Author excoriates the Left for attacks on the family
Author and journalist Melanie Phillips has launched a blistering attack on the UK Left in general, and the Guardian newspaper in particular.
She has accused leftwingers of resorting to crude insult against anyone who dares to challenge their harmful theories.
The Left, “doesn’t argue its case,” said Phillips. “It simply tries to shut down debate by bullying its targets and labelling them as extremists and enemies of humanity in order to frighten people away from listening to them.”
Once on the Left herself, the award-winning journalist worked for the Guardian for 16 years, part of the time as news editor, and has a particular disdain for its ideology.
“Those of us who worked there had a fixed belief in our own superiority and righteousness,” she wrote. “We saw ourselves as clever and civilised champions of liberal thought.”
But in a new book about her experience, she tells how the scales gradually fell from her eyes. “I came to realise that the Left was not on the side of truth, reason and justice,” she wrote.
And again: “Increasingly, I saw how journalists on highbrow papers write primarily for other journalists or to impress politicians or other members of the great and the good. They don’t actually like ordinary people.”
In a wordplay on her time with the leftwing newspaper she named her book, Guardian Angel: My Story, My Britain.
Eventually she saw through “the delusion of the Left’s ‘progressive’ politics” and more and more “turned away from their stupidity, hypocrisy and moral blindness.”
For Phillips, the defining issue, which brought her into confrontation with the liberal Left, was the persistent undermining of the family as an institution.
By the late 80s, “there were more and more divorces and single parents, and mounting evidence that family disintegration and the creation of step-families or households with no father figure did incalculable damage to children.”
But instead of welcoming the research, the Left turned on the researchers, “branding them as evil Right-wingers for being ‘against single mothers’.”
One distinguished academic asked her why there was so much concern about the rights of the child rather than of the parents.
“He turned out to be divorced,” said Phillips. It was a pattern she would meet regularly. “Truth was being sacrificed to personal expediency. Evidence was denied if the consequences were inconvenient.”
In her columns she deplored “the explosion of lone parenting, female-headed households and mass fatherlessness.”
Because of this and other issues, at the Guardian, and even among friends, she was “branded as reactionary, authoritarian and, of course, Right-wing.” The result was social ostracism.
“The ones who were the most aggressive and offended,” she remarked, “were those who had walked out on their families or were cheating on their spouses.”
It was increasingly clear that the Left had lost the moral plot, “and not just over the family. It embraced the doctrine that all lifestyles were equal and none could be deemed to be better than any other.”
But such blindness only made the journalist, who now writes for the Daily Mail, more determined to expose what was happening, undaunted by the insults and bigotry.
“Those of us who inhabit the world of intellectual combat should not be too surprised by the missiles that are hurled our way,” she wrote.
But her experience, she believed, “is symptomatic of what has happened to British society and western culture as a whole over the past 30 years.”
She has accused leftwingers of resorting to crude insult against anyone who dares to challenge their harmful theories.
The Left, “doesn’t argue its case,” said Phillips. “It simply tries to shut down debate by bullying its targets and labelling them as extremists and enemies of humanity in order to frighten people away from listening to them.”
Once on the Left herself, the award-winning journalist worked for the Guardian for 16 years, part of the time as news editor, and has a particular disdain for its ideology.
“Those of us who worked there had a fixed belief in our own superiority and righteousness,” she wrote. “We saw ourselves as clever and civilised champions of liberal thought.”
But in a new book about her experience, she tells how the scales gradually fell from her eyes. “I came to realise that the Left was not on the side of truth, reason and justice,” she wrote.
And again: “Increasingly, I saw how journalists on highbrow papers write primarily for other journalists or to impress politicians or other members of the great and the good. They don’t actually like ordinary people.”
In a wordplay on her time with the leftwing newspaper she named her book, Guardian Angel: My Story, My Britain.
Eventually she saw through “the delusion of the Left’s ‘progressive’ politics” and more and more “turned away from their stupidity, hypocrisy and moral blindness.”
For Phillips, the defining issue, which brought her into confrontation with the liberal Left, was the persistent undermining of the family as an institution.
By the late 80s, “there were more and more divorces and single parents, and mounting evidence that family disintegration and the creation of step-families or households with no father figure did incalculable damage to children.”
But instead of welcoming the research, the Left turned on the researchers, “branding them as evil Right-wingers for being ‘against single mothers’.”
One distinguished academic asked her why there was so much concern about the rights of the child rather than of the parents.
“He turned out to be divorced,” said Phillips. It was a pattern she would meet regularly. “Truth was being sacrificed to personal expediency. Evidence was denied if the consequences were inconvenient.”
In her columns she deplored “the explosion of lone parenting, female-headed households and mass fatherlessness.”
Because of this and other issues, at the Guardian, and even among friends, she was “branded as reactionary, authoritarian and, of course, Right-wing.” The result was social ostracism.
“The ones who were the most aggressive and offended,” she remarked, “were those who had walked out on their families or were cheating on their spouses.”
It was increasingly clear that the Left had lost the moral plot, “and not just over the family. It embraced the doctrine that all lifestyles were equal and none could be deemed to be better than any other.”
But such blindness only made the journalist, who now writes for the Daily Mail, more determined to expose what was happening, undaunted by the insults and bigotry.
“Those of us who inhabit the world of intellectual combat should not be too surprised by the missiles that are hurled our way,” she wrote.
But her experience, she believed, “is symptomatic of what has happened to British society and western culture as a whole over the past 30 years.”
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