According to new polling, 63% of British adults now say that Brexit has caused more problems than it solved. While some of you may be shocked that the number isn’t even higher, given the shambolic economic state of affairs in Britain over the past several years, that figure is proof that the public attitude towards Brexit has changed. The big question is: why are neither of the major parties saying it?
It should be clear to everyone by now that the Conservatives have permanently pinned their colours to the Brexit mast and that there is no going back for them. The cult of Brexit has subsumed the entire party’s identity. With an evangelical glint in their eyes, ministers pontificate endlessly about the sunlit uplands, plucking imaginary “Brexit benefits” out of thin air and holding them up as victories.
For the Brexiters in the Conservative and Reform parties, anything that goes wrong – as so much has lately – is attributed to a lack of dedication to the cause. As Labour backbencher Hilary Benn put it so eloquently during the recent e-petition debate on a public inquiry into Brexit:
“It is like all revolutionaries, if I may use the analogy. When the revolution does not quite work out, they say, “But comrade, it was not applied with sufficient vigour and purity”—an argument that some Members in the Chamber might be more familiar with than others.”
But what about Labour? While lacking the religious fervour of the Conservatives, Keir Starmer has also insisted that Britain’s future lies “outside the EU.” Beyond that comment, we have no idea what Labour’s specific position is.
A recent YouGov poll made it clear that the general public is completely uncertain about Keir Starmer’s stance on Brexit. He seems to be trying to assuage the right-wing press who want to attack him as a remainer, while also trying not to alienate his remain-heavy base. It’s a tough balancing act.
We have to ask why no major party in the UK is willing to come out as unapologetically anti-Brexit. At the next general election, we’ll almost certainly have just two options to form the next government – Labour or Conservative. Westminster’s bubble is now so insular that it’s barely possible to see daylight between their stances on this, the biggest issue of our time.
63% of British adults are not having their voice heard. These are people who want their freedom of movement back, who want an economy bolstered by the single market, who want the worker and environmental protections previously attached to our EU membership. They are a silent majority that our broken political system has systematically sidelined.
A political system that excludes a majority can’t really be called a democracy. This is yet another glaring indicator of the UK’s democratic deficit, and the abyss that awaits us if we fail to get a grip on our failing institutions and policies.
Richard Gombin, The Origins of Modern Leftism (Harmondsworth: Penguin 1975)
The late 1960s saw a wave of radical ferment and agitation erupt in America and France. In America, the Students for a Democratic Society and other groups campaigned against the Vietnam War and for a radical reform of American society, while Black civil rights activists like Martin Luther King and Malcolm X demanded the end of segregation and improved conditions for Black Americans. This radical agitation was marked by race riots and left-wing terrorism by groups like the Weathermen. I think that most people on this side of the Atlantic are probably more familiar with the American situation than the French through the close ties between Britain and America in the Special Relationship. But France also experienced a wave a radical unrest beginning with the occupation of the Sorbonne by radical students in 1968. These then established contacts with ordinary workers, who struck in sympathy, and there was a wave of wildcat strikes. By the end of the decade and the early 1970s, sections of the radical left were turning to kidnapping and terrorism. Although the French revolutionary activism of these years may be less-well known, it has nevertheless impressed itself on British memory and culture. The left-wing French director, Jean-Paul Godard, produced a film about the agitation and unrest around Jagger and the Stones preparing to record ‘Sympathy for the Devil’. The Sex Pistol’s manager, Malcolm McLaren, spuriously claimed to have been a member of the Situationists, one of the radical groups involved in the unrest. And the ideas of ideologues like Guy Debord have found a readership and supporters among the British left. Way back in the 1980s there was a volume of revolutionary texts from 1968 published, I think, by the Socialist Workers Party. And the radical unrest and its turn to terrorism is covered by Guardian columnist Francis Wheen in his book on ‘70s paranoia.
Gombin was an academic attached to the Centre de la Recherche Scientifique. His book isn’t a history of the revolutionary movement of the late 60s in France, but an examination of its ideology. He calls this ‘Leftism’ and contrasts it with ‘extremism’, which is how he terms radical Marxism. This is the extreme left-wing Marxism, often Trotskyite, which approaches or has some of the ideas and attitudes of the Leftists, but does not go as far as them by rejecting Marxism. And ‘leftism’ itself could be described instead as post-Marxism. Gombin explains that Marxism came late to France, and as a result the gap of a quarter of century or so until French intellectuals and activists caught up with the radical experiments and revision of Marxism carried out by the German, Hungarian and other eastern European Communists and radical socialists in the council and communist revolutions of 1919 and the early 1920s. The revelations of the horrors of Stalin’s brutal dictatorship in the USSR, the gulags and the purges, came as a shock to left-wing intellectuals in France and elsewhere. The Communist party had uncritical accepted the lie that the former Soviet Union was a workers’ paradise. In response to these revelations, some Marxist intellectuals like Sartre condemned the purges and gulags, but otherwise remained faithful to the Communist party. Others went further and joined the Trotskyites. But a few others were moved to use Marx’s critical methods to examine Marxism itself, and rejected many of its central doctrines.
The revolutionary movement was led by a number of different groups, such as Socialism ou Barbarie, Rouge et Noire, the Situationists and radical trade unions like the CFDT, which had originally been set up a social Catholic organisation separate from the socialist trade unions. There seems to have been no overarching ideology, and indeed the radicals explicitly rejected any ideology that sought to dictate the course of the revolution. Nevertheless, there were a set of key ideas and attitudes shared by these groups. This rejected all hierarchies, those of modern, capitalist society, the trade union leadership and the patriarchal family, as well as the education and university system. They adopted wholeheartedly Marx’s slogan that the emancipation of the working class should be done by the working class, while also creating new ideas responding to the new welfare state and affluent society.
The viewed Marxism and trade unionism as a response to the conditions of the 19th century, when the working class had to concentrate on winning concessions from the capitalists and authorities in order to survive. However, the establishment of the welfare state had removed the threat of death and deprivation, and so the workers could now move on to the task of reforming society itself. The expanded Marx’s doctrine of alienation so that it didn’t just cover capitalism’s alienation of the worker from the goods he produced, and the latter’s fetishization, but also the alienation created by the affluent society. People’s real needs and desires were suppressed, and false needs created instead. Work should be playful, but instead the worker suffered boredom.
They also considered that there was a fundamental similarity between the capitalist west and the Soviet bloc, which resulted in them calling the USSR’s brand of state socialism ‘State capitalism’ in contrast to the ideal socialism in which society would be run by the workers. Communist rule in Russia had not liberated the workers, but instead created a new governing class. Unlike western capitalism, the Communist bureaucracy did not own the properties and industries they directed, but otherwise held the same power and privilege that in the west was held by the capitalist elites and industrialists. Changes in capitalism had also resulted in a cleavage between those who owned the companies, and those who directed and managed them. As a result, the struggle in the west was between workers and directors, not workers and owners. Soviet Communism was dubbed state capitalism as it was held the bureaucratic socialism of the USSR resembled that of western capitalism, the difference being that in the Soviet bloc all industries were owned by the state rather than private capitalists. One ideologue, Burnham, considered that Fascism and Communism were both examples of ‘state collectivism’, with the difference between the two being that private industry was retained under Fascism. Burnham was a vicious anti-Semite, and had previously urged the workers to unite with the Fascists against the Jews.
The radicals also rejected critical Marxist doctrines like dialectal materialism and its claim to have produced a science of capitalist development. In his later writings, Marx had believed that he had uncovered the sociological laws that would lead capitalism inevitably to give way to socialism. The Leftists rejected this because it was removed the voluntarist element from revolutionary activity. Instead of revolutionaries deliberately setting out to overturn capitalism and usher in the new socialist society, this attitude instead that all they needed to do was wait for it all to happen on its own. In their view, this attitude was closer to the evolutionary socialism of Bernstein than the Marxism of 1848. They rejected Lenin’s doctrine of a centralised party of active revolutionaries, because the workers on their own could only attain trade union consciousness. This, according to the Leftists, had resulted in a bureaucratic class that ruled over the workers, and was certainly not the vanguard of the working class as it was declared to be by Lenin. They did, however, believe in some kind of central party or organisation, but this would only be to guide and suggest possible ideas and actions, not to dictate a revolutionary programme. And all revolutionary ideas and policies should be subjected to the rigorous test of whether they worked in practice. If they did, they were true. If not, they were ‘ideology’, used in the same sense of Marx’s ‘false consciousness’. The revolutionary could only be carried out by the conscious will of the workers, as they became aware of their mission to reform society, independent of any ideas of social progress or objective historical conditions. There was therefore a radical subjective aspect to their conception of revolutionary activism in opposition to Marx’s ideas of historical progress according to object material conditions. Some of them also challenged Marxism-Leninism’s materialism, in which consciousness arose from matter and was merely matter reflecting itself. This got them attacked as ‘Idealists’ by the Communists.
They rejected the patriarchal family as an institution which brought up and trained the worker to accept hierarchical authority and his position in society as a worker, as well as the sexual repression that resulted from the prohibition of extra- and premarital sex. In fact, the student revolt that sparked the ferment started with a question about this by a student at the Sorbonne to a visiting government minister, who come to open the university’s swimming pool. The student also queried him about the university’s rules against male students entering the women’s halls. Well, as the poet once said, sexual intercourse was invented in 1963.
As for the institutions that should be used by the workers to govern politically and manage industry, there seems to have been a difference of ideas. Some, like the Dutch astronomer and Marxist Pannekoek, argued for worker’s councils like the German Raterevolution of 1919. Others refused to speculate, except to state that they should be created by the workers in response to the conditions of the time and the situations they were faced with. Regarding the conduct of the strikes, these were carried out through workers’ meetings on the shop floor, who would then elect a strike committee that would then take their grievances and demands to management. Some observers felt that this harked back to France’s native socialist and revolutionary traditions that predated Marx. The shop floor meetings were, in their view, related to that of the sections during the French Revolution.
