Welcome to The Gadfly Dispatch – a weekly collection of notes, observations and irritations about what’s happening out there in the real world.
This one’s for paid subscribers, although the opening note is for everyone.
Guidance on UK behaviours
It’s hard to overstate how strange Britain is as a country now, but in case there was any doubt, we need only look at the government’s new guidance for asylum seekers, which explains that they shouldn’t rape people. I’ll give you a moment to decide what to think about a country that needs to print that.
The document explains that sex without consent is rape, “a serious crime in the UK”, but makes no moral judgement about the act itself. Instead, it warns that “you could go to prison, lose your support and accommodation, and it will affect your asylum claim”. Rape is presented as something that may complicate your paperwork.
The guidance also explains that you must never “cut or harm a girl’s genitals (known as female genital mutilation).” Somewhere, a civil servant drafted this, hired a design agency to make it look pretty, and passed it to a few other people for legal checks before it eventually landed on the desk of someone at the top for sign-off.
Are we expected to believe that a man from a culture with very different attitudes to women and girls will read this and suddenly turn into John Stuart Mill? Because if a leaflet with a few bullet points and cartoon figures can do that, maybe we should airdrop a million of them on Afghanistan while we’re at it.
Imagine trying to explain any of this to a British soldier killed in 1945, believing he was defending a civilisation – that his grandchildren would hand out leaflets to men asking them to refrain from raping women and children before placing them in towns and cities across the country.
This guidance, by the way, is the product of an establishment that has spent decades telling us all cultures are equally valid. Yet surely this is the most explicit possible denial of that claim. What other interpretation is there except that some practices really are worse than others? Unless, of course, they’re saying that not raping women and not mutilating girls are merely British cultural preferences – like queuing, something the newcomer is kindly asked to observe.
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