The turn against tolerance

Britain’s political system is fragmented, the old two-party dominance in steep decline. There is growing disillusionment with the status quo. Support is rising for Reform UK, the Greens and a motley assortment of independents.

What we are also seeing, on both the left and right, is a politics increasingly intolerant of plurality. A politics that is increasingly authoritarian in nature. On the left, especially around environmental policy, persuasion has given way to legal compulsion. Net Zero was waved into law with almost no parliamentary debate over 15 years ago. North Sea drilling is being choked off. Even the ban on plastic wet wipes is a small but telling sign of a political class that sees no issue too trivial for it not to make a sweeping intervention. Why debate issues when you can impose your will?

But the right is hardly the bastion of liberty it imagines itself to be. A new ethnonationalism is taking root. In the US, the ‘groyper’ movement – hangers-on of online provocateur Nick Fuentes – has blended grievance politics with a revival of racial essentialism. Britain has its own versions of this: voices demanding that only people of a sufficiently Anglo-Saxon heritage should sit in parliament, or that long-settled residents, including those who have lived in Britain for generations, be ‘remigrated’. The conversation has devolved from a legitimate one – about strong borders, the importance of integration and community – into ultra-nationalism, often mixed with disdain for religious minorities.

Most of the people on the woke left and nationalist right have never experienced living in a truly authoritarian society. I have, which is why I find these recent developments so alarming. When I was a child, in 1994, my family moved to Johannesburg. While I grew up in post-Apartheid South Africa, some of the brutal elements of the old system still remained in place: the cruelty, the casual sadism, the contempt for individual dignity. Once you’ve seen what a society built on censorship and rigid racial hierarchies can do to the human spirit, you do not romanticise it. And you certainly don’t flirt with bringing elements of it back.

In this febrile atmosphere, Jewish people are getting it from all sides. So-called anti-Zionism on the left is deeply infused with Jew hatred. We have seen anti-Zionist speakers on university campuses repeating the medieval blood libel. On the right, Jews are depicted as a subversive force and deniers of Christ. This regressive way of thinking represents the abandonment of the Enlightenment values of reason and liberty.

There are, of course, valid critiques to be made of the current ‘liberal’ world order. Most of all that it is not liberal at all. Indeed, it often treats core liberal values with contempt. The writer Rod Dreher in his 2020 book, Live Not By Lies, argues that we have been living under a kind of soft left-wing totalitarianism, in which our left-ish cultural elites and activist class impose harsh speech codes and viciously cancel those who step outside the boundaries. They also have re-racialised public discourse and demonised young white men in particular.

The illiberalism of the ‘liberal’ status quo doesn’t stop there. The UK’s Labour government is toying with the idea of scrapping jury trials, an ancient liberty and a cornerstone of justice and democracy.

In this already corrupted political landscape, shaped by the identity politics of the middle-class left and the deathless managerialism of the political elite, it is easy to see why there has been such a pushback from the right, as ugly as it has sometimes been.

It is also easy at this point to feel despairing at the rising tide of intolerance and zealotry. Yet there is still an alternative. Many of us remain committed to the values of free speech, civil liberties and humanism. Now more than ever, we must continue to defend and articulate the importance of these traditions. Even as our societies are pitched to and fro by extremism and division, our dedication to these principles can light the way forward.

Candice Holdsworth is a writer. Visit her website here.