‘We’ve been living under a uniparty for decades’

Populism continues to surge in post-Brexit Britain. The traditional Labour-Tory duopoly is haemorrhaging support, while Reform UK is now topping the polls. There seems little doubt that the party-political establishment is crumbling in the face of an increasingly furious populace.

Historian and broadcaster David Starkey recently joined Brendan O’Neill on his podcast to discuss the state of British politics, the explosion of popular anger and what might happen next. You can watch the full conversation here.

Brendan O’Neill: We’ve witnessed an extraordinary frustration with our political leadership in recent years. Why is there still such reluctance among the chattering classes to openly address the issues the public is asking them to address?

David Starkey: There has been an astonishing Americanisation of our politics. People think increasingly of the right and the new right as following Trump, but the left has also blindly followed Democrat America. All of these new ideas – critical race theory, trans, the notion that ‘we are a nation of immigrants’ – are American imports. The great problem is that you cannot easily transpose them on to the wildly different structure of Britain: an extraordinarily stable, subtle and supple state of a thousand years old. We have a political structure that goes back to Magna Carta, which remained entirely unbroken until 1997, when we essentially witnessed a slow-burn revolution.

Unfortunately, the ways in which our elites behave today is much like the elites of the latter days of the Soviet Union. It is an entire culture based on lying. Lying about output, about finance, about freedom. And these are lies that people build their worldviews on and live their lives by. TS Eliot rightly said that ‘man cannot bear very much reality’. That is why the truth has become so hard to admit.

If you govern by shutting people up rather than debating problems openly, those problems eventually grow to become feverish. Suppression is the equivalent of shoving ice packs on people – you never deal with the actual issue.

O’Neill: Do you think people feel British democracy has failed them?

David Starkey: Please let’s not be so final. Let’s not say ‘failed’. I desperately hope we’re not in the past tense. I’m certainly devoting what’s left of my life to trying to make sure that is not the case. It is, however, easy to understand why people feel it is. Everything we are talking about is essentially the property of the left. It came from Democrat America via the infatuations of the Labour Party. But the real catastrophe began 2010, when a coalition dominated by the Conservatives – which prefaced 14 years of Conservative government – did absolutely nothing to push back on it.

It’s not that all progress should be resisted. But super-intelligent conservatives like Benjamin Disraeli understood how you respond to it – that you’ve got to have a notion of what is good change and what is bad change. His masterly formula was to only accept change when it falls broadly within the bounds of your country’s tradition.

When Tony Blair professed – I think correctly – that he would adhere to Thatcherite economics, most on the right were completely blind to the fact that he was carrying out this gigantic double change, both of the constitution and, increasingly, the population.

The Tories failed to see that. They continue to spew things about economic doctrine, Treasury doctrine, and this idea that immigration is ‘good for the economy’, etc. The fact that David Cameron, a supposed conservative, professed his greatest achievement was gay marriage was absolute insanity. At the risk of sounding like a conspiracy theorist, Britons have effectively been living under a uniparty since John Major. It’s no wonder people are so furious.

The so-called magnificent victory of Starmer was, of course, nothing of the sort. Only two-thirds of the people voted, and only a third of those voted for Starmer – which effectively means he got a sweeping majority on the basis of one fifth of the electorate. It was a vote against the Conservatives. But while it took the Conservatives 14 years to get themselves in that position, it has taken Labour just 12 months. That’s why we’ve seen Reform UK soaring in the opinion polls – not because people particularly trust Nigel Farage, or because they’re persuaded by the absurd confusion of his party, but because it’s not the other two.

O’Neill: What is the future of wokeness?

Starkey: I think the important thing to recognise is that, on the one hand, it is lunacy. We all know the sheer ineffable silliness of transgender is completely mad – you’ve only got to look at them. These are people who are seriously ill. If a man dresses up like Napoleon and claims to be him, we all go, ‘There, there’ and put him in hospital. But if a man dresses up like a woman and claims to be one, what do we do? We make it a protected characteristic. This is the catastrophe of the Equality Act, which allowed gender to be considered a ‘social construct’. It’s what set up the extraordinary war that we’ve seen recently in the Supreme Court.

You cannot fight culture with more culture – but you can fight it with law. Those of us on the right must ensure that the next government, whatever shape it may take, is prepared wholly to alter the legal basis of the Blairite state. To roll back the power of those elites who have lied to us about transgenderism, about multiculturalism and globalism.

The reason these ideas are so powerful, and why it’s been so difficult to do anything about them, is because they are so deeply entrenched. They’re entrenched within the universities, whose growth they foster, and they’re entrenched, above all, in our legal system. We can change these things. But we can only change it if the right here is as well-prepared as Trump was for his second term – or, I would argue, better.

David Starkey was talking to Brendan O’Neill. Watch the full conversation below: