The exercise of forgiveness

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As Michael Gove demonstrated yesterday, defining ‘extremism’ isn’t as easy as some might think. He, presumably, thinks he’s got it right, although the range of views and arguments deployed against him suggests otherwise. But there was also another aspect to what he said yesterday when challenged about extremism coming from the direction of his own party’s supporters. Sir Paul Marshall, the man behind the increasingly misnamed GB ‘News’ which gives a platform to the swivel-eyed entryist tendency in the Tory Party, has something of a record when it comes to making or supporting extreme statements about Islam, LBGQT+ issues and migration. Gove attempted to defend him by referring to his record of ‘educational philanthropy’. The underlying issue here is whether, and to what extent, ‘doing good’ in one field is enough to get a free pass to support and promote hate speech in another.

It's not the only recent example. The Leader of the House of Commons defended the Science Secretary over her rash and unwise decision to accuse an academic of Islamism, which led to a law suit for libel, by referring to an entirely unrelated matter as an indicator of her ‘character’, as though that could somehow excuse using public funds to ruin someone’s reputation and pay the associated legal costs. And then, of course, we had Gove himself calling for ‘Christian forgiveness’ for a man who donated £10 million (plus a currently unconfirmed extra £5 million) because he’d apologised. (The idea that ‘forgiveness’ is a ‘Christian’ trait and therefore implicitly not shared with those of a different persuasion is a pretty telling remark and might even be regarded an ‘extremist belief’ in itself.) They haven’t (not yet at least) gone as far as Trump who told his chief of staff that “Hitler did a lot of good things”, although he apparently didn’t spell out what they were. (Things like locking up or even executing political opponents, invading neighbouring countries which didn’t spend enough on defence, and taking what some might see as a ‘hard line’ on people that he didn’t really think were German would all fit the Trump playbook, but all that’s off the point here.)

Maybe it’s true that there are very few people who never did a good thing in their lives, and that we should consider the whole rather than just a part, but the question is one of balance. Which people should be shown forgiveness (whether Christian or not), and which should not? And for which sins? The very cynical might think that the de facto deciding factor is just how much help someone has given to the government or governing party in terms of cash donations or merely a platform to spout their ideas. The more common or garden cynic might see it as more generalised – those who promote the governing party’s ideas are allowed to get away with more than those who don’t. It doesn’t take a lot of observing to note that apologies by Tories seem to be assumed to carry more weight than apologies by members of other parties. Genuine atonement and contrition are – or should be – about more than a mumbled half-apology and a donation to Tory coffers. But there – I’m just showing the extent to which I’ve fallen for the extremist idea that people should, as a general rule, avoid hate speech in the first place rather than atone for it after the event.

Sunak channeling Nelson?

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The Prime Minister seems to be more than a little exercised about the result of the Rochdale by-election, but equally short on solutions, unless you count a bit of performative and ritual condemnation and yet more action against protests. Whilst it’s true that the by-election was hardly the finest hour for any of the traditional parties, and that most people would probably agree that ‘extremist’ is a reasonable description of Galloway, the simple fact is that, under the rules of the game, Galloway won the election. It’s called democracy and, since democracy is about debate between different viewpoints, it doesn’t always produce the results that some of us might want. Of course, in one sense Sunak is displaying traditional ‘British’ values; in this case those of Nelson as he ignores the extremist takeover of his own party. He seems blissfully unaware of the parable about motes and beams.

Would Galloway still have won under a system of proportional representation? It’s hard to be certain, but with 40% of the vote going to Galloway, the second and subsequent choices of eliminated candidates would have had to break very decisively against him for the result to change. That isn’t the end of it, though – had there been a system to allocate the votes of eliminated candidates between those remaining at each stage of the count, that might have attracted a higher turnout. ‘What if?’ is an interesting but largely academic pursuit. What we do know is that Tory and Labour alike prefer to retain the system because it enables them to win an absolute majority on a percentage of the vote lower than that achieved by Galloway (meaning, incidentally, that his constituency victory has rather more democratic legitimacy than the parliamentary majority won by either Labour or the Tories in five of the general elections in the last half century).

