Is nothing private any more?
A few years ago, when I taught at university, a student who lived with their parents told me they had argued with their mother about what they described as 'queer identity'. The student had secretly recorded the argument and wondered what I thought about them using it for a piece of writing. I think their assumption was that because I'm a journalist I would embrace the idea. I did not.
How did the UK become a place where young people think it's permissible to record a relative at home and make that recording public? Why has privacy been so easily discarded, and why have people welcomed its demise so they can control the behaviour of others?
My assumption was that Strangers and Intimates would focus on recent decades and technology – with the erasure of privacy stemming from people having the means of surveillance to counter behaviour they think should be punished. But Tiffany Jenkins goes deeper than that, telling the story from the Reformation onwards, examining why people intruded on privacy long before the internet age, and why others fought for it:
The fact is, we are all different in private. We may not be our best selves when we shut the door. We misspeak, we think the unthinkable, we let off steam, we rant and we rave, and we say and do stupid things. Privacy conceals harmful behaviour and impedes accountability, and yet we all require that place away from public view.
That tension, between wanting to be left unchecked to behave as feels human vs the desire of society to protect people from harmful behaviour and accountability, is what drives Jenkins's book.
In early 17th-century England, courts punished behaviour such as adultery, sex outside marriage, drinking in alehouses during church service and dancing on the Sabbath. They 'relied upon members of the community to police each other', Jenkins writes. As well as religious control, she tackles the impact of feminism, the more recent hawking of our private lives – Prince Harry and Big Brother get a mention – and the clampdown on freedoms. The Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act 2021 makes it illegal to say something even at home that could stir up hatred against people with protected characteristics:
This is a historic change. Since the 17th century, it has been accepted that there is a crucial distinction between what a person says or thinks in private and their public speech, a demarcation between private life and public life. Only totalitarian governments ignored that.
Jenkins takes care to remind us why privacy has been invaded, from a law against incest introduced in the 1600s to the killing of seven-year-old Marie Colwell in 1973 by her stepfather and the increased intervention that followed. But she also mentions the 'removal of 121 children from their parents in Cleveland in 1987, based on later disproved allegations of sexual and Satanic abuse'. So there is a line – but where to draw it?
It has been misjudged many times, whether by a student recording a parent, Boris Johnson's neighbours revealing his quarrel with his partner over spilled wine (an example Jenkins refers to), or those online warriors who expose private messages with 'got receipts' chutzpah but show no awareness of the broader damage they are doing for a petty win. I grew up in the 1980s and 1990s, before email. Letters were private. Even when I started using email, at university and then work in the early 2000s, it was regarded as private. It was only when an infamous email (I won't mention the name, for privacy's sake) went viral that we realised the risk. Now we know emails are not private, so we're careful – the same as we are in all our messages and in our behaviour. We are always being monitored, so act accordingly.
Towards the end of Strangers and Intimates Jenkins writes:
The divide between public and private… has dissolved. The two realms have become indistinguishable, leading to confusion about the rules governing each and preventing the realisation of their respective benefits.
For years it felt shocking that so many turned against free expression, and it seemed impossible that the tide could turn back again. But that tide has shifted a bit. Maybe the erosion of privacy could also be reversed, so we can behave in the more human way, as we once did. This book might be a start.
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Spectator
9 hours ago
- Spectator
Is nothing private any more?
A few years ago, when I taught at university, a student who lived with their parents told me they had argued with their mother about what they described as 'queer identity'. The student had secretly recorded the argument and wondered what I thought about them using it for a piece of writing. I think their assumption was that because I'm a journalist I would embrace the idea. I did not. How did the UK become a place where young people think it's permissible to record a relative at home and make that recording public? Why has privacy been so easily discarded, and why have people welcomed its demise so they can control the behaviour of others? My assumption was that Strangers and Intimates would focus on recent decades and technology – with the erasure of privacy stemming from people having the means of surveillance to counter behaviour they think should be punished. But Tiffany Jenkins goes deeper than that, telling the story from the Reformation onwards, examining why people intruded on privacy long before the internet age, and why others fought for it: The fact is, we are all different in private. We may not be our best selves when we shut the door. We misspeak, we think the unthinkable, we let off steam, we rant and we rave, and we say and do stupid things. Privacy conceals harmful behaviour and impedes accountability, and yet we all require that place away from public view. That tension, between wanting to be left unchecked to behave as feels human vs the desire of society to protect people from harmful behaviour and accountability, is what drives Jenkins's book. In early 17th-century England, courts punished behaviour such as adultery, sex outside marriage, drinking in alehouses during church service and dancing on the Sabbath. They 'relied upon members of the community to police each other', Jenkins writes. As well as religious control, she tackles the impact of feminism, the more recent hawking of our private lives – Prince Harry and Big Brother get a mention – and the clampdown on freedoms. The Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act 2021 makes it illegal to say something even at home that could stir up hatred against people with protected characteristics: This is a historic change. Since the 17th century, it has been accepted that there is a crucial distinction between what a person says or thinks in private and their public speech, a demarcation between private life and public life. Only totalitarian governments ignored that. Jenkins takes care to remind us why privacy has been invaded, from a law against incest introduced in the 1600s to the killing of seven-year-old Marie Colwell in 1973 by her stepfather and the increased intervention that followed. But she also mentions the 'removal of 121 children from their parents in Cleveland in 1987, based on later disproved allegations of sexual and Satanic abuse'. So there is a line – but where to draw it? It has been misjudged many times, whether by a student recording a parent, Boris Johnson's neighbours revealing his quarrel with his partner over spilled wine (an example Jenkins refers to), or those online warriors who expose private messages with 'got receipts' chutzpah but show no awareness of the broader damage they are doing for a petty win. I grew up in the 1980s and 1990s, before email. Letters were private. Even when I started using email, at university and then work in the early 2000s, it was regarded as private. It was only when an infamous email (I won't mention the name, for privacy's sake) went viral that we realised the risk. Now we know emails are not private, so we're careful – the same as we are in all our messages and in our behaviour. We are always being monitored, so act accordingly. Towards the end of Strangers and Intimates Jenkins writes: The divide between public and private… has dissolved. The two realms have become indistinguishable, leading to confusion about the rules governing each and preventing the realisation of their respective benefits. For years it felt shocking that so many turned against free expression, and it seemed impossible that the tide could turn back again. But that tide has shifted a bit. Maybe the erosion of privacy could also be reversed, so we can behave in the more human way, as we once did. This book might be a start.
New Statesman
15 hours ago
- New Statesman
Living by the sword
'T his will go down in history,' said Israel's prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, in his wartime press conference on 16 June. 'What we're saying today, I must say – as a son of a historian,' he continued, 'will go down not only in the annals of our nation, but also in the history of humanity.' Netanyahu's mention of his historian father was not a meaningless aside, but the reflection of the deep influence that his father's ideology, conceptions of Jewishness and world history, and ideas about power and powerlessness, continue to exert over his decision-making. Indeed, Israel's current war against Iran owes it shape, at least in part, to Netanyahu the elder's world-view, to which the son has always seen himself as faithful. Netanyahu is not a religious man. He does not observe the Sabbath or follow a strict kosher diet. Perhaps he does not believe in God. But he does believe in history – that the history of Jews has its own course and logic (perpetual, existential danger), and that Jews are meant to serve as an example to the Judaeo-Christian West (as a healthy nation willing to fight and die for its sovereignty). He did not merely come to these ideas on his own. He inherited them. Benzion Netanyahu, who died in 2012 aged 102, was a scholar of the Spanish Inquisition and, no less significant, an uncompromising right-wing ideologue. As a young man he served as secretary to Vladimir (Ze'ev) Jabotinsky, the charismatic leader of the militant but secular Revisionist Zionists, whose adherents hoped to claim both sides of the Jordan River for a Jewish state. Some within the Revisionist ranks drew inspiration from the authoritarian Sanacja movement of Piłsudski's interwar Poland and the Blackshirts of Mussolini's fascist Italy. In his best-known historical work, The Origins of the Inquisition in Fifteenth Century Spain, Benzion Netanyahu controversially claimed that the Inquisition was not only, or even primarily, aimed at rooting out vestigial Jewish observance among the Marranos (Jews whose ancestors had been forced to convert to Christianity), but constituted the invention of the racial anti-Semitism that would reach its exterminationist terminus under Nazism. Born under tsarist rule in today's Poland, Benzion possessed a dark and pessimistic view of the world and the place of the Jews within it. 'Jewish history,' he once told the New Yorker editor David Remnick, 'is in large measure a history of holocausts.' Benjamin Netanyahu, the family's middle child, has made this catastrophic world-view his own. He has also largely adhered to his father's ideological legacy. In the early 1990s, he rose to national political prominence as the fresh face of the right-wing Likud Party and opponent of the Oslo Accords and the dovish Yitzhak Rabin's Labor-led government. For nearly his entire political career, Netanyahu has aimed to prevent the creation of a Palestinian state. Indeed, it has been one of the central animating goals of his life. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe But while Netanyahu is a territorial-maximalist, he is not a messianist. The radical, religious West Bank settlers, with whom Netanyahu has found common cause, believe that the Palestinian dilemma can be solved (or eliminated) through an apocalyptic conflagration that would lead to the expulsion of the Palestinians from all the territory under Israel's control and end, they hope, with the dawning of the Messianic Age. Lately, Netanyahu has embraced some of the religious right's rhetoric: the idea of 'transferring' Palestinians out of Gaza; referring to Hamas as 'Amalek', after the biblical Israelites' enemy, whom they are told by God to wipe out. But this reflects domestic realpolitik more than genuine conviction. Instead, Netanyahu has tended towards a kind of brutal realism. Rather than the settlers' preference for a 'decisive' eschatological rupture, his preferred approach is an indefinite and, if necessary, eternal war of attrition. 'I am asked if we will live forever by the sword,' Netanyahu once said in 2015. His answer is 'yes'. He does not consider the Palestinians a real people deserving of national self-determination. He remains convinced that, after enough oppression, devastation, punishment and humiliation, they will surrender their dreams of freedom, and if not, that they can be subjugated in perpetuity. It is this logic that, in part, accounts for the way Israel's criminal destruction of Gaza has been executed – and why Netanyahu has refused any postwar arrangement that would allow for independent Palestinian self-governance. In his 1993 book, A Place Among the Nations, Benjamin Netanyahu sketched out his theory of machtpolitik, which has guided his successive administrations for more than 15 years. And while in the realm of domestic politics Netanyahu is known for his flagrant mendacity, when it comes to geopolitics, he has been rather more consistent. According to his strategic vision, military might is the only guarantee of security. 'The only peace that will endure in the region,' he writes, 'is the peace of deterrence.' There is, in other words, no such thing as real peace; there is only preparation for the next round of fighting. Or as he put it, 'ending the state of war is a must, but that will not end the possibility of a future war'. For Netanyahu, Israel's only way to guarantee its survival is to maintain overwhelming military supremacy such that it can threaten any potential rival with outright defeat. Weakness, it follows, is an existential threat. 'If you lack the power to protect yourself,' Netanyahu writes, 'it is unlikely that in the absence of a compelling interest anyone else will be willing to do it for you.' It is here that echoes of his father's world-view can also be heard: the experience of the Jewish people in the 20th century – specifically, the destruction of European Jewry during the Holocaust – is taken as proof that defencelessness is a death sentence while sympathy is much less an insurance policy than the force of arms. The world stood by idly when the Nazis sent Europe's Jews to the gas chambers; there is no reason to expect that, were the Jewish state to find its survival jeopardised, the world would act differently this time. Such a view is widely shared in Israel and has been almost since its establishment. It was a pillar of Israeli defence strategy many years before Netanyahu came to power. It is the reason why Israel sought nuclear weapons of its own, and why it has acted unilaterally on many occasions to destroy the military capabilities of other states it sees as threats to its survival. In 1981, for instance, Israeli fighter jets destroyed the Osirak nuclear reactor located deep in Saddam Hussein's Iraq. The success of the operation gave rise to 'the Begin Doctrine' – after the prime minister Menachem Begin, Jabotinsky's successor as leader of the Revisionist movement, who authorised the strike (and who came to power in 1977 in Israel's first transition of power from left to right). Begin vowed that in the future Israel would carry out pre-emptive attacks to stop any enemy state from gaining nuclear capabilities. In 2007, under Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, Israeli warplanes bombed a suspected nuclear reactor in Bashar al-Assad's Syria. Israeli leaders have warned for years that Iran was next on the list. In 2012, Netanyahu appeared before the United Nations General Assembly and brandished a cartoon to illustrate his claim that Iran's enrichment levels were approaching those necessary for a nuclear weapon. Over the subsequent decade, Netanyahu warned many times that a nuclear-armed Iran would constitute an unacceptable threat to Israel, and that he would take action to eliminate it. Iran, for its part, has long claimed that it does not seek to possess nuclear weapons, notwithstanding its leadership's repeated, lurid promises to destroy the Jewish state. That an Israeli strike did not occur in years past owed much to dissent within Israel's military establishment, about whether Israel itself possessed the capabilities to take down