Latest / Thinking Class / #076 - Compilation - Beyond Repair? The Making And Breaking Of England, Britain And Their Peoples

Transcript

#076 - Compilation - Beyond Repair? The Making And Breaking Of England, Britain And Their Peoples · Thinking Class

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_02: Hello classmates and welcome to Thinking Class.
• 0:03
  SPEAKER_02: I'm John Gillam and today I'm speaking to Well, I've already spoken to them.
• 0:07
  SPEAKER_02: This is a compilation episode with many guests, and I've drawn together a whole bunch of clips focused on the themes of England and Britain's history at home and abroad, the making of its social, political and cultural life, the breaking of them, the relationship with immigration and its impact on individuals and the nation, and how the nation might respond to the challenges that it poses.
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_02: You can expect to hear from the likes of Peter Hitchens, Connor Tomlinson, Charlie Downs, David Starkey, Nigel Bigger, Robert Toomes, Paul Embury, Lionel Shriver, Douglas Carswell, Nima Parvini, Alan McFarlane, and many more.
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_02: There are huge problems facing the country.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_02: I think people can feel it.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_02: And who we are.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_02: And that doing this is important if we're going to retain a sense of the nation and its fruits in a period of unprecedented change.
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_02: And that's that's putting it lightly, I think.
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_02: As ever, classmates do like, subscribe, share, follow on whatever podcast platform you watch or listen to the show on.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_02: The faster we grow the show, the more guests we can attract, and the better conversations you can hear long into the future.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_02: Enjoy the show, classmates.
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_02: How is it that you think we can fight for our history in an age of perhaps a lack of historical understanding without being blinded only by virtues and sentimentality?
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_11: England is an unusual country because of its antiquity and because of its a relative degree of uh of continuity in its its institutions, its its boundaries, and so on.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_11: Uh, even compared with our European neighbors, some of which are also old.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_11: Norway, but uh but then Norway was part of a confederation until the early 20th century.
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_11: Uh French boundaries, French Francis frontiers were not fixed till after the Second World War.
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_11: Um, the same was true of Germany and so on.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_11: Poland was shifted a large uh a long way uh west by the Russians.
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_11: So we have been, partly because we're in Ireland, we've been pretty stable.
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_11: And so I think we've tended to take a great deal for granted and and at times to be complacent.
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_11: Perhaps that's a one of our national characteristics.
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_11: You think nothing can ever really go wrong.
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_11: Um but the origins are, as you said, an idea, and uh the idea principally came from the um a monk called Bede, the Venerable Bede, who wrote the first history of um of England or the English people, which didn't really exist then, in the sense that England itself was divided into a number of kingdoms.
• 3:29
  SPEAKER_11: And uh but Bede thought that it was a spiritual unity.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_11: It was um the the origin of England was therefore, in Bede's view, the English church and the conversion of England to Christianity.
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_11: And that was God's will, and and that was what made the English.
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_11: Um so the idea existed before the reality, uh, and indeed that's true of very many nations.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_11: Uh distinguished uh historian of of nation nationalism said it's it's nationalists that make nations, it's not nations that make nationalists.
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_11: And so a lot of nations are in in some ways invented, or they're they're thought up by people, and England was in in that sense thought up by by Bede.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_11: But it was made a kingdom, as I guess we all know, many people have seen the television series about King Alfred.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_11: Uh it was it was largely King Alfred and his his immediate successors who made a kingdom of England, and um mainly through their struggles with with invading Vikings.
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_11: And the fact that England came into being in these very testing circumstances did leave, I think, a trace, which is that um, well, I said in the book slightly flippantly, one of the fact the characteristics of being English is paying a lot of tax.
• 4:47
  SPEAKER_11: But the the the English kingdom had to become efficient because otherwise it would not have survived.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_11: So this sort of Darwinian process of struggle made the king, the English kingdom, um, a very powerful one and a centralized one, and one which for centuries had a high degree of popular participation, uh, because people realized that their security depended on the security of the kingdom.
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_11: Uh, is that that patriotism, they they wouldn't have called it that, but it was a sense of being somehow part of the same the same thing.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_11: Um and the fact, partly of the the strength of the state, and partly being on an island, um, which was not um was not quite a moat defensive, as Shakespeare put it, because seas are very easy to cross.
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_11: But it was at least uh a certain a certain barrier to to mass invasion.
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_11: And uh and so I think that for that reason, not being invaded, or at least not invaded since not being properly invaded since 1066.
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_11: There were lots of other invasions, some of them successful, but not since the Norman invasion, was there a major cultural change?
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_11: There was there was 1688, of course, the Glorious Revolution, which was also an invasion by the Dutch, but it was an invasion that people welcomed, on the whole, most people welcomed.
• 6:13
  SPEAKER_11: Uh so it was, as it were, a voluntary invasion, uh, whereas the the Norman conquest was certainly not, and it was a hugely um you know culture-changing society-changing event.
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_11: But apart from that, um England since 1066, England has been remarkably stable.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_11: And you might say, well, come on, you know, um, think of all the changes that have happened in almost every area of life, which is perfectly true.
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_11: Uh, but some things do remain.
• 6:45
  SPEAKER_11: And in my book, I uh partly to help myself think about this, I made an analogy with with Cambridge University.
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_11: You know, Cambridge University is also very old, but when it began, it was mainly studying uh theology uh and and some law, uh, and and and now it's doing entirely different things.
• 7:05
  SPEAKER_11: It's also a highly global cosmopolitan institution.
• 7:08
  SPEAKER_11: In what sense can it be said to be the same, apart from the fact that it's in the same place?
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_11: And I said it's it's partly a tradition of self-government, it's partly um it's partly wealth, it's partly reputation, it's partly um the survival of certain institutions like colleges, which give the university a particular character, as as in Oxford.
• 7:32
  SPEAKER_11: And so, although you can say, well, you know, so many things have changed, it can hardly be seen as the same, in some ways it is the same.
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_11: And the the things that remain the same, they evolve, but they remain in some senses the same, they do um shape the present and the future.
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_11: So Cambridge would not be the same place had it not inherited these historical and some in some senses not terribly rational institutions, but in which people have a stake in what in what happens, uh, and in which the uh the the universe is divided into smaller communities, which give people a very different experience, but that you know that's well known.
• 8:15
  SPEAKER_11: And I think England, you know, you could say it's the same.
• 8:19
  SPEAKER_11: Parliament, the counties, the monarchy, uh, as well as cultural inheritance, the language, obviously, um, religion.
• 8:29
  SPEAKER_11: However much these things may change and even decline, they leave something which which which is still there, which helps to shape and will help to shape the future.
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_02: I was speaking to a colleague of yours very recently, uh, also Professor Emeritus of anthropology this time, also at Cambridge, Alan McFarlane, and we spoke about the unique characteristics of the English and then and then British culture society, and he he expounded on um the legal system, the uh our our literature, our humour.
• 9:08
  SPEAKER_02: He talked about um our the economic setup.
• 9:12
  SPEAKER_02: And when I when I often think about um how it is that we fight, I suppose, for our history, all of it included, appreciate it's not all, as you say, both a golden age or an alloyed good, is there are some other things that he said in that and which he's written about extensively, which is typical natural characteristics is value in liberty and also wealth and freedom.
• 9:38
  SPEAKER_02: And at the beginning, he when we were talking about declinism to coin another ism, is there aren't enough already, he said that often people posit it without comparing it to anything else.
• 9:50
  SPEAKER_02: And I think that's the thing that probably sticks in my core a little bit if we are dismissive of our history and the unique things that the country has organically come up with over time, is compared to other places, and back to that quote at the beginning, which is better living standards in the 14th and many places in the 20th.
• 10:10
  SPEAKER_02: Surely there are reasons why we would want to at least maintain that continuity instead of thinking that there's nothing good in that and we ought to push on into a brave new world.
• 10:21
  SPEAKER_02: Uh perhaps you see this yourself in your your academic life, perhaps you don't, but well, I do.
• 10:27
  SPEAKER_11: I do very much.
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_11: And uh I'm glad you brought that up.
• 10:30
  SPEAKER_11: Because um the sort of things that I've been saying up until now, and that Alan McFarlane was has been saying, I think most people would probably have agreed until fairly recently.
• 10:42
  SPEAKER_11: Okay, there were always dissidents, religious dissidents, political dissidents who were very critical of the country, its institutions, and so on.
• 10:51
  SPEAKER_11: That's always been true.
• 10:53
  SPEAKER_11: Um but I think most people would have accepted more or less what we've been saying until quite recently.
• 10:59
  SPEAKER_11: Um I think there has been, and it's still going on, a huge attack on our history and hence on our institutions, because I think the two things are connected, which has been going on now for a generation, uh, and which is in some ways different from the you know, the sort of um um critical opposition, usually from the left and occasionally from the right, that you've always had, which was often that of a minority, which was a sort of, you know, which who were there to um to try and ginger up the country in some ways to provide it with something to you could even say something to aim at.
• 11:39
  SPEAKER_11: Now we have um a very widespread attack on our history by people who are not a dissident minority, uh, but for the first time probably, people who have come to control many of the cultural institutions, the levers of power in our culture, and who seem to be doing their best to um to destroy the kind of consensus view of the past that you and I and uh and others have long have long taken for granted, have long presented.
• 12:13
  SPEAKER_11: Uh and I think you I'm sure you know what I mean.
• 12:16
  SPEAKER_11: I'm talking about, you know, it's often called decolonization, it's often called a woke attitude to the past.
• 12:22
  SPEAKER_11: But whereas in the there have been other such attacks, of which Marxism was an obvious one, um, but those were often argued based on some sort of philosophy, some sort of evidence.
• 12:37
  SPEAKER_11: And in that sense, they often the people putting them forward were quite keen on debate.
• 12:42
  SPEAKER_11: Now I think the people putting forward what you might call um, you know, there are lots of names for it, um uh progressive um radicalism, uh, are not really keen to debate.
• 12:57
  SPEAKER_11: They they're much keener to impose and impose dogmas and to to do so by means which are sometimes intimidatory.
• 13:06
  SPEAKER_11: And you get that in universities too.
• 13:08
  SPEAKER_11: So the universities that I think, you know, a generation ago we would all have said we were very proud of, are now, I think, in danger of uh losing their soul to some extent and being taken over by um activist minorities whose aim is quite difficult to discern, I think.
• 13:30
  SPEAKER_11: But I would I if I had to try to discern it, I would say it's probably the view that if you if you can discredit our past and indeed our our present, because the two are so closely linked, and undermine many of our institutions, you will thereby create um uh a tabula rasa on which you can create something much more inclusive, um, much more progressive, much more international, cosmopolitan, uh than was there before.
• 14:03
  SPEAKER_11: Um I think this is probably dangerous and wrong, but I think that's probably the um the idea.
• 14:10
  SPEAKER_11: And again, it's not a it's not a wholly new idea.
• 14:12
  SPEAKER_11: Edmund Burke, when he was writing critically about the French Revolution, said something like, um, you know, you it's it's extraordinary how some people to regard the history of their country as a blank sheet on which they can scribble anything they like.
• 14:26
  SPEAKER_11: And I think there are many people who are keen to scribble anything they like on a history that they've tried to reduce to a white sheet or perhaps in a a black sheet.
• 14:36
  SPEAKER_11: Nothing but but violence, oppression, exploitation, slavery, of course, is the great, has become the great issue, and everything's seen through this particular lens.
• 14:47
  SPEAKER_11: And I don't know what we do about that.
• 14:49
  SPEAKER_11: You can argue about it, and indeed uh many people do, but it as I say, these people are often not very willing to argue.
• 14:59
  SPEAKER_11: They are simply willing to assert and use the power that they have to make those assertions.
• 15:06
  SPEAKER_11: Uh the philosopher John Gray recently said um something like, What's truth nowadays?
• 15:13
  SPEAKER_11: It's what you and your friends believe and what you can force others to accept.
• 15:19
  SPEAKER_02: I would like to begin, Alan, with you outlining some briefly some of the the characteristics of the English people and and and uh how it came to be that way.
• 15:36
  SPEAKER_12: Thank you.
• 15:37
  SPEAKER_12: Well to start with, um Adam Smith said it was David Hume who said um the English have no national character, unless not having a national character is a national character.
• 15:54
  SPEAKER_12: Um second thing to qualify it is is I'm not an Englishman, I'm a Scotsman, or rather I'm five-eighths Scots, one-eighth Welsh, and so on.
• 16:06
  SPEAKER_12: Um the third is that what I'm talking about are perhaps uh now not quite so true because England has changed hugely in its character over the last generation, anyway.
• 16:23
  SPEAKER_12: So England now is a hotchpotch of different nationalities, obviously.
• 16:29
  SPEAKER_12: Um but sort of boiling it down to its essence of what I was describing in the 1970s, eighties.
• 16:39
  SPEAKER_12: Um the English were regarded by people on the continent, for example, as a peculiar people.
• 16:49
  SPEAKER_12: Voltaire, when he came to England, famously said, I have come to a civilization which in no way resembles my own high front.
• 17:01
  SPEAKER_12: So you can just go through them.
• 17:02
  SPEAKER_12: I'll just go through them very quickly.
• 17:05
  SPEAKER_12: First is political.
• 17:07
  SPEAKER_12: The trend of centralized feudalism, which was traditional in England as a political system, which then led into the first modern democracy, is unique.
• 17:19
  SPEAKER_12: Except according to Mark Bloch, uh, Japan, which had a very similar political system for a long time, but it didn't have the democracy.
• 17:29
  SPEAKER_12: So the political system is unique, and that's why it spread all over the world and why it led to the foundation of America and everything else.
• 17:37
  SPEAKER_12: Secondly, its language is unique.
• 17:40
  SPEAKER_12: It obviously overlaps with Dutch and Scandinavian and so on and so on, but it is it has various unique features and is very long and continuous since the Anglo-Saxons.
