David Starkey: Britain Is No Longer a Democracy | Peter McCormack Show

One of the things that's striking about the left is its belief in the magic of language. It thinks of itself as being rational. It's not. It's rationalist. Um, it's the idea fundamentally its approach is magical that that I become a woman by saying so or by feeling so.

You can even look at the economy. Um, uh, we have growth simply by Rachel Reeves performing a rain dance and saying growth, growth, growth, growth, growth. At the same time, she increases regulation, increases taxation, which we know absolutely will guarantee that it doesn't happen. I mean, it when you think about it, it's utterly [Music] radical.

Let me tell you something. Um, since we flipped the show 6 months ago to be in the UK, cuz we used to make it in America, there's a name that keeps coming up in the comments that you have to talk to, and it's David Starky. It keeps coming up over and over again. So when Joe said, "Do you want to talk to David Starky?" I was like, "Yeah, absolutely, please. Let's make this happen."

And I am probably like you, increasingly fed up and concerned with the moral decline, economic decline, decline of everything in the country. And I wonder, as a historian, you have a you see it slightly differently from maybe I see it in the present, but I I wonder how much you see it reflecting on the passing and how we got to our great position we were and how we're now destroying it.

I think you can approach it in dozens and dozens of different ways. I mean, what I'd like to do is to give you a kind of ground zero which is in one sense arbitrary, and I'm going to focus on one narrow area which is the area of the constitution, which sounds abstract, but it seems to me that's the starting point. We can then ask all sorts ask and try to answer all sorts of other things like immigration. Heaven only knows what else.

What was the key to why Britain? Why? Let's call it Anglo Britain because it's really England plus. Why is England plus, which remember is a tiny country? If you look at the beginning of its age of real greatness in the late 17th century, England has got a population of perhaps 8 million. France is already 20 million. It's five times the size. How does a country of eight take on the greatest European power and defeat it first in Europe, then in India, then in Canada and make sure, as Churchill memorably says about the Seven Years War, turn the world English? The he calls the Seven Years War the First World War. How does that happen?

It happens, and I'm a genuine believer in this. It happens because of politics. You began as a Bitcoin show. In other words, you begin assuming I suppose the primacy of the economic. Yes, you will you will remember the neo-Marxist, dare I say, or on the other hand just Clinton, you know, the it's the economy stupid. I don't think it is the economy stupid. A free economy depends on a free society. I don't believe in Marx. I believe in Aristotle. I believe that politics is architectonic. The way a society organizes itself is the foundation.

And from about 1215, famously the Magna Carta, except we can go back and talk about this. The famous Magna Carta of 1215 was a disaster. It was a catastrophe and because it was revolutionary. And then we did an absolutely typical English thing the following year 1216. You carefully strike all the revolutionary clauses out and refer them to a committee which sits on them uncomfortably and does absolutely bugger all about them, and you legislate a wonderfully conservative Magna Carta of 1216 which is the foundation of everything else that follows because broadly what develops from that is the following. It's the idea that the governed have a part to play in governing and that the governors somehow answer to the governed, and from this develops the idea of parliament develops and the common law is already well on the way. But it it refineses it entrenches the common law. It entrenches property rights. It means that government can't just confiscate what you have. You can't go to jail arbitrarily. All of those kinds of things and it's it's encapsulated.

Judges don't always get it right. You know, the Supreme Court verdict on being able to recognize what a woman was was a rare moment of judicial clarity. But earlier on, they were rather better at it. And back in the as early as the uh as the 14th century when you'll get some little I come from, you know, remote provinces. I come from uh uh way way up north uh in Westland. And when one of my ancestors up north sort of said, "Well, we haven't voted for these taxes. We are not going to pay," Millarned judges went over and they had a nice little formula that they had which was everybody in England is bound by what is decided in parliament because everybody in England is represented in parliament either in person if you're a lord or a bishop or if you sit as an MP or by your representative by your lord your bishop or your MP, and that that's an idea of participatory lawmaking which I think is why to put it very simply we still h sort of have an unarmed police why it was possible to have the um the peelite vision of policing by consent unthinkable in France totally inconceivable.

I remember when I first went to France as a as a as a lad in in 1958 it's I think the moment the goal comes to power I'd never seen a policeman with a machine I can now it's a common sight in Britain. But I remember with I I'm a boy I'm what what am I? I'm a boy of 13. I cannot tell you the shock that I felt of seeing the the the pal Bon the seat of the French assembly surrounded by policemen with guns. It was utterly shocking. I've never ever forgotten that moment.

What happens to that vision is that it's ruptured. And it's ruptured in 1997 by Tony Blair. And that the government of 1997 to 2010 does more damage to Britain than two world wars. And the key thing we've got to do is to understand that damage at how farreaching it is and how desperately difficult it will be to turn it round. And what I want to argue with you is that those changes are the reason we're having this conversation. It's the reason why we feel everything is broken. And still worse, it's the reason that we feel we can do nothing about it.

We should then on that we should be looking at another big question. What has happened to the very meaning of the word democracy? Because if you look now on either side of the Atlantic, the word democracy has got two fundamentally separate meanings. And that great speech uh by VD uh by by Vance by by the vice president if you remember in Munich where you had the the German chairman bursting into tears at the thought of these rude and cruel quill and hard words being said highlighted the fact you've now got two radically different views and which is why we now actually require this funny secondary word called populism which when you come to think about it is just the Latin for the Greek democracy demos rule of the people popular populace in Latin is exactly the same and we need to explore how these extraordinary shifts have come about um what their effect is how difficult it will be to reverse them before we dig into that because I want to take advantage of the fact that I have you here to educate people I see the doors are locked yeah the doors are locked you can't go you you have to do this my my my uh grasp of uh old history is limited to what I did at school.

Yeah. Studying Henry VII, but the buildup to the Magna Carta, what what had happened in England in the buildup to that that led to the Magna Carta?

Well, I mean, you you had a you had a classic bad king. You had bad King John who exhum mistrusted his subjects. He mistreated them disgracefully. He exploited every means of law. Uh he uh taxed arbitrarily uh seized estates arbitrarily, imprisoned people, did unpleasant things to them and all the rest of it. And he made and he made the terrible mistake of doing it to powerful people as well as not very powerful. It's all f all very well generally speaking to mistreat those at the bottom. But when you miss start obviously the danger is if you do it in quantity but he made the terrible mistake of doing it to very important people who were in a position to strike back. Um is already again is is against a very clear uh series of developments you'd you'd had under Henry the first and and Henry II that's John's father. You'd had a very very rapid development of ideas of law, of judicial practice, of regularity and so on. You also had, and we forget this, Anglo-Saxon England, that's the England that's conquered in 1066, was in many ways the most efficiently administered country in Europe. It was huge. We tend we tend to think of the Norman conquest as during the sophisticated French coming in and sorting out these Anglo-Saxon savages. Um it is in some ways rather rather the opposite way around or you know the other version of the Norman conquest. It's a bit like a slightly more violent version of a year in province you know. Um but but what the the reason William is so keen to conquer Anglo-Saxon England is because it's so rich. The Christmas after the battle h of Hastings when the Normans go back to Normandy with the loot. They've never seen as much gold in their lives because the Anglo-Saxon kingdom was unique in Europe that it was able to maintain a coinage of uniform finess. They were able to co call the coins in once every 3 four years and recoin them because of course coins in use get worn and whatever to estab to keep the finness of the coinage going which is why even when I was a boy um and to give you an idea of how much sterling was worth when I was when I was a young man uh I would be how old would I be 1970 I'm 25 I have my first semi job at Cambridge. I'm a research fellow. I've got my board and lodging provided for me. I was paid 600 pounds a year. So you had a coinage, a currency that was able to maintain this spectacular value. Um so the Anglo Anglo-Saxon England was astonishingly well administered. Um so John then inherits a a kind has a double inheritance. This remarkable inheritance of Anglo-Saxon England. Again, uniform royal power. Um the uh maintained very vigorously by William uh William the Conqueror. Uh so there's there's the king's law, the king's writes to all parts of the country, which means you've already got a kind of uh incipient equality before the law and so on. But but John's a classic bad king. The baronss all get together to defeat him. Um, and if I I my my little joke to you about the Magna Carta of 1215 being a very bad idea. Um, the Magna Carta of 1215 contained all the sorts of sensible things we talk about. The need for consent to taxation, the uh introduction because of the importance of the role of the city of London already uniform weights and measures unheard of in Europe. Um, all of those good ideas. um the fact that justice is to be administered that that it should be impartial all these all these sorts of things but it aimed to enforce it against the king by creating a committee of public safety. It actually set up a baronial committee of 25 to whom abs virtually absolute powers were given. If that Magna Cartra had survived we'd have gone the way of Poland. We'd have become an aristocratic republic that was a war was itself that was constantly subject to subdivision and all the rest of it and that is by an extraordinary series of chances which we don't have time to talk about but we we we might at some point if we enjoy each other's company um uh it's defeated um by a remarkable man our first great conservative in I'm very keen on the word conservative our our first great conservative English statesman except of course he spoke French who is a man called William the Marshall Earl of Pemrook and he does this extraordinary thing. He is the regent. John dies famously in the wash after after losing his baggage train in the in that boggy area at the top of top of East Anglia and um between Yorkshire between Yorkshire and Lincolnshire and he dies and he's succeeded by his little son Henry III and um the Pemrook who is very it's very interesting he's a kind of David Beckham figure he was a staggeringly successful sportsman wonderful jouster and in those days when You won a joust. You took the lot. You took your opponent's armor. Uh you took his horse. You made an absolute fortune out of it. Becomes incredibly rich. He does the equivalent of marrying posh spice and marries an enormously rich Irish. He becomes incredibly powerful man. But unlike David Beckham, he's got a brain. Um and and he um acts as regent to the little boy to Henry III. And he does this astonishing thing. He reenacts Magna Carta, the thing that had been this great anti-royal gesture, keeping all the good bits and getting rid of the bad bits, the republican bits. And that's how a document that begins as a found intended to launch a re it was it was a revolution. The 1250 the situation in 1215 is a revolutionary situation. You have a king capture effectively. Well, not effectively actually captured. That's that's what goes on at Ron. The the thing is ex the document is extorted from him. Of course, he doesn't sign it. It's sealed on his behalf, but but it's extorted from him. And instead, what William the Marshall does is turn this into a kind of protoon constitution. And over the next 10 years, it's refined. It's redeveloped. It's granted more generally until finally in 1225, it's granted in return for a general grant of taxation. And the charter is altered to say it's granted to everybody in return for payments from everybody. So it establishes that wonderful idea of the Middle Ages which unfortunately we've lost that you pay taxation in return for the red address of grievance. Imagine if we could go back to that idea. The middle ages were rather rather impressive. They're not the barbarian lot uh that that that we think.

And so from that that that idea of the governors answering in some way to the governed and the two being in a reciprocal relationship develops. And what I would argue is that the the the foundations of the of the greatness of England, the greatness of Anglo Britain are that that's why you get very very quickly the creation of this extraordinarily advanced economy. Why our family structures are very different from most of Europe. We don't have extended families. Um there's a notion you can only have a notion of equality before the law if you don't have clans. It's why, you know, why why the importation of Pakistani clans here is so desperately dangerous. You cannot have an idea of equality before the law in a clan system. You can't have the individual vote in a clan system because the individual doesn't matter in a clan system. And and in England, medieval England, we effectively abolished all that. I mean interestingly enough in that year same year of 12 1215 in Rome just like now there is a great event taking place in Rome the Pope Innocent III calls the Lateran Council and the Lateran Council does many important things which have a major impact in England it outlaws cousin marriage this thing that we're talking about um again which is forms the Pakistani clan and whatever his first cousin marriage um and it's it is from it had already begun in England in theory applies throughout the western church but it's especially vigorously enforced in England. So you break up the family structures and you lay the foundations with that for an increasingly intense individualism. You see we we tend to think of individualism as a very very modern idea. Um the evidence is and it was first worked out by one of the people who most influenced me when I was a youngish man. Um a man called Alan McFarland was Cambridge dawn um very rare uh mixed very very rare individual in that he took two doctorates. He took one in history and another in socio another in anthropology and he wrote what I think is one of the most important books ever written on England which he just called the origins of English individualism and he saw them way way you the sort of thing you're individualism is the foundation of libertarianism of course and he saw them as being absolutely embedded in the middle ages rather than this notion of steady development towards them and the other great thing about 1215, it outlaws the presence of the priest at um a trial by battle. And so from that point on or trial by ordeal. So from that point onwards, you've got to find another way of uh of of trying a criminal and the development of trial by jury. So um there are year, you know that wonderful phrase, there are decades when nothing happens and minutes when everything happens. 1215 is one of those years. And so the impact was massive on the country, the economy, society afterwards.

What I'm arguing is that it is the creation of what we broadly speaking call the parliamentary system and English common law which lays the foundation for the staggering economic political imperial development of Britain which which remember is really the origin of what we call free what we call freedom. We we freedom is an abstract noun. On the other hand, what we think of and what actually most of the world thinks of as freedom is essentially a product of a single culture. It's it is essentially the anglophone culture. The thing that spread from England to America to Canada to Australia to New Zealand, the the open society and you will find the idea of a libertarian culture is pretty well inconceivable outside that. Again, the problem is that we tend to think of values as being universal. I would argue they're sharply culturally defined. They're defined by historical cultures, which is why the whole endeavor from excuse me, partly from partly from uh uh partly from the settlement at the end of the First World War, but much more critically, excuse me, the settlement from 1945. The idea of universal values, it's why it's been so absolutely catastrophic because values aren't universal. They are sharply culturally conditioned. And we need to be aware of that. You know, the whole myth that we had that because the iron curtain fell that because um China, communist China decided to adopt a quai capitalist system, therefore they will become just like us. That the world, you know, just wants to watch Friends and eat McDonald's. Um, and we would all live happily ever after. And we know it didn't quite turn out like that.

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I've often been um I spent a lot of time in America. I've often been envious of their uh treatment of their constitution, the respect of their constitution, how it's uh it's referred to regularly, whether it's uh judicial issues or whether it's more cultural issues like free speech or their right to bear arms. But it it still forms an active part of their society. The Magna Carta doesn't really do that now here in the UK. How did we lose that whereas America retained it and why have we lost?

Yeah. Well, let let's actually look at why why the American Constitution's so good and why in I would argue in virtually every way America is one of the great successor states to Britain. And let's again try to understand this. There have been two empires that have had an astonishing effect. And in both cases they were as far as the known world were concerned they were world empires. One is Rome, the other is Britain. And they both create law, they create language, they create culture, they create politics. And I think we need to understand the impact of Britain as being analogous to Rome. Again, if you wander around London, we're talking about where I live. I live in Bloomsby and on the edges of Bloomsby and Coven Garden. Coven Garden is a mess. Uh it just sort of growed up. um uh dis bits of it that were developed rationally like uh like the Piaza again by the the Russell family, the the the Ears and then the Dukes of Bedford and they then acquire the estates of the Ears of Southampton and the Rizley family going a bit north which is where I am now site of the British Museum going right up to Houston Road and they lay it out in the 18th and the early 19th century in this series of magnificent formal squares and of course they put up statues of themselves in those squares. They don't appear in 18th and 19th century dress. They appear with laurel wreaths and toggers. They're Roman senators. They see themselves as the direct heirs of Rome. They see their empire as the direct heir of Rome. Their cult remember they've all gone to university. We're very unusual. We have an educated aristocracy. They go to Oxford and Cambridge and they study the classics. Um and they're soaked in this stuff. Um uh and what happens is this idea of this idea of a law-based empire, uh this idea of an empire of language, of ideas, of politics is profound. And so when you get the great rebellion of America 1776 onwards, we tend to think of it as the sort of first cousin or maybe even the brother of the French Revolution. And this idea has been very deliberately cultivated, the statue of liberty is the gift of the French third republic to the their fellow great republic on the other side of the Atlantic. But remember uh when the American Revolution happens, France is the most absolute of European absolute monarchies. It helps American revolutionaries out of an act of pure vengeance for the fact that had been heavily defeated by the English uh in in 1763 the treaties of Paris. Uh and by the way, as a little side note, uh it is a matter of profound pleasure that the French bankrupt themselves in an in in helping the Americans to defeat Britain and therefore you have the French Revolution and therefore all the people who plotted against Britain have their heads cut off which is a proper reward. I think we can we can we we can we we can we we can all agree for such disgraceful behavior. Mu Mahon, please note. Uh but the but the the American Revolution isn't like the French Revolution. The American Revolution is is really a continuation of the sort of struggles I've described in England at the time of Magna Carta. It's really a continuation of the great struggles in England of the 17th century, more particularly uh the glorious revolution of 16889. And what the Americans are doing is really recreating that idea of self-government in America. But they're doing it on the basis of a English law. We forget this. America does you you the French Revolution tries to change everything. It tries to change the calendar. It tries to change do we realize this? It you don't just decimalize weights and measures. You try to decimalize the calendar. You've got 10 months, you've got 10 days in the week, 10 hours in the I mean just complete it's completely wooi. It's totally totally wooi. It just try it tries to change it it changes the boundaries of of of every administrative unit in France is is literally an attempt starting the world from scratch. The American Revolution is complet totally different law code. The American Revolution is completely different. You keep existing property rights except for the unfortunate tourists that have been on the wrong side. Uh you keep the existing system of law um uh in detail. Um and above all the American constitution is a very lightly modified version of the English constitution of the 18th century. The the you've got manifested the Senate is the House of Lords. The House of Representatives is the commons. The relative powers of the two of the two chambers are identical. The the person who chairs the uh House of Representatives is a speaker. The thing that's the real giveaway is the administrative officer of the House of Representatives due in America a lot of the time. Do you know who he's what he's called? Tell me. I should the surgeent at arms. And Americans have the faintest idea what a surgeent at arms is. But it's simply because in that English House of Commons, the administrator was the sergeant-at-arms. It is literally like that. And the powers of an American president are closely modeled on that of an 18th century English king subject to election. And so it works because it's it's it is a slightly polished version of the English constitution in including some awkward ideas which are different the idea of the separation

Of powers. So you separate the legislative, the executive, and the judicial, which is why you have to have a supreme court there. Was, we had until Tony Blair, we had the very different notion that all power originally deriving from the monarch, then the monarch ruling with the consent of the nation, and now, as it were, the nation with the monarch merely impersonating it, all powers deriving from that.

So, uh, in in in England, be in Britain before 1997, all power—judicial, legislative, and executive—is in the same bodies in parliament. Um, and the disaster of Blair is that what you try to do is to imitate crudely what had happened in America without actually understanding it. Or still worse, to give Britain—remember the oldest, oldest continuous political system in the world—People talk about, you know, the Japanese empire, the Japanese emperor and whatever, 2,000 years and so on, but remember Japan’s undergone dramatic shifts in how it’s organized itself. And the the current imperial restoration, the Meiji restoration, only takes place in the late 19th century. Before that, you had the shogunate in which uh there was the formal rule of the Mikado uh in Kyoto and the actual power exercised by a great nobleman, um um the Shogun uh in in Tokyo, which is why you’ve got the two capitals and you’ve still got the two railway lines linking them as you originally had the two post roads.

But England, there is a continuous political structure from Magna Carta, ruptured deliberately by Blair, and the model is partly America; still worse, I think, what the the lot, the rather simple-minded lot uh but very effective surrounding Tony Blair, they gave us piecemeal the sort of constitution that a newly liberated, so midaziatic ex-Soviet republic might have had, but but but sorry, but but yeah. Sorry, but to just get back to what it’s like. I mean, I’m a big fan of the US constitution, but why why have we, why do we as a nation not celebrate and refer to our constitution in the same way the US does? Because we’ve lost, we were able to, we were able to take it for granted because it was so good, because it was so successful. I mean, it is the, this is, we are reaping, this is the great, I think what this is the terrible thing that we are reaping. We created a society, particularly in Britain, when you didn’t need to worry about law and order because people, I remember as a boy, it was just very rare that you saw any; there were pockets, there were areas in the east end or areas in Liverpool, whatever, but by and large it was a population that simply governed itself, um that that the, again there’s that that wonderful, uh, I mean you’re the libertarian. Um, one one of one or or maybe not, but one of one of the outstanding remarks on on that is AJP. Taylor uh in his great history of 20th century England, and he remarks that before the uh before the um um before the first world war, an Englishman of any means hardly ever came across the state. Society just functioned. There was the minimal, minimal activity of government, and then there’s this explosion in the two world wars and particularly with the welfare state and particularly with Blair, but you had a society which was as near as near to the libertarian idea all the way that that you can imagine, and and you just get the trouble is you become complacent, and and again remember, um our constitution works so well that we provide the model to the world. Everybody’s got a parliament. People, people just assume that that’s what you call the thing. Um, but of course, eventually things decay, and uh people, again unfortunately, uh do have the notion that was that terribly dangerous idea of the French revolutionaries. I mean, it’s no accident that it takes place, I suppose, at the end of a century. And again, the French Revolution of the 1790s, the Blairite Revolution was very much people thinking they knew better. That peculiar attitude of mind, which is the what I I call it neopilia, the fondness of the new. Do you remember Blair was stupid enough to say we were a new country, new Britain? He called it, he called it a a new Labour. Everything was to be new. um rather like a cheap shiny plastic, you know, with with a pseudo metal trim. Um, and uh that that one knew better. And one of the things that that I am now absolutely certain we have to do is to remind people that if things have survived a long time, it’s not because they’re old and fusty. It’s because they’ve actually worked. What I think we should be learning as a result of the catastrophe of the last 40 years is that just changing things arbitrarily is a disaster, and we are reaping the rewards of the catastrophes that have afflicted our government since 1997. America has suffered much less because a written constitution acts much more as a frame that it’s far harder to challenge. Um uh you have a judicial system there which is which acts as a a break on change whereas here it’s tended to be a propeller of change and so on. I, we were driving home yesterday. It’s my son by the way, and he asked me the question yesterday. He said, when when dad, when when did this decline start? When can you pinpoint? And I said, under Blair, didn’t I? But I couldn’t articulate why. I said, I don’t know why, but everything changed under Blair. Shall I begin to, shall we begin exploring, and it’s it’s going to go on a bit because virtually everything is changed. Yes.

The first thing that, right, let’s establish what it’s changed from, and then we’ll look at how it’s done. What has changed from is that basic idea of what we normally think of as democracy. The idea that the people who finally determine things are those elected to parliament, those sitting in parliament who are finally answerable to the people and can be removed by the people. That idea, as I said, goes right back to Magna Carta, that um govern the governors are answerable to the governed; that that basic idea that was the target, and it’s very interesting to think why. I think again, and I mentioned the business about two different views of democracy. Blair and those around him was very heavily influenced—you’ll remember he was a fanatic for the EU—very heavily influenced by developments in continental Europe, and the point is, of course, in Europe after 1945, after the triumphs of Nazism and then the defeat of Nazism, there’s this profound awareness that a sense of nationhood and the passionate involvement of people in politics could do terrible damage. And so what you tend to do, you tend to see it as important to, as it were, put democracy into chains. You mustn’t give it too much freedom. So you set up legal structures; you set up institutional structures which are designed to stop it going too far. Um, and the entire EU is a series of such structures, which is why the European Parliament is really, it’s just a talking shop. It’s it’s like the Estates General in in in in the old monarchy of France, and real power lies in the hands of the European Commission who are unelected, appointed bureaucrats. Our great problem, of course, used to be—I remember when I’m old enough to remember our going in, our coming out, our doing gen hoke koke around the EU—and we always used to call the commission a civil service; it’s not, the continental word is bureaucracy, that means rule by experts, rule by the bureau, rule by the office, and the that is what Blair’s idea essentially was: you were going to substitute for parliamentary democracy which might lead to reform. It might actually lead to people like Nigel. Oh, shock horror. You create effectively a series of mechanisms that hedge it in on the one hand legally and remove power from it in different directions. And you do it in two different ways. Law, we’ll deal with in a moment. First, what you did was to set up the idea of government by the experts, those who really know. Because, of course, the problem with democracy is pigning people like you and me. Um, and I mean, how can you really trust them to do it? Particularly when you’re dealing with complex things like trade negotiations and whatever, how how can common folk uh or whether immigration is a good thing or a bad thing? How can common people possibly be allowed to express an opinion on such things? So you begin right from the moment of that government. You start taking hugely important decisions away from the government and away from parliament. It’s today, isn’t it, that the Bank of England committee met, the the the monetary policy committee. The first thing Gordon Brown—and he’s much more than Blair responsible for the detail of this—what what Gordon Brown does is to is to, it’s called giving independence to the Bank of England, and you give the monetary policy committee, which is a group of appointed and unreovable by any democratic process experts, the job of setting interest rates, which is in a modern economy one of the most absolutely important things you can do in terms of economic management on the. And supposedly these uh these experts, you know, expert economists, expert trade specialists, expert bankers and whatever, will do a very much better job than mere politicians. Look at what’s happened to the value of the pound since 1997. Look at the catastrophic levels of government debt that we have. I mean, the the government debt is it 2.7 trillion. Um, it’s multip, I’m just trying to work how many it must have multiplied, getting on for 10 times. It’s 100% of GDP. I mean, it it is it is it, I mean, it it no 10 is too much. It will it will have been at multiplied at least three times for nothing. We’re now wartime levels without having had a war. Now that’s the result of its administration by an uncontrollable expert committee. You then go on, you create a whole series of these, they’re called quangos, quasi-autonomous nongovernmental organizations. Uh, and you create another one. You create um, uh, English Nature. English Nature is the organization that required the builders of HS2 to create the 100 million buck tunnel. uh English Nature is the organization which has decreed that a very large slice of southern England is unbuildable, unbuildable upon because the discharge from sewage would affect the amount of of of phosphates and nitrates in the soil. uh English Nature uh effectively determines housing policy, then you set up something else, you set up the climate change committee which determines largely our entire approach to net zero. Now, if you look at those three areas—land usage, net zero, and interest rates—what are you left with in parliament? It’s essentially, it’s talking shop. They’re playing games. And the fascinating thing is that Kier Starmer came to power clearly imagining he thought he was a great administrator as director of public prosecutions. He thought the only reason that government hadn’t been working under the Tories because they were stupid like Liz Truss or corrupt like Boris Johnson, and he would come in as a great white knight. He would, of course, get Sue Gray who’d been at the heart of the civil servant, immediately everything would be run wonderfully. He then finds, of course, that all these levers in Downing Street don’t, you can pull on, pull as hard on them. They’re like an old-fashioned signal box. You can do this massive exercise, and then you find the wires have been cut and they don’t actually connect to anything because it’s all been hived off. Do you know how many quangos there are? God, I’ve heard the number and whatever it is. We’ll see. It was before, it was before they came to power. I think it was 240. They’ve created more since then. And they’ve created 27 and abolished one. Oh god. Admittedly, they abolished a very big one. They, the whole of the NHS was run at arm’s length. You had a woman called Amanda Pritchard um who was the um was the uh chief executive of NHS England, a friend of mine and don’t mustn’t identify him too clearly, but anyway, he ran at one of our largest chain chains of of chemist shops and whatever. Uh, he met this woman. We lunch shortly afterwards. She said, you know, I wouldn’t employ as a branch manager. Well, this is so what what you’ve done then, one thing that you deliberately did was to hive off power. And of course, all these quangos are run by the same kind of people. They are run by the socially sensitive. They believe in diversity, equity, and inclusion. Um, uh, they all now absolutely to a person will vote Labour. Mhm. It’s a particular type. They all live in Islington. Um uh or the Islington scattered over the country. It’s a very, very particular type. That’s one way. That’s so that’s one way power goes. And then what you do is um and this is where uh it the f the first signal for it uh is the importation of the Human Rights Act um which legislates the European Convention on Human Rights into English law. Now this is interesting, isn’t it? Because we talked about how Tony captured language with new, it all swing, you all all swinging, all dancing, all flared trousers. Um uh uh new um another thing is rights, human rights. Don’t they sound lovely? You know, very Paddington Bear. It’s it’s it’s it’s you know, you feel good about it. You’ll know, you know, you know it’s a good idea. But um the problem is, of course, that think about it, if you believe that there’s a thing called European uh European Convention on Human Rights or indeed that there’s a United Nations Convention on Human Rights. This raises some very interesting questions, doesn’t it? What is the source of law? Well, what was it? I mean, how did I describe it as being traditionally in England was common law? No, no. The source of law from Parliament. Yeah. But in other words, and why does and Parliament represent the people? So the law, parliament representing the people. But what if you’ve got European law? What if you’ve got international law? What’s the source of that? Well, it’s not going to be the people. It’s going to be the bureaucrats or or it’s going to be somebody above. And indeed, it raises very fundamental arguments. If indeed there is a thing called European rights, presumably there is a a European man of which being a British citizen, you’re only a kind of little sub-department of it. Um uh or there is no European man because we’re so culturally different. Ah, but but no, they’re not. If you believe, if you believe the if if you believe the EU, uh they’re not. If you believe the European Convention, they have exactly the same rights, which suggests there’s a, as I said, there’s a sort of European man or a universal man. And this seems to me to be the enormous problem with, ju just one sec. Let’s explore this idea. I mean, I’m sorry, I’m taking it to its extreme. What I was going to say is that I believe there probably is a European man and and and the only person I can point to is Tony Blair. If I had to say there’s a European man, that is the Europe. Oh, don’t you think Stephen Fry? I mean, maybe maybe, but but we could all label them. We we we could we could we could instantly identify these people. But yeah, but but what it what it means is, of course, that you call into question the actual necessity and the legitimacy of the state and the nation. I mean, if there’s a superior form of law that’s above the nation, what’s the point of the nation? What’s the point of frontiers? Shh. If we’re all really the same and we’ve all really got the same rights, isn’t it wicked that we don’t let everybody in? Do you see how all the arguments about immigration have developed? They’ve all developed on this basis, which was the basic assumption of the French Revolution. The basic argument of the French Revolutionaries that there are universal values. In other words, we’re all really the same as opposed to what you instinctively believe and what I was talking about when I was talking about Alan McFarlane and English individualism. The fact that these things are very sharply culturally shaped. They’re historically rooted. They’re territorially defined. Um, they are culturally, linguistically expressed in specific language and all the rest of it. We’ve thrown all that away, and there’s no accident that there’s been this explosion of immigration at the same time because we’ve effect, if if you think about this rationally, if you believe in European laws or you believe indeed in world laws, frontiers are simply, they shouldn’t exist. Um, and why does Angela Merkel go about, you know, we can um effectively throwing Germany open to to a million immigrants? It is this notion that the opposite of the wicked world of the Nazis, you know, all keen on all keen on vulgar nationalism and whatever. We need to have open, welcoming arms. We can, and I think that this is this the the the incorporation of the European Convention is the absolute catastrophe. And uh again, it’s a profoundly bad way of making law. Um, it’s a deeply un-English. It’s a very French way of making law. You announce general principles and then you deduce how they might apply to individual cases. It’s completely um what’s what’s what’s um what’s called deductive thinking. English is a completely inductive language. We’re an inductive culture. We don’t believe in generalization. We work from specific examples up, which is the right way of doing things. It’s called experiment in sciences. You don’t begin with abstract principles. You develop theories in accordance with with empirical experiment. But but the this whole way of thinking about law is wholly foreign to English law. I mean, imagine the outstanding example of what this happens and what happens apart from the European convention is the Equality Act. Imagine having an act of parliament the name of a single abstract noun. It’s deranged, and we know it’s deranged for very good reason that we’ve had two very clear examples in wildly different areas. Have you noticed the business of the Birmingham bin strikes? I have. Which act of parliament caused the Birmingham equality? Why? Because they wanted to have equal pay for different roles for men and women. Even if they were doing completely different jobs, how on earth do you determine whether or not it’s unjust? You can’t. That’s precisely it. And what you do instead, you try and do so on the notion that judges can actually somehow judge setting wages. This, it’s deranged, but but the act of parliament in its endeavor to translate this, you know, abstract noun into real legislation, it includes equations; it’s got three equations which the judges are to use with definitions of the terms, and the idea is basically that of Karl Marx that labor has got an intrinsic value separate from its market value; it’s mad; no, no economic theory has been more comprehensively exploded, and you can judge it by its consequences. Look at the consequences. Birmingham has been inflicted with debt and the figures because of the back settlement you have to pay to these alleged disadvantaged women, between 500 and 700 million; bankruptcy, council, bank, absolutely bankrupts. So one act of parliament’s done that, and what what what is the other famous case that the Equality Act has been heavily involved in this is the trans issue, that the the trans issue, the whole confusion between gender and sex, determining who a woman is. Um, in other words, what what it did, what the Equality Act did was to set up a war of rights. Who has got the right to the title of woman? Is it determined by your sex? In other words, is it determined chromosomally? Is it determined uh by every every every every cell in your body, by your biology? Or is it determined by a little bit of paper, a gender certificate? That’s the war in the same, you see, it’s exactly the same principle that the uh European Convention and its attempts at applying it for citizenship. What makes you English? Is it the fact you were born here, that you speak English, that you have have those echoes in your mind of hundreds of years here, that you walk into Westminster Abbey and you sort of inhale and exhale? Or is it the fact that you’ve got a little bit of paper which says your parents arrived here yesterday, uh you were born, you know, today, and therefore you’re English. It’s exactly the same issue. But one of the things that’s striking about the left is its belief in the magic of language. It thinks of itself as being rational. It’s not. It’s rationalist. Um, it’s the idea fundamentally, its approach is magical, that that I become a woman by saying so or by feeling so. I become um again, we can even look at the economy. Um uh we have growth simply by Rachel Reeves performing a rain dance and saying growth, growth, growth, growth, growth. At the same time, she increases regulation, increases taxation, which we know absolutely will guarantee that it doesn’t happen. So you’ve got then this this extraordinary legal attack in the uh in the um in the uh ECR on the absolute fundamentals of a nation, frontier, state, citizenship, sexuality, and quite it’s quite, I, when you think about it, it’s utterly radical. Yeah. This this is right up there with the French Revolution, trying to change the calendar and and and to change the days of the week and the months of the year.

I’ve never had it articulated this way to me before, but the democracy is the the establishment of law. It comes from the people, either elected into parliament or representing the people, and it’s the and it’s the laws that give the basis of society, the moral, economic, and yes, societal decline comes from the destruction of that framework for building the law, which is why people are constantly, why people are constantly saying we want our country back. There’s a kind of inarticulate sense of we’ve lost something. Here’s what you said to me, Connor. You said to me this morning, but you couldn’t articulate what it was. You just, Connor was saying to my son, he’s 21. He was saying, saying to me the same thing this morning. He said, “I’ve had enough of this.” But sometimes it’s, you know, you know, innately there’s a problem. You couldn’t articulate why. Why you need, why you why you need, why why why why you need the overeducated occasionally to be let out of their cages and and to be let loose in front of microphones and to try to explain. [Music] [Music] It’s very important that you don’t lose this. Okay? This is your inheritance through Bitcoin. A, let Bitcoin rip. Don’t rip up your Bitcoin. Set up inheritance with Casa. It’s funny because when you talked about the experts, the bureaucratic state, populism is just a uh a porative they’ve created to argue against the return to being governed by the people. That’s exactly right. But I I always say, well, populism, it it sounds like the word popular, this is democracy, right? We’re voting for what we want. Exactly. It means exactly the same. Yeah. But it’s but but it’s now been cluttered up with all sorts of notions that it means, by by definition, easy solutions to difficult problems. Um, it’s far right, um and all the rest of it. Um, but we haven’t quite finished. So there’s the European Convention, and then the final thing that puts the coping stone on it all is the creation of the Supreme Court. Um, and that’s much later in in in in the process. That’s 2005. And what that does um is uh the our our previous highest court of appeal in the land was a committee of parliament. It was so-called judicial committee of the House of Lords. Um uh uh it it was profoundly influenced by the Lord Chancellor who was a most senior lawyer, but he was also a politician, and he was an important member of the cabinet. Uh, and indeed, I would argue that the the effective abolition or enormous reduction in the power of that office is one of the fundamental reasons that things have gone so terribly wrong in our administration of law, of justice, of the police, of prisons, and all the rest of it. If you go back even even even even to an early Tony Blair uh when when when you had Derry Irving, his former pupil master, you know, Blair himself was a lawyer, though apparently not a very good one. Um, his former pupil master was Lord Chancellor. Immense power. Um, and uh indeed one of the reasons that the office is is is cut off at the knees is because Irving had too much power. um or uh Margaret Thatcher with Mely of Clash Fern, that very severe, high high, we free high high Scottish Presbyterian. But the they would never have allowed the collapse of the court system; they would never have allowed the chaos in prisons, uh the the the the decline of the police that we’ve seen and the that that the thing that’s so extraordinary about the effect of what Blair did, it elevates the position of law in theory and it demotes it terribly in practice. Lawlessness is is rampant. Um, the administration of laws largely broken down. The police are hopelessly ineffective. They’re putting their energies into completely the wrong things. Whole sways of crime are effectively uh uh effectively unpunished. You know, from from shoplifting to speeding to uh to phone stealing.

To virtually everything one can think of. All the petty crimes. Well, they're not petty. Well, some we start we start with sorry, it's branded as petty. It's branded as uh too common, too often, or just involves property. Yes, there is this terrible contempt for property, which of course is characteristic of the socialist that believes all property is just held at the whim of the state rather than is intrinsic, an intrinsic right, which is my view. Remember the the the first proper formulation of the ideas of rights derived from common law: life, liberty, and property. Yes. And and they seem to me they're they're the old trinity which America and the American Revolution was very much better at protecting than it's turned out we were. So but but that that great change in 2005, uh the demotion of the office of Lord Chancellor, because in theory it broke the rule of the separation of powers. You had somebody who was head of the judiciary, um uh was was uh himself a judge, uh was also a politician. So of course you're a um he's in the legislative, he's he's he's judicial, um and he's executive. Dear me, a kind of walking walk walk walk walk walk walk walk walk walk walk walk walk walk walk walk walk walk walk walk walk walk walk walk walk walk walk walk walk walk walk walk walk walk walk walk walk walk walk walk walk walk walking walk walk walk walk walk walk walk walk walk walk walk walk walk walk walk walk walk walk walk walk walk walk walk walk walk walk walk walk walk walk walk walk walk walk walk walk walk walking illustration of of um a a breach of the separation of paths. He must be abolished.

Um but what they do is they create this thing called the Supreme Court. Now the moment you create a thing, you give it its own very grand separate building in Parliament Square. Literally on the opposite, you've got the Palace of Westminster on one side, on the river side of Parliament Square, and then on the other side you've got the old Middle Sex Guild Hall, which is a splendid late 19th-century building which is very expensively refurbished for the Supreme Court, and it sits there separately, but you actually call it the Supreme Court. But we have a thing as part of that notion of self-government, that notion that parliament's authority is its universal representative nature. You have the idea of parliamentary sovereignty, that parliament finally is responsible for determining everything in Britain. What possible place is there for a court that calls itself supreme? You see, in America, you have to have a Supreme Court because you've deliberately created a separation between the executive and the legislative, that's to say, between the president and the two houses of Congress. And you've also got a federal government and you've got states governments. So, you need a referee. And the basic function of the Supreme Court is to act as a referee. But we're not a republic. It's not so much. It doesn't matter. It's not the it's not the republic business. It's the separation of powers business. Right? I mean, if if George Washington, there was a real possibility that that the crown could have become an if he'd had a son, it's not improbable. I mean, as we can see, America's got an enormous appetite. The dynasties, look at how Trump, you know, Trump junior, Trump, Trump very junior, Trump Baron. Uh you can already see a line of kings uh uh uh or presidents stretching out there. Look at the Kennedys. Um look at the Roosevelts. Um very very powerful uh dynastic sense. But it's a separation of powers.

