Jeremy Clarkson is a hero of mine. There are those of us in this wonderful land we call Great Britain that would like to see that lanky, tousle-headed chap take the keys to Number 10 Downing Street, and I’ll tell you why. He’s a man who truly believes in, and defends, that basic right of all mankind: the right to be free. The right to go about your everyday business without the interference of do-gooders telling you what to drive and how fast to drive it, telling you you can’t call women birds or make humorous references to golliwogs, but most of all Jeremy Clarkson is not afraid to say what everyone’s secretly thinking but is too afraid to say out loud for fear of incurring the wrath of the “PC Brigade”. That thing that Clarkson is not afraid to say is this: it’s time to do away with Health & Safety. I tell you, no one piece of legislation has done more to damage British business than Health & Safety. There was a glorious age in this country when your average working man wasn’t afraid to go down a coal mine and get his hands dirty for 12 hours a day in order to earn the money to just about be able to feed his family. Now of course all the Health & Safety regulations have made coal mining in this country completely uncompetitive. Granted it’s true that before H&S regulations hundreds of men died in the coal mines every week, and thousands more were seriously injured, and it’s also true that most mines on mainland Europe were modernised and introduced basic Health & Safety requirements long before the UK, and as a result actually turned out to be far more efficient and completely out-competed the out-dated, dangerous, inefficient working practices still maintained by the mine-owning gentry in this country; but still, think where we could have been if the government hadn’t started interfering and “protecting” the “rights” of those blokes who risked their lives to supply the country with fuel!!
No, argue all you like, but the simple fact is, and what nobody other than Clarkson and a few other courageous Sun and Daily Mail readers are willing to stand up and say is: we need to abolish Health & Safety. History shows us that people do just fine without Health & Safety legislation. Industrial accidents have always happened and always will, there’s absolutely no reason to examine the causes and try and prevent them in future, that’s bad for business and bad for the country.
Jeremy Clarkson for Prime Minister, that’s what I say. Someone not afraid to stand up for the freedom of the average working man (so long as that freedom doesn’t include the freedom to work in a safe environment, drive on safe roads, live in a safe home, send his kids to a safe school and so on and so forth). What the PC Brigade doesn’t understand is that a man is born free, free to do whatever he likes, whenever he likes to whoever he likes without fear of consequences. That’s the kind of world Clarkson envisions, and that’s the kind of world I want to live in.
Outside of this particular issue, what is the value of airing both sides of a story? This quest for impartiality seems to be central to much journalism these days, albeit often very insincere. There are inherent problems with reporting “both sides”, especially when one side is wrong. There are circumstances when one side is wrong, it’s not always about two equally valid opinions being voiced.
Should the BNP be given more airtime to give voice to their opinions and policies? Is theirs an equal and valid opinion? No, it isn’t. However they try to market themselves the fact remains that much of their policy and beliefs are based on bigotry and racism. Their clumsy pleas for immigration control and an England for the English are not based on a sincere belief in the efficacy of those policies, but in the mistaken belief that one race or type of people has more of a right to this land than others. They are wrong. I’m not trying to make a moral point, I’m not trying to say that ethically the BNP are wrong, I’m saying that in every sense they are factually incorrect in their assumptions about the world around them. Everyone in England is an immigrant at some point or other. As a person with a fair bit of Welsh ancestry, according to the BNP’s logic I might well be within my rights to ask all the English to please get the hell off my island, as there’s probably a fairly good chance that the Welsh were here first. It’s ridiculous; their policies are based on nothing but an arbitrary unease about people who are different, a fundamental prejudice, on racism. What is more, they are demonstrably wrong. In more subtle areas of politics, for example those arguments between government intervention and free market self-regulation, it’s hard to predict, hard to demonstrate what works best and what doesn’t, it is often a case of perspective, and both sides can be legitimately argued for. The fact that the wealth and prosperity of Britain could not exist without our immigrant population or our historic plundering of other nations is pretty obvious. The fact that humanity as a whole is an immigrant population is a matter of archaeological record. The fact that the land we occupy remains long after we are dust, the fact that borders are arbitrary and ephemeral: all these things are indisputable. If you argue for a particular policy, or your perspective is governed by a denial of these things, then you are wrong. You’re not morally wrong, you’re not an opposing opinion that deserves an airing, you’re just wrong.
Why do we hold up arguments such as these as valid ones that need to be heard? I know that knowledge and proof are not absolute things in this world; that time and time again the consensus is proved wrong in the light of new discoveries, but racism is the consensus that has been proved wrong, not the other way round. It was the consensus before humanity learned what was wrong with it. Now that we understand what is wrong with it, now that we recognise the fundamental errors of assumption, we should be able to move on. This is not a new idea that contradicts our current understanding. It is an old idea that has been contradicted by our current understanding.
Racism isn’t an alternative opinion that needs to be heard, nor is sexism, nor is homophobia. Prejudice is what it is. It is borne from ignorance, and can be defeated by learning and understanding. It can be shown to be wrong. Not morally wrong, not ethically wrong, but demonstrably wrong – based in error.
We don’t need to hear both sides of the story from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; we know that both sides will only see the wrong done them. We can see what they are doing to each other and know that neither side is in the right, that neither perspective is more legitimate than the other. We can look at what is happening and make our own judgements, we already know the judgements of the sides involved, and presenting them again does not give us a greater insight.
Human-caused climate change is a scientific theory, as such the only perspective we need on it is a scientific one, and the overwhelming scientific evidence is that it is happening. We certainly don’t need to hear the perspective of individuals who do not study the subject at a scientific level but who deny the findings of those who do, their opinion is worthless.
Balanced reporting and journalism cannot be about just presenting both sides of the story, because quite frequently one side of the story is nonsense. It’s not often that one can safely refer to the work of a soft-permed, tight-trousered, soft-rock group, but Extreme’s third album was called “Three Sides to Every Story”. The three sides were: yours, mine and the truth. Simply presenting your side of the story and my side of the story will not necessarily provide us with the truth of a story, and providing another side to the story is a waste of everyone’s time when we know that side to be wrong.
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