Toby Young Speaks Freely

>> Andrew Roberts: Toby Young is a social commentator and campaigner. He's the director of the Free Speech Union, a membership organization that stands up for the free speech rights of its members. Toby, can we look at the history of this assault, essentially, on free speech in Britain, but it's also happening around the anglophone world.

Why is free speech coming under such assault at this point in history?

>> Toby Young: Well, I think there are a number of factors. I think it's partly because the left used to champion free speech and are no longer doing so with quite the same enthusiasm. Because, for the most part, they are now in control.

It was important for them to defend free speech when they were the rebels. Because it enabled them to speak, to set out the case for socialism in the public square. Now that they've essentially won that argument across the West, defending free speech is no longer in their interests.

And because they are in control, that means free speech is under attack. I also think that the kind of coordinated assault on free speech by various government agencies, non-governmental agencies, commercial companies, universities. Seemingly coordinating to try and suppress what they call misinformation, disinformation, hate speech on social media.

I think that was prompted in part by a kind of visceral fear of the Internet and their marginalization as the stewards of the national conversation. But I think, in particular, the triumph of Donald Trump in the presidential in 2016 and the triumph of Leave EU in the EU referendum in 2016 in the UK.

The kind of global elite who felt very discombobulated by those populist revolts. Their analysis, their post mortem, was, well, the reason we lost those debates is not because large sections of the electorates in America and the UK disagree with our agenda, don't share our values. It's not because there's actually quite a high price to be paid for the globalization agenda, and it's been paid by ordinary people.

No, their conclusion was, the only possible explanation for why people could have voted for Trump or for Brexit is because they've been led astray, misinformed by bad actors, in some cases, bad state actors on social media. So the way to address that insurgency was not to try and make the case for their agenda in the public square, not to try and persuade the public that globalization, for instance, was in their interest.

Mass migration was something they should embrace, would ultimately bring about net benefits and so forth. No, the way to win the argument was to silence their critics by describing any criticism as misinformation, disinformation, or hate speech. And that's been successful in one respect. In that it's become much more difficult, I think, for people to speak their minds on social media without being kicked off, shadow-banned, etc.

But it's been unsuccessful insofar as it hasn't seemed to allay widespread popular dissatisfaction with the globalist agenda. I think we're about to see another of similar victories to the presidential and Brexit victories in 2016. And no doubt the international global elite will double down again. And think that the only possible explanation for why they're losing elections is because of misinformation and disinformation and hate speech on the Internet.

But that clearly isn't working for them. So it'll be interesting to see what conclusion they eventually reach.

>> Andrew Roberts: You don't see an incoming Labour government as likely to be any better or worse? How will they be different over all this business to do with white privilege and microaggressions, decolonization, pronoun declarations, gender identity, blah, blah, blah?

 

>> Toby Young: I think a Labour victory will certainly make things worse. First of all, I think that Labour will legislate to actually impose even more restrictions on speech. The Law Commission of England and Wales three years ago produced an oven-ready Hate Speech and Public Order (England and Wales) Bill.

Almost identical, if not slightly worse than the Hate Speech and Public Order (Scotland) Act, which is wreaking such havoc in Scotland since it was activated on April 1st. And the Free Speech Union and others managed to avoid the Conservative Party embracing that legislation and introducing that bill. But I'm sure it'll be only a matter of time before it's dusted off by Labour and brought back.

And then we'll see very similar legislation to that which has been brought in in Scotland being brought in here. And as I say, I think it could be potentially worse. But I think perhaps more importantly, Andrew, a lot of the diversitycrats are on the back foot, particularly those who are promoting the trans inclusion agenda.

Britain's not known as TERF Island for nothing. We've been winning a lot of those debates. And I think that has inhibited the zeal of various enforcers of woke dogma in the workplace, in universities, in professional associations. They know that politically, the government isn't completely on side. And that there are an increasing number of organizations like the Free Speech Union out there, pushing back, defending people's rights.

But I think they will be re-empowered by a big Labour victory at the next general election. They'll feel they have the wind in their sails again, and all the zeal which was beginning to fade will come flooding back. They'll feel again that they're on the right side of history and start persecuting people as a result.

