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How to save Britain, with David Starkey
0 Playsin 2 hours
Most historical revolutions are sudden and violent. Since 1997, the UK has experienced a 'slow-burn revolution', which has completely changed the country economically, demographically, culturally and administratively. Historian David Starkey joins Will to explain how it happened, and to consider whether the disastrous consequences of the Blairite revolution can be reversed.
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Read The Spectator Australia here.
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Transcript
Introduction to UK's Slow-Burn Revolution
00:00:19
Speaker
G'day and welcome to Fire at Will, I'm Will Kingston. Most historical revolutions, sudden and violent, Storming the Bastille, shooting the Redcoats, that sort of thing.
00:00:32
Speaker
Something quite extraordinary has happened in the United Kingdom in the last 30-odd years. A slow burn revolution. A slow burn revolution that has changed the country demographically, administratively, and culturally to a point where, in many ways, is unrecognizable from the country that it was before 1997.
00:00:56
Speaker
Now, I wish I could take credit for that wonderful analysis. I cannot. That comes from my guest today, the wonderful historian, David Starkey. David, welcome to Fire at Will. Welcome, indeed. And to myself, as say as you're presenting my ideas, I think I can take complete possession, but there we are.
00:01:14
Speaker
el we I hope we're not going to turn into too much of a love-in. I think it's important as these ideas, and so this this is, we're acting as self-criticism. Once ideas become received opinions, and you know my big idea of the Blairite revolution, the need for the great repeal and the restoration, once they start to become received opinions, opinion, they need criticism. They need debate.
00:01:38
Speaker
mean, one of the things that are so catastrophic about the Blairite revolution is precisely the curtailing of public debate. you Why this sort of thing is so important. So and after having flagellated myself a little, I'm here now to be stroked and purred by you.
Critique of Blairite Revolution
00:01:57
Speaker
Well, sadly, in many ways, I think we are a long way from having that opinion become received wisdom. so I'm not worried about it yet. Well, you know, in in the Times this morning, the the person who represents what I would regard as the decaying heart of the unipartitory party, Matthew Parris, was suddenly saying, well, Thatcher was right.
00:02:22
Speaker
There needs to be, looking back to the 1970s, not, of course, producing the proper bio diagnosis, but actually recognizing that exactly as Thatcher and people like Keith Joseph, see those remarkable people in both the Center for Policy Studies, which Keith Joseph founds, and the Institute of Economic Affairs, which was significantly older, that you to to to parody Shakespeare, something is rotten in the state of Denmark.
00:02:50
Speaker
Something has gone fundamentally wrong with the country, with and indeed with the party. And even when you get absolute old-fashioned outliers like Paris, what...
00:03:04
Speaker
sensing this, this is, I think, I think it's an absolutely key point. It means that however however much they don't really understand it, they perceive, they feel. you know you You were talking about those vast revolutions.
00:03:19
Speaker
um What is striking is some of them are apparently terribly unexpected. they They capture people by surprise. You will remember the extraordinary, wonderful description of the French aristocracy on the eve of the revolution, that they were treading on an abyss strewn with flowers.
00:03:40
Speaker
Life had never been better, never been more comfortable, never had been more elegant. And then suddenly, The flowers part, the precipice, the fall of the precipice, the fall of the guillotine, if you were lucky, and something very much more unpleasant, if you weren't. But I think um um ah other um in other on other occasions, and I think this is one of them, and you use that interesting term, slow burn.
00:04:08
Speaker
There have been intimations. There have been senses coming from quite a long time in the past, echoing, in some cases, almost at random. So. so let let' and And it's interesting what you said there around how you can feel this happening. And I speak to people in my other capacity hosting a show on JB News, people on the street who won't be able to give you exact data points, but people feel this. They feel this is happening in the country.
00:04:35
Speaker
let let's sit Let's set the stage for people who may not be aware of of the intricacies of what we're talking about.
Blair's Vision for Britain
00:04:41
Speaker
What do you mean when you say the term slow burn revolution? What has happened since 1997? What are the characteristics and what are the implications?
00:04:49
Speaker
Right. Why do I call it a revolution? You summarized it well. It seems to me that the, and indeed Blair summarized it well. The key figure in this is Tony Blair.
00:05:01
Speaker
ah Or you could possibly say Blair was the front man and the Probably, though, because the, as it were, the the the detailed historical work has yet to be done. In other words, I've been simply looking at the broad phenomena because it's relatively recently. We don't have access to private papers and that sort of thing. But it looks as though the key intellectual force was more Gordon Brown, the kind of terrible twin of Tony Blair, and more obscure figures like Charlie Faulkner.
00:05:32
Speaker
And Faulkner, I think, may have been at the heart of the legal revolution, which was a central part of this, and certainly gives a key speech in 2003.
00:05:44
Speaker
I call it a revolution because Blair did. Blair said, listen to what he says. Britain is a new country. Now, that in one sense, we all fell about, or call Britannia.
00:05:58
Speaker
and Britain is the old England, really. is We should call Britain Anglo-Britain. The core, the historic core of Britain is England, England is the oldest, I think this is fair to say, continuously in existence nation-state in the world.
00:06:16
Speaker
It has got a continuous history from the ah late Dark Ages to the present. It's got substantially, or it had before 1997, a continuous constitutional history from Magna Carta from 1215 onwards.
00:06:31
Speaker
But here is Blair saying, We're going to be a new country. As I said, laughed. Well, I didn't completely laugh. Let me tell you what I did on election night 1997.
00:06:44
Speaker
I spent it down with my head down the lavatory, vomiting up very expensive champagne. You were talking about a feeling. I knew something was going to go wrong.
00:06:55
Speaker
It took me 25 years to work out what. Because what Blair decided to do was literally, and this is a genuinely revolutionary idea, the French in 1789 wanted to make France the oldest then, the oldest, the greatest, the most powerful, the holiest, the holies see eldest son of the church, monarchy in Europe. They wanted to make it a new country, and they did.
00:07:26
Speaker
which is why France has never, ever recovered political stability. Whilst we're witnessing, even now, the collapse of the fifth, the fifth of its five republics, alongside the earlier collapse of two monarchies, two empires, and this bizarre thing called a prince presidency of 1848.
00:07:46
Speaker
Blair tried to do the same in England, and it seems to me, in Britain, and it seems to me he came within a whisker of doing it. And he did something that not even the French revolutionaries dared to do, the point that you mentioned.
00:07:59
Speaker
This new country was to have a new population. that extra The Nether phrase, you know the I think it's Andrew Nether, who was the was the bureaucrat who who, as it were, pulled pulled the lid off,
00:08:13
Speaker
and um increasing immigration to rub the population's nose in diversity. It was something, it was the most audacious attempt. It was genuinely trying to reinvent a country and even reinvent its population.
