Think about it: when was the last time you praised someone for being noble or honorable? Even the word good has receded. In its place we find the more domesticated commendations: kind and nice. They are agreeable words, certainly, but also modest ones — virtues stripped of grandeur, careful not to be too much of anything. Self-sacrifice is almost unheard-of.

The moral ends that guide modern life now tend to gather around three dominant aims. The first is safety. This reveals itself in a vigilant concern for the preservation of both the body and, increasingly, the mind. Both of these are now understood as biological systems requiring maintenance, hence the growing societal preoccupation with mental health and the medicalization of emotional states. The second aim is utility: the relentless emphasis on efficiency, productivity and optimization. Life is measured in outputs and improvements, and its worth is justified in terms of functionality.

Lastly, there is the obsession with equality — the only one of these aims that still gestures toward something like a moral ideal. The others are largely managerial and materialistic. When I speak of equality as a dominant aim, I do not mean equality in the classical sense of a universal human right. What I have in mind instead is the contemporary drive toward the equalization of outcomes, the growing discomfort with hierarchy, and the proliferation of the narratives of oppression that now function as a central moral grammar in Western societies.

Nietzsche suggested that obsessive egalitarianism was the afterglow of Christianity: a moral residue that lingered after faith itself had faded. But Christianity bequeathed many values to the modern world: humility, charity, forgiveness, self-sacrifice. Out of these, equality, in particular, survived as the key virtue. The question is: why?

It seems to me that equality functions almost as a consolation prize of the secular age. The transition from an enchanted cosmos to a disenchanted, secular world has undoubtedly expanded human freedom. Yet in dismantling the old metaphysical framework, we have also stripped away the cosmic narrative that once conferred dignity even upon those at the margins of society: the so-called “losers”. 

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The modern valorization of equality, of course, would be bizarre to our ancestors. In A Secular Age, the philosopher Charles Taylor offers a remarkable account of just how foreign the land of the past truly is. For Taylor, modernity is defined not simply by a decline in religious belief, but by a deeper shift in the background assumptions through which people experience reality: a change not merely in what people believe, but in how the world itself is imagined and lived. He describes this transformation as the passage from an enchanted world to one that is disenchanted and secular. 

In the pre-modern “enchanted” world, the world of “spirits, demons and moral forces”, reality was thick with agency and meaning. The cosmos was not neutral or inert, and people understood themselves as vulnerable to powers beyond their control, capable of being corrupted or elevated by forces outside themselves. The boundary between the self and the world was therefore permeable.

Taylor describes this condition as that of the “porous self”: a self embedded within a morally charged universe, open to external influences and aware of its dependence on a larger, divinely structured order. While this dependence implied a certain impotence, it also provided a powerful sense of belonging, situating individual lives within a cosmic order not of their own making. 

Disenchantment dissolves this structure. What disappears is not simply belief in spirits, but the very sense that meaning resides in the fabric of the world. The locus of meaning is relocated from the world to solely inside the human. And this gives rise to what Taylor terms the “buffered self”. The buffered self confronts the world from behind a kind of protective membrane. It no longer sees itself as vulnerable to cosmic forces. In the world of the buffered self, nature is no longer enchanted but inert, something to be explained, predicted, and manipulated. Even when we acknowledge the limits of human power, the dominant modern assumption is that natural obstacles will eventually yield to science and technology. Rather than propitiating unseen powers for a good harvest, we design irrigation systems and engineer crops.

The advantages of the buffered self — and of life in a disenchanted world — are obvious. Human beings no longer experience themselves as helpless before the powers of nature, nor do they feel their destinies to be at the mercy of capricious gods. Nature has become something to be understood and mastered. In this sense, the modern self appears capable of shaping its own fate.

This shift in mentality also helped make possible the extraordinary achievements of modernity. The economist Deirdre McCloskey is among those who have argued that this cultural transformation was crucial in enabling the Scientific Revolution and the economic changes that followed: developments that produced some of the greatest increases in living standards in human history. By any measure, it stands as an immense achievement.

But with such immense empowerment also comes a crushing burden: that of radical responsibility. Once we anchor meaning within the individual and we understand him to be radically able to improve his condition, we can no longer find refuge in helplessness. The secular mind implicitly understands power and merit as matters of will. The loser is solely responsible for their condition.

Formerly, within an enchanted worldview, earthly failure did not exhaust a life’s meaning: the poor and humiliated could still belong to a larger divine story in which salvation, not worldly success, was the ultimate measure. But in a disenchanted world, life’s losers are deprived of both the promise of ultimate reversal — “The first shall be last and the last shall be first,” as the Bible puts it. Even when it came to life on Earth itself, social hierarchy was seen as part of a divinely ordered cosmos, which granted even the humblest positions a certain dignity.

And more disturbingly, without all these, it becomes difficult to resist the conclusion that some lives contribute less, matter less and — even more disturbingly — might even be less necessary.

It is in erecting barriers to this conclusion that post-World War II modernity is at its most morally energetic. This moral energy manifests in the relentless pursuit of equality, the acute sensitivity to oppression and the refusal to accept hierarchy as natural. These phenomena are not merely fashions. They are attempts to supply, through political means, what religion once provided: an assurance that no life is negligible. In a world where dignity no longer descends from heaven, it must be constructed on earth. Or else the weak are left with nothing at all.

The “loser” is not a permanent class of people. It exists, in some degree, within each of us. Human beings are fragile creatures, capable of failure and weakness at any point. Indeed, the anxiety over “loserdom” is often strongest not among the most destitute but among the moderately successful — those who glimpse success and know they might yet fail to reach it. Something of this tension can be seen in the rising levels of anxiety reported at elite universities and other highly competitive environments.

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Equality in a disenchanted world serves not only to reassure “the weak,” but also to place limits on the strong. It provides a moral vocabulary through which we can say that the strong are behaving improperly. In modern societies, strength is often defined in terms of utility: that is, those who are strong are those who generate wealth or have influence. Yet without a shared conception of the good life, it becomes difficult to explain why such individuals might still be failing in their obligations to the community. In earlier eras, even the most powerful figures were understood to stand under a higher moral order. Kings answered to God and power carried expectations of virtue and stewardship.

Modern liberal societies are less comfortable articulating such expectations. Over the past century, political thought, influenced no doubt by the rise of secularism, has increasingly embraced the idea that the state should remain neutral regarding competing visions of the good life. As the philosopher Michael Sandel has argued, freedom came to be defined largely as the ability of individuals to pursue their own preferences without interference. The result is a society that carefully protects rights but grows hesitant to articulate shared ends.

In this setting, criticism of the powerful often takes an indirect form. Public frustration with elites, whether directed at billionaires or corporations, is frequently expressed in the language of equality and redistribution. A recent flashpoint of this kind has been the proposal for a California billionaire tax. Yet beneath these demands often lies a deeper moral intuition: that the powerful are failing in some civic or ethical duty. Lacking a widely shared language of virtue or the common good, however, that intuition tends to be translated into the one moral grammar that remains widely legitimate — equality.

There remain pockets of the modern world where the obsession with equality recedes, most notably in the sphere of work. In such contexts, individuals can still find a sense of belonging and participation in a mission larger than themselves. Nowhere is this more visible than in start-ups. In such spaces, even the pretense of equality is often suspended in practice. Employees willingly subordinate themselves to a founder, often investing that figure with a quasi-prophetic aura. An entire mythology around the figure is born. “Founder-mode” might be the closest we get in the modern era to a grand hero narrative.

This hierarchy is accepted, even celebrated, because it promises belonging to a grand narrative: building the future and bending the arc of history through innovation. In recent years, companies like Anthropic have inspired precisely this kind of near-religious devotion in their employees. Access to such positions, however, is difficult, even for the fortunate. To most people, it is virtually inaccessible. A society cannot rely on such rare opportunities alone; it must find ways to generate sources of meaning for the many. 

One possible response is a return to a civic form of republicanism — the tradition that animated many of the Founding Fathers — in which the value of citizens is not measured solely by their economic utility but by their participation in a shared common good. Such a vision would require a society willing to articulate what that good consists of, and to speak openly about the virtues and forms of life that sustain it. 

Whether modern liberal societies still possess the confidence to define such shared ends — and whether disenchantment itself might be, even in part, reversible — remains an open question. What does seem clear, however, is that the hunger for such ends has not entirely vanished. Our continued ability to read 19th-century novels and not only recognize but feel drawn to their moral world is itself revealing.

At the same time, new technological forces — chiefly those unleashed by the rise of AI, from the spread of hyper-addictive gambling platforms to more subtle forms of behavioral manipulation — are beginning to unsettle even the most committed of liberals. The pressure to recover a richer moral vocabulary is gathering faster than almost anyone could have expected. 

Last year’s contenders included the bank Halifax, which told customers to close their accounts if they disagreed with staff being asked to wear pronoun badges, and the Natural History Museum, which decided it was progressive to liken homosexuals to self-cloning lizards. The winner, though, was Nottingham City Council, which celebrated Pride by banning the lesbian activist Julie Bindel from giving a talk on violence against women, her “crime” (entirely unrelated to her talk) being her belief that humans can’t change sex.

Setting up the award — it’s named after Guardian editor Kath Viner, who knows a thing or two about trashing a treasured brand by pandering to gender extremists — was my way of giving vent to the frustrations that many lesbians and gay men of the old-fashioned sort feel at this time of year. Pride used to be a riot, an opportunity to commemorate our achievements since the Stonewall Inn uprising, and shout about the equalities we still had to fight for. Now it’s a bloated month of pinkwashed flummery, of re-imagined company logos, empty sloganeering and corporate parade float sponsorships — and it’s a drag. 

The only fighting lesbians and gays do these days is among ourselves. Some people don’t think the T belongs with the LGB — Get Over It! If only we could. Those of us who insist that the trans movement can be homophobic, because it encourages young people to think they were born in the wrong sex if they are gay or lesbian, have found ourselves marginalised. Told by Pride organisers that we will be thrown out — in the name of inclusion, obviously — if we dare show up to the season’s events, we have little option but to snark from the sidelines. If we haven’t already been blocked by them on Twitter. 

When I worked on the London paper Capital Gay in the Nineties, a colleague used to call Pride “all our birthdays and Christmases rolled into one”. Back then, it was one day of the year, not an entire season. I have in front of me the last edition I edited of that paper, from June 1995, which reported on a march of 75,000 lesbians and gay men through central London, followed by a party with a record turnout of 200,000 people at Victoria Park. In the previous year, we had achieved the first legislative victory on our long path to legal equality, when MPs had reduced the age of consent for gay men from 21 to 18; but politicians had voted against reducing it to 16, in line with the heterosexual age of consent, reinforcing our status as second-class citizens in the eyes of the law.

Getting together in a park was a way of feeling that, for one day only, we had just as much right as anyone else to be ourselves in the capital. Nowadays, we no longer need that kind of refuge, because life no longer treats us so cruelly. That’s why today’s Pride, to me, feels so overblown and excessive.

On one level, of course, I’m old and jaded, which may explain my cultural cringe at the BBC’s new boy-meets-boy reality show, I Kissed a Boy. To me, all that hand-flapping and “yaas kween” campery harks uncomfortably back to the Seventies model of male homosexuality on TV, as personified by Larry Grayson and John Inman. Not for the first time, I notice the irony of the generation that believes it is reinventing gender taking such ready refuge in regressive stereotypes.

Meanwhile, the fashion world has decided to portray our lives as a circus freak-show. Consider Calvin Klein’s last Pride campaign, which features a bearded, hairy-chested, plus-sized female model wearing a sports bra over the breasts that she hasn’t yet got round to removing. In another age, Calvin Klein put a topless Mark Wahlberg on giant billboards around the world, and gay men convinced ourselves we, too, could be Marky Mark if we bought Y-fronts.

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How did we get here? A decade ago, it wasn’t obvious what the future of Pride should be. The wide array of discriminatory laws had been dismantled, culminating with the legalisation of same-sex marriage. We had achieved everything we’d asked for, and prejudice seemed to fall away, too. Now, surely, we just had to get on with our lives.

At the time, I had a naive idea that we could progress on South Africa’s “truth and reconciliation” model. Having achieved equality, we could afford to be magnanimous about those who had opposed us along the way. Homophobia had been so widespread that there was no point in bearing grudges over past slights. We simply had to embrace the chance to play the full role in civil society that had previously been denied us. And, having won our own campaigns, perhaps we could now turn our attention abroad — to help stop young Iranian gay men being hanged or thrown off rooftops by the state, or the corrective rape of lesbians in Cameroon and elsewhere. Maybe also try to help lesbian and gay communities shrug off UK-inherited anti-gay laws in many Commonwealth countries?

But charities need problems to address, lobbyists need grievances, media publishers need to grow their demographic. In 2015, the lobby group Stonewall — which had surpassed even its own expectations in the effectiveness of its campaigning — extended its remit to campaign on trans issues as well as LGB ones. (It’s a development I satirise in my novel The End of the World is Flat, when a charity set up to correct minor map-making anomalies embarks on a campaign of fully fledged flat-earthery.)

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Until that point, the trans movement had been entirely separate, both culturally and politically. As a gay journalist reporting on political developments over two decades, I never met any trans campaigners. But after the passing of the Gender Recognition Act 2004, a merger of the two movements took place, and the rainbow establishment set about pretending that the two camps had already been one.

This new movement, a cuckoo in the nest of the campaign for lesbian and gay rights, suddenly had a whole menu full of demands and an agenda that would end up trying to redefine language, reorganise public toilets and changing rooms, kibosh women’s sport and take control of HR departments. At its most baleful, it would try to root out wrong-thinking heretics — such as the think tank consultant Maya Forstater — from every walk of life.

This year, however, it feels like the tide is turning. Only last week, when British cycling authorities announced that male-bodied riders will henceforth have to compete in their own sex class, the overreaction from the UK’s most prominent trans cyclist made as many headlines as the decision itself. Emily Bridges — who used to compete as a male at junior level — announced that British Cycling’s new policy was “a violent act” which furthered “genocide”. At a less elite level, the news that the women’s record in sport-for-all Parkrun races belongs to a male-bodied trans runner has furthered the impression that men who say they’re women — and retain the physical benefits conferred by male puberty — are snatching prizes unfairly.

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And there’s further evidence that sanity may soon prevail. Last month, Baroness Falkner, chairman of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, faced down a palace coup by transactivist staff members. And by keeping her cool in the face of hostility at the Oxford Union on Tuesday, Kathleen Stock has made her antagonists look like a bunch of entitled brats. As Sall Grover, an Australian businesswoman taken to court by transactivists for creating a female-only social media network, observed earlier this week: “It certainly does feel like we’re 90 seconds to midnight for everyone admitting ‘the Terfs were right’.”

With a bit of luck, then, the corporate world won’t be quite so quick to listen to those in their ranks who insist on pursuing marketing campaigns that don’t tally with their actual audiences. One day, the stock price collapses at Bud Light, Target and Gillette, following their various LGBT backfires, will be taught at business schools as cautionary tales.  

Meanwhile, just look at the rest of the world. Only this week, Uganda rubber-stamped a new law establishing the death penalty for “aggravated homosexuality“. And in Turkey, a newly re-elected President Erdogan railed throughout his campaign against “LGBT” people — although, once again, the main target seems to be homosexuality, with his interior minister denouncing same-sex relationships and accusing gay people of bestiality.

This, surely, is the stuff that matters. It’s the stuff we once used to care about, before a fragile generation started treating polite disagreement as “genocide” and our rebranded community acquired a reputation for cry-bully tantrums. One day, I hope, the gender wars will end and we can return to those more proportionate values.

For Mill, in the tradition of nominative determinism, was once a machine. His precocity is now the stuff of legend: essays on Rome combining historiographical mastery with a recondite vocabulary at age six; trilingual fluency in English, Latin, and Greek by age 12. But it came at a cost. Mill was essentially a lab rat, an educational experiment gone awry. Home-schooled — some may say groomed — by his martinet father, he swallowed whole the utilitarian creed of James Mill: the greatest happiness for the greatest number. But he himself remained a stranger to happiness.

In the younger Mill’s Autobiography, he recalled his father’s “asperities of temper… I thus grew up in the absence of love and in the presence of fear; and many and indelible are the effects of this bringing-up in the stunting of my moral growth.” Public speaking was an insurmountable challenge. He had no self-confidence. Carlyle recorded Mill’s “incapability of laughing”. Aged 17, he followed mechanically in his father’s footsteps, taking up an East India Company job that he held for 35 years. His worldview, likewise, was a carbon copy of his father’s: disdain for unearned privilege in general and the monarchy in particular; respect for the inherent goodness of the middle classes, whose historical role it was to educate the working classes out of their revolting ways; and belief in the superiority of private property over public ownership. All of this he uncritically absorbed and fiercely defended — that is, until he met Harriet Taylor in 1830.

By all accounts, it was a remarkable encounter. Reporting on what transpired, Jane Carlyle observed “that a young Mrs Taylor, tho’ encumbered with a husband and children, had ogled John Mill so successfully that he was desperately in love”. Accustomed to ceaseless cerebration but little else, Mill had been unacquainted with deep emotions. To be sure, he had had crushes before. The Oxford historian Jose Harris writes of the “adolescent tendresse” he had felt for “the dashing Sarah Austin”, translator and wife of the legal philosopher. Mill had later fallen for the musician Eliza Flower. All the same, as one of his friends had it, on the subject “of women, he was a child”.

It was, foremost, an intellectual relationship. Indeed, there is nothing in Mill’s Autobiography to satisfy prurient curiosity. Harriet was drawn less to what Caroline Fox, a mutual friend, described as his “exquisitely chiselled countenance” than his dazzling mind. Her husband John, in Carlyle’s words “an innocent, dull good man”, knew his limitations and was, by the standards of his time, an astonishingly liberal character. Between the married Harriet and Mill, dinner invitations, and later assignations in France, ensued; her husband considerately absented himself, to give the couple the privacy they needed. The affair remained unconsummated. “A Seelenfreundin to both men,” Mill’s biographer Richard Reeves suggests, Harriet stayed “faithful to both men by having sex with neither”. Mill and his mistress — later wife, on John’s passing — were what we would probably call sapiosexuals.

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It is possible, Harriet’s biographer Jo Ellen Jacobs surmises, that she had syphilis, which would explain why her second was a childless marriage, though it could well have been the upshot of Mill’s anti-natalism. He posited an inverse relationship between sexual and intellectual appetite, blaming working-class fecundity on their being thick as mince. Mill may have died a virgin. At any rate, none of this prevented the scandal that unfolded upon his marriage, prompting the newlyweds to withdraw completely from society. It was just as well. Isolation breeds intellectual independence, and the Mills’ folie à deux was most certainly a fecund one, intellectually speaking.

Ironically for a child prodigy, Mill’s damascene conversion came rather late in life. Harriet and her partner developed a “collaborative self”. True, the title pages of Principles of Political Economy, On Liberty, and The Subjection of Women carry Mill’s name, but they were very much co-authored enterprises. Her influence is all over these works. Gone were Mill’s Ricardian reassurances about the importance of private property. In its place came the recognition — no surprise to both renters and landlords in Britain today — that “the laws of property have heaped impediments upon some to give advantage to others; they have purposely fostered inequalities and prevented all from starting fair in the race”.

Successive editions of the Principles grew increasingly radical, feeding off both Mill’s mesmerised infatuation with Harriet and morbid fascination with French politics. During the July Revolution of 1830, Mill could be found in Paris singing the Marseillaise at the opera. And during the Spring of 1848, when anti-monarchical sentiment swept Europe, he lamented that England remained eirenic. Robespierre was “the greatest man that ever lived”. The extermination of all those who earned north of £500 a year (he himself earned £600) would be no great loss to humanity.

And so the technocrat embraced populism. That the Commons was “composed of millionaires” did not worry him in the 1830s: what mattered was “not by whom we are governed, but how”. By the 1860s, Harriet’s influence ascendant, his tune had changed: “There can be no parliamentary reform worthy of the name so long as a seat in Parliament is only attainable by rich men.” In the interim, Mill had succumbed to what he would later call his beloved’s “heretical” opinions on the “probable futurity of the labouring classes”. In the wake of the Paris Commune, he called for a cap on inheritance, by which time he had already declared himself in favour of a freeze on rail fares, cooperatives, and greater trade union power — albeit only to “heal the feud between capitalists and labourers”. Gardens and baths could be nationalised, he argued.

Harriet “made me move forward more boldly”, he wrote in his Autobiography, but he stopped short of demanding full-blown statism. John Stuart Mill, Socialist, to quote a recent title, is pushing it. Take his view on democracy. Railing against majoritarian tyranny, Mill betrayed the same technocratic fantasies that plague Remoaner centrists today — ruled by Gina Miller and the perfectly smug Jolyon Maugham. In Considerations on Representative Government, in many senses his weakest effort, Mill makes the case for an enlightened epistocracy: only those who pass a literacy and numeracy test would be eligible to vote. The experts know better. Elsewhere, he wistfully hoped for the day when “the uninstructed” shall show “deference and submission to the authority of the instructed”. Here as well, we see Harriet’s hand. In the 1850s, Mill wrote that he and Harriet were “much less democrats than I had been, because so long as education continues to be so wretchedly imperfect, we dreaded the ignorance and especially the selfishness and brutality of the mass”.

Then there were Mill’s attacks on the polar opposites of the class system, both parasitic: the rentier aristocracy and the lumpenproletariat. The latter, in particular, were singled out for criticism; they were “often very much to blame for bringing themselves into a position in which they require relief”. Worse, they could do with birth control — administered with force: Mill was not averse to using state power to forbid marriages “unless the parties can show that they have the means of supporting a family”, not to mention making welfare cheques contingent on family planning. This was, of course, for their own good. It was because the lower orders bred like rabbits that real wages had been sent plummeting. Harriet had her own reasons for extolling the benefits of smaller families: more children meant more domestic drudgery for women.

