But much of the time, I had no idea at all what they had done. And in any event, I was not judging individuals (except where I knew someone really had behaved badly). Of course there were divorced or lone parents who behaved in a responsible and caring manner. I was merely writing about general patterns of relative harm – the only way one could write about public policy. Why couldn’t they understand this?
I had not yet realised that the left’s aggression towards any dissent or challenge is essentially defensive. They are either guilty about what they are doing because they know it is wrong, or else at some level at least they know that their intellectual position is built on sand. What matters to them above all is that they are seen to be virtuous and intelligent. They care about being seen to be compassionate. They simply cannot deal with the possibility that they might not be. They deal with any such suggestion not by facing up to any harm they may be doing, but by shutting down the argument altogether. That’s because the banner behind which they march is not altruism. It is narcissism. But it took me a very long time fully to grasp this.
And in due course, what I saw so clearly in the areas of education or family — which was in essence the displacement of truth by ideology — I would come to realise was part of a much bigger picture. But it took me a long time to put it all together and arrive at that conclusion. And that was because I was unwilling to accept the great breach to which my own logic would inexorably lead me.
CHAPTER 8: Journalism in Transition
While the tectonic plates of British society were shifting, the Guardian was experiencing its own cultural transition. Journalism itself was having its post-modern moment. Truth was now said to be an illusion; objectivity was a sham; journalists who tried to be dispassionate were therefore perpetrating a fraud upon the public. The only honest approach was for journalists to wear their hearts on their sleeves; this was not to be called bias, but honesty.
This doctrine was called ‘the journalism of attachment’. To me, however, it was a green light for journalists to tell lies, disseminate propaganda and make it all up. There were some notable examples of this at the Guardian in those years. Those stories, most of which centred on the Bosnian War, caused controversy within the paper, with critics pointing out that certain events they described did not actually happen. To which the answer was that they told ‘the broader truth’. This ‘broader truth’ seemed instead to me to be a lie.
Shocked as I was by this, I was no less dismayed by a parallel development – the steady slide of the paper down-market. Again, it reflected a broader trend across the press – but we were the Guardian and supposed to be immune from that kind of pressure. Nevertheless, stories and articles became shorter, more trivial and, in my view, less authoritative and accurate.
In 1988, the paper was redesigned to look more modern and fashionable. The unease this stirred, however, was as nothing compared to what happened four years later when the paper launched a supplement called G2. It was trivial, flip and in-your-face; the serious articles it also contained were all but overlooked in the storm over ‘dumbing down’ that then ensued. But the traditionalists were hopelessly outgunned. Other papers immediately copied its stylish innovations. It was in fact a brilliant concept, brilliantly executed. Its creator was Alan Rusbridger.
But I was bereft. The paper appeared to be lurching away from the high-minded journalistic ideals of which it was supposedly the custodian. And this was made all the more bitter because I was now excluded from its inner counsels, beached in the backwaters of environment and social policy, no longer even part of the collegiate camaraderie that once would have seen me sloping off with colleagues for lunch in a local cafe.
It would be nice to record that in these circumstances I behaved with forbearance and circumspection. Alas, this would not even be a ‘broader truth’. I made a nuisance of myself, desperately trying to get a hearing for my protests that the paper was losing its soul. Looking back, I am embarrassed by such apparent arrogance. I can only say that at the time I felt like a little rowing boat being pounded by gales and giant waves while the mother ship had cast me adrift and was now sailing full steam ahead over the horizon.
Into this emotional maelstrom came a blow to the solar plexus. Out of the blue, Preston suggested I should become the paper’s Middle East correspondent and move to Israel. Given how closely I am identified with Israel’s cause today, it may seem strange that I should have taken this so amiss. But at that time I had never even been to Israel. My concern for the country was based merely on a profound sense of injustice and an acute ear to the lessons of history, not a personal identification with what was to me an entirely foreign and indeed somewhat unappealing country.
More to the point, my entire journalistic career had been spent writing about British domestic issues. I had no experience in foreign affairs whatsoever. Preston knew that better than anyone. So the offer didn’t feel like an offer at all. It felt like a dispatch into exile — an exile, moreover, with a twist.
For this was not a proposal to send me on some random foreign posting. It was to send me to one particular country, Israel, on the implicit grounds that I had a particular interest in that country. And on what was the assumption of that interest based? A few remarks to colleagues about the strange obsession of the left with Israel — and of course my play. But that was it. I had never written about Israel. It was not a place to which I had ever expressed a wish to go. Maybe Preston really did think he was doing me a kindness. But to me, it felt as if I was being punished, not just for being troublesome but being a troublesome Jew.
I refused the offer and remained in London. There were no repercussions; the subject was never mentioned again.
It was perhaps at that moment, however, that it really hit home. I was being cut loose. But I still couldn’t bear to let go.
