Posted: November 29th 2011

2 delusions for the price of one...

Twitch Hunting the obnoxious ‘racist tram woman’ gains extra momentum because she’s working class and her child is presumed a hapless, sponge-like creature.

We all know that the liberal elite love to reveal their contempt for ‘fat, ugly, white’ Britain (aka the white working class) at every opportunity.  But in the case of the possibly drunk or mentally ill ‘tram woman’ rant (lets face it we don’t know anything about her - yet) you get two popular delusions for the price of one.  Because there sitting on her lap is a child quietly soaking up his mother’s racist world view.  This is enough to set the whole world chattering because the idea that kids are indeed passive, sponge like creatures is all pervasive and actively encouraged by early years interventionists.  “From the day they are born, they are learning the beginnings of racial and often racially prejudiced attitudes – just as they are learning the beginnings of language”, says Jane Lane author of the 2008 National Children’s Bureau publication, Young Children and Racial Justice.

Not much chance for this kid then?  So vulgar is this de-based idea of kids hard-wired with ‘the wrong messages’ you’d think the experts that promote nip-it-in-the-bud policy interventions in schools and nurseries and blather endlessly about how ‘it’s the parents’ who are to blame would stop and have a think.  For example, how have social attitudes managed to steadily liberalise in parallel with a past generation exposed to a level of racism and homophobia that would cause the twitter-sphere to gridlock and crash? 

Today, the liberal elite don’t just swallow the myth of sponge-like kids (as the seeds of bad future adults). They extend it to adults too (often caricatured as monkey-see/monkey do tabloid reading numbskulls).  Driving all the demands for more and ever tougher hate speech regulation is a degraded view of human agency.  It’s a view that no longer believes in our capacity for free-will, to be resilient, to manage our relationships without state intervention.

Thankfully children show us very quickly that they are not passive, uncritical sponges and, in as much as they insist on behaving childishly, display an impressive resistance to attempts at programming or reprogramming their values in-line with government policy.  But official attempts to do just that represent an attack on childhood.  Its only a matter of time before the ‘racist tram woman’ is cited as the tip of the iceberg of a problem that requires greater policing of hate speech (with the help of the new Twitter-ready bounty hunters) and the tram woman’s kid the latest emblem in the clarion call for more early years intervention.

See Patrick Hayes excellent article 'Sometimes a police state is a good thing' on Spiked here.