“Fascism won’t come to Britain from the far right, but from the far left.”
George Orwell may have penned those immortal words. Or maybe he didn’t. Who cares?
Not Turning Point UK, the new political organisation that burst into the nation’s political consciousness last week. It’s the British extension of Turning Point USA, a youth-oriented organisation that wants to snap America’s youth out of its lefty-liberal daydreaming. Bernie Sanders, inequality and social justice be damned: “Big government sucks! Socialism sucks!” should be what American students should be saying in their seminars before alerting Turning Point USA to their professors’ radical left-wing agendas.
Now, aghast at the frightful plague of ”cultural Marxism” poisoning British universities, Turning Point has crossed the Atlantic to offer a cure. The organisation intends to cultivate a major conservative revolution within UK universities.
Britain’s politically-astute young minds will have no trouble in recognising the superstars that now front TPUK, but those not familiar with the affairs of such intellectual icons as Tom Harwood and Darren Grimes may struggle a little. The main source of information, TPUK’s own website, won’t help that much: it seems to have been constructed intended to get the leftwing-bashing message as soon as possible, at the expense of standards. They’ll clean up their spelling, grammar and Americanisms later, I’m sure.
One thing TPUK’s website does do rather well, though, is the art of putting a powerful spin on the facts. Different ways of telling the same story are part and parcel of political discourse and disagreement, but skilful political operators can create extraordinary interpretations of events that are able to fox the average, uninformed reader, all through a meticulously crafted, edited story.
The vital element of such a work of art is the frugality of the use of facts. Here’s an example: TPUK’s short biography of Dominique Samuels, one of its top team members, currently studying at my alma mater, which states that she “has led a student campaign against ‘Working Class Officers’ for which she was subsequently attacked by student press.”
From this, it seems that Samuels incurred the wrath of student journalists for daring to campaign against ‘Working Class Officers’. That’s the reasonable interpretation to have from what TPUK states. Maybe student media is as infested with impartial, socialist authoritarians as TPUK would have us think.
Indeed, Samuels did lead a campaign calling for students to vote against the introduction of a Working Class & Social Mobility Officer in a campus referendum; and, yes, Samuels was subject to criticism in the student press.
Perhaps this was because, according to York’s student journalists, Samuels had been misleading about the extent of her involvement with the campaign? If the reader knew this, they’d know that the press wasn’t critical of Samuels simply for her opposition to the proposed new role to represent working class students.
This manipulation of language, the omission of key details to alter our interpretation of events, fascinates me. It is, sadly, all too prevalent in politics. It goes a long way to explaining why people can come to radically differences of opinion, perhaps differences in perspectives of reality, especially in American politics. I could go on, but I might clumsily reveal my true colours as a malicious feelings-before-facts mega-Leftist. Or “anti-white antifa scum” if you want to put it another way.
TPUK may go the way of that other grassroots conservative youth movement, Activate, which ended its short life parodied and electronically hacked to death. Right now, there are just as many parody accounts of TPUK’s numerous Twitter voices that the genuine TPUK chapters can’t tell one from the other.
At least Activate had some Conservative support. As reported by the excellent team at Cherwell, various celebrities of the paler, staler sections of conservative thought attended the birth of Turning Point UK in December, but the Conservative Party would allegedly rather its young members avoided the new organisation.
But Activate’s fate was inevitable: it hadn’t the finances, the membership nor the guiding ideology to get anywhere beyond obscurity. TPUK may be a different story. Its American counterpart has received millions in donations from various conservative institutes and foundations since its foundation in 2012. It enjoys chapters all across America.
While it is ironically amusing to watch TPUK’s branches beg the CEO of Twitter to protect them from parody accounts, the group may turn out to be a powerful political force at our universities. And, if TPUK is like its American counterpart, it may make politics at our campuses more bitter, more polarised and more emotional. At some point, we may have to stop laughing and start questioning, challenging and fighting back.
