Liz Truss is back and she’s got a book to plug. ‘It will set out what we must do to counter the disastrous ideas of the global left,’ she told X at the weekend. Now, I think she’s right that there is a smorgasbord of disastrous ideas about in the modern West – net zero, increasing state power and general economic nuttery, and a whole host of barking cultural ideas about biological sex and race. But can these really be laid at the door of the left, and at a hypothetical global left?
I think these foggy notions come from a different place, and they’ve seeped in to all sides of politics. Yes, some have indeed risen from the sediment of people who think of themselves as left wing, or are routinely described as such. Genderism, for example, has attached itself to the Sky bundle of the progressive opinion suite, despite being based on sex stereotypes from about 1866.
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