Latest / Thinking Class / #093 - George Owers - Britain's 350-Year Culture War: The Birth Of Party Politics

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#093 - George Owers - Britain's 350-Year Culture War: The Birth Of Party Politics · Thinking Class

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Hello, classmates, and welcome to Thinking Class.
• 0:02
  SPEAKER_00: I'm John Gillam, and today I'm speaking to George Owers.
• 0:06
  SPEAKER_00: George is an editor and writer and the author of his newly released book, The Rage of Party, how Whig vs.
• 0:13
  SPEAKER_00: Tory Made Motern Britain.
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_00: In this episode, George and I think out loud about the origins of party politics in Britain, and how the Whig and Tory parties emerged from the Glorious Revolution in 1688, how the Whigs' winning led to the creation of so many of Britain's most recognizable institutions, and changed the course of politics right up until the present day.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_00: How each of the parties' relationship with the monarchy and religious differences led to a division, and why modern political divides and culture wars echo these historical tensions, and whether in a discourse obsessed with British values you can find any consistent display of values you could reliably point to.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_00: And finally, how a cohesive national identity is essential for social democracy and a welfare state, and what puts those very things in danger, and much, much more.
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_00: Make sure to like, subscribe, and follow the show on YouTube, your podcast platform of choice and substack.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_00: This is a dense episode.
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_00: You will get a pretty big history lesson.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_00: First 20 minutes, you're going to find out a lot about the creation of party politics.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_00: The conversation opens up to get into how there are echoes between the past and today, and that the culture wars that we are going through today often still relitigate the very same wounds that were opened 350 years ago here in England and Britain.
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_00: Do enjoy the show, classmates.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_00: Let's go thinking class together.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_00: George Owers, welcome to Thinking Class.
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks so much for joining me.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks for having me.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_00: Well, it's my pleasure, and thank you for being very flexible with your calendar as we found a slot ahead of your upcoming book, The Rage of Party, which I think I would describe as the origin story for the formation of party politics in England.
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_00: And I would say probably the history book, the history book, uh, that uh really describes the what we saw within the political sphere on this island we call home.
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_00: What motivated you to write a 500-page book on the topic?
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_00: Why did you find it so important?
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I mean, partly because I think it's a great story, I'm not gonna lie.
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_01: Um, it's got great characters, it all builds up to a fantastic crescendo and then becomes sort of part soap opera, part Greek tragedy towards the end.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_01: But on a more substantive level, I think it touches on what you just said, which is that in many ways it's the period where many of the cultural divides and political antagonisms that still are here to this day originate from, and it's also where many of the key institutions and changes that made, if you like, the modern world came into being.
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_01: So, for example, this is the period uh you know between so we're basically talking about the period between the the late reign of Charles II in the 60 in the 16 uh seventies, eighties through to when the Hanoverians become the royal family in 1714, so that's the Georges, but it's the Georgians, if you like.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_01: And in that period we see the Bank of England being founded, the national debt coming into existence, Parliament becoming a permanent institution that always sits, which was not very much not the case before.
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_01: We see the union between England and Scotland becoming a reality, we see the rise of the City of London, we see all sorts of things, you know, that w without which other later developments such as the rise of the British Empire in the rest of the 18th century, the current tensions over, say, the union with you know the SNP and the question of Scottish independence, all of these things originate in the in this era, and they are in many ways the product of the party divide between Whigs and Tories, um, and the fierce, fierce partisan battles they fought decided a lot of these things that have resonated for hundreds of years since.
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, George.
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_00: So before we do a bit of a then and now and get into what we see resonating from that period to today, let's get into the origin story of the Whigs and the Tories.
• 4:34
  SPEAKER_00: How did they come into being?
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_00: What were the the battles like?
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_00: What were the culture war battles of the of the time?
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_01: So uh basically there are to simplify crudely, there are sort of two phases of Whig versus Tory in the period I'm talking about.
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_01: So at first, the easiest way to describe it is that the Whigs and Tories were essentially the extension uh to into a later period of the older divides between cavalier and parliamentarian or cavalier and roundhead from the Civil War.
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_01: So the Tories were the party, to put it crudely, of church and king or queen.
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_01: And uh they had high view of the authority of the Church of England, and they were often described as the church party, and they also initially had a high view of the authority of the monarch, because they believed the monarch was divinely ordained, and they basically sort of uh more or less believed in the divine right of kings and hereditary succession, that the monarchs were uh uh appointed and anointed by God.
• 5:36
  SPEAKER_01: Whereas the Whigs were much more, much less romantic and had a much lower view of the authority of the monarchy.
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_01: They believed that the monarchs were more of a contrivance of political convenience, they some of the more radical ones essentially believed in social contract theory, i.e., if a monarch did not uphold the lives the life and proper the lives and properties and so on of their subjects, they could be deposed.
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_01: And then on the religious side, the Tories were, as I said, the church party, but specifically they were the party of the what we call the High Church faction of the Church of England, which is essentially people who emphasise more the continuity with the pre-Reformation Church.
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_01: So they believed in that the church was a sort of sacred body that could convey grace through the sacraments and that the priesthood had a sort of much higher role, whereas the Whigs were the party of the lower church element and the dissenters.
• 6:33
  SPEAKER_01: So the dissenters were essentially the Protestants who were more radical outside the Church of England, and they had a much lower view of the church, or indeed were outside the church altogether, so they believed they had a much more individualistic view of religion, essentially, that the important thing was hearing the word of God and having sermons and having an individual relationship with God and the church and priests and so on, were not very important.
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_01: So the Whigs, so that's so there's a religious divide and there's a political divide, and that's how it and it comes into being, or it the actual division between Whig and Tory first comes into being during something called the exclusion crisis, which happens it starts in sort of 1678 and goes on until 1681.
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_01: And this is towards the tail end of Charles II's reign, the merry monarch.
• 7:17
  SPEAKER_01: And essentially the question is who will succeed Charles II as king?
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_01: The the heir is should be, or the current heir that at the time was James Duke of York, who was Charles II's brother.
• 7:29
  SPEAKER_01: But there was a big problem uh in the view of a lot of people, which was that James Duke of York was a Roman Catholic.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_01: He had converted uh in the not entirely sure when, but at some point before he had in the 1670s, probably he had uh converted to the Roman Catholic Church.
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_01: Now in Protestant England, this was, and indeed Scotland, this was not popular.
• 7:51
  SPEAKER_01: Uh people were basically the assumption of most Protestant Englishmen was that the Roman Catholic Church was a sinister authoritarian foreign force, um, you know, which obviously comes from a cultural heritage of Bloody Mary, Elizabeth I struggles against Catholic Spain, and so on and so forth.
• 8:09
  SPEAKER_01: However, and neither Whigs nor Tories were that keen on Roman Catholicism.
• 8:14
  SPEAKER_01: However, the Tories' view was well, James Duke of York is the anointed heir to the throne.
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_01: And it's to to call that into question would be to call anarchy and chaos, and that he has a divine, he's been divinely ordained us to be the next king, and therefore we should support him becoming king.
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_01: We hope, you know, that they were they hoped that he would respect the Church of England, but they ultimately that was their view.
• 8:39
  SPEAKER_01: Whereas what became the Whigs became in favour were in favour of excluding James Duke of Field from the succession on the on the account that they couldn't countenance under any circumstances a Roman Catholic king.
• 8:52
  SPEAKER_01: And this becomes a huge, and it's the whole thing is set off by what is called the Popish Plot, which is a mad conspiracy put forward by a half-mad and extremely disreputable Protestant fanatic in 1678-9, and called Titus Oates.
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_01: And this lights the touch paper of the controversy, and there's a big political battle, which you can read all about in the book, which I won't go into any great detail, but basically there's a huge political battle between the king, supported by a group of people who are increasingly referred to as the Tories, and on the one hand, and on the other hand, the Whigs, who are led by several people, but most prominently someone called the Earl of Shaftesbury, um, who who wants to exclude James from the throne.
