Winston Marshall
speaker
891 appearances
6 recordings
5 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard 13 May
Winston Marshall’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 2.
Appearances
It's a great success. It seemed to be, yes. Which I think only you could have pulled off and pulled everyone together. Such disparate people from across the world, unified by a common, at least, appreciation that things have gone wrong, even if they don't know. We don't all each know exactly how it's gone wrong. and it was overwhelmingly positive.
There's a problem we've got in our space, I think, is a lot of people trying to take things down or angry or anti things. You've actually created an environment that is for something, that is not just countering, but trying to offer and proffer a positive vision for the future, which we need.
Well, Kemi Beynonok, leader of the Conservative Party, actually did that. And what bothered me is she used the term populist in a pejorative sense in her speech. And as soon as she did that, I was a bit bothered, because I was like, again, this is the anti, this is the negative, which is not exactly what ARC is about.
What I mean is that it's... If you get tied into the culture wars and the dialogue online, it's all a lot of, no, you're wrong, no, you're wrong, no, you're wrong. And here it was, this is wrong, but here's actually an alternative. Like, this is wrong, and this is why it's wrong, and here's a better alternative to that.
I'd say on... I found it interesting with regards to the media and your idea of culture, is that one of the headlines, I think, from an Australian paper was that it's the culture stupid playing off the Bill Clinton thing. And... That, I think, is partly because of what you describe, is that the culture is upstream from politics. I think as you're sort of implying that, the Andrew Breitbart thing.
But I would also say, and perhaps this is why some people like this, is that there's been such an attack on our culture for so long that even being in a place where it's okay to feel like it's... Even being in a place where culture isn't negative, like one's... Right, just outright, just its utility outright denied.
Exactly.
But that, by the way, I think is really crucial, because I think that there has been a concerted effort since the end of the Second World War to crush our culture. And I think this ties in with the populist thing, which I was keen to talk to you about.
And a lot of populists will think, or a lot of people who frame the populist age, it's sort of over the last 30 years, you look at failed Iraq wars, trillion dollars spent there, the Wall Street bailout 2008, turbocharged by Covid and the failure of elites there.
But I think you can actually go back to the post, all the way to the end of the war, and this attack on the culture, which has inspired what I think is the worldwide populist movement, is been deliberately because we learned the wrong lessons at the end of the Second World War. So this is what the writer N.S. Lyons has called the long 20th century, which we're now coming out of.
And so at the end of the Second World War, you have writers like Karl Popper writing about the open society, and they create this dichotomy between the open society and the closed society. And the motivation is never again, of course, like after the Holocaust. The lesson seems to have been in Europe that these national cultures are wrong. Nationalism is evil.
And the dichotomy that's created was that those were the closed societies, negative, and we need to aim for an open society. And so that sort of, to me, explains everything that's going on. It explains everything from mass migration, explains everything from the clampdown on free speech. It explains even the failure to address the British Pakistani rape gang scandal. It all comes from that.
And even within that, there's been an attack on British national identity, which another thing I'd like to get into with.
So there has been this onslaught on culture, which we could perhaps talk about, but what, so there's this relief arc at the conference where it's like, oh, it's not, we need not be ashamed about these things, but also it doesn't go into the, because I do see an emerging reaction to this attack on our culture that is negative. And there is a...
Some people are calling it sort of the post-modernist right or the woke right. There's a fraction which has got some elements to it that are not so pretty, I think. So what ARC is to me is a positive contention with the failure of the post-war consensus.
I can actually, sorry, follow that in just to explain how bad it is, right? So at the end of last year, I was speaking at Oxford University for a Roger Scruton lecture. And the topic was, what is English and British identity? And it was a room full of students, presumably all conservative. And I was...
discussing that topic, what it is to be British, what it is to be English, the differences and what have you in the history. And then at the end, I asked the room, what do you think? Every single student in the room gave a different answer as to what it is to be English, which ranged from ethnicity, i.e.
it was an ethno-nationalist argument, all the way to there's no such thing as Englishness and Britishness, and everything in between. No one agreed. That's the Conservatives. Now, to add colour to that, our mutual friend Konstantin Kissin has just gone viral.
on Twitter a week or two ago because there was an argument he had with Fraser Nelson where he argued that Rishi Sunak, our former prime minister, might indeed be British, but that he, as a brown Hindu, was not English. Now, that erupted where he was smeared by left-wingers, you know, the classic types, saying that he was arguing for ethno-nationalism, which he was absolutely not.
But even within the right, there was no consensus on what that is. Now, I'll just tie it back to my thesis about open society. In 1944, there was a writer called Hans Pohn who... It was similar to Karl Popper, that there's a... They're thinking, how do we separate the good and the bad here about what a national identity is?
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