Transcription
Is that extraordinary feeling that if you're, I think, a native and you stand in Westminster Abbey at one extreme or a country churchyard at the other, you know, hundreds of people like you have stood there before from generation to generation? We decided none of that actually matters and that instead merely a declaration, a piece of paper, a statement of citizenship. And it's this that the left is so outraged about; its entire world view has been undercut.
David Starkey, thank you so much for joining us. Now, I have to start by asking about Keir Starmer's speech on immigration. I'm going to give you two quotes and I want you to react. So, Karma said, "We risk becoming an island of strangers, not a nation that walks together." Mr. Enoch Powell in 1968 said, "But while to the immigrant entry to this country was admission to privileges and opportunities, the impact upon the existing population was very different, for they found themselves made strangers in their own country."
Well, I think we should be talking about cancelling the prime minister, shouldn't we? Really? Um, this is the sort of thing, uh, and I'm hard—I'm making a bit of a joke of it, but it's actually a very close line to being serious. This is the kind of thing that people got—people got put in jail back in July. Um, that there has been this astonishing inversion of language. Now, the question is, what does it actually mean, if it means anything at all?
What I'm increasingly struck by is Starmer's astonishing chameleon quality. In other words, the leopard being able to change his spots, a kind of camou—a kind of extraordinary camouflage ability. Now, he did sort of say this right at the beginning when he claimed to be non-ideological, which did sound very strange, bearing in mind this is a man absolutely soaked in the ideology of the newish human rights left, you know, um, and indeed on the question of immigration, uh, every single thing he said in that speech his previous life contradicted it; his life contradicted—not simply in what he said—and though he said things very effectively, there were occasions when he said, "Immigration law as such is wrong," in other words, we shouldn't have it. Um, he campaigns as a human rights lawyer uh for the retention in Britain of people who've committed criminal acts and so on and so on and so on. And of course, the entire positioning uh of the Labour party uh really—it's since Livingston, arguably before—has been as the immigrant party, so some assault—as indeed he has—some assaulted—he—that the new Labour party, his Labour party, the renewed—whatever it is—has become, of course, or was, I thought, the party of the blob, the party of the civil service, the party of the quango, the party of the committee, the party of the human rights lawyer. At every stage he's actually attacked these things. Sometimes he's pulled back, as when he talked about the civil service stifling and whatever, and suddenly first division civil servants were very important in the Labour Party and their organization said, "Oi," and immediately he pulled back a bit. But equally there's been the challenge to the quangos. Is actually unannounced the—the um—what I'm not quite sure what one does with a quango—you—it's not an act of parliament, or perhaps it is—do you repeal a quango? Do you extinguish a quango? Do you blow a quango? Or do you just abolish it? The largest of the quangos, the um, the NHS um trust, which in theory was separate actually from the secretary of state for health, he's announced the abolition of that. So repeatedly we've seen this—this repudiation of what had seemed a central position of Starmer personally and of the Labour party politically and particularly of important sections of Labour back-benchers um and organizations supporting Labour. But this clearly is the most dramatic; it's the one uh in which, as it was put today, um, is not simply—I'm sure—completely deliberately—completely deliberately echoing Powell. He is also, of course, echoing "take back control." Indeed, he's—indeed, he's attempting to take control of "take back control." In other words, he's—he's hugely now uh gone further than the Conservatives and arguably, if you believe him—and this is the big question—he's actually outflanked Nigel Farage.
Isn't it interesting? This is what Farage has done repeatedly. Uh, this is the second really big issue. In other words, on uh the whole business of Brexit, the withdrawal from the EU, it began—there's that wonderful phrase—that it begins as a cloud no bigger than a man's hand, this tiny thing on the horizon with Farage as this lone figure sort of saying this is important. And then it gets bigger and bigger and bigger, and it swallows more and more people, more and more of the political spectrum. And he's pulled the same trick off again. The problem, Stephen, is will it lead to the sort of disappointment that Brexit did? That's to say, the taking back control done unwillingly, reluctantly, badly, against the resistance of the entire political class, because I think that's what's likely to—to happen with immigration. There is such a weight now. There is such a weight economically. There's such a weight ideologically. There's such a weight in terms of very well-funded organizations—uh, that there are—there are—there are committees, there are quangos, there are state-funded charities, particularly important—like the association for refugees with Solomon as its spokesman—all of these things arguing not simply that—that—that immigration is necessary, but broadly that it's a really good thing, or that there isn't actually a difference between the immigrant and the native. But the point is, isn't it? He has used that key word, that word "stranger," because that then shifts us into really very difficult territory. Just the word "stranger." Just can I pick you up on that very quickly?
Yes, I wish you would. We—it's a word we really need to talk about. So, this has caused massive controversy on the left and right. I mean, you could argue whether they are the right really, but someone like Ian Dale has been very upset with this statement from the prime minister. Point I'm trying to make is that, you know, on the soft right, as you call it, and particularly on the left of Starmer, this—this speech, this phrase that we are strangers in our own land, has caused them to be absolutely hysterical. On every single mainstream TV channel and radio station over the last day or so, you've just had Labour MPs, Labour activists, left-wing, you know, as you say, the kind of immigration industry going crazy calling Keir Starmer uh the new Enoch Powell, the new kind of far-right prime minister. But can you just take it—take him at his word? Let's—let you know, let's say that he's being honest about this. He's right that we are strangers in our own land.
David, can we—before we do that, so forgive me interrupting you, but can we be clear what is actually being said, why it's actually so controversial? The question is, we have tried—or the—the soft right uh and indeed people—people, you know, have actually edited the Spectator—um, and arguing passionately, for example, that—to take a recent example—Rishi Sunak is English, that the mere fact of being born here, the mere fact of having a label, a passport, makes you what most people—what certainly Powell, what my generation, what hundreds of years of people would have said was necessary to be English—that you are actually born here, that you are native—but what we've done is something very remarkable, and this is true of—of the whole development since Tony Blair—it applies very much also to the question of sex and gender. We used to believe that a woman was, if you like, created by God, you know, God creates man and woman, and a product of biology is something intrinsic. We then decided, with ideas of gender and transsexuality, that the mere uttering of a word, the mere possession of a piece of paper miraculously transforms you into a woman. What we've decided with citizenship and with national identity is something similar. We have decided, in theory at any rate, that what makes you native isn't being born here, isn't um ancestry, isn't cultural immersion, isn't that sense of standing in the footsteps of others—that extraordinary feeling that if you're, I think, a native and you stand in Westminster Abbey at one extreme or a country churchyard at the other, you know, hundreds of people like you have stood there before from generation to generation—but decided none of that actually matters and that instead merely a declaration, a piece of paper, a statement of citizenship. And it's this that the left is so outraged about; its entire world view has been undercut—the idea that words take precedence over everything—remember the left and the soft right is basically a magical exercise. It believes that words, mere words, change things. This is why cancellation has become so important. The mere uttering of the slightest wrong phrase, saying a colored person rather than a person of color, was sufficient to destroy people's careers—is exactly this. And instead, what Starmer has done is to dare to go back to fundamentals. But does he know what he's doing? Does he really? Well, he does now uh know what an extraordinary can of worms he's opened.
I mean, part of the problem, isn't it? Is Starmer is a man with absolutely no sensitivity to language. Starmer did not write this speech. Of course, he—Starmer doesn't write any of his speeches. He thinks and talks like an automaton. Somebody has put these words in his mouth. Did they—does he even have an awareness? Because again, as a lawyer, he tends to take language with this extraordinary seriousness. The whole fuss over the chaos islands. The whole fuss over international law and the letter of human rights law. This—you know, the notion that the right to a family—right to family life can transcend the public interest, can transcend public service, uh safety. It's this weddedness to the—to the mere word. Does he understand? It's funny, isn't it, with the Supreme Court decision that men are men and women are women. The fact that we needed a Supreme Court to tell us that was rather interesting. But anyway, Keir Starmer changed his mind on that issue because the law changed. And suddenly, you know, the prime minister spokesperson was saying, "Yes, trans women are not women because the Supreme Court says it." Well, Starmer, you know, you—you could have had that position before—arbitrated it. He has been married and so presumably he is aware of the basic biology, or maybe he's just driven by instinct, but clearly um he has got one of these extraordinary box-like minds that's able to fit things into a box, you know, so—so you have one box in which he goes off and has exciting sex with whoever it is, or—and another box in which he can actually think, "Well, actually, uh, the occasional chap, you know, um, uh—uh—um—well, um, actually, the occasional woman will—yeah, yes, she might have a penis," but suddenly these are real words, but of course they're the sort of words that the people who were rioting back in July were using. But this is the interesting thing, isn't it, because Starmer, I don't think that people are going to believe him when he—he says this statement because he has such a long history of being, as you say, a human rights lawyer, incredibly pro-EU, incredibly pro-migration, and then suddenly we have this local election results, this by-election in which Reform, you know, this party on the right does incredibly well. And clearly he's been, you know, focus grouping and polling all of this stuff. I imagine that that line about the strangers was—was very much uh sort of part of that kind of Blairite Machiavellian system where they're focus grouping everything. And you know, I've done a lot of documentaries in the UK about immigration, and you go up north or anywhere really outside of London and you ask people, "Do you feel that this is the same England that you grew up in? Do you feel a stranger in your homeland?" And so many people will say yes. So Starmer is actually echoing a real—he's tapping into a real zeitgeist by saying this. But whether people believe him is another issue, and I think he's going to really struggle there because of his—his history, as I said, of the human rights lawyer and everything else.
I think this is going back to the point that I made about Brexit. Um, the question is, you can deliver in name. The question is whether you deliver in fact—and but again you are right—and again that other slogan about wanting our country back, taking back control, this sense of nostalgia, the realization that there's a world—that wonderful phrase—there's a world we have lost—but of course it's not a world that we've lost; it's a world that was deliberately stolen from us—we know—with Andrew Neather and whatever the famous remarks about—and about immigration—to rub people's noses—to rub the nose of the public in diversity. This was deliberate, and again I think it's something we are now going to need to go back and look at hard because it not only applies here, of course, it applies in Germany. Germany is having an identical debate on this, except there the state has come out very much more firmly in the other direction towards the idea that that citizenship is merely civic. It's merely uh jurisdictional. It's merely a piece of paper. And that anybody who actually talks about, as it were, German racial identity is by definition not simply far right, but potentially actually excluded from the constitution. Here we're seeing now this extraordinary pirouette of Starmer from one of these positions to the other. But of course, nobody will believe him. And I think this is where so much of what he's doing is actually profoundly dangerous.
