The left would rather scoff than understand

It’s now just over a week since I returned to Melbourne from the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC) conference in London.  But as good as ARC was I’ve spent I’ve spent more time thinking about what I saw in the UK.  It’s hard to escape the conclusion that Britain if not yet broken, is close to breaking.  This news story is my main thing I remember from my trip.

Police have launched an investigation after an officer was seen tearing down posters of Israeli hostages in Manchester, announcing it ‘regrets any offence caused’.

Footage shared online shows the lone officer tearing down fliers of those kidnapped by Hamas on October 7, seemingly ignoring calls from distressed passers by, questioning what they are doing.  One woman is heard shouting ‘Why is the police taking this down?  Excuse me, excuse me, excuse me’, receiving no response while walking down Bury Road in Prestwich.

It comes a day after two Met Police officers were seen tearing down fliers, revealing those who were taken from Israel during Hamas’ barbaric October 7 attack, outside of Cullimore Chemist in Edgware, North London.

Some locals in the areas, which is home to a sizeable Jewish community, have slammed the officers over their ‘disgusting actions’.  But the Met has insisted they are were merely taking steps to ‘stop issues escalating’ and to ‘avoid community tension’.

It’s hard to disagree with what Douglas Murray wrote a few days ago – ‘Britain is the new capital of anti-Israel hate’.

I have spent recent weeks in Israel, and goodness knows this is a country that has plenty of challenges.  But one question I have been asked a lot by an alarmingly wide array of Israelis is: ‘What happened to Britain?’

Generally, I get protective after this question, and reassure people that Britain is still Britain and that our core of decency remains as it always was.  But the response is always the same: ‘But these marches?’

It amazes many Israelis – as it amazes me – that Britain has seen some of the worst scenes of all the anti-Israel marches across the world.  And I say ‘anti-Israel’ for a reason.  The first protests in London happened before Israel had even begun its military response to October 7.

The demonstration at the Sydney Opera House was also before Israel’s response to the terrorist attack of Hamas.  Murray finished:

In my view, Israel can look after itself.  Watching the unity of this nation at war assures me of that.  But as I watch hooligans clamber over our war memorials and statues and hold our city centres hostage, I wonder whether it isn’t Britain that is the one in real trouble here.

Suella Braverman as UK Home Secretary called the protests engulfing Britain as ‘hate marches’ and accurately described the double standards of the British police – ‘During Covid, why was it that lockdown objectors were given no quarter by public order police yet Black Lives Matter demonstrators were enabled, allowed to break rules and even greeted with officers taking the knee?’  Last week Braverman was sacked by the British PM, Rishi Sunak.  Allegedly because her comments had not been approved by the prime minister’s office.

Braverman’s fault was not that she was wrong.  Her fault was that she dared speak about what was happening.  The approach of one unnamed Conservative MP is typical of establishment Britain – ‘ignore a problem and hope it goes away.  That MP criticised her for talking about the failures of the police and he said Braverman should instead be ‘dampening things down’ and ‘calming tensions’.

Here in Australia politicians would rather look away too.  In Melbourne a week ago a synagogue was forced to be evacuated after a pro-Palestinian demonstration was across the road of the synagogue.  Victorian premier Jacinta Allan’s comments about it were nonsensical – ‘It is our diversity that makes us great, and our compassion that unites us – but there is never any place for antisemitism or Islamophobia in Victoria.’  Teal independent Allegra Spender would rather look away too, as she called on politicians to ‘collectively we need to lower the temperature and just say, we collectively are really concerned about antisemitism [and] Islamophobia…’

In my Australian Financial Review column on Friday I quoted 21-year-old Benji van der Plaat who told The Age – ‘I’m Jewish, but currently I am scared to show it just because I don’t know who is on the street.  I have always felt like I was safe in Australia, but now I don’t really feel safe anymore.’

Someone who’s not afraid to tiptoe around the reality of mobs on the streets of Australia’s capital cities calling for the destruction of Israel is John Howard.  He was at the ARC conference and while giving a media interview he was asked whether he agreed with Braverman’s remark that multiculturalism had ‘failed’ in the West.  He said:

Multiculturalism is a concept that I’ve always had trouble with.  I take the view that if people want to emigrate to a country, then they adopt the values and practices of that country.  And in return they’re entitled to have the host citizenry respect their culture without trying to create some kind of federation of tribes and culture – you get into terrible trouble with that.  I think one of the problems with multiculturalism is we try to too hard to institutionalise differences, rather than celebrate what we have in [common].

Australia is not ‘multicultural’ at all – we are ‘multi-ethnic’.  We’ve welcomed people from many different cultures but our public culture is Western, liberal, and democratic.  Most Australians would find Howard’s remarks uncontroversial.  But not of course someone of the left like Niki Savva.  In The Sydney Morning Herald she claimed the ARC conference was a ‘jamboree of conservatives, where older participants seemed to believe the solution to their existential crisis was to find new ways of fighting old or lost causes.  John Howard was still grappling with multiculturalism…’

Yes – John Howard is still grappling with multiculturalism – as we all are.  Anyone who thinks we don’t need to grapple with multiculturalism when Jews are afraid to walk the streets of Melbourne is as blind to reality as the Victorian premier Jacinta Allan.

Allan’s comments are becoming less true by the day.  ‘Melbourne and Victoria is a place where people from around the globe, people from all corners of the world choose to come and live.  They know it is a place where they can practice their faith, they can celebrate their culture, amongst a community that welcomes this, that supports this and respect this.’  That might have been the case once – but not now.  Australia in the 1950s and 1960s is a time and place the left likes to criticise for being backward and boring.  Then Jewish schools did not need armed guards at their gates there wasn’t a $50 million federal government program funding security upgrades for places of religious worship, including synagogues, which was announced by the Albanese government last month.  ‘The Securing Faith-Based Places program helps protect Australians from crime and violence motivated by religious or racial intolerance by funding security guards and security infrastructure, including cameras, light and fencing.’  Weasel words like this from the politicians can’t obscure the scale of the problem.  Someone shouting ‘Gas the Jews’ on the steps of the Opera House isn’t motivated by ‘religious or racial intolerance’ – they’re motivated by hatred.

John Howard wasn’t the only former politician at ARC who raised the ire of the left.  The Guardian breathlessly reported former deputy PM, John Anderson at the conference:

…Anderson falsely claimed that ‘every elite grouping in the country’ including ‘90% of the media’ had advocated for a yes vote in the referendum….  Despite the fact that 37 or 45 proposed constitutional alterations have been rejected throughout Australian history, Anderson claimed the voice result was a ‘civilisation moment’

Editorialising in a news report and inserting the word ‘falsely’ doesn’t make what Anderson said untrue.  Every elite grouping the country DID support the Voice and 90% of the media DID advocate for Yes.

It’s been interesting to watch the response of the left to ARC.  It doesn’t know what to make of a conference that was unashamed about the benefits for Western Civilisation, the role of religious belief in society, and the importance of a culture of freedom.  At the conference as the reasons for the capture of the institutions of the West was debated there was a lot of talk of the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci.  His idea was that communism would not be achieved by the proletariat and from ‘the bottom up’ but would arrive as cultural and political elites imposed communism from the ‘top down.  After Gramsci, the next most-talked about writer at ARC was GK Chesterton, famous for his quote – ‘When men stop believing in God they don’t believe in nothing; they believe in anything.’

The Times newspaper in London had as much difficulty as Niki Savva in knowing how to talk about ARC and the work of its founder Jordan Peterson.  The evening of the day on which ARC concluded Peterson spoke at an indoor stadium in London to a crowd of  20,000 people.  James Marriott a columnist at The Times attended and was bemused that ‘it was not a posh crowd.  All of the people I spoke to had attended a non-elite university or no university at all.’  Which makes sense.  The more intellectually curious you are the less likely you are to have attended an elite university.

Andrea, a recovering drug addict in electric blue trousers, referred to Peterson with affectionate irony as ‘Jordan’ and told me that because ‘the world is a mess’ she admired his ethic of ‘structure’ and his opposition to a culture that encourages us to ‘be your own God’.

Another young man said that when he listens to Peterson, ‘I feel like it’s my dad speaking’.  A common theme.  Peterson’s fans love his ethic of order, tough love, self-reliance.  Most people I spoke to agree with everything Peterson said on politics but when (when I pushed them) hesitated to define themselves as right wing…

Uplifting small-c conservative life advice dressed up in grandiose philosophical mumbo jumbo is the heart of Peterson’s appeal.

There’s nothing mumbo jumbo about being told the importance of order, ‘tough love’, and self-reliance.  And its a message those 20,000 people are unlikely to hear from anyone else.  An Oxbridge graduate with all the privileges of birth, wealth, and education doesn’t need to hear about the importance of self-reliance because they have no need to be self-reliant.

Marriott went on to reveal the vastly different world he inhabits from that of Peterson’s audience.  For members of the elite, Covid lockdowns were the time when they quilted, and learned to make sourdough bread – or in Marriott’s case, played board games.

Lockdown and its tyrannies was a big theme of the panel that formed the last phase of the show.  I have hardly thought about lockdown since it ended.  Peterson’s panellists – the journalist Douglas Murray, The YouTube-famous French-Canadian icon-carver Jonathan Pageau, and the climate sceptic Bjorn Lomborg – seem to have thought about little else.

For me, the pandemic was a time when I stayed inside and played a lot of Scrabble.  For them it was a bitter foretaste of a pseudo-utopian globalist nightmare.

I wish I could have introduced Marriott to a taxi-driver I had in London.  During the lockdowns he didn’t work for twelve months and he lost his house.  He didn’t have the luxury of playing Scrabble.

During Peterson’s talk he showed this video made for the ARC conference.  You can watch it here.  According to Marriott ‘it feature[s] expensive footage of churches and classical architecture interspersed with clips of assorted right-wing luminaries intoning uplifting banalities about the glories of western civilisation and the importance of community.’

If it was banal to talk of the heritage of the West and the importance of community conferences like ARC wouldn’t be needed.  And 20,000 people wouldn’t turn up to listen to Jordan Peterson.  If you haven’t watched it already, this speech by Konstantin Kisin at ARC is brilliant and explains exactly why the values of Western Civilisation are worth fighting for.