We need a new kind of politics
Neither Labour nor the Conservative party can challenge woke institutions
We are beginning to get more of a sense of what life might be like if Labour wins the next election. Unfortunately, it seems that divisive, woke policies will proliferate.
This week Labour unveiled plans for a new Race Equality Act. It will enshrine equal pay rights and mandatory pay-gap reporting in law. Of course, no one should be paid less because of their skin colour. This is why it is already illegal to pay someone less on the basis of their ethnicity - just as it is illegal to pay people differently because of their sex.
So what difference will additional legislation make? We only have to look to debates about the gender pay gap to see some of the damaging consequences to come.
Gender pay gap statistics are elastic. If we total up all the money earned by all women and all the money earned by men, and divide by the number of women and men, we can come up with a large pay gap. But when we compare like with like - comparing hourly rates for men and women of the same age, in the same occupations, and with similar qualifications and levels of experience, the pay gap disappears. By cleverly playing with statistics, so-called feminist groups get to portray women as victims who are discriminated against and work ‘for free’ for so many days each year.
This has a number of damaging consequences. It tells young women that the world is against them. It is only in very specific sectors such as film, the media and sport where women and men can be paid wildly different rates for very similar work - so the pay gap narrative allows these women to make a case to be paid more. Meanwhile, earnings gaps certainly exist - some jobs are very badly paid. Yet focusing on gender does nothing to help women - and men - who are in low paid, insecure employment.
It is hard not to imagine exactly the same trends will hold true for ethnic pay gap reporting. Young people who are black or from ethnic minority communities will be turned into victims. Workers will be turned against each other, rather than fighting for higher wages for all. Labour’s Race Equality Act is a nasty, divisive proposal that will racialise workers and engender grievances.
But it doesn’t stop there. This week Labour also announced plans to ban conversion therapy. As I pointed out in The Spectator:
The line between ‘conversion therapy’ and plain old ‘therapy’ is vanishingly thin while the consequences of transitioning are monumental. Take two young adults. One has a relationship with someone of the same sex before changing her mind and deciding she is boringly straight after all. She goes on to get married and have children. Her youthful experimentation is nothing more than a happy memory.
The second woman thinks she might actually be a man. She socially transitions, changing her name and pronouns. She goes on to take cross-sex hormones and has surgery to remove her breasts. At this point, still unhappy, she decides to detransition. But the physical changes to her body are irreversible. She faces potential infertility, permanent scarring and lifelong changes to her voice and appearance.
No humane society should let someone put themselves through this without first making sure they are fully aware of the consequences. It might not be what a transgender person wants to hear, but it is necessary to point out that no amount of hormones or surgery can actually change a person’s sex. And, in some instances, advising against medical transition might be the best course of action. Yet for Sir Keir, these conversations, far from being compassionate, are ‘psychologically damaging abuse’.
In order to challenge the pernicious influence of woke thinking within our institutions, we need a new kind of politics. Last month I had the privilege of interviewing Amy Gallagher, the SDP’s candidate for Mayor of London.
Gallagher sees London’s problems as being down to the mayor’s warped priorities, rather than a lack of resources. Take policing. ‘It feels like we’ve got two-tier policing at the moment with some groups being treated a lot more leniently than others’, she argues. ‘At the protests following the death of Sarah Everard, we saw some women manhandled. At the lockdown protests, I saw an elderly woman pushed to the floor by police officers.’ But it’s a completely different story for the ‘pro-Palestine’ marches that now happen every Saturday in central London. ‘You don’t see the same heavy policing there’, she says. ‘This makes people begin to question whether the police have a political agenda.’
Gallagher wants to take the politics out of policing and concentrate on serious crime. ‘Making the streets safer would be one of my top priorities’, she says. ‘Knife crime has gone up but Sadiq Khan doesn’t seem to be able to get a grip on it.’
Gallagher’s dad was a black-cab driver and she describes herself as coming from a very working-class background. She ‘worked really hard at school’ and went on to study English at the University of Sussex. ‘I loved literature’, she tells me. But when she got to Sussex, she realised that her ‘course was not just political but extremely one-sided… I was being told what to think’. After graduation, she thought briefly about going into teaching but rejected this option because she ‘just wanted to get away from politics’.
This was the first of many similar experiences. Time and again, Gallagher found herself confronted with political agendas in institutions that were supposed to be apolitical.
To end with Gallagher’s words:
‘It feels like an exciting time to be involved in politics. So many people have lost faith in the two main parties and it will be good to see the growth of new parties like the SDP. I think more people really want a new kind of politics. I think we just have to be a bit bolder and pin our colours to the mast a little bit more.’