When you lose, you should not change everything. If British opponents of conservatism were to embrace Boris Johnson’s Brexit, they would be surrendering rather than adapting. Rather than give up entirely, you show you are serious about expanding your movement’s appeal by performing a mental triage. You ask, what essential policies must I keep at all costs because to lose them would be to lose my political identity? What do I want to hang on to but am prepared to sacrifice if necessary? And what must I ditch for causing me needless harm? You make a utilitarian calculation, in other words, and ask of everything you once believed: “Is it worth it?”

In Britain, I see nothing of the kind happening, even though the liberal Left has lost four elections and one referendum. There are no hard questions. No one is taking out the rubbish. Culture matters more than individual policies. Indeed, the silence can be in part explained by the culture of the liberal Left, or at least of its dominant voices, which inoculates it against self-criticism at the same time as it repels potential supporters. To generalise, and you cannot write clearly without generalisation, leftish culture is hugely hostile to freedom of expression and freedom of thought. It is censorious and inquisitorial, and assumes the worst of everyone who opposes it. People who live within the leftish culture are both vicious and frightened. They attack with mobbish relish, and accuse all who contradict them of being motivated by personal wickedness and prejudice.  The apparently self-confident aggression is matched by the fear that the denunciations they throw at others will be thrown at them. Self-criticism is hard in a culture where accusations of treason and selling out follow deviations from orthodox thinking.

A games designer, who caused grim hilarity among my disillusioned leftish circles, inadvertently encapsulated all that was wrong in a couple of tweets. “If (cis) men are finally going to be washing their hands properly,” she said of the coronavirus, “we’re going to have to introduce them to hand cream and try and convince them it’s okay to use it.” It was a lame but hardly novel observation that men are slobs. Notice, however, how carefully she makes it clear that she is only abusing cis men not trans men. (And if you don’t know what “cis men” means you damn yourself as a transphobe and probable racist.) But hold on. The terrible thought occurred to her that she might be open to criticism for white supremacy. She quickly added: “You know what this should definitely have read ‘white’ cis men, imma not about to whitesplain moisturising to black and brown folks.”

Imagine living with that neurotic combination of arrogance and dread. Imagine even wanting to live with it. What free woman or man would ever willingly sign up for a life in this abject culture?

The Left’s tactics in the culture wars are a remarkably self-defeating species of self-abuse that succeeds only in pleasuring its enemies. Its supporters know this, but cannot admit it plainly.

‘In Britain, the United States, and virtually every country in what we used to call the West, to be on the Left is to be a loser’

The ugliest  political neologism is “weaponise”.  Originally a military term, it now means a criticism you have no convincing answer to. The conservative thinker Jordan Peterson condemned his opponents for seeking to “weaponise compassion” by using concern for others as an excuse to pursue egalitarian politics.  What he did not say, of course, is that the willingness of conservatives to ignore the suffering of others was one of the main reasons their opponents detested them. Of the identical complaints from the Left about the weaponisation of freedom of speech by the Right, let one, from Victor Ray, an American sociology professor, stand for them all. “It is time to stop assuming good faith in the free speech debate,” he wrote in Inside Higher Education. “The Right has weaponised free speech, framing campus debates in a way that resonates with liberals to destroy the very things liberals purport to care about. By capitulating to the demands of those who threaten violence against professors, colleges and universities undermine one of their central functions as refuges for debating controversial ideas.”

Look at how battlefield imagery traps you. Criticism becomes a lethal weapon in the hands of an enemy who “threatens violence”—a spectre that is still raised even though the classical liberal justification for free speech prohibits incitement to violence. The naivety of complaints of “weaponising” is as striking as their ugliness. It is as if the sight of political opponents looking for weaknesses and exploiting them was shocking. As if it were somehow an underhand tactic to highlight an opponent’s mistakes. By default, so that the casual listener would not notice, the liberal Left admits the mistake, but instead of seeking to rectify it, blames the “bad faith” of the Right for revealing its faults.

It would do better to ask why the Right has done its own cost-benefit analysis and concluded that opposition to freedom of speech is a weakness worth attacking. The question answers itself—or at least it would if it were ever asked.

Censors look awful. They look like they cannot handle argument. They look narrow-minded. They look menacing and over-mighty because they demand power over the minds of others. Ask yourself would you respect a movement or individual who said: “If you disagree with me, I will shame and ridicule you until you recant. And if you persist, I will try to force your employer to fire you or the police to arrest you”. Would you join that movement or vote for its candidate at election time?

The fate of the trans-rights movement provides a practical illustration of the self-defeating politics of self-abuse. In 2018, even a Conservative government was willing to propose a Gender Recognition Act that made it easier for men to identify as women and vice versa. The existing procedures were time-consuming and expensive. Reforming the law seemed a modest remedy. Feminists raised doubts. The abuse the trans-rights movement directed at them sabotaged a cause whose victory seemed guaranteed. Trans-rights activists have banned women from speaking out, and closed their meetings. Liberal newspapers have come under sinister pressure to silence dissident writers. The Labour Party has considered the outlawing of “trans-exclusionist hate groups”. Death and rape threats abound. Trans-rights activists stopped questions that were reasonable, or at least sounded reasonable to the majority of people. To raise them was to be “transphobic”. To ask what was to stop a male sexual predator declaring he was a woman and gaining access to women’s prisons and changing rooms, was to mark yourself as an irredeemable bigot, unworthy of a public platform. To wonder why doctors were allowing teenagers with learning difficulties to receive irreversible medical interventions for psychological conditions was not to display a knowledge of the grim history of eugenics, sterilisations and lobotomies—irreversible medical interventions that were also advocated, incidentally, by doctors who claimed they were acting from enlightened motives—but to display your irrational hatreds.

The effect was frightening but also futile. The trans debate is about tiny numbers of people. It ought to be possible to answer difficult questions and reach accommodations. Faced with boycotts and threats rather than answers, the Westminster government has backed away from reform. Nicola Sturgeon’s more progressive Scottish administration is looking nervous about changing the law and millions of women think that the Left wants to send rapists into their safe spaces.

For what? For the witch-hunter’s pleasure in burning a victim? For the priggish self-righteousness that comes from never compromising or admitting compromise may ever be necessary? I am not saying that the Left is worse than the Right—the opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal are as much an intellectually closed space as any sociology department. But if you keep losing, if you are powerless, the faults that keep you from power matter more. At a bare minimum, the censorious Left ought to remember it is not in power and that the dominant Right can take its arguments against free thought and use them as a weapon of its own.

It ought to ponder too that, throughout history, demands for free expression have been made by the powerless and been resisted by the powerful. Only in our times do we see the powerless forge the fetters that might bind them.

The liberal Left can be so hostile to freedom of speech because in large areas of Balkanised modern societies it is in power, or feels as if it is. If you work in the arts, universities, charities or the public sector, the illusions of a bubble mentality flourish. Most people agree with you—or pretend to agree with you for the sake of their career or desire for a quiet life—and those who do not can be shamed or punished until they bend their miserable heads and shuffle into line. The cynical saying that “academic politics are so vicious because the stakes are so small” reflects the truth that the power to ban is the only power they have. Censorship is a symptom of a defeat of a political movement that can no longer aspire to govern countries but seeks only to govern itself. The littleness of the ambition is as good a reason as any to object to it. You insist I say “person of colour” instead of “black,” do you. And I must learn to say “LGBTQIA+” instead of “lesbian and gay”. OK, if it makes you happy, but do you really think any of this makes a difference? Have you not yet learned that you do not change the world by changing language with orders from above?  Irony, sarcasm and hyperbole will always undermine your diktats and turn your meanings against you, while potential supporters will resent your attempts to boss them about and move to your opponents’ side.

Two dismal consequences flow from the liberal Left’s authoritarian turn. The first is that without dictatorial state power at its disposal no political movement can close down debate.  Platform bans and speech codes work only in small worlds. At best, the BBC and the arts will be silenced. Even then, debates do not stop, they just move elsewhere. If the liberal Left will not talk about, for instance, radical Islam, then the Right will and will set the terms of engagement.

More seriously, if you do not argue with your opponents you do not learn how to beat them. The campaign against Brexit was so disastrous for Britain because its supporters failed to grasp the appeal of nationalism. Brexit was such a self-evidently stupid idea they saw no need to combat the anti-European Right as it grew in power. They did not sit on stages with the nationalists, learn their weak points, and judge from the murmurs of the audience which pro-European arguments worked and which did not. Not until it was too late.

How much later are opponents of conservatism prepared to leave it? One more election loss, two, three? Or can no defeat hammer the notion into their bubble heads that they must change.   

The post Defeat begets defeat for Britain’s cloth-eared Left appeared first on Standpoint.

Left-wing culture is humourless and pious. The first duty and greatest pleasure of the best satirists is to deflate the self-important bourgeoisie. The British Labour party, the US Democrats, the European socialist parties (what remains of them) are now bourgeois movements. The cultural elite is posher still. Labour members may not be as middle-class as Tories but they are noticeably richer than the average voter is, and it shows. The vast majority of writers and artists are middle-class too. They should have the inside knowledge to puncture the pompous.

The worst of left-wing culture is also vicious. In academia and online, the loudest voices are intolerant to the point of being inquisitorial. They pile on shame and blame. They call out and cancel. Their first rather than last instinct is to ban contrary opinions and humiliate those who cross them: the modern equivalent of the stocks. If they cannot punish directly by persuading the police to arrest their enemies or employers to fire them, they mobilise the opinion of colleagues and online strangers to demand public recantations, like Chinese communists demanding capitalist-roaders abase themselves before a Maoist court.

Writers, above all others, have a self-interest in defending freedom of speech (for if others can be silenced, so can they). Yet though plenty of conservatives announce their support for freedom of speech, I cannot think of one who has made a convincing case in its defence.

An example of the failure of a genre is this passage from Woke: A Guide to Social Justice by “Titania McGrath”, the pseudonym for the right-wing comedian Andrew Doyle, who earns his popularity in conservative circles by adopting the persona of a PC heretic-hunter. I have not gone out of my way to find him at his worst, merely thrown his book in the air and seen what page it landed on.

The more white writers insist on straying into black culture, the more I’m convinced that burning books and works of art is occasionally the right thing to do. When I’ve said this in the past, I have been accused of perpetuating a similar ideology to that of ISIS who, as we all know, have destroyed historical artefacts in Iraq, Syria and Libya. Needless to say, I am no supporter of ISIS, I simply believe that problematic art needs to be expunged in order to preserve a free and civilised society.

Did that have you howling with laughter? Did it raise your anger against the absurdity of the anti-cultural appropriation movement? Or did it just provoke a tired sigh and an urgent desire to move to next business?

The best satire sparkles. But, like a TV producer or newspaper editor who assumes the audience is thick, Doyle clutters the text with laborious explanations, ensuring that his prose trudges at the pace of the slowest reader. ISIS has “destroyed historical artefacts in Iraq, Syria and Libya,” he stops to instruct us. Gosh, so it has.

The best satire shocks. A new reader of Jonathan Swift’s “Modest Proposal” may think they are reading a sympathetic tract on the plight of starving beggars in 18th-century Ireland, until Swift hits them by reducing utilitarian solutions to poverty to absurdity and concluding that the poor should sell their children as food. “A young healthy child well nursed, is, at a year old, a most delicious nourishing and wholesome food; whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee, or a ragout.” Doyle’s punchlines rumble from afar like freight trains and arrive with the inevitability of Christmas. As with so many left-wing comedians, the satire is no more than “yah boo sucks, my opponents are hypocritical idiots,” which partisans of every cause believe.

The toughest satirists know their enemy. George Orwell learned about both the terrors and, crucially, the appeal of communism before he wrote Animal Farm. Like the soft-leftists who went along with Jeremy Corbyn because they thought he was a decent man, however, the Right does not understand the anti-imperialist far-Left. It never acknowledges the crimes of Islamic State, Hamas or Iran or lists the destroyed “historical artefacts”. It deals with clerical fascism by pretending it doesn’t exist.

I am quoting Doyle because he epitomises so many others. Maybe there are brilliant, undiscovered writers, but judging from the Conservative press and websites he’s as good as it gets. The reason for the mediocrity ought to be obvious. We are not living in a great age of conservative satire because, in the age of Trump and Johnson, true conservatives are everywhere in retreat. When the worst of the Right is as dogmatic and intolerant as the worst of the Left, the one cannot satirise the other.

Before I explain why, let me deal with two objections. The first contains a great deal of truth: a liberal-left outlook dominates the arts, television, theatre and comedy. At the height of Corbynism, a well-known comedian told me there were only four comics on the political comedy circuit who did not support the Labour leader. “They all repeat as one, ‘we are not in a cult,’ and can’t see why that’s funny,” he said, before adding that for professional reasons he would be grateful if I did not name him.

You only have to visit the subsidised theatre to know there is a vast range of political opinion its managers have effectively driven from the stage. The paranoid conservative belief in a liberal cultural elite determined to silence dissenting voice is not fanciful. Soft-left artists live in fear too. Indeed, social media activists reserve their greatest hatred not for supporters of the British Conservatives or US Republicans, but for centrists who are not on their side. If you believe, for example, that white supremacism permeates Western societies then you expect to find it everywhere. The smallest example of prejudice on the Left is therefore worse than undisputed prejudice on the Right, because the Left is meant to be leading the emancipatory struggle. In practice, heresy-hunting is also a good career move. Outrage entrepreneurs know that denunciation destroys rivals—thus opening vacancies for them to move into—and keeps frightened supporters in line for fear of receiving the same punishment.

When all that is acknowledged, the press remains dominated by right-wing proprietors and publishing remains a capitalist business. If one publisher turns down a potentially profitable book for political reasons, another will take it with gratitude. Right-wing writers do not have to look too hard to find sponsors.

Leftists raise a second objection. They explain the failure of conservative satire by saying that no one likes a writer who “punches down”: that is, mocks people who are weaker than they are. (Although that does not stop them mocking “gammons” or maintaining that poor, uneducated whites enjoy more “privilege” than a rich, Oxbridge or Ivy League educated person of colour.) Do you want to go back to racist gags about Pakis and poofs, they ask?

