What sort of country has a hospital bed as a symbol of national pride? And how free is speech in Olympic Britain?

 

I reproduce below an article which I wrote on Saturday for this week’s Mail on Sunday. It was necessarily brief, so I couldn’t resist the temptation to say a little more on the subject of the Olympic opening ceremony, and on the curious treatment – and subsequent behaviour - of the rather unattractive Tory MP who dared to criticise the event. By the way, I am also responding, ever so slightly,  the small platoons of Twitter users who, on Friday night, seemed to be hoping for an attack on the ceremony from me. And I am reinforcing my point, made in my Sunday column, that there is something unpleasantly totalitarian about the near-unanimity on the wonderfulness of the Olympic Games. I don’t claim to represent a majority opinion. What polls exist seem to suggest that my view is a minority one. But I do think that many people are keeping quiet about their doubts, much as they did during the Diana frenzy. Also, I think the fear of having the ‘wrong’ opinion is at least as great as it has been in any period of peacetime, and that is the really serious matter. The range of opinion which it is permissible to hold, without the fear of ostracism and possibly career damage, is getting narrower.

Here’s my Sunday article: ‘It was a social worker’s history of Britain, a nation of simple peasants, crushed and besmirched by evil top-hatted capitalists, but rescued in the end by the NHS, immigration, the suffragettes and the egalitarian strains of pop music.

I half-expected the giant Voldemort to transform itself into a menacing Thatcher figure, trampling, slashing and cutting every nice nurse in sight, and tossing bedsteads out of the stadium with a callous sneer.

It is a strange sort of nation that can turn a hospital bed into a symbol of national pride, especially in an era when you can die of thirst in one. 

But most people under 40 have been taught not to have pride in their country, so the Health Service is all they’ve got left. They have been cheated of any real knowledge of history. I’m not talking here about the Armada or the Empire – it’s hard to trumpet military glory when you’ve scrapped the armed forces, and the Olympics might not be the place for that in any case.

It’s our dogged insistence on liberty of thought, speech and assembly, that needs to be celebrated, in a world where arbitrary power and censorship are stronger every day. It is our greatest gift to mankind and we don’t even know it’s ours.

I’m sure Danny Boyle could have found a way of portraying that great tradition of limited government and human freedom that grew out of Magna Carta and flows through our history, and that of the world, like a mighty stream.

But to do that, he might have needed a few more words and a bit less drumming, miming and dancing. It was strange how little use he made of that other great possession of ours, the English language. Where were Dickens or Wordsworth, Keats or Tennyson?

As for Shakespeare, I suppose it would now actually be subversive for such an occasion to include the thrilling words of John of Gaunt’s dying speech ‘This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England’, for ‘England’ and ‘English’ are words that social workers don’t like to hear.’

Before I go any further, can I respond to the people who kindly pointed out that I had put Haverhill in the wrong county, and apologise to them. I shall correct this, as one who cares a lot about the counties.

But I do urge them to search the film clip out on Youtube (Haverhill, Cyclist, and Olympic Torch will bring it up) and then see if they care all that much where it was. It is astonishing to me that this hasn’t attracted more attention and criticism. I don’t, for instance, think the boy has ever been found or interviewed. There is a Dalek-like police comment referring to a ‘male on a bicycle’, which rather misses the point.

Also, may I respond to the ‘why do you never say anything cheerful?’ and ‘lighten up’ comments? Because it’s not what I write about, because there are plenty of others who do, because I think I should use my limited space to say what is not being said elsewhere but what, in my opinion, is important. I am suspicious of those who get annoyed by critical writing. My suspicion is that they do not want to see *any* such writing. After all, they don’t have to read it. My page is only one among dozens in the MoS.  Attacking me for writing it is an odd response. They are, unwittingly, doing the work of the new soft totalitarianism., which has already succeeded in closing down large areas of debate, and in demoralising this country’s patriotic conservatives to such an extent that they have lost the will to pass on their opinions to the next generation. The purpose of propaganda, especially lying propaganda, is to demoralise opponents.

Now, to that Tory MP, Aidan Burley, whose name keeps escaping me. He’s obviously a bit of a ninny , as we know from his dressing-up antics. But his remarks about the opening ceremony on Twitter were perfectly within the compass of British conservative opinion, and legitimate. I didn’t agree with him. I don’t think the Olympics are the place for military display or warlike patriotism, and I think the Churchill cult has more or less had had its day. The Battle of Britain was 72 years ago. It really is time this country achieved something else. As for the Rolling Stones, the Tory Party’s inability to understand that Jaggerism (the new hedonist cult of the self) is not their friend is one of the main reasons they are finished.