But the the problem is once you introduced that idea into England, once you combined it with the European Convention, because what the again we talked I talked in very grand terms about the European Convention on Human Rights. But the real problem with the convention is it's so loosely drafted. What does freedom of speech subject to considerations of public order, public health, well-being, what does it actually mean? It gives judges vast rights, the right to family life. This thing that's been used to say, you know, that some outrageous asylum seeker who's broken the law and indeed I think in some cases may even have murdered, um because he's got a son who who, you know, loves Weaberix. Um he's got to remain in Britain because he's got to stay with his son and his son can't possibly find Weaberix um back in whichever godforsaken hole he came from. Um but that's how the right to family life is interpreted. But the the the looseness of the drafting of the convention gives vast power to judges. And what we've seen uh with the creation of the Supreme Court, with the importation uh of the uh European Convention, you've seen a radical change in the nature of our legal profession. Judges never used to speak publicly. They do all the time. You've now got as it were highly activist lawyers um in the outrageous we in the outrageous position. There are people both acting as immigration lawyers and sitting as judges. These same activists sitting as judges in the immigration tribunals um with you known uh very powerful bias in favor of letting as many people in the country as possible and keeping everybody in the country even if they've been criminal. Um uh so it's it has it has turned it has changed the legal profession fundamentally, but I think it's done something else, and the most obvious example is the business of the the case over the prerogation under Boris Johnson, if you remember, where the Supreme Court uh with Gina Miller uh bringing the case uh and the arguments put forward by Lord Panic, um wonderful name, Lord Panic anyway, um uh about the nature of parliament ruled that Boris Johnson's prorogation of parliament, which was the way that you had to break the deadlock um uh in uh in in that parliament which res remember although there've been the vote for Brexit, uh the bulk of MPs were passionately opposed uh to to leaving the European Union, and parliament after Theresa May's disastrous um calling of a general election became absolutely uncontrollable by the government, and it required prorogation as part of the process with Boris Johnson and and and and Dominic Cummings to break all that, and the the prorogation is ruled illegal.

Now that stands English government, British government absolutely on its head. The court rules that the act of a prime minister holding office and um broadly able to control a parliamentary majority um is can be ruled simply illegal by a court. Um and I think it actually but I don't think I know it directly breaks um one of the central clauses um of the Bill of Rights of 1689, the the the uh uh the semi-revolution, the glorious revolution uh which finally establishes parliamentary supremacy. Um so what we've what we've done is we've said power towards the one side of experts, the monetary policy committee, the English nature uh the climate change committee, and even more importantly, you have distributed power away from politicians to judges and again through the operation of all these these structures, vital decisions that really should be decisions because they affect you, me and everybody else should actually be taken by politicians that say people answerable to the people who can be removed. Look, I am dear me, nobody is less stare eyed about politicians than I am. The only good thing about democracy in that sense of the word is you can get rid of the buggers. It that that really is it. However good a judge, however good an expert, you've got no ready means of getting rid of them. And that that that is the the ability to remove the ruler, preferably peacefully, is the final sanction. And that is what we used to have. And that is what all of these changes deliberately destroy. And that is what I think has gone absolutely fundamentally wrong. It means you now have an elite class which finally is not answerable to anybody, to parody Lincoln. It's not the government of the people, by the people, for the people. It's the government of that wonderful word that I think it's invented by Michael Gove, the in the the the Quanganger, the important lawyers, the civil servants, the blob. It's the government of the blob, by the blob, for the blob. And the, as it were, that old phrase that the the Labour Party was the political representative of working people, the Labour Party is now the representative of the blob. It's the blob. Disgusting thought, the blob made flesh. And if you look at Kestama and you listen to that strange android voice, that is the voice of the blob. Okay. I'd always thought the foundation of our country was the economics, but the foundation of the economics is the law. And we are now law and politics. Law and politics. Law and politics. And we are now essentially politically impotent, cuz we are which is also why the economist gone to bits. Yeah. And you now have the ludicrous position in which judges, because again let's all let's now distribute blame more widely. Okay. Now this the blame why we're in this mess still is that in 2010 you elect a pseudo well it's a coalition but dominated by the conservative party. From 2010 to 2024 is 14 years. The Tories did and I am one did absolutely nothing, nothing at all to change any of this. They actually made it worse. It is del I think quite deliberately. Cameron remember they had this period succession of unsuccessful leaders, William Hey and uh Ian Duncan Smith, Michael Howard and whatever, and they decide that finally if you can't beat them you've got to join them. So you see uh with with uh with David Cameron the decision well he describes himself as the heir to Blair. Uh his lieutenant, one of his lieutenants uh was George Osborne who clearly continues directly the policies uh of Gordon Brown. Um and even more strikingly is Michael Gove, the the kind of demon int demon in the proper sense of the word demon intelligence uh of somebody who holds office right through this period of time when they are when they're elected and they move in uh to uh Downing Street in 2010. He hands round marked up copies of Blair's memoirs as how to do it. What? And the thing the thing reaches its nadir with Theresa May, the absolute rock bottom, much worse than Truss. Truss is only there for two minutes is Theresa May. What does she do? She actually legislates net zero without any debate that it's to be it is to there's an act of parliament which says we must reach net zero by 2050. That means even if parliament says this is not a terribly good idea uh if the government you know tries to say but actually this is going to be jolly jolly difficult, so long as that par remains on the statute book a judge says so when the last government in actually beginning to waken up under the pressure of economic crisis says wouldn't it be a good idea if we consider fracking, wouldn't it be a good idea um if we begin to drill again in The North Sea, judges rule you can't because you must consider the broader impact on the climate as established by the climate change act. Judges actually control our extractive policies. Theresa May Theresa May under Theresa May, Maria Miller, we were talking about the whole absurd business of transgenderism. Well, some of it begins with the Gender Recognition Act passed under New Labour, but the actual notion of self-identification begins under Theresa May with Maria Miller, a conservative. It is simply um it is simply beyond beyond comprehension and and you'd all you're even worse. The last the last days of uh the last days of David Cameron and 2014 the whole business of the the non-crime hate incident comes in which you use uh effectively to police everybody's speech, the silence and under under a cons under under a swagon conservative government.

So on this podcast you are definitely hearing me talk about Bitcoin a lot. Well, why? We live in a really strange time with governments driving inflation with their reckless spending and endless money printing. There is a way out of this. There is a way to protect your money, and that is by stacking Bitcoin. I've made loads of shows about Bitcoin. You can go and research this. You can go and read the books. But the truth is it is the hardest money ever created. If you are interested in protecting your financial future, it's time for you to get on the Bitcoin train. I have. I've been stacking Bitcoin personally and through my businesses since 2017. It's protected me. It's secured my family's future, and it also strengthens all of my businesses. So, if you want to start stacking Bitcoin, where do you do it? Well, for me is with Gemini. They're a fully licensed full reserve exchange and custodian. So, they give you a secure way for you to buy and own your Bitcoin. There's no risks and no funny business. So, if you're serious about stacking Bitcoin the right way, head over to gemini.com, which is gem ni.com. We don't really consider them anything other than a conservative government by name. Well, this has been the tragedy and uh it's why of course the b the brand was so busted. It's why they lost so badly. It's why they're continuing to lose. Um it's why uh we are now in the events of the last week or so. Um, and I've just been at a meeting uh in which more and more people, more and more people in positions of power and responsibility are increasingly taking for granted that there will be a Reform government and that Farage will be prime minister. But of course, we'll now see an extraordinary strike back of this deep state. Um uh I think it will I mean if if if 2028 2029 whenever the next general election takes place, if it does return a Reform government, I think it will make the previous constitutional crisis, the great Reform Act of 1832, the struggle over the 1908 budget, the 20 the uh uh the 1911 um um um parliament which removes the power of the House of Lords over money bills and whatever. I think it will make them look like blips. In other words, we are at the point of another Magna Carta. It will be that sort of struggle, and I think it's necessary. Yes. Um I I hope our existing traditions which were the result of hundreds of years of development of a peaceful politics will hold. Uh bearing in mind the levels of resistance, I think it quite possible that they won't, but one hopes.

So you're confident that Reform are the real conservative party, and maybe I mean I don't think Reform is anything at all at the moment. Um I think Reform uh I mean a movement ju just one second why why right let's look at the three events let's look at the u well one was the one is the face of the the other if we look at the last election the conservatives lost hugely badly for the simple reason that they deserve to. Nobody scrutinized what Labour promised at all. Remember its manifesto was was absurd, the the claim that you could do all these wonderful things, you know, uh for removing that on public school fees, that magically, you know, again, magical thinking uh would enable you to do all these wonderful and no other taxes, great hand-on taxes will not go up. Do you remember? Nobody scrutinized it. Um Rachel Reeves and again talking about juju economics. Rachel Reeves gave the the mace lecture in uh uh in I think it was the March of um uh of 2024 um in which she declared she'd invented a new kind of economics, a new economic theory uh which is to be called securomics. Um this is why there's all this stuff about she was a real economist, you know, she wasn't wasn't just some politician. She was serious academic economist, and it all turns out to be a load of lies. Um but but that's that's another m well it's not another matter. But why this building up of her as an economist? Because she'd supposedly come up with a new economic doctrine. It turns out, interestingly enough, that like everything else about Rachel Reeves, it's a fraud. And she'd actually written a book on female economists, most of which turns out to have been cribbed from Wikipedia, you know, with with without even acknowledging quotes from Wikipedia. But her mace lecture was a direct ripoff um of the woman who was was successively uh Janet Yellen. She's successively um chairman of the Federal Reserve and then Secretary of the Treasury under Biden. And uh she talked about modern supply-side economics, and modern supply-side economics are terribly terribly clever. Uh they apparently mean that if you give large pay increases to public sector workers, build lots and lots of railways, all very expensive and all built of course uh by public servants. If you go on and develop huge numbers of windmills um and other things, miraculously the economy grows. Uh well, it does provide you borrow large enough amounts of money to pay for all of these things. But there is a little problem. America, because it um is the world's reserve, controls the world's reserve currency, can borrow huge amounts of money as Biden did um and and as Trump had done before. But of course, poor Britain can't. So only one person produced a sensible account of of of Reeves of Reeves um modern economic theory is Jason Cowie who's actually a leftish journalist. He was the former editor of the New Statesman, and he came up with this wonderful phrase. It was bidonomics without the bucks. Um in other words um it's old-fashioned Keynesian economics. You know, Keynes argued that that if you've got an underperforming economy, it's better to pay people to you dig a hole and then fill it in uh than than to have them sitting around idle. But that relies on the fact you can borrow money. We can't. We're up against that rock in a hard place with our public finances. But anyway, the Conservatives bear a terrible responsibility. And they were correctly, let's go back to the point we were making, they were correctly punished by the electorate, and Labour was returned simply because it wasn't the Tories. Now, after a few months of a Labour government, you find they're at least as bad and in terms of their financial management very much worse. And so, if you don't go for the Tories and you don't go for Labour, well, you have this new kid on the block called Reform. Which is why, do you remember Trump said, what was it? Trump said that if he shot somebody in uh in times they'll still vote for him, or what they'll still vote for him. I think that's true of Nigel Farage. So all the business of of you know oh the fact that he can't manage people. Oh the quarrel with Rupert Low. Oh the fact that he's got lots of funny people as councillors. Oh the fact uh that that uh local government is going to be badly run. It will make absolutely no difference, no difference whatsoever. There is a chance. But in other words, Reform is a blank canvas.

Yes, it is entirely unclear. Some people I think will be working even as even as we speak now on shaping serious policies because the more it becomes likely they're a vehicle, the more it becomes likely that that vehicle will carry you know Nigel triumphant uh you know in one hand and pint in the other uh to the doors of Downing Street, the more serious people will put money into developing policies, into thinking about what a who might form the cabinet, what sorts of legislation they would have up their sleeves. I mean, the thing, you know, you've got two models of what it could look like. One is Donald Trump mark one when he was first elected. Total chaos. Um every cabinet member, I think virtually every cabinet member is sacked at least once. Um and then Trump mark two when, if you remember, you've got those impressive bits of paper in front of you. Do you remember within hours, an hour literally of his swearing in um in the rotunda um of the capital he is in the Oval Office with a pile of executive orders and the um the kind of necrophiliac figure um of um uh Stephen Miller behind him, the man who's drafted these things, handing them I mean it's like it's it's wonderful it's like one of those great 17 there's a great 17th-century painting uh which shows Charles I's principal minister the Earl of Strafford with his beautiful secretary behind him, the great pile of papers. It was like that scene. Miller is handing um uh um Trump these things. This vast royal signature goes at the bottom. The pen is flung into the uh into the into the throng. The document is held up. The TV cameras going on. You can actually read what's there. Then the pile moves on. If that work takes place between now and 28, 2028, 29, there's a chance there will be a real Reform government. If they don't do that, it will be the terminal catastrophe. Do you believe they can or do you believe they understand the problem the way you've outlined it? I think people can be taught. I'm an enormous believer in teaching. I've been a teacher one way or another all my life. I like it. I think we all need teaching. Um the role again I found I'm profoundly non-religious though I was brought up in a religious family. I call what I'm doing at the moment because I'm also traveling around the country talking to Reform associations, Conservative associations. Anybody will listen to me on this kind of thing. I call it evangelizing. There's a need for evangelism. We need to explain. You see one of the things again if you look at Trump and Mugger at all sorts of level from people like you know Bannon, the great armpit scratching stuff to high intellectuals to Elon Musk, you know, finest tech bras, they've all been explaining, expounding, propagandizing, podcasts, talking about it, agitating, that's how these things It's uh this is a profound interview for me. This is I mean I think it's more of an education than an interview really. But but that's what we need. We again you see we've been a it's so Peter it's so easy to see what's happened. We've just been able to take things for granted. Well, we we the we we've been the immense I mean, I look at my own life, we've been the immensely fortunate beneficiaries of hundreds of years of success, people who've taken huge risks, suffered. And the trouble is, you know, there's that wonderful um line about families that, you know, rags to riches in three generations. We're the Budden Brooks generation, the ones who throw it away or risk throwing it away. What was that statistic you told me, Connor, about inheritance? 40 something like 40% of people inherit their wealth wasted away. Of course, 40% of those who inherit in the top 1% don't stay there. No, that's right. I mean, it's very, very easy because if it's been handed to you on a plate, I mean, what do you do? You put it up your nose or in your belly? Or elsewhere. Um it's very very easy and also and it's even and it's especially easy if we've lost any notion that wealth has got a social function. If generally speaking now the idea of inheritance is denigrated. You you see all these rich people saying oh we won't leave our children anything for some of the reasons you're talking about. But this country was built on a notion of the duties and responsibilities of wealth. That you can laugh at it and sneer at it as noblesse oblige. But we had a political class that was educated in the values essentially of the Roman Republic. The sense of public service and public duty produces figures like Churchill absolutely from this world. And they were the they were at the heart of this process. It was a very very unusual aristocracy because it just opened up. It opened up. I mean I'm a very late example of exactly that process. The sort of northern grammar school that I went to. Mine was had double foundation. Blue Coat School of the late 17th century and or grammar school of 1523. They were founded essentially to tap high talent in remote rural areas, the sort of place that I was born. Um and most of the most of the lads would go on and you know they'd run local businesses and be literate farmers and all the rest of it. But a handful would go on to Boxbridge and would go on to that world of London, of commerce, of politics and all the rest of it and enter that that unlike unlike the French, unlike the German aristocracies, wide open to talent, wide wide open to talent and and um but there was that sense of the duty of wealth um that it had a purpose that you' I mean you you look at the great country houses with those vast avenues of trees. You only plant those if you to plant an avenue of trees. You've got to have um a um what is the word that I'm groping for? Um you you've got to have a political time. You've got to have a time scale of at least a century. And I think again we need to recover the idea that you need some sort of group of people whose values and time scale is more than tomorrow. It is the great problem with democracy. Is again it's the terrible problem that

We've got ourselves into financially that that everybody uh and again it was it was a very deliberate extension of the welfare state by Gordon Brown. Gordon Brown thought the way he could entrench the welfare state was by making sure everybody, however well off, that actually got something from it. So this notion, you know, the notion of giving pensioners winter fuel allowance is Gordon Brown; free television licenses to everybody my age, Gordon Brown.

Um, and it's a profoundly dangerous thing to do because what you're doing is you're throwing money at people who don't need it. But of course, even people who don't need the winter fuel allowance get very cross—well, most of them do—if it's taken away from them. But we're going to have to have a terrible pruning back of these things. I mean, the the uh um the the whole business of disability benefits um the the whole business of Motability is now an outrage. You know, is it a third? Is it a half of the gas on the street? 20%? We looked yesterday, didn't we? It's some it's some staggering figure. One in five cars. One in five new car registrations. Just grotesque. The the the chief administrator of it is paid several hundred thousand pounds a year. It's a huge huge scam.

Even worse is is is SEND, special educational needs. I mean, do you know how much a typical child on SEND can cost? Up to £100,000 a year because they're sent to school individually every day by taxi. It's demented. We can't afford it. We've literally and and and again, I think that that you know, we were talking about what what is likely to happen. Um, what we've forgotten between now and and the next general election. I think there will be a gigantic financial crisis. I think what what again one of the great advantages of being 80 is you've lived through everything before, and I lived through the 70s, and what's going on now is astonishingly—it's a replay of the 1970s.

The uh Liz Truss um was exactly the same with with with that huge engineered boom that crashed uh and sudden shooting up of interest rates and whatever. Exactly the same as the barber boom uh under Edward Heath, 1972-1973. I know I remember it vividly. This was when I got my first job when I first moved to London. If I been able to if I got my I got my job in October, September, October of 1972 um beginning of the university year, if I been able to if I'd had it a year earlier, I would have been able to buy my little flat in South London, all I could afford on the top of Sidnab Hill for £3,000. Remember I'm paid just over £1,000 a year um that's affordable, it but yeah, that's right. But let me—Do you know what that same flat was when I bought it in 1973? In one year. Tell me. Double, triple, £10,000. Property prices go up three times in one year.

And then of course Heath loses the election. You get the return of Harold Wilson. You get um Dennis Healey um taking the marginal tax rates up to effectively 98%. You get the complete collapse of sterling, the calling in of the IMF in 1976 and the winter of discontent in 1979. And I think we will see—I mean particularly with the operations of the Equality Act and the new legislation Labour is bringing in over employment rights—I think we are going and we've already got the signal from the junior doctors. There'll be a series of gigantic public sector strikes. Um uh the wage wages will simply take off. The Bank of England will lose control of inflation. All of that's going to be built in.

But equally, of course, in the 1970s, you something happening which hasn't happened, which was the Conservative Party coming to its senses, or one person coming to his senses. It's Keith Joseph in 1974 after Heath's defeat. Um, Joseph has this moment of self-crutiny, of self-analysis, and he says, um, I've been a member of a conservative government. We'd done nothing conservative. I've been a me call myself a conservative. I hadn't been one. In other words, it's exactly what I was talking about. I said from from 2010 to 2014, you had a conservative government. You used the phrase that wasn't that was conservative in name only. Well, actually that's true of the conservative post-war governments of of the Churchill government, of the Macmillan government, of Alec Douglas-Home, of Edward Heath. They were conservative in name only. They continue exa all the things that the Labour government of 1945 to 51 had done. They continue with Keynesian economics. They continue with the NHS. They continue with nationalized industries. They continue with prices and in all of those things. And it's only with Keith Joseph and then Keith Joseph acting as as pigon uh to to Margaret Thatcher um who you know pops up as as as a new talking statue as the newly reinvented figurehead of conservatism. On. I think that's what they thought they were doing with our chem, but I think there are problems to put it very very mildly. Gosh.

So, do you still have faith in the future of our country? Why am I sitting here? Why am I wasting my time talking to educate enough people to realize what it is we are? I mean, what else am I going to do? In—look, I've I'm in the last 10 years of my life. I would have thought that'd be very unlikely. My father lived to 90. Uh unlikely I'll live longer. Um I've become much more serious than I used to be. Um again I had it terribly terribly easy in many ways. Okay. You know, boy of my background had to you had to come first. You had to uh you know you to come top of A level. You come top GCSE, whatever they called O levels in those days. You had to get a first; your doctorate had to be highly distinct. But I was good at those sort of things. Um, but in in most ways, as I describe it, even for somebody of my very modest background, life was a series of opening doors. It's quite extraordinary. What you could say, what you could do, where you could live, how you could live. And since about 2010, there's been the sense of the reverse—of doors slamming, of closing, of walls coming in, of you know, the ground shifting between your feet, of the ceiling coming down. And I don't go down easily. I uh I believe that there is a one virtue that matters more than any other. It's called courage. If you don't have it, doesn't matter how clever you are, how virtuous you are, how how farsighted you are, uh they'll just take place in the little circle of you. If you don't speak out, if you don't try to do something, you're throwing it away. It's just confetti. No, what what what what should be um the papers that stir people just become confetti?

What advice would you give to somebody of my age? 47, feel well 47 soon, feeling how I feel about this. Not motivated by money so much more but very disappointed, becoming quite angry about the state of our country. Well, translate the anger into action. Translate the understandable—people are just frustrated. They're doing the equivalent of kicking curb stones. Yeah. Um it's deeply unsatisfying and very bad for the shoes and and may indeed occasionally break your toes, which isn't terribly sensible, especially in the current state of the NHS. You know that, but and we've all we've also got to keep a sense of humor about it. We used to be famous for that. But but but get involved politically. Get involved. Educate yourself. Listen, read, get together, talk. Don't just sit grousing on the sidelines because you're then only to believe you you you then don't deserve anything better than what will happen to you. I'm uh I'm going on holiday next week. It's my first holiday in a long time.

If you were to recommend I read a book to take, cuz I will take this very seriously. I will take whichever book you say to read and I will read it. Well, there isn't really a single book. I mean remember all all of this is just starting to happen. Uh in other words the push back, the analysis of this. I mean I begin begin by laying the foundation where I tried to lay it. Read something like Alan McFarland's *The Origins of English Individualism*. I wrote that down. Read read again the great—there are the great texts. Um, Burke—Burke's *Reflections on the Revolution in France*. They're difficult because great chunks of it are bloody boring. Uh great great chunks of it are on the problem of assignats, and I don't imagine you're very interested in the problems of an inflate. Well, maybe you Bitcoin, you you might very well be. He points out the one of the consequences of the French Revolution was galloping inflation. Um, but there are the wonderful paragraphs uh in that um get a sense of—there are lots of books that would give it—you get a general sense of the broad development of the history of England. Um, you—my own *Crown and Country* isn't a bad way of beginning. Um there are lots of others. Um and then the whole world of what we are doing now, the whole world of online and the podcast. I'm I've been pushing it very hard. Um in David Stark talks, the bodies like um PopCon, the thing that I run with Mark Little, he's been here um uh and it was terrific. Um lots of us are trying and um I think that I think there while the ma because again one doesn't want to sound like a conspiracy theorist, I'm afraid one does inevitably at points um the whole mainstream media is losing control, but there are all of these alternatives and they can either take you into complete rubbish, as you know so much of it is trash. On the other hand, I would argue that Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter is one of those great what what Carlyle—Thomas Carlyle—would have called world historical moments. I mean you know if I'm being really clever if I'm doing one of my TV documentaries you know where you've got to express ideas in terms of images, how would I begin and end the long 20th century? I begin it with two pieces of white porcelain. I would begin it in is it 1917 198 8 with Marcel Duchamp's um *Fountain*, you know, which is the inverted urinal in New York, exhibited as a word as as as a work of art. Um and then I would end it with Musk walking into the headquarters of Twitter with that white sink, that moment because remember remember Twitter was the vehicle. Twitter was the supreme vehicle of the blob. People like me who were cancelled were cancelled through Twitter. We were cancelled through Twitter storms, and the whole business of the breaking of the blob in America was only possible because of what Musk did to Twitter. Um the the power of Twitter reaches its climax in 2020 with with with COVID uh with BLM and all the rest of it. Remember that's the moment at which Bari Weiss, who was one of the uh chief editorial staff of the New York Times, resigns in disgust, and she in her resignation essay she comes up with this wonderful phrase that it didn't matter whose name appeared of the masthead of the New York Times as the editor, the real editor was Twitter, and um Musk broke that, otherwise you wouldn't have had Trump. So the the possibility—the in other words this this rule—the the the rule of the blob by the blob for the blob—the it's like a great porto shell, a great turtle shell is breaking, and it's our job to prize it apart, to act you know as we have to think of ourselves as being a little bit like those early mammals in the twilight of the dinosaurs—these little things, these little clever creatures running between the feet of the these great ponderous objects.

I feel very inspired. Thank you. So, thank you so much. I—Yeah, this has been um a real pleasure. I I hope we get to do it again sometime, but I feel very inspired. I think I'm going to be reading the oranges of—Invite me back when you've read.

Please do. I will. I will. I I'm I mean that's can I mean maybe I can get two done next week, but I'm I'm going to start with *The Origins of English Individualism*, and then it's a really good place to start because it will surprise you. Yeah. And then *Reflections on the Revolution in France*. You may find, as I've said, that's a book that Wikipedia is almost the best way of approaching it—the great p—the great passages from it which are completely wonderful and written in amazing prose.

Thank you. Thank you so much. Um, yeah. Wow. I look forward to our journey home. I think we're going to talk about this a lot. Thank you, David. And yeah, hopefully I'll see you here soon and we will talk about those. But great pleasure. I trust I haven't bored you.

No, not in the slightest. And thank you to everyone who listened. [Music]