#the tory party taking identity politics

[ukfrislandembassy]

See also Britain's recent experiences with Conservative governments with increasing proportions of minority ethnic ministers but also increasingly crueller politics and stupider policies at the same time.

I'm trying to write this post about identity-blind admissions/hiring vs affirmative action and I keep running into the idea that this is mostly just lipstick on a pig; I care about fairness and diversity in the abstract, but equalizing the racial makeup of the US ruling class just isn't a political priority to me.

It's good to try and eliminate the explicit racism in the system, but as long as a racial gap in socioeconomic status exists, a racial gap in ability will as well - between two equally talented student populations, the one with greater access to resources, less proximity to violence, more stability and support, etc will always perform better, even in the absence of explicit discrimination.

Even if you construct a perfectly "fair" system, it will ultimately just replicate the material inequities that exist in the broader society. If you construct an equitable system (ie, one that creates a ruling class that matches the racial distribution of society at large), you still won't have fixed the underlying issues that caused the discrepancy in the first place, and by fiddling with the system, you'll piss off a bunch of other people (in this case, Asian Americans) in the process.

The liberal theory seems to be that if we find the Barack Obamas of the world, who would've been denied admission to elite institutions due to racial discrimination, and elevate them instead, the material problems will work themselves out. But I'm just not convinced this is true - it seems to be operating on a sort of pseudo-ethnonationalism where minorities in power will work to the benefit of "their people" and eventually even things out.

But with the way ruling classes work, it seems like most of the time the ruling class becomes "your people" for new inductees, and everyone else becomes, well, everyone else. Without leaning too hard on a Marxist framework, it seems like the ruling class empirically has a strong sense of class consciousness.

And even when this isn't true, when you encounter people in power who seem to genuinely want to change the world for the better, it's hard to imagine any racial divides being magically healed without some engine of economic redistribution behind it, and this is a task that requires more than just individuals who care about it.

None of which is to say that it makes sense to just throw up your hands and say "society is racist, so I guess it's okay for Harvard to be racist too." By all means, hold their feet to the fire as much as you can. But it's hard for me to write about this without feeling like it's all downstream of the central goal of the leftist project, making a more equitable world.

[cripple-woe]

PLEASE READ THIS IF YOU CAN SO YOU CAN KNOW WHAT IS HAPPENING TO TRANSGENDER PEOPLE, POOR PEOPLE AND LEFTISTS IN THE UK RIGHT NOW!

Don’t let Rishi Sunaks current agenda fool you. While he is blaming transgender people for things that aren’t even problems (fun fact: more MP’s have been reported assaulting people in the bathroom than transgender people) you need to be aware of what he is doing.

The price of oil has surged 30% since June,

They are trying to ban protest and free speech,

4.2 Million children (29% of children in the uk) are living in poverty,

The inflation rate is 6.7+.

While people are starving, while kids are going to school with broken shoes and empty bellies, this man is ignoring it and complaining about how he doesn’t like transgender people. He will continue to ignore real issues and harass transgender people so that you don’t notice all of the things going wrong.

He’s banned people from hospital wards that match their gender identity, meaning many trans people may avoid being hospitalised when they need to because they will be put on the wrong ward, which may mean people don’t get the healthcare they need and may even DIE.

In the past five years, hate crimes against transgender people have gone up 186%.

Over 300 transgender people have been murdered in the last year.

Trans people are 770% more likely to commit suicide, mostly because of this cruel persecution from the government and society.

Taking away the rights and ruthlessly persecuting and attacking a group of people who only make up 0.5% of the population is fucking ridiculous. Trans people have done nothing wrong.

Rishon Sunak is a fucking fascist, the whole Tory party are fucking fascists, and if you vote for them you’re also a fascist.

Oh, and by the way, because I’m a very intense leftist, this could be sent to my college and they can send me to a radicalisation/terrorism course for expressing my political views about you know… not wanting to be killed by the governments cruel policies. Yes, you heard that right. If you are communist, anarchist or even just too intensely left for their liking, they can shove you into a radicalisation programme and forcefully influence your views. This country is going to hell and we can’t keep ignoring it.

They are also freezing income and National insurance tax meaning most people will be getting pushed up into a higher tax bracket that they just cannot afford, the rise in tax will be unpredictable and most likely more than the current tax, on this monetary note, our knife crime has risen 80% no doubt because of inflation and cost of living creating a higher general crime rate and therefore increasing this crime alongside it.

This section is directed to the Americans: please help spread this word. Many of us in the UK are reblogging and raising the alarm for you. Please, do the same for us. We are quickly falling into parallel situations, and people seem to have no clue what’s happening in the UK despite the fact it’s no secret.

~ Thank you.

[ceilidhtransing]

If you're eligible to vote in the upcoming UK general election, please for the love of god vote against the Tories

The 2024 Conservative manifesto is a total disaster for LGBTQ rights, particularly those of trans, nonbinary and intersex people.

A smattering of fun things they plan to do if elected:

Change the Equality Act such that the “sex” category only means “biological sex”, thus removing discrimination protections for trans and nonbinary people

Codify that an individual “can only have one sex in the eyes of the law”, denying nonbinary people the right to have their gender legally recognised

Force teachers to follow recent government guidance that bans discussion of gender identity in schools and outs gender-questioning kids to their parents

Ban gender-neutral healthcare terminology like “chest-feeding” or “birthing parent”

Legislate to permanently prevent the private prescription of puberty blockers for trans, nonbinary and questioning youth

That last one is a biggie. You read it right - they have already banned any new prescriptions for puberty blockers on the NHS; now they want to make it illegal to even access them privately, through services like GenderGP or YourGP or GenderCare or any other non-NHS provider. I'm sure I don't need to detail at length how devastating this would be to so many young people and their families.

And aside from these specific promises, this section of their manifesto is full of transphobic dogwhistles like “biological sex is a reality” and that a ban on conversion therapy is a “complex issue”.

So please, if you're eligible to vote on 4 July, go and vote against the Tories. No, I'm not saying you therefore “have to vote Labour”; there are plenty of valid reasons you might not want to vote for that party either, and you may well live in a constituency where Labour is not the primary competitor to the Conservatives anyway. But if you don't want to vote Labour - totally fair - at least go vote Liberal Democrat. Or Green. Or SNP. Or Plaid Cymru. Or something else that isn't this flaming binbag of rabid transphobes. I have a whole election masterpost pinned to the top of my blog that directs you to registering to vote, making sure you have the right ID, and finding out about anti-Tory tactical voting if that's something that you're interested in. If you're not already registered to vote, you have until midnight on 18 June to do so.

And I know that everyone is already saying with certainty that the Conservatives will face electoral wipeout this year. But it's a genuine risk that too many people will just take this for granted and not bother to vote because “the Tories aren't going to win anyway”, so they end up sneaking through with far more seats than expected because of crashingly low voter turnout. We can't just rest on our laurels here. Please do your small part to deny any more power to this hateful nightmare of a political party.

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Andrew Doyle

Published: Jul 5, 2024

Keir Starmer surely cannot believe his luck. He has achieved a landslide victory by doing very little. He received fewer votes than Jeremy Corbyn in 2019, and yet has ended up with a whopping 412 seats in parliament. The rise of Nigel Farage’s Reform Party has split the right-wing vote and ushered the Conservatives along to their worst ever election result, plunging them to even greater depths than the disastrous election of 1906 under Arthur Balfour.

This was very much a Conservative loss rather than a Labour victory. There is no great enthusiasm for Starmer, and his majority is an indictment of the “First Past The Post” system which, as I have argued previously, should be abandoned in favour of Proportional Representation. It is unsurprising that upon his victory in Clacton-on-Sea, one of Farage’s first public statements has been a commitment to campaign for electoral reform. His party received over 4 million votes and has returned only 5 seats. So that’s 1% of the seats for 14% of the votes. Compare that with the Liberal Democrats, who have 11% of the seats for only 12% of the votes. Most of us will see that there is a problem here, irrespective of our political affiliations.

Worse still, Labour’s victory will empower the culture warriors, those identity-obsessed activists who have accrued so much power already in our major institutions. While the Tory party claimed to be fighting a “war on woke”, all the while enabling the ideology of Critical Social Justice to flourish, leading Labour politicians have cheered on the culture warriors while pretending that they were nothing more than a right-wing fantasy. We have seen some pushback over the past two years in regards to the worst excesses of this movement, but all of this may soon be undone. Now that the identitarians have their political wing in power, we should expect a few years of regression.

Take the example of Dr Hillary Cass, now deservedly elevated to the House of Lords, whose review into paediatric “gender medicine” has catalysed a sea-change in public perception. While many medical journals and institutions are so ideologically captured that they have continued to deny the significance of Cass’s findings - preferring instead to continue with discredited and evidence-free “gender-affirming care” - the Labour Party has pledged to implement her recommendations. Wes Streeting, the new Health Secretary and potential future leader of the Labour Party (who narrowly held on to his Ilford North seat last night by a little over 500 votes), has made clear that the Cass Review will guide Labour policy. Starmer, meanwhile, has turned a blind eye to the bullying of MP Rosie Duffield within his own party and has expressed very little understanding of the issues. He has come around to the view that 99.9% of women “don’t have a penis”, which is still approximately 33,500 female penises in the UK alone. This is our new Prime Minister.

And here is Nadia Whittome, who has just been returned in Nottingham East, claiming that Labour will push through gender self-identification with “no ifs, no buts” and “resist calls to exclude trans women from women’s spaces”.

Such a system would have seen double rapist Adam Graham – who identified as Isla Bryson once he had popped on a blonde wig and pink leggings – accommodated in a women’s prison. Whittome also calls for a “ban on conversion therapy” with “no exemptions”. Such a policy would likely criminalise those health professionals who follow the recommendations of the Cass Review and take a psychotherapeutic approach when it comes to confused and vulnerable children. You can read my piece on why a ban on trans conversion therapy is effectively a new form of gay conversion therapy here.

Anneliese Dodds, who won her seat in Oxford East last night, has continually shown that she has a meagre grasp on gender identity ideology and why it represents such a threat to the rights of women and gay people. She has stated that “Labour will ban conversion practices outright”, in spite of appeals from groups such as Sex Matters and LGB Alliance to rethink this position. It is as though she is determined not to read the Cass Review, which was unequivocal on this matter:

“The intent of psychological intervention is not to change the person’s perception of who they are but to work with them to explore their concerns and experiences and help alleviate their distress, regardless of whether they pursue a medical pathway or not. It is harmful to equate this approach to conversion therapy as it may prevent young people from getting the emotional support they deserve.”

And yet Labour politicians continue to push for a ban on “conversion therapy” which could put parents and doctors on the wrong side of the law simply for rejecting harmful “gender-affirming care”. One can only hope that leading figures in the new Labour government read over this policy response to its manifesto by the Gay Men’s Network and reflect on the issues.

Labour is also promising to implement its Race Equality Act, a regressive policy which will effectively prioritise equality of outcome over equality of opportunity (in other words, “equity” rather than equality). Labour wishes to ensure that those from ethnic minorities are entitled to “full right to equal pay”, somehow not realising that this has been enshrined in law since 1965. As Kemi Badenoch has pointed out, “Labour’s proposed new race law will set people against each other and see millions wasted on pointless red tape. It is obviously already illegal to pay someone less because of their race. The new law would be a bonanza for dodgy, activist lawyers.”

Labour is taking its lead from Critical Race Theory in assuming that all disparities in outcome are evidence of systemic racism. This faith-based position was challenged by the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities, which found that there is no evidence at all that the legal and educational systems of this country are rigged against minorities. Activists were so furious that the facts went against their precious narrative that the commission’s chairman, Tony Sewell, was compared to Joseph Goebbels and the Ku Klux Klan. These privileged and predominately white “woke” activists simply cannot tolerate black people who don’t know their place.

And so under Labour we are likely to see these racially divisive ideas implemented under the guise of “anti-racism”. In its manifesto, Labour also pledged to “reverse the Conservatives’ decision to downgrade the monitoring of antisemitic and Islamophobic hate”. This looks very much like an insinuation that the party will reinstate police recording of “non-crime hate incidents”, a clear affront to freedom of expression. It is a staple of “woke” activism that censorship is necessary to ensure social justice. Given Labour’s ideological steer, it is likely that under its watch free speech will erode even further.

I very much hope to be proven wrong in all of this, and that Labour will learn to reject the regressive and divisive influence of intersectional identity politics. The Tories were bad enough, with their restrictions on peaceful protest and their attacks on free speech via the Online Safety Bill. But now we have a government whose authoritarian instincts are even more pronounced. Progress is often an inchmeal affair, and sometimes we have to suffer the occasional retrograde lapses along the way. So we would be wise to brace ourselves for the next few years. For now at least, the culture warriors have the upper hand.

==

If you want to see where the UK is heading, look where Canada is now.

[eaglesnick]

“It’s not a meritocracy until everyone starts with the same opportunities, is it?” – Laura Wade

The right wing of the Tory Party is triumphant!  Kemi Badenoch is now  leader of the Conservative Party and the  next possible  Prime Minister. She was  chosen by just under 59,000 Conservative Party members, 0.0853% of the total population.

Ms Badenoch describes herself as a “disruptor”, and argues for a low-tax, free market economy. She is married to a banker, is an ardent admirer of Margaret Thatcher, and is an energetic critic of “identity politics". Race, gender and class are uncomfortable social concepts for Badenoch as she emphasises the importance of meritocracy and individual responsibility over group identity.

Given her admiration for Margaret Thatcher this should come as no surprise as Thatcher once declared

“There is no such thing as society: there are individual men and women, and there are families” (Women’s Own: 1987)

This is of course a non-sense.

 “Society provides the infrastructure, institutions, and support systems necessary for individuals to succeed and thrive. The existence of collective responsibilities, such as healthcare, education, and social welfare, suggests that society, as a whole, has a role to play in supporting its members.” (The Socratic Method: 11/11/23)

To deny the existence of society is clearly untenable and the apologists for Thatcher claim that what she was really emphasising was personal responsibility and the role of individuals and families in solving their own problems rather than relying solely on government.

I would argue that the vast majority of individuals and families DO initially look to their own resources to solve any immediate problems they may be experiencing. Unfortunately, the availability of these resources is very unevenly and unfairly distributed within Britain,  some families being much  more able to help themselves than others.

Let's take Kemi Badenoch's family as an example.

Olukemi Olufunto Adegoke (Kemi Badenoch) was born in a Wimbledon private hospital in 1980.  Her mother travelled from Nigeria to England, just before the British Nationality Act 1981 abolished automatic birthright citizenship, thereby ensuring her daughter had British citizenship. Once Kemi was born her mother returned to Nigeria.

The reason I retell this story is because it clearly demonstrates that parental family circumstances help determine future outcomes for the next generation. Badenoch’s parents used their wealth – her father was a doctor and her mother a professor of psychology - to secure for their daughter a prestigious British passport and British citizenship. She spent her formative years growing up in Nigeria and then the USA and did not move to Britain until she was 16.

Badenoch did not gain her British citizenship through merit but through privilege. She undoubtedly gained her later successes through hard work and merit but her initial trajectory (British citizenship) was purchased because her parents had the wealth to do so.

When Badenoch talks about individual responsibility and meritocracy being more important than group identity in determining ones journey through life she is being deliberately disingenuous. Badenoch is now a British PM in waiting because her parents belonged to the Nigerian professional class who used their money to buy their daughter a British passport.

This privilege of wealth just doesn’t exist for millions of people in the UK. If Britain were truly a meritocracy, as Badenoch says, then you would expect a high degree of social and economic mobility. The  exact opposite is the case.

The Government paper, “Class privilege remains entrenched as social mobility stagnates” (30/04/19) had this to say.

“Inequality is now entrenched in Britain from birth to work… the better off are nearly 80% more likely to end up in professional jobs than those from a working-class background. Even when people from disadvantaged backgrounds land a professional job, they earn 17% less than their privileged colleagues.”

What determines the fate of individuals in the UK is wealth and social class. Better off UK parents, just like Badenoch’s mother and father, use their money to buy privilege for their offspring. One of the most import ways this is achieved is by sending their children to private, fee-paying  schools. This buys advantages poorer families are denied.

“Access to private schools in Britain matters, given the success these schools have in incubating future elites, and the important discourse surrounding social mobility.” (tandfonline.com: Income, housing wealth, and private school access in Britain.” ; vol 29 2021)

There are many more examples of inequality in Britain that work against a meritocratic society  - homelessness, poverty, chronic illness, unemployment, ethnicity, class, prejudice and discrimination, poor quality housing, low-pay. No matter how talented or intelligent an individual may be, any one of these powerful factors may smother that potential and prevent its development.

Badenoch, born into a middleclass family who used their money to secure for their child British citizenship was spared this fate. She was able to come to Britain at the age of 16 to escape “the deteriorating political and economic situation in Nigeria, which had affected her family.” This wasn’t Badenoch as an individual using her intelligence and skills to escape the political upheavals in Nigeria, it was her parent’s wealth.

The use of wealth to buy an advantage for your children may be unfair but it is perfectly understandable, some would argue even acceptable. Maybe, but what is NOT acceptable is the deliberate lie that Britain is a meritocracy, where individual talent and sheer hard work will ensure economic and social success for the individual regardless of class or family circumstance.

In her acceptance speech to the Conservative Party Badenoch said: “The time has come to tell the truth” I couldn’t agree more. So lets stop pretending that “identity politics” doesn’t matter and that class doesn’t exist. Even Badenoch herself once claimed she was a member of the working class.

“Kemi Badenoch claims she 'became working class' after securing a job at McDonald's as a teenager.”  (Sky news: 18/09/24)

This ludicrous claim clearly demonstrates Badenoch’s total lack of understanding of what it is like to be working class. Furthermore, it exposes her hypocritical nature, as she is quite prepared to indulge in “identity politics” when she thinks it will be to her advantage.

What is too her advantage now is to appeal to the right wing of her party and use the claim that “identity politics” no longer matters to cover up the fact that wealth and social class are still the real determinates of an individuals future success. She is, like so many Tories before her, protecting the unfair advantages her family and families like her enjoy.

Married to senior banker Hamish Badenoch - educated at a Catholic private school, where current fees range from £30,000 to £40,000 per year - Badenoch dresses up her protection of privilege as anti-identity politics, where class and family circumstance don’t matter as much as individual talent and hard work. Such claims are patently untrue and it really is time for Badenoch to stop peddling the myth that Britain is a meritocracy, and admit to the truth.

[mariacallous]

So here we are. Kemi Badenoch is the leader of the Conservative party. That’s another couple of firsts that the Tories have beaten Labour to. So far, the Conservatives have elected the first Asian leader and prime minister, and the first female Black leader of any major British political party.

But as these firsts started to come quicker and closer together – we now have a brown party leader handing over to a Black one – two things have happened. One, the politics of the party has become more unhinged and its electoral record has tanked. And two, the profile of these mould-breaking new leaders has become more extreme. The two are not unrelated to the success of ethnic minorities in the Tory party. I am sorry to point this out, because there is a sort of ritual now that must be observed when the Tories do well on diversity: you must not speak ill of a person of colour who has been elected to a position of leadership for the first time, and the significance of that moment, above all else, should be respected.

That ritual now has become a sort of farce. Because many things are staring us in the face while we are asked to perform some perfunctory ceremony of celebration. The ritual now even has its own incantation: “putting politics aside” or “whatever you think of their politics”, you must say, we must recognise that this is a good day for British politics and society in general. I’m not clear how you can “put politics aside” when it’s Badenoch’s actual job, and when her record is so appalling. I mean, it’s Kemi Badenoch. And her job is leader of the opposition.

This is the woman who said that “not all cultures are equally valid”, when deciding on who is to be allowed to enter the UK. Who said that autistic people undeservingly receive “better treatment” and economic “privileges and protections”. Who thinks that maternity pay is “excessive”. That online safety regulation is “legislating for hurt feelings” and that net zero commitments are “unilateral economic disarmament”. And who has dedicated much of her career so far to pugnacious culture warring.

And if you were to just take a glance at what her elevation means to the ethnic minority from which she comes, I am afraid that there is not only little to celebrate, but a lot to worry about. Take Badenoch on colonialism (she doesn’t care about it); on Black communities (she thinks no such thing exists, a neat echo of Thatcher’s “no such thing as society”); and on racism (when Black people are in the wrong job, in her experience, they just think their employer is racist).

But you must park whatever you think of that, and acknowledge that this is a good day because it says something about diminishing barriers to the rise of people of colour today. What that obscures is the specific circumstances of that rise, and of which people in particular. It’s not just anyone who gets to the top in British politics, but those who adhere to a particular story – one in which their experience, success and racial identity allow them to undermine the concerns of other ethnic minorities and attack those minorities for not toeing the line in terms of their “integration” or political values. (Badenoch says that “ancestral hostilities” make some immigrants “hate Israel”.) It seems that successful candidates, because of their identity, can do the wider work of Conservatism when it comes to race in a way that their white counterparts are not able to without annihilating the veneer of respectability that distinguishes the Conservatives from the far right.

And the circumstances are also troubling. Kemi Badenoch, like Rishi Sunak, ran before as party leader and was dismissed out of hand. And like Sunak, she was only considered when the party’s prospects had dwindled. It’s an awkward question and again I am sorry to pose it while we are in the customary grace period of putting politics aside, but does there not seem to be a correlation between electing ethnic minorities as party heads, and a recent deterioration of the party’s performance internally and at the ballot box? The implication is that when the party is not really in serious play, it can afford to experiment with new people who wouldn’t have been quite the right profile in more bountiful times, and see where it goes.

It’s a lot to reckon with, I know, when there is a far simpler moment to land on, a far simpler story of racial success to grasp on to. If you had told me 10 years ago that we would have a brown prime minister and a Black female leader of the Tory party, I would have imagined a far less flat and dispiriting scenario.The Tories’ record on elevating problematic people of colour has accelerated quicker than society’s understanding that people of colour can be problematic too – and that it’s OK to say so. The party’s degrading effect on social cohesion over the past decade is far too clear now for any of us not to realise that this is the way the status quo works. Its very power lies in constantly expanding the profile of people included in the establishment so that they may stabilise it, by diversifying it.

Badenoch has the right to have whatever opinions she wishes, but it is also the right of others to feel excluded by them, and not be scolded for refusing to cheer an appointment that is at best meaningless, and at worst perturbing.