It is a fair question. But with power, as with property, location is everything. After Islamists massacred the genuinely brave satirists of Charlie Hebdo for publishing cartoons of Mohammed, liberal writers said the reason they did not protest against terror, and against clerical-inspired misogyny, homophobia, racism and tyranny, was not because they were scared a similar fate might greet them. Heavens, no. They stayed silent when they should have spoken out because they did not want to “punch down”. They are right to say that a majority of Muslims in Western countries are at the bottom of society (it is equally true that a majority don’t support radical Islam). But in the Middle East, and much of Asia and Africa, ultra-reactionary religion has terrifying coercive power. Even in the West, you can ask who has the more power: the cartoonist, or the gunman preparing to blow him to pieces. Or, to rephrase that question for 2020, who is the true representative of the elite, whose ideas are in power and determining Britain’s fate: the anti-European gammon in his retirement home or the liberal academic in his ivory tower?

For all these caveats, the argument about “punching down” gets closer to the heart of the reasons for the collapse of right-wing writing. It makes you ask what conservatives want.

Satire, after all, is often a conservative genre. I don’t mean that it is always politically Conservative with a capital “C”, rather that it can draw its strength from contrasting modern ills with the solid values of the past. The Roman satirists pitted traditional virtues against the decadence brought by new money and outlandish Greek ideas. Swift contrasted a happy  peaceful Britain with the pointless foreign wars the Whigs had imposed on a suffering country. Orwell contrasted the mendacity and cruelty of the communist intelligentsia with the decent socialism of the English working class. The left-wing satirists who laid into Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s contrasted the cruelties of unconstrained capitalism with the security of the post-war welfare state. As technology makes it impossible for anyone to understand how the world works, I expect to hear many lamentations for the loss of a simpler age. The point here is not that invocations of an idealised past are true, but that they are a powerful and seductive literary device.

If modern Conservatives were truly conservative, they would know how to tear into the faddism of the woke Left. Conservatives in the Anglo-Saxon tradition said they were suspicious of grand projects to redistribute wealth and radical schemes to remake humanity by abolishing the difference between the sexes. Conservatives were tolerant because they knew that perfect knowledge could not exist. They were empiricists, who valued facts above theory, and traditionalists who understood the danger of tearing institutions apart when you did not know how to replace them.

Traditional conservatives still exist, but everywhere they are in retreat. Power belongs to the radical Right, and it cannot satirise the Left because it exhibits the Left’s vices. A Right that imposes Brexit on Britain cannot pretend that it has a sensible suspicion of social engineering when it is tearing up Britain’s relationship with the European Union without a clear idea of how to replace it. Meanwhile nominal conservatives display a familiar hatred for all who might limit their power.

Boris Johnson purged pro-European dissenters from his party and unlawfully suspended Parliament. He threatens the independence of the judiciary and talks about dismantling the BBC. Right-wing vendettas mimic the persecutions of the intolerant Left. “Conservatives” in power do not content themselves with going after avowed opponents. They also find the smallest deviation from their ideology intolerable. However great the paranoia of the Right—which it shares, incidentally with the radical Left—broadcasters and the judiciary are not the enemy. Broadcasters ask ministers hard questions. Judges tell the government to obey the law. Both perform the necessary tasks of a liberal democracy. But for that they must punished.

Looking into Doyle’s background, I wasn’t remotely surprised to find that he is associated with Spiked!, an online journal that grew out of Living Marxism and before that the Revolutionary Communist Party. Its ideologues have moved from the ultra-Left to the ultra-Right (they campaign now for Nigel Farage’s Brexit party) without changing a single facet of their conspiratorial mentality. Right-wing satire is such an abject failure because, in their hearts, the “conservatives” in power do not want to fight the intolerance of the radical Left. They want to imitate it.

The post Extremism gives us little reason to laugh appeared first on Standpoint.

If you wish to break free from it, and attempt to see the truth about your country in 2020, you must confront the George Orwell of 1940. He stands like a mighty obstacle, and not one I ever wanted to tackle. I believed his part-critical, part-exultant celebration of Englishness for most of my life.

Orwell left the English a set of clichés as familiar to us as Big Brother and Newspeak are to the rest of the world. People who have never read him find themselves repeating his ideas so thoroughly have they penetrated the national consciousness.

The combination of Brexit and the far Left’s takeover of the Labour party has resulted in Orwell once again being cast as St George of England, the patron saint of commentators, with scant respect for what he actually believed. The conservative columnist Charles Moore press-ganged Orwell’s most evocative essay The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius, written at the height of the Blitz, into the service of the Brexit cause. Orwell, he decided, would have had no time for Remainers, who refused to accept the referendum result and “embarked on a character assassination of their fellow countrymen”. In truth, as the Cold War began, Orwell thought the only way for England (and Britain) to retain its autonomy in a world dominated by the Soviet Union and America was to join a “United States of Europe” that was “self-sufficient and able to hold its own”. His argument applies as well in a 21st century dominated by China and America, as I suspect we are about to find out.

Half the writers in the serious press have reached for their Orwell to describe the modern Labour party’s attachment to repellent regimes and terrorist movements. I’ve thrown the words Orwell used against the pro-Soviet Left of the 1940s at the supposedly moral people in the Labour party who went with a conspiracist leader, Marxist-Leninists and anti-Jewish racism: “Do remember that dishonesty and cowardice always have to be paid for. Don’t imagine that for years on end you can make yourself the boot-licking propagandist of the Soviet regime, or any other regime, and then suddenly return to mental decency. Once a whore, always a whore.”

As polemic it is unbeatable, but as a description of modern England it is too kind. Orwell argued in The Lion and the Unicorn against a tiny group of left-wing intellectuals, who had “little in them except the irresponsible carping of people who have never been and never expect to be in a position of power”.

However badly it fared, Labour’s vote of 10,265,912 at the last election was not tiny. A portion of its supporters will say they voted Labour despite the leadership or because our electoral system left them with no other way to protest against the extremism of the Brexit right. Nevertheless, they still voted for the first party since the neo-Nazi British National Party to be investigated by the Equalities and Human Rights Commission for Jew-hatred and institutional racism. The racism, the crankery, the service to enemies of the country was not a deal-breaker.

The contenders for the Labour leadership want to put the ugliness of the past to one side, and the right wants us to “move on” from the Brexit wars. In this, at least, they are being typically English. Their notion that we can, or indeed should, settle our differences and come together is the closest the BBC has to an ideology and the Church of England to a theology. If you believe we should “find closure and to let the healing begin” to use Boris Johnson’s words after he won the 2019 election, or “we’re all in this together,” as his predecessor David Cameron said, Orwell expressed the same thought first and better.

Orwell was a socialist and never ignored England’s class divisions or the crimes of the British Empire. But he was adamant in 1940 that, however unjust the ruling class was, it was still “our” ruling class. England was a “family”, he said in The Lion and the Unicorn. It may be a “family with the wrong members in control”. It may kowtow to rich relations, thwart the young and hand power to irresponsible uncles and bedridden aunts. “Still, it is a family. It has its private language and its common memories, and at the approach of an enemy it closes its ranks.”

Closely tied to the notion of national unity is his view that the English possess an innate hatred of extremism. If you have ever found yourself insisting the English are decent patriots, not dangerous nationalists, Orwell’s view that the British army could never instruct troops to goosestep “because the people in the street would laugh” is ready made for you.  English patriotism wasn’t based on hatred of foreigners but a “refusal to take foreigners seriously,” he explained. England was an eccentric insular country with its “solid breakfasts and gloomy Sundays, smoky towns and winding roads, green fields and red pillar-boxes”. Everyone except left-wing intellectuals who got their politics from Moscow and food from Paris understood and welcomed its peculiarities.

I can understand his pride. In 1940 Britain was the only major European country not to be occupied by Stalin or Hitler. It was also the only one without a mass communist or fascist party. But a lucky history does not mean our luck will last.

A pedant could point out that in the 75 years since 1945, English history has not been noticeably more polite or peaceful than the histories of our neighbours. Starting in 1968 with Enoch Powell’s “Rivers of Blood” speech, the beginnings of war in Ulster and industrial militancy in the factories, and going on through the trade union movement’s effective destruction of Edward Heath’s government in 1974 and Jim Callaghan’s in 1979, Margaret Thatcher’s great recession of the early Eighties, the near civil war of the miners’ strike of 1984-85, the Poll Tax riot, and the collapse of the pound in 1992, conflict, racism and hatred were as much a part of the English way as winding roads and red pillar boxes. The social peace of the Blair years was the exception, not the rule.

‘Our escape from the history of the continent has also made us reckless. No nation that endured the tragedies of the 20th century would risk what we are risking with Brexit’

But what matters is not whether national myths are true but whether they are believed. Brexit is a warning of how a lucky history in the 20th century can become a curse in the 21st. The belief that we are Orwell’s gentle country, that laughed at extremists, and never experienced communism or fascism, led to a vainglorious belief in our superiority. Our escape from the history of the continent has also made us reckless. No nation that endured the tragedies of the 20th century would risk what we are risking with Brexit. Even the Greeks, who have every reason to deplore the suffering that European institutions inflicted on them after the financial crash, have not left the EU or returned to the drachma. Memories of Nazi invasion and a military dictatorship incline a country to caution.

Not so here. The Scots, the Welsh and the Irish used to complain that the English talked of “Britain” when they meant England. What was an irritating verbal tic is now threatening the state. With the apparently unwavering approval of English conservatives, Boris Johnson is betraying the promises made to Ulster Unionists and placing a border in the Irish Sea. He risks giving Scottish nationalists a decisive advantage by pursuing a Brexit that ignores Scottish interests. In this he is an authentic representative of the new English nationalism. Every poll of Conservative members shows they would prefer the break-up of the United Kingdom to their England remaining in the European Union.

They are so dangerous because they are so old. Commentary about the generational divide tends with justice to focus on the problems of the young affording housing. As striking, are the political consequences. In Britain, as in every other modern society, the old are becoming the most influential group. Britain has almost 12 million people aged 65 or over and 8 million aged between 55 and 64. They are not only more likely to vote than the young, they are likely to vote as a bloc as age replaces class as the main predictor of political behaviour. In the 2019 election, 64 per cent of pensioners voted Conservative. In the 2016 Brexit referendum, over-65s were more than twice as likely as under-25s to vote to leave the European Union.

Optimistic writers and politicians from the 20th century would find the power of the grey vote the strangest feature of our world. They looked to new men and women working in new industries, often living in new towns, as the country’s best hope for the future. Harold Wilson won power in the 1960s by arguing that a “new Britain” would need to be forged in the “white heat” of a scientific revolution. Tony Blair and David Cameron emphasised that they wanted to win power to help “hard-working families”. In The Lion and the Unicorn, Orwell saw “the germs of the future England” among “people most definitely of the modern world, the technicians and the higher-paid skilled workers, the airmen and their mechanics, the radio experts, film producers, popular journalists and industrial chemists”.

Now you see the new England in retirement homes. Or at least the England that politicians must work the hardest to appeal to. The demography of Western societies makes culture war inevitable. As the birth rate falls and life expectancy increases, more immigrants are needed. Nativist politicians then exploit fear of the foreigner among the older white voters to win elections and referendums and so the circle continues. Economic arguments along the lines of “Brexit will destroy jobs” lack force when so many voters do not work. Nor do the wild promises of English and Scottish nationalists that they can tear up the old order without inflicting economic pain necessarily cause alarm.

An identity crisis follows. Older white voters are as entitled to think their world has gone, and worry about whether there’s a place for them in a multicultural country, as ethnic minority voters are to worry about racism and the unspoken codes of English life that mandate their exclusion. The only sane future is to accommodate both, which will be hellishly hard but must be attempted. A start can be made by chucking out old myths. The English are not uniquely gentle or tolerant, and racism and nationalism can exist as easily here as in any other European country.

You may want Orwell to be right. You can believe there was a time when he was right. But he isn’t right now.

The post The necessary death of Orwell’s England appeared first on Standpoint.

You can guess the reasons why ministers had to wait until they were shamed by, of all people, Donald Trump and Recep Erdoğan. They see the children, including the babies and toddlers, still living in the disease-ridden and violent refugee camps, as collateral damage. The authorities are not sure they have the evidence to prosecute their parents and fear the backlash if they help them return. They know that Islamic State encouraged women to be just as vicious as the men. Potential terrorists could be among the returning mothers or teenagers. So it is expedient to dump their kids on the Kurds or just dump them completely.

No one should miss the stench of cowardice, and yet there is no sign voters care or understand that cowardice runs through the British state. And not only in its abandonment of innocent children. When they greet people in pinstriped suits and well-cut dresses who act for Russia and other hostile powers, the authorities are just as
pusillanimous.

This election ought to be a moment of illumination, showing how Britain has failed to adapt to a changed world. During the Cold War, communist countries engaged in subversion. Most notably, the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) acted as Moscow’s fifth column. Yet although it had a significant influence on the Left, particularly in the trade union movement, the CPGB was never a substantial force. Only a trivial handful of Maoists backed Beijing. Whatever successes Soviet espionage enjoyed, communist countries could never exploit the lobbying services modern capitalist societies offered those who could afford their fees. Communists had to keep their distance from capitalists (and vice versa). Now Russia is an autocratic kleptocracy and China is Maoist in name only, both can buy the once-forbidden services, along with the opportunities created by a service known to barely anyone outside universities when the Berlin Wall fell: the internet.

The campaign began with a display of contempt for the electorate for which I can find no precedent. As Standpoint went to press, Boris Johnson was refusing to allow the public to read the Parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee’s report on Russia: its influence operations in this country and its attempts to manipulate elections and referendums. You should know that the committee is the only public body outside government that has access to the country’s secret intelligence. It is the best independent means voters have of learning about threats to national security.

Pause and consider what we have become. The government will not tell the public how a hostile foreign power interferes with the democratic process. Threats to British democracy have become official secrets. Perhaps Boris Johnson worried about offending Donald Trump. Maybe the report included evidence from the same sources which revealed Russia’s interest in the president’s election campaign, and his fondness for Vladimir Putin. If this is true, the government was censoring Parliament on behalf of not one but two foreign powers.

But the prime reason for suppression is Brexit. Boris Johnson and the Conservative party are committed to leaving the EU “do or die”. They dare not produce evidence that the vote to leave may have been manipulated, however slightly. Nor until recent weeks was the Labour opposition willing to oppose.

My colleague and friend Carole Cadwalladr exposed, with the help of the whistle-blower Christopher Wylie, how Facebook had allowed the consultancy firm Cambridge Analytica to harvest the data of tens of millions of users and sell it to politicians on the make. She published emails from Arron Banks showing how he and the Leave.EU campaign team met Russian embassy officials as many as 11 times in the run-up to the 2016 referendum. Despite repeated meetings with Corbyn’s front bench, she could not persuade Labour to take an interest. Tony Blair’s former spin doctor Alastair Campbell watched on in amazement. Can you imagine, he said to me, what Robin Cook and the Labour politicians of a previous generation would have done with this material? The communist clique around Jeremy Corbyn has abandoned Marxist-Leninists for oligarchs, and paid court to Putin at Black Sea resorts. It had no wish to raise hard questions either.

That failure to act would be bad enough. But since 2016, other guardians of the British state have been bellowing warnings. Reports by the Committee on Standards in Public Life, the Commons Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee inquiry into fake news, and the Commons Foreign Affairs Committee had different concerns. But they shared a central theme. In the words of Damian Collins, the chairman of the fake news inquiry: “Democracy is at risk from the malicious and relentless targeting of citizens with disinformation and personalised ‘dark adverts’ from unidentifiable sources, delivered through the major social media platforms we use every day.”

Collins is anything but a Remoaner. He is a Conservative MP who nominated Boris Johnson for the leadership of his party. But he is also a democrat, and to apply a much abused word correctly for once, a patriot, who wishes to defend the democratic system.

His committee wanted the government to establish an independent investigation into “foreign influence, disinformation, funding, voter manipulation and the sharing of data” in the 2014 Scottish independence referendum, the 2016 EU referendum and the 2017 general election. The government did nothing. The Committee on Standards in Public Life and the Electoral Commission wanted imprints on online advertising so we could know who was behind it. Again, nothing was done. A responsible government would have a protocol for warning the public when major interference in an election is detected. Britain does not have such a government, or anything resembling one.

The Elizabethan courtier Sir John Harington wrote: “Treason doth never prosper: what’s the reason? Why, if it prosper, none dare call it treason.” Four centuries on, his cynical argument still holds. Both major political parties intend to carry on exploiting the new avenues for propaganda opened up by digital technology. So determined are they to use them, the Committee on Standards in Public Life could not even persuade the Labour and the Conservative parties to agree to abide by a code of conduct to stop members threatening and abusing each other. How can a democracy protect itself from subversion when its democratically elected leaders see no partisan benefit in protecting it? When, indeed, they look on the opportunities for political gain the abuse of the system offers and greet them with wolfish grins?

The Conservatives are very keen on plans to compel voters to produce photo identification before casting their ballots. They believe that alleged electoral fraud by voters of south Asian heritage benefits Labour. (Labour opposes it and talks with some justice about the evidence for fraud being slight.) The wider point, surely, is that when they think it is in their interests, politicians will move to protect the system from corruption. That they show no desire to move to tackle the propaganda explosion shows how little concern they have for the democratic interest.

I suspect they want the public to fall into fatalism. Russia, Facebook, and the web itself appear vast and uncontrollable forces. But Facebook has British offices and staff. If it broke British law, its senior management in California would be as accountable through the normal system of extradition treaties and international arrest warrants as any other alleged criminal. It is the absence of law that will lead Britain to an election whose result will inevitably be met with accusations of foul play.

Fatalism also ignores the fact that specific British citizens are performing specific services. Earlier this month the Commons Foreign Affairs Committee reported on Chinese interference at British universities, which appears to be coordinated by the Chinese embassy. University vice chancellors can be identified and held to account. So why are officials of the China-funded Confucius Institutes allowed to confiscate papers that mentioned Taiwan at an academic conference? Why do university authorities do nothing when dissidents are harassed? Universities want Chinese money. If they are prepared to sell out academic freedom to get it, then wider society must force them to change their ways.

I have sat in an English courtroom and seen expensive lawyers go along with a Russian sting operation against the heroic fund manager Bill Browder. Putin hates him because he organised international sanctions against criminals backed by his regime who defrauded the taxpayer and murdered the auditor, Sergei Magnitsky, who exposed them. I knew one of the solicitors suing Browder for libel on behalf of an ex-major in the Russian interior ministry. (Needless to add, the mysterious major never appeared in court, and when he lost, never paid tens of thousands of pounds he owed in costs.) My lawyer acquaintance’s impeccably liberal principles are not in doubt. But to everyone in the courtroom, apart from a fuming Browder, it seemed natural for Britain to open its legal system to an avowed enemy and use it to punish a Putin critic.

Why not? London is awash with Russian money. The private schools, the upmarket estate agents, the property developers, the luxury shops and the launderers in the City depend on it. So insouciant have they become, they do not feel the need to explain themselves. Last year the Commons Foreign Affairs Committee said “others should now judge” whether the City law firm Linklaters had become “so entwined in the corruption of the Kremlin and its supporters that they are no longer able to meet the standards expected of a UK-regulated law firm”. The firm said it was “surprised and concerned” at the criticism. But in behaviour that to me encapsulated the scorn of the City for the nation state, it had declined to appear before the committee, part of our supposedly sovereign Parliament. Linklaters now says: “We recognise that in this case we missed an opportunity.”

Tom Tugendhat, the committee’s chairman, and Labour’s Khalid Mahmood have proposed updating the Treason Act of 1351, which is still in force, even if it no longer prescribes the death penalty for all “who compassed or imagined” the death of the King. Tugendhat told me he would be happy to see the wealthy in court, even if they received no punishment, just so there could be a public shaming of those who betrayed their country. The dilemmas he raises are real. Although I would enjoy the spectacle of Mayfair estate agents and City lawyers in the dock more than I can say, I feel that the criminal law should punish specific crimes, not make gestures.

Do we want to be a country where government tells universities how to behave? Or the state denies legal redress to suspected Russian agents? Or censors the Web in “the national interest”? Do we indeed trust the state not to abuse its power and accuse legitimate critics of being traitors, saboteurs, and, to coin a phrase, enemies of the people? These questions are not easy to answer. The trouble with Britain is that they are not even being asked. They are being ducked for a reason Sir John Harington understood in the 1590s. When treason prospers, none dare call it out.

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Yet in 2019, as Britain faces the prospect of its first truly radical left-wing government, Conservatives are nowhere near frightened enough. If they were, they would defend the checks the British constitution and European law place on power. They may need these protections soon. But all they want to do tear them down.

Boris Johnson has become Jeremy Corbyn’s role model. He is providing the example and justification the far Left will need if it comes to power. All objections can be met with the retort: “The Tories did that, why can’t we?” In a reversal of history’s usual order, the counter-revolution is preceding the revolution.

In the last century, leftists spat insults at the “capitalist courts” when they ruled against trade unions. “Rank and file miners learned a bitter lesson from the end of a truncheon, that the law, the courts and the police are arms of the state for the defence of private property, that is, for the defence of the capitalist system,” runs an account of the defeat of the miners’ strike of 1984-85 published on the marxist.com website.

Democracy, from this point of view, is a sham. Judges do not dutifully interpret the law as laid down by Parliament. They are Tory politicians in wigs and ermine, who hide their bigotry behind the mask of judicial impartiality. Driven by their wealth and spite, they punished the miners because they feared the victory of the proletariat. Come the revolution it will be different. The people’s representatives will appoint people’s judges to sit in people’s courts.

Boris Johnson is a Conservative prime minister. He’s not a trashy columnist manufacturing rage to suit the confirmation biases of his readers any more. Despite the dignity of his office, and the precedent he was gifting the Left, he insisted the Supreme Court had no right to rule that his suspension of Parliament was an attack on the fundamentals of democracy. Where the Left once condemned “capitalist judges”, the Right now condemns “Remainer judges,” who in Johnson’s words intruded “onto an acutely sensitive political question” and raised “an argument that there should be some form of accountability”. Conservatives, who had fought for Brexit to uphold the sovereignty of Parliament and the supremacy of British law, talked of abolishing the Supreme Court for insisting that in British law Parliament was sovereign.

They did not care that Labour will go into the next election with an astonishingly ambitious programme, which has the desire to confiscate property at its heart.

Conservatives should have noticed Labour’s instinctive reaction to 72 people dying and 300 being made homeless in the Grenfell tower block fire of 2017 was to requisition property in the rich streets of West London that surrounded it. Emotionally it made sense, and not only to the far Left. Here were poor people, burnt out of their homes. In nearby Notting Hill, the world’s wealthy had bought properties as investments rather than homes, and left many of them empty. Everyone with a sense of natural justice felt as Labour did. That emotion has hardened into policy, and this year’s Labour conference called for the requisition of “unoccupied tower blocks in London”.

It is not only the sight of burnt-out buildings and homeless people slumped in doorways that inspires thoughts of confiscation. Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan changed the offer Conservatives made to the mass of the population. They did not strengthen the welfare state; indeed they limited its provisions. Instead, they promised their revitalised capitalism would allow the majority of the population to become richer. So successful were they that the liberal-left of the 1980s worried about “two thirds” societies. The top two-thirds enjoyed the benefits of affluence. Their wages rose every year. They were content with a new order that allowed them to own or aspire to own their own homes, and expect a better life for their children. The bottom third was an underclass, locked into poverty or near-poverty. Even if they voted, and many had given up on voting, there would never be an electoral majority in favour of improving their lives.

No one talks like that now or warns that a culture of contentment hides poverty. Wage growth between 2010 and 2020 will be the lowest it has been over any ten-year period in peacetime since the Napoleonic Wars. The Institute for Fiscal Studies believes that wages in 2022 won’t be any higher than they were before the financial crisis in 2007. Home ownership is either a deferred or an impossible dream for a cohort of young people that stretches far into the middle class. You cannot expect them to support a version of capitalism that won’t allow them to accumulate capital.

Looking at the flats bought as investment vehicles by Russian and Chinese speculators, and thinking the state should seize them, is the one form of anti-migrant loathing approved of on the liberal Left. Labour has yet to say whether it would issue mass compulsory purchase orders. But there is no doubt that its supporters would cheer their leaders if they did. They want visible wealth and privilege tackled. So much so that at the Labour conference they voted to abolish private schools and seize their assets.

Whether a Labour government would turn Eton into a comp is unclear (the shadow Chancellor John McDonnell seems to be edging away from the commitment). But no one should doubt that the party is as committed to destroying the country’s economic model as the Thatcherite Right of the 1980s was committed to destroying the post-war economic consensus. Labour favours rent controls on private landlords and giving  their tenants the right to buy. It favours workers’ co-operatives over shareholder capitalism, in part because workers are more productive when they have a stake in their firms, but mainly because it sticks by the traditional Left belief that shareholders are thieves who profit from the work of others. McDonnell wishes to create an “irreversible shift in wealth and power in favour of working people” by insisting all companies with more than 250 employees transfer a tenth of their shares into “inclusive ownership funds”. The pose of enabling worker ownership is a bit of a swindle. Employees would only be entitled to dividends on the stock worth up to a maximum £500. The surplus will go into social funds administered by the government. It looks like a tax or a partial tax. But the property of shareholders will be raided in any event.

Then there are the commitments to renationalise energy networks, water companies, Royal Mail and the rail operators. How much will it pay shareholders? McDonnell says as little as possible, at least in the case of the water companies. Parliament will decide the level of compensation, he said, citing the nationalisation of Northern Rock as a precedent, while forgetting that the bank was bust when it was nationalised in 2007 whereas the water companies are not.

As with housing, don’t think Labour wouldn’t have support. Few would shed tears for water companies that have loaded their companies, debt-free at the time of privatisation, with debt, in order to pump dividends to shareholders and lavish pay and perks on their senior managers. More generally people have always liked the promise of free stuff at someone else’s expense. Today, after the failure of Thatcherism to deliver truly broad prosperity, and 10 years after the moral and economic failure of the financial crisis, there are clear majorities in favour of renationalisation, redistribution and higher taxes. Labour wants to do all three, and has also made costly promises to students, pensioners, the disabled and the working poor. You can see why it would want to seize assets.

Article One of the Human Rights Act, which incorporated the European Convention on Human Rights into British law, states: “Every natural or legal person is entitled to the peaceful enjoyment of his possessions.” There are exemptions for taxes and fines. But if the state wants to seize property, the first question for judges to ask is whether it is offering adequate compensation.

Suppose a Labour government simply declares that judges are interfering in politics. Have we not been told by the right repeatedly since 2016 that the courts and Parliament have no right to question “the will of the people”? If a left-wing administration wanted to intimidate or pick off specific judges, they would find the path already mapped out for them. After the Court of Session in Edinburgh said the suspension of Parliament was “unlawful,” the right-wing press went through the Scottish judges’ backgrounds, noting ominously that one was the head of the “Franco-Scottish Society” and another was “a jazz lover”.

I could write the script for a left-wing campaign against the judiciary now. Judges are overwhelmingly white, male and middle- or upper-class. Public schools and Oxbridge loom large in their CVs. Conspiratorially minded Labour propagandists would begin by accusing them of failing to check their privilege and finding in favour of privileged interests. It is time, they would declare, for an “inclusive” and “diverse” judiciary that reflected modern Britain—and more importantly reflected the interests of a Labour government. Who could argue against that?

Conservatives have already said that judges are irredeemably politicised. They scoff at the idea judges are trained to leave their political views at the courtroom door. As for the protections of the Human Rights Act, no one has done more than Conservatives to disparage them. It is not just the courts. If a Labour government were to suspend Parliament, politicise the civil service, batter the BBC into submission, or exploit the Queen’s prerogative powers it would merely be following the Conservatives’ example. And if Labour’s opponents said it was taking a huge risk with the economy? Well, it might reply, Brexit does exactly that.

