Equality of Belonging | My Interview with David Starkey
I was interviewed by David Starkey, and we discussed the concept of people deserving an equality of belonging to their communities, and why it should be possible for the government to withdraw regard from us.
Subscribe to Dr Starkey here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uMrHztCNmeE
I was interviewed by David Starkey, and we discussed the concept of people deserving an equality of belonging to their communities, and why it should be possible for the government to withdraw regard from us.
Subscribe to Dr Starkey here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uMrHztCNmeE
I can't remember a time where the government has been so weak.
I can't remember when the opposition to the government outside of politics, outside of Westminster Politics, has been so strong.
I can only imagine that there have been conversations in Westminster that have asked the question, how many men do you think Tommy Robinson could raise if he wanted?
Or who's fighting for Keir Starmer?
The answer is nobody.
Hello and welcome to David Starkey Talks.
And today I'm delighted to welcome as my guest Carl Benjamin.
Now Carl, I've got to that awful stage in life where I'm constantly pretending to apologise for being old, but actually boasting about it.
But in podcast terms, you're an antique in comparison with me as a jumped-up boy.
When did you actually start?
Well, I first began my YouTube channel in 2013.
2013?
Yes, I had very little experience.
Sorry, this again is the old person, 13 years.
It's been a long time, and I had no experience in media at all.
What were you doing with that?
I mean, you must have been a child.
Well, no, I was 33.
Okay, okay.
Well, bearing in my perspective, that's still a child, but there we are.
No, no, I was still old.
I worked in tech mostly, and I was trying to develop a video game just because I thought, oh, this would be a fun thing to do, and maybe I can make a career of it.
And then I got sidetracked by politics, because Pericles' dictum, that politics cares about you, whether you don't care about it, came knocking at my door, whether I liked it or not.
And so I had no experience in media at all.
So I had my very old gaming headset mic that I would record videos with a static image just talking about the thing that was bothering me at the time.
And people just kept subscribing.
And by 2017, 2018, I had some half a million subscribers.
And I still was someone who didn't really know what he was doing, actually.
I just made the videos that I thought were important.
And then in 2019, Silicon Valley became remarkably censorious.
2018, 2019.
The platforms that we were operating on were not safe.
I've got in trouble insulting Jess Phillips and got my channel demonetized.
And it became apparent that you needed to be able to have a platform of your own.
So in 2020, I founded lotuseaters.com.
Extraordinary name, why?
Lotus Eaters.
I mean, there's a poem.
What's the reference taken from?
I'm desperately trying to...
Oh, it's the Odyssey.
It's the...
It is actually the Odyssey.
It's from the Island of the Lotus.
Showing the fact that I didn't do classics, I'm afraid, you know, despite the fact that I'm a grammar school boy, but there we are, yes, right.
Yeah, I always found the island of the Lotus Eaters intriguing because they were the only ones who are not hostile to the travellers on the Odyssey.
And everyone wanted to stay.
And philosophical interpretations of it are usually, well, it represents a paradigm shift back to an earlier and more simple time.
That the fruit of the Lotus Flower is actually a change in mindset.
And it means that you don't want to go back to the complexity of the modern world that Odysseus was living through.
And I quite liked that, actually.
I thought that was quite charming.
And also, it's outside of the sort of non-rational consensus of Westminster.
And at the time, it was a very American-dominated podcast scene as well.
You'll notice that the Americans are often in their war room in the podcasts, and they're often fighting for things.
And I'm not making a judgment about that, but I wanted something that felt more aesthetic and relaxed, that we could have really quite deep and serious conversations about that stood outside of philosophical rationalism.
There's a slight smell of mushrooms about it, isn't there?
A little bit, yeah.
That was the intention, was it?
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
Because it was apparent that whatever the solution to our current problems are, they have to go outside of rational liberal individualism.
And we have to be able to think off of the reservation that we're currently trapped on.
And this would get a bit hallucinogenic at some points.
And also, it was just a really unique name that no one doesn't sound like anyone else.
That is true indeed.
So, again, let's just go back and look a little bit more closely.
You're saying that the date, so you were cancelled in 2019.
You were early.
And I think that the peak, I mean, my own experience is 2020.
The peak of madness.
Twitter's Trajectory00:05:58
If I look at my own trajectory when things, as it were, started to go wrong, because I'd had a really very major career in the media, it starts to bite in 2015.
The major shift is, I gather the work of Jonathan Haight, which has looked at the particular role of Twitter and actual button features in Twitter, the like button in particular, which enables that kind of avalanche.
In other words, it's the thing that supplies the equivalent of media compound interest.
And it seems to move in that trajectory from about the foothills in 2014, and it peaks with George Floyd, with Black Lives Matter, and of course, with the world insanity of COVID at the height of 2020.
When you were, as it were, reshaping your platform and everything else in that period, what happened to numbers?
Did you, as it were, fall off a cliff or did they immediately come back fairly quickly?
There's always, whenever you try to move an audience from one platform to another, there's always a drop-off of numbers because people use platforms and they are kind of attached to them because they're habitual.
It's like a newspaper, isn't it?
I mean, the thing has become very neo-newspaper-like, that people have favourites.
You go to the same place on your phone.
Actually, I view it more like 17th-century pamphleteering.
A YouTube video is not terribly different to a 17th-century pamphlet.
And if you look at the length of them as well, the sort of four-page script is the sort of thing that you could quite easily have had thrust into your hand or paid a penny for from the printer or something like this.
The things that drove the American Revolution.
Absolutely.
And the English Revolution.
It's very, very reminiscent, actually, of that kind of time period, which is exciting, frankly.
It's a wonderful new world.
And I think that we are seeing the political realignments that come out of essentially ideas whose time has come after decades of suppression, for good or ill, actually, whether they're right or wrong.
It's how people feel.
And yeah, so you do lose a certain number of viewers just because you move platform.
But with any social media endeavour, basically you have to build your audience over time.
If you have a show that people actually, there is some substance to it and people want to watch.
In other words, you're a characteristic, unique voice.
Correct.
Correct, yeah.
And it's always very interesting because my YouTube channel is called Sargon of a CAD.
And it was just the gaming handle I used on the internet, because I come from the early days of the internet where you never used your real name just because you didn't know who was out there and who could get hold of it.
And so I just used this perpetual handle on every platform I was using, just so I had the password and the login memorized.