00:08:29
Speaker
And I think that what we can see, we can the the idea of the immigration is now completely in people's minds. Everybody now understands that. But what is much more important and why the immigration has been so powerful, and why it has had such extraordinarily unchecked effects, why indeed woke has been so extraordinarily powerful in Britain, despite the shallowness of its roots, despite the absurdity of its arguments, it's all due to what Blair did to the actual structures of government.
Challenges to English Governance Traditions
00:09:03
Speaker
Because what he did was to say, Do you know what? Like the French Revolution is in 1789, I don't like 800 years history. I don't like what it's given us. I want to do something different. Broadly, the the to put 800 years into a nutshell, the great peculiarity, and this again is something we've deliberately forgotten,
00:09:28
Speaker
The great triumph of England was to invent not only modernity in a general sense, hence the Industrial Revolution, the Commercial Revolution, the British Empire, which is the first stage of globalization, the extraordinary revolution in science in the late 17th century, and so on, and so on, and so on.
00:09:48
Speaker
the key The key glory of England, oh, and again, this extraordinary language with its unique flexibility and subtlety, but the great glory of England alongside all of those, and I would argue as the actual foundation.
00:10:02
Speaker
Here again, this is something very important. It's not the economy is stupid. Yes, the economy is very important. But obviously, the Industrial Revolution couldn't have been couldn't have resulted from the economy.
00:10:15
Speaker
The economy itself is shaped by political and social factors. And the extraordinary thing about Anglo-Britain is it invents this totally novel idea.
00:10:27
Speaker
which is encased in a single word, this peculiar Anglo-Norman word, parliament, that idea of representative self-government.
00:10:38
Speaker
The idea that law is something you make yourself do. which is why, you know, you have this quaint, still we just cling on to it, this quaint notion of an unarmed police force, that you have an unarmed police force, a citizen police force, because they're enforcing not an alien law on a subject population, but they're enforcing a self-made law on a free population.
00:11:02
Speaker
So it's an extraordinary concept, and it's fused in this idea of parliament, this idea of representation, the idea that law is made by everybody in a country, by the either by their representatives or by themselves sitting in parliament. In other words, it's an idea which is pre-democratic, but is one that naturally adapted to democracy.
00:11:26
Speaker
why Anglo-Britain alone, all great European countries, avoids a revolution in the age of of democracy, in the age of the rising, and using Marxist terms, the rising bourgeoisie in the 19th century, because we had a political structure that could accommodate For Blair, he loathed it.
00:11:46
Speaker
And this is a key thing we have to understand about the new left. Their contempt for the people. Their contempt for popular opinion. Their sneer.
00:11:57
Speaker
All that was brilliantly understood by the great prophet. Remember, the great prophet of all of this is George Orwell. The man who understood. The man, again, you you referred to smell, to sense, to feelings.
00:12:11
Speaker
One of the things that's astonishing in Orwell's writing is his sense of smell. The great essays, and the down and out in Paris and London and whatever, those great essays are essays in which they're essays of intimation, of feeling, of sensing.
00:12:26
Speaker
And and he sensed what was he sensed what was going on. And what Blair wants to do is to create something quite different, It's a world of the superior, the elite, the expert.
00:12:41
Speaker
And it happens in two ways. You devolve power deliberately. And it's really important we understand this. You deliberately mistrust democracy. you mistrust democracy to the point at which you actually have to rename it and reinvent
Impact of Expert-Led Governance
00:12:56
Speaker
it.
00:12:56
Speaker
And you denounce proper democracy with this new thing called populism, which is yeah in one is Latin, the other Greek, but you you sneer at. And you then deliberately hive off power in two directions.
00:13:10
Speaker
On the one hand, to expert committees, single-issue committees headed by the Monetary Policy Committee of the Bank of England, English Nature, and the the Climate Change Committee and whatever.
00:13:23
Speaker
And on the other hand, to law. And you completely alter the relationship between law and parliament. Now, sorry, I've been going on a long time. Do you do you want do you have to question me on these? do you want continue my position?
00:13:39
Speaker
I think this is important framing because we will get to the implications of this change shortly, which are the immigration, economic, cultural changes. But this is the framing. Okay, let's let's complete the framework. Thank you. ah just yeah I just wanted your judgment.
00:13:53
Speaker
And right, if we then look at the role of the expert. Now, remember, experts are a very good thing. One of the reasons, Will, you're talking to me is I am an expert.
00:14:05
Speaker
I'm in fact quite a distinguished expert in my own field of history. I've done important things and whatever. But that does not confer on me any right to apply that expertise unchecked politically.
00:14:20
Speaker
This is the key point. We instead, and or Blair instead, have this extraordinary idea that the right people to judge interest rates, for example, is the Monetary Policy Committee of the Bank of England,
00:14:33
Speaker
who is a collection of professional economists. Now, economists are quite important people, but they are not, and they have, of course, absolutely no democratic mandate, whatever.
00:14:46
Speaker
They pursue a series of professional academic arguments and and whatever. And ah Similarly, with English nature, and indeed with English nature, you begin to see the profound dangers of this ah when it's run by a man called to Tony Juniper, who is actually a fanatic.
00:15:04
Speaker
And we've got a brilliant example. All of these are standing committees. By the way, do you know how many of them there are? There are 444. for for Or rather, my left-wing friends tell me with a look of horror on my face, I must remember Labour got rid of seven of has got rid of seven of them.
00:15:24
Speaker
It's created others, but we'll we'll leave that out. and so they they these this These are the quangos. These are the quangos. They got rid of the biggest of them all, the NHS quango. And then it got rid, it discovered, you know, how many quangos there were just looking at how well hospitals are performing.
00:15:42
Speaker
Six separate quangos, each one of which would have a staff aboard. It would have a chairman paid some tens of thousands of years. It would have a chief executive paid several, probably 150 250,000 a year. But we've got the answer why we can see how all this is so bad.
00:16:02
Speaker
We were actually governed by a quango. back during COVID, when there was this funny thing, if you remember, called SAGE, the Scientific Advisory Group.
00:16:13
Speaker
And that was the model, quite. Now, there were some very respectable people. There was Sir Patrick Nurse, who is a Nobel Prize winner. There were also frauds, let's call them by their proper name.
00:16:24
Speaker
The two Neil Fergusons, I must distinguish, otherwise shall be sued for libel. And And the good Neil Ferguson, who is my friend and colleague, the historian, and the bad, the fraudulent Neil Ferguson and at Imperial College.
