‘How the Left gave up on freedom’.
Did they ever really want it?
Radical Leftism – the one in the driving seat right now – inevitably starts as, or soon becomes, authoritarian.
If you are in a hurry to transform society drastically, then most people have to be coerced to do your bidding.
This procedure hardly harmonises with most notions of freedom.
The ‘liberationist’ movements of the 1960s and 70s became more illiberal and authoritarian as they became more successful. Now they think they’re strong enough to be openly intimidatory and totalitarian. It was only ever about replacing the ‘wrong’ orthodoxy with the ‘correct’ one. Hayek wrote The Road to Serfdom as a warning; to the left it could be a handbook.
“The ‘liberationist’ movements of the 1960s and 70s became more illiberal and authoritarian as they became more successful.”
Yes, they became conservative, hence the large numbers of hippies who faded away into society as workers, giving up the slightly naff ‘liberationalist’ philosophy, which was never really political, but behavioural, and although it was expressed in large gatherings was in fact personal and individual (particularly in regard to sexual behaviour).
Both conservatism and leftism are ‘illiberal’ & ‘authoritarian’ but in different ways. To a conservative ‘authority’ comes from the Law, which is itself regarded as the only, ultimately good, source of coercion, but it is not an attempt to solve any particular ‘social’ problem. The law merely prohibits certain acts to everyone. So, I can’t murder you and you can’t murder me, without being liable to punishment. Note that under this kind of authority conformity will not be seen as a ‘burden’ but as an aid, to peaceful co-existence.
Now consider what the left thinks of as ‘authority’. Not the Rule of Law but the State, which is tasked with positively enforcing ‘respect’ between different people merely because of who they are at any particular time. Your obligation is not to an impersonal law, but to your fellow man.So how does your fellow man possess the authority to impose behavioural rules on you? Well, it’s simple. They get the State to do it.
Thus all leftism is an appeal to a strong State mechanism to enforce laws which are designed to protect certain people, but only those people. The Law, as an impersonal entity, withers away, because it has no relevance to individual feelings e.g. ‘racism’, ‘prejudice’, ‘privilege’. Note that these are all terms that refer to ‘specific’ forms of human interaction, but which are correspondingly vague. They need to be defined before a law can be enforced (unlike say, fraud, theft, or murder, each of which is already defined impersonally before the relevant law is created). ‘Hate crime’ enables one to redefine what a crime is from moment to moment, depending on whom one wants to punish, and unlike Universal Law this is aimed at particular individuals who say, or do, certain local things which are not ‘universal’ in scope.
That’s the main difference.
Hopefully, the will of the commons, on whose behalf the State acts. Although of course the Rule of Law is intended to protect the commons from an over-mighty state, which is where we came in ie with Magna Carta
Agreed, except for the the movements-turning-conservative. Did they really embrace the Rule of Law? Perhaps in some individual cases, but I doubt that they did in the main.
Usually comes back to bite them though-think of the French Revolution.What I find more frightening than their disregarding commonly held principles is this new world of subjectivity. I am going to sack you because you have the wrong sort of wrong-speak, wheras I and my friends can say and do exactly the same thing but thats ok.Ok with BLM marches , not ok with lockdown protests.
Right or left, it makes no difference. They all want to increase the size of the state and that means creating state dependency. The masses have given up on taking responsibility for themselves and with every election our freedom is taken away through democracy. Boris has proven to be a master at it.
Not just Boris; “right, or left, it makes no difference.” Point well taken. I am reminded of H L Mencken: “No government is ever really in favor of so-called civil rights. It always tries to whittle them down. They are preserved under all governments, insofar as they survive at all, by special classes of fanatics, often highly dubious.” (Hence, in my country, two cheers for both the ACLU and the NRA.)
Hence the value of Diversity. If the polity contains many different tribes and interests, it is less likely that any psychopath will be able to fool all of the people for enough of the time to enslave them or lead them off the edge of a cliff.
The rest of the Tony Hancock speech is ‘Brave Hungarian peasant girl who forced King John to sign the pledge at Runnymede and close the boozers at half past ten.’ Perhaps we need Joan of Arc?
I would say that Fraser is right, there has been a clear flip of emphasis on the left. It’s evident within a lot of organisations that would have been considered broadly left in their politics, even 10 years ago many were clearly seeing liberties as really important, and now they aren’t. Various civil liberties groups being chief among them, these groups used to fight for the rights of people they clearly disagreed with, now they don’t. Similarly Amnesty International has really changed it’s tone.
There has been a significant exodus of support from people who consider themselves economic or political leftists from many of these groups, but often they don’t feel represented by other groups either. What I find interesting is that the people who are leaving aren’t really more moderate in terms of their leftism than the ones who have imposed an authoritarian agenda – it doesn’t seem to be about that at all.
Consider consent. You would think its a basic human right, but its not.
Yesterday I was debating with a left winger.
No he says, there’s a social contract. If you don’t like it get out of town.
Just like two blokes deciding to have sex with one woman. 2 votes to 1, she has to give it up, and be grateful, or get out of town.
The reason the left doesn’t do basic rights like consent, is that those rights screw their ideology. They need force and violence to impose their views on others.
That’s why 110 million and counting have died because of murderous socialists.
I thought the argument of conservatives was that drastic transformations have already occurred in the ‘West’ – largely under conservative governments – so presumably without coercion or radical impositions on freedom?
Wouldn’t another way of looking at ‘radical leftism’ as you put it be to view it as saying ‘we’ve come so far but need to go further’ and the conservative view be ‘we’ve gone far enough’.
I don’t why the incremental change we’ve seen for hundreds of years won’t continue incrementally with radicals in favour and conservatives resisting.
Anarchists are the paragon of coercion and violence. Just ask Antifa made up of anarchists and socialists.
Anarchist are no libertarian. They believe in mob rule and warlordism – and they call that “democracy”! They want to replace the state with the dictatorship of the (ideological) mob.
You seem to be confusing people you define, or who self define, as anarchists with people who believe in variations of anarchism. A bit like saying all conservatives are like Pinochet and all socialists are like Stalin.
Lots of two dimensional political schemas have different axis for right/left, and authoritarian/libertarian. I’d say they are quite separate. It’s not like it’s difficult to find authoritarians on the right either.
A lot of left libertarians function as communitarians, really – most people on the right or left aren’t anarchists after all.
No such thing as a ‘left libertarian’. That is an oxymoron. The left believes in collectivism and confiscation and distribution of the fruits of your labour. No libertarian would agree to that.
‘Left libertarian’ is just a ruse, so they can infiltrate the libertarian movement and hijack it, like they are doing to the Democratic Party, to the environmental movement, like Lyndon LaRouche, etc.
I’m in agreement with both you and Meghan Kathleen Jamieson.
As a fellow radical left libertarian, I find the terms ‘communitarian’ and ‘progressive Christian’ to hold the solution to this apparent conundrum.
Why are so many people unable to comprehend a sharing that is undertaken freely, in love for the other, out of caring and concern for something greater than one’s own puny self?
The term here is altruism, which lifts shared social arrangements out of the realm of Stalinist coercion (which is the shadow of sharing, not true sharing) and into the realm of positive future human evolution—an evolution chosen freely by groups of people who, having already developed a mature, fully rounded individuality, desire to come together by offering up that individuality in order to move on to something grander, something more fulfilling than any one person on their own can achieve.
Individualism is the masculine principle. Community is the feminine principle. Both sexes comprise both principles, although they are organised in complementary opposite ways in men and women. Both principles are required to operate in balance in each person for positive progress to be made.
Thatcherism enslaved people under the lie of “individual freedom”. Xi Jin Ping enslaves the masses under the lie of “shared social harmony”. Both are lies because coercion is involved in each case, whether via covert manipulation of the unconscious or by overt brutal force.
Thatcherism offered the carrot of limitless wealth to individuals while denying the existence of society. Except so many greedy people found that carrot to be forever hanging just out of reach, tweaked a little higher by the puppet-masters each time the frenetic aspiration to do better than one’s neighbour whatever the cost reached new heights of desperation.
Xi Jin Ping manipulates Confucianism to induce a false sense of conformity in his people. Moral behaviour is confused and conflated with docile subhuman robotism.
There is a middle way, which does lead forward in a positive direction. But it requires that we work hard on ourselves in a freely chosen effort of self-improvement, while practising the art of putting ourselves in the other person’s shoes and choosing to offer a helping hand where needed.
The left is not a homogeneous group. But they generally agree that the state should confiscate the means of production. They also denigrate individualism and promote collectivism. They are also masters of virtue signalling.
No, people who call themselves left wing generally believe the workers should own the means of production. Some think that means the state, some that it means co-operatives, some that it means a combination of whatever is most effective in the particular circumstances.
They generally don’t believe the ownership and control of the means of production should be concentrated in a small group of people acting for their own short term benefit – which is capitalism.
However, I think even my clumsy attempts at definition are becoming irrelevant as we move towards a world where we don’t need all the people on the planet to be involved in production – certainly not as their main waking time activity.
‘ownership and control of the means of production should be concentrated in a small group of people acting for their own short term benefit – which is capitalism.’ The type of capitalism we have today in UK/US/Europe and some of Asia is not as your description. We have shareholder capitalism where lots of the means of production are owned by millions of shareholders, both directly and via pensions and pooled investments. Not saying everyone participates, but millions do.
Andrew Best
3 years ago
The left are just intolerant
Any disagreement and if they could
they would put people like me in to a gulag.
They can’t physically do it so now we have cancel culture instead.
Such warm and welcoming people very inclusive unless you don’t agree 100% and then you are just scum.
Read history and see what happens when radical lefties take power.
It does not end well for the poor working classes.
100 Millon dead in 100 years
If you want to see your relatives go and see them as most people are not paying attention to the lockdown any more.
its not 1945 anymore, that is part of the problem with the labour left, many of it still yearn for 1945 and many are actually intellectually still locked in that era
In that case you’ll have no shortage of quotes from prominent Labour left wingers where they publicly yearn for all that post-war austerity? Or were you making stuff up?
How many did the Shah of Iran kill? About 3,800 dissidents. How many did the leftwing Islamic theocrats kill in Iran? About one million. And the left continues to praise Islam. How many did Stalin and Lenin kill? 10 million?
Spot on! I don’t know if these new totalitarians are ‘right’ or ‘left’ but I suspect they are all part of the same global technocracy that is pushing to take our individual freedom away. Johnson and Co are among the guilty ones.
True, Left and Right are such misleading terms. They make politics look like a linear continuum where centre right liberals are just a few doors down from fascism and centre left democrats are only half a block from Stalinism. In reality the totalitarians are much closer to each other. Their differences are of style and emphasis but their methods and power lust are identical. We really should ditch these inaccurate historical anachronisms and replace them with something better.
Good point, well made. Maybe if people just referred to the thing being discussed and stopped the left vs right stuff. Particularly relevant to this article which combined misrepresentation with shoddy analysis. Might have been good enough for a sermon but not for serious discussion.
do you think unfettered travel would be the norm under Labour? This divide is on full display in the US – the states with the most restrictions are run by Dems, the ones that are more open are run by Repubs.
see Mr Jones 2020 Most underrated film in this Case The Left intelligesia in uK,Malcolm Muggeridge ,George Orwell,Victor Gollanz ,deny the Ukraine famine,ten million deaths…
Or ”Z” the horrors of right wing Coup 1967 in Greece…& ”Missing”1982 one of 10,000 US citizen who disappeared in pinochets Chile
“Left-wing zealots have often been prepared to ride roughshod over due process and basic considerations of fairness when they think they can get away with it. For them the ends always seems to justify the means. That is precisely how their predecessors came to create the gulag.”Margaret Hilda Roberts
They, along with numerous other totalitarians have murdered hundreds of millions of people in the 20th century alone. Its just that the ones that broadly follow the teachings of Marx seemed to pop up more often than those that oppose Marx. They both promise some sort of “socialised heaven on earth” .. but that seems to only be possible by killing anyone who in any way opposes you. Maybe the Marxist religion ( and it is a religion) is easier to understand than the opposite view.
What i do fail to see from the left perspective is any meaningful historical condemnation of Stanley, Mao or even the failings in the Marxist religion that enable these lunatics to gain their murderous powers
Well said. Marxism and wokeism have no basis in fact or science. They are as ideological as any religion. Marx and Che and Foucault are the gods of this religion.
