A Free Left Blog

  An Open Letter to Tom W Green, a composer and musician based in Glasgow. Dear Tom, Thank you for alerting me to your blogpost entitled ‘The Farts Ascending: Classical Music and the Culture War’, albeit with a rather unfriendly tweet saying that it was “partly in response” to my “ nonsense article that tried to concoct a culture war from RVW's The Lark Ascending”. I read it with interest. In responding here, I would like to address a number of factual errors and omissions you make which should be corrected. You call me “a right wing author”. This is untrue. I am actually of the left. I was a Labour Party member from 2010 to 2016 and still count myself of the left. My blog on which this letter is published is called A Free Left Blog . At no point have I said that I am no longer of the left. This assertion is at the core of your argument and should be corrected. Understandably, you use the original title of my piece , ‘Why The Elites Hate Vaughan Williams’. However perhaps yo...

In his recently-published book Tribes , the Labour MP David Lammy, newly-appointed as Keir Starmer's Shadow Secretary of State for Justice, makes a number of accusations against me based on a reading of my book The Tribe . As you can see from the passage below, Lammy calls my book "conspiratorial", saying that I "chastised" his words in responding to the Grenfell Tower disaster "as an example of identity politics' most flagrant excesses". However, if you read the passage from my book that he quotes afterwards, I think you will find none of that. I certainly didn't set out to chastise him or anyone else in the book. Rather, I was seeking to describe how progressive identity politics (or the identity politics of the 'liberal-left' as I describe it in the book) has become so utterly normal that a senior politician can respond to a deadly fire by putting not just skin colour, but gender, front and centre of how he responds to it a...

Sometimes as a writer on social and political issues, I get this nagging feeling that it might be a good idea to suggest what should be done in government and wider public life rather than just moaning about it. This may seem like a somewhat obvious and absurd thing to say. Surely it is the job of someone writing about public life to put forward ideas about how to make it better? I agree with this to an extent. However there are real practical difficulties. Firstly, I think the primary task of a non-fiction writer is to describe and explain what is happening fairly and accurately. This takes a lot more time, effort – and space – than people might give credit for. We have limited time and space to play with as writers – and since we tend to be writing about something, that something necessarily takes up most of our time and attention. Secondly, and perhaps more interesting, is the necessary confrontation with the world of existing policy-making and law.   Policy-maki...

Claire Fox is one of my heroes; one of my favourite people in public life. And she still is. To see her name being dragged through the mud since she committed to become a Brexit Party candidate for the forthcoming European Parliament elections has been difficult to watch and to bear. David Aaronovitch started it off with a vituperative column attacking the ‘shadowy past’ of Fox and her colleagues in the old Revolutionary Communist Party who are now involved in the Academy of Ideas and the Spiked online magazine. Nick Cohen (an old lefty hero of mine) picked up the thread, denouncing her as “one of the most immoral people in public life”.   Sunder Katwala of the ‘independent, non-partisan thinktank’ British Future has been running some huge Twitter threads attacking her and her candidacy. Fellow tweeter Otto English has also been running a relentless Twitter campaign against her. Newspapers and broadcasters have picked up and reported it. The main and see...

This is the text of the speech I gave at the session about my book, ' The Tribe: the liberal-left and the system of diversity ' at the Barbican, London on Saturday 13th October 2018. It differed a little in delivery. Further details of the session and the participants are here . Hello Everyone. Thank you all for coming. Also a special thank you to Jon [Holbrook] and the Academy of Ideas for arranging this session. And another special thank you to Christine [Louis-Dit-Sully], James [Panton] and Helen [Dale] for agreeing to participate and for wading through this book of mine. I hope we can have an interesting and lively discussion about it and the issues it raises. “Questioning Diversity: discussing THE TRIBE” - at #BattleofIdeas - with @bencobley @cricri42 @_HelenDale @jimpanton - packed out!!! pic.twitter.com/NJTAQrEUEY — The Great Debate (@greatdebateuk) 13 October 2018 So, let’s get into it. What is this book all about? I’ve been reflecting on thi...

One of my favourite lines is from the Russian writer Mikhail Bakhtin: “My voice gives the illusion of unity to what I say.” I reckon you could write a book on that sentence alone. There is so much in it and so much it can be applied to. It immediately makes me think of someone talking confidently, perhaps on TV, maybe with a presenter deferring to them as an expert. They feel comfortable, at ease, and this is reflected in their voice, which is clear, calm and authoritative. In order to get on to the sofa in the first place, their voice probably had to sound this way. In order to enter into the situation of being deferred to, to be treated as an authority in front of millions of people, they had to look and sound the part of someone who knows what’s going on. They had to fit in with this sort of situation of people who go on TV and talk confidently about things. There is a sort of unity in this situation: of the authoritative voice matching up with t...

