Peter Hitchens | Reclaiming our Freedoms

today's guest peter hitchens is no stranger to our series we've spoken extensively in the past he's a man who calls it as he sees it and he sees it on the basis of a very fine mind and extraordinary life experience so whether you agree or disagree his insights really do make us stop and think he's contributed to the spectator the american conservative the guardian from the other side if you like and first things he's the author of many books many essays modern history unconventional wisdom published in 2020 which has essays on topics ranging from bloody mary the nazis and covert lockdowns he makes regular appearances on british television and popular podcasts and we always get a really interesting reaction and a very deeply appreciative one from many people even from those who might have a different perspective when we talk to peter so it's i hope you enjoy this conversation peter it's terrific to see you again even if it is via this technology across half the globe if i could firstly say arguably now in your country and mine life is returning to some degree of normality particularly in sydney and new south wales which is the part of the country i spend most time in um but we look back over the last couple of years in your own country can you give us a feel for how britain's leaders and journalists and intellectuals versus the republic if you like have responded to covert and whether it gives some insights into how the british character which australians are so familiar with has changed over the last couple of decades i think a lot of people have welcomed being told what to do uh they've welcomed exchanging a slightly uh unpredictable freedom for a what they believe to be a a safer more ordered society i think has been a surprising and to me very distressing welcome among the great majority for a complete change in the way we live our lives we aren't out of it by any means we're just going through a new uh series of measures to make life more difficult based on the the supposed prevalence of the new omicron variant which a lot of people assume could go on for some weeks if not months so we're far from out of it here but then of course we're in the winter when the the health service always comes under pressure whatever's going on and it will under actually become under pressure and that that's generally a pretty good uh reason for any government to say well in that case we must take measures and that that argument will be accepted somebody was asking me today why why do i say that the the authoritarian side is one in this argument because they they control the past if you if you ask the british population now uh what the biggest lesson of the past couple of years was i would say 97 would agree with the proposition that we should have shut down the country harder and sooner i don't agree with that i think it's completely mistaken but i i do understand that's what most people think it's what most people think about the past and therefore it will govern very much how they approach the future so a very very important battle has been lost and liberty in a society exists mainly in the hearts and minds of the people who live in it and what we've established i think beyond doubt over the past nearly two years now is that certainly in britain people prefer securities liberty and that's where we are and that i think is is the future as it as stretches out before us there's a whole heap of things there to unpack one of them is that i recently did a conversation with jordan peterson about covert and australia because internationally and particularly in america there's a feeling that we've reduced ourselves to a police state particularly in the city of melbourne which is the most locked down city of all yeah i think a lot of people have seen that and felt that something of that kind was going on it certainly looks very uh very worrying from here even even we haven't undergone anything resembling that no i know you know here's a confession i felt with jordan that i had to be really careful about criticizing my own country too strongly and i i look back on it and think i should have been a bit blunter and how i really felt about it but um but here's this is a little straw in the wind that i thought was really interesting it goes to the heart of what you were talking about there was a perceptive comment from i don't know where uh following that conversation to the effect of whatever has happened to the australians that i've known in the past where's their sense of resilience of self-reliance even a sort of larry and spirit nutella was the number of likes there was a a almost a pylon with people wanting to tick the like box there's this perception somehow or other that maybe it's a fear thing i think peter would become very fearful and fear is a great inhibitor and maybe when we're afraid even of our own freedoms and we worry about where our society is going we worry about being cancelled we worry about economics we flee for security do you think that's part of it oh completely but it's a it's it's an old it's the old hobsyan bargain isn't it that you you exchange your your freedom for security and also i think the the arguments has been very strong that the thing which makes people resist authority is pride and if people are afraid they're much less inclined to be proud and there it is i'd say it has happened and in the anglosphere countries which prided themselves on having a tradition of liberty stretching back to magna carta in the 13th century they turn out not actually have any kind of tradition of that sort of tool uh they turn out to be anxious to shelter under the wing of a strong authority you may get lots of likes on the internet for saying the other thing you'll get them from the minority who who still think that liberty is important i think that this uh this change has majority acceptance and when people say to me oh you're you're just caving in we should fight on that's what you fight on if you like but what is it exactly that you're fighting uh a a level of public support of that nature and an understanding of the past so powerfully in my view wrong uh it's a very hard thing to fight and there are a lot of things which i happen to think about the past which i i think are justified by reason logic and fact like even about the second world war i know perfectly well take as an example this my very unpopular view that it was a grave moral and indeed political and military mistake for britain to engage in the deliberate bombing of german civilians it's almost impossible to get that idea across in britain now what is it 70 more years ago you still can't actually argue that because the the past is is controlled and patrolled by people who believe that it was justified and i feel an equally strong decision has been taken about the past that the only failing of government was that they didn't didn't shut down their economies and their societies hard enough and fast enough and had they done so in a sort of chinese style we would now be freer of this disease it's a complete mistake but it's what people believe and they continue to believe in the effectiveness of shutting down society they think that the case is completely proven they continue to believe in mask wearing though the case for that is again how should i put it highly questionable and to challenge this is simply to ask for uh to to be hosed down with with with jets of slime i i'll do it because it's necessary to tell the truth for its own sake but i won't do it anymore with the slightest hope of making any impact uh on predominant public opinion that's the way it's gone and it's gone that way because people ultimately prefer to be safe and they've been they've been offered a choice between fear and safety and they've chosen what they believe to be safety i don't think they are particularly safe but again uh everything that i say is dismissed you know in any argument that you're not arguing with with reasonable people when they lose their temper with you and start screaming at you and deploying guilt by association techniques against you know that it's nothing to do with reason and they're always reminded of the great jonathan swift rule you cannot reason the man out of the position he wasn't reasoned into in the first place people were frightened into this and they and they remain frightened and as far as i can see they're going to stay frightened for the foreseeable