Yeah,

yeah.

If you were to accept the principle of reparations, you would have to say, but there would be huge practical problems in deciding who deserves reparations, who deserves to pay reparations.

But if you say, well, we could solve those problems, I doubt if we could, but assume that there is a case for reparations.

The campaign that is being carried on seems to me to ignore or evade much of what a proper discussion about reparations would have to take into account.

You know, you might say, well, the obvious thing is why focus on essentially more than on any other country, on the one country that renounced slavery and the slave trade and did an awful lot to try to stop it.

If you're going to focus on some country that's guilty of slavery, why this particular one? If the United Nations was going to have a great international conference to discuss which countries should pay reparations to whom, it would not be anything like the one that we're actually witnessing, I think, which, incredibly enough, is being led by Ghana, which was itself a great slave-trading country.

So what do the critics get wrong, would you say, when the British Empire in particular is taken down a notch

I just wanted to get your take on what the Prime Minister has said, which seems to be a slight evolution of the longstanding government position that we weren't going to apologize for the crimes of our forefathers.

Well, I think, I think this is what you call a Burnhamism, isn't it? It's a, a new concept.

It means something that you say which you said you wouldn't say, but you-- that you say in terms that are so obfuscated that it may not mean anything at all.

So he talks about being open to doing something or listening to something, which means-- doesn't mean he'd actually do anything about it, but it means that he's sending a signal to, uh, well, parts of the Labour Party, some Commonwealth governments, which he seems to think will have, uh, his desired effect of keeping his troops happy and, uh, and then probably calming things down.

But it seems to me this is a really rather, rather reckless way of behaving.

The reason I say it's reckless is because previous prime ministers have been very careful to choose their words carefully, because the-- it's obvious that what's going on here is that a number of governments are asking for large sums of money from us, and they're trying to extract a certain form of words which will give them some sort of legal basis at some sort of UN tribunal, perhaps, to, to push us into paying a lot of money.

So if you're a sensible prime minister, you would not fall into this trap.

What do you make of the Commonwealth and its potential future and the UK's role in all of that?

What was that tacit agreement

between? Well, I don't think it was ever, it's only ever been said to be a kind of...

So naturally.

You know, we're not really interested.

If you're on the right, you're interested in making the economy work, making money, going into the city, going into business and so on.

You don't really want to be a schoolteacher anymore or an academic.

You don't want to have a job in a museum because these things are not totally well paid and so on.

The idea of English here, I think, is a really important thing to give to kids.

Le Pen do about the EU, do you think, if she does become president?

Well, I think she's been...

Well, she's been very suspicious of the EU for a long time.

The problem was, as she discovered, in fact, I think it was in a television debate with Emmanuel Macron, that once you're in the Eurozone, you can't really get out of it.

So you can complain as much as you like.

What are you going to do? Well, she said that she will withhold France's...

budgetary contribution.

The

Uh, why do you believe that's happened?

Um, well, I believe it's happened because, uh, one can see it almost everywhere one looks, in museums, in school textbooks, university courses, and so on.

That's w-- Now, the question, if the question is why actually has it happened, then I think the answer is much more complex.

It's something that, uh, that affects not only Britain, but much of the Anglosphere.

Y- you see this very similar phenomena in Canada, the United States, Australia, and New Zealand, in which the whole-- It's as if the whole of Western, modern Western history is now seen as being, uh, destructive, damaging, oppressive, and essen- and racist.

That's often the, the worst term.

Uh, now it's-- This is something that I think reflects to a g- a good deal, to a large extent, American cultural influence.

Mm-hmm.

Mm.

Uh, so this, this, this goes back to the 1950s very obviously when, when European integration after the Second World War got off to another, another start.

So, and, and what happened, of course we all know about this, well, I'm not sure how many of you under the age of 30 do, but we, we sort of know about the Suez Crisis in which both France and Britain made an attempt together to assert their power as imperial powers.

You know, the last hurrah, if you like, of France and Britain as independent global powers.

Uh, and it, it didn't work because the Americans and to some extent the Russians said no.

So what happened? The French say, "We must therefore, we'll never trust the Americans again.

We must look to Europe.

Mm.

And I imagine that, you know, you- the two of you being historians is being affected by this, your fields being affected by this as well, and people now questioning, well, are we being told the truth when we're told history?

Well, I can give you an, an example of this affecting history because it, a friend of mine did this, Lawrence Goldman.

Um, he, he wanted to look at some documents held by the, uh, State Library of New South Wales, um, which, written by a, a, a chap called Eyre in the 1830s who, who traveled a lot in Australia and observed and wrote about indigenous culture very sensitively, though he came to a sticky end, Eyre, later, but that's another matter.

And he was told that they, they were no longer a- available online at least because they concerned des- 19th century descriptions of indigenous cultures, which were not to be seen by the prying eyes of 21st century Westerners.

So here are historical documents which cannot be consulted by historians because of, because long dead people, there was no evidence that they disliked it, because after all, he traveled among them and he, they, they, they allowed him to do so.

But this might upset the, the spirits of the ancestors, therefore you cannot do historical research on this person.

Now, this, I think, would've been utterly unimaginable [laughs] until...

Mm-hmm.

So, uh, Robert, can you kick us off, please? Thanks.

Uh, well, thanks, thanks very much, Clare, for that v- very flattering and quite unjustified introduction.

Um, I'm, I hope I'm not going to disappoint Clare in particular.

Are patriotism and the nation state back, is our question.

I hope so, but I'm not optimistic, at least not about this country in the short term.

But I'd be very happy if you all prove me wrong.

A recent piece by the always thought-provoking writer Mary Harrington made me sit up.

[laughs]