• 17:52
  SPEAKER_12: And that's the second reason why it's spread all over the world.
• 17:57
  SPEAKER_12: The third is its legal system is unique.
• 18:00
  SPEAKER_12: The common law system and then other additions and such as uh the system of trusts in so on is unique, although obviously it was then taken to America and there's an overlap there, but uh it's totally different from the Roman law traditional continent.
• 18:25
  SPEAKER_12: Its economic system is unique.
• 18:27
  SPEAKER_12: It's the first capitalist society going back a thousand years, in other words, a society which separates off the economy from the society as Max Weber described it, and has extensive use of money in markets, has a fully developed private property system from eight hundred years ago, and um so is capitalist um up to three centuries before Marx and Weber thought it was.
• 18:58
  SPEAKER_12: Um its religion is unique.
• 19:02
  SPEAKER_12: The kind of Puritan Protestant religion from the s 16th century, and even before.
• 19:10
  SPEAKER_12: It had tinges of all that, um is uh overlaps obviously with the Dutch and so on, but very distinctive features to the religion.
• 19:21
  SPEAKER_12: Its poetry is unique.
• 19:24
  SPEAKER_12: It's got one of the two greatest poetic traditions to my mind, the other being the Chinese um which if you mix in with the drama, Shakespeare and so on, means that English literature is reddened, uh spread all over the world.
• 19:42
  SPEAKER_12: Those are some of them, and I could go on, but I'll just mention two that three that um are famous.
• 19:49
  SPEAKER_12: One is it's children's stories.
• 19:52
  SPEAKER_12: There's no other country in the world that creates the kind of Harry Potter type, wing in the willows type, Alice in Wonderland type children's stories.
• 20:04
  SPEAKER_12: Other traditions have other kinds of children's stories, but not those.
• 20:08
  SPEAKER_12: The second is its humour, it's runic.
• 20:12
  SPEAKER_12: The kind of irony and dead panning and th and completely mad Monty Python, like all the satirical um tradition going back to Pope and Dryden and so on.
• 20:30
  SPEAKER_12: And everyone says when they come to England, the first thing you need to learn is how to make a joke or how to take a joke.
• 20:38
  SPEAKER_12: And then the last thing is uh it's games tradition.
• 20:41
  SPEAKER_12: The reason why the modern religion of the world, which is football, um is so important.
• 20:47
  SPEAKER_12: It came from England, it was invented in England.
• 20:50
  SPEAKER_12: Most of the team games, cricket and so on, were invented or adapted sometimes, like hockey from Scotland, but um so games playing is another feature.
• 21:05
  SPEAKER_12: So the culture, the society, the economy, and the ideology are all unique in the sense that they are more developed in a certain direction than in other countries here.
• 21:20
  SPEAKER_12: Obviously there's an overlap with say Lowland, Scotland, or say Holland or Scandinavia.
• 21:29
  SPEAKER_02: There are many first to pull on there.
• 21:31
  SPEAKER_02: I'll I'll only pull on a couple.
• 21:33
  SPEAKER_02: Uh the first uh when you opened with how we were to use by visitors from the continent.
• 21:39
  SPEAKER_02: I think it's interesting when you read your book and you you have got excerpts of Venetian travellers and Frenchmen coming over, and their accounts typically follow the follow uh themes like the the English are sure of themselves, they're very well dressed, they love liberty.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_02: Above all, they don't like being told what to do.
• 22:03
  SPEAKER_02: They like wealth.
• 22:05
  SPEAKER_02: And as you say, it even as far back as the 1300s, it was capitalistic.
• 22:10
  SPEAKER_02: And we'll come back to that in a moment because they may all be surprising to lots of people.
• 22:14
  SPEAKER_02: And we ourselves, when you read accounts, I can't remember who wrote it, but there is someone you quote that was writing in 1559 who didn't uh who didn't see us uh on this island as being um hard done by.
• 22:31
  SPEAKER_02: In fact, there seems to be this sentiment that we were we were blessed because everyone on the continent ate salads.
• 22:39
  SPEAKER_02: Whilst we had meat, we had this beautiful island, and we had freedom that the Continentals didn't have because of the the lack of peasantry.
• 22:46
  SPEAKER_02: And again, I think we'll get onto that in a moment.
• 22:48
  SPEAKER_02: But the the capitalistic element, Alan, I think it's common for people to think that it was the Industrial Revolution that ultimately turned us into a capitalistic peoples, and it was a big rupture from what went before.
• 23:05
  SPEAKER_02: But as you outlined in your book, from many records that you surveyed, you could find it all the way back to the 1300s.
• 23:14
  SPEAKER_02: Why do you think it is that we have the view we do about when that change happened being more around the 18th century rather than back in the the 14th, which you had discovered?
• 23:27
  SPEAKER_12: Well, um, just to add to my list, one of the things you mentioned was that we don't eat well, we eat meat and we are well clothed, and this is another peculiar feature of the English for back as far as the records certainly said in Chaucer in the 14th century and onwards.
• 23:45
  SPEAKER_12: Um that it's a peculiarly affluent wealthy island uh for various reasons.
• 23:54
  SPEAKER_12: Um now as to why we um think or many people, I mean if you talk to ordinary people and say, when did we whatever your word you like to use, become modern, become capitalist or whatever they use, they'll usually say it's probably the 18th century, nineteenth century, that sort of period.
• 24:17
  SPEAKER_12: And um this is because it was a big rupture.
• 24:21
  SPEAKER_12: It was a on the surface, there was a huge change with industrialization and urbanization.
• 24:27
  SPEAKER_12: And seeing so if we are peculiar now, it seems likely that that would be the turning point.
• 24:34
  SPEAKER_12: Um people without history, uh much historical training would think that.
• 24:39
  SPEAKER_12: What is rather odd is that many historians came to believe that.
• 24:46
  SPEAKER_12: What I discovered in writing the book was that the general view in the late 19th century of people like Mason Acton, Stubbs, Fraud, all the great historians of that period, Green and others, was that the uh English had a continuous history.
• 25:08
  SPEAKER_12: That the Industrial Revolution, of course, was important, but but if you looked at any institutions, they were all set set down very early.
• 25:18
  SPEAKER_12: A nice example is the great history of English law by Maitlin and Pollock Pollack and Maitlin.
• 25:26
  SPEAKER_12: When does English law end?
• 25:28
  SPEAKER_12: In other words, they are writing a great two-volume history of English law.
• 25:33
  SPEAKER_12: When do they stop?
• 25:35
  SPEAKER_12: They stop in about 1300.
• 25:39
  SPEAKER_12: In other words, nothing much has happened since 1300.
• 25:43
  SPEAKER_12: Now the law is both a reflection and a creator of everything else.
• 25:49
  SPEAKER_12: So if you don't change your legal systems, it's unlikely that suddenly some other part of your society like your economic system and capitalism will suddenly emerge without the law being changed.
• 26:01
  SPEAKER_12: There was no need because nothing much happened.
• 26:04
  SPEAKER_12: Now what happened was that after the about the First World War, um the uh historians in this country, um, particularly uh in the Second World War, many of them became very left wing.
• 26:26
  SPEAKER_12: They saw what had happened in the Communist Revolution, they became socialists, and so many of the best social historians and others, like R.
• 26:37
  SPEAKER_12: H.
• 26:37
  SPEAKER_12: Tawney or E.
• 26:38
  SPEAKER_12: P.
• 26:39
  SPEAKER_12: Thompson, they um uh tried to apply Marx, Weber, and um modern sociological uh models to English history.
• 26:51
  SPEAKER_12: And the broad Marxist Weberian sociological model says that England was feudal and pre-capitalist until the fifteenth century.
• 27:04
  SPEAKER_12: And then it there was a watershed and it changed in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries.
• 27:12
  SPEAKER_12: And this was reinforced by a strange thing which is not easy to explain, but medieval history, in other words, making the medieval world feudal and peasant and pre-capitalist.
• 27:28
  SPEAKER_12: Medieval history was dominated by East Europeans Kosminsky, Postin, Vinogradov, Titoff, Homans, all from East Europe.
• 27:41
  SPEAKER_12: And they were the leading, many of the leading historians of that time.
• 27:46
  SPEAKER_12: And what they did was say, well, we know that people before the 15th century were peasant feudal.
• 27:53
  SPEAKER_12: Where else what what is the mental model we have?
• 27:56
  SPEAKER_12: And they're from East Europe.
• 27:58
  SPEAKER_12: So they impose Russian peasantry or Polish peasantry or East European peasantries onto medieval England.
• 28:07
  SPEAKER_12: And um in other words, the paradigm shifts and creates a threefold Marxist model, pre-capitalist, transitional capitalist.
• 28:20
  SPEAKER_12: And I was taught all this at Oxford.
• 28:23
  SPEAKER_12: I was taught by all the great social writers, E.
• 28:27
  SPEAKER_12: P.
• 28:28
  SPEAKER_12: Thompson, Eric Hobsborne, um R.
• 28:32
  SPEAKER_12: H.
• 28:33
  SPEAKER_12: Hilton, Christopher Hill particularly, who uh took this for granted that we had gone through the same transition as everyone else, but a couple of centuries earlier.
• 28:46
  SPEAKER_12: And so it was only through a set of chances because if you have a paradigmatic breakthrough, as I think I created.
• 28:55
  SPEAKER_12: Um, for example, Lawrence Stone, who was mother of these people, when he reviewed my book in the London Review of Books, said if MacFarlane is right, he is the Einstein of history.
• 29:10
  SPEAKER_12: In other words, it was, and then of course he said, of course he's wrong and it's rubbish, but um uh he it was a hostage to fortune because it turns out that many people think I was roughly right.
• 29:23
  SPEAKER_12: Um to be to make a that kind of breakthrough, you can't do it intellectually.
• 29:29
  SPEAKER_12: It's it's an emotional and psychological break against your what you've been taught about, against your teachers.
• 29:38
  SPEAKER_12: Um it may well lose you your job.
• 29:41
  SPEAKER_12: If I had remained a historian, for example, I probably couldn't have said this because I would have never got a history job.
• 29:50
  SPEAKER_12: Um but because I moved into anthropology and I had a safe, secure place there, the historians could say, Oh well, he's not a historian, et cetera.
• 30:02
  SPEAKER_12: So um it was a set of chances.
• 30:06
  SPEAKER_12: I can tell you what the other chances were if you're interested, but basically it was one of those eureka moments when you suddenly the whole world alters because what we think of our history determines very much what we think of ourselves.
• 30:24
  SPEAKER_12: Um it is a myth or story of our origins, and we interpret our present world very much in the light of our unexamined assumptions about our past.
• 30:37
  SPEAKER_02: You're bringing up King Arthur there, recording this in Edinburgh, for anyone who knows Edinburgh, there's a a big hulking former volcano calls Arthur's Seat that overlooks the city.
• 30:49
  SPEAKER_02: And what I always find remarkable, and you'll be able to shed some light on this, Tom, is that the legend of King Arthur, or perhaps the story of King Arthur, how far it was able to travel given its origins in you know the southwest of the islands, and yet here it is being the the Arthurian main being attached to uh an old volcano looking over the city of Edinburgh.
• 31:21
  SPEAKER_02: How is it that in a world without mass communication and even in some respects uh you know one overarching sovereign and way of disseminating information and myths that that these things managed to almost leech into the soil and stay with us through the generations?
• 31:41
  SPEAKER_03: Um, well, there are some many there are many people who argue that King Arthur was a real person who lived uh in the the dark ages at the fall, at the time of the fall of Rome and fought against the Anglo-Saxons.
• 31:51
  SPEAKER_03: There's some evidence that some people, there are a few candidates of people who could be Arthur.
• 31:56
  SPEAKER_03: That's rather besides the point, because the actual Arthurian romantic phenomenon uh is a thousand years later in the High Middle Ages.
• 32:05
  SPEAKER_03: So you're not talking about the 400s, you're talking about the 1400s.
• 32:09
  SPEAKER_03: And that is what Arthur is.
• 32:13
  SPEAKER_03: He is a, he's like the Star Wars of the time.
• 32:16
  SPEAKER_03: And most of the really important like literature or Arthurian literature was being written in France, and it's French literature.
• 32:23
  SPEAKER_03: And it's in the style of the romantic or European romance, which is the start of the novel, and in and like it's very influential on the entire European literary tradition.
• 32:35
  SPEAKER_03: This is very different to say earlier forms of literature uh that were or or like storytelling that were enjoyed in the Germanic world, you know, which could be seen in the examples of the Icelandic sagas or in Anglo-Saxon poems like Beowulf.
• 32:48
  SPEAKER_03: Those are completely different styles of literature.
• 32:51
  SPEAKER_03: And Ice in Iceland they got replaced by romantic literature of the French type as well.
• 32:56
  SPEAKER_03: So this style of literature became the fashion all the way, all around Europe.
• 33:02
  SPEAKER_03: It's mostly of French origin, but you know, there's Arthurian literature written in Britain, there's Arthurian literature written in Germany.
• 33:09
  SPEAKER_03: Um, and sometimes they add bits in, like you can know, like fanfic or whatever.
• 33:13
  SPEAKER_03: Uh, it's kind of like that.
• 33:14
  SPEAKER_03: Everyone thought King Arthur was a really cool story, and it was like by no means limited to Britain.
• 33:21
  SPEAKER_03: Like people, I'm sure all over Europe were reading about King Arthur.
• 33:24
  SPEAKER_03: I'm sure they were reading about him in Russia and his adventures.
• 33:27
  SPEAKER_03: Uh, and he was an example of an ideal, a Christian ideal in the high Middle Ages.
• 33:33
  SPEAKER_03: And often there's their morality tales where they sort of give examples of someone not being very Christian, and then the problem is solved by being more Christian, something like that.
• 33:42
  SPEAKER_03: So just like Hollywood today, it's like um you could think of Hollywood as being the center and France being its equivalent in the Middle Ages.
• 33:50
  SPEAKER_03: It doesn't matter if the Hollywood film is set in Africa, it's still a Hollywood film.
• 33:56
  SPEAKER_03: Now, King Arthur was set in Britain, but I mean, according to some of the other intelligents, he was the king of Scandinavia as well as Britain.
• 34:02
  SPEAKER_03: So it's complete nonsense.
• 34:04
  SPEAKER_03: It's this is not real, it doesn't pertain to the reality of the real Arthur, if there ever was a real Arthur.
• 34:09
  SPEAKER_03: So of course, it's no surprise that in Scotland they were naming things after Arthur.
• 34:13
  SPEAKER_03: Like he was the, you know, it was it was Superman, Spider-Man, I don't know, whatever the equivalent is now, but everyone loved him.
• 34:20
  SPEAKER_02: We've touched on a few of these myths that have been uh or or or in this case historical reality, uh whichever way we're going to fall on that that, but that we've touched on the myths of the the British Isles.
• 34:34
  SPEAKER_02: Um before we delve into Christianity and how that changed the culture, the psyche of the British peoples, what what were the the founding myths, I suppose, of the English in particular?
• 34:49
  SPEAKER_02: Uh so those derived from the Anglo-Saxons and perhaps even the Vikings, we could check into the mix.
• 34:56
  SPEAKER_03: Well, this is an interesting question because it sort of got disrupted.
• 35:00
  SPEAKER_03: Initially, the Anglo-Saxon founding myth, as described by the Venerable Bede uh in the um eighth century, uh, pertains what we can tell now from archaeology and genetics, exactly to the reality of their history.
• 35:14
  SPEAKER_03: They remembered in the 8th century the factual events of their founding migration in the 5th century, and they built a mythos on that.
• 35:25
  SPEAKER_03: Um it had been somewhat disrupted by the process of Christianization because, well, Beeds, who wrote it down for us, has built it into a Christian narrative.
• 35:36
  SPEAKER_03: But it was a little bit difficult for them to do that because already when the Anglo-Saxons arrived in the fifth century they were uh pagans.
• 35:44
  SPEAKER_03: And so they the mythic progenitors of their race, the Hengist and Horsa, the sons of the, you know, the sons or grandsons of the top god Woden were said to be among the early migrants, or even they are the first English people on in Britain.
• 36:03
  SPEAKER_03: Whereas we know from like in Holland and other parts where they're referred to that they these are actually gods, not people.
• 36:08
  SPEAKER_03: Um they but they came legendary ancestors integrated into the settlement process, where the gods participated in the colonization of Britain and legitimized that.
• 36:19
  SPEAKER_03: Bede obviously can't go for that because he's Christian.
• 36:21
  SPEAKER_03: But he also has a problem that he um is defining the English identity in opposition to the identities of the previous inhabitants of Britain who were Christian.
• 36:33
  SPEAKER_03: Yet he is also wanting to construct an English identity as Christian in opposition to paganism uh of people on the continent, like other Germanic people on the continent were still pagan.
• 36:44
  SPEAKER_03: So he was precariously building the ecclesia through the ecclesiastical history of the English people, this idea of the English as simultaneously being not at all like the Christian inhabitants of England who were Celtic, but also being Christian.
• 36:59
  SPEAKER_03: And um he tries to dismiss some of the uh ideas of like uh the earlier Christians having miscalculated Easter and things like that as being uh you know significant.
• 37:09
  SPEAKER_03: And that that builds into a mythos that something called a Celtic church existed, which it never did.
• 37:13
  SPEAKER_03: Um, but the uh the the the reality is that they were a pagan people who became Christian, uh not entirely because of the influence of Celts, certainly in your uh your part of the world, the Northumbrians were Christianized by Gaels from Ireland, Scotland, um, or from Iona specifically.
• 37:33
  SPEAKER_03: Um as a result, the Anglo-Saxon culture of the Northumbrians was extremely influential on the entire Celtic world, where whereby people call them Celtic knots.
• 37:43
  SPEAKER_03: Uh this medieval artwork, they call it Celtic, it comes from Northumbrian Anglo-Saxons.
• 37:48
  SPEAKER_03: It's a pagan Germanic form of art that were pagan Anglo-Saxons brought to Britain.
• 37:52
  SPEAKER_03: But then when, in the process of Irish people Christianizing the Northumbrians, this style of pagan Germanic art became definitive of Christianity and Christian art in medieval British Isles, not only among Germanic people like the Northumbrians, but also the Celtic people such as the Picts, the uh the Britons, and the Gaels.
• 38:14
  SPEAKER_03: So yeah, the English founding myth was therefore this complicated mix of it was simple, it had to be, it couldn't be entirely based on Christianity because it had to be also in opposition to other Christian people.
• 38:25
  SPEAKER_03: So it had to be focused on its unique Germanicness, but also it's not like Germanic continental.
• 38:30
  SPEAKER_03: It has to be a new thing.
• 38:32
  SPEAKER_03: And within um, you know, as a result of Bede writing that book, I think directly his political propaganda there by of defining this idea of Englishness led into the actual formation of an English state, which was also contributed to by the invasion of the Vikings and the necessity of the consolidation of English powers to fight against them.
• 38:54
  SPEAKER_03: Um but the that mythos had you know built up over the first 500 years of England's history, was again disrupted by the Norman invasion.
• 39:03
  SPEAKER_03: And after the Norman times, like English people had much more interest in King Arthur and Arthurian romance than they did in their own previous heroes that they used to celebrate, like Beowulf and Ingeld, and uh people like all you know real Germanic heroes.
• 39:18
  SPEAKER_03: Because uh, but then later on, especially after the Reformation, Anglo-Saxoness becomes again a really big and important part of Englishness because um many of the like Protestant reformers saw the Anglo-Saxon past as a period of more devout non-Roman Christianity, which it wasn't, it was Roman Catholic as well.
• 39:43
  SPEAKER_03: But they imagined it as being a period of more freedom for the for the common man uh without the Norman yoke.
• 39:49
  SPEAKER_03: This is when the expression Norman yoke was developed.
• 39:52
  SPEAKER_03: And um this uh idea that there was a more liberal time in the Anglo-Saxons was very popular with uh with the rising um sort of not middle class, but like the equivalent of a middle class in uh in parts of eastern England and uh that this sort of momentum led up to the Civil War.
• 40:11
  SPEAKER_03: But uh ever since then, of course, we've we've as you know included Anglo-Saxons as part of our history as we originally did.
• 40:21
  SPEAKER_03: Uh until the 21st century, when people, oh no, and 20th century, sorry, early 20th century especially, some people started to question whether we were really Anglo-Saxons at all, and whether it was all just a mistake and Bede was making it up, and um, many people also, because of the success of the romantic revival of Celticness in the 19th century, which kind of just made up this completely non-existent sort of idea of a Celtic identity that never that never had never existed.
• 40:48
  SPEAKER_03: Um, that was very attractive and mystical and still looms large in the British imagination, like this, the Celtic, misty like regions of the West Country and parts of Scotland are more seem to be more earthy and more even more pagan than the East, which in the complete reverse is the truth.
• 41:05
  SPEAKER_03: Like the last part to be pagan in the British Isles is the Isle of Wight, uh, not the the West Country or Scotland.
• 41:11
  SPEAKER_03: But um this uh this uh these all feature within our identity now.
• 41:17
  SPEAKER_03: English identity has all these different currents feeding into it, but they're competitive they're competing with each other.
• 41:23
  SPEAKER_03: But modern genetics has reaffirmed the original narrative that Bede presented, and we certainly and which many you know Victorian scholars were well aware of, and they said we have an Anglo-Saxon type.
• 41:34
  SPEAKER_03: And they sometimes use such uh racial um definitions to justify oppressing Scottish people, for example, in the the Highland clearances, they would say that you know that some people from Edinburgh, where you live now, would say that they were Anglo-Saxon.
• 41:49
  SPEAKER_03: So people who would describe themselves as belonging to the Anglo-Saxon race in in Lower Scotland, whereas they would say the Highlanders were of an inferior racial type, destined to be um, you know, subjugated by the superior Anglo-Saxon type, which meant people from lowland Scotland.
• 42:04
  SPEAKER_03: Um, now that is not justified by the genetics, but what is justified by the genetics is that the Anglo-Saxon invasion did occur, and the English people are distinct from other parts of the British Isles by having a greater degree of ancestry from continental North Europeans.
• 42:20
  SPEAKER_02: What have you changed your mind about in the course of your life and what was it that made you think differently?
• 42:27
  SPEAKER_10: Oh, what I've changed about is my politics.
• 42:31
  SPEAKER_10: I was a libertarian.
• 42:34
  SPEAKER_10: Um when I first came to pub real public attention, um uh uh things like the moral maze on the BBC.
• 42:42
  SPEAKER_10: I was a radical libertarian.
• 42:43
  SPEAKER_10: I become a conservative.
• 42:46
  SPEAKER_10: In other words, I suppose I've rediscovered that history actually matters rather than is a jolly good way of leaving a nice life.
• 42:53
  SPEAKER_10: I was immense I've been immensely fortunate, John.
• 42:56
  SPEAKER_10: I've been able to make a very good live look at this, um, a very good living out of something that I love.
• 43:02
  SPEAKER_10: But as I've got older, I realized it's more than that.
• 43:08
  SPEAKER_10: I realised that there are things which are on the point of vanishing irretrievably.
• 43:18
  SPEAKER_10: And as I said, I think my own generation has made terrible, terrible errors.
• 43:24
  SPEAKER_10: But we are, well we are, the about to be missing link because uh every every week is a funeral.
• 43:32
  SPEAKER_10: So I've changed my mind politically very sharply.
• 43:36
  SPEAKER_10: And when I say conservative, I mean a Burkean conservative.
• 43:42
  SPEAKER_10: I do not think the solution to our present discontents, as terrible as they are, is a kind of um get up in the morning and think of something new.
• 43:53
  SPEAKER_10: Um I I I'm fond of Nigel Farage, I know him quite well and all the rest of it.
• 43:59
  SPEAKER_10: But the A sh I fear the moment it may change, there's a shallowness, there's just let's reach something off the shelf.
• 44:07
  SPEAKER_10: What we need is a recognition that what has gone wrong was a repudiation of this astonishing continuous history, which you remember, we were unique in Europe, in that we were able to preserve what you talked about, the monarchy, Parliament, the House of Lords, that historic constitution stretching, which Pericles again is the basis of a country, stretching right back.
• 44:35
  SPEAKER_10: We were the only country that in the 19th century, because we had already had the idea that to be governed by law in Britain, in England really, is to take part in the making of it.
• 44:48
  SPEAKER_10: That's what the idea of parliament is about.
• 44:51
  SPEAKER_10: You're bound by a law made in Parliament because you have been in Parliament either in person or via your representative.
• 44:59
  SPEAKER_10: Now that was mythical in the Middle Ages.
• 45:02
  SPEAKER_10: In the 19th century, it becomes real.
• 45:05
  SPEAKER_10: So whereas in France or Germany or Italy or wherever it else you look at, people were clamoring to tear down the ancien regime.
• 45:15
  SPEAKER_10: In Britain, they were clamoring to become part of it.
• 45:19
  SPEAKER_10: There's a fundamental conservatism.
• 45:21
  SPEAKER_10: The Chartists weren't saying tear down Parliament, they're saying we want the vote.
• 45:26
  SPEAKER_10: Even the women, even the monstrous regiment of the suffragettes.
• 45:32
  SPEAKER_10: They weren't saying we hate Parliament, saying we want to be there.
• 45:44
  SPEAKER_10: Excuse me, is one of the richest women in the country, Nancy Astor, with her magnificent town palace at the corner of St.
• 45:50
  SPEAKER_10: James' Square.
• 45:53
  SPEAKER_10: And it's this we Blair and the horror of Alistair Campbell, that master of propaganda, which is wonderfully described by F.
• 46:04
  SPEAKER_10: M.
• 46:04
  SPEAKER_10: Cornford as that branch of the art of lying.
• 46:10
  SPEAKER_10: No accident.
• 46:11
  SPEAKER_10: These people foolishly, shallowly tear it down.
• 46:16
  SPEAKER_10: And what they do, they construct something.
• 46:19
  SPEAKER_10: But it's not simply unhistoric, it is unfunctioning.
• 46:23
  SPEAKER_10: As we know, every bit of the state is at war with every other bit of the state.
• 46:29
  SPEAKER_10: Why we can do nothing?
• 46:30
  SPEAKER_10: Why there's the absurdity of HS2?
• 46:33
  SPEAKER_10: Why there's the absurdity of the backtonic?
• 46:37
  SPEAKER_10: And that's because we ruptured our history.
• 46:40
  SPEAKER_10: That's conservatism is, and again, the Conservative Party absolutely forgot this.
• 46:48
  SPEAKER_10: Um Theresa May, the nasty party or whatever.
• 46:53
  SPEAKER_10: You are a conservative because you believe that the past is not a is not a straitjacket, it's not um it's not a textbook, it's not how you do it.
• 47:04
  SPEAKER_10: But it's this astonishingly fertile soil.
• 47:08
  SPEAKER_10: And you don't grow a plant by uprooting it.
• 47:12
  SPEAKER_10: And this is what we've tried to do in the 20th century.
• 47:15
  SPEAKER_10: We've torn things up by their roots, and we've been surprised that they've withered.
• 47:23
  SPEAKER_02: I'll let you make the the case, if indeed there's one to make, that what in your estation is the current state of the country and and by extension its culture.
• 47:35
  SPEAKER_13: Well, uh the idea that there has been progress is not entirely false.
• 47:40
  SPEAKER_13: Uh when uh you talk about the when I was born, for example, my life expectancy was 66 years, and now uh the life expectancy is 80 uh um uh uh male uh at birth.
• 47:55
  SPEAKER_13: So that is progress, and no one would wish to go back to the telephone system of old, where to uh telephone more than 30 miles away uh was a kind of effort of Hercules.
• 48:09
  SPEAKER_13: Um so there has been undoubted technical progress, but technical progress is not the same as moral progress, although there has been some moral progress as well.
• 48:19
  SPEAKER_13: However, uh there is undoubtedly a feeling, and I don't think it's an unreasonable feeling, that there's a kind of deterioration as well.
• 48:29
  SPEAKER_13: I was recently writing an essay, and I found something that was very um striking.
• 48:34
  SPEAKER_13: In a book I was reading about uh juvenile delinquents, I read that in 1938 in this country there were 8,750 prisoners.
• 48:46
  SPEAKER_13: Um and uh if you take now we have eight about ten times as many.
• 48:52
  SPEAKER_13: If you take the increase in population, we have perhaps six times as many prisoners as we did.
• 48:58
  SPEAKER_13: But it's not just that.
• 49:00
  SPEAKER_13: For each prisoner, there are now six times more indictable crimes than there were in 1938.
• 49:07
  SPEAKER_13: In other words, if you just put this together, you've got 36 times as many uh crimes now as in 1938.
• 49:15
  SPEAKER_13: Well, of course, you can't just extrapolate quite like that.
• 49:19
  SPEAKER_13: But nevertheless, there is no doubt that a country that was almost as crime free as any large society uh ever is or ever will be, uh we have gone to an extremely high rate of uh crime.
• 49:39
  SPEAKER_13: And that seems to me a very serious uh indictment of our society.
• 49:47
  SPEAKER_13: Uh and we can talk about why that should have uh why that should have occurred, but I don't think you could just say that because we have more uh uh indoor laboratories and everyone has a coloured television, that uh is necessarily means that we have made progress in all fields.
• 50:09
  SPEAKER_02: Well, you teed me up for the next question.
• 50:11
  SPEAKER_02: So what are the key influences that have led to both the key increase the increase in crime and as you see it the migration, I suppose, of culture at large?
• 50:25
  SPEAKER_13: Well, I suppose it must really stem from the spread of certain ideas, and those ideas come from intellectuals and um and the academy.
• 50:36
  SPEAKER_13: And uh they have so undermined our society that people like the police ha no longer have any idea what they're supposed to be doing.
• 50:48
  SPEAKER_13: In 1938, a policeman would have known what he was supposed to be doing if you were a little boy and he would behaving badly pull you by the ear and say, Here, yeah, stop that.
• 51:00
  SPEAKER_13: And if he did that now, of course, he would be accused of the most abominable violence.
• 51:06
  SPEAKER_13: But they really, the police, for example, do not know what they are supposed to be doing.
• 51:12
  SPEAKER_13: Uh and of course, bureaucrats prefer doing things which involve a lot of desk work and and so on and are not at all dangerous.
• 51:23
  SPEAKER_13: So, of course, supervising COVID was very pleasant for them, as against trying to catch burglars, which is hazardous and rather difficult.
• 51:34
  SPEAKER_13: So uh they don't know what they're supposed to be doing, uh teachers don't know what they're supposed to be doing, nobody knows what he is supposed to be doing.
• 51:43
  SPEAKER_13: And that comes from a kind of uh a kind of skepticism uh which uh has been spread, I think, uh, by the extension of universities.
• 52:01
  SPEAKER_13: And of course, is a bureaucratic opportunity for people.
• 52:06
  SPEAKER_13: Once you educate people, you have to employ them.
• 52:09
  SPEAKER_13: So because they're very dangerous if you don't employ them.
• 52:12
  SPEAKER_13: And incidentally, this I I first uh thought about this in Central America, oddly enough, when I was in Guatemala, I was writing a book about Guatemala and the Civil War in Guatemala, and I came to the conclusion that the uh uh the the um uh the violence and the violent revolutionary movements, they were not they were not spontaneous movements of the peasantry, they were of university educated types who were disappointed, I think, by the fact that university no longer uh implied joining an elite because there were too many people uh uh at universities.
• 52:53
  SPEAKER_13: And something similar has I'm not exactly the same, but something similar has happened in Britain, I think.
• 53:01
  SPEAKER_02: Is that is that a common theme about the uh uh the overproduction, I suppose, of cultural elites that it can lead to uh kind of disappointment that that the entitlement hasn't been achieved?
• 53:17
  SPEAKER_02: Because uh if I'm if I'm thinking correctly, and you you can you can you can certainly put me right on this if I'm not, uh is that not also similar to the rise of the Nazi movement in Germany that it was uh there's a groundswell of support from the defected youth and the students of the day?
• 53:35
  SPEAKER_02: Is that is that right?
• 53:35
  SPEAKER_02: Uh is this something we're seeing as a theme?
• 53:37
  SPEAKER_13: Well, I suppose there's a vague analogy, but I I would put it more with uh I would say the analogy with the with Latin America is actually stronger.
• 53:47
  SPEAKER_13: And also uh with Russia of the 19th century, you can see the intelligentsia uh produced the catastrophe that uh Russia is even now not able to overcome.
• 54:00
  SPEAKER_13: So um uh obviously it's just uh uh this isn't a a perfect explanation or anything like that.
• 54:13
  SPEAKER_13: And to some extent you're better able to say than I since you're you appear to be younger than I, and so you're you would know more people in the age group I'm talking about than I.
• 54:25
  SPEAKER_13: Um but it does it uh it does seem uh reasonable partial explanation.
• 54:34
  SPEAKER_02: Do you think that we are getting to a point where people do feel as though that progressive worldview history is falling away, that that people perhaps accept or recognize that we are in the in the winter of a civilization?
• 54:48
  SPEAKER_02: And I suppose probably more importantly, do you do you believe that that we are?
• 54:54
  SPEAKER_04: Well I mean what one of the things that interests me is that um when you show people images of the 1950s of this country, or indeed in America, where you've got clean streets, or you've got these uh old uh communities with village greens, and they look impot they look impossibly idealized to the point where you even have some leftists who deny it or claim it's constructed or in some way, okay.
• 55:28
  SPEAKER_04: But I mean this is just video footage that was taken of the 1950s, okay?
• 55:33
  SPEAKER_04: Um I mean and and then you go to your typical high street today with its uh endless vape shops and uh you know people uh various people are from various different backgrounds milling about on the corner and uh everybody looking at their mobile phone and does it feel like that's progress?
• 55:56
  SPEAKER_04: I mean, does anybody really believe that things are better better off now than they were back then?
• 56:05
  SPEAKER_04: So it was kind of e I think it was easier to sell this progressive vision of history if people felt that things were getting better, okay?
• 56:15
  SPEAKER_04: Or if people felt that their lives are bet were better than their parents' lives.
• 56:20
  SPEAKER_04: Um, but of course, anybody I think from millennials on down, millennials and uh the uh the zoomers, possibly even some of the younger Gen Xers as well, um well, that's just not been true.
• 56:35
  SPEAKER_04: We I mean I I was born in uh the early 80s, and I felt that I've lived my entire life under the shadow of the boomers, of their cultural achievements, of their kind of cultural ground zero in the 1960s, and um you know I was a teenager in the 90s, and the 90s was already a kind of homage to the 60s.
• 56:59
  SPEAKER_04: Remember the um Blur and Oasis and uh you know, but it was all nostalgia, it was all looking back, it was all like oh the Beatles again, or if you look at the Blur, it was the Kinks again.
• 57:11
  SPEAKER_04: But if you go back to the Beatles and the Kinks, even they were already nostalgic, okay?
• 57:17
  SPEAKER_04: Already trying to like, I mean, yes, there was the the 60s cultural revolution, but there's also a sense of loss.
• 57:24
  SPEAKER_04: You know, anybody listens to Sergeant Pepper or Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society, there's a sense of they knew that they were living through something that was being lost.
• 57:36
  SPEAKER_04: Okay, now in the 60s there was cause to be optimistic about that, and possibly there would the die the last dying fumes of that were in the 1990s when we grew up.
• 57:45
  SPEAKER_04: Now in 2025, um what Blair was selling, and when you know, when I was 18, uh, of this kind of optimistic vision of technology getting better and life getting better for everybody, is a much more difficult sell, I think, when people can't get on the housing ladder, when people um can't get jobs, when people they can't get it's not that they can't get jobs, it's that they can't get the kind of uh professional class jobs that they feel that they're entitled to.
• 58:20
  SPEAKER_04: Um the uh and and one of the bad legacies of Blair is what they call elite overproduction, that is the dragooning of millions of people into university who frankly shouldn't really be in university, and then they've done degrees that don't really lead naturally to to a job.
• 58:39
  SPEAKER_04: Um, and then those ones who do do jobs, you know, they they do their degree in uh, you know, they could be English literature or history or you know, they could be studying the classics or something.
• 58:51
  SPEAKER_04: But what do they what they actually end up doing is working for some massive multinational corporation uh you know on a on a middling salary doing marketing or internal communications or something, um which you know, I mean it's it's kind of um it's like well okay, this is the progress, this is what we've like this is this is the promised land.
• 59:16
  SPEAKER_04: Um and and obviously, I mean, it's not just uh men, of course, but millions of women too have been sold this dream.
• 59:25
  SPEAKER_04: Um and it's like okay, it's it's framed as liberation, it's framed as progress.
• 59:32
  SPEAKER_04: But you know, a very simple question to ask would be well, you know, there's something called the female happiness paradox.
• 59:40
  SPEAKER_04: Okay, there's vast literature on this.
• 59:43
  SPEAKER_04: As um emancipation of women into the workplace has progressed, uh, you know, their happiness as uh registered in various surveys and empirical studies has progressively declined, their mental health has progressively got worse, uh anxiety uh is through the roof, uh suicide rates have increased.
• 1:00:08
  SPEAKER_04: Uh women are denied starting a family when they're young and now are forced to start families in their late uh 30s or even early 40s, and at some point they sit down and they think I was sold this liberal dream.
• 1:00:26
  SPEAKER_04: Uh I spent most of my formative years chained to a desk writing emails for Microsoft.
• 1:00:34
  SPEAKER_04: Was it all that?
• 1:00:35
  SPEAKER_04: Was it better than the life that my grandparents had?
• 1:00:40
  SPEAKER_04: Maybe, maybe not.
• 1:00:41
  SPEAKER_04: But the fact that the fact that it's even being questioned shows that it's not um it's not obvious.
• 1:00:48
  SPEAKER_04: Whereas I feel like in the 90s, when we when we were teenagers, maybe it felt more obvious than it was kind of going onwards and upwards to most people.
• 1:00:58
  SPEAKER_04: Now I now I think people are more pessimistic about that whole vision.
• 1:01:04
  SPEAKER_04: And um another problem is that our elites, the elite class, are so it's almost like a sunk cost, they're so far in on this that they have no answers whatsoever to any of these questions at all, except for more of it.
• 1:01:22
  SPEAKER_04: You know, Ki Keystarmer ran on a platform of growth, growth, growth.
• 1:01:28
  SPEAKER_04: I saw a Fraser Nelson, editor of The Spectator, uh, write an article the other day saying, Oh, look, there's cause for celebration because um Britain has added five million people to the population.
• 1:01:44
  SPEAKER_04: I mean, okay, that may make sense if GDP is your only concern.
• 1:01:48
  SPEAKER_04: Not that those five million people have necessarily uh led to economic growth, by the way.
• 1:01:54
  SPEAKER_04: I I saw another study showing that they've cost the country 35 billion people.
• 1:01:59
  SPEAKER_04: Uh 35 billion pounds, but that's another story.
• 1:02:02
  SPEAKER_04: The point is, is that okay, right, now we're gonna have a population of 70 million people, 75 million people, 80 million people.
• 1:02:12
  SPEAKER_04: Again, that might be good for Microsoft, but is it better for the standard of living?
• 1:02:18
  SPEAKER_04: Is it better for your happiness, for your life, for the country you want to lead?
• 1:02:23
  SPEAKER_04: And uh, I mean, I I'm much more, you know, you mentioned tech optimism or anglo-futurism or something.
• 1:02:30
  SPEAKER_04: I'm much more of the mind of like, well, wouldn't it actually be better if you just have the population?
• 1:02:34
  SPEAKER_04: Wouldn't be good for growth, it wouldn't be good for Microsoft, but it might be good for the prospect of you buying a house or living a fulfilling life or being part of a community.
• 1:02:44
  SPEAKER_04: But these questions are put out of doors by our elites who just aren't concerned about that because their bottom line all everywhere and always is economic.
• 1:02:55
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• 1:03:00
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• 1:03:09
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• 1:03:12
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• 1:03:25
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• 1:03:28
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• 1:03:31
  SPEAKER_02: Enjoy the rest of the show, classmate.
• 1:03:35
  SPEAKER_02: Well, that probably leads me on to a question which I got from page one, I think, of your your book, where you argue that England's loss of faith is more consequential than Brexit.
• 1:03:52
  SPEAKER_02: Why?
• 1:03:56
  SPEAKER_06: Brexit, in reality, is in practical terms about a sort of trading relationships, freedom of movement, um, the question of whether we allow a particular foreign court jurisdiction.
• 1:04:13
  SPEAKER_06: Um not unimportant things.
• 1:04:15
  SPEAKER_06: I mean, of course, if people cannot exercise their right of free movement, their right to work abroad, of course it's going to change people's lives.
• 1:04:24
  SPEAKER_06: And some people have chosen to use Brexit as a question of modern identity.
• 1:04:31
  SPEAKER_06: I think the idea that uh being pro-EU a lies yourself to um an elite is something that really drove the debate.
• 1:04:42
  SPEAKER_06: It was a really a the class question internally, as much as anything.
• 1:04:48
  SPEAKER_06: Uh and uh that is the closest it got to being a cultural question because there's as a cultural sophistication that I think is inherent with the notion of being pro-EU.
