How To Be Right… in a World Gone Wrong

by James O'Brien

When people like him, and there are plenty who employ altogether more sophisticated language and sophistry to make similar points, demand that their right to free speech be respected, what they are really demanding is that their speech be free from scrutiny. John is entitled to make his ludicrous claim but feels that you should not be entitled to call it out for the racist claptrap it so clearly is.

We’ll look later at how one particular newspaper editor likes to obsess about such ‘values’ while routinely denigrating Parliamentary sovereignty, the independence of the judiciary and academic freedom, which seem to me among the most valuable of British values,

Take, for example, a few hardy perennials: immigrants undercut our wages, immigrants put a strain on public services and immigrants are responsible for the housing crisis. These are widely held and not particularly racist convictions, but even if you allow that they are partly true, which is not at all clear, immigration can never account for either the existence or the scale of the perceived problems. To be temporarily trite, substitute the three instances of the word ‘immigrants’ above for the word ‘people’ and you will see that exclusively blaming the former for the travails of the latter only helps to excuse the employers who aren’t paying decent wages, the politicians who are underfunding the public sector and the property developers who aren’t building houses.

Muslim listeners generally respond to calls like this by pointing out that they’re too busy doing the school run to be waging war against the kuffir. Or that they were going to do a bit of jihad, but something good dropped on Netflix. It is, for my money, the British way to respond to such misguided fury – with disarming humour, but Donald Trump and Steve Bannon have shown what a powerful political force that misguided fury can be when properly harnessed.

Frank gets quite angry now. It’s par for the course. He’s not, however, angry because he is being prevented from speaking his mind, which is the usual dishonest complaint. He’s angry because he has spoken his mind but has now been asked to explain himself; he is being asked to think. The conflation of ‘freedom of speech’ with ‘freedom to say silly things without being challenged’ and, more, ‘freedom to insist that people have to listen to me even if they think I’m ridiculous and/or dangerous’ is rarely quite as glaring as in this case.

Just like the Ukip MEP’s doughty defence of theoretical cakes, people have been telling me for years that the EU restricted their freedoms and imposed undesirable laws. And, for years, they have proved to be uniformly incapable of naming one. I must have asked dozens of times and faced the same cod answers: the conflation of the European Court of Human Rights with the European Parliament; the lazy and erroneous depiction of the EU Commission’s structure as being somehow less ‘democratic’ than our relationship with our own Parliament, civil service and Cabinet, and the final, desperate appeals to ‘blue passports’ and ‘fish!’

It was becoming almost surreal to see people like Nigel Farage retreat from previously stated positions and claim that the mandate achieved after suggesting that we could be like Norway or Switzerland would somehow still apply when the Prime Minister insisted that the ‘will of the people’ had determined we could be nothing like Norway or Switzerland.

I could, on any given day, fill the switchboard six times over with callers primed to rail furiously against ‘snowflakes’ and ‘social justice warriors’ who take offence too easily. Not a single one of them would be alive to the irony that they were taking violent offence at largely innocuous actions which they wouldn’t be remotely aware of if the media wasn’t committed to keeping them furiously offended on a daily basis.

This is real Emperor’s New Clothes territory for me. It sometimes seems that half the country is furiously convinced that so-called ‘snowflakes’ are too easily offended while they literally splutter with rage at a primary school’s toilet policy, a student union’s decision not to have a Rudyard Kipling poem on their wall or a non-existent flag removal.

‘Winterval was the collective name for a season of public events, both religious and secular, which took place in Birmingham in 1997 and 1998. We are happy to make clear that Winterval did not rename or replace Christmas.’

So there are a few strands here, but I think it’s possible to tie them all together. Fans of unfettered free markets balk at the notion of governments interfering in the breakneck pursuit of profit at any (legal) cost. ‘Classical liberals’ are similarly perturbed by the idea that they should have to moderate their behaviour or pay taxes in order to help a section of the population to which they don’t belong. The two combine to create a society in which money is all that matters, but in which ‘freedom of choice’ is used as a fig leaf to camouflage a callous commitment to an economic system which further enriches the already rich at the expense of the eternally poor.

Like a stoned student trying to choose a packet of crisps, I stared at the display for what felt like ages, because the massive tub was only a bit more expensive than the smallest and I couldn’t work out why. Consider now that the ice cream in question would consist mostly of sugar and fat. The costs of getting it from factory to customer would see transport, staff, promotion and premises rent far outweigh the cost of actually making the stuff. In fact, I realised, it cost so little to produce that once the other costs had been factored into the price of the smallest portion, any money spent on more ice cream would be almost pure profit. The pricing was literally designed to make me think that I was getting a bargain if I bought a gallon, and ripped off if I bought the smallest (least unhealthy) portion. I bought a gallon, though, ate half and promptly threw up.

To fully understand Trump and his supporters you need, I think, to actually feel that your whole life is somehow somebody else’s fault, that the status and respect you consider your due have somehow been denied you by gay people or black people or Mexicans or feminists.

If you can’t play the ball, as all bullies know, you try to play the man. Again, the ad hominems, like the slogans and the chants, become fig leaves with which the faithful can hide their abject failure to understand or think about anything.