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March 19, 2020 - The Delingpod - James Delingpole
01:21:18
Delingpod 61: Peter Hitchens
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Hello, special friend.
Before we start this week's amazing podcast, and I'm not going to tell you who it is, but all I will say is, here's a clue.
It rhymes with Rita Mitchins.
Yep, guess the name if you can.
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It's designed to find out what is the best way to monetize the podcast.
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And those of you who haven't, I'd really appreciate it if you have a go.
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That's all, really?
Oh, no, no, no!
God, there's another exciting thing.
Did you know that special friend badges have special properties?
Apparently, they are the best-known prophylactic against the coronavirus.
And if you've got the coronavirus, like I have, I mean, I've got rid of it now...
It will enable you to survive it.
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I am living proof of this.
I've had the coronavirus.
I have my own collection of special friend badges and I can tell you they made me much, much better.
Thank you.
That is all.
enjoy the podcast welcome to the Deli Pod with me James Deli Pod And I know I always say I'm excited about this week's special guest, but I really am.
It's...
Look!
Behold!
It's Peter Hitchens!
Yes, you say that to all the girls.
I do say that to all the girls, but I do actually...
You have no idea how many listeners have demanded Peter Higgins...
25?
Yeah, probably.
25?
Not a bad guess.
That's pretty good.
25,000 would be better.
And I just want to start, Peter, by professing...
I know you get this all the time, but I want to profess my love for you because you know and I know, but the listener doesn't know, the viewer doesn't know yet, that we've already tried recording this podcast once.
Yes, we have.
And I cocked up.
I'm not Mr. Technic.
I'm sure this is what was meant to happen.
Is it?
Yeah.
The proper theological view is that it was what was meant to happen.
But I've been through this...
You know the story about the evangelical priest?
Tell me.
Who falls downstairs?
No.
And it's quite painful, and he picks himself up and says, well, I'm glad that's over.
*laughter* Yeah.
It's all meant.
It was meant to fail.
It was meant to be.
It was meant to fail.
The world was not meant to share that particular encounter.
See if we can do a better job.
I think we should...
We were in a hurry, too.
We were in a hurry.
It's never good.
I think we should start where we ended.
You have made an awful lot of bicycling.
No, no, I'm grateful to you.
It's a nice spring day for you.
I've generated the fitness that will help defend you from the coronavirus.
Yeah, that'll be it.
I've saved your life.
I think we should start where we ended last time because actually it's an important subject and it is one of your greatest scoops.
Tell me about Syria.
Well, Syria is an extraordinary thing.
I got involved in Syria long ago, around about 2013, I think, when a British woman married to a Syrian living in Latakia contacted me and said that she was a great listener to and watcher of BBC World.
She said, what's being transmitted is just wrong.
It's not what's happening.
And what's more, the place is filling up with jihadis.
With thick beards and accents from elsewhere in the Middle East from where we are.
And there is something quite serious going on.
It alerted me and I checked her out with her friends in Britain and this was completely genuine.
And from then on I began to wonder what on earth was going on.
My only engagement with Syria up until then had been as a very, very fierce critic in my column and elsewhere of the Assad regime.
Particularly going back to the massacre of the Muslim Brotherhood in Hama and the asylum which Syria had given to the appalling Nazi mass murderer Alice Brunner.
Who sheltered in Damascus, I think, until the end of his days.
So the idea that I was some sort of sympathizer of the Syrian regime is ridiculous.
And I have a much more consistent record of opposition to the Syrian regime than the British government, which invited Bashar Assad to London to meet the Queen in, I think, 2002.
And the Blair creature went out to visit him on a sycophantic visit, I think, shortly before then.
So, absolutely not.
And so it was nothing to do with that.
But I thought I was sick to the teeth of the attempts by the British and French, and to some extent, lesser extent of the American governments, to engage in regime change and wars of choice in the Middle East.
And this seemed to me to be an extremely unwise reaction.
They were really hot for that.
They were extremely hot for it, and it was incomprehensible, because the people that we were supporting, the supposed moderate rebels who we were supporting, It didn't really exist.
The rebellion against Assad in Syria, it was an absolute devil's choice between the Assad regime with its torture chambers and repression, and the jihadists who were people who, if we found them in Birmingham, we would arrest.
And we were ludicrously supporting in Syria people who we would arrest if they came to Britain.
And there it was, an absurd policy.
It drove me to the belief that British foreign policy has been sold to Saudi Arabia.
I can't think of any other explanation for it.
But this went on and on.
And then the issue of chemical weapons came up.
And I began to be interested in this because I had been quite interested in CW when I was a defense correspondent long before.
And when the Russians had dismantled their...
They'd shown off their great chemical weapons establishment at a place called Shikani.
And they'd begun to dismantle theirs.
And so I knew a bit about it.
And then the episodes which increasingly took place...
It caught my attention, and I began to get the impression when I read the reports of this outfit called the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, OPCW, that there was something slightly iffy about them, that they weren't all they seemed to be, and particularly this seemed to be the case when there was an alleged attack in a suburb of Damascus called Douma.
Many people will remember this in April 2018 because the scenes which were shown on television of dead children afterwards caught the world's pity and made a number of people very angry and anxious that something should be done.
And the thing about it was that when the eventual report on that episode came out, it seemed to me to be equivocal without meaning to be, that there was a sort of signal, if you read the text carefully, that things weren't precisely as they were being presented.
And it was as a result of this that I was ultimately contacted through intermediaries by sources within the OPCW who said, you're right, there is something going on here.
And the more I looked into it, the more it became clear that something extremely serious was going on.
Basically, this very, very reputable, very necessary organization, which I'm very much in support of, by the way, had actually suppressed, apparently for political reasons, information its own inspectors had gathered.
So as to give an impression that there had been an event which had quite possibly not taken place.
You can't say for certain, by the way, that it hasn't happened.
That kind of certainty is not available.
What you can say is that the evidence that was collected threw very considerable doubts on whether it had been as had been portrayed.
So it was a false flag?
Well, I'm absolutely not saying that, no, because to say that would be to enter into exactly the same place that those who insist that there was a chemical attack have entered into.
I absolutely do not say there was a false flag.
I refuse to get involved in any speculation of that kind.
What I say is that the evidence gathered by qualified, scientifically qualified, experienced, among the most experienced that have ever existed, inspectors At the scene does not actually substantiate the claim that chemical weapons were used by the Assad regime on that occasion.
But the thing is that the American, British and French governments all launched missile attacks on Syria very shortly afterwards without waiting for any verdict.
And as they're all three members of the United Nations Security Council, and as waging aggressive war is the absolute no-no, the whole reason for the setting up of the United Nations, they're in a very awkward position.
Because they launched what is actually aggressive war against a sovereign country without a proper justification, if this is so.
So you can see how sensitive it is.
It is as big as weapons of mass destruction.
In the world of international diplomacy, it's quite clear that the American, French and British governments really don't want to know the things that I've found out.
Right.
And have you come under pressure?
No, not that you would recognise.
No one has tried to run me over with a Pantechnican while I've been riding my bike along or anything like that.
No, but social media have definitely been used to smear me.
People, usually anonymous or pseudonymous people, claim I am.
Well, I'm not.
A war crimes denier is one of the most insulting things, they say.
Or a supporter or apologist for the Assad regime, which I think I've just demonstrated fairly convincingly I'm not.
And these lies have been told about me.
But that's to be expected.
Any serious journalism will make you enemies.
It's what it's for.
It wouldn't be any good if it didn't.
But what's much more disturbing is the silence of so many...
Other journalists and indeed people in politics about what seems to me to be an important issue.
After all, if you can have an agency of the United Nations which is allowed to get away with what appears to have happened on this occasion, and the evidence I have accumulated is very strong that something has gone wrong.
If it gets away, then how can we trust the verdicts of these organizations?
And if, at some point or other, in what seems to me to be a growing conflict in the Middle East between Iran and Saudi Arabia, In which Syria is, of course, an Iranian client.
If Syria is successfully accused of using chemical weapons at some future point and the OPCW confirms it, that could be a trigger for general war.
It's that serious.
We could have a general war in the Middle East on the basis of a verdict from this organisation.
So isn't it vital that if that organisation needs reform, that reform is done now?
Otherwise we might be faced with going to war, as I say, WMD all over again.
Any responsible person who cares about the future Who's interested in good governance and honesty should be writing about this.
And yet, with the exception of Robert Fisk, I don't think anybody else in the British press has touched it.
And it's much the same in the United States where the Spectator's US edition has allowed me to speak about it.
And Tucker Carlson of Fox News has been very credible about it.
But apart from that, virtually nobody apart from La Repubblica in Rome, in terms of mainstream press, have even ventured to cover it.
Shocking to me.
So it reminds me quite a lot of one of the issues I really keep banging on about, because I think it's really important, and you write about this as well, which is climate change and the way it's become this kind of...
It dominates economic and social policy.
Yeah, I see the parallel.
Principally, what's interesting to me is that in this, I am very much on the side of hard science.
Yeah.
And I'm not a scientist.
I don't claim to be a scientist, but I think I could recognize it when I see it.
And what hard science is, and I'm very much a Karl Popper person on this, hard science is about real experimentation.
The best test of any kind of scientific proposition is obviously its ability to predict.
But otherwise, experiment which can be repeated, testable, falsifiable propositions.
Which anybody can examine and which at some point or other could be overthrown by future research.
That's real science.
An awful lot of stuff now passes for science which is politicized and which doesn't pass the Popper tests.
And I'm even told by people that Popper is now discredited and outdated and that his philosophy of science is no longer...
To be taken seriously.
This is fascinating to me.
We're moving, oddly enough, at a time when we know more scientifically than we ever have had, when science has probably got more resources devoted to it than ever before.
We're moving into an almost post-scientific age where ideology is taking over again.
I've mentioned this on another podcast.
Are you familiar with the concept of post-normal science?
I have to say that I'm not.
Just as literature and the arts went through a post-modernist phase, so, unfortunately, science, which you would think would be inimical to that kind of worldview...
Well, you would, yes.
Because, after all, it's about...
What was it?
Darwin, I think, said that a scientist needs a heart of ice.
It's just about what is.
You cannot have illusions.
Even if the work that you're looking at, which turns out to be false, is the work of your great friend, and even if you strongly dislike the results which are coming up from your experimentation, you have to.
If you were a proper scientist, you have to stick by what the experiment shows.
Exactly.
I would have thought there isn't any other possible approach.
It's not even science, is it?
To paraphrase, to misquote Ben Shapiro, science doesn't care about your feelings.
No.
And yet we seem to be...
I've had this too, by the way.
I've invoked Popper thinking that, well, that's the end of the argument.
Yeah, quite.
Yeah.
But it isn't anymore.
Now I've been challenged.
The idea that science now, post-normal science was invented by a guy called Jerry Ravetz, who wrote an influential essay on it.
And it essentially is the science that we see in the climate change debate, which is that it is driven not by the evidence, but on what is desirable, a desirable outcome.
Well, before we know where we are, the sun will be going around the earth again, though, won't it?
Well, exactly.
Why do we fight for all these things?
To throw them away in the early 21st century.
The point about Galileo is not the wickedness of the Pope, that he was wicked.
The point about Galileo is that truth was subjected to dogma.
Yeah.
So, I... So who's Galileo now, and who's the other guy?
It seems to me to be worth asking.
One of my...
One of the things I'm often saying, because it just...
I'm shocked and horrified that this should have happened.
When I was a young man, I really thought that the establishment was, you know, motivated, well-motivated, trying to do the right thing, that scientists did actual science, that policy would be based on evidence and so on.
And yet here I am in 2020...
And I find that the lunatics have taken over the asylum.
What happened?
I think something did happen because I think it was to some extent true in post-war Britain, as I remember it up to certainly the middle 60s, that the country was generally in the hands of an elite which was more or less rational and more or less concerned with the good of the country, the immediate measurable good of the country as its prime purpose and government was pretty sensitively based on that.
I think that the arrival of a new dogma of idealistic reform and also I have to say the combination of that with what appears to me to be the destruction of old-fashioned rigorous education Have left us in a very different state.
I wrote an elegy for Didcot A power station the other week, a coal-fired power station, which I remember being built in the 1960s near Oxford, where I've lived for most of my life.
And it's now been destroyed.
It wasn't just shut down, but it was actually blown up, so there's no possibility of reopening it.
Even though it was in good working order, it could continue to produce power because it burns coal.
And that is now dramatically unacceptable.
And a very carefully devised energy policy existed in those times.
And also we had at that stage...
An extremely advanced and rather successful nuclear power sector, which was a very considerable concentration of knowledge, skill and experience, which had been cast to the winds, I have to say, by the Thatcher State.
Which, for its own dogmatic anti-nationalization reasons, destroyed our capacity to build our own nuclear power stations.
So now when we want to build new ones, we can't.
We have to hire the Chinese to do something which we used to be able to do ourselves.
The ludicrous things which have happened because of various dogmatic swings and swerves and zigs and zags.
It was said of the British Communist Party's policy on the nuclear bomb that it zigged when it should have zagged and zagged when it should have zigged.
And I think that's pretty much the description of most of the things that British government's been doing really since the 1960s.
And I do very much link that to the destruction of rigorous education, which I witnessed.
I was one of the last people to be educated in secondary school, up to O-level, as it then was, according to fairly stern standards which previously existed, and they vanished.
I watched them vanish.
It's so bad that people sometimes mistake me for an intellectual, and this is how ludicrous it is, how bad our education system is now.
But who is doing this stuff?
I mean, is it some kind of massive conspiracy?
It was never...
I tried...
When I wrote my first book, The Abolition of Britain, back in the late 1990s, beginning of the Blair era, I thought that maybe this thing could be traced to some sort of deliberate attempt to overthrow everything.
But I've abandoned that now.
Single causes are never there.
What it is mostly...
And almost all of our problems are mostly, is that they follow the collapse of the previous set of beliefs.
They follow the collapse of Christianity, they follow the collapse of old-fashioned, normal English-British patriotism.
And those having gone, all kinds of other ideas have rushed into the vacuum left.
Where they used to be.
It's almost just like a garden.
For many years someone can cultivate the garden and it's an orderly thing of beauty.
And the moment that person goes away and dies and ceases to do it, it's amazing how quickly weeds of all kinds flourish in what were previously beautifully cultivated parts of the garden.
And that I think is very much what's happened.
The decline or the takeover, if you like, of our institutions has been really extraordinary.
I mean, from academe to the police.
Yes, but then again, this is all part of the...
Once Christianity has gone, and it was very powerful, it's everything.
Christianity is in our music, it's in what we read, it's in what we...
It's in our architecture.
The chimes of Big Ben are based upon the air I know that my Redeemer liveth from the Messiah.
The whole, everything in this country is tuned to Christianity, except that the Christianity which informed it is now gone.
So these buildings, customs, traditions, laws, rules, education concepts, they're all without their foundation now.
And people look under these circumstances.
They're bereft.
They knew that there was something there which they valued, which they can no longer believe in.
They look for something else to believe in.
And what they chose to believe in was egalitarianism above all, internationalism particularly.
Even though they're often intended to be benevolent, they have often malevolent effects.
The thing that's always puzzled me about this, because I decided when I wrote my book, the people I was hoping to influence were not fellow conservatives, because there were hardly any.
The people I was hoping to influence were the left.
I thought, you must look at this and see, take something like comprehensive education, even by your own standards.
This is a failure.
The education of the poor, which you are obviously concerned about and would wish to see improved, has deteriorated thanks to what is theoretically an egalitarian project.
You should be more worried.
And over and over again, I've turned to the left and said, these things which you have done have not had the intended consequences.
Why don't you go back and re-examine them?
And they never will.
Because it's faith that's keeping them going.
You can see that the left...
They believe that they're good.
And therefore they cannot understand that anything they do is wrong or damaging.
We saw during Brexit, I think, that the left, the parties of the left, have abandoned the working classes who largely voted for Brexit.
Well, I don't know about abandoned.
They still need their votes.
But the problem with...
The Labour Party as it was, say up until really the era of Harold Wilson, and this is the crucial moment of change.
The Labour Party as it was, was very much a Christian Methodist party, and it was strongly in favour of better conditions for the poor, of stronger trade unions, of better workplace freedoms for the workers, and fewer therefore freedoms for employers and businesses.
It had many, many How shall I put it?
Opinions which are perfectly reasonable if they're being advanced on behalf of the poor.
It was also, for instance, it was quite puritan.
It was very much, it would have been shocked by the current attack on, for instance, the married family, and appalled by the attitude of modern left-wingers towards drink and drugs.
Have you ever read a wonderful book by a Labour MP called Wilfred Feinberg called No Love for Johnny?
Published in the 1950s, Fienberg died in a car accident.
He was a very clever man.
He would have gone far.
But it's partly autobiographical, and one of the most powerful scenes is the young Labour MP, newly elected, takes his first drink.
He's been brought up in the Band of Hope in a northern town, and temperance has been part of his life.
And this stretches right up to the edge of Suez.
This is what people thought and believed, and it was very much part of Labour.
Puritan, pro-family, patriotic.
I'm mainly concerned with the amelioration of the conditions of the honest poor and contemptuous of those who seek to live on nothing without working.
There's no very strong belief in a distinction between the deserving and the undeserving poor.
All that went.
But the voting base remained and the voting bases of course become more and more separated from the party and indeed the people who grew up in the age of old labour are departing from us in very large numbers and being replaced by people who were brought up in homes where labour voting was natural.
But it's not so deeply rooted.
And I think that actually what's probably happened, especially since the referendum, is that almost everybody has become detached from his or her tribal voting habit.
And unpredictable voting is more likely, like by-election voting as it used to be, is much more likely.
In future than it ever was in the past.
And I would have thought that the current supposed success of the Conservative Party is very vulnerable because all these new opinions are quite shallowly based.
Well, yeah.
I was going to come on to that because one of the reasons I was so eager to get you on the podcast again was because since we last did a podcast, Boris Johnson has come into power with a stonking majority.
And I think lots of us who voted Conservative, I know you're going to be the exception.
I don't know which way you vote.
I haven't voted for so long, I can't remember.
Why would I do that?
Well, I think you're going to tell me.
But lots of us who did vote conservative thought that Boris Johnson and his administration represented a change of direction from the sclerosis and spinelessness of Theresa May and David Cameron.
That finally we were going to get, with the help of Dominic Cummings, they were going to dismantle the deep state, the civil service.
The deep state.
Sorry, I love that phrase.
It is, but it exists.
It's a Turkish expression.
Is it?
Yeah.
What's the Turkish for deep state?
I don't know, because I don't speak Turkish, but it is the expression that they used to use before the Erdogan takeover, before what was fundamentally run by the army and the old Atatürk.
Right.
Supporters, which we are all now beginning to miss.
Now we see what an Islamist Turkey looks like.
I quite like the old...
Well, I was writing a warning about Erdogan years and years and years ago because it seemed to me that his rise was a much more important thing for Western Europe than whatever was going on in Russia, for instance.
Erdogan is a much more menacing threat to stability and a lot of other things, and indeed to the freedom of his own country, than Putin.
He jails many more journalists than Putin has ever done, for instance.
That was a fantastic...
Sorry for the diversion, but it's just the Turkish issue is another of those things where I have been right.
And it hasn't done me any good.
You should write a book saying, I was right about everything.
Well, all my books have that as their subtitle anyway.
I don't think I need to...
Boris Johnson or Al.
Yeah, that's what his family call him.
Yeah.
Why do we have a prime minister with a stage name?
So, obviously I was naive, you're going to tell me, in expecting that Dominic Cummings, that combination of...
I thought the combination of Dominic Cummings and the ERG, Jacob Rees-Mogg, and so on, would keep Boris on the straight and narrow.
And instead, we've got this...
Look at what we've got so far.
We've got Huawei.
So essentially giving our 5G network open to the Chinese, who are not unaverse to spying on whoever they can spy on.
We've got HS2. A grand projet which has got no useful purpose.
It's going to destroy some of the loveliest parts of England in order to get people from Birmingham to London in, what, 10 minutes, 15 minutes quicker.
Why would you want to do that?
Why would you want to do that?
You've got the worst, in my view, this crazy, scientifically unjustified net zero policy, which I read today is not supported by the conservative grassroots.
So what's going on?
Tell me.
Well, what is going on is that the supposedly educated political, media, legal, et cetera, elite of this country has been taken over by people who are in the grip of a series of dogmas.
And these dogmas are the ones which they follow.
Really, since the New Labour victory in 1997, no government which has followed that has been able to shake free of them.
And because there is no No counter-argument.
No, there has never been a conservative attempt in this country to offer a complete critique, for instance, of New Labour, or in my view, any proper conservative attempt to understand it.
There was never previous to that a conservative attempt to understand the success of the Harold Wilson, Roy Jenkins governments of 64 to 70 in changing the country almost irreversibly in many very important ways.
Certainly no attempt to put back the clock from that either.
It's really because what people have relied upon is party badges and tribal loyalty for some sort of reversal, restitution, criticism of the ideology which has dominated our country in the 1960s.
They haven't got it.
All they've got is sentiment.
A certain type of person who seems more acceptable to them, but no thought.
There's been a complete absence of conservative thought in this country.
Yes.
What all conservatism has been about since, really, the 1960s has been about finding perhaps more convenient, gentler ways, less expensive ways of implementing what are effectively Labour or left-wing policies.
Yes.
No challenge to the fundamental...
No justification for those policies, no challenge particularly to egalitarianism.
So, for instance, John Major was openly an egalitarian.
In fact, I think Margaret Thatcher operated as one as well.
And certainly no Tory leader or significant figure in conservatism since then has actually challenged egalitarianism as a valid policy.
Other things go with this as well.
The great developments of the Equality and Diversity agenda, everything which went into the Equality Act of 2010, which was vigorously supported by Theresa May while Harriet Harman was putting it through Parliament, and I think it went through more or less with them hand in hand on it on most issues.
The adoption of quite a lot of European Union directives on the same sort of thing.
Nobody ever went back and said, not just, we don't like the look of this, let's moderate it, delay it, or make its implementation less irks of.
Nobody said, is what we're doing right?
To me, the central area of obvious folly in this is that it was obvious within about three or four years of the introduction of comprehensive education, the principal central egalitarian project of modern politics, that it was disastrous.
Schools which had previously been able to cope with certain examinations no longer could do so.
And the reason why the O-level was first of all watered down and then abolished and replaced with GCSE was because the schools could no longer cope with it.
It's a clear, objective, scientifically measurable, if you like, piece of evidence that a reform in educational terms has been disastrous.
But has the Conservative Party at any stage ever offered any kind of intellectual opposition?
To comprehensive education.
It's saved a very small number of grammar schools which can no longer operate as grammar schools because the whole education and examination system and the university system which grammar schools used to support has vanished.
So they're just peculiarly good state schools besieged by ambitious parents as you would expect.
But no attempt to say actually selection liability was good.
We should have defended it and we should reinstate it.
Now, interestingly, when the German Democratic Republic, East Germany, collapsed in 1989, the GDR had been fully comprehensive.
There had been secret elite schools, such as the Karl von Osiecki in Berlin, which was elite for the communist elite.
But for most people, it was Gesamtschüler comprehensive schools.
Immediately, the communist regime fell.
The public, the East German public, finally allowed to have opinions again, petitioned their local governments for the reinstatement of grammar schools.
And it was done.
I've been to one of them in Wismar on the Baltic, and very successfully, wonderfully moving to be in the English class and to see the children of dockers and doctors in the same class.
And speaking very good English, I might say, as well.
And it worked.
So it is possible to put this particular clock back.
And in Germany, of course, there was a really strong reason.
Germany, in many ways, the last conservative country in Europe, and not in all ways, but in so important ways, in social terms.
And they did it.
So they proved that it could be done.
But the thing was, people weren't hostile enough to the implementation of the egalitarian dogma, because it wasn't done on the barrels of Soviet tanks.
It was done by a cultural and moral and thought revolution.
Much of it, I have to say, stimulated by Hugh Carlton Green's 1960s BBC, which was a huge part of the revolution.
The BBC, yes.
Well, tell me about Hugh Carlton Green.
Well, Hugh Carlton Green was a clever, witty, brave man, a former foreign correspondent, but a man of very strong...
Left liberal opinions.
And when he became Director General, he transformed the BBC. Previously, the ideas of Bloomsbury, whether they were the sexual ideas or the political ideas, had formerly been...
That existed in Bloomsbury and maybe in Fitzrovia as well.
But once the BBC embraced them, it wasn't just the Hogarth Press turning out a few beautifully printed volumes.
It was the national broadcaster actually pursuing very, very radical ideas.
Generally, most effectively in the form of drama.
Everybody now remembers, Cathy Come Home and Up The Junction, these very powerful politicized dramas which helped to revolutionize the country's attitudes towards such things as abortion and single motherhood and all the rest of them.
These were then reflected in a whole series of very major reforms, now forgotten by the Labour government of 64 to 70.
And the combination of those two transformed the country and nobody It was never done.
There was no development of a proper conservative argument.
How should I put it?
Thought process.
There was no conservative critique.
There's no basis now for a long march through the institutions by convinced conservatives.
No.
Because there aren't any.
There are a few, a tiny isolated number of increasingly eccentric and isolated young people who are stuck with the fact that they know the truth and are surrounded by a sea of lies which everybody else believes.
But they have no impact or effect because there are enough of them.
Yeah.
Like you, I'm not an intellectual.
I'm reasonably educated and intelligent, but it seems to me fairly obvious.
I could come up with a line of argument which would explain what I think the job of the Conservative Party was, why I think that the police, for example, their job should be stopping crime, among other things, and generally kind of...
Keeping an eye on, you know, broken windows policy maybe, stopping things getting worse.
The armed forces, their job is to defence of the realm, killing the nation's enemies if need be.
But all these, every institution you could name, Oxford and Cambridge or the rest of the universities, they've all...
Given up on their obvious purpose, their only purpose indeed, and adopted this new code.
Given that you and I can make this case fairly easily and we're not the cleverest people in the world, why aren't other people doing it?
It took quite a while.
To make itself felt.
It happened slowly, stealthily, and in small increments.
Of course, the best way to revolutionize a country is by small increments.
And this is the great slogan of Matthias Rakosi, the hideous Hungarian communist leader.
He called it salami slicing.
The idea being that you sliced away at the liberties and the wealth and the freedom of civil society in tiny, thin slices, none of which was big enough to provoke organised opposition.
But at the end of the process of slicing, there wasn't any salami left.
It had all been sliced away, but each slice was so thin that it didn't create a coherent or effective opposition.
This is the real skill of revolution.
Is to do your revolution in such small stages that by the time it's happened it's too late.
You know the story of the Chinese executioner.
Tell me.
This is an old Claude Coburn story.
There's a very famous Chinese executioner famed throughout Imperial China for the brilliance of his skill.
And he's brought in quite often because people like to watch him exercise his skill.
And he comes to this small Chinese town.
They've saved up a lot of money, a lot of cash, to pay for him to execute this particularly horrible criminal.
And he comes in to the room and everyone is sitting around looking.
And the executioner is a slight, not very impressive man, but he has a very beautiful sword.
And he takes it from its scabbard and he waves its back.
Very artistically for some time.
And the condemned man is sitting there, bound to the chair, and eventually says, I'm getting a bit tired of this.
This is all rather boring.
What's so special about you?
And the executioner says, kindly nod, please.
I don't get it.
You don't get it?
Come on, hold on.
He's already had his...
Oh, I see!
Yeah!
Well, that's roughly what's happened to...
It took everybody else's long to see that.
Oh, no.
You kindly nod, please.
You've been revolutionised, but you didn't even notice it was so skilfully done.
Right.
Yeah.
But even so, look, I do feel in a very lonely place right now.
I mean, I'm not as...
Well, you are in one.
I'm red-pilled, you're black-pilled.
I mean, you are the creature of despair.
No, no, absolutely.
Do I look as if I'm in despair?
No.
Do I sound as if I'm in despair?
I think you're happy in your despair.
I don't cultivate my garden.
That's what I do.
Yeah, you do that, and you've got your religion.
I'll tell you one other thing about this, which I think is important for people to understand.
Yeah.
And I do it slightly bleakly.
I could be wrong.
It could be that the old Arthur Hugh Clough say not the struggle nor availeth, the labour and the wounds of vain, the enemy faints not nor faileth, and as things have been, things remain.
If hopes were dupes, fears may be liars, it may be in yon smoke concealed, your comrades chase in now the flyers, and but for you, possess the field.
In other words, why are you running away when you've won?
Well, it may be that I am running away when I've won.
Though it seems more likely to me that I have in fact lost and I should be running even faster.
But if I am wrong, then what have I lost?
And the other thing is, if by alerting people to just how bad things are, I create enough opposition, then that would have been a good thing.
And the other thing is, shouting, follow me, comrades, to your doom against overwhelming forces, is not a war cry which generally gets a lot of people behind you.
No.
And the other thing is this, you doubt have read those great philosophical works, Alice Through the Looking Glass and Alice in Wonderland.
So you'll remember the Red Queen and particularly the scenes Through the Looking Glass where you have to do all the running you can do to stay in the same place.
And also if you want to get to the garden you walk towards the kitchen.
I'm very influenced by that.
They're very clever books.
They're much cleverer than you realise when you're a child.
You should re-read them as adults.
They extraordinarily remember.
Remember what the Dormer said, feed your head.
Remember Lewis Carroll was a mathematician and therefore a man very much in tune with the truth.
Yeah, he was at Christchurch.
He was.
Yeah, okay.
A terrible trouble with the Dean as well.
So, it goes back...
To the French Revolution you mentioned to me before this.
I think the French Revolution is the key pivotal point.
The great pity is that it's not the English and Scottish Glorious Revolution of 1688, which would be a much better turning point where autocracy was...
Consigned to history and the first really law-governed government of a constitutional monarchy was created.
But the French Revolution was the one which was influential and which has influenced, I suppose, the minds of any discontented idealist ever since.
And it was a catastrophe.
But fortunately for all of us, it was put a stop to by Napoleon Bonaparte.
Right.
So he's a hero.
Oh, very much to that extent, yes.
Bonaparte was in many ways an important conservative from the French point of view.
And I think a lot of the French are still very grateful to him for putting a stop to the excesses.
But they did not go away.
And what was very interesting, it seemed to me, was that when in 1989 the barriers came down, What the revolutionaries of Europe particularly wanted to bring back was not a repeat of the Bolshevik coup d'etat of 1917, which most of them sensibly regard as having been a grisly failure.
What they wanted to do was to return to 1789.
That is the sort of revolution they wanted.
That's why it has so little to do with economics and so much to do with culture and morals.
Because economics is a war you can't win, whereas you can...
Economics is subject to those other powers.
You can make it subject to yourself.
It's actually...
Although, of course, everything is materially based, a material base can be much more hugely altered by a cultural revolution than it can be by an economic revolution.
Just tell me briefly what happened, the strain of thinking that became dominant briefly during the French Revolution that we're experiencing now.
It was a belief that the world could be begun over again and that man could be altered.
The fundamental conflict, the reason why revolutionaries are always atheists, this is not the same as saying atheists are always revolutionaries, but revolutionaries are always atheists because the fundamental Christian position is that man is made in the image of God and is therefore not alterable.
The belief of the revolutionary is that man can be changed, that you can create a new man, that you can alter human nature, and that's what they sought to do.
A huge part of the French Revolution was the discussion about what would replace Christianity, whether it be the worship of reason or whether it would just be atheism or whatever it might be.
And a huge part of it, now forgotten, was Fouché's de-Christianization project, the deliberate desecration, smashing up of churches, the bringing of prostitutes into churches and the placing of them on altars.
An absolute furious effort to break the link in the mind of the French people between Christianity and goodness.
Forgotten but a vastly important part of the revolution.
These things were, it was a very profound, as frightening in many ways as Pol Pot, a very profound break with the entire past of the human race.
And now it's been, I think, threatened again.
People really do want to change humanity into something else.
I do sometimes wonder, I don't want to get involved in discussion with this because I find it very uncomfortable as a subject because of the potential to upset distressed people.
But I do think that the debate about transsexualism gives you an instance of just how deeply the cultural, social and moral revolution can affect humanity.
Yeah.
Well, just going back to the police, which you've written about...
It's a good jump from transsexuals to people.
We might as well make it.
It's all part of the same problem.
It is, it is, it is.
If you think from first principles and you think, why do we have a police?
Well, that's a very interesting point because when Robert Peel first began to try to agitate for a police force in this country, Parliament wouldn't have it.
For them, the police was something which they had in repressive continental countries.
It was an engine of repression.
It was a danger to liberty.
It put in the hand of government the sort of power that it would otherwise have had from a standing army, which has never been legal in this country.
Our great good fortune was that our military strength was contained in a navy rather than an army, and therefore that repressive power wasn't there.
People were terrified that a police, if created, would be the state's private army.
And so Peel came up with this brilliant scheme of creating what was effectively a people's police, that is to say the police would patrol preventively, unarmed, in unimpressive, unshowy uniforms, with They would have no particular powers beyond the fact that they represented the law and they were sworn to uphold it.
And they would patrol the places where the poor lived as much as the rich and they would be the defending army of the poor as much as of the rich.
And it was brilliant.
It was brilliant because it worked.
It worked for 140 years undisturbed.
Until in the 1960s, partly under pressure of economics, the cost of maintaining a police force in a country where the cities were getting bigger and bigger was greater.
The cost of employing police officers in a country where you could get quite good unskilled industrial jobs, remember in the days of mass production there were a lot of those about the car industry, so wages were too low to achieve retention.
An attempt was made to make the police force less manpower intensive.
And it was, as far as I can tell, completely unideological.
It was simply – there may also have been some lobbying for private security to take over some of the duties of the police.
I don't know.
It would be interesting to look that up.
But the fact is that there was this campaign to get rid of the old preventive foot patrol, 24-hour beat by individual coppers, replace them with cars and with radios and the telephone and all the modern technology, which is especially so good.
And at the same time, there was a sort of semi-nationalization.
Police forces were much more local.
They were nearly as local as American forces until 1967.
And Roy Jenkins merged.
Almost all of them, much bigger forces, all of which were much more under the control of the Home Office, much less under the control of their own local authorities.
So this nationalisation took place.
And then, he actually, by accident, created the continental-style national police force, which began to develop political opinions and political positions, and because it was no longer It
wasn't deliberate.
It was an accident.
But it is an accident which has had enormous repercussions.
Most people don't understand it to this day.
Every time I hear it, A conservative politician say, we must have more bobbies on the beat.
I know I'm dealing with an idiot.
First of all, it has been impossible to describe a British police officer as a bobby for, I think, at least 40 years.
And there hasn't been a beat since about 1970 for them to be on.
You just can tell, as soon as they say that, this guy doesn't know what he's talking about.
You mentioned the concerns that they had at the time of Robert Peel about police forces being associated with repressive states.
That's what they were.
Yeah.
I get that.
Here's what puzzles me about the modern police.
They don't even seem to be acting on behalf of the state.
The government, I think, I mean Priti Patel, I think, would rather like...
She's quite old-fashioned.
She's probably quite close to being like us.
You really think so?
Yeah, I do actually.
I see no evidence apart from some table thumping.
I think her heart's in the right place.
I think she would like a more effective police force.
But it seems to me that the police are acting...
Then if she did, she would know that increasing numbers would have no effect.
You're confusing me now with your...
I have this terrible disadvantage I know about this.
No, no, no.
I'm not trying to contradict you.
I'm just trying to get you to elaborate on this clever point I was about to make, which is that the...
The political philosophy, according to which the police now seem to be operating, to do with egalitarianism, to do with painting your fingernails in solidarity with transgender people, walking in high heels, painting your police BMWs in the rainbow flag, policing people for Twitter but not solving burglaries.
This seems to me to be an ideology which is separate from the state.
It seems to me...
No, no, it is the ideology of the state.
The rainbow flag is the flag of equality and diversity.
Right.
And equality and diversity since the Equality Act of 2010 has been the guiding force, the ideology, the belief system, if you like, of the state.
So conservatives are really no different from Labour.
Tony Blair's Labour is really...
Well, there were people in New Labour, particularly those who had been student Marxists, or indeed Marxists after they were students, who understood what they were doing and who had an intention.
The difference between New Labour and the Conservatives is that some people in New Labour understood what it was that they were setting out to do.
Conservatives pursue all the same stuff without having the faintest clue as to what it means.
