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Whatever You Say, Say Nothing
Two prominent Londoners found themselves in deep water this weekend after remarks they made to the press were seized upon by critics.
A top political adviser to London's new Mayor, Boris Johnson, was forced to resign after apparently suggesting that elderly African-Caribbean people unhappy with the new Conservative council should leave the country; While novelist Ian McEwan could face "hate crime" charges after telling an Italian newspaper that he hated Islamism.
Outside the media, these statements come under the category "stating the bleedin' obvious."
Johnson's man James McGrath responded to an idiotic line of questioning from a blogger, making him the left's first "blog scalp" in the UK (bloggers on the right led a campaign which eventually led to the Guardian sacking a militant Islamist trainee from its newsdesk).
The hack asked McGrath for his thoughts on an article by Darcus Howe published just before the Mayoral election, in which Howe suggested that there might be a mass exodus of older Afro-Caribbeans from London if Johnson won. Unhappy with the new Mayor, they would return to the West Indies.
McGrath is said to have responded, "Well, let them go if they don't like it here."
Both Johnson and Tory party leader David Cameron have been at pains to make clear that McGrath is no racist, but agreed "that he could not stay on as my political adviser without providing ammunition for those who wish to deliberately misrepresent our clear and unambiguous opposition to any racist tendencies."
Unless you are one of London's many professionally aggrieved groups looking for yet another thing to become aggrieved about, it is difficult to see what was so awful about what McGrath is reported to have said.
Throughout the 1980s, Britons were threatened by a long list of unsavoury celebrities who said they would leave the country if Labour ever came to power (none of them did, sadly). In Scotland in the early 90s there was rightful indignation when Tory-supporting businesses warned their staff that they might leave the country if Labour won in 1992 - effectively telling workers that their jobs depended on voting Conservative.
Throughout this year, columnists have urged Gordon Brown to ignore the squeals and crack down on rich "non-doms" who avoid tax; if they don't like the new tax regime, they can bugger off, we are told.
Should democracies really give in to stroppy threats from some groups that they might leave if a vote goes against them? And really, if the likelihood of a democratically-elected Conservative leadership for London is so intolerable to elderly African-Caribbeans, why should they hang around? Freedom of movement is one of the foundations of our democracy.
McGrath's line - "let them go" - isn't even as controversial as Nicolas Sarkozy's pre-election statement "If it bothers people to be in France, then it shouldn't bother them to leave a country they don't love." Sarkozy won the Presidential election with one of the largest-ever turnouts, and his statement was widely supported even by those who didn't vote for him. It certainly wasn't as shocking as Ken Livingstone's remarks on a Jewish Evening Standard hack's similarity to a Nazi guard, and Ken didn't feel the urge to stand down.
McGrath's only "crime", if crime it was, was to fall for the line of questioning which was clearly set up to score racist points. There is an entire industry of grievance groups in London who owe their existence to Ken Livingstone's policies, and they're going to spend the next five years targeting Boris's team for real or imagined racist offences.
Also in the press this weekend was novelist Ian McEwan's spirited defence of his friend Martin Amis, who has come under fire for his criticism of militant Islam. He told Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera:
"A dear friend had been called a racist," he said, referring to Martin Amis. "As soon as a writer expresses an opinion against Islamism, immediately someone on the left leaps to his feet and claims that because the majority of Muslims are dark-skinned, he who criticises it is racist.
"This is logically absurd and morally unacceptable. Martin is not a racist. And I myself despise Islamism, because it wants to create a society that I detest, based on religious belief, on a text, on lack of freedom for women, intolerance towards homosexuality and so on – we know it well."
"I find (Militant Islamism and hardline US Christian fundamentalists) equally absurd... I don't like these medieval visions of the world according to which God is coming to save the faithful and to damn the others. But those American Christians don't want to kill anyone in my city, that's the difference."
The Independent notes that in "today's febrile legal climate", he could face investigation for hate speech.
Inayat Bunglawala, a spokesman for the Muslim Council of Britain, has already criticised McEwan for his defence of Amis.
"Mr McEwan is being rather disingenuous about his friend, Martin Amis's remarks. Of course you should be allowed to criticise the tenets of any religion. However, Amis went much further than that," he said. Amis made what were "were clearly very bigoted remarks and the fact that McEwan prefers to whitewash them tells us much about his own views too."
Again, where is the problem here? McEwan is quite right to see that militant Islam poses a threat to liberal culture, to feminists, to gays. No-one denies that. Why is stating the obvious setting oneself up for a "backlash?"