You go back, we all go back to the way—way be—we were talking about power right at the beginning. The great problem has been, we've talked about this before. You've discussed it with endless people. You've experienced the feeling on the ground. As you've been saying, from '65 onwards, we have been sold a particular myth, a particular myth that multiculturalism is wonderful, that we are a nation of immigrants, that it's been a wholly good thing. Now, I do believe for one second that it's been a wholly bad thing. I think there are many aspects—because of—and we've—tal—again talked about this before—because Britain has got this strange fact that it's not actually a nation state. Going right back to the beginning, we were an amalgam of two big nations, Scotland and England, uh with two smaller ones, Ireland and Wales sandwiched into the mixture. And we therefore had a common—a certain degree of common identity for which we used the word "British," and why we talked about the British Empire. Why we talked about the British Navy, why we talked about the British state, whilst the king took the title of his Britannic, which is the—the Latin word for it, majesty. Whilst at the same time we kept our separate identities as Scottish and Welsh and English. And as I always say, the first football internationals were between England and Scotland. But Britishness was this essentially jurisdictional thing. It was a matter of law. It was a matter of your formal citizenship. And immigrants were able to tap into that, which is why we're able to accommodate them with, I think, much—much less stress than a country like France, for example, that played immense—placed immense emphasis on the cultural aspects of citizenship. But of course that's been taken advantage of. And still worse, what began as good intention, what began as the good intention of welcoming the immigrant, arguably as early as the '65 Race Relations Act, as early as Enoch Powell himself, turned into something much more dangerous, Stephen; it turned into what I call a noble lie, the noble lie. That's the idea from Plato's Republic that states need founding myths. They know they're not true, but they have to be enforced because they act as a kind of binding cement. The problem is Britain, in the course of the last 50 or 60 years, has become a state not quite knitted together, and indeed I would argue increasingly divided by a whole series of such lies, noble lies that are perveyed by those from on top, and those of us below are expected to believe that immigration is an undiluted good is one of those lies. Um, another one uh is the idea that—that—that we were better in Europe, that we—we were fundamentally the same as Europe, that we found our natural home as Europe. Whereas, of course, we—we have a totally different history from the continental powers of Europe, which are military powers, and we're a naval power. They are land-based powers. We are a sea-based power and so on. So you've had this series of lies, Stephen, and people have wakened up to them. And you could argue, and indeed I would argue, that the sudden aggression of the police, the sort of behavior uh that we saw um at—uh—in the wake of the Southport riots, things like my cancellation back in 2020. Again, BLM is another complete lie. Total—total lie that the British police are a wicked oppressive occupying force, particularly murdering black teenagers. The whole structure of race relations is another one of these noble lies. The trouble is we've seen through them. We are all now. The little boy crying out, "The emperor's got no clothes." And Starmer is marching stark naked, repeatedly stripped off, telling lie after lie after lie, which we all know are lies. This is why trust in politics is collapsing. People know they're being lied to. And it's extraordinary that—that they seem to think they can go through these rituals. You know, they're like the high priests of a dying religion. Or still more closely, they're like—it's like the—the—the high priests of the Soviet Union in—in—in the dying days of the Soviet state in which you were producing the myth that communism works, that it's lovely, that we all enjoy equality, that there's the rule of the people, that we are more productive than the United States. Lies, lies, lies, lies.
Well, it's interesting, isn't it? Whenever there's some terrible terrorist attack or incident or grooming gangs or something that's related to immigration, as you say, they have to come up with this kind of myth. So the guy who committed this awful Southport attack in which he knelt—he was Welsh. He was as Welsh as any—any taffy in Cardiff or whatever, you know, obviously completely nonsense. And again, the same thing whenever something like the Manchester Arena bombing happens, it's all about "don't look back in anger," not—"well, actually, why was this guy even in the country?"
Right. Let's talk about Reform. Um, in the recent local elections, Reform did very well. Do you think this was a turning point in British political history? It's very difficult to say because British political history is increasingly looking like a ballet dancer, and you know, ballet dancers are very good at turning on points. Um, we've seen this series of staggering reversals. I mean, remember um in the wake of Boris Johnson's uh electoral triumph—but it's only 2019—barely two years after that the Labour party experienced its very worst by-election defeat, and Starmer actually thought of resigning as leader of the opposition. So we've seen this series of astonishing somersaults in politics. I think it's also really important to understand their nature. The Labour did not win the last election. The extraordinary uh disproportion between the number of seats it got—more than 2/3 of the seats in the House—um, as against the fact that it got actually of the popular vote and only a third of those who actually voted. Um, in other words, one-fifth of the—of the actual electorate and only—only a third of those who—less than a third of those who actually voted. Um, that shows that, as everybody said, it was this loveless landslide. In other words, again fulfilling a—a dictum of politics. Uh, the opposition didn't win the last election. The government, the Conservative government, lost it and lost it resoundingly and deservedly. People again reckoned and were right. They'd been repeatedly lied to by the Conservative government. They'd been lied to, above all on immigration, repeatedly. Um, they had been, of course, lied to on financial stability. Um, they had been lied to uh in terms of a proper Brexit and so on and so on. So they decide to go for the Labour Party, which remember stood on a—on a manifesto that was so thin that you