00:29:20.440But also the realization that that's not something dead, but is something that is properly a kind of fruitful soil.
00:29:28.940It's a kind of, it's a kind of well-fertilized field from which novelty springs.
00:29:34.560Because again, what the absolute tragedy of particularly the 20th century is the belief you can just start from scratch, which again, blares new country.
00:29:49.420Because it tried to scrub away as much of the past as possible with the disastrous consequences of the present.
00:29:56.300What we have to realize is that everything that's gone wrong, including the NHS, is an attempt when you try to start from scratch.
00:30:05.380When you simply scrub away the past and use an exercise of artificial intelligence and say, wouldn't it be lovely?
00:30:13.760We are a product of wouldn't it be lovely?
00:30:16.140Of ignoring, of ignoring, of ignoring, of Eliza Doolittle, of ignoring what was there already.
00:30:25.520And the, I mean, I am passionate about this, Constantine.
00:30:29.420One of the reasons I am always so impressed by you, you have, you as a quite deliberate intellectual process have absorbed yourself into that.
00:31:06.960In 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.
00:31:52.300Knocks them into you quite, through osmosis.
00:31:54.320Secondly, or presumably you were never beaten.
00:31:58.680Well, 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.
00:32:10.780If 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.
00:32:26.020I 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.
00:32:42.500But, but, but, but, but, but, what I'm, there has to be a more retail version of this for most people to get it.
00:32:50.980Yes, no, of course I understand that, but what I'm saying, I've described the ideal.
00:33:15.200What 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.
00:33:33.340And I think it's entirely possible for that to happen.
00:33:36.620I 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.
00:33:43.520I think the anecdote is often so valuable.
00:33:48.180I 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.
00:34:04.600But one of my fellow panelists was Hugo Grinn, who was the rabbi.
00:34:10.240I don't know whether it's called the liberal or the reform West London congregation based in Marylebone.
00:34:16.560And Hugo, and of course, he's classically on the left or leftish.
00:34:20.400And our relationship was a quite spiky one.
00:34:24.060I mean, I think it's best summarized by a rather nice exchange between us.
00:34:28.420Hugo had this voice that went down, the kind of voice which I always say explains why Americans suffer from prostate.
00:34:34.680You know, you vibrate it all very badly.
00:34:37.780Anyway, you know, David, you're not half as nasty as you appear, to which I fluted back.
00:34:43.900And you, Hugo, my dear, are not half as nice either.
00:34:46.680So it was a very nicely tense relationship.
00:34:51.280Anyway, 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.
00:35:04.760And Hugo, again, you know, Jew, homosexuality, quite awkward.
00:35:09.560He deliberately went out of his way to include the two of us.
00:35:14.780And he did one thing I've never forgotten.
00:35:17.420He invited us both to the Passover in his house.
00:35:20.800And I never really understood Judaism.
00:35:22.960And, 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.
00:35:43.300What is remarkable in a Jewish Passover, it is actually part of the meal you are really going to eat.
00:35:50.140And here was this man who was a major, at that point, public figure and whatever, suddenly becoming the high priest in his own household.
00:36:07.700But it was this doubleness and there is ease in both worlds.
00:36:12.700And in the same way that, you know, the Anglo-Scott is easy in both worlds.
00:36:18.600You 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.
00:36:28.340And those are the things that we've got to work out ways.
00:36:44.280Again, there are so many guilty parties to the Blair enterprise, including many historians.
00:36:49.780I 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.
00:37:12.000We 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.
00:37:23.320And instead, you replace it with this absurd notion that all history is doing is teaching kids to interpret documents.
00:37:30.640You know, this preposterous business of giving children who cannot possibly understand a historical document because you don't have the context.
00:37:39.220You can only understand historical document if you have the context.
00:37:42.760We will need to go back, and we will have to have a much more historically based way.
00:37:50.500Otherwise, it's very – we are at the risk, and you know about this from all your other interests.
00:37:56.300We 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.
00:38:12.120It's not simply destructive of nations.
00:38:14.100It's destructive of the very essence of humanity.
00:38:17.680David, I agree with the vast majority of what you're saying.
00:38:22.000I think there's a piece of the puzzle that you're missing, and push back on me about this if you disagree.
00:38:26.860We're not addressing the issue of the working classes if we take back to the First World War, lions led by donkeys.
00:38:33.340That 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.
00:38:43.940If you look at deindustrialization, you had these working class communities which were congregated around manufacturing, or the pit, or whatever it may have been.
00:38:56.100So 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.
00:39:09.080I think that the lions led by donkeys is a pretty inadequate view of the First World War, actually.
00:39:17.700But certainly part of the complex of British life, English life, was exactly the trade union movement and the Labour Party.
00:39:28.400But let me give you an alternative history.
00:39:30.340At 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.
00:39:44.260At that moment, the British elite is confronted with what does it do with radical socialism?
00:39:52.100On many places in the continent, you actually decide to fight it.
00:40:01.500Do 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?
00:40:16.000Because 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.
00:40:28.300They would never dream of going into the House of Lords, would raise their hands in horror at being called Sir Keir, for example.
00:40:36.160They would regard this as utterly shocking.
00:40:38.120So you created this special order to accommodate them.
00:40:41.180You 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.
00:41:00.420And he identified very easily with the working class members of the cabinet, people like J.H. Thomas.
00:41:08.460And they sit down happily and laugh at the ridiculous pretensions of the middle class socialists like the Webbs, like Sidney Webb.
00:41:19.460You 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.
00:41:27.780And there's a very, there's a wonderful exchange between J.H. Thomas and George V asking, you know, well, why?
00:41:37.320Thomas just says to him, well, sir, in that household, it's Beatrice what wears the britches.
00:41:42.520You know, the usual classic male sexist joke.
00:41:47.060So 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.
00:42:08.300I 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.
00:42:20.360But the real second in command is Ernest Bevin.
00:42:23.420And Bevin controls effectively the entire domestic economy.
00:42:28.560So socialism is totally at the heart of the British state.
00:42:32.700The 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.
00:42:46.500What, 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.
00:43:12.900And 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.
00:43:26.140And I can see why I think it was also deeply problematic.
00:43:31.480I 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.
00:43:44.220But the de-industrialization, as we can now see, was merely accelerated in Britain.
00:43:53.620I mean, everywhere in Europe, heavy industry is now dead.
00:44:23.900I don't know whether you've been to parts of urban America and particularly rural America.
00:44:29.160They make our poverty here look like luxury because, of course, it is prevented from absolute deprivation by the extent of the welfare state.
00:44:38.280But you can then, because it's so big, you can simply move on.
00:44:42.180You can move on and develop another area.
00:44:44.220We can't, and we haven't, I suppose, the city of London in some ways is the equivalent.
00:44:50.920But yes, we need to rethink what this fancy word leveling up or something would entail.
00:45:00.080I 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.
00:45:15.740Remember, there was no need to argue that you'd to level up Birmingham or level up Manchester or level up Liverpool or Glasgow.
00:45:25.200These were vastly more intellectually exciting places than London in the late 18th and the 19th century because it was where economic activity happened.
00:45:36.020It is profoundly difficult to invent economic activity.
00:45:41.300And 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.
00:45:52.340And without that independent economy, it's very, very difficult.
00:46:44.360But 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.
00:47:01.420And what the Labour Party has become instead is the party of the new blob.
00:47:07.560It, the Labour Party now, as you saw it at the, look at the, look at what was represented in Liverpool.
00:47:14.200What it is, it is essentially the party of the new nomenclatura, what you used to have in the Soviet Union.
00:47:21.960It's the, the Labour Party is now, it's not the party of the working class.
00:47:27.500It 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.
00:47:44.180It's become, in fact, the party of the privileged south of England and islands in bits of Manchester, bits of Liverpool, bits of Glasgow.
00:47:53.420And it is this, it is this extraordinary abandonment by the party that was actually founded to represent it.
00:48:03.380But again, sorry, we're talking very frankly and there are questions too big even to be, almost to be touched on.
00:48:12.720But we've also got to remember something else.
00:48:14.920The sheer, although, although what happened in 1945 was done, I think, genuinely with the best of intentions, though I think the results were terrible.
00:48:27.500One of the things it deliberately did was to prevent, and because it seemed to make it unnecessary, voluntary activity.
00:48:35.920If 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.
00:48:58.060I mean, what we would regard as a poverty beyond comprehension.
00:49:54.160Because 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.
00:50:02.860Well, it is the death, well, community is, I hate that word, community.
00:50:54.700I 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.
00:51:03.360I mean, his instead, it was constantly doings.
00:51:06.720I 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.
