At the Daily Sceptic, James Alexander summarizes how historian David Starkey’s views of history — British history specifically — provide a useful way to analyze British political issues today:

David Starkey, 2004.
Screenshot via IMDB.com

What David Starkey is trying to do is deliver to the British (or English) public a jeremiad informed not by moral posturing or theoretical commitment but by a sense of history. This is so valuable it should almost come without criticism. I think that Starkey’s vision of history is so arresting it deserves to be expressed in short form and so I will attempt a summary of the position. Starkey is an admirably entertaining speaker, and offers a vision that is several dimensions more complicated than we hear from anyone else at the moment. He is full of prepared lines, and has a ready mind: “Niall Ferguson, the good Niall Ferguson, not the bad Neil Ferguson …”; “All bad ideas begin with the French”; “The Union of England and Scotland made the modern world”; “The monarch changes religion as he crosses the border: he begins Anglican, and becomes Presbyterian”; “The Labour party is the equivalent of the Nomenklatura of Soviet Russia: a privileged class”; etc.

I have some criticisms. But first, his vision of our history.

Let me begin by summarising Starkey’s view of history as it conditions the present. He argues the following:

1. On the nature and relevance of history. History is fundamental. We cannot understand ourselves using theory. Avoid abstraction. Use history instead. It is concrete. He suggests that we have always studied history for the sake of the present, though in recent centuries we have also studied it for its own sake. He adds that we should make analogies between past and present.

2. On English history. Starkey says that we were first part of Greater Scandinavia, then, from 1066, were part of an Anglo-French order. The third stage of our history began with the Reformation. Starkey likens the Latin Christendom of the Papacy to the European Union: and so calls Henry VIII the first Brexiteer. The consequence of the Reformation was that Britain and Europe become antagonists. For the first time the sea was reconfigured as a barrier, defended by the navy: and this happened at the same time that energies were thrown outward to the rest of the world. What the English managed to do, along with the Scots, was build something out of the strong language that rises from Chaucer to Shakespeare: the two home countries united to make it impossible to be invaded; they united to make an empire in the world; and they united to make use of remarkable innovations in finance and later industry.

One of Starkey’s great themes is this Union of England and Scotland: first by King in 1603 and second by Parliament in 1707. Starkey says England is not a nation. It lacks a ridiculous national dress (since its national dress, of coat and trousers with tie, was given to the world as universal official dress). And the Union was wholly original, as it subjugated Scotland to England’s Parliament, abolishing the Scottish Parliament, while leaving Scottish law, religion, military tradition and heraldry alone. England and Scotland are politically united, but only politically united. Starkey’s point about all this is that it was never about “identity”. There was no such thing as a “Briton”. There was no national system of education. So there was no nonsense of any modern-style post-French Revolution nationalism. Instead, we were natural liberals, able to take in immigrants without difficulty. However, throughout all this England is politically dominant in Great Britain and in the Empire.

3. On the present time. Starkey has two points of reference. One is the 1970s, when things went wrong, with a short reversal under Thatcher, and in the 1990s, when things went even more wrong, and perhaps permanently wrong, because constitutionally wrong. The 1970s was the culmination of the Labour politics of welfare, accepted weakly by Macmillan and Heath, but the 1990s was worse because political and constitutional. Labour took things in the wrong direction by making the Bank of England independent and by enabling a new Scottish Parliament to emerge: also by bringing about the Equality Act of 2010 (actually an innovation of Gordon Brown); also by creating a Supreme Court. Then, finally, Charles III removed Parliament from the Coronation, and there was no mention of politics: whereas, since 1688, the Coronation had been a political act. Political power has been fragmented and dispersed from the King-in-Parliament to the quangos, to the Bank of England, to the lawyers. The principle of balance is lost, as every institution has become an interest group, pursuing single issues: an entire raft of Anti-Corn Law Leagues.

Starkey suggests that England will remain an idea, much as the idea of Rome survived the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. This is pessimistic judgement. His optimistic judgement, or hope, is that some sort of “restoration”, like the Glorious Revolution, can be enacted. As far as I have heard, he has not yet sketched the form of his restoration, though it has been promised.

Is this clear? Henry VIII broke the monasteries, threw out the Papists, built Oxford and Cambridge in new form, fortified the coast and began the story of Greater England. If we fill the gaps, there were difficulties with the consequences, religious and political, through the reigns of Mary, Elizabeth, James and Charles, but these were resolved in 1688 and then 1707. Then Great Britain became a great power. This remarkable creation was politically and constitutionally destroyed by the theorists and politicians of the late 20th century, since they demoted England within Britain, unleashed petty nationalisms in political form, and, in passing, did not do enough to restrain the welfare state or, we might add, enough to prevent English tolerance being twisted to accommodate net immigration of 700,000 people of fairly antagonistic cultures per year. Britain is now ruled not by Government-in-Parliament but by delegated arbitrary powers and influences which offer sops to partial interests and mean that nothing can be done. No one has an adequate conception of the entire state.