CHAPTER 9: End Times at the Guardian
The great fight over the family had crystallised the culture wars for me. Demonstrable harm was being done to children, and so-called progressives were complicit in widening and deepening that harm. Now other thinkers started to notice that the social glue was coming unstuck and that the great alibi of poverty just didn’t wash. There were voices on the left who not only said this was wrong, but believed that the left itself had gone terribly wrong. It was these people who influenced me most because they came from a tradition that was my own — a belief in restraining self-interest out of a duty to others, in taking responsibility for one’s actions, in caring for the vulnerable. All essential in making a better world. All supposedly virtues of the left, but all being repudiated by the left.
I was influenced by writers such as David Selbourne, the political philosopher who was himself hounded out of his teaching post at Ruskin College, Oxford, after writing an article in The Times in 1986 on corruption in the Labour politics of Liverpool. Writing during the ‘Wapping dispute’, in which members of the print unions were at loggerheads with the newspaper’s proprietor Rupert Murdoch, Selbourne was accused by both students and colleagues at Ruskin of having betrayed union interests by publishing the article in a Murdoch paper; his lectures were picketed by print-union members and militant students, and he was prevented from teaching. Selbourne’s unsparing analysis of Britain’s loss of moral order in a number of books, allied to the thuggish treatment he received at the hands of so-called progressives, reinforced and helped explain what I was seeing unfold before me: that the left had lost the moral plot.
I was also influenced by the ethical socialist and grand old man of sociology AH Halsey, hitherto an icon of the left but who now was being treated preposterously as a pariah of the right on account of his magisterial warnings about family breakdown and the importance of marriage. Not only that, but this one-time guru of progressive education theories was now denouncing the ‘mindless egalitarianism’ which was leaving children ignorant and untaught.
Halsey had never denied the importance of tradition or authority, he said; he had merely wanted the ability of poor
children to be recognised and developed. But this had been overtaken by a ‘sub-Marxist message’ that there weren’t any standards at all – a movement that had captured the teacher-training colleges. As for the family, Halsey told me that the decline of the traditional family was the ‘cancer in the lungs of the modern left… The Conservatives injected rampant individualism into economic policy, and the left called it greed. But the left injected the same rampant individualism into family relations and called it progress’ (Guardian, 23 February 1993).
I had come to exactly the same conclusion; here was one of the icons of the left validating my own view. What he was describing was the eclipse of ‘ethical socialism’, the moral movement of social progress on the left whose goal was to create a better society, by a sub-Marxist ideology whose revolutionary goal was the destruction of that society and its replacement by a quite different one. Correctly, he identified that the left had become the sum of various interest groups all out for their own particular causes – single parenthood, homosexuality, animal rights.
For him as for me, the family was the issue of issues because the traditional family embodied the idea that there was something beyond the selfish individual. It was thus a ‘sacred institution’ – but now it was being turned into a mere contract which either side could break more or less at will. Halsey understood that this kind of self-centred individualism contained the seeds of the left’s own destruction – and the destruction of Western society.
Tellingly, the response of the modern left to Halsey was to say he had ‘gone gaga’. As I had already learned, when challenged the left does not come up with a counter- argument. It just demonises. And the suggestion of insanity – as in the former Soviet Union– is its principal branding of choice.
My own writing now became increasingly hard-edged. Once the spell of the left was broken, and I saw that – first in its refusal to condemn Third World tyrants, and then in education and in the family – it was actually promoting harm and describing that harm as progressive, I began to see the same pattern repeated over and over again. And the more the left demonised those who were restating moral precepts based on duty rather than self-interest, the more important it became to me to try to open people’s eyes to what was thus being ignored, denied, or misrepresented.
I worried, for example, about the ‘moral myopia’ through which cannibalism, child mutilation, and bestiality were becoming the cinema’s stock-in-trade. Why was it, I asked, that we seemed to lurch from one extreme to another, from censorship to licence with nothing in between? (Guardian, 12 March 1993). Authority was being disastrously confused with authoritarianism, I lamented, and turned into a taboo along with individual responsibility and the nuclear family; the effects were all around us in rampant juvenile crime (Guardian, 5 March 1993).
The fragmentation of the family was leading to the fragmentation of moral values – but any attempt to tell people how they should behave was damned as ‘theoretical imperialism’, while telling them that lifestyle choice was the only acceptable doctrine was not (Guardian, 3 April 1993). In May 1993, after a single mother treated with a fertility drug gave birth to sextuplets, I was aghast at the ‘reckless amorality’ of a society that had reached its ‘grotesque apogee’ when ‘no fewer than 37 hard-pressed health service employees – three obstetricians, two paediatric consultants, three anaesthetists, four paediatric registrars, five senior midwives, five senior house officers, two pharmacists, a radiologist, and twelve nurses – shared general jubilation for the brilliant masterstroke of creating a single-parent family of seven’ (Guardian, 28 May 1993).
That was my last column for the Guardian.