00:51:20.740I mean, I've got the cutting, his cuttings from papers and whatever, just extraordinary.
00:51:27.540But if you're involved like that, you control something.
00:51:32.180The thing that's gone desperately wrong is this sense of not having control.
00:51:38.820Remember, very interesting studies have done about anxiety, depression, and all these sorts of things, and mental illness.
00:51:48.080And the general view is, you know, people in terribly high-powered jobs and whatever should be very vulnerable to it.
00:51:55.900If 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.
00:52:03.840You can drive yourself into a wall and you'll survive.
00:52:07.060It's the people at the bottom that are on the receiving end that have no autonomy.
00:52:14.120And it is this loss of autonomy, of self-directed activity.
00:52:21.860And remember, these are grand words, but they're the foundation of all classical political philosophy.
00:52:29.000The 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.
00:52:40.240You feel a certain sense of responsibility for it.
00:52:43.660And again, our educational system seems to me to have almost entirely forgotten these things.
00:52:48.700The classical, the old public school system was finally very much about that.
00:52:53.380When 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.
00:53:04.260You look at your Shakespeare plays, you look at different forms of political success and failure.
00:53:11.520There are the examples, there are the ways of tackling it, the way history used to be taught.
00:53:24.860Yeah, and what it seems that we have now is we have this vacuum.
00:54:23.680The health of a democracy and its decline is a universal question.
00:54:33.880But, of course, it's very easy to see some of the things that have gone wrong.
00:54:38.800We've talked about deindustrialisation and the destruction of, and remember, it's, again, one of the central things is we were first in.
00:54:50.440We 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.
00:55:09.640Most countries, that pattern, which was effectively the old coal, steel and iron pattern, was a much, much shorter period of time.
00:55:18.260It 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.
00:55:30.240But, but essentially, the other great thing, and again, we need to talk about this daring delta truth, is the welfare state.
00:55:41.060The 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.
00:56:14.400I'm sorry, we need sticks as well as carrots.
00:56:17.320And the moment those go, it applies on a high political level, too.
00:56:24.800Why have politics in Scotland and Wales been so insane after devolution?
00:56:29.960Because 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.
00:56:38.480So you can effectively have playpen politics.
00:56:41.480And what we've done is to introduce a playpen society.
00:56:44.980Everybody talks about infantilization, this broad fact people grow up, if they ever grow up at all, much, much later than they used to.
00:56:54.320And it is effectively because you've removed risk.
00:56:58.420The state now acts as an overprotective parent.
00:57:18.260No, no, I couldn't agree with you more.
00:57:21.000The 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.
00:57:44.980And 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.
00:58:01.160You know, the widow, the disabled man, the whatever, the child with whatever.
00:58:09.100And it just, I don't see how we're ever going to rebalance that.
00:58:15.220Because nobody would want people starving to death.
00:58:18.520Nobody, and nor am I talking about that.
00:58:20.660What 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.
00:58:36.080Hence the fact there were saving clubs.
00:58:38.540Hence the fact you would be, there were local hospitals in which there was subscription.
00:58:49.200But 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.
00:59:11.620And remember, the classical framework is, you know, if you trade freedom for security, you lose both.
00:59:55.540I've been sunny-ing as much as possible.
00:59:57.360No, 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.
01:00:06.860So when you say Peronist, most people don't know what that means.
01:00:11.640And I've heard you talk about the rule of lawyers and Keir Starmer being one.
01:00:17.100What do you mean when you say it's Peronist?
01:00:19.800What do you mean by when you talk about the rule of lawyers and what does that mean for us going forward?
01:00:24.320Well, again, I think the easiest way of describing it, by Peronism, we look at what happened to Argentina.
01:00:31.600Argentina 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.
01:00:47.220And 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.
01:00:59.580There is more and more nationalization.
01:01:30.080And that's exactly what happened in Argentina.
01:01:32.760And indeed, it happened here in the 1970s.
01:01:35.960It's been manifestly happening here since the financial crisis.
01:01:39.860And 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.
01:01:50.400You know, you suddenly create vast amounts of money.
01:01:53.860We called it something fancy, quantitative easing.
01:01:56.680But it's just as destructive of value, except it wasn't that it went straight into people's pockets.
01:02:33.320Fit this together because we've been doing well with the chronology.
01:02:36.580And 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.
01:02:55.180But she did so at the risk of reducing conservatism simply to free market economics, which I think itself is also disastrous.
