TRIGGERnometry - The Fall of England - Dr David Starkey

Episode Date: September 29, 2024

David Starkey CBE is an English historian and broadcaster. First appearing on television in 1977, he has since been a regular contributor on flagship BBC programmes such as The Moral Maze and Question Time. David is the author of more than 25 books and currently hosts his own show on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@davidstarkeytalks Our trusted recommendation: Protect your wealth with The Pure Gold Company. Get your free investor guide at https://pure-gold.co/trigger Discover the foundations of Western civilization with 321—a free online course on God, the world, and your place in it. Explore at https://321course.com/trigger Join our Premium Membership for early access, extended and ad-free content: https://triggernometry.supercast.com OR Support TRIGGERnometry Here: Bitcoin: bc1qm6vvhduc6s3rvy8u76sllmrfpynfv94qw8p8d5 Music by: Music by: Xentric | [e-mail] | https://www.xentricapc.com/ YouTube: @xentricapc  Buy Merch Here: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/shop/ Advertise on TRIGGERnometry: [e-mail] Join the Mailing List: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/#mailinglist Find TRIGGERnometry on Social Media:  https://twitter.com/triggerpod https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod/ https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod/ About TRIGGERnometry:  Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@francisjfoster) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Taxes and fees extra. See full terms at MintMobile.com. This episode sponsored by Maximus Tribe. You train, you track, you eat right. But if you're over 40, you've felt it. The results don't match the effort anymore. That's not willpower, it's biology. Hormones drop, metabolism slows, your body stops responding the way it used to.

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does not work. That's why we can't build anything. We've created an absolutely malfunctioning structure of government, which is the quintessence of it, is Kirstana. Finally, people have to realize what the consequences of their actions are. We will go bankrupt. So you're constantly putting the day off, but the day will come. Dr. David Starkey, eminent historian and now fellow YouTuber. Isn't it? I'm really, I shrink, I mean, certainly in the presence of a megastar. I'm a mere shrinking violet. Welcome back. It's always a pleasure to have you on the show. So, David, you've been talking a lot about the fall of England and the current state that the country is in. What do you mean by

the fall of England and where are we as a country and as a civilization more broadly? Nice, simple question to start off with. It reminds me of one terrible old, colleague I had at the University of London who could never be bothered to rewrite his lectures. So he insisted, he said, all exam questions must be roomy. And this meant that you could write anything, a question

that was broad enough so that his poor students who had just been fed the stuff of 40 years ago could answer them. But this on the other hand has point. What do I mean by the fall of England? It's again, the quickest way to do it is by saying

let's look at the relationship between the idea of England and the idea of Britain. This is the central question. Remember, everybody chatters about British values and so on. There is no such thing. Britain is not and never has been a nation state with independent values. Britishness was for export. At home, you were Scottish, Welsh, Irish, English. And that is the absolutely key thing to understand the last 300 years of our history.

Britain, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland begins in 1707 with the union of not essentially, although they shared a monarch ever since the accession. of the Stuarts at the beginning of the 17th century, although they share a monarch of the Stewart line, they retain everything that's separate. England and Scotland, they've got separate histories. Why Simon Sharma's history of Britain was rubbish, because there isn't such a thing. England and Scotland are completely separate histories, up to 1707. They're separate countries with, insofar as countries have values, separate values, separate traditions. But the extraordinary thing is with the Union in 1707, it's not a conquest, it's not colonisation, it's none of the

things that the Scots say it is, it is a genuine negotiated settlement between two separate countries, and Scotland in 1707 keeps everything of being an independent state apart from its monarchy and its parliament. So the Scots keep, obviously, Scottishness, they keep a particular a version of the English language and several versions of the English language. They keep their own church. The monarch still changes religion as they go across the border. You keep a separate educational system. You have universities entrenched in the Act of Union,

which is why Margaret Thatcher couldn't abolish the University of Aberdeen, although she wanted to make an example of it. You've got a separate system of heraldry. You've got separate crown jewels. You've got a completely separate legal system. separate educational system. And that meant, of course, that after Union, what all Scotland did was to join in the English Parliament. You send more Scottish MPs to Westminster than Scotland was actually entitled to.

You create a uniform army, a uniform navy, and the army in particular, where the Scots have a wholly disproportionate part, and the Scots get access to the British Empire. but there is no overarching single identity. The monarchy deliberately, as a matter of policy, creates Scottish titles, Welsh titles, Irish titles for each royal son, in other words, an actual endorsement of it. And this is this extraordinary multiple identity. Remember, it goes right through to sport.

The first internationals in soccer, are between England and Scotland, is why we don't have a single national team. So the relationship is what does England become? Scotland, increasingly Wales, Ireland were cultural nationalism. So you've got a national poet in the case of Scotland. You've got Robert Burns, you've got national dress, the kilt or the funny things that the Welsh were. The Welsh and the immense importance of this useless language, Welsh. It's why educational standards

why educational standards have collapsed in Wales. And then you wonder why you're controversial. No, no, but we need to talk, we need to call things by their proper names. Welsh is an unreformable medieval language. It's not even medieval, it's sort of bronze age, literally seriously.

It's a bronze age language in which every word that relates to modernity is an adapted form of English. So it's the fact that you waste a vast proportion of the time of children in schools teaching them this language is a central reason why the Welsh children are performing hugely less well

than English children. It's really important. We don't lie. We spent time lying. I thought this was one place where we can actually tell the truth. The truth is absolutely central. So we have then this world

in which there are three nationalisms that are very typical of general European nationalism. They are intensely cultural, they're about music, they're about special dress, they're folkloric. They don't have a direct political representation. We're talking before 1997. And there's a different one which is English. Where you don't have national dress, except you do, I'm wearing it. Seriously, it's the Savile-Rosuit which completely transforms how the elites of Europe dress,

because before that it's French style in silk. velvet laces and whatever, which is completely impractical. You can't actually wear it outside a coach or a royal court. Otherwise you're torn to pieces by the mob. And the English pioneer, a form of dressing which you can use, you can ride in, you can walk in the street in, you can do business in. But of course it becomes a universal possession. So Englishness becomes a kind of broader identity which is above all related to one thing

and one thing only great nationhood. It's that sense of great nationhood. The England of the 19th century, the made in England, the world's largest manufacturing power, commercial power, the place that originates parliamentary, well, before democracy, parliamentary government, representative, government, a secure system of law that invents effectively modernity, capitalism and all the rest. So there's an incredible pride in all of that. That undergoes tremendous shock from the end of the First World War for obvious reasons.

In many ways, everybody says, you know, what books should people read to understand England? It's that satire, that skit of the 1960s, Sellers and Yeatman, 1066 and all that, which ends in this extraordinary way. It describes the peace treatise and whatever that follow 1918 and it says, this is before Fukuyama, Britain ceased to be top, because you use Britain and England interchangeably, Britain ceased to be top notion and history came to a full stop. Now, I don't think England has ever fully recovered from that moment, because how do you define a sense of nationhood that hasn't depended on the usual conventional symbols of nationhood? And again, if you actually look within Britain, the way it actually worked was everybody was both British in the sense of a formal legal. identity, a formal sense of citizenship, and you were Welsh, Scottish, Irish, English. But the Welsh Scottish Irish actually, and certainly their governing elites, subscribe essentially

to an Anglo-British culture. They go to the elites, especially in Scotland, go to the great English public schools, and they take part in a system of... The Westminster Parliament is just the English Parliament. The laws of the whole community are the laws of England. The numbering of our monarchs go back to the conquest of England in the Norman conquest. Now, all of that is thrown into chaos. It's a very long answer to a very big question.

