Take away the audience and Leftists soon lose interest in identity politics
That thing everyone says about the House of Lords being calm, detailed and deliberative? It’s true. The defining feature of proceedings in the Upper House is that they are largely unobserved. I don’t think I had ever watched a Lords debate before sitting through one in the flesh last month. With no audience, and no electorate, there is no grandstanding. Questions are used to elicit information rather than to make a point; answers are offered in the same spirit.
I’m not saying that precision and primness are preferable to polarised politics. Both approaches have their place, and it is important that governing parties should be faced by properly sceptical oppositions. Nor am I saying that the composition of the second chamber is especially defensible; I don’t think it is, and I suspect that reform is coming.
No, my point is a different one. An unremarked consequence of the House of Lords’ relative obscurity is that its members are not cowed by the constantly-shifting demands of identity politics. Compared to their Commons colleagues, Labour peers are refreshingly unwoke.
One of the first pieces of legislation I voted on was an emergency measure to offer maternity leave to ministers, occasioned by the pregnancy of Suella Braverman, the Attorney General, who gave birth to a gorgeous baby girl last week. Following current drafting guidelines, the bill was gender-neutral referring, absurdly, to “the person who is pregnant”. When the Conservative Baroness Noakes moved an amendment to, so to speak, preserve womanhood, the mass of Labour backbenchers supported her.
It is partly a generational phenomenon. The Labour benches are filled with people who grew up associating Left-wing politics with the spirit of rebellion, and are uneasy about the intolerance and conformity of today’s cancel culture. They feel perfectly able to champion the rights of women and minorities without entering into a purity spiral, in which everyone competes to be more offended by some harmless remark.
There are exceptions, obviously. But in general, both the Old Labour types and the Blairites are able to keep a sense of perspective on issues of race and gender that has become vanishingly rare among their Commons colleagues.
Identity politics – who’d have thought it? – turns out to be largely performative. It isn’t primarily about standing up for other people. It’s about broadcasting your own compassion.
Take, for example, the most recent instalment in our culture war, namely the question of whether we should unhesitatingly accept the Duchess of Sussex’s version of events because she is female and of mixed race. Those piling in to do so are not especially concerned for her, or upset on her behalf. What they’re really saying is: “Look at me! I’m a nice person!”
Such signalling, naturally, requires an audience. Take away the prize of social media likes and its emptiness becomes painfully apparent. All of which prompts the unsettling thought that the madness through which we have been passing these past six or seven years, the so-called Great Awokening, is really a product of technology.