Labourism and Social Conservatism

"Social conservatism has always been part of Labour!", so wrote Connor Naismith last week. Seeing that Labour suffered humiliation in Manchester, he argues that there are "voices" who are laying the blame for the defeat on Blue Labour. "Traditional values", they say, need junking if Labour is going to dust itself off and return to winning ways. As a self-identifying supporter of this trend, Naismith has gone into print to defend it.

There are two parts to his argument. Firstly, social conservatism is embedded in Labourism. The party's forward march and its reformist zeal was driven by the need to protect what he calls "the moral economy". That is taking home a wage enough for a family to live on, the sustenance of "communal discipline" (i.e. solidarity), and localism. Social conservatism is social glue, and every radical programme needs that if it's going to succeed. Speaking of the 1945 Labour government, he says "They built the NHS and the welfare state not to dismantle the British way of life, but to fortify it. They were radical in their means because they were conservative in their ends: the health, dignity, and stability of British families."

Therefore, purging social conservatism is like amputating a limb. Labour and Labourism are radical because they are conservative. Social conservatism respects people where they are, imbues places with meaning, and gives relationships substance. It is a rooted politics based in the every day, and one aimed at preserving what is good while making things better. Labour would be foolish to abandon anyone who aspires to such.

The second part of his argument is why Labour in such a state. Naismith says that Labour has abandoned its vote. The breaking of the so-called red wall " ... was because gradually, over decades, the party’s centre of gravity shifted toward a metropolitan liberalism that felt increasingly judgemental of parts of the tradition that founded it." What does this actually mean? In British politics discourse the term "metropolitan liberalism" has distinct connotations. It's right wing shorthand for "things we don't like", such as equal rights and affording racial and sexual minorities recognition and respect. I don't know how long Naismith's been in Labour for, but in my nine years of knocking on doors in Stoke-on-Trent, from the dog days of Gordon Brown to Jeremy Corbyn's Waterloo, no one told me they weren't voting Labour because it supported gay rights. Or offered help to the disabled. What I got instead was a lot of "you're all the same", you "don't listen", some anti-immigration bile, and even an occasional "you've abandoned the working class". For much of the previous 30 years, that last comment was absolutely right. Who oversaw a greater decline of manufacturing than Thatcher? Tony Blair. Who did nothing to enhance collective rights in the workplace? Tony Blair. Who continued the undermining of sate institutions by subjecting them to the market? You get the idea. This was not thanks to metropolitan arrogance, though there was plenty of that around, rather it was because New Labour was open about its contempt for the labour movement, its aspirations, and presented itself as a reliable custodian of British capitalism and manager of its class relations - for capital's benefit. And when this anti-working class agenda was challenged by Corbyn's leadership, we know what happened.

Naismith's class-blind history aside, he really gives social conservatism too much credit. When we look at the toerags and fools who present themselves as Blue Labour, it's telling that this club are a) middle class, b) white men, and c) have absolutely no standing or roots in the wider labour movement. Read Maurice Glasman - I have - and it's obvious that the "economic radicalism" that is supposedly the flip side of this very, very moral politics is merely a rhetorical nod. A never-articulated alibi for a miserable dismalism of scapegoating, and stop-the-world fogeyness. If only Blue Labour was a careful plea to understand the interests of our class, its (long-declining) culture of collectivism, and putting that at the heart of policy making and the vision for a better future. Instead, what we have had under Keir Starmer is a racist effort to out-Reform Reform, the rolling back of trans rights, and until recently a noted reticence to take on bigotry. Very middle class Labour MPs and well-heeled friendly journalists defended all this because this was their idea of what social conservatism was, and they were merely giving voice to values shared by the salt-of-the-earth. Meanwhile, polling of working age Britons has found this ventriloquism is a poor impression of what they say and think. The Labour working class base was imploding because other parties were actually speaking to their interests and their actual values. It was them talking the language of respect and reciprocity, while Labour imitated the spite, the division, and the small mindedness of their opponents on the extreme right.

Thirdly, Naismith's definition of social conservatism is empty to the point of meaninglessness. If Naismith is impressed by the class cultures of old, what policies are he and his party following to promote a new collectivism appropriate to the actually existing working class? The answer to that, of course, is very little. Instead, along with racist and transphobic divide-and-rule politics, we've seen the same commitment to labour market flexibility, of letting capital run riot in the NHS, and the handing of a veto to business over crucial aspects of their much trumpeted, and much watered-down Employment Rights Act. The danger, the existential threat to Labour lies not in the call for the party to be less racist and binning off Blue Labour, but in its refusal to act as the political fulcrum of the class that made it. And this is why that class is now turning elsewhere.

The Uses of Farage's Schoolboy Racism

Have you seen the latest revelations about Nigel Farage? Brace yourselves. He was, apparently, a bit racist at school. According to an expose from The Graun, while a day boy at Dulwich he made no secret of his admiration for Adolf Hitler, happily capered about with antisemitic banter, to the point of making up a ditty called "Gas 'em all", and put at least one pupil on detention for having the wrong skin colour. What a charmer.

None of these allegations are new, having first surfaced in 2013 when teachers' letters at Dulwich came to light. One of them observing that Farage was "a fascist, but that was no reason why he would not make a good prefect." A flailing Keir Starmer happily seized on them at Prime Minister's Questions. "These are disturbing allegations and it is vital that Nigel Farage urgently explains himself", said the chief presser to the lobby hack huddle afterwards. Does it really matter what the Reform leader said while he was a kid almost 50 years ago? For Starmer and his team, as a recent convert to calling racism racism, they're hoping the label will stick. And if it does, it could cause the softer edges of Farage's coalition to think twice. Something that might have a stronger chance of working if the messenger bearing these attacks was held in higher regard.

However, the real political tell comes in the criticism of Farage. Or rather, its focus. Obviously, there's a link between racist young Farage and 61-year-old Farage who's done very well out of spouting anti-immigration drivel. His campaign was pivotal for helping Leave get over the referendum line in 2016. But dwelling on the past alibis the present. Starmer can't attack Farage now as a racist as, quite deliberately, Labour's attacks on refugees leapfrog Reform. Neither can Kemi Badenoch's Tories, who've also dabbled in overt racism - not that anyone cares enough to notice. The idea is to use whatever the press can dredge up about Farage, and then pin the racist label on him in a manner akin to the Anti-Nazi League's/Unite Against Fascism campaigning against the BNP in the 00s. And this, they hope, deflects from Labour's own scapegoating, its own racism, its own moral depravity. In other words, another cynical ploy unlikely to stymie Reform's support while doing nothing to rebuild Labour's own.

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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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Uncovering Starmer's Fraudulent Politics

I was privileged enough to score an invite to Tuesday morning's presser for Paul Holden's The Fraud, a forensic examination of the shenanigans, rules flouting, and, in some cases, potential law breaking by Morgan McSweeney and the people around him. The story of Labour Together and what role it played in capturing the Labour leadership for Keir Starmer is well enough known, but what Holden has done is hunt down the receipts and the emails that lubricated this dishonest enterprise. But this has not happened without personal risk. A malicious complaint against him was made to the National Cyber Security Centre, alleging that he'd accessed hacked emails from Labour Together. He was also called by someone pretending to be a journalist for openDemocracy who tried pumping him for information, and that "reputation management firms" had tried digging up dirt on him and his family.

Holden began at the beginning. Labour Together was founded by Jon Cruddas and was billed as a non-factional organisation looking to bridge the divides inside Labour. He hired McSweeney, and very quickly Steve Reed, now the minister for housing and local government, and Imran Ahmed, now of the Centre for Countering Digital Hate, came on board, From that point on it became a front for their factionalising, which was hidden from Cruddas. As we now know, LT was central to Keir Starmer's leadership campaign in early 2020, but McSweeney and friends denied it was any such thing. We also know that LT took over £700k in undeclared donations, and while this was later explained as an admin oversight Holden has email correspondence between McSweeney and the Electoral Commission. McSweeney argued that it didn't need declaring because LT was not a campaigning organisation, whereas the EC said that didn't matter and should be reported as a matter of course. The Morganiser subsequently "forgot" this conversation. Meanwhile, LT figures, such as the new home secretary Shabana Mahmood, was writing articles that said all funding was properly declared.

On Labour's antisemitism crisis, Reed, McSweeney, and Ahmed drove some aspects of the crisis, with the first compiling and submitting lists of his own. Where this painful episode needed to be dealt with with seriousness and care, it was instead factional and toxic. Accusations of racism were, yes, weaponised as part of the right's was against the left. One such example was David Gordstein, who made hundreds of complaints against party members. This identity was an invention of the (non-Jewish) Euan Phillips of Labour Against Antisemitism and targeted the left, including Jewish members.

LT also funded some secret projects, which included the astroturf campaign 'Stop Funding Fake News'. Launched in March 2019, it portrayed itself as a volunteer organisation but worked under the direction of McSweeney and Ahmed. It campaigned to demonetise websites. and the primary target was The Canary, which was seen as an important node in Corbyn-supportive media. They also targetted Westmonster, the right wing Arron Banks vehicle, and Nigel Farage and the Brexit Party. In May 2019, SFFN posted a thread telling people not to vote BXP and made ad hom attacks on Trump. The political problem is this used Russia-style disinfo tactics, and laid open the Prime Minister's right hand man to charges that undeclared money was used to cancel opponents. Farage is far from averse to playing the poor little right winger card, and could make something of this. Also, Starmer is in hot water of the notoriously prickly White House takes notice.

Part two of the book is called the long con, and details the dishonest contrivances around marketing Starmer. He was recreated as an inhabitant of the human rights universe, and employed "shadowing" as a tactic. I.e. Politically, Starmer's campaign tracked closely to the positions of Rebecca Long-Bailey so no meaningful gap could open between the two. Entirely by coincidence, Stop Funding Fake News was resurrected on 8th January and again went after The Canary. Their crime this time? Drawing attention to Starmer's time as Director of Public Prosecutions, a record that sits somewhat uneasily with his human rights glossing.

Part three looks at killing Corbynism. Once the leadership was won, the machinery was quickly recolonised by right wingers, which was epitomised by their response to the leaked dossier of Labour staffers' WhatsApp messages. Despite the racist banter, attacks on other party members, and evidence of a shadow campaign that diverted funds to safe seats held by right wingers in 2017, those at fault were barely admonished while heaven and earth was moved to find the leaker. Eventually the party took five former officials to court on the flimsiest of evidence. But what did they have in common? They were part of the left. This shadow campaign, which Holden calls the Ergon House scandal, saw funds diverted away from swing seats to safe seats, circumventing normal governance procedures. This was a secret office and Holden has documentary proof that six right wingers, Gloria De Piero, Mary Creagh, Margaret Beckett, Angela Eagle, Caroline Flint, and Judith Cummins, benefited from their support. Unite wrote to Starmer about this and suggested it might shade into criminality, but this breaking of Labour rules and electoral law came to nothing.

