Silencing dissenting voices. How the left threatens freedom.

A letter signed by academics calls for Cambridge University not to give Dr Noah Carl an academic position because (they state but don't evidence) Dr Carl's work is racist. Now, since I haven't read much of Dr Carl's work, it's tricky for me to know whether or not this statement is true. I am also certain that, despite what they've said in the letter they've signed, few of the 200 hundred or so academics who've said Dr Carl is racist have read any of his work either.

This seems an isolated incident but it represents a trend in our society. Intelligent people, mostly who hold left wing views of one sort of another, collect to silence dissenting views. Dr Carl is a dissenter whose failing is that he is right wing (he challenges this assertion) and researches links between intelligence, politics, race and economic development (this is a simplification). More importantly, I suspect, is that Dr Carl is a prominent and outspoken critic of leftist bias within academia and especially in his own field of sociology and social psychology. It is this criticism that lies behind the academics' letter not the essentially spurious allegations of 'pseudoscientific racism'. Right wing voices must be either silenced or placed in a carefully quarantined box labelled "dangerously wrong ideas".

Don't misunderstand me here, I don't think there's a vast conspiracy of critical theory scholars and sociologists plotting in some university common room to silence voices arguing for conservative, classical liberal or libertarian ideas. It's rather that there's a consensus that these ideas are "wrong", that people who hold them are either sinister forces or misled by sinister forces, and that rather than engage with the ideas the motives of those promoting such dangerous thoughts must be questioned or else their character smeared (sometimes both).

We see this in the "who funds you response" directed (amongst anti-foreigner and misogynist slurs) to young female voices from organisations like the Institute of Economic Affairs, Adam Smith Institute and Taxpayers' Alliance. We saw it in the damning mischaracterisation of Toby Young as an eugenicist, in the selective misquoting of Roger Scruton following his appointment to chair as government body looking at aesthetics in architecture. And we've seen it in the bizarre conspiracy theories of George Monbiot and Carole Cadwalladr - a world where well known libertarians giving money to a libertarian-inclined think tank is "dark money" and where someone turning down the offer of a deal is proof positive of their collusion with the makers of that offer.

The problem - and it is a real one - is that too many left wing people simply believe nobody can support free markets, capitalism, free speech and economic liberty without being 'shills for corporate lobbyists'. This viewpoint is now firmly embedded right across the left of politics and academia, from the mildest of Blairite establishment figures through to the communists who work for Jeremy Corbyn - people are right wing because they are making money from it or thick or 'gaslighted' by those funded by "dark money" into backing ideas against their interests.

Dissenting voices - whether it is old-fashioned conservatives like Scruton or left-libertarian ex-trots like the folk at Spiked - cannot be tolerated. Hence calls for the BBC to stop having people from the IEA or TPA ("who funds you") presenting their work - it's not about the funding, it's about the ideas they promote. These ideas - conservatism, classical liberalism, free markets, open societies, free speech - are what the newly intolerant left want to silence and attacks on motives, slurs, misrepresentation, whataboutery and orchestrated calls for sackings or no platforming are justified by the need to either silence or discredit right wing thinking.

I don't offer a resolution, more a question and something of a warning. The question is how, when the centre-left and progressive mindset is so pervasive across the media, do we create a sense of balance? By way of example, the IEA is routinely referred to as a 'right wing' think tank when its researchers appear on broadcast media, yet when people from think tanks like the IPPR appear they are seldom introduced as from a left wing think tank. This imbalance reinforces the idea that right wing is problematic in a manner that left wing isn't. It is a moderate version of the manner in which communists and fascists are treated with the former allowed space and time and the latter excluded.

The warning is that, without freely expressed voices in support of freedom, we will lose that freedom. You don't have to be a supporter of the capitalist model (many libertarians aren't) or a believer in free markets (lots of conservatives aren't) to recognise that the manner in which such voices are excluded, discredited and demonised by the dominant mainstream left, especially in academia, represents a dangerous trend and a threat to wider freedoms. If one set of voices - many essentially moderate (there's nothing remotely threatening about the work of the Mercatus Centre but George Monbiot sees it as park of his nexus of "dark money") - are excluded, it's only a short step to the exclusion of other voices. This is already happening in academia, through deliberately orchestrated actions like trying to get Dr Carl sacked and through the manner in which the training, recruitment and appointing of academics is conducted as well as by the raising of mobs to shout down dissenting voices when they appear. If we want to be free we will have to challenge this illiberal progressive mindset so the ideas of freedom are heard.

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Why has the left given up on free speech?

Over the sunny Bank Holiday weekend a lot of people who had nothing better to do with their lives (such as drink lager, have barbecues, watch cricket, sit in the garden) assembled in London on a rally for free speech: 

Protesters flying national flags and holding placards decrying limits to free expression rallied at Whitehall after marching through central London from Speakers’ Corner in Hyde Park, a location seen as emblematic of free speech that has been the scene of several recent far-right rallies.

Now, while there's an irony at a march protesting free speech proceeding more-or-less without the authorities doing anything other than watching, there's a point to all this that matters. It's not about whether or not the mobb allows Tommy Robinson to get permanently chucked off Twitter but rather about the manner in which the idea that we should be free to speak our minds is now considered to be a mad, bad and dangerous thing. Not just by authoritarians but by people who probably lay claim to the title 'liberal'. It seems that expressing support for free speech can now be categorised as supporting the "far right":

Claiming freedom of speech as a value is something the American far right has been doing for years (aided and abetted by liberal dupes, naturally)

Well I don't know about you but, for me, free speech is one of those inalienable right things and I thought that the left were committed to the idea that human rights merited vigorous defence? It would appear that today, in our crazed looking glass way, the centre-left - once the bastion of support for rights - has given up on the idea of free speech. In its place is a movable feast of allowed and disallowed ideas, concepts, theories and words - anything, presented by the wrong person in the wrong place can be described as 'hate speech', thereby providing the left its justification for restricting speech.

The problem is that one person's 'hate' is another person's considered criticism of an ideology, attempt at argument or humour - preventing Jordan Peterson from speaking on US campuses, banning of Germaine Greer and Julie Bindel, and the trial of comedians for making bad jokes about blowing up airports or Nazi dogs. We are reminded, yet again, that free speech has to be fought and won with each generation. For much of the last 100 years, most of the left has been on the side of the good guys, the folk who think free speech - the chance to say things that might hold those in power to account - is worth a bit of offence and upset. Today this isn't the case, now most of the left - not just the fascist style left of Momentum but the whole spectrum from centrist social democracts to old unreconstructed communists - are opposing free speech. For sure, in this they're joined by other cowardly centrists in all political parties, but the thrust of the campaign against free speech is coming from the left, from its obsession with identity, with 'shutting down' voices that touch on these issues in what the arbiter of good speech determines as the wrong way - whether it's gender, race or religion.

