Latest / Thinking Class / #150 - David McGrogan - The British State Is Not Broken And The System Is Working Exactly As It Was Designed

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#150 - David McGrogan - The British State Is Not Broken And The System Is Working Exactly As It Was Designed · Thinking Class

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_03: Hello, classmates, and welcome to Thinking Class.
• 0:02
  SPEAKER_03: I'm John Gillam, and today I'm speaking to David McGrogan.
• 0:05
  SPEAKER_03: David is a legal scholar at Northumbria University and the author of the Substack news from Unsible.
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_03: In this conversation, David and I think out loud about why the British intelligentsia wanted to show mercy to the most treasonous man in the country's history, and what this tells us about the moral vocabulary that the nation has since abandoned.
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_03: We talk about what happened to policing, why it has moved from policing by consent to policing by negotiation, and why it seems that calling the police about infringements of the law that you witness is now quite literally the punchline of a joke.
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_03: We also talk about David's idea of the empire of diversity and what Hobbes tells us about the relationship between a heterogeneous society and the authoritarian state that it demands, why Jonathan Sumption, a trained historian and a celebrated legal scholar, is making a catastrophic error when he tells us British institutions will survive demographic transformation.
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_03: What living in Japan taught David about the relationship between a stable, homogeneous population, personal freedom, and a society that works without being forced to, and much more besides.
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_03: This episode is brought to you by Aquinas Tuition, which provides bespoke academic tutoring informed by classical liberal arts principles.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_03: Whether your child needs supports with GCSEs, A levels, or university entrance, Aquinas will pair every student with a tutor who cares about formation and not just grades, but they care about grades too.
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_03: Visit AquinasTuition.co.uk.
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_03: I'm also the founder of the Albion Institute.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_03: This is an institution for the formation of nationally minded leaders and an informed public through the preservation, transmission, and renewal of the intellectual and cultural inheritance of the English speaking peoples.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_03: Lord Nigel Bigger has joined Albion as advisory board chair, and if you would like to learn more or register your interest, visit AlbionInstitute.org.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_03: And if you haven't already, go and watch The Call of England, my six-part documentary series following H.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_03: V.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_03: Morton's 1927 journey through England.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_03: The link is in the description.
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_03: In the meantime, enjoy the show, classmates, and now David McGrogan.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_03: In the United Kingdom in 2026, a retired engineer destroyed a traffic camera with a homemade bomb, and he was sentenced to 15 years in jail.
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_03: While in the same year, an Afghan asylum seeker to the same country abducted and raped a 12-year-old girl and also got 15 years in prison.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_03: David McGrogan joining me today is a legal scholar who tells us that the British legal system, with its infamous two-tier outcomes, its toleration of bad behaviour and criminality, isn't simply a malfunction, but rather the system working exactly as is designed and intended.
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_03: David McGrogan, welcome to Thinking Class.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_03: Thanks so much for joining me.
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks for having me.
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_00: I'm uh looking forward to our conversation.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_03: Well, I am too, and I'm sure many of your Substack subscribers are as well.
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_03: There are a fair few people who are giving you shout-outs for being one of the more prescient voices on that platform.
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_03: And you've written quite a lot about the moral void that seems to have uh enveloped uh the United Kingdom.
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_03: And not just in the judiciary, but public morality too.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_03: Uh, you've written about a vague disquiet about inflicting punishment uh and a ruling class that has lost the moral vocabulary to punish because it no longer believes uh in that moral vocabulary in the first place.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_03: How would you describe public morality in Britain in 2026?
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I think we have to be careful because there is there is a public morality, um, and it's uh I don't think it's um accurate exactly to say that there is a um disquiet about inflicting punishment as such.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_00: It's just that it's very carefully um calibrated, right?
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_00: We all know what is going to be punished and what isn't.
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_00: We all have an instinct for that.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_00: Uh we all have an instinct for what um is wrong uh in terms of how we express ourselves publicly.
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_00: We all have an understanding of what actions are going to incur the wrath of the state's authorities and and which aren't.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_00: Um so we have quite a good sense, I think, of the existence of a unspoken public morality, which is it's at odds with two different things.
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_00: It's it's firstly it's at odds with what we would think of as traditional public morality, a kind of I guess you would call it a kind of secularised Christian morality, which is what I suppose Britain had in the second half of the 20th century.
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_00: Um society was rapidly becoming secular, but there was a rough idea that um the legal system sort of corresponded to a an inherited Christian uh moral framework, let's put it that way.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_00: So the existing public morality of our moment is at odds with that, but it's also at odds with itself because what it insists on is that it's uh against discrimination, it's in favour of equality, um, it's in favour of diversity, it's in favour of inclusion, um it's in favour of uh fairness, it's compassionate.
• 5:23
  SPEAKER_00: We're all familiar with these sorts of uh these sorts of words and how they get used, but what actually happens on the ground isn't really that either, right?
• 5:33
  SPEAKER_00: It seems to undermine itself or to go against itself or to fail on its own terms.
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_00: So we have a very we have a uh kind of unspoken and implicit public morality that we all know about that but we don't really speak about directly and we don't really have the vocabulary to to describe.
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_03: The the vocabulary that I've heard you use with regards to those responsible for uh exercising um criminal justice, um but also setting the tone from the top, uh for want of a better expression, with regards to public morality.
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_03: Uh the vocabulary you used as being a kind, benevolent passivity, and you you um uh elucidated this through an example, uh forget his real name, but the name that he was uh known by in the 19th century was Lord How, which you often find wheeled out on on Twitter when people are referring to figures like Alistair Campbell or or what have you.
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_03: Um and uh uh hopefully I won't get done for some kind of libel here because the next bit is Lord Hohor was a an Irish American fascist, he broadcast Nazi propaganda, he then was hanged for treason, and the intelligentsia at the time wanted to show him mercy, and he said that was due to a kind, benevolent passivity that seems to have taken hold and become the default sitting setting of the British state.
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_03: How did that happen?
• 7:05
  SPEAKER_00: How did that happen?
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_00: Is it great question?
• 7:07
  SPEAKER_00: So so that that um example of Lord Hohor um is one that um Rebecca West uh wrote about in her book, uh it's called The Meaning of Treason.
• 7:19
  SPEAKER_00: Um she wrote an abated version of it, so you have to be a bit careful about which one you read, but so it's the original the original meaning of treason.
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_00: So um her view was that um and she's she's very I think it's it's quite an impolite way of putting it, but I think it I I do think it's accurate.
• 7:41
  SPEAKER_00: Over the course of the 20th century the Western intelligentsia moved away from an idea that uh punishment was the appropriate way to deal with criminality, uh generally speaking, right?
• 7:57
  SPEAKER_00: Um now that's not true across the piece because as I said, there are certain things that we can see that where um they're very much in favour of punishment, right?
• 8:05
  SPEAKER_00: So there are certain things that people can do which definitely the intelligentsia thinks ought to be punished, right?
• 8:11
  SPEAKER_00: But by and large, ordinary criminality, even quite serious criminality, the most serious criminality uh of all arguably treason um should be explained away or treated as perhaps a psychological problem or the product of social and economic circumstance or you know excuses can be made for it.
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_00: Um and her we all know that that's true, we can all we can foreseen that, right?
• 8:37
  SPEAKER_00: That's just uh plainly evident in the culture.
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_00: Her view is that quite plainly the reason why um the Western intelligentsia sort of took on that kind of a mindset is because it excuses their own moral shortcomings.
• 8:52
  SPEAKER_00: If it's the case that Lord Hohor, the worst example of treason that anybody, any British person can think of, you know, if you think of you ask the average person on the street, you know, who's the most treasonous person in history you can think of, chances are that if they've heard of him, they'll say Lord Hohor.
• 9:11
  SPEAKER_00: Um if he can be let off for his crimes, right, if he can be excused for his crimes, then anybody can be excused for anything.
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_00: There is no uh moral culpability for anything, right?
• 9:24
  SPEAKER_00: If you cheat on your taxes, if you have an affair, if you um you know steal stationery from your workplace, if you do all the kinds of things that middle class bourgeois people tend to do that are wrong, uh not actually wrong really, because in the grand scheme of things, well, what what is right and wrong at the end of the day?
• 9:45
  SPEAKER_00: Everybody has a reason for doing everything that they do, right?
• 9:47
  SPEAKER_00: Everyone has an excuse for doing everything that they do.
• 9:50
  SPEAKER_00: So if Lord Hoha Lord Hoho has an excuse if he can be shown mercy because he had some reason for doing what he did, then the same applies generally speaking.
• 9:59
  SPEAKER_00: We all benefit from a system a moral system which doesn't really punish wrongdoing, right?
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_00: Or doesn't have a concept of wrongdoing at all.
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_00: So I think her wider point would be that um it's not even that that there's an abandonment of um punishment, it's there's an abandonment abandonment of of moral certainty, of a kind of underlying acceptance that there is uh a kind of moral framework underpinning our underpinning our actions and our social relations, right?
• 10:30
  SPEAKER_00: So she uh I mean she was very she was a bit of Rebecca West is a kind of firebrand.
• 10:35
  SPEAKER_00: I don't people don't read Rebecca West all that much anymore because um I mean she was very prominent in her day, but in the latter half of the 20th century she was a very staunch anti-communist, right?
• 10:45
  SPEAKER_00: And she started writing a lot about um the Soviet Union and she was a very sort of uh let's call her like George Orwell a little bit, a kind of on the anti-communist left.
• 10:56
  SPEAKER_00: And that caused her to go out of fashion a little bit, really, uh uh in her sort of you know, uh her intellectual circles.
• 11:03
  SPEAKER_00: But she's a really, really interesting writer because she doesn't shy away from very uncomfortable truths.
• 11:08
  SPEAKER_00: So she put puts it really plainly, right?
• 11:11
  SPEAKER_00: In her view, Lord Hohor should have been hanged, he was rightfully hanged.
• 11:15
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, he was a human being who had his foibles and had his um talents, you know, he was undoubtedly a very talented man, he had his good qualities, you know, he had his excellent qualities.
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_00: Everything that he did is kind of readily explicable because of his Irish American background, you know, he'd had his legitimate complaints about the British state, um, but he still deserved to die, in her view, you know, puts it very plainly.
• 11:43
  SPEAKER_00: Um whereas and and she contrasts that with the prevailing view in her class, which was that they wanted to see Lord Haw as a monster, but still show him mercy.
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_00: Because the point is, you know, no matter how monstrous he is, he should not be executed, he should be absolved of his crimes, because that's the reasonable, sensible, civilised thing to do.
• 12:06
  SPEAKER_03: Maybe we can dig into what happens to the public psyche when crime visibly goes unpunished, and maybe we can extend that to what uh it would mean for not just British society, but any society to reinstate severe punishments like the death penalty.
• 12:28
  SPEAKER_03: Let's before we get to that point, think about what the British public psyche might be in the wake of how the criminal justice system is currently operated.
• 12:40
  SPEAKER_03: What what do you think the relationship between subject and state or citizen and state is right now in the wake of a criminal justice system that has wildly different outcomes depending on who's in the dark?
• 12:54
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 12:55
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, I think it's amazing how uh much things have deteriorated.
• 13:00
  SPEAKER_00: Um and I think you can um so I think I'm older than you.
• 13:07
  SPEAKER_00: So I can remember the 80s, right, vaguely and the nineties, um, you know, a bit more clearly than that.
• 13:16
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, I grew up on Merseyside, so uh like Merseyside for people who aren't you know familiar with with um with Britain all that much, and particularly people who aren't familiar with the Northwest, you know, Merseyside had a reputation for being a crime, the crime capital of the country, certainly back then in the 80s and the 90s.
• 13:31
  SPEAKER_00: Um and it would there was a lot of crime, you know.
• 13:34
  SPEAKER_00: There was a lot of vehicle theft, there were a lot of break-ins, it was you know, it was it was a rough city back then.
• 13:40
  SPEAKER_00: It's still a rough city now, but much rougher then.
• 13:44
  SPEAKER_00: Um but the relationship and there was a there was a sceptical view of the police amongst certain segments of the population, no doubt, you know.
• 13:53
  SPEAKER_00: Um there was an idea that the police represented something um authoritarian, you know, they represented the English or the British state against which Liverpoolans tend to traditionally sort of chafe.
• 14:07
  SPEAKER_00: You know, they don't see themselves as being English particularly, they very much see themselves as a kind of an Irish city.
• 14:12
  SPEAKER_00: So there's always an undercurrent of aggression between the police and the the policed, as it were.
• 14:18
  SPEAKER_00: But even then I can remember how much respect, generally speaking, there was for individual police officers.
• 14:24
  SPEAKER_00: You know, for walking around in the street, you would see police officers, and they were they were showed a level of deference, um, and they were seen as being pillars of the community.
• 14:35
  SPEAKER_00: You know, if you had a friend who whose dad was a policeman, it was like, wow, you know, that that's such a an amazing thing to have a uh, you know, a dad who's a police officer.
• 14:43
  SPEAKER_00: Um but fast forward to now, and it's hard to put your finger exactly on what's changed, but I think you'll know what I mean when you say that that then I say that the police now are treated as though more like what I imagine um the scenario was in um a colony during the days of empire, where and people have made this point before, right, that policing has taken on this kind of almost um an aspect of how things were in in in the colonies where the police are kind of managing tensions and sort of speaking to community leaders and um almost policing by negotiation.
• 15:25
  SPEAKER_00: I think that's true, but I also think there's there's something um sort of darker and bleaker about it.
• 15:31
  SPEAKER_00: You actually when you see a police officer now, you almost feel worried that that um there's a certain hostility or a level of aggression there that you don't feel as though they're there to protect you, you feel as though they're there to enforce order in a different way, right?
• 15:50
  SPEAKER_00: Um and I don't think many people could exactly describe why that's happened or where there was a point in time at which there was like a rupture.
• 16:04
  SPEAKER_00: But I think people will recognise what I say when I put it in that way, right?
• 16:08
  SPEAKER_00: That when you see a police car or you see a police officer, you don't think to yourself, oh good, it's the police.
• 16:16
  SPEAKER_00: You think to yourself, oh no, there's something I'm not I'm not sure about the situation now.
• 16:22
  SPEAKER_00: And it's not just because it might mean there's criminal activity going on, it's because the police are not exactly seen as being um trustworthy in the way that they were sort of you know in my youth as as I remember things back then.
• 16:36
  SPEAKER_00: Um so I think the situation's really bad, actually.
• 16:40
  SPEAKER_00: I I I don't think uh I'm not um generally speaking, I'm not as pessimistic as some people are about the future of the the country.
• 16:47
  SPEAKER_00: Uh I am quite pessimistic though, but I think um yeah the the the the relationship between ordinary people and government in general but particularly the police is quite rapidly deteriorating because there's a there's just a feeling that the police aren't interested really per se in uh enforcing the law and preventing crime, but what they're mainly there to do is at best to act as kind of like pseudo-social workers uh and at worst simply to almost enforce kind of um correct right thinking, that's let's say, right?
• 17:30
  SPEAKER_00: Um they're interested in hate crime, they're interested in wrong sorts of expressions online, they're not particularly interested in stopping shoplifting or or what you know, whatever the uh you know the low-level crime uh might be.
• 17:44
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I'll give you an example, sorry, just to kind of continue that a couple of months ago I was um I mean a lot of people will have seen something similar, right?
• 17:51
  SPEAKER_00: I uh was walking past the local supermarket.
• 17:55
  SPEAKER_00: Um so I walked to and from work, um and this is a supermarket, it's about sort of 15 minutes away from where I live.
• 18:02
  SPEAKER_00: Um and I was just walking past in a shoplifter, I wrote about it on my substack, a shoplifter just was in the act of running out of the shop uh as I was walking past, and the staff were sort of trying to restrain him.
• 18:12
  SPEAKER_00: So I like I was I helped to like restrain him while they rescued the shopping, you know.
• 18:19
  SPEAKER_00: Um and there was a little bit of a kafuffle, and then he kind of like walked away and he was like ranting and raving, you know, uh tired of abuse kind of a thing.
• 18:27
  SPEAKER_00: And I got talking to the staff and they said that that that happens on a daily basis, right?
• 18:31
  SPEAKER_00: That the same guy comes on a daily basis, right?
• 18:35
  SPEAKER_00: Does it every day, um, and they've they were just kind of going through the rigmarole of saying, well, what we have to do now is uh we have to deal still serve the customers in the shop, and now we have to put the shop into lockdown after that because he'll come back and cause trouble, you know, and this happens like literally on a daily basis.
• 18:51
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so there's just a procedure just to deal with this guy, right?
• 18:56
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and that was sort of I mean, we were joking about like, oh yeah, let's tell the police about it, like you know, it's it was almost become like it's just a punchline that, like, oh yeah, well yeah, we'll call the police, like yeah, right.
• 19:07
  SPEAKER_00: Um so there's this it it even if it's not antagonistic, it's just frustrated and disappointed and um it's kind of like bleakly humorous now, the relationship between the the police and the police, we just don't expect them to do what they are supposed to do.
• 19:26
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, and there's a I don't know, a delicious irony in this, in that the in the era which Peter Hitchens has written about quite a lot where you were policed by consent, we didn't have armed police, um, they had their truncheon, they wore their big tall bobby hats, uh, and there was a uh more bucolic atmosphere on the streets uh without all of that force, um, or the force wasn't required really, because the country itself, there was a public morality that uh was prevalent, crimes are at a record low uh in the first half of the 20th century, probably one of the most peaceable societies that earth has ever seen, and yet uh whether it's through a combination of demographic change and people with different um relationships to uh the state, the different moralities themselves, uh, but also the collapse in public morality of what we used to think was good and evil and everything in between, has now led to a situation where even with a police force that's armed to the teeth uh and with more technology than it could possibly hope for, we still have more crime than we've ever had.
• 20:45
  SPEAKER_03: I don't know, we'll see stats and whatever that try to suggest that actually we saw the number of thefts go down last year and the number of rapes go down last year, but everything by every metric is much higher than it ever used to be.
• 20:56
  SPEAKER_03: And on the basis of what you just said, if any metrics are coming down, it's probably because people have lost faith in the police and they don't report them.
• 21:03
  SPEAKER_03: So then the question becomes so we can try and overcome the pessimism, is what is to be done to try to get back to a a time uh not a time because we can't do that, but a state in which we don't have lots and lots of crime, which people aren't suffering from burglaries and rapes and violent assault and just petty shoplifting and all the stuff that makes our lives really bad day to day.
• 21:28
  SPEAKER_03: And my question to you, David, is Does Britain simply need to go Naib Bukele?
• 21:34
  SPEAKER_03: It finds the five percent that are doing all the things, but literally seventy percent of the crime and deal with them, and life will become much better, much quicker, or do we not need to go that far?
• 21:48
  SPEAKER_03: Do we need to bring back the death penalty even?
• 21:50
  SPEAKER_03: Uh so there is something there's a sword of Damocles hanging above people's head if they dare to think about doing something shocking.
• 21:58
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, well, it's interesting you Raised uh Bukele, you know, I was actually thinking of um uh Napoleon, but but maybe naive Bukele is a better example.
• 22:09
  SPEAKER_00: So I think um it it's I mean this is a cycle that that uh you know goes back to the ancient Greeks that they they talked about, right?
• 22:18
  SPEAKER_00: That you know, if you when when democracy goes too far, it sort of like devolves into a mobocracy, and then you have to get like a big strong leader, authoritarian leader to come along and just restore order, right?
• 22:32
  SPEAKER_00: Um and so at a certain point, if things do get very bad, then that is I think and just just that that is what needs to happen, that is what does happen, um, I think by and large in human history is that things deteriorate, they get worse and worse, and eventually things get so bad that people are willing to accept uh sacrificing their freedom in order for an authority to to just restore restore order, um, if it exists.
• 23:01
  SPEAKER_00: I don't think we're by any means there yet, right?
• 23:03
  SPEAKER_00: Because it it's it's easy to forget that there are societies in the world that are far more dangerous than than Britain, right?
• 23:11
  SPEAKER_00: Um, you know, Brazil, we're not we're nothing like Brazil or Venezuela or South Africa or Mexico, right?
• 23:18
  SPEAKER_00: A society can tolerate a lot of violence and still function, right?
• 23:24
  SPEAKER_00: It might not function brilliantly well, it might not function perfectly well, but you know, you can have a relatively nice life in Brazil or South Africa or Mexico, perhaps even Venezuela, right?
• 23:34
  SPEAKER_00: If you if you're uh sufficiently you know sufficiently wealthy and you're sufficiently well connected.
• 23:39
  SPEAKER_00: Um so we're not there yet by any means.
• 23:42
  SPEAKER_00: Things aren't um chaos, right?
• 23:46
  SPEAKER_00: I think so.
• 23:48
  SPEAKER_00: My feeling is that um rather than it has to come from both two different directions.
• 23:55
  SPEAKER_00: So I think there definitely does need to be a refocus on law and order by the police, but I think that is a that is achievable.
• 24:03
  SPEAKER_00: I don't think we're at the point where we simply have to say um the police are a totally corrupt institution, you know, they're incapable of performing their function, they can't be reformed.
• 24:12
  SPEAKER_00: That's probably possible, but I think also that that there has to be a counter-reaction on the parts of ordinary people.
• 24:19
  SPEAKER_00: You talked about how society kind of policed itself uh up until you know roughly the middle of the 20th century, maybe a little bit later than that.
• 24:29
  SPEAKER_00: I think what I can remember um is adult authority was just much stronger in the relatively recent past.
• 24:42
  SPEAKER_00: A lot of the things that happen now are as a result of uh younger people just not being sufficiently disciplined by the adults in society.
• 24:54
  SPEAKER_00: So you see a lot of low-level kind of social disorder going on, you know, people breaking windows, vandalizing things, spray painting things, shoplifting, you know, kind of things that aren't even necessarily crimes but are just quite menacing, like you know, young lads like roaming around on scourses or driving around on you know on bikes, you're looking vaguely threatening, you know.
• 25:17
  SPEAKER_00: Um I'm sure you've seen that type of behavior.
• 25:20
  SPEAKER_00: That that is not really a matter for the police, I don't think.
• 25:24
  SPEAKER_00: That's something that adults simply need to step up to the plate and police themselves more.
• 25:30
  SPEAKER_00: And so the question there, I think, is more does society have within itself the wherewithal to do that?
• 25:39
  SPEAKER_00: Um is there a point at which I mean this is going to be a matter of sort of devolved decision-making across the whole population, right?
• 25:47
  SPEAKER_00: But do things get so bad that the adults in society start policing younger people more than they currently do?
• 25:56
  SPEAKER_00: Do the do we is there a way that we can resurrect that uh mentality that existed certainly when I was a kid, where you know, if you were doing something mischievous or naughty in the street as a young boy, adults passing by would tell you to stop, right?
• 26:12
  SPEAKER_00: People who weren't related to you or didn't know you would feel a sense of responsibility and would try and inculcate in you the correct form of behavior, right?
