Startlingly, Lammy’s proposals go even further than the recommendations of Sir Brian Leveson in his controversial — and widely criticized — report on the future of the criminal courts. Where Leveson recommended removing the right to a jury trial for offenses with sentences of less than three years, Lammy’s proposals would restrict that right only to cases of rape, murder and manslaughter, vaguely accompanied by so-called “public interest” cases. While Leveson proposed that Crown Court cases not tried by juries would still have a judge and two magistrates, meanwhile, the new proposals suggest cases could be tried by single judges.

But even if the Government, as seems increasingly likely, retreats from Lammy’s scheme a return to Leveson’s plans is no victory. Consider, first, the legal principle supposedly underpinning jury-free trials. Both Leveson and Lammy claim that there is no “right” to a jury trial. Yet this assertion has been expertly dismantled by the criminal barrister and academic Alex Benn. Leveson, for his part, takes an approach to the concept of “constitutional” rights that has no place in the English legal tradition: in uncritically adopting Lord Justice Auld’s definition of “an entrenched right overriding all other legal instruments”, he sets the bar far too high.

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As Benn explains, in a common law system without a codified constitution, “constitutionality” must mean more than Leveson’s narrow approach. Rather, it also represents the “fundamental values” of a country’s legal and social system. By this measure, jury trials are undoubtedly constitutional, with a pedigree stretching back even before Magna Carta. Levison notes that there is no right to a jury trial under Article 6 of the ECHR. But that is tilting at a straw man: as even Leveson concedes, there could hardly be such a right in an international system covering disparate legal systems with no history of jury trial.

Not that the Government seems to care about venerable historical principles. It’s especially galling, here, that Lammy’s justification for dumping jury trials is something as banal as a lack of capacity in criminal courts. Yes, the system is in crisis — years of underfunding, and the crippling Covid backlog, has left it on the verge of collapse. But as Leveson himself notes, 2023-4 spending on jury costs was a mere £36 million, a fraction of the total court budget of £2.5 billion. There’s another issue here too. As Benn notes, the justification of crisis implies that jury restrictions might be undone once the worst has passed. But there is no indication of that in Lammy’s proposals, and little realistic hope that a future government would devote the cash and inconvenience of bringing back juries.

More fundamentally, and as Leveson’s focus on the ECHR implies, the Government’s proposals give a depressing insight into what it actually thinks about the law — preferring to obsess over the dry, narrow letter above its spirit. When, for instance, the question involves surrendering British territory at the whim of a hostile court? Downing Street cheerfully hands over billions to smooth the deal. When it’s being asked to accept urgently needed recommendations on nuclear power, changes that might just stop us from tipping into a full-blown energy crisis? The government is far too worried about its international obligations.

Yet when it comes to abrogating cherished British rights — polled in 2011, the public ranked jury trials only second to (of course) the NHS as top choices for protection in a Bill of Rights — Starmer and his ministers are utterly insouciant. The unfortunate impression is of ministers far more concerned with the niceties of internationalism and bien-pensant progressive causes than ancient and vital traditions.

And they really are vital. Contrary to what some (often well-heeled) lawyers argue, the ability of juries to reach inconsistent verdicts is a feature, not a bug, of the system. It is the epitome of a model that prioritizes acquitting the innocent over condemning the guilty, where the very point of the process is to provide a safety valve for when things just feel wrong. As Leveson noted from Lammy’s own review into the treatment of minorities by the criminal justice system, jury verdicts are one area apparently unaffected by ethnicity. As any civil barrister will tell you, the identity and attitude of a particular judge can have a dramatic effect on the outcome of a case: the very fact that jury trials involve 12 random people avoids that precise problem.

The point is not — as sometimes argued — that judges from one background cannot sympathize with another. Nor is it that jury trials always reach the right verdict; there are undoubtedly cases where they don’t. Any jury system like our own will be prone to perverse outcomes, like the acquittal of the Colston protestors in Bristol. It is, rather, that it provides not only a vital safeguard against state power and dubious prosecutions, but also a superb mechanism for ensuring broad acceptance of an outcome across society. It isn’t some bewigged and distant judge descending from his chambers to condemn you, but 12 of your peers, plucked from obscurity to reach a verdict before returning to their workaday lives. It is, in a very real sense, society’s verdict — not the system’s.

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It’s here, especially, that you might wonder if the Government has thought its plans through. We live in an age of judicial politicization, with the increasingly judiciary dragged into political matters — dragged, more often than not, by politicians reluctant to actually make decisions themselves. And yet this government, nominally so committed to the protection of the judiciary, led by a former director of prosecutions, sees no issue with individual judges being required to give their reasoned verdicts for acquittal or conviction. Nor is the carve out for “public interest” cases any answer. Who, for example, will decide what qualifies, and how will the Government answer the inevitable charges of two-tier justice when certain cases are granted a jury while comparable ones aren’t?

Either way, restricting juries represents a shift towards an increasingly technocratic and legalistic state, taking one of the fundamental questions in society — who gets to decide innocence and guilt — ever more out of the hands of the general population. It’s all too easy, here, to see the problems that might arise from removing, in the words of the judge and legal philosopher Lord Devlin, the “protection against laws which the ordinary man may regard as harsh and oppressive”. For Devlin, the “little parliament” that each jury represented was central to British democracy: he could not “see the one dying and the other surviving”.

And certainly, if, as Devlin states, the first objective of any would-be dictator would be to neuter Parliament, the next would be to diminish trial by jury. “For no tyrant,” as Devlin warned, “could afford to leave a subject’s freedom in the hands of twelve of his countrymen.” Indeed, the justifiable outrage at certain overzealous hate-speech prosecutions only shows that we can’t simply rely on the law being just. Juries, for close to 1,000 years, provide a key protection against the excesses of a state that will, by its nature, rarely be primarily concerned about the law’s effect on an individual. The security of a jury trial can be the difference between ruin and redemption. And one day, you might need 12 of your peers to judge you too.

These are serious questions: if his claims were true, then Lammy should shrink from his role as a quisling official in a major client state to a dangerous regime. Indeed, the only moral response would be a British withdrawal from Nato so immediate and dramatic as to make Jeremy Corbyn appear a collaborator in comparison. Harris, equally, should surely prepare her soul for political martyrdom, launch a military coup to save American democracy from its voters, or gather an armed band of partisans around her for a last desperate insurgency — perhaps in the hilly California wine country she knows so well. Yet apparently the answer to this thought exercise is No, as our hapless Foreign Secretary now brushes off these remarks as the youthful exuberance of a then-40-something politician. Harris, meanwhile, urged a peaceful transfer of power in a concession speech notable more for its ditzy wine-aunt motivational messaging than any allusion to being a participant in a dark and historic tragedy.

What can this all mean? Either Trump genuinely is a fascist or Nazi, and the self-proclaimed defenders of the liberal order have shirked their historic destiny — or the terms have become meaningless, and Trump is merely a politician like any other. We may assume, from the revealed actions of Trump’s critics, that the latter is the truth. Yet the inflated rhetoric, so easily cast aside, reveals something of great importance about the American empire, euphemised as the “liberal international order”, now, like its current overseer and contemporary Joe Biden, locked in a state of senility and decline. The “1945 order” so beloved of Washington’s caste of imperial officials and their propagandists — the “subintellectuals” recently mocked by Anton Jäger — is a highly mythicised construct of the post-Cold War world, created to justify America’s global military dominance and now cynically and vainly invoked, reductio ad absurdum, at the unipolar moment’s conclusion.

