06-07-2025
Cryo-liberals are still dishing up deranged delusions
Occasionally, I come across something that captures the very essence of cryogenic liberalism. Cryo-liberals, for those not in the know, are perfectly frozen political specimens from the 1990s and its end-of-history dreamland, when the answer to every problem was open borders, open markets and open arms.
Their heyday coincided with Blairism: sharp-suited social liberalism combined with the post-Thatcherite free market settlement. Since then the world has changed, but the cryo-liberals are still with us and, in many areas, still running the show.
Cryo-liberals are at their best when they're full of data and thoughtful examples from history to make their case. They're at their worst when engaged in such delusional denials of fact that it takes your breath away. Here's the Platonic example that popped on to my radar this week, like many unwelcome things, on X. 'Races and ethnicities don't exist,' tweeted John McTernan, the Blairite political strategist.
• A tinderbox of disconnection and division threatens our democracy
I'm going to write that out again: 'Races and ethnicities don't exist.' Not just 'race and ethnicity have been misused' or 'races and ethnicities are not useful policy categories' or 'race and ethnicity don't mean what your prejudices say they do'. They simply 'don't exist'.
McTernan was engaging with a topic that obviously makes him uncomfortable: the question of whether there is any ethnic component to English identity. The answer is quite obviously yes, in the sense that you can plot the population of England on a genetic chart, which measures the frequencies of particular mutations in the genome, and distinguish a cluster, formed from a mixing of various other groups, that has populated the southern British Isles for most of the last three or four thousand years. And I say that as someone whose genome, if plotted, would not appear in that cluster. It is simply a fact, like the fact that there are different models of Barbie.
Now I can understand why many people may feel queasy that this sort of fact is entering our political discourse. A new era is upon us, in which voters are rejecting the ideology of universal cultural compatibility. This change brings risk. There is a lot of vile race-baiting rising up social media feeds, promoted by racists and grifters.
But the right response is not to deny the reality that there are different ethnicities — clusters of identifiable genetic sameness and difference. Truth, as we learnt from the trans debate, does not care about your feelings. And lying or denying the truth doesn't make you nice or better or cleverer than other people. It makes you a delusional, dangerous dinosaur.
• Emma Duncan: Division, decline, decay? What a load of rot
Geneticists sequencing the DNA of a man found buried in a pot in Ancient Egypt have found that a fifth of his lineage was from Mesopotamia. This was a period in which both regions were home to civilisations that were starting to develop writing and taking great leaps forward in architectural and political sophistication. Perhaps their development was related to interbreeding and population exchange. There. That wasn't so controversial, was it?
I mentioned in my last column that lettuces are used in Chinese new year rituals to symbolise future prosperity, via a pun. The Chinese word for 'lettuce' and for 'growing wealth' are similar. This prompted a reader to send me some lyrics from Guys & Dolls in which the word 'lettuce' is used to mean cash: 'There are well-heeled shooters everywhere/ And an awful lot of lettuce/ For the fella who can get us there.' I can only assume this is because greenbacks might seem salad-like when leafed through in wads. And it rhymes.
The response to the news that the Bank of England may replace Winston Churchill on our banknotes with an array of wind farms was utterly predictable. It's almost as if someone is sitting inside our institutions trying to think of the best way for them to sabotage themselves. What's next? Replace the King with Glastonbury Tor?
