The British State Hates its Own People - Dr David Starkey

29:30I think it's possibly gone a little bit far. And what we've gone ourselves into is a situation in which you can actually, that wonderful phrase, you know I'm quite fond of the Bible, although I don't believe in God, but that wonderful phrase, by their fruits you shall know them. You can judge things by their consequences. We can see what the consequences of this sort of thing have been, and they're all bad. Let's take another interesting example, English Nature, which has been in the news an awful lot recently. This thing costing whatever it is, two billion a year or more to run, what has it done?

30:11It is responsible in its most recent manifestation for saying, wouldn't it be a terribly good thing to kill the ponies on Dartmoor? because we believe in going back to some notion of, isn't it odd? We're not allowed to have an indigenous population, but we're allowed to have indigenous flora and fauna. Isn't it really odd? You know, the notion that they're the natural inhabitants of this island is perfectly acceptable if you're talking about buttercups, but really isn't acceptable if you're talking about human beings. I mean, the whole madness. But in order to restore the alleged original vegetation of Hadn't we better kill the ponies?

30:50Well, of course, the English, because the term is sentimental, people get wildly excited about that. But what else has English Nature done? English Nature has inflicted on HS2, if it wasn't already a bag enough mess, an extra hundred million pounds for a bat tunnel. It is calculated that it might save about six bats. You laugh, but it's not funny. This is your money. It's my money. It's why nothing can get done. Even worse, we're facing this astonishing power shortage. Vast soaring costs of electricity. What have they done to contribute to that? our nuclear power station, which has already taken 10 times as long as equivalent structures in China to build, they have imposed costs of£600 million in order to protect fishes against getting a little bit overheated in the discharge waters.

31:54And do you know what? They've decided that's not enough. And what they're going to do is they're going to insist that we reconstitute the salt marshes. So you're going to look at adding approximately another billion pounds. This is insanity. We've given a group, all headed by Tony Juniper, these people are fanatics. You give single-issue fanatics executive control. Now, all of this, you give judges power over money. Why is SEND, why is special educational needs completely out of control? because you set up a tribunal structure. If you declare that children with special needs have rights, there can be no budget.

32:43Law does not have regard to a budget, as anybody who's been stupid enough to sue in a court knows. Costs are of no order. There's no consequence. You know, the standard principle of Roman law is let the skies fall, justice must be done. But that's not how you manage a society. The only way you can manage how much we spend on children with special needs against everybody else's need is by politics. But we've deliberately removed the final decision from politics, which comes straight back to your point. We're in this terrible paradox that the standing of politicians has never been lower. But we desperately need the political process somehow to be revived, because that's the only way you can balance properly the individual against the group.

33:35Otherwise, you have Singapore, or MBS, or Saudi Arabia, or China, you have a dictatorship. So we've got to recover that. The experiment of handing it to experts on the one hand and judges on the other, which is what Blair did, though he didn't fully realize what he was doing, has been utterly, completely and demonstrably catastrophic. And the fact is now obvious, the left cannot admit it. The left created this, it's become its Bible, because remember, the reason that all this happened, why did all this happen under Blair? It happened because people like Peter Mandelson had already realized that the kind of Labour Party that Burnham wants was stone dead.

34:26New Labour happens because the intelligent people, like Blair, like Campbell, like Mandelson, knew socialism didn't work. So they've got to come up with something else. And this hyperactivity, where they literally pluck down ideas from the shelf, these strange notions of international law and whatever that had been cooked up by people like Herman, people like Tom Bingham, people like Starmer, they just latch on to them. So new Labour itself was a testament to the failure of the old Labour Party. What's now happened, of course, is that the Starmer government shows the failure of new Labour, that these things do not work.

35:11And what is the Labour Party going to do? It's going to try to go back to a double failure of old Labour. So the right, Francis Constantine, never has more open goals. But there's been an extraordinary failure to explain. I cannot imagine a political situation which should be more favourable to the right than the one that we're in at the moment, with one very important point, which is, of course, that unfortunately, thanks to the folly of David Cameron, the even worse folly of George Osborne, the absurd folly of Boris Johnson, the Conservative Party and Theresa May, I would shoot. No, I'm quite serious.

35:59I think, I think, I, no, I'm being really serious. After a trial, presumably, right, David? Yes. Presided by yourself, David? I believe in due process. But I mean, seriously, when you look at what that woman did, she is directly responsible for the full out-of-control nature of non-crime hate incidents, which begin under Cameron and flourish under her, the extraordinary activities of the College of Policing. She carries through the non-legislation. It was barely discussed for legislating net zero by 2050. That again, Francis, means that judges determine whether you can drill in the North Sea. Even if Starmer and whatever, and Burnham, this extraordinary series of somersaults he's performing, have been talking about doing this, they will immediately, until they repeal that, they will be taken to court.

37:01And judges determine whether or not you can fact. This is utterly insane.

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38:40Francis Foster:I think I finally understood what you've been trying to tell us for a very long time, David. What you're really saying, correct me if I'm misrepresenting, but what I'm hearing is, what you're really saying is, New Labour legislated their political opinions into actual law, and then the Conservatives effectively carried it on. Well, it's even worse than that. What you do is New Labour legislates its prejudices into an alternative legal system. Right. You introduce absolutely foreign principles. There's a marvellous, you know, Thomas Sewell, who is this extraordinary, impressive man, the Sewell Report, that argued passionately...