But was he wrong to detect a leftist tone in it? How about this, from the Guardian website on Sunday:

‘Paul Flynn, MP for Newport West, praised Danny Boyle for highlighting the NHS, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and the futility of war. "Wonderfully progressive socialist sentiments and ideas were smuggled into the opening romp," he wrote during a weekend that saw Prime Minister David Cameron and Tory loyalists distance themselves from a tweet by Tory MP Aidan Burley, who called the event "leftie multicultural ****".  

The Sunday Telegraph also reported that some Tory cabinet ministers, shown film of the opening ceremony rehearsals, expressed doubts about them at the time. This very interesting account is buried deep in the story, which is to be found here

Spin doctors have obviously been at work trying to make sure this one never got off the ground. Everyone is happy now. Or so they say.

Then there was Carl Sargeant, minister for local government and communities in the Welsh assembly government, who tweeted that the opening ceremony was "the best Labour party political broadcast I have seen in a while".

Mr Flynn, an independent-minded and thoughtful MP (with whom I disagree about much)  who has some very sensible things to say about antidepressants, and also about the route taken by the corteges of soldiers killed in Afghanistan, is no fool. He can see what I can see, and what Mr Burley can see. How can Mr Burley be citicised for pointing out a fact that it is obvious to lefties themselves?

But Mr Burley seems to have been got at  by some sort of Thought Police, surely a matter of interest for any who still harbour the pathetic belief that the Tory Party is in some way conservative. It is his membership of the Tory Party that has exposed Mr Burley to this pressure.  This is from the BBC website: ‘Speaking later to BBC WM Mr Burley re-iterated that he had not been having a go at multiculturalism.

"I agree it should be celebrated," he said.

"I wasn't having a go at multiculturalism itself, I was having a go at the rather trite way, frankly, it was represented in the opening ceremony."

He added his tweets might not have been the greatest thing for his career, but if it started a debate then it can only have been a good thing.

"We all love the NHS but really for all the people watching overseas, 20 minutes of children and nurses jumping on beds, that seems quite strange.

"And then we had all these rappers - that is what got me to the point about multiculturalism."

He said rap music was enjoyed by a relatively small section of society, young people mainly.

"Is that what we are most proud of culturally?"

This is all very odd. First he attacks multiculti. Then he says he's all in favour of it and that he celebrates it. I thought that multiculturalism as an idea had been disowned by the British establishment some time ago, in various major speeches, such as this.  Speaking in Munich in February 2011, a man called David Cameron said  : ‘Under the doctrine of state multiculturalism, we have encouraged different cultures to live separate lives, apart from each other and the mainstream. We have failed to provide a vision of society to which they feel they want to belong.We have even tolerated these segregated communities behaving in ways that run counter to our values.’ As I recall, this was reported as an attack on multiculturalism, which usually means that the spin doctors have told the political journalists that this is what it is.

Yet Mr Burley is now celebrating it. I could go on, but is this a case of being at war with Eurasia this week, and Eastasia next week? Mr Burley must be confused. Many others are to, Multiculturalism has nothing to do with race. On the absolute contrary, opponents of multiculturalism reject the idea that race determines anything, and urge that the host country ensures that migrants, for everyone’s good, adopt the culture of the country they have chosen to live in. 

The crucial difference between meaningless  'race' and significant culture is explored by the excellent Dr Thomas Sowell in his book ‘Race and Culture’. It is also, interestingly, illustrated in modern cultural conflicts in Japan (where ethnic Japanese migrants from South America have had major cultural differences with neighbours raised in Japanese culture, and in Singapore where ( as recently reported in the impeccably liberal New York Times) mainland Chinese people are encountering hostility from Singaporean Chinese people, entirely because of cultural difference.

In both cases, culture is shown to be far more signoiicant than ethnic origin, and wholly separate from ethnic origin. Yet those who seek to preserve national monocuture as smeared as 'racist' bythe left. This is demonstrably false.

This is why many civilised people are increasingly wary of multiculturalism, which creates competing solitudes and undermines the essential national fellow feeling of national communities.