There are five female speakers at the Holiday Inn and just one man: an extension of her politics. Sultana, born in Birmingham to Muslim parents of Pakistani descent, is one of four sisters. She knows how to fight for herself.

She has toured Britain in the last six months preparing for Liverpool. She says she wants to unite the Left: Corbyn, ever an unwilling savior, tends to hide in his allotment. But he did emerge yesterday for his own pre-conference rally: for his Your Party. Rumors fly. Corbyn’s people brief the media that Sultana-allied Leftists banned from Your Party — the Revolutionary Communist Group, the Socialist Workers’ Party (SWP) and the Socialist Party (SP) — may try to disrupt Conference. It was counter-briefed that Corbyn attended a Marxist festival this year. Extra security guards have been hired.

If Sultana does kick Corbyn into the sea when collective leadership is passed this weekend — he prefers the single leadership model — she will assume de facto leadership of the hard Left, in the sense that they have leaders. She is, after all, Your Party’s only MP: Corbyn now sits as an independent. If she learned singularity from the querulous king of Islington North, she might surpass him now. She is the second most followed British politician on TikTok, after her enemy Nigel Farage.

Corbyn’s allies called her undiplomatic, which is funny, considering what he is. And at the rally, she is defensive: polished and hurt. “We’re not here for fiefdoms and coronations and jobs for mates, and we’re definitely not here for a toxic culture that witch hunts people on the eve of conference and treats people like absolute shit.” Scores of Socialist Workers were expelled from Your Party yesterday. Though 18% of people were interested in voting Your Party in summer, it then slid to 12%. She doesn’t mention the lost 6%.

The Holiday Inn and Your Party are an odd fit. The hotel is aspirational, made for Thatcherites, and styled to repress the world outside — we might plausibly be in John Lewis — but the revolution they yearn for, or think they yearn for, is not here yet. So, they plot, like people waiting to re-wallpaper a country. Speakers from Bristol Apartheid Free Zone, Stand up to Racism, the National Education Union and Borderlands, a refugee charity, discuss the rise of Reform, the fears of people of color and migrants, and small victories against the boss class. If the hard Left is usually energized by struggle, these are the most defeated I have met. They speak in whispers, and, in the break, strangers do not talk. It is as if they are exhausted, before the battle has even begun. Meanwhile, at Corbyn’s rally, there were squabbles and four people were evicted. Splitters.

The hard Left exists for its contradictions. It constantly debates and it does not debate at all; it needs systems, but it does not trust them; it calls itself progressive, but it never changes. It fights with itself, constantly. Yet it has always housed the same people, city to city. There are ancient revolutionaries, always white, seeking a shared renewal to mirror the one they want for themselves. Every few years a charismatic leader emerges, and they cling to that. Before it was Corbyn. Now it is Sultana.

So today, the revolutionaries include young women of color, energized by Sultana’s rage. Candi Williams, the Your Party organizer for Bristol, tells Sultana with tears in her eyes: “This time last year, last August, I boarded up my windows because we were scared that racists were going to break in.” Her fear is rational, of course, but I fear the hard Left response won’t be. Sultana talks about bussing people in from all over the country to combat far-Right rallies. But this will only feed the anger: all extremists meet themselves in the looking glass of battle. On making Britain safer, and more prosperous — anathema to all extremists — she has nothing beyond a call to abolish capitalism. The country — the working-class — Sultana wants to renew may as well be Plasticine.

Suggested Reading

The twilight of the millennial socialists

By Jonny Ball

She recites the credo effortlessly, like a comic at the end of a tour: tax the rich; nationalize water and energy; free public transport; fight climate change; Trans rights. She will abolish the monarchy, Zionism, and leave NATO: “Every penny that we spend on tanks, missiles and bombs is money stolen from our homes, our hospitals and our schools”. No one mentions Ukraine.

The real enemy is the Labour Party. She says that Lord Mandelson, “the Dark Lord, alongside his minion, Morgan McSweeney, has created a dark government”, and she will not rest until, “Keir Starmer, David Lammy, Shabana Mahmood and the rest of them are in the docks of The Hague because [the] blood [of Palestine] is on their hands”. This all sounds absurd in the John Lewis Holiday Inn — overthrow the government from here? — and people listen with only moderate enthusiasm.

Her rally represents an incoherence, and she knows it. People ask her: “What’s the point of Your Party? You should just join the Greens.” Instead, she says, she is going to reach out to Reform voters. “One third of Reform voters actually blame the super-rich for the problems in this country,” she says. “We know that the work has to be done by listening to them, understanding their grievances and going on a journey.” Success, she claims, is about talking to those communities, speaking to the “left behind, knocking on doors and yes, some people are going to slam those doors in your face and tell you to fuck off. And that’s fine. People are really angry. But the Right does not have a monopoly on working class anger.”

These voters, she says, are “blaming the wrong people for the misery that’s been caused in their life”.  But how will she stop them? As ever with the hard Left, I think the talk of reaching out is a feint, mere vanity.  No one asks her a hard question here, as the great new Left party is being born. That would be a heresy. She does admit, though, that “often in Left-wing spaces we just say things, and not everyone is always on the same page, and we’re all in different parts of our political journey”. But she knows, she says, that the people are, “watching, they’re waiting. They’re ready to join and fight.”

The line is, then: the proletariat will save us! Perhaps Sultana has read 1984. But I can’t see how the proletariat can save us. They are barely here. This is still a bourgeois movement and, Sultana, the grammar-school educated daughter of an accountant, is no more working-class than I am. That’s the incoherence.

More from this author

Reform is tearing the Tories apart

By Tanya Gold

The event ends when she’s asked how she navigated politics as a Muslim woman in the western world. “I really don’t want to start crying,” she says. “This is why I go to therapy”. This may be a joke, because she adds, “In all seriousness, it has been really difficult… you are just told to be grateful.” Another party member, a young woman, is grateful: “seeing you gave me so much hope that we could achieve something better”. And that’s the heartbreak: promising revolution in a constitutional monarchy will not work. Hard Leftist politics are a drug, and the comedown will be messy.

Your Party will choose its name this weekend from a shortlist: Your Party, Our Party, Popular Alliance, For the Many. Sultana’s choice — The Left — did not make the shortlist. It’s a good name, and very like her: brief, and made for TikTok.

Corbyn said yesterday, “we’re going to get through this weekend,” which is barely the rhetoric of hope. Monty Python was right.

At that moment, I sat in a London synagogue a few hundred miles to the south, unaware of what was transpiring in Manchester. As I noted in a now-viral post on X, a friend who was sitting next to me whispered into my ear:  I reckon Jews have 10 years left in this country.” I said I wasn’t so sure. What I meant was the tides of antisemitism ebb and flow, like tides under a foul millennial moon. This is obviously a period of acute anti-Jewish hatred, particularly in the UK — particularly in London — but it too shall pass.

As the congregation prepared to recite a prayer of repentance called Avinu Malkeinu, “Our Father, Our King”, there was a bustling in the synagogue hall. Three of the synagogue’s security volunteers rushed in, one took to the bimah, the stage where the Torah scrolls are housed. “There’s been a major incident at a shul up north,” he said, using the Yiddish word for synagogue. The security team was locking down the synagogue. No one was to leave. The children’s service was canceled.

There was fear, but not panic — an indication of how accustomed British Jews are to these kinds of scenarios. We didn’t know what had happened “up North”, but we knew it would be bad. The rabbi leading the service announced that in light of the situation, instead of the customary, mostly silent recitation of Avinu Malkeinu, we would read each stanza aloud, responsively — it being a prayer traditionally turned to in times of communal distress.

Suggested Reading

The shattering of the Jewish world

By Ben Judah

When the synagogue security coordinator finished speaking, my friend leaned over to me: “You see what I mean? 10 years.” It was as if he’d calmly predicted this very situation only minutes ago. But before we could reflect on his prophetic abilities, we were both struck by the same thought — we have to find our families, who would be heading over to the now-canceled children’s service. The picture of a Jewish woman and two Jewish children walking down the road in a quiet London neighborhood suddenly seemed like an inexcusable vulnerability.

And so it is. Only months before, my wife was on a London bus with my children, in the center of town. A middle-aged woman turned to my children and began muttering something in a nasty undertone. My wife asked what she was saying to them. The woman, irate, spat, “You’re a Jew! You’re a Jew!” No one on the bus interceded. No one stood up for them. When it comes to the Jews, Transport for London’s slogan is apparently, “See something, say nothing.”

My children attend school in London under the gaze of a small squadron of security guards in anti-stab vests. Their city no longer feels safe. Four years ago, well before October 7 was a glimmer in Yahya Sinwar’s eye, a convoy of black cars drove through one of London’s most Jewish neighborhoods, the men in the cars chanting: “Fuck the Jews, fuck them all, fuck their mothers, rape their daughters and show your support for Palestine.” The men were arrested — and all charges were duly dropped.

Last year, just days after October 7, a member of the Jewish community sent me a photo of a protester at one of the pro-Hamas rallies in London flying what he thought was an Isis flag. I reached out to a number of leading experts on jihadi ideology, including its symbols. All of these experts told me this was the “Black Flag of Jihad”, employed by proscribed Islamist terror groups. I asked the Met Police about this. Their representative responded: “I’m told it is a call to prayer flag and as such no offenses committed.” I should have known better.

Ten years ago, British Jewry — most of which has supported the Labour Party for generations — were sent into a panic by the rise of Jeremy Corbyn as the party’s leader. Then, as now, there was much handwringing about where (and when) British Jews should go. Corbyn was eventually defeated, and it seemed like the danger had been averted.

In reality, something much worse happened — Corbynism leeched into the broader political culture. It’s a wild, galloping hatred that, driven by its revolutionary rage, cannot slow down for even a moment, not even to allow a Jewish community that had suffered a horrific attack only hours before to mourn its dead.

Instead, the movement decided to go ahead with a pre-planned rally in Trafalgar Square in support of Palestine Action, another proscribed terror group. The protest managed to evince a rare telling-off by Met Police, which posted on X, “At a time when we want to be deploying every available officer to ensure the safety of those [Jewish]  communities, we are instead having to plan for a gathering of more than 1,000 people in Trafalgar Square on Saturday in support of a terrorist organization.”

If you read not between the lines but directly on them, what the Met Police admitted is that on Thursday, as an anti-Jewish terror attack unfolded, they chose to divert resources elsewhere. My synagogue was guarded not by police, but by volunteers — teachers, doctors, accountants, lawyers, and (just maybe) journalists trained to do whatever they can to protect their communities. One of the victims of the Manchester attack was doing just this, holding a door closed, when he was accidentally shot dead by the police.

After the attack, British politicians took to social media, where, one by one, they offered the besieged British Jewish community American-sized portions of pabulum. Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood tweeted she was “horrified” and police were “stepped up” at synagogues. (Apparently, she didn’t read the Met Police’s tweet.) Yvette Cooper found the whole thing “horrific”. And Keir Starmer intoned in a noble and entirely unconvincing speech that “Antisemitism is a hatred that is rising, once again. Britain must defeat it, once again.” 

What’s remarkable is that the gamut of statements by political leaders, including from Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch, were not only indistinguishable from each other, but from that of another political leader: Jeremy Corbyn. “I am horrified by the news of multiple stabbings at a Manchester synagogue on Yom Kippur,” Corbyn tweeted. Not one of the mainstream political leaders called for real change, or dared to speak seriously about the problem of antisemitism.

This signals something important: for many Brits, including numerous Jews I’ve spoken to who have been arrested for social media posts and even Gaza-war related arguments, silence is now the safest option. It‘s by far preferable to getting a late-night knock on the door from a police officer “concerned” about a tweet — a tweet very much like the one I wrote after the Manchester attack. If you speak out, you risk your freedom. If you pray quietly, you risk your life.

Suggested Reading

The terror of the anti-Israel machine

By Jacob Howland

Nearly two years ago, I sat in my garden drinking a cup of tea before getting ready to head to a festive meal. The date was October 7, and it was also a Jewish High Holiday, Simchat Torah. (This fact somehow got lost in the narrative onslaught that ensued.) Someone told me 20 Israelis had been kidnapped by Hamas that day. I said if that’s true this will be a years-long war, accompanied by global upheaval. The actual number of hostages was 251.

The attack perpetrated in Manchester by Jihad Al-Shamie did not take place in isolation. In fact, it’s inseparable from its context. The attack was an extension of Hamas’s terror war. As are the pro-Hamas protests where demonstrators freely fly the Black Flag of Jihad. In many ways, with Hamas losing badly on the battlefield, it’s this propaganda campaign that is the essence of Hamas’s terror war. 

Though it’s tempting, I won’t pull out the old canard about Jews being canaries in the coal mine. Coal mine canaries stay caged until they suffocate and die. While some British Jews may take wing, I suspect many more will stay and fight. There is still a great country worth fighting for. The only question is whether the Jews of England will have real allies by their side, or if they will fight alone.

A year into Keir Starmer’s government, however, and Corbynism’s corpse is rising. On Thursday evening, Coventry South MP Zarah Sultana announced that she was resigning from Labour in order to set up a new party with the old leader, alongside various other independent MPs, campaigners and activists. Citing the welfare reforms, which were torturously voted through last week following an internal rebellion, she wrote that “the Government wants to make disabled people suffer; they just can’t decide how much”. She also accused Starmer’s ministry of being “an active participant in genocide” in Gaza.

Whether this new force on the Left will hold together is another matter. Corbyn was reportedly “furious and bewildered” that the fledgling party was launched before he agreed to join. “Zarah jumped the gun a bit with that,” a source close to the project admits. Corbyn has since declared that “discussions are ongoing” and “the democratic foundations of a new kind of political party will soon take shape” — hardly as emphatic a launch as Sultana’s the previous night.

Still, the conditions are ripe for a Left-wing insurgency. The Prime Minister may have passed his welfare bill, but even the staunchest Starmerite would be hard-pressed to claim this as a success. Reforms which were set to save £5 billion will now cost the Treasury up to £6 billion, and No. 10’s authority is in tatters.

While the 49 MPs who rebelled against the welfare bill — not to mention the 126 who backed an amendment several days earlier — reach across the Labour spectrum, the group set to gain most from these humiliating concessions is the much-maligned Left of the party. Shortly after the vote, Labour MP Richard Burgon accused the Government of trying “to balance the books on the backs of disabled people”; his colleague Diane Abbott, meanwhile, said she opposed the bill “on moral, legal and political grounds”.

Suggested reading

The last days of Jeremy Corbyn

By Will Lloyd

This perceived shift to the Right, not just on welfare cuts but also on issues such as winter fuel payments and war in the Middle East, has fuelled a jumbled but nonetheless potent coalition of old-school socialists, environmentalists, and Palestine advocates. For all Starmer’s fears of a Faragist insurgency, the threat from his Left could be just as damaging.

Corbyn first signalled that there might be life left in his old dog last September, when he established a parliamentary alliance — alongside four other independent, pro-Gaza MPs — to challenge Labour, mirroring the politics of disaffection so cannily grasped by Farage. Where Reform has targeted Labour over “two-tier” justice proposals and Net Zero policy, the Gaza independents latched onto other issues that have public cut-through, such as welfare reform and alleviating the cost-of-living crisis. A prospective Left-wing party could harness these Labour weaknesses to great effect. Particularly if it yokes in other members of the difficult crew, including the Socialist Campaign Group which counts 26 members including Sultana and fellow suspended MPs John McDonnell and Apsana Begum. McDonnell, in particular, has proved a particular irritant for Labour, this week claiming that Starmer has “a sheer lack of understanding of what the Labour party exists for”, and suggesting that MPs are already competing to succeed the Prime Minister. Back in May, he was urging fellow radicals to “take back control of our party — before it’s too late”.

Meanwhile, the Corbyn coalition spies weakness and knows their strength. Starmer was, after all, elected Labour leader in 2020 on an essentially Corbynite platform. Starmer himself cited the party’s 2017 manifesto as the “foundational document” for his campaign, pledging to abolish tuition fees and increase income tax for the top 5% of earners — both of which have since been left by the wayside.

By running as Continuity Corbyn, minus the antisemitism scandals and Punch-and-Judy factionalism, Starmer recognised that the 2019 election was a defeat not of socialism, but instead of a particular leader’s political intransigence. Corbyn’s policies on tax, public ownership and public services were popular back then, and are even more so today. So as Starmer rows back on everything he said he stood for, could this new Corbynite coalition capitalise on the continued popularity of its key ideas? Certainly, some of the Labour rebels were reflecting wider views: after all, a plurality of British voters disagreed with the proposed cuts before Starmer’s U-turn.

But as Starmer falters, there’s another awkward squad on the move. The Greens’ deputy leader, Zack Polanski, has launched a bid for the top job, defining his platform as one of “eco-populism”, challenging Labour on Net Zero and what he sees as Starmer’s surrender to big business. He is out to prove that the Green message isn’t monoglot, and reckons his party can win over Reform voters. “We need to grow faster,” Polanski says of this nascent Left-populist movement. “The Right didn’t mess around with creating little different parties or independent groups; the Right just got on with it.”

While much of Polanski’s language mimics the cadences of Corbynism, he is not a straightforward disciple. In 2018, he suggested that his own Jewish faith was a reason why he couldn’t vote for Labour, and that Corbyn’s “complicity” in antisemitism within the party was an “existential threat” to British Jews. Two years earlier, he heckled Corbyn over Labour’s muddled position on European Union membership.

Polanski has since retreated from his stance on Corbyn’s alleged antisemitism. This disavowal may well be genuine, but it’s also true that, with the war in Gaza, the growing anti-Labour Left has found both a unifying cause and an easy stick with which to beat Starmer. In the weeks following Hamas’s attacks on October 7, the then-leader of the opposition pointedly opposed a ceasefire and proceeded to sack several frontbenchers who called for an immediate end to the fighting. Following a series of incremental shifts, he then adopted the same view which got those shadow ministers fired, albeit without acknowledging that they might have been correct after all.

One Labour source told me that the Prime Minister’s “total lack of accountability” for his previous support of Israeli military action was “shameless”. Yet that the party has now moved closer to the core plank of Corbyn’s planned party is, if not a vindication of Sultana and the Gaza independents, at least a signal that their politics should not be dismissed. Problematically, though, some of Corbyn’s fellow independents campaigned on platforms which weren’t just pro-Gaza but explicitly catered towards the significant British Muslim populations in their constituencies. Their politics are sectarian, not socialist, and might therefore be unpalatable to a wider audience.

So can any of the dissidents form a cohesive platform? The economist James Meadway has called for a “Red-Green alliance, modeled on France’s New Popular Front”. That’s the Polanski model: a Left-wing message couched in Right-populist methods. And one that he would use, should he become leader, to target between 30 and 50 seats at the next election. This would factor in defections from other parties, including, ambitiously, an attempt to entice Corbyn to go Green. I’m told, too, that Sultana was involved in discussions to join, before deciding to press ahead with the prospective Corbyn-led party.

More from this author

The far-Right is coming for Farage

By Rob Lownie

Yet Corbyn was always unlikely to join a Polanski-led Green Party. He thrives on protest and grassroots energy, not the everyday jostling that comes with being a member of a parliamentary party. Even after surviving the Owen Smith putsch of 2016, his greatest threat as Labour leader always came from his own MPs, among whom he never commanded broad support. As Andrew Fisher, Corbyn’s former director of policy, wrote several months after Starmer ascended to the leadership, “the Corbyn project was an attempt to build the car while driving it and learning to drive at the same time, while fighting over the steering wheel.”

Perhaps this irony pertains to the radical Left as a whole. Labour’s Pasokification may have enabled the rise of the Corbynites, but Starmer’s triumph last year killed the idea that they were the Left’s best shot at winning power post-Blairism. This new movement is at once profoundly different from the giddy optimism which defined the early days of the Corbyn project, and a fruitless effort to recapture the magic of 2017.

For while sectarians, socialists and environmentalists share some goals which are born from political convenience, their aims are ultimately distinct; even the Socialist Campaign Group is too divided to make the most of its enduring influence. Yet these factions will damage Starmer by splitting the Left-wing vote. More in Common polling last month showed that a Corbyn-led party would capture 10% of the vote, trimming Labour’s total by three points — and the Greens’ by four. Starmer would be left thrashing in Farage’s slipstream, level with the Tories.

For Corbyn, though, that could be enough: to play spoiler, rather than claim the spoils. Even his supporters acknowledge that, initially at least, he had no intention of winning the 2015 Labour leadership contest. His goal, then and now, was to change the parameters of mainstream Leftist debate, to end the party’s subjugation to New Labour, and take it back towards its socialist roots. His statement on Friday pledged to “create something that is desperately missing from our political system: hope”. And that may well be his best weapon against a Labour Party which increasingly appears directionless, thoughtless and, indeed, hopeless.

Revolutionaries were never meant to master the Rube Goldberg machine of Britain’s governing apparatus. But with the British Left having dealt another blow to Starmer’s authority, they could still be the force that finishes off this government. Corbyn, belatedly, may have his revenge.

Starmer, in his defence, inherited a sinking ship from Jeremy Corbyn. He was handed the lowest number of seats since 1935, a bitterly divided party and a Labour brand that even today remains thoroughly discredited among a large swathe of the country. Corbyn did not cause all of these problems but he certainly entrenched them.

Labour’s fracture with the working class, its loss of credibility on crunch issues such as the economy and immigration and its growing dependency on social liberals who congregate in areas where the party no longer needs votes were all decades in the making. This is why any recovery — if such a recovery is even possible — will be generational rather than cyclical.

Starmer made a good start, or at least appeared to. Over the past year, Labour picked off low-hanging fruit, winning back voters who were repelled by Corbyn. In the polls, Labour’s average support jumped from below 29% to 35%. At the last election, Labour trailed the Conservatives by 12 points; today, they trail by 8.

How much of this improvement is due to Starmer remains unclear. While his supporters point to his strong leadership ratings relative to Corbyn, the fact remains that even today Starmer’s “net satisfaction” score still lags behind Boris Johnson — while 33% of voters are satisfied with him, 42% are not. Leaders only ever have a short period to make an impression. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that Starmer, a year after becoming leader, has now blown his.

Ask someone on the street to describe Starmer and they’ll probably say he opposed Brexit, is a lawyer, took the knee for Black Lives Matter and is better than Jeremy Corbyn but still doesn’t represent “people like them”. This might explain why, when the country is asked who would make “best Prime Minister”, Johnson still leads on 37% while his nearest rival is not the leader of the opposition but ‘Not Sure’. Starmer trails in third, ten points adrift from the man who has been in power for a year and is criticised on a daily basis.

