Latest / Thinking Class / #046 - Dr. Alka Sehgal Cuthbert - How The Intolerant And Divisive Language Of Anti-Racism And Poor Policy Fractured Britain

Transcript

#046 - Dr. Alka Sehgal Cuthbert - How The Intolerant And Divisive Language Of Anti-Racism And Poor Policy Fractured Britain · Thinking Class

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Hello, classmates, and welcome to Thinking Class.
• 0:03
  SPEAKER_00: I'm John Gillam, and today I'm speaking with Dr.
• 0:05
  SPEAKER_00: Alka Segal Cuthbert.
• 0:07
  SPEAKER_00: Alka is the director of the organization Don't Divide Us.
• 0:11
  SPEAKER_00: She is an educator, academic, author, and campaigner who believes passionately in the essential importance of impartiality.
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_00: In this episode, Alka and I think out loud about the importance of recognizing our common humanity amidst a sea of divisive ideologies, the various critiques of the current anti-racism movement, and why Alka emphasizes the need for a more universal and humanistic approach to governing, how the role of education and public policy shape societal attitudes, what the dangers within multiculturalism are and the rise of identity politics, and why ALCA advocates for a return to democratic values and the importance of patriotism in fostering social cohesion and much, much more.
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_00: You'll hear that ALCA is a gentle yet straightforward voice.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_00: She's trying her level best to provide public and private sector leaders with a different set of tools to manage their organizations and their people in a bid to reject the lure of the many social justice ideologies.
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_00: ALCA is clearly trying to keep the flame of classical liberal philosophy alive while promoting institutional neutrality.
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_00: And I think this is a noble endeavor.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_00: It's one that I'm sympathetic to.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_00: Whilst I'm always grappling with how you can keep that flame alive in the face of a liberal winds blown by Islamism, wokeism, and the increasing demands for censorship.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_00: Before we dive in, you'd be really helping me out if you click subscribe or follow on whatever platform you're listening to or watching on, because the more subscribers we have, the more guests we can attract and the faster the show grows.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_00: Enjoy the show, classmates.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks so much for joining me.
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you for inviting me, John.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_00: It really is my pleasure.
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_00: You've been on the hit list of people I've wanted to invite on the show since I decided to start a thinking class uh in October last year and I began in November.
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_00: And you were uh on my hit list because I'd learned of you in the lockdowns when I was doing lots of reading because you know things were generally a bit quieter, and I was able to get a grasp of things that were becoming prominent in the public conversation, or uh specifically in our institutions, including corporate institutions of which I was working in, specifically around things like Black Lives Matter.
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_00: And you were writing articles in The Spectator and other publications, which I found to be impressive and necessary at that moment in time to act as a counterbalance to this these topics of anti-racism, which were being popularized by Ibrahim X Kendi, Robin D'Angelo at the time.
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_00: So it is a true pleasure to have you here, and I'm sure we'll get into all of those things.
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_00: But perhaps we begin with the work that you do for your organization, don't divide us.
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_00: Perhaps you can tell us what it's about, you know, who's dividing us and why are we divided?
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_01: Well, first of all, thank you very much for inviting me, John.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_01: It's it's a pleasure to be able to talk about these things.
• 3:21
  SPEAKER_01: So thank you.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_01: Um well, uh, in terms of don't divide us, as you said, it we we emerged in spontaneously in response to the events of 2020.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_01: Um and our the first response was the debate was so divisive and harsh and so intolerant and so sort of year zero type.
• 3:47
  SPEAKER_01: You know, you either think this way about race and racism or uh or you're beyond the pale.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_01: And there didn't seem to be there didn't seem to be any space for a pluralism that I had always felt instinctively was very important in a democratic society.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_01: So the immediate response really was that, you know, surely, despite everything, we have more in common than we have that divides us.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_01: So that, if you like, was the first core tenet, if you like, of don't divide us, that our common humanity is more important than what divides us.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_01: Um now, common humanity, we don't mean that everybody kind of sings kumbaya together.
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_01: Uh common humanity means that we recognize that as human beings, we have certain things that define us as human beings, and they remain the same, whether you're whatever your skin colour, whatever part of the world you're born in, and really whether you live in Islington or whether you live in Hackney or whether you live in, you know, a little country village, there are a certain as humans we are morally equal.
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_01: So that was our starting point.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_01: But I I I suppose I would say that as the um as time has gone on, um our ideas have developed a bit and we've seen the importance of certain cultural um topics, if you like, that are that are now very contested, that we feel are necessary to defend because they support our core tenant, which is that I our common humanity is common to us all.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_01: And those are to do with the way we see history, our past, um, which I think affects you know how we see the past and where we see ourselves fitting in the past and with our eye on the future as well, kind of shapes how we see the world around us, how we see ourselves and how we see each other.
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_01: And this kind of critical social justice ideology of which critical race theory is one part of, um, is very intolerant of that.
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_01: It really, it really stigmatizes, it's premised on rejecting the past and seeing the past as an obstacle towards going forwards and towards creating a better society today.
• 6:04
  SPEAKER_01: And I just don't think nothing in in my whole experience and nothing in everything that I've studied academically indicates that.
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_01: Everything points to the opposite, you know, that we draw the past may have good and bad things and mean boring mediocre things, but it is essentially a resource, a collective resource, which we need to draw on to make sense of our world today and to guide us in how we go forwards.
• 6:31
  SPEAKER_00: Frank Faradi, who you may have heard of, he recently just released a book called The War Against the Past.
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_00: And in it he writes about year zero ideology, this idea of um social engineers effectively making their way into institutions and finding a way of wiping the slate clean.
• 6:50
  SPEAKER_00: And then if the past is ever brought up at all, it's seen as malevolent, which I guess you've been talking about.
• 6:55
  SPEAKER_00: He also talks about the difference between those who seek to denigrate it, dismiss it, and wipe it off the record, as that's clearly not the right way, and neither is it the right way to look at it only in a sunny side up.
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_00: There's nothing to see here, nothing to criticize.
• 7:09
  SPEAKER_00: But as you've talked about, there is this idea of trying to look at it in the round, being able to spot times where there might have actually been um moral good coming out of something, even as something as seemingly contentious as the British Empire these days, uh should not be a contentious thing to do, because there clearly would have been examples, and yet also finding the shortcomings, both of those things both give you a bar to reach.
• 7:39
  SPEAKER_00: If it's something that is a moral good, it's uh an attempt to govern virtuously, act virtually individually, or gives you something to avoid.
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_00: Because, as there are many historians who'll tell you, if history is cyclical, if things don't repeat but they rhyme, and there's certain things that humans do, then it's better to know what it is that we do and the the the pitfalls we fall into.
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_00: Because if you wipe that slate clean, if you say that there's nothing to see here, it's just all bad.
• 8:12
  SPEAKER_00: And let's just crack on because we know the ideas that are going to propel us into this progressive sunlit upland, they're just gonna fall in the same trap as everyone else that they've done agreed before them.
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, that's right.
• 8:25
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 8:25
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I I'm I I'm reading Frank Frady's book at the moment, um, and it's very interesting because he points to a sort of a paradox where, on the one hand, history is something you want to kind of um cut yourself off from because it was so bad, but at the same time, they're kind of like um the people who advocate for this ideology are obsessed by it.
• 8:47
  SPEAKER_01: But they're not obsessed by history in the round, as you say.
• 8:50
  SPEAKER_01: What they're obsessed by is is a selective choice um that they they think defines all subsequent events from that moment of from the from its instantiation, be it slavery, be it colonialism.
• 9:08
  SPEAKER_01: Um and and the problem, I I mean, I'm from India, um my family heritage.
• 9:14
  SPEAKER_01: And the problem with that is that I find it's very patronizing, essentially, is that it it really doesn't it doesn't leave any space for the fact that whatever colonialism did in India, it left certain it introduced certain ideas, certain values, which uh Indian intellectuals at the time um could engage with and make their own and then you know contribute to the development of Indian society in a way that both in a way that both owed something to what the Western culture had brought to them, but also drew on their own indigenous culture and knowledge.
• 9:54
  SPEAKER_01: So, you know, that that the possibility of a genuine uh conversation between countries from different civilizations, Western and Indian, um, where which both recognizes the necessary freedom of being different, but also as being equal, is really denied by this um critical ideology because it's saying that you know every that that moment was so bad, was so morally reprobate that nothing possible positive can ever come out of it.
• 10:29
  SPEAKER_01: And our duty, and really what they are obsessed with doing, really really their starting point isn't the past at all, it's today.
• 10:36
  SPEAKER_01: It's like they want to make a claim for British society today as being institutionally racist.
• 10:43
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and when they can't really justify that empirically or through a logical argument, their recall, their intellectual recourse is to pick on this one thing in the past and amplify and amplify and amplify until it becomes the whole picture, and and then it becomes really kind of um a negative thing in every way, intellectually, morally, politically.
• 11:07
  SPEAKER_00: A self-destructive course to take.
• 11:10
  SPEAKER_00: We have seen within your organization that you are, I suppose, trying to show another way in which to live amongst one another in a in a multi-ethnic society.
• 11:23
  SPEAKER_00: And within the principles of Don't Divide Us, I noticed the words anti-racist being used, and we've touched on it.
• 11:30
  SPEAKER_00: I suppose for those people who employ see the word employed and those concerned about critical race theory, it does bring to mind the likes of Ibrahim X, Kendi, Robin D'Angelo, this idea of the only way to solve past discrimination is current discrimination and flip things around.
• 11:47
  SPEAKER_00: What what way is Don't Dividers' use of it different to those who are critical race theorists?
• 11:57
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I'm I mean, this has occupied a lot of my time.
• 12:00
  SPEAKER_01: I'm still not sure I've got a a definitive answer.
• 12:04
  SPEAKER_01: It's something I'm still working through, really.
• 12:06
  SPEAKER_01: But um in 2020, I I wrote a pamphlet for the Academy of Ideas called The Dangers of the New Anti-Racism, which is based on an in-speech for them.
• 12:17
  SPEAKER_01: And in that I made the point that anti-racism, as it developed in the 20th century, was really, you could say it came under an umbrella of a universal humanistic outlook.
• 12:30
  SPEAKER_01: And the point of anti-racism then was to um having identified that there were disadvantages that could that were that applied to people as groups, that it was um in the benefit of everyone, not just like giving a charitable helping hand, but literally the freedom and equality for everyone would be enhanced if those disadvantages were overcome.
• 12:56
  SPEAKER_01: And that was the basis for a solidarity that could cut across ethnic lines.
• 13:02
  SPEAKER_01: And in in striving for that improvement, that moral and political and social improvement, society for everyone was made better.
• 13:11
  SPEAKER_01: So the idea was not to um not to sort of um you know take away from Peter to give to Paul.
• 13:17
  SPEAKER_01: The idea was to raise everybody up um and to create a greater freedom for everybody.
• 13:22
  SPEAKER_01: But I think that that is very, very different.
• 13:26
  SPEAKER_01: The um the kind of overall cultural and moral umbrella today is not universal or humanistic.
• 13:32
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know what you would call it, but it isn't that.
• 13:35
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and now it's become much more a kind of sort of very vicious strident redistribution, you know.
• 13:41
  SPEAKER_01: And if if if X has this or is X is in that position, then Y cannot possibly do anything other than to just, you know, get rid of X and take over, kind of thing.
• 13:51
  SPEAKER_01: That's what they mean when they say white allies should do the work and make space for black voices.
• 13:57
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, uh personally, I just would find that, you know, the thought that I might have got my um place at Cambridge to do my PhD because I was a brown woman is just appalling.
• 14:09
  SPEAKER_01: I can't imagine anything more degrading than uh, you know, um encouraging that kind of thinking rather than the you know the more traditional meritocratic um standard that you apply to yourself and to others.
• 14:24
  SPEAKER_00: You're not the first person to say that who um is is brownskin that I've spoken to in life.
• 14:30
  SPEAKER_00: There are former colleagues where I have seen these informal leadership programs be set up inside of an organization, and instead of them being put out for application, people have been chosen based on whether they're going to tick the diversity box.
• 14:47
  SPEAKER_00: And I remember being on a call with a couple of people, um, both were of um uh ethnicity from the subcontinent, but though both had actually come out of Africa, one south, one east.
• 15:00
  SPEAKER_00: And um one was uh actually a freeman of the city of London, um, and the the other had been to the Redbrick universities.
• 15:09
  SPEAKER_00: Now, I'm not I'm not playing any of these uh these victim games here to say you know I I had it worse, but I was an early school lever, no university education until late in my 20s, open university stuff whilst working um from Northumberland.
• 15:24
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and I I I was excluded from the process on the basis of my ethnicity.
• 15:32
  SPEAKER_00: And I said, Surely we don't really want to do this and we just want to open it up to application for everyone.
• 15:37
  SPEAKER_00: And the the person who was leading it said, yeah, I think that too, but you know, the the bosses just say we need diversity.
• 15:44
  SPEAKER_00: I got off the call and I had and I had a call straight away from them, and they both said, I really don't like the idea that I'm being given a shot because of the colour of my skin.
• 15:55
  SPEAKER_00: And so this seems to be common.
• 15:57
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I think there's so many people who've written about it in the States as well, the the Glenn Rowries and John McMaters of this world who would resent the idea that they got anywhere in their their big academic lives through being black.
• 16:10
  SPEAKER_00: You know, they did it because they they worked hard.
• 16:13
  SPEAKER_01: I think that's right.
• 16:14
  SPEAKER_01: And I think, you know, I mean, don't divide us, you know, we're getting increasing number of emails from people, you know, who are not intellectuals, they don't work in academia and they never haven't necessarily had um, you know, uh I've got been to university either.
• 16:29
  SPEAKER_01: By the way, I smiled earlier because I went to my first university.
• 16:32
  SPEAKER_01: Polytechnic was in Newcastle.
• 16:34
  SPEAKER_01: And I think Month is lovely.
• 16:36
  SPEAKER_01: But um uh but you know, that and there's and what's happening is that you know, this it's it's not just like a misguided thing that is just something you can say, oh, that's stupid, and ignore, because it's actually ruining relationships, it's actually actively corroding, you know, people who have worked alongside each other for decades are now being told where these schemes are being introduced that their very existence poses a threat to someone that they've regarded as a friend and a colleague all their life.
• 17:11
  SPEAKER_01: So, you know, and it's like we're being encouraged to constantly interpret our experiences through racial lens, through racial lenses.
• 17:21
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm meant to be continually on the lookout for flights and microaggressions, and you are meant to be continually on the lookout for you know giving offense and you know being active in the micro-aggressive relationship.
