They treated serious things with irreverence, and irrelevant things with seriousness. They were slavish to America, ignored China and took Europe for granted. Many of them backed the Iraq War and don’t understand why that means they can never be trusted with anything important ever again.

This is a generation that hid, or squandered what intelligence it had. They believed in win-wins and public private partnerships, or giving each others’ talentless children plum jobs. Publicly concerned — no, obsessed — with equality, they presided over a society that became as unequal as the one Horace Walpole lived in. Incredibly, they oversaw a decline in the average life expectancy for the first time in 110 years. They never built enough houses. They thought Will Self was a novelist, and Amber Rudd a future Prime Minister. They answered every policy question with the word “education”, so now our cities overflow with miserable PhD-holding baristas.

Their greatest achievement? Maybe Britpop, or the London 2012 Olympics Opening Ceremony, which are both ways of saying they don’t have one. Their lowest moment? The great triggering year of 2016 — which is when they collectively lost their minds. Ever since, these centrist Dads and Mums have faced their cultural twilight and political downfall with whatever the opposite of bravery is.

d’Ancona, whose book Identity Ignorance Innovation came out recently, is a flawless minor representative of this generation, and the age they lived in. He edited the Spectator and wrote columns about Westminster for the Sunday Telegraph. Like so many of his peers, he was a cultural populist, a believer in high-low relativity who never connected the culture of the nation with the court politics he obsessed over. He thought Brexit the “idiot option”.

So, of course, Brexit happened.

Suggested reading

British centrists' deluded worship of Germany

By Aris Roussinos

Then, from a new seat at the Guardian, d’Ancona dreamed his hideous dreams of post-Brexit Britain. We were duped. We were becoming a country in the mould of Philip Larkin: wintry, hopelessly nostalgic, ferociously bigoted, and alone — “an absurd and horrible vision”. He was finally finding his conscience as a peddler of big ideas, not backstage tittle-tattle. With Post-Truth: The New War on Truth and How to Fight Back, d’Ancona successfully landed his vault into the world of sub-TED, high-altitude musing. Post-Truth was one of three books with the same title published in 2017. Each asked how 17 million fools could be so easily hoodwinked by a slogan on the side of a bus. The big idea in all of them was that politicians lie.

Identity Ignorance Innovation is more of the same from d’Ancona. Quite literally: there are whole anecdotes and phrases of the “Ignorance” and “Innovation” chapters that are hard to distinguish from sections of Post Truth. Sometimes, as with sections on racial injustice in Britain or how to make 20-somethings more employable, d’Ancona does a seal roll onto his side and burps his ideas out as bullet points, like a harried junior writing a summary for an executive, not a professional journalist writing non-fiction that retails for a mighty £20.

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The Royal Family always wins

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Like many writers of his generation, he views his ideas as “fiercely contemporary”. The self-image is that of the truth-teller: the bold intellect riskily crossing the lonely and treacherous frontiers of modern thought. “Countercultural” is the word he repeatedly uses, as if the ideas between the covers of Identity Ignorance Innovation are dangerous, or provocative, or fresh.

What are these ideas? It is hard to say in the sections on “Ignorance” and “Innovation”. The former is a lament about education, and how stupid grade-chasing has made the under-30s. They are “brilliant but ignorant”. Their potential intelligence has been crushed by “the deranged pressures of the digital microsecond” — the what now? Is it bold to think that the young are scandalously dense? No, it’s de rigueur, not just for d’Ancona and his generation, but every one since the Pyramids were built.

Is there a big idea then? Well, d’Ancona argues that liberals should view identity politics as an “entirely constructive adrenaline shot to the body politic”. Despite apologetically declaring himself a “one man privilege carnival”, he wants to grapple with race, cancel culture, Trans rights, statue-toppling and all the other deathless culture wars issues that vex our banana kingdom.

He thinks that these are trip-wire subjects that nobody else will touch and regrets that other commentators have “in the interests of a quiet life… crept away from this particular field of inquiry”. Have they? Has Matthew Parris shied away from writing about these issues? Has Janice Turner? Has Trevor Philips? That’s just a few columnists at The Times. Even people who have only picked up a pen by accident in the last 12 months have probably fired off a thousand word think-piece about J.K. Rowling. It is practically a beloved national pastime for us to argue about these things at this point, like making jokes about Charles assassinating Diana, or letting Michael Portillo make his television shows about train lines in the Balkans.

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The many deaths of Virginia Woolf

By Will Lloyd

Identity politics is, d’Ancona thinks, at “an important and exciting moment in its development”. The rise of movements that place racial, religious and sexual identity at their core has encouraged “a little more humility and restraint”. Well, I read Identity Ignorance Innovation in the week when a group forced a teacher into hiding, and within a few days of David Lammy being told that he was not English by a call-in guest on his radio show. Both incidents were examples of where identity politics is taking us, and will continue to take us, if it is not challenged. Exciting moments indeed!

On behalf of no one in particular, except liberal-ish centrist Dads who he flies a flag for, d’Ancona wants to make an offer to the youngsters who will not “tolerate the quiet bigotries of the past”. Look to America — bastion of racial decency and good practice — and see what we could build as allies together. Affirmative action can be used to nudge cultural norms towards “benign outcomes” on racial issues. If that doesn’t end injustice, d’Ancona assures his younger readers, “stronger medicine” can be taken.

In return for affirmative action (we have to hope that, unlike America, these policies do not summon a splenetic white identity politics into being) d’Ancona would like Gen Z to let him undertake the modernisation projects he has been banging on about since the 1990s. An “overhaul” of parliamentary procedure; “a new second chamber”; “real power to metro mayors”; “a fully codified constitution”.

But these are the reforms of an old Westminster “moderniser”, not somebody who cares about young people. Will overhauled parliamentary procedure or petty tyrant metro mayors build ambitious, beautiful garden suburbs, where the young can live good, decent lives around our major cities? No.

I suspect the last time the young looked this scary was the late 1970s. And the Britpop generation, whether it is d’Ancona or Will Self, Rachel Johnson or Ian Hislop, are getting on a bit. They are approaching the same age Harold Macmillan was when Peter Cook began doing his humiliating impression of the Prime Minister. Nobody has really come after them, but all the material is there: Pooterish social climbing, Partridge-level crap ideas, Fawlty-like exasperation amid a changing world.

Ridiculously, they still carry on like they are hated by an establishment full of port-soaked aristocrats and Thatcherites who want Nelson Mandela to stay in prison. Wrong: all those reactionaries died a long time ago; they are the establishment and have been for decades. They will have their Macmillan moment.

Ultimately, of all the vague and uninspiring proposals in Identity Ignorance Innovation, it is that last one — the codified constitution — that is the funniest. Imagine the d’Ancona constitution being chiselled into stone tablets and hung around the land. His generation’s prejudices would be made into law, to bedevil the British for centuries to come.

It was bad enough to be their children. At least when their grandchildren write the histories of the Britpoppers, they may have enough distance to treat them with the fairness they scarcely deserve.

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

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

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

Further reading

How bigoted is Brexit?

By Tom Chivers

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

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

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

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

Further reading

Who's most intolerant in America?

By Peter Franklin

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

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

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

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

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

Further reading

Can the Tories accommodate populism?

By David Goodhart

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

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

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

Further reading

The pointlessness of a 'People's Vote'

By Matthew Goodwin

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

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

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

Have Remainers lost perspective?

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

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

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

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

Further reading

No Bregrets: 10 predictions for 2019

By Matthew Goodwin

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

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

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

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