Approximately 100,000 on a far right march in London. A grim new milestone in post-war political history, and one conventional politics has spent all summer cultivating. What, for instance, did the big brains in the Labour Party think was going to happen after tailing the extreme right on immigration, and saying the tiny band of fascist-led protests against asylum seekers - which were self-evident efforts at repeating the same kind of disorder we saw last year - "had a point"? This is the culmination of Keir Starmer's rancid approach to immigration, one that has, alongside blanket media coverage, legitimated and amplified Reform in the first instance, and now enabled mass far right street politics. Never mind the Peter Mandelson scandal, Labour MPs should be demanding his resignation for this catastrophe.
The government's response to racist violence on the streets of the capital this weekend is pathetic. Number 10's comms allowed tumbleweed to roll through the Saturday evening news schedules. And as the Sunday morning politics programmes swung around, there was a statement from our new Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood, that condemned the violence and ... that was it. An almost apolitical law and order response, as if she was talking about car theft or shop lifting. Worse, Peter Kyle, considered by the leader's office as an able communicator, was invited to venture a political opinion about the far right march on Sky News with Trevor Phillips. He said it showed "free speech was alive and well" in this country. No rebuttal, no response to Elon Musk's call for the overthrow of parliament. Another roll-me-over-and-tickle-my-belly moment. Finally, on Sunday afternoon Starmer uttered something. He said will "never surrender" the flag to the far right. How can the Prime Minister's words be taken seriously with his track record of ceding them the political initiative?
We've been here before. Last summer, Starmer's approach to the riots was politically weak. Instead, he left it to the King of all people to make the rote remarks about cohesion and community. And this reluctance to afford fascism a political rebuttal does not start with Starmer. In the 1930s, as 2010 paper points out, party activists were instructed to avoid agitating and confronting the Mosleyites and that being quiet about the far right would freeze them out of politics. Though, to be fair to this feeble strategy, Labour's efforts at ignoring the British Union of Fascists did not mean adopting the overtly racist parts of their programme or suggesting its thugs were motivated by genuine concerns.
Starmer's timidity toward the far right reflects the politics of our under-fire friend, Morgan McSweeney. Caught in the same doom loop that helped do the Tories in. As a well heeled member of the ruling class, his politics coincide a great deal with Tory statecraft. I.e. Offer nothing that might raise political horizons or get people's hopes up, because that could lead to popular demands they cannot comfortably accommodate within the settlement they defend. And so draw deep on the old, anti-immigrant racist traditions and divert anger toward undesirable out-groups while demonstrating the government's efficacy by dealing decisively with them. It's an approach that smacks of patronising contempt of Labour's voters, while desperately - and against all evidence - hopes it will keep them on board in lieu of anything else. For McSweeney and his view of "working people", anything that might sound like criticism of the racist politics of Nigel Farage, Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, Elon Musk, and he rest of the horror show will put off the people they ignorantly assume might support Labour in the future. A strange strategy when the job of winning the next election is about keeping the voters the party has in the seats that they have, but who are we to dispute the genius that thought bringing Mandelson back would be a good idea?
This is the root of the Labour leadership's paralysis. If we stay quiet while drunk far right mobs scream racist abuse and say they want to assassinate the Prime Minister, perhaps they'll give us a look before the next election. A strategy that will prove a slam dunk for sure. In the real world of politics where the consequences of this are playing out, the results of Starmer/McSweeney's approach has been the loss of one parliamentary by-election, giving away dozens of seats to Reform in council by-elections, and a collapse in Labour's already low levels of support. They are legitimising the extreme right by letting them dictate the terms of politics, and in so doing are paving the way for them while hoping, somehow, its voracious appetite for division and hate will be gratified by Labour's offerings. This is appeasement pure and simple. It didn't stop fascism in the 1930s. And it will not work today.
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9 comments:
This is probably how it felt to be a scientist in the IPCC for the last couple of decades, don't you think?
¹after Saturday, anyone with a platform, eg politicians, journalists, religious leaders, should stand up and be counted. From now, failure to condemn the far right by public figures should be taken as complicity.
Anyone who watched The Guardian's helicopter tracking of the march (still available) , will realise that there were more like 250,000 people on the streets . It does no good to underplay the sheer scale of the march, and the fact that this size of demonstration is far beyond the fascist hard core around Yaxley-Lennon. Time for the Liberal Left to try to understand what is motivating hundreds of thousands , including many family groups, to traipse to London on Saturday to protest at the unlimited , historically unique sheer scale of net immigration , since the Blair government, but particularly since the post Brexit "Boris Wave" of essentially open borders.
As a socialist I believe in comprehensive state-led economic planning, and that includes workforce and population and associated resources, planning. One million a year net migration is simply unsustainable if the NHS, housing supply and general social services are to be adequate.
Unlimited labour supply has always been the Holy Grail of capitalism . The mainly working class marchers on Saturday face the consequences of all that. Time for the mainly privileged middle class Liberal Left to try to understand the perfectly rational reasons why a quarter of a million people joined the fascist hard core on that march on Saturday maybe ?
You seem to be suggesting the current crises in the NHS, housing and social services ARE caused by immigration. This is flat wrong. It's a narrative pedalled by Farage and the far right - and amplified almost universally in the billionaire media.
There is a near vacuum in public discourse where challenging this narrative should be, and a corresponding vacuum where a properly Marxist or even progressive explanation should be. Its this which constitutes the "rationale" behind the weekend's massive turn-out.
Whether we should have much tighter immigration control or planned policies addressing community cohesion is another question altogether.
But on the question of state welfare resources, its both factually mistaken and politically disastrous to concede that immigration is the problem - as Starmer et al have demonstrated
The statistics don't support what you are saying. We have a stagnating population and migrants are net contributors who lower our average age. Wealth hoarding, policies designed to shrink the state and inequality are the obvious causes of the problems with the NHS, housing and public services. You are not a socialist if you push anti migration arguments the the face of this reality.
The marchers are motivated by racist sentiment constantly egged on by practically our entire media. In mainstream media anti migrants rhetoric is the ONLY rhetoric.
Whether you are misguided or speaking in bad faith, adopting the narrative of the capitalist backed far right never benefits the working class.
It seems the BNP strategy for power is working its way through. In the 2000s it was a disaterous Labour Govenment would be replaced by the Tories who would fail and then another Labour one would fail and people would turn to the alternative - BNP. Now we have had the disaster of the Tories followed by MacSweeney's Fusiliers/Light Brigade though the alternative is the Reform Party.
If I lived elsewhere I would watch with interst the fragmentation across all fronts. Labour losing support on the left to Your thingwyjiggery, Greens and LIB Dems, the Tories losing support to Reform, and Reform losing its rougher elements to Advance Uk, which may very well have the best social media and lots of £££ if Elon gets involved. In a FPP system who knows what will happen.
So this is how an adult behaves. I thought it was about doing the mundane, repetitive, necessary things well and making judgements based on evidence rather than ideology. Seems it is about having tantrums when criticised, appointing your 'besties' to jobs, taking sweets from strangers, bullying the boys and girls in the palyground to do what you want and backing up the bully when he is on the rampage, sneaking to Headmaster Trump on whose been naughty and going on the huff when you can't get your way.
Immigration is an inevitable by-product of late stage imperialist capitalism, comrade. Check out V.I. Lenin's "Imperialism The Highest Stage of Capitalism", Chapter VIII, paragraph 19, viz:
"One of the special features of imperialism connected with the facts I am describing, is the decline in emigration from imperialist countries and the increase in immigration into these countries from the more backward countries where lower wages are paid."
The very purpose of immigration is to replicate imperialist structures within the metropole, in order to split the workers. Again, from the same paragraph:
"Imperialism has the tendency to create privileged sections also among the workers, and to detach them from the broad masses of the proletariat."
The British ruling class did not import people from the former empire because they liked them.
Surely the fundamental issue re climate change is that it is only very recently that the technological and (mostly Chinese) industrial base has been in place to enable mass adoption of affordable renewable energy?
Before that was the case serious climate action would have necessitated either nuclearization (à la France) or degrowth, either of which would have been politically untenable in most western countries.
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