EXCLUSIVE - Dr. David Starkey: I Was Cancelled but I Won't be Silenced for Speaking Objective Truth

[Music] [Music] hello and welcome to so what you're saying is i'm peter whittle now before i introduce my guests this week uh just want to say once again please do subscribe to the channel weren't you we have 112 000 subscribers now that's brilliant we always want more and so basically you just go to the subscribe button and click on that it's free and then next door to it there's one which is like a little blue bell and if you click on that then you will get notifications of all of our programs as they come up so uh please do subscribe won't you now my guest today was last on our program about a year ago david starkey is one of our best known historians and the author of numerous books very pieces with us now david um david i think this is the first interview you you were interviewed by the telegraph that's correct yeah this is the the oldest of mainstream media yes yes i think um obviously you know lots happened past year but how is life for you at the moment oh life is fine um remember people think that things like cancellation are tremendously uh devastating well the actual day or two was very unpleasant but they somehow assume that uh it's the equivalent of a plague cross put upon you that you know you become a social pariah nothing could be further at least in my case nothing could be further from the truth uh a single person that i'd sort of called a friend said right and he was a rather typical rich man who wanted somebody amusing you know on holiday company and that kind of thing so that was nothing very terrible um there were aspects of it that fill me with horror which not personal horror but institutional horror the fact that learned bodies for which which i've been a very distinguished member for a long period of time drop you on entirely extraneous grounds that something like the royal historical society decides that a minor view on what is the right language to use about blacks is more important than 50 years of scholarship but once cambridge college does the same this is wholly destructive of any notion of scholarship it is wholly destructive of institutions because it breaks that burkian bond of generations of you go there as a student you become a distinguished member you become rich you leave more money which further endows the institution you rupture all of that you break it and you break it for what feeling good it's i think frankly it's contemptible it's no accident several of the individuals involved like dame no she's even grander the baroness sally morgan of fitzwilliam college they're new labor apparatus they're people of absolutely no intellectual distinction no scholarship no originality they are simply mental but you know this is dangerous this is cambridge cambridge um we have a vice chancel i say we wonderful i'm liberate i've got to i've got to break that habit i'm no longer i was there i'm not there anymore it's absolutely marvelous you know rewriting one's will was a pleasure there was a moment when i thought of it'll be quite a lot of leaving it entirely to a cat's home on the ground that i hate cats but i was a little wiser um but but but cambridge under its current vice chancellor the very appropriately named toop who for some reason or another uh was regarded as being promotional to cambridge after having been the vice chancellor of the university of british columbia has presided over this regime which prioritizes the alleged feelings of minority groups now so cambridge lies at the heart of the intellectual adventure of the last 500 years um came cambridge coming to prominence it does literally 500 years ago it's complete second string to oxford until the tudor period until my own until my own period and i find something very frightening that this institution famously trinity college with more nobel prizes in the whole of france leads the charge in the reverse direction up to this year and with the odd blip here and there um i would have thought of my life and indeed of our society as one of broadening freedom there's a sudden sense of reversal i don't know whether i said it when i appeared on this program i think i probably did in other words um immediately in the aftermath of first lock down at the onset of covet i think i said did i not uh you have a good memory you may remember um a chinese virus a chinese society and that's what we're doing and would would we're reversing it's quite extraordinary we are reversing values um and and we're doing it of course at the moment of the most desperate danger that the only thing that we have faced with the china faced with india a tiny little place dot is that originality that creativity that mental adventurism that made us for some hundred years hundreds some hundreds of years the cutting edge of this astonishing post-reformation post-renaissance world but we're throwing it away it's quite extraordinary it's it's you know there's a famous model to the castle of losh or shino under louis xi where unwanted ministers were locked up in iron cages we're going into an iron cage voluntarily we're closing the door we're turning the locks ourselves and throwing the keys away it's great being old you don't really care i mean if lots of these nice young people choose to commit intellectual and political suicide economic suicide well fine so long as one was so long as one's investments last who cares when this thing happened last year i mean uh you uh have said you i think your mother once said you know your tongue will get you into trouble i think you you said that on this show when you watched it before um but uh were you surprised i think i was uh let's let's just investigate that um it of course did finally get me into trouble but equally it was the entire making of my previous career this is the point that i'm trying to get about the astonishing reversal that the remember all human progress descent depends on naysaying all human progress depends on the my favorite image as a child was the boy who says the emperor has no clothes it all progress is somebody being a non-conformist and i was brought up in a great non-conformist tradition of quakerism i was brought up within a university environment that valued originality that prized critique that prized debate and i was of course extremely good at it and because alongside scholarship i have a certain vulgar flair for language um one acquired notoriety and and and and deployed it so my mother was both absolutely right and absolutely wrong um in the opening world of the 60s you know that the the genuine period of liberation the the the breaking down of barriers of speech and behavior of dress of social class and whatever and my sort of my sort of iconoclasm was the basis of an astonishingly successful career i haven't changed society has so eventually of course you know the mother's curse catches up with you by the way i should make a very important point she was equally the person who gave me the confidence that enabled me to both ride success and to ride the challenge to success you know i haven't haven't as it were retreated weeping i mean you read of many people whatever who've undergone similar processes nervous breakdowns gibbering wrecks petitioning for forgiveness on their knees begging to be let back on twitter [Music] you i mean we should explain actually for people who i i'm sure most people would know but we've got a lot of viewers in america for example as well but it was a particular phrase um i was dealing with the again when it says this the fight now that just appalls me is a competition for victimhood and i was born let me play the victim right shall i play the victim i was born um with two club feet with polio i turn out to be gay acutely short-sighted all right shall shall we continue you know um i've got a brain um poor outsider bizarre religious group perfect victim card i've always despised victimhood um i belong to that generation that was product of the 45 education act grammar school that what you had to do you simply had to do best nobody was going to let you in because you came from outside the elite because you hadn't been to public school you would get there if you were better and jolly good thing too it forces you it requires you to do things we've reversed again all of this and there is now this cultivation of victimhood and there's the most wonderful phrase um one of the one of the uh great inventors of the idea of victimhood uh was of course nationalist ireland and there was the fair are you familiar with the with the phenomenon of mope no the phenomenon of mope is most oppressed people ever and the idea was because of the wickedness of the british and the wickedness of the british empire the irish were the most oppressed people ever and unfortunately now we have this intense competition to be the most oppressed people ever you will find everywhere i mean the latest version of it is with some inane comment from dame jenny murray or whatever you know given the damehood for sitting in front of a microphone and boring the world on women for 40 years um um that that the british empire effectively is to be our our um our holocaust and that whereas germany has come to terms with its history we have not uh and the the the issue that i was addressing was is slavery a holocaust um is it is is it a deliberate act of genocide because that is the claim of the left and you saw you remember the famous debate and it was another famous debate wasn't the debate um panel denunciation of churchill at churchill college directly on the other side of the road just recently just recently and kahindi andrews this extraordinary pseudo professor of black studies again makes this claim at the constant talk of of white empire as holocaust i mean he was particularly and and uh and and as genocide is particularly talking about in extraordinary unintelligible terms about what happens with the spanish conquest of latin america and what i was saying was and i said it very badly for once i mean i'm normally eloquent and i'm normally clear and i my grammar is good and i put thing and i remember what i'm saying i said something really stupid what i intended to say was of course um it couldn't of course at least the slavery that's associated with the british empire and the british colonies couldn't have been holocaust because what i intended to say there were so many blacks in america uh in north america in in in the united states and in britain and instead my tongue slipped and i said so many damn blacks and you know what i was even more stupid i i said actually in africa rather than america this is the sort of idiot thing that is liable to happen in this um without some elementary procedure of editing it was it was stupid it was badly expressed and it i can i can remember the moment of saying it but it was sort of your name six in the evening we were going over time i was desperate for a drink i had a mental no one really should click that and then you had a very very inexperienced presenter who didn't spot the problem and of course it was the height of the fever of black lives matter the black lives matter in britain is the most ludicrous preposterous imitative thing the the way in which we took an utterly extraneous event and it generated and purely purely imitative behavior and it is one of the problems with with britain and america because we do share a language you get this sort of what i call a kind of cultural infection um and um i think one of the great problems with that has happened in race relations in this country which have an entirely different order slavery is slavery has never had a fully legal status in britain we have never had um a kind of new apartheid we we have never had a color bar formally none of those things have ever existed here the history is radically different but of course the tendency and particularly if you're an activist black politician is to look to what's going on in america and and and and again we pay ludicrous amounts of attention to american presidential elections i mean we really do that's sort of increased hasn't it in recent years it's very much to the point where it's almost um american elections are almost covered with the same intensity as british ones it's extraordinary i think that our current british political class is infatuated with america maybe wants to be that maybe wants to be what they see on earth and you i mean again you know the the strength of feelings that people had about trump i mean preposterous i mean absolutely i mean first of all um you know the american the american constitution coped with trump without even sort of you know raising an eyebrow if you like the the the founding fathers were perfectly aware that you could have a demagogic president um what actually a demagogue president demagogue president can do without the vote of congress is very very little i mean he he can posture he can tweet a lot but that's about it but but it is i think i think particularly in the area of of race relations the the imitation of america has been profoundly and deeply damaging profoundly and deeply damaging and of course all of these things damage those who adopt it um and and in a fashion which which i find distressing you see we we we're completely different i mean you were doing an advertisement for the program let me do a little advertisement for the organize the organ that has uh enabled me to uh play a very tiny part in public debate over the last year which is the critic yes uh i've just written um my regular column there and it i think it comes out next week press the button um it comes out next week and this one is about the fact that we are a mongrel culture the peculiar thing about britain england is really england is we are a conquered country we are post-colonial from the very beginning because we were conquered by the normans and we have alone really a completely mongrel language there's no such thing as pure english and because it's a fusion of a germanic structure and a latin and french vocabulary and it comes into being at a particular moment very very it's a very recent language in its modern form it only goes back to about 1400 so when shakespeare writes it is barely 150 years old it's utterly astonishing this this speed of development now this has fundamental consequences it means we don't do what the french do you can't have that notion of a pure culture you can't have that notion of an academy which holds you to count a count on grounds of linguistic purity you can't have the kind of campaigns about la icite about french values that they do in france and and this means we have been able we we we have been able i think to have a very important reaction in the modern post-colonial world because we are ourselves we were always multicultural we were all we were we have we have by definition a peculiar adaptability in this area i don't think there's any accident about as i said our success in the post-colonial world and um it's built into the peculiar structures of english and british history and it's even more reinforced with the way in which we um we became great britain with the uh union with scotland what everybody forgets is because of course it's scott nats again the victimhood victims of english colonialism absolutely rubbish the agreement between england and scotland in 1707 is an agreement of two sovereign states and but what you leave what scotland keeps in 1707 is every aspect of an independent distinct society apart from a parliament you keep your own currency sort of at least your right to issue your own currency you keep a separate legal system you keep a separate church which the monarch joins when they cross the border the monarch actually changes religion you keep a separate court you keep a separate heraldic system extraordinary and this of course is why uh the way that blair's government did uh did did devolution was so catastrophic the only official as it were point at which scotland and england actually came together was in parliament so when you create a separate scottish parliament you rupture the central part of that bond of union um but but what i'm trying to say is we were always multi-ethnic and there was this very very unsuccessful attempt in the 18th century at creating a single british identity it never got anywhere the monarchy itself sponsors separate titles identities for members of the family in england in scotland in ireland and increasingly in wales and the first international games i'm no sportsman as you know but the first internationals are fought between england and scotland the very id in other words this this this these multiple layers of identities are pioneered here um and this is this is you see if you look at the contrast with that in america from many one the emphasis on um a sing a single stream the increasing use which we've seen in the last 40 50 years of the supreme court to override state rights and to impose a particular um a particular world view on this infinitely diverse culture with i think catastrophic results our history is so radically different we don't have a single system of education we very quickly abandoned any we are one of the first countries to abandon any attempt at the creation of of of a single dominant uh dominant religion and so on and all this makes me makes is i think if we hadn't had the all the things that you and i have been ringing our hands about we are in such an advantaged position we could have been it is you know i was saying i was just being a little bit flippant i do care of course i care but it's enough to weep over because there is just just there providing we stop following the wrong models providing we stopped you know that wonderful phrase whoring after false gods you you were saying you know this this obsession with america and the and indeed you know the the history uh race relations in america is quite different to here but the thing that started the problem was not really related to that was it david it was actually it was about something else it was about your um you're you're explaining about genocide and slavery but it is all part of the same thing it's a competition for the most victim status right right that's what it's about um that as i said and you see this repeatedly there is the there is the attempt at claim what right let me put it in very different let me put in as simple terms as possible what is the the nature of the left's attack on britain at the moment is to claim that the british empire is the equivalent of the nazis that its wrongs are as great as the nazis that they require equivalent atonement that specifically the element of slavery in the british empire is the equivalent of the jewish genocide and that therefore we require a similar uh abnegation about our history or renunciation of it to the germans now all of those seem to need to be utter rubbish utter and complete and dangerous rubbish because of course equally what the left has done is to reject any notion of objective truth the reason that it is absurd and you know every every bbc producer talks in these terms i just mentioned jenny murray there was somebody who had i i remember correctly today producer again going on about oh the empire is the equivalent of genocide or whatever um and it is objectively not true i think that was this week wasn't it with jenny mario she yes she made this she made these points um which is this grace and the scandal i mean sorry uh she's you know she she's she's well loved and all the rest but it's intellectually slovenly it's a corruption of language and frankly it's a disgrace because and the reason it's a disgrace is because the obj there is an objective test of these six million jews are killed deliberately deliberately with a machine of death right you know that is not in dispute there is no not even a thousandth part of one percent of an equivalent of that and so but what the left has done is to reject the notion of of objective truth this is the catastrophe of what is going on at the moment that everything is point of view or felt experience no it's not it again begins with the lawrence inquiry where you know an act of race it's a racist fact if somebody feels that it's a racist act we're about to do the same thing with misogyny no it's not and particularly english law depends always used to depend on the objective test of evidence but we're rejecting that and so that really is that is cultural suicide the thing is uh when i keep returning this obviously because it's been such a huge uh event in your life and no it's not so you're vastly really this is rubbish you're wholly exaggerating it it was the behavior you know it's a wonderful passage sorry it really is important we get this right there is this wonderful passage in book uh when he talks this is the height of the french revolution about a lot of noisy grasshoppers making it tremendous twitter whilst the great comfortable and he calls them the great cows the the the the the the great beef of britain sort of contents you know contentedly chews its cud underneath the spreading british oak whilst a lot of go on that's what it is um and it's it's no accident um it it affects the world of the universities and particularly the world of arts faculties and the universities and and aspects of the media in other words peter it's words words words and and so much of this is and this is why i say it's a sort of cultural retreat um the great triumph of and it's very much the triumph of britain and england in particular is the triumph of the inductive experimental test of truth the whole basis of modern science and technology sort of it's remote intellectual ancestor i suppose it's francis bacon um but but the the the test of of of objective truth and objective experience and um this is what separates us from the middle ages where you had a science simply there was a lot of science there was a lot of philosophy it was just words words words words about god words about nature whatever and we broke out of that stranglehold with the test of objective truth we've abandoned that test which is why there's a sudden sense of going back to the middle ages what i did um in what i did i mean nobody has ever been able to produce evidence that i have ever insulted anybody of color that i have ever used abusive language about them um i've lived in multicultural london for 40 or how long now um 40 or not longer since 1972 just coming up to 50 years um there was never i have never been involved in other words there is no objective