00:16:36
Speaker
they mo ah The mock, um as it were, epidemia epidemiological, what a mouthful, statistician who got us wrong on BSE, got us wrong on foot of mouth, and got us ultra wrong on COVID.
00:16:49
Speaker
Now, yes. but we've had we've we've We've had the good one on this podcast. We have not had the bad one on this podcast. Indeed. But just just think of what happened during COVID. You had there a single issue committee committed to one thing, trying to stop anybody dying of COVID.
00:17:06
Speaker
Now, that's a worthy aim. But look at what the consequences were. They decided it was so important to stop anybody dying of COVID that it didn't matter if they died of cancer or heart disease or anything else, because you know
Governance Trade-offs and Quangos
00:17:20
Speaker
what? We shut down the and entire remaining operations of the NHS and turned it into the National COVID Service.
00:17:28
Speaker
We then decided, on absolutely no proper scientific grounds whatever, that we needed lockdown. We decided lockdown had to apply universally, so it applied even to schoolchildren, who were practically at zero risk of contacting COVID.
00:17:44
Speaker
We did all of this, of course, at the cost of the economy, because in order to have a lockdown, you had to have furlough. And yeah in order to have furlough, you had to do what? Well, you had to borrow the equivalent amount of money that you needed for a middling-sized war.
00:18:01
Speaker
This shows you what happens when, in that wonderful phrase, We don't know whether it's Churchill or whether it's Teddy Roosevelt. They have that marvelous saying, you want scientists on tap, but not on top.
00:18:15
Speaker
And what we saw is what happens when you have a single issue committee. You sacrifice to save, in fact, it turns out, a tiny number of lives. Remember, the average age of death of COVID is 82.
00:18:27
Speaker
eighty two The average age of death is 81. eight one So as I said, get COVID, live longer. And and and they think about it. To do that, to save...
00:18:39
Speaker
a relatively small number of lives. Indeed, it's not clear whether the ah whether the decisions we took did. and You bankrupted the country on the one hand. You destroyed the habits of work on the other because you gave people money for doing nothing.
00:18:54
Speaker
You wrecked the educational opportunities of entire generations of school children. You set by cancer care, I would argue, by 30 years in this country, if you actually look at That's the problem with the right thing.
00:19:11
Speaker
So I understand that argument, and I understand the argument that government is about trade-offs. That's what makes it. That's right. This is what we're saying. We've deliberately stopped this. So you're now in this mad situation but you know when you're trying to build HS2.
00:19:26
Speaker
What does English nature do? English nature come along and says, oh, bats are are very important. There are some very important bats here. And you then force them to spend a hundred million pounds building the most luxurious bat.
00:19:42
Speaker
but if you You could build the Ritz four times, many times over for that. you could yeah The bats could have a personal butler. and no serious No, seriously, seriously, it is absolutely demented.
00:19:57
Speaker
and The counter-argument, of course, which someone like Blair would say, is that this depoliticizes issues that should not be political. Take, for example, i and that just just quickly just just quickly, because I want to pick up a particular example of an independent federal bank.
00:20:15
Speaker
you know and Now, this is common practice amongst Western countries. And and I know there was skepticism there from you around having an independent Fed bank which determines interest rates. Now, someone would say that that is important because otherwise interest rates are determined by a ruling government that would say, want to keep interest rates low all the time so voters are happier.
00:20:36
Speaker
well but How do you respond to that argument that these sorts of independent bodies are important as a way to depoliticise issues that should not be political? On the contrary, almost every issue is political.
00:20:49
Speaker
and This is a mad idea that the deployment of resources, the the all the trade-offs that are represented by interest rate settlements are proper, for example – are properly political.
00:21:02
Speaker
The management of the currency by the Bank of England and the Bank Management Office since 1997, and more particularly ah since 2010, has been appalling. if you If you look at our the levels of our inflation, ah if you look at the crazy fact we are the only developed economy that actually is issued at a time of zero inflation and virtually zero interest rates.
00:21:26
Speaker
We issued inflation-linked bonds. Now, that is madness. In other words, you are it's ah guarantee people bought them because it was a guaranteed bet against the government. All the experts, of course, thought we were in this wonderful world in which interest rates would remain for forever low.
00:21:46
Speaker
in which there will be zero inflation, in which you know the the the the the monetary gods have been you know that torn the ah torn at the bowels of Western society since the Second World War, all been tamed.
00:21:58
Speaker
The folly, the arrogance of the single-issue expert. i mean I'm sorry, politics is the way you deal with things. Politics is the only way in which you can peacefully manage manage the necessary trade-offs.
00:22:13
Speaker
All decisions involve that careful balancing.
Philosophical Critique of Governance
00:22:17
Speaker
Again, you know the the whole way we've operated with English Nature, as so the whole way the Climate Change Committee has operated is simply insane.
00:22:26
Speaker
You have pursued quasi-religious. Because again, one of the problems with many of these things is, and we saw it again, with COVID is you enlist science and you actually turn it into a religious creed. Now, that again is one of the, all of this stuff is profoundly, I'm an academic. one All of this stuff is profoundly corrupting of academic life.
00:22:51
Speaker
When you start to talk about the science, science's criticism, science's argument, science's debate is not received wisdom. And this is the problem when you actually, when science and things like the Grantham Institute, which used to be at LSE, are a disgrace to the name of science because they become, they actually become publicly funded ah bodies under the name of science, sponsoring a particular group of essentially and immensely costly political demands.
00:23:22
Speaker
So I think it corrupts science as much as it corrupts government. And the other thing that I think is corrupted even more, I'm using this word corruption, very deliberately. You know, we get tremendously excited about Tum's hapeneer or there or whether somebody has paid fat or, you know, fiddled whatever it is, a few tens of thousands of pounds on ah on ah on whatever the thing is called, stamp duty, on their houses. Now, that's important.
00:23:49
Speaker
But what we are talking about are gigantic mismanagements of public funds, huge queues, and also the complete, in the name of climate change, the complete hobbling of our economy, the destruction of our industry, the destruction of entire communities, the destruction of our future, all in the name of a misplaced expertise.
00:24:12
Speaker
Remember again, you know just just just because I know you like to put things in the big picture, and we are dealing with all of this with one of the great eternal debates in politics, going right back to the politics begins not as the modern heresy ah with Christianity. It begins with Greece and Rome.
00:24:30
Speaker
It begins with Greece. And there are the two great political theorists of that supreme age of Greece and in fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries in which Plato, on the one hand, Plato believes in this,
00:24:43
Speaker
Plato believes that government is about the expert. He believes, forgive me, sorry, he believes in the rule of the philosopher king.
