Billy Bragg’s attack on JK Rowling highlights the idiocy of woke tribalism

How can you tell that JK Rowling is totally in the wrong about gender identity? The answer, it turns out, is really very simple.

Some Conservatives agree with her.

That, at least, is the logic employed by Billy Bragg, the Left-wing singer turned trans rights activist. In an interview with a newspaper this week, he explained why he so deplores the author’s stance on gender issues.

“My problem with people like Rowling,” he declared, “is really who they are lined up with.” It reminded him, he said, of a political debate he took part in many years ago with some fellow pop stars and two MPs: one Labour, one Tory.

The Labour MP was on Bragg’s side, while the Tory MP was on the other, with an old friend of Bragg’s. And, to Bragg, this proved that his old friend was in the wrong. “I pointed to who he was sitting with, and told him he was on the wrong side of the table. And that’s what I see with Rowling and the others: they are on the wrong side of the table.”

Bragg’s attitude perfectly encapsulates the utter vacuity of political tribalism. Don’t judge the arguments on their merits – just judge the people who happen to be making them. So much quicker and simpler, isn’t it? Certainly for those who are too cataclysmically dim to judge an argument on its merits, anyway.

The problem is, this type of knee-jerk woke tribalism doesn’t even make sense on its own terms. After all, there are quite a few Tory MPs (for example, Caroline Nokes, the chair of the House of Commons select committee on Women and Equalities) who share Bragg’s view on gender identity.

Does that put Bragg on “the wrong side of the table”? Or is he on the wrong side and the right side of the table simultaneously? Either he’s capable of being in two places at once, or this table is a very unusual shape.

But it gets worse – because the biggest risk of playing guilt-by-association is that there may turn out to be one or two guilty parties on your own side. Earlier this week, it just so happens, a 31-year-old man named Glenn Mullen admitted in court to sending violent threats online both to Ms Rowling and to Rosie Duffield, the Labour MP who shares Ms Rowling’s views on gender identity.

I wonder what side of the table Mr Mullen is on? And should everyone on that particular side be condemned for it?

Oh, and while we’re at it – Billy Bragg is a passionate socialist and trade unionist. As, incidentally, was Dennis Nilsen. Should we judge Bragg on this basis? Should we accuse him, and indeed all socialists and trade unionists, of being “lined up with” a serial killer who dismembered his victims and then flushed their remains down the lavatory?

Personally, I think not. But by Bragg’s own logic, perhaps we should.