could have used it actually to glaze windows. You know, you could see straight through the thing. Nobody bothered to look at it. Nobody bothered to scrutinize it. The ridiculous claims of Rachel Reeves to be a serious economist were not questioned at that point. Her preposterous Mace lecture on the economy, which really amounted simply to saying, "If I can borrow enough money and throw it at approved things, uh, like double glazing and heat pumps, um, and—and the occasional large windmill, miraculously"—oh, by the way, lots and lots of money for the public sector and for public sector wages—"miraculously, the economy will bloom." You know, you—you—again, it's words. You do a rain dance. Nobody scrutinized it. Then Labour comes into power and what? Within five minutes, Starmer is more unpopular than any prime minister has ever been. There's this instant realization that not simply are they as bad as the other lot, they're actually worse than the other lot because they bring their own collection of absurd prejudices and nostrums—like Rachel Reeves—once you translate Rachel Reeves's Mace lecture into reality. What it means is you think you can bring about growth by increasing regulation and increasing taxation, and you increase the worst possible tax, the tax on employment—it's mad. So of course there is this huge reaction. So what do people do? Well, they look around for anything else, and the one that, as it were, that's cleanest. And here there's something very striking. Normally you judge political parties by what they've done, by what they might do. The very fact that Reform's done nothing at all has got absolutely no baggage. It's got lots and lots of words trailing around it. It's got Nigel Farage, but that is a positive advantage. They are, as it were, "Well, we haven't tried them before. Let's give them a shot." And again, somebody else did extremely well in the election. The preposterous collection of people uh—um—under the leadership of the ridiculous Ed Davey, the man whose idea of political campaigning is to wear a wetsuit and fall into a river. It's just simply—it's—in other words, Stephen, it's simply anybody else. Now, do you know what? I will now make a prediction, and you'll pick me up on this. I think Reform is utterly invulnerable at this point. I don't think it will make any difference if it does badly uh in the—in—in the councils and the meries that it holds. I think it's a bit like Trump. You will remember if Trump said that he shot somebody in Times Square, he would still be reelected. And I think for the moment Reform is in that position. It's kind of peasants' revolt. Maybe that's probably a terrible analogy. I'm sure you can break that apart. Uh, but I do want to ask about suspending historical judgment.
Yes. Just sticking with the Liberals. Okay. So I—this is kind of an interesting question—interesting comparison maybe. So David Lloyd George was obviously the last Liberal Prime Minister, and there was this switch to the Labour Party in the early 1920s. Do you think that that Rishi Sunak is the kind of David Lloyd George of the Conservative Party? Will he be the last Tory prime minister? It is possible—because it's also—but equally I think you could now put forward an even stronger argument that Starmer will be the last—last Labour prime minister because in both cases the kind of broad-based electoral coalition that's held them together and has been necessary for a majority in the Commons has broken apart. I mean, if you actually look at Starmer—what did Starmer decide to do? Let's go back to his speech. Let's go back to the "stranger" speech. What he decided to do was to put all his eggs into the one—into one of the two major Labour Party baskets. The Labour Party has got—well, it's actually got three—and it's got three important electoral baskets. One is the old—largely northern working class, and they are the ones at whom that speech was absolutely directed. This was where uh Reform triumphed and so on. But of course the two other key baskets um of the Labour Party, one is the already semi-detaching Islamic vote, the core immigrant vote, but also again uh the public sector vote—um, the—the vote of the quango, of the civil servants, of the public sector trade unionists, of the NHS and whatever. And they, of course, were just as appalled um as—as—as people like Ian Dale by his remark on strangers. So what you're getting is the pressures of governing are forcing Starmer to choose um to alienate important sections of his coalition. Um—uh—and um in the same way I think that what one's seeing with the Conservatives is that, if you like, the—the harder—the harder right—
Has gone to reform the softer he can; it's very useful you mentioned Ian Dale, archetypical, um, the sort of person who really was only in the Tory party because, um, it took that terrible decision with David Cameron to make Liberals welcome.
Remember this is this is the the utterly false lesson that's drawn from Thatcher. Um, the kind of people who were at the heart, as far as anybody was, of rethinking conservatism, uh, uh, after, uh, the after the fall of Margaret Thatcher decided that where it had gone wrong was being too hard-edged. They decided that you needed to complement, as it were, proper economics with what they called social justice. And that opened the way to the whole of this penetration of conservatism by soft-toryism, with disastrous consequences.
What the conclusion they should have drawn, of course, from Thatcher was that Thatcherism hadn't gone far enough, in the sense that it had not delivered a proper nationally functioning economy. The reason that the north needed these huge infusions of social services and whatever was because you had simply killed the economy there and hadn't substituted anything for it. That was the lesson that should have been drawn, but wasn't, and instead you decide to adopt soft stooge and sticking plaster, um, and reap the terrible consequences.
So what I think we literally have an unknown political landscape. Again, the Greens represent an important section of the Labour vote. Um, the more Star raises questions because clearly we cannot sustain net zero. Net zero is vastly costly. It's another huge lie. One of these they they said we we will reduce we will reduce power bills by 300. Instead, they've gone up by double that, and they will continue to do so because it's a lie. So at some point, I'm sure I predict Milliband will be got rid of, and and Starmer will backtrack on that, at which point there'll be an enormous surge in the Green vote. So we're see we're seeing the the electorate go off in different direction after different direction, but I would suspect the largest pot will be reform.