The objection to the above is that Conservatives have nothing to fear from Labour. They can abuse the constitution safe in the knowledge that the left will never have the chance to follow suit. Corbyn is the most unpopular leader of the opposition since records began. Johnson may not be widely liked, but he is following the example of Disraeli and Bismarck, not only by promising to help the working class but by relying on nationalism to win over working- and middle-class voters. It may work. Johnson could wrap himself in the Union flag and sweep through the marginal seats of the North and Midlands showering promises for more nurses and coppers as he goes.

That is the plan. But there is no certainty it will work. No one can guess how four-party politics will play out in a first-past-the-post electoral system. In the desperation brought upon them by the Brexit crisis Conservatives are playing with fire, while imagining that flames will never burn them. The “take back control” slogan relies on the impossible hope that Conservatives will always be in control. They won’t be and can’t be, and that thought should terrify them.

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A craven desire to uphold the hidden agendas of the neo-liberal elite or woke Left does not drive them, as journalism’s enemies claim. Nor are they noble campaigners inspired by dreams of telling truth to power or of writing the “first draft of history”. To hell with all that.

What motivates the best of them is encapsulated in a cry from Conleth Hill, playing the editor of the Observer in Official Secrets, the most realistic depiction of newspaper life I have seen on film since All the President’s Men.

“It’s a fucking good story.”

Fīat jūstitia ruat cælum runs the legal maxim—let justice come though the heavens fall. Journalists should be motivated by the desire to go for a good story whatever the consequences. It needn’t be a story that brings down a government or stops a war—although both have their attractions. Being the first to expose a wrongdoer, or simply to make as much trouble as possible for the pompous and the powerful, is enough. When the exceptions for needless invasions of privacy and unwarranted harassment of celebrities have been made, journalism at its best is driven by the determination to crack stories open.

The question that tests journalists, along with anyone who boasts of possessing an independent mind, is whether they can handle “the wrong kind of story”: the inconvenient truths that expose and threaten old friendships and political positions. News organisations that fail it display a contempt for their readers and for themselves.

Official Secrets opens in October. I would have wanted to see it even if it had been a slender work. It has a good cast—Keira Knightley, Matt Smith, Rhys Ifans as well as Hill—and it is set in my very own newspaper, the Observer, in the run-up to the Iraq War in 2003. Beyond these attractions, director Gavin Hood has made a serious film that takes arguments from the Iraq conflict and raises questions that are, if anything, more important today.

Hill plays Roger Alton, a part-infuriating, part-charming editor of the Observer from 1998 to 2007. Alton was probably too right-wing to run a liberal paper. Not that he would have accepted the old political labels had life in them at the turn of the millennium. (“Fuck, Nick, can’t you see that left and right don’t mean anything these days?”) Tony Blair was a prime minister made for him, although Alton preferred to adore him from a distance. Office legend had it that when the political editor told him he had arranged a meeting with Blair, Alton cried: “Fuck, I can’t meet the prime minister. I’m just a sub.” While waiting in Downing Street for his interview David Miliband walked by.

“So what changes do you plan to make to the paper?” Miliband asked.

“Bit more sex on the front page. More sport. That kind of thing.”

Easy to look down your nose and disapprove, and I certainly looked down mine when I was in his newsroom. But Alton had an argument. The late 1990s were a happier time when politics was so unthreatening it seemed not to matter. There was space for a bit more sex and a bit more sport. I only wish there was now.

Given the editor’s politics, or absence of politics, it was inevitable that Alton would go along with Blair’s willingness to ally with George W. Bush in the run-up to the second Iraq war.  Although I was entitled to disagree, I supported them too. Saddam Hussein was one of the worst dictators I had seen in my lifetime. As importantly, the worst elements of the Left had taken over the anti-war movement, and I knew they must be fought. (They have gone on to take over the Labour party and may yet take over the country. My thinking has not changed.)

The Observer was a serious newspaper and its staff felt no constraint about expressing every shade of opinion. More to the point, it was a newspaper, and what electrifies newspapers are stories. Katharine Gun provided one that went to the heart not just of Bush and Blair’s justification for war but of what it meant to be a serious journalist.

Keira Knightley plays Gun, a translator at Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), who thought her duty was to protect her country and uphold the rule of law. In January 2003, she and her colleagues at the spy centre in Cheltenham received a memo from Frank Koza, Chief of Staff (Regional Targets) at GCHQ’s counterpart in the US, the National Security Agency (NSA). “As you’ve likely heard by now, the Agency is mounting a surge particularly directed at the UN Security Council members . . . for insights as to how membership is reacting to the on-going debate Re: Iraq.” Koza wanted material that could put pressure on representatives of Angola, Pakistan, Cameroon, Chile, Bulgaria and Guinea to authorise the use of force, and make the war legal in the eyes of most international lawyers. He was hoping for “the whole gamut of information that could give US policymakers an edge in obtaining results favourable to US goals or to head off surprises”.

Gun was such an impressive figure because she understood the significance of what she had read at once. Knightley portrays her nervousness at breaking the Official Secrets Act. She trembles as she approaches a photocopier with the memo. But she knows what she has to do. The US and Britain were “trying really hard to legitimise an invasion, and they were willing to use this new intelligence to coerce and perhaps blackmail delegates, so they could tell the world they had achieved a consensus for war,” she told Marcia and Thomas Mitchell, the authors of The Spy Who Tried to Stop a War. American success at the UN would give war the appearance of legality, so Gun did something unconscionable to a spy who had accepted the taboos of GCHQ, and leaked to the press.

At least she tried to. Gun had no idea how to get the document to journalists. She passed the Koza memo to a peace activist. Her friend passed it to Yvonne Ridley, who had started out as a tabloid reporter, then been captured by the Taliban on assignment in Afghanistan. She converted to Islam on her release, and joined George Galloway and the blossoming alliance between the white far-Left and the Islamist religious Right in the anti-war movement. Ridley called Martin Bright, then the Observer’s Home Affairs editor, and presented him, and the paper, with a journalistic dilemma.

How could the Observer be sure the memo was authentic? Bright (Matt Smith) did not know the source. All he knew was that the document had come via Yvonne Ridley, not a reporter most journalists would stake their reputation on—and I say this as someone who in a sentimental moment once organised a petition to stop her being chucked out of the Observer.

The one checkable fact was whether a Frank Koza worked for the NSA. Proof of his existence was proof that the document was genuine. Bright asks the paper’s Washington correspondent, Ed Vulliamy, for help. Vulliamy finds a way to confirm that the mysterious Mr Koza works for the NSA. The foreign editor, Peter Beaumont, pumps his MI6 sources: in their wariness about the memo, he finds a kind of confirmation. Bright feels vindicated when the head of the D-Notice committee, who could have issued a UK reporting ban, says his job was to protect national security, not save the Blair and Bush administrations from political embarrassment.

Gavin Hood does not duck the arguments in the Observer office. For this was not a story that suited the prejudices of its senior staff. Kamal Ahmed, the political editor in 2003, was a novice. He had been promoted too quickly, and sent to cover politics when he had no experience of Westminster and few contacts in Parliament. Downing Street was his best source of news, and an exposé could alienate No 10. If Ahmed had an authority problem, it was that he was too respectful of it. (Ahmed says of this period: “I wasn’t involved in this story in the way portrayed, and the film’s characterisation of my role and opinions about the story are untrue, as the film-makers know.”)

Alton admires Blair, and has authority problems of his own. Ahmed raises doubts. Martin Bright and Peter Beaumont argue for the story. What should Alton do? He should remember what journalists are for and authorise publication for the best reason imaginable: “It’s a fucking good story.”

Sounds easy when I put it like that. Tell the truth whatever the consequences. Publish and be damned. Hunt, corner, kill. All those macho slogans. But if the old nostrums of journalism are true, how can we be living in the age of trolls, when dictators and alt-fascists and alt-Stalinists can mobilise their supporters against honest reporters and get away with damning investigative journalism as fake news? How can Trump and Putin reign? To measure our decay, consider that the Blair government cared about the charge it had lied to the public and rejected it with fury. Politicians in the mould of Trump, Johnson and Corbyn feel no shame if their deceits are exposed. They care only that their supporters believe them as they dismiss truth as lies.

Official Secrets captures journalism in the last days of an old world when the mainstream media’s dominance was just about in place. A critical mass of public service broadcasters, serious newspapers and magazines, MPs, academics and professional bodies maintained the conventions of public accountability, and the morality that sustained them. They are now everywhere in retreat, and I accept that in a small way they were the authors of their own downfall.

Old serious journalism rested on foundations the demagogues of the 2010s have found easy to subvert.

No one believes in telling the truth whatever the consequences. Marriage, love, friendship, political alliances or any kind of communal bond would be impossible if you exposed every fault in the people around you. The Blair government might have thought the Observer had made a commitment to support the overthrow of the Iraqi regime. GCHQ’s behaviour did not alter the facts of Saddam’s tyranny. The genocidal slaughter of the Kurds, the poison gas, the torture chambers, the blood-soaked personality cult had all still happened, and would continue to have happened whatever British spies did.

Martin Bright was torn about the 2003 war, while Peter Beaumont and Ed Vulliamy were against it. Yet if they had found a story that justified Bush and Blair’s actions, their political beliefs would not have mattered and they would have pursued it. To a journalist, their behaviour seems normal. To outsiders it can seem like the privilege of a vulture, which feeds on any meat it can find.

Martin Bright had no idea who Katharine Gun was. Even so, he alerted lawyers specialising in civil liberties that there must be a GCHQ worker out there in urgent need of their help. Bright recognised that the state would go for the source. In theory, the Observer was open to a prosecution under the Official Secrets Act (an authoritarian law that allows no appeal to the public interest); in practice, journalists were privileged. Bright said later of the coercive institutions of the British state: “They’re cowards. They preferred to take on the little guy—in this case, little woman—rather than us big guys.”

Imagine that Gun had talked to the most scrupulous journalist on earth before deciding whether to go public. He or she would have done everything they could to protect her, as Bright did. But they would never have taken their duty of care to its logical extreme. They would never have told Gun that her memo would not stop the war, and that all things considered it might be best for her and her family if she forgot about taking on the government. Journalists don’t kill a good story.

As it turned out, Gun endured the silky vindictiveness of the British state, which pretends to be civilised as it slips the knife into the gut. Gun confessed almost as soon as the Observer ran the story—she was a hopeless liar and in any case she didn’t want innocent colleagues to be blamed. She was arrested and bailed but the appearance of due process didn’t last. The immigration authorities detained her Kurdish husband, Yasar, and almost succeeded in deporting him. It felt like a punishment for embarrassing the government. The director of public prosecutions made her wait until the first day of her trial at the Old Bailey before dropping the case. Gun’s lawyers had found a way through the apparently impregnable defences of the Official Secrets Act: if at the time of the leak the attorney general was advising Blair that war would be illegal without a UN resolution, Gun could argue that she had acted out of “necessity” to prevent an imminent loss of life in an unlawful combat. Rather than suffer the embarrassment of seeing the attorney general’s advice scrutinised in a public court, the government resolved not to proceed with the prosecution. But it waited until the last minute to let Gun know.

The journalists did not suffer, and you could say that shows today’s Trumpian critics have a case: journalists were part of an  “elite”. They may have been, once. But contemporary journalists will find the charge ridiculous. Revenues for news organisations have collapsed. The internet has destroyed the media’s finances and its quasi monopoly on news production, leaving reporters to compete as best they can with tens of millions of online voices. At the time of the second Iraq war, young reporters could expect to buy a home and to receive a reasonable pension. Today, most can’t. In terms of income and job prospects, journalists’ lives are closer to the lives of the mass of their readers than at any time in the last 100 years. They have never been less of an “elite”.

Realism is not the demagogue’s concern, however. Denigration of media elitism has grown in inverse proportion to journalism’s decline. In fact, I suspect it is the result of journalism’s decline. Like any bully, politicians can smell weakness. When they have Twitter and Facebook to mobilise their supporters, they can safely challenge the efforts of “elitist” broadcasters and print journalists to make them accountable.

They ask: “What are these ‘stories’ journalists say they must publish whatever the consequences?” Fake news from contaminated sources, comes the answer.

Arguments about why one subject is a “story” but another is not have always occurred and have always been worth having. They are almost irrelevant today because they have been taken over by political thugs and exploited to buttress their power. A second inverse proposition applies. The truer a story is, the more likely it is to be reviled as a fabrication or an irrelevant distraction from what really matters. It is axiomatic on the Corbyn left that the anti-semitism their leader and his followers have spent years wallowing in isn’t real racism but a fantasy created by the Israeli government and the British right. Equally, it is axiomatic on the Johnsonian right that warnings of Brexit producing a national humiliation are the fabrications of an anti-democratic ruling class that has been corrupted by the European Union.

Political trolling, properly defined, is not simply the propagation of lies. No one, not even Donald Trump, wants or needs to lie all the time. Rather, it is the marshalling of sympathisers in old news organisations—partisan newspapers and unregulated broadcasters—and online to lie about, minimise or distract attention from politically dangerous truths. Trolling, when it has political significance, isn’t incontinent abuse but targeted propaganda.

The Blair government appeared the master of media manipulation. It lied and covered up like all governments. But it never occurred to its officials that they could run a campaign saying that the truths told about the Anglo-American attempt to subvert the United Nations were fake news, or that anyone would believe it if it did.

Sixteen years on, everything has changed. Roger Alton now works for the Daily Mail, and I am sure he is happy there. The BBC bureaucracy made Kamal Ahmed its Head of News. Ed Vulliamy has retired. Peter Beaumont is now a foreign correspondent on the Guardian. Martin Bright, one of the best journalists I have known, moved briefly to the New Statesman. That he has never had another full-time job in journalism since tells you as much about the profession’s decline as any number of profit and loss statements. He now runs a charity that finds jobs in the arts for underprivileged young people. Katharine Gun lives in Erdogan’s Turkey. It doesn’t strike me as an ideal home for a liberal Englishwoman or her Kurdish husband, but then Britain was not a safe space for them either.

