"Brexit started a revolution - that's why they want to reverse it" | David Starkey Talks

Added: 2026-05-23

[00:00:07]Well, everybody, welcome to this the final session of this conference. Uh, thank you very much to the Freedom Association for putting it on. I always um I always assumed the Freedom Association operated on a very tight and limited budget, but as I arrived, I was serenated with both Beth Hovind and the Beatles. This is I didn't know it stretched that far. Let me just tell you what's going to happen. This is the final session and a good number of people will be wanting some fresh air and a perhaps a glass of wine or a pint of beer. Uh but you're in for a treat.

[00:00:43]I'm going to ask uh the gentleman on my right uh a few questions about what Brexit means for his thinking and his plan. Uh I'll do about 20 minutes of that. I might even try and take one or two questions from the floor if you have them. So, please give a very warm welcome to I think the greatest conservative public intellectual in Britain today, David Starky.

[00:01:14]Uh so David, you you and I have spent many happy months touring the country uh evangelizing what's uh become known as the Starky thesis which uh and correct me if I oversimplify here is essentially to get anything properly working in Britain we're going to have to if Britain was a computer switch it off and switch it on again and reset its settings to let's say 1995 there or thereabouts. But to be clear, making sure the EU app is not on the computer and remains removed. We've heard in the last panel and I know a great deal of the debate um around Brexit as we approach the 10th anniversary of the referendum has been opportunities have not been seized. You know, we, as I put it in a media interview recently, the Brexit vote was to uh throw off our shackles and our chains, but we then decided to continue to hang out in the dungeon even though we' thrown these off. Now, your constitutional proposition of resetting things. Was Brexit a pre-erequisite for that? If we were speaking today as a member of the European Union, would your idea of resetting uh our domestic constitutional coordinates just simply not get off the ground, not get off the runway, not even be on the runway.

[00:02:42]>> I think if we'd remained in the EU, uh the argument would have been extremely difficult to put. Um and let me now just try and step back and connect what we've been hearing now with the question that you've just asked.

[00:02:58]If you like the move, the referendum, the uh Brexit was essentially a moment that divides our politics absolutely into two. We can actually see this. It was a moment of a great rebellion against a peculiar deformationation of our politics. It took the form of let's leave the European Union. But I think virtually everything that people were rebelling against apart from the issue of sovereignty was at home. Listening to the panel just now on the problems with finance, on the problems with regulation, on the problems with energy, these were all subjects of domestic legislation. All of them were essentially part of the new world. And Blair actually uses this the the cool Britannia, the new country that is deliberately created from 1997 onwards.

[00:03:55]I think it's important again that were quite clear what we mean by deliberately. Blair was toying with a straightforward rather simple-minded Ratneresque um modernization. We wanted all modern singing dancing. He didn't greatly understand the various elements. If for example you look in his memoirs about the uh human rights and the human rights act you will find barely a sentence. If you look in Andrew Romsley's wonderful account uh of the go of of the Blair years the the first Blair government you find five words on the human rights act which are presented simply as part of the process of dishing the lib demss absolutely no interest but there were people behind him who fully understood it and the broad agenda was a twofold one it was essentially to remake Britain like newly fashioned European state, preferably one that was newly infranchised from the Soviet Union and had barely known freedom before. That was the essential nature of the agenda and it consisted of very typical elements of the European project.

[00:05:12]remember from its very beginning. If you go back to the first co, if you go back to the signing actually of the uh prefiguration of of the of the uh coal and steel, the the iron and coal pact, it was so secret that even the press conference, nobody turned up the the the the French foreign minister didn't even in inform his own premier. And this extraordinary anti-democratic secrecy was the heart bizarrely of the Blair project. It was to remove all forms of real power from anybody directly answerable to the British people. In other words, our traditional parliamentary structure of parliamentary sovereignty itself transformed by mass democracy in the later 19th and the early 20th century. and to send it in two very typically European directions to panels of experts, the quangos on the one side and to judges on the other.

[00:06:12]Exactly the European model. And the problem is we can only break it if we do it at home. Leaving Europe gave us the opportunity to do this, but it's an opportunity we, as the panel has been illustrating, we have sidulously refused to take up. That's the overall position.

[00:06:31]The chains were domestic.

[00:06:34]They have to be broken by domestic politics. And until they are, leaving the European Union makes in practice no difference whatever.

[00:06:43]>> Okay. So, >> as we've just heard, >> um, Jacob Ree Moog, who you pop up with quite a bit on YouTube, takes the view that, um, again summarizing, I hope I'm not misrepresenting him, that uh, Blairism and the constitutional changes whilst he opposes them, Jacob says they sort of make a certain sense if you're a member of the European Union.

[00:07:07]>> I would agree. And what's sort of happened since our departure, the analogy that Jacob uses is we we used to have leads plugged into sockets and we've just pulled them out of the sockets and we've just left with a lot of leads. So no part of our governmental system properly sort of fits together and works. If you're going to be in the EU and sort of accept all of their, I don't know, regulations about pesticides, you presumably need somebody sitting in the pesticides directorate at the Environment Agency transcribing them and making sure they're enforced. Once you've left the EU, you've just got these leads dangling around, haven't you? Without any sort of aren't plugged in to any central command. Now, I'm delighted we unplugged ourselves, but are you what's your explanation as to why no government post the referendum result or postrexit has started to say, "Well, actually, we're going to plug them into good old-fashioned threepronged UK sockets rather than the two-pronged European ones. This is how we're going to stitch it all back together." and even those who perhaps haven't made it to office um uh the Reform Party or previously the Brexit Party weren't obviously articulating that plan in let's say 2017 2018 2019 we we've spent a lot of time you and I talking about the failure of the Conservatives over 14 years 14 years in office and in no way was the country made more conservative over that time but why wasn't it even rem why why did no one turn their attention to necessary constitutional repair over that time >> because to be blunt the overwhelming majority of the political elite of the quangocracy of the judiciary believe in it. So we've we've got to understand this that this is why we're having such a battle. This is why fundamentally there was such huge resistance to to implementing the referendum. It's partly because of the theological Dan Daniel's absolutely right the theological or the or or the kind of toemic nature of being in the European Union. But it is because we because Blair so completely um metastasized our government. What we've really got to understand just how gigantic the changes from 1997 onwards were. you superimposed on our old constitution a set of completely alien structures that have reproduced themselves. It's particularly striking in law uh the human rights law, international law. I mean the absurdity of the chaos would have been completely unthinkable.

[00:09:52]It is mad even now. But the the total inversion of legal values that's taken place. So I think we always our problem has been at home. The reason that we did not benefit from the decision to leave the EU was that most of the elites didn't want to leave the EU. There's no there was no passion. There was no intelligence. And also, I think there's been an astonishing general failure of the elites, even the most intelligent of them, to understand what's gone wrong.

[00:10:23]Your analogy of things unplugged is only half the story. Much of the time unfortunately the machinery is working incredibly well and what it does each bit fights all the other bits. So, you know, you want to build uh HS2. Uh along comes English Nature, led of course by a fanatic Tony Juniper. Most of these organizations are led by fanatics who decrees there are bats in danger and we spend million pounds on a bat tunnel.

[00:10:54]English Nature looking at the prospect of seismill and whatever decrees that fish are at risk whereupon we spend 600 millions on a fish disco in other words.

[00:11:05]And then a a judge comes along and determines by the extraordinary uh writing of the of the equality act that wages really are not to be set by the market. Do we all understand this is the law? Lee Day, that notorious firm of solicitors, boasted after the success of its action against Next, that the argument that a wage is set by the market is of no legal value whatever.

[00:11:37]our laws as a very much refle reflecting the the Catholic tradition the the the the Leo I 13th Catholic tradition uh of the late 19th century incorporate essentially a Marxist labor theory of value we and we we therefore have a governmental system that doesn't just not do anything that fights itself. Um and again but but what most strikes me is the failure of even intelligent politicians to understand this. The most interesting develop there have been two very interesting developments. Let's now give a little bit of positivity after all the negative. Um there have been two very interesting developments. the weekend before last in his normally I think rather boring Sunday Times column Rishi Sunnak who I gently remind you was once prime minister uh wrote the wrote this extraordinary column >> in which he said I now know why I couldn't get Rwanda through gosh he'd wakened up to the fact that the judges stopped him that there was an entire machinery not simply of the judges but of NGO OS all paid for like the refugee council all paid for by you and me who are working actively to stop government policy. In other words, you see Rishi nudging into the Starky thesis, nudging into the idea that really government has gone systemically wrong. I don't know whether any of you, again, let's just again to cheer everybody up. um uh that semi mororibund organization the conservative party slowly stirred to life after the king's speech and you may have noticed it published an alternative king speech has anybody read it >> yes >> good if you read it you will see in the f in the so-called forward they suddenly say gosh until we change our structures of law regulation the organization of government we and do nothing. So there's a slow slow awakening, but God is it slow.

[00:13:50]>> So let let's turn to what could be done and especially with your upbeat idea that uh it's not just that something must be done. It might be that there is an appetite for something to be done.

[00:14:02]Yeah, I mean what one of the one of the things I get sick of hearing uh and you now hear it all the time from senior Labor politicians, but when the conservatives were in office, you heard it consistently from conservative politicians is they will say as if it's a very wise observation, it's very difficult to govern. It's very difficult. People don't understand, you know, Nigel Farage has got no concept of how difficult it is to govern. And uh I mean I think that actually somewhere in their soul they're speaking to the complete dysfunctionality of our government system. I mean I'm not saying it's a breeze to be prime minister or minister but it shouldn't be fundamentally difficult to go in and say right we've worked out this plan. This is this plan. Will you people please help me implement it? Um so we've got sort of dysfunction and an acceptance almost of this extraordinary difficulty.

[00:14:55]You know nobody realize how hard it is.

[00:14:57]I mean I saw the the I newspaper today the headline uh not necessarily usually sympathetic to our way of thinking but the headline today was that uh HS2 has cost uh slightly more than the total cost of the Arteimus missions. So so you know and America has therefore spent a hundred billion going to the moon and we've spent 100 billion going to Birmingham. I mean I mean >> except we haven't reached birth. They reached they reached the moon for God's sake.

[00:15:27]>> I mean if that's not a comparative sign of dysfunction.

[00:15:30]>> It is a it is absolutely true.

[00:15:32]>> So what what if you like needs to be done if we've got folk like Sunnak who would not you know wouldn't automatically be a um you know of the Starky tribe.

[00:15:44]>> Yeah.

[00:15:45]>> What what's to be done? How can this be garnered this disillusion or this scales falling from their eyes into a program that could be put in place for a government that was sympathetic to this rather than sympathetic to >> Well, let me just let me just give you an illustration and remind me who succeeded as cabinet secretary after Robin Butler. Anyway, he wrote he writes a memorandum a very very important memorandum in 2002 in which he says the following. He re he he's looking at the extraordinarily rapid sp pace of constitutional change and he uses a phrase that I'm going to steal. We carry out constitutional change as it were under anesthetic and only waken up years later to discover what's happened. It's a wonderful phrase. But he did something else. He looked back over the previous years and particularly the 18 years of conservative government and he said it was his proudest boast as a civil servant that in 1997 after having worked very effectively for Thatcher. They were then immediately capable of reversing direction and working for Blair. You could not say that now that what what is fascinating is looking at the situation we're in now karma is the absolute quintessence of the Blairite structure if you put all the reforms that Blair carried out into an old-fashioned limbic or a whiskey still and you distilled it to the final concentrated stinking liquid that is K star and he still he still cannot run the machine that he is the quintessence of. That was the whole point of of of of of the business at the beginning with the appointment of Sue Gray. They thought government was self-functioning and then they discover that it's not.

[00:17:42]And you can even see people like Kia Starmer having this slow awakening that we've got to go back to the position that the civil service found itself and the whole machinery of government found itself in in 1997 that it could reverse direction. It could do new things. But remember uh and this I think is the key thing to understand particularly as the evil genius of Gordon Brown behind so much of this. It was designed to stop the Blairite structure ever being changed. It was designed to render it completely impervious to any form of democratic reversal. And by God, it succeeded. But it succeeded at the price of absolute stasis of rendering our government utterly fundamentally nonfunctioning.

[00:18:33]So until there is a full understanding of that diagnosis that the main constitutional elements again if you use the word constitution you can see people's eyes glazing over because they think constitutions just bits of paper they're not they are they they're not the equivalent of recipe book they're the equivalent of DNA and we we we carried out an editing of our DN D D D D D D D D D D D D D D D D D D D D D from 1997 onwards. and it simply stopped working. So you've got to have that clear understanding of what's happened and the determination to change it. It is exact again with a little note of hope. It is exactly what happened in the 1970s. In 1974 you had Keith Joseph producing that extraordinary um um self-acusing phrase. I had called myself a conservative. I hadn't been a conservative. I'd been a member of a conservative government that had done nothing conservative. And the realization you had to have a radical change of direction and the work of your organization, the IEA, uh the uh the the center for policy studies and so on uh culminating in Margaret Thatcher. But that was an enterprise of realizing that the heart of government had gone wrong for 40 or 50 years and it had gone wrong because the conservatives had followed in the steps of labor. You know there was a uni party then it was called boscalism now it's called the uni party and until there is that realization and I see stirrings of it as I said in sunnike I see stirrings in the conservative party the flame is fitful in reform it's fully understood in restore um but one can't be too hopeful I mean we do our best to propagate it >> so let's this might be uh veering a bit into the area of sort of tactics rather than the philosophy of it. David, but let's imagine the scenario where the penny has dropped >> uh to uh the parties on the right and center.

[00:20:52]>> Uh a mandate is given in a general election. You can speculate about whether it's some three-way coalition or an outright reform majority or whatever.

[00:21:02]Obviously, if reformer are a very big part of that, they won't have had the benefit that Keith Joseph had of four years in government seeing what went wrong. They will just be starting at 9:00 in the morning having, you know, still finding their way around Whiteall.

[00:21:18]What's to be done first? Does it need to be very clear there's a mandate for this? And then do you tackle things in some sort of sequence? You know, mission one is to get rid of the Human Rights Act and pull out of the ECR. And when we've done that, by the autumn, we'll turn our attention to some of these quangos, and then after that, we'll turn our attention to the civil service. or do you go in a bit like Trump appeared to have done in his second term in what's called I believe it's a basketball term flooding the zone that you throw so many uh balls in that um and not expecting to score from all of them but so many that the opposition that I don't take here to be political I take it to be a state bureaucratic opposition will just you know not be able to keep up they won't be able to take you on one battle at a time so is all guns blazing or is it incredibly detailed, delicate patient surgery?

[00:22:18]>> I think it's all guns blazing. The essential problem is that the structure although as I've emphasized it was casual in the extreme there were brains behind it particularly as great lawyer and he was a great lawyer Tom Bingham but with an extraordinarily exaggerated view of the role of the judge. He saw the judge as the equivalent really uh of uh the the the the Platonic governor. He he he really saw it the the Platonic philosopher king. And he he and his like knit together a self-reinforcing structure.

[00:22:55]And for example, if we take you actually offered the the the the notion that you begin at the beginning by trying to repeal the human rights act, the two things will happen. I would predict that would immediately be struck down by the Supreme Court as unconstitutional.

[00:23:14]The second thing that would happen is even if you repeal the act, it wouldn't make a blind bit of difference because the judges have already fully aware because it's highly contentious that this is a possibility and they have deliberately in about half a dozen cases embodied all the principles of the uh European Convention on Human Rights into common law. So repealing the act would make very little difference in practice >> because it's there as common law or president now >> because it's now precedent and it's even more than that the judgments themselves have been draped in this is a judgment of murder this this kind of thing. So my view is that what we have to do is to have I call it the great repeal. I think it would be modeled on two things and again ladies and gentlemen I think we need to recognize where we stand in our history. I was invited to comment on this as a historian. We are at a moment of national crisis which I think is greater than either of the world wars. I think it's comparable only to 1660 and to 16889.

[00:24:26]I think the president of the glorious revolution and the bill of rights is basic which I don't mean an English bill of rights. I mean the the kind of programmatic recital of what's gone wrong with government and the determination to reverse it which which which which the Bill of Rights and by the way direct attack on judges including imprisoning the chief justice.

[00:24:48]I have her in my sights and she would she would be chained up to Brenda Hail in eternity you know but but but but but but there we are. What but what what we need to do is to have a highly ambitious medieval style statute. I'd like to call it the great statute of Westminster which would repeal the ECR. It would uh it would restore the office of L chancellor. It would remove uh the it would send the Supreme Court with its gowns firmly between its legs back to the House of Lords. um uh it would repeal the equality act and crag the constitutional reform and governance act which is the thing that gives the civil service an independent legal status catastrophic. Um so Humphrey now is a separate estate of the realm rather than simply a dependence of the government actually in power. So it must do all of that and it must do it at once and they must be prepared as people were again in those other great moments of constitutional crisis. the 191011 struggle over the budget and the which becomes the parliament act 1832 the great reform act they will have to be prepared with a mass creation of beers and so on all of that is likely to happen but unless it's done at one fell swoop it will not happen so that's definitely flooding the zone then you try to do everything at once right I mean the um and where Do you see the points of biggest resistance? And I wonder here whether we can start to they're not exactly parallel or analogous, but to learn some of the lessons about the push back to the 2016 referendum result where you know sort of rather naively uh perhaps um but touchingly the Brexiteers kind of followed their tent. you know, we the the Brexit campaign didn't necessarily didn't have an agreement on what form Brexit should take. It was just that Brexit must happen. You know, united people from right and left. Um uh and so the the tent was folded and there's just sort of let's sit back and you know, presumably at some point the government will honor this and it was sort of a bit like getting drunk halfway through a revolution, right? Um and uh the the other side had not given up. No, it was a bit like going on holiday halfway through a better still. Better still. So, we went on holiday halfway through a rebel and the other side they did. They did >> the defeated side did not concede uh defeat. So, so what what what are the lessons that we learned from and and where do we expect the push back? You know, who who needs to be put back in their box first? Is it going to be a thousand lawsuits suddenly moved against the government? Is it going to be uh Sir Humphrey Applebee and the civil service just saying very interesting minister I'll get back to you in four months time procrastinating for sake of argument?

[00:27:51]Will it be the House of Lords? Uh is there a problem that the British public might not understand what the hell's going on who sort of say, "Well, I've just voted this election to get rid of this useless Labor government because my taxes are too high and it's very difficult to find a job and I'm badly in debt and the economy waste your time.

[00:28:10]Why are you trying to bring back a man in buckled shoes and tights as a top priority to re re do you see the enemy emerging from first and how do we tackle those different groups?

[00:28:22]>> I think the essential thing is and again I worry desperately that this is not happening uh despite our little our very little endeavors are evangelizing there needs to be a major campaign of public education and explanation. I think again one of the ways we've gone terribly wrong politically is we do not take the British people seriously. There is essentially the assumption they are stupid and and that is deliberately foisted on us by our governors and I think it is wrong. I think if things are explained clearly and forcefully and eloquently people understand and we've got we have to embody that courage in our own behavior in our own actions. I think we must be prepared for very general resistance but I think it may be soft. I mean look at that. I think it may be softened. Uh my guess is that before we get to the stage of the kind of government we're talking about we are going to go through a series of equivalent crises to the 1970s and probably on a bigger scale. In other words, financial crisis. I would see the the the the great likelihood of major strikes by uh the public sector unions including the NHS and so on. I think we're going to go through a few very very dreadful years and that is a wonderful softening up process there that in a sense let me begin let me end this section by telling you a terrible story.

[00:29:57]my visit to Dresdon many years ago quite shortly after reunification and I found myself sitting at the dinner inevitably placed in the riverboat so I had the view of the then ruined Franka and opposite a very distinguished German professor I knew what was going to come of course Dr. Starky, do you know what you are looking at? Yes, I do. Do you know who did it? Yes, I do. Bomber Harris, those days I was at LSC and his statue is just by St. Clemens and whatevers. Yes, I do.

[00:30:33]He then looked at me very hard and said, "What I am going to say now will I'll stop doing a German. What I'm going to what what I am going to say now will surprise you." I was a boy. He was five at the time. He'd been born in 40 40 39 I suppose. I was a boy. We were fortunate. We were on the edge of the town. We saw the ter obviously experienced the terrible firestorm. We were able to escape. Do you know what I do every morning? He said, "I give thanks for Bomber Harris." He said, "If the German cities had not been destroyed, we would never have accepted defeat." that it was that disintegration of the civil structure that enabled Germany to be reconstructed in many ways very very quickly out of the abomination of the Nazi regime. I fear we may need something like that to demolish this poisonous structure.

[00:31:34]>> My very final question to you then I'll hand over to David to close the conference. Uh there's a lot of hyperbole in politics that the next election, the next week, the next day, the next hurdle is the tallest, the biggest, the most important unlike, you know, anything we've ever seen before.

[00:31:53]>> Do you think we are in the last chance saloon pretty much now? You mentioned you you likened, you know, Blair's changes to actually changing our DNA. I mean, that sounds like something that's pretty difficult to um take back. Uh do you think there is a time limit on this that if you like if we don't get this right at the time of the next election, let's say the default is still 2029, it's gone forever. We've passed a tipping point. Or is this actually potentially a plan that could be rolled out at any time 20 the 2047 general election by which time you know the the electoral will be even more disillusioned. Or is there something about this time window the next 2 or 3 years that it's you feel that if we don't get it right now that chance that hope will just slip through our fingers forever? I mean I really do take the pessimistic view uh for the simple reason of course that this terrible status of government combined with the deliberate propagation of malevolent ideas is having the most terrible disintegrative consequences for our society not simply economically but socially uh in terms of our understanding of ourselves our view of ourselves as a nation and so on. I think that we are one hesitates to use a word like last chance saloon but we're very nearly there and bits survive you know the again everybody thinks that the you know the fall of Rome meant suddenly it all snuffed out it didn't um people uh people bit like me like many of the people in this room continued to leave perfectly civilized lives you you know you negotiated a deal with the local barbarians um and Things continued pretty much as normal, but they just began to run down a bit and the walls fell down and they didn't get repaired and the the the aqueducts stop working and disease begins to build up and the currency goes from bad, you know, um that phrase of Adam Smith, there is a lot of ruin in a nation.

[00:34:06]>> David, thank you so much. one one kind of the cause that we've been banging this drum about now for some time and time is short. We're going to have to get this right in the next two or three years. But as you said earlier in your remarks, I think um some comforting signs that the penny is dropping and not just with our normal fellow travelers but perhaps across a wider spectrum that gives me uh a lot of hope that the penny will finally drop. Even at times K star do you remember when he accused the civil service of the the the warm bath of of of com comfort and whatever immediately of course to retract it. Oh I never I never read it before I said it but but in his usual fashion. Yeah, I mean right we we got K star Richie Sunnak at some point I don't want to be in such a big tent I think but we need to widen it but uh much done much left to do as Peter Mandles was saying ladies and gentlemen David Starky