Thanks for the gong - and the electricity bill

I would like to thank all those people who sent warm congratulations after I was awarded columnist of the year at the Maxim Kent Press & Broadcast Awards. The gong is nice, but it’s especially flattering when I hear people say that the main reason they buy the paper is because of this column or that it’s the first thing they turn to. Thank you so much.

The prizemoney was £150. I didn’t attend the ceremony and met colleagues later at a Canterbury pub where the cash was handed over. Feeling very pleased with bonus quids in my wallet, I arrived home the same day to discover a £152 electricity bill.

When writing the column, I only have a few rules. Never treat readers like idiots and never be afraid of voicing an opinion, no matter who it annoys. We live in a pernicious age of selfcensorship when people have been cowed into silence. Moreover, there are powerful, all-devouring orthodoxies which deserve to be questioned and challenged.

My friend and I were basking in the sunshine of the White Hart garden in Castle Row talking law when I announced that I thought that the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, which guarantees freedom of speech, is the greatest piece of legislation ever enacted. “You’re wrong,” he interjected darkly. “It’s the United Kingdom’s Licencing Act 2003 which extended pub opening times past 11pm.”

Overheard in the Gazette office: Colleague one: “What did you just buy at Tesco?” Colleague two: “Just some ham and some toilet paper.”

Quote of the week comes from the French writer Pascal Bruckner: “How does one recognise an ecologist? By the fact that he is against everything: carbon even with CO2 capture, natural gas, shale gas, ethanol, diesel, nuclear power, petrol, dams, trucks, high-speed trains, cars, planes...once again the true desire of this movement is not to safeguard nature but to punish human beings.” Wacism is very naughty, isn’t it? The district found this out last week thanks to one of those cuddly-wuddly “look how good we are” motions which went before Canterbury City Council last week.

For those of you with far better things to do on a balmy summer’s evening than inhaling the gas of a council meeting in the Guildhall, then here it is full: “We are proud to live in a diverse and tolerant society. Racism, xenophobia and hate crimes have no place in our country. Canterbury City Council condemns racism, xenophobia and hate crimes unequivocally.

“We will not allow hate to become acceptable. We will work to ensure that local service providers, charitable organizations, businesses and community groups have the resources needed to combat and prevent racism and xenophobia.

“We reassure all people living in our district that they are valued members of our community.”

What’s wrong with that you might think? Well, apart from the jaw-dropping vacuousness of it, quite a lot.

Let’s start with the obvious paradox in the first two lines. The pride of the “tolerant society” is immediately followed by an appeal to intolerance.

The words imply an assault on free speech, containing a hidden armoury of weapons capable of silencing one’s opponents and censoring anyone’s thoughts which meet with disapproval.

Moreover, definitions of thought crime are loaded, fluid, vague – deliberately so in order that they can be exploited to silence anyone who utters a thought which falls outside the narrow boundaries of what is acceptable.

Do you remember how during the EU referendum we were told a vote for leave was a vote for wacism and a vote for hate?

Observer columnist Nick Cohen, the author of a book on thought crime, has argued better than many today why speech must be protected: “People oppose censorship not because they respect the words of the speaker but because they fear the power of the censor.”

Remarkably, this is a minority opinion in 21st century Britain. Intolerance is all the rage today – intolerance of Israelis, Americans, Ukip, people who voted to leave the EU, traditionalist Christians, anyone not enchanted by liberal dogma and so on. The list of what is not tolerable is very long among people who tell us how tolerant they are.

It was two members of the city council’s Labour group who put forward this motion – an unfortunate piece of timing given that Labour has spent much of the year trying to exorcise anti-semitic demons from its ranks.

But then again, the timing of the motion to the council is the very point. It comes against the backdrop of the EU referendum result.

Project Fear, which warned us we were heading to financial meltdown and the Third World War if we voted to quit the EU, has been replaced by Project Slander. Every foolish remark is being reconceived as a product of Brexit evil.

This new movement’s intention is to portray Brexitvoting Britain as a country so suddenly violently convulsed by wacism that only monsters would contemplate triggering Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty which would begin the twoyear process of pulling out.

Although the councillors behind this motion no doubt persuaded themselves they are simply doing their compassionate bit, we cannot ignore the fact that elsewhere there are organisations and individuals who thrive and prosper – financially, psychologically, politically – on division.

They don’t hate racism. They adore and crave it. Why? Because without it, their activism and campaigning becomes worthless, meaningless, their political selves robbed of purpose and forced into redundancy.

And when they can’t find it, they become like acid-dropping hippies of yore seeing colours and shapes before their eyes that are in actuality not there. (Remember the University of London academic who said Gardeners’ Question was

Such gestures are important for another reason.

Read the second half of the motion again, those sentences which begin “We”, “We”, “We”. You can see here that the focus has by now totally shifted to the speakers, they are the real subjects of the motion. They are the centrepiece, the star turn to which the audience must direct its attention.

There is something so desperate and pathetically needy about all this, a flailing around for the approval of one’s peers: “Look at me...listen to me...love me...please...i’m such a good person!”

The writer Patrick West, currently working on a book about the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, has expertly diagnosed this most modern of political afflictions: “Ever since the libertine cultural revolution of the 1960s, Labour and the orthodox left in the Western world have been in a long process of abandoning the working class, withdrawing into identity politics, rights for the self, for affirmation of the self.

“Hence, so-called progressives now care above all for their image as ‘good people’. Virtue signalling is the epitome of the new faux-compassionate, egocentric left.”

This sort of inept virtuesignalling represents politics at its most shallow and meaningless.

Outside of the vain and narcissistic showcasing of the politicians’ moral goodness, such gestures achieve the sum total of zero.