| The Overton Window | ||
| Understanding what range of viewpoints is acceptable in a society is a major part of being a politician. As is not looking down you nose at your possible electors. Unfortunately not all politicians have received the message. One of its most famous examples is Hilary Clinton’s use of “Deplorables” to describe those with non-liberal views. This was an expression of such disdain that it came back to bite her. What she said was that half of Trump’s supporters were “sexist, islamophobic, xenophobic, racist, homophobic, you name it...”. In the Trump political attack advertisements which followed, he said that she was describing: ‘People like you, you and you’ (his supporters) and went on to say: “...what’s deplorable is Hilary Clinton viciously demonising hard-working people”. As good an example of a non-sequitur as I’ve seen. But increasingly there has been prejudice in the West, directed not at working-class people as such, but at what liberals perceive as their primitive and bigoted world-view. They are automatically categorised as right-wing extremists. Of course, it works the other way round as well. Anyone in Trump’s America who has any belief in looking after the poor is categorised by him and his minions as a communist. In the 1990s, an American policy analyst, Joseph Overton, had a window named after him, the Overton Window. It seems to be a popular concept these days as we go through significant changes in public perception of what is acceptable to the mainstream population. The key to the concept is that the ‘window’ changes over time; it can shift, or shrink or expand. It exemplifies "the slow evolution of societal values and norms". Overton proposed that the political viability of an idea depends mainly on whether it falls within an ‘acceptability’ range. It is therefore also known as the ‘window of discourse’ – those things and the range of opinions we feel comfortable talking about with our friends and acquaintances. A striking example of a change in the Overton window is the abdication of Edward VIII in 1936 – because of his very unpopular wish to marry a divorcee – and years later the marriage of the current King and Queen, both of course divorcees. Deciding on the current shape and position of the window nationwide, however, is more akin to astrology than anything else, because we all assume our views to be within its scope. The very existence of the ‘window of discourse’, however, confirms that disdain is actually felt by certain groups of people for those holding very different views. It is how society seeks to discourage the holding of those views – unless and until they become mainstream, of course. A good example is the woke debate. Trump has allied himself with the presumed common-sense wing of humanity in raging against woke theology and all its works. But his attitude is merely the mirror-image of the attitude of the high priests of that woke community. Their endless prohibitions on what can be said and done - including the ban on cultural appropriation, their rules as to how people should be referred to and how many genders there are (more than all the colours in the rainbow) – have got on people’s nerves. But the purveyors of woke disdain those who see no justification for their strictures. And so, as Matthew Syed pointed out in a recent Times opinion piece, corporate HR departments impose jargon-ridden diversity training to cure the bigotry of their workforce; there are pronoun mandates in the NHS and banned-word directories imposed by local councils, discouraging terms like “blacklist”. And then kids in classrooms are being taught that British history is uniquely awful; the Supreme Court judgement on access by trans women to actual women’s spaces is being side-lined and there are so many different ways of showing prejudice that I have lost track. Inevitably, this has all got caught up with the demand for the restructuring of asylum law and, with it, of course, that shibboleth of the right wing, human rights law. Mr Farage has now unveiled his great Bill to be put before parliament. It would mandate mass deportation, remove us from the various conventions imposing a right to asylum and from the European Convention on Human Rights, all to be replaced by rights exclusively for British citizens and those with residency rights. He is not interested in what would happen to those deported back to the likes of Taliban-controlled Afghanistan or to war-torn Sudan. Although quite how he would persuade those and other countries to accept back their (unwilling) citizens, usually without any identification papers showing them to be their citizens, is unclear. But that the Overton Window really has shifted is apparent when Jack Straw, former foreign secretary and Lord Blunkett, former Labour Home Secretary under Tony of Blair, call for a Labour government to suspend the European Convention on Human Rights and the UN Refugee Convention to help deal with the immigration issue while bringing in a digital national identity scheme. With the example of the legal steps used to create the dictatorships which had arisen prior to the second world war, it was felt necessary to try to create a universal law which could act as a block to that happening again. The ECHR was part of that attempt. I’ve referred in the past, however, to its dubious foundations. The justification given by one of its main architects, Sir Hersh Lauterpact KC, for creating a supposedly internationally binding law was that it was a ‘natural law’, something for which I can see no philosophical basis at all. And unfortunately, the convention provided for nebulous rights, such as a right to family life, leaving judges and not legislatures to fill in the blanks, something which has fed into the populist narrative of ‘activist judges’. The populist case is also that it is not democratic because imposed by a ‘foreign court’ over which ‘we the people’ have no control: a major over-simpplification. But has signing up to the ECHR actually had the effect of preventing countries from ignoring the convention requirements when it suits them? Turkey, Hungary and Poland anyone? They’re all signatories. There has also been a major expansion in the rights of those wanting asylum. The treaties that provided for asylum after the war were created primarily to allow displaced persons in Europe to remain where they were. The 1951 Geneva convention was limited to those who had fled their country before 1951 and only to those fleeing within Europe. This changed in 1967 with the addition of a Protocol to the Convention that removed both of these restrictions. This meant that, under the expanded definition of asylum, a very large proportion of the world's population could come knocking on Europe's door asking for a place to stay. And that is exactly what we are seeing now, with the resulting strain on our societies. In turn, this has created a wonderful opportunity for the Faragist wing of politics to demand a complete rethink of our laws and practices in order to avoid the civil unrest which mainly they have whipped up. Sir Keir is now going to have to do something quite radical: it will certainly be crucial from an electoral point of view if the Labour Party wants to win a second term and, more importantly, if we want to avoid the disaster that a Prime Minister Farage and his mad acolytes would represent. The Overton window would be shattered. 25 August 2025 Paul Buckingham |
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