Culture: the cult of indifference

By Richard North - April 7, 2023

To add to its scalps on prepayment meters, it was interesting to see The Times on Wednesday (for Thursday) take on Scott Benton, the MP for Blackpool South, and expose him for the duplicitous shit that he really is.

But, if it wasn’t enough seeing an MP willing to sell himself to the highest bidder, the new revelations from today’s Times are in a sense more damning, in that they have Benton boasting about how easy it is to circumvent disclosure rules, and thus evade public scrutiny.

That MPs these days seem to be in it from themselves comes as no surprise, and it was only recently that Matt Hancock and Kwasi Modo were caught up in a sting operation, where they also appeared willing to prostitute themselves.

Also belatedly coming into focus is the role of the all-party parliamentary group (APPG) in enabling lobbyists to gain access to MPs and grease a few palms in a legitimate if rather dubious manner.

Concern was voiced recently by Chris Bryant, chairman of the Commons standards committee, that they can be used as back doors into parliament. Foreign trips, domestic hospitality and the bankrolling of APPG secretariats can be used by foreign governments or corporate interests to gain advantage.

Yet this has been going on for a long time. One beneficiary of that system was that fine, upstanding gentleman, Nadhim Zahawi, who managed to profit hugely from his proximity to an overtly corrupt Kurdish administration.

Where high office seems to be a passport to making million, while still taking an MP’s salary, and suspicions of financial misconduct swirl north of the border to the highest political offices in Scotland, it leads one to wonder who the political classes are really working for, other than for themselves.

In a democracy, supposedly, our public servants – elected or otherwise – work for us but, increasingly, one is forced into the realisation that, whoever they do work for, it most certainly isn’t us.

Although it may not seem directly connected to the cupidity of our parliamentarians and political classes, the same can be said of that crass buffoon Air Chief Marshal Sir Mike Wigston who is now revealed as ready to take diversity drives in the RAF to the “limit of the law”, determined to increase the proportion of ethnic minority recruits from six percent in 2019 to 20 percent by 2030, even at the expense of “pausing” the acceptance of white male recruits on to training courses.

In effect, with Wigston as the titular head of the RAF, we saw “diversity” becoming the strategic objective of the RAF, the defence of the realm taking second place, even as the training of front-line pilots was degenerating into chaos.

Whatever Wigston thought he was working for, self-evidently, it wasn’t for the interests of the nation as a whole – a charge that can easily be levied at another national institution, the NHS. Largely run by foreigners, it seems to have become a law unto itself, where the needs of patients have become almost irrelevant.

Then there is the BBC. Keen to display its public service credentials, the corporation has for some time been devoting a section of its website to the “cost of living” crisis, offering a series of articles which purportedly have us “tackling it together”.

Yet, until recently of six articles dealing with various aspects of the crisis, five were illustrated by people from ethnic minorities. Even now, there is only one white British male represented, while the article on “How to crack Easter on a budget” is illustrated by a picture of what appears to be a Chinese child.

Academia, in the form of higher education, has long been lost to the nation, most recently illustrated by a report that Magdalen College, Oxford, has cancelled a St George’s Day banquet, replacing it with a formal dinner celebrating Eid, the Islamic festival marking the end of Ramadan.

One disgruntled, and necessarily anonymous don at Magdalen College declared: “The cancelling of St George’s Day is yet another example of the deep antipathy that the leaders of so many of Britain’s academic institutions seem to feel towards the country that built and maintains them”.

Lower down the food chain, we have the Members of the National Education Union (NEU) – Britain’s biggest teaching union – voting at its annual conference to invite drag queens into schools, welcoming performers and LGBT+ authors who challenge the “heteronormative culture that dominates education”.

Whoever these teachers think they are representing, it certainly isn’t the “heteronormative culture” which comprises the vast majority of the nation and the people who pay their salaries.

Nor indeed, are they in any respect representing the concerns of parents, when seventy percent of schools are allowing (encouraging?) their pupils to switch genders without informing parents, even to the extent of blocking parents from seeing “harmful” sex education materials.

This “insensitivity” – if one can call it that – to the rights and entirely reasonable expectations of the majority also extends to the realm of commerce. On the one hand, the captains of industry pay themselves obscenely high “compensation”, heedless of the offence it causes, while ripping off their consumer base, driving their customers into penury.

On the other hand, virtue signalling become the dominant form of customer relations, where we end up with paying customers at the Lyric Hammersmith theatre shocked to find that an “all gender toilet” had been fitted, furnished with one stall beside row of urinals.

Also determined to ignore customer sensibilities is the sports clothing firm Nike, which is paying a transgender influencer to model a sports bra, despite an obviously male physiology – with the reports referring to the male Dylan Mulvaney as “her”.

We are told that Milli Hill, a feminist author, says she finds the advert “more insulting than words can articulate”, asking, “What happened to all the stuff about realistic female bodies in women’s marketing?”. “How should my teen daughters interpret this messaging?”, she then asks.

This cult of indifference to the sensibilities of the majority view extends even (or especially) to the political domain, where the leader of the opposition, “kneeler” Starmer continues to deny the obvious – to all right-thinking people – that anyone with a penis cannot be a woman.

In saner times, the leader of the main opposition party – with aspirations of taking over the reins of government at the general election – might have been cautious about insulting the best part of half the electorate. But, in this new-found cultural environment, indifference to the views of the many seems to have become the norm.

Such is the grip of this regime, that even to demur is no longer permitted. Criticism of a politician from an ethnic minority is deemed to be racism, while critics of policy are branded “right wing”, Covid deniers, vaccine deniers and even Tories.

Any number of epithets are flung around, from homophobia, to islamophobia and xenophobia, all intended to deny critics the right to question the activities of minorities, no matter how perverse or abhorrent the behaviour.

A final example of this phenomenon – for the purpose of this piece – is the Metropolitan Police, which has retreated from the Peelian principle of the citizen constable, to become an almost para-military force, wholly isolated from the community it serves, and indifferent to its concerns.

It seems thus that, where minority rights prevail, the end result – from the top of the political tree to the plod pounding the streets – is a breakdown of the concept of community. We see the fragmentation of society into a myriad of groups, each indifferent to the concerns of the other, intent on serving only its own interests.

The old joke of “mind over matter” comes to mind. They don’t mind, and we don’t matter. Only, it’s no longer a joke.