I left my local Quaker meeting about 50 years ago over their unwillingness to see that racism in the Rhodesia sense was roughly equivalent to inter-tribal discrimination and domination in the more General African context. People are not blank slates and subpopulations are not identical in their characteristics. I look for people to treat one another based upon their individual characteristics and behavior, not upon perceived or believed group properties. And by this measure many of the strident anti-racists fall into the classic racist camp - all the while denouncing their opponents as evil racists.
The 'racist' term has been so broadly overused that to me it has lost its impact.
I am a grumpy old meritocrat - evaluating at the individual basis.
I agreee with this in principle. But at the same time it's also true that some terms shift in de-facto meaning in the dominant culture to the point where they really can't be used in their original meaning even by people who fulfill the literal definition of the term, and believe there's nothing BAD about doing so -- because more or less everyone will judge them as identifying with the NOW dominant usage of the term, as opposed to the original and often literal meaning.
A good example of this is the term "incel" -- in a literal sense it means involuntarily celibate. A neutral term that describes someone as being celibate, i.e. having no sexual partners, and that the celibacy is involuntary. In other words it distinguishes someone who is celibate because of not having found a suitable and willing partner but wanting one, from someone who is celibate by choice.
But despite the fact that this is clearly the literaly meaning of the word, and historically if I'm not mistaken it was first used by a woman to describe herself -- *today* the culturally dominant usage of the word is quite different.
Today it usually means something like "Straight man who is celibate because he's unable to find any women interested in having sex with him, and who responds to this with some mixture of entitlement and misogyny." -- Pretty often the term even gets abused even further to mean something like: "Man who expresses any kind of frustration in any way about any part of dating"
You could say someone who fulfills the literal definition of the term "shouldn't" mind having the term applied to them. But in a world where the term de-facto DOES mean "awful person" and not just "person who isn't having sex", there's pretty good reason for people to reject the label.
Yes, it’s an emotional response to connotations. That’s what I meant by ‘vibes and feelings’ rather than ‘definitions and reason.’ I suggest if people are really stuck on this by defining literally so you can get to substance. “People on the furthest right of the political spectrum’ rather than ‘far-right’, ‘people who evaluate others by race’ rather than ‘racist’ and ‘people with an ethnicity-centred concept of nationalism’ rather than ethnonationalist. That removes the trigger. So does ‘postmodern thought’ rather than ‘postmodernism’ on the PoMo left.
Agreed. My intention here though was to point out that at least in some cases the "blame" for people rejecting labels that should fit them is a bit split. Yes to some degree they do that because they don't want to own their own preferences, and that's bad.
But on the other hand the progressive left tends to contribute to this trend by a mechanism where they take what started out as a purely descriptive and neutral label and then twist it until de-facto it means "horrible person". At that point people who fit the literal meaning, no longer want the label since it no longer means only the literal meaning, but in addition means "horrible person".
For some labels I think this is unavoidable. Given our history I think "racist" will mean "bad person". But for other labels it's more arbitrary, and it could well have gone a different direction. In principle the progressive left thinks that neither your value as a human being, nor your moral or ethics depend on whether or not you happen to be partnered. So in *principle* they too should AGREE that being an "incel" in the literal sense of the word, is a neutral thing.
But in practice this ends up overshadowed by identity-politics and a belief that all privileges are pure, i.e. that if a group is privileged then it has *only* advantages. Gender isn't like that -- even if someone thinks men are on the overall balance more privileged than women (a view I agree with) -- it's still undeniably true that there's many large and important areas of life where women hold more privilege than men.
And access to willing sex-partners (assuming straightness) happens to be one of those things. Almost all (straight) women have a LOT more such access than almost all (straight) men. And once "incel" had come to be associated with men, the way to then have it mean "horrible misogynist" rather than "person who'd like to have a sex-partner but doesn't" was short.
Far-righter is a bit different. The progressive left by definition thinks that being far right genuinely IS a bad thing to be. Something that *does* clash with the kind of future society they'd like.
