Jackie Danicki

I think I always preface anything I quote from Dr Sean Gabb by saying that I do not agree with him on everything, but wow, is he a pleasure to read and listen to when I do. This is one such case.

He emails his account of going on BBC radio to debate Chris Bryant, Labour MP for Rhondda (”a place where a Labour candidate would be elected even if it were a dead cat”, according to Sean) on whether or not Oxford University should host a debate featuring Holocaust denier David Irving and nationalist Nick Griffin.

I think the idea was that Mr Bryant should attack freedom of speech and I should defend it. But Mr Bryant was too clever to allow the debate to run in this course. He insisted that Messrs Irving and Griffin should have the right to speak their minds in places like Hyde Park, but that the Oxford Union should not pollute itself with their company. On the face of things, then, he was not arguing for censorship—no more than I might be if I advised you not to invite the Seventh Day Adventists into your house. Of course, his argument was only on the face of things. We live in a country where the old boundaries between state and voluntary activity have been so blurred by subsidy and regulation and deals behind the curtain, that advice is fast becoming the same as instruction. And Mr Bryant would not really defend the right of these two men to speak in Hyde Park. Any meeting they called there would be banned under the Public Order Act 1986. If the meeting were allowed to go ahead, all the speeches would be filmed by the police, and the speakers would face criminal charges under the various terrorism and racial hatred laws brought in since 1997. I do not suppose Mr Bryant would hurry forward to criticise
any of this.

But he was making a clever point. To answer him would require more time than was available. So, having heard him out, I decided to go on the attack. I thanked him for his “defence” for freedom of speech, then denounced him for criticising men who were not his moral inferiors. Mr Bryant, I told the listeners, had voted for identity cards, for ninety day imprisonment without trial or charge, and for a war with Iraq that had so far killed 650,000 people. He had no right to call anyone a fascist.

It took thirty seconds and was very easily done. I reduced the man to spluttering rage. He spent the rest of the debate trying to defend his voting record, while insisting that some of his best friends had been murdered by Generals Franco and Pinochet. My answer to this one was:
“Then you should know better”.

Here’s where Sean really gets going:

[T]here comes a point when the truth is both undeniable and hurtful. After ten years of domination by these people, we have now reached that point. It is useful to rub noses in the daily scandal. At the moment, Mr Bryant and his class are presiding over the negligent loss of 25 million names and identification data. Tomorrow, it will be something else. But there is always some more or less credible excuse to get them out of permanent trouble. The real stick to use against them is three bloody wars and a police state at home. They promised us neither of these things. But that is what they have delivered.

I wish they had been more like the people they always said they were. But one advantage of their not having been so is their plain embarrassment. We do not live in the world that they promised us, and perhaps that they did vaguely want. We live in a world where they are looking and sounding and behaving just like their parodic notion of the old ruling class.

I called Mr Bryant a fascist. He took vast offence at the word. I may yet receive a letter from his solicitor. But after ten years of rule by him and his class, what other political term fits him better?

Listen for yourself here.

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