Bread, circuses and the smell of fear

David Cameron has today delivered a speech on education, at the opening of the Norwich Free School.  It offers an astonishingly reactionary and in many respects deeply ill-informed view of what schools are about.  But it’s just the latest in a line of utterances in which huggie-hooding Dave, a man whom the Telegraph Blogs regarded as not quite one of us, has fallen in line with the ethos and values of the tabloid right.

So what’s happening?

One explanation is that this is the real Cameron emerging.  I think there’s some truth in that – I’m not sure anyone really fell for the “compassionate conservatism” inclusiveness schtick before the election, and here he seems to be reverting to type – the red-faced Bullingdon boy spluttering about feral youth and health and safety destroying the fabric of society.  You can take the boy out of Eton …

But I think there’s something much deeper than that, and I think a comparison with Margaret Thatcher is quite instructive.

Watching Cameron and Co, one’s respect for Thatcher as a political operator increases.  That old Cromwellian quote about the russet-coated captains, who knew what they fought for and loved what they knew, comes strongly to mind.  Thatcher made sure her people were looked after – she tapped into a deep populism through her sales of council houses, her attacks on unions, and so on.  On Maggie’s farm they always fed the pigs – Cameron expects the police to be the front-line against the effects of his policies while cutting jobs and pensions.  Thatcher was supremely shrewd at picking her battles. And she knew how to appeal to her natural support in middle England, even when the actions of her government conflicted with their interests.

Cameron and his cabinet of millionaires cannot seem to manage that.  Middle England is taking a colossal economic hit as a result of his – and more specifically Osborne’s – politics.  We’re seeing double digit increases in domestic fuel prices; the cost of a university education soaring; cuts to libraries and other services that Middle England relies on; house prices are falling;  changes to child benefit are hitting middle-class families hard; older people on fixed incomes, with interest rates close to zero, are being tanked. Of course the poor are being hit far harder – homelessness rose by a staggering 17 per cent last year, and cuts in benefits and services are taking as much as 20 per cent of the poorest’s incomes away – but Conservatives and Liberal Democrats do not care about the poor, except when it comes to making examples of them.

It’s impossible to imagine Thatcher attacking the living standards of her core supporters so hard.  In part there’s a difference in background; whatever one may think of Thatcher, for someone of her gender and her class to become Tory leader – a Tory icon, indeed – required energy, work, sheer guts.  It’s a world away from the monied ease of this cabinet of millionaires.  Thatcher knew something of adversity (despite enjoying huge personal privilege, especially by marrying a very wealthy man); Cameron and his cabinet know nothing of it, and lack the moral and intellectual capacity to deal with it.  Look at Cameron’s red-faced anger in the House of Commons when Labour people attack him; and his treatment of women MPs at PMQs suggests that there’s a rather nasty strand of misoginy behind the shiny mask.

So faced with the obvious fact that economic policy has become a disaster, and is hitting his supporters hard, it seems to me that Cameron has retreated into a world where life is easier. He’s taken up political residence in Daily Mail land, where he can rally his supporters by pandering to the atavistic instincts of his media supporters.  It’s an environment where the nasty tendency of the real world to bite back can be minimised, and where the inconveniences of contrary evidence can be comfortably ignored.  It’s the world where things are simple and that bloke Delingpole has a point.  He’s saying – you may not be able to afford to heat your house this winter, and your children are going to graduate with £50k of debt and no job prospects, but at least we’re articulating your values and standing up against political correctness gone mad.  It’s a world where he and his orchestra of Telegraph bloggers and Daily Mail leader writers can fiddle calmly while the economy crashes, and while the democratic deficit in our society acquires proportions that the economic deficit never possessed.

And it’s not about strength, or realism, or being honest, or any other of the words that Conservatives like to use when they’re indulging in fantasy.  It’s ideological bread and circuses, to distract Middle England from failures that Tories in Government cannot comprehend or begin to deal with.  And it’s a symptom of stark, staring fear.

