Archive: Debate – There’s Not Much Great About Britain
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Welcome to Intelligence Squared, where great minds meet. I'm producer Mia Cirenti. For today's episode, we're revisiting a debate from January 2020. The motion was, there's not much great about Britain. And speaking for the motion, we had journalist and broadcaster Peter Hitchens, alongside Will Self, the novelist, broadcaster, and literary critic.

Speaking against the motion were Kate Hoey, the former Labour MP from Vauxhall and now member of the House of Lords, alongside Saeed Awasi, the lawyer, politician and former co-chairwoman of the Conservative Party. The debate was chaired by historian and author Anthony Seldon. Now let's join Anthony as he introduces the debate.

So we want blood tonight. We want heated argument. We want passion, intensity. I was really worried earlier because they were getting on much too well and it was far too cosy. So we want to rip this apart because this debate matters colossally. This is the debate of the day, of the week, of the year.

And we're debating it tonight with a very talented panel indeed. The debate is, I'm going to read it out for you, there's not much great about Britain. Right. So are we all ready? Are you ready? Blood up. Are you ready? Yeah. Excellent. Let's go. The first speaker for the motion is Will Self.

And so Will Self is now going to be walking over to the podium while this is being said about him. In case you'd never heard of Will Self, he is very tall, walks in a very strange way. He's also, when he's not walking in a strange way, a novelist, a broadcaster, a political commentator and a literary critic.

His most recent novels are, not that I need to tell you because you've read them all, Umbrella, Shark and Phone. And his memoir, Will, was published in November 2019. And Will holds the chair in contemporary thought at Brunel University, no less. And the clock, Will, has started. Men and women.

Let's not talk about ladies and gentlemen this evening. The actual motion is there's not much great about Britain, but it's a pretty coy way of alluding to what we're going to be discussing, which is does Great Britain as an entity have any psychic purchase on us anymore? Do we think in terms of Great Britain? What's meant by Great Britain?

Well, we're obviously not going to sort of look into the etymology of the term and tell you that after the Romans left Britain and some ancient Britons went to Brittany, they started alluding to the place from which they had come as Grand Brittany. We're not going to refer to that.

I think we all know from the front of our passports, if we're subjects of the Queen, that it says there Great Britain, the Union of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. So that draws our attention to the Union of 1707 with Scotland. I'm not really much concerned with Wales.

I like Christopher Logue's Clara Hugh. When all else fails, try Wales. So I'm not going to concentrate on that. Nor do I want to particularly get bogged down in issues of patriotism and nationalism and attitudes towards belonging to the nation. In part, and Anthony was right about this, we were all getting on famously in the Green Room.

Very, very cuddly in there. A lot of Snapchatting and stuff like that. And it's really out of respect for the opposing team. Saeed Abbas, a very distinguished politician. And Kate Hoey, my own former MP. A little bit D-more pappy, possibly. Now she's left the House of Commons. But between them, many...

many years of exemplary public service service for what I presume they think of as Great Britain and I don't wish to impugn that

Personally, of course, you might think that Ms Hoey, who has often been a strong advocate of the right to hunt foxes, somewhat strange in a Labour MP, is in a way hearkening back with her championing of this pursuit to a slightly medieval conception of our nation and its culture and mores.

a slightly feudal conception, a conception that belongs as well with that idea so fond to which the medieval monarchs and the baronry were so fond of, which is that might

is right. Might is right. And I think that that idea is bound up in Great Britain, the idea of might being right. So it could be that Ms Hoey is opposing this motion because of that, because of the fox hunting. And as for Baroness Warsi, Baroness? What's that about? Baroness? You know, I mean...

Does she go hunting or hawking? Has she got some sort of estate? Does she occasionally clip-clop around it and look at some peasants groveling in the mud and say, get on with it, you peasants? Because...

I would say that if you style yourself as a baroness, you probably also have a lurking belief in the idea that might is right. So, I don't want to impugn them or their reasons for supporting the motion. I simply want to draw everybody's attention to what the focus is here, Great Britain.

Great Britain styled itself great when it was the hegemon, the most powerful nation in the world. And like all hegemons, Great Britain believed that its value system was an objective system of morality. Its might was indeed right. Do we still live in that country?

Manifestly, we do not. We do not. Just think, for example, of the longest deployment the British Army has ever been engaged in. I refer to the deployment in Afghanistan following 9/11. In 14 years in theater, I think I'm right on this, the British Army suffered 500 fatalities. Okay?

The British Army suffered that many fatalities in five minutes during the first four hours of the Battle of the Somme.

The willingness of the British to sacrifice their young men, and it was mostly young men, but some young women as well, upon the altar of being the hegemon is manifestly no longer the case. And indeed, to hear the public conversation about the losses of those 500 service people, you'd think that you lived in a very, very small, touchy-feely Scandinavian country, not in a hegemon at all.

The other thing is, I've recently, I've been working, they were name-checked before, on a trilogy of novels that focus on Britain's wars over the past century. And as part of that research, I interviewed senior British Army officers who told me that they now regard themselves, this is the command of the British Army,

as an echelon of the American army, a bit like the United States Marine Corps. They have to be interoperable with the American forces and they cannot deploy by themselves, not what you think of in a hegemon. I put it to you that the reason we're even debating this tonight is that Britain has a kind of hegemon hangover.

that leads it to believe it still has hegemonic attributes. Are we as powerful as our status as one of the world's six biggest economies would really suggest? What does our economy consist on? What do we in fact export? Well, we export some death metal, that's true, often to quite unpleasant regimes like Bahrain or Israel. Cool, well done Britain, great. But,

The other thing we tend to do and make a great deal of money out of is a kind of financial Ponzi scheme. It's the City of London, the equivalent in economic terms of taking money out of the cash point with your own cash card and running around to the bank to put it in your own account.

That's what we're engaged in. That's what makes Britain great, is that kind of economics. Oh, yeah, and exporting things like, you know, great famous British brands like Burberry and Barber. You know, they're normally showcased in things like The Queen, right? The Netflix series which bears absolutely no relation to our royal family whatsoever. I am indeed...

a concerned citizen of this country, and as such, I am a foilist rather than a royalist. I liked Claire Foy in the role of the queen much better than I like Olivia Colman and much better than I like the actual queen, who has a penchant for her thickest friend of pedophiles' son. So, not much there to look to in terms of greatness. And then there's culture.

To what extent is British culture still great? After all, I hold a British passport, I'm a writer, I operate in that culture. It may surprise you to hear this from me, who you may think of as a sort of touchy-feely, lefty-typey person. But my way of thinking is one of the problems that British culture has is a problem that a lot of Western cultures have, which is it tries to embrace multiculturalism.

But there's a contradiction in terms there. A culture is a vector that carries forward a set of values. In this case, it would have to be carrying forward, if we're to still be this Great Britain, those hegemonic values that we had when the sun never set on our empire.

But on the other hand, we want to acknowledge the values of all these other diverse minorities in our culture. There's an inherent contradiction there. I would like this country to respect the rights of all minorities, but I don't think that that necessarily involves it in having the kind of great British culture that it used to have. We can see, therefore...

that Britain might not be as great as it was. I haven't spoken much about the thing that is happening on Friday. I myself was a Brexit agnostic. We will see what's happened. But the damage was done ages ago.

the flotilla of Britishness was holed below the waterline. The thing about the British was, unlike other nations and national cultures, they never believed in utopia, but they did believe in Uchronia. They believed in a time that never was, a merry England.

one in which Kate could hunt foxes and Saida could style herself a baroness and everything was just kushti. Thank you. I'm very boring. Go for it.

Well, thank you very much for that very optimistic start here. I don't know about everyone else, but I am just bouncing around here with excitement. And I'm hoping now that Kate Hoey is going to bring us down to earth. Kate is going to be speaking against the motion. Kate, former Labour MP, 30 years distinguished service, born in Northern Ireland, served in Tony Blair's government, independent-minded. Kate,

She defied the Labour whip on, as you heard, banning box hunting and against the Iraq war. And she was a leading campaigner for leave in the referendum. Kate. Thank you. And it is a pleasure to be here. And I hope that I'm going to actually cheer you all up after that slightly depressing speech by my ex-constituent, Mr Selfe.

Mind you, he's never been so miserable that he had to come and see me about any problems, so that's fine. And it's lovely to be on the same stage as, on the opposite side as Peter Hitchens, because Peter and I share, I think I'll share a little secret that I think we both, it's not really a secret, we were both trots in

in a long time ago. And we have moved, as you can see, politically. No, it is a great pleasure to be here, and I'm very proud tonight to speak up for my country, and I'm making it very clear I'm speaking up for the United Kingdom, because Great Britain excludes Northern Ireland, and Northern Ireland, of course, is one of the best parts of the United Kingdom. And I want to say just very clearly at the beginning, I'm very patriotic.

I love my country. I cherish being British. I cherish being able to be a citizen of this country. And I get quite emotional, I'll be honest, when I see the Union flag being raised and I hear the national anthem being played.

And I'm not ashamed of that, and I don't think any of us should be. But of course, tonight, we don't have to prove on this side that the United Kingdom is the greatest country in the world. The question really is, are we one of the great countries? And it really isn't a value judgment either on...

regarding a country, I don't think there's any kind of nationalist exaggeration to regard a country which has had a profound influence, whatever Will may have said, on the entire course of history as a great one. And of course, importantly, great is not a value judgment meaning good.

China is a great country, but I would very much detest its political system. Russia could be considered to be a great country. And we mustn't forget that it was British people who wrote the constitution of one of the greatest countries in the world, and they certainly think they are anyway, the United States of America.

And when we then go to look at this, to me, absolutely fundamental to this whole debate is that we are a great democracy. From at least the 13th century on, there have been efforts and campaigns and wars to rein in the powers of government and to establish the primacy of the rule of law.