All of that is thrown into chaos by the deliberate decision of the Blair government to embark on two things, devolution on the one hand, and large-scale emigration on the other. Because what you do deliberately at that point is devolution says the four nations are equal. So you, as far as possible, you destroy the, as it were, overarching political supremacy of the English Parliament. You do what you'd not done before, which is to embody the nationhood of Wales, Scotland, Ireland, with actual Indian Ireland. Sorry, is a separate case which we should talk about. But Scotland and Wales, you deliberately give it political embodiment, which it hadn't had before, but you don't give England.

So you deliberately marginalise England. The reason Labour deliberately marginalises England is because England is conservative and they don't like it is the essential issue. But it's also too big to operate in a federal system. You can't have a federal system. Where Scotland, what is it, less than 5 million people? Is it three? And Wales is 2 or 3 million.

They're tiny, tiny places, and you're 50 or 60 in England. So you cannot possibly have a federal system with such gross disparity. The 13 colonies are able to do it, although some of them are very much bigger than the others. Because there are 13, you can balance out as you do between the House of Representatives, and the Senate, the Senate representing the states, two from each. In other words, everybody is the same. The House of Representatives actually representing population. You can balance it out.

We can't do that. But the problem is it then leaves England high and dry with no formal expression of its national identity, unlike the Scots, unlike the Welsh, unlike the Irish. It then goes further because what you do is you try to invent a new British identity. And the key thing to under, this is deliberately the work of Blair

and especially of Gordon Brown. And the key thing is, let's be quite a blunt. You accuse me of you. You, you, you, you. If I accuse you of being blunt, you know you're being really blunt. You can tell just how far I've gone.

What we do is, we create a flag of convenience identity. Being British has no content. It deliberately has no content because the only British value apparently is tolerance. Right. And diversity. In other words, which is aggressive tolerance. There's passive tolerance, which is what you and me as white men are expected to show. And there's diversity, which is what those who are not white, which is aggressive tolerance to be directed at us. And this is utterly disastrous, Because in the old Britain and with all good immigrants like you, we don't have multiculturalism. What we had was biculturalism.

Everybody was Scottish, Welsh, English, whatever, and British in the sense of subscribing to an overarching set of essentially political values. Because I believe, unlike most people, politics is actually what Aristotle calls architect ponic. It shapes that it gives. shape to a country, it gives shape to a people. And unfortunately, we've thrown all that away. And the result is then you have a chaos of identities. What we should be going back to is biculturalism, not multiculturalism. But how do we do that?

Well, you have to recognize a primary value. Well, I agree. And let's unpack that because I think what you're talking about is you're at least describing, we haven't kind of found that way to us. But you're describing what I think is the central problem Britain faces from a cultural and identity perspective, which is that what we know we should be saying to people who come here, and we've had a lot of people who've come here in a short period of time, is you have to become one of us. Oh, but you see, it was never something right again.

It wants to be that. No, no, I don't know. I don't think it should be right. Let's again, let me now reverse track because I think do what fashion. used to be called a reverse ferret. Let me explain the good side of what I've just described. Because we didn't have a single passionately enforced identity like the French, like the Germans, like the Americans until very recently, remember all European states are in one way or another inventions. They're put together at different moments of time and for different reasons.

And there's an especially fertile period in this following, the great chaos of the French Revolution and Napoleon. And one of the central instruments in this state forging, well, obviously, it's power, it's bureaucracy, it's industry. But the most important thing in what we are doing here is education. You use the new universal systems of education and compulsory schooling that are imposed in the late 19th century actually to impose a single version of the language, a single interpretation of the history, if you like, a single set of values.

We never did that in Britain because we never had a single system of education. We, again, as I said, Scotland had its own entrenched educational system. Wales did. And at the same time, we had multiple religious schools, we had local authority schools, we had charitable schools, we had public schools. So there was never this uniformity. This is why the good side of what I'm describing is we've been able to accommodate such an extraordinarily broad range of immigrants without the structure actually tearing apart.

Whereas manifestly, in, for example, France, the structure is completely coming apart. Because if you only have this very brittle model of, it means one thing to be French, the only way you can accommodate diversity is actually to pull it right apart. we had such a baggy, it's again, why are we able to avoid revolution from the 17th century right up to now? It's because we had a constitution that was extraordinarily flexible, that right from the beginning had the foundation of the idea that everybody is represented in Parliament. Of course, everybody wasn't. I mean, only a tiny proportion was, but that was the myth. So when you get the Chartists fighting for representing working class,

when you fight, get the later 19th century, skilled unionists, when you get the suffragettes. They're not saying, we want to tear parliament down. We're saying we want to be part of it. And again, so you see what I mean, you've got a constitution which has got this immense, just one second, this immense elasticity. In the same way, because British identity was never one single coherent nation, there is no British nation, It was able to accommodate this extraordinary range, but it relied on this unspoken assumption that there was dominant, essentially political and behavioral culture. I mean, Englishness itself is an extraordinarily diverse thing.

It embodies the Chartist. It embodies weird people like, you know, I'm really weird. My ancestors were Quaker. I mean, again, one of these extraordinary religious minorities that's had such a hugely disproportionate impact. Everybody says for good, I think also for ill. The Roundtree Trust is one of the most destructive things available in England sponsoring every deranged leftist cause at the moment.

But they have this extraordinary ability both to make money and to sponsor radical good causes. So it's a very complex identity. It's not just the bowler hat. It's not just the cut glass accent. It's not just southern England. But it's everything, you know, that somebody is brilliant as a writer, as Orwell describes, it's everything that you feel when you enter a great building.

It's what you feel when you enter Westminster Abbey, that extraordinary sense of 800 years of history, just resting on you, breathing, the amazing figures, the monuments that you walk, the smells you smell, the extraordinary music, the liturgy, and so on. But that was deliberately damaged under Blair, quite intentionally damaged. And instead, you superimpose this mythical identity. And the problem with it is it has literally no content.

So we say to immigrants now that you can be anything you want to be. We allow our willing acceptance and tolerance of very different groups. So we, we, we, we, if you look at the pattern of giving state recognition to Roman Catholics, to Jews, Quakers, and when there's a royal accession, there is actually a special group of, I forget what it's called, but it's something like the privileged bodies. And it includes the entire litany of rather strange people like Quakers and God knows what of the 19th century, sort of incorporated into the establishment. So you can see how we did it, why we did it, but you can also see how it gets out of hand if there is a deliberate attack, especially on Englishness. And the reason for that deliberate attack is, of course, it's identified with a particular form of racial supremacy, which is now decided to be ultimately wicked, it's identified

primarily with empire, though it has to be said, the Scots were the most aggressive imperialist of the lot. If you either look at the honkers and shankas, you know, Hong Kong and Shanghai, you look at the banking system in Canada. You look at the dominant families in India and so on. But the entire operation of wokeery is primarily designed to target that dominant Anglophone culture, which was the only glue that held it all together. Well, this is why I was asking you the question. So your argument is the British identity is vacuous and has no substance, which I agree with, because I agree with, let's just park it there.

So the essential thing is that the fact that British identity was vacuous is only recent. Yes, I understand because of the destruction of English. It is the determination to say that the only British value is diversity and tolerance. Yes. Rather than saying, actually, what you're doing is when you get that passport, when you acquire that citizenship, when you become a subject of the crown, you're effectively subscribing to a thousand years of history. And again, it's really important. And this is also the edging out of the monarchy, which is one of the most striking things in my lifetime, is also central, as it were, the central embodiment of that o'clock. overarching identity, wasn't nationhood.

It was the monarchy. If you, I have a plaque, a bronze plaque, which I found amongst my father's possessions, which was what his family was given after his eldest brother and what Abraham died of horrible wounds at Gallipoli. And what appears this is the plaque that was given to the family of everybody who had been killed in the First World War. So there were millions of these things. And what appears on it is for king and country. The prime emblem of it was the monarchy. And one of the things that I think has been catastrophic

and catastrophically accelerated, especially with the constitutionally illiterate coronation of King Charles III, the role of the monarch as the prime symbol of this... Remember, Britain is the world's most successful state. whether you look at the legacy of the British Empire, maybe dwarfs the legacy of whom, an empire that leaves a daughter-states,

America, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, India, is the most extraordinary thing in the world that creates a language which is not simply universally in Europe, but universal in the world, a dominant system of law, English common law. So this staggering achievement is then, as it were, turned against it, used to destroy it. And what seemed to me to be so extraordinary at the coronation was all the things that were you,

I can remember vividly as a boy, first time I'd watched television, watching the coronation of Elizabeth II. And at that point, there was still the sense of the monarchy as the apex of a political pyramid, and of course at that point, still just about an imperial pyramid. And ever since 1689, the House of Lords and the House of Commons had been present at every coronation, and the monarch was manifestly the peak of a pyramid. Charles, King Charles and Archbishop Welby deliberately swept the whole of that away. Every reference to politics was removed from the coronation.

The original idea of the coronation was the sanctification of political power by divine authority. In other words, what I've always said was the proper role of the Church of England, English Shinto, the English worshipping themselves, through the position of the king emperor. All that swept aside, the Blairization of the monarchy, which I'm afraid latter Queen Elizabeth and present King Charles have been absolutely central. David, let me just finish this line of questioning with you, because what I'm desperately trying to pin you down on is what are we to do about all of this? Because your point about the monarchy, I take very well. I was at a gathering recently. It was probably around the time of the coronation, actually, of people from our space. There were many people who you'd know, many people who our views would know there. And the person who was talking at the end of a speech

said, God saved the king. And kind of ever looked around and said yeah god said and then they giggled afterwards because this idea you know you mentioned the plaque i saw something the other day about how a group of british soldiers were surrounded and ran out of ammunition and were all killed and they sent their final message was out of ammunition god saved the king i don't imagine british squadies in that situation now would be sending that kind of message back that is true right that is true so if we're not to tell new immigrants or, you know, my son is two years old, he is the son of two immigrants here. What are we supposed to tell people about what it now means to live here and to be part of

this society? Call it English, call them British, call it whatever you want. No, no, I think we've got, how do we all coexist? I think, I think we do have, we do have to say that there is an overarching British identity. That is our city, that is what we legally are. Remember, again, because England and Scotland and were so completely separate in fundamental reasons. There was never a sense of a racial basis of our identity. And remember, this is true in Germany until five minutes ago. Everybody who spoke German was potentially a German citizen.

There was this extraordinarily part. Ours is a juridical view of citizenship. You're a subject of the crown. And of course, that can be a matter of will. It's a matter of contract. It's a matter of form. The problem is once it ceases to have a sense of allegiance to what the crown used to represent, the crown used to be this summation, this summary of that thousand years of history that I'm talking about.

Maybe what we've got to do, I would say this is a historian, wouldn't I? I call it, right, let me just go slightly to one side. There's a movement now which I don't know whether you've actually interviewed people who are interested in it, which is to say the only way we can save ourselves is by a religious revival. Quite a lot of people on the right to saying this, which I can see the point on I disagree radically. But they're talking about the needs to be, what we are talking about, an idea of something bigger than oneself, the thing that both you identify with, to an extent explains you, that gives you ground, all those sort of things. And there's a grand and fancy word for it which you can call transcendence. I believe that there is a possibility of historical transcendence.

What I would want to do with every immigrant, and if one could, is to take them round two or three great buildings, to take them around Westminster Abbey, to get them to look at what is there. of all, it would be required that they would have a sufficient level of English actually to understand it. Take them around to look at a great national monument which can, this is the early 18th century which gives pride of place to a scientist. Because on one side of the abbey there is the vast, elaborate tomb monument of Newton, of

Isaac Newton. It's just extraordinary that you have a special corner devoted to poets, It's another special corner to musicians. At the end of the 18th century, the entire royal family takes his hat off and bows before the throne, before the kind of throne of Handel's monument there. And it's that extraordinary, the statues of the great statesman and so on. It's what we should be feeling. It's not empty pride, it's nothing vacuous.

It is a respect, it's gratitude, but also the realization that that's not something dead, but is something that is properly a kind of fruitful soil. It's a kind of well-fertilized field from which novelty springs. Because again, what the absolute tragedy of particularly the 20th century is the belief you can just start from scratch, which again Blair's new country. But do you know what? It actually was because it tried to scrub away as much of the past as possible with the disastrous consequences of the present. What we have to realize is that everything that's gone wrong, including the NHS, is an attempt when you try to start from scratch. When you simply scrub away the past and use an exercise of artificial intelligence, wouldn't it be lovely?

We are a product of wouldn't it be lovely. of ignoring, of ignoring, Eliza do little, of ignoring what was there already. And I am passionate about this, Constantin. One of the reasons I am always so impressed by you, you have, you as a quite deliberate intellectual process have absorbed yourself into that. And have been, is it not true? Yes, absolutely. And been changed and transformed by it.

And you are precisely, I'm not famous for flattery, but I'm going to give it to you, you are an example of exactly what I'm talking about, the extraordinary transformative power of this, how it changes, how it directs, how it is the great pointer from past, present to future. And that's what we should be doing. In other words, we should find a way by which it's ambitious, but I think it's doable, in which Everybody who aspires to British citizenship is helped to the sort of understanding and the sort of transformative process that you've had, that you've done for yourself. Sorry, Francis. Yeah, yeah, yeah, no. I was waiting.

My question to you, David, is, and you flattered me, let me flatter myself, I did have some circumstances which made it easier for me. First of all, I came here when I was young. Secondly, I came to boarding school, which imbues you with many of the British values. Knock them into you. Knocks them into you quite through osmosis. Secondly, or presumably you were never beaten. Well, thirdly, not to flatter myself too much, but, you know, I've had the luxury, let's put it like this, to read a lot and to think about these things.

if I had come in my mid-20s and gone straight into a low-level job where I had to sort of survive, and I've had periods of my life that were like that, but I had something before, I don't know that I would have got to the point that I've got to. And I guess what I feel is,

I love what you're saying about, you know, and maybe we should actually do some kind of collaboration where you take us around Westminster, and we film it. But, but. But what I'm, there has to be a more retail version of this for most people to get it.