You know the old Maynard Keynes joke that whenever he came across a politician or a businessman who said he had no ideology, that person would invariably be the slave of some defunct economist.
People haven't heard of the people who influenced them in many cases.
They don't know the origins of the ideas which govern what they say, but everybody has them.
But the difference between New Labour and the Cameron Conservative Party Is that, with the possible exception of Oliver Letwin, who may have some clue, almost nobody in the Conservative Party has any idea of the origins of the ideas they now pursue and govern with.
That was my jaw just hitting the floor.
You're speaking in praise of Oliver Letwin?
Praise?
I mean, he's obviously an intelligent person and he reads books.
Oh, I see.
One of the reasons why he...
He doesn't make much progress.
I didn't say he was a conservative.
I'm just saying...
Right.
Oh, I see.
You mean he's another Blairite term.
I have opponents, not enemies.
I'm quite prepared to see good qualities in people I disagree with.
Yeah.
I do it all the time.
They don't tend to do me the same favour.
No, no.
But it doesn't matter.
I still stick to it.
It still seems to me to be the greatest joy of my life was discovering you could disagree with someone and still be their friend.
But what...
Why are the Conservatives not Conservative?
Well, why should they be?
Because they're called the Conservatives?
There's never been...
What engine would there have been to encourage them to be Conservative?
They've been able to regain office, which is their main reason for existing, without developing any kind of countering...
That is extraordinary.
...system of thought.
It's not extraordinary, because in a two-party system, there will be, to some extent, a pendulum.
And it's a bad metaphor, because the pendulum doesn't always swing, but what has to happen?
And what particularly had to happen after 1997 was that before the Conservatives could be allowed to enter office again, they had to undergo a purge.
And if you read my book, The Cameron Delusion, you'll find the details of the amazing occasion.
I think in Wellingborough, I was following Blair around in the...
Which was it?
Was it 2001, the next election after 1997?
I can't remember.
The foot and mouth election.
But I was following...
And he made the speech in Wellingborough in which he pretty much said...
The Conservative Party has to do various things.
He was dictating to the Conservative Party what its policies would have to be in the future, and it would never again be allowed to govern on the policies it had had before.
And Steve Richards recounted in a book of his how he'd been with new Labour people at the time, and he'd say, you don't get it.
What this election is about, it's a referendum on conservatism.
The whole idea, the forces of conservative speech that Blair made before, the whole idea that was going on at the time was not just that they were governing Britain according to what they had decided to do, but the Conservative Party had to be belaboured and clubbed and kicked into agreeing to what New Labour believed in.
And that was what the Cameron Revolution was about.
The Hague wasn't acceptable.
Michael Howard wasn't acceptable.
Cameron did.
Cameron finally subjected the Tory party to Blairist thinking.
The modernisation.
And he said he was the heir to Blair.
No, he did.
He tried to deny it, but he definitely said it.
And he and George Osborne would refer to Blair as the master.
They admired him, and they still do.
And there was a very curious meeting, which again I mention in my book, The Cameron Delusion.
In which Cameron met the heads of the BBC, and I've tried various attempts.
Freedom of information, as you know, doesn't really apply to the BBC, to find out what happened at that meeting, and I could not find out what had happened.
But my guess was that he explained to them that he had now signed up.
To Blairism.
And after that, the coverage of the Conservative Party and the BBC pretty much reversed itself.
Oh my God.
So that meeting...
I would love to have been a fly on a wall at that meeting.
So would I. But there was an extraordinary transfer.
The BBC from about 1995 onwards was completely and utterly shamelessly...
It was anti-Tory.
Goodness.
It continued that through the next couple of elections.
By the time the 2010 election came around, it was resigned to the fact that there had to be a change of government and that the Tories should win it because they had transformed themselves.
Even on the night of the 2010 election, you could see that the BBC were poised for a triumphal ride into government by David Cameron.
They overestimated his ability to win.
And in the end, he had to stay in his taxpayer-financed house in Dean because Gordon Brown wouldn't leave because Cameron had got a majority, which is a thing everybody forgets.
Everybody thinks Cameron won the 2010 election.
He did not win the 2010 election, and therefore there could be no triumphal Blair-style right.
The BBC would have covered it with a helicopter if they hadn't.
They became sycophantic towards him.
That is so depressing.
But it's so true.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
No, I... It's not depressing.
You're black-pilling me, Peter.
It's dispiriting.
It's particularly dispiriting if you thought the Conservative Party was any use.
But this keeps coming back to the same thing.
Nobody ever developed.
Nobody ever developed a serious counter.
Yeah, but why?
You say they didn't need to.
Surely there are some basics we need to get back.
Freedom of speech.
Freedom of speech, it can't be...
One of the problems with it is that you can't just declare that you will have freedom of speech.
It will exist in conditions where it can exist, in conditions where it will be very often under attack.
The First Amendment's all very well, but there are many occasions in the history of the United States where freedom of speech has been heavily circumscribed, particularly during the First World War and immediately afterwards.
The actions of Woodrow Wilson against Eugene Debs, for instance, are shocking to read about now.
So it's not by any means as clear-cut as one likes to hope.
You need to create a society in which people will value freedom of speech, and that has to be a better educated society.
And therefore I say the reconstruction of a serious, rigorous education system is probably the best guarantee of people willing to defend the freedom of speech in practice.
So you can't just say we will bring back freedom of speech, you can't pass an act saying there will be freedom of speech, it won't create it.
You have to create conditions in which it will flourish.
And in a lot of counter-revolutionary actions, We have to think of what is the action which will have the effect which you want to have rather than having a list of let us restore honest patriotism, let us bring Christianity back to the people.
These things are just airy, illusory, idealistic things.
You have to think of ways in which to do it.
One of the things that I would do, of course, is to restore as much as possible private life by ending It's amazing to me.
That we have a divorce law.
I could go on for hours about the divorce law and its absurdities.
But it's amazing that it doesn't in any real way distinguish between couples who have children and couples who don't.
It's no more difficult to destroy a marriage where there are children than where there aren't any.
It seems to me to be the most basic provision you could have.
Once you've actually started having children, it should be much harder to divorce.
But that was always one of the aims, wasn't it, of the Marxists and the cultural Marxists to destroy the family unit?
Well, certainly, Engels didn't much like marriage.
He regarded it as an adjunct, marriage, private property in the state, of patriarchy.
And then, of course, now third wave feminism takes a very similar view.
How coincidental that is and whether it comes from the same root, I've never really got to the bottom of it.
There are a lot of enemies of marriage and therefore of private life.
And it's bound to be a powerful state, particularly a powerful reforming state, which has very strong ideas for how people should live, will inevitably come into conflict with the family and will use its power to weaken the family.
Unless the family has powerful friends, which the church used to be.
Yes, the church.
No.
Because the church isn't the friend of the family.
No.
It abandoned that trench a long time ago.
Well, there is not a single institution, is there?
I mean, even the military now has been suborned by...
Well, of course.
This is partly because the war on patriarchy, the feminist ideological belief that in total equality between men and women has to be demonstrated in high prestige, high profile occupations.
Which is why there is and has been for many years a government campaign to encourage the recruitment of women by the fire brigade.
I've seen the posters.
There is an actual quota, which was introduced by Jack Straw, I think, in the early years of the Blair government when he was Home Secretary.
But there is no such attempt to put more women on dust carts, an occupation which seems to be still entirely dominated by the patriarchy.
And why is that?
If you thought, well, women should be equal in all respects, you would want more women on dust cards, but that doesn't happen.