future and beyond yeah i understand exactly what you're saying now you know i count the prime minister of australia as as a friend so i don't want to sound like i'm taking a cheap shot but you talk about this issue of us losing touch with the past and therefore you know being easily led um he's used the expression several times recently and it's been widely welcomed it's time for governments to give their people their freedom back again it seems to me what's lost here is that if there's anything approaching a right in a democracy you know particularly in your country and in our derivative democracy it's that actually governments don't give you those freedoms the the essential freedoms of conscience of belief of speech of association and freedom even of property are you like things that governments should support and respect and buttress but they're not theirs to give well they're not in their gifts but of course the whole the whole uh system of human rights uh is based on the idea that governments can bestow freedom whereas the english tradition was i think it goes back i think really to the norman conquest the idea that there were pre-existing losers uh before we were before we were governed by by william the conqueror which belonged to us anyway and which we've stood by and sought at all times to protect and when lost recovered the government can't give you back freedom which you don't particularly want and i would say the point the point seems to me to be demonstrated here is that people by and large don't want it in various pockets interesting pockets so for instance the former east germany i think you probably found a higher level of protest against being ordered about and confined to people's homes than in most places in europe and that's because the people of the former east germany know perfectly well what authoritarian government looks like and they don't want it back but most people don't even understand what's being done to them uh and or care very much and this the the distilling of fear into power by by very very clever advertising men and public relations men and propagandists over the past 18 months or so has been immensely effective and fear is once people start being afraid especially if something so hard to see and so hard to be sure that it's gone uh is is lasting and potential has changed the way in which people behave but they say the crucial thing is i don't think this would have worked half so well if people hadn't deep down wanted to be safe yeah well of all else what we're really talking about here is an enormous shift if you like to put it in really sort of simple terms from one where we understood that governments were there to service which is what we say we want them to do and they are if you like a function of us and they should respond to our will to one where increasingly we're saying no we want to respond we will be shaped we'll be a function of you as government it's an enormous and profound shift as i see it brings about a different kind of person as well you take a there's somebody of a hundred years ago or 80 years ago living there they had to know how to fix things uh they they knew they had to rely on themselves on there but he would rescue them the principal unit of government was actually the family rather than the government itself uh people could could repair their own houses repair their own cars fix their own engines uh to cope with electricity and plumbing and things like that on their own the way the way people living in places like africa still can but we've become completely dependent creatures in a highly organized society in which we rely on somebody else to come in and help us with almost everything and we're not the same kind of people as we were i i i've said this to you before the the crucial moment seems to me still to be in the first world war at the moment when certainly english society lost that self-reliance and that belief that it could more or less look after itself uh you see it in parliamentary debates on things like gun control before 1914 and after 1918 a total transformation in in the attitude towards how self-reliant people could or should be which took place and it's this this has now come along i had suspected for a long time particularly in the reaction that that western societies have had to terrorism that there was quite a strong desire to to to be embraced by a strong and protective state and i but i never thought it would come in this form this took me completely by surprise that it would take the form of a virus and and related to that the the sort of uh you know neil ferguson's been writing about catastrophism and you're an oxford you won't find that term i'm told in the oxford dictionary but we all know what's meant by this sort of lemming-like rush to coalesce around a crisis and and use extraordinary language rather than calm dedicated reason the sort of approach of your life lemmings by the way they've been much reduced there's a lot of things said about them are not true it's humans are much blessed look it up sometimes the amazing story of how the myth of the lemmings arose you'll be you'll be tickled basically it's it's letting sit around in their pubs laughing about how humans owe themselves over metaphorical cliffs i think it's it's it's we are very much inclined to panic lemmings is rather calmer i'll save that letting sitting around and pups laughing it's extremely easy to panic people in in the in the world of the of electronic media and particularly the internet the it's never been that hard to panic crap and crowds much more often go out than individuals but when you when you can create a huge electronic mob then of course your ability to panic vast numbers of people in the same direction is hugely increased and conform the conformism of electronic media is enormous it makes people want to be like the people on television it makes people want to be like each other it makes people want to share the same beliefs the same sense of humor the same fashions everything with amazing speed and power and of course that this that has never happened before uh that is a result of the the fantastically increased power of electronic media including including computers on the internet which has grown up really only in the past 25 years even though readings or newspapers or or novels of the era just before this began it's astonishing to me how quickly it happened but it has happened and it makes a great impact on that on the ability of anybody to spread an idea very rapidly indeed to a huge number of people who will conform to it i take it quite entirely and it seems to me that there's an enormous political cost to this sort of emerging world in which there's a perpetual sense of crisis we're always in an emergency there's always something that's threatening all of us even though often i mean i would say sitting here in australia listening to the media there's no balancing out of it we faced challenges on many fronts but it was covered and then it was glasgow and they're all surrounded by anything but a calm sense of reason and awareness that we face challenges on a wide number of fronts and they will over you know we'll get mugged by one of the ones we haven't been watching in my view we're not paying anywhere near enough attention in this part of the world to what's happening in china you know we're worried about it but we're not doing enough with a real sense of urgency whereas there's absolute hysteria over over glasgow's outcomes sure but many belief systems are apocalyptic they rely on some approaching catastrophe that everyone has to be preparing themselves for there is some way in which that again that appeals to the human mind but i think again never never before on this scale what about the complexity of these issues do you think there's a sense in which covert uh climate change uh these sorts of issues they're so complex so overcoming uh in terms of the man in the street uh looking at them that they think i've got to shrug my hands in in horror you can't get your mind around these things therefore we'll we'll even though we don't really trust our politicians and bureaucrats we'll trust them so that we don't have to worry and they sort of hand it over in a sense and become disengaged i'm sure that's true to some extent yes i mean these things are quite difficult the complexity of them is great and it's quite difficult to challenge them so yes i think i think undoubtedly people