22-06-2025
Britain's Labour Party Needs to Listen to Its Social Conscience
Progressives on both sides of the English-speaking Atlantic have focused much of their energy and attention on championing minority rights and indulging in identity politics. Standing up for groups who've suffered historic discrimination is laudable; removing barriers to Black employment and giving gay people the right to marry are hard-fought achievements. Transgender people deserve protections too, with trade-offs necessary given the clashes of biological sex and gender ideology.
But whether by preference or distracted by such concerns, social evils which used to fire up the liberal-left conscience — class inequality, lack of economic opportunity and cohesive societies — have been in danger of being overlooked or even downgraded. In the UK, a horrific, decades-long scandal of grooming and rape gangs of mainly Pakistani Muslim men who preyed on young white women has revealed the pitfalls of this lopsided approach.