Liverpool has flushed out the white identitarians

There was a time recently when the political right opposed the racial essentialism of today’s identity-obsessed ‘progressives’. It rejected victim hierarchies and refused to treat people as avatars of their skin colour. It championed the dignity of the individual and equality before the law.

But that seems to be changing. Something uglier is emerging: a new form of racial-grievance politics on the right. Looking like critical race theory in reverse, this is the belief that white Britons are structurally oppressed, while minorities have become a protected elite. It is the same toxic worldview once championed by the identitarian left, only now repackaged in the language of white nationalism.

In some quarters, the right has begun to mirror the very identity politics it once opposed. This was on full display after the horrific incident in Liverpool on Monday. After a car ploughed into a crowd during Liverpool FC’s victory parade, Merseyside Police confirmed the arrest of a 53-year-old white British man. Instantly, some on the right took offence at how quickly the suspect’s race had been reported.

Most of us were horrified by the incident, thinking of the victims and perhaps quietly pleased that the police, having learned after Southport not to keep the public in the dark, had offered transparency this time. Yet others rushed to complain. They moaned that the police were only revealing the suspect’s ethnicity so quickly only because he was white and that this was because of some institutional bias against white men.

Let’s be honest. If the suspect was revealed to have been black, Asian or Muslim, there would have been no right-wing outcry about the revelation of his ethnicity. Those same voices would instead leap to their usual narratives about immigration. Their issue with what happened isn’t really the inconsistency – that is, that the police quickly revealed the suspect’s ethnicity in this case, but were very slow to do so in relation to last year’s Southport attacks. No, their issue is that the suspect wasn’t the right colour to fit the outrage they were hoping to manufacture.

This inverted racial logic has become a pattern. Take the recent furore over a knife arch at Clapham Junction in London. British Transport Police were filmed politely asking commuters to pass through a metal detector, as part of a routine effort to reduce knife crime. There was no aggression. No profiling. Yet right-wing outrage exploded online.

One user fumed: ‘Foreigners stab and commit acts of terror yet the native population is forced through scanners.’ Another called it a ‘humiliation ritual for whites’. Some insisted that the arches should be placed in ‘black and minority’ areas like Brixton or Whitechapel. One even said that it ‘would be easier to just detain a certain portion of the population’.

This wasn’t a debate about public safety. There was no principled objection to the scanner on civil-liberties grounds, either. This was racial grievance dressed up as principle. The knife arch wasn’t the problem per se. The problem was that white people were being made to walk through it.

Besides, it would be wrong to say this was a first. Knife arches have been used for years in places like Glasgow, a city that is 88 per cent white. Scotland’s ‘No Knives, Better Lives’ campaign is focussed largely on white working-class areas, where knife crime has long been rife. No one has cried racism over this. No one has called it a humiliation ritual. Because it isn’t. It is a proportionate response to a real problem.

The right once criticised the left for making everything about identity. Increasingly, parts of the right are embracing that very mindset: demanding race-based policing, promoting race-based outrage and race-based victimhood. Elements of the right-wing opposition to woke identity politics have drifted. They have moved from defending the rights of individuals to indulging in collective entitlement. They have shifted from rejecting white guilt to embracing white grievance.

This is Britain, not America or South Africa. Our race relations, our history and our institutions are entirely different. Neither the right nor the left should import foreign narratives of racial victimhood that distort the reality of British society.

It is entirely possible to love this country without loathing your neighbours simply because they happen not to be white. One can be unapologetically on the right, believe that immigration is too high, that cultural integration is not going far enough and that the challenges created by both must be addressed, without being racist or embracing racial thinking. That used to be common sense. It ought to be again.

Albie Amankona is a broadcaster and financial analyst, best known for his work on Channel 5, BBC, ITV and Times Radio. Follow him on X: @albieamankona.