Latest / Thinking Class / #128 - Lord Tony Sewell - Life At The Bottom In Broken Britain - The White Working Class, The Road Man Culture, And The Collapse Of England

Transcript

#128 - Lord Tony Sewell - Life At The Bottom In Broken Britain - The White Working Class, The Road Man Culture, And The Collapse Of England · Thinking Class

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Hello, classmates, and welcome to Thinking Class.
• 0:02
  SPEAKER_00: I'm John Gillam, and in this episode, I'm speaking with Lord Tony Sewell.
• 0:05
  SPEAKER_00: Lord Sewell is a British educationalist, philanthropist, and a life peer.
• 0:09
  SPEAKER_00: He is the founder of Generating Genius, a charity supporting talented students from black, Asian minority ethnic backgrounds into higher education, and his PhD examined African Caribbean boys' subculture and schooling.
• 0:21
  SPEAKER_00: Lord Sewell chaired the government's Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities in 2021, producing one of the most important and one of the most attacked reports on inequality in modern British history.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_00: In this conversation, we think out loud about why white working class boys are still the lowest performing group in British education five years after Lord Sewell's report named it as a crisis, how the data has been fudged for decades by lumping the white poor with everyone else, whether the failure is primarily institutional, cultural, or something more pernicious, roadman culture now cutting across every ethnicity and every town in the United Kingdom, what I saw on my road trip around England, and what Lord Sewell's research on subcultures tells us about it, whether the institutions can be trusted to fix any of this or whether they have been too thoroughly captured, whether we need a modern day dissolution of the monasteries and close down the institutions and rebuild, and what Lord Sewell changed his mind on, including why he came back to Christianity.
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_00: If you find this conversation valuable, subscribe to Thinking Class on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and Substack.
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_00: Enjoy the show, classmates, and now Lord Tony Sewell.
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_00: And in that report, you found that the main drivers of unequal outcomes in Britain are class, geography, and family breakdown rather than systemic racism being at the core of those disparities.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_00: You were attacked for saying so, and it's fair to say that aspects of the report have been shelved that some of those groups that were struggling remained out of view and perhaps out of mind of policymakers.
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_00: And what you found was that actually, of the lowest performing groups, white working class boys were rock bottom.
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_00: They were the lowest performing group in British education.
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_00: And indeed, those on free school meals saw only 36% of that cohort meeting the expected standard in maths and English and GCSC.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_00: And that hasn't moved in five years.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_00: You're here to tell us what happened and whether anything can be done to improve the educational standards of the youth in Britain today.
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_00: So let's dive right in.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_00: Lord Sewell, five years after your report, we have just heard that white working class boys are still struggling.
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_00: What does the picture look like today?
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_00: Paint the picture for us.
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_01: Well, uh the picture is is is still quite grim, but what's interesting, what's probably still a bit different now and slight window of optimism, is that people are able to name it now.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_01: So for example, recently the Education Minister, the Labour Education Secretary, Bridget Phillipson, has said, you know, uh that white working class boys is an area that she wants to focus in on and she wants to go to, particularly northern regions where she's from and on the south coast, and look at that as a focused area.
• 3:39
  SPEAKER_01: Now, I would say, given my experience, if you had called out the the plight or the issues around white working class boys, say six, seven years ago, you would have been called a racist.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_01: Just and and and and and and and just just even even the idea of focusing on that group and saying that they have got specific issues, it would be hard work to say that, you know.
• 4:08
  SPEAKER_01: And I and I and I worry about that that and that sort of in a sense sets the context for really my report and what we were trying to do is that basically we we we think that uh and I and I I would say that for people looking at this now, what you've got to understand is that uh notions of truth, integrity, um looking at the data right coldly, is probably the best place to start with these sensitive things around race and gender.
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_01: And and and and and and and so what the position was for a long time was that in fact that group wasn't even a group, really, because if you were to look at the numbers, what they everybody else almost had a kind of ethnic kind of cardigan to go wrap themselves around it, except the white majority group.
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_01: But in fact, how we did the numbers in the past, particularly around education, was to lump the white poor group with everybody.
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_01: So it was just like the whites, as it vertical, and so therefore, they were always going to come out quite well because they were lumped with middle-class boys, with children from um wealthier backgrounds, and that was them.
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_01: And then and then everybody else had a chance to say basically how my how poor the system was for them.
• 5:34
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that was the deep unfairness of the whole way in which data and statistics were were being collated.
• 5:43
  SPEAKER_01: The other thing was we lived, and I think we've got to pick this up around notions of guilt, notions of the reality of racism that was quite rife and open in the 1970s when I grew up.
• 5:58
  SPEAKER_01: And so I suppose what has happened is that um policymakers' governments, since that time of open racism, have felt very found it very difficult to talk about this openly and also talk about it accurately.
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_01: So, for example, um even though my report was commissioned by Boris Johnson, he was very nervous about it, given that he felt that um there would be a backlash against him or whatever, because clearly the report was saying things that were not the sort of progressive norm, i.e., that basically the groups that were underachieving, particularly Caribbean black boys, was if you said that, that's fine.
• 6:43
  SPEAKER_01: You would go on news night, going everywhere, and you would be, you know, and the guardian would like that, and it was always but but but to say that this group of um uh children, young people, not only were they um performing badly, but they were performing the worst.
• 7:01
  SPEAKER_01: Now that was was in a time when we were brought out a report that was about racial disparity.
• 7:09
  SPEAKER_01: What on earth were these people doing?
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_01: Saying that the white group uh were doing badly.
• 7:15
  SPEAKER_01: So I suppose that's the context of it, really.
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_01: That that's the shock horror of the story.
• 7:21
  SPEAKER_01: And um and it um it doesn't I would I uh my my sense is that I felt really sorry for, in fact, if you like, people who lived in poor areas, which predominantly white areas in the north and northeast, not that they're all like that, but that those the the that particular population, nobody really was saying anything about that group for them, waving their flag, championing their cause.
• 7:48
  SPEAKER_01: And it's almost like in England, what we what what what's happened now, Britain generally, is that we got into this malaise where um when we were talking about educational underachievement, we just left it.
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_01: Oh yeah, the black boys were doing badly, um, Asian groups were doing well, and um that's the story.
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_01: And we put all our resources and policies around that particular group.
• 8:12
  SPEAKER_01: What was exciting about the report was we disrupted all of that narrative.
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_01: And we used the numbers, and the numbers told us a completely different story.
• 8:23
  SPEAKER_00: Well, let's let's unpack that story before we get there.
• 8:29
  SPEAKER_00: Let's look at the reasons for the underperformance of this group because that report we've talked about in 2024, which you uh found that systemic racism wasn't the primary driver for the disparities between ethnic groups.
• 8:40
  SPEAKER_00: Um, you you you named class, geography, family stability.
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, and that family breakdown figure is pretty striking.
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_00: It was something like two in ten poor white boys live with with married parents or or something, um, six in ten for poor non-white children.
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_00: Uh why why do you think the this group specifically has fallen so bar far behind?
• 9:02
  SPEAKER_00: What's the nested set of causes?
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_00: Good question.
• 9:04
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that um you've got it's when all these things are always complex, so you and then people may turn off when it's always complex, but in a sense, you've got to just go there.
• 9:14
  SPEAKER_01: I think two things are happening at the same time for that particular group.
• 9:18
  SPEAKER_01: One is that um we did, in a sense, as a country, do very well in terms of our resourcing and our ideas around London and London schools, and London schools, in a sense, was kind of sucked in.
• 9:37
  SPEAKER_01: All the best teachers, all the best talent came towards London for a variety of reasons.
• 9:44
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that did was to the detriment of the rest of the country, I think, in some ways, yeah.
• 9:50
  SPEAKER_01: And we so everybody boasted how great we were doing, Britain was going up the the the scales, but it but but in terms of specific areas that they was either the same, you know, and I'm talking I'll name them really.
• 10:05
  SPEAKER_01: We're talking about parts of East Midlands, we're talking about certainly bits of West Midlands, we're going to the north northwest now, you know, the Manchester's the kind of that that kind of then to the northeast, you know, we're talking about Newcastle and things like that, and then we're moving across the country now to I mean, and it's not only in those areas, but then also on the south coast, you know, big areas of of of underachievement inside schools.
