In the past year, Turin’s latest face-off — between the state on the one hand, and an alliance of anarchic, neighborhood “citizen committees” and pro-Palestinian protestors on the other — has been intensifying. Last November, one of Turin’s imams, Mohammed Shahin, was arrested and sent to Sicily, awaiting expulsion to his Egyptian homeland, though his deportation was later stopped. Turin has been twinned with Gaza since 1998, and the Torino per Gaza (“Turin for Gaza”) organization regularly brings hundreds of thousands of protestors onto the streets.

Then, on 18 December 2025, following orders issued by the Ministry of the Interior and coordinated by the chief of police, troops stormed the “Askatasuna” social center at the heart of Vanchiglia and expelled all its occupants. It brought to an end almost 30 years during which the squat — the name means “freedom” in Basque — had become a meeting-point for environmental activists. There have been confrontations ever since. When I visited for the 1 May parade, Askatasuna supporters and the riot cops scuffled. It was shields and batons against flag-poles and beer bottles, and I took my compulsory shower from a police-van power hose.

Two distinct forces are lining up against each other: the authorities receiving orders from the Interior Minister Matteo Piantedosi, and groups of “autonomi” and “attivisti” trying to plant as many Palestinian flags as possible. The clash is asymmetrical because Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni is proving more durable than anyone expected. Elected in October 2022, she’s only a few weeks shy of breaking the record for the longest-serving government in Italy’s postwar history. Despite losing a recent referendum on judicial reform, and falling out of favor with Donald Trump, Meloni and her Brothers of Italy party seem firmly in control.

Yet if the clash is uneven, the outcome isn’t inevitable. “Governments are made in Rome,” Turin used to boast, “but fall in Mirafiori.” That’s a nod to Fiat’s mega-factory, south of Turin’s baroque heart, which used to employ over 60,000 workers. The city’s working-class heritage has vanished in recent decades, and the traditional Left is, anyway, scorned by the squatters from “Aska”. These activists don’t aspire to change a government: because they don’t believe in traditional democracy or even the political spectrum as such. Instead, they are attempting a ground-level associationism that echoes some of their city’s most radical traditions.

***

Turin is disorientating. Its overlay of four bending rivers on perpendicular boulevards makes it feel like a snakes-and-ladders board. With the Superga Basilica on the far side of the River Po, and royal palaces all around — the city’s dukes became Italy’s kings — it’s a grandiose but slippery place. Politically, though, Turin’s Left-wing credentials have always been clear, not least given the legacy of wartime resistance. Over 1,000 local partisans are buried in the “Field of Glory” in the city’s monumental cemetery.

Today, though, anti-fascism lacks definition beyond the obvious, and is anyway politically unhelpful: you can’t build the future on a negation. Besides, the mushrooming of citizen assemblies throughout Turin, not least in Vanchiglia, suggests the city’s radicals are now less inspired by Gramsci than David Graeber. The American anthropologist at the forefront of the Occupy protests, Graeber envisaged “a new, open-ended, pragmatic anarchism”, and spoke of occupied buildings as “an exercise in the politics of mutual aid, solidarity and caring. A simple, unauthorized act of love.”

In many ways, Italy pioneered autonomous spaces both in theory and practice. The first CSAs — “centri sociali autogestiti” or “self-run social centers” — were political squats organized by far-Left radicals in the Seventies. But as well as social centers, they also experimented with “back-to-the-landism”. As anti-mafia prosecutors began confiscating mob buildings and farms, many radicals won tenders to set up rehabs and farm shops.

But if Italy has been at the forefront of anarchic congregationalism, it has also pioneered repression. In Genoa, in 2001, one man was killed and a school was raided by riot police looking for an illusory anarchist “black block”. Now, Meloni has increased the pace of the crackdown. In August 2025, in Milan, the Leoncavallo social center was evicted on its 50th anniversary. In Genoa the previous summer, the Burrida, a similar center named after a local seafood stew, was raided and evicted too.

Meloni may well be feeling pressure here from Roberto Vannacci, a former army general and looming threat on her own Right flank. Yet whatever the cause of her sweeps, it’s clear that the Askatasuna case is different, not least in how it’s long been at the frontline of protest far beyond Vanchiglia. Central to this activism is opposition to the so-called “TAV”. The Italian acronym for “high-speed train”, the project eventually promises a new rail link between Turin and Lyon. But with the Alps in the way, the pristine mountain valleys around Turin have been roiled by unrest, with pitched battles between “No-TAV” activists and riot police resulting in thousands of arrests.

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Perhaps because of its environmental tinge, the No-TAV movement has also gained supporters beyond the radical Left. One insider, Martina, describes it as “truly popular”, bringing together “mayors, Catholics and ordinary people”. In recent years, meanwhile, the war in Gaza has also fueled local outrage. The criminalization of protest — with certain words banned altogether — means that many Torinesi are furious. “What have we got to do?” asks an activist named Karim. “Wait until they’re all dead before we say it’s a genocide?”

Turin’s distinctive architecture provides gathering places for these varied if overlapping groups. Because of mass immigration from the South during Turin’s postwar boom, this most industrial of cities has dozens of so-called case di quartiere (“suburb halls”), as well as a gaggle of circoli operai (“workers’ clubs”) and case del popolo (“people’s houses”).

Askatasuna’s former building is only a two-minute walk from the banks of the Po. A vast, cherry-colored palazzo, squarely facing the buzzing traffic on the Corso Regina Margherita, it’s surrounded by schools. Given the intense police presence, that forces parents and children alike to cross through checkpoints every day. Yet the area behind the building is pedestrianized, and it’s here, flanked by walls decorated with portraits of anti-fascist martyrs, that Askatasuna still does its outreach.

Riccardo arrived in 2006, 10 years after Askatasuna was first occupied. “This is where I found hospitality,” he says. He’s at the end of an open-air “laboratorio” about reimagining education. Thirty people — from children to pensioners — have sat in a circle all day. The Carabinieri, Italy’s militarized national police force, rev their engines at both ends of the pedestrianized zone, making it hard to hear.

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At the end of the workshop, Riccardo describes Aska as a kind of “bring-us-your-needs” listening point, what he and his comrades call a sportello (“help desk”). People drop by with a problem, and the group helps to find a solution. A woman who can’t afford to fix a leak is put in touch with a pro-bono plumber. A victim of eviction is found emergency housing.

Gianluca Vitale, a lawyer who represents Mohamed Shainin and a number of No-TAV activists, says that marginalized suburbs like these — often with large immigrant populations — are being squeezed for reasons of “urban decorum”. Turin is gentrifying fast, largely thanks to tech start-ups and tourism, and pockets of “marginality”, paying low rent on precarious contracts, are easy targets for Fratelli d’Italia politicians urging “redevelopment”.

Throughout all this, the activists are passionately and ideologically opposed to involving the state in their affairs. “There’s a huge problem of drug-dealing and delinquency in our suburb,” admits one. “But we don’t call the police because I know my neighbor.”

***

At its postwar peak, Mirafiori covered three million square meters of Turin’s south side, or the equivalent of 420 football pitches. Inside, some 60,000 workers glued, soldered and riveted along almost 25 miles of assembly lines. What they made were cars: millions of them. Fiat was Italy’s most important factory, and the firm’s Agnelli owners were as rich as royalty. They also owned Juventus, the footballing jewel of Turin and Italy’s most famous team.

Born in 1943, in a small town west of Milan, Pietro Perotti left school at 11. He soon went to work in a baker’s, waking at 2am and working until midday. In 1969, not much taller than he was at 11, he moved to Mirafiori, working as a repair-man on the shop floor. One day, Perotti was moving between units when he saw Southern workers start an innovative form of protest. Some, he recalls, “picked up an empty oil can and started banging on it like a drum”. Others joined in, as word spread of an injury or complaint. These former sharecroppers, newly arrived from Sicily or Calabria and bewildered by Taylorist production lines, even used their tools to start “making trumpets and whistles and musical instruments”.

In all this, Perotti saw a recreation of the “saint’s festivals” in the South, “where the sacred and the profane coexist”. It was the turning point of his life, for he realized that the order of things had to be inverted through in-situ merriment. Perotti began drawing political graffiti in the bogs. His art — Marx hung on the factory frontispiece, Agnelli with his trousers down — was made on the shop floor.

But throughout the Seventies, the atmosphere darkened. During the Anni di Piombo — the “Years of Lead” of extremist terrorism of both Left and Right, with the Italian secret services squatting murkily in between — many idealistic workers were drawn towards bombings and executions. Perotti, for his part, joined both Lotta Continua and Avanguardia Operaia, two groups later accused of funneling activists towards violent struggle.

“Here, in Mirafiori, there were seven of us in a workers’ cell,” Perotti recalls. He was ordered to go into hiding but refused. Five of his band of seven ended up in the Red Brigades, the most infamous far-Left group of all, which in 1978 would kidnap and murder Aldo Moro, Italy’s former prime minister. As for Perotti, he stayed at Fiat until 1985, organizing invisible protests like the “bodywork jump” — when for every 10 cars that passed through the production line, one would be ignored.

Perhaps because he saw the bloody Seventies, Perotti is frustrated by the confrontational nature of the Askatasuna protests. He instead argues that agitation needs irony, and that on the 1 May event, the protestors “should have taken the mick”, finding new slogans of disdain and giving “biscuits to the children to offer the riot police”.

Certainly, Perotti is a wily manipulator of the contemporary political narrative. His foam puppets Trump and Meloni have often been published by newspapers, alongside the usual images of batons and tear gas. But he’s not the only one trying to channel rage in positive directions. Ortensia, part of the Comitato di Vanchiglia, another grassroots “committee”, is a psychologist who says that she and her colleagues try to find words “that land with everyone, that are gentle, and not use words like ‘battle’.”

But the mood is darkening. Ortensia describes “a polarization” in which neither police nor protesters can back down. A friend of hers, an Englishwoman, tells me that, a year ago, the Comitato was only talking about flower-beds with the elderly; now they’re in a militarized zone having their papers checked.

At sunset, I stop in a casa di quartiere in San Salvario, a district of long streets and dense postwar apartment blocks. The casa itself used to be the old public baths, and is now another edgy village hall, all street art, table tennis, noisy teenagers, and grandmothers with pushchairs. There I meet Nicoletta, Rosa and Giulia, part of an informal organization called Mamme in Piazza (“Mums in the Square”). These mothers — about a dozen in all — came together after seeing their children criminalized during the No-TAV protests. Their intent wasn’t to excuse crime, but to understand their kids and the anger animating them. “We don’t always share the practices of the struggle,” says Rosa, “but we defend the struggle against repression.”

These mothers talk a lot about anger: anger with their children, with their spouses, with themselves, with the state and its repression. But as usually happens when mothers take to the streets, they’re listened to because they have a language that, as Nicoletta puts it, “isn’t studied: it’s emotional, instinctive, naïve if you like about certain things”. The women have megaphoned outside the city’s prison, and have gone on countless marches with their banners. They perform regular balcony concerts. “We abstain from judgment,” says Rosa, “but we do see a loop. Exaggerated and frightening repression radicalizes you. It fucks you off.”

***

The fact that even these peaceful mothers are swearing shows the degree of anger in the city. There’s a deep grievance about economic malaise and judicial persecution, and Turin’s radicals have receded from any faith that mainstream politics can offer solutions. The last time that happened, 50 years ago, many frustrated revolutionaries turned into armed killers. No one expects the chaos of the Seventies to return — but the issue of violence is where the debate almost always ends up.

For its part, the Right accuses protestors of a variety of crimes, pointing to the storming of La Stampa‘s newspaper offices, and a January attack on a policeman, as evidence that their movement is invariably brutal. But if you put that to Askatasuna members, the reply inverts the accusation. “For us,” says Riccardo, “‘conflict’ is a key term. But today, there is a system that inflicts daily violence on all the citizens living in our communities.”

Meloni’s much-trumpeted “Pacchetto Sicurezza” is meant to sort it all out. This new security legislation, passed in February 2026, allows for the creation of “red zones” with militarized presences, and legitimizes pre-emptive arrest. Turin is key to this crusade. The first capital of a united Italy, and home to kings and Fiat, it can’t be seen to fail on something as simple as “public order”.

For Vitale, the lawyer, this is dangerous territory. “We’re talking,” he says, “about particularly sensitive topics and about the manifestation of a thought.” He maintains that “an opinion might not be endorsed [by you] but it’s an opinion. An opinion can’t be punished, it doesn’t represent a crime.” “It seems,” adds Vitale, “that in Turin we’re seeing a clash between rival visions of the state: either government legislation is submitted to what is legal according to the Constitution, or else the judiciary has to obey a legislative act.”

That clash between judiciary and executive is ancient, but for those in Vanchiglia itself, the situation feels bizarre. When you talk to mothers outside schools, dropping off their kids, they say they’re insulted by police. “You have the right to shut up,” one officer apparently told Ortensia.

On a street corner I bump into Alice Ravinale, a representative of the Left-Green Alliance in the regional parliament. “This is all just show”, she says, pointing at two riot vans with blue lights flashing. “Every day we ask ourselves what they’re scared of.” The answer, perhaps, is that they’re scared of people who refuse to acknowledge the need for them. That, as Perotti knows, is the best form of attack: not to take authority figures too seriously.

***

Additional reporting by Cecilia Rigattieri.

Today I find the idea of drinking cans of Polish lager to mark the passing of a former prime minister rather pitiable. From a solely political perspective, of course, it is counterproductive, for it tells the general public that the contemporary Left resembles little more than a misanthropic, detached subculture found mainly among the younger, over-educated denizens of gentrifying urban enclaves. But beyond any strategic consideration, it also signifies the strength of Thatcherism, against which my fellow Brixton revelers and I were pathetically impotent.

In contemporary discourse, Maggie’s enduring legacy is taken to be something called “neoliberalism”, a system of political economy apparently dominant for the last 40 years, and now undergoing a critical appraisal, not least because of certain Labour leadership hopefuls blaming it for British decline. In his slick Makerfield campaign video, Andy Burnham says he “saw what Thatcher’s government did to places like this”, citing “deindustrialization” and “the draining away of economic, social and political power” from provincial Britain. As Reform positions itself as the party of the Northern working class, in alliance with small traders and the Home Counties’ petit bourgeoisie, the Left delivers dire warnings of a Thatcherite revival — the better to hold onto those working-class Northerners. Farage and the Reform leadership clique are, after all, longtime disciples of the monetarist creed.

None of this is to say that my opinions on the Iron Lady have altered much. Even from a purely conservative standpoint, she caused a lot of harm to the country, much of it perhaps irreparable. Though her project invoked a parochial conservatism, it nevertheless radically altered our mode of production according to an imported set of continental (namely Austrian) ideologies. It projected a vision of British patriotism that sold off national assets by the pound, exposing a relatively coherent and regionally balanced national economy to all the volatilities of globalized, financialized capital and international trade flows, as well as leaving us dependent on the kindness of strangers and cap-in-hand foreign patronage. And while its libertarian streak was applied ruthlessly to “free market” actors, an authoritarian traditionalism and throwback Victorian morality dominated in the socio-cultural sphere and in law and order — as exemplified by the battle of Orgreave.

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Thatcher, then, is as significant a figure in discourse as she was when she died. In that sense, it is an auspicious time to be putting on a play about her. At Liverpool’s Everyman Theater, an adaptation of Hilary Mantel’s novella, The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher, is nearing the end of its first run. It’s a fitting venue: 13 years ago, as I drank cans of Tyskie in Brixton, groups of fellow Scousers spontaneously emptied out of the dockers’ pub The Casa just yards from the Everyman to mark Thatcher’s death. It’s a fitting time, too, as a famous son of Liverpool promises to reverse the legacy of the city’s — and the play’s — bête noire (Burnham the Scouser has spent around a decade posing as a Mancunian — a rare boon for someone born in the nether regions between the North West’s two great metropoles, with a shifting dual identity that mirrors his political oscillations).

Mantel’s original story attracted controversy at the time of its publication in 2014. For all the brouhaha, one would have expected it to be historical fiction in the philosophical tradition of Frantz Fanon — the French psychoanalyst whose writing on the efficacy and superior morality of Left-wing political violence is still a bookshelf stalwart of many a LARPing student revolutionary. Conservative MPs led the chorus of condemnation, but, in all likelihood, they had never read the text, despite its short length. For Mantel was no frothing-at-the-mouth extremist advocating the progressive or, like Fanon, mentally rehabilitative, qualities of revolutionary murder. Her epic on the French Revolution, A Place of Greater Safety, reveals no sympathies for the cold, utilitarian, socially cleansing properties of the guillotine. Instead it focuses on some of the human costs of political upheaval.

In that vein, the Scouse IRA sniper featured in The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher is fundamentally more melancholic than heroic. He seeks a personal catharsis in his act, as well as political change, but it’s highly questionable whether he will attain either. The play adaptation carries this mood forward — the assassin portrayed more as a sad, disturbed reject than a hardened, cocksure ideologue. The terrorist tricks his way into the home of a single widow, whose bedroom window happens to overlook a hospital entrance on the day of a prime ministerial visit. The widow tries gently to persuade him of the errors of his ways — and it is she who carries the audience’s favor in this two-person performance.

Nor is Mantel’s choice of terrorist surprising. Such is the hold of the Thatcherite decade over the collective Liverpudlian imagination that local politicians still frequently invoke the Toxteth riots along with Maggie’s supposed plans for Merseyside’s “managed decline”. It was, in fact, her chancellor Geoffrey Howe who suggested the policy of allowing a city-wide gradual atrophy, rather than attempting to guide water up a hill in what was known as “the Bermuda Triangle of British capitalism”. Eventually, Howe’s plan was rejected in favor of a Heseltine-branded plan of city-center-focused urban regeneration. But since then, the “managed decline” epithet has stuck — a Scouser never forgets, of course.

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The cultural influence of the era is still broad. The industrial wastelands and mass unemployment portrayed in the Liverpool-based TV series the Boys from the Blackstuff was apparently what inspired Burnham to go into politics by joining the Labour Party aged 14. It is as if our local political elites (all Labour, still, for now) are afflicted by a collective, 40-year hangover induced by the transition from a bustling, Tory-voting, mercantile port (the “Second City of Empire”) into a belligerent poster child of urban decay (“Smack City”). Though admittedly the anti-Thatcher finger-pointing might also help redirect attention from the likes of “Chippy tits”, a recent mayor who awaits trial over charges of bribery and conspiracy to commit misconduct in public office. Many in the audience of The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher will no doubt hope that Makerfield’s Labour populist can prove the final antidote — the acetaminophen and bacon sandwich — to cure the lasting Thatcherite headache.

The rich nuance of the play is undermined by the limited-edition tote bags proclaiming “REJOICE! REJOICE!” on sale behind the theater bar. They will have sold well. But how much can we still claim to live in Thatcher’s world when the tax burden is at a 70-year high? Where is the Thatcherite free market when a bureaucratic welfare state takes ever-increasing tax revenues from productive labor and investment, redirecting it toward the ever-expanding army of the indigent and indolent? Certainly, few business owners will see in today’s stagnant Britain a portrait of laissez-faire nightwatchman governance.

Two political tribes offer opposed diagnoses for the UK’s dismal situation, with each identifying different starting points for the Fall. For the Burnhamite Left, the decline began in 1979, when Thatcher came to power. For the Right, decline began in 1997, on Blair’s arrival. The Right posits that the source of our ills is the lingering effects of too-much-state, of an overbearing, Cool Britannia lanyard socialism. This is a story of radical constitutional renewal and the empowerment of quangos, arms-length bodies, international organizations and the judiciary at the expense of executive ministerial authority and the Crown-in-Parliament. The result is an omnipotent regulatory deep state that hampers individual initiative and state capacity alike.

But what we’re really seeing is a grotesque blend of the worst of Thatcherism with the worst of Blairism: bad aspects of “neoliberalism” coexisting with bad aspects of bureaucratic statism. The result combines top-down statist nitpicking with Thatcherite ownership models; corporate, Whitehall and town hall management structures amalgamating into a public-private-partnership blob, administered and lobbied by armies of LinkedIn-posting hangers-on. Blairism is, after all, a development of Thatcherism, as Thatcher herself recognized when she described New Labour as her greatest achievement.

The consequences of this Frankenstein blend are clear to see. Utilities, critical industries and infrastructure are in the hands of privateers, many of them foreign. Collective bargaining outside the public sector is virtually non-existent, contributing in no small part to a 20-year stagnation in real wages. We suffer from an over-reliance on financial, corporate, and legal services, low levels of public and private investment, and an extremely open, low-wage, low-productivity economy addicted to imported cheap labor and foreign direct investment. But we’ve matched that with a vetocracy that stymies development; with rule-by-NIMBY; with a New Labour-style dispersal of executive power across bureaucracies and professional bodies; and with often excessive meddling in the private sector. Our emasculated politicians are engaging in after-the-fact distributionism, doling out the proceeds of an old, broken growth model without knowing how to kickstart a new one. This is the legacy of Blair: a legalistic, top-down progressivism rather than anything resembling the very British socialism which Thatcher set out to destroy.

It was the One Nation Tory Ian Gilmour who held that Thatcherism had more in common with the free-trading Gladstonian Whigs than with the patrician tendency of his own party. No doubt Britain’s postwar social democracy was in a sorry state by the Seventies, requiring fundamental reform, not least a compromise with the realities of profit and loss. But the grocer’s daughter, steeped in a low-church Methodist ethos, took a polity rooted in the communitarian institutions of mass democracy, million-member political parties, the trade unions, churches, industrial mass production and security in work, housing and therefore family life, and replaced it with a rugged, dog-eat-dog, atomized individualism.

In trying to alter what she called “the object” of man’s soul through “the method” of rigid economism, she initially attempted to model Britain on her native Grantham — a staid Lincolnshire market town full of people who embodied the sturdy, middle-English values of thrift, self-reliance, respectability and quiet, Christian philanthropy. Instead we got the economy of the spiv, the City slicker, the consultant, the agency, with every job outsourced, every project put out to tender, a vast network of email-senders and middle managers vying for a procurement contract, a teat on the underbelly of our swollen PLC state.

Thatcherism’s pivot towards the great circuit of Mammon invited the criticism of even the conservative philosophers, such as Roger Scruton, for whom “the emancipation of the market from the constraints of small communities, territorial loyalty and the jurisdiction of the nation state” had more than an air of deracinated cosmopolitan liberalism.

After watching The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher, I thought back to 2013, getting too drunk on Tyskie. The futility is obvious now: we’ve had Corbynism, Brexit and much else besides, but none has brought us true deliverance, and the debate on Thatcherism has never been settled, instead congealing into two different tribal mythologies. The Left hope that a charismatic mayor with a warm smile will exorcise Thatcher’s ghost, and with it that of her New Labour successors, while the Reformist Right prays that it will one day complete her unfinished revolution.

Any genuine savior, Burnham or otherwise, will have to topple the mongrel system we currently inhabit, which displays neither the features of efficient entrepreneurialism nor those of state competence and capacity. We have neither the comforts of collectivism nor the dynamism of the market, neither the cradle-to-grave carer nor the sovereign individual. Mantel understood this better than most; her assassin seeks a personal and political redemption through violence, but the lead man can’t find salvation by killing what has already metastasized. There are no easy escape routes. At least in 2013, drunk on cheap lager and high off my own supply, I knew who the enemy was.

Zarah Sultana, co-founder alongside Jeremy Corbyn of Your Party, seems to have taken this history to heart. A “fascist” threat, she says, is “growling at the door”. But the real venom is reserved for enemies and rivals on the Left, with the Green Party coming in for particular ire. The traditional standard-bearers for environmental politics are not sufficiently “anti-Zionist”, says the Coventry South MP: they support boycotts and sanctions against Israel, but not, as Sultana does, a complete cut of diplomatic ties. What’s more, she adds, they’re not a “class-based” socialist party.

It’s difficult to know whether Sultana is aware that her own “class base” is an incredibly niche subset of post-graduate activists, plus an ageing cohort of hard-Left retirees who still define their politics according to categories dreamt up in Bolshevik Russia around the death of Lenin. Indeed, to bolster her already-weak position in a party struggling even before its founding conference plumps on a name, Sultana is actively courting the extremities of British Trotskyism, adopting a series of maximalist positions couched in Marxian language. Forget Israel — we should also leave Nato. Nor is nationalising a few industries enough; true socialism would require “the fucking lot”, the whole “means of production” tout court. Sultana has also emphasised her rhetorical commitment to a “member-led democracy”, which would allow all manner of malcontents to exercise their influence over Your Party. Despite the ultra-democratic promises to leave policy to members, she has been content to pre-define Your Party’s politics on the hoof, recently chucking “climate reparations” for Jamaica into the mix. This, she contends, is just the start of a “10, 20, 30-year project” to “run government”.

As a result of these statements, a coterie of bizarre political groupings has flocked to Sultana’s embattled wing of Your Party: the Socialist Worker Party; the Socialist Party; the Revolutionary Communist Party; the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty; and Revolutionary Socialism in the 21st Century (rs21). Each presents their own idiosyncratic and fantastical vision of leading a proletarian revolution. This is all while a real revolution of the actually-existing working class takes place in provincial, post-industrial Britain, where “C2DE” voters flock to Nigel Farage. In this context, the inter-party warfare that has broken out on the Left, and indeed the conflicts inside Your Party between Corbyn and Sultana, feel like fiddling while progressive Britain burns.

Sultana entered parliament at the 2019 election, at the age of 26, and was immediately spoken of as a future standard bearer of the Left, just as Corbyn, John McDonnell and Diane Abbott approached their twilight years. She has been encouraged in this view by her husband, Craig Lloyd, a former trade-union official who, according to several sources I spoke to, has taken to telling anyone who’ll listen that he’ll eventually become general secretary of Your Party, storming the complacent establishment alongside his co-leader wife. This is in spite of Lloyd having no senior management experience in any of his previous professional positions. No matter: the pair are modelling themselves as the Left’s new power couple — British socialism’s answer to the Clintons.

After Corbynism as an organised political force was swept away by Boris Johnson’s brief experiment with Brexity, big-tent Tory populism, the recriminations began almost immediately, with the defeated Left soon resembling rats in a sack. Within the simple “Corbynite” masthead sat a messy mixture of competing ideological strands: old-school trade unionists grappled for dominance with the traditional hard-Left, while a younger crowd of Millennial socialists, steeped in the language of online progressivism, attempted to build something they called a “social movement” — pointedly not a traditional political party — from below. Sultana, a young, dynamic, non-white woman, exhibiting all the radical, aggressive certainty of any good student union-dweller, was perhaps the best-placed talisman of that latter tendency. Rather than the antiquated politics of 20th-century socialism, all brass bands and closed factories, this youthful contingent would push for Green New Deals, Universal Basic Income, four-day weeks and “fully-automated luxury communism”.

In the early 2020s, that crowd became synonymous with the increasingly dogmatic and pernickety assertions of identity politics and cancel culture, earning them a reputation for political pedantry and humourlessness on an epic scale. A case in point is Sultana’s broadsides against a cartoonist for depicting her on a box of raisins (the same newspaper spent years depicting David Cameron as a human condom and George Osborne as his pliant gimp).

This particular brand of progressivism was a departure from the Old Left’s, but, under Labour’s ossified structures, a semblance of unity between the more orthodox and more experimental groupings was possible. Now that these structures have gone, Corbyn himself has demonstrated neither the communicative abilities nor the political dexterity to join these competing factions together.

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Keir Starmer’s authoritarian approach to party management has therefore birthed a monster, his wave of suspensions and expulsions repeatedly splitting Labour’s formerly broad church. Like a North London Stalin, he has enforced an iron discipline on the emasculated Corbynite wing of the Parliamentary Labour Party, removing the whip for the most minor of infractions. When it became clear that Sultana was unlikely to be readmitted after her suspension for voting against the two-child benefit cap, rumours of the founding of an alternative picked up pace. For readers unfamiliar with Sultana’s role in Your Party’s chaotic foundation, and indeed with the surreal, schismatic culture of the British hard-Left in general, the story of internecine factionalism hits first as tragedy then as farce.

In an attempt to bounce the perennially dithering Corbyn into announcing her in a leadership role, Sultana announced the party’s launch without the agreement of her fellow organisers. She then did something similar for Your Party’s membership portal. This second action triggered civil war within Your Party, as well as legal squabbling over the future of the substantial monies collected on Sultana’s watch. A truce, of sorts, has now been tentatively agreed.

