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

My experience of NW small towns is they tend to have large numbers of traditionalists and somewhere. Where I live they don't like gentrification and 'the money moving in' because it destroys the idea of it 'taking a whole village to raise a child' which is essentially about the importance of communities looking after each other.

I think that's probably true, and it's not incredibly helpful to tell people who don't like immigration that they are being racist. A huge wave of immigration can, I imagine, destabilise a community's cohesion and sense of itself. The trouble with the left is that while it focuses on the benefits of immigration - more people working in the NHS, paying taxes, generally being positive contributors to society - ignores that element. So while all those benefits might be true, they fail to recognise the downsides.

Caroline Flint had this to say. She’s furious

In the pursuit of Remain, a number of people who have been ardent Remainers in our party, on our front bench, people like Keir Starmer, people like Emily Thornberry, but many others, Hillary Benn, Yvette Cooper, they have contributed to sacrificing 59 seats. But don’t worry. We’ve got Putney and Canterbury.

I haven't read the article but I agree it sounds like your typical condescending ruling class "I really know what the great unwashed need better than them."

... Urgh pressed post by accident.
I read the Madness of Crowds book and while I agreed with his critique I didn't like his analysis at all. It was very smug and right wing.

Also I'm not British but weren't people on here lauding LOJ at one point for his analysis of the British Proletariat? How does that sit now?

I've said it before that I don't think it's necessarily immigration as such, more a change of migration patterns which can include British white people moving in large numbers to an area.

If you look at what's happened in recent years you have gentrification patterns and what has been termed 'social cleansing' where poorer communities have been displaced to other places around the country due to problems with a lack of council housing.

Immigration has been blamed by some but I think its too simplistic.

In my area the only families that have managed to stay living in the area have tended to be those in council houses. Young people can't afford to stay or return to where they grew up. The population is very white.

But of those who have been here a long time there is resentment over 'the money' and those moving in tend to have moved up from London and the South, which is changing the character of the area. They don't have the same priority of community and devote less time to it.

Of those who have afforded to move here / stay here and are from the North they tend to have certain professions. It's over represented with computer programmers and well paid science based jobs.

It comes back to housing.

It keeps coming back to housing.

I'm sure Caroline Flint is furious. But I think she's wrong to attack Starmer, Thornberry etc. Two reasons. One is that you can't suddenly expect people who passionately believe that leaving the EU is the wrong thing to do to start supporting the Leave cause just because of the referendum result. Second, let's not forget that 48% of people voted Remain. Why should their views not be represented in parliament? I'm really sick of this will of the people stuff. All the referendum result showed is that the country was divided in half.

One of the things about the Arab spring was it was interpreted by Western governments and press as being about a desire for democracy as the time.

The Arab Spring interpretation was an entirely western spin on what the Arab people themselves called the Muslim Awakening , intended to create echoes of Hungary 56, Prague 69, the defeat of an ideaology- that through the natural order of enlightened thinking, all nations and peoples aspire to western style democracy and eventually will become right minded enough to demand it...

It keeps coming back to housing.

I agree wholeheartedly with this.

It was never about democracy, and this was wilfully misinterpreted to the western audience to suit our regimes' narratives .

It was never about democracy, and this was wilfully misinterpreted to the western audience to suit our regimes' narratives

Well said

I think Labour were struggling to appease two mutually hostile, diametrically opposed factions. Jeremy Corbyn tried to avoid stating a clear position because he would alienate voters whichever he chose. The PLP was dominated by Remain and that’s the position they took into the election. As Caroline Flint says, they lost 59 seats. But they got Putney. The irony? Corbyn was a Brexiteer. From the Bennite wing....

All the referendum result showed is that the country was divided in half.

But nobody ever really knew which side Corbyn supported. Choosing a side would always have meant losing some votes, but Corbyn just tried to ignore the whole thing. By the time he offered a second referendum he hadn't done enough to either completely win the support of remainers or persuade leavers that they weren't being betrayed.

People who regretted voting to leave were disproportionately likely to be Labour and Northern.

Labour voters voted to remain by nearly 70% to 30%. Even in the North a majority voted to remain in a lot of places. Many 'traditional' Labour voters in the North had already been lost by Labour prior to the referendum.

Of those who voted Labour at this election, Brexit wasn't their priority.

I think saying that the ref was the issue Misses the point that the loss of Northern and Midland Voters is part of a long term trend that pre dates the ref by some time.

The ft stated the biggest driver of a swing to the Conservatives in this election was the number of blue collar workers in the area.

Brexit was a symptom of wider political issues, not a cause.

Both the LDs and Labour missed this crucial point.

The PLP was dominated by Remain and that’s the position they took into the election.

Not just the PLP - also Labour voters.

The problem Labour faced was that even in Leave supporting areas, most Labour voters supported Remain. However, while there might be a Labour MP who would have been able to persuade Leavers of the benefit of Remaining, or Remainers of the benefits of a soft Brexit, it isn't Corbyn.

On immigration. It isn't just that immigration changes the nature of communities, it is the constant comparing apples to oranges that gets up people's noses.

Yes immigrants positively contribute, but they are in a position to do so. The people that move country are the young, the able, the well educated for the most part. It isn't fair to compare those Polish (for example) people who are in a position to up-sticks and make a new life for themselves to those people in the UK who are not. Nor is this fair in terms of internal migration.

Many people can't 'get on their bike' for various reasons. They have caring responsibilities, or disabilities, or lack the necessary funds, or educational advantages.

It is possible to highlight the positive nature of immigration while also highlighting the positives of staying put. You could, for example, highlight the money saved when people stay and care for their own relatives, and thank them for doing so. You could highlight the importance of stability in communities, particularly for children. You could put policies in place that support people in staying where they are (yes housing is a key part of this).

