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The Monocle Daily
From Japan to the Czech Republic, is the centre-right doomed to be outflanked by conservative populism?
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- [00:00]
A
You're listening to the Monocle Daily, first broadcast on 7 October 2025 on Monocle Radio.
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B
Two years since October 7. Where does the Middle east go from here? The UK's Conservative Party strikes up a mournful chorus of Abide with Me. And how do you teach literature to people who don't read? I'm Andrew Muller. The Monocle Daily starts. Hello and welcome to the Monocle Daily. Coming to you from our studios here at Midori House in London. I'm Andrew Muller. My guests Robin Lustig and Alex von Tonzelman will discuss the day's big stories. And we'll hear from the retired British officer, Lieutenant General Sir Barney White Spunner, about his new book, Considering Five Armies, which helped shape Europe. Stay tuned. All that and more coming up right here on the Monocle Daily. This is the Monocle Daily. I'm Andrew Muller and I am joined today by Alex von Tonzelman, historian, author and screenwriter, and by Robin Lustig, journalist and broadcaster, former presenter of the World Tonight on Radio 4. Hello to you both. Hello, Robin. I understand that congratulations are in order. You are going to write a non fiction book which both myself, Alex, and indeed your own personal experience will confirm is a surefire ticket to riches.
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C
Oh, absolutely. I'm determined to make my fortune. No, I've signed a publishing contract to publish a book about which I don't want to say too much yet because it's not going to appear for several months. But the bulk of it is already written, so the hard bit of it is done. The hardest bit actually was not the writing, it was finding a publisher prepared to publish it. But anyway, I've succeeded on that. So yes, thank you for the congratulations. They are incredibly well deserved.
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B
Can you give us any indication of when we may be able to invite you onto Monocle Radio to talk about.
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C
A note in your dia. It's due out in May or June.
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B
Of next year, so in about October 2032.
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C
You're very cruel.
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B
No, I've just beat an author, Robin. I know what happens. Alex, you have been producing work for a lesser broadcaster. Please explain yourself.
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A
Yes, I apologize for this, but, you know, I mean, you know, Roll on more. Monocle. I have a new show starting on BBC Radio 4 today.
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B
Deadbeats.
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A
I know, I'm sorry. Which is History's Toughest Heroes. It is a sort of spin off of our show History's Secret Heroes, presented by Hunt at Bonham Carter. We're now looking at the Toughest Heroes. So this one is narrated by Ray Winston because He is tough.
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B
He is.
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A
So this is.
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C
And he sounds tough.
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A
He does sound very tough. So I think he had some fun with the script. So it starts today with Peter Froiken, who was a Danish Arctic explorer and pioneer. A rather extraordinary man, actually. I mean, it's very much worth listening to and even I haven't yet heard it in Ray's voice. And I'm quite excited to hear him narrate some of these very gnarly exploits of dealing with frostbite in rather visceral manners. But also, Freuchen ended up very famous at the end of his life because he moved to the US and he appeared on the famous TV show the $64,000 Question and won.
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B
So that is quite the life. Have you considered doing a series and you can have this idea for free on history's most effete milquetoast heroes?
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A
Yes, well, absolutely.
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B
I don't know who you'd get to narrate that.
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A
We're into all potential adjectives. I shan't name names who might narrate that yet.
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B
Well, we will start tonight's show proper with Israel as it reflects on the events of this day. Two years ago, on October 7, 2023, Hamas and other Palestinian militant troops broke out of the confines of the Gaza Strip and killed nearly 1,200 people in Israel, most of them civilians, and kidnapped roughly 250, some of whom remain in captivity. Israel's response, still ongoing, has been merciless, by the estimates of Gaza authorities, killing around 65,000 people and injuring 165,000. While many of those may well have been combatants, many weren't. And that amounts in total to 10% casualties among Gaza's total pre war population. As of this broadcast, talks towards a ceasefire are ongoing in Sharm El Sheikh. Robyn, two years ago, would you have expected the situation round about now to look like it does?
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C
No. I knew that there were going to be terrible consequences immediately after I learned what had happened on that awful day. But I don't think anybody could have predicted the scale of the Israeli response, the length of the. The conflict that would ensue. This is the longest war that Israel has ever been involved in by some distance, by some measure. Yeah, I was in no doubt at all. I mean, as you know, I was at one time a Middle east correspondent. I know that part of the world relatively well. I was in no doubt at all that Israel would respond militarily. But as I say, the scale of the response, the scale of the devastation, both the human loss and indeed the Material loss. I mean, the pictures coming out of of Gaza still have the power to shock in the way that very little else does.
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B
Alex it's probably unknowable thinking exactly what Hamas were thinking before October 7, largely because most of the people involved in the decision making that led up to it are no longer available. But is it imaginable that this is what they anticipated or wanted? Gaza in ruins, Hamas more or less destroyed, and many of Hamas's what they would have thought of as their allies severely incapacitated at best. The Islamic Republic of Iran, Hezbollah, the Houthis, Bashar Al Assad, among others.
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A
It's not surely a result that anyone would have rationally wanted. I think the only possible corollary to that is to say that possibly this wasn't an especially rational move, but rather a strike that they felt they could carry out with the means that they had it, surely. I mean, rather like Robyn, I remember on that awful day two years ago and it really was, you know, first of all, just the absolute complete shock of what you could see happening that was so terrible, but also that underlying feeling that what came after would also be terrible and would, you know, would really cause devastation. But the scale of it is so extraordinary. And I mean, surely anyone rationally looking at that situation would have predicted that Israel, as we clearly posted that day, that Israel would respond incredibly strongly, which is why it wouldn't have seemed like a sensible move. But as I say, the only thing I can think is that perhaps rationality wasn't the point.
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C
Just been rereading a piece I wrote the day after the attack two years ago and a point I made then which I think has actually stood up. Nobody at the time, on October 6, 2023, was talking about the Palestinians. They were talking about the so called Abraham Accords, they talking about the possibility, even the probability, that Saudi Arabia would sign some kind of pact with Israel. And my immediate hunch after the appalling atrocities of that day was that Hamas had decided that they wanted to put themselves back into the conversation. They wanted to say, particularly to Arab leaders, remember we exist. Remember we, the Palestinians, are here because they weren't part of any of these discussions, any of these negotiations about normalizing relations between Israel and various Gulf countries. Well, we've talked a lot about Palestinians in the last two years for all the wrong reasons. Hamas has destroyed itself. It has weakened Iran, as you say, it's weakened Hezbollah. Bashar Al Assad of Syria has gone, it's blown up in its face. Hamas has destroyed itself just to Follow.
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B
That thought up, though, Robyn. We started talking about, you know, what we would have imagined two years ago right now would look like. How optimistic is it possible to about what things might look like, say, two years from now?
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C
The words optimism and Middle east do not sit happily together in a single sentence. I'm not optimistic because history does not encourage optimism. On the other hand, I've always said to people in that part of the world, look at Northern Ireland. It took them 300 years, but they did eventually come to an accommodation with Great Britain, which ended the violence that we saw during the 1970s and 80s and 90s. Peace will come to the Middle east, but I don't think it'll come in our lifetime.
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B
Alex. Benjamin Netanyahu, whose reputation overseas I don't think has been enhanced in many quarters by this, he is, of course now a fugitive from international justice, would claim, as would his apologists and defenders, that Israel is now safer than it was two years ago. And again, one now thinks of again the Hezbollah, the Houthis, Iran, Assad, et cetera. Whether or not you agree with how Benjamin Netanyahu has gone about it, is that true, do you think? Is Israel in fact safer, better defended, more secure than it was two years ago?
