More Witch Hunts
Daniel Finkelstein is a regular contributor to The Times newspaper - a Conservative supporter I think - but a thoughtful and reasonable chap in my estimation.
I'm pleased to say that he picked up yesterday on the activities of one Tom Watson MP - the Labour member for West Bromwich East - whose behaviour could do with a bit more serious scrutiny in my book.
See post dated 12 November 2012 - 'Witch Hunts'.
The trouble with completely tribal, blinkered politicians is that they distort politics - they give it a terrible name - by pretending that everyone and everything on their side is good and noble.
While pretending the opposite is true - of their political opponents.
Which is not true, of course, and never has been - but the problem is that this kind of behaviour debases politics and political debate.
Which is now commonplace in America, the recent US Presidential election being a good example - where lots of people (some of them very famous) felt free to challenge Barack Obama's status as an American citizen - without a shred of evidence to back up their allegations.
So I take my hat off to Danny Finkelstein for standing up to this kind of bullying behaviour - here's what he had to say.
Wild, dangerous paranoia has no place here
Tom Watson has voiced child abuse accusations that must be looked into. But in others he has gone way too far
The story of the child abuse allegations currently sweeping the nation properly begins, I think, in a pumpkin on a patch in a farm in Maryland.
It was there, you see, that Whittaker Chambers hid the proof that one of America’s leading foreign policy adminstrators, a man who had been for years a senior State Department official, had in fact been a member of the Communist Party and a spy. When Chambers retrieved the papers, they helped to show that Alger Hiss had been stealing secret documents, having them retyped by his wife and passing the information to the Soviets.
Hiss was supported during his criminal trials and beyond by blue-chip Americans, by some of the most famous and distinguished members of the liberal elite. The future presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson appeared as a character witness. Harry Truman’s Secretary of State, Dean Acheson, stood by Hiss despite the verdict of the court. And yet, as now seems virtually certain, Hiss was guilty. He was a spy.
Less than one month after Hiss’s conviction, at a Women’s Country Republican Club in Wheeling, West Virginia, an undistinguished junior Senator made a startling allegation. Joseph McCarthy said that he had in his hand a list of 205 people in the State Department who were members of the Communist Party and part of a spy ring.
McCarthy didn’t name the individuals but said that the Secretary of State knew that these people were Communists and nevertheless continued to employ them. As he went round the country speaking, the number changed — one day it was 57, then 81, 10, 116, 121 and so on.
Sometimes the charges were broad, sometimes very specific. He would go after a target, often an unnamed one, and then drop it if went nowhere, moving on smoothly, unchallenged, to the next one.
In a luminous essay published in The Times 15 years after McCarthy’s death in 1957, Roy Jenkins captured the Senator’s style brilliantly: “a combination of going for his adversary’s groin, spattering an issue with uncoordinated misrepresentation and sentiment, and hoping to attract attention by the uninhibited flamboyance of his statements”.
His allies were nervous but impressed at his political success. His opponents were fearful, for who knew what might be on the piece of paper? What if they opposed McCarthy and the Senator could prove his startling allegations were right all along?
Two things are important in all this. The first is that, as the Hiss case showed, McCarthy wasn’t entirely wrong. There really was a KGB-run spy ring and it had penetrated the American Government to a shocking degree. The second is that this did not justify McCarthyism.
It didn’t justify the exaggeration, and the talk of high-level cover-up and conspiracy. It didn’t justify the overstatements and the histrionics. It didn’t justify the self-pity and self-dramatisation. It didn’t justify spinning the whole thing out, teasing everyone with what might be found out or known. It didn’t justify hints about hidden guilty people, even though some guilty people had indeed been hidden. It didn’t justify the fear and hysteria.
The existence of spies, even spy rings, does not exonerate Joseph R. McCarthy.
Anyone reading the Waterhouse report on the North Wales care home scandal will be drawn, I think, to a disturbing conclusion. This is that almost the worst thing about the abuse was the lack of collusion and conspiracy. What that means is that, unknown to each other, many abusers of children were working in the care homes at the same time.
If these people were indeed, as the report concludes, committing their crimes separately, it suggests a frightening national level of child abuse. Enough, certainly, to justify our current reconsideration of the issue. Enough, too, to imply that some well-known people are likely to have behaved like this too. This conclusion is simply mathematics.
But this does not mean that when accusations are made, the standards of evidence and public behaviour should be relaxed. The very importance of it, indeed, dictates the opposite.
Tom Watson, the Deputy Chairman of the Labour Party, is not Joe McCarthy. The Senator was a fraudster, playing the angles. While Mr Watson is not averse to political rough and tumble, on this he is, I believe, totally genuine. He cares deeply about the issues he raises.
He has also been more specific than McCarthy. There are real cases he has referred to the police. He has suggested that one of these involves evidence against a former Cabinet minister. Mr Watson also suggests that he has evidence that a member of a paedophile ring told another member that he, the first member, knew someone else, “a senior aide to a former Prime Minister, who says he could smuggle indecent images of children from abroad”. These are serious allegations, worthy of investigation, even if in the second case they are hearsay.
If only Mr Watson had left it at that. But he did not. He has suggested that there is “a powerful paedophile network linked to Parliament and Number Ten”, which I assume must be substantiated by something stronger than the one link by hearsay he has referred to.
He has written to the Prime Minister suggesting that organised abuse of children might have taken place in Downing Street and needs to be investigated. He has talked of anonymous “powerful people — some of them household names — who abused children with impunity”. He doesn’t say how many.
And he has also claimed that there is a “concerted cover-up”, arguing that this is the work, again, of “powerful people”, and then adding, as if as an afterthought, that some of these may still be powerful politicians. He then suggests, this member of the Shadow Cabinet, that these people might kill him if he doesn’t drop the whole thing. He has been told that by people who should know, apparently. He is keeping a file just in case.
This is wild, unprovable, paranoid, irresponsible stuff. It is dangerous to serious political debate. It does not belong on the front bench of a major party. And this will remain so even if, as indeed they might, some specific allegations turn out to be right and provable.
