Brendan O’Neill

Shot down

Sat, 25 May 2013 05:56:55 -0400

Spectator Australia, 27 May 2013

Anyone with two brain cells to rub together will agree that the Australian Vaccination Network is a mad movement. From its evidence-free claim that vaccines are toxic concoctions that can turn kids autistic to its citing of the work of lizard-fearing conspiracy theorist David Icke, everything about the AVN screams ‘NUTTER’. No wonder polite society and the medical establishment are so down on it, describing its anti-vaccine propaganda as misleading and dangerous.

But you know what is even more dangerous than the AVN? The campaign to squish it. This increasingly illiberal campaign, which will not be satisfied, it seems, until the AVN has been wiped from the face of Oz, might prove in the long term to be more detrimental to public health, and to political health, than the AVN could ever be. If its proponents aren’t careful, anti-AVN intolerance could end up shrinking freedom of thought and, ironically, intensifying suspicion of vaccines.

It’s now de rigueur in right-on circles to rage against barmy anti-vaxxers. In Britain, the name of Andrew Wakefield — the former doc whose laughable Lancet paper ignited the panic about the MMR vaccine causing autism — is now always said with a sneer. In Australia, being ostentatiously agitated by the AVN, and by the simple-minded folk who heed its hooey, is pretty much compulsory for anyone who wants to stay on certain dinner-party invitation lists.

Recently, however, the pro-vax lobby has crossed the line from ridiculing the hell out of anti-vaxxers – which it’s perfectly entitled to do – to demanding that they be silenced. It says anyone who spreads misinformation about vaccines should be deprived of ‘the oxygen of publicity’, in the words of a Times writer railing against Andrew Wakefield. When the UK Independent recently reported Wakefield’s thoughts on a big measles outbreak in Swansea in Wales (typically self-servingly, he said the outbreak proved he was right all along), there was outrage. Newspapers should not give space to ‘incredibly dangerous anti-vaccine nonsense’, commentators insisted. A writer for the Observer shook her head in horror and looked forward to the day when we are finally ‘rid of quacks’.

Australian pro-vax rationalists have gone even further in their attempts to stop the AVN. Indeed, the main anti-AVN campaign group is called Stop The AVN, which leaves no room for doubt as to what its aims are: really to create a brave new world totally ‘rid of quacks’.

To this end, extraordinary political pressure has been brought to bear on the AVN. In 2010, its right to appeal for donations from the public was revoked by the New South Wales Office of Liquor, Gaming and Racing, partly on the grounds that the AVN’s activities are ‘not in the public interest’. This was an explicit attempt to economically emaciate this most hated of campaign groups. The Health Care Complaints Commission tried to force the AVN to publish on its website a message about where people should go for trusted info about vaccines: to a state healthcare provider. Anyone who cares about the freedoms of thought and speech should know that being forced to publish a government message is as authoritarian as being forbidden from publishing one’s own messages.

The NSW Office of Fair Trading has kickstarted a campaign to make the AVN change its ‘misleading’ name or risk being de-registered. This is naked political interference in the right of a campaign group to define itself as it sees fit. Where will it end? Maybe the Labor party should be forced to change its misleading name, too, since it no longer really represents the interests of the labouring classes.

The AVN’s freedoms to organise and speak, to fund itself and to spread its dumb beliefs, are being assaulted. These should be key freedoms in any civilised, democratic society, and they should be afforded as much to quacks as to sages, to conspiracy theorists as well as clever folk. Just as surely as Christians should have the right to say ‘Jesus Saves!’ (even though, technically speaking, he doesn’t), and just as vegans should have the right to claim that not eating meat will help ‘save the planet’ (even though that’s codswallop), so anti-vaxxers should be free to say vaccines are toxic and evil, even though they aren’t.

Ours is an era of gross intolerance towards quackery. Those aren’t my words; they’re the words of John Beddington, former Chief Scientific Adviser to the British government. Beddington recently called, openly and shamelessly and to cheers from the pro-science set, for zero tolerance of pseudoscience. Just as ‘we are grossly intolerant of racism’, he said, so we must also be ‘grossly intolerant of pseudoscience’. When a senior public figure can celebrate gross intolerance as a good thing, and be congratulated by rationalists for doing so, you know we live in deeply illiberal times. And it isn’t only anti-vax daftness we’re encouraged to be intolerant of. Everything from the serious pursuit of climate-change scepticism to the cranky practice of homeopathy is now treated as a terribly dangerous thing we might have to censor or kill.

This whipping up of intolerance, this marshalling of state agencies to harass groups that spew claptrap, stands in stark contrast to the attitude taken by the great 19th-century liberal John Stuart Mill. Mill’s era was also riddled with what he called ‘fake science’ designed for ‘attracting public attention’. Yet far from calling for gross intolerance of such idiocy, Mill wrote about the ‘evil of silencing the expression of opinion’. Even when an opinion is false or wicked, ‘stifling it would be an evil still’, he said. That’s because Mill had something that today’s sorry excuses for rationalists lack: faith in the ability of people to discern truth from falsehood, sense from stupidity. Today’s pseudo-rationalist demand for state punishment of quacks is fuelled fundamentally by a fear of what will befall the little people and their children if their putty-like minds are exposed to evil ideas.

The terrible irony of today’s gross intolerance of anti-vaxxer activism is that it could backfire badly. Some now want to make vaccination compulsory, or, as preferred by Sydney’s Daily Telegraph, to compel parents to vaccinate their kids by making the right to attend school contingent upon it. Yet history shows that mandatory vaccination campaigns antagonise the public. As one British expert recently reminded us, compulsory vaxxing in 19th-century Britain ‘fostered substantial anti-vaccine sentiment and was counterproductive’. The best way to promote vaccination is to be positive, to engage with parents as rational, autonomous beings rather than treating them as dumb and gullible and threatening them with Serious Consequences if they refuse to play ball.

Read more of my articles for the Spectator and other publications here.

A knife crime, not an act of war

Thu, 23 May 2013 07:54:00 -0400

spiked, 23 May 2013

What happened in Woolwich was horrific. However, there’s a real danger of overreacting. What we witnessed was a street murder, a frenzied knife attack carried out by two pathetic individuals claiming, in what sounded like South London accents, to be acting on behalf of aggrieved Muslims everywhere. It wasn’t a million miles away from those occasional senseless knife attacks by clinically insane people who claim to be Napoleon or Jesus Christ. Yet it’s being treated by politicians, the police and the media as an act of war, a terrifying challenge to Western civilisation. This elevation of an opportunistic murder to the level an all-out assault on our way of life graphically demonstrates how society itself can unwittingly do terrorists’ dirty work for them, by aggrandising their actions and amplifying their impact on politics and everyday life.

As hard as it may be, given the disgusting footage that exists, we must put yesterday’s events into perspective. Compared with the 7/7 bombings, which were also carried out by isolated, ridiculous individuals, the Woolwich stabbing was not a big or devastating act of terror, far less an act of war. It was a knife crime, and it should be treated as a knife crime. Also, far from representing an exotic foreign threat to our way of life, as claimed both by those who see the stabbers as representative of ‘Isalmofascism’ and those who think they express desperate Muslim anger with Britain’s foreign wars, in truth the men expressed some distinctly British trends. Their cries of ‘Film us!’ and ‘Take photos of us!’ spoke to today’s craven reality-entertainment culture, to a desire for instant fame, or perhaps instant infamy. And their claim to speak for all Muslims, for the people in ‘our lands’, surely springs from the politics of identity, from the backward belief that if you share cultural traits with certain people then you have the authority to speak for those people and their grievances. Grisly performers and self-righteous ‘community spokespeople’ – they seem to have been influenced by British rather than foreign phenomena.

Yet rather than treating this as a knife crime committed by two deluded men, the authorities and media have treated it as a declaration of war. The powers-that-be have gone on to an actual war footing in response to it. PM David Cameron flew back from a political gathering in Paris, and is currently chairing a meeting of COBRA. It’s the second time COBRA - the government’s national emergency committee that convenes in the Cabinet Office Briefing Rooms - has met since the stabbing occurred. Politicians say we will ‘stand firm’ in response to what happened, as if Britain had just been invaded by a foreign army rather than having witnessed a horrible knife attack. Meanwhile, the media have transformed the two stabbers into massive threats to Britons. ‘You people will never be safe’, screams the front page of the Guardian, quoting one of the bloodied knifemen, next to a massive blown-up picture of him. This transformation of two losers into mortal threats to Britain and its values somewhat overlooks that both are currently badly injured, and will never walk the streets again.

The authorities’ overreaction to this act of murder represents a kind of unwitting moral collusion with the terrorists. In a very real way, it completes their act of terror, by allowing it to have the kind of impact that the two men on their own could never have: freaking out the British public, bringing the political class to its knees, and putting the security forces on high alert. The impact that an act of terrorism has on a society depends to an enormous degree on the institutional and moral coherence of that society. On their own, terrorists, especially two blokes with knives, cannot achieve very much, other than to inflict terrible pain on small numbers of people; but how society chooses to respond to their actions can have huge repercussions, genuinely impacting on how people experience their lives and how free we are. Today, from Boston to London, what gives so-called acts of ‘al-Qaeda terrorism’ their impact is not the acts themselves, which are always tragic but also small and scrappy, but rather the fragility of the target societies themselves, the deep feeling of insecurity in modern Western communities. It is our fearful response that gives terrorism its momentum, which completes the terrorist script set in motion by one or two men with knives or homemade bombs.

The danger is that in advertising our vulnerability in this way, we unwittingly invite future opportunistic attacks; certainly we do nothing to discourage them. In its response to the Woolwich murder, British society has thoughtlessly sent out a clear and quite scary message: if you want to hold the British political elite to ransom and transform yourself into an instantly famous representative of modern-day, civilisation-rattling evil, then all you need to do is carry out one bloody act on a street somewhere in London. You know what would have been a far better response? If Cameron had stayed in Paris, if COBRA had never met, if the two stabbers had simply been arrested and investigated by the police alone, and if their act of pseudo-political knife crime was covered on page 4 or 5 of the papers, not on page 1.

Read more of my articles for spiked and other publications here.

Beware the calls to genderbend it like Beckham

Tue, 21 May 2013 11:19:00 -0400

The Big Issue, 20 May 2013

What a spooky and also fitting coincidence: in the week David Beckham announces his retirement from football, a politician tells us Britain is suffering from a “crisis of masculinity” where young men are no longer sure how they should behave…

Read this column in the current Big Issue available to buy now.

Gay marriage: a fight for equality or a war on difference?

Mon, 20 May 2013 03:06:36 -0400

MercatorNet, 20 May 2013

I think one of the most maligned words in the English language is “discriminate”. These days that word is mostly used negatively. It is primarily used to mean making harsh, even oppressive judgements against people based on their sex, or their sexuality, or their ethnic origins.

The more positive — and in some senses truer — meaning of the word discriminate is getting lost. And that truer meaning is the cultured ability to perceive or note the differences between things. The use of discrimination in a quite honourable and even clever way, as a means of making judgements about the different values attached to different things, is being buried beneath the more common use of the D-word to describe every slight against individuals or groups.

That is a shame, I think, because we really need to recover the ability to discriminate. More accurately, we need to recover the important role of making judgements and recognising the differences that exist in our society and in people’s life experiences. And the reason we need to do that is because we live in an era of what we might call phony equality. An era in which what is presented to us as “equality” is in fact homogenisation; the imposition of sameness; a tyranny of relativism; ultimately, the denial of people’s right to exercise even that clever, cultured form of discrimination and to make judgements about the different ways in which people live. In such a stifling climate of top-down sameness, it is really important that people take a stand and be discriminating.

The gay marriage issue captures brilliantly how degraded the notion of equality has become. If you listen to government ministers and gay-rights campaigners, you will believe that gay marriage is all about equality, all about equal rights. It is referred to as “equal marriage”, to drum the point home. And of course, this means that anyone who criticises gay marriage can be written off as a friend of inequality, and no one wants to be thought of in that way.

But when ministers and activists talk about marriage’s current exclusion of same-sex couples as an issue of inequality, what do they mean? For example, would it be a crime against equality if I were denied access to the Royal College of Music? Yes, it is true I cannot play a musical instrument or read music, but what about my right to be treated equally to those who can do those things? I may lack the credentials and talents to do the things that the Royal College of Music was set up to do, but should that stand in the way of my equal right to attend the college and use its facilities?

The truth is, institutions discriminate all the time. They have to, for if they did not they would lose their identity, their purpose, their very meaning. If the Royal College of Music was forced to accept even the musically inept, it would cease to exist within a decade; it would collapse under the weight of the pressure to not be discriminating, to never make judgements based on a person’s appropriateness or fitness for attendance.

The good, cultured form of discrimination lies at the heart of every institution and organisation. Discrimination is the thing that allows such groups to define themselves, to define what membership means, to judge who may be a member and who may not, to exist at all. Colleges, political parties, churches, the Women’s Institute, sporting clubs, gay men’s groups… none of these institutions could continue to exist if they were not permitted to exercise discrimination, if they were not permitted to say what is required of members and to reject those who fail to live up to those requirements.

In our era of phony equality, that fundamental right of organisations and institutions to be discriminating is being seriously undermined. Consider the example of the British National Party. I’m sure we can all agree that the BNP is a foul and rotten political outfit. But even so, should it not have the right, like every other political party, to decide and define who may and may not join it?

A few years ago, following the introduction of new equalities legislation, the Equality and Human Rights Commission tried to force the BNP to rewrite its constitution on the basis that it was discriminatory. The BNP’s constitution stipulates that only “indigenous Caucasians” may join the party. The Equality Commission said this potentially broke equality laws and thus would have to be overhauled.

Now of course, all of us will balk at the idea of a political party that forbids membership to blacks and Asians. But what you should balk at even more than that is the idea that the state or its offshoots should have the authority to force a political party to rewrite its constitution – because that, right there, is the end of the freedom of association; the end of the right of political organisation; the end of the freedom of people to organise themselves as they see fit and to propagate whatever ideas they hold true.

The attempt to impose a new constitution on the BNP reveals how phony today’s phony equality is. Because of course, black and Asian people are not queuing up to join the BNP. The fact that the BNP is only open to “indigenous Caucasians” is not a practical problem for Britain’s black and Asian communities, because they have no interest in joining a political party that is ideologically racist. Instead, what was really taking place was that, under the cover of equality, the state was attacking a political group it does not like, and was attempting to force that group to accept the state’s own way of thinking. This wasn’t about equality for blacks and Asians but rather was an attempt to dictate and enforce political sameness, to impose conformism of thought. The concept of “equality” is today used to quite totalitarian ends.

