The Strange Death of Left-Liberal Britain
Friday 23 October 2009 at 12:08 The Griffin business in the UK raises some interesting questions about the position of nationalism at the heart of the junior partner in the Atlantic system.
Apologetic Post-Imperialism
Republican Americans seem to have little problem with espousing a fairly militaristic national patriotism. Tony Judt in his 'Reappraisals' (2008) of the dangers of forgetting recent history put this down to the fact that modern Americans had never experienced the horrors of war on their own territory.
European anti-nationalist ideology can be deduced from the opposite - the obvious trauma of the European Civil War from 1914 to 1945 (some would say 1989). But the British seem to have been crushed by their withdrawal from empire.
One side of the political equation seems to be lost in a world of liberal guilt for slavery and colonisation and even for a holocaust for which no Briton was responsible.
This apologetic culture is compounded by the fact that the United Kingdom contains an English heartland, from which empire sprang, that is in tension with its smaller Celtic partners, not sure whether they are the victims or the beneficiaries of imperial history.
Given that all the significant parties of the Right (Conservative, UKIP and BNP) refuse to recognise this tension and the centre-Left parties (New Labour and the Liberal Democrats) pander to it, no wonder those most consciously English, from which the BNP takes its support, are confused and depressed,
Bear-Baiting on the BBC
What we saw over the past week was a remarkable baiting of a fairly small force in British politics by an entire establishment. The BBC kept to its liberal duty of allowing Griffin a platform on the premier popular political programme and it played it fair despite immense pressure from the official Liberal-Left.
But the discussion was not one of the usual four separate positions (the three main parties and some often clueless intellectual fluff) debating against each other, scoring cheap points and providing more heat than light on the great issues of the day.
No, on this occasion, the aim was to get Griffin to 'show his true face' to the British public while a baying mob outside the studio and a fairly aggressive studio audience put him in the position of a bear in a bear pit surrounded by snapping dogs.
This is not to imply any sympathy for Griffin or the BNP as a political ideology. Even though his party does represent some serious and legitimate discontent, partly cultural but mostly socio-economic, and in a serious recession at that, he poses three fundamental threats to the country.
First, his opportunistic Islamophobia is the stalking horse for an irrational and primitive view of human relations that is a-historical and fuelled by a fundamental ignorance of how individuals and communities develop organically. It is essentialist in a world where essentialism tends to exclusion and repression.
Second, his party is authoritarian in a way that goes far beyond any interest in corporatist economic planning - its sentiments are anti-democratic in a very profound way. Combined with the essentialist world view, this authoritarianism must mean a sclerotic rule by the few of the many.
Third, the BNP has a very confused vision of national identity where a particular authoritarian vision of the people is merged with the real authority of the Crown in a way that would reproduce the fascism of the 1930s: a national security state without even the limited restraints of New Labour's version.
Left-Liberal Self-Indulgence
But the problem with the liberal-Left is that it refuses to parse out the real meaning of this programme or understand why it is beginning to catch on in the darkest corners of the country.
The liberal-Left response is self-indulgent and moralistic. It presents its position as self-evidently right to the extent that (as we reported in our last posting) it is quite prepared to use illiberal methods along European lines to preserve the liberal consensus.
Unfortunately for that liberal consensus, the British are not Europeans. Some of the population will see the judicial warfare, the bear-baiting by a discredited elite (in the context of administrative incompetence and the expenses scandal) and street protests as bullying.
The British do not like bullies so we have the paradox that a party of potential bullies is going to be seen by some as the victim of bullies - they may have a 'point'.
The New Public Squalor
Certainly, metropolitan intellectuals do not get out and about much. They are missing a reality that has nothing to do with race and everything to do with failed economics - the growing islands of public squalor that co-exist with the comfort of the private homes of the majority of most of the population.
This recession has not hurt the bulk of the middle class (yet) but it is hurting those who are marginal. The slow-down in public spending (with more to come) and the strains of migration in specific areas are creating a sense of desperation about community and order that is not wholly irrational.
It is interesting that the news that the police would be carrying some serious weaponry into key London council estates arrived after Griffin's performance.