It's about prestige occupation.
So the army, the navy and the air force, the pressure is on.
So how difficult is it?
I mean, how...
How thick do you have to be not to understand, not to be able to look at the fire brigade and say, well, what's the fire brigade's job?
It's rescuing me from a fire.
Look at the army.
What's its job?
It's defending the realm.
How is it that pretty much the entirety of our society, apart from you and me and a few other weirdo, outsider, outspoken loons...
Who ought to be locked up.
Who ought to be locked up.
Probably, if not guilty.
Why is this not obvious to everyone?
Well, it's not obvious because that's what dogma does to you.
It means that you stop thinking in that way.
Because what dogma is fundamentally about is...
Here is what most of us want.
From philosophy or religion or whatever it is.
Or from any kind of instruction.
Is the answer to the question, how can I be good?
Thank you.
That's what people want to know.
How can I be good?
And what these dogmas do is they answer that question.
You can be good by supporting Greta Thunberg.
You can be good by promoting equality.
And people think that by doing these things, they're doing good.
And in some cases, they do.
There's no question.
There were injustices before in these matters.
Women kept out of jobs they should have been able to do, which were resolved by theirs.
I personally think there were other and better ways of resolving it.
This is one of the reasons why I won't say there was a golden age.
I agree with the left.
I was of the left about many of their criticisms of society as it was.
I just don't think that the answers they came up with were the right ones.
And I think it's evident that the answers they came up with in many cases were the wrong ones.
But they won't recognize that.
And you need to have an awful lot of intellectual candle power to make that challenge.
I don't know where that's coming from.
And one of the problems is that American conservatism is so different from English.
English conservatism is fundamentally monarchist and I think also fundamentally Anglican.
American conservatism is very different and really has its roots still in the revolution.
The American Revolution was a real revolution.
It's not just a name.
And they're different from us, and they don't have the same priorities.
In fact, really serious social and moral conservatism is quite rare in America.
What you generally find under the guise of conservatism is this Tea Party-type stuff, which really isn't what I regard as conservative at all.
Really, it's quite an effective defense against the dark arts with regards to this social justice warrior culture that we've now got to identify with.
You have to be careful who you call on to defend yourself.
Well, do you?
Oh, I think so.
Surely...
What about the world of strong men?
No entirely auxilio, not with such helpers.
Well, hang on a second.
Some people you don't invite into your foxhole, to use a term you're fond of.
Well, I am fond of.
You don't want them there.
They'll want things from you that you won't, if you've got any...
You can't do it.
This is another thing about Christianity which is very inconvenient.
Christianity is a very inconvenient religion to those who cleave to it.
You cannot forget the nature of the means.
You can't just forget the means and say the end is good.
You have to be careful how you achieve it.
And if you achieve it with the health of people who are actually bad, then the whole thing is polluted.
Wait a second.
In the last US presidential election, we didn't get a choice between Hillary Clinton and Mr.
Snuggly Bunny, good, conservative, nice, god-fearing...
No, no, we seldom do get that choice, do we?
What?
We don't get that choice.
We don't get that choice.
So...
So, but is voting compulsory in the United States?
Are you taken out and shot?
Trump has done...
He's basically saved America's arse.
Oh, don't be ridiculous.
He has.
He's borrowed an awful lot of money using the fact that the dollar is reserved.
I didn't say he's perfect.
He ought not to have borrowed.
And there will be a price to pay for all the supposed good things.
And he's an oaf.
And...
Indefensibly so.
Voting is not compulsory.
The fact that Hillary is standing on that side doesn't mean you have to vote for the other guy standing on that side.
You can just not vote.
In fact, it's the only moral thing to do under those circumstances.
I wasn't going to say this to you, Peter, but you have provoked me because you did bring up the foxholes.
I'm not sure that...
You'd want me in yours.
I'm not sure that I would want you in the Fox.
I couldn't be sure whether you would come up with the most fantastic defence which would wipe out loads and loads of the enemy or you'd shoot yourself...
Because what's the problem?
I'm not allowed to do that.
It's one of the things I'm absolutely not permitted to do.
That's not a fear you need.
Okay, maybe you'd be out there with your prayer book.
I don't know what you'd be doing, but I just...
It's possible that might happen.
I don't know.
I couldn't rely on you, I don't think, because you're pessimism.
Well, could I rely on you?
I mean, could I rely on you not to consort with the enemy?
Not to be able to tell the enemy from friends.
I mean, if you really think that Donald Trump is an ally of the conservative cause, I think you're much mistaken.
Right.
I think, look, I think we're essentially fighting for the same causes.
But I do worry about your despair.
It's nice of you to be concerned.
Because so much of what you write is absolutely spot-on, but you don't offer much hope to those of us who...
I'm not trying to.
I'm not trying to.
Maybe we need that.
Well, maybe you don't.
Maybe what you actually need is a dose of complete absence of hope and intelligent pessimism.
It mightn't lead people like you, who will be alive after I'm dead, to develop...
To develop.
Pessimum is very good for you.
It might lead people like you to develop, to confront the problem and to develop what it is that is needed, which is, as I say, is a countervailing system of thought, a criticism, a counterculture, which would be the basis for the long countermarch of the institutions, which will overthrow this mistaken A lead which we have in power now.
I like that.
I like that line.
That maybe your pessimism could be the spark that rescues us.
I've got some...
I've just got a few questions which have been provided for you by a fan.
By the way, I wanted to apologise for the bit where the sound got really shit.
Don't use that word.
Sorry.
I'd like to apologise for the bit where the sound got really...
Because I wasn't keeping an eye on the tape recorder and I wasn't going to wear headphones because I don't want to be sitting here with...
Looking like a cyber man.
Looking like a cyber man.
So I know some of you are going to grumble, as you do, about my technological problems, but there it is.
I think it's worth paying the price.
Right around the 2015 general election, you disappeared from the pages of the Mail on Sunday, and there was a lot of speculation that you were out for your awkward views on David Cameron and his brand of muscular liberalism.
Do you worry that you will eventually be cancelled like Sir Roger Scruton and other traditional conservatives before you?
Well, I hope it's painless when it happens.
You could be cancelled, couldn't you?
Anybody could be cancelled.
I could be cancelled this afternoon running my bicycle back to the office.
I don't have any specific worries about that.
Everybody who thinks freely in our current society feels under increasing restraint and that's just the case.
I hear horror stories from people who have to work in corporate environments.
Anything to do with the public sector, anything to do with anything that's regulated by government, it's increasingly the area in which you can speak freely is limited and therefore the area in which you can think.
It really is limited, and that's just the case.
I'm very lucky to be able to speak as I can.
HR departments are particularly bad.
They seem to enforce this dogma.
Well, they have to, because they have legal responsibilities, and this is governed by law.
People don't understand just how powerful and important the Equality Act of 2010 is in governing what can now be said or thought.
And who drafted that?
Well, I think it was a redrafting of the European Union directive, but I'd have to check.
But it was more or less cooperative thing.
The Conservative Party did not offer much in the way of opposition.
I voted against it.
But I think there was a lot of cooperation and committee and everything else in the party.
A bit like there was with the Climate Change Act.
An awful lot of important legislation is bipartisan.
In reality, there might be a technical vote against it, but that's just to retain the illusion that we have a two-party system.
You know the East German Parliament had several different parties in it?
Did it really?
Yeah, it had a Conservative Party, it had a Christian Democrat Party, it had a Free Democratic Party, and it had the Socialist Unity Party.
So it was just like us?
The same illusion?
Yeah, it was just like us, but the other parties were tolerated as long as they agreed with the Socialist Unity Party.
So there were similarities.
More similarities than you care to admit.
Well, now I'm with you.
Now you've blackpilled me.
Okay, next question.
You suggested that the First World War was the death knell for Britain.
That the country lost its best people and its faith in the trenches.
But Sweden...
Which hasn't lost anyone in war for generations, has gone even further down the path of self-inflicted destruction than we have.
While countries like Poland and Hungary, which have lost more than we did, are embracing patriotism, tradition, the family.
Isn't this a bit of a paradox?
Well, I think you're overdoing it about Hungary and Poland.
I think that a conservative person, particularly one concerned with the rule of law and liberty, which seem to me to be the foundations of civilisation, Must be alarmed by the attitudes both of the Law and Justice Party and of the Hungarian state.
They're not things that I would see as being particularly creditable.
The other thing is that The consequences of the First World War result from the fact that all the major nations of Europe took part in it, and also that it was so prolonged.
If Britain had not taken part in it, I don't think it would have been anything like so prolonged.
Countries like Sweden are so small, really, they're city states, the Scandinavian countries, that they couldn't conceivably be morally or culturally insulated from the cataclysmic effects of an event which has been, in my view, correctly compared to the fall of the Roman Empire and its significant civilization.
So much was destroyed.
People were destroyed.
Ideas were destroyed.
The material basis of the civilization was scarred beyond belief.
So everybody was affected by it.
Switzerland, similarly, stayed out of both wars.
But you don't go to Zurich and expect to find a sort of pre-1914 atmosphere.
It would be lovely, but it isn't so.
I heard you mention the L word, liberty.
Is liberty an important part of your philosophy?
Well, liberty is, in my view, again, it's a consequence of Christianity.
To be free, you have to know the law, to recognize it, to understand what it is and what it's for.
There's a wonderful prayer in the prayer book, one of the colleagues at Morning Prayer, a God who art the author of peace and And that seems to me to be the absolute essence of the Christian engagement in politics in many, many ways.
But whose service is perfect freedom?
To understand, this is why science is so important, to understand the nature, architecture and purpose of the universe is to be free.
To be free is to recognize and obey voluntarily the law and to place yourself under the law, which power has to do for a free society to exist, which means that the highest in the land have to be under the law as well as everybody else.
That, to me, is the absolute heart of all political thinking.
But if the law derives from things like the Equalities Act...
If the law derives from power, if the law is simply an expression of the will of power, and it's just a series of slogans encoded, then it ceases to be law, and it just becomes a series of regulations.
And law in this country used to be based very much on Christian thought and practice, and now it's not.
And the judges will say so if challenged.
People try and go to court sometimes and say, well, why am I a Christian not being allowed to adopt a child?
And the judges say, well, don't expect the courts...
To enforce Christianity or to see Christianity as the basis of law anymore because it has ceased to be so.
They specifically say this.
I can't recollect the names of the judgments involved but it's not hard to look them up if you want to.
It has ceased to be.
Do you think I think some of us felt good on that morning of June the 24th.
I felt the most wonderful joy of Schadenfreude.
Yeah, yeah.
That was my main feeling.
Everybody I disagree with has been made to look really, really stupid, and they deserved it.
But beyond that, I didn't think there was all that much to look forward to.
We did like drinking the salty tears of the defeated Ramonans.
It's a rather disgusting thing.
Or we imagined they were the defeated Ramonas and then they came back.
We felt good on that morning in 2016.
Surely you felt good about what it said about what the people...
No, it's against the referendum.
I didn't take any part in it.
I saw no particular good in it.
It wasn't what I wanted.
But I enjoyed the discomfiture of my opponents.
I thought it was very funny to see them.
One of the points that I've been saying years and years and years to those left-wing people who still speak to me is, you may not like me, You may think I'm really horrible, but you have no idea how bad the people are who you will get if you pay no attention to me.
And I do feel, with recent events, quite strong vindication.
You know, I sometimes used to say, I'm not sure that democracy is such a terrifically good thing.
Universal suffrage democracy, that is.
And you could hear the left-wing people in the audience muttering, fascist!
You don't have any faith.
You're not excited about prospects.
There are limits.
One of the things you discover as you look into the issue of sovereignty is that very few people, apart from superpowers, ever actually have anything approaching absolute sovereignty.
The principle of the European Union is, of course, being limited sovereignty of those countries, which varies depending on which country you are.
And Germany, obviously, has much more sovereignty than Spain in this arrangement, or Greece, or Cyprus.
And indeed, Britain would have had more sovereignty than Spain, and Cyprus would remain within the European Union.
We'll get a certain amount more sovereignty outside the European Union.
But we were always going to move from being half in to being half out.
There will be constraints on us which will continue.
And therefore, the question to me was always what those constraints would be.
And the important ones for me were to get rid of the legal constraints, to protect our legal system from becoming continentalised.
And also to have as much foreign policy freedom and as much freedom to enforce our frontiers as possible.
I was never interested in free trade, and I'm still not.
And I'm amazed at how much of the outcome of this has ended up being arguments about trade, which seems to me never to have been the point.
So no, I don't at the moment.
I just look at it.
The real complications of it, the difficulties of being a third country, which I oppose because I thought we should have gone for a Norway option, the difficulties of being a third country will only become apparent at the end of this year, and people will then realize what a very considerable difficulty it is going to be leaving the single market.
I'm much more concerned about leaving the European arrest warrant.
On your grave, it's going to say, I told you so, isn't it?
I don't know, because the thing about your grave is that you aren't the person who actually chisels the words on the...
Yeah, but you can tell the wife.
Ask the wife.
She might not agree with me.
I think she will if she knows you.
Well, you know the old rule about marriages.
When the husband and wife disagree, the wife decides, and when the husband and wife agree, the husband decides.
Yeah.
Well, there you are then, you see.
Yeah.
I mean, I do all the...
In our family, I do all those things like foreign policy and economic policy and Irish policy, and my wife decides where we live and where the trivia is.
Yeah, the trivial stuff.
Yeah, exactly.
Right.
Thank you, Peter.
And then not forgetting, of course, the role of the cat.
But there you are.
Anyway, no, I don't know what's going on too soon.
Great.
What about the presentation special friend badge?
Do I get a sash?
Is it like being a member of the Légion d'Honneur?
It is.
It's very much like that.
It is the same...
I think it goes in the same way.
Who institutes you design?
My brother and I. My brother designed it.
Just you're my special friend.
Okay, well...
I'll think about that.
Almost...
There's only one person who's been more reluctant in this acceptance of a special friend.
I'm not going to...
Because it's a pill.
The curve is an artistic...
It's designed to convey the pill shape.
What does that do with that series of films?
What were they called?
When you were a Marxist, you were telling me that you had loads of badges, so you can't...
Had loads of what?
Badges?
Yes, well, exactly.
That's one of the things that I've ceased to do.
Think of it as a nostalgia trip, Peter.
I don't, you know, I'm not a nostalgist.
Just put it on for me.
I'll admire it.
I'll admire it.
I'm not sure I've accepted myself.
Can you not give it to, I don't know, one of your kids?
The cat.
Give it to the cat.
I'll treasure it.
Good.
You're treasuring it.
He's going to treasure it.
Okay, you can treasure it.
Treasuring it is enough.
Put it in a display case.
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