Free speech, racism and semantic creep.

It's common for older people to feel estranged from the society they're living in.  My wife's godparents retired from somewhere in the south of England to a house by Loch Earn in Scotland.  When the modern world came to Loch Earn they moved again to Nethy Bridge, a small village in the Spey Valley.  If frailty had not overcome them they would surely in time have moved again, perhaps to Cape Wrath or Spitzbergen.

I have felt this dissonance acutely in recent weeks, partly magnified by the propensity social media has to bring you into the mental world of people with whom you profoundly disagree - perhaps you should not read too much into the views of random Twitter strangers - but partly also though it's a genuine reflection of the way the world really is.

According to the Times, a school teacher was interviewed by police last week because a transgender pupil had complained that he had used the wrong gender pronoun to refer to him (or her).  A warning about hate speech was given.  Now personally I have no overwhelming desire to offend people, but I quite like living in a society where I'm free to offend if I want to, without criminal sanction, but where the people I've offended are free to dislike me or disassociate from me if that's what they want. That's what freedom looks like.

How then have we got to a situation where the police can go round to interview someone who's said something someone else finds offensive?

It has been a long process, which began in the 1960s with the Race Relations Acts. Britain was struggling to come to terms with the Windrush generation of West Indian migrants, and use of the N-word was socially proscribed, even if it might not at first technically have constituted incitement to racial hatred.  This proscription has had far-reaching and largely unintended consequences.

Firstly it gave birth to the idea that there were some things you couldn't say. The law already applied to defamatory statements, or words which might lead to violence (or a fear of violence).  It has subsequently jumped enthusiastically on the opportunities for taking these prescriptions further. The Public Order Act 1986 forbade expressions of racial hatred.  The legislation was so successful in excising racially pejorative expressions from public discourse, that other groups began to see that they too, with a little linguistic tweaking, could gather under its protection.  If statements about (and behaviour towards) your group could be called "racist", you could begin to control the way you were treated. 

That meant expanding the definition of race from that widely understood in the 1960s. Today Muslims are a race (even though there are white Muslims, and what distinguishes Muslims from others is not their appearance but their adherence to a religion). Jews are a race too (even though there are plenty of black Jews).

The fact that you can convert to Islam and Judaism means that it is now possible to change race.  

Christians appear not to be afforded the same protection.

Possibly the most absurd manifestation of this semantic creep was the Northern Irish Catholic who tried to persuade me that she had been the victim of racism by Northern Irish Protestants. There is another word for this behaviour, namely sectarianism. Would-be race victims hate using this word, because, as with Israel and the Irish question, it always invites debate about the reasons for sectarianism; racism on the other hand is always stupid and much easier to dismiss without explanation.

The widespread idea that it is legitimate to stop people saying what they want has made it easy for the law to jump aboard this train. Labour's Telecommunications Act, originally passed to add electronic hate-mail to existing letter post legislation, is now being used to jail people who've said things other people don't like.  For example, a young man in Kent was sent to prison for posting on Facebook a picture of a burning poppy alongside the word, "Take that you squadey (sic) cunts". Successive Acts of Parliament have expanded prescription to expressions of hatred on grounds of religion or sexual orientation.

It's clear that we enjoy significantly less free speech than we did fifty years ago.

Does it matter? Once it becomes in principle OK for the state to tell people what they can and can't say at the margins, a series of small steps can be used (has been already used) to silence them elsewhere in the political arena. This is how dictatorships control the public space. And we are one election away from a Corbyn government.

It also matters because it tends to encourage racial minorities to focus excessively on racial matters. Britain is not on the whole a racist society. It might have been fifty years ago, and it's arguable that free speech proscriptions were necessary then. They no longer are. Britain became a (very largely) non-racist society because its people decided not to be racists. Restrictions on freedom of expression were never much more use than nudges by the state in the right direction. They have outlived their usefulness. Since the goal of anti-racists is to achieve a situation where race doesn't matter, it's striking how so many seem desperate to make race matter as much as possible.

But if such restrictions were perhaps justifiable on racial integration grounds, in other areas they are crazy. When I suggested that I might not always use the preferred pronoun with a transgender person a friend told me that doing so was a small sacrifice to make in the context of the struggles such people had undergone to find their gender identity. I might have replied that in such a heroic context the insult of being called he rather than she would be a sling or arrow the transitioning person could probably overlook.

Lastly - and you could not make this up - the police are apparently in some areas so short staffed that they don't have time to investigate domestic burglaries; but they do have time to harass school teachers who use the wrong pronoun. This is almost comical, were it not a symptom of a situation in which police hesitated for years to investigate Muslim sex gangs for fear of "racism" accusations.

Where are the car keys?  I'm heading away from civilisation.  Spitzbergen may not be far enough.

Czech spies, and a few reasons to be cheerful about Jeremy Corbyn

There's been a great deal of wailing in the centre-Right press about the likelihood of a Jeremy Corbyn-led Labour government.  I share the fear of what such a government would do, but for all the much-vaunted enthusiastic endorsement of Corbyn by the young, or youngish, I wonder whether, as with the SNP surge of the last couple of years, his momentum has peaked.

For one - and this is a trivial point perhaps - what the internet creates, the internet can just as surely destroy.  You can be a meme, go viral, one week and the next be stale buns.  Social media is adept at creating phenomena, but phenomena don't necessarily last.

Secondly, it is very hard to imagine that the Tories could run a more incompetent election campaign than theirs of 2017.

A more subtle point however is that the longer Corbyn remains Labour leader the more the public finds out what he and his Momentum friends are like.  This week's storm about Corbyn's contact with the Czech "diplomat" may well not prove that he sold or gave spies to Britain's enemies - it's hard to think of information he might have had which wasn't freely available in an open society - but his willingness to consort with people whose professional aim was to subvert the British government says a lot about him.  It is moreover all of a piece with his flirtation with Jew-hating Arabs and Irish Republicans, his oft-expressed admiration for brutal and repressive failed Socialist states and his enthusiastic espousal of the kind of state interventionism which would rapidly take Britain back to the 1970s.

Ah, you may say, but JC's admirers don't care about these things.  They're too young to remember the 70s, they're not interested in the realities of Britain's fiscal position (precarious) and they're indifferent to the plight of the poor in places like Venezuela which once promised so much but now, conveniently as their failure has been made manifest, seem to have dropped out of Corbyn's Overton window.

This may be true, but, as Tony Blair will tell you, Labour cannot get elected on the votes of just their core support. The hardcore supporters may be enthusiasts (although others will be holding their noses and others still walking away from the Party altogether), but what about the general public?  What about the working class?  The reality is surely that many working class voters will be contemptuous not only of the sheer nastiness of much of Momentum's public manifestations ("Tory scum" amidst a shower of spittle), but also the trigger-warning, cisgender snowflakery of its PC-gone-mad faction.  

Labour may have something to say to the political interests of the working class, but it has almost nothing whatsoever to say them culturally. This for me represents a wedge which the Tories could drive home with a big hammer. It's an open goal.

The craven folly of (most) Labour MPs is becoming more and more apparent. Some of them - even the sainted Frank Field, one of their best - let Corbyn onto the ballot paper, failing to grasp that a process which enfranchised the organisation's enthusiasts was likely to elect someone who closely represented their proclivities. Having committed this error, they see the new leadership beginning to compete with the Tories for the title of "The Nasty Party". And what do they do? They hang onto their seats, and hope. 

Only 18 months ago a vote of No Confidence in Mr Corbyn was passed by 172 to 40 members of the PLP. That did not shame him into resigning; the Hard Left is nothing if not Hard Faced. The PLP could have set up an alternative opposition, but MPs fear for their jobs and pensions. They remind me of Groucho Marx - "These are principles! And if you don't like them - I have others!" What a contemptible shower. Some are Hard Leftists like him and revel in their new found eminence. The rest however are fellow-travellers, lacking the courage to derail the train.

Labour's best chance would seem to be a collapse of the government amidst Brexit bickering. It's possible that Tory Remainers could so lose their sense of proportion that they will embrace the risk of a Corbyn government to avoid Brexit. In those circumstances it's possible to imagine a successful Labour campaign on a platform of a competently managed departure. But if Labour lose next time it is likely the party will by then have been so thoroughly transformed into a Hard Left SWP facsimile that a new Centre Left party could sweep Labour to oblivion.