For the past 18 months or so, a bundle of ideas about human psychology has been getting increasing attention on the political right. Like a lot of the most dangerous modern viewpoints, it has very little to do with objective reality, but that does not get in the way of its adherents’ certainty and self-righteousness. Their contention is that a new frontier in the battle against identity politics, the nanny state and the supposed decline of western civilisation has opened up, around the two very different issues of neurodiversity and mental illness. The basic message fits with the nostalgic tone of post-Brexit Conservatism: it is time, some people think, to return to pulling yourself together and maintaining a stiff upper lip.
This opinion has long been cropping up in certain newspapers, and has now been brazenly endorsed by a high-profile Tory politician: the leadership hopeful Kemi Badenoch, who launched a 40-page treatise titled Conservatism in Crisis: Rise of the Bureaucratic Class at the party’s recent conference. Quite who wrote the pamphlet remains unclear, but Badenoch endorses what it contains: a meandering and very repetitive argument about the supposed tyranny of “the bureaucratic class”, full of claims about the disasters wreaked by a “new progressive ideology” that now dominates most of our key institutions and organisations.
Among the most overlooked catastrophes, the text argues, is the fact that we have allegedly taken refuge in “a narrative built on fragility and medicalisation” instead of “building resilience”. Paraphrasing this stuff is almost impossible, so it’s best to directly quote it: “Being diagnosed as neuro-diverse was once seen as helpful as it meant you could understand your own brain, and so help you to deal with the world,” the text says. “It was an individual focused change. But now it also offers economic advantages and protections.”
It goes on: “If you have a neurodiversity diagnosis (eg anxiety, autism), then that is usually seen as a disability, a category similar to race or biological sex in terms of discrimination law and general attitudes. If you are a child, you may well get better treatment or equipment at school – even transport to and from home.” There are then a few complaining sentences about protections in the workplace, before one of the mind-boggling claims: “The growth of such diagnoses has been accompanied by an expansion of the numbers and the powers of the bureaucratic class.”
As the parent of an 18-year-old with an autism diagnosis, I know a little bit more than whoever wrote that rubbish. We didn’t get my son his diagnosis – at the age of three – to help him understand his own brain: we wanted it to unlock the help he desperately needed to navigate both school and the wider world. Putting autism in the same category as anxiety is the kind of stuff you’d expect in a poor GCSE essay: the former is what psychologists call a neurodevelopmental condition, whereas the latter is a part of the universal human experience that sometimes deepens into mental illness (many autistic people, of course, experience anxiety, but that does not give the two things any kind of equivalence).
There is, moreover, a clear conceptual ignorance at work. “Neurodiverse” is a description of the breadth of all humanity, whereas “neurodivergent” – a word Badenoch and her friends have apparently never encountered – is a term that denotes conditions largely to do with what you might crudely understand as people’s neural wiring, one of them being autism.
Which brings us to the ugliest stuff of all. If you are autistic and in work, thanks to the Equality Act of 2010, your diagnosis is likely to be a protected characteristic, bringing rights to “reasonable adjustments”, and protection against discrimination and harassment. What is wrong with that? But there is an even bigger question: where, for most autistic people, are the “economic advantages and protections” the pamphlet bemoans?
A recent inquiry led by the former Tory minister Robert Buckland found that only three in 10 autistic adults have a job, compared with five in 10 for all disabled people and eight in 10 for non-disabled people. In the context of the ever-worsening crisis in special educational needs provision and the thousands of autistic kids who have no support – increasing numbers of whom are stuck at home – the pamphlet’s claims of “better treatment” at school are so misplaced that they look almost hateful.
The ugliest, however, is the mention of publicly funded help for autistic kids including “even transport to and from home”. What? Many autistic children can only find places in schools – mainstream and specialist – that are a long way from where they live. Besides, navigating standard transport is something a lot of autistic kids find impossible, and walking to school is often too dangerous to contemplate. Are there really still people in positions of power and influence who do not understand that?
And so to the point that clinches the pamphlet’s sinister ludicrousness. It would be lovely to live in a country in which the increasing incidences of autism, ADHD, dyslexia and all the rest – and our worsening mental health crisis – had been matched by any expansion of the “bureaucratic class” that Badenoch has such a problem with. The reality is the opposite. Since 2012, the number of people employed by England’s councils has been reduced by 31.5%, which is one of the reasons the families of autistic children spend much of their lives dealing with unreturned calls, missed deadlines and a system of arbitrary rationing. The children’s commissioner for England has just completed a report showing that almost one in six children wait more than four years for an autism diagnosis. The Badenoch view of an expanded state delivering indulgence and mollycoddling, in other words, is a cruel fantasy.
The reason for that, of course, is that her kind of politics has more to do with flimsy contrarianism than anything real. What she claims echoes the Times columnist Matthew Parris – who has just endorsed her candidacy – insisting that “autism is a real thing for a relatively small number of people and a much-abused diagnosis for a huge number who are somewhere on a spectrum we’re all on”. It also chimes with the increasingly prevalent idea that parents who successfully fight to get their children roughly what they need then receive “golden tickets”, which open up an completely illusory world of plenty.
The endorsers of Conservatism in Crisis, I see, include not just Badenoch but such Tory high-ups as the former crime and policing minister Chris Philp and the Liz Truss ally, Simon Clarke. The text is also backed by a handful of Conservative councillors. Jo Barker, for instance, is the chair of Warwickshire county council’s scrutiny committee for adult social care and health. Dan Birch has the health and wellbeing portfolio on Wychavon district council in Worcestershire. And I wonder: do the ideas in the pamphlet colour how they approach those jobs?
That question should also be asked about Badenoch herself amid the mercifully unlikely prospect of her leading an actual government. Would all this prejudice and nonsense shape what it did? The answer seems to be an emphatic yes, which is yet another demonstration of the frazzled extremes that Conservatism has embraced, and how unfit she is for the job she wants.
John Harris is a Guardian columnist
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