We are still, in the main, a society where people can speak freely but the decision of mainstream - and left wing - politicians to stress identity and the prevention of 'hate speech' above the idea of liberty has meant the cause of liberty, the case for free speech, now sits with people who can be caricatured as 'far right' (in truth, for every actual fascist, there are thousands of libertarians of left and right). The left has given up on free speech:

Freedom of speech is no longer a value. It has become a loophole exploited with impunity by trolls, racists and ethnic cleansing advocates. They are aided by the group I call useful liberals – the “defend to the death your right to say it” folk.

Like Thurber's very proper gander, today's left believes that anyone expressing any view they dislike must be hateful and, therefore, driven from civilised society. To justify this position, its advocates will seek out the most shocking examples of crass and offensive speech -"look!", they'll shout, "you're supporting this vile stuff". And us defenders of free speech are left spluttering - we're not fans of Tommy Robinson's views and think Milo is a dickhead, so our response is mostly to shuffle off to the side and say nothing.

The reason that the left used to defend free speech is because without it things like trade unions, women's suffrage, gay liberation and civil rights wouldn't have happened. All of these things required brave men and women to stand up, seize their right to speak, and tell the powerful that things had to change. This is why we have free speech - not to allow racists to be racist or sexists to be sexist but to give the powerless the right to their voice. I believe this is worth a few tears, a little offence, and I don't understand why the left has given up on free speech.

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Is democracy dying? If it is, there's blood on the left's hands

It sometimes seems that way as we move from a pluralist world where ideas are discussed and debated to one where debate is contained and constrained - a short step to that one-party state:

The solution for the people of California was to reconfigure the political landscape and shift a supermajority of citizens — and by extension their elected officials — under the Democratic Party’s big tent. The natural continuum of more progressive to more moderate solutions then got worked out within the context of the only remaining functioning party. The California Democrats actually cared about average citizens, embraced the inevitable diversity of 21st-century society, weren’t afraid of real innovation, and were ready to start solving the many challenges of our time, including climate change.

This may seem fine until (and maybe the 'ever-so-right-on' chap writing this doesn't care) you consider this excludes not just millions of Californians but, more to the point, a huge swathe of opinion about taxes, markets, intervention, housing and the classical liberal enlightenment. Worse still, our wealthy progressive doesn't just want a one-party state in California but wants to impose its ideas on other places like some ghastly authoritarian hegemon - conservatism must be destroyed:

The side resisting change, usually the one most rooted in the past systems and incumbent interests, must be thoroughly defeated — not just for a political cycle or two, but for a generation or two. That gives the winning party or movement the time and space needed to really build up the next system without always fighting rear-guard actions and getting drawn backwards.

As I said, it seems not just that democracy is dying but that it's 'liberal progressives' - The Left as we call them in Europe - with blood on their hands.

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The left is everywhere but prefers preaching to listening

I could start by adding "..and nowhere" to the headline because that pretty much summarises the issue here. The left's ideas are meant to be universal and absolute - no political postcode lottery is permitted - such that cultural variation is suspect. And conservatism is all about the nuance of that cultural variation. The comment, 'the left is everywhere' comes from this Russ Roberts commentary about Jordan Peterson:

I was recently at a panel discussion of the state of political and cultural life in America. All of the panelists were from what I would call the gentle left — good people to the left of center with a different world view from my own but full of compassion and good intentions. It was something of a smugfest — how sad it is that misguided people found Trump appealing. How sad it is that the right has no interest in the left while the left has been reaching out to understand how Trump voters could possibly exist. They chalked up the stupidity of Trump voters to global capitalism that had hollowed out the middle class and driven so many sheep into the arms of the Republican wolf who would only shear them and make a lovely blanket for himself.

Despite their best efforts at anthropology, the panelists were like fish in water unable to imagine what water is. The reason the right is less interested in the left than the left is in the right, is that the left is everywhere. You don’t have to take a trip to Kentucky or to a church to understand the left. The left dominates our culture — Hollywood, the music scene, the universities. And the left can’t seem to imagine that anything they are pushing for might be problematic. In particular, the radical egalitarian project is not everyone’s cup of tea. By radical egalitarian agenda, I mean equality of outcomes rather than equality of opportunity. Or that gender is a social construct.

This is the gist of the left's incomprehension. Our trendy lefties cannot understand a conservatism that, while it's pro-market, is deeply suspicious of capitalism - or at least the grand capitalism of banks and big business. There's an incredulity at people who think the first duty of government isn't to promote equality but is rather to protect the community and culture of the people that government serves. As Roberts says, who find that "radical egalitarian agenda" not their cup of tea.

The cultural ubiquity of this position can be set out even more starkly:

And an almost equally obvious answer is that the areas in which we’ve made progress have been those which are in fundamental accord with the deepest values of neoliberalism, and the one where we haven’t isn’t. We can put the point more directly by observing that increasing tolerance of economic inequality and increasing intolerance of racism, sexism and homophobia – of discrimination as such – are fundamental characteristics of neoliberalism.

Of course, our neoliberal left will be adamant that they care deeply about economic inequality, they'll point to tweets, to conferences attended, to the presence of M. Piketty's book on their coffee table. But then we look at their priorities and see a different thing entirely - the excitement is over the gender pay gap for TV presenters, the 'trans agenda', and abusive language on social media.

It is a bizarre irony that someone as selfish, grandiloquent and preening as Donald Trump seems to grasp the real worries of the working class and, for want of a better word, lower middle class better than today's left. Concerns about the loss of social infrastructure like pubs, clubs, societies and local shops. Worries about jobs, businesses and the future opportunities for young people. And a sense that nobody is really interested in their local community, culture or lived experience - except, that is, for lecturing them about making the wrong lifestyle choices or sneering about what they like to eat, listen to, read or watch. This isn't to say that Trump's policies are the right ones but that he, at least, makes the effort to try and understand.

Neoliberalism is, in economic terms, brilliant - the billion people lifted out of absolute poverty over the past 30 years are a testament to this - but, while this has been happening, there's a set of people who don't see their lives getting better, watch their community hollowing out and wonder whether anyone is really interested in their lives and their neighbourhood. As Roberts observes, to see these people, hear them, understand them, our essentially metropolitan left has to go somewhere they wouldn't normally go - a tired English seaside town, a church in America's 'bible belt', a Yorkshire pit village, a French small town or an Italian village bar.

And when this metropolitan left arrive they have to do something else, they have to set aside the urge to lecture, to explain, to know better and start to listen. If they don't do this the result we get from the visit sounds like this:

Enough. Don’t buy the too-easy media picture of a rancid or untended town, or of bitter people; but understand that Clacton-on-Sea is going nowhere. Its voters are going nowhere, it’s rather sad, and there’s nothing more to say. This is Britain on crutches. This is tracksuit-and-trainers Britain, tattoo-parlour Britain, all-our-yesterdays Britain.

