An Open Letter To The Left

This is an open letter to the flag-waving, chest-thumping, slogan-screaming, leftists of the UK;

There is a long and noble history of the left of politics making the case for a future that has contributed to the world we live in today. Great people, great minds, have made the case for a kind of compassionate world where might doesn’t always equal right. Even the basis of religion has fuelled the morality of the arguments made by those on the left. As with all sides in politics, the left have made sure that the unheard or the forgotten or the downright abused are given a voice. This legacy is one can be proud of.

In history we argue about the agents of change; is it great men and women or is it great movements and masses of people that affect the course of history. No doubt on the left the answer is somewhere in the middle. The legacy of the Labour movement and its leaders including Keir Hardy and Ramsey McDonald both contributed to the idea that a state has to do more than to oversee society, they made the strong case that the state should in some monetary way help society. This legacy continued and though it went out of favour with the ebbing and flowing of the tide of politics it remains today as a moral compass for those who wish to see all given a chance to live a good life.

Today, you are not part of that legacy. Though you may believe you walk in the footsteps of those who wished for political and economic liberation you have become the very thing they fought against. You and the ‘allies’ of the left are the ones in power and ever since 1997 the UK has undergone the reforms led by those from the very camp you are in. All social groups, and then some, are represented and protected even to a greater extent than the majority of people in this country who are not. Community leaders, unburdened by the state, are now in great positions of influence. The organs of the state use international law forged and refined by hard-left states in the 20th century that make national law and rules almost pointless. You have armies of lawyers actively working in your favour. You have a political class united in their view from both major parties that the left is where policy should come from. From 1997 to 2024 your dream has been unleashed in both a British and global way.

And yet not one of you went home. Discontent with the lack of perceived injustice at home, unless it was imported from America, you looked to the international world and saw a way to carry on ‘the struggle’ in the form of the Palestinians. The narrative of oppression, evaporated in this country, remains strong in the world. Your constant marches in London are a testament to the zeal you have with this in a manner you believe to be similar to the marches for equality in this country by those who went before you. You believe that as you march the spirits of Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King Jr, Mahatma Gandhi and maybe even Karl Marx are marching with you.

They are not.

The world does not act and behave in the same way the UK has done. The world has shown instances of gunning down protestors, throwing people they don’t like off of buildings, mass incarceration and forced re-education. The UK listened to you, but the world will not. No matter how hard you shout what wins in the Middle-East is might, and there is no right. And as you scream for the oppressed Palestinians to get justice so are the Israelis, especially those who have lost loved ones to those who started this present conflict in death or by rape, torture or capture. Social justice is no match for those who demand justice for murder in casting the first stone. And if you think that love can conquer all, there will be no worse horror than seeing those you support turn on those who go against the fundamental teachings of their prophet. ‘Queers for Palestine’ is one of the many oxymorons that are an example of this.

The left has done so much to shape the UK and whether it has been for good or for ill is a matter for debate, but we should be able to have that debate. In the last decade or so your ranks have closed the borders of speech. Issues, free and fair to discuss in a normal world, are taken off the table because of your insistence of the ‘settled’ status. Climate change, immigration, border control, pandemic laws, foreign policy, globalisation, trans rights, these are all issues you no longer wish to have discussed in parliament let alone on the street. According to you they are so above reproach that the everyday person should shut up about these issues because, according to a very used mantra, they have no idea what they are talking about. Your experts would have to either be accredited by the gatekeepers of thought at universities or be those with the ‘lived experience’ and only if they still subscribe to your views. Your representatives in parliament are so far removed from the public that they do not know what to do when the public doesn’t like them.

Your ‘side’ (if we have to entrench ourselves) has become the very thing it used to fight against. Why? The left has one weakness; power. In all, this is all about power. At least that is the genus of it all. In the UK the left simply wanted power to be shared equally. Now the left wants the power for itself. Now you have it you don’t want to give it back or to share it; just like those who the old left fought against. It all come down to power. So long as the left are the decision-makers power, in all forms, is justified. ‘The adults are back in the room’ is a common way of putting it. This means that there is no check on the excesses of this power. So long as the right people are in charge then have at it. That’s what the Russians in 1921 thought. That’s what the Chinese in 1949 thought. That’s what the Cambodians and the Cubans and the Venezuelans thought.

This letter is not asking you to go away. That is never and should never be the case. But now you have to see that the ‘right’ is now asking to be included in much the same way the left did. The case for violence is as a result of years of things being taken off the political table and the monopolisation of leftist principles in politics, commerce and the media. As it was in Victorian times so it is here today and the movement for inclusion of thought, people and representation is back. What is being asked for is for things to be put back on the table for discussion. That can be scary! It was for those who did all they could to resist the left but they had to do it because they knew the consequences if they did not; the delegitimisation of authority. We see it now on the streets. None of us want violence to rule.

If you believe so much in your case and believe there is so much behind it that it could survive the trickiest of examination and scrutiny then you should not be afraid to put your view on the table for discussion. If you shy away under the guise of sensitivities then there will come a time not too far away when you will lose sight of reality as that fear grows. Fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, hate leads to suffering, to quote Yoda. Do not fear talk. Do not fear possibly having your mind changed. Fear comes from believing that your views are vulnerable to reality.

To be sure, there are not very nice people on the right either, but they aren’t all bad. Calling people ‘far-right’ or even racist or Islamophobic is in many ways demonising perfectly reasonable people who just want to chat, or who even might have their minds changed either if you don’t succumb to name-calling. But the more you demonise your opponents, the more you scream for them to be cancelled, removed or in very rare occasions killed, you create more and more that do go to the actual extreme right. As you shout abuse in one voice and continue your derision of the nationstate and its institutions, as many in your camp do, know that you make the greater case for the actual extreme right to exist. Extreme movements are always a reaction to events and people. The extreme left are a reaction to the moderate left getting what they want in this day-and-age. The extreme right are a reaction to the silencing of the right. Please stop what you are doing, you’re making a tiny minority on the extreme right much, much worse.

The left are more likely to block, silence or unfriend those who do not subscribe to their views. Include those you disagree with in your life. The left are most likely to stay in social echo chambers. Shake hands with someone on the other side of the divide. The left are most likely to feel their social, political and economic views in everything they do. Go to a pub and have a friendly drink with someone on the right and speak nothing of politics.

We don’t want to fight, we just want to feel like we matter without being intimidated by those who cancel, deplatform or start social media campaigns to fire people. We don’t want to protest, we just want to be heard in the corridors of power without necessarily controlling it. We don’t want to hate our nation’s leaders, we just want to know they feel our pain. We feel we get none of this and that is really scary in a democracy. Where is the power of the right if it is simply labelled as something which has no place in modern society?

There is something called the ‘George and the Dragon Syndrome’. St George has slain the dragon. He is celebrated as a hero by the people and he is venerated. St George likes this feeling. He matters! He is loved by all! He develops a taste for slaying more and more monsters! But a dragon is the biggest monster around. So he goes around finding smaller and smaller monsters to slay. After a while and after slaying ever-smaller creatures St George is found in a field swinging his sword at thin air. The once great hero is now mad. This is the fear we have of the left of today.

We did it. We achieved perhaps the most compassionate, equal, racially inconsequential society the world has ever seen. Yes there are things we could do better. There are also things we are doing that perhaps were in error. But in so many ways we had a country to be proud of. Now it is going far too far. The pendulum is going to swing back but the more you push it your way the greater the swing will be when you can push it no longer, and the result will be far worse. We don’t want that. We just want a country we can all be proud of, not just you.

Thank you

The Editor of The TDL Times

This article first appeared on the TDL Times. For more information, articles and more please visit www.thetdltimes.com.