Tag: David Goodhart

Police reported a surge in racially motivated hate crime. Did the British public’s attitudes suddenly become more hostile overnight towards immigrants and ethnic minorities? A new economic paper by Facundo Albornoz, Jake Bradley and Silvia Sonderegger, all from Nottingham University, explains the disturbing spike through a framework of a theory of “social norms” and “information shock”. “Following the referendum, people who had so far concealed or repressed their private views for fear of appearing politically incorrect felt empowered and started adopting a behaviour more in line with their true preferences.” Somewhat counterintuitively, they discovered that the biggest spikes in hate crime tended to occur not in areas that voted strongly for Leave but in majority Remain areas. The researchers hypothesise that latent xenophobes in Remain areas had been influenced by local norms about acceptable behaviour. The results are not conclusive. Those influences interact with our preferences. Some, like David Goodhart of the think tank Policy Exchange and Eric Kaufmann of London’s Birkbeck College, have beenproposing an official recognition, even promotion, of the “legitimate group interest” of white people. This is based on the theory that the white majority in the UK is economically and socially neglected due to an official fixation on multiculturalism and diversity – and that this has created a “white grievance” which has been fuelling right-wing populism. Why is it acceptable for politicians to talk about the ethnic identity and needs of minorities but not that of the majority?