Brendan O’Neill

Identity politics is turning violent. It’s been brewing for a while. Anyone who’s witnessed mobs of students threatening to silence white men or Islamists gruffly invading the space of secular women who diss their dogmas will know that, as with all forms of communalism, identity politics has a menacing streak. And at the weekend, in Charlottesville, Virginia, it blew up. That ugly clash between blood-and-soil white nationalists and people crying ‘black lives matter’ is the logical outcome of the identitarian scourge, of the relentless racialisation of public life. Charlottesville was both shocking and unsurprising. It was shocking because here we had actual Nazis, waving swastika flags, in 21st-century America, the land of the free. That is deeply disturbing.

We used to think it was noble when people made sacrifices for their beliefs, when they were happy to endure hardship in the service of a political goal or moral cause. Now we call it 'extremism'. Now anyone who is so devoted to an ideal that he's willing to see his own daily comforts diminished to make that ideal a reality is likely to be branded a nutter. I mean, what kind of loon puts his beliefs ahead of his bank balance? Consider the mouths-agape response to new YouGov research published yesterday, showing that many Leave voters are willing to pay a high price for Brexit.

It’s the casualness with which they’re saying it that is truly disturbing. ‘I’m beginning to think that Brexit may never happen’, said Vince Cable on Sunday morning TV, with expert nonchalance, as if he were predicting rain. He echoed Newsnight’s Nicholas Watt, who a few days earlier informed viewers that there is talk in ‘some quarters’ that ‘Brexit may not actually happen’. Leaving the EU? ‘I think that is very much open to question now’, said Lord Heseltine last month, with imperious indifference. He could have been asking a minion to pass the butter. They say it matter-of-factly, sometimes a little gleefully.

John McDonnell’s use of the M-word in relation to the Grenfell inferno marks a new low in the political milking of this catastrophe. I’m not normally squeamish, but I must say I have found the marshalling of the Grenfell horror to political ends, the transformation of this human calamity into effectively a meme saying ‘Austerity Bad’ or ‘Tory Scum’, deeply disturbing. And now McDonnell has dragged it down to its nadir, with his claim at Glastonbury that the residents of this tragic block were ‘murdered by political decisions’. The entire setting of McDonnell’s comments feels nauseating.

It takes a lot to make me feel ashamed of London, my beloved home city. But yesterday’s tower-block inferno did it. The raging fire at Grenfell Tower in North Kensington, the disturbing speed with which this home to hundreds was reduced to a smouldering shell of a building, heaps shame on this city. It is positively Dickensian, a hellish scene out of place in 2017, like a violent echo from an older era when safety, especially the safety of the poor, was of little moment. London needs to look in the mirror. This cannot just be chalked up to ‘tragedy’. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that it was the low social status of the inhabitants of the tower that left them vulnerable to this horror.

Memo to London-based liberals: not everyone shares your point of view. Some people — brace yourself for this — have different opinions to yours. Amazing, I know. But true. So please dial down your hysteria about the DUP. Because I know you think it makes you look super-tolerant to bash the supposed rednecks and religious fruitcakes of Northern Ireland who’ve never attended a gay wedding or made a donation to Greenpeace, but it of course does the opposite — it exposes your own intolerance. The fury over the DUP is reaching fever pitch.

So now we know: Jeremy Corbyn is a counterrevolutionary. The man who fancies himself as the secret Red of British politics, surrounding himself with trustafarian Trotskyists and the kind of public-school radical who gets a hammer-and-sickle tattoo just to irritate his parents, is now being talked up as a potential saviour of the establishment from Brexit. From Guardian scribes to actual EU commissioners, the great and good want Corbyn to save their hides from that raucous revolt of last June. You couldn’t make it up: Jez the tamer of the agitating masses. No sooner had those exit polls revealed that May was struggling and Corbyn was rising than the EU-pining lobby was saying: ‘Jez we can stop Brexit!

Today, for the first time in my life, I voted Tory. And somewhat disappointingly I haven’t sprouted horns yet. I haven’t been overcome by an urge to pour champagne on homeless people’s heads or to close down my local library and guffaw at any rosy-cheeked child who pleads: ‘But I want books, mister.’ I don’t feel evil. Maybe that stuff comes later. Maybe it takes a few days before you turn into a living, breathing Momentum meme, screaming ‘Screw the poor!’ as you ping your red braces. In fact I feel good. It always feels good to vote, of course, to hold the fate of the political class in your hands.

In this slow-motion car crash of a General Election campaign, there have been few sights more tragic than that of grizzled, greying Labour people pleading with the young to vote for them. Even Diane Abbott’s dumbfounded face on every political show on the box and Tim Farron’s wobbly expression every time a member of the public asks him why he hates Brexit have been no match for these political versions of sad old uncles in skinny jeans creepily cosying up to yoof. How I’ve winced. They’ve all been at it. There was Armando Iannucci, funnyman turned another boring Tory-fearer, who got a gazillion retweets when he said he was getting down on his ‘gnarled and brittle knees’ to beg 18-to-24-year-olds to vote.

So who came off worse in The Battle for Number 10, last night’s Channel 4 / Sky stand-off between Theresa May and Jeremy Corbyn? It was Jeremy Paxman. May and Corbyn were paragons of patience and sense in contrast with this oafish, boorish barker of rude and even pointless questions. Watching Paxo was squirm-inducing. He’s the angry drunk uncle who ruins every barbecue by yelling ‘BALLS’ at anyone who disagrees with him. I’m convinced Corbyn or May would have instantly won tens of thousands of new voters if they had told him to bugger off. It’s amazing how knackered Paxman’s schtick felt. Did we really lap this guff up in the 2000s, when he was anchor of Newsnight?

Today, Jeremy Corbyn elevated terrorist attacks from acts of medieval mass murder to the level of a political statement. He injected the slaughter of pop fans and their parents with the frisson of anti-imperialism. He may not have meant to do this, but he did. When he said in his speech this morning that terrorism at home is a response to British militarism overseas, he imbued that terrorism with political meaning, even with a smidgen of progressiveness. This violence is anti-war, he is suggesting. He’s in serious danger of giving Salman Abedi a posthumous moral boost. Corbyn called for honesty about the ‘connections’ between ‘wars our government has supported or fought in other countries and terrorism here at home’.

Can we please stop pretending this is a normal election? Everyone’s at it. Gabbing about NHS funding, arguing over energy price caps. Everyone’s acting as if it’s 2015, or 2010, or any other election year of the modern period, when mildly right-wing parties and mildly left-wing parties argued the toss over fairly technical matters and voters decided which was most trustworthy. It’s pantomime, a performance of normalcy in an era that’s anything but normal. Because we all know, somewhere in the attic of our minds, that this is an election like no other, and that it’s about one issue and one issue only. You don’t even have to name it. It hangs in the air, a perfume of liberty to those of us who like it, a foul stench to those who hate it.

Nothing better sums up middle-class millennials’ sense of entitlement than their demand that they be paid for interning. ‘Paid internships now!’ has become the rallying cry of young media people and the Twitterati and now the Labour Party, too. Its throwback manifesto, leaked this week, promises to ‘ban unpaid internships’, on the basis that ‘it’s not fair for some to get a leg up when others can’t afford to’. Self-regarding youths will cheer this, as will their sad-eyed supporters in the press, but the rest of us should raise a collective eyebrow. There are many grating things about the call for paid internships. Here are just three of them.