Mr Rifkind’s Second Remonstrance – and a reply

Hugo Rifkind yesterday posted a response to my retort to him. Here is my reply to that (my answers are interleaved with his original words, and marked with asterisks ***) . 

1)    You ask "what is Nick Griffin doing here?" Well, you argue that his positions have no bearing on yours and that he does not share your principles. I agree with you. That is why I wrote that a traditional view of Britain has been “hijacked by the Nick Griffins of the world” and should not be “discredited by the unwilling association”. This, to me, seems to be exactly what you are saying. I am saying it, too. I am not using him to smear you. I am explicitly using him to say you should not be smeared. Why are we fighting about this?

***This seems to be having it both ways. If you think the traditional view 'shouldn't be discredited by the unwilling association', why mention him at all?  He and his organisation are both busted flushes. They played no significant part in the Olympic controversy.  I think his purpose becomes clear later, as I shall explain. You then give a summary of that sort of Britishness which is patronising, shallow and supercilious (scones, cricket and monarchy, tee hee).

 

2)      I meet quite a lot of conservative opinions, as it happens.

I’m the child of a former Conservative cabinet minister, after all. I frequently manage not to “mutter ‘BNP’, or ‘racist’ or ‘fascist’ and shut (my) mind” over Sunday lunch. I did not call you ‘racist!’ or ‘bigot!’ or ‘fascist!’ or ‘homophobe!’ as you seem to suggest. I called you wrong.

*** You'll be lucky to find many conservative opinions anywhere in the Conservative Party, let alone in the regions of it graced by your distinguished and charming parent. I strive, week by week and hour by hour, to dispel this particular delusion, that the Tory party has any connection with conservatism. I even wrote a book about it. I shall have to try harder. And no, you didn't call me any of those things, but you managed, in my view, ever-so-subtly to suggest that my opinions were, well, not quite respectable. But you did so in a willing-to-wound but afraid-to-strike way which made sure you would be miles away once the act was detected. We'll be back to that in a moment. But first I must deal with the assertion 'This is precisely wrong'. 'Wrong' is a pretty absolute word. I use it myself. It's quite easy to employ it when somebody has got his facts wrong. It's legitimate to say that such and such a policy is the 'wrong' way to achieve a certain objective, especially if you can demonstrate that it hasn't worked, explain why it isn't working or risk a prediction that it won't work (if it does, then you're the one who's 'wrong').

But to tell someone his opinion is 'wrong' is another thing altogether. 'Wrong'? You might argue that I was mistaken. But a world in which an opinion is 'wrong' is a world in which another opinion is 'right', and I think we know what sort of world that is. As elsewhere in your article, you don't actually know what you're doing.

First of all, as someone who isn't part of the cultural revolution and who has been opposing and criticising it for decades, I'm in quite a good position to describe how Mr Boyle's festivities strike people of my sort. You're not. How would you know?  Nor do you explain. You just jump straight into a declaration that you admired the show more and more. I don't think you're 'wrong' to have done so. I just think that illustrates the division between us, which might be worth debating. You said 'I don't care if it was propaganda'. I do care that it was propaganda, because my experience of the Soviet Bloc told me that propaganda was (as I said on the radio), a device for telling the losers that they were powerless and beaten.  Nobody believed all those slogans and claims. They just understood that the Party was vaunting its power.  You asserted :' It was the sort of propaganda we need'. Who's 'we'?  Not me. What did 'we' need it for? To say that I'm 'wrong' to hold my opinion is to presume an authority over which opinions may and may not be held which ( fortunately) you don't have. You disagree with me, that's all. The difference is important.

 

3) Frequently, you seem

*** Ah, it's that verb 'seem' again. I know not 'seems'.  Do I, or don't I?

to be suggesting 

*** and that word 'suggesting' that is so often coupled with it. If I have said this, you can take me to task for saying it. Otherwise, let's stick to what has been said.

   that I, or others like me (I am not sure who these people like me are supposed to be, or why I am like them)...

***There are several sorts. There are the deliberate revolutionaries who are openly my enemies, like the New Labour apparatus which tried to stop me asking Mr Blair any questions during the 1997 and 2001 elections, and which actually tried to deny me credentials to attend Labour press conferences  during the 2010 election - Shami Chakrabarti and the NUJ had to intervene on my behalf - and the various left-wing journalists who say rude things about me in their publications, too numerous to mention. And then there are the pseudo-conservatives who got cross with me for failing to join in the Cameroon revolution, so that my books stopped getting reviewed in their publications. Just for instance. Are you like them?  Not sure. I've never met you, though when I read what you write you fit in quite well with the conventional wisdoms I dislike. The article in The Times is evidence that you might well be more specifically critical, though.

...are trying to silence your voice, and voices like yours, or are chiding you for holding the opinions you hold.

*** If 'This is precisely wrong' isn't chiding, I don't know what is. Look, I don't claim to be persecuted. This isn't Alexander Solzhenitsyn territory. I know better than most people how much worse off I could be. But that doesn't mean that some people wouldn't like to shut me up, or that I broadcast less than I'd like to, or that my writings get less attention than they might if I fitted in better with the Zeitgeist. if you have been directly told by a senior BBC executive that you will never be allowed to present a programme on Radio 4 (as I have been) or been subjected to a surprise show trial on that station in your absence (as I have been) or been told by a literary agent introduced to you by a friend that he will not represent you because of the political stance of your book (as has happened to me) or if you have had the same book turned down ( as mine was) by every major publisher in London (it subsequently sold more than 30,000 copies, and was published with reasonable success in the USA), then you might begin to think that you weren't exactly fashionable. Why, even one of my former editors, the delightful Rosie Boycott, said to me 'I think everything you write is complete ****'.  She added a rather nice codicil,  because she's a decent person with a laugh in her, but I'm sure she meant it. And I don't think she's that unrepresentative of the London media classes.

'Emphatically, I am not. Be as wrong as you like, with my blessing.'

***Funny sort of blessing. And why would I come to you to check to see if my opinions were wrong?

 

4)      Regarding Mo Farah and Britishness, you write “unless he means that the new ‘Britishness’ is so loosely defined that it encompasses anyone”. This is precisely what I mean. Well done you.

*** Ah, well, yes, that is an interesting bit. In my view it is the most interesting bit . You wrote : ' Otherwise, Britishness is reduced to a trick for letting the aliens into the club without having to stop calling them aliens — a depository for all the folk whom other British identities still secretly don't want.'

Well, if that is so, what would be so wrong with being, as you said I was : ' somebody who feels that Britishness ought only to be the first of these, and saw a great spectacle designed to usurp it in the national psyche with the second.'

You've said that the second (Spice Girls) sort of Britishness is (if I have you right) ' a trick for letting the aliens into the club, without having to stop calling them aliens - a depository for all the folk whom other British identities secretly don't want'.

Let us be direct here. I cannot see any way of examining this passage without extracting the following meaning: A loosely-defined Britishness allows secretly prejudiced persons to pretend to be inclusive'.

That is surely a pretty grave accusation against this funky formulation. I should have thought it was devastating, actually.

So why would people such as me be 'wrong' to cleave to an older, deeper concept, more comparable (again, as far as I can see from your writing) to the concept of Englishness? Surely, by doing so, I reject any idea of a secret rejection, masquerading as a public acceptance. If I say Mo Farah is British, as I do,  then I am welcoming him into the comity of nationhood fully and without reservation.  Why would I then be  *wrong* to reject a spectacle designed ( as you quite correctly state) to usurp the Britishness we believe in, and replace it in the national psyche with another, inferior version?

And why am I coupled in this with Mr Burley? As it happens, I think Mr Burley was quite innocent in this matter. The Opening Ceremony was indeed a wilderness of multiculturalism, which I and (in his Munich speech of 2011) the Prime Minister regard with some dislike.  It was, as I said on the radio, a moronic inferno. But I don't agree with Mr Burley about the Rolling Stones, and I also don't do Nazi-themed fancy-dress parties ( and I think you'll accept that if Mr Burley hadn't attended a famous party of this kind, his tweet would have gone unremarked). Mr Burley has a similar role in this argument to the one played earlier by Mr Griffin.

Well, I've criticised you for using the word 'seems' and 'suggest' to portray me as having expressed opinions I haven't. So I won't go any further into this rather odd equation myself.  But if you mean what you say, then surely I ought to be complimented for holding fast to a richer, deeper variety of Britishness. Yet I am not. There is an element missing from the calculation. I am not sure that you are conscious of the problem.

So let me strip it to the bone:

Shallow Britishness is bad because it allows bigots to pretend to be tolerant.

Peter Hitchens is against shallow Britishness.

Therefore Peter Hitchens is wrong.

 

5)      You write “As I’ve said to him, I don’t think he has the faintest idea what I really believe.” I’m afraid you are right again. I’ve certainly tried, but your lengthy blog posts and columns perhaps leave it less clear than you imagine. I have thus never taken issue with what you might believe, only with what you actually said.

*** Not sure this is quite correct. See above

 

6)      In the column which so upset you,

***Can we please dispense with this idea that I am 'upset'.  I am not.  Why should I be? I am more used than most people to being disagreed with and criticised.  In quiet moments I can turn to the Internet to see the latest insults. As for Twitter, it is almost touching to see how many people think that the sentence 'Peter Hitchens is a ****' is an argument.  As I so often need to say, I have over the years been insulted by experts.   I didn't challenge your article because I was 'upset' but because I disagreed with it, and it gave me a chance to put my case before a new and wider audience. This patronising dismissal of opponents as 'angry' or upset is a rhetorical trick. Feel free to use it, but don't imagine that it works on me.

I examined your statement that the Olympic opening ceremony had been a political show intent upon "telling people who were not part of the cultural revolution that they had lost". I thought this was wrong. Not disgusting, not old and weird, not a view that should be silenced, just wrong.

***Once again, in a world where an opinion can be classified as 'wrong' , what is the next step?

I disagree with you, Peter. Are we clear on this? I do not thus feel you should be locked away.

***You don't. Some people do. And as our law protects freedom of speech and thought less and less, and there are more and more laws under which speech and writing can be limited (the most pernicious being the Public Order Act of 1986, but see my book 'The Abolition of Liberty' for examples of this process in action), they may well get their wish.

 

7)      Rather, I thought it was, as you say, a reconciliation between a traditional view of Britishness and a modern one. Or, to put it another way, I thought that rather than being a development of New Labour Cool Britannia crassness, it was a reaction against that. The fondness for the past, the reverence for the monarch, the acknowledgment of a mythologised rural past at the core of British identity – all of these things are very anti-New Labour.

****Here I would challenge you directly. New Labour, and its allies among history teachers (see my 'The Abolition of Britain') rewrote the past in a way very similar to Mr Boyle's carnival. And was the treatment of the monarch 'reverent'? I can find you quite a few monarchists, including this one, who thought it part of the transformation of the Queen from a constitutional monarch into the nation's favourite granny, what an old trouper, eh? Dignified? Don't think so.

 

8)      To me, then, Boyle’s vision of Britain encompassed conservatism in a way that Blair’s did not. You write that you are not personally reconciled. That’s fine. You don’t have to be.

***Thank you, sir. Most kind. But who, exactly, are you to give me permission to hold an opinion?

I’m talking about the reconciliation of ideas, rather than the reconciliation of people. You are perfectly free to remain as angry about this as you seem to be about everything else.

***There you go again. Patronising dismissal. You've never met me. You have no idea what makes me angry and I doubt if you ever will.  It is possible for you to accept that someone might feel other emotions than anger about the dismantling of his country?  Sorrow, regret, pain?

 

9)      Like I said, I’m afraid I can’t quite figure out what you mean

by Britishness, or why – or indeed, if – you feel it is distinct from Englishness. I was particularly impressed by the way that Boyle managed to do this, and in a not anti-English manner. If you felt his vision so offensive, I’d love to know how you’d have done it differently. Remember, we’re talking about Britishness unswamped by Englishness here. It’s not easy.

**** Since you ask, I wouldn't have done it at all.    A couple of hymns and some decent 1662 prayers, plus verses 7 and 8 of the 4th Chapter of St Paul's second epistle to Timothy, from the Authorised Version, would seem to me to be all that was needed. Why does an athletics meeting require a political opening ceremony?  Leave that to  less happier lands. Vast vainglorious propaganda displays of this kind seem to me to be, in themselves,  profoundly un-English and indeed un-British. I've seen quite enough of them, in Moscow, East Berlin and Pyongyang.  If you want to get an idea of what I mean by Britishness, take a look at page 92 of the Continuum paperback edition of 'the Abolition of Britain' ( mostly quotations from George Santayana and Rupert Brooke)   . You might also look at page 48 of 'The Rage Against God'  (Continuum 2010)  for a description of the sort of British ceremonial I approve of.                                                            

 

10)   You write, “He is the butterfly upon the road preaching contentment to the toad, I think.” I quibble only with the preaching bit.