Of course, I understand that. But what I'm saying, I've described the idea. Yes. Right. What we need to do is to have that conscious process of cultural inculcation. Yes. By the way, it doesn't,

I've no idea whether you retain or do you, were you ever orthodox? I mean, yeah, well, my family are orthodox. Do you retain it? I'm not a practicing religious person, but I probably imbibed some of the values. Exactly. Exactly. What I think is it's entirely possible, indeed I regard as valuable, that a Jew, a Sikh,

whoever retains all the individuality and peculiarity of custom alongside and with. And I think it's entirely possible for that to happen. I mean, I first, and again, we're being, let's be autobiographical, because I gave you, tried to give you the historical structure. I think the anecdote is often so valuable. I first was really alerted to this idea by culturalism, by my experience in my glory days, doing the BBC's moral maze, which is when, of course, I get the name of, you know, the rudest man in Britain, for being abusive to poor ill George Austin and whatever. But one of my fellow panelists was Hugo Grin, who was the rabbi.

I don't know whether it's called the liberal or the reform, West London congregation based in Marlaban. And of course, he's classically on the left, or left-ish. And our relationship was a quite spiky one. I mean, I think it's best summarized by a rather nice exchange between us, Hugo, I have this word voice that went out, the kind of voice, which I always say explains why Americans suffer from prostate. You vibrate it all very badly. Anyway, you're not half as nasty as you appear,

to which I fluted back. And you, who go, my dear, and not half as nice either. So he was very nicely tense relationship. Anyway, it was halfway through that, halfway through my 10-year stintler, that I met my late partner, that I met James Brown, and we got together and all the rest of it.

And Hugo again, you know Jew, homosexuality, quite awkward. He deliberately went out of his way to include the two of us and he did one thing I've never forgotten, invited us both to the Passover in his house. And I never really understood Judaism and of course at that point you see the head of the household, effectively as high priest performing the central rituals of the religious high priest performing The central rituals of the religion, which are also the rituals of the table, which we in, you know, communion and whatever in the Western churches, it's a kind of ritualized version of that.

What is remarkable in a Jewish Passover, it is actually part of the meal you are really going to eat. And here was this man who was a major sort of that point, public figure and whatever, suddenly becoming the high priest in his own household. And I found it moving in a way. But it was this doubleness and there is ease in both worlds. And in the same way that the Anglo-Scott is easy in both worlds. You can be strutting around in Kilton's Scrutus one minute and in the most fluting of

English accents, discussing imperial policy in another. And those are the things that we've got to work out ways. They have to be educational. We have to rethink how we educate. Again, there are so many guilty parties to the Blair Enterprise, including many historians. I mean, people like Linda Colley, Norman Davis produced what I would argue, and it's a strong thing to say, deliberately wrong. of British history to lead to this vacuous conclusion of a nation which merely has a flag

of convenience as an identity. We are going to, again, the whole way in which we've attacked history which always used to be taught essentially is the narrative history of centering on a narrative history of Britain and instead you replace it with this absurd notion that all history is doing is teaching kids to interpret documents, you know, this posturous business of giving children who cannot possibly understand a historical document because you don't have the context. You can only understand historical document if you were the context.

We will need to go back and we will have to have a much more historically based way. Otherwise, we are at the risk, and you know about this from all your other interests, We are at the risk of a culture which simply eradicates the whole of its foundations, the whole of its past, and is in this perpetual TikTok world of a meaningless present. And that is destructive. It's not simply destructive of nations. It's destructive of the very essence of humanity. David, I agree with the vast majority of what you're saying. I think there's a piece of the puzzle that you're missing and pushed back on me about this.

if you disagree, we're not addressing the issue of the working classes, if we take back to the First World War, lions led by donkeys. That became a moment, as far as I was taught, that the working classes started to develop a distrust of their supposed betters, particularly the way that they were just led to the slaughter. If you look at de-industrialisation, you had these working-class communities which were congregated around manufacturing or the pit or whatever it may have been,

it had the heart ripped out of it. So essentially what you have is the people who are the foundation, the cornerstone of your civilization, who have been demoralized by the people who should have been representing them. I think the lions led by donkeys is a pretty inadequate view of the First World War, actually.

But certainly the part of the complex of British Airlines, English life, was exactly the trade union movement and the Labour Party. But let me give you an alternative history. At the beginning of the 20th century, you get of course this great moment when the Liberal Party, having triumphed in the 1900s, vanishes effectively in 1918 at the end of the First World War. At that moment, the British elite is confronted with what does it do with radical socialism? On many places in the continent, you actually decide to fight it. We embrace it. We do quite

extraordinary things. Do you know in 1917 when you reconstruct the monarchy in the wake of the Russian Revolution, you actually create an order of chivalry exclusively for socialists and trade unionists, the companion of honor? And now of course you laugh your head off, but there was this general sense that socialists wouldn't want titles, wouldn't really want to be called law, absolutely would never dream of going into the House of Laws, I mean, would raise their hands in horror at being called Sir Sir Keir, for example. They would regard this as utterly shocking. So you created this special order to accommodate them. You go out of your way when there's the first Labour government in the 1920s to welcome them to back.

Buckingham Palace to make, I mean, George the Fifth is brilliant at it. He'd been a midshipman in the Navy. He'd been knocked around at the bottom of the pile. He knew all about that. And he identified very easily with the working class members of the cabinet, people like J.H. Thomas, and they sit down happily and laugh at the ridiculous pretensions of the middle-class socialists like the webs, like Sydney Webb. Sydney Webb is the only one who actually refuses to wear a court dress, which was, you know, the British is and all the rest of it. And there's a wonderful exchange between J.H. Thomas and George V.

asking, you know, well, why? Why? What's the problem? Thomas just says to him, well, sir, in that household, it's Beatrice what wears the bridges, The usual classic male sexist joke. So there wasn't the chairman, the general secretary of the of the Trace Union Congress becomes an absolutely central part of the establishment right through the, I mean we talk of of the third Labor government, the 45 to 51 labor government, I mean the which was remember

was the continuation of the wartime coalition. The wartime coalition headed by Churchill, but with Attlee as second in command in theory, but the real second in command is Ernest Bevin. And Bevin controls effectively the entire domestic economy. So socialism is totally at the heart of the British state. The new settlement that is formed at the end of the Second World War is one that embraces and embeds it, the role of the council house, the invention of the NHS and all the rest of it. What of course goes wrong is that the socialism at the heart of the establishment in

the 1970s and a combination of that, welfareism and canesian economics, comes near to destroying the state. I mean, can we just understand that's what happens in the 90s? From an economic point of view, which actually is, I mean, I'm a very much. afraid, the basis of it all, it comes near. And what Thatcher does is absolutely to rip that form of socialism out of the heart of the environment, out of the heart of the establishment. And I can see why I think it was also deeply problematic.

I mean, I think we're now sufficiently far away from Thatcherism to understand that it was necessary, but it also entailed great evils as well as great good. But the de-industrialization, as we can now see, was merely accelerated in Britain. I mean, everywhere in Europe, heavy industry is now dead, isn't it? Yes. And with particularly green policies accelerating the eradication of what's left. Our problem is that we never devised and never thought about what really replaced it.

