SPECTATOR: In praise of the Batley binmen

by Brendan O’Neill

If you need someone to support your right to freedom of speech, forget the teaching unions. Don’t look to the commentariat. And don’t even bother with the Labour party, many of whose younger, angrier members will often be found in the ranks of cancel-culture mobs calling for someone or other to be erased from polite society for having blasphemed against a trendy new orthodoxy.

No, it’s the binmen you want to turn to. It’s the nation’s fine refuse collectors who will back you up when your liberty to speak is being pummelled.

Consider the case of the Batley Grammar schoolteacher who was suspended for showing his pupils an image of Muhammad during a religious studies lesson. Alarmingly, that teacher is still in hiding, fearing for his life. He has received death threats simply for doing what all good teachers should do: challenge their students to consider difficult moral questions.

The supposedly liberal establishment behaved shamefully in response to the demonisation and harassment of the teacher. Batley Grammar itself, in the face of angry protests outside the school gates, suspended him. The school essentially ‘threw him under a bus’, the teacher’s family said.

The teaching unions stayed almost entirely schtum about the case for ages. ‘It would not be appropriate to make any further comment’ while the school is investigating the incident, said the National Education Union. Not appropriate for a teaching union to comment on the fact that a teacher had received threats to his life and is now, according to his father, ‘devastated and crushed’, an ‘emotional wreck’?

In which case, why do teaching unions even exist?

The political class wasn’t much better. Tracy Brabin, then the Labour MP for Batley, now the Mayor of West Yorkshire, praised the school for dealing swiftly with this incident that had caused so much ‘offence' and 'upset’. She essentially sided with the protesters who wanted a teacher punished for blasphemy — these days referred to as ‘offence' and 'upset’ — rather than with the teacher and his right to free expression.

But not everyone has turned their backs on this persecuted teacher. Enter the binmen of Bury. Shaming the intellectual elites, these workers have taken a principled stand on behalf of the teacher and his right to free speech in the classroom.

The Bury branch of Unite, which represents refuse collectors, has put forward a motion championing the Batley teacher. The emergency motion, submitted for consideration at the National Conference of Trade Union Councils in June, urges all unions to back the teacher.

The motion points out that England’s blasphemy laws were formally abolished more than a decade ago and insists there should be no ‘dogmatic restraints’ on our right to discuss religious matters, including Islamic matters.

The proponent of the motion is Brian Bamford, secretary of Tameside Trade Union Council and a retired electrician. He says:

‘This is a motion which has come in from binmen, from ordinary working people… Freedom of expression is very important. I don’t feel guilty in any way for taking a stand on this issue.’

Bamford says an NEU official contacted him and asked him to consider withdrawing the motion. Apparently the official told him the motion ‘risks inflaming what is an extremely sensitive and very complex situation’. An NEU spokesperson said: 'It is a sensitive issue and the NEU did ask for the motion to be withdrawn. With every viewpoint that is expressed our members face yet more public exposure.'

Got that? Binmen and other working-class union members want to express support for a teacher who has been hounded into hiding for a supposed speechcrime, and a teaching union official is reportedly saying to them, ‘Please don’t do this’. This is bonkers.

These binmen have shown us what true solidarity looks like. Their support for the Batley teacher is in keeping with the best traditions of working-class activism. They saw someone being harried and silenced merely for displaying a religious image and they’re not having it. More power to their elbow, and their motion.

They have also shown up what passes for the liberal establishment these days. Too many people in positions of power treat freedom of speech as a negotiable commodity rather than as a core principle of democratic life. Too many turn away — or nod along — as people are shunted out of polite society merely for criticising Islam, or asking questions about transgenderism, or making an un-PC joke. Get 12 weeks for £12

Plus a free bottle of Digby Fine English fizz

Many so-called liberals now consider the right not to be offended to be more important than the right to free expression. So when they saw that fuss outside Batley Grammar, they instinctively sided with the right of the protesters to glide through life without ever having their religious beliefs called into question, rather than with the right of a teacher in a pluralistic democracy to use his freedom of expression to challenge and enlighten his pupils.

Thankfully, there are still people, like those Bury binmen – and of course like the Free Speech Union – who understand that no one has the right not to be offended. Who understand that freedom of expression is more important than any individual’s feelings or any religion’s diktats? Binmen for Free Speech — it’s exactly the campaign we need right now.

Written by Brendan O’Neill

Brendan O’Neill is the editor of Spiked, the online magazine.

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Batley Grammar School capitulation

by Brendan O’Neill in The Spectator

The capitulation of Batley Grammar School has been a truly dispiriting sight. In response to protests by angry Muslims it has suspended a teacher for the supposed offence of showing a caricature of Muhammad to his pupils. This is an extraordinary act of moral cowardice. Batley Grammar has buckled to religious extremists, cravenly begging for forgiveness for something that ought to be perfectly acceptable in an institution of learning — encouraging young people to engage with and discuss controversial issues.

Everything about the Batley Grammar controversy stinks. It began when a teacher at the prestigious West Yorkshire school, as part of a religious education class, showed his pupils an image of Muhammad. Some Muslim groups that caught wind of this fact started stomping their feet. Mohammad Sajad Hussain of the Islamic charity Purpose Of Life said Muslims will feel ‘deeply hurt’ by the teacher’s behaviour and demanded that he be ‘permanently removed’. At 7.30am yesterday morning a group of mostly young men gathered at the school demanding that the teacher be sacked for the allegedly awful sin of displaying an image of the Prophet.

What happened next was staggering, even by the standards of today’s yellow-bellied culture of self-censorship. Batley Grammar’s headmaster, Gary Kibble, suspended the teacher — pending an investigation — and issued a ‘sincere’ and ‘unequivocal’ apology for the ‘totally inappropriate’ display of the Muhammad image. The school also put on hold the part of the religious-studies course in which the Muhammad incident occurred. And it is being reported this morning that the school has switched to remote learning, telling teachers and kids to stay home.

Forget the religious-studies teacher, who was only doing his job by encouraging his kids to confront all sorts of issues head-on. The true scandal here is the behaviour of the school. It has surrendered to religious intolerance. What next — Mr Kibble standing outside the school gates and flagellating himself for the blasphemous transgression of allowing an image of Muhammad to appear in one of his classrooms?

Bizarrely — but also predictably — the school has been cheered on by so-called progressives. Tracey Brabin, the Labour MP for Batley, says she is glad the school has recognised ‘the upset and offence’ it has caused and has now ‘apologised for the offence caused’. Well done for repenting — that’s effectively what Brabin is saying.

So is it Labour policy to support the suspension of teachers who hold open, frank discussions about Islam? Does Labour support the punishment of public servants who are accused of engaging in blasphemy? We should be told. Many Labour voters in Yorkshire and elsewhere will be keen to know if Labour now backs the public shaming of people who are accused of holding blasphemous thoughts against Islam.

That’s surely the central point in all of this: Britain is not an Islamic country. We do not live under Sharia law. It might be a punishable offence in Islamic nations to make or display an image of Muhammad, but it isn’t here. So what is going on? Why has a teacher been suspended and a school reportedly closed over something that is perfectly legal and perfectly acceptable in an educational context: encouraging discussion of religious icons and controversies?

Batley Grammar’s capitulation will inflame religious intolerance. It will embolden those who believe they have the right to bully and silence anyone who ‘disrespects’ Islam. Moral cowardice is the fuel of contemporary censorship. It is the negative energy on which the zealous crusaders for speech-control feast and get fat. Every time a cultural institution, a publisher or a school yields to the demands of the easily offended, the arrogance of modern censorship intensifies and faith in liberty dims further.

The idea of ‘Islamophobia’ plays a central role in contemporary censorship in Britain. Batley Grammar is being accused by some of inflaming Islamophobic sentiments. This is a slippery way of conflating discussion of Islam with racism; of treating critical discussion about a world religion as a species of racial hatred. But of course, as everyone ought to know, it is perfectly possible to criticise Islamic ideas and even to ‘diss’ Muhammad without harbouring a single hateful thought against the Muslim community.

This controversy is more than dispiriting — it is chilling. The teacher has reportedly been given police protection. That isn’t surprising given that, just a few months ago, a schoolteacher in France was beheaded by a radical Islamist for also initiating a classroom discussion about images of Muhammad. In such a climate anyone who is whipping up opposition to the Batley teacher, or engaging in spineless apologetics for those who are, should be utterly ashamed of themselves.

This teacher needs our support. The school has failed to give him its support, so perhaps the Prime Minister will? Boris Johnson, teachers in 21st-century Britain should be free to engage mature pupils in discussions about Islam and Muhammad — correct?

Brendan O’Neill is the editor of Spiked, the online magazine.

Lockdown sceptics should support this lockdown

Editorial Comment: THE Spectator ran an article on the 6th, January by Alistair Haimes, who had until then been a enthusiastic lockdown sceptic, which called on others to support the current government Lockdown. As a consequence of this both Will Jones on the LOCKDOWN SCEPTIC WEBSITE and Les May on the NV Blog have responded with their views on posts displayed below on the NV Blog.

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Scepticism is supposed to be the bedrock of science. But where scepticism shades into cynicism it can be as blind to changing events as the unexamined credence it claims to displace. Scientific belief should be based on informed supposition which is then rigorously tested against the evidence — that is the basis of the scientific method. There should be no shame in changing opinions and assumptions when facts change. We start with assumptions, test them against the evidence (which itself changes) and then use that conclusion to repeat the process, ad infinitum. So if conclusions don’t change when facts change, something might have gone awry.

As an example: your view on the merits of the current winter lockdown versus the Halloween lockdown. First: do you think a lockdown is prima facie defensible? To some people, ‘no!’; to far more people, ‘normally no, but it depends’. Whatever initial view you put into your decision hopper, now try to bend that assumption around the first input of information: the healthcare system either (a) clearly has capacity left, apparently running at below average levels for the time of year, as it was in October; or (b) might credibly need to triage fairly basic healthcare within, say, three weeks as seems to be the case now, or so we are told. Whether we are in (a) or (b) should change your opinion; if it doesn’t, you might be doing this wrong.

Now, add in the game-changer of approved, effective vaccines. Your opinion should be different before and after the approval of the vaccines (2 December for Pfizer, 30 December for Oxford). Put simply, it is perfectly justifiable to be against open-ended restrictions in a world with no vaccine, but to think a brief period of restriction while vaccines are rolled out is sensible, and personally I know many lockdown sceptics whose views pivoted on the day the first vaccine was approved.

