David Starkey: Disraeli: The Great Conservative

[Music] hello and welcome to another members question and answer session uh today i would like to answer a question um sort of statement to begin with and then a question from joseph matthews joseph begins hello david the politics of much of the 19th century were dominated by two men benjamin israeli and william gladstone both men are well known to have possessed a sharp dislike for each other but both men are remembered today for doing a great deal for our country this is the question in your opinion which of these two political giants left the better impact on the united kingdom today and what you see is their legacy interesting joseph that question takes me to the heart of many of the issues that i'm thinking about now as part of our present political crisis because i i've been saying i think the crisis that's developed from the russian attack uh on the ukraine brings into focus the whole crisis of the west of the uh embittered self-hatred of an important section of the elites of the west of the fractured state of what we thought was this this rubis world this world of a rule-based system of international relations as supposedly established in 1945 uh with the foundation of the united nations the universal declaration of human rights and so on which manifestly was not true then became even less true uh in the in the following cold war and really although we persuaded ourselves that 1989 or these people like francis fukuyama persuaded ourselves that the west had won the values of the west of liberalism at one in 1989 it's perfectly clear now that they hadn't uh and the the crisis that we're in at the moment should force us to revalue all of these assumptions now there's a very long way of saying that i think the israeli on the one hand and gladstone on the other do indeed as joseph said have immensely powerful legacies that really represent the opposite sides of the west at the moment that represent i would argue the bad which is going to be rather difficult to register liberalism and the good conservatism now this of course involves gladstone is the liberal or he rather he begins as a high tory and then the whole of his life it's rather odd his life is a shift in the opposite direction here is somebody intensely conservative and very high church uh very uh very high tory as a young man moving steadily to the left as he gets older rather than the conventional shift of going from being very left when you're young you're young to the further right you go the more senile you get as as the parody goes now to suggest that gladstone's legacy is a doubtful one i hope we'll concern and worry because gladstone of course has infinitely the higher moral reputation than the israelite israeli is seen as was seen at the time as flamboyant a charlatan of doubtful moral character as a gross flatterer of the monarchy and so on as well of course as the taint very typical of the 19th century of anti-semitism that hung around him as the son of a converted jew and himself of course although a nominal christian and a passionate assertive of the superiority of the jewish race the sephardic jewish race and there's the the famous incident uh where he is denounced by by by some petty mp um and you know this proud boasts that his his ancestors were um priests in the temple of solomon when the right honorable gentleman's were naked peasants you know wearing furs or whatever it was magnificent priests in the temple of solomon yeah the charlatan the flamboyant immensely flamboyant in dress and and so on uh the famous his inaugural speech in the house of commons which is a huge fancy waistcoat or whatever he's laughed down by the house of commons that we talk about the nastiness of modern politics here is somebody's maiden speech he's forced to sit down by mockery but before he does so he says but you will hear me and he has that indomitable confidence he survives devon said an early cancellation like some other people survive and have survived later once but gladstone in contrast is this man vast moral stature which shows very clearly at the time of his death he is the first statesman uh i suppose um who had not not had major military involvement to be given a grand lying in state in westminster abbey uh one of the people who was his pallbearer uh of the coffin to the lying in state was no less than the prince of wales than than albert bertie the prince of wales who will shortly become after the death of victoria king as edward vii victoria of course hated gladstone she adored israeli and she was appalled at her son acting this pallbearer to the grand old man whom she thought and here she shared very much the view of of the israeli it was a tiresome and self-righteous windbag intoxicated as as israeli said with his own verbosity but gladstone have this vast high moral reputation i'm suggesting not that it's not deserved but the problems of politicians who flaunt morality and see morality as the foundation of politics are themselves very great i don't like they were the pure politician the politician who is so convinced of his own self-righteousness modern example will be somebody and i who think really is very very much in the direct line of descent from gladstone would be keir starmer so was my problem with gladstone well and this again is all embedded in joseph's question i think gladstone is the key figure who shapes the modern liberal party and the liberal aspect to the successor party to the liberal party which is of course the labour party look at the key elements particularly and in the latter part of of of gladstone's career what you see you see him well isn't it striking is one of the earliest advocates of what we could call liberal interventionism this is a result of the turkish massacres in bulgaria in 1876 and gladstone mounts this enormous campaign that the turks are they've they're killed nowadays it sounds really rather small to uh in comparison with the horrors that we witnessed in the 20th century where deaths are in the millions and tens of millions the bulgarian atrocities are estimated at about seventeen and a half thousand but here is gladstone on the start these vast speeches the turks and then he lists you know the the the the satraps the emirs all the various ranks of of turkish society uh from from the sultan at dharmas must be driven out from the balkans bag and baggage the whole origins of modern interventionism and indeed eventually the turks were driven out from the balkans but look at the mess that was left behind look at the mess that has been left behind by our modern interventions in the balkans the what was seen as so so important kind of triumph of the values of the west under clinton uh with the with the interventions in bosnia and so on these are these are pseudo states that were created that depend absolutely on eu subsidies that are utterly unself-sustainable anyway we won't go on about that so liberal interventionism which i regard as one of the absolute catastrophes of the 20th century in the 21st century we can see gladstone as the originator of it because of course the liberalism that gladstone increasingly comes to embody is that liberalism of universalism of a belief in fundamentally that we are all one not only in the sight of god but are all properly equal that fundamentally therefore it is a common human nature a common desire for what used to be thought of in those days as the universe universal liberal values they've been adopted a lot and adapted and of life liberty and property and gladstone along with all those other liberals sees those as things that should be universally available to all peoples in all places of course and this again is is very important gladstone is perfectly clear and is very powerfully clear about notions of of of identity of national identity he is seeing the turks as a wicked empire imposing the values of an alien empire indeed of an alien religion of islam on christian populations with different languages different histories all of which demand recognition so liberal interventionism and the other again strikingly modern thing about gladstone's later years is his passionate advocacy of irish home rule because of course the irish question is one of the great issues of late victorian politics with the moment at which terrorism is introduced into mainland britain and also because of the powerful irish representation in the house of commons in those days there was no irish parliament a powerful representation in the westminster parliament extraordinary disruption of the life and functioning of the westminster parliament gladstone advocates home rule that's to say and a united ireland that would once again be given its own parliament and will be governed under a viceroy or governor general by its own elected parliament with its own separate politics this again is is generally speaking and i see why uh seen as a an impressively imaginative solution to an otherwise intractable problem which of course comes up hard against a kind of conservative centralism belief in the power of the british empire with with the empire as it were over the british isles at its core and also of course against an irish protestantism and particularly the hardline irish protesters and protestantism let me get my tongue around that of ulster on the other hand you see i think you can see gladstone's campaign as the first step which finishes up with the blair government again hooked on the whole business of liberal interventionism and the blair government's catastrophic decisions uh not simply to recognize the separate parliaments which have been created eventually in north and south island but to give separate parliaments to scotland and the pseudo parliament actually call it to parliament to scotland and pseudo parliament the senate uh to wales now the which of course had never been a state had never had a legislative assembly and the problem with this is it is the fundamental problem the key element of britain the act of union of 1707 between england and scotland was purely a parliamentary union when the scots go on the scott nats go on about english colonization english conquest and whatever this is total rubbish the act of union of 1707 absolutely preserves every form of scottish identity a par and separate nationhood indeed apart from the legislative apart from parliament scotland in 1707 preserves its own separate church the the the calvinist the calvinistic church and indeed the monarch changes religion as he or she crosses the border um from from being from being the the supreme governor of the of the anglican church to a very much order status and within uh within the presbyterian tradition of scotland you preserve so you preserve your own established religion you preserve your separate educational system with the scottish universities and separate scottish school system indeed one of my favorite memories and these are actually entrenched in the act of union one of my favorite memories is a story told my dad my dear old now longer dead friend conrad russell um who became an ambitious liberal politician again uh as in