• 1:04:58
  SPEAKER_06: And uh the idea of being local and attached to this place was being as I think of rather as rather low status.
• 1:05:08
  SPEAKER_06: But Christianity has given us the very existence of England as a nation state.
• 1:05:16
  SPEAKER_06: It was the foundational principle behind laws, it's a sort of driving principle behind our ethics, it's been a driving principle behind a vast amount of our culture.
• 1:05:29
  SPEAKER_06: I won't say everything behind our culture, but a vast amount of our culture.
• 1:05:34
  SPEAKER_06: And the break from that, so I mean, him seeing is just one aspect of it.
• 1:05:40
  SPEAKER_06: But I mean, so many um ideas in terms of spirituality, literature, how we arrange the public sphere, what we think is are important in terms of our ethics, charities, laws, the way that we treat each other.
• 1:05:54
  SPEAKER_06: Um that is far more profound and ancient than Brexit.
• 1:06:00
  SPEAKER_06: Our relationship with the EU is the 1970s.
• 1:06:03
  SPEAKER_06: Our relationship with Christianity is 597 or before, depending on where you start the clock.
• 1:06:11
  SPEAKER_06: I think it's easiest to start the clock in 597 for practical purposes.
• 1:06:15
  SPEAKER_06: But this Christianity made the nation state.
• 1:06:20
  SPEAKER_06: Christianity made kingship, Christianity made the basis of the development of law, art, landscape, all of this.
• 1:06:29
  SPEAKER_06: And suddenly we start to move away from it.
• 1:06:33
  SPEAKER_06: So we move into a completely untested world.
• 1:06:39
  SPEAKER_06: I mean you might argue vis-a-vis the European Union, we've gone through periods of relationship with supranational bodies, particularly with the papacy, from say the 1100s to the 1530s.
• 1:06:53
  SPEAKER_06: And indeed, I suppose relationship with um the continents vis-a-vis the umland and pentagenent kings.
• 1:07:04
  SPEAKER_06: So you know that's not unusual for us.
• 1:07:06
  SPEAKER_06: But the absence of Christianity is completely unprecedented.
• 1:07:11
  SPEAKER_02: So when when you find figures uh saying talking of the cultural changes since let's let's just put a line in the sand, post post-war Britain as being the instantiation of a year zero.
• 1:07:31
  SPEAKER_02: Uh we're we're we're bulldozing the old order, as it were.
• 1:07:41
  SPEAKER_02: And it doesn't allow us, as you've talked about, to self-actualise.
• 1:07:44
  SPEAKER_02: It's quite repressive.
• 1:07:46
  SPEAKER_02: And actually, libertinism is what we ought to strive for in some way.
• 1:07:52
  SPEAKER_02: It's it's me to make the sovereign choice, no matter what.
• 1:07:56
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, and I suppose there are many different variations of that.
• 1:07:59
  SPEAKER_02: Um when people say that there are we are we are being governed by those with a year zero mentality, uh, does that stacks up then?
• 1:08:11
  SPEAKER_02: It's not an unfair accusation to be making.
• 1:08:16
  SPEAKER_06: Yes, I mean I I don't like to um comment on this is a rather unfortunate public relations strategy of of the Prime Minister at the moment.
• 1:08:27
  SPEAKER_06: Um but it was very telling over Easter that he he thanked Christians at Easter time for their contribution to national life.
• 1:08:43
  SPEAKER_06: And now the word contribution is um is very telling, of course, isn't it?
• 1:08:48
  SPEAKER_06: Because it suggests it's one thing amongst many rather than the foundation and cornerstone of um what we happen to be.
• 1:08:59
  SPEAKER_06: Um so that I found that very striking.
• 1:09:02
  SPEAKER_06: Um that uh it may just be a lack of knowledge, or but maybe it is a policy of of trying to relegate it and to move away from it, indeed to generate a year zero notion so that England is governed not from a tradition which is based on Christianity, but really from an imperial oversight tradition of many different um many different um religious confessions and um well a bulkanized sort of state, which is an alarming idea.
• 1:09:42
  SPEAKER_06: And it's also unnecessary, really, because I think, and I argue this in my book, that actually if we did hang more closely to Christianity and more confidently, it actually does offer us a much more secure basis for the happier relationship between different faiths in the country.
• 1:10:06
  SPEAKER_06: So I I think again, it's part of the consequence of the consequence of the lack of confidence.
• 1:10:12
  SPEAKER_06: If um I I think the the official reasoning goes we've got to treat Christianity as one thing amongst many, then actually I would argue that if Christianity is secure in the public sphere, it's actually easier for other religions to feel happy and secure in the public sphere because they have a sense that instead of a secular world there is a place for religion in the public sphere.
• 1:10:39
  SPEAKER_06: Christianity will look after other faiths and also it's rather discompopulating.
• 1:10:47
  SPEAKER_06: I think um I mean I I think particularly for Muslims to have this notion that there is a government government that is not based in on religion in any sort of way.
• 1:11:02
  SPEAKER_06: And that makes the profession of religion in public life per se, by any religion, actually rather difficult and and worrisome.
• 1:11:09
  SPEAKER_06: And I think you can compare our model with France, where you have this very um strident laïcité and religion appearing in public life as being something that seems wrong per se.
• 1:11:25
  SPEAKER_06: But of course there's a sense of resentment um I think from immigrant communities that has this notion that well the your notion of laicity is just um a secularized Christianity, and you're using that as a um shield to protect against um any sign of Muslim presence in public life.
• 1:11:46
  SPEAKER_06: And of course that makes a great attention.
• 1:11:48
  SPEAKER_06: If you actually said, okay, this place is Christian, of course you're welcome to practice your religion here, but Christianity will be the thing which sets the tenor for public life, then there's no sort of ingrained resentment that you're saying one thing and actually using it as a shield for um Christianity which won't show its face.
• 1:12:14
  SPEAKER_02: As you're speaking there, it strikes me as to where we live now in modernity uh with regards to the don't judge me culture, the individualist culture.
• 1:12:26
  SPEAKER_02: And and sometimes I wonder when we are able to paint this picture of what it's become, as in the effects of thinking this way, and for example, throwing away the uh the the Christian culture, I suppose, that was the the the country Europe was built upon, which is about um learning to restrain your worst appetites and developing character and obviously having more of a social mindset instead of it being just about you and what you can achieve.
• 1:12:57
  SPEAKER_02: It it makes me ask the question: why are all of these strains of thought so alluring?
• 1:13:06
  SPEAKER_02: You know, the the individual atomistic thing.
• 1:13:09
  SPEAKER_02: We know people are unbelievably unhappy.
• 1:13:11
  SPEAKER_02: We know that Britain in particular is one of the loneliest places in Europe, but the same could be said that most countries are getting lonelier who have followed this model.
• 1:13:20
  SPEAKER_02: And then we have seen typically that people can be drawn to ideas like anything associated with the left, because it feels uh good, I suppose, to be thinking that you are uh communally minded.
• 1:13:35
  SPEAKER_02: And then there's all of these global solidarity ideals that people get drawn to, and as you say, that hollows you out from a connection to the people that you spend your time around in the here and now.
• 1:13:45
  SPEAKER_02: So I wonder, and I'm just thinking out loud, Connor, and it'd be interesting to hear what you think.
• 1:13:50
  SPEAKER_02: Is do you think things like Christianity being thrown on the scrap heap to a degree by those running our institutions and many other people making those decisions is because no one wants to be judged.
• 1:14:04
  SPEAKER_02: You said, you know, you what you actually care about what people are up to.
• 1:14:07
  SPEAKER_02: Is it because it's just hard?
• 1:14:10
  SPEAKER_02: It's hard, and so all of the other options are just easier.
• 1:14:14
  SPEAKER_15: Yeah, quite.
• 1:14:14
  SPEAKER_15: I mean, I I often there's a meme of a very smug-looking man in glasses cartoon that says, ah, but Jesus said exactly this.
• 1:14:22
  SPEAKER_15: No, I'm not a Christian.
• 1:14:23
  SPEAKER_15: I have nothing but contempt for your religion.
• 1:14:25
  SPEAKER_15: But if I put it in terms you'll understand, you might agree with me.
• 1:14:27
  SPEAKER_15: And you get this all the time with people that say, Well, Jesus said don't judge.
• 1:14:31
  SPEAKER_15: Actually, no, he said, don't judge lest you also be judged.
• 1:14:34
  SPEAKER_15: And he said, Do not look at the mote in your brother's eye when you have a log in your own.
• 1:14:38
  SPEAKER_15: Essentially, don't be a hypocrite, apply consistent moral standards, be a living paragon and exemplar of virtue before you go and espouse virtue out into the world.
• 1:14:46
  SPEAKER_15: Otherwise, you're praying on a street corner and you're no better than the scribes or Pharisees, which eventually put him to death and the like.
• 1:14:52
  SPEAKER_15: So the idea that we have jest and Christianity for something better, when that better just seems to be self-service, distraction by the dangling baubles of unfulfilable, ever-propagated desires, a Faustian pact with technology to generate those desires and displace human relationships and ultimately the role of humanity in creating and existing on the earth.
• 1:15:15
  SPEAKER_15: The idea that that's been better for anyone, that we just instead sate our screaming consciences with shallow compliments from other people who we can't really respect and who are only going to be around for one very selfish generation.
• 1:15:30
  SPEAKER_15: I I think that's been a deliberate cruelty inflicted upon people.
• 1:15:33
  SPEAKER_15: But it's also been a sort of slow evolved fall from a hierarchical church with apostolic succession.
• 1:15:42
  SPEAKER_15: I mean, Max Weber documented this pretty well, in that the exporting of the particular type of Puritan Christianity to the new world of Americas by Britain set in motion the Protestant work ethic and then the secularizing logic of liberal capitalism, which has now devoured Christianity wholesale and did so through things like bookkeeping, but also the belief in grace through works, that you can derive whether or not you're predestined for heaven or hell by how prosperous you are.
• 1:16:09
  SPEAKER_15: It sets material wealth as the marker of mankind's success.
• 1:16:14
  SPEAKER_15: It exalts mammonism rather than the kind of virtue that would be displayed through loving one another, willing the good in the other, in the Thomas Aquinas definition.
• 1:16:24
  SPEAKER_15: And so I think this is why, actually, a lot of young men, particularly, are returning to Christianity through that self-selection mechanism of the internet rediscovering tradition.
• 1:16:33
  SPEAKER_15: But they're returning to the Orthodox Church and Latin Mass going Catholicism.
• 1:16:37
  SPEAKER_15: You know, I've taken my nan to novus order, admittedly, but my my priest watches my show, so he's very traditionalist mass for the last now two years.
• 1:16:46
  SPEAKER_15: My my girlfriend, soon to be a fiance, um, haven't picked the day yet, but uh will has been going with me since we basically met, and that has cultivated a community around us, and I've met viewers there, and I see dads taking their kids there, and and it raises the salience of the need to have a family because if no one's in your environment in your 20s is having weddings and having kids, then again you indefinitely defer it and you think of yourself as atomized consumer unit.
• 1:17:09
  SPEAKER_15: And and so from out from the central principle of you have unique human dignity implanted into you by a deity that loves you, and the first act of love was creation, from there emanates out all the wholesome family values, all the neighborly consideration, all the high trust civilization that has waned away and been deprived from my generation.
• 1:17:29
  SPEAKER_15: And what's the alternative to that?
• 1:17:31
  SPEAKER_15: A kind of demonic wedding to technology and having nobody around you when you're elderly to care for you and hold your hand when you pass away?
• 1:17:39
  SPEAKER_15: No wonder so many people are rejecting that option.
• 1:17:42
  SPEAKER_02: This loss of faith brought about uh uh not necessarily even just in the Christian God and and everything our society uh was was keered around through the institutions, but all of the institutions themselves.
• 1:17:55
  SPEAKER_02: Yes.
• 1:17:56
  SPEAKER_02: Uh is there well is is there anything that can save save that if because the crisis of confidence are you asking me to be to engage in political and social activism?
• 1:18:10
  SPEAKER_08: No, I I am an observer.
• 1:18:12
  SPEAKER_08: I don't uh when you see, as I feel I have done through the the work that I've done over the past 25 years writing about this, when you see the extent and depth and height and breadth of this thing, the idea that any individual or any group of individuals working to try and prevent it could have any effect on it is is comical.
• 1:18:34
  SPEAKER_08: It's it's gigantic.
• 1:18:36
  SPEAKER_08: It's it's like a tsunami and a child standing on a beach with a with a with a sand castle.
• 1:18:45
  SPEAKER_08: Uh is is more what what anybody who tries to oppose it is like, you will be overwhelmed.
• 1:18:51
  SPEAKER_08: It's it's enormous.
• 1:18:52
  SPEAKER_08: One of the problems with it is that people like it.
• 1:18:55
  SPEAKER_08: It has liberated people uh from an awful lot of uh restraints, which they, when they'd cast them off, uh they'd decided they had never had any point in the first place and they were unwelcome.
• 1:19:07
  SPEAKER_08: And there's this extraordinary thing.
• 1:19:08
  SPEAKER_08: If you if you switch off an electric device, then it stops working instantly.
• 1:19:14
  SPEAKER_08: If you engage in a moral revolution, then there is a long, long period of afterglow during which things continue as they were before, or appear to do, though they are they're gradually fading.
• 1:19:26
  SPEAKER_08: And by the time you realize that you have lost something forever, it's far too late to go back on the actions which caused it to disappear.
• 1:19:35
  SPEAKER_08: You can destroy a taboo or custom which has been in existence for centuries in an afternoon.
• 1:19:45
  SPEAKER_08: But you cannot then replace it again.
• 1:19:47
  SPEAKER_08: You can't say, well, that was a mistake, we must put it back.
• 1:19:50
  SPEAKER_08: Once it's gone, it's gone.
