The Obscurer

Last week on “Question Time”, Michael Heseltine mentioned that the European Union had maintained the peace across Western Europe since 1945, and Melanie Phillips responded that it was, of course, NATO that has kept the peace since the Second World War. It is becoming a habit; it is only a few weeks since Robert Kilroy-Silk said much the same thing on the very same programme. I wonder if they have they been conferring?

But you do not need to like the direction the EU is going in to understand what Heseltine was saying; it is a matter of History. One of the initial objectives of the European Coal and Steel Community which was formed at the Treaty of Paris in 1951 was to create a form of economic integration where war between the member states, primarily France and Germany, would be a thing of the past. It was the brainchild of Jean Monnet, a French civil servant, and speaking to BBC Online, his former personal assistant Richard Mayne, stated “Coal and steel were essentially weapons of war, and (Monnet) thought that if they were pooled then war would become unthinkable or impossible.” Over time, the ECSC evolved and grew into the EU.

Today the idea of a war between France and Germany seems ridiculous, but it is perhaps a tribute to the EU in its various guises that such a thing is indeed unthinkable. Of course it was not always like this; 1951 was just 6 years after VE Day, and there had been three wars between France and Germany in the previous eighty years. To put this in context, it is now 9 years since the Dayton Accords ended the war between Serbia and Croatia, and it would take a brave man to think that these countries have solved all their problems. The closer economic ties between France and Germany, two nations who had decades of shared enmity, have resulted in a situation where they are now criticised for being thick as thieves and dominating the EU. It is something we take for granted, but it is really remarkable to think such a change in attitude can have taken place in just a few generations.

To ignore all this is really to be blinded by Euro-scepticism. You don’t have to want the Euro to understand the role the EU has played in maintaining peace. You can still yearn for the days of the curved cucumber and yet still accept that not everything about the European project has been bad.

Of course NATO has played a major part in maintaining peace in Europe after the war, but its purpose was to be a counterweight to the Soviet Union, not to prevent wars between Western European nations. It is an obvious but important distinction. Both the EU and NATO have played important but different roles.

And I feel the EU can still play this role of peacemaker. Earlier I mentioned Serbia and Croatia, and how it would be optimistic to think that all the problems between these two countries are behind them, particularly if either country were to elect a nationalist in the Milosevic or Tudjman mould. But as things stand both nations are looking towards EU (and NATO) membership, and as with France and Germany, I can see that if they are both admitted then the idea of a future conflict between them would be just as absurd.

When stupid Europeans come out with a stupid anti-Americanism, stupid Americans often respond in two ways. Some say that if it wasn’t for the USA we would all be speaking Russian by now, and they are wrong. The rest say that if it wasn’t for the USA we would all now be speaking German. This second version is chronologically correct; it was in wars between the Western European nations that the Americans first rescued us, before the Soviets got a look in. I think Melanie Phillips and Robert Kilroy-Silk have missed the point.

Boris Johnson and The Spectator Magazine have got in an awful lot of trouble this week over the Leading article commenting on the Ken Bigley affair. The focus of attention has been on the paragraph mentioning Liverpool and the character of Liverpudlians. For some, comments that many Liverpudlians have “an excessive predilection for welfarism” and a “peculiar, and deeply unattractive, psyche” were welcomed as an example of someone finally speaking the truth as they see it. Others thought it was evidence of lazy stereotyping and prejudice. Include me in the latter; as I stated in a comment in “The Filter^” this description seems to have more to do with characters in the sit-com “Bread” than to be a serious examination of the character of Liverpool, but I think everyone by now has read enough about this aspect of the article and will have formed their own opinion.

By emphasising this aspect of the Leader, most people have overlooked the rest of the article, part of which suggests that since the death of Diana, this country has become “hooked on grief”, is guilty of “mawkish sentimentality” and an “apparently depleted intelligence and sense of rationality”. This is a point worth discussing.

In the weeks and months following Diana’s death, we were constantly being told how Britain had changed for the better; we would be more compassionate and caring, we would have a kinder society, the press will have learned its lesson and will be more responsible from now on. The leader in The Spectator seems to be saying that this change has gone too far, and we are now a miserable load of grief-junkies. This is all good journalistic, state-of-the-nation knockabout stuff, but I would contend that as a country we haven’t changed one jot since Diana’s death. If there was any effect then it was that the media decided to lay off Princes William and Harry – for a bit – but that was about it.

When Diana died I was working a night shift with around 15 other people. As the news drifted in that there had been a car crash, that she was seriously injured, and then that she had died, there was of course interest amongst my colleagues and myself. There was shock at the news, and talk of how we would all remember where we had been when it happened, akin to the “where were you when Kennedy died” question. There was interest and curiosity, perhaps similar to the curiosity of the rubbernecker. But sadness? Not really. Grief? Definitely not. Tears? No, not then nor at anytime during the next week did I see anyone in tears. When I got home, before I went to bed, I switched on the TV and saw that every channel except Channel Five was talking about Diana (I don’t think anyone told Channel Five, bless) and I knew that this would be the way of it for the next few days.

By Sunday afternoon I was already sick of the coverage; by Tuesday I was tearing my hair out. Every one of my mates agreed with me. What I couldn’t get into my head was how the TV and Newspapers were constantly talking about a nation in mourning, and yet the nation was getting along just fine as far as I could see. The media images just didn’t match up to what I was witnessing with my own eyes.

Now I know that some people were genuinely moved by the death. The media did not make up the scenes of crying mourners, and the books of condolence did not write themselves, but I don’t think that this was representative of the majority opinion. I did speak to people who said it was all very sad, and who disagreed with me that the Media had lost its sense of proportion; although these were the same people who looked aghast at me when I had suggested a few weeks earlier that 20 pages of the Sunday Mirror devoted to “The Kiss” between Di and Dodi may have been a wee bit excessive. But genuine grief, with my own eyes, I saw not.

I think that is my point really, to those who think we as a society lack a sense of proportion in these matters, and that that Diana “kick started” it all. Even in the days immediately after Diana’s death the nation as a whole did not lose it’s sense of proportion, but the media certainly did. The papers realised that they only had about a week left to milk their favourite circulation-boosting cash cow, and so they went mad. The nation in mourning was a myth.

And what about today. At chucking out time in our nation’s city centres, are you struck by our compassion and mawkishness? Not the first thought on my mind. Part of the inspiration for the Spectator’s leader was the minute silence for Ken Bigley held before the England-Wales football match at Old Trafford, which was booed throughout. How does that thuggish behaviour fit in with the idea of a nation “convulsed in grief”? Everyone I have spoken about this incident said that it was an embarrassing disgrace that the silence was ignored, and said that they did not think there should have been a one minute silence in the first place. Again, this suggests we are not the mawkish nation we have been painted as.

And turning to the specific reaction to Mr Bigley; outside his family, where actually was this grief regarding his death? Anywhere? A church memorial service and a two minutes silence in Liverpool is all I am aware of. You can argue that a two minute silence is too much, you can argue that we do not hold minute silences for lots of other people so why should we hold one for Ken Bigley, indeed you can argue lots of things, but it is all a far cry from actually grieving.

We may have too many minute silences these days, for all sorts of inappropriate reasons, and I would argue against them. We may get our TV schedules shunted about for all sorts of spurious reasons in order to avoid causing offence, and I have argued against this. As Daisy Sampson said yesterday on the Daily Politics , Prime Ministers Question Time almost always begins with Tony Blair saying he knows the whole house will join him in expressing condolences for some thing or other, and that this never used to happen. But is this misplaced compassion, or is it back-covering, knowing that is you don’t do this or that then you may be criticised in the media, or attacked by your political opponents? Is this really indicative of the beliefs of the nation?

The leading article ends by saying that our attitude to risk has changed due to “generations of peace and welfarism” and this is probably true; when times are hard, people have to be harder. But it is a leap to go from there to say that we “wallow in a sense of … victimhood”, vicarious or otherwise, and I certainly don’t think anything has changed due to the death of Diana. In fact, from where I have been standing, the actual, subdued reaction to Ken Bigleys death largely supports this idea.