Numbers please. Shah killed 3,800 dissidents. Mao killed about 20 million dissidents. You think this is equivalent?
Fred Atkinstalk
3 years ago
“Someone had phoned the police to complain.” And so the police turned up at the Church.
I am forced to speculate (as I have heard several others do.) that if someone phoned up to complain about gatherings outside the local mosque (usually unmasked and shoulder to shoulder) what would the police do? The smart money is on the person making the call being visited for committing a hate crime.
I think he’s trying to say that the police only go for soft targets. And he’s right.
Alison Houston
3 years ago
Dear Giles, the people getting at you are not ordinary lefties. The establishment is involved in bringing down every aspect of British history and every idea which helped us to believe in the concept of the ‘freeborn English man’. There will be nothing left, if these people have their way, because they wish us to be subjugated once again only this time under globalist government. But they cannot undo what is in our minds.
Denounce them as paid employees of the authoritarian state, call them out as actors and frauds. Let it be known you have seen through their agenda and the narrative will not be pushed or furthered by engagement with you on social media. Your role is not to sow division by broadcasting the divisiveness and deliberate falsehoods of others. Name the Devil, let him know he has been unmasked and does not scare you.
I agree with you but lots of people won’t have it.Don’t be daft they say , to which I reply Do you think this last year has been in any way normal? People have adapted to it and the restrictions have become the new normal. We are also encouraged to think of masks etc rather like rationing during the war-we are all doing our bit to see us through this crisis.Lots of comments about police action on Good Friday were -police are only doing their job , trying to keep us safe , its the congregation that is selfish and similar remarks. The world of Box of Delights by John Masefield ( very popular on Childrens Hour in the 1930’s) where the villains try to stop the cathedral service , but are thwarted by the powers of good is gone.
Giles Fraser quoted Tony Hancock-the moderators are ‘ looking at’ my quoting the rest of his speech . When articles are written about a topic why do the moderators then dislike the same words from comments?
Are you sure that is wise giving away your tactics? We need a little self defence. Rebuke a fool and he will hate you for it. Rebuke a wise man and he will love you for it.
I get what you’re saying but I still can’t help wondering if these people are really efficient enough to take over the world! It reminds me of a James Bond movie. Spectre, wasn’t it?
Vikram Sharma
3 years ago
I find it strange when questions are posed about why the modern Left is lacking in this or that moral impulse. The presupposition being that Left was meant to be morally superior but has somehow got tainted over time.
we could argue about what is the Left and end up with the No True Scotsman fallacy. But anyone mildly knowledgable about history will know that morality was always the mask behind which lay lust for power combined with hatred of success that has driven the Left for most of its existence. This does not make every lefty immoral; just as pointing to how religious convictions have led to cruelty does not make every religious person cruel. But the central tenet of the Left is to seek absolute power over others, and within that idea lies every other evil.
Strange old world where being Right wing, i.e. refusing to bow to a mob is considered inherently bad. But the purveyors of Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot et al are considered to be moral.
A wiser person would smile ruefully at the old joke: what is the difference between Capitalism and Communism?
Capitalism is dog eat dog. Communism is the other way round.
Emre Emre
3 years ago
About the point on Enlightenment, I was under the impression today’s Left is more anti-Enlightenment, than pro-Enlightenment. In fact, I thought one of the big ideological upsets of today is about the moving of the mainstream Leftist thought from liberalism towards (illiberal) progressivism due to liberalism’s colonial sins.
today’s Left is more anti-Enlightenment, than pro-Enlightenment.
It’s not only today’s left. The marxist left is anti-Enlightenment by nature – alway been. The Enlightenment was an intellectual, rational, individualist epoch; everything the collectivist, cultist, lowest common denominator-seeking, ‘progressive’ left is against.
And that is as it should be. You can’t control the masses of woke if you allow them the dangerous luxury of thinking! Good Lord no. Easy to remember chants is the order of the day for them – and also unintelligible creeds that, quite conveniently, are undebatable because debate, logic and reason are forbidden to the wokearati as heresies of the Enlightenment.
I am a facist, racist, homophobe, Nazi etc. I know because a woke person said I was when I was debating transgender. He didn’t have an argument though.
You raise some interesting points, but take the French Revolution for example whose protagonists mainly made a claim to represent “Reason”. It’s hard not to conclude, this is the same “Reason” you see today in Pinker’s books on Enlightenment.
French Revolution would be impossible without Enlightenment, and I’d argue it represents a major part of its influence. If you disagree with this, I’d be curious to hear about it. So, I’d say, you can see such collectivist/cultist thinking strongly in French Revolution. Other leftists movements (Bolsheviks/Maoists etc) move in the steps of the French Revolution – and continue to make a claim to represent reason and science.
Whereas, in today’s more post-modernist left, I see a rejection of this heritage, hence my earlier point.
If you look at the 1930s it seems to me that for all their faults and Lysenkian biology, the Communists / Left were more inclined to believe in real science, the Axis powers to believe in magic, quasi-religion and racial pseudo-science.
At some point – the 1960s ? the 1970s? that really began to shift, and the rejection of science and those beliefs in magic, quasi-religion and racial pseudo-science have now moved to the Left.
IQ tests show something you do not like? Do not believe them. Do not use certain words, for they are evil and could conjure up Evil. Saintly people killed by the police, evil whites tainted by an Original Sin they cannot get rid of, the need for repentance – no doubt readers thinking for a minute or two could add more.
Full-on magic and religion – deny it at your peril.
It is indeed a religion, a dualist religion in which the universe is divided into two mutually exclusive conditions: entirely good and entirely evil. They hold that certain truths (for which, read ‘truths’) are not open to question. Anyone attempting to question these truths must ipso facto be entirely evil, and therefore be annihilated, and sent back to the darkness from which they came.
“the Communists / Left were more inclined to believe in real science,”
‘Science’ which has a foreseen ‘result’ in a desirable state of affairs or a ‘goal’ is not science. It is quasi religion. One cannot deduce any desirable state of affairs from science per se. If one does it does not come from science , but from a previously formulated belief system.
“the Communists / Left were more inclined to believe in real science,” —
Communism is a form of religion. Religions do not mix with science. The woke left claim that mathematics is racist and was invented to oppress PoC.
The left denies that chromosomes have anything to do with sex or gender.
I don’t know about Enlightenment, but they are perpetually pro-Entitlement. In truth, most of them wouldn’t even know what the Enlightenment represents. Which is not to say that I am unfamiliar with, or unsympathetic to, some of the points raised against the Enlightenment. Indeed, as I get older I probably identify more with the Romantic response to the Enlightenment.
Johannes Kreisler
3 years ago
Here we go again. Comment was up overnight till just before noon, then suddenly the orange “! Awaiting for approval” notice, so it’s not the filtering machine but human action what removed it. Trying to re-post, see if it gets through:
It seems that, without me noticing, Magna Carta has become a kind of Right-wing meme, a whole new frontier in our never-ending culture wars.
Yes, Fraser, a lot of things went unnoticed by you in the past few years while you were busy drumming up support for th¡rdworld mass-¡mm¡grat¡on and other wokeries on the Guard¡an’s opinion pages.
Of course the Magna Carta is on the left’s blacklist; it’s historical, Engl¡sh, and thoroughly unbame. I’m surprised that you’re surprised by it.
And they don’t even have the “follies of youth” excuse, these are well middle-aged & beyond people who ought to know better. Just like the spurned bunch of third-wave feminists who suddenly found their sacred tenets violated by a younger, testosterone-fuelled translobby. We might see the Guardian’s Susanne ‘hate-all-men’ Moore penning a snivelling diatribe about cancel culture on the pages of Sp¡ked or Unherd any day soon.
Please explain, what kind of “liberty” is socialism where the fruits of your own labour is confiscated for the benefit of a selective few who produce nothing?
Katharine Eyre
3 years ago
“As it would happen, the police didn’t show up to complain. Instead, and far more peculiarly, the only hostility I experienced happened after I shared an image of the poster on Twitter. “Magna Carta is only quoted by ignorant ideologues,” was one of the more polite responses.”
Experiencing hostility after posting something on Twitter…who’d have thought it, eh?
I long for a time when Twitter is no more… but alas I am also fearful of what may follow in its wake…. WeiBo??
Daniel Björkman
3 years ago
Yes, you’re perfectly right, the left has given up on freedom. You know why? Let me tell you in the words of a famous conservative thinker:
Society cannot exist, unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere; and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without.
2015 was about the time it became painfully obvious that large numbers of people were either unable or unwilling to control their lowest impulses, that they were righteously offended by the idea that they should have to in any way improve themselves or aspire to being good or civilised or decent. What did you expect would happen once that was made clear?
‘Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom. As nations become corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters.’
Benjamin Franklin
More interesting thoughts by Washington and others (you know the people whose statues we are expected to tear down). https://nccs.net/blogs/articles/only-a-virtuous-people-are-capable-of-freedom
Yes! It’s a paradox of pluralism. We only legally control what is clearly socially unacceptable at the most basic level. Everything else is up to individual conscience and indeed we are not supposed to judge the values of others, at least in a public way. What isn’t forbidden is allowed.
But then a significant locus of social control – disapproval – is lost. The idea that some things might be legal but still are wrong or gross is lost. So all of a sudden, the only way to guide social behaviour is through what the law tells us is really wrong and bad.
Suddenly all kinds of things that people know to be unsavoury or socially destructive are proposed as things that need to be codified under the law.
I’m wondering why you pinpoint 2015? In any case, I think it has something to do with easily available stuff from Amazon, Deliveroo, et al. Stuff to stuff ourselves with, no need to control our impulses, the stuff will be there because we told our phones we wanted it. And a very few companies profit from our greed.
Simon Burch
3 years ago
Surely this is no surprise; the Left is about controlling all aspects of society.
Mark Preston
3 years ago
Both the left and the right have given up on freedom – why do you think there’s been so little dissent in parliament against the lockdown?
both(Lib-Lab-Cons etc) support Globalism,ie Cheap imported goods,and Labour..Instead of Home Produced Manufacturing, Both support unelected second chamber, Boris just adopted theresa mays” remain”,treaty Lib-dems,labour & half the tories,sNP,plaid,green Still Want to rejoin failing EU, think UN Agenda 21 is democratic ”Build back better” ;;You will be happy on low wages,Salary” etc..
Last edited 3 years ago by Robin Lambert
Clem Alford
3 years ago
What I find disturbing is the double standards on religious freedoms and limitations. It also seems to be the same for political gatherings, demonstrations and the like. Last year there was in Birmingham big crowds for Muslim prayers and for their Ramadan calendar and the authorities and police did nothing. Hardly any social distancing from the pictures I saw. Similarly but on a smaller scale with the Batley Grammar school episode on protesting of an image.
Yet the indigenous religion, Christianity gets singled out for prohibition.
I am an atheist so it doesn’t affect me but I think it only fair to treat those who worship freely and equally, the same.
The woke and progressive classes, as now exemplified by many in the upper ranks of the police, have made common cause with Islam, seeing it as a useful ally in their battle against western societies and peoples. Of course the possibility that Islam would turn on them if successful has not crossed their woke minds..
What the progressives also fail to realise is that soon they’ll have to decide whether to throw the gays under the bus or the muslms as the two groups are at odds with each other. My guess is the gays will get shafted as they’re less likely to go on a killing spree when their ideology is pissed on.
Police Raided Balham,Polish Catholic Church twice over Easter for ‘breaking’ Social distancing,they haven’t,as witnessed stored on Mobile phones.,Police have become increasing Politicized over 1997-2021 A worrying trend.
Last edited 3 years ago by Robin Lambert
Nigel Clarke
3 years ago
The horse has bolted Giles, and now you’re trying to close it, but I suspect it is to cover your own past mutterings.
Do you now regret all that wokery you pushed on us plebs in your various Guardian polemics?
You have been part of the problem for years Giles.
I think the idea is that *we* should be above indulging in the woke pastime of digging up historical dirt from old twitter posts & such; mind you, being a regular Grun columnist is a somewhat different league.
