The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
535. Is It Too Late for the UK? A Candid Talk with Winston Marshall
Thu, 3 Apr 2025
Jordan Peterson sits down with writer, musician, and podcaster Winston Marshall. They discuss the nature of identity on the community and national levels, the relationship between a nation and its citizens, how the UK has a rich culture that is worth preserving, and the unifying question that has still yet to be answered. Winston Marshall is a writer, musician, and host of “The Winston Marshall Show.” In 2007 Winston co-founded folk-rock band Mumford & Sons. In their fourteen years together the band won 2 Grammy Awards, 2 Brit Awards, an Ivor Novello and performed with the likes of Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Neil Young, Willie Nelson and Elton John. In 2017 he released the techno-fusion album ‘Silk’ in collaboration with HVOB. His remix work includes Maggie Rogers and Jack Garrett. His written work has been published by The Free Press, The Jewish Chronicle, The Spectator, The Daily Mail. Through 2022 and 2023 he hosted the podcast ‘Marshall Matters’ at The Spectator. This episode was filmed on February 22nd, 2025. | Links | For Winston Marshall: On X https://x.com/mrwinmarshall?lang=en Youtube https://www.youtube.com/@winston_marshall Substack https://www.winstonmarshall.co.uk/
Chapter 1: What are the consequences of World War II on national identity?
As you pointed out, after the horrors of World War II, there was a consensus around the world that we should never forget. The problem with never forget is that you can't remember what you don't understand.
That sort of, to me, explains everything. That's, by the way, what we're seeing crumbling now. That's why people are so upset about J.D. Vance's speech in Munich. Anything that goes against the open society ideology, if you're against that, you must be for the Holocaust.
Diversity without unity is indistinguishable from chaos. National identity is shared participation in the same stories. The story is everything. And this is why I think we're at the end of the Enlightenment.
The famous tolerance paradox buried within there was the seeds for a new type of totalitarianism. How can we work out what the correct relationship is with the nation where we can't even identify what the nation is?
We could ask ourselves, what's the essence of civilization? It seems to me that the proper story for free societies is... Hello, everybody. I'm here in Cambridge in the UK today at the end of the ARC convention. I have as my guest today Winston Marshall, and I have a long and storied history with Mr. Marshall.
I, in part, was in part responsible for the destruction of his musical career because he had the audacity to indicate to audiences the public at large that he didn't think I was entirely despicable and that didn't go so well for him or for the band and so that's on me.
However, the upshot of that has been that Winston has become a emerging star in the alternative media landscape in the UK, which is behind the curve in the alternative media department, but coming on quite strong with people like Constantine Kissin, for example. And Winston's become a very astute, or has shown his ability as a very astute political commentator and cultural analyst.
And we spent our discussion today talking about, well, partly about the conference, the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship conference, but more as a means of interrogating
the relationship between the story that sits at the base of a culture, that necessarily sits at the base of a culture and that provides people with psychological integrity and social unity, and the political structure that is nested within that. And we delved further into that and discussed the relationship between
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Chapter 2: How does the open society ideology affect cultural unity?
Oh, well, thank you.
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.
So part of the problem that conservatives have perhaps less so classic liberals, is the formulation of a vision. The visionary types tend to tilt in the liberal direction, traditionally, so to speak. And so conservatives do find themselves very frequently playing something approximating a reactionary role
They can see when we've wandered off the path but aren't very good at specifying what the proper path might be. Okay, so we've noticed some things as we've run these two conventions. We've observed our speakers. We've had, I don't know, maybe 150 speakers across both conventions and also monitored the social media network responses to our broadcasts.
And maybe you can tell me what you think about this. If we invite a politician, regardless of their stature, and they do what you just described, which is to only point out problems, which would often be a critique of the people across the aisle, let's say, or if they speak in a partisan manner, They disappoint the audience that's there, and they get zero views on social media.
It doesn't matter who they are, they can be very well-known as politicians.
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.
Yeah, when we opened our first convention a year and a half ago, Kevin McCarthy spoke, and it was pretty partisan, pretty Republican, American Republican. And it was a fine speech from the political perspective, but it wasn't a good opening to the conference, and it didn't do well, either at the conference or online.
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Chapter 3: What is the essence of civilization and national identity?
And he didn't coin the phrase civic nationalism, but his thesis basically was what would become civic nationalism, which is civic nationalism, good, is... democracy, I guess, geographic sovereignty or lands, you know, sovereignty, and a sort of civic duty.
