The link between politics and social status anxiety has become a well-observed phenomenon, especially among commentators on the Right. The politics of immigration control, firm law and order, and scepticism about catastrophic climate change have become associated for a variety of reasons with the poorly-educated, the provincial and the generally unsophisticated. This has been the most important factor in those ideas remaining politically marginal despite their broad popularity with much of the public.
Conservative governments over fourteen years presided over huge increases in non-European immigration, the proliferation of radical ideals about race and gender identity in the public sector, and the passage of extreme legislation to reduce carbon emissions. Much of this is now suspected to be the result of Tory politicians (and their wives) wishing to ingratiate themselves among their fashionable, well educated and socially prestigious circles of friends and partners in London — or at least their fear of being excluded from such peer groups by taking reactionary stances.
But as with any socio-political phenomenon, there are secondary consequences and feedback mechanisms that are less remarked upon. In these pages last week, Freddie Attenborough noted that the Home Office’s Prevent programme has singled out perfectly mainstream schools of thought as being indicative of radicalisation, and potentially even pathways to terrorism. It’s all very well for the likes of Douglas Murray, or Matt Goodwin to observe that certain immigrant groups have failed to integrate into British society, or that Western culture may be at risk from external groups who don’t share our ideas about religious pluralism or free expression. But for a teenaged schoolboy to express the same views could see them referred to Prevent, and possibly blocked from higher education and excluded from a range of professional careers.
Douglas Murray and Matt Goodwin are prestigious commentators with significant public profiles. Both are widely published and have impressive academic qualifications. Not only are they far too sophisticated — and indeed, too old — for the Prevent programme to concern themselves with, but they also enjoy established audiences and platforms meaning that they cannot be browbeat or locked out of their means of making a living for offending liberal sensitivities. Quite the opposite, in fact. In today’s Britain, ostentatious displays of conservative or reactionary opinion are an ideal way to signal that one enjoys some independence of means.
This is not just confined to elite circles. A self-employed electrician, or the director of a small company, is free to speak their mind honestly in a way that a lawyer or doctor might not be, depending on who’s listening. They may not have the same degree of academic prestige, but they enjoy an independence which does not depend on their ingratiating themselves to corporate HR departments or Woke underlings.
Clearly, class plays a critical role in this dynamic. Following the petulant response to the 2016 EU referendum result, many working class and lower-middle class people became aware that those who imagine themselves their betters think of them as being small-minded and racist. Plenty, of course, do not care at all what such people think of them — but when pub conversation inevitably drifts on to the subject of politics or society, it is common to hear folk couch their views in assurances that they are not racist or homophobic or whatever, before moving on to the substance of discussion.
In many traditional working class or lower-middle class lines of work, there is little need for people to signal or conform to high-status liberal opinion. Much of the construction sector is now dominated by individuals working as self-employed contractors, and other than the most paranoid or controlling corporations, few employers will care about the political views of those working on a production line or in manufacturing operations. However, it is in those public sector institutions that are dominated by people originating from non-elite backgrounds, working at the periphery of the traditional professions, that we can see the influence of the upper-middle class progressive consensus at its most stifling.
For all that conservatives bemoan “the liberal elite”, the most striking failures in British public life in recent decades haven’t taken place in Westminster, but in provincial policing, social work and in local government. Whilst bad ideas may disseminate from academia, and be absorbed by influential young cohorts of graduates via a sort of social osmosis on campus and among friendship groups, the weight of these ideas may ultimately be felt years later when those ideas are put into practice by a very different type of person.
The most obvious cases of this are in the institutional response to the rape and grooming gang phenmenon across England. The National Audit of Group-based Child Sexual Exploitation and Abuse led by Baroness Casey released this week includes an entire chapter simply titled “Denial”. This refers primarily to the apparent unwillingness of police, local authorities and social services to address the overwhelming role played by Pakistanis in their handling or reporting of this type of criminality.
The report goes into considerable detail about the ways in which the absence of data around ethnicity impacted the ability of the authorities to recognise patterns in criminal behaviour, and how this allowed those who wanted to ignore the ethnic angle of the crimes for political reasons to do so. But what really comes across is the sense of fear, and “discomfort” that the auditors picked up on in how people in front line and local services addressed issues around race and ethnicity.
In particular, this section of the report examines the “Serious Case Reviews” which were conducted following major cases of group-based child sexual exploitation in specific towns. Normally, the SCRs (now known as Child Safeguarding Practice Reviews) would have been carried out following a particularly serious single case, such as the death of a child, and are led by Local Safeguarding Children Partnerships (LSCPs). These are statutory bodies composed of representatives of the relevant agencies including the local authority, the police, the health service and others. Due to the extraordinary nature of the grooming gangs, special SCRs were carried out to review cases of child sexual exploitation on a geographic basis, such as those in Rotherham, Oxford and Telford.
In its review of the Serious Case Reviews, the National Audit found that “of these reviews, only five [out of fifty] examined the ethnicity of perpetrators as a potential factor in the offending behaviour”.
Indeed, only twelve included details about the ethnicity of perpetrators at all:
More often than not, the official reports do not discuss the perpetrators, let alone their ethnicity or any cultural drivers. There is a palpable discomfort in any discussion of ethnicity in most of them. Where ethnicity is mentioned, it is referred to in euphemisms such as ‘the local community’, or it is buried deep in the report and only vaguely referenced in any contents index or executive summary. Most choose to reside in more comfortable territory of examination and discussion of systems, processes and multi-agency partnerships.
The National Audit drew on a 2013 “overview report” of the SCR carried out into the handling of the Rochdale case. The overview report noted that:
What is absent is any evidence that practitioners attempted to understand why the fact that the men were ‘Asian’ might in fact have been relevant and legitimate for consideration… The degree to which workers understood the communities they worked in may also have contributed to the failure to recognise the unusual patterns of interaction between these two groups.
At this point, many Critic readers will sit back satisfied that the root cause of this problem is a severe case of ideological capture at the heart of the British state, which has metastised across almost every public sector institution, in which a commitment to multiculturalism is placed above any other practical concern or matter of principle. But it’s worth considering the dynamics at play in the context of social status anxiety, and the issues highlighted previously about different tiers of freedom of thought for people with different social positions.
It’s particularly interesting to see the way that the authors of subsequent reviews (and the National Audit itself), carried out by higher-level practitioners and specialists, seem to feel able to address questions around ethnicity and even the legitimacy of aspects of the politics of community cohesion, quite freely and directly. Perhaps it’s just that those at more senior levels in the world of child safeguarding are routinely more right-wing and less politically correct than their juniors, but that doesn’t feel likely given what we know about the rest of the British public sector.
Two decades saw the institutional architecture of official diversity ideology grow inexorably
A number of stories have come to light concerning individuals being disciplined formally for drawing attention to specific racial elements of the grooming gangs phenomenon, most notably the case of a social services researcher who was sent on a “diversity course” in 2002 for doing so. Over the years, as the salience of these crimes has grown and the racial dynamic has become steadily less deniable, such formal punishments may have become harder to impose. However, those two decades saw the institutional architecture of official diversity ideology grow inexorably within local authorities, the police and other public sector agencies.
Physically, within such organisations, this meant the increasing presence of individuals whose “profession” was the propagation and enforcement of orthodox narratives around race, social cohesion and diversity. Such people were present in key meetings, and their input was required in the drafting of formal documentation. Critically, they were also there to give routine training to staff members; as part of their “on-boarding” when they first started, in “refreshers” at set times, and on the ubiquitous “away days” that are now part and parcel of institutional life.
Such dreary settings are a world away from the bohemian American college campuses where the progressive orthodoxy on institutional race politics was born in the 1960s and 70s, or even from the gritty 1980s counter-cultural politics of left-wing London Borough Councils from which it spread into British public life. These ideas were shorn of their radical packaging promising institutional revolution and liberation, and were repurposed for provincial public services in the patronising corporate jargon of Blair’s Britain.
The emphasis was on safety, and compliance; it was included along with health and safety, counter-fraud, and ironically, child safeguarding. As with all of these areas, the trainers sold it to staff as the kind of thing that could help you keep your job when you were unlucky enough to find yourself in the middle of a scandal, providing you could provide evidence you had followed “best practice”, and could refer to the right bit of jargon.
I’ve written previously for The Critic about the anthropology of the rape gang crimes, in which I suggested that while snobbery may well have accounted for much of the dismissive and sometimes dehumanising treatment that victims and their families received from local public services, that those responsible were likely to have been from fairly similar social backgrounds themselves. People who had moved one or two rungs up the ladder by getting a respectable job in a public institution and keeping it, and then getting promoted a few times. It’s easy to project cowardice onto officers and officials who knowingly minimise obvious patterns of criminality, and that is clearly well deserved in many cases. But we must understand the atmosphere of low-level political intimidation and institutionalised awkwardness that kept so many mouths closed, if we have any hope of dismantling it.
The ideology behind official diversity and social cohesion policies in institutional Britain has been so influential because it provides off-the-shelf language to people who lack eloquence, and it provides definitive answers to people who lack the confidence to justify difficult or controversial decisions in a manner acceptable to officialdom. In short, it conveys authority on the part of people who do not possess it naturally. And the middle and upper management of police forces and local authorities are full of such people.
Race, ethnicity and child sex crimes are not the only areas where we will see this dynamic play out. The Cass Report and the Supreme Court ruling on the meaning of the word “woman” have already initiated a scene change in elite and professional circles in Britain on the question of gender identity. What appeared to be the foundations of a new social orthodoxy turned out to be but a passing trend; the season’s must-have opinion for the period 2017-22, but now quietly being forgotten about for reasons of good taste (or at least, to be stored away in the back of the mental wardrobe in case it comes back into fashion).
Within a few years the Guardian set, and the civil service fast stream intake of 2019, will have started pretending they never believed in puberty blockers for children, or in mutilating healthy body parts in the name of gender affirmation. Reminding them that such a position even existed will have become a “right-wing trope”. But among the flip-chart mongers and breakout session overseers, with their charges of junior social workers and school safeguarding officers, in the windowless rooms of conference suites in the M62 corridor, these ideas will take far longer to die.
The class of people who make the cultural and political weather in this country are rarely confronted with the real-world consequences of their belief system. That is left to people with a far more tenuous grip on social prestige. What the rape gang scandal has thrown light on is a caste of local administrators across the country trying to second-guess the prevailing political wind blowing from the metropolitan centre, usually in order to figure out how they’re most likely to keep their jobs. Those of us who are optimistic about Britain because so much of the public can now see through the politics of an inauthentic, establishment consensus must be mindful of how sticky orthodoxy can be.
