If you value honesty, integrity and diversity, all things that are increasingly lacking in established media, then consider supporting us at TRIGGERnometry. As a member, you'll get ad-free and extended interviews. Plus, exclusive content. Click the membership link on the podcast description or find the exclusive episodes link on your podcast listening app to join us. What do you mean by the Fall of England? You can see repeatedly, states get structures that are too big for their e-comments.
We've created a structure of government which manifestly is vastly expensive. Secondly, it does not work. So, I can't build anything. We've created an absolutely malfunctioning structure of government which is the quintessence of it is Kirsten. Finally, people have to realize what the consequences of their actions are. We will go bankrupt. So, you're constantly putting the day off, but the day will come.
Dr David Starkey, Eminent historian and now fellow YouTuber. I'm really a shrink, I think. Certainly in the presence of a mega-star. I'm a mere shrinking violet. Welcome back. It's always a pleasure to have you on the show. So, David, you've been talking a lot about the Fall of England and the current state that the country is in. What do you mean by the Fall of England and where are we as a country and as a civilization more broadly?
Nice simple question to start off with. It reminds me of one terrible old colleague I had at the University of London who could never be bothered to rewrite his lectures. So, he insisted. He said, all exam questions must be roomy. And this meant that you could write anything you were a question that was broad enough so that his poor students who had just been fed the stuff of 40 years ago could answer them.
But that on the other, this on the other hand has point. What do I mean by the Fall of England? It's again, the quickest way to do it is by saying, let's look at the relationship between the idea of England and the idea of Britain. This is the central question. Remember, everybody chatters about British values and so on. There is no such thing. Britain is not and never has been a nation state with independent values.
The reason that Britain's independence was for export at home, you were Scottish, Welsh, Irish, English. And that is the absolutely key thing to understand the last 300 years of our history.
Britain, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland begins in 1707 with the union of essentially, not essentially, although they share the monarch ever since the accession of the steward at the beginning of the 17th century, although they share a monarch of the steward line, they retain everything that's separate.
England and Scotland have got separate histories. Why Simon Sharma's history of Britain was rubbish? Because there isn't such a thing. England and Scotland are completely separate histories up to 1707.
Separate countries with insofar as countries have values, separate values, separate traditions. But the extraordinary thing is with the union in 1707, it's not a conquest, it's not colonisation, it's none of the things that the Scots and At say it is, it is a genuine negotiated settlement between two separate countries.
Scotland in 1707 keeps everything of being an independent state apart from its monarchy and its parliament. So the Scots keep, obviously, Scottishness, they keep a particular version of the English language and several versions of the English language.
They keep their own church, the monarch still changes religion as they go across the border. You keep a separate educational system, you have universities entrenched in the active union, which is why Margaret Thatcher couldn't abolish the University of Aberdeen, although she wanted to make an example of it.
You have a separate system of heraldry, you have a separate crown jewels, you have a completely separate legal system, a separate educational system. And that meant, of course, that after union, what all Scotland did was to join in the English parliament.
And then, when we were in the UK, we were going to be able to send more Scottish MPs to Westminster than Scotland was actually entitled to. You create a uniform army, a uniform navy, and the army in particular where the Scots have a holy disproportionate part, and the Scots get access to the British Empire.
There is no overarching single identity. The monarchy, deliberately, as a matter of policy, creates Scottish titles, Welsh titles, Irish titles for each royal son, in other words, an actual endorsement of it. This extraordinary multiple identity, remember, it goes right through to sport, the first international in soccer, are between England and Scotland, is why we don't have a single national team.
So the relationship is, what does England become? Scotland, increasingly Wales, Ireland, were cultural nationalism. So you've got a national poet in the case of Scotland, you've got Robert Burns, you've got national dress, the Kiltor, the funny things that the Welsh were, the Welsh, the immense importance of this useless language, Welsh. It's why educational standards, why educational standards have collapsed in Wales. And then you wonder why you're controversial there.
No, we need to talk, we need to call things by their proper names. Welsh is an unreformable medieval language. It's only medieval, it sort of bronzes it, literally seriously. It's a bronze age language in which every word that relates to modernity is an adapted form of English. So the fact that you waste a vast proportion of the time of children in schools teaching them this language is a central reason why the Welsh children are performing hugely less well than English children.
It's really important, we don't lie. We spent time lying. I thought this was one place where we can actually tell the truth. The truth is absolutely central. So we have then this world in which there are three nationalisms that are very typical of general European nationalisms. They are intensely cultural, they are about music, they're about special dress, they're folkloric. They don't have a direct political representation. We're talking before 1997.
There's a different one which is English, where you don't have national dress, except you do, I'm wearing it. It's the, it's a sabble rose suit which completely transforms how the elites of Europe dress because before that it's French style in silks, velvet, laces and whatever, which is completely impractical.
You can't actually wear it outside a coach or a royal court, otherwise you're torn to pieces by the mob and the English pioneer a form of dressing which you can use, you can ride in, you can walk in the street in, you can do business in. But of course it becomes a universal possession. So Englishness becomes a kind of broader identity which is above all related to one thing and one thing only great nationhood. It's that sense of great nationhood.
The England of the 19th century, the Made in England, the world's largest manufacturing power, commercial power, the place that originates parliamentary democracy, parliamentary government representative, government, a secure system of law that invents effectively modernity, capitalism and all the rest of it. So there's an incredible pride in all of that. That undergoes tremendous shock from the end of the First World War for obvious reasons.
In many ways, I think everybody says you know what book should people read to understand England. It's that satire, that skit of the 1960s, cellars and yeetman, 1066 and all of that, which ends in this extraordinary way. And the describes the the B street is and whatever that follow 1918 and it says this is before Fuku Yama. Britain ceased to be top because you use Britain and England interchangeably.
Britain ceased to be top nation and history came to a full stop. Now I don't think England has ever fully recovered from that moment because how do you defolane a sense of nationhood that hasn't depended on the usual conventional symbols of nationhood. And again, if you actually look within Britain, the way it actually worked was everybody was both British in the sense of a formal legal identity, a formal sense of citizenship and you were well Scottish Irish English.
But the Welsh Scottish Irish actually sub the certainly that governing elites subscribe essentially to an Anglo-British culture, they go to the the elites, especially in Scotland, go to the great public English public schools and they take part in a system of the Westminster Parliament is just the English Parliament. The laws of the whole community are the laws of England, the number of harmonics go back to the conquest of England in the Norman conquest. Now all of that is thrown into chaos.
It's a very long answer to a very big question. All of that is thrown into chaos by the deliberate decision of the Blair government to embark on two things, devolution on the one hand and large scale immigration on the other. And what you do deliberately at that point is devolution says the four nations are equal. So you as far as possible, you destroy the as it were overarching political supremacy of the English Parliament.
You do what you'd not done before, which is to embody the nationhood of Wales, Scotland, Ireland, with actual indipotent Ireland, sorry, is a separate case which we should talk about. But Scotland and Wales, you deliberately give it political embodiment, which it hadn't had before, but you don't give England.
So you deliberately marginalising the reason you did the reason Labour deliberately marginalises England because England is conservative and they don't like it is the essential issue, but it's also too big to operate in the federal system. You can't have a federal system where Scotland, what is it, less than five million people, is it three and Wales is two or three million and it's a tiny, tiny places and you 50 or 60 in England.
You cannot possibly have a federal system with such gross disparity. The 13 colonies are able to do it, although some of them are very much bigger than the others because there are 13, you can balance out as you do between the House of Representatives and the Senate, the Senate representing the states, two from each, in other words, everybody is the same, the House of Representatives actually representing population.
We can't balance it out, we can't do that. But the problem is it then leaves England high and dry with no formal expression of its national identity, unlike the Scots, unlike the Welsh, unlike the Irish. It then goes further because what you do is you try to invent a new British identity and the key thing to understand this is deliberately the work of Blair and especially of Gordon Brown.
The key thing is let's be quite a blunt, you can tell us how far I've gone. What we do is we create a flag of convenience identity. Being British has no content, it deliberately has no content because the only British value of parent is tolerance. Which is aggressive tolerance.
Which is what you and me as white men are expected to show and there's diversity, which is what those who are not white, which is aggressive tolerance to be directed at us. And this is utterly disastrous because in the old Britain and with all good immigrants like you, we don't have multiculturalism. What we had was biculturalism. Everybody was, Scottish, Welsh, English, whatever, and British in the sense of subscribing to an overarching set of essentially political values.
I believe, unlike most people, politics is actually what Aristotle calls architectonic. It shapes that it gives shape to a country, it gives shape to a people. And unfortunately, we've thrown all that away. And the result is then you have a chaos of identities. What we should be going back to is biculturalism, not multiculturalism. But how do we do that? You have to recognize a primary value.
I agree. And let's unpack that because I think what you're talking about is you're at least describing. We haven't kind of found our way to a solution. But you're describing what I think is the central problem, Britain faces from a cultural and identity perspective. Which is that what we know we should be saying to people who come here and we've had a lot of people who've come here in a short period of time is you have to become one of us.
But you see, it was never something right again. It's really to be that. No, I don't know. I don't think it should. Let me now reverse track because I think do do what fashionably used to be called a reverse ferret. Let me explain the good side of what I've just described. Because we didn't have a single passionately enforced identity like the French, like the Germans, like the Americans until very recently.
But remember, all European states are in one way or another inventions. They put together at different moments of time and for different reasons. And what there's an especially fertile period in this following the great chaos of the French Revolution and Napoleon. And one of the central instruments in this state forging, well obviously, it's power, it's bureaucracy, it's industry.
But the most important thing and what we're doing here is education. You use the new universal systems of education that are imposed in compulsory schooling that are imposed in the late 19th century actually to impose a single version of the language, a single interpretation of the history. And if you like a single set of values, we never did that in Britain because we never had a single system of education.
We, again, as I said, Scotland had its own entrenched educational system, Wales did. And at the same time, we had multiple religious schools, we had local authority schools, we had charitable schools, we had public schools. So there was never this uniformity. This is why the good side of what I'm describing is we've been able to accommodate such an extraordinarily broad range of immigrants without the structure actually tearing apart.
Whereas manifestly, in, for example, France, the structure is completely coming apart because if you only have this very brittle model of you, there's a one, it means one thing to be French. The only way you can accommodate diversity is actually to pull it right apart because we had such a baggy. It's again, why are we able to avoid revolution from the 17th century right up to now?
It's because we had a constitution that was extraordinarily flexible that right from the beginning had the foundation of the idea that everybody is represented in parliament.
Everybody wasn't. I'm not only a tiny proportion, it was. But that was the myth. So when you get the chart is fighting for represent working class, when you fight, you get the later 19th century skilled unionists, when you get the suffrageats, they're not saying we want to tear parliament down, we're saying we want to be part of it.
Again, so you see what I mean, you've got a constitution which has got this immense, just one second, this immense elasticity in the same way because British identity was never one single coherent nation that is no British nation. It was able to accommodate this extraordinary range, but it relied on this unspoken assumption that there was a dominant, essentially political and behavioral culture.
The notion of itself is an extraordinarily diverse thing. It embodies the chart, it embodies weird people like, I'm really weird, my ancestors were quaker. Again, one of these extraordinary religious minorities that's had such a hugely disproportionate impact, everybody says, for good, I think also for ill, the round tree trust is almost destructive things available in England sponsoring every deranged leftist goals at the moment.
But they have this extraordinary ability both to make money and to sponsor radical good causes. So it's a very complex identity, it's not just the polar hat, it's not just the cut glass accent, it's not just southern England.
But it's everything, somebody is brilliant as a writer, it's all well described, it's everything that you feel when you enter a great building, it's what you feel when you enter Westminster, Abbey, that extraordinary sense of 800 years of history, just resting on you, breathing, the amazing figures, the monuments that you walk, the smells, you smell the extraordinary music, the liturgy.
So on all of that, that was deliberately damaged under Blair, quite intentionally damaged, and instead you superimpose this mythical identity, and the problem with it is, it has literally no content. So we say to immigrants now that you can be anything you want to be, we allow our willing acceptance and tolerance, very different groups.
So if you look at the pattern of giving state recognition to Roman Catholics, to Jews, Quakers, when there's a royal accession, there is actually a special group of, I forget what it's called, but it's something like the privileged bodies. Because the entire litany of rather strange people like Quakers and God knows what, of the 19th century, sort of incorporated into the establishment. So you can see, you can see how we did it, why we did it.
We also see how it gets out of hand, if there is a deliberate attack, especially on Englishness. And the reason for that deliberate attack is of course, it's identified with a particular form of racial supremacy, which is now decided to be ultimately wicked, it's identified primarily with empire, although it has to be said, the Scots were the most aggressive imperialists of the lot.
If you either look at the Hongkos and Shankers, you know, Hong Kong and Shanghai, you look at the banking system in Canada, you look at the dominant families in India and so on. The entire operation of Wukari is primarily designed to target that dominant anglophone culture, which is the only glue that held it all together.
Well, this is why I was asking you the question. So your argument is the British identity is vacuous and has no substance, which I agree with because it's, I agree with Leicester's pocket there. So the central thing is that the fact that the British identity was vacuous is only recent. Yes, I understand. It is a determination to say that the only British value is diversity and tolerance.
And rather than saying, actually what you're doing is when you get that passport, when you acquire that citizenship, when you become a subject of the crown, you're effectively subscribing to a thousand years of history. And again, it's really important and this is also the aging out of the monarchy, which is one of the most striking things in my lifetime, is also central. This, this, it were the central embodiment of that overarching identity.
It wasn't nationhood. It was the monarchy. If you, I have a plaque bronze plaque, which I found amongst my father's possessions, which is what his family was given after his eldest brother and what Abraham died of horrible wounds at Gallipoli. And what appears, this is the plaque that was given to the family of everybody who had been killed in the First World War. So there were millions of these things.
