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Scottish Review : Kenneth Roy’s Week

6 January 2009 · Kenneth Roy

Kenneth
Roy’s
Week

The imprint of the crowd

One of the inspirations to have emerged from the holiday retreat of the Prime Minister is the decision to hold the first Cabinet meeting of the new term away from London. The band of warring brothers is to be whisked to the West Midlands, there to be exposed to the British people, an amorphous sub-group of humanity with whom ministers do not normally come into contact. Mr Brown has made it clear that, apart from the formal business of Cabinet, he and his team will be out there ‘listening’, the failure to listen having been identified as a source of the Government’s troubles.
     The excursion is a PR stunt (needless to say), but if there is any serious intent behind the new listening agenda, we can expect Britain to become a less tolerant, less civilised country than it is already. Bit of an old hypocrite though he was, Seneca got it right when, asked by a young friend what to avoid, he replied that it was particularly important always to avoid a crowd. ‘Associating with people in large numbers is actually harmful,’ Seneca wrote. ‘There is not one of them that will not make some vice or other attractive to us, or leave us carrying the imprint of it…When a mind is impressionable and has none too firm a hold on what is right, it must be rescued from the crowd.’
     A modern example of Seneca’s theory is the campaign of Barack Obama, whose rock star persona seems to conceal a politician of little fixed principle. The Democratic nominee has recently found it possible to support the death penalty, while his once courageous stand on gun control has been abandoned with astonishing abruptness. So obviously does Obama now carry the crowd’s imprint that it may be too late to rescue him from it.
     Until recently, the only crowd Gordon Brown permitted himself to mix with was the comparatively small, often subdued gathering in support of Raith Rovers. Otherwise, Mr Brown was careful to cultivate the image of a man of ideas, not much of a listener but a deep thinker, in attractive contrast to the light comedian and part-time war criminal next door. All that has changed; or perhaps Mr Brown was never what he claimed to be in the first place. He is now listening like mad. He is among the crowd, blinking in its unforgiving glare.
     What will he learn from the crowd? The crowd has little interest in civil liberties. The crowd believes that asylum seekers are allowed to work but prefer to sponge off the state. The crowd is anti-immigration, racist, casually homophobic and, in Scotland, sectarian. The crowd would never have abolished capital punishment and would probably bring it back. The crowd is convinced that prisons are 3-star hotels, that life should mean life, that they should throw away the bloody key. The crowd would abolish public subsidy of the arts. The crowd does not know a paedophile from a paediatrician. You cannot expect much from the crowd. No crowd would have invented the Open University. No crowd would have liberalised oppressive laws on marriage, sexuality and abortion. Such progress – most progress – is made possible by brave, reforming individuals whom any self-respecting crowd would lynch on the spot.
     These honourable radicals used to include politicians, occasionally even Cabinet ministers. I was fortunate to meet one of them. His name was Roy Jenkins. But how lowered is the breed – dispatched to some god-forsaken hole in the West Midlands with a brief to listen to the crowd. Pity help them.

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