A Labour Government Should FRIGHTEN Us All.

Addressing the New Culture Forum’s 2024 annual conference, Dr. David Starkey explains that Britain cannot be saved without reversing the revolutionary changes New Labour made to Britain’s constitution and institutions between 1997 – 2010.

Summary:

The Catastrophe Awaiting Britain

– A disastrous government with an unwanted huge majority is expected after the next election
– This calamitous situation is compared to the failures of past governments like Edward Heath’s
– There is hope that one reformer (Keith Joseph) can spark a positive reaction, just as happened after Heath’s downfall

Blair’s Revolutionary Reforms

– Between 1997-2010, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown carried out a revolution on a scale equivalent to Clement Attlee’s socialist reforms after WW2
– Their “reforms” severely diminished the sovereignty of Parliament in areas like:
– Making the Bank of England independent
– Scottish devolution
– Incorporating the European Convention on Human Rights into UK law
– Establishing a Supreme Court separate from Parliament
– Empowering unaccountable quangos and committees
– The Equality Act privileging certain groups over equality before the law

Reversing the Disastrous Reforms

– Any future conservative/right-wing government must embark on a deliberate “restoration” to reverse Blair’s legislative achievements
– This must be accompanied by an educational effort to explain to the public:
– Why concepts like “human rights” have been dangerously perverted
– How the equalities agenda undermines true equality before the law
– The loss of democracy and accountability caused by the reforms

The Courage Required

– Enacting such a radical reversal will require genuine courage from politicians
– They must reject the false idols of victimhood, political correctness and identity politics
– The public must be persuaded by promoting the values of freedom that made Britain successful before these ruinous reforms

Full Transcript:

(00:00) [Applause] ladies and gentlemen it’s a very great pleasure to be here even though fundamentally this is a miserable occasion well we come on let shall We All Shall we all Begin by being truthful something very Dreadful and there’s no smiling something very Dreadful awaits Us in the latter part of this year and anybody who does not recognize that and I shall use the word without apology because I’m fond of using words without apology is a fool we are about to vote in a government with a vast majority that
(00:45) nobody wants it is something that has not happened before the consequences are frightening to contemplate so there’s the Gloom let’s have a little ray of sunshine because we have been here before what we forget is the catastrophe of Liz truss is pretty fully matched by the catastrophe of Edward Heath have we all forgotten may I now remind you Heath was elected on the sson man platform which was intended to introduce radical free market reform he then engineered a boom through his Chancellor Barber that made
(01:34) what listra and quati quatang did look like a blip property prices multiplied three times in one year right he then collapsed in the face of the miners and immediately reverted to an extreme form of keynesianism complete with price and income policies rental control TRS 3-day week and every single catastrophe you can think of and of course in the election fought on the back of the minor strike about who governs Britain everybody said anybody but you and we returned the Absurd figure of Harold pantown Wilson as we’ve
(02:19) now as we have now discovered the hope is the reaction of one man to that in April in April 1974 Keith Joseph experienced a damine conversion he wrote about it a year later and said I thought I was a conservative now I know I wasn’t and what he did he read Hayek he spent the summer reading and thinking now that is what we are going to have to do it would be nice to think think somewhere in the upper Leons of the conservative party or even reform there was maybe somebody who had read hiek or could read hyek or
(03:10) could think about hyek or anybody else what I want to do now is to draw the very striking comparison in other words it took remember the gigantic shift of socialism carried out in Britain by The absurdly lorded Clement Atley the foundation again most of our discontents disastrous structures of the NHS the bloating of welfare all at the time of immense exigency after War all of that took 30 years to begin to reverse thater under Heath was the Secretary of State for Education who closed more grammar schools than everybody else it is
(03:56) possible to turn the ship State round but by why God is it difficult so where what is the parallel with where we are now what we have forgotten is that blur between 1997 and the the kind of burp of Blair Gordon Brown exhaling even more unpleasant breath and between between the two of them They carried out a revolution exactly equivalent in scale to what actually did in 45 to 51 what we’ve done is to forget that is not to understand it is not to seek to reverse it what I want to do now is to delineate that Revolution to explain it to you and
