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Ep 22 - James Orr - What's Happening In The UK?
145 Plays23 days ago
On this episode of the Sphere Podcast, Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry, Publisher of Sphere Media, interviews James Orr, Associate Professor of Philosophy and Religion at the University of Cambridge, Chair of the Edmund Burke Foundation UK and Trustee of the Roger Scruton Legacy Foundation, about the state of politics and policy in Britain.
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Transcript
Introduction and Guests
00:00:00
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Hello everyone and welcome to the Low Production Values Fear podcast, which is shot as always from my terrorist hideout in the Sudan. ah I'm here with my co-host Vesta the Black Labrador and with my very good friend, ah one of the smartest people I know, James Spohr, who is a professor of something or other.
00:00:29
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
See, I told you, I said low production value, so I didn't even Google you before I started this.
00:00:30
James Orr
Actually,
00:00:35
James Orr
action correction, correction.
James Spohr's Background
00:00:37
James Orr
I'm an associate professor of something or other.
00:00:40
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Oh, that's... Oh, my... An associate professor. If I'd known, if I'd known... No, all joking aside, you're you're you're um you're great scholar of philosophy and theology um in the UK and a great...
00:00:58
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
um i i don't I don't know how to say this, but you have you have affiliations that you can talk about outside of academia, yes?
00:01:09
James Orr
Yes, I think that's fair.
00:01:12
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
So, well, describe them.
00:01:13
James Orr
Okay, fine. Well, um in addition to being associate professor of something or other at the University of Cambridge, I i moonlight... ah Well, it's not moonlighting.
00:01:24
James Orr
i One of the great... we will I think we might we might talk about this. you know One of the great things about having the privilege, the good fortune of of inhabiting the life of the mind is that one can be very free-ranging in one's engagements in the public square.
00:01:39
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:01:39
James Orr
And I think one has... indeed a public duty to justify the lavish taxpayer subsidies that is showered on these ancient places of learning to to model ah disagreement good disagreement, to inform a stressed and increasingly bewildered electorate.
00:01:59
James Orr
um And so in that capacity, with that in view, um I engage
Academic Engagement and Public Discourse
00:02:04
James Orr
in various things. So I'm chair of the Edmund Burke Foundation UK, which is the vehicle for national conservatism in the United Kingdom.
00:02:11
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:02:13
James Orr
ah that That is something which I am very passionate about. And that's enabled me to be engaged in NatCon US and the European strand of NatCon2.
00:02:25
James Orr
ah What else do I do? i have been for the last 12 years um in charge of something called the Trinity Forum ah to be distinguished from the American Trinity Forum, which is taking a slightly different direction from the one I've chosen to to take it in.
00:02:39
James Orr
Really, and that's a sort of network of um engaged students, postdocs, early career professionals, ah who meet, we meet, we talk, we do we do events, we do breakfasts, we do debates, we do symposia, primarily in the golden triangle of Oxford, Cambridge, London, which covers four of the top 10 universities in the world and five or six of the top 40.
00:03:03
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Ooh.
00:03:04
James Orr
five or six of the top forty ah that's ah That's five or six more than I think France has in the top 10 or top 40, incidentally.
00:03:09
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
okay
00:03:14
James Orr
um So it's great. So I have a sort of campus life, but I...
00:03:18
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
According to extremely skewed rankings...
00:03:22
James Orr
Both of them, yeah. I mean, ah so I try to connect the quad life, you know ah campus life to the public square as much as I can.
00:03:32
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yes, which is important.
00:03:33
James Orr
And I try to encourage... the wonderful, the very, very bright and alert and interested and engaged and, and um you know, increasingly politically and philosophically homeless young people who pass through my lecture halls and pass through Oxford and Cambridge and often move on to London, I try to encourage them to think about
00:03:47
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:03:55
James Orr
a life in service ah of of um the common good. And whatever that might look like, that might have a sort of political dimension. It might very often be in ah looking at ah exploring the new emerging ecosystem of media outlets um or more mainstream media outlets.
00:04:14
James Orr
And some of them might just want to go and make some money in the city and become lawyers and so on, but would still want to have a foot in the camp of those who are
00:04:23
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yes.
00:04:24
James Orr
passionate about their nation, ah passionate about ah values, about conserving all of all that which has made our nation what it is.
00:04:36
James Orr
um And I should say not just our nation, but our respective nations, because of course the graduate cohorts of Oxford and Cambridge are stunningly international and um and and are populated by some of the, you know, it's
00:04:45
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
yes
00:04:50
James Orr
People talk about, oh, they you know they're leaders to leaders of the future, leaders to be. And and and some of them will, you know statistically, some of them really will be.
00:04:58
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yes.
00:04:58
James Orr
um But all of them will, all of them have the capacity and the competence and the character to make a real imprint on the public square, whether it's here and whether it's in Britain or back in the States or all across the English speaking world.
00:05:07
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
That's very good.
00:05:13
James Orr
And we even got get we even get the odd Frenchman passing through. nobody ever no no Nobody ever knows what happens to him
00:05:20
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yeah, well, yes. um I mean, Britain is an attractive place for ah for French people to study because there's a...
00:05:32
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
you know ah there is a
00:05:40
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
brilliancy to the to to britaint to the great British universities that there's a charisma there that France doesn't have because we sort of got rid of our universities in 1789. And so we have and small specialized schools that are very good that don't do well in international rankings because they're small.
00:06:00
James Orr
Mm-hmm.
00:06:02
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
But and that they don't you know they have buildings that were built in the 60s and not in the 1600s. um And so, ah yeah, lots lots of French people go to study in the UK. It's a good idea. So i want I wanted to have you on to talk about two things.
Main Discussion Topics
00:06:21
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
I think you put it very well. You have one foot in the world of ideas and one foot in the public square. and so I thought that the people who listen to this would appreciate on the one hand a sort of, you know, what's going on in Britain at the moment, because most of my audience is American and so they they probably care but don't know.
00:06:44
James Orr
you
00:06:44
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
ah And then we'll we'll we'll talk about more intellectual things. um So i'm I'm going to approach this in a sort of very candid way. I'm going to ask a lot of very stupid questions.
00:06:57
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
um So from my very skewed sort of American Twitter ah perspective, if I think of politics in the UK, the only thing that I can think about is immigration.
00:07:12
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
i I have this perception of
Immigration in the UK
00:07:17
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Britain. We had, ah as we're taping this, Canada just had an election yesterday at the That's the other country which seems to be replacing itself as an ah at an extremely accelerated rate, which is you know certainly for this Frenchman sort of strange because France used to be the the sort of the the stereotype of the country that's replacing itself through immigration.
00:07:30
James Orr
All
00:07:41
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
And then at some point, the Brits were like, well, we can catch up to France. We're going to we're going to do what they did in 40 years and we're going to do it in 10 years, which of course makes the scale of change.
00:07:52
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
ah all the more striking um is... um First of all, am I correct... on on on on the fact of the scale of the immigration issue in the UK? Secondly, am I correct about its importance as a political issue or is it just that I'm following too many reform accounts?
00:08:15
James Orr
Mm-hmm.
00:08:15
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
ah And and what's what's the politics of it? I saw clips of, you know, sometimes it sounds like ah your Labour government is toying with what's known as the Danish option, which is we're going to be...
00:08:30
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
you know, right wing on immigration and center left and everything else. But sometimes it sounds like, you know, they just want to keep it going. Anyway, I threw out a lot of things out there, but it it is a bit mystifying from outside to see this massive shift.
00:08:38
James Orr
Mm-hmm.
00:08:44
James Orr
Mm-hmm.
00:08:46
James Orr
Yeah, absolutely. Well, let me just try and give it like give you a little bit of clarity. i mean, first first thing to note is that your your your instincts are spot on. And so what you've what you've garnered from social media reform accounts or other accounts is is exactly right. What we've witnessed...
00:09:06
James Orr
since Brexit really, and been accelerating from 2019, 2020, really from from the plague onwards is an unprecedented inflow of migrants um ah into the UK.
00:09:22
James Orr
But of course, it's actually, the reality is into a very, very concentrated corner of the United Kingdom, namely the Southeast of England, ah to some extent, the Midlands,
00:09:31
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
right
00:09:34
James Orr
as well and these are numbers that are just frankly hard to believe. We are adding ah in terms of net net migration at least ah well over a million a year is what we're looking at and that in and that's that's been that's been going really for well when ah at least you know three to four years and so the the numbers are just very very difficult to
00:09:50
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
That's crazy.
00:10:01
James Orr
comprehend, and they're very, very difficult for ordinary people to comprehend. What what they see, if if you like, is is the impact on their local communities. They see it in sort of deindustrialization. They see it in depressed wages, um collapsing public services, fragmented trust and social cohesion.
00:10:25
James Orr
So they feel it in the air. There is a sort of sense of existential angst and a kind of, but and and a bewilderment. And they have very little outlet outlets for that.
00:10:36
James Orr
then do They don't see that mood being um expressed or or articulated within the the elite sense-making institutions.
00:10:49
James Orr
The, the, the gaslighting as one might call it. And I think that's a perfectly appropriate metaphor, by the way, gaslighting by the,
00:10:54
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yeah.
00:10:58
James Orr
the mainstream media is, at least until recently, has has has been sort of off the charts. But um the the the sort of social impact of the so-called Boris wave of 2020, 21, 22 is has has his incalculable and is getting harder and harder,
00:11:21
James Orr
as it were for the um
00:11:23
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Okay, so ah just to jump in, can you explain what the Boris wave is? and My understanding is so Boris Johnson brought in tons of people for ostensibly work-related reasons to do specific jobs. And apparently, you know their visas have like a certain term.
00:11:43
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
And there's a deadline where the UK has to decide whether to send them back to send them back at the end of their visas, like legally, this wouldn't be, you know, some sort of remigration or apparently to give them permanent residency. right?
00:11:58
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Okay. Right.
00:11:59
James Orr
Yeah, that's that's that's correct.
00:12:01
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
and okay
00:12:01
James Orr
So in the run up to Brexit in 2016, the ah immigration was the, well, I would say certainly the second most central driver of the Leave vote in 2016 of the 17.4 million people who voted Brexit.
00:12:12
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
right
00:12:17
James Orr
the the i mean the leading driver was this sense of, ah well, sovereignty or ah but or the basically the principle that laws affecting British people should be ah passed by mechanisms wholly accountable to British people. and But in many ways, that was a proxy factor for immigration worries.
00:12:37
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yes.
00:12:38
James Orr
And in the wake of 2016, migration from Europe ah did indeed slow. ah When Johnson comes in in 2019 with this extraordinary um ah victory, the biggest that the Conservative Party had won since 1987, the sense was that it was, that as it were, the nightmare of the Brexit negotiations was over.
00:12:55
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yes.
00:13:03
James Orr
And ah Johnson was there to deliver on the central demand of the Leave voters, namely to regain control of our borders and to get back get net migration back to something manageable of between 50 and 100,000 a year.
00:13:10
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:13:17
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
right
00:13:22
James Orr
What then happened, this is the so-called Boris wave, was in fact an enormous increase ah in levels of migration from um well well from all over the place, sub-Saharan Africa, from India, from Syria, though it's not always clear that the migrants from migrants from Syria were in fact Syrian because ah a lot of the illegal migrants are very, very difficult, that but are motivated not to make it very, very difficult to track ah what their nationality is that they can't be couldn't be sent back.
00:13:49
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:13:53
James Orr
And so... um ah So that was the Boris wave. it was It's sort of been a you know a demographic shock to the system. And we've gone from a position where in 2019, the salience of the migration issue looked as if it was at long last um ah plummeting, getting you know just just just dropping off.
00:14:12
James Orr
to ah point where it is now dominating the political ecosystem all across ah all across ah the UK, but also all across the political spectrum, to the point where really it is the only ah it is the only it it is the issue against which all ah other issues are judged.
00:14:35
James Orr
And I think one of one effect of the Boris wave has been that for the first time in the public mind, a lot of the other issues that were concerning them, particularly on public services, depressed wages, lack of productivity, ah ah declining GDP per capita, were at last being connected to the unprecedented waves of um unverted mass migration.
00:14:35
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Really?
00:15:01
James Orr
And so that's why it's suddenly taken, it's now rocketed back to the top, not just the obvious failure of our political classes to do what the British people have been asking for so every election since, effectively for the last 20 years, certainly since 2010.
00:15:19
James Orr
um But now they're, as it were, beginning to understand that all of the other, ah many of the other aspects of state dysfunction can be connected to the to um to to the migration issue.
00:15:33
James Orr
um So yes, there are all these mechanisms as one that you referred to as the indefinite leave to remain regime, which um I mean, it's complicated, but ah but effectively, yes, you're right.
00:15:45
James Orr
ah Once migrants have stayed stayed for a certain period of time, they can secure indefinite leave to remain. Once they've got indefinite leave to remain, in effect, it's its almost legally impossible to to remove them.
00:15:59
James Orr
um And so...
Emigration and Economic Impact
00:16:01
James Orr
We're dealing with ah ah you know a cluster of headaches. um One of the issues, of course, and this is not just a ah problem in the UK, is that we always talk, the debate is always indexed to net migration figures.
00:16:14
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:16:14
James Orr
um And one of the things I've been trying to track a little bit better over the last year is um how is is emigration numbers. So it turns that which, of course, are masked by this sort of very liberal blank slateist statistical sleight of hand, whereby um ah it's the sort of the pan fungibility fallacy that, you know, ah that that if if as reform used to say, for example, and Nigel Farage has said in the past that the policy aspiration is net zero migration,
00:16:24
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:16:33
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:16:53
James Orr
um
00:16:53
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:16:53
James Orr
Then effectively, you know to the blanks latest, ah you know a million people arriving a year from from wherever it might be, ah very, very different cultures.
00:17:05
James Orr
um And then a million ah Brits have been here for a very long time leaving. ah Then you've you've achieved your far right objective of ah of of net zero migration.
00:17:10
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yeah. right
00:17:15
James Orr
But of course, ah you're as replacist as the rest of them.
00:17:19
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right. Right, right.
00:17:20
James Orr
um
00:17:21
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
That's an issue also in France, which is like people ah talk about people that are coming in and then the left-wing response, oh, but on net, it's much fewer. and it's like, no, the people who are leaving are not the same kind of people as the people who are coming in.
00:17:35
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
it's It's largely talented young people who are leaving France.
00:17:39
James Orr
And if you look at those numbers, um the the so so ah the exodus of millionaires from the UK per capita, I think exceeds almost any other country in the West.
00:17:47
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:17:51
James Orr
I think even even China at one point last year, we were we were losing more millionaires. ah per capita than China. and And so that's a huge problem. um I've just but i spent a few days with some people who work out in Dubai.
00:18:04
James Orr
We're having enormous spikes in the number of young people who are who are leaving for Dubai.
00:18:07
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
yeah
00:18:10
James Orr
And, you know, I love Dubai. I've got many good friends there. It's clearly a very nice quality of life. But um My goodness, if you're leaving if you are leaving a land as beautiful as England um that has achieved so much, that has been the cradle for so much for you know a skyscraper in the desert and you know something in in in extraordinary numbers.
00:18:29
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yes.
00:18:33
James Orr
um
00:18:33
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yes.
00:18:33
James Orr
These are the sort of the bright young people, bright graduates who are looking to, ah you know with entrepreneurial flair, looking to... just looking to succeed, just looking for an ordinary life.
00:18:45
James Orr
And and these and these are not all scions of the elites.
00:18:45
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yes.
00:18:48
James Orr
um I was reading yesterday about, you know, working class lad who's done well in Nottingham. He's built up built up a little, you know, good property portfolio and decided he's, you know, he's just decamping to Dubai ah because it just makes absolutely no sense to stay in a country where taxes are pretty much higher now than they have been
00:19:01
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right. Right.
00:19:08
James Orr
as a proportion of GDP than they've been since the Second World War.
00:19:11
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right. I mean, it's so it's astonishing what's happened to Britain, because if I remember the mid to late nineties, which is when I was starting to become politically aware and informed, um,
00:19:29
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
French people envied the UK tremendously. ah Your left was this sort of reasonable Blairite left, whereas our left was crazy socialists.
00:19:41
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
ah Taxes were lower, ah size of government was lower. There was a more pro-business and pro-innovation outlook. I mean, I, you know... ah when we look you know When there was a headline about startup investment in France, the question was, how how do we compare to the UK?
00:20:00
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Because the UK was the number one destination in Europe for startups, and we were trying to beat Germany to be number two.
00:20:05
James Orr
Thank
00:20:09
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
and you know the the The thing that most people don't understand, or um there Britain has this reputation as the sort of the the cradle of liberalism, a a a very liberal in the classical sense, nation of liberty and so on and so forth. But it's an extremely, France is more libertarian than Britain now.
00:20:36
James Orr
Thank you.
00:20:36
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
and And when you have to deal with bureaucracy and things like that, I have a friend who's an architect in England, and he's been trying to build a house for 10 years. ah And that i I don't know. I'm ah not trying to just be mean to Britain, which is, of course, ah ah a very beautiful country, and and you know nobody gets to destroy it except us. So don't just... you know it's It's cheating. If you destroy your own country, then we don't get to destroy it. So so don't do that.
00:21:09
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
ah
00:21:09
James Orr
Well, well ah well i i look, I would say we haven't really talked about, we haven't really drawn the distinction here between legal and illegal
Legal vs. Illegal Migration
00:21:18
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:21:19
James Orr
migration.
00:21:19
James Orr
i mean, to be clear, just in terms of numbers, obviously it's legal migration, which is the huge problem. However, I should say, and here your fair country has had a role to play, um ah the ah clearly the the civil war roiling the plains of northern France is driving...
00:21:39
James Orr
is is driving hundreds of thousands of of poor, benighted refugees, clearly hoping for a nice life in the suburbs of Lille to the beaches of Calais and and thence often escorted by the French Navy.
00:21:55
James Orr
ah to be picked to to the middle of the channel, to be picked up by the um ah Royal Navy's lifeboats and and moved over.
00:21:56
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Really...
00:22:04
James Orr
And so, you know, yes, in terms of raw numbers, you know, this is not, ah you know, it still, the that's yeah we're hitting unprecedented spikes. but you're talking you know up to 80, 100,000 a year.
00:22:18
James Orr
But if um you know if you're an l if you're, for example, an Albanian who is paying 3,000 euros ah for a dinghy ride across the channel when you could be paying 49 euros to get on a Ryanair plane from Tirana, I think it is a plausible suspicion, plausible concern to worry about your motives for um coming over, coming into the country.
00:22:32
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:22:43
James Orr
Um, so, you know, it's not, um, it's not quite the Norman invasion, actually, you know, the, the Normans, the Normans, uh, did a terrible job up North of the harrowing of the North and all of that. But in fact, we assimilated, um, William the Conqueror and his feudal thugs rather well.
00:23:01
James Orr
Um, I I'm less confident that we will, um, that we will assimilate those, those waves of migrate, uh, migrants from, um,
00:23:08
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yeah.
00:23:09
James Orr
from the beaches of Calais. And so, you know, there is a, you know, it is a real headache. There have been ongoing discussions of the French government and so on.
Cultural and Identity Challenges in the UK
00:23:16
James Orr
um But to go back to your wider point about the sort of the sense of malaise and the collapse the bureaucracy and the inertia and state dysfunction, ah you know, it's getting, you know, we've we've been, um product productivity has been stagnant since the global financial crisis.
00:23:33
James Orr
um You know, our debt to GDP levels have been going through the roof.
00:23:38
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yes.
00:23:39
James Orr
ah They're now, I think we've just tipped past 100%, the sort of magical 100% marker. ah ah That for a while was okay. I mean, quantitative easing, and this is a case from other parts of the world as well, of course, quantitative easing was just, was masked by
00:23:51
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
yeah
00:23:56
James Orr
you know, the low rates on the bond markets that is now changing. And that seems to be, you know, our levels of indebtedness are enough for the bond market to give, to have handed power to the bond markets to tell us who can be our prime minister ah in the case of the unseating of of Liz Truss.
00:24:10
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
That's true.
00:24:14
James Orr
Of course, you know, so that that That is a huge, huge problem. um we're now we have We're suffering from the standard problems of the of an increasing dependency ratio.
00:24:28
James Orr
Our total fertility rate is, whilst it's not quite as bad as some parts of the West, it is clearly a serious concern. And an issue that we don't really talk about are differential fertility rates across the different communities that make up our um
00:24:46
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:24:48
James Orr
our glorious and varied um multicultural well multicultural paradise.
00:24:50
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
your Your great multicultural experiment.
00:24:54
James Orr
And really, you know, so I think what we're seeing is everything that Robert Putnam predicted reluctantly saw 15 years ago, that not only is diversity not our strength, it is a deep, deep structural weakness that is turning into nothing short of, I think, the most existential threat facing our nation.
00:25:01
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:25:10
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yes.
00:25:18
James Orr
since the Norman invasion. um But, ah you know, in and in many ways, it's not, you know, we have faced Christ existential threats. In the past, we stood alone.
00:25:30
James Orr
um After you guys folded in May 1940. um We, and we've gone through some very nasty ah economic recessions, particularly in the nineteen seventy s we were back then also seen as a sort of, you know bit of a laughing stock, the sick man of sick man of Europe going cap in hand to the um IMF.
00:25:46
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
It's true. It's true.
00:25:52
James Orr
And of course, but I think even there, you know, 1940, 1979, you know, with war looming, economic catastrophe looming, there was still a sense that we could use the first person plural.
00:26:06
James Orr
there was still a sense that there was a we and that we, for all of the threats and for all of the challenges confronting us, you know the we would persist.
00:26:07
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:26:16
James Orr
And I think what's different, what is unprecedented and just different and and and so bewildering, what explains the sense of bewilderment and existential horror is that we're not even sure who we are anymore.
00:26:30
James Orr
um
00:26:30
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:26:30
James Orr
such Such is the rate of demographic churn and change that it's just not clear um if there is a we left. ah And what we've seen is the development of increasingly confident ah cultural and religious silos.
00:26:48
James Orr
um who are not ah getting along ah with each other in the sort of the happy melting pot that was ah that we were assured of in the late 90s.
00:27:00
James Orr
ah we We are not the United States. We simply don't have the capacity to... ah absorb these the the rate of demographic change that we've been seeing at this kind of ah this kind of speed.
00:27:12
James Orr
And I think part of the problem is that we've we've got a sort of America brain, um you know, that you know that that this idea that Britain is an idea, that it's a nation, it has always been a nation of immigrants.
00:27:17
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
yeah
00:27:27
James Orr
It's almost like a propositional nation.
00:27:29
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:27:29
James Orr
we've kind of We've kind of picked up that idea. Now, I'm not even sure. I didn't think that's true of America as it happens. But But it's even less plausible of of Britain in the last 50 to 60 years.
00:27:37
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yes.
00:27:41
James Orr
The truth is that 98% plus of Brits in 1948, when we passed the First Nationality Act, were you know ethnically English, ethnically Welsh, ethnically Scottish.
00:27:53
James Orr
And from there on in, in the 50s and the 60s, as our supposedly evil empire was dismantled, it turns out that all our former colonial subjects wanted either to come over to our rainy island with terrible food and and start a new life here,
00:28:10
James Orr
um or wanted to stay in their country, but ensure that their country applied for a membership of a successor organization to the empire, namely the Commonwealth.
00:28:19
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:28:20
James Orr
And I think, you know, and so the word British ceased to mean to be a Briton. And I think, you know, it's one of the consequences of legacies of empire that we simply have to just swallow that the word British that that in fact, anyone can become British.
00:28:38
James Orr
um And I think we can just about we've been able to cope with that. I mean, the worry is, you know as with the transgender problem, the problem with transnationalism it is the same.
00:28:49
James Orr
You know, if if if any if anyone can become a woman,
00:28:49
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yep.
00:28:52
James Orr
What is a woman? If anyone can become a woman, no one is a woman. If anyone can become a Brit, if anyone can become an Englishman, what is it to be British?
00:28:58
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
yeah
00:29:01
James Orr
What is it to be an Englishman? Surely no one is actually an Englishman. um And I do look across to Paris and to France, Pascal with some envy because I don't know how you've done it.
00:29:10
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
but
00:29:13
James Orr
But when I talk to my French friends, whether actually they're on the left or the right, there is that kind of that fierté, you know, that sense of it's very irritating, you know, and but but but that that absolutely militant chauvinism
00:29:20
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yes.
00:29:31
James Orr
That total, it's not even made up, but that total effortless assurance that France is basically the best country in the world. i don't I don't know what they put in the water, but we need some of that.
00:29:44
James Orr
And we just don't have it. We're not even capable. It's all this terrible toxic mix of sort of indigenous, an indigenous spirit of self-effacement. on the one hand, and on the other,
00:29:56
James Orr
a um ah new emerging communities who have been trained to hate Britain, to hate the country that they've moved to, to hate the country that's welcomed them.
00:30:03
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right. Right.
00:30:07
James Orr
And they are aided and abetted by that. that's not often the fault of the migrants, but it's certainly the fault of the chattering classes, of the the the the the elite classes who are dominated, whether it's here in Cambridge or in Oxford or or in London, dominated by
00:30:15
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:30:24
James Orr
that kind of progressive spirit of national and cultural self repudiation.
00:30:30
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right. Interesting. ah So can you explain to me who or what Keir Starmer is?
00:30:42
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
He seems to be the most transparent, odorless, colorless, ah insubstantial leader of any nation of consequence I can name today. ah And and who i i' I'm not even attacking him personally, although I think it's fascinating. But you know the the the history of the Labour Party in the UK, as I was talking about, you had New Labour, which was very successful politically.
00:31:22
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
um you could You could argue about the extent of the legacy, but at least there was an ideological, sociological thing there that you can agree with or disagree with.
00:31:34
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
And then you sort of had this sort of Corbynite backlash, which again, agree, disagree, it's got a clear identity, you know what they want to do with the country. um And now there's this thing They've won the election for ah year now, six months, something like that.
00:31:55
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
I have no idea what they want to do. you know i mean, people ah you know if you if you ask people, oh, you know what kind of politics does Macron stand for?
00:31:58
James Orr
Mm-hmm.
00:32:06
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Or what kind of politics? Hello there. She's not a fan of of labor. ah What kind of politics does Justin Trudeau stand for? Like people know.
00:32:18
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
I have no idea. is is is am I poorly informed or?
00:32:23
James Orr
No, you're not and you're not ah poorly informed in the slightest, and and you you'll get nothing but furious agreement ah from me on that. um Starmer is somebody with no inner life, it seems.
00:32:38
James Orr
He has no favourite novel. He has no favourite film. He is bewildered when interviewers ask him the most simple and straightforward advice questions.
00:32:49
James Orr
And he's got no sense either either of the political consequences of admitting that he's got you know no no interest in um no no no interest in any no hobbies, nothing
00:32:58
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right. No hobby.
Political Landscape and Labour Party Issues
00:33:02
James Orr
like that.
00:33:02
James Orr
I mean, even you know Gordon Brown would make something up like, oh, his favorite band was really the Arctic Monkeys or or whatever it might be.
00:33:05
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:33:09
James Orr
And you know even you know yeah ah even the worst politicians can sort of come up with some kind of answer there.
00:33:13
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yes.
00:33:14
James Orr
But there's a sort of yeah, that there's a sense of um that he's really this kind of bland, blank canvas that maybe, you know, in an age of, you know, um extremely chaotic, divisive politics, maybe that somehow is strangely a superpower that maybe, maybe there's, there's, there's nothing there.
00:33:41
James Orr
And that's why and the electorate can just project what they want onto him.
00:33:45
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
he Yeah, I mean, he seems like a fictional character from some you know dystopian novel about the end of history.
00:33:45
James Orr
He can be,
00:33:49
James Orr
Yeah.
00:33:52
James Orr
And i think I think part of it, you know, part of this is perhaps the sort of the poison fruit of a lingering poison fruit from the Corbyn era.
00:34:03
James Orr
um Because in effect, Starmer is having to navigate with the parliamentary Labour Party and the Labour movement, a very, very strange and rapidly changing
00:34:12
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:34:16
James Orr
political beast um that of course has its roots in the middle great labor movement of the beginning of the end of the 19th century, beginning of the 20th century.
00:34:24
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Thank
00:34:24
James Orr
it It surges into power, breaking up the duopoly of of the liberals and the conservatives in um in the mid 1920s, exactly 100 years ago. um And then of course, undergoes this um metropolitanization in the late 90s under Blair and through into the noughties and becomes this sort much more technocratic elite movement.
00:34:50
James Orr
And the center of gravity for labor shifts from Hull in the north to Hampstead in North London. and And then alongside that, you've got um the the fact that the Labour Party in the Labour movement is a kind is a similar effectively assimilating the political energies of the new waves of migration that Blair began to unleash in the early noughties.
00:35:15
James Orr
And one especially neurologic dimension to this, of course, is that Labour now depends ah upon for any success at a general election on the Muslim vote.
00:35:28
James Orr
So British Muslims are voting, think last time I checked, 80 to 85 percent for Labour.
00:35:28
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
great great great
00:35:35
James Orr
And what we saw at the general election last year, in July last year, astonishingly, for the first time ever, ah were MPs ah who effectively were being backed and won, in the case of five of them, a on a sectarian vote, campaigning on on Gaza and on Gaza alone.
00:35:52
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
right right
00:35:56
James Orr
um
00:35:56
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
right
00:35:57
James Orr
And that, I think, has clearly spooked the Labour Party. And so Starmer, to go back to Starmer, he's navigating all of these, you know, he's not got an
00:36:03
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
I mean, that's that's just normal British life. I mean, if you're if you're you know an average Brit, you know you of course your top issue is Gaza. well What are you talking about?
00:36:13
James Orr
ah Well, and the the sad thing is that it the fact is it may well be the case that that's true. So since October from ok october october the 7th onwards, I don't think you saw this in in in ah on the streets of Paris, but effectively for almost every weekend after October the 7th, it was impossible to move in central London for the tens of thousands of people ah marching ah for ah ostensibly for Gaza.
00:36:25
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
yeah Yes, yes, yes.
00:36:40
James Orr
And it was obvious that at least some of them were perfectly happy to see themselves as marching for Hamas. I mean, the blood of the victims was barely dry.
00:36:47
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right. Yep.
00:36:50
James Orr
um not
00:36:50
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yes.
00:36:51
James Orr
so On October the 8th, 2023, you saw not protests, but celebrations outside the Israeli embassy in Kensington. You had fireworks being shot at the embassy, fired at the embassy, clearly an imitation of the rockets. You had ah people praying on their knees.
00:37:10
James Orr
on the streets. I mean, this is just horrifying. And and as the India-Pakistan unrest um ah began last last week, there are, I'm sure, all kinds of conversations happening um within India,
00:37:18
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right, yes.
00:37:26
James Orr
the security services as to how we keep a lid on ah any civil unrest, particularly in those northern towns, um ah Bradford and Leicester, where there are significant Hindu and Muslim communities.
00:37:31
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:37:39
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:37:40
James Orr
And so we're becoming, if you like, you know, all of these faraway conflicts are being replicated on our streets. And ah this, I think, you know, is this a sign that multiculturalism has failed? Well, yes, in a way, but perhaps it's also a sign that multiculturalism has succeeded. This just is what a multicultural society looks like, especially one where there is simply no unifying, organizing horizon at all.
00:38:09
James Orr
There's no sense of ah a shared orientation, even at very even at a very thin level, towards um an idealized picture of Britain that that can transcend our ethnic and and religious differences.
00:38:12
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right. Yeah.
00:38:22
James Orr
That might have been possible to pull off. I mean, I'm skeptical, but I think it might have been possible, like a very robust sort of pro-nation, slightly jingoistic, slightly twee celebration of what it is to be British, perhaps you know harking back with some you know nostalgia, perhaps not you know reflective and not uncritical nostalgia for the days of empire.
00:38:41
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
yeah
00:38:43
James Orr
That might have been enough to hold us together and to keep the hierarchy of the hearts, to keep the order amoris intact. But what we've seen actually in our intellectual classes is an active hostility and an active um ah strategy of, as I said, self-repudiation when it comes to everything to do with anything positive to do with our past, um whether whether it's empire, whether it's slavery, whether it's Churchill, whatever it might be.
00:38:55
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yes.
00:39:07
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
yes
00:39:12
James Orr
um And so, you know, taking all that together You're looking at effectively at a position where, you you know, and somebody, even our very greatest leaders, ah the very greatest prime ministers we've had, and we have had some great ones in the last 200 years, would find it difficult.
00:39:31
James Orr
But for somebody for somebody of Starmer's blandness, and I think complete uninterest in politics, it's not just that he's not it's not just that he's not good at politics, he he just doesn't,
00:39:32
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yes. so
00:39:44
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
I mean, that that's something fascinating about the the contemporary politician.
00:39:45
James Orr
Doesn't seem to care.
00:39:48
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
It's it's these people who who, A, are not interested in politics, and B, don't want to do anything. ah this So this is this is my next question. ah what I mean, it's it's the same question in a way, but like what does Labour want to do?
00:40:07
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
like what if if there was you know If this was a three-way conversation and there was a Labour Party spokesman, and maybe we'd administered a bit of truth serum, ah like what you know you're in the early phase, you've won a parliamentary election, you have an actual majority, right?
00:40:24
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
They have the majority, they don't depend on a coalition whatever.
00:40:24
James Orr
Okay.
00:40:29
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
ah you can pass significant... leg Like, what's...
00:40:37
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
It's so bizarre that, you know... ah
00:40:42
James Orr
i I think you know the way to think about it is just, you know um if you if we wind back to July last year, yes, you're right, they have secured, they won a victory that delivered them an enormous parliamentary majority.
00:40:56
James Orr
But because of course the way our electoral system works with first past the post, um they ah ah were able to secure that huge parliamentary majority on, I think, something like 17 or 18% of the electorate's support.
00:41:08
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yes.
00:41:08
James Orr
of um of the electorates support And so you've got this strange situation where they um they've got a very, very weak popular mandate, but an enormous parliamentary majority.
00:41:22
James Orr
And um that mandate, the the weakness of that mandate, and indeed the weakness of their current polling, which is basically in the low 20s and sinking, is, I think,
00:41:34
James Orr
in part to be explained by the fact that there was no, um there's no animating vision, there was no sort of philosophical um vision of the future of the country, there was nothing that really inspired, it inspired the country at all to come out and vote for them. It really,
00:41:50
James Orr
um ah they They lost, they they won simply because the Tories um were so were so hated and lost so spectacularly after the broken promises of 2019.
00:41:59
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yes. Okay.
00:42:00
James Orr
And they lost because 4.1 million ah Tories and I think Labour voters too turned Trump. reform and liberal democrats did pretty well too so you're right it is a sort of it's an ideological vacuum which is odd for a for a movement that has actually tended to be you know driven by ideology um and i think you know there's a kind of there's a sort of pragmatism in some you know in some instances here and there but you know they are i think the central problem is that what they would like to be
00:42:33
James Orr
is ah sort of Labour Party of old, that is to say, a party that is going to increase spending on public services, it's going to increase taxes on the middle classes and on the wealthy. And to that credit, and I will give them some credit here,
00:42:48
James Orr
um they recognised in a way that Corbyn clearly didn't, that our fiscal room for manoeuvre is just, that there just isn't any at all.
00:42:55
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:43:00
James Orr
ah We've now got to the point where the top 1% are paying roughly 30% of all income tax revenues. ah We're looking at a case where basically I think it's 47% of the bottom half of earners are not paying any taxes at all.
00:43:15
James Orr
ah The dependency ratio is is out of control. This is driving waves of emigration. And emigration is is is just as much of a ah headache in some ways as immigration, because the quality of people that we're losing ah is um is such that, you know, it's having a direct impact on fiscal revenues, we're losing more millionaires per capita than I think any other country ah in the West right
Rise of New Political Parties
00:43:41
James Orr
now.
00:43:41
James Orr
ah You know, brilliant young people, entrepreneurial young people are coming through and heading off um to fairer shores, ah whether it's Dubai or America or Australia, we're losing a lot of our best doctors and nurses to Australia and and New Zealand.
00:43:55
James Orr
So there isn't, i mean, a dear friend of mine is Morris Glassman, Lord Glassman. I don't know if you ever had the chance to meet him. He's a wonderful man and author of something called Blue Labour.
00:44:03
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
No.
00:44:05
James Orr
And morris Morris, for many years, has been arguing for a recovery of that great tradition of
00:44:06
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Ah, yes.
00:44:13
James Orr
um British Christian socialism, the kind of socialism that emerged out of the guild arts and crafts movements of William Morris and John Ruskin at the end of the 19th century that looks back to the Clement Attlee government of 1945, which you know I look on with some suspicion, but but you know at least they they did stuff and they had a vision.
00:44:17
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:44:33
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right, exactly.
00:44:33
James Orr
and you know And now i gather that Morgan McSweeney, who is Keir Starmer's chief of staff in Downing Street, is
00:44:35
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yes.
00:44:44
James Orr
on the phone a lot more to people like Morris and is they are desperately we've got ah at the time of recording we've got the local elections two days away and it looked uh on Thursday on on this is on the 1st of May so we're going to know on the 2nd of May and we're going to
00:44:54
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Oh, really? OK.
00:45:00
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Again, prepare these interviews very carefully.
00:45:03
James Orr
And well at well, it'll be a very interesting very interesting to see, but it it looks almost certain that Labour are going to get a terrible drubbing. And what we're seeing for the first time in the history of British politics is the emergence of a second, an insurgent right-wing party.
00:45:22
James Orr
This is almost unthinkable, given our first past the post system, given how hard it is
00:45:23
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:45:27
James Orr
without proportional representation for the grip of a two party duopoly b to be to be weakened.
00:45:31
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:45:34
James Orr
And so, you know just as a hundred years ago, Labour surged forward um and and broke the hold of the Liberal Party, of Gladstone's Liberals, of of Burke's Whigs,
00:45:43
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:45:45
James Orr
um So too, it may well be the case that on on Friday we'll see, at to okay, this is not a nationwide election, but there will be local elections happening all over the country. We'll get a very good sense of the mood of the country.
00:45:58
James Orr
And if the polls are even half right, it looks as if um both that both the two main parties, hitherto the two main parties are going to get a terrible, terrible drubbing.
00:46:08
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:46:09
James Orr
And this this insurgent party, Reform UK, looks like it's going to get a a very, very strong showing. There's an important proxy by-election ah that has been called up because of a Labour MP decided to um smash a constituent in the face a few months ago, was summarily summarily dismissed that our system is not that dysfunctional that there was that that that he was permitted to stay on.
00:46:37
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
That's good. There there was there was ah there was a ah a similar incident in France, but he kept his post. so there you go. that That British victory. Yeah.
00:46:47
James Orr
so So we're going to see, you know, there's a lot, you know, if you are, you know, if you're into politics, it so it is a fascinating time to be in this country, but it's also unsettling because we've not seen this kind of this kind of unrest in, you know, electorally, certain certainly.
00:47:04
James Orr
um And what it is doing, though, is it's forcing us to, you know, all three parties are now having to think very hard
National Identity and Patriotism
00:47:13
James Orr
about what it means to conserve the nation and what what it is to um to champion the nation, what the nation is, what it is to be English, what it is to be British.
00:47:20
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yes.
00:47:24
James Orr
And of course, ah you know there's a lot of you know fiery debate about this. You get these flashpoints on social media, which okay are not maybe broadly representative of of the people at large, but you know, 10, 15 years ago, no one would have batted an eyelid if you had said that Rishi Sunak um is our our former prime minister, is an Englishman, is English, or Frank Bruno, a brilliant to black Caribbean boxer um and and celebrity, you know, no one would have
00:47:43
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:47:47
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:47:55
James Orr
I hesitated to call him English. I think one of the sadnesses of the kind of disintegration, demographic disintegration under under the weight of this sort of diversity dogma is that people are now starting to be much more self-conscious, more ethnically self-conscious, you might say.
00:48:11
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
right
00:48:13
James Orr
um And I think, you know, civic nationalism there's gonna come a point where civic nationalism ceases to be possible.
00:48:22
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yes.
00:48:22
James Orr
um And ethnic nationalism is going to, as it were, be um accelerated and quickened. And my sense is that actually you could be in a, you could have a sort of dominant ethnic majority and you could just play into and push hard the civic nationalism piece.
00:48:39
James Orr
And that, you know, with the balance broadly right, then you'd never had to talk about ethnicity, you never had to talk about race.
00:48:43
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yes.
00:48:46
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:48:47
James Orr
But part of, you know, the speed of demographic change, allied to the sort of usual, you know, ideological rhetoric coming out of BLM and, you know, the anti-racism movement and so on and so forth,
00:48:59
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yeah.
00:49:01
James Orr
is now, you know, turning us into a much more race slowly, but sort of inexorably into a much more kind of ethnically conscious and racially conscious um um people.
00:49:14
James Orr
And I think that is, you know, it's it's it's a it's a terrible shame because I think, you know, those those on the left are ah right to be worried about this. And we're all going to be pretty worried about this.
00:49:25
James Orr
And it's going to increase that sense of ah paralysis and and and dysfunction. So lot of challenges. And I think there's a lot we can learn. You know, i look across at France and I see, as I've mentioned ah earlier, you know, that sense of, you know, um unapologetic patriotism.
00:49:43
James Orr
And it's very, very hard for us to to to to um muster that up, you know, to summon that up but for for various complex historical reasons, I think.
00:49:51
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:49:54
James Orr
um And part but another you know big problem that we haven't really talked about is Tony Blair's The Quiet Revolution of devolution in 1997, 1998, 99, and so on, whereby, you know, up until 1997, we were really just a unified, a unitary constitutional monarchy, we now effectively have through the mechanisms of devolution, where Westminster gives power to ah assemblies or parliaments in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland,
00:50:04
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yeah.
00:50:18
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yeah.
00:50:24
James Orr
We have, if you like, you know the question, it is it is now a live question, should Scotland secede? And should the United Kingdom cease to exist as it has since the Act of Union unions in 1707?
00:50:38
James Orr
um so and And those, of course, are acceptable nationalisms. It's totally fine to be a Scottish nationalist, to be a Welsh nationalist.
00:50:44
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:50:45
James Orr
And indeed, the more left wing you are in Scotland, the more likely you are to be a Scottish nationalist and say same same in Wales.
00:50:50
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:50:53
James Orr
ah the one ah that The one time you cannot use the other N-word is with respect to England and Britain itself.
00:50:58
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:51:02
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yeah.
00:51:02
James Orr
So that whole complex balance of nested nationalisms that we've sort of managed to stumble through as Britain was forged into a nation with the
00:51:06
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yes. Yes. it's It's very strange from the French perspective.
Intellectual Life and Discourse in the UK
00:51:14
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
All right. So the other topic I wanted to discuss with you was ah the the the more intellectual side of things.
00:51:23
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
ah Again, I'm going to be very pompous in French. ah you know Recently, ah there's been a discussion of Renaud Camus, who was a barred entry in the UK because the Suddenly, the British government remembered that it is sovereign over its borders and that it can refuse entry to some people.
00:51:44
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
um you know not Not rapists, not pedophiles, not not murderers. Yes.
00:51:52
James Orr
but an aging french philosopher with cancer who said some naughty things about demographic change uh you're not setting foot in our country mate yeah
00:51:55
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yes. Yes.
00:52:00
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yes. ah well ah and But i I am an admirer of Camus, and I do think he's the most important living thinker today. And I mean important in a sort of objective sense, which is that the the the great replacement...
00:52:19
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
ah
00:52:22
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
is one of the most important ideas in shaping political discourse over the past 10 years. I think, I think people would agree with that. Uh, and it's striking that it's a Frenchman who, um, who made this contribution.
00:52:38
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
And i I wonder, you know, France has this tradition of sort of public intellectuals, public, especially philosophers, uh, but not only,
00:52:50
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
um how How would you describe the status of intellectual life in the UK and how it relates to helping the country think through its current predicament?
00:53:04
James Orr
Yeah, that's a great question. It's funny, we started, you know, at the beginning of the conversation, we touched on, you know, the apparent gap in quality between British universities and French universities.
00:53:19
James Orr
as schools and stables, you might you might think for a for for great intellectuals. And you might think looking at those slightly dodgy university tables that that Britain would have a far more flourishing intellectual life than France.
00:53:36
James Orr
um And yet I would concede to you that the sort of public status of intellectuals in France, particularly philosophes, and it's slightly different.
00:53:40
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
yeah
00:53:48
James Orr
you know Even to say the word philosophes, it doesn't mean the same thing as philosopher. It has a different resonance in France.
00:53:54
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:53:56
James Orr
um We don't have philosoph. I think it's partly, you know maybe this is speculative, but you know continent the continental tradition has always been being from from you know Descartes, Leibniz, Spinoza onwards, Kant and so on, over has had a sort of deep the deep current ah of of ah basically of of rationalism, of um of of speculative theory theorizing about society.
00:54:23
James Orr
Whereas I think in Britain, and the English-speaking peoples has been that much more and empiricist, John Bull, focus on common sense and suspicion of these strange utopian complex schemes that all those continentals like to come up with i think
00:54:31
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yes.
00:54:36
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yes.
00:54:38
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yes. And and the the grass always being greener on the other side, this is something that French people often envy about about the UK because we we get caught up into our own theories.
00:54:46
James Orr
right yeah but absolutely exactly exactly and so you know if i
00:54:49
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
you know that The joke as a Frenchman is is somebody who asks, sure, it works in practice, but does it work in theory? um But at the same time, you do need, you know, theory to make sense of the world.
00:55:05
James Orr
Yeah, ah exactly right. And if I walk into a bookshop, a library in Paris, what you will be likely to see on the front tables are books by a Finkelkraut or a Besançon or even a Renaud Camus or a BHL.
00:55:22
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yes.
00:55:27
James Orr
If you walk into the equivalent of a bookshop here in Cambridge or in London, it's not that we are a poorly educated or unreflective people, but you're not going to see philosophy books.
00:55:39
James Orr
You will see history books, often very detailed history books. I mean, the kind of history kind of history books that you might see on undergraduate reading lists.
00:55:44
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
That's good.
00:55:48
James Orr
So, you know i mean know, I have colleagues here in Cambridge, you know, who could in principle turn a PhD into a trade book.
00:55:55
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:55:55
James Orr
or Or, you know, where the where the line between an academic monograph and a trade book is actually pretty blurred in a way that, you know, there is absolutely nowhere. way You know, I don't know how maybe 30 people have bought money my my PhD book in philosophy.
00:56:10
James Orr
um
00:56:10
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:56:11
James Orr
And so there is a sort of genuine there's a genuine distinction to be drawn between our sort of between the pet book and the character of our intellectual lives.
00:56:14
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Interesting, interesting.
00:56:19
James Orr
So we are. um and And I say that is why ground zero for the culture wars. in Britain, I think has been history and trying to create not just ground zero, but year zero.
00:56:28
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Is history.
00:56:33
James Orr
um The idea that everything that's come before the kind of the great cultural revolutions of the late 20th century is to be forgotten about, to be repudiated or revised and reworked.
00:56:45
James Orr
And I think that's a sort of backhanded compliment, if you like, the importance that history and that kind of empiricist
00:56:48
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yes.
00:56:52
James Orr
approach to understanding the world.
00:56:55
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yes.
00:56:55
James Orr
you know, it's in the past. How did it happen? Why did it happen? And so on. Relatively shorn of speculative theorizing. kind of that's why the the battles have been so intense around not just our imperial legacy, but first, second world wars, of course. And, and in fact, even back to the, you know, the cultural wars raging around the medieval period too.
00:57:17
James Orr
um
00:57:17
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yes.
00:57:18
James Orr
And so there's those differences. And I think partly it may be the case that it's not just, it's not actually a paradox that, that we have these incredible institutions of higher learning and then a relatively comparatively weak output of um of exceptional intellectuals.
00:57:38
James Orr
um Now, that's not true across the board. I mean, Trinity College here in Cambridge, I'd just like to remind you, has won no more Nobel Prizes than France. um And ah we do produce, still produce, and the empiricists, the scientists, the mathematicians, we still do very well on that front.
00:57:57
James Orr
But when it comes to the sort of the public intellectuals, the status is very, very different. And I think part of the problem maybe of it light lies in the the nature of our institutions.
00:58:09
James Orr
So there is no question that we have seen in our top universities the emergence of a kind of groupthink, a preference for conformity that is analogous to, I don't think is as intense as what we're seeing in the Ivy League, but it's certainly comparable to it.
00:58:17
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yes.
00:58:24
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Interesting.
00:58:26
James Orr
just as we saw when we passed the Test Act in the 1670s, effectively banning anyone who was but basically banning Catholics and in making sure that only Anglicans could be at Oxford and Cambridge, our only two universities, and certainly only Anglicans
00:58:35
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:58:41
James Orr
in in orders could teach at Oxford and Cambridge. And so for you, what you saw from the end of the 17th century, up until the 1828, Catholic Emancipation Act, and then another act in 1873, what you saw was our most prestigious prestigious places of higher learning were effectively engine rooms for groupthink and conformity.
00:59:04
James Orr
um You didn't have any of that sort of lively spirit of collaborative dialectical inquiry,
00:59:08
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yeah.
00:59:10
James Orr
that came to mark, that say marked the Sorbonne within the medieval period in the 13th century with all the great disputations um that have been crystallized in say Thomas aqui iss thomas Aquinas' Summa Teoleci.
00:59:16
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yeah.
00:59:24
James Orr
um And so I think similarly at the end of the 20th century, the beginning the 21st century, it's not Anglicanism, but it's this sort of ultra, you know, um ah ultra ultra dogmatic regime, religion and regime.
00:59:33
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
State religion.
00:59:39
James Orr
ah dogmas and doctrines, which are, you know, the places that ought to be nurturing and forming our very best public intellectuals and philosophers ah should, you know, they should be producing, it but are in fact turning um ah sinsing producing regime stooges.
00:59:55
James Orr
It's not an accident that arguably our greatest um thinker on the right are certainly the closest, the the person I think most most justifiably deserves the the label philosophe in the French sense is was Sir Roger Scruton.
01:00:09
James Orr
it's not It's not an accident that Sir Roger was exp effectively expelled
01:00:09
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
01:00:15
James Orr
or or went into self-imposed exile in 1989, in the end of the 1980s. And he he know he left the universities behind. And here in Cambridge, though he was both an undergraduate here and did his, um ah he did his doctorate here and he was a junior research fellow here at Peterhouse, he was not honoured in any way. he He didn't pick up an honorary fellowship.
01:00:38
James Orr
I'm trying to get something going here, but to to to mark his memory, but he basically has been completely ignored. Same in Oxford.
01:00:45
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
me
01:00:45
James Orr
he did He did a lot for Oxford over the years. The only institution, and I remember him telling me this, and the only institution in Oxford that even recognized him was Blackfriars, was the Dominicans. that And he said, it's always such an irony, you know, the one the one group that is supposed be the most sort of censorious and dogmatic.
01:00:56
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yeah.
01:01:03
James Orr
They're the only ones who were willing to talk to me and actually offer me an institutional affiliate.
01:01:07
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Many such cases.
01:01:08
James Orr
ah Exactly right. And so it is a huge problem. I will say, though, that there is some
New Platforms for Intellectual Discourse
01:01:14
James Orr
hope in the air. I mean, I think this emerging ecosystem of... you know, Substack, podcasts, you know spicy Twitter threads, you know there is a kind of, um there is a sense of a kind of a more fertile seedbed than was the case, he was even thinkable five years ago.
01:01:31
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yes, I was gonna ask, like, please give me, you know, give me a silver lining, give me a signs of hope.
01:01:36
James Orr
and And I mean, but i mean well we you you talked about Renaud Camus and you know I've just just finished his his Enemy of the State, Enemy of the Nation, Enemy of the Disaster that was just translated by Vauban.
01:01:48
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Any of the disaster.
01:01:54
James Orr
um And I really ought to try and read it in the original and brush up on my French. But... um For example, you know the best things that I have seen on Camus in the English speaking world in the last few weeks was a fabulous essay by Nathan Pinkosky, who I think you would probably is a mutual friend.
01:02:12
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yes.
01:02:15
James Orr
Now, I i know he's he's sort of i think he's half French, half Canadian, but I'm going to claim him.
