Struggling with my political allegiance now and it's really bothering me

[Appalonia]

Since the eighties, I have been a leftie, raised money for the Miners ' strike, was in the SWP for a while in the 90s, lifelong Guardian reader, worked for charities for most of my career. However, I'm so disillusioned with what the left has become now. It started as for many of us with the trans issue, seeing formally trusted and respected institutions like the BBC, the Guardian, C4 etc either ignore, or blatantly skew the issues, the only place I could read the truth about what was happening was on ' right wing' media outlets that I would have dismissed outright previously.

Since it was only right wing outlets or posters that were talking about this, pp like Douglas Murray, Jordan Peterson, The Spectator etc, I feel like I've been exposed to right wing views that I now feel more more aligned to than left wing commentators like Owen Jones, Mark Steel, most comedians etc.

I now listen to Trigggernometry, Free Speech Nation The Lotus Eaters, and I'm starting to feel more aligned to them on other issues now, like free speech, immigration etc.

So, I'm thinking about the demonstration for free speech in London on 13 September in London and part of me really wants to go because I think it's really important and what's happened with the trans debate and how it's been reported in the press and how so many gender critical pp have been silenced. And it's not just about GC views, it's about free speech in general. But the people who are organising this, is really putting me off. I want to go and stand up for what I believe in but at the same time, this demo is being characterised as a ' far right' demonstration, and I don't want to be associated with that. In fact, years ago, I would have been on the other side, demonstrating against fascists.

I just can't disentangle it all in my mind, I believe in free speech and I do believe it's under threat in the UK, but at the same time I don't want to be associated with pp like Tommy Robinson. But even saying that, just watching his interview on Triggernometry was eye opening. Can anyone relate to this? I just feel so conflicted right now.

Sorry, I don't feel I've expressed myself very well, there's so much more th an this. I just can't square my identity of myself of a life long socialist with how much I disagree with so much of what the left stands for now, that I just don't agree with.

Um

did you never study history? Even a rudimentary glance at the basics would teach you that.

this thread is a real (depressing) eye opener.

editing because something just occurred to me

As a woman of colour and a woman of a certain age, I'm very aware that racism goes in waves. The swing of the pendulum if you like.

So these posts that I'm seeing from people who genuinely want to leave the country at the moment, and I'm sympathetic to that - perhaps they haven't registered the fact that it goes in waves, haven't registered the pendulum swing, haven't registered the fact that it's happening all over the world

Living in some kind of strange echo chamber?

I had been looking at it and thinking that they must be in their 20s and they've not experienced this unpleasantness before - but maybe it's more than that.

To some extent, everything is going to be about your personal experience, but there's a real sense of "I never saw it before so it didn't happen" around some of the post on this thread.

Ironically, I saw a post with someone saying she was going to look at moving to Australia - I had just finished reading an article about their massive protest at the weekend! A PP has mentioned it being less extreme but some of their protest leaders are very extreme. Of course that's just my impression from the outside, I don't live there.

then again, we are on the Internet, so the people posting that might not be real. 🤷🏻‍♀️

That crosses over into a massive problem we've got in current society which is far too big to deal with on this thread.

🙄

this thread is a real (depressing) eye opener.

In what sense?

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/irony

I voted Labour in the last election and have regretted it since. As they're all desperate to be in they'll say anything at the end and confuse us all!
Where is the honest, in favor of free-speech, party?

I’ve wondered about this too.

If the shitshow at the Guardian is anything to go by, it could be to do with a whole new generation of journalism graduates who brought with them their left wing uni ideas, chief among them queer theory and gender ideology.

A lot of younger journalists see themselves as activists first and foremost, only writing the approved agenda, and so very confident in their righteousness.

Not that the media has ever been unbiased, but this issue in patricular is trying to sell nonsense as fact.

What is your argument then, if you think I am misrepresenting you?