test i used a wrong i use one word out of place oh yes no no no no no no but but but but but let let's really pursue this this is this is incomprehensible in save in religious terms what we have done religion as a work has become a new religion what i did was to commit heresy remember heresy was a voluntary crime it was the denial of the beliefs of the church and if you denied your denial you weren't burnt so it was completely you know that unspeakable death of burning alive was a completely voluntary act and but it was all about words and what we've done now we've elevated language into this absurd um prominence because we've cut it off from meaning we've cut it off from outside experience everything is now just internal to people going now inside their heads it's a form of lunacy i mean it really really is a form of lunacy recently the only reason i explore it more david would do is the effect it has that's all of course i mean it's had no what i mean is the effect it has on your life for example on on all of our lives i mean you know you've had therefore you know a bad experience in terms of being yes but sorry i'm i'm a stoic that is to say i believe that experiences are only bad if you let them be bad right they want to damage you of course they want to damage you they want to humiliate you of course they do but they can only do that if you let that happen um and this is what peterson in an extraordinary cat-handed and clumsy way is trying to say i wish i made as much money as he did but that's another matter but but but but it is stoicism that that you that that you the only thing you you cannot control the world you cannot control what people say about you think about you you can control how you react to it which is why i'm so contemptuous of victimhood victimhood is is all about saying um because i am black or because i am disabled or because i am gay or because i am trans i require the world to make all sorts of special allowances for me what what are you surprised in the past year because since we spoke right which was just the very beginning of code are you surprised at uh how quickly a kind of there's been in our institutions a kind of we'll call it capitulation if you want or or indeed just a sort of a failure i mean whether it's a british library whether it's or right up to shoe gardens now you know only the only thing i mean these institutions are scandals i mean the british library actually dropped publishing an essay by me on anglo scottish relations in the 16th century now that's deranged that is simply deranged and for what is theoretically the custodian institution of the central in this is the british library really is it's equivalent of the great library of alexandria yes it's it is it is the custodian of the record of our civilization and it betrays it it betrays every single principle um at last i mean there's a government the government has shown some faint stirrings now i think so far i've been being fairly pessimistic let me now slightly reverse direction we've had a most interesting incident which suggests that things are going in the way that there is a limit to all of this which is of course uh the megan and harry interview the megan and harry interview uh deployed all the tropes that i've been talking about um the disgraceful unsubstantiated carefully sprayed charge of racism yes the uh the question of skin color above all you know i've been a victim of mental illness risk of suicide all of these things and what's fascinating particularly disgraceful reaction of the times fundamental crisis for the monarchy or a dagger pointed at its heart yeah it's been forgotten in 10 days [Music] and the um um the br in britain it of course polarized opinion in very much the same way as work has done um the young bits of the labour party that we saw keith starman desperately legs being dragged ever wider you know he'll finish up being torn apart he's going to be very very very entertaining to to watch it'll be very painful for him and very amusing for the rest of us but but being pulled apart on on uh by white the by the wild horses of trying to get the red wall back and trying to keep diane abbott on side on the other is exquisite watching him uh being pulled between the two so all those forces on one side and then it was that burkian analogy that i gave you before lot and the great mass of the british public shrugged its shoulders said she is um an intriguing little words that i would not repure that i would not repeat in front of a family audience and shrugged its shoulders and continued so the the moment you get the opportunity for a genuine test of public opinion the dikes are held the problem the prop the prop the problem is this problem is this that we have corporate woke we even had an attempt at royal work there are aspects of prince charles and prince william that flirt with wilkery and it is whatever it touches it destroys it is an absolute rule whatever it touches it destroys and of course it's infected uh the human resources departments of virtually every company of every profession of um as i was saying learned societies the royal historical society under the disgraceful leadership of margot finn signs up to the most extreme version of black lives matter just what are bodies doing that the things i mean we have important we have permanent secretaries in the civil service concluding uh official memoranda with that too oh yeah so that's that's everywhere now yeah no but but but it is a scandal i'm sorry sorry it is it is a genuine scandal it is in my view it is every bit as bad as putting the swastika with uh harry and megan you see you're pretty much saying that this is uh something in nothing that it sort of will go i mean i think it has them i mean i the the um the the the only thing that would change it right very interesting i mean i know an awful lot about this from the inside peter i used to work with cbs would you believe giving you a sense of how the world has changed i was there principal contact for royal matters until 2017. so i've worked with all of them i've i've i've i've worked with susan zarinsky the producer of it i've worked with gail whether he interviewed yes so all of these people i know absolutely from the inside and and there was the what gail came up with the remark because clearly acting as megan's spokesman they have emails to prove every point if those emails are published and they prove every point then the monarchy is in serious trouble until that moment it doesn't matter i think it doesn't matter domestically the only thing i would say is that uh the way that the americans have taken that interview to heart yes but america's split in exactly the same sorry i mean it's not americans it's the american left remember the america is completely split down the middle um there's a piece by my friend and the spectator by lee cohen as we're all doing plugs lee cohen and the spectator pointing out that the genuine the the division in america corresponds precisely to democrat uh versus um versus republican um and uh you see you see this everywhere i mean even the whole debate about which we haven't really talked about uh the whole debate about the response to covet replicates these lines of division and the the most the most obvious indicator of them in british politics is whether you voted remain or leave yes and that lie those lines contin every issue was polarized but we're dealing with a society both britain and america which is divided you know on on a barometer line around 50 percent yes i suppose in the long term though before we leave the the monarchy and go on to covet i do want to ask you because yes the things you said about kovid before really resonated something you wrote in the critic actually but with monarchy um okay this might be a sometime thing comes and goes but do you think that what is the outlook do you think when the queen's no longer there what do you think is the outlook do you think we'll have a friend no one can say i mean i always say this you know history only works in one direction it only works backwards um your famous famous t.s eliot quote i was very very fine beckett um in murder in the cathedral with all with all the tensions and hypocrisies as a schoolboy and the uh i can still remember that gesture uh oh good good my producer said more of that um and it was my knee of course only in retrospection can we say that was the day i think that it's relatively safe um i also think that what we're forgetting is that my guess is that there's a bubbling reaction to woke amongst the younger well boys um and uh i still have quite a lot of involvement with schools and whatever and one is seeing a very mark gender divide on this issue woke has been of course of immense benefit to women to girls um it gives them all sorts of special privileges and advantages which in the battle of the sexes of course they properly take advantage of and boys are getting fed up of it um i think that we will probably see another generation that comes along that will uh i mean let's speculate let's be really silly we'll probably be violently right-wing and neo-fascistic as we've lost any notion of moderation and good sense can we get shall we get on to covey yes no i i was going to ask you you made a very good uh it seemed really plausible that the government had lost its nerve on a very particular weekend yes it was a weekend of the 13th 14th 15th of march and all the evidence has come up to prove that i am absolutely right um but um it's the weekend i know it was my last weekend in london it was i was and it was it was it was extraordinary on the friday i was at covent garden it was the next to the last i think performance in the opera house of beethoven's fidelio which of course is the offer about imprisonment it was entirely and you realize something it was a sellout performance and it wasn't the empty seats uh i went to the pub afterwards and thought oh god i'm being a fool and i got out you know hastily mouthing down half a pint and got into a cabin came home and that weekend everything changed the the the uh the figures of deaths multiply from some tiny number you know like 30 to 60 but they double uh you get we now know it's the weekend when professor lockdown when neil ferguson's absurd preposterous predictions remember nobody has ever been more wrong about everything than neil ferguson he was wrong about uh he was he was wrong about bse he was responsible for the disgraceful overreaction to foot and mouth i remember the countryside filled with smoking carcasses disgusting and disgraceful um and but the government panicked and of course the panic was was exacerbated uh by by by isn't it nice macros had to go into another lockdown by macron saying that if britain didn't follow suit the borders would be closer they'd panic that weekend and they go from what would be a very sensible series of reactions to a grossly silly one and it's silly in every way and again you can look at reasons we've also again at the comments the comments that have come out with with dominic cummings um cummings is cummings is both very bright and full uh he is a historian who thinks he understands maths which plainly he doesn't and one of the reasons that the government fell over and worshipped uh at the shrine of of of neil ferguson was mathematical modeling mathematical modeling is mathematical juju right pure juice and but the but the government was suckers for it because cummings was a sucker for it um and and the final thing is no it's not the final thing though many more and there are two other really important there were two other really important things that happened one of course is nhs worship um the tories had tried to try to present and is very important part of you know the red wall and whatever themselves as the party of the nhs hence that no slogan protect the nhs you said the nhs is here to protect us the the uh and the the criminal i mean in my view it is criminal and i'm not using the word likely the clearing out of of of of of people into care homes um to free up beds in the nhs turning the nhs into a national coveted service but that's all water under the bridge i'm afraid but uh when we look at it sorry the fight the final catastrophic error here again we've got a prime minister who once wrote a rather bad book on churchill um and churchill of course has very intelligence things to say on most things above all scientists churchill was fascinated by scientists he had a pet one and checkers the the professor but he said something very interesting you want your scientists on tap but not on top and what we've done with sage is to put sciences on top yeah catastrophic you can see why they're there they were effectively there as camouflage cover but then it gives them a veto on policy yes the situation now those that i mean that the kind of anti-lockdown argument put it broadly uh sort of lost didn't i mean the people people are kind of you know peter i think peter hitches sort of says well we sort of lost you know it's time and events has gone on to such an extent yeah that we're sort of like this is what it is but of course remember it is it's still important to register how catastrophic it is yeah he may have lost the argument we shouldn't have lost the argument i mean look at what a disaster it is it is the point that i made before chinese virus chinese society a lockdown is something that only a dictatorship can impose yeah and that's why we did it so badly we did a really bad lockdown in china when there's lockdown if you stray i imagine you're machine gun or you're certainly manhandled back in i gather the door a steel bolt is put on the outside that is what happens we we do a shambolic incompetent version with with preposterous bumbling british policemen you know under-reacting one day and overreacting the next day but it is utterly destructive of everything that makes us what we are we've lost the moral argument with china we've lost the moral argument and of course the whole lockdown approach and reinforces everything that i was talking about about ignoring evidence and ignoring the importance of freedom we've discarded the notion of freedom it's the only thing that distinguishes us from china we've thrown it all we've thrown it away but we know why we've thrown it away we've thrown it away on two grams sentimentalism the dianification of society from from 1997 onwards one of the things i found right i'm 76 one of the things i found most disgusting was every death is a tragedy it's a tragedy no it's not no no it's not it's an act of mutual lying it's a solving of the conscience right um so it's that's gross sentimentalism that's one of the one of the things that's gone wrong and the other is the triumph of the precautionary principle which we're seeing an awful lot of debate on in its exaggerated form in europe which of course has led to their catastrophe over uh over the whole in the whole inoculation vaccination program but it's the triumph of the notion of safety and there's a wonderful wonderful phrase of benjamin franklin you know that those who will sacrifice freedom for security will shortly lose both oh yes but so he anticipated this is the whole point the situation that we're in now has been repeatedly anticipated because um it is a response to particular flaws in human nature again the the the the the the the way in which all these things interconnect what i'm trying to say all these things interconnect oh yes they absolutely interconnect yes which is why a sense of genuine civilizational gloom is appropriate um the the um it is it is odd civilizations die from inside they die from inside and once you lose confidence you see the great argument i mean the the previous great death of a civilization is the death of the classical world and of course gibbons great decline and fall of the roman empire it's very interesting what's it attributed to christianity it attributes it to a philosophy that was the direct opposite of what had made rome great which is famous are described by nietzsche as a religion for slaves and i think it's right i really do think that is right um and i'm afraid you know by doing what we've done we've embraced slavery you're writing at the moment aren't you david i am i'm back safely in the tudors oh really i thought you were writing a memoir well i'll be doing that too um but i'm essentially no i'm safely back in the tudors again you see this is i have this permanent intellectual uh refuge i you become as you get older and partly i suppose thinking of memoirs you become aware of what you were when you were young as well and the relationship of that person then and this person now and one of the books that most influenced me when i was a very young man and was terribly pretentious and was determined to be an oxbridge dominant and territorially important learned conversations and panel rooms and passing of ports