• 9:37
  SPEAKER_01: And at first it seems that the Whigs uh might win because they dominate parliament, but gradually the tur the tired the tide turns.
• 9:46
  SPEAKER_01: Charles II outfoxes the Whigs with the support of his Tory allies, and the Whigs lose the first bout of the battle, essentially.
• 9:54
  SPEAKER_01: Many of some of them were executed for a um an actual revolutionary plot to kill the king, which did actually exist, so it wasn't completely that they some of them were executed.
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_01: The ones that weren't executed largely fled into exile, or largely in the Dutch Republic.
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_01: Some of them just get their heads down in England.
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_01: So that was the first battle.
• 10:13
  SPEAKER_01: And then in 1685, Charles II dies, and James II becomes king.
• 10:19
  SPEAKER_01: And with reasonably little opposition, he's it's generally at first pretty smooth.
• 10:24
  SPEAKER_01: However, James II soon runs into big, big difficulties because although he isn't quite the authoritarian butcher that um a lot of the Protestants and the Whigs thought he was, he certainly was quite keen to use his position as king to promote the Roman Catholic religion.
• 10:42
  SPEAKER_01: So he allows the mass to be said in England, he allows Roman Catholic proselytization, he appoints Roman Catholics both to senior positions in the army and in the government, and all of this goes down like a cup of cold sick, with not only the Whigs, the ones on the left, but also increasingly the Tories start to become rather unimpressed by this because the Tories are the church party and they see this as undermining the privilege and power of the Church of England.
• 11:09
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and so but uh for a while it looks like James II is you know still in a reasonably strong position.
• 11:15
  SPEAKER_01: But the thing that really does for him is two things.
• 11:19
  SPEAKER_01: First of all, he has a son, um, which he hadn't previously had, and this raises the prospect of a permanent Roman Catholic monarchy because he's got a legitimate heir a son, um, and it you know it's almost certain that he'd be brought up as a Roman Catholic.
• 11:33
  SPEAKER_01: The other thing that does for him is the external factor, which is that there is somebody waiting in the wings to exploit the unhappiness of many of the people of England and and Scotland with uh James II and his Romanizing, and that is a man called William of Orange, who is the Stadtholder of the Dutch Republic.
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_01: Now, William has a claim to the English throne and the Scottish throne.
• 11:57
  SPEAKER_01: It's not a brilliant one, but he does have a claim because he is Charles I's grandson.
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_01: However, he is actually third in line to the throne.
• 12:05
  SPEAKER_01: However, William is very keen to become King of England and Scotland, largely because he has been involved for a long time in a huge rivalry and indeed an on and off war with France.
• 12:17
  SPEAKER_01: Now, at the time, France is the chief Roman Catholic superpower and the easily the most powerful country in Europe with a huge army under Louis XIV.
• 12:27
  SPEAKER_01: And William has had to fight a long rear sort of rearguard action to fight him off.
• 12:35
  SPEAKER_01: And he and obviously the Dutch Republic is sort of the centre of the most radical, one of the most radical wings of Protestantism.
• 12:41
  SPEAKER_01: It's a Calvinist country against Catholic uh France.
• 12:45
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, William the Third Um William of Orange has largely fended the French off surprisingly well, but he's a constantly fearing, and particularly in the context of 1688, which is when the revolution, the glorious revolution, which is what we're talking about, happens.
• 13:00
  SPEAKER_01: He fears that the French are going to invade.
• 13:04
  SPEAKER_01: And what does he want?
• 13:05
  SPEAKER_01: Well, he thinks, well, I've got a sort of claim to the English throne-ish.
• 13:09
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and England is a very wealthy country.
• 13:11
  SPEAKER_01: If I gain control of the English and Scottish throne, I can use the taxes, the resources, the armies, and so on of those kingdoms to help me in my fight against Louis XIV.
• 13:22
  SPEAKER_01: And so these two things converge.
• 13:25
  SPEAKER_01: There's the glorious in England, there's a lot of unhappiness and uh protests and disorder against James because of his Roman Catholic policies.
• 13:34
  SPEAKER_01: And at the same time, William sees the opportunity to come under the he at first he says that he's coming to sort of help the English have a free parliament.
• 13:46
  SPEAKER_01: What he really wants is to claim the throne, which he does.
• 13:50
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, he the Protestant wind, as it's called, blows, which allows his ships to sail.
• 13:54
  SPEAKER_01: He lands just near Torbay and uh in the West Country, and uh the the James's regime collapses pretty quickly.
• 14:02
  SPEAKER_01: There is a little bit of fighting, not a great deal.
• 14:05
  SPEAKER_01: And to cut a long story short, although the Tories the Tories of the Tories are not that sort of they accept this because they hate the Romanizing the Catholic policy of James, but obviously they're very torn because they are the church and king party, and what's happened is that the church and king have become opposed, um, which is what they their worst nightmare, essentially.
• 14:28
  SPEAKER_01: So the Tories when push comes to shove, they think, you know what?
• 14:33
  SPEAKER_01: We're prepared to accept uh the the William becoming king.
• 14:37
  SPEAKER_01: We don't like it, but we'll accept it because it's better than the alternative, which is a Roman Catholic king, and the church being undermined.
• 14:44
  SPEAKER_01: So William becomes king, the Tories sit on their hands, accept it, the Whigs are jubilant because they've got rid of the Roman Catholic King that they'd always opposed.
• 14:53
  SPEAKER_01: And a new phase, and this is the sort of second phase of the party battle, sets in.
• 14:59
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and this is uh changes, and the dynamic changes in some important sense.
• 15:06
  SPEAKER_01: One said the the thing that never changes is that the the is the religious element.
• 15:10
  SPEAKER_01: The Whigs are always the party of Protestant descent and the low, lower church, more Protestant, if you like, element.
• 15:17
  SPEAKER_01: And the Tories remain the party of the Church of England and particularly the High Church.
• 15:21
  SPEAKER_01: That never changes, and that ebbs and flows over the the course of the reign of William III, right?
• 15:27
  SPEAKER_01: William of Orange has become a king, and then after him, Queen Anne.
• 15:31
  SPEAKER_01: However, the other part of the political battle changes a lot because William III has become king, he isn't the anointed monarch.
• 15:40
  SPEAKER_01: He has his claim he's not that good to the throne.
• 15:43
  SPEAKER_01: Divine right obviously doesn't apply to him.
• 15:46
  SPEAKER_01: So the Tories increasingly become very uh sceptical about the monarch and because and they become increasingly the party opposed to war and in in favour of lower taxes, which had previously been the Whig sort of view.
• 16:01
  SPEAKER_01: When the king was a high Anglican or a Roman Catholic Tory or supporter of divine right and so on, they were the party who were opposed to the court, they were against wars and standing armies and taxes.
• 16:15
  SPEAKER_01: But in the 1690s, which is the key era, this all changes.
• 16:18
  SPEAKER_01: Essentially, the Whigs, who were, if you like, to use slightly anachronistic terminology, had been the populist anti-government party.
• 16:27
  SPEAKER_01: Actually, they become the opposite because the because the new government under William III is one they approve of.
• 16:34
  SPEAKER_01: They want a Protestant monarch, they want to fight the war against France because there is another factor which is that some people still want to restore James II to the throne.
• 16:45
  SPEAKER_01: They still foresee him as the anointed monarch, they they and they're called the Jacobites.
• 16:50
  SPEAKER_01: Now they largely flee into exile.
• 16:51
  SPEAKER_01: There's a war going on in Ireland in which the Jacobites fight against, led by James II, fight against William III.
• 17:00
  SPEAKER_01: But the Whigs' view is look, we have to defeat the French because they're the Roman Catholic absolutist enemy.
• 17:05
  SPEAKER_01: We have to defeat the Jacobites, we have to support William III in his wars.
• 17:09
  SPEAKER_01: What does wars require?
• 17:10
  SPEAKER_01: Taxes.
• 17:11
  SPEAKER_01: They require debt, they require us to roll our hands up and be pragmatic.
• 17:15
  SPEAKER_01: So the Whigs, who'd always been opposed to that when it was Charles II and James II, become the oligarchic party of authority and and and indeed, in a weird twist, the monarchy.
• 17:26
  SPEAKER_01: Whereas the Tories look at survey the scene and think, well, I'm not really sure that I'm that bothered about a war for to defend the Dutch Republic.
• 17:34
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, what is it to us?
• 17:36
  SPEAKER_01: And I and they weren't very keen on having a foreign Dutch king.
• 17:40
  SPEAKER_01: And they and the and so and they don't have any veneration towards a king that is not the the you know has no claim has you know he's not the anointed successor, he's not the divinely appointed uh successor to the rightful king.
• 17:55
  SPEAKER_01: So they think as the 1690s go on, that they become what we call the country party, uh, which is the sort of the party of the country, of uh against the court, against taxes, against debt, against standing armies.
• 18:08
  SPEAKER_01: Whereas the Whigs become the part the opposite, and that's the big change.
• 18:11
  SPEAKER_01: So that um and so by the time by the time that William dies in 1702, um the part the scene has been set.
• 18:20
  SPEAKER_01: You essentially have a increasingly, if you like, to some degree, populist Tory party, that's a sort of realignment.
• 18:26
  SPEAKER_01: You have an increasingly populist Tory party who stands for low taxes, peace and the church, against a Whig party who is increasingly sort of anti-populist, if you like, who stand for war against France, high tax, higher taxes, and religious and in favour of religious minorities, i.e.
• 18:45
  SPEAKER_01: the dissenters and and their and their Protestant allies.
• 18:48
  SPEAKER_01: So that is how it stands as you go into the reign of Queen Anne, and that's when it really gets even more intense, and you have a and and the that's the the period of Queen Anne's reign from 1702 to 1714 is the era where the party battle reaches its most vociferous and uh heated pitch, if you like, um, which ends when Queen Anne dies and the Halavarians come in.
• 19:13
  SPEAKER_01: But I think I've I've spoken a lot, so maybe you want to uh rein me in a bit.
• 19:18
  SPEAKER_00: No, yeah, well, I'd certainly not rein you in, but uh uh pick at a few of the threads there.
• 19:25
  SPEAKER_00: So I think people can recognize the Whig victory, which maybe you'll get into in a bit.
• 19:35
  SPEAKER_00: And what I mean by that is when you look at our political battles today, you could probably look beyond this point, but Brexit seems to be a bit of a pushback against being ruled by money men.
• 19:50
  SPEAKER_00: Um it was also a bit of a bloody nose of the establishment, which has told us and then joined us all to embrace toleration and pluralism.
• 20:01
  SPEAKER_00: And I think you could also say the mainstream culture, what of our leadership class, elite class, whatever you want to call it, typically embrace dissent.
• 20:10
  SPEAKER_00: There's a bizarrely they're part of the establishment, but there's a disestablishment element to them, but really they're just pounding the rubble of a uh of of whatever it is that they're railing against.
• 20:21
  SPEAKER_00: Um, it's long gone.
• 20:23
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and I suppose um what I'm trying to get at is what we're seeing overlaid from that period to today, because I think we we're seeing um reverberations of the same story of effectively uh a knob of uh British people uh becoming increasingly flabbergasted that the system is arrayed against uh interests.
• 20:51
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, we see people who don't particularly want to be um ruled by foreign interests, whether through the European Union, or indeed whether it's through uh you'll you'll see people criticizing various males and what have you, uh forever wars.
• 21:05
  SPEAKER_00: What has that got to do with us?
• 21:06
  SPEAKER_00: Uh why are we borrowing so much money uh when we can't afford it?
• 21:10
  SPEAKER_00: Um this seems to me like what we're seeing today is almost a uh a replaying of that time, um, which is right, could we just focus on our own interests and uh focus on our own independent island nation and stop being embroiled in all of these things and your own uh your own you being the money men's interests um endeavours, uh wherever it is that is taking you.
• 21:40
  SPEAKER_00: Um what what what would you say?
• 21:42
  SPEAKER_00: That's my take on it, what would you say is the the the overlap of that from that period to today?
• 21:48
  SPEAKER_00: And where is it that they start to diverge?
• 21:50
  SPEAKER_00: Where's the where's the battle been lost, I suppose?
• 21:53
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, I think uh we are entering and we have been in now a put a period of politics in contemporary in the contemporary world, which is Ash increasingly looks more and more like the Tory and Whig battles of this earlier period.
• 22:08
  SPEAKER_01: And it's partly because the whole cultural divides that what originate really in the Civil War, but then mutate in the Tory the first era of party politics.
• 22:19
  SPEAKER_01: They don't go away.
• 22:20
  SPEAKER_01: Cultural divides are sticky.
• 22:22
  SPEAKER_01: And although they're now largely couched in much more secular terms, because you have to bear in mind this is a religious era, the one I'm writing about.
• 22:30
  SPEAKER_01: It's not religious, it's not the only issue, but it's a pretty important part of it.
• 22:33
  SPEAKER_01: Now we obviously live in a more secularised age, but nonetheless, a lot of the cultural divides that were created by that era still endure.
• 22:41
  SPEAKER_01: And yeah, basically the Tories had a form of sort of, you know, it depends.
• 22:45
  SPEAKER_01: Some people would say a sort of insular name uh sort of insular attitude, and others would say, you know, a a reasonable um uh focus on the national interest.
• 22:56
  SPEAKER_01: So they would say, like, why are we already involved in this war in Europe?
• 22:59
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, you know, the to defend the Dutch against the the the French.
• 23:02
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, what is it to us?
• 23:03
  SPEAKER_01: Why do we care?
• 23:04
  SPEAKER_01: Why are we being ruled by a Dutch king in the first place?
• 23:07
  SPEAKER_01: Um why would we we why should we be involved in the affairs of Europe?
• 23:10
  SPEAKER_01: Whereas the Whigs' view was very much, uh if you like, our place is at the heart of Europe, because if we don't take an interest in Europe, then Louis XIV will dominate the whole continent and then we'll find ourselves you know isolated.
• 23:23
  SPEAKER_01: They basically were uh argued that an isolationist policy would come back to bite you in the end because Louis XIV would become so powerful and he would threaten Britain's interests in the long run.
• 23:33
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and so yes, there was clearly like Tory, you know, uh sort of insular chauvinism, if you like, or um to put it as in another way, a focus on the national interest without getting too much involved in foreign entanglements and forever wars, which you should bear in mind that in this period that this book is set in, England is England and the Dutch are at war w almost continuously for years.
• 23:56
  SPEAKER_01: So there's there's the war of the nine years' war in the 1690s, and then there's a brief period of peace between 1697 and 1702, and then there's another war, the more famous war, the war of the Spanish Succession, which is probably most famous for the Duke of Marlborough, who is a distant was a distant um ancestor of Winston Churchill, um, who uh became a great military hero and won great victories against the French.
• 24:22
  SPEAKER_01: So there's those two wars, and there's almost so between 1689 and 1714, well no, sorry, 1712, uh England is a war for almost that whole period, apart from a brief period in the middle of five years where there's a bit of there is peace.
• 24:37
  SPEAKER_01: And you know, it's not unsurprisingly, a lot of the people of England were like you know, were extremely weary of the war, particularly by the type by about 1710 when uh the war starts to become seriously politically contested.
• 24:50
  SPEAKER_01: And yeah, so so there's obvious to see.
• 24:52
  SPEAKER_01: And I think what we're seeing in modern day politics is that um if you look at a period, say, from the second world end of the second world war through to quite recently, what was the main dividing factor in politics?
• 25:03
  SPEAKER_01: Well, it was left versus right, right?
• 25:04
  SPEAKER_01: It was Labour versus Tory, it was trade unions, public services, way you know, redistribution, material left-right things that you know.