What the left has been doing all too often comes across as comparing 'marvellous, smart, hard working' immigrants with 'thick, lazy, too stupid to improve themselves' locals. I don't think this is intentional, it just seems a bit of a blind spot in terms of how they are perceived.

The problem Labour faced was that even in Leave supporting areas, most Labour voters supported Remain.

Really?

Really?

Yes, really. I think around two thirds of Labour voters voted remain.

You have to remember that many people who voted 'leave' didn't vote at all in elections which skews the numbers, so a Labour constituency with traditionally low voter turnout could vote 'leave' while Labour voters per se were majority remain.

And that before you get in to the problems Labour has pretending it gives a shit about Scotland or Northern Ireland while supporting 'leave'.

@melroses. Couldn't agree more re the Gordon Brown comment. I think that was when the penny dropped with working class Labour voters and they began to realise the Labour elite had nothing but contempt for them. I am fairly new to mumsnet and was about to give up on it mainly due to the vitriolic left wing rants and abuse on some of these topics, how refreshing to find one with intelligent, well thought out and honest comments.

thanks Arnold - Low voter turnout in labour areas compared with the higher turnout for the Brexit referendum would make a difference.

Welcome Pjlady, I come here for the high quality of analysis and debate, the FWR board rarely disappoints ...

This has made me smile and summed lots of things up:

twitter.com/TitaniaMcGrath/status/1205859214360481792

Does anyone else feel that the gap is noticeably closing between the satire on Titania's twitter feed and real life woke Twitter? The election result seems to have rendered them barely distinguishable.

I'm Northern, I live in an ex-mill town in a Labour region (Labour MPs and Labour councils), and I've been involved in politics for twenty years.

The real rot started under Blair. We had high hopes for Blair, foolishly believing that we might see investment and change in post-industrial areas of recividist unemployment. We saw nothing of the sort. After devolution failed with the NW vote, nothing else happened. Instead, what we got was extraordinary levels of immigration into areas that neither had the housing stock nor the jobs nor the capacity to cope with it.

For example, back in the early noughties, there was a significant issue with British youths being able to qualify as tradesmen because the NVQ route required an apprenticeship. Nothing was done to correct this issue; instead, the Labour government dealt with shortages by importing EU tradesmen. Traditional Labour voters noticed this because it was their sons unable to qualify.

Incidentally, it was also around the time of EU expansion that Labour ditched the requirement for a foreign language at GCSE. I have always felt this was an almost malevolent move designed to hobble British working class youth in the face of freedom of movement. Where could they go and work in Europe? They had NO foreign language skills.

Then came Brown and bigotgate. It became clear then that Labour had no empathy with the situation that many working class Northerners found themselves in. They were just "bigots" and "racists", regardless of the fact that the only thing some of these communities had were the fact they were communities with a shared history and language, and were all in the same boat. Mass immigration took that away from a lot of areas.

The racism charge was also beyond ridiculous, considering that many post-industrial areas had settled postwar immigrant communities and a significantly higher proportion of mixed marriages than you find among the southern middle-classes.

But then the liberal elite had form for that. The Parekh report even had the audacity to tell white working class mothers they were racist to their own beloved mixed-race children, ffs.

Add to that, the decades of Labour council governance and the Blair and Brown years, which delivered very little to Northern areas. Demographic pressures were ignored. Infrastructure overcapacity was ignored. There are areas in my region that have a worse public transport infrastructure than they had in the 1880s. House prices went through the roof in areas where most people lived on NMW. Meanwhile, everything just got shitter and shitter. Towns that were pleasant in the 90s turned into shitholes. And then Labour local councils sat back and let young girls lives be ruined because they were scared to challenge metropolitan narratives about multicultural Britain.

No one stood up for the Northern working class.

Then came Brexit. For the first time in a long time, Northerners in traditional Labour areas got the chance to register their anger against the political classes without having to vote Tory. This is THE important point here. That is what the referendum gave Northern working class areas: the chance to register their anger without making the move to the Conservatives, which would change how they had to think about themselves.

And Labour blew it. Along with the LibDems and the establishment, it basically turned around and called these voters scum. That was the nail in the coffin for the traditional Northern Labour vote. Why vote for someone that hates you? That blatantly disregards your opinion? That calls you stupid? And the Brexit reaction made clear something they had suspected for a long time: Labour loathed them.

Even for Northern remainers, it was a shock. Labour was calling people who were their neighbours, friends, family members and co-workers "scum" for voting to leave the EU, and doing it in such a way that the accusation spread to all Northerners.

But Boris, well, Boris acted like Northerners' opinions on Brexit were worth something. He made an effort, unlike Corbyn. So, as Labour didn't want those voters and had made it clear, he got their votes for the first time in a very long time. After all, those voters had nothing left to lose.

And here we are. A Tory landslide.

GCAcademic

Its been that way for a while, since he created the character. You might find this interesting

I’m a bit annoyed - mildly - with a friend who told me off for finding it hard to spot satire, she told me, years ago, that it’s really obvious. She was quite woke at the time. I always feel intellectually inferior but now I realise it’s no wonder I was struggling to tell the difference.

Yesterday an MNer posted posh girl, I think not as satire but as a good summary of what young people think. I think she’s not returned to that thread so I’m not sure.

I’m glad I’m not the only one with a crush on Douglas Murray but he’s got some very misogynistic views on women and MeToo.

Does anyone else feel that the gap is noticeably closing between the satire on Titania's twitter feed and real life woke Twitter?

Have a look at this:
twitter.com/TitaniaMcGrath/status/1205859214360481792
I'm assuming the video is real but it's more bizarre than satire would attempt.