Scruton Lectures 2022 - Peter Hitchens on After Conservatism

[Music] thank you [Applause] ladies and gentlemen welcome to the Third lecture in this year's series of Roger scrutin Memorial lectures my name is Noel Malcolm and my task essentially is to introduce our speakers thinking about this event I was trying to remember when it was that I first got to know Roger scrutin I can't put a precise date to it but I think it was sometime in the late 1980s I was delighted to get to know him because he was already one of my heroes especially because of the extraordinary bravery and energy that he put into the support of dissidents behind the Iron Curtain but also because of his writings across an extraordinary range of subjects and of course I'd been aware of him for a long time I vividly remember a lecture on Aesthetics which I went to When I Was An undergraduate at Cambridge in the mid 1970s I read in the same period essays by him in the Cambridge review deflating modern fads and fallacies I remember a marvelous series with the title modern charlatanism and some of that fed through I think into his book of 1985 thinkers of the new left later produced in an updated version called fools frauds and firebrands colon thinkers of the new left if you don't know that book I strongly recommend it um and if any of your academics in the fields of humanities and social sciences and if you don't know it you really should read it you will find it immensely stimulating even if you don't agree with it or perhaps especially if you don't agree with it despite the element of sort of jocular polemicism in the revised title it's a deeply serious book it's a remarkable book I think only Roger could have written it because it ranges with equal Authority across every relevant field where he has in-depth knowledge when he's writing about legal theorists political philosophers pure philosophers cultural critics whatever it is he pretty obviously knows as much or more than they did it's marvelous also because it is a book that really engages with arguments even the arguments of people that he's deeply opposed to he's had the patience to go through their work and even the generosity to look for things here and there that might be valid which he has no hesitation in reporting even when he finds them Roger is thought of by many people as a polemical writer but he was never a polemicist for polemicism's sake the key thing I think is that he was Fearless and fearlessness is equality that is hugely to be admired I feel it may be becoming rarer or at least more dangerous as the years go by it's nice to know that tonight we have two speakers who are also quite Fearless I will introduce the second one first Daniel Hammond Lord Hannan of Kings clear must have one of the most consistent trajectories in modern politics while he was still a student here reading history at Oriole he founded an organization called the Oxford campaign for an independent Britain and he followed that course for years afterwards including I think just over 20 years as a member of the European Parliament arguing consistently for withdrawal from the European Union I'm sure in an audience of this size there will be very divided views on brexit there will be many who thought it was a terrible mistake but if you followed Daniel's contributions to that debate you will know that there is something immensely praiseworthy about not just the consistency but the decency of rational argument and principled argument that he put into that long campaign uh not without reason was he described as the man who gave us brexit the description was in the guardian it was not intended as a compliment a monomaniac indeed quite the opposite he's written very widely on a huge range of political issues and published and co-authored books on such things as direct democracy a direct democracy principles of free trade he has set up an Institute of free trade he's been a visiting professor at the University of Buckingham and a prolific writer uh most recently a very lucid commentator in the Sunday Telegraph and he's not afraid on any issue to be unpopular most recently perhaps he was one of the very few prominent people in public life to take a strong line against the invasions of personal freedom brought about by the government in response to the pandemic and that gives me a little point of agreement between him and our main speaker of the evening Peter Hitchens there may be other points on which agreement is less easy to find Peter Hitchens is a very distinguished journalist has had a long career he's been a Moscow correspondent at the time of the end of the Soviet Union after that a Washington correspondent for I think two more than two decades a writer in the mail on Sunday on her range of issues but especially domestic politics and he's also been quite a prolific author there are many books to his name the titles of some of them such as the abolition of Britain and the broken compass might give even to the unsuspecting book shop shelf browser some sense of as they say where he's coming from these are books um deeply researched and very deeply felt about the decline the erosion the dismantling and sometimes worst of all the Craven abandonment of things that he finds deeply important in our culture and Heritage and our whole political tradition so I think I can say on that basis that Peter agents is a deeply conservative thinker but that is conservative without the capital c at least certainly not in recent years when he's been a very trenchant critic of the conservative party I believe you would have to go back to the early nine the early 2000s to find a time when he was actually a supporter of the conservative party In the period when it was in opposition and I'll just end with one reminiscent from that period in 2001 the then editor of The Spectator Boris Johnson was elected to Poland as the member for Henley no there was a perfectly respectable tradition of member's opponent continuing with their their day job and I mean it continues to this day there are barristers there have been doctors dentists who carried on spending perhaps one day a week doing that work while being members uponed but the then proprietor of The Spectator the Canadian businessman Conrad black was done for about whether Boris could continue as he insisted he could to edit a busy magazine while at the same time having a full-time job as a member of Poland and he decided that he must ask Boris to go but he really had very little idea of who to put in his place um and he rang me up one day and said this is the situation I don't think I can keep Boris this is absurd I will need a new editor is there anyone you can suggest and I was not expecting this phone call or this question but I said well off the top of my head there is one person that I can immediately suggest to you he's quite a Maverick he will ruffle feathers but in journalism that's not such a bad thing he has interests in almost everything strong views about almost everything and is a very good writer and his name is Peter Hitchens well history records that Boris in his initial way managed to sweet talk the proprieta into keeping him on to have this editorship as a second job and so it never came about that readers of The Spectator could have a weekly dose of the wisdom of Peter Hitchens but we this evening can have a pretty full dose over the next 45 however many minutes and we all look forward to it foreign well there's another job I didn't get this that was what I didn't apply for uh but it's very nice to know about the recommendation thank you so much before I begin I must mention that the misleadingly philosophical title of this lecture after conservatism was devised only so that it could fit on a rather small poster my suggestions that a bigger title needed a bigger poster was sternly overruled I actually wanted to say something both longer and Ruder what's left now I would have wished it to say what's left now that conservatism is dead and gone well now um as I hurried towards this um towards this beautiful spot in England uh the I recalled that as an Oxford County of many years standing I'd often wondered as I looked at it how it could make the most perfect capital of that impossible oxymoron a conservative Utopia two uh two um beautiful pubs um the the superb building in which we stand a lovely place of worship a gorgeous Walled Garden several find colleges with excellent wine cellars and in the middle of it the extraordinary rate of camera which uh thanks to the Catholic Gloom of James Gibbs resembles more closely than anything else a vast nobleman's Mausoleum actually if you stand on the Eastern Heights of Oxford and look towards it somewhere where no student or tourist ever goes that is exactly what it looks like and it is an extraordinary it has an extraordinary effect on me whenever I I look at this uh this this astonishing group of buildings as I hurried past the the Emperors uh which uh which you pass on the way and I was also reminded of two things first of all of the moment in zulika Dobson uh where they break into US panicking sweat as they observe uh this awful trollop and minks coming to Oxford to bring Rue into the city and secondly I was reminded of an evening long long ago in 1968 when my late brother Christopher armed with a spray can spent a very very long time indeed that deep dark soft Summer Night inscribing the words hey hey LBJ how many kids have you killed today on the hoarding which then stood outside Trinity College then as now trying to modernize itself into the new world the and I won't tell you how I know that this took place or exactly how long it takes you'll have to guess for yourself but it was remarkable the inscription very very long remained in position well into the Autumn of that year when in 1968 it was the that slogan was chanted outside the um outside the American Embassy in Groveland Square excuse me just a moment um I think the Emperors must have been a bit sniffy as they saw me hurrying in and I don't blame them for I'm not really actually particularly qualified to stand here and do what it is that I'm claiming to do but it is the other point about the Emperors that I recall particularly is that at that time they were eroded blobs almost totally unrecognizable as such and they've recently been replaced and it is um it is interesting to see how many people rather satisfyingly to those of us who know better nowadays believe these modern versions to be ancient this is one of the great joys of Oxford for the long stay Tony such as ayam and the long stay University person alike much pleasure comes from watching people who are taken in by fake ancientness especially the tourists who gather to give and receive selfies beneath what is absolutely not a bridge of size and which was built well after the Wright brothers achieved powered flight silly Interlopers they know nothing yet we are all in a way Interlopers in this place my case the poor ignorant tourists searching for the campus or the University or standing in awe in front of undistinguished Edwardian archways are a massifer for most of us we live in a world of which we know very little and which we do not understand we hurry about beneath giant vaults built for beings far greater than ourselves like the goggling visitor who thinks inspection Morse was real or who has been fooled I've sometimes tried this into thinking that baliel college is the railway station of which it has been wisely said we are easily deceived by appearances we have too few hard points of reference in real knowledge to tell the difference between what is plausible and what is true and the plausible is often so much more fun and so much easier to accept than the chilly truth so for instance most of the country looks more or less all right the great institutional buildings of London and Oxford are still standing after many decades of turmoil in most cases they are in far better condition than they have ever enjoyed but they lie here in Oxford the kingdom of thought and learning which used to stand in the small damp triangle between the Chartwell and the Thames is not at all the same place as it once was the commercial imperative Roars ever more loudly for its money the egalitarian Siege tightens more total and inevitable than anything the crown Williams ever managed here and as these things happen Oxford's role as a home for independent thought will continue to shrivel and the same is horribly true of our actual Capital City when I first saw official London it was filthy black from A Century of coal smoke but it was real now it is golden and pristine but it is a great fake a scrubbed and primped treasury with no treasure and admiralty with hardly any ships many of them inclined to conk out when they go to Sea an officially adversarial Parliament with no adversaries and so on we even have those shaming embarrassing institutions a Ministry of justice and the ministry of culture which anyone of my vintage thinks of as joke Departments of the kind you find in banana republics or people's republics or people's banana republics such as we are the one piece of good news is that the vain glorious Supreme Court is not in fact Heaven actually Supreme not yet anyway all the buildings standing none of the ideas which they represent and Were Meant to have still held to or respected it is the most Insidious form of Revolution and the hardest fight the customs and the laws still appear to continue but the spirit which activated them is gone it is as if and some might argue that this happened too that the churches had continued to hold Services much as before but to worship a different God people will not see it they prefer the appearance to the reality they regard the unchanged buildings and take this as proof that all is well and all is as it was they did not notice one of the greatest Revolutions in human history they did not notice it when it happened the Nigel's at the golf clubs I'm sorry and the Kevins in the working Men's Clubs of Yorkshire both joined together in the Absurd chorus that Anthony Blair was the sort of Tory and that his government was right wing this is why I go on so much about having been a trotskiest if you have not been a revolutionary it seems to me you have no idea what revolutionaries do or what they're like former marxists make the best conservatives in fact in my view they make the only real conservatives plain russet coated captains who know what they fight against and hate what they know just as you think a revolution means a red flag flapping over the post office a body on the street corner like a broken doll a plume of oily smoke towering over the silent City and barricades in the streets manned by Surly man in bandeliers you think revolutionaries and noisy impolite unsubtle and coarse making bad tempered demands and resorting to violence and loud noise when frustrated they're not like that at all and that is why they beat you all the time I can tell you as often as I like that Anthony Blair was a student trotskiest effect so hugely important and so hugely subversive of the carefully crafted image of this person that it was Kept Secret till years after he left office I can tell you there's a huge proportion of his cabinet shared revolutionary backgrounds Alistair darling Stephen Byers John Reed Peter mandelson Alan Milburn Bob Ainsworth these are just the ones who his past have come to light mi5's records of what used to be called subversives were as far as I can discover and I was trying to find my own file and that's when I discovered it where as far as I can discover destroyed in the first months of the Blair government as MI5 was transformed into the people's thought police guiding us from the isms and phobias and the right-wing extremism with which the left character their enemies these would have been the only reliable records if we could see them but we can't tens of thousands of others probably never listed at all and never recorded not at all famous found out into the schools especially the schools the law the media the academy the Civil Service and perhaps above all the police it is surely the conversion of the police into a body of paramilitary social workers neutral between victim and offender which is the most astonishing and huge transformation of our time the only equally disturbing change I have to mention is what has happened to the Guardian newspaper it has ceased to be a voice against aggression and instead become The warmongers Gazette this second change is so vast I can't really deal with it properly today but the conversion of the established left to the cause of foreign war is if you pause to think about it utterly subversive of all conventional wisdom these people faced several years of obscurity and boredom before they came anywhere near influence in their chosen professions And Trades I've often thought that the exaggerated loathing of so many Metropolitan Bourgeois Bohemians for Margaret Thatcher arose from their Fury at having to toil at low-paid jobs in the engine rooms of the state the political parties in the academy at a time when their opponents still appeared to dominate everything but in the end they were once again free to live working lives which did not conflict with their personal tastes and aims and after the election of the new labor government in 1997 totally free and empowered how odd in retrospect that they used up so much bile against Margaret Thatcher a figure who in truth was not especially conservative I challenged anyone who disputes this remark to name a single socially morally or culturally conservative action she undertook in office the unused section 28 even if you think it qualifies in theory cannot really be said to have counted in practice so here we have been since the 1980s in the grip of a great double illusion that Margaret Thatcher was a conservative and that Blair was her heir the illusion has been widespread many stories even some conservatives I mean conservatives notorious genuinely thought that the blairite labor party was their Ally at least to begin with they should have watched more carefully seeing the program of sexual educational cultural and moral Revolution which the balerites launched they should have grasped the blairite's driving purpose to make their actions irreversible by any future Tory government the conversion of the Tory party into an arm of new labor was finally achieved by the election of David Cameron AS that party's leader and asked Peter Hyman who was once a close player aide said surprisingly recently the new labor project was infinitely more revolutionary than anything proposed by Jeremy corbyn or his supporters I'll say it again because I was astonished when he said it that so few people took any notice of it the new labor project was infinitely more revolutionary than anything proposed by Jeremy corbyn or his supporters he went on to explain the idea of new labor was not to be a good opposition party to protest loudly or have an influence over events but rather to take and hold on to the levers of levers of power new labor sought political hegemony winning power and locking out the Tories to ensure that the 21st century was a labor Century with labor values in contrast to a Tory dominated 20th century the scale of that ambition in a country dominated by a stridently right-wing press and the quiet conservatism of the large swaths of the British people was breathtaking if labor could be in power for a serious amount of time then the country would we believed change for good you may want to set that quotation beside an equally amazing confession by another blairite apparatchik a man called Andrew neither in fascinating article from the evening standard of the 23rd of October 2009 he disclosed that the publicly available version of the labor party's plan for immigration had been censored revealing that the earlier drafts I saw also included a driving political purpose that mass immigration was the way that the government was going to make the UK truly Multicultural I remember coming away from some discussions with the clear sense that the policy was intended even if this wasn't its main purpose to rub the rights nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date and he continued in what is still really the only Revelation ever made of this huge deliberate policy ministers were very nervous about the whole thing for despite Barbara roach's keemness to make her big speech and to be up front there was a reluctance elsewhere in government to discuss what increased immigration would mean above all the Labor's core white working-class vote this Shone through even in the published report the social outcomes it talks about are solely those for immigrants and this first term immigration policy got no mention among platitudes on the subject in Labor's 1997 Manifesto headed faster firmer fairer the results were dramatic in 1995 55 000 foreigners were granted the right to settle in the UK by 2005 that had risen to 179 000. last year he was talking of course some time ago with immigration falling thanks to the recession it was 148 000 in addition hundreds of thousands of migrants have come from the new European Union member states most requiring neither visas nor permissions to work or settle the UK welcomed an estimated net 1.5 million immigrants in the decade to 2008. part by accident part by Design the government had created its long for immigration boom but ministers wouldn't talk about it in part they probably realized the conservatism of their core voters while ministers might have been passionately in favor of a more diverse Society it wasn't necessarily a debate they wanted to have in working men's clothes in Sheffield or Sunderland in part two it would have been just two Metropolitan an argument to make in such places London was the real model I quote this at such length because it gives you an absolute open indication of something which I believe was taking place the whole time during the 13 years of the Blair brown government that many many decisions were taken in secret kept from the labor party's own supporters and kept from the public of enormous moment force and Power Gordon Brown would find this out in brutal detail in 2010 during the general election he denounced on an open microphone one of his own voters of Mrs Jillian Duffy as a bigoted woman I will always think this blunder was the main reason why millions of Labor voters supported the leave campaign in the EU referendum they were for once liberated from the normal tribal party loyalties those loyalties had always until then kept them from punishing their own party for policies which did little for them but they're learning now that the Tory party in practice shares Mr Brown's view of them where will they turn next and I was present at the birth of this huge issue I have long thought that we on the 1960s left were genuine opponents of racial bigotry it was the best thing about us but we favored immigration not because we especially liked immigrants but because we do not much like Britain as it then was the arrival of many new citizens would Aid the transformation we sought and given that so many in the Tory party at the time were genuinely prejudiced it was very hard for them to offer a rational argument against the policy without being just the accused of paolism I saw this process begin and had little idea of how important it would be I witnessed what was possibly the first rather sheepish student demonstration to take place there in Oxford at some point in 1968 it was against racialism which I'm now sure was a wholly different theme from the racism which has replaced it was the great object of disapproval and tested virtue it was originally directed against a hairdresser shop in the Cali road which had been accused of hair discrimination the participants were undergraduates at a varsity not students of the uni they had pretty obviously never been on a protest March before so they did not yet know that they needed to fill the street and Shout aggressively they formed up diffidently in Broad Street in the sort of queue or crocodile few months later when Enoch Powell came to speak at the Oxford Town Hall they had learned plentifully my old friend Michael press the man of peace and reason if ever there was one was carried unconscious from the howling Malay so Furious did it come it was period of transition for instance we still had proper Politics the intrude difference between labor and Tory in which Freedom lived as Richard Neville so cleverly pointed out the contest between two equally matched and strikingly different conservative and labor parties still continued the Oxford parliamentary seat changed hands every few years and the city council did the same Oxford's then MP when the Tories were in was also mi6's man the fascinating Monty Woodhouse Woodhouse hand in hand with the ludicrously named Kermit Roosevelt and overthrone how in mussodex legitimate government in Iran in 1953 one of many rehearsals similar actions later in the century and one of the most disastrous acts of foreign policy in my lifetime a leading figure in the city's labor party was by contrast Olive Gibbs who'd grown up in great poverty down in the rough streets of Saint Thomas's and was also a national chairman of the campaign for nuclear disarmament one of her Tory Rivals was Janet Young who was the only woman Margaret Thatcher ever appointed to her cabinet Janet Young's opinions on the married family and Morality In general would nowadays get her expelled from the Tory party and denounced as a foe and a bigot the times were halfway between one age and another they are now actually gone let me give you an example I still used to play the national anthem at the close of films and Cinemas the young Tariq Ali was by the mid-1960s one of the leading figures of the student Revolution he left but also a well-brought out member of the Pakistani upper class he recently recalled an evening when he had gone to see ashes and diamonds and what was done the Scarlet Cinema in Walton Street now the Phoenix he says they played God Save the Queen thoughtlessly I stood up as I used to do in Lahore when the national anthem was played only to be greeted with a uniform chart from the row behind set down you fascist in the more conventional picture houses in the center of the city it was troublemakers like me who were approved for failing to stand how startling to think that conformity in those days meant standing for the national anthem wearing a tie polishing your shoes and starting a family at the earliest opportunity now look and see what Conformity is over the past few months many of Oxford's buildings have flown the new and rather different standards of Conformity the rainbow flag of General sexual liberation the flag of the Ukrainian oligarchy Republic which can do no wrong and that of the Republic of transgendria which can do even less wrong it was not very some of these get mixed up sometimes it was not very long ago that actual academies that's the actual academics joined in the peculiar roads must fall demonstrations that filled the High Street in the early months of the great covet panic I remember the day when with the grass a foot high in Radcliffe Square thanks to the National shutdown the multitudes in the High Street gathered to shout d d d colonize a slogan which makes hey hey LBJ how many kids did you kill today sound positively contemplative that day that day hundreds took the buttock rather than the traditional knee to the black lives matter cause by sitting down in the High Street by not doing so I attracted about as much touching and disapproval as I would have done 55 years before for failing to stand up in the cinema for God Save the Queen can I be the only living person who has actually got into trouble for both these acts of rebellion seems possible a week later I'd yet another such March as stately and rather graceful religious figure whom I've long observed walking and talking in the ancient streets where the great men go was suddenly and disturbingly transformed into a yelling Fury balling slogans into a bullhorn like a teenager who knew what might happen when such people behave in this way and this sort of disproportionate unreason is at large he would never be sure where it might lead as it happens I think it was just a pressage of a worse future when I turned up to observe this March I was honored to be the object of hostile chanting directed against me personally and was actually followed through the streets and then told by one demonstrator far more interested in transgender matters than the ancestral roads that they and see how polite I am about pronouns that they wished me not to stand watching them and would prefer me to move out of their sight attempts were made to recruit the police to this of course and uh to their credit they declined to play any part in it but another few years and the officers who were obviously uncomfortable at my conservative presence there will enforce such wishes I'm told that these marches were a minor public glimpse of a far more intense struggle in private over the road statue issue I don't doubt it but I should stress here that I care little for the face of the road statue itself examine it while you still can it looks like a memorial to a successful bookmaker he stands as if he should be smoking a cigar holding a disreputable hat in his hand and the whole ensemble with its scalloped Arch above him and The Barley sugar pillars on either side of him crudely mocks and consciously parodies the equally controversial image of the Blessed Virgin Mary on the church opposite something Rhodes himself it was a person's son cannot have been unaware of you can keep it it's not because it's full would give pain to the late Cecil Rhodes or because there was anything especially conservative about the commercial and Imperial rape of Africa that I sort of defend the statue it is because it would give pleasure to my foes to see it crash to the ground but I suppose it might be better if it stayed where it was so here is one of the problems of trying to be conservative in the society which has forgotten what the word means you're not nearly completely cut off from most important discourse from any semblance of power or authority or influence or indeed from the BBC these are in a way healthy things pushing the healthy things teaching modesty and humility to the Arrogant such as I am you find yourself being allocated without your permission the cause is you do not in fact much like in the past few months I've been told by both the supposed right and supposed left that the Premiership of Elizabeth Mary trust was the most right-wing or most conservative in modern times so I'm supposed to be in favor of it and so presumed to be distressed by its unraveling before that I was told similar things about David Cameron that Blair right Toady and warmonger