• 26:21
  SPEAKER_00: Um can we recapture that?
• 26:24
  SPEAKER_00: Probably we can't recapture it, I don't think, while A, we have this level of demographic churn that we have, because the sort of um let's say that the the shared sense of loyalty to society has broken down partly as a result of demographic churn.
• 26:42
  SPEAKER_00: I think unavoidably that's the case.
• 26:44
  SPEAKER_00: And I don't blame anybody for that, actually, really particularly.
• 26:47
  SPEAKER_00: I have lived you know overseas, uh, you know, spent a number of years living in Japan.
• 26:53
  SPEAKER_00: I would not have felt comfortable telling off a child for doing something wrong as a foreigner living there, um just because it just doesn't didn't wouldn't have felt like it's my place.
• 27:07
  SPEAKER_00: So if I I can understand why, you know, let's say if you're from Nigeria or wherever and you're living in the UK, you wouldn't particularly feel like it's your responsibility to to engage in um you know kind of disciplining the local youths or whatever.
• 27:22
  SPEAKER_00: I I get that, you know, I understand why that's the case.
• 27:25
  SPEAKER_00: Um so so I think demographic churn is something that has to come to an end.
• 27:30
  SPEAKER_00: That's social stability will emerge once we have a relatively stable population.
• 27:37
  SPEAKER_00: So I think that's one thing.
• 27:38
  SPEAKER_00: I think the other thing is undoubtedly something that which people on the right don't talk about enough, which is technology.
• 27:44
  SPEAKER_00: Um people being cut off from the world around them by their headphones and by their screens causes them to wall themselves off from or overlook what's happening in the immediate environment, right?
• 28:01
  SPEAKER_00: And we've all we've all seen that, right?
• 28:03
  SPEAKER_00: Tech sort of creates a barrier where you know you're on the bus, there's five lads sitting at the back who are causing a kerfuffle, you know, causing a row or you know, doing whatever, playing their music too loudly, you just put your earbuds in and you you know look at your phone and keep your head down, and you know, it becomes an irrelevance to you.
• 28:25
  SPEAKER_00: I think my hope, I'm optimistic, that the reliance on technology, the um desire to immerse oneself in technology may at some point decline.
• 28:41
  SPEAKER_00: I don't think that's beyond the realms of possibility that people will try to embrace a more embodied, more let's call it a physical relationship to the world around them than they currently do.
• 28:52
  SPEAKER_00: And that I think will also have an effect on how we treat the material world around us.
• 28:57
  SPEAKER_00: I do think by and large a lot of the material deterioration that's evident in our cities is also a result of this over-reliance on technology or the kind of immersion in technology.
• 29:11
  SPEAKER_00: It becomes easy to ignore litter and graffiti and dilapidated buildings if you're looking at your screen a lot of the time.
• 29:20
  SPEAKER_00: So my hope, again, uh this is my and maybe it's a vain hope, you know, listeners will agree or disagree, but I don't think that the um the obsession with technology can last forever.
• 29:34
  SPEAKER_00: I think that there is a very small but growing desire for people to disengage with the tech to a certain extent and create a more manageable relationship with it.
• 29:46
  SPEAKER_00: I think as that happens, it's possibly also the case that our relationship with our physical environment and the people around us will also improve.
• 29:54
  SPEAKER_00: So I think societies can manage themselves when you allow them to do that.
• 30:01
  SPEAKER_00: I think what we have at the moment is a situation where society isn't being allowed to manage itself because it lacks firstly a stable population of people who are born and raised mostly in the country and have a shared loyalty to the society.
• 30:16
  SPEAKER_00: And also there's that instability caused by the rapid technological change, which I think at some point there will be a disengagement from.
• 30:35
  SPEAKER_03: Yes, yeah, it'll be it'll be written by the large language model that's scraping the transcript of this episode once it goes up.
• 30:42
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 30:44
  SPEAKER_03: You you've touched on demographic change, it's unavoidable.
• 30:48
  SPEAKER_03: We should dive into it.
• 30:50
  SPEAKER_03: You wrote a piece called The Empire of Diversity, did some clever usage of Machiavelli's work in that, and ultimately what you argued was mass migration and the destruction of freedoms aren't separate problems, but they're one and the same.
• 31:09
  SPEAKER_03: Perhaps you could unpack that for the listener.
• 31:14
  SPEAKER_00: Rather than rather than Machiavelli, let's start with Hobbes.
• 31:20
  SPEAKER_00: So what does Hobbes what's the core of Hobbes' argument?
• 31:25
  SPEAKER_00: What's the core of Hobbes' understanding of the role of the state?
• 31:29
  SPEAKER_00: What Hobbes says is that human beings will pursue uh what he called felicity, right?
• 31:38
  SPEAKER_00: They will pursue their own desires.
• 31:42
  SPEAKER_00: And that is uh unending.
• 31:46
  SPEAKER_00: If you have a desire and you pursue it and you realize it, then you'll just move on to the next desire.
• 31:52
  SPEAKER_00: Right?
• 31:53
  SPEAKER_00: So if you leave human beings to their own devices, that's what they're going to do.
• 31:57
  SPEAKER_00: They're going to pursue felicity.
• 32:01
  SPEAKER_00: The state is the to resolve the conflicts that arise as a result of people pursuing their desires.
• 32:09
  SPEAKER_00: Because if everybody in society is pursuing their desires willy-nilly, they'll come into conflict with each other, right?
• 32:15
  SPEAKER_00: And the state is going to have to intervene to prevent the conflict from happening.
• 32:23
  SPEAKER_00: If you have a society that's relatively homogenous, then the state can govern society in a relatively non-interventionist way.
• 32:35
  SPEAKER_00: Because the preferences of people, the desires that people have for the pursuit of felicity is pursued in a relatively more consensual way.
• 32:47
  SPEAKER_00: Because people's preferences, desires have more accordance with each other because they're relatively more homogeneous.
• 32:56
  SPEAKER_00: If you have a society that's very heterogeneous, then you have a much wider range of preferences being pursued, right?
• 33:05
  SPEAKER_00: A much wider range of desires being pursued.
• 33:09
  SPEAKER_00: That means that you have relatively more conflict, because you know those desires are going to conflict with one another much more commonly.
• 33:18
  SPEAKER_00: And that means the state needs to become more authoritarian because it needs to intervene more in society in order to resolve the different conflicts.
• 33:30
  SPEAKER_00: So that's Hobbes.
• 33:32
  SPEAKER_00: The problem with Hobbes, there are lots of problems with Hobbes, but one of the problems with Hobbes is he doesn't really have an account uh of politics.
• 33:42
  SPEAKER_00: So he more or less says, well, you know, the the the Leviathan simply imposes order, right?
• 33:48
  SPEAKER_00: And it's not really for you or I, the Hoy Poloi, to inquire into the you know the system of order that he's introducing, you just have to accept it.
• 34:00
  SPEAKER_00: But we have to think about the choices that the Leviathan is making in a more sophisticated way.
• 34:10
  SPEAKER_00: If the Leviathan is intervening in society to resolve conflicts by applying the law, then by definition it has to choose whose desires win in a particular conflict, right?
• 34:26
  SPEAKER_00: You have different competing uh uh pursuers of desire, they enter into a conflict, the Leviathan has to resolve the conflict by choosing one set of preferences over another, right?
• 34:38
  SPEAKER_00: So the state becomes more biased towards certain sets of preferences than others.
• 34:43
  SPEAKER_00: It's involved in making political choices, value-based jud uh choices about who it prefers.
• 34:51
  SPEAKER_00: So the more that you that society becomes diverse, the more heterogeneous it becomes, the more authoritarian it becomes, but also the more biased it will become, right?
• 35:03
  SPEAKER_00: The more the state will have to orient itself towards preferring some desires over others, some groups' preferences over others.
