Deborah Morgan

I think the discomfort is less to do with the antiwoke movement and more to do with how you fear being perceived because of the people who happen to agree with you on this one issue. Many of us don’t have the luxury of caring how others perceive us. As I’ve already explained, many of the GCs you dismiss as far right are working class who have watched their neighbourhoods and communities change beyond recognition. There are parts of London that make me think Ireland is the most salvageable country on earth. These people don’t have another ten years to waste waiting for Labour or the Greens to get their shit together and call a spade a spade. So when Reform or the Conservatives come along and start addressing concerns that the left has spent years either dismissing or demonising people for raising, of course you’re going to find those with otherwise liberal views supporting them. What exactly did you expect? You claim to understand women’s struggles regardless of who they are, where they’re from or which God they believe in, yet so much of what I see from you is contempt for women who don’t share your political allegiances. You cannot claim to understand people while refusing to understand the circumstances that have shaped their politics. And that’s exactly where I think you’ve failed. In Ireland, we’ve had gay men murdered in recent years in attacks involving men who came here from outside Europe. I’ve been contacted by gay men who say they’ve been attacked, chased and harassed by newcomers. Do you seriously think these gays have the luxury of waiting for the left to stop calling them bigots for raising concerns and start taking their experiences seriously? Do you think the working class women who feel their communities have become less safe are concerned about whether their opinions might upset somebody at a feminist conference? It is an extraordinarily privileged position to sit comfortably above all of this, deciding which political concerns are respectable and which people deserve to be cast out of the movement. As with gender ideology, the consequences of migration policy are not distributed equally. Working class communities experience the changes most directly, while the people lecturing them about tolerance and writing essays are insulated from those consequences. And the irony is that people like you have spent so long throwing the label far right at anyone who refuses to toe your political line that you’ve helped make the term practically meaningless. Which is a whole other can of worms. You don’t have to agree with these people. You don’t have to vote the way they vote, but if your entire understanding of their politics begins and ends with the assumption that they’re ignorant, hateful or morally defective, you haven’t understood them at all. You’ve just found a convenient excuse not to listen.