(04:46) to tie it very much to the whole purpose of the ncf now Peter’s foundation of the ncf the direct tackling of council culture the absurdities and all the rest of it is very important but what we need to ask ourselves is why have these absurd doctrines got such purchase so quickly why are they particularly in America and in Britain what is it that has led to the penetration of the great Anglo-Saxon democracies who not only Pioneer freedom but Pioneer economic growth why have they been so profoundly vulnerable to
(05:28) these catastrophes and my answer is that the mistake that the new culture Forum has made and I’ve said this to Peter in private I will now say it in public is to assume you can tackle culture directly you cannot the reason that the culture the reason that these absurd doctrines have triumphed is political it is only because they have a network of political support that they’ve been able to send their tentacles everywhere and that political support in this country is created by the so-called Blair constitutional reforms this is what
(06:08) we’ve got to understand therefore the first thing that any future serious right-wing government whether it be called conservative reform uh uh whatever has got to do is to understand it has to reverse a revolution you have to carry out what we did in 1660 you have to carry out a restoration there has to be a process of going back and I think America to a large extent will have to do the same because certainly particularly post the New Deal and whole particularly the 60s changes very similar patterns appeared now what is it
(06:50) that that Blair does that is so catastrophic well I’m afraid the list is a very long one but let me summarize it very quickly as saying essentially what it does is to subvert the central feature of the English Constitution and remember the British constitution is simply the English Constitution r large we number our Kings in accordance with the Norman Conquest Parliament is Westminster or the the order of parliaments is not altered by Act of Union with Scotland in 1707 what is the central principle or what used to be the
(07:25) central principle of the English Constitution it was the idea of the sovereignty of Parliament that is spelled out fully by AV dcey in his great work on the law of the Constitution written at the climax of that in the late 19th century when of course it had carried Britain through the Industrial Revolution through Empire to the position of of extraordinary hegemonic power but had also done something else because of the domestic implication of that idea it had carried Britain peacefully through the gigantic social Transformations which are
(08:03) associated with that why is that because when we talk about the supremacy of parliament we do not just mean we do not mean at all the supremacy of the House of Commons as such what is supreme in the country or was is the crown in Parliament the three bodies of the crown the Lords and the commons and this goes back not simply to the 19th century the 18th the 17th the 16th it goes back to just after Magna Cara it goes back to the 13th and particular the 14th century and already in the 14th century this why history
(08:41) matters we are historically shaped State freedom is grounded in history this is why we have a a parliamentary building which is gothic which deliberately Echoes the Middle Ages it’s not a creation of abstract reason it’s not a cre creation of the Enlightenment it’s not a creation of the 19th century or the 18th century because back in the 13th and 14th century judges are able to say to a collection of upit a little people who don’t want to pay their tax none of us wants to pay tax and we all
(09:15) try to come up with good reasons for doing it and they say oh we can’t possibly pay tax or we’re not we’re not legally obliged to because we weren’t sitting in Parliament to which the judges yawn and give the stock reply everybody in England is represented in Parliament either in person or by his representative and it was that idea that carries us through it’s that idea that you are bound by law because you’ve participated in making it we didn’t need to take back control because we had control and in Britain you didn’t
(09:53) in England Britain you didn’t struggle to tear down the Constitution as you had to in France in Germany and Italy in Spain you wanted to become part of it so the suffragettes don’t want to tear Parliament down they want the right to vote and sit in Parliament the working classes my ancestors do not wish to tear Parliament down with chartism or the rise of the working class in the late 19th century on the contrary they want a place there they were given it and they take their part their honored part in
(10:26) the great panop play the Great pageantry of State all of that reaches a climax actually a bit of a doubtful one I probably won’t have time to go over it in my talk but we may explore it in questions um the as it were the acceptance the Tory and I would say very Tory rather than conservative because I would like to distinguish between the two the very Tory acceptance of socialism reaches its climax believe it or not in 1917 the of Revolutions in which you reinvent the English Monarchy the British Monarchy this is when you change
(11:05) the name of the royal house it’s when you change the marital rules of the royal family so that you marry English people rather than Germans which you had to up to that point you had to to preserve uh the the uh uh the nobility or or rather the royalty of the German side of the house they had a role of deance um but in 1917 you reverse all of that and you do something else that’s even more extraordinary you completely reform the honest system to mean that Ordinary People could be given an honor first time ever and do you know where
