The writer AR Moxon went viral with this post on social media:

Meet me in the middle, says the unjust man.
You take a step toward him. He takes a step back.
Meet me in the middle, says the unjust man.

I was reminded of it today when Ed Hodgson of the think tank More In Common effectively suggested that all the ills of the world are because people on the left won’t compromise with people on the far, far right. Posting on Bluesky, he said:

So while you might not want to campaign alongside a Reform voter on refugee policy you might find you agree with them on pushing for greater regulation of social media. You may disagree with an evangelical Christian on trans rights, but share the same views on foreign aid.

Leaving aside the fact that the calls are never for the right to compromise for the greater good, this is astonishingly naive. What the far right and evangelical right have in common is that they lie about what they want: they say what they think they can get away with, not what they want to do. And if you take one step toward them, they take one step back.

It’s also naive because it clearly believes that the issues mentioned mean the same things to both left and right. They don’t. Reform’s goals for social media regulation are to ban LGBTQ+ voices and “transgender ideology” while allowing consequence-free speech for repellent views and online abusers. Evangelical Christians increasingly demand that foreign aid is subject to their beliefs, so for example the US support for the fight against AIDS has been criticised for prioritising abstinence over sex education and safe sex.

There’s no clearer example of that than the phrase “trans rights”. As we’re seeing in America now, the evangelical view of “trans rights” is that trans people should be eradicated from society and even from the history books. The trans view of trans rights is simply wanting to be left the fuck alone. These are not two sides of a debate; there’s no centre ground between “we want to live” and “we want to kill you”.