David Lammy

David Lammy is the Labour M.P. For Tottenham in London, currently Shadow Secretary of State for Justice and Shadow Lord Chancellor. He’s also a politician that I frequently agree with, and so I was keen to read his new book. For those who are not familiar with him, he sets out the ‘tribes’ that have made up his identity at the beginning of the book:

‘I am from Guyana, or at least both my parents were. ... my DNA is a close match to members of the Tuareg tribe in Niger, West Africa, but I do not speak their language. I grew up in the British Caribbean community in a single-parent household in Tottenham, but I spent term time as a choirboy in a boarding school in Peterborough. I am British, English and a Londoner, but my answer to where I am from changes depending on how far I am from my first home on Dongola Road in Tottenham. I am a member of Parliament for the Labour Party but I did not spend my time at university wearing a red rosette and knocking on doors. I am a lifelong Spurs fan, but occasionally I lend my support to Peterborough United F.C.. I have faith in Christianity and its traditions, but my views are progressive. I grew up working-class with no elite connections, but these days I am one of the Queen’s Privy Councillors, and I am friends with the man who became the forty-fourth president of the United States of America. I am black, but I am happily married to a white woman, with three mixed-race kids.

These are several of my identities. Each classifies me according to a characteristic that qualifies me for membership of a particular group. My identities are fluid and cross-cutting and a couple of them even contradict’

In Tribes, subtitled ‘A Search for Belonging in a Divided Society’ David Lammy argues that the natural tendency of individuals to feel that they belong is being subverted by modern society. As individualism is encouraged, and community structures that once held people together weaken, individuals are looking to new identity groups to find belonging. By looking first at the places where he himself has felt a sense of belonging, Lammy then moves on to the issues that increased tribalism is causing:

‘Unquestioning loyalty to a group matched by unthinking opposition to enemies can undermine our ability for intellectuel honesty. When issues are split into Labour versus Tory, Democrat versus Republican, or Leave versus Remain, they are always oversimplified. We are not always able to make an honest assessment of the other side’s policy idea. We judge an idea’s merit according to its messenger rather than its content. This has the secondary effect of blinding us to bad behaviour within our own group. Members of a tribe are predisposed to closing their eyes when confronted with a fellow member’s wrongdoing.’

Certainly, the U.K has never felt more politically divided as it does currently. Labels of ‘leaver’ or ‘remainer’ (frequently remodelled as the insult ‘remoaner’) are still thrown at people who have opposing views over Brexit, years after the referendum that supposedly decided the matter. Polls show majority support for independence in Scotland, and even Wales, where independence was historically pretty much a non-starter, showed almost 40% support for independence in a recent poll, something that would have been unheard of even 10 years ago. And in Northern Ireland the percentage wanting a united Ireland has been increased by Brexit, so that it seems almost an inevitability in the medium term. And increasing virulent divisions are seen about many other current societal issues, from the requirements for COVID restrictions, to environmental issues and to the case for immigration. And more and more, rather than make a rational case for the argument, the dispute involves an attack on the individual holding the ‘wrong’ views, effectively an attack for being a member of the wrong tribe.

This is a thoughtful book putting forward some interesting suggestions on how to bring people together, harnessing their desire for a sense of belonging in a positive way. I’m not sure I agree with all of them, but definitely an interesting read.… (meer)