Dave Hill's Big Britain

Oxford Union Debate: An Internal Q & A

Question: So, Dave, what do you think about the Oxford Union inviting Nick Griffin and David Irving to its debate about free speech?

Answer: Well, Dave, young Tryl and his chums were within their rights to do it. But I wouldn't have.

Question: Why not?

Answer: Two reasons: one, because they're a pair of turds who, given half a chance, would cheerfully deprive the likes of me of my right to free speech; two, because inviting them was bound to result in a media furore and a street ruck, both of which have enabled them to pose as martyrs while the actual debate has barely had a mention.

Question: But Dave! You're avoiding the key issue! Never mind how things turned out. Surely your priority should be to defend the right of people you despise to express their opinions, however revolting you find them!

Answer: If they're not inciting violence - which is, of course, a bit of a grey area - then I do defend that right. But, at the same, I and others have the right to express our disagreement with their views and the decisions of others to provide them with a platform that invests them with undeserved respectability. Free speech is a two-way street - something callow libertarians forget in their eagerness to stick up for the rights of scumbags while heaping scorn on those who exercise their right to remind people that scumbags are what they are.

Question: Hang on, though. Isn't it true that people are rarely given the chance to hear the views of such as Griffin and Irving? Shouldn't they be given that chance and left to make up their own minds?

Answer: Oh, do me a favour! The reason why lowlife like those two don't get much mainstream airing is not that they've been censored in some mysterious way but that their arguments have long since been exposed as pernicious crap. No one prevents them organising politically, writing books, pamphlets and blogs and generally using all the freedoms a democracy puts at their disposal to propagate their views. And guess what? Almost no one is convinced. Tough.

Question: OK, thanks. By the way, Dave, do you know what they say about people who talk to themselves?

Answer: Yes, Dave. And in my case it's probably true. But, hey, it's still a free country!

Melanie Phillips Head-In-Sand Shock!

Ooooh, she's cross!

"For years we have watched helplessly the undermining of the traditional family, which has been relentlessly attacked by an alliance of feminists, gay rights activists, divorce lawyers and cultural Marxists who grasped that this was the surest way to destroy Western society. Stitch by stitch, the fabric of family life was unpicked. Sex, marriage and childbearing were separated from each other. Divorce became easier."

It's lethal! It's toxic! It's a liberal conspiracy! And it's, er, making us happy!

Over-Spiked

I always read with interest the commentaries of the Spiked Online coterie (formerly Living Marxism, formerly the Revolutionary Communist Party whose intellectual guru Frank Furedi used to teach an ex-girlfriend of mine when she was at Kent University in the late Seventies - not boring you am I?) They often make interesting points about double standards among middle-class liberals, and though I'm mindful of the accusation they often attract - that they're very, very clever at saying what they're against, while less clear about what they are for - they do raise issues that need to be addressed.

Sometimes, though, they're so busy pointing out how deluded everyone else is that they fail to see big bits of wood for trees. Spiked editor Brendan O'Neill's latest for Cif is an example. He's tackling the political response to now former Tory parliamentary candidate Nigel Hastilow's local newspaper article in which he wrote that "many" people believe "Enoch Powell was right" about immigration. A "race row" blew up in the media, resulting in the Tory top brass having a word and silly old Nigel hanging up his blue rosette. Brendan's thesis is that all of today's politicians are saying the same things Powell said but using trendy weasel words to say it.

"The two big issues that most concerned Powell - overcrowding and the potential for instability - also underpin today's panic about immigration. Only today, politicians and commentators have tempered their language. So where Powell talked about 'coloured people' causing overcrowding in city suburbs, Cameron and his numerous backslappers in the press talk about the coming 'demographic crisis'; where Powell envisioned rivers flowing with blood, Cameron and others talk about the threat posed by immigration to 'social cohesion'. The words have changed, but the intellectual content of Powell's speech and today's handwringing over immigration is strikingly similar: immigrants cause overcrowding/overpopulation, and chip away at Britain's stability/social cohesion."

This is, yes, a clever point and not without force. But Brendan's soon galloping off on one of his tendency's hobby horses, claiming that when anyone who gets bollocked for saying something stupid in public it's a symptom of the namby-pamby times we live in, free speech is being shut down and so on (though I haven't noticed Nige going quiet yet). In the process he ignores the real world implications of a modern politician lending respectability to the view that "Enoch was right". Whatever Powell actually said, whether he really was a bigot or just a crude opportunist (as no less a Trot than the late Paul Foot concluded), the phrase has become code for "I hate blacks." It makes nasty little flagpoles stiffen all over the UK. It ushers those who wield them just a little further back from the margins to which most of society has consigned them. In other words, it endorses racism.

