“The future after the Covid crisis“ with Dr David Starkey

if not all of you will have seen our distinguished speaker dr david starkey on television and also looked at google and other media for additional information that you needed it would therefore be superfluous for me to discuss his his expertise particularly as a tutor historian and his career he's also the author of widely read books including the six words elizabeth and music on the monarchy turning to recent events i have spent much of my career working as an investment banker with with major companies and government entities in around 20 countries and speak a couple of other languages so i have a good idea of the thinking of international decision makers for example in the rising powers of asia they respect us when we when we respect ourselves our achievements as a country and in the past as an empire they have no problem when we say what we think if there is evidence to back it to back our views they regard the work narrative and political correctness with bemusement however they do resent any claim by british politicians to global moral leadership and few of them were impressed by our supposedly moral interventions moral military interventions in afghanistan and iraq so they would now reject the recent criticisms and attempts to boycott our speaker as absurd now i hope i look forward to dr david starkey's talk thank you over to you okay you're audible now yeah very good right after the very flattering introduction from our chairman uh i must begin by not too long an act of self-deprecation unlike all other media commentators of the last 12 months i am not a virologist i am not an expert epidemiologist i do not have highly developed statistical skills happily none of those with any use in what i am going to say now and i think we can in general see that with the abysmal performance of the commentaries those skills haven't actually been very much used or the pretense of them hasn't been very much use anyway because i think it's really important several of you have been asking about history the first thing you do when you tackle a major question is to try to determine its nature what are we going to be talking about are we going to be talking about as a virological problem as an episode of plague as a pandemic ladies and gentlemen if we are it will be a singularly boring talk because covid as a pandemic doesn't even rank in the top hundred not even in the top hundred let's have a look very quickly at a few of the real pandemics the great plague of justinian uh in the 6th century which isn't only the plague of the eastern roman empire but is also a plague of sassanid persia is arguably the turning point in the history from the ancient world to the middle ages because it is that plague more than anything else which weakens the two great powers on either side of the euphrates and which leads to the fall of the mediterranean to islam right that's what one plague does the black death perhaps kills well if you look at 15th century england the population of uh sorry 14th century england the population of 14th century england is probably pushing four million it may actually be more the population of tuda england to begin with is about two and a half over 50 years the population roughly halves that's a real pandemic again if you look at something that we always forget about because we're so busy about abusing the english of the british if you look at the impact of spanish colonization on south america populations more than half in the inca and aztec empires under the impact of disease and social dislocation we all know about 1665 the spanish flu so what have we actually been through why is it worth having this evening why is it worth talking about the last year why would i in fact say that 2020 represents the end of the long 20th century the 20th century begins with the first world war it ends with covid right that would be my view of of why do i make a claim of that magnitude i do because what is unique about covid is not the pandemic it is the reaction to the pandemic never before in reaction to disease has there been anything like it on the scale clearly they've been low there were local lockdowns the actual use of the word quarantined quarantine which incidentally of course comes from jesus's 40 days in the wilderness the actual origin of the thing but highly localized highly localized closures of cities villages houses the houses of the infected of course were regular responses to put to play whether voluntary or or by compulsion but never before have entire cities on the scale of modern mega cities countries continents the entire world economy effectively shut itself in down in response to disease the dislocations to everyday life in britain for example in the second world war are trivial compared with the ones that have been imposed on us in the last 12 months now why this i suppose uh revealing my hand here why has there been this absolutely staggering disproportion between the problem the very mini pandemic the equivalent i mean i mean if you actually look at excess deaths it barely looks as a bad bad winter's flu right why the scale of response well it seems to me that there are two ways as always in history in which one can tackle this you can title it first whatever classic when you're doing your tripos question long-term and short-term answers let's begin with the short term um the short term i mean i had a sort of ringside view of this um can i ask you all to cast your minds back to the second week of march in 2020 this is the weekend that began on very appropriately friday the 13th um saturday the 14th and sunday the 15th that friday i was in london and what turned out to be either the the last or the next to the last performance at covent garden it was already clear something had gone wrong because it was a it should have been a sellout performance and there were gaps in the auditorium you'll all be delighted to know bearing in mind our imprisonment uh over the course of the last 12 months that the opera was fidelia which of course is the opera about imprisonment um the following day it became clear to me as i was having lunch and talking to friends in the gilbert scottish and pancras that i needed to get out of london whilst i still could what happened that weekend is a story of absolutely classic government panic the explanation that of what happened here and i think throughout the west is that we simply panicked and we've then seen the sustained response to panic which is to try to pretend that you didn't panic what were the elements of the panic at that weekend well the first was of course what have been going on especially in italy and here again one of the things that's most striking about this event uh the the the response to the lockdown response to the pandemic is how imitative it is across borders that countries and leaders have been positively imitating each other and it's it's been it's been like the behavior of chimpanzees or or infants in the playground one sucks the lolly and then spits it out and another sucks a lolly and spits it out further um that sort of thing and um the the key to the events of that weekend were first what had happened in italy and this particularly the scenes of the living and the dead mingled on the floor the corridor floors of hospitals um the the second thing that happened was that suddenly uh between the saturday and the sunday although the figures were trivial i think it was 20 or 30 deaths on a national basis they doubled so the actual numbers of deaths doubled next was uh the usually friendly intervention of president macron uh who having locked down in france threatened to close the frontier if we didn't do so too and then finally at the beginning of the following week we had the usual measured and carefully judged and immaculately researched and perfect mathematics of a contribution from professor neil ferguson of course i don't mean the great historian i mean the rubbish statistician uh pretend epidemiologist who i don't know i don't i'm sure need to remind you it was responsible for the complete misjudgment of bse the even more scandalous scenes of the burning of multiple carcasses of of of cattle i still remember the stink when i was filming at thornbury um it was it was like in india um [Laughter] around thornbury uh with the foot and mouth and so on he was the one who came up with the prediction of half a million deaths and if you look at all of those things and you combine it with something else which is absolutely and utterly fundamental it is the tourist decision under johnson to make themselves the party of the nhs and the result has been that the from being the party of the nhs they have become the slave of the nhs we've seen these astonishing scenes in which we are actually governed by a coven of doctors and the these bizarre scenes you will remember the wonderful phrase of churchill whom johnson affects occasionally to emulate and to even to know a little bit about the wonderful statement of churchill who had regal scientists who was in the habit of dining them at checkers throughout the 30s and his famous prophet whatever and actually had a very considerable understanding of the natural sciences church has this wonderful phrase you want scientists on tap but not on top we have had them on top with ups and going public and in a fashion which i think is is disgraceful so these are the sort of short-term things and i think in many ways i think this this absurd slogan i mean can you imagine this sillier slogan protect the nhs isn't the nhs supposed to be there to protect us we already pay 120 billion a year for the damn thing um the the idea that it's some delicate flower that requires protection and is an is or should be uh you know beyond belief preposterous so that's the short term you know were you doing your essay what is the longer term why didn't we do this before why didn't we do this with hong kong why didn't we do it with spanish food well first of all we couldn't that seems to me to be very important and the uh the economy would simply have completely collapsed um there are enablers and obviously they take the form essentially of what we're using at the moment which i shall talk about at length but i'd like to postpone that um but let's look now at the more specific enablers the changes of attitude even from hong kong flew to us what has happened well i would like to list three or four things the first is sentimentalization otherwise known as dianification the extraordinary shift in public discourse from 1997 onwards i mean i played a large part in the coverage of diana which is why you see me in the background of those scenes um in in in in you know the queen and whatever it's why i'm there and and uh i was one of the the reason i one of the reasons i was so prominent on the day of diana's death was that i was the only commentator actually fully clothed and wearing trousers and everybody everybody else was half naked so i was much more flexible in actually being moved from studio to studio but one of my favorite memories as i was being moved from studio to studio it was in a taxi and um the taxi driver and i shall bleep myself here um because it's terribly terribly rude the taxi driver said to me what the do you think is going on said well there's been this terrible tragedy that um i got my daughter this morning who got client eyes out and i said to her what is up and she said oh dad dad dad and he said to her oh shut up um she said he said she said during the walk sort of getting crossed and crossed with each other and finally and he said to her why are you crying like this there hasn't been a death in the family and she looked at her father and she said oh yes the house and it's this false identity