David Starkey SLAMS WhatsApp message leaks: 'They display an utter corruption of our politics'

[Music] thank you this week we saw the release of the lockdown files a massive leak of a cache of data of Matt Hancock's Communications within government at the time of lockdown and to delve deeper into this topic we have Dr David Starkey himself David Boris Johnson used the analogy of War to describe the covet pandemic and to justify the emergency powers that he used for measures how accurate was this analogy and do you think it was right that and proper parliamentary scrutiny was abandoned MPS after all did vote in the emergency powers I think the use of the war analogy is where everything went wrong the moment you claim something is a war you as it were say everybody should get behind it this is a matter of total National Security dissent becomes treason it is not the way that you conduct ordinary politics and by the way just just to find out from that it seems to me to be exactly what's going wrong with how we're dealing with the so-called climate emergency the moment you claim it's an absolute emergency that we're facing a desperate circumstances that it's a war on global warming you stop thinking you stop reflecting you stop debating you're telling the truth and we did all of that during lockdown so I think the war analogy is where absolutely everything went wrong and because of course I'm afraid something else goes along with that um you use propaganda first victim of war is truth and there's another thing which I think again we need to put you're right down up there up front a state of permanent war was identified by George Orwell in 1984 as how the party maintained its control it's the basis of that monstrous regime of 1984 which is permanent war no one's quite sure in 1984 a bit bit like covert actually whether the war is real whether the the bombs that are for the rockets that are falling in London may actually be being dropped by the regime to maintain this Perpetual sense of tension and danger and of course 1984 is also about the sacrifice of Truth what is the ministry of propaganda called it's called the ministry of Truth which lies the whole of the time and what we had during lockdown it's now clear carbon and it's profoundly shocking is we had government by lies by deliberate calculated coordinated lies the lockdown files I think are the most disgraceful set of documents ever released as it were of British public life they display an utter Corruption of our politics interestingly enough you know what again one person you mentioned Boris Johnson one very few people that emerges with any kind of credit is Johnson himself the two things that strike about uh um they're all WhatsApp messages the two things that strike about Johnson's messages first they are immeasurably more literate than everybody else's here is somebody who is reading God I'm going to say astonishing things about Boris here is some use of reading is thinking is criticizing the information that he's receiving but he's not doing it enough he lacks the confidence to carry it through the other thing is utterly shocking is that this these are the activities of a conservative government of a government that is supposedly committed to the to Britain to England to our astonishing record of personal freedom to a light touch from the state to a police which is not a police state but is supposedly an arm of the citizenry and they're only to enforce the law not current government policy all of those were simply thrown out of the window this is because you have conservatives and I'm afraid here Boris is as guilty as everybody else who aren't have got no grounding have got no roots don't really know why they're there disgrace well you touched on a lot of important topics there the idea of Perpetual War which I would suggest the West is engaging in right now the ministry of Truth uh pushing forward propaganda we could look at the nudge unit and the trusted news initiative and all of that but I think going back to the source of a lot of this governments not just government Parliament gave up the idea of being able to dissent gave up the idea of being able to challenge the government in voting in these emergency Powers why do you think they did that in the first place undermining proper parliamentary procedure for the simple reason it's War the moment remember in in the second world war or new Democratic politics were suspended you had a coalition government everybody pulled in together because the important thing was to defeat the Germans I mean at least much responsible for everything that went wrong as the government is of course the opposition the utterly Craven behavior of Kirsten I'm afraid as we know now really loves control he really loves controlling things he was in his absolute element with lockdown if you'll remember every day he got up and he called for more of it he called for it to go on longer he called for it to go on and be more intense and by the way so did another organization that Prides itself on its liberalism the DBC the BBC was ranting day in day out why isn't the government going doing more why isn't it paying attention to of course this mysterious thing called the so-called science which would we can now see was an utter panic-stricken fabrication based on bad science worst mathematics and disgraceful argument but essentially the media I mean all of this went wrong because not simply did the government Panic the media and particularly the opposition funny and the person who panicked most of all and panicked with pure cynical self-regarding calculation was Nicholas touch and in other words the levels of disgrace in this Covenant and it uh it it it it it disgraces our whole public life one I think I mean dare I say shall we get together and boast one of the very few news outlets that gave voices from the other side any space at all was ours with GB news but equally the channel made a terrible mistake it gave too many too much credit to those who were going on about you know problems with vaccines and all the restaurants it that that you know is just indiscriminate conspiracy theory it seems to me vastly more important and what would have been vastly more effective would have to have been to have followed the example of Jonathan some person and I say it was truly and focused on the issue of lockdown and its outrageous challenge the fundamental British liberties okay where I would disagree with you is is that on our focus on the vaccines I don't think we talked enough about the vaccines and the potential damages to be honest with you but you're right we should have been focusing also on the lockdowns and I think we were to some degree but you mentioned that they were based on bad science and a lot of these decisions were based on bad science would you acknowledge that actually a lot of these decisions were based on politics rather than science at all for example mosques and schools the closing of schools um the second lockdown and the other lockdowns following that and Boris Johnson has alleged that uh it was the wrong data but is a case of there wasn't data considered and this was just politics I think this is a very strong element of Truth in what you say I think once the thing got going once people were panicked once the opinion poll said started saying oh people actually want more because of course people were fragrant what the government this wasn't nudging this was panicking this was actually designed to produce panic and fear the characteristics it were reactions in war the characteristic psychological reaction in flight and deliberately designed to suppress descent but I do think carbon we do need to go back to the fundamental the reason that this went so hideously completely wrong was bad science one of the people again who should be held up to disgrace and blame is Neil Ferguson at Imperial College his calculations on every epidemic have been out by factors of between you know 10 and 100 or a thousand I mean you know he used response for the panic over foot and mouth he was responsible for the so-called mad cow disease Panic all of these these of course were Veterinary diseases which inflicted terrible suffering on the farming Community I Vivid remember I was filming at the Time in the West country around Bristol and we couldn't film because of the stink and smoke of burning cow Corpses it was disgusting of his miscalculations did this time was to lead to human tragedy Financial tragedy and dare I say the dislocation and disgrace of our political system but of course he was aided and abetted from within the government he was aided and abetted in two ways again a huge burden of responsibility rests on Dominic Cummings Cummings comes out disgracefully in this as a Perpetual proponent of panic and in other words he imagined that he understood the mathematics it's perfectly clear that he didn't the other the other source of of that of that Panic it seems to me was of course dare I say it the behavior of other European governments and Italy and France I mean the weekend that that March weekend when we shifted from what was clearly a completely rational policy of herd immunity exactly once Sweden did to this group test business of lockdown it was direct pressure from Macon it was photographs of what were going on in the Italian hospitals and and again immediate and immediate media generated Panic so there's there's the really bad maths but there's another reason why bad math you can then not to ask a question Catherine why does such obviously bad maths work and the answer is do you know what because most of our media cannot do arithmetic and hardly any of our politicians can do basic arithmetic either I mean I remember vividly I appeared not on this channel I appeared I think it was before I was canceled and I remember I was on The Air I remember vividly with the two people with Ann subri and Sir Roger Gale one of these Preposterous Tory uh back Woodsman and they were both proponents of absolute panic and I challenged them I said actually if you look at the figures this isn't terribly severe and uh pandemic is it indeed demonstrated it wasn't terribly terribly severe it was in fact astonishing the little shift in the daily death tolls and of course I said to them do you actually realize how many people die each day I said well about 1600 which means about 10 000 die every week oh those figures can't possibly be right how disgraceful of you to say sir you know this this is the problem when you have members of the political class who can't even calculate if you've got a population of 65 plus million then about 500 000 people are going to die every year which is why of course when you use those Figures it's so easy to panic people um and it's again it's a shocking I'm sorry let's add let's add to our list of disgraces It's the Great failure of our educational system that you know it doesn't teach people to have the basic confidence about number in the days when I used to teach history I was always going on to people you know what you need is an order of magnitude you didn't need you didn't need to be doing um simultaneous equations or the calculus all you need mostly is a sense of number basic Edition and multiplication and subtraction and you know to know that if 1600 people die every day then ten thousand die every week and roughly 500 000 and that die every year similarly that you know in the early modern period France four or five times the size of England with a multiplier of the population of simple things like that but if you have a political class which doesn't have that basic understanding a media that doesn't have that basic understanding then of course charlatans Triumph is it a case that they didn't have the understanding because of course these death numbers were put out there and it's very abstract not quite as you point out unless you know the average death numbers on a day-to-day basis how do you know if it's any different where do you know where's the relative number there and it was never given and Boris Johnson did say he wanted to end lockdown earlier but he was afraid it was too far ahead of public opinion which suggests to me that once they put project fair in place they didn't know how to reel it back is that not the problem here you know Bill Gates has a book out how to lie with Statistics is it not the case that the media and the government were all involved in this propaganda and they purposefully obscured these numbers to make people afraid I think that's probably true I mean but isn't it again you know the things Calvin that our education used to furnish you with do you remember the wonderful story of The Sorcerer's Apprentice who as it were teaches himself the spell to draw water so the bucket goes to the weather what's water automatically unfortunately he forgot to learn a spell to tell it how to stop and I think it's exactly the same once you launch what we can call operation Panic how do you stop it what then happens is of course again our Bible going back to the the gatherine rush starts and how long you know once once the herd of pigs have got that action in them they all charge over the cliffs we all charged over the Clifford lockdown over the cliff of folo with the disastrous consequences that we can see I mean this is this is why I think I mean disgraceful and that's a very very mild word though Isabella Oak shots Behavior may have been this should do good but it will only do good if rather than picking on individuals we ask ourselves the absolutely fundamental question what does this say about what's gone wrong with the way that we run ourselves I mean if you think about it you know I've been giving a very negative view of it which it's not like you my response corresponds well it corresponds to my horror and I I hope I've been conveying genuine horror because I think it is utterly disgraceful but there's another positive way of looking at this which is that the the way that in theory we do our business with public debate with the ability either on the floor of the house to challenge ministers or through select committees and so on to challenge the so-called expert that is the right way of doing it the wrong way of doing it is when you engender this Panic create again not even the cabinet was consulted we used and this is also utterly shocking we use the models of wartime government when you effectively create a war cabinet and I mean that war cabinet consisted isn't effectively of Boris Johnson of Matt Hancock and and and I think oh yes Rishi Suna and I pray disgracefully Michael Gove who was one of the leading panickers and this again you know it's really very important we say this his well-known ability to get things done was turned to utterly malign ends but it's the other thing that again you know you've got a wall cabinet but surely we have a cabinet office we have a civil service that is behavior of the civil servants involved I mean the emails from the rather WhatsApp messages from the cabinet secretary Simon case if anything they're more vulgar they're more school-boyish they're Moshi June even than those of Matt Hancock this is somebody who simply is not up to the job all of that is absolutely outrageous is it's you know I happen to think that Dominic Cummings is a genius at campaigning I think Michael Gove is a genius at get in instilling his political will and like you say the unfortunate situation here is that they made themselves an executive along with Matt Hancock who I wouldn't say is a genius at anything but they made themselves entirely undemocratic and they made an executive power that is unchallengeable and the people the civil servants working for them were Hypocrites therefore the question David is how do we avoid this kind of situation happening ever again the only answer I'm afraid is to appoint better politicians or to elect better politicians again I I think and I'll go back to the point that I made right at the beginning about Boris Johnson I think he comes out of this as a sort of tragic hero here is somebody who had all the right instincts in these circumstances Boris is a natural libertarian he is profoundly is skeptical of jargon he's profoundly skeptical of why he was why he was as it were both right and wrong about Brussels and so on but he lacked the courage of his convictions he lacked the will he liked the force if you remember in exactly a similar circumstances when he was so often overwhelmed with facts figures and whatever there is Churchill Churchill of course understood science far better than Boris and he is what he doesn't apparently coin the phrase but he constantly uses it that you want scientists on tap not on up because again the full the final false lesson of all of this is the heresy of worshiping the expert the in particular the one issue expert the reason that the sage committee was so utterly disastrous was the reason that the climate change committee is utterly disastrous the reason I would argue that the monetary policy committee is utterly disastrous the reason that nature England under Tony Juniper is is disastrous because they're single issue committees the only person speaking rationally apart from Boris and of course he's not in this group very conspicuously and hardly anything of the current prime minister appears in this very strikingly I think but but the the whole problem was that nobody was actually speaking within government saying well what's the cost of lockdown what's the literal cost in terms of money the the tens hundreds of billions that were thrown away on folo what is the cost in terms I mean Gavin Williams doing a buying a little bit what is the cost in children's education and Above All Because Of course Hancock was also a Secretary of State for health nobody's saying what is the cost of the deranged decision to make the National Health Service and National covet service to ignore heart disease to ignore dementia to a to to to to to to ignore cancer I mean just just it's it's the problem of a false notion of expertise and a worship of single issue committees and far too much for our public life is dominated by them again a proper conservative government would break the power of these things it's what is so beautiful about our parliamentary system working properly it involves debate it involves weighing you know there's no such thing as as as a good decision all decisions are just less bad because human life human life is is is is is is is complex and you have to wait often in commensurables against each other we devise because again of the notion of War of Total War we devised a system with none of the checks and balances which British government pioneered for which it's been famous but would you is a loss if we want the system to survive we have to use the system properly I'm with you entirely David this is a disgrace and all of these people are a disgrace David Starkey thank you very much see you next week it's a pleasure [Music]

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Length: 21min 56sec (1316 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 05 2023