Finally, consider the pace of the epidemic. Have cases apparently stabilised, as at end of October, or has there been an out-of-leftfield development like the Kentish variant, which experts believe might be at least 50 per cent more transmissible with no obvious sign of deceleration? Whatever the state of your opinion on lockdown so far, this development should alter it at least somewhat.

You might be stridently, philosophically, against lockdowns whatever the consequences, or you might be a dour socialist zealot who instinctively thinks that the cilice should always be tightened in a crisis; but for everyone in-between, allowing opinion to change with evidence like this is likely an excellent idea. Where opinion becomes rigid it can also become brittle, and often doesn’t age well.

Personally (not that it matters given I’m just a punter rather than in government) I have unashamedly been sceptical of the government’s use of interventions throughout the epidemic, though I’m closer to the moderate than the fundamentalist wing. I thought that the March 2020 lockdown was sensible and inevitable while disease parameters and treatment protocols were clarified and healthcare capacity was built, but believe it dragged on far too long, inflicting incredible social, economic and collateral health damage when the first wave of Covid was obviously waning with the seasons. It appeared the government was allowing opinion-polls to lead it down a path of ever more severe restriction rather than examining realistic targeted alternatives that could tide us over sustainably until a vaccine arrived (which I admit came miles faster than I’d imagined possible), and hadn’t stopped to gauge the damage done along the way.

You can of course understand the bind. There is a crisis, the government needs to do something, lockdown is something it can do, so it does lockdown. It might well be the only lever to pull initially, but that doesn’t mean the lever should stay pulled. Who knows, it may even be the best answer in the medium-term, but it is hard to believe that scrutinising every cost and alternative along the way wasn’t a very worthwhile exercise even so.

For lockdown two, like many others, I thought that the case in November was not well argued, was farcically presented with scary out-of-date death charts and poorly administered (creating the boom Halloween weekend by leaking plans on the Friday night was absolutely unforgiveable).

Every intervention, after all, has a beginning and an end, and the degree of social mixing from the ‘one last shindig’ at the beginning to the ‘thank God that’s over’ effect at the end may conceivably outweigh the temporary reduction in R — such ‘forcing events’ cause discrete social circles to overlap which otherwise wouldn’t intersect.

But in the event, the key moment in autumn (possibly during lockdown) wasn’t underground kids parties or news presenters’ knees-ups, it was the emergence of the Kentish variant. Some have hypothesised that the variant emerged from the way we treat Covid sufferers. Hospitals with chronically ill patients create living petri dishes for mutation (it is worth remembering that a quarter of all infections are still presumed hospital acquired). Add in treatments like convalescent plasma (blood extract containing antibodies­) and there are then all the pressures needed to evolve a mutant strain. We will, like good scientists, have to await more data.

Lockdown three, I’m sorry to say (and I can hear the howls from sceptics as I write this), is justifiable, practically and ethically. Given the rollout of the vaccine, the emergence of the new variant and the plausible risk of the healthcare system falling over, there is probably now no realistic alternative. Whatever one’s objections to the first two lockdowns, on both cost-benefit and libertarian grounds, it is at least a defensible position to acknowledge the merit of a brief lockdown during a maximum-speed vaccination campaign to minimise morbidity and mortality along the way.

The calculation is entirely different now from that of the previous two lockdowns. Given the vaccine, the variant and the healthcare situation, the current restriction can be supported (regretfully) without cognitive dissonance by those who opposed the previous lockdowns vehemently and vocally. It is either bad logic, bad faith or fundamentalism to argue otherwise.

This is a position that will make no friends. The zero-Covid Sanhedrin (whose ship sailed long ago in a connected Europe) and the libertarian sceptics (very few of whom are actually anti-vaxx by the way) will both find reasons why this nuanced view is outrageous.

The big, big difference this time is this: an opening in a rock without an exit is a cave — but if you can see an exit, it’s a tunnel. The previous two lockdowns were caves. It was dark and nasty, possibly involving bats, and we had no idea how we were going to get out except back into the same world we’d entered from. But this time really is different: we’re going not into a cave but into a tunnel, there is a credible exit strategy that we can see and believe in, and we’re scheduled to emerge in about 100 days (give-or-take) into a country where almost all the most vulnerable will have been vaccinated and where lockdown is not just lifted but dismantled, hopefully never to be seen again, and good riddance.

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A Defence of Lockdown Sceptics

FROM the LOCKDOWN SCEPTIC's WEBSITE - By Will Jones / 8 January 2021

I was disappointed to read the Spectator article by Lockdown Sceptics contributor Alistair Haimes about his departure from our ranks. The brilliant data analyst has been a valuable ally and I hope he will return to the fold in due course.

His argument boils down to this: “When the facts change, I change my mind.” But what facts have changed? He cites three. First, the health service is under severe stress and unless we can reduce virus transmission over the next few weeks it’s at serious risk of being overwhelmed. That wasn’t true when the second national lockdown was imposed in November, he says, but it is today. Second, we now have two approved Covid vaccines, with more to follow, so any new restrictions will be short-lived. Third, there is a new variant of SARS-CoV-2 which is around 50% more transmissible than the pre-existing variants.

I’ll take each of these in turn – although I may digress a bit.

First, I’m sceptical of the claim that we have X number of days to save the NHS – a familiar trope that I thought the Labour Party had flogged to death. Let’s not forget that a winter bed crisis in the NHS is an annual event, as you can see from this collection of Guardian headlines. According to PHE, there was no statistically significant excess all-cause mortality in England in the final week of 2020 and while excess winter deaths this season are above the five-year average, they are currently below the peaks reached in 2016/17 and 2017/18. We published a piece on Wednesday in Lockdown Sceptics by Dr Clare Craig on Emergency Department Syndromic Indicators that looked at various indexes of ill-health, such as hospital admissions for Acute Respiratory Infection, Influenza-like illness and Pneumonia, and those are all below the baseline for an English winter – or were until a week ago. These data suggest that some of the people currently in English hospitals with COVID-19 have either been misdiagnosed or would have been hospitalised with something else if they hadn’t been laid low with Covid. In some NHS regions, Critical care bed occupancy numbers are currently above what they were in December 2019 – an unusually mild flu season – but there was still some headroom on December 27th, as you can see from this bar chart.

But let’s allow that things have got worse by an order of magnitude in the past week or so and some NHS trusts really are on the cusp of being overwhelmed, which they may well be. (See today’s report from the senior doctor.) Will the lockdown Boris announced on Monday do anything to avert this catastrophe, as Alistair seems to think? The only difference between the new national lockdown and the Tier 4 restrictions that were already in place in 80% of England on January 1st is that restaurants and pubs can no longer serve alcohol to take away and schools will be closed. But schools had already closed when London went into Tier 4 on December 20th and there isn’t much evidence that those restrictions reduced the R number in the capital. As SAGE member Professor Andrew Hayward pointed out on Tuesday, nearly 10 million key workers are still travelling to and from work. In addition, people are still going to supermarkets, chemists and corner shops. The statistician William M. Briggs, co-author of The Price of Panic, argues that it’s misleading to think of lockdowns as quarantines. Rather, they just create a number of ‘concentration points’, herding people into a limited number of spaces, and in that way increase the rate of transmission. If masks worked this mobility might not matter, but the recent mask study in Denmark suggests they don’t.

Some lockdown enthusiasts pick out a handful of examples where lockdowns have coincided with a fall in Covid deaths but that’s not a scientific approach. Numerous research studies, published in reputable, peer-reviewed journals, have concluded that there’s no association between Covid mortality and the standard suite of non-pharmacuetical interventions, such as mandating masks in indoor settings, closing schools and universities, shutting non-essential shops, imposing curfews and banning domestic travel. You can adjust the lockdown variables all you like – timing, severity, etc. – but there’s no signal in the noise. The American Institute for Economic Research has collected some of the best of these studies here and we’ve created a compendium of the evidence that non-pharmaceutical interventions don’t work at Lockdown Sceptics. The epidemiological models that SAGE uses to persuade the Government to ratchet up the restrictions rely on counterfactuals – if you don’t do y, x number of people will die – that cannot be falsified because the Government always end up doing SAGE’s bidding, as Alistair Haimes has pointed out.

On the other hand, it is incontestable that lockdowns cause harm. Lockdown sceptics are sometimes accused of putting profit before people, but I’m not just talking about economic harm – increased borrowing, businesses going bankrupt, growing unemployment. The negative impact of school closures on children has been flagged up by numerous educational organisations, including Ofsted, with the most disadvantaged paying the highest price. The Centre for Mental Health estimated in October that that up to 10 million people will need either new or additional mental health support, thanks to the trauma of enforced isolation, and reports of domestic abuse to the Metropolitan Police increased by 11% during the first lockdown compared to the same period last year. Drug overdoses in San Francisco killed more than three times the number of people last year than COVID-19.

It’s also nonsense to imagine the economic damage caused by the lockdowns won’t have ruinous public health consequences – anything that hurts profits, hurts people. Professor Sunetra Gupta estimates that the global economic recession caused by the lockdowns will result in 130 million people starving to death and the United Nations predicts it will plunge as many as 420 million residents of the developing world into extreme poverty, with low-income countries seeing average incomes falling for the first time in 60 years.

Even in the absence of the detailed cost-benefit analysis the Covid Recovery Group of MPs has repeatedly asked for, it seems overwhelmingly likely that the harms caused by lockdowns in the UK alone are greater than the harms they prevent. According to one study out of Bristol University, the ongoing restrictions will cause 560,000 deaths, 310,000 more than Professor Neil Ferguson and his team predicted would die absent a lockdown but with voluntary ‘mitigation’ measures in place. As the now disgraced President of the United States said, the cure is worse than the disease. That essential point hasn’t changed, so I see no reason why sceptics should change their minds about lockdowns now. Yes, the NHS may be in genuine peril, but that doesn’t mean we should set aside our well-founded doubts about the effectiveness of heavy-handed interventions. On the contrary, trying to quarantine people for a third time, given that the policy clearly hasn’t worked, seems like Einstein’s definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.

What about the vaccines? True, some sceptics did argue that shutting people in their homes until a vaccine became available was impractical because it might take years to develop one. But that was never the central plank of our case (see above). On the contrary, our preferred alternative to locking down is ‘focused protection’, as set out in the Great Barrington Declaration, and vaccines make that strategy more attractive, not less.

