We all... where modernity actually starts. Aren't you ashamed of it? So in some ways, it might be quite appropriate if it started ending. We'll blow apart the whole rotten structure. I would see woke as having much the same... impact. If you want to look at strong family structures, I'm afraid they're the kind of thing that we're importing with certain groups from places like Pakistan and Bangladesh, where there is first cousin marriage. But they're not terribly...
from our point of view. We all believe in natural rights, which suggests fundamentally everybody's the same. I believe passionately. passionately that were not. This is not government of the people for the people. This debate you may have seen with Fraser Nelson and a rival of yours, Constantine Kissin, the whole business about is Rishi Sunna English.
or not. Seems to me to get it absolutely wrong. I will surely be seeing His Majesty the King to offer my resignation as Prime Minister. So are we... pretty much screwed at this point. We've got two ways in which we will go. There was this cancellation you spoke of. You used the words damned blacks. Why did my tongue slip so badly? I was absolutely sick and tired of... That is very honest of you. I'm trying to be. You don't need to admit that. Well, isn't it sensible too? No.
David Starkey, welcome to the show. Hello. Good to have you here. I want to ask you straight away, because people know who you are, are we now in the last stages of Rome? Depend where you situate the last stage is. Are we for 10? the beginning of the end, or are we in the reign of Augustulus Romulus when the whole thing is going to fall completely to bits? Is Starmer the Romulus Augustulus? I don't think so.
at least the latter. We are clearly undergoing an acute crisis. It's general in the West. I think it's particularly acute here. It's felt here particularly for a very good reason that we were where it all began. If you actually look at the history of... I call it Anglo-Britain, England come Britain. We are where modernity actually starts.
All the ideas that people like us value, or at least pretend to value, the ideas of limited government, of secure property right, of a properly independent judiciary. legal system. They all start here. The extraordinary explosion. of the mind, of the spirit, the physicality of Britain in the late 17th century following the Glorious Revolution, which is the real Enlightenment. It's the moment at which...
that explosion of Newton, of Locke, of the physical explosion of empire, what we used to call the expansion of Europe. It all starts here. So in some ways, it might be quite appropriate. If it started ending here, in the same way we were the first into industrialization, we are arguably the first significant industrial power. almost completely to have de-industrialized. I see. So, I mean, there were lots more resemblances.
And they're real resemblances, they're not pretend ones. The British Empire has consequences for the modern world that are of the order of Rome. in a civilizational sense the english language is the new latin and it's doing of course what latin did after the period we're talking about in the fifth century is beginning the process of separating out are difficult in understanding, for example, much Indian English.
They're turning into separate languages. As with Latin, the written language holds it together. The English law, common law, is similarly. distributed in the world. It is the basic language by which commerce is negotiated in exactly the same way that Roman law was. So there are lots and lots of parallels. And I suppose if I were being really naughty and you wouldn't...
expect me to be naughty, would you? I would see woke as having much the same impact as Christianity. Remember, the great argument of Gibbon's decline and fall is that the key to the fall of the Roman Empire... is Christianity, a system of belief which is absolutely antithetical to everything that had made Rome great. And woke is a Christian heresy. Woke, if you...
think about it, is the Magnificat to a slightly extreme extent. You know, he shall put down the mighty from their seats and exalt them of low degree. And of course, particularly addressed to a woman. And the triumph of feminism is clearly one of the essential elements in the decline of the West in general, and I would argue with Britain in particular.
That's a really interesting point, actually, because so many people are talking at the moment about the fall of Christianity and that being the reason for the fall of whatever we call this, modernity. Do we need Christianity to an extent to uphold Western traditions? I think, here again, this is where I disagree violently, a very inappropriate word to use in talking about Christianity, we are told, with Tom Holland, who is the one who is...
He essentially argues that the foundation of our civilization is either Christianity or this fashionable word Judeo-Christian, so that we can sort of fit the Jews and the Old Testament into it somewhere. It isn't clearly an element, but I can see no evidence that it's the basis of our politics. Our politics is Greco-Roman. The language of politics is Greco-Roman. We talk about democracy when we're being rude about democracy.
Democracy, obviously, the rule of the people, demos. When we're being rude about democracy, we switch to Latin and we talk about populism. The whole language of politics is from the classical world. How on earth, and this again, I've never debated this with Holland, it would be very interesting to do so, how on earth can an open politics possibly derive from a revealed religion?
The religion in which the basis of it is I am the truth, the light and the way. Where does an idea of the essence of our politics, which is... party, the essence that there are conflicting ideas, conflicting ideologies, and neither has an absolute claim to truth. What you do is test them evidentially.
I think, again, it is clear to me that Christianity, for most of its existence, I mean, when does Christianity become important as a religion? Well, it becomes important when it's adopted by the Romans. an empire, which is, of course, an absolute monarchy. In other words, Christianity becomes the vehicle of absolute monarchy. For most of its history, Christianity is entirely happy.
with absolute monarchy. The Pope is an absolute monarch. Of course, sometimes a rather improbable one, as with the strange Argentinian occupant of the throne of St. Peter, but it's still an absolute monarchy. But it's court politics. It's not the sort of politics that we're talking about. So I'm very sceptical. Where I would concede that Christianity has been important isn't the real Christianity.
You see, I know a little bit about... and I would argue real Christianity, because I was brought up a Quaker, a member of the Society of Friends, which in some ways I think really, not in some ways, did genuinely try to... put into practice the precepts of the early church. In other words, a belief in the abolition of hierarchy in Quakerism, there was no use of titles. Everybody was addressed by...
their forename, you didn't call it the Christian name because they didn't believe in christening, by the forename and by the surname. There was a studied simplicity of dress and observe. a deliberate refusal to observe formal politeness. I mean, it's very, very polite in one sense, but none of the business of the bowing, the scraping, and whatever that was true of an aristocratic society.
And Christianity, remember, in its early form is a profoundly radical thing. It rejects wealth. The early Christians refused to reproduce. Is that right? They believed in the imminent end of the world. They believed in the imminent second coming. So what we think of as Christianity is a Christianity profoundly adapted to suit.
Many of the customs of late Rome, there's a wonderful phrase, it's Christianity made suitable for a Roman gentleman so that they wouldn't feel too awkward. And you see, I think that's the real clue. to what Christianity becomes. It becomes a form of Shinto. That's to say, public... A kind of rituals of public life and indeed the rituals of the family and so on, with births, marriages and deaths, with the ceremonies of baptism.
of marriage, of burying, because we need these things. I mean, I am a fairly determined atheist. At least I think I am. I'm much less... If I can put this a bit paradoxically, I'm much less confident about what I don't believe than I used to be, I suppose, following James's death 10 years ago.
