Poor white men and Labour’s identity trap
THE “OLD” LABOUR PARTY, ESTABLISHED to represent the working class, should be justly proud of its long history of fighting discrimination and championing historically oppressed groups. However, within the purview of the “new” progressive identity politics, socio-economic class is now merely one of a kaleidoscope of intersecting disadvantages. This ideology rejects a materialist class analysis and instead orders the world along an intersecting and oppressive hierarchy of race, sexuality and gender.
Given Labour’s overwhelmingly middle class, metropolitan graduate base, it is thus unsurprising that some disadvantages are more equal than others. On the intersectional matrix, it’s more than feasible that today’s privately educated ethnic minority female Cambridge graduate may be more “oppressed” than yesterday’s white male miner.
Labour’s 2020 “rule book” outlines the logic. Black and Ethnic Minority (BAME) is mentioned 104 times, gender representation 40 times, but only four mentions are made to increasing working-class representation. Even then, class is subordinated to identitarian ideology. While the party’s schemes seek to increase working-class representation, it will “select more candidates who reflect the full diversity of our society in terms of gender, race, sexual orientation and disability”.
Many on the left in Britain now parrot American cultural imperialism through the importation of its race-suffused culture wars and “critical race” mantras. This new religion requires an unquestioning belief in the malignant nature of “whiteness”. It pitches high-status white progressives, corporate keynote grievance grifters and elite minority interlocutors against a largely
