Latest / Thinking Class / #052 - Dr. Philip Kiszely - How British Media Became Cynical And Divided The Nation

Transcript

#052 - Dr. Philip Kiszely - How British Media Became Cynical And Divided The Nation · Thinking Class

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Hello, classmates, and welcome to Thinking Class.
• 0:02
  SPEAKER_00: I'm John Gillam and today I'm speaking with Philip Kissily.
• 0:05
  SPEAKER_00: Philip is a cultural historian, an academic, an author, a political commentator and senior fellow at the New Culture Forum.
• 0:13
  SPEAKER_00: In this episode, Philip and I talk about the evolution of British culture, media and education from the post-war era to the present day, why we have seen significant shifts in the media's treatment of Britain and its history over the years, how British comedy has changed and not for the good, how social media has impacted cultural identity in Britain, the decline of traditional music and comedy, our changing relationship with cultural heritage and what this means for youth culture today, the profound cultural shifts occurring in Britain, particularly in relation to identity, education, and societal values and the impact of mass immigration, the changing landscape of higher education and the policy choices and politics that have changed the fabric of our educational institutions, what the future of British identity amidst these transformations might be, and what the country's response to Remembrance Sunday and Armistice Day tells us about our culture and why there are glimmers of hope for a resurgence of traditional values and much, much more.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_00: Classmates, you will hear that Philip is a gentleman.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_00: This conversation was a lot of fun because it's not every day you get to talk about British comedy shows like Blackhadder or how technology has changed the way we experience listening to music.
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_00: Philip has also taken a leap out of the long familiar world of academia, and I wish him all the best in building his personal brand inside and outside the New Culture Forum.
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_00: He's a good guy.
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_00: Before we dive in, please follow, listen, subscribe, share, whatever platform you watch or listen to the show on.
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_00: Enjoy the show, classmates.
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_00: Philip Kissley, welcome to Thinking Cast.
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks so much for joining me.
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks very much, John.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_00: It's really great to be here, and I'm really looking forward to talking to you.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_00: Likewise, likewise, it was a pleasure when you accepted my invitation.
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_00: You've done some pretty big-hitting podcasts like Andrew Gold Heretics, and of course, you are a fellow at the New Culture Forum, which is a heavy hitter in its own right.
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_00: So when he agreed to come on, I knew he was going to have a great conversation.
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_00: Really grateful for you to be here.
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_00: And a bit of background about you.
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_00: You are a cultural historian by trade, and you're an academic at the University of Leeds up until very recently.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_00: Perhaps before we get into talking about what you know about British cultural history and its ebbs and flows and how it's been presented in the popular culture, maybe we start off with what does the a day in a life of a culture and historian look like?
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_00: And what was it in particular that you were focused on?
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I've always been interested in post-war culture.
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, so so stuff from post-1945.
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_01: I'm interested in 20th century primarily.
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_01: I'm interested in 18th century, I'm interested in all in all cultural history.
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_01: But um the post-war stuff, the the the road, I suppose, from 1945 to to where we are today, which is this incredible kind of moving road, and we're going through all sorts of realignments and uh and changes.
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_01: But um as we speak at the moment, and we might we might get into that, but it's I suppose it's just that modern era.
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm I'm really interested in popular culture in particular, and I suppose the technological developments from that time, so the emergence, for example, of um the the seven-inch single, which I think is really important actually in terms of youth culture, uh, the development of uh of the LP.
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_01: Uh I'm also interested very much in the development of television because, again, that's hugely, massively important in terms of communication and ideas uh as well as entertainment, uh, and film, of course, as well.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_01: So, all of those things together and literature, I'm a huge um 60s and 70s literature boff.
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_01: So, I like that that sense of trying to understand some of those pivotal moments that take us to where we are now.
• 4:35
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and I suppose a day in the life.
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_01: Um, at the moment, there's lots of um media stuff and and podcasts and going up and I'm I'm I'm here in Yorkshire, so it's up and down to London quite a lot.
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but but doing doing lots of stuff from home because technology allows us to do that now.
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, writing um and feeding my little cat over there.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_01: So hopefully it won't make too much of an appearance uh on on this podcast.
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_01: Um I don't know about that.
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, cat cat videos do very well on YouTube.
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_00: We we would do well out of a cat appearance, so you know, drop a few biscuits.
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_01: Well, well, well, we were he's he's asleep at the moment, so uh, so he's okay.
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_01: But I I suppose it's just it's it's making culture a career.
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_01: Uh and I've yeah, I mean I've I've taught for 25 years, I've been in higher education, I've seen huge changes there as well, um, both in terms of the research culture, but also in terms of the pedagogical culture, the teaching culture.
• 5:36
  SPEAKER_01: Um and and and and we're at we're cursed to live in a very interesting time.
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_01: Um and my life, because I'm involved in all of that stuff, has been pretty interesting in the recent past.
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_00: Well, well, we should definitely unpack some of these turning points you've seen within British pop culture.
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, we should also unpack a little bit about what you've seen in the university setting with regards to teaching style and content and perhaps even uh profile of student.
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_00: Uh but let's let's dig into British media.
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_00: Uh a couple of weeks ago, this is before a very, very good friend of mine.
• 6:19
  SPEAKER_00: He'll be the best man at my wedding, knew that you were coming on and that we were going to be getting into this kind of thing.
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_00: He obviously knows what I'm into, and he sent me a video, and it was a clip of a news presenter back in the late 90s.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_00: It probably wasn't long after Blair had taken power.
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_00: And it was a whole segment on the 10 o'clock news talking about Tomb Raider, which had just come out, and it was one of these big releases in the gaming industry, which made it was the slickest-looking thing you could you could see.
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_00: And it was unashamedly pro-British in its sentiments.
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_00: There was all sorts of talk about us being a leading centre.
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_00: Look at this ingenuity and insinuating that you couldn't find it anywhere else.
• 7:05
  SPEAKER_00: And effectively, it was just one big pro-British plug.
• 7:10
  SPEAKER_00: And he said when he watched it, he just couldn't believe it was the same country, that it was so bizarre to see.
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_00: And I believe it might have been, I couldn't remember, it was either BBC or Channel 4, and he couldn't actually believe that the sentiments being pushed were the same, the same organizations.
• 7:29
  SPEAKER_00: So perhaps we can delve into um how media has portrayed aspects of British life as it develops throughout the 20th century.
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_00: Was there ever a point where it was pro-British and then it started to drop a bit as it we we perhaps looked in on ourselves and lost a bit of confidence?
• 7:50
  SPEAKER_00: Did it go up again?
• 7:51
  SPEAKER_00: And when was it that it dipped again?
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_00: What what does it look like, Philip?
• 7:57
  SPEAKER_01: I think there have always been elements of anti-Britishness, and there's always been a you know a communist party that's always worked to varying extents of success, uh, probably not so much after, say, Hungary in 1956, but but up until then that that was kind of a uh a major thing.
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_01: But even then, even if you think about the um the new left after the war, for example, uh the Marxist left, they weren't that anti-British.
• 8:29
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, certainly not by uh comparison, yeah.
• 8:34
  SPEAKER_01: So I think something's happened and I think you probably have to go back to uh education to to to really understand it.
• 8:44
  SPEAKER_01: So we used to have an historical education that was essentially on the one hand it was uh economic history, and on the other hand, it was political history.
• 9:00
  SPEAKER_01: So if you did GCSEs or O levels before that or A levels or whatever, then you'd you'd have those two strands of history.
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_01: Um and somewhere in between you you'd gain a social understanding between those two things, okay.
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_01: What was tall to generally was a sense of a grand narrative.
• 9:28
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, these are the things that have happened, and often those things that had happened were achievements, yeah.
• 9:36
  SPEAKER_01: And that that sense of how those achievements knotted together was the the the story of Britain in a way, because in in lots of ways you know Britain is a story of achievement.