While writing The Tribe I found two of my main interests, in the existential background to life and in mass immigration as a phenomenon, fusing and coming together in ways that I am still exploring and finding interesting. I think this coming-together has helped me to address one of the fundamental questions of our time in the book, namely, Why is mass immigration such a troubling phenomenon for ‘host’ communities or people? Even using this word ‘phenomenon’, which I know annoys some people in its vagueness, helps to guide us towards the sort of answers I have been coming up with. It helps because it does not limit how we address what is going on in the act of describing it. For one thing, it helps us to avoid locating the source of trouble in immigrants themselves, as if there is something wrong with them. But it also avoids locating the troubles in what I am calling here, for want of a better word, ‘host’ communities or people – as if there is something wrong with them...

My book, The Tribe: the liberal-left and the system of diversity , is being published on 1st of July, so not long to go now. Last week a courier dropped off my copies - showing this thing  that has been dominating my life for the past few years in physical form for the first time. THE BOOK: it exists I have already posted the backcover blurb and some of the theoretical background . But what is it about, really? How would I sum it up? At the most basic level, The Tribe is an attempt to explain what  on earth is going on with the politics of identity and diversity. How has it come to dominate our public sphere? And what is the role of the progressive liberal-left in this? It obviously has a major role, but how does this work? Why is this combination so powerful? And what are the consequences of it, not least on our public life? It is not a history book. It does not attempt to find 'root causes' for what it going on or to track back in time to find a few individua...

Imprint Academic has made available some details of my book, The Tribe: the liberal-left and the system of diversity , on its website  here . [ Update: it is now available for pre-order via Amazon here  and on the Imprint website here ] The Tribe : book cover The blurb reads: From Islamist terror to feminist equal pay campaigns and the apparent Brexit hate crime epidemic, identity politics seems to be everywhere nowadays. This is not entirely an accident. The progressive liberal-left, which dominates our public life, has taken on the politics of race, gender, religion and sexuality as a key part of its own group identity – and has used its dominance to embed them into our state and society. In   The Tribe , Ben Cobley guides us around the 'system of diversity' which has resulted, exploring the consequences of offering favour and protection to some people but not others based on things like skin colour and gender. He looks at how this system has almost tota...

I have just finished writing a book. The title is ‘The Tribe: the liberal-left and the system of diversity’ and it will be published between August and November 2018 by Imprint Academic. [ Update: the publishing date is now scheduled for 1st July 2018 ] The Tribe picks up on many of the themes I have been exploring on this blog about the politics of identity. However, it reaches towards a wider understanding of what is going on: of how and why the politics of gender, skin colour and other forms of ‘fixed’ and quasi-fixed identity have come to dominate our public sphere in recent years. This is where the idea of ‘the system of diversity’ comes in. With this idea, I am not talking about the sort of social system which covers the whole of society like some accounts of capitalism, patriarchy and colonialism do. Rather, the system of diversity appears as a system of relations , which offers possibilities – for involvement, inclusion, social approval and also material reward. ...

Speech at the London School of Economics Forum for Philosophy debate , 27th April 2016. I was proposing the motion alongside Dr Gerard Lyons  (economic adviser to the Mayor of London), with journalist Hugo Dixon and Professor of Political Theory Katrin Flikschuh on the other side arguing against. Each panellist had seven minutes to speak, followed by questions from the other side and then questions from the audience. Dr Gerard Lyons making his case for leaving the EU. [This is an amalgam of what I had planned to say in my speech and what I did say – so I missed out some of this in actual delivery while adding some ‘umms’ and ‘errs’ and various other stuff] The whole debate is now available to listen via a podcast here . Hello everyone. I want to start off by emphasising that I’m actually a pro-European. I always have been. I even like an idea of the EU (as  an idea, albeit not the idea). But on the balance I think we should leave the EU. I’m proba...

This is the first part of a four-part essay applying the powerful critiques of Karl Popper to contemporary ideologies which have gained significant social power – focusing in particular on Islamism and ideological forms of feminism (those forms which have become dominant in left-wing politics). This first part engages with the way Popper has been mistakenly appropriated by the free market right, and makes the case that he should be adopted by the liberal-left, not least because he was liberal and of the left. “ The future depends on ourselves, and we do not depend on any historical necessity. There are, however, influential social philosophies which hold the opposite view .” ~ Karl Popper If guilt comes with association then on the left you do not get much guiltier than receiving Margaret Thatcher’s seal of approval. This is the fate of Karl Popper; perhaps the best critic of authoritarian and totalitarian ideologies there has been, yet somehow associated...