Either way, Your Party’s descent into Leftist self-parody has destroyed Sultana’s reputation, confirming her as a serious liability. The general public sees Your Party as po-faced, hectoring, lacking in self-awareness and obsessed with arcane minutiae; Sultana certainly seems determined to prove them right. And yet despite repeated setbacks, she retains the confident air of someone convinced that her substantial social-media following, shadowed by that growing Trotskyist fan club, will be enough to retain the backing of comrades eyeing Zack Polanski’s Greens with envy.

There’s an extent to which our cynical, fractious politics might suit the abrasive invective of tubthumpers like Sultana. But that righteous anger needs to be accompanied by a positive emollience, a self-deprecation, a relatability — none of which are present in the beleaguered parliamentarian. There’s an ironic air to a figure like Lee Anderson or even Farage himself. Everything is said with a nudge and a wink; they’re their own best satirists, inviting you to laugh alongside them. In contrast, the Left’s default tone is bitter rage and oblique, holier-than-thou screeds against anyone and everyone. With honourable expectations, they exude ideological zealotry.

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“The revolution”, said a condemned Georges Danton in revolutionary France, will “like Saturn, devour its children”. And so it goes again. Sultana will likely lose Your Party’s ongoing factional struggle — unlike Corbyn, she lacks a solid base in her constituency, and unlike the pro-Gaza independents, she lacks the grassroots voter networks, built through local mosques and community groups, that propelled four MPs to the Commons last year. Her TikTok game won’t be enough to defeat the phalanx of battle-hardened, former trade-union organisers stacked up behind her prime rival.

If she is ousted from the upper echelons of Your Party’s structures, Sultana might be tempted to try her luck with the Greens. But would Polanski ever give prominence to someone who has demonstrated only an aptitude for scorched-earth politics, and who has shown repeatedly that being queen of the Leftist graveyard will always take precedence over the collective reputation of the labour movement? Indeed if Sultana’s uncompromising approach to politics has to an extent proved useful in making a name for herself — notwithstanding her attacks against her own colleagues for their views on transgenderism — it’s increasingly clear that it’s little help when it comes to the painstaking but necessary work of coalition-building. Even critics who may otherwise back Sultana, but increasingly feel that broad Left unity is required to combat Reform, are condemned for “middle-class entitlement” and using “angry/irrational brown woman tropes”.

When the Comintern eventually abandoned their “class-against-class” line in 1933, they performed a speedy about-turn, calling for “Popular Fronts” with liberals and social democrats to defeat fascism. Hitler had assumed the Chancellery. Rearmament was underway. It was too late. The damage had been done by years of over-enthusiastic sectarianism. Despite Sultana’s protestations, Reform are not a “fascist” threat. But the fragmentation on a Left obliviously revelling in its own demise will presage Britain’s own shift to the Right. As ever, history repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce.

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”.

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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.

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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.

That is owing to Starmer’s chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney. Once, McSweeney was called a “Blairite”: it was he, after all, who had steered Liz Kendall’s ill-fated 2015 attempt at a New Labour restoration. He remains aligned with Kendall; both have spent the last week under extreme pressure from backbenchers over the welfare reform bill. He has however found that the Blue Labour outfit, at least as far as the rhetoric is concerned, fits him better than the Blairite one: Alasdair MacIntyre beats Alastair Campbell. Maurice Glasman has described him as “one of ours”.

The outfit does have the tactical advantage of being amorphous, of revelling in “the politics of paradox”. It is rhetoric as much as ideology. Sometimes it presents itself merely as a strategy for winning back the “Red Wall”; other times it is a fully-fledged philosophy, which promises to defend the dignity of man against commodification and atomization, those wretched hallmarks of modernity. Blue Labour is, broadly speaking, anti-woke, anti-euthanasia, anti-austerity; it is pro-union, pro-nationalization, pro-“Levelling Up”. Its adherents can usually be spotted by their watchwords: “work”, “community”, “tradition”, “faith”, “flag”, “family”. If these sound ubiquitous and banal, that’s partly the point.

It is best understood as the peculiarly British variant of “postliberalism”. American postliberalism tends to carry a reactionary flavor. Many of its adherents are Roman Catholics, more often by conversion than birth, aiming more or less openly at Catholic integralism. There is a Right-wing postliberalism in Britain, too, represented in Parliament by the Conservative MPs Nick Timothy and Danny Kruger. But in Britain’s postliberal scene the Left has the upper hand. The academic Adrian Pabst, who co-edited one of the “Blue Labour” books, wrote the book on postliberalism in 2021; and John Gray can usually be found banging the drum in the Left-wing New Statesman. Britain exported its finest postliberal, Alasdair MacIntyre, to the United States; but although he swam the Tiber, as American postliberals are wont to do, his thought remained much infused by his earlier dabblings in Marxism.

When the British postliberals cast around for an illustrious, indigenous pedigree, they find one on the Left, inhaling the fumes of an old, patriotic socialism. Unlike in America, Catholics do not hold a monopoly on postliberalism in Britain: there is a strong Dissenting element here. The British postliberals can take their cues from R.H. Tawney’s Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (1926), the most widely read history book in interwar Britain. They can conscript to their squadrons the “guild socialism” of G.D.H. Cole, the Romanticism of William Morris, even the half-crazed rantings of Thomas Carlyle. They can tap into the Englishman’s radical historical memory: Blue Labour is surely the only political force in modern Britain which trades seriously in the language of the “ancient constitution” and the “Norman Yoke”. In its mixture of high-minded intellectualism and the robust common sense of the working man, Blue Labour calls forth the proud tradition of working-class autodidacticism, now largely lost.

Related to all this is the Blue Labour version of Labour Party history, which rejects any notion that the Labour Party was the inheritor of 19th-century Liberalism. This is a heresy which Glasman ascribes to Anthony Crosland — a pernicious turn in Labour’s sense of itself, laying down the foundations for its Blairite hijacking and subversion. No matter that Keir Hardie (for example) started life as a Gladstonian Liberal: Blue Labour is true Labour, promising salvation after prolonged apostasy.

As Blue Labour and postliberalism have risen in recent years, so too has a standard line of attack. Its locus classicus is a brilliant 2023 article by one J. Sorel. It argues, in effect, that the postliberals have already won: that Britain, at least since 1997, has been dominated by the “community” at the expense of the “individual”. Sorel’s is a fair objection. After all, lockdown was sold to a compliant public precisely by making reference to “social bonds”, “responsibilities”, and “community”. Markets were shut down for “the common good”: behold the postliberals’ ultimate victory.

Already in 2022 Glasman was writing about the lockdown with a certain nostalgia. Furlough gave a “substantive role” to the state “in support of the workers”, as he had always dreamed of. The pandemic reminded us all of the quiet dignity of labour: “Pakistani nurses, Nigerian cleaners, Portuguese carers and Bolton lorry drivers all risk their lives to keep things going.” The pandemic focused “the importance of place, of neighbours, of mutual aid and community”.

The Blue Labour sense of being stalked by the phantom of “individualism”, contrary to so much recent experience, quite clearly bears the imprint of the Eighties. For postliberalism is every bit as much an ideology of the Eighties as, say, Thatcherism. It owes much to the critique of Thatcher by the Tory Wets, and to a widespread disgust at the excesses of capitalism as represented by crude caricatures of “neoliberalism”, such as “Loadsamoney” and Gordon Gekko. Britain’s Left-wing postliberalism then formed part of a wider reaction against the liberalism that emerged triumphant out of the Cold War: Fukuyama’s “The End of History?”, so often made to stand for this moment’s hubris, appears as the punching-bag in every book in the postliberal canon.

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While the wildest dreams of the liberals were being realized, the British postliberals had all their hopes betrayed. Glasman’s doctoral thesis, co-supervised by John Gray, praised the West German social market, and asked why other countries had not implemented its model. Poland might have; the labor movement Solidarnosc had inclined in that direction under communism. But once communism fell, once Solidarnosc had attained power, it succumbed immediately, on Glasman’s telling, to the forces of Western capital. The intervention of Western “free-market fanatics” was to blame; and those same fanatics were responsible for much “unnecessary suffering” in Britain, too.

The doyen of the Polish economists, Tadeusz Kowalik, wrote a rejoinder in the New Left Review, criticizing Glasman for overplaying the extent of “individualism” in Nineties Poland. Glasman’s portrayal of Poland’s “libertarian atomisation” bore no resemblance to reality. Rent and heating were still subsidized; “there is no basis to Glasman’s later statement that there has been ‘a virtual abolition of welfare’”.

These shortcomings could be described as an early instance of the “Blue Labour fallacy”: the assumption that all social ills owe their existence to the excesses of “liberal individualism”. A good example of it can be found when, while dipping his toe into Blue Labour in 2015, David Lammy described the 2011 riots as “the product of a ‘me-first’, ‘take-what-you-can’ culture” — individualism run amok. Gangs are communities of a sort, so their part in the lawlessness had to be brushed aside.

There is, as Sorel observed, also a distinctive postliberal style, characterized by new terms for the various dichotomies and cleavages of modern society. Take David Goodhart’s “Somewheres and Anywheres”, or Danny Kruger’s lesser-known “The Order and the Idea”. Glasman’s 2022 book has “Mercurians” and “Apollonians”, which map more or less onto the Goodhart formula. Mercury is the Anywhere god, the god of commerce and capital and all those who do not till the land. Apollo is the Somewhere god, the god of (to use a postliberal cliché) that sense of place. When Glasman reached for this terminology, as his footnotes make plain, he was — quite strikingly — referring to Yuri Slezkine’s ingenious and controversial book, The Jewish Century (2004).

In that book, Slezkine argued that, in medieval and early-modern Europe, the Jews were “Mercurians” par excellence, “service nomads” who filled a social and economic niche. But Mercury fast became the presiding god of all modernity: “Modernization is about everyone becoming urban, mobile, literate, articulate… modernization, in other words, is about everyone becoming Jewish.” Zionism was one response to this. Whereas America, the destination of many European Jews, stood for “unabashed Mercurianism, nontribal statehood, and the supreme sovereignty of capitalism”, the Zionist project stood for “unrelenting Apollonianism”. It promised to return “the world’s most proficient service nomads” to the land; to transform Mercurians into Apollonians, or “rootless cosmopolitans” into hardened sabras.

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Israel is now the world’s finest exemplar of the “Apollonian” postliberal state: it places enormous obligations on the shoulders of its citizens (such as military service); it sanctifies community and family life; it is robustly “civic-nationalist”; and it reaps the rewards, as postliberals would have it, in its high fertility rate and few deaths of despair. It can draw on a proud socialist, communitarian heritage, too, with the kibbutz standing in for the British cooperative. When Glasman decided to take his signal inspiration from Slezkine — rather than falling back on Goodhart’s terminology, as he might have done — he was setting out what might be described as a kind of Anglo-Zionism. Labour, in his telling, has too often exalted the Mercurian way of life over the Apollonian; Britain today, thanks to the depredations of liberalism and capitalism, is too Mercurian. To restore Labour to the Apollonians, to Make Britain Apollonian Again, is the central mission of the Blue Labour project. It is, much as Zionism was for the Jewish diaspora in the 20th century, a matter of restoring to an emasculated nation its manhood.

This last metaphor ought to be taken seriously. In an earlier outing of Blue Labour ideas, in the aftermath of New Labour’s downfall in 2010, Glasman made essentially the same point, though with a more familiar dichotomy than “Apollonian vs Mercurian”. Labour then, in Glasman’s analogy, was a strained marriage between a university-educated, progressive Mum and a salt-of-the-earth, traditionalist Dad. The story of the Labour Party was the story of Mum taking over; under Blair and Brown, “the Dad might as well have left home”. One Labour MP, Helen Goodman, was not pleased with the gender politics at play: “it looks more like something suitable for the psychotherapist’s couch than a political tract.” Perhaps this is why Glasman chose to abandon it for “Mercurian” and “Apollonian”.

Blue Labour prides itself on its sense for British history, but here it is selective and superficial. It privileges the rural over the urban, the agrarian over the commercial, the “Apollonian” over the “Mercurian”. Its national feeling tends towards the twee parochialism of Morris dancers and Maypoles. It abhors aspects of our history for which many feel some affection: the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, the tradition of enterprise and free trade. “Commerce” means at least as much in Britain as “community”. In excoriating the vice of “individualism”, Blue Labour dispenses with one of the most precious parts of Britain’s cultural inheritance. Blue Labour dislikes “modernity”, but Britain fared rather well in modernity; modernity is in a sense our creation. A certain “rootlessness”, a devotion to Mercury, is an inevitable characteristic among a people with a diaspora as large as ours. One might go so far as to say that Britain — more like America than Israel — is a Mercurian nation.

But do the British people yearn for more social obligations? After the lockdown they might have had their fill. Do they want higher taxes, as the ideal Blue Labour programme would likely entail? It’s unlikely; the tax burden is already the highest it’s been since the Second World War. Do they want more power in the hands of “local communities”? Perhaps — though they are hardly impressed by devolution in its current form, and might prefer a centralized state which can actually do things. Are they much roused by talk of Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, and Rerum novarum? Even the heartiest Blue Labourite will surely admit that they are not. Blue Labour, in short, is based on a series of misapprehensions about the country it wishes to govern and reform. Britannia is not whispering about “the common good” and “that sense of place”; instead she shouts four rather familiar words, “lower taxation, lower immigration”. The future now belongs to whoever listens.

All the more shocking, then, to hear the allegations of sexual misconduct levelled against him in recent months. And how strange the silence that they were met with. Until now, that is. 

In a six-part podcast series by Tortoise Media, hosted by Rachel Johnson and Paul Caruana Galizia, a succession of women air allegations of sexual impropriety or abuse against Gaiman, author of Good Omens and The Sandman series. They raise serious questions about consent within relationships that were, at best, highly asymmetrical. Writer and broadcaster Julia Hobsbawm, for example, says Gaiman “jumped on her… out of the blue” in an “aggressive, unwanted” pass in London in 1986, when she was 22. Another, “K”, claims she and Gaiman began a romantic relationship in 2003, when she was 20 and he was in his mid-40s. She alleges she was subjected to rough and painful sex “she neither wanted nor enjoyed.” In 2007, she claims he performed non-consensual penetrative intercourse on her after she had repeatedly asked him not to. 

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Scarlett, another accuser, claims Gaiman assaulted her in a bath at his New Zealand home, hours after they had first met. He was 61, she a 22-year-old nanny. Gaiman said that they “cuddled” and “made out” in the bath — and that the encounter was consensual. But Scarlett claims that Gaiman also assaulted her with “rough and degrading penetrative sexual acts” she hadn’t agreed to. When Scarlett attempted suicide, Gaiman’s response was to say that he was also suicidal. In May 2022, after her employment with the author had ceased, Scarlett signed an NDA with Gaiman which was backdated to her first day of work.

When I spoke to Scarlett last week, she told me how it felt impossible to not be impressed by Gaiman’s fame and status, while at the same time not feeling at all sexually attracted or drawn to him. “I’ve never read any of his books,” Scarlett tells me. “He just talked about himself all the time.”

For Scarlett, “Gaiman’s superfans somehow seem to think that they have personally been betrayed by the allegations because they see him as sharing their own tick-box ‘progressive’ values,” she told me. “It’s beyond belief for me that people just aren’t acknowledging that a man in his Sixties has admitted that he got into the bath with his 23-year-old employee within the first few hours that they met.”

Scarlett, as with the other women who have come forward, was vulnerable at the time she met Gaiman, and, as she describes it, “desperate for love”. “Pretending to myself I had fallen for him was a way to kind of trick myself to think that I had not been sexually exploited,” she said. 

Given the seriousness of the allegations made against such a famous author, you might have expected the Tortoise podcast to have been met with righteous anger. And it was. But not the sort that you might think. Despite the careful reporting — which includes regular reminders that Gaiman denies any wrongdoing whatsoever — many of his fans have expressed their outrage at the podcast, claiming that Johnson is a “Right-wing Terf” with an axe to grind. The podcast, they say, is an attempt by anti-trans activists to smear him. As Rachel Johnson tells me, “The trans activist lefties discrediting the podcast as ‘terf’ made by the sister of Boris is purest misogyny. It’s meticulously researched and it’s fair to a fault.”

Perhaps his impeccable Left liberal feminist credentials have confused people. A whole book has been written about how women-friendly Gaiman’s work is: Feminism in the Worlds of Neil Gaiman: Essays on the Comics, Poetry and Prose. The podcast also found two female advocates. One says she’s known Gaiman for 12 years, and that while she’s alive to his faults, doesn’t believe him capable of sexual misconduct. She says she would “go to the wall for him on this” and be “stunned if the allegations were true”. Yet the same friend also said that Gaiman has autism, suggesting that perhaps “some of his mistakes” may be explained by its contribution to what she called his “naivety”. 

That she talks about “mistakes” nods, perhaps, to the fact that these women were all in consensual relationships with Gaiman. But to claim that he was “naive” is to disregard the fact that the vast amount of sexual abuse takes place within consensual relationships. I have heard women who should know better describe the allegations against Gaiman as “not really abuse” because there was no force involved, and the women did engage in certain activity willingly. But each of the women who has come forward about Gaiman described instances of coercive control.

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At least one of the women that have made allegations against Gaiman has approached the police — but with limited success. In October 2022, Scarlett filed a complaint with New Zealand police. In response, Gaiman has claimed the police have not taken him up on his offer to assist the investigation, claiming this showed the complaint’s lack of substance. But officers said they had made a “number of attempts to speak to key people as part of this investigation and those efforts remain ongoing”.

How did the big corporations who profit from Gaiman’s work respond? While Disney and Netflix quietly paused their Gaiman adaptations, it took Amazon until last week to announce that filming of the final series of Good Omens had been halted due to the allegations. “I may be cynical,” Scarlett told me, “but I don’t imagine that Amazon or Disney have paused production because they altruistically care about allegations of abuse. Amazon and Disney have likely suspended production because they are a business, and the only thing that drives a business is cost. This is about cash and not care.”

As ever with allegations of a sexual nature, we have a “he said, she said” situation, complicated by highly asymmetric nature of the relationships, the vulnerability of the women and his claims of their “false memory syndrome”. And unless — or until — there is a criminal trial, there will be no resolution. 

As for Gaiman, he has said very little, only issuing a statement denying the allegations. The storyteller has fallen unusually silent. 

“Mr Biden’s here,” his friends yell across the room when Herman walks in. He’s the only self-proclaimed Democrat who’s a regular at the western Pennsylvania club, and they make sure everyone knows it. Luckily, Herman is about the most likeable person you could ever meet, and he’s more than capable of holding his own, including by giving his friends their own set of nicknames.

In industrial or ex-industrial towns and their surrounds in the Midwest, union retirees such as Herman are more likely today to vote Democrat than their younger, working counterparts. And even though they don’t stand to gain much any longer, they’re still likely to believe that unions are important for society. Despite long-standing endorsements of Democrats by union executives in Washington, D.C., today’s rank-and-file members aren’t convinced. Many view the Democratic Party as out of step with their way of life and reflective only of the urban, coastal elite.

But how did unions cultivate such loyalty among members, and what can Democrats learn from it? The answer, I suspect, lies in understanding that how we vote is based on a lot more than a candidate’s stance on a particular issue. More often than not, the powerful nature of community attachments comes into play.

Perhaps predictably, then, the presidential tickets are fighting desperately to court the votes of union families in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan. But while union presidents were primetime speakers at both conventions, the parties’ strategies have differed markedly. On one side, the Harris-Walz ticket is playing up its commitment to unions and the right to organise, distributing “Union Yes!” signs to audience members at the Democratic National Convention. The Trump-Vance ticket, in contrast, is stressing the failed free-trade policies of previous administrations and proposing protectionist policies toward domestic industry, such as a 60% tariff on goods imported from China.

Who will prove the more convincing? Union voters have a high likelihood of showing up to the polls, but it’s unclear who they’ll favour and by how much. Aggregate exit polling data shows that Joe Biden ran away with the union vote in 2020, with 56% to Donald Trump’s 40%. But aggregate exit polling data is misleading. Most union members today live in solidly Democratic states. Those are not the union voters who could decide the 2024 presidential election. Rather, the union population being sought by Harris and Trump are workers, retirees, and families in industrial or building trade unions in those key Rust Belt states.

It’s hard to overstate how much of a departure from mid-20th-century union loyalty it is that Trump has a very good chance of winning the vote among these union members. Although it may seem unimaginable today, these voters — prototypically white men without college degrees who worked in the trades or heavy industry in the Midwest — used to be a reliably Democratic constituency. As one union retiree told me, most blue-collar workers in the mid-20th century “figured there wasn’t a Republican in the world who took care of the working guy”.

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But things have changed. In the employee parking lots of unionised western Pennsylvania steel mills, the most frequent type of bumper sticker relates to guns. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Trump stickers abound as well. The licence plates of the cars in the employee parking lots are not only from Pennsylvania but also from West Virginia and Ohio. In contrast to the mid-20th century, when workers lived around the mill in the same several communities, these workers came from all over the region.

At the executive level, union loyalty to the Democratic Party is largely intact, despite leadership being aware of the chasm between them and the workers. At election season, union leadership sends members pamphlets and candidate information, and many unions make endorsements. But union members have never liked being told by the leadership how to vote. Polling data from 1955 show that, even back then, the majority of United Steelworkers (USW) members didn’t think their union should even be making endorsements. And yet the vast majority of those members voted in line with the union’s endorsements for Democrats.

In the days of the solidly blue union vote, workers viewed being a member as a core piece of their identity. Just as people display allegiances to sports teams by wearing jerseys and caps, they often had rings or pins. One retiree I spoke with, for example, proudly wears a ring with the engraving “USW Retiree” and the union’s logo. And if you go digging through the bins of small metal items at antique stores in the Rust Belt, you’re likely to find some United Mineworker rings or United Autoworker pins.

Unions in the mid-20th century were deeply embedded into family and community life. Brick-and-mortar union halls were used for more than just union meetings: they hosted banquets and dances, Christmas parties and Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. Beyond the physical halls, local unions hosted sports leagues for members, provided community services, and circulated information via newsletters to members and their families about local and national happenings. Unions were woven into the community fabric and being a “union family” had a great deal of personal importance.

Back then, local unions were much more than collective bargaining units or political action groups, and that’s why they had so much power. We don’t vote based on purely economic metrics or a dispassionate calculus of policy pros and cons. If that were the case, most college-educated people would be irrational actors — they’re less likely to use government-provided social services and more likely to pay higher tax rates. We vote based on who we are. Being a union man or union family — or even living in a union town — meant being part of a shared identity, and that shared identity was inextricably connected to voting Democrat.

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When people receive political cues, we make both conscious and subconscious decisions about what to filter out and what to hold onto. Our subconscious decisions about what to hold onto are informed, in part, by our social identities. For example, a union steelworker voting for Trump may cite the fact that Trump signed an executive order to protect the domestic steel industry by putting tariffs on steel imports. It is simultaneously true, however, that as president, Trump made it easier to fire striking workers and harder to organise. What made that worker overlook the anti-union actions that Trump took as president? Perhaps because that worker does not have a strong stake in his union. I would venture to guess that if that worker’s friends were all fellow union members, and if they had a union hall that they frequented every so often for parties and gatherings, and the union sponsored his son’s Little League team, the answer might be different.

Because multiple messages can be true, it’s a matter of which messages are being listened to. What we spend our time on, the places we spend our time in, and the people we spend time with are how we subconsciously prioritise information we receive. Unions used to be, and to a lesser degree still are, central places where people would get messages from trusted sources — not necessarily from union executives in Washington, D.C., but from fellow workers and their families. The bumper stickers in the union parking lots indicate that, today, this process of prioritisation no longer favours unions.

Gun clubs, like the one that Herman frequents, aren’t new in western Pennsylvania. But their function as community gathering spaces has increased in importance as other institutional spaces have shrivelled. Just as union halls used to be built in part to be social spaces, so too are gun clubs. Today, they are some of the most vibrant civic associations in smaller towns and cities in western Pennsylvania and other electorally important regions of the Midwest.

Consolidated churches and megachurches are other civic associations that are thriving in these areas. One union retiree told me that her grandson is deeply involved in his megachurch. “It’s like a choose-your-own-adventure,” she said. “They have groups for everything. You like rock music? There’s a group for that. Punk music? A group for that.” The backdrop of this community atmosphere, she said, is an intense form of traditionalism and conservatism — “anti-abortion and stuff like that, for sure”.

Unions used to balance out some of the conservative forces at play in predominantly white, Christian regions of the industrial Midwest. A former mine inspector even told me a story about how a United Mineworker (UMWA) member joked to him that he didn’t join the Ku Klux Klan because he was a UMWA member — “and we believe in equality and all that”, he had said. Now, the union counterweight in many of these communities is largely gone.

But while union halls may no longer exist in all of these places, people are still getting together somewhere. And the Democrats, if they’re smart, should try to locate those places. Every community is different. Maybe it’s a café or a bookstore that hosts workshops and events. Maybe it’s a Boys and Girls Club or a Lions Club. It might be a knitting club. Once those places are identified, a smart Democrat strategist could scope out friendly players. Someone in a leadership position at the Boys and Girls Club, for instance, may be open to the Democrats using the space to coordinate door-knocking events. The knitting club might in fact be an excuse for women who were part of the anti-Trump “Resistance” movement in 2016 to get together to chat about local happenings and politics. Using the existing, informal community infrastructure can help get more people involved. And it’s more likely to be effective for people who wouldn’t otherwise get involved but will, because their friends are. That’s how mobilisation often happens — through friends.

When it is not election time, the model of the Democratic Party on the state and county level should be long-term investment in building community in towns and localities. Having brick-and-mortar locations, hosting events, organising community service initiatives or block parties, and having volunteers show up at every local parade, fair, or festival (and, at least in western Pennsylvania, there’s a lot). This is a long term project. Its goal would not be to politicise everything. Indeed, similar to union community life, organising efforts would not have to always put the Democratic Party in the foreground. When a union hall hosted rare-coin trading events, for example, it didn’t have people going around the room telling attendees about the benefits of joining a union. It was enough that the event was there, in that space, to convey that the union was present and committed to the community. Building a hub for community information and happenings would begin to build two-way relationships between community members and the Democrats. On Election Day, there will be a huge effort to drive community members to the polls. Maybe, year-round, the county Democratic Party could coordinate a volunteer system to deliver food to elderly community members.

There’s been a lot of talk about civic decline and the loneliness epidemic in America. In the industrial Midwest, there is no speedy remedy for the sense of loss that many people have experienced as a result of regional economic decline and the toll that addiction has had on many communities. But it starts somewhere. Unions didn’t have banquet halls for collective bargaining purposes, and, likewise, gun clubs don’t have clubhouses so members can become better shooters. To rebuild support — and for the more important goal of creating stronger communities — the Democratic Party should take note.

These Games, however, also served as a curious political hiatus: unexpected legislative elections, held just before they began, failed to result in the formation of any government. Instead, President Emmanuel Macron ordered the outgoing government to remain in place in a caretaker role. The composition of a government, and most significantly the choice of a new prime minister, was deferred until after the Games.

For this reason, the end of the Olympics in France signals not only the end of a big party, and the inevitable hangover that follows. It also means the end of the political truce and a return to the tawdry question of running the country. Though time can do many things, it cannot solve the impasse which exists at the French national assembly. The Left-wing coalition — the Nouveau Front Populaire — did relatively well in July’s elections but it did not win enough seats to form a government on its own. Neither did the far right Rassemblement National, nor Macron’s party, which lost 73 seats, bringing its total to 166.

In the aftermath of the election, the Left claimed that its strong showing — 182 seats — gave it the momentum and “legitimacy” to nominate a prime minister. But more than a month later, it has found it very hard to settle on any name. The Nouveau Front Populaire is itself an alliance formed in the frenzied weeks between the European elections and the legislative elections. It was created in large part to form a barrier against a victory of the far-Right, and brought together individuals and parties that until recently had been firm critics of one another.

Almost inevitably, suggestions for prime ministers came and went, vetoed by one or another of the coalition members. Lucie Castets, the Left alliance’s current nomination, has been dismissed by Emmanuel Macron, who retains the authority to decide who to ask to form a government. Macron’s position is that a government led by Castets would lack a majority, and therefore it makes no sense to nominate her. Completely unknown to the public, Castets, a civil servant specialising in public finances, has tried to establish herself over the course of the summer, giving interviews about her private life to Paris Match and campaigning across the country. She has done her best but, as momentum builds up towards the start of a new political year, doubts are emerging. Her boss at the city of Paris, the mayor Anne Hidalgo, has suggested that what is needed is a more moderate figurehead.

For all the gossip about the identity of the prime minister, there remains a fundamental difficulty which no amount of medal-winning has been able to efface. As things stand, the Nouveau Front Populaire contains as its principal member La France Insoumise, a far-Left party which Macron considers to be led by a demagogue — Jean-Luc Mélenchon — and not much better than the far-Right Rassemblement National. Yet since any name put forward by the Left coalition must satisfy La France Insoumise, it will likely be too far to the Left for Macron. Meanwhile, any prime minister drawn from the ranks of the centre or the Right would appear to undermine the results of the legislative elections: the centre-right party, Les Republicains, only won 47 seats.

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Macron’s own view is that the new government should be made of various political currents, committing itself to compromise and collaboration. This is a position consistent with his own instincts, and the political project of Macronisme, which has always been to push ideology and doctrine to one side, and focus instead on “results” and solving problems that “matter” for people. However, in this instance, Macron is also aware that such a pragmatic solution would likely put an end to the Nouveau Front Populaire. His ideal government would be composed of socialists, greens, his own party, and a few smaller groupings of the centre-right —led a political figure from the old Hollande regime of 2012-2017, a centre-left politician acceptable to the Macronistes. But this would be quite unacceptable for the France Insoumise, presenting the socialists and the Greens with a choice between governing and keeping the Nouveau Front Populaire together.

All of which suggests that, as France’s Olympic holiday comes to a close, the country will have to swap its athletic games for political ones. In many respects, the legislative elections appeared to herald the triumph of ideological politics in France: the Left cloaked itself in the glory of the first Popular Front, while the far-Right seemed as close to governing as it had ever been. The ensuing impasse, however, revealed that French politics is dominated by the spectre of fragmentation, reflecting the shallow and shifting quality of ideological alliances in France.

Macron could make a decision on prime ministerial nomination in the next few days, or he could wait until the end of the month, or even into September. Either way, it seems clear that the route to a majority government in France lies in the dismantling of the Left alliance. Let the games begin.

After the rapidly cobbled together New Popular Front (NFP) alliance agreed to act tactically with the centrist Ensemble block, it was clear the RN would not win a majority in the National Assembly. What was always more likely is what has indeed happened: no single party or group of parties has managed to win enough seats to form a majority. Indeed, if anything, the real surprise here was the degree to which the logic of the cordon sanitaire still animates French politics. In spite of the significant differences between centrists and the Left block, the desire to block the RN was strong enough to result in cooperation between the first and second round of voting.

Given its importance in determining the results of these elections, it is worth exploring the merits of this anti-RN tactic. Most obviously, it appears to elevate republican institutions above party politics, implying that an RN victory would be against the spirit of the French republic and should be avoided at any cost. The practical consequence of this is to bring together political parties and groups whose programmes diverge widely and whose leaders excoriate each other on a daily basis. The achievement of the republican front thus comes at the cost of providing voters with a clear choice between rival political programmes. Moreover, it merely pushes into the post-election period the fundamental problem of how to constitute a government that is able to legislate and command the authority of the National Assembly. If the lesson of the election is that the RN cannot govern with a majority, it is also that no other political force can either.

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There is another lesson of the elections, which is that we now have what we might call les deux Frances. The formation, over the past 30 years, of a solid hard-Right electorate is one of the important developments in French society. The strength of the NFP, however, and in particular the prominent role played by La France Insoumise within the NFP, is evidence of the formation of a very different electoral block on the Left. This one has its own codes and culture. It is also generative of its own language around progressive change. These electorates inhabit the same country but are worlds apart. Most significantly, neither of these two electorates comes close to a governing majority.

If the RN is able to achieve its long-term goal of the Union of the Rights (l’Union des Droites), then it could aspire to government — though the reaction to the centre-right leader Eric Ciotti’s decision to align with the RN suggests this union des droites is still some way off. On the Left, however, the route towards a majority is full of seemingly insurmountable obstacles. For starters, there are major divisions between the LFI and all other political forces on the Left. At the same time, the Left alliance would need to dismantle the centrist block and absorb significant parts of Macron’s electorate. Yet as things stand, there is evidence that the centrist bloc feels that things should go in the opposite direction: that they should divide the Left alliance by offering to govern with its more moderate elements — the Greens, the Socialists and Raphael Gluckmann’s movement — leaving the LFI on its own as a rump far left.

Celebrating the strong score of the NFP, Clémence Guetté, one of the leading figures of La France Insoumise summarised it thus: “Tonight we taste joy; tomorrow we govern.” The truth is rather different. Precisely by choosing to keep the RN out of power through tactical voting, NFP and Ensemble voters have created a situation where no party or coalition can form a government. For the moment, we know that prime minister Gabriel Attal offered his resignation, which the President rejected for now. We also know that the new National Assembly will sit from 18 July for two weeks, during which time it could vote on a motion to bring the government down.

Yet what happens next is less clear. Macron, after all, could reject this and keep his caretaker government in place at least until the beginning of October. However, without anything like a majority, any government that is formed will struggle to survive. For all of the relief felt across France, we should not forget that the RN was kept out of power by an alliance between two political forces who are unlikely to be able to govern together. Unless that changes, the survival of the republican front will come at the cost of being able to govern the country.

Similar confusion hangs over the New Popular Front. The party is a surprise development of Emmanuel Macron’s decision to call a snap election. Its name invokes the union of the Left in the Thirties, which culminated in the Popular Front government formed in 1936: a government led by Léon Blum and a host of ministers from the SFIO and the Radical Party, and supported from the outside by the Parti Communiste Français (PCF) of Maurice Thorez.

Yet as Panot demonstrated, the choice of the name does not come from an intimate acquaintance with the history of the Popular Front. Today, it is little more than a slogan, one that celebrates a surprisingly quick display of unity on the Left and — above all — a desire to impress upon French voters the danger of a radical Right victory in the forthcoming elections. Indeed, if we compare more closely the world of 1936 with that of 2024, we can see how the New Popular Front is a very different beast from its namesake: rather than echoing the changing interests of particular social groups in France, it is an expression of electoral opportunism.

As the historian Claire Andrieu recently observed, the Popular Front of 1936 was a fusion of the socialist and communist movements in France, forced upon reluctant party and parliamentary leaders by party members and activists determined both to block France’s drift into authoritarian nationalism and to secure specific gains in the class war between workers and bosses. This move was triggered by violent demonstrations led by the far-Right Action Française group on 6 February 1934, which many viewed as an attempt to seize power. For months, leaders of both the PCF and the SFIO resisted these bottom-up demands for unity, until the PCF was told by Moscow to strike a deal with the socialists.

This fusion, and the elaboration of a shared legislative programme, was made more difficult by the nature of French democracy at the time. Though still excluding women, the Third Republic had become deeply embedded in society. Its political arena was populated not just by political parties but also a host of organised labour groups, and a plethora of committees and leagues of intellectuals. As a result, the Popular Front’s programme was signed off not only by the PCF, SFIO and Radicals, but also by the country’s principal trade unions. Thus the coalition was one of the first expressions of what the sociologist Peter Wagner called the era of “organised modernity”: collective action, pursued by social groups, structuring the lives of individuals, of families, of villages and towns, resulting in a fusion between politics and society.

By contrast, the New Popular Front of 2024 was negotiated in six days, behind closed doors, by party bosses. The agreement was struck between the Socialist Party, the Greens, La France Insoumise (LFI) and the French Communist Party. It also brought on board prominent figures who enjoy a more distanced relationship to the main parties on the Left: Raphaël Glucksmann, whose “Wake Up Europe” campaign for the Socialist Party did surprisingly well in the European elections, and François Ruffin, a firebrand who sits loosely on the LFI benches but functions more often as an independent voice on the Left.

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Most obviously, their alleged catalyst is the prospect of a victory for the far-Right in the legislative elections. Macron’s decision to dissolve the national assembly came as a surprise for most and reflected a willingness to gamble with what he thought was still a refusal, among a majority of French voters, to accept that Marine Le Pen’s National Rally (RN) could ever become the party of government. Aware that this historic refusal may no longer exist, the disparate forces of the Left decided to put to one side their differences. This “antifascist” animation, however, is far from the only reason for this new alliance’s genesis — and perhaps not even the most important one.

Far more essential to the formation of the New Popular Front has been the electoral dissolution of Macronism as a political force. Evident already in the 2022 legislative elections, where Macron’s party was unable to win an outright majority in the national assembly, it was confirmed in dramatic fashion by the poor showing of the presidential party in the European elections of June 2024. In those elections, the combined score of the Socialists, Greens and LFI would have placed the Left within just five points of the RN, and a good 10 points ahead of Macron’s party. Thus, what brought these political figures together — who, just days before in the run-up to European elections, had been viciously accusing each other of antisemitism and warmongering — was the whiff of political office. Should the unified Left come ahead of Macron’s party in the first round on Sunday, they will most likely face the far-Right in a second-round run-off. And under those circumstances, they fancy their chances.

Paradoxically, however, as well as being its animating force, the implosion of Macronism is also the New Popular Front’s main limitation as a political force. It is, after all, operating only at the level of the political players themselves. There is no associated social movement or a coming together of rival social forces. Its programme is an amalgam of the interest of the different parties involved, with an economic programme that focuses on tackling the cost-of-living crisis.

This old Keynesian strategy of boosting aggregate demand through government spending has echoes of Mitterrand’s socialist programme of 1981. However, without a firm anchoring in French society, it is likely these measures would be just as short-lived as Mitterrand’s, who undertook a dramatic U-turn two years into his first term as President. Elsewhere, the New Popular Front has said it would reject the EU’s fiscal rules without explaining how it would go about doing this. Once again, there is a striking contrast with the original Popular Front, whose legislative achievements included the 40-hour week, two weeks’ paid holiday and a host of new additions to the French labour code which were sealed in the Matignon Agreement of June 1936.

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Offering little by comparison, the New Popular Front is no more and no less than a product of the collapse in the centre. For this reason, it is not surprising to see the return of some of the familiar faces of the Left from the Nineties and early 2000s, such as the former socialist prime minister Lionel Jospin. Far from being a radical force for change, then, it reflects a belief among the old guard that this is a good time to impose a more moderate Left onto what had become a Mélenchon-dominated Left. Indeed, it seems fitting that the New Popular Front may well be a vehicle for the political return of the last Socialist president, François Hollande, who is standing in his old constituency in Corrèze, in the heart of France.

Crucially, because it is a product of the implosion of Macronism, the New Popular Front contains within it the seeds of its own demise. Little more than a product of a void, it is already coming apart as the rival figures within it make the case for why they are the best candidate for prime minister. Mélenchon has refused to step aside, declaring instead that he is ready to govern, invoking the ire of all other parties in the New Popular Front who have spent years criticising his rhetorical excesses and narcissism. The recent exchange between Hollande and  Mélenchon, where each has said that the other should “shut up”, speaks volumes about the mood within the coalition.

Its essence, in other words, is far removed from that of 1936, when the Popular Front was the political expression of a vast social movement rooted in the struggle of the workplace: pay, working conditions and the right to collective organisation. Back then, it was overwhelmingly a workers’ movement, one that generated new forms of popular culture preserved in the joyful and sun-kissed photography of Pierre Jamet and many others. The New Popular Front of 2024, by contrast, is an alliance of political rivals occurring within a context of widespread cultural pessimism. Electoral success may yet lend it some impetus, but even then, it is difficult to see how it can escape the fragmentary pressures that produced it in the first place.

Now is not the place to rehash the many examples of Corbyn’s jaw-dropping attitudes towards Jews, never mind Israel, ideas some of us naively thought had died out with Stalin. Those are specific to Corbyn, whose political relevance is now, thankfully, in the past. But two general truths emerged from that era that would prove extremely relevant after October 7.

The first was how little people across the Left cared when Jews pointed out the obvious antisemitism they saw in the Labour Party. In 2018, 86% of British Jews said they believed Corbyn was antisemitic; and still the Left supported him, and still The Guardian backed him in the 2019 general election. Would they — good Lefties one and all — have done this if the vast majority of another minority said they believed Corbyn was bigoted against them? Would the Left have supported an Islamophobic leader in 2018? A homophobic one? A racist one? It’s hard to imagine. “What are Jews so scared of? It’s not like Corbyn’s going to bring back pogroms,” a prominent figure on the Left asked me. I briefly amused myself by imagining a response: “Why are black people so against the Tories? It’s not like they’ll bring back lynching.” But I stayed schtum. The Left doesn’t care about antisemitism if they deem it inconvenient to their cause. They just call it “anti-Zionism” and carry on, and that was — it turned out — a good lesson to learn.

There was another lesson, too. When Corbyn was pushed out of Labour in 2020, I dismissed him as a useful idiot, which was right. I also dismissed him as a blip, an aberration, one I needn’t think about again, which was wrong. Because then October 7 happened. I realised that the Corbyn era had opened a Pandora’s box and some ghosts cannot be controlled.

Antisemitism found a new point of entry through identity politics, which argues that in order to see the world clearly, we need to divide it up into particular group identities, specifically racial and sexual identities, and quantify the degrees of their oppression. As Yascha Mounk writes in The Identity Trap, adherents of identity politics believe that, in the name of fairness, liberal democracies need to jettison universal values such as free speech and respect for diverse opinions — values long championed by the Jewish Diaspora. Instead, we should now see everyone through the prisms of race and sexual orientation and treat them differently, depending on their identity group and how much oppression they have historically suffered.

To make this simplistic ideology even more simple, identity politics divides the world into two racial categories: “white” (defined as colonising oppressors) and “people of colour” (the oppressed). This is how the Left pivoted from talking about class to talking about race. It is also why antisemitism is thriving again on university campuses, as supporters of identity politics combine with activists for black and Muslim causes, who see Jews as ultra-white and therefore oppressive. And to be clear, those activists aren’t necessarily Black or Muslim themselves; in fact, as multiple students have told me, they are often white, but see supporting these causes — and trashing Israel and Jews — as a means of proving their allyship and exonerating themselves from white guilt.

No doubt many people pushing identity politics are motivated by good intentions, though some, of course, are pure grifters. I initially assumed that a fear of being called racist had lobotomised them, so they were unable to see the obvious idiocies of this ideology. (Is a poor white man in Glamorgan really more privileged than an extremely wealthy black man in Nairobi?) But the more identity politics took hold, the more I understood that a lot of people on the Left just want a very simple way of looking at the world, and they crave a group they can hate with impunity.

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One of the biggest problems with this framework is its inability to accommodate competing rights, and the idea that two groups can both be right. I got a glimpse of this in 2015, when I started to write about gender ideology, which argues that trans women should be accorded all the rights biological women have, such as access to female single-sex spaces. The problems seemed glaring to me, but as I quickly learned, asking any questions sparked furious accusations of transphobia from the progressive Left.

Identity politics, you see, is a zero-sum game, and for one group to be all good, the group with competing rights must be all bad. So, in the case of gender ideology, trans people are all good, and women who are anxious about the erosion of their rights are evil. And so identity politics gave Left-wing men a self-righteous cover so they could deride women like me, and feel morally superior for doing so.

It’s a similar story with the progressive Left’s reaction to Israel and Palestine: a lot of it is about antisemitism, but identity politics obscures the bigotry, giving the Left a preeningly self-righteous excuse to ignore Hamas’s terrorism and violence against Jews. This comparison between how women and Jews are discussed in identity politics is not new. In February, Corinne Blacker wrote in Tablet magazine that, thanks to the energetic efforts of gender ideologue and anti-Israel academic Judith Butler, antisemitism has been “queered”, meaning anyone who supports Israel’s right to exist is seen as analogous to a bigot who hates trans people. Only trans people and Palestinians are seen as oppressed, and never women or Jews.

In Jews Don’t Count, published two years before October 7, David Baddiel addresses why the Left is so antipathetic to the idea of Jews being oppressed. He memorably describes Jews as “Schrödinger’s whites”, meaning their whiteness depends on the politics of the observer. The far-Right sees them as suspicious, foreign and not white, whereas the Left sees them as extremely white because they can pass as non-Jews.

Since October 7, this perception of Jews and Israelis has been especially popular. “You’re either on the ‘white’ or ‘right’ side of history,” one popular march placard has it, with images of the Israeli, British, American and French flags on one side, and the flags for Palestine, East Turkestan, the DRC and Sudan on the other. Never mind that around half of Israelis are Mizrahi, meaning they have roots in North Africa and all over the Middle East, and are descended from the Jews who were kicked out of those regions in 1948. So, very much not white.

Another of the central tenets of identity politics is that all oppressions are linked, so LGBTQ+ rights are the same as Palestinian rights, and so on (never mind that same-sex sexual activity is illegal in Gaza). This is why so many Western activists see the Palestinians as akin to black slaves and the Israelis as plantation owners, with a total lack of embarrassment about their historical ignorance. Israel and Palestine have nothing in common with the gay rights movement in the US or the desegregation of the American South, and while stupidity plays a big part in why so many people in the West believe otherwise, there are other issues, too. For some people online with big followings, there’s a lot of brand-building going on here, as they loudly reassure their followers that Palestine and Israel are a simple matter of good versus evil. Few things attract more followers than reassuring them that they’re good and this other group is bad.

But the enthusiasm with which the West has taken up this idea suggests something else, too: how better to absolve your guilt about your own country’s historical wrongs than by dumping them on other countries now? The sheer volume of comparisons between anti-black racism and Israel’s behaviour strongly hints that there is more than a little displacement going on. It is, I think, no coincidence that it was South Africa that accused Israel of genocide. In a gruesome twist of irony, only a week beforehand, the country’s president, Cyril Ramaphosa, welcomed Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, a Sudanese warlord whose militia is accused of genocide in Darfur. Still, what better way to cleanse oneself of uncomfortable accusations than to point the finger at someone else?

It has been an especially strange time to be a Jewish woman on the Left. When we explain why we might not want trans women in our single-sex spaces, referring to past experiences of male violence, we are accused of  “weaponising our trauma”. When we talk about our fear of Hamas, because Jews have some experience when it comes to genocidal fascist groups, we’re accused of “weaponising the Holocaust”. Women in general — like Jews — tend not to be believed when they describe violence committed against them; according to a recent annual report from the victims’ commissioner for England and Wales, only 5% of reported rapes result in charges being brought, never mind convictions. So, when stories started to emerge fairly soon after October 7 that Hamas had committed horrific sexual violence during the pogrom, I knew the reaction would be bad.

The October 7 rapes of Israeli women and men were so brutal that Meni Binyamin, the head of the International Crime Investigations Unit of the Israeli police, said it was “the most extreme sexual abuses we have seen”. One woman was found with a knife in her vagina and her internal organs removed. Others were shot in the vagina and breasts. Witnesses reported a woman begging to be killed as she was passed between Hamas fighters, a woman being stabbed in the back while she was raped, terrorists cutting off a woman’s breast and playing with it in the road.

And yet, it took UN Women 50 days even to acknowledge that these sexual assaults had happened. When Reem Alsalem, the UN special rapporteur on violence against women and girls, was asked why, she reportedly replied that the evidence of rape was “not solid”, even though there was video footage of Israeli women with blood-sodden crotches and reports from witnesses about dead Israeli women’s mutilated vaginas. On October 30, almost 150 “scholars in feminist, queer and trans studies” signed an open letter implying that to support Israeli women was to endorse “colonial feminism”. Not a single UK charity that purports to protect women from violence condemned Hamas’s brutality — except Jewish Women’s Aid. Southall Black Sisters expressed sympathy for people killed in Gaza and Israel, but overlooked Hamas’s taking of hostages when calling out contraventions of international law. Sisters Uncut, which was formed in reaction to the UK’s government’s cuts to services for victims of domestic violence, staged a sit-in at Liverpool Street Station demanding an Israeli ceasefire. After I wrote an article in the Jewish Chronicle asking how this fitted in with their feminist credentials, they replied with a statement saying that the reports of Israeli women being raped were merely “the Islamophobic and racist weaponisation of sexual violence that presents it as an Arab, as opposed to a global, problem”.

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In an attempt to make people believe what had actually happened, the IDF compiled and edited the footage they had from Hamas’s GoPro cameras, made it into a film, called Bearing Witness, and took it around the world to show small, carefully selected audiences. Most journalists who watched it wrote about how traumatising they found it. Others had different reactions.

The far-Left activist Owen Jones, The Guardian’s most high-profile journalist, went to a screening and afterwards posted a 25-minute video review. He claimed that “the purpose of the film was made very clear: that we were to ‘bear witness’, as it was repeatedly put, to the horrors committed by Hamas and also make the PR case for Israel’s onslaught against Gaza”. Others who attended the screening told me that no one said any such thing — the purpose was to provide video footage of the pogrom. “If there was rape and sexual violence committed, we don’t see that on camera,” Jones added, apparently unaware that the IDF had already said it only included footage that “preserved the dignity” of those killed. The body of a burnt woman with no underwear on “is not what you consider conclusive evidence of rape”, he asserted.

Jones’s trajectory is typical of the modern far-Left. After making a name for himself by writing about social class, by the mid-2010s he was focusing increasingly on identity politics, especially trans issues. Now, he tweets primarily about Palestine and calls anyone who disagrees with him a defender of genocide. Questioning the rapes of Israeli women was the perfect crescendo.

Still, when progressive-Left identity politics takes you to a place where you are jazz handsing away the rapes of Israelis, maybe you should ask yourself if this movement has outlived its purpose. It reveals such vanity, but also such bankrupt intelligence, this desire to outsource any critical thinking to an external, prefabricated ideology. Perhaps the thing that surprises me the most about human nature, even in my mature middle age, is how enduring this desire is.

***

This an extract from Blindness: October 7 and the Left, an essay published by Jewish Quarterly.

Front and centre, of course, was Starmer’s failure of principle and command over the war in Gaza. But it was notable that Galloway’s messaging made hay of many other unrelated issues, designed to attract disaffected white voters. Anti-woke rhetoric, Rochdale’s grooming gangs, local NHS inadequacy, and a sense of municipal dilapidation that an economically cautious Labour can’t be trusted to turn around: all also featured in his campaign. Far from a managerial mishap, this by-election points to a far graver threat to the Starmer project writ large. Just in time for this election year, the British Left that he swore to keep out and down is rearing its head once again.

Pollsters and analysts largely missed this development, obsessing instead over the electoral threat that Reform poses to the Conservatives. And this is considerable: we have a prime minister who waxes unlyrically over the “need to protect our democracy” even as, on his watch, trust in British political parties has slumped from a meagre 20% last year to a dismal 12% today. But this energy is not only clustering to the Right. A coalition of hundreds of thousands has assembled to march every week since the war in Gaza began. Galloway’s victory proves that, unlike a Reform Party whose political power still remains in the subjunctive mood, this is a movement that is capable of traversing from the streets to Parliament, depriving Labour of votes and MPs on the way.

Ever the opportunist, Galloway has lost no time in calling on Jeremy Corbyn to stop dithering, and lead a new party of the Left, which he says he would support. But, beyond him and his uniquely divisive personality, this is a move that a significant tranche of former Labour supporters, climate campaigners and peace activists would support, increasingly disenfranchised and frustrated by the Tweedledee and Tweedledum double act of Sunak and Starmer. Because the public fury over the failure of either politician to call out Netanyahu, and at the shenanigans in Parliament to prevent a vote on an “immediate & permanent ceasefire” that might acknowledge the collective punishment of Palestinians, is not confined to British Muslims. At a time when authenticity and answers to profound questions are lacking, it seems that the public increasingly regard Parliament and its occupants (taking their cue from Dennis Skinner) as a “Palace of Varieties”. An ineffectual conjuring house, utterly detached from real matters of politics.

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The terminal unpopularity of the Tories continues to provide for a large Labour lead on paper. The traditional parties of protest provide no comparable outlet: the Liberal Democrats have all but disappeared into one of those cracked pavements they tend to obsess about. But Labour’s standing as “the party of change” will only maintain its resonance while voters are on board with what this “change” represents. And a slip in the polls as the election approaches will open the door to new mathematical possibilities in Parliament, especially if Galloway’s win emboldens MPs on the rump Left of the party to jump ship. The best estimates suggest that at least eight Labour seats are threatened by the Gaza effect, while the anti-war SNP seem likely to hold on to more seats than hitherto projected.

And this could sabotage the entire strategic grounding of Starmer’s leadership. In their rush to congratulate him on winning the party leadership (with what proved to be a borderline fraudulent manifesto), and to salute the subsequent defenestration of Jeremy Corbyn (whom he had once claimed as “a friend”), many in Labour seemed to think they could happily do without their Left-wing. But the few successful coalitions of the Left in recent years have not permitted such arrogance. It is a mistake Joe Biden has strained to avoid, continuing to work closely with Bernie Sanders and members of the radical “Squad”, all while rolling out the kind of transformative, state-driven economic programme that Starmer has unceremoniously dropped. But for Biden, the fault lines over Gaza are also showing. He is dropping in the polls, and many of the younger activists who worked so hard for him last time are threatening to sit on their hands, even in the face of a third Trump candidacy.

Keir Starmer claims Harold Wilson as his political inspiration. But he shares none of his hero’s intelligence, shrewd political skill, or easy humour. If he did, he might be familiar with the irascible former Labour MP and Commons bookie, Ian Mikardo, who supplied the rule Wilson cleaved to in his own party management: the Labour Party needs a “Left and a Right wing to fly”. Starmer has decisively severed the Left from the body of the Labour leadership, ruling instead through a coterie of sectarian hatchet men. MPs and candidates from the Left have found themselves censured and suspended, often on the most spurious grounds, with even party veterans left wondering if they will be able to stand in the general election. The role of local parties in selecting their own candidates has been quashed beneath the boot of central office, and party panjandrums are said to have a list of approved, on-message candidates they intend to drop into safe seats that become vacant between now and the election.

All of this is unlikely to cost Starmer his victory, although it suggests a smaller majority than that predicted by the pollsters. But a network of internal opposition is forming, not least in Starmer’s own backyard. In common with a number of prominent Labour MPs who have demurred from calling for a permanent ceasefire (including West Streeting in Ilford and Rushanara Ali in Bethnal Green), Starmer’s home ground of Holborn and St Pancras will likely be facing an insurgent campaign from the Left. Andrew Feinstein, a former ANC MP under Nelson Mandela, has lived in Starmer’s constituency for 20 years and is weighing up standing there in the general election. This weekend he endorsed the launch of a new political alliance, billed as the first organised movement of the Left outside Labour, calling itself “Collective”. The name is more than symbolic: a pragmatic grouping, Collective will likely work with other parties, including Galloway’s own, and could field several parliamentary candidates, targeting constituencies in inner cities with large student populations.

The idea that the bruised Labour Left could be bundled up and tossed over the ropes of the political ring was an enormous miscalculation on Starmer’s part. After all, we’re only seven years on from the peak of the Corbyn movement, which operated with a grassroots dynamism well beyond the playbook of the powerbrokers who’ve managed the party since the New Labour turn. The same forces will drive this new Left, with enthusiasm and young volunteers making up for the lack of donor money drawn to the big parties. And while some may dismiss the electoral damage a Left breakaway could do, as with Ukip and the Brexit Party’s influence over successive elections, independent Left candidates could one day hold the balance of a Labour majority.

For now though, the next election seems probably produce a Starmer-led Labour government, benefiting from the Tory collapse and a likely low turn-out. But beneath this victory, a new movement might begin to find its voice. For decades, first-past-the-post elections have been fought and won among swing voters in a small band of marginal constituencies. Independent candidates may perform better than expected, exerting a disproportionate impact at a time when constituency boundaries have been redrawn and pressure continues to mount for proportional representation. It is the election after this one which may deliver the body blow to the old political giants, who in any case already resemble, as Christopher Hitchens once said of America’s own dead two-party system, “two cosily fused buttocks of the same giant derrière”.

The Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (EZLN) announced themselves to the world on 1 January 1994, when they overthrew and temporarily occupied various Mexican centres for political power. The timing was symbolic, corresponding with the day the North American Free Trade Agreement came into effect. Outraged at the treaty’s effective removal of Article 27 from the Mexican constitution, which guaranteed indigenous peoples their rights to collective lands, they became the first organisation to declare war on an internationally recognised treaty. Their campaign came to resemble a war from February onwards, as Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo launched an offensive to capture or destroy them.

In 2006, I was part of a delegation accompanying the Zapatistas as they returned to the streets of San Cristobal in what they called the “Other Campaign”, a broad movement of protest and civic resistance. Our vehicle followed directly behind their leader, the Subcommandante Insurgente Marcos. He led the rebellious cavalcade out of the canyon on a motorcycle, inevitably recalling the spirit of Che Guevara. For many activists of the Nineties, Marcos had filled a similar space to Che: the exotic radical who combined the roles of intellectual and man-of-action. And like Che’s movement, the Zapatistas’ idealism eventually shattered when it collided with the raw realities of power.

Often described as the “poorest of the poor”, the Zapatistas connected their fight to a broader history of persecution. “We are a product of 500 years of struggle,” their First Declaration proclaimed. Theirs was a fight for dignity, which was inseparable from their demands for autonomy and the constitutional right to self-govern according to indigenous laws, customs and practices. And their name bound their struggle to the nation’s revolutionary past, invoking Emiliano Zapata, who led the Mexican revolution of 1910.

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But though the Zapatistas wove themselves into a tapestry of Mexican history, many observers felt what they represented was radically new. My guide in 2006, the late journalist and Beatnik poet John Ross, told me: “If the Zapatistas hadn’t appeared, we would have needed to invent them. There would not have been such a thing as the anti-globalisation movement without them. They were the catalyst.” The Zapatistas immediately became icons of a global Left, largely thanks to the non-indigenous Marcos, who positioned himself as a bridge between the two worlds. Like all revolutionaries, Marcos projected a romantic allure with his trademark military cap, smoking pipe and balaclava. He became a new kind of pin-up for a globally sensitised radical generation. Indeed, perhaps part of his appeal was precisely that he was faceless, the balaclava he wore acting as a kind of leveller, which allowed men at least to dream of the romance of being a revolutionary without the impossible handsomeness of El Che.

Beyond his mystical appeal, Marcos’s greatest accomplishment was the originality of his writings. The Zapatistas insisted that words were their most formidable weapon, and Marcos became their most recognised author. Not only did he display an astute reading of global political affairs, but his adaptation of myths and tales with human spirits and fictitious animal characters showed the true power of fabulation. If there were to be a genuine revolution, he insisted, it would need to be written in a different style. Marcos quipped he was a Marxist who, intent on converting the indigenous to his doctrine, found himself being converted to an indigenous way of seeing the world.

But his movement was soon to be lost in translation. The Zapatistas arrived at the dawn of the internet age; some commentators even claimed they were the first internet revolution. Leading security think tanks, such as the Rand corporation, called their struggle “network centric warfare”. And Manuel Castells, among the most prominent social gurus for what he called the “information age”, even fronted one of his books on “The Network Society” with Zapatista artwork. It was hard to read any study of the Zapatistas in which the new language of the digital age — networks, non-hierarchy, connectivity — wasn’t applied. Yet during my visit to la Garrucha, which was widely promoted as the first rebel stronghold to have internet, it was clear that the technology simply didn’t work. The projection of digital language onto the Zapatistas was designed purely to appeal to bourgeois radicals in the West.

What actually set the Zapatistas apart was their ability to surprise, to go into hiding, and the unpredictable and untimely responses they offered that didn’t follow obvious paths. By 1998, they were already writing about the importance of slowing things down and embracing silence. This couldn’t be further from the performativity of a certain kind of radical politics they were made into emblems of. The Zapatistas never asked to become global icons, even if they undoubtedly welcomed the solidarity. Their demands were actually rather straightforward: land, liberty and autonomy for the indigenous of Mexico. Yet at the dawn of the digital age, it was external forces that wanted to momentarily parade them to the world as part of a new revolutionary vanguard — despite the fact they resisted those very terms.

By the turn of the millennium, it was becoming apparent that radicalism in the West was taking a different path. While the Zapatistas had fully embraced non-violence as a political strategy — a position that was most evident during their march upon Mexico City in March 2001 — the previous year’s protests in Seattle at the WTO convention, and in Prague against the IMF and World Bank showed how some Western anti-globalists were willing to engage in violent confrontation. And after 9/11, the attention of Western activists turned to the battles in Iraq and Afghanistan, which gradually pushed the conceptualisation of war back into a more familiar statist direction. This seemed to be at odds with Marcos’s insistence that war was a global state of affairs in which the nation state merely played a militarising and policing role.

In the two decades after 2006, the Zapatistas saw a notable decline in international attention. This was due in part to their own political moves, which included a rather disastrous foray into electoral politics in 2018 that seemed to contradict their previous critique of the state. But something else happened in 2006 that would end up transforming Chiapas, Mexico and the Americas in ways that diverted attention away from the indigenous campesinos.

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In December 2006, President Felipe Calderón won Mexico’s election — though many analysts believe the vote count was rigged, and the then-contender Andrés Manuel López Obrador never accepted the result. Ten days into his presidency, Calderón announced an outright assault on the narco-trafficking cartels. The expansive and violent battle that ensued drew international interest away from the conflict in Chiapas, leading to hundreds of thousands of murders and disappearances. In the process, the narco wars pushed the drugs trade into Chiapas. During one of my trips there in 2006, human rights representatives said that Chiapas didn’t have a major drugs problem. That is no longer the case today. In January, more than 700 villagers permanently fled their homes in the communities of Chicomuselo and La Concordia due to cartel violence.

This violence has escalated since smuggling groups moved in to control and exploit the flow of migrants heading north. And the electoral victory of Andrés Manuel López Obrador in 2019 has further exacerbated the problem. His militarisation of the region hasn’t deterred the cartels: on the contrary, with the links between organised crime, the military and the police, promises of greater profits in this new economic corridor has resulted in open warfare. In response to this instability, a Zapatista communique stated in November they were closing their autonomous municipalities to the outside world.

After this retreat, what legacy do the Zapatistas have today? By emphasising the Zapatistas’ race and identity over their desperate poverty, Western radicals were as complicit as liberals in setting aside the importance of poverty as the defining marker shaping political consciousness. What’s more, their attempt to frame the Zapatista movement to fit the language of digitalisation anticipated the parading of social justice solidarity we continue to see on social media, and speaks less to the indigenous of Mexico than to virtually connected intelligentsia of today. Given the self-serving performativity of it all, is it any wonder the Zapatistas became a kind of fetishised object, openly embraced by techno-optimists to convey an image of “good indigenous” radicals until they too could be neatly set aside?

Ever since the dawn of the 20th century, the lands and people of Mexico have been stereotyped. In their heyday, the Zapatistas fulfilled a Western radical fantasy. And now their country is over-filtered in that familiar cinematic shade of Mexican yellow: dangerous and unforgiving, lawless and ruled by crazed bandits who kill without remorse. This is not the Mexico I know. And the remedy is a better appreciation of the complexities of history, while moving beyond fetishised portrayals of identities that are loaded with prejudice, including the prejudices of radicalism.

It’s a comforting fable, designed to excuse their own failures. It is, however, completely untrue. Neoliberalism wasn’t exported to Europe from across the Atlantic (or from across the Channel, for that matter). It was a largely homegrown affair — one that was, in fact, spearheaded by European Socialists, and by one Socialist in particular: Jacques Delors, President of the European Commission from 1985 to 1995, who died this week.

To understand this tragedy, we need not return to 1945, but 1981. In May, the Socialist François Mitterrand was elected France’s president, after more than two decades of the Left being excluded from office. He went on to form a government that also included Communist ministers for the first time since 1947, prompting a widespread belief that France was headed for a radical break with capitalism.

At the time, such a notion was not inconceivable. Most European governments still firmly believed in the importance of economic dirigisme and the need for capital controls and regulated financial markets, which presupposed a high degree of economic sovereignty. Nowhere was this truer than in France: the French had always been particularly reluctant to agree to any supranational authority — a consistent position that had hampered progress towards an economic and monetary union. In general, there was still the belief that individual nations had the power to shape their own economic and political destinies — and even to challenge the capitalist system itself.

Nothing exemplifies this better than Mitterrand’s victory in the spring of 1981. The new president’s policy agenda embodied an ambitious reform programme of Keynesian economic reflation and redistribution. It also proposed extensive nationalisations of France’s industrial conglomerates. By implementing this platform, Mitterrand claimed, his government would precipitate a “rupture” with capitalism, and lay the foundations for a “French road to socialism”. It’s easy to see why this represented a moment of immense hope not just for the French Left, but for the entire European Left — of the kind not witnessed since.

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Soon after the Mitterrand experiment began, however, it started to unravel. As a reaction to the Socialists’ ambitious plan for economic reform, capital started to flee France almost immediately. Despite the imposition of draconian capital controls, the government was unable to halt the flight.

This created a downward pressure on the franc (further exacerbated by the post-1979 global interest rate hikes), threatening France’s membership in the European Monetary System (EMS) — the system of semi-fixed exchange rates created in 1979. Under the EMS, the central banks of participating states had little choice but to shadow the Bundesbank’s restrictive monetary policy. Yet this was incompatible with Mitterrand’s reflationary programme — and Mitterrand found himself in a position where a decision had to be made about whether to leave the EMS or abandon his progressive agenda. Regrettably, he chose the latter path.

And so, in the spring of 1983, Mitterrand and the Socialists drastically reversed course, in what came to be known as the tournant de la rigueur (turn to austerity): rather than growth and employment, the emphasis would now be on price stability, fiscal restraint and business-friendly policies. A crucial aspect of this was the gradual rollback of virtually all capital controls and restrictions on financial transactions. And who was the main architect of this shift? Mitterrand’s finance minister, Jacques Delors.

The effects of this U-turn cannot be overestimated. Mitterrand’s victory in 1981 had inspired the widespread belief that a break with capitalism — at least in its extreme form — was still possible. Yet two years later, the French Socialists had succeeded in “proving” the exact opposite: that globalisation was an inescapable reality. Even though there were alternatives available to Mitterrand (such as leaving the EMS and floating the franc), the conclusion most people drew was that the “Keynesian road to socialism” had failed. Capital had won.

To make matters worse, the French Socialists, after having embraced neoliberalism at home, then proceeded to export their newfound views — on everything from capital movements to monetary integration — to the rest of Europe. Here, Delors was also central. “National sovereignty no longer means very much, or has much scope in the modern world economy,” he said. “A high degree of supranationality is essential.” This was a radical departure from France’s traditional souverainiste stance, which had already been seriously compromised by France’s decision to join the EMS, under which, as noted, the country was effectively forced to subjugate its own monetary-fiscal policy independence to the Bundesbank’s monetary policy.

For all of France’s historical concerns about supranational (that is, “European”) encroachment on its sovereignty on the one hand, and German hegemony on the other, few missed the irony of it being the Socialists who gave up that freedom — and to Germany of all nations. But by the late Seventies, French politicians on both sides of the political divide had come to accept that maintaining France’s status required them to remain firmly “in Europe” — that is, in the EMS — which in turn entailed adopting a low-inflation, stable-currency policy.

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This brought about a distinct shift in attitudes among the Socialists towards Europe — a mood that Delors summed up in October 1983: “Our only choice is between a united Europe and decline.” As Rawi E. Abdelal, professor of business administration at Harvard Business School, noted: ‘To the extent that the French Left continued to hope for socialist transformation, its members could see Europe as the only arena in which socialist goals could be achieved.” The problem was that, by 1983, they had little to offer in terms of a Europe-wide progressive alternative, since they had accepted the notion that social-political objectives should be subjugated to “price stability”.

And so, two years later, France strongly supported Delors’s nomination to the post of President of the European Commission — a position he would go on to hold for a decade, serving for three terms, longer than any other holder of the office. It is no exaggeration to say the Delors presidency was groundbreaking, giving the European integration process a momentum that had been lacking in the preceding decade. It is also the period in which the foundations of monetary union, and more generally of neoliberal Europe, were laid down — a development in which Delors, and the French Socialists in general, played a key role.

Their logic was the following: given that, within the EMS, the Bundesbank effectively set the interest rates for all participating states, and that leaving the EMS wasn’t considered an option, the French became increasingly convinced that there was only one way to preserve a low-inflation fixed exchange rate system while also wrestling control of monetary policy away from Germany: to push for a full European monetary union. For Delors, creating a single European currency became an utmost priority, and he set out to persuade his reluctant fellow European policymakers to embrace the idea. The first step was the signing of the Single European Act, in 1986, which set the objective of establishing a single market by 1992. Delors also proceeded to export France’s new views on capital movements to the rest of Europe, by pushing for the full liberalisation of capital flows across the continent — paving the way for a monetary union.

This brings the historical importance of the French Left’s neoliberal turn into stark relief: if the French hadn’t embraced financial liberalisation at the domestic level, they never would have offered their support for an integrated European financial market — and a monetary union would likely never have seen the light of day.

The Commission’s proposals were initially met with fierce resistance from a number of governments. But by the late Eighties, Delors had succeeded in radically changing Europe’s approach to capital controls — and in getting EU member countries to introduce full capital mobility by 1992, effectively making the free movement of capital a central tenet of the emerging European single market. This was a binding obligation not only among EU members but also between members and third countries.

In effect, Delors had succeeded in pushing Europe to fully embrace the “Paris consensus”, the European equivalent of the Washington consensus. The consequence of this was a European financial system that was, in principle, the most liberal the world had ever known. In this sense, the Europeans, far from being passive recipients of the free-market policies being concocted in Washington, actually preceded the Americans in embracing neoliberal globalisation, and promoting the spread of global capital.

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This also profoundly influenced the construction of the monetary union. In short, Delors succeeded in convincing European governments that, by joining the EMS and liberalising capital flows, they had effectively already lost much of their economic sovereignty; they therefore had little choice but to embrace monetary integration as a way to regain some sovereignty at the supranational level, by “having a say” in Europe’s collective monetary policy. It was a shrewd argument, but a fallacious one: as history would show, by ceding their monetary policy to a supranational central bank, European governments simply ended up losing what little sovereignty they had left.

However, Delors was aided by the fact that, by the early Nineties, even the German establishment had come round to the idea of a monetary union — and indeed, national elites in most European countries had come round to the notion of a supranational central bank, fully immune to democratic pressures, as a useful way to insulate economic policy from popular contestation. By 1989, the Delors Committee had published its hugely influential Delors Report, which essentially acted as a blueprint for the construction of monetary union in the coming years.

The final act of this democratic tragedy came three years later with the Maastricht Treaty. This didn’t only establish a timeline for the establishment of monetary union (in line with the Delors Report), but also created a de facto economic constitution that embedded neoliberalism into the very fabric of the European Union. By the time the Delors Commission came to an end, in 1995, much of the groundwork for the techno-authoritarian and anti-democratic juggernaut that the EU would later become was laid — and, to a large degree, we have Delors, a French Socialist, to thank for that.

Ironically, this didn’t just lead to the demolishing of the Left’s cherished European social model, to the benefit of financial-corporate interests (and, of course, Germany), but it also paved the way to the demise of the European socialist Left — and to the rise of the populist Right. More than anyone else, it is the latter who, today, should pay tribute to Delors.

First there is the implicit geographical parochialism. In response to the invocation of the notion of “the Left”, one might reasonably ask: the Left where? Do we mean the Left in Hungary, or China, or Russia, or Iran, or Afghanistan, or India? Might the Left in some places not be different from the Left in others? If so, this would give us many Lefts, not the Left. For example, some Lefts might be libertarian in nature, not least where forms of social authoritarianism reign. In such places, a system of rights and free markets might look like liberation. Yet for some, such a position can only count as being on “the Right”.

This suggests that there is a circumstantial relativity to the very idea of Left and Right. Devotees on both sides dislike this fact. They usually deny it. For them, there is some essential content residing in the concept of the Left. They contend that it is an ideology with roots. Therefore, they believe, it constitutes a tradition. But when did this supposed tradition begin? We know the spatial metaphor derives from the period of the Legislative Assembly in Revolutionary France. Looking back, actually both sides (Left and Right) had merit. Consequently, neither position need awaken dogmatic partisanship. Equally, modern political attitudes can hardly be divided in terms of this antiquated polarity.

Was Friedrich Hayek on the Right? I personally don’t think this characterisation makes much sense, even if recent activist historians insist on connecting his ideas to an ill-defined “neo-liberal” resurgence. Hayek, as an Austrian, was a critic of German nationalism in both its economic and political manifestations. For good or ill, he came to regard Stalinism and National Socialism as extreme expressions of the same basic worldview. He called himself a Liberal, never a Conservative, and for those in the Eighties opposed to Hungary’s or Czechoslovakia’s communist leaders, he might plausibly have been identified as Left.

These clarifications are not offered as a defence of any form of Hayekian dogma, but they are meant to imply that there is a need to correct prevailing misrepresentations. From the point of view of scholarship, it makes no sense characterising Hayek relative to our own concerns. Times change, and the meaning of political affiliations changes with them. Equally, at any given moment, party loyalty can cover a great variety of positions. Was Winston Churchill on the Right in the sense that Margaret Thatcher was? How close was Boris Johnson ideologically to the very ideological Liz Truss?

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Was Oliver Cromwell on the Left? Or was Thomas Paine? Was George Orwell? I think it depends on whom you ask. Was Mahatma Gandhi Left? Is Xi Jinping? Was Stalin, or Erich Honecker? Some may think that all these figures could be grouped by family resemblance. Others might repartition these Lefts into a new Left and Right. Still others would insist they make up a venerable tradition. But this, surely, could not be squared with historical fact. Instead of a tradition, this Left would be an invented tradition.

Dispassionate commentators do not need the crutch of Left and Right. Their job is to study and describe processes impartially. For example, at least in principle, academics are not required to locate themselves, or their subject-matter, along some imaginary spectrum. One would hope the same would apply to journalists. On the other hand, politicians are openly obliged to display their colours. They need to appeal to partisan sensibilities by compartmentalising positions into good and bad.

Strangely, despite their hard-won independence and their enjoyment of intellectual freedom, academics are often moved to mimic the attitudes of politicians. This is perhaps especially the case in more recent years. Over the last century, the politicisation of the academy has come and gone in waves. Over the past decade, signalling ideological preferences has become a sort of fashion. As a result, it is astonishing, but true, that most lecturers are afraid of saying something that their peers might arbitrarily identify as “Right” wing. By “Right”, they mean wrong. They mean it’s morally bad, at least in the eyes of the dominant peer group.

I say this is astonishing because historical investigation commonly shows that political choices are not simple. They never present a straightforward good opposed to an unambiguous bad. Academic historians and philosophers should know this: circumstances are usually ambivalent and consequences uncertain. Naturally party politics is impelled to streamline and moralise the alternatives. However, academic evaluation need not do this. It does not have to resign itself to party-political categorisations.

The most important elections we face are national elections. During the hustings, the prevailing political configuration will likely be compared with the state of affairs elsewhere. But the national scene won’t so much be juxtaposed with Ethiopia or Azerbaijan as it will with Europe and the United States. This shows that when we ask where the Left is today, we are asking a local rather than a world-historical question. In Britain, “the Left today” largely refers to something altogether smaller than Nato. Roughly, it encompasses affinities between French, German, British and American politics. To repeat, then: our understanding is historically and geographically parochial despite claims that the Left embraces a cosmopolitan worldview.

While the Left, like any other set of political attitudes, is parochial, its commitments are inevitably partisan. Although the rhetoric is outwardly universalist, the orientation is nearly always sectarian. In fact, the determination to capture and purify the Left is a symptom of this narrow partisanship. On average, Left particularism assumes that virtue resides in just half of the population. This refers to that portion which votes in the preferred way. In certain constituencies, for example in universities, that cohort shrinks to less than 20%: only this faction is “truly” Left. Since this proportion can never constitute a real electoral force, it must make up for its lack of power with the intensity of its beliefs.

But while the Left in the educational sector lacks immediate political power, it enjoys significant influence. Members of the teaching profession, the publishing and heritage industries as well as the print and broadcast media are products of a broadly conceived university culture.

Since the Eighties, if not earlier, generations have been inducted into a diffuse postmodern ideology commonly denominated “identity politics”. The resulting fetishisation of the rights of personhood is often accompanied by confected outrage. It registers an obsession with negligible degrees of marginalisation and tends to abominate just mildly unfavourable attitudes. The assumption is that no one should feel “offended” or “uncomfortable”. What was once disliked as an opposing view is now abhorred as a kind of evil. Disadvantage is mostly conceived within the bounds of middle-class privilege. Consequently, the approach tends to verge on narcissism. The main casualty in all this is a sense of proportion and coherent social policy.

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Marx's vision of inequality

By Branko Milanović

Where, then, is the Left today? It is not fighting an age-old struggle or advancing the cause of international fraternity. It is waging a provincial campaign in a struggle with forces slightly further to the Left and with various opponents on the Right, all deriving their meaning from the fairly recent past. This Left is operating after the demise of socialist planning of the soft and hard varieties. The soft kind fell at least partly at the behest of the electorate at the end of the Seventies after a postwar period of high expenditure failed to alleviate social dissatisfaction or deliver in terms of growth or mobility. The hard kind fell in 1991 with the collapse of Soviet power. An era of Left disorientation has followed.

As I’ve been suggesting, this disorientation has a cultural and a political axis. The cultural side is concentrated in sectors that influence opinion. It is preoccupied with “inequities” in race and gender. Its focus often lacks demographic specificity — which “races”, we are left asking, and gender in which class? What is championed is a rudimentary egalitarian programme constructed around the concept of “balance”. Its focus is on comparative advantage in the professions and symbolic capital in society at large.

The cultural agenda is poorly integrated with the other hinge of the Left, the party-political wing. This side for the most part is concerned with public sector funding, which is basically a matter of fiscal policy. To the extent that the two flanks overlap, they align on the issue of mobility, without necessarily agreeing on what mobility is intended to achieve. The cultural sector is without clear questions while politicians lack definite solutions. In the end, just one thing is plain: neither the cult of victimhood nor the obsession with the “microphysics” of power will be of any help. As the Labour Party tentatively prepares for government, it stands in need of a fundamental rethink.

This view, however, overlooks what was the principal objective for Marx: the abolition of classes, end of private property of capital and thus transcendence of capitalism. Marx and Engels were indeed activists, founders of the First International, indefatigable organisers of various workers’ assemblies, writers of The Communist Manifesto, authors of very accessible lectures delivered to workers’ associations (especially so Marx’s very simple but brilliant Wage Labour and Capital). In such activities, they necessarily argued for typical pro-workers or pro-trade union causes: reduction in the number of hours of work, a ban on child labour, higher wages, free education.

So, how could he not have been a pro-equality thinker? To understand this, one has to return to Marx’s and Engels’ principal objective: the end of class society. For that ultimate objective to be reached, workers’ activism in which Marx participated and which he supported, was necessary. It was useful too as it brought some real gains to the workers. But such activism, in Marx’s view, must never lose sight of the ultimate objective. The reduction of inequality that could be obtained through syndicalist struggles cannot by itself be the final goal. It is only an intermediate aim, on the road to the classless society.

Marx and Engels are very clear on this point in their critique of the Gotha Programme, the new programme of the German Social-Democratic Party drafted in 1875. This was the single most important occasion at which they forcefully expressed the contrast between the two objectives: reduction of income inequality within a capitalist society, and the abolition of classes. As Engels writes: “The elimination of all social and political inequality [as stated in the Gotha Programme] rather than ‘the abolition of class distinctions’ is similarly a most dubious expression, as between one country, one province and even place and another, living conditions will always evince a certain inequality which may be reduced to a minimum but never wholly eliminated.”

That their concern was not unfounded can be seen from the fact that the programme, despite Marx’s and Engels’ objections, was adopted with all of its reformist and meliorist features. The party then went even further in the reformist direction when Eduard Bernstein, who in the years before the First World War became its chief theoretician, argued that “movement is everything, goal nothing”, meaning that the continual struggle for improved workers’ daily existence is what matters, not the abstract, or perhaps, utopian goal of transcending capitalism.

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Neoliberalism killed the liberal dream

By Ashley Frawley

For Marx, as Shlomo Avineri and Leszek Kolakowski independently argue, this transformation of a social-democratic party into the political arm of a trade union movement wasn’t enough. Avineri moreover thinks that, for Marx, the key value of trade union activity was not in its struggle, or at times, successes in improving workers’ conditions, but in the fraternity among members that it created in the struggle for a common cause — in “the real constructive effort to create the social texture of future human relations”. The readiness for sacrifice, dedication to the common goal, and good humour that Marx saw among the Parisian proletariat in 1848 and 1871, and which he chronicled with such passion, were for him glimpses of the future classless society where solidarity will reign rather the “icy-cold water” of self-interest.

For Marx, the subsidiary or secondary importance of equality as a goal comes also from impossibility to achieve true equality under capitalism. True equality will become possible only when a minority no longer monopolises access to capital in order to hire labour, and to appropriate the surplus-value. “To clamour for equal or even equitable remuneration,” Marx writes, “on the basis of the wages system is the same as to clamour for freedom on the basis of the slavery system.”

When will concern with equality become more important? Only when the right background institutions (absence of private property) have been established. Here, as is well-known, Marx distinguishes between two stages: socialism where scarcity is still present and where equal rules will be applied to unequal people (those who work hard, are smarter or luckier will earn more), and the highest stage of development, under communism, when, as the famous formula says, “everybody will contribute according to their abilities and receive according to their needs”.

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Poverty is not inevitable

By Terry Eagleton

It is only under socialism that we should begin to be primarily concerned with material inequalities — that is, at the time when class exploitation has been eliminated but before the society of plenty had arrived. As long as the background institutions are “faulty”, and as long as private capital exists, believing that reduction of inequality is the primary objective of the Left is, according to Marx, wrong because it implicitly accepts the maintenance of unfair institutions that generate inequality.

Given Marx’s writings are explicit about this, why do we tend to ignore his views on equality? The answer, I suspect, is that after the cataclysmic failures of socialism and ideological ascendance of neoliberal ideology, we have tacitly accepted the permanence of capitalism. If one has such a view, then indeed it makes sense to refashion Marx as a pro-equality thinker who cared about trade union activity, equal opportunity, higher workers’ wages and the like. In other words, if we have given up on the idea of ending capitalism, we can try to repurpose Marx into the apostle of equality under capitalism.

But it may not be easy. After all, if the Left tosses out the idea of transcending capitalism, can it be said to be Left-wing at all?

Yet for weeks now, local members of the Labour Party have been in open revolt against their leadership. Jamie Driscoll, the Labour mayor of the North of Tyne, has been blocked from standing as its candidate for a new mayoralty which will cover most of the area, from Durham to Northumbria. Administratively, this may seem like a minor regional snub. But it was Driscoll, a former engineer, who led the negotiations by local council leaders to secure the impressive £1.4 billion devolution settlement to establish the authority in the first place. It was just one victory among many in his current role: he’s created thousands of new jobs, extended rural broadband, and, unlike in the neighbouring Teesside Valley, has seen off the Tory threat.

It seems churlish, then, of the Labour high command to allow the leading architect of this new post stand for it. Starmer’s close ally, Baroness Jenny Chapman — best known for her role in Labour’s defeat in the 2021 Hartlepool by-election — has said Driscoll’s exclusion was “simply guaranteeing the highest quality candidates”. Everyone, however, knows it’s because of Driscoll’s reputation as the “last Corbynista in power”, a provincial leftover from that era of turmoil and defeat which Keir Starmer is desperate to forget. But this time, he seems to have miscalculated; this time, there’s talk that Starmer’s “purges” have finally gone too far.

It is true that Driscoll was backed by Momentum and by Left-wing unions such as Unite. But when Driscoll last stood, these were endorsements for a Labour candidate, not shameful baggage. The Greater Manchester mayor Andy Burnham supported him too, on the basis of his existing record as mayor, and Burnham is no rabid Marxist, no “enemy within”. It has been said that Driscoll’s proximate crime had been to interview the socialist film director Ken Loach in an event at a local theatre four months ago. (Loach was expelled from the Labour Party in 2021 for refusing to disown Labour members who had been expelled for alleged antisemitism.) But Driscoll’s discussion with Loach was a cultural event, not political, and made sense given that Loach has set two of his most recent films on Tyneside, including I, Daniel Blake, which won the Palme d’Or.