The best journalists debate the worth of their work at a time when exposure and disgrace no longer bar politicians from office. They ask how they can fulfil a democratic duty when the powerful no longer care if they are caught in a lie and their supporters want to be lied to.

Timid and boring though it may seem, I can see no alternative to carrying on as before. The enormous provocation of Trump, Corbyn, Brexit and Johnson is leading many to become so committed to opposition that they will never examine the faults on their own side. They worry about the consequences and the heavens falling.

Their tactics can never work, morally or practically. Thinking about consequences risks turning a journalist into a politician. You ask yourself whether your writing helps or hinders a cause instead of worrying about the truth and importance of your research and strength of your argument. Take this road and you quickly descend into self-censorship and deceit. Travel further and you find yourself no better than the garbage politicians and their entourages of lackeys who call themselves “outriders”.

Meanwhile, I can cite you exhaustive studies, which prove that honest factual reporting remains the most effective journalistic technique. It doesn’t convince fanatics cocooned in their bubbles, of course, but then it  never did, and I have yet to see evidence that the readers of the 2010s include significantly more unreachable fanatics than readers from the past. Even if I am wrong, you cannot reach them without becoming them. Serious journalism, like anti-extremist politics in general, has to distinguish between the hardcore, who can never be persuaded, and the rest who are open to argument.

All you can do is produce the best work you can and leave it to others to determine what happens next. Despite the moral ambiguities about the role of the journalist and the earnest arguments about what we should say and how we should say it, despite the concerns about the explosion of propaganda the internet has enabled and the undoubted feebleness of the response of traditional reporting, the old advice remains the best: just tell the fucking story.

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The Republican supporters of Trump control a superpower, and their hatreds are the most significant. On a psychological level, Trump’s dominance of conservative America raises questions about how the politically committed delude themselves. The Trump movement includes the majority of white Protestant evangelicals, who once dismissed left-wing attempts to blame the ills of society on broad social and economic causes. They emphasised the importance of having the strength of character to stick to the Bible’s teaching. Now they support a character who is a liar, lecher, groper and what their ancestors would called a whoremonger, given his record of buying sex from porn stars. Conservatives once believed in fiscal as well as personal responsibility. Now they support a president whose tax cuts for the people who need them least is increasing the budget deficit. They once believed in free trade. Now they support a president who uses tariffs as a foreign policy weapon. They once believed in the rule of law and the US constitution. Now they cheer a demagogue who gets his mobs to cry “lock her up” and rejects congressional scrutiny.

The innocent might believe that the president’s incessant lying and attacks on freedom of the press would trouble conservative intellectuals more than any other fault. The defence of basic standards of truthfulness is meant to be the intellectual’s prime concern. A cursory knowledge of  20th-century history would tell them that intellectuals can be the most abject power-worshippers of all. The record of the 21st is looking no better, if Victor Davis Hanson’s recently-published book The Case for Trump is a guide. Hanson, a former classics professor and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, displays two evils which are everywhere in the writing of the authoritarian Right and Left. The book’s main theme is a mawkish attempt to paint Trump as a tragic victim of respectable society’s hypocrisy. Trump is the guy who gets the job done and expects no thanks for it. All his faults, and by extension all his followers’ betrayals of conservative principle, are excused because Trump has revived the US economy, taken on China and pulled out of climate change accords. You can doubt whether Hanson’s implicit rejection of man-made global warming is evidence-based, or shake your head at his gormless belief that trade wars and debt-driven boosts to the economy in the boom years of a cycle can ever end well. But I found the lachrymose appeal to victimhood more revealing than the politics and economics. They would have conservatives labelled snowflakes in other circumstances.

Hanson variously compares the draft-dodging Trump, who never put himself in harm’s way, to Dirty Harry, Ajax, Shane and Patton: men of action who do the brutal but necessary work and are not over-pernickety about the methods they use. Like Trump, they can’t help but fight. Hanson quotes Shane’s line when he finds he has to turn into a gunfighter once again to save the farmers he has befriended: “It’s a brand, a brand that sticks. There’s no going back.” Where I see Shane as a quiet man in the classic Western mode, Hanson sees a forerunner of the liar and braggart and know-nothing ignoramus who sits in the White House. Like Shane, Trump himself will one day ride off into the wilderness because polite society will want nothing to do with his rough ways when the battle is won.

Trump’s rejection by the country he is saving is assured, Hanson concludes. The double-dealing beneficiaries of his achievement will either shun him when he is “out of office and no longer useful” or be so embarrassed by his bitter but necessary medicine they will limit him to a single term. You wouldn’t be surprised if Hanson burst into tears and repeated Kipling’s lines:

For it’s Tommy this,  an’ Tommy that,  an’ “Chuck him out, the brute!”
But it’s “Saviour of  ’is country” when the guns begin to shoot.

The Case for Trump is such a good example of modern propaganda because its appeal to victimhood is matched by a contempt for heretics who refuse to applaud the brute.

Hanson cannot leave the conservative critics of the once-powerful Never Trump movement alone. They are “obdurate”, “irrelevant” and “orphaned from the Republican Party”. At one moment, they are priggish virgins who show their unworldliness by being shocked by Trump’s “invective and earthiness”. Man up, he tells them, and get real. Remember Eisenhower’s affairs, and Kennedy’s and Clinton’s sexual exploitation of women before you start complaining about Trump’s pussy-grabbing. At the next, he transforms them from frigid prudes into decadent metropolitan sophisticates, who display an “elite contempt” for “poor white folks”.

The obsession seems all the stranger because the Never Trump movement barely exists. It is indeed orphaned from the Republican Party. When I asked conservative journalists who had no time for Trump from the Washington, DC-based magazine The American Interest how it was faring, they looked faintly embarrassed. To speak of a “Never Trump movement” was a bit of stretch, they said. All that remained was a loose collection of writers, academics and retired officials who could speak out without fear of losing their jobs.

In 2016, the grandees of the Republican Party opposed Trump. Now they have either gone over to his side or learned to bite their tongues. The old British Labour Party has shown more spirit. Dozens of moderate Labour politicians have risked their careers by fighting the far Left. Yet the British Left can be reasonably compared with the US Right. Hardly any leftist or far-leftist dares call for Corbyn to go. Even that level of subservience is not good enough for his supporters. Paul Mason, a Marxist commentator, was treated as a traitor when he said Corbyn’s communist aides must go. He didn’t dare say a word against Corbyn. It was enough that he had criticised his team’s belief that Brexit could lead to socialism for the dogs to start howling. Corbyn’s supporters accused him of organising a “coup”, as if arguments in a democracy were the equivalents of tanks in the streets and men in combat fatigues seizing control of the TV stations. Pro-European critics from the Left were seeking to “undermine Jeremy Corbyn and prevent the election of a truly socialist Labour government”, the leader’s allies declared—even though not one of the critics had found the political courage to take Corbyn on directly.

Leadership cults and the power-worship that attends them are as strong in Britain as in America. And yet, despite their dominance, the existence of a handful of heretics disturbs the sleep of strongmen’s courtiers.

I could go on. The attacks in the right-wing press on the tiny group of Conservative politicians who are still prepared to put the interests of the British economy before a hard Brexit again appear grotesquely lopsided. The argument for Europe has been lost in the Conservative Party and wider Right. Why do the victors feel the need to hunt down every survivor from a defeated army?

Like a medieval inquisitor reading a list of the damned from the pulpit, Hanson stops his narrative to name each one of his sinners: Max Boot, David Frum, David Brooks, Mona Charen, Eliot Cohen, Robert Kagan, Jennifer Rubin, George Will and Bret Stephens. Why, given that no rival conservative has a hope of winning the 2020 Republican nomination and few Republican politicians can hope to prosper if they oppose him, do his supporters waste their time by even caring about what marginal writers say?

The power of heretics lies in their refusal to be infidels. They do not abandon one religion and swear loyalty to another. The British Left knows what to say about writers in the Melanie Phillips mould who leave their former friends to become conservatives. They denounce them, but only so they can warn others of the punishment that would await them if they thought of taking the same path. British leftists always said their opponents were closet Tories. For over a decade, the US Right has denounced its rivals as “Republicans in name only”. Nothing would give them greater pleasure than their targets justifying the insult by abandoning conservatism. They could sleep easy then, safe in the knowledge that their enemies had permanently disqualified themselves from the arguments on the Right.

Heretics never leave them in peace. They nag away at their betrayals of principle, and remind our generation’s fanatics of what they once were. As with the medieval Church, they inspire the fear that they could lead the faithful away. They know how to talk to believers and to appeal to their instincts and prejudices. However small in number, they are far more dangerous than avowed enemies. The Catholic Church has nothing against the heresy of people who hold erroneous doctrines because they were not brought up in the Catholic faith. They commit no sin because they know no better. Excommunication is a punishment for insiders: heretics baptised into the Church yet showing “the wilful and persistent adherence to an error in matters of faith”.

What applies in religion applies in politics. American liberals have produced many brilliant and scathing assessments of the Trump presidency. But they have no instinctive feel for conservatism. They cannot speak with the same conviction to conservatives as a writer who understands the Right because he is a part of it. Leaving all other considerations to one side, liberals would attack any Republican president as a matter of course. They have no answer to the greatest cynical question of all: “Well, you would say that wouldn’t you?” Heretics have an answer. They say it because they mean it.

When I spoke to David Frum, he succinctly explained the continuing obsession with the small band of Never-Trumpers. Their heresy rankled because they were “a moral, not a political movement”. Hanson boasts that once-critical conservatives have fallen into line. He should not celebrate their surrender too enthusiastically for it is a capitulation moralists can damn with ease. You cannot doubt the scale of the rout. In February 2016 the right-wing magazine National Review ran a special “Conservatives Against Trump” issue. Not all the writers’ warnings   have stood up. One fretted that Trump was a closet liberal who supported abortion, a fear the president’s judicial appointments have squashed. But most of their predictions stand the test of time as it was pathetically easy to see in 2016 what Trump was and to predict what he would become in office. One contributor warned that Trump’s nativism and fondness for one-man rule offended the best of the American tradition. Another feared “runaway executive power”. A third said, “He doesn’t know the constitution, history, law, political philosophy, nuclear strategy, diplomacy, defence, economics beyond real estate, or even, despite his low-level-mafioso comportment, how ordinary people live.” The conservative editor William Kristol delivered the best line: “Isn’t Trumpism a two-bit Caesarism of a kind that American conservatives have always disdained?”

Indeed it is, but conservatives no longer disdain it. Half of the National Review writers made their peace with Trump and one, Reince Priebus, went on to be his chief of staff. Money mattered. You could not get a job on a right-wing think-tank or a contract with Fox News if you spoke out of turn. In his memoir The Corrosion of Conservatism: Why I Left the Right, Max Boot, one of the intellectuals on Hanson’s heretic list, recounts how the head of a conservative think-tank told him that he agreed with Boot’s criticisms. Like him, he regretted he had not made a stand against the extremism on the Right before it was too late. He would not say so publicly, however, for fear of offending his board of directors. In Britain, the conformism is nowhere near as bad. Right-wing papers employ reporters who delineate the delusions of Brexit. You can oppose Corbyn and work in the left-wing press. We should not be too smug, however. Conservative opponents of Brexit aren’t often found on the opinion pages of the Tory press, while social democrat opponents of Corbyn shouldn’t apply for jobs in the modern Labour Party or many of the trade unions.

Money isn’t everything. It can make dissidents sound noble and heretics sound prophetic. Most people believe they cannot match their purity, because they fear the political costs of speaking out. An anti-Trump conservative is not a liberal any more than a social democratic opponent of the modern Left is a Tory. Yet, their former friends note, the dissident Republican’s arguments delight Democrats, and the Corbyn critic pleases conservatives. Most dangerously, they speak for swing voters. In the worlds they have either left or are trying to reform, heretics can be insignificant non-people. But if partisan loyalists stand back and look at the suburban Republican women who are voting Democrat for the first time or the millions of centre-Left British voters who are leaving Labour, they have every right to see them as formidably dangerous figures.

Writers and intellectuals face an apparent dilemma, which I’ve seen cripple many, The people most likely to publish a Boot or a Frum will be liberal editors. A large proportion of their audience will be liberal readers. I spent several years worrying that by some process of osmosis I would become more right-wing when I was published by right-wing newspapers. In the end, I concluded I should stop being so self-obsessed and care only about what I wrote. I would tell any heretic of Right or Left to worry about what you say, not where you say it. This is an easy sentiment to utter, but a hard one to follow in a time of polarisation which forces people to place bets they thought they would never have to make.

Modern British leftists must believe they can get the renationalisation of the utilities and an end to the miserly treatment of the public services without risking the corruption of public life—that the paranoia and prejudice that so mark their party’s leaders won’t, when it comes down to it, affect how a Labour government will rule. Likewise, they have to dismiss as a side issue their leaders’ history of support for secular tyrannies and Sunni and Shia Islamist theocracies, and their fellow-travelling with Britain’s Leninist parties. Even though Corbyn and the men and women around him supported tyranny abroad, they can be trusted with democracy at home. Few put it so starkly. On the contrary, they denounce heretical left-wingers for peddling “smears” and promoting “Tory lies”. But their anger is no more than a gambler’s bluster. They have placed a bet that anti-Semitism is a price worth paying for the renationalisation of the rail network; that support for the Russian and Iranian regimes is as nothing when set against the abolition of tuition fees; and that some mysterious alchemy will allow a Labour government to support Brexit while still finding money for the welfare state.

I accept there is a section of Labour support that delights in the Jew-baiting, and shares the leadership’s paranoid fantasies. But most are just betting that they can have socialism without tears.

