Douglas Murray on intolerant politics

Packing, Barbara - I think I would have voted Lexit also on economic grounds (state aid, that sort of socialist-y thing) but the sticking point was a realistic view of whether we had an electorate who would have voted a government that left into power. I decided probably not, so voted Remain.

What I've found interesting (and depressing) in my area this election is the disparity between working class and "underclass". I noticed that whereas previously there was a large stereotypically 'aspirational' chunk of middle class, that has now crept down to working class, who now view themselves as a very distinct population to the "underclass" - and don't want to pay for them, whereas they may have been happier to previously (or perhaps just didn't talk about it anyway). This change in attitude in working class populations has already been linked to negative media coverage of "scrounging", but I think it also is affected by positive "influence" (either influencers or just other WC people) on social media.

I've noticed more "keeping up with the joneses" from WC friends recently, and in comparison a lot less empathy with those who receive all of their income in benefits. Of course not you - your circumstances are different - it's that family down the road with their twenty seven kids and seventy four flat screen TVs. The kind of attitude I had only previously seen from the more snobby of my MC friends.

This thread is a breath of fresh air.

Fantastic posts packing

I was a remainer but I have surprised myself with how relieved I am at the GE result. Not just because we get to end the deadlock but also because of the sense of people being listened to for the first time in decades. Or perhaps just by a quirk of our electoral process it looks as though they are being listened to.

I spoilt my ballot paper and now I feel that this was the right thing to do. I couldn’t vote LibDem (my natural home) because of TWAW. Labour ditto. Repulsed by Boris. So I found myself homeless but in some ways this feels apt. I’m a Londoner and I work in financial services. I have a high salary in an influential industry. I live about 2 miles from Westminster. It probably right that this election was not about me. We need to start listening to people and stop closing them down with accusations of racism when they say they don’t really want their home town to become an unrecognisable outpost of a foreign country whose language they can’t speak. This seems to me a reasonable thing to be concerned about. We don’t live in a joyful multicultural theme park and we should stop pretending that it’s all good for all people all the time.

Our biggest local issue is a persistent Roma begging and homelessness issue - small groups of Roma women are sleeping in every single doorway in our high st right now (usually with a male minder). At one point they were sleeping on the steps of our local (state) primary school and the caretaker had to move them on and wash the steps before school could open each morning. The begging is endemic. I have to brief my children on what to do if approached when I send them to the shop. It’s awful. I won’t say it’s superduper because some moronic Labour tweeter doesn’t want either to acknowledge the downsides or even allow other people to mention them.

Ian Warren @election_data
If you're analysing the election but only looking at the 2017-2019 elections you're making a fundamental mistake. This graph from @jburnmurdoch is a hint as to why. Look at what has happened since 1997 to Labour's support amongst the working-classes.

Packingsoap I think that's spot on as an analysis of the Eurozone's genesis and structural instability. I tend to read a wide range of stuff (deliberately) and I'm always struck by the fact that Yanis Varoufakis (Marxist, former finance minister of Greece during the Greek crisis) and Ambrose Evans-Pritchard (economics editor of the Torygraph) give pretty much the same analysis, despite coming from opposite ends of the political spectrum.

Add to that genuine concerns round the political role of the Commission (this is an old article from the Guardian, but an interesting one, articulating these worries from the perspective of Germany, in particular, Martin Schultz, www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jul/21/eu-future-post-brexit-germany-split-european-government) and there are good reasons why one might be a Eurosceptic.

All the economic arguments I think were in favour of staying in the EU but outside the Eurozone. But there were political and constitutional reasons for being a Eurosceptic. The portrayal of Leavers as "thick, ignorant and racist" was a ludicrous over-simplification of a very complex political situation.

Wow, great thread!

I wonder if Corbyn would have come across better if he'd actually tried to explain why he wasn't keen on the EU (I also would assume it was for the reasons above).

I mourn Bob Crow.

Policies around restricting freedom of movement should also address the (in my view) bigger problems that come with unrestricted freedom of movement of capital.