• 35:13
  SPEAKER_00: So the danger in society becoming more diverse is not just that it becomes more authoritarian, but that it becomes noticeably more biased in favor of one direction or another.
• 35:25
  SPEAKER_00: Right?
• 35:26
  SPEAKER_00: So if we just uh sort of blithely accept the idea that diversity is our strength, um, you know, that we should be more inclusive, blah blah blah, we have a an understanding that that pushes things in a um more authoritarian direction because it seems to be associated with more control of speech, more control of thought, even, um, more control of um you know what you can and can't do in public and so on and so forth.
• 36:03
  SPEAKER_00: We we kind of get that, right?
• 36:04
  SPEAKER_00: Things become more authoritarian.
• 36:07
  SPEAKER_00: But we haven't yet, I think maybe maybe perhaps just beginning to understand that it also that that authoritarianism is naturally biased in particular directions.
• 36:18
  SPEAKER_00: And I think what we're seeing happen is a kind of bias towards um let's call it a a plurality um that will sustain a political status quo or a or political stability of a kind.
• 36:35
  SPEAKER_00: What appears to be happening in our societies is that when the state makes its decisions about whose preferences to prioritize, it prioritises the preference of a sufficient coalition of minorities to make up a majority.
• 36:51
  SPEAKER_00: Right?
• 36:53
  SPEAKER_00: So because there is no majority group, if you cut if you slice the sort of population into sufficient salami slices of identity, there isn't one that's more than 50% of the population, right?
• 37:07
  SPEAKER_00: You're dealing with a number of different minorities.
• 37:10
  SPEAKER_00: The number of white males, the number of white females is not 50% of the population, anywhere near uh 50% of the population, right?
• 37:17
  SPEAKER_00: What you have to do is you have to cobble together a plurality of groups.
• 37:22
  SPEAKER_00: The state appears to be cobbling together a sufficient plurality of groups in order to form enough social stability to keep itself, to keep the show on the road.
• 37:35
  SPEAKER_00: But as that's happening, it's becoming inevitably more authoritarian and more biased.
• 37:42
  SPEAKER_00: It kind of that that puts it on a ratchet effect where it simply has to hold that position in order to sustain itself.
• 37:50
  SPEAKER_00: So that's the real um that's the situation that we're in, I think, at the moment, and that that's how what I would call putting it so grandiosely the sort of political philosophy of EDI, that's kind of the position that we've come to.
• 38:04
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 38:06
  SPEAKER_00: Where Machiavelli comes in is just that he provides the s the initial impetus for that, right?
• 38:13
  SPEAKER_00: So readers of my substack will know that you know I'm a reader of of um Leo Strauss.
• 38:20
  SPEAKER_00: Strauss uh sort of has his the thinkers that he liked to write about, right?
• 38:27
  SPEAKER_00: And the the two main ones are Machiavelli and Hobbes, I would say.
• 38:31
  SPEAKER_00: And he more or less sort of points the finger at them when he identifies all of the problems of of modernity.
• 38:39
  SPEAKER_00: Hobbes is, if you like, the systematizer of Machiavelli.
• 38:44
  SPEAKER_00: The problem of Machiavelli, why Machiavelli is the root of the of the trouble, if you like, the root of the problem, right?
• 38:51
  SPEAKER_00: It's because he's what Strauss called the teacher of evil.
• 38:55
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 38:55
  SPEAKER_00: Now he's the teacher of evil because he's the first certain the first political thinker in in you could say since you know the since the Greeks to come up with a political philosophy that owed nothing to morality the only thing Machiavelli is interested in, if you read The Prince, the only thing that he cares about is expediency.
• 39:20
  SPEAKER_00: His interest is you want to be the prince, right?
• 39:23
  SPEAKER_00: You want to be the ruler.
• 39:24
  SPEAKER_00: What do you have to do to win power and sustain it?
• 39:29
  SPEAKER_00: And he doesn't all bets are off in terms of what you're allowed to do once you've made that your goal, right?
• 39:36
  SPEAKER_00: You're allowed to kill the children of uh your rivals, you know.
• 39:42
  SPEAKER_00: Um you're allowed to conspire, you're allowed to assassinate, you're allowed to publicly execute people, right?
• 39:48
  SPEAKER_00: All of this is legitimated in the prince.
• 39:51
  SPEAKER_00: As long as it's in the pursuit of power, right?
• 39:54
  SPEAKER_00: Winning power and sustaining it.
• 39:58
  SPEAKER_00: Strauss's argument was that that is the root of modernity as such, right?
• 40:04
  SPEAKER_00: What is modernity?
• 40:05
  SPEAKER_00: When was Machiavelli writing?
• 40:07
  SPEAKER_00: Machiavelli was writing at the exact point in history when the scientific revolution was taking place, and an awareness was growing or an acceptance was growing, that the world was its own thing, it was not related to a divine order, it was not related to a divine framework of natural law, right?
• 40:29
  SPEAKER_00: It was its own phenomenon.
• 40:31
  SPEAKER_00: There was this thing called the world, and it had its own value, it had its own laws, it had its own systems of organization that weren't related to God, right?
• 40:44
  SPEAKER_00: Machiavelli is providing a political philosophy that parallels the scientific revolution.
• 40:49
  SPEAKER_00: What he is saying is when it comes to politics, what matters is what's expedient.
• 40:54
  SPEAKER_00: What can you do in the world?
• 40:57
  SPEAKER_00: Not what can you do in reflection on the existence of a divine order, right?
• 41:02
  SPEAKER_00: But what can you do in relation to power?
• 41:05
  SPEAKER_00: So Machiavelli provides the initial idea.
• 41:10
  SPEAKER_00: Hobbes is the systematizer of that.
• 41:12
  SPEAKER_00: Because what Hobbes is saying is, what does the ruler do?
• 41:16
  SPEAKER_00: The ruler enforces order in the world.
• 41:20
  SPEAKER_00: The ruler doesn't give effect to natural law, to divine law.
• 41:24
  SPEAKER_00: The ruler doesn't care about external morality.
• 41:27
  SPEAKER_00: What the ruler does is enforces order, given that people will just pursue their own desires.
• 41:35
  SPEAKER_00: There's no connection there at all to external morality whatsoever, right?
• 41:39
  SPEAKER_00: To a Christian morality or any other kind of morality.
• 41:42
  SPEAKER_00: There is just individual people pursuing their desires, and the ruler maintains order.
• 41:49
  SPEAKER_00: Fast forward whatever it is since Hobbes was writing 350 years, is it?
• 41:54
  SPEAKER_00: I guess.
• 41:54
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, roughly that, maybe a bit a bit more, right?
• 41:57
  SPEAKER_00: We're now in that world, right?
• 41:59
  SPEAKER_00: We are in Hobbes' Hobbes' system.
• 42:02
  SPEAKER_00: We're all individuals pursuing our own desires.
• 42:05
  SPEAKER_00: The state is maintaining order.
• 42:07
  SPEAKER_00: The way it's maintaining order, as I said earlier on, becoming more authoritarian, becoming uh more biased.
• 42:14
  SPEAKER_03: I want to pick up a thread from a conversation I've had previously.
• 42:18
  SPEAKER_03: Lord Jonathan Sumption was on the show, and I put to him the impact that demographic change might have on the legal institutions, democratic institutions of Britain.
• 42:33
  SPEAKER_03: And um Lord Sumption has various views about how democracy is failing, but one thing that he didn't mention was the impact that a changing people might have on it.
• 42:45
  SPEAKER_03: So I put it to him is it likely to survive mass demographic change?
• 42:51
  SPEAKER_03: And he believed that it would, he thinks the institutions are strong enough, he thinks um the the democrat the democratic norms will ultimately come through in the end, that they will survive.
• 43:05
  SPEAKER_03: Uh from what I've just gathered from you, is that in that heterogeneous society and in that um Hobbesian world of balancing competing claims and going for the most expedient outcome, I'm wondering: is Lord Sumption thinking things are going to survive either because he has blind faith in the institutions, is he thinking that these institutions are going to survive because he thinks, well, they're going to choose the most expedient outcome, therefore the institutions just remain?
• 43:36
  SPEAKER_03: Or is it something else?
• 43:39
  SPEAKER_03: Because from where I'm sitting, it feels like there's a bit of a ostrich, head in the sands, hoping that everything will turn out o okay.
• 43:48
  SPEAKER_03: Where do you stand on that?
• 43:51
  SPEAKER_00: Well, yeah, I mean, uh well, I agree with that that that sentiment, but just to sort of, you know, put some flesh on the on the bones, so to speak.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_00: The there's different things going on.
• 44:02
  SPEAKER_00: I th I think so one of the one of the the big problems that our society has, particularly British society has, is that our elite, you know, however you want to refer to our kind of you know thought leaders, um are incredibly parochial.
• 44:19
  SPEAKER_00: So they they know about this country, but they don't even know this country particularly well.
• 44:23
  SPEAKER_00: They know about London, right?
• 44:25
  SPEAKER_00: And they know about America because they imbibe a lot of American media.
• 44:29
  SPEAKER_00: They don't travel a great deal, they don't learn other languages a particular uh uh you know a great deal.
• 44:36
  SPEAKER_00: And when they do travel, they tend to go to um sort of their tribe in the country in which they're visiting, right?
• 44:43
  SPEAKER_00: There is this sort of fairly kind of like globalized um let's call it what's the best way of putting it, wherever you go in the world, middle class people are broadly the same, right?
• 44:58
  SPEAKER_00: When you go lower down the social order or higher up the social order, you find more difference.
• 45:02
  SPEAKER_00: But bourgeois people are the same the world over, right, broadly speaking.
• 45:06
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 45:07
  SPEAKER_00: So you get this weird insularity where um they simply don't think about the long-term implications of what it looks like to live in a heterogeneous society like Brazil or South Africa or uh Singapore for that matter.
• 45:25
  SPEAKER_00: And so they don't think to themselves, right, what are the most diverse societies on the planet?
• 45:32
  SPEAKER_00: What do they look like and how do they function?
• 45:35
  SPEAKER_00: And the answer to that question is they either function really, really badly, right?
• 45:39
  SPEAKER_00: Like South Africa or Brazil, or they function really well, but in a really authoritarian way, like Singapore.
• 45:48
  SPEAKER_00: There isn't a w there isn't a country in the world which functions on the basis of old school sort of you know 20th century liberal democratic values and which incorporates the level of diversity that a place like Brazil or South Africa or has, you know, that that society doesn't exist anywhere on the planet, right?
• 46:08
  SPEAKER_00: So there's that going on, there's that just that weird parochial idea that um just because when I go on my holidays to Paris or New York or for that matter, Sao Paulo or you know, wherever, and I'm with other members of my class, it seems to function effectively, right?
• 46:28
  SPEAKER_00: The the refusal to go beyond that and to think outside of that box uh is very strong, uh I think.
• 46:34
  SPEAKER_00: So there's that issue.
• 46:36
  SPEAKER_00: The other issue is just um the and it stems from the same the same problem, I think, that same source of insularity.
• 46:46
  SPEAKER_00: It's just a failure to understand how tribal human beings are and how wedded human beings become to identity groups, particularly when they're in a kind of plural situation.
• 47:00
  SPEAKER_00: And it's surprising that Jonathan Sumption doesn't realise this as a as a historian, right?
• 47:06
  SPEAKER_00: When you have um when you are living as an expat in a foreign country, you know, I've seen this, I've seen it in my own life, you know, but from my own point of view and the people uh I've associated with living overseas.
• 47:21
  SPEAKER_00: There is just a human instinct to congregate together with the people who look like you and speak like you, who speak the same language, who have the same religion as well, you know, uh, and have the same cultural values, to band together and to see yourselves to a certain extent as just members of an outgroup.
• 47:38
  SPEAKER_00: Um that's whether we like it or not, that seems to be a feature of human nature.
• 47:44
  SPEAKER_00: So the idea that I mean that the all of the conversations around immigration try to avoid the subject of of Islam, but it is the most obvious, salient example in in the West, where you have groups of people who naturally, again, you know, there's no blame attached to this, come to a country where they are foreign, you know, quote unquote, they're not they're not native, so to speak.
• 48:08
  SPEAKER_00: They think of themselves as outsiders, they don't have connections to to the local pe population, really, particularly.
• 48:15
  SPEAKER_00: So they naturally congregate with people who they have something in common with, which is, you know, the religious faith, obviously, and also a certain cultural background.
• 48:24
  SPEAKER_00: Perfectly normal and inevitable and even sensible from the individual point of view, but disastrous for the society because what then happens is an interest group forms, and once you've got an interest group forming, then you get a voting block forming, right?
• 48:38
  SPEAKER_00: And then you have a block which is acting for its interests at the expense of the mainstream rather than working for the greater good.
• 48:48
  SPEAKER_00: That's not something I I don't agree with this view that this is some particular problem that we have to pin on you know Muslims as being particularly problematic.
• 48:56
  SPEAKER_00: It's not the case at all.
• 48:57
  SPEAKER_00: It could be any identity, any religion.
• 49:00
  SPEAKER_00: That kind of dynamic is going to emerge.
• 49:03
  SPEAKER_00: What the mainstream has to do is, well, it comes back to the authoritarian point, right?
• 49:10
  SPEAKER_00: Either it's going to do what we appear to be doing, which is picking winners on the basis of cobbling together this plurality and including Muslims within that, within that kind of plurality.
• 49:21
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, it can go down that route, or the authoritarianism can come from a different direction and try to force everybody to adopt a certain set of values to kind of eliminate difference in an authoritarian sort of a way, right?
• 49:36
  SPEAKER_00: But what we definitely cannot do is just play by the rules that we played by 50 years ago when Jonathan Sumption was a young man and everything will be okay.
• 49:44
  SPEAKER_00: That that just isn't how things work.
• 49:47
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, the point about whether it's a trained historian like Jonathan Sumption or other people who just have a passing observation and understanding of history is anyone who looks at the the past of the British Isles is you don't find it being this um melting pot of different identities.
• 50:13
  SPEAKER_03: It was a battlefield for the best part of a thousand years after the withdrawal of Rome.
• 50:20
  SPEAKER_03: Um and within that, even the nations that formed England and Scotland, these ended up being formed off the back of dominant kin cultures, uh as in demographically dominant kin cultures.
• 50:35
  SPEAKER_03: And yes, there was a fusing over time, you know, the Danes being grafted on, they didn't have WhatsApp to stay in touch with the former homeland, you know, take your conversion, that's the flag.
• 50:48
  SPEAKER_03: In Scotland, that was the Gaels, the Picts, the Anglo-Normans, the Lowlands, that were more like uh the Germanics of of Northern England.
• 50:57
  SPEAKER_03: Um, and yet what they ended up cohering around, oh, and the Norse as well, of of uh of Orkney and the West Niles and Shetland, is what they ended up cohering around was the hatred of the English.
• 51:08
  SPEAKER_03: Um, but they didn't much like each other.
• 51:11
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, the the the the Highlanders and the Lowlanders really hated each other.
• 51:15
  SPEAKER_03: Lowlanders thought the Highlanders were barbarians and their silly kilts and didn't start wearing them until about 200 years ago.
• 51:21
  SPEAKER_03: And the Highlanders thought the Lowlanders were basically English, and uh it takes an awful long time for a settlement to come about, and there's lots of uh intra nation or intranational conflict too, even in something that might look like well, we know what Scotland is, we know what a Scottish person is, and England is an English person is.
