Tom Jones, post-postliberal

The price of politeness

A while ago, I was identified in an article predicting where the British New Right will come from as a ‘communitarian traitor.’

When I first started writing, I very consciously wrote about and around postliberal ideas. My first three articles for the Critic, for instance, were about winning back Britain’s ‘somewheres’, a conservative case for doubling council tax on second homes and about a community-lead effort to save the last pub in a village I represent. I had too much of a Burkean strain - I also wrote a piece arguing that all central government attempts to rebuild common life are doomed to failure - to ever buy into the project wholesale, but I thought that at least it offered a compelling and interesting narrative to explain how Britain got in the state it’s in.

So how did I get from there to being a ‘communitarian traitor?’

The answer is immigration. I started talking about immigration;

The opportunistic young pull the wool over the impotent old, and those LARPing civility dog whistle to their feral tribesmen.

When I first started writing about immigration, I very deliberately used postliberal language - in particular David Goodhart - because it offered an easy and safe way to discuss a touchy subject. A kind of safeguard, if you will, which had the added allure of allowing you to frame your argument in the language of the old left., so you thought you might convert someone along the way. I attach a range of examples;

Braverman’s civic argument goes something like this: a cohesive society is based on a sense that each citizen owes — and is owed — rights and responsibilities, both to each other and to the common good. Those mutual bonds and obligations are far stronger when the society has a set of common values and assumptions, because that shared commonality provides an understanding of acceptable practices and interactions. These then form a framework inside which a cohesive society can operate with minimal friction.

The common culture that is the framework of a cohesive society, therefore, was eroded in order to assimilate immigrants with minimal friction. Denigrating common culture to twee nonsense like fish and chips, and our common values to vague platitudes like “responsibility” and “tolerance”, makes it easier to absorb large rates of demographic change.

In order to assimilate immigrants with the minimum of friction, and since all cultures were of equal value, we accepted that we could make no demands of new arrivals — or even enquire as to their existing beliefs. This loosened the ties of our common culture, eroded any meaningful notions of British values, and introduced an unprecedented multiplicity of values across Britain to replace the common values that had come before.

Student visa migration adds to the erosion of those values; that’s because people who game the system don’t act like the rest of us.

I’m not saying that I now believe any of this is wrong. Looking back I think I strung together a perfectly coherent narrative on the societal problems of immigration of the course of several pieces - particularly in terms of critiquing multiculturalism, both as an idea and as a doctrine.

Rather, what I am saying is that the problem with writing about immigration in postliberal terms is it cannot really stand any contact with the reality of immigration. Talking about loosening ‘the ties of our common culture’, the erosions of ‘any meaningful notions of British values’ and ‘mutual bonds and obligations’ is at best an abstraction, and at worst moral evasion - a way of talking around the material consequences of immigration, rather than through them.

Let’s look at a concrete example; this 2017 article by Yasmin Alibhai-Brown in The Mail on Sunday. ‘As a female British-Muslim writer,’ she wrote, ‘I am deeply troubled by the Muslim men who work in packs and entrap and ravage young white girls and teenagers.’ So she spoke to the families of Asian men jailed for raping vulnerable British girls, and persuaded them to share their stories. I recommend reading the whole thing, but here are someshort snippets that are particularly illustrative.

Perhaps what took place was beyond their comprehension. They do not seem to understand the concept of consensual sex. In their world, the sex drive is a male urge that must be satisfied. Their men took the white girls as they took their wives.

But later, at a separate meeting, I encountered Suju, the wife of another jailed groomer. She was afraid of him but she, too, thinks white girls are: ‘Filthy. How they dress. They have no shame, no fear of Allah.’

Was it OK to hurt them the way the men did?, I asked. ‘No. You can’t hurt people. Allah does not want that,’ she replied. ‘But it is the girls who should be careful. They did something to him, maybe bad magic. I am now alone, no money, no life.’

How can we talk about the bonds of civility, about the framework of a shared society, about shared acceptable practices and interactions, with people who believe that white girls are either possessed by Djinn and thus responsible for their own rape, or that they simply deserved it? With people who don’t even understand the concept of consensual sex?

Postliberal immigration rhetoric is very, very big on ‘integration’. It imagines a kind of inclusive & wholesome civic nationalism where vaguely-defined mutual obligations, tolerance and respect, gentle nudges from institutions and shared civic rituals will unite a society that enjoys and upholds British Values.

But practically, how do you integrate your society with the people who Alibhai-Brown spoke to? Never mind the staggering numerical scale of the problem; their values are so different to our that bringing them into line with even the most basic standards of behaviour would require something tantamount to cultural eradication; a full-blown dismantling of worldviews, assumptions, and moral codes that are not just different from but fundamentally incompatible with Western norms.

Postliberal approaches to immigration persist, however, precisely because the wholesome abstraction it presents is a wholesome abstraction. It lets you talk about the vagaries of ‘integration’ and ‘assimilation’ without descending into the particulars of race, religion, class or sex. It lets you believe that what’s being eroded is abstract mutual obligations, common culture, shared values. It lets you ignore the concrete results from that erosion; what happens when language barriers isolate children in schools, what gets said to your daughter on the street, what justice looks like when a jury doesn't understand the word "consent."

This is why Starmer’s ‘island of strangers’ turn is only half a win. Yes, it has moved Labour back to position Tony Blair would have recognised, but postliberal language is still being used to obscure realities into vagaries - although his adoption of it, as I noted before the speech, should come as no surprise;

Language has always mattered in politics, and Starmer is no exception. His lingua franca is a kind of doggerel post-liberalism, bastardised to camouflage the intellectual hollowness of his politics — which, if it can be called such, is best described as domestication.

But this [postliberal] language also lends itself to bastardisation because postliberalism itself has remained so resolutely unable to reify itself; postliberalism’s greatest failure is, and always has been, its inability to step from the realm of prose into policy.

I was called a "communitarian traitor" for no other reason than following an argument where it led. Postliberal language lets you believe you’re being brave by railing against what immigration does to an abstract sense of civic cohesion, whilst avoiding talking about stark realities of what that means in places like Rotherham and Rochdale. You substitute abstraction for reality and truth for civility.

But when the language of civic nationalism collides with the reality of multicultural Britain, something has to give. Too often, what gives is the pursuit of an inconvenient truth. You can either continue to mouth meaningless pieties or deal with the problems of immigration in practical terms. The latter is far more uncomfortable, far less tactful and far more important.

There lies the essential weakness of the postliberal approach to immigration: it asks us to build a society on euphemism. But even if I still hold some faint, Burkean notion of a politics rooted in belonging, it cannot be built around the immigration euphemisms postliberalism uses because euphemisms are lies, and any society built on lies is built on sand; and the rain will descend, and the floods will come, and the winds will blow, and beat upon that house; and it will fall: and great will be the fall of it.

Any real, possible, sustainable hope for the future demands honesty. Not just about who we are, but about who we are not. It requires us to say what is incompatible, what cannot be reconciled, what must be protected - and how.

The price of our politeness is profound. We are constructing the future of this country on foundations which we know are false. And someday - someday sooner than we think - something will give.

Not because we were rude. Not because we were cruel. Not even because we were traitors; but because we refused to be honest.