The Cancellation of Diane Abbott

I half-jokingly suggested on Twitter that Diane Abbott's ill-advised letter to the Observer might have been political suicide by spy-cop, as she has been wholly marginalised within the Labour Party since Starmer's accession to the leadership and might justifiably have felt that she had no future well before this week. But to step away from the personalities for a moment, it also occurred to me that the cause of anti-racism, of which she has been a high profile advocate for decades, has been notable by it absence in the party's sayings and doings over the last two and a half years with the obvious exception of antisemitism. If there is a hierarchy of racism in the Labour Party it is a peculiarly shallow one, and also one in which membership of the notionally privileged group has not provided any obvious benefit. The purge of the left has disproportionately focused on Jews in a way not seen in politics since the time of Stalin and the Doctors' Plot. 

Of course the real hierarchy in Labour is the dominance of right-leaning white men, with Starmer their emblematic figure (the "top bloke", no less), hence the different treatment of Abbot compared to Steve Reed, Barry Sheerman and Neil Coyle, all of whom were forgiven once they had apologised for their overt racist statements. Their behaviour was arguably worse because they were trading insults, but if there is one thing that the party's unrepentance over the "Asian nonce-protector" slur against Rishi Sunak should tell us it is that bigoted insults are considered perfectly acceptable under the current leader in a way that they weren't before, not only under the previous leader but even under earlier ones. Gordon Brown famously got into hot water for being caught on microphone calling Gillian Duffy a bigot. That he didn't challenge her publicly reflected the way that New Labour instrumentally tolerated bigotry, but what the Sunak advert suggests is that Labour no longer sees bigotry as something to be even privately regretted.

Though it was clumsily-expressed, Abbott's point - that ethnic bigotry and racism are not the same thing - is generally accepted by academics and other experts in the field. It is non-controversial. Where she went wrong was in extending the fomer category to include non-ethnic prejudice, such as against redheads, which had the effect of trivialising the suffering of Irish, Jewish and Traveller victims of oppression. What she didn't say was that this suffering didn't matter, or that it was of a lesser quality, but the implication of a scale in her words led to the charge that she was promoting a hierarchy of racism and regard. That such a charge was made against a black woman by a number of white men did not cause many to pause for thought, while the speed with which the Labour leadership moved to suspend the whip was framed (and obligingly interpreted in the media) as evidence of Starmer's determination to extirpate the virus of antisemitism by preventing any leftwinger standing at the next general election.

The key point to understand is that while all racisms - that is schemas of racial difference - are bigoted, not all bigotries are racist. English contempt for the French or Scots is not based on race. If anything, racist pseudo-histories have been used to distinguish each of those nations internally rather than externally: Norman and Anglo-Saxon, Frank and Gaul, Anglo-Norman and Celt. In theory, you could be racist in the positive sense of simply considering your own race to be superior (i.e. racial chauvinism or ethno-centrism), but in practice racism is always negative in that it insists on the inferiority of other races and uses this claim to justify unequal treatment and even genocide. Race, in the sense of biological essentialism, does not exist, but racism as a concept does. And the foundation of that concept - i.e. what gives it internal (if not logical) coherence - is race science: the belief that those biological essentials are real, that they can be assessed and measured, and that they consistently produce particular behaviours or traits in the people who possess them.

In terms of praxis, the litmus test for whether you're dealing with racism or bigotry is assimilation. If you believe that a group can be assimilated into the "nation" over time, then your present objection to that group's different culture is bigoted. For example, English bigotry against the Irish was based on religious, economic and cultural prejudice but it assumed that the Irish were capable of being assimilated: they simply had to become industrious Protestants and give up hurling. There was no systematic and institutionalised belief that the admixture of one drop of Irish blood would corrupt Anglo-Saxon stock. In contrast, the segregation of the US South and the Apartheid of South Africa were as racist as Nazi Germany's Nuremburg Laws precisely because they believed in the essential and irredeemable nature of race. Of course all such attempts to systematise race fail because race isn't real and the boundary cases that such artifical schemas throw up make a mockery of the precision claimed by the pseudoscience.

The contemporary argument by David Goodhart that "white self-interest" is not racist depends on the idea that cultural differences will never be resolved because multiculturalism not only tolerates but seeks to preserve them. In other words, liberal pieties prevent assimilation. However, it is pretty obvious that this is merely a way of expressing racist sentiments indirectly - i.e. "Those people are different and always will be so they cannot be considered part of the national community". It also ignores that people deemed white may retain significant cultural differences, and that even within the native community constituting the majority of the nation there may be cultural differences that are equally significant, at least in the eyes of some (consider the prejudice against Liverpudlians). While the fiction of multiculturalism (i.e. the strawman beloved of newspaper columnists) has helped justify white self-interest, the biggest boon for racists has been the gradual extension of the concept of racism to the point where people can talk about "anti-white racism" without being laughed at.

This situation has arisen not because conservatives have been effective in moving the boundary but because liberals have adopted what you might call an equal opportunities approach to the interpretation of racism. The original article that Abbott was criticising is a good example of this. Tomiwa Owolade's comment piece took a report on how the experience of the Covid-19 pandemic varied by ethnicity (and which clearly distinguishes between racism and ethnicity in its title) as evidence that racism is "multidimensional", largely by cherry-picking a survey of self-reported "racist assaults". That many Irish and Traveller people believe what they experienced was racist simply reflects the way the term has been universalised. The idea that all bigotries are racism is functionally equivalent to "All lives matter", which occludes the specific nature of anti-black racism captured in the slogan Black Lives Matter. It's a short step from there to acceptance that anti-white racism is a thing.

To accuse Diane Abbott of creating silos that militate against anti-racist solidarity, as Aditya Chakrabortty did in the Guardian, not only attributes a remarkable power to a marginalised backbencher but comes close to endorsing the anti-identitarian line promoted by Kenan Malik and other "post-leftists" for whom race is something to be transcended (a form of assimilation through liberal virtue). You cannot build anti-racist solidarity by accepting that everyone can be a victim of racism any more than you can build solidarity with the disabled by redefining health as a debilitating condition. What creates silos, and implicitly revives the pernicious idea of racial difference, is the particularism in the name of equal opportunity that holds that any and every ethnic group is potentially a victim of racism. This is retrograde because instead of a racist act being interpreted as a reflection of the sociological (and thus political) assumptions of the perpetrator, we become focused on some intrinsic quality of the victim.

One thing the Diane Abbott brouhaha has highlighted is exactly who gets to control the narrative of racism. When she cut her teeth in the 1970s and 80s, it was black academics and cultural critics who were setting the agenda. Since then there has been a shift, marked by attacks on the legitimacy of race as a topic (e.g. the "grievance studies" backlash), and by the rise of "legitimate concerns" (ironically more befitting the "grievance" appellation) and the consequent apologetics for white self-interest advanced by Goodhart and Matthew Goodwin. Both developments have eaten up the bandwidth. The acknowledgement of institutional racism at the Metropolitan Police, the Windrush scandal and initiatives like the Guardian's apology for the slavery links of its founders might suggest progress, but where are we now? Doreen and Neville Lawrence remain frustrated, the current Home Secretary thinks Albanians have values "at odds with our country", and much of the public debate on historic slavery has been taken up with the virtuous contrition of the descendants of slave-owners. Abbott was one of the few black voices able to command a national political platform, and she has long been resented by many for precisely that reason. Her cancellation is not going to help the cause of anti-racism, but then that was never the objective, was it?

Almost Medieval

The publication of Matthew Goodwin's book, Values, Voice and Virtue, has revived the debate about the "two nations" of Britain. Whereas the term was originally coined by a future Conservative Prime Minister to describe the gulf between the working class and their betters in Victorian England, the contemporary intepretation is that society is divided by culture and values, a division made politically concrete by Brexit. This is not to say that material factors have no bearing (the proletarianisation of educated professionals is obviously a factor in current industrial disputes), or that demographic dimensions such as age don't highly correlate. But what is striking about Goodwin's rather unoriginal thesis is the focus on the lack of sympathy between the groups, which echoes Disraeli's words: "Two nations; between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy; who are as ignorant of each other's habits, thoughts, and feelings, as if they were dwellers in different zones, or inhabitants of different planets; who are formed by a different breeding, are fed by a different food, are ordered by different manners".

This emphasis on the alienness of the "new elite" has led Goodwin to employ the tropes of antisemitism, which is one reason why he has been accused of giving off a Fascist vibe. This has in turn resulted in demands for left media outlets like Novara to de-platform him, though you can guarantee that this would only lead to another article in the Times or Sun in which he bemoaned his cancellation at the hands of the elite. My own view is that Goodwin isn't a Fascist, though his claims will obviously be congenial to the far right. In terms of his politics, insofar as they can be deduced from his work, he is closer to the right-of-centre thinkers in Starmer's Labour Party with their obsession over socially conservative "hero voters" in small towns and their barely concealed contempt for the urban young. What stands out in Goodwin's thesis is his narrow-mindedness, which leads him to cram the variety of society into two simplistic definitions: them and us. This goes beyond an unwillingness to let go of the clarifying moment of the 2016 EU referendum to a more profound belief that everyone must pick a side, which finds its parallel in the cynical instrumentality of the current Labour leadership's refusal to regret the playground insults of its "attack ads".

I've not read Goodwin's book, but to judge from snippets posted online (e.g. by Mic Wright) I'm not missing much. What I think his critics may be missing however is the nature of the ideal society that sits behind his analysis. For example, he describes the new elite thus: "Consistently, they feel much less attached than others to the group-based identities which have long held the country together, including a strong sense of commitment to the majority group and attachment to their national identity". There's much to wonder at here, such as the insistence of that "consistently", which refuses to brook the idea that people might be varied intra-group, and the vagueness of "others", which is similarly flattening, but what stands out for me is the plural "group-based identities". Goodwin isn't advocating a uniform national identity - the Fascist national idea - but something more parochial. While "majority group" has obvious racists overtones, national identity is presented as the organic, encompassing product of multiple group identities, and it is paradoxically the absence of a group identity that defines the new elite, rather than their supposedly uniform values.

Goodwin's focus on the new elite's individualism is expressed as deracination (echoing the "anywheres" critique of David Goodhart). This has an obvious Fascist interpretation: the rejection of the organic community, rootless cosmopolitanism, and so on. But it also points towards a nostalgia for corporatism, both in the Italian Fascist sense and the Medieval sense. In other words, the idea that people should be fixed within the otherwise unchanging structures of society. This is not simply a reactionary, traditionalist impulse that seeks to revive the good old days of "natural" hierarchy but a programmatic rejection of the dynamism and mutability of capitalism ("All that is solid melts into air"). Where Goodwin takes leave of Fascist corporatism is that he clearly has no real views on the economy. His worldview is self-absorbed, hence the focus on academia and the media: the milieus with which he is most familiar. And hence too the obvious resentment he displays towards graduates of more prestigious universities than the ones he went to and now works in.

Which leaves the Medieval angle. That is perhaps fitting for someone whose persona is so intimately bound up with study and publication that he even went so far as to eat a page of one of his earlier books on live TV. In other words, it would be better to interpret Goodwin as a scholastic rather than as a critic of modernity. He has the air of a monastic scold decrying the wickedness of the world, which isn't helped by his prickly defensiveness when challenged and his habitual blocking of critics on Twitter. As a consequence, he over-estimates the importance of tertiary education: "For the new elite, their very identity as high-flying, highly accomplished graduates of elite institutions not only gives them a profoundly important and highly collective sense of unity but also shapes their values and political loyalties". The idea that a person's values and politics are fixed for life at 21 is obviously wrong, but so too is the implication that those values and politics will lean in a liberal direction, as if university Conservative societies did not exist or law schools only produced human rights lawyers. 

This highlights a general tendency in Goodwin's writing which is to avoid explaining the mechanics of social change, or to explain them in highly superficial and partial ways. For example, in placing the evolution of the new elite in a historical context, he imagines a past in which "the country was run by upper-class aristocrats, landowners and industrialists who were united by their hereditary titles, their wealth and, importantly, their instinctively conservative values. Those people still exist. They can be found in the House of Lords, the Sunday Times Rich List, the private members clubs on London's Pall Mall and holding positions of influence in the Conservative Party. But in the early decades of the twenty-first century, the axis of power in Britain and many other democracies has been tilting away from them and towards a new ruling class". This is a naive history that occludes the Edwardian Liberal Party, the postwar welfare state and the actual source of contemporary wealth in the service of a supposed unity. You'd be embarrassed to read that in an undergraduate history essay.

It gets worse: "The new elite are the product of two seismic changes which transformed the country over the last seventy years. The first was the transition from an industrial to a post-industrial and knowledge-based economy; the second was the rapid rise of the universities, which expanded to supply this economy with a new, highly-educated, highly skilled and culturally distinctive professional class." The idea that the UK was not already a post-industrial and knowledge-based economy in 1950 is fatuous, as is the implied rapidity of this change. The education system had been expanding at all levels since the 1870s to meet the growing demands of the economy for higher skilled labour. Goodwin clearly intends to lead his audience back to the 1960s as part of the origin story of "where it all went wrong". This will reliably secure him column inches in newspapers and future book deals, but the political utility of a reaction to the 60s was exhausted by the Tories over the course of the 1980s. Assuming Goodwin can read the polls as well as the next person, my guess is that he sees his future prospects being tied to a Labour government, as a critic of "elite values" and as a conscience of the "somewheres". 

We've actually been here before. The communitarianism that was en vogue in the 1990s was an attempt to supersede the individualism of the 1960s, as much as that of the 1970s and 80s, hence there was always a sepia-tinged nostalgia at its heart. But it was also motivated by a desire to not return to the class politics of the 1940s and 50s, hence it imaginatively projected itself back even further, making nods to intellectual dead-ends such as guild socialism and early twentieth century liberalism. What was notable in this was the refusal to learn anything from the 20s and 30s, tainted as they were by Marxism. Thus the Frankfurt School was ignored and more recent thinkers who abjured collective action, such as Rawls and Giddens, were promoted. George Orwell was of emblematic importance to New Labour because he provided an escape route both backwards into a nostalgic Englishness and forwards into a post-Marxist ameliorative progressivism. Goodwin seems to be positioning himself for the return of this communitarianism and a revival of the anti-immigrant rhetoric that will undoubtedly accompany it. As Oliver Eagleton astutely put it, Goodwin hasn't drifted to the Fascist extreme. Rather his trajectory shows how "establishment centrism can comfortably accommodate the ideology of the hard right".

Antisemitism Without Jews

A characteristic of classic antisemitism is that it assumes a malign conspiracy between both the financial and cultural elite and the alien lumpenproletariat. Thus Jews were presented in Nazi Germany simultaneously as the secret masters of the world and as foreign vermin. In recent decades, there has been a conscious attempt on the far-right to establish a conspiracy between the "liberal elite" and immigrants, the most obvious expression of this being the Great Replacement theory. This has migrated to the political centre, where it is now acceptable for a British Home Secretary to recycle myths about Pakistani grooming gangs while a supportive press hint that they were indulged by "woke" authorities precisely because of their ethnicity. This is in the context of a compact in the media to ignore evidence of Islamophobia in the Conservative Party and the hierarchy of racism operating within the Labour Party. But overt attacks on minorities defined by race or cultural heritage are difficult to pull off without broad pushback, hence the tendency to focus on emblematic bad guys, such as groomers and people-smugglers, where the racial dimension is (usually) unspoken. Not for the first time, Suella Braverman's solecism was to say the quiet part out loud.

This usual delicacy means that there is a vacancy for a broader segment within society that can be targeted as the willing foot soldiers of the nefarious elite, and in the UK this is clearly misguided youth. The emphasis on the supposed fragility of young people is intended to suggest that they lack the true robustness of their island race, while their adoption of foreign concepts ("critical theory", "cultural Marxism" etc) shows how they are undermining the national community. The young are being alienated both in the sense that their membership of the nation is being called into question and in the sense that they are being deliberately offended by performative bigotry, from transphobia to racism. This is quite different to the traditional "war of the generations" in which the young were criticised for deviancy but where the motive of their elders was clearly to encourage their adoption of conventional values. Now the young are held to be a blight. The rhetoric directed at them is less about the need to grow up and join the ranks of society and more about the need for society to shun them if they persist in their perversity. In this they are clearly acting as a proxy for the malign alien.

Matthew Goodwin's "new elite" exhibit many of the characteristics familiar from traditional antisemitic tropes: intrusion into traditional elite institutions (such as Oxbridge), deracination (postcodes in big cities or university towns), financial exploitation (they "hoover up the economic gains of globalisation"), endogamy (they "tend to marry and hang out with other members of the elite graduate class who share the same backgrounds"), a focus on cultural production ("the knowledge, cultural and public sector institutions"), and covert influence ("which give[s] them an immense amount of cultural power over the national conversation"). Significantly, while this echoes late-19th century antisemitism of the sort common around the time of the Dreyfus Affair, with its emphasis on the material and social esteem, Goodwin also highlights the role of alien ideology, which under the Nazis was used to create the hybrid of Judeo-Bolshevism in which the Rothschilds could be yoked together with Leon Trotsky. 

Goodwin offers a foreshortened history in which the last few decades have witnessed a wholesale subsitution of elites. Thus "Whereas the old elite used to display their status to other elites by pointing to their family titles, estates or membership of London’s exclusive clubs, today the New Elite project their status and sense of moral righteousness by demonstrating their allegiance to wokeness". Naturally, he doesn't explain how the shift from one to the other came about, nor does it trouble him that the old elite appear not to have changed one iota in their behaviours or values. As the Conservatives have stuffed ever more paying customers and useful idiots into the House of Lords the number of titles has grown, while there has been no breakup of the great estates or mass closures in London's Clubland. It is surely bizarre to imagine, when the last Prime Minister but one (it's easy to lose count) and his predecessor were both Old Etonians and the current occupier of Number 10 is an Old Wykehamist, that the British ruling class has been comprehensively turned over since Gary Lineker started presenting Match of the Day in 1999.

Ironically, there was a significant change in the composition of one part of the actual elite over the last 50 years, specifically in the City of London where domestic banks, brokerages and exchanges were increasingly taken over by foreign firms, though this was done on the understanding that the traditional elite would retain roles within boardrooms and ancillary services (the law, public relations etc). In some ways Brexit can be seen as a reaction to that trend, with the "nativist" element of the City keen to re-establish greater domestic control. But however that plays out, it doesn't suggest a financial elite so enervated that it will cede political and commercial influence to the massed ranks of the critical race theorists without a fight. Likewise, it is plausible to suggest that the upper echelons of the BBC have shifted politically over the years, but the distance from Greg Dyke to Richard Sharp isn't that far and anyway the direction of travel is clearly to the right.

While it would be easy to dismiss Goodwin as a latterday Julius Streicher, it's important to recognise that his role is not to articulate conventional thinking but to shift its boundary and thus the political centre. A modern-day Enoch Powell would not be expected to resign ministerial office, and would probably defend his comments as "the legitimate concerns of people in the Midlands". Phrases like "Stop the boats" and "Asian grooming gangs" are just more decorous versions of "Let them drown" or "Paki paedos". The equivalent of Powell's "The black man will have the whip hand over the white man" is the suggestion that the police failed to stop those grooming gangs because they feared being accused of racism. Similarly, the young are supposedly dictating social norms and cultural values. Here we see the classic antisemitic trope in which a community that is objectively disempowered and discriminated against, whether Asian Muslims or low-paid graduates, is presented as having an almost magical power to impose its will and compel the acquiescence of others.

Centrist complaints that Gary Lineker's comparison of the Conservative government's rhetoric with Nazi Germany was over-the-top are not just a reflection of the shift promoted by Goodwin and others. They misunderstand that the Nazi's rhetoric was not particularly extreme in the 1930s. It employed the tropes of an existing culture of antisemitism, widespread across Europe, while its practical application was more bureaucratic than emotional (the pogrom of Kristallnacht was very much the exception before 1939). Hitler was careful pre-war to stop short in his speeches of inflaming international (conservative) opinion, while doing his best to inflame domestic opinion through dog-whistles and implication. His most famous speech - on the annihiliation of the Jewish race in Europe - was significantly a prophesy rather than a promise, though everyone surely understood the veiled threat (the Final Solution itself was an ambiguous phrase and remained a largely secret undertaking). Lineker's radicalism (or wokeness, if you prefer) is the result of him apparently standing still since the millennium while the political centre has shifted to the right.

A focus on the antisemitism of Nazi Germany and its terrible conclusion can blind us to the nature of antisemitism more generally. In nineteenth century Western Europe, where foreign immigration was rare and largely focused on urban centres and commerce, the Jew offered a ready target for both resentment towards existing hierarchies (the Court Jew) and contempt for the vicious lower orders. The twentieth century altered this, not so much because of the tragedy of the Holocaust but because democracy broadened the conception of the elite while postwar immigration created a more visible "other" associated with vice and competition in the labour market. The critique of the liberal elite is ultimately a critique of the welfare state and its expanded managerial class, while the critique of "unchecked" immigration reflects status anxiety in a society where "all that is solid melts into air". It is a reactionary plea for old deferences and social certainties. The irony of recent charges of antisemitism against the left is that far from being the marginal obsession of a few, the antisemitic worldview is now conventional wisdom.