In America, you see, in one sense, it doesn't matter. You can abandon corners of America. I don't know whether you've been to parts of urban American, particularly rural America. They make our poverty here look like luxury, because, of course, it is prevented from absolute deprivation by the extent of the welfare state. But you can then, because it's so big, you can simply move on. You can move on and develop another area. We can't, and we haven't, I suppose, the city of London in some ways is the equivalent. But yes, we need to rethink what this fancy word leveling up or something would entail.

I think it's profoundly difficult because the foundations of what you're talking about, what I'm talking about, was a particular form of industry and a particular form of prosperity. Remember, there was no need to argue that you'd to level up Birmingham or level up Manchester or level up, level up Liverpool or Glasgow. These were vastly more intellectually exciting places than London in the late 18th and the 19th century because it was where economic activity happened. It is profoundly difficult. to invent economic activity. And the whole idea that, you know, we're now subscribing to, that simply by building

houses, that simply by building transport things, you will somehow magic an independent economy. And without that independent economy, it's very, very difficult. But we made no attempt. We never really contemplate, and you are right. And in a sense, what, but the most terrible thing, I mean, let's again face this. I come from that background. My father was a toolmaker.

No, genuinely, genuinely genuinely. At Platt Brothers. And he didn't have a business, unlike Starmer's father. He didn't have a paddock that could have been, was sold for several hundred thousand pounds and could have been sold for more. I was born in a pebble dash semi that didn't even have a full bathroom. I know all about that. But the most shocking thing is, of course, that the party that was founded to represent that, namely the Labour Party, has abandoned it completely, totally and completely.

And what the Labour Party has become instead is the party of the new blob. The Labour Party now, as you saw it at the... Look at what was represented in Liverpool. What it is, it is essentially the party of the new nomenclature, what you used to have in the Soviet Union. It's the Labour Party is now the... It's not the party of the working class. It is the party of a new governing class that consists of the quangocracy, the white-collar employees in state education, the white-collar employees in state education, the white-collar employees.

in the NHS, in the bureaucracy, in this multitude of quangos that what we have. It's become, in fact, the party of the privilege south of England and islands in bits of Manchester, bits of Liverpool, bits of Glasgow. And it is this, it is this extraordinary abandonment by the party that was actually founded to represent it. But again, sorry, we're talking very very far. Frankly, and there are questions too big, even to be almost to be touched on. But we've also got to remember something else.

Although what happened in 1945 was done, I think, genuinely with the best of intentions, though I think the results were terrible, one of the things it deliberately did was to prevent, because it seemed to make it unnecessary, voluntary activity. If I look back to my father, who experienced the horror of almost unfunded and unemployment for three terrible years in the early 1930s on two occasions, he and my uncle actually walking from the north of Manchester to London in search of work. I mean, what we would regard as a poverty beyond comprehension. There was never a loss of dignity.

And he was engaged throughout in intense voluntary activity, in religiously, educationally, in all sorts of other ways. And it's that structure of voluntary activity because the only ways you kept going, you had little clubs that paid for trips out, you had, you had, sounds gruesome, you'd burial clubs that would actually pay money. you friendly societies, you had, of course, an intense degree, in my parents' case, of involvement in religion, which was extraordinarily wide embracing activity. All of that has gone.

Because what we're talking about... There's hardly a trace of it left. Because it said, sorry to interrupt you there, David, because what we're talking about here from different points and different angles is we're talking about something very profound, which is the death of community. Well, it's, it is the, well, communities, I hate that word community. Well, come on. It is the word most frequently used by Yvette Cooper.

That tells you it should never, ever pass your lips. It's murmured by thick police officers when they're justifying too-deer policing. But the social bonds that that word used to represent. But it's not, community is the wrong word. It's this extraordinary important. of voluntary self-directed activity. The thing that is awful now about the working class is in many ways the term has become a paradox.

It's the non-working class. But it is, it's this sense that they don't have control of anything. What that voluntary activity gave, I have my father's time. It's, I look at his day. Although it could have just been, you know, nowadays we're slouching around with the fag on the sofa or whatever it is, you know, getting pissed on cheap beer. or Lager. His instead, it was constantly doings.

Somebody at the, in fact, the bottom of the social pile, still, you know, collecting for the poor, still interested passionately in what was going on in continental Europe, still interested in the persecution, at the beginning of the persecution of the Jews in Germany. I've got the cutting, his cuttings from papers and whatever. Just extraordinary. But if you're involved like that, you control something. The thing that's gone desperately wrong is this sense of not having control. Remember, very interesting studies have done about anxiety, depression, and all these sorts

of things and mental illness. And the general view is, you know, people in terribly high-powered jobs and whatever should be very vulnerable to them. Not at all. If you're up the hierarchy where you're in charge, you're setting targets, you're driving yourself, you're driving other people, you're almost immune. You can you can drive yourself into a wall and you'll survive. It's the people at the bottom that are on the receiving end, that have no autonomy. And it's, it is this loss of autonomy of self-directed activity.

And remember, these are grand words, but they're the foundation of all classical political philosophy. The beginning of the ability to take part in politics is the moment at which you begin to take control of yourself, at which you take control of your own life. You feel a certain sense of responsibility for it. And again, our educational system seems to me to have almost entirely forgotten these things. The classical, the old public school system was finally very much about that. When you got to the top of the school, you became a prefect. You participated in the government of the thing. You were studying the classics, which are all about that process of self-education. You look at your Shakespeare plays. You look at different forms of political success and failure.

Your best, your Coriolanus is, your Henry V, whatever. There they all are. There are the examples. There are the ways of tackling it. The way history used to be taught. Yeah, and what it seems that we have now is we have this vacuum. Totally. We have a vacuum and as we all know, nature of haws a vacuum, so it has to be filled by something. By rubbish. And when you have at your centre rubbish, nothing good is going to come from that. And what is happening is you're seeing a society and a people slowly become corrupted because

they have rubbish at their centre. And the tragedy is, it's not their fault. It's the fact that we have our ruling classes. No, I think that, no, the decline of the people, we are all complicit in it. I don't think it's anything like a sim. So you're subscribing to this wonderful starmerite view. There are working people. All the rest of it.

And then there's this wicked little group, you know, were too rich, too leisure, all the rest. This is nonsense. But the health of a democracy and its decline is a universal question. But of course, it's very easy to see some of the things that have gone wrong. We've talked about de-industrialization and the destruction of... And remember, it's again, one of the central things is we were first in. were first into industrialization, which means that the patterns of the trade union of the

friendly society, of specific trades and the traditions and pride of specific trades, were very, very deeply ingrained here. They'd a century and a half. Most countries, that pattern, which was effectively the old coal, steel and iron pattern, was a much, much shorter period of time. It embeds itself into the fabric less, so it's easier to remove and to go to the more mobile forms that followed electrification and and all the rest of it. But essentially, the other great thing, and again, we need to talk about this daring

Delta Truth is the welfare state. The welfare state, because it removes the penalties of failure, because it removes the penalties Because it effectively says to you, in every way, if you don't look after yourself, don't worry, we'll pick up the pieces. The central rule of all human conduct should be actions and inactions have consequences. The moment you lose that sense, you are absolutely lost, and welfareism has removed that. I'm sorry, we need sticks as well as carrots. And the moment those go, it applies on a high political level too.

