Britain’s rulers endorse trans ideology, as part of their wider embrace of identity politics, says Marxist John Rees, a leading member of Counterfire. (Establishment ideological contradictions and the left 29 November 2021).
The “the rainbow of minorities”, he says, find support from most “of the political establishment, parts of the broadcast media, the NGO universe, the Human Resources departments of most public and private institutions” and from “much of the Labour Party and trade-union bureaucracy,” the establishment’s “labour movement echo chambers.” This support is, of course, tokenistic. So, for example, black people are “visually prominent in prospectuses and publicity, celebrated in black history month, and promoted in public,” but not given resources to deal with discrimination. But this tokenism helps the establishment re-legitimise itself after decades of austerity.
A minority within the establishment, Rees says, replaces tokenism with right wing populism, taking “a more traditional, often socially conservative…