OK, this is written by a Conservative (I really object to those CINO, RINO sneers from the, mostly reactionary rather than conservative, alt-right - Matthew Parris is a conservative) but it rather sums up the dismissal that these distant, slightly tatty places get from the great and good when they call in. The same goes for France where arrivistes get a prickly response from locals for wanting some sort of (largely imagined) lost past to return:

Hours had passed on a sunny Friday in the center of town, yet on some streets we saw almost no one. “You see clearly that we are on a street that is dying,” Mr. Jourdain said on Rue Emile Grand as we concluded our tour. “There are whole buildings where there isn’t a soul.”

I called City Hall for a meeting with the mayor, a member of France’s center-right party, but was met with a distinct lack of enthusiasm from her spokeswoman. I was put off with the promise of a phone call the following week, and when I finally reached the mayor, Stéphanie Guiraud-Chaumeil, she argued that urban “devitalization” has had a “relatively moderate impact.” She also angrily condemned Mr. Jourdain.

“He is an extraterrestrial,” she said, “who came here to get talked about.”

There is no comprehension here, simply a refusal to sit and listen. It is the pattern again and again, in place after place. Journalist or researcher arrives in town, talks to a couple of people, takes some pictures and then rushes back to somewhere with better coffee bars and trendier restaurants to write a piece explaining how the community they visited is tired, left-behind, struggling, dowdy, depressed (select the descriptors of your choice). Sometimes these writers or researchers are good enough to speak to a few actual locals but mostly this gets boiled down to a few grumpy quotes - even better if the locals say something a bit racist, sexist or homophobic.

The places we're talking about here aren't rich places but they're also not really poor places. The people who live in these places are conservative and it hurts them to be told they're "going nowhere" and we should look instead at the shiny city with its overpriced apartments, fancy restaurants, crowded roads and unfriendly neighbours. Nothing is offered to people in Clacton or Albi except the strong suggestion that somehow the people in the big city are better than them - be more like East London, more like Paris. Presumably without the racism and knife crime.

The biggest challenge facing western democracies isn't populism, it isn't robots, it's not flying cars or food security or climate change or the rise of China. No, the challenge is stopping the city from strangling our societies and cultures. Part of this is to start trying to work out how we make Clacton and places like Clacton something other than "all our yesterdays". And sitting at the centre are the people, the ones who think that "radical egalitarian agenda" has gone too far, the ones who want politicians to worry as much about neighbourhood, community and place as they do about transphobia, the gender pay gap and high speed railways.

We started with the trendy left being everywhere and nowhere, like butterflies flitting across a cultural herbaceous border. Set against this isn't just "somewhere" but the idea that society starts with family, friends, neighbour and community. And that this society needs looking after. This isn't about everything being the same, nor is it about community developers - assorted left-inclined missionaries of social action - arriving in a place getting everything sorted. No, it's about rebuilding the structures of place - community, neighbourhood, families - and the institutions they need to succeed.

Many conservatives (and Conservatives) have forgotten this essential part of what we believe, preferring instead a sort of technocratic fix based on regulation and grand institutions. Not that such things are unimportant but without strong local institutions - family, neighbourhood, community - strong national institutions will not succeed. Hospitals in "Our NHS" work (most of the time) despite the stupifying bureaucracy of the NHS because they are local institutions - our hospitals, our clinics, our health centres. And the same goes for schools, policing and much else that makes society work - when the ties to local community are strongest, the institution is most effective. The national, even supranational, urge for homogeneity that neoliberalism and social democracy force on communities excludes people from any sense of owning those institutions, prevents initiative and slowly stifles the local ties, the idea that we should love where we live, that make community work.

Although there's a grumpiness (and bemusement) at that 'radical egalitarian agenda' it perhaps covers over a deeper malaise in society, the seeming alliance between the uncaring utilitarianism of neoliberalism and the controlling 'gentleman in Whitehall knows best' approach of social democracy. Everything is so far away, out of our control, and more bothered with things that aren't important to us and ours. It's not that people far from the places of power - Westminster, Brussels, Washington, Paris - are ignorant but rather that they've stopped listening as so little is about them or their lived experiences. The left is everywhere, except in the lives and communities of people just over the hill from the shiny city, quiet places with good people who would like a little care and attention for a change.

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Are free markets unjust?

A few days ago I posted a piece asking why The Left has such an issue with free markets. One commenter took me to task (ever so slightly patronisingly):

I care about the well-being of humans, and I care about reducing inequality (and lots of other things). I support, for instance, rights to gay marriage because these rights can massively improve quality of life for lots of individuals, without really harming anybody. I also oppose unrestricted free markets when they lead to relatively poor quality of life for lots of individuals.

The difference is that I do no believe that the outcome of a free market is just, per se. In other words, my morals and opinions about how society should operate are derived without consideration of markets. Markets are merely a tool to realize my goals.

At the core of this argument - at least as it seems to me - is a suggestion that the outcomes of free markets are, in some way, unjust. I'm going to put to one side the argument about "unrestricted free markets" leading to a "relatively poor quality of life" because it seems to me something of a nonsense.

Are free markets unjust? The post in question referenced the opening lines of Adam Smith's other book - "The Theory of Moral Sentiments" and this is, maybe, helpful in looking at justice because it is a central theme in Smith's book:

Society, however, cannot subsist among those who are at all times ready to hurt and injure one another. The moment that injury begins, the moment that mutual resentment and animosity take place, all the bands of it are broke asunder, and the different members of which it consisted are, as it were, dissipated and scattered abroad by the violence and opposition of their discordant affections. If there is any society among robbers and murderers, they must at least, according to the trite observation, abstain from robbing and murdering one another. Beneficence, therefore, is less essential to the existence of society than justice. Society may subsist, though not in the most comfortable state, without beneficence; but the prevalence of injustice must utterly destroy it.

So free marketers much have regard to justice as well as prudence and the most common criticism - seen above in Brian's comment - is that free markets are solely concerned with utility: "Markets are merely a tool to realize my goals". And Brian suggests that, if "unrestricted", those markets may deliver an unjust outcome - we much therefore manage markets so as their outcomes are just.

The problems here are twofold - firstly, are free market outcomes ever unjust? Should we prevent or limit people's freedom to exchange because we fear that some will receive no benefit - or actual harm - from the process of exchange? Secondly, is it right - just - to restrict someone's liberty so as to deliver, we hope, a more just outcome elsewhere?

The problem with Brian's argument (which I'm taking as archetypically left wing) is that he sees a just outcome as being an equal outcome - "I care about reducing inequality". But if the consequence of this equal outcome is that everybody is, on average, poorer, is that a just outcome? We have limited or directed exchange to secure equality of outcome and in doing so have removed value from that exchange - everyone is poorer: equally poorer but still poorer.

What is unjust about free exchange - about me seeking to purchase a second hand Land Rover? Is the injustice that not everyone has the wherewithal to buy a second hand Land Rovers? 4x4s for everyone! But isn't intervening in the market to make second hand Land Rovers cheaper - the outcome that delivers social justice - simply removing value from the people with second hand Land Rovers to sell? And isn't this equally unjust?

For Adam Smith, justice was primarily about how we behave:

The principle by which we naturally either approve or disapprove of our own conduct, seems to be altogether the same with that by which we exercise the like judgments concerning the conduct of other people. We either approve or disapprove of the conduct of another man according as we feel that, when we bring his case home to ourselves, we either can or cannot entirely sympathize with the sentiments and motives which directed it.

So if we behave honestly, honourably and fairly in our exchange - in the market - then justice is served. And, if the market does what markets do, the outcome will also be fair and just because both buyer and seller have obtained value from their exchange. Preventing this from happening or saying only certain parties can engage in exchange is not just. At the level of the individual, not only are markets just but limiting, managing or directing them - ending what Marx called the "anarchy of production" - is unjust.

The problem for The Left, however, is that they see poverty or, more commonly, inequality in society and ask whether - given we've a market society - this is just. Surely, they ask, there is some better way of organising exchange that will mean there isn't any poverty or, more likely, inequality. And this is a noble aim until you begin to ask what happens in a market. When I buy that second hand Land Rover I get a benefit - value - by having the off-road vehicle my heart desires. And the person selling that vehicle has the cash I've given him - value - to use elsewhere in the marketplace to meet his heart's desires. There is no point at which free exchange leads to "relatively poor quality of life for lots of individuals", quite the opposite.

None of this is an argument against regulation, laws - Smith is very definite about the consequences of injustice being punishment - but that those laws should be directed to ensuring that exchanges in the market are honest, honourable and fair. Nor is this a pro-capitalism argument - there's no reason at all why socialist forms of ownership shouldn't operate effectively in a free market. Rather it's an argument that justice and equality are not synonyms and that, if we want a fair society, a free market system is more honest, honourable and just than a system designed by government, however well-intentioned.

It is true, however, that without justice the market is not free but rather that "society of robbers" Adam Smith describes. But justice is not achieved through coercion, price-fixing, artificial monopoly or the damning of commerce. Free markets are just only if we act - through social mores, honour if you will, as much as through laws - to ensure that justice is served. As Smith put it:

If [justice] is removed, the great, the immense fabric of human society, that fabric which to raise and support seems in this world if I may say so has the peculiar and darling care of Nature, must in a moment crumble into atoms.

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It puzzles me why the left opposes free markets - they argue for most other forms of liberty

It's odd how many on the left, so keen on all sorts of social liberation, are adamantly opposed to the idea of people being economically liberated. It's hard to understand why, when the liberation of women, gay and lesbian people, and ethnic minorities get such prominence in left wing thinking, they seem unable to recognise that part of that liberation must be economic, must be the power to exchange, interact, co-operate and trade.

It seems, without conducting any sort of extensive survey, that the problem lies in two places - firstly, a sort of elitist belief that most people aren't bright enough to make their own economic decisions and therefore need guidance from experts, and secondly a sort of semi-comprehended Marxist reject of the market in preference for a wholly planned economy. In truth though, a lot of the opposition to free markets is pretty woolly - here's an example in a tweet to cabinet minister Liz Truss from Labour MP, Stella Creasey:

Except in a free market you aren’t free @trussliz because you will always end up picking up the tab for its failures - try reading the other half of adam smith about value of collaboration to securing freedom for us all …all money is after all a matter of belief

Now I'm not going to try and deconstruct Ms Creasey's Tweet (it is after all only a Tweet) except in so far as it contains several of those presumptions about free markets - they're not 'free', they 'fail', and they are exploitative. Ms Creasey also references (I assume) Adam Smith's 'other book', the Theory of Moral Sentiments. Here's a chunk from a commentary by Eamonn Butler:

As individuals, we have a natural tendency to look after ourselves. That is merely prudence. And yet as social creatures, explains Smith, we are also endowed with a natural sympathy – today we would say empathy – towards others. When we see others distressed or happy, we feel for them – albeit less strongly. Likewise, others seek our empathy and feel for us. When their feelings are particularly strong, empathy prompts them to restrain their emotions so as to bring them into line with our, less intense reactions. Gradually, as we grow from childhood to adulthood, we each learn what is and is not acceptable to other people. Morality stems from our social nature.

Smith wasn't limiting free markets but rather making the observation - at considerable length - that human beings are not just motivated by prudence, by an overriding utilitarian urge. Rather our motivations are grounded in a set of ethics of which prudence is just one - justice, temperance, faith and courage are just as important. And since our motives in a marketplace are not just self-interest, the idea that free markets exploit is wrong. As Smith put it himself:

“How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it.”

I'm sure we can have an extensive discussion about whether or not we are ever truly free but, in more pragmatic terms, Ms Creasey's typically Fabian position is essentially that we don't have sufficient knowledge in the marketplace so are liable to manipulation and exploitation. We see such an argument put repeatedly in respect of advertising drawing on a variety of slightly sneering observers - Veblen, Packard, Klein - who argue that advertising is uniquely and corruptly persuasive especially for children and what might be called the lower orders of society. As a result, the first target of the prohibitionist is to limit, then ban, the advertising of the product they wish to ban - smoking, drinking, sugary food, gambling.

The problem with this argument is that it is, as with so many left wing critiques of classical liberalism, essentially a straw man. Nobody claims that free markets require perfect knowledge for all parties merely that there is no coercion and that the buyer and seller both secure benefit from the process of exchange. I do not need to know the price of every second hand Land Rover to be able to judge whether the price I pay to buy one provides me with a value in excess of that sum. If I'm wise, and most buyers, regardless of age or social class, are wise, then I will do more than simply buy the first of a product I encounter but even if I do this it doesn't stop the market being free.

To return to Ms Creasey, she argues that Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments is about collaboration and I assume that, in making this assertion, Ms Creasey believes that collaboration is not a feature of a free market. Now, leaving aside Smith's position that human nature is not simply about self-interest, maximising utility, it does seem odd to consider that interactions in a free market do not feature collaboration or cooperation. Is the achievement of mutual benefit through exchange not the very essence of collaboration - two humans freely interacting to the advantage of both? Yet the Fabian socialist position seems blind to all this, preferring to fall back on the idea that exchange in a marketplace is exploitative and therefore not free.

It makes absolutely no sense at all for people on the left to be so dismissive of free markets, enterprise and trade - they ought to have the same enthusiasm for such things as they do for women's rights to control their bodies, for society to see gay and lesbian people as normal, and for ethnic minorities to be treated fairly. Instead the left seeks out things - often falsely - to suggest that free markets are wrong. Most often they point to failures in highly regulated markets - financial services, energy production, transport, housing - where powerful businesses work with government to limit innovation, create rents and prevent new entrants to that market. But even when they don't, the criticism of free markets is based on an entirely vague notion of an alternative (and I'm guessing that most on the left don't want a Soviet-style planned economy).

In the end, however, the alternative to a free market is a market that isn't free. And this means either that you do not have access to that market or else that your access to directed by another party. As I wrote a while ago:

Please explain which part of the word 'free' is a bad thing? If you don't like free markets, what you want is markets that aren't free. Markets where only some privileged people can trade. Markets where someone else (usually the government) sets the price. Markets where their effectiveness is determined not by the actions of those in the market but by who is most effective at lobbying - for which read bribing, corrupting - government. If you fetter free markets (which given you always go on about the free market being "unfettered" is what you want) what you create are winners and losers, privileged and unprivileged, rather than having a system where people seek co-operation and mutual benefit. Freedom is a good thing. Free markets are a good thing. So stop lying about this and undermining the liberty of your neighbour.

And it makes no sense, given its enthusiasm for other liberties, for the left to oppose this liberty.

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The nice, pleasant, decent left is valorising violence with its silence and excuses

I know it's not all of you but "The Left" as it likes to call itself really does have something of a problem with being extremely unpleasant. And this problem is getting worse not better.

It may not be the biggest of big deals but this rather illustrates the problem:

"The government has blocked a giant statue of Margaret Thatcher in Parliament Square over fears it will be vandalised..."

 So it's just a statue of Britain's first woman prime minister - something definitely worth marking in Parliament Square (where, in case you haven't noticed, there aren't many statues of women). But because of that unpleasant faction on "The Left" it isn't going to happen.

The bigger problem with all this is that so many of those nice, pleasant, decent folk who hold left-wing opinions are prepared to make excuses for the sort of people who indulge in this sort of vandalism and worse. You only need to read the story of the attack on Sarah Wollaston's office, listen to Sheryll Murray describing the appalling vandalism and personal attacks in her election campaign, or to run down the Tweets of the Liberal Democrat campaigner in Manchester targeted at four in the morning for the heinous crime of putting up some posters.

Yet every time the response is to swat it away - "every party has these people" - to draw a false parallel between policy disagreements and vandalism or personal attacks ("look at these political campaign posters I don't like") or whataboutery - "here's something nasty that a Tory said fifteen years ago, what about that then". When the extreme left target a Liverpool MP for the terrible crime of being critical of Jeremy Corbyn, targeting that includes appalling anti-semitism and misogyny, those nice, pleasant, decent folk with left-wing views do nothing and say nothing. Every time.

It's true that every party has its share of unpleasant folk but it's also true that only "The Left" valorises vandalism, personal insults, threatening behaviour, intimidation and bullying as campaign methods. And because those nice, pleasant, decent folk with left-wing views don't deal with it - even having the almighty gall to talk about some sort of "kinder" politics - this sort of campaigning continues.

I've said for a long while that our political culture celebrates the bully - you only need watch "The Thick of It" to appreciate this - but we now are in the position where a faction on "The Left" has lifted this unpleasantness and transferred it to the political campaign itself. In forty years as an active political campaigner, I've never known a time when so much unpleasant, personal and downright nasty campaigning has been directed at the good people who hold different political opinions from "The Left".

I know you consider yourself different. You're not part of that left, oh no. But so long as you tolerate, excuse, deflect or explain away violent campaigning, you are little different from the left wing men who are doing the vandalising, performing the intimidation and ganging up on those most exposed and especially women and ethnic minorities.

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A bad person asks what's so funny 'bout peace, love and understanding?

Intolerant, judgemental, excluding, bigoted, closed-minded, sneering, insulting, rude, divisive, ignorant, aggressive and downright offensive. Shallow, unpleasantly personal, condemnatory, bullying and, sad to report, violent.

These are the sorts of words that spring into my mind when I consider our politics right now. I guess that, what with Donald Trump in the White House, Brexit and the rise of populism across Europe this is how many of you - especially the left wing ones - feel too. What you don't realise is that it's you I'm talking about. I'm fed up with the narrow, bitter little world that you inhabit and the manner in which you think anyone prepared to consider other opinions, ideas from the right, is essentially a bad person.

I've known I was a bad person for a long while. It's not just that I think capitalism is brilliant, empowering and liberating. No it's a wider conservative agenda - the bits about rejecting the world of equalities top trumps created by left-wing group think. It's about thinking that we should take people as individuals - in the round.

I know a bloke. Have a drink with him now and then. We'll call him Steve. He's a racist. And I've told him this loads of times. But I know he also fusses over elderly neighbours and will go out of his way to help someone hurt or stranded. I've seen him do this. So tell me, am I to reject him because he's a racist? Or should I mention his sin to him and continue to see the good that he does? Truth is it's better I hear his argument, engage with his concerns, than simply walk away.

But then I'm a bad person. I don't agree with your left-wing agenda. Take abortion - for sure I'm not opposed to it. But I do think it's a damned sight more complicated than the simple slogan 'women's right to choose' tells us. Yet people who don't agree with you about abortion - terrible people. Bad people. You know something? I want to hear those people, to treat what they say with respect.

A couple of days ago this gay, journalist 'came out' as a conservative. Now I appreciate that this is the USA where there's an enormous liberal temper tantrum going on but this little quote sums up for me the problem the left has with the idea that people don't all accept their worldview.

Frostiness spread far beyond the bar, too. My best friend, with whom I typically hung out multiple times per week, was suddenly perpetually unavailable. Finally, on Christmas Eve, he sent me a long text, calling me a monster, asking where my heart and soul went, and saying that all our other friends are laughing at me.

I realized that, for the first time in my adult life, I was outside of the liberal bubble and looking in. What I saw was ugly, lock step, incurious and mean-spirited.

The left wing commenters I read seem to speak a lot about values - how politics should be value-driven and how we should all fight to defend their values. Yet, these are values that think it's OK to ostracise someone from a community because he wrote an interview with someone right-wing? Think I'm exaggerating? Here's a chunk from a riposte to that gay journalist by another gay journalist:

Gay conservatives aren’t welcome in gay spaces because the people they support are an existential threat to our rights and our community. After all, queer spaces (such as bars, bathhouses, community centres, and even bookstores) were founded and instrumental in radical sexual politics and political engagement. You can’t divorce that from the social aspect, because doing so would deny the history of our community and the present reality of so many vulnerable LGBT people.

You're not allowed to be in the gay community if you're not left-wing.

For a while I worked for a voluntary organisation in Oldham. I never made a secret of my politics if anyone asked but I never brought those politics to work. I did my job, talked about all the other things in life but left political debate on the doorstep. This was hard because one or two colleagues with robust left-wing views were always ready to loudly proclaim their opinions (including in front of me, saying that conservatives are all ignorant, racist bigots).

You, my left wing friends, really must stop this (and I apologise at this point for the left wing friends who've already stopped). Not just because I'm telling you it's not very nice but because this attitude is destroying your parties and political prospects.



