Sunday 31 August 2014

Think The Thinkable, Say The Sayable, Do The Doable

Much mirth at Melanie Phillips's denunciation of the Board of Deputies of British Jews for its apparent deviation from the script.

Call it a very guilty pleasure, but I have a soft spot for Melanie Phillips. She is catastrophically wrong about a very great many things, of course. But she is right about some others, notably drugs.

She decries the evisceration of civil society by Thatcherism as surely as Rod Liddle and Peter Hitchens do, and that aspect of her work, like that aspect of each of theirs, is completely ignored. As are her acceptance of the existence of the Palestinians as a distinct people with national rights, and her criticisms of West Bank settlement activity.

The overused charges of misogyny and anti-Semitism seem genuinely applicable to much of the abuse that Phillips receives. That is not explained by the fact that she used to be on the Left. A lot of her generation used to be on the Left, and she was never as far Left, indeed Far Left, as many of them were until only about 20 years ago. 

(Watch out for the new trend of people who are starting out as libertarians at home and possibly as neoconservatives abroad, but who will grow into a broadly Disraelian position as mediated through post-War British social democracy and its general restoration under Ed Miliband as Prime Minister.

That process will be greatly assisted by their One Nation Labour voting habits all along, since it would simply never occur to almost anyone below a certain age to vote any other way if they were going to vote at all, no matter what their political opinions might happen to be.)

It may surprise you to lean this, but I have for some time wondered at Melanie Phillips's lack of ambition.

Her e-publishing venture has produced nothing in well over a year, and all of the ebooks before then, including her own autobiography, would have had no difficulty in finding mainstream publication in both print and electronic formats.

There was always something ridiculous about the claim to have been excluded by the gatekeepers of public discourse on the part of a then Daily Mail columnist who remains a panellist on The Moral Maze and a fairly regular panellist on the mighty Question Time.

As at a push she might still be able to do from The Times, she could from the Daily Mail have created a qualification in social policy, advertisements for positions requiring which that newspaper would have carried for free.

Even lists of endorsed parliamentary candidates would not have been out of the question. Or an alternative A-list (the M-List?) of aspirants to Conservative nominations, effectively endorsed by the Mail.

Phillips was and is the only person in Britain who could have set up a Weekly Standard here, and a monthly review called Commentary. The latter's original was founded, and was published until 2007, by the American Jewish Committee.

Bringing us back to Phillips's pronounced disillusion with the Board of Deputies. She is the only person who could set up an alternative British Jewish Committee, simply inviting each of the synagogues and agencies represented on the Board to send someone, and individual members to do so where those bodies, as such, declined or did not reply.

What is stopping her?

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