again like to sink into the into the comfortable sofa of certainty uh rather than actually worrying themselves too much about whether it's true particularly since what the government is saying it's all right we have this covered if you listen to us everything will be fine it won't be but that's what they say yeah i think you might have written about this but you know in 2020 uh you almost wonder about the impact on democracy because there was very little debate about a lockdown you know parliament sort of met there seemed to be all sorts of advice you ought to go into lockdown so you're going to lock down and that was parallel time and time again in australia you also had the handing over of decision making to unelected health officials uh in an extraordinary moment in new south wales was it a new incoming premier who'd been castigated by the press oh he'll be too conservative he's a catholic he's got lots and lots of children he's out of sync with the times one of the first things he did said that um in future we will make the decisions because we're elected not the health officials which was a very welcome step but but going back to britain you went into lockdown with almost no debate as i understand it and that and that pattern was reflected here too oh all the supposed institutions of the constitution failed uh there was the the official parliamentary opposition did not oppose parliament itself did not find time or room for any serious opposition the courts didn't question uh the media with some small exceptions by and large decided to follow the government line uh the academy the same uh and the all these things fail i i just wasn't in the least but surprised me i i having always placed liberty above democracy i tended to be suspicious of universal suffrage democracy's readiness to override freedom uh when it when it suits it to do so and in this case that absolutely happened it didn't all those things which was supposed to protect us just let us down there were no breaks at all if there weren't even any gears we went straight from what had been apparently normal life into a situation of permanent state of siege which we're still in and which people have uh have accepted and the government and its experts speak to the people directly over the heads of parliament and the constitution there's no sign of an independent civil service and i'd say we were really really very badly let down by the courts which in this country wouldn't even consider an application to hear a judicial review it's not that they heard a judicial review case and rejected it they wouldn't even let it be heard in the courts despite some pretty insidious attempts to get it into the courts nothing was even so nothing worked at all and there was a small group in fact in some ways it was i do wonder whether people like me acted as a fig leaf to to give the impression of this being a free society when it really isn't anymore that no one actually comes and arrests you for saying actually i'm not entirely sure the government's right but on the other hand your whatever you say is completely ignored by every official body in action and things carry on as if you hadn't said anything do you do you see a link you and i both lived through the enormous decline of christian influence uh in in beliefs and values and the way we live our lives in the sense of um having feeling we have a responsibility to respect other people even if we differ strongly with them and i wonder whether that there's a a relationship there between what i would say is a lack of the narrative and the cohesion uh that that came out of a broadly shared view that even if you weren't a christian believer it was broadly the way we ought to live our lives to where we've got now is there a sense in which we're looking for a new solidarity in very strange places like clustering together around covert and accepting that government should tell us what to do in this area yeah i'm not sure i i like to think because it suits me i like to think that the christian era was one in which it was possible to develop a society in which adversarial institutions could exist and people still search for something by which to to guide themselves morally to give themselves some sort of idea as to how to live well and i think that the um the climate change movement and in the over the longer period and i think the desire to behave in a neighborly way towards your fellow citizens overcome it by adopting social distancing staying at home wearing face coverings and rest i think these things do tap into the the very strong desire of people to have some code by which they might live well i mean again i personally i think it's it's a mistaken understanding of how to live well but i can quite see why people do believe that by following these these these codes and obeying these these rules they they are doing good and also i can see why they believe that the people like me who are heretical in this matter are doing harm and are bad sometimes they tell me so yeah um it's it's an interesting experience well talking of experiences you actually wrote and i'm quoting here that when you got vaccinated for covert you felt a quote pang of regret and loss and you went on to say that we're going through this revolution we've been talking about in which we're giving up freedom for what you call the game quote the illusion of safety but some might say well you know gee seat belts and food hygiene standards are common examples of how we trade off freedom for safety just what did you mean by the illusion of safety we've talked about it but i'd just like to just get you to elaborate a bit more on that this will deal with the seatbelt analogy and the the the evidence for the effectiveness of seatbelts is incontrovertible it's been established in many many highly authoritative uh surveys of actual results in road accidents over many years on both sides of the atlantic beginning in sweden back in the 1950s with the volvo company which began the whole thing and there isn't any question materially that seat belts are affected uh the vaccination i thought i've got nothing secure against vaccinations i mean my my arm has been punctured so many times for vaccinations some of them which i i think i was quite unwise to have such as the yellow fever when i had the age of 59 which is fantastically close to the age of 60 which i now discover it's quite dangerous to have yellow fever vaccinations i've done them all it's not it's i have no principal objection to them but i felt that the reason for as i explained at the time for for taking the um the kerb investigation which i got an awful lot of quite very personal attack from people who decided that i was sort of lost leaders was done this was that at the time i thought it was very likely that i would not see several close members of my family for years unless i was prepared to undergo this because i i foresaw that it'd be very difficult to travel without it i would since then i'd say that it seems to me that the argument that the vaccination is quite effective at preventing the disease from from becoming too virulent in the individual is more persuasive than it was at the time so i i but that wasn't understood or even known when the vaccination was being pressed on us i don't think it was just what we were being told was get the vaccination and the implication was very strong if you didn't do so you would be restricted from doing all kinds of things and the one that worried me in that case to say was particular kinds of foreign travel which i was afraid i would not be able to undertake otherwise and i felt i felt a bit pushed honestly into doing something i would not i don't i i that that that was all but i it the whole thing that exploded into people writing the incredibly rude things on the internet about how i'd let them down and uh portrayed the cause and i couldn't quite see it myself but there it was i never said at any stage i wouldn't have it i've never advised anybody not to have it i've never advised anybody to have it i just thought that i'm a sort of semi-public figure and it would be honest to tell people that i had had it because i had uh and i've been brought up very strongly with honesty as the best policy and with the initial capital letters on every word and i thought well okay i'll say well i've done and honestly the the the effect of it made me wonder whether honesty is in fact the best policies because you didn't i