The Guardian merch is made by New York brand Lingua Franca, best known for putting what it calls “thought-provoking and culturally resonant phrases” on expensive sweaters in cursive script, and getting celebrities to wear them on the red carpet. And — a bit like the newspaper — the fashion label’s current political messaging seems somewhat chastened compared to former cocksure progressive hectoring. Indeed, the semantic trajectory of the company’s sweaters would make for a fascinating modern history project: from the uncompromising “time’s up”, “we say gay”, and “Dr Fauci fan club” messages of yesteryear to the sullen “exhausted American”, “I didn’t vote for him”, and “I read banned books” of the current collection. Even the writing on women’s chests seems to have got smaller — or maybe the breasts got bigger. Either way, things have definitely changed.

During the first Trump presidency, company founder Rachelle Hruska McPherson was apparently able to claim with a straight face that luxury goods activism might change the world. “This is not a time to be silent,” she told Fortune magazine in 2020 “Virtue signaling to our communities on where we stand on issues is literally how change has happened historically, and it’s how it will continue to happen today”. This year, though, there are signs of adjustment to new political and commercial realities, and not merely in those defeated-sounding new mottos. According to a recent interview in Elle magazine, McPherson now “considers herself just as much of an activist… but she wants to fight that fight in a different, more measured way than she did the first time around”. She says she sometimes looks back and thinks: “‘Oh, that’s a little cringeworthy.’ And then I’m like, ‘Is it? We all were doing it.’”

More from this author

Toddler logic is poisoning politics

By Kathleen Stock

Many fashionistas were, indeed, doing cringeworthy things in the heady days of woke, spurred on by their bottom line. “The future is female”; “transwomen are women”, and “I can’t breathe” were just three of the sartorial shortcuts to canonization in a cotton-polyester blend. The makers of such garments didn’t seek to persuade by appealing to reason: t-shirt slogans are not exactly Aristotelian syllogisms. And nor did they even try to invoke much emotion — you can’t tug on heartstrings when limited to four words per line. Instead, they sought to appeal to the self-interested desire of the consumer. If you wear this, people will think you are a good person; and being a good person is very in right now.

Thankfully, things have moved on, and the cool kids these days wouldn’t be seen dead in a Guardian-Lingua Franca collab, assuming they could afford one. I know this because I read it in a Guardian article two years ago, and — as we now know — the paper treats facts as sacred. As the story explained, Gen Z hates “peppy but shallow” slogan tees: including “painfully tone-deaf” jumpers from, er, Lingua Franca.

But it’s not that the hipsters and taste-makers have gone off words on t-shirts per se. It’s just that they now prefer jokey, amoral, gnomic ones. For while Lingua Franca has stuck to the moralizing high ground — “history has its eyes on you” etc. — a brief perusal of what the kids are into gives us slogans like “hardcore” or “I’m gonna win” or “follow me, I’m a cult leader”. You might even say that there’s been a Trumpian turn.

Perhaps the new generation is just more clear-eyed than its elders about the fact that wearing words on your clothes to bring about meaningful political change was always bogus. Unless you design your own, the words in question are nicked from someone else. In that sense, wearing a slogan tee is barely a genuine communicative act at all. And as soon as you are photographed wearing the item to put on your socials — essential for the pretense that you are making any kind of political difference — whatever independent meaning faintly resided in the slogan to begin with is now subsumed into the meaning of the person wearing it, as just one more visual aspect for the viewer to interrogate. Onlookers are asked to consider, not whether black lives really matter, or whether this is indeed what a feminist looks like, but rather the question: “what kind of person would wear a slogan like this?”.

As such, sloganwear fit seamlessly into a post-literate internet culture. Context collapse is a thing: the simultaneous exposure of your words to different kinds of audiences, with alternative ways of reading the same sentences; so that your in-joke or political point, meant for one group, can cause accidental outrage in another one. The desire to say as little as possible that might be challenged or misunderstood — while still saying something that gets you attention — means that the sort of vaguely ironic exclamation or sanctimonious tautology you might put on a t-shirt (or jumper) starts looking irresistible to many.

In face-to-face communication with a person you know, understanding what the other is saying depends on at least a rough understanding of the sort of person you are talking to. There’s a reciprocal relationship between interpreting the words — is what she just said meant to be sincere? funny? kind? patronizing? — and assumptions about the deeper personal characteristics of the speaker. Very occasionally, a person’s saying something in isolation can radically change your view of who they are; most of the time, your prior view of who they are modulates your understanding of their individual statements. A benevolent and a malevolent person can say the very same thing, but you will hear it in very different ways.

This is also true of understanding great novels: the deep reader tries to build a picture of the sort of creative mind that wrote the text, at the same time as building a picture of what the text actually means. Is this a mind capable of irony? Of rich symbolism? Is it cynical or optimistic about human nature? Judgments about the author affect how the book is read, and vice versa. Despite the “death of the author” nonsense in Sixties French literary theory, great artists remained alive and kicking, way past their actual deaths. But on the internet of strangers, such subtleties break down. In this domain, at least, Barthes and Foucault were right.

Here there are lots of orphaned phrases, dislocated from concrete facts about the identity of the speaker and her accompanying thoughts. You publish or post something; I have no real idea of your character or history, which means I have no well-defined idea of what you, personally, mean by those words. Texts become detached from the intentions of their producers, floating about the internet like ghosts. This creates interpretive perils, but also opportunities in the marketplace of mass communication: I can write down stereotypically righteous, funny, or clever-sounding things, in a compressed way, and naïve observers will just assume I am righteous, funny, clever. Getting reposted by a big X account is a bit like persuading a red-carpet celebrity to wear your words, and so promote your brand.

At least the untrustworthy communicative dynamics are more obvious when the words are on someone’s chest, right there in front of you. No matter the thread count, sloganwear in the wild is usually easy to see through: the disconnect between desired effect, and the perceptible reality of the wearer, is often too great. The owner of the sweater wants you to believe she is the sort of person who holds facts sacred; but what you see instead is someone who wants you to believe she is the sort of person who holds facts sacred — and that is completely different. It’s a lesson in the complexities of human interpretation we would do well to hold on to elsewhere. You might even say that — for once, at least — thanks to the Guardian, we get close to the whole picture.

I’d rather not live in a Muslim country. My cousin Abdul lives in Algeria and flunked out of school early; now jobless, he’s finding it impossible to marry, which means screwing is indefinitely off the cards. At least his world is ontologically consistent though, at least he knows where he stands. Sat on the tube the other day I noticed one of these new TFL posters that condemns leering. “Unwanted staring is harassment,” the legend ran. Fair enough. One mustn’t stare. Right next to this TFL warning was an advertisement for perfume — I forget the brand. This ad consisted of a young blonde lady, her bikini-clad chest all but bursting out of the frame, her stare set to a merciless come hither. The screaming contradiction might well sum up the predicament of many a Western male today: stare, but whatever the hell you do, do not stare. Be this, but whatever you do, don’t.

The paradox I found myself bound up in on the train brought to mind an online spat from a few years back — a subject I’d given a lecture on in New York last summer. At the tail-end of 2022, climate activist Greta Thunberg was set upon by viral misogynist Andrew Tate. Unprovoked, Tate sent a picture of himself with one of his gas guzzlers, offering to email Thunberg a list of his cars with details as to their respective “massive” emissions. Her response set the internet on fire: “yes, please do enlighten me. email me at smalldickenergy@getalife.com.”

More from this author

The night I conquered Berghain

By Lias Saoudi

Hailed by the commentariat, the phrase soon found unlikely mainstream currency. Imagine for me if you will, the feminized parallel of “small dick energy”. Now, take whatever three-word expression of gendered body shaming you’ve come up with, and imagine it not only finding its way into print at a high-profile newspaper in the year 2022, but being crowned “one of the greatest Tweets in history” by the country’s foremost progressive media outlet. In attempting to equate machismo with climate change denial, the author most famous for introducing the term “mansplaining” into the discourse — Rebecca Solnit — here finds it fit to lean into a chauvinism all her own. The uselessness of attempting to dismantle the master’s house with the master’s tools, as feminist hero Audre Lorde might have it, is casually thrown aside in a moment of point-scoring ideological bloodlust. A sadly familiar tale this last five or 10 years. No, I did not take an especially dim view of Greta’s comeback to Tate — Solnit’s opinion piece on the other hand I found genuinely disturbing. I still do. Given her stature, and given the fact her 2015 Lit Hub essay, 80 Books No Woman Should Read, castigated Hemingway on account of his smearing Scott Fitzgerald in exactly like fashion. She might have been more aware of the harm she was wreaking.

About Tate I know little. Unless I’m trying to sell something or ogling members of the opposite sex from a safe distance, I avoid being online. I try to keep myself out of touch, try to expose myself to as few of these click-ravenous public spats as possible. I’m often tempted to leap into the fray, but the jungle is laden with ideological tripwires — one’s actual opinions seem barely worth the hassle anymore. A cursory glance at Tate’s Wikipedia page suggests the lowest form of human life. A deeper dive leaves me thinking that I probably wouldn’t piss on the guy if he was on fire. By what contemporary progressive metric, I couldn’t help but wonder, does one feel entitled to equate everyone born with a small penis to this uber-pillock?

In an epoch defined by its obsession with the sweeping away of generalizations pertaining to that with which you were born, how does abuse like this end up on the top shelf? For sheer hit count, it’s still the fourth greatest Tweet of all time. If you wanted to turn confused young men wandering hopeless through the spiritual apocalypse of the internet, young men searching desperately for a way to rationalize or displace their ever-swelling superfluity into fully-fledged woman haters, then there are few more optimal ways you could go about doing so than by employing this kind of reactionary double standard. The history of Western civilization was one bad joke, women were the butt of that joke, therefore, let’s all laugh at the little members.

More meat equals more man. More meat equals dignity, respect, honor and self-assurance. It all has, well, a bit of a Trumpian air about it, wouldn’t you say? The Solnit school of thought here appears as attracted to the source of its resentment as it is repulsed. The old heinousness is to be given a certain amount of free play. Hatred at a healthy dose in a bid to expel it from the community: the way of the scapegoat. A viable target must be selected, ideally someone harmless. In this instance, the small dick community — a community only now, for the first time in history, finding the courage to step out of the shadows and speak its truth — is being utilized as a kind of sponge with which to mop up society’s moral impurities.

The all too natural obsession with penis size proves an obvious fault-line in recent ideological trends. It is to “progressive” idealism what Epstein’s “suicide” was to the concept that our ruling elite are not child-molesting lizard people: a fissure, a glitch in the official narrative. Through this crack, that of guilt free, publicly proud, “sing it from the rooftops one more time Miss Solnit” small penis resentment, we momentarily glimpse the true nature of the beast, the faintly scrutable shadow play of bad faith, reactionary hysteria masquerading as social justice. Identity fetishism run ragged, basically, the very thing which has led us into our current political quagmire. Through its progressive arm, the neoliberal regime finds fullest validation and authority by posturing as the voice of equality and freedom. Questions of race and gender are of course important, but inflamed to the point where they drown out discourse centered around class, they wind up producing a kind of narcissistic counter-solidarity. Everyone reaching for their own personalized crusade, everyone obsessed with immutable characteristics — but only when it suits them.

Unsurprisingly, Miss Solnit got back on her soapbox to denounce the election of America’s irreverent strong man. She had lost none of her gift for aggravating cognitive dissonance. In her article she wrote of the “extraordinary balance of idealism and pragmatism, the joy, the generosity” of Kamala Harris’s coalition building. As a Muslim, I don’t quite see it that way. I see a party posturing as the representatives of moral hygiene while aiding and abetting an excruciatingly visible genocide. That was always going to be a tough sell: we’re the party of fairness, of diversity and inclusion… unless the people in question are a strategic inconvenience, in which case, bombs away. Maybe, some credit is due actually, after all they did achieve the impossible: they managed to make the touchy-feely convicted felon look like the one in possession of a shade of integrity. She then described the failed candidate as “supremely qualified”. The one hoop of qualification Kamala had to jump through — a primary — she hadn’t. She’d been anointed despite a track record of 0% electability, utterly devoid of democratic process, then attempted to sell herself as a bulwark against a lack of democratic process. Stare, but whatever you do, don’t stare…

Then of course we have the usual victim blaming where the “crisis in masculinity” is concerned. Apropos nothing, she reminds us that Silicon Valley — to whom she allocates a third of the blame for Trump’s success — was created by “white men”. The guy who comes to empty my wheelie bin once a week is also white. By whacking him and Elon with the same stick, all you’re doing is pushing them closer together, providing them with common ground. That even now, after an era defining drubbing, the self-defeating uselessness of this mode of attack still remains elusive to certain people is astounding.

It is the “crisis in masculinity” that leads us to the Donald, apparently. The “crisis in masculinity”, not the Democratic Party’s sponsored and curated usurpation of class politics with a self-glorifying, divisive fixation on identity. No, the now undeniably very real Bernie-to-Trump pipeline simply gave birth to itself. Instead of acknowledging the writing on the wall — that Western liberalism, in a kind of decadent, echo-chamber induced trance this past 10 years, has allowed itself to become dangerously unmoored from reality — commentators such as Solnit persist with more of the same alienating drivel, unaware or in total denial of their part in the symbiotic expansion of intolerance and scorn on both sides of the political spectrum this last 10 years.

Suggested reading

Sex strikes are hot again

By Sarah Ditum

Men have always been in control. They’ve always been largely superfluous as well where reproduction is concerned — there’s always been a superabundance of male chaff. Hence sending them off to die in their droves fighting this war or that. What else are we supposed to do with all of these guys? Maybe that feeling has never been so acute as it is in the here and now? War is generally less of a thing. The provider, the protector, the patriarch; all notions fast becoming the stuff of nostalgia.

A long and bitter confrontation with our disposability is on the cards. Hence the explosion in male suicide. Hence Trumpism. The Don isn’t busy rubbing salt into the wounds of male redundancy. When I take a look around me, the guys generally seem to be falling apart: jobless, almost universally depressed, semi-homeless, furiously alone, minds ravaged by incessant pornography and drug abuse. Meanwhile liberal media outlets — which erroneously seem to believe that they speak for the man in the street — have been busy churning out articles for the last 10 years about the toxic masculinity of sky scrapers and the like.

And what have we got to show for it on the Left? The reduction of culture to a never-ending round of trauma Top-Trumps; a guy who goes on TV claiming illegal aliens eat cats and dogs is in charge of the Empire; and these little signs on the subway that remind you “staring is bad”, signs that jostle for attention with images of breasts begging you to stare at them — that’s like offering someone with a brain tumor a band-aid. The Democratic Party of America deserves all the loathing in the land. By gaming identity, by placing undue emphasis on it in a bid to retain power without having to betray their corporate sponsors, they have opened up questions of identity to undue enmity amongst the population at large. By forcing this fraud on people, they have inflamed the very issues they purported to solve. The one silver lining of the election result might be that it finally brings the curtain down on identitarian orthodoxy, that we finally get a Left that sticks up for the proles, instead of one that insists on trying to patronize them into submission. A Left more concerned with the size and shape of a man’s wallet than what he keeps stuffed down the front of his jeans. I doubt it, but god knows more of the same is no longer an option.

Jay Rayner’s parting shot as he announced his departure from The Observer after 28 years tops off a turbulent few months at Guardian Media Group (GMG). Next week, indignant journalists will be striking in protest at the sale of the paper to Tortoise, an online media organisation. The Scott Trust, they claim, is betraying its commitment to The Observer — a  feeling reflected by The Observer’s former editor, Paul Webster, who lambasted the deal as a betrayal when he retired last week.

Rayner also expressed concern at the sale, claiming that “The Guardian has told me they will terminate all our contracts if they can sell The Observer to Tortoise”. Perhaps he was also anticipating this cost-cutting by the new owners as he resigned. But his strongly worded statement about the failure of the Editor in Chief, Katherine Viner to deal with antisemitism struck a chord.

Suggested reading

Why I stopped being a good girl

By Hadley Freeman

Rayner is not the first big name to have publicly accused Viner of not handling controversial issues as she should. In December 2020, Suzanne Moore jumped ship, having been the subject of a complaint sent to Viner, signed by over 300 “colleagues” after she was finally allowed to write about the gender wars.

Moore was followed by Hadley Freeman in November 2022. She resigned because she was unable to write freely about the “gender issue”. But in her resignation letter she disclosed that she had been warned off writing about Israel “from her perspective as a Jew” describing the paper as “internally dysfunctional”.

I’m no fan of Rayner: it often feels like his ego is bigger than his appetite. A decade ago, I made a joke about his attitude on Masterchef, and received a nasty, vitriolic email in response, despite having never corresponded with him in the past. Nevertheless, I believe him when he says there are antisemites at the paper — because I have encountered them myself. Once upon a time, before I was slowly cancelled from every section of the newspaper, I would go to parties there, and I recall one particular member of staff saying the most outrageous things about Jews under the guise of anti-Zionism.

I first met Viner when she was editor of The Guardian’s Weekend Magazine; it was a great newspaper, and The Observer the best Sunday around. I would write the occasional column to fill in for Julie Burchill and Viner was a joy to work for. When she was appointed the first female Editor in Chief, in 2015, my feminist crowd were pleased, because she had long prioritised women’s issues, and in particular the campaign against male violence.

She had also defended me in 2004, when the paper had come in for an almighty kicking after publishing my “Gender bender beware” column — the one that first got me labelled a transphobic hate figure. I remember when I filed the piece, she said “We are going to get shit for this you know?”, only to send me back a very light edit. When I was nominated for Stonewall Journalist of the Year in 2008 and I got word that I would be greeted by a 200-strong picket outside the venue, Viner came with me, offering support. I respected her immensely.

There were moments, though, when her nervousness about certain issues showed. One example was when, back in 2006, I pitched a piece about the phenomena of so-called grooming gangs operating in former mill towns in the north of England.  As we now know, a sizable majority of the perpetrators were of Pakistani Muslim origin, because that was the demographic of young men in those towns.

She said: “We’ll be seen as racist.” I explained that I was writing as a left-wing feminist who had never been accused of racism, but she wouldn’t commission me. So I took the story to The Sunday Times, where it was published in September 2007, four years before The Times ran its first piece (in January 2011) by Andrew Norfolk, who was credited with breaking the story. Norfolk had been given five months to research the phenomenon and it turned into the massive story I had suggested, way back in 2006; Viner, though, had seemed more concerned with being labelled “Islamophobic”.

Still, Viner commanded respect among feminists. But by the time she became Editor, the trans train had picked up speed. Two years earlier, in 2013, The Observer had removed a column by Julie Burchill defending Suzanne Moore from allegations of transphobia, with the commissioning editor admitting that the newspaper had “got it wrong” by publishing it.

It is true, though, that while Viner is Editor in Chief of both The Guardian and The Observer, the latter has managed to be more open and honest about the gender issue. But many of the journalists on the latter have told me they are appalled at the censorious, often anti-feminist atmosphere at The Guardian. And when Webster retired, some admitted they were nervous about whether Viner would merge the editorial line into that of The Guardian. But given Rayner’s objection, the rot seems too deep. By failing to confront the ideologues, Viner has betrayed the principles of liberal, open-minded journalism.

I predict Rayner leaving in a storm of controversy will change nothing. His allegations will be denied. And the sale — described by Webster as a “discreditable conclusion to a damaging episode in the company’s history” — will go through. But I do think that rather than preparing to strike, the many decent, sensible people still at GMG should take a good look at the discreditable state of their journalism. Instead of going along with the ideological madness that Viner has allowed to flourish, they should, instead, demand that she is replaced by someone who has the courage to stand up for the similarly brave journalists.

Other users have followed suit, with an exodus of accounts from X to Bluesky, a social media platform that resembles in style the pre-Musk Twitter. Taylor Swift fans are flocking in their thousands and former CNN anchor Don Lemon posted a lengthy statement outlining his own reasons for relocating. The official account of the Clifton Suspension Bridge and Museum posted a similar statement, which has led to candlelit vigils and a mass outpouring of public grief.

After the Guardian’s announcement, many users were quick to point out that misinformation, far from being the publication’s chief concern, appears to be its speciality. Since Musk has introduced “community notes” to X, journalists who post falsehoods or misleading articles have quickly been corrected. Inevitably, the Guardian has been slapped with community notes on numerous occasions, which might help explain its decision to withdraw. On its website, the Guardian proudly boasts that it “delivers fearless, investigative journalism — giving a voice to the powerless and holding power to account”. But whether its executives admit it or not, the publication has developed a reputation for extreme ideological bias.

More from this author

Is The Guardian sowing disinformation?

By Kathleen Stock

The frequent “community-noting” on X suggests that this reputation is not unfounded. For instance, when the Guardian posted a piece entitled “England riots: how has ‘two-tier policing’ myth become widespread?”, notes were quickly added to provide links to the various articles in which the Guardian has asserted that “two-tier policing” based on race and sexuality is rife. When it published an article entitled “How many more children like Sara Sharif will be killed before smacking is banned?”, the community notes quickly explained that the victim had not merely been smacked, but had suffered extreme beatings and multiple forms of torture. All such hideous acts are, of course, already illegal.

The political theorist Patrick J. Deneen has argued that ideology always fails because once its inherent “falsehoods become more evident, the gap grows between what the ideology claims and the lived experience of human beings under its domain”. Those currently scurrying away from X are effectively retreating from the battlefield of ideas envisaged by John Milton in his Areopagitica (1644) in which Truth and Falsehood are seen as antagonists. “Let her and Falsehood grapple,” he wrote, “who ever knew Truth put to the worse, in a free and open encounter?”

I was the subject of the Guardian’s misinformation tactics only the other week. Reporting on a short course on the “woke” movement that I will soon be teaching at the New College of Florida, the Guardian described me as a “controversial British media personality and culture warrior”. It is of course entirely predictable that culture warriors would brand their critics as “culture warriors”, but quite how my consistent defence of liberal values is “controversial” is anyone’s guess.

The article’s author, Jason Wilson, went on to claim that I am guilty of “courting rightwing opinion” because I have been interviewed by Jordan Peterson and Tucker Carlson. I have also appeared on shows hosted by Left-wing commentators such as Hugo Rifkind and George Galloway, but thus far I have not been accused of “courting leftwing opinion”. Perhaps Wilson is simply unfamiliar with the concept of engaging in dialogue with people of opposing views?

Wilson further claimed that the course at the New College of Florida had been “reinstated”, which is odd given that it had never been cancelled in the first place. But the most egregious factual inaccuracy came when Wilson, in pointing out that I have written for Spiked, described the magazine as “hard-right”. Spiked began its existence as Living Marxism, and has consistently supported free speech, the values of democracy and liberal immigration policies, while vehemently opposing all forms of racism and white nationalism. Mislabelling Spiked as “hard-right” is either outright dishonesty or staggering ignorance. It’s what happens when journalistic standards are subordinated to propaganda.

The crowning moment of Wilson’s inadvertent self-satire was when he admitted, in light of my forthcoming course on the “woke movement”, that he had been actively searching for non-profit organisations which might qualify as members. He writes — and I am not making this up — “The Guardian’s search of IRS non-profit records indicate that while there are some 20 nonprofits with the word ‘woke’ in their names, none have reported any income in their most recent filings, and most appear to be inactive.” Wilson genuinely seems to believe that one can only subscribe to an ideology if it is registered with the government and has applied for tax exemptions. This is a species of literal-mindedness so colossal that it must surely be eligible for some kind of award.

On reflection, I got off lightly. A far more egregious example of the Guardian’s mendacity was the controversy over the Wi Spa in Los Angeles in 2021. A video of a woman who calls herself “CubanaAngel” on Instagram was posted online, in which she could be seen complaining to the staff about a naked man in the women’s jacuzzi area. The man in question, Darren Agee Merager, was a registered sex offender with previous convictions for indecent exposure, and it was alleged that the complainant at the Wi Spa had seen him semi-erect. “So it’s okay for a man to go into the women’s section and show his penis around the other women, young little girls — underage — in your spa?” she had said to staff, who defended his right to be there on the grounds of self-identification.

Josephine Bartosch outlined the sequence of events in an article for The Critic. After the video went viral, protests outside the spa were organised by women’s rights campaigners. These were quickly smeared as “far right” and mobbed by so-called “anti-fascist” protesters. The Guardian, having spent years promoting the notion that womanhood is an identity category rather than a biological reality, and having faced allegations of driving female journalists from its staff for their gender-critical views, then produced two articles in quick succession that implied CubanaAngel’s complaints were a hoax. The writers claimed that the incident “provided clear evidence of the links between anti-trans and far-right movements”, while Guardian columnist Owen Jones called the entire incident a “campaign of lies”.

More from this author

It's time to flee your utopia

By Alex O'Connor

Even when it emerged that Merager had been charged for indecent exposure at the Wi Spa, the Guardian continued to conflate the female protesters with the far-Right agitators who had turned up to exploit the situation. As Bartosch puts it, “For all the Guardian’s handwringing about #metoo, when it comes to believing the women who complained about Merager’s crime, rather than ‘giving a voice to the powerless’ they pretended his victims didn’t exist. Women like CubanaAngel are ideological inconveniences.”

The combination of Musk’s successful Twitter bid and a forthcoming second term for Donald Trump has curdled many once sensible minds. Those who were comfortable with the echo chamber that Twitter had formerly established, where users were routinely banned for pointing out that no human being has ever changed sex, are now looking for an alternative. It is the psychological equivalent of the “safe space” mentality, one which led Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy to establish a “Self-Care Suite” after Trump’s victory. Here students could isolate themselves and process their trauma by playing with Lego, drawing with crayons, and bingeing on milk and cookies.

And now we have the digital milk and cookies of Bluesky, where users can be shielded from the disorientation that occurs where plurality of opinion is permitted. Such online echo chambers are of course largely to blame for the escalation of political tribalism that we have seen in recent years, and also for the sense of shock that many experience when elections don’t go their way. While it is true that Musk has reinstated accounts on X that post some genuinely objectionable material, this is the price one pays for an open marketplace of ideas.

This desire to avoid any challenges to one’s ideological certainties is becoming more widespread, and there is a sense in which we are entering a new phase in the culture war. I am not celebrating the departure of activists to Bluesky, because I would rather hear their views and see them participate in these important debates. By insulating themselves from criticism, and seeking platforms where their misrepresentations will not be flagged, the Guardian and its ilk are doing themselves no favours. If they are serious about their goals, they should reconsider their resolution to speak only to those who will unquestioningly cheer them on. Those who withdraw from the debate stand no chance of winning it.

The Guardian prides itself on being one of the most Left-leaning and anti-racist news outlets in the English-speaking world. So imagine its embarrassment when, last month, a number of black podcast producers researching the paper’s historic ties to slavery abruptly resigned, alleging they had been victims of “institutional racism”, “editorial whiteness”, “microaggressions, colourism, bullying, passive-aggressive and obstructive management styles”. All of this might smack of progressive excess, but, in reality, it merely reflects an institution incuriously at odds with itself.

Questions about The Guardian’s ties to slavery have been circulating since 2020, when, amid the media’s collective spasm of racial conscience following the murder of George Floyd, the Scott Trust announced it would launch an investigation into its history. “We in the UK need to begin a national debate on reparations for slavery, a crime which heralded the age of capitalism and provided the basis for racism that continues to endanger black life globally,” journalist Amandla Thomas-Johnson wrote in a June 2020 Guardian opinion piece about the toppling of a statue of 17th-century British slaver Edward Colston. A month later, the Scott Trust committed to determining whether the founder of the paper, John Edward Taylor, had profited from slavery. “We have seen no evidence that Taylor was a slave owner, nor involved in any direct way in the slave trade,” the chairman of the Scott Trust, Alex Graham, told Guardian staff by email at the time. “But were such evidence to exist, we would want to be open about it.” (Notably, Graham, in using the terms “slave owner” and “direct way,” set a very specific and very high bar for what would be considered information worthy of disclosure.)

The problem is that the results of the investigation, conducted by historian Sheryllynne Haggerty, an “expert in the history of the transatlantic slave trade”, have never been made public. When contacted with questions about what happened to the promised report, Haggerty referred all inquiries to The Guardian’s PR, which has remained silent on the matter. (The Guardian was asked for comment and we were given the stock PR response The Guardian gave following the podcaster’s letter.) But what we do know is this: according to Guardian lore, a business tycoon named John Edward Taylor was inspired to agitate for change after witnessing the 1819 Peterloo Massacre, when over a dozen people were killed in Manchester by government forces as they protested for parliamentary representation. Two years later, Taylor, a young cotton merchant, with the backing of a group of local reformers known at the Little Circle, founded the paper.

“Since 1821 the mission of The Guardian has been to use clarity and imagination to build hope,” The Guardian’s current editor, Katharine Viner, proudly proclaims on the “About us” page of the paper’s website. Part of this founding myth concerns one of the defining social and political issues of the day, slavery, which the Little Circle members, including Taylor, vigorously opposed as a moral affront. “The Guardian had always hated slavery,” Martin Kettle, an associate editor, wrote in a 2011 apologia on why during the Civil War the paper had vociferously condemned the North while equivocating on the South.

Suggested reading

Is The Guardian sowing disinformation?

By Kathleen Stock

That may be true, but it also presents an incomplete picture. The Manchester Guardian, as the paper was then known, was founded by cotton merchants, including Taylor, who were able to pool the money needed to launch the paper by drawing on their respective fortunes. While none of these men, many of whom were Unitarian Christians, is likely to have engaged in slavery, they didn’t just benefit from but depended upon the global slave trade that provided virtually all of the cotton that filled their mills. As Sarah Parker Remond, an African American abolitionist, said upon visiting Manchester in 1859: “When I walk through the streets of Manchester and meet load after load of cotton, I think of those 80,000 cotton plantations on which was grown the $125 million worth of cotton which supply your market, and I remember that not one cent of that money ever reached the hands of the labourers.”

Remond had ample reason for saying this. The relationship between the northwest English cotton industry and the American South’s slave society was one of mutualism. Of all the cotton in Manchester, 75% of it was sourced from Southern slave plantations. On the eve of the Civil War, Lancashire was importing more than one billion pounds of cotton from the United States per year, about half of the two billion pounds of cotton picked by Southern slaves annually. By buying slave-picked cotton at extremely cheap prices, Manchester’s cotton industry could use advances in manufacturing to profitably spin the cotton into textiles that were then sold back to the Southern slavers. Instead of trading slaves — a morally messy and economically-risky affair — Manchester’s liberal elite learned how to trade slave-grown cotton.

The trade in Southern-sourced cotton enriched the city, giving rise to the wealthy middle class of which John Edward Taylor and other members of the Little Circle were a part. On the back of this cotton surge, men such as Taylor — the son of a tutor, who apprenticed with a local cotton merchant — rose from humble beginnings to achieve affluence and national influence within a matter of years.

Suggested reading

Why I had to leave The Guardian

By Suzanne Moore

So when the Civil War broke out in 1861, The Manchester Guardian found itself in a strange position. Its very existence was owed to the profits made on the backs of slaves, yet it could not morally support the South. But, because of its business interests, it also found itself unable to champion the North. To explain its at-times stridently anti-Union positions, the paper pointed to a smattering of statements by Abraham Lincoln indicating he would maintain slavery if it meant preserving the Union. The paper would go so far as to characterise Lincoln’s election “as an evil day both for America and the world”.

But there were other forces at work. For all their brotherly love, the Little Circle of Manchester elites believed that the power of democracy, and even of free expression, should be limited to a small elect who were educated and intelligent enough to be entrusted with such power. When it came to the masses, the Circle believed that “because most people had not yet reached the same moral and intellectual standards of the members of the Circle, it was suggested that the bulk of the population should be indefinitely denied access to the public sphere, or at least the right to vote…” To the founders of The Manchester Guardian, America was a lesson in the painful effects of too much democracy. According to its editorial spin, the Union had not gone to war in order to free a downtrodden class but to act upon its expansionist ambitions. This, in one view, was a way for the paper to advance its abolitionist position without putting its weight behind the idea that all people everywhere should be free and fully enfranchised — an idea the paper’s leadership considered dangerous.

The Guardian melded this political conservatism with its stance on free trade, and notably the Corn Laws, which the Manchester elite maintained was an unnecessary tax that hurt the poor. But they were doubtless also sharply aware that, if replicated in other industries (say, cotton production), such tariffs could threaten their businesses. What emerged from The Guardian’s moral contortionism was an argument claiming that the root problem in America was not that Africans were being enslaved by Southerners, but, incredibly, that the South had been enslaved by the North. The South, The Guardian held, could break its Northern bonds by establishing free trade with England’s industrial and commercial centres. As the paper wrote in May 1861:

“If the sentiments of the educated and higher classes of Southern society could find expression, we should be frankly told that in the emancipation of the South from dependence on the North, in the creation of diversity of employment for Southern capitalists and for the masses, and in the saving that would arise from direct Southern intercourse with Liverpool, Southampton and Havre, the day would not be distant when slavery itself would cease.”

More from this author

How the New York Times rewrites history

By Ashley Rindsberg

What emerges from this picture of The Manchester Guardian in its formative days is a cultural institution that was able to pull off a kind of moral arbitrage, turning slave profits into an anti-slavery position; espousing high-minded ideals on freedom without supporting the equality that freedom affords; and cannily leveraging the horrors of the Civil War to advance its most pressing economic policy: free trade. Perhaps it should be no surprise, then, that in the two centuries since the paper’s founding, The Guardian has returned to the same issue that lies at the heart of slavery — race. For the past 20 years, The Guardian’s approach to the topic of race has been nothing short of total. Yet, like the current leadership’s 19th-century antecedents, it’s not clear that the paper sits on a foundation sturdy enough to support such an uncompromising approach.

Since the 2000s, The Guardian’s race coverage has left no element of existence, human or otherwise — as a piece on why driverless cars are racist attests — unbent by its racial prism. By The Guardian’s telling, post-Brexit Britain has been beset by a “frenzy of hatred”. British schools are racist. Twitter is racist. The Covid response was racist. Dog walkers are racist. Chicken is racist. Cricket is racist. And if you consider asking someone to explain why something is racist, don’t: it is, according to another Guardian piece, extremely racist.

But you need only look at the Executive Committee of the Guardian News and Media, the body that governs the paper, to see that, by the racial standards the paper has spent decades engendering, The Guardian has a serious problem: it is strikingly white. From the company’s CEO, Anna Bateson, to Viner, its chief editor, right down to its CFO, deputy editor, head of communications, and head of product are white. Now, the liberal democratic world in which The Guardian was fashioned would find nothing about this fact objectionable. These are simply individuals who seem to be doing their best to combat social ills. But that is not the standard The Guardian has held the world to. Social justice and racial equity, as expounded by The Guardian, hold that whiteness is inherently a form of racialised power, achieved through the subjugation of non-whites. And that’s where the charges levelled by the podcasters, who accused the paper of, among other things, “editorial whiteness”, gets thrown into stark relief.

Suggested reading

The media's Manchester snobbery

By Joshi Herrmann

For all its talk of corporate equity efforts, according to an internal report from 2019, only 12% of The Guardian’s editorial team come from BAME backgrounds — despite BAME people making up 18% of the British population. The paper’s median ethnic pay gap has hovered around 15% over the past three years, which means non-white Guardian employees are paid “only” 15p less on the pound than white Guardian employees. For your average British company, this might be a stellar result. But for a newspaper that for the past two decades has made race into a defining issue in all of our lives, is it quite as acceptable?