Some labels gets demonized because the thing they describe is one that progressive forces genuinely does oppose. (racism, far-right-wing politics) Other labels dets demonized even though the literal thing is one that progressive forces see as neutral, because the label is merely associated with a group that they habitually demonize on account of binary privilege-thinking, i.e. not just identity politics, but identity politics that lacks nuance and refuses to recognize anything any spectrum more nuanced than a stark binary good/bad, privileged/oppressed, perpetrator/victim kinda divide.
“Why ideologues resist the names that accurately describe their own beliefs.”
Because many political labels have been overused and abused by people across the ideological spectrum, to the point where they’ve lost much of their meaning. Once that happens, claiming there is a single “accurate” way to describe someone’s beliefs becomes relative rather than objective. So who exactly gets to decide how someone ought to be “accurately” labeled?
My problem with far right, and similar terms like hard right and right-wing extremist, is that the equivalents of these terms are almost never applied to the left. Even Antifa and BLM rioters, people who celebrated the October 7 attack, or Mamdani and other open socialists, are almost never described as left-wing extremists. Whereas someone who simply supports a secure border and enforcement of existing immigration law is often tagged as far right.
I don’t necessarily agree that “far right” should be defined as the furthest right of actual, extant political parties in a given country at a given time (especially in a first-past-the-post system the rewards parties that are not far from the centre). I suggest that an actual “far right” stance in the UK would be things like, no welfare state at all, abolish the NHS (people could buy private health insurance if they wished/could), et cetera. But there’s no significant party advocating this. The “furthest right” political party are Reform, but many of their social and economic policies are actually centrist or even centre-left.
Today, the label “far right” is mostly applied to opposition to mass immigration, but then, according to polls, a large majority of voters think that immigration is way too high. But it seems weird to describe a majority opinion as “far right”, more or less by definition a majority opinion is centrist.
Well, that is how it measured in reputable sociological research and also what the words literally mean. Of course, we can all suggest it means something else entirely. I could suggest it means a kind of French cheese but then we don’t get very far. In this case, I have argued that we avoid arguing over definitions and go with something that can get us to substance. If you don’t like ‘far-right’ we can go with ‘the people on the right of the most right-wing party.’ In our country that is Restore and people like Steve Law and Zoomer Historian.
That's extremely economically right-wing, but the left-right spectrum isn't purely economic. The economically furthest right relatively major party seems to be the Tories.
Right of there, economic populism becomes a major issue, which means that they're actually moving left economically. And I tend to use that as the start of the far-right.
So you’re using the label “far right” for people to the left of the Tories on economic policy? Is that really sensible? I get that there is more to the political spectrum than economics, but economics is still a large part of it. But this sort of thing helps to explain why many who are labelled “far right” reject the label.
Realistically, yes. As I said, it’s about the parties and political culture. Nobody uses ‘far-right’ to mean ‘libertarians’. Our concepts of left and right are currently based on an identitarian model.
And no, people not considering ‘far-right’ in terms of libertarianism is not why people reject the label ‘far-right.’ They accept that the opposite of them is the identitarian far-left and have no problem identifying them as far left. They just want their own stance to be seen as the mainstream one. So do the far-left.
Let’s make this concrete. I like and respect Japanese people and culture. I wish Japanese people success, prosperity and contentment. But I would not want 10 million Japanese people to move to Britain (for a whole host of reasons including liking Britain as it is, valuing British heritage and culture, and not wanting house prices to go through the roof, nor wanting the countryside built over). Does this opinion make me “far right”?
I don’t think it does, I think it makes me normal and sensible and I don’t think that opinion places me on the political spectrum (in the sense that one could find many with the same opinion at all locations on the spectrum).
Out of an adult population of about 48 million voters how many are racist or far-right? Is it 0.1%, 5%, 10%? And what ethnicity are these racists? I've seen many in London chanting anti-semitic slogans such as Hitler was right. The media seem to think anti-semitism is not racism when it is perhaps the oldest racism. The label that accurately describes their beliefs is not so much resisted by them as disapplied by the media.
> We saw this with the Critical Social Justice movement too when it resisted any terms other than ‘Social Justice” to define itself.
They weren't happy with that either. Before they were called woke, they were called social justice warriors, and really didn't like that term. Although admittedly, it was mostly used as an insult.
As someone with considerable sympathy for what is now referred to as being “woke,” I find that I still have to be careful how I identify that. “Social Justice Warrior” spent a lot of time as a strictly pejorative term: someone so attached to the idea of being a warrior for social justice that they make a self-righteous nuisance of themselves. So if I were to say “Yes, I am an SJW, I think there is nothing wrong with this” then there is an interpretation of this in which I would be saying “Yes, I am self-righteous, nothing wrong with that.” Since I think there is something wrong with being self-righteous, this is not actually something that I want to say!
“Woke” is more complex. I still need the quotes around it, because the original usage meant something along the lines of “a person who really understands the political situation of Black Americans.” I am from New Zealand and have no particular special insight into the situation of Black Americans. Indeed, the phenomenon of white people describing themselves unironically as “woke” was, naturally enough, concentrated amongst people who were particularly inclined to claim deep political understanding that they did not in fact have—hence the way it morphed into a pejorative, and from there into a more general term. The more general usage is now so common that I feel comfortable using it in a neutral, informative sense—but only if it has careful quotes around it to distinguish it from the painfully overconfident white usage from which it is derived.
After some reflection on this piece, I suspect that (a) you are one of the few anti-woke people who would not consider me to be woke, but, (b) if so, you would have a strong case for being right!
Whatever they called themselves - including “woke” - got turned into an epithet by the opposition, so they just tried to deny the label as if they hadn’t come up with it themselves.
More disingenuous chaff from HP to keep her Labour Party membership card. Yes there are people who are racist, far right and ethnonationalists, and it’s easy to find examples of all three on Substack. But in the current context when Leftists are smearing the broad right by implicit association with these reprobates - it’s Hope Not Hate’s entire business model, funded by this Labour government - protesting that all she’s doing is a matter of nomenclature just doesn’t cut it. If you want people to be honest HP, start with yourself.
May I call your attention to a variation on this theme of Linguistic Evasion, illustrated by the recent furor over an American judge being very, very specific with his choice of language to describe the material effect of his colleagues' ruling on a particular case? Sometimes speech that triggers emotions is the only way to persuade certain people to even acknowledge facts that are very important to the issue being discussed. https://reason.com/volokh/2026/03/13/the-penis-mightier/
Whilst I would totally agree with your stance that intellectual honesty and at least *some* basis in rationality is desirable, I think the element that's not included here is that of who gets to define the labels?
You (rightly) castigate 'the far right', whatever that term actually means, as not being willing to own up to their own racism - when defined by the commonly-accepted definition of that term. Yet the 'woke left' have not once, to this day, admitted that many of their own stances are, by that definition, also racist.
In these terms, if we set the 'far right' and 'woke left' as boundary conditions, what we have are two groups of racists hurling slurs at one another. And each group, in my view, is *justified* in their accusations of racism to the other.
We kind of do need labels that are (usually) wholly inadequate and rather blunt, if only for the simple reason that few of us have the patience for sitting through a 2 hour long description of qualifications before any substantive point is made.
I think a more productive stance is to focus on *problems* rather than labels - which will, of course, never happen - and even if we do that we still end up with people suggesting that problem X is a result of ism Y in a kind of knee-jerk fashion.
Is it, for example, 'racist' to recognize that the UK's implementation of immigration policy over the last 25 years has caused significant problems? Many would argue that it is and that any such concern arises principally from racism. And yet the data we have does indicate cause for concern. In the decade leading up to the new millennium average net yearly migration into the UK stood at around 4,000. Today that figure has risen by close to 10,000%
That's not a typo.
Whilst net migration is not the best metric, being simple a measure of the difference between in and out, such a stark disparity does indicate that things have massively changed in a very short timescale. There's no way such a change happens without significant ramifications and many people, including myself, are not at all happy with those ramifications. No one appears to be even talking (in a sensible way) about numbers and limits. I definitely don't want to see an end to immigration, but what are the practical limits here? Can we simply absorb 5 million people, say, the majority of whom will not find employment? Current figures suggest that maybe only up to 1 in 4 adult migrants to the UK is in employment.
With immigration, and in other things, we've created a wholly unnecessary problem for ourselves that is increasingly looking like, one way or another, to be only solvable with extreme measures. The system of checks and balances with its inbuilt tolerances - the one we lived with for many years - is looking increasingly inadequate (some would say unwilling) to properly address some of the problems we face.
I'm not happy about this at all - in fact I'm appalled that things are now at breaking point - but I just don't see how the things that worked so well for us in the past (our broadly liberal institutions) are capable of sorting this ungodly mess out. That terrifies me - and I don't think changes in the definitions of labels, or some honesty in accepting them, are going to make any kind of dent here.
The whole piece is about ‘who gets to define the labels’ in the sense that I am saying we should not let the identitarian left or identitarian right redefine those labels for everybody or avoid criticism by pretending they don’t know what the majority of people mean by them. My answer to “Who gets to decide?” is always “nobody and everybody” because my stance is always about not letting anybody decide who gets to say what and that everybody gets to decide what they say.
I castigate both the illiberal left and the illiberal right in this piece and everywhere. I do so in this piece mostly to convince those on the right not to adopt the tactics of those on the illiberal left.
Yes, the woke left don’t apologise for redefining racism in racist ways because they don’t agree with me that that’s a bad thing to do. They think it is a good thing to do. So do the woke right. The rest of cannot wait for them to rethink this before objecting to it and trying to cut through it so we can criticise them.
Yes, we do need words and labels so that we communicate in language which is the way we communicate. I suggest some ways to cut through people on the right trying to make this hard and get to discussing substance at the end.
“Is it, for example, 'racist' to recognize that the UK's implementation of immigration policy over the last 25 years has caused significant problems?”
No. The woke left will redefine racism to include doing that in order to intimidate people out of doing that. Then the woke right will use that redefinition to redefine racism themselves as a meaningless term that indicates someone is woke left so they can give racist reasons for opposing immigration rather than addressing issues of substance such as you address and shut down anybody criticising this.
I’m suggesting we recognise both of these as attempts to derail the conversation by redefinition and don’t let them get away with it.
I left my local Quaker meeting about 50 years ago over their unwillingness to see that racism in the Rhodesia sense was roughly equivalent to inter-tribal discrimination and domination in the more General African context. People are not blank slates and subpopulations are not identical in their characteristics. I look for people to treat one another based upon their individual characteristics and behavior, not upon perceived or believed group properties. And by this measure many of the strident anti-racists fall into the classic racist camp - all the while denouncing their opponents as evil racists.
The 'racist' term has been so broadly overused that to me it has lost its impact.
I am a grumpy old meritocrat - evaluating at the individual basis.
I agreee with this in principle. But at the same time it's also true that some terms shift in de-facto meaning in the dominant culture to the point where they really can't be used in their original meaning even by people who fulfill the literal definition of the term, and believe there's nothing BAD about doing so -- because more or less everyone will judge them as identifying with the NOW dominant usage of the term, as opposed to the original and often literal meaning.
A good example of this is the term "incel" -- in a literal sense it means involuntarily celibate. A neutral term that describes someone as being celibate, i.e. having no sexual partners, and that the celibacy is involuntary. In other words it distinguishes someone who is celibate because of not having found a suitable and willing partner but wanting one, from someone who is celibate by choice.
But despite the fact that this is clearly the literaly meaning of the word, and historically if I'm not mistaken it was first used by a woman to describe herself -- *today* the culturally dominant usage of the word is quite different.
Today it usually means something like "Straight man who is celibate because he's unable to find any women interested in having sex with him, and who responds to this with some mixture of entitlement and misogyny." -- Pretty often the term even gets abused even further to mean something like: "Man who expresses any kind of frustration in any way about any part of dating"
You could say someone who fulfills the literal definition of the term "shouldn't" mind having the term applied to them. But in a world where the term de-facto DOES mean "awful person" and not just "person who isn't having sex", there's pretty good reason for people to reject the label.
Yes, it’s an emotional response to connotations. That’s what I meant by ‘vibes and feelings’ rather than ‘definitions and reason.’ I suggest if people are really stuck on this by defining literally so you can get to substance. “People on the furthest right of the political spectrum’ rather than ‘far-right’, ‘people who evaluate others by race’ rather than ‘racist’ and ‘people with an ethnicity-centred concept of nationalism’ rather than ethnonationalist. That removes the trigger. So does ‘postmodern thought’ rather than ‘postmodernism’ on the PoMo left.
