We have to back our institutions against the shrivelled insects of social media
In an age when anyone or anything can be attacked by a Twitter storm, it is up to the public to stand firm
Standing on a Tube escalator one evening this week, I was overtaken by a long-standing acquaintance, roughly my age. We started chatting. “When things were last so bad, in the 1970s,” she asked me, “were they so unsettling?” It interested me she was thinking this way. She and I are broadly on opposite sides, politically – she Remain, I Leave; she Leftish, I conservative. Yet we agreed that the word “unsettling” described the effect of the state of our country on both of us, and we couldn’t remember it worse.
When times are bad, and the public space is filled with people talking utter rot, I draw comfort from a famous quotation from Edmund Burke: “Because half a dozen grasshoppers under a fern make the field ring with their importunate chink, whilst thousands of great cattle, reposed beneath the shadow of the British oak, chew the cud and are silent, pray do not imagine that those who make the noise are the only inhabitants of the field.”
It is the perfect description of the difference between the screeching excitement of agitators and the settled beliefs and interests of a stable society. It is a definition of the “silent majority”, nearly two centuries before that phrase was invented.
But is Burke still right in an age when the half-a-dozen grasshoppers can whip up a Twitter storm? When the mainstream media, despite their denunciations of “fake news”, magnify it further? And when the Government, political party, business, university, charity or prominent person under attack panics? How do the “thousands of great cattle” react? Although, by temperament, calm, they begin to stir. They raise their heads, get off their haunches and worry how well the British oak is protecting them.
The grasshoppers are at their most dangerous when they use social media to distort issues which the thousands of great cattle truly care about. If they stick to matters like the Chagos Islands (one of Jeremy Corbyn’s obsessions), they won’t get very far. Their dream is to grab a mainstream question and refashion it the way they want.
This week, they came close to succeeding over animal welfare. Millions of British people care a great deal about the subject – although we often differ about how best to advance it. To arouse popular anger on animal welfare would be a great prize for the tweeting grasshoppers.
The EU Withdrawal Bill causes us – obviously – to withdraw from the Lisbon Treaty. Article 13 of that treaty speaks of animals as “sentient beings”. So when Parliament voted against a Green amendment to transfer this into UK law, it was the work of a socialmedia moment to allege that “Tory MPS say animals don’t have feelings”.
Luckily for the Government, which is simultaneously too timid and too careless about such attacks, Michael Gove, the Environment Secretary, had seen in time how environmental questions would be distorted by Remainers. He had already promised a strong statement of post-brexit environmental policy principles in the New Year and the setting-up of some form of environmental governance after we leave, to replace that of the European Commission. He is not about to deny animal sentience. The Government seems to have escaped without a serious wobble, but it could easily have gone the other way.
Nowadays, scarcely a day passes without attacks of this sort. They are best understood as attempted coups. Instead of the clunky, old-fashioned method in which armed revolutionaries take over the state broadcasting station, play martial music and then announce that they have achieved power – as we saw, low-key, in Zimbabwe – the modern Western method is by cyber-propaganda and intimidation. It nearly worked in the Scottish referendum and the recent illegal vote in Catalonia.
The very structure of politics is vulnerable to such technological subversion. Once the post-blair Labour Party had become a hollow shell, Momentum could use social media to turn it into a Jeremy Corbyn personality cult (I gather some of his followers even have their own special JC red pyjamas). The hard-left infiltration which took many years – and ultimately failed – in the late Seventies and early Eighties, can today spread like a computer virus.
These 21st-century coups can be mounted on a company, as well as a party or a government. Recently, Paperchase was scared off doing a promotion with the Daily Mail by a hate-filled online campaign called Stop Funding Hate. They can be mounted against a charity. Last month, National Trust members came within 300 votes of supporting a motion to ban trail-hunting on the Trust’s land, although less than one per cent of them voted. They can be used against a collective organisation – the Church, the army, a university, a school. They can be staged against an individual: the easiest way to ruin someone is to accuse him of being a paedophile or a groper. He will probably be dismissed whether or not the accusation is true.
Such attacks can be made by pseudonymous fantasists, people with grudges, tiny extremist groups, Russian robots or the likes of Edward Snowden or Julian Assange. The nature of the source seldom troubles those who run with the stories. There are 13.4million files in the so-called Paradise Papers, but that didn’t stop Mr Corbyn using them, from day one, in would-be drive-by slayings of prominent people, including the Queen, as if he really knew what the papers meant.
These attacks are the reputational equivalent of a power cut, and so their potential victims are absolutely desperate to keep the lights on. What they need, to pursue the analogy, is their own back-up generators. They must store up the inner strength to deal quickly with attacks, and survive them instead of folding.
This is where we, the public, come in. We have moved, in not much more than a generation, from a naïve deference towards our institutions to an equally naïve cynicism. If it was foolish to believe that, say, the police never concocted evidence, or priests never molested children, it is even more idiotic to believe they always do. In any institution, trust cannot be absolute, but it has to be the presumption. The concept of the benefit of the doubt, like the presumption of innocence, is essential for civilisation to work.
We have come so close to losing this concept that institutions and individual leaders find it dangerously hard to do their work. If you are a general, bishop, chief executive, charity boss, consultant, and so on, your time is ever more absorbed by issues of governance, compliance, workplace rights, “equalities”, and the investigations, tribunals, law suits, and trolling which proliferate when things go wrong. Not all of these things are avoidable. Some are essential. But when one sticks them all together, one can see that the purpose of bodies on which we all depend is seriously distorted by these demands.
We want our armed services to defend us, our police to stop crime, our universities to educate us, our doctors to make us better, our businesses to make us prosperous, our Members of Parliament to represent us. If people who represent almost no one can undermine them, “unsettling” is the right word. We, the public, are going to have to back our institutions much more strongly against what Burke called “the little shrivelled, meagre, hopping, though loud and troublesome insects of the hour”.