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The far right monopolised the debate about 'grooming' cases. Credit - Christopher Furlong/Getty
I think we might have to invent a new political term. It is to describe an issue of importance, but one that you have decided not to engage with – or may even have denied is an issue – because those already interested in it are not people you are sympathetic to. Or, to refine matters: because the people who were first on the scene with answers are people with the worst possible answers. (I’m pretty certain the German language would come up with a phrase that would catch it superlatively.)
By way of example, a confession. Over the years since the 2008 financial crash, there has been growing discussion about ‘inequality’ in Western societies. The work of Thomas Piketty and others gave ammunition to the cause, and the word is now weaponised by the Left in almost every political debate and context. Ten years ago, you would find me denying that inequality was any type of problem: “a product of the free market”, I would have said. “There has always been inequality.”
Over the past decade, though, one aspect of this inequality has become especially acute. It is the inability of young people to get onto the housing ladder and the fact that this is being reflected in youth voting patterns. People without capital don’t have much stake in capitalism, and people who cannot enter the housing market would appear to be losing faith in the free market.
At the same time, the welcome given to oligarchism in places such as London (as described in Oliver Bullough’s eye-watering book ‘Moneyland’) has been warping prices to stark effect. We are living in a strange phase in capitalism that I sometimes think of as ‘Everyone can afford to eat out but no one can afford to eat in (a house they own)’.
I realise now that I was enormously resistant to conceding any points on ‘inequality’ not because I didn’t think there was something going on, and not only because the area isn’t one of my areas of specialism, but because I knew that the people lurking in the wings with the answers were people with the worst answers imaginable. It seemed clear to me from the start of the financial crisis (especially as events unfolded in Greece) that the people waiting to answer concerns about ‘inequality’ were basically Marxists.
They wanted to highlight inequality because they wanted to replace capitalism. Specifically, they wanted to give socialism, or one of its derivatives, another whirl. It’s possibly wise to resist engaging with such political gambits in the short term – at least until you have gathered together your own intellectual and political counter-forces. But it’s a mistake to ignore an issue in the long-term simply because the people waiting with the answers have the worst answers. The free-market across Europe is now in a serious state of disadvantage for having been so slow to respond to the worsening problem.
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