Pinker saw very clearly that factual evidence no longer counted for anything. Social workers were being told they were not allowed to test whether society was fundamentally racist or not. Evidence was being replaced by political slogans and indoctrination. Through him, I learned of situations so terrifying that I could scarcely believe this was happening in England. Social work tutors who asked to remain anonymous for fear of reprisals said students had come to them in tears after other tutors had told them: ‘You’re white, so you must be racist; confess.’ Students reported that marks depended on displaying the ‘correct’ attitude on race — which meant challenging ‘racist’ attitudes even where none existed. Conversely, social workers were becoming too frightened to deal with black families for fear of being thought racist; it was therefore common for social workers to say it was normal for black families to beat their children (Observer, 1 August 1993).
Almost twenty years later, when a gang of Pakistani Muslim men was convicted in 2012 of more than two decades of sexual violence against young, predominantly white girls living in children’s homes in the north of England, Ann Cryer, a former Labour MP, said that complaints to social workers and the police had been ignored because they were ‘petrified of being called racist’ (Daily Telegraph, 8 May 2012).
It was voices on the left, again, that I took seriously when they identified the moral vacuum at the heart of the welfare state. Frank Field, MP, had been an iconic anti-poverty campaigner. Yet, by 1993, he was warning that expanding the welfare system was dragging more and more into welfare dependency rather than helping them to live independent lives. What had failed, it was becoming clear, was benevolent paternalism – and it was thinkers on the left, like Field and David Piachaud, Professor of Social Administration at the LSE, who were saying so.
I was listening hard to what concerned caring professionals were telling me – that children in shattered families living on welfare benefits and with no fathers around possessed mountain bikes and video recorders, and yet when they arrived in their nursery class they had to be taught to eat with a knife and fork at a table because they had only ever eaten with their hands in front of the TV (Observer, 17 October 1993). Ours is a society of deep poverty, I wrote, but it is not merely material but moral and intellectual, with the breakdown of marriage at the root of this impoverishment (Observer, 5 June 1994).
I was becoming ever more horrified by the illiberal attitudes and measures being promoted by so-called liberal circles, which seemed to me to derive from a clear moral vacuum. What was so distressing was the utter contempt the left was displaying for ordinary people – those outside the gilded cages of the intelligentsia. I wrote of the guilt and self-loathing that had gripped the left, which decided that the middle-class was patronising, elitist, narrow-minded, parochial, and prejudiced (unlike themselves, of course). This animus had penetrated deep into our cultural institutions, resulting in a kind of ‘cultural cleansing’ of the middle class.
At the same time, the intelligentsia was in fact exhibiting deep contempt for the masses by treating them as morons. In 1995, the BBC Programme Strategy Review said, ‘In many respects the needs of Asian and African-Caribbean audiences are the same as many others. Feature films and music are important parts of their lives’ (Observer, February 1995). It never occurred to the BBC that what it was thus revealing was its default assumption that black people were in fact different from everyone else.
Such views were surely themselves racist. Yet racism, along with a host of other behaviour, was now a deep taboo. Racial prejudice was necessarily abhorrent, but the new dogma of anti-racism, along with taboos against sexual harassment, pornography, date rape and a range of gender and other stereotypes, constituted a perversely one-sided view of prejudice or aggression – that it could never be perpetrated by any group that designated itself to be victims of the majority.
I agreed with the American thinker Gertrude Himmelfarb that this represented a kind of ‘telescopic morality’. It disdained ‘bourgeois’ values such as chastity, fidelity, or sobriety; it marginalised unarguable rapes by its fixation with the far more ambiguous ‘date rape’; it didn’t worry as much about crime, which created real victims, as uncivil speech which merely caused offence; and it placed the entire burden of guilt upon the privileged, while giving the disadvantaged a free pass for antisocial behaviour. Such fin-de-siècle decadence, I wrote, was now wrecking the social fabric (Tablet, 1 July 1995).
But I had still not crossed the political floor. Instead, I scorned the ideologues of both left and right. The fragmentation of the family, I wrote, had been caused by an unholy alliance between the economic libertarianism of the right and the social libertarianism of the left – the free market in economics and the social market in lifestyles (Observer, 11 July 1993).
The reckoning for libertarianism on both left and right was now coming in. The Tories had all but killed off public service with what I saw as the vandalism of the NHS, civil service, and BBC, dissolving Britain’s cultural glue. Work was essential to human dignity, but the left refused to impose an obligation on unemployed people to work rather than subsist on welfare benefits, effectively declaring that it was better to be unemployed rather than have a low-paid job (Observer, 19 June 1994).
Both the state and the market had failed. On the left was social licence, on the right, worship of individual profit, withdrawal of collective responsibility, and the identification of citizens with consumers. Youth culture was glorifying nihilism and violence, parents were junking authority and parenting, teachers were repudiating authority and refusing to stand in for parents. Discipline was now frowned upon and punishment was taboo. Love had been turned into an expression of self-interest. Children were being told they could choose whether to have sex or take drugs. Deviancy – divorce, out-of-wedlock births — was now treated as normal while the formerly normal – the traditional family – was now treated as pathological, hiding systemic abuse behind a respectable facade (Observer, 4 June 1996).
On the right, however, the obsession with market forces had reduced public life to an arid and brutal utilitarianism (Observer, 9 January 1994). The Tories believed self-interest was the route to happiness and the market was the panacea for every ill. This was why the ‘back to basics’ initiative in the early 1990s – the attempt to restore basic standards to education which almost immediately morphed into an attack on sexual licence – was such a disaster. It was not so much that that ministers themselves were being outed for their sexual peccadilloes, but that John Major, the Prime Minister, wouldn’t rule such behaviour out of order. He seemed to be paralysed by fear of being branded ‘judgmental’. Much later, he too was revealed to have been ‘playing away from home’ with Edwina Currie, MP.
Values such as duty, honesty, or responsibility were being abandoned by the ‘anarchic libertarians’ of the Tory party, no less than the left. In 1994, I wrote, ‘The ground to be seized is that conservative ground. It is a space that was once filled by ethical socialism’ (Observer, 23 January 1994). And I lamented the prevalence of ideologies – dogmatic ‘isms’ – which drove out reason itself through the way in which they blinded people to reality. ‘Away with meaningless labels of left and right’, I wrote; ‘we need an ism to end all isms’ (Observer, 4 July 1993).
Fat chance! A creed I thought was supposed to represent tolerance instead disseminated intolerance. Those who were ostensibly committed to helping the oppressed had themselves become oppressive. Dissent from these prevailing orthodoxies was being suppressed through professional and social ostracism. The doctrine of non-judgmentalism meant no judgments at all – except for the savage judgment damning anyone who was judgmental. Language was being rewritten accordingly and certain words banned from use.
Trying to explain all this, I suggested that, during the long years when Margaret Thatcher had dominated British politics, left-wingers who found themselves excluded from much of the public sphere had trained their guns instead on the private sphere of personal behavio
ur. Intent on establishing what seemed to be nothing less than a dictatorship of virtue, they were clearly following the path founded in the eighteenth century by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in ‘forcing people to be free’ – the formula for a witch-hunt.
For saying such things, I found myself fingered as the very worst witch. What I had written was turning up in distorted form in vituperative articles in the press. Told to my face I had become a reactionary fellow-traveller of the right, I was branded a ‘moraliser’, which appeared to be a term of abuse. Clearly the only thing to be now was an ‘amoraliser’, or maybe ‘immoraliser’ (Spectator, 17 September 1994).
Most of the time, those hurling such insults provided no contrary evidence or even arguments, just blanket denials and gratuitous abuse. Where some attempt was made to provide a reasoned argument, it consisted merely of parroting research that could swiftly be shown to be full of holes. On the issue of man-made global warming, there was no shortage of this kind of ammunition against my position. On that issue, I was also told repeatedly that as I was not a scientist myself I had no right even to speak about the subject, let alone expect to be taken seriously.