• 10:34
  SPEAKER_01: And so I would say there was a school problem generally in those areas of poor performing schools, poor attendance, which really governments and and local governments didn't really get a handle on, yeah, as we did in London.
• 10:51
  SPEAKER_01: So that's that's a sort of general issue about why that group would be would be failing.
• 10:56
  SPEAKER_01: They were going to poorer schools, poorer leaders.
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_01: However, and I think the other thing, and this is where the numbers are quite interesting about why that particular group of boys are underachieving, it really seems to be around attendance.
• 11:13
  SPEAKER_01: If you look at the attendance levels of those that group, they're the worst in the country.
• 11:20
  SPEAKER_01: So they're not still coming to school enough, you know, it's as simple as that.
• 11:25
  SPEAKER_01: Now, that's strange because it's happening not only in the single parent scenario, but it's also kind of happening also with even when some of the dads are around.
• 11:35
  SPEAKER_01: But it is predominantly in that area, I think, of see uh of where the the family might be breaking down.
• 11:41
  SPEAKER_01: And I think there is an element of collusion there with the parents.
• 11:46
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that uh that idea, and I think there's a generational thing going on where in fact um parents are together with the they've had a poor performance, they've had a poor experience of school themselves, and that then is a generational thing and it goes back.
• 12:05
  SPEAKER_01: So, in fact, what is the problem if he takes a few days off to PlayStation instead of going to school, you know?
• 12:13
  SPEAKER_01: And the sense then that the school as a driver of um achievement is, and I'm talking about a cultural thing here, has has been lost in a couple of generations of white working class children, uh families.
• 12:31
  SPEAKER_01: I think that's an a factor.
• 12:32
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it wasn't always there, but it's there.
• 12:35
  SPEAKER_01: And you compare that to the family structures that are sometimes in London where there's a drive, really, and what I call like a almost like an immigrant optimism around school and education.
• 12:49
  SPEAKER_01: And you can see this in in uh Catherine Burbaugh Singh's school, Michaela School in in London, one of that's one of the best achieving schools in the country.
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_01: But it there are very few white children in that school.
• 13:02
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 13:02
  SPEAKER_01: So what I'm trying to say here is that there it's it's a more complex picture of um uh uh a kind of sense that on a policy level and a school level, more needs to be done in those areas to drive up the kind of sense of high expectations from those children in those schools.
• 13:29
  SPEAKER_01: And top of that, the expectations around education in some of those communities isn't good enough either from the family.
• 13:39
  SPEAKER_01: So you have this twin level you know pressure that's on there, and then the ch the the the child, and I say that child under 16, a boy in that context is then literally a victim of that because nobody he goes to school, there's nobody really expects him to do really well, is at home, and then the parental thing isn't really driving enough of a sense that you've got to attend school and school's important.
• 14:07
  SPEAKER_01: And so so that twin thing is is holding us back.
• 14:13
  SPEAKER_01: And I and I and and then nobody really cared.
• 14:16
  SPEAKER_01: Nobody seemed to the all all the energy seemed to be in London and around particularly the black grouping and uh uh and other groups uh around getting their achievement levels up, but people almost seem to give up or not be interested in the in the in in in in the outcomes of of of of white boys.
• 14:38
  SPEAKER_01: And I think there's a third thing which is a little bit more sinister.
• 14:42
  SPEAKER_01: I I I also wonder whether there's a sense that um because nobody was really lobbying around that group, you know, um you know, in a sense of the you know, we really want I mean I I can't remember ever seeing and I could be wrong, but uh like a massive campaign amongst um like uh white community community leaders who were from these particular areas really banging the door on government and saying, Look, we've had enough of all this underachievement.
• 15:23
  SPEAKER_01: Uh it's it's hard because they never get the they never got the data.
• 15:26
  SPEAKER_01: That was another problem.
• 15:27
  SPEAKER_01: So we couldn't compare things.
• 15:29
  SPEAKER_01: As I said, we were it was fudged in this whole whole white kind of thing.
• 15:33
  SPEAKER_01: But specifically, you would have thought when you see those numbers now, now they've all has been revealed, you would have uh I would have expected there to be mass demonstrations going in front of the D FE office saying, you know, people from you know the suburbs of Liverpool coming down to the saying, what's happened to our children, you know, and you know, but there was so that somehow, and of course, I mean there's there's stuff now, but at that particular time nobody was championing this, yeah.
• 16:06
  SPEAKER_01: And of course, indifference from political leaders, you know, you know, people just say, and it was just like so that that was missing.
• 16:15
  SPEAKER_01: So I I I think now things have changed, but that I think is the context of why uh that is happening.
• 16:25
  SPEAKER_00: Well uh let's pull on the threads of the perhaps more sinister reasons that you've outlined there as to why this group might be underperforming, uh and I'll float these ideas with you.
• 16:37
  SPEAKER_00: I I think some other potentially pernicious things going on could be I'll draw on my experience in the corporate world here, is that amongst um the professional uh managerial class class made up of middle class uh white British, um my experience has been of uh a kind of internalized um self-loathing which has been driven by that guilt toward the past.
• 17:04
  SPEAKER_00: So uh I have seen Irish women stand there and talk about how the only reason why they're in the position that they're in is because they're white.
• 17:12
  SPEAKER_00: And this is in the middle of London where not 50 years ago you could find those signs up on the door saying no blacks, no dogs, no Irish.
• 17:19
  SPEAKER_00: So she's kind of forgotten the history there, but she was in HR, and all of those policies were starting to be geared up toward um lifting up all the other groups, but just assuming that all white people are just naturally privileged, so it's the white privileged idea.
• 17:36
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I also saw it whilst at Deloitte uh following the the George Floyd um uh killing, and um it continued right on up until you know your report came out, but there was a black action plan that was rolled out um around the country, and um actually very quickly other ethnic groups started piping up saying, What about us?
• 17:57
  SPEAKER_00: which is quite interesting.
• 17:58
  SPEAKER_00: But I I piped up and said, look, London has all of the jobs, we already don't really need to be doing mass outreach around here to different ethnic groups.
• 18:06
  SPEAKER_00: It's there, we've already got programs in place.
• 18:08
  SPEAKER_00: What about the forgotten parts of the country?
• 18:10
  SPEAKER_00: If you care about rising all boats, forget about ethnicity, just get out to Blackpool, get out to the northeast of England and pull them back.
• 18:16
  SPEAKER_00: So I think there's a there feels as though there is partly a self-loathing from middle class white people, uh, and there's a luxury belief going on there as well, which doesn't harm them, but it harms the people lower down the order.
• 18:30
  SPEAKER_00: And I don't want to be unfair about it, but I think they're probably also because ethnic groups can and do uh jostle for competition, and Paul Morland has shown this in in his research 15 years ago.
• 18:42
  SPEAKER_00: Um, they compete for resources that some people are driven by an anti-white animus.
• 18:47
  SPEAKER_00: And you can see this um, you know, it through it th through COVID, I can't remember the name of the Cambridge professor, but that when there was the disparities in health outcomes, she was coming on the television basically saying it was white supremacy.
• 18:58
  SPEAKER_00: And um, you do find these ideas uh are shot through our institutions, and so in some ways, I wonder if in many ways there's kind of a class warfare and and a an ethnic conflict dressed up as progressivism within that as well.
• 19:14
  SPEAKER_00: Uh does would you agree with any of that?
• 19:16
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, you're absolutely right about that, and I think that um that's one of the things that I found strange about why it was, and it it you could almost feel that there was a paralysis really around why it was that this issue of underachievement, which in a sense you need to kind of I mean no there was no panorama program, there was no BBC investigation for years.
• 19:44
  SPEAKER_01: It's a bit like the grooming grounds thing around the underachievement of of of of white boys.
• 19:49
  SPEAKER_01: We never had anything like that.
• 19:51
  SPEAKER_01: You know, so nobody knew, and I think that it was a well, but they did know, but they didn't want to they didn't want to talk about it until we we we we were the first person to put it on the table, really, in a sense of a government report.
• 20:03
  SPEAKER_01: It was things thing things had come out be prior to us, but as an official thing on ethnicity, and that's the thing.
• 20:09
  SPEAKER_01: I do think these things do flow around ethnicity and race, because in a way that's where the the nub of what you're saying i is about.
• 20:22
  SPEAKER_01: Is the issues to do is being white a race?
