Andrew Neil...among the missing

Be Careful What You Wish For

By Luke Haines

Sometimes, we have to be careful what we wish for. Just ask Ben Shapiro, who likes to pretend that he wants intellectual debates with people right up until he gets one, and who is then quickly exposed as the sneering pseudointellectual Fascist fluffer that he always has been.

This was what happened when Shapiro ran up against Andrew Neil, the veteran Scottish political journalist, in 2019. Neil himself is a right-winger, albeit a stuffy British one and therefore pretty centrist by modern standards. Still, it resulted in a brief, odd moment where Andrew Neil was treated as a hero by the American left, who had no idea who he was.

"I wish I had the luxury of not knowing who Andrew Neil was," many British leftists muttered to themselves.

Like I say, we should be careful what we wish for. Because now Andrew Neil has mysteriously vanished.

Neil's disappearance needs a little backstory. He has, for years, been the chairman of the right wing magazine "The Spectator," but also somehow managed to appear on BBC whilst being treated as an unbiased commentator. This is the Old Boys Network at its finest - people with overt political positions shouldn't really be allowed to host political shows on the supposedly unbiased BBC, but Neil is an old white man who went to a private school and is friends with Rupert Murdoch, so he can do what he likes. In the interests of balance, the BBC should probably hire some destitute, barely educated, swivel-eyed left wing anarchist to host a show opposite Neil, but unfortunately they won't and anyway, I'm busy.

Despite having a centre-right magazine and a platform on national television, Neil was one of the many tedious old white people who thought conservative voices like his were being silenced, and as such he was instrumental in setting up the new TV station GB News. It billed itself as a news station that was more willing to look at other viewpoints, of the sort that the leftist BBC (which, again, employed Neil for decades) apparently ignore. It was amother version of the Fox News "fair and balanced" bullshit; a safe space for right wingers who wanted to be told they were correct in spite of evidence.

Having set up this channel, Andrew Neil disappeared. He was supposed to have his own big, important flagship show, but within two weeks he had stopped hosting it. As the station rapidly descended into the sort of unpleasant, reactionary echo chamber of small minded bigotry that many had seen coming a mile away, Neil quietly snuck away from his post and has barely mentioned it since. He's missing in action. He has abandoned his ship. He has become The Phantom of GB News.

The Spectator continues, of course, as do all of Neil's other projects. He's actually pretty easy to find, in any other context, but in the halls of GB News he's like D.B. Cooper, or Elvis - everyone has heard of him and they all knew where he was, once, but now he's just a rumour. A myth. A ruddy faced Sasquatch perhaps glimpsed from time to time but never conclusively photographed.

He became what small time editors would tell their interns - "You report on Brexit food shortages and Andrew Neil will get ya!"

Of course, Neil's reasons for making a midnight flit from GB News are embarrassingly obvious. The station's star anchor is now Nigel Farage, the far right investment banker who is largely responsible for Brexit and who allegedly liked to whistle Nazi anthems in school. Neil's professed dream of robust political debate has quickly given way to constant unchallenged right wing talking points and the whole station is becoming a British Fox News, if not a British One America. The tragedy isn't that anyone with a brain saw this coming a mile away, or even that the supposedly intelligent Neil didn't. The tragedy is that people like Andrew Neil don't learn.

Whether Neil will ever go back to his news startup is still in debate, but if he cuts all ties tomorrow, he'll probably sit in his no-doubt expensive house, in a tastefully appointed room, within reach of many leather bound classics, and think to himself "I don't know what went wrong..."

What went wrong is that there are now essentially two versions of right wing politics. The old school is epitomised by people like Neil - people who don't hate black people or women, necessarily, but who don't want anyone without "the right background" having too much say in society. People who might feel genuine concern for the plight of the working classes, but who are also reluctant to pay any tax or sell off any of the family estate. These people may genuinely believe that the poor can, and therefore should, pull themselves up by their bootstraps and succeed through hard work. They are the Thatcherite, Reaganite brigade who may actually believe that wealth trickles down, even if they personally made sure to dam any of their own financial tributaries a long time ago. They will sacrifice lives at the altar of capital, but they will shake their heads sadly that capital has forced them to do it.

The other, more modern Right Wing is comprised of people who want to force women into their "god given" roles as servants and breeding stock, who want to build walls to keep immigrants out and who respond to their hated enemies "the libs" with abuse and, if they can get away with it, violence. They will sacrifice lives gleefully, at the altar of their own imagined righteousness. They don't care about the economy, or morality, or anything, much, as long as the people they hate are getting hurt - financially, emotionally, physically.

What Neil and his ilk fail to recognise is that you can no longer invite "Conservatives" of the first kind into a space without also bringing in the second.

This is why GB News has rapidly become a cess pit, and why Neil is so reluctant to return. But unfortunately, because Neil is a conservative of the first type, he doesn't have it in his nature to question his own decisions. It can't be that his ideas are wrong, or that modern conservatism is as ugly as it looks.

It can't be that the old systems he supports have broken society to the point where people vote for Brexit and Trump and will happily burn everything to the ground as long as the other side of the culture war is immolated first. More than anything, it can't be that inviting these "other viewpoints" that apparently needed to be championed just leads inexorably to platforming Nazis.

Because sure, there are always crazy fascists on the far right who will draw an audience. But the Right People - people like Andrew Neil, with good educations and the right connections - must surely be able to control the side shows that they invite into the main tent. Good, well-bred conservatives will be able to dilute the crazies. Like the Republicans diluted Trumpism. Like the Conservative Party diluted Farage and his Brexiteers. Like the Weimar Government diluted the Nazis.

Exposed as he is - a supposed Scholar with no grasp of history, and a political commentator with no ability to see which way the wind would blow - it's no wonder Andrew Neil is keeping a low profile.

~Luke Haines

Copyright©2021 Luke Haines

About the author:  Luke Haines is a British writer based in Wales. You may see more of his work at: lukehaines85.medium.com 

He notes that he "enjoys writing online and referring to himself in the third person, which is why he recently changed his name to 'I.'"

The opinions expressed here are his own and may not reflect those of anyone else involved with this blog.

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