• 17:34
  SPEAKER_01: So that you know, in that situation, how can you have a good faith conversation?
• 17:38
  SPEAKER_01: How can you, you know, you can't really trust yourself, you can't trust others when you're continually not trusting yourself, kind of thing.
• 17:45
  SPEAKER_01: So it's a very, I think, psychologically quite a damaging outlook to be, you know, endorsing as a normal and you know, um admirable, desirable way of thinking when it clearly isn't, you know, for anybody, other than the people doing the training, of course, who are making a lot of money out of it.
• 18:04
  SPEAKER_00: Indeed.
• 18:05
  SPEAKER_00: I I can't help but think about how the governing philosophies of those who run our institutions have changed over time.
• 18:14
  SPEAKER_00: So we've talked a lot about freedom, compassion, quality today, and that they're the things that guide, don't divide us.
• 18:20
  SPEAKER_00: And in my mind, it it strikes me as well, these are the these are the qualities, the the values that uh over time have been um created, at least socially, by institutional Christianity in the West for a long time.
• 18:35
  SPEAKER_00: And that was what guided everyone, even if you're a dissenter, even if you weren't particularly a believer, that was what guided our political class for a long time.
• 18:43
  SPEAKER_00: It's it's how institutions were set up, and that was the core message upon which the whole of society was ultimately taught.
• 18:51
  SPEAKER_00: And then we saw post-world wars, lots of faith in those institutions collapse, and and then these various different um ideological revolutions from the 60s, of which we've been talking about some offshoots from with critical race theory, critical theory in general, which starts to view things in a very different way.
• 19:13
  SPEAKER_00: And I wonder whether this new governing philosophy of looking at things in the power relations, uh, and also dividing people up in a different way to the class-based view that that um typical Marxians uh would have looked at it and now looking at it through ethnic lenses, are now just putting fuel on the fire of something which Christianity through St.
• 19:40
  SPEAKER_00: Paul, we are neither Gentile nor Jew, which had ended up in the cot in the mindset, is now being expunged from the record from this war on the past.
• 19:48
  SPEAKER_00: And now we have people who are ultimately bringing us back to this um birds of a feather flock together mindset, making it obvious what's different about us all, um, beginning ethnically, but now obviously there's a there there are religious elements to this now too.
• 20:08
  SPEAKER_00: And I suppose this is a an open question.
• 20:11
  SPEAKER_00: I don't necessarily expect you to have the answer, but the the future without the Christian governing ideals, uh, I don't know how long the things like freedom, compassion, equality can remain on the table as something that exists within the culture, the further it gets divorced from that, and the more we keep on juicing our institutions with this other idea of power and um victimhood.
• 20:38
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know what you think about that, Alka.
• 20:40
  SPEAKER_01: No, I I I certainly recognise um you know what you're describing, and I would agree with the trajectory that you've outlined.
• 20:48
  SPEAKER_01: It's you know, I and I think um religion broadly does have something to do with it because religion's been is the largest, if you like, receptacle for belief, you know, and a society that negates belief is going to be a very dry, shallow, and uh not a very pleasant place to be in.
• 21:10
  SPEAKER_01: Because as humans, one of the things we do is believe, you know, we think we believe and we imagine.
• 21:16
  SPEAKER_01: Those are kind of fundamental things to being human.
• 21:19
  SPEAKER_01: Um, on the institutional things, I think I mean uh everything I've looked at, I think the one thing I would say is that the collapse didn't happen immediately after the Second World War.
• 21:31
  SPEAKER_01: Uh I think if you like that social democratic period that was materially founded on the establishment of the welfare state was uh, I mean, Marshall, one of the um, you know, if you like, the authors of the thinkers at the welfare state, uh recognized at the time that it would be a compromise.
• 21:53
  SPEAKER_01: Uh it could it would be a temporary compromise, but it was a necessary compromise, and it wasn't just a case.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_01: Of providing organizations that could dish out rights or dish out medical services or educational services.
• 22:10
  SPEAKER_01: It was actually, it was on such a scale, but it did reorganize society.
• 22:14
  SPEAKER_01: You know, it was provided a framework in which people understood their work lives and built up their work relationships.
• 22:23
  SPEAKER_01: And it included the Commonwealth, you know, which is how my parents came over to Britain in the early 60s.
• 22:30
  SPEAKER_01: And so we were of a generation of immigrants that had had some, if you like, historical knowledge of British culture in some way, through having been colonized by Britain.
• 22:41
  SPEAKER_01: And whatever my mum and dad generations like my mum and dad thought of Britain politically, they really admired British culture.
• 22:48
  SPEAKER_01: They admired the high culture, particularly my dad, who was educated.
• 22:53
  SPEAKER_01: My mum was less educated, but um, you know, they admired the high culture, Shakespeare and the romantic poets, but they also admired the possibility, the way of life that British culture offered.
• 23:06
  SPEAKER_01: The autonomy and respect for the family, the respect for the family, but the autonomy of the family.
• 23:13
  SPEAKER_01: The idea of an Englishman's home is his castle.
• 23:16
  SPEAKER_01: The idea that my dad, who in the 70s stood for the local Labour Party, you know, he was amazed.
• 23:23
  SPEAKER_01: He was saying, you know, I couldn't, in India, this could never happen.
• 23:26
  SPEAKER_01: You know, I would have to have a sort of bucket full of uh rupees to be able to ride my way to be, you know, get anywhere near a political representing being a political candidate.
• 23:36
  SPEAKER_01: So, you know, those kinds of, if you like, less tangible um aspects of British life and culture, I think you know, did provide a commonality, right?
• 23:48
  SPEAKER_01: They provided a basis for a commonality through which our differences, which you know, our differences are important, they are what make us unique as well, but they're not the only things.
• 23:58
  SPEAKER_01: If we if we set our limits at what makes us different, we're cutting off a huge part of our our own selves, really.
• 24:06
  SPEAKER_01: And that common culture allows, I think, and facilitates the kind of tolerant attitude of a way of life that we associate that most people of a certain generation associate and admire and love Britain for.
• 24:21
  SPEAKER_01: And that is going, and that is going um not just through a Marxist march through the institutions, but it's going um really because I think, and uh extrapolating from my research that looked at education um and educational policy from the post-war period to say the early 2000s, was that um they were unable, the ruling classes, if you like, and that includes both parties, not just Labour or Conservative, um, increasingly felt unable to deliver on that promise.
• 24:57
  SPEAKER_01: And they began to retreat from it themselves.
• 25:00
  SPEAKER_01: So you can see, you know, that the institutionally there was an actual structural breakup of the whole state administrative state under Thatcher in the 80s.
• 25:10
  SPEAKER_01: Right, that introduced the commercialization element into education that we now see amplified on, you know, turbocharged on testosterone, if you like, in the kind of marketization of, you know, teaching kids about gender, sex, and race.
• 25:26
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, it's not anything that is done by a uh a teacher that is there representing an intellectual and moral leadership.
• 25:34
  SPEAKER_01: It's being done by paying new so-called experts in race, whatever that may mean, to come in and tell people how rubbish they are if they're white and how victimized they are if they're brown.
• 25:46
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, this is this has been the uh doors to this have been opened by the the institutional and moral retreat of our political class from a project that once was more humane, once was, you know, was able to provide a common culture.
