Latest / Thinking Class / #031 - Ben Cobley - We Are Suffering The Institutional Erasure Of The English

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#031 - Ben Cobley - We Are Suffering The Institutional Erasure Of The English · Thinking Class

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_02: Hello, classmates, and welcome to the show.
• 0:02
  SPEAKER_02: I'm John Gillam, and today I'm speaking with Ben Cobley.
• 0:05
  SPEAKER_02: Ben writes the blog A Free Left Blog and is author of The Tribe, The Liberal Left and the System of Diversity.
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_02: Ben is a journalist by trade and a former Labour Party activist.
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_02: In this episode, Ben and I talk about being English and Englishness, what it is and how it has come under threat from the spread of progressive ideologies, what it means to be a part of a nation, why there might be a hostility toward the English and Englishness, the impact of liberalism on England and the world, the difficulty of finding the language to explain something deeply felt, the impact of modernity and cultural disintegration, the feeling of overpopulation in a small country, why Ben joined the Labour Party and why he left, and much, much more.
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_02: For any of you who find Englishness comforting, funny, ridiculous, or kitsch, then well, you're in for a treat.
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_02: Because listening back, I noticed Ben and I, without realizing it, were frequently as stereotypically English as you could possibly get.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_02: Lots of sorry for interrupting.
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_02: No, please you go and being very self-deprecating in our humour.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_02: This episode is more of a personal exploration as to what it feels like as an Englishman in a modern world taken with globalized ideals.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_02: So please do enjoy.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_02: And before we dive in, you would be really helping me out if you clicked subscribe on whatever platform you are listening to or watching on.
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_02: The more subscribers we have, the more guests we can attract, and the faster Thinking Class grows.
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_02: Enjoy the show, classmates.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_02: Welcome to Thinking Class, Ben.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_02: Thanks so much for joining me.
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_03: Hi, John.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_03: Thanks very much.
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_03: Good to be here.
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_02: Well, very good to have you too.
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_02: Appreciate we had a very long preamble to this conversation where we got into lots of stuff and could have easily pressed record on it.
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_02: So I am going to try not to get you to repeat yourself.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_02: But what I thought I'd speak to you about today was what it means to be English.
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_02: You wrote a piece for The Critic recently, um, where there was a sense of uh a feeling of diminishment, uh a feeling of displacement as an Englishman.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_02: And I suppose this seems to be downstream from what you became um known for with your opening uh kind of foray into the writing world, writing about what it means to be part of the liberal left and its system of diversity and having left the Labour Party.
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_02: And so you write a lot on culture war issues and uh the preoccupations of the liberal metropolitan class.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_02: So what's behind that?
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_02: What's driven you to write this article about Englishness?
• 2:47
  SPEAKER_02: What does it mean?
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_03: Well, actually, actually, I think it is very closely related to the to the book.
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_03: Um, because I mean one of the chapters in the in the book, The Tribe, is is called the Unfavoured Groups.
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_03: So I have the favoured groups, you know, of the liberal left, wider group, the system of diversity, and then you have the unfavoured groups, and one of those groups is the English, of course.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_03: You know, you have men, you have white people, you have um heterosexual people, uh you could say non-Muslims, maybe non-immigrants, you know, categorized as sort of unfavored.
• 3:25
  SPEAKER_03: English are very much in there.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_03: So, in a sense, I was I was writing to an extent of personal reflection on on just being in that unfavoured group.
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_03: In the book, I I didn't really get into you know my own personal feelings.
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_03: I just tried to write it as it was.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_03: And in this article, I was I was looking to connect to you know that personal sense of loss, and not just I feel, but a great many others obviously feel from the reaction to the article, you know, clearly reflected that.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_03: Um so it was it was looking at that that personal reflection, but also um looking to explain it.
• 4:09
  SPEAKER_03: And I actually went back to my book, you know, to look to explain it and to see the sources that I used then, like Cole Polanyi, you know, who's writing about the Industrial Revolution and the massive social transformation that happened there, especially to rural people moving into the crowded cities and their whole lives were effectively destroyed and they had to rebuild.
• 4:34
  SPEAKER_03: And I I was saying that this is a phenomenon which I call, in a sense, existential defeat, you know, where the connections, the relations which make your life are no longer tenable, they no longer make sense anymore.
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_03: You can't stay in the country anymore because your land's being taken away, you know, and you can't make a living.
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_03: So, in a sense, what I'm saying is um not not to such maybe such a great extent, or you know, as other examples like in colonialism, or you know, the experience of the American Indians is is quite similar, I think.
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_03: But in a sense, I'm I'm saying that the English, and especially uh I guess the white English male, but not just the white English male, not just the English, not just men, are going through a similar type experience now through the penetration of this system of identity politics.
• 5:33
  SPEAKER_03: Um and it's it it it's penetrating into I think virtually all corners of our lives now, even private lives.
• 5:41
  SPEAKER_03: Um so causing ruptures in friendships, even in family relationships, not just in the workplace, not just in public politics, in the way our institutions are effectively revolutioning, uh revolutionizing themselves, you know, turning themselves into something that they they weren't before, sacrificing their previous previous purposes, you know, standards.
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_03: Um so yeah, that was that was really a long-winded explanation, but that was where what I was trying to do in the article, two things, a little personal reflection, and then trying to explain it, and I guess as well, you know, a little reflection about the end about where we're going and how I just feel I know a lot of people may actually feel pessimistic, even though, in terms of thought, we may we may have reasons for optimism, or we may just be optimistic.
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_03: It may maybe a sunny day.
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_03: We may be, you know, we may be feeling quite good today.
• 6:45
  SPEAKER_03: But as you know, the the general feeling reflection reflecting on it for me is that we're in we're we're going into a bad place, it's gonna get worse.
• 6:58
  SPEAKER_03: And I can see there are countervading forces, us two sitting here now is one of those, but I don't see them as strong enough.
• 7:07
  SPEAKER_03: You know, the mainstream discussion discourse, if you tune into the BBC, is very different.
• 7:15
  SPEAKER_03: You won't get a conversation like this, or you're very unlikely to.
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_02: Well, maybe uh toward the end of the conversation we can talk a bit about what those other can counterveiling forces might be, perhaps for the purposes of trying to put some meat on the bones of that that question of Englishness, is well, why don't we start by trying to define it?
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_02: Because if we say that it's sorry, I didn't actually what does it mean?
• 7:47
  SPEAKER_02: What does it mean to be English to you?
• 7:48
  SPEAKER_03: No, I I didn't actually answer your question, of course, did I?
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_03: Well, one of your questions, which was that, which and I to be honest, I I would quite like to avoid answering that because it's it's an existential thing, it's it's shades, it's not absolutes, it's not you are this and you are that.
• 8:09
  SPEAKER_03: It's you know, you're you're more this type of thing.
• 8:13
  SPEAKER_03: And I mean, I in sorry, briefly in the in the article I did refer to Kate Fox, her book's Watch in English, so she refers to things like humour, moderation, hypocrisy, which I quite like, but that's that's closely linked to our form of politeness.
• 8:31
  SPEAKER_03: You know, you're a hypocrite in order not to cause trouble, you know, which I think is is in in some ways quite a reasonable thing to do.
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_03: Uh but I I think it's closely related to your forms of politeness, uh and and not causing trouble.
• 8:51
  SPEAKER_03: You know, not that it's caused people trouble, and you know, moderation.
• 8:56
  SPEAKER_03: Any anyway, I'd sorry, I think you I can see you busting to interrupt.
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_02: Maybe I certainly wasn't, I certainly wasn't.
• 9:04
  SPEAKER_02: I was trying to hang on to my thought.
• 9:06
  SPEAKER_02: Um, maybe maybe I've just proved the point about Englishness there, the politeness.
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_02: No, no, of course.
• 9:11
  SPEAKER_02: Uh that wasn't trying to jump in.
• 9:13
  SPEAKER_02: Uh I I I was reading um uh Robert Toomb's book, The The English and Their History.
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_02: It's this big thousand-page history book.
• 9:22
  SPEAKER_02: Um, run it.
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_02: And he is a very good book, isn't it?
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_02: And um I suppose the way he characterizes it, he does it within the context of what it means to be part of a nation.
• 9:32
  SPEAKER_02: And his view is that um to have this a national identity is quite a modern conception for most countries, because you know, Germany, for example, was lots of princely states for a very long time until it would become a unified country in the 19th century.
• 9:49
  SPEAKER_02: And so any idea of German-ness as a nation is a very new concept, he said.
• 9:54
  SPEAKER_02: But England he doesn't really apply that to because it's more ancient, you know, from the 8th century that people were talking about the English people, whether it was Bede or whether it was the Anglo-Saxon kings.
• 10:07
  SPEAKER_02: And so he talks about England and Englishness, first beginning as an idea before it became a unified kingdom all those years ago, 1200 years ago, a thousand years ago, and then it was a country, and then over time it was a people, and the culture obviously builds around that.
• 10:25
  SPEAKER_02: And he said, you know, you can see the seeds of a country and its monuments and its books and its institutions and its symbols.
• 10:32
  SPEAKER_02: And I guess this is why sometimes I bridle in modernity the changing of things like the English canon to try and modernize it, because it it all hangs on everything that we just spoke about, and everything that we just spoke about when you go back to origin stories, it was so closely bound up with um even the Christian religion, which I know you mentioned within that, and many of the things that are seeking to displace um whatever it is that's within our canon, the things that we see as being particularly English don't come from that same, that same root.
• 11:06
  SPEAKER_02: And I suppose looking at it in this way, it's not to say that actually it's about having a genetic link, it's about this cultural kinship being a part of something and taking part in it, which I suppose is more of a civic nationalist idea than an ethno-nationalist idea, which obviously everyone gets worried about right now.
• 11:26
  SPEAKER_03: Definitely, it's it's really interesting in that way.
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_03: And on in reflecting on this sometimes, I've I've thought that you know there are aspects of Englishness to other countries as well, you know, to America.
• 11:41
  SPEAKER_03: Um but but I think we've we've seen a similar type process, obviously, to that we've seen here of the kind of the reduction in presence of a positive version of Englishness.
• 11:54
  SPEAKER_03: Um over there, for example, with the WASP, you know, the white Anglo-Saxon Protestants.
• 11:59
  SPEAKER_03: And I've been reading about the um the Korean War, you know, lately, and it's it's remarkable when you come across all the names of these generals, you know, virtually all of them have English names.
• 12:13
  SPEAKER_03: And that that just it struck me as quite unusual for what America is now.
• 12:19
  SPEAKER_03: And you know, the wasps have kind of almost like died away from public life, especially in the Democratic Party.
• 12:26
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, they're they're kind of effectively, you know, the outgroup, I think, to the Democratic Party.
• 12:32
  SPEAKER_03: But also I was reflecting on on India.
• 12:37
  SPEAKER_03: You know, when I went to India when I was like um 18 or 19, which was quite a few years ago, believe it or not, and um the the traces of Englishn were still quite strong there, you know.
• 12:52
  SPEAKER_03: You could say of Empire, but I'd say it was it was more of a sensibility, and um the way, you know, the newspapers they were very sort of old English in a sense.
• 13:05
  SPEAKER_03: And um people used to come up to me on trains and find out I was English and just share a front of a similar culture, you know, with me.
• 13:15
  SPEAKER_03: And I I haven't been to India since, but I do get the impression that at least sort of there being a positive attachment to Englishness has at least in public life has almost died out.
• 13:29
  SPEAKER_03: You know, now it's something to be very hostile to, you know.
• 13:33
  SPEAKER_02: Well why do you think it is so controversial to speak of being English, or why why do you think there is hostility to Englishness?
• 13:46
  SPEAKER_03: Um I mean obviously there's the history.
• 13:51
  SPEAKER_03: I mean colonialism, you know, genuinely have had negative effects all over the world, and not not that it's all all negative, but it did, and there's understandably a lot of resentment about that, and also sort of judgment, and you know, people knowing some of the history.
• 14:10
  SPEAKER_03: Uh I don't have any problem with that at all.
• 14:13
  SPEAKER_03: But obviously, there's a rocket being put under that, uh, and now it's it's become a proper visceral hostility and uh an institutional and a dogmatic hostility.
• 14:28
  SPEAKER_03: And um talking about causation though, and it's it's very difficult the way these things always kind of come with the wind, don't they?
• 14:37
  SPEAKER_03: They come and go with the wind in fashion.
• 14:40
  SPEAKER_03: I'm hoping it does, and that they go away.
• 14:43
  SPEAKER_03: You know, that we're no longer the great enemy of the world, neither the new Nazis.
• 14:48
  SPEAKER_03: Um, but I think especially in this country, it obviously has a lot to do with immigration and the politicization of identity, especially by the left, and the way they, you know, they allocate as a um allocate favoured groups, you know, which are non-white, which are immigrants, you know, are are by definition not the like the ethnic English at least.
• 15:13
  SPEAKER_03: So it's associating Englishness and English people, people I get who identify with English, at least in an implicitly negative way, because they're not on the positive group.
• 15:27
  SPEAKER_03: And and I think this just feeds through through a kind of existential logic into the way people think about it.
• 15:35
  SPEAKER_03: And I think we're now probably seeing the consequences of decades of this, plus immigr lots more immigration, uh, lots more politicization, lots more interest in that politicization.
• 15:49
  SPEAKER_03: You know, since since there are far more people of immigrant backgrounds, it it pays for the left, especially a lot more to politicise those groups as being dependent on them.
• 16:03
  SPEAKER_03: It's like, you know, you're really at risk from these awful people, we will protect you.
• 16:09
  SPEAKER_03: Um so I think that's what's going on, and the way the way obviously, I mean, traditionally the the liberal left more widely is in the institutions.
• 16:19
  SPEAKER_03: You know, traditionally conservatives are too busy either you know conserving things or you know making money.
• 16:27
  SPEAKER_03: Um so in the in the state and in you know artistic institutions, creative institutions, all the rest of it, you you know, traditionally you've had you know a large you know left, liberal left prison.
• 16:42
  SPEAKER_03: But that's kind of lost its sense of tolerance now.
