Confederacy of dunces now in control

I HAVE spent most of my life living under minority rule. First in South Africa, and now in England.

England? The home of democracy? Yes. I’ll come to that.

But first South Africa. I considered minority rule apartheid grossly unfair and wrote about it as a journalist.

This was not activism on my part. Just straight reporting on everyday stuff revealed in the society we lived in.

Today in England, I am still living under minority rule. But this time not in a political sense.

Instead, it is minority mob rule, where a group of hysterical activists are hell-bent on invading every facet of the lives of ordinary people.

You have to take your hat off to the agitators who brought this about. It takes Machiavellian cunning to new heights - or rather, depths.

Posing as ‘human rights’ and ‘anti-fascist’ campaigners, these radical rabble-rousers have somehow manufactured often-alleged minority grievances to such an extent that the majority are cowed into submission for fear of being called racist or (insert prefix)-phobic.

Even more bizarrely, these zealots shouting or tweeting hatred for the majority under the guise of being ‘anti-hate’ are seldom ethnic minorities.

Instead, they’re predominantly white rabble-rousers weaponising ‘grievances’ for their own ends.

Their launch pad is social media, burying dissenters under a barrage of hash-tagged bile that is as damaging as a Stalin-style purge.

Obviously the ‘reactionaries’ are not sent to a gulag, but many lose their jobs and are ostracized.

If you don’t believe me, ask

Nobel laureate Tim Hunt, a scientist who joked that research laboratories should be segregated as men tended to fall in love with women.

Even though the vast majority of people thought his comments harmless, he was hounded out of his position at University College London.

Indeed, academia is rife with minority mob rule. You can find instances on any given day.

For example, a handful of students are currently demanding the statue of Cecil Rhodes, Oxford University’s most generous benefactor, be torn down as he was a racist two centuries ago. They are, however, quite happy to accept ‘racist’ money.

It gets weirder. Theatre companies in London’s famed West End don’t qualify for Arts Council subsidies unless they show ‘progressivism’, such as women playing Hamlet, or muscular Jamaicans getting roles as regency fops in all-white courts.

Most theatre-goers consider this insane, but who cares about them?

It’s also dangerous. The Royal National Lifeboat Institution recently sacked veteran coxswains for owning tea mugs with risqué images of women.

Sailors stranded in the channel will now be rescued by luvvies referring to buoys as ‘transgender floating devices’.

There is no end to this craziness. Even literature, the last refuge of infinite imagination, is under threat from minority-rule fascists.

I have a dog in this fight as I consider myself a writer, even if no one else does. So it was with absolute incredulity that I discovered a publishing giant will only accept manuscripts that ‘take into account ethnicity, gender, sexuality, social mobility and disability’.

It now employs ‘sensitivity readers’ to police hidden ethnic or phobic slights. Boiled down, this means that if you are a white guy, it is offensive to write about a black guy as you have ‘none of his life experiences’.

I lived for 47 years in Africa. I have more awareness of the life of a black African than a black Londoner does. Yet I may be contravening the ‘sensitivity’ code if I introduce a black hero in a work of fiction.

Taken to its logical conclusion, this is creative writing’s Titanic iceberg. If only gay writers can include a gay character, then what’s the next step? Only criminals allowed to write crime novels? Men being unable to write about women?

This is one reason I only submit my non-fiction work to publishers. My fiction stuff, which helps pay the bills in-between ghost-writing gigs, is all self-published, mainly because writing about red-blooded heroes and villains of all creeds, colours, appetites and sexes will probably not cut the mustard with ‘sensitivity readers’.

Most readers just want a rollicking good read — but hey, they’re in the majority so they don’t count.

Maybe one day the majority will rule. For me, it’ll be a first.