Suggested reading

How Starmer can beat the Tories

By Peter Franklin

There are, of course, many who argue that Covid-19 dealt Starmer an unlucky hand.  But it is during moments of crisis, when the glare of public attention is strongest, that leaders are made. Indeed, it won’t be lost on Starmer’s team that it is precisely at the same time as the entire country has been sat at home, watching the news and paying attention to politics, that Starmer’s ratings have fallen not risen. To put it simply, the more people have seen, the less impressed they have been.

Starmerites might respond that his ratings are better than Mr Corbyn’s. But that is like saying Michael Howard’s ratings were better than Iain Duncan Smith’s. In the end, neither saw power. And it appears that the British people can sense that, too. More than half of them told YouGov last week that they simply do not see Keir Starmer as a prime minister in waiting.

Even if you put the question of leadership aside, there remains little evidence that Labour is dealing with the deep-rooted structural problems that arguably make it impossible for the party to win the next election. To do so would require a swing close to what Tony Blair and New Labour achieved in 1997 – with a leader who is nowhere near as popular as Blair was and a party that is nowhere near as popular as it needs to be outside of London and the university towns.

As the 2019 election and today’s polls underline, amid the “realignment” of British politics Labour is stacking votes where it does not need them while failing to win votes where it desperately needs them. Labour will probably cheer Sadiq Khan’s easy victory in London next month, while struggling to hold its historic blue-collar fiefdom of Hartlepool. It is cruising in its stronghold of London with a 20-point lead, but across the rest of the south it is 25 points behind. No party can win power with these numbers.

Suggested reading

Why Starmer is no Attlee

By James Kirkup

This reflects how Britain’s new political geography, the first-past-the-post system and earlier Labour leaders have made life harder than it ought to be for Starmer. Over the past two decades, the Left essentially walked into the casino of British politics and put all of its chips behind social liberals whose support is concentrated in liberal enclaves rather than spread across the country. Much of that was entrenched during Corbyn’s tenure and by the dismal reaction to Brexit, and now Starmer is paying the price. Ask the working class today who should lead Britain and Boris Johnson holds a 19-point lead. Starmer might win a few more seats around London, but he should remember that there are still many more Red Wall seats that could fall. The assault on the Red Wall might just be starting.

There is a broader point to be had, too. At the heart of recent political commentary has rested a fundamentally flawed assumption: that once Brexit was over and done with life would return to the traditional “Left versus Right” fault line that governed politics during the twentieth century. We would get back to debating the economic issues that play to Labour’s strengths and that would clear the path for the party to repair its relationship with workers and return to power.

But I was never convinced. For a start, this narrative completely ignores the extent to which the Conservatives have also leaned towards the Left, variously promising to “level-up” the most regionally imbalanced nation in the industrialised world while moving institutions, civil servants and banks north.

More from this author

Why Boris is still beating Labour

By Matthew Goodwin

It also underplays the extent to which culture, rather than economics, has come to dominate national life — as reflected in our intensifying debates over cancel culture, freedom of speech, the Royal Family and racism in British society. Only last week, voters looked on as Keir Starmer and a number of his MPs rejected a nuanced report on racial and ethnic disparities and instead implied that Britain, and by extension the British people, are inherently racist. Every day that radical left Labour MPs Clive Lewis and activists like professor Priyamvada Gopal are in the news, screaming about racist Britain, is a good day for Boris Johnson.

But as Ronald Reagan reminded Jimmy Carter, nobody wants to be told over and over again what is wrong with their country and its people, especially when much of it is not true. Nobody wants to hear about the malaise. They want to be inspired and led to the sunlit uplands. They want their leaders to believe in the country as much as they do. Yet as much research over the past year has shown, it is precisely on these questions about culture, identity, race and history where Labour MPs and activists are completely detached from the rest of Britain.

Put all of this together and it becomes extremely difficult, if not impossible, to see how Starmer charts a path to No 10. While he might have steadied the ship, too many gaping holes remain. Labour’s broken bond with the working class, its perceived lack of economic competency, the cultural isolation of its MPs from the average voter and an increasingly radical “woke” Left that is cheered on in seats that the party already holds, but loathed in those that Labour actually needs to win — these are all major obstacles that Starmer has yet to tackle.

And unless he does, then he might find himself going down in the history books as the Labour Party’s Michael Howard  — the man who brought “stability” but ultimately failed to win power.

Kinnock’s words were true, of course. The trust of the electorate is secured not by gimmickry, soundbite or hoping the other lot mess up, but ultimately through the demonstration of competence and the methodical process of crafting a cogent policy programme that appeals to sufficient numbers of voters.

So I’m not convinced that the forthcoming by-election in Hartlepool will be quite the litmus test for Labour that some are suggesting. It is, let us not forget, only a little over a year since the party suffered its worst general election defeat since the 1930s. Hammered in many of its heartlands and abandoned by huge swathes of once-loyal voters, the task of reconstruction was always going to be slow and painstaking. And potentially more than three years out from the next election, the result in Hartlepool, whatever it be, is unlikely to alter the broader electoral landscape in any profound way.

But modern politics has little time for such nuance. Whether the party likes it or not, the by-election will be seen as an interim assessment of Sir Keir Starmer — both the man and his leadership. And while Hartlepool may not prove pivotal to the party’s longer-term electoral prospects, it is undeniable that the “direction of travel” is important. Labour must be able to demonstrate that progress is at least being made in the job of reconnecting with its core vote, that it understands it cannot be an organisation only for student radicals, social activists and middle-class liberals living in our fashionable cities, but must also be seen by those in working-class, post-industrial Britain as their natural home. If that is the mountain to be climbed — and it surely is — then the party is barely beyond the foothills.

A by-election in a Red Wall constituency such as Hartlepool at a time when the Tories are in government would once have been a walk in the park for the Labour Party. Since its creation in 1974, the seat has returned a Labour MP at every general election. But now things are far less certain.

Last time out, Labour held on — but with a much-reduced share of the vote. Unsurprisingly, given that the place voted heavily in favour of leaving the EU, Brexit Party heavyweight Richard Tice swept up support from over a quarter of the electorate, eating into the vote of both Labour and the Tories. Tice has hinted that he may stand in the by-election under the banner of the Brexit Party’s new incarnation, Reform UK — though, with the flames of the whole Brexit debate somewhat dampened, it is doubtful he will secure the same level of backing this time round. How those Brexit Party votes from 2019 are divided may therefore prove decisive.

The ideal candidate for Labour would have been a local person who, while imbued with Labour values and passionate about challenging economic and social inequality, understood working-class Britain and spoke its language, voted to leave the EU, perhaps — God forbid — had a job in the private sector and knew what it was like to take a shower after work rather than before, didn’t obsess about trans rights and wasn’t ashamed of the national flag. Finding such a person would have been something of a fool’s errand, mind. Those matching these criteria are these days in short supply within the party’s ranks — and that fact alone stands as testament to all that has gone wrong.

Suggested reading

Why is the Left calling me a fascist?

By Paul Embery

So Labour has plumped instead — following a process that some are calling a stitch-up — for what appears to be an identikit candidate: Dr Paul Williams, a Remain-voting, university-educated member of the professional and managerial classes who banged the drum very loudly for a second referendum and subscribes to a liberal-progressive worldview. And a budding retread MP to boot. The very opposite, in other words, to what is needed.

The problem for Labour is that it has stopped looking and sounding like a large chunk of those it was created to represent. A survey of the party membership carried out in 2017 found that 77% fell within the ABC1 grade (occupational middle-class), with nearly half of all members living in London or southern England. Fifty-seven per cent were graduates.

For all his creditable efforts to reconnect the party with its old base — accepting the Brexit war as over, and focusing his messaging on the value of family, community and nation — Sir Keir is shackled by a party that, in the main, doesn’t want to go where he is trying to take it. The mix of globalist liberal progressives and toytown revolutionaries that still holds so much sway in Labour’s ranks view any expression of patriotism or the politics of place and belonging as unenlightened and reactionary. Witness, for example, the slings and arrows some among these groups hurled at the leader for his terrible crime of having given some speeches in front of the union flag. On the continent, to give a speech in front of the national flag is, even for politicians of the Left, viewed as an entirely normal thing. To many on the British Left, it is a harbinger of the new fascism. And then they wonder why they lost the working-class.

Suggested reading

What Labour learned from a year of Boris

By Paul Embery

With the acute impact of the economic crisis triggered by Covid beginning to be felt, and with the likelihood that the working class will, in the end, take the biggest hit, Labour should be Hoovering up the support of hard-pressed Britain. But from the Red Wall, the Labour Party still looks like that unappealing blend of 1960s hyper-liberal and far-Left ideologue that actively despises working-class values and culture. Those residing there continue to see an organisation dominated by middle-class activists preaching the gospels of cosmopolitan liberalism and social revolution. And the selection of Dr Williams as the by-election candidate in Hartlepool will not do much to disabuse them of that view.

Hartlepool is emblematic of blue-collar Britain. It should be safe territory for Labour. But instead the by-election could turn out to be a knife-edge battle against the Tories. The era when Labour could expect anyone wearing a red rosette to win in this type of working-class constituency is gone. Peter Mandelson was three times returned by the voters of Hartlepool. But that was in the days before the acute effects of globalisation – in the form of widespread deindustrialisation and intense demographic change – started to be felt in such places.

Mandelson and his New Labour chums were the cheerleaders for the new global market and all that came with it. They lectured provincial Britain about the benefits to be gained through improved GDP and cultural enrichment. But the people in these communities felt no better for it financially, culturally or spiritually. They yearned for something different – something that went beyond economic justice and was rooted in the concepts of place, stability and social solidarity. And when Labour showed itself unwilling to provide it, they began to look elsewhere.

To win back these places, Labour needs a radical overhaul. It must start focusing on the things that people want to talk about on the doorsteps in working-class communities — not only economic betterment, but law and order, immigration, national security and family.

Suggested reading

Whose side is Labour on?

By Paul Embery

I argue in Despised: Why the Modern Left Loathes the Working Class that, at its best, Labour is an electoral compromise between (coincidentally) Hartlepool and Hampstead – a coalition that fused the party’s traditional working-class base with a layer of more middle-class liberals who were attracted to its vision of a fairer society. But that coalition has become seriously unbalanced: Hampstead has come to dominate while Hartlepool has been sidelined and taken for granted.

This by-election presents an opportunity for Labour to demonstrate how serious it is about pushing the pendulum back the other way. I fear the party is nowhere near ready to seize it.

Well, something along those lines happened to me this week. My book, Despised: Why the Modern Left Loathes the Working Class, analyses the rupture between the British Left and working-class voters, and concludes that a contributory factor was the former’s increasing tendency towards authoritarianism and its habit of shutting down legitimate debate by dismissing opponents routinely as ‘fascists’, ‘xenophobes’, ‘racists’, and suchlike.

We see it all around us — this creeping despotism which seeks to engender an atmosphere in which any expression of unfashionable opinion is met with fierce condemnation. No longer, it seems, is the Left interested in winning hearts and minds or reconciling competing interests. Instead, every debate is viewed as a battle between good and evil, enlightened progressives versus reactionary bigots, tolerance against intolerance. It does leave one wondering why, if these people are so inherently right, they feel a constant need to wield pitchforks and hurl abuse at opponents rather than attempt to win them over through the power of argument.

Suggested reading

Is this the end for Labour?

By Paul Embery

Think kids are better off through being raised by two parents? Not terribly keen on Black Lives Matter? Support proper control of immigration? Don’t believe a man is a woman just because he says he is? Then, in the minds of many on today’s Left, you belong in the basket with all the other deplorables, and the debate should go no further. It is irrelevant that such views still hold currency across much of the land. Liberal-progressive types always know better.

But I digress. No sooner had the more fanatical among the Left got wind of Despised’s release than they were inveighing against it across social media. No matter that none of them had read so much as a single word of it yet; they apparently knew everything about it.

The Left shouldn’t touch the book with a barge pole, they warned. It was an apology for ‘fascism’, claimed some. Others portrayed it as a homage to Vichy France or a manifesto for a new style of ‘red-brown’ politics. All this because – horror of horrors – the synopsis contained a call for the Left to return to the “cultural politics of belonging, place and community”. That was enough for these people to know my secret and sinister motives in writing it.

That an entire chapter of the book is devoted to making the case for the Left to renounce its support for the soft totalitarianism we have seen emerge over recent years, and to renew its historical commitment to free expression and diversity of opinion — the very antithesis of fascism — mattered not a jot. I talk about all that ‘faith, family and flag’ stuff. So I am, by definition, a Blackshirt.

Suggested reading

Whose side is Labour on?

By Paul Embery

One prospective reviewer announced quite boldly that she couldn’t wait to get her hands on a copy – how kind – but as part of her preparation was swotting up on the far-right. That particular review will be a belter, I’m sure.

I’m not looking for any sympathy here. As a seasoned political activist, I’m unlikely to lose any sleep over the brickbats chucked by petulant student revolutionaries and latte-sipping bourgeois bohemians tapping furiously on their smartphones. You will not, I promise, hear of me being bullied off social media. In fact, I find the levels of hysteria mildly amusing.

But, to be serious for a moment. It is worth remarking on how extraordinary it is that a book written by someone rooted in the labour movement and making a straightforward call for the Left, as a means to winning back millions of lost working-class votes, to combine socialist economics with a much better focus on social solidarity and the politics of belonging, should provoke such fury among supposed political allies.

There was a time when Despised’s key arguments would have been considered mainstream on the Left. Not that long ago, in fact. But a Left that is these days far more concerned with personal autonomy, open borders and identity politics than it is community and class finds such views beyond the pale. And then it wonders why it experienced electoral annihilation.

This all serves to illustrate the mountain that is to be climbed if the Left is to again play any relevance in the lives of those working-class voters who no longer feel any affection for it. A schism occurred for good reason. A movement that once welcomed those who, on the one hand, wanted to see a fairer and more redistributive economy while, on the other, holding true to some traditional — dare it be said conservative — values on social issues now looks upon them as an embarrassment. It still wants their votes, of course. But it would sooner not be seen in public with them. And it thinks they really ought to keep their noxious opinions to themselves.

Suggested reading

A manifesto to rescue Labour from irrelevance

By Paul Embery

This modern Left inhabits a world of safe spaces, echo chambers and group-think. It doesn’t want arguments articulated or books written which challenge the new orthodoxy. And those who transgress – especially if they do so from within the movement – must be silenced or hounded.

It is a mindset that leads to the Kafkaesque situation where someone who rails against the new censorship and defends with every fibre the principles of democratic debate and pluralism can be demonised in all apparent sincerity as a ‘fascist’. It is unthinking, unreasoning twaddle.

Ultimately, there is no alternative to confronting and defeating these people. We need a united front across mainstream politics — and indeed wider society — to resist those who would see it as their mission to stifle open discussion and dissent as a means to securing ideological hegemony across our public life. They have enjoyed success so far only because they have too frequently been indulged. The only serious option now is to take them on.

Paul Embery’s book, Despised: Why the Modern Left Loathes the Working Class is published by Polity

For those of us who had been attending protests for years, usually against austerity, this one felt different. It was exhilarating, and a far cry from the institutionally organised marches where we forced ourselves through the streets holding the prescribed banners and drearily chanting the prescribed slogans. At Millbank and in the weeks that followed, we were transformed into subjects with our own agency, and the chaos and uncertainty of those days was experienced as the opening of possibilities that extended beyond the protests themselves.

In Capitalist Realism, Mark Fisher wrote that, “the tiniest event can tear a hole in the grey curtain of reaction which has marked the horizons of possibility under capitalist realism. From a situation in which nothing can happen, suddenly anything is possible again,” and this felt like one such event. The next day, NUS President Aaron Porter wrote an article in the Sun in which he described the disorder as “despicable” and that sharpened our swords against the ranks of careerist New Labour bureaucrats (a look at his subsequent CV is dispiriting; this class is still disappointingly employable).

Suggested reading

Confessions of a student Marxist

By Tobias Phibbs

The leftist magazine Tribune describes Millbank as “one of the most important demonstrations in British political history”, striking a blow at “the nerve centre of the British establishment”. They are certainly right that it has taken on “mythic significance”, judging by the numbers who claim to have been there compared to the relatively small number of people who actually stormed the Tower.

For the few weeks following, protests and occupations spread over the country, culminating on December 9 when the bill was passed and we were kettled on Westminster Bridge until gone midnight. There was no food, no water, no toilet, and the rallying cries passed from joy, through defiance and anger, to desperation. As we were finally released into the night, including school-aged children hundreds of miles from home, we had to walk one-by-one through a tunnel of riot police shining a light on our faces and taking our photo. Any face coverings, worn to protect anonymity, were forcibly removed. We had lost, and the government and police had won. We had been humiliated and it felt like the end.

But it was not. Tribune argues, rather meekly, that Millbank’s legacy lives on through its participants: “Many took on important roles as trade unionists, climate activists, Palestine and Kurdish solidarity workers, disseminators of alternative media, organisers of migrant and refugee campaigns, and senior officials in the Labour Party.” This is another way of saying that Millbank did nothing but reproduce the ranks of the professionally ineffective Left. Tribune should be more ambitious: Millbank’s real significance was much more serious. Though we couldn’t see it at the time, it marked the emergence in politics of a class faction that was just coming into view and is even now transforming our country: the graduate without a future.

During the dead period of the noughties, protests stuck to a tried and tested formula. We would march through central London, before gathering in Trafalgar Square to hear from Left-wing veterans like Tony Benn and Jeremy Corbyn while Trotskyist parties competed to sell papers and sign up the uninitiated. It was all pretty harmless, an alternative to a trip to a National Trust property for a different subset of the middle classes.

Suggested reading

How Noël Coward made me a Marxist

By Paul Mason

There was the odd exception. A year before the Millbank protests, in Spring 2009, I remember skipping school and protesting against the G20 summit in London. A window was smashed and a police officer pushed a bystander, the newspaper vendor Ian Tomlinson, to his death. But this was on the way out; the tired tail-end of 1990s radicalism temporarily given a new lease of life by the recession, and it marked the last moment when the Left was defined by its opposition to globalisation. For the most part, rallies conformed to our cynical characterisation of them: not so much A to B, as A to Benn.

Millbank changed all that. We were no longer content to participate in ritualistic set pieces that achieved nothing. And it was also something new for many of its participants. This wasn’t another protest about Middle Eastern conflict, instead it related directly to our material conditions.

In the months and years that followed, a new class consciousness was born. Not among the idealised proletariat but among the immiserated sons and daughters of the middle class. Of this new set, the Deterritorial Support Group were the sharpest. They pranked the world media into believing Slavoj Žižek and Lady Gaga were close friends. They exposed Johann Hari’s plagiarism and accused him of “policing the boundaries of acceptable thought” and the liberal-left as representing the “left wing of capital.” One of their members explained to the Guardian that “without the specific historical and economic conditions I live under, I don’t feel I would be involved in this sort of thing.” Instead, he would “probably have a mortgage or something”. More often than not their agitprop stung because it was accurate.

And it spoke to the depths of our radicalisation and disillusionment with mainstream politics. The coalition government implemented the reforms but in truth they were coming even if New Labour had clung on in the 2010 general election. This was a bipartisan reform implemented by a generation who had paid nothing for their education. To top it off, the Liberal Democrats broke their pledge to oppose any increase in tuition fees. This had a prolonged effect on a generation’s trust in mainstream politics and Nick Clegg’s disappearance from the UK scene and new career as Silicon Valley executive can be understood as a form of exile – if not a particularly painful one.

Millbank was our year zero. Some of the DSG had voted for the Lib Dems in 2010, and one had even been a member. It was the disenchanted demographic to which they belonged that propelled Jeremy Corbyn to his leadership of the Labour Party and without it he may never have won in 2015. Instead it would have been Yvette Cooper or Andy Burnham managing Labour’s decline.

Suggested reading

Does Labour understand why it lost?

By Graeme Archer

Yet 10 years on, the movement Millbank gave birth to has crumpled. Its predictions – that scrapping EMA and trebling university fees would put off poor kids from college and university respectively – have been proved wrong. The Left has descended into internecine conflict and the policing of individual behaviour. The collective joy and mutual self-interest of those early days has gone. There is a distinct irony that this radical energy was assimilated by the electoral project of Benn’s most loyal acolyte. With that comprehensively crushed in December and Jeremy Corbyn suspended from the party he led, it is hard to see how the fragments of the new Left can pick themselves up again.

The old Left is back to where it started, too, with a few thousand members spread across a few dozen organisations. Were it not for the coronavirus restrictions, I have no doubt that they would be organising their next ‘march against pandemic austerity’, the placards would be out calling for ‘the people’s vaccine’, and the paper sellers of the Socialist Workers’ Party would be setting up their stalls in Trafalgar Square in search of new recruits…

And yet, though the more interesting elements have dissipated, something has changed. The Left is formally defeated but it remains – in its cultural form – more influential than ever. Many of those radicalised at Millbank have graduated from higher education institutions and are reshaping our national political discourse. At the expense of a playful politics of collective self-interest, however, has come the importing and regurgitating of the life-draining successor ideology from the United States, an ideology which every power we claimed to be protesting against 10 years ago has embraced wholesale.

In 2010, we felt as though we were at the precipice of something real. History was re-emerging from its long slumber and it was finally possible once again to imagine radical futures, as Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams attempted to do in the briefly influential Inventing the Future. Their book, published in 2015, seemed at the time like the beginning of a newly ambitious Left modernism. We can see now it marked the end of a short chapter. Today, the Left is shattered and poses no serious alternative to liberal, capitalist modernity. That challenge comes from the Right, while the Left is reduced to dragging cultural institutions ever further down the rabbit hole of intersectionality. What a long, strange trip it’s been.

But, so far at least, the reverse is true. Indeed, some of the landmarks of this new ideological architecture are so familiar, it feels like something of a homecoming.

Among the most familiar and welcome of these landmarks is the presence of the Christian notion of original sin. Theorists of Conservativism don’t always use this language; they are more likely to speak of a suspicion of human perfectibility. But it amounts to pretty much the same thing. The Left believes itself to be participating in some grand project of human improvement, an ambitious endeavour that points towards a comprehensive moral transformation of society. Conservatives don’t believe in this because they have a much more heightened sense of human fallibility.

suggested reading

How I became 'Tory scum'

By Giles Fraser

Original sin has developed a bad reputation. It sounds, to secular ears, like a disparagement of the human — overly associated with the church’s tedious obsession with sex. It is certainly true that St Augustine, the great theorist of original sin, was sex obsessed, and so he saw human brokenness through that particular lens. “God grant me continence – but not yet”, has to be one of the wittier intercessions to have been offered up to the divine by a saint of the church.

But properly understood, original sin was simply a very particular way of speaking about human brokenness, and an understanding that this brokenness was deep in the marrow of human life.

Perhaps the best way of recognising original sin as a kind and generous doctrine is to examine the views of those who opposed it, and in particular those of the British monk Pelagius. Like the liberal Left of today, Pelagius believed in human perfectibility. “Be ye perfect as your heavenly father is perfect” was his big sermon idea. God has given us the moral rules, and he wouldn’t expect from us something we are unable to achieve, so there can be no excuses. Moral improvement is the only way to heaven.

Pelagius hated the permissiveness and moral laxity that original sin made possible. No, he insisted, those who fail must be condemned. In many ways, Pelagius is the patron saint of woke, that unforgiving doctrine of moral excellence that cancels all those who cannot live up to its stringent demands. In a recent piece for UnHerd, Gavin Haynes wrote about how this moral bidding war is corroding communities.

The historian Tom Holland commented: “Purity spirals are what happen when societies saturated in Christian assumptions abandon that most democratic of Christian doctrines: original sin. If perfection on earth is possible, then boo to those who are less than perfect.”

Augustine’s idea of original sin is that human beings are constitutionally incapable of the sort of moral perfectionism asked of them by Pelagius. The Adam and Eve story is a way of introducing the idea that our lives are shot through with moral failure like a stick of seaside rock. This is why Christianity is absolutely not a story about human beings being good and then going off to heaven, but is a story about the need for us to recognise our constitutive brokenness and our need to be fixed of it by nothing less than outside help i.e. God.

suggested reading

What Peterson shares with Pelagius

By Giles Fraser

Even leaving these big theological narratives on one side, it is surely obvious that a political philosophy that recognises human weakness is going to be a good deal nicer a political environment than one that whips people on to ever greater demands of moral stringency and then condemns them for failing to live up to what is expected.

It is this Pelagianism of the Left that makes it so nasty a place to be, with its constant monitoring of micro-aggressions, and denunciations of those whose shade of socialism differs, one from another.

A kinder, gentler politics it is not.

Of course, the Left does have something that, superficially at least, looks a little bit like original sin: being white, being male, being straight. There are things that some of us cannot do anything about, things we were born with, and yet they locate us on a map of oppression as the transgressors. But this isn’t how original sin works, because, on the Christian version, sin is something common to all human beings and is, therefore, the reason for existential solidarity among ourselves, not a source of division.

That’s probably why people on the Right often feel like they are a good deal kinder to each other than people on the Left. The search for total innocence becomes persecutory to those who do not achieve it. The acceptance of fallenness, though, is properly inclusive, a recognition that we are all in the same boat, all stumbling about getting it wrong, all children of Adam helping each other along in the dark.

The thing I never understood about the Right, when I was on the Left, was how this pessimism about human nature could be so much more the compassionate option. Like Pelagius, what I recognised in it was moral laxity, indifference even — a refusal to do anything about the great moral ills of society. What I saw in Conservativism was a metaphorical shrugging of the shoulders as people slept on the streets or queued up at the food bank. But I wasn’t looking carefully enough.

suggested reading

The insidious racism of the Left

By Giles Fraser

For whereas the Left generally prefers to discharge its moral obligation to others through the transformation of society, the Right — sceptical of the grand plan — prefers to discharge it through particular acts of individual kindness and practical generosity.  Though not ever believing that such acts will totally change the world, the Right fights back against the darkness nonetheless, little by little and at local level. Without the showy drama of the revolutionary, the Conservative responds on the human scale, organically.

Conservatism, then, is the politics of human imperfection. For years I have been an enthusiastic proponent of human fallenness from the pulpit, but have never recognised the connections of all those sermons on Augustine to the political realm. I will never sit comfortably alongside all those free-market liberals who, since Thatcher, have made us confuse proper Conservatism with an ideological commitment to capitalism. That was a temporary alliance needed to defeat Communism.

Boris’s full throttle defence of global capitalism, meanwhile, in his recent speech at Greenwich — salvation by free trade — represented a form of business-minded utopianism in which genuine conservatives ought to detect the dangerous odour of ideology. Conservatives don’t believe in grand plans, whether capitalism or socialism. They see the world as inherently messed up; our job is to get on and try and make the best of it.

And as the clock strikes eleven this evening, the objective will have been realised. We will, after an almost four-year battle during which the massed ranks of the political establishment put up the fiercest resistance, finally be out of the European Union.

So why won’t I be celebrating? Why will this evening pass by like most others in the Embery household?

It’s simple really. For all my satisfaction that we would have reasserted our national independence – a precious possession for which many have fought and died – and freed ourselves from the shackles of an anti-democratic, supranational technocracy, Brexit was, for me, never the end game. Instead, I have only ever viewed it as a necessary but insufficient step.

Suggested reading

The betrayal of Paul Embery

By Paul Embery

The question, therefore, is: what comes next? How do we construct the type of society that I, a socialist and trade unionist rooted in the labour movement, would like to see?

When we wake tomorrow, the same Tories who have imposed a decade of crippling austerity, slashed our public services and presided over crashing living standards will still be ruling Britain. Of itself, Brexit doesn’t change that. Milk and honey will not suddenly flow through our land the moment the grip of Brussels in severed.

There is to be no Left-wing exit from the EU. There was never going to be. That’s why I never once in four years described myself as a ‘Lexiteer’. But what Brexit does – and this is why the Left was wrong to set its face against it so determinedly – is to at least give us the freedom in future to govern ourselves in the manner we choose. The referendum provided a once-in-a-generation opportunity to do things in a radically different way should we, as a nation, ever so decide, and the minority of voices on the Left who argued that we should seize the moment were right to do so.

Secession from the EU means escape from an explicitly anti-socialist institution whose laws are inimical to many of the objectives of the Left. It gives liberty to a future Labour government (should we ever get one) to, for example, provide state aid to industry – especially our ailing manufacturing sector – without falling foul of EU competition law; to invest in our economy and people without breaching the terms of the wretched, austerity-inspired Stability and Growth Pact; to take some of our key utilities and industries — such as the railways — into full public ownership without transgressing EU rules on market liberalisation; to aid socialist planning and halt downward pressure on wages by ending free movement; to prioritise the interests of British firms and workers without contravening EU procurement laws, Crucially, it restores to us, the people, the right — fundamental to any democracy worthy of the name – to elect and remove those who make our laws.

Suggested reading

The town that should shame our politicians

By Paul Embery

Such an agenda would normally be standard fare for a movement of the Left. But the British Left’s 30-year infatuation with the EU, coupled with a crushing lack of confidence in its own ability to govern, mean that now, as we stand on the brink of true self-government for the first time in nearly half a century, it can only view such an opportunity with fear and trepidation.

The past four years have been a depressing demonstration in how the Left, and particularly the Labour party, has lost its way. From the moment the bulk of the Left planted itself unambiguously on the side of Remain and was seen to be lining up with the broad mass of the establishment – the Tory government, big business, the banking industry et al – it had set itself on a trajectory that had the potential to result in a major schism between itself and millions of working-class voters. Labour’s post-referendum vacillations on the question of whether the referendum result should be honoured, and its eventual support for a second vote, meant the rupture was guaranteed. It is a large part of why the party today stands eviscerated and pondering whether it will ever have the capacity or support to govern again.

That Labour and the wider Left sacrificed so much in support of a neoliberal institution whose core principles run counter to so much of what they have traditionally stood for beggars belief. Ultimately, what they failed to grasp is that what happened on 23 June 2016 represented a genuine democratic revolt. It was millions of mainly working-class voters (many tribally Labour), angry and resentful at having been treated with contempt for so long by a tin-eared establishment, taking their revenge. It was their way of sending a missile through the status quo and telling their leaders to start all over again. From that moment, the Left should have accepted the judgement of the people. That it didn’t explains why it is now an irrelevance across huge swathes of Britain.

Suggested reading

All the lies about Leavers

By Paul Embery

But we are where we are, as the man said. Brexit is about to be ‘done’. For many who supported it, the battle is over. The bunting is out; the band is about to strike up; the booze ready to flow.

But I won’t be part of it. For me, it was always a long game. Socialism before Brexit was impossible; it had to be the other way round.

I can well imagine, were they to be alive to see the moment, what those past giants of the labour movement who believed passionately in the principle of national independence and fought against rule by unelected European technocrats – Tony Benn, Michael Foot, Peter Shore, Barbara Castle, Bob Crow, to name a few – would be doing at eleven o’clock this evening. I doubt very much that any of them would be popping champagne corks or waving Union flags. More likely they would be telling us that this was no final victory, that Britain remained riven by inequality and injustice, and it would be no good defeating the enemy of workers in Brussels if we didn’t now take the fight to the Tories in Westminster.

They would be right. After a gruelling four-year campaign, it would be tempting to mark this evening in a spirit of jubilation and triumph. Not for me. The fight for a fairer, more equal society goes on. We mustn’t confuse the battle with the war.

Historians generally regard America as having won the trade war with China but in almost all other respects one-term President Trump represented the last hurrah of US global power. President Elizabeth Warren pulled the US out of Nato and the WTO. But life went on surprisingly normally, apart from one ugly dispute in Estonia in which two dozen British troops died in a border clash with the Russians.

It turned out that bilateral agreements between the great powers sufficed to keep trade ticking over and for keeping the peace. The Taiwanese, with no one to protect them, were not happy, initially, about being absorbed into the rest of China; but it turned out that the influence of Taiwanese assumptions about freedom, combined with the enormous power of the Christian underground, slowly ate into the power of the Communist party.

The events of 2016 did not come out of the blue; the rumblings had been audible for some time before. And yet on what slender threads did the new era hang! A few thousand votes in a few different places, plus some more plausible defenders of the status quo, and neither Brexit nor Trump would have happened, at least not at that time.

More from this author

Will Boris save social democracy?

By David Goodhart

When they did, the world turned on its axis in many surprising ways, slowly at first but more markedly in the 2020s and 2030s. Historians came to call it the great pivot year, from the centrifugal era to the centripetal one.

Western society had been dominated since the 1980s by dispersing centrifugal forces that extended individual freedom but weakened collective bonds and the power of tradition, and in the process allowed smart people to claim undue economic and political rewards. The affluent and cognitively blessed, and the two were invariably combined, became ever more powerful, while many others felt they had lost status and meaning. One journalist, writing in 2016, called them ‘Anywheres’ and ‘Somewheres’.

The end of the Cold War in the early 1990s, and the emergence of post-industrial societies had opened up western societies to an unprecedented degree, and thereby weakened collective national and class identities; meanwhile, diversity of many kinds reduced trust and traditional social norms, while social media created conditions of ‘connected isolation’, promoting narrow tribal identities and individualistic identity politics. And all the while, depression, loneliness and cultish political movements marched on.

The centrifugal era turned out not to be compatible with democracy, and in 2016, the two great English-speaking lands decided that democracy came first and ushered in today’s more centripetal era. The nation state stopped retreating, and economic and cultural openness were both a little more constrained. Immigration fell in most rich countries, partly because of stricter rules, but also, with the exception of Africa, because of sharply rising standards of living in poorer countries.

More from this author

Can the Tories accommodate populism?

By David Goodhart

Today’s centripetal era, which may itself be drawing to a close as 2050 approaches, helped to revive democracy and civic life in part through greater awareness of the psychological roots of what was then called populism — the humiliations and mass resentment built into modern, achievement societies.

As Boris Johnson, the long-serving Prime Minister (and later President) of the UK, put it: “Our beautiful democratic society must level up and find a useful place for everyone, not create a competition in which some succeed and the others fail.” Johnson, who successfully led the UK out of the EU by co-opting and channelling the country’s populist forces, became a model for other centrist and centre-right politicians.

The European Union, a product of the post-national, centrifugal era, was initially shaken by the centripetal one and almost came apart — especially after the election of Marine Le Pen as President of France in 2022 propelled on a nationalist wave after the Royal Navy had sunk several French fishing vessels and English home-owners in the Dordogne were expelled in retaliation.

Johnson and Le Pen more than patched things up in the 2024 Treaty of Calais and Johnson went on to marry Le Pen’s daughter Mathilde. The new Anglo-French Entente paved the way for the UK (minus Northern Ireland which had recently merged with the Republic) to re-enter a much looser EU that looked something like the one it had joined in 1973. The Eurozone had shrunk to Germany and the Benelux countries, and German influence had diminished after the wave of green terror paralysed the country’s energy system in the mid-2020s.

Suggested reading

Has Hungary conceived a baby boom?

By Paul Morland

Looking back, one of the remarkable things about 2016, is how unexpected both Brexit and the election of Donald Trump were. How ignorant we then were about our own societies! Such ignorance would be impossible today following the digital citizen project which has truly connected us both to each other and to the local and national state.

After various data scandals, and the failed dirty tricks campaign against Elizabeth Warren in 2020 on the part of the digital giants, the socialisation of the core digital space swept through most western societies, rather as the welfare state had been nationalised after the Second World War. Not only did our digital citizen identities make the provision of state services, especially to the elderly, much more efficient but the constant monitoring of public preferences meant that no more surprises like those of 2016, or the watershed general election of 2019, were possible. (Those of uswho can just about remember surprising elections sometimes regret this.)

Perhaps the most unexpected post-2016 development was the spiritual revival in the UK and elsewhere. The left-behind places and people had been put on the map by Brexit, Trump and European populism. Governments tilted to the new centre, a bit to the Left economically and to the Right socially (in the now quaintly anachronistic political language of the 20^th century). In the 10 years or so after 2016, this helped to bring new life and prosperity to some of the poorest regions but it was really the spiritual revival that took off in the mid-2020s that improved the quality of life in the most depressed places.

Suggested reading

Jesus was a ‘somewhere’. Paul was an 'anywhere'

By Giles Fraser

The post-2016 anxiety about dealing with the polarisation was partly based on the reasonable belief that the negotiation of value differences was going to be harder than dealing with the interest clashes of the old socio-economic politics that dominated the post-Second World War world. It is surely harder, people thought, to split the difference on immigration or family policy than on, say, the desired level of public spending or taxation

This fear turned out to be partly misplaced. The sharply declining hegemony of western countries after 2016— symbolised by the collapse in student numbers from China and India after 2020 — created unifying threats and risks, which pulled people together far more than any nationalist rhetoric ever could.

The new “mass elite” of the expanded higher education sectors of the early 21^st century found that the high-status cognitive employment that they thought they had been promised was in sharp decline, thanks mainly to AI. After some flirtation with the hard Left (in the now long-forgotten Corbyn movement in the UK) this group found itself drawn into alliance with the so-called left-behinds under a broadly small-c conservative banner.

The culture wars flared briefly for a few years after 2020, but a new consensus of a kind, finding common ground between liberals and conservatives, emerged under the great reforming Archbishop of Canterbury, Giles Fraser. It was best represented by the adoption, in the UK and across much of Europe, of Hungary’s successful natalist policies. Larger families were encouraged by public policy and became common again, ending what came to be seen as the narcissistic era of one or two-child families.

Suggested reading

How motherhood put an end to my liberalism

By Mary Harrington

But this did not, as radicals had feared, mean a reversal of gender equality. Quite the opposite, it brought with it a much greater respect for domesticity and the work of child-rearing and care for the elderly, inside the home as much as in the public economy. So-called Fifth wave feminism was associated with the feminisation of society. Many women still enjoyed success in the public realm and, by 2035, half of all MPs were women. After the monarchy was abolished, following the disastrous reign of Charles III, and Boris Johnson was elected first UK president, he was replaced as PM by Munira Mirza, the third Conservative party female PM (and first PM of Muslim heritage).

The spiritual revival was pioneered by a new form of secular Christianity stripped of much of the traditional theology, though not the ritual. The churches filled again as much as centres of community and neighbourhood as places of deity worship. This went hand in hand with a kind of remoralisation of human relations. More families stayed together for longer and child-care mainly took place within the family, and was increasingly undertaken by fathers (30% of main carers were men by 2035).

The co-option of populism represented by Boris-ism did not succeed everywhere and authoritarian governments did emerge in Austria and Sweden — in the latter after a horrific terrorist incident that killed thousands of people. The Sweden Democrat government imposed a curfew on all Muslims after the attack and many innocent Muslims died in random attacks.

Vegan terrorism was also a problem in parts of Europe, including the UK, even as meat-eating dwindled to being an exotic minority taste.

The dog that didn’t bark, looking at the big concerns of 2016, is climate change. Technological advances, including a final breakthrough in nuclear fusion and in the technology of de-salination, meant a largely carbon-free global economy by 2040 and security of drinking water in poorer parts of the world. Moreover, I am writing on the eve of 2050 in the middle of a mini-ice age, and sea levels have fallen so low that the Boris bridge connecting the UK and France now runs over dry land for several miles at both ends.

It is a wonderful symbol of how the fears of those people once called “Remainers”, who believed that leaving the EU in 2020 would cut off an independent UK from the continent, have proved so wrong.

Although the Conservatives led across every social class, their lead in the skilled and unskilled working class was particularly emphatic. Boris has no equal in cabinet. There is no coherent opposition, his majority is impregnable and all his MPs have signed up to his agenda. Hail Caesar. Meet the new King of Merry England. Good King Boris.

His goal is to make his domination hegemonic through two measures. The first is to identify the Tories with the working class and the country towns and distance them from London and finance. Putney went Labour and Bolsover went Tory. Look up the difference in house prices between the two. It is a class polarisation against the ruling financial and cultural elite.

Ministers have been banned from going to Davos. The Conservative vote went down across the home counties, and especially those areas nearest London. That was the logic behind proroguing Parliament and the expulsion of the remain rebels from the Party. The Conservatives were happy for them to vote Lib-Dem and Labour. Instead the party concentrated entirely on the towns and villages of the North and the South, the country shires and the post-industrial working class, the basis of the Brexit coalition. “Fuck business.” The Conservatives will be more northern and proletarian and Boris will drink beer with his new MPs in the many bars in Parliament. The Cavaliers will lord it over the Puritans.

Suggested reading

How cavalier is Boris?

By Giles Fraser

The second step was to break from fiscal orthodoxy and embrace the activist state. Expect to see a thousand Boris busses bombing around the country lanes of England in partnership with local government. Expect a house building boom. The PM will violate EU rules on state aid and competition law with relish, while Labour will cleave to the constraints of the single market and the rulings of the ECJ.

During the election campaign, the Conservatives pledged state aid to small regional businesses while not pointing out that half of Labour’s manifesto would have been illegal under EU Law. They quietly renounced Thatcherism. Boris will be the heir to Keynes while Labour will uphold the rectitude of Hayek forever enshrined in the Lisbon Treaty and its sovereignty over the single market and customs union. While Boris will point out the distinction between free trade and free movement, Labour won’t know the difference between the two. The interregnum has been broken, and as in 1979 its broken to the right.

Pope Francis said recently that we are not living through an era of change but a change of era. This Conservative victory is an important part of defining what the features of the new era are. The previous consensus was defined by four shared assumptions; that the nation state, democracy, the working class and conservatism would matter less. The dominant forces were the educated middle-class, globalisation, written constitutions and liberalism. Blair and Cameron expressed this perfectly.

Brexit is a sign of the times, a glimpse of the future but the progressive mind can only see it as reactionary, nostalgic and backward looking. The decisive role of the working class in asserting national sovereignty through its democratic vote in order to renew the ancient institutions of Parliament and the common law is incomprehensible to the left. The new era is a foreign country for those who thought the arc of history was with them.

Suggested reading

Will Boris save social democracy?

By David Goodhart

The scale of Labour’s defeat last Thursday is hard for the progressive mind to comprehend. Like the death of a loved one, who has survived terrible illness before, it is both shocking and predictable. The responses of blame, avoidance, denial, anger, displacement and depression from the Labour family are also shocking and predictable. Labour is like a family from hell. Full of hate and blame and unable to understand how it got here. Labour is no longer a tribe and has lost its homeland. It’s gonna be lonely this Christmas.

This is because Labour is out of relationship with its history, traditions and the communities that created and cherished it. So out of touch that it couldn’t see the rejection coming. It now shares the entropic fate of the French, Italian, German, Belgian and Dutch Labour Parties, who have shrunk progressively into irrelevance, replaced by nationalist and Green Parties on the whole. Drained of their national purpose by the constraints of the European Union, social democracy has no conception of the social, or of democracy. Labour now shares their fate which means irrelevance and endless meetings that go nowhere. Just a slow and inexorable decline. It marks the end of British exceptionalism on the Left, just as we leave the EU.

It could have been so different. In 2017, when Labour said it respected the result of the referendum, it surged through the final two weeks of the campaign. The Conservatives, running on the policy of ‘lose your mind, lose your home’, turned a Brexit election into a discussion of the financial consequences of dementia.

There were indications of disaffection as Mansfield and North Derby turned blue; but the heartlands believed that Corbyn was a faithful son of Tony Benn and he had spent a lifetime denouncing the EU as a capitalist club where no-one was accountable. Against the current of continental Europe, Labour alone was a vital and renewed social-democratic party committed to nationalisation and the redistribution of wealth. Brexit was a source of socialist renewal and democracy was re-affirmed as the means of resisting the domination of the rich and their decades of relentless plundering. But, then, Corbyn’s Labour renounced Brexit.

Suggested reading

How motherhood put an end to my liberalism

By Mary Harrington

One of the reasons why the election result seemed so shocking was that the working class were supposed to be on the wrong side of history, to not really matter anymore. Despite the result of the Brexit referendum, it was assumed that the task for Labour was to build a coalition of ‘progressive’ voters around a second referendum which they called a ‘people’s vote’. The difference between 2017 and 2019 was that the working class noted that Labour was blocking Brexit and denying the legitimacy of their vote. Corbyn’s Labour sided with global capitalism. It is a minor irony in all this that Andrew Murray and Seamus Milne, who prided themselves on their Marxist analysis with a central role for class ran a campaign based on ‘values’ and were trounced by the Conservatives who placed a relentless stress on the working class and transferring their loyalties. Labour Marxists turned out to be Whigs. What a lot of luggage for such a short journey.

The deep complicity between New Labour and the Corbyn Project was shown here. The progressive certainty that history was going in one direction, towards the free movement of people and things, that technology would dissolve place and borders in an undifferentiated swirl in which only the individual and Treaty law mattered.

That the future was based on globalisation was unquestioned between them, as was the idea that the nation state and democracy no longer really mattered. This Whig theory of history is as untrue now as it ever was. The working class, the Nation-State and democracy are key features of the new era. Far from being losers, the post-industrial working class has decided the two most significant votes of our time.

