Last week, Auberon Waugh, the greatest English columnist of recent decades, died. His death was warmly welcomed by the self-righteously liberal circles of Hampstead, for he tormented their holy cows with fiendish humour and irresistible puckishness; and the hostile obituary from the most eloquent English ideologue of intolerant liberalism, Polly Toynbee in the Guardian, only exposed the world which he loathed and opposed with every brain-cell of his being.
Auberon Waugh, she said, was merely the worst of "a coterie of reactionary fogeys centred on the Spectator and the Telegraph. . .effete, drunken, snobbish sneering, racist and sexist, they spit poison at anyone vulgar enough to want to improve anything at all."
Well, actually, there is more free speech in the Telegraph and the Spectator than there is in the Guardian set inhabited by such as Polly Toynbee: both publications employ columnists who are ardent supporters of the British Labour Party. It is inconceivable that comparable ideological latitude would ever be shown by the Guardian.
Free speech
The left-liberal orthodoxy that has triumphed in academia and the legislating classes in recent years is no friend of free speech. In this country, a robust protection of intellectual freedom is more likely to come from a conservative Catholic such as David Quinn, an ex-leftie such as Eoghan Harris, both in the Sunday Times, or a solo player such as Mary Ellen Synon, than from the dominant ideologues of the liberal-left.
To judge from the fate of Mary Ellen Synon, Auberon Waugh would not have lasted long in Irish journalism. The lynch-mob frenzy which engulfed her after her - admittedly ill-judged - description of the Paralympics suggest that the culture of tolerance in modern Ireland is not even skin-deep. The substance of what she was - correctly - saying is that the only true test of true athleticism is in the real Olympics. The Paralympics merely reward effort in adversity. That adversity might be very severe, and the conquest of it quite heroic, or - as we now know from the Spanish basketball team - feigned. But there is no equivalence between the two sets of games, and it is intellectual fraud and moral blackmail to suggest there is.
She fell into comparable trouble - even being investigated by senior Garda detectives - for her observations about Traveller lifestyle. They were robust, but not racist, for Travellers are not a race. I would not have chosen her words, but I understand her sentiments. Though I make no judgement on Travellers individually - and nor indeed did she - I truly abhor the conditions in which so many of them live.
Influential factor
As do those who argue most vehemently that the State should do more for Travellers. Not the least influential factor in the creation of those conditions is a powerful Traveller sub-culture of illiteracy, State-dependency, social exclusivism, domestic violence, high criminality, alcoholism and academic non-achievement. Engels said almost exactly the same of Irish slum-dwellers in England in the 19th century; but Engels, of course, being something of an icon to left-liberals, is revered for his essays.
Mary Ellen is not for hers. Her reward from the liberal-left was best summarised by Fintan O'Toole in this newspaper when he said that he did not see why the mass dissemination of such racial insults (my italics) should not result in a legal sanction. Where race comes into this, I do not know, nor do I know what legal sanction he had in mind. It is, however, an interesting day in journalism when a respected columnist wants the courts to be an arbiter over how journalists should express themselves.
Nobody in mainstream English journalism, not even in the most virulently intolerant bastions of liberalism such as the Guardian, would have proposed that Auberon Waugh be answerable to the law for the things he wrote in his columns. These were anarchic, perverse, insulting, outrageous, cruel, and often simply wrong. But the willingness to accept another's error, to tolerate loud opinions one despises without throwing offenders into clink or fining the newspaper they work for, is the price one pays for having a free press.
Nor are the press the sole guardians of that freedom. Did the State-subsidised health boards which threatened to withdraw advertising from Independent Newspapers unless Mary Ellen Synon were suitably chastised (How? The pillory? The stocks? Ritual strangulation?) give a moment's consideration to the philosophical import of what they were doing? Did servants of the State really think they had the right, on their own whim, to threaten to direct State money away from those newspapers whose columnists they personally disagreed with? Was there a single reprimand for such abuse of power? Was there even a discussion about it?
Morality competition
There was not, merely a nationwide morality competition, judged according to the volume and the vituperativeness with which the many competitors could condemn Mary Ellen Synon. It was The Tailor and Ansty or The Rose Tattoo all over again - the font of outraged authority no longer being the Catholic church but the bishops of illiberal liberalism, smiting opponents with their croziers of mandatory egalitarianism.
Auberon Waugh set his face, his life, and his art against the humbug of socialist egalitarianism, and the world is the poorer for his passing. He was the greatest journalist of his generation, provoking, enriching and enraging in equal measure. From last week he was doing the same among the archangels, some of whom have sent his more outrageous celestial columns to higher authority, demanding downwardly vertical ejection.