Nobody can call themselves a civil liberties campaigner while suggesting that unpleasant speech should be criminalised
It was only a matter of time before the frenzied condemnation, Tory-bashing and virtue-signalling which met the publication of a controversial Thatcher-era memo from Oliver Letwin and Hartley Booth turned into suggestions that law enforcement should get involved.
Step forward “civil liberties” campaigner Darcus Howe, who – seemingly forgetting what civil liberties are – decided to weigh in against Letwin.
The Guardian reports:
Civil liberties campaigner Darcus Howe has condemned remarks about black communities made in the 1980s by the prime minister’s policy chief after the Tottenham and Handsworth riots, describing the comments as “bordering on criminality”.
Oliver Letwin was forced to issue a statement apologising for any offence caused when a confidential memo from 1985 was released by the National Archives in which he blamed unrest on “bad moral attitudes”.
In a confidential joint paper, Letwin, who is now MP for West Dorset, and inner cities adviser (and later a Conservative MP) Hartley Booth, tell the then-prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, that “lower-class unemployed white people had lived for years in appalling slums without a breakdown of public order on anything like the present scale”.
The men warn Thatcher that setting up a £10m communities programme to tackle inner-city problems would do little more than “subsidise Rastafarian arts and crafts workshops” and that any help would only end up in the “disco and drug trade”.
“If a black man had said something quite like that he’d have been called into Scotland Yard and and he might be charged with incitement to riot. It is bordering on criminality,” said Howe, who was a prominent figure in black rights campaigns in the period the document was written.
Let’s be clear: Oliver Letwin’s words, and the sentiment behind them, were reprehensible. And yes, they were far from an isolated case, just as elements within the Metropolitan Police were once institutionally, unabashedly racist.
For all the necessary good that the Conservative government did to turn Britain around in the 1980s, we should not deny that some decidedly unsavoury elements – as typified by the arrogant, cloistered high Toryism displayed by the youthful Letwin – also rose to power on Margaret thatcher’s coattails. And yes, this included some high-handedly ignorant and unreconstructed ideas about race, as the Oliver Letwin memo reveals. On that much, there should be no argument.
But to draw such fresh outrage from a decades-old incident as some are now doing – or to make impetuous calls for Letwin to resign or even face criminal charges, as Darcus Howe is openly hinting – would achieve nothing, and change nothing about the past.
Oliver Letwin may be guilty of having held some unpleasant and ignorant views on race back in the 1980s, but there is no suggestion that he has at any time practiced discrimination on the basis of race, committed acts of violence or even said anything which might be considered a “hate crime”, even by Britain’s low standards of evidential proof.
Besides which, what is the statute of limitations on having once expressed some nasty – but at the time commonly held – political or social ideas when serving in public office? Are people to be permanently disbarred from public life for ever having said or thought the “wrong” thing? And are we so pathetically naive that we expect those politicians who pass our stringent tests to be anything other than those who are smart enough not to get caught, or to commit their deepest and darkest thoughts to paper in the first place?
The Left have a dangerous tendency to weaponise race and social issues, focusing so much on dealing out instant political death to anyone who treads on one of their verbal land mines that they fail to actually deliver the “social justice” they so ostentatiously seek.
And the hysteria surrounding Oliver Letwin’s 30 year old memo is just another example of seizing any opportunity to bash the “Tory scum” (how much more lenient would people be had, say, John McDonnell uttered a similar sentiment back in the early 1980s?) while failing to do any serious policy making of their own. After all, how much easier is it to cry “racism!” than it is to stand before the electorate with your own newly minted policies designed to deliver true equality of opportunity for all Britons?
But worst of all is the predictable irony of a so-called civil liberties campaigner making dark threats about criminalising speech. Any civil liberties campaigner worth their salt knows that the battle for free speech is won or lost at the margins – that the battle will be fought not over pleasant small talk about the weather, but over rude or intemperate speech which may be very offensive to some very vocal people.
Oliver Letwin expressed some truly unpleasant thoughts in his recently unearthed memo, and Darcus Howe is free to criticise him for it as much as he pleases. But if Darcus Howe or anyone else want to include threatening musings about “criminality” or being hauled in by Scotland Yard in their howls of outrage, they should take off the white hat of virtue first – and stop pretending to care about civil liberties.
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For many people, of course, The Nutcracker is the quintessential Christmas music. But I have long felt that Tchaikovsky’s unfairly neglected third piano concerto has an equally festive and magical quality, one which also happens to work better as a standalone piece.
The third piano concerto was left unfinished, with only the first movement completed at the time of Tchaikovsky’s death. However, second and third movements do exist in the form of separate piano outlines which were fleshed out and orchestrated by Sergei Tanayev.
Few recordings exist of the piece in its entirety, but there is an excellent Naxos recording as well as several on YouTube.
The festive atmosphere of the first movement and its hushed bassoon opening contrasts well with the beautiful second movement, which always puts me in mind of a snowy town or village on Christmas night.
When and wherever you happen to be celebrating the holidays this year, I wish you, your friends and family a very Merry Christmas.
2015 has been a very good year for this blog. The frequency of posts increased dramatically as we covered the general election and its aftermath, and we have kept up the pace ever since. There are now new articles nearly every day, as well as a more lively Twitter feed.
The net result has been an increase in readership of nearly 400%. This blog is still small, but a number of articles have caught the attention of influential MPs, journalists and activists. And nobody recognised or wrote about the eventual cause of Labour’s general election defeat before this blog, though many others have subsequently swooped in to take credit.
Semi-Partisan Politics will continue to grow and flourish as we enter 2016, and will campaign – loudly and unapologetically – for the following goals and ideals:
Brexit: freedom from the European Union
Democracy and national sovereignty
Constitutional reform and a federal UK
Separation of church and state
Healthcare reform, not NHS worship
Smaller, smarter government
Free speech, without restriction
Fighting timid centrism on the Right
Fighting empty virtue-signalling on the Left
If you agree with these objectives and have enjoyed this blog’s coverage over the past year, please do consider using the PayPal tip jar to make a small regular contribution or a one-time donation:
Any reader donations will 1) be a personal ego boost to myself, 2) help me to do more original reporting, like the successful live blog of this year’s UKIP annual conference, and 3) help me promote this site and the work of other like-minded writers so that we can actually make a difference.
As I swiftly learned this past year, writers don’t get paid very much (unless you are Owen Jones). This blog is written in my spare time around a day job, usually between midnight and 3AM, and is available to everyone free of charge.
However, small donations from individual contributors are not only greatly appreciated, but also help to preserve independent journalism and commentary in general – so that nobody has to rely exclusively on the BBC, the Guardian or the Telegraph to understand what’s going on in our country and around the world.
If you are happy getting all of your news, analysis and commentary from the BBC or the big national newspapers, then by all means carry on. But if you value independent writing which is not beholden to any party, clique or the Westminster establishment, then please consider helping to ensure its continued existence by donating a couple of quid to the independent sites which keep you coming back for more.
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With the help of my informed and generous readers, 2016 will be another record-breaking year for Semi-Partisan Politics.
Many thanks to all of you, and a very Merry Christmas.
Jeremy Corbyn’s restive but cowardly shadow cabinet members have refused to put up or shut up with their concerns about his leadership. Therefore, he should fire them. Now.
Rumour has it that Jeremy Corbyn had finally had enough of spineless Labour shadow cabinet members who choose to serve under him by day but run to the newspapers with sensationalist quotes attacking him by night.
Jeremy Corbyn will spend the Christmas break planning a reshuffle to oust his most prominent shadow cabinet critics that is due to be announced within weeks of the New Year, The Telegraph understands.
The Labour leader and his aides will spend the next fortnight working out how to replace leading internal critics with allies in major a departure from his initial conciliatory top team.
Hilary Benn, the shadow foreign secretary, and Maria Eagle, the shadow defence secretary, are high on the target list after their public opposition to Mr Corbyn over Syrian air strikes.
Good. A reshuffle is long overdue.
Let us not forget that it is the restive Labour centrists currently murmuring and plotting within Jeremy Corbyn’s shadow cabinet who are responsible for his rise – and the rise of the hard left in general – in the first place.
Hopelessly pathetic Labour leadership candidates like Andy Burnham and Yvette Cooper inspired such little inspiration among the party grassroots with their centrist non-vision that Corbyn, an unreconstructed socialist, won the leadership contest by a landslide.
And for the past five years of Conservative coalition rule, the Labour centrists – working under Ed Miliband – engaged in a hysterical, sanctimoniously moralising form of opposition which tolerated the most ridiculous anti-Tory hyperbole in the pursuit of power. This approach – incorporating such tactics as ranting about the supposed “human rights” abuses of the Evil Tories – gave a green light to the crazies and far-left types who have now taken control. The centrists tried to ride the far-left tiger, but were eaten by it.
And yet these losers – these Labour centrists who could barely motivate their own families to vote for them – have the temerity to mutter their discontent to the national newspapers, even while serving in Jeremy Corbyn’s shadow cabinet and being loyal to his face.
These are some of the anti-Corbyn quotations briefed to just one sympathetic journalist, Dan Hodges, by those dull, craven shadow cabinet featherweights who sanctimoniously claim to have the best interests of the Labour Party at heart:
If even one of these quotes had been made by a restive shadow cabinet member about Ed Miliband, such brazen disrespect for the office of Leader would have been front page news, and news channels would have led with stories about an imminent resignation from the Labour front bench.
But under Corbyn’s leadership, the normal rules of behaviour have been suspended – Corbyn’s shadow cabinet feel free to brief against him every day without doing the decent thing and resigning, and the spectacle has become so unremarkable that each instance serves only to add colour to other news stories, rather than making headlines on their own.
Mass shadow cabinet resignations. A dramatic stalking-horse challenge. Poor-health. An act of God. The bulk of the PLP yearns for anything that will bring an end to their Corbyn nightmare. Anything, that is, that does not require an act of courage or defiance from themselves.
And these people actually aspire to govern us. They have the nerve to represent themselves as our future leaders. Ask us to place in their trembling, fumbling hands decisions of life and death, health and happiness, war and peace.
They will not get their wish. There is no 100,000 strong army of “moderates” riding to their rescue. Good. Labour’s spineless parliamentarians no longer deserve salvation.
The current situation is quite simply untenable. The Labour centrists lost the general election, the Labour leadership election and the argument. They lost. They utterly failed to present a compelling political vision of their own, and so they were turfed out in favour of the Corbynites, who do actually stand for something (however unappealing that vision may be).
Jeremy Corbyn’s shadow cabinet are duty bound to serve the man who won their party’s leadership election. That’s how it works. If they have irreconcilable differences with Corbyn on fundamental matters of policy or leadership style, they should air their dissent from the backbenches after having resigned on principle, and not continue to moan and whimper while clinging on to their thoroughly unremarkable front bench careers.
So I say bring on the Corbyn cabinet reshuffle. Those who brief anonymously to the newspapers but lack the courage to air their grievances directly do not deserve their positions of seniority.
May many cowardly heads roll this Christmas.
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The hysterical left will always call conservatives “Tory scum” and hate us with a blind, unthinking rage. It’s time to stop cowering at their attacks and apologising for our values
As 2015 draws to an end, we still have four and a half more years of David Cameron’s wishy-washy, ideologically rootless, Conservative In Name Only government to look forward to, followed by a general election which will almost certainly deliver another five years of blandness.
For small government conservatives and libertarians, this continual betrayal of principle is bad enough. But as an added insult, it also means four more years of being spat on and called “Tory scum” by demented far-left types who view David Cameron and George Osborne’s half-hearted attempts to pare back the state as the modern-day equivalent of Nazi war crimes, and who have no reservations in publicly saying so. Not very appealing.
That’s why the time has come for conservatives of all stripes to finally seize back the word “Tory” from the haters and reclaim it with pride, rather than meekly and apologetically crawling around and apologising for our values – values which saved this country from decline and irrelevance three decades ago, and can do so again if only we fully unleash them.
