Latest news with #identitypolitics
Telegraph
22-07-2025
- Politics
- Telegraph
Men aren't the enemy, but I wouldn't want to be one
On Sunday the BBC managed the difficult task of getting the Environment Secretary, his shadow opposite, and the leaders of both Reform UK and the Lib Dems onto Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg, each for a discussion on our water industry. Unfortunately for the programme's producers, the panellists were all male, white, and over the age of 59. And so, with mind-sapping predictability, the identity politics brigade – to which the BBC usually obediently kowtows – went bananas. 'British politics in all its diversity this morning,' sniffed the political editor of The Byline Times, though the country is 81 per cent white and 50 per cent male. It's true that men and women are treated unequally in this country, just not in the way most people think. We approve when females dominate certain industries, run FTSE100 companies, make up the majority of university graduates, yet cry 'sexism' whenever and wherever men are in the lead on some criterion. We have an Equality Act offering a legal get-out card to employers who prefer candidates from 'under-represented' groups. It's why the RAF, NHS and several police forces have all tied themselves in knots explaining why they have prioritised minority recruits. We used to pride ourselves on providing 'equality of opportunity' but now that's not good enough. We have to aim for 'equity' which, purportedly righting the wrongs of the past, permits turning a blind eye to evidence suggesting white males are now often at a marked disadvantage. White British males eligible for free school meals, for instance, are now the lowest performing group at GCSE. They are grossly underrepresented in higher education, with just 13 per cent going to university. And when was the last time you heard about an outreach or access programme focused on this group, rather than ethnic minorities and women? Who will advocate for the white men, in left-behind towns and communities, hit hardest by the decline of manufacturing jobs in the late-20th century? None of these opportunities have returned, whilst others are gradually being cut off: it was reported this week that women in the construction, electrical and plumbing sectors are now 'inundated' with requests from customers who feel safer with them working in their homes. Apparently, there's too much 'inappropriate behaviour from tradesmen' going on. Really? How many clients can honestly say they've been subjected to Gregg Wallace-style misogynistic banter over a faulty cable or leaky pipe? White men have the highest suicide rates in the UK; white working class men are statistically among the least likely to experience upward social mobility. The list goes on and on. But it's not unique to men from any particular ethnic group. If you possess XY chromosomes, you are growing up in a society which will treat you with suspicion, as a predator in the making, whose basic instincts ought to be suppressed. Where you are terrified to approach members of the opposite sex in a social setting, let alone in the workplace, in case you are taken to be an Andrew Tate tribute act. Where traditional masculine qualities – assertiveness, competitiveness, independence, strength – are dismissed as destructive to our society. Where your economic contribution will be downplayed: how many people are aware, for example, that men pay over 70 per cent of all income tax? That they pay back more of their student loans on average (£50,800) than women (£39,200)? How many stop to consider that, Waspis notwithstanding, women's life expectancy means we get the state pension for longer? That men account for the vast majority – 95 per cent – of fatal workplace injuries? Meanwhile feminist groups bemoan the gender pay gap, conveniently forgetting that it is largely a consequence of compensating differentials and free choice. If women opt for part-time roles, remote roles, less demanding roles, why should they expect to be paid in line with male colleagues who are putting in the harder yards? For all the grimness of our medieval maternity wards, I'm glad I'm a woman in modern-day Britain. Most of us do reasonably well. I should confess, however, to having a stake in this debate, as the mother of three young boys. But why should my sons be instructed to 'stand aside' to allow girls to rise up? It's precisely this mentality which leads us to convince ourselves slavery reparations are a solid idea. Boys born today have nothing to atone for, nor will they benefit from the 'patriarchy' of the past. So why should they listen to people like Jerry Levins, the late AOL-Time Warner CEO, who famously proclaimed that 'it's time to replace all men at the top with women'? 'Women are better leaders', he intoned back in 2017 – before the full scale of the Jacinda Ardern or Angela Merkel catastrophes became clear. The evidence is far from definitive. Perhaps it's time for a truce between the sexes. Not least so that we can focus on the areas where women are genuinely disadvantaged, discriminated against or mistreated. The Left appears far more troubled that easyJet pays its male pilots more than its female cabin crew than it does the steady rise in FGM or warnings from charities that forced marriage is on the rise. I'm sorry, but I struggle to see the Kuenssberg panel as such a horrorshow. Laura was in charge, after all.
ABC News
22-07-2025
- Politics
- ABC News
Greens co-founder Drew Hutton slams party as 'authoritarian, aggressive, unlikeable'
Green's co-founder Drew Hutton has responded to his expulsion from the party, saying the Greens have lost focus on environmental issues and become "authoritarian and aggressive". He claimed the party had become "unlikeable" and there was evidence it was impacting their support amongst voters. Mr Hutton was expelled from the party at the weekend for refusing to delete transphobic comments made by others commenting on a Facebook post he made in 2022. In an interview with 7.30, Mr Hutton claimed the party refuses to allow frank debate on its transgender policy, which states people have "the right to their self-identified gender". "What I disagree with vehemently is the way that anybody who actually voices any dissent with that policy and do so from a credible position, that there is such a thing as biological sex and there are two sexes, is forced out of the party," Mr Hutton said. "That's extremely authoritarian. And what I worry about is that there is a very doctrinaire mentality developing in the Greens, especially with regard to this issue." Mr Hutton accused the Greens of being run by a "cult" intently focused on identity politics and showing a "disdain" for free speech. "There is a clear need for a party like the Greens … But there is also this fairly authoritarian and aggressive and unlikeable element to the Greens that I think people in the community are responding to," he said. According to an internal Greens' party account of the events leading to the expulsion, the comments on Mr Hutton's Facebook page were brought to the Greens' attention by "distressed" party members. Some of the comments seen by 7.30 used transphobic language, including claims that trans women pose a threat in women-only facilities. Mr Hutton refused to remove the comments, claiming they were "free speech". He told 7.30 he supports transgender rights but opposes what he calls an attempt to stifle debate. Greens leader Larissa Waters said she had not read the documentation about Mr Hutton's expulsion. "I haven't read the documentation because here I am in parliament hoping to talk tomorrow about introducing a climate trigger into our environmental laws and fixing the gender inequalities in our tax system," Ms Waters told 7.30. She rejected Mr Hutton's claim, however, that internal debate about transgender issues was stifled. "Our members are involved in formulating those very policies and those debates happen on a regular basis … And we love involvement in the democratic process," she said. Ms Waters said Mr Hutton did not debate "respectfully". "I believe that's the basis for which the party upheld the decision." Mr Hutton told 7.30 that former Greens leaders Bob Brown and Christine Milne had lent their support in an email. The email says: "Bob and Christine say that any member may hold a view different from Greens' policy. Consensus decision-making is the hallmark of Greens policy-formulation making … We oppose Drew Hutton's expulsion … and advocate that his membership be restored." Asked to comment on the request by the former leaders, Ms Waters said: "Like me, they respect his environmental achievements … But this was a decision that was reviewed by the party, taken by volunteer party members, many of whom uphold the code of conduct on a regular basis. "It's not hard to uphold the code of conduct." Watch 7.30, Mondays to Thursdays 7:30pm on ABC iview and ABC TV Do you know more about this story? Get in touch with 7.30 here.
