A Free Left Blog

This article was posted yesterday, 10th June 2020, on the SDPtalk website. Black Lives Matter (BLM) is a masterpiece of political marketing. It’s a slogan with a campaign attached, linked to some pretty heavy racial ideology and propaganda.  None of it can be criticised without appearing to oppose the idea that black lives do indeed matter. BLM is a classic and effective piece of rhetorical blackmail. Either get on board or you’re a racist: that is the logic of it - a logic driven by fear. It’s the perfect slogan, as befitting the powerful alignment between progressive liberal-left politics and the PR, media and advertising industries across the Anglophone world. There’s an immediate and powerful social block on even questioning this movement just from its name. One of the great successes of the campaign is how it has got many institutions in our society applying this block themselves, promoting the organisation and even punishing insiders who publicly question and criticise any a...

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 had a short piece published for Spiked a few days ago about the erosion of impartiality in broadcast journalism. In this piece I only had the space to relay a few thoughts I’d been having in response to various journalists’ tweets. Quoting them in full meant there was little space to develop thoughts and put them in proper context. So I thought I’d write a follow-up piece here on my blog. Clearly, the erosion of standards is a much wider phenomenon than what broadcast journalists (who are meant to be impartial according to OFCOM rules) say on Twitter. What they say there is important, for it shows us how they think, how this thinking informs their broadcasting and other things like how they tend to act as a pack, enthusiastically running with some stories but not others. However the real proof is what they do in their broadcasting – and this leaves a lot to be desired. For my part, I have now largely given up on mainstream news, bored by the subjects it focuses on and...

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...

“The strong cannot help confronting; the less strong cannot help evading.”                                                               Julian Barnes, The Noise of Time One of the core themes of my forthcoming book The Tribe is the remarkable power that certain kinds of identity politics have attained in our public life. The knowledge base of this politics is the universal victimhood of its favoured identity groups. As the United Nations’ ‘ Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance ’ Tendayi Achiume put it in her report on how awful and racist Britain is, “The harsh reality is that race, ethnicity, religion, gender, disability status and related categories all continue to determine the life chances and well-being of people in Britain in ways that are...

This is only a brief post, but I thought it was worth doing on account of a classic example of left-wing double-talk on the BBC Newsnight programme last night which shows once more how our ideologies are completely blinding us from reality. The occasion was a little report on university admissions outlining how the admissions service UCAS has accepted just 172,420 male admissions for the coming academic year so far, compared to 224,570 from females. That is 35% of male A-Level students going to university compared to 44% female students. National Union of Students (NUS) Vice President Joe Vinson was interviewed for the segment and said the numbers were “ not surprising ” because “ apprenticeships pay less for women systematically; women earn less in the workplace, particularly when they don’t have a degree. So it’s not surprising that women feel like they have to go to university to better themselves, in order to compete with men on an equal level ”. So we can see how fem...

I’ve found myself blathering on about immigration rather too much for my own liking lately, but it is probably the issue which best demonstrates a conceit at the core of current liberal-left politics in Britain. We have reached a point which feels like a crescendo in the ‘debate’ on immigration, at least in terms of attention being paid, following BBC Political Editor Nick Robinson’s BBC2 programme last night, entitled ' The Truth About Immigration '. Yet the response of mainstream liberal-left publications and their writers to this heightening of discussion and awareness has been almost universal: that we shouldn’t be having the debate at all . It is a revealing viewpoint, and offers a nice opportunity to look at the arguments of Chantal Mouffe on how liberal politics seeks to crush what she calls ‘the political’ in favour of a sort of self-styled ‘rational consensus’. Let’s have a look at some of the arguments for suppression first. First up is Stephen B...

This article was first published on Labour List on 1st November 2011, but notwithstanding the faltering attempts by Labour to make itself out as a 'One Nation' party, I think it is just as relevant now. “Don’t be boring in your Parliament, Dad.” Five-year old Sarah Mullin’s delightful advice to her father Chris on July 18 th 1994 (related from his diary entry for that day), is something that the whole of our political class would do well to bear in mind once in a while. The little girl’s point is even more pertinent for Labour in opposition – as indeed Mullin Snr and his colleagues were in 1994. Being boring should surely be the cardinal sin of mid-term Opposition, when it is difficult enough to get noticed even at the best of times. Yet the blunt, unvarnished truth is that Labour is actually extremely boring at the moment – even for a political geek like me. Polly Toynbee’s comment about the “ curiously bloodless Labour party ” hits the spot. We seem to be d...