“You should do the baby-led approach,” my friend said.

Baby-led weaning was coined in the early 2000s, and it advocates that, instead of parents spooning food into their baby’s mouth, they let the baby take the lead by feeding themselves, with parents putting a boiled piece of broccoli, say, or a small cup of hummus on the high-chair tray, which the baby can eat with their fingers. Baby-led weaning became so popular that the baby-led approach has expanded to all areas of early parenting, with baby-led sleeping, baby-led walking and baby-led potty training. Baby-led parenting, in other words.

I embraced the baby-led approach with enthusiasm that was really relief. Hell, I didn’t know how to do anything with these babies – I was just some idiot who put their nappies on the wrong way round every time. How marvellous I could delegate all complicated decisions to my infants! Now they wouldn’t scream at me anymore when I tried to make them do something they didn’t want, ie have a nap. The babies would be in charge.

This did not work out as well as I’d hoped. Baby-led weaning was fine. Baby-led sleeping, however, meant that none of us slept at all. It turned out that my babies were even more clueless than me about how they should be raised. And so, I returned to attempting to get them on a schedule, which they didn’t love, and it wasn’t always fun for me. But eventually, all three of us were sleeping at night.

The first generation of kids who grew up with the baby-led approach are now in their late teens and early 20s, and we are currently living in a baby-led world. Young people have always believed that they know better than the older generation, and now the older generation agrees with them. Middle-aged and experienced editors working in journalism and publishing live in fear of printing something that might displease the twenty-somethings who work in their company’s digital and publicity departments. Parents defer to their teenaged children about the correct languages to use and opinions to hold.

Some teachers even capitulate to the teenaged bullies in their class: last month, the Times reported that a girl in a London private school “was surrounded by up to 60 students who screamed and spat her” after she questioned gender ideology. “Teachers were initially supportive but withdrew their backing after the other sixth-formers accused the girl of transphobia, and the school ended up apologising for not maintaining a ‘safe-space’ in the sixth form,” wrote Nicola Woolcock, the paper’s education correspondent. This girl, ‘Kate’, was interviewed by Julie Bindel for UnHerd last week and she described overhearing her favourite teacher apologising for Kate’s “terrible, hateful behaviour”. Kate, who had only recently left hospital where she was being treated for anorexia, ended up leaving the school.

Babies are tyrants. If they don’t get their way, they cry, they scream as if the world is ending and no compromise is possible. Two babies screaming together, I can tell you from experience, is a nightmare. A pack of them is unimaginable, so I have some sympathy with the teachers at Kate’s school. Anyone who has ever raised a toddler might find the now regular Twitter meltdowns when someone’s employer hasn’t done exactly what they wanted strangely familiar. This is part of the reason the phrase “baby-led” is so alluring: no parent wants deal with a screaming tantrum, and no employer does either. So much easier to let the kids lead the way, even if it does lead to a Lord of the Flies-type scenario, with the adults fearfully letting the kids dictate the norms, as appears to have happened at Kate’s school.

Younger generations have always looked for ways to differentiate themselves from the stuffy old farts who came before – their parents, in other words – while also seeking an identity that confers upon them a set of ready-made beliefs and a supportive social group. This has become much harder with the dissolving of traditional barriers between adults and young people; parents chase social media likes as passionately as their children, the kids are listening to Harry Styles and Kate Bush, just like their mum and dad. In previous decades you could be a punk, or a skater, or a goth. For the current young generation, it’s being a social activist, and the changing parameters in discussions about race and, in particular, gender have become the defining generational divide. Telling your mum off for using the wrong words is great way to prove that she’s old and passé, even if she does still go to Glastonbury. A lot of good has come from this: today’s teenagers are far more clued up than we were in the Nineties, when jokes about disabled, fat, BAME and gay people were pretty much par for the course in any stand-up show and school playground. But a lot of deeply weird shifts have emerged from this, too, and all of them are due to us now living in a baby-led world, where the grown-ups are too scared to say “No”.

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Baby-led doctoring, for starters. In the appallingly sexist but undeniably revealing documentary, What is a Woman?, provocateur Matt Walsh interviews American paediatric professor Dr Michelle Forcier, who is dressed in a toga and talks in the soothing, beatific voice of a cult leader. She says that children are ready to be put on medical treatment to change gender “when they ask for it”. By “medical treatment”, she means Lupron, which is now used as a puberty blocker on gender non-conforming children, but has been used in the past, Walsh rightly says, to chemically castrate sex offenders. Forcier wrongly insists that puberty blockers “don’t have permanent effects”, and ends the interview.

Forcier is not an outlier. Trans activists now argue that confused four-year-olds should be seen as analogous to trans adults. Not very long ago, I received an email from my children’s nursery to say that a three-year-old who I’ll call Daisy was now a boy and should be called Robert. As it happened, my three-year-old had, that same morning, informed me he was an astronaut, but it hadn’t occurred to me to tell anyone (or NASA), and that’s because children’s identities are mutable. They are still discovering who they are, and that’s as true for three-year-olds as it is for 13-year-olds. By now, I’ve received several emails from parents I vaguely know, telling me their child — always under 15, invariably female — is trans and now goes by a new name. Those parents are, of course, only trying to support their child. But it is not supportive to publicly lock a child into an identity when, in a week, or month, or year, they will likely be a very different person.

In March, the Cass Report, an independent investigation into the quality of care for gender dysphoric young people in this country was published. It found that treatment by the NHS’s specialist Gender Identity Development Service had become mired in ideology, with clinicians too scared to raise concerns about rushing children into changing gender, or asking why girls are disproportionately now identifying as boys, lest they be accused of bigotry. If even doctors are too scared to press the brakes on unhappy children diagnosing themselves, what hope for parents?

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Discussions about gender are often described as “toxic”, and that means they are characterised by tantrums and threats from activists — again, arguing tactics that will be familiar to parents of teenagers and toddlers alike, and yet that does not diminish their effect. Parents have been terrorised into buying their unhappy teenage daughters binders to suppress their breasts because ignorant and bad faith organisations have told them — without any evidence — that not doing so will push their children towards suicide. Similarly bosses of liberal organisations have allowed feminists to be muffled and denounced so as to avoid censure from young activist employees.

Adults in their 40s and 50s — my generation — remember what it was like when we were teens. Many of us cringed at the words our parents used: “the blacks”, “poofters” and worse. We tried to tell them not to use those words, but there wasn’t the embarrassment then as there is now about being a bit bigoted. An adult didn’t gain anything, really, from being what was called then politically correct and what is now called woke. Like I said, things are different now, and that’s clearly a good thing. But in our rush to not repeat the mistakes our parents made, too often we have forgotten that, as well as loving and accepting our kids, it is our job to guide and safeguard them.

I was talking to a friend recently about a mutual friend whose daughter has said she is a boy, and so her mum bought her a chest binder, and I said how sad I found that. My friend was shocked by my sadness.

“But what would you do if your daughter wanted one?” she asked.

“I’d ask her what she thought she could do as a boy that she can’t do as a girl, and I’d ask if she wanted to be a boy, or did she want to be different person,” I said.

“But it’s the daughter’s choice,” my friend said.

“It would be her choice if she wanted to self-harm. But I wouldn’t buy her the razor,” I replied.

I don’t know if I’m right, but, like Kate, I was a very unhappy adolescent girl who was treated for anorexia. So I know a little about unhappy and confused adolescent girls, and how much we attack our own bodies to express that unhappiness. I also know what it’s like to be a desperate parent who just wants their kid to stop crying, to be happy and healthy and safe, and to feel like I’m a good parent who listens. The baby-led approach is an expression of that because sometimes (often) we don’t know what’s best for our kids, especially when it comes to a new issue like gender. But guess what? Your kid doesn’t know either, and nor, it seems, does anyone else who is supposed to safeguard them. Our kids aren’t breaking down barriers, they’re rock climbing without any safety ropes, and we’re encouraging it. It’s time for my generation to grow up, and be the adults.

In Britain, however, where “black power” also began to take hold, there was a twist: it wasn’t just being embraced by black people, but Asians too. Indeed, Stokely Carmichael once recalled his surprise when, during a trip to London in 1967, he witnessed Black Power “resonating” among “the raised fists in the Asian communities, especially among Pakistani youth.” This would extend into the 1970s and 80s, when South Asians and black people were united under the banner of “political blackness”.

In the US, “blackness” was  —  and remains  —  both a political and ethnic identity; in Britain, things have always been more complicated. Here, political blackness was fashioned to encourage solidarity and mobilisation between Black Caribbeans and South Asians: an identity for people who shared a history of colonial subjugation, migration and diaspora  —  and who were now being treated as second-class citizens.

Ambalavaner Sivanandan, for instance, left behind the ethnic pogroms of his native Sri Lanka to migrate to London in 1958, only to witness attacks by white mobs on West Indians during the Notting Hill riots. “I knew then I was black,” he wrote; he would be treated as black whether he accepted it or not. Decades later, not much had changed. After a long career as the editor of the journal Race & Class, Sivanandan wrote in 2008: “Black is the colour of our politics, not the colour of our skins”.

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But political blackness was born in a different era, one where “coloureds” — anyone who was not white — were treated as part of a de facto underclass in the UK. Institutional racism meant they occupied menial jobs, were denied decent housing and education and were excluded from many social spaces due to the “colour bar”.

At the time, the mainstream Left did little to change this state of affairs. Trade unions, for instance, were generally hostile to the cause of anti-racism. Political blackness, therefore, wasn’t simply a critique of Tory governments; it also attacked the Labour Party for being co-conspirators in institutional racism. “What Enoch Powell says today, the Conservative Party says tomorrow, and the Labour Party legislates on the day after,” was Sivanandan’s sardonic assessment. After Powell’s Rivers of Blood speech, as fears abounded of Kenyan Asians “swarming” into Britain, it was Harold Wilson’s Labour government that rushed through the racist 1968 Commonwealth Immigration Act. Where previously Commonwealth citizens had had unlimited entry to Britain, as British subjects, they were now barred.