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Harriet’s guiding hand was more palpably registered in On Liberty. Many of its key ideas, Jo Ellen Jacobs tells us, can be directly traced to her early writings. Today, Mill’s liberalism has become a shorthand for individualism. But as the Oxford philosopher Alan Ryan reminds us, this is a mischaracterisation. On Liberty combines both a “positive” and a “negative” idea of liberty, but it is only the latter it is known for. This is the gospel of toleration: live and let live (so long as it doesn’t harm others). Verging perilously close to the autobiographical, practically telling on his own dangerous liaison, Mill castigates the American intolerance for Mormon polygamy. Prostitution and gambling, too, ought to be tolerated, he argued. But his relationship with Harriet was equally to be felt in Mill’s “positive” conception of liberty. Here is the communitarian, as opposed to individualist, strain in his thinking. Mill expected the bourgeoisie to show leadership, working for the greater social good on the behalf of the working class that looked up to it.

More than shaping his views on equality and liberty, Harriet above all won Mill over to female suffrage. Indeed, his reputation as an apostle of gender equality in great measure rests on her interventions. Mill’s father, it should be remembered, had concluded in his Essay on Government that women’s interests were essentially the same as those of their fathers and husbands; extending the vote to them was essentially superfluous. The younger Mill’s progress, acutely shepherded by Harriet, led him to question the wisdom of this line of thought. He may have been an incorrigible bore — and Stefan Collini is on to something when he observes that a compendium of Mill’s wit would be “a slim one indeed” — but we owe one of the better ripostes to the votaries of the male franchise to him: excluding women was about as absurd as denying the vote to redheads.

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Mill also made an early foray into the pronoun wars, replacing “his” with “their” in the third edition of the Principles, at Harriet’s instigation. In The Subjection of Women, he challenged the institution of marriage, for depriving women of the rights to property, inheritance, and divorce. In 1867, Mill introduced the first bill proposing suffrage for women in the Commons. He died in Avignon five years later, leaving half his estate to promote women’s education.

Mill may have started his intellectual journey as a utilitarian, but he ended it, more than anything else, as a utopian. And it was that restless font of reform, Harriet Taylor, who was responsible for this. Her brilliance and ebullience were, undoubtedly, very infectious. But I wonder if they might have got carried away, putting so much store in Progress. British society evidently was less Millian than they imagined. They felt sure, for example, that Britain was to be “republicanised … before we die”. There is some irony, then, that the 150th anniversary of Mill’s death will find the country not only not republicanised but in the mad throes of coronation hysteria.

But the barrister and lesbian Allison Bailey may have put a stop to this. Yesterday’s ruling in her case Bailey v Stonewall and Garden Court Chambers found that she had been victimised and discriminated against by her employer for expressing gender critical beliefs. Such was the oppressiveness of Garden Court’s actions against her, she was awarded aggravated damages: £22,000. These are only granted where a discriminator’s actions are particularly unnecessary, high-handed or oppressive.

Bailey also sued Stonewall for inducing, instructing or causing some of GCC’s actions — she had accused the charity of “trans-extremism” — but she didn’t win that aspect of the case. As a result, Stonewall and its supporters, including Owen Jones and Pink News, are celebrating. In their blinkered view, she has lost. However, this is to disregard the consequences of interrogating the extreme ideology and methods perpetuated by Stonewall. Bailey’s tribunal has tracked the ideological trajectory of what was once the foremost activist for gay rights, and put the absurdity of its activism under the spotlight.

Back in 2018, Bailey complained to her chambers when they signed up to Stonewall’s Diversity Champions Programme (DCP), which gives training and guidance on how to be “inclusive employers”. At the height of its power, more than 950 organisations were signed up to what Bailey and many others have called the “protection racket“. But she, along with many other lesbians and gay men, objected to the charity’s stance on trans issues, which included its uncritical promotion of self-ID. Such was Bailey’s disenchantment, she helped set up the LGB alliance which advocated for the rights of lesbians, gay men and bisexuals. This, in turn, was labelled a “hate group” by trans activists.

There can be no doubt that Stonewall, in its aggressive and uncompromising support for extreme transgender ideology and a refusal to discuss or debate alternative viewpoints, helped fuelled the fire already raging against Bailey for her gender critical views and support for the LGB Alliance. In 2019, Kirrin Medcalf, Stonewall’s Head of Trans Inclusion, emailed the heads of GCC accusing Bailey of “making and retweeting multiple transphobic statements online”. Examples included “liking and writing posts referring to trans women as men”, and “writing tweets calling for trans people to lose their current legal rights”. The latter was because Bailey was protesting the fact that male-bodied sex offenders were being placed in women’s prisons.

According to Medcalf, “her actions… threatened the positive relationship that Stonewall and GCC have built with the trans community”. He accused Bailey of making trans people feel “unsafe” if they were to even catch a glimpse of her while visiting GCC. Medcalf stated: “For Garden Court Chambers to continue associating with a barrister who is actively campaigning for a reduction in trans rights and equality, while also specifically targeting members of our staff with transphobic views on a public platform, puts us in a difficult position with yourselves: the safety of our staff and community will always be Stonewall’s first priority. I trust that you will do what is right and stand in solidarity with trans people.”

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According to Bailey, the charity appeared to be threatening to distance itself from GCC if GCC did not make the decision to cut ties with her. During the six-week hearing, at which 30 witnesses in total were cross examined, Bailey claimed that some GCC barristers were invested in trans ideology, and that if the relationship with Stonewall were to become fractious it would be difficult for chambers to take on potentially lucrative trans rights cases.

As a result of Stonewall’s complaints, Bailey was asked by heads of chambers to remove the reference to chambers on her Twitter bio, which she did. However, without her knowledge, GCC then tweeted that the criminal barrister was under investigation by her chambers, which implied she had done something wrong.

An investigation into the complaints about Bailey, including those by Stonewall, was ordered by GCC management and carried out by Maya Sikand QC. Seeking advice from Cathryn McGahey QC, Vice Chair of the Bar Council’s ethics committee, she was informed that two of Bailey’s tweets were “probably over the borderline of acceptable conduct”.

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One concerned a trans activist named Morgan Page, who had recently been hired by Stonewall. In 2012, Page ran a workshop entitled “Overcoming the Cotton Ceiling: Breaking Down Sexual Barriers for Queer Trans Women”. The “cotton” is a reference to women’s underwear, and a number of lesbians had taken serious offence at the notion that male bodied transwomen had attended workshops in order to overcome difficulties in accessing sex with lesbians.

Bailey, on discovering that Page was working with Stonewall, tweeted that Page is “a male-bodied person who ran workshops with the sole aim of coaching heterosexual men who identify as lesbians on how they can ‘coerce’ young lesbians into having sex with them”. At the tribunal, Stonewall attempted to deny that Page’s actions had anything to do with coercing lesbians into sex; in evidence, though, Bailey was convincing in her arguments that it was precisely that. Stonewall’s Chief Executive, Nancy Kelley, was revealed, in a leaked email to the BBC, to have described those women who resisted cotton-ceiling indoctrination as “sexual racists” because expressing preference in sexual partners was “discriminatory”.

In giving evidence in the tribunal, McGahey defended the concept of overcoming the “cotton ceiling” and compared it with initiatives to promote racial integration in post-apartheid South Africa. McGahey, at the conclusion of the 2019 investigation, decided that Bailey’s use of the word “coerce” was unfounded and directed that Bailey should delete her tweet. Bailey refused.

Complaints about two separate tweets were upheld — the cotton ceiling tweet, and also one in which Bailey wrote, following a report in The Sunday Times about the investigation she was subject to, “I and many other women are grateful to The Times for fairly and accurately reporting on the appalling levels of intimidation, fear and coercion that are driving the Stonewall UK trans self ID agenda.”

Both tweets were castigated even though they were true.

Although GCC claimed that the language used by Bailey went beyond the belief that sex rather than gender is fundamentally important, the tribunal found that all of Bailey’s pleaded beliefs, not just the belief that “woman is sex not gender”, are protected (this protection was established by the Employment Appeal Tribunal in the case brought by Maya Forstater).

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That’s why it was found that GCC discriminated against Bailey when it published its statement on Twitter that she was under investigation. It was also found that in upholding Stonewall’s complaint against her, GCC victimised Bailey. Vitally, the tribunal held that Bailey’s protected gender critical beliefs also include the belief that “Gender identity theory as proselytised by Stonewall is severely detrimental to women and to lesbians” and is a protected philosophical belief under the Equality Act 2010.

The fact that a chamber full of experts in human rights law did not adhere to the Equality Law 2010 is staggering; it’s a stark example of how workplaces and other institutions can be influenced by the definition of “transphobia” exhorted by Stonewall.

It has long been known that Stonewall exerts undue influence and instills fear in so many institutions and workplaces when they step out of line on the trans ideology it promotes. This is one reason why it is difficult to take Stonewall seriously when it claims: “The case heard by the Employment Tribunal did not accurately reflect our intentions and our influence on organisations.”

Bailey spent all of her adult life fighting sexism and homophobia and was horrified when she first pushed back against the Stonewall dictats to find that women questioning the new orthodoxy were being labelled Terfs, bigots and fascists. She, too, found herself on the receiving end of death threats; it cost her enormously to stand up and fight. Regardless, Bailey, with Maya Forstater and other courageous truth tellers, has lifted the lid on institutions and individuals who should have known better.

Upon hearing the Tribunal decision Bailey said: “I did not win everything, but I won the most important thing: I have brought Stonewall’s methods into the public eye, and I have shown them for what they now are.”

Stonewall had become as impenetrable and unaccountable as its namesake. But Bailey made sure it was finally held to account and will no longer be able to act with impunity when it comes to peddling its trans ideology and misinterpretation of the law. Organisations that put “Stonewall Law” before Equality Law will now be aware that they could now be acting unlawfully. In removing Stonewall’s right to silence she exposed them for the immoral parasites they have become.

In Stage Three of this process as seen during the Black Lives Matter protests, you’ll remember, right-wing media were filled with hair-raising scare stories about what BLM really wanted. “Revealed:” burbled the Daily Mail. “The British arm of Black Lives Matter’s full agenda – abolish the police, smash capitalism and close all prisons”. No reference to this loose and decentralised racial justice movement went unaccompanied by mention that three of the prominent figures in it had described themselves as “trained Marxists”. You feel on stronger ground, I suppose, resisting a movement that you’ve decided wants to tear capitalist society and its institutions to bits than one that asks us to give people of colour an equitable stake in society and the hope of walking the streets without being harassed by the cops.

Yet, capitalism being miraculously forgiving, we have now entered Stage Four. Robin DiAngelo, of White Fragility fame, makes her main living as a “diversity consultant”, and is reported to charge north of £10,000 for a speech. She lectured Coca-Cola last year on “Confronting Racism”. And a brace of new books in her tradition indicates that far from wanting to smash for-profit workplaces, the diversity-industrial complex now wants to make capitalism safe for diversity. We have reached the stage, in other words, that trained Marxists would call co-optation.

Two books — one by Y-Vonne Hutchinson, How To Talk To Your Boss About Race: Speaking Up Without Getting Shut Down, and the other, A Judgement-Free Guide To Diversity and Inclusion for Straight White Men by Felicity Hassan and Suki Sandhu — are similar in scope and approach, though Hutchinson’s primary focus is race, while Hassan and Sandhu cover racism, sexism, ageism and homo/bi/transphobia too. They’re both aiming squarely at the business how-to market, most shamelessly in the case of the latter, which again and again mentions the “business case” for diversity and inclusion and barely makes the moral case at all.

In genre terms, we’re seeing the collision of two well established discourses: the boilerplate of antiracist discourse folded into the numbing cliches of the business self-help manual. This has the unfortunate effect, at least stylistically and in publishing terms, of making the case for antiracism or workplace diversity read like another vogue in management style — the new “mindfulness”, say — rather than an urgent moral imperative.

The books adhere to the same, by now familiar, theoretical framework — with leading anti-racists DiAngelo, Kimberlé Crenshaw, and Ibram X Kendi liberally and respectfully cited, and microaggressions and privilege given the traditional working over. They both address the reader in a buttonholing, folksy way. “If you feel concerned that you may now be labeled ‘cisgender’ for the first time in your life, hold onto that thought”, say Hassan and Sandhu. “It’s all part of the learning curve”. Hutchinson opens with the words: “Let’s cut the bullshit”. If you resist any of this, in other words, it’s just another sign that you need to do “the work”.

That doesn’t mean, I should say, that the ideas they’re selling are in broad strokes wrong. We can agree that people from historically marginalised minorities continue to be disadvantaged even when they achieve de jure equality. To take one of the most obvious examples, racial disadvantage in the US is generationally baked in in all sorts of ways, and prejudice survives and adapts to legal remedies. This is why it makes sense to talk about “structural racism”.

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There is much evidence — cited generously in both these books — for the notion that not only are black and brown people disproportionately under-represented in agreeable and well-paid jobs, but that more black and brown people in those jobs would make everyone, not just the black and brown people, richer and happier. And that what goes for black and brown people goes, in the broadest sense possible, for other minorities. It’s also true to say, as both these books do, that privileged people – white, cis-male, straight, able-bodied etc – can get a bit defensive when confronted with their complicity in such a system. Hassan and Sandhu address themselves, primarily, to the notional white dude standing in the way of reform; Hutchinson, primarily, to the person of colour seeking to start a Difficult Conversation with that white dude.

They both offer, in styles apt to the genre (Hassan and Sandhu: Venn diagrams, bullet-points, away-day exercises and wince-making tint-panels in which the likes of Richard Branson puff themselves by spouting abstract bromides about how much they value diversity), explanations of the jargon of the territory for bewildered newcomers, and hand-holding step-by-steps on how to help to centre marginal voices, be a good ally, and be the change in the world that you want to see. Most of the practical advice is not unobvious. Hutchinson, that said, has useful points to make about the way in which the task of changing workplace culture can all too easily fall on the unpaid labour of minority employees, and warns all too plausibly of how corporate HR departments are generally more interested in shielding the company from legal and financial risk than treating individual employees fairly.

But there’s little sense in either book that the received ideas or the received vocabulary of antiracism or gender politics needs any interrogation. This is, perhaps in keeping with the turn in identity politics where an individual’s own sense of themselves (in the case of the argument over aspects of queer and trans identity) or of their experience of oppression (in the case of much race discourse) holds an almost theological authority: that unless you have “lived experience” you don’t just have an inferior standing to consider the issues, but no standing at all.

Both books proceed from a position of epistemic confidence. “Is your workplace racist?” asks Hutchinson. “The short and simple answer is nearly certainly yes. The more nuanced answer is still nearly certainly yes”. What can the reader do? They can start, say Hassan and Sandhu, by “learning the language of diversity and inclusion”. A set of terms, rather than a set of ideas. “Set up a debate to debunk the philosophy that women compete more with each-other than their male counterparts”, they advise chirpily at one point. Foregone conclusions, regardless of the subject, isn’t what debates are traditionally about.

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Yet the vocabulary is contested; and the remedies, when it comes down to fine detail, are contested too. Hassan and Sandhu make a distinction, for instance, between “diversity” and “inclusion” (though they seem to muddle the two at other points) and between “equity” and “equality”. They disagree with Hutchinson, a little, on “unconscious bias”. The Judgment-Free Guide finds the notion useful; How To Talk thinks we should stop pussyfooting around and call it racism, so as not to centre white people, their intentions and their feelings in a conversation about the harms done to people of colour. Do you capitalise “Ally”, as Hassan and Sandhu do, but leave “white” lower-case; or do you capitalise “White”, as Hutchinson does, and leave “ally” lower-case? At this point, I should say, my fragility is perhaps causing me to indulge in what Hutchinson identifies as the racist-in-denial tactic of “sealioning”: “focusing on details and small points of argumentation rather than the larger themes of the discussion”.

What I can say, which I don’t think is my fragility talking, is that however we may endorse those larger themes, or humbly submit to be educated by the emotional labour of their authors, this subject’s established orthodoxies can make for wearyingly abstract and repetitive writing. “Power is not binary”, Hutchinson writes, “It’s multifaceted and fluid”. I lost count of the number of times Hutchinson uses the word “leverage”, or Hassan and Sandhu — the front of whose book promises “everything you need to lead positive change” — talk about “journeys” and “driving change” (though, be it said, these are more the failings of bollocksy business books than identity politics books per se). As a side-note, isn’t it careless when writing about diversity and tolerance to quote, as Judgement-Free Guide does, Henry Ford and Chairman Mao — one antisemite, one mass-murderer — with approval? That’s a bit more judgement-free than many of us will be comfortable with.

Both these books default too often to a tissue of generalities and buzzphrases that tend to leave little or no impression on the mind. That isn’t sealioning. You can agree that the elimination of structural racism and all the other structural-isms is an urgent necessity, and still wish that writing on the subject were lively and original and precise; indeed, the more you recognise the urgency the more you’ll want some decent books on the subject. It’s a bit depressing to think that wine made from the vineyards of Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass and James Baldwin has found its way into bottles designed by Tom Peters.

They would have recognised that the rhetoric of levelling up can all too easily be conscripted as a clever alibi for the maintenance of the status quo. It implies that those of us who are wealthy do not need to change our ways, that others can aspire to our level, that levelling up for some will not mean levelling down for others. Levelling up doesn’t frighten the rich. It implies that no one is going to take their precious cake away.

Of course, cake is the very last thing that the Prime Minister wants us to be thinking about now. Not only because it has become a symbol of the “one rule for us, another for them” thinking that has come to characterise his premiership. But also because he has ostentatiously broken the golden rule of class camouflage. As Keynes put it: “the capitalist classes were allowed to call the best part of the cake theirs and were theoretically free to consume it, on the tacit underlying condition that they consumed very little of it in practice.” Boris, meanwhile, has his cheeks stuffed full and has crumbs all down his shirt.

So, desperate to avoid all mention of cake, Boris is off to Scotland for the half-term break to promote his levelling up agenda. It’s the great Boris rebranding exercise, a tour of less-well-off places that will benefit from his big plan. That is what we are supposed to think, anyway. It turns out that many of the places that have been awarded early levelling up funds are Tory-run areas that are relatively prosperous. Savid Javid’s constituency of Bromsgrove is set to receive £14.5 million and Nadine Dorries’s neck of the woods of Bedfordshire £26.7 million. Both of these areas are in the least deprived fifth of local authorities in the UK.

Economists like cake too, of course. Some think the important thing is that it is divided up equally. Others that it needs to be grown, with everyone getting a bigger piece even if that means some still get more than others. The Prime Minister — like pretty much all-mainstream political parties, with the possible exception of the Greens — is of this latter view. If the size of the cake remains the same, more for the poor will mean less for the rich. But if we grow the cake, we can support the poor without bothering the rich. One of these options is electoral kryptonite, the other is electoral gold.

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There is a reason the Greens are the most sceptical about growth. As David Attenborough put it in his latest book: “Our first lesson from nature concerns growth. We have arrived at this moment of desperation as a result of our desire for perpetual growth in the world economy. But in a finite world, nothing can increase forever.” In other words, at some point the cake doesn’t get any bigger. Or rather, it gets bigger at the expense of the health of the planet. We all watch his lovely TV programmes, we ooh and aah at the cute images, we have a bit of a cry, we think of him as a national treasure. But we totally ignore the punchline.

The trouble with the growth is that is has been historically very bad at pricing in all the consequences of our comfortable lifestyles — things like carbon emission and nuclear waste. And if those, like Attenborough, who predict disaster are even half right, then the challenge for the foreseeable future will not be how to level up but how most of us can learn to level down. Levelling up is a luxury we can no longer afford.

No doubt the Tories will point to the fact that the levelling up agenda includes “£26 billion of public capital investment for the green industrial revolution and a transition to New Zero”. Which is another way of saying that the best way to get to less carbon is more and better capitalism, appropriately directed, supported by more and better technology. More gives us less. Of course we should be suspicious.

Tories will also say that Attenborough’s thought is dangerously watermelon-like: green on the outside, red in the middle. Some years ago, the philosopher Derek Parfit gave what is often said to be the decisive argument against egalitarianism: “Suppose that those who are better off suffer some misfortune, so that they become as badly off as everyone else. Since these events would remove the inequality, they must be in one way welcome… even though they would be worse off for some people, and better for no one. This implication seems to many to be quite absurd. I call this the Levelling Down Objection.” Equality, of the sort loved by the Left, makes no sense if it addresses the question of blindness by putting out everyone else’s eyes — so goes the Parfit objection to the levelling down agenda.

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But this only works if we are sure that levelling up genuinely means aspiring to something better. Parfit’s levelling down criticism is an objection to equality as an end in itself. But the argument being put forward by radical Greens isn’t about equality; it’s that some version of levelling down — of the wealthy, even the moderately wealthy, having less, producing less, consuming less — is what we need to achieve in order for us to save the planet from catastrophe.

If Boris’s levelling up agenda is little more than a pork-barrel electoral ploy targeted at floating voters, and one that leaves a dangerous economic complacency intact, then “up” isn’t better, but just another meaningless metaphor — like growth itself — that reinforces our refusal to face what we are doing to the planet. If Attenborough is right, growth is killing us. So “up” isn’t always good. And we need more politicians brave enough to say it: we need to be talking more about levelling down as an aim, not as something to avoid.

Yes, there are very many people who do require a lot more economic support — some of whom live in this country, but most of whom don’t. The reduction of that tiny sliver of cake that this country used to give to the poorest in the world in foreign aid — from 0.7% of GDP to 0.5% — is an indication that Johnson doesn’t really give two hoots about levelling up the poorest in the world. So don’t be deceived: his levelling up agenda is just a smidgeon of Left-leaning cosplay to tickle up a few Red Wall voters. We should learn to despise this grinning cynicism.

Yet the proponents of levelling down still feel like grumpy Old Testament prophets, mad Green voices of doom crying in the wilderness. They are telling us something we do not want to hear. Something no one would ever vote for. I suppose Christianity has had a hand in associating “up” with something good and better and “down” with something bad. Up is towards heaven, down is towards the fiery pit and everlasting damnation. But these days, we are being led into fire by the language of more and of up.

But I always interrupted. I shouted over him to say things like “When I grow up, I will be a doctor”, or “Maybe I’ll go into engineering”, or “I will be President!”. I fantasised about becoming an army general so I could set my father free from prison, where he was being held as a political prisoner. Every time I saw a plane fly overhead (which was not as frequent back in those days), I would declare that I would grow up to be a pilot. I thought I had limitless options. I was a dreamer.

The response from most adults, both men and women, was always the same: “If God wanted you to be anything other than a wife and mother, he would have created you a man.” My kinder relatives would at least attempt to base their prejudice against women on something more than “God’s will”. They would say that women were not designed to do certain jobs, that it went against the natural order. My uncles and cousins would explain that every woman they knew who attempted to take a man’s job had failed. They insisted that it was actually a blessing to be a female and I should be happy since they had to work, while I got to enjoy the fruits of their labour and protection.

For many women around the world, a similar, deeply ingrained misogyny remains a part of everyday life. Yet there are also countless examples of women who prove this persistent myth to be wrong. Today, especially in the West, there are women who do — and excel at — all the things I dreamed of as a child and much more.

Nevertheless, there is now a ridiculous campaign in America (which is fast spreading to other countries), that seeks to fast-track the closing of the inequality gap and eliminate all prejudice against women in one fell swoop. The result is a caricaturing of a very complex situation: it is one thing to develop animation characters for Disney that feature girls and women as superheroes or to swap a woman for James Bond, but it is quite another to place women in high-profile positions when they are clearly unqualified for the job. As we are starting to discover, doing so only affirms prejudices.

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By Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Enter Kamala Harris. When Joe Biden was searching for a running mate, it seems he had just two requirements: black and female. The Democratic Party agreed, pressuring Biden to select a “diverse” candidate for vice president; at one point, he boasted of having to choose between four black women. Biden plucked out Harris from his narrow search field and what did he get? A vice president who is unhelpful in advancing his agenda and unable to connect with the American people.

This week marked the second time Biden slipped up and referred to his deputy as “President Harris”. But don’t be fooled. His mistake says more about his own level of competence than Harris’s. As we approach the one-year mark of Biden’s presidency, it is obvious that Harris was set up for failure from the start. She had neither the experience nor the demeanour to be a successful vice president. Biden’s approval ratings may have slumped, but they have nothing on his Veep’s.

Her failure is so embarrassing that even traditional allies are starting to flee. CNN, which traditionally fawns over black female Democrats, published a blistering hit on her late last year, painting her office as dysfunctional. A former employee described her management style as having destructive patterns. Since her disastrous trip to the southern border last June, at least seven of her close aides have resigned.

While I have never been a fan of Kamala Harris, it does sadden me to see her fail so miserably. I had hoped the first female vice president would prove a success. After all, her failures affect more than just the White House and the Democratic Party; they affect women everywhere. On one level, Harris’s failures affirm the beliefs of misogynists who incorrectly believe that women are not capable of holding such weighty positions. It provides fodder to those men like my uncles and cousins, validating their prejudices against women.

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More depressing, however, is the impact it could have on women: it’s not too difficult to see how Harris becoming the target of ridicule could dissuade young girls from taking such positions in the future. For them to see a woman finally make it to the position of Vice President and then fail so ignominiously is a massive discouragement to every girl dreaming of a big future.

But this is also the problem with quotas more broadly. Equality and empowerment can’t be achieved through bureaucratic box-ticking. It has to be fought for and earned. Harris, however, is a clear example of someone who has acquired her position due to her immutable characteristics, rather than her own abilities and achievements. The consequence of this isn’t hard to discern: any successful woman will wonder if she, too, were hired to fulfil a quota requirement, asking if she earned her position or were handed it.

What today’s activists fail to understand is that the key for any woman to succeed remains the same as it has always been: to prove that she is capable. Simply ticking the boxes of “female” or “minority” and expecting a good outcome might make you feel good about yourself in the short term. But in the real world, it is never enough. In the case of Harris, it is a recipe for incompetence.

I wasn’t wrong to dream of something better when I was a little girl, despite my family’s disbelief. Girls today deserve to do the same, with strong and successful female leaders setting an example. How sad, then, that arguably the most powerful female politician in the world embodies neither of these qualities. All America is left with is a failed black woman. And there’s nothing progressive about that.

To put it rather crudely, some consider themselves to be “virtually normal” (as Andrew Sullivan’s 1995 book argued). By which I mean they want nothing more than equality before the law so that that they can get on with living lives which are pretty much — except in the bedroom — just like everyone else’s. Others, though, consider themselves to be outlaws: their experience of same-sex desire placing them outside of mainstream, “heteronormative” society and they (at least in the case of gay men) would never be so bourgeois as to restrict sexual activity to the bedroom.

It’s the conservatives versus the radicals: the former position is the traditional “equality” argument; the latter is the more “liberationist” one.

But this good-natured debate is as nothing compared to the division that has opened up in lesbian and gay communities following Stonewall’s 2015 decision to re-formulate homosexuality around the nebulous concept of “gender identity”. Its policy today, which it has promoted through its Diversity Champions scheme, is that biological sex is less important than self-declared “gender identity” — an inner feeling of being either man or woman, male or female, which, according to Stonewall, is an identity we all possess. It follows that biological males can be lesbians, and biological females can be gay men. To disagree is transphobic.

It has riven us like never before, and only now is society waking up to this as a slew of private and public institutions pull out of the Diversity Champions scheme. Ofcom is the latest to quit stating that taking part “poses a conflict or risk of perceived bias”.

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The breadth of support Stonewall enjoyed until now was predicated on its small-c conservative agenda; lobbying for legislative equality and wider social acceptance of LGB people, and seeing legislative equality and social acceptance as linked. Its consensus-seeking agreeableness enabled buy-in from politicians of Left and Right. In particular, the issues of civil partnerships and same-sex marriage enabled socially conservative politicians to be absorbed into the equality project.

For radical liberationists, a background of legislative equality was tacitly welcome as a precondition to a more disruptive ultimate goal. On the whole, whether you wanted assimilation or a radically “queer” reshaping of society, Stonewall’s activities were largely uncontroversial among lesbian and gay people.

But the gender identity handbrake-turn fractured that consensus. Stonewall’s strategy for dealing with the fallout has been to insist that there can be “no debate”, characterising entreaties to discussion as equal to debating trans people’s very existence.

The “no debate” strategy was intended to delegitimise opponents’ views while the charity worked behind the scenes with the Government to drive through its preferred changes to the Equality Act and the Gender Recognition Act before critical voices could get a public hearing.

Today, the “no debate” shield is starting to fail. This is largely down to all those women who refused to concede that a man who claims to to “identify” as a woman counts as a woman in exactly the same way as a biological female does. Stonewall’s stance on gender identity, and the public consultation on the GRA in 2018, created some powerfully angry grassroots women’s organisations, such as Woman’s Place UK and Fair Play For Women. It also produced the LGB Alliance, founded by seasoned lesbian activists Kate Harris and Bev Jackson. (Full disclosure: I was involved in the early planning of LGBA.)

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This means that there are now two lobbying charities aiming to represent lesbian and gay people. Stonewall, which argues that the policies and principles of LGB Alliance (prioritising biological sex over gender identity) are transphobic, and LGB Alliance, which argues that the policies and principles of Stonewall (prioritising gender identity over biological sex) are homophobic.

Nothing represents the extent of this schism more powerfully than the intervention of Simon Callow — a gay man who came out publicly in 1984, five years before Stonewall was founded, when gay and lesbian people were commonly hounded by the tabloid press, and when the age of consent for gay men was still 21. Earlier this week Callow pointed out Stonewall’s “strange turn to the tyrannical” regarding self-identification. And described the “extraordinarily unproductive militancy” that surrounds its current position.

As for the charity’s ideological shift, he said: “When it impinges on women’s rights, hard-won women’s rights, the right to exclusive spaces for women, away from any threat at all — I think that’s a very serious issue.”

This must be discussed, he pointed out reasonably.

But reason is in short supply. The last few years of gay and lesbian politics has turned the consensus which held for thirty years upside down. Our most reliable lobbying charity, within which most of us used to be able to see at least something of ourselves, has become radicalised and divisive, igniting and reframing that discussion which had simmered in the background but never seemed existentially important in the way that it now does, namely — what does it mean to be gay or lesbian? Who are we?

For many of us, Stonewall’s position conflicts profoundly with how we feel about our gay or lesbian nature. Let me put it bluntly; I experience sexual desire for men, not human beings of either sex who claim to identify as men. My sexual orientation is towards male bodies — and yes, that means male genitalia too. If you explore this on Twitter (and I don’t recommend it) you will encounter people minimising same-sex desire to “genital preference”, arguing that it is inherently transphobic. Stonewall has avoided endorsing this view — but it has also avoided speaking up for specifically same-sex desire.

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For three decades, Stonewall was broadly representative of the majority of people for whom it lobbied. There was only occasional dissent — a minor kerfuffle over whether or not it should follow up its successful campaign for civil partnerships with lobbying for same-sex marriage, for example. But now, through the fog and noise, one thing is becoming clear; Stonewall’s legitimacy is eroding, and with it the illusion that there is one LGBT community, to which the vast majority of us affiliate.

Tibetans are no longer à la mode, though the destruction of their civilisation by the Chinese state continues, and few opinion-formers consider the persecution of Christians in the Middle East worth mentioning. Little is heard any more of the Yazidi, despite their still being a target of genocide by Isis. The Kurds are receiving media attention following their betrayal by Trump, but it will surely not be long before they are re-forgotten. Being identified as a victim of injustice has become a kind of privilege, handed out to favoured groups and denied to others according to the shifting diktats of progressive opinion.

A certain arbitrariness goes with demands for social justice. Possibly for this reason, SJWs (social justice warriors) are intolerant of criticism. In the US, anyone who argues that despairing Appalachian proles might be more deserving of concern than middle-class student protesters is condemned as a white supremacist, and their views suppressed. The suggestion that individuals and groups may suffer different degrees and kinds of injustice is rejected as reactionary thinking. Overthrow the prevailing power structures, and injustice will simply vanish. Anyone who questions this vision is not just wrong but evil.

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How the liberal West is dismantling itself

By John Gray

The trouble is that the imperatives of social justice are inherently conflicting. Distributing the goods of society according to equality and merit are not just competitors in practice. Merit and equality are inherently antagonistic values. A number of recent studies have argued — correctly — that the meritocratic claims of western liberal societies are at best partly justified, if not actually fraudulent. But a society that was perfectly just by meritocratic standards would be extremely unjust in egalitarian terms. Some injustices may be worse than others, but no world is imaginable which all the demands of social justice are fully realised.

Markets are condemned because the distribution of income and wealth is partly random. But so is the distribution of genes. If you aim to correct randomness in human fortunes, you may end up in the dystopian world of L.P. Hartley’s Facial Justice (1960), in which people who are “facially over-privileged” are encouraged to have their looks surgically altered. Conversely, gross disparities in educational opportunity are accepted as long as they cannot be defended in terms of merit. In the 1830s Lord Melbourne declared he liked the Order of the Garter best of all his titles because there was “no damned nonsense about merit” attached to it.

Egalitarian thinkers take a similar line today. Selection by ability by grammar schools is rejected by large swathes of progressive opinion. Quite a few seem to find it less objectionable to send their children to schools where selection is by parental income.

Contrary to a familiar line of criticism, there are few signs of hypocrisy in these people. Hypocrisy requires a measure of self-awareness, and there is little evidence of that in them. When they buy an expensive education for their children, might they not be expressing their conscientious revulsion against the evils of meritocracy? No doubt egalitarians who send their children to private schools — or are well-heeled enough to buy a house in a catchment area containing a socially selective comprehensive — are stacking the life-chances of their offspring against those of the majority. But why should any child be denied the good fortune of having progressive parents?

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Who will resist the great awokening?

By Eric Kaufmann

When it does not lead to tragedy, the pursuit of social justice quickly turns to comedy. It is tempting to conclude that the very idea should be junked.

That was the argument of F.A. Hayek, strongly articulated in his magnum opus The Constitution of Liberty and reiterated in the second volume of his trilogy Law, Legislation and Liberty: The Mirage of Social Justice. Market processes emerge and operate spontaneously, and the resulting distribution of income and wealth does not correspond to any criterion of a just distribution. Markets reward luck as well as talent and hard work. Being in the right place at the right time is as important in determining anyone’s fortunes as their abilities or virtues. The defence of free markets turns on their superior productivity, not any theory of rights or justice. For the same reason, Hayek opposed any attempt to correct market distributions for the sake of fairness. In his later writings he showed some sympathy for John Rawls’s theory of justice, but this was because Rawls rejected the idea that justice meant redistribution according to what people may be thought to deserve.

Like Rawls and the egalitarian left, Hayek rejected any ideal of meritocracy. In conversations I had with him in the Eighties, he often observed that the fact that the free market operated without regard to anyone’s beliefs about the good life was for him one of its advantages. The price of a virtuous economy would be stagnation. A certain moral indifference was necessary for continuing economic progress. In praising the amorality of free markets, Hayek was influenced by the Anglo-Dutch economist and satirist Bernard de Mandeville, author of the early-18th-century poem Fable of the Bees, which argued that the driving forces of wealth creation and prosperity were needs and impulses that Christianity condemned as vices.

Because it invokes values that are inherently antagonistic, social justice is indeed a mirage. But so is Hayek’s libertarian ideal of a social order in which the market operates without any controls. It is striking how little Hayek learnt from the political disasters of his lifetime (1899-1992) in which liberal regimes were repeatedly swept away by malfunctioning markets. The Nazis came to power on the back of massive economic dislocation. Roosevelt’s interventionism and British social democracy were responses to the Great Depression and the experience of full employment during the Second World War.

Hayek opposed government intervention in the economy because he believed it to be a threat to liberal values. The message of history, however, is that the surest way to overturn a liberal regime is to let the market rip. Events after Hayek’s death confirmed this lesson. The anarchic capitalism of the Yeltsin era produced Putin’s authoritarianism, and post-communist Europe’s populist regimes came to power partly because former communist officials so often benefited most from the shift to a market economy.

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Why I've reported Douglas Murray to the police

By Titania McGrath

If capitalism is legitimated solely by its productivity, anyone who fails to benefit from the wealth it creates has no reason to support a market system. A free market regime will be stable only if it delivers more or less uninterrupted growth and most people benefit from it. Except for a minimum income that protected against destitution, Hayek rejected any kind of intervention in the distribution of income produced by free markets. Yet as he acknowledged in his nod to Rawls, policies that alter market outcomes need not serve ideas of merit or moral deserts.

At present, when large sections of society have failed to benefit from many years of economic growth, measures going well beyond securing people against destitution are required. The goal must be to ensure a decent measure of economic security to everyone. Such policies need not invoke any ideal of social justice. The NHS does not exist in order to transfer resources from the healthy to the unwell, or even to provide medical care to those who cannot afford it. It is there to enable everyone to share a part of their vulnerability in common. Institutions of this kind do not serve distributive ends. They promote social cohesion, and thereby political stability.

Thinking about common institutions in this way is not another iteration of liberalism. The liberal preoccupation with distributive questions is part of the problem. What is needed is to shift to a way of thinking that is clearly post-liberal. Security and the need for a common life must be acknowledged as values that are as compelling as personal freedom, and frame a more coherent picture of a liveable society than inchoate visions of social justice.

The shift may be too great for liberal societies to accept. Protecting people from market-generated insecurity may involve some reduction of overall economic growth. In turn, any long-term slowdown requires high levels of solidarity among those affected. The social democracies of the past were all relatively closed societies — avowedly multi-ethnic but not radically multi-cultural. In practice, multi-culturalism is not so different from anomic individualism. Many are caught between communities and left without a common form of life. Yet that does not mean that large numbers yearn for release from the moral poverty of individualism. Many want greater security than they enjoy now, but not at the price of sacrificing the liberty to live as they please. It is a mistake to think most people in the affluent west want a different way of life.

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Taking on the Social Justice Warriors

By Eric Kaufmann

The largest obstacle to a shift in thinking on these issues is the zeal with which ideas of social justice are held and promoted. The goal of most SJWs is not to repair or improve society. Instead, they want to overthrow the existing social order. Accordingly, they are untroubled if pursuing social justice is actually socially divisive. Like Lenin before the revolution, they believe “worse is better”.

If there is anything approaching an iron law in history, however, it is that revolutions are followed by injustice worse than existed in the ancien régime. The French Revolution produced a war against the peasantry in the Vendée (1793-1796) which cost somewhere in excess of a hundred thousand lives. The Russian Revolution produced a lesser known peasant rebellion in the Tambov region (1920-21) in which similar or larger numbers perished. The American Revolution is no exception. For indigenous peoples, which under British rule were sheltered from settler expansion, it was an unmitigated disaster.

But history has no lessons for the “woke”. To accept that revolution only multiplies injustice would destroy the meaning of their lives. The social justice movement is not based on errors in fact or reasoning. It is a cult, whose chief beneficiaries are the SJWs themselves.

At this point we are back to Pascal. He was able to view the shifts and turns of human ideas of justice with equanimity because he was confident a higher justice existed. Lacking any such belief and incapable of living without a surrogate faith, SJWs find meaning in the fantasy of a secular millennium, a battle between good and evil followed by a world they cannot imagine.

When I was writing the piece I wondered whether there was a British parallel. London of course has extremes of wealth and poverty, but they’re stirred up together .

Further reading

The brutal apartheid of the French banlieues

By Peter Franklin

However, looking North for CityMetric, Sam Gregory argues that Sheffield is not one city but two:

“Sheffield A is a healthy, wealthy and leafy mix of greens, golf courses and gastropubs stretching from Fulwood and Ranmoor in the west to Nether Edge, Meersbrook and Dore in the south. This is the city that made international headlines in recent months with a campaign to protect its street trees from an incompetent and complacent council.

“Sheffield B is an adjacent but almost entirely unconnected city running down the Don from Upperthorpe to Hillsborough, up to Ecclesfield in the north and stretching to Tinsley, Attercliffe, Darnall and Gleadless Valley in the east. It is a place economically characterised by poverty, lack of opportunity, low-skilled work, poor quality housing stock and even poorer public transport.”

The west/south versus east/north split is remarkably similar to that of Paris, but Gregory draws a striking parallel with another European city:

“Uniquely for a British city, where pockets of deprivation are usually nestled uncomfortably between well-to-do suburbs, Sheffield’s dividing line runs directly through the city like the Berlin Wall. How did this happen?”

As it happens, I lived in Sheffield for three years as a student – so its Paris-like social geography should have occurred to me before.

The reason it didn’t is a telling one: almost all the students lived and studied and amused themselves in Sheffield A (though there may have been changes since my time). The politics and culture of the university was decidedly leftwing, albeit in a middle-class-but-pretending-not-to-be kind of way. The instinctively Labour but culturally conservative politics of much of working-class Sheffield was the one variety of leftism with no voice on campus. Indeed, there was very little about Sheffield B that impinged upon our solipsistic little world.

Sheffield is obviously a much smaller city than Paris, London or Berlin. You can travel from Sheffields A to B readily enough. Yet there are other kinds of distance. Gregory describes neighbourhoods along a bus route across the city where “average life expectancy falls by 7.5 years for men and almost 10 years for women”.

How did the city come to be so divided?

“The wealthier half, much of it dating from the turn-of-the-century, represents the flight of the managers and mill owners from the noise and smog of Blake’s ‘dark satanic mills’. The rich ensconced themselves in an enclave high above their employees, literally: Sheffield A is significantly hilly, particularly the parts that border the Peak District to the west. The spacious Victorian houses often feature spectacular views across the seven hills.”

This west-versus-east pattern can be seen in many cities with a long history – and is partly explained by prevailing wind patterns and their contribution to air quality. It could be that this general factor combined with Sheffield’s particular topography to produce an especially strong geographical gradient of social separation.

However, as in Paris, architecture and urban design has also had an impact. The traditional streets and dwellings of Sheffield A, while by no means uniformly luxurious – are attractive, adaptable and loved by their residents. They are organically self-sustaining.

Non-traditional architecture, especially that purpose-built for social housing (like Sheffield’s brutalist Park Hill estate) is very different. It comes into existence through top-down initiative and can only be sustained in the same fashion. In more than one sense of the word, it keeps its residents structurally dependent upon those with power.

Further reading

"Sneckdowns" and desire lines: A parable for the big data age

By Peter Franklin

In her recent speech to National Housing Federation, Theresa May said something surprisingly profound about social housing:

“Whether unintentionally or by design, the decisions we make about the homes we build for social rent – their location, quality and appearance – can all too easily make them distinct from the community in which they stand.

“This, in turn, can cement prejudice and stigma among those who live in them and wider society, leading to lowered expectations and restricted opportunities.

“It shouldn’t be this way.”

That’s right, it shouldn’t. But when one looks at the evolution of our cities, whether bigger ones like Paris or smaller ones like Sheffield, what stands out is that successful, sustainable patterns of development take hold when residents have genuine control and agency over the places they live in.

Politicians must therefore close their ears to the theories of fashionable architects (and their pockets to the donations of wealthy developers). The key to true regeneration is to give everyone the same chance to shape their own space.

Not, however, in the way we expected. There has been no revulsion against its excesses, nor at its far-fetched and impossibly exacting conclusions. It has become pointless not because it has been applied to ludicrous ideas nobody believes in, but because it is applied to everyday notions in support of any and every belief.

People still believe in it, but the ideology has become useless – precisely because it’s become pervasive and all-powerful. It can be used to argue for anything; as a result its proponents have started to splinter into opposing groupings and factions, always a prelude to schisms, like those that used to be notorious among Marxist groups.

Consider what happened when the French national team won the World Cup. The polemic that followed was rather more surprising than the outcome on the pitch. Rushing to score political-correctness points, some commentators noted that most of the players were of African descent.

Further reading

In theory, you’re a racist

By Peter Franklin

After all, what better way to celebrate racial equality than to point out the achievements of African players? And what better way to celebrate immigration than to note that without its African players, France would never have won.

The progressive position here is that we want to be recognised as equals, but also want to be valued as individuals with unique selves. Otherwise, equality will feel like self-sacrifice, served in unequal doses, because the point of arrival is much farther away for those with the ‘wrong’ skin colour or the ‘wrong’ accent.

Interestingly, just as this set of commentators was rushing to make their ‘PC’ remarks, another set quickly argued the opposite. Rather than celebrate the African origin of so many of the players, they maintained that we should ignore it. They were French, as French as anyone else, and to single them out on the basis of their skin colour or where their parents or grandparents were born was exactly what Marine Le Pen would do, in order to divide France into first and second-class citizens.

There was passion on both sides, the kind of passion that comes when you know you are making a morally educated point and advancing the cause of the oppressed. And yet both sides were all arguing opposing things. The cacophony came to a pitch when the comedian Trevor Noah and the French Ambassador to Washington Gérard Araud exchanged angry barbs on the matter.

Further reading

Can there ever be racial harmony in France?

By John Lichfield

Can anyone remember on which side of the debate either stood? I can’t. They are both perfectly respectable progressives always ready to take the side of justice against darkness. But what I do remember was the surprise shown by each man at the other’s approach. After all, the whole point of taking a politically correct position is supposed to be that you don’t have to argue for it, that it presents itself as self-evidently true. But now two opposite views were both claiming the mantle of indisputable truth – something that rather defeated the point of the exercise.

A few weeks later a second episode caught my attention. After it came to light that the new hire to the New York Times editorial board had tweeted violently racist messages in the past, it seemed obvious that the newspaper would have to rescind the appointment.

Yet it did not and Sarah Jeong, a tech writer, kept her job. Why? Because her tweets were directed against white people. Since whites are deemed to be the origin of racism, to fight racial hatred is to fight against white identity, even if that also looks a lot like racism.

The contradiction here is in the thinking that you can only affirm a relation of equality if you do so against an existing or potential inequality. But if that’s the case, you will never be able to rely on equality alone, without a context, and your argument will lose the self-evident character of political correctness.

The problem is that equality is formal. You can draw relations of equality almost arbitrarily. Dogs have four legs. Cats have four legs. That doesn’t mean dogs are cats, and it doesn’t tell you whether dogs are better than cats.

Both are statements of equal truth, but equality alone is no help. In Jeong’s case, it’s wrong to be racist, but it’s also wrong not to privilege minority experience. Political correctness can’t moderate between the two ‘wrongs’, and if its only point is that it’s obvious to any right-thinking person, it has failed in its task.

Further reading

The new political correctness: not a fad, but a deep cultural shift

By Peter Franklin

In the example of the French football players above, are we equal because where our family comes from does not matter, or because it matters equally? The two sides in the public argument disagreed violently on where to place the equality sign. They had both made their remarks assuming that their own view was the least controversial thing available, but ended up being swallowed by a bitter controversy.

While political correctness was fighting an external enemy, its internal contradictions remained more or less hidden. All the energy was placed in the service of “crashing the horror” or “smashing the rogues” to use two translations of a famous sentence by Voltaire, perhaps the intellectual father of political correctness. Now that the enemy has been soundly beaten and political correctness has become a mass movement, everyone feels free to be politically correct in his or her own way. But the method is so empty that it can allow you to reach any conclusion whatsoever. You can even, like Sarah Jeong, become a politically correct racist.

No one knows how to be politically correct anymore. You might argue that this is true of every ideology. These days, we are not sure how to be liberal or conservative either. But political correctness was supposed to be different. The whole point of the enterprise was that you would know immediately and without effort how to think and act on a particular issue. Political correctness was meant to save you from thinking. If it cannot do that – if it actually gets you involved in difficult discussions – it has lost all usefulness. It can no longer be called political correctness at all.

More from this author

Europe no longer exists – our future is Eurasian

By Bruno Macaes

There are accusations of ‘microaggressions’ (small incidents of disrespect that accumulate over time) and of ‘slut-shaming’, ‘fat-shaming’ and ‘body-shaming’ (attempts to make someone feel bad about their sexual behaviour, weight or body). To add to ‘sexist’ and ‘racist’, which have long been common currency, a person can be ‘ableist’, ‘Islamophobic’, ‘transphobic’ or ‘whorephobic’ (prejudiced against disabled, Muslim, trans people or sex workers). The aftermath of incidents covered by ‘trigger warnings’ (alerts to upcoming content that could reawaken previous traumas) might require ‘safe spaces’ (welcoming areas where one will be sheltered from any form of possible distress, including dissenting opinions).

Those, however, who openly oppose the growing reach of ‘political correctness’ (over-policing of speech and thought in the proclaimed service of social equity and diversity) have made counter-accusations of ‘snowflake’ (one who believes themselves to be unique and precious but disintegrates easily) and ‘crybully’ (one who wields their alleged victimhood as a means of dominating and intimidating others.)

In the eyes of sceptics, ‘social justice warriors’ (those who vigorously proclaim their commitment to eradicating perceived oppression) will be accused of ‘virtue-signalling’ (making public statements with the intent of placing themselves on a higher moral plateau).

Then, every so often, to add to this confusing mix, a new word appears, such as the left-wing slur ‘gammon’ (used to describe older, white right-wing men who are pink in the face, ideally with outrage at ‘political correctness’.) There will then be a flurry of newspaper articles and impassioned debate on whether such a word is useful, funny, or prejudiced and whether you can be guilty of racism against all races or only non-white ones.

Further reading

The tragedy of the ‘gammons’

By Peter Franklin

It will flow into the question of whether women can display sexism towards men or – as some feminists argue – it can only be enacted by men upon women. Feelings will run high, but these questions will remain unresolved. They are, potentially, never-ending.

Over time, such arguments have spread from US and Canadian university campuses, where they have long been raging, into UK universities and beyond, into media, publishing and the upper echelons of companies. They are gradually becoming part of mainstream discourse, along with a constant flux of argument that leaves many people confused.

So, too, does the widespread sense that a small clumsiness of description or communication might – in the current climate – have major personal and career repercussions that would have been unthinkable even five years ago: one thinks, for example, of the public shaming of the Nobel-prize winning British scientist Tim Hunt for making a silly, jokey remark about ‘girls in labs’ during a 2015 speech encouraging women into science. Labelled a sexist, Hunt later admitted to suicidal thoughts in the midst of the social media storm his comments had triggered. He is now living and working with his wife in Japan.

In such an era, The Rise of Victimhood Culture: Microaggressions, Safe Spaces and the New Culture Wars, by the US sociologists Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning, makes for fascinating reading. As the authors anticipate, there will be those who argue that the use of the phrase ‘victimhood culture’ itself places them in a camp opposed to the goals of ‘social justice.’ On the contrary, Campbell and Manning are worried by the rise of the alt-right in the US, and themselves support ideals of equality and diversity as components of ‘dignity culture,’ which holds that all people are of the same essential worth. Much of their concern about ‘victimhood culture’ in fact appears to stem from the belief that, long-term, it will deliver acrimony and division.

The thrust of their analysis is that an ‘honour culture’ – in which men in particular were easily offended and provoked to fighting as a means of guarding their reputation (for example through duels fought over perceived slights) – widely gave way to a more pragmatic and constructive ‘dignity culture’ in which people were encouraged to ignore verbal insults.

Dignity culture eschewed reactive violence, but sought judgement from a competent state for more serious matters. The recent emergence of a ‘victimhood culture,’ according to Campbell and Manning, is something quite new for society: it borrows the touchiness to perceived offence from honour culture but retains the appeal to a higher power (for example, university authorities) that is characteristic of dignity culture.

Its participants gain social status by emphasising victimhood, although only from within groups that are historically viewed as oppressed: white males are not included.

Further reading

Why has the diversity debate left white working-class boys behind?

By Jenny Mccartney

I had not heard cultures divided in these terms before, but the phenomena the authors describe are familiar to me. I can instantly see, for example, that there was a higher likelihood of encountering manifestations of ‘honour culture’ in a Belfast pub during my teenage years than in the London journalistic circles of my twenties (at that time in Belfast there were observable lines of verbal insult that – if openly crossed – were more liable to get the speaker punched).

Northern Ireland is also cited in the book as an example of “‘competitive victimhood’, in which both sides of a conflict vie to present themselves as the truly victimized party.” There is a strong measure of truth in that.

The authors observe, too, that today ‘honour culture’ is still to be found among certain groups – London’s street gangs, for example – but that it exacts a high toll upon its participants in terms of injury and loss. That is why there was a general shift in the West towards ‘dignity culture’ in the first place, as a cool-headed approach to insult and legal means of redress became more possible and desirable.

The authors argue that the ‘victimhood culture’ which has originated in the higher echelons of society – in particular, US elite universities – will gradually become more mainstream, spreading downwards, unless it is challenged. It differs from ‘dignity culture’ in that it does not separate verbal and physical attack, but instead tends to conflate them. Words can be seen as a form of violence that causes harm and are responded to as such: hence the need for ‘safe spaces’ away from voices that may offend, such as controversial speakers to universities.

The culture actively “promotes constant vigilance and outrage” in response to perceived microaggressions and divergences from approved opinion. The commitment to ideological purity – as evidenced by always being seen and heard to say ‘the right thing’ – can be tricky territory even for activists: with a single slip, one can attract social shaming. One graduate student, Frances Lee, is quoted as saying in 2017:

“The amount of energy I spend demonstrating purity in order to stay in the good graces of a fast-moving activist community is enormous…at times, I have found myself performing activism more than doing activism.” 

Someone who is a member of multiple categories that are perceived as disadvantaged will be afforded greater moral status than a member of just one or two. This can lead to in-fighting or what the authors term a “purity spiral”, in which members of groups compete for occupation of the moral high ground, sometimes by pushing others out or by self-denunciations. The authors reference that in 2016, for example, the UK’s National Union of Students’ LGBT Campaign passed a motion that abolished the reserved place for “cis gay men” on campus LGBT groups on the grounds that they “do not face oppression as gay men within the LGBT community”. It seems inevitable that such ‘purity spirals’ will lead to the fractious splintering of formerly progressive movements.

Two of the most interesting questions that this book poses are whether victimhood culture is psychologically healthy for its adherents, and where it could ultimately take society as a whole.

On the first question, they point out that although this emergent culture rewards hyper-vigilance to offence, disciplines such as cognitive behavioural therapy seek to teach people the exact opposite for their own mental health: they are encouraged not to perceive everything as a slight or threat, or automatically presume negative attitudes in those around them.

As I was reading the book, I happened to come across one tweet and its responses that illustrated how negative the social media ‘victimhood’ loop can be. An American-Salvadoran female poet, Yesika Salgado, used Twitter to describe her exchange with an Uber driver:

“Uber driver: what do you do for work?

Me: I’m a writer, poet specifically

Uber driver: oh, are your poems in anything?

Me: they’re in my book

Uber driver: how easy is it to publish a book? I’ve considered doing that before.

Sigh. Old white men are exhausting.”

The tweet met with general derision from people who thought that Salgado was being unfair to the Uber driver, who appeared to have been making small talk and showing polite interest in the poet and her work. Nothing he said, they thought, had merited the dismissive remark: “Old white men are exhausting.”

Furthermore, his employment as an Uber driver – at the beck and call of a large company seen by many as exploitative of its workers – added another layer to the interaction. Salgado’s dismissal of ‘old white men’ derived from her confidence that it was morally permissible to speak in that way because white males are seen as historically privileged. Yet whatever the Uber driver’s background, it’s unlikely he was economically privileged.

Many of Salgado’s critics – including black and Latino men and women – made these points clearly and courteously. Others, inflamed by her tweet, insulted Salgado herself, making nasty and indefensible comments about her gender, looks, weight and poetry. Salgado deleted her original tweet, but kept up a tweet that said: “The yts [‘whiteys’] are trolling me again because I said old white men are exhausting”, including the many negative remarks directed.

That particular thread will no doubt reinforce Salgado’s position among existing followers and fans as someone who is persecuted by racists and misogynists (even though, if you read the thread, the profile of posters also includes many people who are neither of those things, nor even white and male).

Further reading

How Kanye and Trump are smashing racial stereotypes

By Douglas Murray

Yet one of the points of poetry – which is precisely why many publishers are seeking more varied ‘voices’ – is that it speaks across social barriers, enhancing mutual understanding. Salgado’s conversation with the Uber driver could have gone in another direction entirely: she could have asked him what he dreamed of writing about, told him what her poetry was about, and perhaps found some common territory of interest that brought enjoyment to them both.

Instead, her public dismissal of him as simply “exhausting” and an “old white man” brought the shutters down on the conversation, seemingly on the grounds of factors which he couldn’t help: his age, colour and gender. It was a discourteous response, which then triggered even more poisonous discourtesy on the part of some of those who attacked Salgado. Did anyone truly gain in the long-term from that set of sad but predictable interactions? How do you run a successful society on the constant amplification of aggrieved difference between groups?

‘Victimhood culture’ divides people into groups that are privileged and those that are not, on the basis that only those who are not privileged are fully deserving of courtesy. But privilege can be a slippery concept to define, as we are now discovering: for example, do we also include questions of social class, age, income and parenting? Do you get victimhood points for an absent father, an alcoholic mother, or losing a sibling?

These are complex arguments, and of course there are times when it is necessary to address the issues of particular groups – such as the widely-perceived disparity in the treatment of black and white people by police officers and the prison system in the US, or the forced separation of immigrant Latino parents and children at the US border. 

Along the way, however, one thing is certain: the steady erosion of the principle of universal respect and courtesy will eventually damage all of us, ending in a fragmented and angry society. People are much more liable to support and participate in a moral good if they feel that they too are protected by its principles. Britain today is a less racist place than it was fifty years ago, in part because the ‘dignity culture’ argument won: a slur against a non-white person now repels the majority of white people in Britain because we clearly hear in it the denigration of human dignity in which we all share. 

I grew up absorbing the principle that no-one should be insulted or treated unfairly for factors that were inherent to them, including their gender, race, sexuality, disability or appearance. Yet ‘victimhood culture’ now often seems to wish to recategorise the population into separate groups, rank those groups according to perceived ‘privilege’, and finally decide who should be afforded respect according to that ranking: hence the routinely expressed contempt for ‘white men’.

In that sense it feels as if culture is performing the kind of potentially treacherous shift described in Orwell’s Animal Farm from the principle of ‘all animals are equal’ to ‘all animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others.’

This shift in culture explains, for me, my growing unease in recent months at the direction of some strands of the feminist movement. For almost 20 years I wrote articles against a casual misogyny that was seemingly becoming acceptable in the UK and US media: rape jokes and crude remarks about women on prime-time television, growing sexualised violence in films, ‘porn chic’ and pressure on young women to appear physically ‘perfect’ by means of extreme grooming and plastic surgery.

Further reading

How come the misogynistic Frankie Boyle is so acceptable now?

By Jenny Mccartney

The #MeToo movement – which began in response to groping and harassment in workplaces – has thankfully addressed many of these wider questions too. Yet now there is a movement in some feminist arguments towards blanket condemnation – not just of individuals or specific behaviour – but of all men per se. In a recent Washington Post article entitled “Why Can’t We Hate Men?”, gender studies professor Suzanna Walters concluded her piece with this impassioned finale:

“If you really are #WithUs and would like us to not hate you for all the millennia of woe you have produced and benefited from, start with this: Lean out so we can actually just stand up without being beaten down.

Pledge to vote for feminist women only. Don’t run for office. Don’t be in charge of anything. Step away from the power. We got this. And please know that your crocodile tears won’t be wiped away by us anymore. We have every right to hate you. You have done us wrong. #BecausePatriarchy. It is long past time to play hard for Team Feminism. And win.”

Where does this kind of exhortation take us? Do we really want men of enormous and valuable talent – husbands, partners, brothers and sons of women, with whom their fates are intertwined – to follow the bizarre mantra: “don’t be in charge of anything”? Should I start the day by confronting my husband with “the millennia of woe you have produced and benefited from” and thereby perhaps encourage him, being of Indian origin, to have a go at my history of “white privilege”?

The point is that Walters’ style of writing – and its equivalent on Twitter – creates its own kind of rhetorical world, forcefully repeated, which diverges sharply from most people’s reality, but nonetheless inflames resentments. In recent months society has discussed bad behaviour among men at length – and, certainly, every woman will have her stories of creeps or worse – yet contrasting experiences need articulating too.

Further reading

We should be wary of post-Weinstein prejudices

By Douglas Murray

During my career I have encountered numerous men who were not power-hogging sexists and gropers, but instead encouraging, kind and notably generous with their time and professional expertise. All around me I see decent men who are helping to support their families, both in work and at home, while playing a valuable part in their community. Are such men simply to be written out of the ideological picture – or if their presence in the lives of many women is acknowledged, where does it leave Walters’ sweeping argument?

I share with Campbell and Manning an anxiety about where ‘victimhood culture’ will take us. Appeals to ‘fairness’ – a concept even young children can understand – are historically much more successful than the ringing denunciation of particular groups. If entire sections of people are effectively dismissed because of their category of birth, rather than specific behaviours, what follows?

The authors argue that some less well-off white men – openly despised by the ideology of the Left, yet devoid of economic privilege – may well drift towards an angry, right-wing ‘victim story’ of their own: “it therefore seems likely that the influence of white identity politics is growing and may continue to grow for some time.” Trump’s ascendancy in the US may already be evidence of such a polarising phenomenon in action: “victim narratives on the right seem to have become especially prominent during the 2016 presidential campaign.”

Further reading

This era of hysterical certainty does women no favours

By Jenny Mccartney

The authors ask: “will victimhood culture subside and wither away? Or will it replace dignity culture as dignity once replaced honour?” Few can tell, but the latter scenario is potentially a grim and divisive one, in which a left-wing ‘victimhood culture’ spars with a right-wing ‘victimhood culture’ while a violent ‘honour culture’ dominates in worse-off communities.

Meanwhile, big issues of poverty and equality of opportunity are neglected: culture wars rule the debate as the wealth gap widens. Before heading in that direction, those of us who believe in a harmonious, multi-racial society in which men and women like and respect one another should give close thought to the best means of getting and staying there – and remember that courtesy is a social asset beyond price. I hope we will re-examine the mass benefits of ‘dignity culture’ while we still have one.

In the very same way that Marxists argue that capitalism leads to the exploitation of the poor, Marxist Feminists argue that capitalism leads to the exploitation of women. In 1986, Maria Mies penned what was to become a classic work. Titled Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Division of Labour, she argued that capitalist production depends upon cheap female labour, not just within factories but also within the home.

Silvia Federici, in Caliban and the Witch, went further, suggesting that capitalism relied on violence – against women, the poor and ethnic minorities – in order to create a class of landless labourers who were entirely dependent on capitalists.

As the world has gone global, Marxist feminists have highlighted the way in which professional Western women rely on the labour of poorer women on the other side of the world, whether indirectly in the form of cheaply produced clothing and household goods or directly in the form of cleaners and nannies – and even surrogate mothers.

Philosopher and feminist Nancy Fraser argues that pro-market feminists have engaged in a “dangerous liaison” with capitalism. They have shackled themselves to a system in which inequality is preordained, and so shouldn’t be surprised that the “gender gap” in all of its many dimensions is yet to close. Marxist Feminism, in other words, suggests that the strategy of “lean in” will never be enough; that women need to “lean out”.

Suggested reading

Feminism may have won the vote, but it has lost its way

By Victoria Bateman

While capitalism is, of course, far from perfect, for me the idea of replacing capitalism with an opposite kind of system could not be more terrifying. The bright red revolutionary posters of the Soviet Union depicting healthy and strong factory women may give a positive impression, but in practice, alternatives to capitalism place greater power in the hands of the state and society. These are two bodies that history has shown provide no guarantee of women’s freedom, something John Stuart Mill recognised:

“Society can and does execute its own mandates: and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with which it ought not to meddle, it practices a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression.”

For those, like me, who see society as something other than a happy and harmonious place – as something that can potentially constrain us and restrict our freedom – the market provides an escape mechanism. It is not competitive markets that have been the greatest enemy of women over the course of human history; it is social norms.

Suggested reading

Capitalism is the best guarantee of individual freedom

By Victoria Bateman

Economic historians Jan Luiten Van Zanden and Tine De Moor point to the way in which women’s involvement in the labour market in medieval Europe led to substantial changes in family life that empowered women, including providing them with the ability to escape early marriage, ultimately laying the foundations for economic growth. Historian Amy Froide in her recent book Silent Partners points to the way in which early financial markets in Britain before and during the Industrial Revolution provided opportunities for women that had been denied by incumbent societal practices and institutions.

Not only do markets allow us to escape the norms of society, the greater competition provided by the market also adds a further release valve: it means that individuals are, in general, better able to escape individual cases of abuse or mistreatment than a situation in which there is one sole employer, the state.

While by human nature “bad apples” are inevitable, they are more likely to face the consequences of their actions in the marketplace than they are in any state-run economy. Without competition to expose them, the state can cover-up wrongdoing, meaning that abuses continue. In the marketplace, while cover ups can and do happen, competition generally – and eventually – roots out wrongdoers. Either consumers get wind of it and stop buying a particular producer’s goods, or workers move on to another producer. While the mechanism for this to happen is not perfect, at least it provides a possibility of punishment and escape that is missing when the state has a monopoly of power – and, all importantly, a monopoly of force; one which enables it to imprison or even kill those who speak out.

The recent edited volume Women’s Experiences of Repression in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe highlights the brutal and dehumanising way in which women were treated when they dared to disagree with the state or were simply seen as being an obstacle to the “wider good”. According to Orlando Figes’ estimates, one-eighth of the Soviet population were the subject of direct and state-sanctioned repression over the period 1928-53, amounting to 25 million people. Half a million people alone were deported in an effort to eliminate “anti-Soviet” sentiment.

Ultimately, it is not capitalism that is the problem for women; it is society and a state that comes to embody patriarchal social norms.

Read the opposite view

Can capitalism ever be good for women?

By Vicky Pryce