Having met Sir Jimmy Savile, OBE, KCSG on a couple of occasions, it is unbelievable what some people can get away with in plain public view. Well before he got knighthoods from Her Majesty and Pope St John Paul II, he boasted in his autobiography about bedding 2,500 women. Long before that TV documentary finally caught up with Jimmy’s decades of abuse, Irvine Welsh wrote a detailed description of his paedophilia and necrophilia in “Lorraine goes to Livingstone”, as the barely disguised Freddy Royle. Talk about a paedophile disguised as a paedophile.
After the unveiling of Jimmy, there was a fascinating article in the London Review of Books in 2012, which listed a catalogue of dodgy characters at the BBC and elsewhere in British showbizz. A commentator below the line had evidently checked out the BBC archives in Reading and found the astonishing list of comments on Jimmy from appalled viewers in the early 1960s. They obviously sensed something radically unwholesome about him – it was not just a matter of his wacky hair and clothes. But they were obviously just old fogies, unlike the BBC sophisticates.
The ducks do not firmly line up in a row when it comes to Savile. Thatcher liked him and he would probably have been knighted earlier if there had not been some resistance to the idea from Whitehall civil servants.
You may not like Margaret Thatcher, but it’s pretty clear she had no idea of his sexual predations, and would have been horrified if she had. There were many, much closer to Savile on a day to day basis, who did know that at the least, ‘dodgy’ things were going on.
She was only the Prime Minister of the UK for 11 years, with access to police and security service briefings, and I find it a little hard to believe she had no idea. As I noted, there was resistance in the Civil Service to knighting him, based on Savile’s “louche” statements about his sex life which were thought to set a bad example. Maybe the Civil Service suspected more than this. That Savile and others seem to have had some kind of elite protection is certainly entirely plausible.
“Letters released in December 2012 by the National Archives under the thirty year rule confirm the close friendship between Savile and Thatcher. Some of the correspondence was heavily redacted before publication, using exemptions under the Freedom of Information Act.” (Excerpt from Wikipedia article on Savile.)
Men call other men ‘paedo’ whenever it’s quite clear to them that the other bloke is enjoying degrees of nubility they themselves could only dream of. It’s really quite simple, you know! Taking such blurts for a stroke of empirical genius is deeply misguided, to say the least..
You’re using the wrong terminology. Whatever the allegations made about Savile – and that is ALL they have ever been – the person is best described as an exuberant opportunist; but in no wise a genuine paedophile. That is just so much flatulent rhetoric, explicitly rendered to edify NO-ONE
Last edited 3 years ago by Don Lightband
Alison Houston
3 years ago
“No-one is suggesting that we should invariably judge by appearances, or by initial impressions”. I am. Shakespeare, Oscar Wilde, Roger Scruton and Ayn Rand did too.
I judged NeilFerguson by his face the first time I saw it, before I read the articles pointing out he was the man responsible for the foot and mouth disaster and others. I knew he was a fanatical, ideological lefty with a Messiah complex at first glance. I used to paint portraits, as a hobby so perhaps look more closely at other people’s faces, than others, but observing character and personality in the face is simple and instinctive and a God given or evolutionary ability, which accompanies our God given or evolutionary prejudices, which keep us safe.
I think Shakespeare isn’t a good witness in your cause. Remember Duncan’s comment about the disgraced Thane of Cawdor: “There’s no art / To find the mind’s construction in the face.”
I was going to reply with disagreement but I’ve just read an article in the New Scientist which seems to back your assertions, so I’ll have to think again.
We are identical to our primal ancestors who had to make quick judgements about others. There may be a natural tendency to err on the side of caution, but to ignore an instinct one gets gets upon meeting another is not wise
I lived in a very precarious way for a good number of years’ one where you had to make judgements on people and then live with what you had thought, and so be proved right or wrong. It did not take too long to discover one is almost never wrong when alarms are going off and you disregard them. That I am alive is because I developed an exceedingly good intuition on making fast judgements on people. This is a learned skill though, and most people have not had the scope of expierence to be good at it, still, some radiate their bad side for all to see, the snag is most have been taught to not judge, and so do not act on their intuition.
Matt Hindman
3 years ago
“We have to do something!” usually translates into “we have to do something stupid and quickly!”
every story of outrages we read now days seem to have an amazingly dark side, and it is not a surprise Qanon picked up on this, it is a dark world out there amongst the power people.
David Uzzaman
3 years ago
Moral panics usually result in Ill thought out legislation but in my lifetime we’ve removed some sensible laws on the grounds of modernity. Gambling was recognised as a dangerous trap for a minority of individuals and was heavily regulated up to the 1960s. It wasn’t illegal but betting shops were required to be very bare and uninviting with obscure glass at the windows. Advertising of any form of betting was illegal. All this has been swept away with a proliferation of gambling and the resultant casualties are reported regularly. Doing nothing is sometimes preferable to doing something.
New Liebour were very fond of gambling, for some reason. Never understood it myself. Why create more problems for people? It’s non-sensical. Unless they had a vested interest in the outcomes, of course.
the blairites were hardcore neo liberals who were only concerned with the interests of their donors/lobbyists and promoting unfettered capitalism, not to dissimilar to the tories.
Gambling is a wicked thing as an industry. I remember when the state of Georgia began the State Lottery, the reason voters approved was all the profits were to go to pay 100% tuition for state college/university to every local student with a B average.
It seemed great, casual luxury dollars going to educate disadvantaged kids. Till it was noticed that the great, vast, majority of people buying those lottery tickets available in every shop were low income people. The middle class do not buy Lotto tickets, the low income do, and both would get the free schooling.
The low income go less to college/university, and few finish all their years wile middle class have almost total attendance of college/university, and tend to do the 4 years. IT IS LOW INCOME PEOPLE PAYING FOR MIDDLE CLASS CHILDREN TO GET FREE UNIVERSITY!
Warren Alexander
3 years ago
The problem with judging people by their appearance is that all too often those that appear most respectable do the greatest evil.
Precisely. And don’t get me started on how presumptuous those that deem themselves “sharp judges” on the grounds of their shallow perceptions really are… Some modesty would serve them better.
An excellent well argued article! I’m a gay man, and certainly consider myself a beneficiary of social liberalism. I can live openly and happily with my partner, have recognised legal rights through our civil partnership etc. However……not all social concern over the increasing sexualisation of so much of our culture involving often very young people should be portrayed as reactionary and repressive.
The phenomenon of drag-kids, highly sexualised dancing etc is just almost unbelievable, but celebrated by all too many pseuds, trendiest and extremists as well as institutions with cultural power who should know better.
The celebration of violent and extreme ly misogynistic rap and grime artists is another example – ah, they are oppressed black people, so that’s ok and you are a racist for pointing this out. (Of course behind this pose lies a patronising, itself hidden racist attitude of ‘what can you expect’? ‘).
Refresh my memory: what did Mary Whitehouse think of homosexuality? Did she think kindly of it? Or was it in fact one of the main things she was trying to suppress?
And it’s funny that the picture representing this article is Marilyn Manson. I remember well the concerns raised about him in the 90s, and funny thing is, not one of them was that he might commit domestic violence. That was the least of the moral panickers concerns. If the moral panickers were so on the money here, how come they completely missed the one thing he allegedly did?
Michael Whittock
3 years ago
As always Niall Gooch writes so much sense. It has been said that up to the1960s we were a moral society in that there was a consensus about what was acceptable, and most people lived by it. Then came the 1960s(the decade in which to paraphrase Philip Larkin we invented sex) we became an immoral society. The consensus, especially in regard to sexual behaviour, began to break down. Such was the trajectory downwards that we now live in an amoral society where there is no agreed moral code, everyone does what they like and the result is moral chaos.
What has become very clear is that the OLD sexual revolution has resulted in a society which treats the life long commitments of marriage with disdain. But it’s precisely these committments lived out day by day by loving couples “for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health”which were the glue which kept our society together. Now we’re all over the place. In a Labour Force Survey conducted by the ONS 3.8 million children live in one parent families – 91% of the parents being the mothers. This has led to what has been called “farther deserts” and “dad deprivation”. The social cost of this is horrifying. Without the loving discipline and role model that a father can give, boys in particular can suffer lifelong disadvantage and trauma. According to “Psychology Today”research has found greater incidences of the following amongst fatherless families:physical and emotional insecurity, behavioural problems, truancy and poor academic performance, delinquency, promiscuity, drug and alchohol addiction, homelessness. abuse, physical and mental health problems, unemployment and difficulty forming lasting adult relationships.
This is just one aspect of the mess we’re in. What we need is a NEW sexual revolution in which virtue , restraint, faithfulness, the willingness to commit to a loving relationship with a spouse as a basis for bringing up a family and respect for the institution of marriage is encouraged and expected rather than undermined and derided.
I made a mess of my marriage but I agree with you. It’s often tempting when one is guilty of failing to claim that the fault lies anywhere but oneself. Society does indeed benefit from faithful and strong marriages
The greatest moral perversion by modern societies is paying the unemployable to have children wile taxing the hard working till they no longer can afford to have enough children to even replace themselves. Children fallow very closely in their parents footsteps.
In OTHER words, a revolution (choke) in which we manage to infinitely sustain the delusion that sexual appeal does not matter to “love”.
kevin austin
3 years ago
“Sir Peter Lytton Bazalgette is a British television executive. He was elected President of the Royal Television Society and Deputy Chairman of the National Film School. He was knighted in the New Year Honours for 2012 for services to broadcasting.” His company created “BIG BROTHER” UK and a host of other TABLOID NONSENSE. Go-figure…
Victor Lewis Smith contrasted him with his grandfather who built London’s sewers. The grandfather shifting shit out of the city, the grandson bringing it back in.
Russell Tandy
3 years ago
“Sir Lawrence Byrne, the judge who heard the Lady Chatterley trial and made that famous remark about wives and servants, will forever be remembered as an archetype of stuffy repression.” Actually, Sir Lawrence Byrne did not make that remark, as even the link you posted makes clear.
What a great piece. “And pushing boundaries has its place. JMW Turner is now firmly domesticated in the popular imagination, but caused great controversy in the second half of his career when he abandoned normal figurative painting.” Of course, JMW Turner abandoned normal figurative painting because his figures were terrible. And we’re lucky to have the result!
Red Asp
3 years ago
There is a ‘moral panic’ every few years, when the next round of stupid children begin to reproduce, having children themselves. There’s the ‘violence’ in PS and X-box games; Eminem’s lyrics; the Beastie Boys; Black Sabbath and Led Zep songs played backwards; The Rolling Stones; Elvis’s hips; long kisses on screem (Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman) – back and back it all goes.
Look up the ‘controversy’ around the exhibition of Manet’s ‘Olympia’ in 1865 to see that there will always be someone, somewhere, wanting a superiority fix, and will try to get it by tagging something – anything – as ‘bad’ or ‘immoral’ or whatever.
And what of Bing Crosby, hmm? Sean Connery? Is it only freaks and social outcasts that can do these things? That that’s even a reliable warning sign? But normies and squares are fine? That good Christians who attend church every Sunday would never?
Leave Mary Whitehouse in the cold ground where she belongs.
Mrs Whitehouse wasn’t a particularly lovable figure, and often overreacted. But can you counter the point made in the article, that our current society does, in fact, conform to her predictions?
You are a good liberal moral parrot. Having known several Priests who ran remote aid stations and schools in remote lands I have to say most were saints giving their entire lives to serve distant poor people.
Before the advent of NHS almost all medical was either private, or charity, the Church did almost all the charity side with armies of Priests and Nuns and lay Christians paying for and providing the Medical service NHS came to do, and same throughout the West. This is why Nurses in UK are still called ‘Sister’, try to educate yourself on the huge good Christainity did, almost all good in the West, and so the world, has its roots back in the Cholic Church, that remarkably intellectual institution (whos army of monks copied all the books, educated the Priests to educate the nobility, created science and the scientific method, made up the vast majority of the greatest philosophers who formed our thinking, gave the charity, gave the 10 commandments as a base of justice, formed the universities and schools and hospitals.)
That you liberals have been trained to despise the Christians is as twisted as any unreasonable hate Wokeism. The Church is staffed by people. People can be flawed.
So you’re saying that sometimes accusations in the media can be blown out of proportion, exaggerated, false, or even blowback on innocent people who don’t deserve them?
Thank you, that saves me the trouble of pointing that out and being tarred a denier or victim blamer.
Savile was a practising Catholic. If he was at all honest his confessions must have been interesting for the priest. He never seems to have been at risk of excommunication.
He was made a Papal Knight about the same time he was knighted in Britain.
Steve Kaczynski
3 years ago
Discussing Savile also makes me think of Rochdale MP Cyril Smith, who was anti-abortion and the only Liberal MP to favour the return of the death penalty. In other words, quite a conservative figure. Yet his dark side was much like Savile, who seems to have been a friend of his.
alison rain
3 years ago
what a wonderful article highlighting conservative cancel culture
Michael Wright
3 years ago
Heartfelt thanks to Nial Gooch for an extremely perceptive and thoughtful Essay. I hope he will forgive a very minor nitpicking footnote – I had always understood it was Mervyn Griffiths-Jones. QC, The Common Serjeant, who, as prosecuting counsel for the Crown, made the celebrated remark about “wives and servants” while addressing the Jury during the 1960 Lady Chatterley hearing. I’d never seen the remark attributed before now to the trial Judge. I’m quite open to correction if that’s wrong.
Am I the only one noticing the subliminal message in the article as “We conservatives know better than anyone else how people’s art and actions should be judged”?
Who the f# these people think they are to rob other people of the opportunity to experience and judge by themselves everything life has to offer?
Please spare me the patronizing…
well said andre and no you werent the only one to notice that, but then this is unherd the place for free thinkers as long as that free thinking is in line with conservative values.
Nicholas Rau
3 years ago
One of the two things I remember about Mrs Whitehouse was how selective her outrage was: her targets were the BBC rather than ITV, subsidised theatre rather than the commercial West End. She appeared to be motivated as much by economic conservatism as by the cultural kind. The other was her ability to convince large numbers of people that the National Viewers and Listeners Association (herself, her husband and their cat) had some kind of official status. Many of today’s self-described think tanks seem to have learnt from her.
Ironically, your post itself describes a perfectly reasonable logic. If ITV or HBO want to create anti-social garbage, what right does a citizen have to try to shut them down? None in a free society. But government subsidized TV is paid for by the citizen and represents the citizen and society; so, a citizen is right to question and protest subsidized content they feel has a negative impact or is not representative of the society’s views.
J-P Gayford
3 years ago
Whilst I find some of the ideas in the article interesting there appears to be a misrepresentation of both the term “moral panic” and its use in some of the cases identified. There is a conflation of a moral panic, which is a social issue, and criminal actions, which centre on individuals. As such the piece misses what is being hinted at at several points in the article, but is not expanded upon – the corrosive effect of fame and the way it legitimises dominator behaviour.
Stanley Cohen’s work fundamentally exposed the way that authority structures, spurred on by moral entrepreneurs, mistake events for symptoms of a moral decline. Lawmakers then over-react and, if there is a actually a social malady, treat merely a symptom and not the cause.
If there isn’t actually a real problem they may even mask very real crimes.
Recently allegations have been made against Brian Warner. These allegations of sexual misconduct are not particularly surprising given the things that he has said, done and even written in the past.
The moral panic however surrounding Marilyn Manson in the 1990s was not about sexual misconduct. The panic concerned the corrosive effect of the performer on society, and linked him to all kinds of real, and imagined, ills; such as youth violence and Satanism. His nasty behaviour towards women who were attracted to his fame and power was not the major discussion point.
The moral panic surrounding the Sex Pistols was similarly not about violence perpetrated by the band members. It was about their language and attitude to authority structures. Nancy Spungen’s death was actually a symptom of a much more corrosive power; the attraction of fame and the way fame derives from, or pushes people into, social transgression. She had a desire to be in a relationship with the most infamous star she could find (which in no way excuses the violence perpetrated against her) and landed upon the damaged, and vulnerable person of Sid.
In the article Mr Gooch notes the way that women have been abused by performers (and writes at length about other abusers). This is abhorrent behaviour but the article misses the chance make the final link; the way that fame creates an environment where abuse can thrive by creating an attractant for victims and access to victims. It doesn’t matter if the fame comes from socially transgressive music or children’s television. What is a genuine cause for concern is the way that fame offers the abusive positions of power and attracts the vulnerable into positions of abuse.
The saddest part of this is the way that moral panics obscure the really nasty stuff.
Last edited 3 years ago by J-P Gayford
Terry Needham
3 years ago
“Sir Lawrence Byrne, the judge who heard the Lady Chatterley trial and made that famous remark about wives and servants, will forever be remembered as an archetype of stuffy repression.” Tell me that I’m not the only person who thought that Sir Lawrence must have had a great sense of humour.
Mark Beal
3 years ago
Having grown up in the 70s and 80s more or less implacably opposed to the Mary Whitehouse school of thought, with the benefit of hindsight I’m happy to concede Mr Gooch’s point that she was more alert to the general trajectory of society than almost all of her foes.
Nevertheless, there are two parts to a moral panic. The first consists of moral issues generally, which can at best be discussed and debated in a civilized manner. The second, however, is panic, which is to say a collective irrational state in which people cease to think clearly, which often causes legislation with bad, unforseen consequences to be passed under the guise of “protecting vulnerable people,” or simply because “something must be done.” In point of fact, we live in something of a panic right now, concerning Covid-19, with a lot of useless measures in place, not because there’s any sense to them, but because people are afraid and the authorities need to be seen to be doing something. Same difference.
Another point about moral panics is that they are often class panics. They are driven by people who are afraid of the effects of popular culture on “the lower orders” – sophisticated people of the kind who sat on the British Board of Film Censorship might be able to watch “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre” without acquiring murderous inclinations, but they were less sanguine about the effect said film might have on factory workers in Birmingham.
Lastly, one need not read much about previous generations to realize that there has always been an appetite among people for the morbid, the violent, the sordid, the pornographic, etc. Whether or not moral panics are good, bad, efficacious or dangerous, the deeper issue is one of human nature. After all, if there was no interest in sex and violence, there would be none of it on TV in the first place.
Having met Sir Jimmy Savile, OBE, KCSG on a couple of occasions, it is unbelievable what some people can get away with in plain public view. Well before he got knighthoods from Her Majesty and Pope St John Paul II, he boasted in his autobiography about bedding 2,500 women. Long before that TV documentary finally caught up with Jimmy’s decades of abuse, Irvine Welsh wrote a detailed description of his paedophilia and necrophilia in “Lorraine goes to Livingstone”, as the barely disguised Freddy Royle. Talk about a paedophile disguised as a paedophile.
After the unveiling of Jimmy, there was a fascinating article in the London Review of Books in 2012, which listed a catalogue of dodgy characters at the BBC and elsewhere in British showbizz. A commentator below the line had evidently checked out the BBC archives in Reading and found the astonishing list of comments on Jimmy from appalled viewers in the early 1960s. They obviously sensed something radically unwholesome about him – it was not just a matter of his wacky hair and clothes. But they were obviously just old fogies, unlike the BBC sophisticates.
Mary Whitehouse’s National Viewers and Listeners Association gave savile’s “Jim’ll fix it” programme an award for being good family entertainment
The ducks do not firmly line up in a row when it comes to Savile. Thatcher liked him and he would probably have been knighted earlier if there had not been some resistance to the idea from Whitehall civil servants.
You may not like Margaret Thatcher, but it’s pretty clear she had no idea of his sexual predations, and would have been horrified if she had. There were many, much closer to Savile on a day to day basis, who did know that at the least, ‘dodgy’ things were going on.
She was only the Prime Minister of the UK for 11 years, with access to police and security service briefings, and I find it a little hard to believe she had no idea. As I noted, there was resistance in the Civil Service to knighting him, based on Savile’s “louche” statements about his sex life which were thought to set a bad example. Maybe the Civil Service suspected more than this. That Savile and others seem to have had some kind of elite protection is certainly entirely plausible.
“Letters released in December 2012 by the National Archives under the thirty year rule confirm the close friendship between Savile and Thatcher. Some of the correspondence was heavily redacted before publication, using exemptions under the Freedom of Information Act.” (Excerpt from Wikipedia article on Savile.)
Jim was knighted in 1990. I was warned about him by family in 1976.
As Thatcher’s time came to an end. He would have been knighted earlier if she had had her way.
I wonder if she was aware that the programme was referred to as Jim’ll F**k It among the cognoscenti at the Beeb?
Precisely! In my family my doctor father called him a paedophile, and my teen-aged self was so repulsed by him that i would turn the TV off.
Men call other men ‘paedo’ whenever it’s quite clear to them that the other bloke is enjoying degrees of nubility they themselves could only dream of. It’s really quite simple, you know! Taking such blurts for a stroke of empirical genius is deeply misguided, to say the least..
You’re using the wrong terminology. Whatever the allegations made about Savile – and that is ALL they have ever been – the person is best described as an exuberant opportunist; but in no wise a genuine paedophile. That is just so much flatulent rhetoric, explicitly rendered to edify NO-ONE
“No-one is suggesting that we should invariably judge by appearances, or by initial impressions”. I am. Shakespeare, Oscar Wilde, Roger Scruton and Ayn Rand did too.
I judged NeilFerguson by his face the first time I saw it, before I read the articles pointing out he was the man responsible for the foot and mouth disaster and others. I knew he was a fanatical, ideological lefty with a Messiah complex at first glance. I used to paint portraits, as a hobby so perhaps look more closely at other people’s faces, than others, but observing character and personality in the face is simple and instinctive and a God given or evolutionary ability, which accompanies our God given or evolutionary prejudices, which keep us safe.
Yes, you only have to look at Ferguson to know that he is very strange at best, and demonic at worst.
He does seem to fit the profile of the privileged left.
I think Shakespeare isn’t a good witness in your cause. Remember Duncan’s comment about the disgraced Thane of Cawdor: “There’s no art / To find the mind’s construction in the face.”
Twaddle
I was going to reply with disagreement but I’ve just read an article in the New Scientist which seems to back your assertions, so I’ll have to think again.
We are identical to our primal ancestors who had to make quick judgements about others. There may be a natural tendency to err on the side of caution, but to ignore an instinct one gets gets upon meeting another is not wise
I lived in a very precarious way for a good number of years’ one where you had to make judgements on people and then live with what you had thought, and so be proved right or wrong. It did not take too long to discover one is almost never wrong when alarms are going off and you disregard them. That I am alive is because I developed an exceedingly good intuition on making fast judgements on people. This is a learned skill though, and most people have not had the scope of expierence to be good at it, still, some radiate their bad side for all to see, the snag is most have been taught to not judge, and so do not act on their intuition.
“We have to do something!” usually translates into “we have to do something stupid and quickly!”
every story of outrages we read now days seem to have an amazingly dark side, and it is not a surprise Qanon picked up on this, it is a dark world out there amongst the power people.
Moral panics usually result in Ill thought out legislation but in my lifetime we’ve removed some sensible laws on the grounds of modernity. Gambling was recognised as a dangerous trap for a minority of individuals and was heavily regulated up to the 1960s. It wasn’t illegal but betting shops were required to be very bare and uninviting with obscure glass at the windows. Advertising of any form of betting was illegal. All this has been swept away with a proliferation of gambling and the resultant casualties are reported regularly. Doing nothing is sometimes preferable to doing something.
New Liebour were very fond of gambling, for some reason. Never understood it myself. Why create more problems for people? It’s non-sensical. Unless they had a vested interest in the outcomes, of course.
the blairites were hardcore neo liberals who were only concerned with the interests of their donors/lobbyists and promoting unfettered capitalism, not to dissimilar to the tories.
Gambling is a wicked thing as an industry. I remember when the state of Georgia began the State Lottery, the reason voters approved was all the profits were to go to pay 100% tuition for state college/university to every local student with a B average.
It seemed great, casual luxury dollars going to educate disadvantaged kids. Till it was noticed that the great, vast, majority of people buying those lottery tickets available in every shop were low income people. The middle class do not buy Lotto tickets, the low income do, and both would get the free schooling.
The low income go less to college/university, and few finish all their years wile middle class have almost total attendance of college/university, and tend to do the 4 years. IT IS LOW INCOME PEOPLE PAYING FOR MIDDLE CLASS CHILDREN TO GET FREE UNIVERSITY!
The problem with judging people by their appearance is that all too often those that appear most respectable do the greatest evil.
Precisely. And don’t get me started on how presumptuous those that deem themselves “sharp judges” on the grounds of their shallow perceptions really are… Some modesty would serve them better.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSL4pNvvMbg
“Some that seem good sometimes proveth to be evil”
An excellent well argued article! I’m a gay man, and certainly consider myself a beneficiary of social liberalism. I can live openly and happily with my partner, have recognised legal rights through our civil partnership etc. However……not all social concern over the increasing sexualisation of so much of our culture involving often very young people should be portrayed as reactionary and repressive.
The phenomenon of drag-kids, highly sexualised dancing etc is just almost unbelievable, but celebrated by all too many pseuds, trendiest and extremists as well as institutions with cultural power who should know better.
The celebration of violent and extreme ly misogynistic rap and grime artists is another example – ah, they are oppressed black people, so that’s ok and you are a racist for pointing this out. (Of course behind this pose lies a patronising, itself hidden racist attitude of ‘what can you expect’? ‘).
Refresh my memory: what did Mary Whitehouse think of homosexuality? Did she think kindly of it? Or was it in fact one of the main things she was trying to suppress?
And it’s funny that the picture representing this article is Marilyn Manson. I remember well the concerns raised about him in the 90s, and funny thing is, not one of them was that he might commit domestic violence. That was the least of the moral panickers concerns. If the moral panickers were so on the money here, how come they completely missed the one thing he allegedly did?
As always Niall Gooch writes so much sense. It has been said that up to the1960s we were a moral society in that there was a consensus about what was acceptable, and most people lived by it. Then came the 1960s(the decade in which to paraphrase Philip Larkin we invented sex) we became an immoral society. The consensus, especially in regard to sexual behaviour, began to break down. Such was the trajectory downwards that we now live in an amoral society where there is no agreed moral code, everyone does what they like and the result is moral chaos.
What has become very clear is that the OLD sexual revolution has resulted in a society which treats the life long commitments of marriage with disdain. But it’s precisely these committments lived out day by day by loving couples “for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health”which were the glue which kept our society together. Now we’re all over the place. In a Labour Force Survey conducted by the ONS 3.8 million children live in one parent families – 91% of the parents being the mothers. This has led to what has been called “farther deserts” and “dad deprivation”. The social cost of this is horrifying. Without the loving discipline and role model that a father can give, boys in particular can suffer lifelong disadvantage and trauma. According to “Psychology Today”research has found greater incidences of the following amongst fatherless families:physical and emotional insecurity, behavioural problems, truancy and poor academic performance, delinquency, promiscuity, drug and alchohol addiction, homelessness. abuse, physical and mental health problems, unemployment and difficulty forming lasting adult relationships.
This is just one aspect of the mess we’re in. What we need is a NEW sexual revolution in which virtue , restraint, faithfulness, the willingness to commit to a loving relationship with a spouse as a basis for bringing up a family and respect for the institution of marriage is encouraged and expected rather than undermined and derided.
I made a mess of my marriage but I agree with you. It’s often tempting when one is guilty of failing to claim that the fault lies anywhere but oneself. Society does indeed benefit from faithful and strong marriages
The greatest moral perversion by modern societies is paying the unemployable to have children wile taxing the hard working till they no longer can afford to have enough children to even replace themselves. Children fallow very closely in their parents footsteps.
In OTHER words, a revolution (choke) in which we manage to infinitely sustain the delusion that sexual appeal does not matter to “love”.
“Sir Peter Lytton Bazalgette is a British television executive. He was elected President of the Royal Television Society and Deputy Chairman of the National Film School. He was knighted in the New Year Honours for 2012 for services to broadcasting.”
His company created “BIG BROTHER” UK and a host of other TABLOID NONSENSE.
Go-figure…
Victor Lewis Smith contrasted him with his grandfather who built London’s sewers. The grandfather shifting shit out of the city, the grandson bringing it back in.
“Sir Lawrence Byrne, the judge who heard the Lady Chatterley trial and made that famous remark about wives and servants, will forever be remembered as an archetype of stuffy repression.”
Actually, Sir Lawrence Byrne did not make that remark, as even the link you posted makes clear.
“Most quotations on the internet attributed to famous people are fake, as Oscar Wilde memorably said”!
Well, quite so.
aw c’mon, don’t ruin my day.
What a great piece.
“And pushing boundaries has its place. JMW Turner is now firmly domesticated in the popular imagination, but caused great controversy in the second half of his career when he abandoned normal figurative painting.”
Of course, JMW Turner abandoned normal figurative painting because his figures were terrible. And we’re lucky to have the result!
There is a ‘moral panic’ every few years, when the next round of stupid children begin to reproduce, having children themselves. There’s the ‘violence’ in PS and X-box games; Eminem’s lyrics; the Beastie Boys; Black Sabbath and Led Zep songs played backwards; The Rolling Stones; Elvis’s hips; long kisses on screem (Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman) – back and back it all goes.
Look up the ‘controversy’ around the exhibition of Manet’s ‘Olympia’ in 1865 to see that there will always be someone, somewhere, wanting a superiority fix, and will try to get it by tagging something – anything – as ‘bad’ or ‘immoral’ or whatever.
True, but that doesn’t mean that there are no harms in the world, and no harmful people, deliberately or through unintended consequences.
Nobody said there weren’t. Literally nobody.
And what of Bing Crosby, hmm? Sean Connery? Is it only freaks and social outcasts that can do these things? That that’s even a reliable warning sign? But normies and squares are fine? That good Christians who attend church every Sunday would never?
Leave Mary Whitehouse in the cold ground where she belongs.
Mrs Whitehouse wasn’t a particularly lovable figure, and often overreacted. But can you counter the point made in the article, that our current society does, in fact, conform to her predictions?
As did and always had the more morally upstanding ages she sought a return to. It’s just that it wasn’t talked about.
These are human weaknesses we’re talking about, not evils specific to certain groups.
Bill Cosby was a paragon of moral virtue until he wasn’t. So were Catholic priests.
You are a good liberal moral parrot. Having known several Priests who ran remote aid stations and schools in remote lands I have to say most were saints giving their entire lives to serve distant poor people.
Before the advent of NHS almost all medical was either private, or charity, the Church did almost all the charity side with armies of Priests and Nuns and lay Christians paying for and providing the Medical service NHS came to do, and same throughout the West. This is why Nurses in UK are still called ‘Sister’, try to educate yourself on the huge good Christainity did, almost all good in the West, and so the world, has its roots back in the Cholic Church, that remarkably intellectual institution (whos army of monks copied all the books, educated the Priests to educate the nobility, created science and the scientific method, made up the vast majority of the greatest philosophers who formed our thinking, gave the charity, gave the 10 commandments as a base of justice, formed the universities and schools and hospitals.)
That you liberals have been trained to despise the Christians is as twisted as any unreasonable hate Wokeism. The Church is staffed by people. People can be flawed.
So you’re saying that sometimes accusations in the media can be blown out of proportion, exaggerated, false, or even blowback on innocent people who don’t deserve them?
Thank you, that saves me the trouble of pointing that out and being tarred a denier or victim blamer.
I assume you mean Bill Crosby, unless Bing was up to some nefarious activities I’m not aware of…
Bing was known to abuse his children. This is a scandal that emerged in the 80s.
Savile was a practising Catholic. If he was at all honest his confessions must have been interesting for the priest. He never seems to have been at risk of excommunication.
Not publicly perhaps.
He was made a Papal Knight about the same time he was knighted in Britain.
Discussing Savile also makes me think of Rochdale MP Cyril Smith, who was anti-abortion and the only Liberal MP to favour the return of the death penalty. In other words, quite a conservative figure. Yet his dark side was much like Savile, who seems to have been a friend of his.
what a wonderful article highlighting conservative cancel culture
Heartfelt thanks to Nial Gooch for an extremely perceptive and thoughtful Essay. I hope he will forgive a very minor nitpicking footnote – I had always understood it was Mervyn Griffiths-Jones. QC, The Common Serjeant, who, as prosecuting counsel for the Crown, made the celebrated remark about “wives and servants” while addressing the Jury during the 1960 Lady Chatterley hearing. I’d never seen the remark attributed before now to the trial Judge. I’m quite open to correction if that’s wrong.
It was Griffith-Jones.
Am I the only one noticing the subliminal message in the article as “We conservatives know better than anyone else how people’s art and actions should be judged”?
Who the f# these people think they are to rob other people of the opportunity to experience and judge by themselves everything life has to offer?
Please spare me the patronizing…
well said andre and no you werent the only one to notice that, but then this is unherd the place for free thinkers as long as that free thinking is in line with conservative values.
One of the two things I remember about Mrs Whitehouse was how selective her outrage was: her targets were the BBC rather than ITV, subsidised theatre rather than the commercial West End. She appeared to be motivated as much by economic conservatism as by the cultural kind. The other was her ability to convince large numbers of people that the National Viewers and Listeners Association (herself, her husband and their cat) had some kind of official status. Many of today’s self-described think tanks seem to have learnt from her.
Ironically, your post itself describes a perfectly reasonable logic. If ITV or HBO want to create anti-social garbage, what right does a citizen have to try to shut them down? None in a free society. But government subsidized TV is paid for by the citizen and represents the citizen and society; so, a citizen is right to question and protest subsidized content they feel has a negative impact or is not representative of the society’s views.
Whilst I find some of the ideas in the article interesting there appears to be a misrepresentation of both the term “moral panic” and its use in some of the cases identified. There is a conflation of a moral panic, which is a social issue, and criminal actions, which centre on individuals. As such the piece misses what is being hinted at at several points in the article, but is not expanded upon – the corrosive effect of fame and the way it legitimises dominator behaviour.
Stanley Cohen’s work fundamentally exposed the way that authority structures, spurred on by moral entrepreneurs, mistake events for symptoms of a moral decline. Lawmakers then over-react and, if there is a actually a social malady, treat merely a symptom and not the cause.
If there isn’t actually a real problem they may even mask very real crimes.
Recently allegations have been made against Brian Warner. These allegations of sexual misconduct are not particularly surprising given the things that he has said, done and even written in the past.
The moral panic however surrounding Marilyn Manson in the 1990s was not about sexual misconduct. The panic concerned the corrosive effect of the performer on society, and linked him to all kinds of real, and imagined, ills; such as youth violence and Satanism. His nasty behaviour towards women who were attracted to his fame and power was not the major discussion point.
The moral panic surrounding the Sex Pistols was similarly not about violence perpetrated by the band members. It was about their language and attitude to authority structures. Nancy Spungen’s death was actually a symptom of a much more corrosive power; the attraction of fame and the way fame derives from, or pushes people into, social transgression. She had a desire to be in a relationship with the most infamous star she could find (which in no way excuses the violence perpetrated against her) and landed upon the damaged, and vulnerable person of Sid.
In the article Mr Gooch notes the way that women have been abused by performers (and writes at length about other abusers). This is abhorrent behaviour but the article misses the chance make the final link; the way that fame creates an environment where abuse can thrive by creating an attractant for victims and access to victims. It doesn’t matter if the fame comes from socially transgressive music or children’s television. What is a genuine cause for concern is the way that fame offers the abusive positions of power and attracts the vulnerable into positions of abuse.
The saddest part of this is the way that moral panics obscure the really nasty stuff.
“Sir Lawrence Byrne, the judge who heard the Lady Chatterley trial and made that famous remark about wives and servants, will forever be remembered as an archetype of stuffy repression.”
Tell me that I’m not the only person who thought that Sir Lawrence must have had a great sense of humour.
Having grown up in the 70s and 80s more or less implacably opposed to the Mary Whitehouse school of thought, with the benefit of hindsight I’m happy to concede Mr Gooch’s point that she was more alert to the general trajectory of society than almost all of her foes.
Nevertheless, there are two parts to a moral panic. The first consists of moral issues generally, which can at best be discussed and debated in a civilized manner. The second, however, is panic, which is to say a collective irrational state in which people cease to think clearly, which often causes legislation with bad, unforseen consequences to be passed under the guise of “protecting vulnerable people,” or simply because “something must be done.” In point of fact, we live in something of a panic right now, concerning Covid-19, with a lot of useless measures in place, not because there’s any sense to them, but because people are afraid and the authorities need to be seen to be doing something. Same difference.
Another point about moral panics is that they are often class panics. They are driven by people who are afraid of the effects of popular culture on “the lower orders” – sophisticated people of the kind who sat on the British Board of Film Censorship might be able to watch “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre” without acquiring murderous inclinations, but they were less sanguine about the effect said film might have on factory workers in Birmingham.
Lastly, one need not read much about previous generations to realize that there has always been an appetite among people for the morbid, the violent, the sordid, the pornographic, etc. Whether or not moral panics are good, bad, efficacious or dangerous, the deeper issue is one of human nature. After all, if there was no interest in sex and violence, there would be none of it on TV in the first place.