Most of the time, the UK’s electoral system works in a way which favours a two-party contest, with other parties being seen as ‘also-rans’. However, sometimes circumstances are such that the system can end up favouring an alternative, for example if the support for that alternative is heavily concentrated geographically. The rise of the SNP to dominance (a dominance which would have been far less sweeping under a properly proportional system) is one example. Galloway’s victory, in what are probably utterly unique circumstances in Rochdale, is another. In railing against the outcome, either Sunak is too dim to realise that he is really railing against the UK’s electoral system, or else he is trying to lay the groundwork for a further assault on that system to rig it even further in favour of his own party. His words were so empty of content that it’s really hard to tell.

One thing on which I can agree with Sunak is that we face a serious danger from extremism. It’s just that the extremism emanating from his own party worries me more than any other sort, because that extremism is actually in power and eating away, from the inside, at the traditional values which its proponents claim to espouse.

Identifying the extremists

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After several years of trying his damnedest to get expelled, which led instead to his being promoted to posts within the governing party, Tory extremist Lee Anderson has finally managed to get the Tory whips to act against him for his astonishing, not to say ridiculous, claim that ‘Islamists’ have taken control of Sadiq Khan, and through him of the imperial capital itself. This has been adjudged to be one unhinged comment too far. Presumably, his efforts to date have been regarded as merely obnoxious, something which has become de rigueur in his party since it has been largely infiltrated and taken over by Farageists.

In response, the man himself said that he fully understood that “…they had no option but to suspend the whip…”, but refused to retract or apologise for his remarks. It’s probably just the excuse he’s been looking for to lead what he probably hopes will be a mass exit from the Official Farageists of the Tory Party towards the Provisionals of Reform. In what would, in any rational universe, be seen as a not-very-funny attempt at self-parody, but which appears to be instead a deadly serious lack of self-awareness, he said that he would “continue to support the Government’s efforts to call out extremism in all its forms”.  ‘All’ its forms? It would be nice to be able to believe that he is the only one who sees any political view which diverges from his own as being ‘extremist’, but it seems to be becoming the norm for his erstwhile colleagues, given the number of times he’s made extremist statements with the apparent consent and support of his now ex-party’s leader. And despite her own unhinged comments this week about the huge leftist conspiracy being driven apparently by the World Economic Forum, The Financial Times, and the Economist amongst others, Truss has apparently managed not to cross the line between being merely mad and being expellable. Still, given that the man making the decisions on who to suspend and for what, the Chief Whip, has previously suggested that the RSPB is a terrorist organisation, it’s difficult for anyone to know where the line actually is. If there even is one any more.

FPTP doesn't do what its supporters claim

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One of the most common arguments against proportional representation is that it potentially allows extremist groups or parties to gain a foothold in elected bodies.  That is undeniably true; to the extent to which an extremist party enjoys public support, it will gain representation in a fair voting system.  But designing an electoral system around the need to exclude certain viewpoints from winning seats doesn’t strike me as being either a legitimate design criterion or the best way of countering extremism.  It is the ideas which need to be confronted and dealt with, not the electoral expression of those ideas.

Current political circumstances also cast considerable doubt about whether it’s only a proportional system which allows a platform to extreme groups.  What the Brexiteers have shown is that if a small faction manages to seize control of an existing political party, they can impose their will on the majority by gaining only around 30-35% of the vote.  Even better (from their point of view), using such an approach means that they are likely to ‘inherit’ a fair proportion of the existing vote for that party as a result of electoral inertia, so they don’t even need to win the argument for their viewpoint.

What the Brexiteers in the Tory Party have shown us is that we need to change the system which gives total power on the basis of a minority of the votes, as can all too easily happen with first-past-the-post; gerrymandering the system itself to exclude extremists doesn’t always work.

