Sunday, 13 March 2011
How's this for hypocrisy writ large?
Rod Liddle: Libya is bad, LSE, but how do you explain Ms Liberty?
The Sunday Times, 6 March 2011. Shami Chakrabati seldom turns down a request to appear on Question
Time for Liberty, nor did she turn down a donation from Colonel Gadaffi
http://www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/comment/columns/rodliddle/ article570195.ece
How do they get these jobs (part 356)?
This week we examine the case of Shami Chakrabarti CBE, the hand-wringing director
of the pressure group Liberty for the past eight years and almost weekly performer
on the BBC’s Question Time.
If she’s not patronising you on Question Time, she’ll be patronising
you on some other programme.
There she will be, lightly chiding you in a compassionate manner as if
you were a five-year old who had just had a little accident.
Chakrabarti is not simply the director of Liberty but also, it transpired last
week, a member of the council which governs my old university,
the London School of Economics and Political Science.
She is also, for what it’s worth, a governor of the British Film Institute —
perhaps because she once watched a film —
and chancellor of Oxford Brookes University.
Oh, and visiting fellow at Nuffield College
and also master of the Bench of Middle Temple —
this last may be something to do with our legal system,
or connected in some way with Hogwarts.
How are these jobs doled out, when so many are jobless?
What exactly are her duties at these many august institutions — or do they
just employ her because she is a nice, articulate, young, middle-class
Asian lady with agreeably left-of-centre views? Can’t have enough of those, can we?
Liberty is an organisation that is dedicated to upholding human rights throughout the world.
That’s why you often see Chakrabarti on Question Time, shaking her head sadly at the audience
or the panel because they have somehow missed the crucial human rights element on some issue,
to our moral detriment.
As a member of the council and court of governors of my old university she was also part of a decision to accept a
large donation from Colonel Gadaffi in return for training 400 of his stooges
to administer his vicious, totalitarian regime. She did not balk at this.
She said nothing.
Amnesty International and other human rights organisations report that under Gadaffi
the Libyan people had no freedom of speech, freedom of conscience or freedom of assembly.
Nor did they ever get the chance to vote. Opponents of the regime were imprisoned, tortured or killed.
Libya is — or was — one of the five or six least politically free states in the world.
This did not remotely bother Chakrabarti, who merely admitted to having been — retrospectively,
mind you — embarrassed. Yes, we know now that you’re embarrassed, you hypocrite;
how about resigning, then, from one or another of your posts, if you can remember what they all are?
She was not alone, mind, at the LSE.
A cabal of almost exclusively Blairite academics, appointed by God
knows who, and former security service monkeys waved through the donation
from old Muammar along with a decision to award his smug, half-witted son,
Saif al-Islam, a PhD, despite the fact that his work was almost certainly stolen
from someone else. One of the cabal was
Anthony Giddens, now Baron Giddens — a shallow sociologist who was nonetheless
adored by new Labour for championing a “third way” in politics — who ended up as
a Gadaffi groupie, applauding his speeches on meeting the fruitcake in a tent in
the desert.
Can you imagine for a moment the LSE council and court of governors accepting a
donation from the Israeli government — despite the unquestioned fact that that
country is several shades closer to a pure democracy than anything envisaged by
Gadaffi? If that had been suggested, you would have had Chakrabarti resigning
live on air during Question Time and Giddens penning an angry pamphlet
(which nobody would read).
There is some truth in the suggestion that our universities felt
compelled to act as whores in pursuit of money as a consequence of seeing their
funding cut — and none whored it more than the LSE.
But whoring it with the Libyans, under new Labour, was seen somehow as
clean-whoring, almost radical-whoring, and therefore okay. The LSE director,
Sir Howard Davies, has had the decency to resign.
Shouldn’t Chakrabarti and Giddens do the same?
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