THE HUMANITIES?
Nlike any other evidence-based, systematic thinker, is delighted to have his thesis confirmed. When he is the confirmation, however, the satisfaction can be muted. Such was my own experience on Thursday 2 July when I became the most notorious example — I refuse to write victim — of the “cancel culture” in Britain. It was the strangest day of my life (which has not been without incident). And it was made all the stranger by the fact that I had in effect predicted it in my column on the Black Lives Matter movement for the July issue of The Critic, which was published a week earlier on 25 June. “Tag,” I wrote, “somebody with racism … and all their other achievements, whatever they are and however great they are, are rendered worthless … and their reputations [are] trashed in a modern version of the Roman damnatio memoriae.”
I was writing about the statues of the dead; the equivalent happened to me, who am still, my enemies will be irritated to learn, very much alive. Or at least alive as a private individual. But, as a public figure, I have been cancelled, obliterated and buried as far as the reach of the woke extends. Which these days is very far indeed.
And all for one word. For only one word. For only one word distinguishes my Critic column, which occasioned no comment whatever that I’m aware of, from the podcast with Darren Grimes recorded on Monday 29 June, which brought the world — or at least my world — down. Even the sentence that caused so much offence was there almost word for word.
The slave trade, I wrote, was not a genocide, “otherwise there wouldn’t be so many blacks in North America or the West Indies. Or indeed in Britain”. But the word I added in the podcast, fatally as it turned out, was “damn”. “Damn” is now one of the mildest expletives in the language. And its use as a numerical intensifier is a characteristic idiom, at least for my generation.
So if I had said, for example, talking of one of those academic
when I said “so many damn blacks”: that there were a lot of them, not that they were a bad lot. But that was not of course how it was taken. Instead, the phrase, ripped from its context, was re-tweeted furiously to paint me as a racist of the deepest hue. For the word “blacks” is not an ordinary word, like “books”, to be used according to idiom; to have its meaning judged by context or its appropriateness tested by evidence.
Instead, it has become a totem or fetish. Used in any other than a wholly favourable sense it is an immediate indicator of racism and its user must be punished accordingly: “cancelled” if they were public figure as I was, or subject to immediate dismissal if they were an employee. The point was made with brutal frankness by the editor of History Today when he summarily ended my 40-year membership of its editorial board. “I cannot defend the phrase ‘damn blacks,’ ” he wrote. “If anyone used it in the workplace, they would be out.” And I was.
publicly and unreservedly, for my use of the phrase and the offence it caused. And I am happy to repeat the apology here. Indeed, I am happy to add another one. For in the podcast I said, “So many damn blacks in Africa and Britain.” I would have sworn on oath that I said “in America”, as in my Critic article. But the evidence of the transcript is — to coin a phrase — damning.
For to talk of Africa in this context makes no historical sense whatever. A more alert interviewer would have challenged me; a more alert interviewee would have corrected himself. And Twitter, if it had any sense, would have latched onto this rather than bloviate about “damn”. But at least my second blunder offers the opportunity to expand a little on my assertion that the Atlantic slave trade, however monstrous, was not a genocide.
The point can be made simply with two sets of figures. The number of black slaves shipped to the Thirteen Colonies before Revolution was about 310,000; the black population of the Thirteen Colonies at the time of the Revolution was about half a million, an increase of 60 per cent. That is not a genocide, though it
may be a diaspora. In contrast, the number of Jews in Germany in 1933 was also about half a million; in 1945, after Hitler and the Holocaust, it was 20,000, a decrease of 96 per cent. That is a genocide and nothing else.
On the other hand, one branch of the African slave trade was a genocide and one of the most terrible in history. Some 20 million black slaves, it is estimated, were exported to the Ottoman or Turkish Empire, of whom barely a genetic trace remains. This is because the men were castrated; while the mixed-race offspring of the women, with whom their Ottoman masters slept freely, had their brains dashed out at birth. How this holocaust — and the term is all too appropriate — squares with the fascination of much of Black America with Islam is difficult to see.
Bto my own errors. “How on earth did you — a broadcaster of such experience — make such a stupid mistake?”, my frank friend asked me over lunch at the Wolseley, where our arrival had caused a certain frisson. How indeed? Especially since just before the beginning of the lockdown I had passed unscathed through the bearpit that is the quick-fire, three-way podcast conversation with stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin and Francis Foster. “What a joy it was the other day to watch your hour-long interview with the boys on Triggernometry,” a retired professor, who has been a friend since Cambridge days, emailed me. “It was a masterly tour d’horizon and I thought you struck exactly the right joshing tone with them while making serious points.”
So why after this the spectacular cropper at the pons asinorum (it seems somehow the right phrase) of the Reasoned UK podcast with Darren Grimes? The answer, in a word, is the lockdown. I recorded Triggernometry in a low-dive Islington pub, half-heartedly converted into a stand-up comedy venue. Its pitand-sawdust, black-painted and blacked-out upper room, stinking of last night’s beer and bodies, was the perfect reminder that this was a performance, with you on a stage and in front of an invisible but omnipresent audience that was ready to jump on your every word. And to be on your toes accordingly.
The contrast with the Grimes podcast could not have been greater. When I took part in this via Skype I was in my own elegant, well-stocked library, sitting in my own leather-covered desk armchair and in front of my own computer, which seems like an extension of myself, and using the same system, Skype, via which, for the long months of the lockdown, I had held long, intimate, no-holds-barred conversations with friends. It was fatally familiar.
At the time, as I uttered the incriminating phrase, I seem to recall a warning inner voice which said, “Oops! Rephrase and re-record.” But we over-ran; it was late and I wanted a drink and supper. And I forgot.
In normal broadcasting of course there would have been someone to remind me. “I’m aghast at the lack of care shown towards you,” the friendly features editor of one of the Sundays texted me. “Even as a 15-year-old I would have said ‘David, perhaps not that’.” But podcasts are run on a shoestring and Grimes’s, for all I know, may be a one-man band, with the only editorial judgement being his.
But finally the responsibility is mine: I uttered the words; I have paid the price and duly fallen on my sword. All very Roman and dignified.
For the last thing on my mind on the morning of 2 July was Grimes and his podcast. Instead the big event of the day was the delivery of my replacement fridge-freezer. This was not going smoothly.
The cheerful pair of lads from Appliances Online had knocked over a large, expensive plant pot taking the old appliance out and broken a castiron drain cover bringing the new one in. They also fitted the handles without the necessary washers, which they had ripped off and discarded, remarking “Don’t know what those are for.”
Meanwhile, the more recent items I had rescued from the archaeological strata of the old freezer and buried in mountains of ice-cubes in every sink and plastic bowl I could find were quietly thawing in the summer heat.
I was on the phone, trying to sort out the problems of delivery with a very helpful, savvy supervisor, when Grimes’s first email came through warning me of the gathering Twitter storm. My reply was insouciant: “I’m not on Twitter and I couldn’t care less what’s said on it. So there I fear you’re on your own.”
INo, grounded in solid democratic fact. Less than 20 per cent of the population are on Twitter, with a far smaller proportion being active users; the huge majority, four-fifths of us, have nothing to do with it at all. And yet, in an extreme case of the tail wagging the dog, the less than 20 per cent of Twitter has become the proxy for public opinion on both sides of the Atlantic.
A week or so after my “cancellation”, Bari Weiss wrote her magnificent resignation letter from the New York Times, claiming that “Twitter has become its ultimate editor.” Here, as my own case shows, it is if anything worse, with every public body and most private ones bowing before it. It has become the new Jehovah: “Twitter blew with his winds and Starkey’s honours were scattered.”
Is this what we have come to? That things given with careful scrutiny and on grounds of solid merit, like trusteeships of charities and fellowships of colleges and learned societies, can be removed, Jehovah-like again, “in the twinkling of an eye”, without due process and in deference to the transitory passions of an online mob? And if they can be removed so lightly, what were they worth in the first place?
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IThe Shortest History of England (out later this year) James Hawes states a truth that is no less obvious because hardly anyone else mentions it. “The UK had been founded by and for a united elite. Nobody had ever asked the peoples.” As soon as they did in the 1880s, the country split on tribal as well as class lines. Northern England, which the Romans had thought barely worth conquering, was harried by the Normans, enjoyed a brief moment of equality after the industrial revolution, and much of which is now, according to the Economist, at the wrong end of the largest gap between rich and poor regions in the developed world, broke with the south. The Irish, Scots and Welsh used the vote to make nationalist demands, openly or implicitly.
The electoral maps of England before and after the 1884 Representation of the People Act make the point starkly. They are close to unrecognisable. When both liberals and conservatives appealed to the same group of elite voters the Liberal Party could win all over the country. When the franchise was extended to 60 per cent of adult men — not democracy by any means but more democratic than anything England had known — and the Liberals under Gladstone became more radical, borders sprang up.
In the general election of 1885 a virtually impregnable Tory bloc in the Home Counties and south of England appeared. From then on, first the Liberals and then Labour could win only by mobilising northern English resentment in alliance with the Celtic nations and then fight for what seats they could win in the south. In 1906, 1945, 1966, 1997 and 2001 they produced anti-Conservative landslides. These were the exceptions, however. Conservative rule was the rule.
You can challenge this analysis. Labour and the Conservatives were both British parties that opposed Scottish, English and Welsh nationalism. Anti-Catholic feeling kept Liverpool and much of Lancashire Conservative well into the twentieth century. The Conservatives took 50 per cent of votes in Scotland in 1955. I could go on, but the hard truth remained that without Scotland, Wales and the north believing that they were on the same side, there was little prospect of removing the Conservatives from power.
You may disapprove of regional loyalties too. Voting, hating and thinking on party lines because it is what my gang does is contemptible. Supposedly serious people should make rational choices, not holler along with their tribe. But the existence of regional and nationalist feeling at the birth of British democracy ought to warn you against believing that identity politics began at some point in the 2010s. Southern English, northern English, Scottish, Welsh, Irish, Anglican, Catholic and nonconformist identities determined politics long before our current convulsions. When I canvassed working-class northern neighbourhoods for Labour in the 1980s men told me they voted Labour because their ancestors had always voted Labour.
“And how will your wife vote?” I added.
“She’ll vote as I tell her.”
The modern dictionary of political debate appears to have no entry for “individual”, but then it rarely did. Today your skin colour or sexuality is assumed to be your essence and to deny that is to not only betray yourself but your group. The hatred directed at leftists who query trans rights or conservatives who decry Brexit is as much tribal as rational. You were one of us, and now you have betrayed us. The focus of identity politics has changed, that is all, but it is a seismic change that once again appears to put the liberal-left at a structural disadvantage.
the electoral map of 2015 was not so different from 1885. Conservative support was concentrated in the south. But Scotland was no longer a part of a unified anti-Tory alliance. Nationalists, who brazenly claimed that criticism of their many political failures proved their critics were not true Scots, had swept Labour away. In a sign of what was to come, David Cameron won by saying Labour would ally with the SNP to form a government, and used English nationalism and anti-Scottish resentment to secure a narrow victory. Inevitably, he also bolstered Scottish nationalism.
Get to the 2019 election and we are in a new country. The SNPs still dominated Scotland. But now the Conservatives looked like the English National Party. They were not only winning across the south outside London, as was traditional, but the promise of freedom from Brussels brought them gains in the north-east, north-west and much of Wales.
The old divisions are being replaced by new and as apparently unshakeable tribal identities. They are the result of two vast changes: mass immigration and mass university education. Brexitland (out this month from CUP), by Maria Sobolewska and Robert Ford, of the University of Manchester, two of the most acute political scientists around, shows a future dominated by uneasy alliances. On the right, traditional conservatives and
school-leavers from the white working class. On the left, liberal and often ultra-liberal graduates and ethnic minorities.