Why have politics in Scotland and Wales been so insane after devolution? Because you've given them large-scale political independence with no requirement that they pay for it, because it's paid for by the British taxpayer. So you can effectively have play-pen politics. And what we've done is to introduce a play pen society. Everybody talks about infantilization. This broad, the fact people grow up, if they ever grow up at all, much, much later than they used to. And it is effectively because you've removed risk.

The state now acts as an overprotective parent. So you never grow up. Growing up requires you take responsibility for yourself. And if you fall flat on your face, you pick yourself. up. You wipe yourself off. You disinfect your wounds and you sort yourself out. Mother's Day has a way of sneaking up on you. But when it does, 1-800 flowers makes it easy to send mom something beautiful, thoughtful, and worthy of everything she does. Right now, with double blooms from 1-800 flowers, order one dozen roses and get another dozen for free. It's a bigger gesture,

with fresh, beautiful flowers arranged to make Mother's Day feel as special as she is. Make Mother's Day feel bigger with double blooms at 1,800flowers.com slash Spotify. That's 1,800flowers.com slash Spotify. And doesn't it? No, no, I couldn't agree with you more. The question I was going to ask you is, I think you and I both know that the central value of modern society has become this pathological empathy. Yes. Compassion. Every time I hear the word compassion, I want to reach for my revolt. Is Christianity gone Matt? It's, you know, it's Nietzsche's parody of Christianity.

Right. And if that's the central value, which it seems to me that it is, then every time when I put those ears on myself and I hear what you're saying through those ears, then what I'm hearing is David wants people to suffer. You know, the widow, the disabled man, the whatever, the child with whatever. And it just, I don't see how we're ever going to rebalance that.

Because nobody would want people starving to death. Nobody, and nor am I talking about that. Of course. What I was talking about was a world in which people recognize that provision for old age, provision for the widow, provision for the sick was something that you engaged yourself consciously to provide for, to, hence the fact, there were saving clubs. Hence the fact, you would be, there were local hospitals in which there was subscription. All of this sort of thing.

Now, I'm not saying that we go back to that, that would be preposterous. But what we've done, all the great world of the first large-scale popular interventions in politics in the later 18th. century, if you look at what founding fathers of America, they are profoundly aware of the payoff between freedom and security. Remember, the classical framework is, you know, if you trade, freedom for security, you lose both. And that's exactly what we are doing. Because the outcome of where we are now is Argentina. And Argentina has been lucky enough to get Miele. We are not all that far from Argentina and we now have a government that is fully peronist. The new Labor Party

is fully perornist and will bring about exactly the same consequences. Let's talk about that, David. I hate to sally the highbrow conversations that we always have, including this one, with the day to day of modern politics, but I think... I thought we've been talking about a lot about it. Well, I don't think so. I've been sullying as much more than that. No, I feel I I feel like we've been soaring somewhat above it and looking down on it from a great height and doing other things onto it from a great height too. So when you say Peronis, most people don't know what that means. And I've heard you talk about the rule of lawyers and Kirstama being one.

What do you mean when you say it's Peronist? What do you mean by when you talk about the rule of lawyers and what does that mean for us going forward? Well, again, I think the easiest way of describing it, By Peronism, we look at what happened to Argentina. Argentina was as rich as America in the late 19th century, a country of astonishing natural resources which seemed a vast British investment, though it was never a formal part of the British Empire. And then from the Second World War onwards, it embraces this perpetual statism, particularly under the rule of Peron and indeed Evita.

in which the public sector gets bigger and bigger. There is more and more nationalisation. There is more and more welfare. And what you do is, again, it's something we can see going back upstairs, going back into the heavens. You can see repeatedly states get structures that are too big for their economists. That's what happens to the Roman Empire from 260 onwards. You develop there.

It's the administrative and the military state and so on. and the tax base can't actually support it, so the state becomes self-consuming. And that's exactly what happened in Argentina. And, or indeed it happened here in the 1970s. It's been manifestly happening here since the financial crisis. And the only way that the state can actually continue to pay itself without taxing itself to death is by vast inflation and the multiplication of the coinage. You suddenly create vast amounts of money.

We called it something fancy. quantitative easing, but it's just as destructive of value, except it wasn't that it went straight into people's pockets, it went into property prices. Property prices haven't multiplied just because there are not enough houses. They've multiplied because vast sums of money were created by this disgustingly irresponsible thing called the Bank of England. And they find outlet somewhere, they find outlet in acid inflation, if not just ordinary inflation. And what we did, under Blair, again in the 1970s, was to create... In 1990s. And I say, what am I talking about?

Forgive me, I said 70s there. We created... Thatcher sorted... Right, let's go back. We fit this together because we've been doing well with the chronology. And in the 1970s, Thatcher more or less sorted out the result of the problems that had been created by the first welfare state, the first nationalizations, the first excessive power to trade unions.

of that Labour government of 1945 to 51. But she did so at the risk of reducing conservatism simply to free market economics, which I think itself is also disastrous. Blair, as it were, deceives everybody, including he deceived Margaret Thatcher. Margaret Thatcher says in 1992 that Blair is her principal tribute act, that she shows that she's won. But what she didn't realize, what Blair did was deline. was deliberately to transform the actual constitution of Britain.

It is an extraordinary thing to say. You create a new kind of British state. In the same way, you totally distort what had been this Anglo-British identity and evaporated of meaning. You create a new state. You replace the parliamentary legal state which had run England in one form or another Magna Carta, effectively since Magna Carta up to the 1990s, you replace it with this new, intense, centralized, extraordinarily, profoundly dangerously structured thing that deliberately

reduces the role of Parliament and therefore you and me, which is again like the German constitution which was put together in the wake of Nazism, which was determined to make sure that you couldn't really have democracy doing anything too much. You deliberately reduce the power of Parliament. So we reduce it first by devolution, which produces this completely, crazily confused structure within the British Isles. Secondly, you incorporate the European Convention on Human Rights. Now, this is the problem again. We talk about woke a lot. What the left has done is to capture language. Human rights sound lovely. They're wonderful. Of course they are. But they've changed their meaning. The human rights

that Churchill, that Eleanor Roosevelt was interested in, were the human rights of every individual against the state. The original conventions were designed to stop Nazism, to stop communism. What happened instead is through the influence of judges and, through above all, in the United Nations, the actual influence of Stalinism, you stand them on their head because human rights and Lord Bingham actually says this absolutely explicitly in the 1990, the real purpose of human rights is to protect minorities. Now the moment you do that, you reverse because the only way you can protect, remember, There's a very simple definition of democracy.

It's the rule of the majority. So you use human rights deliberately to destroy the democratic majority. That's exactly what the Human Rights Act does. It prioritizes minorities. So you produce this entire inversion, which of course woke does. Woke sees, as it were, you meet all of us one way or another, white white men, you're allegedly the ruling majority as the wicked who've got to be suppressed. So it's the magnificat.

You know, he shall put down the mighty from their seats and exalt them of low degree. But it goes much further than that. If you believe in universal or European human rights, it means you don't actually believe in the state because you've got a source of law outside the state. You remove the notion, which is absolutely central to England, that what is, What gives law, people always say, why do the English, as it were, dot eyes and cross-tees with laws? Why did we always gold plate European legal interventions and regulations? Well, the idea is that in England, law was seen as something you made yourself.

