Labour’s internal battle over trans women and All-Women Shortlists suggests its strategy of identity politics is backfiring
by Mark Wallace, Conservative Home:
For many years now, the Labour Party and the wider Left has enthusiastically capitalised on identity politics as a strategy. By taking full advantage of any opportunity to pitch itself as the political vehicle for a wide range of divided and subdivided identity groups, Labour has managed to attach its own brand to various group identities, sometimes with remarkable electoral results among narrow demographics.
That was a dubious, if profitable, strategy to pursue. It required them to disregard reasonable concerns – about prioritising identity over beliefs, principles or outcomes, and the downsides for wider society of stoking division along the lines of race, faith, gender and so on – or to view such knock-on effects as a price worth paying in return for electoral advantage.
Labour might have been willing to strike such a bargain, but it seems that they underestimated the degree to which they were taking a risk by trying to harness very powerful forces which they did not fully understand.
The thing about identity politics is that it forces its practitioners to create a hierarchy of identities. Those who believe class is paramount argue that the workers of the world have a shared interest which trumps national identity. Those who see religion as the essence of their identity might identify more strongly with a fellow believer far richer or poorer than themselves ahead of someone of the same class, or nation. And so on, and so on, ad infinitum – the capacity to cut and cross-cut each group ever more finely has proved limitless.
Read also: Women come last in Labour’s deranged victim hierarchy. Feminists are enraged that their long fight for equal representation is once again under threat by Rod Liddle, Spectator (£)
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