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As opposed to the actually existing one, the mythical “1945 order” began, we can say, at some point between 1989 and 1991 with the collapse of the Soviet Union. As John Mearsheimer correctly observes, “’the Cold War order’, which is sometimes mistakenly referred to as a ‘liberal international order’, was neither liberal nor international”, instead being a bounded order, limited to Western Europe and North America, within a bipolar global system contested between the United States and the Soviet Union. From its inception, Nato had very little interest in the advancement of liberal democracy which has, from the Nineties onwards, become its ostensible purpose: Salazar’s Portugal, Greece’s junta and Turkey’s various military putschists were all valued members at one time or another. All of them were less democratic and more authoritarian than Trump. Peace in Europe — if not in Asia, which witnessed millions of deaths in the struggle between the two political poles for dominance — was not the natural product of a liberal democracy guarded by the great Western victor of the Second World War, but preserved simply by the nuclear standoff between the two rival empires.

Indeed, we can go further than Mearsheimer, deconstructing the Second World War myth so sacred to British institutional memory — no doubt because it recasts Britain’s subordination to the American Empire as an act of Christ-like sacrifice. In the vulgar version of the myth, the great contest was a struggle for liberal democracy, and indeed the Allied eventual victory was proof of its superiority over rival political systems — an otherwise perceptive British politician told me just this, with complete conviction, the other week. Yet Stalin’s Soviet Union, which bore the brunt of the fighting, was hardly a benign liberal democracy, and Churchill was correct in viewing the alliance as one with the devil, borne of amoral necessity. Even the Poland Britain and France went to war to defend, in 1939, was not a liberal democracy but an authoritarian military regime, typical of the Central Europe of the time. Yet it was viewed as no less worthy of support for this. Yet by the standards of today, Poland’s Right-wing paternalist regime of 1939, happy to harass Jews and annex the territory of its weaker neighbours, would be the object of liberal enmity rather than support.

Today’s political taboos simply cannot be mapped onto the actually existing world which birthed them: following the fall of France, Britain’s only extant ally, for a time, was Greece’s military dictatorship; and following Greece’s liberation, Churchill made sure to oust the country’s effective Communist resistance and replace it with a Right-wing regime, which employed Nazi collaborators to hunt down the wartime resistance. Like many Western conservatives, Churchill had admired Italian fascism and Mussolini — “one of the most wonderful men of our time” — and regarded Italy’s late alliance with Germany as a tragedy. Indeed, even the Britain and France of 1945, which together ruled vast swathes of what is today called the Global South through non-democratic and coercive means, would be far beyond the pale of 21st-century liberalism.

At its simplest, the Second World War was won by the combined industrial might of two great land empires, the United States and the Soviet Union, whose power was the result of the preceding two centuries of continental expansion, experienced as dispossession and genocide by the native inhabitants. It is perhaps natural that this simple truth is too much for liberals to bear as the foundation of their political system, and that a gentler and more noble myth was required to take its place. Yet the result is that the actual world constructed by the victorious Allies of 1945 — the world to which we have in many ways returned — is paradoxically an alien and hateful one to today’s shrill defenders of the post-Cold War “1945 order”. Trump’s mass deportation orders would be comprehensible to Eisenhower, the architect of both the D-Day victory and Operation Wetback; the attitude of today’s American liberals would not. It is hard to see how Musk is more objectionable a rocket scientist than Wernher von Braun, other than through liberal radicalisation in the intervening decades. It is the supposed destroyers of the 1945 order who instead retain its pragmatic values.

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The Ukraine war, and the Gaza war, each in their own way define the terminal point of the post-Cold War 1945 myth. At the peak of Ukraine’s military successes, in 2022, it was commonplace to hear the claim that the war was a fight for liberal democracy against authoritarianism, which Ukraine’s fragile democracy was predestined to win due to the inherent superiority of its political system. Three years on, this argument is rarely heard, for obvious reasons. Indeed we can say Ukraine’s looming defeat is largely the product of liberal democracy. Within a domestic dynamic fuelled largely by the liberal conspiracy theories of the 2016 election, Putin served as a metaphorical final-boss Trump to be defeated. In response, the Trumposphere adopted an exaggerated antipathy for Ukraine, wearing the sympathy for Putin they were tarred with as a badge of honour. As a result of America’s divided democracy, the Ukraine war swiftly mutated from a bipartisan cause into another battleground of its own internal conflict. Putin’s calculations on Ukraine’s capacity for organised resistance may have been faulty, but his assessment of Western democracy has proved entirely correct.

In 2022, despite America’s own record of invading countries to overthrow their regimes, or annexing territory from hostile rivals to award it to pet clients, Washington’s criticism of Russia’s actions in Ukraine could reasonably expect a fair hearing. But in 2024, as the world observes America’s shrugged posture of helplessness at the slaughter in Gaza, the moral high-ground shimmers far beyond Washington’s reach. The original sin of the actually existing 1945 order was invading other countries, violating their borders in pursuit of a messianic political vision. But this taboo rapidly became obsolete once America claimed the same right for itself. Instead, after 1989, as cultural historians have long noted, the Holocaust — only tangentially dealt with at Nuremberg — became “the supra-denominational passion story of late modernity”. And by explicitly tying the atrocity to contemporary conflicts in the former Yugoslavia, “Never Again” suddenly became the moral basis for America’s new empire, justifying military interventionism as long as a humanitarian principle could be invoked. 

Yet the human rights NGOs who provided moral justification for America’s wars against its rivals find themselves ignored and helpless when it comes to Gaza: the revealed principle of America’s liberal order is not that never again can war be waged against civilians, but that only Israel may do so. As in other aspects of politics, Israel presents itself as a dark, perhaps unconscious satire of America: that the war in Gaza helped turn liberal American voters away from the global order which claims their name is only fitting. Perhaps, indeed, America’s global liberal order helped undermine its domestic one. If the first time round Trump was dealt with as an aberration against the natural order of things, now it is the Biden administration that shows itself the aberration — a brief and largely failed interlude in the new world that has dawned.

For as Mearsheimer notes, the American global liberal order, which claimed the mantle of the 1945 victory to justify its imperial dominance, was “bound to fail”. The hyperglobalisation of capital it undertook detached the working- and middle-classes of the Western world from an economic and political regime which impoverished them; the equivalent hyperglobalisation of human beings reignited the West’s dormant nationalism through creating a sense of demographic threat. The messianic mission to reshape the world in America’s image overstretched and weakened the empire, while consolidating an alliance of rival major powers which now outmatches it. As expansionist and revisionist as any of the great 20th-century totalitarianisms, American liberalism searched the world for monsters to destroy and created them, just as domestically it fears fascists under the bed — while it rapidly creates them too.