In other words, Parliament binds everybody because everybody is represented there. Continental Europe, everywhere had been an absolute monarchy. So law was something that was put on you, which is why there's a much more relaxed attitude to law. And in Ireland, Italy, a positive opposition to law, that it's seen as an external oppressive thing. And then the even worse thing that universal human rights do is to say there should be no state frontiers. Because if there are universal human rights, going back to the point of immigration, it must mean we're all the same. It must mean there's a universal human being. This absurd business, if you remember, the young man of Rwandan origins who was born in Wales,

who committed those hideous murders in Southport, there were people saying, oh, he's Welsh, jaw-dropping. This notion that the mere fact to be second-generation born here, or first-generation to be born here, means somehow you're as British or as Welsh as English as the rest of it. But if you believe in a universal human being, this is why we have an entire apparatus now that believes fundamentally, and the Labour Party really subscribes to this, it's lying at the moment that there shouldn't be frontiers. There should be, I mean, this is the logic of what they're doing. There should be a universal citizenship.

In other words, what I think we've got to get into our heads is that, Unlimited immigration is the final expression of globalism. It's the idea that we are all the same and should be the same and nations and identities and values are mere parochial eccentricities which will be swept away in the great sweep of history. So that was the incorporation of the European Convention on Human Rights. And then, of course, you had the independence of the Bank of England, although in some ways look quite a good thing. It's the first of the fact you deliberately create a whole set of bodies which removes as much power from Parliament as possible. So, Parliament and ministers don't set interest rates. They now don't control the budget because the Tories were stupid enough to create the Office of Budget responsibility.

We don't control this gathering rush to net zero because of the Climate Change Committee. There's the Immigration Advisory Committee, whose essential remit to say more, more, more, more, more, English nature, which prioritises nukes over human beings. All this nonsense with this world of quangocracy, which is new labour to a man and especially to a rampant woman. And then there's a second wave of all of this, which is responsible for, again, Lord Bingham,

the man who said the purpose of human rights is to protect minorities. the creation of the Supreme Court. It's a catastrophe because you introduce a natural and inevitable tension and a contradiction in our Constitution between a sovereign parliament and a Supreme Court. The two of them are bound to fight each other, as happened most obviously with the absurd nonsense of Miller I, or was it Miller 2, I forget which, and the whole matter of the prerogation of Parliament being ruled illegal, inconceivable, directly against the Bill of Rights, which tries to separate legislative and jurisdictional matters.

And then finally, and most catastrophically, the Equality Act, again, it sounds lovely. But what it does, it prioritises minorities. It does something else, which I didn't even realize until recently. You will be familiar with the idea that labour has got an intrinsic value, the Marxist theory, a Marxist labour theory of value. In other words, the value of labour is not determined by the market, but by some sort of intrinsic thing. It's mad. It's economically deranged and has been known to be so since Adam Smith, one of the great classical passages in the wealth of nations.

the Equalities Act's three insane equations which writes the Marxist theory of value into English law gives judges the right to determine whether women or men are properly paid, so that implies a non-market evaluation, and is the reason that we've driven Birmingham into bankruptcy and we're about to drive next into bankruptcy. I mean, the sheer insanity of this stuff, Harriet Hartman. Harmon's great tribute act. So what we've done, we've created a structure of government which manifestly is vastly expensive. Secondly, does not work. That's why we can't build anything.

It's why the costs of construction in this country are between, I think it's five to fifty times the European average. And it's why nothing works because nothing can be corrected. It's why every time you try to do anything there is a lawsuit. It's why you can't remove immigrants, you can't stop immigrants. So what we've done, what we've done is to create a deliberately, well, it wasn't done deliberately, but we've created an absolutely malfunctioning structure of government, which is the quintessence of it is Kea Stama.

Stama is at the heart of this process. He believes in rules. Do you remember coming back quickly from all these ground statements? Do you remember when the first business of Starma and freebies comes up? What is the thing he says, oh, I obeyed the rules? He's the kind of man who thinks that the rules replace the innate perception of right and wrong. And this is the terrible world we've created in which we've

replaced those vital things like prudence, judgment, wisdom, which are not reducible to simple little rules, but to everything that is written down minutely. I mean, Grenfell, the terrible disaster there, we have a set of building regulations, which is about three times the length of the Bible. And yet that still happened. and it's a tax code which again has expanded to lunatic size everywhere you look. So we're like Gulliver in that, Gulliver in Lilliput. We're an extraordinary creative people because we're mad and eccentric and three of us around

here are pretty good examples of that. But which is why things happen. That's what's fruitful. All creation depends on heresy. It depends on dissent. And what we're doing, we're tying it down, we're dampening it, we're sitting on it with this awful structure. David, it's been great chatting to you.

One thing that Francis mentioned that we ought to talk about as well, and we've touched on it briefly as economics. And the thing I wanted to ask you there is you talked about sort of magicing up economic activity. And the entire Western world, maybe the entire world, frankly, is in a productivity crisis. And we don't seem to know how to get out of that. Is it going to just be the invention of new technology?

Is it going to be AI or whatever? I see a fake picture of Kirstama or my Twitter today, generated by AI as if to say that's the next thing. Because I agree with you, this idea that if we build a railway to nowhere, at the end of that railway line, suddenly, you know. There is a, there's a rainbow, a rainbow which takes a form of a productive economy. That doesn't seem to be accurate.

It's preposterous. Right. And I read a, I think it was called the Foundations Report that's just come out, which says exactly what you said, which is basically it's way more difficult or and expensive to build anything in the UK. We see the tax rates and what's going to happen with them. More millionaires are leaving Britain than any other country in the world. Apart from China.

Apart from China. Oh, is that right? Well, the Chinese are leaving for a very different reason. Yeah, yeah. So apart from China. So, how are we going to get out of this? Well, finally, people have to realize what the consequences of their actions are. We will go bankrupt.

And the whole of this nice structure will collapse. It's very simple, that that is what happens. States go bankrupt. In the 1970s, we had the resort to the IMF and the humiliation that followed that. I reckon that will happen to us very quickly. There are iron laws and you cannot escape them. And you see, again, what's interesting is the world of Eastern Europe. If you look at the extraordinary rapid economic growth, Poland, Lithuania, whatever, the thing

that's striking about it is, they were all because of the horror of the experience of Soviet communism. They were inoculated against it. There's no risk of them going back to it. There's a very interesting middle ground here, which is Eastern Germany. Because Eastern Germany was mollicodled through the transition by Western Germany, there's much more nostalgia for bizarrely, for the secure, almost a bit like miners being nostalgic, ex-mining communities being nostalgic for what was both the horror of mining, but

And of course, all the things we were talking about, the sense of community, energy involvement, sense of dignity, doing something that was worthwhile, of carrying literally the nation on your shoulders because you supplied its fuel. And the fact, you know, it was vigorous mass connective, all of those things. And there is that kind of fondness which we can see in the changed electoral patterns in Eastern Germany. In Poland, Lithuania, whatever, Finland, where there was nobody to intervene. There was nobody to dole you out.

You really had to confront the consequences of the... I mean, I was in Lithuania shortly after 1988. And you saw a world in which... Okay, I was... Because I was medious. I was staying in the only Ruele-e-Chateau Hotel between Berlin and Moscow. So inside the hotel, a cup of coffee was about five pounds. Outside the hotel, it was less than half a penny.

