The rise of the new puritans, and the success of their culture war, has effectively sabotaged the class struggle of the traditional left. Identity politics is not progressive; it is a bourgeois fig leaf that often conceals the realities of economic inequality. As editor of spiked magazine Tom Slater has observed, it is much cheaper for corporations to hire diversity experts ‘to lecture staff about their alleged racism than it is to offer them better pay and working conditions’. The ideology of Critical Social Justice has never caught on in poorer communities, because those who are facing
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