What if the Question Time Audience is Representative After All?

What if the BBC’s Question Time audiences are in fact truly representative of public opinion? It’s a favourite belief of beleaguered conservatives that the studio crowd assembled for this programme is in some way selected to reflect the BBC’s own view of the world.

 

But I am not sure that it is wise to cling to this belief. For at least 20 years now, the British public have been subject to a stream of propaganda and re-education all the more effective for being subtle. The borders are not closed. It’s not illegal to listen to foreign radio stations. Conservative newspapers, magazines and books continue to be published. There are independent schools. People such as me appear on the panels of discussion shows, though under interesting conditions. 

 

Frankly, if the old Communist regimes of Eastern Europe had had the sense to allow such safety valves, they might still be in power. As long as the young were imbued with the regime’s world view, as long as mainstream TV seldom if ever departed from the agenda of equality, diversity, globalism, climate change, as long as comedy, drama and soap operas were all under the control of pro-regime ideologues, not to mention the book review pages and the bookshops,  supporters of the old regime could continue to live in a world of their own, while the government got on with its purposes.

 

British conservatism – I use the word widely – has really been talking to itself for the past quarter-century. Since the collapse of the Thatcher project, which was never that good in the first place, it has been an exile community, a bit like the Jacobites after 1745.

 

It  has enjoyed itself complaining about Labour government, but never really understood what Labour was doing or why. And it has, in its heart, repeatedly accepted Labour’s legitimacy and right to rule.

 

The final hours of the last majority Tory government ever, in 1997, were not a moment of grief and fear, but a gentlemanly departure, leaving the garden tidy as they went off to relax at the cricket. I never met a senior Tory in that era who genuinely felt robbed or sorry.

 

Yet the Blairites came charging into the seats of power, bursting with plans to transform the country irrevocably (Andrew Neather’s amazing outburst about immigration lifted the veil on a tiny corner of this immense project). The neutral civil service, already tottering, was simply destroyed. The Prime Minister’s Press Secretary, armed by Orders in Council with unprecedented and unconstitutional powers, became the head commissar of an irresistible, centralised executive. The independence of the House of Lords was smashed. Northern Ireland was sold to the terrorist gangsters. Even the monarchy was co-opted and made subject to Alastair Campbell, after the death of Princess Diana. Huge, irreversible steps were taken to merge our sovereignty with that of the EU, many of them involving the independence of the armed forces. And so it went on.

 

And the Tories sat about, making daisy chains,  until the day they believed inevitable, when some pendulum or other would swing them back into office. They never fought against the Blairite ideology. Most of them quietly accepted it.

 

Those were the worst years in which to be an ex-Marxist, seeing a government with at least four 1960s revolutionaries in it in senior positions (none of them open about their pasts or anxious to discuss them, let alone willing to renounce or condemn their past views -by contrast with my good self) , and listening to deluded old Tories saying ‘That Tony Blair, best Tory Prime Minister we ever had, haw haw’.

 

They seemed to think that because he hadn’t nationalised the ice cream industry, or raised the basic rate of income tax, he wasn’t the head of a radical government. Didn’t they understand that the Left these days cares about culture, sexual politics, open borders, the constitution and the ceding of sovereignty to supranational bodies, plus of course the expansion of a vast client state of welfare recipients and public service workers? No, they didn’t.

 

During that period, the Blairites sought to get the message across to the Tories – you can’t come back into office until you have surrendered to our policies. This was made plain by Mr Blair himself, at an amazing meeting in Kettering, towards the end of the 2001 ‘election’(in truth there was never any contest, so completely had Tory Britain conceded the right to rule).

 

He said ‘"At this election we ask the British people to speak out and say the public services are Britain's priority, to say clearly and unequivocally that no party should ever again attempt to lead this country by proposing to cut Britain's schools, Britain's hospitals and Britain's public services. Never again a return to the agenda of the 80s."

 

I was there when he said it, and I managed to ask him (it was a sparsely-attended occasion and the election was really all over) if he wasn’t presuming a bit, telling the Tories what they should think. He looked a bit vague and Bransonish, and avoided the point. By that stage he and I were both going through the motions.

 

But while all this was going on, the schools (backed by the BBC) were teaching everyone our new multiculti history, and our new climate-change dominated geography, and our new post- Christian sexual morality. And it worked!

 

A Survation poll in the Mail on Sunday showed that support for same-ex marriage among the under-35s is 73 per cent.  50 per cent of Tory voters b back it too.  It’s only among the pre-revolutionary population, the over-55s, that there is a majority against it, and it is not a very big majority.

 

I suspect most middle-aged people don’t really have strong feelings about the issue one way or the other. Christian sexual morality more or less collapsed when divorce-on-demand became legal in the late 1960s.

They’ve just realised that the majority is now in favour, and it’s simpler and more convenient to join in.

 

I’m not advancing an argument here, just stating a fact. I don’t use the phrase ’silent majority’ (I may have done long ago, but I can’t recall when) because I have long suspected that there isn’t one. The fact is that propaganda works, and people like being in the majority.

 

The question of what is right or wrong, on the other hand, cannot be answered by opinion polls, and never will be.