 

>> Andrew Roberts: Full disclosure, I'm on the Writers' Advisory Council of the Free Speech Union, very proud to be. Let's talk about this Scottish Hate Crime Act. 7,152 online hate reports only last week in the aftermath of the passing of that Act, which, of course, makes misgendering a criminal offense.

If you say a trans woman is a man or a trans man is a woman, you can be arrested, can't you?

>> Toby Young: Well, that was the fear. But the law is extremely unclear, even though it's called the Hate Crime and Public Order of Scotland Act, hate isn't defined in the act.

Which grants Police Scotland a great deal of latitude about which hate crime reports they investigate. And who they prosecute for allegedly saying something hateful and so forth.

>> Andrew Roberts: They're not going to be prosecuting JK Rowling, are they? Is that just cuz she's rich and very popular and is able to take care of herself?

 

>> Toby Young: Well, for the time being, they're not going to be prosecuting JK Rowling. I think they're going to wait for an extremely unsavory example of someone who's broken this law, not a very successful middle class author with bags of money. But some, probably working class football supporter who said something indefensible, at least in the public square, they want to make, and they'll try and make an example of him.

They want that person to be the first high profile prosecution under this new law. Once they then got away with that, they then, I think, might come for people like JK Rowling, but for the time being, they're not going to pick on her as the first person to prosecute, because it would make it just seem absolutely ridiculous.

And she could defend herself extremely well.

>> Andrew Roberts: And what you do at the Free Speech union so far, 2300 cases which have been processed by your support team. You've been helping people since you founded it in the February of 2020. Tell us a few sort of stories, essentially, about, for example, the Simon Isherwood West Midlands trains case, or any other case that sort of springs to mind, something that's going on at the moment, something that you're particularly proud of.

Tell us really what you do.

>> Toby Young: Well, we do a number of things. We're a membership organization. We're not a charity. And although the membership dues are subsidized and not very expensive, and if one of our members gets into trouble because of something they've said. Particularly if it's something they have said which is patently lawful, but a breach of some workplace speech code.

Or not even a breach of a speech code, but just something that someone, some busy body, some snitch has complained about, we'll go to bat for them, including, if necessary, going to law. And in those cases which have come to a conclusion, we've been successful 74% of the time.

And as you say, we fought 2,400 cases so far. That's mainly what we do. But we also organize events, we publish briefing papers, we do a bit of lobbying, we send out a weekly and monthly newsletter. But about a good 50% of what we do is actually helping our members fight their corner, defend them.

And we have a four person case team and a four person legal team, and they're all working flat out. We currently have over 100 open cases, so we're extremely busy. And about 1,000 people in Scotland have joined in the past couple of weeks because.

>> Andrew Roberts: I bet they have

>> Toby Young: So we're quite busy with our new Scottish members.

But I'll tell you about one case in particular, which is our biggest victory to date. So a manager at Lloyd's Bank, who'd been employed by Lloyd's Bank all his life, more than 25 years, called Carl Borg-Neal. During lockdown, I think he was asked to do diversity training for the first time.

So this is a white Englishman in his late fifties, and he was told by this ghanaian diversity trainer, who was a third party, she'd been employed by Lloyd to produce this training. They were told that some words were just inappropriate to use in the workplace, and if anyone they were managing used those words, they should certainly report them and discipline them, if not, fire them.

And he asked, I think, very reasonably, isn't it context dependent? So if one of my black employees uses a particular word about another black employee in conversation, that might be appropriate, whereas for me to use that word about a black employee wouldn't be appropriate. And she claimed not to know what he was talking about and asked him to give an example.

And even though she'd said at the very beginning of the training session, regard this as a safe space, nothing you say is going to go beyond this room. Youre not going to get into trouble, let your inhibitions down. Which, by the way, we always tell our members, this is a big red flag anyway, even though she said that at the beginning, in order to explain what he meant in the example he gave, he used the n word.

He didnt say the n word, he actually used the n word. And she was horrified, didnt answer the question and reported him. She was the only person in this sort of session, lots of employees in this session to report him, but she reported him to Lloyd's. Lloyd's placed him under investigation for gross misconduct and fired him.

And happily, he was a member of the free speech union. We were able to find him a really good legal team, and he won that case. And not only did he win on unfair dismissal, but he also won on discrimination because he had a disability, which contributed to the fact that he blurted out this word when under pressure in this session.

And he was awarded, in total, a compensation of 800,000 pounds. And that's our biggest victory to date.

>> Andrew Roberts: Congratulations on that. Tell me about Simon Isherwood. The West Midlands trains story where he texted or put something out, a tweet that he put out and you managed to save.

 

>> Toby Young: That was his job, essentially. No, we've had two West Midlands Trains employees, actually, Andrew. So the one you're referring to, I'll tell you about Simon Ishwood in a second, but the one you're referring to was Jeremy Sleith. And on Freedom Day, as Boris called it, I think it was June 19, 2021, when all the lockdown restrictions were lifted, he said on his private Facebook account, thank God for that.

I didn't want to live in an alcohol free Muslim caliphate for the rest of my life.

>> Andrew Roberts: Which was obviously a joke.

>> Toby Young: Obviously a joke, yes.

>> Andrew Roberts: But jokes don't work with the left, do they? They don't like jokes.

>> Toby Young: They don't, or they pretend not to get them.

Anyway, one of his colleagues complained and he was investigated for gross misconduct and then fired. And we went to that for him and got a finding of unfair dismissal and he got a pretty decent compensation package. Simon Ishwood, so that was a similar to the Carl Borg-Neal case.

Also an employee of West Midlands trains, he too was in an online diversity training session for the first time ever and was introduced for the first time to the concept of white privilege. And he thought it was errant nonsense. And at the end of the call, it was all on Zoom.

He thought he disconnected one of those stories and he turned to his wife and said, white privilege? What a load of balls. Do you think they have black privilege in Ghana or a black majority country? And because he said this, even though no one complained, I don't think.

But the trainer overheard because he'd left his microphone on and hadn't disconnected and they complained, he was fired. We managed to win compensation for him, too. What's extraordinary is how often employers, particularly public sector employers, go beyond the law. They think that the law is on their side and that what someone has said, because it's produced a complaint from someone with a protected characteristic, is a breach of the Equality Act.

Not realizing that the Equality Act also provides some protections for particular religions and beliefs and so forth. So they often go beyond the Equality Act, sometimes at the urging of activist organizations who deliberately misinterpret and gold plate the Equality Act. So they go beyond what's permissible by equalities law to punish people.

So you can often win by fighting back, particularly if your lawyers know more about equalities law than theirs.

>> Andrew Roberts: And it has become, the equality, diversity and inclusion, it's become an industry, essentially, hasn't it? There are enormous amounts of people employed in it. Therefore it's very much in their interest to become witchfinder generals in this sense.

I saw the other day that the Royal Navy, a totally cash strapped organization where we simply don't have enough ships or men, is spending 2.5 million pounds on EDI stuff. It has to be insane in a country that isn't properly defended in a maritime way. Mustn't it be?

 

>> Toby Young: It's just absolutely insane and completely indefensible. And the NHS is constantly advertising for equity, diversity and inclusion officers at vastly inflated salaries, and yet almost in the next breath complain about Tory cuts making it impossible to run the NHS. It's like, if you really are cash strapped, why are you creating these non-jobs and paying people these ridiculous salaries for doing them?

It has become an industry. I mean, I think in the US, it's an $8 billion a year industry. Last time I checked here, it's probably over a billion pound a year industry. And one of the ironies is that it doesn't work. I mean, even if you think that unconscious bias is actually a problem in British workplaces, including in the Royal Navy.

There's been quite a bit of research now that shows that if you give people unconscious bias training, if you make them aware of their biases and get them to monitor them more carefully, they end up being more discriminatory, not less.

>> Andrew Roberts: The classic law of unintended consequence.

>> Toby Young: It was on that basis that the cabinet office recommended that unconscious bias training be scrapped across Whitehall back in late 2020.

Of course, nothing of the kind has happened, but we recently conducted a survey, Andrew, of 800 British workers. It was a representative sample of British workers taken from across the board, and it was done by a professional polling organization. And so it was, I think, a reliable result.

