It’s difficult to decide which is worse: that a Conservative MP with leadership aspirations should be thought of as brave for talking fondly of “English identity”; or that the Left establishment via its media outriders should be so predictably sniffy about the possibility of there even being such a thing. “Englishness”, for the Left, is like Australian wine or the success of Clarkson’s Farm: tolerable only to the extent that it’s not discussed.
Robert Jenrick MP has an inexplicable aspiration to lead the post-election wrecking yard still bafflingly known as the “Conservative Party”. He has written this, for the Daily Mail:
The combination of unprecedented migration alongside the dismantling of our national culture, non-integrating multiculturalism and the denigration of our identity have presented huge problems.
Cue the inevitable “gotcha” ambush, this time from a house mediocrity on Sky News, who demanded from Jenrick a definition of this curious relic he calls English identity. Jenrick’s reply was sensible enough, as far as it went: that he was unable to condense in soundbite form a set of cultural, historical and legal phenomena which make for a collective of quantum complexity is hardly surprising (I’m helping him out a bit here, but that’s the gist).
The journalist’s question amounted to a crude, tedious and very voguish reiteration of the Socratic strategy. The Socrates of the Platonic dialogues, talented though he undoubtedly was, was also a nuisance who spent his days walking the streets of Athens in search of likely marks on whom he could lay down his own “gotcha” schtick. This would involve asking them to provide a definition of an abstract concept (such as “justice”) and then explaining to the victim why his response was deficient.
Most of us know how that ended: a speedy trial followed by an invitation to down the cup of hemlock – cancellation being of a less reversible (and arguably less deserving) form in those days.
A “gotcha” of this sort is philosophically in error. It assumes that for a thing to have an identity then it must have an essence, one which is definable in non-vague terms. But the world is not constructed like that. There are logical systems which are constructed in acknowledgement of the fact that vagueness is an intrinsic feature of the universe. It would be absurd to think, for example, that a person is not bald when he has n hairs but becomes so when that number declines to n-1. There is hirsute, there is comb over, and there is bald – and the details of that journey are not conducive to a strictly arithmetical formalisation. Certain parts of that map are of necessity impossible to read.
What is it we want from a definition? Wittgenstein, whose competence as a philosopher of language arguably exceeds that of even the most intellectually agile news anchor, has some persuasive things to say here. In his later writings he suggests that it is strange to think that the meaning of a concept is reducible to a list of necessary and sufficient conditions which determine its application:
The idea of a general concept being a common property of its particular instances connects up with other primitive, too simple, ideas of the structure of language.
The example Wittgenstein uses is that of a “game”. There are all manner of games. Some of these require a ball others do not; some are played as a team while others are not, etc. These things we call “games” admit of no single unifying definition but share in a common resemblance. As with games so with “English identity” – perhaps its resistance to an easy classification is evidence of the strength, rather than the weakness, of the concept.
We do not need a theory of Englishness to be able to know it when we see it, any more than a Catholic communicant is required to fully understand the concept of transubstantiation before she receives the Host. An account of English identity might refer to the Common Law, make mention of the complicated history of the Anglican church, or valorise the peculiar nature of English traditions (including the tradition of being sceptical about the nature of Englishness). Or it might prefer to point at the perverse pleasure we take in an England batting collapse, or the Pavlovian and very English default to apology when somebody bumps into us.
These are, of course, all things which exercised the wonderful mind of Sir Roger Scruton, whose explication and defence of English culture and identity is distributed throughout many articles and books. Sir Roger was famously ostracised by the Tory parliamentary party for “unacceptable” remarks he made during a New Statesman set-up job a year or two prior to his death. Remarks which, it almost goes without saying, his accusers had not bothered to contextualise. Perhaps the current crop of Tory leadership contenders would find it useful to look at what Scruton had to say about our shared culture and the increasingly acute threats to it? (An appreciation of irony is, of course, also a very English thing.)
Sky’s question to Jenrick was not worthy of serious consideration. And to his credit Jenrick displayed a very English embarrassment at being expected to answer it. I’d have been more robust. If asked the same question I’d have said that English identity includes an affection for eccentricity and a love of queueing. If further pressed I’d have pointed out that Englishness is a bit like crap journalism: we can’t define it, but we know when we are in its presence.
Questions about immigration are not exclusively questions about economics. They can also arise from a sense that a national identity is something worth preserving. Jenrick is quite correct to reframe the discussion in this way. Yet again the legacy media has shown that it is more interested in the easy gotcha than a serious discussion. Which is a pity for all of us, because that discussion is becoming urgent.
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Big respect to the author for speaking up. I’ll bet money that the perv had done it before, probably to his own son, and has most likely done it after the incident described above. He was a paedophile and don’t they say paedos cannot be rehabilitated? It’s not just a passing fancy, get it out of your system and then all deviant impulses disappear. You’re either programmed that way or you aren’t. But back in those days many things went on behind closed doors that were not talked about out in the open, this type of incident being just one example.
Toby, Cooper’s criticism of Raymond Baxter tells us less about Baxter than it does about your would-be molester. I recall Baxter’s authoritative voice introducing ‘Tomorrow’s World’ in the 60s. Added to which he (Baxter) was a decorated Spitfire pilot during the WW2. To be thought a “complete c***” by Cooper was something of a badge of honour.
The BPC.
I’ve asked this question since 2012 and never received an adequate reply.
What is the evidence (excluding allegations) that Jimmy savile committed the crimes he’s accused of?
Yes I’ll get lots of down ticks but, almost certainly, no reply to the actual question.
Maybe they buried all their ( whoever they were/are) dirty washing with Savile
No evidence then?
Savile suffered from mass hysteria as you know.
I see what you did there.
Thanks for the msg BTW..
No evidence then?
Lots of witness statements, plus he was well known by people who knew him and knew of him to be a pervert. It is hard to bring a dead person to trial (I shouldn’t need to say that).
Lots of witness statements that turned out to be false, and “I always knew he was a wrong un (but did nothing)” hearsay allegations by the sort of celebs who on another occasion promoted COVID jabs; perhaps we should believe them about that too. There was a very lengthy and public trawling operation for evidence, with financial incentives from his estate and, for those who went public, from newspaper stories, with no downside for false testimony. The late lawyer Susanne Nundy (the “Anna Raccoon” blogger), who had been a resident at the Duncroft school for girls where the allegations started, took a strong interest in the case and her conclusion was that there was no evidence that was made public that he’d done what he was accused of.
Well I’m confident that either way, had he been alive today, he’d be allowed to keep his bank account.
And remarkably, although the allegations ran into the hundreds, not a single documented police complaint made at the time,
I was sexually abused, by a teacher at a Catholic school, I never complained to the police. So I understand why there was “not a single documented police complaint made at the time”, and you don’t. It was a very different time.
No evidence then?
The evidence is documented in “‘Giving Victims a Voice’ A joint MPS and NSPCC report into allegations of sexual abuse made against Jimmy Savile under Operation Yewtree”
https://library.nspcc.org.uk/HeritageScripts/Hapi.dll/filetransfer/2013GivingVictimsAVoiceSexualAllegationsMadeAgainstJimmySavile.pdf?filename=CC18C70DB7C8C3D49403BB94EB176F95207E5F66235DCA89651F5ED2BA5DA9311A3547010EB1745F9098C8189E66B54F16BBCA4419250DDAE584462476E362622BD259A20D1597309210AC995C99F449C7702D4CF7627CBCEC72291068BFEAFDDC8C9625B71658F22EAD1E815FED12FF6D0DEB5CDBB40AEA4EF5D058E57168353BEB2DA3730B57DF729865CC3271FEE73BB1D434AB645BB5&DataSetName=LIVEDATA
If you think more than 400 people, who don’t know each, making the same type of detailed serious allegations isn’t “evidence” because they could all be lying, then you need to explain why you don’t believe any of them and explain what you would regard as “evidence” for any sexual crimes.
“…more than 400 people, who don’t know each other,”!
I would regard correspondence, video, audio, photographic, forensic evidence, confession, police complaints at the time as evidence.
There is nothing for Jimmy saville.
Toby, well done for putting this on the recors.
What I have found amazing is how meny in the MSM and politics behave like that but are never reported. Why do they congregate there.
In all my year sin business at senior managerial level I only once ever had a similar situation. It eas a 3 something woman trying it on with a 20 year old woman whose mother called in to complain.
Wow, the BBC sure seems to be a really big magnet for creeps and nonces! You may recall one Jimmy Saville, for example.
I wonder if the reason his own son didn’t want to go on holiday to Skye was about a great deal more than boredom?
A very evocative account of the attitudes of the time. I was 14 in 1966, so a bit older, and fortunately do not recall a similar incident but I do remember the lack of questioning of motive, as well as the automatic deference to authority. A lot of people had the capacity to keep secrets, good and bad.
Fascinating story and glad you managed to avoid full-on sexual abuse by the sounds of it. I imagine many people can recount experiences of inappropriate behaviour if not full-on sexual abuse during that era. It does seem prominent people who one might describe as “larger than life” are prone to getting carried away (to use a polite term for such perverts) and taking advantage of vulnerable or impressionable youngsters. I’m not making excuses, just observations and I take the point make by a fellow commentator that evidence of Jimmy Saville’s abuses is thin on the ground. I wonder if anything has changed nowadays. It maybe that would-be abusers are more aware that they may get exposed if not brought to justice.
I also had this instinct to stay silent when similar things happened to me as a 16-17 year old – being driven back from a babysitting assignment or given a lift back to a campsite. I struggled and ran too, suffering little more than ruffled feathers – though it does, as you note, stick in the memory.
It is worth pondering this instinct to stay shtum. I suspect it is an evolutionary adaptation – better survival rates for those who did not tell tales on powerful people. When Trump famously observed that ‘it was amazing what you got away with once you were perceived as rich and powerful,’ I felt he was expressing honest surprise at his happy discovery as much as simply boasting. Better appreciation of this mechanism should help us stamp out the unacceptable exploitation of the young and powerless.
How many avuncular figures turned out to have WHT (wandering Hand Trouble) after drinking? Many women remember being groped by such men when they were young. It was such a surprise/shock (the switch from avuncular to groper) that you didn’t know what to do apart from try to distance yourself from them and keep your distance thereafter.
Groping is a strange thing – being groped so unpleasant, what do the gropers think they are doing apart from hurting their victim? It surely is a power thing.