If I'd been Tory leader, I'd have done the same as David Cameron: told him to pipe down or piss off. As for what Brendan calls the "hounding" of Hastilow being a symptom of the stifling of debate, oh c'mon! An attention-seeking twit has come unstuck. Conversation about immigration can only be more honest as a result.

Why Does A.C. Grayling Carry On That Way?

As an atheist I have two problems with the way A.C. Grayling and others approach the subject of religion. The first is that in their enthusiasm for attacking repressive theologies they do an injustice to ordinary believers. Here's Grayling blazing away on CiF yesterday:

"Look at most Catholic countries until the 1960s and beyond, in South America or Ireland or Spain: the picture of the social, political and economic effects of Catholicism is in its essentials the same. Women enslaved to child-bearing, over-large families perpetuating ignorance and poverty, backward social policies and the iron grip of a clergy acting like the Stasi in controlling the minutiae of private lives through the confessional and the influence of fear - fear of hell, among other things."

This needles me partly because I'm married to an Irish Catholic whose mother, the bearer of ten other children, is one of the most extraordinary people I've ever known. Who is some privileged academic to tell such a woman that she is ignorant, that her personal life has been "controlled" by someone else and the family she is so proud of "over-large"? This objection isn't purely emotional. Like his fellow God-bashers Grayling's grasp of the relationships between people and their faiths is unsubtle. His every polemic on the theme rests on the assumption that believers are by definition vacant vessels into which fear, shame and bigotry can be poured unopposed.

He attacks Catholic leaders for having reactionary political ambitions, and rightly so. But he cannot comprehend that in the politics of their everyday lives plenty of Catholics - and no doubt others of different religions - pay only selective heed to their leaders, drawing from the cultural well of their faiths what gives them strength and rejecting the rest. Some are barely believers at all, yet still value aspects of their religion highly and accommodate them with their secular values. To ignore such complexities is to overlook that even ardent subscribers to faiths have what social scientists call "agency" - the capacity, albeit constrained by social context, to think and act independently of larger powers around them.

Of course, this dehumanisation has advantages for rhetoricians: it makes it easier to heap scorn and ridicule. But now I come to my second problem with Grayling et al. In a Britain where, like it or not, religion matters - including to many of the least powerful of its citizens - it's hard to see what such goading achieves beyond the gratification of the goader.

Quentin Letts & Paddington Bear

The Daily Mail columnist has joined the chorus of complaint against marmalade-eating national treasure Paddington Bear being recruited to advertise Marmite:

"Those vultures of the advertising world have swooped again. They may use words like 'homage' and 'affectionate tribute', but yet again they have pillaged our heritage."

Already I detect tension in the closed thought system that operates at the Mail. Attacking those who wish to tamper with "our" heritage is consistent with the sacred line. But the involvement of the advertising industry presents a problem. It is, after all, the most public face of free enterprise, something else the Mail seeks to protect. Anyway, following several lines of boyhood reminiscence, Quentin, 44, gets to the sticky bit.

"Marmalade sandwiches are a vital part of him. And now some smartypants in a London ad agency (no doubt with go-ahead views and trendy red spectacles) has to go and fiddle with the formula."

Spot that nifty footwork, did you? In order to blame the desecration of Paddington on the Mail's usual suspects Quentin needed to fashion an escape bridge between them and thrusting, dynamic, capitalistic adland. Hence the construction of a "smartypants" archetype whose glasses are "trendy" and whose views are "go-ahead". This enables Quentin to skip neatly into less risky territory, where there is no ambiguity about who the nation's true enemies are.

"But what's to stop the Marmite modernisers taking things further still? In today's world, Paddington would be an illegal immigrant and his famous duffle coat would cast him as a hoodie...He would be offered the full panoply of state benefits, with social workers, housing officers and bear welfare monitors thrown in..."

See how skilfully the evil "Marmite modernisers" have been redefined in the space of one paragraph? They've ceased to be well-paid representatives of an industry whose booming profits in the Eighties were emblematic of the Tory decade and become instead the generic "they" of the soft-on-crime, namby-pamby, nanny state-loving, politically correct brigade blah-de-blah. And soon Quentin's trotting out the standard why-oh-why litany of what "they" have done to our children's literature "in the name of" not offending ethnic minorities or gays or whoever, dum-de-dum. Please provide the muzak of your choice.