or about Alexander Johnson that political vacuum good good Heavens how I am not in favor of the Tory party whoever leads it yes I once joined it after a rather dangerous Mass fuel protest in the year 2000 I thought this country needed a legitimate constitutional opposition if it was to avoid Lawless disorder and MOB rule I still do but I found that membership of the Tory party wasn't always completely unpolitical occupation you're expected to help raise funds and to get out the vote quite reasonably but there was no political discussion such as I was used to from my trotsky's past there was no mechanism by which the member could play any role in forming policy when I asked to see the Constitution I was told and this has to be one of the most astonishing things I have ever been told I was told that it would cost me 150 pounds to buy a copy but otherwise it was not available eventually as I am a trained journalist I managed to see it without paying and found that it was as I feared the Tory organization is not a political party as I understand the term it began as a device for putting the sons of gentlemen in office now it appears to be a device for seeking out men and women without any trace of conservative desires or tastes making them into MPS and ordering them to shout at secure stalma every Wednesday at noon and that's promised from time to time the more compliant and thought-free of these interviews is individuals is given a ministerial Post in which he or she pursues the wishes of the rich lobbyists who actually decide what I will not call policy for that would dignify it but is best described as the wishes of Downing Street formulates these wishes and decides their priority it appears to this Outsider as if it is mainly the sort of people who want to cover the entire country in concrete claiming that this will solve the housing crisis which is in fact a crisis of mass immigration and mass divorce not of housing but never mind my old friend and former colleague Peter oborn has rightly drawn attention to the profusion of think tanks probably financed by Super Rich hedge funds speculators which played such a part in the formation and initial decisions of the truss cabinet I've suggested that the cliched idea still held by many that the Tory parties membership is made up of nice Anglican old ladies in Wiltshire and Shropshire it's obsolete the evidence of the recent leadership election suggests that it is instead made up of metrosexual free market Fanatics swivel-headed drug legalizers and teenagers in think tanks this trust chosen as the chief nurse of this futile faction seems to have bought her opinions on eBay having floated about in a fur hat on a very warm day in red square and climbed aboard a tank in Estonia in both cases seeking and failing to resemble lady Thatcher she posed as a free market liberal perhaps she really believes this but we know how easily this one-time liberal Democrat marijuana liberalizer and anti-monicus changes her mind in any case this free market thing is not an especially conservative view although I know some people think it is the trouble is that our economy loaded with debt and taxes is far too decrepit to cope with such measures you could say you're getting just stimulated back to health but you might as well try to turn a hobbling pensioner into an Olympic Athlete by giving him a handful of amphetamines an electric shock and a can of Red Bull the other trouble is this such policies appear to be chosen for political effects more than as a part of some coherent system thought mistrust in her Rivals were reduced to this narrow area of political economy because the conservative party has no coherence Once Upon a Time the Tweedy assertion that tourism was a disposition not a Dogma had some Merit but in an age when your opponents do have a very strong and revolutionary Dogma you have a choice you may combat and question that dogma and formulate a proper alternative or you may adopt the ideas of your Penance and become what you will hold first with Atlee then with Wilson and Jenkins and finally with Blair the Tory party took the second course it stands for nothing that's profoundly different from labor as EasyJet is profoundly different from Ryanair and so here we are yet again as a party without a purpose stumbles and crashes through yet another leadership election as embarrassing and off-putting as drunks fighting near you in a bar and so many years too late it finally finally finally persuades millions of its former supporters to abandon it and not vote for it anymore ah if only those supporters had done this when I begged them to do so in the days of David Cameron the collapse of the Tories at that stage would have made it possible to create a genuine conservative formation that formation might have been able to replace the Tories in our two-party system and so re-establish adversarial politics and allow rational consideration so badly needed of proper conservative approaches to our national problems I cannot tell you how much vituperation freezing disapproval contempt and sheer Fury I encountered when I said this at the time when it would have done some good in fact my critics were unwittingly doing the work of the Enemy by 2002 new labor dizzy with success it decided that its main target for reform was now the Tory party itself in the 2000 election as the perceptive journalist Steve Richards recorded the Blair Entourage were often in an exasperated Fury you don't get it they would occasionally Scream the election is a historic referendum on a right-wing conservative party if we win a second Landslide we would kill off right-wing conservatism by which they meant conservatism for good I was present it was an extraordinary moment in Wellingborough of all places where should I have been on the 5th of June 2001 when Blair opened his thoughts prescribed the policy limits of the Tory party saying at this election we asked the British people to speak out and say the public services are Britain's priorities to say clearly and unequivocally that no party no party should ever again attempt to lead this country by proposing to cut Britain's schools britons hospitals and Britain's Public Services never again a return to the agenda of the 80s I think this was an unguarded moment I was there and recalled trying to ask Blair about it afterwards and getting nowhere but I've always thought that labor had at last grown strong enough to impose a wish long voiced by such figures as an iron Bevin and Harold Lasky who desired and publicly stated desire to prevent any future conservative government from overturning their major measures in this effort they soon had the help of figures such as Mrs Theresa May who had denounced her own party as nasty and of course they had the help of David Cameron who called himself the heir to Blair in semi-private and really meant it and whose actions persuaded the BBC the College of cardinals of the new regime to give him a fair wind in 2010 they succeeded in that project I think the moment in which it might have been challenged is quite gone now Damage Done to our culture since 2010 is colossal the trust episode underlines it nobody even knows what conservatism is anymore there is no place left in which conservative ideas on morality Family Life foreign policy economics freedom justice or education and now even seriously discussed who would buy such ideas anyway where is the market for them at Westminster a crude laissez-faire is widely mistaken for conservatism nominal conservatives despise rules traditions and institutions which they should give their lives to defend the Revolutionary left has become the establishment it's all over I once felt differently in 1998 when I was persuaded by a thoughtful friend to write the book which became the abolition Britain I wasn't that sound astonishingly youthful Amir 47 years old and I foolishly thought that I might be entitled to have some small influence on the future of my own country I've done some things which I thought qualified me to be heard just a little I'd spent many years at the heart of British politics reporting first on what was then a mighty labor movement and then from Parliament itself I traveled pretty widely in my own country and around the world lived abroad as a resident correspondent for my newspaper in the two great Exemplar countries of the age the USA and the USSR I'd seen the grotesque face of War smelt the stink of famine and heard bullets fly I'd watched while the supposedly securely conservative newspaper on which I worked had been taken over and turned to another purpose by new left-bring owners and education in the direct exercise of power which I suspect few have seen I should add here that I had also been given a beautiful lesson I apologize to the shade of Bishop of Archbishop Sheldon I I must point out here I believe in the death penalty and above all foreign [Applause] shade of Archbishop Gilbert Sheldon for what now follows uh but I had I was given during the Takeover of the Daily Express a beautiful lesson in genuine tolerance by my new left-wing editor Rosie boycott who invited me for lunch and told me over the cheese I think everything you write is complete but I really like you and continue to publish my work without interference blessings be upon her head you don't often meet this sort of thing and when you do you should treasure it and I've been gifted with yet another experience that everyone should have when I propose my book on the British cultural revolution I mean turn down flat by so many Publishers that even my agent the much missed David Miller was once moved to Mata I have never in my life had such trouble finding a publisher for anyone I think he genuinely thought that he might Justice once actually fail in the anti-final another person whose memory I blessed because he had the true Spirit of Liberty in him and I cannot tell you how surprised Naim was by the amazing number of my books he sold not since the fictional production of Springtime for Hitler in that clever film The Producers has there been a more unexpected and perhaps undesired commercial success when naive invited me for a celebratory lunch in his bizarre so her headquarters crammed with astonishing numbers of beautiful girls I had the strong sense that he would much