Of course, this was egregiously to misunderstand the role of a journalist. As on so many other topics on which I had no specialist expertise, I went to those who did. From these scientists, I discovered first that, far from the warmists’ contention that ‘the science was settled’ and that all but a few Big Oil-financed cranks endorsed the inconvenient truth of man-made global warming, dozens of the most distinguished scientists in their field thought on the contrary that the whole thing was a scam. From them I learned facts about climate which – as with any other issue – I constantly tested out for consistency, logic, reasonableness, and supporting evidence. It was on the basis of all this that I concluded that the claims made by the warmists had no reputable basis in science; worse still, I discovered – not least from scientists who had themselves been involved with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – that some of the most fundamental research underpinning the theory was simply fraudulent.
In other words, on this as on every other topic I was doing what I had done ever since starting out in journalism — following the evidence where it led, and only then reaching a conclusion.
But did I ever doubt myself? Of course I did, and still do. One of the many complaints bowled in my direction is that ‘you always seem so sure of yourself’ – a grievous fault, obviously, to those for whom non-judgmental and ineffectual hand-wringing is the only acceptable, indeed virtuous, position.
In any event, this is once again to misunderstand the nature of the exercise. People confuse the strength of my views having reached a conclusion – that mass fatherlessness is causing untold harm, that educational orthodoxies are trapping the poor in disadvantage, that the man-made global warming scam has hoodwinked millions and cost billions — with the manner in which I reach that conclusion.
Of course I wondered whether I was wrong. How could I fail to do so, when so many seemed to be so sure that I was? How indeed could I be right, when I was so out of step with received wisdom? And the risks of taking such a stand are nerve-racking. The higher you stick your head above the parapet, the greater the danger that it will be blown off. All I could do was return to the evidence, check and re-check with new sources, constantly test out facts and logic, and try to keep an open mind.
For sure, sometimes I have got it wrong. After all, I did come to the conclusion that my entire world view in my early years in journalism was wrong, so I can hardly be accused of never changing my mind. But without wishing to sound boastful, I believe that on issue after issue where the evidence is now finally in – education, family breakdown, multiculturalism, human rights law, the European Union, the effects of cannabis, and yes, man-made global warming — I have been proved right.
There is also another side effect of enduring so much abuse. Eventually, the insults start losing their power. Once you have been called reactionary, right-wing, far-right, extreme-right, ultra-right, fascist, racist, Nazi, Holocaust-shroud-waver, warmonger, insane, and extreme right-wing insane racist warmongering Holocaust-shroud-waving Jew, what else can they throw at you?
CHAPTER 11: All Must Have Prizes
In 1996, I published a book analysing what had happened to British education. It was called All Must Have Prizes. The title was drawn from the caucus race in Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, where the dodo announces that ‘everybody has won, and all must have prizes’.
In this book, I wrote that education standards had not only plummeted, but education itself had been redefined. It was no longer the transmission of knowledge and culture, but a process of self-discovery by ‘autonomous meaning-makers’, once known as pupils. This self-destructive process could only be understood in the context of a country and a society which had become radically demoralised. The ideological dogmas behind the unraveling of education were also eroding family life and the moral codes that kept civilised society together, replacing these by the ‘no blame, no shame, no pain society’.
Respect for authority both in and outside the classroom had collapsed. Knowledge had given way to creativity and spontaneity. Literacy had been redefined as un-reading. The essay had been replaced by the imaginative story, replacing teaching children to think by allowing them to imagine. Teaching the rules of grammar or maths was frowned upon for stifling a child’s innate creativity. Right and wrong answers were no longer distinguished from each other; relativism reigned instead and children were told to make it up as they went along.