On the EHRC report on Labour's antisemitism, within half an hour of Starmer saying he would implement its recommendations he had violated them. One of the EHRC's findings was that the party was guilty of "indirect" discrimination because the leader's office under Corbyn was occasionally consulted about the pace and outcomes of complaints. It's worth noting here, which Holden did not, that this "discrimination" was focused on expediting complaints, not delaying them as falsely claimed by right wingers at the time. However, despite pledging to end interference, between May-June 2020 the leader's office and Angela Rayner were copied into all complaints and were regularly briefed on cases. Complaint handlers were also directed as to their findings. Perhaps the most egregious example of this was the suspension of Jeremy Corbyn from the party, with emails and tweets being sent announcing this immediately after Corbyn, rightly, acknowledged that antisemitism was played as a political football. Other interferences involved "VIP lanes" for MPs who wanted to complain against inconvenient activists

Overall, Holden's presser portrayed Labour as a vicious and, at times, lawless party. Their dismissal of the Forde report into factionalism and the issuing of legal threats around non-disclosure against him, the deselection of Anna Rothery as Labour's candidate for Liverpool's mayoralty, the racist profiling of Newham Labour Party, which involved significant data breaches, and - it might ba added- their repeated victimisation of Diane Abbott demonstrates a systematic problem with racism. But one that gets a free pass because it's the right wing that are doing it.

In all, what Holden has accomplished is a detailed, meticulous exposure of right wing perfidy. It sounds like a dossier of damnation, and one whose evidence could form the basis of civil and legal cases against the Labour Party in general, and McSweeney and his boys in particular. Matters not helped by the fact these right wingers have boasted about their genius dark arts moves to any journalist willing to be their stenographer. As Holden concluded, their fraudulent approach to politics marked the 2024 election campaign and helps explain the alienation and antipathy Starmer has engendered in government. Who can disagree?

Kemi Badenoch's Attention Seeking

Do you remember the Conservative Party? For much of this year, they hung around like a half-remembered memory. It's difficult to recall when they were the centre of political life, and I write that as someone who wrote a book and has expended hundreds of thousands of words about them. Are we living in a Britain after the Tories? It certainly feels like it. The current crop of polls has them hovering around the 16-17% mark, and they are entirely marginal to a discourse geared around the Labour/Reform face off. It seems even the Liberal Democrats and Greens are attracting more coverage and comment these days. More than any other party, this is the world the Tories have shaped. And they're absent from it.

When the Tories were dumped out of office last year, there were two strategic directions available to them. The first, which was an outside shot, was learning from their experience of trying to be a right wing "populist" party, how this positioning alienated the broader constituency they depended on, and that this committed them to promises they could not deliver. Such as the Rwanda scheme and their war against the boats. The solution? Reinvent themselves as a moderate centre right outfit that eschews the politics of division and begin constructing an appealing project that might get a hearing outside its shrinking heartland of reactionary pensioners. What with the composition of the parliamentary party and the membership being as it is, such a transformation would be as difficult as it is painful, but the party's long-term viability depended on it.

And so the Tories chose the easier path. To those for whom politics is a tussle between ideologies and vibes, this appeared as an illogical retreat into their "comfort zone" where the party can feel safe. As per its 1997 drubbing. In fact, from the standpoint of the party's two leaders this did make sense. Having suffered an earth shattering defeat, consolidating one's base by turning further to the right is a reasonable, if mistaken, response. Once the base is firmed up they could then sally forth and contest Labour for votes. This was reflected in Kemi Badenoch's oft-stated timetable for her leadership: spend a couple of years getting the philosophy right before making policy. But there is a problem. A Nigel Farage-sized problem.

Before Farage decided to re-enter British politics, Reform were barely of any consequence. But since he has become a lightning rod of disaffection, being able to prey on right wing voters for whom the uselessness of the Conservatives was amply demonstrated over five years, and the layer of Reform-curious Labour support repelled by the cruelty and incompetence of Keir Starmer's "grown-ups" and are game for giving someone else a go. Wall-to-wall media coverage hasn't hurt Farage either, with his political pronouncements burying the Russia links, not declaring earnings, and questions over who purchased his home. As such, Reform's rise has severely disrupted Conservative regroupment and making consolidation difficult, if not impossible. Matters are not helped by the fact that neither Badenoch, nor Robert Jenrick, the man who would be king, are up to the task. As they have been eclipsed in the polls, media attention, including coverage provided by what Tim Bale helpfully calls 'the party in the media', has moved on. Unaccustomed to playing second fiddle in British politics, to be relegated to third party status in the attention economy is a reduced circumstance the Tories have never endured before. How can they make waves again?

