Transcript
Speaker: Hello and welcome back to the Debatable Discussions podcast.
Speaker: Today we are joined by another guest for a very interesting and hopefully exciting episode.
Speaker: Yeah, today we're joined by Ioannis Shuntis de Fabri, who is a House of Lords advisor and a PhD candidate in intellectual history at the University of Aberdeen.
Speaker: He's also written a book about the influence Lord Byron had on the Greek Revolution and is an Edmund Burke scholar.
Speaker: It's great to have you with us today.
Speaker: Thank you very much for coming.
Speaker: Thank you for inviting me.
Speaker: So going straight away to the questions, many people who follow you on Instagram may know that you are a House of Lords advisor.
Speaker: So can you please explain what this role really is?
Speaker: Well, as many people might know or may not know, the House of Lords is the upper chamber of the British legislature.
Speaker: So basically what we do in the House of Lords is we scrutinize bills that come through the House of Commons.
Speaker: And so the peers of the realm are, as it were, legislators in their own right in the British Parliament.
Speaker: And what advisors like me do is advise them on the questions of the day.
Speaker: We all have some kind of specialization on some policy issues.
Speaker: Mine are mainly about immigration or migration and culture, heritage, the arts.
Speaker: These are the fields that I've specialized over the years working both in the House of Lords and previously in the Council of Europe and the Hellenic Parliament before that.
Speaker: So yes, it's the equivalent of a senior advisor in the House of Commons or in government.
Speaker: This is what we do.
Speaker: Because peers usually, as it is their right by law, maintain some extracurriculum activities, as we can say.
Speaker: They're usually very active in business, in finance, in consultancy.
Speaker: And they can do that because they don't have a salary, like MPs do.
Speaker: Usually, advisors also, in some way, are connected to their activities in business.
Speaker: in consultants and elsewhere.
Speaker: But some are and some like me are not.
Speaker: So it depends.
Speaker: Could you also tell us a bit more about perhaps, you know, should the House of Law still exist today?
Speaker: A lot of people have this sort of dilemma on is it an antiquated concept or not?
Speaker: Well, it is as much an antiquated concept as the House of Commons, if you approach it like that, because they both go back to times immemorial.
Speaker: They both are part of the British mixed constitution, or some would call it the ancient constitution.
Speaker: So just because something dates back
Speaker: a long time doesn't mean that it's useless.
Speaker: I think that the House of Lords is an excellent and very unique legislative mechanism.
Speaker: I think that any talk about reforming the House of Lords, because I think that even the current government has
Speaker: backtracked from the original promise of abolishing the House of Lords.
Speaker: Now they are going for a reform of the composition and the membership of the House of Lords, not even its functions.
Speaker: But I think that any talk about reform should mainly focus on how best the House of Lords can scrutinize legislation coming from the House of Commons, which is its constitutional right and obligation to do.
Speaker: So I think that the House of Lords serves the British politics well.
Speaker: I think that because the upper chamber is unelected, you avoid the convolutions or the divergences that are observed, or even the deadlocks that are observed in the United States of America, for instance, or even continental parliaments like the French parliament or the Italian parliament, which are also bicameral.
Speaker: So, yes, I think the House of Lords is a working part of the Constitution.
Speaker: And also, regarding its composition, since at least 1998, that is the Blair reform,
Speaker: the composition of the House of Lords is not that of a port-stained earl sitting on a chest-field chair in some London club, which up to a certain extent was before the 1998-1999 reform.
Speaker: But it's a very diverse chamber.
Speaker: The demographics of the chamber are based on...
Speaker: race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender, professional background, education, age, it's all very, very diverse and inclusive, I would even might say.
Speaker: So to some extent, if you walk around the corridors of the House of Lords, and then you do the same in House of Commons, I would even dare say that the House of Lords, I don't have the data in hand, but I would even dare say that the House of Lords is actually more diverse.
Speaker: chamber than the House of Commons regarding the members of the body politic that are represented there.
Speaker: So yes, by and large, I think that certainly it's a part of the constitution that should be maintained and that it performs its duties well.
Speaker: Interestingly, though, from my perspective, I really enjoyed the idea of the House of Lords from an ideological perspective.
Speaker: As you said, it's perfect for sort of scrutinising government policy laws with perhaps more experts.
Speaker: But one of the sort of the biggest criticisms of it, though, is that it's basically gotten too big.
Speaker: I think I'm right in saying that it's perhaps the second biggest legislative body in the world.
Speaker: So do you think then there should be reform to sort of reduce the size of the membership?
Speaker: That's a very good question.
Speaker: There was an article in the Politico magazine published last week about actually the size of the House of Lords and it was used as the main argument suggesting or proposing its reform.
Speaker: Now,
Speaker: If you take just the numbers, yes, it is the second largest legislative body in the world, I think, after the National Assembly of China or something like that.
Speaker: So one prima facie will say it's too big.
Speaker: Now, as it happens with the House of Commons, but it's even more the case with the House of Lords, not all peers sew up at the same time or for the same debate.
Speaker: Otherwise, it would be impossible for the Chamber to hold them, even size-wise.
Speaker: What is the House of Lords is that it is a pool.
Speaker: What I usually say, it's a pool of talent and it's a pool of knowledge and experts.
Speaker: And at every single given debate on immigration, on heritage, on sports, different members from this pool emerge and participate in the discussion.
Speaker: So because they don't have a standard salary and because they only get a daily compensation if they show up and vote,
Speaker: I don't really think that it's a problem to have a very large pool or database, if you like, a contact book of experts that you can call upon every time you have a very niche debate, because there are many niche debates that come to the House of Lords.
Speaker: I think last session we had a bill about heritage trees in the UK.
Speaker: I know nothing about heritage trees, but there were actually peers who knew a lot about heritage trees and were able to help in the debate.
Speaker: So it is big, but it doesn't cost anything.
Speaker: It is very flexible.
Speaker: And I think that the argument of its size is not one to count against the House of Lords because exactly of how it works.
Speaker: But it's a popular argument.
Speaker: It's even used by publications of standards like Politico because actually it is not often the case that people look into the workings of the House of Lords or its composition or its function to actually see the details about its operations.
Speaker: Could you also tell us a couple of topics that have recently come up in the House of Lords where you've had an input?
Speaker: Well, the House of Lords has three functions.
Speaker: First, we debate bills that come to us from the House of Commerce.
Speaker: It's not our initiative.
Speaker: And of course, as you probably know, the biggest single item of legislative controversy in the previous parliament was the Wanda bill, the immigration Wanda bill, which is now killed.
Speaker: So there is little use talking about that.
Speaker: But it ping-ponged between the House of Commerce and the House of Lords quite a few times in quite a few sessions.
Speaker: I think overall it was ping-ponged for over three years between the two houses.
Speaker: Second, we have very interesting debates that are instigated by peers.
Speaker: So we had a very interesting debate about the bicentennial of Lord Byron and how best to commemorate his legacy in the United Kingdom.
Speaker: And the Minister of State back then for Culture, Lord Parkinson, came and briefed the House about how we're going...
Speaker: about the move of the Lord Byron statue from Park Lane to Hyde Park, which is a great project.
Speaker: So things like that.
Speaker: We had a debate about the Elgin or the Parthenon marbles, also instigated in the House of Lords.
Speaker: And I think on this topic, it was one of the most elevated and subtle discussions I ever heard on the topic in either the British or the Atlantic Parliament.
Speaker: So these are just examples of what is going on in the chamber and things that have been involved one way or the other, either pertaining to immigration or heritage.
Speaker: So you just mentioned there the Parthenon or Elgin marbles.
Speaker: And for any of our listeners who don't know, these are a collection of ancient Greek sculptures removed by Thomas Bruce, 7th Earl of Elgin, back in the 1800s.
Speaker: So this is a very contentious debate, very contentious issue between Greece and the United Kingdom.
Speaker: So could you perhaps tell us about the controversy and also what's going to happen with these marbles, with the Elgin marbles?
Speaker: Yes, so even by the name, you see that a Greek person would call them the Parthenon marbles and a British person would call them the Elgin marbles.
Speaker: So the two countries don't even agree on the actual term that they want to use.
Speaker: It's a story that goes back a long time.
Speaker: It goes back, as you mentioned, before the establishment of the modern Greek state.
Speaker: So Lord Elgin removed those parts of the Parthenon structure during the time of the Ottoman Empire.
Speaker: He brought them back to the UK and later sold them to Parliament.
Speaker: Now, the whole thing was quite forgotten for 100 years or so.
Speaker: It resurfaced in the 60s and the 70s.
Speaker: It was the time when, for the first time, the issue of repatriation of cultural artefacts came to the public sphere, to public debate.
Speaker: And as the decades passed and as the successive Greek governments cultivated this in public opinion, it became even and even stronger.
Speaker: It reached its peak in the mid-80s when there was a very influential movement
Speaker: Greek Minister of Culture, Melina Mercouri, who was also a very famous European actress and was the wife of Joan Dasson, the famous American actor.
Speaker: She gave it a lot of visibility and she did a lot of tours in the UK, London, advocating for the return of the Parthenon marbles.
Speaker: Then it continued on in the 90s, early 2000s and
Speaker: Again, the issue came into prominence when Rishi Sunak, the former prime minister, refused to meet the Greek prime minister a couple of years ago, no, sorry, less than a year ago.
Speaker: They had an arranged meeting in Downing Street and the British prime minister cancelled the meeting last minute because of some comments that the Greek prime minister made on BBC about the Parthenon marbles.
Speaker: So it is a strange case of a subject of an issue, a policy issue of cultural heritage or cultural diplomacy to basically dominate the bilateral relations of two countries.
Speaker: And that I don't particularly find productive.
Speaker: I've written articles about it in the International New York Times and elsewhere that I think there are many areas that the UK and Greece can work closely together.
Speaker: That is immigration, education, tourism, sustainability, a lot of things.
Speaker: But for some reason, this thorny subject of the Parthenon marbles remains up there.
Speaker: Now, I think that we are maybe coming closer to a sort of a solution.
Speaker: And that is because we have a change of government in the United Kingdom.
Speaker: And we also have a change of leadership in the British Museum.
Speaker: So Nicholas Cullinan, the former director of the National Portrait Gallery, has just been...
Speaker: appointed assumed duties as the director of the British Museum.
Speaker: The chair of the trustees, George Osborne, has been for a couple of years now liaisoning between the two governments to try and find a solution.
Speaker: So there is exhibited will on behalf of the British Museum to sort of try and find a solution on this issue.
Speaker: The previous UK government was adamant that there would not be any move towards resolving this conundrum, but the current government has
Speaker: has left some room for negotiations.
Speaker: Chris Bryan, the culture minister, two or three weeks ago made a statement that there might be some solution coming up.
Speaker: I know that the Greek government is actually actively working towards a solution as well.
Speaker: Now, one might ask what the solution is going to be and why a solution is going
Speaker: is feasible now and not three or four or five decades ago.
Speaker: It seems that both sides have come to the understanding that if a solution is to be reached, there needs to be mutual concessions.
Speaker: As with any negotiation, you start from your maximum position and then you meet towards the middle ground to sort of compromise with the other side.
Speaker: Now, the compromise
Speaker: probably, this is both my personal opinion and my information, will be something like, will be as follows.
Speaker: So basically what the Greek government, the British parliament and the British museum will give
Speaker: is that they will allow the loan of the Parthenon marbles to the Acropolis Museum in Athens for three, five, fifteen years or indefinitely, which is the legal term at Perpetuum.
Speaker: That would probably mean they will be replaced by some kind of high-end techy replicas in the British Museum, as you can do these days with the technology that is available.
Speaker: Now, I'm talking about return.
Speaker: Sorry, excuse me.
Speaker: I'm not talking about return, but I'm talking about reunification.