Writing in the 1950s, the great liberal thinker Hannah Arendt said: “[The] right to free association, and therefore to discrimination, has greater validity than the principle of equality.” What she meant is that if freedom and equality were put to battle, we should cheer freedom rather than equality. We should be on the side of the freedom of private groups or political parties or certain institutions that play a specific social role to discriminate as a means of defining who they are, what their purpose is, and who may join them.

Of course, in the public sphere – in law, in employment, in public social interaction – everyone must be treated equally. But in the private sphere, and also, very importantly, in institutions which have for years played a very specific social role for specific groups of people, being discriminatory is essential. This was recognised by the earliest Enlightenment thinkers. John Locke, author of the great Letter Concerning Toleration, published in 1689, said religious and certain other institutions are effectively “spontaneous societies”. And therefore, he said, “It necessarily follows that the right of making its laws can belong to none other but the society itself… to those whom the society by common consent has authorised thereunto.”

“Spontaneous societies”, religious groups, political groups, certain institutions with particular roles… they must be at least relatively free to write their own laws and rules, which will govern those who have “commonly consented” to be part of those societies. Yet today, in our era of phoney equality, the ability of institutions to govern themselves, to discriminate on the basis of belief or ideology or fitness for the task, is being demolished. This calls into question the very possibility of having organisations and institutions, since the pressure of embracing equality can mean having to do away with one’s organising principles and specific shared beliefs.

Some gay-marriage campaigners will say that marriage is all about love, and therefore for the institution of marriage to deny access to individuals who happen to love someone of the same sex is unquestionably oppressive, a clear example of practising inequality. They say that gay people do have what it requires to enter into marriage – that is, they’re in love – and therefore it is wrong to refuse them entry.

But actually, love is not enough to enter into the institution of marriage. Marriage already discriminates, even against people who are in love. For example, a man might be genuinely and passionately in love with his sister, and she with him, but they are absolutely forbidden from getting married. A woman might be hopelessly in love with two different men, but there is no way she can marry them both. Some of us will remember being 14 years old and head over heels in love with another 14-year-old, but we could not have married. Marriage is a discriminating institution, even against people who are in love. Clearly, something more than being in love is required in order to get married. Clearly marriage plays another, specific social role, which is not just about allowing people to express their love for each other.

In pushing the idea of “equal marriage”, the idea that it is quite wrong for this institution to be discriminating, will this specific social role get lost? Will the role marriage plays as the union of two people with the potential to procreate, and with the potential responsibility to socialise the next generation, be undermined? Will society’s longstanding promotion of marriage as the main means through which adults and communities take responsibility for future generations become meaningless? I think it will. Just as surely as the social role of the Royal College of Music would be undermined if it allowed people like me to enter it. The process of homogenisation dressed up as “equality”, the failure to discriminate between different kinds of relationships, will empty marriage of meaning. Because if everything is a marriage, then nothing is. If the institution of marriage may not discriminate, then it has no organic meaning or purpose.

It is undoubtedly the case that for a great many years, gay people were treated unequally. They suffered oppression. For hundreds of years, homosexual activity was punishable by death. Even in the more modern period, homosexuals were sentenced to prison sentences with hard labour simply for having sexual relations. These severe restrictions on the rights of gay people impacted on how they were treated in society, too. They were considered inferior, even diseased.

Thankfully, that has changed. Thankfully, gay sex has been decriminalised, laws oppressing homosexuals have been repealed, and there has been a corresponding shift in social attitudes. Homosexuals are now accepted as ordinary members of society and are treated equally. Courtesy of civil partnerships, they now also have all the technical rights afforded by marriage. So why the demand for so-called “marriage equality”? What is the need for “equal marriage”?

This is really interesting, because if you look at the key arguments put forward for “equal marriage” you’ll see that they often have a strong therapeutic component. The argument is that in being denied the right to marry, gay people feel worthless, unvalued by society, rankled. Activists will often say things like “the inability to say ‘I’m married’ rankles and makes me feel like a second-class citizen”. They might not be second-class citizens, but they sometimes feel like one, so apparently institutionalising gay marriage will boost self-esteem and make people feel better.

But it is not and should never be the role of government to provide therapy or make people feel better about their life choices and experiences. In relation to equality, the government should do only one thing: provide equality of opportunity. That is, remove any legal impediments to individuals or groups taking part in the daily public sphere. But it cannot provide equality of outcome, ensuring everyone makes it in life; or equality of experience, ensuring everyone has happy and fulfilling existences; or equality of emotional contentment, ensuring everyone feels valued by society. Those are things that we must achieve for ourselves, through exercising our autonomy and choosing the path in life we feel best suited for.

Inviting the government to give us equality of outcome, equality of experience and equality of emotion, all phony equalities, is to invite greater state intervention into our lives - into the moral make-up of institutions judged to be “unequal” and even into our emotional lives, too. In this way, we can see how today’s phony equality doesn’t liberate people but rather makes them more reliant on state favour, and doesn’t improve the social fabric but rather makes it more difficult for the inhabitants and institutions of a society to have any internal moral life of their own.

Brendan O’Neill is editor of Spiked, a British online magazine. He describes himself as a “Marxist Libertarian”. He gave this speech at the House of Lords on May 15.

Conformisme rond homohuwelijk verstikkend

Sat, 18 May 2013 03:46:07 -0400

Reformatorisch Dagblad, 20 May 2013

De overweldigende consensus over het homohuwelijk die zich in het Westen aftekent, is een verschrikking voor iedereen die diversiteit en tolerantie positief waardeert, betoogt Brendan O’Neill.

Ik houd me al twintig jaar bezig met politiek. In die periode heb ik me achter een aantal tamelijk onpopulaire campagnes gesteld en me verschillende keren verzet tegen een benauwende maatschappelijke consensus. Maar nooit heb ik een kwestie als het homohuwelijk meegemaakt, waarin de ruimte voor verschil van mening zo snel afnam en waarin de consensus gewoonweg verstikkend is. Het is de enige kwestie waarbij ik tijdens een ”after-dinner speech” werd uitgejouwd toen ik het onderwerp vanuit seculier-liberaal perspectief bekritiseerde, en waarvoor ik doodsbedreigingen ontving. Het is de enige kwestie waarbij ik van zowel harde rechtse als softe linkse mensen de meest verschrikkelijke verwensingen kreeg.

Velen becommentariëren de enorme toename van de acceptatie van het homohuwelijk. De Amerikaanse journalist Christopher Caldwell van de Weekly Standard schrijft dat het homohuwelijk binnen een decade van een bespottelijkheid een dogma werd. Het tijdschrift Time heeft het over een „seismische sociale verandering”, die sneller en onverwachter plaatsvond dan enige andere verandering in de publieke opinie.

Schoolvoorbeeld

Hoe verklaren we deze buitengewone consensus, die veelzeggend wordt aangeduid als „capitulatie” voor het homohuwelijk door haast iedereen in het openbare leven? En is het een goede zaak? Er was immers een verhit debat over een nieuw burgerrecht, en de voorvechters hebben toch gewonnen? Nee, ik denk het niet. Ik denk zelfs dat we dit niet eens een consensus kunnen noemen. Dat zou namelijk inhouden dat verschillende elementen vrijwillig samenkomen om overeenstemming te bereiken.

Je kunt het beter conformisme noemen: een onder druk langzaam, maar zeker slachtofferen van kritisch denken en verschil van opinie om te accepteren wat door degenen die het in de samenleving voor het zeggen hebben als goed wordt gedefinieerd, namelijk het homohuwelijk. De kruistocht voor het homohuwelijk is een schoolvoorbeeld van conformisme, een benauwend inzicht in de manier waarop zacht autoritair optreden en groepsdruk in de moderne tijd worden gebruikt om elke visie die wordt ervaren als overdreven veroordelend, ouderwets, discriminerend, fobisch of anderszins onbehoorlijk, naar de marge te drukken.

De verandering in het denken over het homohuwelijk is bijzonder opmerkelijk. Het homohuwelijk wordt nu niet alleen overdreven gepromoot door regeringspartijen in talloze landen, maar wordt ook geaccepteerd door degenen die het ooit venijnig afkraakten. David Frum bijvoorbeeld, een rechtse journalist en later tekstschrijver voor president George W. Bush, argumenteerde eind jaren 90 tegen de nieuwe gedachte om homo’s toe te staan om te trouwen. Nu maant hij de Republikeinen echter aan om de herdefinitie van het huwelijk waartegen hij ooit waarschuwde, te omhelzen. Amerikaanse Republikeinen, en zeker jonge, behoren nu tot de meest uitbundige voorvechters van het homohuwelijk.

In liberaal politieke kringen lopen ze haast in ganzenpas achter het homohuwelijk aan. Toen Hillary Clinton in maart Barack Obama volgde en zich achter het homohuwelijk stelde, had dat een domino-effect in de Amerikaanse Senaat. Binnen drie weken volgden veertien senatoren haar. De verwachting dat elke fatsoenlijke politicus het homohuwelijk omhelzen zal, is zo uitgesproken dat The Guardian een artikel publiceerde met de kop: ”De laatste drie: de Democratische senatoren tegen het homohuwelijk”. De krant verlangde te weten wanneer deze drie –die natuurlijk aan de schandpaal genageld werden– zich in de rij zouden voegen.

Ja, zo gaat het echt. De acceptatie van het homohuwelijk is ondertussen zo sterk verankerd dat we artikelen zien verschijnen over de eigenaardige mensen die ertegen zijn, in plaats van artikelen over mensen die ooit gezien werden als getikt omdat ze het promootten. Tegenstanders van het homohuwelijk worden door de pers op dezelfde manier behandeld als de onruststokers die in het verleden opkwamen voor homorechten: ze zijn vreemde, verdorven schepselen, en we wachten met ingehouden adem op hun berouw en overgave aan de algemeen geaccepteerde waarden.

Martin Luther King

Ook de publieke opinie is ingrijpend veranderd. Een recente peiling in de VS gaf aan dat 58 procent van de Amerikanen voor het homohuwelijk is. Tien jaar geleden was dat 37 procent. Uit een Engelse peiling bleek dat 62 procent van de Engelsenvoor en 31 procent tegen het homohuwelijk is. Sommigen vinden dat een goede zaak. Maar ik voel meer voor wat journalist Christopher Caldwell zegt: „In vrije samenlevingen verandert de publieke opinie niet zo snel. Of de opinie verandert in werkelijkheid minder snel dan het lijkt, of de samenleving is niet zo vrij als we dachten.”

Vooral de gedachte dat de „seismische verandering” in de politieke en publieke opinie te danken is aan de strijd die de voorvechters van het homohuwelijk hebben geleverd, is ongelofelijk weinig overtuigend. Een columnist van The Guardian die kwistig strooit met citaten van de zwarte burgerrechtenbeweging in de VS, zegt dat de „adembenemende” opkomst van het homohuwelijk laat zien dat Martin Luther King gelijk had toen hij zei: „De boog der geschiedenis is lang, maar buigt altijd naar het recht.” De ontwikkelingen rond het homohuwelijk laten zien wat voorvechters kunnen bereiken wanneer ze „idealisme met actie” combineren.

Welke actie? Waar? Door King voor het voetlicht te halen, maakt de columnist alleen maar duidelijk hoe ongewoon de campagne voor het homohuwelijk eigenlijk is: er was geen massale Mars op Washington voor het homohuwelijk; er waren geen straatgevechten; de politie heeft geen waterkanonnen en honden hoeven in zetten en niemand hoeven oppakken. Er is in het geheel geen openbare actie geweest, en al helemaal niet van de soort die de Senaat van de VS zo zou verschrikken dat zijn leden een voor een de noodzaak voelden om te buigen voor de zaak van het homohuwelijk.

Elite

In werkelijkheid zegt de buitengewone opkomst van het homohuwelijk vooral iets over het politieke en morele conformisme van onze tijd; over het griezelig veroordelende niet-oordelen van onze pc-tijd; over de manier waarop in een onkritische tijd als de onze ideeën met een alarmerend gemak in hoog tempo dogma’s worden; over de strijd om te zeggen wat je vindt en je te hechten aan je geloof in een tijd waarin twijfel aan de publieke opinie en verschil van inzicht als een ziekelijke afwijking worden gezien. Het homohuwelijk laat prachtig zien hoe in deze tijd politieke verhalen worden vervalst en hoe mensen worden bewerkt om dat te slikken.

In feite is het meest schokkende aan het homohuwelijk dat het begon bij de elite. In zijn nieuwe boek, ”From the Closet to the Altar. Courts, Backlash and the Struggle for Same-Sex Marriage”, beschrijft Michael Klarman hoe rechters, geen straatvechters, de voorhoede vormden in de campagne voor het homohuwelijk. Het is zelfs bizar hoe hij rechters een „aparte subcultuur” van de culturele elite noemt, die „ertoe neigt nog liberaler te zijn dan het algemene publiek in kwesties als gendergelijkheid en homogelijkheid.”

Nu het homohuwelijk een soort common sense is geworden, is het moeilijker geworden om ertegen te zijn. Het kan zelfs je sociale en morele positie in gevaar brengen. De common sense van het homohuwelijk lijkt heel subtiel op een dogma. Een debat over het homohuwelijk wordt impliciet gedemoniseerd. Sommigen zeggen dat er geen erkenning mag zijn van subtiliteiten en culturele verschillen inzake het homohuwelijk, omdat er maar één juist antwoord is in deze kwestie.

Degenen die benadrukken dat er culturele verschillen zijn in de opvattingen over het homohuwelijk –of nog erger, ertegen zijn– voelen de hete adem van de voorvechters in hun nek. Tegenstemmers in Amerikaanse referenda werden door respectabele politici en media uitgescholden voor alles wat mooi en lelijk is: „slecht geïnformeerd”, „misleid”, „jammerlijk onwetend”, „gestoord.”

Het effect hiervan is dat een kritische bevraging in de kiem wordt gesmoord. Het tijdschrift Scientific American schreef kortgeleden over de briljante manier waarop sociale media worden gebruikt om gedrag en houding van mensen ten opzichte van het homohuwelijk te beïnvloeden. Iedereen is „gevoelig voor de krachten van groepsdruk”, stelt het artikel. Dus kan voortdurend aardige dingen over het homohuwelijk zeggen op sociale media een manier zijn om „een boodschap over te brengen over wat acceptabel, behoorlijk, en (…) ja, normaal is.” Dus zonder je erover te bekommeren of je iemand met redenen overtuigt, gewoon plompverloren laten weten dat het homohuwelijk normaal is en dat het dus wellicht abnormaal is om ertegen te zijn.

