How a lie becomes truth

Teachers were told to exclude children who made ‘inappropriate’ jokes about Covid when they returned to school this week. These days every joke is inappropriate in one way or another: someone, somewhere will find it transgressive. I cannot imagine being a schoolchild and not making a joke about Covid, and a sense of humour is about the only thing these kids have got left. But for the officials who dreamed up these edicts, humour is the last refuge of the bourgeois, as Herbert Marcuse or one of those Frankfurt School monkeys put it. (I forget exactly which one. Maybe it was Jürgen Habermas. What a fun night you’d have out on the town with those boys.)

But the poor children: masked up in the corridors, separated from their mates, held in ‘bubbles’, at school one week, at home the next, denied the human right to make jokes about their predicament — all to preserve them from an illness which, if they caught it, they would not even notice. Covid is real enough. But for the children it is a chimera.

They can also be sent home if they ‘cough maliciously’. I kind of coughed maliciously when I read the recent comments made by Liz Jolly, the chief librarian of the British Library. She had been on video simpering around some fatuous decolonising BAME project which when it is put into effect will undoubtedly serve to devalue the worth of the institution under her benighted stewardship. These were her words: ‘I think, as I have said before, that we need to make sure some white colleagues are involved because racism is a creation of white people.’

I mentioned a week or so back that we now live in a post-truth society. One of the fascinating aspects of our dystopia is the way in which a very stupid lie — such as ‘white people created racism’ — becomes a truth, and a truth which in the end becomes unassailable.