Tag: Policy Exchange

The politics of identity, which can segue into the politics of victimhood, has now established itself strongly on the left and among liberals of all stripes. A recent book, The Tribe (2018), by Ben Cobley, argues that “a discrete strain of politics… assign(s) favour to one group (including women and non-white-skinned people) and disfavour to another (notably the white-skinned and male)”. A spectrum running from far left to liberal conservatism, it has developed “shared assumptions, shared language and a shared value system”. Wars over these attitudes mainly take place among members of the political and cultural establishments, who are themselves generally white. Tariq Modood, professor of sociology at Bristol University, a British Pakistani and one with both academic and state honours, believes the left’s obeisance to an unreflective anti-racism is “confused”. In a talk he gave to a workshop on “Labour and England” in September, he said that “the self-effacement of being British among the centre-left made it difficult for people like me to say I was British and was proud to be British, that we were British together…ethnic minorities are now more affirming of a British identity than the white English”. On a panel earlier this year he has argued that “we need to put right what’s gone wrong in immigration: people have lost trust in the system…People don’t blame the immigrants - they blame the politicians. I think we should change the system of free movement.” The shame which leftists and liberals often express – the writer Paul Mason wrote in 2015 that “I do not want to be English” – and the left-liberal contempt for what they claim is a continued attachment to imperial glory by whites, are themes picked up and developed by Iranian born Ali Ansari, now head of the Institute for Iranian Studies at St Andrews University. Deprecating British self deprecation, Ansari told me that “the empire is accused of being a racist project – in fact, imperialists who knew and worked in the empire were often very inclusive – cosmopolitanism came to be part of imperialism… Someone said – the ‘trouble with the British is that not only were they the greatest imperialists, but they are also the greatest anti-imperialists’.” Ansari and Modood are scholars, Katwala a journalist turned think tank leader. Munira Mirza was born to working-class Pakistani immigrants in Oldham: a former researcher for the Centre-right Policy Exchange institute, she later worked as London Mayor Boris Johnson’s advisor on culture.

Millions of dollars has been raised from anonymous US donors to support British rightwing thinktanks that are among the most prominent in the Brexit debate. The Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA), the Adam Smith Institute, Policy Exchange and the Legatum Institute have all received financial support from US backers via this route. The charitable status of the thinktanks requires them to remain non-partisan, and they all insist they have not taken a line as institutions on whether the UK should leave the EU. However, they have published or contributed to policy papers that advocate a Brexit deal that makes a clean break from European regulations. It also called for opening all services to competition, including the health service, scrapping many of the EU regulations on data protection, pharmaceuticals and food safety and chemicals, and reducing taxes. Undercover filming by Greenpeace this year recorded Michael Carnuccio, the head of an Oklahoma-based libertarian thinktank, the E Foundation, saying his organisation was planning to pour cash into the IEA. In response, the IEA said it did not recognise the sums of money being suggested by the E Foundation and it had not received any cash from US businesses in relation to its work on trade and Brexit. After the disclosures, the Charity Commission opened an inquiry into the IEA to examine concerns about its political independence. It is unclear how much of the money raised by the American entities is passed to the British thinktanks, due to the secrecy surrounding the donors. The Adam Smith Institute has raised $1.4m from American donors since 2008.

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?