And our greatest claim to greatness, I believe, is that we have created a fiercely democratic society that treasures the liberties our ancestors fought for and died for over many, many centuries. And we have seen, I know we probably don't want to talk about it, but we have seen a great example of that recently. Our political system delivered a referendum result that most of our political leaders...

and the dominant intellectual, academic and legal class have been unable to stop, and they certainly tried to stop it. And the people showed that they were prepared to actually give quite a beating to a party that had tried to stop that referendum result. Our country is one of the most free, open and tolerant societies in the world, and a welcoming country, whatever anyone says to outsiders.

And perhaps that's why people from all over the world, living in oppressed countries, living under dictatorships, living in wars-torn countries, dream of still coming to this country as a refuge. British greatness extends, of course, far beyond the British Isles, and this is where I feel very strongly. We belong to a global family of nations, unlike any other, the Commonwealth.

A creation of genius expressing the sense of tolerance and shared values championed by Her Majesty the Queen throughout her reign. Still, countries with only slender connections to the United Kingdom are queuing up to join this remarkable movement.

reinvention of a worldwide empire which we had as a free association of independent yet interdependent nations committed to work together even more closely than friends but as family. And I hope that we will maintain, I'm sure everyone on this platform hopes we will maintain friendship with all the EU countries, but they're not our family. Our place at the head of the 53 nations of the Commonwealth is

Nearly 3 billion people, one third of the world's population, is an asset we should be proudly celebrating and we tend to take it for granted these days. Yet so many nations can only dream

of such a wellspring of goodwill and positive engagement. Trading with countries, other nations look to the United Kingdom. Again, whatever the movers of this motion will say, other nations do still look to us for leadership.

And, of course, with greatness comes that extra responsibility. But we have a soft power influence around the world that you could not simply make up. It is there and it does work. Ladies and gentlemen, there's so much great about the United Kingdom that it's impossible to get into it in such a short time.

And I know that Saeed will be putting some of the other points, but of course being a great country doesn't mean that we're always right and that we do the right things. And of course one of them has been mentioned was when we went into the Iraq war. But we have a democracy and we can oppose things like that that are wrong sometimes.

And we don't have to like some of the things that governments do. We don't have to like governments, whatever their political ideas are. But we are a country also, and I think this is very important when we're talking to perhaps other countries. We are a country of foibles. We do have some strange, strange customs here.

One of those customs which endears, I think, visitors to us is our queuing habit. Another one is the way we repeatedly say "sorry". I walked from Victoria to Westminster the other day

And I just deliberately counted the number of times that I actually said sorry on that walk. And it's amazing how often we just automatically say sorry. And it's something that, you know, we as a country, we can put ourselves down. We never actually, we always try to underestimate things. We never exaggerate anything.

We shouldn't exaggerate, but politicians are always exaggerating. But I would say that we on the whole, our makeup is that we don't. We understate ourselves. We don't blow enough of our own trumpet as a country. And of course, we have a monarch that even Will might agree with actually uses Tupperware. So we have a way of showing that we are not too full of ourselves.

No other country can present such a long list of credentials, but I think...

that our best days are ahead. And I wanted just also to say very quickly, as a former sports minister, you know, sport is so important in the world, particularly to young people. And those many of the sports that have been right across the world, we put the rules there. We set the boundaries. And now and again, we still actually win. And one of the points that I actually think is significant

Just very interesting to point out that of the 10 teams in Formula One racing, seven are based in the United Kingdom. We have a Premier League of Football that's watched the biggest, watched by more people all over the world. We came second in the Olympics in Rio. We came second in the Paralympics, which we started at Stoke Mandeville. And of course, we've got wonderful golfers like Rory McIlroy, I would mention him. And then we've

we've got Eddie the Eagle and it's that contrast that shows what a great country we are so let us not be full of doom and gloom I want to see the next decade of one of hope, optimism and ambition using the creativity of all our peoples so banish the doom mongers throw out this motion and celebrate all that is great about this great country thank you

So, after depressive foist, Will, we've had emotional foible-ish Kate. And now we're going to go on to Peter Hitchens, member of the International Socialists.

Not now. Until 1975. Columnist for the Mail. I always thought you were extremely Trotskyite. Columnist for Do Walk Up, as I'm talking, on the Mail on Sunday. Occasional broadcaster and author of several books. Most recently, The Phony Victory.

And attracted to both parties, but now belongs to none at all, Peter Hitchens. Lift our spirits. Yeah. Good evening. I'm here actually to persuade you of the virtues of gloom.

Kate's optimism is a terrible code for living and one that will always end in unhappiness. It's being pessimistic that keeps me so cheerful.

I want to first of all explain to you exactly why it is you should adopt gloom. By saying a brief story about a welder working late at night in one of the old shipyards we used to have in Clydebank and no longer do, working so late that he was probably the last person in the dock working on a rather precarious piece of scaffolding on the side of perhaps an ocean liner. And as he prepared to leave...

Suddenly the scaffolding gave way beneath him and he fell many, many feet until eventually he grabbed onto the side of the dock and below him perhaps 200 feet of concrete and then a puddle of oily water and nobody to be seen. So he called out, is there anybody out there? And a vast sepulchral voice came from very, very far above saying, I am here, my son. And he said, what shall I do? And the voice said, let me.

And he said, is there anybody else up there? I am the sepulchral voice. I am telling you, let go. Let go of your illusions.

Let go of the ridiculous fantasy that we have that we are a rich, powerful, important country. Many years ago, Dennis Healy said that we should probably get used to being an island Austria. I wish that we can now look forward to anything as stable and prosperous as that, but even so, it might be wise if we began to understand just how precipitous our fall has been.

I grew up at the very end of the empire. I was born in the empire. I was a subject of His Majesty King George VI when I was born in Malta, then the headcourses of the now non-existent Mediterranean fleet of the Royal Navy. And I saw, I had to concentrate slightly in the next few minutes on two things, one of them railways and the other the navy, because they dominated so much of my childhood. The Britain of those days was full of wheezing, clanking, panting steam engines with

with names like 601 Squadron and Sir Winston Churchill, and I saw for much of my life great grey warships gliding in and out of naval bases. So I was moved by these things, and I would just tell a couple of brief stories here about how these things have changed in, not in my lifetime, but in what you might call the recent lifetime of the country. In 1906,

The greatest advance in military technology of the era, the construction of HMS Dreadnought, the first really heavily armoured, heavily gunned battleship, which completely changed the naval arms race and the balance of power in the world, was completed in one year and one day in Portsmouth Dockyard from the laying of the keel to the finishing and launching of the ship. It took 14 months before she was actually steaming.

In 2007, the then Labour government ordered the construction of HMS Queen Elizabeth, the new aircraft carrier looking very much like a multi-storey car park afloat, which will be obsolete by the time, sometime next year, 14 years after the announcement of its construction, by the time it actually obtains any aircraft. Ha, ha, ha.

Well, that's one example. In 1836, the bill, or rather the act authorizing the construction of the Great Western Railway from London to Bristol was passed by Parliament after a longish struggle. Immediately, without any aid of JCBs or any kind of modern technology or electronics, Eisenbad, King and Brunel commenced to construct what was then the most advanced, and in some ways still is, the most advanced piece of railway line from London to Bristol. It took him five years.

By contrast, what is known to travelers like me on that line as first late western began to electrify it so many years ago that I've forgotten how long ago it was, ran over budget to a colossal extent and never finished it.

These seem to me to sum up in many ways the contrast between the Britain that was and the Britain which many of us still fondly imagine we still are and the Britain that is. One which was competent, effective, capable and efficient and one which is now sloppy, incapable of completing or indeed devising anything worth doing. This extends into so many things. And Kate spoke of our freedom.

I don't know why she spoke of it in such, how should I put it, effusive terms. I took some time studying this, apart from Michael Howard's assault on the right to silence and William Hague's and Anthony Blair's assault on the laws against double jeopardy and prosecution. We have in my lifetime pretty much dismantled jury trial. Majority verdict means that the independent jury is really no longer in existence.

and make ceaseless attacks on civil liberty on every conceivable occasion on the weakest possible excuse. I was amused the other day, and you'll have to take a moment to think about this, when I saw a headline, prisons to introduce airport-style security systems.

This means that people who've been convicted of quite serious crimes, murder, theft, armed robbery, that kind of thing, are finally now, on arrival in prison, going to be subjected to what you, innocent persons, have to undergo when you want to fly to Paris. Is this the right way around? On the contrary, it's an indication. I mean, when you fly anywhere, which I try not to do, and you have to have your testicles scanned by a revolving machine, and your luggage searched, and be treated as if you were a guilty person, this is a country in which the presumption of guilt is now pretty much universal.

and that is where we live. And the idea that we're still a beacon of freedom seems to me to be fanciful beacon of freedom. When I was at school, it was generally stated that a set of English A levels were equivalent to an American university degree. And this is one of the reasons why there was then a thing called the brain drain, where the United States spent an awful lot of money scooping up the products, largely of our extremely effective and excellent state grammar schools, to go and work there. So what did we do?

we abolished the grammar schools and created in the name of equality probably the worst state education system in the advanced world whose certificates are multiple and many people have large piles of them which are in relation to the education available in this country 50 years ago much as a 10 billion mark note was in relation to a golden sovereign. They are specialised

Spectacular, but worthless. And our education system is a national disgrace and is one of the reasons for many of the deep problems which we have

which we have been unable to face and have attempted to overcome with, amongst other things, mass immigration. Most of the other vainglorious statistics about our being the sixth or seventh largest economy are actually based on more fantasies. Our actual position in GDP per capita is round about 26th in the world. Our actual...

Current account deficit is appalling. Levels of public and private debt are pretty much unprecedented in peacetime and are simply unrepayable. To imagine for a moment that this can possibly end well is to be self-deluding. And the ultimate symbol of this

Hubris is our ridiculous pretense of being a great power. We, a country which could not defeat a collection of gangsters and protection racketeers and surrendered to them in 1998 in Northern Ireland, still pretend to be a world power and maintain and propose to extend and renew the Trident nuclear weapon, a gigantic Cold War superpower weapon, totally useless to us, which we cannot afford.

This is the symbol of all the hubris which we possess. It is absolutely everything that is wrong with this country. The fantasy that we are more important than we are, the fantasy that we are richer than we are, the fantasy that we stand for anything much anymore. All things which will never, ladies and gentlemen, never under any circumstances be put right as long as we entertain these delusions.

And that is why it is so important to say the things that I'm saying. I'm not just saying them because I've been invited to say them. I am saying them because I believe them to be true. I'm saying them because if there is to be any future for this country, which I frankly seriously doubt, then it has to be achieved by a recognition of reality. I love every field in Hedra of this country.

I was brought up to believe that it was a beacon of all kinds of wonderful things, which I see rotting away. I was brought up pretty much to know by heart John of Gaunt's dying speech. But what do I see? That this country which was wont to conquer others hath now made shameful conquest of itself. And it is because we need to recognize this reality that I urge you so very much to vote for this motion. Thank you.

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Saida, pick up the spirits and let's hear from Saida Farsi, who is, as you know, a member of the House of Lords, Baroness no less, from one of your favourite people, David Cameron. What's he doing now? He was the first Muslim cabinet minister, first Muslim chair of the Conservative Party, first in many, many ways to do many things. He's a prominent campaigner for Islamophobia and Islamophobia.

against racism. So she is going to lift our spirits and tell us the truth at last. Well, good evening, ladies and gentlemen. What a ridiculous motion. There's nothing, there's not much great about Britain. It is a nonsense and it is why I urge you to listen carefully to my submissions and vote against this motion tonight.

This is what's great about Britain. This amazing city, this multicultural audience. You, an audience that has turned out on a bitterly cold night and has paid, yes paid, I'm shocked, paid to listen to those two miserable moos over there telling you what a shithole we live in. Right.

I ask you to oppose this motion, and that's where I start. What's great about Britain is our quirky pastimes, our ability to listen politely when we disagree, our dry, self-deprecating sense of humour. We are a serious nation, but we don't take ourselves very seriously. We wear as a badge of honour our ability to do ourselves down, because deep down, we know we have nothing to prove. When we don't just tolerate...

But celebrate, great thinkers, those have perfected moaning to a form of art, ladies and gentlemen. It's been on display tonight. I asked you to reject it. The fact you came here, we discuss what we do. We leave and call home where we choose. We pray to whom we wish and we love whom we desire. You may say these are basics, but

but basics which as a whole are simply not true of most nations. And yes, there's the issue of values and democracy and the rule of law and free speech and freedom of association and privacy. And I could go on and on and Crate was brilliant at outlining some of that.

And as someone who has lived in cultures where overdramatic reactions, high emotions are part of everyday discourse, I'm glad that reality TV in the UK is just a pastime and not a way of life. I say what makes us great is that we're a country of steady eddies, not a nation of drama queens.

It's what underpins our world-renowned diplomatic service, how even in the ex-colonized nations we still command a hearing. And it's where in international fora our advice is still sought and still heard. And I had the privilege of serving our country, serving as a foreign office minister and helped

lost counts of the number of times we were asked for our unique British perspective in our unique British way. Branded in a report last year as a truly global power second only to the US, it said that we have a unique capacity to project and extend ourselves around the world with a particularly strong performance in relation to diplomatic leverage.

And yes, we may be leaving the UK, in my view, a bad decision, but it's one top table of many that we sit on as head of the Commonwealth, a member of the Permanent Five at the UN Security Council, a member of the G7, the sixth largest economy in the world, despite being less than 1% of the world's population, we.

And this one's for you, Peter, because I know you love this phrase. We're punching above our weight on the international stage. As we do in sports, as we do in sports, we rank third in the world for rugby. You heard from Kate, second in the Olympic Games.

medal league, first in cricket. And yes, we may fall down, all nations, in terms of our national football teams, but we still have the best football league anywhere in the world. As Owen Morgan said, when we won the Cricket World Cup last summer, ladies and gentlemen...

Allah is definitely with us. And in the arts, Shakespeare is the unrivaled king of theatre, and we have an alphabet of greats. Ladies and gentlemen, can you name them? A is for Austin, B is for my favourite Blighton, C is for Chaucer, D is for Dickens, E is for Elliot. We could go right down to Z, and we would still have people to name. From Lawrence of Arabia.

to Gandhi. We tell other people's stories better than they do. From the railway children to train spotting, we beautifully defined and redefined the coming of age moments through film. And we may not rival Marvel and Star Wars, but we come a close second with Harry Potter and Mr. Bond.