And that world in which you're actually starting literally from nothing. and you to reconstruct it. We will go there if we're not careful. You know what? I actually don't disagree with you because, and the reason is you talk about the iron law. I don't know about iron law. I'm sure you're better qualified than I to talk about it. But what I see is we won't change direction until we get a slap in the face.

That's right. It's a very, when I said, actions have consequences. At the moment, we've been kicking the can down the road. Things like quantitative easing, you magic money. I mean, everybody could patty themselves on the back. It was absolutely amazing. There was no increase inflation. Well, it was slightly odd, wasn't it?

Property prices were going up at this absolutely spectacular rate. And we're terribly good. Bonds were really very, they're terribly good in value. In other words, the lie. The lie that this is not having consequences. And so you constantly kick it down the road. I mean, what it, what, what, what is our new wonder chancellor of the exchequer doing? She's going straight back to Gordon Brown's playbook.

So you're going to have PFI, that wonderful thing in which apparently you can borrow vast amounts of money to pay for nice, shiny new hospitals and nice shiny new railway lines, and even nicer shiny new railway stations. And do you know what? It doesn't actually appear on the balance sheet. Because what you've done is you've decided that you will pay for it by rent. And then suddenly you actually see it costs you £100 to change a light bulb when you actually look at the small contract. She's already talking about lifting the borrowing limit, your magic money. So you're constantly putting the day off, but the day will come.

And I quite agree with you and it feels that we are in an unsustainable part. Totally unsustainable. Unsustainable parts. Why I use the example of Argentina. And there they finally confronted it and they elected this extraordinary figure, Millet, who do you know what the change in inflation rates in Argentina is? From 200% to 12 in 12 months. 200% to 12 in 12 months.

And that's by forcing people to confront reality. But you can only do that when things have got to such a terrible price. That's right. This is the thing, you can't get people to take drastic action at 15% inflation to get it down to 12. It has to get really bad for people. Well, in fact, actually, when we had one year we had inflation of 25%. And that is what pretty much directly leads to that.

Now, of course, some of us benefited enormously. I borrowed an enormous amount, well, what seemed then a lot of money, 10,000 pounds to buy my flat. So I was rubbing my hands, you know, every year that went by a large chunk of my debt simply went into thin air. I mean, inflation is enormously redistributive. But, you know, as the hideous case of Germany, Weimar Germany shows, it finally is destructive the entire structure of society, the entire security of property. But we are creating just unsustainable structures. I mean, and there are very, very clear examples of this happening before.

You know, people talk now quite openly of the possible parallels between our civilization and the fall of room. There's some very interesting work been done on Roman monetary policy and the consequences of Imperial Army expansion and that kind of thing, which effectively seem to pin down the moment at which Rome begins the downward path to 260, when Caracalla at a single stroke, a bit like blur, when he ratches up the wages of the NHS, which I would see as the thing that sets us on this irreversible path, and indeed as they have done with the public sector in the last few weeks.

In 260, Caracalla doubles the wages of the Roman army. And at that point, it just ceases to be sustainable. And the currency, which had been rock solid, in which the gold and silver values were absolutely fixed, in which you didn't need to use money. You could do long-distance trade simply by bills of exchange, because money was the same in Alexandria as it was in Rome, and it was rock-solid,

and you didn't need to put specie on boats even for long-distance trade. That begins to be undercut. You debase the currency, the structures of fiduciary trading, of trading simply by bills of exchange, starts to fall to bits. You revert to using gold and silver. You then have arguments over all of that. So that extraordinary structure sits quite slowly. Again, Adam Smith puts it very clearly. There's a lot of ruin in the country, a big complex country.

as wealthy as we were, there's a lot to ruin, but you can see how that ruin is just penetrating more and more. So when you say, when Labour said it's broken Britain, yes it is, but what it's guaranteed to do is make it worse. What again, what seems to me to be the optimistic note from this otherwise rather pessimistic discussion is Starmer's government is bound to fail. It is bound to fail. It will fail badly.

And I think it will fail quickly. David, it's been an absolute pleasure. Sorry, we've been miseries. I've been as miserable as bloody Stormer. Well, yeah, but on the other hand, I think, I actually, you know what, everyone is slagging off Kirstama. I have to say, look, the freebies and whatever, there's an obvious level of hypocrisy there. He was criticising the Tories for it.

I think he's actually being honest on many issues. Except that he's got no remedy. Because he represents, the problem with Starmer is this problem with Rachel Reeves, the problem with Bridgett Phillipson, they represent the quintessence of the system. They are the system. But you know what? I at least have respect for them. And I'll tell you why for them. Because the Tories were in power for 14 years.

They didn't repeal any of them. No. I mean, I'm the one who's been empath. Right. So they didn't repeal any of the laws that you're talking about that they all knew, the Equality's Act, all of it. They made it worse. They actually legislate net zero and they set up the Office of Budget Responsibility,

but there is at least one conservative candidate now, Robert Jenrick, who is recognizing this fact, has actually stated that the great disaster of the Conservative Party was that it went along with those changes and that what they've got to do is reverse. them and saying, of course, remember, that's exactly what Thatcher did, exactly what Keith Joseph did. They recognized what had gone wrong. They recognized they had been complicit. MacMinnon, that whole Butzcalite world was totally complicit with what Labor had done.

And it hit the buffers in the 1970s. We've had a conservative party. It was entirely complicit with all the things I've been talking about that made them worse. I'm afraid we are in for very unpleasant times. The 20s are going to be a horrible period to be in Britain, but we will hit the buffers. And with luck, we will have exactly, we'll have a new factor. She won't, he, she will not get it entirely right,

but they will be forced into radical change. Well, they certainly will, and this is the point I was going to make, David, is this law, they don't have any of that same problem. I mean, day one, the freedom of research or whatever that bill was about free speech in academia. John. Gone. They have no problem repealing stuff that they don't.

No, that's absolutely true. So we're going to keep moving in that direction because I think they're going to be pretty ballsy about the legislation they've got. What has got to happen as soon as there is a serious conservative leader, he or she has got to say one thing. When you get one of these absurd acts, the next conservative government will repeal this. And everybody, I mean, things with the absurdities of Miliband on climate change, and There should be a conservative leader of the opposition getting up or conservative shadow chance of getting up and saying, all those of you are investing in this, you are ripping off the taxpayer.

We will not simply reverse this. We will introduce legislation to confiscate all profits that have been made up. But seriously, I mean, now we're finally on to the optimistic part of the conversation, David. It's pie in the sky. Dream on Starkey, dream on. It's always wonderful having you on the show. We really appreciate it. As I mentioned earlier, you are now a fellow YouTube.

Your channel is doing very, very well. You put out lots of great in-depth breakdowns of some of the things that we talked about. Occasionally smiling, unlike this up. Occasionally. And perhaps we should see if we can do something together where perhaps you take us around somewhere and you talk us. It would be great. It will be great. David, we're going to move on to our supporters who are going to ask you their questions.

Before we do, we always finish with the final question, which is, of course, what's the one thing we're not talking about two hours after we started that we should be? What are we not talking about? Oh, I hear we pretty much covered everything, haven't we? What should we be talking about? Do you know, we've ranged so widely. Right, this is a first. Stark's mind has gone blank. Fantastic.

Well, head on over to see the questions and the answers that. you guys wanted to put to David. Do you think the UK's Jewish and Muslim communities are going to be able to function together cohesively or are ties irrevocably broken?