If I'd known I was going to become famous, I would have called myself just Carl Benjamin.
But I do.
Have you actually copyrighted your name?
If you think of the Beckham fuss that you may be lining up for your family.
But just going back to this extraordinary trajectory that we've been through, and I, again, it seemed to me, and I'd be interested in your judgment, the turning point in our favour and the thing that is really underpinning the sense now of a world that had been essentially dominated by the Emily Maitlises and other right-minded people.
It turns on a pin's head in 2022, doesn't it?
Once you actually get Elon Musk doing that extraordinary thing, the marching into the headquarters of Twitter in New York with carnage and a white sink.
I mean, I think the fact that it's a piece of white, vulgar piece of white porcelain, that man has got a genuine sense of drama, a bizarre, offbeat, almost it's a kind of, but he is of English background, and it is a very English sense of humour.
There is something of John Cleese or whatever about it, or even the goons about it.
But I think it is a genuine world.
One hesitates using Germanic language, but it's a genuine world historic moment.
I agree.
I agree.
You would agree?
Without a doubt.
People, there is essentially a kind of hierarchy of social media platforms.
And it's about the kind of people who use them and what they use them for.
Twitter is a very narrow social media platform.
Of the tech giants, Twitter has always been by far the smallest, having somewhere between 500 and 600 million users, which is a lot.
But when you consider Facebook has something like 2 billion, YouTube has 2 billion a month, these are just scale.
The scale is just.
Twitter is the elite platform.
That's precisely the point.
And this is why the aristocracy of the new aristocracy of the airway.
Not just the aristocracy.
It's even got its own hierarchy within it, which Elon Musk upended when he said, no, anyone can purchase a verified check mark now.
Because you had the sans-culottes from the gallery shouting down with the unverified types, but then you had the official verified nobility ignoring.
The news agents, the good people, the polite people, those who know they are right and have that wonderful Puritan armour of self-righteousness girded firmly around them.
Extra Institutional Thinker00:08:22
So you were suddenly, as I was indeed, I got going in 2022, beginning obviously from a very small base, but enjoying that new opportunity and the ability in my own case to burst outside of what was in fact a kind of mental prison.
I mean, the intention of cancellation, I mean, the word has got a peculiarly neutral quality about it, but it is designed to have the effect, as my dear student, former student Dan Jones, puts it brilliantly.
It's designed to be an act of attainer.
It's designed to strip you of everything, to make you a non-person.
And it's a brutal thing, but suddenly that prison was the pot that you could break out of that prison thanks to Elon Musk.
Now, you said just now that you felt a good YouTube channel had to have a particular basis, a particular novelty.
What's the basis of yours?
I think the advantage I have, or have always had, aside from any sort of intrinsic properties about myself, is that I am extra institutional.
I've not been within any of these institutions.
And so I'm, I mean, Helen Dale is constantly fascinated with the fact that I'm in the long tradition of English autodidacts, where I've had to learn all this on my own.
Now, are you saying you didn't go to university?
I went to university and did a degree in computer science, which I left after two years because I found it profoundly boring.
You could do it anyway, was that?
Oh, yeah, absolutely.
And then I had a 10-year career just doing tech work, you know, programming, website administration, fixing computers.
These are all practical skills that I developed just because I was working on the thing.
And the only reason that I did computer science at school at university is because I come from a very normal background.
I don't like the term working class when it's referred to the southwest because we're not an industrial heartland.
But, you know, my father's father was a farmer, for example.
Which bit of the southwest?
Somerset and Wiltshire.
About as rural as you can get.
Precisely.
It's not the industrial proletariat.
This is the south of Gaskills North and South.
It's a very, very south, isn't it?
Very much.
We're a family of yeomen, and my father escaped poverty by joining the RF at 16.
And so I moved around as a forces brat.
But that would produce a certain degree, I mean, in the one sense, the instability of the constant moving, but also the stability of the institution of the quasi-I don't know what these things are called in the RF, the quasi-regimental structure and all the rest of it.
And the fact, of course, that your father had a very known place within a hierarchical organisation.
Absolutely.
And this, I think, imbued me with a slightly rebellious quality, because I think he would have been thrilled if I'd joined the RF as well and followed in his footsteps.
But I guess I've always had a rather individualistic temperament.
You really?
No, you spent your entire life railing against liberalism.
And here you are boasting of being a dissenter, a liberal.
I'm not saying I'm a complete bundle of contradiction.
Well, anyway, we're going to need to turn to tease that out.
So you again use that remarkable phrase in that long tradition of the English autodidact.
In other words, the self-taught.
What did you teach yourself with and what were you teaching yourself?
Well, initially, when I did computer science, it was just I had access to machines that I would learn on.
And, you know, you get magazines that teach you how to do things, and so you learn.
And then when it came to philosophy, which is what I began a philosophy degree in 2019.
Were Birkbeck, University of London.
Which, of course, is the classic resort for the autodidact.
It's the place that's designed to enable you to work in the day and study at night.
That's exactly what I've done.
And of course, it had, in terms of philosophy, to give people an idea of its ranking, it was the place that gave Roger Scruton his longest home.
And then I actually did a master's degree in philosophy at the University of Buckingham on the Roger Scruton course.
You were actually taught by him, were you?
No, no, I wasn't taught by him.
This was only last the year before last.
So he'd already passed on.
But it was a course he had founded, and I was very lucky to have, I mean, the people there are just wonderful.
I've handed my thesis in, I'm waiting to defend it, so we'll see how that goes.
But I'm relatively confident I could do it.
And so I'm on the other end of that after exactly, as you say, working during the day and then studying in my evenings.
It's been very long and tiring, but I'm very proud of having accomplished it.
And I think it was very necessary for me to be able to explain myself as well as the political environment that we're in.
Because I think that I wouldn't say that I'm a liberal.
What I would say is that I'm actually a fairly regular Englishman who thinks that he can do these things himself and wants to retire to his shed to tinker.
That's where almost all of the great inventions have come from.
So this is philosophy as the equivalent of making the fourth bridge out of matchsticks, is it?
Yes, basically, yes, but in that great tradition.
But why, again, I'm a bit curious.
And let me explain.
I'm fundamentally hostile to the idea of philosophy.
I think it's what's left over from a much earlier tradition, a much earlier tradition of intellectual universalism.
I even find Scruton's work completely unsatisfactory as a foundation for conservative politics.
Generally speaking, though not always, philosophy begins in what I would call idealistic, and it begins, it's essentially deductive from big overarching principles, which seems to me just to be, dare I say it, you've been boasting about being English.
On the contrary, that is typically French and it's wrong.
And all bad ideas are French.
So why did you contaminate yourself?
Why didn't you?
And if one wants to understand, and we won't go on about this too much, but if one wants to understand the human being, if one wants to understand the world, one doesn't want this spider's web or something worse of abstraction, of words.
You want the thing itself.
You want the experience.
The word for which is called history.
Well, I happen to be a big fan and student of history.
So I do read a lot of history in my own spare time for fun, which is great.
But I think you undersell yourself because this isn't my first experience with you.
I've watched many, many of your lectures and heard them live.
And I know that you're actually a Sterling philosopher because actually I think what philosophy proper is, is describing how things actually are rather than how they should be.
And the problem with French philosophy is often they have the normative approach to say, oh, things should be this way in order to achieve this result.
Whereas actually, I think the job of the philosopher is to really tell people that which they already knew but never properly articulated to themselves, to actually have a piercing insight into themselves and the real world.
So we should all be, as it were, online Socrates, is that the idea?
Well, no, I mean, that is exactly what he thought it has been.
And used, indeed, the method that, dare I say it, I'm doing with you, which is the process of interrogation, otherwise more gently known as questioning.
Anyway, this is all getting deep stuff.
Let's begin to, again, as I suppose would be good philosophical principle, begin to apply it.
So you have carved out a very particular niche, I think, online.
Apologies and Euphemisms00:04:36
And again, I'm going to reveal little things in the background.
When I first started out, the chapu, to whom I an awful lot, who got me going, said, you really must steer clear of Carlt Benjamin.
Oh, really?
He's terribly extreme, you know.
He's just been cancelled.
We don't want that.
What led you into those territories?
I mean, what were you actually cancelled for?
I was cancelled for very meanly insulting Jess Phillips.
And I think that the impetus to doing this was because I was so far outside of the mainstream discourse, I didn't think they would ever notice me, frankly.
And it was a way of trying to provoke them into admitting that we existed.
Because at the time, what I think we can just call sort of dissident right-wing politics was so far outside of the Overton window, as they call it, that we seemed very ignorable, but we had gargantuan audiences.
So this was a cry for attention.
Dare I say a psychologising?
This was a cry for attention.
It was, and I didn't really think of it in those terms, but it was definitely...
Come on, tell me what you did.
Well, I don't want to.
It's very rude.
And I have since gone on GB News and apologised for it.
Okay, all right.
If I'm pushing too far, but I have apologised for it.
And the reason I apologise for it is because when I insulted her, if you remember the political environment in 2019, it was still very English, right?
As in, we all understood we all have a place here, and words will never translate into violence.
And so I didn't feel uncomfortable being very insulting because I knew that she would be offended, but she wouldn't feel threatened.
And obviously, you know, there's no threat behind any insult that I give.
However, in 2024, with the elections, she was overtly harassed by constituents in her constituency who were not English.
And she had her tyres slashed, she had her local branch vandalised, and I could see that she was scared.
And that's frankly, I wanted to apologise because clearly I had been also contributing to the coarsening of the discourse.
And when you have a series of people who understand each other and who have a shared history, maybe that's not such a big deal, especially in the case of England, where our politics are remarkably gentle and has been for a long time.
But when you have a bunch of people whose politics is actually quite clannish and aggressive and does not respect the sanctity of the individual person, things, I mean, we've had MPs murdered, multiple MPs.
At least two.
At least two.
And so Lindsay Hoyle gave a speech in the parliament where you could hear the trembling in his voice.
He was, I just don't want this to happen again.
And it became all very real to me at that point.
And so when Stephen Eggton of GB News said, would you like to talk about it?
I'd like to come and apologise, frankly.
And he was like, well, of course we can do that.
So I did, because I think that actually we have to be considerate of the nature of the political discourse because the world around us is changing in ways that we didn't really see.
At a lightning speed.
At a lightning speed, in ways that we didn't really foresee.
And it's going to get kinetic in the future.
I mean, it already is, actually.
It's going to get far more kinetic than it ever has been.
Now, what on earth does the word kinetic mean?
That's a particular kind of hyper-energy, isn't it?
Yes.
Are you saying, are you using that as a euphemism for violent?
Yes, I thought you were.
I think it's quite important to use the clear Latin rather than the obscure Greek.
I would prefer to use the Anglo-Saxon.
Well, you could do that.
But yeah, no, I appreciate the point.
After having been persecuted by social media platforms, sometimes you can't help but fall back into euphemism to make sure that you can describe what you think is actually happening accurately, but without also drawing the ire of a censor.
Right.
Now, so you're trying to establish, as I suppose I am too, a form of right-wing politics which is non-destructive,
Opponents Speaking to Each Other00:03:14
which draws on that what I think is a central tradition in English political life, that opponents have actually been able to speak to each other.
Yes.
With, in other words, the whole parliamentary tradition, the reason for the rules of Parliament, I mean, the allegation of the fact that it's two swords-length and whatever, I think, is a bit of a myth as we know the dimensions of the Parliament of the House of Commons Chamber set by the fact that it's the old chapel of St. Edward.
That was already determined.
But the rules of debate, the avoidance of personal terms, the avoidance of personal insult, the whole thing being set up genuinely to offer the notion that in every conflict argument analysis, there are at least two sides.
And that there is, by definition, no one side that is right.
And that there is a kind of, again, we invent the rules of games, often very violent games, like boxing and fox hunting and whatever.
I mean, obviously, the poor fox doesn't understand that he's being hunted according to very strict rules, but there we are.
But the most violent of human impulses, and I think within politics and the determination of the direction of a country, clearly deep, deep passions are involved.
But we develop rules that were designed to not simply to contain the, and it's very important, not simply to contain the conflict, as again in the contact sport, like rugby or football, but much more importantly,
rugby, designed to turn the violence actually into a kind of theatre, into a kind of spectacle, but also into something that satisfies profound needs.
And I think that what has happened, of course, and there's a profound irony here, I think what's gone wrong, or what went appallingly wrong with our politics for the last 30 or 30 years or so, was precisely that the possibility of expressing that conflict, the radically different views and perspectives, were suppressed.
And the thing that's so extraordinary, and again, we were talking earlier about the difficulty of getting people to understand things, is precisely the false general agreement that breeds the morass of Mandelson, the pretended notion that there is a single proper view which we all share.
Because of course, that leads to fundamentally to lies, to dishonesty, to completely non-functional use, well, non-functional in terms of reason and argument of words.
Words then just become a bromide.
They become a form of anesthesia, a form of manipulation.
False General Agreement00:14:49
Now, all these are pretty abstract.
Let's get down to the nitty-gritty.
Can I add something to what you're saying?
Because I think you are correct.
What I am looking for is a form of non-ideological right-wing politics.
And I think I'm looking at the problem.
Now, what does that mean?
Right.
So an ideological statement is a statement that begins in the abstract from a set of ideas that can be formulated propositionally.
And because they can be formulated propositionally, they end up rendering themselves categorically and they end up with definite conclusions that are drawn from them.
So one of the most, I think, important things to remember is that categories aren't actually all that useful when talking about people.
Because what they do is they group together things that are otherwise not related.
So for example, I could say, right, okay, everything in this room that is the category of white is in the same class, and that's true, but then the walls and the cups and whatever we have around that's white, things that are otherwise completely unrelated are now lumped together and are told essentially by our conceptual mechanism that these are the same in some way because they share the property of being white.
And we see this kind of categorization all the time.
We call them communities, the gay community, the black community, the Muslim community.
It's like where do these things live?
Because a community describes a group of people who have relations with themselves, that live in a time and a place, and who know each other, who actually have connections to one another.
And so, I mean, there just can't be a gay community in the way that a community actually operates because it could never sustain itself through time.
It would have to be a series of people who move to a certain place to sustain itself.
I think they're called gay cruise ships.
I can imagine it's utter hell on earth.
I mean, having looked at videos of them, I think it will be hell on earth.
But then what do you, right?
Okay, let me play you your own game.
What would you call a nation?
Well, is that a community?
Well, yes, in the proper sense of a community.
I think the term community has been misapplied to categories.
By community, in other words, what you're really saying is it is a polis.
It is simply a proper community.
It's simply a group of people who happen to live together.
Is that correct?
Would that be, again, you were rejecting definitions?
Presumably, that would be your definition.
Whereas what you're saying we do is we take an abstract notion and then claim that this group of people, because they are black, because they are gay, because they are trans, form a sub-political category in themselves.
Correct.
I mean, yes, let's just again...
Well, can I just explain a little bit further?
Because there's a bit more to this.
So what the term community does when we use it in public life is conceals that what we're talking about is essentially a race.
So when they say the gay community, they mean every instance of a gay person that exists, no matter where they are, no matter who they're related to.
And you're exactly correct that a community is a bundle of relations.
So think of the sort of metaphysical connections between individuals who live in a settled area.
So they know their neighbours, they know their families.
They might hate that guy down there who stole apples from their apple tree or something.
But he's part of their community and they know one another and they're predictable to one another.
And of course that is a creation not here again, I'm going to come in as the historian.
It's a creation of history, not of argument.
Correct.
It's a creation of accident, not of calculation.
Unless, again, we're dealing with a new town.
Now, you're completely correct there.
And that's exactly hitting on the point.
This is historically contingent.
It exists not because of any reason, but because it just exists.
Or you could argue that there's a deeper reason.
I mean, we're getting, well, the notion of time itself containing reason.
I mean, the kind of Hayekian without our getting into recherche territory.
But what you're saying essentially, if I've understood you correctly, is that we need to have a view of our politics as essentially formulated by Edmund Burke, that we are part of this given thing,
that we are not a product of a moment in time when as an abstract community we got together and we decided we had certain rights and that we wished to pool these rights and that we drew up a written document called a constitution.
This is really, I mean, what I think is important to understand about this is the standard view of the left as going back to the 18th century, particularly to Tom Paine.
And I think it's a child's view of politics.
There's an element, isn't there?
There's an element of deep childishness about this view that and I think one of profound danger.
But you don't spend all your time talking about this, otherwise you wouldn't have a very large audience.
I actually do spend a lot of time talking about that.
Because I think it genuinely is important, because there are several things that are connected and corollary to these points.
So, for example, in the sort of Aristotelian sense, as you correctly say, what we are dealing with is essentially policies that themselves are political entities and have, and communities themselves have relationships with other communities.
I mean, anyone who knows Liverpool and Manchester will definitely know that Liverpoolians and Mancunians have a relationship with one another.
But nations have relationships too.
We know exactly what to expect from a Frenchman, and a Frenchman knows exactly what to expect from an Englishman.
And so we carry these through life with us, whether we like it or not.
And this became apparent to me because I lived in Germany for eight years.
And I came to the European Union.
Germans really do correspond to the stereotype, don't they?
Unbelievably so.
We are not like them.
They're very nice.
I like them all, but they're just very different to us.
And when we moved back to England, it was very clear that I felt at home here and not there.
But the point is, these things are all forms essentially a kind of substrate into which people belong.
And I think that's what people are actually asking for in life: to feel that they belong somewhere.
You are a nerd in a network that is settled and actually makes sense.
And it doesn't have to necessarily be that it's physically located either.
A lot of people are finding community now online, virtually, where they feel like they belong in a group of people where they discuss things.
But that surely is a category, isn't it?
I mean, that essentially, certainly in the world we are talking about.
It's not hyperreal, yes.
But that community will be chosen on grounds of similarity, of one set of beliefs, one set of interests, or something like that.
But let's go back to, as it were, these apparent abstractions and how they relate to one of the most pressing issues now.
What you're really saying is, of course, that the grand theory of Blairism or the grand theory of globalism or the grand theory of human rights,
that fundamentally there is this generalizable thing called a human being that is broadly similar everywhere, is probably the most misleading description of humanity that you could possibly have and that has led us directly to most of the catastrophes that we're now facing.
That's broadly what you're saying.
Oh, that's precisely what is precisely what you're saying.
And this is the issue with liberalism and liberalism as an ideology.
So any set of ideas could be formulated into an abstract propositional form and then applied anywhere.
And this is why I think the ideas of English liberalism were so destructive in France or in Russia or wherever.
Because they're really just England.
So you were trying to apply English values in France, essentially.
And you had none of the history for you.
You had none of the social institutions.
You had none of the common expectations.
You didn't feel like you belonged in a thing that was being governed by assumed rules.
And this is what Michael Oakeshott makes the point in in Rationalism and Politics.
and it's such a good point that we don't really think about.
When you abstract these things out, he's got a great tone of phrase where he says that the moral lessons in our society are carried in the fluid of our social lives and the way that we interact.
And what ideology does is drain the fluid of the social lives out and expects us to choke down the grit of the moral lessons.
And so it becomes all the more difficult.
And so this is why ideology is actually so dangerous, because you've got a series of propositions that come to definite and unchallengeable conclusions.
And then you can start walling off and cutting off people who otherwise belonged in a perfectly fine community, saying, no, that person is a racist.
Now they're outside of the community.
That person is a sexist.
They're outside the community.
And you see Kier Stalman doing this all the time.
I mean, just yesterday, he gave his speech about unity and declared that Matt Goodwin, the online right and the left, were all outside of unity because they have different ideological opinions about the world than him.
Because they didn't believe in those universal values of tolerance and respect.
What is the other one?
I forget.
It's diversity and tolerance.
Diversity and tolerance, isn't it?
But can we just go back and tease that one out?
Absolutely.
Because I think it's very, very important to spell it out clearly.
What liberalism took to be universal, that's to say, a broad adherence to rules, the ability to treat individuals as equal, as it were, counters on the board, be they rich or poor, be they female or male, is a peculiarly peculiar feature of Anglo-Saxon society.
That it's effectively limited to the five eyes.
It's effectively limited to the old empire, which is America, and the new empire, which is Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and whatever, with a little bit of tendency in that direction in Northern Europe.
Yes.
And that's it.
And it has been the disaster that we thought that that was a universal set of rules.
And do you know who puts it so much more simpler than Oakeshott?
This is understood astonishingly clearly by Disraeli.
Oh, really?
Disraeli.
You bring up Disraeli a lot and I've yet to read him.
You must.
Disraeli is astonishing.
Disraeli, in the essay that he writes as a very, very young man before he becomes at all serious as a politician in the 1830s.
He writes an essay on the English Constitution.
And he shows he understands Burke more profoundly than any of the so-called great thinkers of the 19th century.
But he takes the specific form of the Constitution and he says, America, Latin America, is cursed by the fact it wants to be the United States.
Therefore, you spend all your time trying to apply an American-style constitution to former governor-generalities of the old Spanish Empire, where it is totally, totally foreign.
So you equip yourself with a grandiose constitution, which is derived from a completely different Anglo-Saxon culture.
He says the curse of continental Europe, remember, we're now talking in the 1830s, you're just after the 1830 revolutions, and you're before the 1848 revolutions.
What they were all intended to do was to bring English parliamentary liberal values to the rest of Europe.
And of course, they produced complete chaos because these were all former absolute monarchies.
And he gets it.
That's exactly correct.
And the thing is, viewed through this lens, suddenly all of the ideological revolutions of the Enlightenment actually look kind of the same as in the concept of.
The main problem is the harmonization of the concepts of liberty and equality.
Because equality doesn't mean to an ideological perspective, what it means, you put it brilliantly there, that a piece is on a board, right?
As in, you all belong in this substrate.
You might not be at the same point, but in a way, you've all got the kind of equality of regard.
It's the English sense of equality before the law.
It's not actually equality or the equity of DEI or that kind of thing.
But what I think it really means is, we say, you know, we want equality, we want equality for the law.
But I think what we're really saying is equality of belonging, right?
Equality of respect for our belonging to this group, this tradition, and the entitlements of fair treatment that that comes with.
And that's what I think the average English person is rather egalitarian in that way.
As in, yeah, of course, that fairness.
That's what we mean by fairness.
It's what we mean by what we mean by fairness.
Precisely.
It's exactly what we mean by fairness.
And so this equality of belonging is not something you can export.
It's not something you can ideologize.
It's not something you can write down in a rule book.
I mean, this is the great problem with Starma.
Starmer is the absolute quintessence of the opposite form of mind.
He thinks in terms of rules.
His mind, whereas most of us have, I gather, synapses, which are useful connections that go in all directions.
I think his mind looks like the Labour Party rule book.
You know, it begins with Rule 1, subsection A, big Roman one, small Roman one, you know, superscript A, that kind of mind.
And what is striking about it is, of course, it's a mind that inhibits you from every proper form of human judgment.
It means you've got no moral sense.
You have merely a sense of does this correspond to the rules or not.
And it also eliminates any form of genuine political judgment.
In other words, the practical wisdom.
Is this the right thing to do in the sense that it's likely to turn out well?
Which is why his government is such an absolute all-round disaster.
He's got no moral sense and he's got no political sense.
And we saw the perfect example of this after the Axel Rude Cabana murders and the Southport riots.
Now, a sensible and sensitive response to that would, of course, been to say, look, it is not acceptable to just target a community after an atrocity.
They were behaving rather as you'd behave, weren't they, when you were being a naughty boy.
Sunak's Claimed Britishness00:15:58
Absolutely.
Yeah, but that's the point.
Show some empathy to me.
They are suffering, they feel dispossessed, and they feel unheard.
And they're behaving badly.
And they're behaving badly because they don't think that you represent them.
They don't think that you're on their side.
They think that essentially they're acting like they're under occupation.
And what did Kierstarmer do?
He said, right, this will not happen.
24-hour courts, and I'm sending 30 million to protect these mosques.
What was that?
That was the worst political manoeuvre.
And that was the end of Starmer's good graces with the public.
And that happened, what is a month into that?
And of course, as we now know, that involved his mate, Lord Hermer, of course, immediately intervening in the legal process in a fashion that was denied.
Yes.
And what Starmer's saying there is, I don't accept that you belong to my moral community.
I don't think he's got any.
You see, I would like to repeat what I just said now.
I don't think Starmer has got any real sense of a moral community.
Because, no, genuinely, let me, what Starmer's view of being British, did you remember there's some sort of Indian extraction Labour MP who has written a piece saying Matt Goodwin isn't British?
I did.
Jan Veer, someone?
Something or another.
Now, what's fascinating about it is here is a man, presumably first, second generation in this second generation Indian in this country.
Somebody whom you and I would put a certain question mark over his Britishness.
I would actually acknowledge his Britishness, but I would absolutely deny his Englishness, correct?
And that would be the position that I would take.
But what he is saying is being British is simply a matter of subscription to three or four identifiable beliefs that can be listed in exactly the same way as the Labour rule book.
And in Starmer's case, it is you are committee.
And indeed, this man, whatever he's called, beginning with a J, and they are those two key things of tolerance and diversity.
Diversity is our greatest strength.
We have to display tolerance to everybody apart from Carl Benjamin, David Starkey, Matt Goodwin, and Uncle Tom Commission.
The list gets longer and longer and longer.
But you see, that is their definition.
And it is literally turning the notion into a form of exclusive club.
Correct.
But also, look at the kind of patently preposterous position we've arrived in.
Because I agree with you.
Being British is a civic identity.
There's no ethnic group that is the British.
There's no British nation.
No, there's no British nation.
And a lot of what is lent on when people think of a British nation is the English nation, because we're the most populous nation of the United Kingdom.
So you're exactly correct.
He's not English, obviously, and any kind of genetic testing or ancestral investigation will find him to be, I think, a Sikh man.
But that doesn't mean that he can't join our community.
It doesn't mean he can't have relations in our community.
That doesn't mean he can't settle.
Now, we're talking about this MP, are we?
I think so.
It doesn't mean he can't join the English community.
But isn't he showing the profound...
I mean, can we just begin with a prima facie point?
Somebody who thinks that he can define Britishness by subscription to two or three rules is so infinitely remote from the English mindset that I would immediately, if I did have this man here, I would immediately say, you know, I'm terribly sorry, but to use a term, terminology derived from your politics, not my politics, you need re-education.
In other words, he hasn't the faintest idea of the country that he's claiming to represent.
Exactly, and it exactly comes from Starmer's ideological rules-based mindset.
Because notice how he somehow excluded Matt Goodwin from the community of Britishness on a series of propositional rules.
You subscribe to our four British values or you are not British.
And I'm going to punish you.
And I'm going to punish you.
I'm trying to kick you out of politics, in fact.
And I'm going to deny you as far as I can freedom of speech.
Exactly.
And all of the problems that come with being marginalised.
But a normal perspective would see Matt Goodwin as belonging to Britain and England because of his ancestry and because of his upbringing in England.
So for me and for us, Matt Goodwin has that kind of equality of belonging that is pre-rational.
It's just habitual.
It's the way that we live our lives and we judge it based on the characteristics that we carry with us from our upbringing through life.
This is why Rishi Sunak can seem so English, because he was born in Southampton and raised there and then parachuted into Richmond.
And he went to Winchester.
Exactly.
And he went to Oxford.
Exactly.
So he carries the characteristics of having been raised in the English community.
He might obviously genetically not be English, but that didn't make him objectionable because we're not evil people.
We recognise the kind of equality of belonging with Rishi because he was born and raised here.
And actually, this other guy who's trying to expel Matt Goodwin from the British community is also kind of the same.
He's got a very British English accent.
He's acting like a Pratt in public, which is a very English property.
And so people would understand that he could claim an equality of belonging if he were just to use that kind of language and say, well, look, don't I consider, don't I deserve consideration here too?
And Matt Goodwin would say, well, of course you do, even if you're not English.
Because I mean, I think that the problem has come down to a question of demographic security.
Obviously, in every previous age, England was 99.9% English.
There would always be a handful of foreigners, but it would be the most minor amount.
And even in the early 1990s, was 92% white English, and white British overall.
So I mean higher.
Possibly higher, yeah.
I mean, the I mean, the, I remember, I mean, again, let's just talk about the importance of historical fact.
I did not see a black until I went to Cambridge.
The first time I saw a black man was when I shared lodgings with one, and he was Ghanaian, and if I dare say so, he was simply an English public schoolboy dipped in chocolate.
He was of a Ghanaian princely background, with all the arrogance of that combined with all the arrogance of a minor English public school.
And I loathed him.
But I loathed him on grounds of what was inside, not what was actually outside.
You recognized his equality of belonging, that's not.
I'm not sure I did.
I mean, I thought that there was an alienness which I found uncomfortable.
I mean, I'm wondering about whether, though, you are really coming up with descriptors that are useful in the particular situation we find ourselves.
Let me explain how I would deal with this, starting from a narrowly, or you could say broadly, historical perspective.
Let's begin with the proposition that there is no such thing as a British nation.
I mean, the key thing to understand is that Britain is not and never has been a nation-state.
We are a pre-modern state.
We are created effectively in our modern form in 1707 with the Union of England and Scotland, two kingdoms of extremely different histories, although they shared common languages, common religions, and so on, but with quite significantly different mindsets.
And what you did in 1707 was only very, very half-heartedly try to introduce the concept of Briton or Britishness.
You play with it a tiny little bit.
You sometimes, in much public discourse from 1707 to about 1900, Scotland will be referred to as North Britain.
I remember my one of the things that drives it home to me when I was a schoolboy, I was an actor and a very good one, dare I say, as is evident now, I hope.
But one of my parts was John Worthington in the importance of being earnest.
And John Worthington, of course, like every Edwardian gentleman, has got three addresses.
He's got one in the home counties.
He's got one in London in Belgrave Square, but as Lady Bracknell points out, the wrong side of Belgrave Square.
And he's got one in Scotland, and his Scottish address is the Sporum, Feifscher, North Britain, you know, and North Britain.
And there was a hotel in Edinburgh until very recently called the North British Hotel.
But What the Georgian and the 19th century even more did was, and right up to the First World War, you cultivated the subordinate separate nationalities in cultural terms.
Because what Scotland preserved after Union, although the monarchy was already united with the English monarchy through the House of Stuart, Union gave them a union of parliaments.
But otherwise, Scotland keeps all the elements of separate nationhood.
And then you start to accord like a separate legal system, like separate orders of chivalry, like a separate court, like I mean royal court, like a separate educational system, astonishingly so.
And you start to treat Ireland and Wales in the same fashion.
So royal title, titles of royal princes will be given an English title, a Scottish title, a Welsh title, and then eventually, once you've got to Lloyd George and the Lloyd George's invention of Wales, a Welsh title.
Again, you create, even in Wales, this notion that which had never been a country.
You create Cardiff as a capital under the Edwardians and so on.
The first.
So we're a unity in difference.
But there is one, there's the matter of primacy, that Scotland, Wales, Ireland were essentially cultural nationalisms.
Hence, the horrors, in my view, the horrors of Scotland.
Last night was Burns Night.
That was on the 29th of January.
Have you ever had a Burns?
It is the most ghastly.
It is the food of a very, very poor country.
Sheep's guts, wet turnips, and potatoes, completely disgusting.
I'm a Wessex man, I can't be further from that.
I love Scotland, but never.
Never mind, but there is that deliberate playing up of a national music, national dress, national poet, and whatever.
But what happened was all of the other nations were subordinate to an English political and value-based norm.
And the English, on the other hand, tended to play down manifestations of culture, like the fact there isn't English national dress, there isn't English national music.
Yes, there's Shakespeare, but there isn't the equivalent of a Burns or the Welsh druidical tradition.
You see, I think we drew the wrong lesson from that.
That fact that there was this multitude of different nations, I mean, shown most dramatically when you get the beginnings of organized sport, the first internationals in football between England and Scotland.
I think we drew the notion that we were, as it were, implicitly multicultural.
And it's flowed very easily into that idea.
You see, I think we weren't multicultural.
I think we were bicultural.
There was a single dominant, this thing that you were talking about, the world that gave us that notion of fairness, that notion that despite all our differences, before the law and in the presence of the state, we were equal, and so on.
That was a kind of using a too complicated word, but it covers since reified Englishness, an overarching Englishness.
And I wonder, you see, whether our way forward is, and I think we should just discuss this a little bit and then perhaps end, adopting this idea rather than multiculturalism.
We need to talk about biculturalism.
Because if we go to Richie Sunak, Sunak is clearly also in anywhere, that category of David Goodhart.
He's somebody who can be as at home in California, New York, or anywhere where you make huge, huge amounts of money.
As opposed to, I think, what you characterize yourself of as an emphatic somewhere, a Somerset or whatever lad, a Wiltshire lad.
Well, the thing is, I wasn't born and raised there, but my family was from there.
No, no, but you've gone back.
And you are very, very clearly, I think, presenting yourself as rooted and making sure your children are.
And that seems to me the point.
But equally, Sunak remains an observant Hindu, but within an overarching tradition of civility, education, manners, accent, style of dress, which is recognizably English.
But I think the way we should deal with Sunak, as I said, is this category of bicultural.
So the whole debate you'll remember between Fraser Nelson and Constantine Kissing, is he English or isn't he? Is simply silly.
Yes.
It's simply silly.
But the way I'm handling it, I think, is much less abstract than the way that you've been doing, and that it's historically based.
And I think that, dare I say it, people find that much easier to understand.
That if you know, if you can really do what I've just done now, you talk about the process by which we're put together as a country, you talk about specific places, you talk about the extraordinary fact that Wales has actually got an invented capital that was a tolling port.
It had no existence in the historic Wales.
I think people find, in other words, I suppose, I'm deliberately taking the conversation right back.
And it seems to me that better than abstraction is the thing, is the thinginess.
No, no, I'm completely with you.
Yes, because I appreciate that what I'm saying sounds abstract, but I think that actually it's more concrete than people really realize.
Because when you have this kind of sense of belonging, it's a felt experience that you have with someone else.
As in, if Richie Senak and I were on holiday in Belgium or something, and we met in a bar, I could sit and have a conversation with him and we would recognize the sameness of our upbringings, right?
The fact that we both were in the same country, same language, all that sort of thing.
Despite the fact that his actual technical genetic origins are India or whatever it is, that's not what I'm talking about.
Citizenship and Collective Claims00:12:44
What I mean is essentially the problem with liberalism Is it only interpolates individuals?
It only recognizes the really individuals.
And whenever it does characterize a group, you'll notice it's always in an inferior position.
It's like, oh, minority communities.
Oh, the gay community, the trans community, the excluded communities.
And therefore, we need special rules because they're not really individuals like us liberals.
And that's, I think, the incorrect way of actually viewing the world.
What that conceals, that's a conceit that conceals that actually they are still speaking from a group perspective.
And actually, I think just being honest about the fact that the world is governed by groups that contain individuals who have this kind of equality of belonging within the group is more honest and it allows us to actually talk about the relations, the appropriate relations between groups without being exclusionary.
Because people can join groups that are not categorized.
So, for example, if we would say, I mean, and they have this horrible habit of doing it, saying, you're talking about the white British, aren't you?
It's like, well, I'm talking about the English.
Now, the English is not necessarily a racially pure category or anything like that.
You know, I'm talking about, you know, my auntie who married a Greek man and then had half Greek, half English children, who are therefore, I mean, I've just made that up, I don't have an auntie who married a Greek man, but you know what I mean, for the sake of argument.
Like, I'm talking about the people who are the lived relationships of a particular local community and the way that that community deserves regard and respect and is political in itself and deserves to be taken seriously on those grounds.
I'm not saying that people can't join or leave this community either.
They absolutely can.
It's not intrinsically exclusionary, like a category.
Whereas you can't just become white or how would this translate itself?
Again, let me be vulgarly practical.
How would all this translate itself into law?
Because we're clearly dealing with a moment of immense dispute as to what is meant by citizenship.
Who actually belongs?
I mean, you've been talking about belonging.
How we are going, aren't we, to have to decide legally how people belong.
We're going to have to decide whether an absolutely arbitrary notion now that if you fulfill certain categories, or in other words, we effectively have a concept of citizenship, which is the exact opposite of what you talk about.
It is a purely Star-Maresque concept of citizenship.
I kind of hate the term citizen, actually.
I kind of hate the term citizen.
You want to become a subject again.
Yes, why not?
Because a subject has a relationship with the king.
The king has obligations to me as a subject.
I can say, Your Majesty, you owe me something and I owe you something, which is why I call you Your Majesty.
Suddenly, we're not in the abstract world of ideology.
We're in the personal realm of relationships.
And that's where morality really exists.
Morality is, it's always been the sort of Germanic conception of the world, that morality exists in the tribe itself, in the bundle of relations.
And how I deal with you strengthens or weakens the morality.
Okay, you're wandering off again.
I gave you a challenge.
How do we, because we are going to have to do it, how would we translate those ideas into realistically enforceable law?
Now, I haven't got a ready answer for this because it's one of those questions whose time is coming but has not yet come.