when he sat in the lords as an hereditary peer and he was the youngest son of bertrand russell earl russell and when he was in the lords and margaret thatcher as part of her purge of the universities in the in the 1980s was talking about closing as a kind of a kind of symbol of punishment of the inadequacies of the universities she was talking i think it was closing down the university of aberdeen and um conrad rose in the lords and you know asked did the right honourable lady in the other place know that in order to close down the university of aberdeen there was one slight problem she would first of all have to repeal the act of union between england and scotland or at least amended a wonderful intervention so a separate educational system of course a separate legal system scottish law is different it has its its own structures at every level um a separate legal system the right of scottish banks to issue their own coins and notes and finally even there's a separate scottish court there's a scottish structure of heraldry and so so all of that identity survives only the parliaments are united so when blair sets up a separate parliament for scotland he has already i think sold the pass his idea was in doing this he thought he was going to scupper the scottish nationalists and ensure donald duer the father of the nation the then leader of the labour party in scotland persuaded him that if he gave he set up the scottish parliament he would first of all dish the gnats and put the uh the labour party in scotland for yet another in power in scotland for yet another century in fact we know exactly the opposite happened the labour party has been eliminated and a dreadful fiefdom one party state headed by nicolas sturgeon has been created in scotland well you can see i would argue um william gladstone as the grandfather of that william gladstone's liberalism is the direct grandparent of the radical leveling universalizing liberalism of the blair government the belief in short in year zero so that's gladstone i think a deeply debatable uh inheritance and in most ways a profoundly harmful impact on 20th century politics now now let's turn to the charlatan let's turn to the flamboyant wonderful disreally why am i so keen on just ready i'm keen because of what he did it seems to me i've suggested that gladstone is the real inventor of not so much a party because of course the liberal party effectively extinguished itself as a serious political force and when it's its electoral base is taken over by the labor party uh in the years immediately after the first world war but he says gladstone is that particular tendency in politics as i said his direct heir complete with the preachiness the self-righteousness the reckless interventions in the constitution the even more reckless interventions abroad in the name of freedom liberty and all the rest of it is blair um that if you want to see gladstone's uh it is bl that's good gladstone's air it is blair right who is the israelis well i suppose i'm not sure i'm really advancing my argument here i would have to say that israel is boris johnson you're all going to say god what is this man on about let me try and explain um the two of them do actually have rather a lot in common you know the flamboyance the uh exis excessively luxuriant use of language and all this and the fact that they're both of them essentially literary men the israeli was a novelist brilliant very odd novelist um and an artist a speculative thinker and boris is is operating at a much lower level but it's very much that same type of thing but israeli in sharp contrast with boris actually creates genuinely i think creates what do i see israeli is actually creating i think israeli creates first the modern machinery well put it simply this really creates the modern conservative party which unit is an astonishing achievement in itself because it is the most successful electoral machine in the west that's to say the most successful electoral machine in the world right in representative democracy so he creates a conservative party so he creates the actual machinery of the conservative party he creates or recreates its electoral base which enables it to survive in democracy and then secondly this is even so he creates political machinery and that's very important thing to do but the second thing that he does i think he creates a plausible intellectual basis for a conservatism that can actually sit with a modern country because britain was the most modern country britain england but but here of course scotland very much active from from union with the enlightenment and the extraordinary rapid advance of industrialization in scotland in 19th century britain is the world's first modern country and it again this is something we can well i'm going to be talking about a lot later it imposes that modernity on the world in other words the british empire is the essential vehicle of globalization really is as simple as that but so but but a modern country a super modern country the most modern country in the world does present a paradox doesn't it in that the party which is the most successful party in governing that super modern country calls itself and more or less thinks to itself and even arguably is a conservative party and it is the israeli i would argue who comes up with a set of ideas a formulae but more genuinely real ideas which enable you to bridge that gap between a conservatism and modernity in other words the israeli conservative party is not the party of continental reaction anything but it's a conservative party a modern conservative party on a modern electoral base for a super modern state right let's just go back and explore those points again but i'm going to be going over them much more fully uh in later videos but let's just look the conservative party after the reform act of 1832 which of course it had fought bitterly um with to begin with very much the support of the king um uh um william iv which it fought bitterly but eventually the king wisely conceded and and the the reform act was brought in over the dead body very nearly the dead body of the tory party and the tory party after 1832 seemed effectively dead as a serious force and it of course also split over the whole issue of free trade under robert peale and and the tories are fundamentally out of serious government for the next 40 40 30 40 years the mid victorian period is a period of the liberal heyday of of the virtually a liberal hegemony in politics why is this it is because the 1832 act created an essentially middle-class elected middle-class essentially urban essentially educated electorate in other words the kind of people who now we would say pretty straightforwardly are the basis of woke um the professions the universities the important part of the church non-conformity industry and all of that all of that lot so you can see why the fate of the conservative party seems pretty desperate it's israeli who has the courage in 1867 to rescue it because he does something that stood previous approaches to the basis of conservatism which was seen as the kind of squierarchy of the countryside the aristocracy the established church the the crustier aspects of oxford and cambridge and so on he stands all that on his head because in 1867 israeli does this astonishing thing he brings about a radical broadening of the franchise the 1867 second great reform act of 1867 does what it gives the vote to the skilled working man so suddenly there's this radical increase in the size of the electorate the consequence of that of course is that you really have to invent modern politics at this point you know modern campaigning modern party organization the beginning of the with modern bench mp to the parliamentary party party party whipping the whole business uh of the government's control over the agenda of the house of commons uh through through through through the uh through the the actual rules of the commons all of that develops from very very quickly from the 1867 act but much more than that why does disraeli do it well this really has this wonderful phrase clever wordsmith he says it's dishing the wigs in other words it's pulling the rug from liberalism the liberals professed to believe in you know what we would call democracy but of course the more intelligent liberals like john stuart mill were very clear that there was a problem at what they thought as the ideal man this ideal liberal universe a universal man was of course the id and woman and was of course the ideal liberal universal educated man again the basis work in the universities and so on and and israeli saw that too but whereas people like john stuart mill thought this was a good thing israeli thought it was a bad thing and israeli this again it's this extraordinary imaginative streak in the mountain and one of the when i when i talk about burke i always edmund burke who's my ideal my god in this and i always talk about his imaginativeness i mean he's clearly a brilliant rhetorician an extraordinarily shrewd political analysis but it's this quality of imagination this ability to see things differently and israelis saw things differently the times in its obituary which doesn't always grasp these things and talk to israeli with the 1867 act as having been like a sculptor he looked at the roughhewn block of marble which was the british working class and inside he saw what he saw not this thug that that of con of contemporary fears and i think particularly the kind of fears of the john stewart mill this you know the uneducated the thuggish the crude i mean think you know what the typical remainer thinks of the typical lee voter you get the general sense of john stuart mills view of the uneducated israeli saw not this thug he saw somebody who was rooted who's patriotic who believes in england he would have said england not britain england and of course israeli turned out to be right and he also turned out to be right in this very romantic view that he had and in his in his younger day when he was a reactionary conservative he had this this this vision of the new middle ages he saw that he felt there was an imaginative bond between the lord as it were and the peasant whereas in the middle there was this awkward difficult group of the urban elites and whatever who were basically again both the lord and the peasant it was this really was although victorian politics he was i suppose he he defies class really doesn't he i mean if you if you're the son of a converted jew and whatever but he was in fact really middle class but but he deeply in theory disapproved of particularly the values of the big victorian bourgeoisie and he idolized this supposed relationship between the upper class and the lower class whom he saw as being bound together by what essentially by patriotism by a sense of identity and israeli again famously says no footing around i mean israelis says without a single doubt in the 1872 crystal palace speech the conservative party is a national party or it's nothing so it's this sense of patriotism as binding together the top and the bottom was in the middle well those who believe in liberal universalism these are the somewheres these the the these are the somewheres um [Music] let me get that right the the the the the liberals in the middle uh are the are the are they anywheres those people who feel they can be anywhere these are the people who imagine themselves the citizens of the world one good phrase of theresa may i'm sure it wasn't written by theresa may these are the people who imagine themselves the citizens of the world rather than of a specific country the israeli will have none of that israeli wants people to be rooted properly in their own national tradition so this really comes up i think with an actual electoral basis and it proved to be right um the liberal stranglehold on uh on on on the british political system was broken by the 1867 act and and when the franchise is broadened even further in the 1880s you see in fact the tory party with a very large section of the working class voting for it becoming the naturally dominant party of the later 19th century and of course again israeli the the invention of victoria as empress of india the whole business of jingoism of the playing up of britain's power the idea of empire of the imperial uh and the splendors of britain and so on and it is really giving voice to this full-throated uh this full-throated um nationalism idealization in many ways correct i think of of britain as the greatest country in the world uh unapologetically uh and and eloquently um so israeli comes up with an electoral formula he comes up with a new class basis for conservative politics now think about that all for a moment under the israeli in other words and thanks to what israeli had done with the electoral system great swathes of the new urban centers of the north and in scotland become conservative we all persuaded ourselves that you know the north had never voted for tory until when well until all the red wall seats fell when boris johnson was elected we persuaded ourselves because we looked at a very shortened view of history post thatcher and or yet even its furthest going back to 1945 we thought that all of those areas were naturally labor no there was the tory working man i know very clearly because my own family when i was a young boy growing up my father represented that liberal labor tradition my mother was actually liberal my father was a radical socialist and trade unionist and pacifist all of those things and but my grandfather who lived with us when i was when i was a young boy my grandfather was a solid patriotic working class story he was one of those who had voted for churchill churchill's first seat as a conservative is oldham you know center cotton spinning where my family comes from and my grandfather was so passionately patriotic that even though he was already at the outbreak of the first world war a married man in his 30s with three children and and therefore exempt from from from from conscription he is a volunteer he actually volunteers he doesn't serve at the front but he serves throughout the war and as an army driver even crashes a gustaf car somewhere in kensington gore if i correctly understood his military record but a passionate passionate patriot and that becomes the basis of the tory party and the elect the the electoral coalition but you see that's exactly what is revived in with the collapse of labor in the north and the antecedent collapse of labor in scotland that is exactly what is revived with boris johnson and the where you you have that extraordinary electoral spread from the torres shires to the red wall seats in the north of england unfortunately boris johnson's proved very much less adept at handling the two sides of that electorate to indeed different size of that electorate than was israeli the great problem is of course because of the awkwardness of um full-throated and conservative party is a national party it's nothing against a full-throated display of patriotism in the early 21st century you can see the words not quite being able to form on the lips of most modern politicians the difficulty is of course particularly in britain the vibration of them in the united kingdom the vibration of meaning between england and britain it is a terrible problem it is this the malign legacy of of the union of england and scotland because of course our politics the peculiarity of our politics the glory of our politics is extraordinary 800-year constitution which was strong enough actually to be constantly expanded to take in new social groups didn't have to be torn down that is english the glories of common law they are english scotland as roman law i said it preserved a different legal system and the again the incorporation the the broad basedness of of of religious policy in england as it develops after uh uh in britain as it develops after um 1689 is not scotland it is england and so on and so on and yet there is this modern shyness and the conservatism that is going to have to if it is survive to recover that sense of powerful unapologetic even slightly boastful national identity will have to come to terms with the idea of england i don't think in any way it excludes on the contrary i think and again i will develop this argument much more fully i think the idea of england is one that is astonishingly inclusive and in and in and in a remarkable way and indeed i would argue in a unique way but anyway so whereas whereas as i said that israeli was extraordinarily adept at handling the two sides to the two social science of the cons the conservative electorate that he invents unfortunately boris has