emotionless thing what i call emotional incontinence um which has become you know the stiff upper lip is dissolved in the acid of diana's death it died with the teddy bears and the rotting flowers around the gates of kensington palace and this seems to me to be really very seriously important and um and of course hugely exacerbated by the social media and so on the second thing is a complete shift of attitude to death death is no longer the ordinary conclusion of the human condition death is an outrage i mean we've been having this none of it here is well few few of us here are chickens and but this absurd business that the death of a 92 year old with dementia and emphysema is a tragedy you know who had been dumped in the care home because nobody wanted to look after him and it is completely preposterous but we have decided and of course this is the result of the collapse of religious belief um it's the result of of the uh the notion that only this life matters but we have decided that every death is an outrage with so we need counselling can you imagine if you'd need the counseling of the second world war um can you imagine what the home front might have looked like anyway and then finally i think so we can summarize that quickly so we've got sentimentalism and then we've got this ex extraordinary notion beautifully summarized again in one of my favorite quotes that americans think it is a natural right to die in a state of perfect health so the the absurd solutions that we've got ourselves into with life and death and decline of religious belief and so on and then finally i think and this is this is this is utterly and absolutely fundamental it is the ideological illiteracy of our leaders the what we did with lockdown following italy and so on was to adopt a solution to a problem which is a wholly disproportionate and secondly as my friend lord sampson has been repeatedly saying completely in contravention of all the traditions and foundations of our own society and that is the product of the ideological illiteracy especially of right-wing politicians which is why the right having won economically is steadily lost in all other important areas now the i think i could summarize this very quickly because i'm coming to the end of my allotted stretch by saying we caught a chinese virus we're at the risk of well we adopted chinese solutions and we're at the risk of finishing up with the chinese society and the great enablers of this of course is what we're doing now none of it could have happened without the web and it it both enabled it to happen and it has also provided a machinery of compulsion what is quite extraordinary is with the hysteria of both the social media and commentators like piers morgan the government has people be constantly clamoring at the government not to let us out but to lock us up and it is completely extraordinary situation but that's what they've been doing now the likely results of this are what the first of course is that we have got as it were effective socialism uh the that that and this is clearly very much the case in the second world war we have a complete takeover of the economy we have discovered i think catastrophically that mr corbyn's magic monetary was gravely underestimated by mr corbyn there are apparently unlimited supplies of money we have also discovered that people like being controlled now if that's not chinese socialism i really don't know what is um and this this seems to me to be utterly catastrophic um because the only little reason um you sir at the beginning we're talking about our history and the respect occasionally that the chinese as a rising empire might feel for some well have an empire that fell and has risen again that they might feel for a sunset empire as the thing that distinguished us from china why did china fall this vast vast country remember china is still at the end of the 18th century the world's largest manufacturing power can we just get our heads around that and why does it fall it falls because of its failure to innovate i don't know how many of you saw the wonderful uh first emperor exhibition i was completely bored with all the chinese soldiers but i was totally fascinated by the first emperor's chariot the first emperor's chariot is more sophisticated in its springing than anything that the western world was capable of producing until 1820 but they continue making the damn thing and they continue making it until 1920. so ours is a unique civilization i mean the west is a unique civilization and england especially is the cutting edge of it because of constant change and innovation change in innovation depends on minorities it depends upon dissent it depends upon why people canceled me those who dare to speak out i am the product of many generations of quakers although i rep i found quakerism and it's in its final sentimental form in which the holy spirit invariably spoke with the voice of a guardian editorial detestable um the tradition of descent is a noble one and a great one and then finally of course if we combine that which of course will totally destroy any prospect of ours as a functioning economy and we have no economy of scale we don't have these highly dexterous obedient populations of the far east and so on and the final disaster i think is the unmitigated instrument that we're using now virtual reality and i will stop at this point virtual reality is plato's cave it is the trap for the fool it is the means for control it is how the chinese society will actually be managed over to you all thank you very much that was brilliant i will just read a question from a member stephen gray who couldn't make it so and then i will hand over to bernard for the rest of the questions historically pandemics have attempt have attenuated the reality of the inequalities between and within countries this one is no different have the breton woods institutions brackets which were not around in previous in previous pandemics failed in the delivery of their social contract in reducing these equalities question mark if so what do they need to do differently in future to reduce these inequalities question mark finish of question uh here i'm afraid i'm going to be very naughty and i'm going to reject am i audible yes yeah i'm going to reject completely the premise of the question i do not think that this pandemic because it's not a particularly important pandemic is that any form of equality at all on the contrary it has wildly exacerbated inequalities which is because of course it's been managed as economically and and of course shut down i mean i go up and see my delight my my my lovely sister-in-law and her family and she is a city girl they've got money coming out of their ears because of course she no longer needs to catch the boring train peterborough uh she can settle down in her very large carefully adapted house where they've just converted the coach house because the children did get a little bit annoying even though they were being managed by their beautifully organized public and prep schools and they are absolutely fine ordinary people that needed to go out to work those who worked in hospitality those who worked in travel those like me who did public lecturing you saw your income fall completely off a cliff and similarly of course the the whole gap between countries that have got the resources like us at least can beg and borrow them and those who don't in the face of this one sees which is why we're talking about sort of donations of of doses of vaccines so i'm afraid i i completely reject the premise of the question because this was not a pandemic it's a gigantic economic and it's a gigantic interference in the structure of economy and society which has completely opposite effect sorry brilliant i will now mute myself and leave all the other questions to bernard where's bernhard gone can you hear me i can now yes i need to see you yes well uh first of all thank you so much indeed and i'm pleased that um you came with a fight with a crate from churchill um because i believe that his words um the further back you go the further forward you can see are so true and if i may ask my question is my sort of meager effort to try and put this pandemic into context and it's been rather overshaded by your brilliant efforts air pollution and our food choices are thought to be the two main causes of premature deaths each year what you believe will be done to improve air quality especially indoor air quality and to encourage regenerative biodiverse agricultural development worldwide the problem of course is that those are noble aims but we are now in immediate crises an immediate crisis um particularly in this country you have a gigantic tension between last year the general election of last year saw the most important political realignment since the death of the liberal party um you saw in fact a revival of disraelian conservatism with the enormous importance of the of the former manufacturing areas in the north of england and ladies and gentlemen somebody who comes from there let me tell you air quality does not rank very high in the order of problems that the north would like addressed and um the the you know the uh you see it vividly with the whole argument about the the the co-pit uh in cumbria to enable the production of steel we are going to see repeated tensions here and again um the kind of you know lord debden selwyn gummer of the hamburger that was and the whole approach of his committee seems to me to be one that has as a real element of either naivete or occasionally it looks like gross sectarian self-interest because of course our cutting back of emissions in britain especially but the west in generally has been bought because we have exported our dirty manufacturer to china and india and again one of the things that you know trump um did and clearly biden is continuing to do is is to explore some of the extraordinary international disparities that were created by that and our great challenge now in the wake of this is going to be to revive non-graduate employment and this is the supreme challenge and um unless all the things that we talk about with clean air biodiversity and all the rest of it can be harnessed to that and can become a genuine and economically properly economically functioning and not just a a vast sargasso sea and sink subsidy unless they can actually work to give decent well-paying jobs to a much wider sector of society than have had them in the you know the the sort of city slicker economy of the 90s uh through through to covid um a the conservatives will not be returned um again uh i think probably ever um and b uh we as a country uh will face i think serious political unrest and perhaps actually real unrest so and so i i do think it's important that we create what i mean um that we cross over here and and and and come out of the world of the ideal and look at the actual world of the practical which is what i tried to do in those that short-term weekend and when you know when i looked at that march weekend and that answer was very much designed to do something similar well thank you very much indeed i'm so pleased that you mentioned non-graduate employment because i'm a non-graduate sorry this wasn't sucking up i didn't know you know i did so badly at school that i uh um but we won't get that but we've got a question now from um mr david ward um is david with us would you like to answer the question or does he want me good good evening can you hear me yes very clearly thank you um well good good evening in 1957 the asian flu struck and the uk population including my father took to their beds they worked their way through the crisis or be the flu variant continue to be transmitted until 1968. i'll just welcome your insight into our government's respective responses in 1957 and 20 20 21 and the uk population's mindset back in 1957 as compared to the current current day and finally what key message should our government the uk population take away host this 2020-21 covid crisis well actually in a sense the whole of my talk i think was an answer to your question um wasn't it i mean what i was talking about was effectively what has changed from the 1950s to now and i highlighted sentimentalism i highlighted the decline of religious belief i highlighted ideological uh illiteracy the the web and and everything else um i mean the plain the plain truth is of course um that the the the the difference is all between 57 and now is all of those things right the world of 57 i mean i was 12. the world of 57 in retrospect was not very different from edwardian england really wasn't um you'd you were you know antibiotics were just really coming on stream you just got the full operation of the salk vaccine i know because i got polio before it before it was actually functioning and the nhs was still in its infancy we were in a post-rationing society and and and and all of those things and and and the transformation over the course of the 60 years from then to now is simply gigantic the world of consumerism the web of sentimentality and people who are just not used to putting up with things but remember it was said a very long time ago before any of the things that i've been talking about um and i think it's it's the very one of the greatest statements that that's ever made which is by benjamin franklin the sacrifice of freedom for a little um what is the word i want for a little security and what we've done is the most gigantic illustration of that sacrifice in the name of a holy false security because i think it is a holy false security we have thrown away the freedoms that cost us a thousand years from the norm on conquest the lesson that we should be taking away is of the infinite folly of our own society sorry i really do i think there's nothing admirable about okay the science i mean the the actual discovery of the vaccines and whatever is deeply impressive everything else one thinks all right okay well thank you for that we can carry on with the um um the next question and by the way if people want to come back please come back um everyone here is intelligent has views is forceful and i hope somebody at least is outraged my view of what it's worth is i agree with quite a bit what you said i think there's no in 57 there wasn't a fear of death people had come back from the war people understood death people had large families people still died young and i think that's forgotten about now it's not it's not in the it's not in the cultural mindset of the european people absolutely as i said each death is treated as an outrage it's preposterous utterly utterly preposterous but it's it is also the sentimentality i mean dare i say it again the captain tom phenomena i'm afraid 1957 wouldn't have got excited about 100 year old man walking around his garden he really wouldn't you know uh i shall be taken out and shot of course but that i expect that we need to move on if you could sorry um martin barrow hi good evening everybody and david welcome great you can hear me i hope yes i can very clearly david a very very interesting um and uh innovative ideas you expressed um you and i have some common links i i was born in in cumberland and spent early life life there and i also come from a quaker background too so um some columns also are you awkward also i don't think so no oh yeah but coming coming back to covid my question is what the lesson to be learned from all of this that's been going on you know the critical need for what i call tech t-e-c-h that is about teamwork [Music] aberration and harmony across the uk across the world we've got to work together in a much more positive and sensible way so in across governments and with business academia every sector we need to be working for common solutions common way forward and that's something i've been pressing for since march last year the interest in your views on that well forgive me but these are fine words but the reality that you look at is it not completely the opposite look at the impact of the vaccine program on the eu it is every man for himself and every country for itself isn't it um sorry the the moment at the moment again the the the last question the question this is a matter of or has become and has been presented in many ways i think falsely but the way it's been presented is a matter of life and death the fundamental basis of the state of the social contract is the protection of life life liberty and property the classic lockheed formula and the state is the thing that does this and the international institutions or the quasi-international institutions like the eu like the who have performed appallingly but then you expect that because faced with the hard choice you know not just the common agricultural policy which i've always said is just you know german reparations to france and uh the but but faced with the hard reality of which population is going to benefit us a you we choose us and you know we do need we do need a kick i know these are painful things to say but one of the things that i've been most struck by is and why trump was regarded one of i mean trump was monstrous but one of the the points with trump like a court jester he sometimes spoke the truth and we have a public and international discourse which consists of high-minded lies um and you know until we really grasp this we are we are mere putty in the hands of the chinese or putin who understand our lives who understand our bad faith who understand our dishonesty who understand our double speak and exploit it with genius and the whole the whole the whole arguments about free trade and globalization are fundamentally why china is where it is now we reduced tariffs and we killed our own industry and we all decided we wanted cheap t-shirts and bugger the north of england or microchip and my my family used to make cotton and and so on and and and we use fine words but we don't really believe them i don't think they correspond sorry thank you well thank you martin if i could just uh go on to uh next question from ronald lehmann is ronald with us yes hello thank you so much um well tonight has certainly been shock and awe um i've got to say i don't agree with everything that you've said tonight but it's certainly been very powerful my question is how might you encourage the next generation of aspiring historians um you can imagine that there are many parents uh david who when their sons and daughters come home and say i'm going to study history roll their eyes there's no career in that well how do i encourage people to be interested in history well when i'm allowed to by doing what i've just done um that when i was a sixth former my best subjects were all the natural sciences um and that was against people who went on to win open scholarships in the natural sciences of cambridge the reason that i didn't do them was that i wasn't a natural mathematician and i had the again the great good fortune that the two people who went on to um two scholarships that came into one of them to scholarship another i think to an exhibition in the natural sciences at cambridge were both brilliant natural mathematicians they could see numbers hear numbers small numbers i could never do that but i could do it with words um but for me history was the nearest subject to physics auto astronomy where you're using evidence and argument and the rigorous testing of propositions and so on um to do what we are born to do as human beings human beings above all are pattern making animals pattern creating animals and history is one of the one of the greatest examples of the multiple layer of pattern making and i believe it is essential to all proper discourse i think it is and i'm very old-fashioned here i believe history is actually the foundation of um a proper politics i'm a complete burkian um i believe that the that our ideas our values uh i don't believe in doctrines of universal human rights um jeremy bentham described universal human rights brilliantly as nonsense on stilts they always have been nonsense on stilts the whole notion of right and wrong moral morality of politics is a creation of history but it's a creation of very particular human histories the histories of our own countries um and and and this seems to me to be of absolutely fundamental importance i also believe in britain that we are in many ways uniquely well placed the very fact that the foundation of english is in fact a post-colonial a post-colonial literature and we go on with all the fashionable phrases about postcolonial this and postcolonial that we're a completely post-colonial society we are the result of the norman conquest um and the fact that we are this highly successful adaptation um uh uh uh of of two languages the fusion of french and and anglo-saxon with a powerful admixture of greek and latin um is why we don't make the mistakes of the french it's why we don't have academies it's why we don't um insist on on on pure ly season it's why we can even begin to uh semi-accommodate islam and so on so these this is what history this is what for me history is it's both a wonderful intellectual voyage it's immense fun and it is also utterly fundamental to the human particularly political experience thank you for that thank you um the next question uh is from carl hunter uh and it's very appropriate you just mentioned us being in a post-colonial society evening berlin evening dr starkey lovely to see you and thank you for this lovely talk dr stark if if building on ronald's uh last question really if i if one was to arrange in a very easy form the the distinguishing values of the united kingdom you know you might you might say democracy institutions rule of law um society and family public service free trade free markets regulated of course but would you would you i would put history as one of those eight distinguishing values for our country and i know that touches on ronald's question but i wonder whether you would see it as not only a national value but a conservative one as well oh absolutely i mean it is conservative is the proper relationship of past and present that's what it is and future i mean this is this is burke's great phrase you know if there is a social contract it's a contract of past present and future that's exactly what it is which is why i'm so delighted that oliver dowden has actually started to waken up a little bit uh in this area and and and the the we are a historic culture and again are um uh uh when when i was kindly introduced at the very beginning and china is a historic culture too except it had the cultural revolution and came very near to destroying itself we could be doing something of the same sort of thing with the work revolution and certainly the left actually aimed that to happen but at the moment in many ways the people who are protecting us against ourselves are the chinese why are they sending their children to our public schools because they recognize a cultural entrenchment they recognize patterns of behavior see i think that one of the strongest selling points that we have is actually our society why do people want to come to london it's not simply because they can money launder it's not simply because there are rather nice houses it's the actual we invented an agreeable way of living the london season is the most agreeable way you could possibly spend your time on god's earth which is why you know italians and french and all the rest of it do this rather than a longshot do this rather desperate um over manicured imitation of it and and again again the terrible things are happening at eaton and the whole and by the way i'm a yobby grammar school boy um but but the whole way the the properly the public school and and indeed the whole patterns of our very very odd very open elite operate these are all historically conditioned and but they're huge selling points i mean nobody comes to britain i'm sorry to admire the nhs they really don't nobody comes to britain to admire labour party social housing they really don't nobody comes to admire our motorways they really don't just bernard am i allowed just to ask a supplementary or not that's a chairman's prerogative exactly now bernie can i ask a quick supplementary excuse me we've got good five minutes okay dr starkey in that case would you also agree that a definition for a politician is the ability to educate and lead and that the frailty of their historical understanding reveals sometimes that they're you know they're less than capable forms of that education and leadership of the of the nation as a whole you see i think this is true in general but i think it's equally catastrophic with our civil service the very senior levels of the civil service i mean um you know there's there's there's this hagiographic biography of course by his wife of jeremy haywood do you know what jeremy haywood said when he was taken to see um at the stop art play rosencrantz and guildenstern no i don't understand this i've never seen hamlet in you again you look at the the most catastrophic government is is blair's government because it was you know a year one government it was the notion that that history is a bad idea and all the changes that were made the absurd asymmetric devolution the destruction of the office of lord chancellor the creation of the supreme court every one of them because it was not simply unhistorical but anti-historical the only ground for union between england and scotland is a political one it's a common parliament that was what 1707 is about you deliberately leave scotland in 1707 with all the other lineaments of national identity you leave it with a separate church you leave it with a separate currency assuming that you introduced parity with sterling you won't leave it with a separate educational system you leave it with a separate heraldry a separate court um the only union was parliament and then you rupture that and you create a thing called the scottish parliament again you call it a parliament a parliament in english means one thing it means the assembly of a sovereign people and and that's a product of gross historical illiteracy thank you we must move on um rosamund bloomfield smith yes thank you um dr starkey um fascinating talk which has veered towards uh china chinese solutions chinese problems uh the dexterous populations of the far east rather nice phrase i thought i'm quite good at phrases happy phrase which i have written down um but i wonder if you'd like to say something that the preoccupation with the pandemic has completely reduced the focus on the huge geopolitical issue of our day which is the rebalancing of power economic and political power between the far east and the west particularly uh china and the west how far and in what ways do you see that rebalancing as likely to be influenced by the economic upheaval caused by the pandemic well of course we've committed economic suicide i mean you actually look at china china has flourished in the pandemic china can do there's a china can do lockdown it's why you have that sort of society i mean and china doesn't do a sort of pissy little lockdown of the kind of thing that we do with a mild slap wrist you know you're actually locked up if you try to get out i think you're probably shot right now this is why it works um we we do it half measures and at the same time because you do it half measures it has grotesque knock-on effects i mean china china is the i think that somebody will have to think the figures at their fingertips i'm sure the chinese economy has been growing by just less than was it eight percent this year i mean the real the real loss of iron we talk of a nice friendly sort of manageable figure of 20 i think it's much lost i think it's much much bigger and you know the the whole economic model of the city of london i don't think the city of london will requ you know i don't mean the city city necessarily in the financial sense but the broader model of london such as i've known it since the big bang is manifestly dead and what that's going to lead to god alone knows but i mean in other words this is we're really going right back to my answer to the first question i think that what what has happened our mismanagement because i think it's the scandalous mismanagement has enormously exacerbated the problems we had beforehand um and and has hugely increased the disparity between china and the west and the what china is going to do with its strength is a very open question one of my closest friends who is very interested in all of this thinks that we're going to see much of its economic activity now being directed specifically into the enhancement of military and naval power and again with the scales of their populations and all the rest of it they're not frightened of war well thank you um yeah we were right on 1855 i don't know if we've got time for one more question so would that be um possible we got one question from brian weller um could we actually aleister wilson put up his hand earlier okay could we have the two questions quickly together maybe and and then we could wrap up so should we go to aleister first because he he raised and then bran and then we must wrap up yeah yeah that's kind thanks melissa and thank you dr dr starkey for the speech i just wondered whether you had any thoughts on

Channel: Foreign Council

Views: 30,854

Keywords:

Id: nB_ehhV3amk

Length: 54min 28sec (3268 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 22 2021