A Few Thoughts on Extremism and Interruptions in Debate

On Sunday morning I took part in the BBC programme ���The Big Questions���. The two subjects were the government���s worrying plans to pass laws restricting ���extremism���; and the growing clamour for the removal of all remaining laws against abortion. I made a few fairly brief but (I hope) pithy contributions . My friend and (often) adversary Douglas Murray makes a very interesting point at just after 30 minutes into the programme. After admitting the problem is pretty insoluble, he says:  ���This government ��� doesn���t particularly have the confidence to say Britain and British values , British institutions ��� we���re basically trying to make it liberal values,  that Britain will be about liberal values, about gay marriage���

I��� think this is a big mistake��� It���s all very well saying make people liberals but doesn���t mean ���that you make them��� British or with any other sense of identity

���.Because the British government has decided that the best thing we can do is to make  should make people vaguely liberal then it means that the qualificatiions for extremism are effectively conservative ideas������

I think this is a very smart observation, though I would go further. I think the government intended from the start that liberal, PC ideas would be the ones that were to be reinforced by law and culture. It���s moved from crude multiculturalism to exaggerated neoconservative concern about Islam for precisely that reason.

I���m often criticised by people who watch these programmes for supposedly being rude and interrupting others.  In fact a member of the North Oxford audience came up to me afterwards and dealt me a double-edged compliment by praising me for trying to stop my two immediate neighbours from heckling all the time, suggesting that this was in some way uncharacteristic.

Well, I do sometimes interrupt people, but I have two reasons for this. Presenters (and I do not criticise Nicky Campbell here)  are under terrific pressure during live programmes, listening to feedback from the director as well as trying to control a room full of voluble people. They can���t be expected to be scrupulously fair about time. If you want to have your say (and if you don���t, why go on at all?) you sometimes have to fight your way in. Likewise I expect to *be* interrupted, and will fight against it when I believe I have not finished my point. It���s normal. If you can���t take a joke you shouldn���t have joined.

I try to time my interventions for point where speakers have made their point and are drifting because they don���t know how to stop (a common problem among those, who, unlike me, don���t get interrupted by other audience members or the presenter) or when they have just said something solid with which I can directly disagree. I tend to think the people who object to this actually just object to me, and would rather I never spoke at all. Which would be the case, if I didn���t look after myself. But I try not to talk over and heckle people in mid-flow, when they have the floor.

 

The programme can be watched here

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b07d3hk9/the-big-questions-series-9-episode-17