Can Social Order be Restored?

Divided communities, sectarian intimidation and collapsing social mores

Towering Columns

In The New Statesman John Gray attacks the fantasy of post-liberalism and impossibility of social integration.

If a Reform-led government collapses under the weight of its empty promises, trust in democratic politics will be damaged irreparably. More extreme forces like those that manifested themselves in the mass demonstration orchestrated by Tommy Robinson in London last month will grow in strength. Riven by ethnic and sectarian divisions and insurgent movements of the far left and right, Britain could fast become a failed state.

In these conditions, post-liberal fantasies of cultural restoration are a distraction. In any realistically imaginable future, this country will continue to encompass a variety of faiths and values. Not only in Europe but throughout the world, the age of large-scale migration is over. But there can be no going back to the monocultural nationhood of the past. The issue is not how to integrate minorities into an overarching culture, but how ways of life that will remain divergent can cohabit in some sort of modus vivendi.

The way forward is to constrain communities rather than to entrench them. Everyone should be subject to a rule of law enforced equally on all. Nobody should be denied freedom to exit their community or subjected to coercion by other communities. The tyranny of minorities in stifling free expression should be firmly resisted. Individual liberty must be reasserted against the invasive claims of collective identity. But can the political will be summoned to bring about such a radical change in direction?

In response on his Substack, Andrew O’Brien, says that Gray’s vision of a strong state without an integrated social order is a mirage.

Uncharacteristically for Gray, I think he is both overoptimistic and universalising in his approach. He is overoptimistic because he thinks that a Hobbesian Leviathan is possible without the integral community, hoping that fear of disorder will prevent disorder. Human history and amour propre show the human capacity to ignore the risk of violence. He is universalising because he is too expansive in his view of liberalism, failing to see that what he is interested in is preserving not a catholic liberalism for all times and places, but a particular form of liberalism – a British liberalism.

Gray is important because various liberals of different strands on left and right are starting to coalesce around the same idea. Ironically, his ideas in practical terms lead to the sort of security state that he critiques in his article. Reasserting “individual liberty…against the invasive claims of collective identity” without integrated communities requires the sort of security apparatus that Gray rejects…

The economic, social and political order are intricately connected. Without integral communities, Gray’s only hope is for a Leviathan who is the Wizard of Oz, an entity that can maintain order through smoke and mirrors. However, as in the film, history tells us that Toto will eventually pull away the curtain.

For UnHerd, Aris Roussinos discusses the violent politics gripping Ireland in the wake of public unrest over asylum seekers.

Fearing a riot, the Irish authorities yesterday evening shut down the Luas tram line from central Dublin to the suburban village of Saggart, southwest of the city centre. It didn’t work. Many hundreds — perhaps a thousand — angry protestors had gathered outside the gates of the Citywest IPAS (asylum) centre, hurling missiles and abuse at the Gardai public order unit blocking them from forcing their way up the long and wooded drive to the hotel. The day before, an African asylum seeker had been charged with the sexual assault of a 10-year old Irish girl on the grounds of the Citywest centre, a 2,500-bed hotel recently acquired at vast expense by the Irish government, against fierce local opposition in the 4,500-strong community. The suspect, who needed an Arabic translator, was issued with a deportation order this spring and hadn’t yet been removed; the victim, in the care of Ireland’s scandal-hit Tusla child protection agency, found her chaotic personal circumstances publicised by the state in a manner many on social media saw as tantamount to victim-blaming. Outside the IPAS centre, the toxic combination had fired up both locals and protestors from across the country, who now had very little time for Ireland’s main political parties, or the police forces standing between them and the hotel they wished to storm…

There was a sense in the immediate wake of the crime, at least on social media, that this might be a turning point for Ireland. Coming in the middle of a disastrous presidential contest, where the Fianna Fáil half of the government coalition had been humiliated by its top-down insistence on a weak candidate it was forced to withdraw, and the Fine Gael half of the coalition is stuck with an uninspiring candidate of its own, there is a mood that Irish politics is at an impasse. Even Sinn Féin, clawing back a poll lead from the coalition’s current turmoil, felt compelled to issue statements of alarm and concern at the state’s evident, multiple failures in the assault case.

