What did you manage to read on your summer holidays? I found myself in the early phases of the 14 volume CP Snow Strangers and Brothers series – covering 20th century Britain from the first world war to the 1970s - to which we owe the phrase the ‘corridors of power’. The series may prove more of a marathon than a sprint.
Newly Labour MPs may have been a bit frazzled to read too much during the recess after a single intense and volatile year on the green benches. But Patrick Maguire of The Times reports that some have found time for a five page memo on the condition of the party and the country, entitled ‘What did we learn on our summer holidays?’, and reportedly written on the day of the recent Cabinet reshuffle. Maguire writes that the author’s identity is unknown – ‘But so many found themselves agreeing with its central critique that it might have been written by any one of a hundred people’.
That insight could prove of more use to a psychologist than any student of political thought. The memo offers a strikingly banal collection of clichés and caricatures; ‘forks in the road’ between ‘easy paths’ and ‘hard journeys’ in ‘a new tragic age of conflict and hard choices’. That ‘provincial England once marginal to the metropolis is now the terrain on which electoral success will be won or lost’ does not particularly sound like it would come as news to a whole century of politicians from Stanley Baldwin to Keir Starmer. Once the memo tries to populate this terrain more content fully, the short document read to me like the sort of shallow tribute band pastiche that some kind of ChatGPT bot might regurgitate unthinkingly if it was fed the collected oeuvre of Lord Glasman, Jonathan Rutherford or other blue Labour thinkers who have sought to provoke argument about how a modern social democratic party might try to engage with the politics of identity and belonging.
The memo argues that ‘Britain is ungovernable’ on the grounds that no party can command more than a third of the vote. Yet it does not stick to that argument. Instead, it has a persistent stark bias – conscious or unconscious – towards lauding the legitimacy of the third of the public attracted to Nigel Farage’s populist project while lambasting the lack of legitimacy of his political opponents, whether from the social democratic centre-left or the populist left.
So the memo proposes a simple answer: let Farage win to save Britain. It even goes quite so far as to offer a warning to the left not to stop Farage at the ballot box if they care about democratic norms in Britain: ‘his political failure will open the way for dark forces and the Left will have been the midwife of the storm they bring’. This implicit spectre of violence if Farage loses a democratic election follows from the argument that giving Farage what he and Reform demand is now simply the only antidote to racism available to our society. ‘Farage is to the left of his political support and Reform is the only political force capable of neutralising the extreme right and racist movements that have sprung into life’.
Its endorsement of Farage as the answer renders the memo’s epilogue calling for one last chance for a social democratic response redundant – since it has explicitly argued that there is a much greater risk to the social norms of a multi-ethnic society if Reform lose the election than if they win. Anybody who sincerely believed that should obviously join Reform, rather than trying to help the Labour Party make an effort to keep Farage out of power: an outcome that this memo’s author does not just consider unlikely but also undesirable. Yet it seems unlikely that dozens of defections are afoot. Perhaps those sharing a secret memo with a frisson of samizdat excitement did not quite manage to read it or to understand its core argument at all.
Politics in a diverse democracy
How social democrats respond to the challenges of an increasingly diverse democracy is one of the challenges of the age. The author worries about this – but founds a response on the most cartoonish caricature of the challenges of seeking to govern this ethnically diverse society that I can recall reading this century.
A central challenge for Labour’s social democrats is the risk of an electoral coalition fragmenting in many directions at once across the nations and regions of the UK – but this memo belongs to a simpler imaginary world where only some defections count in a democratic society. Any loss of support among the graduate leftists is dismissed as an inauthentic progressive tantrum. So the memo imagines the unlaunched Corbyn left party will take 15% of the vote – ‘the radicalisation of this higher educated class’ – but suggests that a democratic party which tried to hang on to any of those four million voters would simply make the ‘blowback’ on the right worse. (The British Election Study shows that in voting intention, Labour is losing 2.5 million votes to the centre-left, a million to the right, with 2.5 million mostly left-leaning voters currently in don’t know. But that is one thing the memo’s author decided not to learn this summer. Denial about the existence of electoral cross-pressures is foundational to a simple clarity in which ‘the nemesis of the left’ is only to be found on the populist right.
So ‘the English populist revolt is of a different order of magnitude’ to any challenges of losing the support of left-leaning graduates. What matters is that the populist right are the real people, its rise characterised as ‘a class conflict inflected by the assertion of English and British national identity, with an inflammatory streak of ethnic-nationalism and anti-Muslim hatred’. The memo puts a heightened sense of radicalisation at the heart of its understanding political conflict, but brings its weirdest twist in deciding to characterise the polarised politics of our time as primarily a ‘whites against whites’ battle for the soul of a multi-ethnic nation: ‘These class-based conflicts are whites against whites fighting over the future character of a multi-ethnic nation and the place of minority ethnic groups within it’.
