TRIGGERnometry - Toby Young on Journalism, Education, Public Shaming and Offence Archeology

00:00:00.000 hello and welcome to trigonometry i'm francis foster i'm constantin kissin and this is the

00:00:14.320 show for you if you're bored of watching people arguing on the internet over subjects they know

00:00:18.800 nothing about at trigonometry we don't pretend to be the experts we ask the experts our amazing

00:00:24.960 guest this week is the fantastic classical liberal journalist, Toby Young. Welcome to

00:00:29.920 Trigonometry. Thanks for having me on the show. And I introduced you as a journalist.

00:00:33.560 How did you first get into journalism? Tell us a little bit about that. Well, I first

00:00:37.160 started writing for newspapers and magazines when I was a student. I was commended in the

00:00:44.860 category of Young Journalist of the Year in, God, 1985. And when I left university, I became

00:00:53.280 a news trainee at the Times and that was my first kind of proper job in journalism I actually lost

00:01:00.840 that job after six months and the reason for that was because every morning I would come in and try

00:01:06.280 and log on to the in-house computer system as Charlie Wilson then the editor-in-chief of the

00:01:11.880 Times and how much access you had to the kind of in-house computer system depended on your status

00:01:17.080 in the office hierarchy because I was a news trainee I was at the bottom of the pecking order

00:01:21.980 and really had access to nothing.

00:01:23.680 So I would try and log in as the editor

00:01:26.080 in order to get access to everything.

00:01:27.760 And I would try and guess his password

00:01:29.060 for kind of five or ten minutes every morning.

00:01:30.960 And after about five and a half months,

00:01:34.060 I hit on the right one, which was top man.

00:01:37.160 And the first thing, I had this very kind of supercilious boss

00:01:40.820 who had this kind of very languid air, long hair,

00:01:44.880 lots of girlfriends, drove an open top MG. 1.00

00:01:47.940 Sounds like a legend.

00:01:48.720 Yeah.

00:01:50.100 And a total legend.

00:01:51.400 and I hated him.

00:01:52.840 And so the first thing I did when I was inside the editor's kind of,

00:01:57.100 I think it was called a queue, when you sent someone a message,

00:01:59.760 their name came out of me.

00:02:00.680 So I immediately sent a message to my overlord saying, 0.99

00:02:04.860 move your fucking car, it's in my space, the editor. 1.00

00:02:07.880 And he kind of leapt up out of his chair as though he'd been kind of hit 1.00

00:02:10.260 with a cattle prod and ran into the car park and moved his MG to another spot.

00:02:14.360 And I thought, right, I can have some fun here.

00:02:16.300 And I wreaked havoc for about a week.

00:02:18.200 I found this memo detailing all the salaries of the most senior employees of the Times

00:02:23.200 and circulated that kind of to the entire office.

00:02:26.520 And then immediately people started queuing up outside the editor's door

00:02:29.580 to kind of demand more money because so-and-so was getting more than them.

00:02:33.800 Anyway, and then after about a week of this,

00:02:38.320 the kind of IT police tracked down the kind of miscreant who was kind of causing trouble.

00:02:42.500 and I was told to meet the managing editor for a kind of dressing down

00:02:49.260 and I went to the managing editor's office expecting, you know, a slap on the wrist

00:02:53.440 but to be secretly kind of admired for having kind of displayed my hacking skills,

00:02:57.500 you know, crucial skills for a modern journalist

00:02:59.720 and I was met by a security guard with a kind of see-through plastic bag

00:03:03.360 containing the contents of my office drawer and escorted off the premises

00:03:06.840 so that was the end of my career as a news trainee at the Times.

00:03:10.400 I then went to Harvard for a year and thought I'd become an academic and embarked on a PhD

00:03:17.860 at Cambridge, binned out of that after two years, started a magazine called The Modern Review with

00:03:23.840 Julie Birchall and Cosmo Landesman, who were then my next door neighbours in Islington. The Modern

00:03:29.880 Review was kind of a magazine in which intellectuals and academics wrote kind of long scholarly pieces

00:03:37.040 about things like Madonna and Arnold Schwarzenegger.

00:03:39.880 We called it low culture for highbrows.

00:03:42.620 Julie Birch used to describe it as smash hits edited by F.R. Levis,

00:03:46.780 which I guess makes me F.R. Levis, which is kind of complimentary.

00:03:50.640 And we kept that going for four years

00:03:53.660 and produced it out of my kind of bedsit in Shepherd's Bush.

00:03:57.640 And I thought, you know, I was Jan Wenner,

00:03:59.700 the kind of dawn of the Rolling Stone kind of empire.

00:04:03.140 And I was going to be this kind of, you know, billionaire in years to come,

00:04:06.920 with private jets because this magazine was going to be kind of so incredibly successful

00:04:10.520 it folded in 1995 after Julie and I fell out she left Cosmo and ran off with an associate editor

00:04:18.340 called Charlotte Raven and it became a bit of a kind of news story at the time anyway I shut down

00:04:23.140 the magazine and at that point was recruited by Graydon Carter then the editor of Vanity Fair to

00:04:28.080 go work for Vanity Fair he initially said you know come out for a month you know let's get to

00:04:32.640 know each other it'll be fun and a month turned into three months three months turned into six

00:04:36.620 months and i was eventually i was i was at vanity fair for almost three years and in new york for

00:04:41.080 five years and i thought again you know i was going to conquer new york i was getting a male 1.00

00:04:45.920 tina brown um you know here was the land of opportunity turned out it was for me the land

00:04:50.680 of the unreturned phone call and i crashed and burned spectacularly and um uh returned to london

00:04:58.940 in 2000 with my kind of tail between my legs but wrote a book about my disastrous attempts to take

00:05:04.640 manhattan called how to lose friends and alienate people which was published in 2001

00:05:09.020 um turned into a stage play in which i played myself in the west end for eight weeks um sometimes

00:05:16.600 to full houses sometimes not um and uh comedians we know all about the variability of an empty

00:05:24.540 house on a tuesday afternoon um or sometimes a full house that feels empty yeah you tell a joke

00:05:31.100 and it just dies, it's terrible isn't it

00:05:33.000 I used to get the flop sweat

00:05:35.040 when it's like someone turns on the waterworks

00:05:37.600 because no one's laughing at your gags

00:05:39.360 I call it sweaty back syndrome

00:05:41.800 sweaty back syndrome, ok so you don't know about it

00:05:44.100 and that book was

00:05:47.220 it became a bestseller

00:05:48.640 sold it around the world

00:05:50.240 it was eventually turned into a film

00:05:53.420 in which Simon Pegg played me

00:05:55.300 which was released in 2008

00:05:57.540 also called How to Lose Friends and Alienate People

00:05:59.440 wrote a sequel called The Sound of No Hands Clapping, started writing a column at The

00:06:05.460 Spectator in 98, and had been writing a column ever since, also an associate editor at The

00:06:10.620 Spectator, got kind of into doing more political stuff around about 2008, 2009, and have been

00:06:19.840 kind of fairly political since then.

00:06:23.780 Wouldn't quite describe myself as an activist journalist, but probably on the cusp of being

00:06:28.260 that.

00:06:30.100 On the conservative side of things.

00:06:31.580 On the conservative side of things, yeah.

00:06:34.400 So that's my journalistic career in a nutshell.

00:06:38.420 And how did you get involved in education?

00:06:40.200 Because that's also been a big part of your life.

00:06:42.000 Yeah, well, around about 2008, my wife and I started to look at local secondary schools.

00:06:52.640 So we've got four kids, and we had the children in very quick succession.

00:06:56.000 at one point worked out that my wife was pregnant

00:06:58.500 over a five-year period for more than 50% of the time.

00:07:02.060 Excellent work.

00:07:02.740 Which I wouldn't recommend.

00:07:05.360 My wife is a lawyer who gave up practicing law

00:07:09.120 to become a full-time mum when we had our first child,

00:07:14.120 which I always say is the worst of all possible combinations

00:07:17.120 because she contributes nothing to the household income 1.00

00:07:19.400 but can always beat me in an argument.

00:07:22.020 I'd say she's gone back to work now, 0.99

00:07:23.460 so if she was to hear me saying that, she would kill me.

00:07:25.280 so she now does contribute to the household income you're only on youtube for the rest of 1.00

00:07:30.060 eternity yeah um and uh anyway so we had these four kids they were all at this really good local

00:07:36.560 primary school in shepherd's bush but we were nervous about whether we're going to go to

00:07:40.480 secondary school and there are some good um it's around here actually there are some good um

00:07:44.620 catholics some good cv secondary schools but you have to be you know a church going catholic or

00:07:50.520 anglican in order to get into those schools uh there were some other really good secular schools

00:07:54.500 but the catchment areas were tiny

00:07:56.180 and practically had to live within the school gates

00:07:57.900 to get into those schools

00:07:58.680 and we sat down and thought

00:08:00.420 well what are we going to do

00:08:01.360 we can either move

00:08:03.540 we can get religion

00:08:05.620 which around here is known as

00:08:07.000 on your knees to avoid the fees

00:08:08.460 and none of those options seemed

00:08:17.000 we could go private

00:08:18.340 being a freelance journalist

00:08:19.920 and having four kids

00:08:20.740 that wasn't really an option

00:08:21.520 so we initially decided to move and my wife got all these details of houses in this village in

00:08:30.000 Suffolk called Parham which is near a really good comprehensive called Thomas Mills and the plan

00:08:37.840 was to move to Parham in Suffolk 200 miles away and about 100 miles away and send our kids to this

00:08:43.720 this good local comprehensive but I thought you know why should we have to kind of uproot ourselves

00:08:49.760 and move halfway across the country

00:08:51.580 just to secure a decent state education for our children,

00:08:54.320 shouldn't that be, you know, available more locally?

00:08:57.620 Plus, you know, Parham happened to be where my parents-in-law lived.

00:09:00.560 That wasn't a big factor.

00:09:01.460 I'd get on with the fight.

00:09:02.820 But it was as though I was, you know,

00:09:04.180 having to move back into the basement.

00:09:05.980 It wasn't quite the basement, but almost the bottom of the garden.

00:09:08.720 My parents-in-law just to secure, you know,

00:09:11.100 a decent education for my children.

00:09:12.320 I didn't really want to leave London.

00:09:13.860 And, you know, I just felt angry about the fact

00:09:15.580 that I was having to jump through all these hoops

00:09:17.500 to secure something, which should be everyone's by right

00:09:20.560 if you're a taxpayer and so forth.

00:09:22.180 Anyway, so I thought maybe there's another option,

00:09:24.320 which is to set up our own school.

00:09:27.260 That's fascinating in itself because most people's reactions now

00:09:30.660 to that situation would be to write a massive Facebook post

00:09:33.260 about how the education system is broken and everything's terrible.

00:09:36.760 But you actually did this horrendous thing of trying to do something about it.

00:09:40.760 Well, yeah, I think it was, I agree, it's a slightly unusual reaction.

00:09:44.200 i think um one of the things that gave me the confidence to think that was possible

00:09:50.480 is that my father was involved in education he came up with the original idea for the open

00:09:55.360 university um which is now the largest higher education institution in europe um with you

00:10:01.320 know something like a quarter of a million students on role at any one time um i think

00:10:06.200 that's right anyway um and uh so i you know i thought well if he can start a university the

00:10:11.080 least I can do is start, you know, a small secondary school. Plus, at that time, Michael

00:10:15.560 Gove was the shadow education secretary and was talking about making it possible for parents to

00:10:21.720 set up free schools, which have been set up in America as charter schools and in Sweden and in

00:10:26.700 other European countries. So it looked at that point, too, as though the Tories were going to

00:10:31.340 kind of romp home in 2010. So it seemed, you know, it didn't seem completely beyond the realm of

00:10:37.100 possibility so i wrote this piece not a facebook post it was a piece for the observer in 2009

00:10:42.280 saying i wanted to start what i called a comprehensive grammar school so a school

00:10:47.160 which combined the best of both the grammar and the comprehensive tradition so mixed ability intake

00:10:53.540 inclusive but uniforms houses latin grammar hogwarts meets grange hill and uh and and um

00:11:03.600 And I published it and I put an email address at the bottom saying, anyone want to help me, you know, email me.

00:11:09.940 And I got about 150 people emailing me saying they'd love to help, mainly local parents, worried about the same things as my wife and me.

00:11:17.820 And I invited them all to a meeting in my sitting room, not much bigger than this room here.

00:11:23.000 And about 50 people crowded into the room.

00:11:25.300 This was in sort of, I guess, September, October 2009.

00:11:29.100 and out of that group emerged a group of about 12 people,

00:11:33.420 almost all of whom were complete strangers to me until that meeting

00:11:37.020 and they became the steering committee of the West London Free School

00:11:41.540 and we embarked on this kind of mammoth undertaking

00:11:44.860 and it was at times kind of horrendously difficult.

00:11:47.680 I remember when morale was at a particularly low ebb,

00:11:51.820 I mean we got nothing but the hand from Ed Balls whenever we tried to,

00:11:55.560 who was then the Secretary of State at DCSF,

00:11:58.480 known as the Department for Chairs and Soft Furnishing.

00:12:01.420 Anyway, but he was the Education Secretary

00:12:03.640 and was totally uninterested in a kind of parent-promoted academy,

00:12:06.940 which was how we built it at the time.

00:12:08.520 And I remember inviting this guy who led a parent group

00:12:12.040 who'd successfully established a Jewish comprehensive,

00:12:15.420 the Jewish Community Secondary School in Barnet,

00:12:17.980 which was due to open in September 2010.

00:12:19.900 So he'd effectively done what we were trying to do.

00:12:22.360 It was a parent-promoted, voluntary-aided school.

00:12:24.340 but it was about to open you know with the huge new buildings and it was a huge success story

00:12:29.800 and so I invited him to come and address my little group my little merry band to try and

00:12:35.080 raise morale when it was at an all-time low and the first thing he said was it took my group 10

00:12:40.940 years that's 10 years of your life you'll never get back I hope you realize that and I was like

00:12:46.300 Jesus so I said yes but you know had you realized at the beginning of that 10 years that after 10

00:12:51.480 years you'd have this kind of fantastic school embodying your vision presumably you wouldn't

00:12:55.280 have done anything any differently would you and he was like are you kidding my wife's almost left

00:12:59.640 me i'm practically bankrupt my kids too old to go to the bloody school i never would have done it 0.66

00:13:03.620 but i know it would take 10 years oh no anyway um we managed to recover from that kind of low point

00:13:10.240 and um uh in 2011 in 2011 two years later um we we became the first um group to sign a funding

00:13:19.740 agreement with michael go when he became the secretary of state for education so the first

00:13:23.440 free school to get the green light and we were one of the first 24 to open in 2011 boris johnson

00:13:29.320 opened the school this is when he was still on speaking terms with michael goes he made a kind

00:13:32.900 of friendly gag he said yes the secretary of state for education he's given a new word

00:13:36.460 to the english language we give they give he go he go versus the school anyway i'm sorry about my

00:13:42.300 boris impression which actually isn't bad anyway um uh and uh we and we we we've been told a lot

00:13:50.100 of things by critics of the free schools policy we've been told that um teachers wouldn't want to

00:13:55.300 work at a kind of parent-run school because it would be an insult to their professionalism

00:14:00.080 actually we had you know over 100 applicants for the head teacher position which is believe me

00:14:04.500 unheard of um we were told that parents wouldn't want to send their children to the school the

00:14:08.960 analogy was you know if your kid burst his or her appendix you wouldn't send him or her to a hospital

00:14:14.920 run by patients so why on earth would a parent entrust their precious child to a school run by

00:14:20.620 parents that wasn't really run by parents it was run by professional teachers but nonetheless you

00:14:25.160 know we were massively oversubscribed we were one of the you know 10 most oversubscribed mixed

00:14:30.520 ability state schools in england um uh you know everything people said would go wrong didn't go

00:14:36.640 wrong all the reasons people said it wouldn't work turned out to be kind of just false and we

00:14:42.820 got our first GCSE results our first set of GCSE results in 2016 and they put us in the top 10%

00:14:51.660 mixed ability comprehensives in England we've got our first kids graduating from the sixth form

00:14:58.940 this year 83% of them have had university offers 63% from Russell Group universities and 40% of

00:15:05.360 The kids at the school are from disadvantaged backgrounds.

00:15:08.880 That was another thing people said.

00:15:09.940 They said that the only parents who'd be interested in sending their children,

00:15:15.240 as the critics said, to a school where Latin was mandatory for the first three years,

00:15:19.920 which it is, would be kind of local middle-class parents who couldn't afford

00:15:24.360 or who wanted to save the money on private school fees.

00:15:27.480 And actually, it's got an incredibly kind of mixed group of kids at the school.

00:15:32.380 I mean, you know, it's about a third black Asian minority ethnic, about 40 percent from disadvantaged backgrounds.

00:15:38.840 It's, you know, almost perfectly representative of the local area.

00:15:42.160 It's just nonsense that, you know, only white middle class people are interested in securing a kind of academically rigorous education for their children. 0.51

00:15:49.840 It's just patronizing nonsense.

00:15:51.560 Anyway, it's been it's been a huge success.

00:15:53.120 and subsequently the group that emerged from that meeting in my sitting room in 2009

00:15:59.340 went on to create three more schools, three primaries, also local, also doing very well

00:16:05.400 and we've just been approved to open a second secondary in Cambridge in 2022.

00:16:12.780 So that's been, you know, I've been, I thought that, you know,

00:16:16.860 enjoying some success as a journalist would be kind of enriching and give my life meaning

00:16:24.220 and you know it was certainly kind of great to appear as myself in a one-man show in the West

00:16:30.240 End and I co-produced a Hollywood movie based on the book the book was a bestseller but nothing was

00:16:35.820 as enriching or as meaningful as setting up these schools and just getting involved with a group of

00:16:41.500 almost complete strangers and kind of working collaboratively on this kind of project that we

00:16:46.420 really thought would benefit the local community and i think it has i mean originally i did it you

00:16:51.140 know for selfish reasons because i wanted a good school to send my kids to and three of my kids are

00:16:55.800 now at the school two are and one's about to start in september and the fourth will go next year

00:16:59.060 but it's become a kind of you know mission since then i've become a kind of passionate advocate

00:17:03.800 for the free schools program and you know don't believe what the critics tell you about it um

00:17:10.220 last year kids made more progress at free schools uh according to the new progress eight measure

00:17:16.180 than they did at any other type of school.

00:17:18.140 They're massively oversubscribed.