didn't the response wasn't rational it was it was it was it was one of really quite odd fury i was just expressing how how i felt at the time that i was pushed into doing something i probably would not otherwise have done because of what appeared to me to be a iron array of bureaucracy lying before you which meant that even the freedom to travel was now circumscribed by by uh by covet regulations which i do find dispiriting i still do yeah i suspect there's a lot of people who will resonate with what you just said there they they believe in principle that honesty is the best policy but in reality i mean people say this all the time i don't feel i can actually be honest and we'll come to free speech in a moment but before we do can we just tease out a little bit i mean there are times of course when we we do surrender certain of our powers to governments there's a sort of covenantal arrangement if you like in a properly working democracy so to take an extreme example that we talked about uh when i was with jordan peterson recently in london during the blitz it was accepted i think that everyone there was no there could be no right of freedom of conscience over the issue of blackouts you you could not let light throw onto the streets you had to have your curtains dark curtains drawn for the safety of all the point was i suppose that as soon as it became safe people could turn their lights on again and throw their curtains open but that was there was no room for dissent on that one there are times it's an extreme example of when governments collectively take very tough decisions and we have to respect them any any thoughts on that on how we get that balance right because i think you and i are agreeing we've gone far too far but but how do we understand the need for governments from time to time to take tough action that we all have to comply with well it's easy to get the balance right because the in the case of these justices with the seat belt uh the blackout it was incredibly effective and we know this because of a report called the butt report into the into the total ineffectiveness of the royal air force's early bombing of germany in the first couple of years of the war they couldn't hit anything uh because the germans hadn't affected blackout they couldn't find the cities so they they were they were killing german cows if they were killing anybody at all and we know this and it's perfectly evident with a blackout thing and it's effective as long as everybody engages in it it's a completely different thing from either a vaccination or mask wearing or other things well the effectiveness is still very much a matter of how should i put it debate uh and where the individual action is which affects the individual is separate from the collective action what the the effective vaccination as far as i understand is mainly and i know there are arguments about how much it affects the uh the transmission but i think it's perfectly possible for a vaccination person to infect somebody else with curvy it's perfectly possible for vaccination vaccinated person to get kobe the main effect of the vaccination is on the person i think again i there is a there is a parallel but it's so imperfect uh that i think and again the the official religion of great britain is really the second world war i think using wartime metaphors to try and get people to do things is um is is often pushing it a bit i it's it's such an exact parallel that i think people should should think before using it and do some of you really think that because i'm skeptical about face coverings that i wouldn't take part in the blackout if if there were if there were black out of the age of course i would uh unquestionably because it's it's objectively demonstrable that it's effective and objectively the muscle with stupid selfish and and actually borderline moroccan not to take part in it but the arguments for these other things are not the same they're not as strong they're not as direct and it's it's just it's it's an unfair form of argument which is to simply design to isolate uh and in my view to to denigrate uh dissent i take the point uh and and from my perspective i think it goes back to this issue of of us only surrendering to government power for those things that we can't best do for ourselves what we've lost sight of is if you like our entitlement to those things that governments should respect that belong to us that are not for them to give a sort of claim to give back to us but okay let's come back because it just goes back to the seat belt question and it's jumping back it's important uh that i've been to center on some aspects of the things that i'm expected to do for kirby in the early years of seat belt introduction in my own country i made myself incredibly unpopular with quite a lot of my fellow creatures people who owned and drove cars by insisting on wearing my seatbelt i thought the evidence for the seatbelt was so totally persuasive that it was madness to ride in the car without doing it but what people in those days used to do they shoved them under the uh under the under the the seat uh some of the times they were gummed up with chewing gum uh sometimes they would they were they were tangled up so you had and i would insist on wearing them to the with making myself gp deeply unpopular by doing so and this exactly the same impulse is the one which makes me skeptical about other measures which i do not think are necessarily as justified and i again i'd hugely objected to the the assumption that there is these things are exact parallels because i know this i remember very well that the sneers and the skulls and the frowns and the grumpiness of the drivers of cars who said oh why are you making this fuss about this seat belt well i actually said because i've been in a road accident and i know what happens i'm wearing this thing because i don't want it to happen to me again thank you so much and but it is it is so annoying to to be told that my objections to any of these things is is uh similar to that but i feel i'll take this opportunity to say it i was exactly as dissenting in the opposite direction on seat belts as i am on some of the measures being being demanded well it's powerfully illustrative and and thank you for that changing gears a little bit the great debate in the west now about freedom of speech and what have you i i sort of take this view that actually our essential freedoms are like a table if you weaken any of them you weaken all of them um so you know freedom of belief conscience and so forth freedom of speech there's perhaps the one by which you defend your other freedoms freedom of association and assembly and the freedom not to associate uh even the freedom to earn private property uh but this free speech debate that i know is alive in your country and i get the impression there's some significant pushback now against the clamping down on freedom of speech there seems to be your country does seem to have people who are prepared to stand up and have a go at this including in in in the political realms but recently i was i was struck by this uh professor tim luckhurst from durham university uh he stepped back from some of his duties after he was heard to call some students quote pathetic end quote for disrupting and walking out on a speech delivered by a prominent conservative at dinner and predictably you know you've had students calling for luckhurst's resignation and i just wondering do you have any insights is this students being young and irresponsible and wanting to be noticed or is it deeper than that it goes to the culture of you know faculties and administrative staff as well where do you think that balance now lies in britain i think what you have to understand is that there are an awful lot of people growing up in britain now they've arrived at university now to long years of school where they have never been taught the concept of tolerance of differing opinions on the contrary they've been taught very powerfully that the holders of certain opinions are actually not just wrong bad but if you hold certain opinions and opinions about the sexual revolution about i i can go through the list but by holding those opinions you are actively damaging certain people and making their lives unhappy and they believe that and that is what they deny this is not this is not something that just suddenly appears as i say this is what people have been taught in schools which is