The Spectator’s Khrushchev moment

It has now been fifty years since Nikita Khrushchev stood up to denounce Stalin’s crimes and to tell his comrades a few uncomfortable but undeniable facts about mass executions and show trials. Perhaps to commemorate this occasion, the Spectator decided to engage in its own act of timely truth-telling, and dedicated a whole issue to “Sex and Society”.

Timely this is, but dangerous also under the current climate. Ross Clark got right into the spirit of the moment, with an article that pretended to discuss what he termed the new morality:

It was John Major who came a cropper while trying to restore the nation’s moral values: his ‘back to basics’ campaign was mocked to death before it had really got started. Yet Mr Major’s attempt to influence the nation’s morals was nothing compared with that of Tony Blair, who has overseen a Sexual Offences Act, a law against discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation, the introduction of civil partnerships for gay couples, and a gambling Bill. Moreover, Mr Blair seems to have got away with it.

That, alas, was the last suggestion of coherent English prose to be found in the article, which continued by quoting opinion poll after opinion poll. These showed that the British public had not swallowed Blair’s ersatz new morality wholesale and are distinctly unsupportive of adultery, corporate sex education and other such blessings of a socially liberal government. I could have more easily, and far more pleasurably, derived this very same information down the local pub rather than from Clark’s meandering article.

Any serious (or at least earnest) discussion of the Peter Mandelson Question is a relief. Yet, said of an article in a magazine that has recently paid host to Ferdinand Mount’s full-brayed delight in the introduction of gay marriage by another name, not to mention Mark Steyn’s homoerotic and entirely irrelevant musings occasioned by seeing Roughback Mountain, this is damning by faint praise. There is essentially no analysis in the article; it’s just a long litany of figures. One cannot help thinking that it would sit far more at home in an obscure journal of social statistics, not in a mainstream magazine allegedly dedicated to discussing political questions.

It’s not as if Clark would have struggled to find an argument against the new morality had he wished to find one. Not to boast unduly, I could have provided him with one. He could have also spoken to his party at prayer, who had wondered if one of the new morality’s pet projects might be in fact an “unholy alliance”. He might have even inquired about his Spectator co-worker Charles Moore’s now repressed opinions on homosexuality.

He could have invoked religious arguments, and perhaps even quoted the liberal clergy’s least favourite Biblical verse. This might not have persuaded many, but it would have at least sown the seeds of doubt in many a Christian’s mind, and perhaps even in the minds of those who simply value Britain’s religious heritage.

There also an argument for keeping social traditions intact in order to prevent social breakdown and because there must have been a reason for things being the way they were in the first place. Edmund Burke did not think such an argument below him, but Ross Clark evidently does.

It isn’t even as if the old morality is indefensible on its own merits. It created stable families, remarkably good general health given the levels of sanitation at the time and well brought up children. The new morality’s fruits have been teenage mothers, an AIDS epidemic and a generation taught not by their betters but by Murdoch’s and Desmond’s porn channels.

It’s most certainly not like Ross Clark to be so coy about any question. His recent novel, which imagines a future world regressing to the Middle Ages as a result of environmentalist infatuations, could be faulted for excess sharpness, but not excess timidity. So, why does he shrivel up before the colossus of gay rights, adultery-on-demand and mass pornography?

To ask that question is to answer it. Just like questioning Communism in the post-Stalin Soviet Union, questioning the new morality can only go so far. When you can get a visit from plod for doubting the wisdom of homosexual adoption on radio, it takes a truly brave, suicidal man to question the morality of sodomy itself.

It’s a fact that homosexuals do not reproduce. From this, it’s easy enough to conclude that too much homosexuality will result in a demographic collapse. This is the conclusion that, nowadays, dare not speak its name.

The Old Left once spoke of building Jerusalem. The New Left would prefer to build another Biblical city, Sodom and Gomorrah. That’s what the new morality is all about, not a long list of unattached statistics.

Posted by Alex Zeka on Friday, March 3, 2006 at 05:07 PM in Social liberalism
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