Latest / Thinking Class / #118 - Michael Reiners - The Laws That Quietly Abolished England: Blair's Constitutional Settlement And What Can Be Done About It

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#118 - Michael Reiners - The Laws That Quietly Abolished England: Blair's Constitutional Settlement And What Can Be Done About It · Thinking Class

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_01: Hello, classmates, and welcome to Thinking Class.
• 0:02
  SPEAKER_01: I'm John Gillam, and today I'm joined by Michael Rayners.
• 0:06
  SPEAKER_01: Michael is a barrister, architectural historian, and a writer.
• 0:09
  SPEAKER_01: He's also the founder of the Rayners Project.
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_01: In this conversation, we think out loud about the constitutional foundations of Britain's present identity crisis.
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_01: What do we mean by England, Britain, and the United Kingdom or UK, because these terms are not interchangeable and it matters how we use them.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_01: The impact of devolution and rights frameworks, the logic and danger of a great repeal approach to post-1997 reforms, and the reality of what many now call the permanent state, the administrative machinery that can contain or defeat radical political change.
• 0:47
  SPEAKER_01: This conversation matters now more than ever because institutions and nations don't run on vibes, though that's how society seems to run these days.
• 0:58
  SPEAKER_01: Instead, they run on rules, they run on incentives, they run on legitimacy, and when any of these become unclear or become contested, societies can change faster than people expect.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_01: If you value serious long-form conversation on the political, cultural, and institutional questions shaping England, Britain, and the West, subscribe wherever you listen and consider supporting the project via Substack.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_01: Now for Michael Rayners.
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_01: Enjoy the show, classmates.
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_01: And thank you for having me, John.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_01: Michael, I think it's fair to say that we're at a rather critical juncture in English history, whether everyone knows it or not yet.
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_01: England and Britain more widely seems to be suffering an identity crisis in an age of multiculturalism, an increasingly contested political landscape.
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_01: British peoples are asking who and what they are.
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_01: And the question before us then is how can we talk of cultural and national identity on the British Isles?
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_01: And what can the British peoples do if they no longer believe in the current political settlement, legally, constitutionally, politically?
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm very glad you're here to join me today because you're someone who's spent a lot of time thinking about the solutions to these seemingly intractable problems.
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_01: You're a writer and an architectural history to boot, as well as a lawyer.
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_01: So, Michael, uh let's let's begin with a bit about your story, actually, before we get into it.
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_01: So uh very varied background.
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_01: Is is law or architectural history your bag?
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_01: And how how did you end up deciding you were going to start focusing on constitutional issues of the United Kingdom?
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_02: Well, it might not sound like the obvious uh transition uh to from architectural matters to uh constitutional legal matters, but I think both are underpinned by this need for formulaic understanding of what uh underpins how something is built, uh w where those forms come from, and I've carried exactly that study from my architectural history background, where I specialise in essentially uh English architecture from about the 15th century onwards, uh particularly looking at the Tudors, and I had some uh I did a piece of research about the gatehouse's role in being a formal emblematic symbol of English architecture prior to the term architecture being introduced into the British Isles.
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_02: Uh it's John Shute introduces the term architecture in around um I believe it's 1563.
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_02: Uh but prior to that things are just considered a a a set of monstrous babels, a total mess of things.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_02: And that's all the Tudor palaces.
• 4:05
  SPEAKER_02: Uh so looking at these the history of things and the history of terms and the history of specifically how terms emerge and how forms emerge and how they are carried on into the future and and what they they become in a in a long-standing fashion has always been my interest from the architectural history stuff, which I studied uh at Cambridge University.
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_02: Uh and I took that straight into my interest in constitutional law, having converted and uh taken the bar and things.
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_02: And I take that approach exactly the same when it comes to terminology and the history of our uh legal landscape and aspects of uh the limits of our liberties today.
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_02: Uh those are the same approaches I take and lenses I take to that that I did to buildings.
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_02: Uh so I I don't think it's as mad of a a transition as as some might think, and I think it's a perfectly valid one in the uh conversation that we're having as a nation currently, which is what is our constitutional settlement?
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_02: Because people cannot quote it in the manner that an American can, where they have access to the standard, at least first five are known by all Americans.
• 5:09
  SPEAKER_02: That could not be further from the reality of the Englishman when police knock on his door.
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_02: In fact, the Englishman's constitution has been hidden and shattered and and tucked away in strange places to the point that it is difficult to know what one is entitled to do uh and what what is at what what one is at liberty to do, which puts you on the back foot on a constant basis, chills our speech, and is presently restricting a lot of the uh the the necessary working, both government and in the press, in addressing the problems that we have here.
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_02: Uh so I think that might sum up my background a little bit and uh and my interest in both things.
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_01: Well, you've teed me up perfectly for a segue into constitutional matters, which really isn't as dry as it sounds for everyone.
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_01: It really does plug directly into the question of national identity, as you touched on.
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_01: I think to talk of England today uh is not as common as it used to be.
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, even to talk of Britain uh isn't isn't that common.
• 6:13
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, and what we have now is reference to the UK, or as it has become colloquially and sardonically known as the UK Y O K A Y from Drook McCunley.
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, and there are memes about how he creates memes, and we all talk about them.
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_01: But it does speak to the changing nature of the constitutional settlement of the nations of the British Isles.
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_01: So perhaps we can begin with a definition of England, Britain, and the UK and why you think it's important that we understand these definitions and how they've changed over time.
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_02: It's an interesting one because it's an easy one to get bogged down on.
• 6:51
  SPEAKER_02: I speak with a lot of Americans and they are often unclear on the distinction between these things.
• 6:56
  SPEAKER_02: So because I speak with quite a lot of Americans, it means I'm quite versed in explaining these things.
• 7:01
  SPEAKER_02: And when you lay it out in a um, say, for example, when someone says, explain it to me like I'm five, you realise it's actually quite difficult to do so.
• 7:10
  SPEAKER_02: Uh there is a distinct entity known as England, a historic nation, which first gains a sense of unity in the pre-Norman conquest, uh Alfred the Great type times, uh the Union of Saxon kingdoms that then is inherited in the formal monarchy of the post-Norman conquest and becomes its own state, uh with a king of England.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_02: That's then as a term to describe a people is fairly accurate, and it seems actually when you you pop onto Research Gate and you look at PCN clusters of various sort of scatters uh of of data points of people from these islands, the English are a distinct thing, and they're made up of mostly Anglo-Saxons who have come from Germanic regions, uh with a mixture of other things, including Celtic, some French, and some Iron Age Britons.
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_02: The term England, though, obviously we're referring to the constituent country, which is part of what is now the United Kingdom.
• 8:10
  SPEAKER_02: The country England is on the island of Great Britain, which is the long island that contains Scotland also, another nation, uh constituent to the United Kingdom.
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_02: And then you've got Ireland, or as it was once known, Little Britain.
• 8:25
  SPEAKER_02: It is sometimes translated as from the early Roman documents about it, uh, which is now within the UK as a state settlement, split into two, that is the Irish uh formerly the Irish Free State, the Republic of Ireland, and Northern Ireland, which forms part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain.
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_02: These are all fairly openly known things, but that is a lot of explaining you have to do just to even explain it in simple terms that are that are quite there's no funny business about them, and you're telling an American that this is how it all works, and they thought, Oh, I thought Britain was the same as the UK, and isn't England also the same thing?
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_02: Well, Great Britain is the island, the geographical island that contains England, Scotland and Wales, and for the longest time, most of empire, in fact, in printed texts, people referred to it as a whole, as England, and would often refer to the entire land mass as England, preferring that over Britain, which then later gets a a bit more purchase in in printed texts after the Acts of Union, where the we we also take on um Scotland uh as a to share a parliament and under a shared crown under James I from 1707 onwards.
• 9:41
  SPEAKER_02: Uh still from that document onwards it's not a particularly popular term, Britain, uh though it is mentioned in the uh the Act of Union of 1707.
• 9:53
  SPEAKER_02: Uh we absorbed Wales much earlier in 1535 under Henry VIII.
• 9:59
  SPEAKER_02: Uh but that whole landmass has largely been known as England, funnily enough, in printed texts.
• 10:05
  SPEAKER_02: Britain then is more of a uh a late nineteenth century imperial type term, so height of empire and the beginning of the twentieth century, Britain is is preferred to some extent, or equal in usage uh over England.
• 10:21
  SPEAKER_02: Uh then you get to the idea of the UK, or the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
• 10:29
  SPEAKER_02: Obviously, that didn't exist before the Titles Act of 1927.
• 10:33
  SPEAKER_02: That is the act where we suddenly call this this arrangement uh of who the monarch has has dominion over of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland after the separation of the Republic of Ireland.
• 10:46
  SPEAKER_02: It is a term that comes about for the first time as a formal title, as a form of what we might call now COP, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
• 10:56
  SPEAKER_02: You know, they've just lost this huge territory that was from Henry VIII times onwards claimed by the monarch.
• 11:02
  SPEAKER_02: So that's when you first get United Kingdom capitalised in an Act of Parliament, and that Titles Act in 1927 is the first time that we decide that all of our states, um various bodies and governance of it and parliament will be referred to as the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
• 11:24
  SPEAKER_02: The term UK, the initialism of U.
• 11:27
  SPEAKER_02: K that we might see on drop-down menus now, is a much, much more recent invention.
• 11:32
  SPEAKER_02: You don't really get initialisms until the last thirty years at all.
• 11:37
  SPEAKER_02: So it does see some usage in the mid-20th century, uh around the time when the Cold War is going on.
• 11:45
  SPEAKER_02: You do see UK used occasionally, but it is definitely not something that people really called the place.
• 11:51
  SPEAKER_02: It wasn't in in common parlance, I don't think, and it's the last thirty years, it's the Blairite Project's sort of runtime in which the UK is observable as what we are calling the state.
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_02: I still prefer to call where I'm from England, and plenty of people looking in and also here will call it Britain and call themselves British.
• 12:12
  SPEAKER_02: But the UK is very much dist with those the initials, it's very much a modern thing.
• 12:18
  SPEAKER_02: Only this month we saw that HM government, his His Majesty's government, was renamed to UK government.
• 12:25
  SPEAKER_02: In 2022, we saw the uh overseas license plates on cards go from GB Great British or Great Britain to UK.
• 12:34
  SPEAKER_02: So that's 2022 that we saw that shift.
• 12:37
  SPEAKER_02: And then in 2018 it was a design firm that describes itself as a progressive design firm from London called Some One for several hundred thousand pounds oversaw the change of uh Houses of Parliament and House of Commons on all the branding to UK Parliament.
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_02: So it's as recent as the last decade that many of these institutions have, without legislation and without consultation really from the public either, have adopted this thing, the UK.
• 13:11
  SPEAKER_02: And the UK spelt with the Y, of course, has, as far as I'm aware, its origins with a ex uh formerly Twitter user, Cunley Dropka, uh or Dropka Cunley, who does some excellent satirical uh and long form essays about things, saying that this is spelt with the why.
• 13:29
  SPEAKER_02: UK is where you've got that cultural uh fragmentation, that kind of sectarianism.
• 13:35
  SPEAKER_02: Uh he makes light of it and he makes uh tremendous fun of it in a in a very British satirical way.
• 13:41
  SPEAKER_02: Uh but that term, the UK, is a sort of disparaging term for things not going particularly well in this set of islands because of that fragmentation culturally, because of large imports of people who who don't seem to know how to fit into it or and therefore cluster together as much as possible.
• 13:57
  SPEAKER_02: Uh and the sort of odd and absurd things that you get when you uh you bring people into this country and then you you confront them with the modern UK.
• 14:06
  SPEAKER_02: I think that's really at the heart of that term.
• 14:09
  SPEAKER_02: Dropka coins it, um, that spelling.
• 14:12
  SPEAKER_02: And then within a year, I believe um it was who's the chap?
• 14:17
  SPEAKER_02: The um big American conservative commentator uh speaks a little bit like this.
• 14:23
  SPEAKER_02: Um that could be quite a lot of people, couldn't it?
• 14:26
  SPEAKER_02: Ben Shapiro?
• 14:27
  SPEAKER_02: No, that was too good of a Ben Shapiro impression.
• 14:29
  SPEAKER_02: They do they do sound quite a uh alike, in fact, but um oh I c it his name escapes me, but big conservative commentator.
• 14:37
  SPEAKER_02: Um anyway, uh those kinds of people are using it.
• 14:41
  SPEAKER_02: There was a spectator article from the chap uh at the end of 2025.
• 14:45
  SPEAKER_02: So within a year it's gone from somebody making sort of long-form satirical content about it to major sort of powerhouse uh Fox News type commentators.
• 14:54
  SPEAKER_02: Come on, surely you'll know who I'm talking about.
• 14:56
  SPEAKER_02: It's completely escaping my mind.
• 14:57
  SPEAKER_02: Curtis Jarvin.
• 14:58
  SPEAKER_02: No, not Yarvin.
• 14:59
  SPEAKER_02: No, I'm not uh Yarvin would have almost certainly have seen uh Dropka's posts as the thing.
• 15:05
  SPEAKER_02: It'll come to me, I'm sure, at a later point.
• 15:07
  SPEAKER_02: But that kind of observation satirically of this malaise that is a post-United Kingdom UK phenomena, and then taking on this slangish satirical way of describing it, has become mainstream at this stage.
• 15:24
  SPEAKER_02: Because it is it is fairly observable.
• 15:27
  SPEAKER_01: Before we start thinking about how the waves of immigration that we've experienced here has changed the country and taken us towards the UK, YWOKAY, uh I think it's fair to say, and we'll also de de dive into this a little bit later on, it's fair to say that England along the way has been lost.
• 15:52
  SPEAKER_01: Englishness has been lost in some way.
• 15:54
  SPEAKER_01: We don't really talk about Englishmen, or at least we're not particularly allowed to, as we have seen this week with the launch of Restore Britain, where some of the party uh directors are talking about Englishmen, Scotsmen, Irishmen, all the rest of it.
• 16:12
  SPEAKER_01: And there are some people, including in your own uh field of law, that uh basically saying this is all very worrying, and basically we gave up England in the Acts of the Union, and we're all the better for it.
• 16:27
  SPEAKER_01: So there's no such thing as England anymore, it doesn't exist, and we need to get over it.
• 16:30
  SPEAKER_01: We are Britain.
• 16:31
  SPEAKER_01: Uh just before we go on to how mass immigration has changed the nation and what that might mean for our our settlement in future, what do you make of those those lawyers who say that England is no more forget about it and any try and bringing it back is not a good thing.
• 16:48
  SPEAKER_01: We're we're all just British now.
• 16:51
  SPEAKER_02: Well, I think it's absurd because of course England has a historic uh both visual uh built identity and a cultural identity that is preserved in the continuity uh of the Crown as uh as a lineage as well.
• 17:05
  SPEAKER_02: Uh it is the Parliament of England that fundamentally is the Parliament of the United Kingdom still.