10 years this year, you scrutinize yourself in different ways. But I think I'm still, I think I am still an atheist. I'm an atheist that hears echoes that... will use concentrated thinking in a way which some people would almost regard as praying, that is profoundly susceptible. To the Magic of Place, a poem that I regard as one of the keys to my understanding is...
T.S. Eliot's, one of the four quartets, Little Gidding, the one about his experience as the light falls in a winter's evening, an autumn evening, in a country churchyard. that extraordinary experience of history is now in England, history is now and England, as you sense the footfall. the people who've been there for hundreds and hundreds of years. So you need ceremony. Just one second. Which is exactly what...
Quakerism refuses to produce. Quakerism, like certain forms of Judaism, there is no priesthood. So you'll marry yourself. Actually, there's no baptism, so you're not required to baptize yourself, but you marry yourself. You actually proclaimed the words, you are supposed to bury your parent. I was completely incapable of doing it. Luckily, my aunt was available and she did it.
I think at those moments, you need, it doesn't matter what you call them, the priest or whatever, you need a figure that steps between you and the awfulness, that rawness. the brutality of the emotion. And we need in the life of a community, the life of a country, you need ceremony. You need, as it were, the brutality of life.
Edmund Burke, who puts it nicely, you need a drapery. Even Karl Marx uses that language too. He says that what the bourgeois revolution did was to tear the drapery, the drapery of medievalism and feudalism. and aristocracy and nobility from life and leave the brutal relations of capital, of money exposed. We need, again... Even the nature of politics itself needs ceremony. Why? I mean, let's just investigate.
I'm sure we'll get round to talking about what we began by talking about, the mess that we're in now. What actually went right as opposed to what so much that went wrong last July with the election? What I think went right was ceremony. The fact that we went to the polls.
Most of us actually went into the polling booth, and we put this archaic thing. We took out that warm bit of pencil. You go in there, you look at them, and you think, I don't really want to try any of them, but I'll put it there. You fold it up. You exchange a few pleasantries with the clerk in charge of the old thing. You either have a set two or you have another few pleasantries with the funny old people sitting outside.
checking you in for the various political parties. I mean, I voted with my move to central London. I voted in a very attractive polling station in the examination schools of London University. just off Russell Square. And if you remember, it was the most beautiful morning. And there was a little old lady sitting outside, of course for the Labour Party. No other party had bothered to turn up. As I came out, she smiled at me sweetly and said,
don't think I can count on your vote, can I? And I smiled back sweetly and I felt a certain swell of pride. done my civic duty and the inevitable result happened. And what happened? Sunak sweetly moved out and Starmer moved in. Now that's called political ceremony. Now that's legitimacy. That's why, even though they only got one-fifth of the actual electorate, I mean, they got a third of the whatever it was, the 30-odd percent who actually voted in, sorry, 60 percent who voted in the election.
Nevertheless, they are the legitimate government. And I think this sense of legitimacy, which is so closely bound up in ceremony. and so closely bound up in habit and tradition is absolutely vital. It's one of the things that's preserved us in Britain from the horrors that we see around the world. I mean, however much we may feel, isn't the country dreadful? You look at most of the rest of the world. Oh, yeah. Yeah. It's not great. So Christianity then, Christianity then.
I have this very mixed feeling about it. I think that the, I don't believe that it's the central element of Western civilization. I think the reason, for example, that the things that everybody looks at notion... of equality, the attack on slavery or whatever, they happen...
very, very late in the history of Christianity. If you look at the famous section in Corinthians, I think it's Corinthians 14, where St. Paul talks about there being no difference between man, woman, Jew, whatever. That's not here. That's in the world to come. That's in the eyes of Christ. The application of that idea to the here and now is very, very much later. You see, I don't think there's any accident that it happened. largely in Britain.
which is already the country which for quite different reasons had started to explore limited government, representative government, all the things I was talking about. So it's Christianity. opening up because of other historical circumstances rather than Christianity driving the pattern. That would be my explanation. But I think it would be really interesting to explore it with something like Holland, and I haven't done so.
Well, I hope you're able to do so. Perhaps we'll call out to him and see what's what. ... ... ... ... ... Zelensky differently. It's fascinating to see that a lefty publication like Inquirer is concerned that the meeting left Ukraine exposed, whereas the right-leaning Daily Express had my former guest, Dr. Raj Persaud, writing about the five mistakes Zelensky had.
made let me know in reply to my pinned comment which you agree with and go to ground news to see how this story has been reported across the spectrum with its really cool biased distribution, which shows in this case the media across the spectrum reported on the mad interaction, and check trustworthiness of each source with the factuality tool. Ground News is my only way to get unbiased news. Subscribe through ground.news.com for 40% of unlimited access this month.
And I think that's really interesting. So you're saying it's not the fashionable judo-Christian values that have started what we have, but perhaps the absence of pomp and ceremony, which goes out the window with... The decline in Christianity has left open a door for maybe wokeism or Islamism. Yes, I mean, I think what has happened, very simply, is that English society is a... is both very strong and very weak.
A strong and weak in all sorts of ways. I mean, everybody goes on about, oh, isn't it terrible, the triumph of individualism and don't we want warm communal feelings and whatever. But of course, precisely the fact that we were able... to develop a notion of individual responsibility in the law, individual property right, all the things I'm talking about, is precisely because in England, particularly, we had relatively weak...
family structures. You see, if you want to look at strong family structures, well, I'm afraid they're the kind of thing that we're importing with certain groups from places like Pakistan and Bangladesh, where there is first cousin marriage. that produces really very, very strong family structures. But they're not terribly desirable from our point of view. What we had was...
a very, very different sort of pattern. And I think historians now recognize the work was all done at Cambridge back in the 1950s and 60s with Peter Laszlitz Population Group and whatever working through into the 1970s. and 80s. So this notion that we've had, which again is a very Marxist notion, that there is a sort of everybody moves from huge extended families towards the smaller nuclear family, ain't true.
There's instead a pattern of very sharp divisions between different areas. So the Irish, the Russians tend to have very large extended families with partable inheritance and whatever, whereas in England at the other extreme... You've got much smaller families and non-partable inheritance. Partable inheritance, of course, is dreadful because it leads to constant subdivision of holdings. And therefore...
a terrible failure of agriculture, whereas we have a very, very different kind of pattern, and so on and so on. In other words... One of the things that I am more and more convinced about is how useless it is to talk in very general terms about human development. There's an incredible... specificity about human development. And what we've tended to do is to try to find very, very big patterns, I think, in contradistinction. If you look at somewhere like...
England and later on America, what is striking is there really is exceptionalism. Because, of course, we've all decided that's a very bad idea. We all believe in a common human being, don't we? all believe in natural rights, which suggests fundamentally everybody's the same. I believe passionately, passionately that we're not.
Is that culture? Are you saying human beings? I mean, that's probably a controversial place to go. I've had somebody on, Nathan Kofnas, who talks about the differences in IQ between races. There's been conversations about... taking people of Chinese heritage.
put them elsewhere around the world and they still sort of go for the same kinds of customs and traditions. There might be something innately different about human beings. I mean, I'm not, shall we, shall I for once fight shy of controversy? I'm going to disappoint you. What I'm really talking about are social traditions. In other words, what we've got to remember is we are the inheritors of patterns of behavior. We don't...
create them. We inherit them. Now, we bring all sorts of things to it, but I think it's quite clear that what strikes me most is the... is this question of fundamental You see it particularly when you try to do the process in reverse. The catastrophes that we've seen, particularly since 1989, when with the fall of the Soviet Union, we have...
And as it were, the transcendent moment of the American empire, the absolute hegemony of a single power. And it's associated, of course, with liberal interventionism on the one hand. conservatism on the other. So all of these wars, these kind of Rousseauian wars to make...
people free. The idea that, you know, you could invade Libya or you could invade Iraq or you could invade Afghanistan and you'd be greeted as a liberator. That, you know, this extraordinary notion that we invaded Iraq and it was perfectly clear. Everybody really wanted to live in Wisconsin. And they were desperate. Well, they are quite desperate to wear Levi jeans, but not much else. And all they wanted was, you know, hamburgers and freedom and the odd dose of pot.
and suddenly to confront reality. that different societies want different things, and the idea that you can spread Westernism at the point of a gun. The maddest was, of course, going into Afghanistan and fighting a war, if you remember. We were actually told it for women's rights, you know, the rights of the poor Afghani women to wear miniskirts. And then, of course, we leave, leaving the memory.
the remnants of freedom and the reality of a different world coming back. And those are the kind of monuments of this folly. believing that all societies are the same. So Syria is an example right now. Absolutely. So is this a kind of, I don't know, it's said so often, a mind virus, but the Rory Stuarts, the Alistair Campbells, I talk about them a lot because they sort of, they label themselves.
as centrists or moderates, and yet they were posing for photos with the fellow who's taken over in Syria. Well, we could have told them only a few weeks later they're rounding up and murdering Christians. In the most exquisitely horrible fashion. We could indeed. But you see, we are in a world in which... So many people, so many people on the left and the center believe in the triumph simply of words.
That they refuse to acknowledge this brutal thing called reality. You have these words like universal human rights. If you believe in universal human rights, you believe in a universal human being. You fundamentally believe everybody is the same and people are interchangeable. And then suddenly, of course, you discover they're not. But we believe, we have been in a world in which it's a kind of extraordinary conjuring trick.
Wherever you look, it's again a belief in the sheer efficacy of words. The whole business, and once again, it's likely all these things circulate round. If we look at the most obvious... case, which is the whole question of transgenderism and the idea of gender self-identification. In other words, saying, I say I am a woman, therefore I am a woman. Or you could say there's a rather close resemblance between the sacrifice of the mass from transgenderism to transubstantiation is clearly.
a hop, step, and a jump, or smaller, if you say hoc es corpus, and the bread and the wine suddenly transform themselves into flesh and blood. It's essentially magical. It's a magical way of thinking. And the reason that so much has gone so desperately wrong in our politics is that we believed in magic, this whole notion of a rules-based international order.
Manifestly, it was magic. It was mere words from the very beginning, because you set the structures of the United Nations up in 1945, but they have to accommodate the Soviet Union. which, of course, is a violent, absolutist, tyrannical regime. So, of course, the structure is perverted from the very start, and yet we pretend.
We pretend. At the moment, I mean, look at the absurdity of so much of – I knew we were going to get around to the government. Look at so much of the absurdity of our current policy. The government says our principal aim is growth. And what does it do to bring about growth? Well, three things. It decides it will impose a direct tax on employment. That is what raising national insurance is. It's a direct tax on employment.
Then what do you do? You say, well, we will bring about growth by making it much, much harder to employ people by imposing all sorts of regulations on employers, like giving a worker who may or may not. be any good or may or may not be well-behaved rights, as it were, to go to an employment tribunal from the moment you actually employ them. And it goes on. In other words, there is...
a kind of belief of what I would call raindance economics, that just by saying growth, growth, growth, growth, growth, somehow it magically happens. Could just be lying, though, couldn't they? No, I don't think so. I think they genuinely believe it. And I think it's what we're seeing actually with this government, of course, is increasing clashes between the world of magical thinking.
and the brutality of actually being in power. You can see the whole structure of the leftist world starting to break apart. I mean, the most interesting is actually the Ukraine. Have you not noticed suddenly people who would once upon a time until very, very recently have said, oh, war is the most...
Terrible thing you can think of. The Paul Masons of this world, for example, have suddenly discovered an Indian warrior instinct. Suddenly, the Ukraine is worth having conscription for. It's worth having an army for. It's worth having... having atom bombs for. I remember a little while ago, before I suppose my cancellation, I was on some programme or another with Mason, and I dared to say that I thought on the whole, right needs might. What's the response? You're a fascist.
And he started quoting some obscure sub-Nietzschean Nazi thinker of the 1930s. I mean, now they're all clamoring for war. The Rory Stewets, they are, of course, the Alastair Campbells. Now, isn't it interesting? The people who were... clamouring most for the support of the Ukraine, are the ones who were loudest in advocating the invasion of Iraq. Yeah. That's really interesting, yeah. It's again this magical world of thinking.
But equally, of course, once you start saying that, all sorts of other standard lefty things start coming apart if we actually believe that we've got to have. have war, that we've got to stand on our own feet. Well, of course, that means we need manufacturing. No, that has a kind of... doesn't it if we're closing all our blast furnaces if we're not actually very difficult to have shells if you don't make steel yes well that's an awful problem with getting to net zero very quickly
Do you see what I mean? All sorts of incantatory views, which I would just regard as the magic of words, start falling to pieces because there's nothing like war. for bringing you up against that awful fact.
There's a wonderful moment in Boswell's Life of Johnson when Dr. Johnson is talking about a theory that the world doesn't actually exist and it's simply... exists in the mind of god right and he sees a stone and he kicks it he says right it's there it's real it moved it hurt me and We are now suddenly in a world, it seems to me, in which all this magic, we've been in a very easy world, you know, for a very, very long time.
There hasn't been war. Somehow we've kept the magic monetary yielding fruit. I mean, it's not yielding quite as much fruit as we would like, you know, and we've got to administer a bit more fertilizer. it in the form of heightened interest rates. But broadly speaking, it's been going for a very long time, suddenly showing awful signs of...
drying up. We've been tearing up so many of our institutions by the roots. And do you know what? We're quite surprised when they wither. We're proposing to send our boys to fight. for the Ukrainians. What are the Ukrainians fighting for? Well, very understandably, they're fighting for their language, their national identity, their frontiers, and their flag. What do we do with our flag, our language, our frontiers, our national identity, as I constantly point out? We can't defend Kent.
let alone Kiev. Which takes us back to the lack of ceremony and something to hang a hat on, I suppose. And the very sense of an identity. So, yes. Well, I mean, identity today means a whole different thing, doesn't it? Well, if you... If you look at the handbook, it's too essential. defining features of being British are diversity and tolerance. Now, that is a coat peg on which you can hang anything. The Union Jack has become a mere flag of convenience. Spice Girls.
That's all people think of. Spice girls in the 90s, all the spice power stuff. Is your argument regarding Ukraine that it's hypocritical because of the liberal nonsense that's gone on? But were we to reinforce our own sense of identity and be a bit stronger, that right is might that you said before, that we should... No, no, I didn't say right. I said right needs might. Right needs might. Right needs might. Is that right as in political...
Spectrum or right as incorrect? Right as in, well, I would regard the two as being identical, of course. But more generally, if you're a moral position or anything that you believe... in finally has to be defended. It's got to be defended intellectually. It may have to be defended physically. So should we defend Ukraine? I find myself... on this.
I am so aware that all the arguments that have been put forward for the Ukraine and the intervention in the Ukraine are exactly the same arguments advanced by exactly the same people as Libya. as Iraq, as Afghanistan, as the Balkans, which raises very strong questions. This, I think, is precisely...
the reason that America is backing off, that what we're seeing, and again, I think it needs explaining much better than it's generally done. What we're actually seeing is America pulling back from this notion that... What it wants to do is to impose its own values on everybody else. And it's again, I find myself questioning. I stood many years ago in the town hall in Lithuania, in Vilnius.
in an area which was rescued from the horrors of both Tsarist domination and Soviet domination in the years after the fall of the Iron Curtain. And looking at the plaque in the floor, which... said, here stood George W. Bush in whatever year it was, and declared that an enemy of the freedom of the people of Lithuania is an enemy of the United States. I felt sympathy. I felt understanding. I felt a kind of vicarious pride. On the other hand, the Ukraine is a very much more complex thing.
it's a country if it is a country that only has a separate existence from 1945 Otherwise, it's part of this vast plain fought over by empires, occupied by swirling groups of semi-nomads. with the towns having different languages, cultures, different nationalities, races, whatever you want to call it, from the countryside and so on. Sounds like the UK. No, it doesn't. Nowadays. But this, again, is really important. All of that is within the last 30 years. Everybody goes on about this dreadful...
quote from Defoe about Britain being a nation of immigrants, and he goes on about Romans, Normans, Danes, and all the rest of it. That was, that stopped with more or less the Norman conquest. The numbers of as it were, strangers that come in, the actual groups, the Huguenots, the refugees from the Netherlands and so on, more Irish in the 19th century and so on, were tiny drops in the ocean in what was...
otherwise a highly stable population. So know the Ukraine, it is difficult to imagine anywhere less like Britain than... the Ukraine. We have had stable frontiers, a stable structure of government, and a stable pattern of language. several hundred years. I mean, in terms of our frontiers, we're before 1066. I mean, obviously, the frontiers of Britain have shifted. Well, I meant that as a dig against sort of the modern diversity is our strength.
No, but what I'm trying to do, I'm trying to answer it seriously, which is not undercutting your question. But if we actually look at the Ukraine, as I was saying, what you have to remember as a... within something like its present borders. It is only created deliberately by Stalin in 1945 to give Russia, give the Soviet Union, which was this huge land-born... Remember, it's the land-born empire.
It's a land empire to give it an extra vote in the United Nations. And it's only Khrushchev who actually adds on the Crimea, which has got a completely separate history to it in the 1950s, deliberately to increase. the number of Russian speakers. So it's this extraordinarily complex thing. And what I would argue is going on in the Ukraine is a process of the invention of a notion. Nations go through periods of invention.
You can see it with the strange process. We talk about England. The strange process by which genuine English identity emerges from this thing that is... a product of Norman conquest, the barons at Magna Carta, although they speak... Although they speak French, they're calling themselves English and they're clamouring for the rights of Englishmen. By the time that you've got to the Great War, the Hundred Years' War against France, there's a conscious sense.
of we are English and they're French and we're different. By the time you've got to Henry V, you know, the great warrior king who we all know what he looks like from Laurence Olivier with the pudding base and haircut, you're all... already consciously using English as the national language of administration and so on. The vast turmoils of the reign of Henry VIII really forged this notion of a very...
powerful, blood, soil, language, sense of identity. And that's going on in the Ukraine at the moment. In other words, it's a crucible. And we're intervening in this crucible. So it's very complex. In other words, several wars are going on. There's a war of liberal interventionism, the clamor of the European Union, of the Ursula von der Leyen.
and whatever, the Verhofstaffs and so on, extending European values. But you know what? The Ukraine hasn't got much of European values. If you look in the Ukraine, it's toxic masculinity. It's blood. It's violence. It's a belief in the supremacy of language. It's the suppression of Russian and the triumph of Ukrainian. It's a savage struggle between two very close... related people I suppose what further complicates things is I think we've seen a visceral reaction to the
alliance of the woke who were going for the LGBT stuff and all of those things with the Ukraine in there, the BLM. Isn't it just extraordinary? All the people who hate the West suddenly are leaping in in favour of all of these things in the Ukraine. Arthur Douglas Murray wrote that because of our disdain for that, some of us are jumping the gun a bit and then reimagining Russia as some sort of utopia. Which is, of course, deranged. The last thing I am.
is a believer in that or a worshipper Putin. I find it disgusting. You're seeing that a lot, though, around at the moment. You are. And again, it's silly in which people take their ideas as a kind of a la carte menu. Not an a la carte, forgive me, a tabloidote menu, a prefix menu in which you have to have all the opinions lined up together rather than being sensible and judging the case.
cases on their merits. So I suppose I am guilty in some ways of the fact that so many people for whom I have an intense contempt. like Alastair Campbell, passionately in favour of intervention in the Ukraine, which makes me think, ooh, ugh. This is the thing. As they are so wrong on everything else. We must resist that. Pardon? We must resist. Well, must one. Yes. Wouldn't it be sensible to look more honestly?
In other words, to say this is not a conventional extension of European values. What you're witnessing is something much... more visceral is something that belongs earlier in our history. This is actually the creation of a nation. It's not simply a war of national liberation. It's not simply... war self-determination. You're actually having to invent. If you go back to the 19th century, for example, when this sort of thing is going on generally in Europe, remember...
Much of Europe was some form of empire or another. And there's then this extraordinarily... complex, difficult, often violent process by which empires, in which all sorts of populations live on top of each other, then filter out a kind of, what's the word I'm wanting? a kind of centrifuge in which you swirl things around and you separate them out into nations.
very bloody process, usually a very bloody process, as we saw particularly in the former Yugoslavia, that the old Yugoslavia, Tito's Yugoslavia, was a kind of empire. which all sorts of little groups of different races, different religions and so on, lived in very close proximity to each other because they didn't have... genuine democratic rights the moment you actually give them the democratic rights then of course they all think well we actually want to be a people
But, of course, being a people means my language is better than your language. My religion is better than your religion. By the way, I don't want you here because you don't share my language. So you see what I mean? So it is this process. in which these overlapping groups separate themselves or you get... processes of forcible conversion. I mean, again, it needs to be said, in the Ukraine, people are being compelled to give up Russian.
and to start speaking Ukrainian. Whereas, of course, under the Soviet Empire, the two languages merged and mingled with each other. And again, so this isn't a liberal paradigm. But this is a good place to come back to the UK then, because we have just learned more than a million people who live in this country don't speak the language. Is that all?
Well, exactly. That sounded low. That sounds to me to be a severe underestimate. I think so as well. I'm quite sure, actually, and I'm sure people who only speak a little bit, you know. So that's an issue. Then I saw, I think it was Robert Jenrick shared this new law around... pre-sentencing. Did you see that around that people from minorities and transgender people will be sort of given extra consideration before being sentenced? What the hell is going on?
Well, what is going on is that we are reaping the whirlwind. We are reaping the whirlwind of uncontrolled immigration. We're also reaping a whirlwind to which we are peculiarly vulnerable. Everybody says, or it used to be fashionable to say, that Britain coped with multiculturalism unusually well. and coped with immigration unusually well. And there is a reason, and I would say to a significant extent, it's true that we did. Because remember, what is peculiar...
Did you notice when we were having this conversation earlier, I was talking about England, England, England, England. Yes. I wasn't... as it were, confusing. I wasn't making the mistake of saying England when I really mean Britain and including Scotland. I was deliberately talking about England. Because what we've got to remember is there isn't a British nation.
It's very confusing. I've never quite understood it. Well, for a simple reason. We are called the United Kingdom of Great Britain for a very good reason. We are a fusion of... two completely separate monarchies, a refusion of Scotland and England. with the Act of Union of 1707. And what is really important to remember, with an Act of Union in 1707, the English, I mean, this is not the sort of usual rant of Scottish nationalists, the English didn't conquer Scotland.
Scotland wasn't anglicised. There was no attempt at anglicising Scotland. On the contrary, the Act of Union specifically preserves to Scotland. Every lineament of separate nationhood that you can think of. Scotland has got its own legal system. It's got its own religion, its own religion to the inner wise, own variation of Christianity, Calvinist Presbyterianism, the Church of Scotland. And it has its own religion to the extent that the monarch changes religion as they cross.
the border, which is why Princess Anne was able to get herself married at Crathay Church at a time when the Church of Scotland allowed second marriage after divorce, and the Church of England didn't, hence Prince Charles. his awkward problem, you know, in having to have a registry office wedding when he married the present queen. Scotland, more than that, an entirely separate educational system, its own universities, its own right.
to issue currency, its own peerage, its own titles of honour, its own system of heraldry. The only thing that was united was the Crown, which was already united, and Parliament. They were the only two things that were united. So in other words, with Union, you were sort of British abroad.
So we talked about the British Empire because, remember, the reason that the Scots came into union with England was, in fact, they had failed to set up their own empire. They tried to set up an empire in the Isthmus of Panama, the Darians. scheme and it had failed catastrophically so scotland was bankrupt in 1707 which is the principal reason it agrees to union with england and what they do is they bargain away their freedom in return
and for access to the British Empire. But at home, you're English and you're Scots. So I'm completely uninterested in sport and especially uninterested in football. But the first... Football, and I'm talking about soccer, the first football internationals are between England and Scotland. It's why there's no British team.
Because of that delineation. Because of that delineation. And, of course, you incorporate Wales and Ireland. They were already, in one way or another, incorporated with England. Ireland goes in and out of being a separate pseudo-kingdom. What happens from union onwards, the crown deliberately, and latterly the politicians, deliberately pander to the idea of four separate notions. So you start giving royal princes an English title, a Scottish title, then you add an Irish title and a Welsh title.
You start deliberately from the 19th century onward. Well, from the 18th century, Ireland's already got its capital in Dublin, which was, before the Irish got their hands on it, a grand and magnificent Georgian city. You develop Edinburgh as the wonderful, elegant city of the 18th century, but then you deliberately create a capital in Wales. And this is Lloyd George at the beginning of the 20th century. Cardiff was just a cold.
That was its purpose. And it suddenly turned into a grand Edwardian capital. Unfortunately, the First World War comes and they never quite finished building it. But magnificent. grand Edwardian Potsdam classical centre. So you've got this strangest of things, the most powerful country in the world not actually being... nation-state. And our identity was this extraordinarily complex thing. Remember, we didn't have a thing called citizenship.
as it were, the definition of what you were. You were a subject of the crown. And the most powerful source of identity in Britain was the monarchy. This is true right up to the Second World War. And I have the plaque that was given to my father's family after his eldest brother, after Abraham, was one of those. He was actually sent to Gallipoli and he died of his womb. and he's buried at Alexandria. And the plaque is for the fallen.
So it shows the Britannia mourning with the lion. It's a magnificent thing in heavy bronze and it's inscribed for king and country. You fought for the king. And as late as the Second World War, you see George VI profoundly concerned that Churchill was replacing him as the war leader. And what happened, particularly under New Labour...
Partly with the breakup of empire, partly with the desire to create a clear notion of... Because, of course, that idea of being a subject of the crown, you shared to begin with, with every inhabitant of the empire. Yeah. Who were all subjects of the Kran. And then what were you? Was it not national? Would you say, I'm English, I'm Scottish? Is that... Well...
But again, nation, yes, you would have said English or Scots. And the only time I remember as a boy that you used the word, nobody ever called people Brits. Even Americans? Well, of course Americans did. And of course Irish did. Fenians called. Those opposed to. It was an outsider's term for us. We just called ourselves we. You're saying that movement towards calling oneself British, calling ourselves British, open up the doors. It's a new development.
I mean, many things go towards it. It's a result of immigration. It's a result of the dissolution of the empire. It's a deliberate, it's a result of the marginalization of the crown from public life. The thing that most strikes me is how the monarchy has shrunk. The monarchy was the centre. We didn't have, again, why did we avoid in Britain, why did we avoid the violent horrors of communism and fascism?
and whatever, those tidal waves of blood and soil nationalism that tore Europe apart? The answer is because our sense of identity was a much subtler one. It was primarily tied up with the crown. And that's a quite harmless thing when you come to think of it. Why is our national anthem isn't about England? God save the king. You see what I mean? Oh, yeah.
