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now I'll get attacked - "am I left wing" like it really matters to be part of an identified group rather than ideas, irrespective of being left or right, traditionally speaking.

- voted labour my whole life
- literal member of the Labour Party for well over a decade up to this year
- supporter of trade unions
- left wing degree
- working class background
- believes in public ownership and wealth distribution for non competitive industries and essential services

But am I left wing? Who cares.

The "left" (like it's a thing to be identified, like a body of people you can label) has spent the last 30 years steadily moving away from simple, understandable economic arguments about wages, housing, inequality and corporate power, and into identity politics and guilt-by-association arguments that are incredibly easy for the media and large corporate interests to counter or caricature. You question immigration? You think perhaps the EU has too much power? Tory / Fascist / Racist etc. People will scoff, it happens - it happens on this forum all the time. If you don't see it then you probably do it.

Most people instinctively understand arguments about stagnant wages, rising housing costs, wealth concentration, corporate profiteering, declining public services etc. They do not instinctively connect with highly academic cultural or identity-based politics, especially when it comes across as moralising. People just don't get it and that's the core problem. Some of that thinking is right, some of it isn't but the focus of the left on it has fucked the left and it's so easy for the right or the press or twitter or whatever to control the narrative and basically control what we would traditionally call the working class.

Ironically, large corporations are often perfectly happy to support symbolic cultural politics because it costs them very little, while avoiding any real discussion about redistribution of wealth, labour power, tax structures or market concentration. At the same time, while the deeper problems in society are far more about economic inequality and corporate influence than they are about benefit fraud or people “scrounging”, I also think it’s reasonable to question whether the current welfare model is sustainable long term. Demographics, immigration, healthcare costs, ageing populations, debt levels and slowing productivity growth are real pressures.

You can believe both - that inequality and wealth concentration are the core structural problems but that the welfare system in its current form probably needs to be reformed.

But what grates me is the gatekeeping. Maybe that's because I'm a Tory, or something.