Ross Clark

collective madness. My wife asked me yesterday what I thought the next generation would think of it all. I said I wasn’t sure there will be a next generation unless it is produced by test tube.

Under the new strictures of social contact that some are trying to force on us, it will be impossible to initiate any kind of physical relationship. According to Newsnight’s poll three per cent of the pop ulation now think it is sexual harassment simply to ask someone out for a drink.

What began five years ago with the revelations of Jimmy Savile’s abuse has evolved into a bizarre moral panic involving the entire male population.

To imply, as Newsnight seemed to do, that men are somehow all naturally inclined to sexual abuse, and therefore collectively responsible for it, is outrageous sexism but that term is never used when the targets are male.

You can imagine the justified outrage that would follow if Newsnight broadcast an edition carrying the words, “The problem with women”, and went on to assert that women are less successful in the workplace because evolution has conditioned them to be submissive. The entire BBC board would have to resign but yet it would merely be the mirror image of what Newsnight put out on Wednesday.

The whole issue of sexual abuse has become hijacked for political purposes. Unless there is something much more sinister about Fallon’s past behaviour which has yet to emerge, his resignation is absurd – the very word used by his “victim”, journalist Julia Hartley- Brewer.

There are plenty who will push on for more resignations like Fallon’s because they have an agenda to attack men – and Conservative men in particular. It was remarkable how the Twitter- spread outrage over Michael Gove’s joke about Harvey Weinstein last week never spread to Lord Kinnock, who joined in.

The tragedy is that while Westminster works itself into a moral frenzy, little will get done to prevent another Rotherham or Rochdale scandal. The cries of lower- class victims of genuine sexual abuse will go unheard among the gossip of who placed their hands on whose knee, especially where authorities see it as politically incorrect to intervene.

THIS onslaught against inappropriate touching revolves mostly around the interests of well- off, professional women. It is they who stand to gain if their male rivals are shamed and forced from the workplace. It is just the same when the gender pay gap is raised: it isn’t Puerto Rican cleaners who get the attention but the likes of female BBC presenters already earning 10 times the average UK salary.

We have heard endlessly this week of how inappropriate touching is all about power. But it is the response to it that has become the real power game. The self- serving feminist activists who were once treated as extremists for plugging the line “all men are rapists” have seized the opportunity to promote their poisonous agenda – and the BBC takes the bait.

Meanwhile ordinary men and women are caught in the middle of this aggressive anti- male campaign. How sad that what began as a genuine concern about abuse of children committed by Jimmy Savile has been allowed to come to this.

‘ Issue of sexual abuse has been hijacked’