In recent weeks, two types of women in revolt have been sighted on the streets of Britain, defined by opposing outlooks and experiences. One group rails against Israel, the other objects to illegal immigration.

What they have in common is their sex. They are mothers, wives, grandmothers, but there the similarities end. What divides them is class.

Provincial middle-class protesters have become a spectacle in a market town in Somerset, a county colonised by the Lib Dem vote perhaps more than any other. In the market square of Wells, the smallest city in England, they gather on Saturday mornings banging pots and pans, accompanied by a sandwich board calling for sanctions on Israel, much to the annoyance of the stall holders attempting to earn a living. That’s not an issue for this handful of women, as they’ve passed pensionable age. Two of them, former teachers, returned to Wells as conquering heroes following their arrest at a rally in support of Palestine Action in Cardiff, with their adventurous day out becoming a major story in a minor local newspaper.

These are the same ancient activists who block roads for Just Stop Oil, or cling to ‘Refugees Welcome’ signs between bread-making classes. A type as I say. They shop at Waitrose (while boycotting the Israeli goods), they buy shapeless tops from Seasalt and sport hairstyles that belong on Colette or Mary Beard. The women of Wells on pan duty for Palestine wear a shade of burgundy reminiscent of that required by devotees of the bygone religious cult of free love, Rajneeshpuram.

‘Who radicalised Nan?’, began Tom Slater, when examining this breed of silver-haired female activists in the Telegraph recently. It’s a type, a trend, a cult. Rumour has it that there have been sightings of similar women, of a similar age, armed with similar pots and pans, in similar settings. But larger crowds of females from another class with their own pressing concerns are evident in other towns and cities, swelling in numbers with each passing week.

In London’s East End, working-class women taking to the streets don’t have the luxury of returning to rural middle-class homes after a day of demonstrating. What needles them, what has propelled them to protest, doubtless for the first time, is an immediate threat that’s on their doorstep: illegal immigrants housed in hotels and buildings on the streets in which they have spent their lives.

These women are all ages. The younger are accompanied by their children, with the elders supported by walking sticks, frames, wheelchairs and mobility scooters. They are captured on camera doing the conga, breaking into a rendition of ‘Maybe it’s Because I’m a Londoner’, holding a sit-in outside the Britannia Hotel in Canary Wharf on the Isle of Dogs. These happenings followed in the wake of protesters congregating outside the Bell Hotel in Epping, a postcode familiar to those who were part of the diaspora when East Enders made the voyage out to Essex, to become home owners.

Events in Epping have pressurised the district council to apply for an injunction to close down the asylum hotel, but this is yet to be acted upon. In Westminster, government ministers have been silent on the impact of these protests, and those in Waterlooville, Diss, Bournemouth and elsewhere. This is also true of the mainstream media, leaving a clearing for citizen journalists, activists and GB News reporters to cover the story.

Beyond the Labour government’s silence exists a sinister attempt to censor these protesters and prevent similar events – largely using the Online Safety Act, which introduced age restrictions on content in July, having been passed into law by the Conservative government in 2023. The police at these protests threaten those gathered with arrest for public-order offences that could result in lengthy sentences. This further confirms the two-tier policing operation that takes a far softer approach to counter-protesting interlopers – from other postcodes, other classes – masked by balaclavas and keffiyehs.

The face coverings conceal the identity of ‘Antifa’ activists who are as interchangeable as the marches and counter-demonstrations they join to bring about disruption and confrontation. They lack the impetus that has roused the women assembling with local men outside asylum hotels throughout the country. They are motivated by the detrimental impact an influx of strangers will have on their neighbourhoods and on local services. As one of the organisers of the Canary Wharf demonstration is quoted as saying, they are well aware that not all these migrants are paedophiles or rapists, but they are unwilling to ‘play roulette’ with their children’s lives.

The women returning to protest at Canary Wharf have earned the title ‘pink ladies’, because they turn up wearing assorted pink garments, which bring a softer, amenable look compared with the cult of the ancient sisterhood in a certain market town. Yet they are referred to as ‘far right’ by left-wingers who have never lived in the streets native to these women, and never will. In response to the predictable name-calling, they march behind a banner bearing the words: ‘We are not far right but we’re not far wrong. Stop the boats.’ Yet still the slurs occur. At the prospect of a protest in Bristol, Carla Denyer, MP for Bristol Central and co-leader of the Green Party, declared:

‘Today a far-right protest is expected to take place outside a hotel housing asylum seekers in Bristol. Let me be clear: the far right are not welcome in Bristol. They don’t represent us, or what we stand for.’

Arguably, the politics and pedigree of a middle-class woman like Denyer, daughter of a scientist mother, with a father who worked for the Ministry of Defence, do not represent the majority of Britons – particularly the working-class women taking to the streets of the East End.

The attacks on these women, and the men they march alongside, are reminiscent of the verbal assaults on Leave voters who triumphed in the EU referendum from middle-class Remainers, hinting that the background and social status of the victors should have prevented them from having a say. It’s an attitude that goes back even further, to the age when Matthew Arnold popularised the term ‘populace’ in the 19th century, and later when the poorer classes from the London docks took to West End streets, flags raised, to celebrate the relief of Mafeking in South Africa, following a seven-month siege during the Boer War. One observer compared them to ‘rats emerging from a sewer’.

Centuries pass, times change and still the bleat goes on. Figures from the left post their reactions on X to the recent protests, referring to these characters as the worst of Britain, as jobless scroungers and benefit cheats. Leading trade unionists not only support those antagonising these working-class men and women, but also reputedly fund them. At an Epping protest, Ed Harlow, vice-president of the National Education Union, addressed the ‘Stand Up To Racism’ demonstrators with a comical, tone-deaf speech that knowingly overlooked the class and concerns of the locals protesting nearby: ‘The enemies of working people in this country are not staying in hotels in Epping. The enemies of people in this country are floating around the Med on super yachts.’

Among those relevant to the new trade unionism of the late 19th century were the unskilled ‘matchgirls’ from the Bryant & May factory, who famously went on strike for better working conditions in 1888. Then as now, East End local working-class women are taking on a contemporary challenge. One that they are generally fighting alone, with an absence of support from women from other parts, other classes. Many, but not all, feminist writers and pundits from the middle class and upwards, rightfully forthright on misogyny and male violence, are silent on the hotels issue.

To their detractors, the women protesting are as much a type as the provincial middle-class women wearing Crocs and banging pots in the West Country. If so, it’s a type many of us salute. Their voices, accents and histories are familiar to us, as are the streets they walk and the city that formed them. The elders among these women are from the last generation of men and women who witnessed or were privy to harsh times, deep struggles and a conflict that saw the East End ablaze during the London Blitz. They have buried parents, husbands and maybe children long before their time. This might be their last battle, but it’s one they won’t retreat from.

For the younger ones it could be the first fight of many, in a city in which they have been discarded, and their history erased, by officials who hold them in contempt, and a London mayor who continues to cart around the washed-up corpse of multiculturalism, while ignoring key issues that are destroying the nation’s capital.

These women, these men, are part of a silent majority seeking a voice, just as their distant relatives and ancestors were, for other reasons. They have been stirred into action. Something has been awakened in them and their number elsewhere. It may be the beginning of a new dawn. As Edward Carpenter wrote in his famous ‘Socialist Marching Song’ from 1886: ‘England, arise! the long, long night is over.’ Or it may be the last gasp of a diminishing people in a dying nation. But if they’re going down, they’re taking this ship with them.

Originally published in Spiked.

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It’s more than two years since the death of Queen Elizabeth II at her beloved Balmoral Castle, and, in May, it will be two years on from the coronation of her first son, Charles.

The period of mourning that engulfed the House of Windsor has passed. The honeymoon period for the new monarch has come to an end. So, what kind of king is Charles at this juncture? It has been neither an easy run nor an easy reign for him thus far. There were the cancer diagnoses that threatened to take him out along with the Princess of Wales, and the domestic dramas that threatened the stature of the monarchy. Prince Andrew has become akin to a tumour the royals are keen to remove, or relegate to a frugal exile at Frogmore Cottage, in the grounds of Windsor Castle. (His links to sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein continue to haunt him.) Meanwhile, the manoeuvres of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle have become less malignant, and may soon be in remission.

For some of us, the mona…

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There is much about the modern Labour Party to make the stately politicians from its past turn in their graves.

Think of Labour leader Keir Starmer and his deputy, Angela Rayner, embarrassing themselves at the Pride Parade in London in 2022. Gay anthems played as Rayner indulged in a self-conscious shoulder roll, before Keir Starmer followed suit. This was before his current incarnation as ‘Starmer the Statesman’. This was ‘Queer Keir’, a heterosexual sexagenarian with glitter on his cheeks. He even sported his customary Barney Rubble look of confusion as though struggling with two thoughts simultaneously. Perhaps he was trying to remember who the Weather Girls were, and what made them biological women.

But it is London mayor Sadiq Khan who is surely most responsible for sending those regal figures from Labour’s past spinning in their graves. His identitarian posturing is ceaseless, his support for voguish causes tireless. He embodies perhaps all that is wrong with the modern Labour Party.

He was also at Pride on the same day as Starmer and Rayner, rallying the crowds while welcoming his comrades to his fiefdom, his Trumpton. ‘The great thing about London is that if you’re different, you aren’t simply tolerated, you’re respected, celebrated and embraced’, he said. ‘That’s who we are: open-minded, outward looking.’ Yet he was oblivious to just how provincial this outlook is. He seems to assume that those in London, and beyond it, who challenge this fantasy, who don’t share his worldview, are the enemy. And this is the main problem with the current mayor: he is arguably the most divisive leading politician in Britain today.

Not that this would concern a figure of Khan’s imagined stature. He seems to believe his position is more presidential than municipal. He even has a security team which provides, as he himself put it last year, ‘the same level of protection the prime minister and the king receive’. He effectively surrounds himself with metaphorical henchmen, too, ready to fend off justified criticisms of his crass political posturing and unpopular policies. The many opponents of his expanded Ultra-Low Emissions Zone (ULEZ) have been attacked and demonised a ‘far right’. And those drawing attention to his failure to tackle the ever-rising rates of knife crime or the capital’s deepening housing crisis – despite his pledges to do so way back in 2016 – have been wilfully ignored.

On paper, Khan has forged a brilliant career, a product of application, ambition and, above all, impeccable timing. Born in Tooting, south London, in 1970 to a working-class Muslim family, he studied to become a lawyer when human-rights law turned the profession into a truly lucrative industry. And he became the member of parliament for Tooting in 2005, when New Labour was on a winning streak.

Good timing also aided his first mayoral bid in 2016. He may have been mocked for making much of his father being a bus driver, but in that moment it provided a welcome contrast to the upper-class pedigree of previous mayor Boris Johnson and of then Tory opponent, Zac Goldsmith. Khan won the 2016 mayoral election with ease, before winning again in 2021 with slightly less.

He has profited from the rise of social media, too. Indeed, the tweet is Khan’s communication of choice. He was one of the first politicians to capitalise on its usage when he chose it to announce his appointment as transport minister in 2009 when Labour were in government. And he has continued to use X, as it’s now called, ever since – mainly to wage his self-aggrandising culture wars, from endlessly attacking Brexit to grandstanding against Donald Trump.

Khan may have been a moderate Labour MP and minister in the 2000s. But his mayoral tenure has been defined by virtue-signalling self-promotion and militant identitarianism. Take his response to the Covid pandemic in 2020. He used it as an opportunity not to unify Londoners, but to spout critical race theory and talk of ‘structural racism’. Or take his oafish anti-sexism campaigns, ‘Have A Word’ in 2022 and ‘Say Maaate to a Mate’ in 2023. The TV adverts for both implied that ‘toxic masculinity’ is the condition of white men, with their black and brown brothers tasked with enlightening them.

While Khan looks the other way on the scourge of knife crime, he eagerly talks up the terror threat of the far right, and was quick to use the T-word after a Welshman drove a van into a group of Muslim worshippers, causing one death, in Finsbury Park in 2017. ‘London stands united against terrorism’, he said at the time. Yet his language has been far more tentative when it comes to addressing Islamist attacks – attacks that have destroyed too many lives to list.

It seems that Khan is similar to too many other figures on the ‘modern’ left who once fought against actual racism and sexism. Now change has come about, bringing progress in the main, he is lost for a cause. And so in the name of identity politics, he busily reignites the embers of old grievances and revives old battles.

Khan takes an approach to London’s past that is as selective and divisive as his approach to present-day issues. Last summer, he tweeted that London ‘was built by migrants’ and ‘refugees’. This came as a surprise to Londoners whose ancestry is synonymous with the city – particularly the white working-class Londoners who were seen as a blot on the landscape of multiculturalism when they lived there, and provincial racists when they made the voyage out of the city during the second half of the 20th century. Many of them were born in the poorer postcodes of the capital long before these became gentrified and colonised by self-entitled cyclists. These Londoners, or their relatives, worked in the docks, factories, markets and warehouses. They laboured on building sites, laid the tarmac for roads and the cables that ran beneath them.

Londoners knew them. They were our families, our ancestors. Now, those of us who evacuated the city return as ghosts to familiar streets to visit ancient relatives. They too will soon join those whose bones lie beneath soil and stone on cemetery plots beyond the urban streets where they lived their lives, and in the suburbs where their children lived theirs. They are dust and ashes now. But the memory of them is immersed in the city many remember and which some attempted to capture in poetry, pop and prose. As WB Yeats wrote: ‘This melancholy London – I sometimes imagine that the souls of the lost are compelled to walk through its streets perpetually.’

Mayor Khan seems to think he can re-write and ‘improve’ this history of London. In 2021, as part of his Diversity Commission’s ‘Untold Stories’ project, he claimed that ‘London’s diversity is its greatest strength but for far too long our capital’s statues, street names and buildings have only shown a limited perspective on our city’s complex history’. Just this month, he announced that several London Overground lines are to be renamed along predictably right-on lines, with Windrush, Lioness and Mildmay lines arriving among others in the near future. They are a nod, said Khan, to London’s diverse history.

To this mayor and other figures on what passes for the left today, it seems that London’s and indeed Britain’s familiar history is a source of shame. It is useful only when it is being renamed, refashioned and often simply fabricated to satisfy the ‘diverse’ fantasies of our cultural elites.

And so Khan claims that multiculturalism has always defined London. He suggests that the waves of mass immigration into the city and the country more broadly in recent decades have forever been the norm rather than an anomaly. This argument, like the lexicon around race to which the left plays lip service, is risible.

In spite of the revisionism, the factual history of London as many experienced it is there for those prepared to look, listen and learn. London and the traditional concept of the Londoner was once defined by the working class. This was the demographic most likely to remain in the capital, because of a lack of options. They were likely to be born there, raised there and end their lives there, very likely within the same neighbourhood. Although tribal and localised, they incorporated whatever changes were imposed upon them and the city, whether it was the eradication of the infrastructure of their neighbourhoods or the shift in demographics, attributable to the high level of immigrants moving to beleaguered postcodes.

From the 1980s onwards, the official emphasis ceased to be on the integration of immigrants. Instead, policymakers demanded that the natives accommodate themselves to the new arrivals, even when the newcomers’ tribalism was more rigid than that of the established Londoner. This resulted in communities defined by faith, and sometimes race, dominating parts of London – as it did in other cities, too. This lack of integration has been cheered on by a white middle class, eager to flag up the edginess and vibrancy of the capital from the comfort of their leafy or gentrified postcodes. And it has been observed contentedly by super-rich foreigners, perched high up in their shielded Ballardian towers.

Mayor Khan hails this division, this factionalism, with the mantra, ‘Diversity is our strength’. It’s rhetoric that deafens the ears it falls upon, and dies on the lips of Khan’s supporters. The conflictual reality of ‘diverse’ London does sometimes bubble to the surface. Such as last year, when a crowd descended on an Asian shopkeeper’s business in Peckham, south London, because he retaliated when attacked by a black shoplifter he challenged. But like crime statistics, particularly the knife crime for which young black men are disproportionately the perpetrators, but not always the victim, such events are sidelined by the mayor’s office.

If the multiculturalism Sadiq Khan celebrates had emerged from London itself, a product of a city’s inhabitants absorbing influences from outside and evolving over time to form a new Londoner, that would be one thing. But Khan’s multiculturalism is not organic. It’s an elite imposition, a result of encouraging and incentivising minorities to cultivate and ‘celebrate’ their difference.

In 2022, Khan attended the ceremony for the launch of the Bangladeshi signage on Whitechapel Tube station – a first, as no other station has the official name in anything but English. ‘London’s diversity is its greatest strength’, Khan announced, as though road-testing a tweet. ’The revamped signs at Whitechapel station celebrate the vital contribution Bangladeshi Londoners have made in shaping the community in Tower Hamlets and throughout our city.’ Exactly what contribution has this community made that warrants a privilege never accorded to any other immigrant group? Surely Khan should be promoting a common language, shared values and aims to bring the people of the capital together? But instead he seems intent on emphasising the differences that drive Londoners apart.

