AND ANOTHER THING
Snooping, spying, sneaking and hating: an everyday Guardian saga
PAUL JOHNSON
In late mediaeval Europe, spiteful people revenged themselves on enemies or people they envied — or business competitors by reporting them to the Inquisition. The practice was known as `delating'. It was also a characteristic of Vichy France, where delation to the authorities usually led to torture and death. It is creeping into con- temporary Britain, I see. Troublemakers now delate people to the Commission for Racial Equality for alleged 'racism'. Thus A.A. Gill, much envied by other less talent- ed journalists for his earning power, has been delated to Sir Herman Ouseley, chair- man of the Commission, for abusing the Welsh. Ouseley is 'investigating' and may have Gill prosecuted. Of course, as with the Inquisition and Vichy, the delator's anonymity is protected.
There are two intriguing points about this episode. First, it is doubtful if delation to the CRE can be an altruistic act by someone genuinely concerned about racism, since the Commission is itself a racist body, one of the only two institutions in Britain, the other being the British National party, which can fairly be called such. Whereas the BNP is anti-black, the CRE is anti-white, thus forming what Blake called a 'fearful symmetry'. I suspect the delation of Gill is inspired by malice, and he is right to give a two-fingered salute in return. Second, Gill abused not merely the Welsh but the Liverpudlians and the Geordies. But the latter two, it seems, do not qualify for a CRE delation as they are not 'races'. What is a race? How is it defined? Where does regionalism end and race begin? The criterion cannot be num- bers, since more people live in the North- East or the North-West than in the whole of Wales.
It is all right, under Ouseley's Nurem- berg-style rules, to abuse a Yorkshireman, but not a Scot. Throughout my life I have been abused for coming from Lancashire and having curly red hair. It still happens occasionally, although my hair has now gone a mysterious, non-abusable cham- pagne colour. If I had curly black hair and came from Jamaica, I could delate my accuser, but under CRE rules I have no redress. Not, I hasten to add, that I need it: people who abuse me, if they are significant enough to be noticed at all, usually live to regret it. But the fact that the system is so arbitrary, illogical and irrational is an addi- tional reason for treating the CRE with well-merited contempt.
I raise the point, however, since the Guardian, which has good reason to fear The Spectator's relentless exposure of its many iniquities — there is much more to come, readers will be glad to know — has recently delated Taki to the CRE for using the word `Sambo'. Most editors would find the idea of sneaking on another paper to the beak— even such a jumped-up one as Ouseley — repellent. Not so the Guardian, however. After all, one of its senior execu- tives allowed her bank account to be used to funnel money from Libya into Britain so that an African secret police chief could sue its rival, the Independent, for libel. So delation is all in the day's work for a Guardian apparatchik.
All the same, for the Guardian — not the old Guardian, of course, but the sleazy paper it has become in the Preston-Hugo Young- Rusbridger epoch — to accuse anyone of racism is richly hypocritical. One of its vic- tims is Taki himself, constantly subjected to racial insults as 'a Greek-Cypriot waiter'. Only this week the paper dredged up various obsolete terms of abuse, 'Idke', 'Yid' and `nigger', to make a humbugging point. Out- side the Guardian you would never come across such terms in print nowadays.
And the paper is habitually racist towards one distinct group in the United Kingdom, the Ulster Protestants. I don't know whether you would call them a race or not under Ouseley's rules. They certainly see themselves as a distinct ethnic group, not so much because of their religion as because of their history and culture. Obvi- ously the Guardian agrees, because it regu- larly attributes to them common racial characteristics, such as brutality, cruelty, intolerance, love of violence and hatred. To ram home the point, their cartoonists, espe- cially the atrocious Steve Bell, present them as possessing bodily and racial fea- tures and clothes in exactly the same way Der Stunner portrayed the Jews. If this is not racism, the term has no meaning.
Bell, I may add, does not hesitate to mock the cripples and the handicapped with his vicious pen. The day the Guardian delated Taki, Bell had a particularly nasty caricature of the Education Secretary, who has lost his sight, being steered by Tony Blair, under the heading 'The Bland lead- ing the Blind'. How Rusbridger and Young must have laughed at that one! The sheer personal venom behind this cartoon idea takes one's breath away. The Guardian, under its present regime, is guilty of some- thing which in my view is worse than racism: the constant, unrelenting pursuit of personal malice against individuals, often accompanied by gross physical abuse. The huge diversion of the paper's limited edito- rial resources away from honest and objec- tive reporting to its vendettas against Neil Hamilton and Jonathan Aitken is notori- ous. But these are only two examples of what is now an established Guardian cul- ture, which members of its staff are encour- aged to acquire.
Here, for instance, is one of Rusbridger's favourite columnists, Linda Grant, writing of Mrs Parker Bowles on 8 July last year: 'Con- sider her toothy face, the skin crumpled by too many days in the saddle, braced against the elements. But also consider the lascivi- ous, even depraved look in those vast eyes of hers that the camera sometimes catches, as if her hold on the prince is some perverse sexu- al practice that only the upper classes know of because it requires so many servants to clear up after.' And here is another Rus- bridger favourite, Catherine Bennett, writing about Cherie Blair's face 'contorted into that familiar rictus of bared teeth, wild eyes and leap-frogging eyebrows'.
Yet another Rusbridger columnist, Decca Aitkenhead, summed up the current Guardian hate culture when she wrote of Ann Widdecombe MP: 'One of the great things about British politics is the dependable supply of people to loathe.' She hailed the election results for providing a new 'list of people available to hate'. It seems to me a monstrous thing when a once reputable and responsible paper, selling over 400,000 copies to supposedly educated people, becomes daily a vehicle for racial, class and above all personal hatred, directed without restraint or pity at anyone on its enemies' list. This is a classic example of the abuse of power.
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