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Feminism: Sex and gender discussions

Douglas Murray on intolerant politics

784 replies

BovaryX · 15/12/2019 12:43

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

OP posts:
merrymouse · 16/12/2019 08:59

I think as well the private school thing and getting rid of Ofsted was misjudged.

I suspect that very few people who aren't either Labour party members or parents of children at private schools could explain LP policy on private schools.

Floisme · 16/12/2019 09:14

Yeah Packing is spot on. I'm a remainer as are many of my friends and family (not all - some voted to leave and guess what, we still rub along as we always did). I'm upset about leaving the EU and think it's a big mistake. However I've noticed from talking to remainers in London (and yes this is anecdotal), that they're not only upset, there's also a kind of outrage that their 'great city' is being dragged down by a backward country. They talk - and they're only half joking - about independence for London, ignoring the fact that several northern cities voted to remain. (In fact I believe the remain vote in Manchester was higher than in London.) The more I talk with them the more I get the sense - and no I can't quantify it - that what really rankles isn't having to leave the EU but being overruled by the people of Oldham and Mansfield and Lincolnshire.

FlyingOink · 16/12/2019 09:20

Floisme
You're right, there was an element of "how dare you!"
But a millionaire gets to vote only once, as does a part time security guard.

Floisme · 16/12/2019 09:24

Yes - and even though I regret having to leave, there's a part of me that does find the outrage quite amusing.

SingingLily · 16/12/2019 09:28

My small contribution to the discussion is the observation that there has been deliberate twisting of the meaning of ordinary words for so long now that we now have two languages: one for the "identity politics" campaigners who make up much, although not all, of the Labour Woke cult.

Fascist means "anyone who doesn't love Jeremy"; bigot means "anyone who doesn't agree with me"; privileged means "anyone who has two pennies to rub together and gets by without food banks"; fake news means "any legitimate or quantifiable truth or fact that backs up your argument but dispels mine"; transphobe means...well, you know what it means.

Such words, used in those ways, apply to just about every single one of us. And there's no point in explaining the inaccuracy or indeed the inherent injustice in those labels. The response has been to shout over us and if that doesn't work, silence us.

We saw the future. And voted No.

MoltenLasagne · 16/12/2019 09:35

Thank you packing for putting into words what I experienced growing up. My family are from Birmingham in the trades and for them the choice of Labour to welcome Polish labourers rather than fix the qualification issues was spit in the eye.

Men with families were being undercut by men living in bed sits (it's actually a lot better now that many have their families here). When my Dad raised the issue to the Labour MP he was basically called a liar and the MP implied he was driven by racism. This from the party of unions.

I get the feeling that Labour are embarrassed about our type of working class. The ones who go into the trades because they didn't do well at school but still want to earn enough to buy a car and a house. Those who really love football and hang out England flags and have them flying from car windows during the World Cup. Those who genuinely like the military and the Queen and the opportunities for flag waving and being proud of your country.

We knew they held us in contempt before the Brexit vote, calling us thick white racists afterwards confirmed it. Half my family voted Remain, but seeing that reaction changed their mind.

LangCleg · 16/12/2019 09:45

I really like this thread for its willingness to share perspectives rather than ideology. That is all.

Needmoresleep · 16/12/2019 09:59

Packing is right, but it is not just the north.

The town where my mum lived has lots of elderly so a big care sector, seasonal tourism, and a port with light industry and some fishing attached. There are posh golf and sailing clubs, and plenty of ostentatious wealth, but equally plenty of cheaper housing for care workers, tradesmen etc. The only difference perhaps with "the north" is that there was not the big collapse in employment so people have always had jobs, from "benefit tourists" in the 1990s effectively squeezed out by the need for accomodation for an expanding student population, albeit often low paid. Better employment prospects presumably helps aspiration so schools are good, whilst there has never been the tradition of organised labour you had in the North. The area is very traditionally Conservative, and strongly Brexit.

The community is liberal in many ways, with significant gay and Jewish communities, and well integrated immigrant communities from post WW2 Spanish to more recent East Europeans.

I found the post Brexit sneering about racism and the "white working class" (a London Trustafarian I know actually posted this on Facebook) well out of order. I so hope Boris comes good on his promise to repay those who voted for him.

packingsoapandwater · 16/12/2019 10:02

Yes, I also feel there was an "unravelling of integration", which is a great way to put it, AutumnRose1.

It seems ludicrous now but, back in the early 90s, I remember a mixed-ethnicity group of us as teens talking about how we would be the last generation to know what racial prejudice was. We seriously thought that because we just couldn't conceive of those ideas surviving any longer.

We all went to school together, we lived next door to each other, we socialised together, we dated each other, we went to each other's life events (christenings, marriages, funerals). We knew each other's mums and dads, and stayed over at each other's houses. A huge number of us have mixed-ethnicity/heritage children, as did our parents; I myself am mixed ethnicity/heritage, as is my DH.

So to us, there was no way racism could survive because, well, we were the same people, the same community. Yes, we were all different colours, and our parents and grandparents had different accents, and we all ate slightly weird food at home, but that was no barrier at all -- even when we did take the piss out of Don because his dad had a massive collection of Desmond Dekker CDs. Grin

It wasn't until I went to university and mixed with more privileged students that I realised not every one in Britain was like us working class Northerners. That was when I first met people who were nervous of black people and weird about people from immigrant backgrounds. And there were people who were odd with me because my boyfriend of the time had a West Indian dad; they were wary of him because he was obviously bi-racial. I never had that experience with working class people.

Now, it is those very same privileged people on my social media feeds that are calling Northerners and working class people "racist" for voting Tory or Brexit. I hold my tongue and don't respond, but it infuriates me.

There's no recognition of Northern working class lived experiences. There's no recognition that Manchester was one of the only cities in the Western world where working class promoters invited American black soul artists to perform in the 1960s and paid them a decent wage. There's no recognition that Jo Smooth was so blown away by the love he got touring in England in 1987 that he wrote Promised Land ... because he'd experienced what he thought was a post-racial paradise in British clubs. Even Kevin Sanderson says today that he couldn't believe that there were all these white people in Britain that loved black urban house music and thought he was terrific; it touched him so deeply as a black man from Michigan.

Instead, it's all just this weird false narrative that bears no relation to reality. Sometimes I think the left thinks we live in the America of the 1950s where white working class "yokels" are just itching to lynch foreigners.

Ffs, those "foreigners", those "immigrants", and those white working class "bigots"? They are our mums and dads, our grandparents, our mates, and our spouses!

It beggars belief. It really does.

ArnoldWhatshisknickers · 16/12/2019 10:04

The brexit sneering also manages to studiously ignore the fact the white working classes of Scotland and Northern Ireland voted remain.

And that is true of remain and leave voters alike.

7Days · 16/12/2019 10:13

packing re your last post- do you believe theres been a kind of Americanisation of UK social issues? It's something I've noticed but cant really articulate. Sometimes its just things like using US terms instead of British ones. That's probably another side effect of social media. It's a distorting mirror.

LangCleg · 16/12/2019 10:19

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

Yes, British academia imported American critical theory without repurposing it for context. Race is the original sin in the US. In the UK, it's class. And, as Packing points out, the British working class is multi-ethnic.

Pjlady · 16/12/2019 10:26

@packingsoapandwater absolutely brilliant post and imo 100% accurate.

SingingLily · 16/12/2019 10:33

Yes, British academia imported American critical theory without repurposing it for context. Race is the original sin in the US. In the UK, it's class. And, as Packing points out, the British working class is multi-ethnic.

Ah, that explains in a nutshell some heated discussions I've had over the years, including distant family in the US. I had just resigned myself to the fact that it was a mutual incomprehension problem and remained baffled as to why the more I tried to explain, the worse it got.

ArnoldWhatshisknickers · 16/12/2019 10:33

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

I certainly think this and it is unhelpful in the extreme.

There is not only a complete disregard for class but an unwillingness to acknowledge that many ethnic minority groups are white, or even more embarrassingly attempts to shoehorn in issues around 'indigenous' people, who in a UK context are white.

Ot isn't that there aren't ever problems with racism here, but they are very different to those of the new world and trying to apply American rhetoric just comes across as unhinged. I am particularly reminded of the (white, middle class) black lives matter activists waving 'hands up don't shoot' banners at bemused, unarmed UK police officers.

53rdWay · 16/12/2019 10:43

For my family it was industry jobs and even whole industries going overseas. Much cheaper for certain very big companies to do their manufacturing in developing countries, where you don't need to pay the workers as much and you're not held down by all those inconvenient safety regulations protecting people from being injured on the job Angry And then people end up unemployed facing a job market where their skills and experience mean little and see it, with some justification, as being shrugged off and ignored by the establishment.

I have seen people passing around a quote on Facebook that says something like "if you're worried that an unqualified Eastern European worker with no experience can take your job, then maybe you should have worked a bit harder at school!" and it makes me so angry because YES the jobs people have are shit but that's all they're left with! You think people want to be working some crappy p/t unskilled job on minimum wage with terrible working conditions?

People ARE going to look back to a happier past when there are things about that past that worked for them. When my dad grew up he and all his friends went straight from school into decent apprenticeships, had good skilled jobs to look forward to in the future, lived in towns that had actual jobs and thriving town centres themselves and worked as communities rather than being commuter dormitories for the cities. There was a lot that was awful about that time too (especially for people like my mum whose prospects were not so wonderful) but you can't address people's concern by saying "yes but also it was shit in the following ways so we can't go back to that", you have to give them hope for a better future.

