The Old Red Lion with Professor David Betz

[00:00:00] Tam McDonald here, your host for Timetable London, the podcast crafted by lovers of London for lovers of London. We recorded the following episode with David Betz, Professor of War Studies at King's College London. This is a little while back now. The co-host Jeff and I and our producer Chris were somewhat skeptical about some of David's more downbeat theories. Take this one, for example, the revolution in military affairs.

[00:00:26] This was a big idea back in the 1990s and held that wars for the wealthy and technologically proficient societies of the West would be fast. They'd be cheap and they'd be easy on account of their technological advantages over less technologically capable nations. David suggested that this was a rather over-optimistic view, to which the rest of us raised a few eyebrows. But then the Iran war broke out. So listen carefully, folks. This guy knows what he's talking about.

[00:00:56] Even if he is wrong about London. Or is he? Have a listen. See what you think. Hello and welcome to another episode of Timetable London, the podcast crafted by lovers of London for lovers of London. I'm Tam McDonald, co-founder of Cradle of English and co-host as ever with the wonderfully erudite Dr. Jeff Browell of King's College London.

[00:01:25] Today we are coming to you from the Cromwell Bar in the Old Red Lion Pub in Holborn, established in the 16th century and rebuilt in classic Victorian style in 1899. The inspiration teases the connection with our guest today. How so? How so?

[00:01:43] Well, the story goes that sometime after the end of England's civil war and the restoration in 1660, King Charles II had the bodies of Oliver Cromwell and his fellow regicides, John Bradshaw and Henry Ireton, exhumed from Westminster Abbey and brought here to rest in the pub cellars before they were posthumously executed in nearby Red Lion Square. Posthumously executed. There's an idea.

[00:02:11] Anyway, nearby Red Lion Square, which by some accounts is where Cromwell might actually be buried. So not far from where we're actually sitting now. All of which makes it fitting that we should have come to the Old Red Lion to meet our special guest of the day, something himself of an expert on civil wars and what causes them. So, Geoff, assuming that our listeners haven't been overcome with the hideous imaginings induced by the notion of posthumous executions, would you like to introduce our guest?

[00:02:41] Yes, thank you, Tam. Our guest today is Professor David Betts of King's College London, Professor of War Studies. Welcome. Thank you very much. Glad to be here. I want to say, among many things, you're an expert on civil war. And I suppose one starts with Cicero as being a great, and obviously a victim of civil war, as well as a writer about what drew you to the study of civil war. Coincidence, really. I never planned anything.

[00:03:08] I've always had a morbid, lifelong fascination with war since childhood, and I was probably headed towards war studies either as a student or professor. And actually, I still consider myself to be a student. But essentially how it happened was this.

[00:03:28] I was hired by King's College London to teach a course on what was then called the revolution, or still called the revolution in military affairs,

[00:03:39] which is a big idea of the 1990s that wars for the West as technologically proficient, wealthy societies were going to be fast, easy, and cheap on account of our ability to leverage technological advantage over less wealthy, less technologically capable societies.

[00:04:04] And this was just about the time that the Iraq war broke out. And essentially as a kind of personal disposition that is translated into a scholarly habit, I'm a consensus-seeking missile. I have the habit of wanting, of listening to people.

[00:04:33] And when I sense that there is some consensus occurring, I feel a desperate urgency to get in there and blow it up. Which isn't always correct, frankly, but often is.

[00:04:47] And so I got interested in insurgency more precisely because if you're asking why the West was not going to get an era of fast, easy, and cheap wars, the answer, quite obviously, from the perspective of 2025, is insurgency. So I really became an expert in insurgency and counterinsurgency.

[00:05:15] Insurgency is a variant of civil war. And for the first, I would say, eight or ten years that I was working on insurgency, I didn't really think much about civil war.

[00:05:30] It was only until really the crunch point was probably the Brexit drama of 2016, and specifically the parliamentary shenanigans which followed after 2016, where I felt that what was occurring in Britain was a systematic, elite-driven project of slaughtering their own legitimacy.

[00:06:00] When faced with essentially a pretty obvious question on a matter of significant public interest in which they had received a clear instruction, it was pretty clear that the elite, which, let's say, was 90% opposed to Brexit, sought desperately to subvert that decision.

[00:06:28] And I thought, well, this is really dangerous for a government to do. So do you think of Brexit as an insurgency, the Brexit vote? I mean, we're still debating what Brexit, in fact, was about. Yeah.

[00:06:42] But it's pretty clear, I think, to most people that it was a deeply symbolic protest vote on the part of the population, which, a fraction of which did deeply care about the European Union, either being in it or getting out of it.

[00:07:03] But I think the primary animation of a lot of voters was, in fact, an opportunity to take a shot at our power elite, which they felt had abandoned them in a range of ways.

[00:07:22] Including its involvement in the whole European project, which was essentially this undemocratic and unasked for sharing of national sovereignty.

[00:07:35] Which lots of people didn't agree with, or didn't think that it was proper for merely elected governments, which, of course, pass every four years, to dispense with the national patrimony so easily.

[00:07:56] And they wanted to strike back at that, which is why take back control was so powerful as a piece of rhetoric. I mean, I always felt that if one were to analyse the reasons why people voted to leave, the European Union wouldn't have been in top place. It was an opportunity, a once-and-a-generational opportunity for a referendum for them to stick two fingers up at the elite. Give them a bloody nose.

[00:08:22] And the vote was highest in those areas where there'd been three generations of unemployed people. Really, they'd never recovered from the 70s and 80s. Three generations of people who had no... And so it was their chance to really lash out. And it was a scream in the dark, as it were, against all this. But another thing I did notice after that was the polarisation. After 2015, 16, 17, the polarisation was extreme, has been extreme.

[00:08:52] For and against. And it wasn't necessarily rational, for and against. It was... There was a degree of irrationality about it. And also, something else has happened as well, which you see in the United States. Yeah. With the whole Trump phenomenon. And the other thing that was, I think, is that people... Previously, I mean, on certain issues like abortion and so on, which are immensely controversial, it's slightly different. But in general terms, people could still be friends.

[00:09:21] They could still be related to one another. They could still work with one another as colleagues and hold opposing political views. But people now, either for or against, were demonised as being not only holding a different view or holding a different set of opinions, but in some senses being morally less valuable as people. And that's a middle stage between just disagreeing with somebody and then going for a pint with them, through to the opposite end of the spectrum, which is for dehumanisation,

[00:09:49] which is necessary for to actually go out and kill people in the civil scenario. And we're sort of 60% along that dial, as it were. A country is not permanent. A country is a collection of things. The most important one being a sense of its own identity.

[00:10:12] And when a country loses its identity and loses its will to live, essentially, then it can disappear. What I'm trying to say is that it impressed me at a fairly young age, before I had finished my university education and gone on to an academic career path,

[00:10:35] of the potential for national suicide through bad luck or through malice or bad government, bad decisions. But do you think civil war occurs before suicide? Or is it too late? Because there are steps towards a civil war, aren't there? Yes. Little things that happen. You can look back and say that was a step towards... It's a good question.

[00:11:04] Civil war should presumably occur before final dissolution of the country to try and stop it happening. Well, countries can survive civil wars. Yeah, well, this one did. Yeah. And America did, didn't it? Yeah. And I suppose it's a spectrum as well, isn't it? I mean, we have the last hundred years in the UK up until relatively recently has been a century of great stability since the mid-Victorian period. But before then, there was a great deal of tumult. I mean, the Gordon riots in, what, 1780?

[00:11:34] It was about five, six hundred people died in not far from where we're sitting today. Right up the street, yeah. Which were anti-papist riots. They were anti-Roman Catholic riots. And I suppose going back, you have the 45, the 1745 and the Jacobite Rebellion, which is a kind of dynastic conflict. You know, the conflicts of the 15th century were dynastic. Hi, this is Tam MacDonald, your host.

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[00:12:20] I suppose one of the things with Britain is people, other than a relatively small community of veterans, is actually unfamiliar with war in a way that wasn't true of certainly 20th century generations. Maybe 19th century, because unless one fought in Crimea or the conflicts at the beginning of the 19th century, land warfare, not naval, putting that to one side, was relatively unfamiliar to most people, I suppose. Yeah.

[00:12:47] But in the 20th century, it was the stock of everybody's lives. Everybody either had fought in a war, had a relative who had fought in a war and died in wars. It was part and parcel of everyone's lives. I remember my father was in the war, and all my relatives were, and they all knew how to take a gun apart and put it back together again, and they knew how to do these sorts of things.

[00:13:12] So all stuff that is now completely, bizarrely unfamiliar to our modern audiences. So it's the very juxtaposition between the unfamiliarity of war, other than through smartphones and CNN and the BBC, and the reality, the potential reality of civil war, that makes it all the more jarring and potentially troublesome.

[00:13:40] Yeah, I think that's absolutely true. It's true. We're all of an approximate age, I think. And looking at it the way that you've just observed, one can't help but remark that it's a very lucky generation that has had almost a complete adult life without experiencing war

[00:14:10] in the way that other generations had done very, very directly, and which it seems on current trajectory very likely that the younger people around us will live with. They will live with directly, and they will live with the consequences for much longer than we shall.

[00:14:36] But are they much more cosseted now than we were? You know, they're all used to benefits and having the government do everything for them, and they're not ready for war in a way that perhaps those of us who had relatives who'd been through the war and could talk about it... There speaketh the voice of the shires. Indeed. Indeed. Indeed. Indeed. Indeed.

[00:15:03] But it just seems to me that the modern generations are very cosseted in that sense, technologically cosseted and cosseted by government, which previous generations weren't. Yeah, I think that's true. It feels like a valid statement to me.

[00:15:26] The younger generation has grown up with the expectations that they've inherited from the likes of you and I, which is that you will have a long and prosperous life under conditions in which this war thing will exist, but it's going to affect people in places distant from you.

[00:15:50] And you may participate in a voluntary capacity if you're the sort of person who feels the urge to put on a uniform and join the military profession, but you won't be compelled by circumstance into that role.

[00:16:10] And so those are expectations that we've built and passed on to younger people. But it feels very unlikely, increasingly unlikely, that those are valid expectations, that they will be realized.

[00:16:31] And so, yes, some people who may be described as cosseted, I know maybe it's, I probably wouldn't have chosen cosseted, but let's say, have had certain expectations, let's say, and they're likely to receive something very, very different.

[00:16:56] And the adjustment to reality, therefore, is going to be very harsh, I think, very difficult to accomplish. Yeah, interesting. Defending the sanctity of, are there crumpets still for tea in Stens the Clock at 10 to 3? And what comes home to the Shire is the fact that there are a lot of boys that left the Shire to preserve that peace who didn't come back to the Shire. Yeah.

[00:17:27] Yeah. But, I mean, in terms of young people, I suppose, young people tend to grow up a lot later now, and yet they're exposed to the world through the Internet and so on at a much younger age to violence, war, pornography and so on, but in a dissociated sense, and they're not actually out there experiencing it until they're in the late 20s or early 30s, 10 or 15 years after people in the Second World War experienced it when they were 14 or 15 or 16.

[00:17:57] So that comes as a particular shock. Yeah. So what do you see as precipitating the next civil war in England? I would suggest that civil war is a manifestation of some deep illness in the society. And the illness precedes the emergence of the symptom. Yes. Okay?

[00:18:26] The illness may or may not be fatal, but that period which we point to as civil war, beginning here and ending there, usually with some dramatic event and some negotiated conclusion, is a phase in a larger story. You know, so, which is why, for example, if you read a history of the American Civil War,

[00:18:55] nobody starts with the bombardment of Fort Sumter in April of 1861. There's a long and vitally necessary preface to that event that any good historian is going to make sure you understand before they get to the throat slitting and the... The English Civil War. Yeah. There was a big build up to that, wasn't there?

[00:19:19] So, which then, you know, may beg the question, rather raise the question, is it possible that we're already in that? And my inclination is to say that we are already past the tipping point. You know, it's... We haven't yet reached our Fort Sumter moment, but we've already passed the point which historians

[00:19:44] of the future are going to start chapter one of the coming Civil War. Have you any inklings of what the Fort Sumter moment might be? In my case, it's ID cards, compulsory ID cards. I will not have one. So that's going to be my insurgency. Would it be something as small as that that can say, people, we've had enough?

[00:20:12] I mean, we're already seeing riots, aren't we, outside hotels. But is there anything you can see coming down the lane? There's lots of things. But the thing is... And I'm not going to dodge your question. I'll make some suggestions. But I don't think I'm going to be correct. This is in the nature of sparks and tipping points, is that there are lots of people, for example, who might have said of the Arab Spring that you could see that there was going to

[00:20:39] be a period of significant domestic turmoil in the Middle East on account of a range of factors. But, you know, nobody sitting in a pub beforehand could say, well, it's going to be... What's going to kick it off is a completely frustrated... What's going to do? Was it Tunisian fruit seller in a market was going to pour petrol on himself and set himself on fire on account of just being at the end of his rope with respect to the local policing, essentially.

[00:21:10] You don't know what is going to set off. I would suggest that there are a whole bunch of things, you know, there are a whole bunch of potential matches. Digital ID, I suspect, is one for a lot of people. A lot of people recognize this as, A, unnecessary, and B, and more importantly, invidious. And enough people in this country have read Orwell to have kind of pre-programmed a sense of alarm

[00:21:39] about governments who suggest these kinds of things. And moreover, practically everyone in the country is already uncomfortable with the level of erosion of anonymity and kind of basic personal sovereignty that has come with the digitalization of life. So they're near the end of the rope on that. But there are other factors.

[00:22:06] There could be continuing revelations around the sexual torture networks that are running in the country. I think a major step recently was the belated admission on the part of the Metropolitan Police and the London mayor that, in fact, these things have been occurring in London too, and on a gigantic scale, despite having straight up lied about that for many years as though somehow

[00:22:35] this could happen, this was happening other places but not elsewhere. So it could be that. It could be, if you'd ask me while Lucy Connolly was in prison or when Tommy Robinson was in prison, I'd say another potential is that the government creates martyrs. Somebody who is pretty clearly a political prisoner gets killed in prison.

[00:23:06] That's likely to be, that could be very consequential. Any, any, any, all kinds of variations of terror attacks. There's no reason why we couldn't have another Lee Rigby attack tomorrow or the next day. That's pretty obvious. There were threats against the cadet corps recently, not too strongly advertised, but warnings to

[00:23:33] cadets that they should be careful about appearing within their uniforms on the street, on the, on the streets of their towns and villages. Cadet corps is very central to teen life for a lot of people in the country. And these are young, these are, these are children, right? Do you, do you see a difference between London and the rest of the country? In terms of what?

[00:23:57] In terms of London doesn't seem to experience the depressions that the rest of the country do. I mean, London is always thriving. It's always cosmopolitan. It's very different from the rest of England or the rest of Britain because it's its own little country. And I mean, you look around London and the pubs are packed. Everybody's got lots of money. There's plenty of smart cars, smart houses and things.

[00:24:27] Whereas if you tend to go out of London, out of the bubble, it's a very different feel. Do you live in London? I lived in London most of my life. I now live back in the country. Right. That's a very good, very good question. And I also lived, I lived in London for 25 years. I still work in London, but I don't live in London anymore.

[00:24:55] I live considerably north of, north of London. And I would say in answer to your question, yes, it's very different. But also, I think Londoners are quite deluded. When I come into London from outside of London, from the rest of Britain, basically from Britain,

[00:25:18] when I visit London from Britain, put it that way, I don't see in general this vibrancy and wealth and the like that you'd describe. I used to, but I don't now. I feel it's a very changed place. Also, let me go, I have to go back to an episode which occurred many years ago now.

[00:25:48] But I used to teach a course on, called the Evolution of Insurgency, which was fundamentally about revolt, actually. It was slightly misnamed. The premise of that course was that if you wanted to understand counterinsurgency, as many of our students were animated to do because they were coming from the kind of Western paradigm, you had to understand insurgency first. So we would run a big simulation.

[00:26:15] We had a series of exercises which were designed to get students to think like an insurgent. So if you wanted to break this society, if you wanted to flip it, transform it, and you were proceeding from a place of material weakness but high, high political ambition, how would you do it? And in one of these exercises, which occurred just after the Brexit referendum,

[00:26:41] one of the student teams created an insurgent scenario where London seceded from the rest of Britain because the way the students presented the idea was much, as you say, that London feels kind of its own self, right? Separate from the rest. It was a lunatic scenario.

[00:27:04] If London ever dared to think that it was insulated from the thing that has connected every city in human existence ever, which is its hinterland, they're out of their mind. Where is the infrastructure located? Where does your water come from? Where does your power come from? Where does your food come from?

