It is often hard to remember, when so much of the modern Left seems lost to various forms of identitarian madness, that there is a form of leftwing politics that seeks to strengthen the common life of ordinary people, seeing the decency and stability of such a life as a thing of nobility to be sought. Rakib Ehsan’s recently published book, Beyond Grievance: What the Left Gets Wrong About Ethnic Minorities, is a reminder of a certain idea of English left-wing politics, one that celebrates a covenantal form of life of people lived in rooted communities, joining together in resistance to economic forces that would uproot the bonds of mutual obligation, loyalty, and reciprocity that enable a decent life for those not at the pinnacle of economic fortune.
As Ehsan shows again and again, the modern Left forgot such a vision during the disastrous Labour leadership of Jeremy Corbyn, investing all its scant intellectual resources in a divisive form of identity politics. Under Sir Keir Starmer, Ehsan argues, the Labour party risks perpetuating this state of affairs, stripped of the obnoxious elements of Corbyn’s reign. The key message: the Left shouldn’t take British ethnic minorities for granted. Whether the Left will hear this is open to question.
The core message of Ehsan’s book is a hopeful one. He argues, backed by extensive social science data, that ethnic minorities in contemporary Britain are not the benighted victim groups that the Left so often paints them to be. Having made Britain their home in the post-war years, and in increasing numbers since New Labour’s victory in 1997, many ethnic minority Britons are patriotic, traditionally minded on social and cultural questions, and are happy to live in a democratic, free country. Even so, Ehsan is also far from a utopian, pointing both to the continuing problems faced by minorities in some areas, such as unemployment, as well as being upfront about the problems of multiculturalism.
Let’s begin with some of the positives. As Ehsan shows, ethnic minorities in the UK are far more politically diverse than either side might expect. For example, a third of ethnic minority voters went for Brexit in the 2016 EU referendum. The condescension on display from elite Remainers across the political spectrum both ignored the legitimate reasons why white Britons voted Leave and treated ethnic minority Brexiteers as an irrelevance. Ehsan’s hometown of Luton, a majority-minority conurbation, voted for Brexit by 56.5%. This Euroscepticism was repeated across areas with high South Asian populations.
It appears that one’s ethnocultural background isn’t always determinative when it comes to political viewpoints. This means that the Left and Right actually have to compete for votes, rather than take them for granted or write them off. Ehsan argues that the Left’s cosmopolitan identitarianism risks alienating socially conservative, religious, communitarian minorities that seek socio-economic solidarity, not cultural condescension.
Such diversity of opinion and voting patterns extend into other areas. An ICM poll from 2021 showed that ethnic minority Brits were more satisfied with life in the UK than white Brits. 68% say that British identity is important to them, higher than white Britons. This extends to trust in British institutions. For example, “Only one in ten people in the UK general population supports reduced investment in their own local police force—something that is also a minority view in black-British communities (held by fewer than one in five people).” Moreover, Ehsan shows that even the left-wing group Hope Not Hate has found that “64% of ethnic-minority Britons believe the police are, on the whole, a force for good, and that racism in policing is down to a small number of problematic individuals.”
Meanwhile, “[i]n the most recent crime survey for England and Wales, people of Bangladeshi origin were more likely to have confidence in their local police force than white Brits (81% and 74%, respectively).” The Left, determined to import the American racial psychodrama into the British context, will proclaim the institutionalised mistreatment of Britain’s black population. Yet one discovers that the picture is more nuanced than one is led to believe. While there is still mistrust between the police and black British communities, particularly those of Afro-Caribbean origin, “black-British Africans, when compared with black-British Caribbeans, are far more likely to have confidence in their local police force and report satisfaction with British democracy.”
Ehsan also contextualises the disparity in police use of stop-and-search tactics against black British youth by citing the problem of gang violence in deprived urban areas that disproportionately affects the very people the Left claims to care about. As Ehsan writes: “the most recent Crime Survey for England and Wales undermines racially loaded ‘police v. community’ narratives. The survey shows that around two in three black people have confidence in their local police—not much lower than the corresponding figure of 74% for white Brits.” Importing American BLM narratives on police and race wholesale into Britain is inimical to maintaining the public safety and good order that are wanted by those most affected by their disappearance.
The Left is obsessed with portraying Britain as an overwhelmingly bigoted country whose power structures and institutions are dedicated to oppressing its minorities. And yet, when it comes to such leftist bugbears like the Prevent counterextremism programme, we find that “while some have accused the UK’s counterterrorism strategy, Prevent, of alienating the ‘British Muslim community,’ Crest Advisory found that the majority of British Muslims—56%—are not even aware of it.” Furthermore, “[o]n matters of public safety, 63% of British Muslims say they’re worried about the threat of Islamist extremism— not too dissimilar to the figure of 67% for the general population.”
