Nick Cohen: Writing from London

A few weeks ago, Sean O’Neill, the crime correspondent of The Times, claimed that Lord Hope, the former Archbishop of York, had covered up allegations that a senior Anglican clergyman had abused choirboys and school pupils.

You have to have worked in a newsroom to know how hard it is to break a story like that. How do you get victims to talk to you? How do you know whether you can trust them? Accusations of sexual abuse are hard to prove. In the absence of forensic evidence, impossible to find years after the alleged event, they often come down to “he says, she says” or in the case of many paedophiles, “he says, he says.” Then there are Britain’s ferocious libel laws to navigate.

Nevertheless, O’Neill stood-up the story, and went home convinced that he and The Times would receive some credit for publishing. The next morning the Today programme reported: “It has emerged that the former Archbishop of York had covered up allegations that a senior Anglican clergyman had abused choirboys and school pupils.”

Emerged? Does the BBC think that stories appear like rocks at low tide? Does it imagine that passers-by can point their fingers and say, “Oh look, evidence of corrupt political donations has emerged”?

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A plane crashes in the Sahara. Only a reporter and an editor survive. At first they hope that rescuers will see the smoke rising from the wreckage. But the fire dies, and no one comes. They are lost and alone under a merciless sun, and start walking.

For days, they march in horrendous heat. Their water runs out. Their skin peels. Their minds reel from sunstroke. Finally, they collapse — blistered and dehydrated — at the bottom of an enormous sand dune.

“Let’s curl up here and die,” gasps the editor.

“No!” cries the reporter. “We cannot give up. Let’s climb to the top of the dune and see if there’s any hope.”

They stagger up — two steps forward, one step back — and reach the top of the dune.

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Look at the Edinburgh Television Festival. It never debates why Britain once exported quality dramas and imported game shows, and now gets its best dramas from abroad while pumping out lightweight and formulaic programmes. The executives who take the stage are as complacent and as self-congratulatory as bankers before the crash. The otherwise excellent Mark Lawson will never devote an edition of a Radio 4 arts programme to asking why Nicholas Hytner, the director of the National Theatre, can produce shows the world wants to see when Ben Stephenson, the BBC’s Commissioner of Drama, cannot.

You find an admission that America and Scandinavia are now producing better television only in the willingness of our companies to, well, “borrow” their ideas. I am not going to mock. I don’t mind British commissioning editors ripping off foreigners. There is no copyright on ideas, and originality is overrated. The real question is not whether a British company has stolen but whether they have stolen with style; whether they are cat burglars or muggers; whether they can make something new out of someone else’s idea or just smash and grab it.

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What is the problem? Why can’t you oppose, say, the war in Afghanistan, if you wish, while also opposing the subjugation of women? Why can’t you say that Western societies give women greater rights, while also opposing this or that Western policy decision or politician? Why, in short, can you not walk and chew gum at the same time? I don’t mean to single out academics for special condemnation. The postmodern university may not be able to guide society, but it reflects its deformities and double standards. I know civil servants, liberal journalists, broadcasters, politicians, diplomats and police officers who never read an academic paper from one year until the next. They will condemn the gender pay gap or the sexual abuse of white-skinned women, but stay silent about the religious oppression of brown-skinned women. Fear of violent reprisals, fear of causing offence, fear that their enemies will denounce them for possessing a racial or sectarian hatred play their part. On the Left, there is the strong fear of accusations of complicity with the status quo, which never go down well in arts and humanities departments. Tax quotes one left-wing academic booming at a colleague: “Secular feminists’ concern that Muslim fundamentalist religious codes impose and sanction violence on women and queers relies on a myopia that understands Muslim women only as victims of Muslim men and Islam, ignoring the role of imperial violence in defining Muslim realities around the world.” No one looking for tenure wants to hear words like that directed against them

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The easy thing to say is that British television is just updating Agatha Christie, the most successful mediocre writer there has ever been. They recreate her “Mayhem Parva” to use the crime writer Colin Watson’s happy description of the Christie school of village detective fiction, and over-complicated plots. The result, however, is not quite as benign as Christie would have wanted.

If the British public and a slice of the international audience want to see murders set among the English upper-middle class they also want to see the English upper-middle class murdered.

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Daniel Johnson: Our subject is the Left and the Jews. A famous phrase from the 19th century—I think it came from the German social democrat August Bebel—was that “anti-Semitism is the socialism of fools”. If that was true then, there are still plenty of these fools around today. Just as in the 19th century, when leading figures of the Left such as Karl Marx set a bad example in their writings about the Jewish people, so today we have a problem on the Left. Where does this come from? Why does it exist?

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Imagine if white racists in Norway or Britain had targeted Deepika Thathaal, the former pop singer who has recently made her first feminist documentary, Banaz: An Honour Killing, which was shown on ITV1 at the end of October. As a brilliant and beautiful 17-year-old she had mixed the influences of the Asian music her immigrant parents knew with the sounds of Massive Attack and Portishead to become one of Norway’s first Asian stars.

Her opponents dialled her parents’ home and bellowed out poisonous threats. They burst into her classroom and screamed that she was “a slut, a whore, a prostitute”. They attacked her on the street and stormed the stage during a concert in Oslo. She moved to London and relaunched herself as Deeyah, “the Muslim Madonna”. With a touching naivety, she thought that Britain would be a safer country to work in than Norway.

Carry on reading