Deluded leftists are avoiding responsibility for the failure of their political project
In his keynote speech to the Labour Party Conference late last year, the embattled Prime Minister sought to clarify the political stakes for his increasingly restless party. Sir Keir Starmer proclaimed that the country was approaching a fork in the road and was faced with a direct choice: “we can choose decency, [or] we can choose division”. This was to be the political battle of our time, and his call to the country’s progressives was to unite to face down the dawning threat of “division”.
Unwilling to articulate the causes of social tensions and unable to offer any potential remedies, the British Left has doubled down on the nebulous concept of “division” being the true obstacle to the creation of a harmonious UK. Their unwillingness is unsurprising, since the Left has achieved the vibrant, diverse and modern society it spent decades agitating for. Britain is now a thoroughly multicultural society, with ever fewer holdouts from this cultural transition, and the country has received large numbers of immigrants both to supplement the labour market and on humanitarian grounds. In short, the Left won.
Rather than being a cause for celebration, this victory has been confusing and debilitating. If we achieved the society we wanted, then why is it so riddled with problems? Why is the highest polling political party one that vocally undermines and seeks to undo our multicultural project? Why are there constant protests, clandestine flagging operations, and a growing reversion to interpreting national identity on ethnic rather than civic grounds? Instead of interrogating how their vision for society might be flawed, the Left has settled on a far more convenient explanation: the pernicious influence of the forces of division.
In this telling, divisions within society are manufactured, either by right wing politicians for electoral gain or by political entrepreneurs and media for financial gain. These divisions are purely rhetorical constructs rather than reflections of people’s lived experience in contemporary Britain. Any divisions that currently exist can therefore be overcome and extinguished if only politicians would change their tune, be “decent” rather than “divisive”, and stop pointing out any of the fissures within British society. And to the extent that incidents occur that harm Britain’s social cohesion, these are a direct consequence of the incendiary division spread by right wing political actors. If only these forces of division were extinguished, then such incidents would not occur, for there would be no grievances between Britain’s communities once the voices causing their divides are silenced.
The less articulate proponents of the Left sometimes stumble into stating this mystic belief in the all-pervading force of division as the root of all evil in circumstances that expose the view as both ridiculous and malicious. Hannah Spencer, the Green Party candidate in the Gorton and Denton by-election, did just that when challenged by Reform candidate Matt Goodwin to name the cause of the 2017 Manchester Arena attack, blurting out that the terrorist killing happened “because people like you are dividing people”. If only right-wing shock jocks like Matt Goodwin would keep schtum about the divisions between Muslims communities and others in Britain, then presumably we could have avoided the Islamist Abedi brothers from slaughtering people attending a pop concert.
When stated so bluntly, the obscenity of this blame on “division” for issues like Islamist terrorism comes into sharp focus, but more telling was the fear in Spencer’s quivering voice at having to state directly what caused the Manchester Attack. It was a fear emanating from the challenge to admit that multicultural Britain — and specifically her city of Manchester which experienced one successful and one thwarted Islamist terror attack on Jews in recent months — is evidently not as harmonious as she might pretend it is.
The emphasis on rhetoric is a tacit admission that the Left has no answers
It is questionable how deeply sincere some commentators on the Left are in their denial of organic differences. When it comes to making electoral calculations, parties like the Greens are quick to exploit the deep divisions in values, worldview, aspirations and even language of Britain’s communities for electoral gain. While slick videos by their leader Zack Polanski aimed at a general audience focus on bread-and-butter issues that affect all voters — public services, housing affordability, rising bills, and so on — local campaigns in predominantly Muslim areas have distributed leaflets written in Urdu telling voters “Labour must be punished for Gaza. Reform must be defeated and Green must be voted for. Vote for the Green Party for a strong voice for Muslims”. Call out this kind of nakedly sectarian political campaigning, and no doubt the Greens would accuse you of spreading “division” by doing so. It is like blaming a doctor for a patient’s illness. If they simply hadn’t diagnosed it, the patient would be healthy!
As the Left continue to fail to contend with the problems of the society they agitated for — one of state multiculturalism, high immigration, permissiveness towards religious ultra-conservatism, and so on — their inability to ideologically course-correct will lead to ever more hysterical denunciations of “division”, which will often amount to nothing more than sober descriptions of issues afflicting British society. The threat of “divisive politics” will be rhetorically ratcheted up, in part to justify its censorship, and in part as a self-soothing mechanism to allow for a continued avoidance of self-reflection. The emphasis on rhetoric is a tacit admission that the Left has no answers to solving the very real social fractures of our time, preferring to retreat into the abstract world of discourse management and policing. A more comfortable world, perhaps, but not one that stands any chance of making contact with reality.