I I think a major part of this, um, difficulty and kind of upheaval in British politics does come from immigration and multiculturalism. The actual form of the electorate has changed so much. I mean, I like to make historical comparisons to people like David Lloyd George, but to to have these I don't know if we can anymore when the British electorate has has changed and and sort of transformed into various different religious sects. You know, you've got the Conservatives pandering to the Hindu Indians; you've got Labour pandering to the Muslim vote, uh, and the Islamic vote, the Pakistani vote, and so on. And suddenly everything is, this is a completely novel thing in British politics. Maybe you can go back to the kind of religious debates of the 17th century and make some comparisons there. But maybe we just can't predict any of this stuff because of the huge change in the British electorate.
I think you're right. I mean, the the thing that was the politically equivalent of that change and of course which which accounts for the great shift, uh, from liber or largely accounts from the great shift from liberalism to Labour was the effect of the changes in the franchise, because what the changes in the franchise from 1867 right up to 1921 what they do they as it were bring in new people; they're British, English, Scots, Welsh, Irish, but of different social classes, is of women getting the vote for the first time. They bring them into the political notion. So that vast change, again, the huge uncertainties of late 19th early 20th century politics were the result of a change in the political notion. What we're talking about now is a change in the actual physical notion.
Now there's a really interesting point. Are you familiar with that wonderful joke of of Bertolt Brecht, um, in East Germany? Um, you will remember that the communist regimes always made great play of the fact that they derived their power from the people. Well, there was one particular moment, um, in which the people expressed very vigorous dissatisfaction with the terrible I think it was Hanukkah, terrible government in East Germany. Um, and uh, it was picked up by Brecht, who was a kind of lone satirist. Um, he was a bit the equivalent. He was East Germany's Ian Hislop, you know. Um, he was allowed to say things that were slightly naughty but didn't actually transgress the big myths, the big lies, and paid of course enormous amounts of money for it. But anyway, um, Brecht, just like Ian Hislop, but anyway, Brecht, uh, comes up with this wonderful phrase, says, "Well, you know, you've got a real problem." Uh, uh, general secretary of the Conserv general secretary of the Communist Party, both CPS, of course, general secretary of of the Communist Party. Shouldn't you re-elect the people? You know, as the as you depend on the people and the people have expressed severe, uh, severe reservations about you, don't you really have to change the people?
What were laughing? What immigration has done is changed the people, and that's what gives the added drama to this whole dispute in Germany, that it's taking place against that kind of rhetoric. Um, is taking place here, um, against um, nothing so nothing we have I think we're coping with this in some ways in a sort of stunned fashion, because of course Germany has had this politics of staggering turbulence; it's very familiar with political turbulence; we've enjoyed even with the enormous shifts of the electorate in the 19th century, the introduction of universal suffrage, the shift from what was a high aristocratic politics of the of the 18th and the and right through the 19th century to a genuinely democratic politics. Nevertheless, it's been it's been largely orderly. And I'm not using it as the euphemism. You remember, I'm not saying it's been mostly peaceful. It was actually genuinely mostly peaceful. It wasn't like a BLM demonstration.
So we have, as you've pointed out, we've really we've no feel for this until we go back to the 17th century or before to those periods of intense religious strife. We've now got, of course, um, a religion and that actually claims to be superior to the state, that claims to have its own superior form of law. And if you listen, uh, to the unguarded moments, um, uh, of immans and whatever actively campaigning to impose that on the rest of us, we may have to go back into our history and to look at how we dealt with an overmighty papacy and and and a a dangerous and invasive Catholicism. There are legislative instruments which are available which were highly effective. They didn't persecute on the whole. Um, they but they kept under control. We may have to go back to that. We're in a genuinely it's wonderfully exciting for people like you and me. Um, it's a new political world. It demands new approaches. Um, but one of the things that that's so sad that you look you look particularly at the Conservative Party, you have the sense of their there there's that wonderful, uh, phrase in Matthew Arnold's Dover Beach. Um, the they're wandering they're wandering blind between waring armies with no idea of what they're doing. That all all the phrases they used don't work anymore. They haven't thought. They haven't analyzed. We've now got a political world where we have to analyze what's happened.
Which is why, as you know, I am I'm trying to get us all to understand that not simply if we have this revolution, uh, in terms of population, uh, which remember is hugely accelerated under Blair. We've had a deliberate demolition of the basic structures of our politics and constitution and legal system again by Blair. All the things that we took for granted. A country that's had a continuous politics for 800 years. We've deliberately broken down the walls. It's not been simply that we welcome diversity of population. We've suddenly introduced completely new legal concepts, new ways of looking at things. The reason why woke seems to have exercised so much power in Britain is that Blair embedded it in law. So what had been alternative, what had been relatively harmless, what you could giggle at, suddenly acquires the full terrifying force of law, which is why you needed the Supreme Court to declare bizarrely that a man is a man and a woman is a woman.
I can't believe it's taken us 40 minutes to bring up Blair. Normally it takes about five. Uh, so congratulations on that. So on the multiculturalism aspect of this, you're right, to enforce multiculturalism. You can look at other kind of, uh, multicultural empires, whether it's the Ottoman Empire or the Austro-Hungarian Empire or in the Balkans, and you do have to have a strain of authoritarianism to deal with these kind of inter-ethnic rivalries, religious rivalries, and so on. In the Ottoman Empire, they had the millet system. But you can even look back in British history, and you talked about the kind of stability that we've had, at least political stability, over the last few hundred years. But the one area or one part of Britain that wasn't stable was Ireland. And even throughout the 19th century, you had terrible violence and you know, um, sort of political disruptions because of the so-called Irish question. You know, this was something that really grappled someone like Gladstone and Salisbury, and um, you had these huge debates and and as I said, even political violence during a time where it was peaceful otherwise throughout Westminster. So, can you talk about this kind of enforcement of multiculturalism throughout other empires and other periods of history?
