Remember Orwell’s Two Minutes Hate? We now have that culture of denunciation

From Catalonia to sex change, we are too quick to condemn in the name of fashionable doctrines

‘Order!” shouted Mr Speaker Bercow on Wednesday. “Far too much noise and finger-pointing!” He had grown weary of the way one lot of MPS, accusing another lot, point across the Chamber at them, and then that lot, incensed, return the accusation and point back.

Mr Speaker is on to something. It has always been true – and should remain so – that public life in a free country is a bit rough. But we do seem to live in an age of denunciation. Not a day, not a minute, passes without someone being accused of something horrible, and millions credulously, immediately repeating it.

In his novel 1984, George Orwell invented the Two Minutes Hate, a moment each day when workers in the totalitarian state of Oceania (including what was once Britain) have to watch a film denouncing the enemies of the party. Orwell described how “it was impossible to avoid joining in… A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture… seemed to flow through the whole group like an electric current.” Nowadays, modern technology permits this to happen not just for two minutes, but 24 hours a day and with only 140 characters.

There is a vital difference, of course. We live in an open society. If you are pointed at, you can point back. If you are tweeted against, you can tweet in your own defence. The Government does not have to get involved (though, as we are discovering, the Russian government often does).

It may not be so easy in practice, however, for the victim of the attack. A Twitter storm can come so fast and furious that you are blown away. That, indeed, is its purpose. Public rage barrels on to something else, but the wreckage remains.

You see this in allegations of sexual harassment or abuse. Even in cases where it is hard to have any sympathy with the accused, such as that of Harvey Weinstein, it is objectionable that sentence is passed before facts are established. The numerous businesses which for years happily worked with Weinstein drop him at once. This is not evidence of their thirst for justice. Both when they ignored rumours in the past and when they rush to accept accusations now, they were/are acting out of fear.

Weinstein will probably not be vindicated. Much of the evidence against him looks strong. I merely point out that this is frequently not true of those denounced. Lots of people – Sir Edward Heath, Field Marshal Lord Bramall, Lord Brittan, Bishop George Bell, and probably thousands unknown to fame – have been condemned anonymously and without proper evidence, and nothing has ever been found against them. This injustice has often been assisted by over-zealous police officers, or witch-hunter politicians like Tom Watson, or my own dear media trade, using the collective power of denunciation.

Probably because of the atmosphere created by cases like Weinstein’s, we now hear accusations against President George Bush senior. Mr Bush is 93, and the claims relate to him in extreme old age. In one, an actress says he touched her from behind in his wheelchair and made a dirty joke. No doubt Mr Bush should not have done such a thing – if he did – but one cannot help feeling that a less self-righteous society might have treated such a story with caution.

If you are in a wheelchair, Mr Bush’s defenders point out, you might find it easier to touch from behind than to wheel round to shake a hand. You might make a joke about this and your joke, since you are of a generation that fought in the Second World War, might not win the kite-mark for PC humour. One might even suggest that a disabled nonogenarian might be indulged a little. The young US Navy aviator who, in 1944, completed his attack even after his plane had been hit and then bailed out over the Pacific might deserve a little mercy, more than 70 years and decades of public service later.

An ex-president of the United States must constantly meet people in formal situations where he feels a duty to break the ice. He might sometimes miscalculate how best to do this. A woman of my acquaintance met Nelson Mandela in her fifties (and his eighties). “When did they let you out of school?” he asked her flirtatiously. Was this remark “inappropriate”?

The culture of denunciation spreads wider than attacks on individuals’ behaviour. It tries to determine what side you must take on entire subjects. Look at the current argument about transgender issues. If you were a Martian – or perhaps even a citizen of the developing world – you could be forgiven for finding our approach confusing. Our society fiercely condemns female genital mutilation, but looks kindly on “gender reassignment”. Obviously there is a fundamental difference about consent. But how much is that distinction maintained when we learn that nowadays some young children are being encouraged to change sex?

We have become increasingly aware of the problem of self-harm among young people, especially girls, yet we increasingly promote the physical alteration of sex as a good thing, if sincerely wanted. Is there never any possible conflict between the two?

What is worrying here is not that people raise sex-change issues: there is a genuine difficulty for those who believe themselves “trapped in the wrong body”. It is that anyone who questions change is denounced. As a mere journo, I can probably get away with writing these words, but few health professionals could publicly challenge the new orthodoxy without risk to their careers.

It is also noticeable that the present Government, though Conservative, lets these new doctrines slice through the old like a knife through butter. It, too, is scared. The same goes for doctrines about race, “diversity”, marriage and green issues. Institutions must be firmer in the face of the series of little coups that technological flash-mobs use to get their way.

We hear much about “fake news”. But it is not confined to wacky websites. In this age of denunciation, it is a feature of mainstream media. The way to detect this is to ask yourself of any story: “Who is being put in the dock?” In the tabloid world, this is usually blatantly obvious. On the BBC, it is subtler but equally prevalent. If you analyse BBC news this way, you will see that government “cuts”, big business, Donald Trump, organised Christianity, good universities, Brexit supporters and oldish white men are having the prosecutor’s finger wagged at them far more often than are high taxes, nationalists (unless they are English), Jean-claude Juncker, the NHS, politicised charities and pressure groups, green businesses reliant on subsidy, and people who claim to be the victim of something or other.

A recent example was the Catalonia story, where an illegal, ill-supervised, low-poll referendum conducted in defiance of the constitution of a successful democratic state (Spain), was presented by the BBC as an appalling tale of police brutality against a people yearning to be free. A bit of film of policemen in helmets roughly dragging protesters out of the way was allowed to carry all before it. No one explained that the nationalists were attempting a coup d’etat in stages. It culminated yesterday.

A hundred years ago this month, the Russian Revolution took place. No BBC existed then. If it had, imagine the emotional footage of poverty-stricken workers, peasants and soldiers calling for “Peace, bread and freedom”, persuading us that this was a noble cause – and then remember the long years of war, famine and tyranny that ensued.