• 20:26
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, this is really what we're this is what it's about.
• 20:29
  SPEAKER_01: So the cheek of it, we it we were a group of oh, there was uh about uh 12 of us on the report, one token white guy was on uh the inverted token.
• 20:43
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that's right.
• 20:44
  SPEAKER_01: And then and you see, this is the thing which which makes the report sweet.
• 20:48
  SPEAKER_01: All of us from ethnic minorities, we were adamant that this this because the numbers were in front of us.
• 20:55
  SPEAKER_01: And that's what annoyed, I think, the progressives.
• 20:57
  SPEAKER_01: That this group, what are you these group black and Asian people saying that in fact, you know, the the the the the the the people who were uh were uh and also in health as well, the people who were under the most pressure in this context was the white poor group.
• 21:11
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah?
• 21:12
  SPEAKER_01: And and it came from us, and that was what really did annoy the Guardian and all of that.
• 21:17
  SPEAKER_01: They couldn't understand why these people and chaired by somebody who looks like race traitors.
• 21:21
  SPEAKER_01: That's right, traitors to the cause.
• 21:23
  SPEAKER_01: But we were not we we we were we were we were actually faithful to truth and truth is about numbers.
• 21:32
  SPEAKER_01: We didn't deny the reality of racism, you know.
• 21:34
  SPEAKER_01: It's there and we we said it and we called it out.
• 21:38
  SPEAKER_01: But we had to we had to go with this.
• 21:40
  SPEAKER_01: And but I I come back to this thing about ethnicity because in a in the end, if if the luxury beliefs or these ideas are about people upping their kind of ethnic kind of credentials, what happens when you find out, when the truth tells you that in fact In the classrooms of England, it is not the black and Asian groups that are suffering the most, it's the white group.
• 22:07
  SPEAKER_01: So therefore, you have to then ask yourself some people would would uh even argue why on earth are we even talking about white people in a in a in a in an uh ethnic disparity uh piece of work?
• 22:20
  SPEAKER_01: There's almost like you say, they're privileged, you don't even need to talk about them.
• 22:24
  SPEAKER_00: It doesn't even exist as an ethnic group.
• 22:26
  SPEAKER_01: They don't exist, you know.
• 22:29
  SPEAKER_01: And um what it then did was it took it took it in a sense, I I did say it was about race, but then in the end, it quickly, I'm gonna contradict myself.
• 22:39
  SPEAKER_01: It what what what what the white thing did in a sense, it took it to class.
• 22:45
  SPEAKER_01: Because quite quickly, what were the underlying reasons for these these underachievements and then where people lived?
• 22:53
  SPEAKER_01: So so here is here is the big irony in the British landscape.
• 23:01
  SPEAKER_01: If you are from a West African background, if you um have got more or less two parents at home, you are uh you and you live in London, you are more likely to get eight or nine GCSEs without any problem.
• 23:20
  SPEAKER_01: You're gonna get the best teachers, you're gonna get all those, remember all those programs you're talking about uh of of of of uh you know, kind of specifically for going to university for your ethnic group, all of those things.
• 23:37
  SPEAKER_01: If you live in Tower Hamlets, you live on the cusp of all those big um industries, HSBC, Barclays, all those people have to do is come down the steps, go down the lift, and they walk on the road and then into your school.
• 23:50
  SPEAKER_01: So you've got all those role models that those companies can pump into it.
• 23:54
  SPEAKER_01: You know, you are living in a privileged space, living in London, yeah?
• 24:00
  SPEAKER_01: And you're from that ethnic group as well.
• 24:02
  SPEAKER_01: So when it comes then when we began to unpick it, we would say, wait a minute, if you if you're black and if you're living in London, you've got everything going for you.
• 24:13
  SPEAKER_01: And there was a narrative out there somewhere, maybe saying that it was a complete reverse.
• 24:19
  SPEAKER_01: That it was that that all the white kids were having all this privilege living in parts of Liverpool, you've got all and the and it was the black kids who were under pressure.
• 24:30
  SPEAKER_01: And if you think about it, the numbers were telling us something, particularly in education, was telling us almost the reverse.
• 24:38
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that so that's the scandal.
• 24:40
  SPEAKER_01: And also the s I don't want to encourage people to go on the street and riot.
• 24:45
  SPEAKER_01: I hate all of that.
• 24:46
  SPEAKER_01: That's how you do social change.
• 24:48
  SPEAKER_01: But I I I think, you know, we're looking at it, you know, I I I you know, and this is why I come back to this idea that in fact I think almost the white group has been comatosed in all of this.
• 25:01
  SPEAKER_01: They've just become the the you the the white poor population in Britain have been comatosed by an elite living in London and and and not understanding that all the goodies were coming to London and they just didn't feel they had anything.
• 25:18
  SPEAKER_01: And the the the key area of all of this is in education.
• 25:22
  SPEAKER_01: You see.
• 25:24
  SPEAKER_01: And um so so so so so that that is is a scam.
• 25:29
  SPEAKER_01: And I think things are beginning to change.
• 25:30
  SPEAKER_01: I said there's a glimmer that because we you and I having this conversation now, I think it it won't, it we couldn't go on mainstream yet, but I think most people now get it.
• 25:42
  SPEAKER_01: They're not gonna say, they're not gonna, I don't think, I could be wrong, and this is where I kind of disagree with you a little bit now.
• 25:48
  SPEAKER_01: I think things have moved on slightly.
• 25:50
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I don't think people are gonna turn around and say that you and I are a bunch of racists talking about this.
• 25:56
  SPEAKER_01: Because they do know the numbers are so clear now that that white group is under.
• 26:00
  SPEAKER_01: They don't know what to do about it, and we can come on to that because I think I've got some ideas.
• 26:04
  SPEAKER_01: But I do think there is now an acknowledgement that in fact, you know, wait a minute, things are not right.
• 26:12
  SPEAKER_01: Hence, you know, we have reform, we have um leveling up.
• 26:17
  SPEAKER_01: What do you think?
• 26:18
  SPEAKER_01: Governments are panicking about our political crisis at the moment.
• 26:22
  SPEAKER_01: It's all about the fact that you governments over the years, conservatives and labor, comatose, try to comatose that white mass.
• 26:32
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I think I think you're right.
• 26:34
  SPEAKER_00: And I think if you were to look at the electoral map and see the areas that are leaning towards reform, they're typically still white majority areas.
• 26:46
  SPEAKER_00: And you made a really good point earlier on about why isn't there an uprising almost, or at least uh just a bit of energy and activity from the areas that uh, as you just described, have been dispossessed.
• 26:58
  SPEAKER_00: And uh you you've used the word comatose.
• 27:01
  SPEAKER_00: It definitely feels like there's been a demoralization over time.
• 27:05
  SPEAKER_00: And um I wonder if, in some ways, after so long of the institutional setup going against the grain, where uh and knowing that every time that people have shown up to the voting booth, things just haven't changed over those 30 years or what have you, that people have just gone, uh, what's the point?
• 27:23
  SPEAKER_00: But I think there's something else, Tony, which I think is worthwhile this getting under the skin of, and you've already touched on it, is the cultural aspects of it as well.
• 27:29
  SPEAKER_00: So it it we can talk about the top-down approach to how you might fix this, and uh you certainly can't exculpate the the elite class from what I'm about to talk about, but I do think in the parts of the country we're talking about, those areas that have are now post-industrial um, they uh not only had the their um their industries outsourced uh um which uh whole communities had been built around.
• 27:58
  SPEAKER_00: You know, there was a a church and a factory and a street built for you know, humble houses.
• 28:02
  SPEAKER_00: But if you look at those images from Ashington in Northumberland, former mining capital of Northumberland of a hundred years ago, you will find a very proud people dressed very well.
• 28:12
  SPEAKER_00: Um go there today.
• 28:14
  SPEAKER_00: You do not find that.
• 28:15
  SPEAKER_00: My first job in banking was on the high street in Ashington, retail banker at HSBC.
• 28:20
  SPEAKER_00: I was 24, and the only people who had money in their pocket were those who were given payouts from the mines for emphysema and whitefinger, but just about everyone else was struggling.
• 28:30
  SPEAKER_00: The jobs that they could hold down of anything were Asda and McDonald's, church, Methodist church is gone, you know, the whole thing is kind of collapsed.
