Feb 27, 2024 Off Script | Telegraph | Podcast

Amidst the recurring threats posed by Islamist extremists against MPs, rapidly changing demographics, and the overshadowing influence of foreign wars in Gaza and the middle east on English elections, can England survive as a nation? To answer, Steven Edginton is joined by the historian and author of The English and Their History, Robert Tombs. “It’s not the case since the 17th century that quite small religious minorities have been able to exert a pretty startling political impact. You might think of Guy Fawkes, and the Gunpowder Plotters or you might think of the Puritans and the origins of the Civil War against Charles I. But, we did think, I suppose, that religion, or at least religious extremism had left our politics really, in the 17th century.” “This was rather like the violence that led up to the Great Reform Bill, in the early 1830s, when you did have major public unrest, rioting, the burning down of the Palace of the Bishop of Bristol. A general sense of the country was on the verge of revolution, and the direct threat of revolutionary violence did really cow Parliament into accepting that it would adopt reform. The House of Lords was the one that stood out against it, but they too were eventually cowed, not so much by popular violence, though that might have happened eventually, but by the King, William IV, deciding that he would, if necessary, create peers to overthrow their majority.” “This combination of what you might call legitimate protest, though, on a scale that we rarely see so repetitively, and I think in some ways the repetition of it is what makes the impact, mixed with a penumbra of extremism which could include violence, against individual MPs or against Parliament, or indeed, of course, it could lead to terrorist action of the sort we’ve been warned about as a growing danger. So I think this is a rather different phenomenon from that of the Suffragettes, the Chartists, and it goes back, I think I might say we probably haven’t seen quite this since the 17th century.” Subscribe to The Telegraph with our special offer: just £1 for 3 months. Start your free trial now: