18 ***^ Sunday 1 September 2019 The Sunday TelegraphO
bserving the thoughtlessness
with which the word “coup”
was reduced to a hashtag this
week, I had an epiphany about why
I dislike those shrill young people
we hard-hearted types like to call
snowflakes and who like to call
themselves Social Justice Warriors
(SJWs).
It’s not because I find them Left-
wing, as many Snowflake-baiters do –
but because I find them not Left-wing
enough. They are bleeding heart
solipsists whose hearts bleed only for
themselves.
That the lily-livered SJWs of
Twitter dare to apply “coup” to being
outfoxed by someone who pulled
the rug out from under their two left
feet made me see red – and indeed
remember the time I used to be
Red. I may be a churchgoing Hove-
dwelling sexagenarian Telegraph
columnist now, but in my youth I
was forever carrying placards which
generally read “Down With This Sort
Of Thing”.
I’d march for dolphins being
slaughtered by the Japanese and
foxes being bothered by the burghers
of Berkshire, but anti-fascist demoswere my favourite by far; facing
down the National Front on the
mean streets of Lewisham, crushed
between a Rastafarian and a posh old
man who waved his walking stick
and shouted “Jew-baiters! Damn Jew-
baiters!” I was having the time of my
teenage life.
Yes, we sometimes verged on
the self-righteous and the Socialist
Workers Party was always lurking
on the sidelines like perves by a
playground, trying to making puffin-
killing connected in some way to the
situation in so-called Palestine.
But I don’t think we were anything
like as pathetic as the “Antifas” of
today, mainly because we were all
about the cause, not the coverage.
Because we existed before social
media, we couldn’t mistake Tweeting
about the sexism of the term “guy”,
or sharing pictures of the Amazon
fires on Instagram for activism.
When we found ourselves on the
wrong end of a police horse, we took
a few dodgy pills and got on with it
rather than portraying ourselves as
online martyrs.
When one looks at the history of
modern protest, there’s real courage,tenacity and dignity involved,
especially in the United States of
America; students getting shot by
the National Guard on campuses for
protesting against a war, one-legged
priests on long marches for racial
equality – even the lazy hippies
showed some guts and stuck flowers
down the barrels of police guns.
Compare this to the big
incontinent babies squawking for
attention with their blue hair and
pierced-navel gazing “Look at me,
mom, aren’t I naughty”?
This solipsism leads to a
worse state of affairs than mere
exhibitionism; it leads to cases
of cultural callousness wherein
Western feminists will wear the hijab
in solidarity with Muslim women –
visibly purring with self-satisfaction- when the bravest of Muslim women
are harangued for daring to
remove theirs.
It’s far more ego-boosting
to declare yourself non-
binary than protest about
the vile treatment meted
out to gay people in the
Islamic world; SJWs
have no concern about
Protest isn’t what it used to be in this vapid snowflake age
oppression in other countries,
preferring to keep the spotlight on
themselves and their own pet peeves.
They take this attitude into the
classroom with them, where the
words that African-American author
James Baldwin wrenched from the
depths of his pain have to be neutered
lest they be triggered; recently a
professor at the New School in New
York was reportedly investigated for
using the N-word in one of her classes
when reading out the Go Tell It on the
Mountain author’s prose.
Would, say, the International
Brigade of the Spanish Civil
War, with their matter-of-fact
willingness to fight and die for
democracy, recognise the SJWs?
I think not.
But they’d see an echo of
themselves in the youngsters
who went off to join the
Kurdish army to fight Isil,
for the sake of a faraway
country of which they
knew nothing, while their
coddled contemporaries
on the conventional Left
stayed safely at home
whining about pronouns.JULIE BURCHILL
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opinionW
ords have never
mattered more
than this. It is fair
to say that what the
Government has
decided to do is
irregular and tactically ruthless.
But it is not – I think we can all
agree after days of meticulous
argumentation – unconstitutional, and
it is certainly not undemocratic.
Even its irregularity and
ruthlessness seem pretty mundane
after all the arcane legal contortions of
the Irreconcilable Remainers who
have manipulated Parliamentary
procedure over the past months. (I
wonder if they have any idea how
much furious exasperation these
antics provoked among real people.)
And it is certainly right to describe
the antagonistic response to that
Government decision as absurd,
hysterical and largely opportunistic.
But it is not true to say that it is
unprecedented.
Those old enough to have been
politically sentient during the Eighties
will recall that the anti-Thatcher bile
of that time could give this current
frenzy a run for its money.
In fact, today’s histrionics are,thus far anyway, a rather effete
impersonation of the often violent
resistance to Thatcherite trade union
reforms and clampdowns on local
government which was reinforced by
the knowledge that such protest had
successfully brought down elected
governments.
Those protesters who spontaneously
appeared in Westminster within
hours of Boris Johnson’s prorogation
announcement, mysteriously
equipped with identical, professionally
printed placards (“Defend Democracy –
Resist the Parliament Shutdown”) were
a nostalgic tribute to the massed trade
unionists and militant Labour activists
who were once able to shut down
industrial and economic life in Britain
for weeks at a time.
In all the excitement, nobody seems
to be asking where all this explosive
outrage has come from. Even allowing
for the fact that social media has made
death threats the everyday currency of
public discourse, isn’t there something
rather strange about this?
However idiotic it is all going to
seem in a few years’ (or possibly a few
weeks’) time, it is important to examine
precisely what is going on now.
Not long ago, it was Leavers who
were thought to be the unbending
fanatics. Indeed, the caricature of
them was that they were desperate
malcontents who were convinced that
everything that was wrong with their
lives and their local communities was
the fault of Brussels.
The most sympathetic account
offered by their opponents was that
they were the rump of the old working
class left behind by globalisation
whose benefits they were too
benighted to understand. (Hence, the
truly appalling pronouncement that no
attention need be paid to them becauseall we had to do was wait for them to
die.) Remain supporters, on the other
hand, were civilised, reasonable people
who simply judged the advantages of
EU membership to be greater than
any disadvantages (which were real,
they acknowledged with grown-up
judiciousness, but ultimately trivial).
As in the nation at large, so it was in
Parliament. It was the Brexiteers who
were the purist trench fighters and the
Remainers who were the responsible
arbiters of reason. Remember that?
What exactly happened?
There is an obvious cynical account
of this Remain Rage phenomenon:
that it is a phoney staged campaign
organised by a convenient coalition of
groups whose self-interests happen to
coincide.
First there are the people who have a
personal stake in our EU membership
because of their own professional or
financial concerns. This category does
not preclude being an MP or a lobbyist
with the ear of an MP.
Then there are whole categories
of national institution which benefit
directly from membership. Scientific
research bodies have publicised their
reliance on EU grants very openly.
The arts have been a bit less
explicit so it may be useful to point
out that there is scarcely an artistic
or heritage body in the country that
has not been directly helped by EU
funding or by the advantageous
exchange arrangements of people and
artefacts which membership makes
possible.
There is nothing disreputable
about academic or arts lobbies
making their case on the basis of their
own circumstances. But be aware
that the almost unanimous shriek of
condemnation from these quarters
is not disinterested. And then thereEurophiles once claimed to
be the only sensible adultsin the room. What on earth
has happened to them?JANET DALEYEY
KIT CHAPMAN
Antibiotics could
kill us before
climate change
I
t would be nice if we
only had to tackle one
doomsday scenario at
a time. There is currently
much focus on the peril
of climate change, with
campaigners using a
simple metaphor: act as
if your house is on fire.
Sadly, a roaring inferno
isn’t the only thing we
have to worry about.
Our home is also under
constant attack from
trillions of tiny, deadly
monsters – and unless
we stop leaving the door
open, they could wipe us
out long before we burn to
a crisp.
That’s the message from
England’s chief medical
officer, Dame Sally Davies.
The problem of bacteria
growing immune to our
antibiotic arsenal, Davies
has warned, “could
kill us before climate
change does”. Davies
is right. Antimicrobial
resistance is both a
catastrophe on a global
scale, and a problem we
brought upon ourselves.
It is also arguably more
urgent (if not ultimately
more serious) than
global warming. When
penicillins first emerged
in the mid-20th century,
they were miracle
cures. By the turn of the
millennium, having saved
billions of lives, we had
such a choice of drugs that
pharma companies had
simply stopped looking
for more. Doctors wrote
unnecessary prescriptions
for illnesses probably
caused by (antibiotic-
immune) viruses. Patients
didn’t think to treat their
medicines like gold dust
and obey instructions to
the letter. And massive
amounts of antibiotics
were – and in some
countries still are – dished
out like Smarties to
perfectly healthy livestock
in the name of disease
prevention.
We were complacent
when resistance to these
wonderful, life-saving
cures began to emerge.Hysterical Remain is redolent of
the bilious anti-Thatcher brigade
are the political opportunists – the
Labour Party leadership, which will
do virtually anything to discredit
the Government even if it means
abandoning its traditional supporters,
and lifelong activists who will
move from shutting down roads
over climate change, to occupying
bridges to protest over Parliamentary
procedures which they scarcely
understand.
But even this confederation of self-
serving agitators does not account
for the virulence of the cosmopolitan
liberal axis which once saw itself as
moderate and open to argument about
most things – which, in fact, prided
itself on its tolerance and ability to
meet prejudice with sensible debate.
What on earth has happened to
these people? They used to be, on
balance, in favour of Remain – now
they are apparently in favour of
hanging people who are opposed to it.
There is a key to this and it is
related to that revival of anti-Thatcher
hysteria: the crucial element is a
peculiarly poisonous form of snobbery.
Remain Rage isn’t so much about
loving the EU: it’s about despising the
people who want to leave it.
The same sort of social circles (in
some cases, the same individuals) who
sneered at Thatcher, “the grocer’s
daughter”, now loathe the oiks who
“did not understand what they voted
for”.
Ironically, they repeat the familiar
language of bigoted reactionaries:
Leave supporters are backward,
ignorant, naive and easily misled. So
their judgments, for their own good,
must not count.
When I was growing up in America,
this is exactly what white people who
did not think they were racists, used to
say about black people.To order prints or signed copies of any Telegraph cartoon, go to telegraph.co.uk/prints-cartoons or call 0191 603 0178 [email protected]We ignored warnings
about the insidious,
invisible menace, even
as we were forced to rely
on outdated drugs as
second, third and fourth
lines of defence. And, as
infections such as MRSA
began to sweep through
the population, as cases of
sepsis in children became
untreatable in countries
such as India, we began to
pay the price.
The good news is we can
turn things around before
we collapse back into a
19th-century dystopia
where a paper cut is a
death sentence. But action
must be immediate; we are
already at the point where
some strains of gonorrhoea
are so resistant they are
impossible to treat. New
drugs are trickling through
the pipeline – although
these are likely to be held
as a last line of defence- and new approaches
in how to make them
in the laboratory are
emerging. Both need more
investment.
We must stop giving out
antibiotics unless essential,
particularly in countries
where they can be bought
over the counter. Tighter
regulation of use in
animals is also required
in many regions, where
they are still given to
promote growth rather
than treat disease. And we
need to get smarter about
preventing infection,
wise up to our own
responsibilities and accept
the days of antibiotic
prescriptions for minor
aches and sniffles are gone.
The cost of modern
living is that we must fight
multiple battles at once.
Antimicrobial resistance
is an apocalyptic threat.
Our house may be on fire,
but we can’t let monsters
sneak through the back
door while the flames have
our attention.
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opinionREAD MORE at
telegraph.co.uk/opinionSUNDAY COMMENT
‘The same
sort of social
circles who
sneered atthe grocer’s
daughter
now loathethe oiks who
“did notunderstand
what they
voted for” ’RELEASED BY "What's News" vk.com/wsnws TELEGRAM: t.me/whatsnws