00:24:55
Speaker
And you know what? He also does something else. He believes in the rule, the important it's so important that he believes in what he calls the noble lie. the that you have to have an enforced belief, an enforced belief system.
00:25:10
Speaker
So there's no accident, just to conclude this section before we move on to another one, they there's no accident that we've seen this extraordinary curtailment of freedom of speech. It's part of the rule of the expert.
00:25:23
Speaker
It's part of the rule of received wisdom and has been going right back to the Greeks.
Legal System Overhaul
00:25:28
Speaker
And then the other and You know, there's that wonderful phrase in Gilbert and Sullivan on politics in Iolanthe about every boy and every gal that's born into the world alive is either a little liberal or allow a little conservative. hi Well, you're not, I think. You're either a Platonist like Blair or you're an Aristotelian like you and me because Aristotle has got this complete, complete counter-argument to expertise.
00:25:54
Speaker
He says, the judge of the meal is not the cook. However grand he may be, however many Michelin stars, however much he preens and pisses and punces around, the judge of the meal is the eater.
00:26:11
Speaker
That's what politics is about. And that's what that's the that's the key element. But the other catastrophe of Blair... was, and the other way in which you shifted power from parliament, was to the law.
00:26:23
Speaker
And I think, I would argue this is even more damaging. i mean I mean, you can literally quantify the damage of the quanguils I mentioned. There are 400 and odd of them.
00:26:35
Speaker
They control an entire... ah third, more than a third of government expenditure, 500 billion pounds a year, which you and me can do nothing about whatever. So you can quantify that.
00:26:49
Speaker
But I think the unquantifiable, because it's so great damage, is done by Blair's changes to the legal system. the in in in in In, again, that view of Anglo-Briton that I talked about before, there was one supreme body, and it was supreme over everything.
00:27:11
Speaker
Parliament, it controls the church. It incorporates the executive. ah It incorporates the legislature. It incorporates everything within this idea of the crown in parliament. In other words, it's the final authority of the sovereign state, as you'll see immediately.
00:27:27
Speaker
ah The childish analyses of politics, which banned departments of government like that at UCL, and even worse, the Bennett Institute at Cambridge, I'll name names, teach, a separation of powers manifestly doesn't apply and never has applied in Britain.
00:27:43
Speaker
But the problem with Blair was he didn't want that necessary correlate of that, that Parliament is sovereign and supreme. he And again, it's really important.
00:27:54
Speaker
We're used to the idea is on the left, of, you know, Nigel Farage trotting off to Mar-a-Lago, looking at the court, always slightly from the outside, it has to be said.
00:28:08
Speaker
of the court of King Donald and seeing, for example, Elon Musk doing doge and immediately coming back and setting up a doge in Kent County Council, which is even more of a failure than doge in D.C. But what we forget is the left has been equally obsessed by America.
00:28:25
Speaker
And particularly by the broad constitutional outlines of America, but more particularly by the operations of the Democrat Party. what what the What Blair and Brown tried to do in many ways was to Americanize the British Constitution.
00:28:42
Speaker
So you create this extraordinary, this nonsensical thing in a country with a sovereign parliament. You create a Supreme Court. Now, it's a deranged idea. it it sets inevitable conflict.
00:28:56
Speaker
You got this extraordinary business at the time of Brexit, where the Supreme Court ruled that Boris Johnson broke the law by proroguing Parliament. In other words, a tactical suspension of a parliamentary sitting.
00:29:11
Speaker
Now, we'll This is where me, the historian, comes in. That has been a regular type technique for managing parliament as far back as we can go. For example, prorogation in 1659, 1658, 59, was used to through the Elizabethan settlement.
00:29:26
Speaker
was used to force through the elizabethan settle It's similarly used to force through ah by the Labour government of 45 the revision to the Parliament Act. is ah Because parliaments have to be managed.
00:29:39
Speaker
If you have a non-manageable parliament, as you do in France at the moment, this entire system of government collapses. the But, oh, for the Supreme Court, this collection of infinitely learned and infinitely naive lawyers, that wasn't enough.
00:29:54
Speaker
They rule it illegal, and they do, of course, break one of the foundation documents of our constitutional history, the ah the the Bill of Rights of 1689. But that's, I think, only the superfluity.
00:30:08
Speaker
What we've got is something much more fundamental, Will. The changes that were carried out under Blair cut at the very heart of the nation, um the nation legally defined.
00:30:19
Speaker
They cut to the very heart of the idea that government is responsible to its own people. They cut to the very heart of the idea of equality before the law.
00:30:30
Speaker
In other words, this is why, again, I use that term, revolutionary. They subvert what had been good about England, Anglo-Britain, in exactly the same way that the French Revolution did in France.
00:30:42
Speaker
And at the heart of the process, and this is, again, where people like you and me have such an extraordinary problem, the left captured language. The less good words. Because what could be nicer than human rights?
00:30:59
Speaker
Who could possibly oppose human rights? I always say they're like Paddington Bear. You know, it's got little red squidgy pork pie hat on. It's got little, little, oh, so sweetly written brown, traditional brown luggage label around its neck, you know.
00:31:15
Speaker
with Per Wu, with, of course, a little lift. It's got a battered leather suitcase in it. It's a refugee, and you know it. you know That's what it is. But you know what?
00:31:27
Speaker
They're subversive. They're dangerous. What we forget is, when incorporated the European Convention on Human Rights in 1997-98, it was literally incorporating cancer.
00:31:39
Speaker
it was literally incorporating ah cancer It was a foreign body that has progressively undone the law of England.
00:31:50
Speaker
And we need to understand this. It was a different system. It incorporated a different set of ideas, a different set of values, and that cancer as metastasized.
00:32:02
Speaker
And we will get into that in more detail. But to summarize where Tony Blair comes in in 1997 and then Gordon Brown accelerates this by effectively taking power away from elected representatives and giving them to experts and bureaucrats on the one side and then unelected judges on the other side.
00:32:21
Speaker
Correct. Now, if those two groups of people were doing, now, on principle, I am opposed to that fundamentally, but If those two groups of people were doing things which I liked, I'd have less of a problem.
00:32:34
Speaker
But it seems like they are all captured by the same type of progressive, and I don't like the word, but globalist ideology, which is a rejection of the nation state, an embrace of identity politics, all this sort of stuff which we have seen across those institutions, and it is pretty much universal across the quangos and across the judiciary.
00:32:58
Speaker
how that bo yeah And across the universities and across the Labour Party and across local government and across the entire network of charities that support all this.
00:33:09
Speaker
How has that happened? Well, I think, again, it needs turning
Progressive Laws and Sovereignty Challenges
00:33:14
Speaker
around. I think that... why Why woke has become so extraordinarily important in Britain?
