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Edmund Burke: I am Edmund Burke, and in our last conversation Mr. Paine presented his argument that Britain’s decline is the inevitable consequence of inherited privilege, monopolized land, and a political class that has always served itself at the expense of everyone else. It was a formidably argued case. I told him it was completely wrong. He did not take that well. I am Edmund Burke. I rarely take being wrong as an option.
Thomas Paine: And I am Thomas Paine, and in Part One Burke spent considerable time explaining that everything I have identified as the cause of Britain’s suffering is actually the load-bearing architecture of civilization, and that dismantling any of it would bring everything down. I have heard this argument applied to every injustice in human history. It did not stop me in 1776. It will not stop me now.
Edmund Burke: Since Mr. Paine was generous enough to summarize my position accurately in Part One, I will return the favor here, fully intending to take it apart the moment I have finished presenting it fairly. Burke’s most sophisticated position, in its strongest possible form, is this. Societies are not mechanisms but organisms. The traditions, customs, and institutions that appear from the outside to be mere privilege and entrenched advantage are frequently the load-bearing structures of a civilization, and you cannot remove them without knowing what will fall. A society that knows who it is, where it came from, and what it owes to those who built it has a coherence that no amount of abstract rights theory can manufacture or replace. British identity and British habits of governance, whatever their flaws, represent something that took centuries to build and can be dismantled in a generation by people who mistake criticism for understanding. The immigration question, in this most respectable version of my argument, is not about race or ethnic prejudice. It is about whether any society can absorb demographic and cultural change faster than it can integrate it without losing the shared understanding that makes it a functioning society rather than simply a collection of people in the same geography. That is the steelman. It is the most intellectually honest form of an argument that has been used to justify some of the worst policies in British history, but it deserves a genuine answer, and I will give it one.
Edmund Burke: I am profoundly moved by your generosity. Please continue.
Thomas Paine: The answer is this. The British identity that Burke is so eager to preserve was always a story told by the powerful about themselves, for the benefit of the powerful, and distributed to everyone else as a substitute for material improvement. The working people of Britain, the people actually suffering from wages that have not grown in fifteen years, from housing they cannot afford, from hospitals that cannot treat them promptly, were never the primary beneficiaries of this celebrated continuity and this cherished identity. When Burke mourns the decline of British civilization, he is mourning the civilization of the landowner, the gentleman, the man of property. The rest of Britain has been in relative decline for considerably longer than the current newspapers suggest, and the institutions Burke reveres are a substantial reason why.
Edmund Burke: And there it is, laid out with your customary economy of subtlety. Every actual human institution, every real attachment, every loyalty that is not addressed to abstract universal humanity, is simply false consciousness invented by landlords and distributed to the credulous. I have genuinely never understood how a man can claim to love ordinary people with such volcanic intensity while holding every particular expression of ordinary human culture in such magnificent and comprehensive contempt. You were not, in Rights of Man, liberating the common people of England. You were explaining to them at considerable length that everything they valued and everything they were attached to was a fraud designed to oppress them. The monarchy they felt some pride in, a fraud. The church they worshipped in, essentially fraudulent. The constitutional settlement they had inherited, a swindle in parchment and precedent. At some point one has to ask whether the liberation on offer is something the liberated actually wanted.
Thomas Paine: I held inherited privilege in contempt. The people who suffered under it are a different matter entirely, and you know the difference perfectly well.
Edmund Burke: The distinction is less clear in your writings than you suggest. Let us discuss immigration directly, since it is the question that animates the current debate in Britain more than any other. Net migration of nearly nine hundred thousand in a single year represents a pace of demographic change that is genuinely without precedent in British history outside of wartime. Many of those people are contributing enormously. Many of them are working in the National Health Service that everyone agrees is indispensable. I do not doubt for a moment the individual merit and worth of the people arriving. What I am asking is a different question. I am asking whether the communities receiving that change, communities in the English Midlands, in coastal towns, in former industrial areas that have already lost their economic reason for being, have the institutional capacity and the social resources to integrate change at that pace. Communities that feel they no longer recognize themselves are not simply expressing ignorance or prejudice. They are expressing a loss that is real, and dismissing that loss as moral failure is the single most effective method yet devised for driving working people into the arms of demagogues.
