I’m a left-leaning classical liberal. Always have been. Always will be. To me, it’s just the right thing to be. Which is why I’m so disappointed with the Left at the moment.

The state of left wing politics has been concerning me for some time. There are a huge number of people on the Left who are happy to violate the principles that I find to be important. Freedom of speech? Maybe but we should ban hate speech. Presumption of innocence? Okay but not with rape accusations. Individual rights? Screw that, we’ll have collectivism. And some of them claim to be liberals. No. You’re not liberals, you’re moral busybodies, you’re authoritarians, you’re cultural Marxists.

And I’m not exaggerating here. They appropriate Marxist principles from class issues and apply them to racial issues or gender issues. Traditional Marxists will label the proletariat as the oppressed and the bourgeoisie as the oppressor. Cultural Marxists say that women are oppressed and men are the oppressor or black people are oppressed and white people are the oppressor and so on. And it’s all dependent on the idea that everyone in a particular demographic is the same, which isn’t true.

We’ve lost our way. Mainstream left wing politics has become more obsessed with identity politics and political correctness. The public have become disenchanted with us. We saw that with Donald Trump’s election and the other Republican victories as well as the Brexit result. And don’t forget that the far right will gain a lot of ground in Europe over the next few years. If we don’t root out the problems among our own, then we can look forward to being left out in the cold forever.