Now that virtually any well-known male entertainer of a certain age is arrested for alleged sexual offences, it is becoming clear that this is more a culture war than a set of proper criminal investigations. This does not necessarily mean that all the allegations are false — look at Stuart Hall — but it does suggest that a new way has been found of ruining people’s reputations before anyone has established their guilt. The undeniable fact that so many of the men accused wore deplorable clothes in public all through the 1970s is not, in itself, proof of iniquity. Enraged by Leveson, the press argue that naming people being investigated for sex crimes is a brilliant way of smoking them out. Possibly it is, but it is also an unfair process because the anonymous accusers can do damage with impunity. The new doctrine that one must believe victims assumes that anyone who says he or she is a victim is. It gives legal force to the old feminist claim that ‘All men are rapists’. Even the less irrational cry that ‘All elderly presenters from popular BBC kiddies’ programmes are rapists’ cannot be true.
This desire to convict regardless of evidence is deep in the human heart, but it has taken a politically correct form in recent times. Attacks on traditional, ‘reactionary’ injustice often ape the evils they condemn. In 1999, the appalling report by Sir William Macpherson on the Stephen Lawrence affair formally declared that: ‘A racist incident is any incident which is perceived to be racist by the victim or any other person’. This means that any incident of anything, ever, can be racist so long as one person in the world can be found to declare it so. Against this doctrine, no form of justice can stand. The same applies to the automatic credibility of anyone who claims to be the victim of a sexual offence.
And now comes the arrest of Nigel Evans, the deputy speaker. In yet another copying of former oppressors, militant homosexuals spend a lot of time nowadays trying to ‘out’ fellow gay people who, for whatever reason, would rather stay quiet. This seems to have happened to Mr Evans two or three years ago. Now two men have accused him of rape, and the goody-goody police, bursting to show that they yield to no one in their detestation of whatever it is that their paymasters have told them to detest, have made a public show of nicking him, destroying him in the process. Of course it is possible that Mr Evans is guilty. I doubt it, but I do not know. My general point is that a mixture of madness and malice has now entered the whole subject of sex and crime. Let’s all join in. When a policeman stops you for bad driving, accuse him of raping you and force him to arrest himself.
This is an extract from Charles Moore’s The Spectator’s Notes in this week’s magazine. Click here to subscribe.
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