The Tribe: The Liberal-Left and the System of Diversity

By Ben Cobley

From Islamist terror to feminist equal pay campaigns and the apparent Brexit hate crime epidemic, identity politics seems to be everywhere nowadays. This is not entirely an accident. The progressive liberal-left, which dominates our public life, has taken on the politics of race, gender, religion and sexuality as a key part of its own group identity - and has used its dominance to embed them into our state and society.
In The Tribe, Ben Cobley guides us around the 'system of diversity' which has resulted, exploring the consequences of offering favour and protection to some people but not others based on things like skin colour and gender. He looks at how this system has almost totally captured the Labour Party and is spreading relentlessly around our other major institutions. He also looks at how it is capturing our language, appropriating key terms like 'equality', 'tolerance' and 'inclusion', while denying a voice to those who do not play along.
The system of diversity makes a challenge to us all: submit, or risk exclusion from society itself.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Imprint Academic
• Release date: Jul 9, 2018
• ISBN: 9781845409876

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THE TRIBE

THE LIBERAL-LEFT AND THE SYSTEM OF DIVERSITY

Ben Cobley

SOCIETAS

essays in political

& cultural criticism

imprint-academic.com

2018 digital version converted and published by

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Copyright © 2018 Ben Cobley

The moral rights of the authors have been asserted.

No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form without permission, except for the quotation of brief passages in criticism and discussion.

Acknowledgement is gratefully made for permission to reproduce extracts of Karl Popper’s The Open Society and Its Enemies © 2008 University of Klagenfurt/Karl Popper Library.

Imprint Academic, PO Box 200, Exeter EX5 5YX, UK

For Jenny, Peter and Cathy

The machine-like condition of modern humans may seem a limitation. In fact it is a condition of their survival.[1]

-John Gray

1 John Gray, The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Myths (Allen Lane, 2013), p. 6.

Preface

When I set out on this book, my aim was to show how liberal-left politics has been consumed by the politics of identity and detail some of the damage it is doing. But in working on it I started to see the connections and recognise how the patterns of behaviour fit into wider contexts. Especially, I started to see the patterns of call and response in which individual members make calls to the wider group and to allies, anticipating a certain response which they generally receive (depending on how well connected and attuned they are). This is politics in its most basic form. The call and response gathers ‘the Tribe’ of our title in, mobilising it each day to renew the fight against its enemies and maintain its identity. The material I use to show this will be quite familiar for the most part, but I have tried to treat it as unfamiliar: to show how strange but also how banal it is - by exploring how it works and especially how it fits in.

Before I go any further, I should probably explain what I mean by ‘the liberal-left’, or ‘progressive liberal-left’ in its longer title. I think it helps to think in terms of ‘worlds’; that, just as we can be ‘in a world of our own’ at any point in time, so most of us most of the time are not. We live in shared worlds, with shared language, shared understandings, customs, beliefs and possibilities. Also, the world we live in is not the whole world. There are many worlds, their horizons are all limited and they are constantly banging up against one another, intersecting and interlocking, confronting and competing against one another.

As I write it in this book, the ‘system of diversity’ is the world occupied by the liberal-left. It is a world in which identity appears to matter more than anything else. This identity appears to be fixed. It is based upon aspects of ourselves that appear to be unquestionable, like our skin colour, ethnicity, gender, sexuality and religion (in the case of Islam). It fixes our place in the world, helping to prescribe the sort of roles we can take on: as members of victim and/or oppressor groups, as representatives of victim groups, and lastly as the people who make space for these roles in the wider public sphere.

The liberal-left ‘tribe’ is the latter group. It oversees the system of diversity, offering possibilities for victim groups to break the barriers of white-skinned, male-dominated power. Many members of this group are male, and even more have white skin. Sometimes, it appears as if they are atoning for a sort of original sin brought on by their identities. In doing so, they appear as a bit liberal and a bit left-wing. They are liberal in the sense that their favoured groups are groups whose causes liberals took up in the past. John Stuart Mill as the quintessential liberal campaigned for women to have the vote many years before they got it. Roy Jenkins as Labour Home Secretary in the 1960s liberalised laws on abortion, divorce, homosexuality, censorship, race relations and immigration.

