New Statesman: British politics is being destroyed by a total lack of shame

The Conservative Party has said, rightly, that the ongoing problems with anti-Semitism in the Labour ranks are a scandal. But its correct criticisms of the Labour Party, ought to, if she had any sense of shame, mean that Kemi Badenoch wouldn’t have felt able to say that when the Muslim Council of Britain says there are institutional problems with Islamophobia in the Tory Party, it does so for a “political motive”. [...]

Scruton’s thesis is that the problem with the European project is that it has become an empire, that while there are good and bad empires, good empires seek to “protect local loyalties and customs under a canopy of civilisation and law”, but bad empires have no respect for the need for nations and their traditions. The European project sees national pride only through the prism of the destructive conflicts in the first half of the 20th century. Although he is more rhetorically sympathetic to Hungarian Jews’ inability to distinguish between positive and negative forms of nationalism, it is impossible to rescue this section from the charge of repeating a series of anti-Semitic tropes: that Jewish intellectuals and George Soros in particular form part of a supra-national project, and the classic “divided loyalties” trope that Jews are uneasy with their own nations. The rhetorical acknowledgement of existing problems of anti-Semitism in Hungarian society should be taken no more seriously than the same in the god knows how many rhetorical flourishes made by Labour politicians on the issue. [...]

This lack of shame allows MPs to, with a straight face, retain ministerial office in the face of scandal, defend the indefensible and powers the breakdown of our political norms. As so often when politics breaks down, the first victims are those least able to defend themselves: in this case, the poor and people with Jewish and Muslim cultural heritage. While we ought to care about this in its own right, history should teach us that what starts with bad treatment of minorities very rarely ends without bad treatment of everyone else.

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