#Unherd website free

This dogma is promoted by “highly educated whites” in alliance with multinational firms, with the end result being an “informal alliance between white elites, corporations and minorities, against the white working-class”. Writing about the recent report into racial and ethnic disparities in the Daily Mail, he noted that “minority ethnic groups” are now pulling ahead of white people – a conclusion which “does not sit neatly with ‘woke’ dogma”. Goodwin has now given the conspiracy theory an explicitly racial twist. This new model is advocated by a group of commentators attached to the national-populist Unherd website – including Goodhart philosopher John Gray Blue Labour guru Maurice Glasman trade unionist Paul Embery and Matthew Goodwin, an academic who co-wrote a perceptive book on the rise of UKIP but has become a fervent advocate of what he started out analysing.

The political significance of this anti-globalisation shift from market economics to national populism is that it enables Conservatives to appeal to workers with an apparent ‘anti-capitalist’ message, challenging the iniquities of foreign capital at the same time as decrying foreigners and refugees.

#Unherd website free

Montgomerie argued that, within the Conservative Party, “the magnetism of national sovereignty needs to overtake the magnetism of free markets”. Just before a short stint at Downing Street, former Times journalist Tim Montgomerie set out the clearest exposition of this politics in Prospect magazine, arguing for a “social Thatcherism” – a re-balancing “from a conservatism of freedom to a conservatism of locality and security”. In her 2016 conference speech (co-written by national-populist Nick Timothy), Theresa May’s “citizens of nowhere” were “people in positions of power” in thrall to “international elites”. In his 2013 book on immigration, The British Dream, David Goodhart blamed the increase of immigration under New Labour on a conspiracy between New Labour globalisers wanting to suppress wages and multiculturalists wanting to “rub the right’s nose in diversity”.

In Britain, it is being promoted by ‘culture war’ Conservatives and some former Labour supporters.ĭespite the iniquities of the voting system, the Conservatives know that the ground is moving against them, hence their drive for a new divisive model focused on cultural warfare The ‘cosmopolitan elite’ concept is not a new idea or an exclusively British one – a virulent version was around in the 1930s, and the current variant is being cultivated by nationalist populists across Europe and America. This narrative alleges that a liberal, cosmopolitan elite is flooding the country with immigrant workers, in the interests of global finance capital. The report seeks to divide communities of colour against one another and validates a crucial element of the current national-populist narrative: the concept of “the white working-class”.

It is of no wonder that the right-wing commentariat greeted the Commission on Racial and Ethnic Disparities‘ Government-commissioned report with unalloyed joy.