Well, I think the I think you put your finger on it. Um, democracy essentially demands a degree of national coherence. Democracy demands the nation state. Remember the earliest democracies were very very much smaller. Uh, they were the city states, uh, first of Greece and then in the Middle Ages of the ital of the north Italian peninsula. Um, but, uh, the democracy, uh, requires, um, above all it requires losers' consent in order for it to function. Uh, you have to be able to have a sufficient sympathy with the political, uh, position of your opponents that you treat it to a certain extent like a game of cricket. And indeed you you can actually if you if you go back into the 20th century you can find politicians effectively saying, well, it was sort of the turn of the other side. Now that sort of thing, and I would argue again that that any form of real representative government again is only compatible with the nation state; uh, all forms of multi-ethnic societies require a very strong arm to manage them. I mean, we have a we have an absolutely wonderful example of this, um, in, uh, in Yugoslavia. Um, that Yugoslavia under Tito, under under communist rule, functioned reasonably well; indeed, was regarded as being in many ways the model communist state, one that that gave the most freedom, that that had the best developed economy, that appeared to be the most civilized, and the moment that iron hand was removed, all the ethnic tensions come to the surface, to the point at which you actually it is decided you have the bizarre forms of EU EU US British intervention, and you create this series of extraordinary little stateless that are essentially maintained by foreign policing; the the only only way you can actually hold it together.
And again, one of the reasons that we in Britain enjoyed in mainland Britain and enjoyed this astonishingly long history of broad political peace, of increasing prosperity, of the astonishing development of our commerce, in development of science, development of literature, the development of the arts was precisely precisely that we had to begin with a very strong monitor, that was capable of suppressing clans on the one hand and areas of aristocratic privilege on the other. Um, and what we've done in with insanity is to bring back all of these things because you've not simply brought back different ethnic groupings. Um, Stephen, you brought back worse things if you're actually looking within the Bangladeshi, particularly the Pakistani communities that come from come from the Kashmir area and the Punjab and whatever; they organize themselves in tribes; they organize themselves in clans by first-cousin marriage; this is absolutely impossible in a democracy; it's also impossible with modernity; we've imported tribalism; the reason that all our invasions of, uh, of, uh, Afghanistan, our invasions of Libya, our invasions of Iraq, all well-meant, all failed because these countries are unreformable and unmodernizable. You cannot modernize an a tribal society. And if you look in countries that were modernizing like South Africa, once you remove the structures that we that the British Empire imposed there, you revert to the tribalism, and the entire economy starts to go into reverse. You look at Johannesburg now; it is looking like a city out of the apocalypse. Um, we are at risk of doing this in our own country in the name of the wonders of diversity. Again, this preposterous myth, our strength is diversity. It's just it is mad. It is a lie. A deliberate utter lie.
Which is not to say that absolute we were not in any way a uniform society. That it's it's very easy to see that the opposite of diversity is uniformity. We were Britain, and again people from the right who constantly go on about family, faith and flag and the importance of strong communities. By God, Pakistanis have got strong communities. Um, um, the thing that that that was remarkable about Britain was that we had this extraordinarily high level of public order combined with very high levels of individuality and eccentricity. Um, uh, but with an illegal structure, a legal political behavioral structure that could accommodate them, we've thrown them away.
Yeah. This phrase male, pale, and stale is so disgusting and insulting. I mean, to think that London before multiculturalism was basically a bland uninteresting place; I think it only produced Shakespeare, you know, the occasional Oscar Wilde; you had George Bernard Shaw; just just you you look you look at what the Victorians created and you look at what we've done; you mentioned South Africa; I think that's an interesting perhaps diversion; we'll come back to Britain in a minute, but, um, Trump has now approved for white, uh, South Africans to come to America as refugees because of the persecution that they've had under the, um, kind of black majority governments of the last decade.
Yeah, exactly. ANC. What do you make of this? It's an interesting kind of change in policy, US foreign policy, and this maybe is a significant moment for for Trump and for America to welcome some of these refugees. And by the way, in the states a lot of people on the left has said this is outrageous; we don't want these, uh, white refugees in America. So, it's interesting that when the refugees are white, suddenly they're against, uh, course they're on they're on the right politically. These are Boer farmers, essentially Boer farmers, the the ones who are on the whole because they are the ones who've been driven being driven off the land and so on.