And what appears on it is for King and country. The primal, the primal emblem of it was the monarchy. And one of the things that I think has been catastrophic and catastrophically accelerated, especially with the constitutionally illiterate coronation of King Charles III, the, the role of the monarch as the prime symbol of this, remember Britain is the world's most successful state.
And in, whether, whether you look at the legacy of the British Empire, maybe dwarfs the legacy of room, an empire that leaves a daughter states, America, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, India, is the most extraordinary thing in the world that creates a language, which is not simply universal in Europe, but universal in the world, a dominant system of law, English common law. So this, this staggering achievement is then, as it were, turned against it, used to destroy it.
And the, what, what, what seemed to me to be so extraordinary at the coronation was all the things that were you, I, I, I can remember vividly as a boy, first time I'd watched television, watching the coronation of Elizabeth II. And at that point, there was still the sense of the monarchy as the apex of a political pyramid. And of course, at that point, still just about an imperial pyramid.
And ever since 1689, the House of Lords and the House of Commons had been present at every coronation. And the monarch was manifestly the peak of a pyramid. Charles, King Charles and Archbishop Welby deliberately swept the whole of that away. Every reference to politics was removed from the coronation.
The original idea of the coronation was the sanctification of political power by divine authority. In other words, and what I've always said was the proper role of the Church of England, English Shinto, the English worshipping themselves. The position of the King Emperor, all that swept aside. The blairization of the monarchy, which I'm afraid, Latak, Queen Elizabeth and present King Charles have been absolutely essential.
David, let me just finish this line of questioning with you because what I'm desperately trying to pin you down on is what are we to do about all of this. Because your point about the monarchy, I take very well. I was at a gathering recently. It was probably around the time of the coronation, actually, of people from our space. There were many people who you'd know, many people who I've used would know there. And the person who was talking at the end of a speech said God saved the King.
And I kind of looked around and said, yeah, God said, and then they kigled afterwards because this idea, you know, you mentioned the plaque. I saw something the other day about how a group of British soldiers were surrounded and ran out of ammunition were all killed. And they sent the final telly, the final message was out of ammunition. God saved the King. I don't imagine British squatters in that situation now would be sending that kind of message.
That is true. Right. That is true. So if we're not to tell new immigrants or, you know, my son is two years old. He is the son of two immigrants here. What are we supposed to tell people about what it now means to live here and to be part of this society? Call it English, call it British, call it whatever you want. No, no, I think we've got to go. I think I think we do have we do have to say that there is an overarching British identity. That is our city. That is what we legally are.
Remember again, because England and Scotland were so completely separate in fundamental reasons, there was never a sense of a racial basis of our identity. And remember, this is true in Germany until five minutes ago, the everybody who spoke German was potentially a German citizen. There was this extraordinary part. I was a juridical view of citizenship. You're a subject of the crown. And of course that can be a matter of will. It's a matter of contract. It's a matter of form.
The problem is once it ceases to have a sense of allegiance to what the crown used to represent, the crown used to be this summation, this summary of that thousand years of history that I'm talking about. Maybe what we've got to do, I would say this is a historian, wouldn't I? I call it.
Right, let me just go find this one side. There's a movement now, which I'm done aware you've actually interviewed people who are interested in it, which is to say the only way we can save ourselves is by a religious revival. Quite a lot of people. On the right to saying this, which I can see the point on I disagree radically, but they're talking about the needs to be what we are talking about, an idea of something bigger than oneself.
The thing that both you identify with to an extent explains you that gives you ground all those sort of things. And there's a ground and fancy word for it, which you can call transcendence. I believe that there is a possibility of historical transcendence. What I would want to do with every immigrant I know it won't could is to take them round to a three great buildings, to take them round Westminster Abbey, to get them to look at what is there.
First of all, it will be required that they would have a sufficient leisure level of English, actually to understand it, take them round to look at a great national monument, which can this is the early 18th century, which gives pride of place to a scientist. On one side of the Abbey, there is the vast elaborate two monuments of Newton, of Isaac Newton. It's just extraordinary that you have a special corner devoted to poets, another special corner to musicians.
At the end of the 18th century, the entire royal family takes its hat off and bows before the throne, before the kind of throne of handles monument there. And it's that extraordinary, the statues of the great statesmen and so on, is what you should, what we should be feeling, it's not, it's not a tip-pride, it's nothing vacuous. It is a respect, it's gratitude.
But also the realization that that's not something dead, but it's something that is properly a kind of fruitful soil, it's a kind of, it's kind of well fertilised field, from which novelty springs, because again, what the absolute tragedy of, particularly the 20th century, is the belief you can just start from scratch, which again, blairs new country.
But you know what, it actually was, because it tried to scrub away as much of the past as possible, with the disastrous consequences of the present. What we have to realise is that everything that's gone wrong, including the NHS, is an attempt when you start, try to start from scratch. When you simply scrub away the past and use an exercise of artificial intelligence, say, wouldn't it be lovely? We are a product of, wouldn't it be lovely?
Ignoring, if it ignores, if it ignores, if it lies, it do little. And, are, are, are, are ignoring what was there already. And the, I mean, I am passionate about this, constant. And one of the reasons I am always so impressed by you, you have, you as a quite deliberate intellectual process, have absorbed yourself into that. And it's not true. Yes, absolutely. And been changed and transformed by it. And you are precisely, I'm not famous for that, flattery, but I'm going to give it to you.
You are an example of exactly what I'm talking about. The extraordinary transformative power of this, how it changes, how it directs, how it is the great pointer from past present to future. And that's what we should be doing. In other words, we should find a way by which it's ambitious, but I think it's doable, in which everybody who aspires to British citizenship is helped to the sort of understanding and the sort of transformative process that you've had.
That you've done for yourself. If you value honesty, integrity and diversity, all things that are increasingly lacking in established media, then consider supporting us at trigonometry. As a member, you'll get ad free and extended interviews. Plus exclusive content. Click the membership link on the podcast description or find the exclusive episodes link on your podcast listening app to join us. Sorry, Francis.
Yeah, that's why I was waiting. My question to you, David is, and you flatter me, let me flatter myself. I did have some circumstances which made it easier for me. First of all, I came here when I was young. Secondly, I came to boarding school, which imbues you with many of the British values. Not them into you. Not them into quite the throws moses. Secondly, or presumably you would never beaten.
Thirdly, not to flatter myself too much, but I've had the luxury, let's put it like this, to read a lot and to think about these things. If I had come in my mid-twenties and gone straight into a low-level job where I had to survive, and I've had periods of my life that were like that, but I had something before. I don't know that I would have got to the point that I've got to.
And I guess what I feel is, I love what you're saying about, you know, maybe we should actually do some kind of collaboration where you take us round Westminster Abbey and we film it. But, but, but. What I'm, there has to be a more retail version of this for more people to get. Yes, of course I understand that. But what I'm saying, I've described the idea. Yes, right. What we need to do is to have that conscious process of cultural inculcations.
