David Starkey: Immigration & Diversity the Historical Truth

foreign you're watching d-programmed this is the new culture forum's latest show devoted to fighting back against the forces of ideological Conformity particularly among the Young my name is Harrison Pitt I'm a senior editor at the European conservative and I'm delighted to be joined today as ever by Evan Riggs who is a freelance journalist and a man who will need no introduction the highly distinguished historian David Starkey now um I'm interested at the moment David there appears to be a cross-party consensus that diversity built Britain you have British sunlight holding up the new 50p coin with bearing that inscription and of course you have the reliably dim Sadiq Khan making those points basically saying to britians that you know immigrants built their capital city is this true to begin with and if it's not true why does there seem to be so much intellectual and mental Capital involved in convincing us that it is true well of course it's as always history being bent to fit the president and that's really what it is as you know the like the latest figures for immigration under a government led by Rishi sunak are an incredible 600 000 in one year that City the size of Manchester a city bigger than Liverpool in one year so this has got to be justified that's one part of the story one part of the reason for this the other thing is of course the very understandable reason to make immigrants of all shapes sizes religions colors somehow feel that they belong and I think the latter has become very dangerous because what it says is you can't if you are black or if you are Indian or Pakistani you cannot somehow identify with this country unless you can produce evidence that there were large numbers of people who looked exactly like you in historic periods before and of course it just isn't true it really isn't true and there's a very different kind of approach to immigration uh you you've given us two definitions of different immigrant attitudes could you give me give us an example of both types please uh well the the the really important one we've we've chatted about the one that says you've got to have people in the history of the country that look exactly like you you will have exactly the same religion the other one of course is uh one of the most where I'm in the middle of a podcast which of course I'm enjoying greatly now the podcast that I I've actually uh and and enjoyed most which again too is trigonometry with the wonderful constant in kissing and dare I say sidekick and that idea that you're one of three and if you remember Constantine who is of course Russian did this extraordinary performance at the Oxford Union in which he talked about the West as his ideal as the place that liberated him that he wants to be the he really came up with a brutal line that the only thing that we have to say about slavery is that every other country had it in Britain abolished it and that is that's that very different sort of attitude attitude that that the the I think a good immigrant wants to be part of this country uh recognizes again dare one say that Britain is an extremely good place to live I mean why do 600 000 people want to live here the answer is not because they've come to be oppressed it's not become because they've come to feel culturally alienated it's not because we are systematically racist or they will be systematically disadvantaged it's they think they will do much better here than anywhere else and I think this is what this is the real narrative that we should be pushing now again remember you can play the game of immigration in very different ways um the the famous remark that sort of everybody latches on to is Daniel Defoe at the beginning of the 18th century who refers to us as the bastard notion and he talks about the fact that you know we are Roman we are Anglo-Saxon we are Danish we are Norman we are humano now all of that is true but eight was a long time ago be historical in more recent history the numbers were absolutely tiny and c and this is the really important thing from that extraordinary Fusion of anglo-saxon and French speaking the uh the the future Fusion of two dramatically different cultures between the Norman conquest and the end of the 14th century with Chaucer you forge a remarkably homogeneous culture and it's that homogeneous culture which dare I say it spawns Freedom remember England between the 16th century and the end of the 17th simply invents modernity everything that we regard as a good thing fundamentally starts here now if that's not enough for any any immigrant who wants to better themselves any immigrant who wants to enjoy Freedom wants to enjoy Prosperity wants to enjoy freedom of speech wants to enjoy political rights if they can't find something to be attractive why here I would have to imagine the fact that people think that they can actually in this country mold it a bit to become more like they're the country that they've left whereas other places even if they might have slightly less economic Prosperity or slightly less secure are going to be less malleable why do you think people have been able to infiltrate you know not only the news but also you know the media I mean we even see so many Netflix shows now where they've basically done a full-scale rewriting of English past it is an extraordinary mystery isn't it I mean all one can say is that the key element of a civil of of a thriving civilization like a thriving human being is finally confidence that what differentiates a successful country from an unsuccessful country is finally a genuine confidence in itself so why did Britain lose its confidence what it's a very difficult question to answer and it could I mean remember this is not the first time civilizations have lost confidence Rome lost confidence and the one of the greatest Minds one of the greatest historical minds of all time Gibbon Edward Gibbon devoted a lifetime to trying to analyze why Rome fell I mean can we understand the traditionally you know because medievalists and whatever get very excited about the Middle Ages we do forget some absolutely simple straightforward facts it takes until the end of the 18th century for standards of Civility culture the economy life expectancy to recover from what they had been before 400. they're genuinely are Dark Ages urban life genuinely vanishes there is um at an absolute destruction of culture that happened now Gibbon's answer is one that's deliberately naughty because a bit like me I suppose really Gibbon is denounced by the great Dr Johnson who's another extraordinary figure of this extraordinary world of late 18th century London and Johnson describes him as the Infidel historian Gibbon is profoundly hostile to Christianity and the central thing that he puts in the middle of his Narrative of the fall of Rome is Christianity that in other words Rome underwent a religious Invasion we know we know that that the Roman attitude to religion is a very interesting one it's there is on the one hand the formal Civic religion of the worship of the emperor remember the emperor is divine the emperor becomes Divine and to refuse to offer a sacrifice to him is is treason I mean that's essentially why Christians are persecuted because they will not worship an Earthly God it's a similar reason why John Locke thought that Catholics wouldn't make good citizens because they would have two rival Sovereign they would have two rival sovereigns but of course that that was that was different in in the in the uh even Roman Catholic didn't think the poet was God no indeed but but I mean that that was that was a really geosecular I suppose actually the Roman one was a religio uh uh uh secular dispute but what what what what what what uh Gibbon is essentially saying is that Rome fell because of a crisis of confidence in itself what had happened was uh Rome had been been interpenetrated by a multitude of religions he uh and uh again Gibbon because he's a he's we were talking about neat phrases Gibbon is a wonderful phrase maker and he describes the Roman attitude to religion as follows that in Rome the people thought that all religions were equally true the philosophers thought they were all equally false and the politicians thought they were all equally useful I pointed out this seems to be the attitude of the king as you demonstrated in the coronation with the parade of mutually contradictory religions and it was even better in Scotland when they included humanists as well oh at a service in front of a king's head we all believe in human equality but King Solomon said yes the culmination of the absolute nonsense but what goes on with that is the interpenetration of that Roman sense of Civic religion with mystery religions mithraism and whatever and Christianity is one of these and it is profoundly subversive to Roman values and Nietzsche calls Christianity religion of slaves and and again this is also something very interesting historians are all the good historian I'm a turbot good one Tom Holland refers constantly argues that Christianity is the foundation of the liberal politics of the West I think this is manifest and indeed it thrives in the Roman Empire via absent monarchy via the acceptance of Christianity by Constantine by the Emperor or in Russia with the tsars etc etc etc and but what what what I think is much more important is to look at the actual chronology that's to say the fall of Rome in 410 the first Barbarian Invasion the reign of honorius which is the moment at which the Roman Legions finally quit Britain and this triggers one of the great works of Western Civilization but also if you like the work that more than anything else my marks the end of the ancient world the classical world the city of God Saint Augustine city of God and what the city of God is about Augustine is trying to say the fact that the the Rome contemporacy that the reason Rome fell is that we've stopped sacrificing to the gods of the capital we've got we've stopped sacrificing to Victory we've stopped sacrificing to the God of War we then become victims and Saint Augustine a denied that and set these false gods and stupid Gods but he also said Rome was never really worth defense defense he says that the values of Rome were false values and indeed that there can be no absolute moral value in the earthless state only the Heavenly city the city of God is a real city has real justice has real has real truth as real validity in other words in one sense he accepts the argument he accepts the argument and I I think that between the two of them Gibbons and Augustine get to the truth this is a very long-winded way of saying I think we're undergoing a new religious Reformation I think I think that we're under or revolution I think that woke and everything we associate with it is probably it's either a new religion or it's a Christian heresy and remember it it originally although the actual language of woke largely comes from France it's largely Continental Europe it's a bizarre mixture of German idealism on the one hand and and French you know sexo speculation sociology and whatever on the other uh my we're talking about quips as I always say all bad ideas are French but it's refracted through America's torment about slavery and a completely different history and and and and the treatment of black people uh it's refracted through a different history from us but not necessarily a different history from the rest of the world or indeed much of South America so absolutely I remember Brazil is much worse um the the the the port the Portuguese export of slaves to Brazil dwarfs that and 300 about 300 000 at the Atlantic trade sends about 300 000 slaves to to North America to the north of 13 colonies five million to Brazil um and of course you know again this whole this whole absurd language of slavery uh being a genocide how can a genocide then lead to the multiplication from three hundred thousand to the whatever tens of millions are in America at them in the United States um at the at the moment so that that so it's it's this refraction uh of the Continental idealism I mean it's this is my great quarrel um like everybody else I we finally respect Rogers but it seems to me that he introduced reintroduced into English conservative thought this element of hegelian of German uh German idealism which I just think is profoundly dangerous we are an ultra England and English conservatism is ultra Ultra uh empirical it is totally ground rooted it is totally ground specific and of course again the world of woke is one that denies the existence of demonstrable Truth um or rather it claims to have Truth by Revelation um if you actually look at what's happened to our discourse now it's become a kind of parody of religion Twitter with the limited number of characters you can use looks just like a verse in the Bible again the way in which each word is parsed find a profound meaning in it this is not how language Works language certainly if you are an empiricist like me language depends on context um and this is Twitter storms are invariably about territory do I not know invariably about tearing a phrase out of context um again the idea of words carrying so much meaning that that you know an individual effectively can be burned at the stink that's cancellation um which again I know from personal experience this is a religious attitude to language it's not a like it's not a rational attitude to language it's not a lying attitude to language which encourages debate remember again going back to the world of Greece and Rome um however much they all tended to become autocracies of one sort or another still the basic culture of Greece and then more more specifically developed in Rome was a culture of debate of rhetoric of what we're doing now of language being used to persuade by famines and foul within the political process and and it's exactly that which is no under attack as it was under attack by the Christian Church um that once you establish the notion that truth is a subject of creedal formation which cannot be challenged once you establish the notion of magisterium that there is an absolute religious Authority which determines the truth there is no such thing as truth it merely it merely becomes a fetish um and so only I think that it weird it's so easy to think of as being a deeply irreligious society which in many ways we are in terms of formal attitudes to God but in every other way it seems to me there's been this as I said extraordinary religious revival I mean it's not just in the things we're talking about things like pride and you know women's day liturgical characters they're taking on a liturgical character they've even got a place in the current we're also best brain the the and what's going on now is just stop oh just stop boy it's like a religious possession they should assume they'll be flatulating themselves I think they've already started now do you think that this uh religious character to to the language that we're trying to work out online now do you think this is indicative of kind of uh entering the the fall of civilization much like the Romans when they started arguing about religion they they fell into their fall to take uh um Gibbons wicked wicked explanation of the of the the Dreadful riots in the second room in Constantinople that is a possibility now I am not a prophet I'm a historian and there's nothing worse than even very great historians like Neil Ferguson with unfortunate uh Tendencies You don't believe in applied history then it needs to be dumb it's a really good point um I think that the um that all political questions need thinking about in the historical context as one of the ways of thinking about them you see I believe that there are different modes of thought and that one of the catastrophes that we've got ourselves into now is not simply woke it is the notion of the expert determining public policy well this does not mean I'm against expertise I'm one myself which is why we're talking about history but the historical component can only be part of the argument um and that is why I reject any form of historical determinism or anything of that kind of thing but equally we now see and the disaster of a public policy which is driven by single issues it came to a head with covet covert again was it wasn't rational response it was a queaside religious one and we we we we we we treated the the virus suddenly became like the devil um and quite seriously it was that sort of absurd language we had kind of purely remember we purification rituals hand washing widgetisms and they did but but with purification rituals I mean I remember I remember my friend Rod riddle who once for once didn't display his usual good sense and skepticism describing that he got trapped hands which is which on his knees was he wearing sack was he wearing sackcloth and whatever but but do you can see that if you let public policy be determined by a single issue committee uh like Sage the the scientific committee that had a single remit which was to stop if possible single death from covid you destroy the economy you destroy education you turn the National Health Service into a national covered sickness service and you go mad and that we've seen now the disaster of letting monetary policy committee be determined by the bank of England it's a single issue the catastrophe industry of watching again we can talk about the other great religion which is nature worship Gaia worship which is the oldest most primitive form of religion uh with you know people like like David Attenborough as a kind of nuisance Simon styletes if I could put him on top of a column and keep him there I would and and the ridiculous greater Thornburg you know like some child Saint she seems to me to Merit the fate of Joan of art he would damage the environment I can imagine all CO2 emissions too many emissions there must be a more ecological ecological sound maybe a bit about that well then you would normally kill them first you know we must stop being so naughty but but but we yeah as always I'm doing a full staff I'm leading leading Youth and stray but you're seeing the point all these things are quasi-religion but they're more than quasi-religious yeah they are actually they are actually forms of misplaced religion um and again this weird business that we want to bring back nature as though man is not part of nature as though we are not in fact what the Bible tells us we are the Masterwork of Nature and this again it's this extraordinary sense of um the moment that humankind is the most powerful it's ever been we're written out of the script all of a sudden but they're trying to write ourselves out of the scripture the future historians if indeed there is any literacy any documentation and anybody is capable of writing about it are going to have a field day with the psychosis of the presents yes I I was taking it back a little bit because I was very interested in in the point you made about two types of immigrants and I wonder if in a certain sense I don't know you were half joking but the Immigrant we we might call the good immigrant the one who's enthusiastic about being here looks at the place thinks How Lucky I Am to be here and you know and feels an instinctive loyalty to the society without necessarily having any ancestry here I wonder if that immigrant is in in many ways the exception rather than the rule and I think this is true for of all people ancestry is naturally very important I mean and and it has an emotional impact on our lives depends what you mean by us I give it can I give an example of course I'll give an example and it's one I've used before on the show but I want to know what you what you make of it you know when you and I and Evan as well being a Canadian went go to the cenotaph you know we are moved by that as human beings but we're also moved by that because we we have an ancestral stake in what that symbol memorializes whereas if we were to go to some um you know memorial for the for the for the Chinese who suffered in the in the rape of Nan King again of course as human beings we'd be moved by that but we're not going to be half as moved as Chinese people will simply by virtue of the fact not not because there's any kind of racial essentialism going on but because we have an ancestral connection to the cenotaph in a way that we wouldn't have to that hypothetical Memorial I have a remarkably ambiguous connection I come from generations of Quakers okay who were of course challenges opposed to war and my father was tormented by the fact that he was torn between his desire I mean he was too old to fight but he was um because he was a machine to work at the factory that he'd uh that he was working in was turned over to the manufacturing Munitions and he wanted desperately to be a conscientious objector but he had been unemployed in terrible poverty um three years on three years in the early 1930s which is not pretty walking twice to London in search of work having to delay his marriage for seven years seven years you know biblical length of time and and he was torn on these things and it he was a tormented man for much of my childhood um so I've got I have a complex attitude to that now I I rejected the quakerism I rejected the pacifism and whatever but I'm still aware of that corner of my mind that gives me a an intense ambiguity I'm also aware that and I know a lot about my ancestry right back I mean not terribly far but in 18th century that all of my ancestors were at the bottom of the pile uh and that again produces a different sense um uh now that doesn't in other two ways that you can react to that one is a sort of bitter chippiness yes and the other is mine which is we have always been a society Britain has always been England yes supremely England it's a Society open to Talent going back to the Middle Ages and you think of the origins of most of the great leaders of the English church they're not Nobles they are people usually of modest middling by the time you got to my own period of History the 16th century look at the origins of a walls here of a Cromwell or indeed of the sistles um they they Rise by talent and what we then do it's one of the reasons we are so staggeringly well done in the 16th century you then create a general machinery for the recruitment of talent which is called Oxbridge um and and both what become the public schools and the grammar schools and you also have again uniquely in Europe you have a completely different definition of aristocracy and gentry which isn't simply it's this it's this wonderfully ambiguous point it's two things it is partly ancestry so William Sissel I mean you know I I know the I know the current markets of Salisbury yeah reasonably well and we giggle happily at William sissel's desperate agonies prove that he really was of distinguished descent today sicil sort of labors to prove that he comes from one of the Roman tribes of Cecilia and all I complete rubbish of course and vast expense spent on fake genealogies and Coats of Arms or whatever so this on so there's that there's that desperate desire so there's this double attitude to ancestry yes there is genuine sense of ancestry the great sense of noble lineage the thing that the king stupidly rejected when he excluded the hereditary peerage from the coronation I think an extraordinarily foolish and profoundly unhistorical uh a merely destructive thing to do um uh um so they said on the one that's there's on the one hand the gentility um aristocracy is indeed a succession of generations which is reinforced by primogenitor which is reinforced by a strict settlement which enables you to have the Magnificent country houses Estates and also highly sophisticated governing class but it's also about Behavior and the the the phrase of Thomas Smith who by the way is writing specifically in response to Saint Augustine and is also writing specifically in response to uh to Thomas Moore remember Thomas Moore's Utopia is an early 16th century version of the city of God it's essentially about the rejection of England as a moral Society um and Thomas Smith in his daily public of the English Republic although it's a crowned Republic in his day Republica anglorum what Smith is saying is that we are we are a society with moral validity but he also gives this wonderful general definition of an English gentleman and we and he uses the phrase we make gentlemen good sheep in England that that they are that you know they're newly minted that to be a gentleman in England it is enough to actually have a degree from one of the universities to again listen to the point live without manual labor and maintain the port and state of a gentleman it's behavioral see it's a bit like my good immigrant um so do you see what I mean I see exactly what you mean and I I think that this that that that and again you aren't gay so in in