• 9:51
  SPEAKER_01: Um you could then map those things onto the the the broader picture, which was Western culture.
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_01: And it wasn't all you know, wine and roses and aren't we brilliant and everything wonderful as as people would have you believe now.
• 10:10
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 10:11
  SPEAKER_01: It really wasn't like that.
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_01: So there would be the tragedy of the first world war.
• 10:15
  SPEAKER_01: There would be you know real critical engagement.
• 10:19
  SPEAKER_01: Um there would be all sorts of you know, what's happened and why, and how can we avoid that kind of thing again, you know, the lessons of history.
• 10:30
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but it was generally a grand narrative with Britain at the center of it.
• 10:38
  SPEAKER_01: Then certainly by the middle to late 60s and into the 70s, and my god, very much into the 80s, this is earlier than most people think.
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_01: We were seeing the a sense of deconstruction, right?
• 10:56
  SPEAKER_01: And and this idea that okay, let's not think about the grand narrative, let's think about what we might call micro-narratives, okay, and let's think about particular groups of people and particular things.
• 11:12
  SPEAKER_01: And this idea of the postmodern really burgeons and becomes massive certainly by the beginning of this century.
• 11:23
  SPEAKER_01: Now, there's nothing wrong with looking at detail, okay, and there's nothing wrong with being critical, and there's nothing wrong with looking at micronarratives.
• 11:31
  SPEAKER_01: You need to do that, you know, history is themed, you need to do that.
• 11:36
  SPEAKER_01: But if what you do is look at only the micro-narratives, only the interest groups, and you remove them from context, absolutely, because you don't really believe in context.
• 11:50
  SPEAKER_01: The only way you will think about context or use it is as a weapon, yeah, then things begin to unravel very, very quickly, and you can pretty much say what you want.
• 12:03
  SPEAKER_01: So this postmodern micro-narrative approach to history gets a set of agenda, a set of agendas become very, very kind of prominent.
• 12:14
  SPEAKER_01: And we know what they are, right?
• 12:16
  SPEAKER_01: So they're obviously race, okay, their gender and their sexuality, and latterly they are things like the environment and mental health.
• 12:26
  SPEAKER_01: But those things are essentially framed as anti-British.
• 12:33
  SPEAKER_01: They don't need to be, but they're framed as anti-British.
• 12:36
  SPEAKER_01: They are a way of kind of they are tools of decolonization, they are tools of anti-Westerness, and somehow they have completely supplanted, they have completely got rid, we got rid of, we've we've thrown away that that uh grand narrative, and in its place we've got this set of micronarratives that do relate to each other, but relate to each other in ways that are fundamentally anti-British and anti-Western.
• 13:10
  SPEAKER_01: And I think all of that stuff has then gone into media for very, very obvious reasons.
• 13:19
  SPEAKER_01: Well, technology is is is a massive reason why, okay, because we're using technology now, we we we can get to a potentially a huge audience here, okay, and we couldn't have done this 20 or 30 years ago, right?
• 13:31
  SPEAKER_01: Social media is is is is the driver there.
• 13:34
  SPEAKER_01: But also because people are now of age and have been for a long time, who know no different.
• 13:44
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 13:45
  SPEAKER_01: Talked about education before.
• 13:47
  SPEAKER_01: I I've you know very regularly come across people, students, uh, in in several institutions that I've worked in.
• 13:54
  SPEAKER_01: I'm not I'm not gonna mention any institutions in in this podcast, but several institutions that I've worked in who couldn't give you the dates of the of the Second World War, for example.
• 14:03
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 14:04
  SPEAKER_01: Now that's not because they're they're stupid or or they've got a low IQ or anything like that.
• 14:09
  SPEAKER_01: So they've never been told.
• 14:11
  SPEAKER_01: Right?
• 14:11
  SPEAKER_01: They've never been told.
• 14:13
  SPEAKER_01: Uh so there's a there's a sense that media is going to reflect all of that stuff because media is a product of all of that stuff.
• 14:25
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 14:26
  SPEAKER_01: And if you look at the we're talking about comedy in particular, I was talking about comedy the other day.
• 14:35
  SPEAKER_01: There is just no comedy now, right?
• 14:39
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, and if you compare uh the comedy today, which is basically someone pointing a finger at you and and and telling you either how terrible you are because you're white and male, or how brilliant you are because you're of colour and trans, uh, and how terrible Britain is, um, that's comedy today.
• 14:59
  SPEAKER_01: If you compare it to comedy of only 20 years ago, it's hugely it's hugely different.
• 15:07
  SPEAKER_01: Um so the the change, while it's been a long time coming, has also happened very quickly.
• 15:21
  SPEAKER_00: It absolutely has.
• 15:22
  SPEAKER_00: Uh Run, you brought up comedy.
• 15:24
  SPEAKER_00: It brought me straight to a conversation that I've had repeatedly with my fiance, and I don't watch a lot of television.
• 15:31
  SPEAKER_00: So when we when I when I say, Yeah, okay, let's watch some television, I have started to insist that we watch reruns from a pre-social media era and potentially even pre-nauties, but certainly pre-social media.
• 15:45
  SPEAKER_00: And a great example was we watched Black Adder together, the Rowan Atkinson series, which started in the 80s, and that is certainly no um uh voice box for the establishment.
• 16:00
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, it is the the it isn't as anti-establishment program, but it gently lampoons our institutions and key figures, and it doesn't do so in a political way, it mocks the idea of backwardness in many respects and um the abuse of power, but in an incredibly typically British funny way.
• 16:20
  SPEAKER_00: You can see the whole national character in there, and whilst I didn't find the next Rowan Atkinson series anywhere near as funny, my fiancee loved it, but uh there's a few parts that were amusing.
• 16:31
  SPEAKER_00: The thin blue line is another example, and that in that they'd brought um uh a Muslim police officer in, and she showed her hair, she wore skirts, she um she was proud about her open, she was open about her sexuality, uh her heterosexuality.
• 16:53
  SPEAKER_00: And what was amusing was even when there was slight references to the culture she was from, it wasn't in any kind of hectoring way.
• 17:05
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, and this is mid-90s, and as you have alluded to, you effectively can't turn on the television now without a really obvious moral lecture taking place, and it makes it unwatchable.
• 17:20
  SPEAKER_00: So I I just think it's best not to watch anything pre-social media because that's when it all just goes off a cliff, in my opinion.
• 17:27
  SPEAKER_01: Do you know one of the times that it was a few years ago now?
• 17:32
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and I think it was the BBC, and they did a version of the Chris uh a Christmas Carol.
• 17:38
  SPEAKER_01: And it was the it was about 2019, and and it had everything in it.
• 17:45
  SPEAKER_01: Scrooge was, you know, a capitalist, uh, and and and there were allusions to the NHS, and and it actually said for the many and not the few, actually, actually used that that phrase in in the uh in the show, which was the uh for for viewers that was the the the labor, you know, the the labor tagline, the Jeremy Corbyn tagline for the many and not the few.
• 18:08
  SPEAKER_01: And and it was just like it would had been produced in a really bad undergraduate um script writing workshop, uh, and it had every single cliche you could think of, every single cliche in the book, right?
• 18:24
  SPEAKER_01: And I thought, my god, things can't get any worse than this.
• 18:27
  SPEAKER_01: You know, little did I know.
• 18:29
  SPEAKER_01: Little did I know.
• 18:30
  SPEAKER_01: Now I'm like you, I can't watch anything.
• 18:32
  SPEAKER_01: I never watch the Bv3, I never watch ITV.
• 18:35
  SPEAKER_01: My god, I never watch Channel 4.
• 18:37
  SPEAKER_01: I don't I don't watch any of it, I only watch heritage uh channels uh like Talking Pictures, I'll give it a poke, Talking Pictures TV, which is just absolutely excellent in every single way.
• 18:50
  SPEAKER_01: Um because the the the modern stuff is is is just completely unwatchable.
• 18:55
  SPEAKER_01: But here's the thing, I hardly know anybody who watches it.
• 18:59
  SPEAKER_01: You know, and maybe that's because I I I move in particular circles and you can say, oh well, you're you and you do all of this kind of stuff.
• 19:06
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, but I I I I I know people who vehemently disagree with me in terms of politics, but they agree totally in terms of the culture, in terms of the in terms of the education, uh, in terms of the entertainment culture.
• 19:21
  SPEAKER_01: And that's really sad.
• 19:25
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 19:25
  SPEAKER_01: Because I think of young people in particular, and I think of when I was young and how I adored some things.
• 19:33
  SPEAKER_01: I absolutely adore.
• 19:35
  SPEAKER_01: I remember growing up in Manchester in when I was a teenager in the 1980s, and it was all happening in Manchester.
• 19:42
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 19:42
  SPEAKER_01: And you, you know, I had the Smiths, for example, in Manchester, Morrissey and the Smiths, and I adored them.
• 19:49
  SPEAKER_01: I absolutely adored them.
• 19:50
  SPEAKER_01: They were my band, they were on the doorstep, and they were they were just brilliant, you know.
• 19:54
  SPEAKER_01: But I also loved things like the stones and I love the stuff from the 60s as well.
• 19:57
  SPEAKER_01: And and all of that stuff which was in in a way mine, I don't see people relating to popular culture, young people relating to popular culture in the same way now.
• 20:11
  SPEAKER_01: They can only relate to it, or it seems to me, with a kind of ironic distance with modern pop culture.
• 20:18
  SPEAKER_01: And that's a shame because there's no passion there.
• 20:21
  SPEAKER_01: And and it's and it it is awful, is it's a real shame.
• 20:24
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that's the difference between then and now.
• 20:29
  SPEAKER_00: Pop music, that's a good point you made.
• 20:32
  SPEAKER_00: And before we started recording, you you um had alluded to, and then when we started recording, you mentioned that you you thought that the launch of the seven-inch single was a huge impairment in in cultural history.
• 20:46
  SPEAKER_00: And I remember growing up, you would listen to albums front to back.
• 20:52
  SPEAKER_00: And I was growing up, I suppose, in the era that OACs were popular, I was still a little bit young, but I was I was aware of them, and I knew Oasis and Blur were battling it out to be the the best of British, as it were.
• 21:05
  SPEAKER_00: Um, in that era of cool Britannia, that the the Blair government had um had ushered in in the media's eyes.
• 21:11
  SPEAKER_00: And uh what's really funny now is knowing that when people hold on to any kind of music now, it's always from the 60s onwards.
• 21:24
  SPEAKER_00: But here in this country, the Erasus tickets and everything that went on with there is the the crazy amount of demand for people trying to get these tickets, and then they ended up doubling the number of shows to meet the demand.
• 21:37
  SPEAKER_00: Erasists were around well before social media, before all of our attentions got fried, before we just had streaming services where we had listened to the odd song all disconnected from one another.
• 21:48
  SPEAKER_00: And also in an era where you have songs effectively been made to juice your hormones, you know, faster bass lines, lots of Lots of um heavy drums, auto-tune voice, potentially aggressive or really uh uh sexual lyrics, and people don't listen to them in in a storybook anymore, but that's what albums were made for, and they would go through lots of ups and downs, they'd get your heart racing, they'd bring in some melancholy, and it was uh around someone's life or a period, and now it's just what can we do to it's like the chase in the clicks, isn't it?
• 22:29
  SPEAKER_00: And uh I think it's remarkable just how much things have changed in the music scene and how clearly whatever music has been produced post-nauties just doesn't seem to be anywhere near as popular and it lasts for about a second, and then everyone's forgotten who made it.
• 22:44
  SPEAKER_01: It lasts for a second, and then it goes.
• 22:46
  SPEAKER_01: You've got the the idea of the album, the 12-inch album, which is big enough to have great artwork on it, okay, and a collection of curated, a curated collection of songs which which might have an overarching theme, but which might not but belong together.
• 23:02
  SPEAKER_01: And and the very this has been overplayed, hasn't it?
• 23:06
  SPEAKER_01: You know, the the the thing about vinyl and how everybody loves vinyl and stuff like that.
• 23:09
  SPEAKER_01: But the the the idea of you know taking out, putting it on, sitting down and listening to it.
• 23:14
  SPEAKER_01: I don't think I don't think many people do that anymore, but that that that sense of listen, it's almost like you would sit down and listen to a symphony, you know, it's it's like it's like the popular music version of that.
• 23:27
  SPEAKER_01: And and then you talk about Oasis, and I I was there in Manchester, I was in a band in Manchester doing um retro rock and roll in in the um in the in the early 90s, and it got to about 1993, and I thought we're not we're not we're never gonna make it because nobody yeah, it was all dance music and electronic music and stuff like that.
• 23:51
  SPEAKER_01: And so round about the end of 1993, I just said, I mean, I'm gonna go to university, I'm I'm I'm worried about my future.
• 23:58
  SPEAKER_01: No one's gonna no one's gonna um buy kind of uh a band that's making retro rock and roll.
• 24:04
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, queue six months later I walk into the uh into my flat and there's the television and there's Noel on the television, you know, who used to we used to play at the boardwalk where they had the residency.
• 24:18
  SPEAKER_01: We we played the in the city that they played, you know, where they were where they were used to see them around all the time.
• 24:23
  SPEAKER_01: And it's like, oh my god, you know, they were the biggest thing to hit Britain since the bubonic plague.
• 24:29
  SPEAKER_01: And I'd left the building Elvis style six months earlier, right?
• 24:33
  SPEAKER_01: Um but it wasn't just the music, it was they were funny, right?
• 24:42
  SPEAKER_01: They they were a representation of class and place uh and they didn't care.
• 24:53
  SPEAKER_01: They were the last massive band who made I mean any idiot can like not care and be outrageous and not be successful, right?
• 25:05
  SPEAKER_01: Any any idiot can do that, but to have the the the kind of success that they had and and genuinely not care, I can't remember which way it might be some might say, I can't remember which single it is.
• 25:15
  SPEAKER_01: There's no video to it because uh Liam didn't turn up one day because he was face, and so they never made a video, you know, and one of the shots.
• 25:23
  SPEAKER_01: It was that kind of thing.
• 25:24
  SPEAKER_01: It was like the sex pistols or it was like the stones, and you know, it was it was classic, you know, massive, but totally kind of anarchic in a way.
• 25:32
  SPEAKER_01: Um there was something about that era, it was almost we didn't know how things were going to change, but it was almost a uh uh a last hurrah of hedonism for me, right?
• 25:46
  SPEAKER_01: Because I was very much part of it.
• 25:47
  SPEAKER_01: My god, I was hedonistic in in those phrases, I was only in my 20s.
• 25:51
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and it was and it and it felt like the end of of something.
• 25:56
  SPEAKER_01: Um and and and of course it was, it was the end of something.
• 26:01
  SPEAKER_01: So I think we into the new century, a few years into the new century, things started changing and Britain became a very different place.
• 26:10
  SPEAKER_01: But that looking back, a lot of that stuff was fresh and new, but it was also looking back and it was celebrating a kind of heritage, right?
• 26:20
  SPEAKER_01: They were celebrating the Beatles, obviously now we've got a very different relationship with our cultural past.
• 26:30
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, to get back to the point, me talking about Manchester.
• 26:34
  SPEAKER_01: You talking about Manchester also.
• 26:36
  SPEAKER_01: We have a very different uh relationship with our cultural heritage now.
