Our identities are tearing us apart

A major study has shown that between left and right we share little identity in common now, but that that is also true within the left. Without collective identity can we reverse polarisation?

It seems like everyone wants to try and understand why our society has become more divided, fragmented and angry. Their motives are not always convincing, they tend to find only what they already believed and few engaged in the pursuit seem to ask themselves difficult questions. But better that the question is being asked than not.

What we need is less rhetoric and finger-pointing (Reform did not 'break Britain', they just capitalised) and more data on which to base our investigation. The core text should really be The Spirit Level and its forensic dissection of the real effects of economic inequality. If you want to look at any individual indicator, look at the cluster around 'antisocial behaviour'. That is a decent proxy for social disillusionment.

But I came across some data this week which, for me, is pretty startling and tells us a lot about our situation. It is all about identity and politics. What I want to argue here is that it appears to show that on one side of the political spectrum people have adopted identity positions that tend to unite them while on the other they have emphasised identity positions which are fundamentally divisive.

The data comes from a study on attitudes to national identity in England which was published this week. This is a very valuable piece of work and contains an awful lot of really revealing data. But what startled me most wasn't widely covered and only got passing reference in the report itself (understandable because it is a little tangential to the aim of the report).

The poll involved 1,500 respondents in England being asked in-depth questions about their identity and how it relates to their political, social and emotional decisions and views. Right at the end it asks people to list their 'top three personal identities' selected from a pretty long list of options. This then of course enables that data to be broken down by other factors, and I'm looking at electoral voting behaviour.

Let's start with Reform. The top three identities its voters self-declare are English (44%), being a parent (37%) and British (27 per cent). The pattern is similar for the Tories other than ordering – they are parents first (38%), English second (35%) and British third (31%).

Now let's skip to the other extreme; the Greens, who are furthest left on the political spectrum. For them identity is dominated by their age (33%) their sex or gender (30%) and being parents (24%). But this slightly underplays the effect. If we connect sexuality to sex/gender then we get up to 45 per cent. Sex, gender and sexuality as an identity factor is miles ahead of anything else.

Labour is not dissimilar, again varying in order and strength but not selection, with parent at the top (28%), age next (27%) and sex/gender after that (26%). If you add sexuality into sex and gender, it comes top at 32%.

(Interestingly, almost all the parties have 'spouse or partner' as an identity sitting at very close to the same rate of about one in five, the Greens a bit lower, Reform and the Tories a touch higher. But 'parent' varies much more – with right-of-centre parties being ten points more likely to see themselves as 'a parent'. Parent-and-spouse combined would top every party.)

For the sake of completeness, the Lib Dems have age and gender tied on 26% and being a parent next at 25%. (I'm taking Labour to be left of centre and Lib Dems as centre, doubtful as that is these days, though political affiliation in this study is 'at the last election' so before Starmer's 'Reforming' of Labour).

Now let's have a look at some of the other findings to see what they tell us. More Reform voters identify as working class than Labour voters, but at 16% and 11% respectively they're not a big cohort. At 1-2-3-4-6 per cent across the parties (Lib Dems at top), no-one wants to admit they're middle class.

In right-of-centre parties, English identity dominates, but British sneaks it from the centre to the left – but no party has even one-in-three voters who think of themselves as British (the Greens at the bottom with 12%).

There are a load of 'hot topic' issues that the political classes think are big identity issues that don't make a dent here. Brexiter, Remainer, Unionist and Nationalist all score under 10 per cent (well, one in ten Reform voters identifies as a Brexiter in their top three), and no-one has unionist or nationalist at above four per cent.

Slightly surprisingly for me is the significance of 'home town or region'. I'd have bet that the liberal left would be lower on this score and Reform higher, but it's the other way round (though not by a lot, and hovering around one in five for most parties). In fact it goes Labour-Lib Dem-Green-Tory/Reform.

Left and centre parties have closer to one-in-six picking their occupation compared to about one in ten for right parties. But 'health or disability' is remarkably consistent – 13% for three parties and only Reform a marginal outlier and even then only two points below the Greens at nine per cent. Of all the other options only 'European' for the Lib Dems (13%), 'ethnicity' for Greens (13%) and 'faith' for Lib Dems and Tories (both 10%) make double figures. Well, unless you count 13% of Greens who think they have no identity (which is basically impossible...).

