The Omnicause and the death of the left

How the far-left is killing the centre, and jeopardising all hope of a compassionate, effective government

Last week, the Met Police wrote to an activist group called ‘Defend Our Juries’ to plead with them to postpone their rally for the weekend.

Defend Our Juries, in spite of the name, has almost nothing to do with juries and almost everything to do with themselves. They are protesting - brace yourself - against the arrest of protestors who were arrested for protesting the proscription of another protest group.

It’s far, far removed from any real issue or any real suffering. These are, mostly, well-off, metropolitan white people who are protesting against the fact that other well-off, metropolitan whites were arrested for protesting.

For these protestors, nothing is more important than themselves and their allies. These causes are not really about ending suffering - they are about positioning themselves in the tribe of likeminded, virtuous saviours.

Your Party, your problem

There’s a degree of absurdism to all of this. It’s protests about protests about protests, all the way down.

And, increasingly, the left isn’t even holding a consistent position. They believe they have the right to march in support of a proscribed terrorist group, but others can’t march in support of Tommy Robinson (both should be proscribed and banned). They want to champion women’s safety while shutting down conversations on grooming gangs and women’s spaces. They take the side of states that have anti-LGBTQ laws, just to stick it to the centrists. They are opposed to prisons, but want their political enemies arrested.

The collapse of Jeremy Corbyn’s “Your Party” is the perfect illustration of the ideological inconsistency and selfishness at the heart of the modern far-left. Within weeks of it forming, the party - which was fundamentally led by two individuals - somehow split into three factions.

The project was never about the people or even about politics. It was always about the egos of Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana. That they spend more time airing their own spats than putting forward policy positions says it all. It was the perfect illustration of the far-left’s egocentric approach to politics: this is not about doing good, it’s about looking woke.

Populism vs virtu-ism

This is almost the parallel of the right-wing populist approach. The populist (Trump, Farage) says things that are untrue and ideologically inconsistent: but that rallies and energises his base. He is unable to do difficult things, like reform welfare, because his primary goal is popularity among his base: not improving the state.

The far-left equivalent could perhaps be called the virtu-ist. Still ideologically inconsistent, still heavily reliant on untruths, still focused on rallying a base rather than improving the state.

The difference is that the virtu-ist is obsessed with their self-righteousness. They take this position, not because it is popular, but because it is dogmatically, undeniably the correct one.

The policy position of the virtu-ist is sometimes called the ‘Omnicause’: a general sort of opposition to the status quo, an increasingly complex set of perspectives and views that are united only by their self-righteousness and their intensity.

The supporters of the Omnicause lack any sense of perspective, and that hurts all of our ability to push the things that really matter. To them, cancelling JK Rowling, stopping arms dealing and ending all oil production must happen absolutely immediately, else the world will end tomorrow.

But what that means is that when sensible, grown-up moderates make serious warnings about the real threat that Reform UK poses, or the threat of climate change: we are ignored, because the country lumps us in with a loony left that sees every issue as imminently earth-shattering and world-ending.

It’s killing the moderate left

Trump won the 2024 US election because Joe Biden didn’t hobble off the field early enough. But he also won because the Democrats were not fast enough to disavow an increasingly frenetic far-left.

If Keir Starmer loses the next election, the far-left will be equally to blame.

Some of the MPs that stood and won with Labour rosettes now take every opportunity to undermine the government and the Prime Minister in aid of the Omnicause. This will lead to a Reform government. The far-left influencers (like Owen Jones, Diane Abbott and Novara Media) are pushing many of their supporters directly into Reform’s arms. Even when they’re not, they are weakening the centre-left enough to strengthen Reform.

Either way: the far-left are directly angling for a Reform UK government.

And frankly, I’m convinced they would be gleeful at that. They’ll get to go out and protest every week! They’ll go viral on Twitter with their rants about Farage! And they’ll get to say “I told you so” to the Labour moderates who insisted the centre-left could win elections.

Losing is at the heart of the far-left project: the entire foundation of their position is hating the winners.

But these far-left grifters are not the ones that would be hurt by a Reform government.

It’s everyday Brits who would see their finances decimated by the mismanagement of the Reform liars and loons. It’s British citizens who were born overseas and would be conscious of the risk of wrongful deportation by an incompetent government. It’s gay and trans people that just want to get by in life and would instead see liberal reforms rolled back by a government that panders to American Trumpites.

The only way to subdue the extreme right is with moderation - not with the extreme left. If the centre-left and moderates unashamedly disavow the extremism of the far-left, they will win back the support of the middle ground. The far-left will hit back with indignation: the answer is to ignore them.