By Lindsay Ash
There’s a wonderful exchange in Blackadder Goes Forth between General Melchett and Captain Darling that goes like this:
Captain Darling: So you see, Blackadder, Field Marshal Haig is most anxious to eliminate all these German spies.
General Melchett: Filthy Hun weasels, fighting their dirty underhand war.
Captain Darling: And fortunately one of our spies…
General Melchett: Splendid fellows, brave heroes risking life and limb for Blighty.
I thought of this exchange the other day while considering the latest trend of the woke left to brand anyone who doesn’t agree with them as “far right”, or, as someone recently tweeted, the new definition of racist is anyone who wins an argument with a Labour party member.
At the recent conference, we have seen Nigel Farage accused of having “flirted with the Hitler Youth”, which is not easy considering he wasn’t born until around 20 years after the war finished. Perhaps Nige has a DeLorean – who knows? It does demonstrate, however, the lengths politicians go to denigrate each other. It probably started with Mrs Thatcher being referred to not as the PM, but merely as “Thatcher”, which was spat out like a swear word.
Up until then, although feisty, there was always a veneer of respect in these exchanges. That veneer has long gone, aided by social media, as the treatment of Bojo, Ms Sturgeon and Diane Abbott demonstrates.
The similarity with Lord Melchett’s statement, though, was well demonstrated when the rappers Kneecap were acquitted. They emerged from court wearing an Irish tricolour balaclava and Palestinian flags were being waved and scarves worn by their supporters, many of whom declared this as a great victory against “political policing intimidation”, as well as a victory for free speech and showing solidarity with the Irish and Palestinian people.
All great libertarian stuff, eh? Up the revolution! Power to the people! Except the very same people praising this victory for freedom of expression had a few weeks earlier wholeheartedly condemned a free-speech rally in the capital as, amongst other things, “flag-waving fascists and right-wing thugs”. Now, some may well have been, although many were not, but it illustrated perfectly the way we are now entitled to say what we like as long as the left approve of it. Waving Palestinian flags is jolly good, as is waving European flags at the Last Night of the Proms to protest Brexit, but flying the flag of the country is jolly bad. End of story… Who says so? We do, and we make the rules. If you disagree, you are “far right” and your view is therefore void.
I have to confess that I had never really heard of Charlie Kirk, but after he was shot, I decided to Google some of the things he said. Some I agreed with and some, like his opposition to universal healthcare, I didn’t. But he did give an answer to a student that gave me a solution to a question I had been searching for as to how the unofficial thought-police triumph over the majority of us who don’t agree with them.
He was debating with a student on the merits of “blind interviewing” – that is to say all you see are the facts of a candidate, but other than that, you know nothing about them. He argued that he was in favour of meritocracy and it should be the best person for the job. He then debunked blind interviewing by saying if you saw a CV for a heavy-lifting job you may see a brilliant CV that ignores the fact the bloke is 64 and is now in need of two new hips and would desperately struggle, but you’d reject a physically fit 22-year-old as he had no experience in that role.
Yet, the student could see this made perfect sense and so played the woke card: “Ok, but don’t you care about diversity?”
This normally has the spokesperson at Mega Bank grovelling like a corporate Uriah Heep, spewing out platitudes as to all they were doing to help diversity and inclusion, from shared toilet seats to rainbow paper. However, Mr Kirk merely answered: “No, I don’t… I believe in the best person for the job.” That, of course, is the correct answer.
Much of this “far right”, “Nazi” name calling has come about on the subject of illegal immigration where people have not been entirely happy with boatloads of people rocking up on the Kent coast.
Now, whatever the rights and wrongs of the situation, we have seen a very disingenuous argument put forward from the liberal left – and indeed, the Prime Minister at the Labour conference – asking where, as a country, we’d be without immigration and where would we be without immigrants who have made a fantastic contribution to the country – especially the NHS. The answer is, of course, in a right old mess!
The only problem with the argument is that the vast majority of people acknowledge this fact, but that’s not their problem… their concern is with illegal immigration and all that goes with it, not people that have entered the country perfectly legally, many with vital skills to offer, and these people strongly object to being described as racist, far right or Nazis for having those concerns.
Rowan Atkinson (Blackadder himself) wrote a very good piece in 2012 attacking the “creeping culture of censoriousness” and criticised the “new intolerance” for having a “chilling effect” on free expression and free protest: “The clear problem of the outlawing of insult is that too many things can be interpreted as such. Criticism, ridicule, sarcasm, merely stating an alternative point of view to the orthodoxy, can be interpreted as insult.”
12 years on, all those things have probably become worse and nowadays, of course, could also have you marked down as “far right”… be very careful!
Lindsay Ash was Deputy for St Clement between 2018 and 2022, serving as Assistant Treasury and Home Affairs Minister under Chief Minister John Le Fondré. He worked in the City of London for 15 years as a futures broker before moving to Jersey and working in the Island’s finance industry from 2000. Feedback welcome on Twitter @Getonthelash2.