Speaker: This is the term that the current Greek prime minister has repeatedly used for over four years now.
Speaker: He stopped using the term return, either in Greek or in English, and he's using the term reunification.
Speaker: Reunification means that the Greek side may be willing to give away a part of the deal that is they recognize the ownership, the legal ownership of the marbles on behalf of the British Museum and the UK government, which would be
Speaker: a serious step to be taken by any Greek government and will cause problems at home, I can assure you of that.
Speaker: Political problems at home, if they dare do that.
Speaker: So the compromise in simple terms will be the British Museum approves a loan of the marbles to the Acropolis Museum and in return it gets the legal acknowledgement on behalf of the Greek government that those marbles belong to the UK.
Speaker: That would be the only way
Speaker: a solution could be reached, could be found.
Speaker: If not, if either of the two sides decides that they want to move towards a different direction, I would say that the issue will continue as it is for many, many, many years.
Speaker: It's clear to anybody who's involved with negotiations at this point that this is the only realistic expectation.
Speaker: With what you just said, I think the legal ownership is the key aspect of it personally for me, because I believe that if they do find out that Thomas Bruce legally seized it and it was legally and is legally owned nowadays by the British government and the Greeks do admit that,
Speaker: Well, then it sort of beckons the question personally for me, why are Britain giving away something they legally own?
Speaker: Because it would then further jeopardise many other artefacts that the British Museum and all museums in Britain have, that they own but belong to a different country.
Speaker: So I think the Greek government can admit ownership, but it does sort of challenge the status of many other artefacts that the British have.
Speaker: which they own, would they then have to be repatriated?
Speaker: So I think it really does put many of the artefacts that the British gained through the empire in the 1800s and 1900s.
Speaker: What do you think about that?
Speaker: Well, the answer is that the UK is already returning cultural artifacts to their countries of origin.
Speaker: It's done with the Benin bronzes, for instance.
Speaker: I'm sure that it's in the ideological agenda, or not ideological agenda, but in the policy program of the Labour Party, which is the UK elected government now, that they don't really mind.
Speaker: repatriating cultural artifacts that were obtained through imperial operations to their countries of origins.
Speaker: I wouldn't be surprised if Labour believes that.
Speaker: As far as I can see in public opinion polls in
Speaker: British newspapers or TV channels, the British public doesn't seem to mind overwhelmingly nowadays.
Speaker: It's usually, especially about the Department of Marbles, I'm not generalizing, it's usually around 60% in favor, 15% I don't know, 20% I really don't want them to go back, which pretty much tells you the demographics and the political opinions of those who are advocating either in favor or against.
Speaker: I think that
Speaker: It will be very easy for Labour to proceed with this solution because it will gain them popularity in their own voters, in their own political audience.
Speaker: And ultimately, this is what political parties do if we want to be cynical about it.
Speaker: They cater to their voters' prejudices most of the time.
Speaker: So I think that for the two sides involved,
Speaker: and I'm approaching it as objectively as I can, for the two sides involved, it's a win-win situation.
Speaker: Because labor will feed the ideological needs of its audience, and the Greek government will gain back some important cultural artifacts.
Speaker: What both sides will lose is that the Greek government...
Speaker: What you consider as problematic on the British side will be considered problematic on the Greek side.
Speaker: I can assure you that it will be very difficult for Greeks to swallow even an oral or written declaration of ownership of the Parthenon Mapples on behalf of Britain because it's a deep-seated belief that
Speaker: in the cultural and in the collective subconsciousness of Greeks that these belong to Greece.
Speaker: So the Greek government will basically sugar pill the whole thing by actually exhibiting the marbles in the Acropolis Museum, but they will have to give a pretty good fight to convince Greeks that the marbles should be legally owned by the UK.
Speaker: Now, what Labour will lose, of course, is that it will really feed the right-wing press.
Speaker: Probably, I can expect that the right-wing press will go berserk on the issue.
Speaker: I can already imagine the Telegraph and the Spectator and even more so the Daily Mail and Daily Express covers on the issue.