Since British society remains 75% white British after 80 years of post-war immigration, it is trivially true that no major political clash in our times could ever have its outcome in doubt without splitting white voters. Does anyone need to be told that the Scottish referendum of 2014 or the Brexit referendum of 2016 can be taken as a proof that not all white people in the United Kingdom think the same thing about politics or society just because they share a skin colour? So why not simply recast every political clash in British political history as a ‘white on white’ conflict – from Charles I and Cromwell in the English civil war to the constitutional crisis of 1909-11. The claims and responses to feminism could also be called a ‘white on white conflict’ – though it was not only the case the men took different views of female suffrage, but that women too have held different political and social views from each other in the century that followed it. (Our AI article generator might just as well throw up ‘these class-based conflicts see men against men and women against women fighting over the future of a gender-balanced society and the position of men and women within it’ too).
Curiously, this weird ‘whites against whites’ framing of multi-ethnic Britain of the 2020s could even have produced an insightful aside about what happened half a century ago. That was when British politics did make some big choices about the future of this multi-ethnic society – and what may often be overlooked now is how those foundational and existential debates took place in all-white parliaments. There were no black or Asian voices in the Commons at all when in 1968 it debated Powell’s Rivers of Blood polemic, and passed the race discrimination legislation that Powell objected to so vociferously as ‘giving the black man the whip hand over the white man’. Nor were there when the next Parliaments went on to end Commonwealth free movement with Heath’s immigration legislation, and Thatcher’s reform of the citizenship rules in 1981. So there were indeed in a past generation foundational moments when Commonwealth migrants and ethnic minorities – though enfranchised – simply lacked any share of public voice in defining arguments ‘over the future of a multi-ethnic nation and the place of minority ethnic groups within it’.
But the effect of making such an assertion in 2025 is to seek to render British minorities voiceless in a multi-ethnic democracy – mere props for an author seeking to wage a factional culture war within the Labour tradition over the question of a multi-ethnic society, while expressing an allergy to the idea that black, Asian or mixed race citizens have any voice or agency as equal citizens. That would seem to be of a piece with the memo’s sweeping characterisation of ‘the emergence of multiple ethnic communities, with no incentives to integrate, living in parallel cultures to mainstream society and its social norms and symbols of nationhood’.
Britain certainly faces real challenges of identity and integration. But that is a statement that is less true about the United Kingdom in 2025 than of any other multi-ethnic democracy in western Europe or the Anglosphere. To cast eight million ethnic minority Britains as unfamiliar out of reach others, living parallel and pillarised lives – without contact with British symbols, social norms or opportunities to study, work or live alongside their fellow citizens – is the kind of atomised nonsense that can only be propagated by an online scribbler who mistakes the increasingly skewed and radicalised X platform for the society that they live in.
If there is no engagement with national symbols, how did the UK become the only major western democracy where ethnic minorities persistently express a higher degree of identification with national identity than the majority group? If there are ‘no incentives to integrate’ – nor opportunities to do so – why was the UK the sole country in Europe to eliminate the aggregate educational attainment gap?
Which other western democracy could try to compete with the UK’s level of ethnic diversity in professional and public life? I first voted in a General Election in 1992 ,in which the six ethnic minority members of the House of Commons did not yet have a 1% share of parliamentary voice. That Shabana Mahmood and David Lammy, Zarah Sultana and her allies on the left, Kemi Badenoch or Rishi Sunak’s strands of Conservatism, and the liberal democracy of Josh Babarinde have contrasting views and contributions to make alongside their fellow citizens of a paler complexion is somehow ruled offside.
So the cartoonish nonsense of this memo simply misunderstands the nature of the challenge of a multi-ethnic democracy for any party that seeks to govern it. The truth is that it has become ever harder to generalise so sweepingly about ethnic minorities now that the patterns of opportunity and disadvantage within as well across each of the majority and minority groups in our society have never been more complex. This memo characterises Muslims as a monolithic bloc, suggesting their alliance with the left would – if Corbyn was to win half of the support of Nigel Farage – must amount to ‘an existential threat to British Jews’. A little noticed electoral fact is that the Muslim vote was much more fragmented in 2024 than before, not more monolithic. The intent may be solidarity with British Jews, but this narrative treats them as props too. There is no interest in the cross-pressures within a group that largely holds some commitment to Israel yet is strongly and increasingly anti-Netanyahu, and in which there is concern about antisemitism from both minority and majority groups, but where the view that Jews and Muslims are incompatible is certainly not the group norm.
It is fifteen years now – after a Maurice Glasman apology for a crude call to ban all immigration – since Jon Cruddas suggested that ‘Blue Labour’ politics needed to move beyond its ‘hand grenade’ phase. It was already obvious then that a grounded, sensible blue Labour project would spend less time making and then retracting deliberately provocative statements – whether about migrants, ethnic minorities, or women. Instead, it would attempt to practice the relational politics it preaches of mutual respect and common ground, and to integrate thinking about identity, belonging and economics into a more coherent social democratic communitarianism in a diverse and liberal society. A new UCL collection on the politics of left communitarianism might be a more useful read for the parliamentary class of 2024 than the anonymous memo.
A social democratic approach
The theme of a ‘progressive patriotism’ was central to the panels of the Global Progress Summit last week. It should be. No party has ever been trusted to govern a major democracy without a confidence and ease with its national symbols. As the author of How to be a Patriot, I naturally welcome the effort. I remain sceptical about whether a ‘progressive patriotism’ is the right way to think about or to reframe this response. The aim is less for the left to seek to ‘own’ national identity, and more to contribute to a civic understanding of identity, citizenship and belonging that can reach across political divides. It has become more important, in polarised times, to try to protect spaces and symbols which transcend political divides – from Remembrance to our sporting teams. The engagement of social democrats with national symbols should be normal, rather exceptional and difficult territory. That would provide a useful foundation for a more partisan political narrative which links that understanding of identity and belonging to its political programme about what needs to change.
The Labour Party in this generation shows little evidence of having thought seriously about its approach to a multi-ethnic society. The centre-left of the 2020s does not quite know if it wants to stand for multiculturalism or against it, because it has not done much work, not just on its public narrative, but its underlying philosophy, about what that might mean in political terms. Neither the instincts of Blue Labour – ‘its the woke, stupid’ – nor the soft left – ‘its the economy, stupid’ – extend much beyond the ritual exchanges of slogans. To get beyond ‘calling out’ racism to an agenda which tackles the causes of prejudice, fear, and hatred, social democrats will have to dig deeper.
So the memo is right to consider that an asymmetric multiculturalism can not provide the politics of integration that social democracy needs. A ‘communities of communities’ multiculturalism is too static to deal with changes within minority groups. British multiculturalism was largely ‘multifaithism’ – but the conflation of ethnicity, faith, and culture in a first generation when minorities were largely absent from the centres of political, economic and cultural power was insufficiently alive to the risks of reinforcing inequalities of voice across genders and generations within minority groups. Moreover, an asymmetric multiculturalism will risk generating a populist backlash effect if it lacks an account or offer to the majority group.
But the memo voices a bizarrely naive faith that the mobilisation of grievance politics on the populist right has the motivation or the resources to integrate Britain. The memo ratifies Farage's self-conception: that UKIP defeated the BNP by offering a more respectable populism, maintaining the cordon sanitaire against overt ethno-nationalism. Plenty of racists continue to be attracted to Reform, and its pledges to improve candidate vetting remain demonstrably inadequate, but the party does reactively expel those overt racists, when exposed by others, if it is a form of overt prejudice and extremism that the Mail on Sunday and Daily Mail would think had gone too far. Farage has the right strategic instinct in believing that he should maintain that boundary with overt racism at least. But Farage is now under more pressure about maintaining this boundary. Donald Trump did not maintain any such boundary to the racist right in the US – and Steve Bannon is active in advocating the dissolution of any barrier between the respectable and the racist right internationally. Elon Musk finds the Farage and Le Pen reassurance strategy boring – so wants to use the X platform to boost those like the AfD in Germany and Tommy Robinson in the UK.
Yet the author declares that ‘the critical task of brokering a political common ground between estranged interests such as Muslim communities and the white working class now lies in the hands of Nigel Farage and Reform’ without any evidence that Reform have any intention to try. Just after the memo was written, Farage responded to criticism from Elon Musk and Rupert Lowe that his mass deportation bid at 600,000 people was ‘weak sauce’ – increasing that to two million, by targeting legal migrants for deportation stripping those with permanent leave to remain of their status. The Labour Party was flat-footed in first noting that these plans were ‘unworkable and unfunded’, but the Prime Minister is now making the case that they are immoral and indeed racist too. There is a tug of war for the Farageist agenda – but the radicalisers, like ex-academic Matthew Goodwin who argues that model needs to be Trump’s second term rather than his first, are winning the argument. The latent pressure from the median target voter for reassurance, rather than radicalised authoritarianism, has no vocal champions within Reform itself.
The unheard grievances of the older half of the majority group for whom change has felt too fast are one significant part of the challenge of a diverse democracy. But it is the view of a vocal minority, not the majority that it imagines itself to be. A social democratic politics can hardly follow the instincts of the memo’s author in casting as as unpersons younger black and Asian Britons, or their white friends, whose experience is that the promise of fair chances has some way to go – and who face the attempt to relegitimise an overt ethno-nationalism that aggressively questions not just their status as equal citizens, but even our very presence in this country.
So a social democratic project should seek to combine the acknowledgement of the settled reality of a multi-ethnic and multi-faith society with a social democratic politics which respects difference but works to promote commonality and equal citizenship. At one point, the memo comes close to noticing that there is a hidden history of the Labour Party as an integration project within British society: in the early twentieth-century, Labour was the party which brought the labour movement and the working-classes into the political system; in the post-Powellite era, it was the vehicle for the engagement of Commonwealth migrants and their children into the political system.
In the twenty-first century, the success of social democracy depends on narrowing differences between groups: a politics of fair chances, equal voice, and shared missions that can appeal to those from the majority and minority groups, the cities and towns, villages and the coast, across the whole of the UK. Those who do not share the anonymous author’s instinct to hand the baton of seeking to integrate an anxious, fragmented and divided society over to Nigel Farage should be seeking to rediscover in social democracy a politics of solidarity that can bridge the divides of our diverse democracy.
Sunder Katwala is the director of British Future and author of How to be a Patriot.