• 28:38
  SPEAKER_00: And now part of that is because obviously the jobs were taken away, say goodbye to the money, some key people would have moved on to where the money was, but there also has been a dependency class that has grown over time on the welfare state, I think.
• 28:53
  SPEAKER_00: And I think this sense of learned helplessness.
• 28:55
  SPEAKER_00: I I the more I think about it, the more I think our lives at every class, but we're we're on the working class at the moment, have been stripped of agency.
• 29:04
  SPEAKER_00: And um there has been some personal choices within that, as well as that having been the policy response to it, which I think has led to this circling of what we've we've had here.
• 29:16
  SPEAKER_00: Um so I suppose um we we've seen communities where there was once a drive toward self-improvement, uh collapse over time.
• 29:26
  SPEAKER_00: Um so do you do you think that there has also been a cultural collapse that's gone with this?
• 29:32
  SPEAKER_01: There's just too much of a uh Yeah, I was coming back we we talked about m some of the answers being at the end here, but I I I do think that I look I look back at um you see, in a way, London the the i when I grew up it was in a sense that the big difference there there was a difference between London and the rest of the country, but it wasn't as big as it is now, you know what I mean?
• 29:54
  SPEAKER_01: And and I say that because even even even with Margaret Thatcher coming in, she it was it still felt like a bit of a London story that she was really energizing if you look back on it now.
• 30:06
  SPEAKER_01: And you're absolutely right, but I I'm a big thing about high streets, you know, they really were the key, you know, and even in poor areas in London, the high streets still stood as something, you know, it was in there.
• 30:18
  SPEAKER_01: I come I I I I I do think that uh we've uh culturally kind of uh and I do think it's to do not only with just the uh breakdown of post-industrial North, I do think even in London I see that there's a cultural kind of issue about um things that uh I think in a way um would drive uh I think uh a positive sense of yourself, agency, you're absolutely right, resilience, a sense that um of pride in your country and your local community, you know, those kind of things have been decimated, I think, by a kind of leftist ideology that I mean I mean even around gender, the page I mean it's not it's not surprising in the end, and uh people I'm not being sexist here.
• 31:14
  SPEAKER_01: It's like saying I'm not being racist, but but it's uh but I will say that that I've just noticed that this thing is we're talking about a boys thing here, you know.
• 31:23
  SPEAKER_01: Boys are not going to university, they're they're they're in their bedrooms, kind of a mummy's there, you know, she'll bring in the food while he's on the PlayStation.
• 31:32
  SPEAKER_01: They're they're not out there doing when when I I I don't want to go back to the good old days because the 70s were not good old days, you know, because that's where I grew when I grew up.
• 31:41
  SPEAKER_01: But I went to Cub Scouts, it was pride in that.
• 31:45
  SPEAKER_01: We went there, we did our bobber job, we did, we had pro those badges that we had.
• 31:50
  SPEAKER_01: We were out there.
• 31:52
  SPEAKER_01: We we we we we had the flag on the Sunday, we used to, you know, the Union Jap, we used to take it down in the church and and and walk with it.
• 31:59
  SPEAKER_01: And it was a it was a real an activity.
• 32:01
  SPEAKER_01: We were outgoing, we were, you know, it was a sense of adventure and I and the building of resilience and also um uh a great mass of volunteers that came out of those communities.
• 32:14
  SPEAKER_01: Because I I look back and none of those, none of my Cub Scout leaders, I don't think they got paid.
• 32:19
  SPEAKER_01: I just think they just they just turned up.
• 32:22
  SPEAKER_01: Now, look, I'm not saying that in the 70s there wasn't a lot of abuse and stuff like that, and I agree that we need to have um some safeguarding and things like that.
• 32:32
  SPEAKER_01: But I think the thing has just gone to the other extreme.
• 32:36
  SPEAKER_01: When nobody wants to do this, everybody's scared.
• 32:39
  SPEAKER_01: Boys are even scared to talk to a girl now in case they're gonna be put in prison for you know saying the wrong thing.
• 32:45
  SPEAKER_01: You know, it's got to all it's got to ridiculous state.
• 32:48
  SPEAKER_01: I think the state has come in with a with a sense of this thing, we've got to fix patriarchy, you know, and we and we're gonna we're gonna be part of this in legislation and things like that.
• 33:00
  SPEAKER_01: And the whole culture seems to be one where you're just dividing people and people have lost their sense of agency.
• 33:07
  SPEAKER_01: You say boo in a workplace and everything else are like down to HR you go, you know, like you know, yeah, and you know, and you know, and but then you see, you see, this is difficult because I think what happened was much of this is a reaction to the 70s because that culture was very sexist, you know, in some ways.
• 33:29
  SPEAKER_01: On the other hand, it just probably needed to be reformed rather than this mass kind of thing that all men are enemies, all boys are dangerous, you know.
• 33:40
  SPEAKER_01: And in the end, we have a culture now where our boys are pathetic.
• 33:45
  SPEAKER_01: I have to say that.
• 33:46
  SPEAKER_01: I hate to say that word, but that's what I feel.
• 33:48
  SPEAKER_01: And this idea that boys are dangerous is ridiculous.
• 33:52
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, yes, they are as knife crime, but they're they're not they're not they've got no entrepreneurial now, they've got no sense of as you say, agency, and the welfare is the killer of all of it.
• 34:09
  SPEAKER_01: You know, it's the thing that's locked us in so that you can simply do the maths.
• 34:15
  SPEAKER_01: I will earn more on pips or whatever it is, or whatever I need to do, I'll get all that money, and that's more than going out to work.
• 34:26
  SPEAKER_01: Do the maths.
• 34:27
  SPEAKER_01: Let me stay at home and do my PlayStation.
• 34:31
  SPEAKER_00: I I can't I can't disagree with much of what you said, Dan.
• 34:35
  SPEAKER_00: Actually, the cultural trends which have taken hold amongst people, I think, would be worth talking about because uh I have certainly seen this first hand, both in cities that I've worked in and lived in.
• 34:49
  SPEAKER_00: But recently, Tony, I I just did a uh road trip around all four corners of England I was following in the tire tracks of a writer a hundred years ago called H.
• 34:58
  SPEAKER_00: V.
• 34:58
  SPEAKER_00: Morton, and it was an amazing set of books he wrote because he writes about an old England that's still there but is starting to um be encroached upon by this new England, one that is taken with ideas of modernity.
• 35:11
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, and it's quite interesting because the motor car wasn't even particularly prevalent then.
• 35:15
  SPEAKER_00: So he was getting around there almost last chance to see.
• 35:18
  SPEAKER_00: And it was funny, some of the things he saw as going off the tracks.
• 35:21
  SPEAKER_00: I thought, well, I wonder what he'd think today if he went around.
• 35:24
  SPEAKER_00: Because I was driving around the country and I got to Froome, for example, this lovely town in Somerset.
• 35:30
  SPEAKER_00: And what I noticed was the kids that were coming out of school, most of the boys, and this didn't matter where I was in the country, and it didn't really matter which ethnicity were they were either.
• 35:42
  SPEAKER_00: Um, there was this posture of aggression and transgression.
• 35:48
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, the way that they dressed, their comportment, um, these aggressive faces.
• 35:55
  SPEAKER_00: It's what see, it it's it's like everyone's walking around listening to drill music or something in their ears.
• 36:00
  SPEAKER_00: It's like everyone's taking on this international roadman culture.
• 36:04
  SPEAKER_00: And I saw it in Birmingham, you know, a couple of confused-looking Korean boys standing next to these flyovers that were kind of taking on again this kind of like gangsterish uh look.
• 36:15
  SPEAKER_00: And it seems that unless you're part of, say, the middle classes, where you might style yourself as more of a um uh you know, right-thinking progressive, or a little bit like, oh yeah, what's the what's the point, is that everyone else seems to be just taking on this, I've got this aggressive, don't mess with me um culture.
• 36:34
  SPEAKER_00: And the thing is, is you know, there's a good chance that had some of us grown up at this time with what's the you know, those things streaming into our ears and our eyes, and the things that we champion in mass culture now, uh that we may not have actually managed to escape certain things, uh, because it seems that so many people are are just pulled into it.
• 36:58
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know what you think about this, because I know you've looked into subcultures that exist, and um, you know, you're in London, so you probably see it more than I do.