And we found that not only is EDI training unpopular in the workplace, but the people who like it least are precisely the people it's designed to help. So, ethnic minorities, members of the LGBT community, they dislike it even more than the average worker. I think they find it patronizing.

They don't like being portrayed as being weak and in need of protection agency. And they also don't like the various solutions, such as affirmative action, because then people suspect that they've only been employed because they tick a diversity box and not because they're actually qualified. So, yeah, we thought that was a really useful finding.

 

>> Andrew Roberts: Now, there's nothing that you've said so far that would be disagreed with by any Tory I know, and I do know lots of Tories and we have been in government, the Conservatives have been in government since 2010. So how is it that in that period, this billion dollar industry, these extraordinary sort of culture change in Britain has taken place?

Why does it seem to be completely unaffected by the fact that the people who are taking decisions in government and at cabinet level are conservatives who as I say, agree with you.

>> Toby Young: I think the explanation has to be that since 2010, Conservatives have been in office, but not really in power.

A good example is the Cabinet Office recommendation that unconscious bias training be scrapped across the civil service because it was counterproductive. Nothing happened in response to that. They can make an announcement. The equalities minister can say, please scrap this, it's useless. It's worse than useless. It's a waste of money.

But they don't know which levers to pull. They're not really in charge. And so nothing happened. And of course, it's metastasized since then. And that seems to be true in general. Perhaps that might have been the case even if the Conservatives had won a thumping majority in 2010.

But certainly one of the things that has empowered the deep state over the past 14 years is that successive conservative led administrations have been divided and quite weak. So we had a coalition government from, what, 2010 to 2015? Cameron then won, but only won a small majority, resigned after one year.

The vote leave team couldn't work out who should take over as PM. So Theresa May took over. She was quite weak and ineffective. She lost her conservative majority in 2017. We then had a minority government for two years. Boris then won a thumping majority. And perhaps that was the moment when real change could have been affected.

But to put the most charitable spin on it, he was derailed by the pandemic, and that kind of consumed all his bandwidth. And beyond, leaving the European Union and positioning us as staunch supporters of the Ukraine, he didn't do very much that you and I would have liked him to have done.

And now, of course, he was defenestrated, replaced for a very short period by Liz Truss, who was then defenestrated, too. And now we have Rishi Sunak, who's a pretty weak source, too. So I think it's partly because the deep state is just very effective at entrenching and preserving its power, no matter who's in charge, but also because the people in charge haven't been terribly efficient or well organized or resolute about affecting real change.

And I think that was a lesson also from the first Trump administration. And it looks as though the second Trump administration will be more effective and they'll be better, wiser to the various whiles of the deep state for avoiding any kind of accountability change. We'll see.

>> Andrew Roberts: I think it's worth pointing out, not least because a lot of our listeners are Americans, that the British deep state is very different from the American one, isn't it?

You're not really talking about MI5 and MI6 that's fighting these culture wars. You're talking about the unelected side of the British sort of official world, the establishments, essentially, the people who take very important decisions over our lives. But you're not alleging a kind of conspiracy of sort of sinister cabals there, are you?

 

>> Toby Young: No, but I don't think it's always used in that way in the American context either. No, I think, I mean, as you say, the unelected public officials who wield an enormous amount of power and whom it's very difficult to hold to account, not just in the civil service and not just officers in local authorities, but also quango crats, diversity crats.

People at the kind of pinnacle of the kind of cultural economy who run the BBC, edit newspapers, people at the top of academic institutions, opinion formers in the United Kingdom, maybe a little less so in America. It varies from state to state but certainly here, for the most part, that kind of the establishment is very liberal, very progressive and not at all sympathetic to conservatives like us.

 

>> Andrew Roberts: Toby, it seems that there's a long way since we were undergraduates at Oxbridge 40 years ago that academia has gone towards the left, towards wokeism, towards a kind of much Much less, maybe I should say, a much more sort of collectivist approach to politics. Why is that?

Yeah, it's an interesting issue to say that, Andrew.