rather have been lunching with somebody a bit less reactionary and making money from more respectable sentiments than mine among my punishments for my unexpected Triumph was to be reviewed in the Daily Telegraph by the late Gerald Kaufman who said the book made him want to take a shower I pointed out to the then unenabled editor of the day Telegraph Charles Moore that the guardian would not have asked Norman tebet to review a book by a left-wing writer so why did he put me at the mercy of Sir Gerald how could conservatives make any impact if we did not stick by each other just a bit I think I know because like so many perfectly nice people who still linger in the Tory party Charles has no real sense of danger no grasp of how far things have gone that utterly we have been defeated after all you can still get a jolly good high table dinner at Oxford or Cambridge you can still get your children into a reasonable public school and nobody has bothered to close down or censor what remains of the right-wing media why bother to worry we will soon be now of important we'll assume that we have no importance at all that inch of difference between the great parties which I mentioned earlier in which we all lived is fast disappearing the approaching era of Perpetual economic and foreign policy crisis War Without End forever and ever amen plus inflation will not be a good time for free debate trust me and the alleged conservative party which never developed any kind of response to the radical revolution of the 1960s has now rendered itself impotent for years to come and so the horrible gray Phantom of a thought police forms and starts to solidify all around us we all know how many things we cannot say so most of us don't say them we all know the danger of cancellation if we're sensible we will not get mixed up with the actual police who are quite plenty not on the side of conservative respectability anymore we know that the university authorities will not defend us we watch as individual teachers clergymen foster parents registrars are picked off one by one and we know that if we speak out we will be next martinus listen to you about how if we don't speak up for others we fail to protect ourselves you know the one first they came for the Socialists and I did not speak up Etc it doesn't work anymore because in 21st century Britain if you speak up for someone in trouble their enemies will not stop their persecution and will instead come after you too if this rule prevails and I think it will we're all done for and here I must dwell on a small event which ought to be much bigger because I think it's so important that you should know about it I've been appalled but not Amazed by the almost total lack of response to the shocking persecution of the video blogger Graeme Phillips sanctioned By Her Majesty's government for supposedly undermining the sovereignty of Ukraine however you do that Mr Phillips is the first British citizen to be sanctioned by this government decisions normally applied are leveled against such figures as the governors of of Russian oblasts or senior officers in the Syrian Army who are not really very much troubled by the rules laid upon them if they should ever come here which they will not Mr Phillips is a citizen of this country and he has reason to fear these sanctions he has been severely punished well you might say he deserved it he's not a likable person he's done some things which many people find reprehensible but he has been punished quite without due process by the state an outrage against both Magna Carta and the Bill of Rights apart from Toby Young whom God preserved I have not yet got anyone in the country to come to his defense in my sight so much for everyone who ever quoted Voltaire and said I disagree with everything you say but I will defend to the death your right to say it oh no you damn well won't we knew this already especially about the Tories when sir Roger scrutin in his name this lecture is being held was himself the victim of a public mugging by the intellectuals of the new Statesman conservative MPS joined in with it Mr Phillips who by now return lived some sort of mixture of kafka's trial and Hello's Catch-22 in which he cannot received payments or make them he cannot for instance insure his home or pay his council tax he is forced by law into not obeying the law and into being improvident or wholly irresponsible the idea appears to be to make his life unlivable he was virtually powerless to oppose the measures against him as the foreign office which imposed them when Elizabeth trust was at its head largely ignores his Communications now as I've said Mr Phillips is perhaps not very nice I confess that I do not especially like him but then a lot of people feel the same way about me and if you need to be nice to get public support against depression and arbitrary state power then we've all had it as the great U.S Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter once said the safeguards of Liberty have frequently been forged in controversies involving not very nice people luckily for me I shall probably be dead before the New Age begins in Earnest but this assault on free speech and thought and this total abandonment of due process of the presumption of innocence and of the whole idea of Justice seems to me to be the end and not the beginning of a long process in which adversarial debate has been strangled and has been strangled largely because of the useless political party believing in nothing but office and money thought it beneath it to fight to fight for what fight for the Christian religion to fight for the freedoms won over centuries of struggle and preserved by repeated battle on land and sea and in the air it's a fight for patriotism for the honest love of every field Hedgerow landscape language architecture Law And Justice lifelong marriage private life for our unique language for Shakespeare and the Bible and the prayer book for Dickens and Wordsworth for the great Cathedrals and Parish churches which express without words The Truth About Us for the fact that we are unique and should remain so for the ashes of our fathers and the temples of our gods it was all in our hearts once and it is still in mind but what do they offer us box homes and towel blocks and hedge funds freeports and tax cuts exciting trade deals with the Far East and the Tangy flavor of chlorine washed chicken and and when Roger's scrutin was few enough to land his distinguished name to their tortry government they turned on him and got rid of him so that is all over and this era is indeed after conservatism and pretty much after Britain too and the only honorable life for those of us who must stay and endure it is internal Exile in that we can treasure what we can of what is left to us which lies beyond their reach above all for me this lies in the realm of the Eternal from which all our most important desires come though the church which is supposed to remind us of the Eternal seems increasingly nervous of it the great text of what it down made Bland poetry is surgically removed at every point and replaced by language which might better be used for notices telling us to stand six feet away from each other not to sing or to wear pieces of cloth over our faces it's got no bite in it no sense of the great truth expressed by Edmund Burke that he who truly fears God fears nothing and nobody else surely and this is all ages the following verse of the great hymn prays to the Lord the Almighty the king of creation Should Be Sung with special fervor it runs praise the Lord who when darkness of sin is abounding who when the Godless you Triumph all virtue confounding confounding shadeth his light chaseth the horrors of night Saints with his Mercy surrounding but I wouldn't you know this is one of the verses they've cut out in all the modern hymnals may I recommend above all as a watchword for the times the great second collect for peace said every day at morning prayer I often think that when everything else I've ever learned has burned away this will remain I do hope so anyone is welcome to say Amen at the end oh God who aren't the author of peace and lover of Concord in knowledge of whom standeth our eternal life whose service whose service is perfect freedom defend us thy humble servants in all sorts of our enemies that we surely trusting in thy defense may not fear the power of any adversaries with the might of Jesus Christ Our Lord amen [Applause] well good good evening ladies and gentlemen before I begin my conversation with Peter I wonder if I can be permitted a little personal recollection of Roger's crucial like no Malcom I met him in the 80s but I was a little bit younger than Noel when I met him I was still 16. he caught me at a very impressionable age he came to speak to my school philosophy Society and this is often forgotten about Roger he is as Noel wisely said his remembered as a polemicist but he he generally spoke about completely unpolitical things and on that night he was speaking about Wittgenstein and language games and so on and this can be quite a dizzying concept when you're 16 and and when he finished there was a rather awkward silence as people waited for questions and everyone's heads were swimming and they were trying to think of what to ask so more to break an awkward silence than anything else I I thrust my fist in the air and asked him what did he see as the role of a conservative thinker and he blinked a little bit behind the big glasses he used to wear and then in that rather charmingly different way he had he said I think the role of a conservative thinker is to reassure the people that their prejudices are true and it was it was a wonderful one sentence summary of of burkian thought and I wonder if I can segue from that into your incredibly stimulating speech therapy so Roger defined conservatism rather in the way that you did towards the end it's being about love he would often contrast the righteous indignation of the left and the bitterness and anger that we see and that you saw on the High Street outside uh Oriole at the road statue with the conservatives love for our institutions our nation our language our family and all the things you mentioned Shakespeare and hedgerow's Cathedrals and all the rest of it but he never gave up on either political parties or other institutions he believing conservatism to be an instinct an inclination rather than an ideology although he had no Illusions he could be very frustrated about the the conservative party as about other institutions he never stopped trying uh and almost to the end of his life was always setting up Ginger groups and uh and philosophy discretion groups and so on with MPS is it not I mean I wonder whether you think occasionally you're veering close to the sin of Despair I mean is is are things really so bad oh the sooner despair is about eternity it's not about the trivial temporal things which we discussed tonight anybody can despair about those well okay let me put it another way then uh because I I'm not sure your despair is well founded when you talk about the treasury that has no treasure the admiralty that that has no ships the the buildings that lack soot which I I see is a positive thing I I can remember when buildings were black and I think they look rather better now but doesn't that actually reflect things repeatedly the reason we have fewer ships is because our ships are incredibly powerful now and have missiles that can sort of turn corners and go through Windows uh the idea that the treasury has no no treasure I mean we oh put it like this I was I was born in 1971. in 1971 it took the average British worker nearly three months to be able to afford a television set now it's just over two days but but the idea that we've got poorer if I I wonder whether this I mean do people not remember I I when 1971 a car that was stationary emitted more pollution than a car today moving at full speed in 1931 fewer than half of girls globally completed primary education now it's effectively 100 I mean have things really got us bad this is all material stuff isn't it it contains no moral Dimension well how about the fall in in child uh in infant mortality that seems to me about as good a measure of happiness as you can ask but on the other hand look at the number of pre-infants we we um we kill in the womb uh but which is a moral question and a huge backward step it seems to me but you mistake the point about the the Blackness of the buildings that there was some extraordinary Grandeur about it uh Josephine noted the contrast between the redness of the buses and the Blackness of the buildings was an amazing dramatic scene and the official London at that time just looked much more like the capital of a great country than it does now but you could have had you could have cleaned the buildings without filling them with uh with build but that's the trouble we cleaned the buildings and filled them with build okay I mean just sticking for a a moment with the the idea that uh things have got worse one way of understanding materials well done again we're not going we're not going down the Golden Age fallacy I don't say things have got worse I say things are not as good as they should have been and I I do understand that the world changes uh that's the the the sun changes surprisingly small amount of it is progress but that I'm not I'm not trying to return to the past or saying that we should I'm saying that we repeatedly chose the wrong future all right let's let's look at it another way um I think blaming political parties is often a a displacement because a lot of what politicians do in a democracy is driven by public opinion so for example you and I were very early opponents of the lockdown we were joined by lots of people in April and May of of 2020 but it was a very lonely business in March in those first few days public opinion was 94 95 in favor now it's all very well to say the government made all of these mistakes but the reality is surely that the government was reflecting an almost Universal national moment which has its roots in a psychological fear of change which then or a a reaction to a perceived threat that drives people in an authoritarian directional people were worried and I have to say a lot of my trades are responsible for worrying them excessively but the the worry was found that the famous minute the famous Sage minis in which it was stated the people people were not frightened enough and measures should be taken to frighten them more illustration of that and you couldn't move in this city or in London for for posters and publicity telling you to be more afraid and as for the televisions which takes such a short time for people to buy they were also pumping out more and more of this stuff I think the fear uh that you speak of must also existed in Sweden but Sweden had a responsible government which refused to be carried away by that fear and it's a ridiculous and disproportionate actions the the famous Burning Down The House to get rid of a wasp nest the policy we followed yes so the international comparatives are interesting I mean of course you're right and Sweden has been Vindicated uh by events as have the handful of other territories that that held firm but I wonder whether if we're looking at International contacts that also applies to most of the cultural changes that you were lamenting so when you said the Blair government began this policy of mass immigration as a kind of deliberate way of rubbing the right nose in the piece you quoted not me it was not you know yeah but was that not a process that was unfolding in almost every desirable bit of real estate on the planet I mean the only countries that weren't experiencing immigration as the global population became more mobile were the ones that you wouldn't want to go to gosh I haven't come prepared for this I'm sure that you're wrong uh but I think that this country underwent a level of mass immigration pretty much unmatched and the increase in our population over the past 20 years has been absolutely extraordinary I think you'll find that it's it's the the several other countries have not undergone it well I mean Russia hasn't undergone it or but but Sweden the United States Canada Australia France Germany I mean this has been a because people are more mobile people have the wherewithal to move Germany Germany deliberately undertook to undergo under the um the much praised Angela Merkel government but I think before then had not done so for instance but let's ask it uh let's look at the that migration in a in a different way if it's as you say sort of it was intended to be a battering ram because or as you recalled from being a young from when you had your basilis of trotsky's I mean in youth hey is it necessarily a successful way of doing that isn't that really about the values of the host country rather than the number of immigrants uh or the the way in which they arrive and one of the things that I was very struck by I remember I came across a a cabinet a committee of Imperial defense discussion before the first world war which was very very worried about what would be the attitude of Muslims under the crown in the event of a war against the ottoman sultanate which the sultan was of course at that time not just the leader of the Muslim state but the college the commander of the faithful and there were all these nervous papers circling around What will what will be the impact on our musselmans as they put it in in Egypt and India and so on and of course in the event the answer was almost nothing in India Muslims volunteered in slightly larger numbers than Hindus did and I think the reason for that is because the British brand still stood for a great deal in those days and it was it was something that people wanted to be part of I wonder whether the real change in the intervening hundred years is not to do with the number of uh you know the religion or ethnic origins of British people at that time 80 of British subjects were neither white nor Christian I wonder whether it isn't more to do with the values that we communicate and I don't know it's not an argument I'm actually having the point that I was seeking to make is that is that new labor in power deliberately sought to change the country and felt that the large-scale immigration was a way of doing so and I think the phrase rubbing the rights nurse and diversity and also making their actions irreversible is the point I know I'm not the the other things you're talking about are interesting but they're not things which I've really been arguing about the point I'm making is the huge Folly I remember so many people uh conservative-minded people who I knew in the late 1990s saying Blair best conservative prime minister we ever had total illusion the reverse of the truth completely wrong and I'm still fascinated by this fact that when when Peter Hennessey in in a marvelously soft hitting interview uh of Blair a couple of years ago actually got him to say that he had been a university transist I thought well good Heavens that is the most astonishing Mission and I waited for it to appear in any other newspaper but mine and it nobody to my certain knowledge and I scan the the the internet regularly to see if anybody else's never ever even remarked upon it if you look at the rest of them they hold the the the the the the the the vast numbers of people in New labor who had backgrounds similar to mine but who don't talk about them I talk about mine incessantly they don't talk about theirs at all because what do you think is still important I mean I mean including Peter mandelson John Reed I mean people who are not in in any sense on the left uh as labor MPS what do you think would you would you not say well they're not certainly not on the left of the labor party not what you think over the left of of the left but that's your problem you've never been amongst us now isn't it so they are on the left it is since 1968 the left has been a moral cultural and social project it abandoned the Soviet Union it abandoned the the Lenin route to power it adopted Antonio Graham she's uh desire for for cultural hegemony and moral change gramsci went to the Soviet Union in the 20s he came back to Italy and he said this will never work in Western Europe yeah sure no one would listen to it the reason why 1968 I think of someone like John okay I would like John Reed very similar politics to yours kind of anti-free trade patriotic you know so he loves the armies you don't know the code I was once sitting in the today program studio and and actually having a