In this video (posted 19 October 2022) anti-white racism is criticised by Nick Timothy, chief of staff for 10 Downing Street under Theresa May, British prime minister from 2016 to 2019. Timothy describes institutions, public and private, as being “tightly controlled” by militant identity politics as practised by “academics, activists, HR managers and diversity officers”. He likens this institutional control to living under a communist dictatorship.
This video was produced by the New Culture Forum under the leadership of Peter Whittle. The Forum has emerged as a champion of British identity at a time of unprecedented attacks on public monuments and the innocence of school children. It is heartening to see high status individuals joining the fight to defend British democracy.
And this is a fine speech as far as it goes. Timothy is clearly disturbed by the rapid deterioration of British political culture due to the authoritarian left’s capture of institutions. He echoes the concern voiced in the United States, such as by Professor Victor Davis Hanson, who reports comprehensive institutional capture in that country. Hanson discussed an article he published in the American Greatness website, titled “This isn’t your father’s left-wing revolution”. The gist of his argument is that the cultural-Maoist revolution of the 1960s and 1970s was a bottom-up, easy-going, free speech affair. The organised leftists and SDS murderers were small in number. This new cultural revolution is top down; it is being conducted from within the centres of power.
Unlike Hanson, Timothy thinks the problem of Anglophobic identity politics has emerged only in the last few years, not ten years as suggested by one questioner. Perhaps this explains why Timothy did not speak up sooner. Presumably he disagrees with analysts such as Professor Eric Kaufmann, who traces multicultural ideology back to the late 19th century, and dates its emergence as a dominant political force in the late 1960s and 1970s, at least in the United States? (The Rise and Fall of Anglo America)
In the 1960s many commentators perceived a deterioration in Britain’s race relations. In that light, it would be interesting to know whether Timothy sympathises people from that era who observed some of the same trends that Timothy perceives now. For example, does he think Enoch Powell accurately warned about ethnic replacement, censorship, mass violence, and people’s fear of coming under the “whip hand” of immigrant minorities? Or does he think that Ted Heath, the Conservative Party leader, got it right when he sacked Powell for speaking up?
Anyone who advertises himself as a defender of truth and of traditional Britain should be expected to have positions on these questions.