New York Times
10-07-2025
- Politics
- New York Times
It's Time to Let Go of ‘African American'
I'm no fan of performative identity politics, and I think racial preferences are long past their expiration date. Yet I don't think the New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani did anything wrong when, as was reported last week, he checked off 'Black or African American' on a college application. As a man of South Asian descent who spent the first part of his life living in Uganda, he was within his rights to call himself African American. The problem is that the term appeared on the application, or anywhere else. Plenty of Black people have never liked it, and ever more are joining the ranks. It's time to let it go. 'African American' entered mainstream circulation in the late '80s as a way to call attention to Black people's heritage in the same way that terms like 'Italian American' and 'Asian American' do for members of those groups. The Rev. Jesse Jackson encouraged its usage, declaring: 'Black does not describe our situation. In my household there are seven people and none of us have the same complexion. We are of African-American heritage.' In 1989 the columnist and historian Roger Wilkins told Isabel Wilkerson: 'Whenever I go to Africa, I feel like a person with a legitimate place to stand on this earth. This is the name for all the feelings I've had all these years.' Since that time, the United States has seen an enormous change in immigration patterns. In 1980 there were about 200,000 people in America who were born in Africa; by 2023 there were 2.8 million. So today, for people who were born in Africa, any children they have after moving here and Black people whose last African ancestors lived centuries ago, the term 'African American' treats them as if they are all in the same category, forcing a single designation for an inconveniently disparate range of humans. Further complicating matters is that many Africans now living here are not Black. White people from, for example, South Africa or Tanzania might also legitimately call themselves African American. As for the community that Mamdani grew up in, it dates back to at least the late 19th century, when South Asians were brought to Uganda to work as servants for British colonizers. 'Mississippi Masala,' the movie for which Mamdani's mother, the filmmaker Mira Nair, is perhaps best known, tells the story of South Asian Ugandans expelled from the country in 1972 by the dictator Idi Amin. Feeling just as dislocated from the only home they had ever known as I would feel if expelled from the United States, they would be quite reasonable in viewing themselves as African Americans after settling here. A term that is meant to be descriptive but that can refer to Cedric the Entertainer, Trevor Noah, Elon Musk and Zohran Mamdani is a little silly. And not just silly but chilly. 'African American' sounds like something on a form. Or something vaguely euphemistic, as if you're trying to avoid saying something out loud. It feels less like a term for the vibrant, nuanced bustle of being a human than like seven chalky syllables bureaucratically impervious to abbreviation. Italian Americans call themselves 'Italian' for short. Asian Americans are 'Asian.' But for any number of reasons, it's hard to imagine a great many Black Americans opting to call themselves simply African. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Fox News
10-07-2025
- Politics
- Fox News
Carville pans Democrats for continuing to alienate men with 'future is female' talk
Veteran Democratic strategist James Carville scolded Democrats and liberals for lecturing men about their lifestyle choices and using rhetoric like "the future is female." Carville has frequently called out the Democratic Party for its use of identity politics, warning that it has damaged the brand like a foul odor clinging to a shirt. On Tuesday, he was asked by "The People's Cabinet" podcast host Daniel Koh whether the Democratic Party has a problem communicating with young men. "They do," Carville replied, suggesting that one can just listen to NPR for a few minutes, multiple times a day, to hear the kind of rhetoric that has alienated men. "They were told, 'The future is female, you must always believe the woman is never wrong, #MeToo,'" Carville said. "And men are like, 'S---, do I count? What about my life? I mean, we're only 48% of the voting population.'" He then called out the language he has heard from his fellow Democrats about elections. "Every time you would see an election, 'It's all coming down to suburban women,'" he said, lamenting rhetoric about an "uprising" and "women-of-color." The "Ragin' Cajun" then offered a hypothetical about the male, working-class experience. "You go home, you want a cold beer, you want a hamburger, and you want to watch the football game," Carville said. "No, no!" he added, mocking Democratic rhetoric. "You can't do that! Not football. No. No. Hamburgers? How many calories does that have? Do you know what that does to you? Beer? No. You should be drinking a nice fruit spritzer or something." "And I'm like, 'Oh, get off of my back!' Right?" Carville said. "And then, 'If you have sex, you must wear a condom!'" "I mean, we just never communicated with them," he said, lamenting that the alienation of men could be fixed by "just talking like people." While Carville acknowledged there are demographic shifts in the country, he warned that some members of society are being ignored. "There are no television shows about these people anymore. They've been erased from the culture. We've just erased them," he said of American men who feel ignored by the modern Democratic Party. "'You don't exist, no one sees you, no one cares about you, you've had it made all your life.' And a lot of these people say, 'I got it made? What are you talking about?'" "We just lecture people too much," Carville argued, adding the same alienated men have suffered stagnating wages and loss of status.