(11:41) the first inauguration of the order of British Empire took place I bro Park football stadium and the star of the show was a little woman working in the Glasgow Munitions Factory who got her MBE and at the same time you introduce bizar the tit it the order of Companions of Honor specifically for socialists and trade unionists because of course they will be too conscious of their socialist dignity to want to vulgarize it by peerage or a title of nobility or being called Sir how far did they get them wrong but anyway the companion of Honor was
(12:20) deliberately invented to incorporate socialism into the establishment so this extraordinary placing in the panop play of English History all undone in n in all undone from 1997 onwards if we look at it it’s an astonishing story and what he every single feature of it does is remove power from Parliament and the elected representatives in Parliament and it’s worth and it’s worth putting in a quick footnote here most of us participated willingly and enthusiastically in brexit with the Great slogan Take Back Control that
(13:02) sense that our Sovereign Parliament and therefore us this is the whole point Parliament as the as the Keystone of the arch of English and British democracy the slogan unfortunately was misplaced because the power had not gone to Continental Europe This Is Why brexit has been such a profound disappointment the erosion of democracy Ry is at home the seeping away from Parliament is into our domestic institutions into the quangos and into the legal institutions and into the devolved assemblies this is the disaster
(13:45) so we were attacking the wrong Parliament it was the right thing to do but it did not have the desired consequences and we need to understand that and to admit it and to comprehend it and to fit it into our general interpretive pattern but if you then look at this process of the dimin diminution of the sovereignty of parliament it takes place with astonishing speed the independence of the bank of England remember the nationalization of the bank of England is actually done by a labor government if we look again I do not wish to
(14:17) sustain the Absurd self- delusions of Liz truss but the general record of the bank of England since mvin King ceased to be Governor is disastrous in comparison with any but and it’s also entirely unamenable to us these people are entirely and deliberately unanswerable to anybody so the independence of the government of of the bank of England Scottish Devolution 1998 creating of course this grotesque parody of a government in Edinburgh which is contriving to reproduce all the worst features of pre-union Scotland the
(14:55) factionalism the corruption the idiotic kind of noxian pursuit of Purity every single undesirable feature of clanism and Calvinism combin in the detestable person of Nicholas ston and [Applause] [Music] um again 199 but look at what this means it means that remember the only point of connection between England and Scotland was Parliament when you cre because Scotland by with with with the the wonderfully generous settlement of 190 of 1707 preserves every other feature of statehood it preserves its right to issue currency its own legal system its
(15:41) own educational system its own church its own herit its own heraldry its own order of Knighthood its own Court its own Crown it’s only Parliament and you break that Bond you shatter the thing that had created the world’s most successful state because it was I the the idea of a union in America is a deliberate development of the idea of unionism in England in Britain it’s exactly what it is anyway so you you you then set up this profound contradiction between the essentially unitary British State and
(16:15) Devolution you’ve taken the fundamental levers of control over monetary policy out of the only people who can answer for it then with the incorporation of the ECR in 1998 you do something even more cap catastrophic you incorporate a doctrine of universal human rights that means a law which has got Authority which does not depend on popular conent do we all understand this it sounds lovely it is disastrous then there’s a slight pause whilst we digest that extraordinary series of things but it all starts again
(16:53) in 2005 with the so-called constitutional Reform Act uh uh of 20 05 which sets up a supreme court how can you have a supreme court and a supreme Parliament they are logically completely contradictory the American system depends on a separation of powers controlled by a supreme court as the final Authority we never had that and again you introduce by the by the uh demotion of the office of Lord Chancellor you introduce a serious attempt at creating a um a separation of powers again everybody because of this sheer unthinking notion that the
(17:35) American Constitution is good forgets that Britain cannot have a separation of powers how can you have a separation of powers when the head of the Executive sits in the legislature the Prime Minister and normally controls it so we’ve introduced what they did they introduced a series of the most staggering contradictions and tensions so we’ve been in a state of permanent constitutional crisis uh since the end of new labor and we’ve also been in a state in which nobody’s actually responsible because we’ve then gone on
(18:13) and we have multiplied endless quangos we put the whole of climate change policy which Now controls the basic structure of the economy into a specialist committee we have put the entire business of Land Management English nature that’s why we can’t build it’s not it’s not the wicked conservatives it’s the fact that vast wayes of the countryside are designated as you know bat reserves or for n and so what it’s tempting to sound as though one’s parodying unfortunately you’re not
(18:45) that is the case um and then finally and disastrously the equalities act now why is the equality again you see all of these things human rights the consolidation of nature the uh the idea of equality these all sound wonderful don’t they why is it they’ve gone so badly wrong well we need to understand some absolute fundamentals here what happened under new labor is essentially an Americanization I said that there were two countries where the cultural revolution had got purchase it’s England and America we undergo a
(19:27) partial Americanization of our Constitution and it’s one that goes into areas that we haven’t really thought about and until I started working on this I hadn’t fully thought about do you know new labor even perverts charity do you want to know why the Royal National Lifeboat League behaves in the funny way it does because it was written into the Charities Act of 2006 that the pursuit of Human Rights and international Amity and ever is now charitable so you write in to what had been previously highly strictly defined
(20:05) this series of vague General Notions which are entirely unlimited by the nation are extraneous to the nation there’s then another point to make which is what has happened to the idea of Human Rights all our enemies say ah but the Tes were responsible for the European convention it was Maxwell light Maxwell 5 as attorney general and interesting enough an attorney general who was one of the last great persecutors of homosexuals we need to couple this authorship of human rights with remembering his domestic role but
(20:39) what is important to realize is that the echr like everything else has been perverted it’s been perverted in two ways it was never intended to be a court to which individuals could directly appeal if you look at the European convention it’s very interesting to look for example Le at the the relative position of the uh say freedom of speech in America freedom of speech um under the Second Amendment under the uh uh under the Bill of Rights is absolute here in our convention because the convention was not really intended
(21:18) as law but a guide to the making of law it’s subject to considerations of public morality safety um uh domestic peace in other words judges can twid it around in whatever Direction they like but there’s a much bigger issue here which again I’m afraid is one of the reasons why that other magnificent creation of 45 the United Nations and and whatever itself has turned into and and the uh the uh International Convention on human rights why they’ve all turned into disasters they were deliberately
(21:55) perverted by the communist block can I re recommend to everybody here to read a remarkable book you can get around it by reading a single article it’s by a man called Jacob machang Gama uh m c h a m g m a machang Gama who is Believe It or Not A Dane but obviously a mixed race Dane and what he demonstrated was that the Soviets and their allies between the 60s 70s and the early 80s penetrate the entire Machinery of Human Rights and twist it it the original intention of Human Rights was to protect the right of
(22:33) the individual against the state what the Soviets do using anti-imperialism and racism as the leevers to do it is to turn it into the supposed protection of minorities against the majority and what that requires of course is you pervert the entire Machinery of Human Rights and particularly freedom of speech you invert it you turn it against itself you turn a doctrine of freedom of speech into a doctrine of hate speech which limits freedom of speech now we have to understand all of these things it’s hard
(23:12) work what we need is therefore a serious legislative program it is a legislative program that will set itself deliberately and quickly to reverse the entire legislative achievement of the new labor years of 1997 to 2010 it has to do that until we do that frankly we are pedling we are doing nothing and we can do nothing this is why the conservative government of the last 14 years has been as catastrophic a failure as it has because the structures that have put in place from 1997 to 2010 make it as we’re seeing over one over
(23:58) one and as as uh we we we we saw with the extraordinary case of prorogation they make it absolutely impossible to do most conservative things we have to understand this and until we have a political party that actually has a program saying this but it also has to be accompanied with an educational program we have to explain these things to people we have to explain why human rights sound nice and cuddly but are in fact the opposite of what they mean it’s not easy it’s deliberately not easy this is new
(24:39) speak what we’ve got to do is to understand of course that the the the George Orwell remember Orwell’s dictatorship can I remind you all 1984 is a leftwing dictatorship can I also remind you what is the Striking thing about it it is the importance of language anguage it is the importance of language which again is exactly what we’ve seen ourselves in the last few years and finally and there’s a point again which I do not think has been properly understood in Orwell if you read 1984 you’ll see that there are actually two
(25:18) classes of people there are the pros the ordinary people who were left entirely untouched in a state of fre Freedom squalor beer sex and whatever and then there are the middle classes the party members the Believers in the rubbish Big Brother well they I’m afraid are exactly the people who are running us exactly the people who are privileged by this structure this structure of Law and this structure of of of quangos and the structure of elite committees and the sense of perversion ladies and gentlemen is deep and is appalling the
(26:03) fundamental principle of law should be equality but what does the equality act do it privileges particular groups this was understood and I will dare to mention the name this was understood by Enoch Powell immediately the race relations act of 1968 was passed the moment you privilege one named group the moment you protect one named group they become a privileged group and you destroy the entire basis of law law has to be blind law has to be Universal we have instead created a law which is theological which is aimed at
(26:47) protecting particular groups we’ve abandoned any notion of proper distributive justice and instead we’ve embarked on this notion that the goal of law is somehow to bring about equality or to redress wrong to redress vast social wrong the moment you put an adjective in front of Justice you have perverted it so you see what I mean we we’ve got to what I’m outlining is obviously something of impossible absurd radicalism that’s why I began by saying no for your comfort rather like Luther um but can I suggest that we have to
(27:34) first of all and you will forgive me this will sound horribly patronizing we’ have to start by educating ourselves we’ve to recognize how far our opponents have been successful because they’ve controlled language because they’ve seized these nice sounding words and turn them into vehicles for horror which all forms of dict leadership do the last time we had laws governing speech as such was in the reformation and Henry VII and treason by words it’s taken freedom and liberty to take us back to the reign of Henry VII I
(28:13) think that would be good pause moment to pause I hope I’ve thrown up enough to produce the odd question thank you [Applause] David thank you so much uh obviously questions uh please make them questions won’t you uh not just uh statements of your opinion um can we start with the gentleman here and then the gentleman writes the back uh is uh is one solution to go the whole hog and um get instead of the um Constitution being constituted in England of the laws in the basement of Parliament and get a written
(29:15) constitution in the sense of the US and and sweep away um by doing so you know lots of this wokery Etc and and constitute that constitution in the manner of a us one that’s so that’s precisely what I’ve been saying we mustn’t do that that the that that that look can we just really pause and think again can I suggest please everybody try to read Hayek’s constitution of Liberty it is not easygoing but it should be our Bible there are two different ways of running government and human Affairs one
(29:56) is that you rely on the notion of if you like the free market of ideas tested by time that is the great idea of Adam Smith and the English Enlightenment of the 18th century it’s expressed in the idea of common law which has no specific origin and is subject to continuous slow modification and development and it produces of course in England in the course of the Middle Ages a society which gives you all of those rights which are set out in the American Constitution life liberty and property and lays the foundation long before the
(30:39) American Constitution is written of the gigantic explosion of human energy creativity and intelligence that leads both to Industrial Revolution and the astonishing turmoil of ideas in late 16th 17th and 18th century England this is where we invent modernity what is the great Paradox we invent modernity by rooting it in the past this is the Supreme Paradox it’s understood right at the beginning of this process by Jeffrey chorer when he’s dealing with what we conventionally call the Renaissance in the late 14th century
(31:16) comes up with when you’re first really reencountering the great works of Greece and Rome in their original form he comes up with this wonderful four lines just as each year after of the old ground new corn Springs so from these old books new learning comes and it’s this this this is the process of the market the English Constitution is the Constitutional expression of the market now the other view is the French all bad ideas of French it is it is um apart from food um and wine and architecture and dress come on let’s let’s we’re
(32:07) compliment you England and France are the missing halves of the perfect civilization never never with the do thrown in and the but the what France does under the influence of deart is to come up with a completely different notion which is that you improve Human Condition not by slow organ growth but by aood by by an explosion in the brain by starting everything from scratch in other words the catastrophe of the French Revolution the thing that from which France has never recovered and I think never will recover once you
