I don’t suppose that Tim Nicholson thought of himself as a revolutionary who would anticipate a crisis in British politics when he took his employers to court in 2008 after being made redundant. He was furious, not because he had lost his job but because, as he saw it, his bosses had committed an unpardonable sin: hypocrisy. They had treated him unfairly, not because of his sex, race or disability but because he asked the firm to live up to its environmental promises. In short he was discriminated against because of what he believed, not who he was.
His courtroom retribution was part of a chain of events that contributed to last week’s parliamentary crisis. Events in the Commons revealed, if we needed any more evidence, that with political tools appropriate to the 18th century we are trying to manage the furies unleashed by 21st-century cultural and social divisions.
Today the theatre of politics remains but there are no great economic differences between our main parties. It is the conflicts over identity — immigration, family, religion and nationhood — that stir the blood. People tell pollsters that they care about the cost of living and the NHS; yet the vast sums poured into the latter and the tax cuts meant to ameliorate the former have barely caused a ripple in the polls. Politics needs to find a fresh and compelling answer to the question: “What kind of people do we want to be?”
That is why non-economic issues that many think marginal generate such controversy. Nicholson’s great passion was, and remains, the fight against climate change. In 2004 he and his partner, Joanne Bowlt, undertook an epic journey from Oxford (England) to Oxford (New Zealand) raising funds for the Red Cross, travelling in a 1954 Morris Oxford called Florence. They returned with a burning passion to stop the world stifling itself with carbon dioxide. In later years they would spend £60,000 making their own home as carbon-neutral as possible. They put their money where their mouths were.
As the manager in charge of his company’s environmental policies, Nicholson railed against his bosses’ extravagant use of air travel. He was frustrated by his colleagues’ refusal to provide necessary information so he could track the company’s carbon footprint; and he must have exploded with rage to learn that his boss had flown a member of the IT staff from London to Ireland to deliver a forgotten BlackBerry. Like all serious reformers he must have been a nightmare for bosses; I imagine the phrase “eco-fanatic’ might have been whispered in the executive washroom. Perhaps that is why when the opportunity arose he was seen as a prime candidate for redundancy.
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Nicholson refused to go quietly. A year later an employment tribunal ruled that his dismissal had taken place because of his profound belief in environmental policies. As chairman of the Equality and Human Rights Commission at the time I noted the decision with a little unease. We had persuaded a somewhat reluctant Labour administration to introduce laws protecting people against discrimination because of their religion or belief, largely with Britain’s burgeoning Muslim communities in mind. As a scientist who had grown up in a deeply Christian family, I thought that equating a commitment to the evolving understanding of climate change with faith in millennia-old religious doctrines revealed a misunderstanding of both but we were too busy to worry about tomorrow’s ethical dilemmas.
We should not have been. The case, Grainger plc v Nicholson, has now spawned a series of profoundly important judgments that are quietly transforming public life and posing knotty dilemmas for politics. Several categories of everyday beliefs have gained the status of religious doctrine. Courts have opined that veganism, pacifism, Scottish independence and anti-Zionism all meet the so-called Grainger criteria of seriousness without infringing on the rights of others.
What’s more, individuals holding these beliefs benefit from the protection of the 2010 Equality Act, even if the belief is held by just one person, as long as it is held sincerely. The one, holy and apostolic church to which you belong may have millions of adherents but it carries no more weight in discrimination law than the group of Jedi Knights feeling the force every Thursday night in the back of the Dog and Duck.
All this opens the door to the pre-eminence of personal identity. Other nations, with political systems that have grown out of religious or tribal divides, spawned parties — Germany’s Christian Democrats, India’s Bharatiya Janata, South Africa’s Inkatha Freedom Party — whose purpose is entirely to meet the demands of identity politics. But since feudal times we have seen ourselves as a nation of haves and have-nots. The Industrial Revolution turbocharged class divisions, reflected by our political parties. Politics became a means to reach accommodation between classes.
The problem is that when a political or social scheme of thought becomes recognised as a protected belief it becomes impervious to negotiation or compromise. No philosophical jiggery-pokery can make the virgin birth a bit less virginal; you either believe or you do not. Similarly, those who believe that all white people bear the mark of Cain will never be convinced otherwise by the decency of their Italian neighbours.
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And some of those who hold these views, like many religious fanatics believe that any action to further their identity beliefs can be justified. Set against the certainty of human extinction, qualms about inconvenience to a public official or her children are immoral. Believers who consider that the treatment of Gaza is evidence of a global conspiracy now imagine that their threats are the emanations of the righteous: only the damned would compromise in action.
Both groups will, like the anarchists of the 19th century, tell themselves that when victory is achieved the fainthearted who share their aims but not their tactics will finally understand that it was all necessary. Those on left and right who snort at the so-called “culture wars” are already decades out of date. Our political parties, originally formed in the struggle over the distribution of resources, between master and servant, countryside and city, worker and capitalist, are ill-suited to the task they face.
Our system is designed for negotiation — its tools are persuasion, accommodation and compromise — but big economic decisions are taking place in Beijing, Mumbai and San Francisco and we are not at that table. And when there is precious little left to redistribute, there is no force to a negotiation. The political choices that raise the passions increasingly rest on the answer to the non-economic question: “Who will best preserve, protect and defend the way of life I value?” When we blurred the line between religion and politics we started the culture wars.