Our starting point is that the number of people who died from COVID-19 in English hospitals in 2020 who were under 60 with no underlying health conditions was 388 and the virus is less deadly than seasonal flu for healthy people under 70. Note, we’re not claiming that SARS-CoV-2 is less deadly than the average bout of seasonal flu for the entire population – although that’s true of some flu seasons – only that it’s likely to kill fewer healthy people under-70, including children. Whenever we cite that 388 statistic, critics accuse us of being callous, as though we’re saying older people and those with chronic conditions don’t matter. Far from it. We think the Government should pull out all the stops to protect those who are vulnerable to this disease, including care home residents, who made up about 40% of those who died from COVID-19 in the first wave (and 50% of those who died in Scotland). Shielding for people in these groups should not be compulsory – we believe in trusting people to make their own risk assessments and adjust their behaviour accordingly. But it should be a viable option, with all the necessary support. Meanwhile, the rest of us should be permitted to go about our lives, taking the same precautions we would in a normal flu season.

The arguments for and against ‘focused protection’ have been well-rehearsed, but the vaccines deal with one of the best objections – that it would be inhumane to expect the vulnerable to shut themselves away until the rest of the population develops natural herd immunity. That would create a two-tier society. But now that we have a vaccine, those groups only need shield until they’ve been immunised, at which point they can re-enter society (something they can’t do at present, even after they’ve had the jab, because there’s no ‘society’ to re-enter). The Government is planning to vaccinate 13.9 million people by mid-February – although that number includes everyone who works in health and social care settings – and there are about 16 million who fall into the above vulnerable categories.

So, yes, the vaccines do make a difference – they strengthen the sceptics’ case by making ‘focused protection’ more palatable.

What about the new variant? I’m reserving judgment on whether it’s more transmissible. As Mike Hearn pointed out yesterday, ONS infection survey data released on December 23rd show that the percentage of the UK population testing positive for the new variant began to fall in November before taking off again, and in some areas it has already started to dip, as was clear from the plot presented by Chris Whitty on Tuesday. If it’s 50% more transmissible than pre-existing variants, why isn’t the percentage just constantly rising in all parts of England?

But suppose the new variant is more infectious. What evidence is there that the new lockdown measures will interrupt transmission? If the first two lockdowns didn’t stop the original virus in its tracks, why will a third stop a turbo-charged version?

I sympathise with Alistair Haimes. He believes the NHS is at risk of falling over and wants us to do something – anything – to protect it. Lockdown sceptics also don’t want to see the NHS fall over, but where I part company with Alistair is in believing that a third national lockdown is the right mitigation strategy. Wouldn’t it be better to offer robust protection to the vulnerable and make vaccinating them an absolute priority? Not only would that be more likely to ‘save the NHS’, it would save the rest of us from the harms caused by yet another lockdown. ‘Focused protection’ is sometimes dismissed as not scientifically credible, but the 700,000+ signatories of the Great Barrington Declaration include over 13,000 medical and public health scientists and nearly 40,000 medical practitioners.

Alistair thinks this lockdown is more palatable than the others because there’s light at the end of the tunnel, thanks to the vaccine. Within 100 days, he estimates, it can be dismantled, hopefully never to be seen again. I wish I shared his optimism. At Tuesday’s Downing Street briefing, Chris Whitty said restrictions might well be back next winter and some people have called for masks to remain mandatory indefinitely.

The problem with allowing the state to suspend your civil liberties is that you may never get them back. I treat the Government’s claims that it will relinquish the powers it has arrogated to itself when the crisis is over with extreme scepticism, just as I do every official announcement about the virus.

One final point. Over the past week or so, some of the most prominent lockdown sceptics have been vilified in the media, accused of encouraging members of the public to ignore social distancing guidelines and thereby causing people to die. These attacks may ratchet up over the next few days as the NHS comes under more and more pressure, although it’s hard to imagine them becoming even more hysterical. Paul Mason wrote a column in the New Statesman on Wednesday saying that Allison Pearson, Laurence Fox, Julia Hartley-Brewer, Peter Hitchens and me should be consigned to the seventh circle of hell. But the assumption underlying these criticisms is that lockdowns work, which is precisely the point under dispute. Is it reasonable to expect us to just take that on faith and keep any doubts we have to ourselves? After all, we don’t ask the Paul Masons of this world to take it on faith that lockdowns cause more harm than good and accuse them of killing people by advocating for tougher restrictions. We think history will prove us right, but we’re not so full of righteous certitude that we want to silence our opponents.

One of the most unpleasant aspects of this crisis is that it has brought out an ugly, authoritarian streak in so many people, particularly those in positions of authority. Before March of last year, I believed that totalitarianism could never take root in British soil because we are such a Rabelaisian, freedom-loving people, fiercely proud of our independence. Now, I’m not so sure.