Apart from these political and industrial ideas and aspirations, there were also a set of revolutionary ideas about the proper reform of the arts. These looked back to the attacks on official art by the Dadaists and Surrealists, but felt that they had failed in their mission to create an anti-art. They therefore looked forward to a new, revolutionary society in which everyone would be an artist or a poet.
Well, the revolutionary agitation passed with the sixties and first years of the 1970s. Wheen seems to suggest that it ended when one group was about to bomb a millionaire’s yacht but finally drew back. Nevertheless, the terrorism carried on over this side of La Manche with the IRA in Northern Ireland and in Britain by the Angry Brigade, an anarchist group. In France the anarchists, syndicalists and Anarcho-Syndicalists were largely excluded from the revolutionary movement. Some of this was due to the antagonism between anarchists and Marxists and to the isolation of the anarchist groups themselves. By 1968 these had declined in membership and largely confined themselves to keeping the flame alive and commemorating great anarchist revolutionaries of the past, such as the Ukrainian Nestor Makhno.
The revolutionary movement of 1968 is now over fifty years in the past, overtaken in Britain and America by Reagan and Thatcherism. These two started a political counterrevolution aimed at preventing such a situation ever happening again. The right-wing, if not reactionary philosopher, Roger Scruton, said in an interview in the Spectator that he had been a socialist. But he was in France during the revolutionary movement, and was horrified by their ‘anti-civilizational rage’. The ideologues of the period still have an influence in the radical left. People are still reading and gaining inspiration from Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle, for example. I think they also exerted an influence on the anti-capitalist movement of the ‘90s and noughties. Their protests had a deliberate carnivalesque aspect, with costumed marches, puppets and so on, which seems to have drawn on the ideas of the Situationists and other revolutionaries.
I strongly believe, however, that the leftist rejection of the family has had a profoundly negative effect on western society. The Tory right loathes Roy Jenkins because of the socially liberal legislation he introduced in the late 60s Labour government. This decriminalised homosexuality and made divorce easier. Jenkins was certainly not as socially radical as the revolutionaries across the channel. In 1982 he, Shirley Williams and David Owen left the Labour party to form the SDP on the grounds that the party under Michael Foot was now too left wing. Still, the Daily Heil once denounced him as the man who had ruined Britain. Jenkins probably had completely different motives for his legislation than the Revolutionaries. In Britain the movement for the legalisation of homosexuality had started, or at least had the support, of Winston Churchill. Churchill had been worried about the danger of gay ministers, civil servants and others establishment figures being blackmailed by the Soviets because of their sexuality. As for divorce, I think this came from the humane desire to stop people being trapped in unhappy, loveless marriages, especially to brutal, violent partners. John Mortimer in his one-man show in the ‘90s recalled that before Jenkins’ reforms, the only cause for divorce was adultery. There was one man, who was so desperate to divorce his wife, that he came home in different hats so that people would think she was being unfaithful.
Unfortunately, there were radical activists, hostile to the institution of marriage and the traditional family. I can remember a pair who turned up on an edition of the lunchtime magazine programme Pebble Mill in the 1970s to present their views, much to the disgust of many of the programmes’ viewers. The result has been a rise in fatherless families. I am very much aware than many unmarried mothers have done an excellent job of raising their children, but the general picture is grim. Children from fatherless homes perform less well at school and get poorer, lower-paid jobs. They are more likely to turn to crime, do drugs and engage in promiscuous sex. Many Black activists are particularly concerned about this and the way these issues are especially acute in their community.
As for workers’ control, I would love a degree of it introduced into industry, but not to the exclusion of parliamentary democracy. And while the radicals have a point in that trade unions hierarchies have frequently acted to stifle revolutionary activism by the workers, trade unionism as a whole was tarnished by the wildcat strikes that broke out against the wishes of the union leadership. It’s resulted in the caricature of union activism presented by the Tories in which Britain was held hostage to the union barons and its economy and industry weakened by their strikes. We desperately need a revival of trade union power to protect workers, especially with Sunak and the rest of them preparing to scrap the EU legislation protecting workers’ rights.
And with an ever-growing number of people in Britain relying on food banks to stave off starvation, because the Tories have wrecked the welfare state, we’ve gone back to the early conditions of the 19th and early 20th centuries, when trade unionism and other forms of working class activism are very much a matter of survival.
On the plus side, I think the revolutionary movement has left a tradition of radical working class activism, which is no longer confined to either left or right. French working people seem much less willing to put up with government dictates than Brits, as shown in the Yellow Vest protests and the marches and riots against Macron raising the official retirement age. This has been admired by many Brits, including YouTube commenters and people on talk show phone-ins. We really need some of that spirit over this side of the Channel.
There is no doubt, from the position of democratic socialism, that the radicals went too far. Nevertheless, the continue to inspire members of the radical left with rather more moderate aims now protesting against predatory, exploitative capitalism, the exploitation of the environment, and racism, although this is not an issue that the book considers. Nevertheless, it was there, at least in the views and campaigns of post-structuralist Marxist activists.