01:03:04.360Blair, as it were, deceives everybody, including he deceived Margaret Thatcher.
01:03:09.560Margaret Thatcher says in 1992 that Blair is her principal tribute act, that, you know, she shows that she's won.
01:03:17.380But what she didn't realize, what Blair did, was deliberately to transform the actual constitution of Britain.
01:03:28.900You create a new kind of British state.
01:03:32.180In the same way, you totally distort what had been this Anglo-British identity and evaporate it of meaning.
01:03:39.180You 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.
01:03:51.600You replace it with this new, intense, centralised, extraordinary, profoundly, dangerously structured thing that deliberately reduces the role of Parliament and therefore you and me.
01:04:06.480Which 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.
01:04:19.820You deliberately reduce the power of Parliament.
01:04:23.120So we reduce it first by devolution, which produces this completely, crazily confused structure within the British Isles.
01:04:34.320Secondly, you incorporate the European Convention on Human Rights.
01:04:53.120The human rights that Churchill, that Eleanor Roosevelt was interested in, were the human rights of every individual against the state.
01:05:02.200The original conventions were designed to stop Nazism, to stop communism.
01:05:08.380What happened instead is, through the influence of judges and through, above all in the United Nations, the actual influence of Stalinism,
01:05:18.320you stand them, you stand them on their head.
01:05:20.620Because human rights, and Lord Bingham actually says this absolutely explicitly in the 1990s, the real purpose of human rights is to protect minorities.
01:05:30.860Now, the moment you do that, you reverse, because the only way you can protect, remember, there's a very simple definition of democracy.
01:05:55.220So you produce this entire inversion, which, of course, woke does.
01:06:00.440Woke 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.
01:06:12.800So it's the Magnificat, you know, he shall put down the mighty from their seats and exalt them of low degree.
01:06:19.140And the, but it goes much further than that.
01:06:22.200If 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.
01:06:32.320You 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?
01:06:43.500Why did we always gold plate European legal interventions and regulations?
01:06:50.760Well, the idea is that in England, law was seen as something you made yourself.
01:06:56.200In other words, parliament binds everybody because everybody is represented there.
01:07:00.740Continental Europe, everywhere had been an absolute monarchy.
01:07:04.360So law was something that was put on you, which is why there's a much more relaxed attitude to law.
01:07:10.120And in Ireland, Italy, a positive opposition to law, that it's seen as an external oppressive thing.
01:07:19.620And then the even worse thing that universal human rights do is to say there should be no state frontiers.
01:07:25.500Because if there are universal human rights, going back to the point of immigration, it must mean we're all the same.
01:07:32.340It must mean there's a universal human being.
01:07:35.040This absurd business, if you remember the young man of Rwandan origins who was born in Wales, who committed those hideous murders in Southport.
01:07:46.820There were people saying, oh, he's Welsh.
01:07:51.340Jaw-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.
01:08:03.460But 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.
01:08:20.320That there should be, there should be, I mean, this is the logic of what they're doing.
01:08:23.820There should be a universal citizenship.
01:08:25.840In other words, what I think we've got to get into our heads is that unlimited immigration is the final expression of globalism.
01:08:34.900It'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.
01:08:48.940So that was the incorporation of the European Convention on Human Rights.
01:08:54.840And then, of course, you had the independence of the Bank of England, although in some ways looked quite a good thing.
01:09:00.780It's the first of the fact you deliberately create a whole set of bodies which removes as much power from Parliament as possible.
01:09:08.600So Parliament and ministers don't set interest rates.
01:09:11.680They now don't control the budget because the Tories were stupid enough to create the Office of Budget Responsibility.
01:09:17.620We don't control this gathering rush to net zero because of the Climate Change Committee.
01:09:23.980There's the Immigration Advisory Committee, whose essential remit is to say more, more, more, more, more.
01:09:30.420English Nature, which prioritizes newts over human beings.
01:09:34.600All this nonsense with this world of quangocracy, which is new labor to a man and especially to a rampant woman.
01:09:43.060And 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.
01:09:56.240It'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.
01:10:09.240The 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?
01:10:21.440And 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.
01:10:35.320And then finally, and most catastrophically, the Equality Act.
01:11:07.980It's economically deranged and has been known to be so since Adam Smith, one of the great classical passages in The Wealth of Nations.
01:11:17.000The 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.
01:11:34.540So that implies a non-market evaluation.
