A Free Left Blog

Public, political and institutional discourse can often appear strangely detached from ordinary, everyday life. On identity politics, now a specialist area for me, there was a time when my own everyday life seemed blessedly free of race antagonism. Race/skin colour and ethnicity appeared as a borderline irrelevance that we seemed at least close to transcending. I know that hasn’t been so for many non-white people. However I have heard from some who have said the same. Of course, sometimes I have witnessed or been part of incidents in which these things came to the fore – either conventional racism or racism used as an accusation to attack someone else. On other occasions I have smelt it in the air, palpable and unmistakable, while remaining under the surface, just. However in the last four days race has appeared front and centre in my ordinary life, just being around in London, three times. The first occasion was in a bus station when a scrawny-looking white man appea...

I have written a piece for the website Unherd about the way the alliance between  technocratic, free market liberalism and the politics of diversity over mass immigration - is a theme that crops up a few times in my book. You can read the article  here .

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. ...

Sadiq Khan is playing the race card again, this time in his campaign to be Labour’s candidate for London Mayor. Khan, who managed Ed Miliband’s successful Labour leadership campaign in 2010, was talking to George Eaton of the New Statesman about fellow candidate Tessa Jowell, and said: “I don’t think [Jowell’s] got the answers for the 2020s, the future business, we’re a modern city, we’re young, we’re diverse.” Sadiq Khan, MP for Tooting. We can see here that Khan thinks Tessa Jowell hasn’t got the answers and shouldn’t be Major in part because she isn't 'diverse'. He contrasts her to a ‘we’ which is ‘diverse’, as well as modern, young and of the future . It illustrates once more how this notion of diversity in the hands of left-wingers actually often excludes white people. On the left it's one of those words that actually means something different from its literal meaning; often only those who are attuned to the language can pick up the differenc...

It has often been said that while the right has won the economic battles of the last few decades, the left (in its various liberal and pseudo-liberal forms) has conclusively won the social war. This seems incontrovertible in Western Europe and America at least. I won’t go into the political triumph of economic liberalism here because: 1) it’s not what I’m talking about here and 2) it’s a bit technical and boring. But it’s good to reflect on social liberalism’s success, which is largely the story of a basic positive and righteous progression of politics from ‘not-so-good’ to ‘a lot better’. In Britain we are much better off, or perhaps better to say we are more civilised , for the reforms and changed social attitudes that have come with the triumph of social liberalism during the last Labour governments. From free museums admission, the ‘ right to roam’ , free bus travel for pensioners and civil partnerships for gay couples, we have been freed up to live our lives more how...

In The Open Society and Its Enemies , Karl Popper quotes a passage from Hegel that shows how social ideologies can end up giving free rein to all sorts of bad behaviour. Hegel says in it: “ We may fairly establish the true principles of morality, or rather of social virtue, in opposition to false morality; for the History of the World occupies a higher ground than that morality which is personal in character – the conscience of individuals, their particular will and mode of action.” Here we can see social virtue, or ‘social justice’ you might say, being consciously put up against personal morality and conscience, and beating it. Hegel’s true principles of morality trumped the false trivialities of people being good or bad to each other in real life. The incredible failings of Rotherham Council and police in relation to the industrial-scale child sex abuse going on in that town show how such ideas are not mere fodder for dry debates in the fusty rooms of academia. They ar...

Equality is one of the most problematic and even dangerous notions in politics, yet it retains a particular appeal and is well worth exploring. Gottlob Frege, the founder of modern mathematical logic, asked a basic question at the beginning of his work Sense and Reference : “ Equality gives rise to challenging questions which are not altogether easy to answer. Is it a relation? A relation between objects, or between names or signs of objects? ” Frege favoured the latter; that equality is a relation between names or signs of objects rather than between things or beings as a whole. In this way, we can see equality occurring between aspects of things rather than the things themselves. After all, if an object or being (a human being for example) is absolutely equal with another, then it would be the same thing. It’s like Wittgenstein said in his Tractatus: " Roughly speaking: to say of two things that they are identical is nonsense, and to say of one thing that it is...