It's hard not to conclude that the right are embracing racism in ways we haven't seen for years. The last Tory government certainly pursued racist policies. From Theresa May's hostile environment and victimisation of Windrush citizens, Rishi Sunak's Rwanda scheme, and the rubbish peddled by Suella Braverman, they sailed close to the wind of mainstream conventions but purposely had an element of plausible deniability. We aren't targeting black and brown people, our beef is with legal and illegal immigrants and asylum seekers. We have to control our borders, Britain is only a small island, and this have nothing to do with race. These pretences have evaporated. The repugnant Robert Jenrick can complain about not seeing any white faces during a trip to Handsworth. Nigel Farage can unveil plans for deporting everyone with indefinite leave to remain, while having a convicted racist hatemonger address his conference. The Tories have tried outbidding Reform, with the "rising star" Katie Lam calling for more deportations to make the country more "culturally coherent", which Kemi Badenoch has said is broadly in line with party policy. And then the Pochin/Philp nonsense.
There are a couple of popular theories circulating around online political chatter. The first is about Twitter, or what it has become. Under Elon Musk, it is an open sewer, a welcome home for neo-Nazis, Holocaust denial and antisemitism, anti-Muslim and anti-black racism. Musk has created a safe space where the far right are not just tolerated, they're coddled. The algorithm boosts their posts, and several times Musk has publicly intervened to promise that Grok, the AI chatbot he's forcing down users' throats, backs up and supports racist views of the world. Meanwhile, links to external sites have been downgraded, and the reach of left wing and even centrist views are algorithmically dampened. The theory goes that the right, and much of the political establishment for that matter, have remained on the site and treat it as they always have: as a window on the world. Because the far right have been normalised on the platform, political and media elites assume this is reflective of real life. With Reform topping the polls and immigration surging as a priority issue, these serve as secondary confirmations of this belief. Hence the overboard coverage and discourse here about the assassination of Charlie Kirk, and the importation of many a trope and trick from Trumpland. Twitter brain makes them think overt racism is popular, that it has cut through.
The second is a consequence of the aforementioned immigration policies pushed by the Tories. The relentless scapegoating and dog whistling around refugees only has one place to go, and that's outright racism. Cut the crap and go for plain speaking. The racist rioters last year knew what they were about, and follow up remarks from the Tories showed they understood too. With Reform stealing the Conservative base from under the party's feet, going ever more extreme is the only way of holding the central components of their coalition together. This was aided and abetted by Labour too. Keir Starmer's critique of the Rwanda scheme was about cost and practicality. Nowhere did he or his front bench challenge the politics. Over this year, they've tried to look credible and failed utterly on small boat crossings while ratcheting up immigration controls. And we had the utterly shameful spectacle of Labour ministers refusing to criticise this summer's far right-organised protests against asylum seekers, saying they were sympathetic to their "genuine concerns". And they wonder why the Greens are surging. The consequence of this? Laying the ground work for open racism to flourish.
Both points have something to recommend them, and neither excludes the other. But I think they speak to something fundamental - a deep crisis in ruling class politics that goes beyond the decline of the Tories and the evaporation of Labour in office. Gramsci's celebrated discussions of hegemony were more than a question of securing popular consent for class rule. It was inseparable from providing leadership, of a tiny class and its allies generalising their particular interest as the universal interest, their class-bound outlook as the proper, commonsensical outlook. Their rule as the natural state of things. Generally this sits in the background, and only comes to the fore at moments of crisis. The post-war consensus, the compact between labour and capital to ensure the latter's continuation was refracted through Labourism and one nation Conservatism and helped pacify the radical mood following the war. The class battles of the 1970s and the ruling class "solution" of Thatcherism was another. Though not at the same level, New Labour emitted sub-intellectual hogwash about the third way that gestured toward political leadership, as did the Tories of the coalition years with their Big Society hand waving, and after them May with her talk about the burning injustices, and Boris Johnson with the mashing together of Brexit and "levelling up". When Liz Truss induced a crisis in public finances, it was simply introduced as a measure that would straightforwardly favour the wealthiest. Sunak abandoned this, but retreated from offering leadership as he tried keeping his government on an even keel. And Labour? As Starmer has retreated from his leadership pledges, he's also drawn back from those aspects of his platform that might have laid the foundations of a new hegemony. The devolution agenda, green energy, expansive workers' rights, all have been toned down. And what do we have instead? Breakfast clubs, AI boosterism, arms for a genocide, and blandly technocratic statements about economic growth.
This is a problem, because their system is beset by trouble. The old way of governing is in crisis, it is not delivering the goods, and their traditional political agents find their legitimacy collapsing. Labour is an ideas-free zone, and their effort to rest their appeal on "delivery", as if voting is a simple question of customer satisfaction, is doomed. There is no sign from within that they're capable of providing the leadership this moment if crisis requires, either for their own electoral wellbeing, for sustaining class relations, nor providing initiatives for gaining popular consent for the persistence of this state of affairs. They're relying on social inertia to keep things going.
The same applies to the right. Strip Reform of its racist programme and what does it offer? Is there any sense of giving Britons their sense of self-respect? Of rebuilding a country of community and belonging? Of a policy agenda that might restore the country to the land of nostalgic fancy? No. Theirs would be a straightforward rule of oligarchical interests just like Trump's America. A hellhole of roving deportation gangs, crude and racist public discourse, shuttered cultural institutions, and a hobbled politics. The Tory programme, at this stage, is identical. It too is stripped back, the bones of the class relations they uphold visible through paper thin skin. Because the starting point of right wing politics is dishonesty, of presenting the elite interest as the general interest, central to these politics across time and space has been division, of preying on existing divisions or generating them where they haven't previously existed. The latter does require some political nous to identify and articulate new out-groups, which is what the press is for in this country. But the right are now so bereft of talent, so clapped out and lazy, that they turn to the basest forms of divide and rule transmitted and received from the past. Again, Trump is the model and the possible future. A racist administration largely unconcerned with popular concerns as they trough on state coffers, lock up Americans, and erode democratic norms and mechanisms of accountability, such as they exist. And for what? there's no sense of historic mission, just a grab-what-you-can while they can before multiple crises get so bad that they either cannot get away with this any longer, or what they're doing becomes impossible. This is where the recrudescence of racism on the right comes from, a class project butting up against its limits without any obvious way forward. Faced with the end, this has encouraged the opposite of thinking, the opposite of leadership. All that's left is an opportunity for one more round of looting, and collective stupefaction. The right's re-embrace of racism is a morbid symptom, and one that cannot abate.
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3 comments:
I congratulate you on your diagnosis of the disease. The question then arises - is it incurable and terminal, is it incurable but the patient can carry on for most of their alotted span, gradually getting more decrepit, or is there a cure? And if the latter, is the cure one that the patient will accept easily, or will they resist it and pretend that all is well? In this event, will the patient ever be persuaded to undergo the curative process?
At the moment nobody seems to agree on what the cause of the illness is, which makes the prospect of any effective treatment very remote.
The inevitability of this end-state of affairs has been blindly obvious for years, since first the 2008 crash and then the COVID pandemic failed to either dislodge the grip of the ruling parasites, or endow them with any appetite for sensible compromise as possessed by their wiser forebears.
Neoliberalism possessed and zombified the political centre like a cordyceps; when it failed, the political centre was a goner too. With the centre gone, only the wings remain, and the ruling class fear the slavering beast of rabid nationalism (often their friend in the past, even if it also sometimes turned bloodily upon them) far less than the other alternative. So there was never much doubt about which possible future they would throw their psychopathic weight behind.
And here we are, with the absolute minimum being done to suppress the aforementioned beast, whilst consistently no expense is spared in trying to make it look like the continuation of the death rattle of neoliberalism is the only alternative to the monster.
Nowhere in the captured democracies of the West is to be spared this grim pantomime, as one can see by a glance in the direction of France. If "the markets" and their servants won't tolerate concessions to socialism, then they choose nationalism, and shortly after that mass murder and open war. The markets apparently don't fear those things enough.
Pochin's remarks do echo the sentiments of a real section of the voting public, I believe, one which can be found on social media wherever the sewer bursts onto the surface. There are significant numbers of these creatures, and they are absolutely determined nowadays to not allow their raw animalistic opinions to be suppressed from the public discourse any longer. So Pochin is at least representing her constituents...!
Exactly how many of them are there? Much harder to say, since it takes the applied resources of billionaires to get them to actually show their faces in the light of the real world (c.f. Yaxley-Lennon's Musk-bankrolled flag parade, dwarfed by a pro-Palestine march only weeks later); and those same resources are also clearly being thrown into trying to make it seem, in the online world, as though there are many more of these vicious critters than there really are. If you find them on social media then you'll notice that they swarm like flies when they get to an opportunity early, but if the "room" is already hostile to them when their scouts show up, there's no swarming but rather a token show of defiance before slinking away. It's also striking in swarming incidents how old that their demographic appears to be, at least on this side of the Pond. And unsurprisingly, they show a general lack of both sophistication and eloquence - the few determined bigots that have shown up repeatedly to this blog over the years are giants of intellectual erudition by comparison to the typical specimen! Which again makes it difficult to be sure how many of them represent real people, because anyone with too much time on their hands (and/or an income stream for performing this very activity) can run multiple accounts and spam low-effort comments.
So, definitely significant numbers, but probably a minority which is declining as its members die off without being replaced like for like - and whose current dominance of the public sphere is dependent firstly upon resources being thrown at them at by obscenely rich malcontents who share their wretched opinions, and secondly upon the suppression of their more vital opponents by the strangling death grip of the neoliberal machine. I'd love to know if there's any hard evidence which points to the reality being other then this.
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