This kind of data is crucial because it gives the lie to the American-inflected narrative that the British Left increasingly pushes as its main ideological message. Far from being totally alienated from British life and its public institutions, Ehsan shows that most ethnic minority Brits trust British institutions at similar, or even greater levels than the white population. Those like Britain’s Muslim population, as well as other minority faiths like British Hindus and Sikhs, appreciate Britain’s democratic politics and freedom of religious practice. Indeed, while Britain undoubtedly has deep-seated problems, it outperforms many European countries in these domains, as well as on social cohesion between groups.
Such doses of reality extend to the “disparity as discrimination” shibboleth that has become hegemonic in leftist discourse on both sides of the Atlantic. Briefly, this view holds that any group disparity in outcomes between a minority group and the majority must always and only be due to discrimination against the minority by the majority. Any context that accounts for socioeconomic differences and cultural influences on life outcomes is ignored or dismissed as “blaming the victim” and an example of internalised prejudice on the part of minorities (an updated but equally foul way of accusing people of exhibiting false consciousness).
The reality is, however, that on a range of measures, non-white British people are outstripping white Brits. Non-white Britons are upwardly mobile in both an economic and social sense. Chinese and Indian heritage Britons now earn more than the white majority, a state of affairs grounded in strong family structures, a sense of belonging to rooted communities, a hopeful rather than resentful view of life and the opportunities and challenges attendant on it.
These social factors influence educational performance, the main drive, along with family formation, of success in our post-industrial, managerial society. At school, almost all minorities fare better than white Britons, with white Britons near the bottom of educational attainment league tables, and white working-class boys doing especially poorly, particularly those on free school meals, an indicator of low socio-economic status. This educational performance extends from primary and secondary into higher education. Many ethnic minority British groups attend university at higher rates than their white British counterparts. Again, the data concerning white working-class attendance at university, particularly white working-class male admittance, are dire.
Ehsan cites such data to drive home the point that acronyms like ‘BAME’ (Black, Asian, and Minority Ethnic) and ‘BIPOC’ (Black, Indigenous, People of Colour) must be thrown in the bin. Britain’s ethnic minority populations are too diverse, in a socio-economic and cultural sense, to be lumped into such confected identity blocks that obscure far more than they reveal.
Black British underperformance in certain domains is chalked up exclusively to racism, without disaggregating the population along the lines of Caribbean and African origin communities. Such disaggregation shows that Caribbean heritage Britons suffer higher rates of family breakdown and community instability than do African heritage populations. Meanwhile, the urban character of such communities and the deprivation that this often entails are downplayed or ignored.
The same obfuscation holds when discussing the ‘British Asian community.’ Successful Chinese, Hindu, and Sikh populations are lumped in with poorer Pakistani and Bangladeshi populations. As Ehsan shows, both of these groups have lower female economic activity and cultural participation, rooted in male-dominated cultural norms and lower rates of English language proficiency.
These labels assume that non-white equals homogenous beliefs and interests. We used to have unflattering terms for broad brush descriptors like this. These amalgamations reflect the colonisation of the British leftist mind by American leftist cultural imperialism, which is ironic given this side’s obsession with decolonising everything and everywhere. This colonisation leads to the labelling by the identitarian Left of those from ethnic minority backgrounds who uphold their duty to observing reality and maintaining academic and journalistic integrity with slurs and smears that I won’t repeat here.
A prime example of what this leads to is that of Dr. Tony Sewell, chief author of the March 2021 Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities report into the state of British race relations. Sewell is black, and for his crime of hewing to impartiality and objectivity, was subjected to abuse—like Labour MP Clive Lewis tweeting a picture of a KKK member captioned by “Move along. Nothing to see here #RaceReport.” A Cambridge academic called Sewell a Nazi. Black Conservative politicians like Kemi Badenoch are referred to as ‘racial gatekeepers,’ while those like former Chancellor of the Exchequer Kwasi Kwarteng are smeared as ‘superficially black.’
This unsophisticated thinking ends in bigotry and is the sign of ideological capture of the contours of our national conversation. This is driven and reinforced by what Joel Kotkin calls a liberal “clerisy,” the academic-media-non-profit complex which serves to legitimise the ideology that gives coherence and purpose to the ruling overclass, a class that enjoys hegemony on the Left but also stretches across to the nominal British Right. Ehsan labels those activist cultural elites the “grievance industrial complex,” pumping out what Roger Scruton called the “culture of repudiation” against everything that British and English culture and society used to base its identity on, and which provides the resources both for cultivating one’s own sense of rootedness and belonging, and for promoting a public culture around which a nation can cohere.
This culture of repudiation reflects a secularised Protestant heresy that undergirds the identitarian politics of much of the modern Left, as Joshua Mitchell argues in American Awakening. In this new metaphysical order, we see a continued seeking for a Christian-influenced morality, with a division between those damned and those saved. This rests on a moral economy that “measures transgression and innocence,” in which “no balance of payment between them is possible,” even while “all accounts must be settled.” As a result, “Identity politics is not about who we are as individuals; it is about the stain and purity associated with who we are as members of a group.”
This depraved metaphysics is shown for the evil it is by Ehsan’s remorseless detailing of the unreality of white privilege narratives so beloved by our leftist race hustlers. White Britons, especially lower down the socio-economic ladder, are hardly possessors of some form of racial privilege, and furthermore do not bear the sins of their fathers, legitimate or hyped-up by the academic Left, as a form of racial original sin. White Britons, men in particular, live shorter lives, make less money, have lower educational attainment, marry less, are more likely to come from broken homes, more likely to be addicted to drugs, and suffer with alcoholism and mental illness. Such accusations of racial privilege and original sin are made more malignant by the fact that white Britons overwhelmingly do not think one has to be white to be British. Such sentiments extend into the over-65 age group.
What Émile Durkheim called “anomie” at the end of the 19th century is well and truly alive among significant swathes of this population. As Ehsan further notes, the dominance of white Britons in senior positions in corporate structures, political life, and cultural institutions, is more of a cohort effect than active suppression of minorities. Obsessing over such superficial examples of ‘representation’ does next to nothing to improve the lives of those outside the metropolitan hubs and lower down the ladder of British life. The Left used to take such concerns around what used to be called ‘want’ as its reason for being. No longer is this the case for the factions that have both the status and the will, it seems.
Such a view of life—its meaning and purpose, and how this influences society—is a recipe for ethnic division and social unrest in our increasingly diversifying societies. It is inimical to any chance different groups have of building a national life together, of forging bonds of mutual loyalty that undergird the common life. Ehsan is not sanguine about the challenges that a diversifying society poses to social and cultural cohesion, pointing to the communal riots between Hindus and Muslims in Leicester last year as a sign of tensions between groups. He also cites the racism black Britons experience from members of other black British populations. And then there are the harrowing, continuing revelations of large-scale, group-based child sex abuse by grooming gangs of disproportionately Pakistani origin that targeted socially vulnerable, white working-class girls.
Ehsan is open about all of this and refuses to shy away from it. This does him great credit. The simple fact is that diversity does indeed lower trust between people, confirmed by a significant 2020 meta-study which found that “the literature on the relationship between ethnic diversity and social trust” of “1,001 estimates from 87 studies” found that “a statistically significant negative relationship between ethnic diversity and social trust [is found] across all studies. The relationship is stronger for trust in neighbours and when ethnic diversity is measured more locally.” In light of this, the woke identitarian worldview that Ehsan savages in his book is suicidal for (a) any political party that claims to want to govern for the common good, and (b) suicidal for any country that wishes to maintain the common life of its citizens in an increasingly diverse society.
Ehsan shows another way: while not denying the challenges we face, he demonstrates that the Left’s dark view of Britain is far from warranted. He celebrates British cultural dynamism and achievements that go back well before the leftist new dawn of 1945. He lauds “the sheer richness of English heritage and culture” as one that can incorporate “the nation’s diverse population—without compromising the solidarity of the Union. This includes admiration for the jaw-dropping magnificence of English Gothic architecture, appreciating the creation of Magna Carta at Runnymede (something that has personal significance for me as a Royal Holloway alumnus) and celebrating ground-breaking English achievements during the Industrial Revolution. Chaucer, Shakespeare, Chesterton, Dickens, the Brontë sisters, Austen, Kipling, Orwell, Woolf, Christie, and many others—the list of magnificent writers produced by England is remarkable.” I found such an upfront celebration of our culture, lacking the caveats about historical sin, surprisingly moving.
Reinforcing the glory of what a particular place and its people produced—what the theorist of nationality Anthony D. Smith calls a mythsymbolic complex—while not restricting such glory only to the group that produced it is the key to bridging between groups in a nation with such a long history as Britain. It is a duty for us as participants in Chesterton’s “democracy of the dead” to conserve this glory for the future, while bringing newcomers into the life and story of the nation in the present. Those on the Left identified by Ehsan as the grievance industrial complex must be resisted and pushed back. We need a cultural regime change.
Ehsan shows that contrary to what some on the Left and Right say, with time the bonds of mutual loyalty and solidarity can be woven. He has done us a service in showing the possible path for a patriotic, culturally traditionalist Left—an alternative to a sterile neoliberalism or an invidious identitarianism. More importantly, finishing the book left me with a feeling of hope for Britain’s future, a scarce sentiment in these times. This, on top of everything else, means this book is to be heartily recommended.
This essay appears in the Spring 2024 edition of The European Conservative, Number 30:106-109.
