good people and bad people or why identity politics fails us

‘ There are good people and bad people’ told former co-leader of the Green Party Jonathan Bartley to Judge Hellman in court on the last day of the hearing Shahrar Ali vs The Green Party of England and Wales. Slightly mystified, the judge asked ‘ ‘which side were you on ?’ to which Barltey replied, somewhat hesitantly, ‘in the middle’.

A few months after the event that lead to the hearing, Bartley, who had co-led with Caroline Lucas and then with Sian Berry, had apparently found the conflict between the good, the bad and the ugly so stressful that he ‘could not take it any more’ and handed in his resignation.

The problem with identinarians is that they live in an infantile world where life is a struggle between ‘good’ oppressed people and ‘bad’ or even ‘evil’ oppressors. And they strongly believe that their mission is to literally get rid of bad people.

They do this by seeking to silence and attack those who disagree with them, whether it be about gender ideology or strategic priorities. Identinarians do not need to listen to the ‘evil’ opposition or consider complex arguments. They are always right. They also tend to have fixations. Their obsession with hierarchies of privileges according to group identities or the politicising of mental health is used to destroy open mindedness and resilience.

But unlike fairy tales, reality exists in a material world and it is complex. Everyone one is unique in some ways, but can be the same in other ways. A poor white woman, for example, might have more in common with a poor black man than she does with a rich white woman even though they are of a different race and gender. Identinarians are simply not equipped to deal with the messy realities of class and life.

Their post modernist ideological rejection of basic scientific approaches to knowledge and therefore truth has taken them – and the party leadership team with them- into such a confused place that it is becoming harder for members to know what is true and what is not and where the party is going. Not left, not right, but… Avanti !