PostScript: In the phone-in on BBC Radio Merseyside, I thought Boris Johnson acquitted himself quite well. It can’t have been easy, especially when Paul Bigley launched into him and asked him to leave public life. Now I understand he is someone who is currently mourning his brothers death – and as the rest of the Bigley family eloquently stated, everyone reacts in a different way – but can I suggest that this advice really should apply to Paul Bigley himself.

George Orwell gets quoted so much nowadays that I wouldn’t be surprised if something from “Homage to Catalonia” has been used as a reading at a wedding. And why not? He is, in my opinion, one of the finest English writers and thinkers of all time. This is one Blair whom everyone loves. One of the things I like about him is the way he publicly changed his mind on matters, and his writings could sometimes be contradictory; in other words he was a very human writer.

What everyone seems to agree on is that he was a great visionary. His works, in particularly “1984“, describe a future world which daily seems to be unfolding in front of us. But I am not sure how accurate this is. Orwell did show a nightmarish vision of a totalitarian society in “1984”, but I feel this should be seen in context. Orwell was born in 1903, still twenty-five years before full and equal universal suffrage for men and women was realised. He was educated first at St. Cyprians, a brutal regime he described in “Such, such were the joys”.

He grew up in a world where the British Empire was at its height, and he played his part in administering justice in the colonies as a police officer in Burma from 1922 until 1927. When he returned to England he saw National Socialism, Fascism and Communism rise to power across Europe, then witnessed the Second World War and a National government in the UK.

This was the background to Orwell’s life, when he wrote “1984”, after Kafka’s “The Trial”, Huxley’s “Brave New World” and Koestler’s “Darkness at Noon”. Totalitarianism was not a terrifying fiction but was very much a part of his world, and “1984” was to some extent not so much a prophesy as just 1948 given a tweak.

What would Orwell think if he were able to see the world in 2004? Would he be shocked, and agree with everyone who invokes his name on such matters as CCTV cameras and Political Correctness, and rail that his predictions of Big Brother and the Thought Police were coming true? Or would he not instead marvel at just how much the world has changed since 1950; at the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the huge increase in democracy across Eastern Europe and South America? Of course the world is not perfect; there are still far too many despotic regimes, and a few unconvincing democracies, and there is of course still the small matter of terrorism – there is still much to do (oh no, now I am sounding like the other Blair!) – but would Orwell not be interested in the important issues like the human right to freedom of expression across the world, rather than the human right to go 40 mph in a built up area without a GATSO catching you.

Of course, I don’t know what Orwell would think, but that doesn’t stop everyone else from having a go. Another great English writer, William Shakepeare, wrote in “The Merchant of Venice” that “the Devil can cite scriptures for his purpose”, and I cannot help thinking that, should he not find what he was looking for in the Bible, old Satan would use something Orwell has written to suit his needs.

For Orwell is quoted by such diverse writers as George Monbiot when talking about globalisation, and referred to by Melanie Phillips to attack the bill on inciting racial hatred. Peter Hitchens uses him in his lament to a lost Britain, while Christopher Hitchens sometimes appears to think that he is George Orwell, or at least his heir. Michael Moore in his film Fahrenheit 9/11 compares Bush’s War on terror to Orwell’s theory of a perpetual war, while the website Moorewatch quotes Orwell to attack Moore’s film “Bowling for Columbine“. Perhaps they are all right.

Quoting Orwell has become a way to give instant kudos to your argument. Anyone can do it, and it doesn’t really matter if it is an appropriate quote or not. It says I am on the side of Orwell, light and freedom; those who disagree with you, and who you criticise, be it George Bush, Michael Moore, the Government, the EU, or whatever, are therefore on the side of darkness and totalitarianism. Ironically, his words on freedom are often used to try and gain the moral high ground and can be used to silence debate.

This is not meant as an attack on Orwell, rather to express concern at the way his name is bandied about. If he is used to defend everything, then eventually his writings will mean nothing. “1984” is a fine novel, and Orwell’s warnings about totalitarian rule should of course be taken seriously; alongside the writing of others and the teaching from history they are a constant reminder of where society can go, and where it should not go. We should never be complacent about sleepwalking into totalitarianism and there is still much to learn from Orwell’s writings; but not necessarily from those who quote him.