Douglas Murray on intolerant politics

[BovaryX]

There is an interesting article by Douglas Murray in the DM about the authoritarian, identity politics which have alienated Labour voters and triggered a paradigm shift in the political landscape. It covers some of the themes which Lang GC Pencils and others have been discussing in light of election result.

It is a divide between people who have real-world concerns and those focused on niche and barely significant ones...How, you might ask, have we reached such a state? There is a clue in the Labour Party’s dysfunctional reaction to its catastrophic defeat on Thursday

Have finally reached the end!

I've been reading, watching linked vids & reading linked articles for over 2 & half hours now 😮

What an absolutely amazing thread

The Tony Benn speech, Douglas Murray & Tatiana McGrath creator were very prescient

Loads of thought provoking contributions from so many posters

Thank you 😊

On the subject of somewheres, I think it is often overlooked that even if you are not wealthy, not everything is about economics. You still value your culture, local community social cohesion and the state of your immediate environment, urban and natural. If you see these things negatively affected by a policy that claims or even does make you a bit financially richer, it might still be a policy you'd rather do without.

One of the problems I think is to do with gentrification and new build planning and how it means only certain types of people end up living in an area.

You don't mix with a vary of people.

I've found it interesting watching how some of the snobs here have a real issue with saying their children can't afford large houses but we don't want small houses here.

My former estate was a mix of small houses - some privately owned, some shared ownership and some full housing association surrounded by very large 5 bed executive homes.

Some locals made comments about it being a council estate and there being loads of trouble there. And opposed similar schemes on those grounds. Which was the biggest load of nonsense you can imagine.

The larger homes all made a point of not associating with the rest of the estate as if they were above them.

Off the estate I've since heard they have a certain reputation for being up themselves locally. Which amuses me.

All of a sudden now we've moved we are allowed to join this club socially.

DH and I have been amused.

We now live right next to a council estate which some on the next street who have lived here for nearly a decade don't appear to have noticed. Apparently there are no single mothers here.

I am actually very glad we live where we do. There's a good mix of people and one of the nice things is people looking out for each other in a way that wasn't there in the same way at the old estate.

The whole 'it takes a whole village to raise a child' mentality.

I know who has been parked outside my house, or anything out the ordinary has happened. I get told. And vice versus.

I once, as a teenager whose parents were away leaving me with the house to myself, brought a bloke home to stay for the weekend. 2 different sets of neighbors called my mum to let her know.

I think grammar schools were gone long before that - abolished in 1965 I think. Kent was one of the few places that hung onto them. It was my route out - back then no one I knew had coaching to get in so it was mix of kids of all classes & backgrounds

Well, yes! When I sat the 11-plus nobody really knew quite what they were sitting. It was a just a test we all did together in the classroom in the last year of primary school ( 1976). We knew it was important...but it was nothing like it is today.

There is still a grammar school in Liverpool, where I live, but now the difference is that people pay to have their children coached to pass the exam; and the exam is sat, not in the classroom, but in a high pressure situation, in school itself - at the weekend - with the parents waiting, anxiously, outside.

Over the last 10 years or so , the ethnic mix has become almost 50/50: White/ & Chinese/Arabic/Asian. Some immigrant populations are very ambitious for their children.

Hey @rolaren Swoon and yes, I know he's gay!

I saw him in conversation with Lionel Shriver in October and I felt the same way! 😂

Thanks for the tip off about the talk with "Tits" is that also a Spectator event?

They still have grammar schools in Lincolnshire

I went to an all girls one in 1986 (only did 3 yrs there then moved to a comp in Scotland)
It was those 3 yrs at the grammar that gave me a good academic grounding, but also gave me aspiration & self belief & opened up my horizons

With hindsight, it was a mix of backgrounds there, but at the time I didn't notice - we were all the same in my mind at the time

There was no hothousing or anything back then, not sure about now though

My dad has been complaining about the destruction of the grammar schools for as long as I can remember, since well before Blair actually. Even though he didn't go to one (his route out was via a trade union that taught him what it turned out were highly portable skills)

My father too.....he went to a grammar school but had to leave at age 14 to help support his family. A life long trade unionist but who, one one occasion, voted Tory because of the issue of grammar schools.
I attended a grammar school and am very thankful for that. The level of expectation was always high and the role models were all academic, independent women. My experiences in school really shaped me - and gave me great confidence.

I speak, also, as an ex teacher - who has taught in a very wide variety of schools: from 'challenging' inner city to elite Cotswold boarding school.

Some locals made comments about it being a council estate and there being loads of trouble there

Maybe this is a Scotland/England divide but I often find comments on here about council estates weird.

I live on what was a council estate. A mix of two bed flats and three bed terraced houses. Most in private ownership these days but some still owned by the housing association that took over council properties locally.

We waited five years for a house to come on the general market here. The majority exchange hands privately. They're like gold dust and far more in demand than the much shoddier and pokier private new builds.

There are shitty council estates round town, but the vast majority are perfectly nice places to live.

The worst thing I could say about any of the Scottish council houses my extended family ever lived in was that the wood look panelling in one was a bit tacky, but, you know, 70s. The ones my dad's family lived in where gran and auntie were on the same street a few doors down from each other were lovely, gran's had a garden where she grew strawberries in the summer. My other gran's flat the only thing wrong with it was that the internal stairs were very steep so she had to move once she got too old to manage them any more.

*Agreed that grammar schools are not a great idea for social mobility. They take a relatively small proportion of poorer pupils and a relatively bigger proportion of privately educated pupils8

That wasn't always the case...even if it now is. Now pupils are hot housed and sent to private tutors. That wasn't how it was when I sat the 11 plus.

Don't get me wrong Prodigal there have been some appalling blunders with social housing in Scotland, not least the vast post war estates round Glasgow built with no amenities but there is also an awful lot of really good quality, well proportioned, solidly built housing that is far superior to your average Barrett box.

Yeah there are a few estates that nobody was sad to see go because living in them was awful, but the idea that it's all like something out of Oliver Twist is classist nonsense.

Ive been mulling over the whole Somewhere thing all day. I've no conclusions but a few observations. You cant put a price on that sort of community spirit.
It's the sort of thing you itch to get away from when you are 18, but many many come back to when you are 35, with kids entering education and parents getting on.

You see so many threads on here about people struggling with the normal challenges of life, which is what rooted communities mitigate against.
When you are the first one you know to have a baby, and no experienced aunty nearby to stop anxiety escalating, what happens?. When your parents age 200 miles away, what then?

Single parents are more likely to be in poverty and that seems to be an absolute crunch point. You all know it from rants about popping out kids, and living on the taxpayer. The obvious answer is to get absent parents- overwhelmingly fathers - to actually pay for their own children.
No party, nobody is willing to tackle that.

Another attack angle on the 'somewhere' is crime and anti social behaviour. The perception is it's getting worse, and that's why people seek social mobility and 'better areas'. Why house prices are so high.

My bubble says that people want a decent job in a secure home in a peaceful area. Sometimes you have to get down to first principles.

Sarah Conor Fern

“ Thanks for the tip off about the talk with "Tits" is that also a Spectator event?”

Beg pardon? 😂

I started to fancy him after this

Dare I say, really worth reading Murray’s book Strange Death of Europe.

Have suggested it to one friend who immediately got upset because of the description.

PS not a fan of Murray’s views on women.

Because this is the feminism board I was thinking about how dismayed I've been by what I see as my feminist principles leading me to be judged negatively by the progressive left.

For example, I'm still viscerally shocked by niqabs and dislike them because I simply do not believe covering women's faces up in public comes from anywhere but a male desire to control women yet this feminist view gets me labelled Islamophobic.

Then because I want to defend women's sex-segregated spaces, I am charged with transphobia.

Then back to Islamophobia again because of my concerns about halal meat and animal cruelty.

Then general racism or xenophobia because I'm anti high net immigration (not anti-immigration!) not just because of social cohesion or pressure on services but because of the environmental impact of the human population.

All these things I have always been concerned about and thought were good things to care about - women's rights, animal rights, the environment and indigenous wildlife - but seem in the past couple of decades to have put me on the progressive left's superhighway to bigotry.

Btw especially as this is on the Feminist board, I wondered if anyone else had seen Christine and the Queens on Newsnight.

It feels like such a fuss is made of Christine becoming Chris. Her pronouns are still she/her etc

She says she wanted to really “deconstruct” gender meaning. I just wonder why people find that important. Perhaps not a great example as in this interview there’s no reason to believe she’s chucking out women’s rights. But I just wonder why any of this genderqueer stuff is such a big deal initially.

I think her music is fab and that’s kind of it, really. I don’t think she needs extra publicity?

Regarding mixed grammar schools:

I passed the 11-plus exam in about 1975, so got a grammar school place.

School was roughly 50:50 girls and boys.

Then when I was in Form 2 (second year) there were rumours of imposed 50:50 female:male quotas, and if there hadn't been that imposed quota - my school would have been 60:40 female:male.

The 11-plus pass mark was adjusted for boys, in order to ensure a broadly 50:50 intake.

Which also means that some girls who merited a grammar school place, were dropped from grammar school, in order to meet the "affirmative action for boys" objective that was implemented, at that time.

Yes, heard the arguments about "boys maturing later" etc. etc.

Still, girls were denied places in grammar schools in my county, because a 50% affirmative action quota for boys was implemented, to girls' detriment.

I don't know anything else about her but I think Chris/tine came across really well and sounded very sensible in that clip AutumnRose1 Yeah, I don't know quite why there was a news story about her from that clip alone and they didn't go into a definition of pansexual as she was described by Evan but I was pleased she said unequivocally, "I'm a woman" and "I'm she". She sounds just like she wants to break down gender stereotypes which I'm all for. I wondered if the producers were assuming she was trans or something but it didn't really work because she doesn't identify as any such thing. I liked what she said about the male gaze too.

Since when is Chris rather than Christine a change in gender rather than a nickname?

When you’re super special presumably...

Since when is Chris rather than Christine a change in gender rather than a nickname?

Not sure but I suspect it may come as a surprise to my mother in law. And my mum's cousin. And my colleague. And my neighbour.

Just wanted to say that I don't know if it's just Corbyn that is the reason for the bad Labour result - it is surely Brexit.
A vote for Labour risked another X years of bickering and wrangling by MPs as to whether to stay leave have another vote.
I think many will return to Labour voters at the next election - presuming they get their house in order by then. It was the Tories house not being in order that caused Brexit when DCameron wanted to shut up EU Dissenters by a once and for all vote.
So hopefully all parties will come to their sense now and work for the country as a whole not just their beef.

I am 67 and was stunned that some MPs in Westminster, the Mother of all Parliaments , home of democracy ever suggested that there could be another 'peoples'' vote. It would have been shameful imv. They made a mistake, they lost, live with it.

May failed to control immigration when in the HOme Office. Didn't get the numbers below 250,000 (I think it was ) - had she looked as if in control then we would probably not have had the Brexit result.

My feelings in the 60s, 70s was that immigrants admired our democracy, freedom of speech, non corrupt law system. and that they wanted to come and adopt our British way of life. This I see now is wrong. and that people are just wanting a better life (understandably, I would do the same) regardless of us, so are not necessarily going to integrate or adopt our lifestyle. Groups of the same religion or ethnicity stick together. But when white British want more non-immigrant british in their street that is racism. If others want to live with others who share their beliefs/lifestyle it is not, apparently.

But free immigration - how many below the poverty line live in India/ China , millions? billions ? Immigration is a world problem. I don't see us having quotas to cream the best educated from these countries solves anything. This needs discussed at International Summit level.

We have the Scottish elections in May 2021 - it will be interesting to see how the vote falls then. Would being in Europe but separate from England work?
One of N Sturgeons policies is to increase immigration to Scotland due to falls in population. Seems barmy to me, what to stop an immigrant moving out of Scotland after a few years, for the same reasons others are. I think the vote in Scotland was anti Labour rather than solely for SNP. We have our own parliament , not sure everyone really wants Independence. So many have family across the border/ all over the world.

I followed my MEPs work in the months before the Brexit vote. He attended meetings with British MEPS of his party and they had discussions. Didn't debate/ didn't vote/ didnt' decide/ didn't promote - ie did FA imv. That's why I voted leave.