There’s a battle under way at the heart of British politics and reactionaries are in the ascendancy. With the Brexit wind in their sails, when an issue of history or culture comes into prominence, they set the terms of the debate. Whether it is the singing of Land of Hope and Glory and Rule Britannia on the closing night of the Proms; history teaching in schools; statues in public spaces: the Right has a consistent story to tell and they find plenty of places to say it. Whether it is tub-thumpers like Richard Littlejohn, Rod Liddle and Toby Young; opportunist academics like Matthew Goodwin and Eric Kaufman; or Etonian intellectuals like Douglas Murray and David Goodhart, they tell a common story about Britain’s proud past that is now being trashed by ‘metropolitan liberal elitists’ and the ‘woke’ mob who are threatening our ancient liberties.
In response, progressives are allowing themselves to be distracted and pigeon-holed, ignoring the economic and social content of many women’s, race and environmental issues or paying excessive attention to relatively fringe topics. In the process, the traditional alliance between manual workers, the public sector and middle class intellectuals is being torn asunder to the delight of the cultural conservatives.
A pivotal but rarely discussed figure in this assault has been John Gray. He made his name as a philosopher and author but since his academic retirement has achieved wider prominence as a political commentator. He has been a regular contributor and main feature writer at the New Statesman for almost a decade and more recently a regular columnist for ‘Unherd’, the Conservative on-line web-site. His assessments and analyses are hostile to the left and overwhelmingly gloomy about the prospects for any progressive change, whether in Britain or across the world. A set of consistent themes run through his regular, lengthy essays. They have been uncontested within the New Statesman’s pages over the decade and have been instrumental in its shift away from being a heterogeneous – but confirmed – journal of the Left. Both here, and in his more apocalyptic columns in ‘Unherd’, Gray has been one of the intellectual leaders of the nationalist Right, where his academic record lends additional weight and gravitas to his writing.