Equally, there’s a section of Trump’s support that relishes his every vice. His lies are their lies. If their president can break the rules, they reason that they can too. Respectable Republicans have to dismiss Trump’s mendacity and vainglory as irrelevances or tragic flaws. In return for the tax cuts, immigration controls and assertions of national greatness, they have gambled that Trump’s viciousness is a sideshow that merely winds up liberals, and his misogyny and racism aren’t deeply-held prejudices but a necessary balance to the overexcited demands of the PC Left. That tax cuts are worth the trade wars, in other words. The trade wars won’t turn into shooting wars, and the appointment of judicial conservatives is worth the open contempt for the Bill of Rights. The chips are different but the gamble is the same.

Few stop to think that they never had to place these bets before. Between 1945 and 2016, American conservatives didn’t have to choose between free trade and tax cuts. They could have both. If you were a British leftist, you didn’t have to choose between social democracy and opposition to anti-Semitism. It was once as absurd to believe the Labour Party could be institutionally racist as it was to believe the Republican Party could be protectionist.

You do not need enormous reserves of imaginative sympathy to put yourself in the gamblers’ shoes. They hate and fear their opponents, and want to hear nothing that might give their enemies comfort. They dream of an America made great again or a socialist Britain and will block out the warnings that their leaders have taken them for fools, and are fools themselves. Sympathy should have its limits, however: to understand is not to pardon. Movements whose propagandists descend to the level of treating Donald Trump as a tragic hero or Jeremy Corbyn as a Christ figure persecuted by enemies who seek to smear him have given fair warning that they are not to be trusted.

I always listen to heretics. Their inside knowledge of the movements they have left means that it is worth taking the time to talk to them, as long as you remember they don’t have a sacred status. Minorities can be as wrong as majorities, and just because their former allies revile them does not mean they are right. But come now, look around—in our times heretics are the best guides we have through the mire.

The post The enduring value of the political heretic appeared first on Standpoint.

On the one hand, we have the liberation of people suffering from periodic bursts of mental illness or mild conditions. I don’t wish to diminish them or say anything other than that their success in seeing their right to be treated as independent adults upheld has been one of the great social advances of the age.

Yet the language of liberation provides cover for the oppression of men and women with severe learning disabilities. It has become too easy to justify the neglect and abuse of those who cannot make informed choices. New taboos stand in their way. Polite society now insists that it is insulting to deny their voice, when in truth they have no voice, and patronising to say that their families know their interests better than they do, when often their families are their best and only friends.

And so at a time when hymns in praise of “neurodiversity”are being sung, we have the English courts allowing a 23-year-old autistic woman to be in effect pimped out by the state. A senior judge put a stop to it last autumn, and explained that numerous men she barely knew so exploited her that she faced a high risk of sexual abuse, injury or death. You may think that shocking, but by the standards of the day the authorities were behaving well. The woman offered her phone number to “any number” of men. Care workers said she did not always recognise the men when they arrived at her house and “they sometimes don’t recognise her”. Yet who were care workers to constrain her independence with “marginalising narratives that essentialise autistic subjectivities”, as one American academic researcher, who worked, inevitably in a cultural studies department, described decisions that overrode the wishes of a person with a learning disability. What right did they have to treat her as if she were somehow less privileged than so-called “normal” people?

‘The language of liberation provides cover for the oppression of men and women with severe learning disabilities. It has been too easy to justify the neglect and abuse of those who cannot make informed choices’

And so, at a time when awareness of mental health has never been higher, we find a father saying that his 17-year-old daughter was “falling apart in front of my eyes” after being kept for two years in a 10ft by 12ft hospital “seclusion room”. We find schools cleansing children with learning disabilities from their rolls. They can be noisy. They can be violent. They are hard to teach, and they pull the school down the exam league tables. Better to chuck them out, and to take the bet that their parents don’t have the money to go to court, and that the rest of society will forget its syrupy sentiments and turn away.

Everywhere you look in the welfare state, you see a bodyguard of political correctness covering the retreat from public provision. As resources are cut, the language so mellows that it dissolves neglect, like soft soap dissolving dirt, until we lose the ability to see it at all.

The public sector and serious media outlets would not now dream of using clearly insulting descriptions like “psycho” or “schizo”, “lunatic” or “nutter” to describe those suffering from mental illness. But the prohibitions do not stop there. Talk of “the mentally ill” or use “handicapped”, and you are guilty of reductionism. You are allowing the condition to swamp the rest of the individual. Use apparently neutral descriptions such as “those suffering from mental illness”, or say that “she is a victim of a learning disability” and you are not only a reductionist but patronising to boot. Don’t say “victim”, “the afflicted”, “a sufferer”, say guidelines issued by the Time for a Change campaign group. Why ever not? Because “many people with mental health problems live full lives and many also recover”. So they do, but many do not, and how should we speak of them?

I can denounce the prissy linguistic policing. I can say that euphemism conceals cruelty. However, unconstrained criticism misses the mark. The fact that I and millions of others don’t know whether to say “sufferer”, “victim”, “mental illness”, “mental handicap”, “learning disability” or “learning difficulty” is a sign of a revolution that has brought emancipation to those able to enjoy it. At least some people with autism have emerged from a world where they were ignored or despised to speak for themselves in the modern equivalent of the black civil rights movement. The comparison is not glib. Autistic people are one of the largest minorities in the world. There are as many people on the spectrum in the US as Jews. Rather than seeing them as victims or sufferers, rather than letting their condition be a burden, or continuing the apparently hopeless search for a cure, the world is being made to understand it is better to accept people for who they are and help them lead valuable and—more importantly—happy lives.

Search the Web and you can find lists of famous men and women who were autistic. Their obsessiveness and  their ability to concentrate enabled them become scientists and intellectual pioneers. No autism and we would still be living in caves, runs a slogan that may not be wholly wrong. Turn on the news and you see 16-year-old Greta Thunberg explaining that being born on the autistic spectrum with Asperger’s syndrome was a “gift” that helped her face down leaders and force them to at least pretend to take man-made climate change seriously. “It makes me see things from outside the box,” she said. “I don’t easily fall for lies, I can see through things.”

Even today, one still stumbles on evangelical quacks boasting that they can cure homosexuality. Few believe they can, or that a cure would be worth having if they could. As with gay liberation, the growing acceptance of neurodiversity is proof that, despite it all, humanity can progress. Like anti-racist movements, or campaigns for gay or women’s equality, it takes people previously seen as inferior or otherwise unworthy of full citizenship, and it changes perceptions. The mentally handicapped are not handicapped at all, any more than the subject peoples of the European empires were inferior or women were disqualified by their nature from voting in elections or working in the professions.

Just as the straight white male has to accept his preconceptions are the problem, so the “normal” must accept that the chief handicap of the “handicapped” is the society in which they live. We want to “raise awareness amongst those who are not on the autistic spectrum so they do not see autistic people as requiring treatment, but as unique individuals,” say the organisers of Autism Pride Day. Proponents of “neurological pluralism” say we should accept difference and not seek to force people to change. Not that “we” can control or cure it. No one knows what causes autism, any more than they know what causes schizophrenia. This is why every variety of charlatan, from Freudians through to MMR conspiracy theorists, has claimed to be able to unlock autism’s secrets.

Leading the way for the Freudians was Melanie Klein, who decided in the last century on the basis of nothing but magical thinking that an autistic boy’s fascination with doors and door handles reflected his subconscious fascination with the penetration of a penis into his mother’s body. Leading the way for modern conspiracists is Andrew Wakefield, who, despite being struck off the medical register for misconduct and dishonesty, after fraudulently claiming a link between the MMR vaccine and autism, and despite opening the way for measles epidemics with his paranoid fantasies, has convincedmillions and, unsurprisingly, been received by Donald   Trump. Frauds have exploited fear and ignorance. I suspect they will continue to do so, because there is no sign of evidence-based science stopping them with easy answers.

Molecular biologists have identified about 1,000 candidate genes and hundreds of de novo mutations associated with autism. Even the most common genetic factors are found in less than one per cent of cases. A review published in Nature concluded: “Most individuals with autism are probably genetically quite unique . . . If you had 100 kids with autism, you could have 100 different genetic causes.” So many contributing causes and triggers have been discussed, that Steve Silberman, in his wonderfully humane history of autism, Neuro Tribes, quotes the exasperated mother of an autistic boy posting a blog with the headline: “This Just In . . . Being Alive Linked to Autism.”

Like so many others, Silberman recommends that autism, dyslexia and attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder be regarded as naturally-occurring cognitive varieties that have contributed to the evolution of humanity. Both these statements are true. But here’s the rub.

The inspiring tales of Greta Thunberg, and of geeks on the spectrum making fortunes in Silicon Valley, are the stories of the few, not the many. The few who, whatever difficulties they face, can study, work, live, love and marry. In a melancholy piece that deserved more attention that it received, Jonathan Mitchell described in the Spectator how he had never had a girlfriend, could barely write or perform simple tasks, often caused offence, and had been fired from 20 jobs before giving up work at the age of 51. Others, as he was the first to admit, were in a far worse state than he was. They soiled themselves. They smashed up their homes. They couldn’t speak.

To him and them, the happy cries that autism was a gift not an affliction were almost insults. In his key passage Mitchell said of the leaders of the neurodiversity movement:

[They] claim to be autistic and to speak for others on the spectrum. They use what a friend of mine called “the royal we”. They state “we” don’t want to be cured—as if we all feel the same way . . . But in fact they are very different from the majority of autistics. Many of them have no overt disability whatsoever. Some of them are lawyers who have graduated from the best law schools in the United States. Others are college professors. Many of them never went through special education, as I did. A good number of them are married and have children. No wonder they don’t feel they need treatment . . . Those more severely impacted by autism are often not in a position to lobby.

They need others to lobby for them. But the modern state is unwilling to let parents lobby on behalf of their voiceless children. Its unwillingness sits too comfortably with the state’s overriding urge to cut public provision for those who need it.

A test case being decided as we go to press shows how deep the rot has set. It has earned attention because Rosa Monckton and Dominic Lawson are among the parents asking for the Mental Capacity Act to be clarified. Their daughter Domenica, 24, has Down’s syndrome. In her case and many other cases, Rosa Monckton said: “When assessments of their capacity and best interests for life-changing decisions are made, parents are unaware, not invited or even asked not to be in the same room.” Another mother described to the court how her son is non-verbal and has sensory and eating problems. He lives at home after failing to manage in residential care. Yet, because he is over 18, she has no legal right to take decisions on his behalf. As telling to my mind is the third couple bringing the case, who highlight a problem people do not like to talk about.

‘The modern state is unwilling to let parents lobby on behalf of their voiceless children. Its unwillingness sits too comfortably with the state’s overriding urge to cut public provision for those who need it’

As successive scandals have shown, the abuse of patients is widespread in residential care. Less often discussed is that withdrawn, violent and angry people, without the social skills to read and react to the clues of “normal” life, can be hard to care for. More often than not, only their families will do it.

The couple’s 22-year-old son suffers from severe learning difficulties, epilepsy and anaphylaxis. He is non-verbal, hyperactive, has no concept of danger and little understanding of the world around him. “Despite these very serious challenges, he continues to be brave, charismatic, endlessly patient and a huge giver of joy.” To his parents, perhaps, but not always to others. For, the parents continued:

With apparently little regard to their own care plans, and dismissing all offers to help in every possible way, we feel that attempts are being made to reduce his support to the point where he will be at huge risk. The decision-makers don’t know our son at all, in many cases have never met him, and our 22 years of experience and accumulated knowledge seem to count for very little.

One should be wary of trying to find signs of wider intellectual and cultural movements in judicial decisions. The law governing mental incapacity is a mess, and judges must struggle to make sense of it. On the one hand, the law recognises that people with a learning disability are truly disabled. They need others to make decisions for them on everything from the medication they take, the food they eat and the homes they live in. The Mental Capacity Act gives the courts the power to make a parent or guardian a “deputy” who can take decisions on their behalf. Yet the judiciary rarely obliges. The parents’ lawyers, led by the indefatigable solicitors at Irwin Mitchell, say disabled people’s families “naturally have their care and wellbeing at heart. Where they are willing and able to do so, they should take first place in the care and upbringing, not only of children, but of those whose needs, because of disability, extend far into adulthood.”

They are seeking to have the law clarified because courts have been reluctant in the extreme to grant parents that right.If we were truly becoming a more compassionate country, there would have been a scandal long ago. The record shows that the Court of Protection received 4,724 applications for a personal welfare deputy between 2008 and 2017 and 1,092 applications for hybrid deputyship, whose responsibilities cover welfare and finance. In all, the courts appointed just 2,127 welfare deputies and 338 hybrid deputies—a success rate for a welfare deputyship of 45 per cent and 30 per cent respectively.

The courts have had to deal with a code of practice tagged on to the law. Its author states that parents can only apply for rights to speak for their adult children in “particularly difficult cases” and when disagreements “cannot be resolved in any other way”. This tight instruction has naturally influenced judges.But that can’t be all. Refusing to allow parents to protect their adult children chimes with the spirit of the age. Lawyers tell me that it is commonplace to hear the authorities dismiss parents as overprotective and a threat to their children’s independence.

It’s not good enough for parents to argue that adult disabled children are making bad decisions. For all parents—or, at any rate, most parents—think their children make bad decisions: they fall in love with the wrong person, drop out of college when they should stay on, hang out with the wrong friends. It doesn’t matter if the parents are right and their daughter would have been happier if she had not gone off with a worthless man or son with a worthless woman. Adulthood is the freedom to make mistakes. How dare the patronising and paternalistic say those whom the politically incorrect label as “the disabled” should not enjoy the same freedom?

Except they are not free. When parents are frozen out, decisions are taken by social workers and local authorities who have been on the receiving end of vast cuts in central government support since the Conservatives came to power in 2010. Their overriding aim has to be to save money. They may not want to do it, but they have no choice.

That the consequences of austerity can be hidden beneath the robes of political correctness is an inevitable consequence of how we talk about mental health. The very notion of spectrums is unscientific. An autistic spectrum that can put a devastatingly effective environmental activist in the same category as a young man who can’t speak and is locked in a cell for most of his days is so broad as to be medically useless. In truth, it is worse than useless. It is dangerous. It allows neglect to pose as liberation and meanness to pose as kindness. If society wants to help people, it must be specific. Throwing around broad labels, lumping together people who have next to nothing in common, is a recipe for suffering.

