So much was this trend that I was almost disappointed when 2018 ended without UK Girlguiding transgender row blowing up on Damore-esque scale. Perhaps, surfeited with Brexit, there was little room over Yule for the UK political-right to adopt that controversy as another spurious evidence of Britain (indeed ‘the West’) slowly mirroring Saudi Arabia with the immediate condemnation of anyone who abhors ‘legitimate concerns’, whether it be over immigration, feminism or LGBTQ issues. Under guise of ‘free speech’ and allegation of ‘identity politics’ (a phrase that quickly disintegrates under scrutiny), the political-right have successfully triggered a proletariat angst across the West. The proletariat are now, of course, patriotically defending their societies, echoed in chants of ‘take back control’ in the UK and ‘drain the swamp’ in the United States.
That the human identity is fragmented, and the fragment of our identity we choose to prioritise differs individually, seems to escape consideration of these patriots who have now gone to war against the elites with vaguely defined, but yet effective, identity politics as their weaponry.
Take for instance two most prominent UK minority ethnic politicians. Both born a year apart in Rochdale and London respectively to Pakistani-immigrant bus drivers. If ‘identity’ and ‘politics’ were so axiomatically linked, shouldn’t both men be in the same political camp? Instead, Sajid Javid, inspired by Right-wing value of self-responsibility, has become first minority ethnic UK Home Secretary, as member of the Conservative party. And Sadiq Khan, admiring Left-wing value of solidarity, the first minority ethnic Mayor of London, and member of the Labour party.
It’s the same with Kezia Dugdale and Ruth Davidson. Both female, Scottish and gay, but politically far apart. Mhairi Black is also gay and is neither a Tory nor a Labour politician, but instead a member of the Scottish Nationalist Party, suggesting that, perhaps, she prioritises her Scottishness above other fragments of her identity. And we have Kemi Badenoch, a British-Nigerian newly-elected Tory MP, who laments being often mistaken as a Labour MP (her politics assumed by her skin colour), even though she isn’t ‘left-leaning on anything’.
In short, it isn’t a person’s identity that informs their politics, but rather it’s values they’ve accumulated through lived experiences, which they hold as dear.
But such consideration matters little to figures on the political-right who are today more preoccupied with raising a mob to smash contemporary Western society. Their latest incarnation gilets jaunes in France, like Trump-supporters and Brexiteers before them, is a dictatorship of the proletariat led by the political-right. Whipped up by paranoia that the West is experiencing ‘a swarm’ of migrants, as said by a former UK Conservative Prime Minister, the mob, like the original 1789 Paris Commune, is setting fire, literally and metaphorically, to every institution that has sustained Western democracies for many centuries - be it tradition, hierarchy or knowledge - with rhetorical Molotov cocktails provided by the so-called Intellectual Dark Web (IDW).
The IDW use a fig leaf of ingenious phrases to mask this mob action as though something legitimate. There’s ‘orienting response’ put forward by clinical psychologist Jordan Peterson in Canada. And American economist Thomas Sowell swears ‘mundane knowledge’ (wisdom of the crowd) should take precedence over expert knowledge: an argument that was deployed on this side of the Atlantic by Michael Gove during the Brexit debate claiming ‘the people have had enough of experts’. And can we omit unambiguously titled bestseller The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam by Douglas Murray? These are, but a few, examples of the political-right’s embrace of nihilism in full gear.
And we know where it leads. We see it in Western countries where this proletarian revolution led by the political-right has moved from fringes into the mainstream polity: Hungary, Austria, Italy, Bulgaria, and the United States. It has led to ethnostate, theocracy, anti-gay expressions, executive harassing other government arms, in short, it’s led to totalitarianism.
The UK political-right have ignored wise admonition of foremost conservative thinker, Edmund Burke, of ‘infinite caution’ before making social changes. They are recklessly tugging at the fulcrum of contemporary UK society: multiculturalism with no seeming understanding of what comes next. As a Nigerian, who’s now living in England, I have a lived experience of new elites successfully wrestling back control with no tangible improvement materialising for the proletariat.
In the absence of a coherent post-Brexit plan by those who spearheaded the outcome, the UK political-right must now, patriotically, put a lid on chaos they uncovered. This can be done by supporting a ‘People’s Vote’ or ‘Brexit-In-Name-Only’, given ‘No Deal’ isn’t being seriously countenanced. Furthermore, the political-right should soberly reconsider what it means to be a conservative in twenty-first century multicultural UK. And may I suggest that they begin that journey by ditching phoney arguments like ‘identity politics’.
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