A family friend, whose politics I probably don’t share, looked perplexed. It was the day after Trump’s victory and she had just seen a man wearing a Make America Great Again cap on the Tube. “Nobody was sitting near him,” she observed, approvingly.
There are those who will say that so publicly supporting MAGA is provocative. But I thought it took guts. Frankly, and this being London, he’d have been safer sporting a t-shirt saying HAMAS.
I thought of him when I read that today, Saturday, is thanks to a former Secretary General of the United Nations, International Tolerance Day. I suspect that the UN’s idea of tolerance is not mine. In fact, its current Secretary General is so tolerant of genocidal violence directed at Israel, that Israel has banned him from ever stepping foot on its territory.
And that’s part of the point I want to make. One person’s meat is another’s murder. The important thing is to tolerate other ways of looking at the world. I wear a poppy. But if someone chooses not to, that’s their choice. Yet, the playing field isn’t equal is it? Refuse to take the knee, choose a pronoun, wear a Pride lanyard and an individual risks, not just scorn, but being held back in their place of work or study.
Let me take you back to that Tube carriage. There are some things we should not tolerate. People who routinely and purposely evade paying for a ticket, or selfishly play music loud enough to break the sound barrier. Or putting their feet on the seat opposite - as if challenging fellow passengers to upbraid them.
And some of these anti-social habits were in the cross-hairs of a campaign launched last month by the MP Neil O’Brien. Not MAGA, but MBVCA - Make Britain Vaguely Civilised Again. Not so catchy, I grant you. More Margate than Mar-a-Lago. But O’Brien’s onto something, I think.
Many of the items which appear on his list of things which we should tolerate less seem trivial. Cracking down, for instance, on spitting which, as O’Brien says, “is endemic in parts of London”.
But his proposals (which, sad to say, made not a ripple) were more than a prescription for improving quality of life at street level. They were also a reminder that we - as a society - increasingly tolerate things which aren’t just ill-mannered, but actually illegal.
Things like e-scooters, a daft social experiment which uses our cities as a laboratory. The resultant Brownian motion make something as simple as walking to the shops a misery for the elderly or partially-sighted.
Colin Brazier has said Britons need to be open to different viewpoints
GB News
And cannabis. Whatever you may think about its prohibition, it remains illegal outside of medical use. So why is it possible to wander through so many of our increasingly desolate town centres and small its pungent waft at regular intervals?
Insisting that people can’t ride an e-bike or smoke drugs wherever they like isn’t intolerant. It is merely to acknowledge the corrosive effects of doing nothing to stop those who do. If the State has laws which it refuses to enforce, then the law will be made to look an ass - and we will all suffer in the long term, as relatively minor lawlessness gives way to serious crime.
The new Tory leader seems to get this. It’s been repeatedly said that Kemi Badenoch is much influenced by ‘Why Nations Fail’, by Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson. It’s said that, having grown up in Nigeria, Badenoch has a strong sense that Britain plays fast-and-loose with the rule of law at its peril.
Well, she might have her work cut out. Earlier this month a survey revealed that 40 per cent of Britons think it’s okay to shoplift if they are financially struggling. If this data is reliable, we are on course for half of the country accepting that something as immoral as theft is justifiable.
I’m sorry, but when it comes to stealing things which don’t belong to us, there can only be zero tolerance. Because, leaving aside high-minded considerations, those suffering most from the predations of shoplifting are our poorest. Already some of our grimmest inner-city areas are being abandoned by supermarkets after sustained assaults from thieves.
So my advice to anyone thinking of marking International Tolerance Day is this.
First, accept that people cannot be made to like each other (something the Left struggles with), but can be taught to tolerate opinions they find objectionable, provided those opinions are not a direct invitation to cause violence.
Second, be chary of confections like International Tolerance Day. They piggy-back on a tradition which, for more than a thousand years of Christianity, set aside dates for reflection. Mothering Sunday. Fish on Fridays. Lent. Advent. Or punctuation marks in our history which have the deepest roots, like Remembrance Sunday. Others can decide whether our increasingly secular society is better served by a calendar littered with the likes of Black History Month or International Women’s Day.
The most egregious example is, of course, this month’s ludicrous Islamophobia Awareness Month. Christopher Hitchens famously described Islamophobia “a word created by fascists, used by cowards, to manipulate morons.” If activists hope to close down legitimate - not intolerant - debate about their faith by creating an Islamophobia Awareness Month, they might need to accept that we are not the morons of Hitchens’ description. It’s hard, for instance, to see footage from Amsterdam of Jews being hunted down and feel the world is in the grip of rampant ‘Islamophobia’.
And my third piece of advice for those minded to mark International Tolerance Day? Think back to the Remembrance Sunday just gone. The sacrifices made by millions to retain our rule of law. And then remember that our own police chose that day to visit the home of Telegraph columnist Allison Pearson. There to tell her they’d received a complaint, not about theft, or illegal drug use, but a tweet.
