Read It In Books:We Need New Stories:Challenging the Toxic Myths Behind Our Age of Discontent.

Has our freedom of speech become a tool for prejudice? Is our media reliable? Is our history a fiction?

These are the questions on the back cover of Nesrine Malik's We Need New Stories:Challenging the Toxic Myths Behind Our Age of Discontent and, though they're certainly not the only questions she asks in the book, they are three questions of great interest to me. I was in Waterstones, Leadenhall Market looking for a new book to read and as those were themes I'm curious, and as I'd often enjoyed Malik's Guardian columns, I thought I'd give it a go.

I'm glad I did. It was an easy, enjoyable, and sometimes challenging read. I agreed with a great deal, if not all, that Malik had written and even when I didn't the book gave me plenty to think about. The bulk of We Need New Stories is split into six chapters (The Myth of Gender Equality, The Myth of a Political Correctness Crisis, The Myth of a Free Speech Crisis, The Myth of Damaging Identity Politics, The Myth of Virtuous Origin, and The Myth of the Reliable Narrator) and, in an introductory session which address Malik's upbringing in Sudan and her disappointment on reading Ayaan Hirsi Ali's Infidel, the writer explains that "individually, and collectively, we need stories".

That telling stories is a "universal impulse". We need some galvanising, sense-making framework, a narrative, in order to instil order and a sense of purpose to our lives. But she goes on to argue, and I agree entirely, that some stories are "dangerously regressive" and are used to "preserve the status quo" (despite often pretending to do the exact opposite. It probably won't be a surprise that, as examples of these, she cites Brexit and the election of Donald Trump.

Regarding gender equality, Malik believes that the social contract between most countries and their female citizens is broken, that the system doesn't provide happiness, or even safety, for women. She cites gender pay gaps, abortion rights being rolled back in America, the bargaining women must do if they are to be both caregivers and workers, and cyber sexual harassment and shes makes clear that these are as common in the UK and the US as they are in, for example, Sudan or Iran.

She cites Jordan Peterson (who's hardly impartial) using twisted 'science' to argue that inequality is hardwired (Peterson also suggests men should 'toughen up' so his work is at best useless, at worst dangerous for both women and men) and elsewhere looks at how the likes of menstruation and the differences between male and female brains have been used to argue the case that there are some jobs, some roles, that women should not do.

There are some truly disturbing statistics (in England and Wales - between 2010 & 2015 - 64% of all women murdered were murdered by their partner or ex-partner) and if some of Malik's points seem a bit obvious, there are other occasions when she points out things I didn't expect. In Sudan, she found women to be the strongest advocates of female genital mutilation.

In the chapter titled 'the Myth of a Political Correctness Crisis' Malik, quite rightly, points out that the rise in racist abuse since 2016 is a far more concerning crisis - and a real one. When Cambridge student Lola Olufemi wrote an open letter to her facility requesting non-white authors be added to the curriculum, the Telegraph put her picture on its front page under a headline which read 'STUDENT FORCES CAMBRIDGE TO DROP WHITE AUTHORS'.

But Cambridge had not dropped any white authors and Lola Olufemi had not asked, let alone forced, them to do that. The eventual clarification in the Telegraph was, as these things so often are, tiny and, anyway, it didn't matter, the damage had been done, a narrative (an incorrect one) had been created. 

That's how it works. Twist a story. Put your enemy, one who is simply asking for better representation or a more level playing field, on the defensive. Create a wide held belief in a grievance against others. Malik describes how a long nourished grievance boiled over in 2016 when the US elected Trump and the UK voted for a disastrous Brexit.

Brexit happened and Trump won but in the UK and in the US during the Trump presidency, the supporters of Brexit and Trump didn't celebrate their victory so much as they looked for new enemies to attack. High court judges, liberal elites, the media, the blob, the anti growth coalition. Many of these were simply made up and many of the people who attacked 'elites' were millionaires, nobility, and extremely influential politicians. Or, to use a more simple collective term, - the elite.

That's all stuff most of us already know but Malik is even better when she turns to 'frequency scrambling' and cites an example of Hillary Clinton talking about curbing immigration because it had created grievances for Trump and the far right. She had played straight in to their hands when, in Malik's view - and mine, she should have been defending immigration and the benefits it brings. "Frequency Scrambling", Malik writes, "makes values negotiable".

Regarding "the myth of a free speech crisis", Malik talks of receiving personal and abusive comments online. Those people, quite clearly, didn't think "you can't say anything these days" and nor do any of the people who send racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, and ableist abuse to people they've never even met on a regular basis. Though despite saying whatever they want, no matter how disgusting, they quite often add "you can't say anything these days". It's the new "I'm not racist but...".

Malik points out, quite correctly, that what people are really complaining about is not that they no longer have freedom of speech (because they do) but that they don't feel their speech should have consequences or be questioned. You can call somebody a racist or homophobic slur if you want - but you shouldn't expect to not be picked up on it and you certainly shouldn't expect to be applauded or treated as some kind of maverick because you're espousing the same tired old views we all heard back in the playground as kids.

False equivalence is the idea that every opinion must have a counter opinion, must be allowed a counter opinion. When it is raining, you may look out of your window and objectively observe it is raining but if somebody else was to say that, no, it's not raining their view would be equally valid. It doesn't matter that they are demonstrably lying.

Probably the clearest and most dangerous example of that these days is the phenomenon of climate change deniers. Another example would be the neo-Nazi BNP leader Nick Griffin appearing on Question Time in 2009 (a show I watched, he made a sweaty fool of himself). Griffin's appearance caused outrage back then but now, as Malik writes, it would barely raise a shrug. Griffin's views have now become mainstream. Party policy even in the case of our current government.

Then there's the new popular technique of complaining you're being silenced by the establishment while being very much part of the establishment and having your views amplified by the establishment. Nigel Farage has appeared on Question Time thirty-two times (joint top with Kenneth Clarke) despite never being an MP even after having stood seven times to be one. Yet he regularly complains that the establishment are against him.

When it comes to the myth of damaging identity politics, Malik correctly points out that people like the killer of Jo Cox and the man who plotted to murder the MP Rosie Cooper and their identity politics (white supremacism, Nazism) are not an established part of the popular discourse. She makes the case that those in the majority (heterosexual white people) don't see that as their identity at all while, say, a black gay person may feel very defined by their identity. Crucial to the misperception, writes Malik, is a belief that whiteness is the default mode.

On the myth of virtuous origin, Malik starts by declaring that "there is no mainstream account of a country's history that is not a collective delusion". The UK, or a huge part of it, cannot admit to itself that its 'greatness' was built on global expansion, slavery, and resource extraction. To ignore that, to opt for a culture that is unable to self-reflect, is to take part in a corrosive myth.

Sometimes it's a case of intentionally ignoring the history that doesn't suit the narrative. Sudanese school curricula doesn't mention the Al Mahdi massacres, in Saudi Arabia mention of the storming of the holy mosque in Mecca in 1979 is banned from all books, and Chinese history omits the bloody purges of the Cultural Revolution. In the UK it's a little more nuanced, a little more insidious even.

Debates about empire take place but the establishment narrative is that empire was a mostly positive, civilising force for good. One that not only made Britain Great but one that made all the nations that Britain colonised great as well. In fact it made them British citizens but when British history is told those parts of Britain (those parts that were British) don't seem to feature in a long line of kings called Henry, Edward, and George, two World Wars, and an Industrial Revolution.

This came to a head in 2016 with, you guessed it, Brexit. Where the Brexit brigade somehow convinced enough people that we were being occupied, in a sense, by the EU. Rather than that we had been occupiers of many other countries over many centuries. Some of them went mad. Michael Howard threatened war with Spain over Gibraltar, others talked about the Dunkirk spirit even though the Dunkirk evacuation was, as described by Winston Churchill, a "colossal military disaster" in which 68,000 British soldiers lost their lives. Was this something we should try and repeat?

Concerning the myth of the reliable narrator, Malik turns on her own - the press. How the press didn't see Brexit coming, how they didn't see Trump becoming President, how they didn't see Corbyn's "success" in the 2017 election (if not the 2019 one), and how they backed George W Bush and Tony Blair in their invasion of Iraq. This is because, she says, the media class and the political class are, essentially, the same class and they're a class that doesn't represent huge swathes of society.

It's just one more good point made in a book that features lots of good points a lot of truly awful, and some vaguely awful, people. Trump, Douglas Murray, Peter Hitchens, Oswald Mosley, Steve Bannon, Peterson, Richard Nixon, Ann Coulter, Enoch Powell, George Wallace, Boris Johnson, Saddam Hussein, Alex Jones, Nick Griffin and Lionel Shriver through to Rod Liddle, Roman Polanski, Michael X, Jacob Rees-Mogg, Milo Yiannopoulous, Michael Gove, and Mike Pence, Isabel Oakeshott, Roger Ailes,Ben Shapiro, Nigel Farage, Richard Spencer, David Duke, Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, Cecil Rhodes, and the Koch brothers. Even Anders Breivik. Even Hitler. 

But are there any positive role models? Male or female? Thankfully, yes. If not as many as the bad guys. There's Simone de Beauvoir, Malcolm X, Hannah Arendt, Harriet Tubman, and Barack Obama (give or take Guantanamo Bay) as well as lesser known positive and progressive voices like Reni Eddo-Lodge, Gary Young, David Olusoga, Fintan O'Toole, and James O'Brien. There are others that sit in the middle. People who have done good but perhaps have also done bad. Have said fine things but have also said problematic things. Here we find Germaine Greer and Hillary Clinton.

There's a few things in the book I disagree with but the main one is my belief that it is acceptable to critique the beliefs of a religion without being called Islamophobic or anti-semitic. Although it's very different if you start making threats or untrue accusations about individual people and I think those that criticise religion should at least be consistent, Christianity has a horrific history and some utterly vile practitioners.

But if anything, Malik could have been even bolder and the book, already a very good read, would have been even more compelling. But Nesrine Malik wanted to write a book about creating a fairer society, about truth and justice. So she, quite correctly, felt it important to be truthful and fair when doing so. She managed to do so right up until the final page. A recommended read.