discussion on why the left weren't more cheerful about having won so much with Jim naughty and they they broke it for some news person in which in which John Reed appeared and he said discussing Afghanistan he's saying well of course and then pessimism of the intellect optimism of the will and I said grouchy it's Antonio gramsci and nobody in the studio even knew really who grouchy was or what he'd said read knows all about grouchy he knows all about that he knows all about the real nature of the river that's how you're supposed to work isn't it look at that look at that government look above all it's it's the sin of everything that it did the equality acts of 2010 uh and and look at that and see the transformation which that which that imposes effectively it ended the last traces of this being a Christian country just for instance there's a huge colossal and that's it it's in the moral and in the social and the cultural and the educational the expansion of the university is another enormously powerful ideological thing and not to mention uh the enormous confiscatory taxation which Gordon Brown introduced who are your favorite politicians I don't have any any at all which is your favorite disease well I would I'd still happily rank them you know uh but I don't and there is the gulf the Great Golf which lies between us yes so what would you do instead because I don't see how you can have I wouldn't I've I've I have genuinely given up I've decided that internal Exile is the thing anybody who is very welcome to prove me wrong I would be so glad if somebody would I've tried to prove myself wrong for 20 years and failed but I mean and I look back at my life who are the people who I respect the most and they're the people who managed to survive with some sort of conscience amid the darkening surroundings in which they lived I think it's what we have to do I don't know there's been a great thing that's that's a withdrawal question I could answer it there's been a great confusion in in particularly in the 20th and 21st centuries a kind of heresy has arisen in which people have come to believe far too much in the power of politics to do good and they've wasted an awful lot of time and conscience and hope you can withdraw like the the monks in Ireland in the Dark Ages just helping things out but I see that unless you have no sorry we get that we got that very very clearly from the from the lecture Peter but uh I mean unless you unless you say that there's a better alternative out there that you know dictatorship or Anarchy or theocracy or something would be a better system I don't see what the alternative is well I'm not saying because I'm not proposing it but what would be the point of me uh who couldn't even get selected for parliamentary seat let her in wheel but what would be the point of me writing a Manifesto it would just be a delusional thing to do uh it's the moment that anybody offers me the leaves of power I promise you I have an elaborate and extremely well worked out plan transform the nation for the better I've written nine books about it which you can read yes but they're all they're all laments as well what you must see is that the mints contain within them the uh the descriptions of what I would of what I would seek to do if I had the power to do it put this right I know it's wrong I know what's wrong with your engine but you just won't ask me to fix it you get Liz truss it it's very you know I we we both no wonder your big end is gone we've both we both uh occasionally written book reviews it's very easy to write a negative one because no I do not agree I will never review a book bad unless it's by Jonathan Powell I will never review a book badly unless I have read it absolutely every word and made thorough notes on it and I know that I cannot review about it until I've done that lots of other people don't take that view especially when they're reviewing my books but it's my view and I think it's actually a very hard well I want to draw you into saying some positive things so because it's you're not you're you know it's very easy to say I like the architecture it's Julia there you go there you go we could we um could we have more of it but what about what about if we replicated some buildings like this the way they do in Budapest and they rebuild you know old 18th and 19th century uh buildings where they knocked down the communistics right there are restores restore the things that have gone to Decay as demonic Promises of the coronation I'm all in favor of it very good let me okay let's change the subject a little bit um one of the things that you and Roger scrutin have in common but that I think most people on the right don't have is that he was he was as I think you are uh a Scottish separatist he he believed that England and Scotland were authentic but that the United Kingdom was kind of legalistic construct is that fair or am I character no I it's I don't have a detail of you as that I just think if they we made such a mess of Ireland by not letting them go when we should have done and created so much business and shared so much blood that I'm not interested in ever doing that again this country should not be held together by anything the desire of its peoples to remain together if the Scots wish to go and my experience is that most Scots under 35 increasingly do wish to go those over 60 it's a different matter then we mustn't try to stop them what's more we must make it very plain that we'll leave a light burning and that they're very welcome to come back if they change their minds if we get into some kind of awful bitter wrestling match trying as the Spanish are doing with Catalonia to try and prevent them from going with them and throwing people into jail and and and refusing them the the the freedom to hold votes then bitterness will come and and we will destroy what is actually a very sensible Union forever if you want the union to survive you may have to go through a period when it's broken so that's that's much more of you I like Scotland a lot I I went my first memories are of Scotland and I went to the the part of Scotland the kingdom of Fife around dunfermline in recite which I remembered during the the last referendum and talked to a lot of people and I came away with the impression that if I was Scottish and if I were young I'd want independence and I could not I could I couldn't deny that sympathy I I never ever uh um despise other people's patriotism no sure but it's it's the question of Roger always used to call it the politics of the first person plural you know you you for any functioning polity you need to have a sense of of a shared demo so when we say we we all need to agree roughly on on whom we mean it works it did work but no it doesn't and for very and one of the reasons it doesn't work is because of the Blair revolution of course one of the things they put a bomb under was was the University of the United Kingdom yeah so but if the if the if the will of the people the Scottish demos or the UK demos whichever one uh is valid whichever one has the majority uh so your your you know your your placing your faith in the good sense that the Israeli put it the sublime instincts of an ancient people how else is it to be expressed if not through parliamentary elections which necessarily involves all these parties and politicians that you dislike well how what do you mean how is this what to be expressed well you what do you think I'm suggesting yeah I I because I think on occasion uh like Alan Partridge I sometimes blame the public I think the occasionally the electorate gets things wrong as they did over the the lockdowns um what I think is a is a is a slightly cheap thing is to say no no the people are right but all the people all the politicians they elect are wrong because that that can't quite be true can it well I don't necessarily say that something is crude or as simple as that though it must be more convenient if I did um the part of the problem of the of the Revolution which took place in this country really beginning in the 1960s was particularly the the Jenkins uh cultural revolution put through by the labor party between 64 and 1970 was not in general in the party Manifesto most of it was done through through the government whip supporting members bills which would never they'd never have dared put in their Manifesto they lied about uh about uh about comprehensive education saying it would mean grammar school education for all which is absolutely nothing like the truth uh and and the there are many others respects of the government which that can be said and also again if you look at the labor Manifesto of 1997 in which they claim to be the the party of the British people as a whole the actual intentions of it in depth were very very carefully hidden and people didn't know what it was that they were voting for us all that's why so many of them thought Blair was a Tory and there were all these stupid slogans about tough on crime tough on the causes of crime and education education education whatever that means so a lot of those things I'm sure had they been put to referendums wouldn't have gone through um and in some cases I I'm sure you would still as you as you reminded us earlier you you support the death penalty and so on fine but I mean what about well mobile what about the for mobile phones exactly what about um what about the criminalization of of uh homosexual acts in private I mean that was something that would have probably failed at a referendum at the time but very few and maybe you would still recriminalize it but very few people would you see you there's a little about me um I don't I absolutely think that that um that the 1967 Act was was right and should have been pursued in a government with with courage would have pursued it anyway uh I don't mind in that case it wasn't a Manifesto it seems to me to be a reasonable way of getting something out that was that that was desirable possibly wouldn't get public support though I don't know whether whether it was ever tested I don't but I've I've said so many many years right the the absolute bill was it was a good thing and should have uh and and and was completely laudable well it doesn't it simply doesn't follow uh in for instance is the the actual the other other uh major Jenkins action uh of abolishing the death penalty which she knew he could never have got through uh in a general election and the the general decapitation of the criminal justice system which followed or indeed his criminal justice act which began the uh the evisceration of the jury system is one of the worst things that has happened so so but then let me put you the other and the abolition of preventative patrols by the police which was also Jenkins which never saw Parliament at all a lot of these changes I I think the progressive argument I mean I was never on the left but tell me if this is if this is wrong I think very often what you get when the argument has moved on to pronouns or you know uh bathrooms or whatever um or is people say well every one of these reforms is unpopular when it's mooted you know it was unpopular that women should be allowed to work it was unpopular that gay people should be allowed to to do what they want in private it was unpopular that you should have same-sex marriages and public opinion then Catches Up Now what's your what would be your response there to the to the I don't know if I'm if I'm I don't think public administ should necessarily be the be the Arbiter of these things I think we should quite often it should be the job of people who take it on themselves to govern the country to to defy public opinion when they think it's mistaken in in more than one direction so for instance you defy probably you say obviously it's ludicrous to persecute people for having having a certain type of sexual relation to private uh the law should never have been passed in the first place but it's by no means ludicrous uh if you if you want to have a serious serious criminal justice system to to discriminate between the crimes against property and crimes against human life no sure I'm sorry I I don't want to I don't want to relitigate the I'm just making the point that that the argue the the the progressive case rests on saying all sorts of things that seem unconscionable because people are change averse and because people have small C conservative prejudices end up being later Vindicated and I'm just arguing how you draw the line between the ones where you accept that argument and the ones well they don't I'm not I'm not interested as they're saying whether whether an action is popular or not I'm interested in whether it's right and if it's unpopular and right then you should do it and if it's popular and and wrong you shouldn't do it okay uh let's let's move on lead me around let's move on to something else um so you you began and you you you ended with uh with with a prayer um again just for the last time I'm gonna I'm gonna refer to uh Roger scrutin whose shade hovers above the this lecture series he had some complicated religious beliefs um he had a a beautiful metaphor once where he said you can build a structure around something that is so well made that in the end if there was nothing in the middle of it it doesn't matter because everything is hanging around it so beautifully and I I think that was uh that was as close as he came uh in in the books that I've read to where he stood another he was a great one for the these metaphors another uh one he he spoke about at some lectures he gave in in Princeton was he said if you accept that there is nothing except material things that there's no dualism there's no soul we now know a great deal about science and about how all of this works does that mean that you have to give up on all of this morality and he had this this great simile about painting you know putting paint on a canvas he said you can take lots of different splodges of paint and smooth them and all it is is paint on a canvas but there comes a moment when it's a portrait of somebody and you haven't added anything it's still just the smears of paint it's still just dorbs on a canvas but if you don't see the portrait you're looking at it in the wrong way now you I think moved from I I I I don't know if you were a churchgoer in childhood but you moved from a quite to a fairly anti-clerical position and then and now you're a you're a an Anglican again yeah that that sums it up yeah so I mean do you would you would you say uh it's an argument one is that a lot of the the Constitutional uh norms and Liberties that we take for granted if you like require this morality behind them or or once they've once they've achieved orbit are they are they okay regardless of the uh do the institutions work without the morality no I think I think I think the idea particularly that law is above power is essential to to the existence of the free Society and I cannot see any other origin of that idea than a religious organ it was uh let's see what who what else you can frighten Kings with frankly sure but it wasn't just I mean there were lots of religious societies that didn't really have it uh it was a an idea that was largely admirated in the language that you and I are now speaking uh and when we talk about Universal values now and we mean above all the rule of law the idea that the powers that be shouldn't just be able to make things up as they go oh from a universal value it's far from a universal value exactly they if it became a universal value it became a universal value because of a series of military victories by the English-speaking peoples if the Cold War had ended differently or if the second world war had ended differently there'd be nothing Universal about it then and the the things that we tend to assume I trace it back a bit further than that actually oh sure so of course you trace it back further I'm just saying that that uh that that what you were talking about the the the traditions of Magna Carta and and the idea of uh a force that binds the king as as surely as it binds the meanest subject in the the kingdom that was an idea overwhelmingly expressed in the English language it wasn't a universal one it's one of the reasons we should value it more absolutely right no well but but uh one of the reasons why I campaigned as an old said and and voted to leave the European union now you out of interest just you you abstained in the end I remember sharing a platform with you during that's right referendum and you said the whole thing is useless and there's no point and all the outcomes are bad um I I think that was that meeting I maybe it may have been a different picture well it's a it's a it's a it's a brief and brisk summary of the event but what a it was actually trying trying to say Obviously unsuccessfully uh was that I don't like flip side uh I think that they're far too easily manipulated and I think they're very dangerous uh as it proved uh in a parliamentary system to have two sources of democratic mandate you have a parliament which has a democratic mandate and you have a a separate and conflicting Democratic mandate for a referendum and then how do you resolve it the answer is you don't we still haven't it's not over yet I don't think and uh the the other thing was I became completely convinced uh in the in the time before the referendum by the arguments that my friend the late Christopher Booker that he was right that we should we should stay in the single market and possibly go even further than that that we should move from being half in the European Union to being half out of it as a sensible conclusion I visited Norway to examine how they'd got on I thought they'd done very well and there was this didn't seem to be to be and I'll tell you something else which really gave me the creeps when Michael Gove and Alexander faithful whatever his other name is Johnson both stormed onto the stage saying we're in favor of brexit I thought are you where did that come from uh they were people who I mean I I would say it was known to me that these were not people who had been in favor of leaving the European Union over the long years very no I think I spent two and a half hours walking round and round Hyde Park on a freezing Winter's day trying to persuade Michael Gove to be in favor of leaving the European Union and the answer was no so I can say definitively not so uh he that that was not my record it was possible he was just saying maybe he tells different things to different people it's possible but um you can say but that's what he said to me did you indict you and I agreed on on uh on a Swiss type deal uh Johnson for goodness sake what happens suddenly what had been inspiring you know quite a noble cause suddenly turned into a a sort of a cultural sort of Yobo became a culture uh Campaign which I couldn't conceivably take part in it became a culture war and and what I regarded as an almost inevitable outcome on the 24th of June which was some Swiss type Arrangement uh rapidly became unacceptable to both sides because there were Purity spirals on both sides uh we're almost out of time I'm going to ask you one final question um we were both opponents of the Iraq War although I think we differ on the the current fighting in Ukraine but let me ask again let me ask it the other way around what what uh Wars would you have been in favor of that Britain participated in I struggled to find any I mean I think the the so many of them are avoidable and certainly in the 20th century period uh if we had avoided as we should have done in involvements in the the um Russo German War of 1914 we'd have been a lot better off and there would have been no need to get uh into the entanglement of 1939 so but you have to go back I mean I think that the just War actually is very very hard not the Falklands I didn't say it's not the foreigns were invaded knew where they were my father had been had been had been there rebuilding gun in placements in 1936 for the Royal Navy on the South Atlantic Squadron we knew about the Fultons I never had any doubt about the full films that was a response to aggression and that is a just War there we go you defend you defend Sovereign territory against against aggression very good it's fine by me but that's a very tight limit that's an effect we found some agreement Peter thank you very much and thank you thank you [Applause]

Channel: Roger Scruton Memorial Lectures

Views: 117,836

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Id: aX5_eiZtDhg

Length: 89min 34sec (5374 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 30 2022