Labour’s identity crisis

On the face of it, there could scarcely be better conditions for a revival of the Labour party. Even before the Covid crisis, a generation of young people were struggling to earn as much as their parents did at their age. The housing crisis remains unresolved, prices are higher than before the pandemic. The Tories are borrowing far more than they can afford and there will soon be a reckoning — with tax hikes, austerity or both. Unemployment will soar as the furlough scheme is unwound.

But much of the left’s energy is being wasted in marching down the cul-de-sac of identity politics. For activists, the summer has been spent in an unseemly competition over who can find offence at the most unlikely people and inanimate objects. This week, they began to turn on their own icons. Students at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts (Rada) demanded that the institution rename its George Bernard Shaw theatre on the grounds that the Irish playwright supported eugenics and spoke in favour of Mussolini, while a petition successfully led to the University of Edinburgh stripping the name of David Hume from one of its buildings, which for now will just be called 40 George Square.

Hume, complained those who started the petition, had invested in a plantation that was staffed by slaves and wrote that he was ‘apt to suspect the negroes to be naturally inferior to the whites’. These would be damning offences if committed today, yet in Hume’s time, over two centuries ago, they were hardly unusual views. What matters far more, surely, are the ways in which Hume, often described as the father of the Scottish Enlightenment, changed the world with his insights into the relationship between reason and emotion.