GUARDING THE NEW SNOBBERY
Peter Hitchens says that a columnist who
denied that there was a stereotypical
Guardian reader only confirmed it SOME PEOPLE worry endlessly about freemasons but surely the biggest, best- organised and most powerful cabal in Britain today is the brotherhood and sis- terhood of Guardian readers. Ask almost any BBC employee what his favourite newspaper is, find out what your child's teachers read, or the people who run your local authority, and — if you are still in doubt — examine that newspaper's fat recruitment sections. At least half the paper's revenue must come from the pub- lic sector, either directly, through advertis- ing, or indirectly, from the pockets of state and town hall employees.
Thanks to an astonishing flicker of self- knowledge in the Guardian itself, we can at last openly discuss its strange place in our national life. For this we have to thank the writer Martin Kettle. Stung by good- humoured mockery of his newspaper in what he predictably calls 'the right-wing press', Mr Kettle made what he thought was an ironical attempt to define the stereotypical Guardian reader as seen from the Right — before claiming that there was no such thing as the stereotypical Guardian reader: We believe, I infer, that women must behave exactly as men, that the family is a bourgeois tyranny, that abortion is an unalloyed social boon, that euthanasia should be encouraged, that homosexuality must inevitably be cele- brated, that white people are always racist and black people are incapable of racism, that to be British is to live with perpetual shame, that everything that came out of the Soviet Union was beyond criticism, and that nothing good ever emerged from the United States.
Above all, though, we believe that anyone who demurs from any of these — to us self-evident truths is to be run out of town.
Close, but not quite close enough, partly because it is seriously out of date. Since 1991, defenders of the Soviet Union have melted away until it is hard to find anyone who admits having championed it. To con- fuse things still more, Bill Clinton's weak- ling multicultural United States has recently found favour with the Left. But if you substitute South Africa for the USSR, you will be nearer the mark. Nelson Man- dela is beyond criticism. There is also a strange, obsessive loathing for Michael Howard, quite out of proportion to any- thing he may actually have done. Probably this is because all the fury and hatred that used to be directed at Margaret Thatcher now needs another receptacle.
The Mandela factor, largely because it appears so unselfish, fulfils a more reli- gious role, as we saw in the vacuous demonstrations for Mandela when he vis- ited London last year.
Since the days of the ridiculous Mrs Jellyby, the British middle classes have always been ready to use foreign parts as a playground for their consciences. It is essential for these people to hold the cor- rect view, as publicly as possible, on Bosnia, the Middle East or whatever hap- pens to be the most fashionable televised conflict at the time. That view must never have anything to do with the real interests of this country, though it may accidentally coincide with them. It is held solely to demonstrate the moral purity of the hold- er. For the most important thing is this, that the moral value of a person is defined by the rightness, or otherwise, of his opinions.
This new prejudice has almost com- pletely replaced old-fashioned class dis- tinction as a test of social worth and inevitability. The successful middle class has adopted a new snobbery of opinion, just as exclusive and devastating to those who fail to measure up to its standards. But why does it want to run non-conformists out of town?
For this generation learnt its behaviour in the same places where it learnt its politi- cal pose — in the relaxed university milieu which first developed in the late 1960s and is now commonplace rather than revolu- tionary. By day they experienced teachers like Malcolm Bradbury's Howard Kirk. By night they experienced sex and drugs and rock 'n' roll. They were indulged as nobody has ever been indulged before. Coalminers and agricultural labourers were taxed so that future directors of social services or BBC producers could live their expensive lives and move smoothly into comfortable careers far away from the people who bought their education for them. Their par- ents, and the whole traditional apparatus for passing morality from one generation on to another, had been neatly elbowed aside by a government subsidy. For the first time, this applied to daughters as well as sons, as feminist fashion fell mysteriously into step with the needs of employers, who began to realise how easy it would be to exploit the talents of women, while using their biology to manipulate and blackmail them.
Easy abortion, unrestricted contracep- tion, sexual freedom in all its forms and permissiveness about drugs were important guarantees if their way of life was to con- tinue undisturbed. So was a big, fat, tax- financed public sector, so that they would all have congenial jobs. Rather than think about these enormous questions — which I don't think they ever did — they declared that they were rights and linked them with an utterly unconnected set of opinions about race, international politics and class. What other explanation is there for the confusion between racism, discrimination on the unreasonable and unfair grounds of race, and sexism, discrimination on the per- fectly reasonable grounds that the tw° sexes are utterly different and only one of them can get pregnant? Yet by linking their desires with their professed morality, this generation dressed up their own self-aggrandisement, conve- nience and indulgence as tolerance and open-mindedness. They have probably ben- efited from Thatcherism more than trost people, though they would die rather than admit it. No wonder that, as they have grown used to the delights and advantages provided by two incomes rather than one, they have become ever more fiercely wed" ded to sterile sex, whether heterosexual or . homosexual, and that greatest of all Guardian causes, the abolition of the bona between mother and child. This brings us neatly back to Mrs Jellyby, whose ow° neglected offspring wailed in vain while their mother busied herself with the woes of Africa.
The author is assistant editor and columnist of the Daily Express.
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