 

The monster in your mirror

As more details emerge about Anders Behring Breivik, charged with carrying out the appalling massacre of dozens of participants at a Norwegian Socialist Party summer camp, it has been fascinating to see how the media has chosen to report the events.

First, the immediate assumption that this was an act of Islamist terror – and the fact that the media continued to press this line once it became clear that this was not the case – the Sun’s “Norway’s 9/11″ headline, but also the BBC – who ought to aspire to higher standards than that.  And then, once the fact that Breivik was no Islamist became clear, the lapsing into the easy journalistic clichés about loners.

But the comforting fantasy of the “loner” is ideological, as always designed to try and demonstrate that the individual is acting outside society, not part of it.  It’s one of a range of words that aims to show to the reader that Breivik (or indeed any other perpetrator of a shocking crime) is not one of us; monster, pervert, sicko – the repertory is large and predictable.  It’s a view that might especially appeal to those who believe that there is no such thing as society, to ensure that the person with whom we are dealing is definitively “the other”.  And there’s a more subtle distinction too – the reluctance in the British media reporting the Utoeya massacre to use the word “terrorism”, to try and isolate the incident and remove it from any social or political context.

But that won’t do.  Breivik clearly had links with far right organisations across Europe, including the English Defence League in Britain; and his actions are a reminder that the far right is resurgent across Europe and in Scandinavia in particular, with Islam as a principal target.  By attacking the Socialist Party, Breivik appears to have carried out a clearly targeted attack against the social democratic ideal that everyone associates with Scandinavia, even at a time when Sweden and Denmark have right-of-centre governments; this was an attack on the Scandinavian Model itself.  And it draws on a far-right tradition that has traditionally been strong in Scandinavia – through, for example, the practice of eugenics in the early years of the Twentieth Century – and has recently re-emerged in response to what is perceived as a growing Muslim population.

That this is a political act – an act of political terror – is implicit in the reaction of the Norwegian political establishment.  It’s a very mature and democratic reaction; Norwegian politicians argue that their country needs to ask questions about its values and democracy – in powerful contrast to the post-9/11 “Bomb them to Hell” reaction of George W Bush – the reaction of a weak man holding the highest office in a failing democracy.

This morning, the Independent published some of the collected thoughts of Breivik.  They are banal and surprisingly familiar; they’re not that different from what you might read in the comments columns of the online Daily Mail, or on the BBC’s “Have your say” sections on its website.  There is apparently a manifesto, which talks about how multiculturalism is attacking Christian society.  Breivik apparently holds beliefs that are shared by many people who comment on line – people who might use words like “common sense” to rationalise their fear of the other, or who would refer to the idea that one might acknowledge another person’s cultural viewpoint as “political correctness gone mad”.  There is a banality that forces us to look in the mirror, knowing that in our society those opinions are widely-held and not remotely unusual or abnormal.

The argument that Breivik was to some extent a product of his society does not absolve him of responsibility for his actions.  There are people who share his warped views of society everywhere – almost none of them go on killing sprees. But until we accept that society has a responsibility too I believe we cannot begin to understand and deal with the problems he represents.  And that means that there is a point up to which we all have to take collective responsibility for the values of the society we live in.

Where does progressive politics stand after 5 May?

Elections last Thursday saw conflicting fortunes for political parties across Britain – an SNP landslide in Scotland, annihilation for the Liberal Democrats in many parts of the country, Labour gains but the Tories taking enough seats from the Liberal Democrats for them to claim (with help from the supine media) they’re holding their ground, and a resounding defeat for AV in the referendum.

So, for progressives, where does this leave us?

On the face of it, the really big winners from this have been the Tories. They’ve got the election system they wanted, the one which gives the political establishment the smoothest ride and ensures the narrowest representation. This, combined with the reduction in the number of seats in the House of Commons, the mass appointment of Peers and the what appear to be strong hints that they will block House of Lords reform, means that they have consolidated their grip on power. Moreover, the balance of power within the ruling coalition has been made clear. The Liberal Democrats have been skewered – Vince Cable’s complaints about the Tories being ruthless and tribal (he’s only just noticed?) are no more than distant warblings from the bottom of the dustbin of history.