Suggested reading

Does class still count?

By James Bloodworth

And the Left was the loser. The progressive illness has dissolved the ties that bind because it has no concept of society, of the social, of belonging and inheritance. Trapped in an endless now, it lost the future. The coalition of Peter Mandelson and John McDonnell that tied Labour to a second referendum is the key to understanding the catastrophic defeat because it finally ruptured the connection between the working class and Labour. It said, you didn’t know what you were doing. It said that democracy does not decide issues in our society. It said that it had no faith in our country to decide its future through democratic politics but that it had to be contracted out to an unaccountable system of directives and laws.

By embracing a second referendum, Labour crossed a line. It no longer supported workers who trusted democracy more than the European Court of Justice when it came to their rights. Labour thought that the consequences would be catastrophic and displayed no confidence that our country could flourish outside frictionless capitalism. The Left suddenly became experts in just-in-time supply chains as if capitalism, the most adaptable economic system ever devised, would not be able to cope. They were not faithful to the marriage and it is now over. There is no evidence that there will be a reconciliation.

At the last election, Labour lost Mansfield by a thousand votes. Now the majority is more than 16,000. The Scottish working-class have not returned to Labour, but moved to a nationalist party and show no sign of remorse. Once rejected, they move on and don’t look back. In Michael Lind’s recent book, the New Class War, he makes the connection between class and geography, between hubs and heartlands. Labour is the party of the hubs, but the Conservatives now lay claim to the heartlands.

Suggested reading

Ditch the City, enrich the nation

By Maurice Glasman

And beyond the immediate devastation of defeat, is the existential horror of what it means. The severing of the long-term marriage with the working class that created the Labour Party in the first place. It opens the space for the emergence of a genuinely nasty right-wing populist Party as an alternative to Labour and the Conservatives. The Brexit Party is merely a mild taster of what the future portends. The Conservative vote only rose a few percent overall, many former Labour voters went for the Brexit Party. What was clear is that the Labour vote collapsed in the heartlands and the Brexit Party saved more Labour seats than it lost.

The glory of Labour was its ability to express the Labour interest within the framework of the inherited Parliamentary and legal institutions asserting democratic politics as an alternative to violence. While the rest of Europe did polarise and went Fascist or Communist, Labour retained the affections of the working-class and engaged in the politics of war and peace. Defeating the Nazis in the War Coalition and then creating the National Health Service, nationalising steel, coal and the railways, creating the National Trust and the Green Belt.

The virtues of civility, generosity, and kindness in the public square are easily dismissed and hard to retain. Labour was the source of that politics and with its departure from the working-class communities it used to represent, a sullen resentful politics looms. Something closer to the Front National or the Afd in Germany.

The new Government needs to offer something more than electoral success and some infrastructure projects; it needs to build on the politics of earning and belonging, of contribution and civic renewal. Over the past 40 years, the counties and towns of our country have been denuded of its assets and inheritance. None of the building societies that were demutualised in the last 40 years exist any longer as local institutions. The endowment of regional banks so that there is access to capital once more is an essential part of that. The recognition of vocation is also essential and the establishment of vocational colleges for building, maintenance, social care and taxi driving with apprenticeship laws that regulate labour market entry would address the skills required for building homes, caring for the elderly and the 85% of the economy that functions outside globalisation.

The dignity of labour is the foundation of this. It should be the basis of Labour’s alternative. The central question for the next ten years is whether the Conservatives can recognise that their future now lies with labour.

All hail Good King Boris

Subscribe:

It is interesting, therefore, to see that according to the data published by UnHerd today, the city remains far more religious than the countryside. Respondents were asked whether or not they thought morality is rooted in religion (my answer: it’s not). But I am going to assume that, generally speaking (and unlike me), the more religious you are, the more likely you are to think that morality is rooted in religion. As a result, the survey gives an idea of the distribution of religious belief around the UK.

It is no surprise to me that faith is more vigorous in the cities, especially in places shaped by migration. This is partly about the impact of Islam in the West Midlands and elsewhere. But also about the extraordinary growth of Christianity worldwide and its return back to the places that first sponsored its evangelisation.

Take the patterns of church growth/decline within the Anglican communion, which has doubled in size in the last 50 years. There are now some 86 million Anglicans worldwide. Western liberals might keep telling themselves the story of secularisation, but in truth this is bubble thinking: religion is growing fast and expected to keep on growing. From China to India, in post-Soviet Russia, throughout the Middle East, religion has been growing fast since the mid 20th century. It was not that long ago that only a couple of hundred thousand people went on the Hajj to Mecca; it is now 2.5 million. And no, this growth is not just in poorer places – South Korea has gone from 1% Christian to 30% in half a century.

More from this author

The pointlessness of happy-clappy atheism

By Giles Fraser

As with the first Urban Christians, faith is pulsed around the world via the arteries of migration. And so it is, within the Church of England for instance, that church-going is declining fastest in those Dioceses that are furthest away from the big cities. And even though the overall picture is one of decline, this conceals as much as it reveals. For example, between 1990 and 2010, adult membership in the Diocese of London grew by a whopping 70%.

My own congregation near the Elephant and Castle is a good example of why. Looking back at parish photographs of 50 years ago, a large congregation of exclusively white faces tells the story of the important role that religion played in the lives of working-class Londoners. Today, my congregation is mostly black, many originally from West Africa, and I host packed services of Christians from Zimbabwe to Sierra Leonne.

Suggested reading

Why Polly Toynbee is wrong about God

By Freddie Sayers

My boss, Bishop Woywin Karowei Dorgu, was born in Nigeria, where Anglicans grew from 3 million in 1970 to 20 million in 2010. When there is trouble in the congregation, it is in Yoruba that the Churchwarden tips me off: “Wahala” she whispers. I suspect there is no place in this country that is as diverse as a London church. Just down the road from me, the other side of the Elephant and Castle, is a growing Church of England congregation that has Mass in Spanish to cater for the large numbers of people who have come to settle here from South America.

Not that urban Christianity is the best way to understand this survey. For a while, I was Vicar of a parish in North Walsall, number 2 on the list. It was a great big barn of a church and very few people came. It is Islam that best explains many of these figures. In 1961 there were 50,000 Muslims in England and Wales. In 2017, there were 3.4 million. And the Muslim population continues to grow some 10 times faster than the rest of the population, generally in the cities.

One familiar explanation for the religiosity of migrants is that faith is a way of maintaining a connection with the places and culture from which people have travelled. There may be something to this, but the bigger story is surely that the world is a much more religious place than the western secular imagination often recognises. If Brexit happens, and the UK is forced to face more towards a world outside of Europe, it will be engaging with a world that is far more religious than it is used to and perhaps comfortable with.

More from this author

No, my marriage is not a "second holocaust"

By Giles Fraser

It is not insignificant that many of the places in this list that are the ‘least religious’ — Cambridge, Edinburgh etc — are also the most Remain-y. For the secular minded, the EU is a safe little space where the fantasy of religious decline can still be maintained. Stuck in a mid-20th-century narrative of secularisation, Remainers are trying to ward off the realisation that they may have to contend again with an idea that they believed to have been dead and buried – that of God.

As David Goodhew, director of The Centre for Church Growth Research, has put it: “The assumption that everywhere will eventually become like the West has a strong whiff of imperialism about it. We should be sceptical of the idea that the future belongs either to the ‘modern’, the secular or the West.”

It is interesting to note where religion is renewing itself in the UK, many of these places are traditionally Labour seats. Now, I would not describe Labour as the least religion-friendly of the main political parties – that prize is clearly won by the Liberal Democrats who have, for example, just deselected a candidate for being a Roman Catholic. But Labour, more Marx than Methodism, is often tone-deaf to a great many religious sensitivities – as Corbyn’s failure to understand anti-Semitism so obviously demonstrates (Finchley and Golders Green is number 23 on this list).

More from this series

Who cares about immigration?

By Eric Kaufmann

When Labour tries to address the subject, it talks obliquely about ‘communities’ – as with the recent launch of its “Race and Faith Manifesto”. This includes a commitment to set up a new body to teach about the legacy of colonialism. I wonder if this body will explain how colonialism also helped spread Christianity throughout the world, a legacy that is now returning home as those who were originally converted by the British are now arriving here to remind us of the faith we have abandoned.

“We don’t do God” as Alastair Campbell famously put it. Unless they are content with being the party of the few not the many, they had better find a way to do precisely that.

This year was no different. To observe the general atmosphere of anticipation and positivity around the streets, bars and meeting places of Brighton, one could be forgiven for assuming that Labour is on the brink of being swept to power by an enthusiastic populace desperate for us to build the New Jerusalem. Whereas the truth is that we are consistently trailing in the opinion polls and going nowhere fast – a failing all the more inexcusable considering the government’s current disarray.

The week got off to the worst possible start with the aborted defenestration of Tom Watson. There is no doubt that Watson has, to the fury of many inside the party, frequently sought to use his deputy leader post to undermine Jeremy Corbyn and present himself as an alternative leader. But instead of seeking to remove him from office via a democratic process, his opponents – the Momentum group and its outriders – resorted to the worst kind of bureaucratic manoeuvring. They couldn’t silence the man, so they tried to abolish his position. In doing so, however, they showed themselves to be undemocratic authoritarians who were frightened of a dissenting voice. The lesson of history, plainly lost on them, is that you don’t win the battle of ideas by purging people.

It is abundantly clear that the Corbynites now wield control over huge chunks of the party. So far as there is resistance, it comes principally from the Parliamentary Labour Party, which provides a redoubt for those – and there are many – who remain faithful to the creed of Blairite centrism.

But what is also clear, is that neither side truly understands Labour’s current dilemma – how to build that coalition between the party’s traditional working-class base and less tribal middle-class voters which is a precondition of electoral success. Or, if it does, it offers no credible strategy for achieving it.

The centrists seem to think that power will be won through a return to the pre-referendum status quo – a status quo that did so much to alienate working-class voters from the party and set in train the events which have led to our nation’s current polarisation; whilst the Corbynites believe that all we have to do is keep hammering on about elitism and economic injustice, and the voters will flock to us.

Both are mistaken. Labour will only win again when it offers a programme that combines its entirely laudable policies for a fairer economy alongside a social agenda that recognises the sense of cultural fragmentation and deracination brought about by globalisation, and seeks to build in its place a new, post-liberal politics of communitarianism. In short, it needs to marry its economic radicalism with a return to the politics of belonging.

There were signs in Brighton that some people in the party are beginning to understand this. It was heartening to see fringe meetings organised by some groups, including the Fabian Society, focusing on these very questions. A clutch of MPs too – often those representing constituencies which voted Leave – are beginning to address these issues. Stephen Kinnock has been particularly vocal in arguing that the party’s – indeed, the entire political establishment’s – relentless promotion of liberal cosmopolitanism has pushed away voters in the more traditional working-class constituencies and risks tipping the country into a full-scale culture war.

When set alongside efforts to subvert the result of the referendum result, it’s easy to see why the atmosphere in these communities is becoming increasingly toxic. And, maddeningly, Labour did nothing to ameliorate the tensions on this issue this week. On the contrary, the party’s absurd and anti-democratic position on Brexit will serve only to further disenchant those whom we should be moving heaven and earth to win back, as indeed will the spectacle of senior Labour MPs, including shadow cabinet members, heading a march around Brighton calling for a ‘People’s Vote’.

None of this is to say that nothing good came out of the conference. In fact, several policy commitments – such as the reduction in the working week, abolition of prescription charges and introduction of free personal care – are forward-thinking measures, entirely in keeping with the party’s traditional values.

But sadly these announcements were overshadowed by the conference’s decision to support motions that will make many voters recoil and serve to justify their perception of Labour as a party in the grip of militant hardliners. In particular, the pledges to extend free movement at a time when millions are demanding proper control over immigration; grant voting rights in elections to non-UK nationals, thereby undermining the very concept of citizenship; and abolish private schools — a sinister and authoritarian measure that has no place in a free society — will do nothing to help propel Labour towards power.

In making such controversial commitments, Labour fell into the classic trap of appealing to the activists within its own ranks, rather than to the wider country.

The air in Brighton was thick with fashionable buzzwords such as ‘diversity’, ‘inclusivity’ and ‘equality’ — the type of terminology that has become the stock in trade of the modern Left, but which has little resonance out there in the provinces of the nation.

The party, if it is to ever reconnect with its one-time core vote, needs urgently to start speaking the language of ‘place’, ‘community’, ‘belonging’, ‘work’ and ‘family’ — the things that hold real meaning for people and which they wish their politicians to focus on. Because, ultimately, until its own language and priorities match those of the millions for whom it purports to speak, the Labour party cannot expect to win their votes.

For all the upbeat chatter and optimism that I experienced in Brighton this week, the truth is that the Labour party has a mountain to climb if it is to form the next government. And we are – with potentially just weeks to go before a general election – still in the foothills.

This is, we are told throughout conference in Brighton, a new Labour: organised, united, filled with generous and effective policies — they have found dragon gold — repentant on anti-Semitism and ready to take the fight to the external, rather than the internal, enemy. None of this is true.

I read politics by detail, not spouted fantasies. At a small fringe meeting on the freighted subject of the abuse of women in public life – about 90% of attendees were female, of course, in this party of equality — delegates complained to Diane Abbott, one of the most abused women in public life, that they suffered misogynist abuse in their party.

How could they hope to change the world, one asked, if they could not change themselves? Abbott allowed that internal party misogyny was “wrong”, but said little else on it, before turning to external enemies, and their evils — as she does on radio, attacking Tories, refusing to see cruelty if it is close to her. Then she left, and the room sank with disappointment; nothing would be done about the “Brocialists”.

I have seen this before, when Luciana Berger told her testimony about the anti-Semitic abuse she has suffered in parliament. Diane Abbott could not look at her, as if the sisterly feelings do not extend as far as Berger; do not extend beyond political allies. I wonder if Abbott is inured to it, except when it happens to her. That would be excusable in any other woman but an aspiring Home Secretary.

Suggested reading

Is Chris Williamson an antisemite?

By Tanya Gold

A far better attended event was “The Media War on Labour and How to Defeat It”, which throbbed with conspiracism. The best way to defeat it, of course, is to stop providing opportunity for them — Tony Blair managed to seduce the media to three election victories — but that would require self-reflection. So, they provide opportunity like a man punching himself in the face.

There was the attempted coup against the deputy leader Tom Watson. It was aborted, but “Shun Tom Watson” leaflets were still circulated, and a rally planned during his speech. Both the speech and the rally were later cancelled. Everything was thwarted.

The resignation of Andrew Fisher, Corbyn’s close aide, citing “a lack of professionalism, competence and human decency” at the top of the party was another opportunity for the media to write lies — I mean truth — about Labour.  “I no longer have faith we can succeed,” he said.  They blame the media for reporting on splits. They do not look to the cause — that they do, actually, split.

The insanity of the vote on the “Back Remain Now” motion, in which the chair appeared to change her mind about Conference’s wishes after the General Secretary muttered her wishes in her ear was more opportunity. If it was machination, it was appallingly done. Enemies would say: you cannot even manage to be effectively corrupt.

Suggested reading

The Left is deceiving itself over antisemitism

By Douglas Murray

And again, and always now, anti-Semitism. Labour is raging on the accusations, which prod its essential benevolence, the belief on which it depends; but not on the reality, about which they are completely in denial. The reality is that delegates to Labour in Brighton all passed, as they walked into Conference, a cartoon of a warplane decorated with a Star of David bombing Jeremy Corbyn on his podium.

You cannot govern without attention to detail. You cannot be moral without attention to detail either, whatever you tell yourself. The police removed it, after complaints from the Jewish community, but Corbyn, who lies to himself above all on these matters, claimed it was he who had it removed. He said so on his Twitter feed.

All week, internal saboteurs — real, not imagined — fizzed around the edges, their psychological imperatives disguised, and not well, as political aims. They are conspiracists; they need to believe themselves oppressed by some great enemy because it explains all their failures in life. The Labour Representation Committee (LRC) established themselves in the Rialto theatre and spouted the usual conspiracy theories about Zionism and Blairites and Momentum. John McDonnell is still their president; that aside, he says he has nothing to do with them.

Suggested reading

Labour should be careful what it wishes for

By Paul Embery

Labour was my party and I struggle, as I nod at their policies, and approve of them, to understand why I trust them so little under Corbyn. I think it is their monomania, their paranoia, their loathing of internal critics – a lack of compassion for the different – and sometimes, I wonder how much they actually respect parliamentary democracy: if you are certain you are right, you do not need it.

It would enrage them to hear it, but they are as responsible for brutal political language as anyone; they have been calling Tories murderers for years. If you agree with them, they are kindest people in the world. If you don’t, they hate you, and hatred does not play well on the doorsteps in Hove.

You can argue whether a Socialist project in a country which is also a constitutional monarchy where the Queen has a 72% approval rating (Corbyn’s is 21%) and Downton Abbey, a film about servants longing to serve is No.1 at the box office, will ever be tenable, or is mere dreaming. Sometimes I find it very touching dreaming. At the reinstate Clause 4 rally in a church hall where they pondered a different anomaly – why can’t we share? – I actually wept bourgeois tears.

But this remains a party in denial about itself, and how others view it. Corbyn’s speech was followed by a mass singing of the hymn Jerusalem. Considering Labour’s relationship with the Anglo-Jewish community, it did not feel like a call to arms to the desperate beyond the Labour Party who need a functioning opposition. It felt, rather, like something maiming itself.

As some Remainers have rightly pointed out, we are, and have long been, a nation of immigrants. And the idea that we can or should be protecting something ethnically pure and unique about our society is not just a fantasy, but a form of racism that must rightly be called out for what it is.

What I want to explore is whether there is also a largely unacknowledged racism in one of the intellectual tributaries to the Remain instinct, and one that, because largely unacknowledged, is dangerously insidious — not least because it is often dressed up as a positive thing. I will call this instinct ‘universalism’.

In writing about the racist traditions in his own country, the French Marxist philosopher, Etienne Balibar, tries to explain what he describes as “historical fact that is difficult to admit”:

“There is, no doubt, a specifically French brand of the doctrines of Aryianism and biological geneticism, but the true ‘French ideology’ is not to be found in these: it lies, rather, in the idea that the culture has been entrusted with a universal mission to educate the human race. There corresponds to this mission a practice of assimilating dominated populations and a consequent need to differentiate and rank individuals or groups in terms of their greater or lesser aptitude for — or resistance to – assimilation. It was this simultaneously subtle and crushing form of exclusion/inclusion which was deployed in the process of colonisation and the strictly French (or ‘democratic’) variant of the ‘White man’s burden’.”

In other words, just as there is a racism of wanting to maintain some sort of ethnic distinctiveness and difference, there is also a type of racism implicit within universalism too – that all the peoples of the earth ought to submit to a common set of moral and political standards. One might put it this way: there is a racism of over-emphasising the importance of cultural difference and distinctiveness, but there is also a racism of wanting to obliterate difference in the name of some common universal framework: be it ‘democracy’ or ‘Western values’.

When I spoke to the Israeli political philosopher Yoram Hazony for Confessions, he made the point that the God of the Jews is unique in not imagining universal peace to come about through a process of conquest. All other gods in the ancient world, he maintained, thought that universal peace would come about when everybody else in the world thought the same way they did. Nebuchadnezzar and his god did not seek to conquer enemies because he believed in war but because he believed in peace though sameness. To use a more modern formulation, they believed in a ‘world order’. Their armies wanted to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony. Today we might call it ‘liberal interventionism’.

Suggested reading

Two responses to the Holocaust: Israel and the European Union

By Giles Fraser

In contrast, Hazony maintains, the God of Israel believed in borders. Not as a form of ethnic exclusivism — there is much in the Hebrew scriptures about welcoming the stranger and those in need — and nor as a way of maintaining that ‘my people are better than your people’, but rather more as a type of political humility. In a world of borders, distinctiveness is maintained. In a world without borders, distinctiveness is obliterated. And the obliteration of difference, even if done with the best of intentions, easily amounts to the domination of a backward people by an enlightened one.

And I write enlightened advisedly, because nothing has given the universalising instinct more impetus than the enlightenment. Kant is a case in point. He imagined ‘Perpetual Peace‘ as the implementation of enlightenment values. But these values also carried within themselves clearly racist estimations of those who did not share these values. He maintained, for instance, that the Chinese, Indians, Africans and the indigenous peoples of America were incapable of doing philosophy. Here is one example among many:

“The race of Negroes .. [is] full of affect and passion, very lively, chatty and vain. It can be educated, but only to the extent of servants, i.e they can be trained.”

It is because of examples such as this that Kehinde Andrews, another Confessions guest, has described the Enlightenment as “white man’s identity politics”. But these days we know better, the universalist maintains. Well, tell that to the woman on the beach in France arrested for wearing the burkini, thus offending against western values. Or those banned from wearing a headscarf in school.

The insidious racism of the Left

Subscribe:

Religion is often at the root of the trouble. Critics of religion of the Dawkins school often maintain that it counts against religion that faith in God is subject to so much local colour. They point out that those born in one particular place are likely to believe in the gods of that place, as if this is some sort of gotcha observation, clearly undermining the claims made by that religion.

But this is a gotcha only by the standards of modern, i.e. post enlightenment, notions of universalism. Faith does not aspire to the same sort of universalism as mathematics, for instance. Faith is stubbornly rooted in place and time. It grows out of shared experience. It is an expression of local forms of imaginative solidarity. That, to me, is not a weakness; it is precisely its strength.

I write these words sitting in a café in Tel Aviv, a relatively new town that is an expression of the desire of the Jewish people to maintain their distinctiveness. The way I see it, part of the reason the Labour party in Britain gets Israel so wrong, and the reason it continually falls into anti-Semitism despite its repeated protestations of anti-racism, is not so much that it wants to protect Palestinians from Israeli occupation, but that it refuses to recognise that the desire to maintain religious and cultural distinctiveness is a legitimate aspiration in the modern world.

Suggested reading

The Left's long history of antisemitism

By James Bloodworth

To return to Balibar, Israel is the political expression of a refusal to assimilate, to be assimilated – and not least because many of its citizens are still only a generation away from a murderous project to eliminate difference, designed and executed in the very heartlands of the enlightenment.

I do not deny – and nor does Hazony – that borders often mean border disputes and therefore conflict. We live in a fallen world. But the desire that we all submit to the same rules, the same cultural framework, is the far greater danger, threatening as it does the very diversity that the Left so often proclaims as one of its objectives.