That's why, historically, Marxists had a huge problem with the EU. And what is not very well known is that freedom of movement of capital was THE initial principle. Freedom of movement of labour came later as a "compromise" principle to silence those voices that pointed out how dangerous freedom of capital really was.

It's like how many people don't realise that the EMU came about because France said it would block German reunification unless Germany allowed France to use the Deutschmark; this was a protective move for France who feared the power of a newly reunified Germany. Hence we got the neo-Deutschmark in the form of the euro. In-built in that move was the entire, utterly predictable, economic disaster of Club Med, who would be enticed to use a currency that was way too strong for their economies because they were, essentially, using a relabelled Deutschmark.

But you say any of this and the screams of ... I dunno ... bigot/witch/nazi/racist/eaterofbabies can be heard in John o'Groats.

To be fair, I think this is why Corbyn has been so wishy-washy on the EU and Brexit. I reckon he personally thinks it is a corporatist, hyper capitalist stucture imposed on countries for the benefit of a global elite.

But somehow the solidarity angle and the social and cultural benefits of EU membership suffocated an actual discussion of the economic and financial issues involved in EU membership. We were not allowed to have that conversation, and we really needed to have it.

It's a shame Bob Crow died when he did. We really needed those kinds of voices on the left just to create the space to be able to talk about those economic issues.

She definitely wanted a working class pet.
Reminds me of this:

I see echoes of the Labour screams of 'Racist!' whenever anyone raised an eyebrow about the speed of change caused by immigration in the noughties with the 'no debate' and no platforming we see around the current trans issues. They were very successful in shutting down dissent - see Gillian Duffy (bigot-gate). Today's tactics are very similar.

And see, that's an issue that I'd have expected Corbyn to care about. But Momentum? Not a bit.

Policies around restricting freedom of movement should also address the (in my view) bigger problems that come with unrestricted freedom of movement of capital.

The idea that capital should be allowed to move wherever it wants and that this somehow has no adverse consequences on nations should be examined more closely.

Sorry - merail over. Have just been struck by that idea

God I have just remembered my ex's mother literally parading me around her friends because I was 'a miner's daughter'. They owned a fucking castle! She wasn't so keen when she realised I had opinions She definitely wanted a working class pet.

Bet she loves Momentum.

Yy. Noble savages. Until we're not woke.

I think I have been guilty of this attitude toward my family - around Brexit particulary no wonder they think I'm up myself (but love me anyway)

But all of it seems to be, largely, a product of parts of the British establishment, most notably Guardian and BBC journalists, certain parts of the academy and other voices from the liberal left, who seems to have a residual imperialist mindset

Lisa M used to call these people the "mediating class". I think that's accurate.

ShesDressedInBlackAgain
So many perfectly put points on this thread, that one resonated for me too. The working classes are painted as 'noble savages' when the ruling elite can use us to push their agenda, but just as savages when we don't do as we're told.

that a lot of things start to make sense in Britain if you perceive the English working classes as the last indigenous people still colonised by the British Empire and governed by a remote imperial elite that doesn't understand their history or culture.

Wow. Lightbulb.

This resonates so much with me. I realised in the last couple of years that lots of things I had been conditioned to think were 'rude' by living a middle class life were actually hangovers from growing up in a really poor traditionally working clas community. A good example is dropping in to see people. It used to drive me mad that my family never knew who was turning up or when they might arrive but I realised that actually they think it's really rude to ask. Because the back door is always open to visitors and you can always put the kettle on.

It has been doing my head in completely to see momentum falling over themselves to claim to be socialists and to represent working class communities. This thread is really useful.

As a Scot the idea that some* English people, particularly in the political class, see us as a colonized country that ought to be grateful for any scraps given definitely rings true.

*Obviously not all English people, but some where you wouldn't have expected it. A former friend from London once responded to media jokes about Snowpocalypse causing chaos in England and lots of sledding for kids in Scotland which is more used to is with an I'm joking but not really ha ha I can barely contain my rage that they don't see themselves the way I'd like them to comment about the Scots being jealous because we're so obviously inferior. It was one of those moments where you go, oh, so that's what you really think? Bye then.

Fab thread. Loads to think about.

Someone made the point upthread about the difference between immigrants and immigration. It's one that is difficult to explore with many, many people. The assumption tends to be made that if you oppose unlimited immigration, you are a racist/fascist/xenophobe. But it's perfectly possible to like and respect many immigrants, and appreciate the benefits that immigration can bring while at the same time understanding that wages can be undercut, opportunities for the existing population closed off and that housing shortages can easily occur as a result of high levels of immigration.

This is a conversation that was effectively forbidden for years (Gordon Brown and his 'bigot' comment being just one example) but shutting it down didn't stop people thinking about it. Speaking for myself, it bred resentment against a political class that didn't seem to give a shit about the social cohesion of the area I lived in, or various other issues that followed from an increasing population.

do you believe theres been a kind of Americanisation of UK social issues?

Most definitely. But it is tricky to determine just how it came about. LangCleg is spot on with the comment that British academia imported American critical theory without repurposing it for context, but I feel it goes further than that.

I honestly feel, and I've said this before on mumsnet, that a lot of things start to make sense in Britain if you perceive the English working classes as the last indigenous people still colonised by the British Empire and governed by a remote imperial elite that doesn't understand their history or culture.

To an extent, you can argue this for the Welsh, the Scottish and the Northern Irish, but I think it is a clearer, more obvious predicament for the devolved regions -- most notably in Scotland where it is blatantly obvious and the Scottish people are all too aware of their situation, and in Wales where the Welsh language supports their understanding of nationhood and self-determination.

But very few people see it with England and the English. Yet once you do, the picture clears. It explains the typical tactics of divide and rule. It explains that patronising attitudes of the British establishment towards the white working class (and the working class British descendents of Commonwealth migrants from former British imperial holdings) because they basically perceive the English working classes in the same way they used to perceive "the natives" in British India, the West Indies, and Africa.

As an illustrative example, it is worth saying that when Ugandan Asians came to Britain in the 70s to escape Idi Amin, they were horrified by the living standards of the white working classes. They couldn't believe how these white people lived, and within Britain itself.

Indeed, Hanif Koreshi, back in the 70s, made a very interesting point. He said that when the British Empire fell, the British elites reacted to that situation by recreating the Empire within the geographical boundaries of the UK through Commonwealth immigration. And I personally think that is a very interesting perspective with a lot of merit to it.

And it seems to me that the 90s and noughties political concept of multi-culturalism was very much of this mindset. It was almost Victorian in the way it classified people according ethnicity and religion, and completely disregarded class and cultural values. If you were Muslim, you were "Muslim" regardless of whether you were a middle-class pediatrician from Turkey with a penchant for raki or devout Pakistani-heritage taxi driver who had a second job delivering curries.

This led to bonkers situations where the government housed Iraqi Kurdish asylum seekers in the same areas as disaporic communities that supported Saddam Hussein, for example, on the basis "they were all muslims." Cue: internecine violence on Northern streets, and a famous case where one Kurdish lad suffered extensive brain damage after being attacked as a pro-western, "anti-Saddam" individual.

Kenan Malik, who you hardly hear from nowadays, did a lot of excellent work on this issue back in the early noughties.

Finally, it was recognised that the political ideology of multiculturalism was a load of old crap. When this happened, I can't really tell, but it seems to me that it kinda coincided with the importation of US identity politics and the explosion of twitter, which, as a tool, allows for the confusion between US and British contexts.

But all of it seems to be, largely, a product of parts of the British establishment, most notably Guardian and BBC journalists, certain parts of the academy and other voices from the liberal left, who seems to have a residual imperialist mindset, and the hard left which seem to latch on to these ideas and then just disseminate them everywhere.

Now I know what the hard left is like. I've had enough dealings with them over the years to know that they will use anything to try and provoke a state of political chaos (which, in theory, is supposed to forment the social and political breakdown necessary for revolutionary conditions to arise ) and now so many of them have piled into the Labour party through the Corbyn conduit that their voices are being massively amplified.

But the problem is wider than that. A lot of it seems deeply routed in the mentality of the establishment, and I suspect that the cause is down to the stranglehold certain sections of society in Britain now have over national politics, culture and society.