Today, 24 June, is St John the Baptist’s Day. In Wagner’s great opera Die Meistersinger, it is on the morning of St John’s Day that Hans Sachs sings his famous Wahn monologue. Usually translated into English as “madness”, the word conveys more a sense of craziness, absurdity, a sense of irrationality. Sachs asks himself why everywhere in the history of the world “people torment and flay each other in useless, foolish anger”, and why “they wound themselves but think they are giving themselves pleasure.”
Still, it wasn’t only the proximity of St John’s Day that brought this marvellous music to mind. Sometimes it is hard not to be a little down about the state of one’s country, to feel not only that needless harm has been committed but that people are actively revelling in it, and to sense that something disturbing has come to the surface. Last week was such a week.
It’s not just because the British Parliament voted after just two hours’ debate to decriminalise abortion, against the wishes of most of the population. A woman can now take a pill, “lose” her baby up to the 40th week, but commit no crime. Meanwhile, the government will send a solemn certificate of commemoration to any woman who loses a baby in a miscarriage. It’s almost as if whether a baby deserves to live or not depends, not on objective reality, but on the attitude of the mother.
It’s not only because our Parliament went on to pass an “assisted dying” law, devoid of meaningful safeguards, but greeted by self-congratulation from its proponents for their “compassion” and “empathy”.
No, it is not only because of those things. After all Britain is not an outlier in Europe on either point. Nevertheless, while I appreciate not all readers may share my convictions, one might still hope that such decisions would merit a reception more of introspection than self-satisfaction. But no. As Sachs says, we give ourselves pleasure when we are actually doing ourselves harm.
It’s more than that. Almost without anyone noticing, the government confirmed it had a plan to take and record the DNA of every child born in Britain, initially for public health purposes, but afterwards, who knows? Many British people pride themselves on the country’s resistance to compulsory ID cards, but what is the point if the government will, over time, have everyone’s genome?
And finally, the country finally acknowledged it had to look into the 30-year-long scandal of rape gangs, made up disproportionately of Pakistani men, abusers of young women in dozens of British towns. The events themselves would be bad enough. But what is worse, what makes it so revealing of the pathology of the country, is the apparent willingness of so many people in authority, in local councils, in the police, in social services, and in government to look the other way or even actively engage in a cover up – for the sake of better community relations. What does this tell us about the moral seriousness of those in authority over us?
Indeed there was ironic contrast in the fact that, just as we were facing up to one consequence of migration, we were being invited to celebrate another, “Windrush Week”, a commemoration of the country’s modern founding myth: That migration from the Commonwealth in the 1950s “laid the foundations of modern Britain”, as Keir Starmer put it. I have absolutely no criticism of those who came, and were often shamefully badly treated, but it is simply absurd, self-evidently irrational, to claim that modern Britain was built by migration amounting to 1 per cent of the country’s population over 20 years. It is, to borrow a phrase so often used by our new establishment, “misinformation”.
I labour these points not because I think Britain is uniquely bad. Sadly, it isn’t. As Sachs points out, the madness is universal. But what normally restrains the madness is tradition, history, convention, and established moral norms. This bad week in British politics shows us in microcosm what happens when you allow progressive politics to disconnect from those things in different ways and to have full rein.
What then happens is that it becomes just too easy to go over the boundaries. After all, why would you not, if you feel you are doing good? And the proponents and advocates of all these developments do feel they are doing good. But the untruths get easier to live with and the slippery slopes get steeper – as in those Western European countries where assisted suicide has developed into something very close to a “right to ask to be killed”.
All of us in the West have gone some way in this direction, but perhaps the Western Europeans more than most. By and large, central and Eastern Europeans do not have “assisted dying” laws. Resistance to abortion on demand, to large-scale migration, to the “pride” and “trans” ideologies as things to celebrate, is stronger in those countries – as the ongoing fight over the Budapest Pride parade shows.
I share the worry of many that Europe’s governing ideology allows less and less room for these differing judgements about values and about morality. Indeed, refusal to acknowledge the progressive hegemony is now close to identifying yourself in many eyes as pre-modern, certainly “un-European”.
After all, how else are we to interpret this week’s agreement between European Council and European Parliament that European political parties must declare that their members “comply with EU values” as set out in Article 2 of the Treaty? Hungary is accused of breaching these values in its fight against the gender lobby. Yet it is impossible to imagine that the EU would take action against the UK, were it still a member, for its abortion or assisted suicide laws on the grounds, say, that they infringed “human dignity”. Similarly, the EU is very concerned about misinformation about certain subjects and totally unconcerned about it on others. It’s very worried about democracy when its favoured candidates lose, as in Poland last month, and less so when things go their way. These values are only ever enforced in one direction.
So, if we are not to stick close to tradition and to established moral norms as a matter of principle, the least we can do is allow proper debate about the consequences. If we don’t, we will never learn from our mistakes, and we will end up punishing people for holding convictions that were entirely normal until, in historical terms, just yesterday. If we can’t stop the irrationality, we must at least control and confine it, as Sachs puts it, “finely guide the madness, so as to perform a nobler work”. That nobler work is the one of supporting genuinely European values, tradition, history, culture, intellectual enquiry, free debate. Unless we preserve those things, we are all performing assisted dying – on European civilisation itself.
The Rt Hon Lord Frost of Allerton CMG was Britain’s chief negotiator for exiting the European Union.
ECHR to national governments: You can talk but we won’t listen