A Free Left Blog

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...

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...

The novelist Doris Lessing has been called a ‘feminist icon’ but had some withering words for modern-day feminists before she died last year. At the Edinburgh Book Festival in 2001, she said: “ What I really can't stand about the feminist revolution is that it produced some of the smuggest, most unselfcritical people the world has ever seen. They are horrible ." She added: " It is time we began to ask who are these women who continually rubbish men. The most stupid, ill-educated and nasty woman can rubbish the nicest, kindest and most intelligent man and no one protests . " Men seem to be so cowed that they can't fight back, and it is time they did ." I have had my fair share of shouty abuse from feminist mobs online and can certainly sympathise with what Lessing says, even though I would pull away from calling all of these people ‘awful’; indeed they are often perfectly pleasant when separated from this side of their politics. It is ofte...

The word identity entails a mathematical formula of one thing being identical to another, as in x = y . Jump over to the conception of human identity and you have something different though. In describing our ‘personal identity’, we might come up with any number of things that define ourselves: from our basic physical characteristics to social identifiers like the religious and political groups we belong to, class (middle class/working class?), ethnicity, maybe profession... Hence I may say I ‘am’ a middle class, white, male, agnostic journalist, a member of the Labour Party, with a critical view of mainstream liberal-left politics. This probably does about as good a job at describing me as you can do in a sentence, but of course it misses out so much that it is nowhere near reaching ‘identity’ with me. That sentence and me are nowhere near that x and y relationship which an actual identity would entail. But then I could go on for years detailing different aspects of myse...