>> Toby Young: I remember when I was an undergraduate at Brosenose College, Oxford, doing politics, philosophy and economics, from 83 to 86. Within my year, there were ten of us doing PPE, and they ranged from an out and out fascist to a revolutionary communist with every shade in between.

And then I went to Harvard as a Fulbright Scholar the following year. And in the entire government department, which must have numbered more than 250 students, the only argument was between Rawlsian liberals and Nozickian liberals, two different types of liberalism. It was extraordinary. I mean, the homogeneity of thought within Harvard was really striking and a great contrast to Oxford.

But I think Oxford has now become much more like Harvard. And across the Anglosphere, conservatives are finding themselves an increasingly beleaguered minority at university. Not just students, but faculty as well. Why is that? Number of things. I think it's partly groupthink, isn't it? I naively thought when I first went to university that the better educated someone was, the better read they were, the more intelligent they were, the more independent minded they'd be.

But actually, more or less the opposite is the case, with some exceptions. So the higher you go up the academic food chain, the more brilliant people appear to be, the more susceptible they are to the woke mind virus. And that was really striking during the imbroglio following the death of George Floyd, when one distinguished academic institution after another started issuing these kind of mea culpa statements.

And they all use the same language. They all use phrases like, it's past time we examined our own racism. We've been sweeping it under the carpet. And it's not enough just to be opposed to racism. You have to be anti racist. It was as though they'd all been written by the same person.

And I thought, as a joke, I would run some. So as soon as, I don't know, the president of Yale issued one of these mea culpas, I would run it through the plagiarism software that's used to detect academic plagiarism. And I imagine it would, kind of the result it would spit out.

What is it? Well, this statement's almost identical to the one issued by the president of Harvard last week, and that one was very similar to the one issued by the president of Yale the week before. And my plan was then to create a website, seemingly created by a passionate supporter of BLM.

Accusing these university panjandrums of not being sincere about being anti-racist because they merely copying each other. And I imagine that in response they'd then produce even more pious statements of fealty, abasing themselves at the altar of the woke church to prove just how anti-racist they were. But I never actually got around to it.

But I thought it would have been a good, fun thing to do.

>> Andrew Roberts: Tell me, you've mentioned the Anglosphere several times now. Is it just an Anglosphere thing? Do the French and Germans, Italians and Spanish not have the same thing, or do they have the same thing in a much less virulent form?

 

>> Toby Young: Well, interestingly, I think the woke mind virus first went viral in the English speaking world, and that's because I think it's an American export. And the mechanism by which it's exported is social media, and the first language of social media is English. It also rhymes with the kind of non-conformism that is typical of the Anglosphere.

But I think if your country has a Catholic heritage and it's not English speaking, Spain, Italy, Greece, maybe not a different kind of Christian heritage, then you had antibodies. But those antibodies appear to have been now overcome by the unstoppable woke mind virus, and it's now infecting France, for instance.

People talk about low-wokeism now in France. People in Italy and Spain also tell me that it's spreading in those countries too, Portugal. So I think they held out for a bit longer than us, but now they've also fallen.

>> Andrew Roberts: Tell us about debanking and your struggles with PayPal.

There seems to be a really sinister aspect also, of course, the way in which Lloyd's tried to debank Nigel Farage, the Brexit leader. What's the story there, and should we be worried about this?

>> Toby Young: I think we should be worried about it. So, as you say, I first encountered it when PayPal told me that they'd shut down not just my personal account, but the account of the free speech union and the Daily Skeptic, this news publishing site I produce.

And they did all three within 15 minutes of each other. And I kicked up an almighty stink, got some MPs and peers to write to the treasury select committee, and eventually my accounts were all restored. But other people haven't been so lucky. But I think what we're beginning to see, and as you say, Nigel Farage lost his account at Coutts, and there have been a number of people who've been debanked, seemingly for purely political reasons.

And Trudeau did this in Canada with people supporting the truckers protesting about lockdown. What we're seeing, I think, across the West is the emergence of an embryonic, Westernized form of the Chinese Communist Party's social credit system. Whereby if you dissent publicly, if you challenge woke orthodoxy, you are now at risk of losing your access to financial services, which for many people is completely devastating.

 

>> Andrew Roberts: Another thing we're seeing across the west at the moment, and have done since the 7 October, is this huge rise in anti semitism. Is there a argument with regard to freedom of speech that cries like from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free, that one hears at demonstrations, essentially equates to incitement to violence and therefore shouldn't be allowed?

Or would you defend their right to shout that slogan at demos?

>> Toby Young: Well, I think my guiding principle here is the principle enshrined in a famous Supreme Court case, Brandenburg versus Ohio, where the principle set out was that something should be permitted unless it's likely to lead to imminent lawless action.

And that is actually an american version of the old english common law principle, that you should be permitted to say more or less what you like in the public square, provided it's not going to lead to a breach of the peace. So the question there, I think, is the chanting of slogans like from the river to the sea likely to lead to a breach of the peace, and I think in most cases it isn't.

So I would tolerate it. Of course I don't like it. I'm passionately on the side of Israel in this particular conflict, in every conflict, come to that. But nevertheless, I think if you are a defender of free speech, you have to hold your nose and defend people's right to say that.

Just as, let's suppose Jeremy Corbyn had won the general election in 2019, which I think we're going to get on to talk about, he probably would have declared the IDF a prescribed terrorist organization by now. And anyone out on the streets chanting their support of Israel, or chanting bring them home about the hostages might find themselves in the same hot water as some of the people chanting from the river to the sea, although none of them have, in fact, got into hot water.

So I think it behooves us as defenders of free speech to hold our noses and defend people's right to chant that, provided it's not going to lead to an imminent breach of the peace.

>> Andrew Roberts: Ditto Holocaust denial.

>> Toby Young: Yes, I'm not a great believer in criminalizing Holocaust denial or genocide denial of any kind.

I think far better to let people set out their ridiculous beliefs in the public square so they can be properly rebutted with evidence and reason. That is the counterspeech principle, also enshrined in a famous Supreme Court decision. For some reason, the West has abandoned the principle of counterspeech in the past 15 years.

And to remind you, that principle is that the best way to counter bad speech, false speech, is not to try and silence it, but to rebut it with more and better speech. Sunlight is the best disinfectant. I think that applies to all genocide denial.

>> Andrew Roberts: And aren't we, therefore, because so few people seem to at least publicly agree with you.

And because we are in this world of EDI, are we not in a dangerous moment where the enlightenment itself and the concept of meritocracy, the word of which was coined by your own father, Michael Young, are at a dangerous tipping point? Am I going completely over the top here by worrying about whether the concept of meritocracy and the enlightenment can survive this onslaught?

Whereby all issues are seen through the color of race, sex, and all the other the other ones, rather than on their own inherent rational and logical senses?

>> Toby Young: Yeah, well, that's the $6 million question. I'm an optimist, and I think that the pendulum of identity politics has reached its peak and we're just seeing the beginnings of a swing back the other way, peak woke.

I mean, I'm a bit hesitant to declare peak woke because I've been declaring peak woke more or less at every free speech anniversary party. I announce on stage that we've reached peak woke, only for things to get worse by an order of magnitude over the next 12 months.

It's like falling through a building, a collapsing building. Every time you think you've hit rock bottom, the floor gives way again and you're falling again. But I do now think there are sufficient signs to indicate that we have reached the peak of this particular mania. No doubt it'll be replaced by other manias, but this particular one seems to be finally running out of steam.

You see-

>> Andrew Roberts: Okay, what are the signs? Tell us, what are these signs? Let us be optimistic. Tell us a few signs.

>> Toby Young: In the UK, we've seen a great pushback against trans rights activists. So the NHS has now finally announced it will no longer prescribe puberty blockers.

One of our gender identity clinics has just been shut down. We're known now across the world as turf island, because the turfs have largely been victorious in that particular battle. And that's huge, because trans rights activists, along with their fellow social justice warriors, claim that they are on the right side of history.

That's one of their most powerful arguments. That's rhetoric which worked for communism for many decades, and it's now worked for the woke cultists as well. But if they suffer a colossal setback, which they have, I think in this case, it begins to look as though they're not on the right side of history, and their victory isn't inevitable.