much what much of the media and social media have been propagating and now it's coming to fruition and there are people in britain who oppose it and say well look this is terrible universities places of free thought and speech and it shouldn't be it shouldn't be restricted in such places but in fact they come up very quickly against the the politically correct work or whatever it is view which is that actually the the mere expression of these opinions is bad the people who express them the wicked and they really should not be given the platform and they don't they they don't imagine themselves to be sensors they don't see themselves as being dictatorial they see themselves as good and it's very hard for our universities particularly now since they basically become commercial organizations which have to attract large numbers of students every year to to keep going and expand it's very hard for them even if they particularly wanted to to challenge this because you challenge it then they'll go elsewhere so the fascinating thing about the luck hosts episode which you described is of course that after professor lighthouse got into this trouble a very large number of the faculty at the university of durham um took uh the side of the students against him so i know i was and i was a i was a trustee as a in the early troublemaker and i remember engaging in a test d platform uh a particular particular academic who really disapproved those struggles the fascinating thing was that the very numbers of the lecturers and of our fellow students took the opposite side and said that we were behaving uh wickedly or wrongly and we should not be trying to speech and they fought us off and that was the difference because there was still a huge reservoir in civil society in those days of people who understood the idea of tolerance of opinions not your own now that's gone now if it's people you say to people what happened to i i disagree with everything you say i will defend the death the right to say it what happened to it was that you don't it's not they disagree with that thing you say they think that everything you say is actively wicked and damaging and harmful therefore they cannot defend it and this is the basis and so much totalitarianism is is is based on benevolence these people think they're doing good and it's the hardest thing to fight if someone who thinks he's doing good this is an enormous sort of puffed up sense of puffed up pride in all of that isn't that you lack the humility to acknowledge that perhaps uh not all of your ideas are perfect and that there might be other people who have something worthwhile to say indeed it's it's it's very troubling that there's so little respect for other people in all of this you see that's i'm not arguing i'm not looking for against that i'm trying to explain why it is this is such a such an incredibly difficult battle to fight these people they don't believe that they're acting out of pride they don't believe that they're acting out of censorship they believe that that what they're doing is is actively good and those who oppose them are actually bad and that that's what they think and that's and there are a lot of them and there are going to be more of them all the time because the long march to the institutions of course was concentrated very heavily on educational institutions and has produced this new idea of what what freedom of speech this should be and what should govern it and i don't see any sign at all of anybody working out how to oppose it all kinds of formulae come up with and new rules have passed and universities make declarations they're going to defend for your speech but when it comes to an episode like the like earth episode then you see what happens it doesn't actually amount to anything the the authorities give in to the pressure of the people who think that they're good don't mistake my explanation of it for a defense to understand all is not to forgive all but i think a lot of conservatives certainly do not understand uh the power in the minds of the of their opponents of the of their hugely uh strong belief that what they're doing is good yeah i think that in itself is is quite frightening um and and i think part of what you're saying in a way is that even if you had a perfect campus now where debate was really genuinely open and so forth so much of our past has been washed out so much of our understanding of the of the the blood sweat and tears that have gone into defining freedom and then defending it and so forth that it's hard to have a debate when [Music] there's such a paucity of understanding and information and historical perspective as well yes but also we're moving into a new age of rigid orthodoxy such as we emerged from in the enlightenment and there will be in the coming years only one opinion that you can literally behold and somehow we're going to have to find a sort of anti-spinoza to overpower it with charm and intelligence look what happened to him it's not going to be easy but this there is a new orthodoxy coming and it will impose itself and this is the way it will do it of course you can still go i sometimes still go but in recent in recent months it's been difficult to university campuses and i speak and some people disagree with me and and it works out but there's also always a danger that it won't do and i i've been i've been platformed on but this is a this is a the darkness is falling we're in the we're in the twilight period now where all kinds of things can still happen but the direction is all one way it's all towards it's also always a new orthodoxy which won't really allow anything else to be spoken in public and you've written again comparing uh wokism to a kind of western taliban with this pulling down of statues a suspicion of free speech the idea that no speech should be appropriate not free uh the belief that our thinking around gender and sexuality and national identity is both corrupt and intolerable you know you've used tough language presumably you're trying to shake people to get them to see what they're coming to well i i was i was mocking a lot of my opponents who get into a great tizzy about taliban afghanistan i think they seek to make make themselves look and seem virtuous by being angry about what's going on in afghanistan which of course no idea where any of them lived but in their own country it's it is remarkable how strong the parallels are between the taliban and the kind of people who pull down statues and shut people up and i i said that simply to point out to these people what they were really like and to ask them if you are so angry at taliban why is it none of your anger finds its way uh towards criticizing people who behave in the same way in your own country staying um just for a moment with this uh issue of freedom of speech then uh recently britain's court of appeal ruled that julian assange should be ex or could be extradited to the u.s to face charges for those who are not familiar assange is of course australian uh yeah he's been held in prison in london since uh april 2019 and he was in virtual seclusion in a south american embassy for a long time before that he's been charged with deliberately publishing uh sensitive u.s security documents as long ago as 2010 which is a very long time ago now some say he's a criminal others yourself has included i think it's fair to say i've described him as a journalist who's been persecuted can you just fill us in a bit on your thinking there what are the implications for journalism and freedom of speech if your prime minister for example doesn't intervene and prevent the extradition i think it's very bad first of all he's he's not um he's he's not being extra which would have been a crime in the country which he now is uh he didn't himself obtain the documents which he published he's often accused of being careless about it and causing the deaths of agents and so forth but there's no actual evidence of this and he wasn't the person who actually obtained the documents in the first i think that technically the the expedition treaty between britain united states completely bans politicalized tradition there are many signs but particularly in the way in which the us government itself approached the case which has often changed changed its attitude towards plenty of science this is a political case which means it shouldn't he shouldn't be anyway i we argued about a different subject he's not my cup of tea at all and i noticed he had my politics but i do think that it would be very dangerous for any journalist especially one who found himself in possession of documents embarrassing to the american government on british soil uh if this case were allowed to go through the to the point where he has exercised in the united states because in that case which any which journalist who handles and publishes such documents uh would ever be safe that would be there for you in american terms i don't i do not think that the united states could proceed against him because it would he would he would be able to claim first amendment protection but american officials have specifically said that they don't believe the first amendment should be applied to him uh i the whole thing stinks to me uh as i say i i don't i i'm increasingly against extradition at all i think it's a very major threat of national sovereignty and if the price of it would be that we couldn't on some occasions get people back to our own country who we wanted to prosecute it's what i would be prepared to pay in return for for saying to foreign states no you cannot beat your hand into our country and pluck out this person and hold him in conditions which we would never employ in our own country and i know guarantees have been given without guarantees but promises anyway have been given by the united states authorities that if fewer misogyny is now extradited to the usa that he he will not be treated in certain ways which uh there is great fear that he would people he would be so miserable if he might commit suicide or undergo some other tragedy if he is extradited um so these these promises have been made i don't know how much they're worth and there is a suggestion that he might be able to serve some of his term in australia again i don't know how much that's worth in reality but for me it just seems that it's a political expedition and it shouldn't be allowed and that basically what he was doing was publishing things which were embarrassing to the united states government there was no doubt they were highly embarrassing the united states government but they were he was not acting uh as a spy uh or publicizing things which would which would deliberately decide to do damage to the national interests being embarrassed is one thing being spied upon us another and i think there's a difference so i i just i i'm mainly shocked at the fact that more journalists in britain and the united states and indeed in australia are not making fuss about this because the president of it is quite is quite worrying well that's an interesting perspective and i appreciate you you're sharing it um to to come to something else the year after the brexit vote i thought very interestingly you implored british policymakers to make a quite practical deal whose main aims are liberty prosperity and happiness not some wild doomed utopia of total free trade or world government uh i can see what you were driving at but how would you say now that five years on this is working out peter no it's not it's not working out at all well and i i never wanted to leave in this fashion i didn't want to referendum i i think plebiscites are a very dangerous way for for a country to conduct itself i i i never wanted this i didn't campaign in it i didn't vote in it uh i i had i had apprehensions about it and they proved to be justified i also thought there was a compromise available which we could have taken which we didn't take which would have allowed us to remain in large parts of the economic benefits of the european union without taking the political side uh or the legal side which is what it was has worried me and but it was impossible to insert this idea into any any part of politics because there were two factions and neither of them was interested in that for compromise and i i'm concerned i i don't think it's going at all well and i think that there may well yet be a severe backlash to it when as the economic implications of leaving particularly the single market and becoming a third country sink in which is which we would have avoided by taking the norway option which i wanted so yeah i decided so often um one of my favorite characters in history is lucy kerry lord falkland uh who fought on the king's side in the civil war in the 17th century but eventually became so exasperated with king and was so unattracted by cromwell that he rode into the thick of the battle at newbury with clear intention of getting himself killed and julie was and i know exactly how he felt there are times when people should seek a compromise between differing positions rather than be in transit and demand everything and this is one of those and so far we haven't found it yeah they um it raises the interesting question in my mind given that brexit the vote itself in many ways reflected as did the trump uh unfolding in america the deep disillusionment of an awful lot of people with the status quo and with their political masters and the bureaucracies that back them up but it raises in my mind the question is to on the one hand people feel the political parties and political leaders and bureaucracies have let them down but to what extent have we in western societies become ungovernable i think i might have mentioned this before but our best political the most senior political writer in australia in the context of an election about five years ago he said we australians must ask ourselves the question are we in fact becoming ungovernable with the breakdown of what he called virtue and civic glue i think there has been a great a great breakdown of virtue and what do you correctly call civic uh and i think that we this has been a product of the great cultural revolution that's one of the things that i've tried initially when i began to write about it i thought might be reversible and it hasn't been so i think we have become less able to cope with freedom that we had than we were before because we have we no longer have a lot of mechanisms which restrained us and there's a simple edmund burke point isn't it that if a people that will not restrain itself will end up being restrained by outside force that the less people are governed by morality the more they will need a strong state and i think we see this increasingly and we have seen it but there is another problem it's certainly a british problem and i suspect you have it too but the political parties have become [Music] detached from their proper constitutions we saw it in the great ukip growth and crisis and the the the eruptions which that caused in the conservative party and actually also in the labour party a secondary way uh you saw it i think with the pauline hanson episode where people were were so distressed with the way in which their parties were said to which they used to be were failing them or they thought they were prepared to defect to other things and i think there is a there is a great danger to the adversarial systems which they're not adversarial anymore the parties themselves represent metropolitan elites which have a set of views which are more or less matching at the top ends of both parties whereas there is a huge division between these bourgeois bohemian city dwellers and basically what you might loosely call the poor who live a different kind of life and this is not represented in the political parties anymore there was a time when your labor party and our labour party represented the poor now they do not now they represent a particular form of metropolitan liberal morally socially culturally liberal politics and they have also no interest in the poor at all and there is this huge failure to represent and also conservative parties used to represent what you might call the the the highly moral respectable lower middle class a very important part of any of any society which contended to have strongly socially conservative views on things such as crime and immigration and they're no longer either and that that the fact there's now no transmission belt between very large parts of the population and parliament and government is very dangerous and it's the reason for it's the reason it might be for donald trump donald trump is the direct consequence the large parts of the american population being pretty much regularly insulted as worthless deplorables not just in the hero of hillary clinton but for 30 or 40 years before that and finally losing their temper and in my view losing it in an extremely unproductive and foolish way by by supporting donald trump but that that i always have always blamed donald trump on american liberals and one can't help feeling that in many ways this lack of understanding and breadth of um commitment to your fellow citizens is not being tackled in a way that's very constructive in our schools i understand you're writing a book about education i'm very interested in that because here in australia we've got a debate going on we're very polarized about we now have a national curriculum despite being warned by some of britain's best thinkers not to allow it to happen and all of their worst predictions have come true and and the the debate now and fortunately ministers around the country have said no the revised national curriculum is to coin a phrase just simply too woke to be workable but we're looking at seriously declining educational standards and we're looking at wokism you know writ large kids are basically being told what to think not how to think and uh you're as i understand it writing a book on education can you give us a feel for for how you're approaching it and what we said it's completely rooted in a particular british and largely english part of educational history which is that there were in 1944 the government britain england's particularly did not really have much in the way of secondary state education people left school at 14 and that was it and the decision was taken to provide a secondary education for all and the way in which this was done meant there were two kinds really in reality two kinds of schools to which you could go to complete your secondary education one selective so-called grammar schools and it's a term which means something completely different in the united states generally local day schools of of high quality which had previously been fee paying and now became academically selective and so amazingly large numbers of feedback schools were open this is a simplification free of any kind of fees to anybody who could pass a pretty simple uh but quite rigorous test and they were extraordinarily successful the problem was that the other schools that the people went to if they couldn't get to the grounds we weren't as good and there was a the the other thing was the instead of expanding this sector and building more of these schools its population group the government failed to do that so quite a lot of people who should have gone to grammar schools didn't so the end result of this was that it was thought simpler to abolish them uh than to undertake the reforms which would have kept them in being so we now have a comprehensive educational system which the better schools select most basically on the wealth of the parents so we have a much more unfair system than we had before the wealthier you are the better chance you have getting a good education and that's about it but even there's another problem as well the grammar schools were fantastically good because they were academically selective and quite small they were in many cases of extremely high standard and the schools which succeeded themselves we haven't been able to replicate that and the other thing was that they kept we have another layer of schools in this country the so-called public schools which are the reverse of that the fee paying boarding schools uh which were kept honest by the growing schools and because the grammar schools were outperforming them for instance getting people into cambridge the best universities in the country uh but in when the grammar schools went the the fee paying schools were able pretty much to get away with murder because just simply by having the selection of fees and the parental cooperation with the teachers that such schools have uh they were able to get extremely good results in the devalued examinations which were introduced after the underground so we've we have basically destroyed a very good education system and replaced it with a deeply unfair one which is based on wealth and is vigorously defended by socialists they really really want they if you try and suggest them we should go back to selection on merit and say no no we want to keep the existing system uh which is based on selection by wealth it's completely baffling it's one of the most amazing political stories it's very particular to britain and i doubt very much whether you have anything comparable in australia because it's a lot of it goes back very deeply some of these grammar schools are very very old as they go shakespeare shakespeare went to school there are some parallels in australia around 40 of parents now opt out of the public school system but actually i would argue some of our best schools have drifted into real workers and because the top end of town many of our wealthiest suburbs you find people who have almost completely capitulated frankly to woke-ism and this is the sort of uh this is holistically about our great um recharging schools such as you go to them you'll find that large numbers of the teachers are of the left and the the things which are taught again there's still the idea the modern ideology of the left is largely taught even in schools which are which are which are educating the children of plutocrats the idea that capitalism is sympathetic conservatism is as ever found to be untrue in your day would a left-wing teacher have gone to teach at eaton or would they have said as well yes they wouldn't have been preponderant the way they are now i mean it's a school like even would have been would have been ashamed of itself if it hadn't had some left-wing teachers and exposed exposes people to left-wing ideas but the the the things that it's it's it is the dominant ideology even in such schools which is in my view a different thing yeah i say what you're the only logical thing to do these days would be their conservative so so peter as we sort of pull this together um talking about here is the way in which we've you know surrendered so much to governments and we even though we don't trust them the surveys also that's incredible the breakdown of trust in our institutions and uh and and and the people who people them in this country you can track it a lot of valuable research around and it's i don't know how democracy continues to operate if we don't trust one another we don't trust our institutions and the people in them i don't know but but given that we've got this sort of great shift and we look to government to do everything and we seem to be losing our sense of direction of belief in ourselves we challenge all of our traditional approaches to life as we've talked about we face though now a very different global outlook you've lived under communism and you've modestly said you don't follow closely what's happening in china at the moment but i'd just be very interested in your views on how we understand china because as we drift towards an acceptance of authoritarianism chinese people don't have much choice china has increased its defense spending this is very real for us in australia by 800 per cent since the mid-90s as i understand it you know they really now have a massive military they're threatening taiwan uh they're behaving in a way that is reminiscent of past authoritarian regimes that have turned out to be very dangerous indeed but here's the rub for the fortune that they spend on defence second only to the states and more than what the whole of the rest of asia spends on defence they spend even more surveying and monitoring watching controlling their own people now you've lived in a communist regime the chinese leadership describes china as a communist country with chinese characteristics or communism with chinese characteristics we don't seem to understand our own culture anymore we've broken down our understanding of major political philosophies i can't help thinking that one of the great mistakes we've made is that we've misunderstood that a communist is a communist is a communist and power is all important and they always if you like are fearful of the loss of power and control not only from external dangers uh or what have you but also from their own people how can we understand as you see it the nature of these authoritarian regimes that loosely go under the banner of communism that we thought we thought they'd lost out after the berlin you thought that i the thing is that if you haven't had a master's lens training you're completely at sea seeing all this stuff anyway and i have had one of those uh and one of the things that you have to understand is the huge alteration in in marxist politics which took place in and after 1968 with both the may events in paris that year and the crushing of the prague spring in czechoslovakia in the same year this is a huge moment of change when large numbers of people on the left both in the west and in the east decided that the soviet experiment had come to an end effectively and couldn't be continued certainly couldn't be applied in western europe in any any advanced country the ideas of antonio gramsci who've begun to formulate this in the 1920s uh began to come to the forum that is that the crucial uh the crucial area of left-wing advance was no longer to try and seize control of the economy or even the state machine to seize control of the culture and this and so that this this began of course this this is paralleled in china with the understanding of people such as dan sioping but it didn't matter that the power of the communist party would not be reduced if they allowed capitalism to flourish when he said to get rich is glorious it was a it was a moment of understanding and what the the the left both in the east and the west have returned to very much is revolutionary politics way before the russian revolution they're going back to the the original fountain of it all the french revolution um the 1789 1793 and also the other thing which which karl marx was full of admiration for the paris commune of 1871 not really much to do with the canonic measures not really much to do with uh with the seizure of the of the economy much more to do with the transformation of the culture much more to do with the overthrow and crushing of religion particularly the christian religion which you will have noticed has been facing a great deal more persecution in china since she took over than it did before so there is some parallel in this between the two the other thing about china i spent a lot of time visiting china in the first decade of the century it's a planet not a country it's enormous and you can see that they they're terribly worried pk about how to control this country which are huge causes of discontent particularly in rural areas and they are terrified in china disorder uh with very good reason because you look back over the 20th century history of china so the the country which tore itself to pieces and basically allowed the particularly the japanese to to charge around all over the country without anybody to push them out but they never want that that again so they're they're terrified of the internal descent also the taiwan issue i think they believe that if they can if they can increase their their their military power in certain ways and areas to a particular extent that eventually the united states and japan will recognize that the taiwan is indefensible and will have to in the end be ushered back into the people's republic which is their intention they don't want to fight over it but what they do want to do is to create a type of level of military strength which would cause the united states a huge amount trouble and expense to to challenge and therefore to create the atmosphere in which taiwan itself will eventually recognize that that's where its fate lies and japan will understand that if it's going to carry on having an alliance with the united states it's going to cost it that would be my guess about what chinese foreign policy is so these things are not surprising and they've become rich enough which they weren't really before the big dancer being changed they've become rich enough to indulge in this level of defense spending and they're doing it and they are resentful of the way in which they were treated by outside powers in the 19th century particularly and resentful of the way in which they were virtually a corpse in the 20th century they don't want that to happen again i can't blame them for that i don't think any of us can and they're proud of being chinese why shouldn't they be but these are these are different aspects from the nature of the internal regime which is is still the communist party uh which still believes very strongly that the the government is so uh is is so endowed uh with a good understanding of the world and the best interests of china that it it it must have desires and must be given supreme power and authority in all matters and this is uh this this is obviously frightening to to close neighbors into the world in general especially if china does manage to maintain its economic growth and maintain its internal power to the extent that it does eventually challenge the united states and become the supreme global power of course it's very worrying uh but i'm not quite sure what you can do about it but the other thing is that the parallel events in in western europe united states where the left has shifted its trajectory away from economic power seizing the barracks from the police station to seizing the school and the television studio and the the cinema and the university in the newspaper and altering morality and driving out the remaining precepts of christianity the world is going through an extraordinary revolution of convulsion at the moment and much of it because it's not actually violent goes past people because they expect revolutions to to look like an eisenstein film or or something out of charles dickens that they they expect to see bayonets and people being strung up on lab posts and guillotines and firing squads none of that happens it's the kierkegaardian revolution where everything remains standing but the world becomes totally different that's what i believe we're going through well as always peter you really help us understand what is happening with clarity of mind and great experience and i'm deeply appreciative perhaps one final thought or one final question um it's often said that authoritarian regimes always fail sooner or later the people rise up they demand something better but there's a difference this time around as i see it i'm one of those people who believes that human nature doesn't change that generally speaking history rhymes the lessons can be learned what's different about china this time is that massive amount of money they spend on controlling their own people is able to deploy technology that is truly frightening in its reach into our everyday lives they really can monitor virtually everything and the social credit scheme based on you know you jaywalk across the street and you lose a couple of points you criticize the communist point you might lose party you might lose so many points you can't get a job or you can't get married or you can't get the internet and that level of control is something that i would argue we've never seen before it's true and it's it's it's actually it's a state replacing god uh and replacing cultures uh placing conscience with electronics we know what you're doing uh you can't hide anything from us and we'll reward you if you're good in our terms and we'll punish you if you're not so this is this is georgia world's 1984 come to full reality and if they can succeed in doing that they will have measures of control that no one's ever seen before doesn't mean i don't know i can't who can who can tell the future it doesn't mean that china couldn't at some stage fall victim again to internal dissent and control this is an immensely old civilization i remember that as well it's been there for a very very long time and it's very big and for change it's very rich for a change recent history is very powerful and i it might it might be quite lasting uh and we may have to come to an accommodation but certainly for sure a lot of western governments have been heavily influenced by chinese attitudes towards how to deal with the coronavirus peter i've taken a lot of your time but as usual it's been packed with insights and information and very very helpful so so thank you very very much and all the very best to you and yours thank you very much and i'll is perhaps too early but i'll do it anyway to wish you a happy christmas all of us to you and the same thank you very much did you enjoy this episode we cannot get good public policy out of a bad debate if you value vital conversations like this one please like share 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Channel: John Anderson

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Id: 2cQw_2ITBlM

Length: 72min 37sec (4357 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 20 2022