The Guardian
04-07-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
In an age of failing economies and a populist backlash, I'll tell you what we need – Marxism
A young woman I met recently remarked that it was not so much the existence of pure evil that drove her berserk, but rather people or institutions with the capacity to do good who instead ended up damaging humanity. Her musing made me think of Karl Marx, whose quarrel with capitalism was precisely that – not so much that it was exploitative but that it dehumanised and alienated us despite being such a progressive force. Preceding social systems might have been more oppressive or exploitative than capitalism. However, only under capitalism have humans been so fully alienated from our products and environment, so divorced from our labour, so robbed of even a modicum of control over what we think and do. Capitalism, especially after it shifted into its technofeudal phase, turned us all into some version of Caliban or Shylock – monads in an archipelago of isolated selves whose quality of life is inversely related to the abundance of gizmos our newfangled machinery produces. This week, alongside a host of other politicians, writers and thinkers, I will be speaking at the Marxism 2025 festival in London, and one of the questions that occupies me is the way in which young people today clearly feel this alienation Marx identified. But the backlash against immigrants and identity politics – not to mention the algorithmic distortion of their voices – paralyses them. Here Marx can re-enter with advice on how to overcome this paralysis – good advice that lies buried under the sands of time. Take the argument that minorities living in the west should assimilate lest we end up a society of strangers. When Marx was 25, he read a book by Otto Bauer, a thinker he respected, making the case that to qualify for citizenship, German Jews should renounce Judaism. Marx was livid. Though the young Marx had no time for Judaism, indeed for any religion, his passionate demolition of Bauer's argument is a sight for sore eyes: 'Does the standpoint of political emancipation give the right to demand from the Jew the abolition of Judaism and from man the abolition of religion? … Just as the state evangelizes when … it adopts a Christian attitude towards the Jews, so the Jew acts politically when, although a Jew, he demands civic rights.' The trick that Marx is teaching us here is how to combine a commitment to the religious freedom of Jews, Muslims, Christians etc with the wholesale rejection of the presumption that, in a class society, the state can represent the general interest. Yes, Jews, Muslims, people of faiths that we may not share – or even much like – must be emancipated immediately. Yes, women, black people and LGBTQ+ people must be granted equal rights well before any socialist revolution appears on the horizon. But freedom will take a lot more than that. Shifting to the topic of immigrant workers suppressing the wages of local workers, another minefield for today's younger people, a letter Marx sent in 1870 to two associates in New York City offers brilliant clues on how to deal not only with the Nigel Farages of the world but also with some leftists who have bitten the anti-immigration bait. In his letter, Marx fully acknowledges that American and English employers were purposely exploiting cheap Irish immigrant labour, pitting them against native-born workers and weakening labour solidarity. But for Marx it was self-defeating for trade unions to turn against the Irish immigrants and espouse anti-immigration narratives. No, the solution was never to banish immigrant workers but to organise them. And if the problem is the weakness of the unions, or fiscal austerity, then the solution can never be to scapegoat immigrant workers. Speaking of trade unions, Marx also has some splendid advice for them. Yes, it is crucial to boost wages to reduce worker exploitation. But let us not fall for the fantasy of fair wages. The only way to render the workplace fair is to do away with an irrational system based on the strict separation of those who work but do not own and the tiny minority who own but do not work. In his words: 'Trade unions work well as centres of resistance against the encroachments of capital. [But] [t]hey fail generally from limiting themselves to a guerrilla war against the effects of the existing system, instead of also trying to change it.' Change it into what? A new corporate structure based on the principle of one-employee-one-share-one vote – the kind of agenda that can truly inspire youngsters who crave freedom both from statism and from corporations driven by the bottom lines of private equity firms or an absent owner who may not even know he or she owns part of the firm they work for. Last, Marx's freshness shines through when we try to make sense of the technofeudal world that big tech, along with big finance and our states, has surreptitiously encased us in. To understand why this is a form of technofeudalism, something much worse than surveillance capitalism, we need to think as Marx would have of our smartphones, tablets etc. To see them as a mutation of capital – or 'cloud capital' – that directly modifies our behaviour. To grasp how mind-bending scientific breakthroughs, fantastical neural networks and imagination-defying AI programs created a world where, while privatisation and private equity asset-strip all physical wealth around us, cloud capital goes about the business of asset-stripping our brains. Only through Marx's lens can we truly get it: that to own our minds individually, we must own cloud capital collectively. Yanis Varoufakis is the leader of MeRA25, a former finance minister and author of Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism
