I once wrote a column about Camden Council, the total bastards, stealing my car. Never had a response like it. Lawyers got in touch, offering their services. Motorist groups wanted to sign me up. Readers wrote in, offering other tales of total Camden bastardy, or similar bastardy from elsewhere, and Tom Conti invited me round for a coffee. It was the first time I properly realised that modern Britain does, after all, possess a fearless, freedom-loving backbone. It’s just peculiarly preoccupied with things like parking tickets.
No disrespect intended to the glowering love interest from Shirley Valentine, but I always thought freedom was supposed to be sexier than this. It’s like that Freedom Zone thing they sometimes set up, just down the road from Conservative party conferences. The first time I went to one, I had dim hopes it might be like the free zone of Copenhagen, Christiania, where you can buy hash by the brick. Or one of those giant sex-industry shows they have in places like the ExCeL, which my photographer friends rave about, and where you learn about all sorts of exciting new places to which a lady can attach a leash. But no, it was just a bunch of sweaty-palmed bloggers, trailing around after David Davis again.
With freedom, sex and drugs are both good places to start. Last week, we had Sarah Palin on drugs. (That’s my newsy start point for this column — look hard enough and it’s always there.) Nattering away, vaguely, to Fox News, she was asked about cannabis. ‘If somebody’s gonna smoke a joint in their house and not do anybody any harm,’ she said, ‘then perhaps there are other things our cops should be looking at to engage in.’ Finally, I think I get the point of her. As Norman St John-Stevas said of Margaret Thatcher, ‘When she speaks without thinking, she says what she thinks.’ It’s hard to tell when Sarah Palin is thinking, or even if she ever does, but this sounded like unthinking libertarianism to me. And unthinking, in this context, is no criticism. This is a love of liberty that goes to the bone.
Americans can manage that sort of thing. Brits struggle. I suppose part of the reason why British libertarianism is so damn unsexy is that we have it living next door to conservativism, with which it has almost nothing in common. The British Right often tries to do both at once, and gets in a terrible mess. Take sex, for example, and the fuss over gays and B&Bs. The classic British libertarian sees a chap who owns a B&B, who perhaps looks and sounds a bit like he does. And then he sees some preachy Guardianista council officer, probably in stupid plastic spectacles, coming along and telling said B&B owner that it’s not up to him who he lets into his house. And so, vicariously, he gets the hump.
In fact, this is entirely wrong. The true freedom-lover ought to despise that B&B owner — and I do mean despise, I don’t think that’s too strong — for his invasive censoriousness about what other adults get up to behind closed doors.
Or, seeing as this is a column by me, and we’re nearing the three-quarters mark, take climate change. Turn up at any Freedom Zone-type thing and they’ll have somebody droning on about it, most likely Lord Monckton. Go to the website of the Freedom Association, which is where these events come from, and they’ve even got a wee poll on the side, to find out whether you believe in it or not.
What does believing climate change have to do with individual liberty? Bloody nothing, that’s what, you paranoid loonies. Environmentalists don’t believe in climate change because they want to take away your enormous car; they worry about your enormous car because they believe in climate change. A libertarian assault on climate science makes about as much logical sense as a libertarian defence of killing people and eating them. It forgets that other people are people too.
It’s weird that British libertarianism heads off in these directions. It does so because it is tribal, and because it is tribal, it is also ineffective. What we need is a great, glorious alliance between all sorts of people who really hate each other. The determinedly religious and the avowedly secular; dope-smoking hippies and fans of shooting things; people who like to cycle and people who don’t like parking tickets. People who recognise that, unlike many things, freedom resolutely doesn’t begin at home. Basically, we all need to be more like Sarah Palin. Who’d have thought it?
I always knew that, at some point in my life, I’d reach a point where I’d read the popular culture bits in broadsheet newspapers and genuinely not have a clue what they were on about. I expected it to start in my fifties, maybe my seventies. I didn’t expect it to start when I was 33.
Who is Christine Bleakley? On Monday she was in every newspaper, all of them, every single one, and all because she’s got a new job. It seems she’s left something called The One Show on BBC1, and moved to something called ITV. No, I’m kidding, I’ve heard of ITV. But The One Show? Apparently it’s on at 7 p.m., on our main terrestrial channel, every single weekday. And I’ve never seen it. Never sat down to watch it, never turned it on by accident, never, never. And everybody else has. I keep asking people about it. ‘Who the hell is Christine Bleakley,’ I keep asking, ‘that she is worth £1.5 million a year?’ And they’ll say, ‘well, she is on The One Show.’ And I’ll say, ‘the what?’ and they’ll look at me as though I was mad.
It’s a terrible surprise. I’m simply not that sort of person. Or, at least, I thought I wasn’t. But, the more I think about it, the more I realise that I am, actually, a grotesque tele-visual snob. I’m not particularly well-read, and my music tastes, I’ll freely confess, are both adolescent and pedestrian. But I can’t bear mediocre television. I judge it damningly, and I judge the people who watch it, too. When I hear people I admire discussing, say, The X-Factor, I admire them rather less, even though I’ve never really seen that programme either, and don’t know what I’m talking about.
All in all, even so, this is a personality flaw I’m quite pleased to discover I have. I feel it gives me a certain depth.
Hugo Rifkind is a writer for the Times.
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