The cliché that “the road to hell is paved with good intentions” is usually taken as a warning against unintended consequences. They are certainly on display when the well-intentioned speak of severely ill people as if they were victims of prejudice just waiting for the moment when liberal society shakes itself and appreciates their mathematical genius or coding skills. But the Cistercian abbot Saint Bernard of Clairvaux (1090-1153), who supposedly came close to coining the phrase, can’t have meant that. Medieval theologians believed in good intentions, after all. His admirers reported him as saying “l’enfer est plein de bonnes volontés ou désirs”. (Hell is full of good intentions or wishes.) The faithful would have understood him to mean good intentions are not good enough: you must act on them.

If Britain wants to act on its good intentions, it will accept that parents in most cases must have a say in the treatment of children who are adults in age only, and that the under-funding of mental health services is a disgrace. Until it does, tens of thousands of our fellow citizens will continue to live in the neuro-diverse, politically-correct version of hell we have built for them.

The post The road to hell for the mentally incapacitated appeared first on Standpoint.

Look everywhere and you see an inquisitorial insistence on the sinfulness of anyone who disagrees with the far Right or Left. Competing interests or philosophies no longer explain a rival view of the world. Dissent is evidence of personal wickedness and corruption. It is the personal element that is the most striking feature of modern conspiratorial politics. The underlying assumption is that an opponent would agree with Brexit or Trump or Jeremy Corbyn if they were honest. Only their sinfulness can explain why they refuse to embrace the true faith; a sinfulness fed by corrupt monetary motives, or an irrational hatred of whites, Muslims or sovereign nation states.

Like secret policemen building a case for a show trial, today’s activists scour social media for anything that may be twisted to use against their enemies. If the evidence isn’t there, they make it up. In my world of the British liberal Left, the invention of smears has become standard practice. Corbyn’s propagandists routinely claim that J.K. Rowling opposes the Labour leadership because she is so consumed by greed that she will do anything to stop a left-wing government raising her taxes. Rowling, in fact, chooses to live in Scotland, which has higher tax rates than England. If greed consumed her, she would have moved to a tax haven years ago or merely shifted across the Tweed.

Meanwhile, the far Left claimed that the TV presenter Rachael Riley’s own tweets show the real reason she exposes left-wing anti-Semitism is not that there is endemic and institutionalised racism in the Labour Party. To entertain that thought marks you a heretic. No, she invents an imaginary racism because she is an Islamophobe, spreading lies about Labour to do down Muslims in general and Palestinians in particular. To reach this conclusion, her enemies counterfeited the evidence “proving” that she was motivated by religious prejudice. The forged tweets were so crude only a cultist could have entertained the thought that they might have been genuine. Needless to add, thousands did.

Rowling and Riley are famous, and I can see the opportunist case for lying about them as their political interventions reach a mass audience. A more telling sign of the totalitarian mentality of the populist Left is its determination to go after obscure figures who could not possibly swing public opinion against their cause. The ex-Labour councillor in the north-east, the Jewish anti-racist campaigner, random members of the public who take on Corbyn with throwaway lines, turn on their phones and find themselves the target of online pile-ons, organised by his media supporters, who are Labour Party apparatchiks in all but name. They can and do summon thousands of yapping dogs to snarl on the Left’s behalf against anyone who threatens them, however weakly.

The screaming accusations of the witchfinder, the insidiousness of the police informant, the duplicity of the forger, the hypocrisy of the propagandist, who prefers useful lies to difficult truths, and the sadism of the stalker who finds an erotic thrill in inflicting suffering on others, these are not accidental features of the populist Left. You cannot explain them away as a sideshow and say they are the regrettable but trivial by-products of the enthusiasm of its supporters. They are the Corbyn Left as surely as they are the Trump Right. Without a coherent policy programme, all it has is its determination to destroy enemies and keep the faithful marching in step by warning them that they will face the same treatment if they shift one centimetre from the party line.

We have not begun to think about what will happen to civil liberties in Britain if such people gain the power to direct the police and intelligence services.

We know, however, what happens when their right-wing counterparts in Hungary and the United States achieve control. Once again, the point worth noting is the personal nature of 21st-century conspiratorial politics. The Nazis and communists had broad conspiracy theories about Jewish and capitalist power. Today the conspiracy is made easier to comprehend by boiling it down to the level of the individual. We have developed the extremist politics of a celebrity culture which finds it easier to be persuaded of the evil in on one person than in broad and nebulous forces.

Hungary’s Viktor Orban and the global far-Right have elevated George Soros into a figure of supernatural power. Across the world, he is attacked tens of thousands of time a week. A Jew who survived the Holocaust in Hungary is recast as a Nazi. What his enemies call “the Soros
plot” unites anti-Semitism and Islamophobia, while Soros’s funding for dissident movements fighting Soviet  communism is turned into a satanic  conspiracy. He helped to remove the Iron Curtain so that the West would be open to immigrants, most notably Muslims, who would swamp the white world and abolish Christian culture. So appealing is the lie that Trump, Farage, and every other leader on the populist Right has found it useful to replace Marx’s spectre of communism haunting Europe with the spectre of Soros.

It’s easy to hear echoes of classic fascism in Orban’s denunciations of Soros as a Jewish financier seeking to dilute the racial purity of the Christian West for diabolic reasons. Echoes there certainly are, but it is worth noting the celebrity culture of the fascists’ descendants. The propaganda pouring out of the state-controlled Hungarian media and the websites and troll factories of the global Right is directed against one man rather than Jews in general. So useful has Orban found Soros that he framed the last Hungarian election in July 2017 as a fight between his Fidesz party and the financier, even though Soros was not standing, and had no party representing his views. Cities were plastered with billboards showing Soros’s face and the slogan “Don’t let George Soros have the last laugh!” The tactic worked. Despite presiding over a ramshackle state and a corrupt and failing economy, Orban secured victory. “It always helps rally the troops and rally a population, when the enemy has a face,” one of Orban’s tacticians explained.

Donald Trump’s politics are also intensely personal. Like the fat bully in the playground, he delights in finding the derogatory nickname that will incite his gang to turn on his chosen targets, whether Republican or Democrat. His lies are so incessant there is a danger of becoming used to them. Familiarity does not breed contempt but acceptance, and you have to step back, shake yourself, and remember that the President of the United States is a man without moral limits. It is worth noting something else: there is no sign that the Republican base is revolting against him. On the contrary, the more he lies, the more outrageous his smears, the more it believes and supports him.

“Populism” always struck me as a limp way to characterise today’s extremist movements. It captures none of the malevolence or mendacity; none of the threat to basic liberties when politicians say: we won an election, therefore we have the right to pack the judiciary with our supporters or censor the free press or fill the civil service with our placemen and women. To insist on restraints on our power is to challenge democracy itself.

There’s an academic justification for the term, however, that gives it a meaning that goes beyond blandness. On Left and Right, populists say they work for “the people”, who are the sole source of legitimacy, and in whose interest the traditional restraint of laws and rights can be cast aside. Whether “the people” be Trump’s white Americans, Orban’s Hungarians, the 17.4 million Britons who voted for Brexit, the “99 per cent” the modern Left invokes, or the Scots of nationalist propaganda, the people are always pure and good. They would be free to enjoy the fruits of their hard work were they not continually under threat from within and without: from quislings among their own number and foreign enemies. Whether populist movements are left- or right- wing doesn’t matter: the story is always the same.

As the Conservative MP Owen Patterson said of Brexit: “To the horror of the political establishment, the commercial establishment, the media establishment, the people have gone against the will of the establishment.” In other words, all the powerful forces in the country were united against “the people”. As is now commonplace, he was offering a total conspiracy theory. Institutions had merged into a malign monolith dedicated to frustrating the popular will. The solution can only be their destruction at the hands of the last uncontaminated institution left standing — the populist party.

The standard objections to demagogic conspiracism are true but too easy to make. To date, they have not succeeded in shaking the grip populist movements have over large sections of the population.

You can say that invoking “the people”, rather than individuals and groups with competing interests, has been, notoriously, the trick of totalitarian movements since the Jacobins. “Any institution which does not suppose the people’s good, and the magistrate corruptible, is evil,” said Robespierre in 1793,  anticipating today’s politics. The objection is true but will not persuade an extremist movement’s followers, who see nothing wrong with having their virtue exalted and every law or institution that stands in their way torn down.

You can add that the notion of “the people” is an absurdity. In the case of Brexit the electorate split 48:52. Donald Trump actually lost the popular vote in  the 2016 presidential election. Vast numbers have taken to the streets of Budapest to protest against the corruption of the Orban regime and its determination to increase the burdens on Hungarian workers. Meanwhile, the Western Left’s claims to represent “the 99 per cent” are belied by its poll ratings and electoral performance. And so on.

All true, again. But no one engaged in populist politics is remotely perturbed by these objections. “The people” is not a concept that encompasses dissenters, and the politicians who wield it do not want it to. They want, indeed they crave, traitors to denounce and quislings to expose as the behaviour of Orban, Trump and Corbyn reveals. How else to unite their followers behind them, and show that, without their leadership, the people will be lost. They are fighting culture wars, and you can’t have a war without an enemy. To take an example from the Left rather than the Right, here is a speech Jeremy Corbyn delivered to the Fabian Society in 2017. He sounded like a machine-gun spitting bullets as he described the enemy within:

The people who run Britain have been taking our country for a ride. They’ve stitched up our political system to protect the powerful. Right now, they’ve rigged the rules to suit themselves . . . Power, wealth and opportunity lies in the hands of the privileged few, not the many . . . They’ve carried on fixing the system for an elite few at the top. It is not enough to bring back powers from faceless bureaucrats in Brussels when the rules are rigged for a moneyed class, defended to the hilt by Downing Street . . . As well as taking on those who profit from this rigged system we also need to take power away from Downing Street and hand it to every city street, town avenue and country lane across the country.

On and on he went as he hammered home his essential point that the cards were marked and the game was fixed by cheats who live among us. Without them, he would be bereft, and so would be his supporters, who need a clear enemy to hate. In identical language, Nigel Farage declared this year, “The Westminster elite are in the process of betraying the British people over Brexit. All of us who want Britain to be a great country once again accept that we must be prepared to stand up for what we believe in and fight for our independence.” Once again, the people are defined against their enemies, and the favoured mode of operation of the enemies is the conspiracy.

On the Left and Trumpian Right, the conspiracy goes far beyond politics. The economy and by extension the whole of
society is a giant swindle run for the benefit of thieves. The notion of “disaster capitalism” popularised by Naomi Klein in the last decade could not be more explicit. The theory held that individual capitalists did not just profit from natural disasters or conflicts by moving in to provide the services, armaments or relief but provoked disaster so they could conspire to rig the system before the shell-shocked people realised what was being done to them.

To say an economy is rigged is not the same as saying that Amazon and Facebook have monopoly power and should be broken up, or that the tax system treats the wealthy too leniently, or that the City has allowed London to become a vast laundromat for dirty money. These are specific vices with specific solutions. Nor is it an analysis of a real class system that concludes with the recommendation that more wealth needs to transferred from the top to the bottom, or that the lower middle class needs more help, or that we are providing too many benefits to pensioners and not enough to parents and the young. In the place of the mess of everyday life and the confusion of interests is a total explanation of the world that subsumes the real economy and abolishes class and every other interest.

Left-wing populism strips society down until just two groups remain standing: the one per cent and the rest — the 99 per cent who are tricked and oppressed by a handful of rich people. The Right uses the same argument but with different language. It has “the elite” on one side and “the people” on the other. The effect is the same and so is the absurdity. To posit a split between nearly everyone and a cabal is ludicrous even as sloganising. But at the individual level, notice how reassuring it is. The public-school communist working for Corbyn or the retired university lecturer on a gold-plated pension trying to deselect a Labour MP can cast themselves as members of the 99 per cent. Despite all their privileges, they can pose as victims of oppression because are not members of the super-rich. Likewise, the Old Etonian can think himself at one with the masses as he rails against the pro-European conspiracy.

We live in a world where everyone condemns the elite, but no one admits to belonging to it; where everyone plays the underdog, especially when they’ve won. Both major parties in Britain support Brexit. Trump is the US President, and for the first two years of his administration his Republicans controlled Congress. Corbyn dominates Labour and no one can stop his supporters turning it from a social democratic party to a post-communist one. Winners keep winning by behaving like losers and extending their conspiracy theories to cover every aspect of society.

In the first academic study of Corbynism — Corbynism: A Critical Approach (Emerald Pubishing, 2018) — Matt Bolton and Frederick Harry Pitts make the essential point that, however unconsciously, the unthinking faction in the modern Left has inherited Karl Marx’s theory that the work which goes into a commodity determines its value. The workers, however, do not receive the profits of their labour as the owner pays them a wage and then takes the rest. As an economic explanation, the Labour theory of value falls because it fails to take notice of how fashions, shifting demands and competition from more efficient rivals with better products determine value. The desolation felt by many left behind by modern Western societies is explained by the fact that redundant industrial workers cannot blame wicked employers for a global shift in manufacturing eastward. Their employers did not close their companies because of greed. In their own way, they were equally trapped by the global economy and would have kept their firms in business if they could have done. Capitalism is a tragedy not a melodrama.

But as a conspiratorial explanation, the labour theory of value is hard to beat. Capitalists steal the labour of others. They are personally sinful and the populist Left must intervene to stop them sinning and to punish their wickedness.Just as Trump sees trade as a zero-sum game and wants mercantilist protectionism, so left-wing protectionists believe they can put the economy behind walls and stop the theft from the workers: a belief, which, incidentally, explains Corbyn’s opposition to the EU.

The battle against populism necessarily involves fighting it on its own ground. In unlucky Britain, which has to contend simultaneously with the Brexit Right and Corbyn Left, opponents of fanaticism have become almost populist figures in themselves. Anna Soubry, Jess Phillips, Chuka Umunna and David Lammy have used social media to create mass followings as effectively as their opponents once did. They have ignored the prim refrain that you cannot beat populists by using populist methods. They have accepted that we are in the middle of a communications revolution and anyone who does not understand it will be left behind.

