"Having abandoned Marx...
the Left have taken up
Gramsci..."

Twenty years ago, we'd never have let them do it. Today, after years of enforced 'multiculturalism', thoughtcrime comes to Britain and we scarcely notice. On 21st October, the BBC screened a documen-tary,
The Secret Policemen, showing a small number of police recruits, covertly filmed by an undercover
reporter, making 'racist' remarks in supposedly pri-vate conversations. In response to this programme, a
number of recruits resigned, senior officers expressed their outrage, criminal proceedings were considered,
informers were proposed, and the BBC went into a frenzy of multiculturalist breastbeating, demanding
of various minority-rights agitators how racism was to be 'rooted out' and whether it could be 'cured'.

What had gone wrong? These men had undergone 'diversity awareness training'. Had they just gone
along with it in public hoping to get away with their true thoughts in private? Thank heavens the state
broadcaster was on hand to prove them wrong! Nobody in the BBC, as far as I saw, doubted that
men's livelihoods and careers should depend on their private conversations. Yet this is inimical to a free
society. It doesn't matter what the men actually said.
Some have tried to defend it, but this is unnecessary and unwise. Some of the comments – eg, that
Stephen Lawrence deserved to be murdered – were indefensible, however misguided the Macpherson
Report was; others – eg, "A dog born in a barn is still a dog; a 'Paki' born in England is still a Paki" – were
crudely expressed standard positions in the nature/ nurture debate, defensible when translated
into more neutral language, but independent of polit-ical attitudes and more convincing when dissociated
from them. One recruit expressed a desire to beat up an Asian colleague and pick on ethnic minorities, and
I certainly would not defend that either. The point is, in a free society, we are entitled to express indefensi-ble
views and unsavoury desires, especially in private.


There are exceptions, of course – private conver-sations held in the course of a conspiracy to commit
a crime, say. But a conspiracy is more than just wish-ful talk: it is an agreement to perform certain actions
directed to a particular, intended end. Until some of those actions have been performed, there can be no
proof of conspiracy. Merely expressing a desire, the most any of the recruits did, is not enough to show
you intend to do something, let alone that you will do it – or else people like me, who regularly give
voice to bloody fantasies in the privacy of their own homes during the Today programme, would be serious
security risks, if not multiple murderers. Thankfully, we are innocent until proven guilty, and cannot be
proven guilty until we have done something. We all have impulses and desires upon which it
would be wrong to act. We all have to restrain ourselves and be judged accordingly. A police officer
victimising innocent people (for whatever reason) or assaulting a colleague s'ould be disciplined and in cer-tain
cases prosecuted. But to judge him on his pri-vately expressed impulses and desires regardless of his
actions is to violate the presumption of innocence and brand him guilty for things he cannot help (precise-ly
the objection to racism). Such judgments reveal a barren and simplistic conception of human nature,
failing to recognize that virtues and vices are interde-pendent, ignoring the lesson of Shakespeare's Antony
& Cleopatra, where Mark Antony, despite kissing away kingdoms and losing to Octavius Caesar,
remains a bigger man than Octavius ever will be, just because his capacity for great emotion, revealed by
his disastrous infatuation with Cleopatra, shows what inner strength he needed to be a successful leader for
so long. It is unfair to judge us on desires rather than actions, and stupid to condemn us merely because the
desires in question are better left unacted. It is also totalitarian, going beyond the proscrip-tion
of actions, the mark of the rule of law, to pro-scribe thoughts and feelings, thus extending political
control into the private sphere, thereby destroying the autonomy of institutions.
You may say these men would have been fine if they hadn't been secretly filmed: it's just that once
their comments became public, the police force had to condemn them. Perhaps it had. But that is an
uncomfortable thought, for two reasons, the first trivial, the second anything but. First, if the problem
was the publicity given to the recruits' comments, why haven't those responsible for that publicity – the
BBC – endured more criticism? Why have we heaped opprobrium on the officers themselves, who never
wanted their comments publicised? Why have senior officers promised to probe their recruits' private feel-ings
more deeply in response? Second, if a society cannot tolerate private remarks by members of a
major public institution, if, no matter what they actu-ally do, it cannot allow people with particular atti-tudes
to participate in that institution, then such a society can never be a free society, as it cannot have
autonomous institutions. The question of publicity is a red herring, since,
necessarily, nobody can do anything about private attitudes until somebody knows about them; the question is what happens to people if their private
attitudes are exposed, and what happens to those who try by underhand means to effect that exposure.
If those with the 'wrong' attitudes are effectively forced out and those who exposed them congratulat-ed
and emulated, then the institution concerned can-not be truly autonomous. Autonomous institutions
must have purposes peculiar to themselves, and their members, qua members, are obliged solely to help
them fulfil those purposes; when we judge members on other criteria – such as their private thoughts and
feelings – we impose on institutions a standard that may in principle conflict with their true purposes.
In Britain today, this unfortunately happens all the time. Take universities. The purpose of a teaching
university is to educate its students by transmitting to them something of the best that has been thought
and said, ensuring they understand it as well as they can. It cannot fulfil this purpose unless it selects as
students the candidates best equipped to understand
whatever the university is best able to transmit. As
soon as the university is obliged to account for its
selections in other terms – such as the social back-ground of its students – it can no longer concentrate
on its true purpose, so can no longer be truly autonomous.
It goes way beyond universities, of course. Every public institution is assessed on what percentage of its
members belong to 'minorities', how much effort it makes to attract minorities, whether it indulges in
'discriminatory' practices, and so on, and all large pri-vate firms have 'equal opportunities' policies. In a
recent piece in his on-line Free Life Commentary, Sean Gabb argues that the Left, having given up on violent
revolution to socialise the means of production, has for some time been waging a cultural war, undermining
the autonomy of our institutions by imposing irrele-vant egalitarian standards, so ensuring (incidentally)
that those who rise to prominence in institutions are those most committed to meeting such standards.
Having abandoned Marx, who believed the cultural, institutional, ideological "superstructure" of society,
being merely the reflection of its economic "base", would automatically be transformed in any revolu-tion
that transformed that base, the Left have taken up Gramsci, who argued that the superstructure
entrenched the ideological "hegemony" of the ruling class, making revolution impossible until it was trans-formed
first. Now that the proletariat is better off, the ruling
class is no longer the bourgeoisie (except in areas, such as education, where cleverness matters), but
white heterosexual men – and since whites are more likely to speak English than non-whites, heterosexu-als
more likely to be open about their sexual procliv-ities than homosexuals and so to seem over-repre-sented,
and men, having no role in child-bearing and less of a role in child-rearing, always likely to concen-trate
more on their careers than women are – white heterosexual men are bound, through no fault of
their own, to wield 'disproportionate' power and wealth. The Leftist cannot tolerate this 'inequality',
so white heterosexual males, especially when they have the bad taste to be also middle-class, must lose
their grip on our institutions in favour of 'minorities',


to give us an equal society without a ruling class, a prospect the Leftist considers both realistic and self-evidently
good. It is hard to fight this. Condemn the Left for
eroding institutions' autonomy by imposing ideology on them, and it replies that these supposedly
autonomous institutions already embody the ideolo-gy and advance the interests of the ruling class, citing
as evidence 'under-representation' of minority groups. Reply that any such evidence may equally be
evidence of political indifference, and they just put the political bias beyond evidence, eg, by making accusa-tions
of 'institutional racism', which seems to amount to nothing more than the consistent failure to regard
certain people's belonging to certain races as more weighty than any other consideration, a weighting
incompatible with the true purpose of any non-racially-based institution. Denial of racism is simply a sign
that the institution's racism is 'unconscious', and all the more insidious for it. In true Marxian fashion,
protestations of innocence are taken as proof of guilt.
They have to be. The whole point of the
Gramscian project is to transform institutions into
agents of political change; when institutions resist this, they are doing something political, so proving
the Gramscian theory that they are essentially dis-guised agents of reactionary oppression. For the
Gramscian, there is no such thing as an autonomous institution, so any defence of them is based on an illu-sion.
Institutions are essentially reducible to their members, who are in turn reducible to whatever
characteristics make them part of one or other 'class' or group. Thus the private thoughts and feelings of any
institution's members are a direct reflection of the real nature of the institution itself, and on the groups
whose interests they advance. The secret policemen have shown what the police thinks, and in doing so,
have revealed what the ruling class of white heterosex-ual males thinks. Of course police spokesmen will deny
this, but only because they have to conceal the real purpose of their institution for it to be effective. The
only solution is to force another purpose on the police. This argument depends on an elementary confu-sion
between purposes, which need not be political, and effects, which always partly are; but that doesn't
make it any easier to defeat. In attributing class polit-ical motives to both sides, those attacking and those
defending institutions, it appeals to our natural sense of fair play, and we are tempted to conclude that the
best way to win the argument is simply to defend the political purpose ascribed to us, just as those who
have defended the secret policemen's attitudes have done; and that's fair enough – some of their attitudes
were defensible, even if others were not. Perhaps it would be better if 'whites were in charge' or whatev-er.
But there are obvious risks in a democracy in defending any kind of ruling class, however broad it
may be, and although sometimes we must do it any-way – as when we defend the hereditary principle in
the Lords – if we do it as a matter of course we fall into the trap of having always to attack 'fairness'.
It's much better to push our opponents into the trap of always having to attack freedom. So let's make
it clear that The Secret Policemen is not a one-off. The Gramscian, by the very nature of his argument, will
always be on the lookout for thoughtcrime.

Hadrian Wise is a freelance writer