Zo wordt conformisme tegenwoordig opgelegd: een elitaire groep verzint een idee; dat idee wordt geveinsd als eis en andere elitaire groepen gaan meedoen; door een proces van demonisering van het debat en pathologisering van verschil van opinie, door acceptatie te behandelen als normaal en kritiek als abnormaal, verspreidt het idee zich breder in de maatschappij. Ten slotte, zegt Caldwell, zullen zelfs degenen die onzeker zijn over het homohuwelijk „hun natuurlijke onbehagen onderdrukken.”

Inderdaad, toen ik laatst de Britse popster Dappy interviewde en hem vroeg of hij het homohuwelijk steunde, zei hij: „Ik zou nee willen zeggen (…), maar ik krijg al zo veel kritiek. Zeg dus maar ja. Ja, doe dat maar, zeg ja.” Hoeveel anderen zeggen ja, niet omdat ze geloven in het homohuwelijk, maar omdat ze niet bij de losers willen horen?

Hard veroordelen

Het conformisme over het homohuwelijk kan natuurlijk niet helemaal geweten worden aan een handjevol campagnevoerders, en zeker niet aan een bewuste poging van hun kant om politieke en morele gehoorzaamheid af te dwingen. De andere kant is de zwakke binding van de maatschappij aan het traditionele huwelijk. Dat is het puin waarop het homohuwelijk is gebouwd. Als rechters, politici en andere elitegroepen met succes de deur van het traditionele huwelijk hebben ingetrapt, is dat omdat die al uit z’n scharnieren hing. Het resultaat van jaren van culturele verwaarlozing.

De maatschappij is onwillig om de traditionele visie op het huwelijk te verdedigen en er is een relativistische weerstand om onderscheid te maken tussen verschillende levensstijlen. Dat gaf brandstof aan de bijzondere tirannie van niet-oordelen van de campagne voor het homohuwelijk, die degenen die durven oordelen over het leven van anderen hard veroordeelt.

En zo zijn we terechtgekomen in een situatie die lijkt op de briljante beschrijving van de Engelse filosoof John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) hoe kritisch denken kan zwichten voor het despotisme van het conformisme, zodat „eigenaardigheid van smaak en zonderling gedrag gemeden worden als misdaad, tot [deze volgers van het conformisme] door de eigen natuur niet te volgen geen natuur meer hebben om te volgen.”

Gay marriage: a fight for equality or a war on difference?

Wed, 15 May 2013 15:33:01 -0400

Speech, 15 May 2013

I spoke at the House of Lords today on same-sex marriage. My speech is published below.

The more positive and in some senses truer meaning of the word discriminate is getting lost. And that truer meaning is the cultured ability to perceive or note the differences between things. The use of discrimination in a quite honourable and even clever way, as a means of making judgements about the different values attached to different things, is being buried beneath the more common use of the d-word to describe every slight against individuals or groups.

The gay marriage issue captures brilliantly how degraded the notion of equality has become. If you listen to government ministers and gay-rights campaigners, you will believe that gay marriage is all about equality, all about equal rights. It is referred to as “equal marriage”, to drum the point home. And of course, this means that anyone who criticises gay marriage can be written off as a friend of inequality, and no one wants to be thought of in that way.

This is really interesting, because if you look at the key arguments put forward for “equal marriage” you’ll see that they often have a strong therapeutic component. The argument is that in being denied the right to marry, gay people feel worthless, unvalued by society, rankled. Activists will often say things like “the inability to say ‘I’m married’ rankles and makes me feel like a second-class citizen”. They might not be second-class citizens, but they sometimes feel like one, so apparently institutionalising gay marriage will boost self-esteem and make people feel better.

These were comments I made at the House of Lords on 15 May 2013.

St Angelina, save us from ourselves!

Wed, 15 May 2013 08:06:47 -0400

spiked, 15 May 2013

Was I dreaming, or yesterday did Angelina Jolie’s breasts really knock every other world event off the top news spot? Perusing my inbox this morning, it seems it was no dream. There’s that email from CNN: ‘BREAKING NEWS: Angelina Jolie reveals she’s had double mastectomy.’ There’s that alert from Fox News, too. And Ms Jolie is staring out at me from the front page of every British newspaper this morning, most prominently The Times’s, which is Britain’s newspaper of record. Which makes it official. It really happened. The decision by an actress to have an operation that millions of women have had kicked to the curb everything from the savagery in Syria to the tussle over the future of the EU. What are such trifling matters compared with the contents of Angelina’s bra?

The bizarre global Angelina breastravaganza confirms that celebrity culture is no longer just a thing – it’s the thing, the key prism through which modern morality is forged and through which politics is increasingly conducted. Too often, the term ‘celebrity culture’ is used only to refer to certain people’s love of tittle tattle, to slam the tastes of vulgar little folk who read heat or are hooked on the right-hand bar on the Daily Mail website. But yesterday’s frenzied fawning at the feet of an actress who had an operation and then wrote an article about it confirms that there’s so much more to celebrity culture than watercooler gossip among TOWIE fans. This is a culture that seeks to provide a moral framework for a world seriously lacking in one, and which creates new secular saints like Ms Jolie to dispense that morality, and which is promoted most vociferously, not by idiotic tabloid readers, but by what now passes for the intellectual classes.

One of the main claims being made for Ms Jolie’s article on her preventive mastectomy, which appeared in yesterday’s New York Times, is that it represents a blow against celebrity culture. Apparently, in being so open about having dramatic surgery, Ms Jolie is rebelling against the ‘bizarre values’ of the ‘celebrity industry’, which instructs women to have perfect bodies and to never talk about their physical ailments or defects. This is spectacularly wrongheaded. For far from undermining celebrity culture, Ms Jolie’s tell-all article conforms to it. Yesterday’s unofficial beatification of the suffering Angelina didn’t remotely challenge celebrity culture, but rather took it to a new and genuinely mad level.

The idea that it was ‘incredibly brave’ and anti-celeb of Ms Jolie to talk openly about a physical problem she has is particularly weird, given that one of the main themes of modern celebrity culture is that it’s good to make a public display of one’s sicknesses and woes. Flick through Hello! magazine or browse the Daily Mail website and you’ll see article after article about celebs’ cancer scares or battles with bipolar. Whether it’s the late Jade Goody being diagnosed with cancer on an actual TV show, or Kerry Katona being interviewed about her bipolar disorder, or Stephen Fry making documentaries about his depression, all celebs, both low-brow and high, now make public spectacles of their private struggles. One of the main contributions of celebrity culture to modern life has been to energise the erosion of the line between private life and public life, and to elevate the idea that it’s unhealthy to bottle things up and good to get them off your chest, ideally on Oprah’s couch or, failing that, in the pages of the NYT. Ms Jolie’s article is totally of a piece with today’s emotionally promiscuous, victimhood-celebrating celebrity culture.

Of course, snooty observers make a distinction between, say, a Bermondsey bruiser like the late Ms Goody talking openly about her cancer and the more beautiful, refined Ms Jolie talking about hers. So where Ms Goody’s cancer talk was denounced by commentators as ‘the lowest publicity stunt ever’, Ms Jolie’s nicely written NYT piece about her personal battle to stave off cancer has been hailed as brave and magnificent. But is there really that much difference between Goody and Jolie? Both complied to the big, borderline medieval idea of our era: that what you have suffered is more significant than what you have achieved, and that a good person speaks publicly about his or her troubles rather than keeping them ‘secret’ (or what we used to call ‘private’).

Of course, one big difference between Goody and Jolie is that the latter used the magic phrase ‘raising awareness’. What makes Ms Jolie’s article radical, we’re told, putting its author ‘light years beyond celebrity culture’, is that it’s designed to raise awareness about breast cancer and the genes that can cause it. Yet here, too, Ms Jolie is conforming to a key aspect of celebrity culture. Modern celebs are forever seeking to raise the awareness of the presumed-to-be unaware great unwashed. They’re deployed by politicians, NGOs and charities effectively to enlighten the dumb public, about everything from the dangers of stuffing your face with food (Jamie Oliver), to how unpleasant grinding poverty can be (Bono), to how important it is to check one’s breasts or testicles for signs of disease (Ms Jolie; every male actor who has ever appeared in Hollyoaks).

‘Raising awareness’ is one of the most striking phrases of our time. It is tellingly distinct from ‘having a public debate’ or ‘discussing ideas’, since it comes with the very loaded assumption that huge swathes of people are unaware of something really important, and if they aren’t made aware of it by some figure of authority, ideally a celeb, then they will stew and potentially even die in ignorance. The political and charity classes’ use of celebs to ‘raise awareness’ reveals a great deal about modern politics. It exposes the elite’s powerful sensation that it lacks legitimacy in the eyes of the public, and thus must push forward those who do still enjoy some social cachet – celebs – to communicate apparently important messages to us; and it suggests the elite, and its growing harem of celebrity campaign-fronters, view the public as an ignorant blob that must be injected with the right way of thinking in order to be ‘made aware’ that disease exists, war is bad, and if you eat nothing but McDonald’s food you’ll probably get fat.

What is really great about Ms Jolie’s article, her massive fanclub says, is that it will encourage more women to check their breasts for lumps or to have themselves tested for the genes that can cause breast cancer. Numerous doctors and health groups have hailed Ms Jolie for potentially helping to improve public health. Let’s leave to one side the fact that, actually, it’s potentially dangerous to encourage women to panic even more about breast cancer, given that many experts now believe that the modern breast-cancer self-check obsession is leading freaked-out women to have surgical interventions they don’t really need. The more striking thing in the Jolie case is the way actual medical authorities are praising the actress for helping them do their work.

This, too, is a core aspect of modern celebrity culture: the effective outsourcing of authority to celebs. In an era when our rulers and betters feel they lack the authority to push forward campaigns and ideas, they frequently outsource that authority to celebrities. Indeed, the affix ‘celebrity’ – as in celebrity doctor, celebrity campaigner, celebrity chef – has replaced the old affixes ‘royal’ or ‘expert’ to denote seriousness and clout. Having already been a ‘celebrity diplomat’, through her various interventions in African warzones, Ms Jolie now looks set to be crowned ‘celebrity saver of women’s lives’.

Indeed, it is remarkable how much Ms Jolie is being hailed as a saviour of womankind, almost as a modern-day Madonna (the Virgin Mother, not the singer), who, having suffered herself, might now help alleviate the suffering of others. The Guardian says ‘her bravery will save lives’; she will ‘save other women from dying’, says Hollywood Life. Such slavish fawning over a celeb by supposedly level-headed commentators and campaigners is so embarrassing. It makes the screeching of Justin Bieber fans or Twilight obsessives seem rational in comparison: at least they’re only driven by lust and longing, rather than by a belief that their favourite celebs have all the answers to modern moral and political problems and can save human beings from themselves, disease and war. The investment of Ms Jolie with the moral authority to combat disease, to enlighten the dark-minded global hordes, and to renew the battle for public health reveals how unhinged celebrity culture has become, and also what is fuelling it: the inability of society itself, and its elected rulers, to do politics and morality in the old-fashioned direct and rational way.

Read more of my articles for spiked and other publications here.

Sceptics, have courage - it's your Millian duty

Tue, 14 May 2013 09:20:07 -0400

The Big Issue, 13 May 2013

Remember when it was considered good to be sceptical? When puncturing ideological bubbles and asking awkward questions about received wisdoms were seen as decent pastimes? When doubt and rigorous querying were treated as serious intellectual pursuits?

Those days are long gone…

Read this column in the current Big Issue, available to buy now.

The phoney border war over immigration

Thu, 09 May 2013 18:59:37 -0400

spiked, 9 May 2013

The fuss that followed yesterday’s Queen’s Speech reveals what a weird turn the debate about immigration has taken. In the past, the clash over migrants’ rights tended to pit border-fortifying nationalistic types against left-leaners who believed in the right of foreigners to move around the globe and work and live in various places. Today, if the reaction to PM David Cameron’s proposed new immigration measures is anything to go by, there’s little more than a pseudo-spat over immigration, with hamstrung anti-immigrant politicians on one side and a ‘pro-immigration’ lobby that is increasingly elitist on the other. What’s most striking is how neither side treats immigrants as actual human beings, the anti-immigrant side treating them as spectres of destabilisation and the pro-immigrant lot treating them as the ciphers for a new, post-borders, shallowly cosmopolitan political dawn.

Cameron’s proposals, ironically unveiled by our German-descended queen, led to outraged headlines about how he was pandering to xenophobic attitudes and taking Britain back to the bad old days of immigrant-bashing. In truth, the most remarkable thing about his plans is how chaotic they are, and also how much they concede in terms of the security of Britain’s borders. Cameron is proposing effectively to outsource authority over immigration to various non-state actors. Landlords will be charged with checking the immigration status of their tenants, and will face fines if they let their properties to illegal migrants. Employers will have to check passports and papers or risk getting a severe slap on the wrists for ‘hiring illegal workers’. The Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency will have to ensure that only legit immigrants get driving licences.

Some have depicted these measures as supremely anti-foreigner, even Orwellian, potentially creating a nation of curtain-twitching snitches checking up on the ‘status’ of everyone with a funny accent. It is true that Cameron’s ideas will likely intensify the suspicious public climate already fostered by CCTV cameras, ASBOs, smoking-ban hotlines and a host of other low-level citizen-on-citizen policing introduced in recent years. But there’s another, more important way to interpret his measures: as a sign of how incapable the modern British political class feels of exercising meaningful control over its borders or over the number of immigrants that arrive, certainly from Europe. Indeed, in turning everyday folk into papers-checkers, Cameron and Co. are effectively admitting to defeat on the border question itself, on the actual immigrant question, and are really saying: ‘We can’t stop all these people from coming here, but we can get some native Brits to check they’re legit.’

Looking at the government’s recent statements and actions on immigration, you get the distinct impression that it just doesn’t know what to do about this alleged problem, or even how big the alleged problem is. So for the past two months, officials have made spasmodic, conflicting statements about how many Romanians and Bulgarians will come here next year when EU immigration rules are relaxed. Eric Pickles said it will be a lot, and will ‘cause problems’, but refused to give an exact number. Another Tory, perhaps using a crystal ball, predicted 425,000 will turn up. Other officials say they just ‘don’t know’. Meanwhile, home secretary Theresa May recently announced the abolition of the Borders Agency and said her office will assume direct control over Britain’s borders in an effort to get this whole Euro-immigration thing under some kind of control. Even for saying that she was stingingly rebuked – one newspaper editorial chastised her for failing to realise that borders are ‘not eternally fixed’, especially in this era of ‘successful multiculturalism’.

