My heavy two-volume tiny-print edition of the complete Oxford English Dictionary (OED), with its accompanying magnifying glass, has been a constant companion for much of my adult life. Ever since learning that the poet W.H. Auden in his study in Austria had surrounded himself with 12 of the 13 massive normal-print-size volumes of this dictionary – the remaining one (whether A-B or V-Z we are not told) used in the dining room as a booster cushion (Auden was quite short) – I have always wanted a full set for myself but never dared raid the family budget to buy one. Auden loved his dictionary so much he chose it as the 'single book' he would take to a desert island.
I have been picking up my magnifying glass a lot recently to check in this dictionary words with multiple meanings that are applied politically either as if they had only one meaning or, when the meaning is negative, used differently across comparable contexts, in both cases with the intention of discrediting opponents. These words include 'divisiveness', 'discrimination', 'hate' and 'prejudice'. I write here about the first.
The nouns 'divisiveness', 'division' or 'divide' and their adjective 'divisive' are words we hear exclusively from the Left criticising the Right for its views on immigration, gender, race, elites and anything else to which the negative associations of these words can be attached. We have heard them a lot over the last 12 months.
From early 2025 onwards the new Labour Government decided that the best way to counter Reform UK's existential threat to its position was to convey the message that this was a party totally beyond the pale, 'toxic', 'racist', 'far Right' (some even said 'fascist'), one that would set people against each other and that no decent person would wish to be associated with. If it were ever to come to power, we were told, the country would go down a dark path.
In May 2025, during the Hamilton by-election campaign, the 'd' word was added to this message, Keir Starmer accusing Reform of creating a "toxic divide" within the country. The word was given prominence at the September 2025 Labour Party Conference, where Starmer denounced Reform's policies on tackling immigration as "racist" and, pushing further the notion of an existential choice between goodness and evil, light and darkness, told the country it faced a choice between "decency" and "division".
With opinion polls showing Labour falling behind Reform, and with local elections looming, Starmer opened the New Year in January 2026 with an instruction to ministers to target Reform with the message that it was a party feeding on "grievance, decline and division". On March 25th the word was centre stage during Prime Minister's Questions, first in a reference by Starmer to Reform-led councils bringing nothing but "chaos, grievance and division" and then, in connection with a ban on cryptocurrency donations to political parties, accusing Nigel Farage as "the one party leader who has shown that he will say anything, no matter how divisive, if he is paid to do so". The word was turning into a nervous tic.
It was a tic obediently picked up by Labour Ministers. Jo Stevens, Secretary of State for Wales, said that Wales faced the choice of "decline and division" with Reform or "renewal and decency" with Labour and Wes Streeting, Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, criticising Nigel Farage as "divisive" for daring to say something critical of the behaviour of parts of some Asian communities (perish the thought!) In Scotland, Labour leader Anas Sarwar has also repeatedly criticised Reform's "divisive" politics in the strongest possible terms. Outside Labour and ever ready to jump on a bandwagon, Lib Dem leader Ed Davey added his own voice, criticising Reform for its "divisive" values while joining the others in failing to specify what he believes these to be.
My Complete OED defines divisive, in its main meaning, as "having the quality or function of dividing… expressing division… making or perceiving distinctions; analytical". The Left's use of the word turns it instead into one that can only refer to the dictionary's subsidiary meaning of "causing division", with all that phrase's implicit negative associations. If one looks into the contexts in which the word 'divisive' is used by the Left there is always the assumption that "making or perceiving distinctions" must involve unfairly pitting one group of people against another with negative effects.
For example, criticising the view that anti-black institutional racism is widespread in the UK is liable from the Left to be seen as a 'divisive' opinion, ignoring that the notion of 'institutional racism' reinforces a distinction between 'black' and 'white' to the disadvantage of 'whites'. Those shouting 'divisive' in this case would be those who themselves are 'causing division' by drawing attention to the difference between groups and promoting the interests of the minority against the majority.