• 25:14
  SPEAKER_01: But my take would be that since say the 90s, but more pronouncedly, since the last 20 in the last 20 years, though those material left-right distinctions have faded and was come to the fore are questions of basically how should the country interact with the global economic order.
• 25:34
  SPEAKER_01: So globalization, essentially, has become the key thing.
• 25:38
  SPEAKER_01: And the response and that that attitude of whether you believe in the nation-state and the ability of the nation-state to dictate its own affairs, or whether you are a more cosmopolitan uh supporter of you know global trade, uh global free movement, so on, that has become much, and I know it maps onto the left-right divide now, but quite unclearly, because clearly, you know, it's not as straightforward as it used to be.
• 26:04
  SPEAKER_01: A lot of the forces in the modern world that are populist are seen as populist right, um, are actually not econom economically quite dimensionist.
• 26:13
  SPEAKER_01: You know, but you know, they're not um free market uh thatcherites in the way that the right would have been 30, 40 years ago.
• 26:22
  SPEAKER_01: So international issues have now are a large element of the structuring principle of modern politics.
• 26:29
  SPEAKER_01: You know, we don't it's much less the case that we see things in terms of you know old-fashioned Labour versus Tory, you know, sort of uh left v-right, social democracy versus sort of conservatism.
• 26:40
  SPEAKER_01: That's not the issue.
• 26:40
  SPEAKER_01: And that's because of, I think, mainly globalization, foreign wars, you know, the long legacy of Iraq and so and so forth, and those sorts of things.
• 26:49
  SPEAKER_01: And that is and the reason why, and I think that that's the reason why the politics of Dao increasingly resembles the politics of the period my book is about, because the realignment that took place in the 1690s is a what happened for several reasons, but part of the reason, probably the main reason it happened, was because international affairs and your position on Europe and your position on um global uh forces became much more important to uh to politics.
• 27:19
  SPEAKER_01: Like you know, whether or not we thought of war and you know in Europe and whether or not we showed, if you like, solidarity with Protestants across Europe um or not, uh became like hugely more important, large basically, because William the Fur became king and and and took us into a European war.
• 27:38
  SPEAKER_01: So it's a classic realignment um because of new issue, and in the new issue, although it's slightly somewhat different, obviously, it's not but it's similar in the sense that it uh international affairs and our attitude to the rest of the world and so on has suddenly become like much more important.
• 27:55
  SPEAKER_01: And it has influ and obviously these things, although they're you know, way they're like about foreign affairs or our attitude towards the global order or you know, whatever, they have domestic and economic implications.
• 28:06
  SPEAKER_01: You know, obviously globalisation has had massive economic implications in in Britain and indeed America and so forth, just as fighting a war for 20 odd years um had huge economic implications in in the England of uh the 1690, 70, and then the fur uh up till 1714, because you you took we've got to bear in mind that um the period of where these wars begin in the 16, 1689 and go on.
• 28:34
  SPEAKER_01: England hadn't really been involved, Britain, England, Scotland hadn't really been involved in a major land war for a long time.
• 28:40
  SPEAKER_01: But we we kept out largely.
• 28:42
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, we we date not entirely, but we we hadn't last major land war we'd fought in Europe was basically in Hundred Years' War, hundreds of years before.
• 28:51
  SPEAKER_01: So it was a bit of a shock to the system that suddenly we were having to help either pay mercenaries or put our own armies into the field in a massive land war, and it cost a huge by the you know to give you an idea, under James II, uh average annual expenditure of the uh English state was£1.7 million a year.
• 29:13
  SPEAKER_01: That was the entire expenditure of the British government or the English government.
• 29:18
  SPEAKER_01: Uh under William III, the average expenditure was between five and six million pounds a year.
• 29:24
  SPEAKER_01: So it triples basically the amount of money spent by the by the states, triples.
• 29:28
  SPEAKER_01: Um this was a huge I mean, although it now it seems a bit quaint because now the levels of taxation and debt that are routine are like vastly higher, and we and we've come and that's quite normal to us.
• 29:41
  SPEAKER_01: But you know, to the men of the mid-1690s, suddenly tripling government expenditure and then and with the correspondingly large increases in taxes was a massive shock to the system.
• 29:50
  SPEAKER_01: And the people and the people, you know, and and that changed everything.
• 29:54
  SPEAKER_01: Um the the the foreign affairs becoming, you know, indirectly or directly, changing the entire basis of the British state and economic and financial policy to completely overturn British politics.
• 30:06
  SPEAKER_01: And I think we've seen something quite similar.
• 30:08
  SPEAKER_01: And then it maps onto cultural anxieties of whether justify I'm not I have my own views, but uh uh you know, I'm trying to see this fairly neutrally.
• 30:18
  SPEAKER_01: Uh the the economic uh you know, these map onto the um you know the economic realities, you know.
• 30:25
  SPEAKER_01: If you're in the Midwest in America or the north bits of the north in Britain where you've seen the industrialization and your you know the old jobs gone, replaced by warehouse jobs or whatever, then which is partly because you know, trade patterns, the rise of China, free trade, and so on, not surprisingly, you are going to be unimpressed.
• 30:45
  SPEAKER_01: And you might then see that in the cultural side and the economic side are really hard to distinguish.
• 30:50
  SPEAKER_01: People think that a culture war is separate from the economic and other side.
• 30:54
  SPEAKER_01: It's not.
• 30:54
  SPEAKER_01: Um it was the same in the 1690s.
• 30:56
  SPEAKER_01: A lot of the people who were extremely discontented with the new order that came in with William the Third, uh, you know, that that they they they had uh similar uh, you know, they were they there was a similar connection.
• 31:10
  SPEAKER_01: So for so to put it bluntly, um the the many of the what one of the key things that happened is that taxes went up.
• 31:18
  SPEAKER_01: But taxation in those days was almost solely on the landed gentry, because that was the land tax was the main and most efficient method of taxation.
• 31:29
  SPEAKER_01: So so to increase the spending during the war, it hit the landed gentry.
• 31:32
  SPEAKER_01: Now, the landed gentry, particularly the were the lower landed gentry, the poorer bits of the landed gentry, relatively speaking, they were the Tories.
• 31:39
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, that was their the basis of their social, of the so the sort of social basis of the Tory party.
• 31:44
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, not all the gentry were Tories, but most of them were.
• 31:47
  SPEAKER_01: And so they and and and then what happened?
• 31:50
  SPEAKER_01: Well, the taxes still didn't cover government expenditure.
• 31:53
  SPEAKER_01: So debt had to come in, and the national debt and the uh became a much more systematic, organised, larger scale thing, uh, because the Bank of England is founded in 1694, and as it it basically completely overturns and makes much uh and gradually it makes the national debt uh a more I mean it's rational in a way because the national debt before was a mess and it sort of consolidates it, brings down interest rates, brings order into the the state's borrowing and then massively increases the state's borrowing.
• 32:24
  SPEAKER_01: But the interest has to be paid on the national debt, you know, the the the what we would call bondholders, but at the time we usually called fund holders, fundholders, money men, stock jobbers.
• 32:34
  SPEAKER_01: I mean there were various terms for them, but they were paid interest.
• 32:37
  SPEAKER_01: So the the the the the the landed gentry thought, well, hang on a minute, where pay all these extra taxes and who is benefiting?
• 32:42
  SPEAKER_01: Well, the people who've lent money to the government are you know a reasonable rate of interest.
• 32:46
  SPEAKER_01: They're making money out of this, and they're not taxed.
• 32:48
  SPEAKER_01: The financial interest wasn't the the the people who lent money to the to the government weren't taxed.
• 32:54
  SPEAKER_01: It was not uh in those days.
• 32:55
  SPEAKER_01: And so funny, and and and and and and the other crucial thing about the financiers or the money men who became prominent in the 1690s uh is that they are very disproportionately, they were dissent, they were Protestant dissenters, which is not surprising because Protestant dissenters have been excluded from large parts of you know public life.
