I think I’ve always been very hesitant to consider Israel/Palestine as a Goodies/Baddies situation so no big changes on that for me but I have become much more aware of how many people around me are willing to reduce it to that. The trans debate has encouraged me to read and listen non-left-approved media, and that’s taken the shape of paying attention to some of the outspoken women of the last 30-40 years who have been smeared, demonised and ostracised. The obvious one being Germaine Greer, but I’ve also found myself admiring Lionel Shriver, and, most relevant to your comment Melanie Phillips.
I don’t think I’ve personally changed my mind on much, I still believe in economic left wing policies such as free at the point of use medical care and a strong welfare safety net. Quality education should be available to all and higher education affordable to those who will truly make use of it (not just an expensive box tick to signal social status, but the beginning of a specialist job or arts vocation).
I’ve come to understand myself as ‘Blue Labour’, a Labour that perhaps doesn’t exist any more. one that cared about communities (based on current shared geography, rather than family heritage or immigration status) about wages that worked for families (families made up of single parents or same sex parents or grandparent guardians, not just the ideal hetero cookie cutter, picket fence family) one that understood that we don’t all live in urban, cosmopolitan, environments and that what most children need to thrive is secure housing, fresh air, a little bit of outside space, a school that sees them as both an individual and a part of a team and a guardian (or two) who isn’t working so hard to keep head above water that the child is left alone absorbing all the fears of adults and bills and bailiffs.
Somehow the material needs of people, of families has been lost in a sea of IDPOL - in my lifetime I think we’d slowly, gradually, started to do a pretty good job of working out how to get along with neighbours who looked a bit different and had different customs, and how to ensure the vulnerable aren’t left behind (and by vulnerable, I mean the truly vulnerable, newborn babies, the under 5s, children in the looked after system or at risk of becoming so in future, the mobility impaired, the cognitively impaired, seriously and terminally Ill people, including those with profound mental illness and very elderly people towards the end of their lives) and we understood that all those vulnerabilities could be worse for female people and for people from ethnic or religious minorities but we also understood that poverty made those vulnerabilities worse for all.
But we’ve imported some American ideas that have sidetracked us - yes racism exists, but Britain has a completely different pattern of immigration and a different demographic- by framing racism as purely a white supremacy over black people issue we miss all the other tensions and if we can’t see them, how can we resolve them?
What does American Critical Race Theory teach us about the current violent clashes between young British men of Pakistani descent and young British men of Indian descent taking place in the British Midlands?
What does it teach us about the violent attacks on elderly, male, Ultra Orthodox Jewish Londoners perpetrated by young, male, Black Londoners?
Absolutely fuck all! Yet younger Brits absorb all this American social justice from social media and assume they are enlightened.
I want everyone to live free from violence and everyone to have a reasonable standard of living.
I want families to be able to stay in one area and not be priced out by overseas property investors driving unwanted gentrification.
I want parents to be able to make a genuine choice between work and family life, not a choice that is driven by economic pressure in either direction (single parents on benefits can be just as trapped in their as a full time working couple with a scary mortgage).
I want everyone to be able to see a doctor when they are actually ill, not a month later.
I want people with disabilities to get the accommodations they need and not be overlooked by fashionable, imported Equality and Diversity trainers who seemingly care more about the colour of a person’s lanyard than they do about a desk that fits your wheelchair (and doesn’t constantly get adjusted by ‘hotdeskers’). Ditto mothers returning to the workplace needing a private place to express milk, ditto women of minority religious needing a female only space for adjusting their headwear.
I want kids to be allowed to be kids and not be introduced to niche adult sexual identities under the banner of ‘inclusiveness’ and that applies to equally to the Muslim rape gangs, to the Catholic Priest child sex abusers, to Rainbow Kinksters, to kiddy fiddling celebrity DJs, to OnlyFans/Stripping/‘sex work is work’/sex positivity and to hardcore porn online and paedophiles inside Roblox.
Yet great swathes of the current left nod along to women prisoners being locked in with peniswielding rapists, they say ‘family’ is a right wing dog whistle, that paedophiles are a conspiracy theory (despite the police here and abroad openly admitting that they can no longer keep up with the millions of images of child rape appearing online) and that anyone pushing back against any of this is motivated by ‘racism’ or some other ‘bigotry’.
It’s just a big fucking clusterfuck, we’ve got a shambolic conservative government and an opposition that is, to quote my late Nan, ‘about as much use as udders on a bull’
‘I didn’t leave the left, the left left me’
cartoon by Colin Wright: