Nothing left
Sir: Rod Liddle is right to ascribe the establishment’s desire to suppress the truth in relation to grooming gangs to its fundamentally anti-working class mindset (‘We demand a right to truth’, 11 January). But he’s characteristically wrong to attribute this to ‘liberalism’. The contemporary left’s identity-politics agenda is born from the opposite: the postmodernist-derived idea that reality can be radically reconstructed through control of what is, and is not, communicated. Its various fantasies – and the public-sector interests that depend upon them – necessarily involve suppressing our powers of rational cognition.
Culture-control leftism has been able quite brilliantly to simultaneously pass itself off as a manifestation of ‘progressive liberalism’ while pursuing an inherently authoritarian agenda.
Marc Glendening
Royston, Hertfordshire
Century note
Sir: The abusers involved in the ‘grooming gang’ scandal have a ‘7th-century’ attitude to women, according to Douglas Murray (‘Hollow talk’, 11 January).
The glories of 7th-century Britain include Hilda of Whitby, abbess of two monasteries in succession and founder of a third at the age of 66. She was known, according to her younger contemporary Bede, for her ‘industry and virtue’ and her ‘outstanding devotion and grace’. Even kings and princes sought her advice.
Douglas rightly castigates the use of coy euphemisms such as ‘Asians’ when ‘Muslim men of Pakistani origin’ would be more truthful. Isn’t ‘7th-century’ just another coy euphemism?
David J. Critchley
Winslow, Buckinghamshire
Bundles of energy
Sir: Lionel Shriver’s excellent piece deserves the widest circulation (‘The case against a “climate emergency”’, 11 January). Her point about the ignorance of politicians is well brought by the passing of the Climate Change Act in 2008 with only six MPs voting against – these were the only MPs with science or engineering qualifications.
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