We are blind to the soft-left bias across British institutions

A few weeks ago, I went to an art exhibition at Somerset House called 24/7.

Billed as “a wake-up call for our non-stop world”, it promised to explore the many ways in which technology is speeding up our lives.

This was, admittedly, something of a busman’s holiday. Back in 2016, I wrote a book called “The Great Acceleration” about, er, the many ways in which technology is speeding up our lives.

In the course of my research, I read a great many excellent books — and a few pretty awful ones. Among the worst was “24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep”, by Jonathan Crary. 

Its basic argument was that, like, capitalism doesn’t want you to sleep, because The Man wants to keep exploiting you all the time. Basically, adolescent Corbynism garnished with copious citations of left-wing French philosophers.

It was pretty depressing, then, to find that the Somerset House exhibition was curated by none other than Jonathan Crary. That didn’t prevent the exhibition from having some interesting pieces. But it did mean that the central message was very clearly that capitalism plus technology equals bad. 

Strikingly, the gift shop at the end featured virtually none of those many excellent books on the acceleration of society (the exhibition’s actual theme), but did have shelf after shelf of all-purpose left-wing doom-mongering, from Aaron Bastani, Naomi Klein, Paul Mason and the like.

We encountered a similar phenomenon last week, with two separate news stories — both of which received significant coverage, especially on the BBC.

First, Professor Sir Michael Marmot popped up to remind us that life expectancy growth is stalling, and to blame it on austerity. Second, Lord Kerslake, the former head of the civil service, unveiled the findings of the “UK2070 Commission” on regional inequality within the UK. 

Professor Marmot is pretty clearly an expert in his field. But he is also pretty clearly of the left: witness his repeated calls for higher taxes on the rich. 

And the life expectancy picture is much more complicated than he suggests. Austerity may well be a factor, but there are several other potential explanations (especially since other countries have also seen similar slowdowns). When challenged by Iain Dale on this on LBC radio, it is fair to say that Sir Michael got pretty shirty.

As for Lord Kerslake, he is not just the former head of the civil service. He was an extremely senior and influential adviser to Jeremy Corbyn and in particular John McDonnell, to the point where he was widely expected to enter government alongside them had Labour won in December. 

His report may have valuable things to say about regional inequality, but it was reported by most outlets as though it were revealed celestial truth, with barely a mention made of the author’s obvious biases.

It is cases such as these which, I think, explain quite a bit about current conservative — and Conservative — thinking, for example on issues such as the BBC, which is now mounting a frantic rearguard action against a series of hostile briefings from the government. 

It is no longer the case that there are “Reds under the bed”. Most of the Reds, over the last couple of years, have been sitting proudly and openly in meetings of their constituency Labour party. 

But beyond the Corbynite surge, there is a more pernicious problem, a kind of soft leftism that has seeped into so many institutions. 

It manifests itself in many ways, including a general feeling that left-wing things are good and right-wing things are bad; that if there is a problem then state intervention is generally the way to solve it; that the primary effect of cutting taxes is to harm public services rather than ease the cost of living burden on ordinary people.

In all three of the cases above, the fact that partisan positions were presented as neutral was due (I suspect) less to some sinister conspiracy, and more due to a simple failure to examine and interrogate biases — in a way that is hardly imaginable if those involved had been on the right rather than the left.

This contributes, understandably, to something of a siege mentality among conservatives: hence why Toby Young and others felt moved last week to establish a new Free Speech Union, prompting a predictable online furore. 

It also helps explain why politics is increasingly becoming focused on culture wars — most prominently Leave versus Remain. 

There is, after all, little that makes people angrier than feeling they are not allowed to be heard.

Main image credit: Getty