Left needs saving from its own self-righteousness

Climate Change protesters in Sydney. Picture: Christian Gilles.

Sir Roderick Spode spent much of his youth as an “amateur dictator”. His followers became known as “Black Shorts”; he discovered that the entire stock of black and brown shirts had been taken by other groups so, undaunted, he dedicated the party to advocating fascism and “firm … muscular” British knees. Spode’s creator, PG Wodehouse, taking aim at Oswald Mosley, described him as “about seven feet in height, six feet across … as if nature had decided to make a gorilla and changed its mind at the last moment”. When not strutting about, Spode ran a successful business, Eulalie Soeurs, designing and selling ladies’ underwear.

British satire has never limited itself to party politics. On the 1980s TV hit Not the Nine O’Clock News Rowan Atkinson’s senior police officer berates a constable for bringing 117 charges including “walking around with an offensive wife” against the same man: Mr Winston Kodogo “currently in the cells for possession of curly black hair and thick lips”. In the wake of riots in Brixton and Bristol, the sketch helped to convince the public that something was seriously wrong with British policing.

What Americans might call the “bullshit detector” of comedy has always been part of our defence against extremism. Targets have not been exclusively right-wing. Monty Python’s depiction of the split between the People’s Front of Judea, the Judean People’s Front, and the oft-forgotten Popular People’s Front of Judea, was aimed squarely at the narcissism of small differences on the left that helped destroy Jim Callaghan’s Labour government. In the long struggle that brought New Labour into being, the slogan “Splitters!” became a rallying cry for centrists.

Today, it is the left rather than the right that needs to have its prejudices pricked; not to defeat us, but to rescue us from our own self-righteousness. We can, of course, make a joke of ourselves without any assistance. A professor of African and Caribbean studies who has benefited from years of advancement based on her lived experience of “blackness” admitted this week that she is, in fact, white, Jewish and grew up in a Kansas City suburb. Here, a student union plans to ban “mocking” drag parties. Leaving aside the question of whether drag itself ridicules all women, who will draw the line between “mocking” and “celebrating” trans?

These events are not one-offs. They lie in a continuum. At one end sits a supposed defence of the oppressed; towards the other extreme, censorship by Extinction Rebellion and ultimately the murderous retribution meted out to the journalists of Charlie Hebdo for making jokes. It has been sickening to witness much of the establishment slide into capitulation to XR’s recent assault on our free press and the quiet apologias for the Charlie Hebdo murders. Those who claim to “understand” extremist frustration appear willing to defend dogma and doctrine to the death – presumably someone else’s rather than their own. Reminder: there is no human right not to be offended.

We should constantly be encouraged by the brightest and the best to question our beliefs. Yet higher education today seems to be populated entirely by zealots, whose witless response to dissent from orthodoxy is to “cancel” it. If XR and critical race theorists represent the intellectual challenge to capitalism, the plutocrats are safe for a while yet.

Forty years ago, as a moderately left-wing president of the National Union of Students, I faced a challenge from an undergraduate called Chris Hamel-Smith, now a distinguished lawyer in his native Caribbean. Paradoxically, the seriousness of Chris’s campaign lay in his sense of humour. He championed hedonism, demanding rum punch along with the student grant and proposed restoring student union finances by betting on Red Rum in the 1977 Grand National. He lost the vote, which was a shame because the horse won. But more importantly, he highlighted the fact that the left was devoting more attention to solidarity with Chile than to making sure that students had affordable accommodation and decent teaching. He shamed us into moderation.

He also recently reminded me that he had to be rescued from a group of outraged ultra leftists who thought that his broad Trinidadian accent was mocking black people, specifically me. The joke was that, being a white West Indian, he sounded like I looked, and I looked like he sounded. According to Chris, I grabbed the mike and explained that where we came from, pretty much everybody, of every race, talked like him; it was I, born in London, who was the odd man out. The Trots slunk back to their seats, deprived of both a victim and a target.

Chris now protests that he had no mischief in mind. But his humour worked because it carried a grain of uncomfortable truth; he wanted to make the point to my would-be saviours that you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover. Leftist puritans now label women who stand up for their own sex as transphobic. Others accuse anyone, whatever their colour, not wholly obsessed by race of being white supremacists. And the supposedly moderate left, cowed by the noise, daily surrenders its principles of justice and freedom of expression to extremists; as Churchill warned, feeding the crocodile in the hope it will eat us last.

In so doing, we are alienating the very people whose interests we should be promoting. The progressive cause desperately needs a good dose of Wodehouse-style puncturing to bring our balloon back to earth.

The Times