In his article, entitled “Why I’ve Become Tory Scum”, Tony Parsons calls out the Labour Party and other forces on the Left for the sanctimonious nature of their campaigning during the general election, and their utter inability to empathise with their opponents – or even entertain the thought that those who oppose them might be doing so from a position of legitimate, morally valid disagreement.
Parsons points out:
The general election was decided not by shy Tories but by us reluctant Conservatives. The millions like me who saw nothing but catastrophe in Labour’s addiction to high taxes and big spending, their loathing of success, the way they could use a word like “mansion” with a straight face and, above all, that endless pious prattle about the NHS – as though the British have no other identity but as a sickly, enfeebled, diseased people in need of having our bottoms wiped by the state from dawn till dusk.
But the truth is that David Cameron’s government is very much an unremarkable continuation of New Labour. Far from being a son of Thatcher, Cameron and his leadership team are very much the heirs to Blair, and would bear comparison with many centre-left governments around the world. The Conservative Party, even under Thatcher, has in many respects always been to the left of even the Democratic Party in the United States, and certainly is so now.
Of course, you would not think that the Conservatives were in any way moderate, judging by the hysteria among many vocal parts of the Left, who present David Cameron’s steady-as-she-goes paternalism and tentative deficit reduction as some kind of outrageous economic shock treatment combined with “human rights” abuses worthy of the Nazis.
Tony Parsons ponders why this is so:
Why are those of us who believe in a different economic model – one where aspiration is encouraged, where the state gets out of your way and doesn’t spend money it doesn’t have – morally reprehensible? Exactly why are we scum? History suggests that, when presented with the chance to vote for socialism the British people always run as fast as we can in the opposite direction. It doesn’t make us bad people. But the left have lost the argument and are reduced to shrieking abuse.
But then the hysterical far left have always talked about conservatives thus, and they always will. Parsons recognises this as he writes:
The loud left are as pertinent to modern Britain as blacksmiths. No wonder their protests are increasingly ugly. They react with furious disbelief at the result of a democratic election. They rave about balancing the nation’s books as if it was like drowning kittens in a sack. They scream in our faces about their own compassion while bandying around epithets like “scum” and “filth” with the vicious abandon of Nazis talking about Jews.
Since the abuse will never end, clearly there is nothing to be gained from running from it any longer. Nor is there anything to be gained by continually apologising for core conservative principles – free individuals and strong families, fiscal conservatism and a prohibitive national defence – as the current Conservative leadership sadly continues to do.
What British conservatism and libertarianism really need is their own version of Jeremy Corbyn – someone who unapologetically sticks to their principles, refusing to water them down for political expediency, and who seeks to lead and persuade rather than conform to the results of the latest opinion poll or focus group.
Or to use a West Wing analogy, British conservatism needs a Matthew Santos-like figure, someone willing to proudly wear the “Tory” label just like Santos refused to apologise for being a liberal in the famous presidential debate episode:
Speaking up for American liberalism in a way that one can only wish David Cameron or George Osborne would do for small government conservatism, Santos says to his Republican opponent:
What did liberals do that was so offensive to the liberal party? I’ll tell you what they did. Liberals got women the right to vote. Liberals got African-Americans the right to vote. Liberals created social security and lifted millions of elderly people out of poverty. Liberals ended segregation. Liberals passed the Civil Rights Act, Voting Rights Act. Liberals created Medicare. Liberals passed the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act. What did conservatives do? They opposed every single one of those things. Every one.
So when you try to hurl that label at my feet – liberal – as if it were something to be ashamed of, something dirty, something to run away from, it won’t work, Senator. Because I will pick up that label and I will wear it as a badge of honour.
Of course it is almost unimaginable for a conservative to ever talk this way, with such passion, partly because we tend not to make such grand claims for ourselves in reshaping the world or forcibly changing human nature in pursuance of our goals. It is not in our nature to brag about our accomplishments, because the biggest accomplishment a conservative can aim for in government is to get out of the way and help remove obstacles from others so that they might reach their full potential.
But more than this, British conservatives since Margaret Thatcher have had precious little to brag about. Locked out of office under thirteen years of New Labour, the Conservative Party which emerged under David Cameron has made so many compromises with triangulating, Blairite centrism that there are almost no genuinely conservative policy victories or changes in the country which we can claim.
What are we supposed to brag about? Remember when the Tories stood up to the growing climate of intolerance toward freedom of expression, and formally codified a British citizen’s right to free speech? We can’t say that because it didn’t happen. Indeed, under Theresa May Britain is becoming an even more authoritarian police state than it was before, with human beings languishing in our prisons simply for saying, singing, or tweeting the “wrong” thing.
Remember when George Osborne struck a blow for fiscal conservatism, rallied the country with his argument that it was morally obscene for government to spend more on debt repayments than education or the military, and achieved a real budget surplus in order to finally begin paying down the national debt? We can’t say that either, because although Osborne is happy for the public and lazy journalists to believe that the Tories are “paying down Britain’s debts”, in reality the government is doing no such thing.
Conservative supporters truly have the worst of both worlds at present. We are attacked by the furious Left for an ideologically-motivated attack on the state and its poorest dependants, while in reality almost zero real conservative reform is being enacted. We are stuck with the leftist abuse, but have absolutely nothing positive to show for it.
If David Cameron’s Conservative Party was voted out of office today, what will future historians and political commentators say about this government fifty years from now? What will be the Cameron / Osborne legacy? What edifices of stone, statute and policy will remain standing as testament to their time in office? Try to picture it clearly.
Are you happy with what you see?
No real conservative should be happy with what they see right now. Assuming that the political pendulum will at some point swing back in favour of the Labour Party, we conservatives have almost nothing to show after five years of David Cameron other than a half-finished job clearing the budget deficit. We have a reanimated Ted Heath sitting in Downing Street, not a worthy heir to Margaret Thatcher.
But just as the American Tea Party lay conspicuously dormant for the many years of fiscal profligacy and budget-busting spending under the George W. Bush administration only to miraculously awaken when a man named Barack Hussein Obama won the presidency, so the hysterical British Left are now shrieking bloody murder over a set of very pedestrian, middle-of-the-road centrist policies being enacted by the Conservative Party after having airily ignored the very same governing philosophy when the now-hated Blairites were in charge.
As conservatives, we realise there is no point in launching a futile battle against human nature or the instinct of many on the Left to demonise that which they do not or cannot understand. They will continue to call us “Tory Scum” and we have no control over that.
But we do have the power to take back ownership of the label “Tory” and refuse to see it as an insult.
We do have the power to point out that there is nothing virtuous or compassionate about throwing more money at unreformed healthcare and welfare systems, or spreading the wealth around so much that wealth creation is destroyed or driven overseas.
We do have the power to proclaim the importance of fiscal conservatism, not out of some wonkish obsession with balancing the books but because running up further government debt today is a blatant act of intergenerational theft, living at the expense of our children and grandchildren. And because as we have seen with other countries, excessive national debt can become a foreign policy and national security issue too.
We do have the power to point out to anyone who will listen that the modern Left love to parade their virtue and ideological purity but have apparently given up on coming up with alternative policies of their own, and to demand that Labour produce some costed tax and spending plans rather than simply railing against the inhumanity of the Evil Tories.
We do have the power to point out the many ways in which David Cameron’s pitiful excuse for a Conservative government ignores or betrays real conservative values, and to declare “not in my name”.
The Left are not going to change, so we had better get used to the spitting, the vandalism, and the overwrought, emotional and short-termist way in which they discuss public policy.
But we can change. We can stop lying down and taking it every time a virtue-signalling lefty pontificates on welfare without offering a plan of their own, or seeks to win an argument on healthcare by stoking the public’s idolatry of the NHS.
We can stop fighting on the Left’s terms.
And who knows, if small government conservatives and libertarians actually succeed in getting off the back foot for the first time since Margaret Thatcher left 10 Downing Street, we might even manage to salvage something from David Cameron’s woeful premiership.
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Semi-Partisan Politics 