• 37:06
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, you you make a good point about subcultures.
• 37:09
  SPEAKER_01: I actually am uh I'm quite positive about subcultures, even though even though I'm a conservative, big C, small c, I still I still I still feel that um part of being English and part of being British and that that whole thing is is this idea of preservation of the old, you know what I mean?
• 37:32
  SPEAKER_01: Making sure of what was in the past, right from Magna Carta all the way through, preserving those institutions.
• 37:39
  SPEAKER_01: Because in the end, once you start attacking them and what they need reforming institutions, they need reforming, but essentially that is what England does, Britain does well.
• 37:49
  SPEAKER_01: That's why the Americans flood here to see it, to hold it.
• 37:52
  SPEAKER_01: It's not a walking museum, but it's also a a space that we kind of that that that's a distinctive thing.
• 38:00
  SPEAKER_01: But on the other hand, England, right from Peasants Revolt right the way to punk rock, it's it it has a disruptive part of it inside it.
• 38:11
  SPEAKER_01: You know what I mean?
• 38:12
  SPEAKER_01: So it's a it's a I mean if you look at medieval England and people like Chaucer and all these, they're always disrupting stuff, and it it's a world Shakespeare.
• 38:22
  SPEAKER_01: You don't produce all these great writers and all these great thinkers without be having the the disruptive element that goes alongside this preservation, this conservative thing.
• 38:32
  SPEAKER_01: The two things running alongside, you know.
• 38:34
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and um even sexuality as well, it it has it has that going with it.
• 38:40
  SPEAKER_01: A sense, yes, of we've got to, we've got to, you know, we the swinging sixties were there, it was Britain was a place, but we produced great art and great stuff.
• 38:49
  SPEAKER_01: And I so I'm not gonna look my nose down on one thing and not the other.
• 38:52
  SPEAKER_01: I think that the the church, if you like, sits well in the same place as the mods of rockers who are beating each other up.
• 39:01
  SPEAKER_01: It's just it's just part of what England is, you know.
• 39:04
  SPEAKER_01: Go to Brighton and you have us, and and and and and and and some of the the female disruption you might get on uh on a night time in Newcastle with with women, you know, with wearing ver virtually nothing.
• 39:18
  SPEAKER_01: That what may make I'm not gonna look my nose up.
• 39:21
  SPEAKER_01: That's still part of what England is.
• 39:22
  SPEAKER_01: That's what part of Newcastle is, you know.
• 39:25
  SPEAKER_01: Um so I don't know if you see where I'm going with this.
• 39:28
  SPEAKER_01: It's it what what what I'm what I what what what seems to be the problem is that in the end, I don't think it's actually about um that that disruptive element or in fact even um uh the the preservation, although the preservation is important.
• 39:45
  SPEAKER_01: It's this sense of malaise.
• 39:48
  SPEAKER_01: The sense that we just un do nothing, the death of the high street, the fact that we can go at home and just sit in front of a television and do this all day, that's not English culture.
• 40:00
  SPEAKER_01: It just it just it's just you're you're not in you're not in anything really.
• 40:04
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that's the so in a sense, what I think the the cultural elites and whatever have done, they've they've they they've captured a a nation and kind of slowly killed it by that kind of s malaise that's gone along.
• 40:19
  SPEAKER_01: And that's why I'm very much against that film Adolescence.
• 40:23
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know if you know that film.
• 40:25
  SPEAKER_01: I haven't seen it, but I I I know I know it's pronounced heard about it.
• 40:28
  SPEAKER_01: And I think what what it did was it it missed the point really about what was happening to that boy.
• 40:34
  SPEAKER_01: It it was the opposite, it it wasn't that white boys are going around killing the girls in their class.
• 40:40
  SPEAKER_01: In fact, that's an American thing where they go and shoot people.
• 40:44
  SPEAKER_01: In England there are very few white boys who attack the females in their classroom violently.
• 40:51
  SPEAKER_01: We have virtually no numbers on that, you know.
• 40:54
  SPEAKER_01: And so this film has this, and uh, and what it is is that the problem he had was that he was in a coma in his in his bedroom.
• 41:04
  SPEAKER_01: And so at the end the film has the guy, the father crying in the bedroom, and that's the place where big tech, everyone else has stopped that community.
• 41:13
  SPEAKER_01: So that what it does is it it conveniently stops I think some real disruption that should be going on.
• 41:21
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah?
• 41:22
  SPEAKER_01: And I and I don't want to I don't want to go for violence, but I do think that in for my end of the thing, those communities should be more up and saying, look, you know, we want this and we want education, we want a better standard, and we don't want to be in our bedrooms.
• 41:38
  SPEAKER_01: That's not what masculinity is about.
• 41:41
  SPEAKER_01: You know, it's going out there, it is chatting up girls, it is going onto the high street, it is doing all those things that you know, we're not gonna listen to the elites in their universities talking about this is sexist, this is misogynist.
• 41:54
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, there's some of that stuff.
• 41:55
  SPEAKER_01: But overall, I I grew up in an era where misogyny was rife, the 1970s.
• 42:02
  SPEAKER_01: Believe me, it's nothing on what's going on here now, you know.
• 42:06
  SPEAKER_01: So to say that uh even with the internet and the pornography that's available, I think that the 1970s was worse.
• 42:15
  SPEAKER_01: You know?
• 42:16
  SPEAKER_01: And so it the the prop uh it's it's back to this almost sinister thing, I think, of because you see, education in a way is the driver.
• 42:26
  SPEAKER_01: And if you if you have welfareism as Labour want to have, then you just have you just pacify the working class because they don't like white working class people anyway, that the left.
• 42:36
  SPEAKER_01: They don't like that's the contradiction.
• 42:38
  SPEAKER_01: They're not actually like they actually despise them, you know, the group.
• 42:42
  SPEAKER_01: They actually the internal they talk about we're not class warriors, but they're really class haters, really, you know.
• 42:52
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and and you you touched on an interesting point there about how much of what we just see today isn't English culture, and you the this my home city, though I'm not from there, I'm from the banks of the Tyne Hexon, 20 miles to the west, Newcastle upon Tyne.
• 43:06
  SPEAKER_00: Um I grew up thinking that place had just always been hedonist central, but actually it was one of the most literate places in the country for a long time.
• 43:17
  SPEAKER_00: There are more weekly periodicals than than London.
• 43:20
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, again, images from the past will show a very well put together people, and this is at the time of high industrialism, you know, people coming out of the mines.
• 43:29
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and uh I suppose it goes to show the importance of not just economic opportunity, but a sense of being able to build lives around that, uh, and perhaps even a more uh positive national picture being told.
• 43:41
  SPEAKER_00: So, yeah, I would argue that.
• 43:44
  SPEAKER_01: I'm a point I missed here, and this is about Wales.
• 43:47
  SPEAKER_01: Because Wales is always a everybody's everyone's sort of doom about Wales at the moment.
• 43:52
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know what was But look, when the Welsh miners used to come out about because I was reading this the other day, when they used to come out of the of the mines.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_01: Of a when they were there and whatever.
• 44:01
  SPEAKER_01: They the Murder Tilville and all these other places.
• 44:04
  SPEAKER_01: The first place you know, the first place they went to was the library.
• 44:08
  SPEAKER_01: When they the first place they went, they came out of the mind and they went straight to the library, and reading was so important in that culture.
• 44:17
  SPEAKER_01: You know.
• 44:18
  SPEAKER_01: And you and you then you then you have all these people, so it's it's a myth that this idea that white working culture is is illiterate or whatever.
• 44:29
  SPEAKER_01: You produce great D H Lawrence, yeah, all these great kind of writers that emerge out of that out of that yeah.
• 44:37
  SPEAKER_01: So something something has gone wrong in the last 20 years, I think.
• 44:42
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I I agree.
• 44:43
  SPEAKER_00: I agree.
• 44:44
  SPEAKER_00: Uh well uh yes, I think we can basically point to quite a lot of today's uh cultural trends or anti-cultural trends that aren't really that that English, you know.
• 44:54
  SPEAKER_00: Again, taking that Newcastle point, that was once a hotbed of Methodism, which is very anti-drinking culture.
• 45:02
  SPEAKER_00: Uh it's almost like since that's been nipped in the buds, everything the floodgates have opened, and you know, we just have a big booze up on the weekend.
