My brand is pessimism so I’m wary of flogging it to death or becoming a parody of myself, but it’s hard not to feel a bit downcast about the direction of the country. Perhaps it’s just been an especially grim couple of weeks for Britain, with riots in Leeds, a soldier stabbed in Kent and the unimaginable horror in Southport, followed by the ugly mob scenes that followed. That this happened on the same evening as screaming crowds were seen in Southend running from a machete fight added to the sense of national fragility. This was followed, yesterday, by horrific scenes of widespread mob disorder across the country in which policemen and civilians were attacked, and businesses looted.
To those of a pessimistic persuasion, there is a common feeling that the country is crumbling and falling apart at the seams, and things are going to get worse. Perhaps Rishi Sunak’s seemingly reckless decision to maximise his chances of losing the election by going early was actually a work of genius.
As it happened I spent this week reading Dominic Sandbrooks’s Seasons in the Sun, the early chapters of which describe the crisis year of 1974 when many people felt Britain was disintegrating and even ready for a dictatorship. Perhaps 1974 was much worse, but what does feel familiar is the sense that the new people in charge haven’t any fresh ideas about how to turn this around. It’s just the same, but more.
Before the election I wrote about what I expected of the new Labour government, and suggested that it would at least be good news for Britain’s most under-appreciated demographic, Right-wing moaners like myself. So, one of the first things the regime announced was the early release of several thousand prisoners, despite the widespread evidence that this will cause even more crime and the fact that habitual criminals are already spared jail on a regular occurrence.
Violence and disorder are obvious concerns right now, and a feeling that the authorities are losing control. We don’t have 1990s levels of crime, largely because smartphones and CCTV have created both a surveillance and an escapist society, neutralising the young men who commit most offences. What we suffer from is more like anarcho-tyranny, with the majority subject to intense levels of regulation in their lives while suffering the low-intensity warfare of a criminal minority who are not scared of authority.
Many of the most shocking crimes of recent years have involved mental illness, and while the number of available psychiatric beds has steadily decreased these past decades, Labour plans to make it far harder to section people, even though we already have a huge problem with the mentally ill being out in the community, something which is visible on every high street in the country.
Although a lack of money to invest in prisons and mental hospitals is the immediate cause, as well the difficulties of getting things built, there are also ideological reasons related to what are sometimes called the culture wars.
When people hear this phrase they often imagine flags or pronouns, and respond by asking ‘why does this bother you?’ They often tend to think of culture wars as being just something other people do, because their worldview is self-explanatory and morally right. This is presumably what culture secretary Lisa Nandy meant when she declared that these ‘culture wars’ are over.
Yet what people dismissively call ‘culture wars’ are in fact deep-seated divisions over how we order our society, over what is right and wrong, what social norms should be, and even how we define fundamental terms like men and women. They can never be over, and many of these issues go way beyond symbolism and have a deep-seated real-world impact, from women’s sport to public safety.
One motive for reducing the number of people in mental hospitals is a belief in equity, the idea that inequality of outcomes between groups can only be explained by injustice. Since black men in Britain are about ten times as likely to experience psychotic episodes as whites (as of the last time those stats were collected), to apply equity to this area would have very serious consequences. (And for this, we can thank Theresa May.)
Equity is also a driver for the proposed Race Equality Act, which ‘would impose a duty on public services, including the NHS, police, schools, and councils, to collect and report data on staffing, pay, and outcomes by ethnicity,’ something which presents a heavy risk of repeating Birmingham’s bankruptcy.
The head of the Free Speech Institute has been quoted as saying:
Labour’s proposed Race Equality Act will further institutionalise critical race theory and attempt to foist diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives on to the workplace… We anticipate being involved in lots of employment-tribunal cases involving people who’ve been fired for challenging diversity training.
This will also strengthen the role of non-elected bodies in public life, further ‘de-politicising’ – i.e. de-democratising – important issues of concern. Legal academic Yuan Yi Zhu has written about how the ‘most radical elements of Labour’s legal agenda may be found … in the form of a promised enactment of the Equality Act’s socio-economic duty, as well as in the promise of a Race Equality Act, both of which will inevitably substantially increase the incidence of judicial review in all areas of government activity.’
Yi Zhu writes that:
A proposed mega-regulator for standards in public life is also likely to intensify the quangofication of British political life. Opposition within Labour to these plans is likely to be limited. The political constitutionalists in the party, who understood that the government of the United Kingdom could not be subcontracted out, are by and large gone, having been replaced by a generation whose ethos has been shaped by the Blairite constitutional settlement.
The proposed Race Equality Act also promises a ‘curriculum review to ensure diversity in schools’, although many parents will be well aware that diversity and other progressive beliefs are already being disseminated in secondary and even primary schools which are increasingly open in promoting the values of the progressive left – something which has become far more pronounced since the death of George Floyd.
Education is a central aspect of the culture war, because conservatives fear that progressives – like Christians many moons ago – are using their dominance of teaching to install their values in children. Anyone who doesn’t think this is important is being disingenuous, since every political and spiritual regime in history has quite openly attached great importance to controlling education for this very reason.
So again, it’s not encouraging that the government has appointed to re-write the national curriculum an academic who has authored a number of works on gender, as well as co-authoring a book on ‘Minority Ethnic Achievement in Schools’, citing the likes of Michel Foucault and Judith Butler.
Another worrying sign is that they may make school exclusions harder. The behaviour of a minority of pupils is already a huge problem for staff and children, who make teaching impossible, drain staff time and demoralise teachers forced to deal with abusive teenagers. But many in Labour are ideologically opposed to exclusion, which entails ‘giving up’ on children, something which goes deep into the Rousseau/Hobbes divide about human nature. Again, this is real existing culture wars, with real-life consequences.
The reason why a lot of parents send their children to private school – something which is now going to be a lot less affordable – is not necessarily because they’re sharp-elbowed social climbers or because private education is always better, but to avoid the minority of badly-behaved children who make life in some comprehensives nightmarish for many. In my experience, bullying is the number one reason why parents take their sons out of comprehensives, and the behaviour of their tormentors often goes unpunished.
My impression of education is quite similar to my impression of British society more generally: that the majority are held hostage by the behaviour of the worst behaved 5-10 per cent of the population, who make real freedom – and real human rights – impossible, or at best degraded. At the very least, well-behaved, rule-abiding pupils are simply neglected because so much time is spent dealing with the troublesome tenth, and this will now get worse.
To those of a pessimistic persuasion, there is a common feeling that the country is crumbling and falling apart at the seams
Then there is the government’s plan to stop the university Freedom of Speech Act, which had been drafted to protect academics with controversial views being sacked or harassed. Bridget Phillipson, the Education Secretary, said that universities should not be a ‘political battleground’, and they will no longer face fines for failing to protect free speech.
It’s notable that, while the Tory party had 14 years to repeal the Equality Act and did nothing, allowing a piece of legislation that ensured progressivism was embedded into the system, Labour are quite serious about ruling. Toby Young expressed a grudging admiration when he wrote of Phillipson that: ‘In one stroke, she has been far bolder than any of her Tory predecessors in the last 10 years. I detest her ideology and believe that doing nothing to counter the wave of intolerance sweeping our universities means they will soon lose their “world class” status. But, by God, she’s a far more brutal political combatant than the enfeebled Tories. If you want to win the culture war, Phillipson has shown us how to do it.’
Culture war issues on campus matter because ideas matter; new approaches to reversing decline will require institutions where ideas can be proposed, debated and stress-tested, and the most fertile grounds are the universities. Those ideas are less likely to emerge if the academy is less open.
High-level immigration will remain the norm, on the grounds that the economy cannot grow without it, even though we have tested this theory to destruction for two decades. The university visa mill will continue, because the alternative is too immediately painful, and struggling towns depend on higher education institutions to bolster a local middle class. They’re also going to make it easier for migrants to bring spouses, will allow students to bring their dependents and have increased the pathways for more arrivals from Afghanistan.
They have also dropped the Rwanda scheme, an imperfect but so far the only deterrent to illegal migration. This is already costing £8 millipn a day and expected to rise, since Labour has abandoned the only possible deterrent to arrivals, and already small boat arrivals have reached a record high. Their plans to tackle illegal migration seem wildly naïve and inadequate.
The number of people who intend to make Britain their home if we don’t stop them is so unfathomably large that it will bring not only immense financial costs but will further destabilise our society – and yesterday’s thuggish racist violence will only make it harder to argue against these changes being forced upon us.
That destabilisation was seen with a recent general election carried out in an atmosphere of intimidation, with Labour MPs so scared of pro-Palestinian extremists that they even changed parliamentary procedure.
Their response is to suspend export licenses for arms sales to Israel. I don’t know whether that’s the right thing to do, and don’t have strong opinions either way – I tend to think we should stay out of the region as much as possible – but I can’t help feeling that the decision was made under duress. As a general rule, if people threaten you – don’t give them what they want.
It’s not all bad. On housing I was initially quite optimistic, and their proposals for housing targets seem pretty good. There are some Labour MPs, like Chipping Barnet’s Dan Tomlinson, who seems to understand that growth depends on housebuilding where it’s needed.
But Labour are instead focussing new-builds away from Labour-voting big cities, where they are needed most, with London’s housebuilding to be scaled down, when the capital should be absorbing most of the new homes. Instead they’re placing targets where the shortages are least acute.
It’s also rather dispiriting that they’ve deleted the word ‘beautiful’ from housing plans, with the deputy prime minister saying that ‘beautiful means nothing really’. In fact, beautiful architecture has a big impact on our wellbeing, and opposition to traditional forms tends to be ideological rather than financial; in other words, culture wars.
Like most new governments, Keir Starmer’s initially enjoyed something of a honeymoon – they are certainly having a honeymoon among journalists – although it appears to be ending already. The Prime Minister’s approval rating has already fallen drastically, and as with 1974, a hopeless Tory government has been replaced and the new one is already out of ideas. It feels like we’re losing the last additional bit of hope we didn’t even know we still had.
This article originally appeared on Ed West’s Substack Wrong Side of History.
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