and decanters and all that sort of stuff and then i came up to london and rather discovered the leather seat and forgot all about it you know but uh the but the the the the the the the the the uh if i'm not careful i'm going to forget what i was going to say as well uh um uh with with the church one of the books most profoundly influenced me is the microcosmographia academica which is this pistic of academic politics written by one of the great geniuses of trinity college fm cornford francis cornford the great classicist and cornford uh the memoir is utterly brilliant on the analogy you you you you know the uh the the wonderful phrase about you know why why uh academic politics is so vicious because the stakes it's 26 brilliant pages it's in wardian pro so it's it's oscar wilde praise utterly utterly completely brilliant phrases like you know those who speak at the union developed the habit of addressing their their best friends as though they were a room full of stupid reporters this this wonderful wonderful but there is marvelous section in there that uh you know you will go on you'll become an academic politician you'll become a vice chancellor you will be hated and loathed and then maybe if you're fortunate you'll return to the things of the mind you will go back to what you started off being serious research serious thinking and you will finish up with the joys of a clean muscular intelligence and nobody will want you out of the way and nobody will want to get rid of you and there is that sense of i've always loved the processes of historical research of analysis of tight documentary analysis it was how i you know it was how i was picked out at cambridge uh there was that extraordinary moment in my seminar with elton who was the great historian of this and when jeffrey was going on my english and such and such and such a document and stark his hand went up and said sorry professor elton you are wrong right the atmosphere turned and he was and i was able to tell him why he was wrong but you know at that point he was still big enough to see that as good not bad later on he became small-minded and tried to defend his own youthful absurdities the tudor revolution in government uh and whatever so you see i've had this experience of fall before i was the subject of a lecture at cambridge given by um john morrill rather cruelly known as the moral majority given by john on lucifer you know you remember this bright star of the morning who turns into the devil i was elton's favorite student and i challenged him and was driven into outer darkness why didn't i get that job at cambridge um so i've been here several times and providing providing you retain that inner confidence providing you with something that remember nothing is important there is that wonderful that wonderful phrase which which which is is almost certainly aj balfour you know the bob's your uncle chad because his uncle was the marcus of salisbury robert robert salisbury and nothing matters very much and few things matter at all that is true human values are our invention we make them things matter because you make them matter there are no external forces there are human beings and all that matters is if you have that confidence and you have that belief and you have that that sense of the recognition of not the external worlds of feelings but something else for me a good scientist it's what goes on as a laboratory for a good mathematician it's his sons a good historian it's the document as jeffrey alton it is best always used to say there are no authorities in history there is just evidence well david on that note um with the book you're you're just going to write a memo or you uh oh yeah it is much of it is done oh is it um well you must come back and talk to us yeah i mean i i think i would prefer to get the tutor the the what i'm doing is i'm writing um i the reason i was having such a struggle with resuming my henry viii biography after a rather good start was i couldn't work out how to get back into it yes and i now know why um what the book is going to be called it's going to be looking at something that is of crucial importance the relationship between henry and his father right it's going to be called henry tudor and son it's rather nice you know like a firm of undertakers henry henry tudor and son and it's stolen of course all things are stolen aren't they it's stolen from dear old s t bindoff who was this tedious old professor at queen mary college when i came to first came to london and he had a chapter of his rather bad book on tudor england called henry tudor and son but it's a very good title and that's how i'm tackling it and it's wonderful do you know when we can can i end on the advertisement yes the do you know we don't actually know the date on which the most important marriage in english royal history takes place we don't know the date on which henry vii and elizabeth of york actually marry i can prove that the date that's in the books is a fake ah with a single document okay a single document a single piece of evidence and that's the excitement it's the excitement of the chase david thank you very very much thank you uh that's it for us what you're saying is this week we shall see you next time thank you very much [Music] you

Channel: The New Culture Forum

Views: 255,939

Keywords: New Culture Forum, Peter Whittle, So What You're Saying Is..., Culture Wars

Id: UrDOkYGd5d8

Length: 57min 5sec (3425 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 18 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/waxbbq]

I'd be more interested in this if only he was a bit less of a twat...