“As it stands, the reality is that the left doesn’t want to unite and neither does the nation as a whole”

There is one overwhelming conclusion I want to draw from this, and it is not about the numbers in each category but about the nature of the categories themselves. Nationality is a wide, all-encompassing identity. Those who say they are British or English will have different interpretations of what that means, but they will start from a shared assumption. It is a 'connecting' identity.

By comparison, if you pick 'gender/sex' then there are at least three different 'tribes' included. Likewise, gender and sexuality have at least four clear options. As for age; well, since this is adults I think we could probably agree that we have at least 'Silent Generation', 'Baby Boomers' 'Generation X', 'Millennials' and 'Zoomers' (or whatever we end up calling them) still living, so that's at least five options.

Or to put it another way, I could have picked gender, age and sexuality as my three top options and you could have picked the same and we could mean exactly opposite things. I could be saying 'middle-aged straight guy' and you could be saying '21-year-old lesbian woman'. On the left side of the political spectrum our identity categories all need sub-categories. On the right they don't.

In fact if we take parent-and-spouse to be an odd category which is at the same time 'an awful lot of us' and yet also 'each of us alone', it is hard to identify a single unifying identity which is prevalent on the left of the political spectrum. You can be as intellectual as you want in 'deconstructing colonial social formations' when considering something like 'national identity' (be it in this case English, British or European).

What you can't do is argue that it isn't something we share, something that makes us feel connected. It is a misreading of a seminal text called Imagined Communities to believe that it means a community that is created in the imagination isn't a community. In the modern world few of us really know all the members of any community we are a part of, but that doesn't make them 'fake'.

Here's my guess; until some point probably after 1990 we mostly all shared at least one identity. At one point it would probably have included 'Christian' in addition to 'British'. I have no interest or space here to examine whether that identity-sharing was good, or real, or meaningful. I'm only arguing that it was shared, that two people who claimed the same identity would expect to be able to have a conversation.

That is still the primary feature of rightwing politics. They might hate each other on a personal level and have disagreements about strategy, but they all believe they're trying to achieve something like the same thing. Over on the left we don't have time to fight the right because we've all chosen personal, conflicting identities and we've all created ideologies around them.

Right at this moment in Scotland the most heated fight is between people identifying themselves as feminists and those identifying as trans activists. Both of those are positions on the left of politics, both would be placed in gender/sex.

Extending beyond that, there is now virtually no identity that in any substantial sense connects us across right and left. The left is no longer arguing about 'the meaning of Britain', it has walked away from the concept of the nation state into 'boutique policy for my group'. When I was young you'd get someone from the left and someone from the right arguing about what Britishness means.

Now, the left would reject the conversation. There is no connecting tissue at the social level or the ideological level. The death of class as a factor in people's minds has ripped apart one of the defining and connecting elements of left politics.

Remember, this is an English study and the aftermath of the 2014 independence referendum probably makes Scotland a bit different – but how much different? You don't usually find me arguing that 'Britain's problems are created by the left' but this data raises that question. Did the left embrace hyper-individualism above and beyond the right? It rather looks like it.

Has it abandoned any obvious uniting project? There remain elements of it, but it isn't shared. Or rather, everyone has their own 'uniting project' and they all disagree what it is. And as society we're siloed into identities that really do divide us. Unless the left is happy to decline further (and I mean left in the very broadest sense), we are going to have to find some uniting factor. It should have been economic equality and climate change...

As it stands, the reality is that the left doesn't want to unite and neither does the nation as a whole. We're rather like addicts clinging to our next fix of identity which is custom built to make us feel good and important. So we're all excluded from each other's thinking, from each other's empathy.

If you want to understand the rise of the [fill in blank for whatever morbid social development you're most worried about], ask yourself if your identity is the solution – or the problem. If you can't find something you share with your opponent, who is the divisive one? And if we keep going like this, what's left? I think these are big and important questions. We ought to be talking about them.