TRIGGERnometry - The Fall of England - Dr David Starkey

00:00:01.000 What do you mean by the fall of England?

00:00:02.840 You can see repeatedly states get structures that are too big for their economies.

00:00:09.400 We've created a structure of government which manifestly is vastly expensive.

00:00:14.680 Secondly, does not work, it's why we can't build anything.

00:00:18.960 We've created an absolutely malfunctioning structure of government which is the quintessence

00:00:24.720 of it, is Kyrgyzstan.

00:00:26.880 Finally, people have to realise what the consequences of their actions are.

00:00:33.200 We will go bankrupt.

00:00:34.200 So you're constantly putting the day off, but the day will come.

00:00:39.640 Dr. David Starkey, eminent historian and now fellow YouTuber.

00:00:45.000 Isn't it?

00:00:46.000 Really, I shrink, I'm certainly in the presence of a megastar YouTuber, I'm a mere shrinking

00:00:53.120 violet.

00:00:54.120 Welcome back, it's always a pleasure to have you on the show.

00:00:56.560 So David, you've been talking a lot about the fall of England and the current state that

00:01:01.800 the country is in.

00:01:02.880 What do you mean by the fall of England and where are we as a country and as a civilisation

00:01:08.120 more broadly?

00:01:09.320 Nice, simple question to start off with.

00:01:11.880 It reminds me of one terrible old colleague I had at the University of London who could

00:01:16.880 never be bothered to rewrite his lectures.

00:01:20.200 So he insisted, he said, all exam questions must be roomy and this meant that you could

00:01:27.120 write a question that was broad enough so that his poor students who had just been fed the

00:01:31.840 stuff of 40 years ago could answer them.

00:01:35.120 But this, on the other hand, has point.

00:01:38.360 What do I mean by the fall of England?

00:01:40.360 It's again, the quickest way to do it is by saying, let's look at the relationship between

00:01:48.960 the idea of England and the idea of Britain.

00:01:53.480 This is the central question.

00:01:55.720 Remember, everybody chatters about British values and so on.

00:02:00.800 There is no such thing.

00:02:04.980 Britain is not and never has been a nation state with independent values.

00:02:12.480 Britishness was for export. 1.00

00:02:15.760 At home, you were Scottish, Welsh, Irish, English.

00:02:21.720 And that is the absolutely key thing to understand the last 300 years of our history.

00:02:29.920 Britain, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland begins in 1707 with the union of,

00:02:40.400 but essentially, although they shared a monarch ever since the accession of the Stuarts at

00:02:45.660 the beginning of the 17th century, although they share a monarch of the Stuart line,

00:02:50.500 they retain everything that's separate.

00:02:53.640 England and Scotland, they've got separate histories. 0.68

00:02:56.480 Why Simon Sharma's history of Britain was rubbish?

00:02:59.360 Because there isn't such a thing.

00:03:01.480 England and Scotland are completely separate histories up to 1707.

00:03:05.620 They're separate countries insofar as countries have values, separate values, separate traditions.

00:03:11.880 But the extraordinary thing is with the union in 1707, it's not a conquest.

00:03:17.280 It's not colonization.

00:03:19.040 It's none of the things that the Scots now say it is.

00:03:22.400 It is a genuine negotiated settlement between two separate countries.

00:03:27.660 And Scotland in 1707 keeps everything of being an independent state apart from its monarchy

00:03:35.040 and its parliament.

00:03:36.440 So the Scots keep, obviously, Scottishness. 0.86

00:03:39.480 They keep a particular version of the English language and several versions of the English

00:03:44.920 language.

00:03:45.920 They keep their own church.

00:03:47.500 The monarch still changes religion as they go across the border.

00:03:51.200 You keep a separate educational system.

00:03:53.580 You have universities entrenched in the Act of Union, which is why Margaret Thatcher couldn't 0.99

00:03:58.420 abolish the University of Aberdeen, although she wanted to make an example of it.

00:04:02.640 You've got a separate system of heraldry.

00:04:04.760 You've got separate crown jewels.

00:04:06.880 You've got a completely separate legal system, separate educational system.

00:04:12.780 And that meant, of course, that after Union, what all Scotland did was to join in the English

00:04:18.880 Parliament.

00:04:19.880 You send more Scottish MPs to Westminster than Scotland was actually entitled to.

00:04:24.860 You create a uniform army, a uniform navy, the army in particular, where the Scots have

00:04:32.120 a wholly disproportionate part, and the Scots get access to the British Empire.

00:04:37.360 But there is no overarching single identity.

00:04:41.120 The monarchy deliberately, as a matter of policy, creates Scottish titles, Welsh titles, Irish

00:04:48.880 titles for each royal son.

00:04:52.500 In other words, an actual endorsement of it.

00:04:56.160 And this extraordinary multiple identity, remember, it goes right through to sport.

00:05:02.380 The first internationals in soccer, football, are between England and Scotland.

00:05:07.460 It's why we don't have a single national team.

00:05:10.960 So the relationship is, what does England become?

00:05:16.580 Scotland, increasingly Wales, Ireland, were cultural nationalisms.

00:05:21.940 So you've got a national poet in the case of Scotland.

00:05:25.120 You've got Robert Burns.

00:05:26.180 You've got national dress, the kilt, or the funny things that the Welsh wear. 1.00

00:05:31.240 The immense importance of this useless language, Welsh. 1.00

00:05:34.860 It's why educational standards, why educational standards have collapsed in Wales.

00:05:39.460 And then you wonder why you're controversial.

00:05:41.260 No, no, but we need to talk, we need to call things by their proper names.

00:05:46.660 Welsh is an unreformable medieval language.

00:05:49.920 It's not even medieval.

00:05:50.980 It's sort of bronze, literally seriously.

00:05:53.520 It's a bronze age language in which every word that relates to modernity is an adapted form

00:05:59.200 of English.

00:06:01.200 So the fact that you waste a vast proportion of the time of children in schools teaching

00:06:06.440 them this language is a central reason why the Welsh children are performing hugely less

00:06:11.920 well than English children.

00:06:13.580 It's really important.

00:06:15.540 We don't lie.

00:06:16.700 We spend time lying.

00:06:19.580 I thought this was one place where we can actually tell the truth.

00:06:23.120 And the truth is absolutely central.

00:06:26.120 So we have, then, this world in which there are three nationalisms that are very typical

00:06:31.040 of general European nationalisms.

00:06:34.440 They are intensely cultural.

00:06:37.260 They are about music.

00:06:38.620 They're about special dress.

00:06:40.260 They're folkloric.

00:06:41.460 They don't have a direct political representation.

00:06:44.720 We're talking before 1997.

00:06:46.780 And there's a different one, which is English, where you don't have national dress, except you

00:06:52.560 do.

00:06:53.560 I'm wearing it.

00:06:54.560 Seriously, it's the Savile Row suit, which completely transforms how the elites of Europe

00:06:59.480 dress.

00:07:00.480 Because before that, it's French style in silks, velvet, laces and whatever, which is completely

00:07:05.800 impractical.

00:07:06.760 You can't actually wear it outside a coach or a royal court, otherwise you're torn to pieces

00:07:12.560 by the mob.

00:07:13.320 And the English pioneer a form of dressing, which you can use, you can ride in, you can

00:07:18.600 walk in the street in, you can do business in.

00:07:21.780 But of course, it becomes a universal possession.

00:07:25.460 So Englishness becomes a kind of broader identity, which is above all related to one thing and one

00:07:33.960 thing only, great nationhood.

00:07:36.480 It's that sense of great nationhood, the England of the 19th century, the made in England, the

00:07:43.060 world's largest manufacturing power, commercial power, the place that originates parliamentary

00:07:49.140 democracy, well, before democracy, parliamentary government representative government, a secure

00:07:55.260 system of law that invents effectively modernity, capitalism and all the rest of it.

00:08:00.360 So there's incredible pride in all of that.

00:08:03.420 And that undergoes tremendous shock from the end of the First World War, for obvious reasons.

00:08:11.420 In many ways, I think everybody says, you know, what book should people read to understand

00:08:16.620 England?

00:08:17.520 It's that satire, that skit of the 1960s, Sellers and Yateman, 1066 and all that, which ends in

00:08:26.200 this extraordinary way in the, it describes the, the peace treaties and whatever that follow

00:08:33.540 1918.

00:08:34.200 And it says, this is before Fukuyama, Britain ceased to be, because you use Britain and England

00:08:42.140 interchangeably, Britain ceased to be top notion.

00:08:45.200 And history came to a full stop.

00:08:52.200 Now, I don't think England has ever fully recovered from that moment, because how do you define

00:09:00.200 a sense of nationhood that hasn't depended on the usual conventional symbols of nationhood?

00:09:09.200 And again, if you actually look within Britain, the way it actually worked was, everybody was both

00:09:16.800 British in the sense of a formal legal identity, a formal sense of citizenship, and you were Welsh,

00:09:25.180 Scottish, Irish, English.

00:09:26.840 But the Welsh, Scottish, Irish, actually, and certainly their governing elites, subscribe essentially to an Anglo-British

00:09:36.780 culture.

00:09:37.540 They go to the elites, especially in Scotland, go to the great English public schools, and

00:09:43.780 they take part in a system of politics.

00:09:45.980 The Westminster Parliament is just the English Parliament.

00:09:49.380 The laws of the whole community are the laws of England.

00:09:54.200 The numbering of our monarchs go back to the conquest of England in the Norman conquest.

00:09:59.540 Now, all of that is thrown into chaos.

00:10:02.740 It's a very long answer to a very big question.

00:10:05.060 All of that is thrown into chaos by the deliberate decision of the Blair government to embark on

00:10:11.300 two things, devolution on the one hand, and large-scale emigration on the other.

00:10:18.280 Because what you do deliberately at that point is devolution says the four nations are equal.

00:10:27.620 So you, as far as possible, you destroy the, as it were, overarching political supremacy of

00:10:34.940 the English Parliament.

00:10:36.020 You do what you'd not done before, which is to embody the nationhood of Wales, Scotland,

00:10:43.600 Ireland, with actual independence.

00:10:46.160 Ireland, sorry, is a separate case which we should talk about.