all sorts of ways and I mean I wasn't completely unashamed campaigner for gay rights right you're back way back when Ian McKellen was busy in the closet these were all Johnny come lately they come along the moment it's safe and the moment they can make sure their Knight ones go along along with their comings out um and I have a degree of contempt um but but the the that I was always profoundly aware as a gay man that to an extent I'm outside the family um and and that sense of family lineage and whatever um so again all of these complicating layerings but for me the there's that broader sense of belonging which is fundamentally cultural historically rooted yes um and if that seems to me to be a genuine genuine unifier whereas of course the attempt to pretending that there were large numbers of people of different Hues and different religions is a false story and you're encouraging people to be to be things I'm sorry I really am really yeah I know it's I know it's a it's an awkward thing and and it's terribly it's in terribly inconvenient if you're convinced you're a woman and you're a man you know but I do think it's truth if if I made Dr Starkey I mean it seems to me that you are not a proponent of what we might call wig history that the the Ark of Justice or the Arc of history is long but it bends towards Justice right but more you're more of a cyclical historian there are Rises and Falls to these civilizations to these movements to these religions do you worry that you know some of the the aspects of the trans movement or some of the sort of gender hysteria that we've seen erupt over the last decade might actually contribute to a kind of reversal of the rights that gay people have uh you know fought very long and hard to get and are now actually being threatened I think perhaps women particularly for women for women particularly um yes of course uh but of course you see I think it's it's again it's the fundamental problem and again it's something we need to understand liberalism and this again is a point that's understood by by I don't right let me start again it's conventional to assume that conservatism is merely a reaction to the French Revolution and that it's a form of reactive thought I don't believe that's true I think English conservatism is the authentic strand of English culture it goes right back to a figure like John Fortescue in the 15th century who was and again the interesting notion of freedom and prosperity as contrasted with with French absolutism and the poverty of the people and and the obscene wealth of the monarchy and the governing class that's all there I mean how can you not be a conservative country when you reverse a revolution remember the second we did the most extraordinary thing of any country that without external intervention we deliberately reverse a revolution rolled the clock back 11 years thoroughly um in 1616. same thing I'm talking about well it's a complex process it's 1660s but you deliberately undo a revolution you create a different political settlement but it's one that's firmly rooted in the past and whatever so so there's that that very very long tradition but if if we go back to book then Burke I think is really reasserting is it's not inventing this is Con convenient it conventionally said he is reasserting a the continuity of that culture be the fact that English freedoms are historically rooted I.E go back a very very long way um but also um he is pointing out what the essential problem with the French Revolution is the essential problem with the French Revolution and all liberalism is that it starts with the abstract rather than the concrete that it starts with the universal rather than the particular and I'm afraid the only possible outcome of it and this is a terrible thing to say Liber tourism naturally relieves to tyranny and to destruction it seems to me there is no accident but and Burke says this perfectly clearly there is no accident about the outcome of the French Revolution remember what's so astonishing about the reflections is written right at the beginning it predicts everything it predicts published in November 1719. well it's not only that he he predicts Napoleon it's going to be ready but he predicts a military detention military dictatorship he he predicts social disintegration um and he does it all on if you like I've been arguing against principles he does it all on first principles he says that if you begin with ruthless reason yes this is what inevitably happens and again I found I mean I'm very interested in your question um if I look at my younger self if I look at the self at first I suppose became quite famous in the 1990s I was I was a thorough going libertarian um and I uh I would have um I used to say things like that that I was torn politically because Margaret Thatcher believed in economic liberalism and the left believed in in Social liberalism and what I wanted was the two together and then I suppose as things began to change and the ground shifted and gave way Beneath Your Feet um I became aware that that was foolish and shallow very understandable and particularly even if one in your context in my context my sort of background my my kind of sexual experience you know I've been moved on by the police I had some Thug of a police Constable uh on Hampstead Heath we won't I noticed you I noticed you when you said Constable you emphasized the first syllable yeah yeah um almost all of that and but I became aware that this wasn't satisfactory so I've been on a kind of voyage from libertarianism to a much more grounded understanding of conservatives and of the freedoms which you valued as a Libertarian I have in fact exactly you see this is the whole week teaching of History gets it wrong there was this terrible Exhibition at the British Library fronted by Linda Colley on Magna Carta that presents this this irresistible movement towards Freedom actually if there's no irresistible movement towards Freedom the essential principles are there pretty much from the beginning what you see is a broadening um and what is again you know anybody looking at British British and particularly English History up to the 20th century is struck by one thing yes there are radical movements of