• 26:42
  SPEAKER_01: It's it's it it deconstructs, it criticizes, it pulls apart, it's ironic that there's a distance there.
• 26:50
  SPEAKER_01: But interestingly enough, we don't have that distance.
• 26:54
  SPEAKER_01: We have utter naivety when it comes to any other culture outside of the atmosphere in the West.
• 27:04
  SPEAKER_01: That's the difference between then and now.
• 27:07
  SPEAKER_01: We used to we used we were used to celebrate all of those cultures, but but primarily we celebrated our own.
• 27:15
  SPEAKER_01: Now we rubbish our own and we very naively celebrate everything you'll see.
• 27:19
  SPEAKER_01: Students on campus openly celebrating Hamas, for example, saying that oh well, they are the oppressed and and you know the West are oppressors or the Israelis are oppressors.
• 27:32
  SPEAKER_01: So, in a way, a very, very stupid mindset, but it's all connected.
• 27:39
  SPEAKER_00: Certainly is, and having spent quite some time in the corporate world since I got into it, uh well, what my been working for 20 years or something after being an early school lever, did a stint in retail and sales, and I was front of house, I didn't really see a lot of the social stuff going on in the background.
• 27:59
  SPEAKER_00: But having spent time around the financial services ecosystem in the last 13 years, which is chock full of graduates, those who came after the the Blair reforms that turned the universities into uh a hive for paying customers nationally, internationally, and no one wants to fail their customers, and we want to give customers what they want, and uh we can not challenge them and all of those things, but also allow them to effectively create their own syllabuses in some respects.
• 28:33
  SPEAKER_00: You could make an argument that many of these social sciences and the various uh lenses that have been applied are able uh are the the consequence of allowing a kind of self-gratifying selection of content, and obviously, most people who get into academia will be inclined towards that left bias just because of the numbers of them.
• 28:56
  SPEAKER_00: But working in the financial services environment, I see the celebration of cultures very openly and the diminishing or at least the um suppressing of the host culture of Britain.
• 29:09
  SPEAKER_00: Two examples.
• 29:10
  SPEAKER_00: So most recent one is seeing Christmas parties not being called Christmas parties anymore, they're winter parties, which is soul destroying.
• 29:20
  SPEAKER_00: Um you don't don't need to be a Christian to recognise that the just because the company might be full of people from all different places, it doesn't actually reside inside of an airport terminal where there is no law of the land there, you know, there's no taxes, there's no duty, whatever.
• 29:39
  SPEAKER_00: There is a very real place and people around here, and this is what has been celebrated for 1600 years.
• 29:46
  SPEAKER_00: It seems a little bit um self-indulgent and uh uh at least, and I suppose at worst, a bit imposing um to suggest we can just wipe that away.
• 29:59
  SPEAKER_00: And I've also seen uh there'd be uh flexibility added to people's holiday allowance so that they can choose not to take Christmas Day, Boxing Day, Easter Sunday, or Easter Monday, the Friday.
• 30:15
  SPEAKER_00: They can just take them any other time in the year.
• 30:17
  SPEAKER_00: Just you choose, it's all about flexibility as though a corporation can decide that as to what a country decides.
• 30:25
  SPEAKER_00: And and the final point I'll make is Easter.
• 30:28
  SPEAKER_00: Now you don't see Easter talked about in the corporate world anymore.
• 30:31
  SPEAKER_00: It runs alongside Ramadan, and Ramadan is promoted, and often you'll find leaders of very large corporations doing lots of social media talking about how they're fasting.
• 30:45
  SPEAKER_00: Um Too Fast, Too Furious is a hashtag that I saw.
• 30:49
  SPEAKER_00: Saw them breaking iftar at the end of the day, taking pictures of themselves, doing bios, encouraging other non-Muslims to do it, without actually realizing that you know culture isn't just made up on the spot and religious ideas and uh are theological and they mean something to the people espousing them.
• 31:09
  SPEAKER_00: And in the case of Ramadan, it's the the acceptance that that the Quran is the final word and that everything goes into that.
• 31:19
  SPEAKER_00: And for these corporate leaders, it's just a way of showing their bona fides with regards to look how inclusive we are.
• 31:29
  SPEAKER_00: There are no ramifications to them, but for many people there is huge ramifications, and I I I don't know when this this ends, if it ever does, but I think it's having such deleterious effects on cohesion.
• 31:46
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I I think there are a few things to say about that, and and as you were telling me those stories, which are very familiar to me, you know, working in in the uh education sector.
• 31:57
  SPEAKER_01: A few things um kind of suggest themselves.
• 32:01
  SPEAKER_01: Um that idea that we have to celebrate every every other culture than our own, uh apart from our own, it's actually a really patronizing, paternalistic idea, isn't it?
• 32:15
  SPEAKER_01: You know, oh well we we we know we we can we can take all of that.
• 32:18
  SPEAKER_01: We're we're very mature, you know, we we but but you you must enjoy your your your cultures.
• 32:24
  SPEAKER_01: We'll we'll we'll we'll lock on and and and like you know like like um like loving parents to the uh to the to the childish cultures.
• 32:33
  SPEAKER_01: It's just it always strikes me as really patronizing.
• 32:37
  SPEAKER_01: Um because the because it is, it's hugely patronizing.
• 32:41
  SPEAKER_01: You know, it's it's taking, you know, being being the parent, taking yourself out of it and letting letting these children play, let the children play.
• 32:50
  SPEAKER_01: Related to that is the the growing sense that we fetishize youth as well.
• 32:57
  SPEAKER_01: You were talking about um syllabuses or syllabi, I'm not quite sure.
• 33:02
  SPEAKER_01: I should actually have to 25 years in the second.
• 33:05
  SPEAKER_01: Um where uh you know it's student-led uh and and young people know best, um, and and it's a lived experience, but then lived experience.
• 33:18
  SPEAKER_01: There's something that that happened in the culture about 20, 25 years ago in which uh we somehow jettisoned experience, we stopped uh venerating age and experience um and all of those things that have that have guided us for millennia, right?
• 33:43
  SPEAKER_01: And we started kind of putting youth on a pedestal, and it's almost like saying, right, you don't know anything, you've got no experience whatsoever, you are uh by definition shallow because you're young, okay.
• 33:59
  SPEAKER_01: We'll take a lead from you, that'll be great, won't it?
• 34:04
  SPEAKER_01: And you see it with you know various cultural figures, and the obvious one that I'm thinking about, of course, is Greta Thunberg.
• 34:12
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so it's it's that sense of if we're kind of trying to think about where this stuff comes from, it's actually quite complicated because it brings in all of these other things.
• 34:23
  SPEAKER_01: But the thing about youth is that they tend to be shallowly idea idealistic and they tend to veer towards radical left-wing politics because they've not been kicked about by life yet.
• 34:42
  SPEAKER_01: And so, in a way, that's one explanation of how we're going left and left and left and left and left and left.
• 34:51
  SPEAKER_01: I think it was Douglas Murray who said, or Jordan Peters, I can't remember what said, you know, we can go left and left and left and left, but we never get to the gulag.
• 34:59
  SPEAKER_01: Whereas, you know, you talk about uh mention reducing taxes once, and you're a far-right fascist and and God knows what, you know.
• 35:08
  SPEAKER_01: So there's there's there's a sense that things are at play, which we're taking away the the things that have guided us in the past, and and in a way, I don't want to get too dark, but that's really frightening.
• 35:26
  SPEAKER_01: And part of British culture is that Burkean thing of thinking about the the contract between generations, the past, the present and the future, and that idea of conserving something of the culture and conserving something of the way we do things.
• 35:46
  SPEAKER_01: That stuff is being pushed away.
• 35:49
  SPEAKER_01: We see it in the culture, we don't see the references to the past that we used to have.
• 35:54
  SPEAKER_01: It's all new.