Thomas Paine: Do not speak to me about demagogues while defending the conditions that produce them. The communities you are describing, in the Midlands and the coastal towns and the former industrial heartlands, lost their economic reason for being because the manufacturing base was allowed to collapse without replacement, because successive governments decided that the City of London producing financial instruments was equivalent to the country producing things of actual value, and because the political class that made those decisions lived in parts of London and the Home Counties where they encountered none of the consequences. Those communities did not lose their identity because of immigration. They lost their livelihoods because of deindustrialization, and they lost their public services because of fifteen years of austerity, and they were then told by newspapers owned by tax-exile billionaires that their misery was the fault of Brussels and foreign workers rather than of the people who made the decisions. Rupert Murdoch has not lived in Britain for decades. He does not pay tax in Britain. He spent forty years telling British working people who their enemies were, and the enemies he identified were never the people who actually made the decisions that hollowed out their towns.
Edmund Burke: And your solution to the problem of demagogues inflaming public opinion is to tell the people who feel dispossessed that their feelings are a manufactured illusion? I agree that the press has behaved with grotesque irresponsibility. I agree that the political class has failed comprehensively to address the underlying economic conditions. What I am contesting is your assumption that the cultural dimension of the concern is therefore entirely fabricated and illegitimate. People are not simply economic units whose only real interests are wages and services. They are members of communities with histories and attachments and a sense of place, and when that sense of place is disrupted faster than it can be processed, the disruption is real regardless of its ultimate cause.
Thomas Paine: I will tell you what the real disruption is. The real disruption is a housing market in which a buy-to-let landlord can own six properties while a thirty-five-year-old nurse who works in the National Health Service cannot afford to buy one property in the city where she works. That is not a cultural problem. That is an Agrarian Justice problem, and I described the solution in 1797. A tax on the unimproved value of land returns the economic rent of the earth to the people from whom it was taken by the original enclosures. Denmark has implemented versions of this principle. Estonia has implemented versions of this principle. Singapore has built an entire model of urban development around versions of this principle. Britain has had two hundred and twenty-five years to implement it and has instead built one of the most dysfunctional property markets in the developed world.
Edmund Burke: Denmark. Estonia. Singapore. You have given me three countries, none of which is Britain, none of which has Britain’s history, Britain’s institutions, Britain’s particular relationship between its capital city and its regions, or Britain’s specific political economy, and you are presenting them as straightforward templates. This is the fundamental error of your entire intellectual method, applied now as it was applied in 1791. You identify a principle, you find somewhere that has implemented a version of it, and you declare the problem solved in theory, leaving the actual human beings in the actual country to manage the gap between the theory and the reality. You might as well ask why British vineyards do not produce Burgundy.
Thomas Paine: British vineyards are actually producing increasingly good wine, largely because the climate has changed, which is another problem your reverence for tradition offers absolutely no solution to. But the point about land value taxation is not that it is a magic transplant. The point is that the underlying principle, that land is a common resource and those who monopolize it owe a return to the community, is a principle of natural justice that applies regardless of geography. I did not derive it from Denmark. I derived it from the same natural rights philosophy that you have spent your entire career trying to discredit. We will finish that argument in Part Three.
Edmund Burke: Like and subscribe before you leave. I would say that subscribers to this channel are clearly people of refined taste and careful judgment, unlike subscribers to Mr. Paine’s general worldview, who tend to end up imprisoned by the revolutions they started. We will see you next time.
Thomas Paine: Like and subscribe. Part Three is where Burke runs out of elegant ways to say nothing should ever change and is forced to resort to shouting. It is, I will admit, the most entertaining part. Do not miss it. Unlike Burke’s policy recommendations, it will actually deliver something.
Edmund Burke: You are a menace to ordered society.
Thomas Paine: You are a decorator of its failures.
