Ed West

These days I find myself so drifting away from the bounds of acceptable opinion that I don’t even shout at Radio 4 for being biased, because I don’t even understand the basis of what the arguments are about. Take this morning’s schools feature (occasioned by Sir John Major's comments about the 'truly shocking' dominance of a privately educated elite in public life), in which Harry Mount argued in favour and Owen Jones against the motion that grammar schools lead to more social mobility than comprehensives.

I hate drivers. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t hate all of them, just a considerably larger proportion than I hate of the population as a whole. And, like most cyclists, I drive myself, having been bullied into it by my then girlfriend who bought me lessons for my 27th birthday. But generally speaking I feel the same way about them as Rod Liddle feels about cyclists. Although I agree with Rod on almost all things, it would be weird and awkward if I agreed with him on everything, and this is the slither outside the bubble on the Venn diagram. I don’t object to his characterisation of cyclists as angry, self-righteous ninnies, because I’m not opposed to generalisations as they’re quite necessary.

I know we’re inundated with ‘raising awareness’ days these days when we’re supposed to wear a bracelet or grow facial hair, but I’ve got a great idea for a new one – Hate Speech Day. It occurred to me while reading this Atlantic piece about gay rights by Jonathan Rauch in which the author came out with a brilliant sentence explaining how liberal societies should work. ‘The best society for minorities is not the society that protects minorities from speech but the one that protects speech from minorities (and from majorities, too).’ Exactement! The best route towards maximum freedom, peace and happiness is through open debate, and that requires that all theories be tested, even the hateful ones.

The media seem to be in a pickle over the removal of a blonde girl from a Roma family in Dublin, which followed the arrest of a couple in Athens who had a suspiciously Nordic-looking child with them. It’s a fascinating story because for the first time I can remember the two great hysterias of our age have finally clashed – racism and child-snatching, the Guardian's obsession versus the Sun’s. It has also pitted the almost immovable object of media taboo against the unstoppable force of the human-interest story. The highbrow media maintains a sort of code of decency about reporting the Roma, so that you will never read anywhere an accurate analysis of anti-Roma prejudice.

As Edmund Burke wrote: ‘Manners are of more importance than laws. Upon them, in a great measure, the laws depend.’ Testify, brother – and if our lawmakers have no manners, then we are really up a creek. As Spectator columnist James Forsyth noticed yesterday: ‘Quite remarkable that no MP has offered Jo Swinson, who is seven months pregnant, a seat. Really shocking manners and decency.’ Swinson didn’t help matters when, according to the Mail, she said it would have been ‘quite sexist’ to suggest she was not capable of standing. I wonder how damaging that sort of attitude is to feminism in general?

I’m starting to get the impression that the Guardian isn't very keen on Michael Gove, and may not give him the benefit of the doubt in their reporting. The latest offering was this, ‘Genetics outweighs teaching, Gove adviser tells his boss’, which was presumably designed to infuriate teachers, about an essay written by Dominic Cummings. This was followed up by a Polly Toynbee piece denying the role of hereditary factors in intelligence and claiming that it was all part of some government plan to keep the poor in their place. Others have waded in, raising the spectre of eugenics, and I imagine someone is right now composing a comment piece about Dr Mengele’s legacy with the headline MICHAEL GOVE’s ‘FINAL SOLUTION’ FOR POOR CHILDREN.

Now that the middle class squeeze has become my sujet du bore at the fancy north London dinner parties I attend, I was interested in Saturday’s New York Times piece about what foreign billionaires are doing to our insane property prices. One statistic really stuck out: ‘An astonishing £83 billion worth of properties were purchased in 2012 with no financing — all cash purchases. That’s $133 billion.’ Crikey. Author Michael Goldfarb argues: ‘And as for services, the minimal tax paid by those who have made property into money means that a city whose population has increased by 14 percent in the last decade can’t afford to build new schools. There will be a capacity shortfall of an estimated 90,000 places by 2015.

The outrage over Jack Wilshere’s comment that ‘If you live in England for five years it doesn't make you English’ shows how the Overton window can shift in such a short space of time. Fifteen years ago no one would have cared, but many drew sinister implications from the statement, and England cricketer Kevin Pietersen asked: 'Interested to know how you define foreigner...? Would that include me, Strauss, Trott, Matt Prior, Justin Rose, Froome, Mo Farah?' Mo Farah, again. Every time someone uses Mo Farah as an argument for multiculturalism I do my own version of the Mobot by sinking my head into my hands; even intelligent commentators writing for conservative publications have taken to making this anecdotal case for diversity.

What with the flap about Ed Miliband’s dad, the legion of the outraged have forgotten what they were planning to get angry about this week – the marriage tax break, which is social engineering and a blatant Tory attempt to punish single mothers in favour of the patriarchy. As a paid-up member of the patriarchy it always sounds more fun coming from people complaining about it than it actually is. Marriage, for men, is a form of domestication and many would rather spend their 30s and 40s playing computer games, if possible with a live-in girlfriend to whom they have made no commitments. Many end up getting married partly because their peers do, and the social pressure to conform. Why do we do it?

A few years back I did one of those online debates on the Times website, the subject being why feminism had fallen out of favour. Within about 60 seconds four people had used the phrase ‘gender is a social construct’ and, well, I sort of switched off at that point. It’s strange that the F-word is now so unpopular that even David Cameron, a man with a desperately keen ear for metro-liberal opinion, refused to identify as such last week. When asked by Red magazine, he said: ‘I don’t know what I’d call myself... it’s up to others to attach labels. But I believe men and women should be treated equally.

Should people who comment under YouTube videos be deciding the fate of our country? That’s the frightening scenario proposed by Ed Miliband, who wants to give 16-year-olds the vote because, as he put it, it will make them ‘part of our democracy’. Or, in other words, the electorate’s opinion is no more important than a child’s. There is nothing progressive about allowing children to vote, any more than it is progressive to allow kids to sit on juries or take out mortgages. These things all involve the ability to make judgments, which is not sufficiently developed in adolescence. Voting isn’t just a right that makes you feel ‘part of democracy’; it’s a responsibility and decision-making process.