• 45:10
  SPEAKER_00: Similarly, whilst there might have been transgressive groups like punk rockers, whatever, uh you know, machete fights on TikTok, definitely not an English thing typically.
• 45:19
  SPEAKER_00: Um so that that there's certainly been a wheels coming off through this malaise, this demoralisation.
• 45:25
  SPEAKER_00: And as you've mentioned, there is a big civilizational inheritance in which to be grabbed a hold of.
• 45:30
  SPEAKER_00: And actually, let's pause on that a moment, or at least let's meditate on that a moment, because you you mentioned Catherine Burbelsing, who runs her school in Northwest London.
• 45:40
  SPEAKER_00: She does her level best to be able to transmit that civilizational inheritance to people who are not um ancestrally linked to the historic part of the nation that produced it.
• 45:51
  SPEAKER_00: And um, it is often suggested that model should be rolled out around the country.
• 45:55
  SPEAKER_00: Really hard to disagree with.
• 45:57
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, I actually wonder, given what happens to um, you know, your report with regards to left-leaning institutions, the ideological capture saying, nope, not doing anything with that.
• 46:07
  SPEAKER_00: That was a whitewash report.
• 46:09
  SPEAKER_00: Uh if I think about the the people who staff the schools, there are stats coming out about their political inclinations.
• 46:16
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 46:18
  SPEAKER_00: 7% of teachers reform and conservative voters.
• 46:20
  SPEAKER_00: It's this isn't about political parties, it's about political inclinations.
• 46:24
  SPEAKER_00: If a government or a state uh a policy maker decided that we're doing the Catherine Burble Silk Singh model and we're rolling it out nationally, I think there would be mass non-compliance, either explicit or implicit.
• 46:35
  SPEAKER_00: And so my question, Tony, is this is leading in the what is to be done, is is it time that we have to start building parallel institutions?
• 46:44
  SPEAKER_00: Because I dare say that those institutions that we're talking about, serious, uh, would actually bring in quite a fair few people who are very, very concerned about the state of things that are delivered through through the state.
• 46:58
  SPEAKER_00: Um, can we trust the institutions to even do anything about it, even if Bridget Phillipson now says it's a national disgrace?
• 47:04
  SPEAKER_00: Do we think the class warfare will disappear?
• 47:07
  SPEAKER_00: Do we think they will actually do anything about any of it?
• 47:09
  SPEAKER_00: You're absolutely right.
• 47:10
  SPEAKER_01: We cannot trust them.
• 47:11
  SPEAKER_01: I couldn't trust I couldn't trust any of them.
• 47:14
  SPEAKER_01: You know, I mean, I'm talking about the universities, I'm talking about um even the Cub Scout movement that I grew up in, I wouldn't trust any of them.
• 47:24
  SPEAKER_01: The Church of England can't trust them either.
• 47:27
  SPEAKER_01: So what's happened is our institutions have been captured.
• 47:31
  SPEAKER_01: They're part of the same program.
• 47:33
  SPEAKER_01: So you're absolutely right.
• 47:35
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that um you would have to create uh newer new universities, that are new colleges, new volunteer movements that are just based on I think what I would call strong 19th century Victorian values.
• 47:54
  SPEAKER_01: Back back to the roots of it, you know, Dickens, all these kind of, you know, Mill.
• 47:59
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, you know, and you know, Darwin, I mean, we we've got to have all these people up there now as the stars again, you know?
• 48:05
  SPEAKER_01: And they've got to be resurrected and brought back.
• 48:08
  SPEAKER_01: You know, they can't be people who would just them machine gunning every day, you know, which is what happens in those institutions.
• 48:15
  SPEAKER_01: White males are just uh hunted down.
• 48:18
  SPEAKER_01: That's what they call it, that's what they call education.
• 48:22
  SPEAKER_01: And and you know, so in the end, the best, and this is what this is what makes the whole thing so sad.
• 48:28
  SPEAKER_01: The best of Britain, really, is being hunted down, you know.
• 48:33
  SPEAKER_01: So you're absolutely right.
• 48:35
  SPEAKER_01: I would not I uh now I I would be scared.
• 48:39
  SPEAKER_01: Now, this is I have a very difficult, this is where my you really caught me here.
• 48:43
  SPEAKER_01: If there's a contradiction I've got is one.
• 48:46
  SPEAKER_01: How do I encourage white boys to go to university and then have to deal with the crap that they're gonna have to hear?
• 48:54
  SPEAKER_01: Say we're gonna do English or or or or history or whatever, all the decolonization nonsense they're gonna have to deal with, you know, how the self the the hatred that they're gonna the hatred they're gonna have the the self-hate almost that they're gonna kind of have to inculcate in those boys.
• 49:10
  SPEAKER_01: Why would I want to encourage them to step out into that?
• 49:14
  SPEAKER_01: You know, I I that's why I tend to sort of I mean, at least to a certain extent in STEM, you might be able to get away with some of it, you know, because science is a little bit more neutral, you know, but it but is it?
• 49:25
  SPEAKER_01: I think that's being captured as well.
• 49:27
  SPEAKER_01: So I don't know.
• 49:28
  SPEAKER_01: Uh uh here's where I, in terms of the answers, we have got to over the next whatever it is, it it might this government won't be the one to do it.
• 49:38
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe the next set might be able to, but is to rebuild uh I mean we have to sack a lot of teachers, we have to close a lot of institutions and and and try and rebuild.
• 49:51
  SPEAKER_00: You know.
• 49:53
  SPEAKER_00: Well, yes, I'll be interested to hear some of your other ideas, but it does feel like we are ripe for dissolution of the monasteries 2.0.
• 50:03
  SPEAKER_00: Um uh not necessarily sympathetic to the first one, but I can understand why uh the leader of a state might decide that a set of institutions are no longer working in its favour.
• 50:14
  SPEAKER_00: And how could we actually argue uh in favour of some of these institutions?
• 50:19
  SPEAKER_00: Whilst grades keep on going up, there's no doubt that educational standards are not really, because if you were to compare the reading lists of those going to university again, 50, 100 years ago, so much more expected of them.
• 50:31
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, I think there's a quite a large number, perhaps even 40% of uh university students get diagnoses for various things now that allow them to uh get extensions and this, that, and the other.
• 50:42
  SPEAKER_00: So that you you're not exactly producing the best and the brightest.
• 50:46
  SPEAKER_00: So we've lowered standards, as you say, we uh are typically driven by ideology over truth.
• 50:53
  SPEAKER_00: And not only that, we have um uh an in a set of institutions that are supposed to produce the next set of leaders.
• 51:00
  SPEAKER_00: But if we look at all of that and we go, do we want those hands on the levers of power when we have a national debt at high as high as it is, um, community relations fraying because of uh mass immigration, uh, then you've got the dispossession of various groups on the basis of their own immutable characteristics.
• 51:19
  SPEAKER_00: The country's a bit of a tinderbox, we lost ourselves culturally and spiritually, don't have the heart to try and turn back in any way.
• 51:25
  SPEAKER_00: Um it seems to me like you would actually go, right, you you are working counter to the interests of the national health.
• 51:32
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe it's time we close you down.
• 51:34
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 51:34
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, there's one word that is is is at this thing, and it's it's courage.
• 51:39
  SPEAKER_01: The word is courage, you know, the the a a leadership that's courageous enough to say this is nonsense.
• 51:45
  SPEAKER_01: We're not gonna we're gonna the common sense thing is to do this.
• 51:48
  SPEAKER_01: I mean I came across a couple of teachers the other day and they were telling me they'd they don't believe in meritocracy, they just don't believe in it.
• 51:55
  SPEAKER_01: That's it, that's how they that's that's their philosophy on life.
• 51:58
  SPEAKER_01: And so and they're running schools, you know?
• 52:01
  SPEAKER_01: And you say you you you you you really need to kind of um embed uh you you're absolutely right, a new set of people who are on the handle of that.
• 52:12
  SPEAKER_01: I think it might work if you uh begin to almost recover um uh what I call kind of local communities.
• 52:24
  SPEAKER_01: I mean in Hackney where I did some work, uh we managed to recover the schools from some of the madness.
• 52:30
  SPEAKER_01: And it was really around high expectations.
• 52:32
  SPEAKER_01: Interesting.