These causes, together with real disadvantages suffered by the groups involved, affiliated liberals and left-wingers to these groups and established a model for relationships between them which endured after their initial causes had been won. The liberal-left was born out of this process, coming to direct both its leftism and its liberalism selectively, towards its favoured identity groups. To its unfavoured groups it now appears distinctly authoritarian rather than liberal: constantly intervening, clamping down and curtailing possibilities.

The liberal-left is what it is when it is sharing this world of favoured and unfavoured identity groups. But when its members concern themselves with other things, they melt away into those things. The tribe comes together in order to defend its territory, which is the system of diversity.

In this book, I aim to show how this system works as a system and how its problems are the problems that systems have - of reproducing the same behaviours over and over again, in whatever circumstances; of squeezing out the distinctively human, relational and ethical aspects of life; of integrating us into a sort of machine. My approach is critical and I focus mostly on the negatives. But there are positive aspects too. The system has provided a framework that has helped to more or less eliminate traditional forms of racism and sexism from our public sphere (albeit with a considerable amount of ‘concept creep’). Also, the system offers belonging. Integrating into it means fitting in, being part of something, being accepted and approved in public life. Indeed, in a sense the system is itself a form of society, for it brings people together and gives us a way of relating to each other. This has its own value, not least when the same progressive politics is combining with globalisation to overturn old values and ways of life.

Also, I am not arguing that diversity is a bad thing in itself. Part of our problem with diversity is that it carries different meanings. In strict terms, the word ‘diversity’ describes a state of variation, but the politics of diversity places restrictions on who we are, what we can do and what we are allowed to say. The confusion arising from this creates a problem for anyone questioning the politics of diversity, since doing so can easily be made to appear as an attack on the groups that the system of diversity favours, or on the idea of variation. This is part of a more general tendency within the system to appropriate and manipulate language for political purposes, which I explore in Chapter 7.

My intention has not been to write a history, to pick out ‘root causes’, or to nail the original thinkers whose theories have helped get us to this point (though there is a little bit of that at the end). I rather wanted to look at how the liberal-left operates on a daily basis, through the voices of its major figures, in the words of its activists and supporters, and through the practices of ‘institutions of diversity’ like the Labour Party, the Guardian and the BBC. I critique what is said and done, sometimes forcibly. However, the point is not to blame individuals but to extract examples of typical, customary practices - and show how they fit together.

The sheer weight of material arising in our public sphere every day makes it impossible to give a complete picture. Because of this, I have deliberately narrowed my focus to Britain. I have also narrowed down to how liberal-left politics aligns with certain, prominent forms of identity politics, notably feminism, Islamism and the politics of mass immigration. This means that some aspects of contemporary identity politics, including Scottish nationalism and the transgender rights movement, do not feature much here. Many other fascinating topics also remain to be explored, including the interaction of black culture with the system and how personal relationships are being affected by it.

I have many people to thank for getting the book to this stage. My family deserves special thanks for keeping some faith even when there seemed to be no faith worth keeping. I have also received much welcome and valuable support from the following: Timandra Harkness, Tamara Chabe, Susan Masters, Daniel Bentley, Claire Fox, Cathy Cobley, Toby Mundy, David Goodhart, Helena Little, Wendy Earle, Mel Stride, Paul McLaughlin, Amy Parker and Barry and Carol Roberts. I also owe a special debt to the late Professor Hubert Dreyfus for making his Berkeley lectures available for free via podcast, which have helped me formulate my language and arguments. Lastly, I would like to thank those who I follow on Twitter, and others, for highlighting an inexhaustible stream of material on contemporary identity politics and for the discussions which have helped develop my thoughts. There are far too many to list, and I do not know the proper names of many, but thanks to all.

Introduction: Identity Politics and the Liberal-Left

Tribes and in-groups are a fact of life. There is nothing inherently wrong with them or anything that should be done to get rid of them. Collective life has its own justification - to be together and through that to survive and prosper now and into the future.

However, some groups are mutually exclusive. Being part of one group means not being part of others. As a white man I am naturally excluded from women’s or Black and Minority Ethnic (BAME) groups: this is how it works. Being a Labour Party member means not being a Conservative or UKIP or Liberal Democrat or Green member. For groups to have any meaning they must exclude people as well as include them: this is what defines those groups as what they are and not something else. For there to be insiders, there also need to be outsiders. This means inclusion/exclusion criteria and boundaries which need to be maintained.

These group boundaries or distinctions are real, but their significance is socially generated. Someone’s skin colour or political affiliation may be irrelevant in one social context, but it may determine their fate in another.

In Life and Fate, his epic novel of family, Stalingrad and totalitarianism, the Soviet-era journalist Vasily Grossman said:

Human groupings have one main purpose: to assert everyone’s right to be different, to be special, to think, feel and live in his or her own way. People join together in order to win or defend this right. But this is where a terrible, fateful error is born: the belief that these groupings in the name of a race, a God, a party or a State are the very purpose of life and not simply a means to an end. No! The only true and lasting meaning of the struggle for life lies in the individual, in his modest peculiarities and in his right to these peculiarities.[1]

Grossman maybe stretches his point a little too far. Nevertheless his polemic makes a powerful and important point: that identity and the groups which support different versions of it can become forces of oppression, not just against other groups but against individuality and humanity itself. This happens when they become ends in themselves (as Grossman says, ‘the very purpose of life’) - when they take on lives of their own and their practices become self-sustaining, working to maintain group integrity at the expense of such things as truth and personal ethics.

Far from dying out following the horrors that Grossman witnessed in the 20th Century, the politics of identity based around largely unchosen characteristics like skin colour and sex is now going strong in Western countries, including Britain. What is more, it is drawing most succour by linking into left-wing and liberal political organisations and movements - to the extent that the politics of identity appears to be the defining trait and core purpose of liberal-left politics nowadays. However, some of those who politicise identity and favour certain identity groups do not belong to those groups themselves. Also, while some assign degrees of value to different identifiers (like skin colour, sex/ gender and immigrant status), maybe based on perceived group victimhood, others also work to bind group members into a particular way of life, attaching implicit and/or explicit conditions on group membership - attaching a value of conformity. Mixed up into this is the way that some people appear to represent identity groups, having the authority to speak on their behalf. Normally representatives appear as group members, but not always, as with the firebrand left-winger George Galloway and the role he has taken at various times representing Muslims.

These different roles are fluid. We can switch between them: for example appearing to represent a certain identity group at one moment and assigning value to various other identity groups the next.

After the dreadful Grenfell Tower fire in West London, in which 71 people died, the Tottenham Labour MP David Lammy appeared on the scene, rightly bursting with indignation, but also specifically taking on a role as a representative or spokesperson for the tower victims on the basis of them being overwhelmingly of immigrant background, with non-white skin colour and non-British ethnicity.[2] In taking this stance he expressed anger at the appointment of retired judge Sir Martin Moore-Bick to head a public inquiry into what had happened. Lammy said, ‘He is a white upper middle class man who I suspect has never visited a tower block housing estate and certainly hasn’t slept a night on the 20th floor of one.’ He added: ‘It’s a shame we couldn’t find a woman to lead the inquiry, or indeed an ethnic minority to lead the inquiry, in 2017. And I think the victims will also say to themselves, when push comes to shove, there are some powerful people here - contractors, sub-contractors, local authorities, governments - and they look like this judge.’[3]

Here we see Lammy interpreting Grenfell not just through the prism of skin colour but of gender and class too, treating the fixed (and quasi-fixed) identities of the people involved as primary to the disaster itself and the response required. He assigns the categories of ‘white’, ‘male’ and ‘upper middle class’ to an order that was responsible for the disaster. He also demands an identity-based response, narrowing down to gender and skin colour in prescribing that only a woman or someone of non-white skin should be allowed to decide what happened at Grenfell.

In our public life, this sort of response has become so common, so regular and predictable that it marks out a discrete strain of politics. There is a distinct tribal aspect to it: of shared assumptions, shared language and a shared value system, not based on belonging to a certain fixed identity group, but on politicising various fixed identity groups - assigning favour to one group (including women and non-white-skinned people) and disfavour to another (notably the white-skinned and male). Across the spectrum of left-wing and liberal politics, we can see this way of being going strong - from far left and environmental activists to centre-left types, Liberal Democrats and even ‘liberal’ or ‘progressive’ Conservatives. All seek to fit in and gain approval by offering favour to the same favoured identity groups.

Diversity as a system

The infrastructure of identity-based favouritism has been spreading rapidly through our public institutions, the more so the more linked in to the political left they are. The broadcaster Channel 4 was set up in 1982 with the remit to innovate and appeal to audiences that were neglected by the established broadcasters. It provided genuinely lively, diverse programming in its early years with a distinctly anti-Establishment flavour. More recently, the channel’s top news presenter Jon Snow showed his political colours by joining in with a chant of ‘Fuck the Tories’ at the Glastonbury Festival. But, like Glastonbury itself, this stance no longer has such an anti-Establishment edge as it used to.

The same goes for the diversity agenda that Channel 4 is pursuing, which seems to tell a wider story of diversity becoming institutionalised and conformist, of integrating into established forms of society rather than challenging them. Channel 4 now has an extensive system in place which it calls its 360° Diversity Charter. This includes specific identity-based favouritism for 40 programme directors from ‘underrepresented groups - BAME, female and disabled’, plus interventions to ‘enhance the careers of ten high potential BAME talent... to improve BAME representation at more senior levels’. Channel 4 says the Charter’s initiatives, which include a raft of other measures to support diversity within the organisation and in its relationships, ‘have now been dubbed the new normal as they have become Channel 4’s established ways of doing business’.[4]

Channel 4 talks about the individuals it favours providing ‘representation’ to ‘underrepresented groups’, so binding them into the organisation in a more structured way than as mere employees - fitting them in as go-betweens between Channel 4 as an organisation and these groups as groups. One of the reporters the company employed during this time was Amandla Thomas-Johnson, a former head of the Federation of Student Islamic Societies and press officer at Islamist prisoners’ group CAGE. Another, Channel 4 News senior reporter Assed Baig, left after a string of controversies, culminating in a segment promoting the self-described ‘anti-colonialist Islamist’ Nadia Chen as one of a group of Muslim women who ‘fight back by rejecting stereotypes’. Chen had a track record of anti-white and pro-terrorist comments behind her, including quoting Robert Mugabe’s line that ‘the only white man you can trust is a dead white man’.[5]

These and more benign instances like presenters boasting about all-female line-ups on the news are all consistent with the same logic and value system, which is concerned with favouring some identity groups and disfavouring others. The idea that a judge should be representing certain identity groups rather than making impartial judgements appears as a variation on the same model, one that is not concerned with equal rights or equal opportunities, but rather favouring groups as groups by giving those who appear as their representatives prominent roles in which their purpose is to represent their respective groups.

This institutionalisation of the diversity agenda represents an extending and deepening of the system of ‘multiculturalism’, which assigns special privileges to members of certain ethnic, racial and religious groups through the mediation of ‘community leaders’, adding new groups like women, gay and disabled people and widening the scope of those who appear as representatives - including by bringing younger people into the system.

The system of diversity: Favoured and unfavoured identity groups

At the top of the system though, overseeing it, we find many people who appear as unfavoured group members, notably many white-skinned men. These overseers, or ‘administrators’, of diversity, take on a role distributing power to the favoured groups via prominent members of those groups. At the next level down from them we find the group or community representatives themselves, who respond to the possibilities offered by diversity administration and use the power granted, in theory, on behalf of their groups. At the bottom level we find the much larger body of group members whom the representatives represent. These roles can be fluid though. In his response to Grenfell, David Lammy appeared firstly as a group representative, speaking on behalf of the victims as a prominent member of their identity group as he saw it. But he was also pronouncing as an overseer, demanding the allocation of power either to an individual of his identity group or to that of another favoured identity group, that of women.