The best way to distil the mountain of evidence the authors present is to imagine a 70-year-old and her 18-year-old granddaughter voting in the 2019 election. The pensioner would have grown up in an overwhelming white Britain where only the educational elite enjoyed higher education. In the early 1960s, 4 per cent of school-leavers went on to higher education; by 2019, the proportion was 50 per cent of those aged between 17 and 30. Sobolewska and Ford are wary of characterising white school leavers as racists. They prefer “ethno-nationalist”: there is “us”, the English, who define themselves against “them”: immigrants, the politically correct and Brussels.
there is an alternative. The “us” are the Scots who define themselves against the English and Westminster. Sobolewska and Ford’s own charts of statistics make the line between racist and ethno-nationalist appear a distinction without a difference. Older generations consistently express stronger support for an ethnically exclusive national identity, for example, and opposition to ethnic minority in-laws. White school-leavers of all ages are much more likely than white graduates to agree that birth and ancestry are very important markers of “being British” and to agree that those who do not share British culture and traditions can never be “truly British”. But let us stick with “ethno-nationalist” for politeness sake, and acknowledge that white school-leavers are quite right to see their world as under threat.
Now virtually all good careers are closed to people like them, without a degree. They can turn on a British TV channel or watch a British film and find their world is not acknowledged or when it is, shown to be as much of a relic as the exhibits on The Antiques Roadshow. They are on the wrong end of social transformation that is taking Britain along with the rest of the West from being a country of school-leavers to a country of graduates. The loss of the dominant status hurts. Life feels a zero-sum game where new groups can only benefit at their expense. Small wonder the politics of nostalgia embodied in the slogans “Make America Great Again or “Take Back Control” appeals.
They need a strong state to protect them. But they are now in alliance with City conservatives and southern Tories who want a small state and low taxes. The Covid crisis has hidden the tensions in England’s new nationalist party. Perhaps like the SNP they will be able to use identity politics to gloss over them. Nationalists have been able to hide their shameful failure to help Scotland’s deprived young by acting as if all attempts to make a better life for poorer Scots can be ignored until the great question of independence is settled. The only way for Boris Johnson to hold his coalition together, it seems to me, is to fight his own nationalist kulturkampf and rally all those who are uneasy with modernity to his banner.
Tfor the first time the modern world feels normal. Racial diversity was the world they had grown up in and “going to uni” was just what you did. By 2019, any teenager with ambition thought it was natural to leave home, family, friends and neighbourhood and spend their formative years in a monoculture of other ambitious and uprooted young people. At university they would imbibe the dominant ideology of globalisation: individual choice, internationalism and liberalism, even though their chances of joining the global elite have become ever slimmer.
Unlike in every other developed nation, nearly all of them will go to study in a new town or city to study. The result is mass internal migrations. New students move to start university, and new graduates move again in search of work. Both migrations increase the segregation of Britain by age and educational levels as the young leave the small towns and countryside behind and settle either in the cities where they studied or, of course, London.
The liberal identity politics that education and geographical concentration bring can be every bit as dogmatic as white work
ing-class conservatism. There is “us” — the racially just, the forces of progress, the exemplars of virtue — and there is “them” — the bigots, the gammons, the Karens. Ethnic minorities have good reasons to ally with people who stigmatise prejudice. They experience racism and, naturally, support anti-racists. Their willingness to do so should silence those who think that racism doesn’t exist in Britain, or we are the most anti-racist society on earth or whatever other self-congratulatory guff we produce to kid ourselves. For if it wasn’t for white racism, the majority of voters in ethnic minorities would find they are not natural leftists.
What is the most socially conservative city in the land? Where is the capital of British “bigotry”? If you subscribe to the notion that prejudice is buried deepest in the southern middle class, you might pick Guildford or Bath. If you think northern Brexit supporters are thick racists you might go for Doncaster or Sunderland. In fact, the supposed secular Babylon of London is more religious and socially conservative than the rest of Britain. London has the highest level of prayer and religious attendance, a study by the Christian think tank Theos found earlier this year.
Mass immigration has made it the most pious city in the country, with a vertiginous gap between believers and secularists. Londoners are nearly twice as will stick with Labour pretty much under any circumstances.
As long as the liberal left focuses on racial justice and for as long as conservatives mobilise against migrants and minority groups, ethnic minorities have a strong incentive to align with the liberal-left, even though their views on many matters may not be remotely liberal or left.
Ais a rundown pub where I sometimes see a white working-class guy I’ve known for years. Once, he and men like him might have been the stalwarts of the Labour and union movements. The last time I met him was when I was covering a demonstration against Islamism. Go north a few hundred yards and you are in a neighbourhood stuffed with grand houses that routinely sell for £2 million or more. The uniformly white residents are not uniformly Conservative. They do not follow their class interests because Brexit and Conservative culture offends them, but then so would the sermons in the church if they ever heard them. It’s probably best for their peace of mind that they never do.
The generalisations you make when you discuss the new identity politics must be questioned as toughly as the generalisations about the old identity politics. There is no regular polling on how ethnic minorities vote. All we know is that the “BAME” label (Black and Minority Ethnic) does not just deny individuality but absurdly lumps together people from wildly different groups. Anecdotally, people of Indian and Sikh heritage are said to behave far more like traditional swing voters, but as I said there’s no hard evidence.
The alliance between the left and ethnic minorities also depends on whether the left regards your minority with approval. Under Corbyn, it repelled Jews, and there are hints the left could turn on British Indians because of Kashmir and the descendants of Idi Amin’s ethnic cleansing in Uganda for prospering in Britain. Likewise, to speak of the post-Brexit white working class like some Telegraph columnist is to miss the complexity. Young white working-class voters were as likely to vote Remain as young voters everywhere.
Yet when all the qualifications have been made the broad lines of a new identity politics remain visible. They present immense problems for Labour and may yet disturb the nationalists north and south of the Tweed.
Labour’s difficulties are obvious. It did as badly in southern England in 2019 as it has done in the past, and is now losing traditional northern and Welsh seats. The alliance of liberal graduates and ethnic minorities concentrates support in the cities and university towns, leaving much of the rest of England and Wales open to the Tories. Sobolewska and Ford identify 123 socially conservative seats in England and Wales where the 2011 census recorded 26 per cent or more local residents with no qualifications, less than 15 per cent from ethnic minorities and less than 10 per cent studying in further education.
They include Welsh valley constituencies such as Rhondda
and Cynon Valley, and northern English seats like Bolsover, Ashfield, Rotherham and Wigan. Labour’s support declined by 10 per cent on average from 2005-10. It rose a little between 2010 and 2015, although Ukip did well too. Come 2019 and traditional seats were going or gone. Meanwhile in Scotland Labour has been terribly led and appears unable to challenge the SNP.
If it bends towards socially conservative English nationalism, it will alienate Scottish voters and many in the liberal graduate class, who are primed to turn against politicians who cross any one of their innumerable red lines. If it bends towards Scottish nationalism, it will infuriate English nationalists but not, surprisingly, liberal graduates who regard Scottish nationalists with an unwarranted tenderness. If Labour suggests it can form a governing pact at Westminster with the SNP, the Conservatives can do at the next election what Cameron did to it in 2015.
Yet the Conservative Party of 2020 is not David Cameron’s party. It is a party of the old today — age is now a more reliable guide to how people vote than class. The young regard it with such distaste that even a Labour Party led by Jeremy Corbyn would have won in England in 2019 if the franchise had been confined to the under-fifties. The tactic of holding together its ungainly coalition by ramping up the culture war is not without risks. The more it tries to cling on to populist voters the greater the risk it will alienate middle-class moderates.
They voted for Johnson because of fear of Corbyn, but could be led away by a Labour leader who appealed to them — like Keir Starmer, who may have noticed that in the US the group that has withdrawn its support from the Republicans most decisively is college-educated women.
Identity politics is dispiriting, not only because it denies individuality but because it denies reality. In its twenty-first century variant it is as if it exists to fulfil the grim vision Matthew Arnold saw on Dover Beach in 1867:
Today’s ignorant armies are meant to stay loyal, whatever defeats their generals lead them to or whatever sufferings their ideologies impose. Experience never impinges. The tribes stay together united by their prejudices and beliefs. People’s economic wellbeing, their concern for their families and their wider hopes of justice are sacrificed on the altars of the tribe’s gormless gods. If nothing else, our crisis-ridden age will put that theory to the test. The Johnson administration landed Britain with the highest Covid death rate in the rich world.
Recession is already upon us, and depression may follow. A hard break with the EU will come in January. The SNP is proposing an exit from the UK that will make Brexit appear a gentle hiccup in comparison. Perhaps today’s identities will emerge unscathed from the fire. I can’t say they won’t. But I hope they don’t.
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