Yes. By the way, it doesn't, I've no idea whether you retain or do you, were you ever orthodox? Yeah, well my family are orthodox. Do you retain it? I'm not a practicing religious person. But, but I probably invite some of the values. Exactly. What I think is, it's entirely possible indeed I regard as valuable. That a Jew was seek. However, and retains all all the individuality and peculiarity of custom alongside and with. And I think it's entirely possible for that to happen.
I mean, I first, I first and again were being, let's be autobiographical because I gave you, tried to give you the historical structure. I think the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the anecdotes is often so valuable. I first was really alerted to this idea of biculturalism. By my experience in my glory days doing the BBC's moral maize, which is when of course I get the name, if you know the rudist man in Britain, the being abusive to poor Ilge or Jostin and whatever.
But one of my fellow panelists was Hugo Grin, who was the Rabbi. I don't know whether it's called the liberal or the reform west London congregation based in Marlowebin. And he was, and of course he was classically on the left or leftish. And our relationship was a quite spiky one. I mean, I think it's best summarized by rather nice exchange between us. Hugo had this word, when that kind of voice, which I always say explains why Americans suffer from prostate.
You know, you vibrate it all very badly. Anyway, you know, David, you're not half as nasty as you appear to which I fluted back and you who go my dear, and not half as nice either. It was, it was, it was, it was very nicely tense relationship. Anyway, it was halfway through that, halfway through my tenure, Stintler, that I met my late partner, that I met James Brown and we got together and all the rest of it. And Hugo again, you know, Drew, homosexuality, quite awkward.
He deliberately went out of his way to include the two of us. And he did one thing I've never forgotten, invited us both to the pass over in his house. And I never really understood Drew Dias, and of course at that point you see the head of the household effectively as high priest. Performing the central rituals of the religion, which are also the rituals of the table, which we in, you know, communion and whatever in the Western churches, and it's a kind of ritualized version of that.
What is remarkable in a Jewish pass over, it is actually part of the meal you are really going to eat. And here was this man who was a major of that point, public figure and whatever, suddenly becoming the high priest in his own household. And I found it moving in a way, but it was this doubleness and there is ease in both worlds. And in the same way that you know the Anglo-Scott is easy in both worlds. You can, you can be strutting around in Kilton's screws one minute.
And in most fluting of English accents, you know, discussing imperial policy in another. And that, those are the things that we've got to work out ways. They have to be educational. We have to rethink how we educate. And the, again, there are so many guilty parties to the Blair Enterprise, including many historians.
I mean, people like Linda Colley, Norman Davis, produced what I would argue, and it's a strong thing to say, deliberately wrong accounts of British history to lead this conclusion, to lead this vacuous conclusion of all the world. Which merely has a flag of convenience as an identity. We are going to, again, the whole way in which we've attacked a history which always used to be taught essentially is the narrative history of centering on a narrative history of Britain.
And instead you replace it with this absurd notion that all history is doing is teaching kids to interpret documents, you know, this post-Rus business of giving children. You cannot possibly understand the historical document because you don't have the context. You can only understand the historical document if you have the context. We will need to go back and we will have to have a much more historically based way.
Otherwise, we are at the risk, and you know about this from all your other interests. We are at the risk of a culture which simply eradicates the whole of its foundations, the whole of its past, and is in this perpetual tick-tock world of a meaningless present. And that is destructive. It's not simply destructive of nations. It's destructive of the very essence of humanity.
David, I agree with the vast majority of what you're saying. I think there's a piece of the puzzle that you're missing and push back on me about this if you disagree. We're not addressing the issue of the working classes if we take back to the First World War, lines led by Donkeys. That became a moment as far as I was taught that the working classes started to develop a distrust of their supposed betters, particularly the way that they were just led to the slaughter.
If you look at the industrialization, you had these working class communities which were congregated around manufacturing or the pit or whatever it may have been, it had the heart ripped out of it. So essentially what you have is the people who are the foundation, the cornerstone of your civilization, who have been demoralized by the people who should have been representing them. I think the lines led by Donkeys is a pretty inadequate view of the First World War actually.
But certainly the part of the complex of British life, English life was exactly the trade union movement and the Labour Party. But let me give you an alternative history. At the beginning of the 20th century, you get, of course, this great moment when the Liberal Party having triumphed in the 1900s, vanishes effectively in 1918 at the end of the First World War. At that moment, the British elite is confronted with what does it do with radical socialism.
Many of the many places in the continent, you actually decide to fight it. We embrace it. We do quite extraordinary things. Do you know in 1917 when you reconstruct the monarchy and the wake of the Russian Revolution, you actually create an order of chivalry exclusively for socialist and trade unionists? The companion of honor. Because there was this, and now of course you laugh your head off, but there was this general sense that socialist wouldn't want titles.
It wouldn't really want to be called law. Absolutely. It would never dream of going into the House of Laws. It would raise their hands in horror being called Sir Keir, for example. They would regard this as utterly shocking. So you created this special order to accommodate them. You go out of your way when there's the First Labour Government in the 1920s to welcome them to Buckingham Palace to make George V's Billion Datties.
He'd been a midshipman in the Manavie. He'd been knocked around at the bottom of the pile. He knew all about that. He identified very easily with the working class members of the cabinet, people like J.H. Thomas, and they sit down happily and laugh at the ridiculous pretensions of the middle class socialists like the webs, like Sydney Web. Sydney Web is the only one who actually refuses to wear a court dress, which is the British and all the rest of it.
And there's a very wonderful exchange between J.H. Thomas and George V asking, you know, well, why are you that? What's the problem? Thomas just says to him, well, in that household, it's Beatrice Wat, whereas the British is the usual classic male sexist joke. So there wasn't the general secretary of the Trae's Union Congress, becomes an absolutely central part of the establishment right through.
I mean, we talk of the Third Labour Government, the 45 to 51 Labour Government, which was remembered was the continuation of the wartime coalition. The wartime coalition headed by Churchill, but with athlete as seconding command in theory, but the real seconding command is Ernest Bevin. And Bevin controls effectively the entire domestic economy.
So socialism is totally at the heart of the British state. The new settlement that is formed at the end of the Second World War is one that embraces and embeds it, the role of the council house, the invention of the NHS and all the rest of it. What of course goes wrong is that the socialism at the heart of the establishment in the 1970s and a combination of that, welfareism and Keynesian economics comes near to destroying the state.
Can we just understand that in the economic point of view, which actually is afraid of the basis of it all, it comes near. And what that should does is absolutely to rip that form of socialism out of the heart of the environment, out of the heart of the establishment. And I can see why I think it was also deeply problematic. I mean, I think we were now sufficiently far away from that tourism to understand that it was necessary, that it also entailed great evils as well as great good.
But the deindustrialization, as we can now see, was merely accelerated in Britain. I mean, everywhere in Europe, heavy industry is now dead. Isn't it? And particularly green policies accelerating the eradication of what's left. Our problem is that we never devised and never thought about what really replaced it.
In America, you see, in one sense, it doesn't matter. You can abandon corners of America. I don't know whether you've been to parts of urban America, particularly rural America. They make our poverty here look like luxury.
Because of course, it is prevented from absolute deprivation by the extent of the welfare state. But you can then, because it's so big, you can simply move on. You can move on and develop another area. We can't. And we haven't, I suppose, the city of London in some ways is the equivalent. But yes, we need to rethink what this fancy word levelling up or something would entail. I think it's profoundly difficult.
Because the foundations of what you're talking about, what I'm talking about, was a particular form of industry and a particular form of prosperity. Remember, there was no need to argue that you too levelling up Birmingham or levelling up Manchester or levelling up Liverpool, or Glasgow. These were vastly more intellectually exciting places than London in the late 18th and the 19th century, because it was where economic activity happened. It is profoundly difficult to invent economic activity.
And the whole idea that we're now subscribing to, that simply by building houses, that simply by building transport things, you will somehow magic an independent economy. And without that independent economy, it's very, very difficult. But we made no attempt. We never really contemplate. And you are right. And he says, what? But the most terrible thing. I mean, let's again face this. I come from that background.
My father was a tool maker. And he didn't have a business online, a starmist father. He didn't have a paddock that could have been the soul, was sold for several hundred thousand pounds and could have been sold for more. I was born in a pebble dash semi that didn't even have a full bathroom. I know all about that. But the most shocking thing is, of course, that the party that was founded to represent that, namely the Labour Party, as a bandendid completely, totally and completely.
The Labour Party has become instead is the party of the new blob. It, the Labour Party now is you saw it at the con. Look at what was represented in Liverpool. What it is, it is essentially the party of the new Nomenclature, what you used to have in the Soviet Union.
It's the Labour Party is now the, not the rep, it's not the party of the working class. It is the party of the new governing class that consists of the Quangocracy, the white collar employees in state education, the white collar employees in the NHS, in the bureaucracy and this multitude of quangos that what we have.
It's become in fact the party of the privileged south of England and islands in bits of Manchester, bits of Liverpool, bits of Glasgow. And it is this, it is this, this, this extraordinary abandonment by the party that was actually founded to represent it.
But again, sorry, and we're talking very frankly and there are questions too big, even to be almost to be touched on. But we've also got to remember something else. The sheer, although, although what happened in 1945 was done, I think genuinely with the best of intentions, though I think the results were terrible. One of the things it deliberately did was to prevent, and because it seemed to make it unnecessary, voluntary activity.
If I look back to my father, who experienced the horror of almost unfunded and unemployment for three terrible years in the early 1930s on two occasions, he and my uncle actually walking from the north of Manchester to London. In search of work, I mean, what we would regard as a poverty beyond comprehension, there was never a loss of dignity. And he was engaged throughout in intense voluntary activity in religiously, educationally in all sorts of other ways.
And it's that structure of voluntary activity because the only ways you kept going, you had little clubs that paid for, that paid for trips out. You had, you, you, you had, sounds gruesome, you had burial clubs that would actually pay money. Friendly societies, you had, of course, an intense degree in my parents' case of involvement in religion, which was, which was extraordinarily wide embracing activity. All of that has gone. Because what we're talking about, there's hardly a trace of it left.
Because it's sorry to interrupt you, David. No, no, no, no. Because what we're talking about here from different points and different angles is we're talking about something very profound, which is the death of community. Well, it's, it is the death, well, community is a hate that worst community. Well, come on. It is, it is, it is the word most frequently used by evet Cooper. That, that tells you, it should never ever pass your lips.
It's murmured by thick police officers when they're justifying to the police. But it's not from communities the wrong word. It's this, and this extraordinary importance of voluntary self-directed activity. The thing that is awful now about the working class is in many ways the term has become a paradox. It's the non-working class. But it is, it's the sense that they don't have control of anything. What that voluntary activity gave, I have my father's time.
He's like, look, it is day. Although he could have just been, even nowadays, it was slouching around with the fag on the sofa or whatever it is, you know, getting pissed on cheap beer or lager.
I mean, his instead, it was constantly doings. And somebody at the, in fact, the bottom of the social pile still, you know, collecting for the poor, still interested passionately in what was going on in continental Europe, still interested in the persecuted, the beginning of the persecution of the Jews in Germany. I've got the cutting, his cuttings from papers and whatever, just extraordinary.
But if you're involved like that, you control something. The thing that's gone desperately wrong is this sense of not having control. And remember, very interesting studies have done about anxiety, depression, and all these sorts of things. And mental illness and the general view is, you know, people in terribly high powered jobs and whatever should be more, but very vulnerable to them.
Not at all. If you're up the hierarchy where you're in charge, you're setting targets, you're driving yourself, you're driving other people, you're almost immune. You can, you can, you can drive yourself into a wall and you'll survive. It's the people at the bottom that are on the receiving end that have no autonomy. And it's, it's, it is, it is this loss of autonomy of self-directed activity.
And remember, these are grand words, but they're the foundation of all classical political philosophy. The, the beginning of the ability to take part in politics is the moment at which you begin to take control of your own life. You feel a certain sense of responsibility for it. And again, our educational system seems to me to have almost entirely forgotten these things. The classical, you know, the old public school system was finally very much about that.
When you got to the top of the school, you became a prefect. You participated in the government of the thing. You were studying the classics, which are all about that process of self-education.
You look at your Shakespeare plays, you, you, you look at different forms of, of, of, of political success and failure, you know, and best your career, you know, your Henry Viths, whatever. There they all are. There are the examples. There are the ways of tackling it. The, the, the way, the way history used to be taught.
Yeah. And what it seems that we have now is, is we have this vacuum, hopefully, we have a vacuum. And as we all know, nature of hauser vacuum, so it has to be filled by something by rubbish. And when you have at your, at your center, rubbish, nothing good is going to come from that. And what it is happening is you're seeing a society and a people slowly become corrupted because they have rubbish at their center.
And it's the tragedy is, it's not their fault. It's the fact that we have all ruling classes. Oh, no, I think I think that, that, that, no, that decline of the people, we are all complicit in it. I don't think it's anything like this. So you're, you're subscribing to this, not this wonderful, storm or I view. There are working people. So I, all the rest of it. And then there's a wicked little group, you know, we were too rich, too leisure, all the rest. This is nonsense.
But the, the health of the democracy and its decline is a universal question. And, but of course, it's very easy to see some of the things that have gone wrong. We've talked about the industrialization and, and the destruction of, of, and remember.
It's also, it's again, one of the central things is we were first in, we were first in to industrialization, which means that the patterns of the trade union of the friendly society, of particular, of specific trades and the traditions and pride, or specific trades were very, very deeply ingrained here. They'd century and a half. Most countries, that pattern, which was effectively the old coal steel and iron pattern, was a much, much shorter period of time.
It embeds itself into the fabric less. So it's easier to remove and to go to the, to the more mobile forms that followed electrification and, and, and, and, and all the rest of it. And, but, but essentially, the other great thing, and again, we need to talk about this daring Delta truth is the welfare state.
That the, that the welfare state, because it removes the penalties of failure, because it, what effectively says to you, if you don't, in every way, if you don't look after yourself, don't worry. You'll pick up the pieces. The central rule of all human conduct should be actions and inactions have consequences. The moment you lose that sense, you are absolutely lost. And, well, fairism has removed that. I'm sorry, we, we need sticks as well as carers.
The, the, the moment those go, the, the, it applies on, it applies on a high political level too. Why have politics in Scotland and Wales been so insane after devolution? Because you've given them large scale political independence with no requirement that they pay for it, because it paid for by the British taxpayer. So you can effectively have play pen politics. And what we've done is to introduce a play pen society. Everybody talks about infantilization.
You know, this braw, the fact people grow up, if they ever grow up at all, much, much later than they used to. And it is effectively because you've removed risk. The state now acts as an overprotective parent, so you never grow up. Growing up requires you take responsibility for yourself. And if you fall flat on your face, you pick yourself up, you wipe yourself off, you disinfect your wounds and you sort yourself out.
We'll get back to the interview in just a moment. But first, let's talk about something that might just change the way you see the world. Many of you will know that Christianity has been a subject of fascination for me. Christianity isn't just a religion. It's been the bedrock of Western civilization from our legal systems to why we feel slightly guilty about having that extra biscuit. And maybe that's just me.
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No, no, I couldn't agree with you more. The question I was going to ask you is I think you and I both know that the central value of modern society has become this pathological empathy. Yes. Compassion. Every time I hear the word compassion, I want to reach from my revolve.
Well, Christianity gone mad. It's even a niche as parody of Christianity. Right. And if that's the central value, which it seems to me that it is, then every time through when I put those ears on myself and I hear what you're saying through those ears, then what I'm hearing is David wants people to suffer, you know, the widow, the disabled man, the whatever, the child with whatever. And it just I don't see how we're ever going to rebalance that because nobody would want people starving to death.
Nobody. And nor am I talking about that. Of course. What I was talking about was a world in which people recognize that provision for old age, provision for the widow, provision for the sake was something that you engage yourself in consciously to provide for, to the hence of that.
There were saving clubs. Hence the fact you would be there were local hospitals in which there was subscription, you know, all of this sort of thing. No, I'm not saying that we go back to that, that would be that would be preposterous. But what we've done, all the great world of the first popular and large scale popular interventions in politics in the late 18th century.
And if you look at what founding fathers of America, they are profoundly aware of the payoff between freedom and security. Remember, classical framework is, you know, if you trade freedom for security, you lose both. And that's exactly what we are doing because the outcome of where we are now is Argentina. And Argentina has been lucky enough to get melee. We are not all that far from Argentina.
And we now have a government that is fully peronist. The new Labour Party is fully peronist. And we'll bring about exactly the same consequences. Let's talk about that, David. I hate to sell the high-brow conversations that we always have, including this one with the date today of modern politics. But I think I thought we've been talking about a lot of that. Well, I don't think so. I think I've been sunny and gulps much.
No, I feel like we've been soaring somewhat above it and looking down on it from a great height. Doing other things on to it from a great height too. So when you say peronist, most people don't know what that means. And I've heard you talk about the rule of lawyers and Kierstama being one. What do you mean when you say it's peronist? What do you mean by when you talk about the rule of lawyers? And what does that mean for us going forward?
Again, I think the easiest way of describing it by peronism we look at what happened to Argentina. Argentina was as rich as America in the late 19th century of country, a astonishing natural resources which seemed vast British investment, though it was never part of the formal part of the British Empire. And then from the second world war onwards, it embraces this perpetual stateism, particularly under the rule of Peron and indeed a Vita in which the public sector gets bigger and bigger.
There is more and more nationalization. There is more and more welfare. And what you do is you again, it's something we can see going back upstairs, going back into the heavens. You see repeatedly states get structures that are too big for their economists. That's what happens to the Roman Empire from 260 onwards. You develop there, it's the administrative and the military state and so on.
And the tax base can't actually support it, so the state becomes self-consuming. And that's exactly what happened in Argentina. And indeed it happened here in the 1970s. It's been manifestly happening here since the financial crisis. And the only way that the state can actually continue to pay itself without taxing itself to death is by vast inflation and the multiplication of the coinage.
So suddenly, we create vast amounts of money. We call it something fancy, quantitative easy, but it's just as destructive of value, except it wasn't that it went straight into people's pockets, it went into property prices.
Property prices haven't multiplied just because there are not enough houses. They've multiplied because vast sums of money were created by this disgustingly irresponsible thing called the Bank of England. And they find out, let somewhere they find out, let in acid inflation, if not just ordinary inflation. And what we did under Blair again in the 1970s was to create the 1990s.
I'm not talking about, forgive me, I said 70s. We created, that just sorted right, let's go back, we fit this together because we've been doing well with the chronology. And in the 1970s, that just more or less sorted out the result of the problems that had been created by the first welfare state, the first nationalizations, the first excessive power to trade unions of that labor government of 1945 to 51.
And she did so at the risk of reducing conservatism, simple to free market economics, which I think itself is also disastrous. Blair, as it were, deceives everybody, including he deceived Margaret Fattra. Margaret Fattra says in 1992 that Blair is her principal tribute act, that she shows that she's won. But what she didn't realize, what Blair did was deliberately to transform the actual constitution Britain. It is extraordinary thing to say, you create a new kind of British state.
In the same way, you totally distort what had been this Anglo-British identity and evaporated of meaning, you create a new state, you replace the parliamentary legal state, which had run England in one form or another,
since Magna Carta, effectively since Magna Carta, up to the 1990s, you replace it with this new intense, centralized, and extraordinarily profoundly dangerously structured thing that deliberately reduces the role of Parliament and therefore you and me, which is, again, like the German constitution, which was put together in the wake of Nazism,
which was determined to make sure that you couldn't really have democracy doing anything too much. You deliberately reduce the power of Parliament, so we reduce it first by devolution, which produces this completely, crazily, confused structure within the British Isles.
Secondly, you incorporate the European Convention on Human Rights. This is the problem again. We talk about Woke a lot. What the left has done is to capture language. Human rights sound lovely. They're wonderful. Of course they are. But they've changed their meaning. The human rights that Churchill, that Eleanor Roosevelt was interested in, were the human rights of every individual against the state. The original conventions were designed to stop Nazism, to stop communism.
What happened instead is, through the influence of judges and through and above all in the United Nations, the actual influence of Stalinism, you stand them on their head. Because human rights and Lord Bingham actually says this, absolutely explicit in the 1990s, the real purpose of human rights is to protect minorities. Now the moment you do that, you reverse, because the only way you can protect, remember, there's a very simple definition of democracy. It's the rule of the majority.
So you use human rights deliberately to destroy the democratic majority. That's exactly what the Human Rights Act does. It prioritises minorities. So you produce this entire inversion, which of course woke us. Woke sees, you meet all of us one way or another white men, allegedly the ruling majority, as the wicked who've got to be suppressed.
So it's the Magnificat, you know, you should put down the mighty from their seats and exalt them of low degree. But it goes much further than that. If you believe in universal or European human rights, it means you don't actually believe in the state. Because you've got a source of law outside the state, you remove the notion, which was absolutely central to England, that what gives law, people always say, why do the English, as it were dot eyes and cross tees with laws?
Why did we always go plate European, European legal interventions and regulations? Well, the idea is that in England, law was seen as something you made yourself. In other words, parliament binds everybody, because everybody is represented there, continental Europe, everywhere has been an absolute monarchy.
And then the universal human rights do is to say there should be no state frontiers, because if the universal human rights going back to the point of immigration, it must mean we're all the same. It must mean there's a universal human being that you know, this absurd business, if you remember, the young man of Rwandan origins who was born in Wales, who committed those hideous murders in Southport, there were people saying, oh, he's Welsh.
No, you're dropping this notion that the mere fact of being second generation born here, or first generation to be born here, may mean somehow you're as British or as Welsh as English as the rest of it. But if you believe in a universal human being, you death, this is why we have an entire apparatus now that believes fundamentally in the Labour Party really subscribes to this, it's lying at the moment that there shouldn't be frontiers.
There should be, there should be, and this is the logic of what they're doing, there should be a universal citizenship. In other words, what I think we've got to get into our heads is that unlimited immigration is the final expression of globalism. It's the idea that we are all the same and should be the same and nations and identities and values are mere pericule eccentricities which will be swept away in the great sweep of history.
So that was the incorporation of the European Conventional Human Rights. And then of course you had the independence of the Bank of England, although in some ways looked quite a good thing. It's the first of the fact you deliberately create a whole set of bodies which removes as much power from Parliament as possible. So Parliament and Ministers don't set interest rates. They now don't control the budget because the Tories were stupid enough to create the Office of Budget Responsibility.
We don't control this gathering rush to Net Zero because of the Climate Change Committee. There's the Immigration Advisory Committee whose essential remit is say more, more, more, more, more.
The English Nature which prioritises newt's over human beings. All this nonsense with this world of quangocracy which is new labour to a man and especially to a rampant woman. And then the fire, there's a second way of all of this which is responsible for again Lord Bingham, the man who said the purpose of human rights is to protect minorities, the creation of the Supreme Court.
It's a catastrophe because you introduce a natural and inevitable tension and contradiction in our constitution between a sovereign Parliament and a Supreme Court. The two of them are bound to fight each other as happened most obviously with the absurd nonsense of Miller Wana was it, Miller too.
I forget which and the whole matter of the pro-regation of Parliament being ruled illegal, inconceivable directly against the Bill of Rights which tries to separate legislative and jurisdictional matters.
And then finally and most catastrophically the equality act again it sounds lovely but what it does it prioritises minorities. It does something else which I didn't even realise until recently. Are you, you will be familiar with the idea that labour has got an intrinsic value, the Marxist theory, a Marxist labour theory of value.
In other words, the value of labour is not determined by the market but by some sort of intrinsic thing. It's mad, it's economically deranged and it's been known to be so since Adam Smith, one of the great classical passages in the wealth of nations. The equality act is free in saying equations which writes the Marxist theory of value into English law gives judges the right to determine whether women or men are properly paid so that implies a non-market evaluation.
It's the reason that we've driven Birmingham into bankruptcy and we're about to drive next into bankruptcy. I mean the sheer insanity of this stuff, Harriet Harman's great tribute act. So what we've done, we've created a structure of government which manifestly is vastly expensive. Secondly, it does not work. It's why we can't build anything, it's why the costs of construction in this country are between, I think it's five to 50 times the European average.
And it's why nothing works because nothing can be corrected. It's why every time you try to do anything there is a lawsuit, it's why you can't remove immigrants, you can't stop immigrants. So what we've done is to create a deliberately, well he wasn't done deliberately, but we've created an absolutely malfunctioning structure of government which is the quintessence of it is chaos.
Starmer is at the heart of this process, he believes in rules. Do you remember coming back quickly and all these ground statements? Do you remember when the first business of Starmer and Freebies comes up? What is the thing he says, oh I obeyed the rules, he's the kind of man who thinks that the rules replace the innate perception of right and wrong.
And this is the terrible world we've created in which we've replaced those vital things like prudence, judgment, wisdom which are not reducible to simple little rules but to everything that is written down minutely. So we've got to get grateful that terrible disaster there, we have a building, a set of building regulations which is about three times the length of the Bible and yet that still happened.
It's a tax code which again is expanded to lunatic size everywhere you look, which are like golevere, you know, in that golevere in lilypot. We are an extraordinary creative people because we're mad and eccentric and three of us around here are pretty good examples of that. Which is why things happen, that's what's fruitful. All creation depends on heresy, it depends on dissent and what we're doing, we're tying it down, we're dampening it, we're sitting on it with this awful structure.
David, it's been great chatting to you. One thing that Francis mentioned that we ought to talk about as well and we touched on it briefly as economics. And the thing I wanted to ask you there is you talked about sort of magicying up economic activity and the entire Western world, maybe the entire world frankly is in a productivity crisis.
And we don't seem to know how to get out of that. Is it going to just be the invention of new technology? Is it going to be AI or whatever I see a fake picture of Keir Starmler on my Twitter today generated by AI as if to say that's the next thing? Because I agree with you this idea that if we build a railway to nowhere at the end of that railway line suddenly there is a rainbow which takes a form of a productive economy. It doesn't seem to be an accurate.
And I think it was called the foundations report that just come out which says exactly what you said which is basically it's way more difficult or inexpensive to build anything in the UK. We see the tax rates and what's going to happen with them more millionaires are leaving Britain than any other country in the world apart from China apart from China. Well, the Chinese are leaving for a very different reason. So apart from China. So how are we going to get out of this?
Well, finally, people have to realize what the consequences of their actions are. We will go bankrupt. And the whole of this nice structure will collapse. It's very simple that that is what happens. States go bankrupt. In the 1970s we had the resort to the IMF and the humiliation that followed that. I reckon that will happen to us very quickly that the there are iron laws.
And you cannot escape them. And you see again what's interesting is your is the world of Eastern Europe. If you look at the extraordinary rapid economic growth, Poland, Lithuania, whatever, the thing that's striking about it is they were all because of the horror of the experience of Soviet communism. They were inoculated against it. There's no risk of them going back to it. There's a very interesting middle ground here, which is Eastern Germany.
Because Eastern Germany was mullicottled through the transition by Western Germany. There's much more nostalgia for Italy, for the secure almost a bit like miners being in the last year X mining communities being nostalgic for what was both the horror of mining. But of course all the things we were talking about, the sense of community energy involvement,
dignity, dignity, doing something that was worthwhile, of carrying literally the nation on your shoulders because you supplied its fuel. And the fact that you're a vigorous mascunactive, all of those things. And there is that kind of fondness we could can see in the change to the electoral patterns in Eastern Germany in Poland, Lithuania, whatever, Finland, where there was nobody to intervene.
