So, what do virtuous, liberal, democrats do now? This is the question of our age. Each new event, whether domestic or international, forces us to confront it.
Take Iran. Should we throw petals at the feet of “peacemakers” Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu? Because they have despatched Iran’s theocratic despot and his vile buddies?
Decades ago a feminist psychotherapist, a friend of mine, self-immolated in a street in Tehran, in protest against the violently enforced dress codes for females. Citizens who rebelled against the theocratic controllers were savagely punished. Artists, teachers, writers, human rights lawyers have been indefinitely imprisoned; gay people hanged; women who refused the headscarf beaten, others killed by “morality” police. Egalitarians and activists have yearned for this to end. But they are revolted by the American and Israeli crusade to achieve “regime change from the skies” as Keir Starmer pithily, and unusually courageously, described it.
Some of the possible “winners” of such regime change are equally distasteful. The man who would be Shah, crown prince Reza Pahlavi, an exile in the US, profusely thanked the US President and tweeted that his “heart aches” for the three Americans killed and five wounded so far. Not, at the time of writing, for the 165 dead, according to Iranian state media, after a girls’ school was bombed to shreds. Or other innocent victims. Pahlavi’s father was an evil tyrant.
For decency – one of our most important values – to survive in this age of organised chaos, liberal lefty activists will have to communicate complicated, nuanced messages. We have to be understood, promote our beliefs with conviction, admit our failures, and meet real people.
Last Monday, I mingled with young British-Iranian protesters outside the Iranian embassy who hoped the Shah would return. I showed them my book, Refusing the Veil, and articles championing anti-ayatollah resisters. Then conversations got tricky. They believe the Shah’s reign was full of grace and goodness. I told them how it really was, full of rank corruption. And reminded them that after the West’s wars on Iraq and Libya, those countries never recovered. Some reacted as if I was a crazy old bird. But three of them were interested. Small victories. Our messy modern reality demands an honest appraisal of the facts – and the maintenance of our strongly held beliefs.
This is as true of the situation in Iran as it is of our ever more disorderly, unpredictable domestic politics. We must maintain similar vigilance and active engagement. We can’t let ideologues poison our democracy, tear apart the nation and scavenge on its remains. But to beat them back we must be robust as well as painfully honest. Immediately after losing the Gorton and Denton by-election, Matthew Goodwin, Reform’s losing candidate, and Nigel Farage, his party leader, kicked up about postal voting and “family voting”. They mean wily Muslim voters.
Democracy Volunteers, an election observer group, did say they had seen the “highest level of family voting at any election” at Gorton and Denton in their last 10 years of observation. But the same group also in 2022 observed “family voting in 25 per cent of all polling stations in the UK – 21 per cent in England, 42 per cent in Northern Ireland, 19 per cent in Scotland and 34 per cent in Wales. [And that] 70 per cent of those affected by family voting were women and that it was not limited to any one ethnic group or another”.
Why is it only now that “family voting” has become an issue? Think about this. Forty-two per cent in Northern Ireland. Are there secret enclaves of brown, beardy men there, warping democracy? Prejudice has potency. It gets to parts the truth can’t reach. Farage threatens to end the voting rights of Commonwealth citizens. And Kemi Badenoch has also joined in and is spitting out badly thought-through words about cohesion, like, “We will replace the promotion of multiculturalism in schools with a national story”.
Anti-racists have rightly slammed this feeding frenzy. Hannah Spencer, the new Green MP for Gorton and Denton, has kicked back: “Everyone’s vote is equal. Farage today is talking racist nonsense and is trying to sound like his hero Donald Trump who also tried to deny the results of an election he lost”. A brilliant riposte.
That isn’t enough. Regaining trust means being open about hitherto buried problems. This is one of those. In some working-class South Asian communities, male community leaders and family members have been determining the democratic choices of their women. While investigating this way back, a Hindu seamstress told me her mum back in their Indian village voted freely, while in Leicester, her husband and father-in-law made the decision for her.
This was in Keith Vaz’s constituency. Big Labour names, like Roy Hattersley, benefitted from the sexist practise and so never challenged it. Hattersley wrote of his former constituents in 2005: “I always assumed that…mothers and aunts (often on instruction) voted the same way as their husbands”. I know racists will use what I write for nefarious purposes, but the truth must still be exposed. Base behaviours are found across the races. That should be a baseline for anti-racism.
Committed democrats and defenders of international laws, justice and equality need to develop new insights and dexterities, fresh tactics and sophistication in this bleak new world. That means refusing to simply “take sides” and being prepared to be attacked by enemies as well as allies, holding complex views, yet remaining true to the principles above. You have to do this incessantly, even when exhausted and dispirited. It’s a mission to save our world.
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