The old order looks increasingly exhausted, but its heavy hand on state media, in a country whose cosy political relationship with the press makes the BBC look like anti-establishment mavericks, has helped suppress the populist upsurge currently reshaping the rest of the Western world. The position of the predicted winner of the election, the Republican socialist Catherine Connolly, is that Ireland’s borders are nowhere near open enough. Marginalised electorally (not least due to its own propensity towards crankish internal feuding), and effectively banned from the airwaves, Ireland’s anti-immigration Right is politically a non-entity. The result is that the country’s only current outlet for anti-immigration politics is the street.

In The Times, Fiyaz Mughal spotlights the extremist preachers fuelling sectarian divisions in Birmingham.

The context is segregation and disengagement. The picture painted by Birmingham’s politicians is one of a multicultural melting pot where everyone gets along. In areas such as Sparkbrook, it is possible to live largely within one foreign language, culture and religion, rarely mixing beyond it. This social insulation may not create extremism, but it certainly provides shelter. Integration initiatives are underfunded, while political leaders avoid confronting the ideological drivers of radicalisation for fear of causing upset.

The decision to ban Maccabi supporters is not a one-off misjudgment, but a symptom of a deeper drift: an official reluctance to face Islamist intimidation directly. Countering extremism means defending pluralism and standing firm against those who shout the loudest. The test now is whether civic and religious leaders have the courage to meet that challenge.

For UnHerd, Mary Harrington documents how the Epstein scandal is just another example of the libertinism corrupting the West.

For Epstein’s network simply took the training-wheels off a moral outlook that has come, by degrees, to govern the entire modern West: one that does not simply reject but actively seeks to desecrate the older, Christian value-system, in pursuit of a morality of power, violence, and individual desire.

One of the earliest and frankest exponents of this spirit of negation was also, and not by coincidence, also a trailblazer in the literature of ritual sexual abuse: the Marquis de Sade. Justine (1791), written during one of his numerous stints in prison for sexual crimes, details the suffering and eventual death of Thérèse, a homeless 12-year-old orphan girl, who keeps trying to be virtuous but receiving only violence, cruelty, and sexual torture at the hands of everyone she turns to for help. The message, exhaustively hammered home by de Sade’s characters through lengthy interspersed passages of philosophical debate, is that the world is fundamentally godless and amoral, and there exists no governing force save power, violence, and untrammelled individual desire.

It is, in the precise sense, a satanic worldview. Justine was banned by Napoleon, and did not appear in English translation until the 20th century. But especially since the Sixties, de Sade’s radical libertinism and rejection of all moral constraints has come, by degrees, to appear almost ordinary. So much so that, in recent decades, it’s begun to look as though at least some segments of contemporary society view Justine less as a provocation than as an instruction manual.

Wonky Thinking

A new Policy Exchange report, Beyond our Means, outlines a series of measures that could get UK public spending down quickly by 2030 including freezing the state pension, reforming the NHS and reversing unaffordable increases in childcare and free-school meal eligibility.

At about 100% of GDP, public debt is inordinately high and is set to rise a good deal further. Debt interest alone accounts for about three quarters of the government’s budget deficit. And at close to 45% of GDP, the share of government spending in GDP is close to a post-war high, which in turn leads to levels of taxation that are stifling economic growth.

These high levels of taxation can only be reduced by significantly reducing public spending.

This report proposes a series of measures that would reduce public spending by £115 billion per annum by 2030, or 3.2% of GDP which, if implemented, would reduce public spending as a share of GDP to just over 40%. This in turn would lead to reduced borrowing rates and a reduction in debt interest payments, creating a virtuous circle.

Ballot of the Sexes, a new report by Onward, finds a widening gender divide in international politics. The report analyses data from the USA, Germany, Portugal, South Korea and the UK and finds that a growing digital divide is making it harder to build broad electoral coalitions.

One cause of the gender divide may be that men and women, particularly those in Generation COVID who spent much of their time in the pandemic in digital communities, increasingly inhabit parallel online spaces which reinforce radically different worldviews. At the same time, these are far from being conventional echo chambers; social media algorithms actively promote provocative counter-views, likely further entrenching division through provoking outrage and hardening beliefs, rather than insulating users against opposing ideas.

The antidote to this polarisation may lie in the formula that has made those only a few years older more likely to vote for Labour, the Liberal Democrats, and the Conservatives: prosperity. Those who are wealthier, married, and feel they are doing better in life are more likely to vote for one of the big three mainstream parties. While this might only be a temporary fix, as Reform’s vote share only continues to rise after the age of 35, it represents one of the few remaining roads to recovery for Britain’s traditional parties.

If Generation Z continues to be let down by the political mainstream and fails to reach key life milestones by the age millennials are now, political parties will have to adapt to a more volatile and gender polarised political environment if they are to survive.

Re-joining the EU is not the answer to the country’s growth challenge, finds a new report for the Centre for Policy Studies. The report calls for the UK to make maximum use of the competences that have returned to Westminster to boost GDP per capita.

Addressing the UK’s growth problem is paramount and should underpin virtually every other priority when it comes to public policy. However, contrary to recent clamour, re-joining the EU, its Single Market (SM) or Customs Union (CU) will not provide a solution to Britain’s growth challenge, and should not be part of any pro-growth strategy. The Government needs to have the confidence to stand its ground on remaining outside of EU institutions…

Debates around re-joining the SM or CU overstate how good they have been for the UK in the past, and do not properly address the economic (let alone political) trade-offs re-joining either or both. It is particularly telling that the initial narrative of economic catastrophe upon leaving the EU has now become that of a ‘slow puncture’.

Questionable statistics – including the oft-quoted (and often misunderstood) claim that our economy will be 4% smaller in 15 years’ time than if we had stayed in the EU – are distracting policymakers from the UK’s genuine economic challenges, which are deep-rooted and have little to do with the EU…

The inability of British politicians (not least in the last Conservative governments) to articulate a coherent vision and deliver a properly thought-out post-Brexit economic policy has allowed figures vehemently opposed to Brexit to define the debate and helped to create an economically damaging narrative about the UK on the global stage.

Book of the Week

George Owers new book The Rage of Party tells the story of the emergence of party politics in England during the late 17th and early 18th centuries and shows how this divide is still influencing our politics today.

“The Whig victory during the ‘Rage of Party’ helped to unleash all manner of structural forces, economic and political, that continue to shape us and our politics. But whatever else it was, Whig versus Tory was also a culture war, and one fought in terms as vitriolic, and rooted as much in conflicting senses of identity, as any social media spat in the twenty-first century. This legacy still shapes us, not least because the divide upon which it was based most fundamentally, between the Church of England and Dissent, continued to form one of the most fundamental cultural and social dividing lines in British politics until the early twentieth century. Although that divide has now faded with the secularisation and the precipitous decline of all Christian denominations, culture is ‘sticky’: its imprints endure for centuries. The fading of its original religious framework doesn’t mean that the attitude this divide produced have disappeared. Anyone who listened to both Remainers and Leavers express their astonishment that anyone would have considered voting for the other side during the Brexit referendum - a classic conflict between Tory nationalism and Whig cosmopolitanism - was hearing an audible echo of that historical culture war play itself out 300 years later.”

Podcast of the Week

At Policy Exchange this week Nick Timothy MP gave a major speech on the need to defend free speech and avoid undermining the pluralism that has been at the core of British politics for generations. Watch below:

Quick Links

Plaid Cymru won the Caerphilly Welsh Parliament by-election.

The Home Secretary said the Home Office is not fit for purpose after the release of a scathing review by Nick Timothy, the MP and former Home Office adviser.

Survivors of rape gangs called for the government’s Safeguarding Minister to resign over concerns about a national inquiry.

An NHS Doctor accused of glorifying Hamas wore No.7 necklace to trial.

The Equality and Human Rights Commission attacked the government’s proposed Islamophobia definition.

HM Treasury opposed efforts to protect a UK tech company from Chinese infiltration.

The Oxford Union is facing a financial crisis over the Charlie Kirk scandal.

The UK’s economy per capita is just 3% larger than Poland if London is excluded.

The Prime Minister’s commitment to speed up Chinese Embassy decision could be illegal.