FrontPage Mag readers almost certainly are familiar with
British journalist Melanie Phillips from her book Londonistan, which chronicled
England’s multicultural slide into submission to Islam, or from her more recent
book The World Turned Upside Down, about
the West’s slide into a secular mass derangement. But few readers may know
about Phillips’ own journey from the political left to social conservatism. She
takes us on that journey in the short autobiography she just released on her
own publishing imprint, EMBooks, an
ebook called Guardian Angel: My Story, My Britain.
This quick and compelling memoir of her personal and
professional life “is the story of my culture war: the account of my battles
with the hate-mongering left.” It spans her youth and her decades as a journalist,
editor, prominent columnist, and author, reflecting the disturbing changes in
British culture and society that she witnessed along the way. Those changes
left two Britains in their wake: one “adhering to decency, rationality, and
duty to others,” and the left, “characterized by hatred, rampant selfishness,
and a terrifying repudiation of reason.”
In 1977 she joined the staff of the progressive Guardian,
one of Britain’s most influential newspapers. The attitude there, as among
progressives in general, Phillips acknowledges, was that “we were the
embodiment of virtue itself… We were the left; therefore everyone who was not
the left was the right. The right was evil; everyone not on the left was
therefore evil… and everything not on the left was politically extreme.” The
significance of this was that the left had hijacked the middle ground and
substituted its own extreme values as the center of political and moral
gravity.
Phillips herself was not driven by ideology, which meant
that she found herself increasingly in confrontations with the Guardian’s left, “who had replaced truth
with ideology, and whose weapon of choice against all dissent was vilification
and demonization.”
By challenging their twisted thinking, Phillips had aligned
herself with the oppressor. When Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982 to crush the
terrorist presence there, the Guardian’s
chief leader-writer cornered Phillips and referred to it as “your war.” “At
that moment,” she writes, realizing that she represented the Jewish “other” to
him and to others at the paper, “the iron entered my soul.” It was a turning point
of no return. The scales fell from her eyes and she understood that she was
“wrong to have assumed that the liberal left was on the side of the angels. I
now realized that, on the contrary, there was a gaping moral hole at its
heart.”
When she wrote a column in 1987 placing the responsibility
for the crisis in British schools to the breakdown of teaching, her Guardian colleagues were dismayed that
she did not blame Margaret Thatcher’s “heartless” spending cuts, and in their
eyes, “[l]iterally overnight, I became ‘right-wing.’” And indeed, “[i]ssue by
issue, my writing during the 1980s and 1990s reflected the fact that Britain
was undergoing a cultural revolution. And, as society changed, so too did my
own attitudes change.” She saw her “former comrades on the left… embracing lies
over truth, injustice over justice, rule by the strong over the weak – and even
destroying the very basis of what it was to be a human being.”
Her biggest break with the left, however – “the most
visceral, the most ferocious, the cultural Rubicon” – was over the breakdown of
the family. “The fragmentation of the family was leading to the fragmentation
of moral values – but any attempt to tell people how they should behave was
damned as ‘theoretical imperialism,’ while tell them that lifestyle choice was
the only acceptable doctrine was not.” Her defense of the traditional family
unit marked her as a “right-wing extremist,” even an “Old Testament
fundamentalist.” Gradually she saw that what the left hated about her was that
“they understood that the banner behind which I was actually marching was the
Biblical moral law which put chains on people’s appetites.”
In 1993 she left the Guardian
and joined the Observer, and in 1996
she published All Must Have Prizes,
about the ideological dogmas that were unraveling British education. “Most
teachers, I wrote, were unaware that they were the unwitting troops of a
cultural revolution, being now taught to teach according to doctrines whose
core aim was to subvert the fundamental tenets of Western society.” This
brought howls of condemnation from the left, naturally, but “[o]n and on I
marched, straight into the guns. What else could I do?”
In March 1996 she won the Orwell Prize for political
writing, and in 1998 left the Observer
for the Rupert Murdoch-owned Sunday Times.
“Was I now a conservative?” she asked herself. Though she resisted the label
and was no devotee of the free-market and hyper-individualism, she was being
invited to speak at conservative venues, and
Much that such people said
resonated with me. They seemed to be refreshingly rooted in the real world
rather than frolicking in the neverlands of theory and wishful thinking; they
looked soberly at facts and evidence and had an open mind; in disagreement they
were courteous and did not resort to abuse.
She went on to write for the Guardian’s nemesis, the Daily
Mail, and she increasingly addressed the threat to the West of Islamic
extremism. When 9/11 came, “the twin tracks of my isolation on social and
cultural issues and my isolation on Israel were finally joined.” For
understanding that Israel and Britain faced the same Islamic enemy, she was now
labeled “Melanie the warmongering Zionist Jew.” She subsequently published Londonistan, a book that highlighted
“the unbridgeable chasm between myself and the left,” which felt like a “very
bad divorce.”
(This article originally appeared here on FrontPage Mag, 7/15/13)