But we have in living memory examples of the sort of what I think are probably, I don't want to say inevitable, but it's hard to see how it can be properly avoided at this point, where it's you have a very messy and in many cases unfair process of people stipulating you're British get out of India, you're French get out of Morocco, you're Greek get out of Turkey,
your Turkish get out of Greek, and there are just mass population transfers.
your German, get out of Poland.
This has happened within...
This normally is a result of war.
Yes.
And I'm not an advocate for war, of course.
But all the cases that you've mentioned are the result of war.
Unfortunately, well, maybe the decolonization of India less so, but there was a war.
But there certainly would have, almost certainly would have been.
I mean, most forms of decolonization do involve a measure of violence.
And of course, the whole terrible issue at the time of India and Pakistan, the infinite, huge violence of partition, but again, the separation out within empires, so-called notions.
But hoping we're not going to do that.
I agree.
I genuinely hope that doesn't happen, obviously.
But then, don't you, forgive me, need then, and those of you, and remember, I am essentially on your side.
Don't we then, let me use a collective rather than a kind of accusatory, don't we need urgently to be looking at what has been characteristic of Britain with our avoidance of violence, a legal solution and thinking about this.
And I wonder, and I'll just throw this in as a kind of essay towards, as you said, something that isn't yet formulated.
Isn't the issue of time, again being a historian, isn't the issue of time important?
We have come up with notions of citizenship which are extraordinarily quick.
That you can go from being an immigrant to a citizen with apparently full rights in five years less.
I mean, with the sign of a pen.
The sign of a pen.
Interestingly enough, if you go back to one of the great traditions of philosophical thought, that's to say medieval scholasticism, if you go back to Aquinas, Aquinas writes very interestingly on this.
He talks of citizenship as this, and he talks very much in terms of your belonging.
And he introduces the element of time.
It can only happen after three generations.
And you see, I wonder if this isn't really the clue.
If you think, if you go back, if you look at earlier generations of immigrants into Britain, be they the Ashkenazi Jews arriving at the end of the 19th century, some of the Sephardic Jews arriving from the middle of the 17th century to the earlier 19th century, the French Huguenot in the 17th century, they all seemed very, very exotic when they arrived.
But three or four generations later, even if they preserve, especially if they preserve their own religious customs and everything else, there's even a still a French Protestant church in London.
There was until recently a French hospital.
It's actually in Upper St. Martin's Lane and is now rather a nice hotel.
But they become us.
So you have General de la Billière is the most English of gentlemen that you're going to be a great military figure, despite the extraordinary exoticism of the name.
But time, time has done that work.
And we again, because of this rule-based world, have tried to compress time with disastrous consequences.
And this is one of the main problems of ideology itself.
It is eternal.
It exists in no time and no place.
It doesn't have a beginning or an end.
As Althaza's brilliant formulation, ideology has no beginning.
It's true.
It's true everywhere or it's true nowhere, is the problem.
And I just want to return to the the point I made at the beginning.
I think the the proper philosopher's job is to describe what is, not what ought to be.
That's for people to discuss amongst themselves as they like.
And so, when I say I'm worried that a time is approaching when stipulated communities will just be told in no uncertain terms, whether it's lawful or not, that's not me advocating for anything.
That's just me being honest with what I can see happening and extrapolating the natural logical consequences of that.
And I think you're absolutely right.
It is the relationships that build up between communities over time that make them have this equality of belonging.
And these are predicated on goodwill between the communities.
The problem is, we actually have communities that have demonstrated overt bad will to the English host community.
And I think one of the primary things to we have to essentially understand that the world around us is grounded on is that ethnic groups have collective claims to land.
England belongs to the English, Israel belongs to the Israelis, Palestine belongs to the Palestinians, Scotland belongs to the Scottish, and therefore, whatever follows from that is following on that premise.
And again, I'm not saying this is how I want things to be.
I think this is just how things are, which is why we saw the flagging campaign so virally spread across the.
I mean, it was everywhere, absolutely everywhere.
You see the English flag, and it was the English flag that really struck, because like no, this is our land and we live here.
And you live here because, like a dog marking its territory like a dog and and this is how the communities of belonging where it's you know this community or that community you already stipulate that you are different communities, and so when we point the finger at you and say you have to go, you all know who you are when you're going.
I'm not, like I said, i'm not saying I want this or anything like that, but I think a time is approaching where something like that might happen, and I I think though I do think that you are absolutely right our innate political gentleness will probably mitigate the worst of any excesses.
If that were to happen and I, like I said, i'm not advocating for anything, I think i'm just describing what I think will come or may come to pass, and I think that if we don't think about these things, they'll creep up on us when we're least prepared, because I can't remember a time where the government has been so weak.
I can't remember when the opposition to the government outside of politics, outside of Westminster politics, has been so strong, and I can only imagine that there have been conversations in Westminster that have asked the question, how many men do you think Tommy Robinson could raise if he wanted, and how many men do you think the parliament could raise if they wanted?
I think they've come to these calculations, said, well, who's fighting for Kiostarma?
The answer is, nobody.
Now obviously, like I said, I don't want anything like that to happen, but i'm sure that they're aware.
There's another calculation, isn't there?
How many people armed with baseball bats could significant sections of Muslim England raise?
They showed us this during the Southport riots, where you saw them.
Get the Muslim community out in the streets with baseball bats and please put their weapons, or indeed the marches through London.
And so we are arriving at a point where conflicts of interests, of claims to the country, are being made, and a lot of bad blood has been built up between these two.
This is a Muslim area.
And that, I'm afraid, isn't England, is it?
No.
That's Northern Ireland.
That is exactly what Belfast looks like.
the old parts of Belfast that were fought over between Protestants and Catholics.
I mean, I was there last year, and the thing that struck me was a new multiplication of flags.
So clearly, in the old Protestant areas, everywhere there is the Union Jack.
In the Irish Republican areas, the Irish tricoleur.
Now, there's a new flag, or rather, there's two new flags.
There is the Israel flag in the Protestant areas, and there's the Palestinian flag, or various forms of the black flag of Islam, black and white flag of Islam in Republican areas.
And that Northern Irelandization is a fate too horrible to contemplate.
I've enjoyed this discussion immensely.
I think it's one to be continued.
I think events are moving at such a speed that if we reassembled in three or four months, we would actually have different, as it were, observable facts in front of us.