I don't think the Conservatives have that better future to offer either but they are willing to lie through their teeth about it and spin a much better narrative that they do.

The right wing talk up the working class as something that's almost exclusively white, lives in towns not cities, and is inherently racist but in some sort of heartwarming patriotic way involving Werther's Originals and beer. The left wing sometimes do the same but presenting it as inherently negative, and sometimes glamourise traditional male working-class jobs and lives at the expense of women (all those brocialists talking about the glory and dignity of steel and mining jobs, while ignoring all the women on minimum wage in retail and care work).

I don't look forward to a future of privately-educated rich people on the right arguing with privately-educated rich people on the left about who has the better understanding and right to speak for The Working Class or The North, who don't seem to exist as actual people as far as many of them are concerned.

53rdWay · 16/12/2019 10:45

Yes to the Americanisation of social justice issues, definitely. Right down to the rhetoric as well. Stop saying 'y'all' FFS, you're from Tunbridge Wells.

AutumnRose1 · 16/12/2019 11:14

RoyalCorgi “ And the difficulty then is the confusion between immigration and immigrants. I do think that immigrants who have come here have done a lot of good for the country, and have made valuable contributions. I can also see why people are resentful about immigration and the impact it has on their communities - and I think you should be able to say both those things.”

Agree.

Packing. “ Yes, I also feel there was an "unravelling of integration", which is a great way to put it, AutumnRose1.

It seems ludicrous now but, back in the early 90s, I remember a mixed-ethnicity group of us as teens talking about how we would be the last generation to know what racial prejudice was. We seriously thought that because we just couldn't conceive of those ideas surviving any longer.

We all went to school together, we lived next door to each other, we socialised together, we dated each other, we went to each other's life events (christenings, marriages, funerals). We knew each other's mums and dads, and stayed over at each other's houses. A huge number of us have mixed-ethnicity/heritage children, as did our parents; I myself am mixed ethnicity/heritage, as is my DH.

So to us, there was no way racism could survive because, well, we were the same people, the same community. Yes, we were all different colours, and our parents and grandparents had different accents, and we all ate slightly weird food at home, but that was no barrier at all -- even when we did take the piss out of Don because his dad had a massive collection of Desmond Dekker CDs. ”

This. So much this! A childhood friend, who moved away, said to me “we never had issues living a multicultural society”. And I said, “but we didn’t live in a multicultural society. We lived in a multi ethnic society and no one made a massive deal of yelling “multicultural, diversity, inclusion” at us.” Which is probably why we didn’t suffer from divisions.

And there wasn’t a hierarchy of victimhood.

I also blame academics for bringing irrelevant ideas here from abroad, ideas that have no application to England. I will refrain from mentioning other parts of the Union as that’s got me in trouble on here before. I’ve also been told off for blaming academics 🤷🏻‍♀️

AutumnRose1 · 16/12/2019 11:15

Sorry - no clear line between my words and packing’s. Apologies. Sneaky work posting 😱

RedToothBrush · 16/12/2019 12:17

I really wish we'd had a thread like this 3 years ago...

packingsoapandwater · 16/12/2019 12:20

if you're worried that an unqualified Eastern European worker with no experience can take your job, then maybe you should have worked a bit harder at school!"

Okay, this type of thing really pisses me off. Angry

And there's so much to say about it.

Even as late as the 80s and early 90s, many Northern comprehensives were still operating on a kind of informal "manual work" or "office work" mentality towards pupils. If you were intelligent, you were destined to work in an office as a secretary or clerk. If you were not so intelligent, you were destined for a trade or for factory/mill work (despite the fact that almost all the factories and mills had closed down by that point, which meant a lot of kids left school with no employment possibilities).

The almost subconscious attitude was that the kids who would become the professionals were at the grammar and private schools. There was no channel at my comprehensive school to funnel smart kids into a professional career in science, law, medicine or technology. And this was a time when comprehensives were mixed ability, and the clamour for a grammar place in our area didn't really exist.

However, if you left school at 16 back then, you had the option to go to a local FE college to resit your GCSEs and A levels at a later date. A lot of people I knew did this, and quite a few who had gone to sink secondaries ended up at universities through this route.

All that disappeared under Blair's Labour government; funding for FE just vanished in the noughties. Now, if you want to take an A level over 19, you have to travel twenty miles to the nearest city. So if you screw up at school, the only option to you is pretty much an access course of some description, which means you have next to no chance of getting into a traditional profession or a Russell Group/1994 university.

So bear this in mind when I say, in the North where I am, there are only really three kinds of jobs that pay over about £26k pa (the cut off point for household income for UC). You either need to run your own business, work in the public sector or be a manager at Aldi.

