Here’s a pretty paradox. Labour is more than 20 points ahead in the polls.
Yet the electorate, on cultural issues such as immigration, gender self-identification, racial politics and crime, is not just to the right of Labour; it is to the right of every mainstream party.
A major survey of 13,534 voters, commissioned by the Conservative donor Lady McAlpine, found that the population at large is less woke than almost all MPs.
Nearly two-thirds of people, including a majority of Labour voters, want immigration reduced. More than half want children to be banned from changing their pronouns. Labour supporters were evenly split on the issue.
Why, then, does Britain seem set to give a landslide to a party which indulges in every politically correct fad, from anti-white racism to refusing to state women have wombs?
Why is Britain so at odds with most of Europe, where a similar mood has produced a sharp swing to the Right?
There are, I think, three explanations. First, the Conservatives have been in power for 14 years. A fifth win would be tough even without the price rises and tax rises occasioned by the lockdowns.
No party has won five consecutive general elections since the early 19th century, when 98 per cent of the population could not vote.
Being in office for a long time means that you exhaust the benefit of the doubt. The mistakes of any public bureaucracy become your fault. The cost of the Ukraine war becomes your fault. Even the pandemic, or at least its effects, are somehow deemed your fault.
Second, although the country leans Right on cultural issues, it leans Left on economic ones. A survey in December found that people want spare government money to go on spending increases rather than tax cuts.
By 64 to 26 per cent, they preferred the statement ‘the Government should prioritise spending on schools and hospitals’ to ‘the Government should prioritise cutting income tax’. Free-market policies are rarely popular when polled in isolation.
And the lockdown made people much more authoritarian, because it normalised state control. Voters saw mountains of money conjured into existence, and got used to some of it being used to subsidise their bills.
They may be anti-immigration but, when it comes to big government, half of their heart is in Havana.
The third reason is the most significant. Put simply, voters don’t think there is much difference between the two parties. They see wokery all around them.
The National Trust is obsessed with slavery. The fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square carries the statue of an African revolutionary who urged his followers to murder whites. The countryside is declared to be racist. Civil servants proclaim their pronouns in email signatures.
Most people see all these organisations as, on some level, the responsibility of the Conservative Government. This leads them to conclude that, when it comes to wokery, the two parties are as bad as each other.
Here, I’m afraid, the country makes an error. A serious error, as we shall learn if Sir Keir Starmer forms the next government. For there is a world of difference between activist officials slipping identity politics past distracted ministers, and activist officials being encouraged from the top to make everything they do about diversity, equality and inclusion.
Conservatives have at least tried to constrain the Leftist tendencies of the administrative state. The Sewell report on Race and Ethnic Disparities was a forensic takedown of the race hustlers — who denounced it dementedly.
New rules have restored sense to how trans issues are handled in schools.
Every week, Conservative legislators push, in the teeth of opposition from every other party, to send illegal immigrants to Rwanda. You might object that these efforts are insufficient, that a determined government would stamp its will on even the most woke civil servants.
You might have a point — though, in my experience, people who have not been closely involved with politics can’t imagine how difficult it is for ministers to get policies through their departments.
All I am saying is that we currently have ministers whose starting assumption is that Britain is a non-racist country, that our identity as individuals matters more than the accident of our birth or physiognomy, and that no one should be fired for expressing views that were mainstream until five minutes ago.
That is a far cry from where Labour is. Remember the photograph of Sir Keir and Angela Rayner taking the knee in 2020 — at a time when it was already clear that BLM was a revolutionary Marxist organisation?
If that had been a one-off gesture during that over-excited summer, we might overlook it. But the fact is that that photograph captured the instincts of the Labour leadership.
Sir Keir, who took over just after Covid had reached Britain, began by commissioning a report into the ethnic aspects of the pandemic. In a world where everything is racist, the coronavirus was bound to be racist, too.
Sure enough, the report concluded by demanding all the things that Labour always demands, whatever the occasion, such as ‘a review into the diversity of the school curriculum to ensure it includes Black British history, colonialism and Britain’s role in the transatlantic slave trade’.
What did that have to do with the coronavirus? Good question. It is unsurprising that a party which draws its MPs disproportionately from government bureaucracies, mega-charities and universities should be obsessed with the diversity, equality and inclusion that dominates those sectors. Its instinct, whatever the question, is to blame racism and call for state intervention.
Mandatory voter ID? Racist! A free rental market? Racist! Energy bills? Racist! Climate change? Racist!
We have Labour MPs calling for more lenient community courts to deal with crimes by non-white offenders.
We have the party calling for government contracts to be reserved for ‘black-led businesses’. The idea that the political parties are all the same when it comes to woke does not withstand a moment’s scrutiny.
Consider, for example, Labour’s promise of a new Race Equality Act, which would require companies to show that they were not paying people differently on the basis of ethnicity.
Companies don’t currently do this, and for good reason. Pay discrimination on grounds of race is immoral, unprofitable and, critically, already illegal.
What Labour proposes is a massive new monitoring system that will create opportunities for frivolous claims by disgruntled employees and huge profits for mischievous lawyers.
If you doubt me, consider the ruin of Birmingham City Council through a creative interpretation of the 2010 Equality Act.
Although the local authority had been paying the same rates for the same jobs, it turned out that there were bonuses available to binmen and grave-diggers that were not available to cooks and care staff.
Since the former jobs were deemed male-dominated, the local authority ended up being stung on equality grounds in a case involving 170 female workers for more than a billion pounds.
It puzzles me that intelligent people can look at Labour-run Birmingham, or Labour-run London, or Labour-run Wales, and conclude that the parties are all the same. If you think things are woke now, just you wait. Just you wait.
- Lord Hannan of Kingsclere is a former Conservative MEP and serves on the UK Board of Trade.
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Daniel Hannan
