Lionel Shriver: lashing out at diversity

Another week, another Twitter “lynch mob”, said Fraser Nelson in The Daily Telegraph. The latest victim of our “digital Salem”, where “to be accused is to be guilty”, is the novelist Lionel Shriver. This month, she wrote a column in The Spectator mocking the publisher Penguin Random House for its new policy of hiring staff and authors based on whether they reflect a “diverse” society; diversity was to be established by a tick-box exercise so long and PC that it contained options for both “bi” and “bisexual”. Her perfectly “rational” argument – that publishers should be concerned with talent, not social quotas – was greeted with uproar. Shriver was accused of every kind of bigotry. And after a few days, “the mob got its scalp”: she was dropped as a judge from a fiction award run by the women’s writing magazine Mslexia.

All this “whining” about diversity is “pathetic”, said Hanif Kureishi in The Guardian. The arts in Britain are largely closed to outsiders. “The industries I’ve worked in for most of my life – film, TV, theatre, publishing – have all been more or less entirely dominated by white Oxbridge men, and they still mostly are.” Those of us who have forced our way in have faced “a difficult and humiliating trip”. Penguin’s decision to look for new voices from outside its traditional constituency is “wise and brave” – and if “the master race is becoming anxious”, that’s “good news”. Besides, Shriver really is guilty of bigotry, said Amrou Al-kadhi in The Independent. She wrote that “if an agent submits a manuscript written by a gay transgender Caribbean who dropped out of school at seven and powers around town on a mobility scooter, it will be published, whether or not said manuscript is an incoherent, tedious, meandering and insensible pile of mixed-paper recycling”. That sentence is “infused with systemic homophobia, transphobia, ableism, racism and classism”. Is it really inconceivable that such a person could write a good book?

Shriver clearly intended to provoke a response, said Kenan Malik in The Observer. And she succeeded. Diversity has become less an issue to debate than a zone for ritual confrontation. “Let me provoke,” says one side. “Let me be outraged,” says the other. Still, Shriver had every right to put her case, said David Aaronovitch in The Times – and the growing tendency to shout down voices like hers is disturbing. Announcing her sacking, Mslexia magazine tweeted: “Although we welcome open debate, Shriver’s comments are not consistent with Mslexia’s ethos.” The point, surely, is that “open debate means being able to say stuff inconsistent with ethoses. Or it is not open debate.”