He would have had a field day with it - the estates are black and yet we have had twelve years of multicultural expenditure. Guns are historically one tool that consensual British policing has never had to use. The implication is that community has collapsed, much as many have been privately predicting.
The liberal establishment is in denial. We covered some of this in our last posting but the Generals are in denial about their squaddies, the Home Office about the police, the media about the underclass (with the exception of the BBC) and the politicians about the country.
Even as we look at the 'dark side' of the BNP, we have to recognise that it gets votes. The demonisation of its voters is on the edge of the demonisation of minority groups by the fascists themselves. The BNP-voting underclass and peite-bourgeoisie are regarded as if they were vermin to be exterminated.
The Refusal To Engage
And yet ... they have some cause for grievance. There are questions to be asked about the social sustainability of migration, ostensibly based on humanitarian asylum claims but actually about cheap labour and economics. There are serious questions about relative allocation of resources.
Sir Andrew Green has been called a racist for raising migration issues. He has threatened to sue anyone who does. He is not. Migration Watch may or may not be right but the level of vituperation directed at him for raising important issues of sustainability shows that these concerns are not being addressed.
Many of the most aggressive liberals scarcely hide their belief that borders should be open as recompense for Britain's imperialist past without understanding that those 'native' communities that are in the front line in terms of pressure on services are precisely those that stayed and did not colonise.
And then there is the attitude to identity? In the US, half the population are assertively proud of being American. In Russia, the figure is probably 90% and includes the young who celebrate their own anthem in rock versions. But, in the UK, national pride is more than diminished, it is treated with contempt.
Even the Generals, in their attack on the BNP, have emphasised the role of the Army in an international liberal and humanitarian context which largely misses the point to those many Britons who thought that the Army existed to defend their country and that was that.
Defeating the BNP
The dangerous aspects of the BNP are truly there - this is a dark and potentially vicious organisation that would pauperise our culture and our people - but it is moving into a vacuum of the liberal establishment's own making. They are the flip side to left-liberal arrogance.
The probable truth is that the country itself is largely liberal, probably libertarian, broadly happy with multiculturalism and globalisation - but it is not happy with public squalor nor to risks to personal security and it is not happy with foreign wars and growing 'liberal' authoritarianism.
Into a culture dominated by 'oughts' from ideological liberals, the public sees what 'is' - the first signs of serious social collapse spreading from the inner cities outwards as recession takes hold.
And this is where, to the great discomfort of left-liberals, some harsh truths about a significant minority of British people need to be accommodated. The light side of the move towards the BNP is the desire for community security, a sense of respect for identity and a democracy that works.
It is not that individuals do not feel secure but they feel that their communities are crumbling before their eyes. It is not that they do not respect others but that they feel that they are not respected. And they have decreasing faith in the political classes' ability to restore prosperity and social order.
We do not take the BNP too seriously but we do take this mood of concern very seriously indeed. It is what will probably fuel the arrival of a Tory Administration in 2010 and guide the future shape of its policies, fortunately still within a fundamentally liberal, even libertarian, framework.
When the history of the strange death of New Labour is written, it won't be the Iraq War or possibly the credit crunch that did for it ... it will be the attempt to impose from above an alien ideology that opened the gates to the arrival of a right-wing hegemony that may now last a generation.
Reader Comments (5)
Here in the U.S. it... Read More’s clear that the reigning politico-bankster-media caste is so pixilated with plunder that they are simply unable to fathom the actual circumstances of those subject to their reign. The liquidation of the middle class has taken away a good measure of the bourgeois cushioning that is required for mutual civility, and those of us who have watched our tenuous security dissolved even as the banksters escalate their predations are not edified by the cooing statistical gymnastics of disgusting shills like Paul Krugman. There is a strong substratum of repressed moral outrage that a movement like the BNP can tap into—their coarseness is in some sense a positive attribute of health, since narcissistic cosmopolitanism is fundamentally a symptom of decay rather than of growth or maturity.
I concur with much of your article, but I would disagree on one fundamental point: I am not at all sure that there is such a thing as a "Liberal Left" in the UK, particularly as far as the major political parties are concerned.
