'John Rentoul: The right to speak truth unto prejudice'

John Rentoul defends Howard Flight's right to free speech and much of what he said.

'John Rentoul: The right to speak truth unto prejudice

The words about breeding by a former Tory MP were correct. It was the ritual 'gaffe' fallout that was really unspeakable

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The soon-to-be Lord Flight suggested that state benefits encourage claimants to have more children. "We're going to have a system where the middle classes are discouraged from breeding because it's jolly expensive, but for those on benefit there is every incentive," he told the Evening Standard. Both parts of that statement are demonstrably true, but the social psychology of groupthink requires everyone to perform their allotted roles in rituals as formalised as those of the Roman Catholic Church that condemned Galileo.

First, journalists report a "gaffe" – a word of almost theological definition, which is not used in normal English. Opposition politicians and commentators then condemn the maker of the gaffe, often for things that he or she has not said but for an implication or extrapolation. The third stage of the ritual involves disciplinary action and attempts to avoid it. In this case, Flight went through the full sequence of available responses, from "my words were taken out of context" (which they weren't) to an "unreserved apology" and a retraction. That proved enough to avoid stage four of the ritual, and to persuade David Cameron not to withdraw his nomination to the peerage. '

The politically correct left and their thought police control too much of what passes for public debate in the UK and I can't see how that will change as they are too well entrenched.