Badenoch’s election is a first that signifies nothing. But it is useful, because it forces us to confront the fact that representation does not happen simply by elevating women or people of colour. True representation requires specific people and specific circumstances that do something other than merely continuing, or indeed entrenching, the way things already are. It’s a curveball for sure. But we can catch it. And catch up.

[emililyqueer]

so... this is just kind of a personal emotional dump. i don't want to bring anyone down, you can ignore this if you just want to do the sexy stuff.

but it is an insight into me, so ya know. here it is. it turned out a lot longer than i wanted... to be honest it's sort of turned into my life story. um. sorry.

i spent so much of my life being ashamed and confused and depressed. i suppose, the thing is... i'm tired of watching other people live the life that i wanted to live.

i was brought up in a very conservative small town, in the middle of fkin nowhere. the place was extremely homogenous. no (visibly) gay or trans people, almost no people of colour. i had a single, disabled mother. my dad was very mentally ill, and he was abusive and violent with it, and even though he left when i was in single digits, he's left some very deep scars on me. i went to school under the time of the Section 28 law - which is to say, LGBT issues were banned in school, and bullying gay and trans kids was absolutely allowed to happen, or else the teachers could be seen as "taking a side" on a "controversial issue". this happened to me multiple times. i hated school. even though i started off in life with a passion of learning, going there broke my enthusiasm for literally decades.

i was queer, and i was in denial. i... sort of understood, i think?? but i realised very young that i couldn't rely on anyone, not my parents, not my teachers, not my peers. i grew up obsessed with the idea of self-reliance and some fucked up idea of personal strength. even after a university friend of mine came out, and i realised i might be trans, i still clung to these ideas, to masculinity and self-isolation. they had kept me "safe" and i felt i needed them. i abused drink and drugs because i felt empty and just wanted to fucking feel something, at least something other than anxiety and despair. it felt like parts of me were missing. most of the time, i felt either nothing, or fear, or stress, unless i was high.

i had health problems, i didn't have any energy or concentration (i later learned that i had ADD), i was depressed, and i had chronic migraines. i went to university to study a BSc in computer science, and i couldn't complete it due to these health problems.

and yeah, the health problems and depression became disabling... because of that i was constantly broke. this country, the tory party especially (but not only the tories), hates disabled people with a passion. i was into political activism at the time and the number of deaths of sick and disabled people coming out of the initial austerity era actually kind of broke my faith in society, i couldn't believe this was being allowed to happen.

as an aside - that was a choice. austerity was a choice, and it came with a body count in the tens of thousands (according to the British Medical Journal) before they just stopped fucking counting. this is a thing that actually happened in one of the richest countries on earth, and it happened as the richest people in that country only got richer and richer, and then we just... forgot, because disabled people don't fucking matter, do we? i'm sorry to get political in the middle of my own miserable ramble but these bastards need to burn in hell for what they did. fuck the tories

anyway.

because i abused my body, and i couldn't afford decent healthcare, or transition related stuff, i actually wrote off my appearance. i decided i would never be able to look good or feel good about myself. there was a brief time when i first got on HRT where i felt great about the future, but once i realised how badly i'd already hurt myself... i just gave up. for a lot of my life i was convinced that i wouldn't be here in the next few months or years, so why build a future?

my desires and sense of identity were just completely buried under a mountain of shame, self loathing, lack of direction, and substance abuse. i lost so, so many years.

so... how are things today? my living situation is crap. it's secure, but miserable. one tiny room, with mold in it which is aggravating my allergies. my financial situation is still bad, but it's not critical - i am struggling to afford some medications, but generally i'm afloat. i am, so far, just about able to maintain a small old car, which i rely on, because i live in the sticks and there's fck all public transport here. mentally, i still struggle, but it's so so much better than it was, and it is getting better. my physical health is... concerning me; i have a lot less energy than i'd like, and i'm in almost always in pain. in terms of drugs, i am mostly clean. i don't really drink, i don't smoke (neither tobacco nor anything else), but i do use prescription painkillers.

one of the bigger things is my gender and sexuality... confusing as hell, i'm in a superposition between trans woman and like... femboy, or sissy feminine man. i don't really understand it, parts of all these things appeal strongly to me on a deep, honest, fundamental level. i'm really not sure how to interpret this.

and, well, when i look at some certain sex workers and models... i feel equal parts inspired, and like i want to cry. i keep seeing people who lived the life i always wanted, and i see how fucking happy and successful they are, and i feel so many things all at once.

but... i am still here. i do still have time left. and i do know a few things about me for sure:

i am a reasonably intelligent person. i'm good with computers, electronics, and cars. i like music, travelling, and um i think i like cooking??? and of course video games. i mean duh, i'm a queer on the internet! :p

i'm determined, i don't want to lie down and die any more, i want things to get better for me, i want a future.

but i think... above all? it's the things i was ashamed of that i love the most. i love kink, i love femininity, i love showing off, i desire outrageous sexual experiences, and looking hot and changing the person i see in the mirror. i want to do porn, to revel in eroticism and queerness, and i want to take these things seriously.

so, that's what i'm going to do. that's why i'm posting this here alongside the fun kinky stuff. it's important, this is me.

[head-post]

Macron marooned after 1st round of elections

With the second round of a snap general election starting in France this week, there are a number of major risks on the political and economic horizon that will have significant implications for Europe and Ireland, The Irish Times reports.

In an election year around the world, France has suddenly become a source of political drama as Emmanuel Macron’s plan to throw a grenade into the political stage backfired. He had hoped to transform the centre of French politics but instead evacuated it.

Against the backdrop of high voter turnout in the first round, he has re-energised the extreme left, which is building a radical coalition with other left-wing parties, while bringing the extreme right into the antechamber of government. Macron has remade the French political system for the second time.

Very few French people wanted this election, and the timing of it – the holiday season and the Olympics – could not have been more divisive. With the results of the first round clearly favouring the far-right Rassemblement Nationale (Rassemblement Nationale Nationale), Macron is a major loser and “macronism” (loud speeches and big ideas) is likely over.

Scenarios for run-off elections

Two possible courses of action are now taking shape. The first is a minority government led by the RN, aided by various right-wingers (mostly former Republicans). The centrist and extreme left parties are now engaging in a free vote to try and limit the number of seats the RN gets.

The other scenario, given the obvious short-lived nature of an extreme left leaning coalition, is some form of technocratic government. Both scenarios carry the risk of a constitutional crisis and the possibility of political unrest and industrial action.

While Labour seems likely to bring a steady, dull calm to British politics, the contagion of political chaos seems to have spread to Paris, and neither of the above two scenarios is likely to lead to an orderly Assembly. The extreme left and the extreme right are very hostile to each other, and neither has the patience for real technocrats, and the feeling is likely to be mutual.

In this context, it is hard to imagine any meaningful politics in France in the coming year, and it is very much the start of the 2027 presidential race.

Implications of the first round for Europe

Macron has done an unusual thing for a French president – he has, perhaps like David Cameron and his successors in the Tory party, done a disservice to his country. Many believe his decision to call the election has opened up a series of tail risks for France and Europe, and this is where the implications for Ireland lie.

France, like the UK, has a debt-to-GDP ratio that, with the exception of the period after the world wars, has not been this high since the Napoleonic Wars. This and a large budget deficit set the stage for financial disaster and a more difficult relationship with Brussels.

Both the RN and the New Popular Front harbour a deep antipathy to the English-speaking commercial and financial world, and neither has a good relationship with the European political “centre” that would allow them to work easily with the EU and its institutions.

Thus, there is a growing risk of financial stress in the eurozone, although we are probably not talking about a full-blown crisis. In this context, a government with the right-wing at the helm may prefer to put fiscal policy on autopilot and focus on identity, immigration and security issues, which in itself would be controversial.

Read more HERE

[college-girl199328]

Premier Danielle Smith swore for months that she didn't want to politicize issues around the rights and aspirations of transgender, gender-fluid, or questioning youth, and has now declared Canada's most restrictive and wide-ranging set of policies governing the rights and aspirations of those same minors. She didn't want to politicize it, and yet there Smith was on Thursday, by herself at the news conference lectern. The health, education, and sports ministers weren't on hand to explain the various reforms, nor were any civil servants or subject experts — only Alberta's chief politician.

In the social-media video issued Wednesday that launched these dramatic moves, and again the next day, Smith said she wants those children to know "you are loved and supported as you work through your complex and often changing emotions, feelings, and beliefs."

However, the government policy will imply that those young people might be making a terrible mistake about who they want to be, and will not support, and in fact block, any minor from having gender-affirming surgery — in addition to imposing Canada's first ban on hormone treatment and puberty-blocking medication for anyone under 16. Pressed on that point, Smith tweaked her language about who she supports and when.

Smith's reforms stand to change substantially how Alberta trans youth explore their identity at school, pursue gender-affirming treatment, and participate in sports though everything was only announced this week in broad strokes, details to come and to take effect at various undetermined points later in 2024.

Some of that, perhaps, will be sorted out below the political level at which Smith states her United Conservative Party caucus approved these changes.

While Smith's age restrictions break new ground in Canada, she follows Saskatchewan and New Brunswick with her plan to require parental consent when teens under 16 want to change their names or gender pronouns in classrooms and went further by requiring parents to be notified if their 16- or 17-year-olds do the same. In the Maritime province, this triggered an internal revolt in the governing Tories; in Saskatchewan, a court injunction prompted Premier Scott Moe to squelch it with the notwithstanding clause, the constitutional rights override. Did Smith believe that those provinces politicized the issue?

She was asked. She did not answer. Smith noted her limits on teens seeking gender-affirming care follow international precedent in the United States and Europe.

However, she did not point out the distinctions between those two regions: European reforms have been spearheaded at the academic and health agency level, including the National Health Service in the United Kingdom, and while North America's medical associations have made no such proposals. Stateside, like in Canada, politicians have led the charge — Republican lawmakers engaged in ongoing social culture wars that have been known to trickle north of the border.

Last week, Smith shared a stage with commentator Tucker Carlson after he'd caustically referred to surgeries that "castrate" youth, and Jordan Peterson, who puts the word trans in scare-quote marks and calls gender-affirming treatment "medical crimes." Meanwhile, David Parker of Take Back Alberta, the activist group bidding to influence Smith's government policy, said this week that her changes mean teachers "no longer have permission to indoctrinate our children into [their] ideology."

While the trans policies put Smith on the hard edge of Canadian reforms, she certainly does not ape the rhetoric and terms of those commentators. Held up next to Carlson or Peterson, one could perceive her as moderate — the balance striker that she proclaims herself to be on this front. Until this point, even social conservatives had told this writer they didn't believe that Smith, a self-proclaimed libertarian and social moderate, would tread too far on this topic. A decade ago, she pushed against the Wildrose Party she led on LGBTQ issues and against the then-governing Tories. When she appeared on Peterson's podcast last fall, she boasted to him that a senior Alberta Justice official is transgender.

As much as she spoke of somehow not politicizing trans issues, her political grassroots had demanded action on this front at her party's political convention — and it was to that UCP base that she first pledged to do something on parental rights.

Questions will remain about who is or isn't politicizing this. Is she? Are the critics, including the Alberta NDP and federal politicians, as well as teachers and doctors? What about the vocal supporters, with their rhetoric? Politicians might be no better equipped to judge who is or isn't politicizing something than, say, journalists are.

But it holds true that one political figure alone made these announcements and is taking responsibility for them. While the consequences for her will be political support (or opposition), there will be more concrete impacts for those doctors and teachers required to enact the reforms and, of course, trans individuals themselves who must navigate a changed Alberta for them.

[jukashi]

Mr. AyeforScotland™️, let me first say I take no issue with you beyond the confines of this post, and the point I'm trying to make, that stretching to present Labour in a poor light is at this time unhelpful. Let me be clear that the emphasis in that last sentence is on the 'stretching' part, not on 'present Labour in a poor light' part.

The Labour party has many problems. However, they have just been elected in, and there will be little opportunity to correct them for years. It's important to recognize where definite, real problems exist, and to apply what pressure against them is possible, but dwelling on them will not be able to produce any significant benefits for some time. There is definitely no benefit to be had in trying to pull together hints of possible problems to expand the roster ahead of time. I understand that while they were in opposition, this was the only way to try and judge them. However, they are in government now, so you will get much more reliable evidence soon, one way or another.

In the meantime, the site to which you're posting has an audience of many people who will be voting in another election this year. There is a widespread attitude through part of this population that voting is useless, that politicians that present themselves as further left are as bad as the right, et cetera. At this time, when voting in the UK has at least resulted in the bare minimum of some kind of improvement, I don't think it's the wisest move to put out a post that reinforces the idea that voting in a less right-leaning government will just result in right-leaning policies being implemented anyway. People hardly need to be any more depressed about politics.

I never implied LabourList aren't a solid news source - I was telling people to actually go to their side and read their full article. Labour doesn't have the attitudes to gender identity that I'd like, but they probably aren't as bad as Tony Blair's and definitely not as bad as the Tories. Tony Blair does indeed have unofficial influence in the Labour party, but as you say, politicians get influence from everywhere - there are opposing influences to him who also have pull in the Labour party.

I also didn't intend to present your political attitudes as a gotcha. I didn't think you were hiding your affiliations - rather, that you wear them so openly is what made it seem to me like a good opportunity to point out that people should notice that sort of thing. Like, if people might not have noticed that you had a political motivation, how likely is it there are motivations like that from posters who are less open about it?

Finally, the 'strange sense of impartiality' was supposed to be part of the bit I was doing (sort of, for lack of a better way to phrase it), and I ended up going on with it with this post, but on reflection I'm not sure how to feel about it. I'm leaving this post written this way because I don't know how I'd rewrite it, even though it feels kind of weird by this point.

Usual right-wing Labour pish.

I also have this gnawing feeling that one of the Starmer government’s biggest fuck ups will be an absolutely botched implementation of ‘AI’ within the NHS.

[chiassworld]

Denial of Democracy

Scotland is governed by a devolution system - a system in which the Scottish Parliament (Holyrood) can make it's own legal decisions regarding the country independent of the English or UK Government (Westminster). This regards things like education (hence free university tuition, National 5 and Higher exams rather than GCSE and A Levels in England, and a lower age to leave school) and healthcare. This power stops at UK-wide issues like national defense and global economic situations.

Recently, a bill was passed in Holyrood allowing transgender people to change their gender on their birth certificate. Sounds pretty good right? The bill only affected Scotland, not England, and as it's a social and healthcare issue, it should fall under Scotland's devoled powers. Right? Right..?

Unfortunately, the Tory ruled government down in Westminster took swift action to strike down the bill. Not only is this blatant transphobia, and clear use of 'identity politics' in which a political party takes advantage of a set of identities / group of people who use those identities in order to further an agenda. Selfish intention, which can lead to positive, or negative, consequences.

Westminsters striking of the Gender Recognition Reform bill was not only an attack on the trans community, but its implications are far, far more malicious and detrimental to Scotland's freedoms and rights to democracy.

Westminster abusing its power to deny a SCOTTISH bill voted on by SCOTTISH members of Parliament only affecting SCOTLAND clearly show the dynamic Westminster believes it has with Holyrood. To call this a slippery slope is an understatement. It's more like tripping off the Grand Canyon and falling to your death. The tory party have shown time and time again clear disrespect to Scotland and it's citizens, and at this rate, Scotland might end up with less and less devolved power and could even be at risk of annexation. An eerily similar threat to what people had to deal with all the way back in 1707 when England essentially manhandled Scotland into a forced Treaty of Union.

Here's a really interesting Guardian article regarding the topic - which I'm sure goes into far more depth than I have here. Just thought I should write a quick something on this page so it's not just an introduction.

[becausegoodheroesdeservekidneys]

‘Merican who wanted to emigrate until all the great disability schemes over there went bye-bye about a year before we’re lost it too…

are there any good PMs that can come out of this (a vote of no confidence), or is it like how we would have gotten Mike Pence the evangelical AIDS denying robot as president?

(I spent 2019 trying to get that in peoples heads)(he calls his wife mother that is canon!)(that said for a hot second it could’ve be pelosi and when i tell you i don’t use chef’s kiss lightly….)

I mean, the short answer is no. The Tories are, one and all, morally repugnant and appalling wastes of human skin, so the choice is basically to look at their top trumps stats and go 'Would I prefer more evil but too incompetent to enact most of it? Or less evil but competent enough to enact it?'

My husband and I actually disagree on whether Tessie May or Big Dog is worse to deal with. For me, the perils of Big Dog come down to the cult of personality, which were never going to last forever and is now crumbling dramatically. Ultimately, he has always been an inept and bumbling ham. Incompetent and stupid doesn't begin to cover it. His politics are worse than hers, yes, but he's unable to enact the worst of it, or indeed a lot of it.

Whereas May is intelligent and competent and even when she was widely hated by the whole country AND the party, she still managed to get shit done. And unlike BJ, who believes in himself and just wants the adulation, she believes in the party, and what they stand for. A true believer.

So, the long answer, on picking a successor now... Christ, who to choose? I mean from my perspective, I want the Tory Civil War to extend right into the next general election. I want a series of clowns each used as a scapegoat by the others until Labour just forward roll their way into power. Hard to know who would do that best.

I think the most likely four in the running are:

Rishi Sunak reminds me of David Cameron. He delivers speeches that make people say things like 'I don't like Tories, but he did very well', which is a slippery slope (although he's also face-clawingly embarrassing at PR visits). He personally caused 8-17% more COVID infection clusters with the Eat Out to Help Out scheme, and he has openly and provably given billions of pounds of COVID money to his friends and family, and he's mega super corrupt. BUT, Tory voters will not want a brown Hindu man as PM, and it's interesting how the Telegraph straight up reported that his 'the PM's tax' comment was a distancing maneuver from his own unpopular work. I suspect they don't want him either.

Liz Truss is a very realistic option? She's an awful libertarian who has the charisma of a tea towel that you got wet and put in a cupboard and now it's not dried and the kitchen smells. Minister for Women and Equalities who hates identity politics and cancelling people and thinks misogyny should not be a hate crime. She loves selling weapons to Saudi Arabia and has even broken international law to do so. Watching her try to appeal to the youth is an exercise in learning the true meaning of 'cringe'. And, you know, Tory voters hate women and love scapegoating them, plus she's been BJ's best mate for a while, so... there's that.

Uh, let's think... Dominic Raab. Current Deputy PM. Human boil. So far his evil has been obscured by Big Dog's, but honestly I think the cabinet crumbles within a month if it's him - and here's the thing! We're going to get him at least briefly anyway. As Deputy, if BJ goes, either by resignation or by vote of no confidence, Raab takes over until a new leader is elected. It will be very funny.

And, last but by no means least, Michael Gove, a national laughing stock who looks like someone tried to play dress up with their biggest toe. He's a walking disaster. He's incompetent in the extreme. He's best summed up by my favourite political comic of all time, which is this classic from 2016:

It's just so accurate. So honest. It strikes so completely to the heart of the man.

So, I hope it's him, but honestly... No good choices.

[sab-teraa]

Your takes on Rishi Sunak read exactly like you're a tory if you were British 😳 yes he's poc, yes he's the first poc to be pm in this country, but that means fuck all when his policies are going to affect much of the persons of colour in this country negatively. But wow its a huge moment because representation Matters?

This is what happens when you think the entire world revolves around you and your country 😭

I literally responded to the post from the perspective of someone who lives in a POC country 😐 you cannot assume that just bc someone is a POC they will automatically care about the poor + POC. If that was the case, my country and many other countries similar would not be suffering the way we are … we would not have over 60%+ of our population living in poverty, shitty education policies etc.

Also, assuming that he should just care about POC bc he is a POC is just another form of identity politics + populism (or wanting a populist president). The EXACT SAME THING YALL SHAME MODI, BOLSONARO, TRUMP etc + their voters for 🥲 obvs not as extreme, but still identity politics.

People in general are individualistic and selfish… their own interests will always come first. If you think ANY politician … no matter the party is diff … I’m calling indoctrination 😭 you’re out here fighting for your l*ftist besties and your besties are out here dining with your ‘enemies’.

Also, when did I say representation matters? I literally LOL bc it’s such a ???? Who would have ever presumed that we would have such a full circle moment lmao???? I personally don’t care about representation, I care about the most qualified and appropriate person having the job - once again stemming from the issues in MY COUNTRY!! Y’all always want to compare the west to the global south but now it’s problem when we do it? Let’s not act like y’all don’t come to our countries and talk about how ‘cheap’ stuff is here etc. without taking into consideration OUR lived experiences.

Also, wtf should I not be impressed by his academic credentials ?? It’s impressive af … especially considering that almost all of my leaders are liberation leaders, who have no qualifications for their position. Which in turn has resulted in rolling blackouts, lack of water, high unemployment, unequal affirmative action policies (in a sense that it’s created an elite group of POC rather than helping the majority), and a failing education system with a 30% pass rate.

So yes, education does not equate to worth, but having people who actually studied something relating to their field and getting the job had me SHOOK bc the conversation is such a contrast to what’s happening in my COUNTRY. But I once again forgot, I have no right to talk from the perspective of my country 😭👍🏽👍🏽 the entire world revolves around your country!! My bad <33

Tho, one thing that has pissed me off (I didn’t think it would bc im not the most in tune with my Indian culture or religion), is how anti-Hindu are lot of these posts calling Rishi out are. But yeah … your identity politics is selective yeah? 😵‍💫oh and how can I forgot, people that aren’t from the west have no right to feel attacked when people demonize them 😔👍🏽👍🏽👍🏽👍🏽👍🏽 we just need to agree to however ppl treat us bc our politicans are poc 👍🏽👍🏽

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Andrew Doyle

Published: Jul 26, 2023

As our culture war rumbles on, there are hordes of denialists at hand to reassure us that it either “doesn’t exist”, or that it is a mere “distraction”. Labour MP Ben Bradshaw warns us that we need “to resist the Tory culture war”, as though it had been concocted by the very party that has presided over its worst excesses. Writing in The Scotsman, Joyce McMillian claims that the SNP’s Gender Recognition Reform Bill is “being used as a culture-war distraction”. Times columnist Matthew Parris insists that the “Why-Oh-Why War with Woke” is “not a real culture war”, and if we “stop thinking about it, stop talking about it, it will finally go away”.

Wishful thinking only explains so much. A cynic might take the view that all this talk of “distraction” is a way to minimise the significance of the culture war, a tactic likely to appeal to those who support the creeping authoritarianism of our times. But perhaps the better explanation is that culture warriors have been so successful in misleading the public when it comes to their methods and objectives. The claim that the culture war is a “distraction” is, in other words, a distraction.

This is not to deny that some tabloid “woke-gone-mad” stories are frivolous. It is, of course, eminently sensible to shrug off bitter screeds about vegan sausage rolls or reports of young people tweeting about how old sitcoms are “problematic”. All conceivable opinions are available on social media if one searches long enough. Just as the devil can cite scripture for his purpose, so too a lazy tabloid columnist can quote “the Twitterati” to confect some juicy clickbait.

That said, these kinds of trivialities are often symptomatic of a much deeper cultural malaise. We may laugh at the university that appended a trigger warning to Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, informing students that it contains scenes of “graphic fishing”, but the proliferation of such measures is an authentic concern. It points to an increasingly infantilising tendency in higher education, one that accepts the dubious premise that words can be a form of violence and that adults require protection from ugly ideas. Worse still, it is related to growing demands that certain forms of speech must be curtailed by the state. Only this month, a poll by Newsweek found that 44% of Americans between the ages of 25 and 34 believe that “misgendering” should result in criminal prosecution.

Such developments are anything but a distraction. What has become known colloquially as the “woke” movement is rooted in the postmodernist belief that our understanding of reality is entirely constructed through language, and therefore censorship by the state, big tech or mob pressure is fully justified. In addition, this group maintains that society operates according to invisible power structures that perpetuate inequality, and that these can only be redressed through an obsessive focus on group identity and the implementation of present discrimination to resolve past discrimination. This is why the most accurate synonym for woke is “anti-liberal”.

When James Davison Hunter popularised the term “culture war” in his 1991 book Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America, he was describing tensions between religious and secular trends as well as alternative visions of the role of the family in society. He was using the term in its established sense, where any given “culture war” has clearly defined and oppositional goals (such as the Kulturkampf of the late-19th century, which saw the Catholic Church resisting the secular reforms of Chancellor Otto von Bismarck). Hunter’s application of the term mapped neatly onto accepted distinctions of Right versus Left in American politics, which is perhaps why the notion of a “culture war” is still so often interpreted through this lens.

But our present culture war is not so simple. The goals are certainly oppositional, but the terms are vaguely defined and often muddied further through obfuscation. Rather than a reflection of antipathies between Right and Left, today’s culture war is a continuation of the age-old conflict between liberty and authoritarianism. John Stuart Mill opened On Liberty (1859) with an account of the “struggle between Liberty and Authority”; the only difference today is that the authoritarian impulse has been repackaged as “progressive”. This would help explain why a YouGov poll last week found that 24% of Labour voters believe that banks ought to be allowed to remove customers for their political views.

The idea that defending liberal principles is a kind of “distraction” amounts to an elaborate form of whataboutism. Contemporary critics of Mill might well have argued that in writing On Liberty, he was allowing himself to be distracted from more pressing causes. Why wasn’t he writing about social reform, for instance, or the Franco-Austrian war? Similarly, while some commentators ask why we are discussing climate change during a cost-of-living crisis, an environmentalist might well ask why we are discussing the cost-of-living crisis in the midst of climate change. The extent to which we are being “distracted” is very much dependent on our individual priorities.

That is not to suggest that there are not important issues that are being neglected. Matthew Syed has observed the curious lack of interest in the possibility that we are facing self-annihilation due to our rapidly advancing technology. As he points out, in an age when the full sequence of the Spanish flu can be uploaded online and reconstructed in a laboratory, “how long before it is possible for a solitary fanatic to design and release a pathogen capable of killing millions, perhaps billions?” And why, Syed asks, aren’t world leaders devoting time and money to confront these existential threats?

Syed writes persuasively, and I certainly share his concerns. But I part company when it comes to his diagnosis of our culture war as “a form of Freudian displacement”, that “the woke and anti-woke need each other to engage in their piffling spats as a diversion from realities they both find too psychologically threatening to confront”. Syed is right that there are some who specialise in the trivial, but there are many more who are undertaking in earnest the crucial task of halting the ongoing erosion of our freedoms.

The liberal approach to redressing injustices, one now routinely dismissed as “anti-woke”, has a long and illustrious history. We might look to Mary Wollstonecraft, Frederick Douglass, Martin Luther King and many others who understood that freedom of speech and individual liberties were fundamental to human progress. Identity politics in its current form is directly opposed to the ideals of these great civil rights luminaries. While many of today’s culture warriors promote polarising narratives of distinct and incompatible group identities, the proponents of universal liberalism — as embodied in the movements for black emancipation, second-wave feminism and gay rights — have always advanced individual rights in the context of our shared humanity.

Far from being a distraction, then, our culture war still cuts to the heart of what kind of society we wish to inhabit. While it continues to be misapprehended as a conflict between Left and Right, those of us who are urging vigilance when it comes to the preservation of our freedoms will continue to be mistrusted and maligned. The likes of Matthew Parris are free to assert that ignoring the agents of authoritarianism will make them “go away”, but I am not aware of any historical precedents that support this view. When it comes to the culture war, apathy is tantamount to surrender.

[scottydd]

Truss learns the hard way that Britain isn’t America

Reaganism is a good idea, but Reaganism without the dollar isn’t

Into Brideshead Revisited, near the middle, Evelyn Waugh crowbars a scene on a cruise ship for the express purpose of mocking Americans. There is a character named “Senator Stuyvesant-Oglander”. Each and every drink has ice in it. No one is able to tell friendship from desperate bonhomie. The crustiest of England’s great novelists wrote better stuff, no doubt, but the passage is an illuminating fragment of a time when anti-Americanism was a Tory thing.

And one that had its uses. If nothing else, Britain’s establishment was clear back then that America was a different country. A midsized archipelago couldn’t look to a resource-rich market of continental magnitude for governmental ideas.

If anti-Americanism was bad, look what its opposite has done. Britain is in trouble because its elite is so engrossed with the US as to confuse it for their own nation. The UK does not issue the world’s reserve currency. It does not have near-limitless demand for its sovereign debt. It can’t, as US Republicans sometimes do, cut taxes on the hunch that lawmakers of the future will trim public spending. Reaganism was a good idea. Reaganism without the dollar isn’t. If UK premier Liz Truss has a programme, though, that is its four-word expression.

So much of what Britain has done and thought in recent years makes sense if you assume it is a country of 330mn people with $20tn annual output. The idea that it could ever look the EU in the eye as an adversarial negotiator, for instance. Or the decision to grow picky about Chinese inward investment at the same time as forfeiting the European market. Or the bet that Washington was going to entertain a meaningful bilateral trade deal. Superpowers get to behave with such presumption. Why does Britain think that it can, too? Don’t blame imperial nostalgia. (If it were that, France, Spain, the Netherlands, Belgium and Portugal would show the same hubris.) Blame the distorting effect of language. Because the UK’s governing class can follow US politics as easily as their own, they get lost in it. They elide the two countries. What doesn’t help is the freakish fact that Britain’s capital, where its elites live, is as big as any US city, despite the national population being a fifth of America’s. You can see why, from a London angle, the two nations seem comparable. Reaganism without the dollar: this isn’t one woman’s arbitrary whim. It is the culmination of decades of (unreciprocated) US focus in a Robert Caro-hooked Westminster. You would think from British public discourse that Earth has two sovereign nations. If the NHS is fairer than the US healthcare model, it is the world’s best. If Elizabeth II was better than Donald Trump, monarchy beats republicanism tout court. People who can’t name a cabinet member in Paris or Berlin (where so much that affects Britain, from migrant flows to energy, is settled) will follow the US midterms in November. The EU is a, perhaps the, regulatory superpower in the world. UK politicos find Iowa more diverting. The left is as culpable as Truss. From 2010 to 2015, critics of “austerity” urged the Tories to take the softer US approach. The cross-Atlantic comparison implied that then prime minister David Cameron had King Dollar behind him. Soon after came the importation of identity politics from a republic with a wholly different racial history. The anti-Americanism of the Waugh generation was petulant. It was sourness at the imperial usurper dressed up as high taste. But at least it had no illusions. The snobs understood that America was alien, and inimitable. Tories who patronised the US — Harold Macmillan, Ted Heath — were quicker than much of the Labour party to see that Britain belonged with Europe. Truss and her cohort of Tories have none of that snide but ultimately healthy distance from the US. Take her vaunted supply-side revolution. Like all armchair free-marketeers (she has never set up a business) she believes her nation is a blast of deregulation away from American levels of entrepreneurial vim. It isn’t. The creator of a successful product in Dallas can expand to LA and Boston with little friction. The UK doesn’t have a market of hundreds of millions of people. (It did, once, but the present chancellor of the exchequer voted to leave it.) Someone who glides over that point is also liable to miss the contrasting appeal to investors of gilts and Treasuries. Some readers balked last month when I wrote that Truss might not last until the next election. Even I didn’t think she would trip so soon. It is a kind of patriotism, I suppose, to mistake your nation for a superpower.

[mariacallous]

People who don’t join political parties imagine that membership is an expression of opinions held in common. It starts that way, but over time, party loyalty comes to be defined at the threshold of tolerable extremism. What ugly attitude can you rub along with without recoil because, politically speaking, it’s family?

That is the question that Lee Anderson, a former deputy chair of the Conservative party, forced on fellow Tories with his assertion that “Islamists” have “got control” of Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London.

The whip was withdrawn. Rishi Sunak saw a line being crossed but struggled to name the crossing point, observing only that Anderson was “wrong”, not racist or Islamophobic. There was an awkward void in the place where the Conservative leader located the wrongness.

The transgression was severe enough to merit expulsion from the parliamentary party, but it can’t be defined by words that are applied without hesitation by anyone who really understands the offence.

The prime minister doesn’t want to call it Islamophobia or anti-Muslim hate because that would cast a net of opprobrium over everyone in his party who agrees with Anderson. They are too numerous to anathematise. It would drag in Suella Braverman, the former home secretary, who has written that Keir Starmer is “in hock” to Islamists who have nobbled parliament and “bullied our country into submission”.

Some Conservative MPs reject such paranoid hallucinations for what they are. Most finesse the question as a matter of rhetorical taste. “Not the words I would have chosen,” is a standard non-repudiation. It avoids naming the ingredient that is too spicy for more subtle Tory lips.

Press for clarity and the conversation is diverted on to pro-Palestinian demonstrations, antisemitic placards appearing in the throng, chants celebrating a Middle East with Israel erased and, since Hamas pursues that goal by indiscriminate murder, a shadow of intimidation felt by many British Jews.

Those are not imaginary issues, but they can be raised without plunging into the murky water where Anderson and friends swim. “Control��� is the keyword. It unlocks the insinuation that Khan is a cipher, a sleeper agent. He might sound like a mainstream politician of the centre-left, but that is a front. He might have a commendable record of running a multiethnic capital with respect for the cultural sensibilities of its diverse communities, but his true agenda is sectarian.

That is not a plausible depiction of the actual Sadiq Khan. But Anderson speaks to an audience (mostly outside London) that doesn’t see beyond the mayor’s Muslim faith and the colour of his skin, taking them as proof of ulterior and unsavoury allegiance.

Encoded in the attack on Khan is the old “cricket test”, formulated by Tory grandee Norman Tebbit. Tebbit’s question: do immigrants and their children cheer for England in the Test match, or do their non-native hearts crave victory for some other land? The cricket test sets a cruel bar for belonging in Britain. It can only be cleared by jettisoning intimate components of identity. That is nationalism doing what nationalism does – narrowing the criteria for who counts as part of the nation and policing the boundary with menaces.

The left traditionally rejects that way of thinking, with one exception. A socialist variant of the cricket test applies to Jews who feel some cultural, religious or family affinity to Israel, which is most of Britain’s Jewish community.

Formally, the test is not racial. The passport for admittance to left virtue is repudiation of “Zionism”, which is a polyvalent word, narrower than Jewishness, wider than Israeli. It has a complex history, disputed among Jews themselves, which is what gives it utility in laundering the ancient animus. Much of the “anti-Zionism” that exonerates itself from racism replicates the imagery and idiom of what, a century ago, was denounced as “International Jewry”.

The progressive Geiger counter that crackles on contact with most particles of racist radiation passes silently over talk of “Zionists” exerting control over the media, finance and British foreign policy.

No alarm was raised at the Labour meeting in Rochdale where Azhar Ali, then the party’s candidate in a local byelection, said that the Israeli government had knowingly permitted the Hamas atrocities of 7 October as a pretext for military aggression in Gaza. It took a few days for Ali to lose Keir Starmer’s endorsement.

Many were dismayed by the propagation of a wild conspiracy theory while doubting that antisemitism was in the room. But it takes irrational fixation on the evil of a Jewish state, and intuitive reluctance to empathise with a narrative of Jewish victimhood, to embrace the idea that Israel organised a blood sacrifice of its own people to facilitate conquest of Palestinian land.

Conspiracy theory as conduit into the mainstream is a common factor in the spread of antisemitism and Islamophobia. It is the difference between conversations about “Islamism” or “Zionism” as terms that Muslims and Jews might recognise, and the deployment of those words as pseudoanalytical camouflage on blanket vilification of a minority community.

Purported vigilance against “Islamism” is a bridge between the mainstream right and the morbid ultranationalist fantasy where Muslim communities in “no-go areas” wage demographic war to replace Christian populations. “Anti-Zionism” causes a blurring of vision on the mainstream left that makes it hard for some people to distinguish between the struggle for Palestinian justice and railing against inveterate Jewish bloodlust.

I have written this far without a personal expression of horror and despair at the plight of Gaza. Does a Jewish journalist have to declare non-affiliation to the Israeli government, and confess to a sickening dread of every news bulletin, as his licence to participate in conversations about the Middle East?

We are not all freelance ambassadors for a foreign state. We are often made to feel like it, which induces an impulse of resentful emotional retreat. I imagine something similar is felt by British Muslims after terrorist attacks carried out in the name of jihad. It is hard not to resent the suspicion of complicity, the unspoken charge of guilt by cultural adjacency, that flickers in a stranger’s eyes.

None of these experiences is exactly equivalent. Antisemitism on the left and Islamophobia on the right can’t be formulated as a balanced string of political algebra. But there is a grim symmetry of blind spots, self-righteous denial and selective outrage. There is an unhealthy division of vigilance with partisans from each end of the political spectrum appointing themselves arbiters of the prejudice they have decided belongs to the opposite side.

Jewish and Muslim identities are not signifiers of ideology or party loyalty. But British politics, in its relentless polarising vortex, seems unable to treat them, treat us, as anything other than potential recruits for a dangerous round of mutual antagonism. And we are tired, I am tired, of having personal identity, family attachment, culture and innermost anxiety scored and folded into darts for other people to hurl across party lines. So very tired.