What a mess. This little phrase seems unequal to the task of describing the situation Britain finds itself in after decades of multiculturalism and liberalism.
In a – perhaps surprising – spirit of compassion and generosity, I find myself feeling for some of the liberals who are now regularly being mugged at scale by reality. There is very little time to draw breath nowadays, to reset and forget, between what are still described as ‘incidents’. The Bondi Beach massacre followed on from the news of the two Afghan asylum seekers jailed for raping a girl of 15, which followed the news of the migrant hotel worker stabbed to death with a screwdriver, which followed the attack on a Manchester synagogue … all set against the continual background rumble of the rape gangs.
It’s getting harder and harder for such people to run their cognitive dissonance program
Don’t worry, I don’t feel any sympathy for the daft and the despicable who still blither on about diversity being our ‘strength’ – like Labour MP Lola McEvoy, whose reaction to Bondi was to say this on live TV while the horrifying news was still coming in. Or indeed the Prime Minister telling Lorraine Kelly last month that to be British ‘is to be diverse’. And I certainly don’t lament for the likes of Dale Vince. Or the wilfully oblivious high-status London tweeters who make a point of grandly asserting how safe they feel in the capital.
And I’m not feeling any kind of pang for the deeply silly and tragic cases like Ed Davey, who, with his customs union fantasies, is trying to distract himself and the world by recreating the spiffing fun of the parliamentary shenanigans of the late 2010s. This devotion to an imagined version of the EU is deeply tragic to behold.
No, never mind that lot. But I am feeling generous about the casual, unassuming liberals and progressives that we meet in our daily lives. The people who are basically okay, who rattled along fairly happily until the chickens of liberalism came home to roost, because – well, unexamined liberalism seemed the nice thing to believe in. And who are now being regularly smacked in the face by ghastly reality.
I’m picking up stories from various quarters of such people experiencing horrible, shattering realisations. A friend recently messaged me out of nowhere in some agitation, to say that he was resigning himself to vote for Reform. For context, this was somebody who was totally thrown by the referendum outcome in 2016 and attended the ‘People’s Vote’ parades. Another, Labour voting, friend of mine has been deeply shaken by the recent horrors and how weakly the government has responded to them.
A lot of this is only hitting people now, and they are knocked for six. Lord Finkelstein went from angrily admonishing Rupert Lowe on Saturday for saying London was a ‘desolate shithole’ – and also telling a worried woman that the city is ‘one of the safest places in the world’ – to telling Times Radio on Sunday, after Bondi, that he no longer feels completely safe in London.
It’s getting harder and harder for such people to run their cognitive dissonance program. This must be profoundly disorienting and it can put you at odds with your peers, which is a horrible sensation. There is also facing the unpleasant fact that the people in the outgroup were right. I’ve had a few such episodes myself in the past, and the simplest way to resolve them is to bite the bitter bullet and admit the truth; to yourself first, and maybe then you can begin to state it openly. The temptation for others to crow and say ‘I told you so’ is almost irresistible, but at least on the level of personal interaction with friends, it must be resisted. We are beyond the stage where it matters.
Conservatives are often accused of hankering for a lost golden age that never really existed, and sometimes rightly so. But I’m seeing that kind of wistful sadness a lot more from liberals now. I understand their longing, their rather pitiable – and swiftly dashed – hopes after Labour’s election victory that Britain (as Andrew Marr said) would become ‘a little haven of peace and stability’ again.
Late twentieth century liberal ‘values’ just don’t work any more, and even liberals are noticing.
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