• 17:11
  SPEAKER_02: It uh bears all the symbols of English architecture in it.
• 17:14
  SPEAKER_02: Uh it is Pugin's Parliament building, is of course a deliberate homage to that built landscape architecturally.
• 17:21
  SPEAKER_02: The symbol of Parliament is a port cullus, which is derived from the the Tudors, of course.
• 17:26
  SPEAKER_02: It's uh the Beaufort family, it is their family crest, and then it is taken on by Henry VII and and used in gatehouses on palaces by Henry VIII, and then put directly into the symbol of uh of Parliament itself.
• 17:39
  SPEAKER_02: It's on the back of all the chairs you'll find.
• 17:41
  SPEAKER_02: Uh those are just some examples of uh distinct cultural and visual, observable things that are extremely English, uh that are sort of monarchical.
• 17:51
  SPEAKER_02: But then of course the the people of England are a distinct cluster of of people.
• 17:55
  SPEAKER_02: Uh they are identifiable and distinguishable over a long period in terms of archaeological records.
• 18:01
  SPEAKER_02: Uh if you go on to Ancestry.com, for example, the PCA maps that they use, or PCN maps, not my area, but it you can see the cluster of who the English people actually are.
• 18:12
  SPEAKER_02: Uh they they are a distinct cluster of of people, and they have been here for a good enough amount of time, you know, at least uh uh a good thousand years with a distinct and continuous um make up that be it'd be a bit weird to suggest that they weren't a thing.
• 18:27
  SPEAKER_02: Uh on top of that, the Act of Union did not dissolve England, uh nor did really anything, uh as far as I'm aware.
• 18:36
  SPEAKER_02: The one thing that you could argue that point on, and some of these lawyers perhaps uh this is where they're drawing their reasoning from, is that the British Nationality Act of uh of nineteen eighty-one is the most recent Nationality Act when it comes to citizenship, and every single passport of every single person who would fall into the categories of being an Englishman, an Irishman, and such, um if an Englishman, an Irishman, a Scotsman, and uh a Welshman go into a bar, uh then they would all be told, and that bar happens to be HM Passport Control, they would all be simply recorded as British on their passports, and therefore there is no legal distinction necessarily between an Englishman, an Irishman, and a Scotsman, for example, if they are all British citizens.
• 19:29
  SPEAKER_02: Obviously there is a distinction with them outside of citizenship, and we know that that is why there is the sort of gentle and playful rivalry between these various nations, and those distinct sort of identities are lent into.
• 19:42
  SPEAKER_02: They are even lent into people uh if that these are identities and cultures that are lent into by people who are not even British citizens.
• 19:50
  SPEAKER_02: You think of um you know Irish Americans, for example, heavily lean into this, or Irish Scots and uh sorry, um American Scottish people and such in um in Appalachia very much think of themselves as Scottish and lean into those things.
• 20:04
  SPEAKER_02: And an Englishman abroad, uh I think it was Sting, uh the song is I'm an Englishman in New York.
• 20:09
  SPEAKER_02: You know, these things are leaned into by people who aren't necessarily citizens.
• 20:14
  SPEAKER_02: And therefore I think these lawyers suggesting that we've dissolved England, it doesn't exist.
• 20:19
  SPEAKER_02: It's absurd.
• 20:20
  SPEAKER_02: And frustrating as well, which is why we've had this discourse this week in uh the sort of political annals of X.
• 20:27
  SPEAKER_02: But we had this discourse before when Rishi Sunak said that he was an Englishman, and members of his own party, including Suela Braverman, who has now defected to reform, of course, uh called him out on this and said, No, I would call myself British, said Suela, and it's strange for you to call yourself English given you're an Indian bloke.
• 20:46
  SPEAKER_02: Um she wrote quite a good article on the thing, and I I think she set out the correct tone there, which is that British is a an umbrella identity, but these constituent things of of being English are very much more a protected identity and one that you can carry with you if you are English or Irish to America or to somewhere else.
• 21:08
  SPEAKER_02: And don't rely on citizenship.
• 21:11
  SPEAKER_02: I'm rambling a bit now, but I think it's probably the fact citizenship is silent on these things due to the British Nationality Act of of 1981, that people have been saying, well, there's no such thing.
• 21:22
  SPEAKER_02: Of course there is, but it's just not represented in law, and law doesn't always reflect reality.
• 21:29
  SPEAKER_01: Well, we've done a very good job of outlining the development of the national identities of Great Britain, how the constitutional constitutional settlement came to be as it is, and lingering a little bit longer on Dr.
• 21:45
  SPEAKER_01: Cunley's UK, the new multicultural country, uh you you've you've proffered some pretty interesting thoughts about how long this term may linger for, to the point that it becomes a matter of historical fact.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_01: So effectively, what you're saying is all of the things that we've just discussed, England, Britain, United Kingdom, these have all been contingent on the peoples who were here for a very long time.
• 22:12
  SPEAKER_01: But now you're saying if in the space of a century that same land mass has become 50% immigrant descended, then it's not possible to refer to it as the same polity.
• 22:26
  SPEAKER_01: And so, for example, you've thrown out saying that Ottoman Constantinople as Ottoman in the 16th century isn't isn't woke by not s suggesting it's still part of Christendom, but ultimately, how long does a state of affairs need to have been in play before it becomes historical fact?
• 22:47
  SPEAKER_01: So when is the when will the nation start to change itself, both in how it refers to itself?
• 22:54
  SPEAKER_01: Because if England is from Angle lands, those original people, and then all of a sudden in 2060 and beyond, those people form a minority.
• 23:04
  SPEAKER_01: Well, besides the fact that um uh Druck Bacunley's UK probably won't be the name of the state, is we never know.
• 23:13
  SPEAKER_02: There could be another titles act in uh 2027 for the cent uh centenary of the previous one where we adopt it uh as UK Parliament by that spelling.
• 23:22
  SPEAKER_02: Sorry.
• 23:23
  SPEAKER_01: Uh interrupting there, but not at all, not at all.
• 23:26
  SPEAKER_01: And we're actually starting to see some examples in some of our towns which are heavily concentrated with diasporas.
• 23:33
  SPEAKER_01: For example, Whitechapel in London.
• 23:36
  SPEAKER_01: I believe there has been some official correspondence coming out from the councillors um referring to it as Bangler Town, and there's absolutely uh no reference to Whitechapel on there at all.
• 23:46
  SPEAKER_01: So there's already a change of naming convention similar to when the Danes uh populated parts of England and started to change Saxon names to Danish names.
• 23:56
  SPEAKER_01: So I suppose uh the the question I'm putting before you, Michael, is can we expect, unless something is done to change the current settlement, whether it's either to do what Restore Britain says, which is to reverse mass immigration, or if it's some very heavy francophone style uh civic nationalist assimilation um course where you effectively say, no, you're part of France, and there's nothing else but France, forget your other things, and you can maybe have some of your own language on signs, but otherwise this is how you're educating all the rest of it.
• 24:37
  SPEAKER_01: Uh d do you foresee a future where England, Britain, the United Kingdom on our current demographic trajectory is no more, both demographically but also the way it's referred to?
• 24:51
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, so that's actually a pretty meaty question, and if I might address it in a few steps, um from a as an observer of policies that are being floated, it appears that reform's policy currently is to scrap indefinite leave to remain, which is the five-year period in which it which you are required to r remain in the country until you are then allowed to stay here forever, at which point you can claim welfare and you can apply for citizenship.
• 25:23
  SPEAKER_02: I th I I believe that uh they they are likely to extend that to ten years or scrap it, um and no, sorry, they want to scrap it.
