The Spectator

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The politics of Pleasantville

Rod Liddle

There is a sort of golden crescent in London — and they should start doing
guided tours of it for those of us who don’t live there. It begins way out west
in leafy Ealing, swings north and east to Notting Hill and Holland Park,
traverses the gentle inclines of Hampstead, Highgate and Primrose Hill, touches
the funky little hem of Crouch End and then ends — where perhaps all life should
end — in Islington, N1. Even if you have never so much as visited London, you
will be immediately familiar with the names of most of the above mentioned
‘villages’: they have become bywords (and in some cases even adjectives) for
various powerful cliques of people: Hampstead thinkers, the Notting Hill Tories,
the Primrose Hill set of coked-out celebs, Islington’s beating heart of all that
is New Labour. But these demarcations, although fun and containing a germ of
truth, ignore the bigger picture: these places are sociologically,
demographically and politically identical. They should really be seen as a
whole, for they are the Pleasantville from wherein the rest of us are ruled; a
glorious band of red-brick or Georgian villas containing clever, implacably
active and creative little middle-class monkeys from the media, politics,
academia, advertising, charities and the law. Chattering agreeably at one
another over a nice, sharp bottle of Sancerre. And some Fairtrade olives.

There are, to be sure, small differences in the tone of each ‘village’.
Ealing, for example, is where the BBC’s top producers end up when they’re too
well off to stomach the grime of Shepherd’s Bush or Kensal Rise. Genteel
Hampstead is, by now, slightly de trop (although house prices must have risen
when the exciting columnist David Aaronovitch moved in a year or so back).
Islington — by which I do not mean Dalston, but Barnsbury and Upper Street — is
also beginning to feel a little, you know, 1997: too few Polish restaurants and
too many Spanish. But by and large, the extremely affluent inhabitants of this
ten-mile swath of the capital have far more in common than that which divides
them. Whatever their politics, their core values are identical — and, crucially,
at odds with much of the rest of the country.

Just recently I read Anthony Browne’s excellent treatise The Retreat of
Reason: Political Correctness and the Corruption of Public Debate in Modern
Britain. Browne’s pamphlet is a polemic against the manner in which intelligent,
honest debate is suffocated by political correctness. He alights upon several
areas where the politically correct view of one or another social issue is
universally held to be inviolable and yet is factually incorrect. Africa’s
problems, for example, are really down to bad governance, not the legacy of
imperialism. Black boys do badly in school because of anti-educational
tendencies within the culture from which they emanate, not because teachers are
failing them. And so on. Browne misses a few similar examples — of which more
later — but his analysis, that these are examples of a quite magnificent,
deliberately delusional state of mind seems to me wholly accurate. So too his
comment that political correctness ‘started as a reaction to the dominant
ideology, [but] it became the dominant ideology’. I was less taken with his
explanation for the historical roots of PC, which he traces back to the European
Marxists of the 1920s, Lukacs and later Habermas and so on. This strikes me as a
sort of political correctness of the Right — invoking poor old Marx every time
something quite ghastly occurs. In fact, far from being indirectly to blame,
Marx might actually help us on this occasion. Did he not assert that the base
determines the superstructure, that social relations were invariably dependent
upon economic relations? It is the one thing Browne omits in his pamphlet — the
notion that our ruling elite embraces political correctness because it is
economically (and by extension socially) advantageous for it to do so. Which
brings us back very neatly to Crouch End.

If you are affluent enough to live in the golden crescent, you will be
insulated from the terrible woes visited upon us by mass immigration,
multiculturalism and the like: further to that, you will actually benefit from
them. Your experience of the immigrant community will be limited to the
astonishingly cheap Polish nanny or cleaner you now employ — ‘she has a PhD from
Katowice university, you know’ — and the staff of a few of quite the most
delectable restaurants on the high street. You will know plenty of Asian and
black British people, however — and quite probably pride yourself on so doing.
There’s Marvin, who runs an account at OB&M, for example, or Parminder, who
worked on that BBC2 programme about amphetamines. Your multiracial friends, by
and large, have precisely the same political and social disposition as you. They
will not stab you for your wallet, blow themselves up outside your place of work
or insist that we wipe Israel off the map. (Employ economic sanctions against
it, maybe, but not actually kill everyone there.) Your toddlers will not be
required to undertake painful shots against TB as they do a few miles away in my
manor, Southwark and Bermondsey, and in Tower Hamlets — and you may still cleave
to the view that TB is, as the PC view disingenuously has it, ‘a disease of
poverty’ rather than an illness entirely imported from the Third World. When
your children go to school they will not be the only white faces in their
classes and you might tell yourself, reassuringly — bearing Marvin and Parminder
in mind — that you really wouldn’t mind if they were: after all, we’re all the
same, aren’t we? (Forgetting for a moment that Marvin and Parminder are pretty
fluent in the English language and their children don’t wear sackcloth and ashes
for reasons of religious dogma.) You will walk along the high street and exult
in the exotic difference, the profusion of nationalities plying their wares
(though you’ll be grateful there’s still a nice European deli). You won’t resent
the fact that your neighbourhood has been transformed beyond all recognition and
that you are in unfamiliar territory — because it’s been transformed in a nice
way and, in any case, it’s not really, if we’re honest, your neighbourhood at
all, is it? Your family’s from Beaconsfield, isn’t it? You only moved to Notting
Hill six years ago. Hey, come to think of it, we’re all immigrants, you know?

I am overstating the case, I suppose. In a sense, what has happened in the
golden crescent is wholly desirable: a multiracial community striving ever
upwards, its elements at peace with one another. But don’t kid yourself it’s a
multicultural community: it ain’t. Nor that by having a couple of black friends
you’re down with the brothers on the street. Immigration can indeed mean an
easily assimilated, highly educated smattering of foreigners contributing to the
wellbeing of an area. But for the majority of those who have suffered its
iniquities, it can be tens of thousands of impoverished, uneducated people
deposited en masse in the middle of a similarly impoverished indigenous white
community with whom they compete for jobs and to whom they are culturally
antithetical. We like living with people who are like us: that’s why you get on
with Parminder and Marvin. And it’s why there is frequently racial conflict in
Oldham, Blackburn, Bradford, Leeds, and why the BNP got more than 20 per cent of
the vote in Dagenham at the last election.

The root cause of political correctness is, in almost every aspect, a factor
of the economic advantage that this confused ideology confers upon a tiny
minority of the population. If you work for a single-issue pressure group
agitating for better rights for Bengalis, equal employment opportunities for
women, more ramps for the disabled, civil partnerships for homosexuals, rights
for lunatics not to be called lunatics, you do not stop agitating when those
perhaps laudable battles have been won. If you did that, you’d be out of a job,
for a start. You’d have to buy the Guardian and work through those capacious
jobs pages once again. So instead you battle ever onward, regardless of the fact
that the balance has long since been tipped overwhelmingly in your favour and
that your organisation should really do nothing more energetic than disband;
instead you agitate for more and more and trouser the government grants. Have
you ever heard of a pressure group saying, ‘Well, um, we’ve got everything we
wanted. You know, I think we’ll call it a day.’ They don’t do that sort of
thing.

It’s not neo-Marxism; it is pure, untrammelled self-interest. Take a walk
around London’s golden crescent. Soak up the atmosphere. And then tell me it
isn’t so.

Comments

[wegg.livejournal.com]

Не хотела комментировать, но не сдержусь - в голову не приходит ничего, кроме как обозвать статью Рода бредом популиста.

[favorov.livejournal.com]

Гм. Его взгляды как раз непопулярны, так что я не очень понял, при чем тут популизм... Или он популист, но бредит, и оттого пишет нечто против преобладающей идеологии?