Peter Hitchens
26 July 2012
Is it in the film of ‘Far From the ‘Madding Crowd’ that the closing scenes show Farmer Boldwood, condemned to death for the murder of a rival in love, sitting gaunt in his narrow cell, listening to the prison carpenter making his coffin? Something like that.
This rather unpleasant image comes to mind again as I read a pamphlet I wrongly neglected when it first came out ‘The Rise of the Equalities Industry’ by Peter Saunders, published last November by one of the better think tanks, Civitas.
We are not sitting in a cell. Nobody has told us we are to die in the morning. But if we listen carefully we can hear the hammering, sawing and planing of the crude coffin in which our liberty is to be nailed down and buried. Or perhaps it is the scaffold on which it is to be guillotined (no honest British gallows for this execution). We listen, we don’t understand what we hear, and we do nothing. Probably it is too late to do anything anyway.
The pamphlet attracted very little attention at the time, as such work often does. Finding it on one of the slithering heaps of unread material in my office ( and planning, as I am to take two weeks away from my desk to write the index of my own new book) I thought ‘This could be interesting’, and picked it up. So gripped was I that I was still studying it two days later during the interval of a very fine open-air ‘Hamlet’ (performed in the majestic courtyard of the Bodleian Library in Oxford last week).
'The enemies of liberty began, very wisely, by wrecking the schools and the universities'
I think Professor Saunders (interesting as he is) does not know the half of it. The real nature of these matters is known only to those of us who were part of the revolutionary project and have defected from it. But he has done a lot of the necessary spadework, and those who read his work will find they have at least understood the architecture of the new totalitarianism which is slowly but relentlessly rising out of the ruins of British law, the wreckage of our mixed constitution, the remains of our limited government, and the void where our impartial civil service and competent, thrifty local government used to stand. If we had a properly educated middle class, which knew how to think instead of what to think, I don’t think this project could succeed. But the enemies of liberty began, very wisely, by wrecking the schools and the universities.
What’s it about? First of all, it comes close to grasping why egalitarianism is such a danger. For me, ‘equality’ is not a particularly attractive objective anyway. Why should it be? But I always find people are shocked when I say so.
Let me explain . Equality before God simply exists, for the religious believer, as an absolute in Eternity. It reminds us that no human worth, achievement, wealth, fame, beauty, honour or praise has any importance before the throne of the Heavenly Grace. We brought nothing into this world and we can assuredly carry nothing out. We should live our lives in this knowledge. But the idea that this should in any way be reflected in some sort of absolute material equality, in this life, is fatuous. We all have different gifts, and in many cases these gifts do not shine very brightly in this world, however glorious they may be in the next (and vice versa). Kindness, hospitality, charity, generosity are all required from those to whom much is given. Equality is not.
Equality before the law is more persuasive, and is certainly an ideal to be aimed at, even the certain knowledge that it might be approached but cannot be attained. But any practical, wise and experienced person knows that this equality is a fantasy, and will always remain so. Also, that any serious attempt to achieve it will suffer from the usual defects of Utopianism – it will fail, people will be killed and imprisoned in the process, and at the end of it the law will be more unequal than it was to start with.
Material equality is plainly absurd, cannot be brought into existence and is only maintained as a propaganda fiction in societies whose elites keep their privileges secret through censorship, and preserve them inviolate through terror. It is not desirable, for if all are rewarded equally, and people vary in their talents and energies, then many will suffer, talents will wither unused and corruption will be widespread. Some instances: under the Soviet system, all doctors, good or bad, were paid the same. It did not take long for the acute citizen to find out who the good ones were, but their services could only be secured through bribes. The same rule applied to places in better schools, or the allocations of apartments in better districts. Elite privilege carried more weight than bribery, but was in itself corrupt, as it secured the silence and uncritical support of those (the ‘Nomenklatura’) whom the elite admitted to privilege.
I know more about this than most, because during my time in Soviet Moscow I was able to live in a Nomenklatura apartment, with the Brezhnev and Andropov families as my near neighbours. I have never had such magnificent quarters – 14-foot ceilings, chandeliers, oak parquet floors, a sweeping view of Moscow from the University to the Kremlin on one side, and of the Moscow River on the other. And this was in the Homeland of Equality.
As a foreigner I could not take advantage of the dacha (country cottage) in the forest outside Moscow , which came with the apartment, as it was too close to an anti-ballistic missile launch site which I was not supposed to see. Nor did I qualify for entry to the special secret restaurants where the elite ate, or the special elite shops where they bought their privileged supplies of fresh meat and vegetables.
Nor was I allowed to use the special hospitals, in lush gardens behind high walls, where the elite were treated. But these things existed, and my experience of this secret inequality was only the foothills. The truly powerful Communists lived in secluded woodland mansions with battalions of servants, and roared down the city streets along special (Olympic-style?) lanes, which were heated in winter so that they never iced over. So much for material equality. Later, as the Bolshevik privileges faded, I had to pay for my Moscow privileges with hard cash, the way you do anywhere else.
Professor Saunders explains that the equality pursued by the British government is not, as it pretends, the equality of treatment (which is more pernicious than it sounds); nor is it equality of opportunity (which is the only kind compatible with a free society). It is *equality of outcome*.
Professor Saunders shows that this is the hidden, third element on which the entire strategy is based’. It is clear, when you study the actual rules, that equality of outcome is the aim (the attempt to get universities to lower their standards so as to equalise their intake is the clearest and most blatant example of this).
But ‘nothing is said explicitly about …equality of outcomes’.
He shows his lack of knowledge of the enemy by saying ‘Unequal outcomes unthinkingly get used as evidence of unequal treatment’.
I challenge that ‘unthinkingly’. There are undoubtedly people who have thought about this, though they do not include the Equalities Minister, Mrs Theresa May. Mrs May, once a doughty opponent of all-women shortlists for MPs (She said ‘I’m totally opposed to Labour’s idea of all-women shortlists and I think they are an insult to women. I‘ve competed equally with men in my career and I have been happy to do so in politics too’) mysteriously and so far as I know without any explanation later reversed her position, just in time for the Cameron era. She then more or less welcomed Harriet Harman’s Equalities Bill, the legislative basis for the greatest expansion of thought control in modern Britain.
She said: ‘I look forward to working constructively with them on ensuring that we have workable and practical legislation to provide for a fair society.’ Miss Harman thanked her for her ‘broad welcome for the package’.
No wonder then that the Coalition is now ’committed to the most radical form of egalitarian thinking – the belief in equal outcomes’. The Tory party, having failed to oppose the Harman Bill, is now finding that it is bound to follow it. No use blaming Nick Clegg. They sold the ass long before they got together with the Liberal Democrats and should stop pretending otherwise. As ‘equality’ has now started to apply to class as well as to sex, race, sexual orientation, we are fast reaching the stage when an economic policy might have to be rejected because it allegedly threatens the equal rights of ‘disadvantaged’ economic groups. The courts might well rule that it did so. People’s Republic, here we come.
Professor Saunders also points out that this process has not been the result of popular demand, but the wilful programme of the 1960s university generation, in London and Brussels . ‘For almost fifty years, progressive politicians have been introducing laws designed to *change* the way people think and behave about issues like these, rather than to reflect them. Especially in more recent times, the law has been sued as an ideological battering ram, both by Westminster politicians and by Brussels, to forcibly redefine social norms’.
He traces the salami-slicing method by which a small body designed to stop racial discrimination has grown into the enormous and costly Equality and Human Rights Commission (itself a branch of the unjustly-ignored Fundamental Rights Agency based in Vienna).
From protecting people against insults and outrages, it has taken on the task of ‘promoting’ equality, and now increasingly it has the power and the money not merely to promote it but to enforce it, through employment codes of practice supported by trade unions and decisive in the outcomes of tribunals, fines, the withholding of government contracts and ultimately the civil and criminal law.
Equality, of course, doesn’t mean what it used to mean. Linked with ’diversity’ it means that Christianity is no longer the accepted religion of this country, but one among many faiths, equal to them all and (like the rest) slightly more equal than Islam, because the British state is nervous of Islam and does not want to upset it. The effect of this is actually to make Christianity a slighted and discouraged faith, as it has to be reminded from time to time of its lost status and its new subservient role.
State employees, as we have found in a series of cases, can get into trouble for trying to spread a Christian message at work or to act at work according to Christian principles (how long before this applies to those who do it too noisily outside work?). I have yet to hear of this happening to members of any other faith. But I am sure that there will soon be a concerted assault on the remaining Christian presence in the state schools, beginning with dilution of entry requirements and the power to give preference in hiring teachers to members of a faith, and ending in effective abolition.
I suspect a similar fate faces the English language in time. The estate of Marriage is also now ‘equal’ to ‘any relationship’ , which one again means that it has been stripped of its former privileges and needs to be reminded of its new, diminished status by being treated with some coldness by bureaucracy, and not acknowledged in official documents (I believe the words ‘husband’ and wife’ are increasingly disappearing from forms , replaced by ‘partner’).
From a legitimate concern for the victims of racial discrimination, what Peter Simple long ago called ‘The Race Relations Industry’ has jumped the logic barrier into other areas which are wholly different (see my chapter on the important differences between – for example – racism, sexism and homophobia in my book ‘The Cameron Delusion’ (originally published in hardback as ‘The Broken Compass’) for a demolition of the idea that the three are the same, or can or should be treated in the same way. There’s also an exploration of the important switch from ‘racialism’, namely a moronic, indefensible discrimination on the grounds of skin colour to ‘racism’ (in which racial prejudice is falsely equated with defence of indigenous cultures) , which I recommend to any interested reader.
As Professor Saunders points out, decades have gone by during which there has been no serious intellectual challenge to this wobbling mountain of tripe. Positive discrimination exists in all but name. Even supposedly conservative private firms adopt the rules of equality and diversity.
But the EHRC is in fact the nucleus of a Thought Police. Since the Macpherson report dispensed with any need for evidence for an accusation of ‘racism’ ( the same of course applies to the other isms and phobias) the subjective wounded feelings of anyone can create a thought crime. The adoption of ‘racially aggravated’ categories of crime, with much heavier sentences than non-aggravated offences, has given the police and the CPS enormous power to pursue people who say out loud (or are accused of doing so) things which the new elite don’t like. The recent bizarre prosecution of Cinnamon Heathcote Drury, charged with ‘racially aggravated assault’ of a Muslim woman in Tesco (thrown out by a jury) shows how vulnerable anyone is to such accusations. Yes, she was acquitted. But many people wouldn’t or couldn’t have risked a jury trial, something increasingly difficult to obtain.
And the modern British jury is an unreliable defence. Political correctness, egalitarianism and poor education have all found their way into the jury room, and the majority verdict has destroyed the power of the obstinate Henry Fonda character to resist a rush to judgement. ( see the chapter ’Twelve Angry Persons’ in my book ‘The Abolition of Liberty’).
Actually, I suspect we are just at the very beginning of a process which will end with a true Thought Police. The Police themselves are feeling their way, cautiously. They would like to act more, but it is too soon. Remember those bizarre inquiries one Welsh force made about public figures who had allegedly been disrespectful of the Welsh? I asked them what law they were applying. They never answered. But I suspect they had in mind Section 5 of the Public order Act of 1986, a sloppily drafted and silly piece of work originally aimed at football hooligans (now the subject of a worthy campaign for reform whose fortunes it will be interesting to observe) .
Section 5 makes it an offence to use 'threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour, or disorderly behaviour' or to display 'any writing, sign or other visible representation which is threatening, abusive or insulting' within the hearing or sight of a person 'likely to be caused harassment, alarm or distress thereby'. Combined with Lord Macpherson’s view on what constitutes a racist incident, this is of course irresistible, especially once police, CPS, the Judges’ bench and the Appeal courts have all been thoroughly politically corrected, a process close to completion.
I think the police officers who in 2005 and 2006 investigated various public figures who had said unfashionable things about homosexuality (one of these was Sir Iqbal Sacranie, then head of the Muslim Council of Britain, another was the Christian pro-marriage campaigner Lynette Burrows ) on the radio were also relying on the same Act. Again, they never followed through (see below for the reason why not) . At the time they said homophobic racist and domestic incidents were ‘priority crimes’. They then told the media ‘We can confirm that a member of the public brought to our attention an incident which he believed to be homophobic. All parties have been spoken to by the police. No allegation of crime has been made. A report has been taken but is now closed.. Note that ‘which he believed to be homophobic’. In law, that’s all that is necessary.
The Public Order Act 1986 is the law used against the elderly preacher Harry Hammond, who was arrested (yes, he was) after being pelted with lumps of mud, Pushed to the ground, pelted with mud and abused by homosexual rights campaigners (who were not arrested). He was then successfully prosecuted before magistrates for annoying them.
An appeal, held unusually after his death, failed. He had held up a placard bearing the words ‘Stop Homosexuality’, which was his basic message, He had offered no personal insults. One fascinating feature of this case is that the two police officers at the scene disagreed openly about what to do, and gave evidence on opposite sides in the courtroom. The younger, more PC police officers who are now pretty much universal have for long been trained in equality and diversity. There is a steady dribble of cases of preachers and others arrested and sometimes tried for speech code offences of this kind. My guess is that the police and the CPS they are restrained mainly by the existence of a strong free press. There is a steady dribble of cases of preachers and others arrested and sometimes tried for speech code offences of this kind.
Well, listen to the sound of saws and chisels. Lord Justice Leveson is busy making a coffin for that. And when the strong free press is gone, wait for the knock on the door. The Marxist writer Antonio Gramsci is well on the way to scoring his first victory, and the European regions on these islands will be the first to learn that revolutions don’t always happen through noisy and violent convulsions. Indeed, the most effective revolutions take place while people are looking the other way, as everyone has been. All the buildings are left standing. But the laws, liberties, traditions, morals faith and loyalty are destroyed, and carted away to some place of desolation where the remnants can be desecrated and burned. Quomodo sedet sola Civitas [ed. "How doth the city sit solitary"]