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Spectator journalist queries Archer's story-line

by Clare Fox

go to www.spectator.co.uk/2016/09/an-abuse-of-the-archers/

IT's been going on for months now and I must make a confession. I secretly endure a nightly battering in the privacy of my home; it’s been relentless, torturous and psychologically damaging. But before anyone rushes to rescue me or phones a government helpline, fearing I am the victim of some dastardly wife beater — I should explain that the culprit is Radio 4’s The Archers and its relentless and addictive domestic abuse storyline.
My torment was supposed to end last Sunday night, with the conclusion of Helen Titchener’s trial for stabbing her bullying, much-hated husband Rob. When the jury foreman announced not guilty, I was with the rest of the nation, roaring ‘Yes!’ And yet, straight afterwards, I came over all queasy as Rob resumed his threats… Just as Helen has been a victim of manipulation for a whole 18 months, so have we, the listeners. When will it ever stop?
Thanks to a script that denies its audience any choice about who they should sympathise with, what they should think and, even more galling for me, what political position to take, lately The Archers has started to come across like propaganda rather than drama. It no longer ends with that jaunty theme tune but the sober caveat: ‘If you’ve been affected by any of the subjects raised in the programme, details of organisations offering information and support are available…’ Certain episodes have amounted to little more than adverts for the National Domestic Violence Helpline. Ironically, of course, this was why the series was invented: to teach men returning home how to farm after the second world war. But I am less convinced of the ethics of ramming home heavily politicised messages today.
If the BBC has rules banning product placement, it is far less squeamish about policy placement, and so we have been bludgeoned into accepting the importance of new government legislation (in particular the new 2015 law against coercive control) and instructed on how to seek help, by means of Helen. The Archers seems intent on making its listeners extra vigilant about the sinister goings on behind resolutely middle-class closed doors. Drama should ring the bell of truth: it’s when it bangs a bloody loud policy drum that I get anxious.
Initially, the Helen and Rob story had me riveted. It started out with drip-drip revelations about Rob’s true, toxic nature. Too soon, though, such subtlety dwindled. I first realised things had gone awry when I mentioned to some friends that as a character, Helen had always got on my nerves, and they promptly rounded on me and accused me of victim blaming. Never mind that I am not, and never will be, a fan of ever-suffering, holier-than-thou organic types. Never mind that Helen is fictional. I was still told it was ‘dangerous’ to focus on Helen’s faults because this could deter real women from coming forward to report real-life abuse.
My friends are not alone in blurring the boundary between fact and fiction: a #FreeHelen hashtag has been trending on Twitter, while my Facebook timeline is full of people showing ‘Solidari-tea’ with real-life Helens. The BBC employed a court artist who gave us daily pictorial images of figures in a make-believe dock. The trial has also been used as a lobbying tool by NGOs looking to score political points about how ‘17 per cent of refuges have been shut since the Tories re-entered government six years ago’, together with demands that Helen’s story proves that ‘cuts that threaten women’s lives must be reversed’. Even the usually cool-headed legal profession has treated the story as faction. Nigel Pascoe, a barrister from the New Forest, offered Mrs Titchener representation in court. ‘I know we are not allowed to tout,’ he claimed. ‘But I am more than prepared to represent Helen, along with most of the criminal bar.’ Jeannie Mackie, of Doughty Street Chambers, complained that Helen’s barrister wasn’t making ‘a very good job’ of the defence. Meanwhile Rodney Warren, chairman of the Law Society’s criminal law committee, complained that the role of Helen’s solicitor has been neglected: ‘It’s been very unfortunate that the storyline has given the wrong view of the criminal justice process [and]… is a missed opportunity to demonstrate properly how the profession works.’
 What used to be a 15-minute soap opera about how to raise pigs is now being used to ridicule the police for failing to use the new law on coercive control, which Theresa May brought in when she was Home Secretary. The legislation recently hit the headlines after a Freedom of Information request revealed that eight out of 22 police forces in England and Wales haven’t charged anyone with the offence since it came into effect in December. Joan Smith, chair of the Mayor of London’s Violence Against Women and Girls panel, concluded: ‘It seems listeners of The Archers have a more sophisticated grasp of domestic abuse than some police forces.’ And as for those of us who opposed the new law (on civil liberty grounds), we will no doubt now be accused of betraying potential Helens everywhere. That’s the problem with politics via drama: it’s unaccountable, and you can’t argue back.
The Beeb proudly boasts of the impact that The Archers has had off-air — citing a 17 per cent increase in calls to the National Domestic Violence Helpline. Louiza Patikas, the actress who plays Helen, seems to have gone from thespian to missionary, declaring that she hoped her character’s acquittal would mean that more victims will come forward for help: ‘There are people who understand what you’re experiencing and millions of members of the public who are rooting for you, as the reaction to this storyline has demonstrated.’
But why should we accept that it is a good thing to invite greater scrutiny of our personal relationships by the authorities? There is something too pat and right-on about the characterisation of St Helen and the secretly satanic Rob. It feels more like an exercise in box-ticking than in dramatic depth. I realise I am putting myself in the devil’s camp when I resist joining in campaigners’ enthusiasm for the way the story has ‘instigated cultural change’ and ‘opened people’s eyes to a form of abuse they might not have been aware of before’. But I am worried it may lead millions of listeners to become gripped by the domestic equivalent of Project Fear, starting to see abuse where none exists…
The columnist Grace Dent has already insisted that ‘we all know a Helen and Rob’ and that the soap opera has ‘nailed beautifully how love can turn, in incremental steps, into dark control’. No doubt that can and does happen, but far more rarely than this ‘everyday story of domestic abuse’ implies.
Just to declare — I love The Archers. Though I came to it late in life I listen to it religiously. But it needs now to back off before it fuels a full-scale moral panic. As a nation, do we really want to be encouraged to spy on our neighbours and families for suspicious signs of smooth talkers in seemingly blissful relationships? Do we really want to be twitching our curtains and making paranoid misanthropic judgments about the private lives of others? Rob has punished us all for long enough. Bring back the non–metaphorical pigs, I say.

