Mob mentality

FOR the past two weeks I have been looking at episodes in a television documentary called "The Nazis: A Warning From History". The episodes have dealt with the Holocaust, and the rapid development during the early 1940s of the Nazi policy of exterminating the Jews. It was all horribly and dreadfully familiar, but none the less compelling in its awfulness.

One of the most terrifying aspects of the two episodes was the extent to which ordinary citizens not only failed to protest at what was being done - that would have required real courage and would have placed the protesters themselves at risk of death - but, in many cases, went along with it as something inevitable. There were shopkeepers, for example, who profited by supplying food to the Jews awaiting extermination, exchanging it for jewellery of much greater value. Their attitude was: "We are in business to make a profit. That is what it is all about".

It is easy to see in this the perversion of a people by Hitler and his lieutenants, but that is facile. The uncomfortable question raised by this kind of programme is: "In similar circumstances, how many of us would behave in the same way?"

That question was moved from the hypothetical to the real by an incident which took place in Portsmouth, on the south coast of England. It came in the wake of the murder of a young girl, Sarah Payne. It reflected anxieties by parents living on a Portsmouth estate about the presence there of convicted paedophiles who had completed their prison sentences. And it was encouraged by a disgraceful campaign by the News of the World to "name and shame" paedophiles.

What happened was a series of riots over two weeks, in the course of which houses of suspected paedophiles were attacked, and three men with no paedophile past were driven out of their homes by the mob through mistaken identity. One of the profoundly disturbing features of the whole business was that parents brought their young children along, some of them in their prams, holding up placards with such slogans as: "Kill the pervs" and "Don't house them, hang them".

The politicians were caught on the wrong foot. They did not support the mob, but the Deputy Prime Minister, John Prescott, endorsed the call by the Leader of the Opposition, William Hague, for a change in the law to enable paedophiles to be jailed for life.

Parental fears about paedophiles as neighbours are real and understandable, and there is a strong case for devising an effective policy under which such people can be housed without constituting a danger - or seeming to constitute a danger.The parents on the estate may well have felt that their fears were not being taken seriously, and that only by drastic action could they get the political powers that be to listen. If that is so, it is a serious criticism of the politicians.

There can be no case in a civilised society, however, for the kind of witch hunt that was staged by the Portsmouth mob, and there must be deep concern about the example which members of such a mob set to their children by encouraging them to take part. There must also be concern about a knee jerk reaction by politicians. Changing the law in response to public agitation may make the politicians feel good, and may earn them immediate plaudits. It is a bad basis for properly conceived and well thought through legislation.

It would be quite wrong and totally far-fetched to draw close parallels between the behaviour of the Portsmouth mob and the situation in Nazi Germany. What the Portsmouth events showed, however, is how easy it is for people to get carried away by a cause, to the point where reason, and the restraints of civilised behaviour, are submerged. They showed also how difficult politicians seem to find it to show real leadership against a populist wave of opinion. No senior politician in this case spoke firmly and unequivocally against what the rioters did.

To have done so would have invited obloquy - and no doubt also criticism that the situation had arisen because of the failure of politicians to have in place suitable ways of dealing with paedophiles. There would be justification for the criticism.

Real leaders, however, have to be prepared at times to face obloquy, and to stand up for the rule of law, even when - especially when - thousands of people are taking the law into their own hands.

BILL KIRKMAN

The writer is a Fellow of Wolfson College, Cambridge.

E-mail him at wpk1000@cam.ac.uk

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