The Joke: Part Seven

The show-trial and public execution of journalist Toby Young

PART TWO: THE CASE FOR THE DEFENCE

The hounding and un-personning of Toby Young left, for many onlookers, a nasty taste in the mouth. Lies had demonstrably been told – above all the over-arching lie that Young had done anything particularly reprehensible – and some of the least likeable people in British public life had got their chance to celebrate.

Throughout, the worst of motives had been assigned to Young, as though he were barely capable of a good thought or action. “Everything is always taken out of context and cast in the worst possible light,” he himself said later. At every point, the lowest of motives had been assigned to him.

Let us now, therefore, as a corrective and a thought-experiment, try casting a different light on Young’s words and actions. At the very least, it may provide new insight. At the end of it, readers may judge for themselves where they stand.

1

“Weeding out the disabled.”

We have seen the accusation in London Student and Private Eye (Der Merwe and Yeoman) that Young had attended the ‘London Conference on Intelligence.’

We have read Young’s assertion that he knew nothing about the speakers, visited the conference for only a few hours, and sat at the back, strictly as a journalist.

He did it, he said, to gather anecdote and colour for a talk he would give at a Montreal conference later that year – whose speakers would include such mainstream intellectuals as Professors Steven Pinker and James Flynn.

2

Regarding the London Conference, the piece was damning in the extreme about the company Young found himself in that day. Emil Kirkegaard, they pointed out, who had helped organise all four LCI conferences, had been photographed with someone making a Nazi salute and, they argued, had written in defence of child rape.

Another major figure, the piece reported, was Richard Lynn, the “white nationalist extremist” who ‘spoke at the conference in 2015 and 2016 (this would appear incorrect – there is no record of Lynn speaking in 2015). Lynn was also a leading light of Mankind Quarterly, whose founders, Van der Merwe wrote, included a “leading member of Mussolini’s eugenics taskforce’ and whose board once boasted ‘Nazi Joseph Mengele’s personal mentor.” This made the journal sound like some between-the-wars Fascist rag which had somehow made it into the present day - whereas in actual fact it was founded in Edinburgh in 1961, something the London Student piece failed to mention.

3

A recent issue (2020) of Mankind Quarterly, which can be found online, makes perplexing reading. Lynn does indeed seem somewhat fixated on race (“This indicates that Australian aborigines are higher r and lower K than Negroids” runs a typical line in the abstract to his featured piece), and though a fixation on race is not necessarily proof of racial hatred, the two surely sit together more than is comfortable.

Yet other pieces in the issue seem harmless and almost comically cranky:

“Love of Life in Iranian Clinical and Non-Clinical Groups.”

“Prediction of Hopelessness in a Western Sample Using Scores on the Arabic Scale of Optimism and Pessimism.”

“Is Gout Related to Achievement? Testing the Uric Acid Hypothesis in the Vietnam Experience.”

The magazine seems not so much dangerous as plain odd. It is hard to believe that Young went to sit at the feet of these people to receive enlightenment from them: the publication seems marginal in the extreme.

Yet Der Merwe’s piece on Young (on the London Student site it is credited only to him, with Yeomans unmentioned) in fact reads as a frantic join-the-dots of smear by association, a kind of “Six Degrees of Heinrich Himmler”: “X writes for Y-journal which was also once written for by Z, and therefore X is as bad as Z.” In its desire to incriminate, Van der Merwe’s piece hurls so many different names, acronyms and shady political links at you it’s dizzying and a headache to unpick. Perhaps that is deliberate.

One mentions these things not to nit-pick, but to point out that Van Der Merwe and Yeomans are dealing in quite broad brushstrokes. They clearly have an agenda of their own and a rather over-zealous sense of what they are searching for. This blinds them, conceivably, to nuance (or perhaps simply makes them consciously ignore it).

4

What seems indisputable is that Young was naïve in attending this conference – or would have been had he known the backstory of everyone present. Yet how many people have time rigorously to check these things? A conference that seems edgy and interesting will – especially if there are some genuine fruitcakes present – make for juicily entertaining stories later on.

He was also telling the truth about his Canada talk. Entitled “Liberal Creationism,” Young’s paper detailed “scientists and science writers who have got into trouble for talking about the genetic basis of intelligence and other psychological traits,” just as he claimed it had.

One can just about see, therefore, why he might have attended the London Conference. A non-academic preparing to speak in Montreal to academics, he would surely have felt he needed all the original material, all the anecdotal stuff, he could get. He admitted he’d heard people at the conference “express some pretty odd views. But I don’t accept that listening to someone putting forward an idea constitutes tacit acceptance or approval of that idea, however unpalatable.”

5

Was Young right about this? Could you or could you not be judged by the company you kept – even if you only kept it in an open forum, and for just a few hours?

Clearly some the thought the first, or at least claimed to. Young, as we have seen, had been accused by Dawn Butler of supporting “weeding out the disabled.” The comedian Nish Kumar had railed at him for being into “eugenics… some dark Nazi stuff.” Angela Eagle, oozing disapproval during the Urgent Question in the House of Commons, had hissed that Young clearly thought “so little of the contribution of disabled people in our society.”

It's useful here to look at the first of two passages of writing many felt incriminated him. It’s from the Spectator in 2012:

Inclusive. It’s one of those ghastly, politically correct words that have survived the demise of New Labour. Schools have got to be ‘inclusive’ these days. That means wheelchair ramps, the complete works of Alice Walker in the school library (though no Mark Twain) and a Special Educational Needs Department that can cope with everything from dyslexia to Munchausen syndrome by proxy. If [then education secretary, Michael] Gove is serious about wanting to bring back O-levels, the government will have to repeal the Equalities Act because any exam that isn’t ‘accessible’ to a functionally illiterate troglodyte with a mental age of six will be judged to be ‘elitist’ and therefore forbidden by Harman’s Law.

Young had, in the light of this piece, been accused of wanting to banish disabled people from schools by removing their wheelchair access, and of calling disabled people in general “functionally illiterate troglodytes with a mental age of six.”

Yet read it a couple of times, and it’s clear his detractors are being disingenuous and almost consciously playing dumb. Far from being a passage explicitly about disabled people, it appears far more concerned with schools patting themselves on the back for observing the fashionable pieties of the time instead of focussing on educational standards. That “functionally illiterate troglodyte” isn’t, surely, a real person in Young’s mind but a reductio ad absurdum of - as he saw it - a shallow, misguided policy which valued virtue-signalling above proper teaching. But this, for obvious reasons, was not an interpretation of much use to those who wished to bring him down.

6

Then there was Toby Young and eugenics.

Young had been styled by his accusers as, in his own words, B”ritain’s answer to Josef Mengele”, but why was he connected with eugenics at all? It went back to an article he had written for Quadrant Online in 2015, about in-vitro fertilisation, and the dilemmas it raised. In it Young referred to a 2004 article by Julian Savulescu, philosophy professor at Oxford, for the journal “Bioethics”, entitled – rather creepily – “Procreative beneficence. Why We Should Select the Best Children.”

Young summarised the central question the article raised thus. A woman is having in vitro fertilisation and produces four embryos to choose from. Imagine there were a genetic test that could predict - from gene subtypes - the likely IQ of your child ‘if given an ordinary education and upbringing.’ Would you then, Young asked, “test the four embryos for these gene subtypes and use this information in selecting which embryo to implant.”

He acknowledged the hypothetical nature of this – no one had yet established that intelligence was genetically-based nor, if it was, did they yet know how to identify the “subsets and combinations of genes associated with it.” But if ever such a thing did come to pass -. that there could be tests for an embryo’s future IQ - then surely, he argued, the rich would be quick to exploit this to shore up their place at the top of the heap. Therefore, in the name of social mobility, shouldn’t such information and choices be offered solely to the poor?

This proposal, arguably an egalitarian one, was not at its time of publication especially controversial. Dr Iain Brassington, a senior lecturer at Manchester University, described its arguments as familiar, even “pretty standard stuff” denied there was anything in the piece “morally beyond the pale.”

Yet Young had called this field of study “progressive eugenics” and here, arguably, was the problem. “Eugenics” is one of those words which sets off such loud alarm bells for many that they cannot hear the nuances thereafter. “Eugenics” does not mean egalitarianism to the average person – it means sterilisation, the T4 programme, it means – yes – “weeding out disabled people.” As a term it was bound to set people off, even if for Young it may have meant none of these things.