Scottish Nationalist 'People's Vow'

I picked up a copy of The Spectator while I was in Aberdeen at the end of November with a piece by Alex Massie entitled 'Scotland's unwon cause' in which he wrote:

'The SNP is the only political party in Scotland that can credibly claim to be a mass organisation.  It will soon, in all likelihood have 100,000 members.'

 

About the same time I bought a copy of The National a new daily that claims the be 'The newspaper that supports an independent Scotland'.  According to Alex Massie this paper sold 50,000 copies of its first edition – near twice of what the Scotsman averages.  Since then The National has doubled its print run.

 

At their last SNP conference since Nicola Sturgeon took over it produced the People's Vow:which specifies that industry should be nationalised; a republic declared; land ownership reformed; fracking banned; Nato left; and a people's budget published that would offer an alternative to austerity.

 

Whatever the outcome in Scotland at the next UK general election, and the SNP could win up to 50 seats if it performs in line with the recent polls, the consequences could lead to conflict for the Union whoever gained power in Westminster:  a Tory win next May would almost certainly result in increasing the backing in Scotland for the nationalists, and a Labour majority would not be much more helpful in so far as it would have to chose between letting down Scottish aspirations for more independence and possibly upsetting English opinion.  A Labour Government that depended on the SNP would be particularly vulnerable.

 

Mr. Massie argues that during the next General Election in Scotland it will be like '59 mini-referendums [in Scotland] on the national question'.  That in turn would 'serve as an overture to the 2016 Scottish parliamentary elections', at which Massie says: 'another SNP triumph would open the door to a second referendum.'  This would need the approval of the London Government, but in such circumstances it would be hard to refuse.

The building site lads I met from Glasgow at the Rank & File construction worker's conference in Newcastle on the 15th, November, certainly had high hopes that Nicola Sturgeon and the SNP would be able to force the political pace in the New Year and give the Westminster crowd the run-around.  It is expected that Paul Salveson will be writing on this in the next edition of the Northern Voices - N.V. 15.

Heywood & Middleton: 'Too Big a Mountain!'

NIGEL Farage, according to The Spectator journalist Isabel Hardman, last Thursday conceded:
‘I think it’s too big a mountain to climb in that short a space of time, and I think the Labour party is saying that because they’ve got a very divided local party, they’re not happy with the candidate, they can’t get anyone out to canvass, and when they put the coaches on to go from the hall in Manchester to the office in Heywood, only 23 people got on one… they were expecting hundreds. So I think that Labour have talked it up to try to scare their own party machine into getting… I could be wrong, but the one thing about Heywood that is different is in South Shields there were 23,000 postal votes, in Heywood and Middleton it’s about nine three or nine four I think it is, and that obviously makes a fundamental difference to our chances.'

Ms. Hardman had earlier reported:
'I hear that there is a fierce debate going on in Ukip between those who want to divert resources from Clacton to Heywood in order to give the fight a real go, and those who think it best to focus efforts on Carswell’s seat. Currently Heywood is not getting anything like the attention Clacton is, and party high command has not been convinced that it’s worth changing things. They also claim there is more of an effort in Clacton from the Tories than Carswell’s former party lets on, and don’t want to take anything for granted.'

Could it be that the Labour Party is trying to scare their supporters to turn out as Farage is saying?  Or is there a serious threat to the Labour Party candidate? 

I spoke to a member of the Green Party in Rochdale over the weekend, and he'd just been out on a stall in Heywood, he told me that the feeling in Heywood among the public was one of general apathy.  He suggested that the Labour candidate was 'thick with Danczuk', and that some members and supporters of the Labour Party in Heywood were disillusioned.  He further claimed that Jim Dobbin had regarded Danczuk as a rather poor MP.

It ought to be remembered that some people were either excluded or defected from the Labour Party some years ago in around 2010 because of allegations about Mr. Danczuk's behaviour on a holiday in Alicante, Spain.  At that time there was an acrimonious dispute within the local Labour Party which was both personal and political, and some of those people who left Labour then are now believed to have joined the Green Party.  Hence, it is understandable that they may be critical of Simon Danczuk.

Meanwhile, Simon Danczuk in an article in the Rochdale Observer on Saturday the 13th, September launched an attack on the number of asylum seekers coming to Rochdale.  A report had just stated that Greater Manchester is handling one in six of all Britain's asylum seekers, and Simon Danczuk MP for Rocdale told The Observer:
'This is a cause for concern.  What we need is for Rochdale to take fewer asylum seekers, not more.'

Clearly Mr. Danczuk is determined to take the ground of public concern over asylum seekers before Ukip occupies it. 

Are people of low intelligence drawn to conservative ideologies and beliefs?

