Have I Got Ruins For You (V. Treason & Sanctimony)

(Note: this is one instalment of a multi-part essay.)

In a 2022 episode of Have I Got News For You, Hislop and Merton castigated that week’s host, Gary Neville, for agreeing to commentate at the World Cup in Qatar. Other celebrities had declined invitations to attend or be involved, due to Qatar’s record on human rights, especially regarding LGBT issues. A clearly embarrassed Neville attempted to justify his decision to accept the job:

Well, you’ve got a choice I think, haven’t you…

Hislop interrupted:

What - going or not going?

The audience laughed (of course). Neville continued:

My view always has been that you either highlight the issues and challenges in these countries, and speak about them, or you basically don’t say anything and you stay back home, and don’t go. And I’ve always said we should challenge them.

Hislop interjected firmly:

There’s another option. You stay at home and highlight the abuses. You don’t have to go and take the Qataris’ money.

He got a round of applause from the audience for that, of course.

It is for precisely this kind of tedious sanctimony, in the face of an increasingly obviously corrupt world, that many people have come to loathe HIGNFY and indeed all BBC news shows, festooned as they are with self-righteous liberal hypocrites.

But I would go further and turn the tables on Hislop. I would point out that, while Neville might irresponsibly go along with Qatar’s bad human rights record, Hislop actively facilitates the replacement and degradation of the native British people, epitomised by the grooming and gang rape of their children by Pakistani men.

To be clear, I do not accuse Hislop of going along with this. I accuse him, and his colleague Paul Merton, of actively helping it to happen. Their moral crime is far more egregious than Gary Neville’s. Making it even worse, whereas Neville’s “victims” are gays in a far-off land, Hislop and Merton’s victims are the working-class in their own country. And if Neville does it, as Hislop implies, for the money… well, why else do Hislop and Merton betray their people? (They both get paid around £20,000 for each episode of HIGNFY - well over £300,000 a year.)

Of course, were you to suggest to Hislop and Merton that they in any way enabled Pakistani grooming of white children, they would react with indignation (Hislop) and bafflement (Merton). Then they would go on the attack. They would mock your remark, mock you for caring about the issue, mock your worldview, mock your clothes, mock that thing you once said, mock your hairstyle, mock your schooling (or lack thereof), mock your home decor, mock your career, mock your organisation, mock your colleagues, mock your reputation, mock your divorce, mock your achievements, mock you for those allegations, mock your finances, mock your projects, mock your aspirations… they would do anything to cheapen you. In so doing they would successfully avoid reflecting on their own conduct, and prevent on-lookers from doing any thinking at all.

In his defence, Hislop would say that he can’t possibly be guilty of enabling grooming, since in 2013 he gave an award to the journalist, Andrew Norfolk, who broke the story with a set of Times reports in 2011.

Ian Hislop giving the Paul Foot Award to Andrew Norfolk in 2013

The Paul Foot Award was established and is run each year by Private Eye and the Guardian to recognise pioneering work in journalism. Indeed, Norfolk’s work was pioneering and paved the way for the Jay Report of 2014.

But, in fact, Norfolk didn’t break the story. That had already been done years earlier, first in 2003 by Labour politician Ann Cryer who was vilified as a racist for doing so, then by the BNP in 2005. Unlike Andrew Norfolk who got accolades and respect, the BNP were taken to court.

Hislop had contributed to demonising the BNP for saying exactly such things as “Pakistanis are going after white girls”. Indeed, it was his own employer, the BBC, that secretly recorded the BNP saying such things at private meetings, thus gathering the very material that was used to prosecute them for discussing this matter. Only when it was reported by Hislop’s colleagues in the intelligentsia did it become legitimate in his view. Until then, it was just the stupid bigoted hoi polloi violating the current orthodoxy of which he is a stalwart defender.

It is probably significant that, by the time Hislop awarded Andrew Norfolk for “breaking” the story of Pakistani child grooming, the activist Left in Britain had already admitted the problem was real. I suspect, had they not, Hislop would not have countenanced giving Norfolk the award. Here was Nick Lowles of Hope Not Hate, in June 2012:

But who had been “ignoring” an issue like this? Why, the liberal Establishment personified by Hislop and Merton.

If Private Eye, the Guardian, Hope Not Hate (and its predecessor Searchlight), the BBC and HIGNFY itself had not spent decades demonising nationalism and nationalist organisations, perhaps the systematic grooming and raping of white children by Pakistanis would have been reported earlier? Indeed, perhaps it would never have happened at all? Perhaps those men would never even have been in the country?

The problem was never averted. Now that it is here, the solutions to it are unpleasant. Therefore it is expedient for the centre to simply ignore the problem or minimise it. One way of doing this is to demonise anyone who discusses it, and HIGNFY certainly did that - and even continues doing it now, long after those people have been proven correct.

But that is only one way in which Hislop and Merton are responsible for Rotherham. They and their fans would balk at that accusation, so let me list the various ways in which those two men, and their one-time colleague Angus Deayton, are responsible for one of the greatest scandals in British history: