The liberal, secular world view may hold sway over western elites, but it is struggling to answer the conservative challenge
by David Goodhart / March 19, 2012 / Leave a commentPublished in April 2012 issue of Prospect Magazine
Elite colleges produce WEIRD people: Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich and Democratic
The Righteous Mind
by Jonathan Haidt (Allen Lane, £20)
Together
by Richard Sennett (Allen Lane, £25)
A few years ago I was at a 60th birthday party for a well-known Labour MP. Many of the leading thinkers of the British centre-left were there and at one point the conversation turned to the infamous Gordon Brown slogan “British jobs for British workers,” from a speech he had given a few days before at the Labour conference.
The people around me entered a bidding war to express their outrage at Brown’s slogan which was finally triumphantly closed by one who declared, to general approval, that it was “racism, pure and simple.”
I remember thinking afterwards how odd the conversation would have sounded to most other people in this country. Gordon Brown’s phrase may have been clumsy and cynical but he didn’t actually say British jobs for white British workers.
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