00:33:21
Speaker
And remember, the arguments of woke are nonsensical. mean, if you look at the arguments for the idea that men and women can change sex, they're deranged. I mean, it you said he a man who believes that he is a woman should be treated gently, but he should be, you know, in restrictive custody.
00:33:38
Speaker
I mean, he's mad if somebody thinks they are Napoleon. mean, We treat them gently, but, you know, we put them into long-term care. And it seems to me to be exactly the same. It's simply mad.
00:33:49
Speaker
But the problem is that the madness is legally entrenched because you mentioned Tony Blair being succeeded by Gordon Brown. The key act of parliament of the very short Gordon Brown ministry was pushed through by Harriet Harman. It was the Equality Act.
00:34:06
Speaker
And this, again, equality, what could be a nicer word? But the trouble is you're legislating an abstraction, and it does two staggeringly bizarre things.
00:34:18
Speaker
On the one hand, it legislates the Marxist labor theory of value. So that one act of parliament is responsible, on the one hand, for bankrupting Birmingham,
00:34:29
Speaker
Because it enables judge judges, judges to set wages, judges to set wages. The other thing is, it is directly responsible for all our problems about transgenderism, because in its list of protected characteristics, one is gender, this imaginary thing in which you self, really you self-advent.
00:34:50
Speaker
assign the externals of sexuality, and the other is sex. Now, course, the two fight each other. And we know, and all this was predicted back in the 1790s, when, remember, all these ideas are taken directly from the French Revolution.
00:35:05
Speaker
The first declaration of the rights of man in these abstract terms is French. And it was predicted precisely by a great Englishman, by Jeremy Bentham, that it would do exactly what the incorporation of the European Declaration of Human Rights into common law in 1997 did.
00:35:23
Speaker
It would set everybody against everybody else. And in other words, over race, over gender, over the two sexes, we're at perpetual war. with each other because of this nonsense. it is it is it is simply It is simply absolutely catastrophic.
00:35:39
Speaker
But It's entrenched in law. And this is why I keep saying the it's all very well for wonderful people, and I'm not using that word satirically well at all, wonderful people like Andrew Doyle, Douglas Murray, again, and my friend Peter Whittle with the New Culture Forum to attack these nonsensical ideas.
00:35:59
Speaker
But the reason those ideas are so powerful, they're entrenched in law. This is what we need to understand. Again, let's just go back to the the incorporation the, oh, forgive me, sorry, the human rights law.
00:36:16
Speaker
Again, we don't understand just how utterly destructive it is. Human rights law deliberately, now let's be quite clear about this. If you think of the centerpiece of progressivism, you've referred to globalists.
00:36:30
Speaker
ah In other words, the idea that we're all one people. There is, yeah you know, the newly landed immigrant from Afghanistan, give or take the odd murder or rape, you know, will settle down and learn, you know, to enjoy Saturday afternoons munching a bag of crips and watching Manchester United.
00:36:49
Speaker
They're all fundamentally the same. That is actually conceptually written into human rights law. If you think about it, the idea that there is a European or a universal law, human rights law.
00:37:04
Speaker
That means it's above the nation. That means it's beyond the ability, as we've seen, beyond the ability of parliament to control it. It also means that to say that you're English or British is a vulgarism, that there are no nations.
00:37:19
Speaker
We are simply one human race. It says there shouldn't actually be a frontier. Didn't you know what? The Green Party, under its delusional new leader, Zak Polanski, says exactly that.
00:37:32
Speaker
And you know, there's a direct connection here. You may remember ah Mr. Polanski's, ah by the way, his real name is David Polden. His essential professional qualification was hypnotism.
00:37:43
Speaker
And he sold his services in Harlow Street for growing ladies' breasts by thinking about it. And his his views on these matters are, again, this bizarre conjuring of language. But the the worst thing is,
00:37:59
Speaker
I've told ah said that human rights law dissolves the nation state. It actually, worse is actually what the man who is responsible for incorporating all of this does to it in Britain.
00:38:11
Speaker
And again, this is done with no involvement of Parliament. It's done purely on legal authority, the legal authority of a man called Tom Bingham, who was the last senior law lord, that's to say the head of the appellate committee of the House of Lords before it was turned into the Supreme Court.
00:38:31
Speaker
And he writes a book on the rule of law which incorporates, which says our law incorporates by definition human rights law and international law, hence the Chagos Islands nonsense.
00:38:44
Speaker
But if you look at what he says about human rights law, just let me finish, because he uses words that to explain the whole woke and explain the entire legal foundation of woke.
00:38:55
Speaker
This is what he says. And I'm quoting, and by the way, the speech was given in Australia. So it's very fitting that we're coming full circle. He says, human rights law, by definition, is anti-democratic insofar as it is counter-majoritarian.
00:39:13
Speaker
It prefers minorities to the majority, and it protects specific minorities. that He lists them. They include minorities.
00:39:23
Speaker
the Roma, the most indigestible social group. They include radical religions. look at what's going on now in Hansworth.
00:39:34
Speaker
They include the mentally sick and the criminal. If you want to explain what's gone wrong over the our inability to remove criminals, the mentally sick and whatever, and the violent illegal immigrant, and by the way, he says that exactly the same protections apply to the illegal immigrant as they do to the citizen, a deranged notion, but even worse,
00:40:00
Speaker
protecting the mentally sick. There's no accident that Rudacabana and Calocane were allowed to wander free. It's written into this absurd version of law.
00:40:12
Speaker
because this well And what, of course, it does work. And you know this. The whole point about woke is it stands values on its head. It says the majority, the white majority, are wicked and must fundamentally defer to the black and brown minority who intrinsically are superior. Well, do you know what?
00:40:34
Speaker
That's exactly what Bingham said the purpose of human rights law was. And this is why we cannot get rid of it without exactly what I'm talking about, the great repeal of the Blairite restoration the the blairite legislation.
00:40:50
Speaker
Until that's done, we're fookling at the margins. And the other thing that's the vast problem about what Blair did, he created a state structure which is so complicated in which the various forces are all at war with each other because you've got a tradition of parliamentary government, which is wholly hostile to this kind of thing You've also got human rights law creating groups that all fight each other.
00:41:14
Speaker
You've got excessive judicial review, which stops anything doing. You've got all the competing quangos who all disagree with each other. So on the one hand, the government chatters about growth, about the need to build.
00:41:26
Speaker
And English Nature says, no. And you know, you mustn't. We've got bats. Climate change says, no you know ah we've we've we've We've got to prioritize this, that, and the other. And so even when you've got somebody like, remember, it's very important we understand.
