It has been a grim week. The reality that even a small minority is prepared to engage in violence, bringing racist language and acts to our streets, is something we must confront – by prosecuting those involved and challenging the ideas of the far right.
We must also step back and challenge the story they tell about our country. For their own ends, politicians and commentators on the right claim that we are seeing a wider backlash against liberalism – as if the idea of toleration of those different from ourselves is imposed top-down by elites and being rejected by the masses.
But if we pay attention to the data, not GB News, we see that Britain is, across almost all issues, becoming a more liberal and tolerant country. The right is losing the culture wars. The proportion of us accepting homosexuality, abortion and divorce as “justified” doubled between 2009 and 2022, according to the World Values Survey.
While concerns about migration levels have been high at times this century (unsurprisingly, given our failure to build the housing and infrastructure a larger population requires), that has come alongside a progressive shift in attitudes to identity and race. In 2013, just 25% of us said being born in Britain wasn’t important to being “truly British”; that has more than doubled to 54%. These days, only 3% of us think you need to be white to be “truly British”.
Burning a car takes yobs minutes, we know building strong, cohesive communities is the work of years. But we mustn’t let thugs on our streets, or pundits claiming those thugs somehow represent a silent majority, rewrite our national story. We have work to do, but Britain is a more liberal country than it has ever been.
Torsten Bell is Labour MP for Swansea West and author of Great Britain? How We Get Our Future Back
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