Then there’s always the “early adapters” who sense the turn of the tables before the masses of their fellow travellers do. We had oodles of those back in the eastern bloc after 1989 – they were all saying “butbutbut i was WITH you guys all along! Look at this article i penned last year!” – while securing their well-cushioned seats in the “new” system and filling their pockets just as they did ever before. That’s why i’m instinctively suspicious of Fraser in 2021. Had he wrote this sort of stuff back in 2016, i’d be praising him.
indeed – as Douglas Murray has pointed out, forgiveness, generosity of spirit, and the idea that people can change their views, are all in short supply these days. Especially among the woke Left.
I think that Giles Fraser writes some interesting and thoughtful articles for UnHerd. But he wouldn’t be allowed to write them in the Gruan.
There’s that indeed. However, some “coming clean” clarification would be helpful to eliminate any suspicion that his volte face wasn’t genuine but a rats-fleeing-the-sinking-ship act.
Nigel. This is much too close to guilt by association, and expresses a desire to exclude or diminish his current argument unless he repents his previous behaviour. Quite the authoritarian urge you have!
There are plenty of people who consider themselves on the left – sometimes even the far left – who have abandoned what is now calling itself the left. Often because of grave concerns about how they are dealing with the basic democratic freedoms like speech, belief, etc, or in quite a few cases because they see them as having abandoned the basic leftist principles of class analysis (rather than the current neomarxist identity politics) or solidarity with/basic respect for the working classes.
Christians have always tended to take a view of immigration that isn’t entirely of the right or the left, so it should be no shock that GF would as well.
I used to read him regularly in the Guardian, and was always surprised that the Guardian tolerated him. Perhaps you could point me to one of his “polemics”? (I only read his column in the Grauniad, and only saw it ‘cos my wife insisted on buying it)
The woke Left will begin to dislike any kind of justification or ideology used by those it despises, such as dedicated Christians or working class people. Perhaps this is the key to destroying the woke movement? If all those groups they hate began to spout the same rubbish as the woke folk, they’d soon move on and look for a new way to differentiate themselves from the uncouth, unwashed working classes, and those gullible people who fail to embrace science as a religion.
On another point, documents such as the Magna Carta demonstrate the spirit that resists fascism and despotism; a spirit that is stronger in this country than almost anywhere else in the world.
John Lewis
3 years ago
“The church was right to be furious”.
Oh waily waily waily.
Compare and contrast to the splendid Pastor in Calgary.
I first saw the Calgary Pastor a few days ago. I rewatched it a few times to give it a boost. It’s the most wonderful thing I’ve seen for years. And I am by no means religious.
I thought his shouting was rather undignified (even if justified) and I could not help but think that if you shouted at police like that in the UK you would risk getting your collar felt for a section 5 Public Order Offence. You might not end up in court, but you would be making the acquaintance of a cell for a few hours!
We got ‘left’ and ‘right’ from the National Assembly in 1789 but didn’t adopt them into political discourse until a century or so ago. The labels are lazy and useless. If ‘right’ means rule of law, law and order, importance of family, defence of the realm and sound money then there is now no party of the right. ‘Right wing’ has morphed into a term of abuse. ‘Left’ can mean anything from the Socialist Workers Party to the Bow Group, so means nothing at all. ‘Progressive’ means heaven knows what. Momentum? We should be talking about what, exactly, different groups want to achieve and how they propose to go about achieving it. Practical politics over vacuous sound bites and silly insults.
Simon Baseley
3 years ago
John Prescott was viscerally opposed to the eleven plus and with it the grammar school system. And he was so because he was promised a new bicycle if he passed the exam, which he did not. To a greater or lesser degree, the antipathy of the Left to anything can generally be seen as personal. Sure, it gets dressed up as ideology, but its need for bogey men or bogey women betrays it. Thus, I don’t feel that daddy loved me and so I will hate authority figures; when I was young the rich kids had nicer clothes, so I will destroy wealth; I finished sixth on school sports day and didn’t get a prize, I will despise elitism. Giles should not be surprised about those on the Left’s new found distaste for Magna Carta. It owes nothing to new thinking on their part and everything to the simple fact that the Right has mobilised it in seeking to protect freedoms.
Exactly. The Left tend to be useless people who have failed at something or other, or who know they have nothing to offer in an open, market economy of talents and ideas. So they seek to tear down all that is good, and to live off the taxes of others.
As for Prescott, his parents should have offered him a Jag. He might have been a little more motivated.
Part Agree,but Capitalist Sharks like Robert Maxwell(Labour MP) and Sir Phillip Green both raided Workers Pensions ..So they can both defecate,on Us ‘Ordinary Folk..eh… guvnor?..
Stephen Kennedy
3 years ago
Tyranny is the norm in Human History. I fear we are moving back, and that the Enlightenment may turn out to be a ‘phase’.
‘Someone had phoned the police to complain.’ As has become obvious over the last year, ze Germans would have had no problems subjugating the British had they invaded.
The Britain of today is not the Britain of 82 years ago.
Back in WWII we had pride in the UK, a sense of identity; who we were & what we stood for.
After 50 years of the leftist infiltrating everything from the union workshops to schools, universities and the media while at the same time the population has been excoriated and conditioned as to how horrible the UK (especially England) is, of how we are responsible for All evil in the modern world (and past),of how none of our traditions matter, and of how we don’t have a culture (but that all other cultures are relevant-and equal). Not to mention the whole we are European not British exercise in identity cleansing and you have a nation(s) that is effectively castrated.
As has become obvious over the last year, ze Germans would have had no problems subjugating the British had they invaded.
Invaded, what “invaded”. Ze poor mites were only seeking a better life, a little lebensräum. Have some kompasshun, komrade! Empafy! After all that terrible trauma and danger they suffered while reaching our shores (some never even made it!) our subjugation is the very least we owe them.
(^ that’s to paraphrase any Giles Fraser article from the 2015/16 era, when he was a fairly regular columnist at the Guardian.)
Nah, I think we are far more accepting of our own authoritarians than those of other countries!
Vivek Rajkhowa
3 years ago
It is always odd to me how the English love to crow about how Liberty loving they are, when research shows time and again how authoritarian and curtain twitching they truly are. We’ve had
More authoritarianism abd totalitarianism from elected governments than we ever had under royals.
I was going to summarily dismiss your assertion there, but once you’d cited ‘the research’ that backs up your claim ‘time and again’, I thought better of it.
You may have a point about creeping bureaucracy in our modern democratic system – and the gradual erosion of liberties. This is a problem. However…
We are authoritarian though? Compared to what exactly?
Our history over the past 200+ years speaks for itself – precious few nations have avoided succumbing to dictators or oligarchs at some stage or other, from within or without. More recently we have kept the Sterling, moved out of the ERM, and more recently chosen to leave the EU most due to its undue authority over us.
Low-level conformity is common for British people – we don’t usually revel in confrontation (see France for a different approach). But when things get to far we have a track record of taking a stand. This is undeniable, whether you like it or not.
I personally worry this attitude is gradually being eroded – but it’s not over yet.
Last edited 3 years ago by A Spetzari
Alex Lekas
3 years ago
Don’t you have to like or want something before giving up on it? There is little in leftist history that points toward expanding individual liberty, and quite a bit that points in the opposite direction.
Michael L
3 years ago
Probably, someone in the thread has already said as it is way to obvious: Left never adopted freedom, so there was nothing to gave up on. The better title could be “How Left continues to be totalitarian”.
Quite.
And they don’t even have the “follies of youth” excuse, these are well middle-aged & beyond people who ought to know better. Just like the spurned bunch of third-wave feminists who suddenly found their sacred tenets violated by a younger, testosterone-fuelled translobby. We might see the Guardian’s Susanne ‘hate-all-men’ Moore penning a snivelling diatribe about cancel culture on the pages of Sp¡ked or Unherd any day soon.
Last edited 3 years ago by Johannes Kreisler
Ann Ceely
3 years ago
The Left used to be in hock to Trade Unions with their hands up ‘so we can see who isnt voting the correct way’!
Isn’t that also modern Wokery?
Greg Greg
3 years ago
I think the difference is that the left has split….there are the Leftists who are full of sound and fury, ignoring things like, say, the bill of rights, in their determination to repeat the age old mistake of creating a dystopia while aiming at utopia. Then there are the liberals who are far more modest in their aspirations and timid in tone….but terrified of being labeled an ‘ist’ of some sort, tagged with the scarlet letter du jour and sent into outer darkness by those fire breathing leftists in their ranks. The irony being that liberals and conservatives have more in common than do liberals and leftists. It’s just that liberals, with a few courageous exceptions, can’t bring themselves to align with those deplorable conservatives. Better that the nation die than they suffer social exile…. I call it the ‘perhaps they will kill me last if I don’t offend them,’ strategy.
A lib-dem ,tory,Labour,grreen,SNP,plaid MPs fauning to eu,reminds one A quisling is one who hopes the crocodile will eat him last! to Paraphrase W.S.Churchill 1974-1965
Mike Ferro
3 years ago
You’ve answered your own question, Giles, Magna Carta is “the foundation of the freedom of the individual against the arbitrary authority of the despot” Hardly surprising the left don’t like it, they are the despots!
Michael Whittock
3 years ago
I’ve wondered about the Polish church situation. Was it a rather dim, religion illiterate Mr. Plod not realising the import of what he was doing? From what I could see the congregation were in breach of what was required. But I would hope a more intelligent Police Officer would have asked that a message be taken to the presiding priest simply asking the people to exercise some social distancing and put their masks on.
Maybe the complainant was seeking to victimise the Polish community. Maybe we have here another example of a growing trend to victimise the Church in general. Woke inspired groups and organisations are aware that much of the Church will oppose their efforts to impose their views on society and criminalise those who argue against them. For instance the LGBT people have taken several Christians to court for speaking publicly against homosexual activity. They unsuccessfully tried to ban Franklin Graham ( Billy Graham’s son) from preaching in this country for the same reason They are also trying to include prayer and ministry of Christian ministers and priests for gay people who request it, as an activity forbidden by law.
Would it be cynical to suggest that the police are happy to over-react to a ‘soft’ target to prove (if only to themselves) that they are not prejudiced against ‘minorities’? Much easier to make a point of clamping down on some harmless christians, rather than take proper action against a bunch of bigots outside a school in Batley, for example.
No , it wouldn’t be cynical and yes it would certainly be easier
vince porter
3 years ago
Scream Media can turn anything on its head. Look at what it’s done to commonsense.
Andy Duncan
3 years ago
Was the left ever interested in freedom? Really interested in freedom? If in the past it has appeared to have been so was this not just following the ideological fashion of the time?
William Gladstone
3 years ago
But there is something very strange about all of this. How did the Left fall out of love with Magna Carta? Back in 2007, a Guardian article attacking the 90-day detention period for suspected terrorists was headlined “Protecting Magna Carta”.
Erm I could have sworn Labour were in power in 2007 oh you mean not the left in government but the guardian. I guess you will tell me Tony Blair and Gordon Brown weren’t on the left next.
That 90 day detention period didn’t become law, though. Though it was requested by the Police, Blair and Brown supported it and apparently public opinion. It was removed by the Government when it looked as though an amendment moved by a Labour MP to remove it from the bill would win sufficient support from Labour MPs to defeat the Government in a vote. So they changed the period back to 28 days.
Good example of how bad laws can be prevented in Parliament, sometimes. If Parliament is given the opportunity and members of the governing party have the courage to stand up to their leadership. Currently, the Government seems to be avoiding using Parliament to pass laws, good or bad, whenever possible.
On that particular issue, Blair and Brown weren’t on the left or in the right.
Both ,G Broon, A Blair, Trotskyists at university,according to Ex-Trotskyist,; Peter Hitchens,Half Blairs cabinet,were iN the Communist party..John reid etc..
Last edited 3 years ago by Robin Lambert
Philip Burrell
3 years ago
I am trying to work out exactly what Magna Carta has to do with the incident you just described. The police broke up a perfectly legal gathering which was taking place in many churches up and down the country during the Easter period. Generally speaking Catholic churches have been open far more frequently during the pandemic than the other johnny-come-lately religious sects such as that based in Canterbury.
Why turn an issue of police abuse of their powers into yet another boring Unherd diatribe against the Left? Less displacement activity as evidenced by the constant stream of verbiage on these pages about culture wars and more connection with real issues would be most welcome.
Roland Ayers
3 years ago
All due respect to Reverend Giles for serving his community over Easter. However, before making sweeping judgments about certain attitudes being representative of the thinking of “The Left”, let’s consider a couple of things.
The Great Barrington scientists, in attempting to find a sane way forward, were motivated by social conscience and a desire to return to the norms of public health policy, rather than concepts of individual liberty. Prof. Gupta in particular, explicitly referred to her politics as left wing and it was precisely this refusal to fit into the the lockdown-scepticism-is-right-wing-libertarianism narrative which led her being smeared and vilified by The Guardian and other hysteria merchants.
It was liberal, progressive, pragmatically left-leaning Sweden that stuck largely to public health norms, eschewing CCP-inspired experimentation and proving wrong the doom-mongering mathematical modelers. It did so, partly due to liberties written into a modern constitution (last revised 1975) rather than totemic medievalism. Such liberties can act as a balwark against authoritarianism, but are a whole lot more workable in the context of a culture that values social responsibility.
Linda Brown
3 years ago
If you look at the Left you can see how psychoticlly narcissistic they are.
Clown,Trump Was not left OR Right,More Antiwar, than Democrats like O’bomber,Biden,LBJohnson ..Why dont some idiots Get round the fact some people are not part of Party ‘greasy pole’ machine?..
Last Jacobin
3 years ago
A confused and disingenuous piece.
If you read the Guardian article Giles quotes (selectively and misleadingly) it’s clear the Magna Carta ‘delusion’ the article refers to was messages circulated on social media suggesting the Magna Carta has current legal standing giving lockdown opponents the legal right to open their shops. The article does not refer to the Magna Carta itself as a delusion.
The article also gives examples of how the Magna Carta has been used as a symbol of freedom by far right groups and on right wing websites.
The other Guardian article Giles links to is one from March this year which refers to the site where the Magna Carta was signed as being at the very beginning of campaigns that shaped British Civil Rights.
In summary, Giles presents no evidence (just assertion) that the left has fallen out of love with the Magna Carta, some evidence that the Guardian (as his chosen representative of the left) thinks it’s a symbol of civil rights and some evidence that it’s being used as a symbol of freedom by the right and by anti-lockdown campaigners.
Don Gaughan
3 years ago
The left progressive woke cult fabricate a huge volume of empty baseless rationales and pretexts for their minions and increasingly monopolising propaganda machine that erodes the authority and principles of the free democracies of western civilisation.Their cancel cult tactics aim to erase any and all human rights ( free speech, democracy= populist = bad, due process, etc) and dissent to unilaterrally impose their truthless neo marxist dogma , under the pretentious banner of fighting systemic racism ( which they actually impose with the blatantly racist Critical Race Theory) and their fear mongering anti caplitalist climate change issues, their wedges to gain power and power.
The woke progressive cult tyranny is a truthless human rights violating culture destroying irrational deceptive fanatical movement. They have deliberateky inflicted enough pain, loss, violations and damage to individuals, groups.and civilisation , are chillingly indifferent to the human pain and outcry they inflict and actually revel and celebrate it . The work and effort now required to liberate civilisation from the woke is starting and will need the support and drive of many to protect and restore our cultures and freedoms from the woke.They should be brought to justice and fitting consequences for their crimes , violations and scale of damage.
The woke tyranny and the targeted peoples of the free democracies of western civilisation will eventually have their Nuremburg.
Hmmm, maybe the Magna Carta is still a symbol of the ideals of freedom. Maybe it was an important stepping stone on the journey out of arbitary tyranny and oppression, but a left wing document it is not.
Taking Clause 61 as an example:
The barons shall elect twenty-five of their number to keep, and cause to be observed with all their might, the peace and liberties granted and confirmed to them by this charter.
https://fullfact.org/online/did-she-die-in-vain/
The quote posted on the outside of Gile’s church also has some disturbing connections with past actions of some members of the Church placing themselves above the law (dealing with things as internal matters). The Church may be above the law – but the people who go there are not and most certaintly should not be.
robert scheetz
3 years ago
And the Nazarite languishes dying in Belmarsh.
Jeff Mason
3 years ago
When you need the government’s permission to exercise your rights, you have no rights. Everyone, everywhere needs to aggressively push back against this kind of tyranny. Fortunately, in the US, we have the Second Amendment right to protect ourselves through force of arms – at least for the time being. That tends to give overbearing bureaucrats pause.
Alex Delszsen
3 years ago
My favorite trends: the universal descriptor, “ignorant,” and the mantra of threes, or listing all goals in threes, from the Duke of Montecito to every other corporate head. Example: “diversity, equity, and inclusion.” You will read and hear this in every speech or mission statement.
Inevitably, ‘diversity, equity and inclusion’ is now being extended to the employment of pilots at United Airlines. In other words, pilots will be employed not on the basis of their flying skills and records, but on their race, gender and sexuality etc. I, for one, will be avoiding United Airlines.
Funny how “equity” replaced “equality” all in a sudden. ‘Equality’ i’m familiar with from the French Revolution; ‘equity’ i was vaguely aware of being a somewhat obscure financial jargon. Until the ever-helpful pages of the Guardian explained that ‘equity’ is the equality of outcome. The antithesis of equality, in essence.
kyonvor
3 years ago
What riles is the attitude of the coppers! The altar is for Catholics a sacred space but the two officers nonchantly sauntered towards it and stood by the lectern as though they were in a pub or something of that sort. Absolutely no respect. Does anyone imagine our culturally sensitive and brain-rinsed in unconscious bias training plods would have traipsed all over a mosque like that without by or leave. The Met shouldn’t get away with such clumsy ‘me and my size nines’ insensitive policing. But of course they will. Says everything about modern policing. Take a knee for BLM but don’t genuflect before the God’s Altar – On the day of Christ’s Passion.
Last edited 3 years ago by kyonvor
Samuel Gee
3 years ago
A couple of very disturbing things arise. First the lack of boundaries that common sense should give the police. “what sarg? You want me to go into a Catholic mass on Good Friday, Good Friday sarg, think about it, and threaten people with arrest? Are you sure sarg? You can’t be serious.”
Secondly that not one government minister appears to see what the problem with cops doing that is.
While I’m musing though, I bet the sergeant would have thought twice about wading into a mosque and threatening people and had he done so his career in the police would be over already.
A lot of people on here seem to be accusing the police of respecting Islam more than Christianity.
Is there any objective evidence for this? Or are we looking at a prejudiced, ethnocentric Christianity (“My stuff is worth more than that furriner’s.”)?
alistairgorthy
3 years ago
I think you’ll find that there has always been a certain ambivalence to Magna Carta and the issue of civil liberties by both the left and the right. Each is capable of abusing it whenever it suits them.
Perhaps the clergy and congregation should be reminded of:
Acts 17:24 (KJV)
God that made the world and all things therein, seeing that he is Lord of heaven and earth, dwelleth not in temples made with hands;
Congregational worship is primarily a social endeavour not a religious imperative.
Lee Johnson
3 years ago
Thank goodness clever people like Giles Fraser and the the rest of the clever people on here have not been in charge of the pandemic response.
Retanot King
3 years ago
Any moral posturing by a leftist (except for some decent liberal-lefts) should be met with strong doubt. As they say, the left has no principles except that the means justifies the end — the end being some kind of infantile wishy washy socialist utopia where workers are forced to hand over the fruits of their own labour to ideological grifters and those who wish not to produce. Never be taken aback by their carefully cultured veneer and mastery of jargon. On the first question or argument, they often fold, preferring to divert the subject or leave the scene altogether.
Last edited 3 years ago by Retanot King
Peter KE
3 years ago
The sad thing we are suffering from is that the police are swinging against the people and joining the left woke thugs. Happy to dance and take the knee with XR, BLM but not to protect the majority.
Penelope Lane
3 years ago
…most of the congregation were social distancing Why weren’t all of them social distancing? How can a person genuinely professing Christianity be so thoughtless and uncaring about their neighbour’s welfare even in church? All very well to agonise about religious freedom—and from what you say it does sound as if the police overreacted in this instance—but there is documented evidence that religious meetings of fundamentalist Pentecostals and suchlike brethren have been breeding grounds for the spread of Covid into the community, in the USA and I believe in the UK too. The police don’t have the time to inspect every case in detail; they have to adhere to instructions and guidelines, which means mistakes are inevitable here and there.
I tend to get irritated when people blether on about freedom before they’ve inspected their own antisocial behaviour.
I get even more irritated when people start confusing a simple requirement for good manners and consideration of others’ welfare with authoritarianism or totalitarianism or other even more unspeakable bogeymen.
Clem Alford
3 years ago
It was notJesus’s claim to be King of the Jews that upset the authorities of the day, it was him kicking out the moneylenders. Step too far!!
Kristján Arngrímsson
3 years ago
What a bonanza this Covid has been for the talking set. They really should be thankful for the lockdowns and government evils. Their endless anger is endlessly justified and rewarded. What a lark!
are you comparing Covid to WWII? Isn’t that the problem? A completely disproportionate response to a relatively minor threat, which I have heard people compare to the Black Death. It’s insane, and the police response is part of that insanity, not a rational reaction to a complaint.
Dave H
3 years ago
The left loves it as a symbol, the defiant hairdressers of the world think it literally grants them the right to ignore any and all law they feel like, based on little more than some Facebook noise.
These are hardly comparable.
Nigel Hewett
3 years ago
I sometimes feel that I’m the only person with binocular vision in the land of the one-eyed. All the erudite utterings in the discussion seem to have completely missed the basic point – No one should have the right, either bestowed upon them by Magna Carta or by the Lord All Mighty, to injure or endanger another person. The reason that gatherings of people, some of whom could easily be carrying lethal viruses, are currently banned is simply to stop some people injuring (killing!) others. It’s got nothing to do with personal freedom, the Church, Magna Carta or politics.
Except that gatherings of people for worship are specifically allowed by the UK Government, with certain restrictions (current requirements are social distancing, masks and sanitising pews/chairs after each service). Please refrain from commenting from ignorance.
Joe Lynn
3 years ago
Yet another religious nutter with an opinion. It’s time we educate people out of religion.
Give us a break. Two cultures and all that stuff is soooopassé.
Diarmid Weir
3 years ago
‘…the mess the Left now finds itself in over their uncritical enthusiasm for lockdown’ What ‘mess’? What ‘uncritical enthusiasm’? To the extent that there is ‘enthusiasm’ for protecting lives and health at the expense of some business revenue (a false dichotomy in any case), it certainly comes with criticism for this government’s unwillingness to provide adequate support for those suffering from that loss. ‘…some basic freedoms, including the freedom to worship….’ Why exactly are mass gatherings required to ‘worship’? And why – whatever might be the text of some significant but historical document – should those gatherings be exempt from temporary ordinances intended to reduce the very real risks such gatherings pose to public health at this time? It appears to presume what we are not obliged to believe – that there is some supreme being that demands to be supplicated to.
‘How the Left gave up on freedom’.
Did they ever really want it?
Radical Leftism – the one in the driving seat right now – inevitably starts as, or soon becomes, authoritarian.
If you are in a hurry to transform society drastically, then most people have to be coerced to do your bidding.
This procedure hardly harmonises with most notions of freedom.
The ‘liberationist’ movements of the 1960s and 70s became more illiberal and authoritarian as they became more successful. Now they think they’re strong enough to be openly intimidatory and totalitarian. It was only ever about replacing the ‘wrong’ orthodoxy with the ‘correct’ one. Hayek wrote The Road to Serfdom as a warning; to the left it could be a handbook.
“The ‘liberationist’ movements of the 1960s and 70s became more illiberal and authoritarian as they became more successful.”
Yes, they became conservative, hence the large numbers of hippies who faded away into society as workers, giving up the slightly naff ‘liberationalist’ philosophy, which was never really political, but behavioural, and although it was expressed in large gatherings was in fact personal and individual (particularly in regard to sexual behaviour).
Both conservatism and leftism are ‘illiberal’ & ‘authoritarian’ but in different ways. To a conservative ‘authority’ comes from the Law, which is itself regarded as the only, ultimately good, source of coercion, but it is not an attempt to solve any particular ‘social’ problem. The law merely prohibits certain acts to everyone. So, I can’t murder you and you can’t murder me, without being liable to punishment. Note that under this kind of authority conformity will not be seen as a ‘burden’ but as an aid, to peaceful co-existence.