It all depends on where you are standing...

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I’m not a big fan of using words like ‘left’ ‘right’, ‘centre’ or ‘extreme’ to describe political positions; they’re far too often used as a term of abuse rather than a serious contribution to debate.  But setting aside my reluctance to use such terms for a moment, there can be few better examples of the way in which what is generally called the ‘centre’ has shifted than the statement last Friday by Sajid Javid praising Nigel Farage for not being an extremist, because he walked away from UKIP and called his former party a bunch of ‘thugs and extremists’.

Farage has never said anything to make one believe that he’s changed his mind about his previous use of anti-immigrant rhetoric, such as his statement that he’d feel uncomfortable if Romanians moved in next door, or that he feels awkward hearing people on a train speaking anything other than English, "because I don't understand them" (although why he feels it necessary to understand a conversation between strangers on a train was left unexplained).  It’s the sort of casual anti-foreigner sentiment which seems to come naturally to the Anglo-British not-nationalists-at-all behind the Brexit project, and Javid has effectively declared that he considers it normal and acceptable.

‘Extremist’ is not an easy term to define, because it’s a relative rather than an absolute term.  Whether someone is an extremist or not depends largely on where you are standing in relation to him or her.  In effect, the closer you are standing to someone, the less extreme that person will appear to be.  Javid’s claim that Farage is not an extremist tells us more about the position in which he and the Conservative Party find themselves than it does about Farage himself.

The tyranny of democracy

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Benjamin Franklin said that “Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch”.  He went on to add that “Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote!”.  I don’t find either of those images terribly appealing, although the second, I suppose, provides an explanation of sorts of US political culture, especially when it comes to gun control.  The first expresses well part of the problem with an over-simplistic approach to ‘democracy’, eliminating as it does the rights of any minorities; put together, the two concepts suggest that minorities only have rights to the extent that they’re prepared to defy the majority – using violence if necessary.  It’s not, for me, an attractive picture of the sort of society I want to live in.

It was the election of a man described as an ‘extreme right winger’ as president of Brazil this week which brought the quote to mind.  I’m never sure that labels such as ‘left’ and ‘right’ are terribly helpful other than as terms of abuse, but it is clear that the people have elected an authoritarian who wants to criminalise his political opponents.  There are also fears – based on what he himself has said – that he plans to remove the rights of indigenous peoples and open their lands to mining, will give the police carte blanche to kill, and will do away with human rights.  It could be that all of this was just campaign rhetoric, and that now he has been elected he will moderate his words and actions – but the omens for that are not good.

The problem, for those of us who believe that democracy is, in general, a good idea (or even for those who merely believe, as Churchill put it, that “democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time”) is that whatever Bolsonaro does, he can legitimately claim that he said he would do it, and the people have voted for him to do it.  He has a strong mandate to do what he said he was going to do.  In a not entirely unfamiliar phrase in the UK these days, ‘the people have spoken’.

The question it raises in my mind is about how to define – and enforce – the limits of democracy, and how to decide what rights minorities should have.  There isn’t a simple point at which one can draw a line between what people can decide through a vote and what they can’t – and even if there were, the world doesn’t have any mechanism for enforcing that line.  There are some limits to democracy – as we’ve discovered in relation to Brexit, voting for free unicorns doesn’t magic them into existence.  But aside from limits set by what is actually practical and achievable, where does the line go?  Is it OK for the majority to vote to eliminate the minority; for the wolves to vote to eat the lamb?  Is it acceptable for people to vote to abolish their own rights and privileges (even if they believe that it’s only ‘other people’ whose rights are being abolished)?

What the Brazilian election highlights is that there isn’t an easy answer to the question; in Brazil, as in the Philippines, when the people voluntarily, exercising their own free will, choose to elect an extremist, there is little that the rest of the world can do except watch and condemn from the sidelines.  To continue the theme from yesterday, concepts such as liberty, equality and fraternity are by no means as deeply ingrained in humanity as we like to believe.