Iran's nuclear programme on its own and whether it could withstand a potential Iranian counter-attack. Netanyahu has gambled his legacy on Israel's current war against Iran. He has said more than once that he hopes to be remembered as the 'protector of Israel'. And while the Hamas-led attacks on 7 October 2023 cast doubt on his claim to be Mr Security, it is clearly his hope that by destroying Iran's nuclear programme and, as he has not so subtly hinted, toppling the Islamic Republic's regime, he will restore his flagging domestic reputation and rewrite his place in history, masking with a stunning military operation the deadly, colossal intelligence and operational failure that preceded it almost two years earlier. Still, for Netanyahu, and indeed for many Israelis, what is at stake is much more than that – nothing less than the shape of the post-Cold War order. It has long been both Netanyahu's conviction and policy goal that Israel's integration and normalisation into the Middle East can be achieved without granting the Palestinians a state. Successive Netanyahu administrations have pursued the de-Arabisation and isolation of the Palestinian national cause, perhaps most spectacularly in the form of the Abraham Accords, brokered by the US in 2020, which Netanyahu believes even Saudi Arabia could one day join. Iran, through support for its proxies – in particular, Hamas, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Hezbollah – has constituted the most significant obstacle to this vision of removing the Palestinian issue from the global agenda, as well as the last standing substantial military rival to Israel's armed forces in the region. By taking down the Islamic Republic, or at least its nuclear programme, Netanyahu hopes not only to eliminate a threat he perceives as existential, but also to realise his long-held geopolitical fantasy. Yet the ongoing attempt to do so could just as well result in catastrophe – for the region and perhaps the world. At the time of writing, it is too early to know where the balance of power will lie after the last bomb is dropped and the final missile fired. The paradox of Netanyahu's perpetual struggle for Israel's security is that, in practice, it has meant that Israelis live under near-constant threat. For Palestinians it has meant decades of military occupation and, since 7 October, utter devastation, war crimes and ethnic cleansing in Gaza. Indeed, Benjamin Netanyahu's dream of a new Middle East – devoid of any military rival, absent any prospect of Palestinian self-determination – has only brought more death. [See also: Ideas for Keir] Related
South Wales Guardian
a day ago
- South Wales Guardian
Nightclub cocaine dealer also attacked pregnant girlfriend
Prosecutor Alycia Carpanini said police were contacted by CCTV officers in Carmarthen at just after midnight on New Year's Day in 2023 after two men were spotted exchanging packages on Queen Street before entering a nightclub. Cousins Alex John and Joshua Jenkins were arrested. John had four bags of cocaine weighing a total of 1.3 grams and two bags of cannabis, whilst Jenkins had six bags of cocaine totalling 2.54 grams. John claimed the drugs were for his personal use, but Jenkins told officers he had been forced to sell drugs after being threatened by drugs gang – and the drugs found on his cousin were also his. Drug paraphernalia was found at the pair's homes, whilst messages on their phones showed their involvement in dealing cocaine and cannabis from mid-2022. The court heard Jenkins, 30, of Station View in Tumble, had seven previous convictions for 10 offences – including one for cannabis possession in 2023. 21-year-old John, of Lon Y Prior in St Clears, had two convictions for six offences. John was further charged with controlling and coercive behaviour against his partner and criminal damage. Ms Carpanini said John got together with his partner in October last year, but after she went travelling abroad for six weeks the defendant became verbally abusive and would call her derogatory names. On New Year's Day, John was 'extremely intoxicated' and an argument broke out. He then grabbed his partner – who was pregnant with his child – off the sofa and threw her to the floor. Drug dealer Alex John also attacked his pregnant girlfriend. (Image: Dyfed-Powys Police) In a statement read out by Ms Carpanini, the victim said she had been 'constantly on edge' around John. 'I now realise that this relationship wasn't healthy,' she said. He also damaged a door after a drunken argument broke out at his partner's dad's home on January 25. Both defendants admitted possession with intent to supply cocaine and being concerned in the supply of cocaine and cannabis. John further admitted possession with intent to supply cannabis, as well as coercive control and criminal damage. Mr Jenkins, appearing for Jenkins, said the defendant using drugs since he was 16 'has essentially corrupted his lifestyle'. He said Jenkins racked up a drug debt of around £3,000, and he began dealing in order to repay this after he and his family were threatened. Mr Jenkins said the offences were over two years old, and the defendant was now 'unrecognisable' after he 'managed to break his connection to drugs'. Joshua Jenkins began dealing after falling into debt with a drugs gang. (Image: Dyfed-Powys Police) David Singh, appearing for John, acknowledged the defendant faced a 'lengthy' spell in prison. He added that the drug offences were of some age, and asked the court to consider John's immaturity at the time – having been aged 19 when he was arrested. 'When you two both got involved in selling Class A drugs in particular, both of you would have known full well what would happen to you when you were caught,' said Judge Paul Thomas KC. 'That was a decision you both took.' Turning to John, he said: 'You exhibited horrible violent behaviour towards a woman with whom you were in a relationship and whom I have just found out was pregnant.' Jenkins was jailed for a total of two-and-a-half years, whilst John was sentenced to two years and three months for the drug offences, with an additional two months for the offences against his partner. She was granted a four-year restraining order against him.