00:41:40
Speaker
Keir Starmer, you talked at the beginning ah about the the values of of what Michael Goh wonderfully called the blob, the blob, the people who run the quangas, people who run the Labour Party.
00:41:52
Speaker
the people The people who run the BBC, the people who run the judiciary. Outrageously, it is now a condition of being a barrister that you actively support DEI, diversity, equality, and inclusion. What we've what we've done, in other words,
00:42:09
Speaker
is to pervert our entire structure in support to support the perversions of
Bureaucratic Expansion and Reform Possibilities
00:42:17
Speaker
woke. And so until we undo the legal structure, we can never break these bonds. But the staggering thing is that evil Even Keir Starmer sort of understands this.
00:42:29
Speaker
Why do you have a government? Is it 168 majority? Is incapable of doing anything. And you know, Starmer is the quintessence of this. Starmer is at the heart, he is a human rights lawyer, and he is part of a close-knit group of human rights lawyers.
00:42:46
Speaker
We've just mentioned the Chagos Islands. they The man, the QC, the KC, who acts for acts for Mauritius, that's to say for a hostile government, is called Philippe Sands.
00:42:58
Speaker
He is the man who outrageously, when Britain lost in the International Court of Justice, toasted the humiliation of his own country. i mean, that is treason.
00:43:09
Speaker
he But let me finish, because it's really important we establish the degrees of connection. Who wrote Tom Bingham's obituary? A huge, crawling obituary in the Manchester Guardian, the Guardian.
00:43:22
Speaker
I think it was the longest obituary that the Guardian had ever published for somebody who was not a head of state. It was Philippe Sands. Who gives the Bingham lecture last year but, well, interestingly enough, Keir Starmer's best buddy, Richard Hermer, the Attorney General. They're a close-knit group, but even they can't make the bloody thing work.
00:43:47
Speaker
And ah this this, I think, is our, this alongside, of course, the fact that the structure is also profoundly detrimental economically. This, I think, will be the salvation.
00:43:59
Speaker
and The structure is actually breaking the state. It's acting... I mean, ah the you in the background, what it all is, it's the final culmination of the bureaucratic state that was imposed on Britain beginning with the First World War.
00:44:16
Speaker
ah your the The beginning of the cabinet office, of the the whole of this machine is 1916 when Asquith falls as prime minister and is replaced by David Lloyd George at the Great Crisis.
00:44:29
Speaker
of the First World War. And from that point onwards, bureaucracy has simply grown. There have tiny pullbacks under Thatcher and whatever until the end entire machinery of the state is taken over.
00:44:41
Speaker
It's why I call it a cancer. it and It is a genuine cancer because it stops what was the traditional glory of England. The traditional glory of England was self-government.
00:44:52
Speaker
It was units that you ran yourself that you were involved in. The network of charities, of friendly societies, of trade unions, of churches, and all the rest of it. And what's happened in the 20th century, all of those have withered and died.
00:45:06
Speaker
And this dreadful state structure has taken them over. And it's doing what it did to China. It's doing what it did to ancient Egypt. It's doing what it did to Rome.
00:45:17
Speaker
They were all pulled down by these gigantic tentacle-like structures of the state. ah Interestingly enough, the origin of origin of it all, of course, goes back to the Northcutt Trevelyan reforms in the 1840s and 50s of the Victorian period.
00:45:35
Speaker
One great Victorian politician argues against them, Disraeli. The Israeli, this man of staggeringly wide reading, immediately says so it will lead us to Mandarin China or to ancient Egypt. And he was, of course, absolutely right.
00:45:53
Speaker
Well, keep the... untangling or the destruction of that state apparatus at the back of your mind? Because I think that's the right question to end on.
00:46:03
Speaker
If we do get, say, a reform government in three and a half, four years, what capacity will they actually have to implement their changes given that apparatus?
Cultural Changes and Integration Issues
00:46:11
Speaker
But hold that in the back of your mind because there's a few things i want to squeeze in before we get there.
00:46:16
Speaker
And one is on culture and your again, from what most people would be a self-evident truth that not all cultures are equal. Now, I think many people in the United Kingdom, and Australia for that matter, tolerated, if not embraced, multiculturalism when the deal was basically along the lines of, well, we can get, you know,
00:46:37
Speaker
great Greek restaurants, plus Australian or British values. Or we can get great Thai food, but there is an overarching framework of Western liberal values, and therefore things kind of work.
00:46:49
Speaker
Something has happened in the last 20-odd years, and the elephant in the room is the increasing immigration from Islamic fundamentalist countries. How worried are you about the Islamification of the United Kingdom?
00:47:02
Speaker
Profoundly. Again, it's one of my favorite memories, Will. I have very many cherished memories of Australia. And one of my favorites, this is back in 89, when if you met me, you're far too young to remember, but there was the pilot strike.
00:47:16
Speaker
So I as a foreigner could fly around Australia and Australians couldn't, which meant I could have the presidential suite of the Four Seasons in Cairns to myself. And I've never got such bad sunburn in my life. But that another matter?
00:47:29
Speaker
But one of my favorite memories is the the the wonderful restaurant on the that amazing Horseshoe Bay in Cairns in the middle, which was Australian one day and Japanese the next. And that's exactly what you're talking about.
00:47:44
Speaker
Run by a couple, you know, Australian-Japanese couple. Wonderful. What's gone wrong, I think, is very simple. Islam is different.
00:47:55
Speaker
the But it's also, we talk about the religion, yes, and I think the religion is problematic. But in Britain, it's been accompanied by very, very specific phenomenon. And that phenomenon has been analyzed.
00:48:07
Speaker
Again, we're talking about good experts. by a friend of mine, and a brilliant academic called Patrick Nash, who's written an extraordinary book on Islam and English law, and a great journalist, Matthew Sayed, has popularized this.
00:48:22
Speaker
And what they show, what the two of them concentrate on, is the peculiarity, if you look at what's going on in Birmingham at the moment and so on, or in Oldham, or in Rochdale, or in so many other places.
00:48:35
Speaker
It is not simply Islam. It is Islam in the form of individuals who belong to specific tribal or clan groups, ah and especially the Midi Puri from Pakistan.
00:48:50
Speaker
These are groups of people who intermarry at first cousin level. So they are effectively extended families. Entire areas are extended families.
00:49:01
Speaker
There is no notion of individual rights. There is no notion of individual responsibility at justice. Now, this is something that historically Western Europe, and particularly Britain, has deliberately broken. Our incredibly individualistic culture in which individual achievement, individual innocence or guilt is central to how we think, is totally subverted by this.
00:49:27
Speaker
And the thing that's terrifying about it is, of course, and If you have a highly individualistic society, in which, for example, you determine elections by the ballot box, if you have a Klan group that comes in, every individual in that Klan group, particularly the women and the younger people, will simply be told how to vote by the Klan leaders.
00:49:48
Speaker
When we have our police, our now, in my view, disgraced police force, who include groups that actually call themselves the Muslim Police Officers Association.
00:49:59
Speaker
What? they will say, we've talked with the community leaders. The most outrageous example was at the time of the reaction to the white riots. Let's call them by their proper name.
00:50:13
Speaker
Last summer, in the wake of Southport, in Ingestalip's constituency, one of these Muslim clams, the young men, all dressed up in black, many of them musk, carrying sticks and carrying baseball bats, and in some cases other weapons, all marched out. They actually did up a pub.
00:50:34
Speaker
People were rather badly injured. And they were then confronted by a Muslim police officer. who said the following, we've had a boys, we've, i can't do the accent, boys, we've had a conversation with your community leaders.
00:50:50
Speaker
Now, we don't want trouble, do we? Now, why don't you just disperse, go back to the mosque, and put your arms up there?
00:51:02
Speaker
Can you imagine? Can you imagine, after a bit of bother with Millwall, a local South London police officer says, mate, you know, don't want trouble, do we? Why don't you just go back to St. Vincent's Church, you know, and shove your knuckle dusters up ah in the vestry? Now, do be careful, you know, there are some rather valuable copes there. we don't but you The moment you do that, you realise...
00:51:28
Speaker
that we've now got a specific series of groupings. What is terrifying, of course, is significant parts of our machinery of government have actually been taken over by these clan structures.
00:51:42
Speaker
This is the background to what is just happening now in Birmingham over whether or not Aston Villa, who are about to play about the play the Maccabees, whether, that weather and again, the Maccabees supporters are by no means locks what.
00:51:58
Speaker
Don't think I'm a fool. But the problem is the the safety advisory group that is supposedly impartially advising on this. of course, consists of individuals who have already said it is outrageous that the team should be here anyway, because Israel is an apartheid genocidal state.
00:52:16
Speaker
In other words, that that you've got what in theory is an impartial advisory expert group. taken over by ah muslim extreme Muslim, Islamist, pro-Palestine faction, and, of course, entire parliamentary constituencies.
00:52:34
Speaker
It is perfectly clear. I mean, there's remarkable man working in Oldham, where two generations ago my family comes from, so I'm very familiar with it, who has been pointing out that what happens there is the entire machinery, the town council, the police, the social services,
00:52:52
Speaker
It's entirely taken over. And you see, I think what we need to understand well is, for the first time, we now have a political religion. We now have something, and the the the way it operates, and we I think we can best understand this by an analogy, it operates in exactly the same way that the Communist Party did in Russia or indeed still does in China.
00:53:17
Speaker
In Russia and China, I know more about Russia than I do about China, in in in in yeah in in the days of the Soviet Union, you had all the ordinary apparatus of the state.
00:53:29
Speaker
You had ministries, you had boards, you had parliaments, you got the whole lot. But all of them were just superficial. The key was you had party commissars, you members of the party, who alone enabled the formal machinery to work and controlled
Strategic Response to UK's Challenges
00:53:48
Speaker
it.
00:53:48
Speaker
Again, going back to George Orwell, that's what he's talking about in 1984, the party. the party And what you've now got is that structure, which is a politico-religious structure.
00:54:01
Speaker
Interestingly enough, Britain had this before, or thought it had it before. and In the 16th, 17th, and the early 18th century, but Roman Catholicism had a profoundly political aspect.
00:54:15
Speaker
It was associated with absolutism. It was associated with the enemy, first Spain and then France. And we had a series of policies that didn't actually, to begin with, they weren't very kind to individual Catholics, but it very quickly, we didn't we didn't have mass persecution. There wasn't what was done to Protestants in the Netherlands and or to heretics in Spain. there wasn't There weren't mass burnings and executions and whatever.
00:54:43
Speaker
there were There were, as a measured response, which curtailed political activity. It looked particularly at preventing the importation of Jesuits.
00:54:53
Speaker
It looked at stopping importation, importing foreign legislation. In other words, it it does it was designed to clip political wings by doing the least possible damage to the individual right of belief.
00:55:07
Speaker
I think we're going to need something like that. That historical analogy is interesting. And he these These historical analogies have been on my mind because this country has gone through dark times before.
00:55:20
Speaker
There have been plagues. There have been Vikings raiding the countryside. There have been world wars. I've heard you speak at length about the um IMF bailout in the 1970s, how you believe that we may be approaching something similar coming up.
00:55:34
Speaker
In terms of where we sit as a country today, the United Kingdom today, Where does this sit in terms of the darkness of times gone by? How is it the same? How is it different? How does it compare to the dark moments of times gone by?
00:55:46
Speaker
Well, I think in some ways it's worse. I mean, i i I made the repeated comparison with the 1970s and Margaret Thatcher. the And indeed, the the the resemblances are in great detail. and We needn't go into them. It's particularly striking if you look in terms of the Conservative Party, because one of the reasons that that this happened is that in 2010, when you might have expected an incoming conservative government to look back at what had been done and to say this is dreadful and that it needs undoing, in fact, politicians like David Cameron and arguably, I think, still worse, George Osborne said, oh, it's lovely.
00:56:26
Speaker
Let's do more of it. And so, you know, the crass judgment of the web but turns out to be right. There really is a uniparty. And it's a uniparty which has ruined Britain, and hence the extraordinary surge in the polls of reform.
00:56:42
Speaker
But there was a Thatcher back in the 70s. There was Keith Joseph. There was the Center for Policy Studies. There were very serious people.
00:56:54
Speaker
I see far less sign of that now. Now, what we've got to hope is that perhaps Farage, will grow. Now, I think Faraj is a remarkable individual.
00:57:06
Speaker
I think that he has shown an instinct and an understanding, which is truly impressive. On the other hand, he's never shown anything like what that even more bizarre figure Donald Trump has done. He's never shown that capacity act, to seize.
00:57:29
Speaker
And one of the things that's most impressed me this year has been... Trump, in many ways, mad. And I'm not sure I can get on with him terribly well.
00:57:40
Speaker
ah But thus those things are completely irrelevant. He's shown a monarchical capacity. There you've actually got a politician. And it's virtually unique. I mean, you you had one or two. You had somebody, you had people like John Howard and Albert, who actually, for example, on boats, did something.
00:57:59
Speaker
They said it will stop. And precisely, everybody hadn't been told the the tur told Trump that there was nothing you could do about the Mexican frontier. It stopped.
00:58:10
Speaker
Now, that's deeply impressive. I've never got a sense that Nigel had that capacity. But he will, if, look, the terrible thing.
00:58:22
Speaker
Supposing, and it is now likely, you the opinion polls are consistent, they are that ah the reform is now creating, and it's doing it from scratch, and it's making mistakes. Of course, it's making mistakes.
00:58:35
Speaker
If you look back at them the Tory and the Liberal parties, in the Conservative and Liberal parties, the 19th century, they made mistakes when they were trying to set, and the Labour Party at the beginning of the 20th, when they were trying to set up organizations. But it is growing at an astonishing rate.
00:58:51
Speaker
I am not a member. I remain a member of the Conservative Party. I speak, ah will be speaking ah in reform, conservative associations and whatever. I'm struck by the seriousness, the energy, the involvement of the members. It's profoundly impressive.
00:59:08
Speaker
But there's a terrible risk. It could be Trump won. It could be another Liz Truss. And it won't be forgiven. For it not to be, of course, there has to be, and it is beginning, and there's some signs of this, but it will require immense energy.
00:59:26
Speaker
It will require immense self-discipline. There will have to be what people like America First, what individuals like Stephen Miller,
00:59:37
Speaker
like um stephen mill um ah got gone out of my mind of my head, the Deputy Chief of Staff, Stephen... st Stephen Miller. Stephen Miller, sorry, its problem of being aged. Every so often pop ever ever so often from proper names go out of one's head.
00:59:53
Speaker
Stephen Miller, an extraordinary moment, the Trump's actual inauguration. You remember those... very, very swift scene, very quick swearing in in the rotunda, very different from the extended ceremonies that traditionally took place outside the Capitol.
01:00:09
Speaker
And then that immediate move into the Oval Office, Miller looking, I think, extraordinarily like a modern version of Thomas Cromwell. ah behind but behind Trump as a kind.
01:00:21
Speaker
You can see the resemblances to Henry VIII. A big orange man. and But what was he doing? That great pile of executive orders. yes And interestingly enough, at the one of the institutes that's working on the likely program for an incoming reform government in this country, I actually met ah individuals who'd been in America first, including one man who'd worked on one of those executive orders.
01:00:47
Speaker
And he told me how it had been done. One man working for years on one of those orders, stress-testing them against entire teams of lawyers. Because remember, reform will face the whole of that blob, all of those 444 quangos, entire legal structure,
01:01:04
Speaker
that and entire legal stuff check The civil service, the BBC, the bulk of the media will all be determined, the Bank of England, determined to do it down from day one.
01:01:18
Speaker
They need to look at what was done to this trial. They need to learn that lesson. They need to be ready. I'm afraid I don't like using words like coup, but the only way the French Revolution was stopped was was by were by a series of coups in which you cut this thing off the knees.
01:01:40
Speaker
And we will require, ah de I hope, a democratically powered one, a democratically empowered one. But it will have to be, you know, there's that wonderful phrase in the Bible that that that you have to be as meek as doves.
01:01:55
Speaker
that's the That's the democratic endorsement. And as wise as serpents. And we need the wisdom of the serpent. I'm afraid we probably also need the venom and the teeth and the coils of the serpent as well, because blob will not give way lightly.
01:02:15
Speaker
As an aside, I know for a fact that Tony Abbott will be listening to this interview, so I'm sure he'll appreciate that little nod. You pretty much answered what was going to be my final question, so I'll reframe it slightly from whether or not either a re-energized Conservative Party or Nigel Farage can take on that blob, to you are, David, you're still wonderfully sprightly, but dare I say probably closer to the end of your life than the start?
01:02:41
Speaker
ah Yeah. How do you hold out hope for the United Kingdom? Thank you very much. I keep my coffin next to the table. It's it's a reminder of mortality. I try it out. and but Do I feel the sink the silk lining is entirely comfortable?
01:02:58
Speaker
I replace the pillow from time to time as rheumatism can be. Very, very stoic. ah do do Do you hold out hope for the United Kingdom? Absolutely.
01:03:10
Speaker
I don't know. How can one say? I mean, I know what I do, and I know why I've decided to do it. You're right. I am in what is almost certain of the last decade of my life.
01:03:22
Speaker
I could be very agreeably frittering it away in comfortable retirement, or indeed I could be writing books and learned articles, or I could be listening to opera, or I could be doing 10,000 other things that I enjoy.
01:03:36
Speaker
But I decided but one has, going to use really old-fashioned words, a duty. There's a duty to try to do something. There's a duty to try to waken people up.
01:03:49
Speaker
And there's also something else. One of the things that's gone very badly wrong, and this again I think will offend people, is what I call a feminization of our politics.
01:04:00
Speaker
Value, like caring, compassion, now they're important. But finally, that's not what states are about. Finally, I'm afraid, you do need some of those old masculine virtues.
01:04:15
Speaker
You do need, above all, courage. And that you need something else, you know. Well, I'm aware, obviously, I'm a historian. I'm aware of how England, Britain,
01:04:28
Speaker
was there's this extraordinary term, ethnogenesis, the making birth of nations. Nations don't simply happen. They also conceive, they're developed, there are key individuals.
01:04:42
Speaker
And you go into somewhere like Westminster Abbey, or indeed into a little country churchyard, or into the National Portrait Gallery, and you look at them, and you walk past them, and you think of what they did, they thought, they said.
01:04:59
Speaker
And i wouldn't mind a place there. I think ambition, I think that awareness of ancestors, of present, of futurity.
01:05:12
Speaker
These are important. They matter. I don't want to be the last. I don't want, I'm just back from Italy. As you wander around Italy, you're so aware of those ends, the ends of Rome, the wandering in Herculaneum, Pompeii.
01:05:33
Speaker
You know, as you wander through Pompeii, or as you go, I did, to the wonderful Archaeological Museum in Naples, you i You wander into a gallery. They've taken frescoes off the walls. They're mounted.
01:05:47
Speaker
There's a tiny little section, Will, on painting the art of the painter in the ancient world. And it shows a painter who happens to be a woman, sitting, elegant, palette, brushes, easel.
01:06:03
Speaker
It shows the equipment, differential divider, the understanding of the art of perspective. you know what? It took us 1,800 years to recover that.
01:06:17
Speaker
Things die. i don't want to be at the dying fall of our own civilization. I think there is a chance to fight.
01:06:30
Speaker
The Muslim hordes were resisted. but They were turned back. They were turned back. Act in 1688 at Vienna.
01:06:41
Speaker
It can be done. It must be done. At least one should try. ble Poignant and powerful words to end on. David, this has been a great privilege for me. Thank you very much for your time.
01:06:54
Speaker
You too.