“This universalism is indeed a form of racism”, writes the brilliant Rabbi Daniel Boyarin. Until the Left begins to recognise that its own version of ‘one size fits all’ universalism contains within itself “coercive discourses of sameness”, and various forms of implicit – sometimes explicit — racism, it will never begin to address, or even understand and recognise, the anti-Semitism that it promotes.

How can we be racists, when we want to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony, thinks the leftist, not appreciating that, as with the gods of old, this desire for harmony through sameness is the very root of the trouble.

Having been a Labour party member for the best part of a quarter of a century, I want my party to win the next election. So I take no pleasure in saying that Labour’s current strategy (such as it is) around Brexit is a half-baked, shambolic mess.

The party’s plan, should it win power, is to return to Brussels and secure a better withdrawal agreement than the one negotiated by Theresa May. But, having achieved this, it may then decide that remaining in the EU is the preferable option after all, and thus campaign to reject its own deal in a second referendum.

Of course the strategy is a complete dog’s breakfast which doesn’t stand up to the slightest scrutiny. You don’t have to be a genius to recognise that the EU – which remains desperate to prevent Brexit – would be under no pressure whatsoever to deliver any further concessions in talks with a Labour government. It would know, first, that that government had already ruled out no-deal and, second, that the worse the deal on offer, the greater the chance of its being chucked out by the British public – and thus of there being no Brexit at all.

Suggested reading

Will Boris lose his seat?

By Paul Embery

Labour frontbenchers brave enough to defend the party line are being mauled and spat out – Richard Burgon and Emily Thornberry the latest victims. This is not the consequence of any unique personal failing on their part; instead it’s because the Party’s ridiculous policy has rendered them helpless in the face of any serious inquiry.

The approach of putting your name to a deal which you then campaign to reject is novel in the extreme. It is certainly not something I have ever witnessed in many years of activity in the trade union movement. Surely the leaders of Labour-affiliated unions – who know a thing or two about how negotiations work – ought to intervene and warn party leaders of the absurdity of their position. Regardless of individual views on Brexit itself, the current incoherence does nobody any favours.

Labour’s stance ultimately derives from the fact that most sections of the party are vehemently anti-Brexit while knowing that to alienate their working-class Leave-voting heartlands would be to risk losing millions of votes. So it has tried for three years, through a tactic of ‘constructive ambiguity’, to keep both sides on board. When the coin was tossed, Labour, rather than call heads or tails, willed it to land on its edge. But having served to persuade both sides that the party doesn’t really speak for them, this approach has failed dismally. That’s because, in the end, Brexit is a binary issue: we either leave the EU or we don’t.

If Labour thinks it can win an election from a position of campaigning to subvert the Brexit vote, it should think again. The recent European and local elections were a demonstration of how the party’s failure to convince working-class communities that their Leave votes were safe in its hands resulted in the haemorrhaging of support among its traditional base.

Suggested reading

The betrayal of Paul Embery

By Kate Hoey

Too often, the priorities of the party are determined by those who cannot see a world beyond the M25. The UK Labour party is, in practice, the London Labour party – witness, for example, the fact that the most senior positions in Corbyn’s shadow cabinet are filled by MPs representing constituencies in the capital: McDonnell, Starmer, Thornberry, Abbott and, of course, Corbyn himself.

This London-centrism manifests itself politically in the kind of liberal cosmopolitanism that has done so much to drive a wedge between Labour and the post-industrial areas which were once the bedrock of its support and where a more rooted, patriotic, communitarianism exists. Unless Labour begins to reconnect with these voters, and quickly, it risks losing them for ever.

A step towards this would have been to pledge from the very outset to honour the EU referendum result, come what may, deal or no deal. This would have been the right approach not only as a matter of simple democratic principle, but also because Labour cannot win without Leave voters. The facts are stark: over 60% of Labour constituencies voted Leave, as did 35 of the 45 target seats in England and Wales which Labour needs to win if it is to return to power. At the other end, 16 of the party’s 20 most vulnerable seats also voted Leave.

The party’s vacillations on Brexit have allowed its opponents to make ground in traditional Labour territory. The latest message from Nigel Farage – that Labour speaks for Dalston, not Doncaster – will undoubtedly strike a chord with many. Some kind of non-aggression pact between the Tories and Brexit party at the next election could see Labour become an also-ran in these places.

Suggested reading

Labour needs a moral revival

By Giles Fraser

If Labour wants to be sure of holding on to them, the party needs to swiftly rediscover the spirit of Euroscepticism that was once mainstream within its ranks – articulated by such giants as Clement Attlee, Hugh Gaitskell, Tony Benn, Michael Foot and Barbara Castle. These luminaries believed passionately in the principles of democracy and self-government, and weren’t afraid to voice their opposition to proposals for deeper political and economic integration throughout Europe. Euroscepticism was also a dominant theme throughout the wider Labour movement, including trade unions, many of which saw the EU – correctly – as an institution whose values and laws were explicitly anti-socialist and therefore inimical to many of their own objectives.

But I fear the party has left it too late, and the tribal loyalty that once existed towards Labour in these working-class communities – call them small-town Britain – may have disappeared for good.

The past week may have been a nightmare for Boris Johnson, but the real losers in the long run may be Her Majesty’s Opposition. A rambling, shambling policy on Brexit, coupled with its sudden aversion to a general election – preferring instead to go around shouting nonsense about a ‘coup’ – will do nothing to propel the Labour party to power or win back the hearts of minds of its one-time core vote.

Labour should not make the mistake of assuming that victories in parliamentary procedure equal success at the ballot box. Whatever happens at the Palace of Westminster in the coming days and weeks, the real struggle – that for the soul of the country – has really only just begun.

After all, Jeremy Corbyn had only been in the job a few months and some officials noted — not unkindly — the toll the job was taking on him. Two general elections in barely six months had been followed by the immense task of governing Britain in its first year outside the European Union.

On top of that, he, nominally at least, was overseeing John McDonnell’s “economic revolution”. That agenda had already seen the Corbyn government facing staunch opposition in the Commons, the Lords and in the courts, as aggrieved investors claimed the British government had violated international trade agreements and even human rights law by confiscating shares.

No wonder the man was tired: let him sleep. No point waking him about some rock in the Baltic Sea with a population of 20,000 Swedes. No, the duty clerk thought, I’ll just tell the Chief of Staff. He might be a ferocious manager of Government advisers — he’d just summarily sacked another of Home Secretary Angela Rayner’s spads for alleged disloyalty  — but he’s always very keen to hear news about Russia.

Curiously, when the clerk called the Chief of Staff just after 2am, the phone was answered on the first ring and he sounded wide awake. Nor did he sound surprised to hear that initial assessments suggested that the “fishing boats” were carrying several thousand armed Russian men who, though they were not in uniform, moved and spoke like a professional military unit.

More from this author

How the Lib Dems could seize power

By James Kirkup

“Interesting,” the Chief of Staff drawled in response to the clerk, public school vowels to the fore, “but not urgent, surely? Sweden’s not even in Nato, after all. Not sure this is one we want to jump into.”

Surprisingly, that was not the view in Washington. Everyone knew that President Trump’s father, Fred, was not, as he had long claimed, from Sweden, but that didn’t stop the President from invoking his supposed Swedish blood in a televised address to the nation warning Vladimir Putin to “get those men off my father’s soil”. (The Washington commentariat were divided in their explanations for this new approach to Russia: some said it just was part of the 2020 election strategy; some said it related to the potential seizure of a Trump International hotel in St Petersburg; CNN ran another analysis piece suggesting the President was now in the advanced stages of dementia.)

Almost equally surprising, was President Macron’s similarly bellicose response. Keen not to let Trump set the pace, Macron made his own address, promising that France would honour its role as the ultimate guarantor of European security: “Aujourd’hui et pour toujours, la France protégera l’Europe.” Pledging to stand in solidarity with a fellow EU member, he even reminded the French and the world that France retained full nuclear strike capability.

In London, a rather different story. Prime Minister Corbyn of course addressed the Commons, but insisted that there was no clear evidence of Russian state involvement in “the events” in the Baltic. Britain would wait for the accounts of the Swedish and Russian governments before drawing conclusions, he told MPs, but talk of a military response was “baseless and irresponsible”. Calm diplomacy was the only way forward, he told a restive House.

He even drew some grim laughs as he ridiculed demands from Conservative Leader, Dominic Raab, for a more muscular response in defence of Sweden: “May I remind him, Mr Speaker, that he was foreign secretary in the government that tore Britain out of the European Union without an agreement and so severed our most important relationship with the Swedish people he now claims to care about?”

Suggested reading

How Corbynomics is winning over Britain

By Matthew Goodwin

From that day in early April 2020, things moved quickly. The Russian fishermen established a large, secure compound with fortifications, secure communications links and what satellite images suggested were several batteries of anti-aircraft missiles. According to the Russian Foreign Ministry, the fishermen were simply patriotic Russian citizens who had taken it upon themselves to protect Russia’s interests in the Baltic. In Moscow, state-run news channels ran packages about the Russian occupation of Gotland in 1808, quoting historians who said the island had always been Russian but was unlawfully seized by the Swedes.

Meanwhile, Macron pulled a further surprise by demanding that the response to the “Russian invasion of Sweden” be coordinated through Nato, not the EU military planning cell.

This, the cynics said, was an acceptance that the EU, shorn of British military involvement, lacked the clout needed to face down the Russians. Taking the Nato route was Macron’s way of testing American committment to the Alliance, and pressuring the Corbyn Government to support him.

The Corbyn Government did no such thing. Despite — or perhaps because of — the outrage of Conservatives and British diplomats and generals, the Prime Minister continued to insist on an approach he called “security through peace”. Britain would not take sides, No 10 said, because that would only escalate the situation. “Just as Jeremy worked for peace in the Middle East and Northern Ireland, he will work for peace here too,” the Chief of Staff told journalists.

More from this author

Too posh to fail

By James Kirkup

As part of the new government’s new way of doing politics, the Baltic crisis would be put to the new “citizens’ assemblies”, consultative panels that were supposed to inject fresh legitimacy into politics. “Jeremy is bringing the voice of the people to the heart of government,” in the words of a Guardian columnist.

When the Prime Minister addressed the Commons, in July, to report on the verdict of the citizens and the Government’s response, his statement set new standards for shock and surprise.

Not only did “the people” want no part in any dispute with Russia over Gotland, they wanted no part in any Nato response, Corbyn declared. Accordingly, the Government of the United Kingdom was invoking Article 13 of the North Atlantic Treaty. Britain would leave Nato.

The ensuing rage in the Commons forced Speaker Bercow to suspend the sitting for 15 minutes, and threaten to expel several Conservative members from the chamber. Even Emily Thornberry, shouting from the Labour backbenches, was severely reprimanded.

When the Prime Minister was able to resume his statement, he had more. Once that exit from Nato was completed, Corbyn continued, Britain would begin the process of retiring the Trident nuclear deterrent; the replacements for the Vanguard-class nuclear subs would be cancelled. “As a neutral nation committed to security through peace, Britain has no need of weapons that could kill millions,” he said, promising to spend the Trident budget on the NHS instead. Additional health spending would be focused on areas that had reported shortages of medical supplies and NHS staff following Britain’s EU exit, he added: “We will use this peace dividend to heal the wounds caused by the reckless Tory Brexit.”

Suggested reading

Why Europe can't cope

By Helen Thompson

He ended his statement by setting out how these proposals had come directly from those citizens’ assemblies. “Up and down the country, thousands of British women and men and people of other gender identities have told us clearly that Britain’s future, the future of their children, will be secured not by rushing into the imperialist wars of past centuries, but by taking the path of peace and healing,” he told MPs. “This is the will of the people and we will implement it.”

In a briefing following the statement, the Chief of Staff waited patiently for journalists to stop shouting before explaining that, even as he spoke, UK ambassadors were serving notice to Nato members that Article 13 would apply and UK membership would cease on 31st October 2020. In the meantime, he explained, UK officers and officials had been ordered to withdraw from Nato structures and operations immediately. “We are leaving, so there is no point in them being there any longer,” he said.

Would Parliament get a say on the withdrawal, he was asked? No. The Prime Minister would be exercising prerogative power. “He is well within his rights to do so,” the Chief of Staff said. “There is ample precedent for a Prime Minister acting this way in service of the people.”

The legal challenge to that decision began the very next day. Raab himself said he wanted to be party to the action and was even prepared to appear in court, but quickly abandoned that plan when it became clear that the case would rest on the precedent set in R. (on the application of Miller) v Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union, otherwise known as the Gina Miller case.

Suggested reading

Labour needs a moral revival

By Giles Fraser

Despite contesting the case, the Government lost — and lost quickly. By late August, the Supreme Court had ruled that Parliament must have the final say on Article 13 and Nato exit. While Britain’s politicians fixated on court hearings in London, the rest of the world watched a rock in the Baltic.

The day after the Supreme Court ruling, Vladimir Putin made a televised statement: Russian citizens would be “rescued” from Gotland by the Russian Navy under a process witnessed by “monitors from neutral countries, including Great Britain”. The Russian president was effusive in his praise for Jeremy Corbyn, “a man of peace who is delivering security for his people and the world.”

Asked if the Prime Minister had spoken to the Russian President before that address, Downing Street declined to answer. Nor did No 10 respond to questions about a Reuters report from Moscow suggesting that the Chief of Staff had held two days of meetings with Putin in a Black Sea resort the previous week. A Moscow-based blog linked to the few remaining liberal opponents to Putin also suggested that the President had decorated the Chief of Staff with a medal, possibly the Medal for Impeccable Service XX, and legal title to a seaside dacha.

Within hours of that report hitting the wires, several prominent supporters of the Corbyn Government began to argue on Twitter that the Chief of Staff was not just a genius who had out-thought his domestic opponents, he was also a major international figure who deserved credit for defusing the Baltic crisis. Attempts to smear him as a Russian agent of influence, it was suggested, were just another “Black Ops” move to undermine the elected government by the British deep state.

When the Commons returned in early September, Prime Minister Corbyn showed no signs of changing his plans over the Alliance. He explained to MPs that, having served notice to quit, the process of UK departure from Nato could not now be stopped. His case was supported by both Trump and Macron, who both, in their own ways, made plain that Britain had made its choice and chosen a side.

Asked repeatedly by MPs to say that the Government would comply with the Court ruling and introduce legislation for the Article 13 exit, Corbyn declined to give a clear answer, instead pointing at the Conservative front bench and naming, in turn, every member who had sat in the Government of Boris Johnson. “How dare they, Mr Speaker, how dare they seek to block the will of the people, the people’s demand for security through peace?” he asked.

Suggested reading

Dominic Cummings is no chicken

By Tom Chivers

No one was surprised by what came next in the Commons. Raab quickly formed an ad hoc alliance with around 20 Labour MPs (they quickly became known as the Atlee Group, though some preferred “Bevin’s Boys”) who moved to take control of the Order Paper and introduce legislation that would require the Government to pause the Article 13 notice and get Parliamentary consent to reinstating it.

Nor was the Chief of Staff’s first response a surprise: all Labour MPs supporting the motion would lose the Labour Whip and the party’s general secretary would not endorse their reselection as Labour candidates in future elections.  “These MPs are siding with the Conservatives to try to drag Britain into war and danger,” the Chief of Staff told reporters. “The people have clearly said they want security through peace, but these MPs have made themselves the enemies of peace.”

The motion passed nonetheless. In early September 2020, lacking a Commons majority, facing a Supreme Court ruling and the prospect of parliamentary defeat, it was now widely expected that even the Corbyn Government would have to back down.

That was what journalists summoned to an on-camera Downing Street statement by both the Prime Minister and Chancellor McDonnell expected. McDonnell’s presence promoted widespread Twitter speculation that Corbyn would actually announce he was stepping down, perhaps for reasons of health, and hand over to his ally.

Suggested reading

Slaying dragons: Corbynism and its cabal of thugs

By Julie Bindel

In fact, the Prime Minister announced that he was immediately asking the Queen to prorogue Parliament. The new session would begin on 1st November, with a Queen’s Speech setting out Chancellor McDonnell’s New Green Deal. There would also be a bill setting a legal cap on military spending at 1% of GDP and giving details of the new hospitals and nurses that would be hired “in every constituency” using the “peace dividend” produced by scrapping the “Trident weapon of mass murder”.

“The will of the people is clear,” the Prime Minister declared. “They want security through peace and they want medicine not murder. That is what this Government will give them, by any means necessary.

First, all my political energy has been a reaction to Margaret Thatcher. I hated and continue to hate Thatcherism with a passion that remains undimmed, even after all these years. There have been moments when I wondered if I should have gotten over it by now. But I can’t. It is too deeply and furiously embedded in my psyche.

In the name of the free market, she trashed the long established infrastructure of care and civility that held us together as a country. Not since the Dissolution of the Monasteries has a whole pattern of social care been so thoroughly and successfully wiped away. In particular, she eviscerated northern working class towns, held together by mining and heavy industry, that were the heart of this country.

Second, my philosophical point: Mrs Thatcher wasn’t really a Conservative at all. She was a turbo-charged classical liberal who believed that the freedom of the individual, and most especially the economic freedom of the individual, trumped all other moral considerations. Setting people free from the state, setting people free to pursue their individual economic interests, this was her guiding idea. And so she took a sledgehammer to all those patterns of community living that held the individual back. To express her mistake philosophically, she confused ‘freedom from’ (any external constrains) with ‘freedom to’ (something that requires a whole social architecture of discipline and solidarity to enable people to flourish and live out their fullest lives).

Suggested reading

Labour needs a moral revival

By Giles Fraser

Get “on your bike” was the message of one of her fiercest lieutenants to those whose communities had been trashed. Freedom of movement and freedom of capital, deregulated markets and the privatisation of public services – with all these, the world was transformed. Under the influence of people such as Keith Joseph and the free market philosophies of Friedrich Hayek, social problems were all imagined to have market solutions.

But far from setting ordinary people free, this turned into a revolution for financial opportunists feasting on the corpse of traditional manufacturing and the way of life it sustained. By destroying the power of the Trade Unions, Thatcher paved the way for the reign of the money men from the City. Very little was conserved. That is why Mrs Thatcher should be considered a cuckoo in the nest of traditional conservatism.

It is from these two perspectives that I consider the long slow death of the Labour Party. What changed Labour was Tony Blair. Blair conceded the Thatcher victory and set out re-inventing the Labour Party as a faintly progressive version of liberal ideals, not challenging the liberalisation of financial markets one bit, but simply adding a top-dressing of social liberalism to disguise the overall concession of defeat.

Then, in 1995, Blair got rid of Clause 4 from the Labour Party’s constitution. It read: “To secure for the workers … the full fruits of their industry and the most equitable distribution thereof that may be possible upon the basis of the common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange.” At the price of ditching socialism, Blair established an electorally powerful, but intrinsically unstable, alliance between traditional Labour supporters and a newly empowered liberal middle class. The big tent.

Suggested reading

Our modern parenting is making monsters

By Giles Fraser

There are those who will argue the Labour Party had no choice. Its traditional power bases had been so weakened by the Thatcher revolution that it had to find new ways of drawing upon a wider constituency of support. Others, like me, think he sold the pass. And so the Labour party became an uneasy coalition of professional metropolitan liberals, media professionals, techies, academics, journalists; and socialists who looked back to a political philosophy embedded in the factory and more traditional patterns of communal life.

The IT revolution of the 1990’s further entrenched the power of liberalism. ‘Freedom from’ went digital. For those who grew up with this new technology, socialism transformed itself out of all recognition into a philosophy of individual empowerment: a refusal of any expression of heteronomous power, a commitment to the freedom of the individual to self-define. Yes, this is a generalisation. But it contains a basic truth. These new liberal individualists may have railed against the neo-liberal economics of the US right, for example, but they were more than cousins – both expressions of the same ideal: that the I has moral priority over the we.

Brexit has blown apart this coalition. In the recent European elections, former manufacturing towns like Wigan, Doncaster and Dudley voted 44.6% for the Brexit Party and 14% for Labour. By sharp contrast, university towns like Cambridge, Nottingham and Manchester split the other way, 27% for the Lib Dems and 21% for Labour. And this is why the Labour Party is falling apart.

Suggested reading

Will our Brexit conflict ever be resolved?

By Giles Fraser

Traditional Clause 4 Labour Party members – Benn, Skinner, Corbyn and so on – have long despised the European Union as just another expression of free market hegemony, a means of allowing big business and financial power to free itself from the limitations placed upon it by the power of the state.

For Clause 4 socialists like me, the debate over Europe is a question of who is to be master: the state, with its democratic justification and ability to redistribute wealth, or international finance, a force that is always trying to rid itself of state control and the power of the state, under democratic mandate, to impose taxation.

The ‘free’ bit in free markets and free movement is the freedom to evade taxation. Businesses like Amazon want ‘free’ because it allows them to transfer their profits to parts of the world where they are not taxed. It allows them to make stuff or employ people where labour is cheap – or even better to get cheap labour “on your bike” style to turn up where it suits them – and then to transfer the profits to low tax regimes, and thence to offshore accounts.

These forces are unthreatened by social liberalism and are happy to encourage it. California hi-tech capitalism is as woke as you like because social liberalism doesn’t challenge the basic financial plumbing of the free market.

The best argument for the EU is that only something as big as the EU is powerful enough to take on such interests. The argument against is that the EU facilitates them, that the EU is a Davos run business club that, by weakening the democratic mandate held by nation-states, allows international finance an increasingly unrestricted playing field. Look at how the EU dealt with Greece and its debt crisis. No thank you.

Suggested reading

Remainers' immigration hypocrisy

By Giles Fraser

The problem for Labour is that it now looks in two directions and it cannot make up its mind. Liberals face in one direction and Clause 4 socialists in another. The transfer of votes from Labour to the Liberal Democrats during the European Elections – including that of Alastair Campbell – demonstrates the natural affinity of new Labour with liberalism. The story of 20th and 21st Century politics is usually written up as the death of the liberal party after WW1. In 1935, George Dangerfield wrote the highly influential The Strange Death of Liberal England. But he read the rites far too early. Liberalism has decisively shaped both the Conservative and Labour parties. It became the enabling philosophy of late capitalism. And it gradually hollowed-out and replaced the original philosophies of the two great parties of the 20th Century: the conservatism of Conservatives and the socialism of Labour.

The tragedy of the present moment is that no mainstream political party has developed a robust and popular enough political philosophy to resist the forces of a globalised and unfettered market.

If fascism is the only answer, then I will side with the liberals every day. For there can be no concession to the hateful politics of the hard Right. But there has to be another way, a philosophy that resists fascism but also resists the power of liberalised globalised capital. One that respects the more conservative instincts of community preservation. One that understands that the family is the most successful delivery mechanism of care for the vulnerable. And one that appreciates that there will be no space for something as wonderful as the National Health Service if there is no positive and underlying philosophy of the nation state to bolster it. Likewise nationalised industries and utilities.

Suggested reading

Why won't Remainers talk about family?

By Giles Fraser

In the name of the wrong sort of freedom, the liberal Left in England gave up on the nation as a philosophy for bigots and racists. In Scotland, always more comfortable with its own national pride, Labour was wiped away by an avowedly nationalist party: the Scottish Nationalist Party. And similarly, in Wales.

But in England the nation state was abandoned by the liberal internationalist Left. They twitched and tittered though ‘God save the Queen’, not understanding that this was the true anthem of the big tent, the nation being that imaginative space where otherwise diverse people might find common cause and mutual solidarity.

Brexit didn’t break us apart. Thatcher broke us long before that. Brexit is simply a mirror to our brokenness. And if we are to find unity again, we need a moral revival of the Left. It must bring back Clause 4. And it must learn to stand up straight when it sings the national anthem.

The Conservatives walk away with a national equivalent vote of just 28%. To put this in perspective, if it were replicated at a general election it would be a lower share of the vote than what Michael Howard presided over in 2005, and a lower share of the vote than what John Major presided over in 1997.

It would be the party’s lowest vote in history.

The results that they’ll still be poring over in Conservative headquarters reflect the continuation of trends that I first pointed to in the shadow of the 2017 general election, with my colleague Oliver Heath.

To understand the dilemma facing the Conservative Party you need to drill down into its electorate.

Ever since the vote for Brexit, the party has been polling stronger in pro-Brexit areas, among working-class voters and in communities where there are larger numbers of voters without degrees. They have been steadily losing territory, though, in economically secure, middle-class and pro-Remain areas where there are larger concentrations of graduates and social liberals.

Suggested reading

How Corbynomics is winning over Britain

By Matthew Goodwin

This tension was less of a risk when it looked as though the Conservative Party would deliver on Brexit and lead Britain out of the EU. Having done so, the party and a new leader could then have gone the country with a radically revamped domestic policy agenda, with as much for Remainers as Leavers.

But, as we know, things didn’t quite turn out that way.

With Theresa May having failed, so far, to deliver any sort of Brexit, the Conservative Party is getting hit on all sides. Their biggest setbacks were in Remain areas. And among the voters, the most important were not the 18-24-year olds that are generally obsessed over, but the slightly older, 30-and 40 somethings who swung hardest against them in 2017.

These voters comprise what I call the ‘Things Can Only Get Better Generation’; they are the middle-aged and young middle-aged who came of age under New Labour and Tony Blair and who probably today have young families of their own.

In focus groups, they tell me a lot.

They say they feel squeezed on multiple fronts. They are often struggling to pay for childcare and also worry about how on earth they are going to afford to send their kids to university in the future.

Suggested reading

Is Corbyn doing the country a favour?

By Tim Bale

The Things Can Only Get Better Generation is absolutely convinced that their kids will have a lower standard of living than they did, and that the future is going to be harder than the present.

They worry about how they will afford to look after their own Baby Boomer parents, who are retired and will soon need care.

They are probably renting or, if they are not, then heavy mortgage payments and few savings mean that their family is one crisis away from financial disaster. And they lean instinctively against Brexit, or if they voted for it then they have concluded that it is being managed disastrously. The Tories are losing them.

But most worrying of all is the fact that the party is now also losing ground among the older and more committed Leavers, albeit less dramatically than it is losing ground in Remainia. Many of those areas where the party lost council seats, or councils flipped into no overall control, had endorsed Brexit in 2016.

But their results could have been far worse.

The Conservatives were only saved from further embarrassment by Nigel Farage – and the fact that his Brexit Party decided not to contest these elections. If the populists had done so, then the Tories would have seen much more serious losses in pro-Leave areas.

Indeed, in polls for the European Parliament elections, the Brexit Party is already polling around the 30% mark, while it is taking around 14% in Westminster polls –more than enough to pave the way for Jeremy Corbyn into Downing Street. Much of this vote is coming from disillusioned 2017 Conservative voters and Leavers. Farage has already won over 52% of the former and 60% of the latter.

Suggested reading

Brexit has exposed our education apartheid

By Matthew Goodwin

The perfect storm that is approaching the Conservative Party is going to cause significant damage on all sides. The middle-class Remainers who are still in the party will finally jump ship or abstain, while Brexiteers will drift over to the Brexit Party or similarly decide that turning out to cast a vote at the next election is not worth it.

But nor did Labour fare particularly well at the polls. While Corbyn and his party did make some gains, their overall tally, compared with 2015, was a net loss of 82 seats.

An unwritten law at local elections is that the main party of opposition is supposed to enjoy gains not suffer losses. Nor is it supposed to suffer losses in its heartlands. That, though, is precisely what happened.

While it is true that the red Labour wave is continuing to sweep out beyond London, and into the commuter towns and parts of the South East, commentators who argued that Labour would suffer no costs for drifting toward Remain now find themselves having to explain serious Labour losses in northern pro-Leave areas – from Ashfield to Bolton, from Bolsover to Hartlepool, from Burnley to Darlington.

Suggested reading

Have Remainers lost perspective?

By Matthew Goodwin

The weakening of Labour’s relationship with its traditional working-class voters, which started to break down long before the 2016 referendum, and which I first pointed to in 2014, continues. And there isn’t much evidence that the challenge will ease.

Blue-collar Britain, which leans heavily toward Brexit, is now being targeted by the Brexit Party, which is spending much of its time campaigning in pro-Brexit Labour heartlands, as well as seats that flipped from Labour to the Conservatives in 2017.

For Labour, this means that, once again, the party is going to have to fend off national populists in its pro-Brexit heartlands where, we tend to forget, UKIP often finished in second place at the 2015 general election.

But, for me, the most striking statistic of all from the local elections was that the combined share of the vote going to the two big parties tumbled to just 56% – the second lowest figure on record. A bad night Labour and the Tories was a good night for independents, Liberal Democrats and Greens.

In this sense, one of the peculiarities about Britain’s Brexit moment is that it is making our politics more European. Britain voted to leave the European Union but its political system is now fragmenting like many other EU member states. The old mainstream parties are being squeezed by an array of new challengers.

The weakening of Britain’s two-party system has been visible in the national polls for a while. In the past month, those challengers above alongside the Brexit Party and UKIP have been taking as much as 46% of the vote.

Suggested reading

Tories will reap the Brexit whirlwind

By Matthew Goodwin

This is a stunning turnaround from the general election less than two years ago when ‘the others’ took less than half this figure.

It is a remarkable shift. It is also a deeply problematic one for a political system that is organised around only two, or at a maximum, two-and-a-half parties. The longer this continues, the harder it becomes for either of the major parties to win a large majority. And the longer this continues, the stronger the case for electoral reform becomes.

It is tempting to trace all this to Brexit. But the picture is more complex.

The process of fragmentation that is unfolding in Britain began long ago and is one that our Dutch, German, Italian and Spanish neighbours know well, none of whom are grappling with leaving the EU.

As we argue in National Populism, what is happening in Britain and other advanced democracies is that many of our established, older and hence less flexible parties are struggling to absorb and navigate new issues that are cutting directly across their traditional electorates.

Suggested reading

Europe's biggest test yet

By Matthew Goodwin

Brexit is certainly one of them but there are many others such as immigration, terrorism, refugees, climate change, minority rights and the steady advance of social liberalism, all of which are dividing voters and often because of their values rather than because of their specific views toward specific policies.

The arrival of these value conflicts is also coinciding with a breakdown of tribal loyalty to the main parties, which is making it easier for new populists and other challengers to break through. The firewall of party loyalty is today much weaker.

Meanwhile, deeper changes in the overall structure of societies are reshaping party coalitions from below, and will continue to do so for many years to come. These drivers include the expansion and now squeezing of the new middle-class, the rise of university graduates, our collective failure to respect and support those who choose, or are forced down, other paths, and the ongoing effects of unprecedented migration and demographic change.

Our established parties enjoyed a golden era when much of this was absent or had only just begun. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that they are coming undone.

British politics has been pushed into a state of partial realignment with voters facing cross-cutting pressures and our political parties facing deeply divided electorates. Whether the Conservatives, and whoever succeeds Theresa May, can win voters back and build a new coalition remains to be seen. Likewise, whether Jeremy Corbyn and Labour can cobble together a viable coalition for majority power is unknown. It’s entirely possible that the future holds a full-blown realignment.

For now, though, the only thing we can be certain of is that the fragmentation that has been working through our political system is set to continue. And as the old order struggles to cope, new challengers will take advantage of that volatility.

But could Corbyn, by making what might be a big mistake in the short to medium term, end up doing the country a huge favour in the long term? By sitting on the fence he just might prevent the already painful polarisation between Leave and Remain voters from creating a partisan divide between Labour and the Conservatives to rival the one between Democrats and Republicans that’s disfiguring politics across the pond.

Declaring Labour’s support for a second, ‘confirmatory’ referendum would undoubtedly be a logical move for Corbyn. It would open up the possibility not just of topping the poll at the European elections (an accolade which on current form will otherwise go to the Brexit Party, just as it went to UKIP in 2014), but of strangling Change UK in its cradle or, if that’s too murderous a metaphor for you, blowing up its planes while they’re still on the ground. It would also stop what, after the locals, is bound to be trumpeted (with some justification, it has to be said) as #libdemfightback.

Suggested reading

How Thatcherism produced Corbynism

By John Gray

Before anyone gets on my case, yes I know – or at least think I know – why Corbyn won’t make that move.

For a start, there’s the ‘Lexiteer’ perspective he shares with his hard-Left advisors and trade union allies. Just because most economists deride the idea that EU membership presents an obstacle to a faster growing, more ‘socialist’ Britain, it doesn’t mean Corbyn and co. are going to stop believing that it does anytime soon.

And then, of course, there’s the widespread concern among many (but by no means all) Labour MPs in ‘Leave constituencies’ that being seen to do anything that smacks of stopping Brexit will lose them the support of ‘traditional Labour voters’ or ‘the white working class’. Doubtless those MPs will be citing Labour’s disappointing local election results in some Leave voting areas in the north of England as ‘evidence’.

Again, expert opinion would differ. It’s not just a matter of refusing to lump all sorts of very different people together in outdated, subjective, and fetishised categories. Or of being wary of extrapolating too much from the outcome of council contests. It’s also about preferring solid survey research over the faux-concern for their constituents or  ‘democracy’ expressed by a bunch of politicians arguably more interested in hanging on to their precious seats in parliament than the fate of the country as a whole.

Naturally, those politicians will dismiss that research: no-one but no-one, especially a bunch of ivory-tower academic number crunchers and London-based polling companies, will ever persuade an MP that they don’t know ‘their patch’ and ‘their people’ quite as well as they think they do – something which presumably accounts for the stunned incredulity with which so many defeated incumbents greet their demise at general election after general election.

But, to me at least, that research suggests that supporting a second vote wouldn’t actually lose Labour many, if any, seats anyway. And it also suggests that, even if it did, Labour might well win seats elsewhere as a result.

Suggested reading

How Corbynomics is winning over Britain

By Matthew Goodwin

We also need to factor in the opportunity costs that Labour may have to pay for continuing to sit on the fence. True, a fair few of its members and supporters, whatever their t-shirts say, ultimately love Corbyn more than they hate Brexit. But not backing a second referendum – or whatever euphemism you prefer to call it – is, over time, still going to alienate an awful lot of them.

Maybe not so badly that they’ll immediately take to Twitter with their party cards and a sharp pair of scissors. But enough to see them slowly drift away or at least out of the ‘high-intensity’ activities (canvassing, leafletting, etc.) that are still so vital in first-past-the-post contests – something that Labour learned to its advantage, and the Tories to their cost, in 2017.

The eight-month run-up to that election saw Theresa May dismiss any notion that the 2016 Referendum had produced a close result which, along with the difficulties the UK was always going to face negotiating with a more powerful interlocutor, implied the best course to pursue was some sort of Norway-style arrangement. Instead, she went for a hard Brexit designed to appeal to Leave voters – many (though not all) of them socially conservative, less well-heeled and less well-educated – and in particular to the four million voters (13% of the electorate) who two years previously had voted for UKIP.

Suggested reading

Britain's first Brexit was the hardest

By Tom Holland

Sadly for Mrs May (and, as it turned out, fatally for her hopes of honouring her promise to extract the UK from the EU by 29 March 2019), she was only partially successful. Although she increased the Tories’ vote share (from 36.9% to 42.4%), the narrow majority they won under David Cameron in 2015 evaporated, leaving them as a minority government reliant on a dodgy support arrangement with the Brexit-supporting DUP.

True, the Conservatives did win over (and in many cases win back) many former UKIP voters, but only rarely in sufficient numbers in the places where they stood a chance of winning seats from Labour.

Meanwhile, Labour, despite its leader’s ambivalence during the referendum campaign, and despite its pledge to honour the result of the referendum, picked up votes from those sections of the electorate most likely to have voted Remain, namely the younger, the better educated and the more socially liberal. But because many of them were located in more urban areas where Labour would have won anyway, and because Tory support also rose, the party’s big improvement in vote share (from 30.4% to 40%) resulted in a much smaller, 30-seat improvement in seat share.

At that point, the stage was surely set for Britain’s two main parties to make Brexit and, crucially, the values associated with Remain and Leave voting, the main divide between them. And in many ways it still is – but for Jeremy Corbyn.

Few can doubt that the Conservatives’ response to what has happened since – most worryingly the rise of Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party  – will be to become, in nature if not in name, what Nick Timothy (once seen as some sort of Rasputin to May’s Tsarina), has taken to calling the National Party. Losing seats at the locals in some Remain-voting areas in the South might give them pause for thought, but it’s unlikely, particularly when Brexiteers can (and will) point to picking up the odd council in the West Midlands – an area that traditionally helps decide the result of general elections.

Suggested reading

Where would the Left be without Brexit?

By James Bloodworth

Now, if politics were physics it would presumably obey Newton’s third law of motion: for every action, there would be an equal and opposite reaction. The Conservatives’ seemingly inexorable drift towards what many of its more moderate MPs see as populism, jingoism, and intolerance would be matched by a Labour Party catering only for those for who shudder to think of such things.

Anyone who wonders what that might do to our politics only has to look across the Atlantic, ideally with a copy of Lilliana Mason’s provocative but persuasive book, Uncivil Agreement, in their hands. The polarisation we are witnessing in the USA is driven not just by the fact that Americans are divided by race, religion, and whether they see themselves as conservative or liberal, but by the fact that these identities, via social sorting, increasingly map on to the partisan divide between Republicans and Democrats.

Nobody, surely, wants to see that kind of poisonous politics play out here. All of which raises the intriguing possibility – even for those who want to see Corbyn commit his party to a referendum and to remaining in the EU – that, by resolutely refusing to do either, he might be doing precisely the right thing, albeit for the wrong reasons.

The Economist was evidently worried by this – unsurprising for a magazine once derided by Lenin as a “journal which speaks for British millionaires”. But the magazine’s staffers aren’t the only ones nervously looking on at politicians such as Jeremy Corbyn and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Kristian Niemietz is too, and he tells us why in his new book, Socialism: The Failed Idea that Never Dies.

More from this author

Corbyn's intolerant populism

By James Bloodworth

Head of political economy at the free market think tank the Institute for Economic Affairs (IEA), Niemietz argues that socialism has returned to haunt the political establishment because its doctrines are “strangely impervious to refutation by real-world experience”. Socialists are able to dismiss each of their failed experiments as not ‘real’ socialism, a claim which is always made retrospectively (during the honeymoon period of a revolution almost no one says this).

Niemietz writes that “Contemporary socialists define ‘real’ socialism in terms of the outcomes they would like to see, rather than the institutional setup which is supposed to produce those outcomes”.

For example, socialists celebrate equality yet distance themselves from the army of bureaucrats and secret police required to enforce it. So-called libertarian communists are effectively longing for a dish of fried snowballs. And democratic socialism – “the democratisation of every aspect of society”, as prominent Left-wing columnist Owen Jones has defined it – would in practice be ruled by fanatics with too much time on their hands; typically the over-zealous and the under-sexed.

More from this author

Why is the hard-Left so conservative?

By James Bloodworth

Socialism as a term is frustratingly imprecise. Tony Blair and George Orwell have at one time or another defined themselves as socialists, as have Joseph Stalin and Pol Pot.

The difficulty Niemietz faces in defining socialism is largely a result of the word being used as both a synonym for communism and a woolly affectation, an appellation which signals that one cares about worthy causes. Niemietz see socialism as in the ascendance. “Socialism is popular in the UK,” he writes, “and not just among students”. Yet it feels more like communism that Niemietz is railing against.

On the hard-Left, socialism denotes the transition period in which the state grows ever-larger before ‘withering away’ under full communism.[1. As the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin wrote in 1873, while Marx was still alive: “And from the heights of the state they begin to look down upon the whole common world of the workers. From that time on they represent not the people but themselves and their own claims to govern the people.”] In contrast, the variant of socialism which has gained popularity in Britain and the United States in recent times is more plausibly a left-wing strand of social democracy.

This is where Niemietz’s argument – as well as that made by The Economist – breaks down somewhat. It is social democracy that is gaining in popularity, not socialism in any meaningful sense.

More from this author

Today's voguish communists should remember Budapest

By James Bloodworth

Widespread support in Britain for public ownership of the utilities, for example, is not necessarily synonymous with support for socialism. Some of this is nostalgia for the post-war world, whereas some of it is an expression of nationalism: just a few years ago UKIP supporters were found to be among the keenest to re-nationalise things.

Moreover, that majorities appear to favour rent controls and an interventionist government is unsurprising considering the sorry state of the housing market and the precarious nature of so much contemporary work.

Hyperventilating about the ‘return of socialism’ seems especially overdone when Jeremy Corbyn has been forced to conceal what he really thinks behind a tepid social democratic agenda (see Labour’s 2017 manifesto). Yet because there is no firewall on the Left between its democratic and totalitarian wings – Jeremy Corbyn has surrounded himself with communists such as Andrew Murray and Seumas Milne – many of Niemietz’s broadsides still hit their targets.

More from this author

Six types of 'useful idiot'

By James Bloodworth

Niemietz’s book could in fact have been titled ‘Useful Idiots’, for much of it recounts the pilgrimages made to the socialist world over the years by the credulous. At one time even North Korea had its western seekers, as did Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge. As Niemietz recounts, everyone from the Webbs to Susan Sontag to Owen Jones has gone on one of these socialist excursions.

Academics in particular seem drawn to the vicarious thrill of violent revolutions. On a pilgrimage to North Korea in 1964, the Cambridge economist Joan Robinson gushed that “all the economic miracles of the postwar world are put in the shade by [North Korea’s] achievements”. These achievements were attributed to Kim Il Sung, who “seems to function as a messiah rather than a dictator”.

According to Niemietz, socialist fellow-travelling is a three-stage process. The initial revolutionary euphoria gives way to disillusionment. Whataboutery usually kicks in at this point, and an imaginary army of wreckers and saboteurs are summoned and subsequently blamed for socialism’s failures.

Later on, the pilgrims will pronounce that it does not matter because the experiment was ‘not real socialism’. And they will get away with it. “After Venezuela fell off a cliff,” Niemietz writes, “some of Britain’s most eager Chavistas went on to become some of the most senior political figures in the country”.

Suggested reading

Communism's forgotten victims

By Douglas Murray

There is something horribly sordid about revolutionary tourism. I am reminded of a remark by the novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez about Cuba. A personal friend of Fidel Castro, Garcia Marquez told The New York Times that he personally could never live under the Cuban communist system. “I would miss too many things. I couldn’t live with the lack of information. I am a voracious reader of newspapers and magazines from around the world.” Yet for Cubans, such privations were apparently acceptable.

This willingness to subject other people to grotesque historical experiments represents the apogee of political selfishness. Niemietz is right to focus on it and he is clear that it is not only the Left that projects its fantasies onto foreign lands. There were plenty on the Right who were willing to defend General Pinochet’s murderous regime in Chile on the basis of that country’s supposed ‘economic miracle’. Proponents of the Iraq war similarly believed that hundreds of thousands of lives were expendable in the name of bringing democracy and a market economy to the Middle East.

There are of course material reasons for socialism’s apparent return. Its critique of contemporary capitalism can sound appealing. The thirty-year free market settlement is in a state of morbid decay: work is precarious, towns are hollowed out and homes are both cramped and exorbitantly expensive.

Meritocracy, the ideological foundation of the free market, is mostly deployed nowadays as a post-hoc rationalisation by those who have done well. The myth of the poor and struggling as “temporarily embarrassed millionaires” – per Steinbeck – has about as much utility in 2019 as a chocolate teapot.

But the utopianism of the extremes is partly motivated by what Hannah Arendt identified as the urge to locate “a suicidal escape from… reality”. Freedom is a double-edged sword after all: it leaves a person responsible for their own decisions, at least to some extent. This can generate an existential crisis which, as Albert Camus warned, can prompt a frantic search for an escape hatch, either through suicide or submersion into a cause which purports to swap the ambiguity of liberalism for human perfection.

Suggested reading

Slaying dragons: Corbynism and its cabal of thugs

By Julie Bindel

There is also little to lose in swearing allegiance to exotic-sounding causes, especially when they are being tested on somebody else. “If a false belief is emotionally satisfying, and if there is no cost associated with holding it,” Niemietz writes, “we would expect it to be widely held”.

As such, while orthodox religion is in retreat, the allure of creeds which purport to explain everything persists. In this sense, socialism has become a romantic rather than a material ideology. The ‘scientific’ conception of Marxism has been replaced by what Friedrich Nietzsche depicts as a degenerated form of Christianity. Jeremy Corbyn is a contemporary socialist messiah: his vocabulary is an assortment of uplifting truisms and platitudes: peace not war, equality, the common good, the 99%.

Corbynism has also created meaning. Oscar Wilde famously said that the trouble with socialism was it took up too many evenings. Yet for some this is the attraction. Go to any gathering of British socialists today and you will be told by an erstwhile comrade that Corbyn has given them a ‘reason to get up in the morning’: socialism as a movement lends purpose to otherwise dull lives.

Social democrats must try to gain a better understanding of socialism so that they can more effectively purge communists from their ranks. This book is a lucid articulation of why a firewall between the democratic and the totalitarian Left is necessary. The fact that many on the Left will refuse to read it – because it was written by a pro-free market author – highlights the extent to which contemporary socialism at times resembles a hive-minded surrogate religion.

Without Brexit, parliament would presumably be dealing with the myriad problems that confront the country – rather than obsessing over something called a ‘backstop’.

Yet no Brexit presupposes no David Cameron as prime minister – at least beyond May 2015.

Cameron called the referendum in order to appease Eurosceptic MPs in the forlorn hope of uniting the Conservative Party. And then he disappeared. Without Brexit, David Cameron would likely have disappeared from the scene a little earlier…

Suggested reading

What if Remain had won?

By James Kirkup

It is 8 May 2015, and Prime Minister Ed Miliband has just emerged from a car outside Downing Street to make his first speech.

Of course, the Left would soon grow frustrated at what it saw as the timidity of a Miliband-led social democratic government which, like all governments, would be forced to make compromises shortly after assuming office.

Throughout his time as leader of the opposition, Miliband was, after all, assailed by the ideological purists of the far-Left for his purported timidity in taking on the Tories. Occasionally this was warranted. But the chorus of discontent was so incessant that it arguably cost Labour votes at the (actual) 2015 election. As James Morris, a former advisor to Miliband, put it in 2014, “We are too worried about Left-leaning commentariat and the party”.

Yet had the centre-Left won power in 2015, it would have been the Right-wing press that Miliband sought to appease. Labour promised, had it won in 2015, to “cut the deficit every year”, something even George Osborne didn’t manage. Brexit or no Brexit, a Miliband government would likely have zig-zagged between appeasing Left-wing activists on the one hand, and trying to assuage hostile media voices on the other.

Suggested reading

Labour should be careful what it wishes for

By Paul Embery

Of course, there are real things the broader Left could have achieved in a Brexit-free administration. One of these is tackling the scandal of low-pay and precarious work.

Over recent decades the life has been sucked out of smaller towns in Britain. Jobs have relocated overseas or to the larger cities, and young and educated folk have followed in their wake. Town dwellers have subsequently been ‘left behind’ – as a thousand comment writers discovered the morning after the Brexit referendum result.

A centre-Left government could have begun to seriously tackle this issue of regeneration. Labour’s 2015 manifesto committed, for example, to establishing a British investment bank and an ‘apprenticeship guarantee’ for school leavers.

In the process, they could even have partially pulled the rug out from under any future campaign to leave the European Union. Though far from a purely economic issue, the absence of opportunity in these forgotten communities clearly contributed to the support for Brexit.

Suggested reading

Why liberal-Left paternalism led to Brexit

By James Bloodworth

It has become something of a cliché to share – to the sound of great mirth – a tweet David Cameron sent a few days prior to the 2015 election, warning of “chaos under Ed Miliband”. The implication being that without Brexit – which would never have happened under a Miliband government – we would have little of the upheaval that has subsequently followed.

Yet realistically, the Left would be facing its own travails – with or without Brexit. To some extent this is a question of the limitations of government. Indeed, a Corbyn-led administration will likely face the same challenges should it ever win power.

The question that hangs over any Left-leaning government these days is this: what can really be achieved in a global capitalist economy where wealth can be moved elsewhere in a heartbeat? State socialism is a dead end; so what is the Left’s function in the twenty-first century?

There is of course the protectionist course, dissected unsparingly by Matt Bolton and Frederick Harry Pitts in their critical account of Corbynism. A Britain that ensconces itself behind tariffs and trade barriers is a Britain that becomes significantly poorer as a result.

Suggested reading

Corbyn's intolerant populism

By James Bloodworth

Then there is the moderate course: a slightly more tepid version of New Labour.

It is unlikely that a Miliband-led government would have taken the first course. For one thing, the centre-Left is less driven by the ideological fervour that animates the Corbynistas. Which is not to say there wouldn’t have been headlines in the Daily Mail accusing Miliband of wanting to turn Britain into Venezuela – that’s par for the course for any Labour leader.

What might have brought down the British centre-Left – in the event of a Miliband government and no Brexit – is indecision. Radical governments almost have it easier in this respect, at least when it comes to economics. Ideologues care not whether their citizens become poorer; instead they worry about whether the correct ideological course is being pursued. The mainstream on the other hand must at least pay lip service to what works.

The experience of Francois Hollande in France is telling in this respect. Elected on a Left-leaning prospectus, Hollande pursued a course that vacillated between radical-sounding rhetoric which spooked the markets, followed – as surely as night follows day – by screeching U-turns that satisfied nobody.

Suggested reading

Why is the hard-Left so conservative?

By James Bloodworth

The radical Left has been nipping at the heels of the centre-Left across western democracies in recent years. The British Labour Party has been turned upside down by this phenomenon, and so it is hard to see how the hard Left would not have continued its resurgence even without Brexit.

In this no Brexit scenario Jeremy Corbyn would still be a backbench MP, but I suspect he would nonetheless be an increasingly influential one. He would have been spared the forensic dragging over the coals by the press that has accompanied his rise. Instead, he would be a regular guest on alternative outlets such as Novara media, where he would be presented as a Left-wing national treasure on a par with the late Tony Benn.

We on the other hand may at least have been spared from those cranks who proliferate online and share their hero’s obsessions and proclivities. Without a Jeremy Corbyn-led Labour party, there would undoubtedly be less antisemitism in public life. The manhole cover which sits atop that sewer would have remained firmly shut – for the time being at least.

Suggested reading

Tories will reap the Brexit whirlwind

By Matthew Goodwin

A 2015 Labour government might have been short-lived – it may even have been propped up precariously by the Scottish Nationalists. Yet it would at least have had a chance to tackle some of the pressing issues of the day. At present, we are barely talking about the things that really matter – rising in-work poverty, a spike in homelessness, the dilapidation of the country’s infrastructure – because we are so consumed by Brexit.

Anything which might have pre-empted that – as well as the rise of comrade Corbyn and all the residual nastiness that he has brought with him – would arguably have been a deliverance.

The Left would almost certainly be in far better shape today were it not for Brexit. By now it might – in government – have some real achievements to its name. That’s a lot more than can be said for the Corbyn movement.

Signs of the malaise can be clearly seen in an exclusive survey for UnHerd conducted by Deltapoll. It shows a remarkable lack of faith in both main party leaders, not just by voters generally but by high proportions of their own voters. Loyalties are being tested as never before.  

In the past, one party leader has occasionally had a shaky reputation among their own supporters on one or two characteristics. In the early 1980s, many Labour voters thought Michael Foot was weak; towards the end of her premiership, many Tories considered Margaret Thatcher out of touch. But I have never seen so many supporters of both parties simultaneously hold such low opinions of their own leaders across the board.  

Here is the evidence. The following table shows the main findings. 

Consider first the two columns, in black type, showing the responses of all voters. Both leaders have strongly negative ratings on all counts. That is unusual enough. But when we look at the blue figures, showing how Conservative voters view Theresa May, and the red figures, showing how Labour voters view Jeremy Corbyn, the scale of the drama becomes clear. The positive scores for May range from 57% of Conservative supporters who say she is strong, down to 40% who back her on Brexit. Her average score among Tory voters is 45%. Labour voters give Corbyn positive scores ranging from 64 to 38%; his average is 50%. Among all voters, the averages are, of course, even worse: May 26%, Corbyn 28%. 

To put these figures in context, a successful leader would expect average scores of around 80% among their party’s own voters and 40% among the general public. For both leaders to fall so far short of these figures should set off alarm bells in both parties. 

Here, though, is the paradox. Precisely because both leaders have terrible ratings, the scale of the problem is less obvious than it would be if only one was doing badly. In that case (as when Foot led Labour and towards the end of Thatcher’s premiership), their party would have support well below 30% in the polls and facing a landslide defeat. Instead, nothing much seems to have changed since the 2017 election. An average of recent polls shows the two parties still close together, and with almost as many supporters as 18 months ago. The high commands in both parties, though plainly struggling over Brexit, see no wider reason to panic. 

Suggested reading

Can our politics survive Brexit?

By James Kirkup

In truth, they should be terrified. For the poll shows that the disenchantment with the main parties and their leaders has spread throughout Britain. Within Westminster, it is rare to find any backbench Labour or Conservative MP who, giving their candid views in private, will say their leader is any good or that their party is in anything other than deep trouble. But some hope this despair is a feature of the Westminster bubble, and that real voters away from London have not changed their views of politicians and parties that much. 

In fact, it is increasingly hard to avoid the conclusion that millions of voters Left and Right are losing faith in the people who either govern us today or aspire to do so in the future. 

Which brings us to the possible long-term consequences of current public attitudes. In any country with a different electoral system, the chances are that support for both Labour and the Conservatives would have crashed by now. Across Europe, countries with more proportional voting systems have seen the traditional big parties slump in recent years – even with leaders less widely derided than Britain’s.  

Here, first-past-the-post creates a huge barrier to entry. Elsewhere, small parties ranging from the Greens to the far right have obtained a foothold in their parliaments with as little as 5% support, and then managed to increase their credibility. Here, they can’t. In 1983, the Liberal/SDP Alliance won 26% and only 23 seats; in 2015 Ukip’s 14% gave them just a single seat.  

Suggested reading

Our new political order: Ins v Outs, not Left v Right

By Henry Olsen

The party that might have benefited from the Tory and Labour travails is the Liberal Democrats. But they paid a heavy price for their role in the 2010-15 coalition government. While their support has picked up a little in recent months, they are still scarred by decisions they took almost a decade ago. 

It is, of course, possible that when the Brexit drama has played out, normal service will resume. Perhaps May and Corbyn will both be replaced by leaders who have greater personal appeal to the electorate. 

I am not so sure. My reason is that May and Corbyn’s truly awful ratings do not flow solely from their personal attributes. Both lead deeply divided parties, and these divisions are unlikely to disappear anytime soon. The faultlines will remain: inward-looking nationalism versus outward-looking enterprise with the Tories; ambitious socialism versus progressive capitalism with Labour. A leader that combined the strategic ability of Napoleon with the genius of Einstein and the moral courage of Mandela would still struggle to win public approval if they could not reunite their parties. The Deltapoll figures providence symptoms of a deeper crisis. 

Suggested reading

The political void that Labour needs to fill

By Paul Embery

In short, both main parties are more fragile and less stable than for many decades. First-past-the-post could save both Labour and the Conservatives from the consequences of their current divisions. But it is no longer ridiculous to image a different future. Once the adhesive glue of our electoral system starts to crack, things can change with bewildering speed. A century ago, amid the stresses of post-First-World-War Britain and the divisions within the Liberal Party, realignment happened quickly. Labour climbed from fourth place in 1918 to government in 1924.  

Will Brexit end up having the same glue-cracking effect? And if it does, will the beneficiaries be existing herbivores such as the Liberal Democrats and the Greens; or some new centre party created by disenchanted Labour and Tory moderates; or carnivores on the outer fringes of Right and Left? Is the century-long dominance of Britain’s Parliament by competing forces on the centre Right and centre Left about to end? 

Ask me again in 10 years’ time and I shall tell you. Meanwhile I wouldn’t bet a great deal against changes that could be immense, and which not everyone will like. 

Few, however, have taken Corbynism seriously as an intellectual movement. Fewer still have done so from a point of view that is, by temperament, broadly sympathetic. Yet this is what two young academics, Matt Bolton and Frederick Harry Pitts, have done in a new book which seeks to take “Corbynism seriously and critically as a semi-coherent set of ideas”. In Corbynism: A Critical Approach they have produced the most thorough and alarming overview of the Corbyn worldview to date.

In contrast to some of the headlines which usually accompany stories about a future Corbyn government, Bolton’s and Pitts’ first contention is that Corbynism is not as radical at it seems. Instead the Corbyn movement reflects “wider societal, ideological and political-economic shifts that bring it closely in-step with an increasingly ‘post-liberal’ political environment”, as the authors put it.

They demonstrate that Corbyn’s populist division of the world into oppositional ‘us’ and ‘them’ camps has more in common with the politics of Donald Trump and Viktor Orbán than it does with the traditions of democratic socialism.

Suggested reading

Peterson, Corbyn and the rise of the kidult

By Jenny McCartney

Borrowing heavily from the baleful and half-baked ideas of populist theorist Chantel Mouffe – as well as from the Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt – Corbynism’s division of the world into ‘friends’ and ‘enemies’ requires regular heresy hunts in order to sustain itself.

Moreover, capitalism itself is viewed not as a material system of production, but rather as an unfolding moral-religious story in which one side – the ‘99%’, the working class, the ‘oppressed’ – is regarded uncritically as innately ‘good’, while blame for society’s ills is placed squarely on the shoulders of ‘them’ – the bankers, the ‘1%’, and in the darker reaches of the Corbyn movement, a sinister cabal of wealthy Jews.

As we have discovered over the past three-and-a-half years, this deeply personalised interpretation of capitalism easily lends itself to conspiracy theories about the malevolence of particular groups and individuals. Once this group of permanent outsiders is required to define an ideology, the search for enemies continues without end. As populist governments around the world have demonstrated, the triumph over one adversary invariably necessitates the creation of another, as well as the never-ending expansion of categories such as ‘fascist’ to include anyone with whom the party or movement disagrees.

Perhaps the most interesting part of this fascinating book is contained in its erudite attack on Corbynomics. Corbynism as an intellectual movement is built on several key planks. As the authors note, it is first and foremost the reheated ‘socialism in one country’ that was a hallmark of Tony Benn’s Alternative Economic Strategy of 1975. It also rests on a personalised understanding of capitalism inspired by the late socialist theoretician Ralph Miliband.

Suggested reading

How Corbynomics is winning over Britain

By Matt Goodwin

In this reading of Labour Party history, the failure on the part of Labour politicians such as Harold Wilson, Jim Callaghan and Tony Blair to usher in socialism was seen by Miliband not as a result of the power of global capitalism, but as a consequence of (in Miliband’s words) the personal “failures, derelictions and betrayals” of these politicians. In addition, Corbynism is inspired by the ludicrously determinist post-capitalist fantasies around full automation promoted by a new generation of media-savvy pundits such as Aaron Bastani.

It is the first of these – the equation of economic nationalism with socialism – that is behind Corbyn’s apparent ambivalence towards a hard Brexit. Little attempt is made within the increasingly influential ‘Lexit’ movement to understand the global nature of capitalism. Instead, and in common with Blue Labour, delusions abound as to the power of a single nation state to hold-out against the immense power of global capital. Yet “capital,” as the authors put it, “will win out” – just as surely as night follows day.

Were a Corbyn government to come to power and implement its desired programme – which in practice would resemble the recent ‘Alternative Models of Ownership’ paper more than its watered-down 2017 manifesto – a “recklessly deluded” protectionist agenda could well result in a beggar-thy-neighbour, 1930s-style trade war should other countries choose to pursue a similarly nationalistic economic path.

Suggested reading

Corbyn is natural response to Blair's political and personal failings

By Douglas Murray

As for fantasies of workers’ control of industry favoured by more democratically-minded sections of the far-Left, under this contemporary incarnation of Bennism production would remain within constraints set by the state. As Bolton and Pitts put it: “If workers refuse to adhere to the ‘needs of the nation,’ the state must ensure that they do”.

The trade unions, vocally supportive of Corbyn in opposition, would potentially be neutered and reduced to mere arms of the state under a Corbyn-led government, just as they are in favoured Corbynista despotisms such as Cuba. In other words, workers would gain no more freedom than they currently possess under capitalism. And they are likely to suffer even greater privations if the raft of protectionist measures favoured by the Lexiteers around Corbyn are put into practice.

At a time when it has become fashionable in socialist and communist circles to portray liberalism as little more than the handmaiden of fascism, Bolton and Pitts’ book offers a refreshing defence of liberal democracy from the Left. Too short-sighted to recognise that socialism and social democracy are built on the freedoms set down by liberalism, and too mired in the logic of identity politics to articulate a vision in which what a person thinks and says is more important than the tribe they belong to, competing tendencies within the Labour Party “luxuriate in the flames licking at the sides of liberal society,” the authors write.

These competing tendencies – in particular Corbynism and Blue Labour – hope to ride the ascendant wave of anti-liberalism for electoral gain. In this they are unwittingly aiding and abetting the very nationalist forces that – in a familiar story – will turn their sights on the workers’ movement once the formal niceties and civility of liberal democracy have been dispensed with.

More from this author

Why liberal-Left paternalism led to Brexit

By James Bloodworth

There is something profoundly disturbing taking place in politics across the globe and Corbynism should, in my view, be seen as another morbid symptom of it rather than its putative solution. As orthodox religion fades away in the developed world, it has been replaced by a Manichean style of politics that retains the moral fervour of its progenitor, as well as its teleological faith in progress.

Heretics are regularly uncovered and cast out of what the academic David Hirsh has called the “community of the good”. Instead of fearing each new political crisis, competing sets of true believers try to outdo each other in cheering on our steady descent into the abyss – a process they believe will hasten our arrival at the promised land.

Corbynism: A Critical Approach, is the best book on the phenomenon of Corbynism by some distance because it slots the movement firmly within this camp of moralising and intolerant populism. In doing so it ought to free up space on the broader Left for a more critical approach to the Corbyn project, not least because it is written by two activists who have by their own admission long-yearned for “the Left to take the reins”.

This is probably something of a forlorn hope to be sure. Many prominent Left-wing journalists long-ago abandoned any pretence to truth-telling in their adherence to the Labour Party line. Nevertheless books like this are valuable because they will stand as exemplars of clear thinking and objectivity, long after the career-ideologues have been swept away and child-like adoration of ‘Jezza’ has subsided.

There is one further pressure: he has become the most powerful Left-wing leader in the world. On his shoulders rest the hopes not just of tens of millions of Mexicans but voters in many countries who cleave to a revival of socialism as a means of addressing the many fissures of globalisation.

That is why the relationship between Obrador and Jeremy Corbyn is so important. The Labour leader, whose wife is Mexican and who has frequently visited Latin America, is a close friend. On the eve of his inauguration, Obrador made a public gesture of welcoming Corbyn to his country home in the southern state of Chiapas.

Mexico’s journey in the coming months will provide Corbyn with valuable lessons, to prepare him in the event of getting to power. In these times of deep cynicism and fear, the enthusiasm among a broad swathe of Mexicans is striking. They see in Amlo, his name’s initials by which he is best known, the answer to their prayers.

Further reading

Why we should welcome the populist victory in Mexico

By Charlotte Pickles

In his first few days in charge he has done little to dampen expectations. Launching a 100-point plan, no less, he vowed to reverse decades of free market liberal economics, put the interests of the poor and indigenous communities first, decentralise power to the regions and revive the oil industry. Five months of planning since his landslide victory in early July – perhaps the longest transition in any country’s constitution – have removed much of the surprise. Everyone has known for some time what is coming.

During a working trip at the end of August I was struck by the disdain in which Amlo is held by many professionals I met. Part of it is pure snobbery. Like Corbyn, he has spruced himself up, but he still doesn’t cut it as a suave, jet-setting leader in the style of previous presidents. Part of the ill will is simple economics. This is a deeply divided society. Polanco and Condesa, the two swankiest districts of Mexico City, resemble London’s Knightsbridge and Notting Hill. Meanwhile, the grinding poverty for millions is visible everywhere.

In a second trip over the past few days, some of the wealthier were prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt, assuming that he won’t really go after them, and if he does, they have ways of spiriting their money out. So far the Mexican peso and stock market have fallen sharply but there has been no dramatic run – yet.

Suggested reading

Jean-Luc Mélenchon: a smarter Jeremy Corbyn

By John Lichfield

The silver-haired son of a shopkeeper has tried to become Mexico’s president twice before. In 2006 he lost by just 0.5% of the vote, claiming that he had been robbed and setting up a tented protest village for months. On his second attempt in 2012 he lost by a more convincing 7%. Some thought his time was up.

In his manner of governing, he has pledged to be as different from his centre-Right predecessor Enrique Pena Nieto as possible. On Monday, on his first morning in charge, he despatched the presidential Boeing 787 jet (more lavish, it is said, than Air Force One) back to California for safekeeping until a suitable oligarch can be found to buy it. Amlo plans to fly economy on commercial airliners, and he plans to get rid of the 60 planes and 70 helicopters on the government’s books. He has refused to live in the presidential compound, Los Pinos (the Pines), and has opened it up to the public. He has promised to work 16 hours a day, starting with a 6am security briefing and a 7am press conference.

He is proud to call this austerity – but not the British version where the general population, particularly the poorer, shouldered the biggest burden. He is going after government spending on luxuries. No meetings in restaurants or posh hotels. Only in plain government offices.

One of Amlo’s most symbolic decisions, taken during the transition, was to hold a referendum on plans for a new airport, designed by Norman Foster. This was a waste of money; plane travel, he implied, was a plaything of the rich. A majority voted to scrap it, but the turnout was tiny (one million out of 45 million who voted in July’s election) and the ballot was run not by the electoral commission but by his Morena party, raising fears of ballot stuffing.

Electoral promises will be kept. The people are sovereign. Sound familiar? Amlo appears a curious mix of Brexit-era and Trumpist populism.  Trump couldn’t stand Pena Nieto (the feeling was mutual) and tweeted hearty congrats to his successor. On the chummy level there is every chance the two will get on just fine. Here are two folksy, call-it-as-it-is, leaders; convergence of the angry Right with the angry Left. But that’s before they start to deal with the detail on trade and immigration.

Suggested reading

Peterson, Corbyn and the rise of the kidult

By Jenny Mccartney

There is also a comparison to be made with the smooth Davos-man Blair, a man who could not be more different to the new Mexican president. Not in policies or behaviour, but expectations. To watch Amlo’s victory speech at Zocalo, Mexico City’s colonial-era vast central square, evokes the less iconic but equally powerful setting of the Royal Festival Hall in May 1997. Things can only get better was the soundtrack. People hugged, believing a new Camelot had arrived.

Blair’s thesis, which propelled him to power with a similar landslide, was to portray the art of the possible as radical. New Labour would initiate change by stealth; he would keep on his side a country that the young prime minister believed was big C and small C conservative.  We know what eventually ensued: the financial crash and the end of centrist consensus, giving rise to the radical Left and Right.

No matter what era, however, and how it is dressed up, politics is the art of compromise, of marrying high principle with messy pragmatism. The inevitable conclusion is that he will disappoint. He has to, by the nature of the job. That is why, in his inaugural address, he asked the people for patience.

And that’s why it’s so crucial for Corbyn. Both men romanticise past Latin American revolutionaries (including the current regimes in Venezuela and Cuba). The reality of office will be more mundane. How much can radical Left-wing leaders really change within the confines of democracies and market systems? When the going gets rough, do they plough on or do they retrench, to the consternation of those voters who yearned for radical change? It will all be about managing expectations. Getting rid of presidential jets is the easy part.

