MEGA-THREAD!

We're living through a dangerous historical period, characterised in part by the ongoing ‘culture war’. It is driving division, increasing polarisation & destabilising democracy, especially here in the UK, across Europe & in the US.

The positions of both sides appear to be becoming more entrenched with each passing day.

History shows us that this doesn’t end well. We need to take urgent action to reduce the tension.

The main criticism from the Right is that the Left is obsessed with ‘identity politics’.

The Left’s position is characterised by the view that bigoted behaviour is driven almost exclusively by people on the Right.

I want to sketch out some thoughts about how @UKLabour & the Left more generally might respond to this.

The basic claim from many on the Right is that the Left is obsessed by *some* aspects of identity, seemingly caring more about the race/ethnicity/religion/gender/sexuality of a person, than it does about white - & especially working-class - people.

The Right sometimes claims the Left must actively hate white working class people, because they relentlessly denounce ‘them’ as bigots, sexists, homophobes, racists & even ‘fascists’ whenever they raise any (often legitimate) concerns about, say, gender, Islam, and/or ethnicity.

Recently, we’ve seen this playing out in the negative stereotyping of Leave voters & Trump supporters as ‘thick white bigots’.

Let me give you a recent illustration of this.

The Right have raised concerns about the problematic & controversial term #WhitePrivelege. They see it as a term which constitutes white working-class people as ‘privileged’, even though the evidence suggests that for any a wide range of measures (e.g. health...

, educational attainment, earnings), the outcomes for white working-class people are generally far worse than for, say, middle-class females, middle-class gay people or middle class people of colour.

This is a very powerful argument: how on earth can poor, white, straight working-class people be “privileged” when their outcomes compare unfavourably with, say, non-white middle-class people?

Furthermore, whenever straight, white working-class people raise (often legitimate) concerns about, say, the effects of migration on housing in certain areas, sexist aspects of Islam, or the negative effects on them of positive discrimination, they are immediately branded...

...as not only “privileged”, but racist, Islamophobic, sexist etc.

Frankly, the Left (& I include myself in this) has been awful in how it responds to these understandable arguments.

So how might the Left better respond?

An interesting example recently came to light. In a discussion on @bbcquestiontime about the extent to which racism has played a role in shaping the actions of Meghan Markle, when challenged with the accusation of “white privilege”, privately educated straight white male actor...

Laurence Fox said ‘To say I’m a white privileged male is to be racist, you are being racist’.

He received a great deal of applause for saying this. The view of “Darren from Plymouth” is typical of many of the online reactions to his response:

“Laurence Fox speaks for us all when he is says he is sick of the race narrative rammed down our throats by the chattering classes, media elite & disconnected politicians”.

https://twitter.com/DarrenPlymouth/status/1218072994775535623

In response, I tweeted about the problematic concept of #WhitePrivelege, explaining how the term ‘does NOT mean you're racist, does NOT mean your life has been easy & does NOT mean you don't face struggles too. It means your life isn’t made harder by the colour of your skin’.