• 35:55
  SPEAKER_01: The references are around the new religion of gender and race and and sexuality.
• 36:01
  SPEAKER_01: That's that's the whole thing.
• 36:03
  SPEAKER_01: You know, it's the year zero mentality.
• 36:05
  SPEAKER_01: Now that's fundamentally un British, right?
• 36:08
  SPEAKER_01: We we never don't things like that.
• 36:10
  SPEAKER_01: There have been elements of that in the culture, but they've never been dominant.
• 36:14
  SPEAKER_01: Um, even in the 70s with the socialist experiment, there was there was still something really British about where we are.
• 36:22
  SPEAKER_01: Now you can say, well, well, what's what's the reason for that?
• 36:25
  SPEAKER_01: One of the obvious reasons for that is mass immigration.
• 36:27
  SPEAKER_01: We had 1.2 million people coming to the country last year.
• 36:31
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, that's going to change things massively.
• 36:34
  SPEAKER_01: And that extremely quick, accelerated change is also part of what's going on.
• 36:42
  SPEAKER_01: But we're not getting that sense of hang on, let's just just put the brakes on a little bit.
• 36:49
  SPEAKER_01: It's no, it's it's more putting your head down and running towards the brick wall as quickly as you can.
• 36:55
  SPEAKER_01: And for me, that's the frightening thing.
• 36:57
  SPEAKER_01: That's what we see in culture, but that's what we're seeing in politics and society as well.
• 37:03
  SPEAKER_00: Dear classmate John here.
• 37:05
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• 37:08
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• 37:16
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• 37:19
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• 37:32
  SPEAKER_00: You can also follow me on X at Thinking Classes.
• 37:35
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks for listening, thanks for sharing, thanks for showing your support.
• 37:38
  SPEAKER_00: Enjoy the rest of the show, classmate.
• 37:42
  SPEAKER_00: I think you're right.
• 37:44
  SPEAKER_00: Uh as I suppose I've probably betrayed my leanings long ago in this conversation, so it probably doesn't come as any surprise for me to say that.
• 37:52
  SPEAKER_00: The the notion that we're we're knocking away the supports of what the country was was built upon, and not in an intentional top-down way, but in organically developed way over many centuries.
• 38:08
  SPEAKER_00: A couple of examples hit the news recently.
• 38:10
  SPEAKER_00: Number one, in the home of our national church, Canterbury, I think the the Christchurch University has just removed English literature as a course to study because there's not enough takeoff, a take take up.
• 38:22
  SPEAKER_00: You know, this is also where the the very famous Chaucer's Canterbury Tales was was written about and is a as a pillar, a cornerstone of national culture.
• 38:33
  SPEAKER_00: But as we were talking, you uh reminded me of a conversation I had with one of your colleagues very early on in the podcast, and he's over in the business school.
• 38:45
  SPEAKER_00: And uh I got him on because he was talking about the need to inculcate an epistemic humility, which is for most years a sense of you don't know at all.
• 38:56
  SPEAKER_00: And he particularly was focused on business students like MBAs, because you know, if anyone's worked with an MBA, they can be pretty cocksure when it comes to how business should be run, but they might not see the big picture.
• 39:09
  SPEAKER_00: And I thought, well, that's an interesting concept.
• 39:12
  SPEAKER_00: And what I also found interesting, though, was that it was being applied in a way that was not particularly humble, insofar as the ideas to inculcate humility were getting them to focus on the solving of global goals like the UN sustainable development goals, which to me seems like an incredibly uh um hubristic thing to think about, the idea that you can just go across the world, you've got this one take off-the-shelf goal, which you're going to apply to any geography and people, and that's going to be a success.
• 39:47
  SPEAKER_00: I don't think that breeds humility, but the reason why I bring that up is in that conversation, I said to him, what you're doing there, there's a there's there's a noble goal for sure, but where has it been lost in the universities to try to bring about uh uh the next generation of torch carriers?
• 40:07
  SPEAKER_00: And I brought up the example of the film Chariots of Fire, which was about the the famous runner from Edinburgh, well from the Highlands of Scotland called Eric Liddell, uh, all that famous music.
• 40:20
  SPEAKER_00: And uh in there there was a Jewish man called Howard Abrams, and he was a bit of a relegated type, and there was a scene with the Cambridge Dons, and the Cambridge Dons are bringing them in on their insert day or whatever it's called, and said that the role of us at Cambridge is not just to develop a student, we're here to create an Englishman, and that's gone, but it's gone as I know people like Connor Tomlinson put it, we we are now just a free economic zone for all of the world, and so we're like a big duty-free lounge.
• 41:01
  SPEAKER_00: And this sense of not trying to pass anything on, not trying to develop the character and to pass that on, whether it's through literature, whether it's through character formation, we don't even talk about that anymore.
• 41:13
  SPEAKER_00: It's about GDP and things that that contribute to STEM.
• 41:18
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I mean if as far as education is concerned, which you know you started talking about Canterbury there, these these courses are being closed down on.
• 41:31
  SPEAKER_01: Um because the model doesn't serve them, right?
• 41:35
  SPEAKER_01: Every every university prides itself on being global, international, um all of those things.
• 41:44
  SPEAKER_01: Um and every traditional uh subject is at the mercy of the colonizers, yeah, for example.
• 41:58
  SPEAKER_01: And it's also at the mercy of a theory.
• 42:03
  SPEAKER_01: So the the idea that you can go through an English literature degree without really reading you know more than a handful of novels, but you spend all your time reading feminist theory or or post-colonialist theory or you know gender theory or Judith Butler or whatever it is.
• 42:23
  SPEAKER_01: You can either read all of those stuff and and not really read any novels.
• 42:27
  SPEAKER_01: You don't really have to.
• 42:29
  SPEAKER_01: Um that is uh very uh sad and and it and it negate what am I trying to say here?
• 42:42
  SPEAKER_01: I just want to be a bit careful.
• 42:44
  SPEAKER_01: There's there's a sense that the arts, social sciences and humanities that I think are in such trouble, I can't really see them existing in universities in 10 years' time in the way they exist at the moment, right?
• 43:03
  SPEAKER_01: Because they're completely interchangeable.
• 43:05
  SPEAKER_01: If you're if you're if you're if you're reading history, all you're gonna learn about is uh post-colonialism and and and feminism.
• 43:13
  SPEAKER_01: If you're reading drama, then you're gonna read exactly the same thing.
• 43:16
  SPEAKER_01: It's a sausage machine in which people are just coming out with exactly the same ideas.
• 43:22
  SPEAKER_01: It used to be about free thinking, it used to be about engaging with text.
• 43:26
  SPEAKER_01: Now it's applying a set of uh precooked ideas to text, or not, as the case may be.
• 43:36
  SPEAKER_01: You might not bother with the text, you just you just engage with the ideas on a very shallow level, because they're actually quite shallow ideas.
• 43:45
  SPEAKER_01: Excuse me, that's one thing.
• 43:47
  SPEAKER_01: The other thing is the market, okay.
• 43:50
  SPEAKER_01: So domestic students, English students from Britain don't bring in that much money.
• 43:57
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 43:58
  SPEAKER_01: So university.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_01: Universities tend to focus on international students, right?
• 44:06
  SPEAKER_01: But what happens is they don't get international students in great numbers.
• 44:13
  SPEAKER_01: What they tend to get is Chinese students in great numbers, right?
• 44:18
  SPEAKER_01: So our students are big our universities are becoming Chinese fishing schools.
• 44:29
  SPEAKER_01: If it's a good university, the vast number of MA students there are going to be Chinese.
• 44:33
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 44:33
  SPEAKER_01: Because they pay a fortune to come under it and they want to come.
• 44:36
  SPEAKER_01: Now the Chinese students are lovely.