In this context, it made sense for the descendants of Britain’s colonies to band together. In 1968, Jagmohan Joshi co-founded the Black Peoples’ Alliance (BPA). Their founding congress was attended by various Caribbean and Asian militant groups — including the Pakistani Workers’s Association, the West Indian Standing Conference (WISC) and the Afro-Asian Liberation Front. The BPA took to the streets a year later, 8,000-strong, in a “march for dignity” to Downing Street, calling for the repeal of the Immigration Act. And over the next decade, it would, along with other groups, continue to play an important role in protesting police brutality and defending ethnic minority communities from far-Right attacks.

But political blackness is now a fossil. Today it’s widely accepted that it flattens out the differences between blacks and South Asians into an abstract non-white identity. For Kehinde Andrews, a modern-day black nationalist, blackness is the sacred unifying glue of the “African diaspora”. Turning into a political umbrella, he claims, “erases the history of political organising based around shared African ancestry” in Britain.

Moreover, discussions surrounding race in Britain have been further fudged by the super-diversity that has resulted from recent decades of mass migration from Eastern Europe, Africa and the Middle East. Eastern European migrants, for example, have been the frequent object of xenophobia in the past couple of decades, despite being “white”. At the same time, the emergence of identity politics in recent years has had the effect of breaking up what was once a unified “black struggle” into ethnic and religious fragments.

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Within this political desiccation, it is hardly surprising that the Tories are the political group best equipped to appeal to an increasingly diverse electorate. It is, after all, something that they have been trying to do for a long time; in 1983, they ran an election poster featuring a besuited black man alongside the words: “Labour say he’s black. Tories say he’s British”. The message is clear: we emphasise nationhood and want to include you in it, while the Left wants to keep you imprisoned by your race.

Of course, when the Tories first tried to paint themselves as the party of the aspirational ethnic minority, the message was hollow: the party was extremely white. Now, the party is responsible for the most ethnically diverse cabinet in the history of British government. Beyond Rishi Sunak — who is, of course, its embodiment — there’s also Priti Patel, the daughter of Indian migrants by way of Uganda, at the helm of the Home office. Kwasi Kwarteng and Kemi Badenoch, both of West African stock, are Business Secretary and Equalities Minister respectively. Then there’s Claire Coutinho, Bim Afolami and Suella Braverman among others.

What this shows is that there is no such thing as “black politics” in any unitary sense. Black people, with various backgrounds, are acting politically across the spectrum. Yet today’s understanding of “political blackness” still implies that you need to have a particular kind of radical politics be “authentically black” politically — and any deviation equates to “selling out”.

This expectation that all ethnic minority politicians must be naturally Leftist reveals a basic ignorance of the fact that many of them come from communities and cultures that are conservative, probably more so than your typical Tory whose conservatism has been diluted by the winds of liberalism. Norman Tebbitt once expressed his admiration for the “natural conservatism” of British Asians (and you could chuck in British African communities too) for upholding traditional virtues: respect for tradition and faith, strong family and communal bonds, deference to authority and conservative sexual morality. A recent BBC survey of British Asians also concluded that they were more socially conservative than the rest of the British population.

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Of course, within ethnic minority communities these values are hotly contested, as in any community. Ethnic minorities are as divided by class and politics as white people. Many British Indians and some segments of Britons from West African communities are affluent, socially mobile and well credentialed enough to vote Tory; most other ethnic minorities are disproportionately poorer, so tend to vote Labour, though there are exceptions. Gone are the days when “political blackness” could be used to represent ethnic minorities as an underclass; significant slices have climbed the social ladder.

So don’t underestimate the power of a Tory government that can synthesise patriotism and multi-ethnicity, practise “colour blindness” and rebut the Left’s accusations of tokenism by pointing out that they operate on talent and aspiration and beliefs, not skin colour. The Tories’ message of equality of opportunity and meritocracy strikes a chord with many, whatever their hue.

On the identitarian Left, meanwhile, instead of “political blackness”, ethnic minorities are currently stuck with “people of colour’ or the soulless bureaucratic acronym BAME as umbrella terms to express their collective grievances to officialdom. Political blackness may have been flawed, but at least it was a radical attempt to encourage solidarity between different communities for a politics dedicated towards social transformation. Any attempt to revive it now would only degrade into kitsch.

For today, blackness in Britain has morphed from a radical political identity into an almost wholly racial identity associated with African ancestry. If anything, blackness has become an aesthetic, a chic identity swallowed up into the consumerist economy. Despite the Left’s best efforts, political blackness cannot be the basis for any politics of solidarity any longer.

Which brings me to a question about my youngest son. At eighteen months, he has an extraordinary crop of luminous golden hair. His cheeks are pink. He comes from a comfortably middle-class family, complete with all the advantages of a household full of books and two parents with PhD’s. The only signals that give away the fact that he’s not unquestionably a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) are the Hebrew words that he uses to describe the four corners of his world. Mummy is “ima”. Home is “bayit”. Milk is “halavi”. Sleep is “lishon”.

So where does he fit in with the “progressive” view of whiteness? Is he BAME?

David Baddiel’s new book, Jews Don’t Count, is a broadside against the widespread progressive assumption that Jews don’t fit in with the “minority ethnic” framework of today’s identity politics. In a culture where you can receive considerable censure for misgendering a transgender person, the refusal to count Jews as belonging to an ethnic minority is widely unnoticed.

Baddiel opens with an example from a recent book review in The Observer, which reprimands the narrator for operating from a “white-male-cis-het perspective”. Yet the character in question is called B Rosenberg. He wears a tie that proclaims “100% Kosher”. People shout things like “Fuck you, Hebrew” at him. It cannot be that the reviewer failed to notice any of this. Nonetheless, the book is still apparently written from the perspective of “white-male-cis-het” privilege.

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I sat in my church and, in one sitting, read Baddiel list example after example of this sort of blindness, my indignation rising with his. Back in 2019, for example, Sajid Javid was widely hailed as the first BAME Chancellor of the Exchequer, totally ignoring — and thinking it irrelevant — that Nigel Lawson had been appointed to that role back in 1983, his paternal grandfather having changed the family name from Leibson to Lawson in 1925 (as my family changed it from Friedeberg in 1917). Likewise in 2017, progressives were up in arms that not a single BAME person was on the list of the BBC’s highest paid broadcasters — even though it included Vanessa Feltz and Claudia Winkleman. Apparently, Jews don’t count.

Part of the issue here is that Jews are widely perceived to be wealthy and powerful, and so not so deserving of the attention of anti-racists. They seem to forget, of course, that it is also one of those standard anti-Semitic tropes beloved of the racist far Right. It also fails to explain why my son’s prosperous ancestors, who ran a factory in Lodz (my side) and were well-heeled doctors in Lvov (my wife’s), were still dispatched by the Nazis to the camps to be murdered.

The church also rightly comes in for criticism. In July of last year, in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement, the current Archbishop of York declared that “Jesus was a black man”. Now it is indeed extremely important that our perception of the historical Jesus is reclaimed from those who have depicted him as fair and white. He was very probably dark skinned. But nowhere in the ensuing discussion was the most obvious point about his ethnicity even touched upon: Jesus was Jewish. Perhaps this was just assumed. But given that the church has, since the earliest of times, sought to distance itself from the Jewishness of Jesus, I am not convinced.

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And it is here that Baddiel skates over an important issue. For while he is very clear that, as an atheist, he has little use for religion as a category through which to understand Jewishness, it’s a connection which simply can’t be ignored.

Yet this is becoming increasingly common. In March last year, for example, a report published by the Institute of Jewish Policy Research recommended: “For the purposes of representation we should adopt an inclusive definition of the Jewish people and present ourselves as an ethnic minority.” In response, The Independent ran an article — under the headline “British Jews are urged to ‘rebrand’ as ethnic minority” — that offered the following observation: “After 5,000 years of believing they are God’s chosen people, a high-powered committee of British Jews has ruled that being Jewish has little to do with religion.”

There was so much wrong with the article that I find it hard to know where to begin. The idea that Jews were “rebranding” themselves as an ethnic minority suggests that it was a duplicitous ploy, something invented to gain some sort of advantage. It’s a take on Jews being shifty.

But it also misunderstands the nature of religion itself, as well as the origins of the very concept of Jewishness. As the best scholarship on this issue makes clear — see Shaye Cohen’s masterful The Beginnings of Jewishness — before the second century BCE it makes little sense to talk of “Jewishness” but rather of “Judeanness”; those who come from Judea.

The Greek word Ioudaioi originally referred to the ethnos of Judeans in Judea. In other words, the idea of Jewishness, of being a Jew, begins not with something we might now call “religion” or “belief” but in ethno-geography. Indeed, it might even be said that the very idea of belief as constituting the essence of a religion is an originally Christian idea.

Nonetheless, by about the first century BCE, the idea of Jewishness became rooted in religion and included everyone who worshipped in the Jerusalem Temple, whatever their ethnic or geographical origins. In other words, being Jewish came to be seen in various terms: ethnic, geographical and, most importantly, religious.

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We tend to separate out these categories in ways that did not exist in the ancient world. So Baddiel’s desire to understand being Jewish as something ethnic shouldn’t be seen as some new invention, nor even a response to the renewed focus on the status of ethnic minorities in the light of Black Lives Matter. But that doesn’t mean it should become the only way to isolate Jewishness.

After all, the trouble with associating being Jewish exclusively with ethnicity also ignores the generally accepted Rabbinic law that the child of a Jewish mother and a non-Jewish father are not half-Jews but fully Jewish. Jewish law does not have any equivalent to being mixed-race. The Rabbis may not get to define Jewishness exclusively. But neither can they be ignored.

I also wish Baddiel had more to say about the discrimination Jews experience as followers of God in a world increasingly suspicious of belief. And I worry about Baddiel’s attitude towards Israel. Baddiel is, of course, absolutely correct to highlight the ways in which all Jews are often held responsible for the politics of the Israeli government in ways that other people are never held responsible for theirs.

But I do get a little bit twitchy when he writes: “Israelis aren’t very Jewish anyway, as far as my relationship with Jewishness is concerned.” Too macho, too ripped and aggressive and confident. As one of the characters in a film he wrote puts it: “Jews without angst, without guilt. So not really Jews at all”.

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I admit it: I laughed. And, being married to an Israeli myself, I do recognise that he is on to something about the very different ways people are Jewish in Israel and in Britain. In fact, Israel has to be one of the most ethnically diverse countries in the world; with Arab Jews and originally European Jews, Ethiopian Jews and so on. But I do feel that there is an absence of solidarity here — not least because Baddiel acknowledges that being “being white” has become a euphemism for “being safe”.

And that, after all, is why my little lad is “minority ethic”, notwithstanding his appearance. The Nazis produced a nasty little book called The Poisonous Mushroom, explaining to children that while some mushrooms may look edible, they can be, despite their deceptive looks, poisonous. Given the prevalence of this type of thinking, “safe”, for my little boy, will always also mean Israel. That indeed is the very purpose of its existence.

The report published by the Institute of Jewish Policy Research was called “A Community of Communities”. It’s a fitting title; there are various ways in which Jewish identity is expressed — secular and religious, national and international. Baddiel rightly highlights one particular aspect of this surprisingly fluid identity. But there are other ways of being Jewish. And Jews have been made to pay for all of them.

When my name is read out, I affect a smile for the benefit of my mum. There is a wicked pleasure to feeling so removed from such a major life event. The choirboys and bagpipes add extravagance to an already surreal spectacle: beyond the screen, we are afforded no interlude from the cacophony of the present job crisis (for which the university’s emphasis on “networking” over the years has done little to prepare us). My precarious situation has, by now, clearly become a monomania, through whose filter any show of gaiety appears in bad taste.

I belong to what some unpalatably call “Generation Covid”. Just as I and thousands of other graduates were preparing to enter the job market last May, open vacancies dropped by 278,000 and two thirds of graduating students saw applications paused or withdrawn due to the pandemic. Since then, job-hunting has bordered on the farcical: an entire corpus of myths has originated from the effort by applicants to understand the dos and don’ts of the hiring process.

The practical value of university degrees has been publicly called into question, and academic career services have finally revealed their raison d’être: none whatsoever. And so CVs are handed out like flyers, in a scattershot fashion. Most of them are bound to disappear into a black hole: my couple hundred applications obtained a total of two interview invitations. Rejection letters, too, were provided only by a courteous minority.

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Some of us young jobseekers cannot rely on generational wealth and a family home to sustain us through this crisis. My single mum raised me way beyond her financial means: though I missed nothing growing up, supporting us through her freelancing gigs was never what you’d call a breeze. A recent eviction notice has eroded the little security we had left, and made finding employment crucial to affording rent elsewhere.

Whenever applying to a role, I wish I could convey all that is contingent on the simple “yes” or “no” of my faceless correspondent. I yearn to explain that, even though my CV looks like that of countless others, a secure position means an immensity more to me than what is discernible. Yet, an unwritten rule binds me to reticence.

Indeed, I was cautioned many times against “seeming desperate” as something of an indecency, an assault on recruiters’ sensibilities. Need, and in particular, financial need, seems doomed to always achieve the opposite effect to the one desired: to repel, rather than to conjure assistance. This is informed by the very structure of job applications, and, specifically, of equal opportunities’ forms. I am asked about my ethnicity, gender, sexual preference, and religion, but a crucial (perhaps, the most crucial) feature of my candidacy appears to never be of any relevance: household income. This way, a company is able to reach its yearly diversity target and give itself a good pat on the back, while those in most desperate need of work go unrecognised.

I am living proof that these questionnaires are wholly inadequate at reckoning with the complexity of personal circumstances. The “working class background” checkbox, strictly speaking, does not fit me: up to some point, I could afford traveling abroad and a private education. Now, however, a knock on the door evokes images of bloodthirsty creditors, and, by night, I dream about my adventures as the best-dressed bag lady in Covent Garden, a modern Eliza Doolittle minus the accent.

Ticking the “BAME” box, too, involves a contradiction: I may have non-white blood in me, but I was raised exclusively by a white mum. My language, education, and life experiences are entirely European. Yet, I dare anyone call me an impostor for applying to opportunities reserved to candidates from lower socioeconomic backgrounds. I am obliged to deform reality by a screening system that favours perception over experience.

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The checkbox forms, the automated emails, the applicant tracking software – all accommodate a hiring process that caters to optimisation, rather than human interaction. Requests of feedback are predominantly ignored by recruiters, I suspect, not due to the “overwhelming amount of applications received”, as every single rejection email invariably recites, but to the fact that machines are, as yet, unable to express personalised criticism.

I may have been born in the digital era, but I still resent the alienating quality of modern job-hunting. Instead of it being geared to suit me, the human applicant, I am the one having to blunt my idiosyncrasies, legacy, urgencies — all that makes me me, and not somebody else — to suit the mechanised screening process.

Last November, my Zoom assessment day with a well-known social enterprise gave me a hypnotising taste of the assembly line. About twelve of us were passed over from one desensitised recruiter to another, with the job of evaluating whether our answers would align with the company’s listed “competencies”. Candidates who, even unwittingly, resisted standardisation like myself were discarded with ease.

A lot of time and emotional investment went into my prep; even so, they had the cheek to turn me down without feedback. This time I was not in for it, however: I engaged in a hunt that lasted two weeks, until, finally, a videocall was arranged. The woman on the other side of the screen, who had only her audio on, giggled as she invited me to disable my own video, clearly more comfortable addressing a disembodied voice than a feeling person just like herself. It looks like, in a more or less unconscious attempt to delay being supplanted by them, human recruiters are also increasingly adjusting to robotic modes.

The tribulations of young jobseekers are brushed under the carpet not only by all political parties, but also by those responsible for keeping them accountable for their shortcomings. As, a couple of months ago, the media were busy contending over whether Suzanne Moore’s essay from decades ago should or should not have been considered evidence of her transphobia, Rishi Sunak’s plans to cut welfare payments and ending furlough within the spring went relatively unchallenged. The amount of activistic effort that goes to waste in the realm of symbolism and semantics could be almost comical, if it didn’t end up diverting politics away from the material predicaments of large sections of society.

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Perhaps unemployment would earn its own hashtag if its impact on mental health — a catch-all term that nonetheless holds the power to prick ears up — was seriously explored. Unemployment does not just hurt people’s chances at wealth and stability; it also undermines their sense of self. More than 70 years ago, Simone Weil taught, in her essay Need for Roots, that, just like the body needs nourishment, the soul, too, has its own set of needs. Among them are responsibility and honour, which indicate human hunger for productivity, accountability, and public recognition for our deeds. Living on Universal Credit is not enough for me to feel whole. Instead, my labour is necessary to me — in that, when made to experience its value and utility, I also perceive myself to be useful and valuable. Without it, I feel more unsure in myself, feebler.

During this pandemic, policies have failed to reflect this common need for purpose, instead treating citizens as mere consumers. Much thought has gone into strategies for safely letting people out of their homes, straight into shops and pubs, wallets ajar, whereas none has been employed to ponder the harmful effects of prolonged economic inactivity on people’s sense of worth as human beings.

I don’t just speak for myself when I say that joblessness has made me anxious, more sad and more resentful towards institutions than ever. Though unable to progress as time progresses, I can feel myself growing old with unnatural clarity every day. Yet I, like so many other job-seekers, am not lost, let alone part of some “lost generation”. We do not want to be shut away and forgotten. What we want is to be seen for exactly what we are: the very individuals on whose strength the sound course of the rest of the century depends.

He wasn’t alone. The Archdeacon of Croydon, the Ven Rosemary Mallett, then issued a similar statement: “I also hear that there are a number of people from black and minority ethnic communities who are finding themselves really worried about the vaccine… Please, please, get yourselves vaccinated.” The Diocese of Southwark went one step further, bringing in an urban epidemiologist, Professor Tolullah Oni, to lead an online forum to try and disabuse churchgoers of their fears.

As a priest with a black majority church in the same diocese, I am also making every effort to reassure people that the vaccine is safe.

It seems, however, that the same cannot be said of the very people whose jobs it is to promote the “public understanding of science”. Take Professor Alice Roberts, the Professor of the Public Engagement in Science at the University of Birmingham, who is also the President of Humanists UK. At the same time as Bishop Karowei and others were pleading with their communities not to see science as a threat, she was doing her level best to ridicule people of faith.

Without any consideration for whether now is an appropriate time to go on the offensive, Professor Roberts, displaying that jocular, superior tone so beloved by professional religion haters, took to social media to sneer about the resurrection, the virgin birth and so on. It “all seems a bit … makey-uppy,” she proclaimed.

Here, of course, Roberts is following in a tradition well-established by another former Professor of the Public Understand of Science, Richard Dawkins. He famously denounced God as “a vindictive bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser, a misogynistic, homophobic, genocidal, phillicidal, pestilential, meglomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully”. This too from the person paid to promote the public understanding of science: “Science is interesting and if you don’t agree you can fuck off.”

