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Michael Gove speech; ENGLAND: London: West Hampstead: JW3: INT Michael Gove MP (Levelling Up, Housing and Communities Secretary) speech SOT (part 5 of 7) - The hard left finds it impossible to acknowledge that higher material living standards - and indeed greater human flourishing – in some states rather than in others –?is better explained by reference to Adam Smith, John Locke, Edmund Burke and Karl Popper rather than Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, Franz Fanon and Edward Said. That historic fact is unconscionable for the dedicated activists of the radical hard left. So they argue that the prosperity of states such as the US, the UK, France, Spain and even Australia or Canada must be built on exploitation and empire. That argument, as my colleague Kemi Badenoch has brilliantly shown, and historians from Niall Ferguson to Nigel Biggar have reinforced, is inherently flawed. But these ideas are deeply congenial to those authoritarian states who are, increasingly, arrayed together against us. For Iran, for China and even for Russia, the decolonisation narrative is meat and drink. The idea that the success of liberal Western nations is built on plunder and exploitation, that we seek even now to dominate others through illegitimate means and that our attachment to freedom is mere hypocrisy is central to their efforts to advance their goals. That is why forces within those powers seek to influence the debate in our country. They want to weaken our collective resolve in support of democratic values and fellow democracies. And they know that if they can undermine support for Israel by encouraging a broader lack of self-confidence in the West’s values, they have secured a signal victory. It is no mere coincidence that Iran, Russia and China are sources and spreaders of antisemitic and anti-Israel narratives. They know those intellectual currents erode our shared defences. And they know that if the decolonisation narrative and the delegitimization whic...