The Progressive Left has a Rule of Law Problem
This week's attacks on Michael Ben-Gad and Alice Sullivan are merely the latest example
From ‘direct action’ and vandalism to public officials disregarding the laws under which they are required to operate, the progressive left has a rule of law problem.
If this was a one-off incident, targeted at one particular, far-reaching policy (such as the UK being in a particular war) then this - might - be justifiable, or at least understandable. But in this decade alone at least four major progressive causes - Trans Rights, Black Lives Matter, Climate Change and Palestine - have repeatedly claimed the right to disregard the law in a broad variety of ways.
And while, yes, #NotAllLefties, it is also true that this disregard for the rule of law has been tolerated, abetted and enabled by the broader progressive movement and its sympathisers, including in education, in public service and in the broader commentariat.1
The cause is above the law
Over the last week, I’ve taken part in a few, and observed a good deal more, conversations about the Aston Villa / Maccabi away fans controversy.2 What I’ve noticed is that, with a small number of exceptions, those defending the decision have rapidly moved to arguing that Israeli football teams shouldn’t be playing ours at all, due to the actions of the Israeli government in Gaza.
The position that we should boycott Israel in sports is clearly a legitimate political position to hold, although it is not one I share. The bodies that could lawfully implement this could be either our elected Government (e.g. by passing a law), UEFA (through football governance) or, I guess, an individual club, who could refuse to play (although might suffer consequences, such as defaulting the match).
It is not, however a factor that West Midlands Police or the Birmingham Safety Group are permitted to consider: their role is to consider public safety. Those who hold up the wider political circumstances in defence are implicitly arguing that these organisations should set aside their lawful duties and act according to their own political views.3 We don’t actually know if any of the individuals involved in the decision did this4 - but it is clear that many of their supporters believe they should have.
Back in the long distant days of 2016, as a recently minted deputy director in the Department for Education, I attended my first ‘Senior Civil Service Departmental Away Day’. At one point in the proceedings, an extremely senior individual gave us a talk about the importance of diversity.
After discussing how the SCS had made great strides in equal representation of men and women, before going on to say that ethnic minorities were still under-represented. So far, so normal.
They5 then said that we needed to take action to change this. That if an ethnic minority candidate applied for a role who could do the job, we shouldn’t spend lots of time carefully scoring them to see if they were technically the highest scoring candidates, we should just appoint them.
This was explicitly asking us to break the law - the Equality Act 2010 would not allow such treatment. I remember being shocked; I suspect others were too - though I am sure there will be others who felt it was right, and subsequently acted upon it. Needless to say, this was not challenged, nor reported - it would have been severely career-limiting to do so.
Similar scenes - perhaps less blatant, less open, more of the quiet word within small groups - will have taken place in public and private organisations up and down the country, with the perpetrators only being found out in a few cases, such as the RAF, where they were stupid enough to document their actions.
At this point, I will anticipate the progressive defence, which is to argue that they are not ignoring the law, but rather obeying a higher law: perhaps the ECHR, or a decision by the UN General Assembly, or the Climate Change Act. Sometimes it will be a more abstract principle such as equality, or fundamental human rights.
The trouble is, the law doesn’t work like that. The ECHR isn’t a document which allows anyone to consult it, interpret it in the way they see best, and act accordingly - no more than the Magna Carta empowers the ‘sovereign citizen’ loons to ignore the law. It is a legal document, incorporated into UK law via the Human Rights Act, which confers various rights that are enforceable through the courts. The Climate Change Act, or the Equality Act, similarly place specific obligations about public and private bodies, and on individuals, all of which can, again, be enforced through the courts.
There’s a term for people who set aside the laws and duties placed upon them by a government or organisation, in order to follow their conscience to do what they think is right according to a higher set of principles. That term is ‘Chaotic Good’:
A chaotic good [person] acts as his conscience directs him with little regard for what others expect of him. He makes his own way, but he’s kind and benevolent. He believes in goodness and right but has little use for laws and regulations. He hates it when people try to intimidate others and tell them what to do. He follows his own moral compass, which, although good, may not agree with that of society.
We all love our stories of Robin Hood - but they’re certainly not lawful. And it’s hard to build and maintain a functioning society where people have no respect for the rule of law.
Over the last decade we’ve all become familiar with the vandalism, the trespass and the occupations carried out by the activists of progressive causes. The monuments defaced, the statues torn down,6 the roads blocked and the windows smashed. The mobs of activists threatening violence7 against ‘terfs’ or ‘Zionists’, or screaming hate at those who are ‘on the wrong side of history’. Nooses, threats to ‘punch them in the face’ or of beheading,
But perhaps more insidious are those who take it upon themselves to subvert the law within organisations - particularly within publicly funded institutions. The civil servants who, despite the clear instructions of Ministers, continued to pursue directly contrary policies. The many, many organisations working with children who cast all standard principles of safeguarding law aside at the behest of Stonewall and similar lobbies, or the dozens of organisations who, still, continue to defy the Supreme Court’s judgement on the definition of a woman.8 All those who have taken it upon themselves to unlawfully discriminate against or harass others within the workplace, in the name of ‘equity’.
How did it get this way?
It begins in childhood, where we celebrate ‘activism’ far more than we do civic responsibility or personal duty. I remember one time, when Eldest was still very young, when he came back from a holiday club where they’d been learning about recycling (fine) and had been encouraged to go home and put up posters urging people to recycle. I suggested he could first begin by putting his own rubbish into the correct bins and turning off lights, before telling others what they should do.
Even in those we teach about and celebrate, activists are overly represented - both historical and modern.9 Of course, the suffragettes, Martin Luther King or Gandhi deserve to be honoured. But in all these cases, their civil disobedience took place in a society where the communities they were advocating for were denied the vote10 - not the best parallel for 21st century Britain.
It continues at university, where those who advocated for violent resistance, such as Frantz Fanon, are valorised and glorified. And while students on the right must carefully toe the line to avoid their society’s being barred from Fresher’s Fair, or cancelled in some other means, those on the progressive left take as their due the fact that they will be permitted to trespass, occupy buildings, and hurl abuse at and harass those whose views they disagree with.11
And why should they think otherwise? Time and again, the only sanction has proven to be a slap on the wrist - if that.
It continues into adult life, where work places encourage people to ‘bring their whole self to work’ - a code that enables some to import their political causes into the workplace (of course, only some political causes are welcome). Many large employers have established ‘staff networks’ based - usually - around identity characteristics. While initially well intentioned, such groups allow activists to work for the interests of their own progressive cause, rather than either the statutory duties of the public organisation, or the interests of the company. In some cases, they have even succeeded in getting internal policies changed in such a way that it left the organisation vulnerable to lawsuits.12
Politicians, commentators and others on the progressive left have repeatedly defend law-breaking, including direct action and criminal damage. ‘It’s good to punch Nazis’ may sound good as a meme - yet serious voices on the left, repeatedly refer to mainstream political opponents as being similar to, or ‘worse than’, Nazis, it is hard not to see a link.13
The attacks this week, on Professor Alice Sullivan and Professor Michael Ben-Gad, are simply the latest in a long trend in which law-breaking and harassment has spilled over to something more
Alice Sullivan is Professor of Sociology at UCL and Head of Research at UCL’s Social Research Institute.14 To quote her bio, “She has published on areas including: social class and sex differences in educational attainment, single-sex and co-educational schooling, private and grammar schools, cultural capital, reading for pleasure, social mobility, and health inequalities.”
Her ‘sin’, in the eyes of the activists, is to be a gender critical feminist. After playing an important role in a successful judicial review to seek to prevent the ONS mangling the questions on sex and gender in the census,15 she authored a government review into how to appropriately collect data on sex and gender during statistical data collection.
This week, after being invited to give a talk on sex and gender stats at Bristol University, the lecture theatre was mobbed by Trans activists, to such an extent that the talk was moved to a higher floor, and mounted police were required in order for the lecture to continue.
It is, of course, good that the university permitted the talk to continue16 and that police were there - but how could it ever have got to a situation that protesters knew they could act with such impunity that police would be required?
Michael Ben-Gad is a Professor of Economics at City St George’s, University of London, an institution where he has worked for the last 17 years. To quote his bio, ‘His research focuses on Dynamic Macroeconomics with applications to taxation, public debt, the economic effects of immigration, national security as well as the emergence of multiple equilibria in models of economic growth and the incorporation of compositional data into econometric models.’
His ‘sin’ is to be Israeli, and to have done compulsory military service, in the 1980s, in the IDF - as he was required by law to do.
Over the last week he has been the subject of a direct and personally targeted campaign, calling for him to be fired with posters and online material have been circulated condemning him and branding him a ‘terrorist’ - a clear case of direct personal harassment.17 His lecture hall has been invaded by masked ‘protesters’, who brought the lecture to a halt, shouted abuse at him and called for his beheading.
Disagreement, however strong, with the Israeli government does not give one the right to threaten or harass individual Israelis - any more than the disagreement with the Chinese government gives one the right to threaten or harass individual Chinese people. And free speech, as Abhishek Saha (a leading figure in the academic free speech movement) crisply says, does not cover heckler’s veto or genuine threats:
As with the case of Professor Sullivan, in this case, refreshingly, the university leadership has come out in support of Professor Ben-Gad and has said they are seeking to find those responsible. But again, how has society got in a such a state that the thugs believe they can get away with it?
It’s time to call time on a culture of law-breaking
There are many on the centre and left who will condemn it when things become very bad: when the threats are followed through and the violence becomes serious. But they will do nothing about the culture of law-breaking impunity from which such excesses inevitably emerge.18
How to lance the boil? Like any cultural change, there is no silver bullet. But here are some things that could help.
We could stop celebrating activism so much - particularly with children. This would include not just the role models we hold up, but encouraging them to take actions themselves to improve their communities, rather than actions that involve hectoring others.
Those at the top of the civil service and other public bodies need to act firmly to restore political impartiality and the neutrality of the public sphere. The recent High Court decision that active police participation in Pride parades is unlawful should be a wake-up call. We need to end the canard that matters of race and gender, and other identity issues are somehow ‘not political’, or that ‘it’s OK if it’s just in HR policies and training’.19 They are at the heart of modern politics, highly contested, and it is impossible to place a dividing line between what people are taught in HR courses and how they will act operationally or in policy development.
This means ending the toleration of activism within the public sector, and the structures that support it. Ending formal partnerships with lobby groups, and allowing them to deliver training, or to ‘score’ the public bodies on their policies. Shutting down, or severely curtailing, staff networks. Like any major cultural change, such as rooting out a culture of financial corruption, this will require firm leadership from the top and examples - i.e. firing - being made of those who believe they can carry on as if nothing has changed.
We need consistent enforcement, and the end of ‘two-tierism’, where certain causes, sympathetic to those in authority, are treated with kid gloves.20
But above all, we need firm action against those who have become used to harassing others, and making threats of intimidation and violence. They need to be actively pursued (not just giving up because they wear masks), identified and punished severely - whether that is expelling from their universities, fired from work or given criminal charges. And it must happen consistently, so that those tempted to do this know this is behaviour society will not tolerate.
Organisations must stop surrendering to ‘thug’s veto’. If activists know that simply the threat of violence can shut down speech or events without consequences they will continue to make them. Giving into threats in this way not only cedes the public realm to those willing to threaten violence, but makes the cost of that threat incredibly low - because those threatening are never called upon to follow through.21 Accordingly, the state, and public institutions, the state should almost never surrender to ‘thug’s veto’, but should be prepared to use very high levels of resources to ensure that it can go ahead - and then overwhelmingly severe consequences against any who dare to follow through on the threat.22
None of this will be easy. But if it is not done, events across the Pond show that law-breaking begets law-breaking, and that this is a pendulum that can all too often swing wider, not narrower, with each swing.
This is the fundamental difference. It is not the right never tries to break the law, or to threaten or harass others; it is that the authorities - rightly - come down on it like a tonne of bricks when it occurs.
Summary: West Midlands Police said that Maccabi (an Israeli team’s) fans could not attend a forthcoming match at Aston Villa on public safety grounds. Lots of people criticised this, including Keir Starmer and Kemi Badenoch; others defended it, including the local MP who is one of the pro-Gaza independents. Link here.
Or ‘according to their own conscience’.
Though the previous public statements of some individuals concerned might give us reasons for concern, as might the lobbying of some MPs.
As I do not have a recording of this conversation I am deliberately concealing possible identifying features.
While those who tore down the Colston statue were acquitted, the actions of the judge - in terms of directions and permitted witnesses - were highly questionable. When the case was referred to the Court of Appeal for clarification of the law, the Court of Appeal ruled that it was a violent act, and not covered by ECHR Articles 9, 10 or 11. This does not alter the acquittal of those responsible, as once someone has been found innocent by a jury of their peers then this cannot be overturned by such a process.
Including implicitly, such as images of nooses, as well as explicit such as to ‘punch a TERF’.
Biological. On this and other matters higher courts have shown a great deal more sense and respect for the rule of law than much of the rest of the public sector.
Looking at you, Greta Thunberg.
Unlike women before women’s suffrage, some black people could vote in the South during the Segregation era, but Jim Crow laws systematically disenfranchised a high proportion of the black population.
At least two gender critical female academics that I’m aware of have required police protection.
This has particularly been the case in the Trans debate, and there have been numerous organisations which have paid out large sums at Employment Tribunals, because their policies reflected the law as Stonewall would have liked it to be, rather than the law as it actually is.
I don’t think many on the left recognise just how much impact David Lammy saying that the European Research Group were ‘worse than Nazis’ - and then doubling down! - had on those on the right. Now, I don’t for a moment think that Lammy himself was advocating violence here - but there are many others who wear T-shirts about ‘punching Nazis’ that I am less sure of.
Ironically, given the title of this piece, I suspect she would consider herself to be on the left of politics.
The ONS, unsurprisingly, was a member of Stonewall’s Diversity Champion scheme.
I strongly suspect this would not have happened prior to the passing of the Higher Education Freedom of Speech Act.
This is not an example of law-breaking, but it reminds me of all the voices who came out against the bowdlerisation of Roald Dahl, despite having spent the previous years accusing anyone who raised concerns about cancellations, ‘micro-aggressions’, ‘sensitivity readers’ as ‘fighting a culture war’. We got a partial u-turn on Roald Dahl, but the rest of the edifice remains in place, with sensitivity readers still firmly entrenched and other, slightly less famous books continuing to be bowdlerised.
When I received a written disciplinary warning in 2014 for my winning Brexit essay, I was told firmly that, even at the age of 30 and at the junior grade of Grade 7, I should have had the wit to realise that Brexit was a highly political issue and that fig leaves such as saying I wasn’t arguing whether we should leave or stay, just what we should do if we leave, cut no ice.
This was correct.
The Permanent Secretaries, police chiefs, NHS administrators and other senior public bosses who continue to insist that highly contested views on race and Trans are somehow ‘non-political’ need to take a long hard look in the mirror, and ask if they really believe what they are saying.
Can you imagine the response by Ofsted, the DfE and others, if a teacher took children out of school to attend the Epping migrant hotel protests? Or a pro-life protest? That same response needs to be meted out to those who take children out to attend Free School Meal, or Palestine, or Climate Protests - because no less than the others, they are a breach of the Education Act 1996 provisions on political impartiality and political indoctrination.
Rather like a poker player who always folds when their opponent goes all-in.
'Not giving in to threats’ is rather like not paying ransoms to terrorists. It sounds hard at the time, but it’s the only way to prevent it happening again, and again and again - and so ultimately leads to much better outcomes.
Agreed. I strongly support the rule of law and equality under the law.
I used to think that everyone at least paid lip service to it, and I thought that if someone supported pro-X activitists doing Y, but opposed anti-X activists doing Y and supported punishing them for doing Y, then they were being inconsistent or hypocritical. But I think actually a lot of people don't see that attitude as a problem: they proudly and openly want pro-X and anti-X people to be treated differently by the law. Object-level thinking, in the SSC Political Compass sense. I think this is a problem and I don't know what to do about it.
The thug's veto thing really bothers me. Like, what's the point of having a police force if they just cave to whoever shouts the loudest and threatens the most violence? Then you have de facto mob rule.