Guardian Angel

by Melanie Phillips

  The great battle over education had one unexpected spin-off. For some years during the nineties I was in fairly regular touch with the Prince of Wales. The common cause between us was the state of British education, and on this issue we had many cordial and fascinating conversations. I have never broken his confidence in revealing what he said to me, and I never will. There came a point, however, when there was a changing of the guard in his private office and I suddenly found myself out in the cold. I believe the reason was that I thought some of the education advisers now included in his circle were less than wholly sound, and I told him so. Whether, as a result, I was deemed by his people to have become too difficult, I do not know; but, from that time on, all contact with the Prince of Wales ceased.

  My parents loyally read all my articles and books, but with increasing bemusement. They simply could not understand why I was now apparently siding with people like Conservative politicians, who were by definition a Bad Thing, against people like teachers, who were by definition a Very Good Thing. I tried to explain that left-wing people had changed and were now taking up positions which were harmful, particularly to disadvantaged people, but my poor parents simply couldn’t cope with this. My mother took refuge in saying, ‘Well I’m sure you have very good reasons for thinking this’, and then retreated into her knitting. My father would look at me, head cocked to one side, eyes clouded with perplexity and no little pain.

  CHAPTER 12: The Battle For Britain’s Soul

  On and on I marched, straight into the guns. What else could I do? One explosive issue led to another. During the 1990s, the ultra-feminist agenda behind the willed breakdown of the traditional family became ever bolder in attacking its real target – men. It seemed to me to be driven by women who were declaring, offensively and stupidly, that men were a waste of space and that no sensible woman ‘would take one home’. Such women appeared merely to need men as sperm donors, walking wallets, and occasional au pairs.

  It also seemed to me that the right – excoriated as they were for apparent heartlessness towards single-parents who they were always trying to get off welfare and into work – were actually in an unholy alliance with the left over this issue. In January 1990, I had written that Mrs Thatcher had struck a national chord with a speech in which she talked about strengthening the system for chasing absentee fathers for maintenance (Guardian, 19 January 1990). I approved of this at the time, on the grounds that it was an obvious outrage that so many non-resident fathers failed to pay maintenance for their children’s upkeep.

  But within a few years I had radically revised my position. Now I thought that reducing the duty of a father to a purely financial role would itself undermine the married family. It gave a woman an incentive to have a baby and then ditch its father. It was also surely manifestly unjust to require men to pay for the upkeep of their children, when as often as not they were prevented by the mothers from playing a proper, involved fatherly role.

  Both Mrs Thatcher’s government and the ultra-feminists therefore seemed to be singing from the same bash-the-man hymn-sheet. At the right-wing Institute of Economic Affairs, I had a number of spirited arguments about this with thinkers who accordingly regarded me with bemusement. Wasn’t I supposed to be on their side? Well no, I wasn’t. They saw everything in terms of economics; I saw things in terms of morality, justice, and rational responses to incentives.

  In 1999, I explored all this in detail in another book, The Sex-Change Society: Feminised Britain and the Neutered Male. It was published by a think tank, the Social Market Foundation. This was because I could not find a mainstream publisher who would take it. A few years previously, my literary agent had warned me that I was being blacklisted by the publishing world, and he advised me to stop writing books on current affairs. Nonsense, I said, and dispensed with his services. I engaged a new literary agent and reported to him what I had been told. ‘What nonsense’, he said, ‘of course you can get published’. Alas, it was not nonsense. So the Social Market Foundation, which at the time was run by Tories who had migrated from Labour via the Social Democratic Party and were sympathetic to me, agreed to publish my book.

  In it, I argued that the roles of the sexes were being reversed under a policy of enforced androgyny. Women were assuming the roles of both mothers and fathers while masculinity was being progressively written out of the cultural script, and men were being bullied into turning into quasi-women. Far from delivering greater freedom for women, however, this agenda was actually harming them along with their children as both family life and normative values were destroyed (The Sex-Change Society: Feminised Britain and the Neutered Male; Social Market Foundation, November 1999).

  The response from the sisterhood was as apoplectic as it was incredulous. The Daily Telegraph noted with sympathy in an editorial, no less, that ‘Response by female writers to this book was venomous’. Columnist Julie Burchill implied that I was suffering from sexual frustration. Another columnist, Suzanne Moore, suggested that I should ‘get out more’. Yet another, Maureen Freely, wrote about my ‘bizarre gyrations over girl power’. She asked: ‘Has she lost her mind? I’m afraid the answer is no’. Since I was not clinically insane, in her view, I must therefore be a fanatic. I was apparently a ‘born-again social conservative, or should I say fundamentalist’, who offered the ‘usual specious mix of biological determinism, skewed statistics, out of context research findings and wild statements’ to express my ‘Savonarolean faith in the heaven that was the ideal fifties family’ (Guardian, 5 November 1997).