00:17:21.520 They're more likely, secondary free schools,

00:17:24.240 more likely to admit disadvantaged children than other schools,

00:17:28.120 many much more likely to get outstanding Ofsted results.

00:17:31.720 I mean, the programme has been probably the most successful

00:17:34.380 education policy of the post-war period, I think.

00:17:37.340 And do you agree with academies?

00:17:38.720 Because as a lot of teachers in particular,

00:17:40.700 I don't particularly agree with the academy process.

00:17:42.740 I don't believe that corporate businesses should have any place in education.

00:17:48.520 Would you ascribe to that, or do you think that turning schools into independent businesses is a positive thing?

00:17:56.740 I think people often misunderstand what academies are.

00:18:00.640 I mean, free schools are a subset of academies, so free schools are legally academies.

00:18:06.580 Academies are often described as kind of businesses, but you can't set up an academy.

00:18:12.740 unless you are a charity so every academy every multi-academy trust in England is a charity

00:18:20.760 some of them make a surplus but not many do and I think you know keeping corporates out of

00:18:33.280 education is difficult I mean it's not just that hasn't that doesn't date back to when academies

00:18:40.240 first introduce it long predates that you know the people who supply the toilet paper to the school

00:18:45.540 the people who supply the school dinners if they're externally provided the utility providers

00:18:51.040 these are all corporations and it would be very difficult to run a successful public education

00:18:55.740 service any more than it would be to run a public health service without the involvement of you know

00:19:00.060 the private sector so I don't think that in itself is an evil the question is how well do these schools

00:19:06.200 do um and is the academization process beneficial or harmful and i think that's an interesting

00:19:12.720 debate and i've just actually written a a an essay about that for a forthcoming book being

00:19:17.100 published by the institute of economic affairs which i think was recently stung in a guardian

00:19:20.960 um this morning or yesterday ridiculous but um uh and i think it's a mixed picture um but i don't

00:19:28.900 think that that um yeah schools run by local authorities fared any better um it may be that

00:19:36.000 academization isn't a magic bullet and for that reason we should pause before insisting that

00:19:40.140 every school becomes an academy but i think the program itself has room for improvement it's

00:19:45.300 perfectible in a way that um local authority run schools seem kind of less so i mean one of the

00:19:53.340 things that i've always noticed when the difference between academy schools and locally run schools is

00:19:57.880 a difference in budgets where it appears that academy schools do get much more funding and

00:20:03.740 local authority schools get less and then you have Ofsted coming and going oh you know this

00:20:08.060 isn't working this isn't working it's like well we had half a million quid cut from our budget

00:20:11.660 what do you expect us to do? Yeah I think there's that again is a myth put out by the critics of

00:20:21.140 the kind of whole panoply of education reforms that date back to Andrew Dervis and Tony Blair

00:20:27.760 but which were kind of turbocharged by Michael Gove in 2010

00:20:30.620 and have been continued since.

00:20:33.240 Academies and local authority schools get the same money.

00:20:38.200 Their per-pupil funding doesn't vary

00:20:41.220 according to whether they're an academy or a local authority school.

00:20:44.760 In some cases, local authorities,

00:20:47.000 the money is channeled via local authorities,

00:20:49.380 and they top-slice it.

00:20:50.960 And in most cases, the local authority top-slice is larger

00:20:53.780 than the top-slice, say, that a multi-academy trust will take

00:20:56.480 before then passing the money on to schools.

00:20:58.600 And where that happens, then, of course, the schools get less money,

00:21:04.040 but they supposedly get access to services provided by the local authority in return,

00:21:08.980 so it swings and roundabouts.

00:21:10.640 But the West London Free School, for instance, the secondary school that I co-founded,

00:21:15.180 we actually saw a bigger cut in our per-pupil real-terms funding.

00:21:21.560 It was a cut of 2% if you compare 17-18 to 18-19 compared to some of the local authority schools, which actually saw an increase in their funding.

00:21:34.400 So, you know, it's certainly not true in Hammersmith and Fulham.

00:21:37.680 Toby, well, let's move on to the next stage of your career because the success with the West London Free School and education meant that you were then invited to advise the government as part of a panel or a board, I think it was called.

00:21:48.400 Yeah. So I was invited. Well, I applied to be on this new higher education regulator called the Office for Students last year.

00:22:01.060 And I had to go through a formal application process. So I had to submit a letter. I had to provide referees.

00:22:10.100 I was then interviewed by Sir Michael Barber, the new chair of this regulator, as well as the vice chair and an independent civil servant observer.

00:22:22.920 I mean, one of the criticisms made about the process by which I was appointed was that it wasn't above board.

00:22:31.600 But actually, I went through the same process as all the other appointees.

00:22:37.100 One of the differences was that some of the student applicants to the board had their social media vetted, whereas my social media history wasn't vetted.

00:22:50.840 But then the social media history of all the other appointees, save for the student applicants, wasn't vetted either.

00:22:57.040 So I wasn't treated any differently to all the sort of 13 or so other people appointed to this board

00:23:05.400 and went through exactly the same appointments process.

00:23:09.020 So you were appointed as part of a group of 13 to advise the government in education.

00:23:13.400 There were actually 15.

00:23:14.300 So I was one of 15 non-executive directors appointed to this new higher education regulator.

00:23:21.180 and the Department for Education announced the list of all the appointees at around midnight

00:23:30.120 on the 1st of January of this year and within about and the Guardian

00:23:36.060 they ran a story at one minute past midnight saying something like Toby Young appointed to

00:23:45.760 help lead new universities regulator which was misleading because I wasn't going to be helping

00:23:51.320 to lead in any sort of meaningful sense this regulator I was one of 15 board members you know

00:23:57.200 there were executives a chief executive a deputy chief executive and so forth who would be leading

00:24:02.200 it and there was a chair of this board who would be leading it but I was one of you know just 15

00:24:07.960 trustees anyway um that triggered a lot of people on twitter um who immediately um kind of started

00:24:16.760 objecting i started trending shortly after midnight um and people then on the same day

00:24:22.280 on the same day yeah wow within within minutes within minutes of this guardian story going live

00:24:27.160 yeah and can i just ask what what was your emotions when you saw that it was trending

00:24:32.520 because sometimes when things happen and i go on social media and i see that i've been tagged in a

00:24:37.000 post but there's a little bit of dread that enters my soul where I think wonder what this is

00:24:42.440 well did you have that or were you intrigued or no I you know I suppose um like you I sort of uh

00:24:48.960 kind of think why is this happening and sort of uh you have a kind of you have a sort of slightly

00:24:54.640 kind of uh a slight feeling of dread in the pit of your stomach and then and then I realized it

00:24:59.520 was people reacting to this guardian story and for the most part coming up with kind of flimsy

00:25:05.240 objections as to why I shouldn't sit on this board. I mean, the most common objection was that

00:25:09.780 I didn't have a background in higher education, which was an odd objection to make for someone

00:25:16.220 who was being appointed to a regulator. I mean, you don't want a sector to be marking its own

00:25:23.320 homework, or at least you don't want its homework to be entirely marked by people who are from that 1.00

00:25:29.280 sector i mean you know when when when someone who works for uh or who worked for rupert murdoch is

00:25:35.060 appointed to um it's so um the left throws up its arms in horror and talks about the industry

00:25:42.240 marking its own homework um and yet here i was someone who wasn't involved in higher education

00:25:47.440 being appointed to regularly and they were throwing up their arms in horror because i wasn't

00:25:51.060 you know a vice chancellor of university or a professor of some kind just to clarify for our

00:25:55.660 worldwide audience would you mind just explaining what ipso is please so ipso is um the uh new press

00:26:01.760 regulator that was set up in the wake of the leveson inquiry and which replaced the existing

00:26:07.740 regulator and it's been criticized mainly by people who would like to muzzle the tabloid

00:26:13.740 press because it isn't state authorized it's not the state uh um authorized regulator that

00:26:20.620 hacked off wanted to see as a result of Leveson it's an independent a wholly

00:26:25.300 independent regulator and it has some some people sit on it who have kind of

00:26:29.560 worked in the industry and others haven't it's a mixture of people as is 0.78

00:26:34.060 the office for students so it just seemed to me to be a ridiculous

00:26:37.420 objection to say I wasn't fit to serve on this regulatory body because I wasn't

00:26:42.500 employed by the sector I was supposedly regulating that wasn't the objection

00:26:47.560 that got the most purchase.

00:26:48.900 No, that was the initial wave of objections.

00:26:51.800 And then people started trawling through my Twitter feed,

00:26:56.860 everything I'd ever posted on Facebook,

00:27:00.700 and going back through everything I'd written

00:27:04.020 for The Spectator and elsewhere.

00:27:08.800 Fraser Nelson, the editor of The Spectator,

00:27:12.000 wrote a piece in my defence,

00:27:14.180 when this thing kind of mushroomed,

00:27:15.720 in which he pointed out that the top, most searched for articles in the Spectator's archives,

00:27:22.460 dating back to 1828, were all articles by me as my detractors,

00:27:26.960 were kind of working hard to try and uncover things that they could then kind of pull out of context

00:27:31.660 and stick on Twitter and say, how can you appoint this person to a kind of public body?

