Can you imagine Boris Johnson in a diversity class?
The prospect of former British foreign secretary and probable future prime minister Boris Johnson being sent to a re-education camp to learn to appreciate the burka is tragicomic. As his friend and fellow Tory MP Conor Burns said, “When we have reached the stage when you cannot express an opinion it is a rum do in the party of freedom.”
In fact I wouldn’t want to be the schoolmarm rapping Johnson’s knuckles for saying women in that degrading garment look like “letterboxes” and “bank robbers.” I imagine Johnson was a nightmare in the detention room even as a teen, and it is Conservative Party chair Brandon Lewis, who opened an investigation into Johnson’s Daily Telegraph article, who will likely get a lesson here. But how did we get to the point that freedom of speech was regarded as an inconvenience and a faux pas and even someone of Johnson’s prominence could be chastised by faceless PC commissars?
Evidently the complaints will likely go to a Conservative Party panel and if three nitwits can be found to agree on sanctions, the recommendation will go to the party governing board or floundering, unpopular, weak, wet prime minister Theresa May. If so, she may either chastise her rival and have him laugh in her face, or try to expel him from the party and risk splitting it to cling to a job she’s lousy at. And for what?
The idea of the rumpled, deceptively goofy Johnson on a “diversity course” is laughable. He’s a grown man, 54, a two-term London mayor twice married with five children, not some naive, bulliable undergraduate unaware of the ramifications of blunt speech about gender, culture and religion. And he won’t change his views because some snowflake hisses at him as they melt.
I don’t even see what they’re trying to find out. He made the comments in a newspaper article, on a subject on which everyone this side of the asteroid belt already has an opinion. What’s left to investigate, other than whether Britain’s Conservative Party has either convictions or courage?
Well, London’s Metropolitan Police did briefly consider whether Johnson’s comments constituted a “hate crime.” So there’s that. Met Commissioner Cressida Dick offered a “preliminary view” that they didn’t, while hedging her bets with “I think everybody in public life has to think about the impact of what they say. Absolutely I am proud to police in a liberal democracy in which people have the right to express their opinion.” Mind you, she added, a police officer might well be fired for saying the same thing.
So don’t think you can speak freely even if Johnson can. But I intend to try.
For the record, I still believe in a free society a person should be entitled to wear what they like, provided it is not indecent and we are entitled to react as we like, crucially including refusing to deal with someone who will not let us see their face. Until then, as I wrote in the Ottawa Citizen on April 9, 2010, I want the burka, niqab and all these dehumanizing garments banned in public.
Yes, dehumanizing. A woman in a sack is not “empowered,” no matter what postmodern babblers argue. This view is shared by many women including Muslims. But that isn’t the point right now. The issue here is whether it is socially and legally safe to have views other than grovelling embrace of radical multiculturalism ... or dhimmitude.
I hope so. One reason for Johnson’s fame and popularity is his refreshing frankness in a world of nauseatingly saccharine ersatz rhetoric. For instance, on being fired from the Tory shadow cabinet in 2004: “My friends, as I have discovered myself, there are no disasters, only opportunities. And, indeed, opportunities for fresh disasters.”
What wouldn’t we give for more politicians given to such direct and humorous speech? And remember Chesterton’s point that the opposite of funny isn’t serious; it’s not funny. Johnson’s comments about the burka were funny precisely because they were serious.
In that 2010 column I said the list of “people who cover their faces in interactions with others” included “the Ku Klux Klan, holdup men, terrorists and riot instigators ... All of them are denying the humanity of those with whom they interact. The purpose of covering the face … is to establish a gulf across which normal moral links do not bind us.”
It would indeed be a rum do if we could not say so in a free society.