That was the Greek Prime Minister, Alexis Tsipras, on the campaign trail in 2014. He came to power on a hard-Left platform promising to take on the EU and its reviled austerity measures; he would, he said, force it to surrender. Greeks would get their dignity – and their lifestyles – back.

He failed abjectly.

*          *          *

The DVD hawkers in Exarchia Square are more desperate than usual. They brandish their pirated DVDs under your nose for a few seconds longer; refusal is harder to take. The scent of cannabis hangs even thicker in the air. Drug dealers, swollen in number, moodily stalk the area, offering everything from pills to cocaine. And among it all are the immigrants: Afghans, Iranians, Pakistanis, Congolese, Iraqis, Somalis, Bangladeshis, Albanians and of course Syrians. They idle and loiter. Work is near non-existent: the drift to crime is inexorable.

Greece is the first European port of call – literally – for the great migrant tidal wave of our era. And Exarchia, the hotbed of Leftist radicalism in Greece’s capital city, Athens, is one of the places where they are most welcome.

Exarchia once loved Tspiras and his once hard-Left, populist party, Syriza (an acronym that stands for Coalition of the Radical Left). In an area known for its anarchists who refuse on principle to vote, there were a lot of people talking about their support for a political party four years ago.

Suggested reading

The permanent punishment of the Greek people

By Peter Franklin

“Redistributing the wealth”; attacking the “corrupt elites”; telling “Madam Merkel and her Fourth Reich” to get stuffed: Syriza brimmed with populist far-Left rhetoric, and the people, strafed by austerity, lapped it up.

In this sense, Greece was merely part of a broader trend – albeit a frontrunner, given the near existential financial crisis it faced. Following the Great Recession of 2008, there was a deepening in the West of the mass crisis of faith in its institutions that had begun just after the turn of the century. The trajectory was as clear as it was linear. The political class was discredited by Iraq; the financial establishment by the Great Recession; the media by repeated scandals and the rise of social networks; and, finally, the security services by the 2011 Snowden revelations.

This crisis coincided with the digital revolution: an advance in information technology of an order of magnitude not seen in human history. And, like the advent of all new information technologies from the printing press onwards, it has disrupted and destabilised the existing order.

The result has been that mainstream parties have suffered at the hands of extremes on both Left and Right. From Gert Wilders in the Netherlands to Viktor Orbán to eventually Donald Trump in the US, populist demagogues have either gained support or taken power at the expense of the technocrats that once dominated our governing class.

Suggested reading

Is global momentum with the Left?

By Angus Robertson

But with Greece we were able to witness, in almost perfect laboratory conditions, an experiment with the hard Left in government. The country was made for it. Following the end of the military junta in 1974, Greece moved Leftwards, and from 1981 onwards was almost permanently governed by the social democrat PASOK party. Leftism was in, and for a while it worked. PASOK removed the excessive powers of the President, various repressive laws, created a national health service and boosted wages.

But social democracy soon curdled into clientism. PASOK created and expanded a middle class that lived off the public sector. People retired in their forties; taxes went unpaid; bribery became endemic. The cheap credit of the early 2000s meant that Greeks lived lifestyles they simply had no right to – before it all came crashing down in 2008.

As Daphne Halikiopoulou, Associate Professor in Comparative Politics at the University of Reading, observes: “What was different about Greece’s left-wing populist explosion was that it was based on anti-corruption. It wasn’t and isn’t about identity politics. PASOK imploded because the system upon which post-dictatorship Greece was based – called Metapolitefsi– had become totally rotten.”

Suggested reading

The centre-left will never defeat European populism if it fails to first understand it

By Henry Olsen

She continues: “What happened was that PASOK and then the short-lived New Democracy [Greece’s centre-right party] government created and expanded a middle class that lived off the public sector – the system was about to implode and the middle class suffered the most so they became radicalised.”

And in Greece, as in almost all developed countries, the middle class controls electoral politics. Lose it, and you have lost all chance of remaining in government.

The destruction of PASOK from a once dominant force to a minor player in Greek politics was so great that “Pasokification” has become a catch-all description for the general phenomenon of Social Democrat parties withering in the face of populism from both the Right and Left. Orbán and Trump may be ascendant but that is only half the story. The other is the decline of the centre Left. In the 2017 general election the Netherlands saw the Labour party’s share of the vote collapse from 25% to 6%; Spain saw its centre Left decline with the emergence of the hard-Left Podemos party, while in the UK the Labour Party has undergone internal Pasokification as Jeremy Corbyn and his hard-Left allies have taken it over.

Corbynism may have captured the apparatus of the Labour Party, and its adherents may consider themselves the government in waiting, but the Syriza example should give them pause for thought.

*          *          *

“Tsipras! He is a traitor,” the man makes a spitting motion, but thankfully nothing comes out. “He sold out on everything – and after only five minutes, too. And it has only gotten worse. He has surrendered to the Germans. It is shameful. He is shameful.” The man is Manolis, and he owns one of the many periptera – simple kiosks that sell everything from sweets and fizzy drinks to newspapers – that dot the Athens cityscape.

His complaint is not new. The only surprise is that he still bothers to express it so long after the hard Left’s disillusionment with Tsipras hit, which came just months after he took power and is at the centre of the political homily that Greece’s experiment with Leftist populism has become. To many, Tsipras has long been seen as a traitor.

Tsipras promised to make both the EU and the financial markets dance to Syriza’s tune. It is fitting that hubris is a Greek word. Nemesis followed more quickly than even the majority of his most ardent detractors could have thought.

Suggested reading

What the Right gets wrong when the Left goes nuts

By Peter Franklin

He took power in January 2015. It took until just July for him to reverse – unequivocally – on his promises to end austerity and take on the EU. On July 5, 2015 Greeks voted to reject further austerity. The so-called Troika (the European Commission, European Central Bank, and International Monetary Fund) then told Syriza in no uncertain terms that if it did so, Greece would be booted out of the Eurozone, and possibly even one day, the EU. Oh, and by the way, they would also have to get rid of Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis, who had managed to alienate all of Greece’s negotiating partners with his obnoxious behaviour.

Tsipras had a choice. Stick to his populist bombast and watch his country go under, or abandon it and try to save Greece. He chose the latter option, putting forward a package which accepted even more arduous austerity measures. Greece survived.

His “radical coalition”, however, did not. The most Left-wing faction of Syriza, a hard-Left party within the party, decided to break away.

Twenty nine MPs headed by the Communist former energy minister Panagiotis Lafazanis, formed the new Popular Unity party to contest new elections after Tsipras resigned to let the population make their decision on his U-turn. The people had to choose: between the hard-Left populist who had, just months before, promised them everything but veered, almost immediately, toward the centre; and the purists who had remained true and set up their own party.

They chose. Tsipras was returned with almost double the seats of his nearest challenger, New Democracy. The Popular Unity party failed to make the threshold for even a single MP in parliament.

And that was the end of Syriza’s hard-Left project.

*          *          *

It is said that all parties campaign in poetry but govern in prose. Simply put: it is easy to promise the earth when you don’t have to deliver. But what makes Syriza’s story so remarkable, and instructive, is the degree of change the party underwent and how quickly it did so – and, critically, how it has continued to do so. Syriza today is essentially a party of social democrats. It is PASOK Mark II.

The extent to which Tsipras abandoned everything is hard to exaggerate. Take the hated ENFIA property tax. This is a tax levied on homes that is so high it has essentially pauperised a large percentage of the property-owning class. Tsipras promised to abolish it. The Troika refused to allow him to do so. But, crucially, he has continued to keep it to this day, even as Greece has exited its Troika-funded bailout.

It’s a great source of income – and governments run on income, of which a sufficient amount is always hard to find. Populist bombast runs on air, which is available far more freely.

In the words of Stathis Kalyvas, Gladstone Professor of Government at All Souls, Oxford: “It is of course possible that a populist leader proves electorally successful (Orbán, Erdogan). But not because of radicalism: radical economic proposals simply do not work: there is nothing to deliver. And that was the case in Greece.”

Now Greece is facing elections next year and the centre-Right New Democracy party looks favourite to win. Meanwhile, Tsipras has come to be seen as a pragmatic politician by both the EU and, to make matters worse, for someone who was once such a strong “anti-imperialist”, the US.

Suggested reading

Test article

By Peter Franklin

The political battle raging in Greece right now is the deal with neighbouring Macedonia in which Tsipras has agreed not to veto the country’s membership of NATO and the EU if it changes its name to “North Macedonia”. The political issue is that the name “Macedonia” implies a territorial claim on Greece; the larger cultural one is that it implies that Alexander the Great was not Greek but Macedonian. The majority of Greeks oppose the deal while the EU and US support it to strengthen NATO in the Balkans as a counterweight to Chinese and Russian influence there.

Aris Hatzis, an Athens University law professor and political commentator, was recently quoted in the FT as saying: “Tsipras is determined to complete the… agreement even if there are political costs. It would cement his transformation over the past three years from radical leftist politician to a Western partner who can deliver both on foreign affairs and the economy.”

He was right. From hard-Left firebrand to centre-Left darling of two of the world’s greatest hegemons, the transformation is complete – and total.

We live in the age of populism; the rejection of the expert and of the ‘elites’. Technology that balkanises our information environment furthers political divides through subverting nuance and discussion in favour of sensationalism, which enables extreme parties on both Left and Right. Never has the post-war political climate in the West been more fecund for demagogues. What Greece shows, however, is that hard-Left populist parties are not fit for purpose. Syriza promised to end austerity, take on the EU and various other delusions. It failed on every single one of its hard-Left populist policies. Corbyn’s Labour party is already disaster-prone and riddled with chaos. Greece should be seen as a lesson.

As Kalyvas concludes: “Radical-left populism is pretty much dead in Greece and has morphed into the old, clientelist socialist party. I don’t think it could have been otherwise. Radical leftist plans have a way of being always unworkable.”

The vacillating, ‘third-way’ social democracy of Tony Blair was predicated on the idea that only compromise could win at the ballot box. For many years Left-wing activists would swallow their ideological objections – or at least soften them – on the back of electoral success. “We have to do this stuff to win”, an activist friend used to shrug whenever New Labour briefed against the trade unions in the right-wing press, or announced some draconian policy targeted at asylum seekers.

But electoral expediency is just one of the reasons for the centre-Left’s embrace of politicians like Tony Blair. The decline of the industrial working class is the other. By the 1990s, the Left had been shorn of both its historical agent and narrative.

Further reading

Can social democracy survive?

By Matthew Goodwin

This generated a centre-Left politics which pitched itself largely to the middle classes – with a nod to the poor through policies such as increased social security payments. When Tony Blair boasted in 1997 that under New Labour Britain would retain the toughest anti-trade union laws in the western world, he was consigning Labour’s hitherto electoral base to the dustbin of history.

Corbynism is both a response to this as well as its logical conclusion. The return of the Corbyn project to uncompromising simplicity – anti-austerity, anti-war, nationalisation – is a rejection of the previous three decades of Labour policymaking.

But the Corbyn project is also a response to changing electoral realities. During the Blair years, the centre-Left fashioned a rod for its own back by hanging everything on electoral expediency. Thus, when the compromisers of the third-way stopped winning elections after the financial crisis, their project was an empty husk. If Labour was going to lose anyway – and the centre-Left has been doing that just about everywhere of late – then better, surely, to lose on its own terms and with policies activists actually believe in.

Further reading

Slaying dragons: Corbynism and its cabal of thugs

By Julie Bindel

As it turned out, Corbyn proved popular, winning 40% of the vote at the 2017 General Election despite the inauspicious backdrop of precipitous Left-wing decline. The tantalising prospect of winning elections without having to heavily dilute the party’s core message had become a reality.

Where continuity with New Labour remains, though, is in Corbynism’s pitch to the middle classes. Indeed, the Left that is in the ascendance in Britain is marked by a combination of hard-Left rhetoric and centre-Left policies that – on paper at least – would benefit the middle classes. In this sense Corbynism is an inversion of a central New Labour principle. Blair and New Labour sought to appease the Daily Mail in public, while pushing redistributory policies via stealth. In contrast, Corbynism scares the hell out of the Right-wing newspapers while pursuing – in public at least – a fairly orthodox social democratic agenda.

It would be easy to read this purported moderation as a clever strategy on the part of Labour’s Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell. The assumption among Labour’s enemies is that McDonnell is talking a good social democratic game with a plan to unveil a radical socialist agenda once firmly in power.

Yet I suspect the reality is more prosaic, not least because no one, least of all socialists, is entirely sure what a socialist agenda would entail in the twenty-first century. As things stand the word is little more than an affectation, a statement denoting one’s commitment to a world marginally better than the one that currently exists.

Further reading

Marxist McDonnell has a plan to save capitalism

By Daniel Gayne

To be sure, Labour’s tentative economic agenda for Britain appears to be brimming with interesting ideas and initiatives. It is just not socialist in any recognisable sense. The current fetish for nationalisation among Labour activists, for example, is not matched by a radical party platform. Labour is pledging to renationalise just a handful of key services – the railways, the postal service, water and electricity.

Indeed, no country that has followed that path of wholesale nationalisation has remained prosperous for long. Nor has any contemporary socialist thinker found a way to calculate a price without the existence of some sort of market, which is why the real economy in every officially socialist country has always been a rapacious (and ultra-capitalist) black market.

None of this impugns the type of social democratic agenda as set out publicly by John McDonnell. But the programme for government Labour has been tentatively articulating is a long way from the ‘anti-capitalism’ that fires up Labour activists. One suspects this is because the latter functions more as an identity signifier rather than a meaningful set of policies. Radicalism has become an assertion of personal brand in a social media marketplace where recognition hinges on standing out.

Further reading

Corbyn is natural response to Blair's political and personal failings

By Douglas Murray

Thus domestically at least, the Labour Party in the next generation looks much like the party’s previous incarnations. A Labour government would bring about a rebalancing in the workplace that would go much further than the timidity of the New Labour years, with workers gaining greater access to the tools through which they could assert their bargaining power. But neither this – nor anything else proposed by Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party – amounts to socialism.

Indeed, the degree of radicalism favoured by the hard Left is probably impossible in a parliamentary system with regular election cycles ­– it is hard to believe that British voters would acquiesce in the massive economic dislocations that would come with any radical structural change.

Like all liberal democratic countries in a global system, Britain is ultimately a hostage to capital. As such, Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell are dependent on the mood of the electorate, which has little of the ideological passion required to hold out against the capital flight and economic sabotage that would invariably accompany any transition to socialism. Labour faces a stark choice post-Brexit: social democracy in one country or socialism for one election cycle. I suspect the party will opt for the former.

In addition to reporting hate crime, please report non-crime hate incidents, which can include things like offensive or insulting comments, online, in person or in writing. Hate will not be tolerated in South Yorkshire. Report it and put a stop to it #HateHurtsSY pic.twitter.com/p2xf6OLoQZ

— South Yorkshire Police (@syptweet) September 9, 2018

This tweet from the South Yorkshire constabulary – to which we’ll return – reminded me of something I wrote for a scientific journal in 1996:

“Most of us are critical realists, in that we believe the Universe exists and that we can learn something about its mechanisms by measuring observable phenomena.”

At the time that felt uncontroversial; now it makes me laugh aloud. Not because I no longer believe in the Universe, or the importance of using language as precisely as possible to describe it, in order to produce valid conclusions about the laws that govern (biological, psychological, cultural) existence. I laugh because I no longer believe that “most of us” think any such thing.

“Most of us” – most of those with power, anyway, about whom I’m most concerned – “most of us” seem to believe that the Universe exists only as an extension of our own desires, and that its reality is nothing more than anything we care to assert at any given moment in time.

To such pathologically subjective people – path-subs, let’s call them – simply to declare “This is a fact” is sufficient to turn “this” into a fact; no more evidence about the nature of “this” is required, and any evidence that is produced, which appears to contradict the claim, can – and must – be dismissed out of hand.

Further reading

Bezos and his offensive, self-serving philanthropy

By James Bloodworth

Once you accept that powerful people and institutions have adopted this path-sub worldview, then a lot of what at first seems crazy about modern life begins to make sense.

Don’t believe the world is round? Just say “The world is flat”, and pancake-like it becomes. Look what happened to Angelos Sofocleous when he tweeted “Women don’t have penises”: hounded from the philosophy magazine he edited. (Let’s take a second to note the delicious, beautiful irony of Mr Sofocleous’s name.)

You can dismiss the suffering of Sofocleous as mere student idiocy. Until you remember the British state’s definition of hate crime:

“Any criminal offence which is perceived by the victim or any other person, to be motivated by hostility or prejudice, based on a person’s disability or perceived disability; race or perceived race; or religion or perceived religion; or sexual orientation or perceived sexual orientation or transgender identity or perceived transgender identity.”

The Crown Prosecution Service, from whose site I’ve copied that definition, goes on to say:

“There is no legal definition of hostility so we use the everyday understanding of the word which includes ill-will, spite, contempt, prejudice, unfriendliness, antagonism, resentment and dislike.”

I’ve bolded the overt insertions of path-sub thinking in those definitions. For a hate crime to be committed, it’s sufficient for me to assert that it has. End of debate. I don’t even require to have witnessed the incident to which I’ve decided to apply the label. And that criminal offence itself might have been motivated by “unfriendliness”. Remember that, the next time you stand on my foot on the tube, and don’t return my friendly greeting.

To be clear: I’m temperamentally opposed to the concept of hate crime, since to my boring old Tory mind it is the crime that matters, not its motivation. Ian Baynham died from the kicking he received from a pack of homophobic scum; Alan Greaves was battered to death by non-homophobic scum. The deaths of Ian and Alan don’t weigh differently, to my mind. I couldn’t care less about the motives of their attackers.

However, I can accept that society might take a different view. I can see why its politics might say, “The motivation for some crimes is so abhorrent that we label them as hateful and judge their protagonists especially harshly.” You and I can disagree about this; nothing bad would follow.

But the path-sub perversion of the hate crime definition does matter, because it distorts reality. It leaves the critical realist – the man or woman who requires evidence to back-up assertions about the state of things – at the mercy of the path-sub activist, who can change reality (“That was a hate crime”) at the tap of a keyboard. And once we grant permission to the path-subs to create the reality in which we all have to live, we are at their mercy.

Further reading

Free Minds: Doctor Who, a maverick in time and space

By Graeme Archer

Especially in South Yorkshire? Before pushing the path-sub envelope with that interesting take on hate crime, exemplified by our opening quote, South Yorkshire constabulary turned a blind eye to the sexual abuse of hundreds of South Yorkshire girls, over a period of years. Professor Alexis Jay, who investigated this atrocity, concluded that police “gave no priority to child sexual abuse, regarded many victims with contempt and failed to act on their reports of abuse”.

This, um, flexible approach to applying path-sub rules about hate crime strikes people as bizarre. South Yorkshire police want to know if you’ve done anything mildly unpleasant; that same force declined to investigate the objectively hateful. Similarly, you can be arrested for saying “Excuse me, do you realise that your horse is gay?”, but the Metropolitan police won’t lift a finger while you subject a Conservative MP’s children to what anyone reasonable would call vicious psychological abuse. Even if they’re standing next to you while you do it.

Isn’t that a contradiction? Surely, think Tories and liberals across the centre-Right spectrum, surely this obvious contradiction will cause the whole path-sub house of cards to collapse?

Dream on, matey. The contradiction isn’t a problem; it’s an inherent and deliberate attribute of the path-sub architecture. While old-fashioned types like myself worry about the incoherent stances adopted by various institutions in hock to path-sub thinking, the path-sub activist rejoices at our confusion. Path-sub politicians and activists couldn’t be happier that I’ve spent a few hours trying to unravel their contradictory ideas: that’s two hours a Conservative didn’t spend rallying the electoral base to fight back. That’s two hours when they were out there, bending reality to their will.

From universities, to our criminal justice systems, to our politics. Path-sub is the mindset of the Corbynite – you can see their spiteful toddler “deductions” all over social media: “Because all Tories are evil, there is no level of abuse to which they cannot be subjected.”

This week, Rupa Huq, a Labour MP from west London tweeted an image of the gates at Downing Street:

They rejected calls to create nationwide ones outside abortion clinics but Tories *do* support buffer zones to protect *some* women… Thatcher had these gates erected in 1980s now Theresa “my way or the highway” May lives in splendid isolation behind them pic.twitter.com/a8mTXXrNo4

— Rupa Huq MP (@RupaHuq) September 18, 2018

The gates, of course, were put in place to protect our democracy from terrorist attacks. Let’s not forget Rupa Huq’s party leader’s interesting history with regard to the progenitors of some of those terrorist campaigns, for example being arrested at a demo organised to show sympathy for the Brighton bombers.

Huq knows this. She knows that you know that she knows this. But neither the grotesquely offensive nature of her tweet, nor the overt rewriting of history by a former sociology lecturer matters a damn. Huq says: (Female) Tories have gates to protect their splendid isolation, and that becomes the truth.

Everything real is contingent to the path-sub’s political desire. If reality is contingent then the truth is subjective, or, more accurately, the “truths” are subjective, from which it follows they can be put into a rank order.

Truth A – that Thatcher had security gates installed because terrorists were trying to kill her – can be held in the hands of path-sub MPs, and measured against Truth B – that Thatcher was a Tory, Tories hate and fear the people, so Thatcher installed gates to keep the virtuous mob from the door. Guess which “truth” the Corbynite university lecturers are whispering in the ears of your children.

By the same author

If you don't 'get' statistics it's just as bad as not 'getting' Shakespeare

By Graeme Archer

Back in 1996, I wrote that we can’t understand the universe, in any useful way, without accepting that it exists beyond our consciousness. Throughout my adult life I’ve believed that words matter, as they are our thoughts made (metaphorical) flesh, and so are also real objects in that same universe they are attempting to describe. Words are real things, with power.

Increasingly, and terrifyingly, only the last sentence of that paragraph holds water. Words have power, all right, but their actual meaning (define “hate crime”) no longer matters. Facts don’t matter. Biology doesn’t matter. History doesn’t matter. The truth is whatever the pathologically subjective declares it to be.

Such wordcrime is strong enough to destroy institutions (see our police service and universities for details). Liberals and Conservatives must stop ignoring this. What would happen, for example, were a pathologically subjective Corbyn-led government to assert that “There’s no such thing as a good Conservative”? What reality do you imagine would follow from that?

By the same author

Why does the Left hate gay Tories?

By Graeme Archer