The other week, a long-time reader of this blog put a question to me. They asked what warranted the assumption that if Keir Starmer did this or that, Labour would be able to see off Nigel Farage and Reform. For example, had Starmer criticised the far right instead of rolling out the red carpet for them, what's to say his efforts wouldn't be ignored in the same way their appeasement and cultivation of anti-immigrant politics haven't stymied Reform's polling? Fair point.
What Starmer says and does with regard to the extreme right matters in two ways. Pandering to their politics in a doomed effort to out-Farage Farage has emboldened other establishment figures to ratchet up the rhetoric. Confirmed waste of space Robert Jenrick, the architect of housing refugees in hotels, would not have had the gall to join far right protests to boost his long coup against Kemi Badenoch. No mark Labour MPs might have kept their counsel. The net result of going down the "genuine concerns" path? An undermining of mainstream politics, and Labour in particular. Had Starmer stood against the tidal wave of filth breaking over British politics would likely have kept more of the Labour base on side. The divisions in Starmer's personal base, which remains the managerial layers of the state, local government, and public sector bureaucracies, would never have manifested and given Labour that little more ballast to face the political head winds. Coming out hard against racism, which the Prime Minister delegated to the King last year, and individual Labour MPs these last few days, could begin winning back the natural support he has so far alienated.
What Starmer does also matters. There has been some criticism of Zack Polanski in recent days for linking the growth of the far right to the consequences of austerity and a starved public realm. The implication being that there is a direct correspondence, and that if Labour weren't committed to broadly the same approach to statecraft as the Tories then none of this would be happening. For example, Richard Seymour has argued at length about the libidinal roots of far right politics, and the spasm of pleasure that is derived from punching down. Therefore a properly funded NHS or, to use the Starmerist lexicon, "delivery" would not see the extreme right off.
Yet there is a relationship. As argued many times here and in the book, the building of the Tory voter coalition in 2017 and 2019, and the failed efforts at reviving it since, was based on an understanding of who the core vote was, how they were structurally predisposed to a politics of fear, and using the levers of government and media propaganda to stoke those fires further. A blend of statecraft, governance, and faceless processes of individuation and atomisation have broken up senses of community, evacuated hope from anticipations of the future, and engendered a wide sense of fatalism, if not powerlessness. A politics that offers some people some certainty, while identifying targets that are symptoms of or causes of the malaise can affect a powerful attraction, especially when it involves performative spectacles of scapegoating or that old trick of saying the "unsayable". If Labour had a different political economy and Starmer was governing as if his leadership pledges mattered, Britain would be on the path to better wages, security at work, an obvious and visible movement of rebuilding public services, making state and politics more responsive, and so on. It's not that dealing seriously with the cost-of-living crisis negates the far right, but consequences of this programme would cultivate social conditions that are less conducive for those politics to thrive. Ontological insecurity is displaced by its opposite. By way of demonstrating its obvious truth, why are Reform next to nowhere with young people? Is it because they're all saintly and see through their drivel? Or does it have something to do with their social circumstances, that there is something about their social being that conditions their attitudes to the world at the conscious and unconscious levels?
Labour are in a position to do something about the rise of the far right, which they are doing. It's not just Starmer and McSweeney's pathetic Chamberlain cosplay that's making life easier for the Farages and Yaxley-Lennon's of this world, but it's the consequences their beggar-thy-neighbour politics, their "fiscal rules", and utter disinterest in addressing this country's long-term problems - because it goes against the interests of those whom they serve - that are doing real damage to our social fabric. This is their responsibility, and there is no doubt in my mind that they will carry on as they are. Until they are either removed, or Farage gets himself into Number 10.
12 comments:
This rambling piece of scattershot analysis , for me, along with the painfully middle class fear of "the mob", evident in the current catastrophist posts of Richard Murphy on his blog, shows just how divorced today's Left is from the mass working class base that once belonged to the Labour Party.
Discussions on the rise in mass allegiance to the opportunist parties of the radical Right, as evidenced by current voting results, and that giant Yaxley - Lennon led march in London, strike me as akin to the total lack of understanding by a comfortable colonial elite as to what can possibly be aggravating the perplexing natives in those ghastly dark, unvisited, housing estates one reads about in " the North".
Just maybe there are valid , life experience-based reasons why the old Red Wall Labour voters are, in desperation, falling under the sway of the fascist demagogues ? Unprecedented immigration for one factor, endless consequential competition for jobs and housing another . The predictable looming collapse into intranecine squabbling of the Your Party initiative, is just one more sign that we on the Left are truly in deep doodoo, as the Far Right opportunistically offers their very unpleasant bogus solutions to the key issues that the Left will not even tackle, other than with virtue signalling empty slogans about "fighting racism".
A case of physician, heal thyself as our brave anonymous commentator lobs brickbats in haphazard fashion and fails to engage with what was actually said.
No one is saying 'Keir Starmer must condemn' is the be-all and end-all of anti-racism. The piece above is about making a narrower point about why it's in Labour's interests to take it up on a rhetorical and policy level.
Anon was even so good as to shoot his own point in the foot. Phil argued that Labour should be - but conspicuously is not, under Starmer/McSweeney/Reeves - doing something to alleviate the burden of "endless consequential competition for jobs and housing", among other burdens of the hollowed-out post-Tory economy (assuming of course that Anon really meant for the aforementioned competition to be considered separately to the immigration bugbear).
If the downtrodden inhabitants of the Red Wall wastelands are most concerned about problems of their lived experience, as Anon suggests, then Labour would certainly be doing better there (and the far right ghouls worse) if it gave any impression that it intends to do anything - anything real at all - to make their lived experiences better.
What is Labour doing instead...? Focusing on the performative deportation of tiny numbers of migrants. Apparently hoping that if (IF) they can magically bring the small boat numbers down, whilst bending over backwards to avoid explicitly antagonising the nativists in any way, then the racist parties' support will defect to them - regardless of whether or not they have done anything else at all to improve those people's lives.
Anon shouldn't trouble themselves worrying about Red Wall voters being tarred as a bunch of racist barbarians by the cosmopolitan left which Anon despises so much. Its actions reveal clearly that THE PRESENT LABOUR LEADERSHIP considers the Red Wall voters to be a bunch of racist barbarians.
Phil, do you have proof that Reform really are "next to nowhere" with young people?
I have noticed that some pundits on the BBC seem to have garnered a different impression.
One supposes that might have something to do with McSweeney's genius master plan to win a second term solely on the basis of threatening the electorate with the far right. And/or it might have something to do with the BBC's squalid fawning obsession with the toad-faced rabble rouser.
However, since everyone by now knows that the far right across the Western world have been pouring resources into trying to radicalise young white males, with a narrative about how all of their opportunities have been stolen by uppity non-whites and rebellious women - surely Reform must have picked up some significant number of these?
Pretending Reform is popular with young people is self-serving nonsense. The latest YouGov poll (for Wales) is typical of the trend when voting intention is broken down by age. Reform are on 11%, and the Tories are on 8%. Out in front are Plaid (25%), then the Greens (23%), and Labour (22%).
Three non-socialist bourgeois liberal parties out in front. Big win!
Tommy Robinson and Reform can be easily dealt with,. Simply ban them under anti terror legislation. Ban all groups to
the right of
the the Tories and set MI5 on every one. Make anyone who complains about immigration utterly terrified . Build prisons to house
the right. Solution is simple. Salud
Reform are a flash in the pan. Labour is solid and doing well under Starlet. Don 't panic. British people are left wing
On a practical point, how did all these people get to London for a demo? If it is a left wing one then trade unions and little parties of the left organise buses, trains,etc. So who organised the transport for 200K people to come from all over - or were they all from SE England, able to jump on a tube train?
And do we expect to see the break up of the 'Kingdom' marchers? They seem a very mixed bunch - Fascist militia types in groups that don't like each other, football hooligans, Christian fundamentalists,Zionists, Reform voters of a certain age, family groups worried by something or other and so on. It does not seem a stable basis for moving forward.
It seems fairly clear that Reform's main base is among the middle aged and older. Those that hark back to a past when you could leave the front door unlocked, and everyone in your street looked like you, spoke like you, thought like you, and did similar work. A phrase that has been flung around is "deconstructed culture" - meaning that people from very different cultures have come here and undermined ours (I think).
It's a combination of this change, with the many economic changes, and the technological changes, that have rendered the place (metaphorical and physical) we now live in unrecognisable from how it was 40 or even 30 years ago.
Its easy to see the most obvious physical changes in people and culture as the cause of the larger social change, when they are really just a symptom. But often the symptom is what we experience as the problem. And so it is here.
«Unprecedented immigration for one factor, endless consequential competition for jobs and housing another .»
If you believe in "disparate impact" then preventing people from outside Europe who are almost all non-white from competing for UK jobs and housing becomes, "objectively", racist apartheid.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2002/jun/10/labour.uk
“in the urgent need to remove rigidities and incorporate flexibility in capital, product and labour markets, we are all Thatcherites now”
https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/buyout-boss-says-brexit-will-be-good-his-business-will-mean-30-cut-uk-wages-1602631
“One of the biggest names in European private equity said that Brexit will be good for his business, but will mean a 30% wage reduction for UK workers. [...] He added that EU immigration will be replaced with workers from the Indian subcontinent and Africa, willing to accept "substantially" lower pay.”
But it will also means a significant increase in wage level and house quality for those immigrants from the Indian subcontinent and Africa.
«It seems fairly clear that Reform's main base is among the middle aged and older.»
The same as the Conservatives, New Labour, LibDems and this core constituency of "Middle England" affluent property owners have benefited tremendously from mass immigration thanks to much more affordable cleaners, gardeners, delivery bikers, nurses, etc. and big demand pressure for housing driving up prices and rents.
Those "Middle England" voters and the parties targeting them as their main constituency therefore are delighted with mass immigration and it is a common myth that they want less immigration and even Farage seems to be a victim of that myth, never mind Starmer; what they object to is not cultural issues either:
«A phrase that has been flung around is "deconstructed culture" [...] we now live in unrecognisable from how it was 40 or even 30 years ago.»
What is the most notable aspect of changes in english culture is not that it has become more "multicultural", but more americanised, like the the rest of Europe and every developed nation including China, and few people seem to complain about that.
«everyone in your street looked like you, spoke like you, thought like you, and did similar work.»
This is the hint to the real issue that the "Middle England" voters of Conservatives, Reform, New Labour, LibDems have: they are outraged not that there are many immigrants, but they that they have civil and human rights and go about in public as if it was their place to do so, instead of staying out of sight in their ghettos when not called to server their "Middle England" and "Upper England" employers. Cheap polish plumbers, cheap nigerian nurses, cheap asian delivery bikers delight "Middle England" voters as long as they do not dare to show themselves in public areas outside work.
"Middle England" voters reckon themselves to have become "upstairs" people and their outrage is that "downstairs" immigrant servants are "uppity" and do not keep to "downstairs". They admire instead the saudi-UAE way of dealing with immigrant servants.
Boris Johnson who understands "Middle England" culture well appositely wrote:
https://www.irishpost.com/news/boris-johnson-pledges-stop-eu-migrants-treating-uk-part-country-174975
“You’ve seen quite a large number of people coming in from the whole of the EU — 580 million population — able to treat the UK as though it’s basically part of their own country and the problem with that is there has been no control at all and I don’t think that is democratically accountable.”
"Middle England" voters as to that are not really racist: they had the same "upstairs downstairs" attitude to the native english servant class, to the irish and scottish immigrant servant class, to the EU immigrant servant class as to the african and east asian servant class.
But they had fewer problems with the native english servant class as they had been trained over the centuries to always be aware of their own stations, and more problems with the EU servant class as they had enforceable treaty rights ("WE WILL NEVER SURRENDER TO THE ECJ!") and behaved "arrogantly" as if England was indeed "their own country" (as in part of the EU).
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