(32:45) destroy the basis of legitimacy in a state to that extent it never ever fully recovers now the American Revolution is this extraordinary middle ground it uses the rhetoric of the French Revolution but in fact it doesn’t dis change very much okay the Tores are driven out and some nasty Behavior but but essentially the American Constitution is a very lightly reworked version of the English constitution of the 18th century the Bill of Rights is simply what the um what the uh uh what common law conveys the problem is it was Blair using that
(33:23) model to drive through a perverted notion of the 18 Century that’s the problem there’s also something else we need to remember that notion of starting everything from scratch is what has powered every Revolution since the French and all revolutions are disasters we need to understand this no revolution has made anything better anywhere and I challenge anybody to it’s they are simply destructive and their standard feature is to replicate the worst features of the an RA look at China look at you where where
(34:01) where you have a series of mad Emperors uh see after the fall of the Ching Dynasty I mean they aren’t just they behave like Emperors the entire structure similarly Putin now deliberately invoke sardam things do not change whereas we were able to do something else it’s the great Israeli who explains this if you’re a cons our sort of conservative of course you believe in progress if you’re committed to structures of free market in ideas and free market in an economy of course you believe in change
(34:35) the question is not changing it’s how you change do you change in accordance with abstract principle in which case it will be a catastrophe or do you change organically in accordance with the traditions and constitutions of your own country Blair did the former and reaped well we’ve reaped he hasn’t unfortunately we’ve reaped the disastrous consequences and I think the most obscene thing is seeing Blair struck in the panop strut around in the panoply of a knight of the Gart at Windsor it is the most vomit making
(35:13) spectacle I have ever encountered a man who hated tradition treated it with contempt patronized the queen exploited the death of Diana and generally speaking exhibited moral and political bankruptcy [Music] [Applause] so no please not a written Constitution have I made myself clear just gentleman down here yep hi so suppose you get everything you want and uh somehow we get a government I I I’m not hearing a thing hello you hear me yeah can you take it slightly away from take your voice down little bit hello is that
(36:00) better your way all right take three um so suppose you get everything you want and somehow we get a government that takes the kind of action you’re demanding gives us this restoration rolls back all the blairite reforms Etc how do we prevent the government after that from just doing the opposite and reversing the reversal well you can’t and you shouldn’t I mean one of the things that we one of the things we have to have confidence about finally and again um there’s a logical reason for this if I
(36:30) am right that essentially Freedom that is the right of people to think act create make money in their own ways is the actual Foundation of human progress we need to leave people to be free they will make mistakes but finally I suppose and I may now be exhibiting absurd naive they will get it right the profound risk of course is that and we see this I’m I’m afraid the Blair years are going to be followed by a deliberate intensification do we all realize that the that as part of the program of the forthcoming labor government is the RO
(37:15) constitutional reform as understood by Gordon Brown every single feature that I have mentioned is going to be redoubled and redoubled and entrenched we must not under estimate what the struggle will be there is the attempt and again what I do not understand is it has all been so catastrophically wrong we we’ve known it’s wrong for I mean why is our why is the management of our economy gone so disastrously wrong because we’ve played with econometrics this absurd notion that you can quantify something as complex as a national
(37:54) economy and then on the basis of those figures do delicately little tweaks it’s a deranged method instead what you should be doing is aiming at a broadly balanced budget and again we’ve got to recover we’ve got to recover genuine courage this seems to me there’s only one virtue and again it’s the whole attack and women here will forgive me on the classic masculine Virtues Of which courage is the central one every other virtue is useless without courage it is why I repudiate with passion the
(38:31) word victim I hate that word we’re turning ourselves into a supine culture of victimhood and it’s cont temptable and it will reap the rewards which contempt deserves but that courage has got to say the unsayable we have a state whose size is ruinous we are going the way of Rome all inflation is the result of State activity it’s it’s monetary have you but why is inflation so persistent in America why is it so persistent in Britain because governments continue borrowing vast amounts of money and
