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August 15, 2024 - 10:00am
In May 1971, on The Dick Cavett Show, the theatre director Jonathan Miller had a prickly encounter with the Conservative politician Enoch Powell. He rebuked Powell for raising concerns about integration, culture clashes and social disruption, claiming that the Tory MP and others were creating a problem where none needed to exist. In Miller’s account, ordinary Britons would barely notice any downsides of immigration in their day-to-day experience — unless those like Powell primed them to regard it as a problem. Better for politicians not to discuss it at all, like a Victorian paterfamilias refusing to mention money in front of the servants.
Miller’s preference for suppressing and marginalising popular scepticism about immigration, over actually considering the issue, is widely shared in the modern ruling class. We now have a perfect demonstration of the pernicious effects of this approach, in the extraordinarily harsh prison sentence just handed down to a 53-year-old woman from Cheshire who made an unpleasant and antagonistic comment on Facebook about blowing up a mosque.
Julie Sweeney’s remarks were not a serious threat, by any stretch — a point conceded by the prosecution — and have since been deleted. She is also a carer who has never been in trouble with the law before, but off she goes to prison for 15 months, a fate routinely avoided in modern Britain by serious criminal offenders.
The Starmer state is determined to manage the discourse, in quite unpleasant and brutal ways if necessary. The threat of jail time for crude expressions of anti-immigration or anti-Islamic feeling is the iron hand in the velvet glove of the “Don’t Look Back In Anger” sentimentalism that follows mass-casualty terror attacks or knife rampages. While many of the convictions related to the recent disorder are reasonable and just, it’s hard to escape the impression that the establishment is flailing wildly in its response, with the result that miscarriages of justice are occurring.
Why is this happening? Several trends are coming to a head. The first is a very long-term one, whereby the entire moral basis of the British state has changed. The days when, in A.J.P. Taylor’s phrase, “a sensible, law-abiding Englishman could pass through life and hardly notice the existence of the state, beyond the post office and the postman”, have vanished. The state now regards itself as the overseer and regulator of social interaction — a schoolmistress making sure that all the children play nicely together and sanctioning those who are reluctant to do so. The Covid-19 pandemic gave the state a renewed crusading ardour, a reinvigorated justification for its mastery over the rest of us.
Meanwhile, we are still trying to work out what role social media plays in this dynamic. Sweeney, like so many before her, seems to have fallen afoul of what some theorists call “context collapse”. That is, the way in which comments made within the norms and expectations of one environment are judged by those of a different environment. She clearly regarded her comment about mosques as a throwaway line, an expression of frustration and exasperation with no wider significance. The police and courts have decided, for their own reasons, to understand them in a different way — a perverse way, it must be said.
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