• 1:19:51
  SPEAKER_08: And people as I say, the the the great the great banner of the of the new age is not atheism, it's not Marxism-Leninism, it's what I call selfism, it's uh it's what its own supporters call personal autonomy, the freedom to do as you wish, uh, which is which which uh has it doesn't have any for most people, it doesn't have any philosophical or political basis.
• 1:20:19
  SPEAKER_08: It's just why can't I do what I like with my own body, put whatever drugs into it I wish, have whatever relations with other people I wish to have.
• 1:20:28
  SPEAKER_08: That's uh let's just order everything on the basis of the harm principle and let me decide what I do that is harmful and what I do that isn't harmful and nobody else.
• 1:20:41
  SPEAKER_08: And that is the society we've created.
• 1:20:44
  SPEAKER_08: And in such societies, more or less selfless attitudes such as serious patriotism, not to mention Christianity, are unsustainable.
• 1:20:55
  SPEAKER_08: People are not they're not even interested in them anymore.
• 1:20:59
  SPEAKER_02: So would you subscribe to and I don't know when he said this, the uh the Churchill quotation when he said, nothing can save England if she will not save herself, if we lose faith in ourselves, in our capacity to guide and govern, if we lose our will to live, then indeed our story is told.
• 1:21:18
  SPEAKER_02: It's a political statement.
• 1:21:20
  SPEAKER_08: Churchill, I don't I I don't think Churchill was a Christian believer.
• 1:21:23
  SPEAKER_08: There's no evidence that he was.
• 1:21:25
  SPEAKER_08: Uh he had it's a political statement about rallying people to a to a temporal cause.
• 1:21:31
  SPEAKER_08: And it was when he was in in office, certainly to begin with, the country was in mortal danger.
• 1:21:37
  SPEAKER_08: And therefore, he had a very strong uh a very strong loudspeaker through through which to communicate with the nations.
• 1:21:46
  SPEAKER_08: If either listen you listen to me or we're done for.
• 1:21:49
  SPEAKER_08: That's not the case now, is it?
• 1:21:52
  SPEAKER_08: There is no that from from peril comes power.
• 1:21:56
  SPEAKER_08: Uh and and we're not in the sort of peril which would enable anyone to to accumulate or draw to themselves the sort of power which Churchill got even to influence people's minds.
• 1:22:09
  SPEAKER_08: So no, I don't it's not it's not to be mistaken for a political problem.
• 1:22:13
  SPEAKER_08: The political problems were long ago, and most of the time they were going on, people didn't have any idea that they were going on or what they meant, as they generally don't.
• 1:22:22
  SPEAKER_08: The world goes on around most people, especially those who have no Marxist Leninist training, it just goes on around them, and they have no idea what's happening.
• 1:22:30
  SPEAKER_08: And by the time they find out what has happened, it's far too late to do anything about it.
• 1:22:35
  SPEAKER_02: Well, you've touched a lot and you've written a lot about England, Britain, the hard-won liberty on these isles, the country's cultural achievements and legacy, and their subsequent loss.
• 1:22:49
  SPEAKER_02: Uh what was the high watermark of the country's culture and and and and what are its lows and and why why ought we lament it?
• 1:23:00
  SPEAKER_08: Oh that's that's nostalgia, I'd which I don't express.
• 1:23:03
  SPEAKER_08: There are many highs and many lows.
• 1:23:05
  SPEAKER_08: It doesn't it doesn't come in a in in a in a sort of incremental, slowly constructed uh way.
• 1:23:13
  SPEAKER_08: Uh there have been a number of things which have gone well, and a number of things which have then gone badly.
• 1:23:18
  SPEAKER_08: So that the the development of those laws protecting the freedom of speech, for instance, is is is quite shaky in law and has almost entirely collapsed in recent years under various assaults.
• 1:23:32
  SPEAKER_08: Uh both the um the speech codes of the new of the new of the new dominant class, which are hostile to free speech, and and the uh the willingness of governments to classify certain opinions as extremist or far this or far that, which makes them harder to express.
• 1:23:49
  SPEAKER_08: Uh so things which technically still exist don't operate.
• 1:23:53
  SPEAKER_08: The w one of our greatest documents of actual liberty and limited government, the Bill of Rights, is so forgotten that we recently had a prime minister who didn't know it existed.
• 1:24:06
  SPEAKER_08: And it doesn't operate if you it it it pr prevents governments, for instance, from f uh from uh punishing people uh without trying them.
• 1:24:15
  SPEAKER_08: But uh our governments do this all the time.
• 1:24:18
  SPEAKER_08: And the Bill of Rights is you can you can shout about it if you like, but nobody will pay any attention.
• 1:24:22
  SPEAKER_08: The courts pretty much decided it doesn't apply anymore.
• 1:24:25
  SPEAKER_08: But technically it's still a a sort of entrenched statute uh written on Vellum and stored away in the archives.
• 1:24:32
  SPEAKER_08: But it doesn't apply because we simply haven't, as a people, uh got the spirit anymore to defend it.
• 1:24:39
  SPEAKER_08: So uh things can still be in the letter of the law which don't operate because of the spirit.
• 1:24:43
  SPEAKER_08: So up and down it goes, and it there's been no particular sort of paradise time when it was when it was better than at any other nor peak.
• 1:24:53
  SPEAKER_08: Life isn't like that.
• 1:24:55
  SPEAKER_08: There are a number of moments at which things have gone particularly well for for liberty as they did during the glorious revolution of 1688, and other times when they went very badly subsequent to that, the the awful repressions of the of the Napoleonic era governments uh which were after that.
• 1:25:13
  SPEAKER_08: So, no, I'd I'd not uh I don't clutch at some ideal point when things were at their best, because it never existed, it never will.
• 1:25:20
  SPEAKER_08: This is this is human society.
• 1:25:23
  SPEAKER_08: It's uh again, if you read through the the the Old Testament, the the constant downfall of the children of Israel as they've as they turn away yet again from what they've been told to do by the Almighty.
• 1:25:38
  SPEAKER_08: They just they they they they say, yes, we'll do it, and everything's fine, and then they stop doing it, and before they know where they are, they're being carted off to Babylon again.
• 1:25:47
  SPEAKER_02: It strikes me of a Tolkien-esque um uh quality to what you're saying, this this idea of history being a long defeat, and there are just flashes of victory along the way, but otherwise it it translates.
• 1:25:59
  SPEAKER_08: I don't think it's it's i it it it it it's none of those things.
• 1:26:03
  SPEAKER_08: It's it is but it it does contain lessons.
• 1:26:07
  SPEAKER_08: You can tell very easily when when what you're doing is going to have bad results, but getting people to learn those lessons and act upon them is more or less impossible.
• 1:26:17
  SPEAKER_08: If it doesn't suit people to learn lessons, then they don't learn them.
• 1:26:23
  SPEAKER_02: I had Frank Faradi on the the show and I asked him, what do we think the prospects are of the current uh cultural and politically reforming themselves or do they have to be replaced?
• 1:26:37
  SPEAKER_02: And he said, There's no chance of reform, they have to be replaced.
• 1:26:41
  SPEAKER_02: So let's do a hypothetical that they are able to reform and they're able to stave off the excesses of the populist pushback or general just discontent and bring an alignment between them and ordinary folk.
• 1:26:57
  SPEAKER_02: Um what would you tell our current political and cultural elite they ought to pay attention to if they are to successfully reform and not lose confidence?
• 1:27:09
  SPEAKER_09: I think they would need to understand, first of all, it isn't just about the and I would say particularly to if you like the people on the left who are closer to politically, is that the economy is really important, but it's not just about the economy.
• 1:27:26
  SPEAKER_09: You can't just promise to throw money at people and think that that's all that they want in life, because it's frankly quite a Thatcherite argument to say that people are motivated solely by that.
• 1:27:36
  SPEAKER_09: And actually, if you look at the two elections in 2017 and 2019, where the Labour Party went to the country with arguably economically more radical manifestos than than for a long, long time, but were still, particularly in 19 uh 2019, were still rejected wholesale.
• 1:27:54
  SPEAKER_09: That tells us that it isn't just about whether or not you promise to improve people's lives economically.
• 1:28:00
  SPEAKER_09: People like a bit of cultural security, they like a bit of cultural st stability.
• 1:28:04
  SPEAKER_09: We are at the end of the day, and this is the key point that the political establishment needs to understand, we are social and parochial beings with an attachment to place, with an attachment to community, with an attachment to culture.
• 1:28:19
  SPEAKER_09: Many people do like tradition.
• 1:28:21
  SPEAKER_09: Many people are small c conservative, and whilst, as I said before, you know, not every public policy can necessarily be pitched at those people exclusively, we need to understand how how much those people have been alienated over the last 20 or 30 years in politics.
• 1:28:37
  SPEAKER_09: If you tap into people's basic communitarian impulses, their patriotic impulses, their belief in what some people describe sometimes uh derisively as you know, faith, family, and flag, um, if you understand people's impulses around that, um, then you'll stand a good chance of taking them with you.
• 1:28:58
  SPEAKER_09: Um, but if you continue to peddle this kind of hyper-liberal progressive ideology, uh then you may get over the line at election time, but you're still going to have a country that is not at ease with itself, and you're still gonna have millions of people who feel alienated by the political establishment, and then you do open the way to populist forces.
• 1:29:18
  SPEAKER_09: So that would be my message.
• 1:29:21
  SPEAKER_02: What does the future of a multi-ethnic, multi-religious Britain doing what it's doing with regards to the institutional uh inclination towards Islam?
• 1:29:31
  SPEAKER_02: What does that look like in 10, 20, 30 years on its same uh on this same trajectory?
• 1:29:38
  SPEAKER_01: Well, it looks very, very vague if we continue down this path that we're on um at this rate that we're going, especially.
• 1:29:46
  SPEAKER_01: And honestly, John, when I started um my activism being an outspoken ex-Muslim, it was just because I kind of had read the sources and kind of had this revelation as to what Islam truly wants and what it actually kind of stands for.
• 1:30:01
  SPEAKER_01: But I just thought, let me just kind of make some YouTube videos and let me kind of speak about it so other women don't fall into this trap of, you know, essentially being uh just submissive baby making machines for this political agenda, if you will.
• 1:30:17
  SPEAKER_01: And I thought that was just going to be it, you know, inform some people about what what Islam is is actually like, the true nature of it, the general kind of war manual that the Quran is, if you look at it in the in that right sense.
• 1:30:29
  SPEAKER_01: So then, of course, the program becomes almost like a roll call.
• 1:30:33
  SPEAKER_01: And you know, it gets it gets very dark in that sense.
• 1:30:35
  SPEAKER_01: But I I thought that's what it would be limited to.
• 1:30:38
  SPEAKER_01: And then coming back to the UK and living in London and seeing how quickly things around me had changed.
• 1:30:46
  SPEAKER_01: And as you said, like institutions, probably our places of work and the societies we live in, the general mindset surrounding us, so that I'm like I'm the strange one around my entire social circles or having the views that I hold.
• 1:31:01
  SPEAKER_01: Um, it just seems like such an uphill battle because of how deeply entrenched we are into this mindset that you know everything should be in the spirit of tolerance.
• 1:31:13
  SPEAKER_01: Um we should carry on going the way we are, and nothing needs to give or nothing needs to change.
• 1:31:19
  SPEAKER_01: But I've been listening to commentators on this, and I I'm not the one, I'm not generally the one to kind of fear monger, and I tend to be a bit more of an optimist in general, but I'm also very much a realist.
• 1:31:31
  SPEAKER_01: And when I hear people who are not more well-versed on these topics than myself say that Britain is heading towards civil war and things to that effect, it really kind of sends a shiver down my spine because it's not indifference from what I see around me.
• 1:31:48
  SPEAKER_01: And we've seen pockets of this where this flares up, you know, in incidents like Southworth and things like that, where these two starkly different communities go head to head, or the government just withhold information for us, albeit Kate Osama says, you know, for these reasons that were generally um, which is fair enough, but it is a very, very dark reality if we don't, you know, change something now and we don't kind of, for example, what America has done with since Trump has been elected, and this kind of Trump effect where you can say things that essentially sound like common sense, but were deemed to be so um kind of just inflammatory beforehand.
• 1:32:32
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and we see the rise of the right across Europe, it just goes to show that people are craving this kind of common sense to saying, like, yes, if somebody has come to this country and they have sexually abused little girls and they're not from this country, why on earth should we pay to keep them here?
• 1:32:51
  SPEAKER_01: It makes no sense.
• 1:32:52
  SPEAKER_01: Saying that would make you, you know, uh be a social pariah in certain contexts, even though that that sounds like a very normal thing to say.
• 1:33:00
  SPEAKER_01: So I just this concept of you know accepting tolerance, even if they're intolerant to us, or we have to tread on eggshells because, hey, Islam is just another religion and we don't go around criticizing people's beliefs for whatever reason that might be, you know, historically or whatever, or we've just gone so soft as a people's um that we're just gonna let this unfold the way it's happening.
• 1:33:25
  SPEAKER_01: It the future looks very dark indeed for the United Kingdom, and I'm not surprised why people are fleeing in their droves or people are having to move.
• 1:33:33
  SPEAKER_01: And I just think it's such a sad reality that in the country you call home, if you're having to continuously move or continuously question why you're here or how long you can stay here or the safety of your grandchildren and how they're gonna grow up, it it's it's just it's a very kind of it brings a huge sense of despair.
• 1:33:54
  SPEAKER_01: Even people like I think I was listening to uh Liz Truss talking on the matter, and she said we it would take us about 40 to 50 years to undo legally all the damage that's been done and kind of enshrined into law that is propagating all of these situations that we see play out, whether it's like mass immigration or you know, people being able to stay in this country due to their right to a family life or what have you.
• 1:34:20
  SPEAKER_01: But yeah, it's just I think it's high time now to act.
• 1:34:24
  SPEAKER_01: And I really didn't think conversations on Islam would be as relevant, or let's just say, for the sake of people saying not all Muslims, Islamism uh or the growing rise of Islamism in the UK would be such a dire threat at the moment.
• 1:34:41
  SPEAKER_02: Well, we we've definitely taken the black pill to use internet parlance uh a few times today.
• 1:34:47
  SPEAKER_02: Uh and I'll continue with that until potentially offering an avenue of hope, or at least some we can engage in our own uh uh envisioning of a future.
• 1:34:57
  SPEAKER_02: Andrew Neil posted on Twitter in the last 24 hours the following, which I think um sums up some of the things that we've been talking about.
• 1:35:07
  SPEAKER_02: It'd be good to get your your take on it and uh see whether you agree with it.
• 1:35:12
  SPEAKER_02: Um then I I've got a question uh for you as well.
• 1:35:15
  SPEAKER_02: So Andrew Neil says the UK is drifting, unhappy, losing faith in previously respected institutions like the police, buffeted by extremists, often allowed to run amok, dismayed by decline, angry at the inability of the political class to do anything about it, despairing that the Westminster politico media bubble pursues an agenda, issues and priorities, look at the obsession with Lee Anderson, which are not most peoples, and had enough of being lectured to by a disconnected de hote en bus chattering class.
• 1:35:46
  SPEAKER_02: Yet we have a Prime Minister and leader of the opposition, incapable of speaking up for the moderate majority, who still have pride in their country and are desperate for strong leadership and guidance through the current morass, plus some hope sign things will get better.
• 1:35:59
  SPEAKER_02: All within the bounds of traditional British tolerance and fair play, this vacuum is dangerous.
• 1:36:04
  SPEAKER_02: I'm guessing from some of the things we've talked about, you would agree with Andrew.
• 1:36:09
  SPEAKER_02: Uh but Lionel, if the country could ever win you back as a resident, uh what what would it need you to do?
• 1:36:16
  SPEAKER_02: What would you what would you need to see?
• 1:36:21
  SPEAKER_00: I'd love to see another party come along.
• 1:36:25
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I gr uh I think both party both major parties are dysfunctional.
• 1:36:30
  SPEAKER_00: I would say the same thing of the United States.
• 1:36:32
  SPEAKER_00: Um they are disconnected from what people want.
• 1:36:42
  SPEAKER_00: And uh, you know, both parties are to the left of the majority of the population, which is bizarre.
• 1:36:50
  SPEAKER_00: Um I'd certainly like to see a little more functionality, which would include uh clapping down on immigration and keeping it under 100,000 a year.
• 1:37:06
  SPEAKER_00: That will never happen.
• 1:37:07
  SPEAKER_00: That means I'm never going back again.
• 1:37:12
  SPEAKER_00: Um I'd love to see all the woke stuff just go out the window.
• 1:37:18
  SPEAKER_00: I mean part of the embarrassment of that movement in the UK is that you guys didn't even make it up.
• 1:37:29
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 1:37:30
  SPEAKER_00: This is all imitative of American insanity.
• 1:37:36
  SPEAKER_00: And if you're gonna imitate anything from the United States, the last thing you want to bring in is that is this drecky destructive self-hating ideology.
• 1:37:48
  SPEAKER_00: I mean it's it's poison and it has infected all the UK UK major institutions as badly as it as it's infected the US once.
• 1:38:02
  SPEAKER_00: And I you know, I think it's it's shameful.
• 1:38:05
  SPEAKER_00: And it it does.
• 1:38:06
  SPEAKER_00: It makes uh makes the UK a more depressing place to live for everyone.
• 1:38:11
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, is this um I'm not usually big on vocal patriotism, but that's because I grew up in a time in my country where there was lots of patriotism, and therefore nobody needed my patriotism, if you know what I mean.
• 1:38:37
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not I'm not I'm not really into ceremonies in the UK.
• 1:38:44
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not that big on the royal family.
• 1:38:46
  SPEAKER_00: I think it plays an important social role, but I don't show up for all those occasions and wave flags.
• 1:38:53
  SPEAKER_00: It's just I don't like pomp.
• 1:38:55
  SPEAKER_00: It bores me.
• 1:38:56
  SPEAKER_00: Um nevertheless, when I was growing up, it was normal to be patriotic as an American, and that freed me to be very critical of the United States because it was a minority viewpoint and it it was trendy, but you know, there was this sense that uh otherwise, in terms of people generally believing in the country as a project, that was not endangered.
• 1:39:31
  SPEAKER_00: So I could poke at it and be very outright anti-American if I wanted to, but that didn't endanger anything.
• 1:39:39
  SPEAKER_00: It was still basically a sense that there was a rock solid self-belief in the country.
• 1:39:45
  SPEAKER_00: So that I was indulging in what we what we now call luxury belief, right?
• 1:39:50
  SPEAKER_00: I had luxury uh anti-patriotism as a as as an adolescent.
• 1:39:58
  SPEAKER_00: Um we can't afford it anymore.
• 1:40:01
  SPEAKER_00: That that is that's those luxury beliefs are now institutionalized.
• 1:40:07
  SPEAKER_00: They are now mainstream.
• 1:40:08
  SPEAKER_00: It's now mainstream to hate your country, to be ashamed of your country.
• 1:40:14
  SPEAKER_00: And it's even becoming mainstream to regard it as in a terminal decline, and I'm I'm afraid I'm feeding that right now.
• 1:40:23
  SPEAKER_00: And I don't feel uh entirely good about that.
• 1:40:27
  SPEAKER_00: Because I I do I do think there's still such a thing as British culture, and I, you know, some of my best friends are British.
• 1:40:36
  SPEAKER_00: So uh I I I feel a little guilty doing the the country down too much, and um I have regard for it.
• 1:40:46
  SPEAKER_00: I have regard for British history, uh for British cultural achievements, uh the British sense of humor.
• 1:40:57
  SPEAKER_00: I like Britain.
• 1:40:59
  SPEAKER_00: I don't want it to go swirling down the toilet.
• 1:41:03
  SPEAKER_00: Um but I hate seeing it uh go dark, go dark so dark about itself and become fatalistic in a really saddening way that I guess that's all over now, and you know, we'd have to resign ourselves.
• 1:41:27
  SPEAKER_00: Uh Native Britons have to resign themselves that they're going to be a minority in what was once their own country in short order, and that's kind of oh well.
• 1:41:39
  SPEAKER_00: And there's always been a strain of of British culture, especially at the top intellectual level, that that did did the country down.
• 1:41:52
  SPEAKER_00: And it's never been especially cool to be patriotic.
• 1:41:58
  SPEAKER_00: And uh while uh I I just I in my in my decrepitude I'm starting to see there's a place there's a place for patriotism.
• 1:42:11
  SPEAKER_00: After all, if you're not a patriot, you don't die for your country.
• 1:42:16
  SPEAKER_00: You just don't.
• 1:42:17
  SPEAKER_00: And in both the US and and UK, I think we've got uh majority younger generations who would not go to war.
• 1:42:29
  SPEAKER_00: They just went and that's that's shocking.
• 1:42:34
  SPEAKER_00: There are there are polls that back this up.
• 1:42:38
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, you are right.
• 1:42:40
  SPEAKER_00: And after all, you know, the UK has has to thank many young people, mostly young men, who gave their lives in World War II for the fact that the UK really still exists.
• 1:42:55
  SPEAKER_00: And you can't just assume that will never happen again.
• 1:42:59
  SPEAKER_02: I suppose that's the shocking thing, right?
• 1:43:02
  SPEAKER_02: Is you can get so close to a civilizational collapse, however it is, that you want to um term it with regards to the various different angles we could be we could be facing into that now, and yet uh have it almost uh disappear from collective uh memory um uh to the point where we feel like there's there's there's not so much worth fighting for now, or we just take it for granted, I think is the other thing, is there's a complacency.
• 1:43:29
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, there's a lot also lots of people that I speak to um you know across the divide, um the political divide, who just think, well, things will turn out all right in the end.
• 1:43:43
  SPEAKER_02: On X, I see lots of older Britons starting tweets of things like, I'm 66 or I'm 70 years old.
• 1:43:50
  SPEAKER_02: And they the common theme is they're lamenting the change and loss of their country and values and atmosphere.
• 1:43:56
  SPEAKER_02: You know, there are pains to say it's not about race per se, it's more about that they feel betrayed and like they've lost something.
• 1:44:04
  SPEAKER_02: And and and I've noticed that this feeling is never, well, it can never be accounted for in the statistics.
• 1:44:10
  SPEAKER_02: So even for those people who want to you know criticize immigration policy, ultimately in the modern world, everyone says you don't have an argument unless you can throw statistics up.
• 1:44:22
  SPEAKER_02: And when people like to talk about it in a pro uh look what it can earn it, that still doesn't account for the fact that there are vast swathes of people that might be feeling a sense of loss.
• 1:44:35
  SPEAKER_02: And what whilst the easy way out is to call those people complaining to be racist, gammon, um, those same people who'd cast aspersions on them, I think if they were to look a bit deeper into their own guiding assumptions, you'd they'd realise that there is something there because the people who suggest we should celebrate all people and their cultures equally, the new arrivals' cultures should uh should be celebrated equally, so they do not have to experience a sense of loss, shows that culture matters and people are sad when it changes, and and particularly that they're angry when they didn't ask for it.
• 1:45:08
  SPEAKER_02: And I think that's the one thing you notice, right?
• 1:45:11
  SPEAKER_02: Is even amongst political commentators who might lean a bit left but are sympathetic with the anti-mass immigration rhetoric, they say ultimately no one's asked for this, and this is why there's this simmering resentment.
• 1:45:23
  SPEAKER_05: What do you make of all that?
• 1:45:25
  SPEAKER_05: Well, there's a number of things to say here.
• 1:45:27
  SPEAKER_05: Now, I think you're you're totally right to say that the sort of statistical quantitative approach to talking about mass migration fails to capture um the thing that really resonates with normal people, which is just the experience of watching their homeland transform in a way that they don't like.
• 1:45:43
  SPEAKER_05: But even with that in mind, the statistics are in our favor.
• 1:45:46
  SPEAKER_05: I mean, the statistics all show that mass immigration is damaging to this country.
• 1:45:51
  SPEAKER_05: For instance, a piece of research that we did recently showed that in order for migrants to break even uh financially speaking, they need to be earning more than£47,000.
• 1:46:00
  SPEAKER_05: And only 19% of migrants actually achieve this, leaving the remaining 81% as net takers from the system.
• 1:46:07
  SPEAKER_05: So that's what that means, to be clear, is British taxpayer money going to migrants, right, who are here only as a part of government policy, right?
• 1:46:16
  SPEAKER_05: Another piece of research we put out showed that in the last two years, the average salary of skilled worker migrants has decreased by 10,000 pounds down to 27,000 pounds, which again shows you, suggests the extent to which these people are contributing to the economy.
• 1:46:30
  SPEAKER_05: Um that's not to mention things like homelessness.
• 1:46:33
  SPEAKER_05: 38% of homeless people, uh, of which there are 4,000 in Britain, are immigrants.
• 1:46:37
  SPEAKER_05: You know, it's ridiculous.
• 1:46:39
  SPEAKER_05: And then we don't even need to get onto issues such as, you know, the massive increase in crime, the massive increase in Islamic honour violence, um, the massive increase in uh, you know, for example, sexual violence and the rape gangs in towns like Telford and uh Rochdale and so on.
• 1:46:53
  SPEAKER_05: All of these things.
• 1:46:54
  SPEAKER_05: Um and to address your second point there about the kind of older generations noting these changes, um, I am sympathetic to those older people who do uh look at their town, look at their community, and feel that they have lost something.
• 1:47:10
  SPEAKER_05: But actually, in a lot of cases, it's this it's this generation's crippling fear of being called racist or being called bigots or being called xenophobic or whatever other smear the left uh kind of chooses to use against them.
• 1:47:22
  SPEAKER_05: That crippling fear that has led them to feel unable to criticize mass immigration and to let it go on for so long.
• 1:47:28
  SPEAKER_05: That's part of the problem, right?
• 1:47:30
  SPEAKER_05: And another thing to talk about here is the fact that the generation that we're talking about, which is basically my parents' generation, the kind of uh Gen X uh Boomers kind of kind of uh area, um, these are the people who believed and told us and taught me when I was going through my education that the most important way to think about Britain is as being uh a set of values, right?
• 1:47:53
  SPEAKER_05: I remember when I went to university, there was a mural to uh celebrating 800 years uh since the Magna Carta was signed.
• 1:48:00
  SPEAKER_05: And the values, quote unquote, that um this mural uh celebrated, that it stated that Magna Carta was about were diversity, equality, peace, democracy, and all the rest of it.
• 1:48:13
  SPEAKER_05: You know, the various sort of buzzwords, the various slogans of the regime that governs us.
• 1:48:19
  SPEAKER_05: Um actually that's not at all what it was about.
• 1:48:21
  SPEAKER_05: And that's not actually at all what Britain is about.
• 1:48:23
  SPEAKER_05: Because Britain, fundamentally, being a nation of the old world, of Europe, is a nation of people and history and traditions.
• 1:48:30
  SPEAKER_05: America, on the other hand, which is a nation of the new world, you can actually call that a nation of values because it was explicitly created a specific moment in time with a specific constitution and set of values and uh project that it was fundamentally uh designed to pursue.
• 1:48:47
  SPEAKER_05: Um and this kind of model has then been transparted back to the old world and sort of imposed upon Britain to the point where we're now told that, you know, somebody who's turned up from Africa last week, um, as long as they believe in gay marriage and democracy, then they're just as British as we are.
• 1:49:03
  SPEAKER_05: I mean, it's it's actually a ridiculous claim when you stop to think about it.
• 1:49:06
  SPEAKER_05: Because Britain is not a nation of values, Britain is a nation of people.
• 1:49:09
  SPEAKER_05: You only get British values when you have British people.
• 1:49:12
  SPEAKER_05: This is what's so crucial to understand is these things don't just appear out of the ether uh fully formed.
• 1:49:18
  SPEAKER_05: These are products of thousands of years of tradition and um, you know, people passing these values down, noting that they are valuable.
• 1:49:27
  SPEAKER_05: But if you remove the people, then you inevitably lose the values, which is what we're seeing happen in real time with mass migration.
• 1:49:35
  SPEAKER_02: The point you made about values and people being inextricably intertwined is an interesting one, and one that I've noticed rising in salience.
• 1:49:44
  SPEAKER_02: So I think Douglas Murray might have made the point on a recent podcast with Jordan Peterson, where he said the the founding of America was based on values, but those values were ultimately from, and I think Peterson finished the sentence and said, Englishman.
• 1:50:01
  SPEAKER_02: They were from a settled tradition.
• 1:50:02
  SPEAKER_02: And that liberalism that we've put an ism on the end of was just a settled way of life.
• 1:50:08
  SPEAKER_02: There'd been this an establishment core, there'd been dissenters and non-conformists, there'd been this uh need for toleration to be to be um bred, given all of the uh the religious strife that had been taking place over centuries.
• 1:50:26
  SPEAKER_02: And they just started it in a new continent and decided that there was a whole bunch of stuff they didn't like about the old place, which they would try and keep out, but ultimately they're going to try and live in accordance with what they thought were the worthwhile things that they'd learned from their ancestors.
• 1:50:40
  SPEAKER_02: And I've noticed this rising in salience in America, um, particularly as they go through similar things with uh changing demographics.
• 1:50:50
  SPEAKER_02: And um it reminds me of a quote of um of Franklin Roosevelt, where he said that there's no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism.
• 1:51:00
  SPEAKER_02: The one absolutely certain way of bringing this nation to ruin, of preventing all possibility of its continuing to be a nation at all, would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities.
• 1:51:11
  SPEAKER_02: And there seems to be a truth within this because homophyla, this idea of birds of a feather flocked together, is a very human thing.
• 1:51:19
  SPEAKER_02: And actually, what's been so great about the West in general is our social and cultural norms tended towards a universalizing view where we were much more accepting than probably anyone else in humanity.
• 1:51:34
  SPEAKER_02: However, what we're finding out is that they can quickly unravel if you put too much pressure, uh too much strain on this organic system through through this um through through all these policy um, and and this policy we can see at government level, we can see it in the workplace through multicultural networks where lots of people band around ethnic, religious identities, sexual identities.
• 1:52:00
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and they they use it to shield themselves from being part of a a wider um core culture.
• 1:52:09
  SPEAKER_02: And if this is what what's being bred everywhere, we're actually breeding a balkanizing of society.
• 1:52:16
  SPEAKER_02: And I think you can just see it taking place not just online but on the streets, and and and seemingly now we're seeing it amongst people who would say they've got Anglo identity, which you'd never heard of before.
• 1:52:27
  SPEAKER_02: Do you think that is uh an entirely predictable thing to have happened given what we know about humans and what we see in our culture?
• 1:52:36
  SPEAKER_05: So I there's a number of things to say here.
• 1:52:38
  SPEAKER_05: The first thing I'll say, just on that last point you made, is I am an example of that phenomenon you're talking about.
• 1:52:43
  SPEAKER_05: I mean, in my Twitter bio, I call myself an Anglo-Zuma, right?
• 1:52:46
  SPEAKER_05: And that's and that's because that's how I think of myself.
• 1:52:48
  SPEAKER_05: And that is actually an expression of identity politics, which the right has been railing against for years now.
• 1:52:54
  SPEAKER_05: But the point is, the kind of liberal universalism that we're talking about is paradoxically a distinctly and particularly and almost exclusively European and Anglo phenomenon.
• 1:53:06
  SPEAKER_05: And so this idea that you can just transplant the values of a specific people to everyone is actually bonkers and misguided.
• 1:53:14
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah, well-meaning, I'm sure, but ultimately misguided.
• 1:53:18
  SPEAKER_05: And that I think is what the story of our present era that we're living through, that's that's what it's actually about.
• 1:53:23
  SPEAKER_05: It's the European mind coming to terms with the fact that their project of transplanting their high-minded enlightenment values all over the world has failed.
• 1:53:33
  SPEAKER_05: And that's what we really need to come to terms with now.
• 1:53:35
  SPEAKER_05: Because what I would say is the European mind, for centuries at this point, has fetishized the rational element of uh human nature.
• 1:53:45
  SPEAKER_05: I think it was Aristotle that said that man is a rational animal.
• 1:53:48
  SPEAKER_05: So the the European mind has fetishized the rational part of it and forgotten the animal part of it.
• 1:53:53
  SPEAKER_05: And what happens when you forget the animal part of the rational part is the rational part collapses because the rational part exists on top of the animal part.
• 1:54:01
  SPEAKER_05: Because the animal part is all the things that we don't really like to talk about.
• 1:54:04
  SPEAKER_05: Like, for example, the fact that identity, what gets called identity politics, is an inevitable and perennial element of human existence.
• 1:54:12
  SPEAKER_05: In order for humans to feel as though, essentially to feel happy, to feel as though they belong and to feel as though as though they're in their right place, to feel as though they have a meaningful role in society, they need to have a sense of identity.
• 1:54:24
  SPEAKER_05: You know, this idea, this liberal idea that we're all just atomized individuals, totally sort of self-self-actualized and self-realizing, is ultimately untrue.
• 1:54:32
  SPEAKER_05: For a small number of people, that is the case.
• 1:54:34
  SPEAKER_05: There's a small number of people, generally with very high IQs, who can be these kind of perfectly individuated people.
• 1:54:40
  SPEAKER_05: But for the most part, for most people, as you say, humans are ultimately um pack animals.
• 1:54:45
  SPEAKER_05: You know, we need our tribe.
• 1:54:47
  SPEAKER_05: And this is you know, this is revealed every single day.
• 1:54:49
  SPEAKER_05: I mean, humans are tribal creatures, whether it's in politics or sports, or uh, you know, or even down to the fact that you prefer the people you live on your road with than people who live the next road over.
• 1:54:59
  SPEAKER_05: And it's a distinctly English phenomenon to say that, oh, the guy who lives, you know, two streets down, they're foreigners or whatever.
• 1:55:06
  SPEAKER_05: Even if they aren't literally, even if they're just as English as we are.
• 1:55:09
  SPEAKER_05: Um, but this is the point, right?
• 1:55:11
  SPEAKER_05: Is I, as a 23-year-old Anglo-Zuma, I'm part of a generation and part of a political phenomenon that is only just beginning to emerge.
• 1:55:21
  SPEAKER_05: Because what I have recognized is that by, you know, by my condition of living in a multicultural, multi-ethnic society, as I do in Britain, um, what that has done is brought into sharp relief the distinct and unique qualities of Anglo identity and Anglo history and British history.
• 1:55:41
  SPEAKER_05: And it's made me realize, and this is what older generations just are not prepared to confront, is that I actually have a preference for that.
• 1:55:49
  SPEAKER_05: I have a preference for Britain, I have a preference for British people, I have a preference for British values.
• 1:55:54
  SPEAKER_05: Um I think they are better than the values of other nations and other peoples.
• 1:55:58
  SPEAKER_05: And I would rather be around British people than non-British people because they are my own.
• 1:56:02
  SPEAKER_05: I feel at home, I feel I belong among British people.
• 1:56:05
  SPEAKER_05: But again, what the political class of the last 30 or so years has done is that they've taken that from me.
• 1:56:11
  SPEAKER_05: They've taken that from my generation.
• 1:56:14
  SPEAKER_02: Why do you think that re-migration should form part of a plan to get Britain back on track?
• 1:56:20
  SPEAKER_14: I mean, I'm an immigrant myself.
• 1:56:22
  SPEAKER_14: I'm talking to you from the United States, and I think it's a wonderful thing if people who want to leave one country and go to another become part of that country, and I think it can do a great deal of good.
• 1:56:35
  SPEAKER_14: But unfortunately, that um idea of positive immigration just doesn't match the reality of what is happening in the UK.
• 1:56:47
  SPEAKER_14: Um a lot of people in um the debate about immigration are very wary of saying things that can uh be defined as somehow um supremacist or or racist or what have you.
• 1:57:04
  SPEAKER_14: And I think this has prevented us from having an honest conversation.
• 1:57:07
  SPEAKER_14: Uh one in 27 people living in the UK today has arrived in the past two years.
• 1:57:14
  SPEAKER_14: So this is a a huge change in the demographics of the country.
• 1:57:18
  SPEAKER_14: And I don't think it's a change for the better, because if you look at the available data from Denmark and the Netherlands, a lot of the people coming in from non-Western countries into Europe are of remarkably low quality in terms of skills and capital, have a remarkably high propensity to commit crimes, um, and often, if they come from Muslim countries, bring with them questions of cultural compatibility.
• 1:57:46
  SPEAKER_14: Now, I'm absolutely sure that there are many, many Muslims in Britain as there are in the United States, who are fully integrated citizens of those countries and do a wonderful job of being uh fully integrated citizens.
• 1:58:01
  SPEAKER_14: But I think we need to address the fact that within the Muslim community in Britain and Europe, there are a large number who are culturally incompatible, who are not going to integrate, who want a different way of life, a different system.
• 1:58:15
  SPEAKER_14: And at some point, someone needs to address this.
• 1:58:18
  SPEAKER_14: The promise of a multicultural Britain was that it would become more vibrant.
• 1:58:23
  SPEAKER_14: It would be diversity was a strength.
• 1:58:25
  SPEAKER_14: Actually, diversity has meant that some of the most diverse parts of the United Kingdom uh are beginning to resemble the third world because we've imported the third world.
• 1:58:35
  SPEAKER_14: And just because somebody comes into the UK, it doesn't mean that they become British.
• 1:58:40
  SPEAKER_14: And they certainly don't, I think, become English or Welsh or Scottish.
• 1:58:45
  SPEAKER_14: They bring with them uh uh uh uh uh aptitudes and a propensity towards uh criminality sometimes.
• 1:58:51
  SPEAKER_14: And um, it has to be said uh time preferences um that mean that they are not going to um become British.
• 1:59:00
  SPEAKER_14: They are going to change what it is to be British, and I think for the worse.
• 1:59:03
  SPEAKER_14: And I I think we need to stop mass immigration, and we need to begin to undo it.
• 1:59:10
  SPEAKER_14: And my proposal is to come up with a way of doing this sensibly, rationally.
• 1:59:16
  SPEAKER_14: Um, if we don't act, we will, I think, within a generation or so cease to have a country called England where the majority of the people are English.
• 1:59:26
  SPEAKER_14: Um and, you know, it's imperative, I think, that we act now.
• 1:59:29
  SPEAKER_14: If if if we think that England is worth having, you know, most groups around the world, Turks or Indonesians or Chinese, believe that there is something worthwhile about having a Turkey or an Indonesia or a China.
• 1:59:42
  SPEAKER_14: Um are we really sure that we want to have England a minority English country?
• 1:59:49
  SPEAKER_14: I'm not sure that we do.
• 1:59:52
  SPEAKER_02: You mentioned that it's time to take sensible, rational action.
• 1:59:56
  SPEAKER_02: What are some examples of sensible, rational actions that we could take on this issue?
• 2:00:02
  SPEAKER_14: I I think number one is to recognize that we have a moral uh legitimacy in saying no to people coming in, that if you come in in contravention of due process, if you overstay or you come in illegally, uh we don't need to appeal to some supranational authority.
• 2:00:21
  SPEAKER_14: We we we can just remove you.
• 2:00:22
  SPEAKER_14: We have a British uh ruling elite who don't have the moral authority or the courage of their convictions or the moral claims to be able to do that.
• 2:00:30
  SPEAKER_14: And again and again we see a judiciary unwilling to deport people, to remove people, to kick people out.
• 2:00:37
  SPEAKER_14: Um once we recognize the moral legitimacy of that we have to deny people entry and to remove people who are in the country unlawfully, incidentally most countries around the world would kick you out if you overstayed your visa.
• 2:00:51
  SPEAKER_14: Um, once we recognize that we can do that, I think we then need to remove the million to half a million people in the country who are there illegally.
• 2:01:01
  SPEAKER_14: I I think we need to then look at people who've come into the country perhaps lawfully, but who are essentially welfare dependents, living at public expense.
• 2:01:09
  SPEAKER_14: Again, there's good evidence now from the Netherlands to show that large numbers of non-Western migrants living in the Netherlands are perpetually, um particularly those from Muslim countries, are perpetually dependent upon uh welfare handouts.
• 2:01:22
  SPEAKER_14: Uh we need to be able to remove people, even those who come in legally who do that.
• 2:01:26
  SPEAKER_14: And then I think we need to be prepared to address the the the real elephant in the room, um, the uh growing number of people in Britain who are Muslim, who want uh Sharia law, who don't share the values that I think you have to have to be a member of Western culture.
• 2:01:42
  SPEAKER_14: And we need to be prepared to amend the 1981 Nationality Act and revoke the citizenship of people, yep, people who may have been born in Britain, but who have views that are incompatible with what it means to be British.
• 2:01:53
  SPEAKER_14: Um I don't think we should be hesitant to do this.
• 2:01:56
  SPEAKER_14: I think we should be prepared to do it.
• 2:01:58
  SPEAKER_14: Um the alternative is that we uh cease in a number of decades to have a country that is recognizably British or recognizably Western.
• 2:02:09
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• 2:02:19
  SPEAKER_02: Thinking Class seeks to understand the civilizational issues we face and why what our leaders do in response matters.
• 2:02:25
  SPEAKER_02: Here I seek to explore the ideas, values, and culture that made our civilization, those that are unmaking it, and how leaders at our public and private institutions should respond.
• 2:02:34
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• 2:02:43
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