Riding my Bicycle in a 'Smug, Racist Way', and first thoughts on Birmingham

I was in Cambridge on Sunday and Monday for an interesting conference on youth crime, at which I was the more or less lone spokesman for the British people. Cambridge is one of my favourite places on the planet,  which I first saw in 1963, where I went to boarding school between 1965 and 1967 and which I have visited countless times since. A reader complains that it is false for me to call Oxford and Cambridge ‘serene’ because of the mass tourism, half-witted town planning, ill-mannered modern architecture and slimy commercial greed which have done so much damage to both places.

Well, I was in fact referring to the past, when they were still linked by a railway line, in another country now as vanished as the lost City of Atlantis. But even so, the wise traveller knows that, in the depths of winter or in the still of the very early morning, these two places regain their mystery and beauty, and are still – if you know what they mean and what they are for – among the great sights of the world. Those who come to see them with understanding can still see that, through the mess. Others, bussed there in ignorance, unable to see their point or unwilling to recognise that they were, above all, built to the Glory of God, will experience nothing more than a theme park.

Anyway, as seemed sensible to me, I took my bike with me on the train, so that I could get round the town easily, quickly, quietly and cleanly. But the Twitter Mob were there before me. One person has recorded on the Electronic Mob Site that I ride my bicycle in a ‘smug, racist way’.  I wonder if someone could explain to me how I would have done this. Smugness I’ll confess to. Why try to deny such an accusation? Everyone’s smug from time to time.  But then we come to Racism.

This word,  as most people who read my words know by now,  is an expression which appears to mean one thing (racial bigotry) but actually means another (cultural and moral conservatism) . It cloaks a real attack in a false accusation. The real attack would,  if challenged require a real debate on what - if anything – is wrong with cultural and moral conservatism, and why the accuser thinks so. That would be interesting, and would compel the attacker to engage in actual discussion.  It cloaks it by camouflaging it with a false and defamatory suggestion that the cultural and moral conservative is (axiomatically) a racial bigot.  Thus, there’s no argument. The person dismissed as a ‘racist’ is not worthy of inclusion in the human family, and there is no need to debate with him. We can instead despise him. Thus, such people have no need to engage in a proper debate with their opponents. They subject them to what is in effect a citizen’s arrest on behalf of the Thought Police. The offender is carted off and never heard from again.

This, in my view( as explained in detail in my ‘Cameron Delusion’) is the deep reason for the disappearance of the specific word ‘racialism’ used in the 1960s, and its total replacement by the word ‘racism’ .

There are other reasons ‘ Racist’ is easier to shout and easier to scribble on a wall than ‘racialist’. But the real, serious purpose is different, and much more important.

Now, quiet how one rides a bicycle in a ‘racist’ way, I don’t know. If one rode it in a  ‘racialist’ way, that would presumably involve being discourteous and dangerous to people of a different skin colour, an objectively observable and proveable allegation. That’s why this word is so little use to my enemies.  It involves an accusation that can either be proved, or not proven. And that would never do. They’d need to justify it with facts.

‘Racist’, by contrast, is a matter of impression and the subjective prejudice of the accuser who assures himself that ‘people like me’ are morally despicable and seething with irrational hatreds. Oh, the irony.  As the subtext is an attack on cultural conservatism, was the problem that I wasn’t wearing skin tight Lycra shorts and a plastic helmet ? Or perhaps that my bicycle has unfashionable straight handlebars, an even more unfashionable bell and a profoundly unfashionable basket. Maybe my accuser could write in and say.

I am, as I write this, trying to listen to the Prime Minister’s speech to the Conservative Party trade fair and lobbyists’ festival in Birmingham. (By the way, I am sorry some people may have been misled into thinking that I was taking part in a  debate there on Tuesday evening. I turned down the invitation to do this in July, because I had no intention of subjecting myself to the ghastliness of these empty ‘conferences’ again. I am shocked to find that my name still appears on at least one guide to conference fringe events, and I hope nobody as misled by it)

I have found it hard to pay much attention to this oration, since Mr Slippery claimed to have exercised his veto in Brussels during last winter. As readers here will know well, he did no such thing.  There was no proposal made which was of the kind that he could have vetoed, and so he couldn’t and didn’t veto anything. He opted out, and was willingly allowed to do so by the rest of the EU, many of whose members welcomed his opt-out as it suited them too. Really, to claim this act as some sort of defiance of Brussels is on the outer limits of unscrupulousness.   The statement is terminologically inexact. And it is a very poor reflection on my trade that he was allowed to get away with it at the time, and hasn’t been found out since.

It is hard to hear anything else because of the noise I am making grinding my teeth in frustration that this piffle will once again go unchallenged. Now he’s saying that he wants for our children what he wants for his.

Oh, really, is that so? Then somehow everyone can have access to a chic, oversubscribed Church primary school with a tiny catchment and fierce annual competition for places? And later ( assuming he isn’t out of politics and free to go private by then) to some other wholly exceptional establishment which is in fact selective, but pretends not to be?  Exclusively for everyone? Does he believe what he is saying? Does he even think about it?

More analysis of this ghastly event will, I hope follow later.