Opinion
13th June 2026
The evil of Identity Politics
As the Identity Politics celebration season gets underway, events in Southampton and Belfast emphasise the evil of this political philosophy. That might surprise some readers as the far-right activists and the Pseudo-liberal celebrants would claim diametric opposition to each other. However, if we think this through we shall see that opposition is two sides of the same coin.
For both those who proclaim division and celebrate it as “Diversity” and those who hate groups based on it both rely on distinguishing people in a political belief system defined by publicly identifying people in terms of groups and seeking to differentiate between them in the allocation or denial of rights. The differences are simply a matter of which groups they seek to privilege or consider overprivileged and which ones they wish to promote or persecute.
The reality is both simpler and less simplistic. People are individuals and while they might identify themselves with others where they see similarities, that is a purely personal matter and always should be. It is not for others to allocate them to categories, nor should such allocation be public. The evil of that is to undermine the equal rights of every human being.
The Police officers who arrested a dying man as he lay injured on the ground might have shown a stupifying degree of stupidity in failing to recognise the situation and adjust their priorities, but to claim their action was motivated by racial discrimination is to jump to an unnecessary conclusion. Even if it were, that does not make the perpetrator of the crime a representative of his religion or ethnic group. It is much more likely they simply failed to think and assumed the complaint they had received in a 999 call was their starting point for understanding the situation. Of course, had they thought about things they should have realised the perpetrator of a crime would be unlikely to respond to a victim calling for help by lying on the ground and pretending to be injured when it would make far more sense to walk or run away and hide until the incident became just another unsolved minor offence. When he claimed to be hurt they should have offered first aid or summoned an ambulance. If the claim were false that would soon become obvious and could be dealt with later. There is no excuse for their action, but there is also no excuse to blame Police systems or the perpetrator’s fellow religionists for the crime. They didn’t do it. He did.
That doesn’t mean the Police systems are necessarily right, of course, but that’s a matter for considering in a broader context.
Similarly, the vicious attack on a man in Belfast which has left him with horrific and life-changing injuries was not perpetrated by an imagined conspiracy of all those with non-Irish ancestry. It was perpetrated by one man for a motive currently unknown. We do not even know for sure before a trial whether the suspect is the right man. Until we know the motive we cannot form any conclusion about the nature of the attack, but it was most likely unconnected with anyone’s nationality. Identifying all non-white residents of Belfast as collectively guilty is an absurd consequence of Identity Politics and highlights the utter stupidity of that view of the world. Yet it has produced two nights of rioting so far, and great fear has descended on the victims of those riots. This is where Identity Politics leads.
Around two centuries ago, the great German operatic composer, Giacomo Meyerbeer, promoted a young man working in the same genre called Richard Wagner. Wagner was ambitious, and wanted to replace his mentor as the foremost German composer, but was prevented by the older man’s established position. He needed an argument to discredit him and hit on the idea of ethnic identity as the means. Meyerbeer, he argued, could never be a true German artist because he could not know what it truly felt like to be German, since Meyerbeer was Jewish. How could he feel what he was not? Wagner did not invent anti-semitism or the idea of Blood and Soil nationalism, but he exploited it toward his purpose, and that had terrible consequences around 100 years later when the Nazis used it as an example to seize power and suppress dissent. We all know where that led. For the Nazis were also, at heart, Identity Politicians. So, were the Soviet dictators like Stalin, with their doctrine of class war, another form of Identity Politics.
We have never had Blood and Soil nationalism in this country because we are such a mixture of ancestries from all over Northern Europe and beyond it would make little sense, but there is now a move by the far-right to introduce it. They claim you can only be truly English if your ancestors were all truly English for hundreds of years. This is nonsense. I am English because I feel myself to be so, but I have no public Englishness. Whether you think I am English is irrelevant. Some of my ancestors came from Scotland and Ireland. I have a Scottish name, yet I was born in England as were the last few generations of my family, but it would make no difference to me if they had come from somewhere else. I grew up in England. England is all I know (and therefore according to Kipling I know nothing of it) and that is good enough for me. No one else should care. My identity is personal. It shouldn’t matter to anyone else.
Elon Musk has weighed in with inflammatory language and we must remember he was educated to believe in White Supremacy under the Identity Politics of the Apartheid regime. His school would have taught him that as a fact just as our schools teach current sexual and racial Identity Politics as a fact. None of these ideas is a fact. They are all concocted by people seeking control or influence of one sort or another and reinforced by constant repetition in the absence of hard evidence. That is why the current Western version dedicates a whole month to celebrating its ideas every Summer. We don’t celebrate a Relativity month or an Evolution month because those ideas are quiet scientific theories which serve us well in the background with no need to prove a point. If those ideas proved wrong or to need revision they would be revised just as quietly. We only make social calendars out of ideas we cannot prove but need to keep alive precisely for that reason.
I recently attended a meeting at a church displaying an Identity Politics flag alongside the slogan “All are welcome”. That Church did not understand how contradictory that was; to claim all are welcome alongside a symbol excluding those who disagree with Identity Politics. I don’t feel welcome when I see that symbol. I feel persecuted and threatened by people I know would seek to shut me up rather than let me expose the narrowness of their thought. Welcoming all does not mean allocating everyone to a group and proclaiming that group is included. Welcoming all does not ask questions and accepts everybody as they come, recognising all are flawed in the case of a Church, because it is the nature of the Christian Gospel that all are flawed, all are forgiven, and all can be saved. Churches should not pretend people are perfect as they are, rather that we are loved despite our imperfections.
The sooner we dump these divisive ideas and recognise our fellow human beings as simply that, the better for all of us. We have no need of divisions and distinctions of this kind. We need to welcome and support all.