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The Toynbee tendency
Citizeness Toynbee has denounced the paper on no evidence
The foolish and destructive chickens let loose by the Macpherson report into the Lawrence inquiry are already coming home to roost. One of them, flapping and squawking in our midst, is Polly Toynbee, the writer and broadcaster and author of a disgraceful piece last week in The Guardian. Toynbee is extremely well-connected and influential in Centre and Left of Centre circles and is, generally speaking, a powerful Establishment figure. That makes her remarks about "the white backlash" against Macpherson all the more astonishing
This is what she says about The Daily Telegraph. "If you want a perfect model of institutional racism, buy the Telegraph for a whiff of Britain's Conservative Establishment. In its leaders and columns the racism is witting and unremitting, proud and disgraceful. It revels in it, rolls in it, abominating politically correct non-racists. . . . No, this is not institutional racism - Macpherson describes that as `unwitting' - this is just plain old-fashioned racism. The Daily Telegraph sounds the rallying cry that echoes from the platforms of the British National Party." Not content with this, she attacks the editor, Charles Moore, for his "effete moral frivolity". "I call him him a racist," she says.
Presumably she feels the same deep contempt for this newspaper, which had even earlier questioned the wisdom of the Macpherson report, and of the Government's response, in some carefully argued pieces; in an article which was a victim of Straw's injunction, Alasdair Palmer was brave enough to question the concept of institutional racism as flawed and dangerous, as any reasonable person must suspect it is - in today's climate of guilty hysteria this perfectly reasonable argument is considered evidence in itself that he suffers from it. And presumably Toynbee feels that all of us who work for The Sunday Telegraph, guilty by association, are also racists, whether witting or institutional or whatever.
Something terrible is happening to public debate if such a powerful person can make such serious public denunciations without any evidence. There is nothing in what the Telegraphs have published since the Macpherson report, possibly excluding one or two letters, that could possibly, by any reasonable person, be considered evidence of racism. ( Toynbee quotes at length, as her best shot, a piece that Charles Moore wrote in the Spectator in 1991.) Yet in today's climate, and in the terms of the report, something is now racist if someone else thinks so. And therefore, presumably, on the denunciation of Citizeness Toynbee, The Daily Telegraph is racist and has therefore been breaking the law - incitement to racial hatred, I imagine. She has summoned the tumbrils. There will be a lot of us in them, if they come.
I do not think this is just a nasty spat between journalists, of no interest to readers. I believe that Toynbee's attitude is typical of the views of a large class of important and influential people in this country. It is typical of the instinctive response of the new Establishment. It is a response that cannot merely be dismissed as stupidity. It is dishonest, irresponsible, self-regarding and emotionally corrupt. Confronted with the terrible complexities of the Lawrence case, and the delicacy of race relations in this country, influential people have a duty to think and speak especially carefully. Yet that is what the Macpherson report failed in some ways to do, in the view of this newspaper and others, and that is what they rightly pointed out. Toynbee's response, by contrast, was a smug and dishonest denunciation. For her it is typical of Moore's "effete moral frivolity" that his first objections should be "literary", and that he should complain that Macpherson uses the word literally to mean the opposite, and that the language is confused. If only George Orwell were here. He made it clear that good writing matters. It is not merely a frivolous literary indulgence to object to bad writing; bad writing comes from bad and muddled thinking. Bad writing is the enemy of truth and justice. It is the prop and the tool of hysteria, bigotry and totalitarianism. It produces muddled, divisive and inflammatory expressions such as "institutional racism".
What puzzles me, and angers me too, is that so many educated people of the Toynbee tendency, who ought to know better, don't see this, or pretend not to. They seem deliberately to avoid thinking clearly about difficult subjects such as race relations; they prefer the adolescent delights of uncritical indignation. They seem positively to enjoy despising the police, and British institutions generally, though in this case, oddly enough, they seem to have foregone the usual pleasure of despising the judiciary.
I cannot understand why, just because some police are racist, it is so exciting and satisfactory to denounce the lot. Why should that be so boosting to liberal morale? Why aren't liberals proud of our increasingly good race relations in this country? Why is their attitude to race and identity so guilt-ridden, their attitude to their own British heritage so dismissive?
It was Orwell who wrote that Left-wing intellectuals felt there was something slightly disgraceful about being British and that it was "a duty to sneer at every English institution"; he thought that this intellectual sabotage from the Left was partly responsible for a national weakening of morale between the wars. How little things have changed. The Polly Toynbees of this world are always with us.
The Sunday Telegraph | Sunday, March 07, 1999
