Racism and the Right

Racist party in racism shocker. Reform MP Sarah Pochin has been forced to apologise after saying "it drives me mad when I see adverts full of black people, full of Asian people, full of anything other than white." Her non-apology partially withdrew her remarks, saying she wanted to say something about how unrepresentative adverts are. As far as the rest of mainstream politics was concerned, this was a straightforward racist outburst. Wes Streeting didn't mince his words, seeing as Labour have belatedly discovered that opposing racist arguments is a good thing. The Liberal Democrats have moved a Commons motion of censure against Pochin too. But more interesting were the remarks from Chris Philp, the shadow home secretary. Asked to respond, he said "It’s not language I would have used ... but we should acknowledge the public do have legitimate concerns about large-scale immigration and discussing that is certainly not racist." That Pochin was not talking about immigration suggests, at best, that Philp has a blind spot on racism.

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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