Earlier this week the Spectator published a noxious piece by its noxious editor, Fraser Nelson. Nelson was complaining about the numbers receiving sickness benefit while businesses in Britain are struggling to recruit workers. This included, he said, army officers with a beginning salary of £35,000. From what I could gather, the thrust of his article was that the people on sick leave and benefits should be taken off them and then forced to go into one of these vacant jobs. This has been followed by various other right-wing politicians declaring that they intend to retrain the long-term sick to fill these vacancies. The implication here is the old Blairite assumption about people on disability benefits that a certain proportion of them, at least, must be malingerers. It’s why the work capability assessment was set up to find a certain percentage of claimants fit for work, whether they were or not, and the consequent scandals of genuinely critical disabled and terminally ill people being thrown off benefits and told to get a job. It’s the attitude behind the New Labour and the Tories’ wretched benefit reforms, which not only demands claimants look for work and have their searches checked by the staff, but also has them thrown off benefits and sanctioned on the slightest pretext. If they’re starting on the long term sick, it probably indicates that they’ve gone as far as they can demonising and humiliating the unemployed and have been forced to start demonising and humiliating the sick. It’s also based on the unsympathetic attitude that working is good for you and will get you back on your feet. This was the attitude a few years ago when Dave Cameron’s coalition government came to power, and disability campaigners tore into that, showing that this simply wasn’t the case. There seems to be no awareness that some people are sick because of their jobs and working conditions. As for the mental health crisis hitting Britain, it isn’t due to Gary Lineker spreading fears about climate change, as Richard Tice has declared. It’s far more to do with the cost of living crisis caused by rising inflation, stagnant wages kept below the rate of inflation, as well as job insecurity caused by zero hours contracts and the gig economy and the detrimental effects of Brexit. But Reform and the Conservatives can’t admit that, as they believe that this has all been a splendid success and will make us all wealthier and business more secure and prosperous in the long run.
Behind this, I suspect, is the need to get British workers to take the jobs that were originally filled by immigrants and migrant workers now that immigration has become such a hot topic and the Tories are announcing their intention to cut it. It’s basically a return to the calls for Brits to work a fruit pickers instead of migrant workers a few years. That was met by complaints from people who had tried, but were turned down as the farmers preferred to employ migrants.
As for retraining the unemployed to fill certain jobs, there are obvious problems with this. Not everyone has the strength or temperament, let alone the academic qualifications for certain jobs. Army officers are an example of this. Membership of the armed forces demands physical and mental toughness as well as the ability to kill while observing the laws of war. In the case of the officer corps, it also demands intelligence, the jokes about military intelligence being a contradiction in terms aside. Those are very exacting standards and not everyone is able to fill them. There are other problems matching people to jobs. I was given grief when I tried signing on after gaining my archaeology Ph.D. nearly ten years ago by the clerks at the Job Centre. They were annoyed that I spent my time looking for jobs as an archaeologist, particularly in academia. I was told at my last meeting with them, where the supervising girl basically told me not to bother signing on any more, that I should really have been looking for menial jobs like cleaning before trying to find the work I was qualified to do. It shows the way the Job Centre staff aren’t interesting in making sure the right people find the right jobs but simply getting people off their books. But the problem with this is that employers of such jobs probably aren’t interested in taking on graduates, who are obviously overqualified. And some of the jobs that need to be filled require years of training and experience. Our favourite internet non-historian the other day put up a piece asking why this country needed to import architects and archaeologists from overseas. With archaeologists I think he may have a point, as I think there may be surplus of qualified archaeologists compared to the number of jobs. The profession was expanding a decade ago, but that seems to have passed and the number of archaeology firms set up in the boom time may have shrunk. I don’t know about architects. Assuming that there is a shortage of British architects – and I’m not sure there is – the problem here is that it takes years of study and training to qualify as one. It’s not a profession where someone can be retrained and fit to work in a few weeks.
The demands for people on sickness benefit to be retrained to fill these job vacancies then is just more right-wing Tory ideology about benefit scroungers and malingerers, which ignores the real reasons behind their sickness and the problem the unemployed face finding jobs they can actually do. But as the government and business faces increased difficulty recruiting foreign workers because of Brexit and the controversy over immigration, we can expect these demands to get worse.
I got this message earlier this afternoon from the pro-democracy organisation, Open Britain, commenting on Sunak’s inability to sack Braverman despite her breach of the codes governing ministerial conduct. In their view, and I think it’s the correct one, this is because Braverman’s part of the hard line, anti-European ERG, who now appear to be the major force pulling the strings in the Tories. This is another indication of the parlous state of our democracy, as no-one should be above the law.
I found one detail particularly interesting, because I hadn’t heard about it anywhere else. Perhaps it has been reported, but I simply missed it. It’s that Braverman founded a charity with members of the Rwandan government who were part of Rwandan immigration scheme. This is, in my view, utterly corrupt, and demonstrates more clearly than the speeding fine fiasco why she shouldn’t be in government. Here’s Open Britain’s message
‘Dear David,
No matter the circumstances, it seems that Rishi Sunak is completely unable to hold his ministers to even the most basic standard of conduct. It speaks not only to the ERG’s stranglehold on the Conservative party, but Britain’s ever-lowering bar for standards in public life under this government.