39:20Tony Soule. Tony Soule. Pardon? Tony. Tony. Thomas Soule is an American economist who I love. He spells S-O-W. Both equally impressive. In a very, very similar way. But when he wrote the preface to the report, which I've just mentioned now, from the Prosperity Institute, attacking the Equality Act, he came up with this wonderful phrase. He said, a foreign body of law, an alien body of law. And that's what's happened. So, as I said, it's why I've been using these medical analogies that is like, an autoimmune disease or a cancer. You use the word constitution of your body as well as the state, and that's what's happened.

40:09So it's not simply policy. It's that this fundamental change happened. Again, just looking back to the business of the so-called expert committees, I mean, English Nature is one of them. The Climate Change Committee, the insane policies. we've been having on this. Both Churchill and Theodore Roosevelt, Teddy Roosevelt, the great American president of the first years of the 20th century, they were both fascinated by the role of experts. They're both fascinated by scientists. Churchill has Lord Charwell, he's not yet called that, sitting around his dinner table at Chequers in his wilderness years of the 1930s.

40:51He becomes a major figure in the Second World War. But the two of them fight for the ownership of that wonderful phrase, you want your scientists on tap, but not on top. And what we've done, of course, with this multitude of quangos, 400 and odd of them, effectively spending nearly a third of the state budget without any form of democratic control, you've put the expert on top. That's why Michael Gove said, you know, we've had too much of experts. He didn't explain it. You see what I'm trying to get at? All sorts of people are beginning to understand the problem, but they're understanding it in a fragmentary way.

41:36Similarly, Rishi Sunak, in one of his Times columns, actually admitted when he talked about the Rwanda scheme. And he said, well, in retrospect, what we should have done was change the law before we tried to introduce the scheme. In other words, the legal structures that I've been talking about made absolutely guaranteed its failure. So what they did was something profoundly stupid. Again, it was like this trust. They adopted what's a good policy. Rwanda is something like Rwanda is the only way we're going to deal with it. It's how Australia dealt with it. It's how Italy is beginning to deal with it and so on.

42:18But they did it without making it possible. In other words, they walked straight into an open trap. And repeatedly, British government is doing the same thing. Mahmoud is going to find all the sorts of things she wants to do will face unless she does what I think will be unthinkable, which is reversing great slices of this new Labour legislation. she will find not simply that her backbenches won't do it, but that immediately the legal jaws will snap shut. And so, again, what we should also be talking about is why do we seem to be in such an impossible mess? I think one of the reasons is that because, OK, I used, I'm afraid Theresa May gets me very cross, but just because I think she was so, I hate stupidity.

43:15And when you see, when you ask on the quality of politicians, when you see transparent stupidity, particularly being a teacher for a long time, you learn to control your reproving of it. But when it's on that huge public scale, and again, it's really important. that inflicts such terrible, terrible damage. This quest for the legacy. You do something off the cut, and it inflicts damage on your country, which you can quantify, I would argue, in the trillions. That is serious. That's why the term guilty men and guilty women really comes in. But why is the Conservative Party, why is it in the mess that it is, why is Kemi, who is quite impressive in her way, I don't think she was going to be, but she's performed reasonably well, why has she failed so badly?

44:18Because they haven't admitted what went wrong. until the Conservative Party does a full-scale mea culpa. I mean, you see, it's analogous to the situation that we found ourselves in in the 1970s. In the middle of the 1970s, the entire post-war structure was collapsing. From 1945 onwards, you had, if Britain was a 90 % socialist country, it was arguably more socialist than East Germany or as socialist as East Germany. And what was striking in 51 is that Churchill's conservatives went along with it. So from 45 through to about 75, there were two parties that, you know, in the phrase of the day, the current phrase of the web, it was a uniparty.

45:12And it didn't really make all that much difference. The conservatives were mildly more financially competent than Labour, but not much. The same policies, prices and incomes, boards, the nationalized industries, all of that stuff, Keynesian economics and so on, the determination to maintain full employment even with feather bedding, failing nationalized industries, all of that continued whoever was in power. And it was only after Edward Heath's defeat in the elections 73-74 that you get Keith Joseph coming along and saying, I've called myself a conservative. I haven't been. I've sat in conservative cabinets who've done nothing conservative.

46:04And you get that reinvention of, well, it wasn't unfortunately what they invent, what he and Margaret Thatcher invent, isn't really a conservative party at all. They're Gladstonian liberals with, you know, Manchester School economics, the old Manchester School, the good Manchester School, not Burnham S. But at least you get a difference. There's then an actual, there's actually a political debate in Britain. And unfortunately, what happened in 2010 is that Cameron and Osborne, and it's easy to see why. You look at William Hay, you look at those terrible years in which Blair just ran rings around.

46:42And they decided if you can't beat them, you join them. But that, of course, means you've got an albatross hung around your neck. Every time Bedanock gets up in the House and sort of says, look at the number of illegal crossings, all Starmer needs to do is, oh, well, the relevant legislation you passed, there were even more illegal crossings when you were there than we have now. And what I do not understand, unless Bedanoff is so frightened that half the party, half the parliamentary party, will leave and join the Lib Dems, which I think may well be the reason. She has never explained why the Conservative Party got it so badly wrong.

47:31What she's done, interestingly, is take a tip from you, which is probably a bad idea. And she said the only reason that the Conservatives got it wrong was because I wasn't leading them. In other words, a narrow personal point. Whereas, of course, the answer is, very simply, they got it wrong because they followed the wrong policies as established by the Labour Party. That's the answer. And until they say that, and of course Thatcher had the enormous advantage, she'd no need to say it because Edward Heath threw his big salt. So he made completely clear that there was a fundamental difference. And Bedienk hasn't been able to do that.

48:15And I think, again, with all the things, all the very promising things, and remarkable if she really has managed to screw the leftish members of her party up actually to leaving the ECHR, somebody like Jesse Norman, who is the son-in-law of Tom Bingham, who was the leading legal brains behind all of this stuff, actually wrote a book with Peter Oborn on the conservative case for human rights. So if you persuaded him to repudiate the act, that's pretty good going. But she will get no credit. And she will not have a ground with which to deal with Farage. In other words, and again, I spent much of the last, whatever number it is, two and a half years now, touring around the country with my friend Mark Littlewood, ex-the IEA.

49:08And we've been going around reform associations and conservative associations. The first thing that I do when I go to a reform association, Constantine, you know, so much of this game is pantomime, which is one of the reasons you're a very good public speaker. And it's pantomime. And I always begin by saying, well, I've got to make a confession. This is a reform association. I remain a member of the conservative body. He spoke, you know, fuck off. And then what I do is, that's fine. I've been honest with you. You will be honest with me. Come on, hands up. Everybody was a member of the Conservative Party.

49:49Half the hands go up. I say, right, keep them up. How many of the rest of you have voted Conservative? Virtually every hand goes up. So what we're dealing with, we're dealing with a genuine war within Conservatives as to what it actually is, what it means, what its relationship with the past, what its relationship with the desired future, what it thinks is worth carrying forward, what it thinks has gone wrong. It's exactly the kind of debates that happened in the middle of the 1970s and even more so in the middle of the 19th century after the great reform act, the great clash between Robert Peel and Benjamin Disraeli.

50:33Konstantin Kisin:And we're live on match day as Doug reaches for a buffalo wing. He's got it. Oh, and he's gone for a can of Pepsi too. What a finish. There's no doubt about it. It just tastes better. Match days deserve Pepsi. David, that was magnificent. And despite my facial expression, I understood everything. However, there's one thing that you said where a chill ran down my spine. it was three words where you said, if Britain survives. And you're not a man to use hyperbole or to say words when you don't mean them. Why did you say that? Because I think it is possible that it won't. If we head down the route that we are doing now, we face national bankruptcy.

51:28We are, that's one thing. In other words, we face, if we're lucky, something like the IMF intervention of 1976, although I think our situation is very, very much worse. The level of our indebtedness is much greater than it was in the 1970s. And that's not nice. If you look at what happens with Greece, you deal with enforced cuts in public sector salaries of 20 % and more. You deal with confiscation of elements of bank accounts, you know? Right? That's one thing we face. We are playing profoundly dangerous games with Russia. We are challenging Russia publicly, led, of course, by that ass Boris Johnson, who is asinine in this regard.

52:17And we're doing it without the strength. Again, go back to Theodore Roosevelt, who seems to me to be one of them. He's one of the first politicians of the era of mass democracy. and he really understands. And he's also got a marvellous gift of phrase. He is the one who says, you know, speak softly and carry a big stick. And we do the opposite. We yell from the housetops and we have a bent twig, which is the state of the British armed forces. This is profoundly dangerous. At the same time, we have a demoralized population. We have, thanks to the left, We have spent the last 50 years saying that British history is to be ashamed of, that patriotism, constantly, constantly citing Dr.

53:07Johnson, who meant something different, is the last refuge of the scandal. We've spent time denigrating our armed forces with people like Lord Herma and Keir Starmer himself, imposing ludicrous conditions in which you effectively say war is an act of policing. What? The absurdity of judgments that are lad in 18 or whatever under the threat of imminent death, does he pull a trigger or not? Some fat judge or overfed and overfeed QC, KC, 40 years later, decides whether it's legal or not. Intolerable. So we've, in fact, destroyed the social basis of our army. We've destroyed the ideological basis of our army.

54:00We're in the ludicrous position that we support the Ukraine. Well, yeah, very nice. What is the war in the Ukraine? It's a war of national identity. People are fighting to belong to one tribe or another. A country that wasn't quite sure whether it was Russian or Ukrainian, people are being forced to choose. They're forced to choose a language. They're forced to choose a historical myth. You're fighting to defend absolute frontiers. Why the fuss about the Donbas and all the rest of it, or whether the Crimea? We can't even protect our frontiers. We make no attempt at protecting our frontiers. So we've got ourselves into a mess in which we somehow imagine that if you utter nice words and belong to elaborately titled international organizations, the world will run like a prayer hall.

