The government’s version of identity politics has proved potent. The only response is to change the nature of the debate
I never thought I’d miss the 2010s, but I do have some nostalgia for them. At least last decade’s “opposite world” meant what it said: whatever the truth was, ministers would blame the opposite. In the creation of poverty, the culprit was the poor rather than the rich; in the nightmare of Brexit, the problem was remainers rather than leavers; in a runaway climate crisis, the root cause was Extinction Rebellion rather than fossil fuels and all those who’d hitched their finances to them.
It was pretty tedious, but it was preferable to today’s opposite world, in which, despite whatever is important – from Covid rates to customs turmoil – ministers will be trying their level best to talk about what is petty. (A piquant, if tangential, example: Monday’s Daily Telegraph, the little drummer boy of the endless culture war, reported approvingly the idea of an “anti-woke Citizens Advice service”.) They create pantomimes, patriots battling straw men over trivia. This would make no sense if it came from a state in the grip of a crisis, but it makes every sense from a state with only one aim – the survival of its ruling party. To the modern conservative, all government business is party business.