There was nobody to dole you out. You really have to confront the consequences of the, I mean I was in Lithuania shortly after 1989. And you saw a world in which, okay, I was, because I was medius, I was staying in the only shattel hotel between Berlin and Moscow, so inside the hotel, a cup of coffee was about five pounds, outside the hotel it was less than half a penny. And that world in which you actually starting literally from nothing, and you to reconstruct it.
We will go there if we're not careful. You know what, I actually don't disagree with you because, and the reason is, you talk about the iron law. I don't know about iron law. I'm sure you're better qualified than I to talk about it. But what I see is, we won't change direction until we get a slap in the face. That's right. What I said, actions have consequences. At the moment, we've been kicking the term down the rules.
The things like quantitative easing, you magic money. I mean, everybody could pat it themselves on the back. I was absolutely amazing. There was no increase inflation. Well, inside the odd wasn't it. Property prices were going up at this absolutely spectacular rate. And we're terribly good. The bonds were really very terribly good in there. In other words, the lie. The lie that this is not having consequences.
So you constantly kick it down the road. What is R&U wonder transfer of the extractor doing? She's going straight back to Gordon Brown's playbook. So you're going to have PFI. That wonderful thing in which apparently you can borrow vast amounts of money to pay for nice shining U hospitals, a nice shining U Railway nice and even nicer shining U Railway station. And you know what? It doesn't actually appear on the balance sheet.
Because what you've done is you've decided that you will pay for it by rent. And then suddenly you actually see it costs you £100 to change a light bulb when you actually look at the small contract. She's already talking about lifting the borrowing limit, your magic money. So you're constantly putting the day off, but the day will come. And I quite agree with you and it feels that we are in an unsustainable cost.
Why I use the example of Argentina and they're finally confronted it and they elected this extraordinary figure, Milet, who do you know what the change in inflation rates in Argentina is? From 200% to 12 months. And that's by forcing people to confront reality. But you can only do that when things have got to such a terrible price. That's right. Because this is the thing. You can't get people to take drastic action at 15% inflation to get it down to 12.
It has to get really bad. We had one year we had inflation of 25%. And that is what pretty much direct the leads to that. Now of course some of us benefited enormously. I borrowed an enormous amount. Well what seemed then a lot of money? 10,000 pounds to buy my flat. So I was rubbing my hands. Every year that went by and clunched my dead simply simply went into thin air.
I mean inflation is enormously redistributive. But as the hideous case of Germany, Vimar Germany shows it finally is destructive. It's a kind of a failure structure of society, the entire security of property. But we are creating just unsustainable structures. And there are very, very clear examples of this happening before people talk now quite openly of the possible parallels between our civilization and the fall of room.
It's a very interesting work and done on Roman monetary policy and the consequences of imperial army expansion and that kind of thing. Which effectively seemed to pin down the moment at which Rome begins the downward path to 260 when Caracala at a single stroke a bit like blur. When he ratchets up the wages of the NHS, which I would see as the thing that sets us on this irreversible path and indeed as they have done you know with the public sector in the last few weeks.
In 260 Caracala doubles the wages of the Roman army. And at that point it just ceases to be sustainable. And the currency which had been rock solid in which the golden silver values were absolutely fixed in which you didn't need to use money. You could do long distance trade simply by bills of exchange because money was same in the Amazon, it was in Rome, it was rock solid.
And you didn't need to put speci on boats even for long distance trade. That begins to be undercut. You debase the currency, the structures of fiduciary trading, of trading simply by bills of exchange starts to fall to bits. You revert to using gold and silver, you then have arguments over all of that. So that extraordinary structure is quite slowly again Adam Smith puts it very clearly. There's a lot of ruin in the country, a big complex country as wealthy as we were. There's a lot to ruin.
But you can see how that ruin is just penetrating more and more. So when you say when they were said it's broken Britain. Yes it is. But what is guaranteed to do is make it worse. What again what seems to me to be the optimistic note from the South of Australia rather pessimistic discussion is, the stormers government is bound to fail. It is bound to fail. It will fail badly and I think it will fail quickly.
David it's been an absolute pleasure. So we've been miseries. I've been a miseries miseries miserably bloody stormer. But on the other hand I think I actually you know what everyone is slanging off carestomers I have to say the freebies and whatever the obvious level of hypocrisy he was criticizing the Tories for it.
I think he's actually being honest on many issues except that he's got no remedy because he represents the problem with storm is this problem with Rachel Reeves the problem with Bridgitt Phillips and they represent the country. They represent the quintessence of the system. They are the system. But you know what I at least have respect for them and I'll tell you why for them because the Tories were in power for 14 years they didn't repeal any of them.
I mean I'm the one who's been emphasised. So they didn't repeal any of the laws that you're talking about that they only use the equality's act all of it.
They made it worse. They actually legislate net zero and they set up the office of budget responsibility but there is at least one conservative candidate now Robert Jenric who is recognising this fact as actually stated that the great disaster of the Conservative Party was that it went along with those changes and that what they've got to do is reverse them and saying of course remember that's exactly what that should do exactly what Keith did.
They recognised what had gone wrong. They recognised they had been complicit. That whole Butsklight world was totally complicit with what Labour have done and it hit the buffers in the 1970s.
What we've had a Conservative Party was that it was entirely complicit with all the things I've been talking about that made them worse and in the I'm afraid we are in for very unpleasant times that the 20s are going to be a horrible period to be in Britain but we will hit the buffers and with luck we will have exactly we'll have a new factor. She won't, he she will not get it entirely right but they will be forced into radical change.
Well, they certainly will and this is the point I was going to make David is this lot they don't have any of that same problem. I mean day one the the freedom of research or whatever that bill was about free speech and academic gone and on every other they have no problem repealing stuff that they don't know that you're true. So we're going to keep moving in that direction because I think they're going to be pretty bossy about it.
I mean what's got to happen as soon as there is a serious Conservative leader he or she has got to say one thing when you get one of these absurd acts the next Conservative government will repeal this and everybody I mean things with with the absurdities of Milliband on climate change there should be a Conservative leader of the opposition getting up or conservative shadow chance of getting up and saying all those of you who are investing in this you are ripping off the tax.
We will not simply reverse this we will introduce legislation to confiscate all profits that have been made. Now we're finally on to the optimistic part of the conversation David. He's high in the sky dream on stocky dream on. It's always wonderful having you on the show we really appreciate it as I mentioned earlier you are now fellow YouTube your channels doing very very well. You put out lots of great in depth breakdowns of the some of the things that we talk about.
Occasionally smiling online. Yeah. Occasionally. And perhaps we should we should see if we can do something together where you know perhaps you take us around somewhere and we you talk. It will be great. David we're going to move on to our supporters who are going to ask you their questions before we do we always finish with the final question which is of course what's the one thing we're not talking about two hours after we started that we should be. What what are we not talking about?
Oh I hear we pretty much covered everything and we what should we be talking about do you know we've range so widely I'm not right this is a first stock is mine that's gone blank. That's fantastic well head on over to see the questions and the answers that you guys wanted to put to David. Do you think the UK's Jewish and Muslim communities are going to be able to function together can easily or are ties irrevocably broken.