A true fightback will be under way when the personal politics of conspiracists is challenged. For people who personalise every political dispute, they are remarkably reluctant to accept personal responsibility: a cowardly retreat their underdog poses are designed to hide. In Brexit Britain, Trump’s America and eastern Europe there needs to be a relentless focus on the effects of populism on “the people”: on not just the economic suffering it brings, important though that is, but on the psychological costs of allowing cynics and fanatics to create countries so divided they feel they are on the edge of civil war. The answer to the conspiracy theories of populism lies in improving the lives of real people.

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We waste our time on them, not because of who they are, but because they have persuaded millions to back them. The economic and racial explanations for their support are commonplace: the crash of 2008 discrediting the old consensus or  whites losing their majority status in the United States. Psychological explanations are less explored, even though anyone caught up in today’s vicious debates can sense the release supporters of the far Left and Right enjoy as they push though the moral barriers that once constrained them to engage with glee in pornographic outpourings of hatred.

Coded appeals to pre-existing hatreds are a staple of politics. In the 1980s, the Republican strategist Lee Atwater warned that direct evocations of white supremacy had become dangerous for right-wing candidates. Republicans had to become “more abstract” and talk about tax cuts on assumption that middle-class white voters would understand that they would get the money and blacks would lose their welfare payments.

What is new, or at least new in the West, is the ability to inflame hatreds that were previously suppressed or did not exist at all. There has, for instance, always been an anti-Semitic streak on the British Left, but I speak from experience when I say the majority of British leftists were not remotely racist. But the arrival of Jeremy Corbyn meant that a man with a ghoulish record of supporting every variety of anti-Semitic fanatic was now Labour’s leader, and an adored one for many members. Rather than admit their hero had flaws, they covered up and said the accusations against him were not based on solid evidence but were the result of a Jewish conspiracy to punish Corbyn for his opposition to Israel. With astonishing speed, they abandoned their anti-racism and rushed to embrace the anti-Semitic mentality they would previously have regarded with repugnance.

The success of their leaders is as important a psychic driver. Followers see them mock the disabled, treat women as the objects of lecherous fantasy and indulge the hatred of African-Americans, Mexicans and Muslims in the case of Trump or endorse murderers and torturers and defend tyrannies in the case of Corbyn. They wait for the inevitable retribution as polite society enforces its norms and administers its punishments, and they keep waiting. Far from being punished, the taboo-breakers prosper. Trump wins the American presidency. The Labour membership elects Corbyn as their leader, not once but twice.

As their leaders flourish, their repressed supporters are released from constraints that once bound them.

“Let them call you racist, xenophobes, nativists, homophobes, misogynists — wear it as a badge of honour!” Steve Bannon told supporters of Marine Le Pen in 2018. Enjoy it. Welcome it. We are powerful now and the old insults can no longer cow us.

Even though Zionists have “lived in this country for a very long time, probably all their lives, they don’t understand English irony”, Jeremy Corbyn told an audience of white left-wingers and Islamists in 2013. They are not truly English. There’s no need to treat them as if they were no different from you and me. You can let go, and see 9/11, hostile news coverage and opposition to Corbyn himself as plots by the Zionists, the Rothschilds, the eternally-conspiring Jew of the fascist imagination.

The release Trump and Corbyn have granted their followers is all the greater because both lead movements that are powered by moralistic and highly repressive ideologies: white evangelical Protestantism and the politically correct variant of leftism. They have more in common than supporters of either like to admit. Both insist on high and on occasion impossibly high standards, and enforce conformity by keeping believers in fear of a public shaming. The censorious eyes of fellow believers are ever-present. They must be feared more than nominal enemies for it is fellow believers — your apparent friends and comrades — who have the power to eject you from the community of the virtuous in which you have built your life and very sense of yourself.

An evangelical believes in a personal conversion in which they commit themselves to Jesus. In theory, they do not just inherit their parents’ faith — though in practice most do. Instead, they give themselves over heart and soul in a conscious decision that can only be withdrawn at huge psychic cost. They have a duty to spread Christ’s word; because Christ did not just suffer and die, he suffered and died for Me. Most famously they must abide by the authority of scripture including prohibitions on divorce, adultery, homosexuality and abortion. And, for this is crucial, they must be seen to abide by them.

“A real Christian is the one who can give his pet parrot to the town gossip,” said Billy Graham. They should be willing to have their secrets exposed in front of their community and fear no censure. To say this is a demand reminiscent of the intrusions into private life of totalitarian states is to understate the case. The effort to police not only your deeds but words and thoughts so all are aligned with dogma is beyond human capacity. Failure is predestined, and all atheist critics have seized on the hypocrisy the enterprise induces.

We notice that the modern evangelical movement has gone quiet about divorce and adultery, sins that might restrict male heterosexual freedom. Instead, it has concentrated its theological rage against homosexuality and abortion, “vices” the heterosexual male can condemn without inconvenience to himself. White evangelical support for Trump was still running at 71 per cent in the autumn of 2018, even after the divorcé had been exposed as a man who paid off porn stars he treated as prostitutes. Surely, we say, evangelical willingness to endorse such a man reveals the vacuity of their faith? In a paragraph that can make you glad to be alive, Christopher Hitchens encapsulated the hypocrisy when he declared:

Whenever I hear some bigmouth in Washington or the Christian heartland banging on about the evils of sodomy or whatever, I mentally enter his name in my notebook and contentedly set my watch. Sooner rather than later, he will be discovered down on his weary and well-worn old knees in some dreary motel or latrine, with an expired Visa card, having tried to pay well over the odds to be peed upon by some Apache transvestite.

Joyous though the dissections of double standards may be, they miss the target. Most devout believers know they are sinners. But they see and fight greater sins: children being “murdered in the womb”, secular liberals turning away from the path ordained by God. More to the point, they are likely to wear attacks from atheists as badges of honour. It is only when the criticisms are repeated by their own side that they have the power to hurt. The modern PC Left isn’t so different, and not only because so many of its attitudes originate in American puritanism. Take a white male Corbyn supporter of the 1968 generation. His socialism required him to support the white working class. The struggle against apartheid in South Africa and for civil rights in the American South ought to have made him conscious of racism, while feminism ought to have made him conscious of misogyny  and the gay rights movement conscious of homophobia. By the 2000s he should also have been aware of the need to respect groups and causes that were invisible to him in his youth: animals, if he is not yet a vegan, he knows he should be; sex workers, or “prostitutes” and “whores” as he used to call them; people with disabilities, and trans women and men, whose existence he once barely acknowledged. On one level, his life shows an admirable widening of sympathies. He is living in the “expanding circle”, as the philosopher Peter Singer described it, which leads moral concern to grow as the logic of empathy for one group requires its extension to another.

It is a noble and plausible description of how morality spreads. Yet nobility is not the only characteristic it produces. As surely as evangelical Protestants, the politically correct believe that those who oppose them are committing injustices that cry out to the very heavens for remedy. They too can feel superior, members of the elect. As with atheists and evangelicals, right-wingers are keen to condemn leftist  hypocrisy — the socialist politician who sends her children to private schools has become a stock figure of conservative satire. But mockery from the right has no more impact than atheist attacks on Christian double standards. Neither register that the faithful must be more frightened of their fellow believers than their political opponents, when they live in a world where offence is so easily given. At one point women, gays, transsexuals, and people of colour tell our old white male he is meant to be blind to their identities, and treat them equally. Within seconds he is meant to stand on his head, show empathy and respect, and treat their identity as their defining feature.

The web makes Billy Graham’s fantasy of handing parrots to gossips appear small-time and small-town. Your life is laid out on social media accounts. Utterances made when you were drunk or high, ideas you have once had or held can be dragged up and used in evidence against you. Language policing is not a new feature of leftish life. I felt a shock of recognition when I found a battered copy of Howard Fast’s memoir of his time in the American Communist Party of the 1950s on my father’s bookshelves. Fast, the author of Spartacus, recalled how

People were expelled from the Party for speaking of a“negro girl” or of a “black night”, for both “girl” and “black” had become magical taboo words, the use of which indicated that a white person had a deep well of racism within him. The particular horror mounted to a point where dozens of Communists I knew avoided the company of all negroes, so terrified were they of taboo words or actions that could lead to expulsion. Work among negroes collapsed completely.

Then, as now, the ever-present fear was that your comrades will denounce not defend you. They would not cry, “I am Spartacus”, but either enjoy your destruction or stay silent rather than risk guilt by association. The far Left and far Right have always been vulnerable to charges of betrayal. Just as nearly every prominent supporter of Brexit refuses to compromise for fear of the accusation of selling out, so every socialist knows he or she can be outflanked on the left. You are in a meeting  where everyone in the room agrees on a workable plan of action, until one person stands up to say he or she cannot support the consensus because it betrays a specified group. What do you do? You can explain why your opponent is wrong, but then you are open to the charge of betrayal — which many lack the nerve to face.

Meanwhile the knowledge that you don’t make your name in politics by merely castigating your side’s political enemies (why bother when everyone else can do that?), but by going after apostates (“Republicans in name only”, “Blairites” or “Terfs”) drives careerists. If they are to get on, the old guard must be forced out of the way with charges of heresy. The fear of a public shaming is why so many liberal-Left and centre-Right organisations collapse towards their extremes. With the exception of Mitt Romney and a handful of others, every opponent of Donald Trump in the US Republican party has been browbeaten into silence or forced out of the Senate or House of Representatives. It is to the British centre-Left’s credit that there are many brave opponents of Corbynism in the Parliamentary Labour Party, but alongside them sit MPs you never hear from who keep quiet for fear of bringing trouble on themselves.

Beyond politics, vast numbers of people now worry about what to say. You may have had the experience of hearing a word fall from your lips that could be misconstrued or twisted and then glancing at your listeners to see if they are going to make something of it. After the Fast quotation above, should I have added a sentence to explain that “negro” was the politically correct language of the 1950s. rather than “black,” “African-American” or “person of colour” and I meant no offence by repeating his remark verbatim? Probably 999 readers in a thousand would not have noticed, but what if the one in a thousand was malicious or fanatical or simple-minded and decided to use it as evidence of racism?

Similar calculations are made by millions, and the majority self-censor rather than run the small risk of being called out. Imagine living like that, assuming you are not living like that already. Think of the pressure building up inside you, and how grateful you’d be to politicians who lift the lid and allow you to let yourself go.

The British sociologist David Hirsh wrote with great prescience in 2015 of the “politics of position”. He was describing the Corbyn faction in the Labour Party, but what he said applies to extremist or populist movements across the West. Corbynism’s “political practice is actually to avoid debate over ideas and policies. Instead it defines itself as the community of the good and it positions its opponents and its critics as being outside of that community.” It does not seek to convert opponents through argument, instead it divides the world into the damned and the saved, the insiders within the movement and the alien “other”.
It has become clear since Hirsh that if you found your niche in the politics of position you could get away with anything.Trump and Corbyn took the leadership of straitlaced and repressive movements. They have built their success by assuring followers that they could cast off their inhibitions. They could behave as filthily as they wished as long as the filth was thrown in service of the wider cause. Journalists noticed the change first and not only because Trump and Corbyn must, like the leaders of the totalitarian movements of the 20th century, damn all who ask hard question or pull them up on their lies as purveyors of fake news.

Katy Tur of NBC wrote of attending the first Trump presidential rallies and hearing “little old ladies in powder-pink MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN hats calling me a liar” and otherwise respectable men wearing “HILLARY SUCKS — BUT NOT LIKE MONICA” T-shirts. More than 35,000 Corbyn supporters signed an online petition demanding the sacking of the BBC’s political editor because they did not like the interpretation she had offered of local election results. So ubiquitous were the cries of “whore” and “bitch” that the organisers had to pull it down from the web, and the BBC had to offer her a bodyguard.

The Left is meant to be constrained by a hard but vital set of standards that forbid misogyny. Equally, it is meant to be bound by the dictates of anti-racism and anti-fascism which forbid the racial abuse of Jews and the propagation of Hitlerian conspiracy theories. But as every female and Jewish Labour MP who has crossed the Left has found, the standards disappear when a woman or Jew inconveniences Corbyn.

It seems as if modern extremist movements are unconsciously imitating the church of medieval Christendom, which offered the faithful relief from punishment for their sins in purgatory if they bought indulgences from pardoners. Although anger at the practice helped cause the Reformation, the sale of indulgences had an internal logic. Helping the Church by crusading against infidel Muslims or heretical Albigensians was self-evidently good to Catholic eyes, as was giving money to the Church so it could spread God’s word. Why shouldn’t the Pope agree to wipe out the accumulated debt of a believer’s sins in return? It seemed only fair. Indeed, if there were no incentives and no promises of escape from the punishments of purgatory, the faithful might not be keen to fight on crusades or provide the money for new churches and monasteries.

For the Church, read the party, and for the Pope, read the party leader. And then notice that modern extremists have gone beyond the medieval Church. Catholicism still held that sins were sinful. Modern politics holds that there is no sin zealots can commit if they are sinning for the cause. They can abuse women, blacks, Muslims and Jews if the abuse is in defence of Trump or Corbyn. Far from calling them out, their usually censorious fellow-believers will defend them. Their friends and comrades will tie themselves in knots and set themselves up as moral arbiters as they explain why they are not the anti-Semities or misogynists they give every appearance of being. They try to distract attention with charges of whataboutery. The freedom to hate and be defended for hating is what marks out the fringe that has become the mainstream.

Constraints have not been quietly put aside, but tossed away with the glee of a prisoner throwing off his shackles. Now, at last, we are free to escape all the years of biting our tongues and repressing our thoughts; now we can let ourselves go and vomit up all the hatreds inside us, safe in the knowledge that our friends won’t condemn us, but praise our services to the struggle. Imagine the release and the relief the sadistic pleasure brings. They’ve waited for it for so long, and now they aim to enjoy it. The thrill of a dark liberation is running through our age.

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