Welcome to this special episode of the Sceptic with Professor David Starkey, the renowned and pugnacious historian, author and broadcaster.
Host Laurie Wastell speaks to Professor Starkey about New Labour’s constitutional revolution; why Margaret Thatcher was mistaken to view Tony Blair as her heir; the problem with “human rights” and the ECHR; the disaster of devolution; why the Southport rioters were right to be angry; when Sir Keir Starmer called for him to be jailed; his prognosis for the Labour Government; the need for a post-Blair restoration; why David Lammy is a national embarrassment; and why the facts of life are conservative.
Find David Starkey on YouTube here. And order his books here.
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Blair has indeed destroyed the old Britain: Alanbrooke and Montgomery’s Army gone, the judiciary changed out of all recognition, the civil service politicised, the NHS showered with cash so that productivity declines, business encumbered with a forest of regulations and so on and so forth.
And Labour are at it once more, filling Whitehall with placemen to obfuscate and filibuster any future attempts at reform.
Only Ms Badenoch will do; only she has the vim and vigour to uproot all the nonsense and get the country back on the path to economic prosperity; individual liberty; freedom of expression.
Yes, but Strictly Come Dancing is the envy of the world.
Coincidentally, there’s a piece by NS Lyons on his substack. Very scary, but answers a lot of questions and dovetails nicely with this podcast.
https://theupheaval.substack.com/p/on-public-private-partnership?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=330796&post_id=150304399&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1xq1t5&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email
I thoroughly enjoy Dr D, he is wonderfully rude and insulting I also generally agree that a reset to the good old days is required. However one of the problems with those good old days is that they allowed all this crap to follow. They allowed themselves to be subverted. He needs to deal with how a restoration would not allow the same again. If he can’t then he is to no avail and deserves insulting himself.
I think the problem is not allowing any parliament to bind it’s successor, in order to prevent this repeating (if it is ever reversed) then we have to deal with the Gramscian Marxists and do away with the institutions that they marched through.
A long job.
Isn’t the problem that parliament and also the executive gets it’s sovereignty from the people. There needs to be some basic mechanism to stop this being subverted, which effectively what has happened and explains the invention of the smear term populism, by the experts.
Not a logical analysis. So, if bad laws are passed, like the 2008 Climate Change Act and the NET Zero policies, are you saying that cannot be changed?
Glad to see David Starkey’s important voice given some airing. Historians such as he give some much needed historical context and consequent wisdom to contemporary issues. He has given a series of solo talks on YouTube which are also well worth listening to.
If Tony Blair destroyed old Britain the Tories jumped on its grave.
I don’t think they were that proactive!
They just drifted in the same direction.
Absolute tour de force from David Starkey. Starkey pulls all the modern trends that we all recognise together, and explains how they interrelate and what their causes are, in a completely plausible and rational analysis.
This is facilitated by a great interviewing style by Laurie Wastell. It is wonderful to hear an interviewer not following the trendy hostile interviewing style, but instead holding back, and interjecting only to gently pull out the views of the interviewee.
One tiny quibble is that Starkey claims that “populist” is a modern word, when in fact it goes back all the way to the late Roman Republic, when the “populares” were the party who championed the interests of the people against the aristocrats, who claimed to be democrats, and who claimed that the populares were a threat to democracy, just as they do today.
The Blair era did indeed set off the wokeification of the UK. But our ‘progressive’ malaise is a much bigger thing than just Blairism and has (in varying degrees) been ‘progressively’ blighting the entire Western world for many decades. A central theme of my own writing down the years has been that the craziest outcomes of post-60s ‘social justice’ – the ones that people scratch their heads about in dismay – mostly originated in the groves of academe. Things like white self-loathing-by-proxy, the fetishisation of sexual dysphoria and pseudo-therapeutic psychobabble began as fictions and fixations hatched in its humanities and social science petri-dishes. A madness of intelligentsias in other words. I have argued that our great folly was failing to foresee the long-term consequences of allowing our universities to become colonised by an intelligentsia intent on ‘cleverly’ unpicking the threads that held Western civilisation together. https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/the-madness-of-intelligentsias
I quite like Starkey. He is old but his mind is young and enegetic and open to new horizons. He isn’t stuck in some past. And he hasn’t completely lost the sense of beauty. So many have in our time as if the tempo exceeds their processing power. Hopefully he will be around for a while.
I must have been in a long sleep because I did not hear the Conservative Party discuss free markets or freedpom at all. I hesrd them endorse all the damaging changes Balir made. I heard them adopt quite left wing policies on tax, spending, regulation and state power.
I saw the state explode in size.
I hear Cameron describe himself as “heit to Blair” and he kicked over all the Thatcher reforms. Subsequent Tory leaders have been no better and the next one does not seem to get it, whichever is elected by the party’s members.
I also reject the idea the changes made by Labour and continued by the Conservative Party were “stupid”. I take it that word means ill informed, careless or illigical whereas it was none of them. It was all intentional.
It has been flat out on its arse for a long time. You could go back to the early twentieth century when the country started to live on debt. Christianity stilll had a residual hold in the 1950s but few people were truly pious. And then there was smugness after the last war about materialism and creature comforts but it was utterly hollow and was called out for being so at the time. Now the protection of the spiritual forces has disappeared. Now you will feel naked and alone and you can be introspective about a life well-lived or not. The story of the honest thief by the side of Christ. Even at the latest hour it is possible.