If Trump were a fascist, we should surely welcome his isolationism. Instead, for American liberal hawks, the proof of his fascism is his desire not to militarily intervene in far-off lands. In its dying days, the Harris campaign deployed voter-repelling neoconservatives-turned-Never Trumpers like Liz Cheney — the overlap between these two categories is more or less exact — and suffered for it. The age of the liberal imperialist is over. It is only natural for its remaining hawks to tremor at the age that has just begun, which they themselves midwifed. But in truth, American foreign policy is bound to continue much as before: America’s options are now constrained by its dwindling power, rather than ideology. A cold war, and perhaps a military confrontation with China is destined by geopolitical logic, rather than the personalities of the rival contenders for the imperial throne. A painful peace settlement for Ukraine was coming whoever won the American election, just as, for all Trump’s outreach to Arab-American voters, his policy on Israel will differ only by dispensing with the Biden Administration’s facade of helpless angst.

Nevertheless, we should not lament the collapse of the global order America built after 1989: indeed, liberals themselves should welcome it. Just as the bipolar order of the Cold War world, by restraining liberalism’s inherent tendencies to radicalisation and hubris, made the Western world safe for a tempered and moderate liberalism, so may the multipolar world we have entered save liberals from their own excesses. Beset by confident rivals abroad, and by the disenchantment of their own voters at home, liberals will once again have to learn restraint. The post-Cold War order ultimately proved disastrous for American liberalism: a return to the actually existing order of 1945 may prove more congenial. Lammy’s newfound equanimity at a Trump White House may yet prove uncharacteristically astute.

After all, Powell’s recollection of the newsreel footage of the time — of “close-ups of stocky demagogues, fuming, gesticulating, stamping; oceans of raised forearms; steel-helmeted men tramping in column; armoured vehicles rumbling over the pavé of broad boulevards” — could be a description of the Conservative Party’s first election broadcast. CCHQ’s offering looks like government propaganda from Children of Men: over images of missiles firing and a Chinese tank parading down a boulevard, we are assured our nation’s survival lies only with Sunak’s Conservative Party. The voters, it appears, do not share this conclusion.

As this week’s exclusive UnHerd poll revealed, 54% of voters believe that Britain will be at war within five years. If the majority opinion of the poll respondents is correct, Britain is about to elect a wartime Prime Minister, and have reluctantly chosen Starmer. Given a choice between Starmer and whichever Tory plotter next takes their turn on the throne, this is not an unreasonable decision. Yet in a general election driven by voter apathy, disenchantment and a widespread dissatisfaction, one of the strange lacunae so far has been the absence of any serious discussion of British foreign policy. The election is taking place in the shadow of a volatile international order, and yet the wars in which Britain has found itself embroiled have been sublimated, in the campaign discourse, into parochial domestic concerns.

The Gaza war, whose regional escalation has already seen British jets ineffectually bomb Houthi militants in Yemen and shoot down Iranian drones heading for Israel, has been transmuted into a culture-war debate about the policing of demonstrations in London. In Ukraine, Western allies have just crossed another long-standing red line over permitting Kyiv to use donated weapons to attack inside Russia, provoking a furious debate among security and international relations analysts — and yet the war itself has, for most people, long faded into the background. In the Far East, where Johnson’s ill-fated government committed the Royal Navy to a “Pacific tilt”, Chinese sabre-rattling against Taiwan is ramping up alarmingly. The rising costs of energy, food and consumer goods driven by geopolitical disorder — a mere foretaste of what is yet to come — have taken euphemistic form as “the cost-of-living crisis”, like a permanent shift in weather patterns to be grimly adapted to, rather than a consequence of political choices.

The drumbeat of war is growing ever louder, yet even as Sunak disastrously moots conscription for the young and Starmer pledges a triple lock on the nuclear deterrent, campaigning on the threatening international situation is either an afterthought or an opportunity to posture. Even in the first televised election debate, vital questions of national security were only discussed towards the end, as short soundbites tacked on to a question from a Muslim voter about Gaza. We are told, again and again, that we are living in a 1938 world, and then the dire warnings are overtaken by the usual Westminster gossip and dysfunction. Lobby journalists badger Starmer on whether, and even when, he will use Britain’s nuclear deterrent. Britain’s genuinely alarming security situation, a topic that requires urgent national debate over both the country’s preparedness and willingness to go to war, is just more fodder for the soundbite class.

It is alarming to observe on social media a growing conspiracy theory, notably stoked by the former Conservative MP Andrew Bridgen, that Britain will “reveal” at some point this summer that it is at war with Russia (why Putin would respect the needs of Sunak’s election campaign in obscuring this information has not been convincingly explained). Yet no doubt such anxieties spring from the simultaneous reality of the threats Britain now faces and the strange, cynical unreality of the political discourse surrounding them. It is genuinely irresponsible of Sunak to throw out half-baked plans for national service, which would do nothing to address the modernisation needs of Britain’s still-shrinking and under-equipped Army, purely as desperate bait for wavering conservative voters. In doing so, the entire discourse around national security is cheapened, and warnings about the genuine threats we face are rendered less credible.

Equally, it is irresponsible of Starmer to suborn Britain’s approach to the Middle East conflict to Labour’s internal psychodrama over Corbyn. By initially pledging his unflinching support for Israel’s poorly-planned punitive campaign in Gaza — which now looks set to end with Hamas still in power, tens of thousands of civilians dead, and Israel’s leadership facing war crimes charges — Starmer chose to exorcise Corbyn’s ghost and avoid any serious analysis of the war’s aims and likely outcome. Despite pledging to place country over party, when it came to the first serious test of his future foreign policy, Starmer placed his own intra-party feuds over Britain’s national interest. Had Starmer chosen the path set out here at the beginning of war, of entirely disengaging from the conflict — a policy, the new UnHerd poll reveals, that a majority of the country supports — he would be in a stronger position now.

Instead, just as the Conservative Party finds itself outflanked on the Right among its core voter base over immigration, Starmer finds the Labour Party, in essence a fragile coalition of southern liberals and northern Muslims, struggling to maintain the support of a demographic whose votes could previously be weighed rather than counted. Indeed, the growing antipathy to Israel’s very existence revealed by the poll, now the dominant opinion among the young, can perhaps be partly attributed to the country’s rapidly changing demographics, until now welcomed by Labour Party functionaries as both a desirable outcome in itself and a sure source of votes. Despite the Greens’ attempt to capture Labour’s wavering Muslim vote, the future of politics in Northern towns may soon enough look more like George Galloway’s vision of social conservatism and anti-Western foreign policy than the top-down Zionism of Starmer’s rightward revolution. Blair may have failed at exporting liberal democracy to the Middle East, but by radically transforming the country’s immigration policies, he was unintentionally successful in importing the Middle East’s deepest passions to Westminster. No doubt future analysts, observing the increased salience of Indian and Nigerian political passions in Britain, will make the same observation of Johnson’s most transformative contribution to British history.

Yet until the twin effects of both a rapidly changing world order and Britain’s changing demographics hit the Westminster system, British foreign policy careens down the road of path dependency. As David Lammy’s recent distillation of the Labour Party’s strategic worldview proves, there is no meaningful choice on offer in this election of what foreign policy to pursue, or serious discussion of what British national interests require: such matters are intentionally depoliticised, kept carefully away from debate in front of mere voters. The Tory rebel Robert Jenrick’s call for an “Anglo-Gaullist” foreign policy, ruthlessly focussed on British self-interest, is the majority opinion in the country, according to the UnHerd poll, but it is nowhere to be found in Whitehall: to even suggest such a thing would be an unforgivable offence against mandarin dignity.

Part of the problem, no doubt, is that British security and foreign policy is made in Washington: with our closed and inward-looking national caste of securocrats dedicated to the Atlantic alliance as a good in itself, the only decisions available to the two parties is how far to acquiesce to America’s strategic whims of the moment. Whether or not these whims, bitterly debated in the imperial capital itself, are in Britain’s interests are irrelevant: the choice we are given is only how best to interpret Washington’s confused and ambiguous desires.

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While the international situation looms like a threatening cloud over this election, the absence of any meaningful discussion of Britain’s strategic vision merely reflects the fact that, until we know who wins the American election, we cannot say with certainty what our foreign policy will actually be. Now Biden reigns, both parties’ Ukraine policy is to support Kyiv until Russia’s total defeat, no matter how unrealistic that now sounds. Should Trump win and seek peace negotiations with Putin, even at Ukraine’s expense, then that will automatically become Britain’s policy too — though there has been no domestic discussion of what that outcome would look like, and how Britain’s future relationship with an aggressive, aggrieved Russia can be securely managed. Whichever of America’s two gerontocratic rivals wins the election, Starmer will bend the knee and pledge Britain’s security and prosperity at his service. The great questions of strategy, even when they determine national survival, are after all a matter for great powers, not mere client states: as ever, the weak do what they must.

In his 1940 memoir Strange Defeat, the pioneering historian Marc Bloch, who had latterly served as a staff officer, and would later be executed by the Gestapo for his Resistance activities, ruminated on the causes of France’s sudden military collapse. The army was poorly led and unprepared; the country was bitterly divided. Yet Bloch reserved his deepest antipathy for “the parliamentary system [which] has too often favoured intrigue at the cost of intelligence and true loyalty”. In the France of 1940, Bloch wrote:

“Our party machinery had already begun to give off the smell of a dry-rot which it had acquired in small cafés and obscure back rooms. It could not even offer the excuse that it was strong, because at the first breath of despotism it collapsed like a house of cards… More often than not they failed even to determine who was to wield the power. They served merely as spring-boards for clever careerists who spent their time knocking one another off the top of the political structure.”

In the situation we now face, such immediately recognisable political dysfunction is a luxury Britain cannot afford: our nation’s security is a matter of far greater import than the Westminster rigmarole we sank into in safer times.

Yet the overriding theme of the election — from the Left-wing and Muslim discontent with Starmer, of which Galloway is now the sole Westminster incarnation, to Farage’s reinvigorated revolt against the Conservatives from the Right — has been a message from the electorate that Britain’s political system works against the British people’s interests, and requires total root-and-branch reform. This is doubly true of our foreign policy, the shadowy presence looming behind every rote stump speech on this campaign. Domestically, and internationally, history has fated us to live at the end of one political order and the troubled birth of another. We cannot go on as we are: and for good or ill, soon enough we will not.

It was a wave that meant that when I was publicly “cancelled” by the Royal Academy of Arts this summer, I was swiftly “un-cancelled” in a spectacular fashion. More importantly, it was a wave that finally smothered Stonewall’s ‘No Debate’ strategy — and dragged a conversation they had tried to avoid for so long kicking and screaming into the public sphere.

Things started to fall into place when, within a few weeks, Maya Forstater won her court case, protecting gender critical belief in law, my own story hit the headlines, and the Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie published a damning essay, It Is Obscene, revealing the horrendous treatment she had been subjected to after saying that transwomen are transwomen and not women.

Of course, it was a moment that had been brewing for a long time. Many feminists had been warning about the concerning impact of gender identity ideology for years, sounding the alarm and being vilified, ridiculed and ostracised in response. No doubt, the inimitable JK Rowling’s decision to make her views on the subject known last year helped pave the way for an increasing number of women to stand up and speak out; finally, everything is out in the open.

Yet this debate is far from won. Activists often still succeed in framing it as a “trans rights issue”, rather than something that actually concerns women. Looking at the vast political capture, it’s sometimes easy to lose hope. We see the Mayor of London tweet ideological dogma such as: “Trans women are women, trans men are men, and all gender identities are valid.” We see the leader of the Labour Party say: “it’s not right to say that only women have a cervix, it shouldn’t be said”. We see MPs such as David Lammy, who has made clear that he doesn’t even know what a cervix is, state unchallenged that there are “dinosaurs hoarding rights in the Labour Party”, referring to brave women like Rosie Duffield who keep pushing back against this ideological land grab.

To be fair, that last point resulted in a new trend for wearing dino costumes at most feminist gatherings and protests, so I suppose a thank you is in order, Mr Lammy.

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Yet even his buffoonery shouldn’t be laughed off — if only because it distracts from the more insidious repercussions of the transgender debate. In many institutions and companies, “preferred pronouns” are now being implemented from the top down under the guise of “diversity and inclusion”. Anybody who dares to question this may find themselves quickly under investigation for alleged “transphobia” or called a bigot and cowed into silence.

Let’s make no mistake: “preferred pronouns” aren’t, as some would have you believe, just a courtesy. They are a form of compelled speech; they ask people to no longer trust their eyes, but instead do as they are told or be ostracised. I have previously written about the parallels between the current climate and the East German Stasi under which my whole family used to live. And it is becoming clearer by the day that those comparisons were not an exaggeration.

Just look at the state of academia, where professors who dare to acknowledge the biological reality of the sexes are being de-platformed and hounded, regardless of the toll the often-aggressive behaviour has on their well-being. The use of smear campaigns and intimidating “protests”, with individuals donning balaclavas and waving smoke flares, seems to have washed over from the US and are now commonplace whenever a “heretic” has been identified and needs “dealing with”. Just ask Professors Joe Phoenix and Kathleen Stock.

That this ideology has also crept deep into the Arts, once the most tolerant of disciplines, was clearly highlighted by my attempted cancellation. It was by no means the first time an artist has been attacked and ostracised publicly for her alleged thought crimes, but it was certainly a turning point due to the involvement of the Royal Academy. The public apology and reinstatement of my work in their shop thrust into the spotlight something that has been happening quietly but constantly for quite some years now.

Petty groups like ‘Terf’s out of Art’ and ‘The White Pube’ have long bullied artists, most of whom are women, into silence. Their success is proved by the fact that many of these cases don’t make the headlines, even though they still cost these women dearly, in some cases their entire career. Meanwhile, for those who are yet to be publicly called out, there’s another chilling effect: don’t expect to be invited to give talks at universities or to create public artworks with Arts Council funding. If you’re deemed ‘unacceptable’, you’re on your own.

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These silent cancellations are just as vicious as those fought out in public; perhaps even more so, because they leave their victims utterly defenceless. Being de-platformed for your views is something one can challenge. Being quietly excluded from any kind of platform and conversation altogether leaves you with nothing.

When I wrote on these pages in August about the deafening silence within the arts establishment following the attempt to cancel me, I did so with a sense of despair. It seemed to me that the blue-haired activists had won; that ‘diversity and inclusion’ now only matters as long as you repeat the mantras and toe the party line.

Things still look bleak. But after everything that has happened this year, a sense of optimism has started to creep in. That isn’t merely because the alternative is a dystopian hellscape of authoritarianism that history has seen many times before. It’s because the truth has a habit of prevailing.

What’s striking this year is the growing number of women and men who have started to say: Enough. One court case verdict follows another, holding the line against a vicious new orthodoxy that seeks to burn witches while screaming “JUST BE KIND”.

The Forstater ruling has cemented the protection of “gender critical belief” in law. The charity LGB Alliance has now firmly established itself as a much-needed alternative to Stonewall. Grassroots organisations such as FiLiA, FairPlayForWomen and Women’s Place UK provide support and resources to a vast and growing number of gender-critical women who have found their voice. And for everybody who dares speak out regardless of the consequences, there are many more waiting in the folds, preparing for their moment to be brave.

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Fortunately, in my own case sanity prevailed and, like a monsoon rain, the stains my detractors tried to smear me with have washed right off, leaving me free to continue to create work without censorship, encouraged by a rapidly growing number of patrons and supporters. And I am not alone: despite great efforts to the contrary, heretical artists are finding new ways to exhibit work and bypass gatekeepers.

That is the lesson of the past year. Finally, the tide is turning. We have not been silenced; let alone defeated. So to those art students with a firm grasp on reality who may feel a bit hopeless: don’t be afraid. Come on in, the water’s fine.

Rich in description, Tribes begins with a DNA test landing on his doorstep. Driven to find out more about his pre-slavery roots, Lammy discovers he is part-Tuareg and journeys to Niger in search of his origins where his newfound co-ethnics wrap him in a long white turban and robe. Initiated into the Tuareg in a ceremony accompanied by the “infectious beat” of singing, drums and ululating, he feels this “immense sense of belonging” which changes his world.

“This has been one of the most special moments of my life,” he tells his hosts, and when in Parliament, he would now “stand much taller”. In the local capital, he recognises himself in the physical features of those around him.

Lammy’s quest for origins is the most interesting part of the book. He transports us to his ancestral community of Hopetown, Guyana. Here he recounts that “everyone in the village seems to be related to me in some way… the Thomsons, the Johnsons, the Semples and the Grants…” He speaks warmly of the luxuriant fauna and the local village festival, as well as his ancestors who helped establish the village in 1841.

It’s a powerful story of identity, so I was interested in how the book drew a connection between these rich life stories and those of England. Unfortunately, my admittedly academic outlook was repeatedly frustrated as the narrative chopped and changed between topics, rarely pursuing an argument for more than a few pages.

Yet when Lammy considers the ethnic English, his attraction to communities of shared ancestry takes a sharp dive. “An ethnic Englishness,” Lammy writes, “tied to toxic assumptions about group supremacy, has put down deep roots in recent years.”

His connection to the white English runs through Peterborough, where he attended a state boarding school and made local friends. The parents of one friend, Clive and Kathy, are depicted as generous, but critical of the new East European migration. While claiming to understand the feelings of insecurity induced by rapid immigration in Peterborough, Lammy admonishes those who don’t embrace the transition.

Some of the local white working class are “anxious about the changes society is undergoing and end up retreating into smaller groups,” yet “others are bursting with hope and generosity”. All that is needed is more opportunities for Clive and Kathy to mix with the “dozen or so hard-working Eastern European migrants crammed into the small family home next door” and all will be well.

The term ‘tribalism’ is often reserved for expressions of group feeling Lammy dislikes, notably English ethnicity and, more broadly, ethnic majority sentiment across the West. Minorities tend instead to have the more positive-sounding ‘identity’. Yet, as I point out in my book Whiteshift, attachment to in-group is not correlated with disliking out-groups in peaceful societies. Does someone’s attachment to being black make them anti-white? No, say decades of studies. The same holds the other way around, even as the book seems unable to separate English ethnicity from the unfalsifiable charge of superiority and domination.

More from this author

Can anything arrest the polarisation of the West?

By Eric Kaufmann

This said, Lammy does own up to being a member of various tribes, including the Labour one, and the book makes an important argument that competitive individualism has eroded older communal structures, paving the way for a less cohesive society. The solution, he argues, is a new localism, promoting mixing across groups, giving local authorities more money and power, as well as the mandate to set their own immigration policies.

The book is at its best when discussing Lammy’s autobiography and the identity questions faced by Afro-Caribbean Britons. There is no doubt that differing from the majority – on the grounds of race, sexuality, language proficiency, height or disability – makes life more complicated, and can give rise to discrimination and inequality. There has been considerable injustice on these fronts in the past, and indeed some persists today. However, whereas a systematic approach to this problem would place it in world-historical context, Lammy tends to lose his sense of proportion when discussing race in Britain and America, favouring — dare I say it — an ideologically tribalist approach.

It seems the book has two settings. The first, corresponding to Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky’s deliberative “System 2″ is the macro discussion of individualism, loneliness and alienation, how these promote tribalism, and how to address it. This part of the book, though overdetermined and insufficiently alive to counterarguments, is based on academic studies and a clear thesis.

On occasion, however, Lammy toggles to a fast-thinking “System 1”, bypassing the prefrontal cortex to enter a totalising binary mode in which there are the good folk who embrace diversity and the bad ethnic nationalists/fascists/racists. While he acknowledges some difference between the “fears and anxieties” of the Mail-reading classes and “more sinister groups like…UKIP”, there is precious little in the way of nuance when it comes to understanding his tribe’s ‘other’. Perhaps aware that there might just be a tension between donning the mantle of Healer while demonising the outgroup, he claims that he has sacrificed his tribalism by calling out anti-Semitism in his Labour Party.

The problem, of course, is that Lammy’s ideological tribe is not just Labour, but the cultural Left, or, more specifically, adherents of what African-American linguist John McWhorter terms the “religion of antiracism”.

This secular religion holds that an identity group’s place on the oppressor-victim totem pole determines when it should speak or “just listen”, and that group experience endows a member of an oppressed group with both unique empirical knowledge and a moral authority, neither of which may be questioned with representative data or analytic logic. To attempt do so is to profane the sacred. To question whether a comment like “America is a colourblind society” is racist, or whether “white fragility” is an unfalsifiable trope based on circular reasoning, marks one out for excommunication.

Lammy is quite open about the fact that when the religion kicks in, tribalism is fine: “There are times for cool, dispassionate and objective politics, but there are other occasions when it is important for politics to be about who you are, where you come from and where you belong.” Cue System 1. Back in System 2, we hear the reasonable argument that social media is helping to fuel division, anger and loneliness. Yet we also hear that the author has more followers than the daily circulation of the Times or Telegraph, using this platform to “call out opponents when I think they are wrong”.

For Lammy, when his identity – be it black British or the identity Left – is triggered, he feels entitled to dispense with System 2. The Windrush scandal, in which administrative sloppiness led to people resident for decades in the country being told to leave, was rightly criticised. So too was the Grenfell Tower disaster, in which building control failures were compounded by inept fire evacuation instructions. Theresa May’s campaign to crack down on illegal immigration was likewise bedevilled by bureaucratic errors in the Home Office.

The fact that these measures fell disproportionately — but far from completely — on black people and ethnic minorities led proponents of the religion of antiracism like Lammy to stick the ‘racist’ label on them. The same holds for Oxbridge, which Lammy berates for their low black student intake, his first port of call being to blame discrimination and racism.

More from this author

Who cares about immigration?

By Eric Kaufmann

It’s one thing to deliver a strongly-worded accusation of racism if one has compared the public response to analogous situations in which the victims are predominantly white (Hillsborough, for instance). An honest attempt to rule out competing explanations would provide the scientific foundation for a claim of injustice. But to presume that because one possesses the right identity credentials, one’s outrage should cause others to fall to their knees in supplication is to overestimate the size of the progressive religion’s congregation. In fact, the main result of this priestly strategy is to fuel the polarisation Lammy rightly laments.

