In his article in The Sunday Times today, Rod Liddle rightly rails against The Labour Government’s new proposals concerning rape law.  I have already made my views know regarding this matter in a recent post and previously.  The article deserves to be read in its entirety but Mr Liddle concludes: -

"Now the government wants to have it both ways: it wishes the legal system to assume that actions undertaken by a person who is drunk are in one case the responsibility of the individual who is drunk and in another case — the extremely serious charge of rape — they are not. This makes no sense, either moral, logical or legal.

 

Further, O’Brien’s [Mike O’Brien, the Solicitor General - the Government's second most senior Law Officer] proposed change to the law ignores the probability that people drink alcohol precisely in order to loosen their inhibitions and to enjoy the consequences that come from being in such a state. In other words, the state of dereliction or abandon in which they later find themselves was planned at the beginning of the evening. If this were not the case, why would people drink alcohol? Are we to assume that they drink not realising what is to become of them?

 

Not so long ago Amnesty International carried out a survey which revealed that a substantial minority of the British people thought that in some rape cases women were partially “responsible” for the crime. Again, this strikes me as not entirely stupid — and yet the poll results were greeted with unmitigated horror by Amnesty and indeed the media. The British public needs educating about rape, they all howled. But it does not. People live in the real world, rather than the political world: they know what rape is and the actions which might be taken by women to avoid it.

 

My guess is that they also know that when a woman drunkenly consents to sex it is not the same as rape, and that any later sense of culpability or shame rests in equal proportions upon the shoulders of the man and the woman, however “immoral” either party might consider the act to have been."

These new rape proposals are just the latest evidence of a wider malaise,[1]  but my real concern is how these imbalanced and so often clearly flawed ideas and opinions are fed to us by our “free” pro-Labour media.  We are softened up routinely by a creeping barrage of sympathetic, uncritical media reporting in support of the “new establishment” view.  Opponents of the new “consensus” are given short shrift or disparaged.[2]

A confederacy of disparate single issue pressure groups, united by their belief in the absolute righteousness of their cause, now have the ear of like minded individuals in the Government, the media and beyond.  Unable to forge a society in their image through the ballot box,  they use the media to manipulate the public by misinformation.  Their views are right and ours are wrong: so we need re-education.

The public perceives that it is not being told the truth and distrusts both journalists and politicians alike.  So long as this manipulation continues, politics will continue to be an irrelevance to the majority of people, television viewing figures will continue to fragment in favour of the entertainment channels and newspaper circulations will continue to fall.

There is an opportunity for the Conservatives here.  Over the course of the past ten years or more they have struggled to speak the same language as the electorate.  That language is very simple.  It is based upon common sense and the truth.  It is a language no longer spoken by either the Labour Government or the pro Labour media.  No amount of spin can hide that.