[00:27:28] It doesn't, it's not, all of these things that keep you up and running come from your hinterland. Yeah, but not just those people, but half the younger people who actually come down from the shires to work in London Yeah. Come from those places. Cities are connected, cities are connected into their hinterland, and the relationship is much more equal than might appear at first glance.

[00:27:55] If the rest of Britain wanted to strangle London because London suddenly decided that it was no longer part of that enterprise and wanted to put the middle finger up, this place would go cold and dark and hungry very, very fast. And that situation has not changed.

[00:28:18] Thirdly, and finally, I think from practically everywhere else in the country outside of London, in any situation like this, which is basically four men sitting in a pub, you'll find you don't need to work hard at all before someone will remark that London is basically an occupied territory. It is a foreign city. And from the outside, dipping in and out, it feels a completely valid statement.

[00:28:47] I don't recognize it in the way that I once did 25 years ago. I think that's a pretty explosive set of conditions. So for any potential London listeners to this, don't be complacent. But really to put a nail in it and say what I think we will regard as the Fort Sumter moment is when somebody kills a judge.

[00:29:17] I think that that is much of a judge. This, by the way, is not an incitement to anybody to kill the judge. No, it's absolutely... I'm not inciting by any means. But if you think about it logically, much of what is really animating and offending people

[00:29:42] surrounds issues of two-tier justice and what are, to most people, clearly incomprehensible court judgments. And so it's fairly natural for that, for, you know, to think, well, that would be a likely target. Also, they're, as opposed to politicians who, after the murders of Joe Cox and David Amis,

[00:30:10] are relatively well protected, judges on the whole are not. You can already see on various social media, but primarily on X, people are clearly tracking and recording judges, who they are, what the judgments they've made. You can just look at the comments to see how angry people are at them.

[00:30:37] And finally, there's nothing unusual about that in the British context, because if one thinks is looking for immediate historical parallels, it's pretty obvious to look to Northern Ireland, where judges and police figures were very vulnerable and hence very highly guarded. So, I guess that is my best guess where chapter one of this book is going to kick off.

[00:31:07] Yeah, I mean, it's sort of, well, I suppose what you're describing is something that resembles a cross between Latin American-style insurgency or low-level insurgency involving the murder, the kidnap and murder of judges and so forth, combined with the Lebanon-type scenario, rather than a mass mobilisation of armies in the traditional sense of the American Civil War or the English Civil War. I mean, the English Civil War, and a number of, we can argue,

[00:31:36] till the cows come home about the causes of it, there were a number that have been referenced that have eerie parallels with where we are today. So the question of, are we in 1637 or 38? Are we in 1937 or 1938? It's a question. One of those would be the insufficiency of the state to maintain itself, so the tax base is too small. And so there's an imbalance economically between what can be raised. Essentially, the country is living far beyond its means.

[00:32:06] It cannot support 70 million people with the kind of infrastructure that we have. Infrastructure is fraying, so you have this inability of the state to manage the construct. And you have 300,000 people in total in the armed forces and police who are there to police, in theory, 70 million people, which is not a very sensible balance, I think. For the English Civil War, you had the rise of radical journalism as well,

[00:32:34] which was uncontrolled or became uncontrolled. So that has parallels with where we are today. A religious dimension, so an apocalyptic religious dimension, so in certain communities here and then in certain communities in the late 1630s. And you have... Yes, exactly. So you have long-standing grievances. You have martyrs, so Prynn, Bastwick and Burton, people like that who were persecuted.

[00:33:02] And you have also foreign intervention. So that is a key factor in why civil wars happen, isn't it? Is that you have... Either it's believed that the government is in alliance with the foreign government, or they actually are, or a foreign power intervenes in some way. And for the English Civil War, it was the Bishop's Wars in the late 1630s, so Scottish army. So the Scottish army. And then the Irish rebellion kick-started the whole process. So those are a few elements, food for thought.

[00:33:31] I think as a... Definition... Definitionally, the concept of civil war is very broad. And the most encompassing, and I think probably the most... And therefore the most widely agreed definition of civil war is simply a war in which the belligerents

[00:33:56] were both under the same sovereign authority at the outset of the conflict. Right. Which, if you look at it that way, is a definition that is able to encompass Latin American dirty wars, the English civil war, the Taiping rebellion, the American civil war. So these are all conflicts which are very, very different.

[00:34:25] Very, very different. Um... I use the term civil war in that sense, because I think it's the most academically accepted one. But I'm fully aware that there are plenty of ways in which, you know, that raises questions about the specific character of the war that I anticipate occurring.

[00:34:51] And some people object to that on the grounds that doesn't this look more like a revolution, for example? Or others argue, for example, that this isn't really a civil war in the sense of brother against brother. This is more of the nature of a resistance to colonization.

[00:35:14] And I think those are, you know, those are perfectly valid ways of querying the use of the term civil war. I like to use the term because it's quite obviously civil, within a given society.

[00:35:35] And I also don't want to euphemise or soft-soap, you know, to call it civil conflict or turmoil or something that which I think rather might potentially suggest to people that their situation is less dire than in fact it is. So that's why I use the term.

[00:35:57] I most definitely do not expect that it is going to look like the American Civil War with blue coats and grey coats or round heads and cavaliers. I think it's more complex than that. And I don't think that conflict in the 21st century takes those forms.

[00:36:20] I actually think that one of the complications here, you might say, is that there are two wars going on. One is of the nature of a peasant revolt. And that's like essentially what we've been talking about primarily up to this point is people's deep frustration, building into anger and ultimately a feeling that they're at the end of the rope and they will resist,

[00:36:48] whether that's digital ID or something or something or other. But it's in the nature of a peasant revolt. It's essentially conservative. Peasant revolts are basically conservative. They occur when the peasantry, and I'm not using the term disparagingly, when the peasantry perceive that the elites are changing the rules of the game in ways that are invidious to them. You get peasant revolts and, you know, it's not necessarily...

[00:37:18] At any rate, it has this elite versus street or in this case, mob versus blob quality to it. That's one aspect of what's going on. The related aspect is inter-ethnic, is inter-tribal, effectively. And that is between natives and non-natives.

[00:37:44] Actually, to go back to this elite versus street thing, what is very characteristic about today's power elite in effectively every Western country... We're talking about Britain a lot, but for foreign listeners, don't think that this doesn't apply to you if you're anywhere in the Western world, particularly close by. Right.

[00:38:06] What is very characteristic of our power elite in the Western world in the 21st century is that they are all deeply post-national in their orientation. They are not nation-minded people. They're highly trained and deeply educated in a kind of reflexive skepticism of nationalism or nation-thinkingness.

[00:38:36] Which is why when Gordon Brown gets forced, you know, years ago to talk about Britain first, the words seem to come from his mouth like, you know, like some kind of regurgitated bile. You know, he clearly hates saying the words.

[00:38:54] Or you get scenes from the most recent Labour Party conference where you have the Labour Party cadres waving the union flag clearly through gritted teeth. And that's because people who are post-nationalist in their orientation are skeptical of nationalism, skeptical of patriotism, in fact.

[00:39:24] And they are not just because they think that it is somehow passe economically and politically, like we've come up with better ways to govern ourselves and run our economies. But they also sense that there is something morally suspicious about it. And people, therefore, who talk about nation and homeland and the like are somehow morally suspicious people.

[00:39:54] Problem is that elite attitudes, by definition, are minority attitudes. You're not going to get a majority elite. Problem is that elite. Problem is that elite attitudes, by and large, most people still feel they are still somewheres. They are attached to a place. They are attached to their history, their culture. And they don't like having it taken from them. It wounds them.

[00:40:22] It feels painful. And so those feelings of being wounded and feeling loss and pain contribute to that. Anti-elite mood, which is one vector.

[00:40:37] Of course, we also have a situation where there are huge amounts of people who are recent arrivals, who are in some cases passport holding, but who are in essence non-native. They're not British in the same manner.

[00:40:58] And that's occurred on a scale with a speed that is historically unprecedented. Normans didn't arrive in such numbers. Even the Danes didn't arrive in such numbers and so quickly. And that's going to crack too.

[00:41:27] So you've got two levels of conflict. And they overlap in the sense that people ask, well, why are there 13 million new Britons in the country? Why are the borders completely open? Why can we not have functioning borders?

[00:41:48] And the answer is that our elite isn't interested in those things and won't pursue those policies and won't police, doesn't want to police the borders and so on. So these two things, these two conflicts overlap.

[00:42:08] The peasant revolt and the Lebanon's, the Lebanization direction or the Balkanization or indeed, ulsterization, you might say.

[00:42:23] Do you see a difference between the sort of insurgency where the two warring parties agree that when it's all over and the agreement is signed, we will go back to living together in some state of amity, as opposed to those situations where you see that somebody wants to come in and take over and say, we hear about your English common law, but we prefer Sharia. Right. Right. So in the first vector, I think that ultimately you'll come to a new status quo.

[00:42:52] It will be altered, but basically recognizable. And I say this because I said it is of in the nature of a peasant revolt and that I understand peasant revolts to be broadly conservative in their nature. Of course, they change, they metastasize, passions can get unleashed. But I think that that's the nature of the first vector.

[00:43:14] The second vector with the intertribal and interethnic conflict, I don't see as one that is resolved in compromise, because I don't really think that there is one. Like there is no English compromise on Sharia. In the sense that they can't afford to allow it. Yeah.

[00:43:36] So like, basically, I see, I see, if you think of the English character is this is almost paradigmatically a piss taking culture. I mean, English people believe that they have a given right, whether it comes from God or anywhere else, they have a right to take the piss. Which is why we have a we have a satiric tradition that goes back.

[00:44:06] I don't know, probably goes back as far as the English go. But you can think of, you know, think of late 18th century scandalous representations of the king. I'm thinking of Punch magazine, you know, where it was an illustration of the king with his trousers dropped and basically a fat pimply ass moronic king. Okay, this is this is well before we've become a democracy.

[00:44:33] The English people believe that they have a God given right to take the piss out of the, you know, out of the king. Islam is not a piss taking culture. Islam is very strict on its boundaries with respect to piss taking, which is why people get, you know, multiple people have been murdered for piss taking on the subject of Muhammad.

[00:44:59] Why we have a teacher in the north in Batli who apparently is still in hiding with his family. I don't think there's a compromise there. Okay, I mean basically, you know, where is the middle point? There are lots of other things where you can see potentially, yes, there is some potential for compromise. I actually think that Islamic legal tradition in many ways is not all that offensive.

[00:45:24] I mean, you may argue about certain forms of punishment, but the retributive aspect of Islamic law is one that is not too far distant from British ideas until recent times.

[00:45:45] So, I basically see that there is an inter-ethnic conflict that is largely based, largely centered on indigestibility of Islam in British society. And I don't see how that's really resolvable.

[00:46:05] You know, like, because of the ambitiousness and the cohesion of Islamic ideas, they would see no reason to compromise. And of course, obviously, it's a drinking culture. Let's finish with one pub-oriented question that brings a lot of what we've been talking about together over the last 45 minutes or so.

[00:46:28] Do you see pubs and pub culture as being in anything, in any significant way, a moral player in the question? Do you just go to the pub as a relief from everything else? Or does it create a sort of character that makes it less likely that people will go out and want to punch one another? Are pubs a good thing? Well, that is a very clear question. And it has an absolutely obvious answer, which is yes.

[00:46:56] Pubs are a good thing. Everything that happens in pubs is very much in line with our national character. Who doesn't like drinking beer? And of course, it's absolutely uncontroversial to say that pubs are deeply connected with British culture. I mean, I'm way off my area of expertise, except I've been in a lot of pubs.

[00:47:18] But there's undoubtedly the case that when you walk into almost any pub in the country of any vintage, that it just exudes character. It exudes character and it brings out the best in ours.

[00:47:35] Yeah, it exudes character in the sense that any place that people have been in for a long time and felt the need to embellish or make comfortable and so on, just acquire a vibe. Well, all the people at the end of the room would agree with what you've just said. They probably didn't hear it, but they would agree with it. David, many thanks for joining us. It's been a great pleasure talking to you. Thank you very much. No problem.

[00:48:04] I think another trip. Thank you, David. I think we're doing your trip. Next up, on a slightly lighter note, we return to what's become our headquarters in a way, the Deborah in Middle Temple, where we all intend to retire and drown our sorrows come the revolution. We're here this time to talk to former theater critic, author and parliamentary sketch writer for the Daily Mail, Quentin Letts. What a lovely chap. Let's just hope that he can cheer us all up.