Gordon Brown starkly outlines the dangers of a far-right surge across the world in an important warning from a senior figure of the mainstream left (Europe is in thrall to the far right – that’s the result of appeasement by so-called moderates, 17 September). Crucially, he criticises the appeasement of the far right that the orthodox right and now, in France, the centre have been making.
His call for the development of a progressive alternative is welcome. Yet it will only work if the roots of this far-right surge are acknowledged. As David Edgar and I show in our new study, The Little Black Book of the Populist Right, the far right is exploiting the void left by social democracy when it followed Francis Fukuyama and declared the end of class conflict in the 1990s.
Bill Clinton and Tony Blair’s “third way” politics meant that traditional social democratic parties discarded their focus on the working class at the very moment when profound changes were altering the nature of work. In Peter Mandelson’s contemptuous phrase, they were “old Labour”. On all this, Brown is silent. As he is on the fact that appeasement of the far right’s migrant agenda is being pursued not just by the centre-right but also by left-led governments in Denmark, Germany and Britain.
As Brown rightly says, the far right can be beaten. But it requires a rejection of “third way” austerity politics and a principled discussion of migration, as well as a focus on core everyday issues.
Jon Bloomfield
Birmingham
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