• 16:48
  SPEAKER_03: I mean obviously it still talks about tolerance, but it's it's changed the meaning of tolerance to mean you know, you don't interfere with what I like.
• 16:57
  SPEAKER_03: You know, you don't oppose in a thing that we that we you know that we like and the the people that we protect.
• 17:06
  SPEAKER_03: So so I mean that's maybe a bit of a long-winded like attempt at an explanation, but I think that's basically got there.
• 17:13
  SPEAKER_03: It's a you know it's a it's a group of things going together and uh you know, kind of like I say, an existential logic working through.
• 17:22
  SPEAKER_02: I've heard people talk about the academic, uh not the academic, the institutional focus on expunging things like in Englishness from the record.
• 17:33
  SPEAKER_02: And lots of people have proffered different reasons for this.
• 17:37
  SPEAKER_02: And one of the most recent cases which highlights it is the erasure of the words and the period Anglo-Saxon from the academic record.
• 17:49
  SPEAKER_02: So North American educational institutions have been behind this, where they're trying to make the case that Anglo-Saxons were never really a people, and it was something that we just came up with post-hoc, and that they should now be referred to as the early English period.
• 18:10
  SPEAKER_02: And English and British academic institutions have now taken this on, and people have already started to refer to it.
• 18:16
  SPEAKER_02: I noticed it with a recent podcast guest, and I didn't didn't notice it at the time.
• 18:20
  SPEAKER_02: But as we spoke about earlier, is Anglo-Saxons were a people.
• 18:23
  SPEAKER_02: We had kings who talked about being the kings of the Anglo-Saxons, so it's not that it was just made up post hoc.
• 18:31
  SPEAKER_02: So this institutional bias, I suppose, you're right.
• 18:36
  SPEAKER_02: People can feel it, they might not know all of the academic background to it all, but they know there's a sense of taking away.
• 18:45
  SPEAKER_02: And I guess the question is, is you know, what's going to come of that existential despair that you talk about?
• 18:51
  SPEAKER_02: Because presumably lots of people are feeling it and they don't have the outlook, uh, the outlet for it, then that's a bit of a problem.
• 18:59
  SPEAKER_02: Um, we don't want people to feel like they don't have they can't partake in the the liberal political democracy that we're supposed to have.
• 19:09
  SPEAKER_02: And and uh let's linger on the liberalism bit for a moment because you've talked a little bit about multiculturalism, immigration, and these things being a pressure point on Englishness.
• 19:21
  SPEAKER_02: I I I heard Carl Benjamin, also known as Sargon of a CAD on the Andrew Gold Heretics podcast um recently talk about how liberalism as a governing philosophy was the codification of English culture, and then it was exported on a mass scale.
• 19:39
  SPEAKER_02: It became the governing philosophy, this idea of let's have some neutrality over how we try and govern things and be very indifferent and tolerant.
• 19:48
  SPEAKER_02: But that seems to me like it's suppressed Englishness further, along with all the other things.
• 19:55
  SPEAKER_02: So what's the prognosis, do you think?
• 19:59
  SPEAKER_02: You say you're pessimistic.
• 20:01
  SPEAKER_02: Uh that do you see any sense of the country being able to talk about Englishness in a way that isn't pejorative or nationalistic?
• 20:10
  SPEAKER_03: Well, you say quite a few interesting things there.
• 20:12
  SPEAKER_03: So if you forgive me.
• 20:15
  SPEAKER_02: If you keep apologizing for long-windedness, I I need to as well.
• 20:18
  SPEAKER_03: If you forgive me, yeah, I think I might address those as being elite, not necessarily more interesting, but just that I was thinking about them and starting to frame answers or maybe even questions.
• 20:32
  SPEAKER_03: One is about Anglo-Saxons, which I quite find quite interesting, is around the world, especially the um the Spanish-speaking world, you know, the French-speaking world as well, Anglo-Saxon is an insult.
• 20:47
  SPEAKER_03: You know, it's it's a negative about the English.
• 20:51
  SPEAKER_03: This is the next, you know, the French sometimes say, you know, the Normans were okay and they went and conquered the dust of the Anglo-Saxons, and any anything bad about the English is a is a vestige of that old Anglo-Saxon influence.
• 21:07
  SPEAKER_03: But it's but it's still very strong, like I say, especially in the in the in the Spanish-speaking world.
• 21:13
  SPEAKER_03: So I'm thinking for people to be maybe getting rid of that term Anglo-Saxon is going to cause a bit of trouble for them.
• 21:22
  SPEAKER_03: Or, you know, for I don't know, for how we sort of relate to that.
• 21:27
  SPEAKER_03: Anyway, you were you were you were saying about um oh yeah, liberalism as well, the the second thing.
• 21:35
  SPEAKER_03: I think this is quite interesting.
• 21:38
  SPEAKER_03: Well, basically, liberalism as we know it in in England codified the the attempt to take the edge off the Protestant Revolution, you know, the Puritan revolution in this country.
• 21:52
  SPEAKER_03: Basically, you could say an old form of mad wokeness, you know, of Of sort of crazed religion, you know, in excess.
• 22:05
  SPEAKER_03: And it was if you look at John Locke and you know his notions of tolerance, he's he's he's right at that period after after the tumult of all these civil wars and and and invasions and and uh and and and religious intolerance and and reaction and all the rest of it.
• 22:26
  SPEAKER_03: So I I wouldn't say liberalism is like inherently English at all, but it has, I guess, kind of you could say codified a level of moderation or brought that out.
• 22:39
  SPEAKER_03: So maybe maybe I'm contradicting myself there, in that that has become a core of English, I'd say.
• 22:47
  SPEAKER_03: As for the question you actually asked, if I can remember it, um, which is where we're going, is should we be pessimistic?
• 22:58
  SPEAKER_03: Um I think we should be optimistic because you know I believe in politics and we should we should get involved in institutions and in politics and get our hands dirty, you know, as I tried to do in the Labour Party back in the day, and and kind of failed, but sort of enjoyed the right to an extent.
• 23:21
  SPEAKER_03: You know, we've gotta we've got to take it seriously.
• 23:24
  SPEAKER_03: You know, I I forget who said it, but if you if you leave politics to other people, you're leaving you're leaving it to potential danger.
• 23:35
  SPEAKER_03: And you know, I think whoever said it said to your inferiors, which you know maybe isn't completely fair.
• 23:43
  SPEAKER_03: But um, you know, if if you don't participate in our democratic life, you know, you on there's one level which you've got to accept what's coming to you.
• 23:53
  SPEAKER_03: And I think all of us to an extent have that responsibility and don't don't take it seriously enough.
• 24:01
  SPEAKER_03: Um that we a lot of us fall into consumer habits, you know, rather than getting our hands dirty with the difficulties of confronting and going to boring meetings for hours and you know, argue with people and you know, sometimes it can be really unpleasant.
• 24:19
  SPEAKER_03: So the easy thing to do is just is to is to withdraw and uh and to leave it to other people and then like I used to do bone in the pub.
