The nine circles of Lionel: The Spectator spews racist rhetoric again but it’ll still be treated as ‘respectable’
The nine circles of Lionel: The Spectator spews racist rhetoric again but it’ll still be treated as ‘respectable’
Lionel Shriver is trafficking white supremacist rhetoric, but who can resist a great summer party? Even if Taki might do an impromptu talk about his beloved Wehrmacht...
What is ‘respectable’? The glib answer is the right clothes, the right accent, the right friends and the right demeanour. And there are few outlets so Right as The Spectator. Fraser Nelson, the magazine’s editor, is ‘respectable’. He is frequently on Sunday politics show sofas offering his analysis of the news, presents shows for Radio 4 — despite his magazine and its sibling The Daily Telegraph frequently calling for Auntie’s head — and is treated as a ‘reasonable’ voice of the right by producers dazzled by a sheen of politeness.
But Nelson is neither reasonable nor respectable. He is the emcee for a far-right freak show which retains its role at the heart of the British establishment because of its age — it was first published in July 1828, making it the oldest weekly magazine in the world — its closeness to power (Boris Johnson is a former editor) and largesse when it comes to hospitality (politicians, journalists, advisors and other hangers-on flock to its summer party). What goes on within its pages is not respectable but reprehensible. The latest evidence of that floated to the surface yesterday.
No doubt Lionel Shriver was delighted to discover she was trending yesterday, contentedly sipping coffee from her Ulster Freedom Fighters mug as her latest Spectator piece ‘triggered’ (bang bang) the “lefty mob”. This is, after all, the bridge troll disguised as a novelist who donned a sombrero at the Brisbane Literary Festival to rage about her hatred of the term “cultural appropriation”. After that event, Francine Prose astutely observed in The New York Review of Books:
Shriver takes a familiar tack often used on Fox News: trivializing valid concerns by ridiculing their most absurd manifestations… It’s worth noting that Shriver’s own visibility has greatly increased in the aftermath of her Brisbane lecture.
That same glibness was in effect when she spoke to The New Yorker after a 2020 appearance on Question Time during which she defended Boris Johnson’s now-notorious 2018 “letterbox/bank robber” column about women who wear burqas:
A week later, [Shriver] wrote to me: “I have managed to get myself into trouble again,” adding that she’d appeared on the program “against my better judgement — and I have to say that my better judgement doesn’t get a lot of exercise these days.” After a clip of the spat went viral, an old friend of Shriver’s ended their relationship. “All over a difference of opinion about whether ‘letterbox’ has pejorative qualities. For pity’s sake, one could as well be vilified for saying, ‘You look like a chair.’”
Shriver loves the “just saying” defence and she’ll use it to defend her latest column (Would you want London to be overrun with Americans like me?) which comes with a headline designed to preempt accusations of racism (“I said Americans!”) It’s also clear that just like the sombrero stunt, the Question Time appearance or any number of other columns, Shriver wants attention and to cause anger but will then pretend that her critics are just a wild unreasonable mob out to silence her, ready to accuse them of, as she put it to the New Yorker, “malicious interpretation”.
Here follows my ‘malicious’ interpretation of Shriver’s piece, snide talk from the side of her mouth designed to seem piquant to The Spectator’s audience of terrified Tories and dinner party racists. Shriver begins with some scene-setting balanced on the recent events1 in Afghanistan:
The Afghans the Home Office is scrambling to resettle in Britain present one of immigration’s most sympathetic cases: translators and other support workers for allied troops whose lives are potentially imperilled by Taliban revenge against collaborators. Councils are searching for big, many-bedroomed properties to rent or repurpose, as fleeing Afghan families can have a dozen members. The Home Secretary has offered to resettle 20,000 Afghans in due course.
This is the ‘reasonable’ entree, the bit with some figures and a tone of nervous sympathy, but it’s a meagre offering and the cloches will quickly be removed from the steaming banquet of bigotry for which the average Spectator reader is gnashing their jaws in anticipation. And it arrives with a “yet”, one of the high-handed hatemonger’s favourite transitions:
Yet if history serves, we’ll soon see many more than 20,000 Afghans land on British shores, all of whom won’t necessarily have worked for NATO and few of whom will wait to be invited.
Like those of nearly all immigrants, their stories are bound to be heart-breaking. Surely only a monster would deny such decent yet desperate people ‘a better life’. That’s the winning moral reasoning that has currently turned America’s southern border into no more than a notional scribble on a map.