00:10:50.000 But Scotland and Wales, you deliberately give it political embodiment, which it hadn't had

00:10:55.360 before.

00:10:55.900 But you don't give England.

00:11:00.060 So you deliberately marginalise England.

00:11:02.500 The reason Labour deliberately marginalises England is because England is conservative

00:11:07.940 and they don't like it, is the essential issue.

00:11:13.000 But it's also too big to operate in a federal system.

00:11:17.040 You can't have a federal system.

00:11:18.780 Where Scotland, what is it, less than five million people?

00:11:21.380 Is it three?

00:11:21.840 And Wales is two or three million.

00:11:25.620 And they're tiny, tiny places.

00:11:27.780 And you're 50 or 60 in England.

00:11:30.440 So you cannot possibly have a federal system with such gross, gross disparity.

00:11:36.640 The 13 colonies are able to do it, although some of them are very much bigger than the others.

00:11:41.140 Because there are 13, you can balance out, as you do between the House of Representatives

00:11:46.500 and the Senate.

00:11:47.900 The Senate representing the states, two from each.

00:11:51.020 In other words, everybody is the same.

00:11:53.160 The House of Representatives actually representing population.

00:11:56.500 You can balance it out.

00:11:57.780 We can't do that.

00:11:59.960 But the problem is it then leaves England high and dry with no formal expression of its national

00:12:07.520 identity, unlike the Scots, unlike the Welsh, unlike the Irish.

00:12:11.520 It then goes further, because what you do is you try to invent a new British identity.

00:12:19.080 And the key thing to understand, this is deliberately the work of Blair and especially of Gordon Brown.

00:12:24.880 And the key thing is, let's be quite a blunt.

00:12:28.200 You accuse me of you.

00:12:29.920 You accuse me of you.

00:12:30.920 You accuse me of you.

00:12:31.920 You accuse me of you.

00:12:32.920 You accuse me of being blunt.

00:12:34.920 You accuse me of being really blunt.

00:12:36.520 You can tell just how far I've gone.

00:12:39.040 What we do is we create a flag of convenience identity.

00:12:43.960 Being British has no content. 1.00

00:12:46.900 It deliberately has no content because the only British value, apparently, is tolerance.

00:12:52.200 Right.

00:12:52.700 And diversity.

00:12:54.160 In other words, which is aggressive tolerance.

00:12:57.620 There's passive tolerance, which is what you and me as white men are expected to show.

00:13:01.940 And there's diversity, which is what those who are not white, which is aggressive tolerance

00:13:06.080 to be directed at us.

00:13:08.880 And this is utterly disastrous because in the old Britain and with all good immigrants like 1.00

00:13:15.480 you, we don't have multiculturalism.

00:13:18.600 What we had was biculturalism.

00:13:21.160 Everybody was Scottish, Welsh, English, whatever, and British in the sense of subscribing to an

00:13:30.000 overarching set of essentially political values.

00:13:33.560 Because I believe, unlike most people, politics is actually what Aristotle calls architectonic.

00:13:39.100 It shapes.

00:13:41.160 It gives shape to a country.

00:13:44.020 It gives shape to a people.

00:13:45.800 And unfortunately, we've thrown all that away.

00:13:48.220 And the result is then you have a chaos of identities.

00:13:52.580 What we should be going back to is biculturalism, not multiculturalism. 0.64

00:13:57.940 But how do we do that?

00:13:59.060 Well, you have to recognize a primary value.

00:14:02.720 Well, I agree.

00:14:03.880 And let's unpack that because I think what you're talking about is you're at least describing,

00:14:09.020 we haven't kind of found our way to a solution, but you're describing what I think is a central

00:14:14.720 problem Britain faces from a cultural and identity perspective, which is that what we

00:14:22.340 know we should be saying to people who come here, and we've had a lot of people who've

00:14:25.800 come here in a short period of time, is you have to become one of us.

00:14:30.240 Ah, but you see, it was never something, right, again, it's really...

00:14:34.020 It ought to be that.

00:14:34.660 No, no, I don't know.

00:14:35.920 I don't think it should, right.

00:14:37.520 Let's again, let me now reverse track because I think do what fashion would be used to be

00:14:42.320 called a reverse ferret.

00:14:43.600 Let me explain the good side of what I've just described.

00:14:46.600 Because we didn't have a single passionately enforced identity like the French, like the 0.99

00:14:54.820 Germans, like the Americans until very recently. 0.96

00:14:57.960 Remember, all European states are, in one way or another, inventions.

00:15:03.720 They're put together at different moments of time and for different reasons.

00:15:08.200 And there's an especially fertile period in this following the great chaos of the French 1.00

00:15:13.280 Revolution and Napoleon.

00:15:14.800 And one of the central instruments in this state forging, well, obviously, it's power,

00:15:21.320 it's bureaucracy, it's industry.

00:15:22.860 But the most important thing, and what we are doing here, is education.

00:15:27.320 You use the new universal systems of education and compulsory schooling that were imposed in

00:15:34.880 the late 19th century actually to impose a single version of the language, a single interpretation

00:15:43.220 of the history, if you like, a single set of values.

00:15:47.680 We never did that in Britain because we never had a single system of education.

00:15:54.120 We, again, as I said, Scotland had its own entrenched educational system.

00:15:59.780 Wales did. 0.97

00:16:00.360 And at the same time, we had multiple religious schools.

00:16:03.780 We had local authority schools.

00:16:05.820 We had charitable schools.

00:16:07.700 We had public schools.

00:16:09.000 So there was never this uniformity.

00:16:11.500 This is why the good side of what I'm describing is we've been able to accommodate such an extraordinarily

00:16:18.500 broad range of immigrants without the structure actually tearing apart, whereas manifestly,

00:16:25.140 in, for example, France, the structure is completely coming apart because if you only have this very

00:16:30.720 brittle model of it means one thing to be French, the only way you can accommodate diversity is actually 1.00

00:16:39.380 to pull it right apart because we had such a baggy.

00:16:43.520 It's, again, why are we able to avoid revolution from the 17th century right up to now?

00:16:50.840 It's because we had a constitution that was extraordinarily flexible, that right from the beginning had the

00:16:58.240 foundation of the idea that everybody is represented in parliament.

00:17:02.400 Of course, everybody wasn't.

00:17:04.020 I mean, only a tiny proportion was.

00:17:05.760 But that was the myth.

00:17:07.020 So when you get the Chartists fighting for represented working class, when you get the 0.75

00:17:12.400 later 19th century skilled unionists, when you get the suffragettes, they're not saying 0.97

00:17:17.020 we want to tear parliament down.

00:17:18.820 We're saying we want to be part of it.

00:17:21.620 And again, so you see what I mean?

00:17:23.300 You've got a constitution which has got this immense, just one second, this immense elasticity.

00:17:28.520 In the same way, because British identity was never one single coherent nation, there is no

00:17:36.040 British nation.

00:17:37.040 It was able to accommodate this extraordinary range.

00:17:39.420 But it relied on this unspoken assumption that there was a dominant, essentially political

00:17:48.040 and behavioral culture.

00:17:49.040 I mean, Englishness itself is an extraordinarily diverse thing.

00:17:54.420 It embodies the Chartists.

00:17:56.300 It embodies weird people like, you know, I'm really weird.

00:17:59.980 My ancestors were Quaker.

00:18:02.260 I mean, again, one of these extraordinary religious minorities that's had such a hugely disproportionate 1.00

00:18:08.920 impact.

00:18:09.980 Everybody says for good, I think also for ill.

00:18:12.640 The Roundtree Trust is one of the most destructive things available in England, sponsoring every deranged 1.00

00:18:18.020 leftist cause at the moment.

00:18:19.400 But they have this extraordinary ability both to make money and to sponsor radical good causes.

00:18:26.860 So it's a very complex identity.

00:18:29.180 It's not just the bowler hat.

00:18:31.180 It's not just the cut glass accent.

00:18:33.340 It's not just Southern England.

00:18:35.280 But it's everything, you know, that somebody as brilliant as a writer, as Orwell describes,

00:18:41.360 it's everything that you feel when you enter a great building.

00:18:44.660 It's what you feel when you enter Westminster Abbey, that extraordinary sense of 800 years of

00:18:51.180 history just resting on you, breathing the amazing figures, the monuments that you walk,

00:18:59.040 the smells you smell, the extraordinary music, the liturgy, and so on, all of that.

00:19:05.080 But that was deliberately damaged under Blair, quite intentionally damaged.

00:19:11.960 And instead, you superimpose this mythical identity.

00:19:16.920 And the problem with it is it has literally no content.

00:19:20.820 So we say to immigrants now that you can be anything you want to be.

00:19:26.100 We allow our willing acceptance and tolerance to very different groups.

00:19:32.460 So if you look at the pattern of giving state recognition to Roman Catholics, to Jews, Quakers,

00:19:43.260 when there's a royal accession, there is actually a special group of, I forget what it's called,

00:19:49.840 but it's something like the privileged bodies.

00:19:51.880 And it includes the entire litany of rather strange people like Quakers and God knows what, 1.00

00:19:57.680 of the 19th century, sort of incorporated into the establishment.

00:20:02.800 So you can see how we did it, why we did it, but you can also see how it gets out of hand

00:20:10.540 if there is a deliberate attack, especially on Englishness.

00:20:15.580 And the reason for that deliberate attack is, of course, it's identified with a particular

00:20:21.080 form of racial supremacy, which is now decided to be ultimately wicked.

00:20:25.640 It's identified primarily with empire, although it has to be said the Scots were the most aggressive

00:20:31.560 imperialists of the lot. 0.81

00:20:33.560 If you either look at the Honkers and Shankers, you know, Hong Kong and Shanghai, you look at 1.00

00:20:38.040 the banking system in Canada, you look at the dominant families in India and so on.

00:20:46.700 But the entire operation of wokery is primarily designed to target that dominant Anglophone culture,

00:20:57.940 which was the only glue that held it all together.

00:21:01.460 Well, this is why I was asking you the question.

00:21:03.400 So your argument is the British identity is vacuous and has no substance, which I agree 1.00

00:21:09.480 with because it's, I agree with, let's just park it there.

00:21:15.200 So the essential thing is that the fact that British identity was vacuous is only recent.

00:21:23.080 Yes, I understand.

00:21:24.040 It is the determination to say that the only British value is diversity and tolerance.

00:21:30.200 Rather than saying, actually, what you're doing is when you get that passport, when you acquire

00:21:38.100 that citizenship, when you become a subject of the crown, you're effectively subscribing

00:21:42.920 to a thousand years of history.

00:21:45.740 And again, it's really important.

00:21:47.820 And this is also the edging out of the monarchy, which is one of the most striking things in

00:21:54.460 my lifetime, is also central, as it were, the central embodiment of that overarching identity

00:22:01.680 wasn't nationhood.

00:22:03.740 It was the monarchy.

00:22:05.580 I have a plaque, a bronze plaque, which I found amongst my father's possessions, which was what

00:22:12.720 his family was given after his eldest brother, Abraham, died of horrible wounds at Gallipoli.

00:22:20.500 And what appears, this is the plaque that was given to the family of everybody who'd been

00:22:26.780 killed in the First World War.

00:22:28.240 So there were millions of these things.

00:22:30.320 And what appears on it is for king and country.

00:22:34.620 The prime emblem of it was the monarchy.

00:22:39.060 And one of the things that I think has been catastrophic and catastrophically accelerated,

00:22:44.260 especially with the constitutionally illiterate coronation of King Charles III, the role of

00:22:52.500 the monarch as the prime symbol of this.

00:22:56.620 Remember, Britain is the world's most successful state.

00:23:01.840 Whether you look at the legacy of the British Empire, it dwarfs the legacy of whom?

00:23:07.920 An empire that leaves the daughter states, America, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, India.

00:23:14.440 It's the most extraordinary thing in the world that creates a language which is not simply

00:23:19.580 universal in Europe, but universal in the world.

00:23:22.760 A dominant system of law, English common law.

00:23:25.880 So this staggering achievement is then, as it were, turned against it, used to destroy it.

00:23:33.200 And what seemed to me to be so extraordinary at the coronation was all the things that were

00:23:42.560 you, that I can remember vividly as a boy, first time I'd watched television, watching

00:23:49.900 the coronation of Elizabeth II.

00:23:52.600 And at that point, there was still the sense of the monarchy as the apex of a political

00:23:59.580 pyramid.

00:24:00.120 And of course, at that point, still just about an imperial pyramid.

00:24:05.120 And ever since 1689, the House of Lords and the House of Commons had been present at every

00:24:12.160 coronation.

00:24:13.280 And the monarch was manifestly the peak of a pyramid.

00:24:17.220 Charles, King Charles and Archbishop Welby deliberately swept the whole of that away.

00:24:25.140 Every reference to politics was removed from the coronation.

00:24:29.340 The original idea of the coronation was the sanctification of political power by divine

00:24:36.160 authority.

00:24:37.020 In other words, what I've always said was the proper role of the Church of England, English

00:24:41.140 Shinto, the English worshipping themselves through the position of the king emperor. 0.98

00:24:47.760 All that swept aside.

00:24:49.440 The blarization of the monarchy, which I'm afraid latter Queen Elizabeth and present King

00:24:54.940 Charles have been absolutely central.

00:24:56.660 David, let me just finish this line of questioning with you, because what I'm desperately trying

00:25:00.980 to pin you down on is what are we to do about all of this?

00:25:03.660 Because your point about the monarchy, I take very well.

00:25:07.140 I was at a gathering recently.

00:25:09.340 It was probably around the time of the coronation, actually, of people from our space.

00:25:14.600 There were many people who you'd know, many people who our viewers would know there.

00:25:17.960 And the person who was talking at the end of a speech said, God save the king.

00:25:25.760 And everyone looked around and said, yeah, God save.

00:25:29.220 And then they giggled afterwards.

00:25:31.180 Because this idea, you know, you mentioned the plaque.

00:25:36.080 I saw something the other day about how a group of British soldiers were surrounded and

00:25:40.440 ran out of ammunition and were all killed.

00:25:41.880 And they sent their final message was, out of ammunition, God save the king.

00:25:46.740 I don't imagine British squaddies in that situation now would be sending that kind of

00:25:51.460 message back.

00:25:51.860 That is true.

00:25:52.460 Right?

00:25:52.900 That is true.

00:25:53.800 So if we're not to tell new immigrants or, you know, my son is two years old.

00:25:59.820 He is the son of two immigrants here.

00:26:02.080 What are we supposed to tell people about what it now means to live here and to be part of

00:26:07.480 this society?

00:26:08.380 Call it English, call it British, call it whatever you want.

00:26:10.540 How do we all coexist?

00:26:12.340 I think we do have to say that there is an overarching British identity.

00:26:19.180 That is what we legally are.

00:26:22.180 Remember, again, because England and Scotland were so completely separate in fundamental reasons,

00:26:28.280 there was never a sense of a racial basis of our identity.

00:26:32.380 And remember, this is true in Germany until five minutes ago.

00:26:36.220 Everybody who spoke German was potentially a German citizen.

00:26:41.560 There was this extraordinary part.

00:26:43.700 Ours is a juridical view of citizenship.

00:26:47.040 You're a subject of the crown.

00:26:48.860 And of course, that can be a matter of will.

00:26:50.780 It's a matter of contract.

00:26:52.060 It's a matter of form.

00:26:53.240 The problem is, once it ceases to have a sense of allegiance to what the crown used to represent,

00:27:01.100 the crown used to be this summation, this summary of that thousand years of history that

00:27:08.780 I'm talking about.

00:27:10.080 Maybe what we've got to do, I would say this is a historian, wouldn't I?

00:27:13.980 I call it, right, let me just go slightly to one side.

00:27:19.340 There's a movement now, which I don't know whether you've actually interviewed people who are interested in it,

00:27:25.100 which is to say the only way we can save ourselves is by a religious revival.

00:27:31.100 Quite a lot of people on the right are saying this, which I can see the point on I disagree radically.

00:27:37.580 But they're talking about the needs to be, what we are talking about, an idea of something bigger than oneself.

00:27:43.800 The thing that both you identify with, to an extent explains you, that gives you ground, all those sort of things.

00:27:53.520 And there's a grand and fancy word for it, which you can call transcendence.

00:27:57.960 I believe that there is a possibility of historical transcendence.

00:28:02.480 What I would want to do with every immigrant, and if one could, is to take them round two or three great buildings, 1.00

00:28:11.440 to take them round Westminster Abbey, to get them to look at what is there.

00:28:17.560 And first of all, it would be required that they would have a sufficient level of English, actually, to understand it.

00:28:23.700 Take them round to look at a great national monument.

00:28:28.340 This is the early 18th century, which gives pride of place to a scientist.

00:28:35.600 Because on one side of the Abbey, there is the vast, elaborate tomb monument of Newton, of Isaac Newton.

00:28:42.880 It's just extraordinary that you have a special corner devoted to poets, another special corner to musicians.

00:28:50.080 At the end of the 18th century, the entire royal family takes its hat off and bows before the kind of throne of Handel's monument there.

00:29:04.780 And it's that extraordinary, the statues of the great statesmen and so on.

00:29:10.680 It's what you should, what we should be feeling.

00:29:13.840 It's not empty pride.

00:29:15.480 It's nothing vacuous.

00:29:17.120 It is a respect.

00:29:19.000 It's gratitude.

00:29:20.440 But also the realization that that's not something dead, but is something that is properly a kind of fruitful soil.

00:29:28.940 It's a kind of, it's a kind of well-fertilized field from which novelty springs.

00:29:34.560 Because again, what the absolute tragedy of particularly the 20th century is the belief you can just start from scratch, which again, blares new country.

00:29:46.540 But do you know what?

00:29:47.400 It actually was.

00:29:49.420 Because it tried to scrub away as much of the past as possible with the disastrous consequences of the present.

00:29:56.300 What we have to realize is that everything that's gone wrong, including the NHS, is an attempt when you try to start from scratch.

00:30:05.380 When you simply scrub away the past and use an exercise of artificial intelligence and say, wouldn't it be lovely?

00:30:13.760 We are a product of wouldn't it be lovely?

00:30:16.140 Of ignoring, of ignoring, of ignoring, of Eliza Doolittle, of ignoring what was there already.

00:30:25.520 And the, I mean, I am passionate about this, Constantine.

00:30:29.420 One of the reasons I am always so impressed by you, you have, you as a quite deliberate intellectual process have absorbed yourself into that.

00:30:39.160 And have been, is it not true?

00:30:40.980 Yes, absolutely.

00:30:41.640 And been changed and transformed by it.

00:30:43.840 And you are precisely, I'm not famous for flattery, but I'm going to give it to you, you are an example of exactly what I'm talking about.

00:30:52.280 The extraordinary transformative power of this, how it changes, how it directs, how it is the great pointer from past, present to future.

00:31:05.360 And that's what we should be doing.

00:31:06.960 In other words, we should find a way by which it's ambitious, but I think it's doable, in which everybody who aspires to British citizenship is helped to the sort of understanding and the sort of transformative process that you've had, that you've done for yourself.

00:31:27.300 Sorry, Francis.

00:31:29.980 Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, that's why I was waiting.

00:31:32.820 My question to you, David, is, and you flattered me, let me flatter myself.

00:31:38.720 I did have some circumstances which made it easier for me.

00:31:44.080 First of all, I came here when I was young.

00:31:46.640 Secondly, I came to boarding school, which imbues you with many of the British values.

00:31:51.580 Knocks them into you.

00:31:52.300 Knocks them into you quite, through osmosis. 0.90

00:31:54.320 Secondly, or presumably you were never beaten.

00:31:58.680 Well, thirdly, not to flatter myself too much, but, you know, I've had the luxury, let's put it like this, to read a lot and to think about these things.

00:32:10.780 If I had come in my mid-twenties and gone straight into a low-level job where I had to sort of survive, and I've had periods of my life that were like that, but I had something before.

00:32:26.020 I don't know that I would have got to the point that I've got to, and I guess what I feel is, I love what you're saying about, you know, and maybe we should actually do some kind of collaboration where you take us round Westminster and we film it.

00:32:42.500 But, but, but, but, but, but, what I'm, there has to be a more retail version of this for most people to get it.

00:32:50.980 Yes, no, of course I understand that, but what I'm saying, I've described the ideal.

00:32:54.420 Yes.

00:32:55.040 Right, what we need to do is to have that conscious process of cultural inculcation.

00:33:01.260 Yes.

00:33:01.560 Which, by the way, it doesn't, I've no idea whether you retain or do you, were you ever orthodox?

00:33:06.700 I mean.

00:33:06.980 Yeah, well, my family are orthodox Christians.

00:33:08.280 Do you retain it?

00:33:09.960 I'm not a practicing religious person, no, but, but I probably imbibed some of the values.

00:33:14.540 Exactly, exactly.

00:33:15.200 What I think is, it is entirely possible, indeed, I regard as valuable, that a Jew, a Sikh, whoever retains all the individuality and peculiarity of custom alongside and with.

00:33:33.340 And I think it's entirely possible for that to happen.

00:33:36.620 I mean, I first, I first, and again, we're being, let's be autobiographical because I gave you, tried to give you the historical structure.

00:33:43.520 I think the anecdote is often so valuable.

00:33:48.180 I first was really alerted to this idea by culturalism, by my experience in my glory days doing the BBC's Moral Maze, which is when, of course, I get the name of, you know, the rudest man in Britain for being abusive to poor old George Austin and whatever.

00:34:04.600 But one of my fellow panelists was Hugo Grinn, who was the rabbi.

00:34:10.240 I don't know whether it's called the liberal or the reform West London congregation based in Marylebone.

00:34:16.560 And Hugo, and of course, he's classically on the left or leftish.

00:34:20.400 And our relationship was a quite spiky one.

00:34:24.060 I mean, I think it's best summarized by a rather nice exchange between us.

00:34:28.420 Hugo had this voice that went down, the kind of voice which I always say explains why Americans suffer from prostate.

00:34:34.680 You know, you vibrate it all very badly. 0.70

00:34:37.780 Anyway, you know, David, you're not half as nasty as you appear, to which I fluted back.

00:34:43.900 And you, Hugo, my dear, are not half as nice either.

00:34:46.680 So it was a very nicely tense relationship.

00:34:51.280 Anyway, it was halfway through that, halfway through my 10-year stint there, that I met my late partner, that I met James Brown, and that we got together and all the rest of it.

00:35:04.760 And Hugo, again, you know, Jew, homosexuality, quite awkward. 1.00

00:35:09.560 He deliberately went out of his way to include the two of us.

00:35:14.780 And he did one thing I've never forgotten.

00:35:17.420 He invited us both to the Passover in his house.

00:35:20.800 And I never really understood Judaism.

00:35:22.960 And, of course, at that point, you see the head of the household effectively as high priest performing the central rituals of the religion, which are also the rituals of the table, which we in communion and whatever in the Western churches, it's a kind of ritualized version of that.

00:35:43.300 What is remarkable in a Jewish Passover, it is actually part of the meal you are really going to eat.

00:35:50.140 And here was this man who was a major, at that point, public figure and whatever, suddenly becoming the high priest in his own household.

00:36:03.240 And I found it moving in a way.

00:36:07.700 But it was this doubleness and there is ease in both worlds.

00:36:12.700 And in the same way that, you know, the Anglo-Scott is easy in both worlds.

00:36:18.600 You can be strutting around in Kilton's Scruttoos one minute and in the most fluting of English accents, you know, discussing imperial policy in another.

00:36:28.340 And those are the things that we've got to work out ways.

00:36:36.660 They have to be educational.

00:36:39.400 We have to rethink how we educate.

00:36:44.280 Again, there are so many guilty parties to the Blair enterprise, including many historians.

00:36:49.780 I mean, people like Linda Colley, Norman Davis produced what I would argue, and it's a strong thing to say, deliberately wrong accounts of British history to lead to this vacuous conclusion of a nation which merely has a flag of convenience as an identity.

00:37:12.000 We are going to – again, the whole way in which we've attacked history, which always used to be taught, essentially, is a narrative history of centering on a narrative history of Britain.

00:37:23.320 And instead, you replace it with this absurd notion that all history is doing is teaching kids to interpret documents.

00:37:30.640 You know, this preposterous business of giving children who cannot possibly understand a historical document because you don't have the context.

00:37:39.220 You can only understand historical document if you have the context.

00:37:42.760 We will need to go back, and we will have to have a much more historically based way.

00:37:50.500 Otherwise, it's very – we are at the risk, and you know about this from all your other interests.

00:37:56.300 We are at the risk of a culture which simply eradicates the whole of its foundations, the whole of its past, and is in this perpetual tick-tock world of a meaningless present.

00:38:10.720 And that is destructive.

00:38:12.120 It's not simply destructive of nations.

00:38:14.100 It's destructive of the very essence of humanity.

00:38:17.680 David, I agree with the vast majority of what you're saying.

00:38:22.000 I think there's a piece of the puzzle that you're missing, and push back on me about this if you disagree.

00:38:26.860 We're not addressing the issue of the working classes if we take back to the First World War, lions led by donkeys. 0.92

00:38:33.340 That became a moment, as far as I was taught, that the working classes started to develop a distrust of their supposed betters, particularly the way that they were just led to the slaughter.

00:38:43.940 If you look at deindustrialization, you had these working class communities which were congregated around manufacturing, or the pit, or whatever it may have been. 1.00

00:38:53.820 It had the heart ripped out of it.

00:38:56.100 So essentially what you have is a people who are the foundation, the cornerstone of your civilization, who have been demoralized by the people who should have been representing them.

00:39:09.080 I think that the lions led by donkeys is a pretty inadequate view of the First World War, actually.

00:39:17.700 But certainly part of the complex of British life, English life, was exactly the trade union movement and the Labour Party.

00:39:28.400 But let me give you an alternative history.

00:39:30.340 At the beginning of the 20th century, you get, of course, this great moment when the Liberal Party, having triumphed in the 1900s, vanishes effectively in 1918 at the end of the First World War.

00:39:44.260 At that moment, the British elite is confronted with what does it do with radical socialism?

00:39:52.100 On many places in the continent, you actually decide to fight it.

00:39:56.420 We embrace it.

00:39:58.300 We do quite extraordinary things.

00:40:01.500 Do you know in 1917, when you reconstruct the monarchy in the wake of the Russian Revolution, you actually create an order of chivalry exclusively for socialists and trade unionists?

00:40:13.540 The Companion of Honor.

00:40:16.000 Because there was this, and now, of course, you laugh your head off, but there was this general sense that socialists wouldn't want titles, wouldn't really want to be called, wouldn't want to be called, absolutely wouldn't.

00:40:28.300 They would never dream of going into the House of Lords, would raise their hands in horror at being called Sir Keir, for example.

00:40:36.160 They would regard this as utterly shocking.

00:40:38.120 So you created this special order to accommodate them.

00:40:41.180 You go out of your way when there was the first Labour government in the 1920s to welcome them to Buckingham Palace to make George V is brilliant at it.

00:40:53.000 He'd been a midshipman in the Navy.

00:40:55.080 He'd been knocked around at the bottom of the pile.

00:40:58.400 He knew all about that.

00:41:00.420 And he identified very easily with the working class members of the cabinet, people like J.H. Thomas.

00:41:08.460 And they sit down happily and laugh at the ridiculous pretensions of the middle class socialists like the Webbs, like Sidney Webb.

00:41:19.460 You know, Sidney Webb is the only one who actually refuses to wear a court dress, which was, you know, the britches and all the rest of it.

00:41:27.780 And there's a very, there's a wonderful exchange between J.H. Thomas and George V asking, you know, well, why?

00:41:35.040 Why?

00:41:35.320 What's the problem?

00:41:37.320 Thomas just says to him, well, sir, in that household, it's Beatrice what wears the britches.

00:41:42.520 You know, the usual classic male sexist joke.

00:41:47.060 So there wasn't the chairman, the general secretary of the Trades Union Congress becomes an absolutely central part of the establishment right through the, I mean, we talk of the third Labour government, the 45 to 51 Labour government.

00:42:08.300 I mean, which was, remember, was the continuation of the wartime coalition, the wartime coalition headed by Churchill, but with Attlee as second in command in theory.

00:42:20.360 But the real second in command is Ernest Bevin.

00:42:23.420 And Bevin controls effectively the entire domestic economy.

00:42:28.560 So socialism is totally at the heart of the British state.

00:42:32.700 The new settlement that is formed at the end of the Second World War is one that embraces and embeds it, the role of the council house, the invention of the NHS and all the rest of it. 0.63

00:42:46.500 What, of course, goes wrong is that the socialism at the heart of the establishment in the 1970s and a combination of that, welfarism and Keynesian economics, comes near to destroying the state.

00:43:04.460 I mean, can we just understand that?

00:43:06.400 Yes, from an economic point of view.

00:43:07.740 From an economic point of view, which actually is, I'm afraid, the basis of it all.

00:43:11.640 It comes near.

00:43:12.900 And what Thatcher does is absolutely to rip that form of socialism out of the heart of the environment, out of the heart of the establishment. 0.98

00:43:26.140 And I can see why I think it was also deeply problematic.

00:43:31.480 I mean, I think we're now sufficiently far away from Thatcherism to understand that it was necessary, but it also entailed great evils as well as great good.

00:43:44.220 But the de-industrialization, as we can now see, was merely accelerated in Britain.

00:43:53.620 I mean, everywhere in Europe, heavy industry is now dead.

00:43:57.960 Isn't it?

00:43:58.940 Yes.

00:43:59.200 And with particularly, you know, green policies accelerating the eradication of what's left. 0.93

00:44:09.080 Our problem is that we never devised and never thought about what really replaced it.

00:44:17.840 In America, you see, in one sense, it doesn't matter.

00:44:21.460 You can abandon corners of America.

00:44:23.900 I don't know whether you've been to parts of urban America and particularly rural America.

00:44:29.160 They make our poverty here look like luxury because, of course, it is prevented from absolute deprivation by the extent of the welfare state.

00:44:38.280 But you can then, because it's so big, you can simply move on.

00:44:42.180 You can move on and develop another area.

00:44:44.220 We can't, and we haven't, I suppose, the city of London in some ways is the equivalent.

00:44:50.920 But yes, we need to rethink what this fancy word leveling up or something would entail.

00:45:00.080 I think it's profoundly difficult because the foundations of what you're talking about, what I'm talking about, was a particular form of industry and a particular form of prosperity.

00:45:15.740 Remember, there was no need to argue that you'd to level up Birmingham or level up Manchester or level up Liverpool or Glasgow.

00:45:25.200 These were vastly more intellectually exciting places than London in the late 18th and the 19th century because it was where economic activity happened.

00:45:36.020 It is profoundly difficult to invent economic activity.

00:45:41.300 And the whole idea that, you know, we're now subscribing to that simply by building houses, that simply by building transport links, you will somehow magic an independent economy.

00:45:52.340 And without that independent economy, it's very, very difficult.

00:45:59.640 But we made no attempt.

00:46:02.100 We never really contemplate, and you are right.

00:46:06.940 And in a sense, what, but the most terrible thing, I mean, let's again face this.

00:46:13.800 I come from that background.

00:46:16.360 My father was a toolmaker.

00:46:19.500 No, genuinely, genuinely, genuinely.

00:46:22.340 At Platt Brothers.

00:46:24.000 And he didn't have a business, unlike Starmer's father.

00:46:28.380 He didn't have a paddock that could have been sold, was sold for several hundred thousand pounds and could have been sold for more.

00:46:37.280 I was born in a pebble dash semi that didn't even have a full bathroom.

00:46:43.180 I know all about that.

00:46:44.360 But the most shocking thing is, of course, that the party that was founded to represent that, namely the Labour Party, has abandoned it completely, totally and completely.

00:47:01.420 And what the Labour Party has become instead is the party of the new blob.

00:47:07.560 It, the Labour Party now, as you saw it at the, look at the, look at what was represented in Liverpool.

00:47:14.200 What it is, it is essentially the party of the new nomenclatura, what you used to have in the Soviet Union.

00:47:21.960 It's the, the Labour Party is now, it's not the party of the working class.

00:47:27.500 It is the party of the new governing class that consists of the quangocracy, the white-collar employees in state education, the white-collar employees in the NHS, in the bureaucracy, in this multitude of quangos that what we have. 0.66

00:47:44.180 It's become, in fact, the party of the privileged south of England and islands in bits of Manchester, bits of Liverpool, bits of Glasgow.

00:47:53.420 And it is this, it is this extraordinary abandonment by the party that was actually founded to represent it.

00:48:03.380 But again, sorry, we're talking very frankly and there are questions too big even to be, almost to be touched on.

00:48:12.720 But we've also got to remember something else.

00:48:14.920 The sheer, although, although what happened in 1945 was done, I think, genuinely with the best of intentions, though I think the results were terrible.

00:48:27.500 One of the things it deliberately did was to prevent, and because it seemed to make it unnecessary, voluntary activity.

00:48:35.920 If I look back to my father, who experienced the horror of almost unfunded unemployment for three terrible years in the early 1930s, on two occasions, he and my uncle actually walking from the north of Manchester to London in search of work.

00:48:58.060 I mean, what we would regard as a poverty beyond comprehension.

00:49:02.840 There was never a loss of dignity.

00:49:05.180 And he was engaged throughout in intense voluntary activity.

00:49:11.560 In religiously, educationally, in all sorts of other ways.

00:49:16.780 And it's that structure of voluntary activity.

00:49:19.800 Because the only ways you kept going, you had little clubs that paid for trips out.

00:49:26.980 You had, it sounds gruesome, you had burial clubs that would actually pay money.

00:49:33.000 You had friendly societies.

00:49:34.940 You had, of course, an intense degree, in my parents' case, of involvement in religion, which was extraordinarily wide-embracing activity.

00:49:45.620 All of that has gone.

00:49:46.540 No, because what we're talking about.

00:49:48.940 There's hardly a trace of it left.

00:49:51.440 Because it's, sorry to interrupt you there, David.

00:49:53.380 No, no, no.

00:49:54.160 Because what we're talking about here, from different points and different angles, is we're talking about something very profound, which is the death of community.

00:50:02.860 Well, it is the death, well, community is, I hate that word, community.

00:50:08.340 Well, come on.

00:50:09.720 It is the word most frequently used by Yvette Cooper.

00:50:13.760 That tells you it should never, ever pass your lips.

00:50:18.440 It's murmured by thick police officers when they're justifying two-tier policing.

00:50:23.660 But the social bonds that that word used to represent.

00:50:26.800 But it's not, community is the wrong word.

00:50:29.500 It's this extraordinary importance of voluntary self-directed activity.

00:50:36.040 The thing that is awful now about the working class is, in many ways, the term has become a paradox.

00:50:42.080 It's the non-working class. 0.99

00:50:44.020 But it is, it's this sense that they don't have control of anything.

00:50:50.080 That what that voluntary activity gave, I have my father's diaries.

00:50:53.600 I look at his day. 0.75

00:50:54.700 I mean, although he could have just been, you know, nowadays we're slouching around with a fag on the sofa, or whatever it is, you know, getting pissed on cheap beer or lager. 0.99

00:51:03.360 I mean, his instead, it was constantly doings.

00:51:06.720 I mean, somebody at the, in fact, the bottom of the social pile, still, you know, collecting for the poor, still interested passionately in what was going on in continental Europe, still interested in the persecution, the beginning of the persecution of the Jews in Germany.

00:51:20.740 I mean, I've got the cutting, his cuttings from papers and whatever, just extraordinary.

00:51:27.540 But if you're involved like that, you control something.

00:51:32.180 The thing that's gone desperately wrong is this sense of not having control.

00:51:38.820 Remember, very interesting studies have done about anxiety, depression, and all these sorts of things, and mental illness.

00:51:48.080 And the general view is, you know, people in terribly high-powered jobs and whatever should be very vulnerable to it.

00:51:54.180 Not at all.

00:51:55.900 If you're up the hierarchy where you're in charge, you're setting targets, you're driving yourself, you're driving other people, you're almost immune.

00:52:03.840 You can drive yourself into a wall and you'll survive.

00:52:07.060 It's the people at the bottom that are on the receiving end that have no autonomy.

00:52:14.120 And it is this loss of autonomy, of self-directed activity.

00:52:21.860 And remember, these are grand words, but they're the foundation of all classical political philosophy.

00:52:29.000 The beginning of the ability to take part in politics is the moment at which you begin to take control of yourself, at which you take control of your own life.

00:52:40.240 You feel a certain sense of responsibility for it.

00:52:43.660 And again, our educational system seems to me to have almost entirely forgotten these things.

00:52:48.700 The classical, the old public school system was finally very much about that.

00:52:53.380 When you got to the top of the school, you became a prefect, you participated in the government of the thing, you were studying the classics, which are all about that process of self-education.

00:53:04.260 You look at your Shakespeare plays, you look at different forms of political success and failure.

00:53:11.520 There are the examples, there are the ways of tackling it, the way history used to be taught.

00:53:24.860 Yeah, and what it seems that we have now is we have this vacuum.

00:53:30.000 Totally.

00:53:30.700 We have a vacuum, and as we all know, nature abhors a vacuum, so it has to be filled by something. 0.51

00:53:35.480 By rubbish.

00:53:35.900 And when you have, at your centre, rubbish, nothing good is going to come from that. 0.97

00:53:43.420 And what is happening is you're seeing a society and a people slowly become corrupted because they have rubbish at their centre. 0.93

00:53:52.840 And the tragedy is, it's not their fault.

00:53:56.320 It's the fact that we have our ruling classes.

00:53:59.300 Oh, no, I think, I think that, no, the decline of a people, we are all complicit in it.

00:54:06.800 I don't think it's anything like a, sorry, you're subscribing to this wonderful Starmarite view.

00:54:14.260 There are working people, and all the rest of it.

00:54:19.040 And then there's this wicked little group, you know, who are too rich, too leisured, all the rest. 0.78

00:54:22.860 This is nonsense.

00:54:23.680 The health of a democracy and its decline is a universal question.

00:54:33.880 But, of course, it's very easy to see some of the things that have gone wrong.

00:54:38.800 We've talked about deindustrialisation and the destruction of, and remember, it's, again, one of the central things is we were first in.

00:54:50.440 We were first into industrialisation, which means that the patterns of the trade union, of the friendly society, of specific trades and the traditions and pride of specific trades, were very, very deeply ingrained here.

00:55:07.460 They're a century and a half.

00:55:09.640 Most countries, that pattern, which was effectively the old coal, steel and iron pattern, was a much, much shorter period of time.

00:55:18.260 It embeds itself into the fabric less, so it's easier to remove and to go to the more mobile forms that followed electrification and all the rest of it.

00:55:30.240 But, but essentially, the other great thing, and again, we need to talk about this daring delta truth, is the welfare state.

00:55:41.060 The welfare state, because it removes the penalties of failure, because it, what it effectively says to you, if you don't, in every way, if you don't look after yourself, don't worry.

00:55:54.760 We'll pick up the pieces.

00:55:57.380 The central rule of all human conduct should be actions and inactions have consequences.

00:56:05.820 The moment you lose that sense, you are absolutely lost.

00:56:11.480 And welfarism has removed that.

00:56:14.400 I'm sorry, we need sticks as well as carrots.

00:56:17.320 And the moment those go, it applies on a high political level, too.

00:56:24.800 Why have politics in Scotland and Wales been so insane after devolution?

00:56:29.960 Because you've given them large-scale political independence with no requirement that they pay for it, because it's paid for by the British taxpayer.

00:56:38.480 So you can effectively have playpen politics.

00:56:41.480 And what we've done is to introduce a playpen society.

00:56:44.980 Everybody talks about infantilization, this broad fact people grow up, if they ever grow up at all, much, much later than they used to.

00:56:54.320 And it is effectively because you've removed risk.

00:56:58.420 The state now acts as an overprotective parent.

00:57:02.060 So you never grow up.

00:57:04.280 Growing up requires you take responsibility for yourself.