• 24:31
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I suppose there's a creeping normalcy going on, right, as well, is that the longer that you leave something and it's incremental changes in the world around you, however, it is that you're feeling like the world's changing, which it always is, not always for the for the best, is things can change so slowly and so incrementally that you don't even realise how much it's changed until one day you wake up and realize that that isn't what it's like.
• 24:56
  SPEAKER_02: And it's through that passivity you were talking about that it can happen, is people not being able to talk about it, try and take matters into their own hands, engage with people eye to eye, shoulder to shoulder.
• 25:09
  SPEAKER_02: I'm not particularly good at that, but trying to get better at it.
• 25:13
  SPEAKER_03: And yeah, we're we're all trying to, even the likes of me, I guess, who's spent years trying to frame a language, we're all still trying to find the language to use to confront what you know what is hostile to us within institutions, and that which hates us and gets a free pass within institutions.
• 25:39
  SPEAKER_03: I think I mean obviously we're making we're stumbling around and and alighting on some things, but it takes it takes time, it takes years, it takes maybe even decades, you know, for that sort of shared language, I think, and shared understanding to work its work its way through a population.
• 25:59
  SPEAKER_03: And if a lot of that population is apathetic and prefers you know to consume a lifestyle and a lifestyle of drinking and drugs and withdrawing away from it all, you know, that you could say that I forget what it's called, but it's you know the withdrawal of despair, I tend to think, you know, often about about that into into narcotics and and into drink as much as I like a drink myself.
• 26:32
  SPEAKER_03: Um that's I think that is what a lot of people are doing, you know, who are who are depressed one way or another.
• 26:42
  SPEAKER_03: And disentangling what they're depressed about is really is really difficult.
• 26:48
  SPEAKER_03: And it's you know, you can't just say, oh, this is all down to wokeness.
• 26:52
  SPEAKER_03: This is all down to the left.
• 26:55
  SPEAKER_03: It's not as simple as that.
• 26:57
  SPEAKER_03: You know, for some people it it may not be that at all.
• 27:02
  SPEAKER_02: Well, I think you touched on it earlier on with your various explanations as to how we might have come to the cultural disintegration we have.
• 27:12
  SPEAKER_02: And one of the points you made was even industrial revolution of seeing the countryside get churned up and people get moved to cities, having been attached to the land and part of um clans and whatever uh families wedded to a land for a long time through feudalism as well, despite that having a bad rap.
• 27:34
  SPEAKER_02: You're obviously very rooted to a place, there would have been ways of doing things, and then that's all gone.
• 27:39
  SPEAKER_02: And there would have even been an element of self-sufficiency, and where there wasn't, there was a reliance on a face and a person, uh usually some kind of a lord or a nobleman.
• 27:50
  SPEAKER_03: You then go off to this Yeah, paternalistic figure.
• 27:53
  SPEAKER_03: I sometimes compare that to the people that are now living in their old mansions.
• 27:59
  SPEAKER_03: Who would you rather?
• 28:01
  SPEAKER_03: Would you rather one of these old aristocrats who actually lives there a lot of the time and you know relies on the local people or these Russian oligarchs and Arabic, you know, Arab princes who erect you know very, very tall walls, fences, security cameras, come in in uh black, you know, uh darken limousines, never have any relation at all to the local people.
• 28:30
  SPEAKER_03: You know, sorry, I was going off on one man and I interrupted you, but it was it's a reflection I've had recently.
• 28:35
  SPEAKER_03: It's like, you know, really, what would you prefer?
• 28:39
  SPEAKER_03: Well no, obviously we we can't really say because we we're not there and it's a very, very different lifestyle.
• 28:46
  SPEAKER_03: But um there's something to be said from the old laws.
• 28:50
  SPEAKER_02: Yes, I think that was one of the things that was washed away through industrial modernity, is then we became part of a big hive of industry and urban life, and serving paymasters we had no previous connection to.
• 29:07
  SPEAKER_02: And as you've just alluded to, is now we're at the whims of international finance, borderless finance, borderless organizations, huge organization charts, all these things where you go and earn a living, you are paid, you're clearly paid more than you would have been back then, relatively speaking.
• 29:24
  SPEAKER_02: But what have we lost in that?
• 29:25
  SPEAKER_02: Well, I suppose we've become atomistic and we don't necessarily feel bought into anything like they don't feel bought into us.
• 29:34
  SPEAKER_02: So perhaps the social contract has come to fray over time through all of these things.
• 29:40
  SPEAKER_02: There's an excellent young voice, I would say, called Connor Tomlinson.
• 29:45
  SPEAKER_02: You might have heard of him before.
• 29:47
  SPEAKER_02: He is only 25 years old, writes very eloquently and speaks very eloquently on all sorts of these culture issues.
• 29:53
  SPEAKER_02: And he wrote an article recently for the European Conservative called The Planned, or titled The Planned Obsolescence of England.
• 30:02
  SPEAKER_02: And he opens up talking about a scene from Lord of the Rings and specifically the doors of Durin at the at the foot of the mountains of Moria where the dwarves live, and it's famously depicted in the film as having those two trees either side of it.
• 30:19
  SPEAKER_02: It's really beautiful.
• 30:20
  SPEAKER_02: Gandalf has to say a spell and open it up.
• 30:24
  SPEAKER_02: Anyway, that's what it's it's based on something in Old England, a place called Stowe in the World, and I think it's St.
• 30:30
  SPEAKER_02: Edward's Church, which is for Edward the Confessor.
• 30:35
  SPEAKER_02: And what he's trying to get through in all of this is that there was this very settled way of life, which, through our obsession with industrialization and motorways, and now consumerism and now the digital world, is that it's slipped away from us over time.
• 30:55
  SPEAKER_02: We didn't really notice it until now, and some of us still don't.
• 31:00
  SPEAKER_02: And yet it's somewhat of a parable for today.
• 31:05
  SPEAKER_02: People don't even really know where those things are, but they were a keen sense of who that people were in the Midlands, for example.
• 31:13
  SPEAKER_02: And so I think Connor probably senses something like you with this idea of an existential defeat that's happened over time.
• 31:23
  SPEAKER_02: And the qu the question, which neither of us can answer and we haven't answered, is does any of that make a comeback?
• 31:30
  SPEAKER_02: Do we see a recession from this new modernity?
• 31:34
  SPEAKER_02: Because clearly people are grasping around looking for something to belong to.
• 31:39
  SPEAKER_02: But what that is, I don't know.
• 31:43
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• 31:48
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• 31:57
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• 32:00
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• 32:13
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• 32:15
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• 32:19
  SPEAKER_02: Enjoy the rest of the show, classmate.
• 32:22
  SPEAKER_03: Yes, I mean I've I thought I've actually written about that type of thing as well, like NIMBYism.
• 32:29
  SPEAKER_03: You know, I've written in praise of NIMBY's because they're looking to praise, I swear they're not looking to praise, they're looking to actually preserve home.
• 32:39
  SPEAKER_03: You know, and as I see it, home is in an existential sense.
• 32:44
  SPEAKER_03: It's not just the four walls of wherever you happen to live, it's your local community, it's your local environment.
• 32:51
  SPEAKER_03: If you live in a in a house with a nice view over some fields, and then someone comes along and builds a barrel home estate where those fields are, you're gonna feel a big sense of loss and a loss of home.
• 33:07
  SPEAKER_03: You know, you may not be able to explain it.
• 33:12
  SPEAKER_03: You know, you may just sort of feel resentful and go into a rage or whatever.
• 33:18
  SPEAKER_03: But but I think yes, what you what you're referring to is this isn't this is just one aspect of a similar modernization process is going on everywhere.
• 33:30
  SPEAKER_03: And obviously the increase in population is is part of the story.
• 33:35
  SPEAKER_03: But you know, actually, given how many people we have, we do need to build lots of houses.
• 33:41
  SPEAKER_03: But there's a sacrifice to that, and it's losing it's a lot of people losing that little bit of little bit of home, that that nice meadow where they wore the dog, you know, like I say, looking out onto a onto a nice scene.
• 33:57
  SPEAKER_03: Uh yeah, well, that's the big question about it.
• 34:00
  SPEAKER_03: And all these all these houses require roads, hospitals, you know, other infrastructure which deface the landscape.
• 34:10
  SPEAKER_03: And so, yeah, there is there's a large big sense of loss about this.
• 34:15
  SPEAKER_03: And so sorry I interrupted you.
• 34:17
  SPEAKER_02: No, well, I I interrupted you.
• 34:19
  SPEAKER_02: I thought you were coming toward the the the end and thought, oh well, I'll I'll jump in with my thought.
• 34:24
  SPEAKER_02: But the the we can carry on the the Tolkien reference here because this is almost exactly what Frodo and his fellowship ended up fighting for, right?
• 34:36
  SPEAKER_02: Is that they left the Shire to save it.
• 34:38
  SPEAKER_02: They didn't wanted it, they wanted a simple life, they wanted to remain within that what is effectively uh a metaphor for Englishness that Tolkien was trying to get across.
• 34:48
  SPEAKER_02: But there's this big industrial enemy on the doorstep that is seeking efficiency and total control, and doesn't care a job for those smaller ways of life, just wants to just wants to control things.
• 35:05
  SPEAKER_02: And anyway, we all know the ending, which is depicted by Peter Jackson as Frodo comes back having destroyed the ring, he comes back with the other hobbits, it's all happy, everyone's got a sense of relief.
• 35:17
  SPEAKER_02: Not it, not lots of people even know what's happened, but the idea is no, sometimes you called and you've got to go and fight for something, and when you come back, you're forever changed.
• 35:25
  SPEAKER_02: But Frodo left, and no one really knows what happens after that unless you read the books, because basically the hobbits of the Shire forgot the story and ended up selling it on to Saruman anyway to come and trade and to industrialize, and it was slash and burn policies all around.
• 35:43
  SPEAKER_02: And that gets back to that question I think you're almost implying there when you're talking about the sense of loss people feel through mass building and tarmacking over the land and putting new developments in places is what is a country for?
• 35:59
  SPEAKER_02: Because often people will say, well, we could deal with mass immigration if we just got the infrastructure right, if only we could just build things quickly.
• 36:06
  SPEAKER_02: But what is a country for?
• 36:08
  SPEAKER_02: It's not clear to me that it is just for paving over, tarmacking over, building new foundations and building things en masse to just keep on growing.
• 36:19
  SPEAKER_02: I I feel like that isn't what a country's about.
• 36:22
  SPEAKER_03: I think if you I think if you ask um most English people, I think there have been surveys, but you know, typically I haven't got one to hand about what you love about Englishness or about England.
• 36:35
  SPEAKER_03: I think a large proportion, if not a majority, would say the countryside or the landscape.
• 36:42
  SPEAKER_03: And it's it's genuinely something which is love.
• 36:45
  SPEAKER_03: And we're progressively destroying, in fact, you know, quite quickly.
• 36:50
  SPEAKER_03: You know, at this rate.
• 36:52
  SPEAKER_03: And and of course, the powers that be, the think tank world, everything, they want to do it a lot quicker.
• 36:57
  SPEAKER_03: You know, they want to build everywhere, they want to build on green fields, everything.
• 37:02
  SPEAKER_03: Um and yeah, how you know, how do we I've lost my train of thought.
• 37:11
  SPEAKER_03: Um, best but we go back to your thing.
• 37:14
  SPEAKER_02: Well, the the the the love of countryside, when you said it, it reminded me of that mind-boggling stat, which was people often talk about how in the advent of the Iraq war, the stop the war marches numbered something like a million people, I think.
• 37:35
  SPEAKER_02: Turns out in the same year, maybe two and a half times that amount of people hit the streets in support of the countryside alliance, uh, which just goes to show the sense of how much we love the the little nooks and crannies of the island that we call home.
• 37:54
  SPEAKER_02: And I asked Sebastian Milbank, of the critic, who would have put your article out there on the podcast, what is it that we ought to do if we were to rediscover any of these things?
• 38:05
  SPEAKER_02: And as in our history and culture.
• 38:08
  SPEAKER_02: And he said, Well, if we just get out of the ideas world, if we get out of the just the terminally online world and just go out and encounter it, what Britain is, what England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland are, are there right in your face.
• 38:23
  SPEAKER_02: You can feel it, and you can sense it in the literature, which I know you've talked about before as well, is you can't really understand the literature without understanding the world view of the people who had written it.
• 38:36
  SPEAKER_02: And obviously that came from a long-standing religious tradition, too, which we've since expunged from our curricula in the name of modernity and relevance.
• 38:45
  SPEAKER_02: So, but it's not to say that you can't go out and understand what this place is, you can just go and encounter it.
• 38:58
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, well, I I I think I don't know what to say in response to that.
• 39:02
  SPEAKER_03: So, you know, maybe yes.
• 39:04
  SPEAKER_03: But I don't think that's gonna I don't think going out into the countryside is gonna save the country.
• 39:12
  SPEAKER_02: No, you you're you're you're very right there.
• 39:14
  SPEAKER_03: And and we're talking about you know overbuilding, perhaps, or or maybe we might just think of building.
• 39:21
  SPEAKER_03: We have a limited space, you know, we're quite a small country.
• 39:25
  SPEAKER_03: England itself, I think, is now the the most heavily populated, large country in Europe.
• 39:33
  SPEAKER_03: Um I think only Holland comes close, and they haven't got any hill.
• 39:39
  SPEAKER_03: We have actually got some hill.
• 39:41
  SPEAKER_03: So we're we're a very heavily heavily populated area already, and I I've I I don't know if I should say this, but I've got this pet probably bullshit theory, which is like part of the reason for a decline in birth rate is that we've got this existential feeling of crowdedness of not not not wanting any more people, of already feeling sort of closed in, and the fact that you know so many of our properties are are are being built so small, these tiny box houses and flats, uh which the Tories are of course are letting the developers build.
• 40:23
  SPEAKER_03: Now I I accept this theory is almost certainly bullshit.
• 40:28
  SPEAKER_03: It's more to do with with money, especially and and cultural aspects as well.
• 40:35
  SPEAKER_03: But um I think it it it definitely is an aspect of feeling, you know, if you do value the countryside and landscapes and open space, the fact there is less of it and there's noticeably less of it, especially around where you live, that presses down on us.
