On the Clapham Omnibus

The Marginalisation of the Common Man

A motor omnibus. London General Omnibus Company, (circa 1903). Public domain photo.

Has anyone seen the Clapham omnibus? It’s been in service for almost two hundred years but now appears to be missing. Officially making its debut in 1903 at the handing down in a Court of Appeal libel case (McQuire v Western Morning News), the personification of public opinion as a balding man from a nondescript suburb commuting back and forth to Clapham is actually Victorian in origin. Then, as now, what unites the passengers is not wit, beauty, insight, expertise, riches, intelligence or a surfeit of wisdom, but that most vanilla of qualities: Ordinariness.

The poet Robert W Service sums up the place of the undistinguished Englishman in a forgettable piece of self-reflecting doggerel:

If you and I should chance to meet, I guess you wouldn’t care

I’m sure you’d pass me in the street, As if I wasn’t there.

You’d never look me in the face, My modest mug to scan

Because I’m just a commonplace and Ordinary Man.

That it’s not Shakespeare is perhaps the point. In a world that builds statues to Keats, Benjamin and Woolf, Robert Service is a poor man’s Pam Ayres. Nevertheless, it is this workaday, ordinary man of little note who provides the cornerstone of legal and public society.

Take policing. Still labouring under the delusion that the police are the public and the public are the police, due reverence is paid in The Code of Ethics to the ordinary man. For instance, whether or not an association is reasonable does not rest with the Chief Constable. The test of reasonableness is formally set out in the Code of Ethics: What would the reasonably informed member of the public think?

For instance, in deciding whether it is acceptable for a constable to take the knee, it is the ordinary man who judges. The same might be asked about the police habit of marching with Pride or buying into the Stonewall Champion racket (more of which, later). Notice that The Code does not ask what the expert or academic or learned counsel thinks. It is the opinion of the balding man from Clapham or the single mum on her way back from Aldi that counts. It is little wonder that the Omnibus is missing. The police have impounded it.

Nowhere is contempt for the ordinary man more evident than on Twitter. “Wherever possible, respond to contact posted by others, whether positive or negative. Communities value honest feedback” is the official line. In practice, this translates as this: “Wherever possible, ignore, sneer at, block and report any account which fails to post a clapping emoji every time we tweet something punctuated with a rainbow.”

Take this year’s virtual Pride march in Liverpool during which the chief constable, her assistant chief constable, two chief inspectors and a radical nun took time out from cracking County Lines (and fervent intercession) to regale us all in an onanistic display of flagmanship. 

“I will fight pronoun aggression and negativity in all its forms!” pledged a detective inspector, waving a flag with a vigour not seen since Picket’s Charge at Gettysburg. 93% of violent crimes may fail to land a prosecution but at least visitors to Merseyside can wander along Penny Lane without fear of misgendering.

Fair to say, public feedback tended toward the negative. In fact, of the 204 comments posted, most would qualify as a non crime hate incident. To further position the common man as beneath contempt, the police failed to engage with, or challenge, any of the negativity in spite of having just pledged to do so. 

Karaoke favourite, “The National Express,” is a further iteration of the Clapham Omnibus. In his joyful paean to the working class, Neil Hannon celebrates the customary singing of nonsense songs en route to where the air is crisp and free. “All human life is here, from the feeble old dear to the screaming child,” he sings. To the horror of those who consider themselves extraordinary, no one on the coach is listening to the experts on Radio 4.

“Bureaucratic administration means domination through knowledge,” wrote the sociologist, Max Weber. In common with their masters at the Home Office, the police have adopted the position that experts are the legitimate source of power. Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabularies recently criticised the police for failing to distinguish government guidance from law. It is hardly surprising. When the Prime Minister conducts his televised evening chats flanked by experts, it tacitly conveys the primacy of the technocrat over all other considerations. Government policy is placed beyond politics and, as a consequence, is beyond serious challenge. With no effective opposition, the bureaucratic administration is dominant.

Scepticism in the public arena is reduced to a whisper. Beneath the weight of received, expert opinion, there is an inversion of the principle of public life attributed to Voltaire: Privately, I may agree with your opinion but I will fight for the right of the expert to suppress it. 

Lord Sumption, the former Supreme Court judge, applies this inversion to the current obsession with vaccines, noting that it is difficult to voice dissent when The Royal Society, no less, advocates punishing those who publish an opinion that is not stamped with the official seal of approval. Thus, vaccination is a moral duty and supersedes any consideration of bodily autonomy. If this sounds extraordinary, then good. Experts are, by virtue of knowledge, extra-ordinary. Ordinary people do not have their opinions authenticated by peer review.

Sumption’s advocacy for the ordinary man engaging in heresy is not based on naive romanticism; “Some of what people believe will be wrong,” he acknowledges. Nevertheless, he continues to hold up a middle finger to the demagoguery of the technocrat on their behalf. “We cannot have truth without accommodating error,” he writes.

In an article about the primacy of the commoner, one hesitates to give the final word to a Lord.

In the week in which The Taxpayers Alliance published a report revealing that Stonewall uses money raised through its Champion’s Scheme to advance a political position, it is time for the ordinary man to assert his authority over any Chief Constable. I suggest writing thus:

Dear Chief Constable

As an ordinary man, I am applying the Test set out at 6.4 of The Code of Ethics. In associating with Stonewall, I perceive there to be an actual or apparent conflict of interest with police work. As a reasonably informed member of the public, I reasonably believe that this association could adversely affect your ability to discharge your policing duties effectively and impartially. I demand, therefore, that you instruct your officers to cease the association immediately.

Yours faithfully,

The Man on the Clapham Omnibus