THE STRANGE DEATH OF LIBERAL ENGLAND

Melanie Phillips is accused by the Left of being a traitor

to the cause. She argues that it is the Left which has betrayed the ideals of the Sixties

A FEW YEARS ago, something very strange happened. People started to reproach me for becoming reactionary and right-wing. Since I came from a liberal, left-of-centre background and had worked for most of my professional life for the Guardian newspaper, this was a disconcert- ing experience. One minute the govern- ment was criticising my allegedly left-wing views towards the poor, or sick, or jobless, or immigrants; the next I was being con- demned by people on the Left for being a traitor to the cause.

Was it true? I inspect- ed myself anxiously for evidence of a change of political personality. I seemed to be still con- cerned about the fate of the most vulnerable and dispossessed. Yet I was increasingly finding myself out of step with colleagues, friends and a number of readers.

It would be idle to pretend one does not change with age. Having children, in particular, tends to have a pro- found and salutary effect upon one's per- spectives. But if I have changed, I believe it is because something pro- found has happened to the liberal culture that formed the bedrock of my beliefs.

To my growing perplexity, a creed that for me was supposed to embody tolerance has come to represent intolerance. Pur- porting to help the oppressed, it has itself become an instrument of oppression. Views that offend against this new ortho- doxy are suppressed through professional and social ostracism that plays upon the deeply rooted fear of the liberal intelli- gentsia that they might be thought to be illiberal. The anxiety not to be thought `judgmental' has turned into a denial of any Judgment at all, for fear of causing offence or denying people their rights. Even lan- guage has been rewritten and certain words banned from use, amounting to censorship in the name of individual rights.

It has been all the more bewildering because these developments were rooted in values and thought processes that I myself had shared. Political correctness may have appeared to be a phenomenon that sprang up on American campuses in the late 1980s. But its ideological ancestry lay in the social and intellectual revolution of the 1960s, which had no less profound an effect on Britain. That revolution rejected the authoritarian rules of social intercourse that previously placed unacceptable limits on liberty and human rights. I grew to adulthood during this time, and formed a strong and lasting identification with it. The great movement for women's emanci- pation, the determination to sweep away prejudice against ethnic or sexual minori- ties or disabled people, the wariness of authority and consequent promotion of intellectual dissent and nonconformity, these were the banners behind which I marched. I believed all these causes to be noble, and still do.

But then, in the 1980s, it seemed to me that those very ideals began to be pervert- ed. This strange perversion coincided with the arrival of a particularly authoritarian and long-lasting Conservative government. Mrs Thatcher remade the whole machinery of government in her image. Anyone who was not 'one of us' was cast into the wilder- ness of political opposition. As the years rolled on with no change of government in sight, an alternative establishment grew up of those on the Left who had been exclud- ed from any power over public life. And so instead of operating in the public sphere the Left exercised their power in the one area still open to them — the private sphere of personal behaviour.

The result was a remarkable mirror image of political con- formity. The Conserva- tive Government, committed to an indi- vidualistic free-for-all in economics, represented nevertheless an anti- intellectual conformity rooted in prejudice and ignorance. Any groups who threatened this conformity were to be ostracised. So immi- grants were to be feared, those without jobs despised and the poor written out of the script altogether. I find this intolerable. But I also think that the opponents of Conservatism have been trapped into a parallel conformity.

For the belief took hold on that side of the argument that we were all in some way guilty of oppression. Now, it seems to me to be a truism that we all harbour preju- dices, just as we are all prone to selfishness, or jealousy, or any number of characteris- tics that make up every human being. But understanding the latent prejudices in human nature appeared to develop into the belief that everyone in majority groups exercised those prejudices, and that society was endemically oppressive as a result. The result has been that, in some cases, people whose behaviour was blameless were attacked for behaving in a prejudiced man- ner, simply because they were part of the majority.

Meanwhile, the 'victim' class was infan- tilised by having its own human flaws or weaknesses denied. The consequence was not only injustice, but also that people whose interests I cared about — ethnic minorities, poor or ill educated people were made into victims twice over. They were trapped between real prejudice and bigotry on one side and patronising and false assumptions on the other. The Left has always claimed a monopoly of virtue. Yet history teaches us that self-appointed moral guardians who believe theirs is the only true faith all too often turn into oppressors. That lesson, I believe, has now repeated itself.

It was in the mid-1980s that I first began to find I was losing my political bearings in a strange new world where facts meant whatever the upholders of social virtue wanted them to mean. I was strongly opposed to market forces and the whole minimalist state project, as indeed I remain. Yet I began to become uncomfort- ably aware that Tory newspapers were say- ing certain things I realised were true and which were being denied at the liberal end of the market. In particular, they were making some devastating criticisms of the education system. The charge was that teachers were failing to teach children properly; that emphasis on literacy and numeracy was being replaced by a child- centred philosophy that devalued rules and was inimical to the imparting of knowl- edge; and that the children who were suf- fering most were those from disadvantaged backgrounds for whom schools were the one lifeline out of the ghettos of poverty.

The conventional wisdom on the Left was that this was politically motivated mal- ice. The 'truth' was apparently that educa- tion was being run down by a government determined to starve schools of adequate resources and denigrate the teaching pro- fession. In fact, the position was more com- plicated.

However, such complexities were not acknowledged by people who saw nothing wrong with the education system except for government antagonism. Such people were mainly complacent, well-to-do, white mid- dle-class folk who made social capital out of sending their children to state schools but who were happy to play the system by moving house into the catchment area of the best (i.e. middle-class) establishments, or paying for private tutors. They often came from the kind of backgrounds which meant they simply had no imaginative grasp of the importance of school to a child living in social and intellectual poverty. The idea of a ladder up meant nothing to peo- ple who, to my mind at least, made a virtue out of talking down. Because, after all, they felt they knew best. They knew, for instance, that teaching children to read by tried and tested reading schemes was wrong, because it gave slower children a feeling of failure, just as they also knew that teaching children historical facts or mathematical formulae was wrong because it denied the higher truths of subjective creativity.

Descended as I am from poor Jewish immigrants, coming from a culture that understood from painful experience that education was the only pathway into the social mainstream, I believed that this was itself elitist prejudice, displayed by individ- uals whose belief in their own monopoly of wisdom was not only patronising but deeply damaging to the very people they claimed to champion.

Yet how could it be that the lying, unscrupulous Tory press was getting this right while the caring, responsible, liberal press was pretending it wasn't happening? It seemed to me that liberal journalists were so frightened of being labelled right- wing that they simply closed their eyes to the reality.

I recall vividly an encounter with a young West Indian community worker in Totten- ham, who was angrily denouncing the ide- ology that had given young black people like himself an inferior education, denying them the teaching that could have equipped them to compete, refusing to give them the knowledge they needed of maths and language and history, all in the name of some white middle-class fantasy of equality that was actually going to keep them trapped in disadvantage. 'They teach them all these things in private schools,' he said; 'that's why those children go on to run everything. So why aren't they teaching them to us?'

His anger wasn't directed at Mrs Thatch- er's government. Unlike white liberals, whom he despised, he didn't want his coun- cil to have more money to spend on schools. Instead, he said he wanted West Indian children to be helped to be educat- ed in private schools, and he railed bitterly Jeremy Hanley realises he's made another gaffe. against the Labour council for blocking the planning permission to enable this to hap- pen. He had understood that black young- sters like himself had been cheated by liberals misdirecting their own middle-class guilt.

When I started to explore some of this in my column in the Guardian, the full fury of the liberal establishment was unleashed. One particular article I wrote questioned the opinion that there was no correct way to write or speak English. It seems to me that full command of the language is an essential precondition for people to gain control over their own lives. The politically correct view, however, was that Standard English was elitist and individual patois just as valid. Indeed, an official report in 1988 on the teaching of English to primary schoolchildren genuflected to this ortho- doxy by stating that Standard English should be taught only because it had 'social prestige' but that it was nevertheless mere- ly 'a technical term' for a dialect with par- ticular uses and should not be confused with 'proper, good or correct English'. Proper, good and correct were, in the new orthodoxy, such value-laden terms they could no longer be acknowledged to hold any value whatsoever. Yet depriving ethnic minority children of a mastery of Standard English would inevitably disadvantage them in a society run by people who took its benefits for granted, only to deny them to others.

But, when I said that, I received dozens of furious letters from lecturers in educa- tion outraged at the suggestion that their philosophy of teaching was having any adverse effects on schoolchildren. Dr Barry Stierer, for instance, a lecturer in education at the Open University, wrote of his satis- faction that children were performing badly in 'traditional' reading tests since this showed the 'success of the nation's teach- ers, who were increasingly inviting young children to approach reading from the beginning as a meaningful and enjoyable activity'. On the contrary, this celebration of failure, supported by the false antithesis between 'meaningful and enjoyable' and success in learning to read, seemed to me to demonstrate a most alarming and arro- gant disregard for the right of every child to master the language.

I got into even more trouble when I spoke out in favour of a retired headmas- ter, John Sanders, who had written in the Guardian that teachers were deliberately marginalising themselves. Their role as expert, guide, leader and trainer, he wrote, had given way to the passive role of 'facili- tator', leaving children to find things out for themselves. The result, he suggested, was meaningless work, bored and misbe- having children, harassed teachers and under-achievement. My support for Mr Sanders produced a bulging and memo- rable postbag in which I was denounced variously as ignorant, silly, intellectually vulgar, vicious, irresponsible, elitist, mid- die-class, fatuous, dangerous, intemperate, shallow, strident, reactionary, near-hysteri- cal, propagandist, simplistic, well-paid, unbalanced, prejudiced, rabid, venomous, pathetic.

I was not alone in thinking that, far from liberals devoted to tolerance, there was an intellectual lynch mob out there. Defenders of the new orthodoxy liked to caricature all their opponents as the loony Right, but this simply wasn't true. In 1987, the four-strong history department at Lewes Priory com- prehensive school in East Sussex decided that the GCSE exam was preventing them from teaching history properly. The new history, they felt, devalued facts and substi- tuted peripheral concepts such as cause and effect or evidence skills. Three of them — the department head Chris McGovern, his deputy Anthony Freeman, and Arthur Franklin — offered their pupils an alterna- tive syllabus, the Scottish 0 grade, which they felt was a more appropriate history exam. The result was that the three lost their jobs. Mr Franklin, who had a master's degree, was eventually re-employed in a tertiary college, but Mr McGovern, who had a first-class degree in history, and Dr Freeman, who had a PhD, were retrained as a primary school teacher and an adviser on school trips and blackballed from teach- ing in secondary schools.

Teachers and other educationalists who wrote to me provided more evidence that the new liberalism was anything but. Again, these weren't New Right activists, but ordi- nary teachers up and down the country who were appalled at what was happening. They wrote clandestinely, with bizarre accounts of how they had to conceal their ordered and successful teaching methods whenever the education inspectors came round, forced to rearrange their classrooms in fashionable and unproductive disorder for fear of losing their prospects of promo- tion or even their jobs.

One education psychologist wrote in 1990: 'In my job I see small children whose listening skills and ability to stay focused on a task are chronic. Yet they are put to learn in an environment which no under- graduate would have to suffer . . . Chil- dren do not learn through play, but through instruction, explanation, guidance, motivation from an adult . . . and whenev- er I say this to a group of teachers, the older and wiser members of the group come to me afterwards and thank me for saying it, they have been waiting for years for someone to make this point. But for some reason they cannot say this in public. And neither can I; which is why I do not want my name published. My job is impor- tant to me and public condemnation of teaching methods will not be approved.'

Behind these battles in the classroom lay the new certainties of educational theory, which seemed to have junked traditional liberal ideals of education in favour of a wholly subjective intention to redress a per- ceived set of cultural imbalances. One English literature don, a woman in her thir- ties, reflected to me privately on the fact that, for the past 20 years, English faculties had been preoccupied with ridding the canon of English literature of 'dead, white, male authors'. She herself had been an enthusiastic soldier in this crusade. Now, though, she was horrified. Her students were ignorant, ill-educated, grossly under- read. They found it hard to see any differ- ence in value between good and bad writers because they had been taught that value itself was a concept. Yet she would never say this in public because it would be tantamount to professional suicide. Like many others, she asked to remain anony- mous.

The project, then, was nothing less than to correct the value system of English liter- ature. To that end, a range of children's books fell foul of the ideological censors. I read about and heard of discussions by librarians and teachers about the texts they refused to stock or teach on the grounds that they might poison young minds. Yet one of the defining motifs of the cultural revolution of the 1960s was freedom of expression and the rejection of censorship as authoritarian. For liberals, there was a particular irony in the traditions behind the new voluntary censorship. In the early 19th century, Dr Bowdler and his sister started to expurgate Shakespeare, a movement which led to the progressive doctoring of a range of works — novels by Fielding, Sterne, Smollett, Swift, the Victorian nov- elists, the Bible. Traditional bowdlerisation targeted sexual explicitness and profanity. Modern Bowdlers train their sights on race, ethnicity, class and gender. Both represent an attempt to stamp out evil by people who claim to be the arbiters of goodness; the definition of evil has merely shifted with the century.

As Noel Perrin writes in Dr Bowdler's Legacy, while sexual prudery diminished ethnic prudery increased. We may now reveal Gulliver's Travels and The Canterbury Tales in their entirety, but, Perrin says, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Mary Poppins have now been bowdlerised in the United States, Walter de la Mare and Kipling in Britain. Most famously, he cites Dr Doolittle as expurgated in both coun- tries. The once dark-skinned Prince Bumpo survives, neither black nor white but colourless, which changes the plot. Yet this neo-bowdlerism is selective. If similar

'Organic fruit is so much healthier.' attempts were made to rid literature of its anti-Semitism, there would be very large gaps indeed. T.S. Eliot's 'The rats are underneath the piles/The Jew is under- neath the lot', survives unmarked by oppro- brium. In this brave new value system, being beastly to middle-class Jews appar- ently passes the test of political correctness. Once again the self-styled arbiters of good- ness turn out to embody partial and highly questionable judgments, in the name of which they seek to deny to others the opportunity to exercise their own.

Forcing people to be free, it seems to me, lurks at the very heart of modern polit- ical correctness. It drives the projects to make us make us all confess our racism or deny that there are norms of behaviour.

In the public sector, the drive to eradi- cate racism, for example, has created pock- ets of oppressiveness which are not only unjust but also increase racism and disad- vantage black and other vulnerable people. Take the thorny arena of social work. Directors of council social services depart- ments say they feet helpless to tackle the inadequacies of black staff because they know that to challenge them is likely to produce allegations of a racial witch-hunt. The result is that vulnerable clients, some of whom will be black themselves, are ill- served by inadequate staff. Anti-racism, which started out with the worthy intention of righting a wrong, has developed into a zealotry which creates instead fresh victims. This anti-liberal mind-twist now passes for orthodoxy in many social science depart- ments.

It also follows, of course,tha if racism is `endemic' in all British institutions, then every individual associated with them is suspect until proved otherwise. To me, this is the recipe for a witch-hunt. And, indeed, I discovered to my horror that this was the case. From my inquiries around a number of universities and social services depart- ments, and from conversations I had with traumatised ex-social workers — all of whom conformed to liberal, Labour Party- leaning profiles — I discovered that unless staff and students on social work courses `confessed' to their own racism they would be pressurised until they did so. Staff were reduced to tears when told that their refusal to confess to racism was proof that they were racist. 'Monitoring groups' were expected to sit in on these sessions to ensure the correct line was pursued.

Many adverse consequences followed. Tutors told me that some of the better stu- dents got out altogether. But what particu- larly worried the tutors arrsocial services directors was that so much time was spent on anti-racism training, the social workers ended up inadequately trained to meet the far more pressing needs of their clients. Occasional inklings of what was going on reached the public, such as when a mixed- race couple were prevented from adopting a black child in 1993 because the Asian would-be adoptive mother said she had never experienced racism.- In the surrealist world of political correctness, it is of course deemed impossible for a black person not to encounter racism. So that person's actu- al experience must be denied.

Family values, and in particular the rise in the number of single parents, have become another highly contentious issue. It has become extremely difficult to say in lib- eral circles that chilthen are by and large best served when they are brought up by both their natural parents. This is despite an overwhelming body of evidence, both from social scientists and professionals working with children, that this is the case. Yet to say so invites professional or politi- cal marginalisation and rejection. This is because people are anxious above all else not to give offence to parents who may be divorced or who never married. This power- ful imperative to give no offence means that no one behaviour can be held to be superior to any other. Yet this particular expression of individualism unfortunately produces social casualties — the children. So inconve- nient is this fact to the prevailing orthodoxy that the evidence supporting it is ignored, misrepresented or denied and those who bear witness to it are insulted and con- demned in an attempt to shut them up.

Many social scientists appeared to disre- gard the evidence, promoting instead the idea that it was better for the children if unhappy parents split up. In certain extreme cases — if there was violence, for example — this was obviously so; but the majority of fractured families were not in such extreme positions. The eminent sociologist Professor A.H. Halsey staunchly declared these facts, only to be dismissed with rage and contempt by other academics who told me he had 'gone ga-ga'. I had a remarkable telephone con- versation with one such academic, who had said Halsey had got it wrong. After I had pressed him repeatedly to tell me what the evidence was to prove this, he finally admitted 'tliat Halsey was actually right on the facts. But then he added, by way of explanation, 'What do these people want? Do they want unhappy parents to stay together?' It was all very well to talk about the rights of the children, he expostulated, but what about the rights of the parents?

It seemed to me that this got to the heart of the matter. The analysis could not be admitted because of the fear of the conse- quences. In this clash between the rights of children and their- parents, the adult world had won simply by denying that the price of their freedom was their children's best interests. I thought this was an unforgivable betrayal of vulnerable children. But when I started to write about these matters, I dis- covered to my distress that I too was now a target for condemnation and misrepresen- tation. What I had written turned up in dis- torted form in other critical articles in the press. I was referred to as a 'moraliser', which appeared to be a term of abuse. I was told to my face by erstwhile friends that I had become a reactionary fellow- traveller of the Right. 'Don't you realise,' exclaimed one such furious 'friend' virtual- ly as soon as I had walked into some social gathering, 'that it is the nuclear family that produces dysfunctional children?'

Alas, the 'dysfunctional children' are the neglected offspring of the era of political correctness.

Melanie Phillips writes for the Observer. A longer version of this piece will appear in The War of the Words, published next month by Virago Press.