• 26:03
  SPEAKER_01: It can't do that in the at the current moment.
• 26:07
  SPEAKER_01: I don't have an answer, you're right.
• 26:08
  SPEAKER_01: I don't uh but um I think we need a new politics.
• 26:11
  SPEAKER_01: There's got to be a political realignment at some point.
• 26:14
  SPEAKER_01: Um, that you can't just you know do a blue pizza and say here's one I'm angry, you know, it's kind of gonna be a bit more painful than that, I think.
• 26:21
  SPEAKER_00: Tracy Island's papier machet model pulled out.
• 26:24
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I remember that one.
• 26:26
  SPEAKER_00: An old classic, uh Evans, for for for those listening who are either not old enough or not British, you you're not gonna get it.
• 26:33
  SPEAKER_00: I'd I'd Google that.
• 26:35
  SPEAKER_00: Uh you you talked a bit about the political class and how there might need to be a realignment of politics at some point.
• 26:44
  SPEAKER_00: I know also you have written a paper recently where you made the argument that public policy has played a role in fostering the preconditions for the violent disorder that we've seen in Britain, which has been referred to as the riots, for example.
• 26:58
  SPEAKER_00: Um, could you describe what role public policy has played over the years in creating that and what public policies in particular have done that?
• 27:09
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I think um I'll stick with the example of education because that's the one I know most about.
• 27:14
  SPEAKER_01: But we can really see um uh and in that paper I trace it back to really the um Education Act of 1986 that came on the back of a report called the Swann Report.
• 27:29
  SPEAKER_01: Um at the risk of being a bit geeky.
• 27:32
  SPEAKER_01: I'll just very briefly say it has a it's a fascinating history of that report because it started, it it saw life in the late 70s under Shirley Williams, the Labour Secretary of State for Education then.
• 27:45
  SPEAKER_01: And it was meant, it started off as a inquiry into the educational underachievement of Afro-Caribbean boys.
• 27:54
  SPEAKER_01: Um, now shortly after that, there was a change of government, the Conservatives came in.
• 28:00
  SPEAKER_01: They decided to continue with that report, but they changed the leadership of it.
• 28:06
  SPEAKER_01: And then in the in the intervening time, in the intervening few years, you'd have the riots, the inner city riots in London, Birmingham, and Bristol.
• 28:17
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and then what you saw in the sort of the remaining kind of two to three years till 1985 when the report was published, was the Conservatives adopted really wholesale all the multicultural educational ideas that Labour had been, if you like, trialling in little pockets mainly in the GLC.
• 28:39
  SPEAKER_01: So they had been experimenting with that on a small scale.
• 28:43
  SPEAKER_01: So there were things like, you know, their attempt to address educational undachievement amongst Afro-Caribbean boys involved telling teachers that they should, you know, um value the Creole language and let pupils write in their Creole and that you know, standard English didn't matter so much.
• 29:02
  SPEAKER_01: And not, you know, it was important, but not that important.
• 29:05
  SPEAKER_01: More important was the self-esteem.
• 29:07
  SPEAKER_01: And if self-esteem could be cheaply bought by saying, Yeah, your Creole is great, carry on with that.
• 29:13
  SPEAKER_01: That was the way forward.
• 29:15
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and there were objectors to that.
• 29:17
  SPEAKER_01: You know, there were people who objected to that, but their voices were not heard, you know, they were not listened to really.
• 29:23
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and uh, you know, there was one uh Caribbean writer, something like Maureen Stone, made some very, very trenchant criticisms of that policy, but was ignored.
• 29:33
  SPEAKER_01: And so it was the Conservatives that actually brought that that through the education the Education Act, which was presented in terms of parent choice and presented in terms of probably legitimately trying to sort of um rein in the excesses of a kind of child-centered education policy.
• 29:52
  SPEAKER_01: But nonetheless also opened the door also kind of opened the door to, you know, multiculturalism is the way to go.
• 29:59
  SPEAKER_01: And that meant that meant a teacher not going into a classroom and addressing the children as a whole, you know, we're all in this together.
• 30:08
  SPEAKER_01: What we're going to learn knowledge that is going to be unfamiliar to all of you because it's disciplinary, based on disciplinary knowledge, and we're going to work hard at it together.
• 30:18
  SPEAKER_01: And in that shared endeavor, you do form common bonds, you form bonds of commonality, even though you have the differences as well.
• 30:26
  SPEAKER_01: And instead of that, you have teachers going and saying, Oh, well, you know, we're going to be reading this book, but oh, you over there, if you don't, if you, if this is, you know, um not relevant to you, if you can't, if you're having problems accessing it, um, then let's find you something different, you know.
• 30:43
  SPEAKER_01: And you have the kind of this also took the form of personalization, you know, personalization of the curriculum.
• 30:50
  SPEAKER_01: And at one point in 2009, I think it was Cambridge Assessment, did a review of their assessments.
• 30:56
  SPEAKER_01: It was literally in English literature, it was possible for virtually every pupil to have their own individual pathway to the exam, which meant there wasn't lit literally in terms of literature, no common culture there.
• 31:09
  SPEAKER_01: It was all it became a you become treated as an individual consumer, um, or as a you know, a sort of passive recipient of you needing validation from people outside of you rather than trying to do into trying to tackle um knowledge that is past the test of time, going back to history.
• 31:31
  SPEAKER_01: Um, sure, some things may become a bit redundant and the curriculum isn't set in stone, but if you believe in truth and objectivity, then there is knowledge that is there from which the curriculum should be constructed.
• 31:44
  SPEAKER_01: And all children, whatever their linguistic capacity, need to have access to that so that they can then extend that as they go forward as adults.
• 31:53
  SPEAKER_01: You know, they will have had an experience of working in common.
• 31:57
  SPEAKER_01: At the minute, as soon as children go to school, they are being um addressed as different.
• 32:04
  SPEAKER_01: What their importance, their significance, their social significance, what is worthwhile about them is how different they are, rather than you know, what they do out of their own will, if you like, in can in you know the company of other children in the same place.
• 32:21
  SPEAKER_01: So in that way, I think the institutional culture and their practices of education are really fueling the problem.
• 32:29
  SPEAKER_01: You know, that I'd say the major source of the problem, actually, academia and schools today.
• 32:36
  SPEAKER_00: When you were talking there, it reminded me of something that I read about through Roger Scruton when I learned of who Roger Scruton was in my late 20s and started to read a lot of his work.
• 32:47
  SPEAKER_00: And he used to have a magazine called the Salisbury Review in the early 1980s.
• 32:54
  SPEAKER_00: And a teacher from Bradford called Ray Honeyford wrote an article for it.
• 32:58
  SPEAKER_00: And as you were talking, it seems to me as though we're in a similar place 40 years on.
• 33:03
  SPEAKER_00: And whilst we're talking openly about it, it was very dangerous for people to question this new change in education because it cost Ray Honeyford his job for doing so.
• 33:14
  SPEAKER_00: And I and I just pulled up a few snippets of his article here, which pretty much gets the core of what you're saying.
• 33:20
  SPEAKER_00: And this was back in 1982, I think, um, or maybe even 1984.
• 33:26
  SPEAKER_00: So he said those of us working in Asian areas are encouraged officially to celebrate linguistic diversity, i.e., applaud the rapidly mounting linguistic confusion in those growing number of inner-city schools in which British-born Asian children begin their mastery of English by being taught in Urdu.
• 33:42
  SPEAKER_00: And then he counted that if a school contains a disproportionate number of children for whom English is a second language, true of all Asian children, even those born here, or children from homes where educational ambition and the values disported are conspicuously absent, i.e., the vast majority of West Indian homes, a disproportionate number of which are fatherless, then academic standards are bound to suffer.
• 34:03
  SPEAKER_00: So he pretty much put his foot on all of the landmines he possibly could in uh the in a newly multicultural Britain, where he talked about some um some of the cultural um uh black spots, I suppose, within uh certain communities, uh, why that might not particularly support um a good educational outcomes, and then also questioned whether it was a particularly good idea to be celebrating linguistic diversity when his job as a teacher is to try to get everyone towards a common curriculum.
• 34:42
  SPEAKER_00: And obviously, if you're teaching uh a subject within Britain, you would expect that it's okay to lead in English.
• 34:52
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, and he, I mean, he I think he died, he died uh 12 years ago, according to this Wikipedia page, and he was persona non gratis still at that point.
• 35:00
  SPEAKER_00: You know, he was never never exonerated now.
• 35:03
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe there were some other things he wrote that were were particularly exceptional, but Roger Scruton seems to maintain, or at least maintained up until his death, that ultimately he was it was that growing sign of of cancel culture, and it was it was ruthless, and and indeed it it cost Roger Scruton much in his own academic career, and he had to go off and do his own thing.
• 35:25
  SPEAKER_00: So it sounds to me like nothing's really changed, but things have become much more entrenched in the four 40 years now, uh hence.
• 35:36
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, definitely, definitely.
• 35:38
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, uh, but I I think you know there's a point when the kind of changes reach a tipping point and something you know would you know they become qualitatively quite quite different.
• 35:50
  SPEAKER_01: And I, you know, going just sort of relooping back to uh, I mean, first of all, I agree with you know with what you've said totally, and it's interesting.
• 35:57
  SPEAKER_01: In when I was writing the paper that I've recently put up on our website, I found out that Frank Field and Enoch Powell had been friends, right?
• 36:06
  SPEAKER_01: Which is very interesting because that Frank Field said, you know, that when Enoch Powell made that Rivers of Blood speech, what it did was make it impossible for anyone to speak about immigration.
• 36:18
  SPEAKER_01: It was a complete topic, as well as him becoming the zona non-grata, um, unlike the twits today who think that he had great influence, you know, he was actually didn't.
• 36:29
  SPEAKER_01: He was like sat the next day, and uh, you know, it was the end of his career.
• 36:33
  SPEAKER_01: But you know, he had been a friend of Frank Field, and that it shows you that there's um, and it's quite interesting.
• 36:38
  SPEAKER_01: I am beginning to kind of you know revisit and rethink this whole question of anti official anti-racism, because I think there is we it might be it might be helpful to make a distinction between a multi-ethnic society that I think Britain has been for quite a while, and the fact on a on a on the ordinary everyday level, immigrants have been coming to Britain at different times in different places, including in the north, in Sheffield and you know, places like that.
• 37:08
  SPEAKER_01: And actually, on ordinary working class communities, they're pretty much just got on and integrated, right?
• 37:15
  SPEAKER_01: There have been periodic episodes of racist violence, but that's coexisted with coexistence and intermarriage, and people would come and you know, the sailors would, Laskers would come and they would uh there's a great book by David Holland actually about this, very meticulously researched.
• 37:34
  SPEAKER_01: And you know, they would come and they would, you know, take board, they would lodge with with white working class families, and often ended up like marrying the daughters or the neighbours' daughters or something, you know, and having kids.
• 37:44
  SPEAKER_01: So that was going on.
• 37:46
  SPEAKER_01: So I think the official anti-racism that really happened after the Nationality Act, when uh Britain was giving up its colonies, the Commonwealth was being established, and the Nationality Act kind of allowed former Commonwealth people to come to Britain as British subjects.
• 38:05
  SPEAKER_01: Then very soon after, there's a kind of concern amongst our elites about the relationships within Britain domestically, not the colonial relationships over there, but within Britain within Britain as more Commonwealth people came over.
• 38:19
  SPEAKER_01: And looking at that first Race Relations Act in 1965, I'm not so sure that it I've always I've always accepted it as a good thing.
• 38:31
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, it was a good thing to have an act that you know made discrimination illegal.
• 38:36
  SPEAKER_01: Which of course it is, but it you know, it was like limited.
• 38:39
  SPEAKER_01: It's like that act was also, it wasn't just about that.
• 38:42
  SPEAKER_01: You read it, and you if you read the discussion in Hansard, really the motivating factor, I would say, was actually fear of public disorder.
• 38:53
  SPEAKER_01: It was actually fear over a reaction amongst white working class people, as it happens.
• 39:00
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and the conservative, it was introduced by the uh Labour Party, the conservative criticism of that act of the time was to, you know, it said, you know, in employment, you know, sure we can have a level of legislation, but a lot of these problems that were being talked about might be better settled informally or through civic conciliatory procedures.
• 39:27
  SPEAKER_01: And that the risk for this act was that it would criminalize a whole swath of people for things that really did not deserve criminalizing, you know, clumsy speech, awkward communication, etc.
• 39:41
  SPEAKER_01: And as you say, like that was in 1965, and you can see that happening with the kind of, you know, all the hate speech legislation today, that that kind of the regulation, the tight regulation of people's relationships is really large.
• 39:57
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that I think it was kind of like embryonic then, but at that time you still had an organized working class, you still had a broadly humanistic culture.
• 40:08
  SPEAKER_01: So the authoritarian tendencies were kept at bay, but they don't exist anymore.
• 40:14
  SPEAKER_01: And I think now we're seeing the authoritarianism incipient, what was incipient then, now becoming amplified a million times in a very disturbing way, I think.
• 40:25
  SPEAKER_01: Sorry, I don't even know what your original question boy question was.
• 40:28
  SPEAKER_01: I've lost it.
• 40:30
  SPEAKER_00: It definitely, your your response was certainly linked to the question, so you say don't worry about that.
• 40:36
  SPEAKER_00: Uh we I I see in the corporate world lots of organizations that push the multicultural model, uh, insofar as you have lots of separate multicultural network groups, and uh it might be the black network, it might be the Muslim network.
• 40:52
  SPEAKER_00: And I don't believe they contribute to a sense of cohesion uh in the workplace.
• 41:01
  SPEAKER_00: And um I wonder whether it is actually these organizations that they're a microcosm for the balkanization that we've started to see everywhere else.
• 41:14
  SPEAKER_00: And because these organizations typically tend to be influential in forming, you know, our de facto governing elites, whether you can whether people consider themselves to be governing elites or not, but if you're in these large organizations which are critical to various services, public and private in the country, and then you have all of this social ideologically driven things there, whether people think they're ideologically driven or not, they are.
• 41:44
  SPEAKER_00: Multiculturalism is a specific worldview of which is built on various ideological strands.
• 41:50
  SPEAKER_00: And and your mission at Don't Divide Us is to make sure people aren't stoking division.
• 41:57
  SPEAKER_00: So I suppose my question to you, Alker, is how can private and public sector leaders prevent their organizations inadvertently stoking division or worsening the state of race relations in the UK?