54:53And I'm afraid it doesn't. There's that phrase of Cardinal Wolsey, naked to his enemies. We've left ourselves naked to our enemies. And we've met him. And there's just this refusal. To contemplate, the first duty of the state is to defend and to administer justice. And we failed hideously. The resignation of Healy, the former Secretary of State for Defense, with that excoriating series of resignation letters, and then a clown like Lamy as head of the judicial system. I mean, just one despairs. Government failing. It's two central duties. But unfortunately, the failure really begins under the conservatives.

56:04This is the catastrophe. The worst cuts, and again, Thatcher not escaping. The reason that the Falklands happens is we make foolish reductions to the Navy and to the practice sending ships to the Falklands. And the Argentinians draw the obvious conclusion. Similarly, it is George Osborne in his transcendent folly that imposes so-called austerity across the board. apart from foreign aid and the NHS. I mean, this is what I mean about the Tory party adopting the values of the left. The only things that were protected from austerity were foreign aid and the NHS, the totems of the left by the Conservative Party.

56:53And instead you begin this catastrophic programme of cutting back on criminal justice and legal aid.

57:00Francis Foster:And all of the things you described, David, nobody I would put it to you that there's probably a handful of people in the country that understand them at the level that you are describing them at but the ordinary person at this point and I'd say this from talking to people in all kinds of walks of life hasn't worked out what's happened but what they really have worked out is something very bad something very bad has happened. Absolutely right that's exactly what the article about Maker's Field is about in the New Statesman published today, saying exactly that. And again, it's with what you expect.

57:41How on earth do ordinary people, who most of the time rightly don't greatly care about politics, but they have an instinct. They know. They see everything from the potholes to the tips to the fly-tipping to the extraordinary things that they hear their children say that they've been taught in school to the manifest, the two-tier horrors of what happened in Southport of what happened in unimaginable, what happened in Belfast. and what happened in Southampton. And all of them are the same. The same issues are involved. But you see, what again, both of you, people find it difficult to understand.

58:36So the term two-tier is very useful. But it suggests something sort of, oh, well, it's probably just you've got a woke chief constable or something like that. You see, it's not. This is what is terrifying. It is embedded in law. And this is what has gone so terribly wrong. The law has turned against itself. And it was done with noble motives. So often, you know, again, one becomes old and hackneyed. The road to hell is paved with good intentions. The intentions were good. Yes, they were. I belong to a minority. I'm a puff. And no, no, no, no, but I know because I've been on the receiving end of nasty policemen.

59:25And you also saw the AIDS crisis. And I indeed lived through it and terrible consequences. And I fought for the equalization of the age of consent. But I fought through it through the political process, not by claiming abstract right, which is why I think it's stuck in Britain. In other words, why it's not been challenged. Whereas Roe versus Wade, where you used to secure so-called abortion rights in America, fell to bits because it was on the basis of extreme legal construction. You were straining the legal argument. But if you go back to, I mentioned one man and I want to focus on him again because I think he's so important.

1:00:12There was serious, genuine, really brilliant, and I think in many ways noble lawyer, a man called Tom Bingham, or Bingham, who was the senior law lord before it was turned into the Supreme Court. And he is the one who really reconceives of law in this different way. And he delivers a lecture in Australia, possibly wise to do it in Australia, rather than here. And this is what he says, and it's really important that we all understand this. He says quite explicitly, human rights law is anti-democratic. It is counter-majoritarian. It protects the minority as against the majority. And do you know what?

1:01:01He lists the minorities. Do you know what's in the head? The mentally sick. Ruda Cabana, Calocane. Racial minorities, Gypsies. All the problem groups. So when you look at why the state completely failed to incarcerate Ruda Cabana or Calocane, the presumption of the law is you don't. In other In other words, what we can see is when it comes to the balance between the individual right and public protection, the legal doctrine of embodied right is disastrous. Again, this notion that their rights means prisoners have got the right to vote, which was forced on Britain by the Human Rights Court and Transports, it is an absurdity.

1:02:00You see, again, human rights, it is also the wonderful capture of language by the left. They sound wonderful. Paddington bears. I always say it's sort of Paddington bears. Again, equality, who could possibly object? But you see, the problem is what you do with those ideas. Traditionally, I mean, again, the great contrast is between the French and the American revolutions. If you look at the French, the French are the first people to come up with a declaration of the rights of man and the citizen. But of course, the moment you do it, you have the terror. So you put it in the box and forget about it.

1:02:42And by the way, when it comes back, because of the very loose nature of Napoleonic law, which is a series of general principles anyway, yet another set of general principles get lost in it. It's when you embed that stuff in a common law system where words are taken seriously that you have the disastrous consequences. If we go back to what Bingham is saying there, the law itself is turned against its principal purpose. The principal purpose of the law is to protect the law-abiding citizen. And also the principal purpose of the state is to protect itself. If you constantly go on about, oh, our duty is to the world.

1:03:37The man who has just been made a knight of the garter. The king being, of course, as soaked in this stuff as the leftist of lawyers. and Gus O'Donnell, who was the head of the Treasury. There's the famous conversation, which is reported by David Goodhart, when they were in conversation, and I think it was Mark Thompson, who was the director of the BBC, and then went off to run the New York Times, and David Goodhart, and the conversation was, well, what is the actual purpose of government? And O'Donnell, oh, you know, I didn't think my purpose was just to pursue the prosperity of Britain. It was the well-being of the world.

1:04:20I mean, that's what's gone wrong. And conservatives, again, had no defense because people like Churchill, you know, Churchill was a liberal, really. Remember, he crosses the floor of the House twice. And Churchill, in that expansive post-war phase after 1945, conservatism bought this stuff. It was defenseless. And one of the things we've got to do on the right is to retrawl our past, re-explore our past, to find out what left us so vulnerable. How did we lose the main... What is so terrible? That question you asked me. We were the world's best governed country. Why does everywhere talk about a parliament?

1:05:13Because they were copying ours. Still the role of common law as the world's best system of commercial law, however catastrophically it's gone wrong in terms of public law and criminal law in Britain itself. the just quality of the British public service, the civil service until very recently. Things have gone wrong very, very recently. The roots are deeper, but we need to explore that past to find out what we need to recover. Because again, the temptation is revolution. The temptation is faced with this mess that I described, that we say, OK, knock it all down and start again. That is the infinite catastrophe.

1:06:07The attempts of doing that are invariably failed. The only reason the American… there's only been one successful revolution, and it's the American Revolution. And that was successful because it wasn't a revolution. I've always thought that.

1:06:22Francis Foster:It's a war of independence. It's not a revolution. It's a rebellion. Right. It's a rebellion. And rather than, you know, when the French, with their revolution, they try to alter everything from the system of weights and measures to the actual areas of government, to the names of the days of the week, for heaven's sake, and transform law and everything else. The Americans keep it all. And what you finish up with, by the way, the absolute fury of radicals like Tom Paine, is a very lightly modified system of the British government. You know, the president is an elected king. The Senate is a version of the House of Lords.

1:07:03The House of Representatives is a version of the Commons with a speaker. and as I always tease my American friends, the administrative, I'm going to test you, the administrative officer of the House of Representatives. What's he called? I don't know. The Surgeon at Arms. Americans have the faintest idea of a Surgeon at Arms. But it's there because the British Parliament has a Surgeon at Arms. So what I am trying to do, which is why I slightly bridled when you sort of said, oh, you're a historian, but now we're talking about the present. It seems to me the only way that we can get out of this mess is by realizing that our present has erred terribly precisely because it's repudiated our past.

1:07:54And what we have to do is to reconnect. We have to realize, whereas people like Blair or whatever, or they talk about the hand of history, they clearly regard it just as a fuddy-duddyism, old-fashioned, just to be thrown away. But in fact, properly, the history of the people is an organic thing. It's like a fertile soil. You need that fertile soil of the past for things to grow. It's not surprising all of these things went wrong under Blair, because what he effectively did was to tear everything up by the roots. And then you're very surprised 20 years later when they've all withered because you pulled them up.

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1:09:54Francis Foster:So, well, David, first of all, let me ask you to unbridle yourself because I was not remotely suggesting that your expertise in history is not relevant to the present moment. On the contrary, it's one of the reasons we love having you on the show. And we've often talked about the present. And you mentioned the revolution on the way in to have this conversation today. I revisited our first ever interview and it opens with the phrase, Starkey's, it's you saying Starkey's rule of revolution is that every revolution reproduces the worst features of the ancient regime. But I would put it to you that the rise of Restore, in particular, shows you that in this country now, at a fairly low level, but nonetheless, there's a rising spirit of revolution.

1:10:41Francis Foster:There's a rising, let's throw this whole thing out and start again. I mean, I don't think it's an accident that Rupert Lowe's favourite historical character is Cromwell. And much of the language and the rhetoric is of that nature. And that, I think, is also part of the reasons why I bridled at your suggestion that the right is united around policy. I don't think it is. I don't think it's united around policy or personality. Now, of course, there are some areas on which they increasingly agree. But I think you articulated the problem beautifully in terms of the right. You said it's the most fertile opportunity for the right to fight back.

1:11:19Francis Foster:But what you have is the Tories who are tarnished by their time in government. And like you say, they have not made the mayor culpa that they need to be able to move on. You have reform. But I think part of the issue for reform is just time. It's like people are very fed up, but the next election is three years away. And so increasingly, the rhetoric is amplified, and which is where you have Restore come in as a personality clash with Rupert and Nigel, obviously. But there's also now a feeling like this whole thing doesn't work, which clearly it doesn't. I mean, objectively, it doesn't. But I think the conclusion from some is now actually we just have to throw away the whole thing and we have to go in an almost radical revolutionary route.

1:12:03Francis Foster:And that, to me, is also part of why I think it's more difficult for the right to unite around all of these things. Would you agree? Sorry, go ahead.

1:12:11Konstantin Kisin:There's also one element that I'd like to add to that, which is there is a faction on the right who not only want to tear everything down, they want revenge for what they feel that has been inflicted upon them. I think on that latter point, I am not entirely unsympathetic. I'm very Very sympathetic. But let me distinguish. I think that what we must recognise is that we did one really important thing in the early 18th century. This is after the fall of the Tory government under Queen Anne and the coming to power of the current royal house, the House of Hanover. We at that point looked as though we were going to continue impeachment, which in the form of impeachment, so with Robert Harley, the Earl of Oxford, it looked as though we would do what had always happened up to that point, that when a leading minister falls, you get confiscation and execution.

1:13:09We didn't do it. And we haven't done it from that point on. And I don't want to do that. What I think would be legitimate, because I think there needs to be a measure of public disapproval, that point that I made about the guilty men, I would do it by the stripping of honors. It seems to me that it is entirely appropriate that people like May be stripped of her peerage. I think it is entirely appropriate that Blair be stripped of the garter. And there needs to be an act of public shaming. But there is always the risk of that, of course, that it just becomes tit for tat, which is, you know, what it did before.

1:13:50So maybe, And also, the pursuit of vengeance is a foolish one because it does terrible damage to people. I mean, I know I experienced cancellation. There is a risk that you simply let your hatred of those who did it consume you and it destroys you. And it's a foolish thing to do as an individual or as a person. But to go back, I do not believe that restore has got... And look, why is it called restore? It's called Restore precisely because Rupert Lowe was one of those who first accepted my analysis. Because if you remember, the point that I made is there's this gigantic shift under Blair, Blair Brown, what we need to do is a great act of repeal in which we undo it, and then we restore.

1:14:38We have a new restoration. And I think the problem with Rupert, and he will forgive me saying this, I think he's not the most coherent of thinkers. And he's, of course, got a group of radical young men and some rather sillier middle-aged men who are supporting him, middle-aged men in particular, going off and playing with rather silly bits of pseudo-political philosophy which have been dredged up from Germany and whatever at various periods. But I don't believe it amounts to anything very serious. If you look at their actual policy recommendations, they pretty much fit the same. The debates are the same if you read Harrison Pitt's paper.

1:15:28The only way they will be able to do anything is by winning a majority in Parliament. Where I think things are going wrong at the moment, and it's even the game that's being played on the right, It goes back to your point, Francis, about politicians. This weird business and maker's field demonstrates it really interestingly. Both Robert Kenyon and also the reform candidate and Andy Burnham themselves, they're playing the ordinary chap routine. We're just completely ordinary people. And somehow the fact that we're just ordinary people, you know, do it with a different accent, I've now forgotten to do Northern.

1:16:12I've been away. Whereas people like Andy Burnham was at Cambridge, for God's sake. Read English literature at Cambridge. You can't have anything much more South and Poncy than that, can you? But playing this game of being an ordinary person, this idea that the solution to what's gone wrong with our politics is a house of commons of completely inexperienced people, is a madness. It's a madness that they will be just chewed up and spat out by this judicial legal expert civil service machine that we've been talking about. But it's very easy to see why. And it's also, of course, one of the myths of democracy.

1:16:59We want our politicians to be just like us.

1:17:03Francis Foster:Please, God, no. No, no. But you can see at a moment like this the power of that. Yeah, of course. But also, there is a tragedy, and I think, again, it's tragedy, particularly at the moment of Farage, that you can see what he's trying to do. I don't know whether you read the long-form essay that he published on Substack on Two-Tier. Well, it wasn't terribly well written. It was very rambly. It repeated itself. And although everything in it was very good sense, anybody reading it who wasn't like you and me would just go straight to sleep. And whereas he has got real rhetorical gifts, he's not using them.

1:17:57He's not yet stood on that platform. Maybe he can't. Maybe he doesn't have the confidence to do it. Maybe he doesn't have sufficient interest in ideas. You see, let's go back to Thatcher. Or indeed, Blair. Blair was passionate about ideas. Everybody's saying that what is so catastrophic about Starmer is even though he is one of those who formulates the ideas of the current miasma, he can't articulate them. He can't explain them. and the only way we will get out of this is by people who can clearly articulate a what's gone wrong b what needs to be done to put to begin to put it right and then even more importantly i mean i'm not pretending anything i've been saying is a panacea it is simply the first thing a new government that wants to do anything will have to do it's the first step you've got in other words you've got to strike off.

1:19:04It's like one of these slavery liberation films. It's the moment at which you cut your fetters. Or Samson pulling down the pillows of the temple. That's not a very welcome analogy. But you have to strike off the fetters before you can do anything at all. But that requires what Thatcher was able to do. Articulate ideas. Explain why. Carry people with you. And again, I think that the population is ready for it. This sense of... I mean, there's a sense of... There's a terrible sense of nostalgia, of loss. And it can go in one of two directions, can't it? It can go to the violence. and people like David Betts talking about the evident risk of small, low-scale civil war.

1:20:02It can go in that direction. Or if there is somebody who can seize that moment, can explain to people what's gone wrong, why it's gone wrong, who was responsible, what's got to be done to put it right. It can then be turned round. It can become positive. It can become a moment of genuine restoration and revival, as has happened very frequently in the Anglo-British past. You've termed what could have been the disaster of Magna Carta, the ensuing French invasion and whatever. You had a man, William the Marshal, Earl of Pembroke, with the imagination, with the capacity, with the combination of political and military skill, able to turn it around.

1:20:49You had that extraordinary moment in 1689 when both the conservative, when both the Tories and the Whigs came together to remove an impossible king and to do so in a fashion which you were able to, wonderful, pretend nothing had happened. You'd removed a king in a dynasty and you pretended nothing had happened. The kind of non-revolutionary revolution that we were describing with America. But there's that terrible hole in the landscape.