Such a callous attitude is symptomatic of the growing “facts don’t care about your feelings” school of thought. But those tasked with the public understanding of science surely need to do a lot better than “fuck off” if they are to win over the sorts of communities who see in science some sort of threat.

That was, after all, one of the chief concerns of the “public understanding of science” movement that took form following the Bodmer Report, commissioned by the Royal Society and published in 1985. On its opening page, it explained that “many personal decisions, for example about diet, vaccination, personal hygiene or safety at work or at home, would be helped by some understanding of the underlying science”. Concerns about vaccination scepticism were there on the very first page. That’s partly why it recommended that “scientists must learn to communicate with the public, be willing to do so, and indeed consider it their duty to do so”.

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This is undoubtedly a noble aim. But in recent years, what began as considerate public engagement has become tainted by a new group of public intellectuals who, comfortable in their own echo chambers, understand their role as preaching to the choir.

Roberts and Dawkins are not the only ones who have taken it upon themselves alienate religious believers. Brian Cox, Professor for Public Engagement in Science at the University of Manchester, argued on the Joe Rogan podcast only last week that physics “ruled out” the existence of the soul. Likewise Jim Al-Khalili, Professor of Public Engagement in Science at the University of Surrey and former President of the British Humanist Association, has said that “someone of a religious faith will just stick their fingers in the ears and say: ‘I’m not listening, there’s nothing you can say that will make me change my mind.’” So too Professor Richard Fortey, Collier Professor for the Public Understanding of Science and Technology at the University of Bristol, has suggested that proponents of Intelligent Design should be known as “IDiots”.

On and on it goes. Indeed, it was in this spirit that, back in 2019, the National Secular Society successfully lobbied Public Health England to remove a suggestion from their literature that some people, worried about vaccinations, might like to seek advice from “faith leaders”. Following his victory, Stephen Evans, the NSS’ Chief Executive, crowed: “Advising people to approach religious leaders on healthcare decisions is incompatible with the best interests of individual patients and the wider public.”

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Certainly it is true that not all faith leaders are taking the sort of lead exemplified by the Bishop of Woolwich. But the scornful rhetoric used by the NSS is equally unhelpful. “Some of these fanatics are obstinate, some are deluded or exploitative,” was how one author on the their website described religious attitudes towards Covid-19.

It doesn’t matter how many mosques and cathedrals open themselves up as vaccination centres; there will always be those who want to turn the complex relationship between religion and vaccination into some sort of culture war — using the present situation to leverage more condemnation of religious belief. And that is profoundly unhelpful, not least because it ultimately undermines the efforts of religious bodies to explain to their communities that science is their friend.

Some people just can’t move on from those tired, old, 19th-century debates surrounding science and religion. In fact, we’ve almost come to expect it from anti-religious campaigning organisations like the NSS. But what we should not expect, let alone accept, is the fact that so many of those now tasked with increasing the public understanding of science regard it as part of their brief to attack religion — it can seriously undermine the communication of all the good that science can do to people who may not share the same world view.

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The current pestilence has powerfully reminded us that we are all in this together, and that, unless vaccination is going to be imposed by law, people have to be persuaded about its importance. This is, after all, precisely what the entire public understanding of science movement was intended to achieve, as opposed to being used as a Trojan horse for the advancement of attacks upon religion.

Perhaps it’s high time we had someone in one of these roles who believes in God. This is not an argument about religious privilege — nor one about greater inclusivity. It is simply an argument about public health.

According to one estimate, more than 65% of Nobel Prize-winning physicists in the 20th century were Christians or had a Christian background – a figure which rises to more than 72% for chemists. Yes, a Christian background isn’t necessarily a sign of faith. After all, Professor Roberts went to a church school herself — and sends her children to one. But surely it is not beyond the wit of the scientific community to find someone who can communicate with religious people without resorting to condescension. And if it is, perhaps they should call upon Bishop Karawei.

In Brazil, in India and in the Arabian Gulf, migrants or the native poor have been devastated by the coronavirus. In Sweden, suburbs containing large immigrant populations are believed to be the hardest hit. In New York city, black and Hispanic residents make up a disproportionate number of deaths, and in Singapore, migrant workers living in dorms make up the majority of the country’s cases.

In the UK, the latest reports from the IFS, ICNARC, the Wellcome Trust and the ONS all come to the same conclusion: ethnic minorities and the poor are the most vulnerable to being hospitalised, requiring critical care and dying from the disease. The ONS, which collects data on mortality from all-causes using death certificates, estimates that black people in the UK are four times more likely to die of COVID-19 than white British people.

Although the Government has launched an official inquiry into the causes of these disparities, the likely reasons are already well-understood: ethnic minorities are more likely to come into contact with more people who are infected, they are more likely to work in essential services, more likely to live in dense areas, and more likely to live in crowded homes.

For example, some ethnic groups are much more likely to work in occupations that the Government has deemed essential during the lockdown: 32% of black African and 26% of black Caribbean people of working age are employed in these essential services, compared to 21% of white British individuals. That they come into contact with more people than they would if they were forced to stay at home means they have a higher chance of contracting the infection.

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This is not all, however, since ethnic minorities and the poor are also affected by the behaviour of people around them, and are more likely to live in geographical areas where their neighbours also have a heightened risk of infection.

London and Birmingham, for example, have been hit hard by the disease, and Black and Minority Ethnic (BAME) people are overrepresented in these cities compared to the rest of the country. But even accounting for that, large urban areas like London and New York still exhibit substantial fragmentation in where ethnic minorities live, which is easily discernible using interactive graphics such as these. This segregation has likely resulted in entire geographical pockets becoming more vulnerable to the disease, which exacerbates the ethnic disparities that we see in ICUs and deaths.

In the US, prisons (which are disproportionately black) have seen an explosion in coronavirus cases. The New York Times estimates that the largest local outbreaks have occurred in jails in several counties and states, and that almost every state prison system has at least one infection among inmates or staff, where social distancing is difficult if not impossible.

It is not hard to see how the ethnic demographics of local outbreaks will be reflected in overall national statistics — they already are. An extreme example is of foreign migrant workers living in dormitories in Singapore, where between 10 and 20 men typically inhabit each room. Out of the country’s more than 15,000 total cases, these workers make up 85%, despite being only 3% of the population.

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Crowded conditions within households exacerbate the spread of the disease between family members and flatmates. In the UK, less than 2% of white British households live in housing with more residents than rooms, while that figure is 16%, 18% and 30% among black Africans, Pakistanis and Bangladeshis respectively.

On top of all these risk factors, ethnic minorities are also overrepresented in health and social care roles, which expose them to even higher risks of infection, from people they are caring for. Essential workers and healthcare staff, who are often in contact with both infected individuals and the general public, can spread the disease in the general population much faster than if everyone had the same average number of contacts.

By now, you might be wondering why I haven’t mentioned medical conditions as a possible cause of ethnic disparities in deaths. After all, some ethnic minority groups are more likely to suffer from obesity, diabetes and cardiac disease.

Last week, a large cohort study led by Ben Goldacre and Liam Smeeth was published online. By collecting detailed NHS medical data from a sample of 17 million adults, the researchers were able to estimate the effects of various medical conditions on the risk of dying from Covid-19.

The ethnic disparities in deaths are so considerable that they do not go away when researchers account for the level of deprivation in the areas where people live, or when researchers account for age, smoking status, obesity, diabetes, cardiac disease, respiratory disease or even all of these conditions together.

The data suggests that, when it comes to an individual’s risk of dying from Covid-19, being black is associated with approximately as much risk as having chronic respiratory disease, even after accounting for the medical risk factors people could have.

But don’t obesity, cardiac conditions and respiratory illnesses increase an individual’s risk of dying from the disease substantially? How could it be that these conditions don’t account for all the extra risk that black people face from dying of Covid-19?

The answer is that these risk factors are related, primarily, to a person’s risk of dying once they have contracted the virus. But ethnic minorities and the poor are more likely to be infected by the virus in the first place, so the risk of death is magnified.

The cause of this disparity in risk factors is not entirely clear, but one popular theory is that black people are disproportionately at risk once they have the disease because they are more likely to have insufficient vitamin D. But this, too, is confounded by the fact that they were more likely to be infected to begin with.

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So we would observe ethnic disparities in deaths if there were disparities in exposure, even if there were no differences in people’s likelihood of dying once they had been exposed to the virus. To study the latter risk, we would need to look at the chances of dying once infected (that is, the infection fatality rate) in different ethnic groups. This is information that we lack in Britain, and can only approximate, given the absence of mass-testing.

For now, the unfortunate reality is that the UK still lacks face-masks, mass-testing, central quarantining, PPE and many other measures that could have helped avert these localised outbreaks and can still help reduce their impact. As I explained in March, early action was urgent. It could have prevented the virus from reaching many vulnerable areas entirely, where transmission and deaths can flare up quickly, amplifying the risks for everyone.

There is no way to turn back time now, of course, but there are still lessons to be learnt, actions to be taken, in order to stamp out the virus as far as possible and prevent another wave of disease.

We can reduce the risks from working in essential services with widespread PPE, reduce the risks from poverty with targeted transfers, and reduce the risks from living in vulnerable neighbourhoods with face-masks. We can even limit the risks from living in crowded households by providing centralised quarantining, for anyone who tests positive and for people they have been in contact with, once the lockdown has reduced the number of infected people sufficiently.

Apart from these lessons, the experiences of the last few months should force us to take seriously the importance of protecting the vulnerable from preventable suffering. In the case of an infectious disease, it is suffering that can all too easily spiral out of control.