• 44:38
  SPEAKER_01: They're really, really nice.
• 44:39
  SPEAKER_01: They're fantastic, you know, people.
• 44:43
  SPEAKER_01: But the the courses are being geared towards Chinese students.
• 44:49
  SPEAKER_01: Um and something really weird is happening in higher education.
• 44:57
  SPEAKER_01: You've got the Chinese Communist Party, one of the most brutal dictatorships in the world.
• 45:04
  SPEAKER_01: And we are educating their children.
• 45:07
  SPEAKER_01: You know, there's some and we're not educating our own children because they're not going to university in the numbers that they did, or they're going abroad, or something else is happening.
• 45:16
  SPEAKER_01: And that's happening especially in the arts, social sciences, and humanities.
• 45:22
  SPEAKER_01: So we're not educating Englishmen.
• 45:27
  SPEAKER_01: We're educating Chinese kids, you know.
• 45:30
  SPEAKER_01: And again, I'd I'd I'd reiterate and say, you know, uh certainly the in various institutions, the Chinese kids I've talked about.
• 45:36
  SPEAKER_01: They're fantastic, they're wonderful kids, but we need to educate English people.
• 45:42
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, well, uh there are lots of people talking about that mismatch between entrance requirements, whether you're foreign or national, huge disparities, and obviously much lower, lower barrier uh for barriers to entry for for foreign students who pay three times the amount.
• 46:01
  SPEAKER_00: Um I I I wonder if we start to try and pin the moment things started to change.
• 46:07
  SPEAKER_00: So you you joined academia back in 1999 before you left this year.
• 46:13
  SPEAKER_00: So 25 years, and that's a couple of years after after Blair, who we've talked about, and he brought those great reforms in, but it was also the point in which students had to start paying to go to university.
• 46:26
  SPEAKER_00: And uh did you did you what was the profile of student and approach to education like then?
• 46:37
  SPEAKER_00: And do you think looking back that if there were any remnants of the old order there two years into the Blair premiership, do you think that was ultimately what set us off down this track of all of these social sciences, the deconstructionism being rolled out on a big scale, and then ultimately creating the people who ended up populating our media institutions and all of our other institutions of influence?
• 47:05
  SPEAKER_00: Was that the critical moment, or is that too of a much of a simplistic view?
• 47:10
  SPEAKER_01: No, I think there's something in it.
• 47:11
  SPEAKER_01: I'm not going to talk about particular institutions, just talk generally about about the sector, but I I think there is something in it.
• 47:18
  SPEAKER_01: Um I felt reasonably comfortable in the sector up until about 2012.
• 47:27
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 47:28
  SPEAKER_01: Um I uh I I felt as though um I had a future.
• 47:32
  SPEAKER_01: I I was a bit different in the sense that I wasn't radically left-wing or anything like that, but I was certainly libertarian, and there was a sense of libertarianness about about um about education.
• 47:44
  SPEAKER_01: It was free thinking to to a certain extent, it was still a marketplace of ideas.
• 47:51
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 47:52
  SPEAKER_01: Um the I think the the Blair thing of getting, what was it, 50% of people to university or or whatever it was, you know, really upping universities, the post-92s, getting um it was before Blair, but the post-92s, turning the polytechnics, which previously had worked very well as vocational education institutions, into um research-driven kind of um on the coattails of of the Russell group and um the red bricks.
• 48:20
  SPEAKER_01: I think that was catastrophic.
• 48:22
  SPEAKER_01: I think that was catastrophic.
• 48:23
  SPEAKER_01: I think I think throwing so many people into an education system that that just couldn't cope with them because you just can't have so many people in an elite education institute, education system that's supposed to be educating the best, right?
• 48:44
  SPEAKER_01: Um I think I think what happened was that everything dumbed down massively, so you weren't dealing with small numbers anymore and trying to get the best out of an intellectual elite.
• 48:59
  SPEAKER_01: That kind of um that whole approach changed.
• 49:04
  SPEAKER_01: So you were just dealing with large groups of people and herding them through.
• 49:09
  SPEAKER_01: Because as you said before, they they were customers.
• 49:13
  SPEAKER_01: And what the customers tended to do was say, well, why aren't you getting me through with a two-one?
• 49:20
  SPEAKER_01: Your your your your your teaching isn't that good because you're not you're not doing what you're supposed to be doing.
• 49:26
  SPEAKER_01: I'm a customer, so I want a first or a two-one.
• 49:29
  SPEAKER_01: And at that time, what you what you begin began to see was uh an inflation of grades.
• 49:36
  SPEAKER_01: And I remember uh one year in an institution when I first started teaching, I was flabbergasted at the number of firsts that came out, and I was flabbergasted at who was getting the firsts, you know.
• 49:48
  SPEAKER_01: That was the change, you know, these customers almost pay for these degrees and uh and they were coming out.
• 49:55
  SPEAKER_01: Um it was um quite depressing to see, but it was round about, as I say, 2012, 2013, 2014 when that again changed into something else, right?
• 50:16
  SPEAKER_01: And it was this idea that um if you don't agree with me, or you don't have a particular set of ideas which are the accepted set of ideas, you're a pariah, right?
• 50:35
  SPEAKER_01: Now the left education has always been left-wing and it's always been a bit crazy and and and all of that kind of thing, but not in that way.
• 50:44
  SPEAKER_01: It became quite an uncomfortable place for someone like me, right?
• 50:52
  SPEAKER_01: But then that became more and more um marked.
• 50:59
  SPEAKER_01: So these uh this this sense of the good people we are defined by our politics and what we think and our and our way of life, and there was a real amount of snobbery to it as well, cultural snobbery, huge amount of cultural snobbery.
• 51:19
  SPEAKER_01: That that became more and more intense.
• 51:22
  SPEAKER_01: So by about 2019 or 2020, when you had BLM, then you had lockdown, then you had trans, and now you've got Hamas, all of these people kind of coalesce around around these things.
• 51:42
  SPEAKER_01: And it's as I said before, it's this kind of oppressed versus oppressors.
• 51:48
  SPEAKER_01: And then if you're not on the side of the oppressed, then somehow you need to be gotten rid of.
• 51:54
  SPEAKER_01: You need to, you need to be, you need to go away because you're harmful, okay.
• 51:58
  SPEAKER_01: Um irrespective of actually what the evidence is, what the historical evidence is, or what the empirical evidence is.
• 52:06
  SPEAKER_01: So that kind of burgeoned and burgeoned and burgeoned.
• 52:09
  SPEAKER_01: I'm talking about education there, but I think you've talked about your experience in the corporate world.
• 52:14
  SPEAKER_01: I think you think you can map that onto the corporate world quite easily.
• 52:17
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I think you could absolutely map it on to the media world, you know, with without any doubt.
• 52:23
  SPEAKER_01: But you've also got things like the civil service and and you've also got things like the Church of England now actually not dealing in Christianity anymore, but dealing in this new religion, dealing in this this this kind of cult-like obsession with gender and race and and reparations and um the environment as well.
• 52:45
  SPEAKER_01: So all of this stuff, it's it's it's a changing of the goal.
• 52:49
  SPEAKER_01: I it feels like we've been in a kind of liminal space for the last few years, moving from one metaphysics to another, you know, one way of being to another way of being.
• 53:03
  SPEAKER_01: And and that that shift is is going ever faster.
• 53:08
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and some of us are really fighting against it, and not many people want it, but it seems to be happening anyway.
• 53:17
  SPEAKER_01: We're going from one age to another age, in other words, the 21st century is kicking in.
• 53:21
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm looking from my age of 53, and I'm looking at the rest of the century, and I'm thinking, my God, I'm glad I won't be here for most of it.
• 53:29
  SPEAKER_00: You're not the first person to say that to me, that's for sure.
• 53:32
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, you you will know being in the history game that uh a cliche almost is that a history is written by the winners.
• 53:41
  SPEAKER_00: So the answer to this question, if that cliche holds true in any way, I suppose is going to be tainted by who it is that might might be the the winners.
• 53:52
  SPEAKER_00: And so let's start thinking about what a cultural historian of the future might look back and say on this period.
• 54:00
  SPEAKER_00: And I suppose we could potentially argue that we're undergoing a vibe shift away from that liminal space you just talked about, the the the Uber progressivism, if that's that's one way of referring to it, though it seems a little bit regressive uh to say the least, but let's stick with progressive.
• 54:20
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, we've got the Trump victory, which seems to be uh emanating out this feeling that the administrative state and the various institutions that have all been pushing a lot of the ideas we've been talking about may well be on its last legs.
• 54:40
  SPEAKER_00: And obviously, with that being the de facto centre of our Anglosphere's uh empire, as it were, uh we tend to be downstream of those things.
• 54:51
  SPEAKER_00: So perhaps your answer will be influenced by that, and maybe we do see something looking back in a different way.
• 54:59
  SPEAKER_00: But how do you think a cultural historian would view the period which you studied?
• 55:04
  SPEAKER_00: So from the 60s up until now, and all of the ideological and demographic shifts in the context of British history, what do you think they would say?
• 55:16
  SPEAKER_01: They'd probably call it Goodbye Britain.
• 55:19
  SPEAKER_01: You know, if you were writing a book about that, you'd say, you know, Cheerio Britain, goodbye Britain.
• 55:24
  SPEAKER_01: Um I go through periods of fairly intense depression about it all for all of the reasons I've just said.
• 55:38
  SPEAKER_01: Because we we it seems like we're we're we're we're we've got our heads down and we're we're we're running towards a brick wall, but we're not gonna stop.
• 55:48
  SPEAKER_01: And the only way it it seems as though things are gonna change is after the catastrophe, in a way.
• 55:56
  SPEAKER_01: That's what we do, isn't it?
• 55:57
  SPEAKER_01: You know, we see this in Europe now with you know with the uh countries like Sweden and Denmark are saying, well, you know, enough is enough in Italy, enough is enough with unfettered immigration because things have changed so quickly and and and there are so many people that we just cannot assimilate.
• 56:14
  SPEAKER_01: We're gonna have to do something about it after the catastrophes happened.
• 56:18
  SPEAKER_01: What we're not very good at, especially in this country, is averting the catastrophe and not running into the brick wall.
• 56:28
  SPEAKER_01: Having said that, you know, so if I c if I carry on with with with that imagery, then the then the the historian of the future is gonna say, well, things just collapsed and and that was the end, that was the end of Britain, or or that was the the end of Britain for a time, and and now it you know it maybe things are beginning to get better, but that was a catastrophe.
• 56:51
  SPEAKER_01: The the Trump thing um was extraordinary.
• 56:57
  SPEAKER_01: I think, you know.
• 56:59
  SPEAKER_01: Um I was on a uh I I did a new culture forum podcast um every week.
• 57:04
  SPEAKER_01: We we we recorded on on the on the on the Thursday or the the third either the Thursday or the Wednesday and it again was up Saturday.
• 57:11
  SPEAKER_01: And we all called it, right?
• 57:13
  SPEAKER_01: All uh there were four of us, uh Peter Whittle, um, Ray Fadleman who Amy Gallagher and myself, and we all called it, right?
• 57:20
  SPEAKER_01: We all said, well, Trump's gonna win.
• 57:23
  SPEAKER_01: Um and the uh the the podcast with Alistair Campbell and and Rory Stewart um definitely didn't call it.
• 57:30
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 57:31
  SPEAKER_01: Um we we called it because there are obvious signs that people are fed up with what's going on, fed up with the the mental health crisis that is extreme left-wing seeking, which has now become the mainstream.
• 57:50
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 57:50
  SPEAKER_01: And we see the mental health crisis in in the Trump derangement syndrome, the break, you know, the meltdowns of what's happening.
• 57:57
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, we've we've seen it on Twitter, you know, you know, the the liberals going absolutely bizarre because you know, because Trump people are looking at that and and they are thinking one with we're sick of it, we're fed up of it, but too we don't want it for our children and our grandchildren, right?
• 58:15
  SPEAKER_01: And you mentioned Connor Tomlinson before.
• 58:18
  SPEAKER_01: I I think there's a there's a new breed of of of young, tough, often male, actually.
• 58:26
  SPEAKER_01: Um very turned on, very intelligent political um people, not just commentators, but people who are very definitely pushing back on this in terms of lifestyle, but also in terms of in terms of ideas, all the rest of it.
• 58:40
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm seeing glimmers of hope.
• 58:42
  SPEAKER_01: And I and I and I think the Trump thing is much more than a glimmer of hope.
• 58:46
  SPEAKER_01: You know, it was huge.
• 58:47
  SPEAKER_01: It was a landslide in in American terms.
• 58:49
  SPEAKER_01: It was it was enormous.
• 58:50
  SPEAKER_01: You know, it was a it was a complete negation of all of those things.
• 58:55
  SPEAKER_01: Now, if some of that can come our way, even if it's only some of that, then we might be looking at a much rosier picture than than than we think we're seeing at the moment.
• 59:08
  SPEAKER_01: That said, and I'm really kind of you know, I'm not I'm not very one way or the other right, but that said, I'm still looking at anti-Semitic hate marches every every Saturday in big cities like Leeds uh and London and Manchester.
• 59:26
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, I'm I'm still seeing that that kind of um worrying, very alien to us, anti-Britishness, um, which we we've already talked about, but which which seems to be growing and growing.
• 59:45
  SPEAKER_01: I suppose part demographics is part of that.
• 59:48
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm very worried that that mindset is just going to be more entrenched and grow and grow and grow, but at least we're beginning to fight back against it.
• 59:59
  SPEAKER_01: And we've got five reforms, is it five?
• 1:00:02
  SPEAKER_01: We've got five reform MPs, haven't we?
• 1:00:04
  SPEAKER_01: You know, uh, and we were talking about reform before.
• 1:00:07
  SPEAKER_01: Um, that is a good sign, but reform are by no means perfect, okay?
• 1:00:11
  SPEAKER_01: But there are other uh uh parties like the SDP that which I I wish people would know more about.
• 1:00:17
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, there is an alternative, there is a a sense of of fight back.
• 1:00:24
  SPEAKER_01: It is sensible, it is really sensible, and I think people are really crying out for something that makes sense, something that isn't lived experience of I feel like a woman today, therefore I am a woman today, even though I've got to be it, right?
• 1:00:42
  SPEAKER_01: That kind of thing.
• 1:00:44
  SPEAKER_01: So I think there is a fight back.
• 1:00:46
  SPEAKER_01: The question is how how successful is that going to be?
• 1:00:51
  SPEAKER_01: And I still think we've got to have much more crisis, much more fear.
• 1:00:57
  SPEAKER_01: We've got to be collectively frightened that we are going to lose something before things get better.
• 1:01:04
  SPEAKER_01: But, and I have to say this because I need something to cling to, I think things will get better.
• 1:01:12
  SPEAKER_00: I I think you might be right, only because in my own circles and those in my concentric circles who would have typically, I think, not found themselves around this type of conversation before, are starting to have them in some way.
• 1:01:31
  SPEAKER_00: And the sense of loss you were talking about needing to be felt deep within the psyche before there's perhaps a decisive shift in the opposite direction, whatever that may look like.
• 1:01:42
  SPEAKER_00: I do think it's starting to happen partly because security is clearly becoming a watchword, and we've just had the remembrance Sunday weekend, and indeed we're recording today on Armistice Day, and I I went to uh a service on the Royal Mile in Edinburgh.
• 1:02:02
  SPEAKER_00: I live in Edinburgh at the moment, and eventually we'll move back to the uh the glorious lands of England next year, but for the time being resident in Edinburgh.
• 1:02:13
  SPEAKER_00: Um, the service was was lovely.
• 1:02:15
  SPEAKER_00: There was uh an orchestra with a brass band, there was all the military processing down from the castle, and a real sense of occasion, uh very solemn the national anthem was going, South Africa was in town for the rugby, they were all wearing their poppies, it felt like the Commonwealth in Arms, like people could recognise that actually we are cousins, they're not just a random nation.
• 1:02:40
  SPEAKER_00: And so there was a sense of solidarity at least amongst the core, but it was tempered quite badly by there being a few shifty characters in the crowd, which startled a few of the people that I was with, and they didn't want to stand near the crowd.
• 1:02:57
  SPEAKER_00: They wanted to get away because they're afraid that something bad was going to happen, and it was that moment where we'd gone to celebrate in some way the fact that we were all together remembering the sacrifices made to keep whatever civilization and whatever fumes of civilization they were fighting for alive so we could enjoy them.
• 1:03:21
  SPEAKER_00: And it was totally put in the shadows by the insecurity felt, and it was that moment, that realization for people who usually want to avoid this conversation, who now know we live in a low-trust society, and it was never that way.
• 1:03:39
  SPEAKER_00: And I think once that gets into people's heads, you know, fear is a big driver, and you can see in the political commentary, even amongst the liberal commentary, you know, you can find it amongst the Matthew Sayeds of the times talking about ending identity politics, stop trashing European culture and celebrate it, stop mass immigration.
• 1:04:03
  SPEAKER_00: You know, this is this is pure centrist area, and it's becoming more and more.
• 1:04:10
  SPEAKER_00: So it I think I've been like you, I have been heavily depressed about the trajectory of my country.
• 1:04:18
  SPEAKER_00: I used to be one of these tied-in-the-wall progressive types.
• 1:04:22
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, when I forgot my first job on financial services, because I'd read a bit of Moam Chomsky and some shade of Abraham, I decided that I should get to the top of the system and bring it all down.
• 1:04:32
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't really know anything about my history either, and it wasn't much later on until I started to feel rootless and I got into it and realized that actually we aren't just a malign force in the world.
• 1:04:44
  SPEAKER_00: That everything changed, and particularly as I saw things changing around me in the cities, and I thought I don't like this at all.
• 1:04:51
  SPEAKER_00: So I think I think that seems to be coming now to a much wider purview of people than I don't think we would have expected.
• 1:04:59
  SPEAKER_00: And I suppose we'll see how it develops.
• 1:05:01
  SPEAKER_00: Uh Philip, I've kept you long enough, but there's one question that I ask all of my guests when they come on, which is what have you changed your mind on in the course of your life that perhaps you once held to be concretely true?
• 1:05:17
  SPEAKER_00: What was it that made you think differently?
• 1:05:24
  SPEAKER_01: You see, I don't think that I changed you actually just described in yourself a kind of journey that I think many people of your age are having because they're having to have it, right?
• 1:05:44
  SPEAKER_01: And that that kind of that change has been thrust upon you because you're seeing everything, everything around.
• 1:05:49
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, I'm old enough to have seen um the stuff that was that that was going on.
• 1:05:57
  SPEAKER_01: Um I remember the age.
• 1:06:00
  SPEAKER_01: very well you know might not even remember right at the end of the 70s but uh the the the the beginnings of of mass immigration the the the kind of mass immigration that we know today i mean and and i have to say i'm from an immigrant background myself my father came here in 1959 i'm not i'm not wholly against immigration you know what i mean i'm just against i'm against mass immigration very much so because i think it's a i think it's i think it's the thing that that we are up against the thing is with me the point i'm trying to make is that i always was right uh there was there was you could i could see it i could i could see the potential problems ahead that the the fracturing of society the the the kind of certainly i lived in a a a Jewish area of of north manchester i could see um the potential threat to jews uh i could see all of that stuff it was it was it was crystal clear to me 30 years ago this is why it's so frustrating thinking about seeing all about all of this stuff and i was thinking my could you not see it 30 years ago so i don't think i've changed my i i've not changed fundamentally or philosophically i've pretty much always been a small c conservative even though i've been involved in culture and music and nightclubbing and youth culture and stuff i i'd certainly been involved in that when I was younger and I've been involved in culture all of my life the you know the it tends to be leftist all that I never was that uh but I'm but but I'm open-minded so so so so I felt you know I often thought well the thing that I've changed my mind on it's not a big thing but in in lots in some some ways it is so I was never that bothered about um monarchy before I wasn't particularly against it but I never thought it was you know I never really thought about it that much it's only in the last ten years or so that I appreciate how actually important the monarchy is one to the the British identity but to to the to the British way of life as well the idea of having a family as a focal point um the idea that that they represent some kind of continuity um even though it's it's it's very tenuous and it's very fragile at the moment and being a a a a monarchist doesn't necessarily mean you have to love the particular royal family.
• 1:08:30
  SPEAKER_01: But I I I feel that in terms of um success um monarchy is a kind of work.
• 1:08:41
  SPEAKER_01: You look at the countries that have monarchies and they tend to be reasonably okay and reasonably stable.
• 1:08:47
  SPEAKER_01: So that has been something which has been almost a a final piece in the puzzle that has helped me understand I think what is important about the British identity and way of life it's something that is different to everywhere else.
• 1:09:15
  SPEAKER_01: It's like the common law in a way you know it's peculiar to us and and there's something that because our monarchy our constitutional monarchy is is is kind of unique then it it's something that that we should hold even though there are problems with the individuals involved it's something that we should hold to us I I don't think I'd ever thought that through before because I was too busy doing other things but for me that's something that that that is important.
• 1:09:47
  SPEAKER_01: I could say one more thing actually which is very current and please do ask me if you were to ask me about Donald Trump in 2016 I was saying this before we before we started recording if you asked me to say about Donald Trump just wrote 2016 I was going to oh well yeah right yeah yeah now I've I've I've changed my mind I think I think donald trump is I wasn't anti-Trump but I wasn't I wasn't particularly pro-Trump.
• 1:10:11
  SPEAKER_00: Now I'm I'm I'm pro-Trump I think you know Donald Trump is an extremely important figure not because of who he is but because of what he is what he represents and how he can act as a catalyst for the the change that that I think we desperately need and the kind of change we've been talking about for the last hour or so well let's hope even though as true Brits who wish we could chart our own path and we didn't want to leave the European Union to end up in hock to America in this case we will look forward to our unofficial Metropole in the hope that we can gain some kind of inspiration.
• 1:10:53
  SPEAKER_00: It's been an absolute pleasure I have really enjoyed this conversation being able to talk about Blackadder and Oasis and Tomb Raider and the monarchy all in one file suite couldn't be as as British.
• 1:11:06
  SPEAKER_00: So thank you very much for coming on and I do hope we get to speak again in the future and I I wish you all the best in your life outside of academia.
• 1:11:13
  SPEAKER_00: I'm sure we go from strength to strength and you'll get plenty more talking head spots I'm sure so thank you very much for making the time.
• 1:11:21
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks John it's been an absolute pleasure and look forward to speaking to you soon to keep up to date with all that I am doing please subscribe to the Thinking Class YouTube channel at ThinkingClass and follow me on X at thinking classes.
• 1:11:36
  SPEAKER_00: Thinking Class seeks to understand the civilizational issues we face and why what our leaders do in response matters.
• 1:11:42
  SPEAKER_00: Here I seek to explore the ideas values and culture that made our civilization those that are run making it and how leaders at our public and private institutions should respond.
• 1:11:52
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• 1:12:01
  SPEAKER_00: I look forward to seeing you there and for joining me on this journey