  In the New Statesman, Geraldine Bedell was astonished that I could still call myself a progressive, having written about an unspoken conspiracy to get badly-behaved women to exclude men and thus undermine the family. Apparently it was my ‘judgmental’ tone which meant I could not be a progressive and had the left ‘fuming’. Seeking explanation for this upset of the natural order, Bedell told readers that I was a ‘true believer’ whose ‘austere quality is emphasised by her fiercely short haircut and strong defined features’ (NS, 1 November 1999). Just imagine the feminist outcry if a man had written that!

  For all the insults, there was still a grudging acknowledgement that I had a point. The Labour MP Denis MacShane thought the ‘fury of the attacks’ on me masked the fact that ‘an awful lot of what she writes makes sense’, even though for him my thought-crime was to be ‘anti-European’ (Independent, 16 November 1999). William Leith, who felt the book was like ‘intellectual pornography’, added, ‘still, a lot of it makes sense’; and Claudia FitzHerbert found my faith in marriage ‘an oddly optimistic vision from such a cross and despairing pen’ (Daily Telegraph, 29 January 1999).

  It was around this time that a handwritten note went up on the Guardian’s notice board that I may have been a woman, but I was definitely not a sister.

  If the issue of the family mutated into man-hating feminism, than education mutated into the onslaught against national identity. In the mid-nineties, this battle was joined at national level when the head of the national curriculum authority, Dr Nick Tate, tried to challenge the orthodoxy under which history teaching rejected the transmission of historical knowledge, and aimed instead to prove that objectivity was an illusion, historical truth a chimera, and that there was no established account of the past on which anyone could rely.

  This was part of an agenda whose aim was nothing less than the dissolution of British national identity and the construction of a new, multicultural ‘narrative’. It derived from the particular British self-flagellation over Empire and class, reinforced by the more general left-wing view that the nation state was an oppressive Western construct that was innately racist and inescapably created nationalism, conflict, and war.

  Educationists claimed that transmitting a sense of national identity through education was ‘the new fundamentalism’ associated with ‘the superiority of the British empire’. They objected in particular to teaching classic English authors or British history to ethnic minority children. They said this was
racist.

  I was appalled. To me, this attitude threatened to deprive such children of what they needed to be equal and full participants in society. In an attack on Nick Tate in the Cambridge Journal, one education lecturer quoted with approval writers who questioned whether there could be any shared values at all. But to me, that meant freedom of speech, parliamentary democracy, the rule of law, or monogamy could no longer be upheld (New Statesman, 9 May 1997).

  I saw this as nothing less than outright nihilism which threatened to destroy the West. If all common bonds of tradition, custom, culture, morality, and so forth were destroyed, there would no social glue to keep society together. It would gradually fracture into a set of disparate tribes with competing agendas, and thus eventually would destroy itself. And as I was coming to realise, just about every issue on which I was so embattled – family, education, nation, and many more – were all salients on the great battleground of the culture wars, on which the defenders of the West were losing hands down.

  As far back as 1989, I had grasped that multiculturalism was problematic and a threat to liberty. The Church of England was proposing that the blasphemy law, which applied only to Christianity, should be replaced by a new offence of insulting or outraging the religious feelings of any group in the community. This took place merely weeks after Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini had issued his notorious fatwa calling for the murder of the author Salman Rushdie on account of the purported offence to Islam given by his novel, The Satanic Verses.

  Rushdie was forced to live in hiding for several years. But the Church’s response was to surrender to terrorism and abandon the defence of the West by seeking to criminalise the giving of all such religious offence.

  On this I was very clear from the start. Criminalising the giving of offence as blasphemy was a ‘terribly muddled and dangerous’ curtailment of liberty, since almost by definition every great faith that believed itself to be the sole repository of truth would give offence to others (Guardian, 3 March 1989). And whereas the blasphemy law in defence of Christianity was hardly ever used, a new law criminalising all religious offence would become a weapon enabling Islamic militants to destroy freedom of expression.

  A foreign tyranny had put a bounty on the head of a British citizen who was now being forced to live in hiding for his life. You’d have thought that all decent people in Britain would be united in outrage. Not so; in a chilling echo of history, Rushdie’s book had been publicly burned – with a number of Labour MPs taking part in this auto-da-fé.

  As I wrote, ‘Labour MPs are nervously glancing over their shoulders at their Muslim constituents. It has been estimated that Labour could lose up to ten seats at the next election if disaffected Muslim voters organise behind their own candidates… Those who have faith should be free to practise it so long as that practice does not stifle the freedom of others – so no censorship, no book burning, no murder. That is why those who support the ban on the book, whatever their weasel words about abhorring violence, connive at the establishment of a medieval and theocratic lynch-mob’ (Guardian, 28 July 1989).

  In 1990, I was aghast at the ambivalent attitudes of two Conservative MPs towards Rushdie’s continuing plight. Peter Temple-Morris, chairman of the parliamentary Anglo-Iranian Group, and Robert Adley, chairman of the equivalent British-Syrian group, called upon Rushdie to make a gesture to pacify the Muslim world and thus break the deadlock over the Americans then being held hostage in Iran. I wrote about the ‘mind-twisting inversion of reality’ and surrender of the British government to the threat of Islamic violence, with the extraordinary decision not to prosecute anyone for threatening Rushdie’s life, even though two prominent Muslims had stated they would sacrifice their own lives and those of their children if the opportunity arose to kill him.

  It was an uncanny preview of what was to engulf Britain and the West in later years. Almost a quarter of a century on, it is clear that the Rushdie affair, and in particular the capitulation by the British establishment and the so-called progressive establishment to terrorist blackmail by religious fascists, was a defining moment in Britain’s surrender of its will to survive.

  In 1996, however, I was getting another whiff of the disaster that was looming. A state primary school in Birmingham, where seventy percent of pupils were Muslim, started teaching Islam in religious education classes; a residual multi-faith class would be held for the rest. I duly noted that ‘Islam is the spectre at the woolly liberals’ feast’ — because unlike other minorities, Muslims expected their host culture to adapt to meet their requirements.

  In schools with a high Muslim attendance, there were already running battles over separate playgrounds for girls and boys, the school uniform, and the content of the syllabus. I noted the fundamental dilemma of pluralism when a society’s core liberal values were denied by a belief system it felt obliged to accommodate. Surely we believed that freedom was better than tyranny, democracy than despotism, law than anarchy? If so, schools had to teach a common culture (Observer, 11 February 1996). The alternative, prevailing cultural relativism, directly called into question whether a common culture based on liberal values could survive – a question that is obviously infinitely more acute today.

  By the late nineties, I was fretting over a country that seemed to be sleepwalking over the edge of a cultural cliff. Britain was in the grip of hyper-individualism, doctrinaire group rights, education collapse, and family breakdown. What had gone missing was any sense of a shared national project. ‘Instead’, I wrote, ‘there is a despairing stoicism in the face of the apparently inexorable decline of a nation, the value of whose national identity can be measured by history teachers who resist the very idea that they should teach British history as an elitist irrelevance’ (TLS, 14 March 1997).

  The fetish for subjective values rather than objective authority was also elevating emotion over reason to an alarming degree. The country succumbed to a hysterical outbreak of mass sentimentality and emotional incontinence over the death of Princess Diana in August 1997, absurdly projecting onto her the sublimation of popular feelings of victimisation and dysfunctionality. Hard on the heels of this apparent cultural nervous breakdown, the Tory leadership under William Hague announced that old taboos had given way to less judgmental attitudes, and the Conservative party would reposition itself around a new tolerance and inclusiveness on the family. With the historic values underpinning national cohesion, moral responsibility, and the very spine of Britain’s liberal society now under attack, the response of the ostensible defenders of that society was to buckle.

  In 1991, I had decided to stretch my wings a little at the Guardian and venture out of the social policy arena in which I had been pigeonholed ever since I was a cub reporter. Along with my increasing concerns about the absence of moral seriousness on the left, I was struck by the corresponding vacuity of the Labour party, which seemed no longer to know what it believed in. I decided that the Labour politician who most perfectly epitomised this trend was a young MP who at that time held the party’s employment portfolio. He was personable and telegenic and clearly one of the party’s Young Turks because of his cool attitude towards Labour’s trade union paymasters. But, beyond that, he had not received a great deal of attention. His name was Tony Blair.

  I interviewed him at his home in the fashionable North London neighbourhood of Islington. As he talked, I was both charmed and intrigued; he was winsome and self-deprecating, and was talking earnestly about a new type of politics, a synthesis of individual freedom and community obligation. I didn’t really know what to make of this. What did it mean?

  In my article, which the Guardian headlined ‘A star strong on telly but weak on vision’, I asked him about the difference between himself and his Conservative counterpart and recorded his somewhat diffident answer, about how the unions were vital but needed to be used differently. I noted his apparent discomfort when he described himself as a socialist and how he couldn’t really define the difference between socialism and social democrac
y. I described his views as sounding very reasonable, but wondered about the absence of passion. And I described him as ‘the cynosure of the new model Labour Party… a man without a shadow, a man with no form, no past to live down, or boast about or betray; a Labour politician with no anger, no personal experience of hardship or injustice to expiate, a pleasant man with a pleasant family living in a pleasant North London house’ (Guardian, 29 June 1991).

  The reaction to my article was seismic. Blair himself was silent; but the political reporters at the Guardian went ballistic. My crime, as far as I could make out through the shouting, was that I had no business writing about Blair at all because I wasn’t even a political reporter and had thus written a totally ridiculous piece which made the whole paper look stupid. Or something along those lines. Around that time, I happened to go to a party where I met Peter Mandelson, who had managed Labour’s 1987 general election campaign and was now the prospective Labour parliamentary candidate for Hartlepool. He already had a burgeoning reputation as the party’s Machiavelli. I barely knew him, but he too started shouting at me. ‘That was the single most disgraceful piece about a politician that I can ever remember reading!’ he stormed. ‘You know what you are! You’re a yuppie! You’re just a yuppie!’

  I was as bewildered as I was astounded. A yuppie was a young, upwardly mobile professional. Wasn’t that supposed to be precisely the kind of person to whom the new model Labour party was now appealing? And anyway, quite how had my article exhibited this supposedly noxious characteristic?