It’s not difficult to imagine, then, how a group of black producers would see an environment like this as hostile. Surely, if The Guardian stood behind the decision to throw the statue of Edward Colston into the Bristol harbour, despite everything he did with his wealth, then it stands to reason that a newspaper founded by white merchants who made their fortunes milling Southern cotton should be similarly heaved overboard.

But that has not been The Guardian’s position — and this is where the paper’s blind spot for its own racial misdeeds threatens to morph into something more dangerous. In response to the podcasters’ letter, the newspaper did not bend the proverbial knee. Its editor did not step down. Its CEO did not announce a series of sweeping reforms. The company did not even issue the obligatory company-wide mea culpa lined with pledges to “do better”. Instead, it pushed back.

“We are concerned that some former colleagues and contributors have not had a good experience working with us, but we are disappointed they have chosen to write a partial reflection of their time at The Guardian,” the paper wrote in a statement. From its perspective, the onus is on the podcasters, who have told a tale.

While that kind of corporate crisis control would probably succeed for most companies, The Guardian is no longer most companies. It is no longer even a Left-of-centre publication pushing for progressive policies. It has slowly become a furnace of racial grievance which now threatens to consume the paper itself. For all its commentary on power and race, The Guardian is a powerful publication, able to make a single uncomfortable episode like this simply go away. But the bigger concern is whether it can satisfy the demands of an ethos that seeks to overturn institutions precisely like The Guardian, when they fail to live up to the social justice ideals they preach.

More from this author

The phoney ethics of ESG

By Ashley Rindsberg

When a Left-wing publisher released a collection of essays marking the paper’s  200th anniversary, what readers found was not a celebration but a critique of the institution. Capitalism’s Conscience, edited by a Guardian contributor, slammed the paper in one of its chapters as not just corrupt but a corrupting cultural institution that is guilty of white supremacy.

“[T]he Guardian has repeatedly given voice to racist and far-Right figures and ideas in interviews and articles,” claimed the authors of one chapter. “This platforming and the resulting amplification do not only fulfil the function of deflecting from liberal racism, but also allow the paper to represent its journalism as adhering to liberal principles of objectivity, balance and free speech.” On the face of it, the statement seems absurd. But looking at the political context the paper has engendered, it’s clear that, given the cultural conditions The Guardian has used its considerable influence to foster, it could not be any other way.

For its part, The Guardian has assured readers that the review is “largely complete and will not pull any punches in terms of transparency”. This may be cold comfort for the podcast producers charged with looking into slavery at the paper’s historical roots only to come away with allegations of racism in its present incarnation. Whether or not the review finds that Taylor had direct ties to slavery, the podcast affair shows that The Guardian has, wittingly or not, stumbled into a new and fraught chapter of its story, one even the most polished podcast productions will struggle to explain.

Questions about The Guardian’s ties to slavery have been circulating since 2020, when, amid the media’s collective spasm of racial conscience following the murder of George Floyd, the Scott Trust announced it would launch an investigation into its history. “We in the UK need to begin a national debate on reparations for slavery, a crime which heralded the age of capitalism and provided the basis for racism that continues to endanger black life globally,” journalist Amandla Thomas-Johnson wrote in a June 2020 Guardian opinion piece about the toppling of a statue of 17th-century British slaver Edward Colston. A month later, the Scott Trust committed to determining whether the founder of the paper, John Edward Taylor, had profited from slavery. “We have seen no evidence that Taylor was a slave owner, nor involved in any direct way in the slave trade,” the chairman of the Scott Trust, Alex Graham, told Guardian staff by email at the time. “But were such evidence to exist, we would want to be open about it.” (Notably, Graham, in using the terms “slave owner” and “direct way,” set a very specific and very high bar for what would be considered information worthy of disclosure.)

The problem is that the results of the investigation, conducted by historian Sheryllynne Haggerty, an “expert in the history of the transatlantic slave trade”, have never been made public. When contacted with questions about what happened to the promised report, Haggerty referred all inquiries to The Guardian’s PR, which has remained silent on the matter. (The Guardian was asked for comment and we were given the stock PR response The Guardian gave following the podcaster’s letter.) But what we do know is this: according to Guardian lore, a business tycoon named John Edward Taylor was inspired to agitate for change after witnessing the 1819 Peterloo Massacre, when over a dozen people were killed in Manchester by government forces as they protested for parliamentary representation. Two years later, Taylor, a young cotton merchant, with the backing of a group of local reformers known at the Little Circle, founded the paper.

“Since 1821 the mission of The Guardian has been to use clarity and imagination to build hope,” The Guardian’s current editor, Katharine Viner, proudly proclaims on the “About us” page of the paper’s website. Part of this founding myth concerns one of the defining social and political issues of the day, slavery, which the Little Circle members, including Taylor, vigorously opposed as a moral affront. “The Guardian had always hated slavery,” Martin Kettle, an associate editor, wrote in a 2011 apologia on why during the Civil War the paper had vociferously condemned the North while equivocating on the South.

Suggested reading

Is The Guardian sowing disinformation?

By Kathleen Stock

That may be true, but it also presents an incomplete picture. The Manchester Guardian, as the paper was then known, was founded by cotton merchants, including Taylor, who were able to pool the money needed to launch the paper by drawing on their respective fortunes. While none of these men, many of whom were Unitarian Christians, is likely to have engaged in slavery, they didn’t just benefit from but depended upon the global slave trade that provided virtually all of the cotton that filled their mills. As Sarah Parker Remond, an African American abolitionist, said upon visiting Manchester in 1859: “When I walk through the streets of Manchester and meet load after load of cotton, I think of those 80,000 cotton plantations on which was grown the $125 million worth of cotton which supply your market, and I remember that not one cent of that money ever reached the hands of the labourers.”

Remond had ample reason for saying this. The relationship between the northwest English cotton industry and the American South’s slave society was one of mutualism. Of all the cotton in Manchester, 75% of it was sourced from Southern slave plantations. On the eve of the Civil War, Lancashire was importing more than one billion pounds of cotton from the United States per year, about half of the two billion pounds of cotton picked by Southern slaves annually. By buying slave-picked cotton at extremely cheap prices, Manchester’s cotton industry could use advances in manufacturing to profitably spin the cotton into textiles that were then sold back to the Southern slavers. Instead of trading slaves — a morally messy and economically-risky affair — Manchester’s liberal elite learned how to trade slave-grown cotton.

The trade in Southern-sourced cotton enriched the city, giving rise to the wealthy middle class of which John Edward Taylor and other members of the Little Circle were a part. On the back of this cotton surge, men such as Taylor — the son of a tutor, who apprenticed with a local cotton merchant — rose from humble beginnings to achieve affluence and national influence within a matter of years.

Suggested reading

Why I had to leave The Guardian

By Suzanne Moore

So when the Civil War broke out in 1861, The Manchester Guardian found itself in a strange position. Its very existence was owed to the profits made on the backs of slaves, yet it could not morally support the South. But, because of its business interests, it also found itself unable to champion the North. To explain its at-times stridently anti-Union positions, the paper pointed to a smattering of statements by Abraham Lincoln indicating he would maintain slavery if it meant preserving the Union. The paper would go so far as to characterise Lincoln’s election “as an evil day both for America and the world”.

But there were other forces at work. For all their brotherly love, the Little Circle of Manchester elites believed that the power of democracy, and even of free expression, should be limited to a small elect who were educated and intelligent enough to be entrusted with such power. When it came to the masses, the Circle believed that “because most people had not yet reached the same moral and intellectual standards of the members of the Circle, it was suggested that the bulk of the population should be indefinitely denied access to the public sphere, or at least the right to vote…” To the founders of The Manchester Guardian, America was a lesson in the painful effects of too much democracy. According to its editorial spin, the Union had not gone to war in order to free a downtrodden class but to act upon its expansionist ambitions. This, in one view, was a way for the paper to advance its abolitionist position without putting its weight behind the idea that all people everywhere should be free and fully enfranchised — an idea the paper’s leadership considered dangerous.

The Guardian melded this political conservatism with its stance on free trade, and notably the Corn Laws, which the Manchester elite maintained was an unnecessary tax that hurt the poor. But they were doubtless also sharply aware that, if replicated in other industries (say, cotton production), such tariffs could threaten their businesses. What emerged from The Guardian’s moral contortionism was an argument claiming that the root problem in America was not that Africans were being enslaved by Southerners, but, incredibly, that the South had been enslaved by the North. The South, The Guardian held, could break its Northern bonds by establishing free trade with England’s industrial and commercial centres. As the paper wrote in May 1861:

“If the sentiments of the educated and higher classes of Southern society could find expression, we should be frankly told that in the emancipation of the South from dependence on the North, in the creation of diversity of employment for Southern capitalists and for the masses, and in the saving that would arise from direct Southern intercourse with Liverpool, Southampton and Havre, the day would not be distant when slavery itself would cease.”

More from this author

How the New York Times rewrites history

By Ashley Rindsberg

What emerges from this picture of The Manchester Guardian in its formative days is a cultural institution that was able to pull off a kind of moral arbitrage, turning slave profits into an anti-slavery position; espousing high-minded ideals on freedom without supporting the equality that freedom affords; and cannily leveraging the horrors of the Civil War to advance its most pressing economic policy: free trade. Perhaps it should be no surprise, then, that in the two centuries since the paper’s founding, The Guardian has returned to the same issue that lies at the heart of slavery — race. For the past 20 years, The Guardian’s approach to the topic of race has been nothing short of total. Yet, like the current leadership’s 19th-century antecedents, it’s not clear that the paper sits on a foundation sturdy enough to support such an uncompromising approach.

Since the 2000s, The Guardian’s race coverage has left no element of existence, human or otherwise — as a piece on why driverless cars are racist attests — unbent by its racial prism. By The Guardian’s telling, post-Brexit Britain has been beset by a “frenzy of hatred”. British schools are racist. Twitter is racist. The Covid response was racist. Dog walkers are racist. Chicken is racist. Cricket is racist. And if you consider asking someone to explain why something is racist, don’t: it is, according to another Guardian piece, extremely racist.

But you need only look at the Executive Committee of the Guardian News and Media, the body that governs the paper, to see that, by the racial standards the paper has spent decades engendering, The Guardian has a serious problem: it is strikingly white. From the company’s CEO, Anna Bateson, to Viner, its chief editor, right down to its CFO, deputy editor, head of communications, and head of product are white. Now, the liberal democratic world in which The Guardian was fashioned would find nothing about this fact objectionable. These are simply individuals who seem to be doing their best to combat social ills. But that is not the standard The Guardian has held the world to. Social justice and racial equity, as expounded by The Guardian, hold that whiteness is inherently a form of racialised power, achieved through the subjugation of non-whites. And that’s where the charges levelled by the podcasters, who accused the paper of, among other things, “editorial whiteness”, gets thrown into stark relief.

Suggested reading

The media's Manchester snobbery

By Joshi Herrmann

For all its talk of corporate equity efforts, according to an internal report from 2019, only 12% of The Guardian’s editorial team come from BAME backgrounds — despite BAME people making up 18% of the British population. The paper’s median ethnic pay gap has hovered around 15% over the past three years, which means non-white Guardian employees are paid “only” 15p less on the pound than white Guardian employees. For your average British company, this might be a stellar result. But for a newspaper that for the past two decades has made race into a defining issue in all of our lives, is it quite as acceptable?

It’s not difficult to imagine, then, how a group of black producers would see an environment like this as hostile. Surely, if The Guardian stood behind the decision to throw the statue of Edward Colston into the Bristol harbour, despite everything he did with his wealth, then it stands to reason that a newspaper founded by white merchants who made their fortunes milling Southern cotton should be similarly heaved overboard.

But that has not been The Guardian’s position — and this is where the paper’s blind spot for its own racial misdeeds threatens to morph into something more dangerous. In response to the podcasters’ letter, the newspaper did not bend the proverbial knee. Its editor did not step down. Its CEO did not announce a series of sweeping reforms. The company did not even issue the obligatory company-wide mea culpa lined with pledges to “do better”. Instead, it pushed back.

“We are concerned that some former colleagues and contributors have not had a good experience working with us, but we are disappointed they have chosen to write a partial reflection of their time at The Guardian,” the paper wrote in a statement. From its perspective, the onus is on the podcasters, who have told a tale.

While that kind of corporate crisis control would probably succeed for most companies, The Guardian is no longer most companies. It is no longer even a Left-of-centre publication pushing for progressive policies. It has slowly become a furnace of racial grievance which now threatens to consume the paper itself. For all its commentary on power and race, The Guardian is a powerful publication, able to make a single uncomfortable episode like this simply go away. But the bigger concern is whether it can satisfy the demands of an ethos that seeks to overturn institutions precisely like The Guardian, when they fail to live up to the social justice ideals they preach.

More from this author

The phoney ethics of ESG

By Ashley Rindsberg

When a Left-wing publisher released a collection of essays marking the paper’s  200th anniversary, what readers found was not a celebration but a critique of the institution. Capitalism’s Conscience, edited by a Guardian contributor, slammed the paper in one of its chapters as not just corrupt but a corrupting cultural institution that is guilty of white supremacy.

“[T]he Guardian has repeatedly given voice to racist and far-Right figures and ideas in interviews and articles,” claimed the authors of one chapter. “This platforming and the resulting amplification do not only fulfil the function of deflecting from liberal racism, but also allow the paper to represent its journalism as adhering to liberal principles of objectivity, balance and free speech.” On the face of it, the statement seems absurd. But looking at the political context the paper has engendered, it’s clear that, given the cultural conditions The Guardian has used its considerable influence to foster, it could not be any other way.

For its part, The Guardian has assured readers that the review is “largely complete and will not pull any punches in terms of transparency”. This may be cold comfort for the podcast producers charged with looking into slavery at the paper’s historical roots only to come away with allegations of racism in its present incarnation. Whether or not the review finds that Taylor had direct ties to slavery, the podcast affair shows that The Guardian has, wittingly or not, stumbled into a new and fraught chapter of its story, one even the most polished podcast productions will struggle to explain.

Imagine having your painstaking investigative work on the cost-of-living crisis or the Ukrainian war sit alongside a piece called “How I freed myself from inherited gender roles and stopped feeling unworthy of my own womanhood”, written by someone called Jeremy. Or imagine opining critically about the role of “disinformation” in a publication which also accuses mainstream media outlets of using a “technique employed in Nazi Germany to silence trans people”. The brave souls enduring these indignities at the hands of their colleagues are the real journalist heroes. Truly, it must be a slog.

Earlier this week, former Guardian columnist Hadley Freeman gave a revealing interview to Woman’s Hour about her time at the paper, describing it as an initially happy marriage but one in which her partner eventually became a “conspiracy theorist”. A few years ago, while Freeman was away on a work trip, representatives from lobbyist organisation All About Trans — who had a close working relationship with Mermaids at the time — were brought in to talk about “how trans people should be discussed in the media”. In the course of their intervention (the chummy flavour of which presumably can be gauged from this piece about the same group lobbying the BBC Newsnight team in 2016), two relatively innocuous pieces of Freeman’s were presented to her colleagues as examples of transphobia, she said.

From then on, her viewpoint was dismissed by colleagues as “mean”. Editors would repeatedly refuse pitches from her about Mermaids or J.K. Rowling on the flimsiest of excuses, while continuing to publish gushing pieces about child transition. At one point, she said, senior management told her that only journalists with relevant specialities, who also happened to be male, could write about the politics of gender. Books by gender-critical authors were uniformly passed over for review, and only a single interview with one such author made it onto the page (that is, with me — albeit in the education and not the main section, and with a lot of anxiety on the part of the section editor as I recall). Meanwhile, as befits a good and obedient Stonewall Diversity Champion, trans memoir after memoir was puffed in the paper, approved mantras were intoned, and stories of wrong bodies and wrongthink abounded.

Though Guardian management were not prepared to send a representative to discuss the matter, in a prepared response read out by interviewer Emma Barnett a spokesperson explained, as if talking very slowly to toddlers, or to Russian citizens during the Soviet period: “All writers work with their editors to decide the topics on which they write. This is a completely standard practice across the media. That is not censorship. It is editing”. It is perhaps hard to understand how such a venerable and supposedly sophisticated publication could have reached this level of audience infantilisation. It’s almost as if they think their readers are idiots.

Actually, I’ve come to think that they do think some of their readers are idiots — a fact which partly explains progressive policing and censorship around discussion of gender identity, as well as other controversial topics too. One reason why someone might talk to a group of people as if they were stupid is inadvertent: namely, if the person is himself an idiot and simply trying to describe the world as he sincerely sees it. Into this category would seem to fall some of the gender lobbyists generally benighting our institutions and instructing newspapers what to write. Recent court cases in which they have appeared as witnesses have afforded ample opportunity to scrutinise the extent of their knowledge of biology, ethics, and childhood development. Pearls of wisdom offered include: “describing any particular transwoman as male is inherently transphobic and abusive, unless that trans person as an individual has asked you to do so” (Kirrin Medcalf, Stonewall Head of Trans Inclusion), and “I am not clear that children come out of the womb with a sex, to be honest” (Dr Belinda Bell, Chair of Mermaids trustees).

More from this author

The virtues of Twitter

By Kathleen Stock

As it happens, I once met the founder of All About Trans, the transactivist body named by Freeman as involved in lobbying the Guardian. Nathalie McDermott, not herself trans, met me for coffee in a hotel near the BBC in January 2019. Our companions were fellow gender-sceptic Graham Linehan and transwoman Ayla Holdom, a patron of Mermaids and consultant for All About Trans. The meeting was initiated by McDermott, who seemed convinced that if only we sceptics could meet the eminently likeable and reasonable Holdom, we would seamlessly extrapolate outwards to anyone else who identifies as a woman for whatever reason, and our strong doubts about things like putting males in women’s prisons or women’s sporting competitions might be quashed.

McDermott also pleaded with us that, if only we would meet some “trans kids”, we would see how “happy” they were and therefore stop worrying about the fact some are being sterilised and having body parts chopped off before they can properly understand what is happening to them. I have no doubt this is genuinely how McDermott saw things: that the fact a minor is happy, right now, is somehow a reliable indicator of her well-being in future years. And when we pressed her on the idea that latent homophobia might be behind some parents’ preference for interpreting their feminine boys as girls, or masculine girls as boys, she attempted to reassure us that she had never ever seen this — as if, again, this was something an outsider could tell from relatively superficial observation.

As I say, some people have cognitive blind spots, however well-meaning. But this can’t be the entire story about those writers and editors at the Guardian. These are supposed to be among the nation’s foremost intellectuals, for god’s sake. Most of them easily grasp such basic points as: personal anecdote isn’t strong evidence; most violence against women is carried out by males; children aren’t able to consent in the way that adults do; there’s societal pressure on young lesbians and gays to be more conforming to norms for their sex. Indeed, if they didn’t grasp this standard progressive fare, they wouldn’t have got jobs at the Guardian in the first place.

Rather than being an idiot himself, a second reason why a writer might treat his audience as idiots is because he suspects that some of them are. And indeed, it seems to me that at the root of Guardian doublethink on trans issues lies some degree of contempt for readers’ intelligence. Moral sophisticates as they are bound to try to be, it seems likely that many of those pushing for an “inclusive” editorial line on trans issues, to the exclusion of other viewpoints, would admit in private that they at least understood gender-critical reservations. Yet it appears that they won’t allow untrammelled voice to be given to those reservations because they fear that if they did, stupid people might be influenced to do bad things because of it. Some degree of technocratic smuggery seems implicit here, and, ironically, probably a class element too. As a highly-educated person with wider expertise and a sounder moral compass than many of your readers, you think it’s part of your job to anticipate the highly emotive and irrational ways in which ignorant people might react to certain bits of information, should they read them, and then adjust the information accordingly.

Nor is this impulse to micro-manage other people’s minds solely reserved for the Guardian’s coverage of transactivism. In a recent piece laced with finger-wagging about Kanye West, no room could be left for readers to decide for themselves what the interplay might be between West’s antisemitic tirades and his bipolar manic episodes. Instead, its author primly informed readers that: “Medical experts have underscored that mental health struggles and bigotry are separate problems.” A few days earlier, a piece by a different Guardian journalist included a near-identical phrase: “medical experts and advocates warn that his bigotry and mental health struggles are separate problems.” Good old “medical experts” — speaking with one voice, particularly skilled at diagnosing bigotry by looking at a person’s tonsils, and always on hand to back up a flailing author who is trying to stop presumed idiots from getting the wrong end of the stick.

More from this author

Why I stopped being a good girl

By Kathleen Stock

It is true that we live in a time of proliferating misunderstandings and disinformation, and that the internet is largely the culprit. Most interlocutors online are strangers, about which we can tell practically nothing about their credibility or expertise. Authorial intentions are hard to gauge, tone and nuance tend to go missing, and reduced character limits and attention spans make matters worse. But this is all the more reason for broadsheets with large readerships to explore a complete range of viewpoints on controversial matters, relatively unfettered and at length.

And in practice, Guardian readers should be more than able to handle exposure to unorthodox positions, and to make up their minds about them without heavy-handed mental steering. According to its own website, the paper’s audience is skewed towards the social grade of “AB” — i.e. “higher and intermediate managerial, administrative, professional occupations”. Yet at least some of these readers seem not to mind the fact they are frequently treated like foolish children, and even to positively like it. Survey after survey seems to indicate that the paper occupies a uniquely “trusted” position in UK public life. I can only conclude this is because, alongside its editors and journalists, many readers agree with editors that it’s part of the moral mission of the Guardian to avoid inflaming weak-minded people. Though of course, they probably don’t think this applies to themselves.

In 2017, editor Katharine Viner wrote rousingly that one of the core values of the Guardian is “building hope”. In service of this aim, she wrote, “the Guardian will embrace as wide a range of progressive perspectives as possible. We will support policies and ideas, but we will not give uncritical backing to parties or individuals. We will also engage with and publish voices from the right. In an age of tumultuous change, nobody has a monopoly on good ideas.” Despite the overtly moralised aim here, there are still intimations of intellectual openness, at least in theory. Yet in practice, under Viner’s editorship there has been an obvious straitening of perspective, responding to the Left’s growing fear of populism by becoming ever more nannying in outlook, and becoming far too keen to give some readers what they want other readers to hear. When it comes to sowing disinformation, at least by omission the Guardian is now emphatically part of the problem and not part of the solution. Historically so fond of moral missions, it should perhaps get itself a new one, and start trusting readers to be able to think for themselves.

It probably wouldn’t work, he said. The audience for opera is in London. I told him I disagreed. We had both just witnessed first-hand a large and enthusiastic audience for opera in Greater Manchester, after all. Not only could the move work, but it would also be a great thing for the UK to have a leading company operating out of one of its most central and fast-growing cities. Allied with Opera North, whose production we had just watched and who tour the entire region from Leeds, it would make this part of the country a global opera powerhouse.

By the time I got off the bus, my companion was telling me how a Manchester ENO would allow talented musicians like him to stay in the North after graduating, rather than feeling forced to move to London, or overseas. “I’m just surprised that you are the only person making the argument,” he said.

The reason nobody has heard the case for a Manchester ENO is that the media coverage of this important arts story has been laughably, atrociously London-centric. “English National Opera fights ‘absurd’ plan to relocate to Manchester,” ran the headline of a story on the BBC. It quoted the ENO’s chief executive Stuart Murphy calling the move “insane” but didn’t counter his analysis with a single northern voice.

Suggested reading

The Haçienda saved Manchester

By DAVE HASLAM

Several newspaper reports accepted, apparently without fact-checking, Murphy’s comparison of London’s “9 million people” with “Manchester’s half a million”. It seems neither the reporters nor the editors on those papers could see the mistake the ENO chief was making, although it seems that Northern readers pointed out the problem to the Guardian. The paper has removed Murphy’s misleading quote and replaced it with “a more accurate comparison between the greater metropolitan populations of London and Manchester”. (The population of Greater Manchester is almost 3 million.)

The ignorance didn’t end there. The Observer’s classical music critic Fiona Maddocks said the ENO plans “certainly make no sense” because Manchester is already “well served” by Opera North — a company that is based in Leeds and usually only comes to Salford for one week every year. Maddocks, perhaps, was straying a little outside her area of expertise: the Observer’s classical desk, as one of my readers emailed me this week, “pretty much exclusively writes about things staged in London”. The reader went on to point out that whereas Opera North’s headquarters, at Leeds’ Howard Assembly Room, are an hour and a half’s drive from central Manchester, “the ENO is about six minutes’ walk away from the Royal Opera House, so who is best served?”

It’s understandable that the art world is shaken by the idea of the ENO moving. It is a loss for most of the people making and writing about opera, because they live in London. And it makes sense for an industry to fight against imminent job losses, and to complain that the decision has been made without proper planning or pitch-rolling in the North. What is unforgivable is that the media acted as a supportive chorus for London-based vested interests. I’ve yet to see a story in the national press that doesn’t frame the ENO funding decision as a disastrous folly or a betrayal of the arts. (Melvyn Bragg, also in the Observer, described the Arts Council decision as “stealing arts cash from London”, as though the capital is entitled to as much as it likes from the national coffers.) And it’s not just me who clocks this London-centricity in British journalism — and hates it.

Suggested reading

Why the North will crush the South

By Ian Martin

“It’s all been reported as ‘London is losing this thing’,” says a journalist from a national newspaper who I spoke to this week (who asked me not to use their name). “So they fucking should,” they went on. “Why should that be in London? If that’s taxpayer funded, if it’s the ‘National Opera’, why shouldn’t it be in Manchester? Why should Manchester residents have to travel to London?”

That journalist is one of the very small cohort of national newspaper correspondents not based in London, covering a patch that can only be described as “the rest of the country”. Of course, that’s impossible. “You’re not covering the country — you’re covering what Londoners want to read about the rest of the country,” this person told me, pointing out that the tabloids are better staffed out here in the wilds than the broadsheets are.

As the coverage of the ENO story makes clear, we don’t have a national press. We have lots of London newspapers whose claim to be national ranges from wafer thin — the Guardian has a staff of four in Manchester — to arguably fraudulent. Most of the national newspapers in England have fewer than five staff correspondents outside London. Some “nationals” don’t appear to have a single one.

“They call themselves national because they are sold in a shop in Cumbria, but they’re not national,” one northern editor told me this week. The papers that claim to speak for the whole country are, in the view of this seasoned reporter, clever variations on the London Evening Standard.

More from this author

Does Manchester need the Tories?

By JOSHI HERRMANN

That’s the paper where I spent the first five years of my career, by the way. I’m a southerner who values the capital’s diverse and noisy journalistic scene. What’s annoying isn’t that the London media exists and is strong and argues eloquently and passionately for the protection and extension of London’s privileges — it’s that it does those things while pretending to be the national media. It makes total sense that newspapers whose editors and reporters almost all live in a single city would reflect that city’s interests and blind spots. But it doesn’t make for very satisfying coverage for those of us living elsewhere.

When I asked my Twitter followers for their favourite examples of London-centric media coverage following the ENO debacle, the answers came thick and fast. One theme was the assumption that everyone lives in London. There was a piece in the Sunday Times property section about moving to York which listed one of the downsides as: “It’s so far away.” There was a column in the New Statesman in which a well-meaning political journalist wrote: “In my view, every journalist should make a New Year’s resolution to get out of London more.”

Lots of replies to my tweet mentioned weather coverage, from the trivial — snow coverage tends to kick in when it’s snowing in the South East — to the rather sad. “When the North East had awful weather early last year, some areas of Northumberland had to wait weeks for all utilities to be restored,” one person wrote, noting that the story and its impact on millions of people was sparsely covered in the national news.

What shocks me, as a relative newcomer to the North, is how bad the public transport is — and how little I’d been prepared for it by reading the national (sorry, London) newspapers. There is no way that the current state of the North’s railways — appalling; unbelievable — would be allowed to continue if it were happening in the South East. It’s often journalists personally experiencing things that lead them to prioritise a story, and very few of them are experiencing the 23 cancelled services every day from Manchester to Leeds.

Suggested reading

Theatre could stage a comeback

By Sarah Ditum

Imagine if this kind of disruption took place anywhere near London — actually, we don’t have to imagine: remember the Southern Rail strikes, reported as if it were a national emergency — the editors who frame our national debate would be firing off angry emails to their columnists and news editors from freezing platforms. The stink would be so great that ministers would be forced to drop everything and fix it within days. And yet up here, month after month, despite the attempts of local politicians to raise the issue, the crisis drags on, paralysing large swathes of the country.

After Brexit there seemed to be a moment of self-reflection in the British press, from certain columnists at least, regarding the abject failure to understand the brewing feelings and major demographic shifts that drove a seismic political event that few in London saw coming. But the reason for that short-sightedness was structural, not something a few fleeting trips to the high streets (never the more-important suburbs) of Northern towns is going to fix.

The structural problem is that if you have 95% of your workforce living in one world, you are going to miss a lot of important stories in all the other worlds that make up this country. “You have got an insane number of people sitting together in the same room with the same lives and talking about the same experiences,” as one Northern correspondent put it to me. “It’s utterly bizarre.”

I’m writing this article from The Mill’s office on Cross Street, over the road from where The Manchester Guardian used to be based. That building has long gone and is now a Boots, with a small plaque on the outside wall marking its former use. Within walking distance there used to be massive northern newspaper offices for the Daily Express, the Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mail — an ecosystem, referred to as “the other Fleet Street”, that lasted for half of the twentieth century.

Technological change put an end to those operations and drove a radical centralisation of our media in London. But the technology we have now means that any news organisation can quite easily have dozens of reporters spread across every region. Suddenly, we would see a different kind of journalism creeping into the papers — one that tells us less about meaningless jockeying between random 20-something political advisors in Westminster, and more about how government policy is impacting people’s lives; how people hundreds of miles from the centre of power are experiencing the British state. The benefits of de-Londonising the media will flow far beyond journalism into policymaking and the nation’s understanding of itself. The newspapers could decide tomorrow that they want to represent this country properly again. And if they want us to call them nationals, they should.

By the age of ten, though, I had the measure of her and spent a lot of time persuading my classmates not to be bit parts in Susan Cuthbert’s mundane re-enactments, but to be stars in my special fantasy games. You could be in Dr Who, Star Trek, or T Rex. You can be heroes. Just for one lunchtime. We froze her out.

But guess what? It turns out there are lots of Susans out there. And there is one Susan in particular who frequently uses his platform to demean women. Social media bullying is still something that no one knows quite how to deal with. It’s virtual until it isn’t, and all I can say is this man’s tweets bring violence and hatred to my door, including rape and death threats. It’s all especially horrible because he’s been to my house more than once for lunches and parties, only to later reveal himself to be a misogynist pest.

Owen Jones has long been very angry with me, and it’s not really to do with trans people at all. (There were trans people at many of those parties he attended — that’s how Terfy I am.) Trans people are merely pawns in his proxy war, and they deserve far better representatives. His real problem with me was that I did not support Corbyn or those who surrounded him. I didn’t feel it was my duty to get this deluded old fool elected. But Owen, with his zillions of Twitter followers, thought otherwise and became increasingly hostile to me.

I may have been rude in my responses, but my animus against that part of the media isn’t personal: it’s about class. Owen went to Oxford and was a bag carrier in Westminster before being handed a national newspaper column. So many of these hard-Left types have no life experience and it shows.

Suggested reading

JK Rowling and the lunch of secrets

By Julie Bindel

I was reminded of that recently when Jones went on some mad rant, posting 33 tweets about me. Way to go, mate, if you don’t want to look obsessive and harassing. He wanted to rebut the idea that he had anything to do with me leaving the Guardian. The boring details are this: I chose to leave. I was not fired, but I found it intolerable to be censored for relatively mild views. I have never claimed to be cancelled or silenced. Do I think Owen was responsible for getting my “colleagues” to gang up and write a letter denouncing me? I can’t say. I certainly think he was responsible for creating the toxic atmosphere in which it happened. But he denies it and claims the letter was never about me, even though it was leaked to his mate Patrick Strudwick at Buzzfeed, who strangely seemed to think it was.

No need to go into all that again. I wrote at length about it here without once mentioning the twerp’s name. But suffice it to say that in 30 years of journalism, no one has spoken to me the way he did. Of course, anyone on Twitter will be aware he does this on a regular basis to women. That is why #OwenJonesIsAMisogynist started to trend this week, after Private Eye reported that an independent investigator brought in by the Guardian had upheld a complaint of bullying made against him by a female columnist, and that he is yet to face punishment.

When I read the Private Eye piece, I wasn’t surprised: over the years, so many women have complained and nothing has ever been done. The fact that an internal investigator was brought in and “found that it was reasonable” for the complainant “to feel offended, intimidated and insulted by his tweets” surely means that the complaint was upheld up in part. We can argue the semantics here. Is intimidation the same as bullying? Ask John Bercow.

Yet the Guardian responded in pure legalese. In a disingenuous statement, they claimed that “it is not true that anyone was found guilty of bullying”, though some employees “have had to be reminded about the organisation’s social media guidelines”. It’s textbook gaslighting — only this time it has allowed Owen to proclaim his innocence and cocoon himself in his much-treasured state of victimhood.

Suggested reading

Five rules for fighting transactivism

By Kathleen Stock

So on he marches, engaging only with a few pet females who agree with him and blocking everyone else. The fact that he seems to have got away with it again sends a strong message about what the Guardian’s priorities really are. But after the Wi Spa incident — in which the paper’s reporters defended a sex offender in the name of trans rights and ordinary women were trashed as transphobic liars — perhaps we should have known. It allows Owen to dog-whistle on social media which encourages trolls to crawl out of their caves to abuse women staff. It’s a place where writers like me and Hadley Freeman can no longer be columnists. Their senior editors and writers all remain silent on all this, though I was sent supportive messages when I walked out. Their cowardice disgusts me, but ultimately this is the fault of the editor and The Scott Trust, who know what goes on and do nothing.

What Owen doesn’t realise is that he’s harming the causes he claims to be fighting for. He claims to be Left-wing but punches down on women and loathes Keir Starmer. Likewise, his support for trans rights never extends to answering any difficult questions: What is gender identity? What do we do about the huge spike in distressed teenage girls wanting to transition? Are women no longer allowed to organise as a sex class? What do we do globally about rape as a war crime? Or FGM? Or sex selection? Women’s actual issues don’t interest him. Instead, he trolls women MPs and stands up for anti-Semites, again another proxy war.

DARVO is the methodology of abusers. It stands for Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender. Men often use it to deny their behaviour and paint themselves as the victim. It’s a familiar narcissist move, and I was reminded of this when Owen tweeted this week: “It is completely and utterly untrue that I was found guilty of bullying anyone at the Guardian”. He posted it with a straight face, but that’s not quite the whole truth is it, Owen?

More from this author

Why I had to leave The Guardian

By Suzanne Moore

If you think this is all part of the trans war, you are mistaken. It really isn’t — this is much bigger. It is about how workplace culture deals with social media. It is about whether, when it comes down to it, we listen to and believe women. Thankfully, the Observer still does, but the Guardian has chosen not to. People often ask me why I left, but is it so hard to understand? Its feminism is a thing of the past. It is edited by Twitter.

I am sad for the good people who remain there, who I know feel silenced and depressed by all this. In protecting Owen, the Guardian has revealed its priorities in ways that are incredibly damaging to their own brand. Unless you think that woman-hating is being on the right side of history, that is.

I have seen off many bullies in my lifetime. I know what male violence is. I know what the truth is. So I do not fear this contemptible man and his enablers. Everyone can see what is happening if they choose to. Over to you then. As for me, I am done with his pitiful delusions of grandeur. I am done with that playground. I can organise my own games. They are much more fun.

Dressed head to toe in black, her hair swept into a glorious silver-grey chignon, she told me she was “in mourning” for her former lover David, who had not died but left Claudia many years ago. Describing David as “a cross between George Best and Jesus Christ”, Claudia told me her life story.

Born male, Claudia grew up on a run-down estate in Glasgow, where she was mercilessly bullied for being gay. Then, in the early Eighties, Claudia met David, who soon announced he was “not gay” and that therefore Claudia “must be a woman”. She had genital surgery in 1986.

“I changed for all the wrong reasons,” Claudia told me. David walked out a year after the operation. Claudia and I became firm friends and remain so to this day. I later wrote about her for the Sunday Telegraph Magazine, but the editors decided not to put the article online, so it was not widely read.

Not so my now-infamous column in the Guardian, entitled “Gender Benders, Beware”, in which I railed against a trans woman who had tried to have a rape crisis centre in Vancouver shut down by tying its staff up in years of litigation. The fall-out was immediate; the Reader’s Editor received more than 200 letters of complaint, many as a result of lobbying by trans activists. (He would later distance himself from the article, claiming “it abused an already abused minority”.)

Suggested reading

The hounding of Kathleen Stock

By Timandra Harkness

I began to receive death and rape threats by email, as well as messages that I was “being watched”. I was used to my feminist views being unpopular: those of us who name and blame men for violence towards women are often warned to keep quiet. But nothing could prepare me for the misogyny of extreme transgender activists.

Despite the hostility, I contacted a number of trans people to see if they were willing to talk. Over the years I had debated countless prominent activists at public events. It was always respectful, warm and, in some cases, truly enlightening for both sides. I kept in touch with some of my opponents and friendships were formed.

In 2007, I was asked by the BBC to take part in Hecklers, a live radio programme with an aggressive format. I was asked to put forward my view — that sex-change operations constitute unnecessary mutilation — before an audience of doctors and transgender people at the Royal Society of Medicine. Two trans people, a gender clinician and Peter Tatchell were put up to argue against me.

I was convinced I would mess up, and was too scared to invite my feminist allies to watch. But I survived, and afterwards stayed for a drink with several of the audience. Two individual trans men came up to me, lifted their T-shirts and showed me their double mastectomy scars. A trans woman told me that before transition and hormones she was being “poisoned by testosterone”. There was no animosity, except for the fact that Claudia, who had insisted on coming along to support me, was cruelly snubbed by her own community. Solidarity never extends to those who speak out against the transgender doctrine.

The following year, I was nominated for the Journalist of the Year award by Stonewall for my work on anti-lesbian violence. I had no interest in the nomination, which had come from the public as opposed to an internal vote by the charity. But when the gay media decided to go absolutely berserk about my nomination, I changed my mind: I had to go, despite the fact that I had long made public my view that Stonewall prioritised rich gay men over lesbians.

Soon social media was awash with petitions, open letters and plans for a demonstration at the event. There was talk of how to storm the Victoria and Albert Museum, where the event was being held. But Stonewall held firm.

Suggested reading

Stonewall's greatest betrayal

By Jonny Best

The crowd greeting me on arrival was loud and aggressive. My name was plastered over dozens of placards, and “Bindel the bigot” was being screamed through loudhailers. Once I had managed to enter the building, I was told by one of the judges that I was the clear winner, but the panel had received strict instructions that I was not to be given the award. So it was given to a heterosexual agony aunt.

The impact of that decision would extend far beyond the handing-out of a mundane prize. It galvanised the modern day trans-rights movement: the old guard — such as Press for Change founders Christine Burns and Stephen Whittle — started to be dismissed as irrelevant and too conciliatory, with the younger blue-fringe crew declaring themselves the new overlords.

From 2008 onwards, whenever I was invited to speak alongside a transgender activist or ally, the event would face threats of being shut down or disrupted. In 2010 I was invited to speak at “Queer Question Time” at the Royal Vauxhall Tavern. I turned up to face a massive demonstration of well over 100 trans activists, shouting my name through loudhailers, jostling me as I tried to enter the building. Many of the protesters came inside for the event, and every time I opened my mouth, screamed over me.

The atmosphere became so toxic that one of my co-panellists, former London Mayor Ken Livingstone, was forced to say: “I’m sure that you do have people that put you in danger, but I can’t imagine Julie Bindel is one.” From the floor, an object was thrown across the room and hit me just below the eye. I was terrified, even though it turned out to be a lanyard, thrown by a trans woman.

But at least the event had been able to take place. From 2008, the UK National Union of Students (NUS) has included me on its “no-platform” list, alongside fascist groups and individuals. This meant that even when I was invited to speak at universities on male violence towards women and girls, the NUS would threaten to withdraw any financial support it had given to the organiser. Inevitably I would be dropped, publicly, to protect the event.

For many that still wasn’t enough. In 2011, upset that I was still invited to speak at the occasional university event, the NUS Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender (GLBT) conference voted to no-platform me once and for all. The motion summed up their spiteful worldview: “This conference believes that Julie Bindle [sic] is vile.”

And on it went. In Denmark, at a conference on how to end the harms caused to women by the global sex trade, I had to be escorted out of the venue by police officers after an angry mob started to bang loudly on the windows and scream through loudhailers. At another event, in Spain, where I was asked to deliver a keynote speech on rape, I was stopped from going on stage with minutes to spare. I later discovered that a major funder of the organising group had raised concerns about “transphobia, as reflected by the invitation to Julie Bindel to speak.”

Suggested reading

Why I became trans

By Debbie Hayton

I am, of course, not the only activist to be harassed. Over the years, I have made friends with a number of trans people who have also been harassed and de-platformed when attempting to have discussions with feminists such as myself. I’ve interviewed dozens of de-transitioners who have been cast asunder after expressing regret about transitioning. I also know many trans people who are perfectly happy with their decision — but none of them believe it is reasonable to demand that they encroach women-only spaces such as domestic violence refuges, rape crisis services, prisons or hospital wards.

The problem, after all, is not trans people. It is extreme trans activism — a men’s rights movement which has grown out of the backlash against feminism, in particular the type of feminism that seeks to eradicate male violence towards women and girls.

For me, the costs of being targeted in this way have been enormous — and not just in relation to my unpaid activism. The mob follows me around, preventing me from speaking on how to end male violence under the guise of “protecting trans-rights”. Whenever I speak about prostitution, an expertise of mine, I am told that I “clearly hate trans sex workers”, as though everything comes back to that.

Faced with such vitriol, my mental health took a hammering. I began to feel ashamed of the trouble I was causing for those who invited me to speak. I would find myself apologising to them, which they would graciously accept as though they had done something commendable by having me there, despite my decades of active feminism and public profile.

I started to wonder if perhaps I was a monster — and I was ridiculously grateful to those who did not hide or apologise for the fact that they had any public connection to me. My self-confidence fell to rock bottom, as I doubted my abilities, skills and knowledge. On hearing of the latest cancellation, I would end up highly distressed and in floods of tears, knowing that mud often sticks. I was offered a newspaper column only to have it withdrawn after several staff members announced they would publicly argue against my appointment.

I spent years trying to warn my fellow feminists that if they stood by and let them scapegoat me, eventually they would come after every dissenter. First on the list would be the lesbians, because we are a thorn in the side of misogynistic gay men. Yet when I appealed to academics to stand with me and not cancel an event I was speaking at, most turned the other cheek and decided a quiet life was better.

And so now, here we are. The witches are being drowned and the bitches burned at the stake. Kathleen Stock, Jo Phoenix, Selina Todd and many other women whose names you will never know are being put through hell.

But another, largely hidden cost of this war is the lost opportunity for solidarity. As a young lesbian, trans people were my friends and allies. That is how it should be. Those of us who live on the margins of society, and who are discriminated against, should have each other’s backs. We are all victims of this bloody battle.

In no area has this become more apparent than in our perpetual “gender wars”. My own views on the issue are fairly well-known: I believe human beings have chromosomes. I believe gametes exist. I don’t think homo sapiens are a hermaphroditic species. And I don’t think that the existence of creatures like the clownfish mean that humans are hermaphroditic.

My belief is that something exists called “gender dysphoria”, but we know almost nothing about what causes it, know almost as little about how to respond to it and know infinitely too little to be assertive about it — let alone enough to medically experiment on children.

Why do I mention this? Only because, as I first expressed publicly to Lionel Shriver some years ago, it has become clear that men and women are treated differently in this debate.

Suggested reading

Why I had to leave The Guardian

By Suzanne Moore

Perhaps I am wrong and I have merely been able to express my views on trans issues either because nobody has noticed what I have written or because everybody knows I am a lost cause and highly unlikely to be bullied into silence. But then it may simply be the fact that I am a man.

After all, countless female authors have written articles expressing scepticism towards the transgender movement — many of them more moderate than my own. Yet almost every time, I have watched in horror as online and offline mobs are stirred up against them and not me. Julie Bindel, Kathleen Stock, Selina Todd, JK Rowling, Abigail Shrier, Helen Joyce — some of these women have been subjected to physical assault; the rest threatened with it.

Joyce, whose excellent book Trans came out last month, is just the latest to be hounded. For her troubles — a deeply researched, humane and thoughtful piece of work — she was subjected to entirely baseless and libellous claims of, among much else, anti-Semitism. Because there is nothing a trans extremist won’t say to try to intimidate their opponents. Libel laws appear not to bother them.

Another of the things that all these attempted witch-hunts have in common is that they are orchestrated by a small number of highly motivated activists who behave as they do precisely because they are so deliriously certain that they are on the right side. And no one is more certain in this regard than the YouTuber Owen Jones.

Suggested reading

How artists lost their courage

By Jess De Wahls

Like me, Jones happens to be a gay man. But unlike me he seems to think that transgender activism is simply the latest, logical progression in the gay rights movement. I think that transgender people are as deserving of dignity and respect as anyone else in society. I never have, nor ever would, treat them with anything other than courtesy and respect.

But I remain deeply uncomfortable about the idea of a young effeminate boy being told he is actually a girl or a young tomboyish girl being told that she is a boy — and then being medically transitioned to approximate the opposite sex. Rather than being seen as an advance for gay rights, I see it as the opposite. In fact, knowingly or otherwise, it absorbs one of the most homophobic tropes of the past: that men and women should fit a particular stereotype.

But so high on certainty is Jones that he consistently uses his considerable social media platform to denounce “transphobes”, who invariably end up being women.

That isn’t to say that Jones has never targeted a man. He has, for example, on a number of occasions libelled me, and on one occasion I suspect tried to have me sacked. So much for his concern that gay people are underrepresented in journalism.

But none of this bothers me. What does bother me is that he was one of the people — along with the very weird gays at a pseudo-publication Pink News — who has repeatedly tried to destroy JK Rowling’s reputation after the country’s most successful author had the temerity to say that women exist. Jones, Pink News and others consistently suggested that Rowling had said things she had not said, deploying one of the nastiest tactics of this inquisition. They pretended that rather than expressing a view they disagreed with — and that Rowling had every right to hold — she was, in fact, attacking trans people.

Suggested reading

The transgender lobby wants to rewrite the law

By Maya Forstater

This is, of course, a deranged claim. But it is not an uncommon one. Last year, for instance, Jones was one of the more prominent figures in the witch-hunt against the then Guardian journalist Suzanne Moore. Moore happens to be someone I often disagree with. She is Left-wing; I am not. But by any standards, as a columnist she is one of the standout talents of her generation.

She is also one of the rare examples of a working-class woman who has made her way up the ranks of Britain’s commentariat solely through her own talent. But for Jones, any professed solidarity stopped the moment that a working-class woman dared to disagree with him on the issue of transgenderism. Eventually Moore was indeed pushed out of her position at The Guardian.

There is now a pattern. This week, Jones targeted another exceptionally talented female writer, Sarah Ditum, for the same reason: she disagreed with him about trans issues.

But this time, people started to notice the trend. As the Left-wing journalist Helen Lewis — formerly of the New Statesman — observed, it is becoming increasingly clear that Jones only seems to go for female journalists. She pointed out that a male journalist recently wrote something similar to Ditum, and did so in the low-circulation New Statesman to boot, yet Jones did not organise a pile-on against him.

More from this author

Why is the woke mob so scared?

By Douglas Murray

And so I wonder if it’s time to start treating Jones in the same unforgiving way he treats everybody else. In a discussion with the campaigner Nimco Ali, which Jones enjoys circulating online, he obsesses over a single stupid phrase (“bum boy”) used by Boris Johnson in a Telegraph column a quarter of a century ago. He then asks Ali, who is godmother to Johnson’s child, whether she believes he is a homophobe.

But let us apply the same endlessly uncharitable interpretation to him. Owen Jones’s problem is that he hates women. He is a misogynist. Using his skewed logic, we might even say that because he treated Nimco Ali with such visible disdain he also has a particular problem with women of colour.

This is how Jones and his supporters treat their opponents. They distort their opponents’ language and demonise them. So why not treat him in a similar manner? The answer, of course, is because it would be terrible to live in a world where the rules were set by such awful people.

According to Helen Lewis, a number of her mutual friends with Jones no longer speak to him because they believe he has become a bully. She also observed that Jones has spoken publicly about feeling like an outsider, and about the times he’s been the victim of abuse in the past.

If that’s true, one might expect Jones to act with more compassion. But self-reflection has never been his forte — as countless women are starting to discover.

My thoughts were with those former employees this week when I read that Rusbridger has another act left in him, this time as the editor of Prospect magazine. His appointment to the helm of the centre-left magazine did not cause many ripples beyond the confines of Twitter. But it was a reminder of an iron rule of British life, which is that prizes will always remain available for a certain sort of person on the Left. For them, no setback is ever forever. Often, it is hardly a setback at all.

One of the most perplexing aspects of every Conservative government is the continued reluctance of people on the Right to put themselves forward for public appointments. One reason for this, sometimes put forward by ministers themselves, is that people on the Right are often too busy pursuing private careers to spend their energies in the public sector. The argument goes that if they do move to the public sector, they only do it towards the end of their careers once they have made money.

There may be some truth to this, but it is at best a partial explanation. In recent years, the more likely reason is the tendency of the Left to hound anyone who dares encroach on what they regard as their territory. So a few years ago, when Toby Young was put forward as a non-executive member of the Office for Students, he was not merely deemed unsuitable for the job, but had almost every other part of his career torn from him.

It was the same with Sir Roger Scruton when he was appointed to an unpaid position on an advisory committee on house building. The activist Left used the opportunity to attempt to end in his career — even if it meant making up lies. In this climate of censoriousness, is it so surprising that Right-wingers and even centrists remain loath to put themselves forward for prominent appointments? Who would want every aspect of their personal life upturned for the sake of a job?

Suggested reading

Why I had to leave The Guardian

By Suzanne Moore

But as Rusbridger’s latest appointment demonstrates, such concerns are not shared by the Left. For by any reasonable standards, Rusbridger is a surprising person to appoint to any editorial position — and not only for his budgetary shortcomings.

The recent public admission by Roy Greenslade that he had been an active supporter of the IRA throughout his period of employment at The Guardian might normally have been dismissed as simply a matter of a foul personal conscience, had Greenslade not used his position at the paper to repeatedly push it in a pro-IRA direction. Greenslade’s pro-IRA opinions were well-known at the time — but when  Rusbridger was repeatedly warned about this, he decided that those telling the truth were liars.

You might say that this was a different era and different standards applied. But Rusbridger failed one of the most notable standards of our own era as well. During his time as editor, he allowed Greenslade to downplay the rape of a woman, Máiría Cahill, and its subsequent cover-up by members of the IRA. By then Rusbridger must have been well-aware that his employee was a supporter of the IRA.

Suggested reading

Substack is doomed to fail

By Will Lloyd

Why was that contributor allowed to smear a woman blowing the whistle on one of the IRA’s many disturbing practices? It is worth considering the outrage that would have erupted if, say, an editor of a Right-wing tabloid had allowed a female rape victim to be smeared in his pages. Their career would be finished. For Rusbridger, however, all he had to do was step down from an Irish media commission he was on.

Elsewhere, his career has continued to flourish. After leaving The Guardian he sailed into the comfortable position of Principal of Lady Margaret Hall — a position that it is impossible to conceive would ever have been offered to Paul Dacre. But last year, he announced his plans to leave his Oxford perch to spend more time addressing “the question of trust in media and society”.

No doubt he was confident that the revolving door would continue to work for him. Even if the old media wouldn’t give him another job, I suspect he felt safe in the knowledge there were plenty of other opportunities out there. Indeed, it is noticeable that in the wake of the Máiría Cahill scandal in March, Rusbridger did not resign his membership of other boards he was on.

Suggested reading

Oxbridge is killing journalism

By Justin Webb

He did not, for instance, resign from the deeply sinister Facebook Oversight Board, which decided that former US President Donald Trump should be barred from the platform. Perhaps he neglected to take that particular hit because the Board reportedly pays its members six-figure salaries for not much more than a dozen hours of work a week.

Yet in many ways, Rusbridger’s long tale of success is to be expected. After all, the Conservative Party may be the dominant political force in Britain. But there remains an unassailable culture that will always favour relatively unimpressive figures on the Left who preach about the importance of diversity but always take the jobs that they could so easily offer up to others.

If they have no business acumen, it doesn’t matter. If they have broken the standards of their trade, it doesn’t matter. If you’re lucky enough to be part of a small circle on the establishment Left, the world is your oyster. That is what keeps conservatives out of so many corners of public life. Britain still belongs to the Left – the Right just pretends to govern it.

Distraction has always been a triggering word for me. In a good way. My PhD supervisor told me I was “a woman of too many distractions”. This was because I was venturing into journalism, frustrated by the dead language of academia. She also asked me whether having a grant made any difference. It turns out that my distractions were paying the rent, as they have been ever since.

Even though I’d been writing for them for decades, editors consistently try to steer me towards “lifestyle” subjects for my column. One even suggests that I shouldn’t touch politics at all. And yet I won the Orwell Prize for political journalism the year before. This was for articles on Brexit and war remembrance, among other things.

Maybe they were steering me away from certain subjects because they thought they were dealing with some mad old bint, or maybe they were scared and had been indoctrinated into the cult of righteousness that the Guardian embodies. At its best, the paper deserves to see itself as a beacon of the Left, but lately it has been hard to define what the Left consists of beyond smug affirmation. During the Corbyn years the paper had a difficult job to do: support Labour but to be honest about Corbyn and his cronies’ monstrous failings.

Of course, not every editor is nervous; but the anxiety around certain issues remains tangible. It has often been this way and none of this is new to me. Bad columns don’t come from bad opinions, they come from a lack of conviction. Readers know that instinctively, so to steer writers away from what they want to write about is a strange thing for an editor to do.

But, then, journalism has been in a strange place lately, unsure of itself and what it should be doing and giving itself away for free. A case of low self-esteem one might say, but not in my paper which makes journalists redundant even as it pays moderators to delete comments calling me a cunt under one of my columns about Scottish independence. Have I got issues? More than enough to go round.

My relationship with the paper has always been slightly odd, I guess.

So, I finally get to write a piece on trans issues. And 338 “colleagues” write a letter of complaint to the editor, alluding to that column.

Strung out to cry

Now, six months on, I have resigned. And I am still trying to work out why I have been treated so appallingly.

My hurt is obviously minuscule compared to so much of what has happened in the world. It’s a flesh wound and I shouldn’t make a fuss. But, do I look like a doormat with Welcome written on it?

There were no such upset letters organised regarding the various hot Tory takes about difficult subjects that we sometimes publish. Seumas Milne even reprinted a sermon by Osama Bin Laden. What about that? Not a word. So what did I do that was so terrible? I stepped outside the orthodoxy.

Perhaps I need to put my denunciation into a larger context. At the end of the year one reflects, right?

When I was first at the paper, in the 1990s, there were no women on the Comment pages. My column featured in the “Women’s pages”, which was seen as Features. The editor at the time, Peter Preston, took me out for an awkward lunch after I won Columnist of the Year at the British Press Awards and said: “It must be nice to be a lady columnist. You can write about painting your toenails.”

I had been meaning to raise the idea of an actual pay rise, but I had no idea how to do it. I don’t understand middle-class people and money (not that Preston was middle class but certainly his environment was totally bourgeois). So when he asked if there was anything he could do to make me happier, I just blurted out: “Give me more money.”

Preston’s power lay in silence. He had, after all, spent time in an iron lung. His ability to not speak was quite something, and I admired his refusal to make others comfortable. In one way. But I may as well have just farted loudly. I had made some awful faux pas: asking to be paid the same as men who were not as good as me. That was the end of the meal.

The thing is, I had found out I was being paid less than half what my male counterparts were earning. So I got an agent. She wore very short skirts and had a way of rattling her BMW keys that seemed to unnerve men. The one and only time Preston ever called me was to frantically beg — no uncomfortable silences — that he would never have to see her again. Result.

Another part of not knowing my place was that I also asked to be moved from the Women’s pages to the Comment pages. They offered a Monday slot which would mean I had to work on Sundays. As the only woman in the section, and single parent to boot, I asked them if they had ever heard of equal opportunities. Again I was not only unclubbable but unspeakable. No movement was possible. Madly, I suggested that Hugo Young be moved. I didn’t even realise he was Jesus in the hierarchy, floating above us all.

Watch Suzanne Moore’s interview with UnHerd’s LockdownTV:

The truth was, and remains that I never fitted in at the Guardian. The personal becomes political at the moment you never feel clean enough. I was always somehow inappropriate. As the anthropologist Mary Douglas said, dirt is “matter out of place”. Matter out of place. I know this feeling. I would describe it as an essential part of my political formation, this knowledge that I could scrub myself raw and it would never be enough.

Back then, I was in the office a bit, but was never given my own desk and grew bored hearing conversations about cricket and having various guys yell the names of Oxbridge colleges that I hadn’t been to at me. Telling them that I had been to a polytechnic was information some of them basically couldn’t compute.

The only people who were nice to me were Will Hutton and Richard Gott, who I was very fond of, although it turned out he had taken “red gold” from the KGB and he had to resign. A shame really, but not unfamiliar to me as I had worked at Marxism Today, which it turns out had similar “funding issues”. Let’s not go there now. I liked Richard because he would tell me fabulous stories about finding Che Guevara’s body one day and the next talk about a great Spanish fashion designer. The politics guys were dull, living on Planet Westminster. Plus ça change.

Listen to Suzanne Moore’s interview with UnHerd’s LockdownTV:

Leaving home

Fickle power-crazed harpie that I was, though, I got poached. I love that word. Off I went to The Independent, enticed by Andrew Marr’s exciting vision of having no news on the front page. Also there was no question that I wouldn’t be on the Comment page. It was great working there, I loved it, though it was all to go tits up.

The relevance of this? This was my original sin. No one leaves The Guardian. I had left the cult.

It was to get worse, as when I left the Independent, I went to The Mail on Sunday. The Indy was collapsing and The Mail on Sunday offered me a bit more money and many more readers. I thought it would be interesting to talk to the people who would decide the future of the country and I was bored with preaching to the converted.

Plus, there was the challenge of doing a tabloid column. This is much harder than long rambling pieces: The Times’s Matthew Parris told me so, bless him. The great and the good told me again that I was making a terrible mistake and I would lose my voice. This was another denunciation of sorts. Once again I was in the headmistress’ office chewing gum and telling my teachers I didn’t need them. I left school at 16 because rules did not interest me. Reading did.

This new idea, though, of talking to floating voters appealed. Politically. The very idea! And yet they were the ones deciding who was in power. They are now the ones the Left still despises while needing to win over. The Left could not and still cannot represent those whose “false consciousness” stops them from seeing the true and rightful path.

I cannot say how much I despise this way of thinking, having grown up in a Tory-voting working-class household. Don’t ask me to hate those I love in the name of socialism.

Mind you, clearly at one point I did think just like this. I wanted them all executed and joined the Workers Revolutionary Party in this hope.

Then I grew up. Not much, it must be said.

Now I was at The Mail on Sunday I was no longer pure. The dark side had claimed me. This was utter bollocks but it’s the way so much of the Left thinks, in binary terms. Electoral politics, which could be about persuasion, instead becomes a series of war games.

The Marxist philosopher Eric Hobsbawm, of all people, thought it a good idea for me to talk to “Middle England”. Middle England is a fantasy in my book. An imagined community. Still, my contract said I could write what I liked and that was honored. Anyway, I presumed it was a temporary job, like all jobs in journalism. I didn’t even start hackery till I was 30. I had a life before that. Thank god.

I lasted for several years at the Mail on Sunday, although I hankered to write longer pieces, which I did elsewhere. The lesson I learned was that I could get through to the paper’s readers on almost every social issue except immigration, where I could make no headway. This was to become key to so much of what has followed since. Facts are not feelings.

As I live in North London, when I moved to the Mail on Sunday, most people I knew who had read me regularly in the Guardian or the Indy thought I had just died. Actually I had gone from a readership of 300,000 to two million. Some of us didn’t need the arrival of social media to know about bubbles. Some of us couldn’t see a bubble without wanting to burst it. It’s a class thing.

At one point I was writing columns for both the Mail on Sunday and the Guardian (somehow, neither audience noticed) and eventually a new editor arrived at the former and wanted changes. That was fair enough, so I recommitted to the Guardian.

Back to the nest

Back among the righteous. Now, in the North London playground, other parents would talk to me — I became a “Guardian Writer” again. Resurrected somehow, absolved, I was more and more aware of the conservatism that was rising, politically and culturally.

We were being enveloped in beigeness. Especially women. When I had taken my older children to school in the late 1980s and 1990s, we had all just dropped them off and hurried to work. By 2010, mothers hung around the playground: “Lattes or pilates?” They didn’t have jobs, and made cushions. They had husbands, dogs and camper vans. Violin lessons were a thing and no one seemed to notice that the school had been ethnically cleansed. This was the work of property prices. They thought David Cameron seemed nice. This is, it’s true, a class issue, and something that’s particularly noticeable in my corner of North London. But there was definitely a wider move in modern conservatism to push women back into the home.

The electoral coalition that had brought Labour to power was collapsing. I didn’t find this out from Planet Westminster — for all my sins, I met and lunched Cameron — but from the playground. He will be prime minister I told the pol guys at the Mail. They put this down revoltingly to me fancying him. How could a woman know such things otherwise?

During my time at the Mail on Sunday there was no politician to whom we did not have access. They knew they needed that paper’s support. I have dined with every Right-wing bogeyman and every Labour bore you can imagine.

Going back to The Guardian brought another challenge. What should I be doing? I would describe my approach as: lobbing in some Molotov cocktails, some cultural analysis and some jokes. Not to buy into groupthink and in the end . . . entertainment. People should want to read what you write. I know this is verboten: actual pleasure. I chose not to go into the office. I still did not belong, having strayed from the true and rightful path.

Some debates had remained the same, some had changed. The Labour Party seemed to be imploding. Again. So I returned to my real passion: cultural politics and good old-fashioned feminism.

Seeing Red

In 2012, I contributed to an anthology of essays edited by the great poet and journalist Cathy Galvin. The theme was red. My piece was about the need for female anger and it was called “Seeing Red”. Feminism had become way too polite and we were going backwards. Fast.

The essay was about how and why women should be angry. I quoted the Liberian Nobel Peace Prize winner Leymah Gbowee: “Anger is like water; the shape it takes comes from the container you put it in.” Let it flow, I said. How little I knew.

The book came and went and the following year 2013 my essay was reprinted in the New Statesman. It contained this line: “We are angry with ourselves for not being happier, not being loved properly and not having the ideal body shape — that of a Brazilian transsexual.”

That was wrong — in that it was of its time. Now it’s a different body shape: the Kardashian ribless tits and ass. But hey, let’s roll with the times.

Suddenly I was inundated with tweets about the murder rate of Brazilian transsexuals which is appallingly high. Many of them are forced into sex work (I prefer the term prostitution but the new feminism likes to pretend all jobs are equal when they clearly are not. “Phoebe got four A-stars but hopes to become a sex worker” is not something you hear often.) But it’s true I had carelessly used a certain phrase to talk about the then fashionable shape for women; slim hips and big breasts. Indeed, transsexual models did appear on catwalks.

While I was trying to emphasise the impossibility of the ideals for women, maybe I had been thoughtless. I hadn’t actually killed anyone. Yet the backlash that hit me, online and offline, was like nothing else. And you have to understand I have been threatened in the past by the fascist group Combat 18 for my columns — on multiculturalism, immigration, being pro-choice and in favour of gay rights…  My crimes, back then, were “nigger-loving”, “paki-loving”, and “whore”. Sometimes they called me a “Jew”. I had panic buttons installed in my house. I would get phone calls at home with threats saying they knew I had kids so they wouldn’t kill me, just disable me. As ever I just got on with it. What else can you do?

But this time around, after the Red piece, the abuse was from the Left. It was a taste of what would happen in Labour a few years later with anti-Semitism.

When the big row over anti-Semitism happened, it was strangely no surprise; it had all just finally risen to the surface. I had spent enough time on the far-Left to know how the righteous thought. And it’s not so different from the far-Right. In the name of rights for Palestinians, this most elemental racism was once more permissible. A giant conspiracy theory that places itself on the moral high ground was not discouraged by the Labour leadership. It disgusts me.

Yet the abuse I got over the trans issue was different, and worse than anything that had come before. Social media was beginning to flex its muscles. It was a mindfuck. Twitter was full of people telling me how they were going to rape me, decapitate me, ejaculate inside my head, burn me. This was all somehow to do with the Brazilian transsexual remark. The police came round but they didn’t really get Twitter. They said things like: “Don’t email them back, love”. The worst threats were from people who knew where I lived and said that they would give my then 11-year-old a good fisting.

The sewer was opening, a torrent of women-hatred was pouring out, no one seemed to be able to control it. (Was this helping trans people? Was it coming from them? Mostly I think not.) I made the mistake of losing my temper and insulted my antagonists back. I would not be lectured on feminism or womanhood.

There was a new word. TERF. It posed as an acronym — trans exclusionary radical feminist — but it was used as a slur. On this row went. The label “transphobe” may as well have been tattooed on my forehead. My own history and activism was irrelevant: my years with Act Up, campaigning around Section 28, my lifelong commitment to campaigning for abortion. Nada!

I watched woman after woman denounced as a TERF. Attempted suicides of young trans people were the fault of women like me. The murder of trans people by men was somehow refracted onto feminists. Masculinity is never the problem, you see. Masculinity sets the rules. Women are always the other, the outsiders. Yet suicidal ideation is a growing issue for all young people — I studied counselling and psychotherapy for two years at this time — and suicide rates for young women are rising, too.

The Right Side of History

Why did I speak up? I have no hatred or fear of trans folk. As a feminist, I would argue that gender is socially constructed, and it can be reconstructed.

Under the professions of radicalism and the vitriol and stupidity, though, I was witnessing a new conservatism, the revenge of gender stereotypes. Pink and blue. Girl toys and boy toys. The female role models, such as Sam Cameron and Kate Middleton, were mute. Nostalgia was everywhere dressed up as irony.

During the Aids crisis, I was involved in queer politics, where difference was argued over endlessly. But we were on the same side against a straight world that hated homosexuality and women who wanted equality. Then that world fragmented. The queer alliance was fragile and the theories began to be more important than the practice. When academia moves in, activism moves out.

At the same time, women were getting ahead in the workplace by imitating men and pretending that children didn’t interfere with their wage slavery, now defined as “having it all”. Some act to pull off. I tried and failed. I had three children and worked the entire time. In my entire life, I have had eight weeks’ maternity leave.

Gender roles were becoming more fixed even as gay rights campaigners won the “victory” of gay marriage. I agreed with David Cameron that this was a basically conservative move and it cost nothing, and made people feel somehow that they were a bit modern. Gay rights and feminist campaigners were no longer the natural allies they had once been.

Looking back, I see that by the late Eighties and early Nineties, I had already picked up on something that perturbed me. A denial of female biology, of our ability to name and define our experience. Some of this came from certain strands of postmodern theory where objective reality gives way only to multiple subjectivities. A kind of gender tourism became possible. Everyone could be everything. A new kind of feminism came into being, one in which flesh and blood women and our desires became somehow a bit dull. Feminism without women. Grow a child inside you and push it out of your body and tell me this is a construct. (NB: no one has to have children.)

I believe quite simply bodies exist. I have been there when babies are born. And been there when people die. I know what happens when bodies no longer work…what shall we call my view? Materialism?

As trans ideology came into being, to question this was to question trans people’s “right to exist” — how is that even possible? They obviously exist! — when really we were questioning the ways in which we think about gender and oppression and how complex this all is.

It remains so. Yet somehow morality had entered the debate. To be good — ie, modern — one didn’t interrogate the new trans orthodoxy. Sex was no longer binary, but a spectrum, and people didn’t need to change their bodies to claim a new identity. All this was none of your business, and had no effect on your life.

I disagreed. By 2018, the atmosphere was poisonous. A fellow columnist at The Guardian replied to a message I sent about being civil at the Christmas do with: “You’ve prompted the most sickening transphobia, for which you have never apologised, you called islamophobia a myth and you publicly abuse leftwingers.” This person went on to say that I felt insecure “because a new generation of younger leftists have caught the public mood”. I didn’t even understand the accusation of Islamophobia. More broadly, I understood that the possibility of a left-wing government was exciting, but unlike half the paper, I didn’t believe that Corbyn had actually won in 2017. I also didn’t like the macho, bullying culture around him propped up by writers at my place of work.

I complained to my editor about this person at the time but was told that as neither of us were on staff, nothing official could be done. Really?

So there we have it. Here comes the “new generation”: the new Left, same as the old Left. Full of misogyny, utter pricks and those with the emotional intelligence of whelks. Misogyny in the name of socialism. Again.

Ladies who Lurch

Around this time I was in Armenia covering a story on foetal sex selection. Women were aborting female fetuses as they wanted boys. The UN population fund was doing fantastic work there, knowing that as fertility rates drop, sex selection becomes ever more prevalent. This world was a long, long way from those people who think sex is just a matter of personal choice. Foetal scans at 12 weeks mean generations of girls go “missing”. In rural Armenia I visited class rooms of 27 little boys and 5 girls, while at home I was told sex is simply “assigned at birth”.

Other women were now starting to be disturbed by the idea of transwomen with working male genitalia in womens spaces. The idea of the predatory trans person is not one I am particularly invested in, really. We are talking about a tiny percentage of a tiny percentage of the population. I am not that bothered about toilets or changing rooms. My youth was spent in gay clubs and with wonderful trans people who looked after me in New Orleans. Refuges, though? Prisons? Surely that can be sorted out and it has to be.

No, what I most didn’t and don’t like is the erasing of female bodies and female voices and female experience and our ability to name it.

What I care about fundamentally is the right of women to meet in single sex spaces and assert themselves as a class, a sex class — one that is oppressed by a patriarchal system. By men, even sometimes the good ones. As for the bad ones, they are the ones who rape and kill trans folk, too.