Some of the book’s policy aims, such as more money for local government, spaces for mixing across social lines, and facilities for people to interact face-to-face on the basis of equal status, are sound. The plea to overcome tribal division is welcome. However, the idea that Britain should not have a limit on the number of immigrants because businesses need workers, or because “the world is far wealthier, connected, and more reliant on the free movement of labour than in previous centuries” shows that Lammy is deaf to those outside the bubble. Calls for a global identity, Canadian-style multiculturalism and re-educating people to celebrate immigration come straight out of the New Labour playbook.

Writing off the views of older generations as rooted in chauvinism, Lammy essentially rests his hope in demography: baby-boomers dying off will allow cosmopolitan youth to bring forth the millennium. Like much of the Left, he has learned nothing from the rise of populism and urges ideological purity.

Lammy repeats the claim that British people uncritically celebrate Empire. Yet there is no evidence presented that this is what is being taught, or that Britons are unaware of Britain’s part in the Slave Trade. Yes, there is pride in Empire, but — as with Pakistani celebration of the Mughal Empire — this is more a reflection of general national sentiment than a moral statement.

And those like Oxford’s Nigel Biggar who seek to adjudicate the positives and negatives of Empire are under immense pressure to bend the evidence toward the latter. For Lammy to dismiss the view that transatlantic slavery was not distinct in world-historical terms – a claim made by the recent “1776’ group of African-American intellectuals – as a “glib attempt to deny a real injustice” is not an argument, but just a system 1 reaction.

Banging on about national sins more than already occurs in elite institutions can only feed division. Better to permit those who wish to pay more attention to sins to do so, others to foreground the positives, but all to agree on basic facts, basing claims in representative historical samples.

Suggested reading

A vision of Britain's polarised future

By Daniel Kalder

At first I imagined that the book would engage in more self-reflection about tribalism rather than criticising it for opponents while indulging in it for one’s own, yet at bottom the book fails to see the log in its own eye.

It caricatures Leave voters and ethnic English people attached to their identity as fearful, backward-looking authoritarians, yet part of nationhood and local identity includes historic ethnic composition. It is possible for people — including minorities — to be attached to the distinctive ethnic composition of England without this implying that non-whites are less English. Seeking to conserve a critical mass of distinctive characteristics, or slow their erosion, is not the same as excluding from membership. To use the charge of ‘exclusion’ as a stick to beat those who want slower ethnic change or more time for ethnic assimilation is to stoke the politics of division.

A critical reflection might have asked how the African-Caribbean residents of Hopetown, or of Guyana, should react if their town or country were to transition to majority Indian. It might have mused about Afro-Creole cultural and political hegemony in Guyana and other diverse Caribbean societies.

It might even have reflected on Lammy’s Bantu ancestors, who enslaved pygmies and conquered the San the way agriculturalists in North America conquered the hunter-gatherers there. Not because Lammy’s co-ethnics are worse, but because they have acted the same as whites in analogous situations.

Ultimately the book fails because it sidesteps the role of progressive tribalism in stoking cultural conflict and polarisation. There is an accommodation to be had, but not on these terms. 

David Lammy’s Tribes: How Our Need to Belong Can Make or Break Society, is published by Little, Brown, priced £20

A few weeks later, the Labour MP and prominent Remainer, David Lammy, appeared on the Andrew Marr Show and compared leading Brexiteers to Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party, although Lammy later noted that the comparison to Nazis and supporters of apartheid in South Africa “was not strong enough”.

Around the same time, Remainers on social media, including the head of an academic organisation, were sharing a graphic of the Nazi swastika alongside a logo of UKIP and the new Brexit Party with the caption: “Same shit, different logo”.

Ever since Britain voted for Brexit, the portrayal of Leavers, either directly or indirectly, as racists, Nazis and extremists has been a constant feature of our national debate. “Let’s be honest what’s really driving Brexit”, read the title of a Matthew d’Ancona column last year, “Bigotry.”

Further reading

How bigoted is Brexit?

By Tom Chivers

Urban liberals such as D’Ancona, Snow, Lammy and countless others are not interested in evidence. Indeed, one irony of Britain’s post-referendum debate is that while prominent Remainers have traced the vote for Brexit to ‘misinformation’, ‘fake news’, ‘post-truth politics’ and the dismissal of experts, they have simultaneously been the most willing of all to ignore the expert studies of why 17.4 million people decided to leave the EU. These studies show, clearly, that the Brexit vote was anchored in an array of legitimate grievances about a broken economic, social and political settlement.

But this evidence does not correspond with the confirmation bias of Remainers that has been on display ever since the vote, and which has led Lammy and his ilk to believe that early 21st-century Britain is somehow equivalent to Weimar Germany, or D’Ancona to conclude it is dominated by racists.

“I am forced to conclude that there is now a sufficiency of Britons who just don’t much like people of foreign extraction”, he mused, “and certainly don’t want many more of them around the place.”

These accounts make me wonder where this leaves the one in three black and minority ethnic voters who voted for Brexit, the incredibly diverse towns like Birmingham, Luton and Slough which provided majority support for Leave, or the academic studies which show, clearly, how racial prejudice in Britain has been consistently declining since the 1980s. Moreover, how do these accounts of “bigoted” Leavers fit with the growing pile of research we now have that suggests that it is Remainers, not Leavers, who might have a problem with tolerance.

Further reading

Who's most intolerant in America?

By Peter Franklin

A few months ago, in the United States, I stumbled across an interesting survey. It suggested that today only one in ten Americans thinks that interracial marriage is a ‘bad thing’. This is a remarkable achievement for a society where as recently as the 1950s more than nine in ten said they would be uncomfortable with this idea. Liberals often forget their achievements.

The same trend has also been visible here in Britain, where support for interracial marriage has been consistently rising while measures of prejudice against non-white groups have been showing a consistent and quite dramatic decline. These are not the metrics you would expect to see if Britain really were about to give birth to the modern-day equivalent of Adolf Hitler and the NSDAP.

But even more interesting was a parallel finding about political polarisation; while the vast majority of Americans now have no problem with interracial marriage, about four in ten of them would have a problem if a relative married somebody from a different political tribe. Americans are more likely to take issue with marriage across political lines than marrying across ethnic and religious lines.

But if you drill down deeper, then you find something even more striking; it is Left-leaning voters who are most likely to have a problem with their ideological counterparts. One example was a recent finding that while 45% of Democrats would be unhappy if their child married a Republican, only 35% of Republicans would feel the same way if their child married a Democrat.

Ordinarily it might be tempting to put this down to the insanity of American politics but, worryingly, this now also appears to be happening in Britain. While growing numbers of us are putting ‘social distance’ between ourselves and those who hold a different political outlook, this is especially likely to take place on the Left, or Remain, end of the spectrum. According to one recent poll by YouGov, for example, while 11% of Leavers would mind a little or a lot if a relative married across the Brexit divide, this jumped to 37% among Remainers.

Further reading

Can the Tories accommodate populism?

By David Goodhart

I wanted to explore this in more detail and so, with political psychologist Aleksandra Cichocka, we asked a sample of Leavers and Remainers how they would feel about getting closer to the other tribe, from having them as an acquaintance, to the idea of their child marrying somebody from the other tribe.