In music, the Beatles still rank as the top-selling band of all times, and we dominate the top ten with Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Elton John, and even today with Adele and Ed Sheeran. And ladies and gentlemen...

We have Yorkshire. We have God's own county, that little nation within a nation with its stunning landscapes, the Pennines, the Moors, the historic towns, the quirky villages. Betty's cream cakes rub alongside Bradford, the authentic curry capital of the world. And tea, tea, ladies and gentlemen, it may have been discovered in the East, but it's Yorkshire that perfected a brew. And Yorkshire...

Yorkshire and Britain is where this daughter of an immigrant mill worker broke tradition and taboos to become Britain's first Muslim cabinet minister. And that, as a conservative...

And years later, as I publicly and forcefully objected to government policy and resigned, I knew that I could have my say and walk away without the fear of a bullet in the back of my head.

A certain outcome in many nations around the world. We simply take these things for granted. We take for granted that we have non-rip-off black cabs, that we can arrive in Heathrow, get in a cab, and we will arrive safely with a fair fare. We have free schooling. We have free healthcare. We have world-leading universities and cutting-edge research. We have a largely non-corrupt police force operating without fear or favour.

And we have an armed force who embrace a human rights framework even when operating in the harshest of environments, and which for over 100 years, and I'm proud that both my paternal and maternal grandfather were prepared to serve for Great Britain, a country that they had not even seen. And this great armed force has been made up of people of all faiths and all

all races, yes, including seats. Can somebody send Lawrence Fox the bloody memo? And even our weather, we have the blessings of seasons. And yet, most often, it may be mediocre weather. But you know, at a time of climate change and extreme climates,

I say thank God for mediocre. And finally, language. Ladies and gentlemen, English, the world's language of choice, the language of trade, the language of dispute resolution, the language of diplomacy. 500 years ago,

5 million people spoke English. Today, it's over 2 billion. A quarter of the world's population speak the language of a country of just over 50 million. And if for no other reason, then just this makes us not just great, but pretty spectacular. In fact, the only thing that's really rubbish about Great Britain is the rubbish. And so if we clean up our streets and country verges and neighbourhoods,

we will not only address one of my biggest irritants, but we could be the cleanest as well as the greatest nation on earth. So, ladies and gentlemen, I ask you to reject the motion today. And if in that typically British way, after my and Kate's submissions, you feel pangs of sympathy for the underdogs on the other side, don't.

Will and Peter have done all right tonight. They've had a fabulous moaning therapy session and they've made you pay for it. Thank you. Very good.

Thank you, Saeed. So the only thing that's rubbish about Great Britain is our rubbish rubbish. And thank you for making that clear. I'm going to tell you now the result of the vote. And again, the reminder of this motion, there's not much great about Britain. And 36% of you agreed with that. And 35% of you were against it.

which means, based on the logic of the referendum result, that it's a massive victory, Boris Johnson will say, and Dominic Cummings, a massive victory for, and you should just feel, I mean, why don't you just die? And 29...

Mimsy people, 29% of you, utterly mimsy. You don't even know what you think. I'd be ashamed if I was one of you. Now, we're going to have some questions, get some lights up. Let's have question one here, please. Thanks, everyone, for the debate. My question is, it feels like you could find flaws and faults in any nation or anything, and it's kind of quite easy to be negative sometimes.

So are there any countries out there that you believe can truly claim to be great? And if so, what makes them any different to us? Very good. Question, please, number three.

So I'm with the ladies against the motion, but I found Peter's comments very interesting. And I would be interested in the panel's perception of how far this, I guess, degradation of our greatness has been because we've spent the last few years discussing

Being so critical of ourselves and being very anti-British as British and whether we're actually devaluing ourselves through, frankly, wokeness.

Ultimately, a wokeness. And does that mean you found didn't find Will interesting? You found Peter interesting? I found Will the most entertaining, but no, I didn't find his views as interesting. I'll come round to your house. Right. Thank you very much. Let's have a comment from Will. Did you find that question interesting? Wokeness. Yes. Yes.

Well, I was making a technical point. It's not a question of right or left or anything else. It's just a technical point about cultures, which is what we associate with hegemonic nations, which is what's implied by Great Britain. You know, my argument was quite careful. The gentleman who made the point about it all being about the past,

Peter said that the British Army lost to the IRA in Northern Ireland. The British Army lost to the Sadrist militia in Iraq only a few short years ago and had to hang their heads in shame as they were escorted back to the air point of disembarkation by the militias that had defeated them. So I'm not interested in the past, I'm interested in right now. On the point of wokeness...

Yeah, it's very difficult to imagine a hegemonic nation that is truly multicultural. It's a contradiction in terms. Look at the way that the current hegemon, America, gets its knickers in a gigantic twist over trying to beat up people in foreign countries while respecting the rights of its own minorities. It's a pathetic spectacle. It's pathetic here as well. Wow.