01:11:37.400And it's the reason that we've driven Birmingham into bankruptcy and we're about to drive next into bankruptcy.
01:11:43.140I mean, the sheer insanity of this stuff, Harriet Harman's Great Tribute Act.
01:11:48.580So what we've done, we've created a structure of government which manifestly is vastly expensive.
01:12:23.140So 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.
01:12:39.140Starmer is at the heart of this process.
01:12:43.640Do you remember, coming back quickly from all these ground statements, do you remember when the first business of Starmer and freebies comes up?
01:12:59.400He's the kind of man who thinks that the rules replace the innate perception of right and wrong.
01:13:08.440And 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.
01:13:27.180I mean, Grenfell, the terrible disaster there, we have a set of building regulations, which is about three times the length of the Bible.
01:15:58.500In the 1970s, we had the resort to the IMF and the humiliation that followed that.
01:16:06.540I reckon that will happen to us very quickly.
01:16:09.820There are iron laws and you cannot escape them.
01:16:16.080And you see, again, what's interesting is the world of Eastern Europe.
01:16:19.500If 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.
01:16:36.340There's no risk of them going back to it.
01:16:39.180There's a very interesting middle ground here, which is Eastern Germany.
01:16:43.800Because Eastern Germany was mollycoddled through the transition by Western Germany.
01:16:51.200There'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.
01:17:08.160The sense of community energy involvement, dignity, dignity, doing something that was worthwhile, carrying literally the nation on your shoulders because you supplied its fuel.
01:17:19.320And the fact that it was vigorous mass connective, all of those things.
01:17:23.540And there is that kind of fondness, which we can see in the change of electoral patterns in Eastern Germany.
01:17:30.380In Poland, Lithuania, whatever, Finland, where there was nobody to intervene.
01:17:38.480You really had to confront the consequences of the...
01:17:41.280I mean, I was in Lithuania shortly after 1989.
01:17:44.900And 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.
01:17:55.440So inside the hotel, a cup of coffee was about five pounds.
01:17:58.620Outside 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.
01:18:08.060We will go there if we're not careful.
01:18:56.740The lie that this is not having consequences.
01:19:00.580And so you constantly kick it down the road.
01:19:03.360I mean, what is our new wonder transfer of the exchequer doing?
01:19:08.600She's going straight back to Gordon Brown's playbook.
01:19:11.000So 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.
01:19:58.960Which is why I use the example of Argentina.
01:20:01.240And 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?
01:20:57.280Well, what seemed then a lot of money, 10,000 pounds to buy my flat.
01:21:02.480So I was rubbing my hands, you know, every year that went by a large chunk of my debt simply went into thin air.
01:21:11.220I mean, inflation is enormously redistributive.
01:21:13.980But, 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.
01:21:27.920But we are creating just unsustainable structures.
01:21:33.960I mean, and there are very, very clear examples of this happening before.
01:21:37.520People talk now quite openly of the possible parallels between our civilization and the fall of Rome.
01:21:45.980There'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,
01:22:03.500when 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.
01:22:16.380And 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.
01:22:25.880And at that point, it just ceases to be sustainable.
01:22:29.000And 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.
01:22:37.660You could do long distance trade simply by bills of exchange, because money was the same in Alexandria as it was in Rome.
01:22:44.780And it was rock solid. And you didn't need to put specie on boats, even for long distance trade.
01:22:51.020That begins to be undercut. You debase the currency.
01:22:55.720The structures of fiduciary trading, of trading simply by bills of exchange, starts to fall to bits.
01:23:03.280You revert to using gold and silver. You then have arguments over all of that.
01:23:09.360So that extraordinary structure sits quite slowly.
01:23:13.340Again, Adam Smith puts it very clearly.
01:23:16.160There's a lot of ruin in the country, a big, complex country, as wealthy as we were.
01:24:20.140I think he's actually being honest on many issues.
01:24:23.960Except that he's got no remedy because he represents, the problem with Starmer is, the problem with Rachel Reeves, the problem with Bridget Philipson,
01:24:32.980they represent the quintessence of the system.
01:26:25.100So 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.
01:26:30.720What has got to happen as soon as there is a serious Conservative leader, he or she has got to say one thing.
01:26:36.320When you get one of these absurd acts, the next Conservative government will repeal this.
01:26:42.600And everybody, I mean, things with the absurdities of Miliband on climate change.
01:26:48.720There 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.