This chart, from Political Betting's Mike Smithson, shows that Labour is in third place among C2DE voters. Take a second to absorb this fact. This is, if you want a definition of it, is the 'working class'. Now ask yourself why? I know your response - the media, Brexit lies, racism, bigotry. Every single time this is the explanation from the left.

Perhaps you want to take a step back and consider whether it's actually your outlook and values that are doing the damage. That friend of mine, Steve. He's a Labour voter (except he's not any more). And there are loads more like him. Inadvertently, Paul Mason, left-wing former BBC journalist captured the dominant left wing view of people like Steve:

“They’re not working class Tories… most of the UKIP people are either people who haven’t voted or have flipped in a radical way from Labour. They are toe-rags, basically. They are the bloke who nicks your bike.”

The search for understanding of these voters stops once you've satisfied yourself that they hold views you consider unsavoury such as wanting fewer immigrants, worrying about Islamist terrorism, supporting the armed forces, liking grammar schools, backing tough penalties for criminals, thinking the international aid budget is too big, believing that lots of people on benefits are essentially scroungers. I could go on but you get my gist.

All of these unsavoury views have a sensible, considered policy response that, when people hear it, gets them to to nod - even if thy don't always leap enthusiastically to support that policy response. Right now these people are voting for right-wing' parties because those parties do at least seem to have half an ear for the things that are bothering folk. What's the left's response? Mostly it's to call them racist, homophobic, misogynist bigots. Or, for the more considered, to mutter about 'dark forces' and genies being out of bottles followed by arch references to the 1930s. That and calls for violence.

But then, I'm a bad person. A conservative. I probably don't share some of your values. I certainly reject the idea that we are defined by the groups you've placed us in - it really is possible to be a gay conservative or a black libertarian. Such people are not weirdos, strangely deluded folk who probably need a re-education camp (and who we should surely ostracise before their unsavoury views contaminate our caring liberal places). You, my left wing friends, have a long way to go - you've allowed this to happen:

Ranking institutions as either red, amber, or green in terms of how restrictive they are, the survey of 115 universities found that 108 – when taking university administration and students’ unions as a whole – censor or chill free speech to some degree. Some 73 were assessed as red, 35 were amber, and only seven were green, meaning that as far as Spiked was aware, they placed no restrictions on free speech and expression – other than where it was unlawful.

Red means that the university - often under pressure from left-wing student activists - has "banned and actively censored ideas on campus". And trust me on this one - no left wing ideas have been banned not even the most extreme of communist apologists for historic genocide and current oppression. Indeed some of these lovely folk are the very activists campaigning for restrictions on free speech.

The bitter, snarky, judging and excluding way in which much of the left behave - not just the extremes but people who'd consider themselves moderate - suggests that it is having something of a crisis. Now I know there remain open, engaging and thoughtful left-wing folk out there and I feel for them. But what I don't see is that openness to a diversity of ideas that once was the hallmark of modern liberalism. Those hippy values - peace, love and understanding - have vanished, replaced with a unwavering and judging creed founded in groupthink and the rejection of free speech.

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Why should I believe the left are protecting a liberal society they don't believe in?

I'm probably not alone in being slightly taken aback by the extent to which the election of Donald Trump as US President has brought forth agitation and protest, not just in the USA but elsewhere across the world. I've also been struck by the manner in which events such as Trump's election, the UK's vote to leave the EU, and a reinvigorated cultural right in universities have resulted in the radicalising of people who we previously characterised as 'soft left'.

It remains to be seen whether this radicalisation persists in the way that similar forces in the 1960s did in response to civil rights and the Vietnam war - Jeremy Corbyn's generation. What strikes me, however, about the current situation is the extent to which a youthful centre left has taken to the streets in response to their failure at the established game of democracy. Above all else this is the lesson we should take from Brexit and Trump - the established left has little to offer the public beyond that tired, familiar 'we know better' rhetoric wedded to a desire to close down debate, cut off argument and, using the left's word, demonise other opinions.

Yet the left remains astonishingly unaware of it's problems or of the extent to which it is trapped. Here's Nick Cohen presenting that unawareness as a considered position:

Compulsive liars shouldn’t frighten you. They can harm no one, if no one listens to them. Compulsive believers, on the other hand: they should terrify you. Believers are the liars’ enablers. Their votes give the demagogue his power. Their trust turns the charlatan into the president. Their credulity ensures that the propaganda of half-calculating and half-mad fanatics has the power to change the world.

How you see the believers determines how you fight them and seek to protect liberal society from its enemies.

To understand what we mean by unawareness, we should ask two things: who are the liars and what we mean by liberal society. And when we've done this we will realise that it isn't the false bogeyman of a new fascism but the lies of the left about liberalism that are the problem. First though let's agree with Cohen about Trump and Brexit not being about Fascism:

The temptation to think it a new totalitarianism is too strong for many to resist. Despite readers reaching for Hannah Arendt and George Orwell, strictly speaking, the comparison with fascism and communism isn’t true. When I floated it with the great historian of Nazism, Sir Richard Evans, he almost sighed. It’s not just that there aren’t the death camps and torture chambers, he said. The street violence that brought fascists to power in Italy and Germany and the communists to power in Russia is absent today.

Dwell on that final sentence for a minute. And then consider what this might mean:

Fires that were deliberately set, one outside the campus Amazon outlet; Molotov cocktails that caused generator-powered spotlights to catch fire; commercial-grade fireworks thrown at police officers; barricades pushed into windows and skirmishes within the crowd were among the evening’s violent acts.

The masked agitators came to campus eastbound on Bancroft Way, and fire damage and other destruction to the Stiles Hall construction site, where a new residence hall is planned, was reported. The group entered campus and immediately began throwing rocks at officers. In an effort to avoid injuries to innocent members of the surrounding crowd who might have been caught in the middle, police officers exercised restraint and did not respond with force.

An organised group using street violence to secure a political end (in this case preventing someone from speaking). And we saw plenty more of this violence following the election of Donald Trump and after his inauguration. Is this not something akin to "street violence" that brought fascists and communists to power in Europe? And what about giving yourself permission to punch anyone who you and your friends decide is a Nazi?

The problem for the left is that it is at best targeting a pretty small group or, and this is more concerning, seeking to define anyone who challenges its definition of liberal society as 'alt-right', Fascist or Nazi. As Nick Cohen discovered from a peek at history there are no National Socialist marches, there aren't Fascist gangs forcing opponents to drink cod liver oil and there isn't a rising new politics that seeks to destroy that liberal society. The new fascism or whatever you want to call it is something summoned from the left's mind, they are fighting an illusion.

That lie of a new fascism brings us back to the first of our two questions: who are the liars? Nick Cohen is clear about this - Donald Trump, Brexit campaigners, conservative columnists and business leaders. The alt-right. But is he right? Or rather are there not a whole load of other liars out there? Liars like the ones who predicted inevitable economic doom following a vote to leave the EU. And the liars who continue to promote a thing called socialism despite it repeatedly cause suffering, sorrow and even death.

"The men the American people admire most extravagantly are the most daring liars; the men they detest most violently are those who try to tell them the truth."

You want to know what Trump's biggest lie is? It's the lie that he can bring those jobs back, can by stamping and shouting do what Canute showed couldn't be done, turn back the tide of the world. But when the newly radicalised centre left agree that Trump's protectionism is a lie, they compound it with another lie. The left pretends that somehow globalisation had no role in the steelworker losing his job, the textile worker losing her job, or the miners looking at reserves of energy untapped because of decisions made in Washington, Rome, London or Paris.

Instead the left talks about inequality when what the listener wants is a job. The left talks of rights when what those hearing this cant desire is a better roof over their head and clean water. And the left points at wealthy business people crying another lie: that somehow their lack of a job and their crappy house is down to those business people. "Vote for us and we'll sort it" the left said all those years and delivered nothing. So what remains for the voter: carrying on electing wealthy left wing politicians - Elizabeth Warren, Ed Miliband, Francois Hollande, Yanis Varoufakis, Hillary Clinton - and getting no change or buying a different lie from someone like Trump or Le Pen?

What makes all this worse is that the left then tell people who want a better job, a nicer house, a happier future for their children that it's about defending something called the liberal society. But what exactly is this liberal society we're defending? Is it getting people arrested for saying stuff on Twitter? Is it privileging group characteristics and in doing so creating a sort of equalities tops trumps? Or maybe it's telling folk that black people can't be racists and women can't be violent?

A liberal society isn't one that smashes and bullies to stop Milo Yiannopoulos speaking. A liberal society is one that listens politely to Milo, tells him he's a preening dickhead and then moves on, smiling. A liberal society doesn't stop people going to an event by blocking the streets, it's one that argues and engages with folk we disagree with. A liberal society is one that rejects the bullying of the mob even if it does get John Wilkes into parliament.

My two questions perhaps aren't answered in full but it does seem that the left should consider whether it has a beam in its eye that results in that frightening degree of unawareness. Yes Trump and the alt-right are liars but so is the radical left. Now, as the soft left makes common cause with the anti-democrats of street anarchy and communism, we see that the left as a whole is tearing down the principles of liberal society because it fears an illusory monster will do that if they don't.

The left's biggest lie is that they now own the word liberal, that their state-directed dystopia is that liberal society we should defend. For me a liberal society is one that doesn't make ill smokers stand in the street because you don't like them. A liberal society is one that does tax people to change their behaviour. A liberal society is one that thinks politeness is important but doesn't lock people up for being rude, dumb or offensive. A liberal society is one that values enterprise and encourages it in everyone. A liberal society is a place where people can speak freely, do business, succeed and fail without that society's opprobrium. And a liberal society is, above all, one that doesn't place one set of people - experts, aristocrats or celebrities - above others.

We do not live in a liberal society. The left do not and never have believed in a liberal society. Why the hell should I believe that their marching to defend that liberal society against Trump, Brexit and other demons is anything other than a big, fat stinking lie?

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An existential cry of pain - how "The Left" is losing

As a conservative, it's only recently that I've begun to use the term 'The Left' to describe...well...'The Left'. This was a term that 'The Left', somewhat self-indulgently, used to characterise its so-called values. The premise of any discussion involving such folk was that good things were left-wing and bad things were right-wing. This made life simple - the torture and imprisonment of opponents in an approved left-wing country was necessary to protect the revolution or else simply lies put out by reactionary forces of 'The Right' seeking to undermine said revolution.

In contrast, the torture and imprisonment of opponents in a place designated as 'Right-wing' is a terrible crime against humanity. If you're a Blairite this justifies bombing the terrible place back into the stone age whereas, if you're genuinely of "The Left", the response is to organise a rally, wear clothing symbolising your support for the cause (especially if it looks cool and helps you pick up girls), and do that 'organise, mobilise, agitate' thing that 'The Left' always does.

So I thought that I'd explore this idea of 'The Left'. Not as a coherent political philosophy because, Marxism aside (and Marx would have thoroughly approved of Fascism), there is no coherent philosophy behind 'The Left'. Instead we have a set of positions - some simply not 'The Right' (remember that 'The Right' simply means "bad things I disagree with") whereas others are wrapped up in an incredibly indulgent thing usually called, in that trashing of the language beloved of 'The Left', values.

A long time ago, my Dad said that socialism or socialist in its common usage (by 'The Left') simply meant good. That was it - references to socialism or 'The Left' are intended to conjure up images of people who care more than nasty people who are called 'The Right'. We get folk pulling down a good wage paid for out of tax money or from the contributions of gullible donors while arguing for more 'caring' to be done by taking more cash off other people to give to a different set of ('deserving') people (plus well paid jobs for people from 'The Left'). These people have "values" to which we should all aspire. They are 'The Left' - complete with fluffy kittens, unicorns, glitter and shiny happy people marching for change.

The problem for 'The Left' is that countries that take the ideas of the left and turn them into a platform for government often end up totalitarian, lock opponents up and routinely use torture. These countries - from East Germany to Cuba are places that people tried to leave. Indeed they didn't just try to leave 'The Left', they did so facing the risk of getting shot, arrested and tortured. Or drowning as the tractor inner tube holding up the rickety raft sinks beneath the waves.

Today, 'The Left' face a new problem. Or rather an old problem revisited. In the democracies of the western nations there's an anger among the voters. Millions of column inches are being dedicated by 'The Left' to challenging this anger - they call it 'populism', 'nativism', even 'fascism' and are really agitated by the message it's putting out to voters. Of course, because this threat to 'The Left' is (because it is a threat) a bad thing, it is therefore right-wing, from the dark places of 'The Right'. And as a result people on 'The Right' are being told they should do something about the prospect of more folk like Donald Trump getting elected.

But when you peel back the cover of Donald Trump's agenda (ditto for Marine Le Pen and other nasty populist folk) and look at the policy programme underneath, it's pretty much an agenda that, had it come from 'The Left', would have been applauded. Clamping down on the corrupt and cosy relationship between big business and government. Protecting jobs by stopping firms moving them offshore. Protecting communities by ending dumping. Making politicians more accountable. This is a left-wing programme and it is 'The Left' that is threatened by its success.

What 'The Left' doesn't realise is that us right-wing folk simply don't start from the same place in all this debate. We don't think that the agenda proposed by the likes of Trump, Farage and Le Pen is a right-wing policy platform. The problem is that, after decades of taking its working class voter base for granted, 'The Left' has been found out. Hence the spluttering, shouting and screaming about the way in which those working class voters didn't do as they were told.

There's a huge difference between sympathy and empathy. 'The Left' is very good at the former but appalling at the latter with the result that, for all its language of caring, sharing and 'aren't we good', left-wing people these days come across as patronising, judgemental and arrogant. This is the world of 'we know what's good for you' and 'it's someone else's fault, let's go shout at the government'. The denial of agency to anyone who didn't get a degree is shocking - kids get sugary snacks because their parents can't resist advertising, poverty isn't solved by getting (and keeping) a job, and we need to make it harder for people to have a drink because they don't know how to control themselves.

But these caring noises - "there, there, it's not your fault, nasty, nasty government" - don't wash when 'The Left' shows a tin ear to the communities they claim to care about. At times it seems almost as if 'The Left' are talking about a different animal - one unable to look after itself properly, a permanent victim of 'the system'. There is no empathy for the condition of these people just the idea that we can use them to make our political point (mostly about how caring we are and how our values are so good) and to paint a cartoon picture of 'The Right'.

Back in the day, socialist parties were populist movements. Britain's Labour Party, the Socialist and Social Democratic Parties of Europe, Italy's Communist Party - all these groups built their support using the same sort of populist rhetoric that they now condemn in new political movements. It's true also that these socialist parties emerged from the same place as the Fascists - this doesn't make them the same, just that (unlike conservatives) they're competing for the same voters. This is still true and, in part, explains the screams of pain and anguish from the mainstream left. The problem is that those values 'The Left' is so big on simply aren't the values of a large chunk of the traditional support base for left-of-centre parties.

So when left-of-centre pundits tell 'The Right' that this populist (or nativist, fascist, even Nazi) upsurge is some how its problem they speak from fear. Not fear of a conservative hegemony - nothing conservative about Trump, Farage and Le Pen - but rather fear that the success of populists will keep them, 'The Left', from the things that sustain their livelihood and allow them to patronise the rest of us about values. And those things are government-funded jobs, membership of influential boards or committees, positions of authority in local and national and European government - this is what motivates 'The Left' today. The insurgent populists threaten 'The Left' by borrowing its language but sounding like they actually mean it - there's a real empathy, a genuine feeling of pain rather than a patronising, smug Tony Blair-style "I feel your pain" sympathy.

At the moment, aside form America, the traditional conservative right looks set fair - no room for complacency but it wouldn't be surprising to see by the end of 2017, conservatives leading France, Germany, Spain, the UK, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand. Those who think that the Front National, UKIP and Five Star are a threat to the conservative right are sadly misguided. It is 'The Left' that stands to lose as it continues to pretend that a sort of international order of the smug can sort everything out but only if we can stop those pesky electors voting the wrong way.
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It's not just clumsy language, the left is institutionally anti-semitic

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If we ignore the "it's all an evil Tory conspiracy run by Murdoch" line, there are two narratives around the current problems the Labour Party faces with anti-semitism. One is that the Party isn't fundamentally anti-semitic but has a few members who have spoken or written things that constitute anti-semitism. The other is that the Party has a fundamental problem, to coin a phrase, it is institionally anti-semitic.

Chris Dillow makes the case for the first narrative:

It might be useful to distinguish between two forms of racism: verbal, and structural. Although the two often go together, they need not. For example, you’ll hear far more racist language in financial firms than in the arts industry – but you’ll also see far more ethnic minorities too. One business has more verbal racism, the other more structural racism. In this sense, Labour has a problem with verbal racism, but isn’t obviously structurally racist.

Now taken in the round, Chris is quite right here. Even its biggest critics (and I count myself as one of these) wouldn't see the Labour Party as structurally racist, indeed the Party can make a strong claim to having been instrumental in making Britain a far less racist country than it was when I was growing up. On the specific question of anti-semitism, however, I fear Chris might be wrong - the faction that has captured the Party right now, the Corbyn-Abbott-Livingstone axis does have a structural problem with anti-semitism. And at the root of this is the left's (if it's OK to describe Corbyn's faction in such terms) attitude to Israel.

It's not simply the left's 'edginess' (as Chris calls it) that's the issue here but that the adoption of unquestioning support for Palestinian rights had led them into sharing campaigns with mysogynist, homophobic and Jew-hating groups simply because those groups are opposed to Israel. And, as Jonathan Fredland observed in his plea for the left to treat Jews as they would any other minority, 93% of Jews see Israel as part of their Jewish identity. The support of Corbyn, Abbott, Livingstone and others for organisations that present an existential threat to Israel, that literally wish to destroy the world's only majority Jewish country, isn't seen as 'anti-Zionism' but as an attack on Jews and the idea of Jewishness.

The result of this is that too many from the left are simply blind to how their words and actions around Israel are deeply upsetting to many Jewish people. When Livingstone said Hitler supported Zionism what Jews heard was that the man who sought to exterminate all Jews and killed over 6 million, far from being an anti-semite was a supporter of a Jewish homeland. Livingstone and those who act as apologists for his racism in effect declared that Zionism and National Socialism had the same ends. That so many in the Labour Party fail to realise that this view is horribly anti-semitic says to me that this isn't just 'verbal racism' - the left is institutionally anti-semitic for the same reasons that the the Lawrence Enquiry found that London's police were institutionally racist.

I'll conclude by saying that, while Chris Dillow is correct about the persistence of dog-whistle politics and right that it should be challenged - the attacks on Sadiq Khan in London are appalling - this is essentially 'whataboutery'. What the left needs is to recognise is that it doesn't treat Jews in the way it treats other minorities - in the game of equalities top trumps, anti-semitism is bottom of the pile.

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A reminder - in case you needed one - that the left are the enemy of the poor

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I observed a day or two ago that the environmental policies foisted on us by assorted left-wing governments are specifically designed to make energy more expensive. And that, while the better off can take the hit, the real victims of this 'planet-saving' policy platform are to poor.

Today we are reminded, via the pages of the trendy left's house journal, that the left really do want things to be more expensive. In this case it's a classic - a multi-millionaire, anti-capitalist who makes money from selling expensive stuff to rich people says that the poor should pay more for their food and clothes:

Clothes and food should cost much more than they do in Britain to reflect their true impact on the environment, Vivienne Westwood said on Wednesday night.

Speaking at a Guardian Live event at Chelsea Old Town Hall hosted by columnist Deborah Orr, the controversial fashion designer said: “Clothes should cost a lot more than they do – they are so subsidised.

“Food should cost most more too – you know something is wrong when you can buy a cooked chicken for £2. The world runs on debt and that’s why nothing costs what it should.”

You see folks - you should be made poorer because rich people like Ms Westwood would then feel so much better about their impact on the environment. Now remember that all those rich socialists in Islington town houses will be fine. They'll still have fancy food on the table, nice designer clothes and a classy bottle of wine (just one glass, mind).

But the single mum with three kids in Bradford who rather liked the fact she could buy a cooked chicken for two quid will have to explain to her children why they have less too eat and why they never get new clothes just hand-me-downs. Sadly though generations of brainwashing won't lead her to tell those children what they really need to know - that the 'progressive' policies of left-wing parties, the supposed parties of the poor, have resulted in those children being poorer.

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