutionaries.

01:23:51.960 And the online world enables one to do that.

01:23:55.980 And sensible people just need to have a little giggle and say, come on, boys, you know, really,

01:24:01.500 you're not quite that big chap. And it's all too important. And it matters too much.

01:24:10.300 And there's too much at stake. But I did use that word miracle. And we've been an extraordinarily

01:24:20.260 lucky country. But every so often, luck does run out.

01:24:27.380 David, do you think the next election is existential for this country?

01:24:32.900 Yes, I think the whole of our conversation suggests that. The point is that the path

01:24:40.260 that we are on now is guaranteed. This again is the predictive element. I want to emphasize this,

01:24:47.220 that I'm now donning a mantle of prophecy. It seems to me that the analysis that I've given

01:24:56.180 has worked both analytically, in other words, you're looking back, but it has now turned into

01:25:01.540 an accurate instrument of prophecy. I prophesy the Burnham government will fail, and will fail

01:25:08.100 worse. That we are in a downward cycle. We're trained to a wheel. Everything they do makes

01:25:21.300 things worse. The operations of law make race relations worse. The Equality Act makes, 0.93

01:25:31.140 amongst other things, makes running the company worse. The tax policies make youth unemployment

01:25:37.940 more likely, make the business of employing anybody more difficult. In other words,

01:25:44.500 we're in this lunatic situation. But if you said, what is the worst thing you can do? This is a bit

01:25:50.340 Like your analysis now of the parties and the personalities, if you said, what is the worst thing that you could do, that is the most likely choice that the government will make.

01:26:04.780 So, yes.

01:26:07.860 But what is also extraordinary is that there's a solid 20% and more of the population that is so purblind that it believes in this stuff.

01:26:18.300 Again, one of the things, and we haven't really talked about this, the whole of the

01:26:24.680 left believes in, and we talked about magic, the left fundamentally believes in magic.

01:26:31.420 This is why Polanski is such an interesting figure.

01:26:34.960 He genuinely believes in magic.

01:26:37.380 If you think about it enough, with the pendulum and allegedly going into hypnosis, you can 0.99

01:26:43.180 grow your tits. 0.99

01:26:46.920 The left's approach to policy is absolutely identical. 0.99

01:26:51.880 You believe the Red Queen in Alice in Wonderland, six impossible things before breakfast.

01:26:58.860 Lewis Carroll is fascinating on all of this.

01:27:01.800 Again, the famous interchange with what's he called?

01:27:09.740 What is the big egg called?

01:27:11.160 Oh, it falls off a wall.

01:27:12.800 Humpty Dumpty.

01:27:13.800 Humpty Dumpty is that on a wall.

01:27:15.040 Humpty Dumpty, that exchange between Humpty Dumpty and Alice, where Humpty Dumpty says,

01:27:21.900 words mean what I want them to mean, neither more nor less.

01:27:25.260 And what does Alice say?

01:27:26.760 Question of power.

01:27:28.660 It's the whole, absolutely, just extraordinary.

01:27:34.240 And again, this is the whole point of George Orwell.

01:27:39.680 It's why you have the essay on language at the end on Newspeak.

01:27:45.040 at the end of 1984. The left believes in words over everything. Again, the whole business of

01:27:53.840 gender transitioning. The idea of gender is the triumph of words over biology. 0.99

01:28:00.080 That extraordinary moment, if you remember when Lord Winston, the last moment that he appears

01:28:06.320 on Question Time, when he says, I am terribly sorry, I know I will never appear on Question

01:28:11.360 time again but your sex is in every actual cell of your body yeah says that

01:28:20.900 yeah my favorite bit of that was fiona bruce's response do you remember 0.67

01:28:27.380 no where she went some people might disagree with you here is our here is our here is our 1.00

01:28:33.340 leading here is our leading public biologist you know and some air-headed woman um uh who 0.99

01:28:38.700 who is best, you know, acting as a dolly 1.00

01:28:42.440 to fill it mould in front of a picture, you know?

01:28:44.960 I mean, just...

01:28:46.020 Well, actually, I think it's worse than that

01:28:47.280 because my experience with Fiona 0.99

01:28:48.680 is that she's actually pretty sensible

01:28:51.820 about lots of things and she's always...

01:28:53.620 But she's not allowed to be.

01:28:54.760 But she's not allowed to be.

01:28:56.500 That's what I mean.

01:28:57.560 I think it's worse in that respect.

01:28:59.560 Yeah.

01:29:00.540 But it is, remember,

01:29:03.300 we're dealing with things which are...

01:29:05.640 The left is mythic, you know?

01:29:07.640 As Thatcher said, the facts of life are conservative.

01:29:11.040 But you want to believe it's different.

01:29:14.420 And it's a religion.

01:29:15.880 I mean, not for nothing, you know.

01:29:19.040 Labour is a moral crusader, it's nothing.

01:29:21.480 It's a religion. 1.00

01:29:24.060 Or indeed, like Islam.

01:29:27.300 They are religions. 0.91

01:29:29.840 And the fact that people believe nonsense 0.92

01:29:33.440 doesn't unfortunately stop them believing nonsense.

01:29:36.820 But again, it should be such an opportunity. Sorry, I'm sounding really pathetic. It should be such an opportunity on the right. The doors are open, the windows are open. We've got a political structure which is manifestly collapsing. We've got half the political establishment spouting nonsense. 0.98

01:29:58.260 You can even see with Blair, semi-rowing back, his awareness of the catastrophe, and so on and so on.

01:30:07.920 But, you know, I do understand, David, why people are going to the left.

01:30:13.020 It's very similar to Venezuela.

01:30:14.560 So Venezuela in the late 90s, it was a failed state.

01:30:18.660 People knew that if we had democracy, but people knew that all that would happen is that somebody would come in,

01:30:25.600 they would talk a good game, they'd rob the country blind. So would their cronies. Everything

01:30:31.400 would continue to collapse. Everything would continue to fall apart. And at the end of their

01:30:36.600 term, they would go to Costa Rica or some other country like that and live off their ill-gotten

01:30:41.180 gains. Chavez was starting his campaign and people went, can it be any worse than what's gone before?

01:30:50.540 I mean, it was.

01:30:51.320 I was just going to...

01:30:52.280 I fear that...

01:30:54.320 Spoiler alert, it can.

01:30:56.820 Spoiler alert, it can be a great deal.

01:30:58.700 But there's another spoiler alert there.

01:31:00.540 I don't actually believe that our political class is pillaging the country.

01:31:04.220 No, no, but I'm not saying that they are.

01:31:05.800 But what I'm saying is that people saw a failing system.

01:31:08.800 It's different.

01:31:09.640 But nevertheless, the system is failing and they go for the emergency lever.

01:31:13.840 But what I think is more peculiar is that they haven't...

01:31:17.980 The left, although it's dabbling, well, it doesn't look to be dabbling terribly seriously with the Greens and Polanski, the left is persisting.

01:31:26.840 The left has got this enormously long history of being a central part of the failure.

01:31:31.920 But the true believers continue, whereas at least on the conservative side, there's a serious, however heavily disguised it is, there's a serious degree of rethinking.

01:31:43.440 On the left, there's actually regression.

01:31:46.020 The attempted rethinking of new Labour having catastrophically failed.

01:31:50.840 What do they do?

01:31:52.120 There's a very good reason, of course.

01:31:54.340 The Labour Party is the most nepotistic of parties.

01:31:58.420 Everybody is everybody else's uncle, brother, sister, whatever.

01:32:02.260 You look at it.

01:32:03.660 And, of course, they have to keep going because otherwise, however, this is where I'm afraid,

01:32:09.280 I do slightly agree, not so much corruption,

01:32:11.780 But there is a political machine. Either you've got to acknowledge that it's been a disaster and dissolve it, or you desperately try to keep it going.

01:32:23.960 But I would hope that the one thing that will happen is that the utter catastrophe, because I'm certain that a Burnham government will be an utter catastrophe, really will perform that final act of dissolution to this thing.

01:32:47.660 And it seems to me it is now bound to tear itself apart

01:32:52.980 even more dramatically than the Conservative Party did.

01:32:57.180 You've now, with the fall of Starmer, you're at that stage.

01:33:02.420 This is the equivalent of the fall of Boris Johnson.

01:33:06.660 Weirdly.

01:33:08.280 Although I think there are very strong similarities, actually,

01:33:11.360 between Boris and Burnham.

01:33:13.940 Again, people who like to be loved.

01:33:15.960 the nice chap

01:33:18.180 the good communicator

01:33:20.800 all deeply depressing

01:33:25.320 as always David

01:33:27.320 that's why we have you on

01:33:28.640 to feed our inner pessimism

01:33:31.840 and sense of doom

01:33:33.940 happy?

01:33:36.100 no

01:33:36.380 David always a pleasure

01:33:40.160 before we head to questions

01:33:42.180 from our supporters on Substack

01:33:43.620 what is the one thing

01:33:44.640 we're not talking about that we should be?

01:33:47.520 Nothing.

01:33:49.100 It seems to me that we covered that ground.

01:33:52.800 And the one thing, the thing that is,

01:33:57.980 and again, one's going to sound terribly naive,

01:34:01.540 what are we missing?

01:34:04.320 We are missing the person who can do

01:34:07.040 all the things we've been talking about.

01:34:09.640 We are missing the equivalent of a Thatcher.

01:34:11.760 we are missing the equivalent of Churchill at the key moment of William the Marshall or whoever.

01:34:21.080 And there is, we've got to hope somewhere there is some man or woman

01:34:27.040 who will be capable of standing up and doing that. 0.50

01:34:30.500 You think it's Theresa May? 0.99

01:34:33.860 I do not believe in the living dead.

01:34:38.560 A zombie, please God help us.

01:34:42.620 Head on over to triggerpod.co.uk

01:34:45.340 where David's going to answer your questions.

01:34:47.680 Don't forget to click the link

01:34:49.260 in the description of this episode

01:34:50.840 to grab the special CyberGhost VPN discount.

01:34:54.800 It's completely risk-free.

01:34:56.900 So check it out today.

01:34:59.180 Julius Caesar was voted dictator temporarily

01:35:01.760 by the Senate to save the Republic

01:35:03.680 and never stood down.

01:35:05.480 Could you ever advocate for a dictator

01:35:08.760 and a possible dystopian future Britain?

01:35:11.760 We'll be right back.

TRIGGERnometry - June 20, 2026

The British State Hates its Own People - Dr David Starkey

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