The report that has just been published on sexual abuse in children’s homes in the London borough of Lambeth is horrific. From the 1960s into the 1990s more than 700 vulnerable children in the council’s care — a disproportionate number of whom were from ethnic minorities — were raped or sexually abused while council staff and politicians looked the other way or covered up these crimes.
The report, by the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse, says that these children became “pawns in a toxic power game” both internally and between the council and central government, particularly during the 1980s, when Margaret Thatcher was prime minister.
The council treated the vulnerable children in its care “as if they were worthless” and showed “callous disregard” by putting them in the path of sex offenders who infiltrated those care homes.
Like other inner city councils, hard-left Lambeth was a “rotten borough” where control by the Labour Party was axiomatic, along with this adversarial political mindset against the Tories. Lambeth may have been extreme but this mindset persists today among the vast majority of those who are in the left-wing camp, including many who would be considered moderates. Such leftwingers claim to be on the side of the oppressed against their oppressors, and to champion victims against their victimisers.
That is demonstrably untrue. They define their moral and political worth not by the welfare of the people they so loudly claim to champion but instead by the people they are against.
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The interests of victims are routinely ignored if those victimising them don’t belong to the left-wing pantheon of villains: white people, capitalists, conservatives, American Republicans, Israelis.
We see the evidence of this over and over again. It has been on particularly egregious display over race. Black boys are being knifed to death in shocking numbers by other black boys. Yet the killing of black people provokes left-wing outrage only when the perpetrators are white.
So after the death of George Floyd under the knee of an American police officer, the campaign demonising white society as systemically racist was supported to the hilt, while the mounting death toll of black-on-black killings was received in virtual silence.
Back in the 1980s the overwhelmingly left-wing education establishment decided it was racist to teach ethnic minority children British history, classic English texts and Standard English. Many black parents, understanding very well that this was the surest way to keep their children permanently disempowered in British society, were bitterly opposed. They were contemptuously brushed aside.
Meanwhile the white working-class, the left’s historic core constituency of the dispossessed, also became their victims. This was because they taught white working-class children to despise their ethnic identity as worthless and bigoted.
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Not surprisingly, culturally dispossessed white working-class boys are now underperforming boys of all other ethnicities in school. But from the left comes not a peep of concern. For them, victims are always from ethnic minorities; victimisers are always white.
This mindset also explains why the appalling child abuse in Rotherham and other towns, in which thousands of very young white girls were abused by rape and pimping gangs mostly composed of Pakistani-heritage Muslim men, was ignored for more than two decades.
It’s the same story with victims abroad. The Palestinian Authority routinely jails and tortures dissidents and journalists. In June there were unprecedented and viciously suppressed Palestinian protests after the anti-corruption activist Nizar Banat was killed in custody, with his family claiming that Palestinian security officers beat him to death with metal clubs and rifle butts.
In Ethiopia’s Tigray region, tens of thousands of people are unaccounted for following a savage campaign of ethnic cleansing and massacres. In Iran, dissidents are jailed, tortured, flogged and murdered while gay people are hanged from cranes. In Nigeria, nearly 3,500 Christians have been murdered by jihadists this year, already topping last year’s toll of atrocities, and hundreds of Christians have also been abducted from schools and villages.
Yet there are no mass demonstrations or acres of impassioned polemic in support of these Palestinian, Ethiopian, Iranian or Nigerian victims of murderous tyranny. Their suffering is ignored by the West’s “progressive” classes because the perpetrators aren’t white westerners. They are people who therefore don’t fit the left-wing definition of repression.
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This is part of a circular argument, which goes like this. The left calls anyone opposed to its agenda “right-wing”. The only people capable of bad stuff are people whom the left opposes, who are therefore “right-wing”. “Right-wing” is an incoherent and vacuous term . It’s not a description but a term of abuse that the left uses both to shut down debate and to define itself as virtuous simply by opposing such people.
This Manichaean mindset creates cartoon monsters, such as Thatcher, Donald Trump, Nigel Farage. And the more monstrous the image of them that’s created, the more virtuous the left signals itself to be.
Many leftwingers therefore don’t do compassion at all. What they do instead is sectarian hatred. They actually define their political and moral identity by the people they portray as monsters. They are themselves the quintessence of loathing.
Which is one reason why we now have the politics of Salem, while true victims — both children and adults — go to the wall.