Richard Webster - Obituary
Richard Webster, who has died aged 60, was a contrarian writer who challenged bien pensant opinion about such thorny issues as the Satanic Verses affair, the conduct of investigations into allegations of child abuse in children’s homes, and the reputation of Sigmund Freud.
Daily Telegraph, 12 September 2011 Books Obituaries
Richard Webster
What united his approach to such disparate matters was the view that, in trying to break the links which tie us to our religious past, Western liberals have become profoundly confused about their own cultural history, failing to see how the “superstitions” of our ancestors have translated into currents of modern “secular” thought.
In A Brief History of Blasphemy: Liberalism, Censorship and The Satanic Verses, published in 1992, three years after Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini imposed a death sentence for blasphemy on Salman Rushdie for his novel The Satanic Verses, Webster took issue with those who had expressed outrage at the fatwa and a spate of book-burnings by protesting Muslims.
The Rushdie affair, he argued, was not a battle between authoritarianism and freedom but a clash between two kinds of fundamentalism. It was a Holy War in which neither side had understood the destructive role which has been played throughout history by blasphemies directed against other people’s religious beliefs. Liberal intellectuals in particular, he argued, had failed to understand the history of the repressive origins of their own doctrines of freedom.
Webster explained the offence caused to Muslims by Rushdie’s book, and argued that it was wrong arbitrarily to defend the right to publish material that may cause distress to minorities. The Western liberal concept of “freedom of speech” is based, he argued, on the Puritan idea of an “inner conscience” which dictates right and wrong. But Webster suggested that as the Puritans dictated the terms of such “right” and “wrong”, it is mistaken to confuse with them some universal truth.
Absolute freedom of speech, he went on, has never existed and is neither possible nor desirable: “In the real political world which we all perforce inhabit, words do wound, insults do hurt, and abuse – especially extreme and obscene abuse – does provoke both anger and violence.
“There is one thing I have feared more than the bombs of Islamic fundamentalists,” Webster concluded. “It is the harm that can be done by the machine-gun bullets of liberal self-righteousness.”
The son of a sub-postmaster, Richard Mortimer Webster was born on December 17 1950 and in later life described himself as “an atheist who was brought up as a Methodist”. He was educated at Sir Roger Manwood’s School, Sandwich, and studied English Literature at the University of East Anglia, where he later taught.
In 1985 he and his wife, Bod, founded the Orwell Bookshop at Southwold and also their own imprint, the Orwell Press, which published some of his books and also postcards. At the same time he worked as a freelance journalist and critic. In the mid-1990s he sold the bookshop and moved to Oxford where, among other things, he worked for a time in a bookshop at Woodstock.
In Why Freud Was Wrong: Sin, Science and Psychoanalysis (1995), Webster cast a sceptical eye over the life and works of the great psychoanalyst, arguing that Freud saw himself as a messianic figure and that his theories represented the disguised carrying forward of the “original sin” of the Judaeo-Christian tradition.
Freud, Webster claimed, was determined to prove that most psychological problems arise from sexual experiences in childhood. To this end he fabricated evidence, frequently trying to persuade women who had not been abused in childhood to believe that they had. He also misdiagnosed as “hysteria” medical conditions such as neurological tics, tremors, palsies and epilepsies whose origins were organic, saying virtually nothing when, one after another, his patients drifted away, deteriorated or died.
It was to the subject of child abuse that Webster turned in his next two books: The Great Children’s Home Panic (1998), and The Secret of Bryn Estyn: The Making of a Modern Witch Hunt (2005). These concerned the care home for adolescent boys that became the focus of a police investigation into suspected child abuse that spread across a number of residential homes in north Wales.
Webster argued that investigations of abuse in care homes in the 1990s were disfigured by a zealotry which made miscarriages of justice almost inevitable. Investigation procedures had developed which reversed normal police methods, notably by starting with suspects and then trawling for potential victims to find out whether a crime had been committed. In some cases the police had done too much to encourage accusers to come forward.
Modern scandals of mass abuse, which “inevitably undermine the credibility of those who make genuine allegations”, he argued, were analogous to the witch hunts of the Middle Ages and were fuelled by the same, age-old, human urge “to purify the world through the annihilation of some category of human beings imagined as agents of corruption and incarnations of evil”. The Secret of Bryn Estyn was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize.
Webster’s concern about miscarriages of justice was not merely theoretical. With the investigative writer Bob Woffinden, he helped find lawyers to work on a no-win no-fee basis for Dawn Reed and Christopher Lillie, former Newcastle nursery nurses who, in 1993, were falsely accused of sexually abusing children in their care.
They were acquitted, but the accusations continued and were subsequently endorsed in a report commissioned by Newcastle City Council, after which the pair had to go into hiding. In July 2002, after a six-month trial, Reed and Lillie won a historic libel victory.
Webster’s last book, published both in English and Portuguese in April this year, was Casa Pia: The Making of a Modern European Witch Hunt. This was an account of a paedophile-ring scare in Portugal which had led to several prominent figures being sent to jail without, in Webster’s view, any credible evidence against them.
In September last year six defendants were convicted of abuse and sentenced to lengthy terms but a few months later, shortly before the book was published, one of the accusers gave an interview to a Portuguese journalist in which he admitted that the allegations he had made were false. A second witness also admitted lying. At the time of his death Webster had been working on a book about disgust.
Richard Webster, who died on June 23, was separated from his wife, though they remained on good terms.