Britain's cultural conspiracy?

The Sex Change Society: Feminised Britain and the Neutered Male is the title of a new book by the well-known columnist and commentator Melanie Phillips. It concerns the culture of divorce and illegitimacy currently plaguing Great Britain and the great harm being done to the fabric of civil society by them. Ms. Phillips lays the blame for these things mainly on the influence of feminist ideology on social policy, and she deplores the media's unquestioning support of this ideology.

As you might expect, the book has been well received, firstly by those who agree with Ms. Phillips, and secondly by feminists who feel gratified by the attention and blushingly acknowledge the correctness of her thesis. After all, if she is right, they must be very important people. However, it seems to me that both these points of view miss the broader picture.

The blurb on the back of the book encapsulates perfectly its detailed, but inaccurate, analysis: "The gender revolution of the twentieth century was female. Wartime demand for workers, the contraceptive pill and women's full-scale entry into the workplace changed family life forever. But what became of masculinity? Now, on the eve of the twenty-first century, the male role is in crisis-or even in danger of extinction altogether."

What does it all mean? What, for a start, was the "gender revolution"? Does this mean anything more than that women have been obliged to work outside the home during most of the 20th century-as their sisters had been in the early 19th century-ither because war put them into factories or, latterly, because the wages paid to men were too low to support a family? If so, why doesn't the blurb writer refer to the 1850's as having had a "gender revolution," when the 75% of women who had had paid work outside the home became full-time housewives?

When one thinks of the twentieth century, women's problem with sex roles is scarcely the first thing that comes to mind. One thinks of the First World War, the Russian revolution, the rise of Nazism, the Gulag Archipelago, concentration camps, the Blitz. After the war, women quit the miserable factory work they had been obliged to do for six years and returned to their homes and sometimes to part-time work. Things have remained reassuringly stable ever since, with the overwhelming majority of women with very young children not working at all and a large majority after their children start going to school working only part-time.

There have been changes in Britain of a social and cultural nature, but it is hard to see them as a "gender revolution." There has been an increase in certain social maladies, but their increase has not normalised them, and that is important. Widespread drug use in its current form is a new feature, and so are increased divorce and illegitimacy. With all these things, the fact that they are now subsidised by the state is a much larger factor in their prevalence than any changes in sex roles.

Drug use is nothing new in Britain, but in past centuries if one became unfit to work because of drug use, one simply starved. There was no "safetynet" provided by a kindly state and if you committed crimes to obtain drugs, the law was very severe.

As far as divorce and illegitimacy are concerned, the situation in Great Britain used to be the same as that which still prevails in the rest of Europe. In continental countries to this day, unsupported mothers are the responsibility of their families. The State does not pick up the tab. Even in liberal Holland, girls who become pregnant receive no financial support at all from the state, and contraceptives are not supplied free of charge to young people. Yet we in Britain still pretend to be astonished at our high illegitimacy and divorce rates compared to the rest of Europe.

Indeed, both the illegitimacy and divorce rates have been substantially aggravated by legislation that was enacted not in response to public concern but at the initiative of legal "commissions." If one is cynical-and I am-one can argue that these policies have been a studied attempt to enhance the position of lawyers and state bureaucrats by creating masses of work for them. At least this is what has happened and you never hear them complaining! Of course feminism has been invoked as the philosophy that justified these innovations, but with such a huge financial incentive at stake, we don't really need the fig leaf of a philosophy to justify the changes.

On the political front, the menaces of a new European superstate and of mass immigration are related issues that really do involve problems of gender which have been completely ignored. A Conservative Party organization called The Monday Club produced a glossy pamphlet a few years ago which pointed out that Muslims are in the majority in the primary school population of our main cities and, if current trends continue, will constitute a majority of those under thirty years old being Muslim within twenty years or so. The pamphlet drew out the implications of this for many groups in our society. Women were one of those groups, but feminists have not shown their usual bellicosity in anticipating the possible results. The subject is never mentioned, and no political party has been prepared to discuss the matter, let alone to consult the electorate on it. It remains an unexploded bomb, which will tick away until events either defuse or detonate it.

These five problems-drug abuse, divorce, illegitimacy, mass immigration, and "Europe"-are all, in their current manifestations, the products of government initiatives, not of some grass-roots revolution by Britain's women.

So, returning to the blurb for our book, why does it refer to the traditional family as being "changed forever"? If the rigours of the Industrial Revolution didn't permanently change it, why should the current social engineering have any more permanent effect? If people were allowed to vote on these issues today, as Ms. Phillips points out, they would undoubtedly vote to make divorce less easily available and to make it financially more advantageous to get married and to stay married. In other words, none of these things are the result of a genuine change in the popular mind. They are impositions, and, like all such, are as likely to be changed again as not.

With regard to disappearing masculinity, which is the main thesis of the book, the evidence presented by Ms. Phillips points in quite the opposite direction. She shows how the role of men as principal providers for women and children has been taken over by the State in many cases, and how those in authority insult and denigrate all things male. Rather than having the desired ef fect, however, the attacks have resulted in men and boys becoming ever more violent and difficult to control. Far from disappearing, masculinity is responding to the ideological attacks upon it by re-positioning itself for conflict.

However, Ms. Phillips insists on detailing all the feminist arguments that have influenced government policy and, whilst she is obviously aware that their thoughts do not deserve to be dignified as a coherent philosophy, she plows on regardless. The question she does not ask is why their beliefs, which would produce nothing but hilarity in a pub full of clerks and bootblacks, are taken seriously by both government and the media.

The answer, I suspect, is that, setting aside the useful idiots who are easy prey to any ideology, few people with real power do take feminism seriously. What they are doing is pretending to take it seriously because the ideology has provided them with the most effective mechanism for manipulating people that has come their way since religion ceased to command obedience and Communism died its ignoble death.

The government wants to disguise the fact that its avowed feminism is actually an extremely useful device for giving commerce what it wants. Since all government today depends upon the revenues derived from commerce to provide services that will get its members reelected in the future, a healthy business sector is of as great interest to government as it is to the businesses.

Ever since the end of the Second World War there has been a shortage of labour in Britain. In addition to the deaths in the war itself, there has been a shortfall in the pre-war birth-rate because, fearful of having too many mouths to feed during the Depression, the government campaigned hard for birth control. During the 1950's it began a policy of inviting immigrants to settle in the UK in order to keep wages down and to keep our industry competitive. Since the rise of productive economies in the Third World, with their very low labour costs, this necessity has become even more pressing. However, simply inviting in even more settlers has one terrible danger: should there be a down-turn in the economy, social unrest could very swiftly follow.

Women in the work place provide a considerable buffer against such an eventuality. Should the economic climate darken, the redeployment of labour would be a simple matter of promoting yet another, even more forward looking strand of feminism to assert women's new "rights." With the dumb acquiescence of the media, new-style feminists could be produced out of a hat to say that the latest phase of women's emancipation is to take charge of "domestic enterprise."

The women thus "emancipated" will be described in glowing terms as a new "home-front task-force," and their "holistic skills" will be praised to the skies and directed towards the regeneration of communities. The authorities might even mention what the government's "Household Survey" discovered and suppressed a few years ago: that housewives enjoy four hours more "leisure time" per day than their sisters at work. A simple fiscal adjustment or two "in response to overwhelming pressure from women"-letting women use their personal allowance to set against their husband's tax, for exampleand, hey presto! Government already knows that two-thirds of women who work full-time would quit or go part-time.

As a matter of fact, a similar pseudo-feminist tack was deployed to get women out of employment during the recession in the 1970's. Then-in the interests of full equality, of course-employers were told they had to give women the right to an equal contract with men. In other words, women were obliged to do shift work, the same as men. Many thousands of women who did not want to work hours which were incompatible with their family responsibilities left factory work and went into service industries. Unemployed men moved in.

The fact that this duplicity was scarcely noted at the time indicates what incredible freedom of action the cover of "feminism" gives to government authorities. They can argue in any direction at any time and always get away with it by describing what they do as being in the interests of women.

Apart from the usefulness of feminism as a device for manipulating people, there is another fascinating dimension to the phony "gender war" that Ms. Phillips describes but does not analyse. It is the ability of the media to create a sort of parallel universe where normal standards of honesty do not apply.

A cursory trawl through The Sex Change Society provides numerous examples of the validation given to the absurd, by the simple fact of its being printed somewhere and discussed by the media. For example, "It is abnormal for a woman to love her children." "Marriage is a power structure enforced by men." "There is no discernible difference between the brain functions of men and women." "Men and women must be eliminated as significant social categories."

Ms. Phillips tackles dozens of such assertions-but without the healthy derision they deserve. She fails to address the almost occult power of the media to make absurd ideas seem reasonable. It has been left to an unusual comedian to illustrate the power and scope of this kind of-what can one call it? counter-sense? muscular imbecility?

Ali G is a comedian who until last Christmas was virtually unknown to the public at large, although he had a devoted following amongst young adults because of a regular slot on a late-night programme. He wears the outlandish fashions of young Afro-Caribbeans and adopts exaggerated "ghetto" language. Masquerading as the presenter of a groundbreaking "ethnic" programme, he interviews prominent people and asks them the most ludicrous questions, to which they struggle to give polite and sane answers.

For example, interviewing the most decorated living soldier in the British army, he asked him which side he had fought on in the war. He introduced an interview with a Welsh miners' leader by saying they were going to visit an underground mine, where the Welsh used to live and work before they became human. The polite patience with which the interviewees responded to this lunatic was much written about, and some black leaders protested that he fostered prejudice by appearing so stupid.

In fact, the man is not black at all-he is a Cambridge-educated Jew by the name of Sacha Baron Cohen.

In one interview, he asked some vegetarian tree-protesters why they didn't riot to make their point. "Because violence solves nothing," came the standard liberal response. "Yes it does, man," Ali replied earnestly. "We use it all the time in the ghetto and it gets just what you want." He started haranguing the protesters through a loudspeaker, urging them to attack the police, and they were ready to lynch him for his lack of "peace and love: ' At this point a police officer politely requested him to leave. "Are youse askin' me that 'cos I'm black?" Ali G ventured. "Certainly not, sir," the policeman gravely answered.

It did not seem to occur to the policeman to point out that Ali G wasn't black, any more than it occurred to all the other people to whom he addressed the same question, including a spokesman for the CIA, politicians, and, yes, yours truly.

I was caught by Ali G, before his first series was shown on TV and his cover blown. He interviewed me and two others about family policy and how to bring up children. In the course of the interview he asked at what age parents should introduce their children to drugs, "you know, show 'em how to roll a decent spliff, show 'em how to tell good powder from bad." Then he asked which members of the family should be excluded when it came to the matter of incest. Grandparents? Obviously yes, because they were mostly old and ugly; but surely not brothers and sisters? And then, "What if one of your sons is a `batty boy,' you know, like, a shirt-lifter?"

I cannot honestly remember how I reacted to all this except to answer as truthfully as possible, without being offensive to Ali G. The programme is being shown this spring and will no doubt be as much a surprise to me as to others. However, thinking about it later, when I had learned who he was, and pondering my restraint in answering him, I reflected that his questions had not been radically different from those in many other such interviews. It was actually no more bizarre than innumerable other discussions containing such gems as (and this is an actual quote) "So, Mrs. Burrows. Are you going to tell us precisely why you think there is something unnatural about two men buying the eggs of one woman, fertilising them in a laboratory, having them implanted in another woman, and then taking the subsequent baby home with them as their own?"

However, disregarding the influence of a feminist argument on the level of public debate, and considering instead the harm done to individuals by public policies based upon it, one cannot find fault with Ms. Phillips's facts. Feminism has been invoked to promote public policy on a wide, but shifting front and one still has to ask why.

There are so many aspects of public policy at present that just do not add up that one always comes back to the question of, why? Take, for example, sex education in the schools. This has been managed, for upwards of thirty years, principally by the educational wing of the industry that produces contraceptives. They have provided material and instruction of such a graphic and inflammatory nature that only the intellectually castrated could fail to recognise what is being urged. By their propaganda, children who are under the legal age of sexual activity have been incited to experiment and to risk their health and well being in the process.

Every year without fail, for more than thirty years now, the number of children indulging in this illegal activity increases and so do pregnancy, abortion, and sexually transmitted disease. Yet still the industry is able to get away with calling for greater powers and facilities to provide more of the same.

It is appalling that it happens-but hair-raising that no one questions why it is happening. It is as if the tobacco industry had been given the job of instructing the young on the perils of under-age smoking, on the grounds that they knew more about it than anyone else. No one would have been surprised if they had succeeded in increasing consumption of their product, since that is their business. But who would have allowed it to continue?

That is incomprehensible scandal number one. Number two is what Melanie Phillips calls the phenomenon of young couples cohabiting rather than getting married. To my mind, there is no mystery, let alone an ideology involved. It is simply practical. It is vastly more economical for young working-class couples not to get married. For a start, many local authorities in big cities tell young couples that if they get married, they will not even be considered for public housing. This pattern is repeated up and down the country, yet it is never mentioned as a reason for the very high cohabitation rates.

Just to underline the fact that it is actually government policy to deter marriage, Ms. Phillips details how married people, even with children, are taxed much more heavily than the unmarried. A single woman with two children takes home substantially more money than a married couple with two children on the same gross income. Can one seriously believe that an injustice of this scope could be inadvertent?

These sorts of assaults upon our reason and common sense lead one to ponder whether, in fact, there is a plan and, if so, whose it is and to what end. Many people sense that there may be a hidden agenda attached to many government policies, but they resist looking into the question too deeply. However, the BBC recently gave us an illuminating glimpse of a new way of conducting public debate and one that pre-dates the Blair government by two decades.

Those who oppose our entry into the European Union have long claimed that the government was using the media to advance the whole European project by means of suppression and distortion of the facts. Such accusations were always dismissed by the general public, who trusted the BBC. Its Charter, after all, requires that it maintain both balance and independence. Now, however, suspicions have been confirmed by a remarkable and brave programme aired on the BBC itself on February 3 of this year.

It is unlikely to be coincidence that this took place during the change-over from one Director General to another; perhaps someone was seizing the day. At any rate, the programme gave chapter and verse, names, places, and dates, of a conspiracy approved by Conservative Prime Minister Edward Heath to "knobble" the media over Europe.

To this end, a man with connections to the intelligence community was put in charge of weekly breakfasts at one of Mayfair's most exclusive hotels. To these breakfasts were invited journalists, captains of industry, and television people. The operation succeeded in "knobbling" most of the main BBC and ITV news programmes so that they would deliver only pro-European propaganda. Staffers who were anti-Europe were got rid of and the campaign was successfully completed when the British people voted in favour of the Common Market.

Lord Hattersley, a politician and prominent supporter of Europe, was nonetheless a critic of the conspiracy. On the February 3, BBC programme he said, "Joining the European Community did involve significant loss of sovereignty, but by telling the British people that was not involved, I think the rest of the argument was prejudiced for the next twenty, thirty years."

When asked on the programme whether these breakfasts still continued, the man who originally organised them said, after a long pause, "Yes."

All this has come as a shock even to many people who had been deeply suspicious of the Europe fanatics. However, now that transcripts of this programme are beginning to circulate, there is still hope that some action will be taken over this conspiracy; after all, the BBC has its Charter, according to which it is required to be impartial and honest, and this document provides ample evidence upon which to act.

The stakes are all the higher as a date for the promised referendum on the subject draws closer. The thought must be, If one conspiracy, why not two?

After a university debate a few years ago, a leading homosexual activist told me, in his cups, that New Labour had promised homosexuals an entire shopping list of demands in return for "carrying the whole EU project. He listed: lowering the age of consent, permitting open homosexuals in the armed forces, and allowing homosexuals to call their unions marriage, to adopt children, and to promote homosexuality in schools.

At the time, I thought this was self-delusion about how powerful the homosexual lobby was, but now I am not so sure. The European Court has certainly provided for their open access to the armed forces, and it is on course to rule in favour of same-sex marriage. The government meanwhile has already lowered the age of consent for boys from 18 to 16 and permitted homosexuals to adopt children. Incredibly, in view of widespread public outrage, it is also struggling to remove the safeguards against promoting homosexuality in schools. I have chosen my words carefully here; it is not a matter of "giving information" or "dealing with questions" on homosexuality. The government proposes to give homosexuals the right to promote their "lifestyle." No wonder the public is up in arms and the churches are, uniquely, united in opposition.

It is quite incomprehensible that Tony Blair is prepared to antagonize the public to this extent. At least, it is incomprehensible unless there actually was the deal.

If one were to pursue this intriguing idea, one could see many other things falling into place. New Labour tried to increase the number of women in Parliament by confining its candidate lists to women. This was declared unlawful, but it persevered with a list of approved female candidates. Furthermore, the only women who were allowed to stand for New Labour, even in Catholic areas, were those who approved of abortion.

One would not need to posit a conspiracy any more elaborate than the one outlined above to work how this ties together. Feminists and homosexuals have always made common cause, and so it has proved in this case. The New Labour women have been as solid in their support of homosexual privilege as any homosexual could be, and possibly more so. In return, homosexuals in the cabinet, in the media, and in the law, have been preternaturally supportive of anything the Blair government wants. And the Blair government wants "Europe."

Our present Parliament is the most "anti-life" there has ever been, and all but 3 of the 140 new "Lords" appointed by Tony Blair in his "reform" of the Upper House voted to allow homosexuality to be promoted in schools. Even so, they lost by a thumping majority in a body that still has a Conservative majority, but they will try again.

Meanwhile, the media handle the many scandals that have arisen in Labour ranks with a studied indifference that is in total contrast to their vociferous condemnation of milder scandals among the Conservatives. They do report them, but they refrain from comment.

Conspiracy again? Who knows? However, it would not take Sherlock Holmes to work out that with homosexuals at 2% of the population and committed feminists at probably about the same, they are far too few in number to have wrought such havoc on public life unless there was some other power using them as a front.

The thought that is beginning to occur to many people who are not normally of a paranoid turn of mind is that many of the elements of current policy are in fact pure Marxism. First of all the government loosened the bonds of marriage by instituting no-fault divorce and subsidising family breakdown. Then it made marriage impractical for young people by denying them access to public housing if they are married and taxing them more heavily.

The dependence of young mothers on the state is then consolidated by offering them more material support than a typical husband can. Having taken over the role of breadwinner, the state is now putting pressure on women to go out to work, leaving their children in day-care facilities. So the state then becomes the principle educator of the child.

The family is, by all these means, fatally weakened. In addition, legislation is promised that will remove even the template of the normal, heterosexual marriage. Morality, rather than being something intimately connected to the natural order, thus becomes instead whatever the state says it is. Does all this sound familiar? Yes, indeed! All these elements were explicit in Communism from its earliest days.

"Europe," meanwhile, is the first psychological take-over of countries that has ever been attempted, and the media are its principal tool. "Divide and rule" was a Roman device for breaking the potential power of opposition.

The new "soviet" of the European Union, with its centralised government, a court of law from which there is no appeal, and its disregard for democracy and national traditions, has seemingly just the same blueprint. The brutal and bloody Bolsheviks finally lost the battle to capture Europe, but the Mensheviks, the "little party" that believed stealth and subversion were better weapons of conquest, have taken over. The conquest and domination of Europe has been a prize that several countries have gone to war over in living memory, and it should not surprise us that a cause that has cost so many millions of lives is still alive and kicking.

As yet there are only a few commentators who are prepared to put together these disparate threads of a grand plan and to give it a name, but they are there, and the rumbles of concern are beginning. It has been a masterstroke to commandeer something as innocuous sounding as "feminism" to accomplish so much that is destructive and cruel. But it has been remarkably successful in disrupting the social fabric, which is always the first step in overthrowing civil society.

This gives one a more rational explanation of what is being done to us in the name of "social policy" than any amount of agonising over the banality of the philosophy that seems to lie behind it. Melanie Phillips has written a passionate denunciation of the sheep's clothing with which the wolf of Marxism is currently clad.

The struggle will only get really interesting when commentators of the calibre of Ms. Phillips recognise the enemy for what it is, and stop wasting their energy on a movement that is small, unpopular, and inconsistent, and that currently projects itself, without irony, under the slogan, "Put Yourself First."

Lynette Burrows is a well-known English educator as well as a print and broadcast journalist. Her latest book, The Fight for the Family, was published in 1998 (Family Education Trust, Family Publications, Oxford, England).

Copyright Human Life Foundation, Incorporated Spring 2000
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