Friday 10 November 2017

A man is dead. Are the witch-hunters happy now?

Brendan O'Neill
 But we do know this: Sargeant had been plunged into despair by accusations made against him as part of the increasingly febrile, nasty ‘Pestminster’ witch-hunt. And we know that the accusations did not merit police involvement – that is, they involved fairly mild behaviour, or ‘unwanted attention, inappropriate touching or groping’, in the words of internal Labour correspondence revealed by Sargeant’s distraught and angry family this morning. It is becoming difficult to avoid the possibility that Sargeant is a victim of the finger-pointing, due-process-demeaning cult of accusation swirling around the political sphere right now; that he was a working-class politician destroyed by middle-class hysteria.  .................The sexual-harassment hysteria is innately hostile to and even destructive of the idea of natural justice. Accusation has become enough to establish guilt. Witness the falling on to swords of MPs who have been merely accused, and accused of the most mundane kinds of behaviour, of things only the most prudish and immature of minds could consider crimes or misdemeanours. Kate Maltby complaining that Damian Green touched her knee, Jane Merrick saying Michael Fallon tried to kiss her. These pathetic accusations by actual adults have contributed to a climate in which even advances are reimagined as ‘sexual predation’ and anyone who once sent a saucy text or told an off-colour joke is instantly branded a pervert, a misogynist, on a spectrum with rapists, and unfit for public life. This is the Kafkaesque hell in which Sargeant found himself: where he didn’t know what he was accused of, but everyone felt pretty sure he was a ‘predator’, like all those other evil men."

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