Agreed. My intention here though was to point out that at least in some cases the "blame" for people rejecting labels that should fit them is a bit split. Yes to some degree they do that because they don't want to own their own preferences, and that's bad.
But on the other hand the progressive left tends to contribute to this trend by a mechanism where they take what started out as a purely descriptive and neutral label and then twist it until de-facto it means "horrible person". At that point people who fit the literal meaning, no longer want the label since it no longer means only the literal meaning, but in addition means "horrible person".
For some labels I think this is unavoidable. Given our history I think "racist" will mean "bad person". But for other labels it's more arbitrary, and it could well have gone a different direction. In principle the progressive left thinks that neither your value as a human being, nor your moral or ethics depend on whether or not you happen to be partnered. So in *principle* they too should AGREE that being an "incel" in the literal sense of the word, is a neutral thing.
But in practice this ends up overshadowed by identity-politics and a belief that all privileges are pure, i.e. that if a group is privileged then it has *only* advantages. Gender isn't like that -- even if someone thinks men are on the overall balance more privileged than women (a view I agree with) -- it's still undeniably true that there's many large and important areas of life where women hold more privilege than men.
And access to willing sex-partners (assuming straightness) happens to be one of those things. Almost all (straight) women have a LOT more such access than almost all (straight) men. And once "incel" had come to be associated with men, the way to then have it mean "horrible misogynist" rather than "person who'd like to have a sex-partner but doesn't" was short.
Far-righter is a bit different. The progressive left by definition thinks that being far right genuinely IS a bad thing to be. Something that *does* clash with the kind of future society they'd like.
Some labels gets demonized because the thing they describe is one that progressive forces genuinely does oppose. (racism, far-right-wing politics) Other labels dets demonized even though the literal thing is one that progressive forces see as neutral, because the label is merely associated with a group that they habitually demonize on account of binary privilege-thinking, i.e. not just identity politics, but identity politics that lacks nuance and refuses to recognize anything any spectrum more nuanced than a stark binary good/bad, privileged/oppressed, perpetrator/victim kinda divide.
“Racist” has lost its value, everyone we don’t like is now a pedo.
“Why ideologues resist the names that accurately describe their own beliefs.”
Because many political labels have been overused and abused by people across the ideological spectrum, to the point where they’ve lost much of their meaning. Once that happens, claiming there is a single “accurate” way to describe someone’s beliefs becomes relative rather than objective. So who exactly gets to decide how someone ought to be “accurately” labeled?
Read it?
My problem with far right, and similar terms like hard right and right-wing extremist, is that the equivalents of these terms are almost never applied to the left. Even Antifa and BLM rioters, people who celebrated the October 7 attack, or Mamdani and other open socialists, are almost never described as left-wing extremists. Whereas someone who simply supports a secure border and enforcement of existing immigration law is often tagged as far right.
I don’t necessarily agree that “far right” should be defined as the furthest right of actual, extant political parties in a given country at a given time (especially in a first-past-the-post system the rewards parties that are not far from the centre). I suggest that an actual “far right” stance in the UK would be things like, no welfare state at all, abolish the NHS (people could buy private health insurance if they wished/could), et cetera. But there’s no significant party advocating this. The “furthest right” political party are Reform, but many of their social and economic policies are actually centrist or even centre-left.
Today, the label “far right” is mostly applied to opposition to mass immigration, but then, according to polls, a large majority of voters think that immigration is way too high. But it seems weird to describe a majority opinion as “far right”, more or less by definition a majority opinion is centrist.
Well, that is how it measured in reputable sociological research and also what the words literally mean. Of course, we can all suggest it means something else entirely. I could suggest it means a kind of French cheese but then we don’t get very far. In this case, I have argued that we avoid arguing over definitions and go with something that can get us to substance. If you don’t like ‘far-right’ we can go with ‘the people on the right of the most right-wing party.’ In our country that is Restore and people like Steve Law and Zoomer Historian.
That's extremely economically right-wing, but the left-right spectrum isn't purely economic. The economically furthest right relatively major party seems to be the Tories.
Right of there, economic populism becomes a major issue, which means that they're actually moving left economically. And I tend to use that as the start of the far-right.
So you’re using the label “far right” for people to the left of the Tories on economic policy? Is that really sensible? I get that there is more to the political spectrum than economics, but economics is still a large part of it. But this sort of thing helps to explain why many who are labelled “far right” reject the label.
Realistically, yes. As I said, it’s about the parties and political culture. Nobody uses ‘far-right’ to mean ‘libertarians’. Our concepts of left and right are currently based on an identitarian model.
And no, people not considering ‘far-right’ in terms of libertarianism is not why people reject the label ‘far-right.’ They accept that the opposite of them is the identitarian far-left and have no problem identifying them as far left. They just want their own stance to be seen as the mainstream one. So do the far-left.
Let’s make this concrete. I like and respect Japanese people and culture. I wish Japanese people success, prosperity and contentment. But I would not want 10 million Japanese people to move to Britain (for a whole host of reasons including liking Britain as it is, valuing British heritage and culture, and not wanting house prices to go through the roof, nor wanting the countryside built over). Does this opinion make me “far right”?
I don’t think it does, I think it makes me normal and sensible and I don’t think that opinion places me on the political spectrum (in the sense that one could find many with the same opinion at all locations on the spectrum).
In terms of the identitarian model, what would you say the far-right position (the opposite of the identitarian far-left) actually is?
Out of an adult population of about 48 million voters how many are racist or far-right? Is it 0.1%, 5%, 10%? And what ethnicity are these racists? I've seen many in London chanting anti-semitic slogans such as Hitler was right. The media seem to think anti-semitism is not racism when it is perhaps the oldest racism. The label that accurately describes their beliefs is not so much resisted by them as disapplied by the media.
> We saw this with the Critical Social Justice movement too when it resisted any terms other than ‘Social Justice” to define itself.
They weren't happy with that either. Before they were called woke, they were called social justice warriors, and really didn't like that term. Although admittedly, it was mostly used as an insult.
They didn’t like the addition of ‘warriors’. no.
As someone with considerable sympathy for what is now referred to as being “woke,” I find that I still have to be careful how I identify that. “Social Justice Warrior” spent a lot of time as a strictly pejorative term: someone so attached to the idea of being a warrior for social justice that they make a self-righteous nuisance of themselves. So if I were to say “Yes, I am an SJW, I think there is nothing wrong with this” then there is an interpretation of this in which I would be saying “Yes, I am self-righteous, nothing wrong with that.” Since I think there is something wrong with being self-righteous, this is not actually something that I want to say!
“Woke” is more complex. I still need the quotes around it, because the original usage meant something along the lines of “a person who really understands the political situation of Black Americans.” I am from New Zealand and have no particular special insight into the situation of Black Americans. Indeed, the phenomenon of white people describing themselves unironically as “woke” was, naturally enough, concentrated amongst people who were particularly inclined to claim deep political understanding that they did not in fact have—hence the way it morphed into a pejorative, and from there into a more general term. The more general usage is now so common that I feel comfortable using it in a neutral, informative sense—but only if it has careful quotes around it to distinguish it from the painfully overconfident white usage from which it is derived.
https://www.hpluckrose.com/p/defining-woke-and-wokeness
After some reflection on this piece, I suspect that (a) you are one of the few anti-woke people who would not consider me to be woke, but, (b) if so, you would have a strong case for being right!
Whatever they called themselves - including “woke” - got turned into an epithet by the opposition, so they just tried to deny the label as if they hadn’t come up with it themselves.
More disingenuous chaff from HP to keep her Labour Party membership card. Yes there are people who are racist, far right and ethnonationalists, and it’s easy to find examples of all three on Substack. But in the current context when Leftists are smearing the broad right by implicit association with these reprobates - it’s Hope Not Hate’s entire business model, funded by this Labour government - protesting that all she’s doing is a matter of nomenclature just doesn’t cut it. If you want people to be honest HP, start with yourself.
