The thumb on the British windpipe
Anthony Browne has an excellent piece in this week’s Spectator saying that what Britain needs is US-style think-tanks whose size enables them to do what the far more modest British think-tanks cannot do and for which there is a crying need — to challenge the intellectual stranglehold of the universities. Indeed, we need to go much further than that. At the heart of Britain’s spiral of intellectual, moral, social and political disintegration (yes, I am indeed understating the case) lies the intellectual hegemony of the left, enforced through bullying, intimidation, character assassination and the whole bag of tricks used to stifle an open society.
The result is a public discourse from which truth, evidence and rationality have been exiled, a society where normative values have been replaced by the transgressive or alien, and a national culture which is losing the will to live. In America, these pressures certainly exist, particularly in the academy and its outriders in the media; but at least there a culture war is in progress with the fightback being conducted by the big think-tanks, publications like the Weekly Standard, City Journal or Commentary, talk radio and Fox News, and the evangelical churches. In Britain, the absence of any such alternative discourse means there has been no culture war here but a culture rout.
This spiral of decline therefore cannot begin to be addressed unless this monopoly is busted wide open. The most urgent task for any government which wants to turn Britain round is therefore to open up the public sphere and restore a liberal society. That would involve a systematic re-balancing of public subsidies away from the institutions doing the damage. Top-slicing the BBC licence-fee so that part of it goes to alternative broadcasters, for example, as the Tories have already suggested, would be an excellent start. The same should be done with the quangocracy — the Arts Council or the British Council spring to mind — and the vast fiefdoms of NGOs and the voluntary sector. Reducing the government grant to Drugscope -- the dominant drug advisory body whose 'harm reduction' agenda is a Trojan horse for legalisation -- and giving the money to campaigners who are committed to eradicating drug use would bring evidence into the public domain which would open people’s eyes to the legalising propaganda which at present they have no way of recognising. Similarly, helping build alternatives to such citadels of the nomenklatura as the NSPCC, Friends of the Earth, Stonewall or Liberty would end the free pass currently afforded to the cultural nihilists, arrested adolescents and sub-Gramscian subversives who currently have their thumbs on the British windpipe.