• 40:55
  SPEAKER_03: You know, and I try to discern any tangible effects of that, I you know, I I would I would pull back from doing that despite my my theory.
• 41:05
  SPEAKER_03: But I but I do find all that stuff quite interesting.
• 41:08
  SPEAKER_02: Um there are clearly many pressures on why we've come to have things like decline in birth rates and the the demographic projections that we have.
• 41:25
  SPEAKER_02: Uh I think it probably doesn't help being in a place and time which is seen as uniquely evil, and being told, I think, that your civilization, your culture that you're from is responsible only for bad.
• 41:47
  SPEAKER_02: And I suppose if you couple that with the idea of the climate crisis and having an uninhabitable planet, you capture lots of people who are particularly on the progressive side of the spectrum, going, well, I would be immoral to bring people into the world, and then for everyone else, you kind of diminish the idea of wanting to bring people into the world because you think that actually what you have been a part of doesn't deserve to survive.
• 42:17
  SPEAKER_02: And I've been asking myself this question, and I know lots of people do when they look at what seems to be a decline in the Western world.
• 42:27
  SPEAKER_02: Everyone brings up Rome, people talks about talk about the collapse of civilizations over time, and sometimes if you go, if you want to sign up to the cyclical theory of civilizations, you ask, is this just the way that it's manifesting?
• 42:45
  SPEAKER_02: Is that all of these things, you know, people become aware of environmental pressures, and so the stories end up being told like that, and it's a way of regulating the species away with regards to our civilization having declined over time and lost its clout and its financial means, and it's desperately trying to keep some semblance of relevance, and so it'll just become totally indebted, it will do everything it can to suck resources in to keep the whole thing going, but again, it's all in vain, and really we're just waiting for the rebirth and whatever it looks like.
• 43:21
  SPEAKER_02: And I've been grappling with this, it's you know, we're all on this hamster wheel.
• 43:25
  SPEAKER_02: Is it we just wait for that's turning?
• 43:27
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, to to interrupt again.
• 43:30
  SPEAKER_03: Sorry, just briefly, is um I think yeah, the aspects of confidence, if we can sum, you know, like a factor, an influential factor up, lack of confidence.
• 43:41
  SPEAKER_03: I think that's clearly and we're we're being we're having it thrown at us all you know all day, every day, if you're you know online social media, um around institutional life as well.
• 43:56
  SPEAKER_03: Like you say about civilization, our civilization is diseased.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_03: You know, we as a people are effectively diseased, yeah, mentally, um, spiritually, morally.
• 44:09
  SPEAKER_03: That that has an impact, you know, that reduces confidence, and also reduces a sense of continuity, yeah, with the past, but also I think, yeah, with you know, almost like, well, what's the point of us continuing?
• 44:26
  SPEAKER_03: And that's that doesn't, I don't think that would convert into a thought of okay, well, let's not have any kids, but I think it it does just erode the confidence and lead people in different directions to maybe doing that.
• 44:42
  SPEAKER_03: Um but I find it quite interesting with as a counterpoint, progressives value young people above older people.
• 44:53
  SPEAKER_03: They've effectively, I say, upended the idea of maturity.
• 44:57
  SPEAKER_03: Because younger people are further ahead in history, you know, they're later, so they're better.
• 45:05
  SPEAKER_03: You know, that's you know, the arc of history, um, moving towards justice and all the rest of it.
• 45:11
  SPEAKER_03: You know, the the core sort of progressive ideological belief, the temporality of it.
• 45:17
  SPEAKER_03: Um and you know, you know, for example, in the Labour Party, one of their favorite causes is votes for 16-year-olds.
• 45:24
  SPEAKER_03: You know, we want to enfranchise or in the disenfranchisement, which is quite an interesting idea, of these 16 and 17-year-olds.
• 45:33
  SPEAKER_03: You know, the the hopes are vested in the young, especially because nowadays, you know, demographically there are many more descendants of immigrants and you know, non-white people, you know, and even you could say people are you know who are LGBT or identify as LGBT in those generations because they've they've had more indoctrination.
• 45:57
  SPEAKER_03: Um so the left is very much in favor of young people.
• 46:01
  SPEAKER_03: So you could say, well, why doesn't why why aren't left-wing people or progressive people having lots of kids?
• 46:09
  SPEAKER_03: It's I I you know I I I don't know.
• 46:12
  SPEAKER_03: I don't understand that, but it's a it's a counterpoint, you know, to sort of progressives, you know, maybe pushing us not to not to have kids when they value maybe they don't value kids, and they certainly don't value their education, but they value young people as a as a group which is attached to them and will and will drive history forward.
• 46:40
  SPEAKER_02: Hmm.
• 46:41
  SPEAKER_02: Hmm.
• 46:42
  SPEAKER_02: Interesting, interesting thesis.
• 46:45
  SPEAKER_02: You have had an arc of political realization over the course of your adult life, Ben.
• 46:54
  SPEAKER_02: You were once part of the Labour Party, you're an activist for it.
• 46:57
  SPEAKER_02: It unwound over time, and you realised that you were in the wrong place.
• 47:01
  SPEAKER_02: It was actually not aligned to how you saw the world and what you expected from it.
• 47:07
  SPEAKER_02: So clearly, you've changed your mind about things in the past, and I've started to ask guests this question, which is what have you changed your mind about recently or ever?
• 47:18
  SPEAKER_02: And what was it that made you think differently?
• 47:22
  SPEAKER_03: Well, I know there are quite a lot of things that I've I've changed my mind on over time.
• 47:28
  SPEAKER_03: Not much came to mind, especially recent stuff.
• 47:31
  SPEAKER_03: I'm sure there is, but it's just a mind-blowing.
• 47:33
  SPEAKER_03: But one thing I know and immediately came to mind was actually I think we we talked about it earlier, maybe in our private conversation, was about the EU, European Union and Brexit.
• 47:46
  SPEAKER_03: I I grew up as you know, I was in the Labour Party, and you know, really through the unquestioningly pro-EU, just on a on, I guess you could say an emotional, sentimental side.
• 47:59
  SPEAKER_03: I didn't really know anything about it, except that it it just seemed like a nice thing to be part of.
• 48:06
  SPEAKER_03: Uh and and and that was it.
• 48:09
  SPEAKER_03: And then when the Brexit vote came along, and this was it was when I'd I had started, well, I had been rebelling for years.
• 48:20
  SPEAKER_03: I was still in the Labour Party, just but I'd been rebelling against their identity politics and writing about it and exploring it and all the rest of it.
• 48:30
  SPEAKER_03: So I was like I say, I was in a rebellious mindset when I started looking at this issue, and maybe that was that led me to look at the issue at all.
• 48:40
  SPEAKER_03: Because a lot of people, of course, didn't really, they just went with their group.
• 48:45
  SPEAKER_03: So I looked at I actually I read a lot around the EU.
• 48:48
  SPEAKER_03: There was so much interesting writing around that period, you know, 2015-16.
• 48:53
  SPEAKER_03: It was a real exercise in democracy, which I thought was brilliant, except for what that other side was doing.
• 49:01
  SPEAKER_03: And I and I decided, yeah, I I would I would vote for Brexit for all sorts of reasons.
• 49:08
  SPEAKER_03: But the core one was about I don't I I could see what the union was, and it was an anti-democratic monster claiming to be defending democracy, you know, which I as a as a committed democrat I couldn't I couldn't go with.
• 49:23
  SPEAKER_03: Um so so I went I went I went against that, so I changed my mind, you could say, but it was I could say it wasn't maybe a sort of maybe a developed belief.
• 49:35
  SPEAKER_03: It was more an inclination, a sort of uh a side to be on.
• 49:41
  SPEAKER_03: You know, you know what I mean.
• 49:43
  SPEAKER_03: Um well and I guess associated with that, although I've always been quite a rebel, even though I stay, you know, kind of on the left all the way through until well, I mean organized left until 2016.
• 50:00
  SPEAKER_03: Uh I always, you know, I always have sort of question things, you know, and being prepared to rebel.
• 50:07
  SPEAKER_03: It's just it's just an instinct that I've I've always had.
• 50:11
  SPEAKER_03: Um yeah, like I mean, I think it's quite a concept.
• 50:18
  SPEAKER_03: Sorry to go off on a tangent, but with this idea of changing your mind and what it actually means.
• 50:25
  SPEAKER_03: You know, I think changing your mind, it it should more be a developed belief than you've had, than you've discarded.
• 50:35
  SPEAKER_03: And I and I I've got to be honest, maybe I'm a bit being a bit arrogant there, but nothing really comes to mind there.
• 50:42
  SPEAKER_03: Would you would you maybe give an example, maybe yourself?
• 50:46
  SPEAKER_02: Of of myself.
• 50:47
  SPEAKER_02: Well, similar actually.
• 50:49
  SPEAKER_02: Um I was once uh, well, as we spoke about before we pressed record, is I was an early school lever, didn't go to university, didn't really know what I believed about anything.
• 51:07
  SPEAKER_02: Took me a little while to make my way in this life, but steadily started making it up the corporate career ladder, surrounded by the graduate class.
• 51:16
  SPEAKER_02: And as David Goodhart has written about, is people who typically go to university end up with this anywhere worldview that they're kind of comfortable anywhere.
• 51:26
  SPEAKER_02: And that's why they move around to the big cities, they live a metropolitan lifestyle, and then they typically align to those political ideals.
• 51:34
  SPEAKER_02: I wasn't really a part of that, but because that's who I was rubbing shoulders with, I naturally inclined myself to that worldview.
• 51:41
  SPEAKER_02: Um I read everything about it, and I you could have played a bingo card, and I would have just ticked all those boxes.
• 51:49
  SPEAKER_02: And Brexit came along, and I went with everything else, and I and I ticked Remain, and I probably joined in with a lot of the hyperbole and the the zealotry about the Remain cause and particularly othered the people who voted to leave.
• 52:09
  SPEAKER_02: I know that I did that, and I know that I thought that.
• 52:12
  SPEAKER_02: And about a year later, and funnily enough, it was after I was moving between Leeds and London, but I was having a brief sojourn in Berlin, such was my want to be part of this anywhere class, is that when I was in another country, I realised I'd actually been quite ungrateful, and that I had run away from Britain and England thinking that, well, I don't know anything, and it's not that great a country anyway.
• 52:40
  SPEAKER_02: And then I went away, and then I realized how English I was and how British I was, and that actually hadn't really given it a fair shot, and nor had I really been that grateful.
• 52:49
  SPEAKER_02: But during that time, I also realized that sovereignty point, that democracy point, and I realized on two different levels um that one, the EU was not the panacea that I previously thought it was, and was what you described it as.
• 53:08
  SPEAKER_02: But also that what was being called for by Labour and the Lib Dems and people like me at the time and those part of that class, uh, or at least that set of beliefs, we were calling for the overturning of democracy to until the vote got right, until the vote was right, so that we would be on the winning side.
• 53:30
  SPEAKER_02: And then I just started to think, well, what are the consequences of that?
• 53:34
  SPEAKER_02: Well, the consequences are going to be pretty grave for social cohesion nationally, people are going to lose faith in the system.
• 53:41
  SPEAKER_02: And so I realized that I had to suck that up and that being aligned to any cause that was trying to overturn that or to push it through was just an individual interest, and it wasn't in the interests of the wider people, and actually it was a diminishing of my fellow Brits.
• 54:01
  SPEAKER_02: So that started to just change things for me.
• 54:04
  SPEAKER_02: Once I'd had those realizations, I suppose that's when I started to see why there was such pushback against the establishment narratives and and sacred cows.
• 54:17
  SPEAKER_02: And that made me change my mind on lots of things.
• 54:20
  SPEAKER_02: And I suppose, yes, I have liberal tendencies, but I also have small sea conservative tendencies.
• 54:27
  SPEAKER_02: And almost any vestige of what I had on the left has kind of dissipated just because of how far away that has moved from what it once was, say, represented by Paul Embury and that old working class left uh ideals of community and nation and whatever.
• 54:45
  SPEAKER_02: So I've changed I've changed my mind on lots of things around that.
• 54:48
  SPEAKER_02: But Brexit was one of the key points, but it was a delayed reaction, and then everything snowballed from there.
• 54:54
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, no, I've I've I've heard I've heard a similar explanation from quite a lot of people, funnily enough.
• 55:01
  SPEAKER_03: And it goes against the polls, of course, which show that a lot of levers have moved over to the pro-EU side.
• 55:08
  SPEAKER_03: But I've I've spoken to quite a lot of people like yourself who have gone the other way who were it was you know staunchly or moderately remain, and then just were you know, either over time or suddenly were aghast at what that side more, more than the cause of remaining in the EU.
• 55:28
  SPEAKER_03: It was more the politics of it.
• 55:30
  SPEAKER_03: They were aghast at what it was about and how it was.
• 55:34
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, I I could say well, you were talking, I thought of the phrase losers' consent.
• 55:39
  SPEAKER_03: Democracy depends on that, if nothing else.
• 55:42
  SPEAKER_03: You know, the losers must consent to accept their defeat and go home and then come back to fight another day next time.
• 55:52
  SPEAKER_03: And we all rely on that.
• 55:54
  SPEAKER_03: Without that, we'll we're all finished, or at least uh our political democracy is finished.
• 55:59
  SPEAKER_03: And what while you were speaking, actually, I I did think of something.
• 56:02
  SPEAKER_03: You know, something came to mind about what I've I've changed my mind on, and it's I guess you could say it's a pessimistic thing.
• 56:10
  SPEAKER_03: Um, and it relates to what we were talking about before with the Labour Party, you know, me being a member.
• 56:15
  SPEAKER_03: Is that I joined the Labour Party in 2010, I wasn't particularly optimistic, I just thought I need, you know, rather than moaning all the time in the pub, I should I should join and get my hands dirty, just try and affect things in some sort of minor way.
• 56:32
  SPEAKER_03: And since I've left, I've realized that there is actually no hope.
• 56:40
  SPEAKER_03: The Labour Party for me is finished.
