Over my political lifetime I’ve watched a common English noun acquire a kind of holiness. The word is “victim”. In almost every field of politics and administration it is being used to lift claims beyond proper scrutiny.
So widely has this word now been stretched that at least one group of victims have appropriated to their cause the word “survivor” — “victim” being no longer enough. Victimhood is used everywhere as a weapon for getting priority, money or attention. It isn’t always wrong; but it is way of seeing the world that risks distorting our perspectives on government.
This is going to be a tricky column to write. The case must be made without for a moment denying that in every walk of life there are such things as victims, often with tremendously strong claims on the public conscience. Look, for instance at Hillsborough, or Jimmy Savile, or female genital mutilation, or (in my youth) thalidomide. Look at the insolence and deceit of those with influence, who have tried to brush these horrors aside. Angry crusades are sometimes the only way. Yet these people — real victims — can find their campaigns discounted when a kind of inflation takes hold of a word and an idea, and the mantle of victimhood is spread too thin.
Take disability. If campaigners have not noticed a subterranean public scepticism about claims for a supposed catch-all category called “the disabled”, then they ought to. This is why government “crackdowns” on disability claims have met such feeble public opposition. Satire is often an early telltale. Apparently wheelchair-bound Andy in Little Britain ought to have rung warning bells.
When film stars and celebrities joined the chorus of genuine complaint about phone-hacking and its victims, something in the chorus ceased to ring true. I did feel sorry for Milly Dowler’s family. Hugh Grant has my respect as an actor but does not need my sympathy as a victim. The Leveson bandwagon lost its way.
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Gay men in Britain have been lucky our claimed victim status never turned sour. I feared it would — and did have some hint of that in the “what will they want next?” response that gay marriage legislation attracted from some. The HIV/Aids campaign must be counted a success for victim-led campaigning but I was never comfortable with the conflation of homosexuality with victimhood. Aids was a disease. So is lung cancer. Sufferers must be offered all help and sympathy, and the apportionment of blame is cruel and fruitless. But Aids did not make gay rights a nobler cause; the whimper that homosexuals “can’t help it” infuriates me — what difference should it make if we could? — and (vigorous supporter of Stonewall’s work though I remain) it is high time gays stopped playing the sympathy card, held our heads up and accepted we no longer have any urgent claim on the nation’s finite supply of pity.
Victim inflation can lead to victim denial and victim fatigue. We should look past the claimed victims themselves, and note the submerged forces that acquire an interest in latching on to victimhood, magnifying its effects and bloating its claims. “Victims” are their clients.
Sexual abuse has attracted a whole industry. Lawyers, social workers, campaigners, politicians, preachers, educationists, police chiefs, journalists, self-styled spokesmen, self-proclaimed experts and (sometimes) creepy obsessives: an army of people most of whom are well-meaning and some of whom can help.
But always, always, we must ask the old question: who gains? The prizes are many and various. I’m afraid there is money in the multiplication of sex-abuse claims; there is professional advancement; there are budgets to protect; there are public platforms; there is the megaphoning of one’s own public-spiritedness. We end up with a scarily unstable cocktail of good intentions and suspect ones.
And it’s so difficult to draw the line. Where, in the progress into the limelight of Tom Watson or Camila Batmanghelidjh do we pause to wonder if something or someone isn’t going a bit wonky? Is it when Alan Yentob tries to shield his own reputation with the corpse of a boy who he says fell victim to the collapse of Kids Company? When do we blow the mental whistle?
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We’re unsure. Doubtful, we sometimes deal with our doubt by designating a whole new category of victims: people wrongly accused, lives wrecked by police raids that led nowhere, reputations destroyed by innuendo: the “victims” (as it were) of the “survivors”. Modern Britain and its news media, half-sensing that the sex-abuse story is careering out of control but unable to shake off the mental habits of a victim-led narrative, is now creating a new class of victim — the falsely accused — to provide a brake. We set victim against victim. It’s “Nick” versus Lady Brittan.
Scotland, meanwhile (or its governing party) is designating the entire country as a victim of England. Northern Ireland, which has long led the way in victim politics, divides into two halves, each convinced it’s the victim of the other. Ukip is sure the whole UK is a victim of the European Union, while at party conferences politicians vie to nominate bits of the nation for victimhood: the Squeezed Middle; small business; the self-employed; the working poor. The taxpayer was the victim of the MPs’ expenses scandal, the obese have been the victims of Coca-Cola, and we are all the victims of the big coffee chains.
This mindset distorts policymaking and wrecks rational discussion of the competing demands that politics must always judge. But it cuts deeper, and in a way that I fear can infect our sanity and sense of wellbeing. We’re getting into the habit of perceiving a world where in every scene of life, someone is an oppressor and someone is oppressed. When we were children it was cowboys and Indians. Now it’s perpetrators and victims.
It is so easy for this infection to spread. Which of us doesn’t sometimes secretly feel that something in our life has gone wrong, somewhere there was a false turning, somehow fate has been unfair. As victim we long for a perpetrator. Ah — the reason for our unsatisfactory sex life is that a scout leader once fondled us. We’re fat because Coca-Cola made us so, or drunk because of alcohol pricing. We project resentment at our disability on to politicians. We’re HIV-positive because the world was cruel to gays. We’re in a career rut because of male discrimination.
And the problem is, sometimes this may be part of the truth, even the whole truth. But sometimes not. And anyway it corrodes. It corrodes us personally, it corrodes those we want to help, and it warps our politics.