• 33:13
  SPEAKER_01: So it's not uncommon that a minority that's been excluded goes into things like finance and banking.
• 33:19
  SPEAKER_01: And so they did.
• 33:19
  SPEAKER_01: So something like 40% of the governors of the um people who ran the Bank of England um were dissenters, which can you consider that the broad that dissenters as a proportion of the population were far lower than that in the in the so the Tories thought not only are the people who are tap who are taxi us, leading us driver taxes, they're not only these sort of upstart nouveau riches financiers, but they're also large, not all, but uh disproportionately dissenters who we hate that they hated anyway for religious reasons.
• 33:48
  SPEAKER_01: So the cultural side, which was dissent versus the Church of England to a large extent, mapped onto the economic side, that the economic interests and the cultural divisions were like were not separable.
• 33:58
  SPEAKER_01: And I think you know, in many ways, something similar is the case today.
• 34:02
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, where a lot of the people who've lost out from globalization, um, you know, are uh the the they they clearly the cultural side that they feel that their country has been um the character of their country has been changed by multiculturalism, immigration, and so on.
• 34:21
  SPEAKER_01: They also are the people who've economically lost out from globalization in many cases.
• 34:24
  SPEAKER_01: You know, you go to parts of the what is you know, the Red Wall or Barking and Dagenham or so on.
• 34:29
  SPEAKER_01: Those people have not done economically well out of the last 30 or 40 years, generally speaking.
• 34:33
  SPEAKER_01: And they're also the people who, you know, are more a good way of putting this is like it's the somewhere's and anywheres of David Goodhart.
• 34:39
  SPEAKER_00: I was thinking about Goodhart when you were talking.
• 34:41
  SPEAKER_01: And yeah, and good so so that and and and and I think the original anywhere somewhere in the Goodhart classification worked mapped quite well on to Tory versus Whig in the in the first Asian Post.
• 34:55
  SPEAKER_01: And today, the similar thing, you know, like they that people think oh, it's just people are clinging on.
• 35:00
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, it's often presented as people are clinging on to patriotism and flag waving and stuff, um, because they're backward or you know, sort of bigoted or whatever.
• 35:10
  SPEAKER_01: But to some extent, it's because they think that they've lost out from uh uh an economic uh order that has come into being over the last sort of 30, 40 years, in which uh you know globalization has meant many of the jobs and stuff that they used to rely on have been exported to China or wherever.
• 35:29
  SPEAKER_01: So, you know, like culture wars and economic interests are not separate, they're rarely separate.
• 35:35
  SPEAKER_01: Usually the culture war has a culture wars have an economic side to them.
• 35:39
  SPEAKER_01: And the other thing I would say is that yes, the Whig versus Tory was a culture war, but then again, it was it seems to me most political divides that become very heated are basically culture wars.
• 35:52
  SPEAKER_01: Like it people dislike it.
• 35:54
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, the you know, the the sort of hating the other side because of perceived um cultural deficiencies or that they're they're see yeah, basically one side sees the other side and and as degenerates in some way who are against all that's good and true in the world and so on, and the other side seen it's as have much the same view of the of of the of the of the other side as well.
• 36:15
  SPEAKER_01: Um that isn't that so common in all politics, like not you know in British politics.
• 36:19
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, you you see it again in the 19th century with wars between you know, sort of uh in in the late, say the late Victorian period, sort of Salisbury era where you have sort of loyal monarchist imperialist Tories who see the liberals as uh and the you know selling out Ireland and the Empire and and it's not new and it never goes away.
• 36:42
  SPEAKER_01: I think I think in some ways what is interesting is that the period in say the 30 or 40 years after the Second World War in this country is unusual in that those sort of cultural divides actually were relatively uh low-key, no, were actually not that important.
• 36:57
  SPEAKER_01: Like if you look at the politics of the 1950s and 1960s and 1970s in this country, and in the 1940s in Britain, cultural wars were much less pronounced, they were unusually um uh uh downplayed because the the divide was like the trade unions and workers, not all of them, but a lot of them voted Labour for class reasons, and the middle classes and the small businessmen and so on writed Tory for similar class reasons.
• 37:22
  SPEAKER_01: But culturally, both sides were not that massively different.
• 37:26
  SPEAKER_01: Like they were, I mean, most Labour voters in the 40s and 50s and 60s were actually quite socially small C's, socially conservative, as were the Tory voters, you know, who vote who were small business owners and stuff.
• 37:40
  SPEAKER_01: But the the the difference was we want higher taxes on this, or we want union laws to be stronger or weaker or whatever.
• 37:47
  SPEAKER_01: But that is un that was unusual, I would say, in in the in the grand sweep of British politics.
• 37:53
  SPEAKER_01: Most of it and not just with British politics, I mean America has been having these sort of cultural wars forever.
• 37:58
  SPEAKER_01: Um but you know, that period after the war was an unusual interlude where people and I think what we're seeing now is the return of politics as usual to a large extent, like you know, um cultural wars mapping on to economic divisions of economic interest and divides which are, if not religious, then close to religious.
• 38:19
  SPEAKER_01: Because I mean I think take a lot of the rouse now over trans rights or whatever, which I'd rather not get into the details of, but um uh uh but I mean I think you know, in a way it seems to me that that that they're sort of displaced religious arguments, you know, over the nature of the soul, uh, or or whatever.
• 38:37
  SPEAKER_01: And so the even the religious side of it, it doesn't, you know, it's not no longer is are these sort of arguments, if you like, uh you know, they're not in terms of the authority of the Church of England or you know, the role of the sacraments or justification before God or whatever, they're rather, you know, is there such a thing as a gendered soul sort of sort sort of sort of thing?
• 38:58
  SPEAKER_01: But they're still in a sense religious.
• 39:00
  SPEAKER_01: Um and and though uh that's always been the case because humans are beings which seek meaning, they're spiritual sustenance and an identity and a sense of identity, you know, because identity is massively important in the period I'm writing this book about.
• 39:17
  SPEAKER_01: The Tories have this see themselves as the heirs to law, the loyal good old English um principles of loyalty to the crown and uh, you know, the old England of the person and squire having benevolent authority over them, over the people and so on.
• 39:32
  SPEAKER_01: And as the Whigs, you know, saw themselves as um identity was really important to them.
• 39:37
  SPEAKER_01: They were um uh the defenders of religious uh well, some of them saw themselves as the defenders of the good old cause of the civil war, the more radical ones, you know, the defenders of Poland and Liberty and the old the I mean Algernon Sidney, who was a Whig martyr who was executed in the early 1680s, you know, went to the scaffold saying, you know, I die.
• 39:57
  SPEAKER_01: I can't remember the exact phrase, but it's something that he said something like, you know, I die on the scaffold um uh uh for the sake of the good old English principles of Protestantism and liberty.
• 40:06
  SPEAKER_01: So the the both sides thought that they were fighting in a way for you know the soul of the country and what it really stood for and so on.
• 40:13
  SPEAKER_01: It's just ones they have very different visions of what they thought that was, and and and they see that now, like you know, obviously for nobody in the current culture war, whether they're the most sort of their guardian meaning progressives or whether they're reform voting flag wave, you know, union jack waivers, neither side sees themselves, you know, they both obviously think that they're the real patriots and they're the really moral, but there's a huge moral aspect to it.
• 40:39
  SPEAKER_01: They see the other side as wicked and bad, and that they're you know, and and undermining the integrity of you know the morals of the country or whatever.
• 40:47
  SPEAKER_01: And that's exactly you know, and and then the more that people think that the more that they you know are quite key that violence becomes an option.
• 40:54
  SPEAKER_01: And we shouldn't forget that this period is a period where violence still lurks under the surface, the period of my book.
• 40:59
  SPEAKER_01: You know, a civil war is avoided, largely because the Jacobites, who would be the obvious sort of people who would cause a civil a war, um, are so useless and can get nowhere essentially because they're very disorganized and and so on.
• 41:12
  SPEAKER_01: But you know, election campaigns in this you know in the in the reigns of William III and Queen Anne are not are not tame affairs.
• 41:20
  SPEAKER_01: There's a there's a lot of riots, people being battered senseless by medieval weapons and you know, punch-ups, and people standing in in the uh polling uh the place where people because in these these days people you yeah, you had to go in uh and there was no secret ballot, so you went in and you declared who you were voting for in front of the returning officer.
• 41:42
  SPEAKER_01: And this which gave great great scope for intimidation.
• 41:46
  SPEAKER_01: So you'd have Tory mobs, or Whig mobs depending, would take over the the polling place, um the town hall or whatever.
• 41:53
  SPEAKER_01: And if anybody went up and said, Oh yes, I want to cast a vote for whoever was the Whig Cat, then the Tories would sort of be standing there with a with a pike in hand, ready to batter them senseless if they, you know, if they voted the wrong way.
• 42:09
  SPEAKER_01: And violence, you know, as we see sadly, is not so far under the surface in modern day politics with its sort of uh Menichean culture wars.
• 42:21
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• 42:26
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• 42:35
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• 42:38
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• 42:50
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• 42:53
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• 42:57
  SPEAKER_00: Enjoy the rest of the show, classmate.
• 43:01
  SPEAKER_00: Well, let's let's talk about modern-day politics, linking back to what you just said there.
• 43:05
  SPEAKER_00: We're talking about battles for identity, and we are currently recording at a time where there has been a preponderance of uh say George's flags and union gen X being planted around the country in towns and cities.
• 43:22
  SPEAKER_00: And this is in an era when we have spoken predominantly for 30 years since Gordon Brown, Tony Blum, about British values, tolerance, and the play, respect.
• 43:36
  SPEAKER_00: And these these pronouncements on what British values are typically come from the the Whiggish mental interests which you talked about, right?
• 43:44
  SPEAKER_00: We're talking about uh money monomarchist cosmopolitanism, um, pluralism, and all the rest of it.
• 43:52
  SPEAKER_00: And the those who are planting the flags, wearing the flags of pride, saying No, I've had quite enough of that, really.
• 44:02
  SPEAKER_00: This is we have a pre-political loyalty.
• 44:05
  SPEAKER_00: It's not about bullet points.
• 44:06
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not saying this is what's getting through everyone's heads, but ultimately it's a very raw expression of identity, which is I'm English, I'm British, I'm very unhappy with the status quo, and that status quo is something that we've just described in some way.
• 44:20
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but you have talked about lots of political strife, lots of battles uh which have also spilled out uh into physical altercations, it's not just battles of words in parliament.
• 44:34
  SPEAKER_00: And so if we were to look at British values and try to come up with some, because often the critics of British values and the notion of them will say, how could you possibly link this period with that period with the period before?
• 44:47
  SPEAKER_00: If you did that, you would see something different.
• 44:50
  SPEAKER_00: This is trite and it's nonsense.
• 44:52
  SPEAKER_00: Uh you're clearly very well read, George.
• 44:56
  SPEAKER_00: What would British values look like if you could boil them down?
• 45:02
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, if it's not the Blairite and the Brown version, if it's not tolerance, fair play, respect, what would it be?
• 45:09
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I mean, of course, if you ask the Tory of you know the 70th, the first decade of the 18th century, what were I mean, Britain and Dominion literally just come into existence, so you know, English or British or whatever values, insofar as they understood what you were talking about, they'd say, well, loyalty to the throne, uh loyal uh uh uh pro um religion, Christianity, loyalty to the church, you know, uh business great, you know, during the and then what, 70 or 80 years later, you know, there's all those great prints during the time of the French Revolution, contrasting French principles of republicanism, atheism, immorality, disloyalty with British values of the this is the of the seven uh seventeen nineties, uh, of loyalty, uh content, Protestantism, uh loyalty to the throne and so on.
• 45:56
  SPEAKER_01: So British values clearly had a very different uh implication in 1790s or indeed the 1690s, and even then with it internally, people don't agree on it.
• 46:06
  SPEAKER_01: No one's ever agreed.
• 46:07
  SPEAKER_01: Like politic, you know, trying to seek for some sort of consensus is often, shall we say, difficult because um you know different political sides see that have a different they have a different national story.
• 46:19
  SPEAKER_01: Now, for example, the left has a I think one of the problems with the contemporary left is it has a very ambivalent attitude towards the idea of even having a national story, because it's they're pretty ambivalent about the idea of the nation state in general.
• 46:32
  SPEAKER_01: But they used to have you know a narrative of like, you know, um Britain has a that you know our British values are the values of the levellers and the suffragettes and the Chartists, and here's the national story of protest and of you know fairness and uh you know and social justice and so on.
• 46:48
  SPEAKER_01: Whereas the Tories obviously traditionally would have a national story of loyalty, you know, going back somehow, it would be uh a national story of um the the with the stress, loyalty, victory in war, um loyalty to the monarch and the church, uh and so on.
• 47:05
  SPEAKER_01: So what do you now it seems to be that Blair um sort of attempts to have these very generic British values, which I often think well the problem the thing with them is is that they're often sort of a distillation of some pretty broad principles of human rights, which could apply anywhere.
• 47:21
  SPEAKER_01: I mean they're not I don't really see necessarily how they're particularly British um one way or the other.
• 47:26
  SPEAKER_01: They could be French values or you know, where or or or or any values of any country in Europe, because they've had to be so generic um to cope with various things.
• 47:36
  SPEAKER_01: Now, one is the fact that what used to be one of the leading uh principles that everyone would have said, uh you know, one of the main uh sort of things that would have underpinned English or British national identity.
• 47:46
  SPEAKER_01: Well it would have been Christianity.
• 47:48
  SPEAKER_01: And for a large uh swathes of the time, it's eight the 18th century, what it would be Protestant Christianity, you know.
• 47:55
  SPEAKER_01: What what what marks you out?
• 47:57
  SPEAKER_01: What was the contrast between uh France and Britain?
• 48:00
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, bearing in mind we were almost constantly at war in one way or another with the French.
• 48:04
  SPEAKER_01: Well, we're Protestant the bastions of Protestant liberty, and the French are Gallic absolutists, you know, and so on.
• 48:11
  SPEAKER_01: Um and so with secularisation, one of the obvious sources of British what would have been our identity has gone.
• 48:20
  SPEAKER_01: Um you know, and and uh we and the danger, and sometimes it's that people resurrect it and say, Oh, you know, we're a Christian country.
• 48:28
  SPEAKER_01: Now, I'm a Christian, and I'd like to think we are, but I think and we are clearly culturally been deeply influenced by Christianity, as my friend Bijan Omrani and a recent book about this um called as an Englishman.
• 48:41
  SPEAKER_01: Well clearly our culture has been massively shaped by Christianity.
• 48:46
  SPEAKER_01: But the reality is that the number of people in contemporary Britain who practice Christianity in any form, in any with any devoutness, is a is a small minority.
• 48:55
  SPEAKER_01: So you take that away and you end up appealing to a very generic um vision of rights and stuff, which to be honest, a lot of the time but the supposed British values sound more like the values of the French Revolution than they do anything that's deter that could be identified as British, particularly.
• 49:12
  SPEAKER_01: Um so I think there's an issue.
• 49:15
  SPEAKER_01: Now I'm not I don't want to get into too much controversy, but obviously, if you have a more pluralistic society and a more multicultural society, it's hard to find distinctive things that everyone can agree to because religion's gone, you know.
• 49:27
  SPEAKER_01: Now we're not a uh you know, now we are a religiously pluralistic society.
• 49:31
  SPEAKER_01: You can't say Britain is a Protestant, you know, we are a Protestant nation anymore because we obviously have quite significant religious minorities.
• 49:38
  SPEAKER_01: You know, we always had some religious minorities, but they were tiny numbers.
• 49:42
  SPEAKER_01: Uh now clearly they're not tiny numbers, they're you know more substantial.
• 49:46
  SPEAKER_01: And also, you know, a lot of people would see themselves as agnostics or batheists or whatever.
• 49:51
  SPEAKER_01: So that there gets no consensus.
• 49:53
  SPEAKER_01: And then you know, you can appeal to a shared history, but in an era of polarization, like people don't agree what the history I mean, to some extent they never did, but you know, I remember when I was growing up in a you know left-wing household, which I did, um, you know, everyone could agree, more or less, most people, the vast majority, Labour votes, Tory votes, could say, look, wherever our differences are, we have the Second World War where we defeated the Nazis, and you know, Churchill was a you know, I I mean I grew up basically thinking Churchill was a good thing, you know, even though I was very left-wing background.
• 50:23
  SPEAKER_01: And I remember in the 90s, uh, you had Mo Molam going on the Greatest Britain's program, if you remember that, uh, where people had to advocate for who they thought the Greatest Britain was.
• 50:33
  SPEAKER_01: And Mo Molam went on, you know, Labour cabinet minister at the time went on and advocated Winston Churchill because I thought that we could all agree that like defeating the Nazis was a good thing.
• 50:43
  SPEAKER_01: And for all of Churchill's faults, and don't get me wrong, you know, he was a flawed man, but I thought we could all, you know, Labour or Tory could all sort of see 1940 as the great national, you know, where we all came together, the led the working class and the and the sort of you know middle class and the upper class, we all came together to defeat the Nazis, and that was a great source of national cohesion.
• 51:02
  SPEAKER_01: Now you see people attacking, you know, it's quite common for people on the sort of more radical progressive left to go on about how Churchill is evil and whatever, and how we don't even have that anymore.
• 51:11
  SPEAKER_01: So it's like, well, if we can't even agree on Churchill or, you know, an Attlee and so on as this you know great unifying figures.
• 51:18
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know, it's really hard to see any unifying British values other than things which are just generic human rights values, which may be you know are not necessarily a bad thing, but it's hard to see how they can underpin a cohesive sense of national identity if that's what people w want.
• 51:31
  SPEAKER_01: And it's not clear that everybody does want that, which I personally think is a mistake because I think I'm an old school, I still am an old school social democrat, you know, in many ways.
• 51:40
  SPEAKER_01: My economy on economical material issues, I'm not right wing at all.
• 51:44
  SPEAKER_01: I I but I think it's a good thing to have you know strong trade unions and public services and you know and so on.
• 51:49
  SPEAKER_01: I I I I but that is dependent on having a cohesive sense of national identity, in my opinion.
• 51:55
  SPEAKER_01: Like there's a reason why the left did best in this country in the 1940s and 50s, well, you know, the 40s particularly, when uh you know we had a fairly well, the nation-state was either being the main means of like the left winning, and then and and then wasn't seen as particularly contradictory to be a patriot, patriotic and believe in the nation's state and be on the left.
• 52:18
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, like look at Clement Attlee or Ernie Bevin or people like they were very much patriots, or they were also like in favor because you need a cohesive sense of trust uh national identity to have trust, and trust is the essential basis.
• 52:31
  SPEAKER_01: If you want to redistribute money, you know, via the welfare state or whatever, you need trust uh between the people of the country.
• 52:38
  SPEAKER_01: And I I'm sceptical as to whether if you have very rapid change and you lose a sense of, you know, you become so sort of apologetic about your own national identity, um, and you think that you have to accompany out of shape to accommodate uh a sort of unlimited pluralism, then I think you're in you're in trouble because all of a sudden people look around and they think, well, I'm not sure why why should I contribute to the to the to the national coffers and the sense of shared solidarity when I don't know who my neighbour is because they've only been here for five minutes.
• 53:08
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I I I think the the left, the old-fashioned left, which I would still happily identify with if it existed, would do well to like realizing that a particular, you know, to some degree, a particularistic sense of national identity is essential for a social democratic policy.
• 53:24
  SPEAKER_01: Now, that's not to say that we should embrace all like racial nationalism, or uh completely not at all, because uh, I mean, that's you know very much not um that our way as a country, I don't think.
• 53:36
  SPEAKER_01: And um, it's more a sense of shared cultural, some sense of shared uh cultural things in common and things that bind us together.
• 53:44
  SPEAKER_01: Because my view, the left, you know, as it should be, is about solidarity between fellow human beings.
• 53:49
  SPEAKER_01: And I'd like to believe that we could have universal brotherhood or sisterhood or whatever, based on a sort of airy, you know, sort of vague sense of human rights and universal rights and so on.
• 54:00
  SPEAKER_01: But all human experience shows that that hasn't really worked.
• 54:04
  SPEAKER_01: You you know, people to trust each other and to uh be able to sustain welfare states and public services and stuff like that.
• 54:11
  SPEAKER_01: You need a bit more than that.
• 54:12
  SPEAKER_01: You need a bit of shared identity, which is a bit thicker than that, not as thick as like ethnic ethno-nationalism, but thicker than just vague British values, you know, we all believe in fairness.
• 54:25
  SPEAKER_01: Well, who doesn't believe in fairness?
• 54:26
  SPEAKER_01: Like, what country in the world is gonna say, you know what, what I stand for for unfairness?
• 54:31
  SPEAKER_01: No one's gonna say that.
• 54:32
  SPEAKER_01: So it's just meaningless, really.
• 54:34
  SPEAKER_01: Like, you know, you have to have something a bit more distinctive and a bit more like particular than that.
• 54:39
  SPEAKER_01: Otherwise, you're just a bunch of people, you know, with nothing on common, who are just economic units on an island, who have nothing to bind them together.
• 54:48
  SPEAKER_01: You know, it's like a family.
• 54:49
  SPEAKER_01: Like family can be, can you can bring in outsiders, you know, families can adopt people, that's fine, but they can't adopt like everyone.
• 54:58
  SPEAKER_01: You know, they have to be there's a balance to be struck between cohesion and like a sense of solidarity, and you know, not being completely closed to things.
• 55:06
  SPEAKER_01: And we have, you know, the but we've never been in a completely closed country.
• 55:09
  SPEAKER_01: We do welcome in strangers, and I'm Christians, so you know, we should welcome in strangers.
• 55:13
  SPEAKER_01: But pragmatism and realism suggests that like we have to, we have to, we can't, you know, we have to draw a line somewhere and we have to be realistic about it, and and and and it, you know, and that involves like believing that there are such things as boundaries and nations, and that you know, you can't, you know, not have completely open borders and stuff.
• 55:34
  SPEAKER_01: Um anyway, that was a long answer to your question.
• 55:37
  SPEAKER_00: No, well, all uh it was it's all absolutely relevant to the battles that we're having today.
• 55:43
  SPEAKER_00: Uh and as a as a brief footnote to that on the social democracy point, is we're seeing decreasing cohesion leading to the breakdown of welfare states or at least support for them in places that have typically been looked at, like the model.
• 55:59
  SPEAKER_00: So anytime in the US when someone's trying to do a pro-social democracy platform, they'll go look at the Scandinavians.
• 56:05
  SPEAKER_00: But if you go and look at the Scandinavians now, particularly Sweden, who welcomed in something like 15% of its population in the space of 10 years, from uh Middle Eastern, North African, Pakistan, Turkish countries, it it's absolutely nosedived the support for the welfare state.
• 56:21
  SPEAKER_00: The welfare state is almost not wanted anymore because the social trust has been has been um diminished by welcoming lots of people in with different cultural norms.
• 56:31
  SPEAKER_00: Not suggesting everyone's a bad apple, but the graph do point upwards when it comes to crimes and violent assaults and all the rest of it.
• 56:40
  SPEAKER_00: You've got the grenades blowing up in the streets and that kind of thing.
• 56:43
  SPEAKER_00: And if that's people's everyday experience, and all of a sudden they know that's where their tax money is going, they're not really into it.
• 56:51
  SPEAKER_00: We're seeing it in Switzerland's citizenship's being torn up for generations of people that are taking out more than they're putting in.
• 56:57
  SPEAKER_00: They're going, well, you you're clearly not for solidarity.
• 56:59
  SPEAKER_00: We let you in, you've taken advantage, you're going back.
• 57:02
  SPEAKER_00: I think that conversation is now entering the fray here in Britain.
• 57:06
  SPEAKER_00: You're seeing much more of it online, which is now seeping out into the kind of mainstream uh media and the political discourse.
• 57:14
  SPEAKER_00: But one final question before you go, George, because I know you are close to wrapping it up, and uh this might be a pivoty answer or not, and you can tell me if it's not possible to make it pivot.
• 57:24
  SPEAKER_00: I don't want to make you late for anything.
• 57:26
  SPEAKER_00: But the question I ask all of my guests is what have you changed your mind on during the course of your life?
• 57:31
  SPEAKER_00: Perhaps it was something that you thought was an absolute, maybe it was something more day-to-day, and what was it that made you change your mind and think differently?
• 57:40
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I suppose I've changed my mind on two things particularly.
• 57:47
  SPEAKER_01: One, the most important is religion, because I was an atheist for a long time, a pretty unthinking atheist to be honest, and I converted to Christianity about six or seven years ago, and so I now think that the sort of materialistic humanist uh secular assumptions that people take for granted are unsustainable, um, and uh without some sense of transcendental morality and uh I believe in a creator God it's hard to underpin any sort of of the values that we take for granted.
• 58:26
  SPEAKER_01: And I also believe on independent grounds in the existence of God and and the truths of the Christian religion.
• 58:33
  SPEAKER_01: So that's been a pretty major change.
• 58:35
  SPEAKER_01: And what made um uh and what made me shadow, I mean that's a very I mean that's a very big question, but I mean I essentially lost faith in what I saw as an extremely shallow and intellectually unserious form of secular humanist you know liberalism, which didn't examine its own foundations and seems to think you can have human rights with no real foundation other than uh we say so basically.
• 59:00
  SPEAKER_01: Um whereas I think you know they are ultimately grounded in God's God giving, you know, making humans in the in his own image.
• 59:08
  SPEAKER_01: So that that's quite important, and that you know, this why uh uh you know and I think the danger is you know, I agree I agree that people, you know, I don't think that you know unlimited immigration and so on is a good thing.
• 59:20
  SPEAKER_01: I think we have to have a more pragmatic approach which stresses national cohesion.
• 59:24
  SPEAKER_01: But I think you know I think that the problem, there's a real danger, which is that the you know, people who take that view, whether you know they're they're on the political right, I mean I don't really see myself as being on the political right as such, but it it's often sort of seen in those firms now.
• 59:39
  SPEAKER_01: If you support the nation state at all, you're seen as being on the political right.
• 59:41
  SPEAKER_01: But I do think that the danger is you know that if we don't cling to some of the Christian uh teachings or the our civilization we're based on, we'll lose sight of the dignity of the individual person.
• 59:53
  SPEAKER_01: Um and that that will lead to a sort of you know, see this on strands of the right, which are becoming very radical now and becoming and resurrecting sort of ethno-nationalist things.
• 1:00:01
  SPEAKER_01: And I don't I don't I don't don't like I don't I think that's very dangerous.
• 1:00:04
  SPEAKER_01: I think somebody once it Ross Stohat said, if you don't like the Christian right, you're not gonna like the post-Christian right.
• 1:00:11
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that's uh that's a very valuable observation.
• 1:00:14
  SPEAKER_01: So I think that that's the thing that's changed.
• 1:00:16
  SPEAKER_01: And the other thing that's changed most, I suppose, in a more political sense, is when I grew up, I was a very unthinking pro-statist.
• 1:00:25
  SPEAKER_01: Um I was a you know, various shades as I grew up of left socialist.
• 1:00:30
  SPEAKER_01: Now, I'm still I state's inevitable, and and and you know, I do I'm not saying I'm against the state, but I've become a bit more sceptical that the way to I'm also sceptical of the market in capitalism.
• 1:00:43
  SPEAKER_01: You know, I I don't think that's the perfect answer either, don't get me wrong.
• 1:00:47
  SPEAKER_01: But I I I and I suppose, you know, I read Polanyi and and also although I by no means endorse every his politics really, but I did read Hayek on markets, and I think that the those two people, one a sort of Christian socialist Polanyi, and the other uh libertarian, those two made me think more about it's not as straightforward as state good, you know, non-state bad.
• 1:01:10
  SPEAKER_01: Um it made I mean I which markets are also can be dangerous and private properties should not be worshipped as an idol, but it made me less uh straightforward and I would take a more nuanced view, shall we say, towards questions of political economy and how how we should organise our economic life, which is to say I'm no I'm not a statist socialist, but neither am I a pre-market libertarian or liberal, or I'm somewhere in between more sort of more communitarian believer in cooperative solutions and non-state forms of solidarity.
• 1:01:43
  SPEAKER_01: So, anyway, that was a longer answer to your question than you probably act on, but uh there are the two things that I've changed, I suppose.
• 1:01:49
  SPEAKER_00: Not at all.
• 1:01:50
  SPEAKER_00: I with regards to your religious conversion, very similar experience that I that I've had, and we can we can get into that one day.
• 1:02:00
  SPEAKER_00: Politics, also broadly similar, and I can I can totally understand your your political journey there.
• 1:02:09
  SPEAKER_00: George, before I let you go, let's plug the book.
• 1:02:11
  SPEAKER_00: Where can people find it?
• 1:02:12
  SPEAKER_00: When's it coming out?
• 1:02:13
  SPEAKER_00: And where can people find you online?
• 1:02:15
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, yes.
• 1:02:16
  SPEAKER_01: Well, my book is called the The Vage of Party, How Wick vs.
• 1:02:19
  SPEAKER_01: Tory made modern Britain.
• 1:02:20
  SPEAKER_01: It publishes on the 4th of September.
• 1:02:23
  SPEAKER_01: Um, so by the time this comes out, it will already be out.
• 1:02:26
  SPEAKER_01: And you can get it in good bookshops, but also obviously the usual places, you know, Amazon and so on.
• 1:02:32
  SPEAKER_01: Um and yes, I'm on uh I am Capuloft uh on Twitter, or X as it's now called, and you can follow me if you feel if you feel inclined to.
• 1:02:43
  SPEAKER_01: Um so yeah, that that that's my book, The Rager Party, How We Glow's Tory Made in Modern Britain, out on the 4th of September, available all good bookshops.
• 1:02:52
  SPEAKER_00: Great.
• 1:02:52
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I recommend everyone buys the book who's listening to it.
• 1:02:56
  SPEAKER_00: It really is uh wonderful.
• 1:02:57
  SPEAKER_00: You'd learn an awful lot about the country of Britain.
• 1:03:00
  SPEAKER_00: If you're not from here and you've just got a bit of a pro-British vibe, you'll like it.
• 1:03:04
  SPEAKER_00: And also do follow George on Twitter.
• 1:03:07
  SPEAKER_00: He's a Cerbic, he's very, very on the mummy with political observations and uh very likely has a decent following.
• 1:03:15
  SPEAKER_00: George, thanks so much for coming on.
• 1:03:16
  SPEAKER_00: It's been really enjoyable to get into the weeds on this and keep fighting the good fight.
• 1:03:21
  SPEAKER_00: Looking forward to seeing what comes out next.
• 1:03:23
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you very much, and thanks for your time and uh and for the for the last half hour.
• 1:03:28
  SPEAKER_00: So great.
• 1:03:29
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you.
• 1:03:29
  SPEAKER_00: Take care.
• 1:03:34
  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.
• 1:03:44
  SPEAKER_00: Thinking Class seeks to understand the civilizational issues we face and why what our leaders do in response matters.
• 1:03:50
  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.
• 1:03:59
  SPEAKER_00: 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.
• 1:04:08
  SPEAKER_00: I look forward to seeing you there and for joining me on this journey.