Now consider what the left thinks of as ‘authority’. Not the Rule of Law but the State, which is tasked with positively enforcing ‘respect’ between different people merely because of who they are at any particular time. Your obligation is not to an impersonal law, but to your fellow man.So how does your fellow man possess the authority to impose behavioural rules on you? Well, it’s simple. They get the State to do it.
Thus all leftism is an appeal to a strong State mechanism to enforce laws which are designed to protect certain people, but only those people. The Law, as an impersonal entity, withers away, because it has no relevance to individual feelings e.g. ‘racism’, ‘prejudice’, ‘privilege’. Note that these are all terms that refer to ‘specific’ forms of human interaction, but which are correspondingly vague. They need to be defined before a law can be enforced (unlike say, fraud, theft, or murder, each of which is already defined impersonally before the relevant law is created). ‘Hate crime’ enables one to redefine what a crime is from moment to moment, depending on whom one wants to punish, and unlike Universal Law this is aimed at particular individuals who say, or do, certain local things which are not ‘universal’ in scope.
That’s the main difference.
That’s very interesting. Isn’t the law merely the definition of the will of the State?
Hopefully, the will of the commons, on whose behalf the State acts. Although of course the Rule of Law is intended to protect the commons from an over-mighty state, which is where we came in ie with Magna Carta
That, if true, would come as very good news to the Nuremberg defendants — even if untimely news.
Will of the state is an ambition. The law is supposed to be resistance
Agreed, except for the the movements-turning-conservative. Did they really embrace the Rule of Law? Perhaps in some individual cases, but I doubt that they did in the main.
Usually comes back to bite them though-think of the French Revolution.What I find more frightening than their disregarding commonly held principles is this new world of subjectivity. I am going to sack you because you have the wrong sort of wrong-speak, wheras I and my friends can say and do exactly the same thing but thats ok.Ok with BLM marches , not ok with lockdown protests.
No! 1984 was supposed to be a warning! Not a user’s manual!
Right or left, it makes no difference. They all want to increase the size of the state and that means creating state dependency. The masses have given up on taking responsibility for themselves and with every election our freedom is taken away through democracy. Boris has proven to be a master at it.
Not just Boris; “right, or left, it makes no difference.” Point well taken. I am reminded of H L Mencken: “No government is ever really in favor of so-called civil rights. It always tries to whittle them down. They are preserved under all governments, insofar as they survive at all, by special classes of fanatics, often highly dubious.” (Hence, in my country, two cheers for both the ACLU and the NRA.)
Hence the value of Diversity. If the polity contains many different tribes and interests, it is less likely that any psychopath will be able to fool all of the people for enough of the time to enslave them or lead them off the edge of a cliff.
Yep.
What Britain needs now is an iron lady.
And a good dose of benign dictatorship!!!
Dystopia UK needs repairing.
The rest of the Tony Hancock speech is ‘Brave Hungarian peasant girl who forced King John to sign the pledge at Runnymede and close the boozers at half past ten.’ Perhaps we need Joan of Arc?
do you mean an ironing lady?
no that`s sexist….
This would be better, somehow, than the current iron maiden called cancel culture?
I would say that Fraser is right, there has been a clear flip of emphasis on the left. It’s evident within a lot of organisations that would have been considered broadly left in their politics, even 10 years ago many were clearly seeing liberties as really important, and now they aren’t. Various civil liberties groups being chief among them, these groups used to fight for the rights of people they clearly disagreed with, now they don’t. Similarly Amnesty International has really changed it’s tone.
There has been a significant exodus of support from people who consider themselves economic or political leftists from many of these groups, but often they don’t feel represented by other groups either. What I find interesting is that the people who are leaving aren’t really more moderate in terms of their leftism than the ones who have imposed an authoritarian agenda – it doesn’t seem to be about that at all.
Consider consent. You would think its a basic human right, but its not.
Yesterday I was debating with a left winger.
No he says, there’s a social contract. If you don’t like it get out of town.
Just like two blokes deciding to have sex with one woman. 2 votes to 1, she has to give it up, and be grateful, or get out of town.
The reason the left doesn’t do basic rights like consent, is that those rights screw their ideology. They need force and violence to impose their views on others.
That’s why 110 million and counting have died because of murderous socialists.
?
I thought the argument of conservatives was that drastic transformations have already occurred in the ‘West’ – largely under conservative governments – so presumably without coercion or radical impositions on freedom?
Wouldn’t another way of looking at ‘radical leftism’ as you put it be to view it as saying ‘we’ve come so far but need to go further’ and the conservative view be ‘we’ve gone far enough’.
I don’t why the incremental change we’ve seen for hundreds of years won’t continue incrementally with radicals in favour and conservatives resisting.
But I consider myself a radical, maybe even a left wing one (whatever that may mean), but also a libertarian. Is there a contradiction there?
Yes. Radical leftism entails coercion.
Why? Anarchists, who are supposed to be opposed to any form of coercion, are usually assigned to the Left.
Anarchists are the paragon of coercion and violence. Just ask Antifa made up of anarchists and socialists.
Anarchist are no libertarian. They believe in mob rule and warlordism – and they call that “democracy”! They want to replace the state with the dictatorship of the (ideological) mob.
You seem to be confusing people you define, or who self define, as anarchists with people who believe in variations of anarchism. A bit like saying all conservatives are like Pinochet and all socialists are like Stalin.
Lots of two dimensional political schemas have different axis for right/left, and authoritarian/libertarian. I’d say they are quite separate. It’s not like it’s difficult to find authoritarians on the right either.
A lot of left libertarians function as communitarians, really – most people on the right or left aren’t anarchists after all.
No such thing as a ‘left libertarian’. That is an oxymoron. The left believes in collectivism and confiscation and distribution of the fruits of your labour. No libertarian would agree to that.
‘Left libertarian’ is just a ruse, so they can infiltrate the libertarian movement and hijack it, like they are doing to the Democratic Party, to the environmental movement, like Lyndon LaRouche, etc.
Not that I can see. I consider myself the same.
I’m in agreement with both you and Meghan Kathleen Jamieson.
As a fellow radical left libertarian, I find the terms ‘communitarian’ and ‘progressive Christian’ to hold the solution to this apparent conundrum.
Why are so many people unable to comprehend a sharing that is undertaken freely, in love for the other, out of caring and concern for something greater than one’s own puny self?
The term here is altruism, which lifts shared social arrangements out of the realm of Stalinist coercion (which is the shadow of sharing, not true sharing) and into the realm of positive future human evolution—an evolution chosen freely by groups of people who, having already developed a mature, fully rounded individuality, desire to come together by offering up that individuality in order to move on to something grander, something more fulfilling than any one person on their own can achieve.
Individualism is the masculine principle. Community is the feminine principle. Both sexes comprise both principles, although they are organised in complementary opposite ways in men and women. Both principles are required to operate in balance in each person for positive progress to be made.
Thatcherism enslaved people under the lie of “individual freedom”. Xi Jin Ping enslaves the masses under the lie of “shared social harmony”. Both are lies because coercion is involved in each case, whether via covert manipulation of the unconscious or by overt brutal force.
Thatcherism offered the carrot of limitless wealth to individuals while denying the existence of society. Except so many greedy people found that carrot to be forever hanging just out of reach, tweaked a little higher by the puppet-masters each time the frenetic aspiration to do better than one’s neighbour whatever the cost reached new heights of desperation.
Xi Jin Ping manipulates Confucianism to induce a false sense of conformity in his people. Moral behaviour is confused and conflated with docile subhuman robotism.
There is a middle way, which does lead forward in a positive direction. But it requires that we work hard on ourselves in a freely chosen effort of self-improvement, while practising the art of putting ourselves in the other person’s shoes and choosing to offer a helping hand where needed.
What on earth do you mean by ‘the Left’ here? Who is in what driving seat? In which universe?
The left is not a homogeneous group. But they generally agree that the state should confiscate the means of production. They also denigrate individualism and promote collectivism. They are also masters of virtue signalling.
No, people who call themselves left wing generally believe the workers should own the means of production. Some think that means the state, some that it means co-operatives, some that it means a combination of whatever is most effective in the particular circumstances.
They generally don’t believe the ownership and control of the means of production should be concentrated in a small group of people acting for their own short term benefit – which is capitalism.
However, I think even my clumsy attempts at definition are becoming irrelevant as we move towards a world where we don’t need all the people on the planet to be involved in production – certainly not as their main waking time activity.
‘ownership and control of the means of production should be concentrated in a small group of people acting for their own short term benefit – which is capitalism.’
The type of capitalism we have today in UK/US/Europe and some of Asia is not as your description. We have shareholder capitalism where lots of the means of production are owned by millions of shareholders, both directly and via pensions and pooled investments. Not saying everyone participates, but millions do.
The left are just intolerant
Any disagreement and if they could
they would put people like me in to a gulag.
They can’t physically do it so now we have cancel culture instead.
Such warm and welcoming people very inclusive unless you don’t agree 100% and then you are just scum.
Please…don’t flatter yourself. Gulag my arse.
Meanwhile back in 80-seat majority Toryland, are we allowed to see our relatives yet? Can I travel?
Read history and see what happens when radical lefties take power.
It does not end well for the poor working classes.
100 Millon dead in 100 years
If you want to see your relatives go and see them as most people are not paying attention to the lockdown any more.
The poor millions in leftist prisons over the past century were not at all allowed to see their relatives.
?
Try reading some Solzhenitsyn, or Vasily Grossman’s novel Life and Fate.
Another millennial who was taught an alternate ideological history in school? Don’t blame yourself. Blame your teachers and instructors.
?
?
Post 1945 Labour was pretty radical and lefty. Did quite well for poor working classes, too.
its not 1945 anymore, that is part of the problem with the labour left, many of it still yearn for 1945 and many are actually intellectually still locked in that era
In that case you’ll have no shortage of quotes from prominent Labour left wingers where they publicly yearn for all that post-war austerity? Or were you making stuff up?
Right wing dictatorships are also quite good at killing people, and theocracies – the left has no monopoly on nastiness
Mao outmurdered Augusto Pinochet by a factor of about 20,000 to 1.
Problem is that leftists who graduated in gender studies and women’s studies failed to take math. Now they are saying that math is racist.
How many did the Shah of Iran kill? About 3,800 dissidents. How many did the leftwing Islamic theocrats kill in Iran? About one million. And the left continues to praise Islam. How many did Stalin and Lenin kill? 10 million?
Stalin &Lenin 40 million ….Famine Got you if NKVD forerunners of KGB didn’t!
Spot on! I don’t know if these new totalitarians are ‘right’ or ‘left’ but I suspect they are all part of the same global technocracy that is pushing to take our individual freedom away. Johnson and Co are among the guilty ones.
True, Left and Right are such misleading terms. They make politics look like a linear continuum where centre right liberals are just a few doors down from fascism and centre left democrats are only half a block from Stalinism. In reality the totalitarians are much closer to each other. Their differences are of style and emphasis but their methods and power lust are identical. We really should ditch these inaccurate historical anachronisms and replace them with something better.
Such as right and wrong?
Good point, well made. Maybe if people just referred to the thing being discussed and stopped the left vs right stuff. Particularly relevant to this article which combined misrepresentation with shoddy analysis. Might have been good enough for a sermon but not for serious discussion.
See Hannah Arendt on Totalitarianism
do you think unfettered travel would be the norm under Labour? This divide is on full display in the US – the states with the most restrictions are run by Dems, the ones that are more open are run by Repubs.
The Repubs are not saints. It was Trump that was doing the running and dragging his party behind him.
If you aren’t seeing your relatives then you’re a credulous and weak-minded individual.
Or possibly you don’t want to infect them.
see Mr Jones 2020 Most underrated film in this Case The Left intelligesia in uK,Malcolm Muggeridge ,George Orwell,Victor Gollanz ,deny the Ukraine famine,ten million deaths…
Or ”Z” the horrors of right wing Coup 1967 in Greece…& ”Missing”1982 one of 10,000 US citizen who disappeared in pinochets Chile
Great film, that Mr. Jones!
“Left-wing zealots have often been prepared to ride roughshod over due process and basic considerations of fairness when they think they can get away with it. For them the ends always seems to justify the means. That is precisely how their predecessors came to create the gulag.”Margaret Hilda Roberts
And Brazilian, Chilean, Spanish and Greek juntas didn’t?
Pinochet body body count = 3,000
Mao body count = 60m
Mao outmurdered Pinochet by a factor of 20,000 to 1.
Still want to indulge your whataboutery?
I dont think a Top10 of Horrors of Political despots is Good…
They, along with numerous other totalitarians have murdered hundreds of millions of people in the 20th century alone. Its just that the ones that broadly follow the teachings of Marx seemed to pop up more often than those that oppose Marx. They both promise some sort of “socialised heaven on earth” .. but that seems to only be possible by killing anyone who in any way opposes you. Maybe the Marxist religion ( and it is a religion) is easier to understand than the opposite view.
What i do fail to see from the left perspective is any meaningful historical condemnation of Stanley, Mao or even the failings in the Marxist religion that enable these lunatics to gain their murderous powers
Well said. Marxism and wokeism have no basis in fact or science. They are as ideological as any religion. Marx and Che and Foucault are the gods of this religion.
Numbers please. Shah killed 3,800 dissidents. Mao killed about 20 million dissidents. You think this is equivalent?
“Someone had phoned the police to complain.” And so the police turned up at the Church.
I am forced to speculate (as I have heard several others do.) that if someone phoned up to complain about gatherings outside the local mosque (usually unmasked and shoulder to shoulder) what would the police do? The smart money is on the person making the call being visited for committing a hate crime.
A mob is not reasonable.
Sorry, your point escapes me.
I think he’s trying to say that the police only go for soft targets. And he’s right.
Dear Giles, the people getting at you are not ordinary lefties. The establishment is involved in bringing down every aspect of British history and every idea which helped us to believe in the concept of the ‘freeborn English man’. There will be nothing left, if these people have their way, because they wish us to be subjugated once again only this time under globalist government. But they cannot undo what is in our minds.
Denounce them as paid employees of the authoritarian state, call them out as actors and frauds. Let it be known you have seen through their agenda and the narrative will not be pushed or furthered by engagement with you on social media. Your role is not to sow division by broadcasting the divisiveness and deliberate falsehoods of others. Name the Devil, let him know he has been unmasked and does not scare you.
I agree with you but lots of people won’t have it.Don’t be daft they say , to which I reply Do you think this last year has been in any way normal? People have adapted to it and the restrictions have become the new normal. We are also encouraged to think of masks etc rather like rationing during the war-we are all doing our bit to see us through this crisis.Lots of comments about police action on Good Friday were -police are only doing their job , trying to keep us safe , its the congregation that is selfish and similar remarks. The world of Box of Delights by John Masefield ( very popular on Childrens Hour in the 1930’s) where the villains try to stop the cathedral service , but are thwarted by the powers of good is gone.
Giles Fraser quoted Tony Hancock-the moderators are ‘ looking at’ my quoting the rest of his speech . When articles are written about a topic why do the moderators then dislike the same words from comments?
Are you sure that is wise giving away your tactics? We need a little self defence. Rebuke a fool and he will hate you for it. Rebuke a wise man and he will love you for it.
I get what you’re saying but I still can’t help wondering if these people are really efficient enough to take over the world! It reminds me of a James Bond movie. Spectre, wasn’t it?
I find it strange when questions are posed about why the modern Left is lacking in this or that moral impulse. The presupposition being that Left was meant to be morally superior but has somehow got tainted over time.
we could argue about what is the Left and end up with the No True Scotsman fallacy. But anyone mildly knowledgable about history will know that morality was always the mask behind which lay lust for power combined with hatred of success that has driven the Left for most of its existence. This does not make every lefty immoral; just as pointing to how religious convictions have led to cruelty does not make every religious person cruel. But the central tenet of the Left is to seek absolute power over others, and within that idea lies every other evil.
Strange old world where being Right wing, i.e. refusing to bow to a mob is considered inherently bad. But the purveyors of Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot et al are considered to be moral.
A wiser person would smile ruefully at the old joke: what is the difference between Capitalism and Communism?
Capitalism is dog eat dog. Communism is the other way round.
About the point on Enlightenment, I was under the impression today’s Left is more anti-Enlightenment, than pro-Enlightenment. In fact, I thought one of the big ideological upsets of today is about the moving of the mainstream Leftist thought from liberalism towards (illiberal) progressivism due to liberalism’s colonial sins.
It’s not only today’s left. The marxist left is anti-Enlightenment by nature – alway been. The Enlightenment was an intellectual, rational, individualist epoch; everything the collectivist, cultist, lowest common denominator-seeking, ‘progressive’ left is against.
And that is as it should be. You can’t control the masses of woke if you allow them the dangerous luxury of thinking! Good Lord no. Easy to remember chants is the order of the day for them – and also unintelligible creeds that, quite conveniently, are undebatable because debate, logic and reason are forbidden to the wokearati as heresies of the Enlightenment.
I am a facist, racist, homophobe, Nazi etc. I know because a woke person said I was when I was debating transgender. He didn’t have an argument though.
You raise some interesting points, but take the French Revolution for example whose protagonists mainly made a claim to represent “Reason”. It’s hard not to conclude, this is the same “Reason” you see today in Pinker’s books on Enlightenment.
French Revolution would be impossible without Enlightenment, and I’d argue it represents a major part of its influence. If you disagree with this, I’d be curious to hear about it. So, I’d say, you can see such collectivist/cultist thinking strongly in French Revolution. Other leftists movements (Bolsheviks/Maoists etc) move in the steps of the French Revolution – and continue to make a claim to represent reason and science.
Whereas, in today’s more post-modernist left, I see a rejection of this heritage, hence my earlier point.
If you look at the 1930s it seems to me that for all their faults and Lysenkian biology, the Communists / Left were more inclined to believe in real science, the Axis powers to believe in magic, quasi-religion and racial pseudo-science.
At some point – the 1960s ? the 1970s? that really began to shift, and the rejection of science and those beliefs in magic, quasi-religion and racial pseudo-science have now moved to the Left.
IQ tests show something you do not like? Do not believe them. Do not use certain words, for they are evil and could conjure up Evil. Saintly people killed by the police, evil whites tainted by an Original Sin they cannot get rid of, the need for repentance – no doubt readers thinking for a minute or two could add more.
Full-on magic and religion – deny it at your peril.
It is indeed a religion, a dualist religion in which the universe is divided into two mutually exclusive conditions: entirely good and entirely evil. They hold that certain truths (for which, read ‘truths’) are not open to question. Anyone attempting to question these truths must ipso facto be entirely evil, and therefore be annihilated, and sent back to the darkness from which they came.
You’re talking about the ex-communists …
Ex-communists, or rebranded to be more palatable?
The Church of Global Warming has many faithful indeed!
“the Communists / Left were more inclined to believe in real science,”
‘Science’ which has a foreseen ‘result’ in a desirable state of affairs or a ‘goal’ is not science. It is quasi religion. One cannot deduce any desirable state of affairs from science per se. If one does it does not come from science , but from a previously formulated belief system.
Communism is a form of religion. Religions do not mix with science. The woke left claim that mathematics is racist and was invented to oppress PoC.
The left denies that chromosomes have anything to do with sex or gender.
Nazis believed in ”Black Magic” Satanism, Astrology and veganism..
I don’t know about Enlightenment, but they are perpetually pro-Entitlement. In truth, most of them wouldn’t even know what the Enlightenment represents. Which is not to say that I am unfamiliar with, or unsympathetic to, some of the points raised against the Enlightenment. Indeed, as I get older I probably identify more with the Romantic response to the Enlightenment.
Here we go again. Comment was up overnight till just before noon, then suddenly the orange “! Awaiting for approval” notice, so it’s not the filtering machine but human action what removed it. Trying to re-post, see if it gets through:
Yes, Fraser, a lot of things went unnoticed by you in the past few years while you were busy drumming up support for th¡rdworld mass-¡mm¡grat¡on and other wokeries on the Guard¡an’s opinion pages.
Of course the Magna Carta is on the left’s blacklist; it’s historical, Engl¡sh, and thoroughly unbame. I’m surprised that you’re surprised by it.
When the left achieves their aims, they simply move the goal post
Close, but no cigar. She’s a columnist at The Daily Telegraph these days.
Oh dear.
no, we might weep what they sow!
The Left has never believed in liberty.
Collectivism cannot tolerate liberty, and must be authoritarian to survive.
This will come as something of a surprise to the French.
Not really – they’re very good at entertaining two contradictory ideas at once
Please explain, what kind of “liberty” is socialism where the fruits of your own labour is confiscated for the benefit of a selective few who produce nothing?
“As it would happen, the police didn’t show up to complain. Instead, and far more peculiarly, the only hostility I experienced happened after I shared an image of the poster on Twitter. “Magna Carta is only quoted by ignorant ideologues,” was one of the more polite responses.”
Experiencing hostility after posting something on Twitter…who’d have thought it, eh?
If God can shut the lions mouth for Daniel, I’m sure it was not unreasonable for GF to expect God to do the same to activist lawyers on his behalf.
I long for a time when Twitter is no more… but alas I am also fearful of what may follow in its wake…. WeiBo??
Yes, you’re perfectly right, the left has given up on freedom. You know why? Let me tell you in the words of a famous conservative thinker:
2015 was about the time it became painfully obvious that large numbers of people were either unable or unwilling to control their lowest impulses, that they were righteously offended by the idea that they should have to in any way improve themselves or aspire to being good or civilised or decent. What did you expect would happen once that was made clear?
Wow! Nail. On. The. Head. Thank you!
‘Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom. As nations become corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters.’
Benjamin Franklin
More interesting thoughts by Washington and others (you know the people whose statues we are expected to tear down).
https://nccs.net/blogs/articles/only-a-virtuous-people-are-capable-of-freedom
Yes! It’s a paradox of pluralism. We only legally control what is clearly socially unacceptable at the most basic level. Everything else is up to individual conscience and indeed we are not supposed to judge the values of others, at least in a public way. What isn’t forbidden is allowed.
But then a significant locus of social control – disapproval – is lost. The idea that some things might be legal but still are wrong or gross is lost. So all of a sudden, the only way to guide social behaviour is through what the law tells us is really wrong and bad.
Suddenly all kinds of things that people know to be unsavoury or socially destructive are proposed as things that need to be codified under the law.
I’m wondering why you pinpoint 2015? In any case, I think it has something to do with easily available stuff from Amazon, Deliveroo, et al. Stuff to stuff ourselves with, no need to control our impulses, the stuff will be there because we told our phones we wanted it. And a very few companies profit from our greed.
Surely this is no surprise; the Left is about controlling all aspects of society.
Both the left and the right have given up on freedom – why do you think there’s been so little dissent in parliament against the lockdown?
both(Lib-Lab-Cons etc) support Globalism,ie Cheap imported goods,and Labour..Instead of Home Produced Manufacturing, Both support unelected second chamber, Boris just adopted theresa mays” remain”,treaty Lib-dems,labour & half the tories,sNP,plaid,green Still Want to rejoin failing EU, think UN Agenda 21 is democratic ”Build back better” ;;You will be happy on low wages,Salary” etc..
What I find disturbing is the double standards on religious freedoms and limitations. It also seems to be the same for political gatherings, demonstrations and the like. Last year there was in Birmingham big crowds for Muslim prayers and for their Ramadan calendar and the authorities and police did nothing. Hardly any social distancing from the pictures I saw. Similarly but on a smaller scale with the Batley Grammar school episode on protesting of an image.
Yet the indigenous religion, Christianity gets singled out for prohibition.
I am an atheist so it doesn’t affect me but I think it only fair to treat those who worship freely and equally, the same.
The woke and progressive classes, as now exemplified by many in the upper ranks of the police, have made common cause with Islam, seeing it as a useful ally in their battle against western societies and peoples. Of course the possibility that Islam would turn on them if successful has not crossed their woke minds..
What the progressives also fail to realise is that soon they’ll have to decide whether to throw the gays under the bus or the muslms as the two groups are at odds with each other. My guess is the gays will get shafted as they’re less likely to go on a killing spree when their ideology is pissed on.
Police Raided Balham,Polish Catholic Church twice over Easter for ‘breaking’ Social distancing,they haven’t,as witnessed stored on Mobile phones.,Police have become increasing Politicized over 1997-2021 A worrying trend.
The horse has bolted Giles, and now you’re trying to close it, but I suspect it is to cover your own past mutterings.