Feminism has to be able to talk about bodies. Many of the advances women have made in my lifetime — reproductive rights, more choice over how we give birth, discussions of menstruation and menopause — depend on biology, the biology we were now told was irrelevant.

When I walked past the Woman’s Place meeting in Brighton at the Labour Party conference last year, people were banging on the windows. More TERF-hunters. It hardly affected me, I was in a blur of distress about anti-Semitism, and a friend of mine who was dying. Her lung and bone cancer was missed and she had been told to do more yoga. Bodies fail us all in the end.

What sort of people would stop other people meeting, though? What good did it do the cause of trans people, some of whom were present at the event? Why can feminists not organise?

The moral climate had shifted from “trans rights are something we need to discuss and we must support trans people in all the ways we can” to a denial that such rights may at certain points compete with women’s rights. Friends were under threat, no-platformed in schools and universities if they questioned what had become a fixed set of beliefs.

Women who said that they were subject to threats of violence were told they had to suck it up. Any discussion of trans rights had now mutated into a denial of the existence of trans people and therefore actual violence.

Debate became murder

So while I and many others were receiving vile threats, we were somehow also responsible for the awful violence that is meted out to trans people. Social media blurred the conversation: very few trans people are murdered in Britain (around one a year) but the American stats are worse, so these are the ones used. In Britain at least two women a week are killed — estimated at 3.5 during lockdown — but women are never a marginalised group. We have it all!

In the States, trans healthcare is not free, either. So when American feminists tell us we are “behind” on trans rights, it rankles somewhat. Get your own house in order. We live in a country where abortion is free and legal and where health care for trans people, though not perfect, is free; and we have maternity leave. Neither country is perfect.

Various people who had not been there for the fight around Section 28 told us this was a re-run of that era, with trans folk being described as paedophiles and predators in the place of gay men. (As ever, lesbians were somehow invisible. Except the ones who wanted to transition.) This is revisionism. No one was being asked to give up anything for Section 28 to be dropped.

Gay people have chosen how they were to be referred to. In the trans debate, however, women were not consulted about their terms of reference. They are “Cis”. And “Cis” women are higher up the privilege ladder than trans women. We had become the oppressors — a subset of men.

Then came the rise of “non-binary”. Phew! Finally! By any definition of non-binary, this is what I am. The knowledge that since I was a tiny child my inner and outer selves did not match in any way. Knowingly, I upped the signifiers of femininity to be able to use the power of my mind. This was what I got in trouble with Germaine Greer for: hair, heels, tits. To me, just my drag. Presumably it is the same for everyone.

The Bad Column

Which brings us to March 2020. Eventually, I was allowed by a great editor to write about how gender critical women wanted to assert their basic rights. A professor of working-class history at Oxford, Selina Todd, was disinvited from an event. I noted, referring to this incident, that it is women again, never men, who were losing jobs, incomes and public platforms if they spoke up. Many of them were emailing me: not on one side or another, but generally worried. I wrote that I believed biological sex to be real and that it’s not transphobic to understand basic science. To my mind the column was fairly mild.

It was published. The next thing I know there are loads of people on social media thanking me for saying what needed to be said. And then another lot: the “die in a ditch terf” lot, amazingly telling me to die in a ditch. Again.

Seven years of this sort of abuse now, and no one from the Guardian had ever spoken to me about it. I just carried on. Do they care? Why should they? They should care, if they truly want more “diversity” in journalism, but that’s a lie which liberals tell themselves. How can you bring on working-class writers if you damn them for not knowing the codes upon which the media runs? If you won’t tolerate the heresies of outsiders? If — gasp — they haven’t been to Oxbridge?

In the new orthodoxy, where do I fit in? What is my place in the tickbox set of Left beliefs? I was Brexity, though I voted Remain. I want independence for Scotland and a united Ireland. I want England to be England. I don’t believe in the monarchy or the UK. I think biological sex is real… I have never hidden any of these views.

My experience is that I have been censored more by the Left than the Right and it gives me no pleasure to say that. Laziness of thought is my big fear, this unthinking adherence to some simplistic orthodoxy. There are values and there is experience and there are people. Complicated fuckers, all of us. The Guardian. Labour-supporting except for its Lib Dem blip in 2010. Endlessly “good”. Yeah; right.

I was discussed at “conference”, the newspaper morning meeting open to all: editorial, digital, advertising, everyone. (It looks like equality, but some people sit on the floor and others get seats, let’s put it that way.) I never go in to the office, or attend conference, but it was reported that a trans woman developer, who had already resigned some weeks earlier, resigned again that morning, because my words, my column, had made her feel unsafe. According to the news story: “the column was ‘the straw that broke the camel’s back,’ the trans employee said, following a series of pieces that pitted trans people against women and against women’s rights.”

Apparently, my fellow columnist Hadley Freeman defended me and I am grateful for that. It appeared to be an extremely upsetting incident for all concerned. I am sorry that it happened. No one will believe that, but I am.

The Letter

Then came the letter to the editor, expressing dismay about the Guardian being a publication “hostile to trans rights and trans employees”, since three trans people had apparently resigned in the last year. This was news to me. Although I wasn’t named in the letter, it was very clearly a response to my column. Three hundred and thirty-eight people signed it.

Not one of them had the decency to pick up the phone to me. Should The Guardian be a welcoming place for trans people to work in? Yes of course it bloody well should. Should it be a place where we discuss complicated issues? Again yes.

The letter made it clear to me that it wasn’t just social media activists who wanted me out of the paper. My fellow staff were gunning for me: time to hand over my job to the young Corbyn crew who spend their lives slagging off the mainstream media but cannot wait to be part of it. Could they write a good sentence? Say something from the heart? Does that matter? Apparently not, they simply think the right things.

The letter was then leaked to Buzzfeed and then the names were made public. I was devastated to find people who I like and had worked with had done this. In 30 years of journalism I have often disagreed with people and had stand-up rows with them but no one has ever done something so underhand as to try and get someone fired because of one column.

I listed the names of my denouncers on Twitter. I read one of them saying I doxxed them, not the case as the names were already in the public domain. I wrote a distraught and emotional letter to the people who I knew, asking how could they do this? What kind of victory had they achieved?

I felt fucking awful. Well, how would you feel if 338 colleagues basically bullied you? But off I went to Amsterdam to do a mushroom retreat because life goes on.

Mistakenly, I thought my editors would stand up for me because that was my experience at other papers; or they might issue a public statement. They didn’t. There was some internal email, and I hear it was discussed at the Scott Trust, which governs the paper. What this means I genuinely have no idea. Nor do I understand what editorial independence means any more. Do they? Not in my book.

This to me was utter cowardice. Shouldn’t you stand by your writers? But on this issue the Guardian has run scared. I suspect this is partly because of Guardian US sensitivities and, partly because the paper receives sponsorship from the Open Society foundation, which promotes trans rights.

This also might explain some of the utter gender gobbledegook we run about how HRT has taught someone to cry and all categories are porous. Whatever.

As a feminist, I have limited interest in all this, in the holes in which other people do or do not wish to put their bits. Sorry it’s rather dull. I am with Foucault in that I don’t believe sexuality is the essential soul or truth of an individual. My concern with this issue is only to do with the rights of women and the welfare of children.

So much of the discussion is about trans women, but the unhappiness of teenage girls must concern us. We have known since 2017 — earlier in fact — that there has been a huge uptick in female teenagers wanting to transition. Presenting to the Tavistock with self harm, eating disorders or suicidal ideation, these girls may end up on puberty-blocking hormones and then go on to have surgery. And for some of them that indeed may be the right thing to do. For others though, it clearly isn’t and to question that is not anything phobic, it is to care.

Why, as feminists, can we not talk about this epidemic of young women who cannot bear their bodies and the thought of what is happening to them: breasts, periods, unwanted sexual attention, the works? Why can you not be a young butch lesbian these days?

In an ideal world, feelings of masculinity or femininity could be achieved without surgery or hormones that may cause infertility. We are far from such a world and I respect the decisions of adults who go through this long, difficult process in often impossible circumstances. Brave, brave people.

My argument to my newspaper, though, has always been if we don’t have this discussion then the Right will, and indeed that has been the case. The Spectator and the Times have covered stories we haven’t, and I have had to write what I wanted to in the Telegraph. Investigative journalism means going into no-go areas. Why can’t we? The liberal Left looks not virtuous but naïve.

Less sexy subjects such as the appalling low rate for rape convictions, the Covid pandemic causing women to lose jobs and be forced back into the home, the complete lack of childcare… all of these things fall by the wayside when the main discussions of feminism appear to be by men telling us men can just say they’re women and if we say otherwise we deserve all the rape threats we get.

There is no actual interrogation of gender and I say this as someone who has written about and studied this subject for decades. There is a simply a belief system.

The Witches They Cannot Burn

For such thoughts, I have been denounced, alongside bigger and better people such as JK Rowling. The words “compassion” and “kindness” are often used by trans activists. Can we all just not be kinder? Well, yes … I never have and never would be unkind to someone because of their gender identity. I reserve the right not to kowtow to certain blokes, though. What I would like is some kindness towards women, some empathy towards our fears and our concerns, but I don’t see much of that. What have you done for us lately?

Since my denouncement, I have received nothing but support from all sorts of people in private, including many at the paper who are now afraid for their jobs. I didn’t stop writing, I carried on. “Don’t mention the war, Suzanne.” It felt quite schizophrenic, the split between the groundswell of women who are thinking along the same lines as me and the lack of support from the institution I work for.

The censorship continues and I cannot abide it. Every day another woman loses her job and a witch-burning occurs on Twitter. My fear is not about trans people but an ideology that means the erasure of women — not just the word, but of our ability to name and describe our experience. We are now cervix-havers, birthing parents, people who menstruate. On Amnesty’s latest posters to support the women’s strike in Poland, the literal translation from Polish for the thousands of women who were protesting the awful tightening of abortion laws was: “I stand with people in Poland”. Which people? Women forced to give birth on a plastic sheet to a dead baby with foetal defects? Say it.

Nor do I buy the idea that all of this is a purely generational issue. In part it is, sure, but it can at times be an issue of unfettered misogyny and a failure to understand that many women’s rights are fairly recent and always contested.

The Left — well, I guess I mean the Labour Party with its mad insistence on conformity — just stopped listening. As the Corbyn project collapsed, the cultural battle around trans issues became a proxy war of insane proportions. The Labour leadership contenders were ordered to sign a pledge which called Woman’s Place a “hate group”. With the exception of Keir Starmer, they did. “Transphobe” was now a slur to throw at anyone who didn’t keep the faith. You lose the electorate so what happens. Do you reflect?

No, apparently armed with misread Gramsci and a smidgeon of Chomsky you decide you will redefine common sense without persuading people to your side. Calling everyone unconvinced by your politics racist homophobes as an electoral strategy never sat well with me. Call me precious. The utter failure of the People’s Vote told us that, surely? The haute Remain position consisted mostly of telling Leave voters they were idiots.

Likewise, alienating women who are lifelong Labour supporters, because of their refusal to sign away what they feel to be their hard-won rights, is a performative gesture that I am unconvinced provides any actual “wins” for anyone.

Yet this one tiny issue has somehow come to dominate every debate now on feminism. It’s boring. Something has got terribly skewed here. Something has been lost and I am lost in it.

There is obviously bigger and more important stuff to deal with than the issue of the liberation of women. There always is. My hurt at being ejected from cults I never belonged in anyway is not self-pity. That dissolves the moment I have the freedom to speak my truth.

The things I want to talk about — the deep unhappiness of women, the suffocating girdle of masculinity, the ever growing and bleak inequalities, the falling fertility rates which will mean girls don’t get to be born, rape as a war crime, FGM — these things are hard enough to do anyway. To understand that women’s bodies are used and abused however we might feel about them is not a comfortable place to be. Our relationship with our bodies is not straightforward. I am sure it’s the same for many men.

Now that I have personally transitioned — my uterus no longer works, my estrogen has dropped — I have even less fucks to give than I did before. You can denounce me as much as you like but you cannot deny my life’s work of living somehow inside this female body. You cannot tell me it’s not real. It’s as real as it gets.

This, then, is a story about a woman journalist who “made it”, who never thought it would be easy.

This is a story about a feminist who started to see things going backwards and wanted to tell the world. This is not a story about trans people at all. Really it isn’t. It’s a story about not belonging. Not knowing my place.

Sure I understand the clichéd trajectory that as one grows older, one moves from Left to Right. Actually, I would say in my case this is not so: class politics becomes ever more pertinent to me, not less. In these fearful reactionary times, I will not be fearful and I will not be reactionary, but I will centre women and children and the possibility of freedom, as I always have, at the heart of my work.

The consequences of this have been tough in a tough year. The support both within and without the paper for which I write has been huge and I am grateful for it. I remain flame-retardant.

All this is then just a little story about being given a warning to shut up. And refusing to. I have had a lifetime of such warnings. Class will out. This is just something I wanted to tell you about a woman saying no. And the ways we say no.

That’s all it is. That’s the rub.

That’s all it takes sometimes.

Listen to Suzanne Moore’s interview with UnHerd’s LockdownTV:

A few letters, it was reported, had been found from the Belfast-born author to a US scientist, discussing the tragic early death of the American’s son, and recalling the passing of Lewis’s wife. “You tell a most moving story. I too have lost what I most loved. Indeed unless we die young ourselves, we mostly do”, wrote Lewis. “We must die before them or see them die before us. And when we wish – and how agonizingly we do, o how perpetually! – it is entirely for ourselves, for our sakes not theirs.”

It was nothing that Lewis hadn’t in essence said before, but it showed yet again how in this age when we fetishise the blackening of whited sepulchers, Lewis seems to escape the purge. He was convinced that within five years of his death he would be forgotten, but since 1963 – he died on the same day as President Kennedy and Aldous Huxley – his influence has instead grown exponentially. His books sell in enormous numbers, films are made of them, and there has even been a play and then a movie, Shadowlands, about his late-life romance.

Lewis, author of the Narnia stories, Miracles, Till We have Faces, Surprised by Joy and so many other implicit and direct defences of Christianity has, up to now at least, largely escaped character attack because there’s just not very much ammunition for the usual assassins to exploit. Some of the female characters in his fiction are hardly champions of liberation, and he was a relatively typical product of his era, but little if anything stands out as a cause for concern. Not, of course, that this always matters to those who cancel therefore they are.

More from this author

There's nothing saintly about anti-Semitism

By Michael Coren

I’m not sure if it’s still there, but some years ago there was a poignant if seldom noticed symbol in The Kilns in Oxford, the long time home of Lewis. It was the outline of a mezuzah: the small container attached to the doorposts of Jewish homes, containing parchment on which is written the Shema. It was there because one of Lewis’s two stepsons had asked to adopt the birth faith of his late mother, Joy Davidman. Lewis, the world-renowned champion of Christianity, had asked Jewish friends how he could best accommodate the boy.

It was a gently noble gesture, and that decency, or goodness if you like, is particularly significant at Easter as Christians, inevitably, face the now standard taunts not only from social media atheists but from television cynics who really should have better and braver things to do.

Lewis was most prominent between the mid 1930s and early 60s and as such inhabited a dramatically different age — good Lord, the BBC couldn’t get enough of him! But a snobbish disdain for faith had already emerged, particularly in the universities where he taught. He addressed this in his 1952 book Mere Christianity, based on a series of highly popular radio broadcasts.

“There is no need to be worried by facetious people who try to make the Christian hope of Heaven ridiculous by saying they do not want to spend eternity playing harps. The answer to such people is that if they cannot understand books written for grown-ups, they should not talk about them. All the Scriptural imagery (harps, crowns, gold, etc.) is, of course, a mere symbolical attempt to express the inexpressible. People who take these symbols literally might as well think that when Christ told us to be like doves, He meant that we were to lay eggs.”

Suggested reading

When Christ conquered Caesar

By Tom Holland

Those who allegedly couldn’t understand “books written for grown-ups” knew exactly who they were. As a consequence they made Lewis’s life at Oxford progressively more difficult, which is one of the reasons why he moved to a more accepting Cambridge in 1954. But even then, his insistence of defending what he saw as Christian truth to a mass audience as well as within his own circle lost him support and allies.

Rather like Tolkien, a friend and another Easter warrior, he was always far more appreciated by his readers than by his peers. If he hadn’t become a Christian and hadn’t written children’s stories he would have been far more respected within the academy, especially for his remarkable lectures, and for his books The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition, and English Literature in the Sixteenth Century Excluding Drama.

Yet while he may not have been given his proper place in university circles, there is something almost hagiographical in the way he’s regarded in Christian circles, and within the Lewis industry there is, it must be said, a certain dreamy nostalgia. He’s the quintessential caricature of a fantasy don: all tweed and tea and leather armchairs. It’s no accident that he is a virtual cult in the United States, especially and in some ways ironically — he drank and smoked — within the evangelical community. American Protestants may be politically influential but they lack intellectual heroes, and Lewis does very nicely out of fulfilling this role.

Suggested reading

In a bewildering world, Easter brings hope

By Graham Tomlin

There are numerous profound thinkers making the Christian case today, but none of them wrote a children’s story as timeless as The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe, or something as deliciously and mischievously clever as The Screwtape Letters – if you’ve never heard John Cleese’s recording of the book about a senior devil writing to his junior, grab hold of it immediately. Or chronicled in a haunting book, A Grief Observed, how it felt to lose a spouse, where he observed that “No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid.”

He once wrote, “I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen. Not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.” That’s not always an acceptable sentiment more than 50 years after the man’s death, but Lewis never worried about what was acceptable, only about what he considered to be important. That, at heart, is why old Jack Lewis, father of Aslan and, as he said about his 1929 coming to Christianity, “the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England”, simply won’t go away, even for The Guardian.

