Hello everybody and welcome to the history of England and to a special episode.

You will all know my wiggish delight, if I can use that word, in all matters, constitutional,

but maybe not also my delight in the great contribution England and indeed Britain more generally

made to the development of the Western

democratic state. Might have spotted it a bit with my bathering about Magna Carta, Simon

and Montford, or that excited detail about the civil wars and the new thinking, sovereignty of the

people, the levellers, Samuel Hartlip and his thirst for improvement. So, imagine my delight

when I was contacted by a listener who suggested

it might be a good idea to put all of that fascinating story into one pithy podcast episode,

and that person was Dr. Jeevan Sander, who is my partner in this bit of casting, and is also,

coincidentally, the MP of my hometown, which is super exciting. Jeevan, welcome to the podcast. It is so, so wonderful to be here. Thank you so much, Happy David's. I think of Jeevan, you're very nice. Why don't you introduce self? Tell everyone a bit more about who you are and what was the idea that inspired you to get in touch with me?

Yes. So I'm Jevon Sander. I am the MP for Loughborough. I am a long-time listener, first time writer, as it were.

There's two things behind this podcast. There's the first the high-minded reason. And that's the core idea of this episode, which I think we'll go through, which is,

why is it Britain, which for most of its history was this kind of, you know, to be blunt,

something of a soggy backwater in human history and human affairs, the edge of the Eurasian landmass,

not really that important is seen as being, not even this, certainly that important in Europe at certain points.

And then all of a sudden, it's the birthplace called sustained economic growth.

It's the greatest reduction of human misery in the history of humanity.

We should remember how big that, what that actually meant.

So it meant that rather than every child under 15 having a 50%

of chance of dying, now 5%, it's a huge reduction in greed. And also growth in the ideas of

liberalism and the dignity of people and man. So something really special happened in Britain.

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