Phoney Bones of Contention - it's...Questionable Time

Evening - first up thanks to Richard D Hall for inspiring the title of this.

A few years ago I used to spend the early part of most Thursday evenings having a few looseners with a work colleague of mine. As it got to about 10pm I'd make a statement to the effect of "four pints is plenty on a schoolnight and besides which, I'd best get home for Question Time". It became a running joke between the two of us, his wisecracks on the subject reaching their zenith when he speculated that I had a picture of 'my hero' David Dimbleby on my bedroom wall. For the record I stopped having 'heroes' in the true sense at some point in my late 20s and will speculate that no such poster exists. If I'm wrong then the owners of this poster have my deepest sympathy.

Question Time is packaged to the viewer as a sober, serious and high brow political discussion programme which seeks to explore 'issues of the day' and, through a wide range of opinions on the panel, present the various angles, perspective and points of view from which an answer to that question can be approached,  while hopefully touching upon some of the nuances and 'grey areas' along the way. Audience participation and the presence of journalists, authors, actors, musicians or comedians on the panel give the show an 'everyman' feel, presenting it as a live and dangerous form of real pluralism, a 'democracy in action' sort of thing.

Regular viewers will be familiar with the format but just in case you aren't:- a member of the audience (which is supposed to represent 'the general public') asks a question relating to something that has been in the news that week, be it Brexit, something to do with the health service, a political scandal or whatever. The (usually five) panelists then take it in turns to wax lyrical on the subject, sometimes with them interrupting and arguing with each other. This is interspersed with comments from 'the public', with Dimblebore sometimes asking specifically for contributions 'for' or 'against' the motion if the collective response is becoming somewhat one-sided.

Now I used to watch this show with some regularity, but not because I find it interesting or come away from it with a greater understanding of any issue than I had previously. Seeing strong and independent-minded good panelists are as rare as rocking horse shit, the useful function of Question Time is to tell us what our lords and masters have decreed we should all be talking about, as well as how apparently intelligent, sensible and reasonable 'mainstream people' are tackling these issues. It's worth asking whether Question Time is genuinely the sort of open and informative piece of broadcasting it pertains to be, or something altogether more limiting and dull.

The first thing to consider is that the audience for the show is not a cross-section of the public at all but a highly stratified, deliberately filtered crowd consisting overwhelmingly as it does of political activists and card-carrying party members. Anyone who has ever been a member of a political party will know that as a general rule, 'politically active' people approach most questions from a completely different starting point and use a lexicon that would be unrecognisable to someone like you chewing the fat with someone like me over a beer. The 'informed apolitical' are typically dangerous mavericks, and the BBC's application process for the show deliberately flushes them out.

But leaving that aside, once the question has been chipped up what follows is a sort of intellectual free-for all, with nothing off limits in the couldron of ideas, right? Er...hardly. In reality two rather predictable and bland 'sides' emerge on a 'by numbers' basis, with it typically being 3-2 or occasionally 4-1 on the panel in favour of one 'side' or the other. As a result, panelists regularly repeat or spend copious amounts of time agreeing with each other, with the audience being no better and very frequently even worse. A typical QT 'discussion' that lasts 20 minutes could very easily be nailed in about one tenth of that time with precisely zero value lost.

While this appeals to the 'Punch and Judy' element that many viewers tune in for, this format is by nature highly restrictive on any sort of intellectual level. The show sets a) the questions we are all 'supposed' to be interested in the answers to, b) the sides/arguments in relation to those questions and c) the parameters within which discussion is allowed to take place. Dimblebore might ask for an 'upper' or 'downer' from the audience but have you ever heard him request the thoughts of someone who disagrees with the premise of the question, thinks the whole thing is a phoney bone of contention or that both 'sides' are wrong in their own way? Of course not - that would be dangerous.

Wondering what the hell I'm on about? Let me give you two really good examples, namely LGBT 'issues' and drugs.

The parameters of the LGBT 'debate' have prohibited the expression of any view that might be construed as homophobic for many years now, so the 'anti' view typically takes the form of promoting something else in its place, namely male-female marriage with a view to raising 'stable families' and 'traditional values' as a foundation of society - you know the drill. Equally the 'diversity' side of the argument is not exactly a googly either with its appeals for new laws against homophobic 'hate crimes', some new 'right' that probably isn't a civil right at all, the championing of LGBT in 'competing rights issues' and a desire to 'change social attitudes', by force if necessary.

Now anybody possessed of an independent and functioning brain can surely dismiss this as a phoney bone of contention. The long and short of the issue is that it's no business of the State which consenting adults are going out with, marrying or having sex with each other, nor is it a legitimate function of the State to 'manage' the reaction of person C to the lifestyle choices, marriage, civil partnership or whatever of Person A and Person B (if that reaction crosses the line into violence, incitement to or threats of then this has always been illegal). Both 'sides' on this feed a highly disempowering notion that without the approval of others for our choices, we are basically nothing.

With the drugs question, the two current 'sides' can best be summed up in a word as criminalise and medicalise. The 'criminalise' side are effectively the real life manifestation of Mr Mackey from South Park, constantly reminding us all that "drugs are bad m'kay?". Meanwhile the current mainstream ostensibly pro-drugs stance is to regard all drugtakers as 'poor addicts' and their vice as a 'medical issue', for which potential treatments might include 'shooting galleries' at which the 'addicts' would be given subsidised heroin on demand. I can see it now - the National Smack Service, free at the point of use, based on need and not your ability to pay. Beveridge would be proud.

And the voice of sanity? Look, I couldn't care less which mind-altering drugs you take and am also aware that the overwhelming majority of drug users do not become addicted, dependent or anything resembling either. They aren't 'ill' by any stretch of the imagination and people suggesting otherwise should knock it off. While anyone should be free to get mashed however they want, they are also individually responsible for not committing crime to procure drugs or while on drugs (criminalisers often conflate drugtaking itself with crimes committed to raise funds or while under the influence). By this reasoning "I'm a poor addict" or "because I got high" will not be accepted as an excuse.

And...who on Questionable Time have you ever heard pushing that rational argument?

One of the reasons I started listening to rather than watching the show was because I got tired of screaming at the television upon realising that yet again both 'sides' were full of it. Whether it's just lazy 'television by numbers' or a more sinister form of brainwashing, there's an overt stroking of the ego allied to a subtle numbing of the mind, the invitation to the viewer of this 'high brow' stuff to believe themselves more well-informed than the average punter while passing tired conventional wisdom off as genuine insight. Opinions outside this 'safe range' presented by the mainstream can then be dismissed as mad, bad and dangerous with a smug, warm and all-knowing glow.

There is a place for the exploration of serious issues amongst all of us (certainly beyond the realm of the political establishment), but something as limited and limiting as Question Time has surely outlived its usefulness, assuming it ever had any at all. Funnily enough I was recently watching some old episodes of 'After Dark', a late night discussion programme on Channel 4 in the late 1980s and early 1990s. 'After Dark' comprised mainly of journalists and people from the public eye but was an open house with nothing off limits, no 'set arguments' and no 'upper' and 'downer' sides - hell, it didn't even have a specified time limit and went into some real depth about serious issues.

Unsurprisingly it was canned - but I would welcome something like that back in a heartbeat.

Anyway, feel free to use the above as a rough guide in your navigation of tomorrow's Question Time - just try not to get too excited if you can avoid it.

I'm off to apply to be in the audience (under an assumed name, naturally) so I'll leave you with some music and catch you next time - thanks for reading.

Why Safe Space is Bad for Your Health

Afternoon all.

It's true enough that none of us like being challenged, criticised or disagreed with. We all prefer the warm glow of being told that we're right, that we have hit upon some searing point that is very rarely exposed or illuminated, that we're a rare voice of sanity in an increasingly mad world. Being challenged and cross-examined about your thoughts or ideas can be bloody hard work, a trip outside your own comfort zone into the 'real world' of someone else. Rather than recalling things sequentially from the card index in the brain, we're forced to slalom at someone else's instruction, perhaps answer questions we'd never considered, from a perspective that isn't really ours.

This is why I'm inherently suspicious of 'ideologically pure' people - having spent a bit of time on the Libertarian wing of politics a few years ago, I found it to be something of a 'filter bubble' and 'warm glow society' (dare I say, its own type of 'safe space') for like-minded ideologues who preferred stroking each others' egos on the internet to anything more substantial. Whereas totally 'pragmatic' people who believe in precisely nothing are dangerous because they are prepared to believe in anything for the sake of personal gain, the purely ideological present their own malevolent threat, refusing to be tempered by context, the need for gradualism or even decency.