proved very much less skilled at that above all because boris is fundamentally and let us face it like most modern politicians boris whatever party label is stuck upon in whatever coloured rosette he wears whatever language he occasionally affects boris is fundamentally liberal and i would reckon really quite a radical one at that israeli then inventing the electoral base and the electoral possibility with his reform act of the modern conservative party he also invents much of the machinery the the whole business of popular intervention of of mass membership party and so on he lays the foundation for that as well as well as i was saying the the the procedural changes in the house of commons that are embodied in the kind of handbook of commons procedure in the skin may and so so the machinery of politics but finally and this is what i really want to drive home what i want to end on boris not ears it's israeli the two really are pretty similar um except israeli is very thin and very angular as opposed to the as opposed to the the the the plump and increasingly portly boris um and israeli is not a womanizer um the uh the other great legacy the central legacy of the israeli is to come up not simply with the name with the conservative party with a political machine with an electoral base but he comes up with a plausible idea of conservatism and the conservatism which as i said at the beginning is sustainable a stretchable is fittable into a super modern society which was that of 19th century britain and particularly 19th century england how does he do it well he confronts the problem quite directly and he says conservatism in a progressive country cannot be about staying still it cannot simply be as for example the tories had tried to be in the debates of the 1832 parliament it cannot simply be the business of saying no we will not change if you're in a progressive society you have to change the question is not whether you change the quest that is taken for granted in a progressive society it is really again this is which i think modern conservatives have to be you have to be far proud of progress you can't be an enemy of modernity if you're a conservative because it is that it is i would argue from the roots of the past from the roots of our past the peculiar roots of of england and britain that modernity has actually sprung so modernity isn't a wicked foreign plant here it is some you know nasty weed which which has grown up in england's green and pleasant land it is the natural product of our soil it is the flowering of our soil and and i'm using deliberately those emotional kind of words it israeli understands this very well so the question is not whether there be change it is what sort of change there should be and israeli puts his finger on it again he's very good at when when a lot of people talk about political ideas they imagine vast tomes lengthy terms of philosophy israelis very good his speech is often inordinately long and extravagant as gladstone speeches that go on for hours during which he consumes god knows how he did it two bottles of brandy there's the famous speech which is given in the free trade hall in manchester how you can stand let alone speak after two bottles of brandy i have no idea what the size of a 19th century bottle of brandy was or indeed what it the proof spirit was but anyway and israeli did that but what israeli comes up with is this neat formula he says the test is what sort of change and he puts it like this if you're a conservative change must correspond to the spirit of your country you it must be with the grain of the historical development and that's exactly what israelis saw himself is doing it's when he's justifying the broadening of the franchise in 1867 what he's saying is we can actually look at the history of britain and i think this history of england parliament is the english bond and see something very remarkable that this is an institution i mean the idea of your constituencies and elections and electorates and a franchise goes right back to the you know the 13th century and and the very origins of the house of commons itself but what israeli sees is that that that notion of the franchise could be steadily widened and widened without destroying the house of commons without destroying the pattern of its constituencies without destroying the party system on the contrary that by incorporating newly powerful social groups into the electorate into the franchise you removed the the need for radical change you removed the need for revolution and revolutionary change and you were able to modernize within the structure existing structures of society and this seems to me to be quite simply true and it is the glory of england and it seems the glory of britain that we have since the 17th century avoided revolution now i know that an awful lot of people on the left think this means that we are terribly fuddy-duddy and we are like the excitement of politics and we don't have a national day because we didn't get our political freedoms in blood and in blood and revolution riot and a separate constitution but actually when you look you know the catastrophe of french politics the the the the absurd number of whatever it is five republics two monarchies and two empires since the french revolution and the whole thing culminating in an electoral struggle between you know a pseudo-napoleon and the kind of revived female version of martial peter what is there to admire whereas what we did we learn very successfully to pour new wine new aspects of the electorate into the old