• 52:33
  SPEAKER_01: Which is really interesting, you see, because once you start uh positioning particularly white children and white boys as sort of, you know, basically you either say a racist or they're just they're no that they can't do much or they're not really they're not in for this, then you you you you you you you have a low expectation of them.
• 52:53
  SPEAKER_01: If you have a higher one or a very, very high one that you can do well and and and and actually, as you say, you're not then uh putting in their heads the notion that their history and their uh ancestors were just you know just a bunch of no goods.
• 53:11
  SPEAKER_01: Then in a in a in a way that will help you know to so you have to go for some national pride here.
• 53:19
  SPEAKER_01: And that's where the problem the gut the governments have with this.
• 53:22
  SPEAKER_01: And um you know Kathleen's thing's interesting.
• 53:26
  SPEAKER_01: I was involved in some of that, but I would like to see a you know in a places like the suburbs of Liverpool, some places in Yorkshire where you you you have a different kind of offer.
• 53:38
  SPEAKER_01: And I would I would go for a lot of pride.
• 53:42
  SPEAKER_01: I don't I do a lot of 19th century work.
• 53:45
  SPEAKER_01: I would, I would, I would really have lots of images of of people who look like them, you know, up in up in around the place, you know, and um really beginning to sort of instill local pride in those children again, you know, and um it's not it's not a a notion that you're saying, oh, all these black and Asian people are bad, or you're trying to make a negative thing.
• 54:12
  SPEAKER_01: In fact, what you're just trying to do is tell the truth.
• 54:15
  SPEAKER_01: And in fact, you know, that that 19th century project had some bad a lot of bad things in there, but it had a sheer lot of good things inside there as well.
• 54:25
  SPEAKER_01: And these are they, yeah?
• 54:27
  SPEAKER_01: And you've got to and and you can take pride in that, you know.
• 54:30
  SPEAKER_01: Um and I I and I suppose it it it is almost a national curriculum of uh of of national pride for those for those for those for those young people.
• 54:43
  SPEAKER_01: So they so they don't go they don't gr they won't grow up as we never did, really, in a sense, and we had some of that stuff, feeling that you are somehow um have a white privilege or you're chauvinistic or whatever.
• 54:58
  SPEAKER_01: You actually want to get out of your bedroom, which is really what we're talking about here, and go and be enterprising and you know uh volunteer in your community and and and feel like it's not a project, it's not about oh, I am white and therefore I am great.
• 55:16
  SPEAKER_01: It's not it doesn't do with that, it's just about agency, it's about you as an individual doing well, and that and those simple things are doing well.
• 55:26
  SPEAKER_01: We have lost there is one elephant in the room or kind of thing in the room that I think is probably what is not working for us, and that is the collapse of Christianity in the project.
• 55:39
  SPEAKER_01: Because and I and it's something that if you ask me what's changed, I I changed my mind a lot about Christianity because it it helped me a lot.
• 55:49
  SPEAKER_01: But then as a working class boy growing up, I wondered whether it whether in fact I I did smell a bit of Marxism.
• 55:57
  SPEAKER_01: I wondered whether it was the opium of the people.
• 55:59
  SPEAKER_01: But I realize now that it's actually the great liberator because the stories around Christianity are so much about agency.
• 56:09
  SPEAKER_01: If you look at all those Old Testament stories, and the great thing is they're all whether you like it or not, they're all about boys.
• 56:15
  SPEAKER_01: You know, you talk about like um David and Goliath, you know, you talk about even you know, even the old men get a stuff, you got Noah, you've got Abraham, I know they're old, but you get, but you get lots of great stories about young men doing well, you know.
• 56:29
  SPEAKER_01: So, I mean, why is that shelved?
• 56:33
  SPEAKER_01: You know, you have to ask yourself, why are those stories about young men who are uh uh taking on big i i ideas and and and monsters and and and winning in a sense and feeling victorious in that in the narrative?
• 56:51
  SPEAKER_01: For put aside all the kind of notions of you know whether this is um you know you know something that was from the past, we've got to get away from it.
• 57:02
  SPEAKER_01: They're actually very modern projects that are in that in those stories, you know.
• 57:08
  SPEAKER_01: And I and and and I I think I don't know how we do it because we've got to clean out the Church of England, or maybe it's another another institution that does it, because they don't believe in it either.
• 57:19
  SPEAKER_01: In fact, some of them don't even believe in God, you know.
• 57:22
  SPEAKER_01: So I I do think there needs to be some kind of uh narrative that we can latch on to to help us through this.
• 57:33
  SPEAKER_00: Uh yeah, you're right, Christianity is the elephant in the room.
• 57:36
  SPEAKER_00: I I don't think there's really anything else on offer within Western civilization and and its uh contents that provides people with um the breadth of human dignity that can be experienced, uh, the depth of human life, uh whether you people want to believe in it uh dogmatically or not, the reality is the arc of those stories um uh is like the perfect coming together of every kind of myth that speaks to the human soul and uh drives agency and helps us reflect on our consciousness in a way that political ideologies cannot.
• 58:14
  SPEAKER_00: And I think if anything's been proven uh since the post-war years is that radical secularism doesn't offer the same thing, and that you you can see just how quickly it has dissipated.
• 58:27
  SPEAKER_00: You know, our whole I mean, England first was united through the Christian faith.
• 58:31
  SPEAKER_00: Um, the West is only the West because it's an outgrowth of or the remnants of Christendom.
• 58:38
  SPEAKER_00: You know, anything that we talk about with regards to unity is shot through with Christian assumptions, including our laws and our institutions, indeed parliament.
• 58:46
  SPEAKER_00: And so trying to do without it is pretty tough.
• 58:48
  SPEAKER_00: But there are certain, again, arresting images from the past, like there's this one image that makes the rounds on Twitter uh on one of the kind of nursing days of the year, and it's a picture of uh nurses at prayer before starting their shift in a hospital in Leeds, just all knelt round a table in 1955.
• 59:06
  SPEAKER_00: Um, now just to think of that happening now is remarkable, but it's not to make a point about oh, everyone should just get on their knees, but to think if that's what their lives are oriented toward, and you think about the whole idea of Christian service and Christian charity compared to faceless bureaucracy, um, I'm not too sure what radical secularism can do to lift us up, so we all just choose from the smogest board of ideas, and definitely not when you have you know very muscular rival faiths like Islam, which back to Church of England, you mentioned that they have totally uh um uh abdicated from their throne of steward of English civilization.
• 59:49
  SPEAKER_00: I I uh on this road trip, every almost every church and cathedral I went into, without fail apart from the small little parish churches, were effectively equivocating between Christianity and the other faiths, and in some ways just denigrating the faith, just making it look like any other idea set.
• 1:00:08
  SPEAKER_00: And that's a big problem.
• 1:00:10
  SPEAKER_00: So how how how that happens, I don't know, but I think more than anything it's it's going to be organic growth like anything.
• 1:00:17
  SPEAKER_00: It's a few people who start to win the battle and good role models and all the rest of it.
• 1:00:22
  SPEAKER_00: But right now the institutions are struggling around in the ruins of a tradition they don't understand, and uh and then trying to just come up with laws to fix everything, and of course it's not working.
• 1:00:32
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I mean you've got it it it's it must be very hard being a Marxist in England at the moment because I mean you you've got you've got this because you've got to unless you kind of say that almost everything in this British culture is is you know is nothing because it all it all frames around Christianity.
• 1:00:53
  SPEAKER_01: You know what I mean?
• 1:00:53
  SPEAKER_01: It all it all it general Christianity frames that everything.
• 1:00:56
  SPEAKER_01: So you you either now it's it's not to say that oh i uh everything is right, you know, it's not that everything is right, but that at the same time you've got to then say, well look, there's if this is the frame, there are things that yes, perhaps needed reforming and changing, and we did we literally did have a reformation, but it it but it at the same time I think you can't get away from that even you know, you know, even if I mean this is where it gets even weird, even if we're gonna knock it, but they don't nobody even knows what it is.
• 1:01:29
  SPEAKER_01: So it's kind of like a ghost.
• 1:01:31
  SPEAKER_01: You know, no nobody knows who they are.
• 1:01:33
  SPEAKER_01: They're just in this this sort of malaise.
• 1:01:36
  SPEAKER_01: They don't they they think there was something there, they see these empty churches, but they wonder what was what was there in the past.