1:21:22Francis Foster:Well, this is why I'm honing on the right, because I think on the divisions on the right, because for a long time it looked like Nigel Farage is the man to do it. He's still in prime position out of the... In pole position. In pole position, yeah. It's the right time to do it. But, look, I can sort of see the Tories doing some kind of pact with reform towards the end of the next election. But the enmity between restore and reform is such that I don't see that happening. And I think there's a very real chance that the vote is split. And therefore, you get actually a different form of life. A red-green coalition, God help us.

1:21:59Francis Foster:Right. So, in terms of your perspective, what do you think should happen between those parties on the right? I want a miracle, don't I? Yeah. This is why I keep coming back to this issue. Come on. Please, I'm quite good in an analysis. but I'm not God yet. I haven't undergone an apotheosis. But one just hopes,

1:22:28hopes a sense of what is at stake penetrates their minds. These are people who claim to be acting for the benefit of the country. Can they not just think and reflect and look at what the possible consequences of their choice, when indeed the certain consequences of some of their choices will be.

1:22:53Francis Foster:I don't think they can, though, because if I... They're so blinded by... Well, if I sit in each of their chairs, here's what I would say to what you're saying. If I'm Kenny Baden-Ock, I'd say to you, I mean, Rupert Lowe is... You know, we agree with him on some things, but he's way out there and not a big party, not a serious person to do business with. Nigel Farage has no experience of government. and he's good at talking, but we can't work with him. And he hates us, keeps talking down our party. How can I do a deal with him? And by the way, the thing she will never say publicly, but we all know, like you said, half of her party are Lib Dems.

1:23:23Francis Foster:In fact, most of her party are Lib Dems because the other Tories either got voted out or are now in reform. And if you're Nigel Farage, you say, how can I do a pact with the Conservatives, who I've been saying have ruined the country for the last 15 years and did, and how can I deal with Rupert Lowe, who keeps, you know, with all the history that we have, who is an extremist and all the rest of it. And from Rupert Lowe's perspective, he's saying, well, look at reform. They've become, I mean, they keep saying the reform is now the establishment, which seems a stretch, but there you go. So from each of their individual positions, there is a reason why this infighting is going on.

1:24:03Francis Foster:It's not accidental. No, no, no. I've never suggested it. I know, I'm not saying you are saying that. And so, therefore, I agree with you. my hope is everybody understands what's at stake. But I think the individual circumstances of which leader that we're talking about are such that the incentive structure drives them in the exact opposite direction. I think that's true if you look at the level of party level and personality level. I think in view of the magnitude of the issues, this is why I was emphasizing policy. And I think, again, that I think party members, I think party members in many ways have a higher wisdom than their leaders.

1:24:46And this is one of the reasons that I'm so keen to push saying look seriously at policy. Because the plain truth is on the big questions, there increasingly is not a sheet of paper between them. What there is is difference of rhetoric. In other words, if we look with Restore, yes, the lads, the homosexuals, play fantastic. They need, frankly, the best way is slightly to giggle at them. They're cosplaying revolutionaries. The online world enables one to do that. And sensible people just need to have a little giggle and say, come on, boys, really, you're not quite that big chap. And it's all too important.

1:25:35And it matters too much. And there's too much at stake. But I did use that word miracle. And we've been an extraordinarily lucky country. But every so often, luck does run out.

1:25:54Konstantin Kisin:David, do you think the next election is existential for this country? Yes, I think the whole of our conversation suggests that. I think the point is that the path that we are on now is guaranteed. And this, again, is the predictive element. I want to emphasize this, that I'm now donning a mantle of prophecy. Because it seems to me that the analysis that I've given has worked both analytically, In other words, you're looking back, but it has now turned into an accurate instrument of prophecy. I prophesy the Burnham government will fail and will fail worse. That we are in a downward cycle. We're trained to a wheel.

1:26:45Everything that you do, everything they do makes things worse. I wrote a little song to remind you, Choice Hotels gets you more of the experiences you value. The Cambria Hotel's got it all. A rooftop bar, have a ball. Bring a date, your squad, or even your mom. Book direct at choicehotels.com. The operations of law make race relations worse. The Equality Act makes, amongst other things, makes running the company worse. The tax policies make youth unemployment more likely, make the business of employing anybody more difficult. In other words, we're in this lunatic situation. But if you said, what is the worst thing you can...

1:27:32This is a bit like your analysis now. of the parties and the personalities. If you said, what is the worst thing that you could do? That is the most likely choice that the government will make.

1:27:47So, yes. But what is also extraordinary is that there's a solid 20 % and more of the population that is so purblind that it believes in this stuff. Again, one of the things that we haven't really talked about is the whole of the left believes in, and we talked about magic, the left fundamentally believes in magic. This is why Polanski is such an interesting figure. He genuinely believes in magic. If you think about it enough with the pendulum and allegedly going into hypnosis, you can grow your tits. The left's approach to policy is absolutely identical. You believe the Red Queen in Alice in Wonderland, six impossible things before breakfast.

