“The road to hell is paved with good intentions,” goes the saying.
It can be true.
Many are the kind words that have been spoken at the worst possible time. Many are the charitable causes that have had the opposite effect to that which was intended.
But it can also be too kind. In 2015, the historian Tom Holland, reflecting on the Rotherham grooming gangs, posted:
The true nightmare of #Rotherham is that the motives of those who turned a blind eye, however monstrous the consequences, were indeed noble.
“It wasn’t the indifference that was noble,” he clarified, “But the concern not to demonise a minority. Caring for the weak. The Christian thing.”
Amid renewed interest in the subject of grooming gangs, this week, Mr Holland has received a lot of criticism. He replied:
My position remains:
- The authorities have a responsibility to preserve good race relations.
- This is a noble goal.
- In the context of the grooming gangs, this goal resulted in fatefully wrong decisions being taken.
- 10 years on, the tragedy of this is even more evident
To be clear, I am a fan of Holland’s, and am quite aware — unlike some of his fiercer critics — that he is not claiming that the failure to stop the rape and abuse was noble but that it sprang from a misplaced noble impulse.
But the fact remains that this is outright wrong.
The officials in Rotherham, Rochdale, Telford and elsewhere did not have a high-minded concern for social cohesion — they had a selfish and small-minded desire not to rock the boat.
In defence of Holland, the author and lecturer Adrian Hilton wrote:
He isn’t speaking about individual motives, but social virtue, and he is absolutely right: the King’s peace—pax regis—is a noble pursuit. You can cavil with his hierarchy of nobleness, but public order is indeed a noble pursuit. And so is child safeguarding.
Obviously, when a concern for “public order” is enabling mass child rape, “public order” is not the virtue that it might have been. If my concern with litter in the park is causing me to hurl abandoned puppies into the bin, that “social virtue” has warped into something perverse. Still, Hilton is hinting towards that with his reference to a “hierarchy of nobleness”, so I’ll ask again — to what extent was that a motivation?
Hellbound and Down 