They have decided that a mixture of stunts and policy extremism can catch the media's eye. Though obviously a self-serving effort to try and secure the leadership for himself, Jenrick's ridiculous rail ticket vigilantism earned the Tories at least one item on Newsnight, but dismissal from everyone else. It demonstrated an unpopulist touch, as most rail passengers despise the money grubbing of train operators, and coming across as a plummy accented tube station Blakey could only invite ridicule. And then as small bands of fascists, egged on by the press and Reform, tried desperately to stir up a repeat of last summer's riots, Jenrick joined the protest in Epping outside the Bell Hotel, which was hosting refugees. I doubt many of the racists there knew, or for that matter cared, that this arch opportunist was rallying against a policy that he developed and implemented. Still, the media were there and it reminded the Tory press that their traditional party still existed and was trying to dance to their tunes.

Jenrick has his own approach to attention-seeking, and Badenoch has hers. With attendance well down on last year's party conference and adrift in the polls, how can she capture the headlines and turn heads? The first part of her gambit was pledging to abolish the climate change act, thereby aligning her party with fossil fuel profit margins. This will do nothing to appeal outside of the Tory core, meaning dozens of Lib Dem MPs across southern England's new yellow wall can sleep a touch more soundly. It is something Tory and Reform supporters have an opinion about, but climate change denial is not the reason why Reform supporters support Reform.

Not fussed with those opinions? Badenoch has others. The Sunday press splashed with her promise to deport 150,000 people every year. Challenged by Laura Kuenssberg, the Tory leader disassembled into stamping her foot and exclaiming "they should not be here", "send them back to where they came from", and making clumsy elisions between refugees and criminality. This pitch to the Reform faithful would include an ICE-style "removals force", which Badenoch describes as a "successful approach". As Donald Trump's goon squad, lest we forget that ICE goes out of its way to terrorise mixed ethnicity working class communities, and will scoop up anyone it doesn't like the look of. Badenoch is too stupid and too reckless to realise that their racial profiling means that members of her own family are theoretically at risk of the state-sponsored thuggery she would unleash on others.

This means getting rid of legal blockages that may hamper such work. On Saturday, Badenoch also confirmed she would withdraw the country from the European Convention on Human Rights. This would also mean leaving the convention on human trafficking, something the Tories might at least want to pay lip service too. The plan is a system where making asylum claims is virtually impossible, and legal oversight and accountability pared back. Effectively a design for one, two, many Windrush scandals. And something the Tories would welcome as a metric for how tough they are. How this would impact on the Good Friday Agreement and the post-Brexit settlement with the EU doesn't impinge on their thinking. As per the Boris Johnson way of doing things, these are problems for another time.

What else might Badenoch have up her sleeves this week? Flat taxes? The abolition of inheritance tax? Banning trade unions? Her problem is that for that tiny minority of the electorate that get switched on by the cruelty of mass deportations, the Tories can be - and already are - outbid by Reform. In addition to platforming someone jailed for saying refugees should burn, Farage has said he would abolish Indefinite Leave to Remain and promise to deport 750,000 people. Do Tory strategists, such as they are, think diet versions of Reform's full fat offerings will satisfy their appetites? This can only lead to one of two conclusions. That they are as clueless as they appear, are resigned to never winning back the 249 seats lost to parties to their left, and that they cannot orientate themselves in a political landscape where their privileged position has gone. Or, that to survive, they're making themselves into a party not a million miles away from Reform so they look like a viable coalition partner. You decide.

Unfortunately, the decomposition of the Tories continues to toxify politics. Along with Labour, Badenoch is using the small media opening she has to reinforce racist and anti-immigration politics. Their rhetoric is the background to increased racist attacks, the justification of more state violence, and an authoritarian charge to the gutter that only Reform can win. While some in the party think it would be nice for the Tories to continue all of them would be okay with Farage in Number 10 because, ultimately, the class interests both of them serve are largely identical. A Reform government would buttress corporate power with the brutality and attacks on democracy we've seen wherever their ilk get into office. The Tories, even as a spent ginger group on the margins of politics would be fine with this. The rest of us cannot afford to be as sanguine.

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Keir Starmer's Declaration of War

"If you say or imply that people cannot be English or British because of the colour of their skin, that mixed-heritage families owe you an explanation... If you say that they should now be deported, then mark my words - we will fight you with everything we have". After a summer of more or less excusing fascist-organised protests against refugees, Keir Starmer's Labour conference speech has demonstrated a rediscovery of anti-racist principles. He attacked Nigel Farage, not always by name, for spivving about the United States and making money from talking the country down. He asked his audience if they could recall a time when Reform said anything positive about or praised British achievements? This was before reeling off examples of everyday people contributing to their community, laying to rest the much misused broken Britain rhetoric. Defences of multiculturalism were applauded. Attacks on Farage's plan to deport our neighbours raised cheers. Hope got a look-in, happy vibes, and the promise of a super soaraway future. Change ... with the promise of something better.

Most of what's left of the Labour Party would have lapped up Starmer's speech. It was a morale booster that offered a rare thing as Labourism goes: political clarity. He set out what Labour is against, which is the division Reform thrives upon. And for good measure, the "extremes ... of the left" were lumped in with them too. Farage was labelled directly and unambiguously as Labour's "enemy". There was also the concession that calling people racist was not enough. In his usual, wooden-topped way Starmer argued that economic growth, the "pound in the pocket" was the best antidote to the far right. That's why it's Labour's top priority. As such, he issued a rallying cry of sorts, a message directed at his own narrow divided base among the professional/managerial caste, and one that might placate the disgruntled who have had their heads turned by Andy Burnham.

Number 10 will be pleased with the response they've drawn from Farage. He has accused Starmer of "descending into the gutter" and, playing the poor little right-winger card, said "this language will incite and encourage the radical Left, I’m thinking of Antifa and other organisations like that. It directly threatens the safety of our elected officials and our campaigners." The worst Reform representatives and activists have had to put up with are people replying to their bullshit in kind. What are you supposed to do in the kitchen if it gets too hot, Nigel?

The obvious problem with Starmer's tough new rhetoric is that's all it is. His speech talks about the concerns working class people have about immigration, and how one woman showed him photos of her at her Indian neighbour's wedding before complaining about the young men from overseas who sat on her wall and spat in the street. There's a world of difference between such concerns that and the rubbish Farage is peddling, he said. But what is his own government doing? Straight out of the playbook that saw Priti Patel/Suella Braverman cynically front up anti-immigration politics, but avoiding their over-the-top incendiary rhetoric, the new home secretary Shabana Mahmood has extended the qualification period for indefinite leave to remain, and wants its confirmation contingent on undertaking voluntary work. This straight away casts migrants as problem people who have to be forced through a punitive civilising process before they're accepted by this country. And who, exactly, benefits from this framing? Certainly not a Labour Party that claims to be "against division". If Starmer and Mahmood were really serious about stopping the boats instead of cultivating their own scapegoats, the safe routes for refugees would have been expanded by now, and an asylum processing centre in Calais be up and running.

Then there is "delivery". Starmer rightly slammed the complacency of the Tories and their 14 years of failure. But lest we forget, while they are responsible for the choices they made, every policy decision was filtered through a class war frame. I.e. How can this divide people up? How can this create new folk devils? How can this keep people from lifting their eyes to the horizon? After the stock markets cratered, the Tory/Liberal Democrat coalition used the moment to turn a crisis of capital into a crisis of public finances. Their aim was to offload the bail out costs onto labour, thereby undoing further the post-war settlement and strengthening business at our expense. During and after the Covid crisis, their politics was a management of expectations, a collective effort to close off aspirations raised by the huge expansion of state capacity during the pandemic's acute phase. Now Labour are masters of the state, their approach to governing and governance isn't much different. Though for them, it's the hauntology of Corbynism that must be dispelled. Starmer and Reeves want to manage the class politics, and therefore capping the expectations of the hoi polloi is of paramount concern. Hence thimblefuls of gruels are heralded as lavish banquets.

In practice, if Starmer wants to leverage his record in government in his offensive against Reform, his achievements are like so many imaginary battalions pushed around a map. Breakfast clubs and GDP stats versus the lived experience of the cost of living crisis, and a situation-fitting narrative of grievance and scapegoating cranked up by a media-saturated charlatan. All of a sudden Starmer's war declaration looks more like The Mouse that Roared. Though unlike that old flick this ending tends toward tragedy, not farce.

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Keir Starmer Vs the Far Right

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.

Chamberlain Labour

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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The Uses of Lucy Connolly

The Lucy Connolly interview at this weekend's Farage Fest, variously available on extreme right wing YouTube outlets, was interesting. Having served her time for inciting violence online as racist mobs went on the rampage last summer, Connolly has been variously used by Reform, by a further diminishing Tory party, and by the right wing press as a free speech martyr. But it seems she's quite happy to be so utilised, saying to the always-ridiculous Allison Pearon that she looks forward to "working with Reform". Don't be surprised if she ends up as a parliamentary by-election candidate before long.

What we got from her conversation was an exercise in right wing grievance politics. As a mother, and one who lost a child to apparent NHS negligence 12 years previously, her concern is that unchecked immigration is a threat to her daughter and other children. Surely anyone with an ounce of compassion can see the sudden trauma of the Southport murders might cause an otherwise powerless woman to lash out? That in fact her call to set fire to hotels full of refugees came from a place of love and care? Connolly then argued that the courts were handing down much tougher sentences following Keir Starmer's remarks about far right thuggery. An example was to be made of her and, therefore, she was a political prisoner. We learned that while she was inside, her entitlements to leave were abrogated, and that even photographs of her daughter wrapped in the Union jack - following her victories in junior Golf - were denied. Her treatment only improved after Richard Tice went and visited her, with the Reform audience guffawing at the imagined bowing and scraping these now frightened prison official emoted before their future master.

This blog has previously visited right wing victimhood and its propensity to moan and whinge about how unfair everything is. Understanding this begins with acknowledging how their politics are fundamentally dishonest, because Faragism, just like the conservatism he came out of, has to present the minority interest - that of the oligarchy of the City, finance, propert, etc. - as the universal interest. Farage is a cannier peddler of this moonshine than the best the Tories can currently offer, and he uses the old populist tricks to creat a "them" of establishment elites and do-gooders, versus an "us" oppressed by political correctness, race hate laws, and people that might answer back. To get a bit abstract about it, the received idea of citizenship grew out of the exclusion of gendered, racialised, and classed others, and what the extreme right here and everywhere want to retain is this power to (arbitrarily) exclude. The imaginary of losing the privilege to define is a powerful attractor for some who feel excluded from politics and society, and the promise of its restoration is a harbinger for the return of certainty, of feeling in control again. This abstraction reflects the concrete realities of class politics - of a ruling class worried about its reproduction, the decline of the West, the right's dependence on the old, and the, for want of a better phrase, petit-bourgeoisification of retired people. The politics of Leave, of Boris Johnson, and now of Nigel Farage is a politics of being under siege. And to lift any siege, sharp initiatives and decisive actions are necessities. But those "solutions" consume much less energy than the performance the right affects of being victimised. It is a contrivance.

Yet Connolly, despite her gushing thanks to Reform and Allison Pearson might prove something of an unreliable partisan. Toward the end of her interview, she talked about the unfairness of the criminal justice system, of how (she felt) she wasn't able to access proper legal advice shortly after her arrest because it was at the weekend, the injustice of waiting long periods on remand, how her experience of prison has made her passionate about reforming the system, and - echoing common feminist arguments, that most women inside shouldn't be. Remarks that earned a smattering of applause. Which indicates straight away the direction Reform are using and want to carry on using Connolly's "plight". She is a martyr, an emblem of a two-tier Britain where we've become, to use Starmer's phrase, an "island of strangers". But where she has actually drawn compassionate lessons from her own experience, they're not interested. We'll see in due course if the rewards of being a useful puppet for Reform will override her desire to do something about the shortcomings of the criminal justice system.

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Taken for a Mug

Authoritarian politics always entails chaotic politics. Reform is a case in point. Since "professionalising" his party and "democratising" it, Nigel Farage has retained a firm grip on his swelling operation via a constitution that confers absolutist powers on his appointee chair, Zia Yusuf. Or, rather, did. For Yusuf is gone - and all at a moment that Reform should still be basking in the glow of electoral triumph.

The precipitating factor for Yusuf's departure was Wednesday's Prime Minister's Questions. Sarah Pochin, the newly-minted Reform MP for Runcorn asked Keir Starmer if he would consider banning the burqa for the interests of "public safety". A move that was calculated by her to bring some much-needed tabloid attention, it sparked off a public bout of disagreement among the party leadership. Lee Anderson happily endorsed the remarks, whereas Farage equivocated and said he was for a "debate". The official spox for Reform said it was not party policy, and Yusuf - a Muslim himself - took to social media and dubbed the question "dumb". Cue several hours of behind-the-scenes texts and phone calls, but the damage was done. Trotting out some ego-stroking figures, Yusuf wrote "I no longer believe working to get a Reform government elected is a good use of my time, and hereby resign the office."

Farage greeted his announcement with "Politics can be a highly pressured and difficult game and Zia has clearly had enough. He is a loss to us and public life", but it's his fault it came to this. Since Farage "returned" to British politics, Reform has eschewed the crudities of outright racist culture wars. I.e. They did not overtly play anti-Muslim cards or go for the "culturalist" racism favoured by the BNP during its heyday, or flirted with by the Tories. Partly because Farage wanted to appeal to as many conservative-minded people as possible, including that layer of first and second generation migrants who are happy to pull the ladder up after them. And that Yusuf, a Muslim, was part-bankrolling the operation. For whatever reason, it appears this political strategy was not discussed explicitly among the Reform parliamentary grouping, otherwise Pochin might have selected another question for her PMQs debut and avoided today's fall out.

Just how damaging is this for Reform? It could hurt them. For Yusuf, after sinking money and his time into the project, he's got to be realising that he's been taken for a mug. No amount of anti-immigration right-wingery and cash can change the minds of a racist party. They will never accept you. And that means the thin following Reform has among Britain's minority ethnicities might take note as well, and wake up to the fact that, at best, all they'll ever be for Farage are useful idiots for hoodwinking the unwary.

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Reform's Anti-Asylum Council Wheeze

After sweeping all before it last week, there has been some thinking aloud about what Reform plan to do with its two mayoralties, 10 councils, and 676 new councillors. What Zia Yusuf, the moneybags businessman Nigel Farage has subcontracted the dictatorial running of the party to, has said is that their local authorities are going to lodge legal actions to prevent the dispersal of asylum seekers to hostels. "We have some of the best lawyers in the country working for free to resist this awful Government", he boasted.

The "reply" from centrist supporters of Keir Starmer has been insufferably smug. This so-called parody account sums up their social media outpourings to a tee: local authorities don't have the power to stop government resettlement efforts, and therefore Reform are going to be on the hook for wasting council money on pointless and doomed legal challenges. This is a demonstration of stupidity and ideology getting in the way of the serious business of delivering local services, helping ensure they lose support when the public wise up to their antics. The fools!

Unfortunately, the foolishness sits entirely with the centrists. Yusuf and Farage know legal challenges stand next to no chance. They're not embarking on this campaign because they don't know the limits of local government. It's a wheeze to build the party and keep Reform in the news. Every time a challenge is dismissed, they get to posture as the common sense little guy battling the liberal elites on behalf of hard-pressed Britons. It's a recipe for generating more headlines in the right wing press, getting the rest of the media to dance to their tune, and forcing Labour to follow their lead - because the government are uninterested in challenging anti-immigration and anti-asylum prejudices - and embedding Reform as the only real challenge to the status quo come the next election.

Yes, there will be grumbles along the way in Reform's new local government base. It won't be long before the diktats from the centre clash with what Reform-run councils and local authority party groupings want to do. There will be rows about Yusuf's power, and the usual suspensions, expulsions, resignations, and denunciations. Authoritarian politics breeds dissension. But this won't affect Reform's standing. Those who voted for them in the local elections were not convinced by their pledges on potholes and Special Education Need pupils. They're also aware councils don't have much power nor appear to respond well to residents' needs, regardless of the party who runs it. Farage and friends know this, even if super clever centrists do not. For Reform's campaign is an effort by a party serious about winning power in 2029. Something that cannot be said about the choices Labour has made in government.

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The Lure of the Racist Self-Own

Having accomplished an unprecedented hollowing-out of support during a general election, Labour remain committed to testing the resilience of its electoral coalition. Among the latest in a long line of tawdry announcements is news Yvette Cooper will publicise the nationality of foreign criminals. The plan involves drawing up league tables of nationalities by crime, which has become possible after wonkish twiddling with how Home Office stats are generated. But why? A "source" says the government wants the public to be better informed, but also to show how much tougher Labour is on foreign criminals than the Tories were, boasting how the government are deporting more than Robert Jenrick did while providing more information about them. And right on cue, up popped Jenrick to say this data should have been available long before now. Falling into the very trap set by the cunning masterminds behind the party's strategic direction.

The politics are, on the surface, pretty straightforward. Because in Starmerland the working class are coded as Reform-supporting racists, pandering to scapegoats will turn the heads of this largely imaginary constituency. You can picture it on the nation's mobile phones. The BBC News alert pops up with Cooper's initiative, and the couple of million looking to vote for Nigel Farage at the upcoming council elections will look at it, curse the Tories' softness, and head to the polls with Labour voting intentions in their hearts. But, of course, this is not going to happen. Reform, you might recall, is a difficulty for Labour but an existential dread for the Tories, making this in strategic terms a fool's errand. Why chase after voters breaking to the right of the Tories on cultural issues instead of shoring up one's own fraying base, or making an offer that might appeal to the apparently "economically progressive" side of the artefactual Labour-Reform switcher?

There is no political mileage for Labour in pandering to the racist mischief thr right stirs up about foreign criminals. So what's the attraction? There is a joy a certain kind of middle class politician has in bureaucratically squishing little people, and especially so if one expects plaudits. Who cares about foreign criminals? They are the perfect out group, a scapegoat tailor made for scapegoating. And Labour needs its scapegoats. But there's more! Anything that is adjacent to cracking down on immigration and immigrants, according to the Tory play book is the route to political success. That Labour have imbibed this as their political common sense is illustrative of how far Keir Starmer's leadership has moved to the right. And then we have the obscene displacement activity of massaging the organs of the repressive state. Because this is a Labour government that doesn't want to do too much that might encourage people to expect more from politics, it's much easier to give the impression of being very busy. And the comparatively risk-free way of demonstrating activity without upsetting the apple cart is to lean heavily into the politics of immigration. And in so doing, the government are contributing to the huge effort made by the media and Labour's political opponents in keeping that as one of the country's top three issues.

And yet, the stupidity is their entering a race they can never win. Galaxy brain Morgan McSweeney is implying that if deportations are ramped up, work and student visas curbed, and foreign criminals seen to be getting their just desserts, then the issue will be neutralised. But it won't be. Labour supporters who are concerned about immigration are more motivated by other issues, and if they're leaning toward Reform it's in a manner akin to those who flirted with the BNP 15-20 years ago. I.e. mostly as the nuclear option among the protest vote buttons. And those that prioritise immigration do so on culturalist and outright racist grounds, and are never going to be impressed by nationality league tables of sex offenders and shoplifters. Except as ammunition for racist scapegoating, which Labour knows is likely to happen as a result of this policy. The headlines of the gutter press write themselves.

Racism as a tool of divide and rule is just as attractive to this crop of Labour ministers as it was to the Tories. And in the mean time, the base - one it can ill-afford to lose with the post-election collapse in its polling - will carry on unwinding and finding a welcome in the Liberal Democrats, the Greens, and where they're available, independent leftists.

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Comfortable in the Gutter

Putting aside the small matter of election night, this has been the worst moment for the Conservative Party since the Liz Truss government visibly disintegrated in the Commons. By "this moment", we are talking about the wholesale adoption of rape gang panic by Kemi Badenoch and the motley crew on the opposition front bench. Yet this same leadership will be toasting the week. As far as they're concerned, the Tories are back on the map and hogging the limited media space available to opposition parties. For once, the conversation isn't all about the doings of Nigel Farage.

Let's look back at the disaster. As forecast in November, the Tories have tried making common cause with Trump, Elon Musk, and the oligarchical interest they front. With Musk's turn against Farage and calls for his replacement as Reform's leader, the Tories have served themselves up as the most deserving supplicants. Andrew Griffith, the shadow for business and trade, marked the initiative with the most excruciating flattery, in which he credits Musk with "saving humanity" for purchasing Twitter. This came just after Badenoch wholesale adopted the call for another public inquiry into grooming gangs, an issue that she had previously shown no interest in nor would likely have done if Musk had stayed off the ketamine and taken an early night.

The repugnance and opportunism of the Tories was on full display at Wednesday's Prime Minister's Questions. Because it was obvious she was going to press for an inquiry, Keir Starmer easily turned the tables on her. He condemned the Tories for appending their inquiry call to that afternoon's child protection bill, which they voted against when it fell. So much for caring about child abuse. He attacked the Tories for not doing anything to implement the recommendations of the Alexis Jay report on grooming and rape gangs in Rochdale, leaving it to gather dust on a Whitehall shelf for two years. And most damning of all, Starmer skewered Badenoch on the fact that as Minister for Women and Equalities and as a member of the Commons, she had not once spoken on the issue since entering the House.. If that wasn't bad enough, later that afternoon Badenoch's spox told the lobby hacks that she hadn't met abuse survivors nor thought she needed to. If it waddles like opportunism and quacks like opportunism.

The Tory adoption of the second inquiry cause is about the shoring up the party, nothing else. As we saw last weekend with Jenrick's rant about "alien cultures" and language that resonates with white nationalist 'great replacement' psychosexual paranoia, Badenoch's Tories have departed the norms of conventional conservatism for the politics of Viktor Orban, the National Rally, and AfD. The Tory hope is enough people will have noticed the row in Westminster and start asking questions about why Labour are keen to avoid an inquiry into the rape and abuse of young women by criminal gangs of Pakistani heritage men, nudge nudge, wink wink. But the Tory problem is they're can easily be outflanked by Reform. For instance, Musk's anointed one, Rupert Lowe, demanded an inquiry focusing just on this aspect of rape gangs. The Tories, so far, haven't been so crude with their racism. Reform has no need for such niceties. And, of course, Starmer is not the only one who can call Badenoch out for her opportunism - Farage is well placed too.

This doesn't leave the Tories in the most advantageous of positions. Starmer has no problem batting away Badenoch's underhanded bowls, and Farage is better placed to reap any electoral disaffection. The Tories might be glad they're making headlines again, but it's not doing anything to consolidate their shaky foundations and is doing nothing for winning back the former support they lost to Labour and the Liberal Democrats. All they've managed is confirming how comfortable they are in the gutter.

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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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Amsterdamned

Since Israel began its genocide against the Palestinians, Western politicians and their slavish media have gone out of the way to prettify the crimes of their client. This has meant bucke tloads of hypocrisy, outright lying, and tanking their election hopes in defence of state interests. But amid the butchery and the cowardly defences of war crimes, there has never been a more distorted, openly propagandistic piece of reporting about and reaction to what happened in Amsterdam last night.

In case you haven't been on social media today, for the last three days footy hooligans attached to Maccabi Tel Aviv have rampaged through the Dutch capital. They have attacked Arab and Arab-looking passers-bys, caved in the windows of buildings flying Palestinian flags, and sought at every turn to provoke fights with locals. At the match they disrupted the minute's silence for victims of the flooding in Valencia, and before and after tore through Amsterdam shouting "death to Arabs!" and mocked the bombing of children in the ethnic cleansing of Gaza. And so fists and boots of the away fans were met by the boots and fists of the home end. A common or garden tale of football-related violence from a team that has a far right firm, and no more newsworthy than that. Until it became something else.

On Friday morning, the Israeli press reported the IDF were sending a team to Amsterdam to rescue citizens from a "pogrom". Taking the cue, virtually the entire West European media followed suit, describing shocking levels of "antisemitism" and the "hunting down" of Israelis. This BBC report is typical, describing how "youths" used scooters in hit-and-run attacks on innocent footy fans. The Dutch king typified the one-sided denunciation of the violence, siding with foreign thugs over his subject's right to self-defence. The rest of establishment politics have weighed in, with David Lammy denouncing "last night’s antisemitic attacks on Israeli citizens in Amsterdam." The Holocaust Education Trust invoked the memory of Kristallnacht, a phrase Benjamin Netanyahu also used in an address this evening. To put things into context, the complete twisting of what's happened was so bad that even the Daily Mail couldn't go along with it.

Israel is a dependent of the West, and knows how to play its patrons to keep the flow of weapons and money coming. In the UK's case, while the government has acknowledged that a catastrophe has unfolded they've framed it in such as if they were talking about a natural disaster. They have not attached any blame to Netanyahu's actions, nor the mass enthusiasm there is in Israel for the Palestinian genocide. Having been partners in supporting Israeli operations since it launched its first air strikes, they can't go back on the crimes they are now associated with. Admitting hesitancy in backing Israel on anything threatens to open the damming operation official politics has erected around the aftermath of the 7th October attacks. So far the political damage of supporting Israel resulted in the loss of one Tory home secretary and Labour's underperformance at the general election, including losses to the Greens and the left. The last thing the government and the official opposition want are the full facts splayed across broadcast news programmes, opening up a new avenue of political pressure. The consequences could be strengthening Palestinian solidarity mobilisations and the moving of their complicity in murder up the range of salient issues. Not a place they want to be in because they know it's completely indefensible, which is why they don't bother to try.

Hence they'll be glad Israel has led the way in portraying the aggressors as the victims. It's not as though it hasn't had plenty of practice. And, handily, this exercise in crude propaganda occasioned Israel's announcement that the residents of northern Gaza will not be allowed to return to their homes. What a coincidence. By entirely distorting what has happened in Amsterdam and confecting a pogrom where none existed, Israel benefits from its continuing efforts at equating anti-Zionism with antisemitism, and Western foreign policy establishments and their political masters gain from having their support for Israel put beyond reproach. Though, as they know, the desperation of running this sort of interference cannot stand indefinitely in the age of social media. They are putting off today what they will have to answer for tomorrow.

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