Predictably, any effort to highlight the failures of multiculturalism in London and Britain more broadly is met with the standard insults from the usual pundits. Last year, the then UK home secretary, Suella Braverman, claimed that the ‘misguided dogma of multiculturalism’ now threatens social cohesion. The rhetoric of the Tories when highlighting the flaws in multiculturalism may be empty. But no more so than the slogans of Labour apparatchiks celebrating it. In response to Braverman’s criticism, wealthy celebrities flagged up curries and carnivals. Others knowingly conflated the fact of living in a diverse society with state multiculturalism, the very policy that emphasises cultural difference over common values, and that is helping to divide the capital. ‘Diversity is our strength’, they said again.

This phrase, and Sadiq Khan’s use of it ad nauseam, epitomises the crassness that has defined his time as mayor. Like Queer Keir’s glittered cheeks, it’s an embarrassing attempt to tie his wagon to relevance and modernity. He has even reached for it in response to the now habitual ‘pro-Palestine’ marches, brimful with anti-Semitism, that have erupted on to our streets. In October, Khan tweeted that ‘anyone inciting violence or hatred in London will have strong action taken against them’, without mentioning who the victims or the perpetrators might be. Yet the day an estimated 100,000 people marched through the streets of London against anti-Semitism, he neither commented nor responded.

It’s a grim irony. Despite rambling on about diversity and repeatedly informing Londoners ‘they’ will never divide us, Khan remains the most divisive politician we have.

Through his identitarian politicking, he has helped to sow antagonism throughout London. Khan has created a divide between those who believe in the values of freedom and tolerance and those who do not. And now many of the latter are calling for jihad and venting their hatred of the Jewish State on the streets of London.

Unlike the useful idiots attending these ‘pro-Palestine’ marches, the old Labourites now turning in their graves held conviction for the causes they supported. The current mob of graduates and grifters will either leave London and grow into the people they loathe, or remain the people that everyone else loathes, by dragging their psychoses, cosplay and homemade placards into middle age. They will hopefully prove irrelevant in the greater history of a once great city.

Mayor Khan, meanwhile, will be a footnote, because of the office he held, and because he was the first Muslim to hold it. In an interview with The Big Issue last year, he claimed he was ‘proud’ of ‘a number of things’. These ‘things’ seemed to consist of reaching air-pollution-reduction targets, planting trees and installing electric-car charging points. No mention of increasing the housing stock, tackling violent knife crime or improving a dilapidated transport system. When it comes to the fundamental changes required to improve the lot of Londoners who are not well-heeled electric-car drivers, his legacy can be covered in the length and depth of one of his tweets, if that.

Originally published in Spiked.

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Even before Harriet Harman married the trade unionist and Labour MP Jack Dromey, she felt the need to tone down her accent.

Born on Harley Street to a barrister mother and doctor father, she was educated at St Paul’s Girls’ School. Her family tree extends from illustrious politicians to the descendants of high-profile peers: Neville Chamberlain is in there, along with numerous countesses and earls; David Cameron is a relative; Boris Johnson’s godmother, Lady Rachel Billington, is her cousin.

Johnson is central to what is likely to be Harman’s last major role as a parliamentarian (our longest-serving female MP is retiring after 40 years) as chair of the House of Commons Privileges Committee investigating “Partygate”. The forthcoming hearing could bury what remains of Johnson’s reputation. Politically, he is the antithesis of everything Harman stands for. Personally, he epitomises all that she abhors about the men in the class she was born into.

Yet in some ways they are each a caricature of the political extremes within that class. He is the Eton-educated, Bullingdon club Tory; she is a variation on those Lady Bountiful socialites of old that embraced socialism and slummed it in posh houses in poor postcodes. Johnson’s rise was fuelled by the belief that he was born to rule, and maybe Harman’s was too, as she has described politics as a “vocation” rather than a career.

Ultimately, he succeeded with a brutal ambition that outweighed his ability and an affability that gave him a common touch that Harman never possessed. In the 2019 election the Tories scooped the lion’s share of low-income voters, and Labour officially became the party of wealthy metropolitan liberals and middle-class graduates — the demographic that Harriet Harman has appealed to since entering parliament in 1982.

Having served in a number of front-bench roles in government and opposition, including leader of the House of Commons, deputy leader of the Labour Party (and acting leader on two occasions), it was expected that Harman might become the first female Labour prime minister. Her reasons for not putting herself forward as party leader vary.

Primarily, she didn’t wish to place herself under scrutiny having taken a “battering” throughout her time in parliament. “I didn’t feel that I could take the Labour Party through that transition from opposition into government,” she later said. “Partly because I’d always been challenging: challenging the press, challenging everybody and demanding progress, and that doesn’t make you very ‘leadershipy’, it makes you more like an outsider and a challenger.” This may also explain why she failed in her attempt to replace John Bercow as Speaker of the House of Commons in 2019.

Grassroots members of the Labour movement never seemed to warm to her. She ascribes this to her campaigning so fervently on women’s issues and equality. Arguably it’s less the issues that were the problem — many of which needed to be addressed — than her manner. Harman maintains she was always a feminist, having grown up with three sisters, but her activism emerged when the women’s movement was in the ascendant in the early 1970s. Here was a marginalised group she could identify with as both heroine and victim.

She may not have the charisma and showmanship that began to define popular politicians from the 1990s, but she possesses the commitment and conviction of many that had gone before; while being adept in the art of prevarication.

Colleagues claim she has a talent for reinventing herself, while critics saw this as a means of distancing herself from policies she had previously supported that are no longer popular. There is that moment when she is seen cheering Ed Miliband’s acceptance speech on being elected Labour leader in which he condemns the invasion of Iraq. David Miliband, his defeated brother, leans towards Harman and says: “What are you clapping for? You supported it.”

Harman studied politics at York university as the student activism of the late 1960s took a further turn to the left. Unlike some fellow radicals of the period, she was smart enough to recognise that the left-wing tradition of refusing to compromise with the electorate was not necessarily a vote winner. This was the Damascene conversion that came to those who, like Harman, blossomed into Blairites.

She says of those years in government: “It sounds rather basic, but it was a big transformation, instead of us waiting for the public to ‘wake up’ because they were just so wrong and so stupid to keep voting Conservative, we were like, ‘hmmm, perhaps the problem is with us, and perhaps we need to change’.”

Yet once New Labour were in government and on a roll, the administration ignored the electorate when it came to immigration and introduced legislation that has contributed to the divisive identity politics now proving detrimental to addressing major concerns affecting the lives of the many rather than the few.

The minority issues that take precedence and the laws introduced to address them have their origins within the Left that Harman was part of in the early Seventies, and the lawyers that saw an opening in civil liberties and human rights.

Harman was an eager, earnest young legal officer at the National Council of Civil Liberties (NCCL, which later renamed itself as the catchier Liberty). Over time the objectives remained, but the nature of human rights and the concept of equality expanded to keep the industry a going concern. Harriet Harman became synonymous with this quango culture, particularly when, as equalities minister she played a part in introducing the Equality Act of 2010. This legislation consolidated previous anti-discrimination laws, shielding groups with protected characteristics from discrimination, harassment and victimisation. The nature of evidence shifted from the concrete and factual, to reliance on how events were interpreted and perceived by the aggrieved.

This has brought us to the age of subjective truth, which features in the inquiry Harman will oversee as part of the cross-party Privileges Committee. The testimonies of witnesses are being sought, along with actual evidence, but in making the case for his defence Boris Johnson maintains his innocence is based on what he believed to be true. In short, his truth.

Certain Tories have objected to Harman as chairperson, citing bias as the reason. (She previously tweeted that Johnson appeared to have misled the Commons.) Like much of the criticism that has come her way, this is deflected and dismissed. The writer and fellow feminist Joan Smith once offered a succinct take on Harman’s reaction to criticism. “She has a patrician testiness,” she wrote, “which doesn’t respond to being challenged.”

Harman managed to evade many of the charges that have been levelled at her, including those little hypocrisies associated with the privileged Left when it comes to exercising socialism in their personal lives; notably the education of their children.

Having attended a comprehensive school in the constituency that Harman represents in Camberwell and Peckham, I was keen to see where her priorities lay when it came to the education of her own children years later, in the 1990s. She opted for schools in Kent, and the London Oratory in Knightsbridge where Tony Blair’s son was a pupil, and which has been investigated for operating an entry policy based on “social selection”.

It was an odd yet inevitable move from someone so opposed to the private education she herself had benefitted from; someone so enamoured with the diversity that summarises the place she represented and where she lives — albeit a postcode in which she once chose to wear a stab vest when going walkabout among her constituents.

A more serious charge emerged in 2014, with the Daily Mail exposé referred to as “Paedogate”. Harman denied she had been an apologist for the advocacy group the Paedophile Information Exchange (PIE), which was rallying for changes in the law when the Campaign for Homosexuality made headway in the 1970s, and PIE became affiliated with the NCCL. Jack Dromey was chairman of the NCCL when Harman started there in 1978. She said PIE had been marginalised by that point, and that Dromey had been influential in bringing this about. Yet PIE was an affiliate until 1983, and it was endorsed at the NCCL’s 1978 AGM, on the grounds of defending the principle of free speech.

A recommended amendment to the 1978 child protection bill, declaring “images of children should only be considered pornographic if it could be proven the subject suffered”. Harman defended herself by arguing that she was protecting parents from being charged for photographing their children in swimwear. (It is telling that actual proof should be essential here, when it comes in a poor second in contemporary laws relating to discrimination and hate crimes.) On her webpage, she added: “We also proposed that the definition of indecent was too wide and instead proposed ‘obscene’ as indecent was very broadly defined.”

The problems that arise from different interest groups muscling in on minority rights has led to fragmentation rather than solidarity, as is evident with the Harman-steered Equality Act, the first to give trans people explicit protection against discrimination. Harman maintains she anticipated the conflict between those demanding women-only spaces and the transgender rights that might encroach on them. But she was clearly unprepared for the fallout that ensued.

Many feminists feel the rights being eroded are those fought for in the nascent days of the women’s movement of which Harman was a part. She has given her backing to trans women (without gender recognition certificates) standing as prospective Labour MPs on all-women shortlists. Having been vocal on women’s issues she — like many female Labour party MPs — has been uncharacteristically reticent on the subject of biological women.

When Harman arrived in the House of Commons in 1982 there were only 19 other women MPs. It was the third year of Margaret Thatcher’s tenure as prime minister. Thatcher, like Harman, attempted to change her accent and remove herself from the class she was born in so as to fit in with those that shared her political beliefs. But to feminists such as Harman, Thatcher was the wrong type of woman, with the wrong views.

Harman believes the rise in the number of female MPs has been among the most significant changes she has witnessed in her political career. The reason the Labour Party has not yet elected a female leader is because Labour women are more subversive than those on the Tory benches, she has said on numerous occasions.

It’s a weak argument but not a surprising one, as she has followed it by demanding the next Labour leader be female. That this should be paramount, rather than ability and merit, is hardly surprising from someone who — unwilling to stand herself — nominated Diane Abbott in the 2010 leadership election.

Her decision to retire as an MP may have less to do with age — she is 71 — than the death of her husband in January this year. Having made several attempts to become an MP, Dromey succeeded in 2010 and landed a Commons office next door to his wife. The pair met on a picket line in the 1970s and married the year she entered parliament. It seems an uncharacteristically conventional relationship for one who has cast herself as the maverick outsider, but one that resulted in a longevity and loyalty that doubtless makes her loss a particularly difficult one.

Harriet Harman’s achievements have been impressive in terms of the roles she has held, including the first Minister for Women. She also championed the identitarian politics responsible for the divide between traditional working class Labour supporters and the metropolitan liberal class now synonymous with the party. She began her career within an organisation so intent on defending free speech it permitted a paedophile pressure group to be one of its affiliates, but ultimately brought about a Britain where people are censored, cancelled and demonised for their views. Commendably, Harman set about changing a parliamentary system that was dominated by men, many with a background as privileged as hers. But she has been instrumental in replacing it with another form of privilege where protected identity status takes precedence. Ironically, in owing so much to quotas and shortlists, the next generation of Labour MPs might not necessarily have the same commitment, conviction, or calling as the retiring “Mother of the House”. But they will be women, and the right kind of women — with the right views — even if some of them are biologically male.

Originally published in The Critic.

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Even before Brexit, the attitude of many in the Labour party towards traditional working class voters had been closer to contempt than camaraderie.

Last week was not only the sixth anniversary of the result, but the point when the left momentarily ditched minority issues. Trade unionism replaced transgenderism as a priority, in support of the RMT union — an organisation left-wing Remainers previously condemned for urging its members to vote Leave.

These workers were once again comrades-in-arms, because the industrial action was an opportunity to create chaos and, possibly, bring down a Tory government. Labour has failed to do as much via the ballot box for over a decade. Last week the party also clawed back a seat in the red wall which it lost in the 2019 general election, and failed to reclaim in the recent council elections. Yet the Wakefield by-election may be a false dawn, as many former Labour voters disen…

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In a bid to restore its reputation, widen its remit and replenish its diminishing funds, Stonewall has begun to focus on less familiar groups within the infinite alphabet of LGBTQIA rights.

This follows the withdrawal of financial support for the charity’s Diversity Champions programme promoting inclusivity in the workplace when Channel 4, Ofsted, the Cabinet Office and the Equality and Human Rights Commission jettisoned the initiative. Driving Stonewall’s fall from grace has been its belligerent attitude to those with a different take on trans rights. Like society more broadly, Stonewall, which was established in 1989, has come a long way from the riot at New York’s Stonewall Inn twenty years earlier (an event Barack Obama compared with Selma and Seneca Falls, moments that transformed civil rights and the women’s suffrage movement).

In the intervening years, its goalposts have shifted in the pursuit of an elusive “equality” until it has taken a form the founders wouldn’t recognise. The…

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William F. Buckley once said that Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams should never be on the same flight because if the plane went down it would mean the death of America’s only black conservatives.

Somehow the right summing up these two brilliant, maverick intellectuals as conservative seemed to sell them short, while their rational stance on race pitted them against a left that expected like-minded views from black Americans on this topic. Even in his dotage Sowell is subjected to this, as when one of his books was reviewed by an academic from the London School of Economics who assumed the author was “a rich white man”.

Sowell has referred to the predominantly white intellectual elite of the left — those quick to classify the minds of minorities — as “the anointed”. He, Williams and the fellow travellers inspired and influenced by these men’s output over the years, have been called other names along the way. In the eyes of say, President Biden, these figures aren’t officially black because they don’t vote Democrat, while others had names for them that should have been consigned to history — Uncle Tom, “coon”, “house negro” — like those ancient racial slurs once favoured by Klansmen.

When it transpired that the percentage of Latino and black Americans voting for Donald Trump, or at least voting Republican, had risen in the recent election, another term was coined. It will doubtless become as common and as catchy as “white privilege” or “white fragility”, terms peddled by academic grifters in the elusive pursuit of an original thought and the research fellowship to fund it. This too will prove to be acceptable in polite society despite its intention to cause offence.

Those non-whites that fail to exist within the limitations placed on them by the left are suffering from “multiracial whiteness”. It’s a term that manages to simultaneously diminish their ethnicity and devalue their views. It’s an academic’s way of calling someone a “coconut”. These so-called honorary whites were the subject of Larry Elder’s superb documentary Uncle Tom, released in 2020. Elder is a long-term supporter of the books, politics and philosophy of Sowell and Williams, is a US radio host and attorney who has been subjected to similar attacks over the years.

Elder himself is among a line-up of interviewees that includes Candace Owens, businessmen, tradesmen, musicians, politicians and members of the military. All refute the orthodox view that racial disparities are entirely due to systemic racism, something that Sowell first noted decades ago, kicking off with a takedown of affirmative action. It may tick the boxes as government policy, but it doesn’t work in practice.

“If you believe that everyone should play by the same rules and be judged by the same standards,” Sowell has said, “that would have gotten you labelled a radical 50 years ago, a liberal 25 years ago, and a racist today.”

One contributor in the film asks why it is that he, and young black men like him, grew up knowing the names of rappers and athletes but not those of Walter Williams or Thomas Sowell. On Sowell’s ninetieth birthday last summer, Coleman Hughes wrote: “Measured by his contributions to economics, political theory, and intellectual history, Thomas Sowell ranks among the towering intellects of our time.”

Both Sowell and Williams overcame hardships and barriers en route to becoming economists, authors, and academics using lived experience and forensic research to produce insightful commentary on a subject central to the American psyche. They came from poor, working-class neighbourhoods. Williams grew up in Philadelphia, raised by his mother. Sowell was born in the South and moved to Harlem in the 1930s. His father died before he was born; his mother died in childbirth a few years later.

They were raised in the era of Jim Crow; they witnessed the injustice that brought about the civil rights movement and welcomed many of the changes that sprang from it. In recent years they watched as a younger generation that had benefitted from the developments of that struggle — as well as more suspect legislation implemented to accommodate diversity — cast themselves as victims.

For some, any progress made will never compensate for the grievances of the past. No matter how extensive the concessions or how evident the preferential treatment it will never be enough. Just ask the journalist and writer Ta-Nehisi Coates: “Enslavement was not destined to end, and it is wrong to claim our present circumstance — no matter how improved — as the redemption for the lives of people who never asked for the posthumous, untouchable glory of dying for their children.”

Arguably figures such as Walter Williams and Thomas Sowell have never been given their due because of their views. Although not silenced by the mainstream media, they were certainly sidelined by it. Recently, as the internet brought together figures such as Sam Harris, Jordan Peterson and Eric Weinstein under the collective title of the “intellectual dark web”, it inadvertently provided a platform for black intellectual outliers like Sowell, Williams, Glenn Loury and Shelby Steele. The academia in which these figures have existed since the 1960s and 1970s has in that time nurtured views on race that have now found a way into the mainstream, while these outliers were among a minority that opposed them.

In so doing, some alienated the survivors from the front line of that original civil rights season. At a speaking engagement in 1984 Glenn Loury told an audience the civil rights movement was over, a move that brought the widow of Martin Luther King, seated in the audience, to tears. Loury, an economist and academic, raised on the south side of Chicago in the early postwar years, argued that the poor performance of black students, the high rate of black-on-black crime, the numbers of absent fathers in black families could not be attributed to racism, points he addressed in an essay for the New Republic entitled “A New American Dilemma”.

Thomas Sowell is the eminence grise of this group of intellectuals, the eldest, and the first to articulate the uncomfortable opinions these academics share on the plight of poor black Americans and the possible reasons for it. In Rednecks & White Liberals (2005), he writes:

External explanations of black-white differences — discrimination or poverty, for example — seem to many to be more amenable to public policy than internal explanations such as culture.

Those with this point of view tend to resist cultural explanations but there is yet another reason why some resist understanding the counterproductive effects of an anachronistic culture: alternative explanations of economic and social lags provide a more satisfying ability to blame all such lags on the sins of others, such as racism or discrimination.

The works of Sowell are now reaching a wider readership because of the internet despite him not having a social media profile. A millennial runs an unofficial Thomas Sowell Twitter account, pasting past quotes and highlighting his recent writings. It has more than 600,000 followers. A documentary has finally been made about him and his work: Common Sense in a Senseless Worldwas released recently.

As Buckley implied, Sowell and Williams were men who stood alone for a long time, brothers in arms as well as long-term friends. So much of what they fought and argued against on race has now become the orthodoxy and led America to its current impasse. Much of the responsibility for this divisive outcome lay with liberal academics, and those that Williams referred to as “the race hustlers and poverty pimps” who have built a living on the back of the grievances of black Americans. The mau-mauing of the flak-catchers continues unabated decades after Tom Wolfe wrote his essay.

At the end of Suffer No Fools, a 2015 documentary on the life and work of Williams, Sowell is asked what he thinks his friend’s legacy will be. He says he should be remembered as an honest academic; a rare thing in a profession in which it’s harder to be honest than any other profession save for politics. Despite his beliefs, and the years of research and experience that informed them, Williams says in the film that it’s “academic dishonesty” to use the classroom to “proselytise” students.

Yet this is exactly what was happening around him for decades, as those academics that got wealthy on the back of the lucrative equalities industry became influential in other institutions. It’s a path that has led to the cul-de-sac that is Critical Race Theory and the dead end that is Black Lives Matter.

For the latter and its ardent supporters, it’s as though 1865 — never mind 1965 — never happened. The one significant historical date is the year central to the discredited 1619 Project. “We do not have a choice whether or not to discuss history,” Sowell says. “History has always been invoked in contemporary controversies. The only choice is between discussing what actually happened in the past and discussing notions projected into the past for present purposes.”

Loury has said that those who “preach despair to our children” are desecrating the memory of the founders of the civil rights movement. Black Lives Matter is a departure from that movement, being without its struggles and the solutions needed to address them. In his 2006 book White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era, Shelby Steele states, “Anger in the oppressed is a response to perceived opportunity, not to injustice. And expressions of anger escalate not with more injustice but with less injustice.”

This explains why the race industry has flourished in the wake of victories resulting in more legislation and greater funds, growing into a booming industry as, paradoxically, actual racism was rapidly diminishing. This brings us to Black Lives Matter recasting the motivations of the civil rights movement and the rituals and swagger of the Black Panthers as theatre, but without the stylish traditional costume of beret, shades and Shaft leathers. The performance shifted from tragedy — the deaths and the carnage during last year’s riots — to farce, as the streets cleared and the movement appeared to be colonised by middle-class white students.

It’s all a far cry from the hopes of Ralph Ellison writing in 1964, after the publication of Invisible Man but four years before the Civil Rights Act. “When we finally achieve the full right of participation in American life,” he notes in the essay collection Shadow and Act, “what we make of it will depend upon our sense of cultural values, and our creative use of freedom, not upon our racial identification.”

In that same essay Ellison reflects on the prospect of a black American president in a distant future. When Barack Obama became president there was dancing in the streets and talk of a post-racial world. When Obama left office, the left lost its way on race: there was nowhere to go but back to zero. Now there was no longer a black president it was possible to once again push the idea there never could be one again. Subsequently, it was as though the abolition of slavery, the end of Jim Crow, the Civil Rights Act and mountainous legislation towards racial equality hadn’t happened. This is now America’s new dilemma.

Walter Williams died last December, aged 84. The event warranted far more attention than it was given and this will no doubt be the case when Thomas Sowell bows out, though for the moment he is still writing. Hopefully he will comment on the new White House administration and its plans to double down on the very policies he and Williams spent years debunking.

In the wake of the Capitol Hill protest, Sowell highlighted the selective indignation of those on the left that remained silent during the violence of last year’s Black Lives Matter riots. As he once put it, plainly but succinctly: “It’s amazing how much panic one honest man can spread among a multitude of hypocrites.”

This essay first appeared in The Critic.

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Some stories stay with you and never leave you until they’re told, even if it takes years to get the opportunity to tell them.

One such story is the murder of Richard Everitt in 1994. Not solely because of the tragedy itself, which attracted little press coverage at the time, but because the response to the crime exposes a double standard in the unremitting debate on race that’s become ever more apparent in the intervening years. Here was the murder of a teenager that drew parallels with that of Stephen Lawrence a year earlier in 1993, except in this instance the victim of the crime was white and his killers were not.mThe details of the Lawrence story have been justly documented at length and will be aired again in a three-part sequel to the 1999 ITV drama The Murder of Stephen Lawrence. A recent BBC film dramatised the murder of black teenager Anthony Walker on Merseyside in 2005, for which the brother of footballer Joey Barton was charged, but films relating to Richard Everitt have been conspicuous by their absence. This is therefore an apposite moment to tell a story I’ve attempted to tell previously.

The first opportunity arose in 2008, when the man sentenced for participating in his murder was released from prison.It was, perhaps, the final chapter in a story of which little was known beyond the basic facts offered as a footnote by broadsheets. The 15-year old was stabbed to death in an unprovoked attack by a group of Asian boys in Somers Town, north London. One of the culprits was now free having served 12 years of a life sentence. He was 19 years old at the time of the trial.

In 2009 I pitched a proposal to the Sunday Times and was commissioned to write an investigative feature for its magazine. From the outset the Lawrence and Everitt murders attracted my attention beyond the futility of the crimes, and the impact on the respective families. I was familiar with the area where Lawrence was murdered; some of my relatives had moved from council homes in south-east London and bought houses in Eltham and the neighbouring suburbs. Their children attended the same school as the teenager. As press interest intensified over time, it struck me how both race and class were central to the coverage. The lack of O-levels of the murder suspects, the revelations that their mothers were neither non-smokers nor natural blondes were cited as though evidence of guilt.

I was criticised for commenting on this by pundit Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, who wrote in the Independent that I was “proffering an intellectual alibi for the killers of Stephen Lawrence”. My point was that the residents of Eltham, and the whole of the white working class, were put on trial. A London cab driver expressed it more succinctly: “When Stephen Lawrence was murdered I thought it was terrible,” he said. “Three years later I thought I’d killed him myself.”

Armed with these basic facts I headed to Somers Town, a neighbourhood responding to change with the gentrification of nearby King’s Cross a snapshot of the shape of things to come. (The Shane Meadows film Somers Town had put it back on the map the previous year). Eurostar had been rehoused at St Pancras where the refurbished Midland Grand Hotel, the monumental nineteenth-century Gothic creation of George Gilbert Scott, would soon accommodate the longest champagne bar in Europe.