Um, well, I think it's it's it's characteristic of, um, of Trump. Um, but we've also got to remember there's a particular intermediary here. It's Elon Musk who is South African. And I think that what Musk is doing, uh, and the new circles around Trump, they of course have got contacts and interests all over the world; again, the peculiarity that we saw, uh, with the interventions, um, uh, the very striking interventions in Munich in Germany. And again when Starmer was in the Oval Office from JD Vance on the subject of freedom of speech; these are people with with broad interests. Vance has got an a very wide interest in the idea of the Anglosphere, the idea of the English-speaking world as having originated the intellectual, the commercial, uh, the technological, uh, progress that that that that he is so keen on. Similarly, similarly with Musk, they're all part of this world. So the the, um, there's a strange strange meeting if you like between the absolute cutting edge of technological progress, um, in the Trump regime, the represented by somebody like Elon Musk with a striking intellectualism in JD Vance and at the same time Trump himself out-faring Farage, and that's the that's the ex that is that is the extraordinary strength of the new Republicanism in America; it touches on all of these things. Farage here has yet to develop it. But I certainly think that the the, uh, um, the, um, as it were, the casualties of empire. Um, remember a very large part of the Asian immigration here is are the casualties of empire. These are the people who were, um, uh, suffering under under, uh, Idi Amin in Uganda and whatever. Um, I I think it's that's the case with Suella Braverman. I think it's the case, um, with Rishi Sunak. They don't come directly from India. They were the commercial classes in Africa who are driven out along with the whites. Um, once you actually get aggressive black dictatorial regimes coming in, and we gave them refuge back here. It's also striking that the the the the Boer farmers haven't thought of going back to the place which of course speaks more or less their native language, which is the Netherlands.
Do you know what might be an interesting question here to add in? You talk about Rhodesia. I was reading, uh, Charles Moore's biography of Margaret Thatcher, and in the first volume or maybe it was the second volume, I can't remember, but there was a huge debate around Rhodesia and whether that should kind of intervene to help Ian Smith, and she didn't, you know, and quite the reverse, quite the reverse, and indeed I mean the the part that played, uh, in the pressure, uh, on both Ian Smith, um, and on, uh, and and indeed on South Africa is itself is very very striking, and remember we all thought it was a good thing, and and particularly, uh, when when you looked in South Africa and you decided you had some sort of heroic and saintly, more or less saintly figure leading it, um, but I'm afraid in retrospect it is clear that economically, socially, and in every other way it has been catastrophic, but once again, um, you look at the whole of Africa, we more myths. We have the myths that somehow aid now we again we've pulled Isn't it interesting that's another myth that that Starmer sort of pulled back from, um, that we had the myth by showering money on these people that there would somehow be economic growth. It's perfectly clear that there isn't.
Bringing it back to the UK and this kind of enforcement of so-called multiculturalism. We saw a case recently of a retired police officer who put out a tweet and had a knock on the door from a series of other police officers who rifled through his home, looked at his bookshelf, looked at his literature; he had books from Douglas Murray, and one of the police officers he had the Spectator, and the Spectator is extraordinary, and one of the police officers said, "Oh, this looks very Brexity." Right? So, can you put this into perspective in terms of England's long history of freedom of speech and liberty and so on? Is that a myth? Is that something that's true? And how does is this quite extraordinary to you? Because I was genuinely quite shocked at seeing this video.
I wasn't. Um, I've experienced the snazzy arm of the state myself in an attempt at stripping me of my CBE, which rested on evidence which I was not allowed to see, from witnesses whose names I was not allowed to know, which had largely been gathered at random from Twitter, a committee that met in secret that delivers its verdict first and tells you what it's proposing to do afterwards. Can you imagine it? That's at the heart of Downing Street. That was a committee that was under the direct control of Sue Gray. Right? But let me go back. I've already dealt with this point. I said that when you have a noble myth and that myth starts to break down and unbelievers start, as we are doing, to become articulate, you have to silence. So you make examples, and this police officer was intended to be an example. Those people who got caught, uh, tweeting around the Southport riots were quite deliberately made examples of. You need a sacrificial victim. This is the slightly milder version of burning people at the stake because you disapprove of heresy. This is why we've had cancellation. But the important thing is I've tried to explain to everybody in Britain the state has actually sustained woke. The state sustains these myths. The it is people people you know there's been lots of talk about two-tier justice; well, we can now see this is absolutely what it is. But the point is it's not simply a phrase. It's not simply a coin clever coinage of Robert Jenrick. It is the stone cold legal principle that I if and I couldn't you were talking about not believing things. I couldn't believe when I read a lecture by the late Lord Bingham, Tom Bingham, who is the author of the most authoritative book on the rule of law, and this was a lecture on the book which told me that human rights law and I'm now absolutely quoting is anti-democratic, counter-majoritarian, and favors minorities, and he lists the minorities: the mentally sick, UA Cabana Kalokai, the criminal, the number of those criminals who've been given special rights to remain despite the fact that they've committed monstrous crimes, the the Roma; he actually cites the Roma; look at those riots in Harfield entirely indulged by the police, and yet if you break the rule of law or if you dare to challenge the myth, the noble lie. This is why we've got to have this is why we need the Free Speech Union.
Now again, it's really important we do not mythologize in the other direction. Freedom of speech has never been absolute in Britain, and it's and I only learned relatively recently and there is a brilliant article on this, and I hope you all let this stand and I can actually give it a plug in a thing called the Pimlico Journal, which has got some of the very best online writing, uh, that I know. There's a brilliant article on the freedom of speech and that absolute freedom of speech in America is a relatively recent invention. It's not a result of the Bill of Rights, the First Amendment. It's a result of deliberate judicial activity in the 1950s. So in Britain, we had theatre censorship. We had, um, occasional censorship, um, uh, on grounds of moral public morality, blasphemy and whatever, but increasingly fading and dissolving in mockery in my own lifetime, uh, in the 50s and 60s. So we never had but what we never had, save when it was a matter we're talking about Ireland of of a of of violent Irish republicanism and all that sort of thing. We never had this limitation of freedom of speech in the fashion we're talking about now from the middle of the 19th century. Um, and the reason that it's become so prominent is because the lies have become so important and they've become so fragile. That's why you're getting cases like this. They're not accidental. Again, we've talked all throughout this hour-long interview of all of these problems of multiculturalism, of attacks on freedom of speech, of a divided society, and the Reform Party seemingly is the only outlet that the British people are able to kind of release their anger into by voting for Nigel Farage.