The position of the Liberal Democrats bears some examination. The question that they must answer is whether they have driven the Coalition in a progressive direction; essentially, whether life would have been substantially different under a majority Conservative government. In most of the essentials, the answer is no. Massive public expenditure cuts and NHS privatisation have not been prevented; the Liberal Democrat agenda on constitutional reform and civil liberties has been brushed aside; university tuition fees will be £9000 per year. All they have done is provided the means for the Tories to enact the shock doctrine, and been wasted in the process; a text-book model of useful idiocy.

The important thing to grasp about the Liberal Democrats, though, is that none of this is a sell-out. This is an Orange Book government – cuts and NHS privatisation were Lib Dem themes long before they got into government. The real betrayal is that Clegg managed to convince electors that his party was progressive. The lies were told during, not after, last year’s election campaign.

Labour did well – better than you would think from reading the mainstream media – but this was not a breakthrough performance. And, as I’ve argued before, Labour’s progressive credentials are weak. If you believe that the Tories’ cuts agenda is economically illiterate, then Labour’s policy of slower, fluffier cuts equally fails to deal with the causes and effects of economic crisis. And Labour remains the party of Iraq, Afghanistan, the party that introduced tuition fees, demonised those claiming benefits and rammed through legislation increasing police powers which criminalised dissent (the pre-emptive arrests of “known subversives” before the Royal Wedding – so reminiscent of how Eastern European states handled dissidents before the fall of Communism – took place under Labour powers). There are progressive people in the Labour Party but collectively it is a party that defends, rather than challenges the status quo, one eye always focussed on the Daily Mail. To adopt Tawney’s language, it has not yet got up of its knees.

But it wasn’t all bad news for progressives. The SNP landslide in Scotland is at one level a rejection of the shock doctrine, as Scots had the option of voting for a party that could claim to have defended Scotland from its worst excesses. More interesting was the steady advance of the Green Party – it still (outside Brighton and Norwich) has no more than a handful of councillors, but becoming the largest party in Brighton on an agenda that explicitly refuses to accept the arguments for cuts and privatisation. In Brighton there is no doubt that Caroline Lucas’ almost lone advocacy of economic and political alternatives at Westminster struck a chord, but here the Greens have built up their position over a number of elections, indulging in what looks like old-fashioned Liberal community politics (before it degenerated into the mindless activism that fuelled the Liberal Democrats’ reputation as the dirtiest fighters in British politics).

It’s an illustration, though, that the best hope for progressives now appears to lie outside the main party system, building a radical analysis within which to tackle individual issues. The student protests, the campaigns against corporate tax evasion and local opposition to cuts have had some success in driving the political agenda. It looks as if we’re in for a long haul – and there are some signs that the future of progressive politics will depend on building structures that will challenge the values of mainstream politicians, and break open the market consensus.

Cameron’s immigration lies

It must be local election time.  The garden is sprouting, the birds in the garden are nesting, and David Cameron is playing the race card.

Of course, being Cameron, he’s doing it in a relatively subtle way – not for nothing was he known as “Satan” in his days in public relations.  But the speech that he is due to make later today is a classic piece  of mythmaking.  Let’s deconstruct what he is due to say:

But there was something else we heard on the doorstep – and it was this: “We are concerned about the levels of immigration in our country … but we are fed up of hearing politicians talk tough but do nothing.” Here, again, we are determined to be different.

Now, immigration is a hugely emotive subject … and it’s a debate too often in the past shaped by assertions rather than substantive arguments. We’ve all heard them. The assertion that mass immigration is an unalloyed good and that controlling it is economic madness … the view that Britain is a soft touch and immigrants are out to take whatever they can get. I believe the role of politicians is to cut through the extremes of this debate and approach the subject sensibly and reasonably.

This is the PR man’s disclaimer – the smooth Etonian’s version of “I’m not a racist but …”  He’s also talking nonsense when he suggests that discussion of immigration is beyond the pale – something that can be disproved by picking up a copy of the Daily Mail or the Daily Express on any day of the week.

This approach had damaging consequences in terms of controlling immigration … but also in terms of public debate. It created the space for extremist parties to flourish, as they could tell people that mainstream politicians weren’t listening to their concerns or doing anything about them. I remember when immigration wasn’t a central political issue in our country – and I want that to be the case again. I want us to starve extremist parties of the oxygen of public anxiety they thrive on and extinguish them once and for all.

Nonsense.  Cameron was two years old when Enoch Powell made his “rivers of blood” speech in 1968.  As far as the oxygen of publicity is concerned, it’s difficult to see how a speech repeating immigration myths (more of which in a moment) is starving extremist parties of space; it’s in fact legitimising and taking over their positions.

or too long, immigration has been too high. Between 1997 and 2009, 2.2 million more people came to live in this country than left to live abroad. That’s the largest influx of people Britain has ever had … and it has placed real pressures on communities up and down the country. Not just pressures on schools, housing and healthcare – though those have been serious … but social pressures too. Because real communities aren’t just collections of public service users living in the same space.Real communities are bound by common experiences … forged by friendship and conversation … knitted together by all the rituals of the neighbourhood, from the school run to the chat down the pub. And these bonds can take time. So real integration takes time.

That’s why, when there have been significant numbers of new people arriving in neighbourhoods … perhaps not able to speak the same language as those living there … on occasions not really wanting or even willing to integrate … that has created a kind of discomfort and disjointedness in some neighbourhoods.

This has been the experience for many people in our country – and I believe it is untruthful and unfair not to speak about it and address it.

This is where some of the serious mythmaking begins.  First, the belief that immigration is an economic drain.  It’s actually nonsense – there is NO evidence that immigration has created pressure on services; in fact the evidence shows that immigrants are less likely to use public services – indeed that they contribute substantially more in taxes than they cost the public purse, helping to sustain our pensioners and health service.  And has he comes close to acknowledging elsewhere in the speech, many of our vital services, including the NHS, employ large numbers of immigrants to fill jobs that can’t be filled bylocal people.  And as far as integration is concerned, it ought to be obvious – even to an old Etonian who knows nothing of life outside his privileged bubble – that it’s a two-way street.  The history of immigration to this country is about people wanting to integrate but forced into ghettoes – physical and social – by racism. Ostracism and daily threats of violence are the texture of life among people of non-white, non-British backgrounds, and lecturing victims on accommodating the needs of the bullies is an inherently racist act.

I can see why this argument is made. Since 1997, the number of people in work in our economy has gone up by some 2.5 million. And of this increase, around 75% was accounted for by foreign-born workers … many of whom were employed to clean offices, serve in restaurants or work on building sites. At the same time we have had persistently, eye-wateringly high numbers of British born people stuck on welfare.

But let’s be clear about what our conclusions should be from this. This is not a case of ‘immigrants coming over here and taking our jobs’. The fact is – except perhaps in the very short-term – there are not a fixed number of jobs in our economy. If one hundred migrant workers come into the country, they don’t simply displace job opportunities for a hundred British citizens. Of course they take up vacancies that are available, but they also come and create wealth and new jobs.

The real issue is this: migrants are filling gaps in the labour market left wide open by a welfare system that for years has paid British people not to work. That’s where the blame lies – at the door of our woeful welfare system, and the last government who comprehensively failed to reform it.

So immigration and welfare reform are two sides of the same coin. Put simply, we will never control immigration properly unless we tackle welfare dependency. That’s another powerful reason why this government is undertaking the biggest shake-up of the welfare system for generations … making sure that work will always pay … and ending the option of living a life on the dole when a life in work is possible.

This is the most pernicious, disgraceful passage of all – the passage that puts Cameron beyond the pale of decency. Cameron’s answer to people who complain about immigration – it’s the fault of the workshy poor.  Of course, the workshy poor is a myth; life for those on benefits has become harder and harder in recent years, and a party which is quite happy to use the sacking of hundreds of thousands of public sector workers as an economic tool really needs to think quite carefully before attaching casual labels to those on benefits.

In summary, it’s a disgraceful speech. Cynical, dishonest, economically illiterate, based on the repetition of social myths wholly unsupported by evidence, with that particular brand of smooth mendacity that characterises Cameron’s political style.

In other words, it’s what Tories do at election time.

A rubbish proposal

More rubbish from the Coalition of the Clueless.  According to the BBC, the Government is about to announce the removal of local authority powers to issue fixed penalties to people who break the rules about refuse collection.  Only the most serious cases of fly-tipping will continue to attract sanctions.

Rubbish, it seems, is a big issue in Middle England.  The Daily Mail, the coalition’s spiritual guide, is full of stories about town hall bureaucrats who have the effrontery to require rubbish to be sorted, recycled, managed carefully.  The coalition promised action and that, apparently, is what we have got.  Dealing with waste is of course a serious issue – we as a society are running out of landfill and have an appalling recycling record, but nobody’s addressing that.

In my view, though, it provides an important insight into the Tory psyche.  Tories have problems with public space; fundamentally they don’t believe in it.  So we have rhetoric about bossy bollards restricting the right of the free-born English 4×4 driver to put his behemoth wherever he likes, and now about the right of householders not to sort their rubbish, or to put perishables out in inappropriate container.  Rats, urban foxes and, where I live in Brighton, giant feral herring gulls can be ignored; rubbish strewn across pavements because somebody doesn’t use their wheelie bin or puts bags out two days before the collection date is a far more trivial matter than the inalienable right of the individual to treat their refuse as they see fit, without interference from town hall gauleiters, as the Daily Mail would put it.

But it ought to be obvious that how humans dispose of their waste is a public issue.  Collective provision has been the norm throughout history; the issues of public health are obvious and even at the height of the age of laissez-faire, London’s sewers were provided as a public good.  One person’s inconsiderate rubbish disposal is the community’s rat infestation or public health problem.  It ought to be obvious – and in grown-up countries like Germany, where the duty of citizens to manage waste properly is accepted and enforced – it is obvious.  It’s only in Britain, where the coalition channels an increasingly infantile view of public space as the playground of the individual, that the sort of nonsense Caroline Spelman appears poised to announce would be tolerated.

Con Dem Britain seems increasingly to be about pandering to the inner toddler – about allowing immature people to stick their fingers in their ears, poke out their tongue, and scream “it’s not fair” when required to think about the wider interests of society, while ingesting cheap fizzy sugary rhetoric from the Daily Mail.  Sustainability starts when politicians grow up.

Lessons from Ireland

The Republic of Ireland has recently introduced an emergency budget to address the effects of the economic downturn.  It’s the latest in a set of measures in an economy which, to an even greater extent than Britain, has been dependent on speculation and booming property prices.  The contraction of the Irish economy has been savage – official estimates suggest it will be 8% in 2009.  The rhetoric is about stabilising the public finances in order to bring a huge deficit under control, to restore confidence in the Irish economy.

The Irish policy response is interesting because it reflects quite closely the sort of policy framework that David Cameron and George Osborne have been setting out for the UK, in opposition to Gordon Brown’s stimulus package.  So it’s a useful exercise to unpack it to assess what Conservative policy could mean for the UK.

There’s an interesting analysis at Though Cowards Flinch which demonstrates how, despite the rhetoric that those who earn the most should pay the most, some of the changes in the tax regime actually bear down hardest on those least able to pay, by reducing income tax thresholds.

But this follows on from the announcement earlier this year of the Pensions Levy, which is in effect a swingeing pay cut for public sector workers.  The justification is simple; public sector workers enjoy substantially better pension provision than those in the public sector, and should therefore pay more for it.  Understandably it has provoked fury and mass resistance in Ireland, and the recent budget package modified it so that that it did not apply to lower-paid workers.

It’s a measure that fits closely with the rhetoric coming from the British Tory Party and its supporters in the Press.  In particular, the Daily Mail has been banging the drum about featherbedded public servants and their gold-plated pension provision, and individual Tory spokesmen have been making guarded comments on the subject (ever mindful of the fact that there are 600,000 voters in the public sector who have to be convinced somehow that voting Conservative is in their interests).  Others, like London’s Mayor Boris Johnson, have been much more outspoken.

The truth, of course, is totally different.  Mailwatch dissects the poisonous rhetoric about public sector pay here better than I could and some of the specific lies about public sector pensions are nailed by the Secretary General of the PCS, Mark Serwotka, in a radio interview in December last year.  Mailwatch points to the fact that public sector workers – who are overwhelmingly among the lower-paid in our society – have enjoyed years of below-inflation pay increases, while the private sector has forged ahead.  It however forbears to comment on the spectacle of Cameron and Osborne – both of whom sit on piles of vast inherited wealth -denouncing as bloated the average public sector pension of £7000 p.a. – barely enought to equip a member of the Bullingdon Club with tails and waistcoat.

The official Conservative line is that nothing has been ruled in or out.  But if the Tories win the next election, watch for the assault on the public sector.

So why has middle England fallen out of love with the police?

For those of us whose political awareness goes back to the 1980s, one of the major changes in the political and social landscape has been the changing perception of the police among the middle-market tabloids and what passes for middle-class opinion.  Take a trip back twenty or even twenty-five years; Margaret Thatcher in No 10, the fight for local control of policing portrayed as the politicisation of the police by left-wing local authorities, the police portrayed by the media as the heroes of the miners’ strike.  A few years earlier, the apparent murder of Blair Peach by unknown members of the Special Patrol Group, who had gone tooled up to an Anti-Nazi League demonstration, was a cause celebre on both right and left.  Peach’s murderers enjoyed the wholehearted support of the tabloid press.

Look, then, at the headlines now.

Take, for example, the Daily Mail’s long-running campaign against Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Ian Blair (examples here and here); or, at a more basic level, a continuing campaign of press stories about police failures, insensitivities and general oppressive behaviour towards the decent tax-paying public of middle England – again, examples here and here.  Not so long ago, such stories were unthinkable in the Mail.

Former London Mayor Ken Livingstone had few doubts about why Blair was in the firing-line.  Livingstone argues that he has been a successful Commissioner and the falling crime-rate in London (and, despite the high-profile coverage of knife crime, it continues to fall) pulls the rug out from under the Tory party’s rhetoric.  Well, fair enough.  (And there is much in common between the Mail’s campaign against Blair and the Evening Standard’s long campaign of vilification against Ken Livingstone).

And much of the rhetoric is about that old hoariest of old chestnuts, political correctness, deemed by a certain body of opinion to be rife in our society.  I’ll come back to that one in a moment.

But it goes a lot deeper than that.  So, what has changed?  Here are some thoughts.

The paradox of more power

There’s no doubt that the police – as part of the generality of the apparatus of state – have gained considerably more power over the years.  Much of that, of course, is generated by the response to terrorism, but it’s also about more than ten years of a Labour government that is clearly running scared of being thought “soft on crime” and has therefore adopted a tabloid agenda, and quite a lot of tabloid rhetoric.  The paradox is that that crime has been falling, and, moreover, that even in the face of all this the tabloids still need crime scare stories – it’s a vital part of their pitch that there’s a rapist, a mugger, a paedophile on every street corner waiting to get you and your loved ones.  There’s another paradox; at the same time that the media bay for more state intervention, they are also determined to avoid their own readers – the forces of reason and enlightenment – from being targetted by the intrusive state.  So more police power is both a good and a bad thing – a good thing when it is used against other people, a bad thing when it stops the middle classes from getting away with driving too fast.  Accountability is for other people.

Mr Toad and Badger

Traffic policing is a good example of this.

In the old days, policemen were undoubtedly more deferential, and in particular the use of mechanical devices to police the road – and, in the unfailing rhetoric of the right-wing tabloids, to raise money for the police – has led to a degree of equality in enforcement that never existed before.  Put simply, speed cameras don’t recognise their social betters; automated enforcement means that the middle-classes are just as likely to get caught.  Now of course, the freedom of every free-born suburban Englishman to exceed the speed limit and park where he likes is one of the wearily familiar tropes of middle-class victimhood, but the sense that authority is doing to them what Middle England has been quite pleased to see it doing to others is surely behind the changes in attitudes

Police join the pampered public sector

Another trope of Daily Mail rhetoric; the pampered public-sector worker, sitting on his or her backside all day dreaming up pettifogging rules and being paid handsomely for the privilege, before sloping off to a retirement of index-linked luxury.  It’s all nonsense of course, but the police – who have not only been paid far better than most public servants but have traditionally enjoyed privileges that most would boggle at – the police house, retirement at 48, free travel – have until now avoided the odium.  Police officers were heroes who daily put their lives on the line.  Part of the reason for the change of heart is of course high-profile cases of police officers getting away with the sort of behaviour that would earn most other workers at least the sack and in some cases criminal prosecution; a nifty retirement on health grounds is usually the case (as in the case of some of the officers who failed to investigate the murder of Stephen Lawrence).  But part of this is pure consumerism; the police are no longer delivering what middle England really wants.

Middle-class victimhood

All of this allows middle England to have its cake and eat it: to call for a tougher society, and yet to resent that toughness when it is applied against them as well; and to allow the luxury of middle-class victimhood, in which the affluent and powerful can acquire a sort of illusion of worthiness; in the same way that people who don’t want to acknowledge their privileged position in society can bleat about “political correctness gone mad”.  And, for the Conservative Party, the London elections – with the big Tory swings in the suburbs – suggest that this is a tiger they can ride into office.

There’s obviously a debate to be had about the role of the police – indeed of the coercive state as a whole – in our society.  But what is happening now seems to me to be an exercise in maudlin self-righteousness, the moaning of the comfortably-off as a substitute for thought.

Utter, witless stupidity

I am grateful to that excellent blog The Enemies of Reason – which exposes the inanities of the British tabloid press – for this story, which seems to me to lay bare the utter imbecility that lies at the heart of what passes for quite a lot of public discourse in Britain today.

The Daily Mail was working itself up into a furious lather the other day about a leaflet on the dangers of child abuse circulated to 8-year-olds at a Worthing primary school a few weeks ago. The leaflet, produced by the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC), set out scenarios in which abuse was happening. The result was predictable – condemnation, outrage at the content, hasty withdrawal of leaflet by backbone-free head teacher. The comments attached to the Mail story tell their own story.

The Mail grudgingly gives an NSPCC spokeswoman the chance to reply. She refers to the fact – easily verifiable by anyone who is interested in the facts – that the victims of bullying and abuse tend to suffer in silence. The purpose of the campaign, she says, is to get children to speak out. And, yes, if that involves children learning that there are things that are right and wrong, and that what is being done to some of them is unacceptable, I believe that it’s absolutely right. Eight-year-olds are not stupid, but they are vulnerable, and if they are being abused they have already learned that there is nobody to stick up for them. It’s ignorance that does the real damage, and allows the abuser to get away with it.

So, what is the argument here? Are the Mail and its readers happy that children should continue to suffer bullying and abuse to spare the feelings of a moralistic few who want to ignore the facts, or wish them away? It’s an inference that is all too easy to draw. But I don’t think that’s the whole story here. I think this is yet another example of the appalling witless stupidity with which we in Britain deal with issues relating to children and sexuality (although of course abuse is about power, every bit as much as about sex), and how that stupidity is preventing us as a society from getting to grips with these issues in a grown-up and sensible way, least of all through proper sex education