CHAPTER 10: The Worst Witch in the Hunt
In 1993, the Guardian bought the Observer, then an ailing Sunday newspaper. It did so largely in order to stymie the Independent, which had branched out into the Independent on Sunday and was thus posing ever more of a threat. There also seemed to be an obvious confluence of viewpoints, since the Observer was a distinguished liberal paper. The then deputy editor of the Guardian, Jonathan Fenby, was appointed editor of the Observer and he asked me to join him as a columnist. In June 1993 I duly moved to the Observer’s offices in Battersea, where it was based until it moved into offices above the Guardian in Farringdon Road.
Joining the Observer seemed a reasonable response to my dilemma. I now felt so out on a limb at the Guardian I knew I had to move on; but I could not bring myself to leave it altogether. So the Observer seemed to offer a very timely halfway house, even though I was uneasily aware that Fenby’s approach might well have been at Preston’s behest.
For a while, it worked very well. Fenby was genial, serious-minded, and with no animosity towards me. The Observer was a paper with a long liberal tradition — and at that time was still demonstrably a liberal newspaper. It was benign and tolerant in outlook, and did not appear to be marked by the bitterness and malice of the Guardian. There were undoubted tensions: Fenby brought in some people from the Independent, and there was a certain amount of jostling and rivalry. But I liked the generosity of spirit of the old Observer hands. Fenby was unfailingly supportive, if distracted, and the columns I wrote were sharper, as if I felt more confident.
I wrote in despair about the crisis of belief within the Labour party, which viewed support for the EU Maastricht Treaty as progressive, even though this erosion of national sovereignty within Europe would destroy jobs and promote social disharmony, racism, and xenophobia (Observer, 6 June 1993). This was becoming unsayable; the Tory party itself was demonising the opponents of Maastricht as swivel-eyed fanatics; it was axiomatic that support for the EU was not only the correct progressive position but had become the political centre ground — even though a decade earlier, hostility to the EU had been the correct progressive position.
I wrote about the crucial importance of fathers to the emotional health of children, and pleaded that people should stop being frightened to say that a certain type of family was best for children’s welfare (Observer, 13 June 1993). By now, it seemed to me that family breakdown was simply dissolving the bonds of society and civilisation itself. I was reporting on whole communities where committed fathers were now almost totally unknown. Children as young as five were becoming highly sexualised from the example of their promiscuous mothers. Teachers, doctors, and social workers were horrified by the way in which both left and right were ignoring or misrepresenting this disaster: gross individual and social degradation, young men fathering children indiscriminately, widespread neglect of children who were growing up in unbridled savagery and lawlessness to despise their mothers and disdain men and all authority. As one child psychiatrist said, we were simply witnessing a breakdown in society (Observer, 17 October 1993). Surely there could be no greater issue to rouse the concern of progressives? Apparently not so.
Those who dared state that in general it was best for a child to be brought up by its mother and father took their professional and social lives in their hands. Encouraging lone mothers to move off welfare and into work was now deemed to be an extreme right-wing position – even though work and family had once been the twin pillars of ethical socialism. The left now identified itself with moral relativism, the doctrine that all lifestyles were equal and none could be deemed to be better than any other. But the idea that a woman could now be both mother and father to her children — more, that it was her ‘right’ to choose such a lifestyle — led directly to the hopeless plight of often inadequate women left to struggle alone with raising children while the men who fathered them were in effect told they were free to do their own thing.
I was as perplexed by this as I was appalled. I had been brought up to believe that the left stood for altruism rather than selfishness, community rather than individualism, self-discipline rather than the law of the jungle and the survival of the fittest. Now, it seemed, the left was playing directly into the hands of the ideological right, for whom the free and unfettered individual was all.
The right said ther
e was no such thing as society; the left said there was no such thing as the family. The right cut taxes and let the poor go to the wall; the left cut family ties and let the children go to the wall. Both sides were worshipping at the shrine of individualism. Yet this was causing a rising tide of juvenile distress, crime, emotional disturbance, educational and relationship failure. ‘Haves’ and ‘have-nots’ were no longer defined by economics: society was polarising into those who had everything – family stability, decent education, jobs, houses, and a reasonable life – and those who had nothing – no family stability, educational failure, no jobs, no houses, and no stake in society as a result. Children, I wrote, needed to be taught that personal fulfilment had consequences for others: ‘To brand this a right-wing perspective is an abuse of language’ (Tablet, 31 July 1993).
But branded it was.
Not only that, but while moral codes that put others first were being junked, a range of taboos was being established around race, gender, and sexuality. One of the most dramatic examples of the oppressive and tyrannical nature of what was now called ‘political correctness’ – but should more accurately be termed ‘cultural Marxism’ – was to be found in the world of social work. I wrote about the ‘anti-racist zealots’ who had captured the social workers’ training body, the Central Council for Education and Training in Social Work, and had built into the social workers’ diploma the dogma that society was fundamentally racist and oppressive.
Once again, it was not some right-wing zealot who opened my eyes here to the way in which progressive circles were snuffing out freedom. Robert Pinker was Professor of Social Work Studies at the London School of Economics. He was an old-style liberal, who was demonised because he took a stand against this brain-washing propaganda which was corrupting social work so badly that countless numbers of deeply disadvantaged clients were being abandoned or thrown to the wolves.
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