Beneath the resistance to structured reading schemes on the grounds that these separated children into sheep and goats and thus destroyed children’s ‘self-esteem’ lay a far more ideological agenda. The New Literacy, which substituted listening, memorising, and guesswork for being taught to decode the print on a page, encouraged the use of English teaching to ‘empower’ children to correct social inequalities. Teaching children to read was apparently an injustice against working-class students. Children were empowered, it seemed by ‘making their own meaning’. So correcting children’s mistakes was an illegitimate exercise of power. The classic 1985 teacher training text Read With Me proposed teaching reading in such a way that children would ‘catch it like a cough’ (John Willinsky, The New Literacy, Routledge, 1994; Liz Waterland, Read With Me, Thimble Press, 1985).
The outcome was a Lewis Carroll world in which the failure of a child to learn to read was glorified as evidence of success. The result was mass functional illiteracy amongst school leavers, and associated behavioural problems by pupils excluded from classroom life through their inability to read. Even universities were forced to provide remedial courses for undergraduates to compensate for the gross inadequacies of the education system.
Most teachers, I wrote, were unaware that they were the unwitting troops of a cultural revolution, being now taught to teach according to doctrines whose core aim was to subvert the fundamental tenets of Western society. A generation of activists had captured academia, and, in accordance with the strategy of cultural subversion advocated by Antonin Gramsci, had successfully suborned education to a far-left agenda.
My book caused a sensation. The Observer received one of its largest and angriest postbags after it published excerpts – so much so that it devoted an entire page to publishing some of the reaction. I was accused of ‘paranoia’, ‘disreputable journalism’, ‘tunnel vision’, ‘unfounded prejudices’, and ‘a mischievous misuse of journalistic power’. The children’s author Michael Rosen sneered, ‘It must be nice being Melanie Phillips believing in phonics, when “phonics” itself can’t be spelt phonically’, and ‘when you’re as knowledgeable as that, you don’t have to mess around with silly things like evidence’ (Observer, 15 September 1996).
All Must Have Prizes was described as the ‘worst written book of the year’ (LRB, 3 October 1996), ‘a farrago of ignorance and inaccuracy’, (Colin McCabe, New Statesman) ‘monomania’ (Terry Eagleton, O
bserver, 29 September 1996), ‘outstanding tripe’ and a ‘reactionary diatribe’ (Lucy Kellaway, Financial Times, 28 September 1996). The London Review of Books lamented ‘The great Melanie Phillips disaster’. The former Senior Chief Inspector of Schools, Professor Eric Bolton, sprayed epithets around his review such as ‘hyperbole’, ‘tendentious’, vituperative’, ‘absurd scenario’, and ‘beneath contempt’. Professor Ted Wragg, having sneered at its ‘selective and anecdotal nature’ followed by a ‘lame “solution”’, reported someone he described as a ‘fat bloke in pub’ pronouncing ‘This is crap by anybody’s standards’ (Independent, 13 September 1996).
Wragg’s additional implication that I had selectively cooked the evidence and had relied upon apparently nonexistent sources was so egregious that I wrote an article in the Independent the following day in which I pointed out the copious referenced and footnoted evidence in the book (Independent, 13 September 1996). Nevertheless, Professor John Sutherland spat, ‘It’s a nice question what is most offensive about this book: the author’s ignorance of her subject, the laziness of her methods, or the arrogance of her pronouncements’ (London Review of Books, 3 October 1996). So all the teachers, education psychologists, government inspectors, university professors, politicians, civil servants, parents, and pupils to whom I had spoken or was reporting, and all the educational texts and research reports I had read, were not evidence, merely ‘anecdote’ and ‘tittle-tattle’. None of the evidence I produced from these sources was debated, merely denied.
Of course, such contempt by these critics for the real world amply proved my point. As one reviewer noted, the mere mention of my name produced ‘knee-jerk reactions of vitriol’ from most socialists of his acquaintance. But as he thoughtfully observed, what I was actually questioning was what being left-wing now meant. It was no longer about redistributing power and wealth from the few to the many; instead it was about pushing ideas stemming from the Romantic opposition to the Enlightenment. While entering some reservations, he agreed with my overall indictment of the loss of morality and responsibility, national self-confidence, and purpose (Chartist, March-April 1997).
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