41: “Taking the knee” and “cancel culture”: Trevor Phillips and Karen Harradine
Cancel culture, editorial purges and your sporting heroes kneeling before kickoff. Why should sport be a promotional platform to institutionalize potentially divisive ideas? Unlike other countries, English football's popularity was built on its competitive integrity and little else. I just want to watch Aston Villa lose in peace in an ideologically free zone and wonder to myself why the jobs market excludes me. What is antiracism and is it the same as being against racism? - and if not, what exists between those definitions? Is antisemitism the elephant in the vaccuum? If we all agree racism is a problem is change even possible when the establishment of public sector, charities, even sports governing bodies are rushing to be associated with an organisation which also wants to defund the police and crush capitalism. Not to mention their plan for Israel. And is the silent majority of Britain made up of factory workers, lollipop ladies and warehouse operatives miffed to be told they’re guilty of white privilege? Over the next two episodes, I talk to some of the leading critics of these sudden events to define this newly-charged identity politics which it has triggered. Trevor Phillips has been there done that, a doyenne of arts, equality and data analytics, he’s also among many other roles, the former chief of the Equalities and Human Rights Commission, who have completed their report into Labour antisemitism which dogged Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership and threatens Sir Keir Starmer’s leadership. Writer and campaigner and Conservative Woman, Karen Harradine believes that while Trump and the Tories are in power, it’s an unelected illiberal left which dominates cultural and civic institutions. And coming up in the next episode: Educationalist and headmistress, Katharine Birbalsingh, who is proud to be British and wishes people would stop telling her black and Asian pupils that somehow their identity lies elsewhere even if they and their parents were born here. And director of the Free Speech Union, Inaya Folarin Iman, who says we’re navel-gazing in the narrow world of identity politics when the human condition of achievement and fulfilment is so much greater. I need your help to keep this voluntary service going, so if you’ve listened to a few episodes and eagerly anticipate the next one, buy me a coffee here! Thanks! ⤵️ https://ko-fi.com/jonnygould