It’s time the British faced some uncomfortable truths, says Matthew d’Ancona

As Britain starts its long Covid recovery, are deeper problems lurking beneath the surface? Matthew d’Ancona certainly thinks so, and in this brief, rather shrill polemic, he urges us to face some uncomfortable truths. Uppermost in his mind is the threat posed by the populist right, which he worries will try to blame Britain’s post-Covid economic hardship on immigrants.

D’Ancona suggests that a message of intolerance would fall on fertile ground. Britain, he says, is already in a state of disarray:

Public confidence in our institutions has plummeted, as has the belief in a widely honoured social contract; the notion of shared universal rights and responsibilities is mortally threatened in many places by a sense of futility and voicelessness.

That overwrought tone perhaps owes something to the super-heated closing act of the Trump presidency. But the message here is that Britain must drop its obsession with immigration and focus instead on three other words beginning with ‘I’: identity, ignorance and innovation.

D’Ancona starts with identity politics, which he says provides the best defence against the racists. It’s a political outlook that requires us to accept that different societal groups have their own specific needs that must be respected. This view of society works, he says, because humankind is ‘naturally tribal,’ and what’s more, ‘neuroscience has shown that our empathy is stimulated by those who are fellow members of our group’.

But here d’Ancona is actually pointing out that identity politics shares a common psychological root with the very populism he so detests. Both, ultimately, are appeals to the same confrontational, ‘naturally tribal’ instinct that seeks to separate people into groups. Seen this way, the fixation on ‘identity’ feels like an unpromising route to pluralist harmony.