Speaker: So I think it's with every negotiation, you win something, you lose something, you take a little bit of a hit, you make a gain, and in the end of the day, you move on.
Speaker: Otherwise, it is very easy for both sides.
Speaker: But I think both sides don't want this anymore.
Speaker: For both sides to continue bickering on the issue and basically having monologues.
Speaker: on either side about their own rights and doing their own conferences and publishing their own books and putting their own celebrities advocating the cause.
Speaker: But it's like two parallel universes not communicating with each other.
Speaker: Again, we don't even know if we're going to get there, but all the public statements made in the last two, three months point towards that direction.
Speaker: So you're also an Edmund Burke scholar.
Speaker: I'd also want to get onto our last section of this.
Speaker: So could you tell us a bit about Edmund Burke and his links to conservatism, just as a general outline, first of all?
Speaker: Edmund Burke was an 18th century Anglo-Irish Whig politician, political theorist, pamphleteer and spokesperson of the Rockinghamite Whigs in Parliament, which were the group of MPs around the Second Marquess of Rockingham, who was briefly Prime Minister between 1765 and 1776.
Speaker: 1766 and again in 1782 just before his death.
Speaker: He died while he was in office actually.
Speaker: So Burke is often considered the founding father of I will say Anglo-Saxon or English-speaking conservativism because no French or Italian conservative would consider Edmund Burke as their founding father.
Speaker: They have their own founding fathers.
Speaker: This is the thing with conservativism.
Speaker: It's not a universal ideology like liberalism or communism or socialism.
Speaker: It's not even an ism like the other isms.
Speaker: It doesn't have a holy book.
Speaker: It doesn't have a basic creed.
Speaker: But if you're an English-speaking Anglo-Saxon conservative, you will pretty much consider that.
Speaker: One of the first, at least, conservatives was Edmund Burke.
Speaker: Now, what is interesting is that Edmund Burke himself wouldn't describe himself as conservative because this is a 19th century term, as all the isms are.
Speaker: He would describe himself as a Whig.
Speaker: Again, it's very complicated to go into what the Whigs were really to take us hours, but these were basically the representatives of the landed interest in 18th century Britain.
Speaker: These were the MPs and Lords and Grandees that were upholding the principles of the Glorious Revolution of 1688.
Speaker: They were advocating for the rights of property.
Speaker: They were advocating for religious tolerance for the mixed government.
Speaker: for the interdependence of the three elements of the constitution, the democratic, the commons, the aristocratic, the lords and the monarchical crown.
Speaker: And they would be Rockingham and his followers in particular, be those who would advocate reconciliation with America.
Speaker: During the American War of Independence, there would be those who would advocate for a more lenient approach towards the administration of Irish affairs in Ireland, the reform of the operations of the East India Company in India and other multinational, as it were, corporations in the West Indies and other places of the country.
Speaker: emerging British Empire.
Speaker: And lastly, of course, this party split into many different parts during the French Revolution.
Speaker: Burke was actually the first to split from the Whig party and form his own independent cohort in Parliament.
Speaker: And later, he sort of pulled away the more grandiose aristocratic elements of the Whigs, the Duke of Portland, the Earl of Fiduilliam and their supporters, who joined William Pity
Speaker: excuse me, the younger, the then prime minister, and basically the remaining Whigs went into opposition under Charles James Fox, the very mercurial but opportunistic leader of the opposition.
Speaker: This is a very short, brief and, as it were, a grosso modo outline of Berg's career and his ideological underpinnings.
Speaker: If you look at Burke and his ideas, how do you think he'd react in a way if he looked at the current political scene and he looked at the current Conservative Party?
Speaker: Well, this is always dangerous for an intellectual historian to do, but I will say that Burke, of course, he didn't...
Speaker: How should we say that?
Speaker: He didn't hold some principles as sacred.
Speaker: But I think what is important is his mode of thinking and his argumentation.
Speaker: That is to say, there are some
Speaker: ways of thinking about political debates if you consider or describe yourself as Burkean.
Speaker: And very few Tory MPs do nowadays.
Speaker: I would consider Jesse Norman, the MP from Hertfordshire as one.
Speaker: He's written a book about Burke.
Speaker: A couple of others.
Speaker: Of course, if you go back in time, you will find more and more people describing themselves as Burkean conservatives or at least being aware of Burke's works.
Speaker: But one thing that you do if you're a Birkin is that you believe in prudence in political debate and political discussion.
Speaker: So you approach things in moderation, in skepticism, and you don't think that there is a one-size-fits-all solution to all political problems.
Speaker: So you're not ideological.
Speaker: you don't adhere to a specific set of political principles.
Speaker: And that doesn't mean you're an opportunist or that you are basically...
Speaker: you don't have a moral or political compass, but you try to find solutions to problems by using the very rich repository of knowledge of the past, of previous experience.
Speaker: It's a test and try, but you start from what you already know.
Speaker: And you apply what you already know to problems.
Speaker: And if it works, you move on.
Speaker: You say that you don't have to reinvent the wheel.
Speaker: And if it doesn't, you sort of try and find a new solution.
Speaker: It's basically what Burke described as the politician being the philosopher in action, but also what he described as in order to conserve, you have to reform.
Speaker: So basically, Burke...
Speaker: Essentially, Burke was not a reactionary.
Speaker: He didn't seek to return to a previous age, as many, like the mestres in France in the same period of time, wanted to do.
Speaker: Burke was advocating for the maintenance of the status quo.
Speaker: Now, in modern Britain, in modern Europe, in the West, Burke would obviously not find many things appealing with the status quo for various reasons.
Speaker: It is very difficult to be a conservative, a Birkin conservative, and operate in the current political landscape because if you are a Birkin conservative, you don't like most of the things you see around you.
Speaker: And then, of course, that means necessarily you have to look into some previous time that is not 100 years ago or 60 years ago, but probably now.
Speaker: Some decades ago, you would go back to the 70s, the 80s or the 90s.
Speaker: This is the element of conservative nostalgia that often manifests in political discussions in the center-right and in the right.
Speaker: This nostalgia for a previous age.
Speaker: nostalgia is dangerous because it encompasses idealization of bygone times and of course if you go back to the 70s there will probably be people who would advocate that in the 50s things were better and I don't like much of the things I see around.
Speaker: So to go back to your original question, I think that
Speaker: My personal opinion is that if the Conservative Party wants to be more Burkean, they have to stop being so ideological.
Speaker: They have to start looking into examples of how things worked in the recent past.
Speaker: approach a one-nation Tory agenda that is try to appeal to the whole body politic, reconcile different societal and economic interests, try to stop the fragmentation of society and the body politic as it is currently observed in various parts of the country, as it were, be a unifying force, offer a unifying vision for the citizens,
Speaker: the voters of this country.
Speaker: And I think that there are conservative candidates already who are, I mean, for the leadership of the Conservative Party, who advocate for this sort of approach.
Speaker: And we will see how things unravel until November when the election is to take place.
Speaker: But I think that
Speaker: all associates and teams working around conservative candidates would really benefit from going back to Burke's works and trying to use some of his perennial political wisdom to try and enrich their ideological understanding and their political thinking.
Speaker: Thank you very much, though, Ioannis, for coming on today.
Speaker: It's been great to have you here.
Speaker: My pleasure.
Speaker: Well, several political issues, whilst also linking in some history to the discussion.
Speaker: Yeah, thank you very much.
Speaker: Thank you very much for coming today.
Speaker: And it was truly a fascinating discussion.
Speaker: I'm going to have to be honest, I say I didn't really know a lot about the topics we discussed today previously to this.
Speaker: Now I feel like I'm going to have to do a bit of reading.
Speaker: So thank you very much.
Speaker: And we hope you liked the episode.
Speaker: And always, if you did, please do give us a five-star review and do listen to the previous episodes of the podcast.
Speaker: Thank you very much.
