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Article by Rebel News staff.

Tonight on The Ezra Levant Show: historian Dr. David Starkey argues that Britain's crisis is a crisis of forgetting, and that a nation cut off from its own inheritance loses the ability to tell the citizen from the stranger.

Starkey, who taught at the London School of Economics for 26 years and is best known for his work on Henry VIII, Elizabeth I and the British monarchy, builds his case on Edmund Burke. Burke answered the French Revolution by describing society as "a contract between the living, the dead, and those yet to be born." "We are not creatures of will. We're creatures of inheritance," Starkey says.

Britain, in his account, has lived through "an extraordinary change in our customs, our manners, our constitution, our way of living," and the schools share much of the blame. "The central task of a teacher is to transmit a culture," he says, but teachers came to see their duty as criticizing and reshaping, and modern teaching "abandoned the idea of knowledge. Indeed, it's very largely abandoned an idea of truth."

His central historical argument concerns time. He rejects the official narrative that Britain is a nation of immigrants, noting that DNA analysis suggests much of the population has been there since the Bronze Age. Romans, Anglo-Saxons and Danes came as invaders, Huguenots, Jews and Irish followed, and even the Norman Conquest, which he calls "colonial conquest of the most brutal sort," ended with conquerors and conquered becoming one people. "It is the effect of time," he says.

The monarchy illustrates the process. The royal family kept itself German for 200 years by marrying back to Germany, then changed its name from Saxe-Coburg to Windsor during the First World War and began marrying English men and women.

The same test of time shapes his view of Rishi Sunak, a man he calls "imbued with that old fashioned English concept of public duty." Yet Starkey argues Sunak cannot yet be called English because not enough time has gone by, though two or three generations may change that. The modern mistake, he says, is believing a passport alone makes someone British or Canadian.

Starkey calls the prevailing ideology "hyper liberalism" and says Canada, "remade by the Trudeaus to be a post nation nation," stood at its vanguard. His example is the Archbishop of Canterbury, who on the anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks honoured a Pakistani imam who refused to let the archbishop, a woman, touch him, so the medal was placed on his wife, veiled in a face-concealing niqab. The award was later rescinded. Starkey calls the archbishop, a former chief nursing officer, "pig ignorant."

The deeper error, he argues, is treating Islam as a private faith when it is "a complete structure of life, law, politics." The idea of universal human rights assumes a universal human being, and that assumption led to the abandonment of frontiers and of the principle that "the first duty of the state is to distinguish between the citizen and the foreigner, and to protect the citizen." He describes Britain's rape gangs as extended families operating like a mafia, bound by clan loyalties the West will not acknowledge.

He warns of what he calls the Northern Ireland-ization of Britain. In Belfast, the Palestinian flag now flies beside the Irish tricolour and the Star of Israel beside the Union Jack. In Portsmouth, men from the Patriot Platform, a group organized by Danny Tommo, gathered in black clothing and face masks to resist the landing of an inflatable boat carrying about 100 people. "This is a very, very real risk," Starkey says of society fragmenting into rival vigilante groups.

The law, he argues, feeds that risk. At the time of the Southport riots, Starkey says, a masked crowd carrying baseball bats surrounded a pub in Birmingham's Sparkbrook district and beat one man so badly his liver ruptured. A Muslim police inspector then told them: "Come on, be sensible. Put your baseball bats away. Put them in the mosque." Citing the judge Tom Bingham, Starkey says human rights law is anti-democratic and counter-majoritarian. "It protects the minority at the expense of the majority," he says, and few people grasp that the law of England, which invented equality before the law, "had actually been deliberately skewed."

Born in 1945, Starkey says he has "lived through the most comfortable experience of human history, but it is manifestly coming to an end." The answer, he argues, is the one thing Kipling, Chesterton and T.S. Eliot each believed in and showed in very different ways: courage.

GUEST: Interview with historian Dr. David Starkey

Migrant Reports UK

Danny Tommo cut an empty migrant dinghy in the English Channel — and now he's in a cell without bail while every migrant on that boat gets a free lawyer. Rebel News is sending Alexa Lavoie to the UK to cover his court case and the rape gang protests the British media refuses to report honestly.