 Can everybody hear me? Good. So in this room, I inqu anation, and some of us are by profession intellectuals. As such, there is a continual temptation for us to pay a greater regard to the power of ideas than is actually the case. We are intellectually, we have been intellectually convinced of the power or military or conservative ideas. And our intellectual conviction has created a passionate moral and spiritual conviction of the truth of both ideas. And there is a temptation for us to regard those people who do not share our conviction as either bad or stupid. In the case of medium intellectuals, that is a fair influence. But when it comes to the great commands of ordinary people, I think it is unfair. Most ordinary people are cleverer than I am, and many of them are cleverer than you are. The difference between them and us is that they don't care about our ideas. They care about our ideas in the way that I care about the color schemes. I am as capable as anybody of looking at a particular color scheme and saying, well that doesn't seem to work very well, or that's not nice. But when people start talking about the harmony of shades and which colors go with which, my eyes glaze over, I'm not interested. Go away and do it, leave it to the experts, and that is how most people regard our ideas. They're not interested, but have better things to do with their lives. And so, if we want to win the battle of ideas, if we want to complete an overpowering victory for the battle of ideas, a victory that persists generation and century after century, we need perhaps to look at something more powerful and stabilized, of course, than the power of mere abstract ideas. And what I want to talk about is a case study of such a stabilisation of liberal, of libertarian, or conservative values. I was talking about England as it's the subject that I know best. Now for various historical reasons which would take far too long to explain and which would take me far outside my remit, I would simply say that England was uniquely fortunate. It was the only country in Europe which preserved the alpine, and in the details of a limited medieval constitution into the rising commercial civilisation of the 17th century. England is the hope of liberal, or libertarian, or conservative ideas. All modern libertarianism is, in a sense, a qualification for English, political and intellectual experience. That's true if it is perhaps a somewhat exaggerated claim, but I would insist that it is in its alpine for truth. Now you might think that the English liberal tradition was created by John Locke, and David Hume, Adam Smith, and Thomas Babington McCall, and even though there are some criticisms related to them, by John Thurlill. What I would say is that although these great thinkers contributed much to the English liberal tradition, they have not created it. They are at least as much an effect of that tradition as a cause of it. The reason why England was and remained a free country for so many centuries had very little to do with the power of autonomous ideas. If you think of political philosophy in the late 17th century, you think John Locke is. John Locke's been corrected to us. John Locke was an abstract philosopher. Oh, his second treatise on civil government was very much, it was very much based on English constitutional practice of the day, but it has a sufficient ingredient of structure to spin to all of you whether or not you're English, whether or not English is your first language. John Locke was never very popular in England. John Locke was the taste of a small minority of intellectuals. By far the more influential writers in the late 17th and early 18th centuries were people like Algern Sidney. And if you read Algern Sidney's discourses on civil government, there would be nothing much left to do. This was far more popular at the time of that. What kept England free could be summed up in the Latin phrase first expressed in the 13th century and last heard of the 19th century. There is only an anonymous retirement. We do not want the laws of England to be changed. In the 17th century, there arose the idea in people's minds of an ancient and immemorial constitution. This was carried to what we would often consider to be absurd lengths in the legal arguments over the validity of Charles I's shift money or his legal taxation in the 1520s. Council on both sides solemnly raised precedence from the reign of King Edward a thousand years before. There was an assumption in most people's minds that the parliament which deposed Richard Vissett in 1399 was exactly the same in its forms procedure as the parliament which meant in 1641. People might wear different clothes, but everything was unchanged. Later on, this idea of an ancient and immemorial constitution was attached to the idea of change. You will read this in Blackstone's commentary on laws that were published in 1774, that they had at one time been this wonderfully perfect liberal English constitution which had been disrupted by the normal invasion, and the previous 600 years had been a time of struggle to get back our ancient fundamental liberties. But the idea was that the constitution had not changed, if it had changed in the past it was the worst, and any change now should simply be towards recovery that earlier meant. Not strictly, but the point is people believe it. And the fact that the constitution was believed not to have changed in the past was an excellent reason for declaring that the constitution should not change now or in the future. The system was legitimised by the fact, or the belief in, its legitimacy. The legitimacy was based on its inner morality. I've always been so, therefore it should always be so. Now, if you look at England in the 18th century with the eye of an outsider, you'll see rather less than a libertarian society. You'll see many good features, but those go on some bad features. Let's look at the law. The law was a mass of injustice. You could be hanged for well over a couple of years. If you had tried for