Similarly, those who stress the rights of women to benefit from women only spaces can be seen as 'divisive' because they highlight a distinction which supporters of gender ideology are keen to remove in the interests of transgender people. In removing one distinction, however, they are creating another – between the respective rights of the two groups – by giving a tiny minority of trans women a right of access that deprives the much larger group of 'biological' women of their own right of access to spaces for females only.
'Divisive' and 'division' may seem little more than boo-words designed to make people feel negatively towards those one is attacking, but there are also fundamental aspects of our dominant progressive Zeitgeist at play here. One is the obsessive prioritisation of minorities at the expense of majorities. The other is the equally obsessive wish to bring down all borders and boundaries.
Prioritising minorities has three main origins.
The first is Marxism's focus on the struggle between oppressed and oppressors and the need to support the former in their struggle against traditional elites. This is a struggle attractive to progressive elites keen to disguise how they are often as equally self-serving and autocratic as those they are attacking.
The second is the legacy of a Christendom which no longer exists but whose religion gave priority to "the poor and mean and lowly", a view of human relations, detached from its theology and wider social context, which leaves us with little more than a profoundly damaging view of the world as one divided between victims and oppressors.
The third is a hyper-individualist strain of thought, with origins in the Enlightenment, which in extreme ways puts the individual before the interests of family, community and nation. This explains the whole paraphernalia of universal human rights, the refusal to support one form of family more than another and the failure to distinguish between the status of the indigenous and the recently arrived. The reductio ad absurdum of this hyper-individualist world view is the judicial decision – well-known to readers of the Daily Sceptic – not to deport an Albanian criminal because his son disliked foreign chicken nuggets.
Anyone who does not put individuals and minorities first is thus 'divisive' even though this is itself 'divisive' in giving priority to the rights of the minority over the interests of the majority.
The other fundamental aspect of the dominant Zeitgeist that makes 'divisive' such a popular term of abuse is contemporary progressivism's distaste for boundaries, borders and barriers. This is another product of hyper-individualism.
Régis Debray, a Marxist and former militant Latin American revolutionary who later became a Gaullist and is one of France's most prominent intellectuals, has written a brilliant essay on this: 'Éloge des frontières' ('In Praise of Frontiers'), focusing on boundaries between cultures and nations. He cites the Caribbean poet Aimé Césaire, at one time also a Marxist, who observed that in the modern world "there are two ways of losing oneself: walling oneself up within the particular and dissolving oneself within 'the universal'". Neither is desirable, says Debray, but at present universalism is the more powerful (he was writing in 2010) and therefore the more to be avoided.
Sociologist Frank Furedi, another Marxist who had second thoughts, in his book Why Borders Matter, similarly sees this distaste for boundaries as a distinctive feature of our contemporary world, putting it in an even broader context and describing it as the "unbounding of cultural domains in all aspects of social life": adult-child (drag queens in nursery schools), private-public (facial recognition cameras), male-female (trans women in female sports), human-animal (animal rights), nation-world (international law superseding national law).
Given these attitudes anyone who is keen to "maintain distinctions" – people who wish to allow some animals to be hunted, oppose 'sexuality education' for young children or criticise measures to boost the recruitment of less physically strong women into front line positions in the police or army – is liable therefore to be dismissed by current progressive elites as 'divisive' even though "maintaining distinctions" is what 'divisive' also means.
Next time therefore you hear the word 'divisive' or, as a member of a so-called 'divisive' party, are labelled as such, remind yourself that it is even more 'divisive' to prioritise minorities over majorities than the other way round and that perfectly valid 'distinctions' in many aspects of our lives that have stood the test of time need to be upheld and are matters one should be proud of.
Dr Nicholas Tate is Adviser to the Learning Institute, Mathias Corvinus Collegium (MCC) in Hungary and author of Seven Books that Everyone Once Read and No One Now Does.
https://dailysceptic.org/2026/04/02/in-defence-of-being-divisive/