Remember, Braverman’s tenure didn’t start on a high note. Sunak reappointed her just six days after her resignation as Home Secretary under Liz Truss, which she tendered for committing a serious national security breach in violation of the Ministerial Code. Despite the public outcry at the time and Sunak’s laughable commitment to “integrity, professionalism and accountability”, the PM ultimately succumbed to the power of the Brexit lobby.
Today, we’ve learned of two new Ministerial Code violations by the Home Secretary. Firstly, three days ago, Braverman was alleged to have used her position to change the punishment for a speeding violation. And now a further accusation has emerged that Braverman failed to disclose her co-founding a charity linked to members of the Rwandan government, including several key officials involved in her Rwanda immigration scheme. So far, Number 10 has refused to announce an investigation into either matter.
How exactly did Suella Braverman become politically untouchable? For her, standards that would apply to any other job in the world seem to be completely absent. Even as a communications officer at Open Britain (an important role, but not one quite as consequential as Home Secretary), I wouldn’t be allowed to perform to such an abysmally low standard. I’d have personally resigned in disgrace long ago.
There is one disturbingly simple answer. Braverman is part of the ERG clique, a secretive and “militant” wing of the Tory party which has exerted immense power over government policy and operations. Sunak, in a futile attempt to unite various splinter groups within his party, has no choice but to put up with her or face the full wrath of this “party within a party”. Sunak, like the rest of us, is hostage to the insanity of these swivel-eyed loons.
But there is a deeper explanation. As our democratic institutions crumble, our rights fade away, and our political debates descend into the realm of petty grievance, the standards we once expected of those in public life simply slip away. Nothing illustrates our steady slide towards authoritarianism than the way government has become more about pledging fealty to Brexit fundamentalism than to honouring a commitment to deliver proper democracy or effective governance. Braverman stays because she is loyal to the cause, not because she serves the people or institutions of Britain. It’s the mark of a nation in steep decline.
It’s time to re-assess. Who are we as a country? What are our values? What do we, as a nation, actually believe in? Right now, the great ship of state is just chugging along to nowhere in particular, with the worst among us steering us closer and closer to the abyss.
Proper democracy means taking back the reins. It means giving real people a real say in what Britain is and what Britain will be in the future. It means having politicians who are happy to be held to account by the public, not focussed on covering the backs of those who climbed the same greasy pole they did. In a proper democracy, no one is untouchable.
I’m proud to be fighting for a system like that. Sometimes it seems like an insurmountable task, but we’re not resting until it’s done.
Looking through Google earlier I found an article on the Speccie’s website claiming with that more or less as its title, authored by none other than its editor, Fraser Nelson. Unfortunately, I couldn’t read the article because you have to be a subscriber, and I’m not. But hold on! Weren’t all the right-wing, Tory anti-immigration types pushing Brexit as the solution too mass immigration and all those pesky people heading across the Channel to us on rubber dinghies?
And was this a pack of lies? Yes, yes, they did and it was. The anti-immigration Brexiteers – there were others on the Labour left who support Brexit, and who were definitely not racist or anti-immigration – told anybody who would listen that the migrants heading over here after passing through Europe had been able to do so because of the European constitution. That isn’t the case. The European constitution does call for freedom of movement across the Union for EU citizens, but from what I understand asylum seekers are required to settle in the first country they travel to. The Schengen Agreement allows immigrants from outside the EU to travel freely from one country to another, but that’s a separate treaty which only binds the specific countries that signed it. Quite simply, the Brexiteer right lied to people about this issue, just as they lied to people about oven-ready deals with the EU, using the money spent on our contribution to the EU on the NHS, the rest of the world flocking to us desperate for trade deals after we left, no traffic queues at Dover or extra bureaucracy and so on, and on, ad nauseam. And now it has dawned on them that, rather than stopping mass immigration, the number of immigrants entering the country has actually increased.
I’m not actually surprised. I was talking to a friend of mine about immigration a while ago, who’d been doing some reading on the issue. He told me that immigration also increased massively after Britain first passed legislation cutting down on it. Before then, it had been largely chain-immigration. Immigrants would arrive from south Asia or wherever and take up residence in a certain area, but would generally only live there for a short period of time before returning to India or Pakistan. They would then be replaced by another set of immigrants, who would also live there for a relatively short space of time before returning and being replaced by a newer set of migrants in their turn. But in the run-up to the date when the new anti-immigration legislation came into law there was a surge in the number of people immigrating to the country, presumably hoping to get in before the door shut. I wonder if something like that is happening now with the people coming here from Africa and the Middle East. Some of the rise in immigration that’s occurred over the past year has been caused Ukrainians seeking refuge in this country as a result of Putin’s invasion of their homeland. I’d say that this was something of an anomaly, as it’s the result of warfare in Europe itself while the pattern of migration that bothers the anti-immigration lobby is that of non-Whites from outside Europe. The exceptional circumstances of the war in Ukraine may mean that in subsequent years the level of immigration may well be lower.
The anti-immigration crew have been aware for some time that Brexit hasn’t been the solution to the issue they believed, or they told people. I’ve seen disturbing articles on various right-wing blogs and YouTube channels talking about this, and suggesting that what we need to do is get out of the 1950s United Nations treaty on refugees. The Nat Cons are taking their inspiration and ideology from the American ultra-Conservative right, and there has been a strain in extreme right-wing American thought that’s been critical of the UN for a very long time. There are very conspiracy theories about the United Nations, which see it very much as the beginning of the Satanic One World Communist dictatorship. Other, less bonkers views attack it for supposedly being anti-American and anti-Israel. My guess is that it may not be too long before we see similar attacks on the United Nations appearing on the right in Britain with the purpose of discrediting the Refugee Treaty. Not that this will be such a radical change for some of the papers. When the UN criticises us for the poverty and suffering Tory policies have inflicted on our citizens, papers like the Heil respond with shrill attacks on it for being anti-British. I think we can expect this hostility to increase and become louder and more vitriolic as the Tories and other right-wing parties like Reform try to stir up anti-immigrant feeling.
That’s the title of a video I found while perusing YouTube this morning. I didn’t watch it, because there’s only so much you can take of people like Liz Truss. But I found it highly ironic coming from Truss, as something like it was the original point of the EU. From what I remember from school, the European Economic Community, as it then was, was set up to protect Europe from economic domination by America and the Soviet bloc. Communism collapsed in eastern Europe in the 90s, but it wouldn’t have taken much to adapt the European Union to protect the continent and its industries from China. I doubt that this would have been quite what Truss would have wanted, as the mention of NATO indicates that the she probably wants it to include America and Canada and possibly other nations outside Europe. But it does seem to me that when the Brexiteers attack the EU, they are attacking the institution that could protect Europe from growing Chinese global power. This is clearly beginning to worry them, or at least Truss, but I don’t think they’re bright enough to realise this.
More evidence of what a nasty, callous and thoroughly unsympathetic piece of work Anne Widdecombe is. With more people suffering real hardship and starvation due to the cost of living crisis, it’s now been reported that Widdecombe really doesn’t have much sympathy for their plight. She was in some kind of debate over the rising cost of food. The prices of some articles have risen by 25 per cent. Cheese sandwiches were cited as an example, the price having risen enormously from its previous price of 40 p. What was Widdecombe’s response to the question? She said that people shouldn’t make cheese sandwiches if they couldn’t afford the ingredients, and that people had no right to cheap food because of inflation. It was the same complete lack of any kind of empathy for the public displayed by 30p Lee Anderson.
But people do have a right to expect staple foods will be kept affordable. During times of famine in the 18th century, when the price of bread rose beyond the ability of the poor to buy it, mobs broke into bakers’, seized the loaves and sold them to the public at a price they considered just and affordable. According to historians of the working class such as E.P. Thompson, this was part of a growing working class consciousness. This has been challenged by right-wing historians, who see it as middle class consciousness. Regardless of the niceties of such debates, the lesson is that ordinary, working people did feel they had a right to cheap food, and when this was unable, took matters into their own hands. I am not suggesting that people similarly break into modern bakers and their local supermarkets to steal or seize items. I am merely saying that people have a right to expect official intervention to ensure that some items remain cheap even during inflation.
Widdecombe departed to Richard Tice’s Reform party a few years ago, dissatisfied with the Tories over Brexit. I caught a bit of her speech on YouTube at their conference a week of so ago before I turned it off in disgust. She’s still suffering from the delusion that we can make wonderful deals with countries independently of the EU, despite the fact that the Tories glaringly struggled to do so. Liz Truss’ deal to export British cheese to Japan, where most of the people are lactose intolerant, was being promoted as some kind of success. Instead it provoked widespread laughter and ridicule. She hasn’t learned anything from that. But what really made me turn off was when she looked back nostalgically at the days when you could just turn up at your doctor’s and be seen without an appointment. Yes, I remember those halcyon days as well, Anne. They were right before Thatcher’s healthcare reforms of privatisation and cuts started to bite, and created the horrific mess healthcare is in today. Widdecombe was part of Major’s administration, which helped create it. She can’t blame Labour or socialism for the state it’s in. It’s purely the Tories’ fault, although I don’t think Blair helped. And it won’t get better if Tice’s lot get voted in, although they are better than the Tories in that they do recognise the benefits of partly renationalising the energy companies.
But Widdecombe has shown herself to be out of touch and completely unsuited to be anywhere near government. Which shouldn’t surprise anyone.
Two of the proposals in the leaked Labour manifesto were bringing the voting age down to 16 and giving the vote to EU nationals. Starmer had said in an interview that it felt wrong, when knocking on doors, to deny voting rights to people who had been here, contributing to the economy, for 10, 20, 30 years. However, That Preston Journalist put up a piece last night saying that these policies had not gone down well with the public, and that Starmer was now already thinking of ditching them, if not the entire manifesto. The Depress has run a story today reporting that Starmer had issued a sort-of climb down after Michael Gove, the ‘Levelling-Up’ Secretary, had written to him asking why he wanted to give the supreme benefit of British citizenship, the right to vote, to people who weren’t British citizens. And, of course, there are also the usual allegations that Starmer was trying to rig elections and drag Britain back into the EU. The first of these allegations is massively hypocritical, of course, after Reet-Snob admitted that the Voter ID laws were the Tories’ own attempt at gerrymandering. Starmer has responded by saying that the proposal to enfranchise EU citizens wouldn’t be a priority, considering the more pressing problems of the economy. He said that none of his five missions concern electoral change. But Tory MPs have commented that he hasn’t repudiated the policy either.
I think they’re right. He hasn’t repudiated it. He’s given the same answer he gave about trans rights when he was asked about that issue during the controversy about it in Scotland. He said then that it wouldn’t be a priority under Labour, before going back to support them, or apparently support them later. And given the way he breaks promises like the Tories, you have no idea whether he’s serious about these policies or not.
I got this latest comment from the pro-democracy organisation about the National Conservatives’ conference earlier this afternoon. They make the point that their real views about democracy and transparency are shown by the way they stopped left-wing media organisations like Novara entrance, despite all their rhetoric about it. Other highlights included Reet Snob stating plainly that the Voter ID laws were all about gerrymandering and a speech by Cruella in which she went on about genitals. This last was dig at Starmer. Cruella said that she and Sunak knew that 100 per cent of women don’t have penises, unlike Starmer. Who, she joked, would stand as the trans candidate at the next election. Here’s the message
Dear David,
The National Conservativism (Nat-C) Conference kicked off yesterday, proving to be just as much of a weird, far-right cringe-fest as any of us could have anticipated. Despite one of the conference’s ostensible themes being “free speech”, they’ve shut their doors to journalists.
Once again, this clique of Conservatives is showing that their commitment to freedom of expression is ankle-deep. One of their core values crumbles to dust the moment anyone disagrees with them, in which case they become the delicate “snowflakes” they claim to detest.
Byline Times’ political editor Adam Bienkov, as well as the political correspondents from OpenDemocracy, Politics JOE, Novara Media and others, all had their press tickets rejected. It’s not hard to see what those publications have in common: they don’t share the extreme views of the conference and probably wouldn’t cover it favourably.
We shouldn’t be surprised that non-Conservative media is being barred from entry. This conference is a symbol of minority rule, a gathering of election deniers, theocrats, and billionaires’ mouthpieces. They’re becoming increasingly bold about rejecting democracy outright.
Here are some highlights from the conference so far that illustrate the point:
Jacob Rees Mogg openly acknowledged that voter ID laws were “gerrymandering” elections. He actually just admitted it.
US Senator JD Vance said that the US and UK Conservative movements are on “similar trajectories“. This from one of the people that tried to overturn the 2020 US election.
Douglas Murray said that just because Germany “mucked up” nationalism doesn’t mean the UK can’t give it another go.
Suella Braverman’s weird speech about genitalia and the need to arrest protestors – ironically interrupted by an Extinction Rebellion stunt.
They may call themselves “populists” and pretend to be representative of ordinary people, but it’s all just rhetorical sleight-of-hand. These are free-market fundamentalists, Christian nationalists, and conspiracy theorists – and thepublic at large is not behind them.
As the old adage from David Frum goes: “If conservatives become convinced that they cannot win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism. They will reject democracy.”
We’re already there – the mask is now fully off. The only way to counter people like this is to force them to play the game fairly. Instead of letting them “gerrymander”, spread lies, and appeal to the worst elements of xenophobia and hate in Britain, we need to fix the system that has enabled them for far too long. We know that the general public rejects this kind of politics – we just need a system that reflects that.
A more democratic, fairer politics would prevent the rise of fascism in Britain. We’re running out of time to build it. As a young person in Britain, my future depends on us changing this trajectory – there’s nothing for me in the UK under Nat-C rule.
That’s why I signed up to Open Britain’s mission and why I would encourage everyone who shares my concerns to do so too. We know the majority of people in this country are on our side. By working together, we can and will see off this creeping authoritarianism and set free Britain.
I’m not a member of Open Britain, but I’m leaving the link here for anyone who is so alarmed by this swing to the extreme right that they do want to join the organisation.
I’ve seen a couple of videos about them on YouTube already. In one of them, various attendees were claiming that it was for small ‘c’ conservatives and that while some Conservatives were there, most of the attendees didn’t belong to the party. Hmmm. The problem is, some of the speakers were very definitely big ‘C’ Tories, like Rees Mogg and Braverman. They also had the former MEP Daniel Hannan, dubbed by Guy Debord’s Cat as ‘the Lyin’ King’, a hard-line Brexiteer who’d like to sell off the NHS. Politics Joe put up a video in which they interviewed some of the people going to the conference outside. One of them was an older man, who lamented the lack of sexual restraint in modern society and said quite plainly that if a man fathered a child, he had a duty to support it. Now I didn’t watch all of the video, and perhaps this gent said something far more extreme later on, but I don’t think what he said was particularly controversial. I think the traditional attitude among intellectuals at least until the middle of the last century was that restraint was one of the key elements of civilisation. It was what made us civilised beings instead of animals. And sexual restraint, finding appropriate channels for sexuality like marriage was an intrinsic part of this. As for men supporting their children, again I can’t see anything wrong or controversial about it. Not on its own, unless it’s coupled with more extreme policies, like attacks on gay marriage. But I don’t doubt that as a whole, the Nat Cons are indeed a deeply unpleasant, highly reactionary movement.