All of that has been shoved aside, particularly under New Labour, particularly by Gordon Brown. And you've tried to create this lame-backed, limping thing called Britishness. You've even eroded our historical tradition, of course. Devolution broke the essential bond between England and Scotland. And if you wanted a model of government that was bound to fail, it's devolution. Couldn't we have just looked? at the fate of Stormont before we decided to reproduce it.
if you think about it, if you decided to reproduce it in Edinburgh and Cardiff. And all the evidence of it in Edinburgh and Cardiff is that it's been not as violently catastrophic as in Northern Ireland, but in every other way. the Scotland of sturgeon or salmon or the Wales of Drakeford have been as absolutely disastrous. in terms of administration as Stormont ever was. But you see, what I'm trying to say is that because we had this very, this absence of a passionate...
single sense of nationhood. And can we just continue this? Because I don't think people understand it enough, you see. If you look in Germany, if you look in Italy, if you look particularly in France and America, you You use things like, I mean, America, how did you forge Americanness out of this extraordinary cocktail of people? You above all used mass education. You use compulsory education, which is why Americans are...
forever saluting flags and praying, well, they don't pray prayers in school, but all of those kind of rituals. We have no single system of education in this country. The way in which... enforced nationhood was above all through a program of public education. We are older than that.
In England, you have state schools, you have Church of England schools, you have Catholic schools, you have Quaker schools, you have Jewish schools, you've now got Islamic schools, you've got county schools, you've got public schools, which are, of course, private. You see what I mean? It's completely, compare that with France. It's a completely different structure. We've not had that kind of process.
of radical national simplification, when we tried to forge a nation, which is exactly what happened in France. So, in other words, we... The last time we went through anything like what France went through in the 19th century or what the Ukraine is going through now is the reign of Henry VIII. It's 500 years ago. which is one of the reasons why we were able to adapt immigration as gently as we did. But it's also one of the reasons that our public institutions have collapsed.
in the face of it. So are we pretty much screwed at this point? It's a very interesting question. What an elegantly technical way. That's the way I have about me. That's my... That's why this podcast stands. I know that careful avoidance of anything that might hurt sensitive feelings. Are we or aren't we? I see two different – I think we're at a turning point. We're at a cusp.
A fork, probably better to call it a fork in the road. We've got two ways in which we will go. One is, and it may be the more likely, that we will see increasing intercommunal violence, that we are seeing more and more communities that see themselves as separate. And to a terrifying extent, they're treated as being separate by the state. That's to say, whenever you hear a policeman saying, we have consulted community leaders.
put your weapons in the mosque and we won't notice them. That's one route. That's scary. The other route, let's look at the... the more beneficent side of the road, of the fork, or rather not the side of the road, the other road. I think very considerable. numbers of immigrants have chosen a very different course. This debate that you may have seen with Fraser Nelson and a rival of yours, Constantine Kissin, the whole business about is Rishi Tsunami.
English or not, seems to me to get it absolutely wrong. That's to say, what we need to be talking about are hyphenated identities. We're a world of hyphenated identities. I'm Anglo-British. I'm English-British. That's what I am. And sometimes I feel one and sometimes I feel the other in my ancestral terms. what I love about the countryside, my language, my literary attachments. And I know I first had this idea.
of these double identities. Another group which mostly has become an inextricable part of our national life, but at the same time has retained a very powerful... sense of semi separate identity. are the Jews, is Jewish. And I encountered this back in the 1990s when I was – the days before I was regarded as being amusingly wicked rather than wicked, wicked.
The days of the moral maze and my strange semi-friendship, semi-detestation with Rabbi Hugo Grin of the Reformed Synagogue. And it was a wonderfully tense relationship. There was a marvellous moment on air in which Hugo, I would say, accounts for the fact that American men get such bad prostate cancer, you know, all the voices going.
down there do terrible things and you know david you're you're not half as nasty as you appear to be me responded flutingly and you you hugo dear are not half as nice either but anyway um He did something very extraordinary shortly after James, my late partner, and I had got together. He invited us to Passover. I'm pretty, pretty hard-nosed. I don't think I've ever been really. Oh, I have when I've been in something like the Parthenon or Westminster Abbey. But...
Rarely have I been so moved. I mean, first I realized why Judaism had survived. Synagogue doesn't matter. Everything is within the home. The head of the household.
Rabbi or not, becomes a high priest. He performs the acts that we see as communion, as part of a real meal at a real table. So that was very striking. But it was also... the fact that gay couple we were there and it struck me here is a man who was or here was a man he died horribly of prostate cancer quite soon after that who was totally comfortable in two separate identities, a leading figure in British public life, and within Judaism, this different figure.
And I think that we're seeing these double identities in the same way. Constantine himself is Rosso-British. Of course he is. He says it. Am I Jewish-British? Can I be Jewish-Anglo-British? Well, I mean, I would... There may even be triple... Yeah, janglo-British. We could come up with all these funny words. But so long as we recognise that there is a single... Not dominant in the sense of aggressive, but a single unifying element, which I suppose we are going to have to call British.
which is a combination of two things. It is our juridical identity, in other words, what goes on your passport. What is nation in that formal sense of the word? What is your legal identity? But it's also, again, it's going back to what developed out of that union of England and Scotland, which was a common...
Political culture, which was a cult. Again, we go back to the ballot box, the little story that I told you at the beginning. We go back to that politics, which is based on fierce debate, but equally a debate. contained within rules, both within Parliament itself and within the country, that is one of fierce party strife which doesn't go to violence and shouldn't even go to street violence.
I find the fact that we're seeing more and more street demonstrations more and more disturbing. That this is... a notion that the right way to bring about change, be it for Palestine, or be it for the environment, or be it for making everybody walk or ride on bicycles, that... form of direct action rather than talking, persuading and winning the case at the ballot box. This seems to me a catastrophic route. It's exactly what started to happen in Weimar.
In other words, politics goes to the street. This is disastrous. I want to get just a personal question for you at this point. I mean, there was this cancellation you spoke of. You used the words damned blacks. Was that what it was? And I believe you meant damned as in... Large numbers. Well, let's frame it in context. What I was talking about was this was when the world went mad.
We're celebrating the fifth anniversary of it. It all started this weekend. Was it with Alex O'Connor you were talking to? Who were you speaking to? No, no, no. It was poor little Darren Grimes. It was Darren! Little Darren. He's actually quite big. but I always think of him as being very small. Well, he's very sweet. But little sweet Darren. Anyway, who didn't behave in a very sweet fashion, it has to be said. But that's another matter.
What it was, it was at the time we'd had lockdown, everybody was mad. Everybody went mad in 2010. Yes, 2020. It really is important we understand this. COVID was an act of national madness. as we can now see. It's very typical. Epidemic illness regularly produces this effect because of fear, because of the excitement of trying to do something about it.
and so on. It's wonderfully described by Lord Macaulay, the great 19th century historian, as there is nothing as ridiculous as the British public in one of its periodic fits of morality. If you remember, we became very moral. Everybody spied on each other. Well, some of us didn't, but lots of people did. This absurd act of public worship for our NHS. S of turning out and beating saucepan. Can you imagine?
British people doing that. Well, you wanted rituals and pomp and ceremony. That's right. But these were perversions. These were perversions. And one of the greatest perversions took place because that summer there was, of course, the... the murder of George Floyd and the vast preposterous overreaction to it, the way in which the entire critical race theory movement...
pounced on it and exploited it, and the whole thing blew up into the preposterous Black Lives Matter. Now, why did I enter into that debate? Why did my tongue slip so badly? Because it did slip. I'm prepared to criticize other people. I will acknowledge error myself. Why was I involved in it? Because why again was Black Lives Matter picked up here? in the way that it was. Because remember, our police force is so unviolent, shockingly ill-prepared, unfit, undisciplined rabble.
which is what they've become as opposed to what they used to be. But anyway, as it were, the more important point is that we have the least violent police force in the world, I would argue. There's abundance. evidence so why did all of this build up in the way that it did it is Why is Black Lives, why did you see all the jumpers on bandwagons like Keir Starmer and Angela Rayner all fussing themselves? Do you remember that preposterous scene of them kneeling alone?
in their Portcullis House office, looking vaguely silly as they were actually photographed kneeling alone. Because, of course, for once they were actually obeying COVID rules, unlike when they were in Durham. But that's an entirely different... matter. We may get on to that. Anyway, why was it all built up in the way that it is? Why has there been this enormous prominence of slavery in
the British version of woke. See, I think what we've got to understand is that there's been a very deliberate attack on the entire foundation. of all that we've been talking about in the last hour or so. It began, curiously enough, in Germany. That with the Second World War, with the horrors of Nazism taking place in the country in Europe, whose culture and civilization, if you look at...
if you look at literature, if you look at poetry, if you look at philosophy, if you look at scholarship, had been the exemplar of civilization. How had that happened? What do we do about it? And of course, the fact that this people had descended into the savagery and the horror of the Holocaust, of the concentration camps, led to the whole... of that extraordinary experience of early German history being, to use an academic term, delegitimized. Careful with that arm.
With the Sig Heiland going on in America. As you speak about the Weimar. I think it's, I think, I'm so, I'm so arthritic. I couldn't raise, I couldn't raise it. I couldn't even do an Elon. That is wonderful. I couldn't even do an Elon. But what happens is German history is delegitimized. And there's been an attempt ever since. do the same using slavery. In other words, the fact that the Germans commit the Holocaust...
delegitimates German history. There has been this attempt in both Britain and in America to claim that slavery is another genocide, and therefore all the claims to civilization are... that greatness that I was talking about, is obliterated. is a mere hypocrisy. All the claims to America of greatness of 1776, of the Declaration of Independence, of the Constitution, these are all morally mere hypocrisy.
begins instead in 1619 with the introduction of slavery. Now it seems to me this is simply a lie. The point that I was making is slavery is horrible of course slavery is horrible but slavery is universal That's to say, I cannot think of a single culture that hasn't practiced slavery. And the one thing that is peculiar about Britain is that it pioneered its abolitionists. The only thing that's peculiar about it. But what is particularly important is the notion that slavery was a...
In other words, all these careful details of the Western passage, of the awful journey across the Atlantic, when indeed sometimes up to a third of the cargo of the ship, usually considered... less, because remember, they were quite valuable. You didn't want them to die. You wanted them to get over there so that you could sell them. But anyway, this argument that it was a genocide, and the point that I was actually making is you cannot have a genocide.
if the alleged genocidal population actually multiplies. And what is remarkable is only I think it's as low... It's in the hundreds of thousands. Only, I think it's maybe only three, I may have got that one wrong, but it's a very small number of hundreds of thousands of black slaves actually go to the 13 colonies, from which this enormous...
population of blacks in America Springs. Now, how can you have a genocide that multiplies people, hence so many damn blacks, I'm afraid. Don't say it again. As in that sense. And also, let me again be honest, I...
It's so many damn books and whatever. There was another element, wasn't there? I was absolutely sick and tired of the sight of the breaking of rules and the indulgence of the police in allowing BLM... in London, of the fact that Churchill's statue had to be boarded up, Westminster was defaced.
People kowtowing before this mob and the sheer total falseness of the thing. So I think, if I'm honest, there was also a certain element of damned in a qualitative sense as well as a quantitative. That is very honest. I'm trying to be. You don't need to admit that. Well, isn't it sensible too? No. I think it is sensible. From your perspective, no. I'm happy you are, though. No, no. Sorry. I always believe in trying to be honest. So do I. But it doesn't mean it's sensible. Well, it is past.
And I think I can defend very adequately in our retrospect as we're now everybody apart from the government and the Commission of Enquiry, the preposterous thing under the preposterous Baroness Hallett is actually a serious question. about what went on in 2020. Let this be another serious question as to how this preposterous nonsense of BLM was allowed to happen and how it was indulged. And of course, setting a pattern of indulgence.
that we have seen with the Palestinian demonstrations and whatever. Absolutely shocking takeover of the centre of our city by an aggressive and profoundly, I think, dangerous minority. I agree. Psychologically, what did that do to you, the anger and cancelling of you? The first day or two was a strange mixture of... There were three emotions. You do feel, and again, let me be honest, and I haven't said this before, you do feel...
initially, if everybody turns against you, that you must have done something wrong. It's very difficult not to. So I was... In some ways, I went along with it more than in retrospect I think was wise. I resigned when I could have fought. But that got over very quickly. There was also, and it's very important and it actually kept one sane, a sense of the absolutely purely ridiculous. Because all of this happened when I was changing fridge-freezer.
So as my entire academic universe was collapsing around me, I was worried about piles of thawing meat. That's funny. The juxtaposition of the... I mean, the nature of human life. The mundane with the... The sublime and the ridiculous. The fact we're forked animals. that the most serious aspects are often the most, like sex, often the most ridiculous. So there was that. There was very quickly, which has not gone away, a sense of determined rage.
and loathing and contempt for individuals and institutions for which I had worked for years, for decades. for more or less a lifetime, who simply spat you out. And... My contempt for those individuals, for people like Baroness Sally Morgan, the master of my college, for Alan Lovell. the chairman of the board of trustees of Mary Rose, for the president and the council of the Society of Antiquaries and its particularly poisonous secretary appropriate.
or John Lewis. For those people, my contempt, my disgust, and my... I try not to... Cherish a desire for vengeance. Vengeance is a very stupid emotion because it does more damage to you than to them. But I feel something very like it. Because I think it's... All of this business of cancellation is wholly and absolutely destructive of every proper human relationship.
It is something to which people resorted without thought. I mean, I remember the exchange with Lovell. Oh, I thought it was appropriate. Couldn't really see another way of dealing with it. The man actually, years later, turned up at a lecture that I was giving and said, I came along to support you. And I said, fuck off. So there's that. And then you know what? I decided there was a very simple solution. I wouldn't be shut up.
It's always been very, very, as you may have noticed from this conversation. It's been very, very difficult to shut me up. I had the marvellous good fortune, again, Those Quaker origins. I'm the product of a long line of what's called dissenters. Heretics, young man. That's why you're here. Why I'm here. I had a mother. who, extraordinary personality and force.
I am my mother's son in virtually every way. Thank God, apart from health. Otherwise, I would be dead. But she had a very clear view that if everybody thinks something, it's almost certainly wrong. That is a marvelous basis for being a serious research historian. And it's a very good way for coping with cancellation. And, of course, it also helped, and again it's important to say this, the years of my media activity of the television, of the book writing and so on, it didn't.
leave me vastly rich but it left me comfortably off and again the people who suffer terribly I mean, okay, mine was a very public case. But the people who suffer worst are those in the public sector in education where their entire careers are taken away, where their livelihood is taken away. It is simple. criminal. And of course, again, circumstances themselves have changed. One of the reasons why I think cancellation is fading is partly because...
People have moved on and partly there's a sense of disgust. Partly woke itself is perhaps peak. But it's also because of something else. It's what happened to Twitter. The vehicle by which cancellation was enforced was Twitter. I mean, it was the Twitter storm.
This was how it was done. There's a famous art, how it was certainly done in my case. I know exactly who organized it. Some awful little socialist worker runt who was a shifter of books at the British Museum. And they actually, there was a group. of them, and they simply organized a Twitter storm. Jonathan Haidt, the American sociologist who writes for The Atlantic, did a study of all of this in which he showed
how closely the Twitter storm and therefore the whole business of cancellation is associated with specific features both of Twitter and the iPhone, the like button. But in other words... You can simply, at a flick, you can develop what is actually a storm. One person does it, ten people do it. It's like compound interest. Well, in fact, it's more than that, isn't it? And I think, therefore, again...
We were talking about epochs. I think there has been an epoch in this, which is Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter. That moment at which Musk enters the Twitter building carrying the large white porcelain sink is a genuine... moment at which things changed. He really has changed Twitter from being essentially a monoculture of the left into what he caught court.
correctly talks about as a marketplace of ideas. And the Twitter storm no longer works. And therefore, you can't do cancellation in the easy way that you could before. Because again, it was very striking. Again, that summer of that summer.
of 2020, when it wasn't just Britain that went mad, most of the Western world went mad. And there was a similar sort of case in New York, in which I can't remember, some Republican or another was... asked to write an op-ed for the New York Times, and immediately there was a vast Twitter storm, the entire editorial team, launched usually by the younger, usually women, in the organisation.
And the op-ed was withdrawn and whatever. And there was that remarkable resignation or remarkable resignation letter written by Barry Weiss in which he used this. Really extraordinary phrase that whoever's name appeared on the masthead of the newspaper, the real editor of the New York Times was Twitter. That's right. Again, I think all of this, you see what's interesting, isn't it? We're describing what's already a dead world. That world of BLM, of COVID, of Twitter is already over there.
Yeah. We've moved on. And I think we are in times in which… As it were, history is moving at such an unbelievable speed, and I'm going to make the joke. I made it before, but it's a good one. I think the long 20th century is established by two pieces of porcelain. We've got Elon Musk in 2020 at the end of the long 20th century. And the beginning is almost exactly 100 years before it. And is it whenever it is?
Towards the end of the First World War, when you have the famous Dada and the urinal being exhibited as a worker. art in New York another piece of white porcelain and the 20th century is sort of delimited by that we're now manifestly into something radically different the world of Trump the world in which All of those, the rules-based international order, the notion of the kind of Pax Americana, all dead within five years. It's over. And we don't know where we are.
Well, we'll see quite soon. And if people don't know where they are, they can probably go and find your YouTube channel. Is that where you'd like to send people over to? I'd love to. That's great. And then we don't have too much time, but tell me who's a heretic you admire? Who's a heretic that I admire? I admire most heretics, I suppose, beginning with people like Martin Luther, real ones.
Although I rejected Quakerism very early because I disliked its pacifism, I disliked its wordiness, I, even as a boy, recognized what it was. Actually, it was. Again, anecdote, I think, is really useful. Like my Marcel Duchamp and the urinal, anecdote is very useful. You can tell what I was like even as a sixth form. Can you imagine? having to deal with me as a schoolboy.
More and more respect my teachers for what, in a little boys' grammar school, what they were able to do. I mean, they recognized me, my George Serre, my history master, with moving house. to move into the Bloomsbury flat. A couple of years ago, things like school reports came to the surface. I hadn't looked. I don't think I'd ever looked at the envelope. It was probably the last opened by my parents in 1960. Where are we? 1961 or 62. Anyway, it was my first report, history report.
in the sixth form. And George there is simply written, Starkey conspicuously lacks the virtue of humility and modesty. They don't write reports like that anymore, do they? Absolutely, absolutely true. But anyway, somebody else who coped with me was my wonderful English master, Edmund Mounsey. And Edmund was also a Quaker, so he was a member of the meeting. And of course, in meeting, I was saying, you level hierarchy. So we'd have addressed each other, I thought he's a distinguished man, as...
I'd have called him Edmund and he would have called me David. In school, of course, it's Starkey and Sir. And he made the mistake of questioning me in school about meeting. I remember the Meeting House, wonderful 18th century. Sorry, no, early 19th century. Vast building that had been designed for the Northern Yearly Meeting because before the railways, it was difficult to get everybody together.
And so you had a northern yearly meeting in Kendall as well as the yearly meeting in London. These vast arches with the sunlight going across the floor and sitting, you still see the scrubbed wood benches. with the blue cushions, sunlight going across the floor, and people prosing on interminably. Because a Quaker meeting has got no form. People get up if they're moving.
by the spirit and say something and sit down again. And then when it's all over, the two elders shake hands. It's as simple as that. Anyway, Edmund said, you know, I'm sorry to talk about this. But I haven't seen you in meeting recently. And when I have, you don't seem very engaged. No, sir. Why? Well, sir, isn't it? The case that you are only supposed to speak in meeting. No, not supposed, sir. I suppose you should only speak in meeting when the spirit moves you.
Yes, Starkey, that's right. Well, sir, why is it that the spirit always seems to have read the Manchester Guardian? Edmund was completely up to it. Starkey, he said. You don't understand. The Spirit wrote the mantras to God. I've had this profoundly. They were very impressive, weren't they? And they gave me the outlet of drama. They gave me the outlet of debating. All the things, how you deal with an aggressive, over-clever.
often silly schoolboy. People, please go and follow David Stark who will put the YouTube channel down below in the description. Make sure to hit like on the thing here and keep watching this channel.