I agree with the OP - I now feel politically homeless. I used to read the Guardian, especially the Women’s page, before all the sensible women left, and I never ever thought I’d agree with Toby Young on anything. But I’m horrified by the way transgender views have taken over the NHS, the BBC and particularly the police. I’m also very concerned that very large numbers of unvetted men, who come from very misogynistic cultures, pretty much live freely here. I’m shocked by the economic incompetence of the current government- any idiot realised that putting up employers National Insurance would hammer retail and hospitality, rather than produce ‘growth’. And did they really think reducing the Winter Fuel Allowance would be popular?
It’s all incredibly depressing.

I think it's important not to underestimate how utterly destabilising it can be when that tower comes crumbling down. Everything you thought was true is in question, all your friendships and connections are in doubt, your entire model of your self is under threat.

"If I didn't realise this, what else was I blind about?"

This can either lead to an amazing period of open-mindedness and intellectual expansion and exciting new ideas - new friends - unexpected angles leading to solutions to problems you thought were intractable because you had fixed ideas of constraints which aren't there anymore...

...or you become so open-minded your brains fall out :)

@Appalonia I don’t know why you’re struggling with this, you’re a human, you’re supposed to have a diverse range of views on different issues, because everyone is different, and people’s priorities change throughout their lives. You don’t have to align entirely with the positions held by a political party or a “wing” be it left or right, and believe it or not a if a party or a wing doesn’t align with what you think they aren’t betraying you. It’s entirely possible to hold different views that fall across the political spectrum.

Do you REALLY think that we are somehow owed a party or political movement that entirely aligns with precisely what we each think? And that if whatever “wing” you are aligned with, brings in a policy you don’t agree with on one specific issue, you then have to defect to the other wing?

SURELY you can see that people and politics are complicated, not binary! You’re not going to entirely fit into one tribe, nor should you be expected to, it’s bad for democracy and it encourages lazy thinking and tribalism.

You can feel more aligned with what x party or movement is saying on gender issues and free speech, but still align to what another party says on the environment or economics. It’s fine. Bring on Proportional Representation

I see that the usual meeeeerailers have arrived to try and make what is a very interesting thread all about them

@OneAmberFinchI’m really hoping my brains haven’t fallen out

But, yes, the destabilising effect is real. On the other hand the I’ve found there’s a whole
world of really interesting, thought-provoking stuff out there once your horizons have changed.

"He appears to think that trans people should be protected against "misgendering" but that women shouldn't be protected against trans activists calling for us to be beheaded."

Firstly, I'm a she as in GC she as in birthed two babies she.
Secondly, saying it's logistically impossible to expect police to apprehend all protesters in large crowds with threatening signs is not the same as say GC's shouldn't protected by hate speech.

The Left has always been fundamentally authoritarian (as authoritarian as the far right) but when one agreed with the ideas this was not obvious. My wake up call was that I didn't agree anymore that people should be forced to be free (that's not how moving people towards a socialist society is usually expressed btw) or that it was ok for teachers to indoctrinate left-wing ideas (my socialism came from studying economic and social history - a good way in to thinking about the realities of social and economic organisation). Then I was drawn to the idea of sex as a spectrum, looked at diagrams and pictures and thought 'yes'. But my degree is in philosophy and I stumbled across an article by Alex (?) Byrne and it was as if scales fell from my eyes. So, not biology but philosophy. At that point I began to see how the Left was mainlining TWAW and I realised I had no home and never had had because the Left has also always been misogynist.
Spoiled ballot paper at last election. Nowhere to go, now. I would not touch Farage and Reform because they might know what a woman is but they want to repeal protections such as the EA2010.

@Appalonia and those who had allegiance to the Miners.
Given the time distance we now have and fuller understanding can you now see how mistaken you were then?
Scargill and co were adamant that there was a viable and necessary industry in those areas. We now know there wasn't. It was a myth.
Can you imagine how expensive home produced coal would make electricity?

Ah, so your argument is that it would be disproportionate for police to do anything about trans activists calling for violence against women because there are so many of them, but it's reasonable for them to arrest Graham Linehan because there's only one of him?

Not the argument I would have gone for, but you do you.

In what sense did Linehan's tweet constitute a 'credible threat'?

Credible threat to who? In what way?

Strawman.

It's more difficult to apprehend criminals in a large crowd. This isn't rocket science.

I'd say it's much easier. Just turn up and apprehend.

Okaaaay…🤪

Pressed send too soon - I think the fact that this thread is about Tommy Robinson is illustrative of this. My circles are fairly wide and include people who would happily say they are "far right" and support policies even I find a bit extreme (and those who know my username will know I'm often all over immigration threads etc so I'm hardly a soft-hearted liberal on that point!)

95% of them think Tommy Robinson is a knob - to a PP's question, yes because of the criminal element specifically and thinking he's a grifter.

If you think of "right-wing influencers" you should think of Burke, Chesterton, Hayek, Scruton, Oakeshott... heck Matthew, Mark, Luke & John... any number of people before Tommy Robinson and the Lotus Eaters come to mind :)

I also found it really interesting to explore feminism from a conservative lens for a while. Like, female activists who opposed things that seemed "weird" to oppose, like female suffrage or women in the workplace or liberal divorce laws or abortion. Exploring what the female-centric arguments for those things might be. Almost like alternate history.

Well why do you think it's 'much harder'?

I think that reporting some tweets from April just a few days before Graham Linehan's appearance in court was probably done to try and discredit him and make him seem dangerous by the usual loony TRAs.

They live in a bubble and echo chamber. They never seem to realise that 98% of the population think they're absolute bellends. If anything the massive outpouring of sympathy for Linehan should wake them up pretty fast. But, like the Labour lot, they never fucking learn.

So the police shouldn't deal with men threatening violence against women because it's...difficult?

I think there are some complex long term issues about the decay of the left, and I could write a book about them ... (don't encourage me)

At random, a couple of things I come back to.

(One)
It used to be in Labour that you couldn't be an AEU sponsored MP unless you were a time served engineer. Other unions had similar arrangements. That doesn't jibe well with the current centre left, because it meant the PLP was much more male and white than it should have been, but it kept the party in touch with its working class roots.

Where are the working class MPs now? Is it just Lee Anderson? Are there one or two others?

Labour today is still doing class politics, but it's a vehicle for the interests of the PMC class. You can see a similar thing with the US Democrats, Australian Labor, the SPD in Germany and analogous formations across the west.

This matters because PMC causes and working class interests are not the same. Open borders are not in the interest of the working class man or woman competing for a minimum wage job. But they work pretty well if you're an MP or BBC journalist or left wing celebrity, and thanks to immigration from Albania, cocaine is much cheaper in London these days.

(Two)
The left being absolutely terrible on VAWG, despite seeing it as an issue they own. I often return to the SWP rape scandal, because I know a bunch of the people involved. But I don't believe the problem is unique to one small Trotskyite sect. During the scandal I was talking with a woman who is extremely well connected in Labour politics, and asked her if she could imagine something similar happening in Labour. Slightly to my surprise, she said she absolutely could.

Now for me, one of the key things is not simply that a lot of socialists who had imbibed all the correct theory on women's liberation decided that covering up the rape of young female members by party leaders was no big deal. That was depressing but predictable.

What I didn't predict is that the people who broke away because they couldn't tolerate the coverups, they themselves quickly decided that the really oppressed group were the women with beards and cocks. If you press them they might concede with considerable ill grace that rape survivors might be entitled to single sex peer counselling, but they're absolutely committed to the idea that gender identity trumps biological sex (which doesn't really exist) and single sex spaces should not exist.

These people, who found the SWP's coverup in 2013 intolerable, have also defended some of the SWP's overseas franchises which are also rapey as fuck; and some of them at least have described grooming gangs as a "moral panic", nothing to see here.

I know this is one smallish group, but these are people who have had an opportunity to reflect on male supremacism on the left and they have learned fuck all. I put a lot of that down to a large proportion of them having advanced degrees from elite universities. They're both extremely arrogant and wilfully stupid. This is your brain on Queer Theory.

(This criticism extends to the women who sign open letters from the SWP front "Stand Up To Racism". Some of the dim celebrities might think they're just generically opposing racism, but I refuse to believe that Diane Abbott or Leanne Wood or Zarah Sultana don't know who these people are.)