Phil Beadle
“This division that goes on, we see it in other sectors. They try to pitch people against each other based on their identity, their heritage, race, religion, ethnicity, whatever you want to call it.”[ET1] Mick Lynch[1] [2]
“Islamists have tested the willingness both of our media and our elected representatives to defend our values, our culture and our freedom: above the acrid smoke of burning flags, they have smelt our fear.” Michael Gove[3]
Michael Gove is the adopted son of an Aberdeen fish processor and of a mother who eventually worked at the Aberdeen School for the Deaf. His parents were Labour supporters and, self-evidently, compassionate people. Gove was adopted by them at the age of four months having been in care. Perhaps the sweetest thing one might say of Mr Gove is that the depth of love and gratitude he has often expressed towards his parents is both beautiful and touching. It is also worth noting that he seems to be quite profoundly competent and that he combines this with energy, drive and ambition. He was highly rated by civil servants during his time as justice secretary where, as he did in education, he took his brief enormously seriously and attempted to change things. He was recently found fighting forces within his own party as he tried to alter the laws for leasehold so that those suffering under a system inherited from feudal times no longer had to pay ridiculous ground rents. He is not without some integrity, and there is no doubt that he has been the most important and influential secretary of state for education of the last two decades.
He attended two state primaries before passing the entrance exam for Robert Gordon’s College, an independent sector school. While the college was originally set up for the boys of poor parents, it has been fee paying for the last 140 years and, although the frontage of the school is architecturally impressive, there are few famous alumni. It is quite a minor private school. The current fees for senior pupils are a ‘miserly’ £14,960 a year. Unlike many of his colleagues, he does not come from high privilege, and this may be a key component to the fact that he seems, on occasion, to be less contemptuously dismissive of social equity than many of those in the party he serves.
In early youth, he was, like his parents, a member of the Labour Party, but transferred his allegiance to the Conservatives while at Oxford. After some small time at the Daily Telegraph, he jobbed around on television and on his local newspaper in Aberdeen before entering the employ of Rupert Murdoch in 1997. At The Times, he seems to have found a place where he was appreciated and which he appreciated back. Despite leaving the newspaper in the early 2000s, he remains a loyal company man who has described Rupert Murdoch as “one of the most impressive and significant figures of the last fifty years.”[4] He ran a number of sections on the paper, and this is what such organs will generally do with someone is regarded as ‘officer material’ and a potential future editor: you give them a grounding in every element of the operation. Gove was marked for high influence early in his career, and this was probably a result of his considerable intellect and easy assertions of loyalty.
In 2005, he was elected to parliament as the Conservative member for Surrey Heath, a safe Tory seat with the second highest percentage of detached houses in the Southeast.[5] His first published work was a treatise on the nature of integrity called ‘Michael Portillo: The Future of the Right’. But even this towering achievement was surpassed by his geopolitical analysis ‘Celsius 7/7’.
The title is a play on words. There’s a Ray Bradbury book by the name of ‘Fahrenheit 451’, so titled as it is allegedly the temperature at which books burn. The title of the Bradbury book was referenced and subverted by Michael Moore for his 2004 documentary, ‘Fahrenheit 9/11’, in which he investigated the Bush administration’s response to the attack on the World Trade Towers and the Patriot Act which authorised the indefinite detention of immigrants. Gove, or his publishers, took the idea of temperature, as represented by Fahrenheit, and cleverly changed this to Celsius (which is also a measure of temperature, you see) then took the notion of the date of a terrorist attack and changed it to the date of the bombings in London. He then used this re-jigged version of titles arguing against imperialist and arguably racist policies as cover for his own arguments for the same. The title is, therefore, a third-generation pun that misunderstands the point of the text it steals from and leads one to be tempted to place Mr Gove quite firmly in the category of a daft person’s idea of a clever person.
The extended bellicosity of the text forms the intellectual underpinning of the ‘Trojan Horse Affair’. It contains bits that are well written, is generally journalistically competent and Gove is not immune to a certain stylishness of withering expression – he notes of one Muslim scholar that his philosophy doesn’t “admit accommodations with modernity”.[6][7]The earliest parts are a history lesson about the Muslim world, its ascent and its decline, the injury of the Suez Canal and the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood.
This section has the timbre of something that might not actually have written by the alleged author. Put simply, Gove cannot know this much about Muslim history. It feels as if it has been written by a paid researcher as the alleged author’s waspishness is missing, and one might note from the tacked-on bibliography, humbly entitled ‘Notes’, is that there are a good few television programmes and newspaper articles but not a single book. It may be that this is because the alleged researcher specialised in researching used the pages of Wikipedia but, whatever the story, it seems an open invite to question the level of research that went into writing a text about a highly charged and nuanced area that can be inflammatory and in which there is a great deal of historical understanding required to be qualified to make any comment at all.
From being broadly informative, it goes downhill when Gove enters the realm of opinion: a realm in which the oft-repeated tropes are taken down from the top shelf and dusted off: the ‘left’ is always radical, regardless of where the real radicalism lodges; the free market is always right; entrenched and depraved privilege does not exist in sufficient volume to warrant comment. One might characterise the opinion sections as an Islamoa
A deeper delve into Mr Gove’s analysis of the Muslim world reveals that what underpins conservative thought and policy is the seemingly entirely reasonable foundation that Western democracy and its tenets, for all its faults, is the best and most successful political system and the least autocratic way of arranging any society. For Conservatives, any threat to it must be taken deeply seriously as, without this political system, our society could possibly, despite the evidence of many decades, fall into fascism, communism or theocracy. Gove identifies the threat he perceives from ‘Islamists’[10] as the key element that might undermine Western democracy, specifically that found in the United Kingdom. He seems to regard the religion and its rules as fundamentally unsuitable to being present in Western democracy and has expressed sympathies with the great replacement theory.[11]
Ultimately, for Gove, it is, as one might argue most Conservative policy has been for the last few years, about the identification of an enemy at the gates, someone whose fault ‘it’ is. There is us, and there is them, and in identifying that they, the enemy, are brown skinned and, in further identifying that Western culture is the thing under assault and that protecting it means protecting the civil liberties we have come to expect and value, he outlines that the thing that will save us all is a virile assertion of the rightness of that culture, a foregrounding of it in our schools and an understanding that our levels of civilisation are innately superior to those of ‘foreigners’. We are lodged here in the quasi-intellectual wing of the class war. For Gove, weakness is provocative, and Western, or more specifically, British culture has to assert its own rightness, its moral superiority.
Like all intellectual Conservatives, he is much enervated by the alleged rise of identity politics and is none too keen on what he describes as moral relativism. One might argue that, for Conservatives, moral relativism is the unacceptable (to them) argument that they might ever be guilty of or culpable for any version of abusive behaviour. Mr Gove seems to believe that, as the gallant protector of traditional culture from its brown-skinned enemies, this should not be, not in any way, any sort of possibility.
(There is a better expressed suspicion about Western society contained in Roger Scruton’s ‘Culture Counts’ in which he complains of the issue of European culture being subject to relativism whereas other cultures are absolutist[12] and suggests that it is possible that the censorship of texts by minority interest groups can result in the closing down of choice. This seems to ring true, but I’m not entirely certain that such groups have had much say in what is regarded as an acceptable cultural diet in our schools for quite a long time.)
At the death, Gove comes up with the one genuine idea that he would like implemented, the admissibility of evidence that has been obtained through means of torture, and his phrasing is chilling. He complains of “the dogged refusal of too many in the legal establishment to put the defence of our civilisation ahead of the defence of the traditions with which their profession has grown comfortable.”[13]
‘Celsius 7/7’ is a thin piece of work. But so is a switchblade.
[1] Mick Lynch, Interview with Novara Media 16 December 2022.
[2] The foreigner, the enemy, the thing that must be blamed always gets more than we do regardless of where truth lies.
[3] Michael Gove, Celsius 7/7: How the West’s Police of Appeasement has Provoked yet more Fundamentalist Terror – and What Can Be Done Now (Weidenfield & Nicolson: London 2006) p113.
[4] George Parker; Helen Warrell, (14 March 2014). “How far will Michael Gove go?” Financial Times. Archived from the original on 5 September 2016. Retrieved 14 March 2014.
[5] 2011 census interactive maps. Archived from the original on 29 January 2016.
[6] Michael Gove, Celsius 7/7: How the West’s Police of Appeasement has Provoked yet more Fundamentalist Terror – and What Can Be Done Now (Weidenfield & Nicolson: London 2006) p26.
[7] Though some of it is egregious. He refers to Muslim intentions to “bash Bush, blast Blair”, thereby showing that he understands alliteration.
[8] Michael Gove, Celsius 7/7: How the West’s Police of Appeasement has Provoked yet more Fundamentalist Terror – and What Can Be Done Now (Weidenfield & Nicolson: London 2006) p3.
[9] Michael Gove, Celsius 7/7: How the West’s Police of Appeasement has Provoked yet more Fundamentalist Terror – and What Can Be Done Now (Weidenfield & Nicolson: London 2006) p5.
[10]Michael Gove, Celsius 7/7: How the West’s Police of Appeasement has Provoked yet more Fundamentalist Terror – and What Can Be Done Now (Weidenfield & Nicolson: London 2006) p3.
[11]This is the bonkers conspiracy theory, originated by Renau Camus in two books that are mercifully unpublished in the UK, that “replacist elites” are intentionally replacing white people in Europe. Camus was, at one time, fined for incitement to racial hatred.
[12] Scruton, Roger, Culture Counts: Faith and Feeling in a World Besieged (Encounter, New York, 2007) p81.
[13] Michael Gove, Celsius 7/7: How the West’s Police of Appeasement has Provoked yet more Fundamentalist Terror – and What Can Be Done Now (Weidenfield & Nicolson: London 2006) p137.
[ET1]Does this make sense?
Added Tue, 30 Jul 2024 08:21