(39:18) throwing it into the economy Biden’s Behavior at the moment in America guarantees inflation sunak with Furlow guarantees inflation trust guaranteed inflation with the whole notion of borrowing to pay people’s fuel bills and and if you Institute a welfare state which is unsustainable in its scale it’s exactly what happened to Rome with carala when he double the wages of the Roman army from that point onwards you have a state which is too big for the economy it becomes parasitic and it starts actually to devour when it should
(39:55) be encouraging creation we’ve got to look learn to say these things and I think the lesson will be driven home I will for once wear the mantle of Prophecy I think we will see the IMF back within about 18 months of the labor government uh we can have two more questions actually umit we have that side um Al the gentleman there with the red youu yeah yeah you and then okay yeah thank you is the equality act so bad uh in theory it protects not just minorities or women or gay people just it says you can’t discriminate on the
(40:35) basis of race or sex or sexuality also the belief-based Discrimination part is actively working to protect conservatives liberals gender critical feminists Believers and color blindness should we scrap it I’m not really sure I I could no I couldn’t tou I’m sorry I’m sorry the the microphones work good in that direction they’re very difficult I’m can you go very slowly elderly hearing and slow brains I’m sorry I’ll try speak to yourself is the equality act as bad as is being made out as I am
(41:09) making it out well Peter said we should uh get rid of it earlier um because you said it’s an it’s an enemy of Universalist justice but in theory it protects everybody it doesn’t say you can’t discriminate against minorities and women it says you can’t discriminate on the basis of race or sex or sexuality does isn’t that Universalist so you know the point the point is very simple if you have equality before the law an equality Act is completely unnecessary it’s it’s it it it is a it
(41:42) is a simple logical statement read hyek you don’t an an equality act privileges Puffs like me un necessarily except it doesn’t privilege me as much as a lesbian and it doesn’t privilege me as much as a transsexual and this is silly and wrong all we need is genuine again you know look look at the scandal of our policing in London at the moment the incident yesterday you are obviously a Jew sir can you imagine that in Britain and it’s the jaw drops at the horror of the thing but that is once you
(42:25) start the whole point of the whole point of work is that it replaces a notion of equality before the law with group Allegiance and again it’s it’s it’s important we understand this historically the there’s there’s a most Splendid work of a young well no longer young but young we’d be very cross with me but but but Patrick Nash his wonderful book on Islam and English law the reason that we developed this astonishing legal system in England was because we managed to outlaw cousin marriage cousin marriage leads to Clans
(43:02) which means that you have got a loyalty to the group rather than to the state and you’re judged as a member of a group rather than an individual woke and the whole business of black rights and whatever aspires to do that it completely breaks down the uniformity before the law and creates a series of privileged groups similarly the whole no the whole way in which freedom of speech has been interpreted particularly because religious belief is protected is demented you protected if you believe in what is it JD something or another the
(43:39) only thing that’s not protected at law is reason I mean if you if if if you advance some mad justification for islamism Judaism quakerism i w up a Quaker you’re protected if you simply say this is unreasonable like the Preposterous statement that a man can become a woman or vice versa then then then the whole weight until recently has descended upon you I mean it is this I keep going on it’s the perversion of language an equality Act is in fact designed to produce privilege specific privileged groups the
(44:15) the way freedom of speech is imposed on us is designed to limit freedom of speech you hate hate speech legislation is designed to permit hate speech by privileged groups and prevent the rest of us from objecting this is the terrible Blair newspaper I think we actually had one example this week uh DAV David you might if you’re on Twitter at all of uh a man being visited by police and an NHS psychiatrist yes uh basically for for uh essentially uh having written something I think on Facebook but it was so alien that it
(45:06) almost looked as though it must have been staged but it wasn’t can you imagine a policeman I mean dear me the police are not shall I say our most intellectual profession saying check your thinking sir I just this is you again I I’m not a Christian in fact I’m very much an anti Christian but Jesus was terribly shrewd on politics and he came up with one wonderful line by their fruits you shall know them if you want to look at the fruits of woke judge it by those if you want to look at the fruits of this
(45:44) perversion of language simply do what we’ve been doing now and but you’ve then got to ask why why can these absurdities happen it is because there’s a legal framework which not only protects them but in large measure legislates them uh just one more question it’s from alah thank you uh yes thank you just um a couple of quick things just very quickly to add on the equality act it introduces an extraordinary um element of subjectivity into the definition of racism um and it actually I was just thinking about this what it seems to be
(46:26) doing now is conf transforming transferring what was a presumption of equality and freedom that we all had in a political and in a moral sense as Citizens into something that is now to be conferred top down by the state and by the courts and now you’re seeing this proliferation of you know wanting to get protected characteristics we shouldn’t need protecting to say what we think um so so there’s that I think that really and and you talk about the Bold courage needed of politicians we need a political class that can say no
(47:01) disparities along race-based lines is not racism not that it may be racism or it may not be it isn’t it isn’t because it denies intentionality and without intentionality you can’t have racism what I wanted to ask you though David was that you you you proposed that what is needed is a is a kind of Suite of legisl looking at the legislative structures and reforming that which is I find very persuasive and and and agree with um however in terms of reaching public and winning public consent which will be needed for some of the extent of
(47:37) the changes that are going to be needed I don’t think law alone is enough and for me I would want to ask you what what kind of what are the resources I for me I’m more drawn to moral philosophy not in an abstract academic sense but drawing on that to make abstract arguments concrete so that we can can go out there and make better arguments and hopefully win more support I think again it’s by their fruits you shall know them what we need to do is and again the deliberate attack on our history is an attack on the
(48:17) opposite of woke our early success our success before this nonsense emerged is the best argument against it the astonishing creativity of our society before this nonsense the signs of it shuttering down the I mean remember there’s one very simple fact if we want good facts are we all familiar with my friend mvin King’s wonderful remark that there are only two facts that you need to know about post-war British economic policy growth that starts in 199 growth starts in 1979 and stops in 2008 it coincides precisely with the
(49:12) chronology that I’ve given you and there is absolutely no accident this what we’re seeing is a shuttering down of what has been the most successful State and Society because I regard regard America us as really kind of slightly distant twins um um but we we need to understand that and the the the again again we have one thing we’re a tiny little island how has this little island done what it’s done it is because it pioneered freedom but what we’ve got to do we’ve got to start about talking about Freedom
(49:59) not simply in terms of economic growth economic growth is very important but you then fall into the Oscar wild trap you know the price of everything and the value of nothing we’ve got to start talking about the value of Freedom we’ve got to start talking about the fact that we gave a model not simply of industrialization but of behavior to the world that we gave a model of living to the world we invent the weekend we invent All Sport we invent dress all do we all realize this the French were still laboring under the ab
(50:33) ab and whatever we invent the FL the the coat that you can actually wear and still look smart and go riding or walk in the streets without being piled by the mob I mean it’s that sense of what was created what we created which is why the attack on history is so catastrophically damaging and there’s a final point and here again I want to register disagreement with even people in the room whom I greatly respect and I’m very fond of there is a Tau now that we need some sort of religious revival to pull ourselves back I do not
(51:11) believe this I believe and I want to end on this note please Peter I don’t want anything else I Believe in a Thing Called historical Transcendence I believe and I tried to communicate it in much of my television that standing in a building in the presence of our ancestors and their achievement is as great as kneeling down and invoking a God who may or may not exist there’s an extraordinary passage in a man who did believe in God in the little Gidding one of the four quartets of TS Elliot in which he talks about
(51:55) this experience of transcendence of hearing the feet that walk before the rustle of the clothes that have moved here before the echo of the ideas and of the hopes and the fears and the achievements we need to listen ourselves and we need to be able to communicate it thank you thank you [Applause] [Applause] hello if you’re enjoying the new culture Forum Channel and you believe in our mission may I invite you to join our membership scheme at the link below or on our website new culture forum.
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Conclusion

As always, Davide Starkey explains the damage that has been done to this country by Labour, which began with Tony Blair, and if as expected, we have another term of Labour in office, they will invariably sink this country in to social and political oblivion.

We must fight against the culture of the victim, the mindset of population replacement, multiculturalism and notion that we should somehow be ashamed of our country.