In January 2012,  a Canadian study was published in the journal 'Psychological Science', which stated that 'low intelligence adults tend to gravitate toward socially conservative ideologies' that promote coherence and order. It was argued that children of low intelligence are more likely to hold prejudiced attitudes as adults, because such things as open mindedness, flexibility and trust in other people, require 'certain cognitive abilities'.

This Canadian study was referred to by George Monbiot in his Guardian column the following month. While conceding that not all conservatives are stupid, he argues that conservative strategists on both sides of the Atlantic, have created a 'fantasy-based' ideology that appeals to the 'low-information' voter. He argues that the conservatives have built an alternative knowledge system that appeals to the basest and stupidest of impulses and have found that "it does them no harm in the polls." For example, climate change is dismissed as an "eco-fascist-communist-anarchist conspiracy" or the deficit is explained away has being caused by the greed of the poor. He also says: "conservative strategists have discovered that there is no pool so shallow that several million people won't drown it" and then quotes the former U.S Republican strategist Mike Lofgren, who said: "the crack-pot outliers of two decades ago have become the vital centre today."

One person who knows about the value of appealing to voters baser and stupidest impulses, is the Chancellor George Osborne. At times he makes Dr. Goebbels look positively decent. This Tory buffoon has stooped so low that he even tried to make political capital out of the deaths of the six, Philpott children, by linking their deaths to the issue of welfare reform, as did that vile and odious newspaper the Daily (Malice) Mail.

As Shadow Chancellor, Osborne was thought by many to have been out of his depth. Vince Cable said of him: "I never rated George's understanding of financial matters, but he is a political operator of some substance." Although Osborne's austerity plan has increased the financial deficit by 30% since the election, has pushed up unemployment, slashed the amount taken in tax, increased the benefits bill and seen the economy stagnate, his excuse for this collapse in growth, is to blame the previous Labour government, the euro-crisis, bad weather, Royal weddings and the British people for taking too many bank holidays. His economic plan has been described as "all shock and no therapy". Even the 'Spectator' magazine, announced a competition - a bottle of Pol Roger champagne to whoever could explain Osborne's growth strategy. Of the 27 EU Finance Ministers, Osborne was the only one to vote against a cap on bankers bonuses that would have set a limit of a year's salary on bonuses and double that if shareholders approved it. The proposal was supported by the European Central Bank and the E.U. Commission.

With the Cameron government there is misinformation on a massive scale. In his "every penny matters" speech given to a captive audience of supermarket staff at the Morrisons distribution centre near Sittingbourne in Kent, Osborne referred to people on benefits and asked whether it was right that some people should be receiving more than £26,000 a year in benefits. As usual, he omitted to mention that those people receiving anything like this amount, represented less than 1% of people on benefits who were living in high-cost temporary accommodation in London. On a previous occasion, he claimed that there were families taking £100,000 a year in housing benefit but omitted to mention that this applied to only five families in Britain. In 2011, government ministers also briefed that 1,360 people had been off work for a decade with diarrhoea when in fact, they had severe bowel disease and cancer. Similarly, of the 120,000 'persistently anti-social families' which were identified by the government, it emerged later that the figures were actually a measure of deprivation not behaviour.

Yet this campaign of vilification has successfully disguised the fall in living standards for millions of others through benefit cuts. Only one-in-eight who are on housing benefit, are not in work. Indeed, 93% of new housing benefit claims are from people who have a job. Far from targeting 'shirkers', the 3 year benefit and tax credit cap doesn't mainly target the unemployed. More than 60% of those who will lose out, are in work.

In January, the TUC published a survey that found that 41% of people surveyed believed that the entire welfare budget went to unemployed people, when in fact it is only 3%. Most if it, does in fact go on pensions. Despite having one of the least generous unemployment benefit systems in Europe, opinion polls suggest that many people think the government pays out too much in benefits. Far from soaring ahead of wages, unemployment benefit has fallen to 11% of average earnings compared to 22% in 1979. As the Guardian columnist Seamus Milne, wrote earlier this year:

"Central to the sharp increase in social security costs over the past generation have been rising joblessness and stagnating wages. Since 1980, unemployment has averaged more than three times the post-war rate, while the proportion of those in low-paid jobs has doubled to over 20%. Welfare has become a prop for the failure of neo-liberal capitalism to deliver jobs or decent wages."

Although two-faced Labour have criticised aspects of the governments welfare reform programme while in opposition, they laid the foundations for much of it, when they were in office. Labour also allowed the government to introduce retrospective legislation that prevented unemployed people who had been unlawfully sanctioned, from claiming the money back.

What government ministers are skilled at doing, along with the journalist hacks working for the Tory press, is diverting public anger that might be directed at the government, the bosses, the bankers and their bonuses, in order to get the 'plebs' to mobilise against their own interests. The Cameron government seek to turn the low-paid against the unemployed as they have done with private sector workers against public sector workers. They talk about the 'Big Society' while playing one group off against another. Their agenda is the billionaires agenda - less tax for the rich, less help for the poor, no cap on bankers bonuses, less regulation for business, less spending by the state. Despite having no mandate from the electorate or a proper majority, what this government aims to do, is to privatise what remains of public provision  and to hive it off to their big business friends whose incomes will be sustained by public contracts and captive markets - a kind of socialism for the rich and private enterprise for the rest of us. But what would you expect from the party that defends established privilege.