We can see these roles reproduced over and over again, in the language our public figures use, the causes they turn to and the interpretations they put on events, which are grounded not just in identity but in specific relations of protection and favour towards some groups while sidelining others. There are regularities at work here - with set relationships and roles for people at the different levels to play. In this way diversity shows itself as systemic, as familiar, established and easy to apply: as diverse in one sense but uniform and predictable in another. It is a system of diversity in the sense of systematising a value system of preference based on certain identity traits.

1.jpg

Administrating diversity < - > Group representation < - > Identity groups

The relationship between administrators of diversity and group or community representatives is crucial to maintaining the integrity of this system as a practical working system of politics. We can see these relations working on two levels: informally through everyday interaction and opinion but also through institutions like Channel 4 and the Labour Party. The relationship has several aspects.

It is ‘multiculturalist’, in the sense that administrators conduct their business and spread opinion by separating out group identities from each other: treating identity groups as discrete groups that should be treated differently, on the basis of their identities: so for example women should be treated differently from men, non-white-skinned people should be treated differently from white-skinned people and Muslims should be addressed as Muslims.

It is ‘transactional’ in the sense that it depends on give-and-take: diversity administrators offer power and non-interference (sometimes branded as ‘tolerance’) in return for various forms of political assistance, like help with difficult community issues or in bringing in votes from the group when elections come around.

In this way, administrators of diversity outsource authority to group and community leaders and prominent group members, giving them the power to mediate between central authority (including centralised opinion-forming) and the favoured identity groups as groups - so they are accepted as authorities representing those groups.

Lastly, it is ‘hands-off’ because that is what outsourcing power entails: non-interference. The politics of the groups is left to the groups and their representatives to decide. The priority is on maintaining system integrity rather than paying attention to whether group politics align with the overseers’ own politics.

These relationships and the system of diversity as a whole depend on these relations being kept intact. Trouble will break out if for example a BBC presenter starts complaining about feminists or if a gay rights campaigner criticises Islamic teachings on homosexuality. Likewise when the Labour Party awards the rights and privileges of ‘real’ women to anyone who says they are a woman, they are intruding on a protected space for women and the authority of feminists to represent them. For these crucial relationships to endure - and therefore for the system as a whole to endure - outbreaks like these need to be minimised and suppressed when they occur. This is how conflicting, contradictory ideologies of identity (conservative Islamic ideology, transgender rights and feminism for example) manage to co-exist under a multiculturalist liberal-left umbrella. The overseeing administration favours these group identities on the basis that they suffer from structural victimisation and must be helped. It places no other conditions on its support except adherence to the system: of allowing the different forms of favouritism to take place.

Rotherham - and the two different forms of ‘protection’

This basic protective stance towards the favoured groups manifests itself in all sorts of ways. It genuinely does protect those groups from racism and sexism and other forms of bigotry. But it also appears in the suppression of inconvenient truths, perhaps the most egregious example of which was the sustained attempts to cover up mass child sexual exploitation (CSE) committed by gangs of mostly Pakistani Muslim men in Rotherham and elsewhere. Rotherham showed how favouritism and protection of a favoured group had been etched into the fabric of local government and police operations to the extent that it overwhelmed another sort of protection they were meant to be practising - of children.

According to successive ‘independent’ reports compiled by Baroness Alexis Jay and Dame Louise Casey, at least 1,400 children in Rotherham were abused over a 12-year period by gangs there. This abuse was carried out by mostly ethnically Pakistani men, centred on the local taxi trade, but attempts to deal with it mostly went nowhere, with those even seeking to speak about it dissuaded and warned about potential accusations of racism. As a voluntary sector worker told the Casey investigators in stark terms, ‘There was resistance to focusing on who the perpetrators were.’[6]

Both Jay and Casey outlined a background in which authorities had delegated relations with the Pakistani heritage community to community ‘leaders’, especially Labour Party councillors from within that community. Jay wrote: ‘There was too much reliance by agencies on traditional community leaders such as elected members and imams as being the primary conduit of communication with the Pakistani-heritage community.’[7] Casey added later, ‘There was a sense that Pakistani heritage Members were handed a community leader role by white Councillors who weren’t sure or didn’t want to deal with the issues around the Pakistani heritage community. They then were able to rescind their responsibility for their constituents as a whole.’[8] This created a situation in which Pakistani heritage councillors alone ‘dealt’ with their own community, a brokerage role which gave them great power.

There was some reason for this though. As Casey said, ‘The former Deputy Leader, Jahangir Akhtar, was sometimes seen to be able to deliver on difficult issues for the council. Inspectors were told that he had been able to stop young Asian men coming out on the streets when the EDL [English Defence League] wanted to march in the town.’ A former senior police officer told her that, ‘Given the town’s problems with the EDL, someone with this kind of reach and influence into the local population was extremely helpful.’[9]

These relations were so strong that when a Pakistani heritage girl from the town went missing, Akhtar and other Pakistani councillors went straight to the police Chief Superintendent to order to deal with it. This is remarkable in the context of normal police practice, but it conforms to the general picture coming out of the Rotherham investigations, of the great power these councillors wielded in the town, including on the police and council operations. The Casey report said of Akhtar that fellow councillors, council officers and others ‘spoke about him with a level of fear’ and were worried that he would come to hear of what they had said.[10]

These relationships are a classic case of our system of diversity (or multiculturalism) in action, with public bodies like the local council and police effectively outsourcing their authority over the local Pakistani community to the community itself via councillors acting as community leaders. They provide an alternative route through which institutional power works, operating as much on an informal level as a bureaucratic one as is the case for other people. But when it came to a situation that was not positive or advantageous to this community and these leaders, those channels of communication broke down, with attempts to engage being rebuffed and abusers being allowed to continue abusing.

In her report, Casey said that council staff felt that Akhtar and his colleague Mahroof Hussain suppressed discussion of CSE ‘for fear of upsetting community relations’. A police officer added:

We’d be at meetings talking about community issues. When there we discussed targeting taxi drivers and the Pakistani heritage community in relation to CSE, we were even discussing particular families we had concerns about. These members [Akhtar and Hussain] would push back. Neither believed the extent of the problem that we were trying to communicate... They were saying to us ‘it will cause a lot of community tension if they are targeted specifically’... We wanted their support...

Another police officer said: ‘They weren’t challenged in their views by other Members [councillors] because they were seen as the experts on Pakistani heritage issues...’[11]

We can see several markers of the system of diversity in action here, especially in the relationship between those appearing as administrators of diversity (the council and the police) and the community leaders. This relationship is multiculturalist (relations conducted with certain favoured groups as groups); transactional (in that administration effectively trades power for assistance with the community); it outsources authority (from public bodies to community leaders); and it is hands-off/not ethics-based (so disregards illegal behaviour in order to maintain the integrity of system relations). Just about the only ‘value’ at play until the issue finally blew up was that of protection and favouritism towards the group represented by the community leaders, maintained through the ceding of authority to them. This was practised by other councillors, council officers and the police, even though Akhtar for example had a past conviction for affray, was not paying his council tax and had apparently helped arrange a deal with his cousin, Arshid Hussain, widely named by victims for his involvement in the sex rings, to return one of the girls involved.[12]

Moreover, perpetrators and community leaders constantly used concerns about ‘community cohesion’ and racism accusations to deter investigations and action. These were also given as reasons not to intervene by local authority staff. One social worker told Casey’s investigators: ‘If we mentioned Asian taxi drivers we were told we were racist and the young people were seen as prostitutes.’ Another said: ‘We were constantly being reminded not to be racist.’[13]

We can see here two typical forms of reaction that arise when the system of diversity’s integrity is threatened: the first being to cover up and suppress, and the second to divert attention towards acceptable perpetrator–victim distinctions, in this case through racism accusations, which restore the favoured group or community’s victim status. Suppression and cover-ups helped to maintain the integrity of the system, because sex abuse by predominantly non-white men against white girls does not fit the system’s narratives about the respective identities of