Do you now regret all that wokery you pushed on us plebs in your various Guardian polemics?
You have been part of the problem for years Giles.
Harsh. People’s philosophies and political beliefs change. Consider what he writes now, not what he used to write.
Ah yes, the church loves a repentant sinner.
Apply that to Blair, Campbell et al…
That’s such a poor comparison.
I think the idea is that *we* should be above indulging in the woke pastime of digging up historical dirt from old twitter posts & such; mind you, being a regular Grun columnist is a somewhat different league.
Then there’s always the “early adapters” who sense the turn of the tables before the masses of their fellow travellers do. We had oodles of those back in the eastern bloc after 1989 – they were all saying “butbutbut i was WITH you guys all along! Look at this article i penned last year!” – while securing their well-cushioned seats in the “new” system and filling their pockets just as they did ever before. That’s why i’m instinctively suspicious of Fraser in 2021. Had he wrote this sort of stuff back in 2016, i’d be praising him.
I must have missed Messrs Blair and Campbell repenting. Of anything.
Agreed. And punishing those who have the integrity to change their minds and in public hardly encourages others to risk same.
Exactly! Retrospectively punishing people for their past actions and opinions is exactly how cancel culture operates!
indeed – as Douglas Murray has pointed out, forgiveness, generosity of spirit, and the idea that people can change their views, are all in short supply these days. Especially among the woke Left.
I think that Giles Fraser writes some interesting and thoughtful articles for UnHerd. But he wouldn’t be allowed to write them in the Gruan.
Are you aware that Giles used to write for the Graun? My understanding is he is no longer welcome there, as you suggest.
yes, I am aware
Hmm…integrity…or something else, maybe?
There’s that indeed. However, some “coming clean” clarification would be helpful to eliminate any suspicion that his volte face wasn’t genuine but a rats-fleeing-the-sinking-ship act.
Has the left abandoned solidarity? – spiked (spiked-online.com)
I found this an interesting listen a couple of months back. I think Fraser comes across very well, and I’m pretty sure he’s genuine!
Thanks – will listen to that. I don’t mind changing my mind, if there’s good reason to do so.
Nigel. This is much too close to guilt by association, and expresses a desire to exclude or diminish his current argument unless he repents his previous behaviour. Quite the authoritarian urge you have!
There are plenty of people who consider themselves on the left – sometimes even the far left – who have abandoned what is now calling itself the left. Often because of grave concerns about how they are dealing with the basic democratic freedoms like speech, belief, etc, or in quite a few cases because they see them as having abandoned the basic leftist principles of class analysis (rather than the current neomarxist identity politics) or solidarity with/basic respect for the working classes.
Christians have always tended to take a view of immigration that isn’t entirely of the right or the left, so it should be no shock that GF would as well.
Great post, spot on in my view.
I used to read him regularly in the Guardian, and was always surprised that the Guardian tolerated him. Perhaps you could point me to one of his “polemics”? (I only read his column in the Grauniad, and only saw it ‘cos my wife insisted on buying it)
Here’s one, for tasters:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/belief/2016/oct/20/others-may-stoke-fear-but-croydon-will-embrace-the-calais-children
Presuming you remember the balding, greying, wrinkly “children of Calais” being imported to the UK a few years ago, you too may find the article as egregious as every sane reader did.
The woke Left will begin to dislike any kind of justification or ideology used by those it despises, such as dedicated Christians or working class people. Perhaps this is the key to destroying the woke movement? If all those groups they hate began to spout the same rubbish as the woke folk, they’d soon move on and look for a new way to differentiate themselves from the uncouth, unwashed working classes, and those gullible people who fail to embrace science as a religion.
On another point, documents such as the Magna Carta demonstrate the spirit that resists fascism and despotism; a spirit that is stronger in this country than almost anywhere else in the world.
“The church was right to be furious”.
Oh waily waily waily.
Compare and contrast to the splendid Pastor in Calgary.
https://youtu.be/K-CptNNGpag
I first saw the Calgary Pastor a few days ago. I rewatched it a few times to give it a boost. It’s the most wonderful thing I’ve seen for years. And I am by no means religious.
I thought his shouting was rather undignified (even if justified) and I could not help but think that if you shouted at police like that in the UK you would risk getting your collar felt for a section 5 Public Order Offence. You might not end up in court, but you would be making the acquaintance of a cell for a few hours!
Doesn’t make him wrong or them right tho’
That’s awesome, and the only way to deal with these people.
I wish more people over here were like this.
We got ‘left’ and ‘right’ from the National Assembly in 1789 but didn’t adopt them into political discourse until a century or so ago. The labels are lazy and useless. If ‘right’ means rule of law, law and order, importance of family, defence of the realm and sound money then there is now no party of the right. ‘Right wing’ has morphed into a term of abuse. ‘Left’ can mean anything from the Socialist Workers Party to the Bow Group, so means nothing at all. ‘Progressive’ means heaven knows what. Momentum? We should be talking about what, exactly, different groups want to achieve and how they propose to go about achieving it. Practical politics over vacuous sound bites and silly insults.
John Prescott was viscerally opposed to the eleven plus and with it the grammar school system. And he was so because he was promised a new bicycle if he passed the exam, which he did not. To a greater or lesser degree, the antipathy of the Left to anything can generally be seen as personal. Sure, it gets dressed up as ideology, but its need for bogey men or bogey women betrays it. Thus, I don’t feel that daddy loved me and so I will hate authority figures; when I was young the rich kids had nicer clothes, so I will destroy wealth; I finished sixth on school sports day and didn’t get a prize, I will despise elitism. Giles should not be surprised about those on the Left’s new found distaste for Magna Carta. It owes nothing to new thinking on their part and everything to the simple fact that the Right has mobilised it in seeking to protect freedoms.
Exactly. The Left tend to be useless people who have failed at something or other, or who know they have nothing to offer in an open, market economy of talents and ideas. So they seek to tear down all that is good, and to live off the taxes of others.
As for Prescott, his parents should have offered him a Jag. He might have been a little more motivated.
And I believe Gordon Brown’s antipathy to Oxford stemmed from his failure to be offered a place.
Part Agree,but Capitalist Sharks like Robert Maxwell(Labour MP) and Sir Phillip Green both raided Workers Pensions ..So they can both defecate,on Us ‘Ordinary Folk..eh… guvnor?..
Tyranny is the norm in Human History. I fear we are moving back, and that the Enlightenment may turn out to be a ‘phase’.
Yes, this is what I keep trying to explain to people I know. But they are not interested.
and the Middle Kingdom is coming for us
‘Someone had phoned the police to complain.’
As has become obvious over the last year, ze Germans would have had no problems subjugating the British had they invaded.
The Britain of today is not the Britain of 82 years ago.
Back in WWII we had pride in the UK, a sense of identity; who we were & what we stood for.
After 50 years of the leftist infiltrating everything from the union workshops to schools, universities and the media while at the same time the population has been excoriated and conditioned as to how horrible the UK (especially England) is, of how we are responsible for All evil in the modern world (and past),of how none of our traditions matter, and of how we don’t have a culture (but that all other cultures are relevant-and equal). Not to mention the whole we are European not British exercise in identity cleansing and you have a nation(s) that is effectively castrated.
Invaded, what “invaded”. Ze poor mites were only seeking a better life, a little lebensräum. Have some kompasshun, komrade! Empafy! After all that terrible trauma and danger they suffered while reaching our shores (some never even made it!) our subjugation is the very least we owe them.
(^ that’s to paraphrase any Giles Fraser article from the 2015/16 era, when he was a fairly regular columnist at the Guardian.)
Nah, I think we are far more accepting of our own authoritarians than those of other countries!
It is always odd to me how the English love to crow about how Liberty loving they are, when research shows time and again how authoritarian and curtain twitching they truly are. We’ve had
More authoritarianism abd totalitarianism from elected governments than we ever had under royals.
I was going to summarily dismiss your assertion there, but once you’d cited ‘the research’ that backs up your claim ‘time and again’, I thought better of it.
There’s literally an article that supports my point on u herd today….
The passive response to the lockdowns is all the evidence one needs.
You may have a point about creeping bureaucracy in our modern democratic system – and the gradual erosion of liberties. This is a problem. However…
We are authoritarian though? Compared to what exactly?
Our history over the past 200+ years speaks for itself – precious few nations have avoided succumbing to dictators or oligarchs at some stage or other, from within or without. More recently we have kept the Sterling, moved out of the ERM, and more recently chosen to leave the EU most due to its undue authority over us.
Low-level conformity is common for British people – we don’t usually revel in confrontation (see France for a different approach). But when things get to far we have a track record of taking a stand. This is undeniable, whether you like it or not.
I personally worry this attitude is gradually being eroded – but it’s not over yet.
Don’t you have to like or want something before giving up on it? There is little in leftist history that points toward expanding individual liberty, and quite a bit that points in the opposite direction.
Probably, someone in the thread has already said as it is way to obvious: Left never adopted freedom, so there was nothing to gave up on. The better title could be “How Left continues to be totalitarian”.
”You reap what you sow” comes to mind.
Quite.
And they don’t even have the “follies of youth” excuse, these are well middle-aged & beyond people who ought to know better. Just like the spurned bunch of third-wave feminists who suddenly found their sacred tenets violated by a younger, testosterone-fuelled translobby. We might see the Guardian’s Susanne ‘hate-all-men’ Moore penning a snivelling diatribe about cancel culture on the pages of Sp¡ked or Unherd any day soon.
The Left used to be in hock to Trade Unions with their hands up ‘so we can see who isnt voting the correct way’!
Isn’t that also modern Wokery?
I think the difference is that the left has split….there are the Leftists who are full of sound and fury, ignoring things like, say, the bill of rights, in their determination to repeat the age old mistake of creating a dystopia while aiming at utopia. Then there are the liberals who are far more modest in their aspirations and timid in tone….but terrified of being labeled an ‘ist’ of some sort, tagged with the scarlet letter du jour and sent into outer darkness by those fire breathing leftists in their ranks. The irony being that liberals and conservatives have more in common than do liberals and leftists. It’s just that liberals, with a few courageous exceptions, can’t bring themselves to align with those deplorable conservatives. Better that the nation die than they suffer social exile…. I call it the ‘perhaps they will kill me last if I don’t offend them,’ strategy.
A lib-dem ,tory,Labour,grreen,SNP,plaid MPs fauning to eu,reminds one A quisling is one who hopes the crocodile will eat him last! to Paraphrase W.S.Churchill 1974-1965
You’ve answered your own question, Giles, Magna Carta is
“the foundation of the freedom of the individual against the arbitrary authority of the despot”
Hardly surprising the left don’t like it, they are the despots!
I’ve wondered about the Polish church situation. Was it a rather dim, religion illiterate Mr. Plod not realising the import of what he was doing? From what I could see the congregation were in breach of what was required. But I would hope a more intelligent Police Officer would have asked that a message be taken to the presiding priest simply asking the people to exercise some social distancing and put their masks on.
Maybe the complainant was seeking to victimise the Polish community. Maybe we have here another example of a growing trend to victimise the Church in general. Woke inspired groups and organisations are aware that much of the Church will oppose their efforts to impose their views on society and criminalise those who argue against them. For instance the LGBT people have taken several Christians to court for speaking publicly against homosexual activity. They unsuccessfully tried to ban Franklin Graham ( Billy Graham’s son) from preaching in this country for the same reason They are also trying to include prayer and ministry of Christian ministers and priests for gay people who request it, as an activity forbidden by law.
Would it be cynical to suggest that the police are happy to over-react to a ‘soft’ target to prove (if only to themselves) that they are not prejudiced against ‘minorities’? Much easier to make a point of clamping down on some harmless christians, rather than take proper action against a bunch of bigots outside a school in Batley, for example.
No , it wouldn’t be cynical and yes it would certainly be easier
Scream Media can turn anything on its head. Look at what it’s done to commonsense.
Was the left ever interested in freedom? Really interested in freedom? If in the past it has appeared to have been so was this not just following the ideological fashion of the time?
Erm I could have sworn Labour were in power in 2007 oh you mean not the left in government but the guardian. I guess you will tell me Tony Blair and Gordon Brown weren’t on the left next.
That 90 day detention period didn’t become law, though. Though it was requested by the Police, Blair and Brown supported it and apparently public opinion. It was removed by the Government when it looked as though an amendment moved by a Labour MP to remove it from the bill would win sufficient support from Labour MPs to defeat the Government in a vote. So they changed the period back to 28 days.
Good example of how bad laws can be prevented in Parliament, sometimes. If Parliament is given the opportunity and members of the governing party have the courage to stand up to their leadership. Currently, the Government seems to be avoiding using Parliament to pass laws, good or bad, whenever possible.
On that particular issue, Blair and Brown weren’t on the left or in the right.
Both ,G Broon, A Blair, Trotskyists at university,according to Ex-Trotskyist,; Peter Hitchens,Half Blairs cabinet,were iN the Communist party..John reid etc..
I am trying to work out exactly what Magna Carta has to do with the incident you just described. The police broke up a perfectly legal gathering which was taking place in many churches up and down the country during the Easter period. Generally speaking Catholic churches have been open far more frequently during the pandemic than the other johnny-come-lately religious sects such as that based in Canterbury.
Why turn an issue of police abuse of their powers into yet another boring Unherd diatribe against the Left? Less displacement activity as evidenced by the constant stream of verbiage on these pages about culture wars and more connection with real issues would be most welcome.
All due respect to Reverend Giles for serving his community over Easter. However, before making sweeping judgments about certain attitudes being representative of the thinking of “The Left”, let’s consider a couple of things.
The Great Barrington scientists, in attempting to find a sane way forward, were motivated by social conscience and a desire to return to the norms of public health policy, rather than concepts of individual liberty. Prof. Gupta in particular, explicitly referred to her politics as left wing and it was precisely this refusal to fit into the the lockdown-scepticism-is-right-wing-libertarianism narrative which led her being smeared and vilified by The Guardian and other hysteria merchants.
It was liberal, progressive, pragmatically left-leaning Sweden that stuck largely to public health norms, eschewing CCP-inspired experimentation and proving wrong the doom-mongering mathematical modelers. It did so, partly due to liberties written into a modern constitution (last revised 1975) rather than totemic medievalism. Such liberties can act as a balwark against authoritarianism, but are a whole lot more workable in the context of a culture that values social responsibility.
If you look at the Left you can see how psychoticlly narcissistic they are.
Trump, Bolsonaro, Johnson – I am not convinced that you couldn’t fling the same gratuitous insult at people on the Right.
Clown,Trump Was not left OR Right,More Antiwar, than Democrats like O’bomber,Biden,LBJohnson ..Why dont some idiots Get round the fact some people are not part of Party ‘greasy pole’ machine?..
A confused and disingenuous piece.
If you read the Guardian article Giles quotes (selectively and misleadingly) it’s clear the Magna Carta ‘delusion’ the article refers to was messages circulated on social media suggesting the Magna Carta has current legal standing giving lockdown opponents the legal right to open their shops. The article does not refer to the Magna Carta itself as a delusion.
The article also gives examples of how the Magna Carta has been used as a symbol of freedom by far right groups and on right wing websites.
The other Guardian article Giles links to is one from March this year which refers to the site where the Magna Carta was signed as being at the very beginning of campaigns that shaped British Civil Rights.
In summary, Giles presents no evidence (just assertion) that the left has fallen out of love with the Magna Carta, some evidence that the Guardian (as his chosen representative of the left) thinks it’s a symbol of civil rights and some evidence that it’s being used as a symbol of freedom by the right and by anti-lockdown campaigners.
The left progressive woke cult fabricate a huge volume of empty baseless rationales and pretexts for their minions and increasingly monopolising propaganda machine that erodes the authority and principles of the free democracies of western civilisation.Their cancel cult tactics aim to erase any and all human rights ( free speech, democracy= populist = bad, due process, etc) and dissent to unilaterrally impose their truthless neo marxist dogma , under the pretentious banner of fighting systemic racism ( which they actually impose with the blatantly racist Critical Race Theory) and their fear mongering anti caplitalist climate change issues, their wedges to gain power and power.
The woke progressive cult tyranny is a truthless human rights violating culture destroying irrational deceptive fanatical movement. They have deliberateky inflicted enough pain, loss, violations and damage to individuals, groups.and civilisation , are chillingly indifferent to the human pain and outcry they inflict and actually revel and celebrate it . The work and effort now required to liberate civilisation from the woke is starting and will need the support and drive of many to protect and restore our cultures and freedoms from the woke.They should be brought to justice and fitting consequences for their crimes , violations and scale of damage.
The woke tyranny and the targeted peoples of the free democracies of western civilisation will eventually have their Nuremburg.
Hopefully without the holocaust and WWIII first!
Hmmm, maybe the Magna Carta is still a symbol of the ideals of freedom. Maybe it was an important stepping stone on the journey out of arbitary tyranny and oppression, but a left wing document it is not.
Taking Clause 61 as an example:
https://fullfact.org/online/did-she-die-in-vain/
The quote posted on the outside of Gile’s church also has some disturbing connections with past actions of some members of the Church placing themselves above the law (dealing with things as internal matters). The Church may be above the law – but the people who go there are not and most certaintly should not be.
And the Nazarite languishes dying in Belmarsh.
When you need the government’s permission to exercise your rights, you have no rights. Everyone, everywhere needs to aggressively push back against this kind of tyranny. Fortunately, in the US, we have the Second Amendment right to protect ourselves through force of arms – at least for the time being. That tends to give overbearing bureaucrats pause.
My favorite trends: the universal descriptor, “ignorant,” and the mantra of threes, or listing all goals in threes, from the Duke of Montecito to every other corporate head. Example: “diversity, equity, and inclusion.” You will read and hear this in every speech or mission statement.
Inevitably, ‘diversity, equity and inclusion’ is now being extended to the employment of pilots at United Airlines. In other words, pilots will be employed not on the basis of their flying skills and records, but on their race, gender and sexuality etc. I, for one, will be avoiding United Airlines.
see my Woke joke above on diversity pilot with one Arm from third World,Oh Well i thought it WAS funny..
Funny how “equity” replaced “equality” all in a sudden. ‘Equality’ i’m familiar with from the French Revolution; ‘equity’ i was vaguely aware of being a somewhat obscure financial jargon. Until the ever-helpful pages of the Guardian explained that ‘equity’ is the equality of outcome. The antithesis of equality, in essence.
What riles is the attitude of the coppers! The altar is for Catholics a sacred space but the two officers nonchantly sauntered towards it and stood by the lectern as though they were in a pub or something of that sort. Absolutely no respect. Does anyone imagine our culturally sensitive and brain-rinsed in unconscious bias training plods would have traipsed all over a mosque like that without by or leave. The Met shouldn’t get away with such clumsy ‘me and my size nines’ insensitive policing. But of course they will. Says everything about modern policing. Take a knee for BLM but don’t genuflect before the God’s Altar – On the day of Christ’s Passion.
A couple of very disturbing things arise. First the lack of boundaries that common sense should give the police. “what sarg? You want me to go into a Catholic mass on Good Friday, Good Friday sarg, think about it, and threaten people with arrest? Are you sure sarg? You can’t be serious.”
Secondly that not one government minister appears to see what the problem with cops doing that is.
While I’m musing though, I bet the sergeant would have thought twice about wading into a mosque and threatening people and had he done so his career in the police would be over already.
And if he had done it in a Sikh place of worship, the worshippers might have terminated his career.
A lot of people on here seem to be accusing the police of respecting Islam more than Christianity.
Is there any objective evidence for this? Or are we looking at a prejudiced, ethnocentric Christianity (“My stuff is worth more than that furriner’s.”)?
I think you’ll find that there has always been a certain ambivalence to Magna Carta and the issue of civil liberties by both the left and the right. Each is capable of abusing it whenever it suits them.
“The Left.” Still enslaved by labels.
A picture is, we are told, worth 1,000 words. Perhaps even more in this age of inflation. Attached is a link which seems to capture the spirit of this topic.
https://wm-no.glb.shawcable.net/service/home/~/?auth=co&loc=en&id=391771&part=2
Perhaps the clergy and congregation should be reminded of:
Acts 17:24 (KJV)
God that made the world and all things therein, seeing that he is Lord of heaven and earth, dwelleth not in temples made with hands;
Congregational worship is primarily a social endeavour not a religious imperative.
Thank goodness clever people like Giles Fraser and the the rest of the clever people on here have not been in charge of the pandemic response.
Any moral posturing by a leftist (except for some decent liberal-lefts) should be met with strong doubt. As they say, the left has no principles except that the means justifies the end — the end being some kind of infantile wishy washy socialist utopia where workers are forced to hand over the fruits of their own labour to ideological grifters and those who wish not to produce. Never be taken aback by their carefully cultured veneer and mastery of jargon. On the first question or argument, they often fold, preferring to divert the subject or leave the scene altogether.
The sad thing we are suffering from is that the police are swinging against the people and joining the left woke thugs. Happy to dance and take the knee with XR, BLM but not to protect the majority.
…most of the congregation were social distancing
Why weren’t all of them social distancing?
How can a person genuinely professing Christianity be so thoughtless and uncaring about their neighbour’s welfare even in church?
All very well to agonise about religious freedom—and from what you say it does sound as if the police overreacted in this instance—but there is documented evidence that religious meetings of fundamentalist Pentecostals and suchlike brethren have been breeding grounds for the spread of Covid into the community, in the USA and I believe in the UK too. The police don’t have the time to inspect every case in detail; they have to adhere to instructions and guidelines, which means mistakes are inevitable here and there.
I tend to get irritated when people blether on about freedom before they’ve inspected their own antisocial behaviour.
I get even more irritated when people start confusing a simple requirement for good manners and consideration of others’ welfare with authoritarianism or totalitarianism or other even more unspeakable bogeymen.
It was notJesus’s claim to be King of the Jews that upset the authorities of the day, it was him kicking out the moneylenders. Step too far!!
What a bonanza this Covid has been for the talking set. They really should be thankful for the lockdowns and government evils. Their endless anger is endlessly justified and rewarded. What a lark!
Demented Joe Biden having taken the First Prize.
A blackout was enforced during the blitz (the Germans did the same on their side). Should observance of the blackout have been discretionary?
are you comparing Covid to WWII? Isn’t that the problem? A completely disproportionate response to a relatively minor threat, which I have heard people compare to the Black Death. It’s insane, and the police response is part of that insanity, not a rational reaction to a complaint.
The left loves it as a symbol, the defiant hairdressers of the world think it literally grants them the right to ignore any and all law they feel like, based on little more than some Facebook noise.
These are hardly comparable.
I sometimes feel that I’m the only person with binocular vision in the land of the one-eyed. All the erudite utterings in the discussion seem to have completely missed the basic point – No one should have the right, either bestowed upon them by Magna Carta or by the Lord All Mighty, to injure or endanger another person. The reason that gatherings of people, some of whom could easily be carrying lethal viruses, are currently banned is simply to stop some people injuring (killing!) others. It’s got nothing to do with personal freedom, the Church, Magna Carta or politics.
Except that gatherings of people for worship are specifically allowed by the UK Government, with certain restrictions (current requirements are social distancing, masks and sanitising pews/chairs after each service). Please refrain from commenting from ignorance.
Yet another religious nutter with an opinion. It’s time we educate people out of religion.
I believe GF has a phd in Philosophy (not Theology) – you may disagree with him, but that doesn’t make him “yet another religious nutter”
Did you read the ‘article’? He’s clearly religious loon, regardless of his PhD.
I would have hesitated to attempt to educate Albert Einstein out of anything. Perhaps you would be equal to the task.
Give us a break. Two cultures and all that stuff is soooo passé.
‘…the mess the Left now finds itself in over their uncritical enthusiasm for lockdown’
What ‘mess’? What ‘uncritical enthusiasm’? To the extent that there is ‘enthusiasm’ for protecting lives and health at the expense of some business revenue (a false dichotomy in any case), it certainly comes with criticism for this government’s unwillingness to provide adequate support for those suffering from that loss.
‘…some basic freedoms, including the freedom to worship….’
Why exactly are mass gatherings required to ‘worship’? And why – whatever might be the text of some significant but historical document – should those gatherings be exempt from temporary ordinances intended to reduce the very real risks such gatherings pose to public health at this time? It appears to presume what we are not obliged to believe – that there is some supreme being that demands to be supplicated to.