1:28:41Lewis Carroll is fascinating on all of this. And again, the famous interchange with what's he called? What is the big egg called? Oh, falls off a wall. Humpty Dumpty. Humpty Dumpty is that on a wall. But Humpty Dumpty, that exchange between Humpty Dumpty and Alice, where Humpty Dumpty says, words mean what I want them to mean, neither more nor less. And what does Alice say? Question of power. It's the whole, absolutely, just extraordinary. And again, this is the whole point of George Orwell. It's why you have the essay on language on Newspeak at the end of 1984. The left believes in words over everything.

1:29:33Again, the whole business of gender transitioning. The idea of gender is the triumph of words over biology. That extraordinary moment, if you remember when Lord Winston, the last moment that he appears on Question Time, when he says, you know, I am terribly sorry. I know I will never appear on Question Time again, but your sex is in every actual cell of your body. Yeah. Says that. Ooh.

1:30:06Konstantin Kisin:Yeah, my favourite bit of that was Fiona Bruce's response. Do you remember? No. Where she went, some people might disagree with you. Here is our leading public biologist, you know, and some air-headed woman who is best, you know, acting as a dolly to fill it mould in front of a picture. You know, I mean, just...

1:30:28Francis Foster:Well, actually, I think it's worse now because my experience with Fiona is that she's actually pretty sensible about lots of things and she's always... But she's not allowed to be. But she's not allowed to be. That's what I mean. I think it's worse in that respect. Yeah. But it is, remember, we're dealing with things which are mythic. The left is mythic. As Thatcher said, the facts of life are conservative. But you want to believe it's different. And it's a religion. Not for nothing. Labour is a moral crusader. It's nothing. It's a religion. Or indeed, like Islam. They are religions, and the fact that people believe nonsense doesn't unfortunately stop them believing nonsense.

1:31:20But again, it should be such an opportunity on the right. The doors are open, the windows are open, we've got a political structure which is manifestly collapsing. We've got half the political establishment spouting nonsense. You can even see with Blair, semi-rowing back is awareness of the catastrophe. And so on and so on.

1:31:50Konstantin Kisin:But, you know, I do understand, David, why people are going to the left. It's very similar to Venezuela. So Venezuela in the late 90s, it was a failed state. people knew that if we had democracy but people knew that all that would happen is that somebody would come in they would talk a good game they'd rob the country blind so would their cronies everything would continue to collapse everything would continue to fall apart and at the end of their term they would go to Costa Rica or some other country like that and live off their ill gotten gains. Chavez was starting his campaign and people went, can it be any worse than what's gone before?

1:32:33Konstantin Kisin:I mean, it was. I fear that. Spoiler alert, it can. Spoiler alert, it can be a great deal. But there's another spoiler alert there. I don't actually believe that our political class is pillaging the country. No, no, but I'm not saying that they are. But what I'm saying is that people saw a failing system, it's different, but nevertheless the system is failing and they go for the emergency lever. But what I think is more peculiar is that the left, although it's dabbling, it doesn't look to be dabbling terribly seriously with the Greens and Polanski, the left is persisting. The left has got this enormously long history of being a central part of the failure.

1:33:14But the true believers continue, Whereas at least on the conservative side, there's a serious, however heavily disguised it is, there's a serious degree of rethinking. On the left, there's actually regression. The attempted rethinking of new Labour having catastrophically failed, what do they do? There's very good reason, of course. The Labour Party is the most nepotistic of parties. Everybody is. Everybody else is uncle, brother, sister, whatever. You look at it. And of course, they have to keep going because otherwise, however, this is where I'm afraid, I do slightly agree, not so much corruption, but there is a political machine.

1:33:58Either you've got to acknowledge that it's been a disaster and dissolve it, or you desperately try to keep it going. But I would hope that the one thing that will happen is that the utter catastrophe, because I'm certain that a Burnham government will be an utter catastrophe, really will perform that final act of dissolution to this thing. And it seems to me it is now bound to tear itself apart even more dramatically than the Conservative Party did. You've now, with the fall of Starmer, you're at that stage. This is the equivalent of the fall of Boris Johnson. Weirdly. Although I think there are very strong similarities, actually, between Boris and Burnham.

1:34:56Again, people who like to be loved. the nice chap, the good communicator. All deeply depressing.

1:35:08Francis Foster:As always, David, that's why we have you on, to feed our inner pessimism and sense of doom. Happy? No. David, always a pleasure. Before we head to questions from our supporters on Substack, what is the one thing we're not talking about that we should be? Nothing. It seems to me that we covered that ground. And the one thing, the thing that is, and again, one's going to sound terribly naive, what are we missing? We are missing the person who can do all the things we've been talking about. We are missing the equivalent of a Thatcher. We are missing the equivalent of Churchill at the key moment of William the Marshall or whoever.

1:36:03And we've got to hope somewhere there is some man or woman who will be capable of standing up and doing that.

1:36:13Konstantin Kisin:You think it's Theresa May? I do not believe in the living dead. A zombie.

1:36:22Francis Foster:Please, God help us. So head on over to triggerpod.co.uk where David's going to answer your questions.

1:36:30Konstantin Kisin:Don't forget to click the link in the description of this episode to grab the special CyberGhost VPN discount. It's completely risk free. So check it out today. Julius Caesar was voted dictator temporarily by the Senate to save the republic and never stood down. Could you ever, ever advocate for a dictator in a possible dystopian future Britain?

1:37:23Konstantin Kisin:Transcription by CastingWords

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