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One brave British historian is speaking out about how and why Britain is broken.

For David Starkey, author and commentator, Britain’s dysfunction is deliberate.

British governance, he told Australia’s John Anderson in early August, has been fundamentally altered, and the cause goes back to the late 1990s.

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Seven “useless” Prime Ministers all in a row isn’t “a stroke of bad luck,” he said.

Questions have to be asked about whether or not the problem is systemic.

“I think that if you look at all forms of political analysis at the moment, you can see that there are two sides in this question.”

“Broadly, the centre left, the centre and the left are, oh, it’s just a set of personal problems.”

They’ll downplay concerns or shift the blame, stating, “Oh, you know, Keir Starmer is hated because people are fundamentally irrational.”

“Oh, the wicked media. Oh, you know, X all of that,” Starkey explained.

He thinks the Right, though, has the problem pinned down.

They’ve “got the right analysis, even though they don’t get credit for it,” he argued.

They admit “there is a systemic problem, and the issue is to identify the problem.”

“It seems to me there is a very simple answer,” Starkey added.

“Until very, very recently, the British Government was the model for the world, not least for Australia, the mother of parliaments.”

“The model of good law, good government, absence of corruption, security of property, origins of capitalism, all of it.”

Even when the post-war trend leaned towards socialism, like in South Australia, and British governance “from 1945 onwards, with buffers in the 1970s and Thatcher’s [successful] reversals, it was still functional.”

System Failure

Up until 1997, the government was still able to turn on a pinhead.

“Now,” Starkey said, “we’ve seen something extraordinary. The failure of Keir Starmer is much more than a rather disagreeable man.”

“It’s the failure of a system.”

“Starmer helped to create the new state, a state that’s failed. [As a human rights lawyer] he believed in it passionately.”

“Even with one of the largest parliamentary majorities in British history, Starmer was incapable of making it work.”

The necessary political post-mortem, Starkey argued, has to include answers to the questions of why and how “it all went so horribly wrong.”

Put simply, Tony Blair’s New Labour broke Britain.

Effectively, after Blair’s election in 1997, the British government was reinvented in line with a left-wing worldview (think Fabianism).

“And by their fruits, you shall know them. It fails repeatedly. It is an omni failure.”

The supremacy of the British Parliament and the sovereignty of the British people were undone.

“The forces behind Blair wanted to adapt the British government to a continental, European model with an alien system of law and even inverting the very idea of democracy.”

“What we’ve got to understand is that the Left has captured words and when it captures words, it inverts them.”

So, we end up with a system, he explained, where democracy no longer means majority rule.

Under the new “liberal democracy,” what it means is “the control of the majority in favour of the minority.”

The Left’s justification for flipping the definition? “Democracy was responsible for the rise of Hitler.”

Using this argument, Starkey said, they believe they’re right in “doing everything to limit” majority rule.

That largely becomes symbolic, he remarked. What you do in practice is deliberately limit it by way of transferring power to the judiciary, and “deliberately irresponsible, unaccountable committees full of ‘experts.’”

With this, Starkey concluded, “That is what the Tony Blair years did to Britain in astonishing fashion.”

One of the UK’s celebrated cultural commentators, Starkey is against the New Labour Left weaponising minorities to control the majority.

It’s the same social-cohesion-killing sectarianism used in the asinine bureaucratic reach for totalitarianism that Australians are facing, such as mass immigration and multiculturalism.

Cancel Culture Came for Starkey

Notably, Starkey, a homosexual, was “cancelled” in 2020 after comments refuting aspects of slavery were taken out of context.

Writing in The Critic at the time, he said, normally it’s a celebration when a historian’s thesis is confirmed.

When the historian becomes the way by which that thesis is confirmed, it tends to dampen the moment.

“I became the most notorious example — I refuse to write ‘victim’ — of the ‘cancel culture’ in Britain all for one word,” Starkey said.

“The slave trade, I wrote, was not a genocide, ‘otherwise there wouldn’t be so many blacks in North America or the West Indies. Or indeed in Britain.’”

“The word I added in a [podcast with Darren Grimes], fatally, as it turned out, was “damn.”

Starkey used the word as a numerical intensifier. He was pointing to a positive, not asserting an irritation.

As he explained, “such was my meaning when I said “so many damn blacks’: that there were a lot of them, not that they were a bad lot.”

Dishonest critics quickly jumped on the phrase, removed the context and “retweeted furiously to paint Starkey as a racist.”

“The point was made,” Starkey wrote, “with brutal frankness by the editor of History Today when he summarily ended my 40-year membership of its editorial board, stating, ‘I cannot defend the phrase “damn blacks.”’”

He would eventually apologise.

Still, the incident stands as an example of the dysfunction Starkey is calling out. For example, when it comes to determining meaning, and the Left inverting words, context is a secondary consideration, if even that.

Appropriately, the cancelled public historian’s article concluded with a question.

“Is this what we have come to?”

Where “things given with careful scrutiny and on grounds of solid merit, like trusteeships of charities and fellowships of colleges and learned societies, can be removed,” as if society were God?

We’ve lost due process “in deference to the transitory passions of an online mob.”

Despite being cancelled, Starkey is back.

In part driven by his own exclusion at the hands of liberal democracy’s perversion of Britain (he is opposed to the LGBTQ+ redefinition of marriage).

Mostly because he’s on a quest to “reverse the constitutional revolution of the Blair governments.”

The historian’s warning for Australia is simple: learn from Britain’s mistakes.

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Images via Wikimedia Commons and screenshot of YouTube.