course there are they're the chartists there are the the struggles for the representation of The Working Man many of my answers to being involved in all of these um uh votes for women and whatever but what they're all wanting to do isn't tear the structure down they're wanting to become part of it and what is want moreover is extraordinary is that the English upper class had the wisdom to do it I mean yes there are struggles the extraordinary tearing itself apart the tearing of the other classes and Tory Park in particular a part in the 1830s again the renewed struggles of the late 19th century the the uh I mean the all the tensions over the particularly the First Reform particularly when you compare it to the continent as well I mean in 1848 you know the continent was erupted in the springtime so peoples whereas Britain just had three not reasonably quiet reform acts throughout that Century there was upheaval yeah but but it was all dealt with with him exceptional process um and dare once said I mean a difficulty of a degree of Riot form part of the country yes and and different parties were involved in it as well and Israeli and then I think Israeli the Israeli is the one who again because he was a gambler um actually takes the biggest gamble of the lot which everybody realized uh which is in 1867 to give the vote to the ordinary working man that what 1832 does is to produce the kind of electorate which Emily matless would be happy with an upper class educated electorate that leads to a permanent liberal majority exactly the sort of thing that you know enables who Edwards to flourish um in in in in all his wonderful variety um and uh where is it Disraeli who take Disraeli takes the Boris he takes the it's the right gamble that the the the British working man was was patriotic uh was a damn I said also jingoistic and of course he rides that and rides it with spectacular success and it's also this really who is absolutely clear like exactly like Burke that liberalism is the enemy and but he does it in a very interesting way he says again you're an Israeli on conservatism it's fascinating he says he says Britain is a naturally Progressive country of course it is he understood that the Victorian age is the most gigantic I think in many ways much bigger age of change but what he says is through two different ways of changing this is the thing that we should all be putting into mind there's a way of changing which is you deliberately do it according to Universal principles that's the liberal way the on the other hand there is the conservative way in which you build organically on what is there and adapt that the circumstance and what is fascinating is looking back at Blair and new labor and the utter catastrophes of of new Labor's constitutional reforms they were all grounded on liberal universalism the notion that we had to abolish the office of Lord Chancellor because it defied the separation of powers a the separation of powers is a piece of inanite French of course Montesquieu based on a complete misunderstanding of the English Constitution he lived in England for a couple of years he spoke no English whatever he moved in a circle of entirely french-speaking radicals people people like Burling brook or whatever and he gets his ideas particularly false ideas of the English Constitution from Bolingbrook whatever it is Patriot Kingdom whatever the idea of a patriot King he gets it from that which is the absurd parody of the English Constitution how can you have a separation of powers when the English Constitution depends on the executive sitting in the representative assembly in Parliament and having a working majority in it this is why the English Parliament survives remember again the the progressive narrative sees Parliament as a development it isn't Parliament Parliament exists essentially in its modern form by the end of the reign of England the first right um the the the the what is peculiar about the English Parliament isn't that it's some sort of great novel development of liberalism it's that this strange thing survives the poor and it only survives partly by accident but also because first in the Middle Ages and then in the 18th century Parliament was useful the reason that Edward the first who had been the great opponent of Simon De Montfort the reason that Edward the first accepts Parliament is it's the best way of getting money out of people um they discover that this is the English I think this is the origins of English politeness but it's much more sensible to ask people nicely before you tax them rather than just to go in like the French with a pitch for and tried to steal their goods which is essentially what the french Monica did so it's this very very different approach and again in the from the 18th century onwards of course it's precisely the deal between crown and Parliament that leads to the gigantic explosion vision of English Power because you come up with a new way of managing Parliament and indeed managing the king into strange Office of Prime Minister the Office of Prime Minister manages Parliament on behalf of the king but it also manages the King on behalf of parliament that's it's this extraordinary median job because remember all European countries have had had various forms of representative assembly they're abolished because they just just a way of good government they behave like the French just absurd um and and they got rid of the English Parliament survives because it's functionally useful and the period of the great conflict in Parliament the late 16th and the early 17th century is when Parliament ceases to be useful and instead you just get the Clash so you're talking just after the the 1680 um eight Revolution yeah into Queen Anne upon Parliament what happens is that that after 1689 um there is a period of intense party Strife of course as we all know which which really culminates um in the uh in the last time that you use impeachment against the Fallen minister with the Earl of Oxford uh uh after uh he he brought about peace with France the treaties with the correct uh the features of wood cracked and the uh then the complete overthrow of that by the Hanoverian uh uh accession but what you then do in the early 18th century the office of parliament in other words 1720s with Walpole you developed this new method of parliamentary management which is what the office of prime minister is and you know I've just walked through the area that bases that that that is the physical testimony to this and the old Royal Palace of Whitehall burns out in the 1690s and then what you see developing in the 1720s 30s and 40s are these new instruments of government which I as it were expressed the power of the Prime Minister and so you see the building of the treasury you see the bill you see the building of doubt you see Downing Street given to all probably 1737 you see horse dance you see the admiralty and all of these are the emanations of the new 18th century state which is this new thing called a working functioning parliamentary monarchy which is what was so disastrously missing in the coronation and when the king decided arbitrarily not to have members of parliament no yes yes to bring things back to the modern day here we had a Peter Hitchens in your in that same chair uh last week and I asked him you know what hope did he have for for the future of he said exactly very reliably pessimistic and I know I know you don't like to make predictions but it seems to me if that England is the only country that has um redone a revolution um that if there's going to be any hope for a kind of a right Revival in this country they're going to have to do it again that would be the cultural revolution of the last 30 to 40 years are you slightly more optimistic than Mr Hitchens that this can be done not in our current political dispensation I think what is very striking is every other European country is actually swinging very firmly to the right and I think they're doing it for two reasons they're doing it first of all because you'll have a much easier definition of nationhood um it's Israeli who says the conservative party is a national party or nothing but I'm afraid in Britain the great question is what there isn't a British nation that there was this desperate a British Nation so it's not a British Nation there was this desperate attempt at trying to invent one by Gordon Brown in fact it was one of the you have to be a historian to understand what was going on but people like uh Linda Cauley David Canada and Norman Davis were all really new labor Storm Troopers trying to it's quite seriously intellectual Stormtroopers trying trying to invent or indeed Sharma with his history of trying to provide historical justifications for what they already wanted for new labor and and for a notion of the British of a British identity remember we Define being British as being tolerant yes and it's the only form of nation which is the equivalent of a sewer yeah it's it's a kind of cloaca maximum yeah everything everything there's no filter there's no filter whatever it's pretty disgusting and I think frankly it was so so so there's all of that and remember this again it's the Paradox one of the reasons we've been able to handle um a tumultuous multicult Society is precisely because we were always multinational that you know there was never a serious attempt with Union with Scotland to amalgamate for two and there's never really a serious attempt at creating a single British identity um so this is extraordinary vibration in the meaning of notion in Britain and then just one second and then the I'm asked I'm trying to answer why why why if you're Hungarian and you're Hungarian if you're French to know your friendship Italian bizarrely um though you get pretty confused between Milan and Sicily he was sort of sort of know that you're Italian and whatever it's very difficult here um so that's one element why I think we've why I worry about the revive of the right and the second is and here again I I've been trying to be very honest in this conversation and explain where I've changed my mind and where I think I've got things wrong I was one of those who led the resistance to the attempt at um at what's the word I want uh and and changing the electoral system uh back at the beginning referendum yeah 2011. in 2011. uh along with Matthew Elliot and whatever um and uh I was absolutely convinced by the arguments that you know two broad Church parties of the way of producing political security or whatever and what it seems to me now the evidence is different that both England and America are experiencing hideous forms of political stasis precisely because of first-person um and in America of course it's exacerbated by electoral gerrymandering and all the rest of it whereas Continental Europe bizarrely is proportional representation as multiplied political parties which of course gives the proper opening to as it were political variety it was staggering listening to the well translations of the debate between the Spanish prime minister Sanchez and the leader of of the main party of the right he was you know what they're different completely as you've been pointing out it's usually very difficult to tell the difference between yeah Santiago Pascal and Pedro Sanchez don't both think that diversity built Spain for example whereas in Britain you know both that you've got Sadiq Khan and Rishi sunak signed up to this new founding myth which I suspect actually has um some pretty uh malevolent motives as well actually because you've got to you've got to wonder what kind of person would you have to be to take issue with the fact that for you know for 90 99 of British history Britain has been a majority white country what kind of person would you have to be to take issue with that if I had something what is this and again this this way in which all this nonsense has been bought into by the city how on Earth is the country which which invents capitalism because that's what we actually do without the benefit of anybody diverse around the table at all so if you actually look at the founding the court founding Court of the bank of England what is very striking is a number of Yoga now yes but they just they just come in there of course I'm afraid they are white they're also Protestants yes there is a form of diversity there's very considerable cultural diversity again what's very striking about London's ability always one ability to attract Scots Jews Dutch so many so many of the Great trade so many of the Great banking houses Traders and whatever they're obviously German um or or you look at the world of Edwardian London um where uh the the King was was profoundly disapproved of by the high aristocracy um my friend Burton uh Conrad Russell's last son um uh came up with uh telling his his grandmother you know somebody can't get to court this Royal cannot because what was the court well it was brutal brutal terms of mockery it was the jury chick was the beerage of a noble a noble Brewers and the great Jewish families the um um the uh what's it called uh the landlords the Great South Africans and whatever and what a wonderful thing I think but of course what they all did none of them came in saying we want to preserve our differences what they all came in was we want to participate in this extraordinary opportunity bluntly to make money but also uh to enjoy the most civilized and the most interesting and the most varied of capitals yes um and and very Splendid that is too um but this is the problem the the more you dilute what it means to be British the harder it is to argue for assimilation because then what are immigrant's new arrivals assimilating into if you've diluted that original core that you had this is this is the last question which I'm very keen to argue Keen to ask you um every revolutionary from reps to Mao has acknowledged that in order to advance The Total Transformation of society to administer your favorite ideological medicine it's a pretty good idea to alienate people from their own history and we certainly live in a in a culture in which people are severely alienated from their own history and in many ways what we would want and what I imagine you would want young people to do is to go go and you know study history at University that's like that's my question we're in a bit of a difficult situation because on the one hand you should be encouraging people to do that sort of thing yet I wonder if you're optimistic about the historical profession and whether you think young people either whether they're on the right or in the center reasonably a political but they care about historical accuracy should they go to these institutions or should they learn history another way well the point is of course the Monopoly of the universities is manifestly collapsing because I think the universities are um the the uh I mean what we're doing now true the the the the the the breakdown of media uniformity uh what is now available I mean they you know the extraordinary uh kind of polluted ocean of the internet in which the wonderful things and terrible things and the problem is that we haven't really given uh young people or indeed anybody the tools to discriminate because the the the the the the tools of forensic reasoning of empirical reasoning and whatever are exactly the ones which are not being developed the notion of debate and the the and how you prove an argument and how how you properly prove an argument and so on I suppose I have unlike Hitchens I still have and maybe I the moments when I have absolute pessimism absent pessimism I mean reading the paper is usually on the other hand in a funny way we talked I think we should begin by talking about the Transcendent we began by talking about the false Transcendence of this awful parody religious revival of this what I've called religious heresies of the of the new left of the boxes left and whatever I think we still have enough of this country of that sense of place of extraordinary buildings of an interwoven historical culture I hope for that I mean the the thing that I suppose has influenced me most uh in thinking about all of this have been the work people like T.S Eliot the four quartets that extraordinary little kidding the one which is history is now in England and I think history can and the continue huge popular fascination with it good bad and different um I think history in England in particular is a form of transcendence I think it is it is the it is our real it's it in the proper sense of of Transcendence it's the it is both the grounding and the destination um and I'm sorry to sound to end in equally mudded equally uh equally mysterious uh uh terms as I've been denouncing on behalf of our uh of our opponents but that standing in a quiet Country Church in the silence and yet you hear bizarrely the noise of the past that's what Elliot's invoking those feet which have trodden their those deeds which have been done there and here in the heart of this city in the heart of Westminster there's another kind of transcend you go into the Abbey despite what the clergy of the Abbey have sort of done you're going to Saint Paul's where the attack um has been much more radical um and you still feel it and that as much as words as much as anything we can do is where there might be hope there may be hope for a British restoration well Dr David Starkey it's been a privilege to sit down with you and to discuss all these matters Evan thanks as ever you've been watching deprogrammed make sure to like subscribe leave a comment and we shall see you on the next one hello if you're enjoying the new culture Forum Channel and you believe in our mission may I invite you to join our membership scheme at the link below or on our website newcultureforum.org dot UK our work is more important now than ever and we have great plans ahead for the future but we can't do it without your support from as little as three pounds per month you can help ensure that we continue on our mission as a member you'll receive a range of benefits including access to exclusive content invitations to our private events including here at our Studios free copies of our books and much much more including of course our famous ncf mug if you aren't able to become a member then please help us by clicking this button and subscribing to our channel it's completely free just remember to also click the Bell icon so that you can get notifications when we post new videos thank you [Music]

Channel: David Starkey Talks

Views: 61,252

Keywords: David Starkey, History

Id: u5TYJNURsDE

Length: 56min 38sec (3398 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 12 2023