>LIZ TRUSS: Equality should be for everyone - not just for the woke warrior's favoured few
>Growing up in Leeds in the 1980s and 1990s, I was struck by the lip service paid by politicians to equality while, in the real world, children from disadvantaged backgrounds were being let down. At my comprehensive school, we had lessons in racism and sexism, but there was too little effort ensuring everyone had a grasp of maths and English.
>Leeds City Council – run by Labour and where Jeremy Corbyn’s former campaign chief Jon Trickett cut his teeth as leader – opposed the introduction of school league tables and anything else that might help children from poor families do better in class. Leeds was not alone. Many other councils considered high standards in schools to be secondary to their political projects – or even worse, they treated such efforts to raise children’s horizons as elitist. And since then, I have witnessed the spread of misguided, wrong-headed, and ultimately destructive ideas, which, sadly, have become steadily more prevalent in many aspects of British life.
>Take, for example, Labour-run Birmingham City Council. It recently announced plans to give six new streets names such as Diversity Grove, Respect Way and Humanity Close. Do councillors really think that names alone pave the way to real change? Too many people have jumped on this woke bandwagon and lost sight of what most people want: a life in which they can live happily in a secure home, work in a good job and send their children to a decent school. Rather than engage with these priorities, the Left has been swept up by a warped ideology and all its bizarre obsessions. As a result, there is a misguided emphasis on policing our vocabulary so as not to offend, rather than policing our streets. And the woke brigade is angrier about the ‘sins’ of historical figures rather than trying to make a better life for those who live today.
>Their answers are to introduce quotas, diversity agendas and so-called ‘unconscious bias’ training. But these crudely treat people as part of groups rather than as individuals. What’s more, those who do not fit in their cultural box-ticking – for example the white working class – are, in effect, written off. And despite their stated intention to improve society, I am convinced that these dehumanising, disempowering and dysfunctional ideas do nothing in practice to make life fairer. Those behind this pernicious woke culture see everything in terms of societal power structures. To these zombies, truth and morality are merely relative.
>The great irony is that with this moral blindness, the Left has allowed insidious practices to threaten equality. For example, it has failed to defend the single-sex spaces that were won by the hard work of women over generations. It has allowed the spread of antisemitism. It has allowed the appalling grooming of young girls for sex by elder men in towns such as Rotherham. It is vital that things change. The way forward is to ignore the Left’s empty gesture politics and give people more control over their lives. Compared with very many other countries, we can be proud about how far society has developed. Britain is more colour-blind and less sexist than ever. That said, we cannot be complacent. Families, especially those living beyond the South East, face serious hardships. Equality should be for everyone, not just for those groups that the Left deems fashionably worthy of such attention.
>What we don’t need is the type of patronising feminism symbolised by Harriet Harman’s notorious ‘pink bus’, which was driven around the country during the 2015 General Election campaign. It often repelled the female voters it was meant to woo. Let us not listen to a party that claims to champion women but which has never elected a female leader. The reason the Tory Party has had two female leaders and now has the largest ever number of people from ethnic-minority backgrounds in Cabinet is not because of positive discrimination, but down to positive empowerment.
>This Government was elected to level up the country – to fix the scourge of geographic inequality and ensure equal opportunity for all. This will not be achieved through identity politics, virtue-signalling or any other kind of right-on posturing. It can only be done if politicians are in touch with the real issues people face in their daily lives. This is a task already under way in government. The Treasury has made it crystal clear that it will assess all future big spending projects in order to guarantee that Ministers spread investment across Britain as part of our policy to level up the whole country.
>We are creating more free schools, a form of education which has already done more to help poor children get on in life than any number of diversity training sessions. This Government is giving poorer kids a fairer shot at getting to university by boosting fairness. Extra measures will be used for next summer’s GCSE and A-level exams in England, such as more generous grading, advance notice of exam topics and additional papers, to make up for the disruption faced by students during the pandemic. We are behind policies to help young people get on to the property ladder, following in the footsteps of the housing revolution implemented by Margaret Thatcher, which changed the lives of countless people by giving them the right to buy their own council home.
>While the Left just talks about equality, we are doing something concrete: beefing up the Equality and Human Rights Commission under new leadership, with crossbench peer Baroness Kishwer Falkner, Left-leaning journalist David Goodhart, digital entrepreneur Jessica Butcher, media charity head Su-Mei Thompson and former Royal College of Surgeons of England president Lord Ribeiro. They are not hidebound by groupthink. Instead, they are committed to equality and ending discrimination. Equality must be for everyone, not just whoever might be among the Left’s current set of obsessions. Our mission is to improve people’s lives across the country, no matter who they are. That’s the only fair way to build a better society.
What I have noticed amongst right-leaning people I associate with is an increase in the targeting of so-called wokeness. When they criticise Labour it's not actually because of a particular policy that they disagree with, it's because they blame them for whatever the latest culture war is. It's the fault of lefties that the game between PSG and Istanbul Basaksehir was abandoned after an official said "that black guy over there". It's the fault of lefties that they weren't going to sing Land of Hope and Glory at The Proms. They love it when Laurence Fox sticks it to the wokies. It doesn't actually matter in their eyes what Labour say or do, they just see a vote for them as accelerating and encouraging this wokeness that they oppose so vehemently.
>opposed the introduction of school league tables and anything else that might help children from poor families do better in class
Sneaky little move there to namecheck a policy that didn't do much more than increase the efficiency with which middle class families bid up the house prices in good school districts.
The right wing has monopolised all aspects of political discourse and can twist and contort everybody else's side into being foaming at the mouth lunatics for pointing out obvious, clear truths that lower capital gains tax =/= greater capital investment.
The only solution to this, I fear, is political violence.
>For example, it has failed to defend the single-sex spaces that were won by the hard work of women over generations. It has allowed the spread of antisemitism
This is where she gave herself away as a bad faith actor. The right is generally cleverer than the left, I'll give it that. Probably shouldn't be surprising considering they all went to private schools, but I digress- It seems they are catching hold of the disillusionment with identity politics on parts of the left and broader working class, and appropriating the rhetoric for themselves.
The woke left will naturally see this and double down on trans rights for your pets and reparative blackface or whatever shite their brain parasites come up with next. The materialist left will remain a fringe minority. The neoliberals will, as always, watch, laugh, and profit.
>>91891 It's typical lefty logic. If people don't want to listen to what they want to say it's always everybody else's fault and never their own. As much as they love to criticise the media monopoly they'd be extremely authoritarian if they had their own way; it's a bit like how some lads portray themselves as "nice guys" when the reality is that they're chauvinist arseholes who are too meek and spineless to act on this, which they convince themselves is chivalrous, and then blame women for not being interested in them and going after bad boys instead.
>>91893 >This is where she gave herself away as a bad faith actor
You don't think the part in the second sentence, where she implied that in the '80s she had more "racism and sexism" lessons than maths or English, did that?
My main observation on this speech is that she doesn't seem to realise which party she's in. Boris may be genuine on his ambition to level up/bring equality, or he may not be and is just playing that tune for the proles, but it's largely irrelevant because there is no way heartland tories and tory donors will tolerate any actions that threaten to topple them off their elevated positions, or even give them any competition. Those people vote tory precisely because they are comfortable with how things are for themselves and they don't want anyone to rock the boat.
No, that's just completely boilerplate politico talk. The bit I quoted is where she just couldn't actually help letting her true priorites shine through a bit.
>The three wise monkeys have been a cultural trope throughout the world for centuries as a symbol of seeing, hearing and speaking no evil. Academics at the University of York have decided that they are, in fact, an oppressive racial stereotype, and pulled an image of the animals from their website to avoid offence.
>Organisers of a forthcoming art history conference apologised for using the picture in their call for submissions. “Upon reflection, we strongly believe that our first poster is not appropriate as its iconology promulgates a longstanding visual legacy of oppression and exploits racist stereotypes,” they wrote. “We bring this to your attention, so that we may be held accountable for our actions and, in our privileges, do and be better.”
>A spokeswoman for the University of York said that the organisers of the online conference, entitled Sensorial Fixations: Orality, Aurality, Opticality and Hapticity, were worried about a possible insult to ethnic minorities.
Otherlad here. I sympathise with the author and find it disappointing that they experienced that at a political gathering describing themselves as the "left". I also broadly agree with their historical point about miners and LGBT people, and would of course like to see more of that kind of solidarity.
I do also think, though, that the hostility and ridicule they experienced is precisely the result of the divide-and-rule politics at play that >>92020 describes. I think the left has the far more difficult task in bringing together and adequately representing a far more diverse range of interests than the right, which are generally more organised consolidations of power -- not perfect, but surely from a narrower range of backgrounds and interests.
By necessity, it's also the working class that should make up the bulk of the movement in terms of sheer numbers. There's a fine balance between extending an olive branch to people who have already been deliberately conditioned to casual homophobia/transphobia/racism and accepting any level of prejudice against minorities.
Maybe the historical example is apt, as they clearly found a way to get past typical socially conservative rhetoric and see it as a matter of basic human rights, in the same way that LGBT people fully threw themselves behind the concrete material issues that plague the majority of the British population.
