Brendan O’Neill caught with his trousers hanging shamefully around his ankles
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We are now used to the Telegraph’s Brendan O’Neill wheeling out his increasingly tired rhetoric about the “hand-wringing” middle classes. Now his lazy method of attack has left him looking rather silly. On Tuesday he took the opportunity to smear Calum’s List, a website dedicated to compiling information about those deaths, particularly suicides, where welfare reform has been “alleged to have had some culpability”.
O’Neill used Calum’s List to exemplify what he called the “highly patronising… victorian-style pity-politics” of the campaign against welfare reform. Such campaigners, he said, lack “any constituency of grassroots support, any backing from ordinary people, and so must try to raise an army of dead people instead”. He contrasted such “pity politics” with what he saw as the much better “politics of solidarity”. Calum’s List he said were “exploiting” suicide victims.
The response from Calum’s List illustrated, with absolute clarity, the sheer baselessness of these assertions:
Calum’s List is written by the disabled, and by people who are bereft… a group of disabled people, widows, widowers, bereaved parents and orphans trying to find a voice
O’Neill’s line of attack, in other words, is simply irreconcilable with the reality of who Calum’s List are. They are not pity-mongers coming in from on high to pick over the carcases of dead benefits claimants. They are the disabled, who rely upon benefits, and the loved ones of those who have died. They are people binding together for collective self-defence – a phenomenon typically described, by everybody except perhaps Brendan O’Neill, as “solidarity”. In case O’Neil still didn’t get it, Calums List added the following:
This website isn’t exploiting people. It has been put together by FRIENDS, RELATIVES & THOSE DIRECTLY AFFECTED
I have previously noted O’Neill’s tendency to utterly misrepresent the sentiments expressed by those whom he writes about. It is, in other words, becoming increasingly difficult to believe anything that this particular commentator says about who people are or what they stand for.
And this failure is made all the more damning by the fact that O’Neill is, effectively, screwing up in his specialist area. He is, after all, a man who writes about politicos. The organisations of the left, and those campaigning against austerity, have long formed a major staple of O’Neill’s journalistic output. And if he cannot convey an honest and vaguely plausible picture of who such people are, or what they say, then he is about as much use as a Westminster hack who doesn’t know what a SpAd is.
This, however, is not simply a matter of sloppy practice, but also of gross irresponsibility. As a writer for one of the biggest media organisations in the country, O’Neill finds himself in an incredibly privileged position to speak to many, and to structure our opinions about groups like Calum’s List. The group itself cannot hit back with anything like the power that O’Neill enjoys by virtue of his relationship with the Telegraph. This is not to say that mainstream journalists should treat small organisations with kid gloves. But it is to say that people like O’Neill have a very serious obligation to put some effort into finding out a bit about the people whom they choose to write about and attack – something that was hardly evidenced by his writing.
In this respect, O’Neill has unfortunately betrayed his own ideals. To his credit, he has long been a powerful advocate for individual liberty, and for press freedom in particular. Yet as his his own writing suggests, the demand for liberty is intimately bound up with the ideal of “moral autonomy” – with the idea that people are capable of properly governing themselves, and of making their own ethical judgements, and that the state ought to give them leave to do so. From this perspective, the greatest advocate for press freedom should also be the journalist who displays the greatest moral integrity. Yet by writing such shoddy, and shoddily researched, attack pieces as that which deals with Calum’s List, O’Neill fails absolutely to demonstrate the capacity for moral self-government that justifies the liberty of the citizen.
To contact Reuben email reuben@thethirdestate.net
Reader Comments
i has this man shot himself by attcking calums list he should have though twice with whot he has written as it seems the gaurdean also writes lies it just so downright disgusting that he can get away with is attack this site whitch doesnt lie or pull the punches its peoples lives and this carring goverment only helps in the way it misstreats the sick and disabled and hope people wake up tp whot our politicians are doing to us jeff3
Shame on O’Neill for his vile, heartless manipulation of very real suffering!
Brendan O’Neill is another graduate of the late Living Marxism magazine, the demise of which in a libel action freed its crew to complete their impressive 180 degree turn from super trendy lefties to “freedom”loving right. Hence the woman who had led its Camoaign Against Militarism became an associate of a NATO-backed Strategic Studies centre and found a job with the Economist; another leading light is now highly paid CEO of a housing charity while her partner helps Hammersmith and Fulham council get rid of council housing; and someone from one of its offshoots is now advising Boris on various things. There’s a former LM man at Murdoch’s Times and Brendan at the Tekegraph.
The Institute for Ideas helped skeptics fight the corner for business on issues like climate change.
The signal for the turn was perhaps their guru Frank Furedi writing in the Guardian about how trade unions had become obsessed with health and safety in the workplace, though I could understand his point of view. The job of an academic or jornalist, at least in a bourgeois democracy, is not as dangerous as being a building worker or docker, or even, let’s face it, a social worker. Anyway Prof.Furedi helped set the ball rolling for all those funny stories about kids playing conkers having to wear goggles and so on. Much more fun than grim injury and death statistics.
Of course no left-wing group or party has been immune from disenchanted individuals deciding their career prospects and salaries would be better on the other side; but what made the LM crowd distinctive was that it seemed to move to the right collectively, shedding here and there some decent types who were not fast and hard enough, or retained their hman values and old fashioned working class loyalties.
Putting it simply though, this bright and shiny new libertarianism is not all that new at all. It is an extension of the old bourgeois freedom – the boss is free to set what conditions he likes, and you are free to take it or leave it -so long as you do so as an individual. Once you combine with others to resist, or to bring about change, you are engaged in a conspiracy. There need not be any homeless – we are all free to stay at the Hilton or Dorchester if we wish, and anyway nobody forced you to live in London. It is akin to Mrs.Thatcher’s philosopy that “There is no such thing as society”, and to the interpretation of Darwinism as “survival of the fittest”. So if you are poor and/or disabled well expect no help because “I’m alright Jack”.