Do you believe, and this is the final question, do you believe that Nigel Farage would make a good prime minister? Could he reverse the problems that we've been talking about? Could he be a great man of history? What's your thoughts?
Well, in one sense, Farage already is a great man of history. Uh, he is not single-handedly brought about Brexit, but he played an absolutely fundamental role in bringing about Brexit. He has changed, we were talking about this earlier, he has changed the political atmosphere, the political language on reform. He is he is a repeated ability. You know, there's that wonderful phrase in Shakespeare and about the tide in the affairs of men which being taken at the flood leads to triumphant rest. He's brilliant at riding tides. He's brilliant. He's like an incredible surfer. But of course when you when you ride the tide when you ride the tide in politics you also change things. He's he's able to do that. The problem is he has never ever exercised power. I like Nigel. We're sort of friends. Um, he has deeply impressive qualities. However, as we've seen with Robert Low, as we've seen with Ben Habib, he doesn't doesn't like tall poppies. He finds it difficult to work with people of similar status. Now as a prime minister you have to lead, but a prime minister will be confronted with the hideous range of tasks that he will be if he's elected in 28 2028 or 2029. We've completely left out the economy. We're on the we are on the brink of a massive financial collapse. Um, we are running, uh, our borrowing requirement is already, thanks to the insanity of Rachel Reeves, 60 billion more than we thought it was going to be; you know, this this mythical 22 billion is has already disappeared. So in order to do that, in order to deal with re, in order to deal with immigration, to deal with finance, to deal with this vast task of demolition of the 200 and odd quangos that that distort public life, to grasp the neck by the scruff of the neck, the needle, the legal profession, which is completely out of control, uh, where you have effectively judges saying to a Lord Chancellor as we saw over sentencing, you
May say one thing, we think another, and right is on our side.
When you have the Lady Chief Justice telling the Lord Chancellor, basically in polite language, “but, sorry, no, but to do that you will need a cabinet of stars.” You will need a cabinet of weighty, serious people. You’ll need to do something as Trump did, because what’s impressive is most of the people around Trump—they’re not the only one or two that are very strange and odd like Kennedy—but somebody like Scott Bessant is as heavyweight a player as you will actually find in Wall Street, and he’s on side, and he’s intelligent, and he’s clever, and he’s forceful. You’re going to need a cabinet of people like that. They won’t just do what they’re told. You’ll have to work with them. You’ll have to manage them. So far, Nigel has not shown he’s able to do that.
The risk, therefore, is that you have a Boris Johnson that you try and rely on, presumably some sort of Svengali figure in the background. I volunteer for the role. I would be exceedingly effective at it. But as we all know, there is then the quarrel between the Svengali and the allegedly puppet prime minister; that doesn’t work.
Again, going back to Trump, there are very important lessons and very important differences between Trump one of the first presidency and Trump two of the second presidency. And what I hope is, and I don’t want to give too much away, but I think this is happening. I think there is a genuine awareness in and around Reform that there is a huge task of preparation for government.
What is disastrous about Boris Johnson, who in some ways came in with the right ideas and certainly the right notion of dealing with Brexit, or Liz Truss, despite all the rude things that have been said about her—her notion that you had to tear down the existing structures and you had to get growth going is absolutely spot-on. The trouble is they did it off the cuff, without preparation. They panicked markets. They hadn’t done their homework.
What’s got to happen now is a huge amount. This isn’t this isn’t the showmanship at which Nigel is so brilliantly good at. This isn’t the campaigning which, whatever I may have said about Zufaf, he seems to be very good at too. Um, it’s something different. It’s hard backroom slog.
In order to take on, particularly the legal profession, there’s going to have to be a watertight series of parliamentary statutes, of alterations of the civil service code, of immediately seizing control of the high civil service, of, if need be, putting handcuffs on certain of our generals, um, of dealing with the House of Lords. You have to you you have to do exactly, going back to those previous moments of political crisis of 1832, of 1911. You would have to get a king who will be very unsympathetic to what Reform wants to do. He will have to agree to an immediate mass creation of peers. You have to have an absolute majority in the second chamber. All that needs work.
And if you think, if you go back to Trump, Trump M2, those hours after he’d been sworn in by the Chief Justice in the rotunda of the Capitol, uh, just a little few yards away down Pennsylvania Avenue into the Oval Office, and that huge pile of executive orders and the man who’d written them, Steve Miller, deputy chief of staff of America First, handing them over to him, and each one of those great flamboyant signatures—you’re going to have to be ready to go like that. If not, it will be worse than a disaster. We will have tried the Conservatives. We will have tried Labour. We will have tried Reform. And they will have all failed. And they will have all failed the British people.
I wouldn’t actually like Stephen to be in Farage’s shoes. He’s wanted to be a man of history. You said, “Could he be?” Being a great man isn’t easy. It’s not just reaping the rewards. It’s carrying the responsibilities. That terrible responsibility, because there will genuinely be the responsibility of the future of the whole British nation resting on his shoulders. That’s something very terrible. Vast possibility, but terrible, terrible risk.