The first requires you have a valuable trade or profession, which means you've been able to complete trade qualifications (which is problematic as I mentioned above as they require apprenticeships to master tradesmen), or you've obtained a professional degree with appropriate experience, or you've inherited a family firm.

The second, inevitably, now means you need a degree, possibly a postgrad.

And for the third, well, not every one can be a manager at Aldi.

The rest is all NMW, and by default, that pretty much means you need some form of state help if you have a child.

So to say "you should have worked harder at school" in order to get a better job, well, that assumes you went to a school where it was possible to "work harder" to get somewhere. And it assumes that working harder at school equates to the ability to get a better paying job.

These things are simply not givens in my area of the North.

In fact, in my constituency and the next one along, we don't have a lot of Polish workers because there are no available jobs to attract them here.

But what we have experienced is a substantial amount of immigration of European-minority groups with low to no skills or English language ability, a significant number of asylum seekers from the Global South and war-torn areas of the Middle East, and an upswell of chain migration encouraged by Labour's 1997 abolition of the Primary Purpose Rule.

Now we can cope with this where we are, to some extent, because the numbers are sustainable, although it is pretty obvious the first generation of these migrants and asylum seekers will never obtain any kind of employment in Britain during their lives. And to be honest, I've no idea what some of them will do about starting families and integrating into society because they are very isolated within the wider multi-ethnic British culture of the area (though we try our best with church-run English language classes and outreach programmes).

However, the next two constituencies along cannot cope with it. The numbers have been too great. All it has done is imported poverty into areas that were not that wealthy to begin with, and didn't have a lot of employment opportunities. And that, in turn, has caused working class and middle class flight (of all ethnicities) to semi-rural towns and villages, which has, in turn, created extraordinary demographic pressures on these areas.

Hence my initial post about everything just pretty much running at stress levels in areas where there is not a lot of avenues for weath creation. And people look at Labour and see that all this began under Blair and that Labour today simply will not recognise it.

Hence Brexit; hence the Tory votes.

AutumnRose1 · 16/12/2019 12:26

RedToothbrush "I really wish we'd had a thread like this 3 years ago..."

believe me, I tried. I got so much vitriol here I didn't log back in for a few months and then that was under a name change.

I haven't looked at politics since because the reaction to Brexit was so....hysterical. I only just started getting interested again when the election was called. I'd given up hope and thought the identity politics brigade had won for good, that there was no hope of me being seen as British ever again.

I feel so much better now - even though I know some muppet is going to call me a name very soon, just like after Brexit. But now I feel less of a coconut, less of a weirdo generally, less like the Owen Jones brigade have succeeded with their Stroop Effect Troops!

LangCleg · 16/12/2019 12:43

funding for FE

This is such a huge issue, second only to housing, to my mind.

We don't need 50% graduates, especially god knows how many liberal arts degrees from pomo-addled posh unis. This was a massive error by Blair. We needed good FE, with a mix of 16-19 year-olds, mature students, and another mix of academic and tech/vocational quals, including old-style day release for high quality apprenticeships.

Imagine how easy it would have been to slot Labour's admirable idea for a National Care Service into that scenario.

Needmoresleep · 16/12/2019 12:49

^if you're worried that an unqualified Eastern European worker with no experience can take your job, then maybe you should have worked a bit harder at school!"^

We saw this a long time ago when the lovely local classroom assistant was replaced by an equally lovely South African at DCs private primary school. The first girl was doing her best to gain qualifications whilst on the job, but the school suddenly refused to support her and effectively said she was not qualified enough. The South African in contrast was in Europe for a couple of years to earn money midway through a Child Development type degree. She shared a tiny ex-council flat in a rough area with about 8 others. Yes the school got someone better qualified for less money, but the deal for society was perhaps less clear-cut.

Tighter immigration controls will put pressure on employers to train, to provide apprenticeships and to pay living wages, which in turn will hopefully provide incentives for young people to study and to work. Work and making a contribution to society is surely a key element in both self-respect and gaining respect from others.

AutumnRose I too got very upset post Brexit. I had worked so hard holding down effectively two jobs, raising children and looking after an elderly mother. Yet all I got was vitriol. I was wrong for seeing that there were two sides to the Brexit argument, wrong for sending my children to a private school, wrong for being a landlord, wrong for driving a car, and all this from Corbynites who were happily living on inherited wealth or earning huge City salaries.

I am not a huge Boris fan, but really hope that we can pull together as a society so we get decent jobs with decent wages, which is what I assume the new Tories were voting for.

53rdWay · 16/12/2019 12:51

FE funding and policy is such a mess. Wave after wave of junior ministers (whichever party) with an incentive to make a name for themselves by shaking it up, but with almost total isolation from the effects of that shakeup, because neither they nor their wider social circle nor their Cabinet nor a majority of those who should be providing oversight, from media or from Parliament, have any direct connection with the people who use it.

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