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A
I think that rather depends what sort of perspective you take on it. Yes. In terms of those immediate threats, obviously, you know, I mean, as already said, Hamas has been effectively destroyed. I mean, you know, doesn't really exist now. But in a longer term and more global point of view, I do think his actions specifically and the actions of the government he's presided over have enormously damaged Israel's reput. And I think it's very hard to avoid that. I mean, look at the fact that you now have pretty moderate European nations like France and Britain that have long avoided doing so, recognizing Palestinian statehood, because even if the governments themselves don't especially wish to go radically down the road, their populations won't put up with this anymore. It's so unpopular and I think that's an enormous long term damage, which is quite hard to assess. That's exactly the impact now. But long term is a real issue. Look at the fact that younger American generations are becoming more and more anti Israel, more and more pro Palestinian. This is a real problem for Israel, I think, in the longer view and the longer term, and I do think that's intensely damaging. And he personally, I don't think his reputation could be much lower internationally, quite honestly. Now, I think also to be fair, he is extremely unpopular in Israel. It is worth saying this is not actually a discrepancy internationally and I don't think he is going to go down wonderfully in history for how he has conducted this.
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B
Well, here in the United Kingdom, the Conservative Party is putting itself and everyone else through its annual conference. For as long as the Conservative Party has been holding conferences, they have been conclaves of a party which is either in power or expects to be again pretty shortly. That is not presently the case. By current polling, an election held tomorrow could leave the Tories the fourth biggest party in Parliament. And with the possible exception of current leader Kemi Badenoch, nobody expects can be Badenoch to lead them into that election anyway. However, the Tories are far from the only old school centre right faction who find themselves floundering somewhat. We will look, Alex shortly at the global picture for the beleaguered centre rightists. But what do we make, judging by this conference of the present state of the party of Disraeli, Churchill, Macmillan and Thatcher?
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A
Well, that's it. I mean, look, let's remember the Conservatives are by some measures the most successful political party in Western history. Indeed. So they have sort of had the most extraordinary reputation as the natural party of government in Britain. You know, despite, yes, of course some ups and downs. They have you mentioned the names there, the most illustrious history. I mean, God knows where we are now. It's sort of extraordinary. It's something that Britain has not previously had or seen. It's a huge sea change. And I think that for me, what I was really noticing coming out of conference that I think is quite extraordinary on top of that is there was one particular comment from some unnamed source saying, well, we don't really think the voters are listening to us anyway right now. They might start listening in a year or so and then they'll want to know what we've got to say. And I was thinking, you have no idea of the challenge ahead of you, do you? You really are taking this for granted and you have no idea what you need to do to turn this around. You're not even starting. It's not that you haven't even started on the project. You don't even understand the project, Robyn.
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B
Which does prompt the wider question, is anybody not just in the United Kingd, but in the western democratic sphere still actually listening to centre right parties? Because if you think of the difficulties currently being experienced by what we might think of as the sensible old school Republican party in the United States, or what remains of it, the center rightist tendencies in for example France, the recent failures of the Conservatives in Canada, the Liberal Party in Australia is the trouble is that the trouble now that a plurality of Western electorates, if they're going to to tack conservative, they basically want to go full seething, swivel eyed or not at all.
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C
Well that does seem to be what's happening, doesn't it? I mean I think if you take center right parties in general as being the sort of political expression of a capitalist economy, then increasingly over the last, what decade or two, I suppose increasing number of people have started to ask themselves whether capitalism is really delivering for them. Because in post industrial societies, once the coal mines closed and the shipbuilding all went to East Asia, the capitalist economy didn't deliver for everybody. And I think over time as economic and social inequality has grown, more and more people are saying what you told us the bargain was, which was that you would tax us, we would work, you would make profits, but you would also provide a level of security, health service, housing and the rest of it, which enabled us to live relatively decent, comfortable lives. That's broken. And it broke particularly during the banking crisis in 2007, 2008. It broke again I would suggest during the COVID pandemic when governments around the world showed themselves to be panic stricken at this sudden medical emergency which they didn't know how to handle. And thousands and thousands of people died, thousands and thousands of people became very, very scared and I think lost all confidence in the political class that the people in charge of the country, of the countries plural, knew what they were doing.
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B
Another potted theory which may not hold that much water, Alex, because frankly I only started working on it about five minutes ago. Is that the shifting of what is called the Otherton window, that is the acceptable boundaries of political discourse because for years many of the sensible centre right conservative parties, one of their arguments was that we are a bulwark against fanatics, we are a barrier against racism and bigotry. We may be conservative but we're basically good chaps. Whereas now routinely part of the political discourse, sentiments and statements which would have been more or less instantly career ending maybe just a decade ago.