One primary result of the rise to power of Margaret Thatcher in 1979 was that she and her government shifted the political consensus hard to the Right, far away from the post-1945 consensus that had by and large been based on the idea of the State operating for the public good and people co-operating to support the less fortunate. The new Thatcher consensus, at the root of many of our problems today, was arguably based on encouragement of individual benefit at the expense of society as a whole.
"New Labour" is effectively a post-Thatcherist incarnation of what would have been regarded in the 1970s as a government quite far to the Right in British politics – much farther to the right than, for example, the Conservative government of Edward Heath in 1970-74. It would have been unthinkable by any major party, prior to the end of the 1970s, for example, to propose the wholesale privatisation of national assets and publicly-owned industries: instead, from its instigation after WWII, the fabric of major industries being under public control was never questioned, even during the intervening period which included over a dozen years during which the Conservative party was in power in Westminster. Look for example at the public/private structure of Independent Television, introduced in the middle of that period, which had a publicly-owned body (the ITA) at its heart and carefully managed competition/co-operation as the component companies' main principle.
The last dozen years in the UK has not seen the rolling back of privatisation, despite, for example, the fact that an estimated three quarters of the voting population would like to see the railways re-nationalised. Rail re-nationalisation is not a part of either Liberal Democrat or Labour Party policy, although the former has suggested that it would continue indefinitely the 'no-choice' re-nationalisation of the East Coast Main Line.
It could be argued that the lack of truly Left-leaning policies in mainstream UK political parties has encouraged disillusionment among the population at large. MPs are criticised for claiming unwarranted expenses (in fact the result of a scheme introduced in the 1980s to avoid paying MPs more as it might be unpopular, and instead give them expenses "entitlements" which, of course, they claimed); bankers are criticised for enormous bonuses and for the collapse of the economy; but the major parties have so far seemed to fail to effectively address these concerns or the selfish tenets of the post-Thatcher era that underlie and encouraged them. It is perhaps hardly surprising, then, that people are frustrated with mainstream politics and eager to look elsewhere; and are more easily seduced by the BNP message and its inherent straw men.
The problem, I would argue, is not that the apparently inevitable death of New Labour signals the end of the British Liberal Left: I would suggest instead that the problem is that it was mortally wounded 20 years ago with the rise of Thatcher and never recovered: it's been dead for some time and we desperately need a "real Left" to take its place in the mainstream of UK political life. Today's Conservative Party pretends to be nice and friendly and Green, but the new MPs likely to arrive in Westminster next year are themselves some way to the Right of Cameron's apparent position. The other two major parties are at best Centrist and at worst Centre-Right by any pre-1980 measure.
Thus we have been living under a "right-wing hegemony" for 20 years, with both leading parties in its thrall. No doubt that is about to get a lot worse. What is needed to counter it is nothing less than the re-establishment of the post-war socio-political consensus: the idea of co-operation rather than competition; the concept of "from each according to their ability; to each according to their need". A rediscovery of the understanding that individual selfishness is not the solution and in fact will literally be the death of us and the planet.
That last, I would suggest, is our biggest challenge. We are so used to the idea of personal gain at everyone else's expense that we will not willingly accept the measures that are sorely needed to combat climate change, and every moment we fail to act the more draconian those measures will need to be for us and our civilisation to survive. It is not going to be pretty.
Only a rediscovery of community, I would argue, and the idea of vital services and industries operated not for profit but for public good and under public ownership, aided by the powerful instant communications and data processing technologies now available that can make all kinds of co-operation and large-scale ventures far more efficient and effective than ever before, can save us from a very bleak future indeed. We need a revival of the old-fashioned post-war social consensus combined with a modern internet-enabled community consensus, and bring that into Government.
I would suggest that this is where a much-needed revival of the Left should be focused to counter the dark right-wing future you predict.
You have no idea what you are talking about. You do not understand the BNP. You do not understand the rights and interests of the English people in England, or the total denial opf those rights and interests by the Establsihment, or the existential crisis which is inexorably engulfing us as a result. You do not understand the vast rage which exists beneath the calm surface of the English exterior. You do not understand that the BNP is the only party not commending the English to accept dispossession, deracination and racial dissolution. You do not understand that if we want to live as a people we have no choice but to turn to it.
This total lack of understanding is hardly surprising, of course. The entire political mainstream in Britain has no more understanding than you, a foreigner, do. But it galling, nonetheless, to read rubbishy commentary such as this, and I strongly urge you to study the matter at greater depth in future.
Thank you for these contributions.
On a matter of fact, TPPR is not 'foreign' to the UK - it is actually based in London and Tunbridge Wells, the latter almost quintessentially Middle England.
On a matter of interpretation, we do not see a 'dark right-wing future' as necessary at all. On the contrary, the last thirty years has seen class politics placed in abeyance with apparent prosperity. Politics has been re-forming along a libertarian/authoritarian axis that offers considerable threats to the 'official' Left but not to liberty as such.
The 'official' Left emerged as a response to, first, the weak organisational skills of 'soft' socialists epitomised in the UK by, say, George Lansbury and then the need to counteract Communist influence, the most effective organisational bloc in modern political history until it imploded in the 1980s from its own sclerosis.
The coup mounted by Blair, backed by the old Labour Right and the anti-Marxist Kinnockite Left, in the mid-1990s drove the 'official' Left into an authoritarian box, firstly internally (the 1996 Partnership in Power reforms) and then within the State.
This was backed by much of the organised and unorganised working population because it appeared to deliver the economic goods (and by the liberal middle classes for that same reason) and because authoritarian means were used to promote a particular liberal agenda centred on the cultural politics (identity-driven) that had displaced class politics.
The whole project is now crumbling on economic crisis and on mass but unorganised resentment of the cultural agenda which was liberal but not libertarian. This is the resentment of 'political correctness' that is beginning to drive Southern British rage at the 'regime'.
The key point is that, while both major traditional parties have authoritarian elements, New Labour hegemony initially created a consensus for the politics of authority (especially in the context of security concerns) until the Tory Party, under Cameron, understood that a pool of libertarian instincts could be exploited.
The 'official' Left has long since lost its activist libertarians who have now dissipated into the political ether - withdrawing from politics, moving to anarchism, environmentalism and the far left or drifting into the Liberal Democrats and the left of the Tory Party. A rump of loyalists remains but they are like 'catholics' - remaining from faith rather than reason.
None of this mattered so long as the alliance of authoritarian Liberals with the organised and unorganised working clasees as well as the petty nationalist and regional machines stayed solid but these are under severe strain now. The role of the BNP, given the failure of the Far Left to come up with a 'Die Linke', is to capture the authoritarian unorganised workers and small businesses who like to delude themselves that they are middle class.
If anything, although ostensibly of the Right, the Tories, with authoritarians in the minority now within their ranks, are more 'left' than the 'official' Left because New Labour has given up on dealing with poverty and exploitation whereas the Tories are clearly concerned with popular service delivery rather than supporting the quangocracy and civil society that benefits the middle classes but not the mass of the population.
If the BNP get even 15% of the vote, they merely undercut New Labour so the balance of power could shift towards a progressive anti-State agenda that, far from 'dark', could open the door to discussion of the real issues that the Left should be contesting with the Right, poverty and exploitation, albeit in a libertarian context.
Similarly the revival of anarchist and environmental protest is beginning to tie in with middle class worries about the increasing role of the State amd much current State strategy appears to be driven by an agenda that aims to frighten the middle classes from association with protest.
If these two sides merged in their interests, then we could see a repetition of the poll tax effect that brought down to Thatcher - New Labour knows this and has placed its control of the monopoly of force at the service of keeping the potential for protest contained, but at the cost of raising worries about State snooping (see recent stories in the Guardian),
Far from 'dark' and 'right-wing', with authoritarians from Hain and Harman to Griffin falling out viciously over control of the State in what amounts to a cultural war, the future could be quite rosy for both libertarian and traditional class warriors, with an opportunity to use the coming crisis to unravel the worst of the inefficient State and to bring power back to the people along lines advocated by Tories like Carswell.
From this point, the libertarian Left might actually see opportunities for recovery ... once the mess caused by the policies of the last twelve years had been cleaned up. So, the future might look brighter than the Left fears ... even if a generation might pass before it returns to power and conditions be different.
A very detailed, helpful and well-argued response. Thanks for the fascinating perspective.