Badenoch's carnival of poison and hate

There's never the slightest thought for how to fix something. Never a hint of a practical plan for the future. There is just the division.

Photo by Jackson Simmer on Unsplash

The only thing worse than the policies are the motivations behind them. The poison. The proud, unashamed, unconcealed toxicity. That one singular black dot in the intentions, the tiny infinite abyss. A toxicity that spreads like cancer from the point of their presentation.

The aim is to divide. Always to divide - never to heal. Never to find common ground. It is to adopt one side of a cultural crevice and use it for a primitive political attack. 

I get this feeling in my stomach when they do it. A dread which I carried throughout the Brexit era. Back then, it was big and all-encompassing, the whole nation pitched into a dog-eat-dog fight. Now it seems pitiful and desperate, most of the electorate totally tuned out from what they're saying. But the moral taint is the same. There's never the slightest thought for how to fix something. Never a hint of a practical plan for the future. There is just the division.

Kemi Badenoch was on the radio this morning, delivering her new anti-trans policy. Just to get the obvious out the way: I'm sure you have views on trans issues, for or against, and I can't tell you how much I don't want to hear them. The point is not the policy itself, but the manner in which the issue is approached.

Indeed, there's no point even addressing the plan, because it does not exist to be implemented. It exists to do exactly what it has done this morning: Secure gushing front page write-ups in the Express, the Mail and the Telegraph. It is a complement to the national service policy, which was also more pertinent for its messaging than its content. The obvious purpose is to target potential Reform voters, whip up culture war, and try to get Labour representatives tied up in knots on television. In the perfect Conservative world, the trans 'debate' would consist of interviewers barking out the question 'can a woman have a penis' over and over again until there isn't a single brain cell left on the face on the earth. As if to underline the point, while I wrote that last sentence, the Tory party account tweeted: "We know what a woman is. Keir Starmer doesn’t." Let's not give them the respect of pretending there is a policy here to be analysed. There is a cynical electoral gambit masquerading as an idea.

There are certain issues which drive a razor-sharp wedge through a society. The trans debate is obviously one of them. Israel-Palestine is another. Brexit another. On most political matters, the wedge is hazy and relatively soft to the touch - smoking in public places, for instance, or fiscal policy. There are severe consequences for many of these decisions, but they do not spark a sense of identity war, they do not break down predictably along demographic fault lines, they do not trigger a fierce black-and-white binary debate. 

The question really is what you do with a debate like that. Do you work to reduce division, or to exacerbate it? Do you sharpen those edges, make them as deadly as possible, make sure that anyone who touches them cuts their hands and bleeds upon the floor? Or do you take the sandpaper to it, rough them down, try to make something which can be gripped and handled safely? I’ve seen people on either side of all these debates who want a way through. And I’ve seen people who want to hurt, to punish, to personally benefit, to claim ultimate victory in their tribal war.

It's quite clear which option Badenoch favours. It's the same approach which Suella Braverman adopted on Israel/Palestine - going on pro-Israel marches herself and calling pro-Palestine demonstrations "hate marchers". And needless to say, it is the approach which the government adopted over Brexit, with its talk of 'citizens of nowhere' and 'undermining the will of the people' and all the other garbled spite that defined our lives through those years. 

As it happens, Labour has been a mess on all these issues: Brexit, trans rights, the Middle East. It's mostly electoral. Their support base is split between socially conservative and socially liberal voters. But it is also about temperament. They are pulled by idealism and pragmatism, ethical impulse and election strategy. 

It's very easy to despair of them and one could rightly do that, on any of these items, for any number of reasons. But then I return to a particular moment last February. It was, for me, a defining moment: entirely unrehearsed, unscripted, unprepared, free of artifice. A moment in which something fundamental was revealed. It spoke volumes about the chief distinction between the current Labour and Tory party and, more broadly, the importance of character in political life. 

It was PMQs in the Commons Chamber. Rishi Sunak was mocking Keir Starmer for having difficulty "defining a woman" while the mother of the murdered trans teenager Brianna Ghey was in the public gallery. Even if nothing else had happened it would still be a pivotal moment. It was a demonstration of moral character and unfitness for office. But it was Starmer's reaction afterwards that was most revealing. This is what I wrote at the time:

"Starmer, to his considerable credit, seemed genuinely outraged. The Tory benches shouted a mocking panto "oooohhhhhh" at him when they sensed a trace of offence. They were still lost in their heady up-yours-political-correctness gusto. "Of all the weeks to say that," Starmer murmured. "When Brianna's mother is in this Chamber. Shame." The Speaker tried to intervene. For a moment Starmer looked lost for words, as if he was grasping for something to encapsulate how it had made him feel. "Absolutely…" he started, then faded away. "Of all…" Then he faded away again. And I felt more warmth towards him at that moment than I have for some time. I felt a genuine sense that he was shocked into speechlessness by the cruelty of it all."

It was a moment that revealed the man underneath the electoral machine. For all Labour's confusion and hesitancy, right there at the core of his character was someone who wants people to be treated with respect, no matter who they are, or where they come from, or how they identify.

The idea that we should treat people with respect sounds fairly innocuous, a little bit Hallmark, the kind of thing no-one disagrees with. But surely now we can see that it isn't. Surely we can see what the alternative looks like. 

Pro-Europeans were not treated with respect when they were called enemies of the people. Young people are not being treated with respect when they're told they'll be forced into a half-baked national service programme to placate the jealousies of the old. Those concerned about Israel's actions in Gaza are not treated with respect when they're branded terrorists. And trans people are not treated with respect by the sniggering hatefulness on display this morning. 

There are many problems with Labour's position on all manner of issues. But the basic distinction is clear to see. They are not, for all their faults, exploiting and worsening division for electoral gain. They are trying to ease the binary, not exacerbate it. They are trying to soften the edges of that wedge.

The right or wrong side of these issues does not lie with one tribe or the other. It’s about whether you are trying to alleviate or worsen them. That is the true binary. That is the one that matters. 

This election is, in many ways, a referendum on that idea. It is of the utmost importance, for our souls as much as our society, that Badenoch is handed the electoral judgement she so richly deserves.