The debate between Left and Right used to be about
economics, now it is about truth. The distinction between objective truth and
subjective opinion founded the scientific revolution and was so uncontroversial
that it would have been hard fifty or sixty years ago to find anyone who didn’t
recognise it as valid. But the Left has been chipping away gradually at the
foundation of Western rationality and in places it is crumbling. The result is
barbarism.
It is not accidental that it was the Left that championed
“Nick”, the fantasist who accused innocent Tories of unspeakable crimes. It
followed logically from the frequently expressed Left-wing viewpoint that
victims always had to be believed.
There used to be the principle in all cases of
criminality that the police would look for objective evidence. If it did not
exist or could not be found, then there would be no prima facie case. No one
would be charged, no one’s reputation would be ruined.
But somehow this principle was gradually undermined.
It began, I think with the idea that there was a special case of crimes,
usually involving women victims, where the woman’s opinion had to be believed
even if there were no objective evidence for it. The Left in the form of the
Feminist movement demanded that women’s viewpoints should count for more than
male viewpoints, as if women’s testimony should count for double rather like
the inverse of the law in the Middle East. It is obvious that such a way of investigating
crime will lead to injustice.
There have been any number of cases where high profile
men have had their lives and reputations ruined simply because someone said
they did wrong with no other evidence at all. Brett Kavanaugh was accused of
sexual assault decades earlier. It is obviously impossible to objectively prove
what someone did or didn’t do in private twenty or thirty years ago. A case
like this would at one time simply have been dismissed as frivolous. Likewise,
mere accusation without evidence has been enough to ruin the lives of people
like Cliff Richard and Kevin Spacey.
How is anyone supposed to prove what they did or didn’t
do decades ago? Yet we have allowed people to be convicted on the basis of mere
testimony without any further evidence. Some of these people are no doubt
guilty, but how do we know that all of the witnesses were not like “Nick”?
People have many reasons to lie. They like the attention. They want
compensation. They want revenge. People misremember. Mere opinion should never
be raised to the point of “beyond reasonable doubt” unless there is something
objective to act as a foundation.
But we systematically undermined the law when we
allowed some crimes to become aggravated based merely on opinion. A crime might
be described as racist or homophobic simply on the basis that the victim perceived
it as such. There need be no other objective evidence. But if a crime can be
racist without objective evidence, there is very little preventing the next
step of saying that there can be a crime of rape without any objective evidence,
or even murder without objective evidence.
The Left has raised mere opinion in certain areas of
life to the stage where it has become absolute truth that cannot be questioned.
A person born as a boy can at any point in his life simply assert that he feels
like a woman and demand that everyone describes him as such. Throughout human
history it has been taken as obvious that people were either men or women and that
this distinction was an objective fact determined at birth. Now mere subjective
opinion in contradistinction with all the objective evidence is enough to
determine truth.
We have reached the stage where women who refused to give
a bikini wax to a “woman” with male genitalia lost their jobs because of their
prejudice. Such “women” have been allowed into women’s prisons, women’s
changing rooms and women’s refuges. When you raise the subjective over the
objective, you end up losing all sense of what truth is. This is where we are
now.
It is a mistake to change the practices of law because
of particular, horrible crimes that attract the public’s attention. The murder
of a black teenager has meant that some crimes are more equal than others, not
because of objective evidence, but because of subjective opinion. Jimmy Saville’s
depravity led to a hysterical reaction where decades old testimony was enough
to ruin lives. Feminists believe that women should be able to sleep with who
they please when they please, but at any time say that what happened in private
was rape or sexual assault and be believed automatically.
What happens when you raise mere testimony to the
level of truth. You end up with “Nick”. Human nature is such that a proportion of
the population will realise that objective evidence is no longer required to convict
someone. They will take advantage.
The Labour deputy leader who supported “Nick” and did
his very best to use “Nick’s” testimony to destroy the reputation of prominent Tories
was following the same principles that are universal on the Left. The victim of
certain crimes must always be believed. Objective evidence is no longer needed
to determine the truth. “Nick” is a
creature of the Left, he is what happens when we allow Labour to undermine evidence
and abolish truth. Why convict “Nick” when he was only saying “Me Too”?