So at that point, the whole house of cards, I think, begins to crumble. But you can see it with the failure of woke in the entertainment industry, the failure of various Disney films, the attempt to create various trans and gay and female Marvel superhero characters. There's no public appetite for any of this stuff.

And it looks as though Trump's gonna win the next presidential election. Though I do worry, Andrew, that just as Trump's first victory in 2016 seemed to fill the woke with a kind of almost religious zeal and fervor, so his victory this year might act as a sort of defibrillator to the corpse of woke and bring it kind of roaring back to life, but I hope not.

I think I begin to see most of these things are cyclical. I think there's probably the west, the enlightenment tradition. Ideas like meritocracy have still got enough going for them to persuade the next generation to defend them. You're beginning to see that, too, amongst younger people. Polling indicates that amongst under 18-year-olds, there's beginning to be a kind of rejection of this kind of liberal authoritarianism, everyone telling them what to do all the time.

I mean, if you're a teenager, you have anything about you at all, of course you're gonna reject it. So I'm reasonably optimistic.

>> Andrew Roberts: Good, and let's all hope that people recognize that the whole idea of there being a right or a wrong side of history is a Whig or a determinist or a Marxist concept, and not one that a sensible person let alone a sensible historian should ever believe in.

Toby, what is the history book or biography or anything to do with history, really, book that you're reading at the moment?

>> Toby Young: Well, I've just got through, more or less, the entire collected works of Bernard Cornwell. So I just finished reading his trilogy. It's, I think, a trilogy about the American Civil War.

That was extremely good. I've read all the Sharpe novels. I've read the ones set in Arthurian England. I've read the one set around the Battle of Agincourt. And actually, I didn't read them in the correct chronological order, which I should have done, because, actually, that's a great way of acquainting yourself with the history of England.

But I feel, if I can sort of piece it together, that I've now been immersed in English history, really, for the past couple of years, as I've been plotting my way through with, with much delight, I should say, his entire oeuvre.

>> Andrew Roberts: All the Peninsular War ones, the Sharpe novels, did you say?

And the Waterloo novel? Fantastic. He's a very nice man, actually, Bernard. He's, as well as being somebody who, needless to say, has done an enormous amount of work in history. It's interesting how historical novelists Michael Grant in the ancient world, of course, Georgette Heyer and CS Forester in the Napoleonic Wars, are very often able to give you insights that you wouldn't get otherwise.

I'm a great believer in people reading historical novels in order to understand more about history. What's your what if, your counterfactual?

>> Toby Young: Well, the counterfactual, which I alluded to earlier, is what if Jeremy Corbyn had won the general election in 2019 instead of Boris? I campaigned for Boris.

I was a great believer in Boris, disliked Jeremy Corbyn intensely, thought he would have been an absolute disaster. But I now think, actually, given the poisoned chalice of the pandemic, which seems to have toxified almost every government that was in power when it struck, we might have been better off if Corbyn had been left to deal with that particular parcel, that ticking bomb, and not Boris.

And at the moment, because the Tories have now been in power more or less for 14 years, because we've been through a succession of leaders in quite quick succession. It looks as though Keir Starmer, Jeremy Corbyn's successor, is going to win a supermajority. And the Tory Party may not even exist after the next general election, so badly are they going to do.

Whereas if Corbyn had won in 2019, I mean, we would have had a bad five years, but we'd now be looking at, actually, the probability that the Tories would win a supermajority, not Labor. So I think, actually, we might have been better off had Corbyn won that election.

 

>> Andrew Roberts: This is tragic. I've agreed with everything you've said up until now, but I can't accept that. Not only would Corbyn have used the pandemic to institute massive tax rises, huge extra powers of the state, he would have used it to crush all opposition and be able to argue that anybody who opposed him was trying to help the pandemic.

But also, he'd have been prime minister when Ukraine was invaded, and he wouldn't have given any support whatsoever in the way that we did early on and usefully and lethally, as it turned out, to poor old Zelenskyy. So I'm not gonna go along with you with this counterfactual.

Toby Young, thank you very much indeed for coming on Secrets of Statecraft. And good luck with the Free Speech Union, which is a really first class organization.

>> Toby Young: Thank you very much, Andrew.