May I call your attention to a variation on this theme of Linguistic Evasion, illustrated by the recent furor over an American judge being very, very specific with his choice of language to describe the material effect of his colleagues' ruling on a particular case? Sometimes speech that triggers emotions is the only way to persuade certain people to even acknowledge facts that are very important to the issue being discussed. https://reason.com/volokh/2026/03/13/the-penis-mightier/
Whilst I would totally agree with your stance that intellectual honesty and at least *some* basis in rationality is desirable, I think the element that's not included here is that of who gets to define the labels?
You (rightly) castigate 'the far right', whatever that term actually means, as not being willing to own up to their own racism - when defined by the commonly-accepted definition of that term. Yet the 'woke left' have not once, to this day, admitted that many of their own stances are, by that definition, also racist.
In these terms, if we set the 'far right' and 'woke left' as boundary conditions, what we have are two groups of racists hurling slurs at one another. And each group, in my view, is *justified* in their accusations of racism to the other.
We kind of do need labels that are (usually) wholly inadequate and rather blunt, if only for the simple reason that few of us have the patience for sitting through a 2 hour long description of qualifications before any substantive point is made.
I think a more productive stance is to focus on *problems* rather than labels - which will, of course, never happen - and even if we do that we still end up with people suggesting that problem X is a result of ism Y in a kind of knee-jerk fashion.
Is it, for example, 'racist' to recognize that the UK's implementation of immigration policy over the last 25 years has caused significant problems? Many would argue that it is and that any such concern arises principally from racism. And yet the data we have does indicate cause for concern. In the decade leading up to the new millennium average net yearly migration into the UK stood at around 4,000. Today that figure has risen by close to 10,000%
That's not a typo.
Whilst net migration is not the best metric, being simple a measure of the difference between in and out, such a stark disparity does indicate that things have massively changed in a very short timescale. There's no way such a change happens without significant ramifications and many people, including myself, are not at all happy with those ramifications. No one appears to be even talking (in a sensible way) about numbers and limits. I definitely don't want to see an end to immigration, but what are the practical limits here? Can we simply absorb 5 million people, say, the majority of whom will not find employment? Current figures suggest that maybe only up to 1 in 4 adult migrants to the UK is in employment.
With immigration, and in other things, we've created a wholly unnecessary problem for ourselves that is increasingly looking like, one way or another, to be only solvable with extreme measures. The system of checks and balances with its inbuilt tolerances - the one we lived with for many years - is looking increasingly inadequate (some would say unwilling) to properly address some of the problems we face.
I'm not happy about this at all - in fact I'm appalled that things are now at breaking point - but I just don't see how the things that worked so well for us in the past (our broadly liberal institutions) are capable of sorting this ungodly mess out. That terrifies me - and I don't think changes in the definitions of labels, or some honesty in accepting them, are going to make any kind of dent here.
The whole piece is about ‘who gets to define the labels’ in the sense that I am saying we should not let the identitarian left or identitarian right redefine those labels for everybody or avoid criticism by pretending they don’t know what the majority of people mean by them. My answer to “Who gets to decide?” is always “nobody and everybody” because my stance is always about not letting anybody decide who gets to say what and that everybody gets to decide what they say.
I castigate both the illiberal left and the illiberal right in this piece and everywhere. I do so in this piece mostly to convince those on the right not to adopt the tactics of those on the illiberal left.
Yes, the woke left don’t apologise for redefining racism in racist ways because they don’t agree with me that that’s a bad thing to do. They think it is a good thing to do. So do the woke right. The rest of cannot wait for them to rethink this before objecting to it and trying to cut through it so we can criticise them.
Yes, we do need words and labels so that we communicate in language which is the way we communicate. I suggest some ways to cut through people on the right trying to make this hard and get to discussing substance at the end.
“Is it, for example, 'racist' to recognize that the UK's implementation of immigration policy over the last 25 years has caused significant problems?”
No. The woke left will redefine racism to include doing that in order to intimidate people out of doing that. Then the woke right will use that redefinition to redefine racism themselves as a meaningless term that indicates someone is woke left so they can give racist reasons for opposing immigration rather than addressing issues of substance such as you address and shut down anybody criticising this.
I’m suggesting we recognise both of these as attempts to derail the conversation by redefinition and don’t let them get away with it.
No, “who gets to
top!