01:02:22
James Orr
I'm going to claim him.
01:02:22
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
ah
01:02:23
James Orr
I hope he doesn't mind if he's listening to this, but I'm going to claim him as an alumnus of the University of Oxford where he did his his studies. In fact, I think he he did his DPhil in Oxford.
01:02:30
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
um
01:02:33
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
know he's he he's He's very good, and I know the article you were referring to, which is very good
01:02:38
James Orr
and and
01:02:38
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
on
01:02:39
James Orr
and i saw that and i And I saw that Camus himself retweeted that article and said, this is one of the best, if not the best quote, summaries of my thought that's ever been written.
01:02:39
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
and
01:02:48
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
right right yes
01:02:51
James Orr
Another thing I just want to single out is my dear friend, Mary Harrington, who was, we were ah we we were at Oxford together 25 years ago. as She wrote a fabulous three-part series on Honolk Camus.
01:03:02
James Orr
I think it was probably about a year ago at a time when, you know in a way that she she can only, only she can do.
01:03:02
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
yes
01:03:08
James Orr
she she will walk this very delicate tightrope because he's still you know very much beyond the Overton window although I think one of the benefits of the scandal of last week or two weeks ago is that people are now talking about him and writing about him and thinking well actually yeah yeah actually what what what is supposed to be so so bad and toxic about him and
01:03:21
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Good, yes, yes.
01:03:27
James Orr
So and those are just two examples, and many others of you know relatively young, up-and-coming, emerging writers who have managed to short-circuit the increasingly captured and useless mainstream sense-making institutions.
01:03:44
James Orr
um you know Neither Nathan nor Mary nor any of the other others are being invited onto the BBC. They're not really writing for The Times. They're not writing for any of the big
01:03:51
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
UK's Role in Gender Debates
01:03:53
James Orr
big newspapers, but they are slowly shifting the dial um of um elite, or should I say counter-elite opinion. And that's extremely encouraging. I mean, just one more example.
01:04:05
James Orr
um If you look at the way in which the turf war debates have played out across the West, again, I'd like to claim some credit for my country on that front.
01:04:16
James Orr
I mean, it is the Kathleen Stocks, the JK Rowlings, um then the louis the Louis, you know, and they are the trans exclusionary revolutionary fairies.
01:04:21
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right, TERF, yes. T-E-R-F. Yes, yes, Yes. Yes. Yes.
01:04:29
James Orr
and
01:04:30
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
um
01:04:30
James Orr
And a lot of, not just the political and activist energy, the campaigning energy coming from so-called Turf Island, ah Britain, um but But actually a lot of the intellectual energy too, um a lot of the really interesting, well, there's a lot of work that came out of the of the States too, but I think we are punching above our weight.
01:04:41
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
yes
01:04:45
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
yes
01:04:49
James Orr
ah we we punch We have been punching above our weight on that on that issue. Of course, it shouldn't, at one level, shouldn't be a philosophically complicated issue. This is something that every, a basic truth that every three-year-old should know, but apparently it takes a Supreme Court judgment to clarify things for us.
01:04:57
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
01:05:05
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yes.
01:05:05
James Orr
um But nevertheless, I think
01:05:06
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yes, that that was that was that that was a ah great agreed ah cultural victory, and the UK is definitely ah leading the world. the the the The counter argument to that is that it was precisely the TERFs, JK Rowling, in other words, people who are identifying with the feminist left and criticizing transgender from a feminist left,
01:05:16
James Orr
So things are not, yeah.
01:05:32
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
ah perspective, which is ah which is you know the victory's there, let's take it.
01:05:33
James Orr
Yeah.
01:05:36
James Orr
Yeah.
01:05:38
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
But in terms of a you know ah great conservative intellectual life in the UK, JK Rowling is very clear that she's not in that camp.
01:05:45
James Orr
Well, ah
01:05:51
James Orr
to be clear, yeah.
01:05:52
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
And and and and to to great respect for her because there's nothing I admire more than an actual free thinker, which I believe she is.
01:05:58
James Orr
yeah yeah
01:06:00
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
But, you know, that that that that's the response to the point you just made.
01:06:05
James Orr
Yeah, I mean, I, you know, I sort of in response, I'd say that I interpreted your question just as a general question about the state and quality and ah of intellectuals.
01:06:12
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yes. Yeah, fair enough.
01:06:15
James Orr
So, you know, there's a there's a there's a there's a Alain Finkel.
01:06:16
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yes. Yes.
01:06:19
James Orr
I mean, actually, you know, there's a lot of lot of the the great philosophes in France of the last few decades have been not just on the left, but have been on the left and unleashed catastrophic consequences of their thought.
01:06:27
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right. Right.
01:06:32
James Orr
ah In some respects, if if we're thinking of of a Derrida or a Badiou and so on, also some very brilliant ones in in my field, theology, Jean-Luc Marion,
01:06:34
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
but
01:06:43
James Orr
and ah and others, Emmanuel Falc and lots of fascinating figures. Jean Chrétien is a superb one too. But no, so I think i you know it's yeah you know you're right about that.
01:06:56
James Orr
um And perhaps you know the only people who could defeat the grandchildren of the revolution were the children of the revolution. And, you know, in many ways, yes, you're right.
01:07:05
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Maybe.
01:07:08
James Orr
This is um this is not, you know, the turf wars were really off limits for people like us. There's no question that this is really ah an internal debate within a kind of dey decaying society.
01:07:20
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yes.
01:07:22
James Orr
ah within the the the sort of decaying corpse of Western liberalism. um And a lot of the ah lot of the arguments are, you're absolutely right, being framed within the kind of philosophical sort of axiomatic sort of scaffolding that I think, you know, is is it was or was always always it always going to be a problem.
01:07:27
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
yeah
01:07:40
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yeah.
01:07:45
James Orr
um That is to say, the basic, you know, both the children of the revolution and the grandchildren of the revolution are agreed that the way to understand equality is in terms of sameness.
01:07:57
James Orr
And once you accept that, and once you insist that for a man to be equal to a woman is for a man to be the same as a woman, then you are basically, there is there is simply no non-arbitrary conceptual stopping point from the complete fungibility of of men and women.
01:07:58
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
01:08:11
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yes.
01:08:13
James Orr
Same with same-sex marriage. if If there is no longer a husband and wife, but simply spouse A and spouse B, then, you know, what first of all, what's wrong with spouse C?
01:08:21
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yes.
01:08:23
James Orr
What's so special about the number two?
01:08:23
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yes.
01:08:25
James Orr
But also, what's so special about the self-declared identity or biological reality of spouse A and spouse B?
01:08:32
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yeah.
01:08:33
James Orr
So I completely agree that all of this is it's it's the same conceptual mess. um
01:08:38
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yes.
01:08:39
James Orr
But, you know, one of the interesting features of some of these young thinkers is they are um recovering a sense. i mean, I've been talking with Mary
Philosophical Underpinnings of Modern Debates
01:08:51
James Orr
quite a lot about this.
01:08:51
James Orr
I mean, she's reading a lot of a lot of Aristotle and thinking hard about going back to the the roots of the problem, ah which I think in many ways is can be diagnosed as the collapse of any kind of metaphysical commitment to something like an Aristotelian or Thomist doctrine of...
01:09:10
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
01:09:11
James Orr
essence.
01:09:12
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
01:09:12
James Orr
That is to say, there are things in the world, we must be, we must take a realist stance towards there being objectively ah existing things, and that Plato was right, what or rather
01:09:20
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yes.
01:09:25
James Orr
You've got to understand that you you carve nature at its joints, um that there's that that that that there is a certain way for things to be, and that we're not imposing ah not we're not simply imposing a sort of scientific taxonomy on the world for ease of comprehension.
01:09:33
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yeah.
01:09:40
James Orr
we're We're not simply inventing the world, we're actually discovering it. And that does mean, I think, doing some serious metaphysical work and thinking hard about where we went wrong,
01:09:51
James Orr
And it may be it may be that where we went wrong was the Enlightenment and effectively the the the rise of a kind of Kantian skepticism that we could ever really come to know the world as it is in itself, but that we could only be navigating and the appearances.
01:09:51
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yes. Yes.
01:10:06
James Orr
And if we're just navigating the phenomena, then really the person with the most power is going to just dictate how the phenomena to be navigated.
01:10:14
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
yes
01:10:17
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Well, I mean, that's that's quite the program. um
01:10:22
James Orr
it gives Well, it gives people like me a bit of a job, but at least when it comes to the day job and doing doing some philosophy and trying to trying to persuade trying to say the world that a bit of philosophy matters and that metaphysics always buries its undertakers, as the great Etienne Gilson once put it.
01:10:26
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yes.
01:10:31
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yes.
01:10:37
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
yeah Yes, yes. There's a famous story of ah um Charles de Gaulle ah visiting a university and somebody had put up a banner saying, Morocon, death to idiots. And he said, that's a very ambitious agenda.
01:10:59
James Orr
Yeah.
01:11:01
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
ah On that note, ah we have a traditional question that we end every episode on.
01:11:03
James Orr
Love it.
01:11:11
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
um And the question is this. Recommend a book, can be any book, ah fiction, nonfiction, recent, old, that's not in your area of expertise. Yeah.
01:11:24
James Orr
Good. Well, um that I have been looking at recently, um I would say,
01:11:36
James Orr
um do you know what? It just so happens that I have completed Côté de Chersoan.
01:11:48
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Very good recommendation.
01:11:48
James Orr
ah And i honestly wasn't planning this, but it was just, ah have literally just finished it. And I have been working along, you'll be pleased to know that I've been working alongside, ah working reading the English, but with the French, original French alongside.
01:12:04
James Orr
So the great...
01:12:05
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
if if you If you can, that's really helpful because Proust is very sort of precise.
01:12:10
James Orr
yeah And it's been it's just ah been a joy joy to read it and to get lost in it.
01:12:15
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yeah, cruust Proust is great.
01:12:16
James Orr
And...
01:12:17
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
and pet And people who are afraid of Proust, he's also very funny.
01:12:22
James Orr
Oh, absolutely. I mean, there's ah
Engagement with Literature and Tradition
01:12:24
James Orr
there's a sort of as they are funny, but in a way that is very different from the kind of humour that you find of, obviously, in the English novel or even the Russian novel.
01:12:24
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
His books are funny.
01:12:34
James Orr
I've just been ah reading the Pickwick papers as well, and there's a kind of, you know, there's a sort of bawdy slapstick
01:12:40
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
01:12:41
James Orr
humor there, which is, it has a genius of its own, but, um but the subtlety of Proust has been, I've wanted, i think, you know, when you work in areas like I do, you know philosophy and politics, it's all, you know, it's it's pretty dry.
01:12:53
James Orr
It's pretty abstract. And what I found just getting lost in, um lost in Proust has been a wonderful antidote to the chaos, you know, as a sense that just, just takes,
01:12:54
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yes.
01:13:01
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yeah. that's That's a very good recommendation. And Proust, by the way, was a raging reactionary.
01:13:09
James Orr
ah So I gather I'm learning more about him as as as time passes. I mean, he is, you know, he is both, um you know, he is he's he's an arch modernist in lots of ways.
01:13:19
James Orr
and And I see him in the same way that I think of of of an Eliot or a Joyce. You know, like I can't remember the dates, but I think the first English translation, Terence Kilmartin of Proust, um Remembrance of Things Past, that wonderful title that he that he lifts from Shakespeare's sonnet.
01:13:35
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yeah.
01:13:38
James Orr
um is also, I think it's 1921, 22. So it's there's something magical about that 12 to 18 month span where you have the birth of a kind of, Yes, it's a reactionary modernism.
01:13:50
James Orr
It is just you know it is it is the an extraordinary artistic expression that is both ever new and yet ever old.
01:13:51
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
01:13:59
James Orr
And that is to say, unlike today, these were intellectuals and artists who were trying something radical and reactionary and new, but in a way that harnessed and drew on the hinterlands of ah of um of of their past intellectual traditions.
01:14:16
James Orr
And you know you when you read Proust, he's a great lover of Ruskin, and you you you can you know you can read Proust in and of itself.
01:14:28
James Orr
I've got another book here, I think simply called Paintings in Proust, which is a wonderful book that just goes through
01:14:31
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Hmm.
01:14:34
James Orr
um all of the artworks that pop up at various points um in A La Recherche du Temps Perdue.
01:14:37
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yeah.
01:14:41
James Orr
And so yeah there's that react, and you see that with Eliot too, you know, in The Wasteland, it is both this very reactionary kind of burn everything to the ground post-war um creation.
01:14:48
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Hmm.
01:14:53
James Orr
And yet you can't read the wasteland if you're not aware of the allusions to the Gita or to Dante or to Shakespeare or to the whole canon of um of Western literature.
01:14:59
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
01:15:04
James Orr
And there's that same sense in Proust. And I think that is something that conservatives need to learn. That is to say, how can we recognize that sometimes conserving, decaying and defective and decadent institutions is no longer, should no longer be our raison d'être, that what we're conserving are timeless values, timeless truths, that um which that that may, you know, that so the the engagement na may take a different form.
01:15:19
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right. Right.
01:15:31
James Orr
It may be that we need to man the barric man the metaphorical barricades better.
01:15:32
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yeah.
01:15:37
James Orr
And in particular, we need to think about what the future looks like, you know how to be more future-oriented,
01:15:37
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yeah.
01:15:43
James Orr
this is very important when it comes to politics and having something having something to sell to an electorate, the the dewy-eyed nostalgia, ah looking looking looking back to a time that never was, is you know is is is not going to work anymore.
01:15:45
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yes. Yes.
01:15:51
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
01:15:58
James Orr
And I think Eliot and Proust and others offer, and particularly Eliot in his essay, and Tradition and the Individual Talent, is very good at showing the power of tradition that that I don't think Mahler ever said it, but you know, it's a good line that um the the the tradition is not the worship of ah is not the worship of as ashes, but the ah what it is it what it but the celebration, the so they' cultivating of fire.
01:16:13
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
yeah
01:16:17
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
01:16:22
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Tending a fire.
01:16:25
James Orr
And there's a lot to that. And so trying to work out how one can harness and the energies of the past and the energies of tradition in an act of renewal and restoration
01:16:30
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
01:16:32
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
And if all you have is ashes, you have to start a new fire.
01:16:36
James Orr
Quite right. Yeah, quite right. um So it's very different. you guys are very good at that. you you Because that's if you read De Maistre or you read Chateaubriand, there is a sense, there's a model there.
01:16:47
James Orr
There's a template for how you can be a reactionary conservative because you are, as it were, they are writing in the wake of this revolutionary conservative.
01:16:48
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yes. Yeah. Yes.
01:16:54
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Chateaubriot another good example of somebody who was politically a conservative, but artistically and a great innovator.
01:17:00
James Orr
ah and you know he And he did that in the novel in novel form. And of course, the the Memoir d'Outre-Tourme was you know she's just fantastic.
01:17:04
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
yes
01:17:10
James Orr
And I think the problem for English conservatism, British conservatism, we've never ever been revolutionaries. We've never had a revolution, really, apart from the...
01:17:19
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yes, you did. In fact, you're the ones who invented beheading your king. I'm sorry.
01:17:23
James Orr
yeah Well...
01:17:24
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
I will not let this Anglo-Saxon myth stand. It started with you.
01:17:28
James Orr
We got it. we We got it out of our system very, very, very quickly, and but but not too quickly for the idea not to sow itself in in the minds in the in the minds of our oldest enemy.
01:17:39
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yes, yes. what the the what what what What is ah what you did do better than us that is that it's not that you didn't do it, it's that after you did it, you thought to yourself, oh, that was very bad idea.
01:17:55
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Let's never do that again.
01:17:57
James Orr
yeah
01:17:57
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Whereas the the the French people feel a need to do it every 20 years again, even though it was an even worse disaster the first time.
01:18:05
James Orr
the the crown the The crown is eternal.
01:18:05
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
But anyway, it was you who started it
01:18:09
James Orr
It simply sat vacant for a few short years whilst we got whilst we dealt with those irritating proto-communist Puritans. and And we had the Great Restoration and the then the Bill of Rights in 1689.
01:18:26
James Orr
And from there on in, we a rose to a position of dominance in the world that know no people had ever attained before. And um so, yeah, there's ah there's a lesson in that. and Meanwhile, you guys are on, what is it, your Fifth Republic?
01:18:42
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yes.
01:18:42
James Orr
I'm not And and and you're lock you're locking up your ah your political leaders. At least these things haven't quite got that bad yet, though. I think, ah I hope Nigel Farage has got very good lawyers on hand because, yeah,
01:18:51
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yes.
01:18:56
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
i Yeah, yeah, yeah.
01:18:57
James Orr
I think this the lawfare strategy is seems to be contagious.
Legal Strategies in Politics
01:19:01
James Orr
is If it can work with Georgescu and Le Pen and Orbán and Salvini and Trump, then I don't see why ah they're not going to be running the same playbook here as well.
01:19:01
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yes, yes.
01:19:05
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yes.
01:19:11
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yes, yes, yes. It's a disaster. Anyway, that that's a whole other conversation. ah i i think we can i think we
Conclusion and Future Outlook
01:19:21
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
can end here. This was a very fun conversation. I hope people ah learned something ah about about what's going on in Britain, which you know is and has been and hopefully always will be one of the great nations of the West and one of the great civilizations of the West.
01:19:38
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
And like all the civilizations of the West this at present is troubled, but there are signs of hope. James Orr, thank you very much. This was a lot of fun.
01:19:49
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
ah Have a good day. Bye.