those values you would not allow legal representation. Oh, there was a question of law raised in councils and a science. But on pure matter of facts you were expected to paint yourself. On the other hand, if there was the slightest defect in the procedure the prosecution case would be thrown out if there was a spelling mistake in the indictment or in this court, but all proceedings were held to dull employment. But it meant that criminal trials were often rather like the toss of the coin. Hits, you hang, tables, you go to the grave, you'll hear a sentence or all that or something else. If you turn to the civil law, that appears a mess of uncertainty. There were three common law courts. The Court of Kings Bay, the Court of Common Pleas, and there was the Court of Chancery in order to apply differences of law. If you wanted to start a law case, you might need to file proceedings in two or maybe three different courts which all proceeded at different states and in different ways. You might do it in one court and in the other. Everything was slow. Everything was expensive. Many things were deeply uncertain. England was not a libertarian society as we would regard it. In England was a free country. There's no doubt about it. It was a free country. The state did not intervene in many areas of life. We were left alone to live very largely as you pleased and, of course, the taxes were much lower. Now, let me continue with the good points about this system. Because everybody believed that the Constitution was legitimised by its antiquity, and because everybody was terrified to raise a single finger against this magnificent structure known as the English Constitution, it meant that the authorities were as tightly serviced in their behaviour as if we had had the sort of constitution the American family powers fought by the England to the United States. Let me give you two cases to example. In 1765, the government got a general warrant out of the search of prison. The common law says that if you want to search for evidence of a crime, you must get a warrant for a magistrate, and you must specify the place to be searched, and you must specify what you were searching for. If there is any defect in the execution of that warrant, the reasons involved are vital to criminal or civil prosecution. A general warrant, however, is right and different. It allows the authorities to go on what England is called a fishing expedition. There is no address named in the warrant and there is no specification of the goods to be seized. It is just a general warrant that allows you to go to somebody over and look for evidence of a crime that is not specified. Now, this procedure is coming in the licensing act of 1661. The licensing act had expired in, I think, 1694, but the procedure for getting a general warrant continued because no one even noticed that it was no longer legal and they were not used very extensively. But in 1764, one of the secretaries of the state got a general warrant to search the premises of a Mr Carriter printer to see if he was publishing Sidish's literature. Mr Emthig refused to allow the magistrates and the officers to enter and he took leave action against the secretary of state and it went into court and the judge, called you the judge as a candidate, listened to the arguments on both sides and the government boys of the government said, well, there may be perhaps some ambiguity as to the warrant, but they were required. I mean, how on earth was the government country with all these people running around publishing Sidish's? And the judge slapped him down saying, I'm very sorry, but the reason of the state is no offense in the court law. And the government lost. And the Secretary of State, Mr Carriter, had to pay damages. And how much was it for the 1,000 or 10,000 pounds? It doesn't matter. This is a lot of money by today's standards. And from that time it was generally accepted that general warrant were illegal in the court. And the government did not rush through an act of Parliament shortly afterwards allowing general warrant. The courts have pronounced these warrants were unconstitutional, therefore they could not be used. Now that was something that happened in a time of moderate political excitement. Let me move to another example. 1793, year two of the French Republic, the world's first modern totalitarian killing machine was chewing its way through France. The king had his head cut off, the queen had her head cut off. Thousands of people were being killed today with the sediments, not even the sediments of the tribe. France was turning upside down, there were cataracts of blood everywhere. And there were radicals in England who wanted the same for us. Some of these people were sent because they guided people to the Soviets. Some of them wanted a range there in England. Oh, there was a mass. There was a huge moral panic. There were people running around saying that Tom Payne was fighting civil war and rebellion. There were people who claimed that little extracts from the rights of men by Tom Payne were being printed on sweet drafts and given to children. You've got incredible stuff being signed to court in other context. There is a problem that the government would do something about it. But even when you put aside the exaggeration and the moral panic, there was a conspiracy in England. There was a large and well-coordinated radical movement which once instituted England what had been done to France. And so in September 1793 the government arrested 12 men whom it said were the leaders of the English radical movement. A couple of them were people like John Phil, a trouble maker, and he would probably have loved to stick a cap of dillus on his head and wandered around with the people saying what to do with him. But most of the people arrested people like John Paul II, old-fashioned radical friend of Dr. Johnson, believed in Parliament in truthful form. Tom's Harley of well-intentioned, not entirely intelligent bloomer. He believed that if a working man should get to the ending and there should be a bit of parliamentary reform at your tax cuts, that's the thing. But these men came to trial at a time of a minute's moral panic. I mean, you can stand on the clicks of Dilluson and you can look across the channel and explain if the wind is in the right direction or if it's in the wrong direction. 200 years ago, you could look across the channel and you could almost see the Dilluson rising and falling and people were trying to handle the pressure and these men were brought to trial and they were given to you to process the whole law. The first trial came on that of John Paul II, the Defence Council, Thomas Lerskyne, a great advocate. He called the Prime Minister to give evidence of the defence. He's appealing that the Prime Minister forced him to leave his house and down the street where he was trying to conduct a war with France and to war into the guilt of all where the trial was in place in London and to give evidence about how he had co-operated with John Paul II nine years earlier in a failed attempt at parliamentary reform. Lerskyne's speech to the defence came on, I think, for seven hours. At the end of that time, the jury brought in verdict, not guilty. John Paul II, released, wouldn't be trying twice for the same defence, never touched again by the authorities for the rest of his life, and came out in 1814. Next trial came on, Thomas Harley, the radical bloomer. Lerskyne ripped the prosecution over to pieces. It was based on agents of provocation, letters steamed open, over her remarks, hearsay evidence. You can find Lerskyne's speech in the same trials. It goes on and on and on and on. Matt Fefford. Well, the three men say, at the end of the trial, the jury came back, not guilty. Thomas Hardy released. The first trial came on, on 12 April. If he'd been brought on first, the government might have a prediction, but they lost heart. John Fefford came into court, and the prosecution stood up and said, with the criminal charges, and Fefford rather upset. He said to the judge, oh, but I want my day in court. I want the sleep I've been saved to give. I don't think I'm able to do my thing. And the judge threw him out of the jury. He held the treatment trials in 1793. And there was no repetition for that. Oh, he has the government sharpened up the laws against the religious libel, and if you were an anti-establishment journalist, you might find yourself spying on it. You might find yourself done over and out again. But, the English Constitution in perfect as it was has sufficient had sufficient legitimacy with the majority of people, so that is prevent the horrors that England of the French Revolution. It also had sufficient legitimacy with the ruling class, with the powers that they to prevent any of the sort of horrors that you see in operas like De Deyvon or Tostea. There is a nasty reactionary police force spiralling people, The constitution was destabilised in the 1830s. The reform of Parliament looked well-intentioned, and that was inevitable. The legal reforms of the years between 1830 and the 1880s were very good. The old legal system was very hard to defend, but you see it was a change. And it was often rapidly changed. The 19th century reforms did the best disguise the fact that it was a change. The way you may take the picture of an ancient and illimorial order of things is by allowing most institutions and most customs and most traditions to continue uninterrupted. Customs died as they became useless, and new customs emerged, and it was often there were changes. But these changes take place against an apparently unshifting background. It is possible to say that constitutives ancient and unchanging things are going to make this little tiny change. You may think that the law of art reverberation, people forget about it, it becomes part of that background or immemoriality, and find its ways in other things. The constitution has so been destabilised by reform. But, as lately as recently as the 1970s, when I was a boy, it was still possible to believe that nothing much had changed. You see, the way in which England's government, the customs and institutions of a natural life had not changed that much, or cede to most people not to have changed that much. When I learned very good politics of the 1670s, 80s and 90s, I didn't have to look up glossaries to see what does this title mean, what does that mean? How does a bill proceed through Parliament? I didn't need to know that. It was history, but it was also current politics. I could use my actual everyday experience of constitutional practice in North England to understand the arguments and the proceedings of 300 years earlier. Then, the collapse came on. The English constitution could be compared to one of all the weak temples we've been looking at for the past few days. It stood, proud and unbroken for a thousand years. Then, many people decided that these things were worthless. For 200 years, fanatics and thieves chipped away at it, neglected it, defaced it. But at the end of 200 years, free structures were still stagnant, still very largely worthless at the end of the past. And then the English found a new way of destroying those buildings. You do not attack the front of the salt. The buildings are too solidly constructed. What's good is that they don't leave them, big tunnels, light fires, but the crops collapse, bringing the ground down and bang, there goes the temples. And that's what the left has been doing to my country since the 1960s or the 1970s. I will go to our views where it started. If in 1960 you had brought in, if in 1960 the government had brought in a bill called the abolition of the common law bill, it would have thrown that in the nightmare that you can't do that. Liberty in England does not depend on a Britain constitution as in the United States. It depends instead on a way of institutions and assumptions. You cannot abolish trouble by doing. It's always existed. You can't do that within a great country. You can't sense the credits. You can't do that. You can't do that. There's no constitutional provision that says you can't. You just can't do it because it is not part of our way. And so what you do is you abolish our way. You do it with small, but repeated cuts of the margin. Who will defend the English system and the weights of the engines? Thoroughly irrational. 12 inches for a foot. 3.5 yards. 1,750 yards per mile. 5,200 meter-thin for a mile. 370,000 inches for a mile, I think, if you will take a view. It's not very rational, is it? And I won't even describe the way that we're going to be weighing things. So let's replace it with an entry. It's an improvement. What about the old English currency? 240 pence per pound divided into 20 shillings of 12 pence. Not very sensible, is it? Let's replace it. Let's decimalise it. Let's have 100 pence per pound. The English counting system, 48 counties, which do not necessarily correspond with the normal distribution of population. And it's sweeping away. Let's divide more pure into three counties. Let's partition Sussex. That's a horrible little set to culture. What about human being procedure? Well, let's give it all this old shill language of Greeks and Atadaeus and plaintiffs. Let's replace it with claim forms and statements of truth. Claimments. Surely only a crack, surely only a nutcase would have generated to these improvements, improvements, improvements, modernisation, after they call it. The problem is, after 40 years of this, this win of customs and institutions on the liberty dependent having worn very thick. It doesn't work. It does to the work. During the past six months, I've been doing a lot of radio and television work, defending the right of an organisation called the British National Party to exist and to produce. The British National Party is saved to the National Socialist Movement. There are some National Socialists in it, but I think it's more accurate and described nowadays as a white nationalist movement. The point is, it doesn't matter who they are. I mean, they've got a picture of a guest chamber on the chronic colour of their literature. It doesn't matter. I have a right to say that they're right. At first, when I used to go on and defend their right to speak as a publisher and to organise, I tried making an abstract argument about people's right to express any opinion they like on matters of public policy. It didn't seem to get my residence with people, so I rapidly switched to this argument. These men are being prosecuted under laws that didn't exist when I was a boy. When I was a boy, you could say anything right to this country on matters of public policy. Why can't we do that right? These laws are illegitimate. The enemy has no artistic rights. They sit by silent and advanced as people calling one after the other. I don't agree with the British National Party. I think the British are probably going back to the Trump right. If these laws are monstrous, you can't do this. You can't do that in England. It still works. It still works. But how much longer? We are facing not a full front of assaulting the world, but very difficult, but we are facing a series of side assaults. You attack the minor things of our actual life. You tear up that web of customs and institutions that preserve treatment. And when you've done that, you have things like transagirgyry that result from this, the right against self-incubination, the right to freedom of speech, etc. You have those things standing alone. They would have missed that, though they were meant to be supported by a vast wave of other less important things. But they stand alone, and they go, not over, one to time. I suppose the lesson of what I'm saying today is this. We should try not to be arrogant about the power of abstract ideas. These were our things, so those were the minds of the masses. We should respect the customs and institutions of ordinary people, so far as we can. Things may not be immediately conducive for free society, but the main need for my experience in England, once you get rid of things which are not immediately conducive to freedom, things like being in the system with some measures, you will see that they did have a certain support role. And if we ever do with the matter of ideas, in order to get complete and overpower victory so that corrupt intellectuals and their breadth and their business interests of other best interest groups do not make recovery, we need to ensure that our ideas are as far as possible embodied, not just in a written document, which a very experienced suggests is by learning tonight. We must make sure that our ideas are embodied in the practices and beliefs and customs and traditions of daily life. Ideas are important. Ideas, in a sense, change the world. But if you want to influence ordinary people, you don't just throw a cup of oil into a coffee pot or what we need for coffee. They're not ready for that. They're all of it. And they're not criticising the project. They're just not up to it in the same way as I'm not up to deciding what is the best policy. We need to be rather more sophisticated in our defence, in our attack, and if we ever get it in our triumph. Now, one last point. The English for the certain present is so that your department is so immorganised that we have to print and bind our own laws. This department is a couple of years old. I managed to sell out 40 copies. Unfortunately, I sold out to 3,000 because people were born with the thing. I'd keep promising to revive it and double the size of it, but I didn't throw this one together before I came out. Some of them were very badly bound and my wife looked at me and said she was going to take loads of ideas, and I said, well, here it is. I'd always sell the gross of my space in £99. I'd hook up at that price to stop this little buy from this too much trouble to print and bind. You could have them for... You could have them for, what was 10% euro. Is that a reasonable price? That's like £4,000. 10% euro. I've had my heart out. Thank you very much for your indulgence.