• 25:32
  SPEAKER_02: However, the current government is doing a consultation on whether it should be extended for ten years.
• 25:37
  SPEAKER_02: That would prevent some of the demographic change that was invited via mismanagement of the border, it would seem, during the lockdown pandemic uh and Boris Johnson's attempt to get low skilled care workers here.
• 25:52
  SPEAKER_02: But it wouldn't necessarily undo all of the last thirty years of non-mandated mass immigration, for lack of a better word, that quite fundamentally nobody voted for, and is reflected quite sharply in the ONS changes of uh of uh what people are reporting on uh ethnically.
• 26:10
  SPEAKER_02: In the census, it's uh uh fairly stark that uh parts of London are at 38% uh white British.
• 26:19
  SPEAKER_02: Uh a fellow traveller, I suppose, called Charlie Cole did some very good work on this in Conservative Home back last year, and his own research on the ONS data and the census data modelling that put the likelihood of overall births in this country being minority white British, meaning Scottish, English, Irish, at that point where those people will be a minority in terms of annual births will come at about 2030 if the peak of the Boris wave migration had continued, and sometime a bit later if it is reduced.
• 26:59
  SPEAKER_02: So that's quite existential, and this is me as an observer rather than suggesting what to do.
• 27:03
  SPEAKER_02: You've got a few things that you could do, you could attempt to reverse that Boris wave, or you would have to do something more drastic to reverse that last 30 years of uh the real key spike in migration.
• 27:14
  SPEAKER_02: Reform isn't offering that.
• 27:15
  SPEAKER_02: It seems like Rupert Lowe is flirting with that, uh, the ability to review already um apportioned citizenship that uh was the result of this sort of mass immigration policy from the Blair era onwards.
• 27:28
  SPEAKER_02: Uh those are the only ways that you would you'd probably stop UKCA.
• 27:33
  SPEAKER_02: Connelly Drupka's use of the term now I think is prescient, uh and is it is already of historical record.
• 27:41
  SPEAKER_02: It was Tucker Carlson that I was thinking of who used the term in both a long form video essay type uh video um about the state of Britain.
• 27:53
  SPEAKER_02: Uh I think it got certain things wrong, but it used the word and uh and the the sense of that is important.
• 27:58
  SPEAKER_02: Uh he also used it in an article for the spectator, I think, from about maybe December time last year, uh or November.
• 28:06
  SPEAKER_02: So it's already a matter of historic record, I think, that any there is an emergent new culture with things like multicultural London English being so prevalent in London now, uh, that is a product of uh immigration waves over the passing thirty years, uh less so before that, uh mostly that because those kinds of numbers don't integrate, and therefore you get this sort of uh a shifting culture at a r at such a rapid pace that it becomes a third new thing.
• 28:37
  SPEAKER_02: It isn't one culture or the other, it becomes a third new thing, and nobody asked for that.
• 28:42
  SPEAKER_02: Uh I think that observing that that is happening is different from observing that Britain is a welcome or British is a welcoming and umbrella civic term.
• 28:53
  SPEAKER_02: The UK is a third thing, which I don't think most people like.
• 28:59
  SPEAKER_02: I think most people in their heart of hearts quite liked the idea of Britain being a civically inclusive term and British being a civically inclusive term.
• 29:06
  SPEAKER_02: But this sort of successor state to Britain and England, the UK with the why, um is a new and distinct thing, and and people turning their noses up at it and saying, We never asked for this, I think is perfectly valid.
• 29:22
  SPEAKER_02: I forget what the second half of the question was, actually.
• 29:25
  SPEAKER_02: I I believe I didn't answer all of what you asked.
• 29:28
  SPEAKER_01: No, you you did it, you did a good job, and I I did my usual here's what I reckon mixed with some questions in there.
• 29:34
  SPEAKER_01: The second part of the question was Um with this stuff not getting reversed, uh can we expect on current demographic trajectory that if Whitechapel becomes Bangletown, then perhaps England becomes wh uh you compared Whitechapel to the Dane law, yes.
• 29:54
  SPEAKER_02: I apologize for not addressing that.
• 29:56
  SPEAKER_02: But uh yes, it's I'd not seen that.
• 29:59
  SPEAKER_02: Uh the instance that you mentioned were in actual government correspondence of some kind or or local.
• 30:06
  SPEAKER_02: Local council council letters.
• 30:08
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 30:08
  SPEAKER_01: And they had to be tablets rather than white white Whitechapel.
• 30:11
  SPEAKER_02: Um, even changing the names in that way that um that you did see at the Dane Law where you get these more Danish Germanic names attached to places and uh you wonder where they're from.
• 30:22
  SPEAKER_02: Well, it's because an occupying force was there.
• 30:24
  SPEAKER_02: Uh very interesting then that a local council would be going about doing the same thing without necessarily any Titles Act or or change to the name of Whitechapel, or for that matter, Tower Hamlets.
• 30:35
  SPEAKER_02: But um that that is concerning, and I've seen some good documentary work done by Professor Ed Dutton, for example, on on some of these areas where it's um it it's some sometimes not the most visible, and for that reason it is it is often ignored.
• 30:53
  SPEAKER_02: Um so going into these places and doing documentary work as citizen journalists or or as um content creators, that stuff has been really essential in in talking about these matters, because our press is remiss to discuss them in a frank way, partly because of the Public Order Act uh 1986, which is baked into Ofcom, the Office of Communications, and prevents frank discussion of what's going on with the the UK at the moment, but because they're so squeamish about ever discussing race or ethnicity in a manner that could be construed as disparaging or or otherwise not positive.
• 31:36
  SPEAKER_02: And this has been something that's made the press very squeamish.
• 31:40
  SPEAKER_02: Uh of course Ofcom was only created in 2003 by the Communications Act, and then they've baked in this older racial hatred clause in into sort of the preventative regulation of the press.
• 31:52
  SPEAKER_02: So the only people talking about it are individuals and what we would call content creators on on things like YouTube.
• 32:00
  SPEAKER_02: Uh and that is a great shame because it should be part of our national conversation, and it is also hampering the the the fullness and the sophistication of our national conversation about it.
• 32:17
  SPEAKER_01: Thinking thinking a bit about what all of this means for the constitutional uh and legal architecture of the country going forwards, um you you've made some pretty in incisive observations, as have people who've written for your Rhiners project, uh, about how the Crown uh in many respects is being um somewhat compromised by this state of affairs.
• 32:51
  SPEAKER_01: And what you're saying, basically, and just for those who aren't English and British, the the importance of the crown to England and Britain is is huge.
• 32:59
  SPEAKER_01: Effectively, as Michael has already put out there, there would be no England if it wasn't unified under one crown, and then that was agreed to rule over all of Great Britain, and we've discussed the rest of it.
• 33:11
  SPEAKER_01: And so many of our constitutional elements flow from that, including from the glorious revolution uh back in the 1600s.
• 33:20
  SPEAKER_01: Um someone working for you has pointed out that the coronation oath may actually be invalidated by mass immigration.
• 33:29
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, and just to quote something at you from that, uh, and then hear you lay out exactly why you think that is the case, and whether this is something that may gain traction in the national conversation, uh, let's let's hear from your writer.
• 33:46
  SPEAKER_01: Parliament can tax people, subsidize people, even punish people, but it cannot replace people, i.e., with people from outside Britain.
• 33:52
  SPEAKER_01: Such an act offends the common sense understanding of the relationship between politicians and people.
• 33:57
  SPEAKER_01: A population can choose its politicians, but politicians cannot choose their own population.
• 34:02
  SPEAKER_01: All nations, including the English, Scots, and Welsh, continue by children.
• 34:06
  SPEAKER_01: The English today are the descendants of the English in sixteen eighty eight.
• 34:09
  SPEAKER_01: Sovereignty passes from one generation from generation to generation within the nation.
• 34:14
  SPEAKER_01: Children of the nation are the nation in perpetuity.
• 34:17
  SPEAKER_01: The people to whom the coronation oath refers today, as sworn by King Charles in 2023, cannot be any other than the descendants of sixteen eighty eight.
• 34:27
  SPEAKER_01: No institution, be it parliament, monarch, executive, or judiciary, has the power to deny the British people their sovereignty or exchange them for another people, or add another people to them.
• 34:37
  SPEAKER_01: Only births, deaths, and marriages can determine the sovereign population.
• 34:42
  SPEAKER_01: Well, if this is true and it would hold up in a legal perspective, that feels pretty earth-shattering and very counter to how our current monarch rules over the realm.
• 34:56
  SPEAKER_02: I think our current monarch is much more interested in ruling over the Commonwealth.
• 35:00
  SPEAKER_02: The remnant name for the British Empire in its relationship with us is the Commonwealth, and those kinds of engagements seem to excite our monarch more than engaging with the traditional Crown of England role, which is perhaps a secondary consideration.
• 35:17
  SPEAKER_02: The Commonwealth in doing that has always been a factor with the modern monarchy, uh, but it's a little bit more pronounced, and I think people are becoming more cynical about the monarchy for this reason, insofar as the people who make up the monarchy.
• 35:31
  SPEAKER_02: James Stoker is the chap who wrote the article regarding the coronation oath.
• 35:36
  SPEAKER_02: I don't think it actually has any legs when it comes to the potential for a judicial review, but his argument is that because of the 1980s sorry, 1688 Coronation Oath's wording, that the people are sovereign and the people cannot be changed.
• 35:51
  SPEAKER_02: Therefore, the continuity of the people would be those people who are constituent and historically constituent from 1688 onwards in the British Isles, the English, the Irish, the Scottish and and uh and such.
• 36:03
  SPEAKER_02: Uh I I sort of disagree in some ways.
• 36:06
  SPEAKER_02: I think it's a fantastic argument, and I think it is definitely one that is worth advancing, romantic perhaps when it comes to an academic more than it is a actual challenge for immigration legislation in the passing century.
• 36:19
  SPEAKER_02: But uh it raises an important point.
• 36:22
  SPEAKER_02: Uh that population has been shifted without the consent of the monarch, despite the crown in Parliament being th how Parliament gains its sovereignty.
• 36:31
  SPEAKER_02: That it that is the way that works.
• 36:33
  SPEAKER_02: He argues that the people are sovereign, which in a way they are, because the Crown is th he's the King of England, and the Crown has the uh the sort of constitutional technology, not the man, in Parliament, is what what gives Parliament its power.
• 36:51
  SPEAKER_02: It's um i it g the government governs with the consent of the monarch.
• 36:56
  SPEAKER_02: This is all part of the constitutional monarchy arrangement that happens one year after the coronation oath is set out in sixteen eighty nine.
• 37:04
  SPEAKER_02: Uh the Bill of Rights, that is, which is one of our most important constitutional documents, it is still in the constitutions of Canada, of Australia, uh of various places that are part of the British Empire, and of course it it is the foundational uh what's the word, sorry, uh it's the foundational influence on the American Bill of Rights too.
• 37:28
  SPEAKER_02: So I think Stoker's article uh is interesting because it raises this this idea of you can't change a people uh to govern uh by decision of the government.
• 37:41
  SPEAKER_02: But I I don't think it has legs in legally challenging, for example, the the British Nationality Acts of 1948 and 1981.
• 37:50
  SPEAKER_02: Though that is the argument he's advancing there.
• 37:53
  SPEAKER_01: I think what it taps into though is a sentiment arising from uh I suppose the the people uh of the nation that feel as though much of uh modern rule has been invalidated, that there has been a contract that has been uh ripped up ultimately between the elites and or at least between rulers and rules, and maybe we can talk a little bit about the current political landscape which speaks even more starkly to this point.
• 38:32
  SPEAKER_01: So, Restore Britain, a party set up by Rupert Lowe, formerly of Reform UK, when he was elected uh a member of Parliament in 2024.
• 38:42
  SPEAKER_01: He and Farage had a uh a falling out, shall we say, over the future of the nation demographically.
• 38:50
  SPEAKER_01: Rupert Lowe wanted uh mass deportations, firstly, of those who are illegally here, and then legally for those people for for legal immigrants who've failed to pick up the language, who've committed crimes, who've taken out more than they've put in, and so on.
• 39:07
  SPEAKER_01: And nasty fallout, reform UK, sent sent the police round to try and get Rupert um arrested and all the rest of it.
• 39:17
  SPEAKER_01: And Rupert set up what began as a, I suppose, a cross-party think tank was the idea to try and get policy traction for what he saw as the required parts of the British constitution that needed to be restored because the Blairite constitution was anathema to what Britain was about and he was against mass immigration and multiculturalism.
• 39:38
  SPEAKER_01: Go on, Michael.
• 39:40
  SPEAKER_02: I was shuffling there, ready to leap in, yes.
• 39:42
  SPEAKER_02: I did notice that when it launched, I believe it was the end of June or early July of 2025, when Restore Britain launched as a movement, I think the initial email said.
• 39:52
  SPEAKER_02: It also advertised that it would contemplate a Great Repeal Act, a term that is often attributed to David Starkey, who has been proselytizing on the concept of resetting the Constitution to a point before Tony Blair.
• 40:05
  SPEAKER_02: I don't think that one has materialized in in uh the policy offerings of of Restore Britain, but everyone is contemplating this idea of a reset of the constitutional landscape.
• 40:16
  SPEAKER_02: And they are right to put it in those terms that that's what you would need to do to reset to a point prior to the the mass immigration that this country has experienced.
• 40:27
  SPEAKER_02: Because it is in that time that we have experienced the imputation of the Human Rights Act, which sets the bar at being human rather than being a citizen, uh as to how rights on a constitutional of a constitutional variety uh are available.
• 40:41
  SPEAKER_02: We then get devolution, which uh and the uh the creation of the London Authorities Act, which creates sort of city-states, you get the Scotland Act, you know, devolved administrations in that way, which moves uh more responsibility and uh power from Parliament, so it gives diagnostic ability to smaller constituent bits of our democracy, but doesn't give them the power to solve things.
• 41:04
  SPEAKER_02: It's always someone else's problem.
• 41:06
  SPEAKER_02: Um you then get the Constitutional Reform Act, which formalises after creating these devolved administrations, formalises judicial review processes and creates a Supreme Court in an American-style model.
• 41:17
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, these are pretty big ch changes that have abruptly happened in exactly the same period as the sort of mass migration uh that has occurred.
• 41:28
  SPEAKER_02: So and also the neurophilicism which uh sees both the ECHR put into our national law in the form of the Human Rights Act, and then also the acceptance of various European treaties, with Blair sitting as one of the revolving presidents in Europe at one point in his own um the prime ministerial term.
• 41:47
  SPEAKER_02: So it's it's a pretty it was optimistic at the time.
• 41:52
  SPEAKER_02: Everyone says it.
• 41:53
  SPEAKER_02: You know, everyone says it was very optimistic at the time, it was very radical, and it's also very legislative, is the the shift that has happened in that time.
• 42:02
  SPEAKER_02: And we are now seeing and witnessing the second order effects of this.
• 42:05
  SPEAKER_02: And they're not good.
• 42:06
  SPEAKER_02: I think even Tony Blair himself is aware of that.
• 42:09
  SPEAKER_02: You know, Jack Straw and Gordon Brown have all criticized the Human Rights Act within a decade of its own implementation.
• 42:16
  SPEAKER_02: There is a souring on this this thing, and it was almost too much, too fast, and with little thought to second order consequences.
• 42:22
  SPEAKER_02: And therefore it's not silly that a Great Repeal Act is being contemplated.
• 42:26
  SPEAKER_02: It is how well thought through the unpicking of the complexly wired bomb that Tony Blair placed under Parliament and our country.
• 42:36
  SPEAKER_02: How well the diffusal team is is going to be able to handle it, that is another matter.
• 42:41
  SPEAKER_02: And I use that metaphor because it it really is a Gordian knot.
• 42:45
  SPEAKER_02: For example, one simple way to undo a lot of what's perceived as Blair's constitutional stuff would be to repeal the Human Rights Act and remain in the ECHR, perhaps, uh, because it is so Gordian knotted into both the Good Friday Agreement and then post-Brexit the Trade and Cooperation Agreement, as to make you think twice about simply leaving the ECHR on a whim.
• 43:08
  SPEAKER_02: You have to basically be quite serious about how you unpicked this so as not to rock markets and bond markets and such, and also in a manner that uh is basically legislative in a way that that legislation was created outside of the Office of Parliamentary Council and outside of the government legal department, and you have that pre-made outside of those systems and ready to attack them because it is so embedded into the civil service, too.
• 43:36
  SPEAKER_02: The way that uh public sector uh equality duties work and the Human Rights Act i is embedded in all of the devolved administrations.
• 43:43
  SPEAKER_02: Um it's sort of it comes at the same year as them.
• 43:47
  SPEAKER_02: So a great repeal like this is a bit of an undertaking.
• 43:51
  SPEAKER_02: Uh it would include likely having to have a settlement on that same period of in immigration, and that needs careful thought.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_02: I have drafted a few examples of what these things might look like on Raynus.org dot UK, including a total reset of British nationality law, a wide Great Repeal Act, as I call it, I call this one the Oblivion Act, which says it puts the civil service to task actually.
• 44:16
  SPEAKER_02: It says what do you need?
• 44:18
  SPEAKER_02: What are you using?
• 44:19
  SPEAKER_02: You must justify every piece of primary legislation that you are using, be that to generate endless statutory instruments, or perhaps it is just used in a day-to-day manner at a certain section.
• 44:31
  SPEAKER_02: What are you actually using?
• 44:33
  SPEAKER_02: List that, and then from the point of enactment, this act will repeal in ten year intervals in terms of what was passed, everything that has been created since 1900 in terms of legislation, except for the stuff you say you need.
• 44:48
  SPEAKER_02: So that's a very extreme example of a broad Great Repeal Act, uh, the Oblivion Act, I'm calling that one.
• 44:54
  SPEAKER_02: And then a more narrow one would involve unpicking Blair's constitutional settlement in a way that doesn't completely lead to anarchy.
• 45:01
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, and that would be specific legislation, the kind of things people list as bullet points to take down.
• 45:06
  SPEAKER_02: Uh it includes the Equality Act, it includes the Human Rights Act, it includes the Articles of Devolution, and all of that 30-year window needs to be unpicked.
• 45:15
  SPEAKER_02: And also, you need to simultaneously have legislation that adequately protects us in those ways that we do use this thing.
• 45:23
  SPEAKER_02: So, for example, the Human Rights Act is generally only used by the an ordinary Englishman when he is fired from a position and must rely upon something to protect his speech that he was fired for, for example.
• 45:36
  SPEAKER_02: Um, the Equality Act is also only useful in really that sense, uh, and is often harmful in many other senses.
• 45:44
  SPEAKER_02: For example, the Equality Act allowing people to hire on the basis of ethnic groups, namely being able to hire non ethnically English people and such, in preference of South Asians in certain parts of the civil service, justified by the Equality Act, or the bankrupting of Birmingham based on socialist pay understandings that that leads to group actions against uh Birmingham Council in that case, or Next or ASTA, these kind of group actions based on the Equality Act.
• 46:14
  SPEAKER_02: It was never designed to cause these.
• 46:16
  SPEAKER_02: These are obviously a a net negative.
• 46:19
  SPEAKER_02: We don't want our private sector being group actioned constantly over minor infarctions when it comes to minimum wage that uh were relied that weight was determined based on market forces, but the Equality Act says that it shouldn't.
• 46:33
  SPEAKER_02: These things need to be unpicked gently and they also need to be rhetorically sold to the public sufficiently that we won't be losing anything.
• 46:42
  SPEAKER_02: That we won't necessarily be losing protections.
• 46:45
  SPEAKER_02: I think all of that is rhetorically possible and people are a bit too squeamish about the potential of repealing the Equality Act or or or repealing the um the Human Rights Act.
• 46:57
  SPEAKER_02: They're sort of soft entrenched because they sound so cuddly and nice that it gives the leverage to the media to say, how could they do this?
• 47:05
  SPEAKER_02: But you just have to repeat you just have to have a parallel replacement that protects the useful things.
• 47:11
  SPEAKER_02: Call it the the Free Speech Restoration Act or something of that kind.
• 47:14
  SPEAKER_02: I've drafted one of those too, just in case.
• 47:17
  SPEAKER_02: Uh you and then you slip in repeal of the Human Rights Act into that and make sure all the things that are protections are retained.
• 47:25
  SPEAKER_02: So uh when it comes to actually repealing things en masse, it is it is an absolute recipe for chaos if you haven't got a bomb disposal team.
• 47:38
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I will include the link to your article on this topic, which actually outlines what a a restorationist government, and you wrote this before Restore Britain were on the scene, uh, what a restorationist government may want to do and how they're going to implement these things, including this is how you get around things constitutionally and legally, and how you phrase things to make sure that people can't slip out of it, or second readings in parliament can be kiboshed or in the upper house.
• 48:09
  SPEAKER_01: It's very, very detailed work, and I suppose that's the challenge to anyone who's going to set themselves against the current settlement.
• 48:17
  SPEAKER_01: Is most people can agree with the broad outline of the things they're railing against, but now's the time to get into the the legal detail and the policy details, so you don't actually just run up against No, they'll destroy you.
• 48:31
  SPEAKER_02: The permanent state will basically uh pull every lever to destroy you.
• 48:34
  SPEAKER_02: That plan that you're referring to, I I wrote is called the How to Destroy a Hostile Constitution.
• 48:39
  SPEAKER_02: It's basically a step-by-step, month-by-month plan, uh, focusing particularly on the first hundred days, but also how to pass a raft of legislation like the one I've drafted safely through Parliament without completely politically imploding.
• 48:53
  SPEAKER_02: Uh it's functionally a legal coup, uh, but it uses all of the existing law, including the Civil Contingencies Act, uh how to pass things using emergency powers, learning from the way lockdown was imposed upon us, and learning from the way that Tony Blair implemented his constitutional reforms to then put us in an advantageous and more breathable situation.
• 49:16
  SPEAKER_02: But it would expend a lot of uh it would require, firstly, a lot of serious um red team, blue team type planning.
• 49:23
  SPEAKER_02: It would absolutely require that a plan be in place in the first hand, you can't wing this.
• 49:28
  SPEAKER_02: They will oust you for even attempting to upset the status quo.
• 49:32
  SPEAKER_02: The permanent state is very powerful, the the quangocracy and the sort of permanent state.
• 49:37
  SPEAKER_02: And it's exact it's been the national conversation since really for over a decade.
• 49:42
  SPEAKER_02: What do you do with the permanent state, with the quangos, with the with the civil service, right?
• 49:46
  SPEAKER_02: There was an attempt in 2011.
• 49:49
  SPEAKER_02: But most recently, you've got Liz Trust being ousted functionally by the OBR, so a not elected Prime Minister being ousted by a permanent body designed to forecast economics.
• 50:01
  SPEAKER_02: Um that's baffling.
• 50:04
  SPEAKER_02: And then only only just before her, Boris Johnson being effectively ousted by another quange in the form of Sage, which had set various regulations on his behalf, certainly, but and then he had breached them, so so he had to step down for having a cake, I think.
• 50:19
  SPEAKER_02: It was uh having being ambushed by a cake, according to him on his birthday.
• 50:23
  SPEAKER_02: But it was deemed a party.
• 50:25
  SPEAKER_02: Anyhow, this stuff is pa the permanent state is particularly powerful.
• 50:30
  SPEAKER_02: I use the term permanent state because some people who've studied uh the ha how to reform it have called it that.
• 50:36
  SPEAKER_02: And it is broad, it is powerful, it it is difficult to unseat, and it will destroy someone who wants to unseat it.
• 50:43
  SPEAKER_02: It will make it as difficult as possible.
• 50:45
  SPEAKER_02: So you have to have a plan ready to go.
• 50:47
  SPEAKER_02: I have suggested one for fun, and I still do not see one necessarily from any of the people proposing these kinds of changes, which is going to be a problem for any political party of any um of any colour, of any kind, who has an appetite to upset the status quo.
• 51:05
  SPEAKER_02: That even applies to the Greens, to be honest.
• 51:06
  SPEAKER_02: I suppose they could probably try and use my uh my suggested plan if they really wanted to.
• 51:11
  SPEAKER_02: But uh I don't think they'd like the legislation that it's designed to implement.
• 51:15
  SPEAKER_02: My point is this, though, it is a it is a modular non-partisan plan, and it is not designed for anyone in parti with anyone in particular or anyone in mind.
• 51:24
  SPEAKER_02: So my point is I'd like to see a bit more planning from the the key political players on that front.
• 51:30
  SPEAKER_02: And I'm sure there is some going on behind the scenes, both in reform with the appointment of James Orr, and I know uh Danny Krueger has been clearly trying to nudge civil servants to tell him uh how do we do this then?
• 51:42
  SPEAKER_02: So I think it's uh the burden of proof falls on Rupert Lowskamp, who promised a great repeal act, to then also demonstrate their thinking about that also.
• 51:55
  SPEAKER_01: A penultimate musing from from me before I ask you the question that I'll I'll ask all of my guests uh is I think you're right, it probably would be Restore Britain, Rupert Lowe, who'd be most likely to be looking in the direction of destroying that hostile constitution.
• 52:15
  SPEAKER_01: And whilst there's lots of political commentary that this entry into the political landscape is going to split the vote on the right, and there's lots of talk about polls and how that might stop people from getting elected, I actually think the more interesting point here, which I have reflected on um on my YouTube channel uh following reading some of David Betts' writings, and I've I've had him on the show, is that actually what this represents is someone who is well, it's no surprise that he's positioning himself this way, but Rupert Lowe's hero is Oliver Cromwell.
• 52:55
  SPEAKER_01: Uh he everything that he is doing is reigning himself against what you've referred to as the permanent state.
• 53:02
  SPEAKER_01: We're talking about reversing a hostile constitution, we're talking about reversing mass immigration.
• 53:08
  SPEAKER_01: You know, lots of these things have been the sacred cows for a long time.
• 53:13
  SPEAKER_01: And what this is actually pitting against one another is two diametrically opposed views.
• 53:20
  SPEAKER_01: At the moment, it seems reform are getting further and further toward the uni party that they have s sought so long to replace.
• 53:28
  SPEAKER_01: And if Rupert Lowe and Restore Britain get enough behind them and we start seeing them 2029 might be too soon, but in the future, or someone else picking up this mantle, is I don't think people have quite r realized just how seismic this will be.
• 53:47
  SPEAKER_01: This is this isn't just some political argument, this is full intrastate war.
• 53:53
  SPEAKER_02: If David Betts talks civil war, I think actually when David Betts talks about civil war, he's talking about this Lebanonization of uh the UKification really.
• 54:04
  SPEAKER_02: What you're talking about here, and is the challenge for anyone who any ascendant party who wants to unseat these various status quo, recent ones, that will it's in itself be a sort of elite civil war.
• 54:18
  SPEAKER_02: And it will need to have a counter-elite ready to fight it once in government.
• 54:23
  SPEAKER_02: Without it, you will essentially be absorbed by well, they call it the blob, don't they?
• 54:29
  SPEAKER_02: But by the blob.
• 54:30
  SPEAKER_02: It will absorb you, and it will spit you out, and it will find something that suits its purposes to replace you with.
• 54:36
  SPEAKER_02: And that uh that sort of civil war.
• 54:39
  SPEAKER_02: Civil wars are usually fought between elite factions, right?
• 54:41
  SPEAKER_02: That is how the English Civil War was fought, and and you mentioned Cromwell.
• 54:45
  SPEAKER_02: Uh you're going to need some parliamentarian type roundheads to even consider taking on the status quo.
• 54:51
  SPEAKER_02: And uh that does require serious planning, either behind the scenes or in full sight.
• 55:00
  SPEAKER_02: And I'm not obviously talking about actual war, I'm using this as a metaphor for constitutional reform, just to be absolutely clear.
• 55:07
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, yeah, yeah.
• 55:08
  SPEAKER_01: Fingers crossed when YouTube is scanning this, it's not picking up on us, uh inciting a war of any sort.
• 55:14
  SPEAKER_01: Roundheads number two, yeah.
• 55:16
  SPEAKER_02: None of that.
• 55:17
  SPEAKER_02: That is not what's intended here.
• 55:19
  SPEAKER_01: No, no.
• 55:20
  SPEAKER_01: But what we are seeing is something pretty seismic, uh, and it will definitely be seismic should there be cut through into polling, because what is being put on offer here is something entirely different to that we've seen before, uh, and and incredibly divisive for the the political and media class de jour.
• 55:39
  SPEAKER_01: They they they don't want to touch this and uh absolutely want to contain it.
• 55:43
  SPEAKER_01: So it will be written.
• 55:44
  SPEAKER_01: Michael, we've talked a lot about political restoration.
• 55:48
  SPEAKER_01: Uh I've been concerned with cultural restoration because ultimately much of what we've spoken about are the artifacts of a culture, that the lived reality of a people and peoples that has crystallized over time into an agreed way of doing things.
• 56:03
  SPEAKER_01: In my opinion, the culture has somewhat dissolved our elites, uh, whether we're referring to Keir Starmer, who doesn't have a favourite book or a poem, and just more broadly, the professional managerial class spend much of their time uh caught up with digital fancies, Netflix, all the rest of it, but don't actually have a sense of the British civilizational inheritance in any way.
• 56:25
  SPEAKER_01: And it seems to me that a cultural restoration is needed almost across all classes, uh, so we have a sense of who we are, that we actually maintain the things we want.
• 56:35
  SPEAKER_01: And also there's there's lots of rich, uh rich uh uh learnings to be had in that.
• 56:40
  SPEAKER_01: Uh uh, we we have some of the greatest writers uh and most esteemed for a reason because they say something of humanity help us understand ourselves, but beyond that, they help us understand our nation.
• 56:52
  SPEAKER_01: But when I hear people talk about things like education, education's really important.
• 56:58
  SPEAKER_01: It's going wrong, we should fix it.
• 57:00
  SPEAKER_01: And it's always about exam results or uh tweaking with the curriculum.
• 57:06
  SPEAKER_01: But in my opinion, a cultural restoration needs to be something more than that.
• 57:10
  SPEAKER_01: It needs some kind of vision, it needs something almost akin, and I might be totally wrong here, and I've had uh Lord Jonathan Sumption not agree with me on this point, but it would it would need something akin to uh having that shared canon once more, whether it's the hymns, the literature, whatever, the thing that actually coheres us as a nation with a sense of history that used to be within both parts of mass education, certainly within the public schooling world, but we don't have it anymore, and we frequently spend lots of time in our own little realms and know nothing of the realm outside of us.
• 57:47
  SPEAKER_01: So uh I'd be interested in your opinion.
• 57:49
  SPEAKER_01: What would a cultural restoration in this country require?
• 57:54
  SPEAKER_02: Uh I can think of three things off the top of my head that could work as a policy in this regard.
• 57:58
  SPEAKER_02: I think people get a bit bogged down in the the muddiness of cultural restorations.
• 58:03
  SPEAKER_02: But first of all, teaching on the basis of the canon again, as you say, both in uh the canon of literature and the canon of great art.
• 58:10
  SPEAKER_02: Uh the fact that the canon is immutable because it is defined by the greatness of it in its day or in uh just after its day, that is the most frustrating thing to people who want to sort of engineer education.
• 58:22
  SPEAKER_02: So teaching on the canon again is essential because it really is quite resistant to re-engineering education.
• 58:29
  SPEAKER_02: Uh too much of it has become critical theory stuff, you can apply it to anything.
• 58:33
  SPEAKER_02: And then the anything that it's applied to can really be anything, and it's very rarely the canon.
• 58:39
  SPEAKER_02: So more canons, uh not in the sense of a warship, uh just to stress again to YouTube.
• 58:44
  SPEAKER_02: Uh and then I would say also that we need to have architecture schools which are capable of teaching people to become competent revivalist architects, uh, and then having those architecture schools have much better connections with industry.
• 58:58
  SPEAKER_02: Because civic architecture, that variety that we think of as you know, tasteful and old and uh and it inspires us, is truly designed to be the best of us.
• 59:06
  SPEAKER_02: It is truly designed to be a celebration of this place and indeed what it does.
• 59:13
  SPEAKER_02: And it's consciously so.
• 59:15
  SPEAKER_02: Uh Georgian architecture being so classical, for example, is at a time when the British and certainly the British Empire thinks of itself as the new Romans, so they use Roman architecture and they put it on townhouses.
• 59:26
  SPEAKER_02: So it's always conscious, and without it being taught on how to execute it, and the necessary Masons uh to actually make the thing happen, and then on top of that, good links with private sector industry to allow them to be in contact with these people, without that it doesn't get built.
• 59:43
  SPEAKER_02: But I think with that you start to uh r revive the built landscape in a way that is consciously proud of itself and what it is, uh in a way that is that is learned and Vitruvian and genuinely uh Anglo in in character as well.
• 1:00:00
  SPEAKER_02: Uh and then the third thing I think uh to talking about cultural um restoration is I think perhaps Rupert Lowe is a very good example of this, uh because he's optically quite a classic old world Englishman.
• 1:00:14
  SPEAKER_02: He he's a farmer, he's he's got the coats and the and the uh the uh the barber jackets, and uh people like that.
• 1:00:20
  SPEAKER_02: Um people people like things like this, people like the sort of uh upper class aesthetic.
• 1:00:25
  SPEAKER_02: You see people trying to adopt it in America as a fashion statement and things like that.
• 1:00:29
  SPEAKER_02: But if you can get some more people in public life who are actually authentically that, then I think it provides that aspirational thing.
• 1:00:35
  SPEAKER_02: The the working class even used to be very aspirationally dressing, and now that has sort of gone.
• 1:00:40
  SPEAKER_02: But I think it's partially because the p figures in public life do not actually provide you with something to aspire to.
• 1:00:47
  SPEAKER_02: It's nice to have somebody in a barber jacket with a range rever who is perhaps visiting a stately home.
• 1:00:52
  SPEAKER_02: A chap called Connor Lynch on X often is uh depicted doing exactly that.
• 1:00:57
  SPEAKER_02: Uh if he was fifty years older and a statesman, that would have real impact, I think.
• 1:01:02
  SPEAKER_02: Uh so having figures who are able to epitomize what it is to sort of be the best of us, uh, aesthetically as well as um morally, ideally as well.
• 1:01:11
  SPEAKER_02: So that's my three-point plan for some relatively cost-effective cultural restoration.
• 1:01:16
  SPEAKER_01: Well, on the first two points, I hope whichever restorationist government in waiting uh that is watching, they pick up on those, and for everyone else, get down to a tailor or the barber store.
• 1:01:26
  SPEAKER_01: I promise you I'm not taking money from barber.
• 1:01:29
  SPEAKER_02: Samuel Rose, gone to the dogs, go elsewhere, ask around, there's some good private people.
• 1:01:34
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, exactly that.
• 1:01:36
  SPEAKER_01: Well, Michael, just before I let you go, one more question, a question that I put to all of my guests.
• 1:01:43
  SPEAKER_01: Um, that is what have you changed your mind on during the course of your life?
• 1:01:46
  SPEAKER_01: Perhaps it was a moral absolute, maybe it was something more quotidian in concern, and what was it that made you think differently?
• 1:01:55
  SPEAKER_02: Well, I think uh for the longest time I thought I was alone in the dark, perhaps as an admirer of uh Dr.
• 1:02:02
  SPEAKER_02: David Starkey's speaking work, and that there would be no contemplation on a national level of a serious and depthy uh intellectual and constitutional restoration.
• 1:02:11
  SPEAKER_02: It is now abundantly clear that that is pretty much inevitable, and on some level, all parties must reckon with how to exactly approach it.
• 1:02:20
  SPEAKER_02: So that has been very optimistic, I think, in the passing few years, and has been visible and and more and more uh distinctly articulated by commentators and politicians.
• 1:02:31
  SPEAKER_02: I think we're converging on a point where we will indeed get that.
• 1:02:35
  SPEAKER_02: Whether it will be as sort of haphazard as Brexit was and therefore could do with some more planning, or it will be a wonderful, smooth running success, is yet to be seen.
• 1:02:47
  SPEAKER_01: Michael, well, on that note I shall let you go, but before you do, what can we expect from you next?
• 1:02:54
  SPEAKER_01: And where can people find you in the dark corners of the internet?
• 1:02:58
  SPEAKER_02: So you can find me on uh X at M-C-R-Rayners, R-E-I-N-E-R-S, uh, and at Rayners Project as well, which is the X account for my website that I've launched, as a store of constitutional and legal writing, putting out draft legislation that can be used and adapted by political parties, or indeed anybody who wishes to adapt it for their own purposes.
• 1:03:22
  SPEAKER_02: I can be found that can all be found at Rayners.org.uk.
• 1:03:27
  SPEAKER_02: And over the next month I'll be putting out more there.
• 1:03:30
  SPEAKER_01: Wonderful.
• 1:03:31
  SPEAKER_01: Michael, thanks so much for joining me.
• 1:03:33
  SPEAKER_01: Keep fighting the good fight, and we shall speak again.
• 1:03:36
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you very much, John.
• 1:03:37
  SPEAKER_01: It's been a pleasure.
• 1:03:38
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you.