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A
Yes, and in fact we've seen that come out of this very conference. Robert Jenrick said yesterday that he went to Birmingham and was upset to see no white faces in Harmonsworth. In Birmingham.
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B
Has anyone asked anyone in Harmonsworth how upset they were to see Robert?
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A
Well, I mean anybody would be well within their rights to be most upset to see that particular face, regardless of it. But and extraordinarily the party leader, Kemi Badenoch, who is a black woman defended him on this comment, which sort of, it feels quite extraordinary, you know, when you have to remember that you don't go back very far to find the Conservative Party, you know, shoving out Enoch Powell and kind of, you know, really taking a strong line against this sort of thing. And, and it does seem that, as you say, that window of what is now considered acceptable has obviously shifted and there's been a lot of factors in that, but it's quite dangerous actually for this to happen. And I do think, and now what you've got, I mean, it's sort of British politics is in a very funny state where as you say, the Conservatives are currently about fourth in the polls. It's always been a two party race in Britain and now it isn't. You've got actually sort of about four or five parties all within a few points of error of actually potentially, which under a first past the system, here's a big old recipe for chaos and extraordinary things could happen if that continues. And the party out ahead at the moment by a few points is Reform, which is the much further right party. And what is sort of happening is that there seems to be a panic among the other parties, the Conservatives obviously, but actually also, to be fair, Labour, the party currently in government, to try to get back those reform voters and therefore chase that further right view. And this is the problem with what you said about these parties trying to act as a bulwark against this kind of far right is actually, actually when they start to use that rhetoric of the far right, what they do is keep pushing that window further and further right and make it more and more acceptable. And we now have lots of evidence for this, that actually when you embrace those terms, you don't sort of immunise yourselves and sort of, you know, and make everything safe in the centre again, what you do is just push it further and further right. And why wouldn't voters who want that kind of thing go for the red meat of Nigel Farage and reform?
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B
Well, indeed, to quote a wise yet sadly anonymous sage, don't wrestle in mud with a pig. You'll both get filthy and the pig doesn't care. But Robert, is this a problem that the center right now does have, that they don't feel like they can take on the further right because they realize that that's a lot of our vote is perhaps drifting in that direction. But as Alex says, if you appropriate the further right, well, that's not going to do you any good either because the people who are inclined to vote for the further right are quite happy voting for the further right.
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C
Well, that's what all the evidence suggests from the past. And it does seem to me that the what used to known as the mainstream centre right parties do have a very important choice that they need to make. Are they going to stand on the ground which they have been standing on for decades past, or are they going to move out to the fringes? And certainly if you look at the Republican Party in the United States, they took a decision that they would become basically a Trumpist cult. If you look back at Republicans of the past, even no further than the Bush first and second, certainly the Rockefellers, the Republican Party today bears no resemblance to their Republican Party. I think the same now is beginning to. You could say the same about the Conservative Party in the United Kingdom. What leading Tories are saying now would be absolutely inconceivable to have heard from Tories even 15 or 20 years ago. Absolutely inconceivable.
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B
Enoch Powell, whose spectre was invoked earlier, would barely have raised a ripple at the current Tory conference if he'd stood up.
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C
Oh, what's being said now makes Enoch.
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B
Powell sound like reasonableness given at the full rivers of blood. Although possibly his audience wouldn't have understood the classical reference. A point to which we shall return later in the show. But just finally on this one, Alex, if I was to briefly give you what is possibly the worst job in the world and make you the senior political advisor to the British Conservatives or a centre right party of that ilk anywhere in the world right now, what would you actually advise them?
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A
Well, I would advise them that I do think looking at history there, even when you've seen this kind of collapse into the far right, that for instance, happened in the 20s and 30s across a lot of places, it was a very, very tough time actually for centre right parties. But the ones that sort of came out of that period with some dignity are the ones who understood that they had to stand up for democracy, the rule of law, for decency, for moral values, and actually reasserting that no, it might not win you this election, but at least it'll allow you to look in the mirror. In a few years time, it'll never.