The art of Eduardo Paolozzi and Anthony Gormley figured in the piazza of the British Library, which in 1997 relocated to the site of an old rail goods yard that was once a key source of employment for local residents and migrants alike.

In the nineteenth century Somers Town appeared in the fiction of Charles Dickens. After his father’s release from debtor’s prison his son moved to The Polygon, the neighbourhood’s first major housing estate. In Bleak House, Harold Skimpole lives there along with “poor Spanish refugees walking about in cloaks, smoking little paper cigars”.

Further housing projects emerged when a local priest established St Pancras Housing Improvement Society to eradicate slums. The landmark Sidney Street estate was built in the 1920s. Turks, West Indians and Africans arrived over time, with families coming from Sylhet, Bangladesh, in the 1970s.

By the 1980s, white British families were taking up the right-to-buy option with many later selling up and shipping out to Essex or elsewhere. As Pret and Starbucks came, regeneration began to erase the past and one notable chapter in Somers Town history became dust and ashes.

The singular reference to the murder of Richard Everitt was a plaque bought by his parents, Norman and Mandy Everitt, to commemorate their son. When the site where it was displayed was demolished they transferred it to a tiny park tucked in the corner of the neighbourhood. “I knew people would forget Richard,” his mother told me in 2009, “but I didn’t want them to forget the circumstances of his death.” (In June this year the plaque was removed again, due to current redevelopment.)

The Everitts — native north Londoners — moved to Somers Town Estate with their three children in 1986. The Sir William Collins school was another staple of the area, established in the 1890s and re-christened South Camden Community School by the time their youngest son attended. There was a diverse ethnic mix within the classrooms. Close to 60 per cent of pupils were Asian, 25 per cent black and 15 per cent white. Following his death, the annual Richard Everitt trophy was introduced and awarded to two children at the school. According to the department for Children, Schools and Families at Camden Council it was presented to pupils who showed “leadership in promoting community cohesion”.

In the 1990s it was a lack of cohesion and violence between ethnic gangs that led the late Rosemary Harris — a reader in anthropology at nearby University College — to make Somers Town the subject for her research, assisted by field workers and youth club leaders. Camden council expressed an interest, until the findings revealed white racism was not the impetus for the violence of Asian gangs.

“Camden Council wanted nothing to do with it,” she told me. “I think because the Bangladeshis failed to emerge as the totally innocent victims of local racism. What angered me at the time was that the findings were dismissed as ‘racist’.” Some of the research featured in the book Divided Europeans: Understanding Ethnicities in Conflict (1999) but the original 50-page document remained unpublished. Yet its content might have offered solutions to issues addressed by the authorities following the Everitt murder.

The pattern of violence began in earnest in 1992, according to the report: “A white boy outside the school offended a group of Bangladeshis and they lacerated his back with knives.” One black youth was stabbed ten times by Bangladeshi boys, yet managed to survive. Harris sat in on a meeting between the parents of a white boy and a teacher, after the parents become fearful for their son’s safety. Previously a knife was pulled on him as he queued for his school meal, now seven Bangladeshi boys attacked him as payback for a tackle made during a football match.

Rosemary Harris wrote that teachers were vulnerable to charges of racism, “an accusation that they know is likely to follow any action by them against misbehaviour by Bangladeshis”. The main culprit was temporarily suspended, with the school denying racism played a part in the assault according to the parents. The victim was Richard Everitt.

In the summer of 1994 a gang of Bangladeshi teenagers between 10 and 15 strong went in search of an elusive boy believed to have stolen jewellery from the girlfriend of a gang member. Having assaulted a couple of white boys — attempting to stab one of them — they happened upon Richard Everett and two friends, aged nine and 17, returning from a burger bar. The trio of boys were ambushed. One was head-butted but managed to flee with the younger child. Richard — 6ft and 13st — was killed by a seven-inch kitchen knife penetrating his ribs, lung and heart.

Police descended on the neighbourhood in the weeks that followed. A team of 24 constables patrolled the area to prevent retaliatory attacks or violent flare-ups between gangs. The Everitts appealed for calm, putting their name to a letter distributed to 7,500 local homes, after the firebombing of a halal butcher. An Asian businessman’s offer of a £10,000 reward for the names of the killers proved futile in an investigation hampered by the silence of Bangladeshi families. Several of the suspects were dispatched to relatives in Bangladesh.

The Everitts were targeted with hate mail and moved to a safe house under the witness protection scheme, eventually relocating to the north of England. The family never attempted to capitalise on the racial element of the killing, but were adamant it was a racist murder – a contention backed up by numerous people I interviewed off the record, including former family liaison officers. This was also the line of the crime writer I spoke to at the Sun, one of the few newspapers to investigate the story at length.

At Millbank, I met the family’s local Labour MP Frank Dobson, who believed there was no racist motive to the crime, and to have suggested so would have only inflamed the situation, creating further division. On leaving I asked if he planned to retire before the next election. The party had persuaded him to stand again, he said, because he could “bring in the Bangladeshi vote”.

The groups, quangos and columnists that made anti-racism central to their remit were silent on the racist motivation of the crime and concentrated on fears of a backlash against Bangladeshi families. This was a marked contrast to events following the killing of Stephen Lawrence, when the chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality, Herman Ouseley, telephoned the Metropolitan Police Commissioner to say this was a racist crime, and “it was imperative that it should be investigated as a racist crime”, according to the book Racist Murder and Pressure Group Politics (2000).

The following day the Anti-Racist Alliance and representatives from similar groups were on the doorstep of the Lawrences’ suburban home. Two weeks later the couple were at the Athenaeum Hotel in west London for a meeting with Nelson Mandela, who compared the killing to events in South Africa where “black lives are cheap”. The only high-profile person that expressed an interest in the Everitt murder, privately at least, was Princess Diana. She laid flowers on the spot where he was killed.

At Scotland Yard, I spoke to a young Asian officer recently appointed to Somers Town. He voiced his concerns over a reluctance to acknowledge how gangs in the area were divided by race rather than by housing estates and neighbourhoods: “It was much more comfortable to see these things geographically.” The Everitt killing was originally classified as a “racist incident” by those leading the investigation, before becoming one that was no longer “purely a racist attack”, according to news reports. Perhaps they, like the teachers Harris mentioned, feared allegations of racism, a development that has become more commonplace in recent years, most controversially with the delayed exposure of Pakistani grooming gangs.

The police were also reeling from the fall-out from the Lawrence murder in which charges of incompetence and insensitivity were levelled, with the vague allegation of “institutional racism” added during the Macpherson Inquiry. The argument central to the Lawrence case was that the teenager would not have been murdered if he was white. Yet the race industry never considered Richard Everitt was murdered because he was.

I completed the Sunday Times article. Lawyers for the newspaper made amendments. Time passed. The magazine editor left, pegs and hooks fell by the wayside, the story died. It happens sometimes no matter how handsomely a writer is paid for their efforts. Nevertheless, I persevered as there were other angles of interest. The Everitt trial began at the Old Bailey in October 1995, six months before the private prosecution brought by the Lawrence family was staged there.

The Lawrences’ lawyers were the defence team in the Everitt trial. Before becoming identified with the Stephen Lawrence case the eminent QC Michael Mansfield defended the Birmingham Six and the Bridgewater Three; now he represented the Camden Six, as their supporters tagged the accused. Ultimately, two of the gang were convicted: one for being a participant in the murder, the other for violent disorder. They received prison sentences of 12 and three years respectively. The legal principle used was “joint enterprise”, the doctrine that assigns criminal liability to all those present at a crime.

In 2009, I found myself seated at lunch within the old Reuters building on Fleet Street — recently converted to a Conran-style restaurant — pitching ideas to the future editor of the Sunday Times. He was familiar with Somers Town but less familiar with the developments in the Everitt story and my attempts to write about it. Within a fortnight the paper’s news editor had me update my feature and rewrite it as a news story. Days before it was to be published, the anonymous sex blogger “Belle de Jour” opted to reveal her identity to the Sunday Times. As I say, hooks and pegs fall by the wayside, stories die. It happens.

Getting the story published was proving more difficult than getting people to talk about it. (Pitches to other newspapers came to nothing, meetings at Channel Four and Radio 4 didn’t progress beyond the perfunctory development meetings.) Many had been ready, willing but unable to speak because of a lack of legal protection. I’d fared no better with those that supported the campaign to free the teenagers shortly after the sentencing. The human rights charity Liberty, Camden Legal Centre, Camden Racial Equality Council, the Society of Black Lawyers, added weight to the campaign, which accused the jury and the Crown Prosecution Service of racism.

In its literature the plight of the “King’s Cross Two” was compared with that of the “Sharpeville Six” in the South Africa of the 1980s, who were convicted under “joint enterprise”. (The London teenagers charged were not activists protesting against apartheid, nor were they sentenced to death.)

The following decade, on the tenth anniversary of the Macpherson Report (1999) on the death of Stephen Lawrence, Trevor Phillips, then Chairman of the Commission for Human Rights and Equality, claimed the battle against “institutional racism” was not yet won. However, the police would deal with the Lawrence murder differently if it occurred today, he said, citing the murder of Anthony Walker, which was immediately treated as a racist attack.

It was unlikely the killing of Richard Everitt would have been treated any differently. The murder of Christopher Yates in Newham at the hands of an Asian gang around the time of Walker’s death was just one of the many incidents in which the racial motive was not considered a factor when the victim was white. If it took the tragedy of the Stephen Lawrence murder to highlight covert prejudice within the police force, it was the murder of Richard Everitt that finally exposed double standards in the race industry.

In 2012, I spent the night with a government minister on a flight from New York. Coincidentally I’d interviewed him for BBC’s The Politics Show just weeks earlier. He was wearing the best Chelsea boots I’d ever seen and, as I pointed out, taking the Tories’ austerity measures seriously by travelling economy, and finding himself seated next to me. We talked of the news that had dominated in the UK during our absence: the latest chapter in the Stephen Lawrence story provided the headlines. Finally, two of the suspects were convicted of the murder, under joint enterprise. Those that condemned the use of this in the Everitt trial were now celebrating, as it resulted in a verdict they approved of.

I informed the minister of my efforts to tell the Everitt story. He suggested that a back-bencher might take up the cause. The Everitt case could have been reactivated years after the investigation had closed, in pursuit of all those responsible for the murder. (Last month the Lawrence investigation was officially classified as “inactive”). Neither the Lawrences nor the Everitts discovered the identity of the actual murderer of their sons, and others involved escaped prison.

Both families had endured battles they should not have had to fight. Norman and Mandy Everitt never saw their son’s murder elevated to the status of a race crime, and also witnessed attempts to prevent his killers being brought to justice. “I know it’s a terrible thing to say, but I sometimes wish that Richard had been murdered by a white boy,” Mandy Everitt told me, when I first approached her with plans to write about her son. “Then we’d have had to deal with the murder but not the nightmare of everything else that followed.”

Ironically, under the interpretation of “racism” according to current hate crime legislation, a racial incident is one that is “perceived” to be as such, regardless of the intention or the motivation of the accused. On the strength of this criteria, Richard Everitt was unmistakably the victim of a racist murder. Twenty-six years later, in the absence of an ITV series or a BBC film dramatising his story, maybe we can at least finally allow him that.

This essay first appeared in The Critic.

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In the opening years of this century I wrote a book, The Likes Of Us, on the white working class.

Several newspapers bid to run an excerpt. I opted for the Guardian as it was those on the left from the middle class upwards that were the most disparaging about this particular tribe. They mocked them and demonised them. Currently they order them to check their “privilege”; to kowtow to the false narratives of the Black Lives Matter cult. Yet this class remains the cornerstone of a silent majority whose angry silence makes itself known via the polling booth, rather than toxic riots.

The Likes Of Us won the Orwell Book Prize. The runner-up, Andrew Marr, wrote in his Telegraph column the next day the win was a testament to Blair’s meritocratic Britain. (In short, I was an interloper, a jumped-up pantry boy who never knew his place.) I’d used my experience growing up in south-east London as the springboard for the story of an urban class over centuries. It was by no means a comprehensive or academic study, yet my pedigree gave me an authority on the topic.

Judging by the correspondence I received, my experience chimed with readers far beyond this postcode. When the praise for the book was good it was great (“an anatomist of England to dwarf almost all others”). Criticism was fuelled by class-based barbs (“a poetic hooligan”) and hackneyed charges of racism (“an intellectual outrider for the BNP”). The further left the organ peddling the review, the more extreme the insults. When it got to the “revolutionary communists” I was compared to Oswald Mosley and heading towards Hitler.

My crime was twofold. First, I assigned this urban tribe the status of an ethnic group. Second, I implied they’d been demonised by the loftiest champions of the proletariat. I broke with the official narrative that the British working class are what has been risibly described as “a rainbow of diversity”. In the years since the publication of The Likes Of Us, the demonisation of the white working class has become more overt, and despite their numbers you could believe they were extinct. Their past is being rewritten and they are increasingly airbrushed from the present. Television and film fixate on an historic ethnic diversity that’s the stuff of fiction. The results annoy whites, patronise blacks and leave almost everyone else, whatever their creed or colour, reaching for the remote or heading for the exit.

“To me, ‘white working class’ is like the word ‘coolie’ — created by imperialists to impose an identity on the people they wanted to rule.” This was the journalist Paul Mason interviewed by Idler magazine last year. “Michael Collins started using the term in the early 2000s with The Likes of Us and what he describes is real: the antipathy towards modernity and the white flight from the inner city to places like Essex. But it is driven by a disappointment and nostalgia for the many good parts of that world that has gone.”

If the term is created by the ruling class they are those on the left who control the narrative on race, faith and class: those who, paradoxically, claim the white working class doesn’t exist while casting them as the fall guy. When they dominate a demographic they are a blot on the landscape of diversity; when they leave they are advancing white flight.

It’s a given that the working class has changed, and is currently a more disparate demographic. But within this citizenry every sub-group is allowed its proud tribalism — except one. The white working class are only acknowledged when part of a shared experience that casts this rainbow collective as the duped victims of capitalism. They are allotted the status of an ethnic group when singled out as racist.

Otherwise, they’re lumped in with their number from all classes, as beneficiaries of “white privilege”. But their ethnicity is relevant here because the urban white working class had a different experience to other ethnic groups. Equally, the experience of the white working class was different to that of other classes. Particularly in relation to immigration.

As I point out in The Likes Of Us, they didn’t have the luxury of viewing immigrants exclusively as victims of racism or symbols of exotica. They quickly had to accept the news — that still eludes so many on the left — that sometimes people with brown skins do bad things. In the flow of newcomers we saw the good, the bad, and the ugly. In short, ourselves.

I recently attended the funeral of a relative who had rented a home in the same south-east London street since their marriage at the beginning of the 1950s. They were the last of the original cast from the postwar years. The street market where they worked is peppered with halal butchers and West Indian take-aways. The sound of drilling, digging and accents from other classes reveals how gentrification is colonising the wider area. Homes at cloud level are owned by absent, super-rich foreigners. On the ground, poorer factions co-exist in separate enclaves.

Returning for the funeral I was reminded of Trinidadian author Sam Selvon writing of the city as an immigrant in The Lonely Londoners (1956): “It divide up in little worlds, and you stay in the world you belong to and you don’t know anything about what happening in the other ones except what you read in the papers.” For me, the funeral marked the end of a historical connection with the neighbourhood, and the street where I once lived. I’d returned to a place I’d never completely left. Now I’m writing about a subject I never expected to return to.

“Nobody can be said to know London who does not know a true cockney.” So begins Virginia Woolf in her 1931 essay “A Portrait of a Londoner”. In writing of the fate of a Mrs Crowe, the novelist is anticipating the fate of the city breed the character was part of: “Mrs Crowe is dead, and London — no, though London still exists, London will never be the same city again.” A few decades earlier two other writers, the American author Jack London and the social reformer Charles Masterman, each of whom had temporarily settled in poor London neighbourhoods, predicted the tribe would be obsolete within a generation, partly because of the impact of migrants from the countryside who were stronger and healthier, but chiefly because the polluted city air would bring these lives to an end.

Yet this London native survived until the twenty-first century. They were not wiped out. Many migrated to the suburbs, the coast and elsewhere, while the elders left behind appear landlocked in a landscape altered beyond recognition by immigration and redevelopment. They are the “somewheres” that David Goodhart has described. At least they are more representative of them than generations that followed. Historically, the working class were stymied by their economic circumstances, and the need to live and work in the same vicinity. The street was an extension of the home, the neighbourhood an extension of the street, and the country an extension of that.

In that still-familiar neighbourhood a funeral was staged at a church consecrated in the 1860s. The vicar delivered a eulogy for a man he never knew, a figure like that in Eliot’s poem whose death went unmentioned in The Times. We have seen weddings, baptisms and funerals there over the years. Generations of us attended the attached primary school, a throwback to the unique tribe that existed there, and the post-industrial, Victorian backdrop that evolved to accommodate their needs.

The infrastructure of this neighbourhood has been transformed three times in my half-century. The industrial heritage of tenements, tabernacles and workhouses was replaced by brutalist housing estates that had half the lifespan of the homes they replaced. Now a Gotham City-style compound has materialised as gentrification has put this postcode — the stretch of turf between Elephant & Castle and Old Kent Road — on the prospector’s map.

At the south London library where I wrote much of my book, you find remaining white working-class locals along with those that have left and those that return, as we mourners do. They pore over old maps and photographs, tracing ancestors, excavating their pasts, not in the name of nostalgia but history. Alongside them are black schoolchildren looking at similar documents, connecting themselves with the history they have inherited by making this home. It’s a shared experience from which no one is alienated, and without the need to fictionalise the past or the present.

Those of us that made the voyage out and live like expats with ambivalent memories of the old country, seek out familiar relics on return trips for funerals, among other things — again not in the name of nostalgia but history, to remind ourselves we once existed on streets we now walk as ghosts. (Which is apt in a city silenced by a global pandemic.) We seek out those red-brick monoliths that recall the civic nature of the neighbourhood — town halls, libraries, welfare centres, the living past in the shadowed present.

Our experience mirrors that of others making similar sojourns elsewhere. “I don’t know what determines meaning in the city any better than these old people with their attenuating memories,” wrote the American Charles D’Ambrosio in his essay collection Loitering. “I went away and in my absence things have sprung up. Good things. It’s a new place, but there’s an old silence bothering me.”

Other mourners at the funeral were returning to the streets that once housed them, the descendants of that tribe that arrived with industrialisation: a new breed of urban working class. At the end of the nineteenth century Charles Masterman moved to the area to work at the university settlement, Cambridge House. The experience inspired The Condition of England, published in 1909. In the book he addresses the question Matthew Arnold posed the century before, when he coined the term “populace”. Masterman, like Orwell some years later, was taking an audit of the nation at a time of unprecedented change. (“And the diversity of it, the chaos!” exclaimed Orwell.)

He wonders where the nation now resides, an issue that didn’t exist a few generations before when it was clearly the population of the countryside: “Is England to be discovered in the manufacturing cities? The Capital? The new plutocracy — the middle classes. The artisan populations — the broken poor?”

Throughout, the author breaks down the tribes that occupied the nation (The Suburbans, The Multitude, etc). The “Condition of England” question could be posed in the present climate, as the country redefines itself in the wake of Brexit, and during the shore leave of a national lockdown. Equally, the tribes that occupy it may be in line for reclassification, notably the working class.

There is pressure from elsewhere to reclassify the working class as terms like “traditional” and “heartlands” now have “racist” connotations, while shifting focus to the “white working class” means neglecting the needs of the ethnic minorities that will one day outnumber them. These are findings from reports in recent years compiled by outmoded quangos and hoary academics, those proposing that the white working class are a construct, a political fiction.

The Runnymede Trust and think tanks such as the Centre for Labour and Social Studies (CLASS) have talked of “white self-interest”, while academics write of “methodological whiteness”. I think it was the sociologist Stuart Hall who once said — and I’m paraphrasing wildly — the white working class needs to be won over to a new idea of itself. I’d argue it’s those of the left, along with the quangos, the academics and the race lobby, that need to be won over to a new idea of the white working class. In this instance, a modernised classification would be a smart move.

Their interpretation of this tribe belongs to another age. It’s as much a cliché as the cartoon cockney or the cloth-capped northerner the left once championed before he displayed that reputed “antipathy towards modernity”. The insularity, the folksy localism, the “marrying-in” was suddenly deemed objectionable, even though it was applauded when practised in other ethnic “communities” in the name of multiculturalism.

If they also harboured “a disappointment and nostalgia” for a lost Eden they didn’t struggle to hold on to it. No marches. No unrest. No riots. Ultimately, their active prejudice was no greater than that of any other ethnic group confronted with similar changes. (In the early 1960s the urban sociologist Ruth Glass referred to this as the “benevolent prejudice” that was acceptable if it didn’t manifest as violence.)

They were the guinea pigs for multiculturalism long before the fissures and the failures appeared, and led to the rebranding of the concept with the word “diversity”. We lived on those streets. We went to those schools. Some of us “married out”. Some of us took black boyfriends home and into our homosexual hearts when we were barely out of our teens. We contributed to that modernity.

These days the white working class is a disparate group. And the diversity of it, the chaos! They own homes. They rent homes. Some have second homes. Some are unemployed. Some have trades. Some own businesses. Class is not where you end up but where you start out. This has always been an issue for the left. While pushing to bring the working class out of poverty, there was an implication that they had to stay poor to remain moral. The left prefers it when education rather than money takes the workers into the middle class, in the hopes that the politics picked up at the student bar will accompany them into middle age. Anything short of this is “embourgeoisement” or “white flight”.

There has always been a problem as to how to define the working class that move up and out, yet remain affiliated to the culture and the place that spurned them. In the aftermath of the referendum, with so many opting for leaving the EU, they were finally given a name: ill-educated. The absence of a degree, or O-levels, made them unworthy of a vote or an opinion. (Despite an impressive résumé, and being described, oddly, by Nick Cohen as a rare example of a working-class intellectual, my lack of school exams and a university education relegate me to this category.) These attitudes to the white working class were reminiscent of the nineteenth century when Matthew Arnold coined the term “populace”: “That vast portion . . . of the working-class which, raw and half-developed, has long lain half-hidden amidst its poverty and squalor, and is now issuing from its hiding-place,” he wrote in Culture and Anarchy (1869). What’s more, these recent views were expressed by those lofty, left-wing champions of the proletariat.

Despite the concerns about the “ill-educated” working class, little has been done to address the poor academic performance of working-class white boys. I wrote about this more than a decade ago, and set about addressing it in a small way by working with a Westminster think tank to establish a supplementary school. The setting was my old neighbourhood in south-east London. The Cambridge House settlement where Masterman pitched up more than a century before was the venue. Little has changed. A recent report from the National Education Opportunity Network revealed that the white working class are the most under-represented group in higher education. This year the Conservative MP Ben Bradley convened a debate in parliament to address the issue. “Imagine the legitimate public outcry there would be if a set of statistics showed that disadvantaged black boys or Asian girls were way behind their white counterparts at school,” he wrote. “Heads would roll. Yet this is precisely what is happening to white boys from disadvantaged backgrounds, and modern society is ignoring their plight.”

Despite this trend the white working class are a lot more savvy and more informed than their detractors would have you believe. The evolution of social media in the last 15 years has contributed to this, as has the identitarian politics that has found its way into the spotlight, where it is stranded and floundering.

So when it comes to knowledge, what do they know? They know that “racism” will forever change its skin and widen its remit to prop up the lucrative industry that needs it to survive. They know that nebulous “hate crime” legislation suppresses opinions and will eventually silence them completely. They know black lives matter when those that extinguish them are white. They know the crimes of grooming gangs are deracialised when the rapists are not. They know an equality of opportunity that would benefit them has been supplanted by an equality of outcome that won’t. They know all of this has brought the left to the impasse that saw the red wall of the north turn blue in the last election.

The rumours that the white working class are in crisis in the face of change and that ever-expanding “rainbow of diversity” are premature. They are pulling up a chair and watching as the competitive victimhood of the intersectional Olympics causes the left to implode. Like Brexit, the election landslide was a cri de coeur on behalf of the silent majority. Cultural conservatism? Or a radical challenge to the reactionary state that currently passes as progressive and radical?

When I set out to write this essay I intended to seek the voices of the white working class now, beginning with my old stomping ground and travelling to the places that switched allegiances from Labour to the Tories, from Bolsover to Sedgefield. An itinerary was planned; expenses were promised. A global pandemic and the subsequent national lockdown put the block on it. If there was a positive to take from the quarantine, it was the possibility that the excesses of identitarianism, and the anti-white tropes that dominate academia, politics and social media would dissipate. The shared values that Masterman and Orwell went in search of would surface, define us and when necessary bring us all together. Instead, in the wake of protests and riots across Britain, Twitter’s King Mob doubled down on the excesses, inflamed the hysteria, and created a division that will deepen the anger of the silent majority.

I left London. A relative had died, and the urban tribe they were part of, that was once synonymous with the capital, as Virginia Woolf wrote, has disappeared too, long after Charles Masterman and Jack London predicted their demise. And London — no, though London still exists, London will never be the same city again.

This essay was originally published in The Critic.

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