• 51:41
  SPEAKER_03: Well, yeah, we were left for an awful long time on our own and have loads of squabbles in the meantime.
• 51:48
  SPEAKER_03: So I wonder if actually, yes, civic the the British identity is civic, yes, it probably needs to be made a little bit more elastic than the English, Scottish, Welsh, and Irish for those who actually want to be a part of it.
• 52:02
  SPEAKER_03: But the reality is, is it's not going to be a cakewalk.
• 52:06
  SPEAKER_03: So the sooner that we just avail ourselves of the delusions and realise that there are real life conflicts going on today, and for those people who think that the English identity, the Scottish identity, needs to be uh a bit broader, it needs to incorporate some other groups.
• 52:20
  SPEAKER_03: So I need to realise that that's going to come at the expense of other groups who aren't going to rub up in the right way, and you need to decide how they're included or excluded.
• 52:29
  SPEAKER_03: I don't really see an easy path forward, and I don't know how much longer we can delay um dealing with this situation, however it's going to be dealt with, whether it's the authoritarian, seemingly arbitrary, this is the public morality and this is who's part of it, or you're just going to leave it as I think you finish in one of your articles, and which is becoming a prominent view at the moment.
• 52:54
  SPEAKER_03: You're just entering the foothills of low-level civil conflict.
• 52:59
  SPEAKER_03: Um what do you think the next stage looks like?
• 53:04
  SPEAKER_03: Or do you think the machinery that we have now has been captured in the let's just go for the expedient um outcome for m minoritarian interests um or ca ought there be a regime change?
• 53:20
  SPEAKER_03: What what what does the next stage look like?
• 53:22
  SPEAKER_00: Well, it will be written as you appreciate earlier.
• 53:26
  SPEAKER_00: I think, yeah, so yeah, it genuinely I um I go back it has to you're right, that it has to be one or the other of those things.
• 53:34
  SPEAKER_00: And I sort of genuinely kind of go back and forth in my own mind about which I think is the more likely.
• 53:40
  SPEAKER_00: I think I mean it could very well be both, right?
• 53:43
  SPEAKER_00: I think um what may happen, I think it's I would say this is the most likely scenario, even though it's a somewhat pessimistic scenario.
• 53:53
  SPEAKER_00: It's not the most pessimistic scenario.
• 53:55
  SPEAKER_00: The most pessimistic scenario is we end up like like Brazil or South Africa, right?
• 53:59
  SPEAKER_00: Where it's just sorry to keep picking on those countries for listeners from the end up in a society that functions okay, but is just has a quite an unpleasant uh cast to it for ordinary people.
• 54:14
  SPEAKER_00: You know, it's not a safe environment.
• 54:16
  SPEAKER_00: Um we could go in that direction.
• 54:19
  SPEAKER_00: I don't I think what's probably perhaps more likely is that the civil conflict scenario unfolds at a certain level.
• 54:28
  SPEAKER_00: You know, you obviously you you will have heard of David Betts and his you know theory about kind of low-level civil war.
• 54:33
  SPEAKER_00: Um we may see that and then we may see the or the ultimate end state of the kind of quite authoritarian sort of um imposition of a shared identity on the population resulting from things deteriorating uh in the the the um the realm of public security.
• 54:52
  SPEAKER_00: So that might be what happens.
• 54:54
  SPEAKER_00: I mean the ideal scenario, I think, is that we get a leader who is able, like you said, to capture optimism about the country, capture optimism about what what it means to be British.
• 55:08
  SPEAKER_00: I think we need to get away from this English there's an awful lot of discussion at the moment about you know what's English and you know how do we define who's English and that type of a thing leads us to forget that what really matters is what's British, right?
• 55:19
  SPEAKER_00: How do we f how do we define a British citizen?
• 55:21
  SPEAKER_00: Because at the end of the day, that's the country, right, as the United Kingdom.
• 55:23
  SPEAKER_00: But there are a lot of people in the United Kingdom who don't feel English, however we just however we define Englishness, right?
• 55:30
  SPEAKER_00: But the most important priority is a positive message about Britishness and uh an idea about what it means beyond the twe nonsense that we get, you know, the the Paddington and drinking cups of tea and you know you know the kind of thing.
• 55:50
  SPEAKER_00: A positive idea about Britishness and a willingness to say that what's hitherto been unsayable, which is that if you're uh from overseas and you've come to live in this country, or you're from an immigrant background, you know your parents came from overseas, if you want to live here, then you have to abide by certain expectations, and you also have to like it, and if you don't like it, then you have to leave.
• 56:18
  SPEAKER_00: And that the most fundamental aspect of that is deporting people who commit crimes, right?
• 56:23
  SPEAKER_00: It's the biggest no-brainer in in public life, I think, at the moment.
• 56:28
  SPEAKER_00: 80% of the population would agree with the view that if you're not a British citizen and you commit a crime, you should be deported straight away.
• 56:36
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 56:37
  SPEAKER_00: I think more or less everybody would be of that view, like I say.
• 56:40
  SPEAKER_00: If a prime minister was able to achieve that, you know, home secretary obviously, but you know, the prime minister would take the plaudits for it, if anyone was able to do that, they would be the most popular prime minister in the last 50 years.
• 56:52
  SPEAKER_00: You know, it just requires somebody to have the the leadership qualities and the kind of the guts, really, the gumption, to do what needs to be done.
• 57:01
  SPEAKER_00: If you get that kind of forcefulness from the top, I think it would make a huge amount of difference.
• 57:06
  SPEAKER_00: But it it certainly can't be the assumption model of, well, the institutions will muddle through and people will just by osmosis learn you know how to get along with each other.
• 57:18
  SPEAKER_00: It's it that it just yeah, we're we're far beyond that point, I think.
• 57:22
  SPEAKER_00: Um yeah, it it's it's there has to be something active that happens.
• 57:26
  SPEAKER_00: My fear is that what the the the um the active response will come after an awful lot of misery and pain.
• 57:37
  SPEAKER_00: You know, it it's like things have to get worse and worse before they before they get better, you know.
• 57:43
  SPEAKER_00: Um that's my fear.
• 57:44
  SPEAKER_00: I'm optimistic that that won't happen, but I think the better side of my nature, the more well, the more rational rational parts of my nature perhaps expects it's gonna be the opposite, that we're gonna have to see a a deterioration and then suddenly there'll be a a genuine, a genuine change.
• 57:58
  SPEAKER_03: Agreed.
• 57:59
  SPEAKER_03: I think some would argue that how many more of the terrible news articles must we see every day of real people being impacted by these terrible decisions.
• 58:08
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 58:08
  SPEAKER_03: But if Lord Jonathan Sumption is indeed still a viewer and watcher and ever was since our conversation, perhaps you could learn something from David McGrogan uh and use your influence in the House of Lords uh to bring Leviathan back in line, please, Lord Sumption.
• 58:28
  SPEAKER_03: Uh David, it's been an absolute pleasure having you.
• 58:31
  SPEAKER_03: There's probably much more we could talk about, but appreciate we're coming up to time.
• 58:35
  SPEAKER_03: But before I let you go, I'll ask you the question I ask all of my guests, which is what have you changed your mind on during the course of your life?
• 58:41
  SPEAKER_03: And what was it that made you think differently?
• 58:44
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I've changed my mind about a huge amount, but um, I mean, to to sort of uh uh the big thing is um I mean this is not an unusual uh story, but I used to be very left-wing when I was a kid, you know, and um I was a member of the Green Party when I was a student, so I was very um I was into all the right causes.
• 59:04
  SPEAKER_00: You know, there was the the right causes back then were slightly different to the right causes that there are now, but there's obviously a lot of overlap, you know.
• 59:11
  SPEAKER_00: Um because I'd grown up in a labor-supporting household, you know, I was from Liverpool, you know, for Merseyside, it's just you know, tribal labor.
• 59:20
  SPEAKER_00: Um but then uh I went to live in Japan, as I said, um, and everybody, you know, this has become like a bit of a trope, you know, that people go and live in Japan or go and visit Japan on holiday and think, why is it that everything's so nice here and everything's so horrible back home, you know, and what could it possibly be?
• 59:38
  SPEAKER_00: It must be some mystifying you know, achievement of the Japanese, you know, something genetic or something.
• 59:45
  SPEAKER_00: Um I had that experience obviously because you can't really help having that experience if you're from Merseyside, you know, and you go and live in Tokyo.
• 59:54
  SPEAKER_00: But what it showed to me was a couple of things.
• 59:57
  SPEAKER_00: So the first one was that um you know, you don't need to have a big state in order to have a society that that's pleasant to live in, and if anything, having a bigger state seems to make things worse.
• 1:00:08
  SPEAKER_00: Like you don't need to have like it blew my mind the idea that wow in Japan there isn't an NHS, you know, wow, there isn't cradle to grave welfare state.
• 1:00:19
  SPEAKER_00: You know, you get unemployment benefits on the basis of how much you've paid in.
• 1:00:22
  SPEAKER_00: You know, it's it's not kind of just a uh available as of right.
• 1:00:26
  SPEAKER_00: It wasn't at the time that I was living there in any case.
• 1:00:28
  SPEAKER_00: Um older people are cared for at home by their relatives.
• 1:00:32
  SPEAKER_00: They don't go into um you know it's nowhere near as common to need social care.
• 1:00:38
  SPEAKER_00: Um people can be trusted to eat well if you just leave them alone and don't hector them about eating five vegetables a day and you know, it's like all it's just you know the it's um it's it's a sort of a little laboratory of what happens if you have a stable population of people who like the country which they live in, who think that they're part of a society and who are therefore considerate of other people in that society.
• 1:01:12
  SPEAKER_00: If you have those conditions, what emerges?
• 1:01:15
  SPEAKER_00: But it turns out that what emerges is a very nice, pleasant, safe country where people are nice to each other and decent to people.
• 1:01:23
  SPEAKER_00: Um it's not rocket science.
• 1:01:25
  SPEAKER_00: Um and so living there just completely changed uh all the way I think about politics because you know you it's like you kind of go through the looking glass and you realise um all of the problems well, I don't want to say all of the problems, but a very great many of our problems come from the fact that we think that the state ought to be remedying X, Y, and Z when actually people will just do it themselves if you leave them alone.
• 1:01:48
  SPEAKER_00: It's the problem is that we've infantilized people to the extent that they can't do the things that they ought to do.
• 1:01:53
  SPEAKER_00: That's the problem.
• 1:01:54
  SPEAKER_00: We stop infantilizing people, then they will be able to do what they need to do, right?
• 1:01:59
  SPEAKER_00: It will come, it will happen automatically.
• 1:02:01
  SPEAKER_00: Might not happen straight away, but it will emerge.
• 1:02:03
  SPEAKER_00: And so once I'd sort of seen that, uh it kind of converted me into you know, for a while I would have called myself a libertarian.
• 1:02:09
  SPEAKER_00: Uh I wouldn't call myself a libertarian exactly now, but it definitely just shifted me totally around.
• 1:02:15
  SPEAKER_00: You know, I became someone who was be like, you know, a kind of Milan Friedman, Ayn Rand sort of type libertarian.
• 1:02:21
  SPEAKER_00: I'm less like I say, less so now, perhaps a little bit less so, but I still adopt that basic view, you know, that the state is just the state is really the the the big problem that we have.
• 1:02:31
  SPEAKER_00: Real problem that we have here in this uh country is that we expect the state to solve our problems when most of the problems can just be solved if people just behave like adults.
• 1:02:40
  SPEAKER_00: Um getting from A to B is difficult once you've gone down the wrong path, but you know, I think there's a way to make it back.
• 1:02:46
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, uh it's it's remarkable that when you do, not everyone does it, but when you go through that uh worldview conversion, how common it is once you open the doors to something else to go fully down that track, uh and then there needs to be this equilibrium that that comes about later on where you go, okay, maybe I maybe I threw all of my previous worldview away a bit too hard, and you can you can pick bits back up of it, but we could we could definitely do with a few more of those um those worldview convusions amongst uh Bien Pena, so to speak.
• 1:03:24
  SPEAKER_03: Um David, we've talked about your Substack quite a lot.
• 1:03:27
  SPEAKER_03: That's where people can find you online.
• 1:03:29
  SPEAKER_03: Why don't you plug it and anything else that we might be able to expect from you and where we can find your work?
• 1:03:34
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so the Substack is news from Uncible.
• 1:03:37
  SPEAKER_00: So Unsible is spelled U-N-C-I-B-A-L.
• 1:03:41
  SPEAKER_00: Um it's one of those things where you pick a name for a Substack uh when no one's reading it, and you about you know, three years later you regret it, and you would could have come up with something that was more readily explicable and easier to spell.
• 1:03:54
  SPEAKER_00: Um the word the name comes from a book by an author called Jack Vance, like a science fiction author who I really like.
• 1:04:00
  SPEAKER_00: Um and it's just you know, at the time I was reading the book that had uh a planet in it that was called Unsible.
• 1:04:06
  SPEAKER_00: Um it just seemed like an appropriate name for some reason.
• 1:04:09
  SPEAKER_00: Uh I'm stuck with it now though.
• 1:04:11
  SPEAKER_00: Uh and on it, I just sort of rant about, you know, I'm an academic.
• 1:04:14
  SPEAKER_00: There's so many things as an academic.
• 1:04:15
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, going back to the point that we started off with, there's so many things you're just not allowed to say.
• 1:04:19
  SPEAKER_00: Not that you're not allowed to say, but yeah, I should rephrase that, you're not allowed to publish.
• 1:04:23
  SPEAKER_00: Doesn't matter what how well written the thing is, doesn't matter how good the references are, doesn't matter how you know well thought through it is, how good the scholarship is, if it's about certain topics, it won't get published.
• 1:04:36
  SPEAKER_00: So it was just kind of originally an outlet for me to just rant about the things that I felt like it was just there was no way that this was gonna end up in a peer-reviewed uh publication.
• 1:04:44
  SPEAKER_00: Um but it sort of took on a bit of a life of its own since then.
• 1:04:47
  SPEAKER_00: So I post about um law, sort of politics, I guess, political philosophy, sometimes like more personal reflections, not all that much though.
• 1:04:56
  SPEAKER_00: Um and yeah, I guess it has a kind of um I it's sort of I guess like educated rants, might be the best way of putting it.
• 1:05:06
  SPEAKER_00: Um I try not to be too inflammatory, but sometimes I can't help myself.
• 1:05:10
  SPEAKER_00: As you get older, you just become you know, you're just more willing to just tell it like it is.
• 1:05:15
  SPEAKER_00: It's just um you know, you um penetratic meljo.
• 1:05:19
  SPEAKER_00: Um I'm not quite at that stage yet, but I'm heading in that direction.
• 1:05:23
  SPEAKER_03: Educated rants.
• 1:05:24
  SPEAKER_03: Now that's terminology that only a man from Liverpool would have uh would have would have termed his would have termed his work, but I highly recommend everyone to go and read it, besides getting the political philosophy.
• 1:05:40
  SPEAKER_03: Uh the good the good abstraction is it all gets grounded in the news of the day, uh practical reality, and I would highly recommend it.
• 1:05:49
  SPEAKER_03: David, it has been an absolute pleasure.
• 1:05:51
  SPEAKER_03: I'm sure we'll speak again.
• 1:05:52
  SPEAKER_03: Keep fighting the good fight, and all the best.