David Butterfield

speaker

739 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard May 2026 last heard 20 May

David Butterfield’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.

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TRIGGERnometry · How Civilisations Die - Ancient Greece Expert David Butterfield · 20 May 2026 podcast

selfish, myopic, frankly, philistine and uneducated class of politicians than we have now.

The saddest thing about that is less the lack of

equality in Parliament.

It's how high the hurdles are for the ordinary good British citizen, which I really do believe the great majority of people are, how high the hurdle is for people to get over if they want to be involved in that.

Party politics is much more an obstacle to good government than it is a help.

So I really worry about our own democratic process and the fact that the House of Lords is slowly losing all of its powers as a genuinely scrutinizing body that can block poorly made laws.

But in education more broadly, we're simply not leading our young people who will become voters to a level of understanding of our history and our values that makes them sufficiently well-informed voters.

I mean, right now we have this...

perverse scenario where a Labour government has lowered the voting age to 16, but at the selfsame time is making changes to education and indeed to the freedoms of 16-year-olds that don't give them the information on which to make a considered vote as a notional adult in the nation.

So there's very little joined up thinking going on as to how we can improve in Britain

our own democratic process, and we've become scared of merit, of excellence, and of exclusion where it's necessary.

And that takes me back to where I began with one of the problems in higher education.

Well, that was one of the things I actually found most shocking, because I guess at the level of the normal person, which is what we are, who is not involved in education, you go,

The University of whatever on whatever.

Yeah, of course, it's a work madrasa, blah, blah, blah.

Cambridge, I mean, Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard.

And suddenly when you talk to people who are actually involved in all these great institutions and Cambridge, Oxford, great institutions.

I mean, these are the pillars of British history, of British society.

It's given us prime ministers on days on end, etc.,

for someone of your caliber, of your intellect, of your sharpness, of your brilliance, to give up, and people need to understand this, you had tenure at Cambridge, which means you had a job for life.

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