00:27:38.280 A guy called Freddie DeBoer wrote a really good blog post called Planet of the Cops,

00:27:45.040 in which he talked about what he called offence archaeologists,

00:27:49.140 people who kind of devote themselves, like literally hours, days of their lives,

00:27:54.960 just to trawling through all the things they can find about a particular target

00:28:02.100 so they can then find things to be outraged about or claim to be offended by.

00:28:07.580 I mean, it's a kind of weird kind of political moment

00:28:11.520 in which people can spend all this time trying to find things

00:28:16.220 which they then claim are really upsetting and triggering and offensive

00:28:19.760 and undermining their mental health

00:28:21.460 and sort of destroying their sense of well-being.

00:28:23.740 It's like, well, if things I've said are actually going to do that to you,

00:28:27.000 why have you spent the last five days trawling through my Twitter feed

00:28:30.600 in order to try and find things that are going to upset you?

00:28:32.960 And if you really think they're upsetting and offensive

00:28:34.780 and should be prohibited in some way,

00:28:37.000 why are you trying to broadcast them for it?

00:28:38.660 Do you want to upset other people?

00:28:39.740 And it's a kind of weird, kind of twisted lesson.

00:28:41.820 Well, it's incredible.

00:28:42.360 Of course, they're not really upset or offended.

00:28:44.640 They're just pretending to be.

00:28:46.160 Captain Renault style.

00:28:47.520 When Captain Renault discovers gambling is taking place

00:28:50.740 at Rick's place in Casablanca,

00:28:52.160 he's shocked, shocked to discover gambling's going on.

00:28:54.540 And that's the kind of shock we're talking about.

00:28:57.280 It's a kind of make-believe, confected shock

00:29:00.500 in order to try and discredit a particular person.

00:29:02.860 This is what happened with Candankula.

00:29:04.180 Because the police...

00:29:05.100 It was actually the police in that case.

00:29:06.800 I don't know if you followed this case.

00:29:08.720 No one was offended by it.

00:29:10.060 Three million people watched the video on YouTube.

00:29:12.060 No one complained about it.

00:29:13.460 And then someone made a complaint.

00:29:15.840 And the police went around showing the clip to people to see if they were offended.

00:29:21.600 And, of course, eventually they found somebody who was offended.

00:29:24.660 And this seems to be the thing.

00:29:26.360 So why do you think you were targeted in this way, though?

00:29:28.960 One of the interesting, just to linger for a second on that particular example,

00:29:33.120 that is an example of someone who is deemed to have said something inappropriate and offensive

00:29:40.620 being prosecuted which i think is extremely sinister yeah um but um what's what's what's

00:29:47.180 interesting and different about um the big brother role played by these offense archaeologists is

00:29:54.660 it's kind of they don't they're not state actors um uh they're just ordinary people i mean they're

00:29:59.880 hashtag activists for the most part.

00:30:02.180 And they're kind of, it's a sort of crowdsourced Big Brother.

00:30:05.700 It's not Big Brother as presented in 1984.

00:30:09.460 It's not Big Brother with the impremature of the state

00:30:13.200 trying to shame people and denude them of their livelihoods

00:30:19.140 and kind of run them out of town, as it were, on a rail,

00:30:22.700 tar and feather them with the authority of the state. 0.60

00:30:25.680 It's just ordinary people, hashtag activists,

00:30:28.400 this kind of assembling in order to kind of recreate this kind of oppressive big brother figure.

00:30:35.540 And for that reason, I think in some ways that that is a source of hope,

00:30:38.540 because if everyone stands up to them, then I think their power would be much reduced.

00:30:45.180 But unfortunately, because that's not happening, corporations, large bureaucracies,

00:30:50.980 governing political parties are just doing their bidding.

00:30:54.040 So even though they're not state actors, it's just a kind of crowd assembling

00:30:57.980 an outrage mob assembling on Twitter and on social media,

00:31:02.180 nonetheless, they have this extraordinary power

00:31:06.020 because various state bodies, various organs and instruments of the state

00:31:10.140 start acting, start doing their bidding.

00:31:14.700 But I think the Count Dunkler case is extremely sinister

00:31:18.560 because that's an example of the police trying to almost second-guess

00:31:22.140 what an outrage mob is likely to ask them to do should it spring up,

00:31:26.720 even though in this case, as you say, it hadn't actually sprung up.

00:31:29.620 So coming back to you then, you had these people trawling through your Twitter post and Facebook post.

00:31:34.840 What did they find?

00:31:36.480 They found a number of articles and tweets I'd written,

00:31:42.840 which in their view made me unsuitable to serve on this public regulator.

00:31:47.800 So for instance, a piece I'd written, an essay I'd written on leaving university in 1988,

00:31:54.840 So 30 years ago was in which I talked about how the English class system operated at Oxford and made some sort of faintly disparaging remarks, disparaging kind of description, rude descriptions of socially awkward boys.

00:32:15.280 and that was taken to be indicative of my contempt

00:32:22.560 for working-class boys who tried to make good through education.

00:32:27.140 Paul Mason pulled this out as evidence

00:32:29.620 that I was a totally unsuitable person to serve on this regulatory.

00:32:32.920 And he said that the reason the Tories had appointed me

00:32:36.220 to this regulatory body was in order to stop

00:32:38.520 working-class children going to university, that that was my role.

00:32:42.600 I mean, literally, I don't know whether he believes this or not,

00:32:45.120 But this is what he actually said in a tweet.

00:32:47.280 For those who don't know, Paul Mason is a former BBC and Channel 4 journalist

00:32:51.000 turned kind of freelance Corbynista activist.

00:32:55.700 And you kind of think, first of all, you've totally misinterpreted this piece.

00:33:03.820 Secondly, it was written 30 years ago.

00:33:06.180 Even if I had said the things you're claiming I said in that article,

00:33:09.820 what about all the work I've done since?

00:33:12.620 At Oxford, I was involved in a widening participation program to encourage children from disadvantaged areas to apply to the university and went and talked to six forms around the country to try and persuade children who hadn't considered Oxford to apply to Oxford.

00:33:31.080 I've been at that stage a member of the Fulbright, the UK-US Fulbright Commission,

00:33:35.840 and we have this programme in partnership with the Sutton Trust

00:33:38.600 whereby we secure full scholarships for English kids from disadvantaged backgrounds

00:33:43.000 to attend US colleges.

00:33:45.360 I'd set up, you know, four schools at the primary schools.

00:33:48.380 We give priority to children from disadvantaged backgrounds.

00:33:51.500 When they apply at the secondary school, 40% of the kids are from disadvantaged backgrounds.

00:33:55.400 I mean, what's Paul Mason ever done to help kids from disadvantaged backgrounds get to university? 0.98

00:34:01.940 I mean, sweet fuck all, I imagine. 0.95

00:34:04.700 But here he was judging me on the basis of an essay he'd misunderstood written 30 years ago 0.99

00:34:11.140 and saying that is the reason Toby Young shouldn't be appointed to this particular regulatory body.

00:34:17.980 And that was kind of typical of, I think, the way in which outrage mobs on Twitter work.

00:34:25.000 They pull out particular things you've written. 0.99

00:34:27.660 I mean, I said some stupid things about women's breasts, you know, after several glasses of wine at sort of four o'clock in the morning, nine, ten years ago. 0.99

00:34:37.620 And those were pulled out as evidence that I was a misogynist opposed to women going to university. 0.99

00:34:43.880 And, you know, often these tweets were reproduced with the hashtag MeToo, as though tweeting about boobs at four o'clock in the morning is identical, morally indistinguishable from, you know, Harvey Weinstein's been accused of doing, which, you know, I think is the feminist equivalent of playing the race card.

00:35:04.280 Don't expect people to become outraged every time you use the Me Too hashtag

00:35:10.440 if you're going to use it to describe locker room banter

00:35:13.920 and not rape and sexual harassment and unpleasant predatory behaviour in the workplace.

00:35:22.600 But I've never been accused of sexual harassment.

00:35:26.820 I've run several medium-sized organisations.

00:35:30.880 I've never been accused of sexual discrimination,

00:35:32.920 never been taken to a tribunal, nothing, anything like that.

00:35:37.680 But because I, you know, I sent some unfortunate tweets,

00:35:41.840 that made me a misogynist in the eyes of my critics

00:35:47.120 and therefore a totally unsuitable person to be appointed to this body.

00:35:51.120 What's it like emotionally when you see slowly but surely

00:35:54.040 this picture being constructed of you, of who you are,

00:35:58.080 which actually bears very little resemblance to the truth,

00:36:00.740 but then you see more and more people just look at it and go,

00:36:04.060 well, he's obviously that person.

00:36:05.780 Yeah.

00:36:06.260 And, I mean, I'd find that soul-destroying

00:36:09.120 because it just reminds me of the play The Crucible

00:36:12.280 where John Proctor goes, that's my name,

00:36:14.500 that's the only thing that I have.

00:36:16.780 It is, that is one of the worst things about it,

00:36:20.100 this feeling that, you know, your name is being dragged through the mud.

00:36:24.400 People are saying these terrible things about you

00:36:26.760 and attributing these terrible beliefs to you.

00:36:30.740 There's this awful sense that people who don't know you, even people who know you a little bit, might see these things and believe they're true.

00:36:42.700 And that's an awful feeling.

00:36:45.380 So probably the low point was watching Question Time.

00:36:50.100 It's a massive current affairs program in the UK.

00:36:53.160 The UK's leading current affairs, flagship current affairs program, in which a panel of people discuss a number of kind of buzzy kind of topics of the day.

