This column is a train of thought – no, a train of feeling – which originated in a photo from an online London news site that popped up on one of my devices a few days ago.
The picture is of a dozen or so women holding up a long piece of yellow tape across the entrance to what used to be called the “Ladies’ Pond” on Hampstead Heath. The tape reads “no men beyond this point – women only”.
We live a mile or so away. Friends and family members often use the women’s pond and I walk past it at least once a week. It’s quiet, it’s peaceful and it’s not Hyde Park Corner. So my feeling when seeing that photo was – independent of the righteousness of the cause – one of mixed sadness and irritation. I thought, “Do you have to?”
Earlier this year there was a meeting of Kenwood Ladies Pond Association at which it was moved that the word “women” be replaced by the term “biological female” in their constitution. This would have prevented any male-to-female transgender person from using the pond. In a meeting of around 200 women the motion was defeated by three to one. The demonstrators thus represented the defeated.
This is a complicated world so both these things can be true: that no woman of my acquaintance has ever seen someone obviously male using the pond, and that the women’s pond should be a place where women feel safe.
The demonstrators were probably perfectly within their rights to mount their picket (I admit I don’t know the Heath’s bylaws on this point), in much the same way as your neighbours are entitled to go on holiday for a month, leaving the builders in and your quiet time in the garden ruined. But did they really have to?
What this brought to my mind is how exhausting all this demonstrating, all this outrage and all this opinionating has become. And yes, as an opinion writer, I am aware of the irony here.
Nowhere is safe from it. Tent camps spring up on Oxbridge premises because of the Gaza war, deploying the same logic that I would be using if I picketed the same camps demanding an end to Houthi attacks in the Red Sea. Cambridge anti-fascists turn out to oppose a far right that is extremely unlikely to go anywhere near their town – presumably just for the joy of being out there with placards. Meanwhile, some schmo on the far left decides that a good slogan for an anti-fascist rally is “Zionists out of Finchley”, which is more or less equivalent to “buy a bagel from a goy”.
I don’t want to lump everyone together but there is a kind of mass opinion entitlement out there: got a view, go out and shout it in someone else’s ear. An extreme version is the guy exhorting people online to burn down hotels housing asylum seekers, who is then astonished to have his collar felt for incitement.
“What have I done, officer?” seems to be his genuine response, one amplified a billionfold by the world’s richest and seemingly most ignorant man, Elon Musk. Crack down on rioters? (Sorry, people with legitimate concerns who just happened to be out walking with a brick in their hands.) That’s “two-tier Keir” – and this charge is made literally weeks after the sentencing to prison for up to five years for the Just Stop Oil people who were plotting how to close the M25.
They won’t have expected so much jail time, if any. Like their colleagues who attack pictures in galleries, their opinion is all that counts.
Once or twice a week, I go to Broadcasting House to record a current affairs programme. Fairly often, there’s a picket outside and the security staff all walk around looking serious and necessary.
We’ve had pro-Palestinian demos accusing the BBC of being complicit in genocide and pro-Israeli demos accusing it of being antisemitic. Theoretically they could both be right, but it’s unlikely. You try talking to them.
Of course, we scribblers and TV lips bear some responsibility by the way we talk up these emanations. As the first rioters were being sentenced and it seemed evident, to me at least, that mass rioting wasn’t happening, at least one respectable radio station was broadcasting under the legend “Britain in flames”.
I stand by the right of Britons to demonstrate peacefully and to express their views in almost any way they want without prosecution, even if it costs money and some inconvenience. But right now I am exhausted by it. A demonstration is not an act of listening or negotiation, and I think we need both. OK, you’re outraged. I get it. Now what are we going to do?
