A Note on Allison Pearson’s Lucy Connolly Interview and “Islamist Savagery”

Much has been written about the Daily Telegraph‘s front page interview with Lucy Connolly, conducted by Allison Pearson, but here’s a detail worth unpacking a bit further:

She now believes that cases like hers were used to deflect attention away from the Islamist savagery that took the lives of Alice, Bebe and Elsie Dot at that Southport dance class. “I was so shocked. People appear to be more bothered by my political views than by children being murdered.”

Connolly, infamously, had reacted to news of the Southport murders by writing online “Mass deportation now, set fire to all the fucking hotels full of the bastards for all I care, while you’re at it take the treacherous government and politicians with them” – a statement based on the false rumour that the killer was an asylum-seeker. For Connolly’s defenders, the formulation “for all I care” meant that she was merely expressing contemptuous indifference rather than inciting violence, although in context the meaning appears to be that people should not hold back from setting fire to hotels if it achieves the stated purpose of “mass deportation”. As such, the case was prosecuted as a instance of incitement – and the context of widespread disorder was treated as an aggravating factor, comparable to prosecutions for online posts during the 2011 rioting. The prosecution and sentencing are thus perfectly explicable without recourse to a “deflection” claim, and the implied rebuke that what happened to her reflects people being insufficently concerned with “children being murdered” comes across as self-serving and unattractive.

And that’s before we get onto the supposed “Islamist savagery”. This is the theory that the killer, Axel Rudakubana, was motivated by Islamic extremism. The primary basis for this claim is that he had downloaded an al-Qaeda manual and attempted to make ricin, although Pearson’s own pet theory, expressed in response to criticism of the above-quoted detail, is that there is a connection between Rudakubana targeting a Taylor Swift dance class and ISIS targeting Taylor Swift concerts – although it’s not clear what this connection is, given that the Austria plot was not exposd in the media until a week after the Southport massacre. But even if you find this plausible, it remains speculative and Pearson misleads her readers by slipping it into her write-up as if it’s something we all “know” about the incident. The theory has no explanation for why Rudakubana did not identify himself as ideologically motivated in court, or why no evidence of even a superficial identification with jihadism could be found by prosecutors. The simplest explanation for the al-Qaeda manual is that it was consulted as a “how to” guide for someone obsessed with violence and killing.

Ahead of the interview, Connolly was photographed standing between Pearson and Dan Wootton, and the Telegraph and Wootton both boast of having secured her “first” interview. This indicates a dual media strategy, in which Pearson promotes Connolly through the (much squandered) reputational legacy of the Telegraph as mainstream media while Wootton brings her to to conspiracist and alt-right audiences . Wootton’s advocacy of Connolly previously included mocking up a photo of Connolly with facial injuries along with the heading “Lucy Connolly Prison Attack”. This was extrapolated from claims made by Pearson and Reform’s Richard Tice that she had suffered bruising to her wrists from handcuffs. Pearson charactered the incident as “mistreatment”, even though she “slid to the floor” to resist transfer to a different prison wing.

I previously noted Pearson’s own experience of an incitement complaint here.

A Note on Matt Goodwin’s Quotes

Populist ideologue Matt Goodwin celebrates the recent outbreak of national flag fetishism in England:

The English philosopher Sir Roger Scruton once said “the English are reluctant to display their identity — reluctant to sing their national anthem, to wave their flag, or to affirm their nationhood … But the cost of this reluctance is the steady erosion of something precious —a shared first-person plural.”

What he meant by that was the erosion of a “we” —the erosion of a community, an identity, a home.

The quote struck me as somewhat  undeveloped. Is the “steady erosion” caused by this alleged English reluctance, or is it rather that the reluctance allows “steady erosion” by some other factor? And what are the causes of this “reluctance”? There is no actual argument here, just a portentous banality about how nationist rituals promote community feeling. We’re supposed to take this observation as self-evidently insightful because it issues forth from Roger Scruton.

Perhaps there’s some nuance of meaning that has been lost by the three dots – but good luck finding out what it is that has been excised. Goodwin doesn’t provide the source, and although the vocabulary echoes Scruton I’ve been unable to find it anywhere online – not in the Internet Archive, not on Google Books, not by searching several of Scruton’s titles on Amazon’s “search inside the book” function, and not on a website devoted to his work. No-one else has quoted it, either. Of course, that doesn’t prove that the quote is apocryphal, but given Scruton’s quotability the obscurity of its provenance is surprising. We cannot discount the possibility that it is from some uncollected magazine article or speech, or perhaps from Confessions of a Heretic, which is published by a small press that does not allow its books to be included in electronic repositories, but it is reasonable to be doubtful –  and if that aggrieves Goodwin he has only himself to blame for not providing a reference.

Goodwin appears to have a stock of quotes that are difficult to pin down. Here’s anotherone he attributed to Scruton in July:

A nation is not merely a collection of people, it is a collection of obligations: inherited, assumed and passed on.

It sounds Scrutonesque, but again, where is it actually from?

And here he is writing in the Sun earlier this month, making a foray into Classics:

In Ancient Greece, the writer ­Pericles warned that leaders will only hold their state together so long as they listen to the people they lead, “for only then can leaders rule with their trust”.

And in Ancient Rome, too, the statesman Cicero reached the same conclusion, warning the leaders of the city state that unless they look after their own people first — which he considered their “highest duty” — then their civilisation will rapidly crumble from within and become vulnerable to external invaders.

Reference to “the writer Pericles” is not encouraging: there are speeches attributed to the statesman in ancient sources, but no actual writings. And as with the Scruton quote, we are again presented with banal maxims, here formulated in such a vague and offhand way that that original passages are difficult or impossible to identify and contextualise.