• 42:10
  SPEAKER_01: Well, um, I'll definitely get, you know, they certainly uh are uh, if you like, an expression of the wider balkanisation sectarianism that we see in society where you know we we no longer have a general public.
• 42:24
  SPEAKER_01: We are addressed as different communities.
• 42:27
  SPEAKER_01: So get sick of hearing the word communities, it's like you say, like, oh, the Indian community.
• 42:32
  SPEAKER_01: What Indian community?
• 42:34
  SPEAKER_01: I'm here, I live in Norwich, I have my friends, I do my work.
• 42:38
  SPEAKER_01: What what what is this fictitious Indian community that I'm meant to be part of?
• 42:42
  SPEAKER_01: You know, I I have a personal history to India and a connection with India, yes, but that doesn't make a community.
• 42:48
  SPEAKER_01: So they are creating these kind of fictitious, fetishized version of sectarian expression of that.
• 42:56
  SPEAKER_01: But they're also, I think, um, you know, in management, where whether it's a public sector employer or a private employer, there are they're also an outcome of stasis, stasis and real kind of poor management arising from not a technical lack of knowledge, but an inability or an unwillingness to actually act in an authoritative way.
• 43:19
  SPEAKER_01: And you certainly, you know, you know, you know, I noticed this first as a teacher when it's like rather than sort of exerting authority and saying, no, this behavior is wrong, and kids will go into detention if they do this.
• 43:32
  SPEAKER_01: It was like you just let it ride, you just let it slide and slide and slide until you get to the point where you'd rather call in the police to deal with it, you know, rather than deal rather than having, you know, should have dealt with it properly, you know, like two months ago.
• 43:46
  SPEAKER_01: We wouldn't have got to this position where you need the police in a school.
• 43:49
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, it seemed terrible to me that you need the police to come into a school to discipline what who are sent, you know, people who are essentially children.
• 43:57
  SPEAKER_01: What kind of a message is that, Sendy?
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_01: So then I see, I think that is writ large in in workplaces.
• 44:04
  SPEAKER_01: You see, this sort of management is unwilling to sort of act in an aut in a clear, authoritative, confident way for fear of being seen oppressive, for fear of being seen as racist or transphobic or misogynistic.
• 44:18
  SPEAKER_01: And that that that that kind of creates a paralysis, a sense of paralysis.
• 44:23
  SPEAKER_01: And when you have that, things go wrong, people get frustrated, tensions arise, mistakes are made.
• 44:31
  SPEAKER_01: I'm sure a lot of the horrible things we hear in about things that happen in hospitals, I'm not denying the possibility of intentional malevolence, but quite often they're a result of complete institutional breakdown and procedures internally.
• 44:47
  SPEAKER_01: And no one really taking responsibility because no one's quite sure who is responsible for that part of the work, you know, and the tendency to always outsource, outsource, outsource.
• 44:58
  SPEAKER_01: And I think what in in that context, the establishment of these sort of ethnic groups, communities, and networks is a way of managing that.
• 45:09
  SPEAKER_01: It's a way of kind of managing that in a way that isn't really managing it properly, but it's appearing to manage it.
• 45:15
  SPEAKER_01: And it and it is a way also of them managing the relationships, the discontent that arises in a very authoritarian way.
• 45:24
  SPEAKER_01: You know, it's sort of it's you know, I've yet to see anything positive emerge from any of these BAME networks.
• 45:32
  SPEAKER_01: And what they seem to be doing is trying to kind of cultivate a new sort of new kind of little black elites in workcases, um, that are that they're not really elites because it's nothing they've done for themselves.
• 45:46
  SPEAKER_01: They've all been, you know, it's all been created and set up for them and managed by wider elites who are all sorts of colours, you know, but they're not, you know, they're not being done for the benefit of black people, even though it seems like that.
• 46:00
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm not saying some black people don't benefit, but they're very few.
• 46:03
  SPEAKER_01: It's mainly the middle class black people that benefit.
• 46:07
  SPEAKER_01: The people who are at the bottom, whatever their colour, remain at the bottom, you know.
• 46:12
  SPEAKER_01: So it's these professional BAME networks, they're really horrible.
• 46:17
  SPEAKER_01: I really hate it, especially in in education.
• 46:19
  SPEAKER_01: I see loads of them, you know.
• 46:20
  SPEAKER_01: Come if you're a black teacher, you know, you know, come and join this black leadership group.
• 46:24
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm it's really disgusting.
• 46:27
  SPEAKER_01: You know, you should be you should be thinking of yourself as a teacher.
• 46:30
  SPEAKER_01: And if you're going to belong to any community, it will be as an English teacher, because that's what I taught, or a history teacher, or a math teacher.
• 46:38
  SPEAKER_01: And that way you learn it, you learn things that will be helpful to you in your job, for which you have public consent and public money, instead of which you're being incur we're being encouraged to associate on purely arbitrary grounds for which nobody is given wider consent, and which is coming out of the taxpayer's purse.
• 46:58
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, it's it's but I I'm surprised I'm amazed that there isn't more upset and unrest amongst the British public at this going on, to be honest.
• 47:07
  SPEAKER_01: I think we're very tolerant, still ordinary people are.
• 47:12
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, I I think there's probably corners of the internet that might also say that um the recent um uh turning of the screw on expression of distaste about these particular institutional biases that are being set up, um, and and the consequences of expressing those uh those those expressions of distaste, mean that people probably feel like they can't.
• 47:39
  SPEAKER_00: There's be I think Eric Kaufman makes the point is that the the race taboo governs most Western societies.
• 47:46
  SPEAKER_00: And so people feel very afraid to say anything because it's so elastic.
• 47:51
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, and things can be pushed into a box and say that thing that you're saying, that question, that um expression of uh dissent, is by by in itself racist.
• 48:03
  SPEAKER_00: And because it's a career-ending thing, because it's a livelihood-ending thing, I think people find it very hard to bring it up.
• 48:10
  SPEAKER_00: As you were talking there, and you're talking about the various programs that are set up to bring specific ethnic minorities up through an organization, so affirmative action programs.
• 48:22
  SPEAKER_00: I I've had similar thoughts about these, um, where you talked about the ethnic minorities who benefit tends to be already middle class.
• 48:31
  SPEAKER_00: They might have already, you know, taken that further.
• 48:33
  SPEAKER_00: They might have been through Red Brick Universities, the graduate programs, all of those things.
• 48:38
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm from Northumberland now.
• 48:40
  SPEAKER_00: I'm from a middle class background myself, you know, son of a construction uh worker, but you know, in management.
• 48:47
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, and I went to school with lots of people, people in the trades, people who uh were farmers, agricultural workers, um, all you know, in in retail jobs.
• 49:00
  SPEAKER_00: And parts of the that county are not particularly not doing that well, you know.
• 49:06
  SPEAKER_00: You've got ex-mining towns which are on their knees ultimately.
• 49:10
  SPEAKER_00: And I've heard Dr.
• 49:10
  SPEAKER_00: Rakeeb Essan, social cohesion researcher, Royal Holloway University, I think he's now at Buckingham University with Eric Kaufman, is he often makes the point that places like Blackpool, which are impoverished, not a lot of diversity there.
• 49:27
  SPEAKER_00: So actually, if you if you want to be trying to raise the boats for people, if you want to be really helping people, you want to be trying to find those, those, those diamonds in the rough, I suppose, in these places that are left behind and long forgotten, irrespective of ethnic and identity.
• 49:43
  SPEAKER_00: Because if you if you care about the raising of the boats, then you need to cast your net wider.
• 49:48
  SPEAKER_00: Whereas if you come up with, you know, and I'm using a term that I've heard in the corporate circles, if you come up with a black action plan and you're based in London and you've got a, you know, 13% of your population are black and you're um and you're you're bringing them in, but there is actually a benefit to being born in London already, insofar as you are on the doorstep of some of the world's biggest companies, all of the jobs effectively that you might want to do and that are heavily remunerated.
• 50:18
  SPEAKER_00: And so actually, if you're gonna level the boats, look beyond that, look beyond the the the metropolitan centre and forget about the ethnicity and try and just provide the opportunities for for everyone.
• 50:35
  SPEAKER_00: Uh I think it's gonna be very hard to see those things get wound down, even if even if people start to agree with that line of argument and people are free not to, because the optics are so bad in doing so.
• 50:52
  SPEAKER_00: Uh and so so I don't know whether we'll see, you know, an emerging trend of these things getting rolled back or just or or or maybe they'll be presented as it's done what we said it is going to do, really good stuff.
• 51:06
  SPEAKER_00: Now we're moving on to the next thing.
• 51:08
  SPEAKER_00: I know we don't have too much longer left, Alcre.
• 51:11
  SPEAKER_00: And we've we talked a lot about being in the age of identity politics, and we talked a lot about how multiculturalism um and this idea of dividing people up into communities is leading to less understanding between people within Britain.
• 51:28
  SPEAKER_00: And I've seen the emergency of the Anglo-identity amongst Zoomers, so Gen Z, they feel dispossessed due to mass immigration and multiculturalism.
• 51:38
  SPEAKER_00: And I suppose my question to you as someone who you're the ultimate synthesis, right?
• 51:44
  SPEAKER_00: You're someone of Indian ethnicity who's come married into the tribe, as it were.
• 51:48
  SPEAKER_00: You know, you've got what seems to be an Anglo-Saxon hyphenated surname with your with your with your Indian name there, uh, which is which is uh very similar to my my my wife to be, she's she's half Indian.
• 52:00
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and I I wonder whether this emergence of Anglo identity, based on everything we've seen, whether it's the institutional setup, um, whether it's the the the multiculturalist policies, is understandable.
• 52:16
  SPEAKER_00: And what are the potential consequences from this rising Anglo identity?
• 52:24
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 52:25
  SPEAKER_01: Well, first of all, congratulations on your forthcoming marriage if you're engaged again.
• 52:30
  SPEAKER_01: Um I think uh of course you can and you know, when you have a situation where our social fabric is already communalized, if you like, or sectarianized, ditched up into pockets, and then you have this racial culture that is racialized, then reactions of people within that are going to take a racialized form as well.
• 52:54
  SPEAKER_01: Hence the white, ethnic, national, you know.
• 52:57
  SPEAKER_01: And but this isn't um, I don't think it's the uh it's understandable, but it's not a helpful or a progressive.
• 53:05
  SPEAKER_01: It doesn't offer a, I think, in my opinion, it's not a way forward to, you know, um, nail your flag to that pursuing that line of thinking, because it's really reinforcing the racialized thinking that's causing the problem in the first place.
• 53:21
  SPEAKER_01: And, you know, this is not actually that way of thinking, it is being endorsed and it originates from our elites, right?
• 53:29
  SPEAKER_01: It's not a bottom-up way of thinking.
• 53:32
  SPEAKER_01: Um, ordinary people have always been, they've had to, you know, because of their position, if you like, because class isn't a characteristic like anything else.
• 53:42
  SPEAKER_01: Class is a very basic, very fundamental structuring of society.
• 53:47
  SPEAKER_01: Um, so you know, and and now we've got a Labour Party that is, you know, sort of talking about bringing class or socioeconomics into a protected characteristic type thing through a new base equality act, which I think will be disastrous, you know, if I put a petrol onto onto onto a bonfire that's just about kind of calming down now, and then, you know, if they go ahead with that be a disaster.
• 54:12
  SPEAKER_01: So I don't think that is the it's understandable, but it is not the way forward.
• 54:18
  SPEAKER_01: I don't think this would just die out of its own accord or run out of steam, unfortunately.
• 54:23
  SPEAKER_01: Um, because while you have the majority of the pop people, as you said, feeling fearful, that will continue.
• 54:32
  SPEAKER_01: But the hope is, because there are people, not just don't divide us, there are many people.
• 54:37
  SPEAKER_01: You've mentioned some of them, you know, yourself, um, and not just in Britain, but internationally, who are beginning to, you know, who are thinking basically, you know, sod it, whatever the costs I need to speak out.
• 54:51
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and that's a really good thing.
• 54:53
  SPEAKER_01: In and of itself, speaking out won't do the job, but it's a very important prerequisite.
• 55:00
  SPEAKER_01: Because eventually, you know, it will have to be challenged politically.
• 55:04
  SPEAKER_01: There will have to be a coherent voice because politics is the only sphere where these things can be decided democratically if we want to be a democratic country, and I do, and I think most people do, not the advocates of critical social justice.
• 55:19
  SPEAKER_01: I don't think they care about democracy.
• 55:22
  SPEAKER_01: That is why they're very happy to base everything on the experiences of London or Birmingham, totally ignoring the fact of so many people who don't live in those cities, you know, that you know, those metropolitan little centres are being taken as as the norm to which everybody should aspire to.
• 55:39
  SPEAKER_01: Well, how's that going to work in a little Welsh village or a little village in Northumbria?
• 55:43
  SPEAKER_01: You know, that's just it's a terrible, terrible, terrible anti-democratic um way of approaching things.
• 55:50
  SPEAKER_01: So um, so I'm kind of cautiously optimistic.
• 55:54
  SPEAKER_01: I think there's, you know, on a good day I'm cautiously optimistic.
• 55:57
  SPEAKER_01: On a bad day, I think, oh my god, this is just like oh, I can't bear it.
• 56:00
  SPEAKER_01: Everybody just go away, leave me alone to my garden.
• 56:04
  SPEAKER_01: But um, you know, that you know there there is no other way, you know.
• 56:09
  SPEAKER_01: If we want, if we don't want society to carry on being fragmented, um, fractious, authoritarian, if we what if we don't want to lose our liberties that have been historically gained from you know the Reformation onwards, if not before, um then you know we are there's no one else going to do it.
• 56:29
  SPEAKER_01: You know, this is the you and me and everyone else that that's that's uh that feels like that and wants to, you know, we'll have to put time and effort into thinking about things, think and and a bit of courage to speak out.
• 56:42
  SPEAKER_01: Because, you know, we are if you forget we are the majority.
• 56:45
  SPEAKER_01: You know, they are the man I they are the minority.
• 56:48
  SPEAKER_01: And just because they have very loud voices that take up all the space in an echo chamber, it doesn't mean they do they they don't speak for everyone.
• 56:58
  SPEAKER_00: So yeah, well, I certainly second the notion of practicing expressing what it is you think and interacting with others.
• 57:09
  SPEAKER_00: And that's partly why the main reason I set up this podcast, I think, having sat around feeling the um rather uh repressive um speech codes informal at the time and worrying, I suppose, about the consequences.
