One of the Conservative Party’s biggest donors, businessman Frank Hester, was recently in the news after it emerged that at a meeting at his company headquarters in 2019, he’d said that Diane Abbott MP made him “just want to hate all black women because she’s there, and I don’t hate all black women at all, but I think she should be shot”.
Hester was widely criticised and he swiftly apologised, adding that his remarks “had nothing to do with [Abbott’s] gender nor colour of her skin”.
It was reported last week that Ms Abbott has personally filed a complaint about the alleged remarks with the Met’s parliamentary liaison and investigations team, describing them as “scary”. The case has since been passed to West Yorkshire Police because the meeting took place in Horsforth, Leeds, with the force now working to establish whether a crime had been committed.
“Small fry though the Hester story might be,” writes Douglas Murray in the Spectator, “it points to something deep going on in our culture – because we live in a time when people’s private and public thoughts can be spread around the world as never before. In-group behaviour no longer stays with the in-group. Thanks to social media, anything can also be discovered by an out-group, which may comprise almost everybody in the world.” He continues:
We have never had to deal with anything like this before. Any mistake can rear up in front of you again – whether five years later (as with Hester) or decades on (as it was for my colleague Toby Young a while back).
People gleefully rake over the outrage. For many, it gives life a meaning of a sort. And as we know, in the social-media era it has not only managed to bring down the odd famous person; it has done for those who were previously private individuals. It has destroyed everyone from supermarket workers to schoolteachers to a lady-in-waiting.
Clearly people enjoy the thrill. Because it is thrilling. But what they have failed to consider is that they are abandoning one of the most important ethical beliefs in our whole Judaeo-Christian civilisation: forgiveness. And not just forgiveness for people you like and eternal damnation for anyone you don’t. But forgiveness available to all.
The world today can watch someone apologise and yet it can doggedly refuse to move on. In fact, the apology tends to make things worse. Most people who have gone through the process of being hounded relate that the effects on their life are catastrophic. Many say they have ended up contemplating suicide.
It’s no wonder they do, because we live in a society that spends a great deal of energy working out how to bring people down. While our mechanisms for condemning have never been more readily to hand, is anyone thinking about the only tools to counter that? The mechanisms of forgiveness.
Forgiving people only when they happen to agree with you or when it is politically advantageous cannot be the answer. Nor, in practical terms, is the answer immediately obvious. The only thing that is clear is if our culture wants to escape the situation of the apprentice without the spell, we might spend this Easter thinking of the story and the teachings that gave our culture its breath. And wonder whether that breath mightn’t find a way to breathe through us once again.
Worth reading in full.