Whenever Shriver writes a phrase like “surely only a monster could…” you can be sure she’s moments away from dressing up as Godzilla and stomping on some unfortunate child’s train set. Similarly, you’ll get lots of the same kind of broad fact-free assertions you’d hear from Fox News or Britain’s Fox with training wheels GB News (hence “America’s southern border [is] no more than a notional scribble…”)
The monster begins to roar in the next paragraph when Shriver introduces two reports from Migration Watch — an anti-immigration think-tank beloved of right-wing publications who can lean on its deceptive name to suggest neutrality and rigour where there is none — and claims she will present their key findings “as succinctly and neutrally as possible”. It’s like Wile E Coyote proposing to give a presentation on the pros and cons of roadrunners. She writes:
In the past 20 years, foreign-born residents of the UK have doubled to nine million, going from 8 per cent to 14 per cent of the population. In tandem, the white British proportion of the population has fallen from 89 per cent to 79 per cent, while ethnic minorities have grown from 10 per cent to 21 per cent. Since 2001, 84 per cent of UK population growth has been due to immigrants and their children, rising to 90 per cent since 2017 — the majority non-EU.
Now, those statistics don’t ‘scare’ me but then I’m a Spectator reader through professional necessity rather than psycho-sexual proclivity. To those inclined to read Shriver while nodding like a toy dog on a parcel shelf, those figures are fodder for the kind of story that produces weeks of nightmares, almost as scary as the prospect of increased inheritance tax or a socialist government.
Shriver uses her full collection of dog whistles from here on; it’s thought that this column alone unsettled canines across the entire south of England. She goes on:
More than a third of UK births now involve at least one foreign-born parent; in parts of London, 80 per cent of births are to foreign-born mothers. Indeed, non-UK nationals are disproportionately concentrated in British cities. The majorities of London, Slough, Leicester and Luton have an ethnic minority background. About half the births in London, Birmingham, Manchester and Cambridge are to foreign mothers.
Is Shriver proposing that we ban UK passport holders from shagging foreigners? Combine that with Brexit shortages and the quality of British cuisine will take go into a dangerous decline. And what of the Prime Minister, who was born in New York to a “foreign-born mother”? Or the Home Secretary and her “foreign-born mother”? Or the Health Secretary and his “foreign-born mother?”
I have many issues with Priti Patel, Sajid Javid, and especially Boris Johnson, but where they or their mothers were born does not make them less British than me2. It’s no factor at all in their worth or otherwise. But Shriver is pushing a version of a common far-right idea here — the great replacement — which is rooted in distorted readings of immigration statistics and fundamentally unscientific racist ideology, so logic doesn’t come into it.
“Even delivering those dry statistics feels dangerous,” Shriver writes, every inch the self-imagined maverick (which explains why she’s always pictured in a godawful leather jacket and seems to think of herself as a spaghetti western sheriff with a book contract). At this point she begins to really turn up the racism dial, knowing that The Spectator’s readership will be on their feet and applauding at how transgressive she and, by extension, they are compared to the sheep who decline to pay £12.99 a month for a far-right fanzine. She continues:
In particular, white Britons who greet those figures with anything short of delight know perfectly well to keep their traps shut. The lineages of white Britons in their homeland commonly go back hundreds of years. Yet for the country’s original inhabitants to confront becoming a minority in the UK (perhaps in the 2060s) with any hint of mournfulness, much less consternation, is now racist and beyond the pale. I submit: that proscription is socially and even biologically unnatural.
Who are the “original inhabitants” she’s talking about? You and I know she just means “white people” but surely that’s not ‘original’ enough for a racist of discernment like Shriver. Shouldn’t she be arguing that the members of homo antecessor tribes who tramped across a land bridge from mainland Europe are the true custodians of this island group? Or, if the inconvenient fact that they died out is an issue, we could just say that if you’re not descended directly from the Insular Celts who were running about before the Romans rocked up you’re just an immigrant with extremely long indefinite leave to remain.
And the words “biologically unnatural”? Did she get out the ouija board and have Goebbels do some ghostwriting?
In Shriver’s mind, I’m letting the side down by not feeling “mournful” that the UK is increasingly diverse. I’m meant to be terrified by the multicultural makeup of the school where I’m a governor rather than delighted by the way the children there learn with and from each other every day. Shriver’s ideas are not “now racist”; they have always been racist. She is simply aggrieved that despite the ‘safe space’ provided by The Spectator to spout them a significant proportion of the world disagrees with her and that number is growing.