00:57:07.900 And if you fall flat on your face, you pick yourself up, you wipe yourself off, you disinfect your wounds, and you sort yourself out.

00:57:16.560 And doesn't it?

00:57:18.260 No, no, I couldn't agree with you more.

00:57:21.000 The question I was going to ask you is, I think you and I both know that the central value of modern society has become this pathological empathy.

00:57:32.260 Yes.

00:57:33.540 Compassion.

00:57:34.180 Every time I hear the word compassion, I want to reach for my revolve.

00:57:40.020 Is Christianity gone, Matt?

00:57:42.360 It's Nietzsche's parody of Christianity.

00:57:44.700 Right.

00:57:44.980 And if that's the central value, which it seems to me that it is, then every time when I put those ears on myself and I hear what you're saying through those ears, then what I'm hearing is David wants people to suffer.

00:58:01.160 You know, the widow, the disabled man, the whatever, the child with whatever. 0.74

00:58:09.100 And it just, I don't see how we're ever going to rebalance that.

00:58:15.220 Because nobody would want people starving to death.

00:58:18.520 Nobody, and nor am I talking about that.

00:58:20.660 What I was talking about was a world in which people recognize that provision for old age, provision for the widow, provision for the sick, was something that you engage yourself in consciously to provide for.

00:58:36.080 Hence the fact there were saving clubs.

00:58:38.540 Hence the fact you would be, there were local hospitals in which there was subscription.

00:58:42.920 All of this sort of thing.

00:58:44.520 Now, I'm not saying that we go back to that.

00:58:47.020 That would be preposterous.

00:58:49.200 But what we've done, all the great world of the first popular and large-scale popular interventions in politics in the later 18th century, if you look at what founding fathers of America, they are profoundly aware of the payoff between freedom and security.

00:59:11.620 And remember, the classical framework is, you know, if you trade freedom for security, you lose both.

00:59:19.460 And that's exactly what we are doing.

00:59:22.680 Because the outcome of where we are now is Argentina.

00:59:26.400 And Argentina has been lucky enough to get Millet.

00:59:29.200 We are not all that far from Argentina.

00:59:32.120 And we now have a government that is fully Peronist. 0.93

00:59:35.960 The new Labour Party is fully Peronist and will bring about exactly the same consequences. 0.99

00:59:42.580 Let's talk about that, David.

00:59:44.020 I hate to sully the highbrow conversations that we always have, including this one, with the day-to-day of modern politics.

00:59:52.100 But I think...

00:59:52.620 I thought we've been talking a lot about this.

00:59:54.580 Well, I don't think so.

00:59:55.540 I've been sunny-ing as much as possible.

00:59:57.360 No, I feel like we've been soaring somewhat above it and looking down on it from a great height and doing other things onto it from a great height, too.

01:00:06.860 So when you say Peronist, most people don't know what that means.

01:00:11.640 And I've heard you talk about the rule of lawyers and Keir Starmer being one.

01:00:17.100 What do you mean when you say it's Peronist?

01:00:19.800 What do you mean by when you talk about the rule of lawyers and what does that mean for us going forward?

01:00:24.320 Well, again, I think the easiest way of describing it, by Peronism, we look at what happened to Argentina.

01:00:31.600 Argentina was as rich as America in the late 19th century, a country of astonishing natural resources, which seemed a vast British investment, though it was never a formal part of the British Empire.

01:00:47.220 And then from the Second World War onwards, it embraces this perpetual statism, particularly under the rule of Peron and, indeed, Evita, in which the public sector gets bigger and bigger.

01:00:59.580 There is more and more nationalization.

01:01:01.260 There is more and more welfare.

01:01:02.320 And what you do is, again, it's something we can see going back upstairs, going back into the heavens.

01:01:11.260 You can see repeatedly states get structures that are too big for their economists.

01:01:17.300 That's what happens to the Roman Empire from 260 onwards. 0.74

01:01:21.220 You develop there.

01:01:22.260 It's the administrative and the military state and so on.

01:01:25.260 And the tax base can't actually support it.

01:01:27.900 So the state becomes self-consuming.

01:01:30.080 And that's exactly what happened in Argentina.

01:01:32.760 And indeed, it happened here in the 1970s.

01:01:35.960 It's been manifestly happening here since the financial crisis.

01:01:39.860 And the only way that the state can actually continue to pay itself without taxing itself to death is by vast inflation and the multiplication of the coinage.

01:01:50.400 You know, you suddenly create vast amounts of money.

01:01:53.860 We called it something fancy, quantitative easing.

01:01:56.680 But it's just as destructive of value, except it wasn't that it went straight into people's pockets.

01:02:01.680 It went into property prices.

01:02:03.340 Property prices haven't multiplied just because there are not enough houses.

01:02:08.360 They've multiplied because vast sums of money were created by this disgustingly irresponsible thing called the Bank of England.

01:02:16.620 And they find out somewhere.

01:02:18.080 They find out in asset inflation, if not just ordinary inflation.

01:02:21.540 And what we did under Blair, again in the 1970s, was to create...

01:02:26.540 1990s.

01:02:27.360 And that's what I'm talking about.

01:02:28.640 Forgive me.

01:02:29.080 I said 70s there.

01:02:30.100 We created...

01:02:31.140 Thatcher's sorted...

01:02:32.040 Right.

01:02:32.300 Let's go back.

01:02:33.320 Fit this together because we've been doing well with the chronology.

01:02:36.580 And in the 1970s, Thatcher more or less sorted out the result of the problems that had been created by the first welfare state, the first nationalizations, the first excessive power to trade unions of that Labour government of 1945 to 51.

01:02:55.180 But she did so at the risk of reducing conservatism simply to free market economics, which I think itself is also disastrous.

01:03:04.360 Blair, as it were, deceives everybody, including he deceived Margaret Thatcher.

01:03:09.560 Margaret Thatcher says in 1992 that Blair is her principal tribute act, that, you know, she shows that she's won.

01:03:17.380 But what she didn't realize, what Blair did, was deliberately to transform the actual constitution of Britain.

01:03:26.400 It is an extraordinary thing to say.

01:03:28.900 You create a new kind of British state.

01:03:32.180 In the same way, you totally distort what had been this Anglo-British identity and evaporate it of meaning.

01:03:39.180 You create a new state, you replace the parliamentary legal state, which had run England in one form or another since Magna Carta, effectively since Magna Carta up to the 1990s.

01:03:51.600 You replace it with this new, intense, centralised, extraordinary, profoundly, dangerously structured thing that deliberately reduces the role of Parliament and therefore you and me.

01:04:06.480 Which is, again, like the German constitution, which was put together in the wake of Nazism, which was determined to make sure that you couldn't really have democracy doing anything too much.

01:04:19.820 You deliberately reduce the power of Parliament.

01:04:23.120 So we reduce it first by devolution, which produces this completely, crazily confused structure within the British Isles.

01:04:34.320 Secondly, you incorporate the European Convention on Human Rights.

01:04:38.700 Now, this is the problem, again.

01:04:40.240 We talk about woke a lot.

01:04:42.380 What the left has done is to capture language.

01:04:46.360 Human rights sound lovely.

01:04:48.500 They're wonderful.

01:04:49.520 Of course they are.

01:04:50.060 But they've changed their meaning.

01:04:53.120 The human rights that Churchill, that Eleanor Roosevelt was interested in, were the human rights of every individual against the state.

01:05:02.200 The original conventions were designed to stop Nazism, to stop communism.

01:05:08.380 What happened instead is, through the influence of judges and through, above all in the United Nations, the actual influence of Stalinism,

01:05:18.320 you stand them, you stand them on their head.

01:05:20.620 Because human rights, and Lord Bingham actually says this absolutely explicitly in the 1990s, the real purpose of human rights is to protect minorities.

01:05:30.860 Now, the moment you do that, you reverse, because the only way you can protect, remember, there's a very simple definition of democracy.

01:05:40.820 It's the rule of the majority.

01:05:42.220 So you use human rights deliberately to destroy the democratic majority.

01:05:49.780 That's exactly what the Human Rights Act does.

01:05:53.300 It prioritizes minorities.

01:05:55.220 So you produce this entire inversion, which, of course, woke does.

01:06:00.440 Woke sees, as it were, you, me, all of us, one way or another, white, white men, allegedly the ruling majority, as the wicked who've got to be suppressed.

01:06:12.800 So it's the Magnificat, you know, he shall put down the mighty from their seats and exalt them of low degree.

01:06:19.140 And the, but it goes much further than that.

01:06:22.200 If you believe in universal or European human rights, it means you don't actually believe in the state, because you've got a source of law outside the state.

01:06:32.320 You remove the notion, which was absolutely central to England, that what gives law, people always say, why do the English, as it were, dot I's and cross T's with laws?

01:06:43.500 Why did we always gold plate European legal interventions and regulations?

01:06:50.760 Well, the idea is that in England, law was seen as something you made yourself.

01:06:56.200 In other words, parliament binds everybody because everybody is represented there.

01:07:00.740 Continental Europe, everywhere had been an absolute monarchy.

01:07:04.360 So law was something that was put on you, which is why there's a much more relaxed attitude to law.

01:07:10.120 And in Ireland, Italy, a positive opposition to law, that it's seen as an external oppressive thing.

01:07:19.620 And then the even worse thing that universal human rights do is to say there should be no state frontiers.

01:07:25.500 Because if there are universal human rights, going back to the point of immigration, it must mean we're all the same.

01:07:32.340 It must mean there's a universal human being.

01:07:35.040 This absurd business, if you remember the young man of Rwandan origins who was born in Wales, who committed those hideous murders in Southport. 0.99

01:07:46.820 There were people saying, oh, he's Welsh.

01:07:51.340 Jaw-dropping, this notion that the mere fact of being second generation born here, or first generation to be born here, means somehow you're as British or as Welsh as English as the rest of it.

01:08:03.460 But if you believe in a universal human being, this is why we have an entire apparatus now that believes fundamentally, and the Labour Party really subscribes to this, it's lying at the moment, that there shouldn't be frontiers.

01:08:20.320 That there should be, there should be, I mean, this is the logic of what they're doing.

01:08:23.820 There should be a universal citizenship.

01:08:25.840 In other words, what I think we've got to get into our heads is that unlimited immigration is the final expression of globalism.

01:08:34.900 It's the idea that we are all the same and should be the same, and nations and identities and values are mere parochial eccentricities which will be swept away in the great sweep of history.

01:08:48.940 So that was the incorporation of the European Convention on Human Rights.

01:08:54.840 And then, of course, you had the independence of the Bank of England, although in some ways looked quite a good thing.

01:09:00.780 It's the first of the fact you deliberately create a whole set of bodies which removes as much power from Parliament as possible.

01:09:08.600 So Parliament and ministers don't set interest rates. 0.99

01:09:11.680 They now don't control the budget because the Tories were stupid enough to create the Office of Budget Responsibility. 0.95

01:09:17.620 We don't control this gathering rush to net zero because of the Climate Change Committee. 0.99

01:09:23.980 There's the Immigration Advisory Committee, whose essential remit is to say more, more, more, more, more.

01:09:30.420 English Nature, which prioritizes newts over human beings.

01:09:34.600 All this nonsense with this world of quangocracy, which is new labor to a man and especially to a rampant woman. 1.00

01:09:43.060 And then there's a second wave of all of this, which is responsible for, again, Lord Bingham, the man who said the purpose of human rights is to protect minorities, the creation of the Supreme Court.

01:09:56.240 It's a catastrophe because you introduce a natural and inevitable tension and a contradiction in our Constitution between a sovereign Parliament and a Supreme Court.

01:10:09.240 The two of them are bound to fight each other, as happened most obviously with the absurd nonsense of Miller 1 or was it Miller 2?

01:10:20.620 I forget which.

01:10:21.440 And the whole matter of the prorogation of Parliament being ruled illegal, inconceivable, directly against the Bill of Rights, which tries to separate legislative and jurisdictional matters.

01:10:35.320 And then finally, and most catastrophically, the Equality Act.

01:10:39.680 Again, it sounds lovely.

01:10:42.280 But what it does, it prioritizes minorities.

01:10:45.680 It does something else, which I didn't even realize until recently.

01:10:49.420 You will be familiar with the idea that labor has got an intrinsic value, the Marxist theory, a Marxist labor theory of value.

01:11:00.260 In other words, that the value of labor is not determined by the market, but by some sort of intrinsic thing.

01:11:07.340 It's mad.

01:11:07.980 It's economically deranged and has been known to be so since Adam Smith, one of the great classical passages in The Wealth of Nations.

01:11:17.000 The Equalities Act, three insane equations, which writes the Marxist theory of value into English law, gives judges the right to determine whether women or men are properly paid.

01:11:34.540 So that implies a non-market evaluation.

01:11:37.400 And it's the reason that we've driven Birmingham into bankruptcy and we're about to drive next into bankruptcy.

01:11:43.140 I mean, the sheer insanity of this stuff, Harriet Harman's Great Tribute Act.

01:11:48.580 So what we've done, we've created a structure of government which manifestly is vastly expensive.

01:11:55.520 Secondly, does not work.

01:11:57.660 It's why we can't build anything.

01:11:59.400 It's why the costs of construction in this country are between, I think it's five to 50 times the European average.

01:12:09.020 And it's why nothing works because nothing can be corrected.

01:12:14.800 It's why every time you try to do anything, there is a lawsuit.

01:12:18.600 It's why you can't remove immigrants. 0.99

01:12:21.820 You can't stop immigrants.

01:12:23.140 So what we've done is to create a deliberately, well, it wasn't done deliberately, but we've created an absolutely malfunctioning structure of government, which is the quintessence of it is Keir Starmer.

01:12:39.140 Starmer is at the heart of this process.

01:12:41.860 He believes in rules.

01:12:43.640 Do you remember, coming back quickly from all these ground statements, do you remember when the first business of Starmer and freebies comes up?

01:12:55.220 What is the thing he says?

01:12:56.880 Oh, I obeyed the rules.

01:12:59.400 He's the kind of man who thinks that the rules replace the innate perception of right and wrong.

01:13:08.440 And this is the terrible world we've created in which we've replaced those vital things like prudence, judgment, wisdom, which are not reducible to simple little rules, but to everything that is written down minutely.

01:13:27.180 I mean, Grenfell, the terrible disaster there, we have a set of building regulations, which is about three times the length of the Bible.

01:13:36.160 And yet that still happened.

01:13:40.860 And it's a tax code, which again has expanded to lunatic size everywhere you look.

01:13:49.160 So we're like Gulliver, you know, in that Gulliver in Lilliput.

01:13:55.020 We're an extraordinary creative people because we're mad and eccentric.

01:13:59.100 And three of us around here are pretty good examples of that.

01:14:01.940 Which is why things happen.

01:14:05.540 That's what's fruitful.

01:14:07.160 All creation depends on heresy.

01:14:09.880 It depends on dissent.

01:14:11.400 And what we're doing, we're tying it down, we're dampening it, we're sitting on it with this awful structure.

01:14:18.280 David, it's been great chatting to you.

01:14:20.820 One thing that Francis mentioned that we ought to talk about as well, and we've touched on it briefly, is economics.

01:14:27.200 And the thing I wanted to ask you there is you talked about sort of magicing up economic activity.

01:14:33.660 And the entire Western world, maybe the entire world, frankly, is in a productivity crisis.

01:14:39.320 And we don't seem to know how to get out of that.

01:14:47.240 Is it going to just be the invention of new technology?

01:14:50.840 Is it going to be AI or whatever?

01:14:53.020 I see a fake picture of Keir Starmer on my Twitter today generated by AI as if to say that's the next thing.

01:15:00.000 Because I agree with you, this idea that if we build a railway to nowhere, at the end of that railway line suddenly...

01:15:07.660 There is a rainbow, a rainbow which takes the form of a productive economy.

01:15:12.060 That doesn't seem to be accurate.

01:15:13.400 It's preposterous.

01:15:13.880 It's preposterous.

01:15:14.700 And I read, I think it was called the Foundations Report that's just come out, which says exactly what you said,

01:15:20.020 which is basically it's way more difficult and expensive to build anything in the UK.

01:15:24.520 We see the tax rates and what's going to happen with them.

01:15:27.020 More millionaires are leaving Britain than any other country in the world.

01:15:30.980 Apart from China.

01:15:31.760 Oh, is that right?

01:15:32.580 The Chinese are leaving for a very different reason.

01:15:35.500 So apart from China, so how are we going to get out of this? 0.87

01:15:40.580 Well, finally, people have to realise what the consequences of their actions are.

01:15:47.460 We will go bankrupt.

01:15:49.900 And the whole of this nice structure will collapse.

01:15:53.000 It's very simple.

01:15:54.280 That is what happens.

01:15:55.940 States go bankrupt.

01:15:58.500 In the 1970s, we had the resort to the IMF and the humiliation that followed that.

01:16:06.540 I reckon that will happen to us very quickly.

01:16:09.820 There are iron laws and you cannot escape them.

01:16:16.080 And you see, again, what's interesting is the world of Eastern Europe.

01:16:19.500 If you look at the extraordinary rapid economic growth of Poland, Lithuania, whatever, the thing that's striking about it is they were all, because of the horror of the experience of Soviet communism, they were inoculated against it.

01:16:36.340 There's no risk of them going back to it.

01:16:39.180 There's a very interesting middle ground here, which is Eastern Germany.

01:16:43.800 Because Eastern Germany was mollycoddled through the transition by Western Germany.

01:16:51.200 There's much more nostalgia for Bizarrely, for the secure, almost a bit like miners being, ex-mining communities being nostalgic for what was both the horror of mining, but of course all the things we were talking about.

01:17:08.160 The sense of community energy involvement, dignity, dignity, doing something that was worthwhile, carrying literally the nation on your shoulders because you supplied its fuel.

01:17:19.320 And the fact that it was vigorous mass connective, all of those things.

01:17:23.540 And there is that kind of fondness, which we can see in the change of electoral patterns in Eastern Germany.

01:17:30.380 In Poland, Lithuania, whatever, Finland, where there was nobody to intervene.

01:17:36.120 There was nobody to dole you out.

01:17:38.480 You really had to confront the consequences of the...

01:17:41.280 I mean, I was in Lithuania shortly after 1989.

01:17:44.900 And you saw a world in which, OK, I was, because I was medius, I was staying in the only Roli et Château hotel between Berlin and Moscow.

01:17:55.440 So inside the hotel, a cup of coffee was about five pounds.

01:17:58.620 Outside the hotel, it was less than half a penny, you know, and that world in which you're actually starting literally from nothing and you to reconstruct it.

01:18:08.060 We will go there if we're not careful.

01:18:10.580 You know what?

01:18:11.280 I actually don't disagree with you because, and the reason is, you talk about the iron law.

01:18:16.140 I don't know about iron law.

01:18:17.280 I'm sure you're better qualified than I to talk about it.

01:18:19.640 But what I see is we won't change direction until we get a slap in the face.

01:18:25.880 That's right.

01:18:26.760 It's a very...

01:18:27.440 When I said actions have consequences, at the moment, we've been kicking the can down the road.

01:18:33.760 The things like quantitative easing, you magic money.

01:18:37.480 I mean, everybody, everybody patted themselves on the back.

01:18:40.940 It was absolutely amazing.

01:18:42.900 There was no increase in inflation.

01:18:45.580 Well, it was slightly odd, wasn't it?

01:18:47.000 Property prices were going up at this absolutely spectacular rate.

01:18:50.220 And we're terribly good that bonds were really very...

01:18:53.560 They're terribly good in...

01:18:54.620 In other words, the lie.

01:18:56.740 The lie that this is not having consequences.

01:19:00.580 And so you constantly kick it down the road.

01:19:03.360 I mean, what is our new wonder transfer of the exchequer doing?

01:19:08.600 She's going straight back to Gordon Brown's playbook.

01:19:11.000 So you're going to have PFI, that wonderful thing in which apparently you can borrow vast amounts of money to pay for nice, shiny new hospitals and nice, shiny new railway lines and even nicer, shiny new railway stations.

01:19:26.820 And do you know what?

01:19:27.360 It doesn't actually appear on the balance sheet because what you've done is you've decided that you will pay for it by rent.

01:19:35.260 And then suddenly you actually see it costs you £100 to change a light bulb when you actually look at the small contract.

01:19:42.100 She's already talking about lifting the borrowing limit, your magic money.

01:19:47.060 So you're constantly putting the day off, but the day will come.

01:19:52.860 And I quite agree with you.

01:19:55.240 And it feels like we are in an unsustainable path.

01:19:57.660 Totally unsustainable.

01:19:58.420 Unsustainable path.

01:19:58.960 Which is why I use the example of Argentina.

01:20:01.240 And there they finally confronted it and they elected this extraordinary figure, Millet, who, do you know what the change in inflation rates in Argentina is?

01:20:14.260 From 200% to 12 in 12 months.

01:20:18.840 200% to 12 in 12 months.

01:20:22.980 And that's by forcing people to confront reality.

01:20:26.640 But you can only do that when things have got to such a terrible path.

01:20:31.960 That's right.

01:20:32.720 Because this is the thing.

01:20:34.640 You can't get people to take drastic action at 15% inflation to get it down to 12%.

01:20:41.820 It has to get really bad.

01:20:44.000 Well, in fact, actually, one year we had inflation of 25%.

01:20:49.560 And that is what pretty much directly leads to Thatcher. 1.00

01:20:53.100 Now, of course, some of us benefited enormously.

01:20:55.560 I borrowed an enormous amount.

01:20:57.280 Well, what seemed then a lot of money, 10,000 pounds to buy my flat.

01:21:02.480 So I was rubbing my hands, you know, every year that went by a large chunk of my debt simply went into thin air.

01:21:11.220 I mean, inflation is enormously redistributive.

01:21:13.980 But, you know, as the hideous case of Germany, Weimar Germany shows, it finally is destructive, the entire structure of society, the entire security of property. 0.95

01:21:27.920 But we are creating just unsustainable structures.

01:21:33.960 I mean, and there are very, very clear examples of this happening before.

01:21:37.520 People talk now quite openly of the possible parallels between our civilization and the fall of Rome.

01:21:45.980 There's some very interesting work been done on Roman monetary policy and the consequences of imperial army expansion and that kind of thing, which effectively seem to pin down the moment at which Rome begins the downward path to 260,

01:22:03.500 when Caracalla at a single stroke, a bit like Blair, when he ratchets up the wages of the NHS, which I would see as the thing that sets us on this irreversible path.

01:22:16.380 And indeed, as they have done, you know, with the public sector in the last few weeks, in 260, Caracalla doubles the wages of the Roman army.

01:22:25.880 And at that point, it just ceases to be sustainable.

01:22:29.000 And the currency, which had been rock solid, in which the gold and silver values were absolutely fixed, in which you didn't need to use money.

01:22:37.660 You could do long distance trade simply by bills of exchange, because money was the same in Alexandria as it was in Rome.

01:22:44.780 And it was rock solid. And you didn't need to put specie on boats, even for long distance trade.

01:22:51.020 That begins to be undercut. You debase the currency.

01:22:55.720 The structures of fiduciary trading, of trading simply by bills of exchange, starts to fall to bits.

01:23:03.280 You revert to using gold and silver. You then have arguments over all of that.

01:23:09.360 So that extraordinary structure sits quite slowly.

01:23:13.340 Again, Adam Smith puts it very clearly.

01:23:16.160 There's a lot of ruin in the country, a big, complex country, as wealthy as we were.

01:23:22.520 There's a lot to ruin.

01:23:24.140 But you can see how that ruin is just penetrating more and more.

01:23:28.140 So when you say, when Labour said it's broken Britain, yes, it is.

01:23:33.940 But what it's guaranteed to do is make it worse.

01:23:38.440 What, again, what seems to me to be the optimistic note from this otherwise rather pessimistic discussion is

01:23:46.220 Starmer's government is bound to fail.

01:23:49.940 It is bound to fail.

01:23:52.080 It will fail badly.

01:23:53.780 And I think it will fail quickly.

01:23:55.340 David, it's been an absolute pleasure.

01:23:59.440 Sorry, we've been miseries. 0.91

01:24:00.760 I've been as miserable as bloody as Starmer.

01:24:03.940 Well, yeah, but on the other hand, I think I actually, you know what? 0.77

01:24:09.220 Everyone is slagging off Keir Starmer.

01:24:11.060 I have to say that, look, the freebies and whatever, that there's an obvious level of hypocrisy there.

01:24:17.360 He was criticising the Tories for it.

01:24:20.140 I think he's actually being honest on many issues.

01:24:23.960 Except that he's got no remedy because he represents, the problem with Starmer is, the problem with Rachel Reeves, the problem with Bridget Philipson,

01:24:32.980 they represent the quintessence of the system.

01:24:36.720 They are the system.

01:24:38.640 But you know what?

01:24:39.320 I at least have respect for them.

01:24:40.640 And I'll tell you why, for them.

01:24:42.060 Because the Tories were in power for 14 years.

01:24:45.480 They didn't repeal any of.

01:24:47.140 No, I mean, I'm the one who's been emphasising this.

01:24:49.960 So they didn't repeal any of the laws that you're talking about, that they all knew, the Equalities Act, all of it.

01:24:55.520 They made it worse.

01:24:56.600 They actually legislate net zero.

01:24:59.160 They set up the Office of Budget Responsibility.

01:25:02.520 But there is at least one Conservative candidate now, Robert Jenrick, who is recognising this fact.

01:25:09.160 It has actually stated that the great disaster of the Conservative Party was that it went along with those changes.

01:25:17.320 And that what they've got to do is reverse them.

01:25:19.700 And saying, of course, remember, that's exactly what Thatcher did. 1.00

01:25:24.180 Exactly what Keith Joseph did.

01:25:26.300 They recognised what had gone wrong.

01:25:29.360 They recognised they had been complicit.

01:25:31.760 But Macmillan, that whole busker-like world, was totally complicit with what Labour had done.

01:25:38.500 And it hit the buffers in the 1970s.

01:25:41.920 We've had a Conservative Party.

01:25:43.660 It was entirely complicit with all the things I've been talking about that made them worse.

01:25:48.780 And I'm afraid we are in very unpleasant times.

01:25:52.960 The 20s are going to be a horrible period to be in Britain.

01:25:56.420 But we will hit the buffers.

01:25:58.440 And with luck, we will have exactly, we'll have a new Thatcher. 0.99

01:26:02.400 She won't, he, she will not get it entirely right.

01:26:05.380 But they will be forced into radical change.

01:26:08.600 Well, they certainly will.

01:26:09.440 And this is the point I was going to make, David, is this law, they don't have any of that same problem.

01:26:14.020 I mean, day one, the freedom of research or whatever that bill was about free speech in academia.

01:26:19.140 Junked.

01:26:19.760 Gone.

01:26:20.560 And on every other, they have no problem repealing stuff that they don't.

01:26:24.100 No, that's absolutely true.

01:26:25.100 So we're going to keep moving in that direction because I think they're going to be pretty ballsy about the legislation they've got.

01:26:30.720 What has got to happen as soon as there is a serious Conservative leader, he or she has got to say one thing.

01:26:36.320 When you get one of these absurd acts, the next Conservative government will repeal this.

01:26:42.600 And everybody, I mean, things with the absurdities of Miliband on climate change.

01:26:48.720 There should be a Conservative leader of the opposition getting up or Conservative shadow chancellor getting up and saying, all those of you who are investing in this, you are ripping off the taxpayer.

01:27:00.280 We will not simply reverse this.

01:27:03.060 We will introduce legislation to confiscate all profits that have been made up.

01:27:07.460 No, but seriously.

01:27:09.680 Now we're finally on to the optimistic part of the conversation, David.

01:27:14.520 It's pie in the sky.

01:27:16.700 Dream on, Starkey.

01:27:17.800 Dream on.

01:27:18.420 David, it's always wonderful having you on the show.

01:27:20.900 We really appreciate it.

01:27:22.420 As I mentioned earlier, you are now a fellow YouTuber.

01:27:25.260 Your channel is doing very, very well.

01:27:27.360 You put out lots of great in-depth breakdowns of some of the things that we talked about.

01:27:32.280 Occasionally smiling on like this.

01:27:33.920 Occasionally.

01:27:34.820 And perhaps we should see if we can do something together where, you know, perhaps you take us around somewhere and you talk.

01:27:40.860 It would be great.

01:27:41.660 It would be great.

01:27:42.740 David, we're going to move on to our supporters who are going to ask you their questions.

01:27:47.060 Before we do, we always finish with the final question.

01:27:49.580 Which is, of course, what's the one thing we're not talking about two hours after we started that we should be?

01:27:54.960 What are we not talking about?

01:27:57.960 Oh, I think we've pretty much covered everything, haven't we?

01:28:02.060 What should we be talking about?

01:28:04.140 Do you know what?

01:28:04.580 We've ranged so widely.

01:28:06.620 Right, this is a first.

01:28:08.360 Starkey's mind has gone blank.

01:28:11.360 That's fantastic.

01:28:12.680 Well, head on over to see the questions and the answers that you guys wanted to put to David.

01:28:20.220 Do you think the UK's Jewish and Muslim communities are going to be able to function together 1.00

01:28:24.900 cohesively or are ties irrevocably broken?

01:28:28.500 And then see what happened.

01:28:32.600 We'll be right back.

01:28:33.480 Bye.

01:28:34.600 Bye.

01:28:35.060 Bye.

01:28:35.440 Bye.

01:28:35.820 Bye.

01:28:36.520 Bye.

01:28:37.080 Bye.

01:28:37.480 Bye.

01:28:38.980 Bye.

01:28:40.500 Bye.

01:28:46.760 Bye.

01:28:48.560 Bye.

01:28:48.660 Bye.

01:28:49.720 Bye.

01:28:50.980 Bye.

01:28:51.600 Bye.

01:28:52.560 Bye.

01:28:52.720 Bye.

01:28:54.920 Bye.

01:28:56.900 Bye.

TRIGGERnometry - September 29, 2024

The Fall of England - Dr David Starkey

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