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B
Catch on to the United States and encouraging news for anybody presently performing the little heralded journalistic task of editing book reviews. A decade from now you could be running a major news network. Such is the trajectory described by Barry Weiss, now editor in chief of CBS News, which has enabled that appointment by spending $150 million to buy the Former Wall Street Journal and New York Times staffers, generally conservative substack. The Free Press reports suggest that the react CBS News employees is some way short of hanging. Bunting. Robyn, how would you rate your own level of overjoyedness at these tidings?
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C
Not a lot of overjoyedness, I'm afraid. Quite a lot of underjoyedness, actually. It does relate to what we've just been discussing because one of the things that any nascent political movement knows is that they have to capture the means of communication. The first thing that any coup leader in any military run state does is seize the radio station. If you seize the means of communication, if you control the flow of information, then you are halfway there. And what I call the Trumpist cult in the United States is doing with fantastic amount of success is buying, intimidating, scaring the main means of communication. Big TV networks, big newspapers are, are effectively falling into line. And that is as damaging, I would argue, as what we've just been talking about. Traditional center right parties beginning to move onto far right territory. You look at the Washington Post, you look at the Los Angeles Times, you look at NBC News, you can go down the list of media organizations which have buckled under pressure from the Trump administration. He's now suing the Wall Street Journal for I think $15 billion. He's suing the New York Times for $10 billion. I is crazy stuff, but he's frightening them, he's intimidating them, and it's working.
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B
Does that seem like what this is to you, Alex? This is sort of pre emptive kowtowing by cbs. And Trump has of course, had his run ins with them before.
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A
Yes, I mean, I think it's pretty obvious across the board that Barry Weiss, who was an opinion columnist and you know, runs a substack which they've just paid this extraordinary sum for, which obviously doesn't reflect its value. It's obviously a sort of political purchase. This is the point. She isn't a woman of a lot of experience. I mean, this is the other thing that, you know, CBS is a pretty serious network with a lot of extremely highly qualified professional people working for it. And, you know, this substacker has been kind of slotted in at the top. Someone with absolutely no experience of running that kind of newsroom or any sort of comparable media organization really at all. And it's very obvious that the reason she's there is entirely political and about her political views. And, you know, so either CBS executives are cowed, as Robyn has described, or they just agree with her.
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B
I Mean, it would be nice, would it not, Robyn? And this is a question, fairly self answering question if they'd spent $150 million on actual journalism instead.
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C
Yeah. Wouldn't it just. I mean, there is a real crisis now for journalism. I've just been reading a book called the New Censorship which argues that whereas in the past censorship was governments passing laws saying you can't say this, you can't say that, and thr people into prison if they contravened the law, what we're seeing now is a different kind of censorship which is partly, actually self censorship as journalists try to accommodate the new reality. And it's partly what we've been describing, which is the purchase of or intimidation of media organizations by state organs. So we are in some kind of crisis. And one of the big problems I think that all of us as journalists face is how we deal with this. Do we call it out, do we resist it and lose jobs as a result? Or do we try and make our peace with it and try to find a way which enables us with a relatively clear conscience to continue to do our job but within this new reality?
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B
And just finally on this one, Alex, I wonder if that CBS and other such networks are making the same kind of mistake that those old school centre right parties do in trying to prise off an audience which isn't naturally there because recent Gallup poll suggests that 51% of Democrats still trust old school legacy media, by and large. And they've all just switched off CBS as opposed to 8% of Republicans who obviously weren't watching it anyway.
- [25:49]
A
No, they'll be watching Fox News or listening to Joe Rogan or whatever else it is they're doing in terms of the media space. Or actually just sort of reading various completely wacky Facebook pages, quite possibly, or watching videos on TikTok. I mean, this is it. The media landscape has changed so radically. The book Robin mentioned, actually the New Censorship, it's by Ayala Panievsky, who's an Israeli journalist in Britain now. It's a really excellent book. I agree. I'm also reading it. It's very, very interesting on how this landscape has completely shifted.
