New Left Media January 2025

It's 2025, and there's enough new media projects to justify a post plugging them! Send them some new year love by checking them out.

1. Red Barrels (Podcast) (Bluesky)

2. Think and Resist (Podcast)

3. Workers' Inquiry (Podcast)

If you know of any new(ish) blogs, podcasts, channels, Facebook pages, resources, spin offs from existing projects, campaign websites or whatever that haven't featured before then drop me a line via the comments, email, Bluesky, Facebook, or Twitter. Please note I'm looking for new media that has started within the last 12 months, give or take. The round up appears hereabouts when there are enough new entrants to justify a post!

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The Tory Party's Gruesome Twosome

Timing in politics is everything. Nigel Farage has seriously disappointed Elon Musk because he doesn't share his enthusiasm for Tommy Robinson. It's a good job that there are others who are willing to step into the breach between the two, such as Robert Jenrick.

On Saturday evening, the shadow justice minister penned a tweet that is the most extreme statement issued by a Tory politician in recent years. In it, he begins with the ritualistic attack on multiculturalism but quickly departs from political politesse with this:

The scandal started with the onset of mass migration. Importing hundreds of thousands of people from alien cultures, who possess medieval attitudes towards women, brought us here. And after 30 years of this disastrous experiment, we now have entrenched sectarian voting blocs that make it electoral suicide for some MPs to confront this. This scandal shows why we must end it.

20 years ago this was the sort of stuff Nick Griffin and the BNP would have been attacked for by the Conservative front bench. Farage has never gone as far as this, nor did Suella Braverman in her most extreme moments. You might say this is a direct challenge to the authority of Kemi Badenoch, but a day later he's still in post and there's nary a ripple of concern among Tory social media and chatterers on Conservative Home. The Tory leader herself is somewhat compromised seeing as she's jumped on the grooming gang inquiry calls, and has already used the "not all cultures are valid" line. Sacking Jenrick - and he should be sacked and stripped of the whip for this - would leave her in an awkward position.

This tawdry episode says everything about the position the Tories are in. With Reform soaking up the media attention and eating into Tory support, they've got nothing left. The MPs determined they wanted right wing leader to see Reform off and consolidate the shaky foundations of the party, and a right wing turn they indeed got. The problem for the Tories is Jenrick's an obvious opportunist who believes nothing apart from his self-advancement, and there's no sewer he won't wallow in if reeking of effluent gets him the top job. Doubly unconvincing is Badenoch whose leadership is proving spectacularly unspectacular. There are the gaffes that aren't gaffes, because she thinks about everything very seriously. And because she and the people around her are clueless, she's hitched the Tory wagon to the Trump train with all the negative consequences that means for her and the Tory party. Keir Starmer must be thanking his lucky stars to face an opposition marked by a rivalry between such a gruesome twosome.

This lurch to the far right might catch Musk's eye, especially as Badenoch and Jenrick were somewhat equivocal over the summer riots. But with the Commons resuming on Monday, the more centre right elements of the parliamentary party are going to be chuntering in their dismay. For instance, on Laura Kuenssberg former Boris Johnson advisor Samuel Kasumu accused Jenrick of inciting racial hatred. He is unlikely to be alone. It's true that Badenoch is seemingly unaware about how precarious her position is, but with this direction of travel it's probably not going to be long before she gets a rude reminder.

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Keir Starmer: A Lucky Leader?

As the snow blankets the country, Keir Starmer has been buried under an avalanche of advice. This is normal for any leading politician at this time of the year as political journos and commentators struggle to churn something out over the idle period. This time they have not had to look far for something to alight upon, as the latest unhinged criticisms of the government from Elon Musk attesst. How should Starmer try and deal with them?

In case you've been under a rock, Musk has accused Starmer of the "rape of Britain" and said Jess Phillips should be in prison for refusing a further inquiry into grooming gangs, or what Musk calls "rape genocide". For context, this is the kind of bullshit peddled by assorted fascists and neo-Nazis as an adjunct to their great replacement "theory"; that white women are being raped and having mixed race children to hasten the take over of the Western nations by black and brown people. Hence why grooming and rape gangs were okay when his friend Jeffrey Epstein organised them. Musk has undoubtedly been radicalised as he's become conscious of his political interests as a billionaire, and is banging on about this because he wants to push UK politics further to the right and visit naked class politics upon the country. As if we haven't already had a bellyful of this destructive rubbish.

Labour are on a sticky wicket. The situation demands a straightforward riposte and, because Starmer is opposed to "sticking plaster politics", retaliation in the form of enforcing the provisions of the Online Safety Act against hate speech. But this is complicated by Musk's being a powerful figure in the incoming Trump administration, and so any response would be overdetermined by Labour's customary obsequiousness to the United States, regardless of who is in office. And if that wasn't bad enough, Labour - and especially this leadership - are loathe to take billionaires on anyway.

As someone not at all fond of Wes Streeting, his comments on Laura Kuenssberg this Sunday morning walked the tightrope the government has set itself. He said the attack on Phillips was a "disgraceful smear". She and Starmer had done more to lock up rapists and "scumbags" than most people, and social media platforms should work toward online safety. He also said that the voices the government should be listening to are those of the survivors of sexual assault themselves. A text book response from the Blairite book of rebuttal. Appear to take a hard line by dismissing the argument, defend the record of one's colleagues, and proferr a course of action that steers away from more confrontation with someone Streeting, Starmer, et al would much prefer to cultivate. An effective rebuttal? I'll leave that up to readers to judge.

Writing prior to this weekend's farrago in The Lead, Zoe Grunewald argues that Labour should stick to the priorities and not get blown off course by criticism, be it from the Tories, disgruntled landowners and the like. Wisely, she suggests taking on the right on grounds of Labour's choosing instead of attempting to outdo them on immigration. It appears Starmer is in part agreement. According to Alex Wickham, there will be no new year address as such on Monday. He's going to plough on while ignoring the "gossip" and, presumably, the "distractions" of the daily headline generators. This studied aloofness didn't serve the government well over freebies or the removal of winter fuel payments, but as all the "difficult" (i.e. poor) choices are supposedly out the way Starmer can focus on the managerialism and, perhaps, recapture something of the appearance of his first week in office.

Smashing the delivery button so government churns out tractor production figures runs the risk of leaving the field to Labour's opponents, but right now that is not too bad an option. With Musk now calling for Farage's removal from Reform's leadership, the divisions among Team Trump over there are finding an echo over here. Despite toadying to Musk across the Sunday politics shows, he dared disagree with his would-be sugardaddy over the release of Tommy Robinson. Farage wants "respectable" distance between Yaxley-Lennon and his thuggery because there's only room for one senior personality on the extreme right, and undisciplined street violence is impossible to wield if one's chosen route to office is electoralism. This exacerbates divisions in Reform itself, which saw Lee Anderson of all people heckled at Reform's East Midlands conference for refusing to back Yaxley-Lennon and his thugs. Meanwhile, the Tories are nowhere with Kemi Badenoch pathetically repeating Musk's calls for inquiries into child sexual abuse, and Robert Jenrick has disgraced himself further with another racist diatribe that, at an earlier period, would have been on the receiving end of a prosecution.

Just as Boris Johnson was lucky in 2019 because of the divisions between his opponents, it's possible Musk's influence could destabilise the opposition on the right and make things easier for Labour than they might otherwise be.

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The KLF - Justified and Ancient

No time for a blog tonight, so let's have a proper tune instead.

The Class Politics of Reform

You can't move for Reform these days. Nigel Farage's mug regularly flashes up on social media feeds almost as much as he appears on Question Time, and political pundits are talking up the party's chances as if they're on the edge of power. While not as ludicrous as some festive silly season content (the New Statesman podcast stood out with its "Can Farage become Prime Minister?" episode), we've got to the stage where the official paper of record can't be bothered to analyse anything. The Times's correspondent Geraldine Scott has suggested a left turn by Farage and Reform to take Labour on is likely. Only someone paid to write for the centre right press could come up with such rubbish.

Noting that the Republicans made pro-working class noises in the lead up to the US election, she ponders whether Reform could copy them. After all, Farage said he was "coming for Labour" in his July victory speech. Very well, but saying and doing are two different things and there are very good reasons for doubting Reform are even capable of shifting to the left.

There are the structural relationships Reform is enmeshed in. Growing out of the Brexit Party, which came out of Farage's parting with UKIP, all of them have been extreme right wing parties. Pro Brexit, anti-immigration, and the sort of hard right economic programme Liz Truss dreams about. This programme, something that Farage has promoted lately with his desire to scrap the NHS, is not a quirk but fundamental to what Reform is about. The party's politics fundamentally aligns with a set of City interests (where, you'll remember, Farage hails from) who want the remnants of the post-war settlement demolished. Theirs is the naked politics of the bourgeoisie where their interests are natural and self-evident, and that having to concede things like public services - even if only to retain consent for their rule - is too much to ask for. We're about to see an experiment along these lines get underway in the United States.

This is the basis for Reform's support within sections of the ruling class. For most of them, Farage and his party are a means for nudging politics further and further to the right, which Labour are never going to try and contest. Dumping the economics for some Blue Labourish social democratic programmes is not going to happen, because trying to stir up working class aspirations around anything positive is the last thing Reform's backers want to do.

How then is Reform poised to do well in Labour seats and has, indeed, made off nicely with seats from Labour in recent council by-elections? For two reasons. Firstly, Reform polls better with older people. Like the Tories, the further up the age gradient one goes the greater the levels of support. A chunk of the party's "working class voters" the press talk up are "ex-workers" by virtue of being disproportionately retired. And this is not without political consequences, and older people are also more likely to vote. Secondly, there is a section of the working class that have always been anti-Labour and more disposed to conservative and right wing politics. I know, this is where I am from. What seems to be happening, looking at Reform's results, is a lot of this layer are switching their allegiance from the Tories to Farage in Labour-held seats. If you add in the perennial protest voters who gravitate toward whatever party is best placed to give the government the middle finger, and the splintering of Labour's vote, there are enough numbers for winning a decent haul of councillors.

Farage and Reform don't appeal to this layer by parading, for instance, their desire to butcher public sector pensions. They have mastered what you might call negative class consciousness. What is often mistakenly referred to as populism appeals because it speaks directly the resentments of being working class. I.e. The fact we have no choice but to sell our time for a living, that we have to swallow whatever rubbish the boss wants us to, and get by with the frustrations and humiliations that come with it. A politics of negative consciousness, however, seeks not to negate this but affirm it. For instance, attacks on social security and immigration are always framed as "you have to work, but look at them living the life of riley off your taxes." Negative consciousness confirms the addressee as an aggrieved person, as someone who sacrifices, and pushes that grievance away from their source (the relations of production) and locates it in imagined figures and archetypes. And this works because everyone thinks they know someone who's swinging the lead and/or has never done a day's work in their life. It's potent, explains the Tory press's obsessive repetition with such stories, and why the Tories have routinely geared their political strategy around negative class consciousness since Thatcher became party leader 50 years ago. It so happens that Farage is a more convincing peddler of this politics than Kemi Badenoch is.

Reform won't be "going left" then. The party has too much to lose if it does, and it doesn't need to. The money is pouring into Farage's bank account. He's treated as a serious figure and now has privileged access to the inner circle of Donald Trump. Why would he risk any of that by saying warm words about trade unions, standing on picket lines, and advocating for higher wages and greater workers' rights? He wouldn't, which us something political commentators might acknowledge if they were in the business of helping people understand politics instead of working to distort it.

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What I've Been Reading Recently

Just what this blog needs. Another list of books. Here are the reads I got through between October and December.

The Fraud by Zadie Smith
Empty World by John Christopher
Snow White by Donald Bartheleme
Who? by Algis Budrys
The Periodic Table by Primo Levi
All the Colours of Darkness by Lloyd Biggle Jr
Children of Time by Arian Tchaikovsky
Pavane by Keith Roberts
Hour of the Horde by Gordon R Dikson
Artifact Space by Miles Cameron
Fiasco by Stanislaw Lem
The Men by Sandra Newman
Orbital Resonance by John Barnes
The Seventh Son by Sebastian Faulks
Hiero's Journey by Sterling E Lanier
Taken as Red by Anushka Asthana
Beyond the Hallowed Sky by Ken MacLeod
Optiman by Brian Stableford
Invaders from Earth by Robert Silverberg
A Fall of Moondust by Arthur C Clarke
Our Friends from Frolix 8 by Philip K Dick
Drachenfels by Jack Yeovil
In Ascension by Martin MacInnes
Let Me Tell You What I Mean by Joan Didion
Middlemarch by George Eliot
Red Planets: Marxism and Science Fiction by Mark Bould and China Mieville (eds)

A list dominated by science fiction titles, I know. Thought I'd use the last couple of months to make inroads into the old SF to-be-read pile. Apart from those already blogged about, one that's worthy of a few remarks is Sterling Lanier's Hiero's Journey. A science fantasy number in the Jack Vance mould, following the journey of our Hiero (and hero) across the mutated post-nuclear landscape of North America is hugely entertaining. The folks at Gollancz obviously agree, seeing as it (and the sequel) have lately had the SF masterworks treatment. This is a recommend if you like that sort of thing. But, be warned, the characterisation of the novel's sole woman is rubbish to the point of cringingly embarrassing. Sandra Newman's The Men almost landed with me. The premise - everyone with an xx chromosome suddenly vanishes and, weeks later, disturbing videos of men and boys and trans women being herded by strange creatures are broadcast on the internet - was intriguing enough. And what we get is a set of character studies of women coming to terms with the trauma of loss and trying to make good of what's left - which, for some, is something of an opportunity. I thought this was fine until we got to the end which, no spoilers, properly soured everything that came before. That said it hasn't put me off Newman's work and her Julia, an officially sanctioned re-imagining of Nineteen Eighty-Four is on the TBR. Lastly, I really enjoyed John Christopher's world-ending plague story, Empty World. I might write about it if I ever get round to writing that long-promised piece on The Tripods.

Non-genre wise, sitting modestly at the bottom of the list is George Eliot's Middlemarch, a book that has perched on the edge of my consciousness demanding to be read for over 20 years now. What can be said about a book that's sometimes heralded as the greatest novel in the English language? I wouldn't go that far for sure, but it is beautifully written and engaging. This is a long story about relationships and the possible fates that await bourgeois young women in pre-Victorian England. Might one marry the wrong man? Or end up with someone of limited means? Two marriages are at the heart of this novel, and we follow through the consequences of duty, dissipation, indebtedness and, in the last quarter, scandalous goings ons. It's not for everyone of a modern temperament because its pacing is quite sedate, despite covering several years, and it is fairly gentle - certainly not as dramatic as The Mill on the Floss. But Middlemarch is essential for grasping English literary culture.

New year, new reading goals? Yes. There will be a return to the SF/non-SF balance, but I've decided it's about time to knock some more landmark works off. I'm not getting any younger, sob, sob. There's going to be more social theory/politics stuff as well, and the odd bit of SF literary criticism when I can find some.

Do you have any reading intentions for the new year?

Five Most Popular Posts in December

We begin the new year as we do every year - by looking back. Here are the posts that did the numbers in 2024's final month.

1. The Futility of Chasing the Right
2. The Class Politics of Rising Water Bills
3. The Death of a Dictatorship
4. On the Road to Somewhere
5. Labour's Defence of Billionaire Influence

Where would this blog be without the Labour Party to riff off? It claims three of the coveted five spots on the end-of-month run down. At one there is the political pointlessness - even from the standpoint of the Labour right's self-interest - of Labour aping and chasing the right. Labour are not losing voters to Reform hand over fist, and they're not interested in being convinced that Keir Starmer takes their anti-immigrant fantasies seriously. Then we have the do-nothing stance of the government over rising water bills. Which links nicely to the screed on billionaires. Labour are not about to upset the applecart, even though there is real electoral mileage in doing so. Because our new ministers are called to a higher purpose: the management of the class relations of production. In at three was the need to mark the justified and overdue collapse of Bashir Al-Assad's regime. And this was followed by news that there might be some movement in the interminable talks about putting together a new left wing party.

Two posts qualify for second chances, and they are a pairing. The worst and the best science fiction I read in 2024.

What's the new year got in store? The reduced pace of posting suits me well, so I'm keeping that. Rather than just chew people's ears off about politics all the time, I might try and do a few more straightforward sociological/theory pieces like the sort I used to do - and that always landed well. The science fiction content is here to stay. And yes, the politics might be reduced but I've said that before and it always clutters up the monthly post tallies. We'll take it as it comes. As ever, if you haven't already don't forget to follow the (very) occasional newsletter, and if you like what I do (and you're not skint), you can help support the blog. Following me on Bluesky, Facebook, and for what it's worth Twitter, are cost-free ways of showing your backing for this corner of the internet.

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