It is the chaos of British officialdom’s immigration policies that is most striking. In essence, border control today is seen as impossible or as undesirable in this relativistic, post-nationalism age of cross-border cooperation and supranational institutions like the European Union. Far from Cameron’s proposals speaking to a revival of old-school Tory nationalism, his government’s confusions over immigration, over the very question of who, if anyone, controls Britain’s borders, reveal how far British nationalism has been emptied of meaning and content. The attempt to turn every Tom, Dick and Harry into a passport-checker is actually to accept the inevitability of mass immigration and the porousness of British borders, and it speaks to the incapacity of modern rulers, even Tory ones, to assert national or territorial interests in the face of any thing or force they might previously have described as ‘Other’. It is this confused post-nationalism that is leading to attacks on immigrants today: the government is carrying out occasional strikes against easy targets – like Asians studying in Britain or ‘illegals’ looking for help in an A&E department – in a desperate bid to demonstrate and really feel like it still has some element of control over the foreigner question.

There has been a strange shift on the other side, too. Today, those who pose as ‘pro-immigration’ seem less interested in defending the freedom of movement of real, living migrants than in attacking the backward attitudes and traditionalism of those natives who raise any questions about immigration. So their immediate response to Cameron’s proposals yesterday was to fret over how certain sections of the population would react. One Cameron-basher feared the Queen’s Speech would unleash the ‘ill-informed prejudices’ of a certain ‘section of the electorate’, those ‘old, pessimistic and predominantly male voters frightened… at a time of immense change amid economic storms’. Others accuse Cameron of ‘pandering to kneejerk xenophobia’. In short, the problem isn’t Cameron’s own ideology per se; it’s those ‘old’, probably racist voters he is foolishly playing to. The belief that questioning immigration is not only illiberal but actually irrational was summed up in one journalist’s description of the desire to ‘curb immigration’ as ‘the snake oil of our time’.

Again and again, supposedly pro-immigration writers and activists respond to proposed restrictions on immigration by fretting over how Them – old, dumb white folk – will respond. So recently, a European commissioner chastised Cameron’s government for potentially unleashing ‘kneejerk xenophobia’ with its statements on immigrants’ alleged ‘benefits tourism’. In March, the Council of Europe’s human-rights commissioner accused British officials of using ‘unacceptable rhetoric’ on immigration. Why do those who define themselves as pro-immigrant always focus on the potential response of the public to politicians’ allegedly inflammatory language, rather than, say, on the freedom of people to migrate around Europe and the globe as they see fit? Because being pro-immigration has also been completely emptied of its old meaning and content, and is now little more than a battering ram for changing allegedly problematic attitudes among states’ native populations, and for further spreading the anti-sovereignty, anti-borders ethos of institutions like the EU and its intellectual cheerleaders.

In the European context, the main impulse of the officials, bureaucrats and thinkers who depict themselves as pro-immigration is to further disorganise national sovereignty. For them, migrants are not individuals with needs, desires and autonomy, but rather the shock troops of EUphilia, who might make more real Brussels’ muddying of borders in modern Europe and the consigning of popular national sovereignty to the dustbin of history. As one EU theorist says, the people who have a problem with immigration – those old, fearful voters and the right-wing politicians they support – tend to have a ‘dogmatic adherence to the principle of national sovereignty’ and fail to realise that the EU is all about having ‘permeable, porous boundaries and… inclusive communities with flexible membership’ (1). That is, the reason anti-immigrant attitudes are bad is because they speak to an instinctive, apparently backward rejection of the EU project of dislodging national sovereignty and replacing it with new cross-border power structures. This is why even the most illiberal Brussels-based suits, who can’t so much as spell the word freedom and who would have a heart attack if they ever clapped eyes on an African immigrant landing on the shores of Italy or Spain, adopt a supposedly pro-immigration posture today: because that’s the surest, most PC-sounding way of pushing farther the dissolution of nationally derived democracy and outdated state sovereignty.

For these ‘pro-immigrants’, always attacking the snake-oil backwardness of ill-educated native voters, the key impulse is not to institute freedom of movement but rather to make Europe’s borders even more permeable as a means of strengthening the cross-border moral authority of post-national institutions like the EU and its offshoots. The end result is an entirely phoney cosmopolitianism, which far from uniting the peoples of Europe pitches border-defying Bulgarians against dumb, stuck-in-the-mud Brits and other outdated idiots. A properly liberal, cosmopolitan approach to modern Europe, which truly valued freedom of movement, would emphasise European people’s common interests, particularly the common interest of being morally autonomous, rather than slyly turning EU migrants into the unwitting underminers of apparently backward political outlooks and ways of life. It is entirely possible to celebrate the freedom to cross borders without demolishing democracy and sovereignty within those borders. Let’s start making that case.

Read more of my articles for spiked and other publications here.

Iain Banks and the death of privacy

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 07:02:44 -0400

spiked, 30 April 2013

I wish Scottish author Iain Banks had kept his cancer to himself. For in making it public, through a statement about being ‘Very Poorly’, he has unwittingly mobilised one of the ugliest mobs of modern times: the death-watchers, the ostentatious grievers, those who like nothing more than to read about another’s physical demise and advertise how moved they are by it.

Almost as soon as Banks announced earlier this month, through the publisher of his entertaining novels, that he was suffering from terminal gall bladder cancer, these professional proxy weepers were doing their thing. Premature mourning was rife. Twitter became a vast virtual pre-death condolences book, as everyone stopped what they were doing for 45 seconds to tweet about how torn apart they were by the news of Banks’ sickness. People seemed keen to out-lament each other. One said Banks’ cancer revelation hit her like ‘a chill blast of sorrow and grief’, which makes you wonder how she’ll cope when he dies.

Friends and fans of Banks set up a website where lovers of his novels can get updates on his condition and sign a ‘guest book’ that is really just another offensively early condolences book. Thousands of messages have been posted. It’s remarkable how many of the message writers admit they ‘don’t know what to say’ yet proceed to say it anyway, at length, clearly feeling weirdly compelled to sign up to the speedily constructed community of online mourners.

We’ve also had pre-death obituaries, articles assessing Banks’ life and work before either has come to an end: his next novel, The Quarry, will be published shortly. Even those who know nothing about Banks felt an urge to write about him, or rather about how they personally felt upon hearing he was sick. Simon Kelner at the Independent admitted ‘I haven’t read any of his books’, before producing a whole column on Banks’ cancer news. The macabre sense of anticipatory mourning is summed up in the way Banks’ wife is referred to on the tribute website: as his ‘chief widow-in-waiting’.

All the Twitter grief for Banks, all the ersatz emotion flying through the media and internet, reveals something ugly about our era: that death has become a public spectacle. No one is allowed to die in private anymore. Just as sex and emotional meltdown must now be performed in the harsh, unforgiving glare of the public gaze, so must death. So totally eroded is the line between public and private that even the darkest, most terrifyingly existential bit in an individual’s life – his demise – can become something watched and tweeted about by strangers.

It’s now de rigueur to die in public. Banks, it seems, will be releasing regular statements about his decline. The most recent, issued at the end of last week, gave rise to yet more newspaper headlines (‘Iain Banks posts new message about his terminal cancer’; ‘Iain Banks issues new personal statement’) and to more ersatz Twittergrief (‘This is very sad. My favourite author is dying’). Banks’ ‘widow in waiting’ is making statements, too. Of course, everyone deals with devastating news in their own way, and the Bankses are dealing with theirs with admirable Scottish humour; but isn’t there also something a little sad about effectively issuing press releases on one’s own decline?

It fits a trend. Also this month, Kate Granger, a terminally ill doctor in Wakefield in Yorkshire, said she plans to ‘live tweet’ her death. Using the hashtag #deathbedlive, she says she’ll spare no detail. I think this is tragic. Traditionally, the end of life was a time for private self-reflection and for communing with those you love, not for feeding perfect strangers with info about your physical decay. Granger’s number of Twitter followers has grown to more than 6,000 since she made her announcement - the death-watchers gathering.

In both popular culture and highbrow circles, death has become a performance. The late Bermondsey bruiser and reality TV star Jade Goody had her cancer diagnosed on a TV show and then had her 2009 death documented on TV shows and in magazine spreads. OK! magazine published its tribute edition – including Goody’s ‘Last Wish’ and ‘Final Words’ – four days before she died. It was like people couldn’t wait for her to die so that they could get stuck into their glory-seeking mourning. Likewise with Banks, obituaries in all but name are appearing before he has died.

Broadsheet newspapers publish ‘cancer columns’ by the seriously sick, and even Christopher Hitchens, that late scourge of all things fashionable, wrote in fashionably graphic detail about his demise at the hands of cancer in 2011. The BBC has aired footage of people dying in that Swiss suicide clinic Dignitas. Documenting your imminent death has now become such a hot ticket that some people are inventing illnesses in order to get published. A few years back, an American journalist wrote a series of columns about having terminal brain cancer. It was later revealed she didn’t have brain cancer. She said she made it up to disguise the fact that she was actually suffering from AIDS. She didn’t have AIDS either.

Such is the ugly public appetite for death-watching that those who refuse to die publicly can expect criticism. When, in 2011, the very ill and ferociously private Apple boss Steve Jobs refused to say what disease he had, he was denounced by the online magazine Slate for being ‘cagey’ and only issuing a 112-word press release. What did we want: a 112-page misery memoir by a man on his deathbed?

The preening grievers who gather around the dying always claim that they’re ‘breaking the final taboo’, that making death more public is a way of combatting humankind’s infantile reluctance to discuss end-of-life issues. But the taboo against observing strangers’ deaths was there for a reason: because we recognised that some human moments, especially the final ones, need pure, quiet privacy if they are to retain their dignity and meaning; thrown open to public viewing, they become shallow and showy, a case of a death performed for others rather than of a life brought to an end with the people who actually shared in it and were shaped by it. The claim of taboo-busting is really a cover for the further invasion of the private sphere, for the fact that the public now expects to see our deathbeds as well as our marital beds and our every other emotional up and down.

Yes, that old obituary line ‘He died after a short illness’ spoke to an unwillingness to mention the word cancer. But it also contained an important unspoken message: it’s none of your goddamn business what this man died of or how he spent his final moments of life.

Read more of my articles for spiked and other publications here.

Ben Elton has always been a Middle Englander

Fri, 26 Apr 2013 14:01:16 -0400

Daily Telegraph, 26 April 2013

Ben Elton is receiving a critical bludgeoning for his new sitcom, The Wright Way. Not only because it is painfully unfunny, but also because it is very Middle England-ish in its lampooning of ’elf ’n’ safety culture. Its shtick concerns the angry shenanigans of one Mr Wright, the clipboard-waving head of a local council department, who is forever fulminating about people who break his petty, killjoy rules.

For former fans of the comedian – who in the Eighties was an apparently radical, shiny-suited teller of jokes about how evil Thatcher was – this sad, conservative sitcom is evidence that the Elton wit is now dead and buried. It is aimed “squarely at the perpetually outraged heart of Middle England”, says an irate Guardian. A disappointed writer for Radio Times wonders whatever happened to the Ben Elton who was “loud, political [and] took no prisoners”, who Lefty students once treated as “a bit of a god”.

It is true that The Wright Way is drastically unfunny – almost as unfunny as Miranda, in fact. But the idea that Elton has sold out, turning from a Thatch-bashing enfant terrible into a boring old fart, is barmy. In truth, Elton was always the droning, mockney voice of the squeezed middle, giving vent to the frustrations of that section of society that finds itself sadly sandwiched between dumb poshos up above and even dumber poor people down below.

Indeed, his innate conservatism was apparent even in his highest achievement, The Young Ones, which mercilessly mocked the subversive pretensions of actually lazy, ill-read students. The great thing about The Young Ones was that it sent up Elton’s own ilk, those youthful Thatcher-bashers who came from relatively well-to-do backgrounds, most notably in the character of Rik – a smug ponce who falls asleep while reading Das Kapital. It is entirely possible to watch The Young Ones both as a witty indictment of Thatcher’s Britain and as a Middle England yelp of rage against skiving, nonsense-spouting students.

Ben Elton’s middle-class angst can clearly be seen in another past glory of his, Blackadder. Here, virtually all the humour derives from the respectable titular character’s frustration with the idiocy of the aristocrats he works for and the boneheadedness of the paupers he works with, most notably the fantastically stupid Baldrick. With each new series, the aristocrats became increasingly air-headed, the pauper types ever thicker, and Blackadder more sneery about both. It was all a thinly veiled (and frequently hilarious) comment on how Elton and his fellow right-on BBC creatives felt about Britain in the Eighties, where both posh old Tories and dumb working-class people had conspired to keep Thatch in power and Britain in a state of distress. It was an exquisite cry of squeezed-middle ire.

Consider, also, Elton’s explicitly political comedy. On Saturday Night Live, the Channel 4 show he compered in the late Eighties, comedians would mock the posh rulers of Thatcher’s Britain, but you would also see them putting the boot into the dumb electorate. This is where we first met Harry Enfield’s Loadsamoney, which was a stinging attack on the greedy, grasping, Essex-based working classes.

Many of the “alternative comedians” of the Eighties spent as much time attacking brainless workers as they did mauling moneyed toffs. As Stephen Wagg explains in his book, Because I Tell a Joke or Two, this creative class ridiculed the “cultural crassness” of those sections of the working classes that “read the monosyllabic Sun newspaper, watched satellite TV, spoke Estuary English”. Indeed, where these alternative comedians, particularly Elton, are often congratulated for having demolished the sexism, racism and other prejudices of Seventies stand-up, in truth they replaced those prejudices with new ones – ones that mocked the lower orders for being vulgar and materialistic.

These prejudices are still rife in today’s so-called alternative comedy (which is now actually mainstream): witness Marcus Brigstocke attacking stupid, gruff plumbers for being lazy and dirty, or Stewart Lee mocking the masses for enjoying the apparently unsophisticated sitcom Only Fools and Horses. The misogyny of Bernard Manning et al has been elbowed aside by the chav-baiting of comedians who emerged from comfortably-off towns and descended on London for a big middle-class moan about Them and Them – the posh and the poorly educated.

Ben Elton and the other comedy “radicals” who came of age during the “Fatcha” era always had a Middle England spirit, a deeply frustrated middle-class core, a fury with both their superiors and their inferiors. So, yes, Elton’s new sitcom might be colossally unfunny; but if it also speaks to “the perpetually outraged heart of Middle England”, then it is only taking Eighties alternative comedy to its depressing logical conclusion.

Read more of my articles for the Daily Telegraph and other publications here.

Left and Right have both misunderstood terror tantrums

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 11:10:58 -0400

The Australian, 24 April 2013

AS soon as it was revealed that the Boston bombers were of Chechen origin and had vaguely Islamist leanings, their outrage started being discussed as a potentially political act. What had been referred to by almost everyone as senseless was now talked about as if it made some sense.

The bombers, brothers whose family fled Chechnya during the war with Russia in the 1990s, were clearly traumatised by their experiences, experts told us, as if that explained their decision to blow the legs off Americans gaily cheering marathon runners.

An American expert on Chechnya said “the precursor and origins” of the brothers’ act could have been “the sheer fact that there’s so much terror in their country (of origin)”. So should we look on anyone who has fled a war zone as a ticking time bomb, liable at any minute to blow up an eight-year-old boy in vengeance for some bad thing done by a foreign government, years ago, thousands of kilometres away?

Media outlets offered semi-sympathetic accounts of the bombers, discussing their terror tantrum in the context of Chechen politics. The New Yorker kicked off its profile of the brothers with a potted history of Chechnya, skating dangerously close to contextualising their marathon murders within decades’ worth of “Chechen rebellions”. News agency AFP said the Boston bombings showed “the turbulence of the (Chechen) region reverberates far beyond Russia’s own borders”, seeming to accept the idea that dumping a rucksack cum bomb at a marathon in the US in 2013 is a logical response to the war in Chechnya in 1996.

This discussion of the bombings is underpinned by an Oprah-style psycho-fatalism, where it’s assumed that as abused children allegedly go on to be abusive adults, so war-zone kids grow up to re-create war zones in their new homes, compelled like traumatised automatons to inflict on others the horrors they saw as youths. The bombers’ criminal responsibility for their blood-spattered spectacle is watered down by those depicting them as the damaged goods of a long-gone war.

The treatment of the bombings as somehow political, springing from history or ideology, can be seen in right-wing responses, too.

Here, the bombers tend to be talked up as seriously scary jihadists, the latest attack dogs of “Islamo-fascism”.

Where leftists foolishly discuss Islamic terrorism in the West as a protest against injustices in far-off Muslim lands, many on the Right hold it up as evidence of a coming Islamopocalypse that threatens to devour the West and its traditions.

The former imbues these acts with too much political coherence; the latter exaggerates the power of the cowards who carry them out. One glance at the surviving Boston bomber — 19, straggly-haired, the pot-smoking Shaggy of Islamo-fascism — confirms how pathetic these so-called holy warriors really are.

What the Left and Right responses to Islamist outrages in the West share in common is a view of these acts as ideological and as fundamentally foreign in origin, as protests over Palestine or Chechnya or as the first stirrings of a dusty, Eastern, falafel-fuelled Islamo-imperialism.

This is spectacularly wrong. For far from being political, Islamic terror in the West is deeply nihilistic, a void of ideology, so lacking in purpose that often the perpetrators don’t even claim responsibility for what they’ve done.

As author Faisal Devji points out, in stark contrast with the “classical terrorism” of the 70s and 80s, there’s an “ambiguity of responsibility” in the modern so-called jihad.

That’s because there’s nothing for these murderous morons to claim responsibility for, no political demand for them to propel into the public sphere on the back of their attacks.

For them, violence is not a means to an end but an end in itself. Their acts have as much substance as those mass shootings carried out by paler-skinned Western youth who listen to Marilyn Manson rather than imbibing the Koran and worship Ozzy Osbourne rather than Osama.

And far from being a foreign phenomenon, Islamo-violence in Western cities is mostly homegrown. Terrorism expert Marc Sageman’s fascinating studies of violent Islamists reveal that they tend to be middle-class and nicely employed and to have been “radicalised” here in the West rather than in some backstreet in Kashmir or Jeddah. So it was after 10-plus years in the US that the Boston bombers came to loathe “American values”. Many of the Islamists who have attacked our towns and cities in recent years came to hate the West while in the West, studying or working here.

How can this be? Perhaps it’s because the modern West actively invites people to hate it. Perhaps it’s because ours is an era in which every gain of Western civilisation is now looked on with disdain and disgust; when modernity is viewed as destructive; when it’s positively, achingly fashionable to despise the US, that pinnacle of Western values. Perhaps it’s because from history-revising academia to the mainstream green movement, the message sent out is that our way of life is a mistake and we must atone for our historic sins.

Let’s not flatter Islamic terrorism by treating it as a political statement, or imbue it with superpowers it does not possess, but rather recognise it for what it is: a pseudo-exotic variant of the Western self-loathing that is rife in the 21st century.

Read more of my articles for The Australian and other publications here.

Five things liberals love that Thatcher invented

Wed, 17 Apr 2013 11:32:53 -0400

spiked, 17 April 2013

Left-leaning liberals love to depict themselves as the yin to Margaret Thatcher’s yang, the Luke Skywalker to her Darth Vader. She is everything they detested, and they aspire to be everything that will keep her spinning in her grave for the next 50 years: socially aware rather than individually grabby, and fashionably unsure about economic growth rather than heartlessly capitalistic.

Yet for all this ostentatious oppositioning, the fact is that evil Maggie is responsible for many of the things and ideas that the modern liberal set holds dear. She’s the mother of much of their political outlook just as surely as Darth Vader was dad to Luke. Here are five things liberals love that they have Thatch to thank for.

Safe sex

The right-on sections of society are the most fervent promoters of ‘safe sex’ – joyless, disease-conscious, sheath-covered bonking. You can’t set foot in a trendy rock festival or have so much as a five-minute chat with a caring-eyed social worker without having a condom pressed into your hands, accompanied by that most buzz-crushing oxymoron of modern times: ‘Play safe!’ In the health-aware set’s eyes, having sex without a condom is as much a sin as having sex with a condom is to the likes of Pope Francis.

Well, thank Thatcher for this. In the late 1980s, during the Great AIDS Panic, she pretty much invented the modern idea of safe sex. Everyone bangs on about the terrible falling-out between Thatcher and gays over Section 28, but few mention the far weirder love-in between Thatcher and gays during the AIDS crisis. They were at one over the need to promote caution and condom-wearing. Thatcher sent leaflets headlined ‘AIDS: Don’t Die of Ignorance’ to 23million homes, with graphic chatter about semen, vaginal fluid, anal sex and the need for condom use. Her health secretary, Norman Fowler, arranged for condoms to be advertised on TV for the first time and boasted that he was ‘responsible for putting the word “condom” back into English usage’.

For the Thatcherites, the AIDS issue represented a glistening opportunity to foist their staid sexual mores and Victorian values on to a fearful public, though it all got dolled up in the lingo of awareness and safety rather than restraint and chastity. As one author puts it, AIDS became a platform from which the likes of Thatcher could hector people about ‘promiscuity and fast-lane lifestyles’. Now, that Victorian project disguised as radical sexual awareness is still being vociferously pushed forward by those who define themselves as Anti-Thatcherite. Great work, folks!

Incapacity benefit

Modern-day leftish observers with cushy jobs love nothing more than fighting for the ‘right’ of poor people to be treated as permanently sick by the state and to be given a pauper-style handout to live on. Any attack on incapacity benefit, which is received by around two million Brits, all of whom are defined as ‘incapable’ of working, has these caring souls seeing red.

Thatcher would have agreed. She was the mother of incapacity benefit. Back then it was called invalidity benefit, and it was actually introduced by Thatcher’s Conservative predecessor, Ted Heath, but it was Maggie who rolled it out to cover those miners and manufacturers she threw on to the dole queue. In 1978/79, when Thatcher came to power, 612,000 people were on invalidity benefit; by the start of the 1990s, after 10 years of supposedly wicked, welfare-cutting Thatcherism, the number had increased by 190 per cent, hitting a whopping 1.8million. Who were all these people who had fallen suddenly and terribly ill? They were the simply unemployed, working men and women made non-working by Thatcher; but they were rebranded ‘sick’ and ‘incapable’ rather than ‘unemployed’ because, in the words of one social historian, Thatcher and Co. were keen to ‘keep unemployment figures down’.

In essence, Thatcher naturalised unemployment, turning it from a social predicament brought about by the failure of modern society to provide all with gainful employment into an individual’s own problem, caused by his physical or mental ineptitude. You are unemployed because you are sick, not because society is sick. As one observer says, Thatcher used invalidity benefit to ‘minimise the fallout’ from her policies. Today, the depiction of working people as having been failed by their own bodies rather than by society, the cynical writing-off of vast swathes of the potentially working classes as unfit for public tasks, is cheered by implacable anti-Thatcherites. These unthinking incapacity benefit cheerleaders are continuing their nemesis’s job of convincing capable men and women that they are incapable. Excellent stuff, liberals!

Comprehensives galore

For some reason, nothing riles modern leftists more than the idea of choice or variety in education. Any school that isn’t entirely state-bound, such as free schools, and any university founded by private individuals, such as AC Grayling’s proposed humanist college, drives them nuts. They think private schools should be abolished and that grammar schools are super-duper unfair because – horror of horrors – they necessitate the testing of 11-year-olds and the separation of the clever from the… how should we put this… sporting. This is a crime against self-esteem or something. They’d prefer to see everyone in a samey comp, being definitely not taught Latin and being fed strictly Jamie Oliver-okayed grub while learning by rote the most life-affirming quotations from Anne Frank’s Diary.

How Thatcher helped their narrow dreams to come true! For all the claims that she was a state-circumscribing monster, and for all her own personal agitation about comps, she was the mistress of comprehensivisation. Reading the infantile ruminations on her legacy, you’d be forgiven for thinking that the only thing she did as education secretary in Heath’s government of the early 1970s was snatch milk from the mouth of babes; but she also ‘closed more grammar schools than any other education minister’ and increased the percentage of children attending comprehensive schools from 32 per cent to 62 per cent… in the space of four years! This wringing of independence from the education sphere and plonking of more and more kids in often ill-equipped, Shakespeare-shunning, horizons-squishing comps is now led by Thatcher’s self-defined foes. Way to go, Thatcher-bashers.

Germany-bashing

Of course, Thatcher didn’t invent anti-German sentiment, which has been a feature of British politics for ages. But she was midwife of the modern version of it, the version which says that post-Cold War united Germany is far too much of a political and economic colossus and thus threatens to destroy modern Europe and its values. You know, the version now promoted by left-wing loathers of Angela Merkel, who was recently described by the implacably anti-German liberal magazine the New Statesman as ‘the world leader [who] poses the biggest global threat to global order and prosperity’.

Anti-Thatcherites love to hold up the EU as yet another dichotomous issue between them and Maggie: they’re pro, she was a bit anti. But both Mrs T and the anti-Ts shared a suspicion towards Germany and its ambitions. When the postwar partition of Germany ended in 1989, Thatcher said this ‘reunited country would represent an unacceptable concentration of economic power, and therefore of all other kinds of power’. ‘Nothing good could ever come from the Germans’, she declared. Such Kraut-bashing has been inherited by the modern left, both of the trade union and liberal-leaning variety, who now describe Merkel-ruled Germany as a ‘bully’ and even mention it in the same breath as Nazism.

Where Thatcher fretted that Germany would threaten Britain’s interests, many on the modern left fear it will ‘destroy the European project’. In both cases, fears for our own futures and standing get projected on to those weird, power-grabbing sons-of-Nazis over there. Carrying Thatcher’s fantasy refighting of the Second World War into the twenty-first century… well played, leftists.

Political environmentalism

‘Thatcher was all, like, grow the economy, and I am all, like, grow nature and the future instead!’ A lot of Thatcher-bashing can be boiled down to that level of boneheadedness, where Thatch is depicted as the single-minded pursuer of industrial stuff, while her critics are more concerned with saving the planet from humanity’s deforming rapaciousness. But of course, it was Thatcher who made environmentalism respectable in political circles, especially Conservative ones, through recognising later in her tenure that the best way to cover up one’s failure to achieve meaningful economic growth was to say: ‘Hey, I’m more interested in saving the Earth.’ Her very green late-80s speeches insisting that human beings do not have a ‘freehold’ on the planet had the effect of, as one author puts it, ‘dramatically heightening the prominence of environmental issues and [giving] unprecedented respectability to their articulation’.

Today, Mrs T’s eco-miserable view of the planet as fragile and humans as potentially toxic is promoted by her so-called foes. These people splutter and rage against Thatcher while keeping alive the worst horizons-lowering, fear-spreading, planet-worshipping ideas that fell from her head. It isn’t anti-Thatcherism; it’s Thatcherism in anti-Thatcher drag.

Read more of my articles for spiked and other publications here.

There's nothing grown-up about the judgement of Paris

Tue, 16 Apr 2013 12:01:00 -0400

The Big Issue, 16 April 2013

When the Mail on Sunday splashed 17-year-old youth police commissioner Paris Brown on its front page, exposing that she had once tweeted some rude thoughts, it was probably hoping to show what a motley crew modern teens are.

But it backfired badly.

The Mail’s mauling, and the handwringing about yoof it gave rise to, actually revealed what a rotten lot adults are…

You can read my column in full in the current Big Issue, on sale now.

Is science becoming a new religion?

Sat, 13 Apr 2013 11:01:47 -0400

Today, I gave this speech at the sceptical QED conference in Manchester.

Throughout history, one of the main arguments against allowing ordinary people to get involved in politics was that they lacked expertise. They didn’t have the necessary expert knowledge to deal with complicated ideas and issues.

So if you look back to the debate about universal male suffrage in the nineteenth century, it was frequently said that, yes, these working men are really cool and important people, good at working with their hands and building cities and all that, but they aren’t cut out for politics. In the words of one Tory, they didn’t have the “expertise and experience” that politics requires.

The same thing was said about women in the early twentieth century. Yes, women are great, they look after our children and keep our homes, and some of them even have jobs, which is fine by us. But they don’t have the expertise for voting or for doing politics. As one author summarises the opposition to female suffrage: women were seen to “lack the expertise in naval, military, commercial, diplomatic and legal matters which is necessary for informed political activity”.

Also, one of the key justifications for having second chambers in politics, like Britain’s House of Lords or America’s Senate, was to allow for expert discussion of commoners’ sometimes fickle political sentiments. These chambers are still held up by some as cool-headed places full of experienced people, who can keep a watchful eye on what less well-informed commoners and their politicians are getting up to.

So the idea that we need more expertise in politics is not actually a new one. It’s been around for a long time, and it has always been on the wrong side of the debate about democracy, in my view. Because it’s an idea which tends to depict ordinary people as not sufficiently enlightened for serious political debate, especially on really complicated matters like war or law and so on.

This outlook survives today, in the widespread belief that we need more expertise and less ideology in politics; more science, less passion; more cool-headed, educated people like David Nutt, and fewer nutters from the mass of the population who think they know everything but don’t actually know very much at all.