As a sidenote: I have been guilty of feeling frustrated with an ineffectual left, and it seems like this sentiment has been with us at least since the 1980s when Alexei Sayle was taking the piss out of people who "knit their own yoghurt". It's tempting to think that trans and LGBT groups are diverting people from material concerns in this way, but I've been kept grounded by actually having LGBT friends from both working and middle class backgrounds. Generally, they don't dismiss my concerns as long as I articulate them well and I don't dismiss theirs.
I also believe that our current economic system is one that will award performative and shallowleftism (which I think is what >>92020 really means by "wokeness") and punish any genuine solidarity that threatens to bring in larger crowds. It's why today we can read the Guardian but not the Daily Herald.
Similar dynamics occur around racial politics, too, by the way; American figures like MLK are remembered for their flowery speeches on issues which don't offend corporate or free market sensibilities, but they're not remembered for their solidarity with striking union workers.
The trouble is it's rare to see examples of real solidarity from those kinds of performative leftists, and it's hard not to come to the conclusion that they're either simple grifters making a bit of money and attention while it's fashionable, or they are intentional wreckers knowingly distorting the shape of leftist discourse.
Either way, it's pretty much inarguable, after everything that's happened over the last for or five years, that all of it is a massive own-goal for lefties and leaves us wide open for the right to score easy, cheap points by pointing at whatever the latest Twitter fad is and going "Look what those mad lefty snowflakes are up to now eh?! They're after female space marines now! Where will it end!"
I wasn't quite as harsh as you in my post. Like I say, it's more of a systemic thing -- in a society which doesn't allow class solidarity, and actively punishes it while incentivising wokeness, of course that's what we're going to see and hear more of.
If there were less institutional bias against the working class generally, we'd be seeing a lot more level-headed takes on intersectionality, how race and disability and sexuality and so on can compound economic disadvantages, but we simply don't live in that world. Corbyn's government probably represented the last proper shot at getting that sort of thinking into our formal political system, but underwent what was essentially character assassination to prevent it. This happens repeatedly with anyone that tries to bring up the issue of class too close to the centers of power. Anyone who tries to follow suit should expect the same treatment.
Personally I'm very sanguine about noted rational person Dominic Raab being made Justice Minister a day after Borison Johnson proundly joked that the UK is becoming the "Saudi Arabia of penal policy", to an audience of Tory donors.
>>91877 The right has always strove to create caricatures of what a "leftist" is like and by and large it works.
There is a minority on the left who do stupid things and make stupid choices but the public has by and large been successfully convinced that these people are the mainstream left.
Liz complains that the left are crudely treating people as groups, doing so crudely treating the left as a group.
>>94564 >This happens repeatedly with anyone that tries to bring up the issue of class too close to the centers of power
ARE Liz done it in the OP.
>>94568 >There is a minority on the left who do stupid things and make stupid choices
I think you're being a bit disingenuous here. It's a sizeable minority at minimum within political parties (or embracing extremism) that you wouldn't want to be cornered in a pub by and when you have a minority of very determined people in power there's no limit to doing stupid things and making stupid choices.
Call it the decline of mass politics if you want. One that I think everyone accepts has been especially traumatic to the left following deindustrialisation.
She gets tantalisingly close, but carefully skirts the issue. If you pay attention, it's the same old social mobility rhetoric that doesn't recognise any real economic inequalities. Children from disadvantaged backgrounds were being let down, yes, but why? Generations of inequality exacerbated by neoliberal economics? Increasingly precarious work for their parents? Completely different league tables for schools? No, they were just focusing too much on racism and sexism, and didn't have enough lessons in maths and English.
She mentions geographic inequality, but what does that mean if you don't recognise some regions have less money than others? She explicitly says equal opportunity, rather than equality of outcome. She also makes the point to repeat the smear of antisemitism about the only recent version of the left to recognise class, Corbyn's Labour.
This is just posturing against the "woke" enemy that the right themselves have constructed, trying to assuage a working class with vague niceties and score a few points without actually mentioning anything concrete.
>>94569 >Call it the decline of mass politics if you want. One that I think everyone accepts has been especially traumatic to the left following deindustrialisation.
Sorry mate, but have you been asleep the past few decades? Deindustrialisation could have been handled multiple ways, but we chose to outdo Reagan on Reaganomics and utterly destroyed our trade unions. This has broken the back of the organisations which the left was centred around. It was a power grab for the right, a pattern that repeated itself throughout the 20th and 19th centuries as soon as "mass politics" threatened to gain any relevance at all.
