Density is no excuse

An inescapable aspect of working life is that some people can be both professionally successful and remarkably dim. To my mind, this piece by Oliver Kamm makes the point very well. It concerns Labour MP Richard Burgon.

Among the trivia of modern politics is that, since its recreation in 1955, the constituency of Leeds East has had only three MPs, all Labour. I find it a pleasing antisymmetry that the first was Denis Healey, who possessed one of the most formidable intellects in British public life, whereas the seat is currently held by Richard Burgon, who does not.

We all make mistakes, and it’s forgivable that the list of Burgon’s gaffes is very long indeed. He famously urged people to turn up to a rally he was speaking at in Port Glasgow, only to inadvertently reveal that he believed this historic town, which he’d omitted to look up on Wikipedia, was the same place as Glasgow. Making what he thought was a decisive critique of New Labour on Question Time in 2019, he declared “I’m fully aware that Tony Blair was Prime Minister between 1997 and 2010”, which is not entirely true...

Kamm moves on to Burgon's equivocation about Chinese treatment of the Uighur Muslim population of Xinjiang

Yet even knowing all this, I had till this week overestimated Burgon’s intelligence, as I’d looked merely at the evidence of his capabilities rather than anything deeper. On an LBC discussion yesterday, he was asked six times whether he believed the Chinese communist regime had committed genocide against the Uighur Muslim population of Xinjiang. Burgon’s response was that ‘there’s things that the government of the United States has done historically that we profoundly disagree with’, and spoke of Hiroshima. His response was worse than evasive. It was abhorrent.

And yet -

This sort of activity has nothing to do with progressive politics. As a longstanding Labour voter, I hope that Burgon will suffer ostracism for his comments. I don’t think he’s a bad man, but as well as raw intelligence he lacks imagination, curiosity and simple human empathy. Density is no excuse for indecency.