“Without the support network that I have, I am not sure I would be here to tell the story, to give this interview today” a noticeably subdued looking Maugham told the nation, who then compared himself with the television presenter Caroline Flack. Flack had taken her own life having suffered an avalanche of hostile publicity after being charged with an assault on her boyfriend. Maugham was suggesting he too had contemplated something similar after falling vertiginously from EU defending ‘hero’ to cross-dressing fox killer.

Thank you for @BBCr4today for inviting me on – at 7.40am – to discuss how it feels to be at the heart of a media hatestorm. https://t.co/K19e4qzOfn

— Jo Maugham (@JolyonMaugham) March 9, 2020

Spiked immediately called out his ‘shameless hypocrisy‘. And yes, hypocrisy there was. Maugham hasn’t been shy of orchestrating a social media pile-on himself, and used all his considerable legal clout to pursue young BeLeave founder Darren Grimes though the courts with all the sympathy of a chasing pack of hounds.

The instinct to say that Maugham deserves all he got is undeniably powerful. He had it coming. I know why people feel that way. But something else needs to be said here too, something about the redemptive power of disgrace. Maybe that sounds too grand, too theological; but I have met quite a number of disgraced people in my time, and I find that their experience often changes them very much for the better. The charge of hypocrisy no longer quite sticks.

Suggested reading

How I found God on Twitter

By Darren Grimes

I received an unsolicited communication from a well-known book publisher the other day. We are thinking about commissioning a book on hypocrisy, it went, and we thought you’d be the perfect person to write it. I wasn’t sure whether to be flattered or offended.

But they were correct to guess that this is a subject that fascinates me, not least because the whole question of hypocrisy focuses attention on that gap between how we present ourselves publicly, and the reality of our actual lives. This gap exists even in the most apparently morally punctilious among us — perhaps especially so. Yes, for some of us the gap is negligible. But, for others, the elastic that holds together the public and the private is stretched to near breaking point. Perhaps this is why many unconsciously long to be exposed, the tension unbearable, the release longed for. Lies are a weight to carry. And there is often much relief in being able to lay down the burden of deceit.

A new series of Confessions begins again next week. And this seems like a good point to take stock of what I have learnt, not least as it applies to the very notion of confession and what sense it might make in a generally post-religious world. The Confessions title is a bit of a tease, of course. Yes, some guests have made personal revelations. I won’t ever think of Bondi Beach in the same way again after Iain Dale’s account of an encounter there. But though this kind of stuff is fun, it is absolutely not the point of the podcast.

What we can learn from the disgraced

Subscribe:

Partly, Confessions is a way of exploring interesting people’s big ideas. What also fascinates me about my guests, most of whom live under the bright sun of public gaze, is how they negotiate the relationship between what they profess and who they are. And this is tricky territory, not least because the public gaze is often unspeakably cruel, wanting to expose and punish people for tensions that exist within their own lives.

A number of Confessions fans have challenged me that I am insufficiently robust at interrogating those contradictions within the lives of my guests. Partly, this is because I do not believe I have earned the right to do so. I am a priest first of all, not a journalist. And the role of self-appointed public prosecutor is not one I have any appetite for. Indeed, I rather despise the species of journalism that exposes, with mock horror and fake surprise, the fissures upon which all human life is precariously poised. And its talk of ‘morality’ is mostly a cover for cruelty.

Suggested reading

Spare us the bedtime morality tales

By Giles Fraser

Most of us do not have bodies buried under the patio so to speak, and we are not all pretending to be something else. The words attributed to the former Times foreign correspondent Louis Heren, “When a politician tells you something in confidence, always ask yourself, why is this lying bastard lying to me”, represents an approach to the search for truth that presumes the worst of human beings. And this distorts the fact that most people are trying to do the right thing, however compromised we may sometimes be. Nonetheless, the human condition is richly variegated, and the different parts of our lives don’t always fit neatly together.

In other words, the exposé doesn’t necessarily tell the whole truth. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer puts it in his Letters and Papers from Prison (arguably, the holiest book of the 20th century) there is a certain journalistic model which insists that it is only when a prominent person is exposed in their underpants or bath that the truth about them is revealed. This is often terribly misleading. The truth of a human life is often far more open to view when it is laid out as an extended narrative, as a life lived; it is just as much a horizontal phenomenon as a vertical one.

And, I hope, this manner of approach — my manner of approach — elicits the sympathy of the audience as much as it generates fresh perspectives. It is particularly pleasing when a listener describes their surprise at discovering how much they identify with someone with whom they thought they had little in common. This too is the bearer of truth, and one that challenges the audience as much as the guest.

This week we recorded Rev Jonathan Aitken’s Confession. Aitken was a former Conservative minister who served a number of months at Her Majesty’s pleasure after perjuring himself on oath (and on the Bible) after lying about who paid his hotel bill at the Ritz in Paris. Doubling down in his denial, Aitken famously took the Guardian to court: “If it falls to me to start a fight to cut out the cancer of bent a twisted journalism in our country with the simple sword of truth and the trusty shield of fair play, so be it.” Aitken, of course, was lying. But the Guardian’s exposure of his deception, though absolutely the correct thing to do, was only the beginning of the story.

Suggested reading

How the Church lost its flock over Brexit

By Giles Fraser

The Reverend Jonathan Aitken now takes confessions himself, sometimes in Pentonville prison, where he serves as a chaplain. And I suspect that he is just the sort of person the lags are queuing up to confess to. After all, what better person with whom to share one’s sins than a man who knows a thing or two about having been there himself. Someone who can speak about judgment without being themselves judgmental — isn’t that precisely what we want from a confessor?

This is not supposed to be any sort of defence of Jolyan Maugham. I have used his example to speak in generalities. But if you can filter out that shrill cry of hypocrisy for just a moment, there is often a kind of wisdom that accompanies disgrace which we all might benefit from listening to.

I find the disgraced generally kinder people: more forgiving. Wouldn’t it be something if Maugham could find it within himself to say sorry for his own persecutory behaviour? But it’s more than this. Disgrace tends to release people from the hypocrisy-inducing effects of personal ambition and excessive self-regard. And the experience of disgrace allows people to finally come clean about who they really are. “It is a joy to be hidden and a disaster not to be found” wrote the psychoanalyst D.W.Winnicott. That perfectly describes the dynamics of confession.

Remember the game of hide and seek you played as a child? On the one hand, you don’t want to be found – that is the point of the game. But also, nor do you want people to give up looking for you — not caring enough to come and find you. In psychoanalytic terms, hiding is a strategy of protection. And an understandable one given the threats that exists out there. But not being found is worse. This is the territory that the confession inhabits. It is all about the tension that exists between wanting to be recognised and yet feeling there is something unbearable about this too.

In public life, this tension is exacerbated by the heightened threat of public opprobrium for transgression. And so public figures are obliged to negotiate an exaggerated version of hide and seek, and in their struggles with this game they reveal in bold a similar tension that is at work within us all.

You may call it hypocrisy. I call it being human.

It is taken for granted that civilisation is on the precipice of disaster. Optimistic voices can still be found, if one searches judiciously for them, but these are typically drowned out by jeremiahs and their terrifying predictions of impending doom.

We are living through another Morbid Age, as the historian Richard Overy named his 2009 book about the fear and paranoia that gripped British intellectual life in the years between the wars. The difference today is that fears of war, eugenics and psychoanalysis have given way to fears around climate catastrophe, immigration and the collapse of capitalism.

Referencing a quote by the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm, who, while studying at Cambridge wondered whether very soon he and his contemporaries might be dead, Overy’s book asks why so many in the 1930s were ready to contemplate “the death of civilisation in a country whose political and social system has proved almost impervious to the savage violence and upheavals that scarred the history of the rest of Europe”.

Hobsbawm’s fear of imminent catastrophe was more understandable, perhaps, in 1939 when Adolf Hitler had recently annexed Czechoslovakia. But many similar sentiments appear in the media today. Moreover, they are often espoused with undisguised relish. A period of supposedly relentless advance — in this case the Nineties — has given way to a prevailing paradigm of decline and collapse.

Suggested reading

Eric Hobsbawm: guiding light or 'evil sod'?

By D.J. Taylor

Trump has provided the lightning rod for much of the recent catastrophism. “People aren’t wrong to point out that Trump certainly appears similar to Hitler in some ways,” wrote the former deputy editor of the Guardian opinion pages, Kira Goldberg, shortly prior to Trump’s election.

Once Trump was elected, the hysteria was dialled up a notch. The new President was about to replace democracy with a fascist dictatorship. The Observer ran a special edition of its New Review supplement comparing our own era to that of the 1930s, based on Trump’s apparent similarities with the Führer. Newspaper columnists encouraged readers to pick up a copy of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (which they did in droves, despite Airstrip One having little in common with 21st century America) together with books by Philip Roth and Sinclair Lewis about fascist takeovers of the government.

Three years on from the election of Trump, who has been an embarrassingly incompetent President but who has not, as yet, ushered in the Fourth Reich, it is now climate change that is about to bring the curtain down on civilisation. The Guardian announced in 2018 that: “We have 12 years to limit climate change catastrophe, warns UN.” This year, Extinction Rebellion have taken to disrupting commuters while the eco-celebrity Greta Thunberg has received plaudits from the great and the good for telling us that we have “stolen” her “dreams” and her “childhood”.

Indeed, predictions of the imminent demise of not just capitalism, but civilisation itself, have gone mainstream. “Without us noticing, we are entering the postcapitalist era,” wrote Paul Mason in the Guardian in 2015. As in the Thirties, many in the political centre are fretting about the end of capitalism too. “Capitalism is in crisis — and business leaders know it,” reads the headline of a recent article by CNBC Editor-at-Large John Harwood.

A further delve into some of the articles prophesising the end of capitalism reveals a circularity to much of the reasoning. If capitalism is killing the planet, then, ergo, “Ending climate change requires the end of capitalism,” as a recent headline in another opinion piece for The Guardian read. Each catastrophic event (or the potential for a catastrophic event) is conveniently marshalled as evidence for the correctness of everything one already thought about the world.

Suggested reading

Why do the Greens make so many see red?

By Tom Chivers

Apocalyptic anti-immigration tomes are also popular. Such books usually attach themselves to the notion that ‘the West’ is facing catastrophic decline unless it curbs the number of foreigners settling within its borders. Again, crisis is evoked to drive home a particular political argument. The supposedly terminal “crisis of late capitalism” is music to the ears of the activists who wish to see capitalism replaced by socialism, whereas the impending “death of Europe” has an obvious appeal to those who wish to fortify Britain’s borders.

Solipsism probably plays a role in some of the recent doom-mongering. We all want to live in epochal times because we all want to feel we have a consequential historical role. Or at least the average political activist does. The Nineties cult film Fight Club captured well the mood of anomie when such historical purpose is lacking. The film’s protagonist, Tyler Durden, laments the spiritual emptiness characteristic of consumer capitalism at the supposed ‘End of History’. “We’re the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression.”

For many intellectuals, journalists and activists, locating this purpose seems to be synonymous with existential crisis. Thus when the planes crashed into the twin towers on 11 September 2001, the polemicist Christopher Hitchens wrote of a feeling of “exhilaration”. The subsequent ‘War on Terror’ invoked a renewed struggle for civilisation against barbarous Jihadists. Moreover, the defence of ‘our way of life’ functioned as a convenient rallying cry to embark on a particular course of action — in the case remodelling the Middle East — that those who evoked it were already set upon.

None of this is meant to dismiss pessimism about the future, which is not entirely without substance. There is certain kind of Pollyanna commentary, perhaps best encapsulated by professor Stephen Pinker and liberal websites such as Quillette, that is so attached to the status quo that every example of human suffering is repackaged as a mere blip in an upward tick of unstoppable progress. The transparent purpose of such material is to sooth the consciences of those who have made their peace with the status quo.

Suggested reading

Trust conservatives to save the planet

By Giles Fraser

The “culture of crisis”, as Overy put it when writing about the Twenties and Thirties, was made possible by the “freedom to express fears openly and the competition to identify its causes”. Much of this competition today manifests itself on social media where, to quote from one of my favourite books of the year, online activists “take up more radical positions to get more attention”.

Grand pronouncements about the world burning, capitalist collapse or the death of the West make others sit up and take notice. And perhaps it is this that explains why Jeremiah has once again become a best-seller. Books with titles such as The Uninhabitable Earth: A story of the Future, How Democracies Die, The Strange Death of Europe have all been best sellers in the past year. The surest way of standing out in the current social media environment is indeed to dial up one’s rhetoric and proclaim that civilisation is at a crossroads.

And, of course, those who make such pronouncements are usually on hand to supply the magical solutions which they claim will reverse the slide towards apocalypse. We should thus take all such doom-mongering with a pinch of salt. For as Overy noted, democracies are not immune from “the distortion of reality or from the dangerous power of popular fear that provokes it, either then or now”.

Existential doubts can force a renewal of quicker thinking and commitment. We can all get tired and lazy about what we do, what we think important, and how we pursue our principal enthusiasms, motivations and beliefs. I’m sure there are some people at that once-respected newspaper asking “What is the Guardian for?”

At least the writer had the intelligence to then quote the German philosopher and composer Theodor Adorno: “Art keeps itself alive through its social force of resistance; unless it reifies itself, it becomes a commodity.” Unfortunately, the article upheld the clear belief that pop culture has achieved this feat, whereas what is referred to as ‘serious music’ has not.

The writer completely missed the fact that the most interesting and controversial thing about the 20th century’s foremost thinker on aesthetics and philosophy was his trenchant criticism of popular culture – especially the mass-produced, American-influenced sort so repetitively, monotonously and unquestioningly championed by the Guardian.

Suggested reading

Who called the fun police?

By Richard Godwin

Adorno’s principal targets throughout his life were fascism and what he called “the culture industry” – a term also used by Max Horkheimer to describe how popular culture in capitalist society functions like an industry, producing standardised products which produce standardised people – and consequently standardised journalistic asininity.

Adorno argues that the culture industry (and its bride, the advertising industry) is a corrupt product of late capitalism in which all forms of culture (from literature, through films and all the way to elevator music) are all just part and parcel of the system of production. Capitalism has a deep cultural force as well as an economic one. The profit principal is paramount in contemporary pop culture, appealing to the lowest common denominator, with the aim of producing pliant consumers, adapted to the needs of the system.

I would expect to read in the Guardian – a Left-wing journal – constant probings of our ubiquitous pop industry and its umbilical link with the rich and powerful. But probings I find none. What I do find (which reminds me also of the BBC) is breathless, adoring praise for events such as the Glastonbury Festival and the elevation of the decidedly mediocre and banal to iconic genius status.

Suggested reading

Does class still count?

By James Bloodworth

I also find criticisms, which baffle me, of the cost of classical concerts. As Richard Morrison explains in his counter-blasting response in The Times:

“You can get a standing-ticket for any of this summer’s 75 Proms for £6, and 70,000 punters will do so. Another 100,000 will buy seats costing £15 or less. Compare that with the £250 cost of attending the Glastonbury Festival. I’ve been promming for decades, and I’ve yet to meet anyone who owns a yacht. I did once meet someone who was off to his second home in Gloucestershire. He was the editor of The Guardian.”

The fact is that the pop-dominated, mass-produced culture industry and big business are inherently bound together to make a large-scale system of control and exploitation. In comparison to this behemoth, the experience of classical music for most of us is of a struggling, hard-pressed cottage industry. Those of us involved in it spend a lot of time fighting the political class (something the Guardian used to do) which is presiding over a state education system that marginalises music and the other arts.

I often come across people – sometimes on the Left but not always – who believe that complex, discursive music like classical and jazz isn’t what ordinary working-class kids should be doing, that these genres are too elitist and the preserve of “dead, white males” as the Guardian would have it. But if someone had told me and my parents this back in the day, we would have laughed in their faces.

I remember my Ayrshire home town of Cumnock as a very musical place, where ordinary men and women from humble homes would make music together. There wasn’t a lot of money around – a lot of people were genuinely poor – but it’s clear that this music making at an early age can transform lives – it certainly changed mine.

This was the beginning of a magical life in music for me. It’s a familiar path for many working-class Scottish kids who were given free music lessons and encouraged to be involved in school orchestras, bands and choirs back then in the Sixties and Seventies, where our teachers knew how to nurture our talents and enthusiasms into lifelong vocations and careers. This is now under threat – and youngsters from less well-off homes are being discouraged away from the world of music, sometimes by budget cuts, but also poisonously abetted by media pressure.

What needs to be said often and loudly – and in our press – is that discursive music, which is complicated and requires focus and concentrated skill (like learning to play an instrument or singing) can take a lifetime’s commitment, both for listeners and performers, as well as composers, of course. But it is a lifetime that is full of rewards, artistically, emotionally, socially and intellectually.

Active engagement with music brings benefits throughout people’s lives. Even very young children’s perceptual development is enhanced by musical engagement, affecting language development, improving literacy and rhythmic co-ordination; fine motor coordination is improved by learning to play an instrument.

What has The Guardian got against classical music?

Subscribe:

Participation in music is said to also improve spatial reasoning, an aspect of general intelligence which is related to some of the skills required in mathematics. While general attainment is clearly affected by literacy and numeracy skills, involvement in music appears to improve self-esteem, self-efficacy and aspirations – all such important factors in improving young people’s commitment to studying and perseverance in other subjects.

Why would the political class, with their media allies, conspire to create a situation which allows children, especially poorer ones, to miss out on such a vital ingredient of their education? It’s as if their sanctimonious mantras about inclusion, access and diversity get thrown straight out the window as soon as they are asked to do something about it.

If the Guardian were really interested in finding an answer to that smart-arsed opening question, it might consider acquainting itself with the grass-roots ecology of art music – something that is now under attack from philistines and ideologues of all political stripes. It should be trumpeting the expansion of horizons, not shutting them down for the sake of some small-minded dogma.