And then on the other side, they have ethnicity, which we probably all, it's different from country to country, but we all agree that it's a bad idea to say just ethnicity is on the other side of, it's the ethno-nationalism. But they also lumped in culture. So they put the cultural side in the ethno bucket. So you have this growth now.
So people, fast forward 80 years and you have diversity as our greatest strength, when actually I happen to believe unity is our greatest strength, or rather I should say diversity without unity it all kind of crumbles apart.
So Britain now is in a place where we can't- Diversity without unity is indistinguishable from chaos. Exactly. And the world is a multicultural place and it's rife with conflict and war. And there's some naive presumption that if you bring people from all corners of the world, to a particular geographical locale, they'll leave all the strife behind them and only bring the fruits of their culture.
And that's, well, I guess partly what we're trying to do in this discussion is to determine why people believe that.
Well, they did that as a reaction to the Holocaust. Yes, yes. And to the war. To the war. And that's, by the way, what we're seeing crumbling now. That's why when people are so upset about J.D. Vance's speech in Munich,
It's because they can't... Anything that goes against the open society ideology, they have this dichotomy, which is a false dichotomy, which means that if you're against that, you must be for the Holocaust. Right, you must be a fascist. You must be a fascist. That's why they use the term fascism, because they actually can't code it any other way. They don't even know they have this ideology.
They've been swimming in it for so long.
Well, this is partly why we've introduced a stream into ARC that's specifically focused on identity, and it's also associated with our concern about the better story, narrative identity. And so the classic Catholic alternative to You could say that what the open society people did was replace tyranny with chaos, right?
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Chapter 4: Why is diversity without unity problematic?
There was no neutral or transcendent territory between us that we could appeal to and move forward to a higher mode of resolution. That was all delusion or maybe justification of our own power claims. Now, it seems to me, and this is something that I've been working out and I tried to clarify this to some degree at ARC, that there's something that the West has got
that has got canonically correct, that makes a hash of relativistic claims or multicultural claims. Because we could ask ourselves, what's the essence of civilization? Which is what we are asking if we ask what's the core of our identity or the core of our story. Or if we're asking how we could have unity without the pathology of nationalism or of patriarchy, let's say.
Is there a principle that could unite us Now, power is one. You see that reflected in the mythology in the Lord of the Rings, right? Because the one evil ring that binds them all together is the ring of power. And power does, power can unite, but it's fragile and it requires force.
So it seems to me that the proper story for free societies, so free and voluntary societies, is not the story of power, but the story of voluntary self-sacrifice. And that's antithetical to the claim of power. Let's see, is this a good way of explaining it?
One of the things we've noticed, my family and I, as I've become more notorious, let's say, or more well-known, is that people approach me for a lot of different reasons. And some of those reasons aren't so good. They're self-serving, let's say.
One of the ways we've determined how to distinguish between people who are after their own ends and people who are interested in a productive partnership is that They come with an offer and not a request. The point is, is that the basis of a genuine social interaction is something like an offering, right?
So if you and I want to establish a relationship, it's a good idea for me to bring something to the table and give it to you. From what I understand, this is how warring tribes in the default tribal condition of humanity started to trade. So what seems to happen, human beings have been around for about 350,000 years, and we didn't seem to get our act together until about 20,000 years ago.
You might ask what the hell we were doing for the 330,000 years before that. And one answer is tearing down anyone who had any modicum of success whatsoever and fighting endless tribal battles. And so then you might ask, how the hell do you get out of that? Because that's kind of a self-sustaining dead end.
So imagine a tribal group here and a tribal group here, and this group is watching this group and vice versa. And this group sees that this group has some cool stuff that they maybe would like to have and vice versa. Then imagine there's a no man's land of disputed territory between them.
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Chapter 5: What role does sacrifice play in societal cohesion?
system of classic liberalism can't maintain its integrity because there's nothing that's like every system depends on some axiomatic presuppositions to maintain its validity and the conservatives Technically, I think the conservatives stand for the maintenance of those axioms It's hard for conservatives to propositionalize what they stand for though because those actions usually aren't Explicit.
It's like the working-class identity British identity. Well, what's British? Well They know it when they see it, but they can't say it. But it's not surprising because it's very complicated. It's like, well, is the monarchy British? Well, it is in its British form. And what's the British form of monarchy? Well, you could unpack that for a month, right? It's something like...
You know, I think the American system lacks this to some degree. It's executive, legislative, judicial, and symbolic.
That's the problem with the American system. That's right. The symbolic collapses into the president. Which is then why everyone loses their shit with Trump.
It's also why America produces dynasties. Right. Like the Kennedys and the Bushes. And so... And who knows where that'll go. But... the monarchy in the UK has this symbolic quality, it's extremely useful, and it does take a fair bit of weight off the executive branch. Because the prime minister isn't the king. And the prime minister himself has to kneel before someone. Right, right.
It tempers him. Right, and the king is supposed to be kneeling before God. And then the question, of course, arises, well, which God, and is God real?
Our king has that problem, by the way.
Of course he does. Well, his god in some part is Gaia. And that's not a good substitute for someone who runs the Church of England. You know, and it's a degeneration into nature worship. And the nature worshipers say, well, there is no higher deity than the earth. It's like... Nature worshipers always end up sacrificing children. And you can understand why.
You already laid it out earlier in the argument. You said, well, if you prioritize rats, you deprioritize children. That's a zero-sum game. Right, because it is zero-sum. Of course it is. Relative value is a zero-sum game. And so if it's the planet first, then children aren't first. And you can see the consequences of that because we don't have any children. So... Yeah, yeah, yeah.
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Chapter 6: How can nations maintain a healthy relationship with their identity?
She could lose the right wing of her party. They could just go over to reform. The left wing could go over to Lib Dems. It can kind of fall apart. It's almost like, is that the realm for that conversation? Farage has a huge advantage. There's only five MPs that he's got. Right, right.
Well, I think the way... So the Democrats in the US... There's a reason Harris didn't go on any podcasts. A couple of reasons. The first is that... The Democrats are so clueless when it comes to the alternative media that they might as well be living in 1970. We invited, by we I mean a group of major podcasters in the US, we've invited Democrats to speak with us
We've offered formal invitations repeatedly for eight years. And we mediated those invitations through one of the Democrats' central political messengers, and they got the invite. And we couldn't find one who would do it. Not one. Now, Dean Phillips talked to me after he got slaughtered in his presidential campaign because he got betrayed so badly by his Democrat peers.
And I've talked to RFK and Gabbard who are, you know... heretical Democrats. But the thing about the Democrats that is very much worth understanding is all the people who have a voice left or got killed.
But they're anti-pluralist, which, by the way, is they accuse the populists of being anti-pluralist. But if you look at Trump's coalition, it's a pluralist coalition.
Yes, it certainly is.
And Obama now, anti-pluralism, they can't say anti-populist anymore because that doesn't work. So they're anti-pluralist. But it was the Democrats. I heard your interview with Dean Phillips. What he's describing is a totalitarian party. Oh, absolutely.
And it's worse than that. It's worse. And maybe this is a reflection of that totalitarian proclivity. The reason Harris didn't go on podcasts, apart from the fact that the Democrats are completely clueless about the alternative media, and like I said, live in 1970, is that a Democrat won't say anything that hasn't been workshopped. And the reason for that is they don't want to offend anyone.
Well, if you're not going to offend anyone, you're going to say the most anodyne things, which, of course, Harris always sounds like she's talking to retarded kindergarten children. It's so demeaning. And you might say, well, that's
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Chapter 8: How does Christian ethos influence national values?
Apart from saying it was phenomenal, I mean, it feels like the Overton Widger window was edged on a few topics, whether it was net zero or talking about culture, as we've described a little bit in this, in this conversation. And I think that's something that people like Douglas Murray is so good. It's like articulating what's in the zeitgeist, but not yet been said.
And so listeners should go to the ARC YouTube and watch all this.
Yeah, well, I think one of the things we're doing, the conservatives in Canada have told me that, and some of them in the US as well, have told me that the role I've played culturally for them is to establish a beachhead in relationship to difficult topics. So I can criticize climate apocalypse mongering, for example, and go substantially farther in that criticism than they would be willing to go.
But by moving the beachhead 200 yards up the beach, let's say, they can come up 50 yards and that's fine. And I think arc, I think that's actually the role of arc is to push the envelope, and to do that intelligently and carefully and positively.
And in the right direction, because the envelope's getting pushed in another direction. So I hinted at this earlier in the conversation, but one response to the open society question Those who observe the open society ideology is that they say, oh, look, all of the philosophers behind them are Jews.
Yeah, right.
And they go, oh, George Soros, open society, Jew. He's the one doing it. So then you have this new emergent anti-Semitism I see coming on the right because they're taking the wrong lessons from what's going on. Even though they might have observed correctly about the open society ideology, they're making the wrong decisions.
Yes, well, the opposite of one falsehood can be another falsehood. Exactly. Right, well, you see the same thing with regards on the masculinity side with regards to the attraction of people like Andrew Tate. Right, and you can understand why he's an attractive figure because he's at least not a cringing milk sop.
Right.
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