A Free Left Blog

This article follows a long Twitter discussion initiated by Sandy Starr, relating Kenan Malik’s review  of Eric Kaufmann’s fascinating new book Whiteshift to the debate we had on my book  at the Battle of Ideas in London on 13 th October. 'The real problem, however, is not that the notion of white identity is racist but that it is meaningless.' @kenanmalik responds to @epkaufm 's #Whiteshift in @ObserverUK . Relevant to recent #BattleOfIdeas debate between @bencobley / @cricri42 / @_HelenDale . https://t.co/xs5ND6W3aF — Sandy Starr (@sandystarr0) 21 October 2018 In this thread, Kenan linked to another article of his, entitled ‘Not all Politics is Identity Politics’ a beautifully-written piece in which he presents his critique of identity politics and through which I could see some avenues to explore the differences with mine. Firstly, it’s probably worth explaining where we agree. Kenan is a critic of identity politics, and from the left. As he sa...

" Every consensus is based on acts of exclusion ." ~ Chantal Mouffe. Labour’s main problem came into focus for me yesterday when I was watching the BBC News Channel. Rupa Huq, the new Labour MP for Ealing Central and Acton (congratulations to her for winning) came on and started boasting about Labour’s success in London, linking it to London as a place where UKIP doesn’t do well and drawing a contrast between the diverse, relatively well-educated capital and the rest of the country. This sort of ‘London exceptionalism’ makes some people feel very good about themselves but it doesn’t seem calculated to appeal to many outside the capital nor indeed many former Labour voters. It’s common currency among London Labourites though, and it’s telling that the contrast is most enthusiastically illustrated by contrasting Labour to UKIP . On this dimension the ‘us’ stands in contrast to a ‘them’ composed of UKIP and UKIP voters. The contrast draws its fuel from a ...

I’m not trained in economics but I do know a bit and have been intermittently digging through Karl Polanyi’s book ‘ The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time ; said to be a core text for Ed Miliband and his close political gang. Perhaps the most interesting and arresting ideas in The Great Transformation concern what Polanyi called the ‘ fictitious commodities’ : land, labour and money. I was reminded of this when reading a post by Chris Dillow on his Stumbling and Mumbling blog yesterday. Dillow's piece jumped off from the most read post on this blog – about how our immigration debate misses the main point by focusing only on economic aspects and treating how people feel as somehow illegitimate (something which is thankfully no longer the case – partly due to the excellent recent work of British Future ). In his fascinating argument to which I’ll digress for a while here, Dillow discusses how and why public opinion differs from ...