It takes a special kind of man who, while the nation is still reeling in shock at the mounting revelations of the scale of abuse of children by a "light entertainer", quickly dashes out a book on our dumb propensity for moral panics. But then Frank Furedi is no ordinary academic. He is a predatory sociologist whose main aim is to reverse the self-absorbed narratives of the bourgeoisie. His day job is professor of sociology at the University of Kent, but by night well? He was the leading ideologue of the Revolutionary Communist Party which morphed into the magazine Living Marxism and now operates as the Institute of Ideas. Then there is its online sideline spiked, the editor of which, Brendan O'Neill, is a sub-Danny Dyer obnoxious intellectual wind-up merchant.
I mention this because Furedi has an agenda one which needs spelling out for this is not really a book on Savile and certainly not about his victims. It's a counterblast against familiar moral panics. Furedi reworks his favourite themes: he dislikes the nanny state, paranoid parenting, therapy culture and "victimology". He always has some sensible points to make: the middle classes do over-protect their children. Disrupting our sentimentality about children is no bad thing. Words such as "trauma" get used so much they are stripped of meaning. But he arrives at a rightwing "libertarian" position he is against intervention, when the reality is that under-resourced social services are being cut anyway.
So to rehearse all this during the Savile revelations is an odd mirroring of what is already happening, and Furedi, instead of challenging dominant thought, mostly reinforces it.
As more and more women came forward, the shock that people felt about the extent of the abuse and the kind of access Savile was given was real enough. It was not mere imaginings. Then a bout of odd self-flagellation by the BBC occurred. The reality of sexual abuse was eclipsed by a panic about the management of key institutions. Who had colluded? Who had known? Was "liking" young girls a part of the culture that we cannot retrospectively impose our standards on? In this febrile atmosphere, Furedi claims, a "moral crusade" was begun.
The context was the perceived "culture of sleaze" in our institutions. But to me it was clearly a huge exercise in displacement, in which the "victims", soon enough, were not the girls raped at 12 but highly paid TV executives, with their jobs at risk. It was easier to discuss this. Those who had bravely spoken up soon became forgotten again.
Furedi does exactly the same thing, and sidesteps the "victims" completely. He shows no interest in them, Savile or the culture in which this abuse was prevalent, beyond some Peter Hitchens-type mutterings about "the 60s". He takes us through other child abuse panics such as Cleveland and Orkney, and discusses "the narrative of abuse" Why? Do we doubt that Savile did these things? He sees a society that invests too much in children but distrusts its own institutions, arguing there is no point in trawling though history for victims, thereby pathologising all child-adult relationships. At times he denies that all violation causes long-term harm.
There are no actual voices of victims here because Furedi is against the affirmation of victimhood as an identity. Or perhaps because he couldn't bring himself to talk to actual people. This is another displacement then, for as he talks of moral crusades, it all becomes a meta-discourse in which the suffering of individuals is inconsequential. He is pretty close to a conspiracy theorist much of the time, while believing he is debunking such theorists. This is where "the radical left" merges with the "libertarian" right selfish individualism, no nannying, no state interference, no protection for the vulnerable. There is no mention in this entire book of gender or power.
Where he is right is in his analysis of the judicial inquiry being now the "instrument of governance", and how this shows the loss of political legitimacy. But do Furedi and his crew want this faith in authority restored? As with much of the "radical" left, there is a deep disappointment with the working class, and thus the modus operandi becomes merely liberal baiting.
Living Marxism, if you remember, supported the Serbs and accused ITN of faking shots of a Serb-run detention camp. I shared a flat with one of its cult members in the days when they said Aids was a capitalist conspiracy. Nowadays they are more likely to get as agitated about the smoking ban as they are about Israel. They are anti-climate change and pro-hunting. They sound a little like Alan Partridge on the subject of health and safety gone mad, and Simon Heffer on political correctness having gone too far. Why would Furedi want to associate himself with such a dodgy bunch?
His rushed book on Savile is a bizarre and unsatisfactory contribution to any kind of "revolution". Instead it fits in neatly with the long-term establishment denial about the level of sexual abuse. One imagines Furedi and Guido Fawkes have much in common, all of it fairly nasty.
The morality of using a scandal about the sexual abuse of children to épater le bourgeois and talk of a crisis of authority is fairly dubious. This book has little to tell us about Savile or the culture he thrived in, never mind the one we find ourselves in now. It's a Furedi fantasy, rehashed and overspun. As pure sociology it appears under-researched, with little evidence to support many of its grander claims. And there is something missing, as far as I could see any empathy whatsoever with the powerless.
Perhaps this is why, despite some media success as a movement (Claire Fox from Radio 4's Moral Maze is the institute's director), the odd little group that looks up to Furedi cannot grow. Though they pretend to promote reason, they suffer from a weird collective political Asperger's. They would rather prove a point than help anyone but themselves to power. Savile, emotionally unable to connect and regarding others only for his own ends, may have understood that. Thankfully I don't.
