Two press stories caught my eye today, both causing me to reflect on the state of fairness in our public discourse.

Of course, when anybody mentions fairness in a political context Everyman promptly sails off into the associative chain of moral and political largesse that is the liberal presumption … you know, the acceptable way to think … the way that makes equality and social justice self-evident first principles quite beyond challenge.  We are all good liberals today.  So we all understand that no dissent on this matter can be tolerated.

Well, it happens that the principle of association is how the thinking part of the brain routinely negotiates its territory.  Since Everyman is not in control of the associations laid down in his mind – and, obviously, at no time in his life does he aspire to such godliness - it is all too easy for thought to be scarcely his own and deed, being even more easily influenced from without, still less so.  The human condition is far more worthy of pity for its ignorance of self than ever it is for its (these days) somewhat sporadic social disadvantage.  We are all good and ignorant liberals!

However, we are as we are.  Nature’s little arrangement thinking-wise did not flip-flop out of the cerebral soup just so we could spend our fleeting days in thrall to liberalism.  We are, actually, worth more than that.  You never know, the concept of freedom may even be authentic, if profoundly non-political.  For sure, liberalism is not a means to freedom.  It does not work.  Therefore, it need not be our immutable destiny.

I was put in mind of these things while reading Boris Johnson’s lively and diverting piece in the Telegraph today.  Dear old Boris, MP rails against the kid-glove treatment accorded to the criminals, traitors and murderers who worked for Communism and for the Soviet Union.  Some have been and remain political fashion icons.  As Boris, MP puts it:-

Remind me: who was the greater mass murderer, Stalin or Hitler? Well, Stalin is thought to have been responsible for about 50 million deaths, and Hitler for a mere 25 million. What Hitler did in his concentration camps was equalled if not exceeded in foulness by the Soviet gulags, forced starvation and pogroms. What makes the achievements of communist Russia so special and different, that you can simper around in a CCCP T-shirt, while anyone demented enough to wear anything commemorating the Third Reich would be speedily banged away under the 1986 Public Order Act?

Boris’ particular source of annoyance is the fact that Melita Norwood, arguably the Soviets’ most successful and, certainly, longest-serving British spy, was never caught, never charged, never prosecuted.  I don’t believe that she was even questioned.  Good God, MI5 actually worried that harassing an old lady would cause a public outcry.

This left the old bird able to laugh in the faces of us all.  She steadfastly refused to accept that she bore any cause for shame.  She told reporters that Soviet Communism was “a good experiment and I agreed with it.”  Of her 40-year career of treachery she claimed, “I would do it again.”

The same media subsequently recorded her passing at the age of 93 with sympathetic obituaries.  Boris successfully extrapolates this into a much wider trend:-

… my point is that we are curiously indifferent to the behaviour of (the) extreme Left-wing … and that in general the Left is able to get away with things that would otherwise be viewed as nauseating and shameful.

Why, to put it bluntly, is Labour allowed to get away with all this?  Imagine the howls of hate, if a Conservative government had spent the past few weeks eroding the right to trial by jury, abolishing habeas corpus, curtailing free speech, and then slapped on the plastic poll tax - the ID card.  Lefties are somehow assumed to be doing things for idealistic reasons, and for the collective good, and their high motives excuse their appalling solutions.

That is why the servants of communist tyranny get sympathetic obits, and modern British girls wear CCCP T-shirts, and that is why a Labour Government can enact a series of authoritarian measures that a Conservative government could not contemplate.  I cannot explain this injustice: I merely point it out.

But it isn’t really that hard to understand.  The left’s “howls of hate” are not different from its presumed “high motives”.  They are one.  They travel towards the same destination, any divergence from which offends against the code of right-thinking and will be met with relentless force.

Melita Norwood did not offend against the code.  She offended - by her treachery – merely against the British state and its people.  She aided the most vile and genocidal political system in the history of the world but she was not personally compromised by this in the same terminal way, for example, as Boris, MP would be, should he stand up at Education questions in the House and ask about black IQ.  Norwood travelled with the flow.  Her treachery did not dissent from liberalism.  That, in the final analysis, blessed all she did.

Before I move on to the second story that took my interest today I want to quote from Norwood’s obit in the Telegraph of June 5th this year:-

She was born Melita Sirnis on March 25 1912 to an English mother and a Latvian father. A bookbinder by trade, Alexander Sirnis translated and printed works by Lenin and Trotsky, and later founded and edited a weekly paper, The Southern Worker and Labour and Socialist Journal. The family house, at Christchurch near Bournemouth, became known locally as “the Russian colony”.

Alexander Sirnis died aged 37, when his daughter was six; but her political education was taken up by her mother, Gertrude, a member of the Co-operative Party and active in the Workers’ Educational Association. When Melita was 10, the family moved to Thornhill, near Southampton, to live with her maternal aunt, one of the first female trades unionists and an official of the Association of Women Clerks and Secretaries, which Melita was to join when she was 19.

So it seems that this woman had scarcely any opportunity, beyond blind rebellion, to escape her fate.  The subtle and not so subtle psychological impressions of her formative years fathered her judgement and doubtless formed her treachery.  Even the man she married was a Communist (who, having discovered her work for the Soviets, never lifted a finger to stop her).

It seems to me that the Conservative view of human nature would admit a certain sympathy for this woman.  Not for her actions, of course … but certainly for her all too human weakness in the toxic embrace of her family culture.  Nobody can stand up and say with any surety that under the same malign influences he or she would become other than what Norwood became.

And that marks a distinct parting of the ways between Conservative and liberal.  In his approach the Conservative is, I think, always mindful to be open to doubt.  He tends to caution.  Not so our liberal opponent.  For whatever, usually highly personal reason – be it vanity or malignity - he resorts early to condemnation.  He launches fearlessly upon one grandiose scheme after another, all of them fantastic, all of them supposedly to perfect human society and, through it, human nature.  To that end, as Norwood demonstrates, any means is legitimate, even mass murder.  Indeed, as John S. Bolton often remarks on MR threads, the logical end-product of liberalism is mass murder.

Such fanaticism requires an extraordinary sense of infallibility.  We should be grateful, I suppose, that at the moment liberals are only killing unborn babies.  Outside the womb they are embarked on the bloodless destruction of the nations of the West so that nationalism will never again grow, on the dissolution of the European peoples so that racism is defeated, and on the sweeping away of sexual differences so that the dominance of European men is excised.  And all this effort is to make you and me, ultimately, free and “fully human”, which is jolly decent of them.  That’s the sort of thing you can undertake in a world that only permits liberal presumption.

The liberal presumption was exquisitely exposed in a Reuters article today.

Improvements in race relations over the last 20 years are being jeopardised by negative public attitudes to asylum seekers, a report said on Thursday.  The Institute for Public Policy Research study found that vilifying and degrading asylum seekers was popular with sections of the public and the media.

“Hostility towards asylum seekers is getting deeper and asylum is becoming the lens through which immigration and race are viewed,” Miranda Lewis, a senior research fellow at the IPPR told Reuters.  “Negative attitudes to asylum seekers are potentially very damaging to the progress in race relations that has been made over the last 20 years,” she said.

The report said hostility was strongest among people with little contact with asylum seekers, and often based on fear they were competing for scarce local resources such as housing, healthcare and jobs.  It found that people aged over 50 were the most hostile, least well informed and most likely to use racist language and express worries over the loss of British identity.

The report said press reporting varied enormously according to type and area, but noted a rise in the use of stereotypical terms and a lack of differentiation between asylum seekers, refugees and other migrants.

Britain brought in laws in the 1970s to provide protection from race discrimination, but immigration became one of the key battlegrounds in the 2005 general election after an increase in asylum seeker applications.  Prime Minister Tony Blair has said the country’s ethnic diversity is one of its great strengths, but opposition Conservatives have argued that the numbers of immigrants and asylum seekers should be more closely controlled.

The IPPR’s research involved 32 focus groups in five cities and showed that opinions were heavily shaped by experiences in local areas, and by access to accurate information.  People were using the term asylum seeker interchangeably for genuine refugees, immigrants and people from ethnic minorities who have settled in Britain, the report found.  While a majority still believed the UK had a moral duty to protect refugees, attitudes varied according to background.  People in deprived areas often felt asylum seekers competed for housing, healthcare and jobs, while wealthier people were more tolerant.

Now, the beautiful thing about this report is its sense of moral infallibility.  Alright, one would expect that.  The IPPR is:-

… the UK’s leading progressive think tank.  Through our well-researched and clearly argued policy analysis, reports and publications, our strong networks in government, academia and the corporate and voluntary sectors and our high media profile, we play a vital role in maintaining the momentum of progressive thought.

There are, I believe, more than a dozen similarly sanctimonious, leftist think tanks.  Together with voluntary sector bodies and special-interest groups they form the caucus of Blairite Third Way liberalism.  Bear in mind that, although OMOV swept away the constitutional balance of interests that underpinned genuine Conservatism in this country, nonetheless an OMOV democracy is not democratic.  It invites the re-establishment of governing interests as surely as a vacuum invites Nature to fill it.  The IPPR has, as it claims, a role in modern liberal government.  It sets out to drive policy.  It doesn’t need to examine philosophy.  It is the beneficiary of the pre-existing presumption, and it shows.

Miranda Lewis talks of “hostility”, “negative public attitudes”, “racist language”, “stereotypical terms”, “vilifying and degrading” and so on.  On the other hand, there are references such as “improvements in race relations”, “progress in race relations”. 

Is this in any way fair?  Not if you happen to have decided that you want the ingress of aliens to cease.  Improvements and progress in that direction are measured precisely by the upswing of public hostility towards the aliens.  How could it be otherwise?

Miranda, who I am sure is a very nice girl and not at all a Melita Norwood, simply cannot get past her infallible liberal presumptions.  Fairness means liberalism and nought but liberalism.  She cannot begin to imagine, for example, that genetic interests exist - and differ and conflict by race.  She cannot conceive that, actually, there is zero likelihood that Nature will, for liberalism’s sake, go on indefinite vacation.  Nature will certainly have its say, and that entails a challenge to every liberal presumption on race and much else besides.

Miranda and her bien pensant colleagues are going to have to listen to it.  But don’t expect much non-vilifying, non-stereotypical terminology from them.  Like Norwood who, after all those years in which to reflect upon the psychopathic criminality of Stalin, still thought the Soviet Union a good idea that was worth trying, the progressive left will never change, never repent.  It will go on thinking that the dissolution of the West is also a good idea and worth a try.  It will resort early to condemnation of any who dissent.  If really threatened it may decide to go a lot further than that. 

As Boris points out at the end of his article, this “liberal” government has concerned itself with “eroding the right to trial by jury, abolishing habeas corpus, curtailing free speech, and then slapped on the plastic poll tax - the ID card.”  And none of that sounds fair to me.