Middle Classholes 1 - Harriet Harman

It’s Harriet’s world - we just live in it

How would you define a successful politician?

Baroness Harriet Harman, former MP and now peer, is surely the exemplar. She never held the big job as Prime Minister or (technically) as Labour leader, but she was very near the treetop for a long time, and slightly out of the direct line of fire is a good place to be. A miss is as good as a mile, after all. She had a very long run as Labour’s Deputy Leader, and a shorter but memorable spell as its Acting Leader twixt Miliband and Corbyn - a rose between twats, you might say. She was pretty good at that, putting the willies up David Cameron at the despatch box better than either of them ever did.

Crowning Corbyn as Labour leader in 2015, and entirely comfortable with this whole thing

Harman is amenable, passive-aggressive but not crassly so, and not a tub thumper. In the common vernacular of our day, she looks okay. Unlike many politicians, it is hard to actively dislike her, personally.

And her success? She got what she wanted, which is more than most of us can begin to hope for, and even less likely for a politician. Whether it was what the British public wanted, or deserved, is the issue. For Harman was the architect of the Equality Act 2010, and thus one of the prime progenitors of our current malaise.

Let’s have a bit of Harman history before we get to 2010.

Born in 1950 to a doctor and a barrister, educated at St Paul’s Girls’ School in Hammersmith, Harman is fairly closely related to the hereditary peerage of the Earls of Longford. Her auntie was married to the seventh Lord Longford, long-serving Labour minister and the epitome of the gullible posh do-gooder idiot, remembered now chiefly for being taken in by Myra Hindley.

After studying Politics at York, Harman qualified as a solicitor and took up a position at the Brent Law Centre. Brent, Law, and Centre - three words grim enough on their own, but positively deadly coming one after the other. In 1978 she became legal officer for the National Council for Civil Liberties.

Gets the pulse racing, doesn’t it? What kind of wingless soul would spend their young life doing that, descending from on high to assist the lower orders? It makes those of us who suspect we missed out on all the fun feel, in comparison, that we were positively Bacchanalian.

I don’t doubt that a lot of this law and liberties work was valued and valuable. But that’s how middle classholes operate; rock up doing something useful, and then, when their knees are firmly under the table, lob the stink bomb.

‘Come on, chaps - shake hands and be pals’

Photographs of Harman from this era suggest a perky ‘cave girls, it’s matron!’ type, the dependable and sensible one at Mallory Towers, with a sensible head on her shoulders; good old Harriet taking control of disputes in the dorm. You can see the faded book jacket of ‘Harriet Sorts It Out’ by Angela Brazil.

Of course, it was during this time that the NCCL numbered among its many affiliates organisations - a long list of anybody with an axe to grind, in fact - the Paedophile Information Exchange (PIE). The story broke in 2014, when Harman got, rather unfairly, some heat for it. Her defence was that any legally permitted organisation (as PIE then, incredibly, was) could affiliate to the NCCL. This doesn’t suggest collusion, but it does suggest an enormous amount of institutional complacency at the NCCL.

But you see, the rules were followed. The processes were complied with. It was procedure.

Of course, anybody with a ha’p’orth of sense would never have countenanced PIE for a second, but these are middle class human rights lawyers we’re talking about here

Have they changed much since, as a class? I would suggest not. Harman’s Equality Act, thirty years later, made ‘gender reassignment’ one of its holy ‘protected characteristics’. That effectively handed enormous legal rights to men who claim to be women. A male sexual fetish was elevated to untouchable status.

‘The Equality Bill will change the definition of ‘gender reassignment’ to make it clear that a person does not have to be under medical supervision to be protected from discrimination,’ Harman proudly told the House Of Commons at its second reading in 2010.

That a supposed feminist like Harman could not immediately see the likely issues arising from this is, frankly, brain boggling. Again I think class matters here. That ‘I’m helping’ identification with the underdog and the outsider - whoever they might be. Some have dubbed this tendency ‘suicidal empathy’. But I’m not seeing much empathy about it. I suspect the motivation is more the chance of getting up the noses of your opposing political side.

It suggests to me that this is all a game. Identify an enemy - in this case the ‘nasty right wing bigots’ etc, etc, blah blah blah - and do whatever makes them angry. If that lot are set against it, oh that probably means it’s the right thing to do.

Such generalisations and rules of thumb are convenient, and they often serve us well. But this is how things like PIE and genderism slip in to the public sphere. Just the tip goes in - and hey bingo, pretty soon afterwards you’re lying spreadeagled like Vitruvian Man, being royally dry-rogered.

Harman’s feminism is of the shaky strain all round, as we can see from her glib assertion that the financial crash wouldn’t have happened if the firm Lehman Brothers had been Lehman Sisters. This is interesting, because it demonstrates a fundamental unseriousness, a lightness and triteness of thought. Simone de Beauvoir, it ain’t. It’s the feminist politics of a girls versus boys soccer match in Erinsborough.

Maybe it could be objected here that I am a man criticising a woman’s feminism. But that objection would carry more ballast if Harriet wasn’t the kind of ‘feminist’ who’d have to drop that riposte if I pinned on a ra-ra skirt and demanded that everybody call me Margery, or else.

But maybe this was all a game for her. Perhaps her world-changing zeal is merely the acting out of interior, psychological pangs of class angst and guilt. It’s not about high-minded ‘values’ of justice and equality - it’s about lording it over the distasteful faction of her own class.

In this connection, it was amusing when Boris Johnson submitted to her judgment at the Commons Privileges Committee, and was then, incredibly, surprised when she dropped a wall on him. My theory is that people in the Westminster environment get absorbed by the blobbiness - blobby blobby blobby - and they start to accept its premises, to go native, in a ‘a fish doesn’t know that it is wet’ way. Boris seemed to genuinely think he’d be treated generously.

The Black King and The White Queen - everybody else is just a pawn

But the middle classholes could not abide Boris. They turn puce at the scourge of ‘high spirited’ Yahoos, like it was 1928. Boris exploited that Wodehousian folk memory for electoral advantage. But that persona enrages the middle classholes. This was funny, like watching people getting angry about other things last seen a hundred years ago, like Prohibition or jitterbug marathons. But they got their revenge in the end, through Harman.

She is an amazingly influential person. Her influence is all about us, another marker of her success.

And so we come to the Equality Act. Here again, we see some reasonable, or reasonable-sounding stuff, acting as a fig leaf over a heap of bollocks. Huge hairy manospheres, in fact.

The Equality Act became law on April 8th 2010, less than a month before the general election of May 6th that saw Harman's party removed from power. A parting gift. It was spun as just a bit of admin. A lick of paint, some tidying up. The consolidating of quite old legislation.

But it transformed the country, blowing apart the basic concept of equality before the law. Suddenly there were nine protected - exalted - characteristics, the extra-equal. The thesaurus provides these antonyms for ‘protected’; defenceless, exposed, insecure, susceptible, unsheltered, vulnerable, weak. Which tells everybody else their position in the Harman scheme of things.

This diabolical piece of legislation has, ironically, enabled and encouraged discrimination, and reignited racial strife - which with the changing demographics of the country caused by uncontrolled mass immigration, another Labour legacy, has wrought cultural devastation. By putting everybody even more on edgy eggshells, it enabled atrocities. Nobody wants to be accused of racism, or even ‘indirect discrimination’, so the Manchester Arena bomber and the rape gangs got to fill their boots.

There obviously needs to be some, simple, understandable discrimination legislation, and electric railings around women’s rights. But this thing is a mare’s nest of quibbles and tangles, making the British state into a gigantic HR Department.

As the midwife of the Equality Act Harman can’t be seen - even to herself - to get cold feet about it, or about any of its sacrosanct protected characteristics. This is a woman who has made her life’s work the emancipation of women - and who accidentally left the back door open to men in skirts. I think her mind closes down at the suggestion that she might ever have made a mistake, and this is where her background matters because that’s a trait that is firmed up by posh education. Confidence is a great quality, yes, but only when the person is actually talking sense.

And the Act has made a lot of other lawyers and/or members of the middle classhole professions a tidy packet. So many billable hours. All those equalities impact assessments, public sector equality duty. All that time taken up by fretting, accusing, counter-accusing, tribunals and testimonies. The police transfigured into a naughty words complaints service.

The Act presses down like a migraine on the spirit of the country, throwing up walls between us, making us hyperconscious of our trifling differences and blind to some really big and important ones. It has handed every chancer a loaded legal gun.

Just look at how equal and happy we are!

And it’s led, inevitably, to the repeated spectacle of people being forced to use the Equality Act 2010 to defend themselves from the utterly foreseeable consequences of … the Equality Act 2010. Along the way, we’ve had the ludicrous spectacle of the ‘belief’ that there are two sexes being judged ‘not worthy of respect in a democratic society’ (which was, thankfully, reversed). This week, a highly paid KC on the government’s payroll has been aggressively cross-examining a Scottish nurse who objected to a man using the women’s changing room. What a win for women, Harriet!

The Equality Act was a bomb under the country. It’s a bomb that, unlike common-or-garden ordnance, didn’t just bang off the once. It never stops exploding, again and again. And Harriet Harman planted it.

Most of us are like Moses at the top of Mount Pisgah; we only get a glimpse of our promised land. But Harriet Harman is a success, and made her dream real. So she gets to walk in her Jerusalem, every day. I hope she’s enjoying it.

NEXT TIME - CLUE: down with God, up with the European Union