The argument — that Shriver presents explicitly in the piece — that the nation-state is a container for racial homogeneity (look how she shifts from talking about nationality to race) is the same one made by the Nazis. And yes, I’ve now set myself up for Auton ambassador to Earth and Spectator contributor Douglas Murray to sneer in his blackshirt officer tones, “See! The left always compares the right to Nazis!” But if it clicks its heels like a Nazi, goosesteps like a Nazi, and writes rhetoric straight out of Der Stürmer like a Nazi, it might just be a Nazi:
…for today’s left, non-white cultures must be protected, preserved and promoted, while evil European cultures deserve to be subsumed. That version of events is neither fair nor saleable.
I wrote yesterday about how Richard Littlejohn uses assertions entirely divorced from evidence and Shriver uses the same technique. She goes beyond strawmen; she creates a whole alternate reality of straw people who she can arrange to ‘prove’ her points. And that word “subsumed”? That’s straight from the white supremacist playbook. Here’s Renaud Camus, the French white nationalist conspiracist and novelist, talking about his ideas in a 2013 interview:
A people was here, stable, had been occupying the same territory for fifteen or twenty centuries. And suddenly, very quickly, in one or two generations, one or several other peoples substitute themselves for him.
He is replaced, it is not him anymore.
Compare that to Shriver’s line (“The lineages of white Britons in their homeland commonly go back hundreds of years. Yet for the country’s original inhabitants to confront becoming a minority in the UK…”) and you could swap one for the other.
This is not just some racist dinner party parlour game or an academic debate in which Shriver’s position in the “marketplace of ideas” is stinking up the shop. What she has written is a white supremacist call-to-arms:
For westerners to passively accept and even abet incursions by foreigners so massive that the native-born are effectively surrendering their territory without a shot fired is biologically perverse…
… white Britons needn’t submissively accept the drastic ethnic and religious transformation of their country as an inevitable fate they’re morally required to embrace without a peep of protest.
That phrase “without a shot fired” recalls Nigel Farage’s celebratory whooping that the Leave victory in the Brexit referendum had occurred “without a single bullet being fired” a week after Jo Cox was shot and stabbed to death in the street by a far-right terrorist who wrote of “the white race [being] plunged into a very bloody struggle.” Shriver writes blithely that…
… anywhere, when the proportion of the ‘other’, however they might be defined, crosses a critical and perhaps even quantifiable statistical line, people who were born in a place stop getting excited about all the new ethnic restaurants and start getting pissed off.
The far-right, whose language Shriver embraces and amplifies for The Spectator, is “pissed off” and the violence that Shriver nods and winks at (“passively accept” “incursions”, “protest”, “without a shot fired”) is a very real threat. Of course, Shriver, the woman who cosplayed with a loyalist terror group’s promotional stash, will be horrified when words she uses as rhetoric become reality. And if anyone points a finger at her, it’ll just be yet more “malicious interpretation”.
Shriver is just one of many columnists for The Spectator though. The real rot starts with The Spectator’s owner — the surviving Barclay brother — its chairman — bilious animatronic bin bag Andrew Neil — and its editor — the stormtroopers' straight man Fraser Nelson. Nelson will respond to criticism of Shriver’s column in one of two ways: He’ll talk about ‘plurality’ in The Spectator (from right to far-right!) and pontificate about free speech or he’ll simply ignore it.
Nelson’s preference is for the latter strategy. We’ve still yet to hear a peep from him about almost being fooled into running an entirely false article about Marcus Rashford and we’ve been waiting even longer for an explanation of the deceptive account of the Cummings/Wakefield family trip to Durham written by the magazine’s commissioning editor and Mekon custodian Mary Wakefield.
Dante defined nine circles of hell in his Inferno (Limbo, Lust, Gluttony, Greed, Wrath, Heresy, Violence, Fraud and Treachery). You can find examples of all of them in any given issue of The Spectator but for me, there’s no greater vision of hell than an endless afternoon at the Spectator summer party. Yet you’ll find Labour politicians and notionally left-wing commentators schmoozing with the demons regardless. Hell is empty and all the devils are enjoying cheeky little canapes.
Anything that began in the last 250 years is recent, right?
Though frankly I’m not particularly enamoured with ‘British’ identity anyway.