Since its inception in 2014, TCW (defending freedom) has become one of Britain’s most popular conservative websites, attracting almost a million views per month. We caught up with its editor, Kathy Gyngell, and asked about how it all got started, the woeful state of conservatism within the Conservative Party, and the Covid farce.
Editor: Just to see if I’ve got this right, you began your career as a TV features editor?
Kathy Gyngell: Actually, I began as an academic. I did a Masters, and then I spent about four years as a researcher to three different professors. I worked at the Institute of Education with Basil Bernstein. I worked at the Open University for a year or two, and then I worked for a sociologist and we were monitoring mass media, and that’s how I got into television really, because we were monitoring the broadcasting of parliament. And then I moved laterally into television as a researcher, and ended up as a features editor at TV-am.
Editor: And as well as that, you’re a journalist and author?
Kathy Gyngell: Well, I’m a self-made journalist. I was a researcher, editor, television (features not current affairs), but I had worked on Weekend World at LWT, on their features and current affairs department. Honestly, I’ve had such a jumbled career! I gave up a promising TV career for full time motherhood, but when my children got to 9 and 11ish I wound my way back in by setting up a company with David Keighley, an ex TV colleague, to monitor BBC bias. But at that time my husband got very ill with cancer, and over the period of a year and a half died. So I sort of pulled out of that, but kept associated, and then David or I had the bright idea that the research we were doing wasn’t being properly used, so we got the Centre for Policy Studies to publish quite a bit of our stuff, and that got me into think tanks. And then from the think tank era of my life, that was when Laura and I began Conservative Woman. And it was that point that I realised the Conservatives weren’t conservative at all – a gradual dawning took place!
Editor: Indeed. I’m seriously considering setting up a petition based on some kind of offshoot of the Trade Descriptions Act, because I don’t see how they can be entitled to use the name?
Kathy Gyngell: Absolutely, they really shouldn’t. They don’t seem to even have any vestige of pretence at being, you know, small state, primacy of the family, almost irrespective of what reading you take – whether it’s economically, or the more Burkean approach – you find very little evidence there; it’s gone.
I do wonder sometimes, whether it’s been amiss for longer, and I wonder sometimes on the economic front whether Thatcher wasn’t the exception, rather than the rule. You look back and you think, the history of our politics, since the war, has been so socialist really – you might have had Tories in power more, but Tories seem to have stayed in power by swaying to the socialist agenda, and Mrs Thatcher was the only one to break with it.
And I think her naiveté was, if one may dare criticise a heroine, is that she didn’t understand the speed of the cultural revolution, the sort of libertarian cultural revolution; the breakdown, and what that would mean for the fragmentation of the family, and increased state dependency as a result.
I don’t think she was thinking about that – she believed in the family so intensely herself, that I think she didn’t realise it was under threat. I don’t think she realised the long march through the institutions had reached the family. This is me trying to be my most objective, but that certainly was happening in the 1980’s – you saw the major breakdown of the family in Britain with the rise of single mothers; just huge. If you look at a graph, the rise of single mothers goes into the steepest upward curve you’ve ever seen, and at the same time all the leftist lobbying groups were demanding that the state should support them.
Then you’ve got the issue of individual taxation, which was a feminist thing, which Mrs Thatcher sort of backed. And once you’ve got individual taxation, and Nigel Lawson (to his credit) did believe it needed to be mitigated for households and married couples as a transferable tax allowance.
So a man supporting a wife and a child would get the benefit of his wife’s tax allowance, as though his wife had been earning outside the home – to respect her choice to work unpaid at home looking after her children while forgoing an income and its tax advantages.
But that didn’t ever happen meaningfully, and every time the Tories and the Right have raised the individual taxation threshold, the more the couple and children with one earner has been penalised, and the more those couples and families tend to drop into poverty. In my view it is one of things that has undermined marriage and the stability of the family and left so many at the mercy of the state.
So you’ve had all these different things – if you think of a ‘Dad’s Army image of those Nazis arrows coming across the Channel, well you could draw a similar image of all the arrows attacking the family, though very few people will acknowledge it.
Many Tories I’ve spoken to say, well you can’t discriminate in favour of married people – you’re demanding marriage discrimination. But if you take the family as fundamental to social conservatism, in terms of rights and obligations, it has been so severely undermined. And if you look at socialism, the ultimate aim is to fragment society – the more you fragment society, the more powerful the state becomes. And that really is something that anyone vaguely concerned with conservatism in the Conservative Party, should be worried about. But those who do, don’t think there’s anything we can do about it, because it would be too politically unpopular. However, there are some glimmers of hope. I hear that a group of Conservative MPs who do believe conservative ideas – free markets, deregulation, personal responsibility – called Conservative Way Forward is to be relaunched next month. And may the force be with them if we are not to slide further into totalitarian socialism!
Editor: I despair about this sometimes, because the ‘discrimination’ card has been one of the left’s best weapons. In life you must discriminate every second of the day, between right and wrong for one thing.
Kathy Gyngell: Yes, exactly – it’s about values, it’s about what you think is important. If you think the family is important for children, and fathers are important for children, then you must discriminate. And yet they won’t apply those (discrimination) principles in reverse, to those who are being penalised for doing the right thing, what I mean is they’re so happy to take away those individual rights when it comes to making a personal judgement about the welfare of your family for example. I wrote a piece recently about human rights reform, where consistently you could argue, we are having our right to personal judgement taken away from us, our right to making personal decisions taken away from us. It is so depressing!
Editor: If you had to grade the Johnson administration out of ten then, what score would you give them?
Kathy Gyngell: Not even one, really. They don’t seem to have a principled bone in their bodies. They don’t seem to understand any basic principles, and if they do understand them, then they’re worse charlatans than we thought.
Editor: Speaking of frauds, how damaging do you think the last two-year Covid farce have been?
Kathy Gyngell: I think going back to people, and our values, and principles of decency, I think it has been astonishingly damaging. I don’t know how you are, but one is in the astonishingly difficult position with people you’ve been friends with for the best part of your life, and for somebody like me that’s a long time now. I’m talking about friendships that go back 35 years, and you find now (it sounds awful to say) they cannot see at all the way you see it. They cannot see that there is something so wrong in pressurising people to get boosted the third or fourth time.
And these are people you know, you’ve been to university with them, you’ve shared holidays with them, and they’ve descended into this type of Orwellian, doubling down on all their own actions. I mean, what do you say? It’s so corrupting.
Editor: It’s like Brexit Mach II, because it was always the case that Leavers could see the counterargument, we just didn’t buy it. But if you voted Leave, that cost you a lot of friendships, and you were branded xenophobic, racist, and thick and all the rest of it. But Covid seems to be worse.
Kathy Gyngell: That’s right, because Brexit wasn’t suicidal. Teaching people to think in a way which totally undermines their capacity to survive, is much more dangerous. This is a population which will be injected to death. Does that sound really awful?
Editor: No, it sounds true. The thing that got me wasn’t the reneging of the government, and all other governments, on the red lines they had set, or promises they had made – you know, it’s never going to be mandatory, you won’t lose your job, of course we won’t be giving it to children. And then you get to the stage where people are posting on Twitter, ‘I’m getting my child vaccinated’, despite the fact that they are completely healthy, are at no risk from Covid, and can only be in danger from possible side effects, or as yet unknown health consequences, because we have no long term data on the vaccines, and I’m doing it anyway.
Kathy Gyngell: Mike Yeadon may have had a point, that the mass vaccinated population may have compromised immune systems. It is possible that the death rates are going to go up because of this, I don’t know, but it’s possible – he may end up being not so far wrong. It’s not an unreasonable point of view.
Editor: No absolutely. I kind of got forced to have the vaccination against my judgement, because in South Korea it was mandated for teachers. And so, I had the choice between a vaccine which doesn’t work, but presumably won’t kill me, and not being able to feed my daughters, which isn’t much of a choice!
Kathy Gyngell: Yes, which isn’t much of a choice. But morally, we’ve never had to have that decision forced on us. For instance, in the case of the MMR vaccine, my eldest was so ill afterwards, that for my second child, I made the decision not to take that risk. But I wasn’t penalised in any way for taking that decision. Of course, people thought I was mad. I was called an ‘anti-vaxxer’, but we have never been penalised for making our own decisions – and in that case, we were free to do so.
Editor: And we have seen, only too clearly recently – the almighty power of the state, as in Canada, when you don’t do what you are supposed to do, they can shut you down.
Kathy Gyngell: And the so-called Conservatives are part of this overreach; this overweening overreach. And they don’t see, as with Mao, how similar the pattern is here. Covid has created a sort of blindness, that’s the worst thing it has done. And the way it has been manipulated to create blindness, in a way that I could not have ever imagined. However depressed I was about the long march through the institutions, I could not have anticipated such a thing happening, and at such speed. And I don’t know who could.