How stupid and arrogant is Rees-Mogg? I’ve put up several messages I’ve received from Open Britain and other internet campaigning organisations giving their assessment of the Voter ID laws. Not surprisingly, they’ve been wholly negative because of the way severely normal Brits were turned away from polling stations because they either didn’t have ID, or didn’t have the right ID. In Somerset 400 people were so denied their right to vote. Open Britain has argued very strongly that this is part of the Tories’ attack on British democracy. They’ve also given sharp criticism of Keir Starmer’s plans for constitutional reform, expressing their concerns over what he leaves out, such as proportional representation and repealing the highly authoritarian legislation stifling the right to protest. There always was a very strong whiff of gerrymandering about the Voter ID legislation. The amount of electoral fraud is low. I think there have been only seven or so recent cases, and so there’s no need for it. The Tories introduced it following the example of the Republicans in America. Left-wing commenters over there pointed out that many of the people affected by the new legislation – Blacks, the young, the poor and students, the sections of society least likely to have such identification – were also the parts most like to vote Democrat. One Republican politician even admitted it was done to the nobble them.
And now Jacob Rees-Mogg has also admitted it on this side of the Atlantic.
The man one of the great commenters on this blog dubbed ‘Jacob Reet Snob’ let the cat out of the bag at the National Conservative conference. National Conservatism is the trend in transatlantic politics towards nationalism as a reaction to the collapse of globalism. Andrew Marr did a very good analysis of it for the New Statesman YouTube channel a week or so ago. Although it’s becoming influential in the Tory party, its roots are in America with the right-wing Edmund Burke Society, and its leadership seems to be American. Mogg was speaking at the conference about the threat to British sovereignty and Brexit posed by Keir Starmer’s statement that he would give the vote to the 6 million EU citizens in Britain. This has naturally panicked the nationalistic, Brexiteer right. Mogg sought to calm them by telling them that such gerrymandering never works, and rebounds on the party that did it.
Which he illustrated using the example of the Tories’ Voter ID laws.
They had, he said, been put in to stop people voting Labour. But they harmed the Tories instead, because most of the people turned away were Tory-voting senior citizens.
I found this short video commenting on Snob’s speech on the News Agents’ YouTube channel. The man in the video is absolutely amazed at Snob’s admission. He states that when he spoke to people in America about the Voter ID laws over there, they all defended it by telling him it was about protecting democracy. Presumably he didn’t meet the Republican politico who was open about it being a ruse to stop Democrat supporters voting. But there Mogg was, telling his audience that it was a piece of deliberate gerrymandering.
So why was Mogg being so open about it?
Maximilien Robespierre did an interesting video the other day talking about how bonkers Snob and the other headbangers demanding the return of Boris Johnson were. He’s part of a group which includes Nadine ‘Mad Nad’ Dorries and Priti Patel, the woman who makes up her own foreign policy. They had declared that the Tory party had been stupid to get rid of such an electorally successful Prime Minister as the huffing classicist. Well, the Tory party had done the same to Thatcher. She was massively successful, but when it seemed she was becoming an electoral liability, they got rid of her. She was replaced by her chancellor, John Major, just as Johnson had been replaced by Sunak. But Robespierre also wondered if the three weren’t also trying to scupper the Tory party’s chances at the next election by reminding everyone just how terrible Johnson was. Bozo had promised to build 44 new hospitals, of which only one has been built, if that. And that’s only one of his failures and broken promises.
Now comes this admission by Mogg, which tells anyone seriously worried about the state of British democracy that they shouldn’t vote Conservative. Is this part of the same plan to destroy the Tories’ chances from within? Cosplay priest Calvin Robinson has appeared on one video at some kind of right-wing political gathering saying that the Conservatives are no longer conservative, and the party needs to die to save Conservatism. Does Mogg share that view?
I doubt it. I think it’s just arrogance.
I think he came out with it because he either doesn’t believe it will do the Tories any harm and/or he thinks that the media won’t pick up on it and it won’t become a major issue. He probably has a point about that, as I have seen many people in the lamestream media commenting on it. The big news about the National Conservatives yesterday was about the Extinction Rebellion protester being thrown out for comparing them to fascism. I’m sure he was right and the parallels are there. But so far I haven’t seen anyone, outside of left-wing YouTubers, comment on this.
But worryingly, the Tory gerrymandering isn’t going to stop with the Voter ID laws.
Snob says in this snippet that the real problem was the postal votes.
So how long do you think it will be before they devise a plan to gerrymander those as well?
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