The trouble with these 'filter bubbles' is that they can very easily descend into a game of who can 'outpure' each other on the ideological front, leading to real silliness. A massive flashlight regarding the 'batshit insane' wing of Libertarianism came one morning when a fella started arguing quite loudly on the old LPUKE website for the legalisation of child pornography, on the basis that, well, watching it wasn't the same thing as doing it and didn't amount to a violation of the non-aggression principle - ergo, it should be filed under the "I'd rather you didn't but I'm not going to have you arrested for it" category.

Whatever the arguments for and against (and no, I don't think we should legalise child porn before you ask, although a few people seemed to be in agreement with him) there's a more important point here when I look back at that morning a few years ago. This is where the occupation of such bubbles ends, in an obsession with marginal issues and a total detachment from what it palatable to people of a different socio-political denomination or none. I got sick of telling my fellow Libs that banging on about how great it would be if we could legalise crack and heroin next week was not a bright idea. In a room full of people who support at least some drug legalisation that's an interesting conversation, but be assured, just about everyone else is off down the fire escape.

A couple of Christmases back I remember getting in a discussion with a friend of a friend on social media, who was genuinely arguing that a person involved in and benefiting from theft from their place of work is not doing anything 'all that bad' and should be treated with some degree of leniency. Now that falls down rather rapidly on three levels, 1) if the theft is on any sort of scale then that could lead to other people losing their jobs in cutbacks, or not getting pay rises etc. 2) the person benefiting from the theft did it for personal gain rather than as some form of protest against 'the man' and was highly unlikely to have been in abject poverty or anything like that, 3) once you defend this then surely you're consenting to him or her nicking your stuff if he or she feels like it?

Thought not.

Now this fella was a 'younger person' in his 20s and I looked forward to hearing his response, seeing as I'd raised these points in a respectful way. His actual response was to shut down anyone disagreeing with him, myself included, and essentially non-platform them. It also became very clear that he'd 'discussed' this subject with a raft of like minded people and received the personal validation of a "well said" from at least most of them. As for the matter in hand, it's a straightforward Marxist way of thinking - poor, oppressed worker gets his own back on evil, exploitative bourgeois boss (who should have been paying him more in the first place) by helping himself to a few quid out of the till. All to feed his starving and malnourished kids and absolutely not for his own gain, promise.

Of course it's completely off the wall, but yes, I understand the 'logic' of this completely.

This proletariat vs bourgeoisie concept is a good example of what is probably the most tragic consequence of a lifetime spent around people agreeing with each other, namely the dehumanisation and demonisation of those who are not considered to be on message. One of the most destructive and dangerous elements of any one-party state, one of the biggest single reasons they end up in poverty, human rights abuses and mass murder, is this depiction of all who are not in complete agreement with the regime not simply as people who are opposed or agnostic, but as traitors, the fifth column, racists, fascists, communists, whatever the appropriate label happens to be at the time.

Once you have stripped your 'enemies' of their humanity, then anyone who wishes to inflict sub-human types of treatment on them is free to do so. See Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia or basically any other hellhole for furher details on how propaganda can be used to get 'the people' to sort your enemies out for you.

With that in mind, the notion of 'safe space' within educational establishments in particular is one which I'm deeply alarmed about and genuinely believe not just to be wrong-headed but potentially dangerous, particularly as it brings with it a hefty wedge of the 'one party state' thinking I've just outlined. While it used to be 'edgy' views on social topics that led to some sort of non-platforming, it seems that the regressive left (who control most student unions these days) have moved into 'economics' as well. Arguing for lower public spending would see someone like Milton Friedman likened to Hitler or Slobodan Milosevic, and almost certainly non-platformed from most universities.

I'll repeat it because we know it's absolutely true - the quite brilliant (and not remotely dangerous) Milton Friedman would be widely non-plaftormed these days. Please, please reflect on that and if you're inclined towards believing that 'safe space' does more good than harm, think again. I can see a situation in about ten years time where Conservative, classical Liberal and Civic Nationalist groups are banned altogether from further and higher education campuses. As for the dubious contender on the charge, the 'alt right', it's clear as a bell that they would simply have different proscribed groups and different sacred cows if they got their hands on the machinery of the state.

Anyone who suggests that their ativists should become teachers so they can indoctrinate kids (as was suggested at the UKIP conference a year ago) is absolutely terrifying and clearly no lover of freedom of expression either. Now we also have groups like the President's favourite, 'Britain First' and the shiny new 'for Britain', led by the 21st century Joan of Arc, banging on about the day that the boot is on the other foot and how they're going to use internment on their enemies. Sorry, I meant 'terrorists', but then who would get to decide who all the 'terrorists' were? The stupidity of the small number of sane, reasonable people who join such organisations never ceases to amaze me.

They claim to be persecuted and in a narrow way yes, they probably are, but then do they stand for an altogether different way of doing things? Or would they impose their own version of political correctness, a 'safe space' for themselves and people who think like them, while that space became deeply unsafe for everybody else? Let's just say I wouldn't trust them to prove me wrong. My good mate Stuart Heal commented to me last week "y'know Daz, I never thought we'd get to the point where people like us were considered the sensible, moderate centre ground". I laughed, but of course Stuart is correct as he normally is. Sanity, logic and reason are lonely vocations these days.

In short, time spent talking and listening to people who disagree with you is not simply good for your spiritual and emotional health, it's highly necessary if you want to avoid the risk of turning into a warped, nasty and narcissistic little bastard. When I first set about writing this I was going to focus on something along the lines of "your opinion does not have an automatic claim on a certain amount of respect in the way that your personal dignity does - an attack on what you think does not and should never constitute an 'assault' in the true sense that needs to be stopped from happening". My good mate Chris Coey quite skillfully blew me out of the water on that front the other night, said that more conciesely than I ever could.

So,,,here's something you rarely hear. Safe spaces, people spending time only amongst people who agree with them, leads to worse tribalism, the dehumanisation of those who see things differently and, ultimately, is largely responsible for the squalid and nasty public discourse we currently have to endure. Someone who disagrees with me is, well, they're someone who disagrees with me - they're not 'scum', a 'traitor' or part of some 'fifth column' which wishes me personal harm. If he or she is giving a speech about a contentious topic on a night I'm free then I might go along and ask some awkward questions afterwards, it's only words after all.

Horrors, I might even change my mind about something - stranger things have happened before.

The alternative is to sit in a cave (cyber or real) with my like-minded pals, lamenting this individual and banging on about what a 'bastard' or 'bitch' they are, stripping them of their humanity, hoping they're involved in a motorway pile-up (copyright Morrissey vs Johnny Rogan) and giving a veneer of legitimacy to someone who might engage in some form of politically motivated violence. Meanwhile, we disappear up our ideological sphincters and try to be more Conservative/Socialist/Libertarian than each other, end up chatitng complete shite amongst ourselves. I'm not surprised that political parties are as useless and inept as they are, they are essentially 'safe spaces' on a national scale.

It's clear as a bell what 'the right approach' is and, as I seem to be saying rather frequently these days, we need to recognise that it's not about 'us' and get over ourselves somewhat. The Brexit 'debate' legitimised the branding of all in favour of leaving the EU as racists or xenophobes, while the mud being flung from the other side of the road was and continues to be about 'traitors', which includes anyone who voted Remain, judges doing their job and upholding the law, or members of parliament remembering the 48 per cent who voted Remain and asking questions of the government rather than engaging in jingoistic tubthumping.

Both 'sides' have dehumanised the other and both seem to have convinced themselves that they are being persecuted, that the other side is getting favourable treatment. Everyone involved needs to drop this petualant crybully modus operandi, get over themselves just a little and grow up before we sleepwalk into an altogether nastier form of tyranny. The state of public discourse post-Brexit has reached a foul new low from which we show no signs of recovering anytime soon - a low we have reached as a result of having too much 'safe space'  among members of our sad little tribes, rather than too little.


It's incumbent on all of us to reject the comfort of an unearned warm glow, dismiss the temptation of 'safe space' for ourselves and respectfully welcome those we profoundly disagree with. If we refuse, then we lose the right to complain when that process of tyranny is turned on us at a later date, along with the built-in auto-correct of the thuggish and unpleasant making utter fools of themselves and standing out like a sore thumb in a different climate. Once you resolve to respect those who think differently to yourself, you earn the right to walk away with honour when that is not reciprocated - to paraphrase the song, opinions don't hurt people, knobheads do.

I'll be doing one more about a topic I was asked to cover on either Saturday or Sunday, so here's some music and have fun in the meantime. Thanks for reading and I'll see you soon.