• 56:44
  SPEAKER_03: Not as a party of government, you know, it'll probably get into government later this year, but as a party that I can vote for and that I think is overall working, you know, overall is a good thing.
• 56:58
  SPEAKER_03: I think that's gone now.
• 57:00
  SPEAKER_03: I think through my work on identity politics for the tribe and how integrated the system of diversity is into the actual infrastructure of the party and also many other institutions, of course, but it was a real eye-opener actually just going to the Labour Party rule book and seeing how absolutely embedded in how the party operates day to day is identity politics.
• 57:28
  SPEAKER_03: And people have been fighting for this for decades, and you can't just stop it.
• 57:35
  SPEAKER_03: A leader can't stand up and go, Oh, actually, we're not we're not in favour of this um, you know, massive positive discrimination in all sorts of areas of society suddenly.
• 57:47
  SPEAKER_03: Um, we're gonna get rid of it because the whole party now is founded on that.
• 57:52
  SPEAKER_03: So I just realise you know, you can't turn around this oil tanker, it's it's set on its course, it's gonna crash into something sooner or later.
• 58:03
  SPEAKER_03: You know, it's already crashing into things, of course, maybe a bit of a bad metaphor there.
• 58:08
  SPEAKER_03: But um, and that was that was a real, you know, over time realizing that was a real huntinger uh of a realization that you know there is no hope actually for this thing.
• 58:22
  SPEAKER_03: You know, we we need something else.
• 58:24
  SPEAKER_03: Something else needs to come from a if possible a left-wing perspective or you know, some sort of social conservative perspective that incorporates left-wing socialism or you know that type of thing.
• 58:37
  SPEAKER_03: Um and it needs to, you know, it needs to destroy the Labour Party.
• 58:43
  SPEAKER_03: And uh and that was, you know, like I say, it's been it's been emotional, you know, over you know, you can say over time.
• 58:50
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, I after my book, I um I was actually invited to to speak to a Labour group, you know, um and this was after I'd left the party, a few years after I'd left the party, and I met some of my heroes, or my some of my old heroes, this little event, and I was no longer part of it.
• 59:13
  SPEAKER_03: I was you know, I had to tell them my my shtick and uh and they s they sat there and they completely ignored it.
• 59:23
  SPEAKER_03: No one even questioned me on on what I'd said, and I'd been quite challenging.
• 59:28
  SPEAKER_03: I'd said, you know, look, there's a problem here, and you guys are part of the problem.
• 59:34
  SPEAKER_03: No response, no reaction in the questions at all.
• 59:38
  SPEAKER_03: And uh I remember going home on the train after that and just feeling really emotional.
• 59:44
  SPEAKER_03: And I I just couldn't I couldn't identify exactly why, I could feel why, but I couldn't I couldn't really put it into words.
• 59:54
  SPEAKER_03: That sort of emotion and that's what we were talking about at the beginning, the sense of loss.
• 59:59
  SPEAKER_03: That was a sense of loss.
• 1:00:02
  SPEAKER_03: So along with that sense of loss, that's something I've certainly changed changed my mind on.
• 1:00:08
  SPEAKER_03: I had hope before the Labour Party, and I don't know.
• 1:00:12
  SPEAKER_02: I think you're joining a growing ranks of people, both typically formerly Labour voters and typically formerly conservative voters, who are wishing for something, a political vehicle to come along and replace those two two parties.
• 1:00:27
  SPEAKER_02: Ben, I've kept you long enough, including the preamble before we press start on the recording.
• 1:00:32
  SPEAKER_02: Before I let you go, you're a writer.
• 1:00:35
  SPEAKER_02: I know you've been writing a new book and it's due out next year.
• 1:00:38
  SPEAKER_02: When can we expect it?
• 1:00:40
  SPEAKER_02: And where can people find you in the meantime?
• 1:00:44
  SPEAKER_03: Uh, firstly, with the with the book, um, I'm I've I've been told an indicative date, maybe spring next year.
• 1:00:54
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 1:00:54
  SPEAKER_03: But at this stage, I mean it I I don't really know.
• 1:00:58
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 1:01:00
  SPEAKER_03: Because there has been some machinations with publishers about it, and it all it all remains to be worked out on Touchwood.
• 1:01:07
  SPEAKER_03: It will it will all get worked out.
• 1:01:10
  SPEAKER_03: It's written, you know, it needs a bit of TLC, but I think it's it's a good you know, it's a it's a good and interesting and valuable piece of work, Touchwood.
• 1:01:22
  SPEAKER_03: Um as for where to find me, I'm I'm on Twitter, which is basically my name as one word.
• 1:01:29
  SPEAKER_03: So I'm there.
• 1:01:31
  SPEAKER_03: I I write articles, you know, especially for Unheard and the Critic, you know, which you mentioned earlier, uh, at the moment, except for that.
• 1:01:43
  SPEAKER_03: I don't know, I can be found at the odd event at times.
• 1:01:47
  SPEAKER_03: You know, and then if you if you see me come up and say hello.
• 1:01:52
  SPEAKER_01: Great.
• 1:01:52
  SPEAKER_03: That'd be quite nice.
• 1:01:53
  SPEAKER_03: Uh and uh anyway, it's been a pleasure.
• 1:01:57
  SPEAKER_03: I've I think it's it's been an involving conversation.
• 1:02:00
  SPEAKER_03: I've I've enjoyed it, I think.
• 1:02:03
  SPEAKER_03: Good, it's been it's been full of thought, certainly.
• 1:02:07
  SPEAKER_02: Good.
• 1:02:07
  SPEAKER_02: Well, uh, as we were going through the conversation, I was wondering what I was gonna call this episode, and it's felt like it's both been an elegy uh as much as an exhortation about something.
• 1:02:20
  SPEAKER_02: So anyway, here's we'll finish on the exhortation, which is let's try and recover a sense of whatever it is that we think we're losing.
• 1:02:28
  SPEAKER_02: And it has been an absolute pleasure, Ben.
• 1:02:30
  SPEAKER_02: Um it's been good to to to chew the cud with someone on what it means to be a free-born Englishman or not, as the case may be.
• 1:02:39
  SPEAKER_02: So until next time, take good care, all the best with your book.
• 1:02:42
  SPEAKER_02: I hope the publishing date comes along soon and keep fighting the good fight.
• 1:02:46
  SPEAKER_03: Thanks, John.
• 1:02:47
  SPEAKER_03: Cheers.
• 1:02:53
  SPEAKER_02: To keep up to date with all that I am doing, please subscribe to the Thinking Class YouTube channel at Thinking Class and follow me on X at Thinking Classes.
• 1:03:03
  SPEAKER_02: Thinking Class seeks to understand the civilizational issues we face and why what our leaders do in response matters.
• 1:03:09
  SPEAKER_02: Here I seek to explore the ideas, values, and culture that made our civilization, those that are unmaking it, and how leaders at our public and private institutions should respond.
• 1:03:18
  SPEAKER_02: Engage with me on YouTube or X or write to me at thinkingclasspod at gmail.com to tell me who you want me to speak to and what topics are important to you.
• 1:03:27
  SPEAKER_02: I look forward to seeing you there and for joining me on this journey.