Douglas Murray

Now that the government has kindly allowed us to go out again, I wonder if anyone has discovered the same social challenge I have encountered? Which is that almost nobody agrees on anything. I should pre-empt a possible line of attack here and acknowledge that I am aware of the case study I am basing this on. Still I fancy the problem is wider than myself. Of course we never did agree on everything. But, after a year of seclusion, it seems that as we de-bubble, the divergences are far greater than before. Not least regarding what we have just been through. It forks off at the very beginning. For instance there are people — few in number, and perhaps not in your own circle of acquaintance — who basically disbelieve the whole Covid thing.

It’s a dangerous thing when you import the worst aspects of another culture. And an even worse thing when you import the worst interpretation of that worst aspect of another culture. This week marked a year since the death of George Floyd at the hands of a policeman in Minnesota. Since that time, Derek Chauvin, the policeman who killed Mr Floyd, has been tried, convicted of causing his death and is currently awaiting sentence. Around the world, the actions of this one awful policeman have been extrapolated out beyond endurance. It has been claimed that they revealed the truth about race relations in America. They have been used to claim that race relations around the world are the same as they are in America.

There has been a huge amount of comment in recent days on the latest round of exchanges between Israel and the terrorists of Hamas and Islamic Jihad in Gaza. As usual whole slews of celebrities and other important figures on the international stage have lamented the fact that Israel has put so much effort into the defence of its own citizens. As usual these ignoramuses cry about 'disproportionate' death tolls. As though it would all be a lot fairer if Israel turned off the Iron Dome system for a night or two and let the increasingly sophisticated weaponry of its enemies rain down, unmolested, upon its people. But all this, and much more, has been rehearsed a thousand times before. From the UK there is only one interesting observation that can be made about this conflict.

One of the least attractive aspects of American politics is epitomised in the ‘Office of the First Lady’. The office in the East Wing of the White House has grown under consecutive presidents and, depending on the incumbent’s ambitions, can include policy and legislative initiatives. All emanate from a person solely in place because some years earlier they were lucky enough — or otherwise — to marry a person who became president. It all makes America less like a democracy, more like a court, with the inevitable overspill of ‘First Children’ and more. By convention this country has been spared that problem.

This article first appeared in the 20 March edition of The Spectator.The Church of England report that was leaked to Douglas Murray has now been published. You can read the full report here. With a heavy heart I must return once more to the subject of the Church of England. I recognise that is not a subject for everybody, and occasionally someone implies that it should not be a subject for me. But I am concerned about the fate of the national church because as the new religion heaves ever clearer into view, I realise that I prefer the old religion to the new one. I would rather attempts to influence the country’s morals were preached from a pulpit than through group stampede on Twitter.

There was much rejoicing among Britain’s Islamists last week when the thinktank and campaigning organisation Quilliam announced that it was closing. The Islamists were pleased because for the 14 years since its founding Quilliam has been the most prominent Muslim-run organisation arguing for a progressive, non-Islamist Islam. The exact reasons why Quilliam has shut down are not clear. The co-founder, Maajid Nawaz, has blamed the difficulties of sustaining a non-profit in the era of Covid. Perhaps it is that, or perhaps it is something else. The group never had an easy ride. But the fact that it didn’t, and that so many prominent British Muslims are celebrating its demise, points to a problem worth noting. I was there in 2007 when Quilliam started.

I wonder exactly when we agreed that it is more of a priority to gather with strangers than to meet loved ones? You might chart a number of moments, but the presumption seems to have become fixed. You might say that it started before the pandemic with the idea that truanting from school is worthy, even admirable, so long as it is done in opposition to climate change. Indeed as we learned this week, if you leave school for long enough then you may eventually have a statue erected to you in an English town known for its cathedral and school but not for its university. If you were an adult you could close down major cities, prevent newspapers from leaving the print-works and much more for the same cause. So long as you were saving the planet.

Earlier this month, with the citizenry still confined to their houses, borrowing at record highs and GDP in a record slump, there was a debate in Westminster Hall about ‘conversion therapy’. An internet petition has called on the government to ‘Make LGBT conversion therapy illegal in the UK’. And so for a couple of hours MPs from across the major parties competed with each other to express their horror at gay and trans people being subjected to this practice. Feelings ran high. Nobody spoke against. One Conservative MP arguing for criminalisation, Alicia Kearns, claimed that she had come into parliament with ‘one legislative change I wanted to deliver, which was to ban conversion therapy’.

Subscribers will know that I wrote in my column for the magazine this week about the revelations by former journalist Roy Greenslade that he was an active supporter of the IRA throughout the Troubles. But there are a number of people who we should still hear from on this, and have not. One is Greenslade’s long-term editor and defender at the Guardian, Alan Rusbridger, now the Principal of Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford. As I mentioned in my column, in 2000 The Spectator ran a piece by Stephen Glover identifying a Republican cell within the Guardian. Rusbridger responded furiously to this, denouncing the piece, The Spectator, the magazine’s then-editor Boris Johnson, and demanding an apology. Naturally the piece was completely right.

In these winter months, we must find our amusements where we can. And like many people I was amused to learn recently that the ‘Martin McGuinness Peace Foundation’ has announced a poetry competition in honour of the late IRA leader. As Ian Acheson has noted here, there will be those who think that the last years of his life, when McGuinness entered government in Northern Ireland, are the years to be commemorated in rhyme. A certain type of leftist even tends to tut at any mention of the earlier, bloodier phase of McGuinness’s career. The Green party MP Caroline Lucas did just that to me some years ago when we were on a programme together and I mentioned the earlier, more noteworthy phase of McGuinness’s life.

We should talk about horizons, and the setting of desirable ones. A newspaper gave it a go the other day with the front-page news that it is possible pubs may reopen in April rather than May. Given that we read elsewhere that when pubs do reopen, they may not be allowed to serve alcohol, the thrill from this news was limited. This cannot be our best hope: that if everybody behaves themselves and everything goes according to plan then we might be allowed to drink an orange juice in public sometime after Easter. This horizon is not sufficiently motivating. And societies, like the people within them, need motivation. There can’t be a person who hasn’t spent at least part of the past year feeling listless or even hopeless.