Consistently, Remainers were more likely than Leavers to distance themselves from the other side: while 80% of Leavers are open to having a Remainer acquaintance, only 70% of Remainers feel the same way; while 79% of Leavers are open to having a Remainer co-worker, only 67% of Remainers feel the same way; while 78% of Leavers would not mind having a Remainer living next door, only 65% of Remainers feel the same; while 80% of Leavers would be willing to have a Remainer as a friend, only 61% of Remainers feel the same way; and, lastly, while 75% of Leavers would be willing to have their child enter into a romantic relationship with a Remainer, only 53% of Remainers would want to see their child in a relationship with a Leaver.

Remainers, who routinely present themselves as the vanguard of liberalism, tolerance and moderation, sometimes don’t seem that liberal at all. Ever since the political shocks of 2016 much of our (liberal) media has latched on to an incredibly simplistic ‘open versus closed’ framework; Remainers, we are told, are open, while Leavers are closed. Yet, if anything, it appears that the former can be more closed off to alternative views than the latter. The reality is far more complex than the likes of Lammy, Snow and D’Ancona would have us believe.

Further reading

The pointlessness of a 'People's Vote'

By Matthew Goodwin

We are not the first to point to this. Recently, the academic Noah Carl brought together a whole body of research to show how people who hold Left-wing and liberal views are almost always more likely than people who hold Right-wing and conservative views to block or un-friend their ideological counterparts on social media (this was also happening before Trump, by the way). Others have similarly found that Left-leaning voters in the US are more likely than Right-leaning voters to stop following people who they disagree with. Summarising other research, a journalist in the US recently concluded that while the political Left might consider itself more open-minded than the Right, “research shows that liberals are just as prejudiced against conservatives as conservatives are against liberals”.

Back in Britain, many on the Left and those in the Remain camp do not engage with this evidence because it undermines the concerted effort to portray the vote for Brexit as a proxy for Right-wing extremism on the march, or an indicator for their belief that the country is sliding into the same conditions that gave rise to Adolf Hitler. I suspect that their stronger desire to disassociate from the other camp helps to explain why many so Remainers have been so quick to ‘catastrophise’ about voters with whom they probably have very little interaction with.

Catastrophising, as Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt note in their recent book The Coddling of the American Mind, is what we do when we believe that something is far worse than it is, usually after an event or moment has challenged our values and beliefs. Psychologists associate catastrophising with the parallel traits of overthinking, magnification, feelings of helplessness and a tendency to view an event (or an election result) as being much worse, dire or severe than it really was.

Have Remainers lost perspective?

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When prominent Remainers compare Eurosceptics to Nazis, or modern-day Britain to the Weimar Republic, they are engaging in something that has defined much of our post-referendum debate: liberal ‘catastrophising’ – a cognitive distortion leading them to expect, and become obsessed by, the worst of all possible outcomes.

The distortion means that Brexit is not an uncomfortable democratic result but rather signals the rebirth of fascism. The 2016 referendum was not a valid democratic exercise but was hijacked by the Russians. The ERG is not a fringe group of eccentric Eurosceptic reactionaries who are obsessed about trade but is somehow equivalent to the virulent anti-Semitic, white supremacist and revolutionary Nazis, and so on.

The irony is that liberal catastrophisers engage in exactly the same behaviour that they associate with populists and Right-wing extremists; they overgeneralise; they label others; they engage in Manichean ‘good-versus-bad’ dichotomous thinking; they lose perspective; and they become obsessed with apocalyptic-style scenarios.

Rather than assessing things rationally, and engaging with those who hold different points of view, they cling to comfort blankets, such as catastrophising, distancing and emotional reasoning.

Further reading

No Bregrets: 10 predictions for 2019

By Matthew Goodwin

Such irrationality, of course, is by no means unique to the Left. Those on the Right fall foul of the same mechanisms. Populists routinely catastrophise when talking about demographic projections, the decline of white populations, Islamist terrorism or the capacity of Islam to integrate into Western ways of life.

The trouble is that as our value divides continue to rise to the surface, and are exacerbated by social media, this behaviour looks set to become more, rather than less, common on all sides. But at this particular moment in our history, it does seem to be most prominent among those who claim to be most tolerant among us.

Cognitive behavioural therapists would suggest six ways forward for those struggling most; acknowledging that sometimes things do not go your way; trying to recognise when your thoughts are irrational; trying to disrupt catastrophic thought patterns; thinking about a different and more positive outcome; repeating positive affirmations; and engaging in stress-relieving techniques.

We need to think far more seriously about ways of building far more stable and resilient bridges across these different communities. Remainers, in particular, might consider how they are responding to our post-referendum environment – and should certainly stop harping on about Nazis, extremists and intolerance.

At the same time, democracies are struggling to supply some of the good things that they have been associated with in the past – such as ever improving standards of living, accountable decision making (as globalisation removes more decisions from the nation) and a sense of a broad equalisation of status and esteem among citizens.

The last of those supply problems arises from the new system of status stratification by education, and in particular higher education, that has turned us into what has been described as “diploma democracies” — political systems in which the main political parties and broader public sphere are increasingly dominated by the views and priorities of the highly educated and liberal minded, notwithstanding a few tabloid newspapers and some angry corners of the internet.

Further reading

What the populists get right

By Matthew Goodwin

Stable, open democracies require representation of all the main strands of opinion in a society, and if significant interests are excluded they will find a way of making themselves heard. This is what has happened with the great democratic ‘rebalancing’ represented by Brexit, Trump and continental European populism.

This rebalancing is messy and disruptive and encounters resistance and push-back, and right now one of the main battle grounds is the British Conservative party.

Historically, the party has prided itself on being a broad church, absorbing all non-extreme views on the Right of politics. This tradition appeared to be at least partly abandoned by the Cameron/Osborne modernisation of the party, in which continuity with New Labour social policy was prioritised, and socially conservative views were largely excluded and seen as politically damaging. (The grudging exceptions to this story were the ill-fated “tens of thousands” immigration target and, eventually, the referendum concession.)

This move by the Conservatives effectively excluded a large body of national opinion from Parliament and continues to unbalance our politics. The militant ‘zero tolerance’ policy pursued by a small niche of metropolitan opinion, which patrols the public conversation seeking out heretics to expel, aims to keep it unbalanced.

Consider, as evidence, the recent sacking by a Conservative government of Roger Scruton, Britain’s most eminent conservative philosopher, for his tendentious comments about Muslims. And the ridiculous comments from David Lammy MP, the Nigel Farage of the Left, on Sunday about how retweeting something from a German populist party is an expression of Nazism.

Further reading

What the populists get right

By Matthew Goodwin

Yet a large body of opinion in this country hold opinions that are anathema to much of the progressive worldview: about 45% of people support the death penalty, about 65% think that immigration has been either too high or much too high, around half the population want to leave the EU, 62% of people think that Britain “sometimes feels like a foreign country”, the vast majority of women and men want modification not abolition of a gender division of labour, 58% of people think that newcomers are not integrating well, about one third of the population say they would prefer to live in an area where almost everyone is from the same background and 44% of whites say they would mind a little or a lot if a close relative married a Muslim.

Not all of these views are equally reasonable but, instead of excluding the people who hold them, would it not be preferable to persuade them to change their minds? Isn’t that how a democratic conversation is meant to function? Some of those views are gradually shifting in a more progressive direction as a result of the expansion of higher education and the generational shift, but not all of them.

Most people with such views are decent citizens, who are comfortable with ‘modern Britain’ but tend to think it is changing too fast. And it cannot be said often enough that the vast majority also accept the broad outlines of race, gender and sexuality equality – though might argue with equality activists about what equality actually means.

Academics have shown a steady drop in levels of racial prejudice since the 1980s. Only one per cent of the population now admit to being very prejudiced against people of different races (and they are almost all over 50), a negligible proportion say they do not want someone from a different race as a neighbour, less than 10% strongly disagree with gay marriage.

Further reading

Why I welcome the Economist's mea culpa

By David Goodhart

Moreover, the constant insinuation, repeated by David Lammy on Sunday, that since Brexit, Britain has experienced a rising tide of violence and hatred against minorities is contradicted by the only reliable piece of evidence we have: the Crime Survey of England and Wales finds that hate crime is on quite a sharp downward trend, including in the period covering Brexit (when there was a brief spike in harassment).

Nevertheless, the partial suppression of legitimate small-c conservative views in the public domain, reinforced by our first-past-the-post electoral system denying representation to overtly populist parties, has ended up giving us Brexit instead.

Contrast this with continental Europe which has absorbed, accommodated and domesticated populist opinion over the last 20 years. Several populist parties have now taken part in government coalitions and in many cases, such as the Finns in Finland, have split and re-formed. The general direction of travel is towards less extreme views with experience of office tempering the views of leaders and most activists: consider the Freedom party in Austria and the People’s party in Denmark. Marine Le Pen’s National Rally has gradually moved away from support for France leaving the EU and not just because of Brexit.

Further reading

Will our Brexit conflict ever be resolved?

By Giles Fraser

The Italian populist coalition has also just provided a good recent example of this domestication. Both the 5 Star Movement and Lega Nord were seduced by the anti-MMR vaccine cult and had promised to abolish a law banning children from attending school unless they had received jabs against 10 diseases. But when the 5 Star education minister was faced with an outbreak of measles in schools the party abruptly dropped its opposition to vaccination and in effect adopted the policy it had previously repudiated.

The influence has, it is true, worked the other way too and populist parties have influenced mainstream ones, most notably in the Netherlands, Austria, Denmark and the UK too (despite first past the post). But this is surely democracy working its magic, not some kind of poison injected into the system. One reason such socially conservative views are not going to fade away swiftly in this country is because they tend to be popular among the fast-growing and often religiously observant ethnic minorities.

“There is a feeling that commonly held values are being eroded and disregarded by an elite that believes it knows better,” wrote one prominent ethnic minority MP by the name of David Lammy in his book Out of the Ashes about the 2011 riots, a book that opposed a ban on smacking and excoriated the hedonism, nihilism and hyper-individualism of the ‘double liberalism’ of 1980s market economics plus a 1960s ‘anything goes’ worldview. The David Lammy of 2011 would surely have attracted the attention of the ‘zero tolerance’ policemen of 2019.

A constitutional reform programme that would give us some variant of proportional representation and so a political voice in Parliament for legitimate populism and social conservatism is not going to happen soon. Which means that the Conservative party must return to its broad-church tradition, as the Brexit result seems to be mandating.

Further reading

Europe's democratic difficulties

By Helen Thompson

This is not rocket science. George Osborne, who was tweeting gleefully in support of the sacking of Roger Scruton, has a reputation as a fearsome political strategist but he must take quite a large part of the blame for his party’s current slump in popularity, as not only the author of an excessive austerity but also of a high-handed liberalisation of the party that turbo-charged Ukip and led to Brexit.

The obvious thing would have been to balance a liberal move, such as gay marriage, with something for the more conservative-minded family lobby – such as the right of couples bringing up children together to share their tax allowances thereby making it far easier for one parent to stay at home when children are young.

Instead, the Conservative leadership have found themselves cornered by a shallow, metropolitan worldview without the intellectual resources or political confidence to create the new kind of liberal-conservative settlement that the country and their future success requires.

In the long run, the main party of the centre-Right remains better equipped to lead that new settlement because it is easier for the Conservatives to shift Left on economics, as they did at the last election, than it is for the Labour party to shift Right on culture in the direction of a David Lammy (2011) Blue Labour politics.

But escaping the clutches of the ‘zero tolerance’ sectarians will not be easy, as exemplified by the Scruton episode, which speaks to a larger nervousness about the Muslim and Islamophobia question.

Further reading

Pakistan is betrayed by its blasphemy laws

By Farzana Shaikh

The party has allowed itself to be painted as having an Islamophobia problem on the basis of a few prejudiced statements by local activists and councillors and an unscrupulous campaign against Sadiq Khan. Sayeeda Warsi, the former party chairman, has played a central role in this as she attempts to turn herself into one of the key gatekeepers to Muslim Britain, describing the Muslim experience in the past decade as a “brutal” one. The BBC and other news outlets uncritically recycle the claim in part to provide balance to the anti-Semitism charge against the Labour party.

Very few Muslims, who now make up about 6% of the population, are Tory voters or members and there is very little knowledge of Muslim communities and politics in the higher ranks of the party. This has made it harder for the party to distinguish genuinely moderate and reform-minded Muslim leaders from those associated with the Islamist strain of politics that encourages separation.

And it makes the party and country incapable, it seems, of having a reasonable discussion about aspects of Muslim life that makes British society more wary towards their fellow citizens of Muslim background than towards other minorities.

For Muslims do, on average, live more separate, and often poorer, lives than other minorities. Many of them come from traditional societies and now often live in the most depressed parts of post-industrial Britain: 46% of the Muslim population lives in the 10% most deprived local authorities. Only about one third of Muslim women work, they are more likely than other minorities to speak a language other than English at home, rarely marry out, and still hold to norms that are more authoritarian, patriarchal and collectivist than the increasingly liberal, egalitarian and individualist British mainstream.

Moreover, British Muslim attitudes on homosexuality, blasphemy, religion in politics, even conspiracy theory accounts of 9/11, tend to have more in common with global Muslim opinion than with the rest of British society.

Given that a large proportion of British people have no Muslim friends – in 2004, this was 90% – and, from the Rushdie affair via grooming gangs to jihadists acting in the name of Islam, Muslims are often associated with extremism, it may not be so surprising that, as I described above 44% of whites say they would mind a little or a lot if a close relative married a Muslim (35% of British Pakistanis feel the same about a relative marrying a white person).

Further reading

Steve Hilton's populist revolution

By Henry Olsen

It is true that some Muslims do suffer discrimination and harassment, probably more than other minorities, but there is no evidence that it is increasing. And it is not Islamophobic to raise these real issues of tension and difference. What we need is a deeper conversation about segregation and how to engineer more and better interaction across the Muslim-non-Muslim divide, plus a focus on the achievements of the growing Muslim middle class, rather than more intense policing of conversations at Tory cocktail parties.

The Conservative party should stop believing what their enemies say about them, remind themselves that they are the first party to appoint someone of Muslim background to one of the highest offices of state, and face down the zero tolerance sectarians.

In fact, if the party is to rise to the challenge of leading the post-Brexit settlement across the country’s great value divides, it needs to apply that reasoning across Conservative thinking on all social and cultural matters.