A whole raft of new terminology has emerged since the Great Awokening ten years ago. Much of it suggests that politics has become increasingly superficial and inauthentic. ‘Virtue signalling’, ‘lifestyle leftism’, ‘elite cosmopolitanism’ and what Neil Davenport calls ‘the aesthetics of radicalism’ vie and jostle alongside that ubiquitous accusation: ‘performative’. In an age when the personal has become the political, striking a pose is now inextricably entwined with having a viewpoint on worldly affairs. Dying your hair pink, sporting a keffiyeh and curating your online profile to accommodate your preferred pronouns and flags of convenience: these are all contrived and combined declarations of selfhood and political creed.
It’s fitting that a non-binary member of the Green party should push the boundaries of credibility to breaking point
So it’s no surprise that in order to give credibility to their political philosophy, some in the corridors of power these days now face a greater temptation to curate their public image to make it align to their ideology. The latest figure to have been found doing so is Q Manivannan, the individual who earlier this month made headlines by becoming the Scottish Green party’s first self-identifying non-binary Holyrood MSP – despite being in the UK only on a student visa and so liable to be forced to leave before his tenure ends.
Before being elected MSP for Edinburgh and Lothians East, Q Manivannan – who is a biological male and whose original first name is Srivatsan, but who now uses the pronouns they/them – told party members that they were ‘a queer Tamil immigrant’ from a ‘lower caste’ background. This qualified them to speak for the ‘working class and marginalised’ because they often went ‘hungry and because I was starved… worked and lied and begged.’
According to a Sunday Times investigation, this account doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. It transpires that Manivannan actually hails from an upper-middle class family in Chennai, one of India’s wealthiest cities. While the MSP claims to be the descendant of panoply of underworld exotics, of ‘courtesans, dancers, musicians, hunters and prostitutes’, the Green politician’s father reportedly has degrees in chemical engineering and business administration and their mother had a career in academia. The young Manivannan attended a private school, a private liberal arts and law university, and in 2019 went to work at a consultancy in Delhi which helps the super-rich gain places at international universities. This is all rather awkward for a Scottish Green party that wants to abolish private schools.
This wouldn’t be the first time an elected politician has over-egged or embellished their proletarian heritage, or adapted and altered their first name in order to signal their solidarity with the marginalised and downtrodden. Tony Benn, Tony Blair and now Andy Burnham all deliberately used or use the diminutive variation of their Christian name to intimate their affinity with the ordinary man – Blair even went as far to change his voice intonation and speech pattern in order to ingratiate himself with, y’know, other straight sorta guys.
Yet it’s fitting that a non-binary member of the Green party should push the boundaries of credibility to breaking point. While some might argue – with great cruelty and beastly intolerance – that believing you can change your sex by mere performative utterance is a troubling sign of detachment from reality in the first place, being a member of the modern Green party might also be considered a sign of mental derangement, of possessing a certain disconnection from planet Earth.
This is the party, as the Sunday Telegraph reported at the weekend, whose newly elected councillors in England have spent their first weeks in power devising fresh madcap initiatives which include cancelling school exams, decriminalising prostitution, deprioritising the policing of cannabis and scrapping the anti-terrorist programme Prevent. These are not signs of a serious party. And despite the occasionally lazy rhetoric employed by their detractors, neither are these signs of a party in hock to ‘cultural Marxism’ or anything resembling orthodox socialism.
Marxists appreciated the value of labour, the dignity of toil – that includes school exams – and took pride in representing the workers. The Green party in its modern incarnation, as it plan to introduce Universal Basic Income and policies extending welfare payments remind us, is an institution for shallow, upper-middle class lifestyle leftists. The Greens are juvenile-minded utopians who speak for those who don’t want to work and think everything should be free – paid for by willingly benevolent ‘billionaires’ and those who do actually work.
That the Green party is led by a man who has also changed his name, who has also been creative about his past – saying he was ‘spokesperson’ for the British Red Cross – and who once asserted that he could change mammary matter through the power of the mind, is also apposite. This is a party for fantasists, ran by a fantasist and beholden to an unearthly, fantastical political doctrine.
