Antisocial media

Two considerable injustices were undone this week. The first was the reinstatement of Sir Roger Scruton to the government’s ‘Building better, building beautiful’ commission. The second was the prosecution of Carl Beech for fraud and perverting the course of justice. The cases may be very far apart in their details, but their origins lie in precisely the same contemporary malady.

Scruton was sacked from his unpaid position in April. The root cause was a doctored and false interview carried out by George Eaton. The New Statesman subsequently apologised for misleading its readers. But what was most shocking was not that one left-wing hack doctored his quotes, nor that by publishing them on Twitter Eaton temporarily managed to ‘scalp’ (as another journalist excitedly put it) one of the most distinguished thinkers of the age. The most shocking thing was that government ministers, Conservative MPs and others so unthinkingly jumped on the bandwagon. The Conservative Housing Secretary James Brokenshire sacked Scruton within hours. Other Tory MPs, former ministers and party figures (including George Osborne and Daniel Finkelstein) called for Scruton’s sacking. Not one first requested to see the quotes or a transcript of the interview, let alone asked Scruton for his version of events.

Had they done so — as this magazine did — they would have realised that the media and politicians had not merely been lied to by a dishonest journalist, but had effectively conceded to rule by online mob.

For that is what causes storms like this. Every day without fail a Twitter mob gets going against someone. Any remaining grown-ups in the land ought to be able to view these 24 hours of hate in the round. For instance they might decide to work out which claims are true and which are not.