• 57:29
  SPEAKER_00: I was then, even though I knew that was not the right way of going, I was then inspired by hearing John Gray, I think, on uh another one from the Northeast, great, great political philosopher, he was on Andrew Sullivan's Dishcast uh podcast, and he um spoke about how whilst liberalism may well be over, um the only way things ever stay alive is through the practicing it.
• 57:55
  SPEAKER_00: They're not these abstract theoretical ideas.
• 57:59
  SPEAKER_00: If you value something, you ought to practice.
• 58:02
  SPEAKER_00: You you if if the space doesn't exist for freedom of expression, create one.
• 58:08
  SPEAKER_00: And that's that's what I've been trying to do with thinking class in a way to try to develop a courage within me to be able to try to express what it is that I'm thinking and hear what the other person has to say back to that without worrying about whether I might get cut down at the at the at the at the feet at the same time.
• 58:31
  SPEAKER_00: We're we're right into the end zone now, Alcur.
• 58:33
  SPEAKER_00: And what I'd like to do is ask you the question I ask all of my guests, which is what have you changed your mind on during the course of your life?
• 58:40
  SPEAKER_00: And what was it that made you think differently?
• 58:44
  SPEAKER_01: Um, yeah, I think yeah, that's yes, it's two things related democracy and patriotism.
• 58:52
  SPEAKER_01: I think and um yes, because when I my my political formation as a youngster many, many decades ago, uh was was left-wing and anti-imperialist, and I don't think at that time I I was fully distinguished between anti-imperialism and and anti-patriotism.
• 59:14
  SPEAKER_01: I think that the the distinction I I felt it, but it was never really actually it was never explicit, it was never very important.
• 59:22
  SPEAKER_01: But then when I was doing my um studying for my PhD and I was looking at the British education policy, I could see, I could literally see as I was reading these documents how the public voice was more and more squeezed out as more and more of the policy became outsourced to well, the EU in that case.
• 59:42
  SPEAKER_01: It was, you know, transnational bodies, including the EU.
• 59:45
  SPEAKER_01: And then Brexit came, and that was why I thought Brexit, the Brexit referendum, was so important.
• 59:50
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and then I I I did the thing that no academic should do if they want to last in academia, which luckily I didn't.
• 59:58
  SPEAKER_01: I did for the Brexit party, and um going out talking to people really, really brought home in a very visceral way how important democracy was, how much common sense most people have, spontaneous common, you know, not academic, but just common sense you intuitively get to ideas and values and attitudes that you believe in yourself, but you know, you might I would articulate them in a sort of trissy, often long-winded academic academies, which I'm hoping trying to train myself out of.
• 1:00:31
  SPEAKER_01: And people speak directly.
• 1:00:32
  SPEAKER_01: And oh, quite often it's you know, there is such a thing as sense in common, common sense, you know, the sense that common people have, and that's that is really, really important.
• 1:00:43
  SPEAKER_01: It's really important that isn't stigmatized, it's really important that gets a hearing.
• 1:00:47
  SPEAKER_01: And I think all of us in our different ways of trying to ensure that that happens.
• 1:00:52
  SPEAKER_01: So or more power to us.
• 1:00:54
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 1:00:55
  SPEAKER_00: Well, you saw my line.
• 1:00:56
  SPEAKER_00: I was about to say, more more power to you, Alka, and in an age where democracy is certainly being squeezed by people who don't necessarily want to uh let the concerns of many um be acted upon and and and governed in that spirit, and also in an age where people take any vote against what is the preferred route by those who typically hold the levers of power as being the product of them being misinformed.
• 1:01:30
  SPEAKER_00: There's been a misinformation campaign, they couldn't have possibly thought of this themselves.
• 1:01:36
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yes, unbelievable, really unbelievable.
• 1:01:40
  SPEAKER_01: And just sorry, just quickly to say, you know, the patriotism is really linked to that because you know, it a love of country is if you can't, if you don't love your country, then how can you possibly love any?
• 1:01:52
  SPEAKER_01: You know, it's how the common sense thing is if you don't love yourself, how can you love anyone else?
• 1:01:56
  SPEAKER_01: But that scales up to the to the national level, you know, it's the largest unit of democratic accountability.
• 1:02:02
  SPEAKER_01: If you keep trashing it all the time or ignoring it and thinking that consent lies with some broader international community, then you're ignoring the very people that you're meant to be, that you want to you want you want their consent for you to rule, but you're ignoring their opinions and interests all the time.
• 1:02:22
  SPEAKER_01: So that isn't gonna work, is it?
• 1:02:26
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, your your point there about um having patriotic mindset, it brings to mind a couple of things.
• 1:02:34
  SPEAKER_00: Firstly, a for a former a former guest, Lionel Shriver, who writes for the spectator, amongst other things, she made the point that she grew up very anti-patriotic, and now in this age, she almost sees that uh it's a bit too dangerous to be anti-patriot patriotic now, given that that is the modus operandi of most people.
• 1:02:56
  SPEAKER_00: Because, and I suppose to to channel Yuval Noah Harari, who I'm not a huge fan of, and actually he's he he stands for things that I don't necessarily stand for, but he makes the point that nationalism doesn't have to be a dirty word.
• 1:03:08
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, nationalism expands the the the um the realm of empathy that you feel for people that don't live in the same town as you, that might not even look the same as you.
• 1:03:22
  SPEAKER_00: And so this idea of trying to unite under the flag.
• 1:03:26
  SPEAKER_00: And I get this image of Queen Elizabeth II's funeral, and I remember a particularly touching moment was when the Scottish and the Irish Pipers were out and they were walking down the mall, I think it was, and they were all under the flag.
• 1:03:42
  SPEAKER_00: And then you had the the English, um, the guards, and you had all of these different people from these British Isles marching under one flag, and how long it took to even establish that peace and prosperity.
• 1:03:55
  SPEAKER_00: And and this takes us all the way back to the start, really, Elka, this this idea of why you need to repudiate any of this year zero stuff.
• 1:04:03
  SPEAKER_00: Because without knowing our histories, our quarrels, the way that we came together, uh, and what it is that we share, which is this plot of land, this island, we're not gonna get we're not gonna get anywhere.
• 1:04:15
  SPEAKER_00: If you if you trash the country, if you trash the flag, if you if you trash any nation, no notion of nationhood, then you are getting the balkanization, you're getting warring tribes.
• 1:04:26
  SPEAKER_00: So let's let's keep fighting against it somehow.
• 1:04:29
  SPEAKER_02: Yes, definitely.
• 1:04:31
  SPEAKER_02: Definitely.
• 1:04:32
  SPEAKER_02: Cheers to that.
• 1:04:33
  SPEAKER_02: We agree.
• 1:04:34
  SPEAKER_00: Cheers to that, Alka.
• 1:04:35
  SPEAKER_00: And it's been an absolute pleasure.
• 1:04:36
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you so much for joining.
• 1:04:38
  SPEAKER_00: And hopefully we can speak again in the future.
• 1:04:41
  SPEAKER_01: Take care.
• 1:04:42
  SPEAKER_00: Take care.
• 1:04:43
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you.
• 1:04:48
  SPEAKER_00: 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.
• 1:04:58
  SPEAKER_00: Thinking Class seeks to understand the civilizational issues we face and why what our leaders do in response matters.
• 1:05:04
  SPEAKER_00: 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.
• 1:05:13
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• 1:05:22
  SPEAKER_00: I look forward to seeing you there and for joining me on this journey.