Don’t vilify novelists for doing their job
Nick Cohen
“Hardly anything in Britain is untouched by the Brexit vote,” says Polly Toynbee. But its effect on the NHS is of particular concern. More than 55,000 EU nationals work in our health service: the system would collapse without them. Yet now our ability to attract and retain them is in doubt. Companies that recruit abroad on behalf of NHS trusts say the Brexit vote has put off many foreign nurses from moving to the UK, and made many who are here feel they’re not wanted. Oxford’s John Radcliffe Hospital has even organised special lunches for its EU nurses to show how desperate it is to keep them. And no wonder: hospitals already face a “severe nursing crisis”, in part because of the big cut in UK nurse training places, and also because stagnant pay levels, combined with the rising workload, have prompted many to leave the profession. If ministers fail to make it clear to EU health staff that they’re welcome here, thousands more will “up sticks and go home, or follow the trail of British-trained nurses to better paid, less stressful jobs in the US and Australia”.
Should novelists be free to write from the point of view of someone from a different racial or socio-economic background? It seems crazy even to pose the question, says Nick Cohen, yet the author Lionel Shriver was recently vilified for daring – in a speech given at the Brisbane Writers Festival – to suggest they should. Her criticism of the new fad for accusing people of “cultural appropriation” so upset the “social advocate and writer” Yassmin Abdel-magied that she fled in tears and denounced Shriver in a blog that was “quoted with approval across social media”. Weird. These critics pride themselves on being culturally sensitive, yet lump people into categories in a way that is reductive and bossy. “Not everyone in an ethnicity shares the same identity, and it is rank prejudice to treat them as if they do.” If rich writers can only write about rich characters, white writers about white ones... and so on, we’ll end up only writing about ourselves. Such solipsism might satisfy “the social justice warriors”, but it’s “unlikely to produce fiction even they will want to read”.