Douglas Murray

Most people won’t have heard of Selina Todd. The only reason I had was because some years ago the BBC invited me to appear alongside her on one of those slots that used to be for intellectual discussion. ‘Would you be interested in coming on Radio 3 at about 10.30 p.m. to discuss class?’ I was asked. ‘Absolutely not,’ I replied, the subject being the only national obsession I would leave the country to escape. ‘That’s precisely why we want you,’ began the producer. And so eventually I ruined a perfectly good dinner and headed to the BBC where I met the aforementioned Todd. She turned out to be an Oxford professor whose area of study is the working class and whose specialism is resentment.

Here is a good test case going on before our eyes. The broadcaster Alastair Stewart has left his job of decades after sending a quotation of Shakespeare to a member of the public. The quotation (because it refers to an ape and the recipient happens to be black) is being interpreted as a sign of racism. A sign so grave that a long and illustrious career is over. So here is a test. Does ITV actually think that Alastair Stewart is a secret racist, really hates black people and has spent his life hating black people? Does it think that he has managed to hide this throughout the course of a long and illustrious career, in which I imagine that he worked with people of every imaginable race and background? Does it think that his deep, terrible racism has only come to the surface once?

‘Cancel culture’ is a horrible term because outside of a dictatorship nobody can actually be ‘canceled’ or otherwise ‘disappeared’. All that can happen is that people can be found to have trodden across one of the orthodoxies of the age. A small number of bullies then come for them. And a larger number of otherwise decent people then fail to stand up for them. It is this last part of the matter that is worth focusing on. It is the only part that is fixable. All ages have their orthodoxies. And if writers, artists, thinkers and comedians do not occasionally tread on them, then they are not doing their jobs. Meanwhile human nature remains what it is.

Sir Roger Scruton has died. Diagnosed with cancer last summer, he passed away peacefully on Sunday surrounded by his family. There will be a lot of things written and said in the coming days. But perhaps I could say a few things here. The first is to reiterate something that the Scruton family have said in their announcement of his death. There they refer to how proud they are of Roger and of all his achievements. I think I can say that all Roger’s friends share that feeling. His achievements were remarkable. He was a man who appeared to know about absolutely everything, producing books on architecture, philosophy, beauty, music, religion and much more. In many ways – as his former student Rabbi Sacks once said to me – he seemed bigger than the age.

We’re closing 2019 by republishing our ten most-read articles of the year. Here’s No. 3: Douglas Murray on the shameful hounding of a distinguished philosopher: Sometimes a scandal is not just a scandal, but a biopsy of a society. So it is with the assault on Sir Roger Scruton, who in recent weeks has been smeared in the media, fired by the government and had his life’s work assailed. Scruton is the latest, though far from the first victim of the modern outrage mob. It is now four years since the Nobel prize-winning scientist Tim Hunt was fired by University College London (among other institutions who were lucky to have him).

Sir Tom Stoppard is Britain’s — perhaps the world’s — leading playwright. Born Tomas Straussler in Zlin, Czechoslovakia, in 1937, his family left as the German army moved in. The Strausslers were Jewish. In adulthood he learned that all four of his grandparents were killed by the Nazis. His father was killed by the Japanese on a boat out of Singapore as he tried to rejoin his wife and two sons. In India his mother married again, to an English Army man who gave his stepchildren his surname. Stoppard has lifted the lid on his early life only once before, in a piece for Talk magazine in 1999.

Sometime around the start of this decade, before anti-Semitism was as cool as it has become, I was standing on a stage in London with a couple of rabbis and a Muslim. And if that sounds like the start of a joke then what followed wasn’t. We were there at the request of a new Jewish group to speak out against the anti-Semitism that we already saw on the rise in the UK. I’m not much given to protests myself as long-time readers will know. But the day showed some solidarity with British Jews and we all went home at least partly feeling like some good had been done. But one thing about the day stayed in my mind. During her remarks, one of the rabbis summoned up the famous phrase of anti-fascists in the 1930s. 'They shall not pass’. Or ‘No Pasaran!

Ah, the BBC. There’s really nothing like it is there? This morning I had the pleasure of appearing on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme. I know what you’re already thinking: ‘You fool, you fool – it’s a trap’. But I was phoned last night and asked if I would come on this morning to discuss Barack Obama’s recent remarks against ‘wokeness’. At some inconvenience to myself I rearranged my schedule, got up early and headed to the BBC. Only to discover that I was today’s BBC effort at replaying the recent Rod Liddle – Emily Maitlis exchange.  I was on with a professor of grievance studies from Birmingham City University called Kehinde Andrews. Which is fair enough.

Discussions of ‘privilege’ have become one of the themes of this age. In a short space of time, the obsession with the subject has forced its way from the margins of the social sciences right into the centre of all cultural and political debate. Politics and office politics is increasingly consumed by it. One day it is Rory Stewart being asked to account for his privilege by that ghetto-denizen Cathy Newman. Another it is Don Lemon being talked over by a black trans woman at the mass asylum breakout that constituted last week’s Democrats LBGT Town Hall. Everywhere the privilege discussion is the same. Who has privilege? Who should give it up? Who should have more?

In the magazine cover piece this week I describe how institutions as well as individuals are having a hard time making it through this deranging age. Bishops call for restraint but then have outbursts of ungodly anger. MPs and peers talk about the need for civility and then are found jabbering like street-corner lunatics. But something that happened yesterday evening provides almost a case-study of the era. There is no reason why most people should have heard of Peter Neumann. A minor left-wing pundit, he is currently a professor of ‘security studies’ at King’s College London. As it happens, King’s is fast-becoming a home for insignificant polemicists masquerading as academics. But perhaps that is a subject for another occasion.

Today nearly all real public discussion has become impossible. Which is why nearly all public thinking has become impossible. Which is why the thinking has gone bad on nearly every major issue now facing us. It isn’t just politics that is finding it hard to operate. It is also the media and every other piece of sense-making apparatus we used to possess. The negatives accrued to any individual or institution for thinking or saying anything remotely controversial now means that they don’t bother any more. We’ve lost the art of discussion and with it the ability to find honest solutions. There are a number of causes. Take the collapse of the ideas of private and public language brought about by technology.