In any case, Keir Starmer himself has even stronger links with Loach. His film on the celebrated McLibel case included substantial footage of the young Starmer who worked on the case, in the days when he was nothing more than a fanciable young barrister who fought for free speech and human rights. And, if it’s the Corbyn era that Driscoll is being shamed for, Starmer himself is far from innocent. Even if he’s made the successful swerve from “Jeremy Corbyn is my friend” to “we were never friends”, some of us couldn’t bear the whiplash. The two statements can’t both be true. And there is a sheen of inconsistency and disingenuousness which now taints Starmer’s leadership — and arguably his entire project in the Party.

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Starmer will regret purging the Left

By Michael Crick

Only this week, an Asian member of Labour’s National Executive Committee [NEC], Mish Rahman, was barred from the selection to become a candidate in Wolverhampton South West. Rahman, a Momentum supporter, believes he upset Starmer by voting against the disciplinary structures introduced after the Equality and Human Rights Commission’s report on antisemitism in the party. And yet, just last September, Starmer was pictured presenting Rahman with flowers and a certificate in recognition of his service on the NEC (the photo adorns Rahman’s Twitter site). What’s more, as an NEC member, Rahman has chaired a couple of the party panels that have drawn up selection longlists in other seats — exactly the same type of panel which excluded him. If he was fit to chair such panels, Rahman quite reasonably asks, why is he unfit to be on a longlist himself?

Even people on the Right of the party feel Labour is being far too authoritarian. It was reported this week that when Starmer defended his decision to stick with the government’s two-child benefit cap, nobody in the Shadow Cabinet dared to challenge him, presumably for fear of reprisals. And the relentless ideological moderation has fulfilled every Left-wing stereotype of Starmer as a ruthless politic cynic, “laser-focused” (to use a Starmer cliché) on power but never change.

The case of Driscoll has extended this hostility from Corbynite liabilities to anyone with a strong commitment to trade unionism. Today, even having a working-class background seems to be regarded as suspect, in a party where the leadership has allowed selection processes to become dominated by outside agencies which charge contenders thousands of pounds to advise their campaigns.  And they wholeheartedly believe this is a winning strategy. One of Starmer’s henchmen, Luke Akehurst, happily admitted to me that potential candidates are chosen not on quality, but politics. Anticipating a slim majority after the next election, he argued, Labour cannot afford dissidents who might rebel against official policy.

Strong, self-confident leaders welcome internal debate, while weak leaders who lack confidence are terrified of opposition. When John F. Kennedy won the 1960 presidential election, he sought out the “best and the brightest” to join his Camelot administration. And truly great leaders relish having people around them who will generate fresh ideas and challenge existing thinking. A hundred years before JFK, Abraham Lincoln famously constructed his cabinet as a “team of rivals”. In the UK, Margaret Thatcher loved a good barney in Downing Street, and admired underlings who debated with her. Clement Attlee regarded himself as a primus inter pares, and thrived on having four major figures in his Cabinet — Herbert Morrison, Ernest Bevin, Stafford Cripps and Aneurin Bevan. Attlee skilfully orchestrated their abilities and ambitions to produce the greatest peacetime government of the last century. But, more than even the New Labour era, senior Starmer ministers look set to be side-lined. Power will reside with a small group of individuals whose names mean nothing to the general public.

Jamie Driscoll represents a new breed of regional lieutenant that Starmer should be encouraging. His background as an engineer, and director of a software company, could have been assets to his party. Instead, he is now a martyr, a permanent memory of ruthless mismanagement. Since announcing his independent candidacy, he has already raised more than £100,000 towards his crowd-funding target of £150,000. When he stands, he will badly divide Labour in the once ultra-loyal North East — another heartland which may no longer recognise its historic party. And symbolically he threatens party unity nationwide, even if, as widely expected, Labour wins all three by-elections today.

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Will the hard Left ever leave campus?

By Nicholas Harris

In popular discourse, Starmer is widely thought to be descended from Blair, while Jamie Driscoll personally compares his situation to Ken Livingstone’s back in 2000. And, when Blair spoke to Starmer this week at his Future of Britain conference, he should have reminded him of how he managed his own rebellious regional mayor. Ahead of the inaugural mayoral election in London, Blair had very publicly denounced Livingstone’s bid to become Labour candidate, dismissing him despite his local loyalties and socialist roots. It was a decision Blair later regretted: Livingstone quit the party and trounced Blair’s stooge candidate, Frank Dobson, into a humiliating third place. Recognising his error, Blair later had to allow the popular Livingstone into the party, and backed him in the following mayoral contest in 2004.

In his quest to sanitise Labour’s brand, Starmer’s diktats have worked like pure alcohol, cleansing only as much as they corrode. He believes that he is operating within Labour’s established traditions: Wilson and, of course, Blair were known as ruthless, determined manoeuvrers. But they both understood that Labour leans on several pillars — including its unions links, its idealism and its localism. Somewhere on the road from London to the North East, there is a pit stop where the Durham Miners’ Gala can break bread with the Islingtonian cadres. At this rate, neither will bother to make the journey. And, come 2024, the worst fate for Starmer will be making his victory speech to an empty hall.

The Left, however, also has its blind spots — many of which are apparent in Srinivasan’s essay. Scathing about the new Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act’s attempt to create a culture which promotes academic freedom in UK universities, she barely acknowledges the problems diagnosed by its authors and defenders. Instead, as many a defensive-sounding progressive has implied before her, real cancellation almost never happens in academia — except, of course, where it happens to exactly those people who deserve it (cough).

Despite the occasional admission that campus life these days is becoming censorious and risk-averse, Srinivasan mostly presents the idea of cancel culture as confected by “Right-wing culture warriors”. (Even when you’ve previously written a book on contemporary sexual politics and are now writing about freedom of speech, becoming a culture warrior is still something that only happens to other people, apparently.)

Her framing is depressingly one-dimensional in other ways, too. Nasty Right-wing men twirl their moustaches and prosecute dastardly secret plans under cover of darkness. A bit like a window display in Ann Summers, dog whistles and fig leaves are everywhere you look. The Good Left bites its lip and stares nobly into the middle distance, trying to hold the line on causes such as anti-racism, trans rights and preventing climate change. Meanwhile, lecturers like me, who have experienced strong hostility within universities for expressing controversial academic views, have mistaken our hurt feelings over personal critique for a general social problem.

Indeed, academics like me are presented as somewhat confused about whether our speech has been suppressed at all — for some of us still write for newspapers and talk on television. As is often the case, the putative problem is treated as, at most, one of self-expression. Critics insist: didn’t you get your thoughts out into the world anyway? Well, then, what are you complaining about?

This assumption — that the plausibility of a given narrative about the suppression of an academic’s work is inversely proportional to the total number of her media appearances — ignores the obvious point that a set of ideas can be anathema in one venue and celebrated in another. For instance, as I’ve written before, though welcomed in some media outlets, gender-critical feminists seem to give Guardian and BBC editors a fit of the vapours.

And it’s strange that many progressives refuse to consider this general point. For one of their original critiques of free-speech defences made a somewhat similar observation, albeit about ethnic minorities rather than political ones. They held that such arguments don’t take account of how minorities can be systematically excluded from certain platforms and so don’t get a voice there.

Now, those who think of ideas as operating in a marketplace ruled by the laws of supply and demand might be happy with this. Maybe they think that — a bit like convincing an ice-cream parlour to stock your new brand — if you had really wanted to get your ideas into a particular forum, you should have made them more attractive in the first place. With ideas, though, perhaps unlike with ice cream, it’s not always wise to give the people exactly what they want.

In fact, self-expression or the lack of it is often not the main reason people are interested in academic freedom. The more pressing concern is whether conditions exist in universities that dissuade people from pursuing certain controversial topics out of fear alone. If so, and if those topics matter to society — which they often do, because public controversy is usually a sign of something mattering — then we all have a problem, and it’s one that goes well beyond hurt feelings.

In these cases, faulty beliefs are more likely to develop and spread, public frustration is more likely to proliferate, and policymakers will be more likely to act ineffectively and even harmfully as a result. There is no better example of this than the terrible state of the public conversations on women’s rights in relation to transactivism, and on the medical transition of minors — two conversations that are still very hard to have within UK universities without fear.

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The Oxford kids are alright

By Kathleen Stock

A separate pressing question about academic freedom, also nothing to do with self-expression, is whether the public is getting adequate access to a range of academic voices on controversial issues. This is not because academics need to be treated like rivalrous children, each getting the same number of pats on the head from Mummy and Daddy. It’s because if audiences are not exposed to a wide enough range of viewpoints about a given controversy, they will start to assume that the matter is settled. Worse, they might assume that everyone reasonable agrees the matter is settled, and so dismiss naysayers on the presumed authority of their favourite media sources. And their favourite media sources might be wrong.

Dropping Srinivasan’s emphasis on individual self-expression also has another benefit, in that it allows us to admit there might be circumstances where — perhaps with an initial air of paradox — certain kinds of speech should be regulated in order to avoid a chilling effect. On closer inspection, however, there is nothing paradoxical about suppressing some kinds of speech in order to facilitate others. Speech is one of the main tools used by humans to shut other humans up. There are clearly times when, given the further aim of a relatively open discursive environment, it is appropriate to disincentivise speech that does this.

For instance, unless the moral case is absolutely cut and dried in a way apparent to nearly everybody, I think we should dissuade people from implying, on behalf of supposedly politically neutral university organisations and institutions, that certain conclusions or discussions are ethically unacceptable. Whether it’s a manager writing a politicised tract against Brexit in an email to all staff, or a student tweeting out disgust for some invited speaker in the name of the society for whom he acts as president, the effect on dissenters within the same organisations is nearly always to make it harder for them to disagree with those in charge. (Exceptions might include associations whose explicit aims were to politically agitate in some direction — in which case, they should both make that prior agenda clear to joiners and not go off-piste).

So, unlike Observer columnist Kenan Malik commenting on a similar case a few weeks ago involving the Oxford University’s LGBTQ+ Society — an organisation that the uninitiated might assume was formed only to bring LGBTQ+ students together socially, regardless of political and philosophical commitments — I don’t think that regulating speech-that-chills-the-speech-of-others automatically counts as infringing individuals’ right to expression. The target, after all, is not the speech of individuals as such, but speech made by individuals on behalf of institutions. The individuals concerned are still free to express identical views in a personal capacity elsewhere. The familiar disclaimer “opinions expressed are my own and not that of my employer” is an easy one to adapt here.

Srinivasan, meanwhile, worries that the new Act threatens to undermine the basis of academic judgement itself — because, she says, much of what might look to some as speech suppression in academia is entirely legitimate. Academics, for instance, decide what can and cannot be said in seminars, journals and conferences on the basis of exercising specialist understanding about disciplinary standards and norms. The Act, she suggests, threatens to prevent academics from doing this.

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We are not all Salman Rushdie

By Darran Anderson

But here she both overstates and understates the extent of academic competence. She overstates, because sometimes what passes for neutral academic judgement about the application of disciplinary standards is itself a way of suppressing politically unwanted conclusions, unconsciously or otherwise. This is particularly likely in high-stakes debates, where believers are convinced that there would be some terrible real-world consequences, were disbelievers to get the upper hand — climate change or vaccine discourse, for instance. Yet she also understates academic competence, by assuming there is no way of differentiating partisan cases from more neutral applications of disciplinary judgement. I’m sure academics could collectively develop an adequate methodology for this with a bit of thought. After all, they’re supposed to be good at this stuff.

Stepping back, it’s worth considering why discussions about free speech so often involve partisanship, or the projection of it onto others. To me, it seems partly due to two permanent features of human life, no matter what the historical situation.

The first of these is that truth matters to people — or more precisely, falsehood does. False beliefs cause actions to go wrong in various ways and can sometimes lead to disaster as reality suddenly hits you in the face.  So — except in the special case where you positively want to deceive someone for self-interested reasons — we have a general vested interest in stopping false ideas from spreading.

The second fact is that everyone thinks their own beliefs are true, and that negations of their own beliefs are false. You might be able to admit to yourself that, in principle, given human fallibility generally, some unspecified proportion of your beliefs is likely to be false — but admitting this about any one belief in particular would be a short route to ceasing to hold it as a belief altogether.

Taken together, these two features give rise to some of the issues we see across the political spectrum. First, they make it easy to get aerated when you think your own true beliefs are under threat, but hard to summon up enthusiasm for the protection of what you judge are the false beliefs of others. This is why free speech defences are so often self-interested.

Second, because it is hard to enthuse about protecting other people’s false beliefs, people tend to assume that if you are defending free speech about a particular set of beliefs, you probably also secretly hold those beliefs, too. This explains why guilt-by-association so frequently gets employed against defenders of free speech, as if they must be using it as cover for more heinous opinions.

In fact, although it’s hard, it is possible to believe that speech — including academic speech — should mostly be free, without having some controversial position secretly in mind when you do it. The academic freedom of others is not just the freedom to hold conclusions you and your friends like. And we mustn’t let either Right or Left forget this.

Roughly 20 miles away, a similar scene was playing out in Newcastle. There, a group of Labour members walked out after the chair refused to allow a proposal to boycott the mayoral selection process.

Both incidents were unprecedented in recent Labour history; and both illustrate the ruthless manner in which Keir Starmer and his aides have purged even relatively mild Left-wingers from the party.

Driscoll, who has served as the Labour mayor for the much smaller North of Tyne area since 2019, is routinely described as the “last Corbynista in power”, though this probably exaggerates how Left-wing he really is. His offence, it soon emerged, was guilt by association.

In March, in his role as mayor, Driscoll had hosted an “in conversation” event with the socialist film director Ken Loach, two of whose recent films were set on Tyneside. Loach is persona non grata in Labour, cast out for directing a production of Perdition, a play accused of antisemitism, in 1987. Party officials seemed not to realise that one of Loach’s subsequent works — his 1997 documentary McLibel — had included a substantial interview with a young human rights lawyer called Keir Starmer. Sometimes guilt by association matters; sometimes it doesn’t.

The rapid decline of the Labour Left since 2019 has been astonishing. Earlier this year, Labour announced that under no circumstances could Jeremy Corbyn stand as Labour’s candidate in his Islington North seat at the next election. At the same time, of the 123 new Labour candidates so far chosen to stand in vacated or target seats, only two are firmly on the Left: Faiza Shaheen, an economist who will again challenge Iain Duncan Smith in Chingford and Woodford Green, and Chris Webb in Blackpool South.

Under Starmer, the party apparatus has gone to extraordinary lengths to stop Left-wingers from getting on to the longlist. And in many cases, the victims are trades unionists and socialists whose politics — like Driscoll’s — are not exactly Corbynite. This week, l learnt of two would-be MPs in north Lancashire who have just been told by party officials that there is no point in applying as they will be excluded at the “due diligence” stage.

Indeed, the problem seems especially acute in the North West and Northern regions. In Copeland, for instance, Joe Ghayouba, a popular councillor who is half-Egyptian and has campaigned for Palestinian rights, was excluded; in Carlisle, Louise Atkinson, a black councillor and teacher who is president of the National Education Union, was mysteriously omitted without explanation. Even when reasons are provided, they are often trivial. One contender was told their offence was to “like” a past tweet in which Nicola Sturgeon said she’d tested negative for Covid.

If this seems ruthless, it’s only because Starmer is able to be. His aides have conducted by far the most tightly organised operation the party has ever known. Candidate selection is overseen by the two Matts — Matt Faulding and Matt Pound — and greatly assisted by long-standing Labour NEC member Luke Akehurst. Faulding was once deputy director of the Blairite think tank Progress, while Pound used to run Labour First, which represents the “Old Labour Right”, and organised to get Blairites picked as candidates during the Corbyn years. Labour First is now run by Akehurst, who as an NEC member gets to chair many of the panels that have been excluding Left-wingers. In other words, these three unknown men are now running the operation to choose the next generation of Labour politicians. Each is easily more powerful than most members of the shadow cabinet.

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The Labour Party has a woman problem

By Rosie Duffield

True, Labour’s due-diligence process certainly needed beefing up; in February, Jared O’Mara became the second Labour MP elected in 2017, following Fiona Onasanya, to be sent to jail for offences of dishonesty. But Labour’s due diligence process isn’t just about character flaws or past misdemeanours. As Akehurst admitted to me last week, there is a strong “political element” behind blocking candidates: “Maybe they’ve been incredibly publicly disrespectful of the current leadership… or they’ve got a constant record of breaking the whip as a local councillor… If we’re in a… hung Parliament situation, or a very narrow majority at the next election, I don’t want to have allowed people to become Labour MPs who are not solid votes for the Labour Party.”

Here, of course, Starmer’s hitmen are partly emulating the ruthless tactics of Corbyn and his allies. Under his regime, loyalty rather than ability also seemed to be the main qualification for selection. The Corbynites, for instance, felt not the slightest guilt in brazenly overturning the selection of Camden councillor Sally Gimson in Bassetlaw on what were obviously trumped up and minor charges.

Yet Starmer’s high command has gone far beyond the harsh rule of the Corbyn years, even pitting MPs against each other in some seats. When Left-winger Beth Winter was defeated by loyalist Gerald Jones in the new Merthyr Tydfil and Cynon Valley seat this week, she complained that the Welsh party had fixed the process against her. Such is the strength of the Starmerite machine that many on the Left have simply given up trying.

And why wouldn’t they? Under the Akehurst criteria, it’s unthinkable that Neil Kinnock, John Prescott, Clare Short and Robin Cook, all of whom were rebels in their early careers, would be selected. Nor do I think Angela Rayner, the party’s deputy leader, would get on the Labour list today — she couldn’t be described as a Corbynite, but her trade-union background would make her suspect to some of those working for Starmer.

Past Labour governments, by contrast, have always thrived on being a “broad church”. Attlee’s cabinet counted Nye Bevan and Stafford Cripps among its towering figures, yet both had suffered periods of expulsion from the party only a few years before. Wilson’s benefited from the presence of Dick Crossman and Barbara Castle; Callaghan had Tony Benn and Michael Foot (another former expellee), while Blair’s deputy John Prescott had been one of the “tightly knit group of politically motivated men” denounced by Wilson during the 1966 seamen’s strike.

As the experiences of both Boris Johnson and Liz Truss demonstrated, it’s a mistake to confine one’s government to a narrow band of loyal yes-men and women. Cabinet government needs the odd maverick, people who are willing to come up with alternative ideas and scrutinise and challenge existing policy. “Keir is blocking off his exits,” a former Corbyn aide recently told him. “You need some people who are creating space, and who enable the party to be a bit bolder.”

Meanwhile Team Starmer’s treatment of Corbyn and, to some extent, Diane Abbott has also instilled a sense of fear among the three dozen die-hard MPs who still belong to the Socialist Campaign Group in Westminster. They’ve deliberately kept quiet in recent months, terrified that the leadership will jump on the slightest excuse to deprive them of the whip and disqualify them from standing for Labour.

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Keir Starmer the Conservative

By Tom McTague

“People are very worried that anything that is in any way challenging will be used in a disciplinary process against them,” John McDonnell said recently. “You don’t want to put yourself in a position of vulnerability and then let other people down as well.” McDonnell advises colleagues to keep their heads down, to keep their noses clean. But he also attempted to cheer up Left-wing MPs by reminding them that if Labour gets a small majority next time — of just 20, say — then they could suddenly be back in business, effectively holding the balance of power in the Commons, as the old Tribune Group did during the Wilson/Callaghan government of the Seventies. And that, of course, is what the two Matts and Luke Akehurst fear.

The Labour Left aren’t just victims of a Starmerite plot, of course. They lack leadership, ideas and confidence. The 2019 election defeat knocked the stuffing out of them. Yet tens of thousands of people who took part in the Corbynite movement haven’t just vanished or died. Many have ripped up their Labour membership cards, but many are still active in politics — in unions, pressure groups and single-issue campaigns. Consider the Corbynite group Momentum, which has refocused its work on issues such as climate change and getting people elected to local government councils.

What’s more, history suggests the Left will be back. The Attlee government spawned the Bevanite surge of the Fifties, while disillusionment with the Wilson and Callaghan governments led to the rise of Tony Benn and the Bennites in the Seventies and Eighties. More recently, the Iraq war and other alleged “betrayals” of the Blair-Brown era eventually prompted the most astonishing Left-wing turn of all — the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn.

And when this happens, the fight rarely ends. Like mafia factions engaged in a perpetual tit-for-tat vendetta, the Labour Right and Left closely observe each other’s tactics, then adopt them, with ever more draconian reprisals. If and when the Labour Left returns, it will be with a great sense of vengeance — and Labour’s politics will get more bloody than ever.

The woke discourse today is confusing because it appeals to emotions traditional to the Left: empathy for the marginalised, indignation at the plight of the oppressed, determination that historical wrongs can be righted. Those emotions, however, are derailed by a range of theoretical assumptions — usually expressed as self-evident truths — that ultimately undermine them.

Take a sentence the New York Times printed shortly after Biden’s election: “Despite Vice President Kamala D. Harris’s Indian roots, the Biden administration may prove less forgiving over Modi’s Hindu nationalist agenda.” If you read that quickly, you may miss the theoretical assumption: political views are determined by ethnic backgrounds. If you know nothing about contemporary India, you may miss the fact that the fiercest critics of Modi’s violent nationalism are themselves Indian.

Now, the New York Times is neither unique nor particularly leftist, but it does set standards for progressive discourse in more than one country. What concerns me most here are the ways in which contemporary voices considered to be progressive have abandoned the philosophical ideas that are central to any liberal or Left-wing standpoint: a commitment to universalism over tribalism, a firm distinction between justice and power, and a belief in the possibility of progress. All these ideas are connected. The Right may be more dangerous, but today’s Left has deprived itself of ideas we need if we hope to resist the lurch to the Right.

This Rightwards lurch is international and organised. The solidarity between them suggests that nationalist beliefs are only marginally based on the idea that Hungarians/Norwegians/Jews/Germans/Anglo-Saxons/Hindus are the best of all possible tribes. What unites them is the principle of tribalism itself: you will only truly connect with those who belong to your tribe, and you need have no deep commitments to anyone else.

It’s a bitter piece of irony that today’s Right-wing tribalists today find it easier to make common cause than those on the Left whose commitments traditionally stemmed from universalism, whether they recognise it or not. Woke discourse is confusing because so many of its goals are indeed shared by progressives everywhere. The idea of intersectionality might have emphasised the ways in which all of us have more than one identity. Instead, it led to a focus on those parts of identities which are most marginalised, and multiplied them into a forest of trauma.

Wokeness emphasises the ways in which particular groups have been denied justice, and seeks to rectify and repair the damage. But in the focus on inequalities of power, the concept of justice is often left by the wayside. Wokeness demands that nations and peoples face up to their criminal histories. But in the process, it often concludes that all history is criminal.

The concept of universalism once defined the Left; international solidarity was its watchword. This was just what distinguished it from the Right, which recognised no deep connections, and few real obligations, to anyone outside its own circle. The Left demanded that the circle encompass the globe. This was what standing Left meant: to care about striking coal miners in Wales, or Republican volunteers in Spain, or freedom fighters in South Africa. What united was not blood but conviction — first and foremost the conviction that behind all the differences of time and space which separate us, human beings are deeply connected in a wealth of ways. To say that histories and geographies affect us is trivial. To say they determine us is false.

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Ludwig Wittgenstein's war on philosophy

By Terry Eagleton

The opposite of universalism is often called “identitarianism”, but the word is misleading, for it suggests that our identities can be reduced to, at most, two dimensions. In fact, all of us have many. As Kwame Anthony Appiah reminds us: “Until the middle of the 20th century, no one who was asked about a person’s identity would have mentioned race, sex, class, nationality, region or religion.”

The reduction of the multiple identities we all possess to race and gender isn’t about physical appearance. It’s a focus on those dimensions which experienced the most generalisable trauma. This embodies a major shift that began in the mid-20th century: the subject of history was no longer the hero but the victim. The impulse to shift our focus to the victims of history began as an act of justice. History was told by the victors, while the victims’ voices went unheard. To turn the tables and insist that the victims’ stories enter the narrative was just a part of righting old wrongs. The movement to recognise the victims of slaughter and slavery began with the best of intentions. It recognised that might and right often fail to coincide, that very bad things happen to all sorts of people, and that even when we cannot change that we are bound to record it. Yet something went wrong when we rewrote the place of the victim; the impulse that began in generosity turned downright perverse.

The limiting case of this trend is the story of Binjamin Wilkomirski, the Swiss man whose claims to have spent his childhood in a concentration camp turned out to be invented. Wilkomirski was hardly alone. In the two decades since, there has been a rash of contemporaries inventing worse histories than they experienced — a trend which runs counter to some of the heroes of postcolonial thinking, such as Frantz Fanon, whose Black Skin, White Masks proclaims: “I am not the slave of the Slavery that dehumanised my ancestors.”

Identity politics not only contract the multiple components of our identities to one: they essentialise that component over which we have the least control. I prefer the word “tribalism”, an idea which is as old as the Hebrew Bible. Tribalism is a description of the civil breakdown that occurs when people, of whatever kind, see the fundamental human difference as that between our kind and everyone else.

Universalism is now under fire on the Left because it is conflated with fake universalism: the attempt to impose certain cultures on others in the name of an abstract humanity that turns out to reflect just a dominant culture’s time, place, and interests. This happens daily in the name of corporate globalism. But let’s consider what a feat it was to make that original abstraction to humanity. Earlier assumptions were inherently particular, as earlier ideas of law were religious. The idea that one law should apply to Protestants and Catholics, Jews and Muslims, lords and peasants, simply in virtue of their common humanity is a relatively recent achievement which now shapes our assumptions so thoroughly we fail to recognise it as an achievement at all.

Let’s also consider the opposite: the Nazi legal theorist Carl Schmitt, who wrote that “whoever says the word ‘humanity’ wants to deceive you”. Instead we might say: “whoever says ‘humanity’ is making a normative claim.” To recognise someone as human is to acknowledge a dignity in them that should be honoured. It also implies that this recognition is an achievement: to see humanity in all the weird and beautiful ways it appears is a feat that demands you go beyond appearances.

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Why philosophers are so weird

By Kathleen Stock

Which do you find more essential: the accidents we are born with, or the principles we consider and uphold? Traditionally, it was the Right who focused on the first, and the Left who emphasised the second. This tradition has been inverted. It’s not surprising, then, that theories held by the woke undermine their empathetic emotions and emancipatory intentions. Those theories not only have strong reactionary roots; some of their authors were outright Nazis. Ideas influenced by Carl Schmitt and Martin Heidegger and their epigones take up plenty of room on the progressive syllabus. The fact that both men not only served the Nazis but defended doing so long after the war is old news. Outrage, today, is reserved for racist passages of 18th-century philosophy.

In fact, many of the theoretical assumptions which support the most admirable impulses of the woke come from the intellectual movement they most despise. The best tenets of woke, such as the insistence on viewing the world from more than one geographical perspective, come straight from the Enlightenment. Contemporary rejections of this period usually go hand in hand with not much knowledge of it. But you can’t hope to make progress by sawing at the branch you don’t know you are sitting on.

It is now an article of faith that universalism, like other Enlightenment ideas, is a sham that was designed to disguise Eurocentric views which supported colonialism. These claims are not simply ungrounded: they turn the Enlightenment upside down. Enlightenment thinkers invented the critique of Eurocentrism and were the first to attack colonialism — on the basis of universalist ideas. When contemporary postcolonial theorists rightly insist that we learn to view the world from the perspective of non-Europeans, they are echoing a tradition that goes back to 18th-century thinkers, who risked their livelihoods, and sometimes their lives, to defend those ideas.

This is not merely a historical matter: we need Enlightenment ideas if we have any hope of moving forward against what are politely called the authoritarian tendencies of the present. But there is no time for politeness when many elected leaders around the world are openly undermining democracy.

My book Left is not Woke sketches the theoretical underpinnings of much woke discourse, and argues for a return to those Enlightenment ideas which are crucial for any progressive standpoint: the commitment to universalism over tribalism, the belief in a principled distinction between justice and power, and the conviction that progress, while never inevitable, is possible. Such ideas are anathema to thinkers such as Michel Foucault, the most-cited philosopher in postcolonial studies, or Carl Schmitt.

Both rejected the idea of universal humanity and the distinction between power and justice, along with a deep scepticism towards any idea of progress. What makes them interesting to progressive thinkers today is their commitment to unmasking liberal hypocrisies. Schmitt was particularly scorching about British imperialism, and American commitment to the Monroe Doctrine; both, he argued, used pieties about humanity and civilisation to disguise naked piracy.

But Land and Sea, his book expanding these views, was published when Germany was at war with Britain and America. It’s an old Nazi trope. Schmitt wasn’t wrong that universalist claims of justice meant to restrain simple assertions of power have been abused for centuries. He concluded that unvarnished power grabs like those of the Nazis were not only legal but legitimate. You may think that’s the best we can do. Or you may go to work to narrow the gap between ideals of justice and realities of power.

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As for Michel Foucault, his style was transgressive, but his vision was gloomier than any traditional conservative. You think we make progress towards practices that are kinder, more liberating, more respectful of human dignity — all goals of the Left? Look at the history of an institution or two. What seemed to be steps towards progress turn out to be more sinister forms of repression. All of them are ways in which the state extends its domination over our lives. Once you’ve seen how every step forward becomes a more subtle and powerful step towards total subjection, you’re likely to conclude that progress is illusory.

Woke activists fail to see that both these theories subvert their own goals. Without universalism there is no argument against racism, merely a bunch of tribes jockeying for power. Any by the fall of 2020 few voices defending Black Lives Matter, of whom I was initially one, were universalist. If that’s what political history comes to, there is no way to maintain a robust idea of justice, let alone coherently strive for progress.

Enlightenment thinkers, meanwhile, proclaimed that progress is (just barely) possible; their passionate engagement with the evils of their day precludes any belief that progress is assured. Still, they never stopped working towards it. As Kant argued, we cannot act morally without hope. To be clear: hope is not optimism. Hope makes no forecasts at all. Optimism is a refusal to face facts. Hope aims to change them. When the world is really in peril, optimism is obscene. Yet one thing can be predicted with absolute certainty: if we succumb to the seduction of pessimism, the world as we know it is lost.

You need not study philosophical debates about the relations between theory and practice to know at least this: what you think is possible determines the framework in which you act. If you think it’s impossible to distinguish truth from narrative, you won’t bother to try. If you think it’s impossible to act on anything other than self-interest, whether genetic, individual or tribal, you will have no qualms about doing the same.

It is often recalled that the Nazis came to power through democratic elections, but they never won a majority until they had already grasped power. Had the Left-wing parties been willing to form a united front, as thinkers from Einstein to Trotsky urged, the world could have been spared its worst war. The differences dividing the parties were real; blood had even been spilled. But though the Stalinist Communist Party couldn’t see it, those differences paled next to the difference between universal Leftist movements and the tribal visions of fascism.

We cannot afford a similar mistake.

To understand why, it’s worth reading a paper by the Tony Blair Institute (TBI) from earlier this year, written by former YouGov president Peter Kellner. The report breaks the population into four subsets.

There are two “consistent” groups: those who are middle-class by occupation and say they are middle-class (26% of the population) and those who are working-class “on paper” and say they are working-class (31%). And there are two “crossover” groups: those in middle-class jobs who say they are working-class (31%) and those in working-class professions who say they are middle-class (12%).

The dynamic between the “crossover” groups speaks to some of the most interesting elements of post-war politics. Underlying it is an abiding non-sequitur — thanks to both segments believing themselves to be a member of the opposite class. Hence, these groups include some of politics’ most familiar stock characters, from the self-hating liberal to the bootstraps Tory, via the beret-wearing student and White Van Man.

Much commentary has been spent analysing the last of the four tribes — those who are working-class “on paper” but don’t identify as such. Described as “blue collar aspirational”, this upwardly mobile group were Tony Blair’s target market. Having been successfully courted by Margaret Thatcher, they were won back by New Labour in 1997, drifting away again after 2010. The progressive need to speak to these voters is, Blair says, “entirely familiar”. And he’s right that parts of the labour movement struggle to do this.

Yet less attention is paid to the other “crossover” group. Dubbed “white collar progressives” in the report, this section of society embodies the reverse of blue-collar aspiration. They are middle-class in professional terms but see themselves as working-class, and are the joint largest group.

This cohort has, I suspect, grown significantly in recent years — as both white-collar jobs and progressive values have become more common. It seems highly unlikely that they would have outnumbered blue-collar aspirationals five-to-two in the Eighties, as they do now. Peter Kellner himself conducted the same polling exercise in 2014, and even then there were fewer white-collar progressives. Since then, around a fifth of the ABC1 population seems to have switched to a working-class identity. Even among those earning over £62,000, half now say they’re working-class, according to the most recent poll.

The politics of Kellner’s four segments goes some way to explaining this discrepancy. White-collar progressives are the most straightforwardly Left-wing — the only grouping which backed Labour in 2019. They represent, in this respect, a set of progressive values which is on the rise in developed nations — something which drives, you could argue, their identification with those who have less.

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Can Starmer break Labour's curse?

By Dominic Sandbrook

Problem solved? Well yes, a bit. But although political leaning may explain why white-collar progressives vote “against their interests”, it doesn’t tell us why they see themselves as working-class. This matters, I think, and we’ll come onto why shortly.

The fact that so many do misidentify as working-class is frequently a source of ridicule, and this is often well-deserved. In his 2014 analysis, Kellner likened them to Dave Spart, Private Eye’s satire of a middle-class radical. The parody Twitter account Corbyn Superfan was Spart’s digital descendent: the privately educated son of a Berkshire executive, Corbyn Superfan was avowedly working-class and expected that his hardship would be alleviated under “Jez”.

We tend to treat white collar progressives — unlike the aspirational working-classes — as a nuisance more than a phenomenon, and rarely take them seriously. But look at the data and it quickly becomes clear that they’re not all hipsters and revolutionaries.

Do white-collar progressives wish simply to “descend” the social rungs — to perform aspiration in reverse? Do they want to get off the property ladder, as working-class Thatcherites aimed to buy their council houses and get onto it? This is the implication, if you invert the idea that a working-class person identifying as middle-class is evidence of “aspiration”.

There are, of course, some methodological factors we cannot ignore: the major role which our parents’ social class plays in how we identify, and the limitations of the ABC1/C2DE grading system in a service-based economy, which means that many non-manual jobs carry low pay or low status. But the blue-collar aspirational group are also prey to some of these caveats, and have remained smaller and more stable. So it seems there must be wider elements at play.

My own theory is that three factors explain the rise of reverse aspiration: a society which is increasingly egalitarian, an economy which is unequal, and a culture which is individualistic. Let’s begin with the first. Many of the assumptions which govern our politics and society are broadly egalitarian. All the main parties acknowledge the notion of equality, and the “on your bike” mantras of Thatcherism are largely unsayable — as Liz Truss can testify.

Different political strains apply this in conflicting ways, attacking different “elites”. The Right claim to speak for those who are truly self-made, while the Left wish to champion those who have overcome genuine oppression and hardship. But neither would be keen to admit to being born with a silver spoon, and both purport to “punch up”.

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In defence of class

By Justin Webb

Our political ethos, then, prizes humble beginnings, encounters with adversity and connection to the lives of ordinary people. This is so ubiquitous that it’s only when you read a Penguin Classic novel — when a Victorian character hides their “low” birth, or experiences the public shame of losing their fortune — that you remember it was not ever thus. Of course, today’s egalitarian norms are unquestionably a good thing. But they make people more likely to disguise their advantages, and to focus on the aspects of their identity which are untainted by privilege.

The second factor is economic. Despite the egalitarian mores described above, the UK economy is in fact — like many developed nations — deeply unequal and getting more so. This contradiction reflects the phenomenon of the past 70 years, whereby the Left have won cultural battles but lost economic ones. You’re more likely to hear a Geordie accent reading the news, but your economic prospects if you’re from the North-East are comparatively worse. An unequal economy leads to working-class identification, I think, because the human tendency is often to look upwards for comparisons rather than down. The presence among us of people with vast riches make us all feel poorer.

An economically unequal society also means, over time, that wealth — particularly housing wealth, often thanks to inheritance — begins to matter more than income. This compounds the importance of our parents’ social class, as a determinant of identity. Let’s take a working-class-born 30-something in a well-paid job. If this person cannot afford a property inside the M25 despite a good salary, they’ll probably feel more closely wedded to their upbringing — especially if they watch middle-class-born contemporaries gifted money from parents to buy a house.

The final factor is our individualistic culture. A study from a few years ago, for example, found that “language in American books has become increasingly focused on the self and uniqueness in the decades since 1960”. Each person, it seems, wants to feel that they have a distinctive merit and story of their own. This has surely accelerated in the age of social media, and nor is it necessarily a bad thing. A focus on the innate value of the individual can lead away from nativism, just as it can open the door to narcissism.

But it means that we put a greater focus on our own personal narratives. And these narratives usually need a hurdle or two to overcome, in order to carry meaning. Otherwise, you’re starting the book at the end. One effect of individualism, therefore, is that you get large numbers of embarrassed meritocrats, who feel they need to construct a reality in which they’re swimming against the tide.

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The return of class war

By Malcom Kyeyune

Given the deterministic quality of the above, one could be forgiven for asking: does any of it matter? But for those looking to advance fairness and equality, I believe it does. Part of the reason why concerns the political debate itself. Many elements of our modern culture war boil down, on both Left and Right, to arguments around who is truly privileged, who is pretending to be and who has the right to decide. These can never be resolved without a full audit of each person’s “lived experience”. But they cause a massive distraction and leave all parties feeling misunderstood.

The other aspect is particularly important for progressive politics. Policy-making gets a lot harder, from a Left-liberal perspective, if large numbers of society’s “haves” believe they are its “have nots”. The Corbyn project’s focus on free higher education was a good example of where this leads — to initiatives which pose as egalitarian victories, while in effect helping those who are already doing well.

During the Eighties and Nineties, political arguments on the Left were often about the need to understand aspiration. Maybe, two decades into a new century, we need to start thinking about how we handle its opposite.

Yet in the past 12 months everything has changed. The Conservatives are now onto their third Prime Minister of the year, having done their best to torpedo their own reputation for economic responsibility, while the Bank of England predicts the longest recession since records began. Above all, Starmer’s poll lead now stands somewhere around 20%, depending on whom you ask. The sense of inevitability is such that even the Chester by-election, which Labour won with a swing of almost 14%, was treated by the press as a bit of a non-event. Maybe the Conservatives will come back in time for the general election; after all, they’ve done it before. They’ve never done it, though, against such a gloomy economic backdrop.

So, while Starmer would be rash to give Pickfords a ring just yet, he wouldn’t be human if he didn’t look up their number, just in case. If Starmer does make it into Downing Street, he’ll be only the seventh Labour Prime Minister in our history, following Ramsay MacDonald, Clement Attlee, Harold Wilson, Jim Callaghan, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. (The Tories have had twice that number since 1924.) No doubt readers will have strong views about some of the names on that list. (All men, of course: a fact that really irritates Labour partisans when you bring it up.)

The really remarkable thing, though, is that there have been so few of them. Indeed, only three of those men — Attlee, Wilson and Blair — actually won a Labour majority at a General Election, an astonishing statistic when you consider that their party styles itself as the People’s Party. I would guess that most of us instinctively think of the Tories and Labour as rivals of roughly equal standing, a bit like the Republicans and the Democrats across the Atlantic. But if winning elections is the test, which it surely is, then the two parties are less Liverpool and Manchester City than Liverpool and West Bromwich Albion.

As it happens, it’s exactly 99 years today since the election that gave us the very first Labour government — although in a sign of things to come, they didn’t come close to winning a majority. The circumstances were complicated, to say the least. A year earlier, in the autumn of 1922, the collapse of the Lloyd George coalition had triggered a general election. The Conservatives won handsomely under the dour Canadian-born businessman Bonar Law, with the Liberals divided and Labour a very poor second. But Bonar Law fell ill with terminal cancer the following spring, and was succeeded by his Chancellor, the former Harrow pornographer turned media countryman Stanley Baldwin.

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How Britain became an American colony

By Dominic Sandbrook

Amid a series of enormously complicated intrigues, Baldwin adopted a new policy of economic protectionism, for which, he decided, he must have a new mandate from the voters. So, on 6 December 1923, the voters turned out for their second general election in barely a year. Almost everybody expected Baldwin to romp home, rather as people expected Theresa May to crush the saboteurs in 2017. Alas, we know what happened to her — and it happened to Baldwin, too. His majority vanished in a puff of smoke, leaving a hung parliament in which the Tories had 258 seats, Labour 191 and the Liberals 158. To almost universal disbelief — including, it has to be said, his own — Ramsay MacDonald made his way to Buckingham Palace for a historic audience with George V.

Almost a century later, it’s easy to forget what an extraordinary moment this was. Born in 1866, the illegitimate son of a Scottish farm labourer and a housemaid, MacDonald was by far the most unlikely Prime Minister in Britain’s history. After leaving school at the age of 15, he had worked on a farm himself before becoming a schoolteacher and socialist activist. Leader of the little parliamentary Labour Party before the Great War, he had been forced to step down because of his pacifism, and had even lost his seat in 1918. Persistence, charisma and intellectual dedication had brought him back into the front line. Never, though, had he expected to be offered the premiership.

For the King, who had actively urged Baldwin not to risk the “turmoil” of an early general election, the prospect of a Labour government was less than enticing. In the words of his biographer, Kenneth Rose, George “thought that nearly all change was for the worse”, and had “scarcely troubled to conceal his detestation of either Socialism or the Labour Party”.

But now George rose to the challenge. When, on the afternoon of 22 January 1924, MacDonald returned from Buckingham Palace as Prime Minister, he noted that the King had been “most friendly”, and had asked only that “I would do nothing to compel him to shake hands with the murderers of his relatives” — meaning Lenin’s Bolsheviks. Indeed, by and large the two men got on remarkably well, given the gulf of class and outlook. “The King has never seen me as a Minister without making me feel that he was also seeing me as a friend,” MacDonald wrote afterwards, rather sweetly.

That first Labour government didn’t last long. Right from the start it was a beleaguered minority administration; indeed, MacDonald had only been given the chance of power because the Liberal leader and former PM, H. H. Asquith, was so sure he would make a mess of it. In the immediate aftermath of the election, the Tory papers were full of blood and thunder about the threat of Bolshevism. Yet as one of his ministers remarked at the time, “MacDonald’s idea is to show how respectable [we] are.”

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In that respect, he succeeded. There were no radical reforms, no major nationalisations, no great innovations. “Once Labour was in office,” the ultra-reactionary historian Maurice Cowling wrote later, “the government seemed very little different from anything that had gone before.” By and large, MacDonald and co. pottered blandly along, waiting for the inevitable moment when the Tories and Liberals would gang up and force them out.

It came in the late summer of 1924, after a row about a Communist newspaper editor who had urged the armed forces to mutiny. Once again, the three parties went to the country. This time the issue was pretty simple: MacDonald and socialism, or Baldwin and anti-socialism. And this time Baldwin won a gigantic 209-seat majority, and that was that.

In some ways, that first taste of power 99 years ago looked very propitious. MacDonald had established Labour as the main rivals to the Tories, and as a serious, ostentatiously respectable party of government. There was no reason to doubt that they would soon return to office, and indeed MacDonald came back as head of yet another minority government just five years later.

The long-term future seemed equally bright. In an industrial democracy like Britain, in which chapels and trade unions played such enormous social and cultural roles, there seemed every chance Labour would become the nation’s dominant political force, as the Liberals had been in Gladstone’s day. Surely, surely, the future was red — wasn’t it?

A century later, of course, we know different. When you survey the political landscape from MacDonald’s unexpected success in December 1923 to Starmer’s great expectations in December 2022, there are a couple of Labour high points — the Attlee and Blair landslides in particular. But there aren’t half as many as MacDonald and his contemporaries would have predicted. Over the decades, Conservative Prime Ministers have come and gone with wearisome regularity, but the spectacle of haggard, red-eyed Labour leaders conceding defeat in the early hours of the morning has become something of a cliché. Even the sainted Attlee, indisputably Labour’s most influential Prime Minister, lost more general elections than he won.

Why? On the Left, the usual explanation is a conspiracy theorist’s bedtime fantasy, with a rich cast of unscrupulous businessmen, wicked press lords and brainwashed masses. After Ed Miliband’s humiliation in 2015, I heard a splendidly baroque version of this at first hand, involving George Osborne, the Rothschilds and a plot by the Post Office to steal millions of votes. It came, inevitably, from an Oxford academic. But if we steer away from the wilder shores of Left-wing lunacy, one of the best explanations lies in an excellent essay by a Labour activist called Chris Clarke, since published as the book The Dark Knight and the Puppet Master.

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In essence, says Clarke, Labour has been distressingly prone to populist myths that drag it down “ethical and electoral wormholes” — a result, I would suggest, of its emotional roots in nonconformist Protestant enthusiasm. One myth is what he calls “The Dark Knight”, which elevates boring parliamentary politics into an apocalyptic showdown between good and evil. The upside is that it gets activists going (“Never kissed a Tory!”). The drawback is that most ordinary people think it’s completely bonkers.

The next myth is “The Puppet Master”, the simplistic view that things are really being controlled by a shadowy elite in cahoots with the mainstream media. (As you may have noticed, these myths have their mirror images on the right, especially in America.) And the third is what Clarke calls “The Golden Era” — the fantasy that life was better in the past, before the Great Betrayal.

In Labour’s case, this means a rose-tinted and often utterly wrong-headed fixation on its one truly significant period in office, the Attlee government of 1945-51. At Labour conferences, you can often see plenty of people wearing T-shirts asking “What Would Clement Do?” Well, what would Clement do? Serve as Churchill’s deputy? Send troops across picket lines to break a dock strike? Set up Nato and commission a nuclear bomb? Send British troops to fight in Korea? Yes, that’s what Clement would do, because he did.

Back, though, to Starmer. Can he break the losing streak? Can he succeed where Hugh Gaitskell, Michael Foot, Neil Kinnock, Ed Miliband and Jeremy Corbyn so conspicuously failed, and follow Ramsay and Clem into the Palace to kiss hands with the King? Given the polls, you’d be brave to bet against him. Indeed, whatever you think of him — and personally, I’d happily never hear another word from him as long as I live — there’s no doubt that he wants it. His slow-burning betrayal of Jeremy Corbyn, his abandonment of his own Brexit position, his ruthless moves against his own Left wing: these are the hallmarks of a politician who’s absolutely serious about winning power. Even his shameless posturing about private schools seems very cleverly calculated, a bit of populist red meat to throw to the loonies.

Perhaps above all, Starmer has the one quality that most recent Labour leaders have lacked. He is dull — and not just dull, but excruciatingly, soul-crushingly boring. That infuriates his hard-core activists, just as Attlee’s taciturn caution infuriated their predecessors in the Forties. But the facts of history are pretty clear. Nobody can lose an election like an interesting Labour leader. And if the Baggies of British politics have their hearts set on a championship charge in 2024, perhaps they should be grateful to have a manager who’s not afraid to grind his way, whatever it takes, to a boring 1-0 victory.

***

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And yet, for many in the Western intelligentsia and policymaking circles, little Vinice is a harbinger of doom — a reminder of how “overpopulation” is destroying the planet. The prize for the most miserable response predictably goes to the New York Times. The paper used the occasion to offer a platform to Les Knight, the founder of the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, which calls on people to abstain from reproduction to usher in man’s extinction — the only possible solution to the problems facing the Earth. “Look what we did to this planet. We’re not a good species,” Knight is quoted as saying.

At the very least, by opting out of reproduction, couples will avoid “sentencing their offspring to a rapidly deteriorating quality of life and unimaginably horrible death”, according to the movement’s website. This mixture of misanthropic anti-humanism and Malthusian apocalypticism used to be among the fringiest of fringe theories; today, however, wishing for humanity’s extinction is touted as just another form of benign environmentalism. The reaction of other mainstream outlets was less grotesque, but the message was more or less the same: the growing global population, said CNN, represents a serious “challenge” to the environment.

The idea of “overpopulation” is difficult to talk about seriously, since it is inevitably tied to outlandish conspiracy theories about 5G or Covid vaccines being part of a nefarious plan to depopulate the planet; but it’s clear the elites are concerned about the issue, as the Times piece demonstrates. The argument is one we’ve heard a million times: human activity is destroying the planet’s biodiversity, and outstripping its capacity to replenish natural resources, and more people on the planet means more pressure on nature.

The issue is rarely framed in terms of the need to forcibly reduce the world population — though it is becoming increasingly acceptable to talk of the need for tools of population control, such as one-child policies, regardless of the fact that the population growth rate is falling rapidly. Rather we are told of the need to “change the way we live” by reducing our “ecological footprint”. The most important goal of all, according to governments and international institutions, is Net Zero — the need for the world to bring greenhouse gas emissions down to zero as soon as possible.

This might seem like a sensible idea on paper; there’s no denying that fossil fuels have serious drawbacks in terms of climate alteration and pollution. Yet its practical implementation is a different matter entirely. The pressure on developing nations by institutions such as World Economic Forum, the UN and the World Bank to stop subsidising fossil fuels or to ban fertilisers in food production has already caused chaos, political instability and unrest in dozens of countries: in 2019, there were major protests in Sudan, Zimbabwe, Haiti, Lebanon, Ecuador, Iraq, Chile, and Iran.

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The great Net Zero lie

By Thomas Fazi

These protests serve as a reminder that one can be concerned about climate change and the state of the planet while still being sceptical of the idea that these problems can be solved through top-down solutions imposed on nations by the Davos-attending, private jet-flying, corporate-backed (if not corporation-owning) policy-building elites of the world — people at the absolute peak of the global capitalist power pyramid. Yet remarkably, these very elites have found an unlikely ally in the struggle against the evils of anthropogenic activities: radical anti-capitalists known as “degrowthers”.

Degrowthers claim that the problem at the root of humanity’s negative impact on the planet is economic growth itself, which in turn is said to be driven by the logic of the capitalist mode of production. It is, in the words of Jason Hickel, one of the most prominent degrowth advocates, “organised around the imperative of constant expansion, or ‘growth’: ever-increasing levels of industrial extraction, production and consumption”. The solution to the many of the world’s problems, according to degrowthers, is therefore to “go beyond growth” — and ultimately capitalism itself.

Once relegated to the political fringes, degrowth theory has been gaining traction in recent years among environmentalists and Leftists. Who, five years ago, would have bet on an academic book about the relationship between capitalism and the planet becoming a bestseller? Well, Capital in the Anthropocene (English translation forthcoming), a book on degrowth from a Marxist perspective written by Kohei Saito, an associate professor at Tokyo University, appears to be on track to do just that, having sold more than half a million copies in Japan since the book was published in 2020.

Saito’s message is simple: capitalism’s drive for profit is destroying the planet and only “degrowth communism” can repair the damage by slowing down social production and sharing wealth. Humans need to find a “new way of living”, and that means replacing capitalism.

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Climate change is no catastrophe

By Michael Shellenberger

But what does this mean in practice? There seems to be some confusion about this, even among degrowth activists. Growth is generally measured using the concept of Gross Domestic Product (GDP), which represents the total value of all the goods and services produced domestically by a nation during a given period, and therefore the size of its economy. If the latter is expanding, we call it economic growth; if it is contracting, we call it a recession or even a depression, depending on the length of the contraction.

Yet while the appeal of turning to GDP seems obvious — a higher GDP tends to be associated with higher incomes and higher standards of living, and studies show it correlates with national happiness — material wealth isn’t everything. Indeed, the concept of GDP has long been criticised as a poor way to measure a country’s well-being. It doesn’t take into account the state of the environment, levels of inequality or human health, or crime rates; neither does it take into account whether a country is growing its GDP by building guns and prisons or by building schools and hospitals. And yes, growth clearly has a negative impact on the natural world — as does any human activity, for that matter.

However, it’s one thing to acknowledge the limitations of economic growth — that is, GDP —  as a measure of national well-being; it’s another to say we should dismiss it altogether, or even that we should “stop growing”, especially when so many countries around the world are striving to industrialise and grow out of poverty. To be fair, degrowthers such as Hickel are keen to note that “degrowth is not about reducing GDP. It is about reducing the material and energy throughput of the [global] economy.” But this is little more than sophistry, as that would almost certainly entail a reduction in GDP.

Hickel says this could be achieved by allowing low-income countries to “increase energy and resource use in order to meet human needs” — which is a welcome distinction from the WEF’s Net Zero-for-all approach — while drastically reducing energy and resource use in high-income countries, by “scal[ing] down ecologically destructive and socially less necessary production (i.e. the production of SUVs, arms, beef, private transportation, advertising and planned obsolescence), while expanding socially important sectors like healthcare, education, care and conviviality”.

I wouldn’t mind living in a society with better parks, schools, hospitals, museums, libraries, and fewer SUVs, Primarks and H&Ms, with good jobs for all in non-polluting industries and sectors. The problem, as far as I’m concerned, isn’t the society envisioned by degrowthers. It’s the unintended consequences of their theory. Most obviously, they erroneously conflate energy and resource consumption, but the two are very different. The production of things inevitably entails the use of finite resources, and therefore cannot be expanded indefinitely. But the same doesn’t go for the production of energy: nuclear energy, for instance, could provide bountiful, clean, carbon-free energy, thus allowing us to potentially expand energy use — ideally to power less resource-intensive industries and sectors — while rapidly phasing out fossil fuels once and for all. And yet, most environmentalists and degrowthers are zealously opposed to nuclear energy.

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This highlights the second problem of degrowthism (and environmentalism in general, for that matter): its inescapable Luddite, anti-industrialist bias, which represents a conceptual obstacle to the massive state-sponsored industrial and infrastructure investment that would be needed to make our economies more sustainable — for instance, by rapidly building up nuclear capacity.

And here lies the third problem: even assuming citizens in Western countries did come round to accepting a deliberate reduction in their material wealth in exchange for immaterial benefits, it is highly unlikely they’d consent to the massive expansion of state power that would be required to implement such a programme. The authoritarianism and assault on democracy witnessed during the pandemic has understandably made many fearful of unchecked government power. No programme that requires giving the state even more sweeping powers of intervention in the economy — something which I personally view as necessary — will win the support it needs until we’re able to build a new democratic social contract. This means, among other things, clawing back the only institution that has historically managed to deliver democracy — the nation-state — from the clutches of the globalists and corporate interests that have hijacked it. But this will take time — something degrowthers constantly repeat we don’t have.

This is where the most concerning element of degrowthism and any other form of apocalyptic environmentalism comes in: by constantly engaging in “doomerism” — the idea that either we fix everything or we’re all screwed — they’re effectively saying that anything is justified in order to “save the planet”, including all manner of authoritarian interventions. It’s like Zero Covid on steroids. After all, if the very survival of life on Earth is at stake, surely we can’t allow the complexities of democratic debate and deliberation to stand in the way of doing what’s needed? Indeed, rather ominously, Saito cites the pandemic as proof that “rapid change is possible” — with apparently little concern for the fact that this “change” was achieved by sweeping aside democratic procedures and constitutional constraints, militarising societies, cracking down on civil liberties, and implementing unprecedented measures of social control.

In this sense, doomerism offers a political cover to what is ultimately the easiest way to reduce people’s consumption levels: making ordinary people poorer — which indeed seems to be the solution pursued by elites. This highlights probably the main flaw in degrowth theory: the driving force of capitalism is not growth or even profits, but power. Those sitting at the top of the capitalist pyramid are more than happy to have less growth if this means increasing their influence. How else should one understand our ruling classes’ passion for growth-crushing austerity?

This is the ultimate paradox of degrowth communism: its proponents may want to overthrow capitalism, but their ideology is actually empowering the globalist capitalist elites they claim to be fighting.

***

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Yet we should be wary of resorting to the simplistic narrative of events which would have us believe that Truss and Kwarteng’s attempts to push through a “fiscally irresponsible” tax-cutting free-market agenda spooked financial markets, “crashed the economy”, and ultimately forced them to admit defeat and back down. Things are a little more complicated.

On one level, this is a story about the influence of neo-Thatcherite think tanks. The Adam Smith Institute and the Institute for Economic Affairs (IEA) have both found fertile ground for their ideas among certain Tories in recent years, after being relegated for so long to the fringes of political discourse.

A number of these organisations provided much of the inspiration for Truss and Kwarteng’s agenda — especially with regard to their proposed cuts to high-income and corporation taxes. Mark Littlewood, director general of the IEA, has described how he worked “hand in glove” with Truss to help her set up in 2011 the Free Enterprise Group, a faction of Tory MPs committed to radical free-market economics. Kwarteng was an early member. According to Littlewood, Truss has spoken at more IEA events than “any other politician over the past 12 years”, while her economic advisor and senior special advisor both have ties to the organisation.

But their influence isn’t the whole story. The truth is that Conservative MPs and party members, who are disproportionately middle or upper-class men from the wealthier postcodes in the south of England, tend to hold rather liberal views when it comes to the economy. They’re the ones who voted for Truss over the more interventionist Rishi Sunak.

The problem for the party is that this refurbished brand of free-market economics — or “Trussonomics” — was unpopular among all voters, and especially among the working-class, low-income and northern constituencies that three years ago voted Conservative. These are the ones who voted Tory for the first time in 2019: to get Brexit done, take back control of Britain’s borders, and level-up the country — not to roll back the state, slash taxes on the rich, and cut back public services.

The more controversial measures in Truss’s mini-budget were deeply unpopular: only 12% of voters supported scrapping the cap on bankers’ bonuses; only 11% supported abolishing the top rate of income tax for high-earners; and only 19% thought it was a good idea to cancel the planned increase in the corporation tax.

It suggests the Tory leadership completely underestimated the extent to which their voter base has shifted to the “Left” on economics. One recent poll, for example, shows that a majority of Conservative voters support public ownership of key services and utilities — including water, energy, rail, Royal Mail, and the NHS. Hoping to compensate for unpopular economic policies with a bit of faux nationalism and cultural conservatism isn’t going to cut it.

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The Tories were destined for civil war

By John Oxley

So aside from all the conjectures about who really influenced Truss, her downfall highlights a much more fundamental problem: the disconnect between the party’s membership and the sensibilities of the majority of their voters, especially in light of the Brexit realignment. In many ways, the party has become the victim of its own internal logic, much as Labour’s own contradictions — the overwhelmingly cosmopolitan outlook of its members — ultimately prevented Corbyn from adopting a coherent Brexit strategy.

But the sighs of relief and the smug commentaries, especially on the Left, about Truss’s attempted and failed “free-market coup” ignore an equally important development: that Truss’s political project, as unpopular as it may have been, wasn’t defeated by the people — but by the establishment.

The truth is that Truss and Kwarteng, and their free-market ideologues, were also waging their personal battle against economic orthodoxy and its technocratic gatekeepers — the Bank of England, the Treasury and the Office of Budget Responsibility. These hugely powerful and largely unaccountable institutions have always been the guardians of fiscal orthodoxy. First, they helped successive Conservative governments enforce a decade of devastating austerity. And then, ever since the end of the pandemic, they have been calling for a return to austerity in order for the UK to “balance the books”.

Truss and Kwarteng, for all their faults, dared to challenge the orthodox austerity narrative. Echoing Keynes of all people, they hit out at “Treasury thinking” — that is, the obsessions for balanced budgets and fiscal discipline — and spoke of the need to review the Bank of England’s remit. When asked about how the government was going to tackle the growing debt, shortly after Truss’s election, Julian Jessop, an IEA fellow and one of Truss’s economic advisors, explained: “The Treasury has been too quick to believe you need to start paying the debt down by raising taxes, both personal and corporate taxes,” he said. “Far better to let the deficit take the strain. If tax cuts do mean more borrowing in the short term, I’m completely relaxed about that.”

This approach was made clear as soon as Kwarteng arrived at the Treasury: his first decision was to sack its top official, Tom Scholar, who was considered to be too fiscally conservative and deferential towards the Bank of England. The message was clear: the new government expected civil servants — and indeed the Bank of England itself — to work for the executive, not against it.

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Why Truss's gamble failed

By Aris Roussinos

Presumably, our free-marketeers Truss and Kwarteng railed against the orthodoxy so that they could cut taxes for the wealthy without having to worry about a rising deficit. And, in principle — and even though morally it’s contemptible — they were absolutely right: an advanced country such as the UK that issues its own currency should have no reason to worry about a rising deficit or debt.

They were also absolutely right, in principle, in reaffirming the primacy of politics over technocracy. Indeed, these are preconditions for the pursuit of truly democratic and economically progressive policies, especially when they threaten powerful vested interests in society. After all, it’s Truss and Kwarteng’s relaxed approach to deficit-spending that allowed them to approve a two-year energy price guarantee worth £60 billion, by far the biggest commitment in the mini-budget.

Challenging the economic orthodoxy, and the technocratic apparatuses that wield the true power in our societies, was the real Truss/Kwarteng sin. This — not the tax cuts, which were trivial from a macroeconomic perspective — is ultimately what brought down the wrath of the entire Transatlantic establishment: not only the Bank of England, the media and legions of orthodox economists, but also, and highly unusually, the IMF and even the US Treasury Secretary, Janet Yellen. There’s nothing more anathema to the establishment than the idea that democratically elected governments should have the final say over economic policy, not unaccountable institutions where decisions are taken behind closed doors.

But despite all the hysteria, the reality is that the British economy never “crashed”; there was a small drop in the value of the pound and rise in bond yields — the result of financial markets attempting to profit from the chaos — that was rapidly reversed to pre-panic levels by the Bank of England’s intervention. If anything, the problem was the Bank of England’s announcement that the intervention would be short-lived — possibly to put pressure on the Government.

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Giorgia Meloni is no radical

By Thomas Fazi

Ultimately, the government wasn’t taken down by “the markets”, but by its own weakness, since neither Truss nor Kwarteng possessed the intellectual and political tools, nor the popular support, to ignore the hysteria and stick to their guns. While their political project might have seemed cruel, especially from an economically progressive perspective, there’s no reason to rejoice in its defeat, insofar as it has led to a complete restoration of the economic orthodoxy and technocratic rule, symbolised by Kwarteng’s replacement by Jeremy Hunt — or “Jeremy Draghi”, as his admirers have already dubbed him in honour of Mario Draghi — and then by the Second Coming of Sunak.

The fact that Hunt’s first decision was to completely overhaul the mini-budget’s main proposal — the energy price freeze — by reducing the measure’s duration from two years to six months, while announcing more budget cuts in the near future, which will cause millions to suffer even more than they would have under the previous plan, should cause everyone on the Left to reflect on the wisdom of joining in on the Kwarteng-bashing.

The consequences will be felt for a long time to come, in the form of an established wisdom that democracy ultimately has to conform to what the markets say — or else. We are already seeing this narrative crystallising in claims that the Tories should vote for Sunak because he’s “the man the markets trust”. This line of thinking is the death of democracy. Which is why the decision to support this bloodless coup will come back to haunt Labour: even if they win the next election (which seems likely), it’ll be the markets and technocratic establishment calling the shots. Not because they’re omnipotent, but because Labour has helped convince everyone that they are.

Three thousand faces, hidden by black, woollen ski masks, bore the distinctive features of the Mayan Indians of Central America: a people outgunned, outcompeted, pillaged, slaughtered or simply passed over since the Spanish conquistadors first arrived on their shores in the 16th century. Now, half a millennium later, here in Chiapas, Mexico’s poorest and southernmost state, “the ones without faces, the ones without voices” had come to make the world listen.

The people of San Cristobal de las Casas, the old conquistador capital of Chiapas, were still groggy from their New Year celebrations when their town came alive with the sound of marching boots. They heard orders barked in Tzotzil, a local Mayan language, by the black-haired major, carbine in her hands, pistol strapped to her chest, who commanded this uninvited army. And from the picturesque central square, the Plaza 31 de Marzo, its ancient yellow cathedral and colonial government buildings framed by a clear white moon, they heard the sound of gunshots.

Those citizens brave or curious enough to venture out into the square were met with a sight they were unlikely to forget: dozens of masked guerrillas were swarming around the Plaza. Some were standing guard with their battered rifles, others were surrounding the police headquarters, while others, armed with sledgehammers, were pounding on the great wooden doors of the Municipal Palace. There could be little doubt in the minds of the people of San Cristobal about what they were witnessing. It was the first act of a revolution.

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The West has lost its virtue

By Paul Kingsnorth

A small group of guerrillas raised a flag in the middle of the elegant square — a black flag, printed with four red letters: EZLN. As they did so, on to the balcony of the Municipal Palace emerged a masked figure. In his hand he held a piece of paper. It was a declaration of war against the Mexican government: one which, on that same morning, would be read aloud to the people of six other towns in Chiapas which this “EZLN” had also claimed as its own.

“We are the product of 500 years of struggle,” he read as, in the background, more gunfire and palls of smoke indicated that a rebel column was storming the police headquarters. “We are the inheritors of the true builders of this nation … denied the most elemental preparation so they can use us as cannon fodder and pillage the wealth of our country. They don’t care that we have nothing, absolutely nothing … There is no peace or justice for ourselves and our children … But today we say: Ya basta! Enough is enough!”

Five hundred miles away, Mexico’s president, Carlos Salinas, and his anointed heir, Luis Donaldo Colosio, were celebrating the New Year in an exclusive holiday resort on the Pacific coast. As the bells rang, Salinas and Colosio raised glasses of champagne and toasted the official arrival of NAFTA — the North American Free Trade Agreement — which, at the stroke of midnight, officially came into operation. With the sound of those bells, NAFTA had created, for the first time in history, one great borderless free market between Mexico, Canada and the USA. Mexico had officially entered the modern world, and Salinas was celebrating his legacy.

Two hours later he was on the telephone, listening to news of a development that would shatter not only that legacy, but his successor’s presidency and his party’s age-old iron grip on Mexican politics; and which, later — much later — would begin to shake the legitimacy of the global free trade project itself. The Secretary of Defence was calling from Mexico City, and he had bad news. Very bad news. An armed insurgent force, calling itself the Zapatista Army of National Liberation — EZLN — had seized control of seven towns in Chiapas state and declared war on the army, the government — and NAFTA itself.

“Are you sure?” croaked the president.

***

It’s been a long time since I wrote those paragraphs. That is the opening of my very first book, One No, Many Yeses, an account of the first wave of anti-globalisation protests, which was published 19 years ago. Back then, excitable young anti-capitalist that I was, I believed that I was part of a worldwide “mass movement” which was rising up against the colonisation of the world’s economies and cultures by an unaccountable corporate elite.

Since at least the end of the Cold War, the declared aim of the Western powers has been the spread of a global market economy, combined with a liberal politics and culture, to every benighted corner of the Earth. Since a globalised market can’t function without globalised tastes (you can’t sell your cheap burgers to Asia until you’ve convinced Asians that they’re lovin’ it), and since liberalism also needs an appropriate soil to seed in, the momentum of this ideological crusade is towards the creation of one global culture, whether the world wants it or not.

This threefold rollout — global economy, global culture and global political system, all of them based on the American model — has long been referred to with the bland moniker “globalisation”; or globalism, if you prefer. In reality, it is a form of soft colonialism — the latest iteration of Western empire — and a hugely successful one.

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By Aris Roussinos

Back in the late Nineties, the “anti-globalisation” movement that rose up in opposition to this process was a political melting-pot of anarchism, localism, indigenous perspectives, radical environmentalism, liberal commitments to democracy and various other strands, all of it uncoordinated and fervently anti-hierarchical. It was a mess, but it was an exciting mess. And though a lot of people involved, including me, were allergic to labels and boxes, there was no doubt that this was a movement of the Left.

Though wrong about plenty of things, the Left has traditionally been correct about the negative impacts of global capitalism, while the Right has floundered about denying its impacts on the poor, on democracy and on nature, generally valorising greed and rapine, and then wondering where the “traditional values” they love so much have gone. You wouldn’t have found any conservatives on the barricades at the anti-WTO protests. Most of them were either inside hymning the virtues of “free” trade, or back in Washington or London ginning up the next Middle East war.

How times have changed. Here in the 2020s, the Left anti-globalism that I once thought was the movement of the future is barely in evidence anywhere. The most incisive opponents of corporate globalisation today are often to be found on the Right; or at least, not from any identifiable sector of the Left. Conservative, traditionalist and “post-liberal” critiques of the impact of globalisation on local communities, nation states, social cohesion, family formation, working class prospects, culture and even (though not often enough) the natural world are pouring out daily. The post-working class Left, meanwhile, has veered into an identity politics cul-de-sac, dictated largely by its commitment to an elite class war and an obsessive pursuit of cultural inversion.

The worldview that the academic Eric Kaufmann calls Left-modernism is now the outlook of the professional managerial classes, the top 10% or so of society, and — not coincidentally — the beneficiary class of globalisation. Via transnational corporations, the academic and cultural sectors, NGOs, global and regional bodies and other collectives of usually unaccountable power, this class is rolling out the threefold ideology of globalism within their own nations and beyond. Meanwhile, a national populist movement built largely around a working- and lower-middle-class reaction to this ideology is coalescing around calls for national self-determination, some degree of cultural conservatism, economic protection and democratic accountability.

On the face of it, this is confusing. Why would transnational capital be parroting slogans drawn from a leftist framework which claims to be anti-capitalist? Why would the middle classes be further to the “Left” than the workers? If the Left was what it claims to be — a bottom-up movement for popular justice — this would not be the case. If capitalism was what it is assumed to be — a rapacious, non-ideological engine of profit-maximisation — then this would not be the case either.

But what if both of them were something else? What if the ideology of the corporate world and the ideology of the “progressive” Left had not forged an inexplicable marriage of convenience, but had grown all along from the same rootstock? What if the Left and global capitalism are, at base, the same thing: engines for destroying customary ways of living and replacing them with the globalised, universalist, technological matrix that is currently rising around us?

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The West has lost its roots

By Paul Kingsnorth

We are living through a time of radical flattening, as this emerging global system, which I like to call the Machine, rapidly replaces previous ways of being with a new and novel global civilisation. Emerging from the industrial revolution and the dislocations of modernity’s revolutions, this Machine is now engaged in a project of deconstructing both human nature and wild nature, replacing them with a borderless world of etiolated, rational individuals, each of them equal participants in a global marketplace governed by algorithms, profit and dreams of universal oneness.

With the possible exception of the bit about the marketplace, this is also a good description of the project of the political Left. The very notion of a “Left” was birthed with modernity: the term comes from the seating arrangement of the anti-monarchy faction of the French assembly after the revolution. Despite much self-mythologising, leftist ideology has always been primarily a product of urban intellectuals and middle-class radicals pursuing a project of theoretical levelling. This levelling always begins with the destruction of previous lifeways — Mao’s four olds, the Bolshevik project to eliminate the “bourgeois family” (currently being resurrected by some on the contemporary Left), French revolutionary attempts to rationalise the landscape, the current progressive push to “transition” children — but what it ends up doing is clearing the ground for the Machine.

Progressive leftism and global capitalism, far from being antagonistic as some of us once thought, have turned out to be a usefully snug fit. Both are totalising, utopian projects. Both are suspicious of the past, impatient with borders and boundaries, and hostile to religion, “superstition” and the limits on the human individual imposed by nature or culture. Both are in pursuit of a global utopia where, in the dreams of both Lenin and Lennon, the world will live as one.

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By Dorian Lynskey

If the past 40 years have taught us anything, it’s that dreams of universal equality can segue very easily into dreams of universal market access. There’s a reason that both progressives and The Economist champion open borders. There’s a reason so many hippies ended up as tech billionaires. If you have ever asked yourself what kind of “revolution” would be sponsored by Nike, promoted by BP, propagandised for by Hollywood and Netflix and policed by Facebook and YouTube, then the answer is here.

In the roiling breakdown of the 2020s, progressive leftism and corporate capitalism have not so much merged as been exposed for what they always were: variants of the same modern ideal, built around the pursuit of boundless self-creation in a post-natural world. The Canadian “red Tory” philosopher George Grant once observed that: “The directors of General Motors and the followers of Professor Marcuse sail down the same river in different boats.” These days, they have abandoned their separate vessels and are sailing downstream in a superyacht together, while the rest of us gawp or throw rocks from the banks.

Perhaps we could say that the levelling instinct is the West’s gift to the world. It’s a complicated offering, to be sure, but at its noblest it is one to be proud of. Without some levellers around, a culture is in danger of becoming ossified, abusive and top-heavy. Power always needs to be kept on its toes. Leaders and systems should always be prepared to justify their existence.

But what happens when levelling is the only instinct left? When the culture is so empty, so purposeless, so uprooted, that it has forgotten how to do anything but deconstruct itself? More to the point: what happens when levelling is the instinct not of the poor, but of power? What happens when the destruction of borders, limits and boundaries benefits big tech, big money and those who drink from their spigot, rather than the small voices left thirsting in the fields? And what happens when big money uses the language of the small voices — the language of levelling — to tie up its work in pretty bows?

This is where we are. The post-modern Left, which has seized the heights of so much of Western culture, is not some radical threat to the establishment: it is the establishment. Progressive leftism is market liberalism by other means. The Left and corporate capitalism now function like a pincer: one attacks the culture, deconstructing everything from history to “heteronormativity” to national identities; the other moves in to monetise the resulting fragments.

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By JUSTIN E. H. SMITH

Where, then, to stand? Could there be a Left without progress? Could there be a Right without capitalism? Perhaps, but we first need to come to terms with the radicalism of the times we are living through. This is a time in which the pertinent questions are not “who should own the means of production?” or “should we privatise the health service?” They are “what is a woman?”, “where should we implant the microchips?”, “how quickly can we get this digital ID system up and running?”, and “what do you think of my new killer robot?” The creation of designer babies, the abolition of the sexed body, the growing of brains in labs: whatever you want, the Machine can provide it, technology can fashion it, and progressive ideology can redefine it as justice.

When people ask me where I stand, I say these days that it’s with an older tradition: the same one I was writing about in that first book, although I didn’t know it then. It’s a tradition I saw represented in what the Zapatistas did back in the 1990s and I have heard its echo in historical uprisings in my own country, from the Luddites to the fen tigers. It’s a tradition which takes its stand not according to ideological positioning, but according to actual positioning: on Earth, under the sky, surrounded by people who know where the sun rises in the morning, where they come from and who they are.

It’s a tradition we could call reactionary radicalism: resisting the Machine’s totalising force from a perspective rooted in the Three Ps: people, place and prayer. Neither Left nor Right nor anywhere else, it’s a tradition that crosses all the modern divides, because it is older than all of them. It digs down, literally, to the root of the matter. It is the dream of a localised, populist opposition to gigantist, destructive modernity in all its forms.

Maybe this is a pipe-dream: but sometimes we see it carry the day. The Zapatistas are still there, after all, and still fighting. NAFTA is gone, too — though it wasn’t the EZLN, in the end, that did for it. The treaty that drew their ire as a symbol of all that was wrong with the imperial project of corporate globalisation was eventually torn up, not by indigenous guerrilleros or a socialist Mexican government, but by a reality TV star-turned Republican US president, who believed that globalisation was a con-job which empowered transnational capital at the expense of nations and their people. Whatever else he may have been wrong about, he was right about that. Unfortunately, most of the Left were too busy calling him a Nazi to notice the irony.

Yet on almost every level, the notion that we’re seeing a return to the Seventies is fantasy politics. Certainly, by paralysing Britain’s rail transportation network through the withdrawal of their members’ labour, the RMT has demonstrated the latent industrial power of Britain’s workers. But just as one swallow does not make a summer, so three days of national strikes by a single union does not signal a return to 1979, let alone a future blighted by class war. Union membership and labour militancy remain at historic lows across the Western world, including in Britain.

Yes, Britain’s summer of chaos is real enough: energy prices, NHS waiting lists, flight cancellations, and inflation are all spiralling. But none of these ills can be attributed to union power or working-class tumult.

It is not uppity labourers but supply chain shocks stemming from the pandemic and lockdown, as well as the Ukraine war, that are driving inflation, smoothed along by pre-emptive corporate price hikes. It is not union barons but airline companies, which slashed so many jobs during the lockdown, that have shredded Britons’ summer plans. And unlike in the Seventies, today’s economic sclerosis can hardly be blamed on creaking nationalised behemoths, given the fact that the Tories have sold off most of them over the last 40 years.

Under an exhausted Tory government, corporate profits are booming while wages are being eaten up by inflation. We are at the end of the process that began with Thatcher’s election in 1979. In short, however this tale unfolds, it will necessarily have a different ending; a neoliberal fairy godmother isn’t going to come to the rescue.

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The boomers destroyed the Tories

By James Sean Dickson

Back in Seventies, governments had no choice but to negotiate with pervasive and powerful unions. Then Thatcher came along and pursued a different tack of open confrontation in her bid to break up the power of the organised working class. Today, the Conservative government’s refusal to negotiate with the RMT is no flash of Thatcherite steel, but a sign that they are unwilling to take political responsibility for Britain’s railway grid, which they have already been nationalising through a haphazard, piecemeal process driven by necessity over the last few years. The Tories’ unwillingness to fully reverse the failed disaster of rail privatisation betokens no commitment to free market nostrums, but a simple inability to see anything through at all.

This is not just a process of elite decay but also a direct result of neoliberal government inaugurated by Thatcher: the regulatory state that replaced the command-and-control state had less direct power. And with less direct power at stake in party-political competition, politics itself became less meaningful, with the banks and corporations sucking up the best and brightest that would have once formed the cadre of government and party-political elite. Neoliberalism locked in a vicious cycle in which a diminished public life drew in increasingly mediocre professional politicians, culminating in our hapless parliamentary class of today. Taking back control of Britain’s railways would require a political vision, and that is something our politicians are unable to supply.

All of this indicates that we are not returning to the Seventies, and we are far away from class war. The fact that sub-editors and journalists have no way to frame the railway dispute except by plucking out shibboleths about seasons of discontents only shows that the Right and the Tory middle classes need socialism and class war just as much as the Left needs fascism — which is to say they have no vision to offer. It is ultimately unsurprising that a generation of journalists, editors and pundits whose careers were made in the era of neoliberalism are struggling to adapt; after all, what we are going through is the end of an exhausted neoliberalism.

The exception to this fantasy politics is the RMT itself, which is seeking to defend its members’ wages and jobs. How far this will inaugurate a new confidence in labour organisation and trade unionism remains to be seen. It certainly seems that, with attempts to re-shore various industries and supply chains, and with tightening labour markets, the conditions exist for some form of organised labour to re-emerge from the abyss. Add to that the way Covid lockdowns exposed our collective dependence on a swathe of often poorly paid and menial working-class jobs, and it is hardly surprising that in the aftermath, “key workers” are now claiming more than merely symbolic tokens of our affirmation.

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In defence of class

By Justin Webb

But who will support them? The fact the broad swathes of the middle-class Left has thus far shown sympathy for a working-class strike is probably more reflective of the Left’s penchant for working from home in the wake of the pandemic than any substantive political solidarity. Were the RMT threatening the middle classes’ capacity for telecommuting, we can be certain we would already have been subjected to a torrent of op-eds and tweets about the “privileges”, racial exclusivity and backwards sexual mores of RMT members. Intersectionalism is designed to disable the formation of collective interests, majoritarian decision-making and solidarity. As long as the Left remains committed to intersectionalism, it will have nothing to offer the reformation of independent working-class politics in Britain. This is plain in Labour leader Keir Starmer’s efforts to distance himself from the industrial action — an attempt to maintain the strategy of triangulation and middle-class support.

Throughout the neoliberal era, it is the unions that were cast in the role of conservative goliaths, standing in the way of the forces of technology, modernisation and globalisation. If it were ever true, that narrative certainly no longer holds: from its insurgent beginnings in the Seventies, British neoliberalism has collapsed into widening inequalities, technocracy, lockdown, indebtedness, stagnant wages and wilting productivity. Can a new working-class politics reverse these trends? For all the media histrionics provoked by the RMT strike, one thing it has exposed is that our entire social and political order rests on labour passivity and working-class quiescence. What happens when this ends?

A month ago, the opinion polls suggested that Marine Le Pen and the far-Right had an outside chance of taking power in the presidential election. Either the polls were wrong or French voters gave themselves a pleasing frisson of fear and then drew back: President Emmanuel Macron, a reformist apostle of the French-European status quo, won by 17 points. Now some suggest that the hard-Left leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon — anti-EU, anti-Nato, anti-market, long-time defender of Vladimir Putin, admirer of Maximilien Robespierre — could become prime minister after the parliamentary elections on June 12 and 19.

Could he? In theory, yes. Will he?

The overwhelming probability is that French voters will do what they have always done since the present electoral system began in 1965. They will give a working majority, or at least the biggest bloc of seats in the National Assembly, to the newly elected, or re-elected, President of the Republic.

All the same, something new and strange is undeniably happening in French politics. The anti-establishment Mélenchon has surged to a position of apparent strength one month after the rise and fall of the anti-establishment Le Pen. This is not an aberration. It is a logical consequence of the redrawing of the political frontiers in France which began with the last election, in 2017.

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Macron is the leader France deserves

By Dominic Sandbrook

After seven decades in which broad blocs on the Right and Left alternated in power and governed in roughly the same way, France has split into three internally quarrelsome political tribes. There is a consensual, reformist, pro-market, pro-European, pro-Nato “Centre”, dominated by Emmanuel Macron but embraced by moderate parts of the old governing parties of centre-Right and centre-Left. There is a nationalist-populist, Eurosceptic and Islamophobic Right, divided between supporters of Le Pen, her unsuccessful challenger Eric Zemmour, and the harder end of the collapsing Gaullist or centre-Right party, Les Républicains. And now, on the Left, four tribes long poisonously divided have been brought together by Mélenchon under a single radical banner to fight the parliamentary elections and — he insists — form the next government.

This alliance is called Nouvelle Union Populaire Economique et Sociale, or NUPES. It embraces Mélenchon’s hard-Left movement La France Insoumise, the Greens, the Communists and what remains of France’s other collapsing former “party of government”, the Socialists. Rather than idealism or any deep, common conviction that they can form a government next month, the cement which holds these mutually loathing groups together is financial need and cynicism. French political parties are financed by the taxpayer to the tune of about €66 million a year. Those state subsidies are doled out according to the number of votes and seats won in parliamentary elections (€1.42 a year for each vote and €37,280 for each deputy).

In the first round of the presidential election, the Socialists, in power until five years ago, won less than 2% of the vote — meaning they now face parliamentary and financial extinction. Mélenchon came third with 22% of the vote, putting him in a position to achieve something unprecedented in French political history: uniting the Left around one of its extremes rather than the moderate, market-friendly centre of, say, François Mitterrand or François Hollande.

And so to the fury of many of their big names, including ex-President Hollande, the Europhile Socialists decided last week to sign up for the radical, Eurosceptic and frankly incoherent  NUPES “left and green” alliance. The platform speaks of “disobeying” or “derogating” (i.e. temporarily withdrawing) from European Union rules on the economy. It also insists that a future NUPES government would never break national or EU law.

How can both of those things be true? They can’t. The Mélenchon programme, like that of Marine Le Pen, implies leaving or destroying the EU through disobedience: a Frexit which dare not speak its name.

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Why Macron is invincible

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Much of the rest of the programme — including returning the standard retirement age to 60 and freezing fuel and food prices — is equally incoherent. The climate-friendly Greens have signed up to freeze prices on fossil fuels; the fiercely pro-nuclear Communists have agreed to abandon nuclear energy, which provides 80% of France’s electricity. It’s hard not to conclude that both the Communists and the Greens assume that Mélenchon will never be prime minister and the programme will never be applied. Both know that an alliance with him is their only chance of retaining a few deputies in the National Assembly (the Communists) or gaining some again (the Greens). Like the Socialists, both have joined NUPES for state funding and political survival.

In theory, Mélenchon could come to power without winning the presidency. The French political system is presidential by custom and practice but the real power remains with parliament. If the Left wins 289 seats or more in the National Assembly, Mélenchon could force Macron to appoint him as head of government. The new assembly could then reject all of Macron’s other choices until he gave way. This would leave Macron with limited influence over foreign and defence policy. He could call a new election (or several new elections), but in all other respects, the real leadership of France would shift to Mélenchon, as it did to the Socialist prime minister, Lionel Jospin, from 1997-2002.

If the Left had a more moderate programme and a less divisive leader, such a “cohabitation” might be possible. In one recent poll, 56% of respondents said that they would welcome a split government of some kind. With Mélenchon as leader, however, the Left has no chance of assembling a parliamentary majority of its own. Posters have already been distributed by La France Insoumise carrying the slogan “Mélenchon Premier Ministre”. They are an effective campaign tool — for Emmanuel Macron. As the French political scientist and author Chloe Morin says: “Jean-Luc Mélenchon is the principal asset of La France Insoumise. He is also their principal handicap. He is a great orator, a matchless tactician but also a deeply divisive figure.”

In practice, this means the parliamentary election is likely to be a reverse mirror image of the presidential election last month. Macron triumphed because many, though not all, Left-wing voters supported him in round two to keep out Le Pen and the far-Right. His parliamentary allies will win many seats next month because many, though not all, Right-wing voters will support them in round two to keep out Mélenchon and the hard Left.

There are, admittedly, a number of possible complications. This is, after all, not one election but 577, with local issues and local personalities. And unlike the presidential election, more than two candidates can, in theory, fight the second round. To qualify from third place (or even a fourth), a candidate has to attract 12.5% of the local, registered vote in round one. Since the turnout is expected once again to fall below 50%, the bar for third place qualification will be around 25% of the people who bother to vote.

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How Marine Le Pen conquered Normandy

By John Lichfield

Five years ago, there was only one “triangular” contest. If this pattern is repeated, the avalanche of two-way contests in round two will favour Macron, as it did then.

A recent Harris Interactive poll suggested that the NUPES alliance could win just over one third of the votes in the first round of the parliamentary elections. The alliance of four or five centrist parties supporting President Macron — called Ensemble (together) — would get somewhat less. The Right would also receive around one third of the votes, but divided in each constituency between Lepennists, Zemmourists and Les Républicains, who have refused to make a nationwide alliance. In the second round, the Harris poll calculated that Macron’s allies would win well over 300 seats (the majority is 289), while the Left alliance would win fewer than 100.

This figure is probably too low. If Mélenchon is able to turn out unusually high numbers of the urban young and in the multi-racial suburbs, as he did in the presidential election, he has a slim chance of reducing Macron to a plurality of seats rather than an outright majority. It is more likely that Macron’s allies will win a comfortable majority: another scare for the consensual centre will have come to nothing.

And yet if this happens, Macron’s parliamentary majority, like his presidential victory, will have been won partly by default. He will enter his new five-year term with the whole-hearted backing of, at most, one third of the electorate.

All of which means the centre cannot afford to be complacent. In the longer term, supporters of the French and European status quo have good reason to be scared. The tripartite division of France — radical Left, moderate Centre, nationalist Right — is here to stay, and it is inherently unstable.

France is a querulous country: its instinct is to boot out incumbents at each national election. How long can the pro-European “centre” expect to survive with tactical support from its enemies, whether from the Left against the nationalist Right or from the Right against the radical Left? We will know the answer in five years’ time.

For Le Pen to narrow that gap, she must win over at least some of the 22% of voters who opted for the “Left-populist” Jean-Luc Mélenchon in the first round of the election. Yet Mélenchon’s position on the matter is clear: “We must not give a single vote to Le Pen,” he stated on the evening of the first round, in what amounted to a de facto endorsement for Macron. In a letter to his supporters, he clearly said that he believes the outgoing president to be the least-worst option on the table.

However, not all his voters are of the same opinion. As Alexandre, a 36-year-old who voted for Mélenchon in the first round, told BFMTV: “I am fundamentally, ideologically on the Left and I am deeply humanist, but I will vote for Marine Le Pen.” He is not alone in holding such a view: according to polling firm Elabe, a third of Mélenchon’s voters are likely to vote for Le Pen in the second round.

But we shouldn’t be surprised that a good number of Mélenchon’s supporters don’t agree with their leader that Macron is the lesser evil. Throughout his presidency, Macron has relentlessly pursued an aggressive neoliberal agenda that has dramatically worsened the conditions of the French working class, while hugely benefiting the country’s wealthy elites and corporate giants — slashing taxes for the rich and for big business, reforming the labour code to benefit employers, cutting back on welfare spending, and pursuing the “marketisation” of every area of French society.

As one French economist put it: “Macron is the candidate of the richest 1% or even 0.1%.” This is more than just a figure of speech: in his eye-opening book Crépuscule, French writer and activist Juan Branco chronicles how France’s most powerful oligarchs and media moguls literally “groomed” Macron from an early age, using all the money and influence at their disposal to help him become the country’s youngest president. It proved to be a worthwhile investment: in recent years, France has seen the greatest increase in the number of millionaires after the United States, with the richest 1% now holding 20% of the country’s wealth and seven billionaires owning more than the poorest 30%. Meanwhile, the living conditions of the most disadvantaged have worsened, and the number of French people in poverty has increased.

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How Macron's hometown betrayed him

By Peter Allen

As if this weren’t bad enough, when France’s underclasses took to the streets to protest the president’s policies of top-down class warfare, giving birth to the Gilets Jaunes movement, Macron responded with frightening police violence, worthy of the world’s most repressive regimes, which caused protestors to lose at least 24 eyes and five hands.

The protests only came to an end because the outbreak of the Covid pandemic offered Macron, as other leaders around the world, the perfect excuse to roll out draconian and authoritarian policies of social control, which, as Toby Green and I have documented, have hurt the working classes the most. As Serge Halimi, director of Le Monde diplomatique, recently stated, Macron’s is “France’s most ‘illiberal’ presidency of modern times”, having exploited the fear of insecurity, terrorism, Covid-19 and now the war in Ukraine to “favour an anti-democratic ‘shock strategy’ aimed at “govern[ing] by fear”.

And the future for the ordinary French isn’t looking any brighter, if Macron’s electoral manifesto is anything to go by: more tax cuts for big business, raising the retirement age to 65, forcing recipients of in-work benefits to work more than 15 hours a week, and returning to Maastricht’s strict budgetary rules (i.e. more austerity). As Halimi notes: “A second term for Macron would be especially dangerous for the working class as he is unable to run for a third. Without the restraining influence of a future election”, there would be little standing in the way of Macron’s authoritarian neoliberal project.

All of which begs the question: why would a socialist like Mélenchon want to see him remain in power? To most leftists, not just in France, the question is likely to appear provocatively rhetorical: well, because the alternative — Le Pen — is obviously worse. But is it? Or is it simply a case of Left-Pavlovian reaction to the sound of her name? Mélenchon’s arguments echo the conventional wisdom among French leftists and socialists: Le Pen’s economic agenda is just as bad — i.e. neoliberal — as Macron’s, while her “cultural” agenda (on issues such as immigration) is much worse.

It would be a pretty reasonable argument — if only it were true. The notion that Le Pen and Macron’s programmes are equally bad from a left-socialist perspective is simply false.

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The future is Marine Le Pen

By Matthew Goodwin

Le Pen has castigated the “neoliberal” logic of many of her competitor’s proposals — particularly the tightening of the conditions for the recipients of in-work benefits and the raising of the pension age, both of which Le Pen has consistently opposed. Indeed, it is frankly difficult to see how anyone in good faith could describe Le Pen’s electoral manifesto as neoliberal. If anything, it is a moderate redistributive programme of Keynesian orientation based on state interventionism, social protection and the defence of public services. Its measures include the strengthening of public services such as hospitals, widespread reductions in VAT, wage increases for healthcare workers and other sectors, tax exemptions or free transport for young working people, the construction of 100,000 social housing units per year, the renationalisation of motorways, and a tax on financial wealth. Nothing particularly radical — but neoliberal it certainly ain’t.

It’s no surprise that an in-depth study of Le Pen’s manifesto by the Centre for Political Research at Sciences Po, one of the largest and most influential centres for political science research in France and definitely not a lepéniste bulwark, concluded that her political programme is firmly “to the Left of the economic axis” — far more so than Macron’s agenda. Interestingly, the study also showed that Le Pen’s electorate shares her Left-wing economic outlook: high confidence in unions, distrust of large private companies, refusal to reduce the number of civil servants. Overall, an overwhelming majority of Le Pen’s supporters agree with the idea that “one should take from the rich to give to the poor”.

Indeed, it’s painstakingly obvious that Mélenchon’s own economic manifesto has much more in common with Le Pen’s than Macron’s. Yes, Mélenchon’s programme has a stronger emphasis on wages and workers’ rights, as is to be expected, but the overall orientation is similar. Mélenchon and Le Pen have also both been very critical of Macron’s “vaccine passports”, promising to repeal them if elected. And the two leaders share a similar aversion to globalisation and to the European Union in particular — of which Macron is a staunch supporter. They also both support France’s withdrawal from NATO.

The biggest difference between the two concerns immigration. While Mélenchon’s manifesto calls for “welcoming immigrants with dignity”, Le Pen wants to “regain full control of immigration” — by tightening the rules for acquiring French nationality, granting priority access to certain social services to nationals and deporting delinquent and systematically unemployed foreigners. She has also taken a hard stance against Islamic radicalism.

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How Marine Le Pen conquered Normandy

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Now, one may very well not agree with these policies, but demonising them as “fascist” — as many on the Left now do — is simply ridiculous. After all, the notion that a state should prioritise the well-being of its own citizens would have been considered self-evident up until not too long ago — even among Left-wing parties and voters, as Sahra Wagenknecht, former leader of the radical-Left German party Die Linke, notes in her latest book Die Selbstgerechten (“The Self-Righteous”).

But more importantly, is Macron really that better than Le Pen in this respect? As Pauline Bock wrote in The Guardian, Macron himself has adopted a very “tough stance on immigration that saw police officers destroying refugees’ tents in Calais… paying homage to the ‘great soldier’ Marshal Pétain… and giving interviews to far-Right magazines”. Indeed, facing Le Pen on a TV show in February 2021, Macron’s interior minister, Gérald Darmanin, even accused her of being “too soft on immigration”.

So it seems that most of Mélenchon’s (and the French Left’s) arguments for choosing Macron over Le Pen don’t hold up to scrutiny: the former is incomparably worse — i.e. more “Right-wing” — than Le Pen on the economic front, and arguably almost as bad as his rival, from a standard “progressive” standpoint, when it comes to the treatment of immigrants. Regardless of what one may think of Le Pen — I’m not a fan and if I lived in France my vote would have gone to Mélenchon — it seems pretty clear that the French working class would be much worse off with a second Macron term.

Ultimately, this whole affair really encapsulates why the Left-Right cleavage no longer makes much sense. No country exemplifies this better than France — the place that invented the concepts of Left and Right in politics in the first place. For not only have nominally Left and progressive parties radically shifted to the Right in economic terms and abandoned class politics in favour of identity politics, while at the same time nominally Right-wing parties have moved to the Left on the economic spectrum. But even where political parties have challenged the traditional Left-Right dichotomy — and Macron, Le Pen and Mélenchon have all insisted, in their own way, that Left-Right politics are over, with the latter going to great lengths to “de-neoliberalise” Left politics — these labels continue to prove very hard to shake off.

This is ultimately why a socialist like Mélenchon still can’t bring himself to choose “Right-wing” Le Pen over nominally “progressive” Macron, even though the former’s economic agenda is much more Left-wing. It also explains why Macron will likely be elected for a second term, with dire consequences for the French working and middle classes.

Of course, Le Pen’s voters would probably face the same dilemma if Mélenchon were running against Macron. But this only proves how the Left-Right cleavage has become a smokescreen destined to make it virtually impossible to mount any serious challenge to the status quo. So long as political parties and voters continue to attach greater importance to the increasingly meaningless labels they give themselves, rather than to the policies other parties and voters actually support, any prospect of toppling the likes of Macron is likely to be thwarted — much to the delight of the ruling classes.

***

A previous version of the article contained an erroneous statistic (“a third of France’s wealth reportedly now in the hands of just eight billionaires”) taken from the French state-owned international radio broadcaster RFI. 

His critics countered that he has not only severed all connections with Left-wing outlets but attacks them with vindictive ferocity, and can now be seen regularly on Carlson’s show, where they get along famously. I interpreted Bump’s description as a deadpan provocation, challenging the idea that Greenwald’s long-running identification with the Left matters more than what he now says and does. A bigger question, not new but intensified by the Ukraine crisis, is whether “Left” and “Right” are remotely adequate descriptions of the current political landscape.

I’m bemused by the idea of “the Left” as a unified, monolithic entity. (For this reason I don’t capitalise “Left” or “Right” except when it is a publication’s house style.) History supplies no evidence to support this notion of homogeneity. The Labour Party, for example, often feels like a marriage of convenience between people who hate each other. No Conservative can needle a Corbynite as much as a Blairite can, and vice versa. When I read some publications, “the Left” encompasses everyone from Joe Biden to a bearded millennial with a hammer-and-sickle in his Twitter handle, but then I turn to Twitter and see Owen Jones denouncing Paul Mason, an actual loud-and-proud Marxist, as a “neo-McCarthyite” and remember that the Left is diverse and fractious.

Responses to the invasion of Ukraine have been educational. Few western commentators are stupid enough to be explicitly pro-Putin but a significant number, including Greenwald and Carlson, are anti-anti-Putin. You can identify them by their obsession with Nato, “legitimate security concerns”, “poking the Russian bear”, the Azov battalion, and hypothetical biological warfare laboratories, all of which are popular Kremlin talking points. Their arguments usually begin with some throat-clearing variation on: “The invasion of Ukraine is abhorrent but…”

Some of them were once associated with the Left but now occupy a more chaotic space: former Democratic congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, former Labour MP George Galloway, former comedian Russell Brand and former Rolling Stone journalist Matt Taibbi. (This is the world of the former.) Some, like Carlson, JD Vance, Nigel Farage and Steve Bannon, are clearly on the Right, if not the far-Right.

Some appear to be nothing more than contrarian narcissists who trade as “free-thinkers”. Others, who can be found in varying proportions in organisations such as the Stop the War Coalition, Democratic Socialists of America and Young Labour, come to anti-anti-Putinism via the far-Left. It will not surprise you to learn that many of the above made regular appearances on the now-banned Russian television channel RT.

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The cowardice of the far Left

By Tanya Gold

Owen Jones gets into trouble because he insists on describing marginal groups as “the Left” and springing up to defend their honour. When the Labour leadership demanded that 11 MPs withdraw their signatures from a Stop the War statement, Jones decried it as “an excuse to purge the Left” — even though those 11 constituted about 5% of the PLP and one-third of the Socialist Campaign Group. Either the Left is a major political force with popular support for its policies, or it is a fringe of the fringe. Which is it?

The idea of a Left-Right spectrum originated with a seating arrangement. After the French Revolution, members of the new National Assembly who supported the king gathered to the president’s right and revolutionaries to the left. “Left” and “Right” caught on in Britain during the Spanish Civil War, which at the very same time exposed how inadequate those definitions were. Writers such as George Orwell and Franz Borkenau observed with horror that Stalinists in Spain murdered and defamed socialists and anarchists, employing tactics similar to those of the fascists they were fighting. The study of totalitarianism developed from those early efforts to explain the puzzling kinship between mortal enemies on the far-Left and the far-Right.

During the Forties, the likes of Orwell, Edmund Wilson, Andre Gide and Albert Camus became known as the “Non-Communist Left”. To them, the difference between Stalinism and democratic socialism was night and day — Clement Attlee suspended five Labour MPs for pro-Soviet sympathies — but this fundamental divide in the Left often confused conservatives. When the Duchess of Atholl, impressed by the anticommunism of Animal Farm, invited Orwell to address the Right-wing League for European Freedom, he wrote back: “I belong to the Left and must work inside it, much as I hate Russian totalitarianism and its poisonous influence on this country.” In the early Sixties, rejection of Soviet communism was one of the founding principles of the New Left, even if many of its members went on to mimic the error by lionising Mao.

Despite these major fractures, Left and Right were useful labels so long as economics and class interest dominated politics. Party policies on tax and welfare may still cleave that way but voting behaviour does not. People regularly vote against their class interests, prioritising cultural values and identity over economics. If you hadn’t noticed before 2016 that parties of the Left were becoming, relatively speaking, more middle-class and parties of the Right more working-class, then Brexit and Trump made it unignorable. In the UK, while Labour broadly leaned towards Remain and the Tories towards Brexit, there were enough Thatcherite Remainers and socialist Leavers to create unlikely new alliances. (Then again, in the Seventies, the two most prominent Eurosceptic MPs were Tony Benn and Enoch Powell. Europe has that effect.)

Strange bedfellows have been a growing feature of the past decade in what we generally call populist movements even when they’re not popular. When it comes to anti-vaxxers, the gilets jaunes in France, or people who spread conspiracy theories about the White Helmets in Syria, it can be almost impossible to tell whether the person talking is on the far-Left, far-Right or has no coherent ideology at all. The rise of identity politics has fractured the Left, too. There are Marxists who reject it outright and socialists who gravitate towards the socially conservative Blue Labour. The language of politics has not yet caught up.

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By Ayaan Hirsi Ali

The anti-anti-Putin Left are most usefully described as “campists”, whose geopolitical philosophy is summed up by the phrase “the enemy of my enemy is my friend”. America is the font of all evil, therefore its opponents must have something going for them.

The British-Syrian writer Leila Al-Shami calls this “the anti-imperialism of idiots”: “This pro-fascist Left seems blind to any form of imperialism that is non-western in origin. It combines identity politics with egoism. Everything that happens is viewed through the prism of what it means for westerners — only white men have the power to make history.” Russia’s unprovoked war of imperialist aggression is as inconvenient to campists as China’s oppression of the Uyghurs. Either they must find a way to blame America after all or they must downplay the issue. Left-wing support for corrupt authoritarians such as Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro and Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega is disappointing enough, but sympathy with Vladimir Putin, Bashir al-Assad and Xi Jinping is symptomatic of a morally broken worldview.

At the risk of sounding like Walter in The Big Lebowski — “Say what you want about the tenets of National Socialism, Dude, at least it’s an ethos” — old-fashioned Stalinism had a certain logic. The USSR was for a long time the world’s only socialist country, and many people believed that if socialism failed there, it would fail completely. So they shut their eyes and ears to the show trials, the purges, the gulags, the Holodomor and so on, until the denial became intolerable. Malcolm Muggeridge compared the British human-rights activists who whitewashed Stalin’s Russia to “vegetarians undertaking a pious pilgrimage to a slaughter-house because it displayed a notice recommending nut cutlets”.

Campists don’t even need the advertisement for nut cutlets, because they do not know what they stand for, only what they oppose. This is how you end up making excuses for dictators who bomb hospitals while demonising the people who pull the bodies from the rubble as terrorists and/or CIA assets. This is how people who define themselves by their opposition to the US invasion of Iraq find themselves claiming that Russia was provoked into invading Ukraine. It is obscene.

The French philosopher Jean-Pierre Faye popularised the Horseshoe Theory, which argues that the extremes of Left and Right curve towards one another rather than sitting at opposite ends of a straight line. Hotly disputed by people who consider it a “smear” on the Left, it has the drawbacks of simplicity as well as the benefits. It does not mean that the far-Left are no different from fascists, any more than Stalin was a Nazi. I see it as an observation rather than an ironclad prescription. I know people far to my Left whose moral and intellectual integrity is unimpeachable, but I’ve also encountered antisemites, Assadists and Putin apologists who claim to be socialists. Another term for this, again harking back to the Thirties, is “red-brown alliance”.

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Back in 2009, Michelle Goldberg observed that Infowars host Alex Jones occupied “the shadowy territory where the far-Right curves around and meets the far-Left”. The invasion of Ukraine has made the existence of this tendency undeniable. Last week, Iranian state television broadcast a conversation between suspended Labour MP Chris Williamson, sacked university professor David Miller and prominent Stop the War member Lowkey about alleged Zionist influence in Ukraine. However that confederation of ghouls might define itself, it does not represent any Left that I identify with. Yet you can see for yourself how many influential people on the Left rallied to the defence of Williamson and Miller over allegations of antisemitism not so long ago.

In Britain, Left-wing writers such as Paul Mason, George Monbiot and Daniel Randall have long been fierce critics of campism. In recent weeks, Leftists from Ukraine and Syria have denounced it, too, while the Polish group Left Together has withdrawn from Yanis Varoufakis’s DiEM25 and the dubiously named Progressive International for their both-sides framing of the invasion. “You, decades after the Eastern European version of communism collapsed and Russia turned into a turbocapitalist, authoritarian regime, are still claiming that the man in charge of it is some kind of ‘anti-imperialist’ hero, despite him doing pretty much all he can to assure his stated aim of rebuilding the Russian empire and beyond,” wrote Zosia Brom in a furious piece called “Fuck leftist westplaining”. They have had enough of this nonsense, and who can blame them?

We are currently experiencing a moment of rare political unity on the subject of Putin and Ukraine, which makes the spectrum-scrambling dynamics of anti-anti-Putinism brutally clear. The Left-Right axis became popular because it helped to clarify existing political positions but now it obscures reality so frequently that I wonder we are so addicted to an archaic binary. Whether someone describes themselves as Left-wing or Right-wing no longer interests me. The only thing that matters is what they’re actually saying.

Many people, like Oliver Dowden, the chairman of the Conservative Party, think that the culture wars in Britain are between the woke Left and the conservative Right. This is only partially correct. They are also between the liberal-Left and the woke Left; they are also civil wars.

Dowden made a speech a couple of weeks ago at an American think-tank called the Heritage Foundation. It wasn’t exactly Churchill in Fulton, Missouri, but it made a splash. Dowden denounced woke ideology as a terrifying force: “a social media mob,” he said, “can cancel you merely because you have dared to challenge one of the Left’s fashionable nostrums.”

Dowden’s analysis of woke politics is slightly misplaced; and so too is the criticism of the speech made by the former MP and government minister David Gauke in the New Statesman. Gauke is wrong because, though he admits cancel culture is a problem, he sees it as a minor nuisance.

I can understand how: if you think it’s simply a battle between academics and conservative journalists, it can seem like a minor conflict. One that is only played out in the hyperactive transient world of social media and radio talk-in shows. But it is not just a clash between Scylla and Charybdis. It is also a family fight. And this is why the word ‘woke’ should be used.

It is now fashionable among a certain type of Left-liberal or centrist to say ‘woke’ is a meaningless term. It is certainly true that it is much abused. Some newspaper columnists relish going after ‘woke snowflakes’ with the zeal of indiscriminate big-game hunters. I can see why one would want to remove themselves from that. It’s all so vulgar, and disavowing the term ‘woke’ thus seems like a cleaner choice.

But there is no point denying that there are conflicts around the issues of gender, free speech, race and culture. And that these conflicts are not only waged by the Right-wing press, but are in fact found within many institutions largely staffed by liberal-Left people. The culture wars, which are often derided as fake and drummed up by the Right, are real. They are an extension of politics — and politics is by its very nature oppositional.

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Woke also has a sharp Anglo-Saxon sting; it’s a name that sticks. “Social Justice Warriors” is too long and its acronymic version SJW is dull. Progressive is too loose and airy. Woke gets straight to the point, and is useful in conveying, in its aggressive consonantal force, the internecine nature of this conflict.

The transgender debate, for instance, is not a conflict between reactionaries and progressives. It is a battle between older liberal-Left women and younger progressive women; between older gay and lesbian radicals and younger ones. Mumsnet and the Observer have done more than conservative think tanks to highlight the tension between biological sex and gender identity. It is not lavishly funded conservative institutions but grassroots feminist organisations such as Woman’s Place UK which are at the forefront of the fight against gender-identity politics in Britain.

It may seem like an intergenerational conflict because older women care less about what people think of them than younger women. But there are many younger people who are privately sceptical about elements of the politics of social justice. The key word here is privately.

We tend to think this conflict is made up of Right-wing cranks and irate historians (and a group of inexplicable feminists!) against an online-savvy Left. But ask many people in the publishing industry about what they really think of J.K. Rowling, Kate Clanchy and sensitivity readers — and the obscuring effect of self-censorship becomes clear. Some of them will be happy to chat to you, over the phone or in a pub, and express their views. But it has to be off-the record.

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These people are Guardian readers. They hate the Tories. They support Black Lives Matter, and are gravely worried about climate change. But they are scared stiff about saying the treatment of J.K. Rowling was terrible, that Clanchy made a mistake in responding to a Goodreads comment on Twitter but her detractors have behaved terribly, and that the use of sensitivity readers is crude and patronising. This is what they believe, but they don’t want to lose their jobs.

People who say woke is meaningless are evasive about this intra-Left conflict. They point to people such as Robert Tombs and David Abulafia, who will gladly write columns for the Telegraph excoriating the woke Left. Tombs will (falsely) claim in the Times that Churchill was not a racist. But where are the academics who will argue that Churchill was a racist but also a great man? When is the Guardian going to publish that?

Such people do exist, but if they think any criticism of woke politics will put them in the same camp as people like Tombs, they’ll prefer to stew away quietly. Many of the same people who bemoan the divisive nature of the culture wars are doing absolutely nothing to make it more nuanced. Claiming that certain figures from the past who were racist were not in fact racist is an extreme view; but so is denying that some of these racist people should not be considered heroic or virtuous or praiseworthy in other respects.

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In English departments, many academics do not want to be labelled as racists, so they publicly acquiesce to calls to decolonise the curriculum, but many of them are, again, quietly sceptical. They value the principle of diversity; they also subscribe to a humanist approach to literature that affirms great books can’t be wholly reduced to politics. They love equality. But they also love pluralism and honest intellectual discussion.

They know these things should not conflict with each other — we can consider the politics of a text without viewing that text entirely through the lens of politics; we can value both diversity and frank intellectual debate. But they live in an atmosphere in which they are in conflict. And so they do nothing about it because they don’t want to face a backlash.

This is why saying and using ‘woke’ is important. It brings what is obscure into the open. It allows the debate to be had within the liberal-Left, where it needs to be had. It is clarifying.

But many (here, here, here, here, here, and here) argue that cancel culture doesn’t really exist. It’s just a Right-wing talking point. To which I would respond: how do you know? There is so much self-censorship going on that people are not being honest about what they believe about certain sensitive issues. They don’t have the wealth or power of J.K. Rowling; they are scared of losing their jobs. That is cancel culture.

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In another liberal-Left organisation, the Labour Party, the tensions are revealed by a poll last year which found that only 25% of Labour Party voters support defunding the police — one key policy of woke ideology. Even among 18-24 year olds, the wokest demographic, it is only 44%. When asked whether we should view society’s problems through the lens of white privilege, the poll also found that only 29% of Labour voters agreed. More than half think “woke practices” have gone too far.

Of course, people have complex views. One might support taking the knee, believe statues of certain slave traders like Edward Colston should be taken down, and believe that we should learn more about slavery and colonialism at school, but such people might still be critical of other aspects of woke ideology. This is why they would be reluctant to describe themselves as anti-woke. To do so might imply opposition to all those things. But they could also describe themselves as non-woke or woke-sceptical; the fact that wokeness can be ambiguous does not mean it is a meaningless term. It just means it can be ambiguous.

Wokeness has a family resemblance to other progressive ideologies — but it is also distinct. Many socialists are non-woke; their analysis is rooted in class politics rather than identity. I also think it’s lazy to simply describe wokeness as liberalism. It is often profoundly illiberal. If woke-deniers think the Right is often misusing the term, they should take ownership of it. Simply saying ‘woke’ is a meaningless term, without offering a more attractive alternative, is a form of evasion.

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One reason why this matters on the liberal-Left is because the vast majority of 18-24 year olds now back liberal-Left parties. There is an old adage that people become more conservative as they get older. But if the changes in people’s lives which lead them to become conservative, such as owning property and having kids, are becoming increasingly rare, then that transition to conservatism might not come to pass for many young people. This is why the battle between the woke Left and the non-woke or woke-sceptical Left is especially salient. It has repercussions for all of us.

Questions such as: what is a woman, how should we examine our past, how we should think about race in an increasingly diverse society, and how we should think about free speech and tolerance are all absolutely key for trying to make sense of the nature of public discourse today and in the future. They ultimately boil down to the question of who we are, and what we should do about it.