The only difference today is that where once it was fat old Tories and stiff American officials who said politics is better done by experts, today it is young rationalists and humanists who say politics needs more expert input and less playing to the public gallery, less populism, less ill-informed passion or wrongheaded ideology.

If anything, today’s call for more expertise in politics is worse than what went before because it is so much more sweeping; it is really serious about elevating experts into almost every sphere of policymaking and giving them a very special position.

What we have today is a situation where evidence and expertise are the main drivers of policy. For many complicated historical reasons, politicians no longer feel they have the moral or electoral authority to make judgements or decisions, and so they outsource their authority to scientists and other researchers. They call upon these people to provide them with authority, to provide them with a good, strong, peer-reviewed justification for taking a certain course of action, often a course of action they had already decided upon but felt too morally denuded to push forward.

When politics and science mix in this way, both of them suffer, I think. We end up with evidence-driven policy and policy-driven science, neither of which is a very good thing.

Politics suffers because it becomes more rigid. It is hard to have a serious democratic debate about a course of action when that course of action is described as the correct, scientific thing to do. Anyone who challenges it is written off as anti-science, a heretic, a denier. Moral debate dies, or at least suffers badly, when authority becomes increasingly scientific and expert-led.

And science suffers because it inevitably becomes polluted, I think. It seems absolutely clear to me that the more politicians call on scientists for evidence and stats, the more science will feel pressured to do the right thing, to provide the kind of info that will allow politicians to do what they want to do. People often complain about corporate-funded science and how that can influence the outcome of science - but what about when Iain Duncan Smith goes looking for evidence for his illiberal family intervention policies or the Home Secretary goes looking for evidence to justify a public smoking ban? Doesn’t that potentially corrupt science, too, especially over the long run?

The worst thing is that politicians’ increasing reliance on science, and some scientists’ willingness to go along with this, shrinks the space for public, mass engagement in policymaking. The more politics becomes an experts’ pursuit, the less room there is for the public’s ideological or passionate or angry or prejudicial views - they are unscientific and to listen to them is to play to populist sentiment, as David Nutt and others say.

But all these things being discussed are not just or even primarily scientific questions. Whether certain drugs should be banned is a moral question. Whether the government should have the right to say how parents should raise their children is a political question. Ordinary men and women fought for centuries for the right to do morality, to do politics, to be the authors of their own and their nation’s destinies. And while they might not be as clever as some of the people in this room, they do have desires and morals and a yearning for autonomy, and, really, that is all you need to do politics well.

The above is an edited version of a speech I gave at the sceptical QED conference in Manchester on 13 April 2013.

Gay marriage: a case study in conformism

Thu, 11 Apr 2013 10:17:00 -0400

spiked, 11 April 2013

I have been doing or writing about political stuff for 20 years, since I was 18 years old, during which time I have got behind some pretty unpopular campaigns and kicked against some stifling consensuses. But I have never encountered an issue like gay marriage, an issue in which the space for dissent has shrunk so rapidly, and in which the consensus is not only stifling but choking. This is the only issue on which, for criticising it from a liberal, secular perspective, I’ve been booed during an after-dinner speech and received death threats (‘If you’re dead, you can’t talk shit about gay marriage’). It’s the only issue on which both hard right-wingers and the wettest leftists have told me to STFU. It’s the only issue on which even friends have said, ‘Stop writing about it. It isn’t worth it.’

Many are commenting on the juggernaut-like rise to respectability of the gay marriage issue. Christopher Caldwell of the Weekly Standard says gay marriage has gone ‘from joke to dogma’ in a decade. Time magazine says there has been a ‘seismic social shift’ on gay marriage, which has been ‘as rapid and unpredictable as any turn in public opinion [in history]’. Another gay-marriage supporter says ‘the pace and scale at which acceptance of marriage equality has shifted is breathtaking’, which he puts down to the efforts of the warriors for ‘marriage equality’. There has been a ‘sea change’ in attitudes, commentators tell us, especially in political circles, where everyone who’s anyone (or who wants to be) now genuflects at the gay-marriage altar. Even Bill O’Reilly of Fox News, scourge of liberals everywhere, now accepts the idea of gay marriage, leading one observer to tell gay-marriage proponents: ‘Lay down your guns… the enemy has surrendered.’

How do we account for this extraordinary consensus, for what is tellingly referred to as the ‘surrender’ to gay marriage by just about everyone in public life? And is it a good thing, evidence that we had a heated debate on a new civil right and the civil rightsy side won? I don’t think so. I don’t think we can even call this a ‘consensus’, since that would imply the voluntaristic coming together of different elements in concord. It’s better described as conformism, the slow but sure sacrifice of critical thinking and dissenting opinion under pressure to accept that which has been defined as a good by the upper echelons of society: gay marriage. Indeed, the gay-marriage campaign provides a case study in conformism, a searing insight into how soft authoritarianism and peer pressure are applied in the modern age to sideline and eventually do away with any view considered overly judgmental, outdated, discriminatory, ‘phobic’, or otherwise beyond the pale.

The shift on gay marriage has truly been remarkable. Not only is gay marriage now fulsomely promoted by the ruling parties of both America and Britain, and in numerous other nations, but is also accepted even by those who once stingingly slated it. So David Frum, right-wing journalist turned speechwriter for President George W Bush, spent the late 1990s arguing against the newly emerging idea of allowing gays to get hitched; yet now, in the words of one columnist, he is ‘energetically urging Republicans to embrace the redefinition of marriage he once warned against’. American Republicans, especially young ones, are among the most effusive supporters of gay marriage.

In liberal political circles, there has been almost a lemming-like lining up behind gay marriage. So last month, when Hillary Clinton, following Barack Obama, came out in support of gay marriage, there was a domino effect, or what one commentator called a ‘remarkably rapid shift’, in the US Senate. In three weeks, 14 senators ‘followed suit’ with Clinton, which ‘amounts to a senator changing position on same-sex marriage on average every day and a half’, as one report put it. Such is the expectation that every decent politician will embrace gay marriage that this week the Guardian published an article headlined ‘The final three: the Democratic senators against gay marriage’. It demanded to know when these three, whom of course it named and shamed, will ‘toe the party line’. Yes, that’s right – such is the entrenched respectability of gay marriage that we now see articles about the peculiar people who oppose it rather than about what would once have been seen as the weird people promoting it. Opponents of gay marriage are now treated by the press in the same way queer-rights agitators were in the past: as strange, depraved creatures, whose repenting and surrender to mainstream values we await with bated breath.

There have also been massive shifts in public opinion. In the US, a recent ABC poll found that 58 per cent of Americans support gay marriage, compared with just 37 per cent a decade ago. A recent British poll found 62 per cent in support of gay marriage and 31 per cent against. A new book by Michael J Klarman, From the Closet to the Altar: Courts, Backlash and the Struggle for Same-Sex Marriage, documents the extraordinary rise of the gay-marriage idea in the US, where since 2009 there has apparently been a four-point rise in support for gay marriage every year. Some see this as a good thing; but I’m more inclined to agree with Christopher Caldwell, who says: ‘Public opinion does not change this fast in free societies. Either opinion is not changing as fast as it appears to be, or society is not as free.’

Certainly, the idea that the ‘seismic shift’ in political and public opinion is down to the fighting of gay-marriage campaigners is spectacularly unconvincing. One Guardian columnist, liberally borrowing from the black civil-rights movement, says the ‘breathtaking’ progress of the gay-marriage issue shows that Martin Luther King was right to say ‘the arc of history is long but it bends towards justice’; it shows what campaigners can achieve when they combine ‘idealism with action’. What action? Where? Bringing King into the picture only highlights the unusualness of the gay-marriage campaign: there has been no mass march on Washington for same-sex marriage; no streetfighting; no getting water-cannoned by the police, mauled by dogs, chased by the KKK, thrown in jail. There has been no real public action at all, certainly not of the sort that might have terrified the US Senate so much that its members felt the urge to bow one by one before the issue of gay marriage. If gay MLK-style campaigners are responsible for the transformation of gay marriage ‘from joke to dogma’, then they must have achieved it through osmosis, since they certainly didn’t do it through any kind of mass, messy uprising.

In truth, the extraordinary rise of gay marriage speaks, not to a new spirit of liberty or equality on a par with the civil-rights movements of the 1960s, but rather to the political and moral conformism of our age; to the weirdly judgmental non-judgmentalism of our PC times; to the way in which, in an uncritical era such as ours, ideas can become dogma with alarming ease and speed; to the difficulty of speaking one’s mind or sticking with one’s beliefs at a time when doubt and disagreement are pathologised. Gay marriage brilliantly shows how political narratives are forged these days, and how people are made to accept them. This is a campaign that is elitist in nature, in the sense that, in direct contrast to those civil-rights agitators of old, it came from the top of society down; and it is a campaign which is extremely unforgiving of dissent or disagreement, implicitly, softly demanding acquiescence to its agenda.

So for all the comparisons of the gay-marriage movement to the civil-rights movement, in fact the most striking thing about gay marriage is its origins among the elite. As Caldwell says, ‘never since the Progressive Era has there been a social movement as elite-driven as the one for gay marriage’. In his new book, Michael Klarman describes how judges, not streetfighthers, spearheaded the gay-marriage campaign; he even bizarrely calls judges a ‘distinctive subculture’ of the cultural elite, which ‘tends to be even more liberal than the general public on issues such as gender equality and gay equality’. Another favourable account of the rise of gay marriage notes how it was led by ‘lawyers and professors’, who counselled against engaging with the public since making ‘open demands for gay marriage [could] trigger a backlash’ (1).

The gay writer John D’Emilio has critiqued gay campaigners’ reliance on the courts, arguing that this ‘conviction that [the law] is the way to change the world… would have been considered unusual for much of American history’ (2). Yet this is where gay marriage emerged – in courtrooms and later in political committee rooms, among those apparently ‘more liberal than the public’ – and as Caldwell says: ‘When elites rally unanimously to a cause, it can become a kind of common sense.’ This was the first stage in the great conformism over gay marriage: its transformation into common sense through being adopted and promoted by a legal and political class keen to demonstrate its liberal credentials and to assume an historic, MLK-style posture in our otherwise flat, uninspiring and illiberal political era.

With gay marriage turned into ‘a kind of common sense’, opposing it became more difficult, potentially even threatening one’s social and moral standing. The ‘common sense’ of gay marriage has been turned into something like a dogma of gay marriage, in a very subtle way. So the very act of debating gay marriage has been implicitly demonised, since in the words of one observer, ‘The fact that there is a debate over whether to deny a group of people their civil rights is unacceptable’. Here, through further linking gay marriage to the old civil-rights movement, even discussion itself can be branded ‘unacceptable’.

Others say there should be no ‘acknowledgment of subtleties and cultural differences’ on gay marriage, since ‘there is a right answer’ on this issue. Those who insist on possessing ‘cultural differences’ on gay marriage – or even worse, opposing it – feel the fury of campaigners. A chicken restaurant in America was boycotted after its owner criticised gay marriage, while voters in American referendums who have said no to gay marriage have been called every name under the Sun by the respectable political and media classes: ‘ill-informed’, ‘deceived’, ‘plain ignorant’, ‘knuckle draggers’. This has the effect of beating down critical questioning. Gay marriage supporters actually boast of using moral pressure over political debate to win people’s acquiescence. Scientific American magazine recently discussed the apparently brilliant way that social media is being used to influence people’s ‘attitudes and behaviour’ on gay marriage. Everyone is ‘susceptible to the powers of peer pressure’, it said, so constantly saying favourable things about gay marriage on social-media websites can be a way of ‘send[ing] out a message about what’s acceptable, appropriate and… well, normal’. That is – never mind convincing someone with reason; just heavy-handedly let them know it’s normal to support gay marriage, and thus presumably abnormal to oppose it.

This is how conformism is forged and enforced today: elites devise an idea or campaign, far away from what one gay-marriage proponent calls ‘the tyranny of the majority’; that idea or campaign gets disingenuously depicted as something that protesters and campaigners demanded and actually put pressure on the elites to come up with; and through a process of debate-demonisation and pathologisation of dissent, through the treatment of acceptance as normal and criticism as abnormal, the idea or campaign is spread more widely through society. Eventually, in the words of Caldwell, even those who are unsure about gay marriage ‘quell their natural misgivings’. Indeed, when I interviewed the British pop star Dappy recently, and asked him if he supported gay marriage, he said: ‘I want to say no… but I get so much stick already. So say “yes”. Definitely say “yes”.’ How many other people are saying ‘yes’ not because they believe in gay marriage, but because they don’t want, in Caldwell’s words, to be thought of as ‘losers’ who have failed to ‘emulate their betters’?

The conformism around gay marriage cannot be put entirely down to handfuls of campaigners, of course, and certainly not to any conscious attempt on their part to enforce political and moral obedience. The fragility of society’s attachment to traditional marriage itself, to the virtue of commitment, has also been key to the formulation of the gay-marriage consensus. Indeed, it is the rubble upon which the gay-marriage edifice is built. That is, if lawyers, politicians and our other assorted ‘betters’ have successfully kicked down the door of traditional marriage, it’s because the door was already hanging off its hinges, following years of cultural neglect. It is society’s reluctance to defend traditional views of commitment, and its relativistic refusal more broadly to discriminate between different lifestyle choices, that has fuelled the peculiar non-judgmental tyranny of the gay-marriage campaign, which judges harshly those who dare to judge how people live. Through a combination of the weakness of belief in traditional marriage and the insidiousness of the campaign for gay marriage, we have ended up with something that reflects brilliantly John Stuart Mill’s description of how critical thinking can cave into the despotism of conformism, so that ‘peculiarity of taste, eccentricity of conduct, are shunned equally with crimes, until by dint of not following their own nature, these [followers of conformism] have no nature to follow’.

Read more of my articles for spiked and other publications here.

The ideology progressives should be worried about today isn't Thatcherism, but anti-Thatcherism

Wed, 10 Apr 2013 10:28:14 -0400

The Australian, 11 April 2013

WHY do the British Left and literati hate Margaret Thatcher with such passion, to the extent that there was dancing in the street when she died? Some say the answer is obvious: because she did lots of things these people loathe, such as shutting coalmines, throwing people out of work, deregulating markets and launching wars.

Yet other politicians did those things, too, often with more vigour than Thatcher, yet they don’t get anywhere near the same flak.

Take coalmines. Far more were shut by Harold Wilson’s Labour government in the 1960s than by Thatcher. Under Wilson, 406 mines were closed, leading to 315,000 job losses, compared with the closure of 146 mines and the loss of 173,000 jobs under Thatcher. Yet it’s Thatcher who’s remembered as destroyer of the mining way of life.

Consider trade unions. Yes, Thatcher attacked and dismantled the trade union system, but her task was made easier by the preceding Labour government of the late 70s, which fulminated against trade union “vandalism” and tried to put tight screws on workers’ wages while the number in unemployment rose to 1.5 million.

How about war? Thatcher fought the Argies in 1982 and joined George HW Bush’s war on Iraq in 1990. But her imperial ambitions, not to mention death toll, pale into insignificance when compared with Labour prime minister Tony Blair’s bloody ventures in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Iraq. While Blair is proving belatedly unpopular among his former fawners, he isn’t loathed with the same demented fury as Thatcher.

As for market matters, all the criticisms made of Thatch for having too much faith in the free market could be made of the banker-loving Labour prime minister Gordon Brown, who even freed the Bank of England from state control. But Britain’s smart set saves its anti-capitalist anger for Thatcher alone.

All the traits in Thatcher that Thatcher-bashers claim to hate can be found in politicians of all persuasion. But it’s only Thatcher’s name that is said with a sneer; who is described as “evil”; who is said to have “poisoned Britain” and permanently changed the British people’s moral make-up through, in the words of The Independent, “implanting the gene of greed in the British soul”. Why?

Because Thatcher-bashing isn’t really linked to anything Thatcher did. Rather, it springs from the failures of the Thatcher-bashers, who have transformed Thatcher into an awesomely powerful, mind-controlling villainess as a way of explaining away their own isolation and disarray.

The ferocious loathing leftists have for Thatcher is directly proportional to the paucity of their influence over people.

As their intellectual and electoral fortunes declined, and their aloofness increased, so their fantasy of Thatcher as the omnipotent warper of the little people’s minds and destroyer of traditions intensified. They project their own failures on to Thatcher and her soul-remoulding superpowers. The word itself, “Thatcher”, always said with disdain, has become the Left’s catch-all explanation for why it isn’t taken seriously by the masses anymore.

Throughout the 80s, as chunks of Britain’s working-class voters abandoned the decrepit Labour Party and annoyed the hell out of the bien pensant classes by being vulgarly materialistic, it became fashionable to argue that these plebs must have been brainwashed by that mistress of might.

Radical leftists came up with a theory of “authoritarian populism” to describe Thatcher’s ability to win working-class support.

They viewed working-class Tory voters not as rational political beings but as cretins who had been mentally kidnapped by the hypnotic Iron Lady. They hated the aspirant working classes not only because they turned their back on Labour, but because they rejected the non-materialistic values of their betters in the Left set. They were described as “culturally barren and mildly brutish”.

A sociologist explained the hatred was because they had “middle-class income but lacked middle-class values”. In the words of social historian Caitlin Zaloom, these grasping workers “confounded the appreciation for restrained behaviour among England’s tastemakers and social commentators”. Anti-Thatcherites railed against the “cultural crassness” of affluent workers. In the words of one academic, they were outraged this section of society failed to “respond to the high-minded appeals of left-wing politicians”. That is, millions of working people were not only not voting Labour; they were cocking a snook at chattering-class decency, at the values of restraint, thriftiness and knowing one’s place.

The cultural elite needed an explanation for this slow-burning shift. Its explanation was that Thatcher had remoulded the minds of the moronic masses.

Unwilling to face up to the post-1950s decline and decay of Labourism in Britain, and unable to accept that working-class voters had simply and rationally lost faith in Labour and its patronising backers in the media and academia, the furious liberal elite invented a monster called “Thatcherism” and fantasised that it had corrupted the souls of once-decent, cap-doffing workers.

This naked disgust for “ordinary people” who dare to desire big houses and fancy cars continues. Shallow, shabby, blame-shifting anti-Thatcherism is still the political glue that holds Britain’s chattering classes together. It has everything they need: it lets them off the hook for failing to enthuse the public, and it explains away the desires of everyday people for a better life. And now they believe it falls to them to socially re-engineer the little people away from what The Guardian calls Thatcher’s irrational “cult of greed” and back towards Labour-backing, materialism-eschewing docility. They are at the forefront of the new political-cum-academic mission to depict material desire as a cause of mental illness and economic growth as a harbinger of eco-catastrophe, and to promote eco-thriftiness and state-organised “happiness”.

Behind supposedly radical Thatcher-bashing, there lurks a truly authoritarian urge to lower the little people’s horizons and make cocky workers re-conform to the “right” way of thinking.

Beware phony freedom

Sat, 06 Apr 2013 15:06:54 -0400

Today, I gave a speech at the annual Liberty League conference in London. The text is published below.

I was doing my weekly shopping recently, when I saw that there was a brand of toilet paper called “Freedom”. And I started wondering what kind of freedom is being offered by this toilet paper?

Is it a “freedom to” or is it a “freedom from”? I thought it could possibly be a “freedom to”, in the sense that purchasing and using this toilet paper would give a person the freedom to wipe their bottoms, something they would not be at liberty to do if they did not own toilet paper.

But then I thought the toilet paper could also be providing a “freedom from” – most obviously a freedom from stains. A freedom from uncleanliness, and also from the social ostracism that often accompanies that particular form of uncleanliness. So it’s possible that this toilet paper held out the promise of liberation from dirt, and liberation from social banishment.

Now, of course, that is ridiculous. This is really hygiene we’re talking about, not freedom. Hygiene is something very different to freedom. Cleanliness might be next to godliness, but it is not next to freedom of speech or freedom of association as one of the great liberties of the modern age.

Those old French revolutionaries did not take to the streets for the right to clean pants. The Chartists did not demand freedom from skidmarks. These people knew that making yourself clean was a purely physical, almost bovine act done in the most private part of the private sphere, whereas freedom involved exercising reason and using that reason to engage with the wider world outside of the WC.

Only a crazy toilet paper company, desperate to catch people’s attention, would denigrate freedom in this way, right? Only a business keen to shift as much bog roll as possible would dare to equate freedom with scatology, yes? Actually, you’d be surprised. These days, even in the upper echelons of the political classes, even at the highest seat of global politics, people talk seriously about the freedom to have a hygienic bottom.

So the United Nations has made access to water and sanitation into a human right. It talks about the universal right to “hygiene and environmental sanitation”. Last year, on something called World Toilet Day, the UN declared: “Eliminating inequality can start in the most unlikely of places: a toilet.” It went on to say that “the humble toilet can be a stepping stone to… greater human dignity, freedom and equality.”

How foolish of those revolutionaries of bygone eras who built barricades in their fight for freedom. Didn’t they know that if they had just built a toilet, and sat inside it, they would have achieved dignity and freedom instantly?

Now, I am all in favour of more toilets. I am all in favour of everyone in the world having access to a clean, flushing, preferably Gaddafi-style gold-plated toilet. And making that happen will involve further industrialising vast swathes of the earth and introducing proper sewage systems where they don’t currently exist – all good things. But I doubt very much that having a toilet will set people free. It will allow them to be cleaner, but freer? No, that is a bigger, public struggle, which actually necessitates stepping out of your toilet and looking at the world around you and your place within it.

So that “Freedom” toilet paper doesn’t look so crazy after all. In fact, it can be seen as the logical outcome of a situation where world leaders now devote much energy to fighting for the so-called freedom of sanitation and freedom of toilet-use.

In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if the UN started sending “Freedom”-branded toilet paper to the downtrodden of the developing world whom it so loves to patronise. “One wipe with this, and you will be free at last!”

The treatment of toilet matters as issues of “freedom” really reveals how casually and cheaply that f-word is used these days. And there are two ways to look at this. Either you can get really down about it and think to yourself: “Oh God, freedom has been so emptied of meaning that it is now literally something you can wipe your arse with.”

Or… you can be more upbeat, and take pleasure in the fact that freedom is still such a valued thing, such a valued idea, such a valued word, that it is used to give a positive gloss to everything – even the act of going to the toilet.

I think we should embrace that latter outlook. I think it’s actually pretty cool that we live in a world where the word freedom still has almost completely positive connotations. A world where hardly any politician would dare to diss the ideal of freedom, at least not openly, and where all sorts of household products or pastimes or development projects in the Third World get dolled up with the word “freedom”. What this reveals, I think, is that freedom remains the one ideal of the post-Enlightenment era that still carries a massive amount of social and intellectual weight.

Other words that were thrust into the public consciousness during the Enlightenment have fallen into disrepair. So sadly, “tolerance” is no longer taken seriously. In fact, people actively boast about being intolerant these days. They talk about taking a “zero tolerance” attitude towards crime or towards prejudice. You would never hear someone boasting about being against freedom, saying that they have a “zero liberty” attitude towards free speech, for example.

Likewise, Truth, that other great Enlightenment pursuit, is openly ridiculed these days. It is seen as an arrogant idea that doesn’t account for the diversity of opinions and the millions of mini-truths, or what I like to call “bollocks”. So during the recent debates about the national school curriculum, a leading teachers’ union declared: “What is known to be true changes by the hour.” You would never hear someone being so openly and insanely relativistic about freedom; people don’t say, “Our freedoms must be chopped and changed by the hour”.

Everyone treats the ideal or at least the word freedom seriously. Everyone pays at least lip service to it. The word freedom is used to sell us products, to sell UN interventions, to sell policies and politicians, because everyone knows freedom is seen as a good. The ideal of freedom has made such inroads into the human consciousness, has become so intertwined with how we see ourselves and think of ourselves, that it would be a brave person who stood up and said: “It is time for zero freedom.”

This does not mean, however, that freedom as a lived experience is not under threat today. It absolutely is. Many of our core freedoms, particularly freedom of speech, are being seriously undermined by a political class that doesn’t trust us to live freely. But here’s the thing: such is the value still attached to the ideal of freedom that now even attacks on freedom get dressed up as an expansion of freedom. Even the killing of freedom is disguised as freedom.

Today, it isn’t only toilet paper or sewage that is made to sound grander by having the word “freedom” attached to them. The erosion of everyday, lived freedom is also presented to us as “freedom”.

We live in an age of increasingly phony freedom, where our leaders promise us a new freedom that is actually an incursion into the old freedoms we were already enjoying.

So in recent years, the government has granted us what it calls “smokefreedom” – the freedom to walk into public buildings without encountering other people’s cigarette smoke. This, of course, is not a freedom at all, but its precise opposite: it is the top-down authoritarian rearrangement of public life to make it conform to the anti-smoker prejudices of the elite. That is an attack not only on the freedom of smokers, who are basically shunned from polite society, but on the freedom of all of us, since our ability to shape and negotiate public space as we see fit is done away with.

Officials also talk about “freedom from hate”. People should be free to go on to the internet or go about their business without encountering hateful or racist or sexist words. Radical campaigners also demand such “freedom” – “freedom from misogyny” or “freedom from online abuse”.

This, too, is authoritarianism disguised as liberty, because it is actually about clamping down on the freedom of speech of those we consider hateful or stupid. Promoting freedom from hate really means restricting the speech of the hateful. And considering that so-called hate speech now includes everything from being outright racist to simply being stingingly critical of the political ideology of feminism, it is remarkable how many ideas could potentially be kicked in the teeth simply to provide sensitive people with the “freedom” never to hear them.

Even one of the most insidious forms of authoritarianism of recent years – nudging – is justified in the name of freedom. It is referred to as “libertarian paternalism”, an oxymoronic nonsense that brings to mind Orwell’s phrase “freedom is slavery”. Nudging involves explicit elite attempts to remould how we think, to modify our behaviour, and to make us follow a path in life that officials consider to be the right one, all of which are dramatic attacks on our freedom to choose and our freedom of thought. And yet it gets called “libertarianism”.

Another example of phony freedom is gay marriage. Here, too, it seems pretty clear to me that what is in fact an authoritarian instinct on the part of our rulers is being dressed up, and accepted by many people, as an expansion of liberty.

The driving force here is the desire of the state to get its foot further in the door of private life, to assume something like sovereignty over how our most intimate relationships are defined and understood. This is about the authorities quite unilaterally overhauling an institution that actually has organic, communal roots.

The implicit authoritarianism of the gay marriage campaign can also be seen in the pathologisation of those who oppose it: they are branded bigots, psychological authoritarians, or homophobes, and as one writer reminded us recently, “homophobia is a mental illness”. Scientific American magazine has written gleefully about the “powers of peer pressure” in changing the “attitudes and behaviour” of those who oppose gay marriage. That doesn’t speak to a free and open debate about expanding freedom and equality, but rather to a pretty insidious process of conformism and self-subjugation to mainstream, state-led thought.

Time and again, the language of freedom is used to undermine the experience of freedom, the reality of freedom. Libertarians, I think, can take a little bit of pleasure in this fact, because it suggests that the ideal of freedom still has great purchase, so much so that even authoritarians must hide behind it… but libertarians must also devote themselves to explaining what freedom means, or what it ought to mean, beyond the word itself.

They must expose phony freedom. They should do this firstly by reminding everyone that freedom is always something you must fight for. Freedom must always be wrestled from authority. In fact, it is in the very process of fighting for freedom that you become free, or at least aware of your capacity to exercise and enjoy freedom. Through using reason, thinking independently and making demands of officialdom, our freedom grows, it expands, it becomes more possible.

If a freedom is given to us, then it isn’t freedom. It is a contradiction in terms to be “granted freedom”. When the government calls a press conference to announce that it is granting the populace smokefreedom, or freedom from hate, or gay marriage freedom, then it is incumbent upon libertarians to ask: what is going on here? Be critical, be conscious, be aware that, historically, all freedoms worth having have been won through serious intellectual or physical struggle.

And secondly, libertarians should remember how important moral independence is to the lived experience of freedom. They must ask, “Does this so-called freedom expand or shrink a person’s ability to think and act independently of the state?” If it expands our capacity for moral independence, that is good, something worth fighting for. Because as John Stuart Mill said, it is only through being free to make a choice, to make decisions about one’s life and destiny outside of officialdom’s hectoring, that one becomes a morally responsible person.

But if the so-called freedom being offered to us shrinks our moral independence, and makes us more reliant on the authorities to protect our fragile souls from smoke or from hate or from offence, then it is not freedom. It is chaperoning. And who wants to be chaperoned?

If you need the state to hold your hand as you go about your life and engage with other people and ideas, then you might actually be better off staying inside your toilet after all, and looking for your dignity in there.

This is the text of a speech I gave at the Liberty League conference in London on 6 April 2013

Welfare reform: it's class war, but not in the way you'd expect

Wed, 03 Apr 2013 07:08:42 -0400

Daily Telegraph, 3 April 2013

Comfortably off liberal campaigners are always bemused to discover that the working classes and poor do not share their love of the welfare state. Where radical middle-class students bravely spend bitterly cold evenings on pro‑NHS demos, and Left-leaning newspaper columnists write heartfelt articles about the importance of maintaining welfare payments, the less well-off seem totally unmoved by cuts to welfare.

Iain Duncan Smith, the Work and Pensions Secretary, has become the pin-up hate figure of well-to-do Leftists in recent weeks. They claim his trimming of certain welfare payments will spell “doom” for the poor, potentially propelling them into what Polly Toynbee melodramatically calls “beggary”.

Duncan Smith’s claim that he could live on £53 a week if he “had to” – after a benefits claimant told the BBC that that’s how much he gets by on – has further enraged the bien-pensant classes. An online petition calling on him to put his money where his mouth is and spend a week living on that amount of money has raised more than 150,000 signatures, after being frenetically promoted by liberal tweeters and journalists.

Yet while middle-class agitators fulminate against IDS’s reforms, the working classes and poor – many of whom actually receive benefits – have failed to follow them into battle. Opinion polls suggest these sections of society accept the need for welfare reform. Indeed, far from being fans of the welfare state, many of the down-at-heel seem to hate it.

Recent polls show that 64 per cent of Brits think the benefits system “doesn’t work”; 78 per cent think that if an unemployed person turns down a job, his benefits should be cut; and 84 per cent believe there should be tougher work-capability tests for disabled people.

Discomfort with welfarism has grown among the less well-off. According to a British Social Attitudes (BSA) survey, in 2003 82 per cent of people on benefits agreed that “the government should be the main provider of support to the unemployed”, but by 2011, three years into the downturn, only 62 per cent did. The proportion of working-class people who agreed with that statement fell from 81 per cent in 2003 to 67 per cent in 2011.

Agreement that “unemployment benefits are too high and discourage work” has risen steadily among the less well-off. Only 40 per cent of benefits recipients agreed with it in 2003, while in 2011 59 per cent did. Thirty-eight per cent of working-class respondents agreed in 2003 that welfarism discouraged work; 58 per cent agreed in 2011.

The lack of love for the welfare state among its supposed beneficiaries drives liberal campaigners nuts. Why, they wail, are those on the breadline so down about the glorious postwar system of welfarism, even though it has saved their ungrateful rumps from destitution?

In Monday’s Guardian, columnist John Harris, who regularly travels around Britain to find out what the little people think, bemoaned the fact that anti-welfare “noise” always gets louder “as you head into the most disadvantaged parts of society”. This echoes a recent Guardian editorial which complained that ordinary Brits have become “more Scrooge-like” towards welfare claimants.

Or behold the bamboozled Joseph Rowntree researcher Fern Brady, who was horrified to discover that the less well-off are not remotely “pro-welfare”. Earlier this year, Ms Brady interviewed 150 families who will be affected by benefits cuts and was alarmed to find that “the majority held the kind of attitudes that make the Daily Mail ’s headlines look positively Left‑wing” – that is, they were anti-welfarism, and stingingly critical of those who claim welfare, even though they themselves claim it.

Pity the poor, unthanked middle-class warrior for welfare rights! These lonely campaigners have come up with all sorts of theories to explain the poor’s failure to get off their lardy derrières and defend welfarism. Their favourite is the idea that the less well-off, being a bit dim, have been brainwashed by “scrounger”-hating tabloid newspapers.

Suzanne Moore of the Guardian says “the Right” has won ordinary people over to its welfare-cutting agenda through appealing to their emotional prejudices, and in such a climate “fact-busting has its limits”. That is, not even the Guardian’s apparently factually airtight predictions of the horrors that will unfold following IDS’s reforms are likely to wake the poor from their anti-welfare stupor.

In truth, if there really is dimwittery in this debate, it’s among the confused middle-class warriors for welfarism. They have failed, and failed miserably, to reckon with one of the iron laws of modern politics – which is that the more reliant you are on the welfare state, the more experience you have of it and the less you love it. And by extension, the further removed you are from the welfare state, the less experience you have of it, the more you can fantasise about its virtues and grow to love it. Or at least an imaginary version of it derived from watching Casualty and reading Polly Toynbee columns.

The implication in all the hand‑wringing commentary is that the less well-off should, by nature, be pro-welfare. And if they aren’t, they must be brainwashed by “the Right”. Yet Britain’s struggling communities have never been fans of welfarism, and for good reason: unlike columnists and campaigners, they’ve seen with their own eyes the devastating impact it can have on community life.

The BSA and Joseph Rowntree research that found the modern poor do not love the welfare state is entirely in keeping with historical working-class attitudes towards welfarism. From the Poor Law assistance of the 19th century, through pre-Beveridge forms of welfare in the interwar years, to the postwar welfare state itself, less well-off communities have been suspicious of external financial and therapeutic assistance.

In the early 20th century, as Pat Thane documented in a 1999 collection of essays entitled Before Beveridge, the less well-off hated new forms of welfare that seemed to entail “intrusion into working-class lives and homes, and seemed to imply that poor people needed the guidance of their ‘betters’ ”.

Poor communities found claiming welfare humiliating. Pamela Graves’ 2009 study, A Blessing or a Curse? Working-Class Attitudes to State Welfare in Britain 1919-1939, found that the early 20th-century poor “expressed very little satisfaction with their new status as citizen beneficiaries of state welfare”. They hated being told by early welfare activists, whom they viewed as “middle-class strangers”, how they should spend their money and even how to raise their children.

Graves cites one Max Cohen, an unemployed cabinet-maker of the Thirties, who believed that a proud man would “allow himself to be starved to death rather than beg the means of subsistence from others”. Apparently that was a common outlook among the poor of the early and mid-20th century.

These anti-welfare attitudes continued post‑Beveridge. And they can still be seen today, in those polls finding that substantial majorities of working-class people and even benefits recipients think modern welfarism is flawed and discourages work.

It actually makes perfect sense that the less well-off are hostile to welfarism, because they know the soul-deadening and community-dividing impact it can have. They know that being sustained by the state is a miserable existence compared with being busy, independent, self-reliant. They know that NHS hospitals, especially in the poorer bits of Britain, are far from the greatest human creations since the pyramids, and rather are often soulless institutions in which their ageing relatives are treated like animals and they are still told by “middle-class strangers” how to raise their children.

They know, from one glance at that defeated uncle or brother on the sofa, that offering “incapacity” benefits to the long-term unemployed encourages these people to see themselves as sick, rather than as having been failed by society. More fundamentally, they know that workless communities propped up by ceaseless welfare-state intervention tend to become ghost towns, bereft of individual initiative and lacking in social solidarity.

After all, if an individual’s or family’s every financial and therapeutic need is met by faraway faceless bureaucrats, what need is there for them to strike up relationships within their own communities, to get together with others in the pursuit of daily happiness or a better future? Welfarism, by coaxing the poor man into the all-encompassing bosom of the state, alienates him from his neighbour.

Who could love such a system, save those cushioned sections of society lucky enough never to have been mangled by it?

So, all you well-to-do campaigners for welfarism, there is no need to be bemused by the poor’s indifference to your battle. For what you love about welfarism – that it insulates the so-called “vulnerable” from the chaotic, often unfair world of the market and struggle – is precisely what the poor hate about it. And what you hate about IDS’s cuts – that they remove the “safety net” that many experience as a trap – might just be what the poor admire in them.

Read more of my articles for the Daily Telegraph and other publications here.

Saving footie fans from their inner fascist

Tue, 02 Apr 2013 13:28:56 -0400

spiked, 2 April 2013

Britain’s great and good get such a moral kick from opposing racism in football, from pointing a long and bony judgemental finger at foreigner-fearing Neanderthals in the stands, that if such racism didn’t exist they’d probably have to invent it. Oh wait, they already did.

This weekend, as the alleged scourge of footie racism once again elbowed everything from Syria to recession off the front pages, it became clear that there doesn’t even have to be evidence of racism for these fan-loathin’ moralists to get on their high horses.

The latest terraces incident to give these faint-hearted followers of football a fit of Victorian vapours involved England fans chanting allegedly horrible stuff about black brothers Rio and Anton Ferdinand. During England’s 8-0 win over San Marino last week, England fans are said to have shouted something about chucking the Ferdinands on a bonfire, in presumed vengeance for Anton’s role in toppling former England captain John Terry, whom Anton accused of calling him a ‘black cunt’. The England fans are also said to have chanted about Rio, who withdrew from the England squad in controversial circumstances, ‘We know what you are’ - apparently a cryptic reference (very cryptic, I fancy) to the fact that Rio, like his brother, is a ‘black cunt’.

Journalists who love football but loathe its lifeblood - its fans - almost smashed their iPads bashing out spittle-flecked columns condemning this foul anti-Ferdinands racism. The well-funded but not well-meaning ‘anti-racism’ industry that has sprung up to police fans in recent years shook its head in collective disapproval of England’s moronic chanters. This incident shows that ‘race hate is still part of our game’, declared the Mirror; it proves ‘English football is racist’, decreed the Guardian.

There’s only one problem with this puffed-up looking-down at racist English football: there’s no hard evidence that England fans chanted anything racist in San Marino last week. The Football Association, loving nothing more than to find some fleeting incident of fan racism it can be ostentatiously outraged by, has scoured video coverage of the San Marino game and has found no ‘recorded evidence’ of ‘discriminatory chanting’ by England fans. Football Against Racism in Europe (FARE), the pan-European group that made the complaint about England’s fans to FIFA, admits it had ‘no eye-witnesses at the game’ and says its complaint was based ‘partially on media comments’. But it remains convinced - in the same way Mormons are convinced that Joseph Smith found a golden book under a tree, I suppose - that at least ‘a handful of [England] supporters’ chanted racist stuff in San Marino.

Got that? On the basis of unproven rumours about unrecorded chants allegedly made by a tiny number of fans, the whole of English football has been denounced as racist. It’s enough to make Torquemada’s evidence-gathering methods seem judicious by comparison. Let’s call a spade a spade (that is not a racist statement, I swear): it’s pure hearsay that fuelled these latest fulminations against England fans. As a BBC headline put it, ‘England fan claims are hearsay’. Like those witch-burners of old who just knew that the old crone at the end of the lane was guilty of something, today’s fan-bashing, pseudo-anti-racist elites will light upon any whispered claim or half-baked tale to prove something that exists in their hearts, if not in the real world: that football fans, especially the blobby, tattooed, En-ger-land variety, are racist.

When the moralists who watch football through racism goggles aren’t being guided by hearsay, they’re getting carried away by hyperbole. The other isn’t-modern-football-foul? story that hit the headlines this weekend was the arrival of the eccentric Italian Mussolini-admirer and football legend Paolo Di Canio to replace Martin O’Neill as manager of Sunderland FC. Reading the coverage, you could be forgiven for thinking a zombie SS had goose-stepped into Sunderland to set up a ghoulish new headquarters.

Di Canio certainly has strange views, having previously claimed to be a fascist but not a racist, and having once being photographed doing an Il Duce-style salute while wearing a freakishly angry grimace. But the idea that his arrival into the game’s managerial elite will take us back to ‘the darker days of English football’, and is a sign that ‘football has lost its battle against extremism’, and is reminiscent of a time when it was acceptable across Europe to do fascist salutes (‘and we know what happened next’, warns one columnist, darkly), is bonkers. No, the moving to Sunderland of a balding, hotheaded Italian manager is not the same as the Night of the Long Knives. If you think it is, you need to read a history book. Or stop taking drugs.

The macchiato-spilling horror that greeted Sunderland’s employment of Di Canio is driven by the same prejudices behind the evidence-lite San Marino racist fans fiasco: the idea that English football is so brimming with dim-witted xenophobia, so close to going back to the banana-throwing days of the Eighties, that simply to have someone like Di Canio in a Premier League hotseat could potentially unleash mayhem. It is not really Di Canio, who after all is just one strange man, that observers fear; it’s the allegedly fascism-receptive seething pit of fans, the tattooed mob, refugees from the ‘darker days of football’, who might be marshalled by Di Canio’s wayward ideas and words.

What this weekend’s unhinged panic about football racism demonstrates is how much this debate is driven by prejudice rather than evidence, by elite fears rather than hard facts. In fact, the more that terraces-based racism fades into history, the more obsessed with it anti-racist poseurs become. There’s no correlation whatsoever between their moral crusading and historical, tangible reality. They desperately latch on to isolated incidents of a fan shouting something racist as evidence that ‘English football is racist’ - which is a bit like saying Morrisons is racist because someone from the BNP shops there. Today, racism in football is in the twisted eye of the beholder, or perhaps in the prissiness of the beholder: it is the fact that these fan-fearing prudes inhabit the shrink-wrapped worlds of politics, the media and quangos, where lingo is heavily policed and passion is virtually a crime, that they believe any expression of less-than-PC sentiment by 50,000 possibly sozzled blokes must by definition be hateful. More adept at adhering to linguistic rules than letting rip, they find stadium rowdiness utterly alien, and frightening.

The reason accusations of racism and fears of fascism can run ahead of any evidence is because the crusade against racism in football is not a response to any surge in hatred on the terraces, but rather to a lack in the lives of the crusaders themselves. This is really about addressing campaigners’ own need for a platform on which they can do some moral preening, and by extension their need for an inferior constituency they can morally preen themselves in contrast to.

This nurtures not only fact-free but also utterly inverted moral posturing. So for example, even though English football is brimming with black players, still it can be accused of being racist by the Guardian, a newspaper so white it makes FW de Klerk’s Christmas card list look like the census of Barbados. The last time the media industry did one of those self-flagellating ethnic-minority head-counts, the Guardian staff was found to be 4.9 per cent black or Asian - compared with English football’s whopping 30 per cent of black players. In the upside down world of moral panic about ‘football racism’, a sport peppered with and enjoyed by millions of blacks can be branded racist by a paper written and read predominantly by whites. Or consider former Labour foreign secretary David Miliband’s decision to resign from the board of Sunderland FC after Di Canio joined. Miliband has voted for or overseen wars on Iraqis, Afghanis and Libyans, yet still he can score moral points by taking a stand against the alleged racism of a football manager. You know racism has been reduced to a mere issue of social etiquette when a politician responsible for the deaths of loads of brown people can be cheered for flouncing out of a club because it was taken over by someone with an Il Duce tattoo.

The war on so-called football racism isn’t driven by principle, but by an old-fashioned fear of yobbos, and a loathing of how they behave for 90 minutes a week. Well, to employ a bit of terraces-style talk, if you don’t like what happens in football stadiums, fuck off somewhere else.

Read more of my articles for spiked and other publications here.