So self-hatred. Well, I was going to talk about, I think, the lady who, even though she thought Peter was interesting, I'm glad to hear she's not. Did you think he was interesting? She did, yes. Did you? Yes, I thought Peter was interesting, yes, very interesting. Yes, very, very interesting. However...

I just want to talk about her question because I think she's quite right. You know, there's been a kind of bash Britain, bash British feeling around in the country for some time now. And I think, no matter how much you support the motion tonight, I can't, again, understand how anyone, if you travel around and go to other countries... Yes, it's great to travel, it's lovely to see other countries and there's some great things in them, but I really...

cannot see any other country that combines the kind of way that we have got our history, and yet our history now is being moved forward in a direction that we're becoming a country that is going to have to now rely on itself again, is going to have to be looking out globally and internationally and not relying on 26 other countries to actually be along with what we're doing. So I'm very optimistic, and I think we should all stop

you know, doing our country down and standing up for it the way other countries' populations do. And we seem to always want to be negative. Thank you very much indeed. I would like people to come to these microphones on the balconies, please, to have questions. I'd like to see a forest of people up there. I'd like to see more questions coming out of the audience. Do you think I could respond to some questions? Yes, you can. I know I was only interesting, but there was a point...

A point made about where might one look for an example of somewhere that ordered its affairs better. Well, this isn't in any way making any case that any other country is perfect or indeed that I would want to go and live in any other country. But I can think of at least two countries where they order things a lot better than we do. Switzerland seems to me to be extremely well ordered to have a much better arrangement of orders.

of education, of transport. It defends itself. It doesn't go around invading other people's countries at a whim for no good reason. And it is extremely free and has an extraordinarily democratic system. It's not the same as ours, but it has much to recommend it. And I will also say I spent a lot of my life traveling to other countries. And one of the things that I learned during that travel was to stop looking at them and wondering why they couldn't be more like Britain and seeing if I could learn things from them.

Another country from which we could learn a great deal is Japan, which has many of the characteristics which we admire in ourselves, which we no longer really possess, such as the politeness and civility, which it seems to me that in many cases we are losing. It's all very well saying that people say sorry to each other. You should try riding a bicycle in London and see if anybody says sorry to you.

To you. A lot of them ought to. So I think that, yes, there are places we could look to, but one of the things that we really do need to do, any real patriot is his country's most severe critic, because any real patriot truly cares about his country and does not.

Does not paint a ridiculous Technicolor tourist board England swings like a pendulum do picture of the kind of bodies on bicycles two by two rubbish about what it's really like here because it isn't. The police may not be corrupt in this country, but they are almost totally absent, which is a much bigger problem.

And Saida, should Peter move to Japan, which he thinks is a great country? No, I don't think he should, because as everybody keeps saying, he's very interesting. And we need...

We need to have interesting people. And so are you. We need to have interesting people in this country. But I think it's also important. I mean, where I do agree with both the panellists opposite is that I think it is important for us to be realistic and for us to challenge, but to do it in a way where we do accurately measure ourselves against other countries. You know, as Foreign Office Minister, I spent a lot of my time travelling around Australia

meeting and getting to know countries incredibly deeply. And what we just take for granted, which I, you know, let me speak very personally, I as a woman take for granted about how I travel, where I travel, what I can say, which I as a politician say in terms of what I can say, how I can say it. These things are just not acceptable.

even available in many, many nations around the world. Okay, I want to move on to more questions now. Do we have the microphone? No. We're holding on to the microphone there. Yes, let's go. Now, Anthony, I know you're on an education list.

But I have to disagree with the Baroness about your idea about social movement in the UK. And this is because I agree with Peter, the educational system in this country is deeply unfair. The same people rise to the top, the same people get all the privileged positions. That is the worst thing about Britain, the lack of...

of social movement and the lack of opportunity for the majority of our children and young people. It's holding us back and it's very, very unfair. And does that detract from us being great? Yes, it does. Right, OK, significant.

A very significant point. Let's take this question there. Yes, please. My question is for Kate, and it's a simple question regarding Brexit. Isn't Brexit one of the most grandiose displays of Britain bashing, and you supported it yourself? And isn't that kind of a mark of hypocrisy, because you mobilise and engage with Britain bashing, and now you're coming out and...

and saying that we shouldn't bash Britain and we live in some sort of Panglossian best of all worlds. Right, okay. Thank you very much indeed there. I'm going to ask you to bear in mind those questions and in your final summative comments, which will be 90 seconds.

each and we are going to go in reverse order it means going to begin with saeeda so picking up those three points and any other uh summative points that you want to make i now have the uh score here which i'm going to announce at the end but uh off from your desk okay um so i think the question that you asked me uh really goes to the heart of this debate and that is that uh can britain be better

Social mobility is definitely on the decline, and there are countries around the world that have better social mobility, and that leads to better community, a more integrated nation. Canada is one example. The bigger the divide between the rich and poor, the less cohesive the country is.

But just because we can do better, and we absolutely can do better in all of the areas that I mentioned, we can do better. That does not mean that we are still not a great country, a great nation. And therefore, what I would ask you tonight, ladies and gentlemen, is to choose hope over despair. I would ask you to choose optimism over pessimism.

And I would ask you to vote against this motion, to vote for Team Burgundy, Team Britain, and not to vote for Team Grey, Team Pessimistic Man Flu. Thank you.

Peter, how would you respond in the final moment? I'm not going to do that because I know all the votes have been counted anyway. No, that's it. Nonsense. I take advantage of the question from the lady down there on our education system. News was brought to Evelyn Waugh that his old friend Randolph Churchill had been taken into hospital for an operation to remove

and non-malignant growth. And Evelyn Ward responded by saying how extraordinary the medical profession to rummage through the whole body of Randolph Churchill and find the only thing which is not malignant and remove it. And this sums up the education policy of this country which in 1965 found that it had some tremendous state grammar schools which had lifted

tens of thousands of people out of poverty into totally new lives, benefited the country immensely by their talents, and it had bad secondary modern schools which were failing to do this. And so what did it do? It closed the grammar schools and turned them all into secondary moderns. And this is one of the reasons why we are a country which is in serious need of, how shall I put it, something closely approaching counter-revolution. And I very much hope that

that that's what we have. But if we don't, then maybe at least some of you will go away from this evening thinking that things are not quite as great as you thought they were. And as a result, we might conceivably survive as a country rather than sink giggling into the sea.

Thank you very much. Peter, Kate. On the question, Jessica, I must say that I don't understand where you got the word hypocrite. I haven't bashed Britain ever in terms of the Brexit debate. I've bashed the European Union and will continue to do so, only now we're not going to be part of it anymore. I have never bashed our country. I thought that we would want it. I wanted to see us being independent. It wasn't about trading for me. It was about actually having a country that

could very much be independent again and making its own in charge of its own destiny and not responsible and working towards a European Union. But just on this overall, the debate, this really is, as Saeeda has said, it's about whether you actually think

that this country has got things in it that you know would not be happening in other countries and that what is great about our country is that we can actually have these kinds of debates, that people on the whole are quite nice to each other afterwards and before, and that in the end we know that our country is going now into an exciting phase and what I would like to see is that everybody gets behind that

and makes the country really great. And for me, great does not mean that you agree with everything that it does, but it certainly means that it's a lot better than many of the countries I've visited. And that's why so many of us are living here and could move, but don't move, because we love our country. Thank you very much, Kate Howie. And...

And lifting the whole debate, and who knows, who knows, maybe even changing the result that I have written down on this paper by the sheer magnetism and power of your speech. Wilson. Thank you, Anthony, for that build. I don't know where to begin. Just on a sidebar, Oliver Rackham, the preeminent historian of the English countryside, writes that the fox...

would have been eradicated in this country several hundred years ago were it not for the desire of a certain group of the gentry to hunt it. So it's been artificially kept alive in order to be hunted. And you best hope that animals do have some rights because you're an animal and you don't have any human rights if you don't have any animal rights. But that's just a sidebar.

What I wanted to talk about really was, it's too late, you voted. I have shame on you if you voted for them, really. The Baroness's speech was the merest sort of Hovis advert whimsy. LAUGHTER

And as for my quantum MP, she rose to the rhetorical heights that, as I said before, you know, mistrust a woman who takes games too seriously means she doesn't take games seriously enough. But both of them attacked us really on the line of patriotism. And that's not what Peter and I were really talking about. But, you know, I got a little time, so I'll tell you a joke. My mother was an immigrant to this country from the States, a Jewish American, so I can tell a Jewish joke.

She used to say, by the way, the difference between the States and here was that in America, they hate you because you're a woman or because you're black or because you're a Jew. And here in England, they just hate you personally. And you only incidentally happen to be a woman, black or a Jew. Great, great country. Thank you, Will, very much. And...

for that elevating, very elevating joke there, which is going to leave, everyone's going to be leaving.

with a spring in their heels. I thought that was, I thought they did incredibly well. They've managed to be very insulting to each other between the teams and even within the team on my right hand side. Now look, it was so significant. The vote before, 29% didn't know what to think or who they were. 36% voted for the motion there's not much great about Britain and 35%

Now, the 29% undecided have gone down to 3%. A variance, it tells me, of minus 26%. So that is saying something for the education system, although it could be enormously better. The variance was 13% on the others. And by a massive, overwhelming and triumphant margin,

the motion has been lost by you. How does that feel? You're losers. You're losers. And it's been won by the depressing negative. Cut your throat.

of Will and Peter. Thank you very much. That was 49-48. Eat your heart out, Dominic Cummings. This is a massive, massive victory. And can we thank all of you for coming and being a fantastic audience, possibly the best audience ever for an Intelligence Squared debate. And can we thank Intelligence Squared and the speakers one more time? Thank you. It was 49-48. Thank you.

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