bottles of the parliamentary system and to do so without bursting the bottles and constantly one could argue improving the vintage at the same time as well so that's what he meant by conservative reform you you take the existing institutions and you work with the grain as you make them adapt and shift and be flexible to modernity and what i think is truly astonishing is the extent to which this english constitution because it is that essentially the creation of the decades after magna carta has been able to stretch and to adapt you know through the the great wars of the middle ages through the extraordinary changes of tudor england of the reformation the the vast the the ruptures of civil war which is the only of the 17th century which is the only time that this pattern has actually broken apart and has as has failed to stretch has had to be torn and then had to be repaired very successfully uh repaired and and and and life breathed back into it in the later 17th century and then to adapt through industrialization empire and the loss of empire and still to the present and still working well it's not perfect nothing is perfect this is the problem liberals gladstone moral people want perfection we're imperfect creatures of course our institutions are imperfect too we're not we're not gods and goddesses we're not angels you know we're flawed human beings not where they're better for it but you just need to recognize you should all look in the mirror and look at our spots as well as the pure skin the sweat as well as the high moral aims and ambitions and intellectual creativity and other forms of creativity and so on the blemishes as well as the beauty we're a product of all of those so there is then this this this proper notion of change and then israeli very deliberately contrast that with the liberal notion of change in which you change according to abstract universal principles exactly what i was talking about with gladstone with his you know campaigns for liberal interventionism abroad and devolved legislatures which effectively rupture the united kingdom at home and pointing out that the natural heir is the blair government and the blair government shows you exactly how you do not do reform in the disraelian sense all the blair government's reforms corresponded to these abstract notions of reason and what is reasonable and what are the proper rules in other words they corresponded exactly to what another great thinker condemned it's this notion that of abstract reason that burke i've made already a comparison between burke and israeli in terms of their imaginative grasp at the heart of politics it was exactly what burke identified as the fundamental problem of the french revolution even before it had properly got going he recognized you know that these absurd notions that everything be made you know just take the typical the most uh radical example everything should be according to base 10 so there should be 10 days in the week 10 hours in a day 10 months in the year and so on the the absurdities of of the french reformed calendar of the of the french revolution and he grasped that there is in fact an absolutely direct line from that to the terror to the gelatine in the same way there's an absolutely direct line from the the sort of radical year one which again is a term taken from the french revolution the the year one the year zero the the all history is useless we can have a completely fresh rational start that was precisely the starting point of the blair government and it naturally finishes up in the horrors of the woke revolution exactly the same process has happened and within the french revolution itself and israeli understood that and as again as and burke understood that and again as i said look at what the blair government did i mean let's just take the example of of of of of putting up the separate parliament in scotland we've already discussed that and you you you you do it in a with a kind of naive notion of well uh look at america and there's a kind of federal constitution you've got all these separate states and you've then got a separate uh legislature a as a separate federal legislature uh in washington and so on well why can't we do something similar totally ignoring the root fact that the only basis of the act of union the only thing that was unified by the act of union between england and scotland the parliament so the moment and also the very the very use of the word parliament the use of the word parliament in english means the assembly of sovereign people and you know you actually create a parliament uh in scotland you've already admitted the fact that scotland is a separate nation with with with the right self-determination and so on so this is that that sort of frankly almost child-like error again look at two of the other outstanding creations of the blair government outstanding in the sense of outstandingly bad the demotion of the office of lord chancellor now why is the office of lord chancellor demoted um well if you look at it according to the alleged universal models of good liberal government the thing called the separation of powers separate legislative executive and judiciary the idea of the lord chancellor who was both the head of the judiciary and the political appointee and actually sat in the cabinet was an outrage he confused in himself judicial legislative because he was excuse me he was under the presiding officer of the house of lords so he combined in himself judicial because he is he is the uh he was the senior judge the head of chancery he is the uh he is the um he is the um he is the um presiding officer the kind of speaker if you like uh of the house of lords and he's political he's a member of the executive so you get you had within his own person a a complete a complete refutation of the doctrine of the separation of powers so and also his person uh happened to be a highly pompous one will not get to all the political details at this point so um comes this you know jumped up little squeak lord faulconer who had actually been blair solicitor and the the whole structure of the um the lord chancellorship is torn apart derry irving who was the the the would-be successor of woolsey is is is unceremoniously sacked he'd also in fact been the blair's master in chambers um and the relationship had been very close and then breaks down so he sacked as lord chancellor and the office is demoted it stripped of both its role as head of the judiciary and it stripped uh of its role as um as the presiding officer of the house of lords and indeed the idea was to abolish it completely and replace it by this noxious thing called the ministry of justice which immediately sounds like you know like the sort of thing that goes on in the semi-fascist states at least by inheritance of continental europe and then of course because again blair and particularly falconer so crastly ignorant of english constitutional history that they didn't realize that the position of law chancellor appears in about is it 2000 statutes some extraordinary number because he was one of the central representative he is the center was the central uh uh um royal officer the the the symbol of the continent continuity of law so you rupture the whole in the name of merely this one thing performing a political execution getting rid of derry irving and on the other hand doing something that looks as though it fits in with the doctrine this holy foreign holy french absurd doctrine of the separation of powers you get rid of this office which incorporates in itself the the entire history of of of of the the bureaucracy the development of government of stable government and so on right through the middle ages you you you try to abolish it but you so that you you you you refute history which is an absurdity and that's utterly unnecessary but it also had profound practical implications can you imagine the current problems with criminal law the underfunding of the courts the disgracefully low rates of pay to criminal barristers all of that can you imagine that if you had had lawyers of the status of derry irving uh on on on on on the conservative side or mccly of cash clash fern who was was margaret thatcher's chancellor they would not have stood for it and the the you know the position of law and the legal system within the country is so important uh that you need a figure of the weight of the law chancellor within the political system to say oy look out for the law and then the the other thing was the which again was part of this absurd separation of powers was pulling the uh the final uh the the final house of the judicial committee of the house of lords which which had been the final court of appeal uh in in in the united kingdom pulling that out of parliament saying you can't have a court of appeal that in theory is a committee of a house of the legislature and instead creating this ludicrous foreign import the supreme court with its name obviously being borrowed from america and then draped draped with with the arrogance that comes from calling itself a supreme court and being presided over by the spiders brenda hale hence you know the ridiculous ruling uh about the um about the prorogation of parliament that's what happens when as the israeli predicted you have change in accordance with abstract principle rather than accordance with the developed and settled traditions of a country so it is really then extraordinary figure the electoral basis of modern conservatism the party's structures of modern conservatism the actual uh political structures of the house of commons itself and then finally most importantly an actual viable ideology for conservatism this notion of a conservatism that can change but can change with respect for by developing the rooted traditions of a country which takes us back to that quote that i use all the time from chaucer from chaucer's parliament to fowls in which you know it's like he says um uh it's it's like the the the the old soil which every year old earth which every year yields new corn in the same way from old books new learning springs and from the soil of our history comes the present and the future providing you till it you fertilize it you respect it as a proper conservative like israeli did hello and thank you for watching david starkey talks if as i very much hope you're enjoying them why not become more actively involved and join my members club as a member you'll be able to take part in the members only weekly question and answer session suggest topics for forthcoming videos and have priority booking for my forthcoming live events and while you're at it why not have a look at the store page on my website davidstarkey.com there you can purchase t-shirts and other merchandise buy sign copies of my books and if you're feeling brave and a bit flush even arrange to take me out to lunch thank you once again for watching i look forward to hearing from you and to welcoming you to my members club [Music] you

Channel: David Starkey Talks

Views: 52,979

Keywords: David Starkey, History

Id: S8v9ZHYX4wg

Length: 56min 15sec (3375 seconds)

Published: Fri May 06 2022