00:37:07.700 So Dawn Butler, Labour's shadow minister for women and equalities, said on Question Time that I was a eugenicist who talked about weeding out disabled people.

00:37:21.660 I mean, it was just, I mean, it was just complete nonsense

00:37:24.840 constructed out of whole cloth.

00:37:27.060 And, you know, I've got a disabled brother.

00:37:29.100 I'm a patron of the care home he lives in.

00:37:32.120 And the thought that he or any of his carers

00:37:34.700 or any of his friends, you know, in that community

00:37:38.900 might be watching Question Time and thinking,

00:37:41.160 Crumbs, didn't know that about Toby.

00:37:43.900 Didn't know that about my brother.

00:37:45.020 He wants to weed me out.

00:37:46.920 You know, this is a serious person saying this

00:37:49.120 on this flagship current affairs programme.

00:37:51.600 A senior politician must be true.

00:37:55.040 You know, that was terrible.

00:37:56.740 And I think what was one of the salutary things about that experience,

00:38:01.000 there was also another moment when there was a House of Commons debate.

00:38:03.820 Again, the Speaker of the House of Commons, John Bercow,

00:38:07.480 in his wisdom, decided to grant an emergency debate,

00:38:13.080 an urgent question about my appointment to this body.

00:38:15.640 and that and the kind of labor objections were led by dawn butler again and just everything that

00:38:23.020 came out of her mouth was wrong i mean it was often kind of garbled stories from how to lose

00:38:26.640 friends and alienate people and again if you write a kind of self-deprecating memoir in which

00:38:31.820 you tell all these terrible embarrassing stories about yourself um then i suppose you know if you

00:38:38.880 do then get appointed to a public body it's inevitable that someone is going to trawl through

00:38:43.280 that book and try and and the way they present it it's as though they through their sleuthing

00:38:47.680 you know through their kind of powers as kind of forensic investigators they discovered these kind

00:38:53.560 of terrible terrible things about now i wrote them all about myself in a self-deprecating memoir

00:38:58.100 but kingsley amiss the british author once wrote that you know uh be careful when you make a 0.98

00:39:03.360 self-deprecating remark about yourself because some little shit is bound to dig it up at some 0.99

00:39:08.120 point in the future and hurl it against you because you wrote an article about pornography 0.99

00:39:13.660 And that was used against you as well, wasn't it,

00:39:16.320 in order to slander into...

00:39:17.680 There were moments during this kind of whole ferrari

00:39:22.380 which were comic, and that was one of them.

00:39:24.580 So I wrote a piece in 2001 for The Spectator

00:39:29.260 disputing that the liberalisation of the attitude

00:39:34.720 of the British Board of Film Classification to pornography,

00:39:38.340 whereby they were allowing more things to get through,

00:39:40.960 wasn't going to result in a kind of epidemic of sexual violence.

00:39:45.980 And the literature linking exposure to sexual imagery,

00:39:50.800 including pornography, to sexual violence was, you know,

00:39:55.220 the evidence was incredibly threadbare.

00:39:57.740 Most of the evidence is that there isn't any link at all.

00:40:00.500 Actually, most of the evidence is on the contrary.

00:40:02.200 I mean, Diana Fleishman, whose episode of ours you've seen,

00:40:05.380 she wrote an article, and one of the points she makes

00:40:07.620 on the increased use of pornography reduces...

00:40:10.760 Sexual violence in society.

00:40:12.160 And you can see that at a very crude level.

00:40:14.360 If you compare societies in which there's a very liberal attitude

00:40:18.460 towards pornography like Sweden, Denmark, Holland,

00:40:23.380 to countries in which there's a very censorious, draconian attitude

00:40:27.760 towards pornography like Saudi Arabia, 0.92

00:40:30.500 the incidence of sexual violence is much, much higher in those countries

00:40:34.340 which have a much more draconian attitude.

00:40:35.720 I made this point in this article.

00:40:37.380 In the course of making this argument...

00:40:40.100 Like the misogynist that you are, Tony. 0.97

00:40:41.660 Like the misogynist. 0.89

00:40:42.740 I described Philip Larkin, the British poet,

00:40:48.100 generally regarded as probably the best British poet of the post-war period,

00:40:52.820 was offered the poet laureateship, turned it down,

00:40:55.880 came up with the line,

00:40:57.320 all that remains of us is love, 0.99

00:40:59.360 as well as the famous poem about your parents fucking you up. 0.99

00:41:02.920 Anyway, he was once loitering outside a Soho sex shop, 0.99

00:41:07.000 too embarrassed to go in,

00:41:08.660 and the owner came out and said,

00:41:10.640 was it bondage, sir?

00:41:12.140 As a matter of fact, it was.

00:41:13.840 And I relayed this anecdote,

00:41:15.780 which he told to Kingsley Amis in a letter to Kingsley Amis.

00:41:19.020 And I described him in the course of relaying this anecdote

00:41:21.400 as a fellow porn addict,

00:41:23.140 not meaning that he was a porn addict

00:41:25.480 or that I'm a porn addict.

00:41:26.480 It was a kind of self-deprecating remark,

00:41:29.140 not intended to be taken at face value.

00:41:31.560 But someone, you know, one of these offence archaeologists

00:41:34.320 kind of found this piece

00:41:36.060 and the sub, the spectator had put the headline at the top of the piece,

00:41:40.380 Confessions of a Porn Addict.

00:41:42.080 So he reproduced this piece on Twitter.

00:41:44.200 Literally, minutes later, it appeared in the Evening Standard headline,

00:41:49.220 you know,

00:41:50.180 New pressure mounts on Theresa May as university czar

00:41:53.800 confesses to being porn addict, quote-unquote.

00:41:57.420 And that was reproduced in The Times the next day.

00:41:59.980 I mean, one of the kind of eye-opening things about this whole experience

00:42:03.460 was realising the extent to which the mainstream media

00:42:06.400 now just takes its cue from social media

00:42:09.000 without doing any kind of checking.

00:42:11.920 You'd expect higher standards to be shown by journalists

00:42:15.420 for the evening standard and the times

00:42:17.600 than by an amateur offence archaeologist on Twitter.

00:42:20.580 But no, they produce something embarrassing about you

00:42:23.000 and it's just immediately reproduced as though, 0.99

00:42:24.960 ah, they've discovered that this guy's a porn addict. 0.95

00:42:28.720 That'll embarrass the PM, 0.97

00:42:30.040 because the Prime Minister had effectively appointed me

00:42:32.520 to this this regulatory body anyway so it's just kind of ridiculous but one thing i was going to

00:42:37.040 say in response to your point is what was it like to um to see people dragging your name through the

00:42:43.780 mud and this kind of horrible feeling of powerlessness that you can't do anything about it 0.95

00:42:49.220 um you know you can you can object but you're not a great witness in your own defense people

00:42:53.600 don't take that particularly seriously you hope other people will kind of leap to your defense

00:42:58.560 and some people did but not that many do in these situations because people are frightened

00:43:02.200 of these twitter mobs understandably um and uh for me i i did think at the time this must be what

00:43:08.660 it's like for um you know people not involved in the media people who don't have any power or

00:43:15.220 influence or money to see their names produced in the media that feeling of powerlessness must

00:43:21.140 be what it's like for ordinary people when a story appears about them uh which is completely wrong

00:43:27.200 and they don't feel they can kind of they have any redress they can't well they can complain to

00:43:31.620 and I didn't in the end complain to him

00:43:34.280 so I did complain to the Guardian's ombudsman

00:43:36.860 and that was a total waste of time

00:43:39.220 So all of this happens

00:43:40.680 your name is dragged through the mud

00:43:42.700 you're eventually forced to

00:43:45.460 well, you were forced to

00:43:48.200 or did you choose to apologise and resign from this point?

00:43:51.040 I decided after nine days of mounting pressure

00:43:56.520 to resign and apologise

00:44:00.320 and you know it was becoming an untenable situation a petition had been got up with

00:44:08.800 something like 225 000 signatures on change.org demanding i'd be sacked or people who thoroughly

00:44:16.960 investigated every article and checked every tweet and made up their own mind yeah and

00:44:22.760 there was a kind of mob of reporters outside my house waiting to kind of ambush me you know

00:44:29.840 whenever i left or came home my 14 year old daughter was kind of refusing to leave the house 0.96

00:44:36.040 um my wife said that if another person came up to her at the school gate and said you know

00:44:40.840 are you okay she was gonna hit them you know um uh and uh what were they saying to me let me just

00:44:48.620 interrupt you there very quickly with your wife were they commiserating with you as a family or 0.89

00:44:55.260 were they saying to her are you okay co-existing with this evil misogynist eugenic no i think they 0.94

00:45:00.740 were saying are you how are you coping with this kind of onslaught of um of abuse of your husband

00:45:07.260 i don't think they were saying how are you all right as in um is it you know are you right living

00:45:12.920 with this kind of vile misogynist uh no i think i think they were just but you know when people

00:45:18.500 i mean i wasn't there i don't know what what their attitude was when they were saying it but

00:45:22.680 generally when people kind of express pity and concern it's always kind of tinged with a kind of

00:45:30.640 little bit of glee a bit of schadenfreude yeah um anyway um uh the other difficulty was that um

00:45:38.920 uh the uh the other members of the board were at this point threatening to resign

00:45:46.080 if i didn't resign okay um and that was putting sir michael barber in a very difficult position

00:45:51.820 he didn't want to have to kind of choose between siding with me or siding with these other members

00:45:56.040 of the board and it was kind of casting a kind of huge uh pull over the launch of this new regulator

00:46:04.080 um uh which i think has an important role to play one of its one of its jobs is going to be

00:46:09.380 protecting free speech on british campuses um another is going to be trying to stop kind of

00:46:15.000 runaway salaries for wildly overpaid vice chancellors trying to do something about

00:46:20.240 the grade inflation at universities so it's got lots of important things to do and you know i

00:46:26.280 believe in its mission um and so i realized i wasn't helping it any by kind of clinging on

00:46:33.060 and this story kind of continuing to dominate the news um so i resigned and uh i'd been advised by

00:46:40.940 um by some people that if you resign and apologize then you know don't expect don't expect the

00:46:49.740 outrage mob to then disperse and go oh okay he's apologized let's move on find another victim

00:46:55.520 it just emboldens them even further and so if you resign and apologize they'll just come after you

00:47:02.900 and demand you step down from all your other jobs they'll come after Fraser Nelson at the spectator

00:47:08.020 they'll see it as an admission a blanket admission of guilt everything you've accused me of

00:47:13.080 I'm guilty of I am this terrible person you are right and that that is actually more or less

00:47:19.560 That's exactly what happened. So the moment I stepped down from the Office of Students

00:47:23.740 and apologised, various leaders of teaching unions demanded that I step down from the

00:47:34.500 Free Schools charity I was running, demanded that I step down from any involvement with

00:47:39.860 the schools I'd set up. The Fulbright Commission came under pressure, someone got a kind of

00:47:46.440 page up on Facebook claiming to be a page representing other Fulbright scholars wanting

00:47:52.680 my scalp so I had to step down from the Fulbright Commission. I was an honorary fellow of Buckingham

00:47:59.300 University and I got an email from Buckingham University telling me that actually I'd

00:48:07.080 misunderstood and that my honorary fellowship which was granted in something like 2011 was only

00:48:12.860 for three years so it had expired in 2014 so I could no longer call myself and I like hang on a

00:48:18.280 second I spoke at this festival of education at Buckingham University last year and you billed me

00:48:24.320 in the program as an honorary fellow so this is news to me anyway so that was their kind of sneaky

00:48:29.620 sneaky way of stripping me of that particular honor and eventually I did have to stand down

00:48:35.320 from the free schools charity I was running and I had to stand down from the board of trustees

00:48:41.660 of the charity that the four schools I'd helped set up sat within so in total I was I lost four

00:48:48.760 no five positions as a result of this kind of outrage. Let me ask you this one final thing

00:48:54.660 sorry Francis on this from my side I know it might seem like an insensitive question from

00:49:00.420 someone like me who hasn't been through it but I always wonder when I see somebody being smeared

00:49:05.200 in this way, the previous comments being misused by people in many cases who are no better than

00:49:12.580 the person that they're talking about. If you go through their Twitter feed, you'll find exactly

00:49:15.700 the same thing. I mean, I can see why you resigned in the sense that it was sabotaging the work of

00:49:22.060 the board to which you'd been appointed and it was going to be. But in terms of your apology,

00:49:26.320 why does no one ever stand up to these people and say, you bunch of sanctimonious, hypocritical 0.99

00:49:31.680 cunts why don't you go and look at your own behavior we're all flawed we're we're all human 0.99

00:49:36.840 none of us never make mistakes we're all like this so i'm not going to apologize for being human 0.98

00:49:42.780 i'm doing my best here's the work that i've been doing i'm not going to apologize why does nobody

00:49:48.300 ever do that um why didn't you do that i think sometimes people do do that um uh and um you know

00:49:55.940 And that can sometimes be a better strategy than apologising.

00:50:01.660 I felt the need to apologise partly because, you know,

00:50:06.260 I did feel contrite about some of the things I'd said on Twitter.

00:50:11.980 You know, there were some things that when they were reproduced,

00:50:15.760 one was reproduced on the front page of the Mail on Sunday, 0.99

00:50:17.900 some stupid gag I'd made about starving children in Africa 0.99

00:50:24.340 during a kind of red-nosed day English telethon broadcast. 0.99

00:50:29.880 And, you know, when that tweet was reproduced

00:50:34.200 on the front page of the Mail on Sunday,

00:50:36.740 my first thought was, thank God my dad's not still alive,

00:50:40.140 you know, because this is so shaming.

00:50:43.440 And, yes, there were certain things I had said

00:50:45.960 that I did regret saying,

00:50:48.640 and so I thought I ought to apologise for saying them.

00:50:52.620 But I also hoped that if I stepped down and apologized,

00:50:58.600 I naively thought that that would draw a line under it

00:51:00.820 and I could continue my work with the schools I've set up

00:51:04.240 and the work I was doing helping other people set up free schools.

00:51:08.560 That turned out to be a mistake.

00:51:12.160 But that was my reasoning at the time.

00:51:15.600 The reason I ask is I understand that you were contrite

00:51:19.680 about some of the things that you said,

00:51:21.060 But, you know, the two of us are comedians.

00:51:23.100 The number of times we've gone on stage and we've tried to make a joke about something

00:51:26.520 and it just hasn't worked or it's offended someone.

00:51:28.940 Speak for yourself, mate.

00:51:30.260 You were just telling me about last night, mate.

00:51:32.160 Don't do this.

00:51:33.340 The number of times that you try to do something doesn't quite work

00:51:36.880 or you say something's out of place or whatever.

00:51:39.480 It's a normal part of human existence to make mistakes.

00:51:43.100 Why does your having said something that you regret

00:51:46.220 mean that you now have to be treated as this pariah?

00:51:50.260 That's something I don't understand.

00:51:52.260 Well, I think that's... I mean, I agree with that.

00:51:55.600 I think that, you know, people should be judged in the round.

00:52:01.500 Right.

00:52:01.940 You should judge people according to the totality of their behaviour

00:52:05.220 and not judge them according to the worst things they've done.

00:52:10.940 It's like defining people by their worst moments,

00:52:15.140 taking a lapse of judgment in which they've, you know,

00:52:19.460 made a gag which didn't work and which could be construed as offensive to some people um taking

00:52:26.300 that as the defining moment in someone's life which then uh completely um eclipses everything

00:52:35.220 else they've done so you could be someone who'd worked with kind of handicapped children your

00:52:40.640 entire life you could have a handicapped younger brother whom you've supported selflessly your

00:52:47.100 entire life but if you make one joke about handicapped children suddenly you are a kind of

00:52:55.140 a terrible person and all the work you've done everything else you've done is completely 0.85

00:53:00.440 disregarded i mean one of the one of the the points i made in my piece about all this for

00:53:05.300 quillette that was published last week is that we've reached a this kind of strange point in

00:53:11.220 our society whereby virtue signaling is considered more important trumps actually being virtuous

00:53:18.840 so not breaching speech codes which restrict what you can say about disadvantaged groups

00:53:25.900 is actually considered more important than helping disadvantaged groups so the fact that I've you

00:53:31.780 know done all this work to help disadvantaged kids dating back you know 30 35 years

00:53:37.660 is less important when it comes to judging my character

00:53:42.880 and whether I'm a fit and proper person to serve on a public regulator

00:53:46.040 than one thing I said about disadvantaged kids

00:53:52.560 in a piece in The Spectator 20 years ago.

00:53:54.600 Do you think that this urge and this desire

00:53:57.900 and this lust of publicly shamed people

00:54:00.340 is inherent in our character?

00:54:02.620 And if you look at the medieval times, things like the stocks,

00:54:04.880 I think where do you think this comes from why do you think some people get so much of a vicarious

00:54:11.300 pleasure and and just I don't even gratitude I think is a word to see someone publicly shamed

00:54:19.100 lose their career when you actually know deep down that you are making a serious impact on

00:54:24.500 someone's mental health and not only on their mental health but the mental health of the people

00:54:28.500 around them i think um i think uh i think and i've thought about this um and i think it's uh

00:54:37.700 i think it must have something to do with the disgust instinct um it's the same root uh as

00:54:45.040 racism um uh so i think uh a particular group in order to um uh uh solidify um its sense of

00:54:57.180 cohesiveness in order to create a sense of belonging and community and common purpose

00:55:03.080 sometimes vilifies certain individuals who are in its view members of an out group

00:55:10.540 and that dates back to i think what they're appealing to is the kind of human disgust

00:55:16.580 instinct this sense if something's bad for you if it's going to contaminate you in some way then

00:55:22.600 you automatically kind of push it out and you want to destroy it and you also think anyone else

00:55:27.460 who comes into contact with it is going to be similarly contaminated and they have to be kind

00:55:32.100 of cast out as well I think it's to do with that I think it's you know down the ages as you've said

00:55:38.320 in groups have always tried to dehumanize and other out groups and in some cases individuals

00:55:47.780 who are emblematic of those outgroups just in order to create a sense of identity and community

00:55:54.180 within the in-group and that's probably more likely to happen when societies are in a state

00:55:59.940 of flux and when there's a lot of uncertainty and when the identity when the values of the in-group

00:56:05.980 becoming kind of vaguer and more amorphous and less defined a quick way of affirming a sense of

00:56:12.980 identity and common purpose is to find some individual who they can all collectively express

00:56:19.160 their disgust for and their contempt for and you know some people say to me do you think if people

00:56:25.100 realized what it was like what it's like for people who find themselves being targeted by

00:56:30.680 these twitchfork mobs do you think if people realize that there is a human being kind of

00:56:34.820 twisting on the end of that pitchfork and that they are suffering their families are suffering

00:56:39.960 and that there's been no due process or effectively lynching someone,

00:56:45.460 do you think if they realised, you know, if you made them pause

00:56:49.100 and you actually explained the various shortcomings of the process

00:56:54.220 which has led to this point and the impact it's having on the individual,

00:56:58.380 that they would reconsider?

00:57:00.200 I don't think they would.

00:57:01.060 I think it's a kind of bloodlust.

00:57:02.860 And if they find out that you're suffering,

00:57:04.740 And, you know, that just kind of makes them even more crazy and frenzied in their desire to destroy you, like a pack of wolves.

00:57:13.240 And do you think the fact that you're a white, middle-class male who went to Oxford, do you think that made you even more fair game? 0.85

00:57:20.360 Yes. I mean, I think left-wing politics has taken an identitarian turn.

00:57:28.040 I mean, identity politics isn't new. It's been around, you know, since at least the 1960s.

00:57:32.200 But it's generally been associated with the hard, regressive left, and that has been kept at bay within most left-wing movements, left-wing political parties.

00:57:42.480 I think since the triumph of Brexit and Trump, the regressive left identitarians have seen their influence within the left increase dramatically, partly because it's as though their claims that capitalism inexorably leads to fascism and that periods of economic uncertainty produce kind of dangerous right wing populist movements, it looks as though their analysis has some purchase.

00:58:11.580 I mean, I think they're wrong about that, and I don't think that is what's going on, but you can see if you're a kind of soft leftist, you suddenly see these things happening, it looks as though these profits to the left of you are actually onto something.

00:58:22.020 And also I think they feel that with the apparent political surge, resurgence of right-wing populist leaders and causes across Europe and across the West, that they need to kind of stick together so it's no longer appropriate to keep the hard, aggressive left at bay.

00:58:40.480 they have to make common cause, at least until these kind of demons have been defeated.

00:58:45.540 So I think for various reasons, identitarianism is on the march.

00:58:49.960 And you see it in universities, you see it amongst public intellectuals,

00:58:53.920 you see it in public bureaucracies, in large corporations.

00:58:57.860 They all seem to be suddenly dancing to the identitarian tune.

00:59:02.400 And if you are a kind of apex predator in the identitarian food chain, 0.69

00:59:06.740 You know, if you're a white, heteronormative male from a privileged background, worse, if you're a Tory, a Brexit-supporting Tory with all those characteristics, then they just assume that you must have all these kind of terrible, toxic beliefs. 0.96

00:59:24.700 You must be a misogynist, you must be a racist, you must be a homophobe, because that's how you justify your privilege.

00:59:33.060 It doesn't occur to them that there could be a kind of perfectly reasonable intellectual case for free market capitalism. 0.95

00:59:40.460 They just assume that anyone defending capitalism, if they're a white heteronormative male,

00:59:47.920 it must be because they're trying to defend their privilege

00:59:51.240 and that they therefore subscribe to these kind of toxic beliefs which exclude other people from power

00:59:58.880 and preserve the structural inequality,

01:00:01.960 which is kind of killing people who are minorities and so forth

01:00:05.840 and people of colour and women and so on and so forth.

01:00:08.860 So I think they were very willing to believe

01:00:10.840 that because I ticked all these kind of demographic boxes

01:00:16.000 that I held all these toxic beliefs

01:00:18.980 so then they set out to find evidence

01:00:21.400 that I did indeed hold these beliefs

01:00:24.040 and it didn't take them long to find it.

01:00:26.300 And I think as well, when reading your article and going into a bit of research about your case,

01:00:31.460 and what I've noticed as well is it does seem, which I find really interesting actually,

01:00:35.300 because my mother's Latin, Latin American, and I've got a whole side of my family who are not white and all the rest of it. 0.54

01:00:41.000 And I just, this is entirely for my dad's side from County Leitrim, but there we go.

01:00:45.260 But one thing I've noticed with people is they'll go, oh right, yeah, but he's just a white male.

01:00:50.500 Therefore, you know, it doesn't matter because he's not oppressed.

01:00:54.600 and therefore anything that I am doing to him,

01:00:57.980 no matter how unreasonable,

01:00:59.940 it's just a way of me redressing the balance.

01:01:03.280 And that's how they justify their arguments.

01:01:05.880 Would you agree with that?

01:01:06.780 I think that is in some cases how they justify their arguments, yes.

01:01:12.040 But I think it's a way of licensing themselves

01:01:16.280 to be unthinkingly cruel and dismissive and contemptuous

01:01:21.740 of people who they think of as being members of out groups.

01:01:25.780 They think, you know, for years, people of colour, minorities,

01:01:31.460 non-cisgendered people have been oppressed.

01:01:35.200 And therefore, we're perfectly entitled to mete out that treatment

01:01:40.000 to people who don't fall into those categories.

01:01:43.980 But it's a kind of, isn't it a kind of, it's the same kind of category error as racism,

01:01:50.420 to think that because white men were slavers in the 18th century,

01:01:59.280 that therefore every white male is in some measure responsible for enslaving people.

01:02:06.400 Because Harvey Weinstein, in all likelihood, we don't know for sure, the trial is continuing, 0.99

01:02:13.480 raped someone, therefore all white men are rapists. 0.98

01:02:18.480 I mean, it's exactly the equivalent error as thinking that because a person of colour commits a crime, that therefore all people of colour are criminals. 0.88

01:02:30.520 And you would hope that rather than just reproducing this category error and applying and just kind of reversing it, as it were, and applying it to another group of people,

01:02:42.640 they would say actually that's a category error and it's wrong to judge people according to the

01:02:47.400 color of their skin or their gender or their sexual orientation or whether they're cis or

01:02:52.380 non-cis but they seem to have gone from you know saying that that's wrong which i don't think anyone

01:02:58.740 you know would dispute whether a classical liberal or a marxist to saying ah it's not wrong to judge

01:03:05.600 people on the basis of the color of their skin or their sexual orientation we've just been judging

01:03:10.260 the wrong people badly we're just going to flip it so now if you're a white heteronormative male

01:03:15.820 you're a bad person but if you're a person of color and you're non-cisgendered and you're a 0.92

01:03:22.060 woman then you're a good person which is just it just seems completely incomprehensible 0.98

01:03:26.900 i mean it's a very very good point you make how much of the blame would you ascribe to social

01:03:32.920 media and facebook in particular the fact that you know that people now who scream the loudest

01:03:38.400 who make accusations they seem to be the most dominant voices like you i consider myself on

01:03:44.260 the left but i look at these certain extreme members of the left and i think you don't you

01:03:48.980 you don't represent me in any shape or form but somehow you are now seen to be the voice of the

01:03:54.560 left in inverted commas and it's again with the right you know you see katie hopkins getting 0.50

01:03:59.140 wheeled out and i've got lots of friends who are conservatives and they're horrified by her

01:04:03.060 and have rhetoric.

01:04:05.620 I think social media undoubtedly has played a part

01:04:10.160 in coarsening political debate,

01:04:14.140 lowering the standard of political discourse,

01:04:17.320 making ad hominem attacks much more prevalent

01:04:20.600 and much more effective.

01:04:22.580 I don't think that it's wholly responsible.

01:04:25.340 I think those things have always been there.

01:04:28.660 Some of the kind of, you know, those sorts of impulses,

01:04:30.960 and even in different political periods,

01:04:33.060 You've seen kind of, you know, I mean, there was a lot of fake news.

01:04:36.080 There's been fake news in U.S. presidential elections dating back to, you know, the dawn of the republic.

01:04:43.440 But it does seem to have escalated and got a lot worse since the sort of social media moment.

01:04:55.260 And it'll be interesting to see if we can do anything about that.

01:04:59.440 I mean, I think this is an interesting example, isn't it?

01:05:01.120 I mean, it's instead of trying to carve out a voice for yourselves within the mainstream media, though you may be doing that as well, you've effectively created a different platform for yourself, in part because you don't think anymore.

01:05:19.380 You don't have the confidence that ideas will be debated and taken seriously and we can have a proper, grown-up, mature, well-informed conversation on mainstream media anymore.

01:05:32.080 Mainstream media has effectively been corrupted by social media and it's kind of sensationalist and as click-baity now as social media.

01:05:39.660 So to create a space to have a much more grown-up, well-informed conversation in which you can seriously consider different ideas and get to the bottom of things,

01:05:48.600 You have to do it outside the mainstream media and create a space for yourself to do it.

01:05:53.120 I think one source of hope is in the same way that, you know, the Internet has had a net negative impact on the level of political debate here, America, elsewhere.

01:06:04.100 So it's also created space for programs like this and for people like Dave Rubin and Jordan Peterson to actually have proper, grown-up, quite long conversations about what really matters.

01:06:21.540 And one of the reasons I think that platforms like this are important and gaining traction

01:06:26.660 is because people are fed up with that kind of petty name-calling, shaming,

01:06:34.600 just that kind of, you know, the dominance of that kind of woke mindset

01:06:38.740 that kind of permeates social media and now the mainstream media.

01:06:42.360 Well, it's fascinating that you say that, Toby, because if you look at our YouTube channel

01:06:47.240 and the number one type of comment that we get is...

01:06:50.400 It's about my personal appearance.

01:06:52.680 That is true.

01:06:54.160 That is actually true.

01:06:55.340 Keep those coming, by the way.

01:06:56.480 I'm enjoying it.

01:06:57.440 But the second most common comment is BBC Channel 4, take note.

01:07:01.840 This is how you do an interview.

01:07:03.260 I wish TV was like this.

01:07:04.980 I wish more people did this.

01:07:06.460 People are absolutely crying out for people to be having serious, genuine conversations,

01:07:12.460 for hearing all sides, for hearing an open conversation.

01:07:15.000 You know, we get a lot of hate, by the way, for having center-right figures on.

01:07:18.880 We've invited Owen Jones on, we've invited people, James O'Brien, people from the left, people from the social justice, Akala we'd love to have on.

01:07:27.040 But the problem that I think we have now is the far left is becoming culturally hegemonic in our debate, in our conversation.

01:07:35.140 And so those people don't need to come on a renegade YouTube show because they can go on the mainstream media every day of the week and talk there and not be interrupted every three seconds and not be character assassinated.

01:07:47.080 And I think that's where what we're doing here is getting the purchase that it's getting

01:07:51.760 because there is no way to have genuine conversation now on television.

01:07:56.200 It just doesn't happen.

01:07:57.160 It's all Kathy Newman-esque.

01:07:59.060 And all you see is someone being interrupted every three seconds

01:08:02.480 and you can't have a conversation like that.

01:08:04.480 And one of the things we find as well is when we talk to somebody for a long time,

01:08:07.920 if there are flaws in their thinking, if there are flaws in their logic,

01:08:10.980 we don't need to batter them into submission for that to be shown up.

01:08:14.340 we just need to let them talk and ask probing questions as we have done and those flaws will

01:08:19.360 expose themselves without anybody being insulted or offended or anything like that so we're very

01:08:25.660 grateful for you coming on and i think i think that's where the future is and i hope that's

01:08:29.840 where it is but let me let me ask you one final question uh or two final questions um you you

01:08:34.800 told us you're a classical liberal for for british audience who may be people who don't

01:08:40.500 watch Dave Rubin as we do. What is a classical liberal and what is your elevator pitch to people

01:08:46.320 who may not yet be classical liberals to join that cause? Okay, I think a classical liberal

01:08:51.240 is someone who believes in natural rights. They believe that insofar as the state enjoys certain

01:09:02.700 powers, it's because those powers have been granted to the state by the people, and they

01:09:11.820 can be taken back. So the kind of ur-text for classical liberals is probably John Locke's

01:09:20.020 Second Treatise of Government, in which he describes the state of nature and how rights

01:09:25.280 get transferred from people in the state of nature to the state. But we also believe

01:09:32.460 in limited government, low taxation, freedom of speech, religious tolerance.

01:09:41.260 We also believe in progress, that actually things are getting better across the world,

01:09:47.060 and in particular since the creation of free market capitalism,

01:09:51.940 things have been on a really steep upward improvement curve,

01:09:56.160 not just in the West, but in the developing world too. 0.93

01:09:59.600 Oh, you really are Nazi. 0.97

01:10:02.460 Okay. Listen, the last question we always like to ask our guests is, what do you think is the one thing that none of us are talking about that we really should be talking about? 0.93

01:10:14.300 Well, one thing that slightly troubled me is the way in which people on the center right and the right have been using the shaming tactics of people on the left to go after people on the left.

01:10:32.460 So, for instance, James Gunn, the director of Guardians of the Galaxy Volumes 1 and 2, and who was also directing Volume 3, was recently fired by Disney because various inappropriate things he had said on Twitter.

01:10:49.660 I mean, quite a few things, and, you know, even if I say so myself, a lot worse than the things I had said.

01:10:56.340 But nonetheless, you know, things he'd said, for the most part, quite late at night on Twitter,

01:11:01.240 where he was trying to kind of play the role of an edgelord and kind of tell kind of risky, off-colour jokes.

01:11:08.940 I mean, very risky and off-colour in his case.

01:11:11.680 But those tweets were identified by people on the right,

01:11:17.300 And they thought he was fair game because he has opposed Trump and he has demanded that people like various directors who he thinks has sexually harassed women should be fired.

01:11:30.860 So he's sort of joined outrage mobs before.

01:11:34.280 He's not quite a witch finder general, but he's certainly kind of, you know, he's complicit. 0.58

01:11:38.900 So they thought fair game.

01:11:41.220 But it seems to be just becoming generally accepted on kind of my side of the divide that, you know, it's OK to deploy those tactics against people on the left.

01:11:54.280 And the rationale is if we apply those tactics to them, then they're going to stop applying them to us in due course because they're going to realise that, you know, if we play that game, we'll lose as much as we gain.

01:12:06.840 I think that we should pause and think very carefully before embracing those tactics.

01:12:14.300 And of course, I would say that because I've actually been through it and I realise how unpleasant and unfair being judged in that way is.

01:12:22.380 But I also think that the correct response to this phenomenon is not to just say, yeah, people on the left are equally guilty and here's why. 0.96

01:12:36.140 But to say, actually, people shouldn't be judged according to lapses of judgment, stupid things they've said in the middle of the night after several glasses of wine.

01:12:46.260 You should take them in the round and see what they're like as human beings over the course of their lives and not just try and skewer them according to their worst possible moments. 0.62

01:12:58.940 and and if we do engage in the same tactics i think we surrender any principle we have over

01:13:07.640 trying to defenestrate people on that basis and i also think that we don't need to engage in those

01:13:16.500 tactics because the left if left to their own devices will turn those tactics on themselves

01:13:21.920 i mean you see it over and over again mary beard for instance who is a kind of died in the world

01:13:27.200 lefty, has been several times kind of targeted by Twitchfork mobs for kind of being insufficiently

01:13:34.260 woke in various comments she made about the Oxfam scandal, for instance. You know, the left is

01:13:39.900 constantly going after its own. You know, there's the old phrase, the right looks for allies, the

01:13:46.580 left looks for traitors. I mean, not always true, but broadly true. So we don't have to engage in

01:13:52.220 those tactics ourselves in order to eventually make sure that this kind of public shaming

01:13:58.720 stops because they will turn those tactics on themselves and in due course realize that

01:14:06.160 that is no way to behave. Toby that was amazing thank you very very much before we go is there

01:14:12.520 anything you'd like to promote your twitter or if you've got articles or books or whatever

01:14:17.440 I think the thing I'd like to promote is Quillette for viewers, listeners who haven't yet discovered Quillette.

01:14:29.660 It is this online Australian magazine started by a former Australian grad student called Claire Lehman.

01:14:39.080 Yeah, we're really hoping you're going to come on, Claire.

01:14:40.840 I know you said you would.

01:14:41.880 Next time you're in London, we're waiting for you.

01:14:44.060 And it was singled out in Barry Weiss's piece about the intellectual dark web

01:14:49.440 in the New York Times magazine a couple of months ago

01:14:52.220 as ground zero of the intellectual dark web.

01:14:56.120 I mean, it has articles by academics, intellectuals, journalists.

01:15:01.500 Comedians, I've written them.

01:15:02.540 Comedians, you've written for them, absolutely.

01:15:04.740 And, you know, the level of debate in Quillette is incredibly high.

01:15:11.300 The standard of argument, of evidence, is incredibly high.

01:15:16.320 It's all informed by kind of mainstream science.

01:15:20.680 It's a scientifically literate publication.

01:15:23.980 I mean, it's an extraordinary breath of fresh air.

01:15:26.520 It's like a kind of beacon of light in the kind of darkling plane.

01:15:31.680 And I've recently become an associate editor there.

01:15:34.560 And I'm very proud to be associated with it.

01:15:37.080 And I've written some things for it too.

01:15:38.200 My piece about being publicly shamed six months ago.

01:15:41.300 appeared in Quillette last week.

01:15:43.020 I got a public humiliation dive

01:15:44.460 because one of the things that happens

01:15:45.460 when you're publicly shamed

01:15:46.380 is you just,

01:15:47.280 without seeming to help it,

01:15:48.840 you just shed pounds.

01:15:50.920 I need to get publicly shamed.

01:15:53.020 Oh, that's coming, mate.

01:15:53.940 Yeah, that's coming.

01:15:55.060 I've joined the gym.

01:15:55.980 What's the point in that?

01:15:56.760 You won't have to wait long.

01:15:57.600 Just talk to a few more Nazis. 0.77

01:15:59.560 That's all you need.

01:15:59.940 Yeah, yeah.

01:16:00.600 We'll be called Nazis.

01:16:01.420 And I'll have rock hard abs.

01:16:02.940 Yeah.

01:16:03.400 Great.

01:16:04.020 You'll have Nazi abs. 0.76

01:16:05.040 Nazi abs, mate, yeah. 0.62

01:16:06.260 That's where it's at.

01:16:07.020 Because they all look good in uniform.

01:16:08.380 Right.

01:16:08.700 Well, well done for plugging Quillette,

01:16:09.940 but you are on Twitter at

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01:16:12.380 Toadmeister

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01:16:14.640 he's a great writer

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TRIGGERnometry - August 20, 2018

Toby Young on Journalism, Education, Public Shaming and Offence Archeology

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