• 1:01:42
  SPEAKER_01: So you you you don't you don't even have a sense of your past anymore.
• 1:01:45
  SPEAKER_01: It's kind of like that that's that that's not allowed anymore.
• 1:01:48
  SPEAKER_01: So we're all we're all modern or we're all postmodern.
• 1:01:52
  SPEAKER_01: And um and and uh and and so there's a there's a reckoning, there's a reckoning to that, and it it comes in this mental health thing that we that we're under, you know, because in the end, that can't answer some of those key kind of um issues around unhappiness and and and and and and feeling unfulfilled, or that the the the toys can actually fit for the mobile phone and all that stuff can actually actually be the answer.
• 1:02:22
  SPEAKER_01: You've got to then think about something which we call that a spirituality, something outside of yourself in a way to push that on.
• 1:02:30
  SPEAKER_01: And our schools and our kind of uh I dare I say universities were once built on that that that notion.
• 1:02:39
  SPEAKER_01: So look, yeah, we we we there's a project there to do, and I I'm I'm not sure.
• 1:02:44
  SPEAKER_01: I I'm not sure what we do.
• 1:02:46
  SPEAKER_01: Do we get Bridget Phillipson to pray before the meetings at the DFE, you know?
• 1:02:52
  SPEAKER_01: Well, you know, you know what's ironic?
• 1:02:54
  SPEAKER_01: In Jamaica, that's what actually happens before before I went to one of the um uh a meeting at uh they're equivalent to our DFE.
• 1:03:05
  SPEAKER_01: And before the meeting, the minister and everybody held hands and they prayed before the meeting, and then they went into the meeting.
• 1:03:13
  SPEAKER_01: So what what here's where it gets really weird that back in the colonies, wherever they are aware of that, they're still hanging on to the past that we've discarded.
• 1:03:24
  SPEAKER_01: And and all and and a lot of the good things that we've discarded, you know, as we march straight through into secularism and and find that there's nothing that there's just all there is in the end is pornography and and and and and and Netflix and some gaming, and that's that's all there is out there.
• 1:03:44
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I yeah, it really is.
• 1:03:46
  SPEAKER_00: It really is that bleak and throw that in with just broken families and abortions and uh i i it just just whichever way you look, there's a there's a it's funny because it's all downstream of various cultural revolutions, and I think people probably thought the cultural revolution of the post-second world war was a bloodless revolution, but when you look around it at the despair, at the disregard of human life, uh no revolution is bloodless, even if it's an ideological one.
• 1:04:12
  SPEAKER_00: Uh Tony, I have kept you long enough and thank you for a nourishing end to the discussion.
• 1:04:18
  SPEAKER_00: But one question that I ask all of my guests before I allow them to depart this digital ethereal realm is what have you what have you changed your mind on during the course of your life and what was it that made you think differently?
• 1:04:30
  SPEAKER_00: I definitely think it was Christianity.
• 1:04:32
  SPEAKER_01: Because I came to it, liked it, and then I left it thinking it was boring, and I thought it was um not for me and not radical enough.
• 1:04:40
  SPEAKER_01: Now I now as it says now that I'm older, as it were, and looking back, I do think that look, it it's got it's got it's got the great stories, and I think that anything that's got the best stories, the best narrative, and and and and it's quite interesting.
• 1:04:56
  SPEAKER_01: Now we're talking about a prime minister that has no vision in a sense in England today, because he's got no stories, he's got no he's got no sense of narrative, he doesn't understand how it what was what happened in the past, what was the middle, and what's going to be in the future.
• 1:05:11
  SPEAKER_01: And I do think that um many ways I've come back to that to see to so that that would be the in my head, the sort of the radical change that's happened to me in a sense.
• 1:05:23
  SPEAKER_01: And uh and so I'm kind of sticking with that at the moment.
• 1:05:26
  SPEAKER_01: I think that's the well basically that's that that's that's the only game in town at the moment.
• 1:05:30
  SPEAKER_00: Hmm.
• 1:05:31
  SPEAKER_00: Well, the story storytelling creatures, aren't we?
• 1:05:33
  SPEAKER_00: We under ourselves understand ourselves through a story, and uh we've allowed ourselves to construct a world in which you could uh be born, go to the grave, and throughout all of that, no symbolism around the important events, whether initiation rituals like baptism, no marriage, because it's just pointless and old hat.
• 1:05:52
  SPEAKER_00: You could just basically incinerate me when I die.
• 1:05:54
  SPEAKER_00: You don't need a ceremony.
• 1:05:55
  SPEAKER_00: Um yet, how empty does life feel?
• 1:05:59
  SPEAKER_00: And even more so.
• 1:06:00
  SPEAKER_00: So when we're just, as you talked about a few times today, we're locked up in our houses, we're mediating our experience through screens.
• 1:06:06
  SPEAKER_00: We barely press the flesh of anyone or make eye contact with people anymore.
• 1:06:10
  SPEAKER_00: And we just think we're, I don't know, sacks of flesh on bone, and that's it.
• 1:06:14
  SPEAKER_00: You know, just entertain ourselves to death.
• 1:06:17
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:06:18
  SPEAKER_01: But let's hope, let's hope.
• 1:06:19
  SPEAKER_01: Let's be hopeful.
• 1:06:20
  SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.
• 1:06:20
  SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.
• 1:06:21
  SPEAKER_00: No, you you have planted some seeds of hope.
• 1:06:23
  SPEAKER_00: If anything, I'm wanting I want conversations like these to act as inspiration for people to see that they can be so much more, that we indeed are so much more, whether you like it or not, whether people like it or not.
• 1:06:33
  SPEAKER_00: But if people were able to recognize that, they might be able to start exercising agency in the right way instead of just toward entertainment and consumption and ease.
• 1:06:45
  SPEAKER_00: So, Tony, thank you for planting those seeds of hopes.
• 1:06:49
  SPEAKER_00: And um you've been very busy on the report front.
• 1:06:52
  SPEAKER_00: Perhaps before you go, where can people find you online?
• 1:06:55
  SPEAKER_00: And what can we expect from you next?
• 1:06:57
  SPEAKER_01: Well, um what I'm planning to do, and this is where communities can help me, I'm actually gonna do a roadshow.
• 1:07:05
  SPEAKER_01: Um, uh what Americans call town halls.
• 1:07:08
  SPEAKER_01: Yep.
• 1:07:08
  SPEAKER_01: And what it's gonna be is gonna be a group of I mean, I'm gonna get people who want to come out.
• 1:07:13
  SPEAKER_01: I really want to go after dads.
• 1:07:14
  SPEAKER_01: So we're thinking of calling it um why dads matter, but there's there's there might be something in it or about the family.
• 1:07:21
  SPEAKER_01: But we're not we're not really gonna be in London.
• 1:07:22
  SPEAKER_01: We're gonna be in some part.
• 1:07:24
  SPEAKER_01: We want to go all the way around, we want to come to northeast, northwest, midlands.
• 1:07:27
  SPEAKER_01: So um I I I I I'm basically um you know open to I mean, the roadshow goes on.
• 1:07:35
  SPEAKER_01: We're sponsored with, but but we we probably want to look for that to happen.
• 1:07:39
  SPEAKER_01: So that's really one of the big things to do these town halls.
• 1:07:43
  SPEAKER_01: And then almost like the conversation we've been having today, you know, that but within the communities in a language that they understand in a in a in a context that is um much more kind of about answers and being challenging, and uh, and and particularly this issue of of of the plight of of white um uh uh low-income boys.
• 1:08:03
  SPEAKER_01: We want to really try and see if we can give some answers to that.
• 1:08:05
  SPEAKER_01: So that's the next thing, the the roadshow.
• 1:08:08
  SPEAKER_01: So look out for that.
• 1:08:09
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I will do, and uh I will keep an eye out for the bus as it travels through the northern Northumberland.
• 1:08:14
  SPEAKER_00: And um later this year I will become a dad, so hopefully I can join you and uh yeah, keep keep me posted.
• 1:08:21
  SPEAKER_00: That is a wonderful project, it's exactly the kind of thing that we need, so keep fighting the good fight, Tony.
• 1:08:25
  SPEAKER_00: All right, thank you, thank you.
• 1:08:26
  SPEAKER_00: Lord Sewell, all the best.