At Last Someone is Saying It

The Daily Mail rather likes announcing that something or other has happened ‘at last’. At last Boris Johnson has ditched green dogma on energy; at last we have a political leader who knows what a woman is; at last the police are prioritising the victims in their approach to crime; at last we have a true Tory budget.¹

The phrase is a little ambivalent. Certainly it is supportive: the reported action or statement is being welcomed. But it also expresses a sort of sarcastic patience, as if to say ‘hooray, the penny has finally dropped’; and this means that the writing, even as it congratulates the politician, adopts for its own part an attitude of weary superiority. You seem to have just got it, but it is what we have been thinking for ages. This vantage point is not explicitly marked; it has to be inferred, and then that act of sympathetic interpretation is the means of constructing a warm commonality between the paper and its readers. ‘At last!’ we all sigh at once, having waited so long together for common sense to prevail that we have no need to explain our feelings to each other.

Of course none of my examples really is a simple matter of common sense. All four encapsulate propositions which are politically contentious. That government energy policy should be less green; that the boundaries of gender are unambiguous; that the point of view of the householder should be the prime consideration when a burglar is prosecuted; that a Tory Chancellor of the Exchequer should cut taxes regardless of the macroeconomic context – all these are right-wing views which are by no means universally shared. The simplest account of the formula, then, is that it is a way of making a partisan opinion sound as if everyone already agrees with it. If the proposition really were as consensual as it pretends, the phrase would be pointless. It is a polemical trick.

Perhaps more interesting than its intended effect, though, is what might be called its structure. ‘At last’ has, obviously, a time dimension. Now a truth has been articulated – ‘Tories cut taxes’, ‘British people resent rules made in Brussels’ – but until now, nobody was saying it. The reported event is not merely a statement; it is the breaking of a silence. With relief, we shake off the inhibition which has kept our lips sealed for so long.

This rudimentary narrative does not depend on any actual history of suppression; its logic is mythic rather than empirical. One myth to which it is affiliated is that of the silent majority, a spectral constituency with a long tradition in US politics. Calvin Coolidge, himself famously taciturn, was credited in 1919 with an understanding of ‘the great silent majority’ who appeared to have no spokesman.² More influentially, the phrase was put into circulation by Richard Nixon in November 1969, in a televised appeal for national unity over Vietnam; his implication was that, although opponents of the war were making a lot of noise, ordinary Americans were undemonstratively supportive of his policy.³ The political convenience of the trope is clear: the speaker has a kind of democratic authority because he is speaking on behalf of the mass of the people, but since by definition the people have not said anything, there is no evidence with which to challenge his account of their sentiments. One has to trust to his intuition; indeed, that is part of his mystique. This turbid mixture of populism and sleight-of-hand has obviously been central to the rise of Donald Trump, and it finds predictable echoes on the post-Brexit right in the United Kingdom. The conservative columnist Sarah Vine declares that ‘Britain is now a nation split between silent strivers and noisy strikers’;⁴ the right-wing Home Secretary Suella Braverman is praised by her backbench mentor, Sir John Hayes, as ‘the intelligent voice of the unheard’.⁵ Although ‘the silent majority’ has passed out of fashion as a phrase, it is still potent as an idea.

The narrative does not make it unambiguously clear why the majority is silent. At times it seems to be because of the admirable character of its members: they are the people who prefer to get quietly on with the job, leaving it to others to shout and make demands. At others, it rather seems that they are silent because they have been silenced: the mainstream media, or the metropolitan elite, are denying them the chance to speak. In the celebrations following the referendum of June 2016, for example, a Leave supporter typically accused the EU of turning a ‘deaf ear to the people of Europe’, and concluded, ‘now listen’.⁶ The extreme form of this version is conspiracy theory: ‘nobody is talking about this’ mutates readily into ‘you are not allowed to talk about this’.⁷ In a way there is a contradiction here: according to the first explanation, the silent majority's silence is praiseworthy, whereas according to the second, it is a scandal. But in practice the contradictory elements make a smooth fit: it is our unassuming good faith that leaves us vulnerable to overbearing minorities, so we are able to feel virtuous and resentful at the same time.

The Conservative General Election campaign in 2005 featured hundreds of billboards with the tagline ‘It's not racist to impose limits on immigration’,¹⁰ and during the campaign before that, in 2001, an attempt to agree a cross-party pledge to avoid pandering to racial prejudice was rejected by the Conservative leadership as a ‘shabby and contemptible’ attempt to gag the party over asylum policy.¹¹ At the same time, the academic David Coleman protested against a public discourse in which, he maintained, ‘that which is true, or at least arguable, but not “correct” is shouted down’; later the same year he was one of the founders of Migration Watch, whose own tagline, today, is ‘The Voice of 30 Million’.¹² Thus the defiant refusal to be silenced by anti-racist orthodoxy has been being repeated, often in the same words, for over twenty years.

Its prehistory is older still. One legendary point of origin is Enoch Powell's ‘rivers of blood’ speech, delivered in April 1968. He prefaced his notorious remarks by saying he could already hear the ‘chorus of execration’ which would greet them, and his peroration declared that ‘to see, and not to speak, would be the great betrayal’.¹³ The oratorical register is more elevated than its contemporary equivalents, but the gesture is the same: the conspiracy of silence must end; at last the thing must be said. Ironically, political historians have argued that this particular iteration of the trope actually produced a subsequent silence: politicians were supposedly so cowed by Powell's excesses and the ensuing backlash that they ‘have, by mutual consent, sustained a political silence’ on the issue ever since.¹⁴ But this alleged ‘shockwave of fear’ had a limited effect on Margaret Thatcher, who in 1978 famously expressed her sympathy with people who ‘were rather afraid that this country might be rather swamped by people with a different culture’. The double use of ‘rather’ in this formulation is designed to mute the Powellite note, but hardly to silence it. If anything it makes it more insistent: the speaker acknowledges that the move she is making is open to objection, but is determined to make it anyway. In her memoirs in 1995, Thatcher explained that, in her view, the people who feared the swamping needed ‘to be reassured rather than patronised … The failure to articulate the sentiments of ordinary people … had left the way open to the extremists.’¹⁵ Yet again, the reason for expressing public hostility to immigrants is a preceding state of affairs, now bravely brought to an end, in which people have been afraid to say these things. It seems that however often the oppressive inhibition is cast aside, it retains its grip, and so its capacity to justify one more long-awaited act of breaking the silence. ‘At last someone is saying it’ is a rhetorical gift that keeps on giving.