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B
Well now to the always gratifying work of deriding the foibles of folk younger than oneself as the unmistakable symptoms of the decadence of a generation obviously less rather robust and noble than one's own. It has emerged that some British universities are having to offer special courses to English literature students, students, to be clear, who are voluntarily undertaking the study of literature to teach them basically to read. It seems that kids today with their smartphones and hula hoops and whatnot, have rendered themselves more or less incapable of concentrating on anything longer than a few words thumbed onto a social media platform. Apologies to any we may have lost since the start of this introduction. Robin, do you despair of the kids today in the state of moder literacy? Go on.
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C
I do not despair. I mean, I remember a magazine in my youth called Reader's Digest which existed entirely to. Well, largely anyway. It had some very bad jokes in it, but mainly existed to provide potted versions of books for people who couldn't read long books. There were, back in the early and mid 20th century, any number of abridged versions of books published, published in millions of copies. For people who couldn't read long books, there's nothing particularly praiseworthy.
- [27:43]
B
But we're talking, we're talking now about people who would struggle with Reader's Digest.
- [27:48]
C
Ah, well, I'm not so sure about that. I. I think this story is a little bit in the way that you described it. This is old people saying, young people today. I've just plowed through a novel of something in excess of 300,000 words, words or 800 pages, by a Victorian novelist called Anthony Trollope, simply because I'd never read an Anthony Trollope novel before. And I thought before I died, I ought to. I actually enjoyed it because I like long novels, but I'm a bit strange like that. I don't see why young people should have to read long literature if they don't want to. There are other ways of spending your time.
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B
But are there other ways of spending your time? Alex, if you are actually literally studying English literature, I mean, at some point you are, Are you not going to have to read a.
- [28:35]
A
Yes, ideally a whole one, I actually think. Okay, so again, I'm going to say that I think this story, in some ways, the idea of teaching students to read long books, I think is probably unfortunately very necessary at universities. And that's partly because, and they do say this in the piece, particularly the GCSE, which is the qualification you get at 16 in English literature, is now so boring and so little about reading and so much about nonsense like identifying fronted adverbials that actually, you know, these kids have just completely turned off the idea of reading. They don't learn how to read. They don't learn to read for pleasure in any way. So they don't, unsurprisingly, because it's just been made as boring as possible for them. And even the gap between you know, things do improve at a level, but the gap between a level and university is huge. It's really huge. And, you know, you suddenly presented, you know, having sort of been given, you know, rather easy things like To Kill a Mockingbird, which is a very, very good book, but, you know, it's quite short and quite straightforward and, you know, morally simple and all of this. Suddenly you're presented with Paradise Loss and you think Crvens, you know, or Henry Fielding or something like this. And, you know, I mean.
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C
Chaucer.
- [29:38]
A
Yeah, Chaucer. I mean, you know, it. It's pretty intimidating and you know, because that.
- [29:42]
B
Talking to someone who was made to study George Eliot in sixth form, it's amazing. I never read another word.
- [29:47]
A
Well, there we go. Exactly. Had you had a smartphone, you probably wouldn't have done so, would you? I mean, you know, just look it up on Wikipedia like everyone else I.
- [29:56]
C
Could have summarized it for.
- [29:59]
B
But, Robyn, there is another survey suggests that in the early 1980s, 35% of American teenagers reported reading for fun almost every day. That number is now barely over 10%. And nearly 50% of American teenagers say they hardly ever read. And given that I suspect people are, that's probably a massive undercount because nobody wants to tell the pollster. Yes, I'm basically an illiterate troglodyte. So that's a death spiral, isn't it?
- [30:26]
C
I'm in favour of people reading because I think reading is a wonderful way of educating people.
- [30:30]
B
And you've got a book coming out.
- [30:33]
C
Exactly. Reading and writing I'm very much in favour of. But, you know, I think one has to realize that times do change. It's only a relatively modern phenomenon that most people actually could read, let alone wanted to read. So we do have to change. I mean, you look at, for example, modern ways of writing poetry, modern forms of communication. You mentioned Alex TikTok videos. I mean, there are lots of new ways of communicating ideas, lots of new ways of imparting information. I'm not sure that learning to read very long books written a long time ago is necessarily a good capital G thing, capital ph.
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B
I'm going to have one last crack at making at least one of you despair slightly. Alex, you've probably seen the much circulated study of American students and these again, American college kids literally studying literature, the first seven paragraphs of Bleak House by Charles Dickens, and more or less entirely baffled by it. Now, I do not sit here claiming to be the greatest ever fan of Charles Dickens. One thing I do remember about high school English Studies is that our teachers, God bless them, for our creative writing assignment in our mock exam, the question was, take your least favorite character from any of this year's set texts and dispose of them in whatever manner seems fit. The things that were done to Pip from Great Expectations made American Psycho pale by comparison. So I'm not a huge fan. But nevertheless, I contend that the first seven paragraphs of Bleak House are not that complicated.
- [32:10]
A
They're not. Well, look, I do think there's an issue, and as I say, there is this in a lot of countries now, a big gap between school and university, between secondary and tertiary education. And I think that is actually a problem. And I think there is also a skill issue that because schools have gone down this road of constant testing, testing, testing on, as I say, really quite trivial things that almost are sort of pub quiz answers, really, rather than deep knowledge and moving away from critical thinking, as you know, for me, a far more important part of education. If you don't teach people to read critically and analyze, then sure, they won't know how to do it. I mean, we're not born knowing this stuff. You do have to be taught it. And I think there is absolutely a case for saying here that schools are not really doing this. And in the media environment, forget, you know, reading, you know, great literature, although don't forget it because it's very enriching. But if you're going to survive in the model media environment, you need to be able to think critically, you need to be able to assess sources, you need to be able to read comparatively and certainly if you're going to survive in the age of AI. And it's interesting that for years we've all been like, learn to code. Well, forget it. No, actually do history or English or humanity, learn to think.
- [33:18]
B
Alex von Tantemen and Robin Lustig, thank you both for joining us. Finally, on today's show, for obvious reasons, Europe has given a deal of thought to its own defences these last three years or so. One possible advantage Europe has in this endeavour is a wealth of historical experience upon which to draw the continent. Having hosted any number of invasions from without and conflicts within, a new book by the retired British Lieutenant General Sir Barney White Spunner considers a handful of the militaries which have been fielded in Europe. The Roman legions of Constantine the Great, the Ottoman marauders of Sultan Mehmet ii, the new model army of Oliver Cromwell, the Prussians who rode to, well, Wellington's rescue at Waterloo, and the U.S. army who helped liberate Europe in the 1940s. The book is called nations in Five Armies that Made Europe. I spoke to Sobani earlier and began by asking whether, while serving, he had often drawn lessons from military history himself.
- [34:15]
D
Yeah, frequently. I think most soldiers do, because, particularly in the era that I was very active, 90s early noughties. Quite a lot of our countries we were in were new. Quite a lot of the. What we were trying to do was different. So I'm historian anyway, but actually there's not that much new in the military world. So looking at how people have tackled problems before and how they answered them is really relevant and really helpful. And that's really the genesis of the book, because my idea is actually we're facing a military situation now, which is going to be difficult. I hope it's not going to be as difficult as everybody says it is, but it could be. We could be in for a dangerous and difficult time. And there is a slight tension tendency now just to look at what we've got and just sort of build on what's there, rather than thinking back to basics. So I wanted to take five examples where people have thought back to basics. They've come onto the very dangerous or difficult time or a time when, like Constantine the Great or Mehmed the Conqueror, they needed. They had a program that they. They had to implement or wanted to implement, and how did they go about it? So the idea we had in the book is to try and get people thinking. Actually, the perceived contemporary wisdom isn't always right. There's different ways of doing things.
- [35:31]
B
As you foreshadowed, you draw on five armies from European history going all the way back to Constantine. What essentials, though, of warfare do you think don't change? What would be recognisable to Constantine or Mehmet or even Cromwell?
- [35:46]
D
Well, there's general things like the uncertainty, the pressures, the costs, all that. What I try to do in the book is identify sort of 5 what I call enduring issues, enduring lessons. The first is that you've got to obviously have a professional trained corps, which is your standing army, like your professional army, and you've got to train that and equip that. But on the other hand, you've actually got to ensure that the whole nation is behind that. And we have a slight tendency now just to think, well, defence, that's the armed forces, and for some, nothing much behind it. But you go back to people like Russian army, actually you get the whole nation needs to get involved in its defense. And I think what would surprise them if they are now is the Fact that actually we've slightly sort of public attitude is the defenses for the government, defenses for the armed forces. Actually there's an awful lot more that society is going to need to do. So give you an example, I mean take pandemics, take flooding, take some of the issues that migration is sadly going to fall. Is there not a cause here to actually get more of society involved in trying to help? You can't just sort of mortgage all that out and say, well, you know, rather small professional armed forces will deal with all that.
- [37:01]
B
Do any of those five armies you draw upon though necessarily build the case for large scale conscription or national service? Because professional militaries tend not to be a fan of that idea.
- [37:12]
D
Totally, absolutely not. Nobody's a fan of conscription in terms of how it's portrayed, forgive me, in the media and sometimes by sort of backbench politicians now a sort of boot camp for 18 year olds. That's not what armies want at all. What armies do need though, and this again is why particularly particular example is the Prussian army is you do need to make available to, for the defence of a country those skill sets, which it isn't either the army, the professional armies don't have all the time or which you only need in certain times. So give an example, British army today, the medical services. That is a copy classic example of something which is actually really well organized. So the arrangement the armed forces have with the NHS is when they need specialists, then those specialists are provided under a reserve system. So is that conscription? No, it's not really conscription because they're volunteers. But you could get to a stage and quite a lot of countries in Europe have done this and I actually list some in the book whereby you do need. The government doesn't need to say to people, you've got the school sake, you might be the linguist or something, cyber expert, the space expert, the medic, the engineer, the technician, whatever, who we need. And actually we went, well, we can skip to you, but we do require your services to help defend the nation and lots of countries do that. I mean it surprised you how many.
- [38:32]
B
I want to close with what you close with and it's not a spoiler, I promise our listeners, but it's that lovely quote from Basil Adele Hart that 2000 years of experience tell us that the only thing harder than getting a new one idea into a military mind is getting an old idea out. But is the military, do you think, really slower moving than any other bureaucracy?
- [38:53]
D
No, I don't think it is and I did actually. It's Slightly tongue in cheek. But what I'm trying to do in the book is get people thinking, how do you do defense? How do you do armies a bit differently? So, yeah, it is a slightly unkind quote, but it's there for a purpose. It's there to get sort of of people to think, well, is the way we're doing things at the moment the right way? Is there a better way of doing it? Is there a cheaper way of doing it? Because money is always going to be important at this and there's no point having a debate about militaries whereby you sort of ignore the cost. No, I don't think militaries are. I think actually when the senior militaries are some of the more progressive. But I think you do find, particularly in democracies, it's quite difficult to get a democratically elected government government to start thinking differently about this because they get in the sort of panic about how. Whether it'll be sort of a vote winner or vote loser. So if you do what I suggest, which is you try and get a much wider involvement in defense in the widest sense, as I say, call it reservist territory or whatever you want, I think you will find that a lot of politicians will go, oh, gosh, you know, how popular is that going to be sort of thing. So it is a bit tongue in cheek. But I'm a great Little Heart fan.
- [40:05]
B
That was Lieutenant General Sabani White Spanner speaking to me earlier. His book nations in Five Armies that Made Europe is available now and much recommended. That is all for this edition of the Monocle Daily. Thanks to our panelists today, Alex von Tonzelman and Robin Lustig. Today's show was produced by Laura Kramer and researched by Joanna Moser. Our sound engineer was Elliot Greenfield. I'm Andrew Muller here in London. The Daily is back at the same time tomorrow. Thanks for listening, Sam.