The danger of lazy identity politics.

You will have heard the term identity politics in recent days. But it’s nothing new.  It’s been around for a long long time.  Put simply, it seeks to stereotype people.  For example, we think of how we label the Travelling community. Travellers, we label them as gypsies.  They are always up to no good we are told.  So they become petty thieves.  And with that the demonising is set.  And forever the travelling community are painted as less good human beings.   

Think about it for more than a Nano second.  You see echoes of the German of the 1930s.  Jews, intellectuals, Travellers and many other identifiable groups.  They are all in some way not good enough for society.  The consequences of that in German were, of course, horrific.   

It’s a phenomenon that Ben Cobley, a journalist and former Labour Party activist, has seen rise again in the Remain campaign.  Everything is simple.  You are either on the right or wrong side of the line.  Just take the logic a wee bit further, you are good or evil.   So, in his book, The Tribe, The Liberal Left and the System of Diversity, he contends Remain has set out to create negative associations towards those on the Leave side.  Subtle as a flying brick they suggest moral, virtuous aspect to those who voted Remain.  So it’s simple.  Remainers Good.  Leavers Bad.  No prizes for remembering which work of literature has that kind of analogy.  You end up with the spectacle of “if you disagree with me you must be racist”.  No sense of irony there in the accusers voice.   

So we have the negative politicisation of Brexit as racist, anti-immigrant, xenophobic and even sexist and homophobic, creating negative associations towards those on the Leave side.  Take Liberal Democrat leader Sir Vince Cable.  Who can forget his remarkable view of Brexiters as “white, male, middle-aged”, and said that Leave voters are nostalgic for an imperial past and should be ignored because of their age.  Or, Pat Glass, then a Labour MP, a month before the referendum, told a party rally,  “Go and speak to your mother, your grandmother. Don’t speak to your grandfather, we know the problem are older white men.”   Are either of these two racist?  Of course they are not.  But were they straying into identity politics?  Perhaps they didn’t realise they were or intend to do so but they were.  And in doing so endorsed the stereotype being created of the typical Brexit voter as a white-skinned ethnically English older man.    

Such stereotyping is just plain lazy.  It’s also very dangerous.  Which is why Remainers must stop the negative campaigning and stereotyping of all Leavers are bad.  For it is those who are doing the stereotyping that are displaying the ‘parochial’, ‘ignorant’, ‘narrow-minded’, ‘uneducated’ as well as ‘bigoted’, ‘xenophobic’, ‘racist’, ‘ugly’ views they claim to be against.