ANDY Burnham has completed his first week as UK Prime Minister, with the role feeling nearly as temporary as the leader of Scottish Labour. Many millions of words have been expended about the challenges and limitations faced by Burnham and the UK, but missing much about the wider mood of politics and how it is created.
The new government will have to make its case and progress its agenda against powerful headwinds pushing in the opposite direction, fuelling an increasingly toxic, divisive and highly charged landscape shaped by an ever more emboldened and hyper-radicalised right-wing.
This political tsunami of the right believes in a world of Manichean good and evil, “the will of the people” versus “the enemies of the people”, citizens in the narrowest ethnic sense and non-citizens who should be stripped of rights, benefits and deported in millions.
Any UK economic future should be based, they stress, on deregulation, low taxes and slashing the state, with the golden age of the supposed Thatcherite economic miracle presented as the pinnacle of recent times.
None of this is grounded in the UK that most of us live in. We have experienced 40 years of economic failure and 20 years of economic flatlining in living standards. The Thatcherite economic miracle was a mirage and the hard Brexit imposed on the UK has been an act of self-harm. All the while, incessant right-wing noise and propaganda feed the fires of dogma in the right-wing eco-sphere.
Not only does it inflame Nigel Farage and Reform, it forces Kemi Badenoch’s Tories further right, aids further radicalisation on the right with Rupert Lowe’s Restore Britain and Tommy Robinson – as well as dragging the rest of politics, Labour and LibDems included, further right.
To understand the state of UK politics, public discourse and society, we need to comprehend the radicalised, increasingly confident and deeply ideological right-wing eco-sphere.
It is critical to identify its core assumptions, its trajectory, what drives it – and where it wants to take the UK.
Challenging the myth of the Thatcherite economic miracle
TAKE the mirage of the Thatcher economic miracle; an incessant incantation of right-wing commentary. Former Tory MEP Daniel Hannan last week
talked about “the disaster and decline of the 1970s” from his post as head of the once thoughtful Institute of Economic Affairs; similarly ex-Tory minister Michael Gove, now editor of The Spectator, regularly invokes “the miracle of the 1980s”
when the UK was turned around from the evils of profligacy and public spending.
This framing device is used all the time on the right namely that the UK pre-Thatcher/pre-1979 was mired in decline, division and strikes, and then post-1979 and post-Thatcher Britain enjoyed unprecedented prosperity and growth. This is bunkum.
The facts tell a different story. The UK of 1970-79 had 2.7% annual growth, with the UK of 1980-89 seeing 2.6% growth. Similarly, the post-war era, painted by the right as one of stagnation and decline, saw faster growth than the decades after, with 1946-73 seeing greater growth, prosperity and productivity than 1975-2007.
Thatcherism did produce a mirage at the time and a bonanza for those in the City and finance. But the economy was held afloat by the proceeds of North Sea oil, privatisation and debt – with household debt exploding over the decade to fuel consumer spending.
There are many layers of tragedy in this. One is the continued fixation and fetishisation by the right of Thatcherism, invoking her with Churchillian-like ability of turning round a country and reversing national decline.
As important and damaging has been how most of the mainstream centre-left have colluded with this, not challenging the myth of the Thatcherite economic miracle or departing from this disingenuous script. This is true of New Labour and Keir Starmer’s Labour but also the SNP in the Alex Salmond era and the likes of Andrew Wilson’s Growth Commission.
The above is used to reinforce the drive for an increasingly isolated UK post-Brexit: a dystopian vision of a perfidious, impervious, imperial-minded Albion which draws from the collective folklore and mythology of Empire and Britain as a great power.
Such a view leads the right to focus on removing the UK from numerous international treaties and binding agreements – most notably the European Convention on Human Rights which now obsesses Badenoch and Farage.
This is a politics of burning down the house and pulling up the drawbridge; of a Britain which is effectively stating “stop the world, I want to get off” and which turns its back on its European friends and neighbours.
This at a time when Vladimir Putin and China are flexing their muscles and the increasingly dangerous Donald Trump regime is proving unreliable and no friend to the UK or the West.
Irish writer Fintan O’Toole points to the rise of “a certain version of England rooted in nostalgia aided by the left and polite society never wanting to address England or mention the words English nationalism”.
Reclaiming racism on the right
UNDERPINNING this is an assertive ethno-nationalism. In recent years, this has descended into the terrain and language once seen as unacceptable and unsaid, with a conscious attempt by many to reclaim from the past remarks and views once seen as beyond the pale and to speak and promote them unashamedly.
More than 50 years ago, Enoch Powell faced the political wilderness for his infamous “rivers of blood” speech in Birmingham in April 1968; this resulted in him being sacked immediately by Tory leader Ted Heath from the Tory Shadow Cabinet.
Today one of the defining points of the right is reclaiming Powell as a critical talisman and claiming that Powell’s “rivers of blood” speech, instead of being racist, was reasonable and statesman-like.
Douglas Murray wrote last year in The Spectator that Powell’s 1968 speech was an accurate harbinger of the Britain that came to pass in the years since; namely that today’s multi-cultural, multi-racial, multi-faith Britain is the Armageddon and moral degeneracy that Powell warned about.
The scale of this transformation on the right needs underlining. It is a fundamental shift from a right which worried about immigration and integration to one which now talks in apocalyptic terms about “the death of the West” and “demise of Britain”.
Across the right, speakers, thinkers and writers frame such themes as “the civilisational collapse of the West” (Matt Goodwin) or “suicidal empathy” (Jordan Peterson: citing Gad Saad, a Canadian marketing professor) – and constantly evoke a host of other grim racist remarks and positions.
The right’s invoking of such brutal racist language has been shaped by the global instability since 9/11, the forever wars of the Middle East, and the permission which the two Trump presidencies, particularly the current one, have given to racists.
There has always been a racist influence on the British right – just as there has been within British society. Powell’s speech did not come from nowhere, and Margaret Thatcher made her infamous “swamping” remark about immigration in 1978 in response to the rise of the National Front. But we now live in a UK where Starmer talked about “an island of strangers”, using words directly descended from Powell, and then pathetically tried to disown it.
Such assertions feed directly into “the culture war agenda” of redefining British history, its past and traditions and doing so in a way which promotes an ethno-nationalist Britain and a country which does not apologise about Empire, slavery and imperial conquest.
The debate centred on Empire, legacy and its continued relevance is not really about the past. It is about who and what Britain is, its values, and how it makes sense of itself in a modern setting. For the now radicalised British right, that means making a case for the defence of Empire and posing it as a force for good.
Nigel Biggar, for example, recently ennobled as a Tory peer by Badenoch, has made this one of his main intellectual missions, posing that Empire was “a civilising project” and that British imperialism was much more “humane” than other European empires such as that run by the Belgians.
The historian Alan Lester has set about challenging this counter-history in books such as The Truth About Empire. He believes there is a deliberate “collective amnesia” about the sins of Empire and this is driven by shaping a certain version of Britishness in the present: rooted in wealth, privilege and whiteness.
Such prejudices are sustained, amplified and given sustenance by the right-wing propaganda machine increasingly financed by a mix of dark and dodgy monies, hedge funds and crypto-financiers who provide the backing to a host of platforms and publications such as GB News, The Spectator and an assortment of secretly funded right-wing think-tanks.
This eco-world has not been sufficiently scrutinised by UK media or public bodies. The former are shaped by a right-wing media driving public discourse and kow-towed and the brow-beaten BBC is too scared to make the case for public service broadcasting.
This has left such work to the likes of ex-Observer journalist Carole Cadwalladr and Peter Geoghegan of the Democracy for Sale website. Geoghegan has written forensically of the need to “follow the money” in UK politics and media and the culture of “dark monies” that are funding the right-wing – such as the money and resources flowing into Reform from beyond Britain; and the millions which Farage can raise from crypto-billionaires.
The reactionary ratchet effect pulling British politics rightward
SO, why have British politics – in terms of public debate and discourse – moved significantly rightwards? Public opinion over the same period has not moved rightward in quite the same way; it has grown increasingly illiberal on immigration and welfare but is more left-leaning on equality and the super-rich.
First, this is about narrative and story. The ideological right have a story. They know who their enemies are. They know who “their people” are. The latter two points could be said of Thatcher and Blair. It could not be said of Starmer, John Swinney – or Burnham yet.
Second, the right has championed insurgency, impatience and embracing and invoking the need for “change” – but their kind of change. Third, this positions their opponents – the centre-left, liberals and progressives as “the establishment” and defenders of the status quo which is widely seen as having failed.
Fourth and perhaps most importantly, the right have understood that not only do you need to make noise, seize attention and engage in creative disruption, you also need to speak in primary colours allowing cut-through. For too long the convention on the left and in related media and academia has been of the need to embrace complexity. This, it turns out, is not enough. Rather than telling a convincing set of stories that know who it is giving voice to, who it represents and the direction of travel are more important.
The right have been assisted in this enterprise by their development of a critique of what went wrong in Britain in the post-war era which contributed to the rise of Thatcherism.
Subsequently, the failure of those on the left to create an analysis of the rise of the right and the radicalisation of the right and their enduring impact has cost them dearly.
In the 1960s and 1970s, the right came up with the notion of “a ratchet effect” in British politics where any economic or social challenge or setback led to a demand for more government intervention, state spending and taxation. This was first given coherent voice by Powell in the 1960s but more fully outlined by Keith Joseph and Margaret Thatcher in the 1970s.
Joseph argued that “British politics was fought on the terrain of socialism and a choice between real socialists and Conservatives operating on the socialist agenda”.
Joseph suggested Conservative governments had to reverse this: advice Thatcher took up.
Post-Thatcherism, it is possible to see the outline of a reverse, reactionary ratchet. This forces parties to compete on the grounds of restricting public spending, not to engage in redistributive taxation and to pay homage to the dogma of deregulation. This is the straitjacket in which New Labour, Blair and Brown operated.
But it has now been joined by a right-wing lexicon on immigration, asylum, race and ethnicity founded on a narrow definition of Britishness, profoundly intolerant, itself drawn from an illiberal version of English nationalism.
How we do politics and the importance of class and power
THE right-wing narrative is strengthened by the way that politics is done – by and for a professional political class – and the way that they speak and behave are reported upon by broadcast media which sees politics as something framed in the contours of the right’s view of the world and the legacies of Thatcherism and post-Thatcherism.
If you think this sounds too harsh, watch the likes of the BBC’s Sunday With Laura Kuenssberg programme or Trevor Phillips on Sky News.
These shows are anchored in an ideological space of the dominant ideology of the past few decades: of the economy as a household economy, of tax as a burden, of deregulation as a good – and of immigration as an existential threat.
All these value judgements are presented as ideologically neutral and the only choice in politics – the continued tightening of “the reactionary ratchet”.
This political framing is informed by one of the biggest changes in post-war Britain: a change which empowered Thatcherism and Blairism and all that came after. This is the defeat of working-class power and interests and the entrenchment of a bourgeois liberal viewpoint.
This, in the words of noted intellectual, the late Mark Fisher, has not just had political and economic consequences, but also a social and cultural dimension: seen in the retreat in the possibilities and imagination in music, TV, film, drama and other creative forms to our collective loss.
British politics in all four nations has been impacted by the rise of the great British right-wing lie machine. There is no Scottish, Welsh or Northern Irish opt-out. Indeed, it can be argued that the relative success of the SNP, Plaid Cymru, and to an extent Sinn Féin, has been due to their mix of pragmatism and preparedness not to take on the potent forces of the right-wing propaganda machine.
Add to this that none of them have had to flesh out a different politics on the economy, or face tough choices on immigration, while navigating “the culture wars”, and this has accounted for a degree of their success without challenging the prevailing ideological weather.
The future of humanity is at stake
WHERE does the rise of the emboldened, radicalised right lead? It does not automatically lead to Farage and Reform in Downing Street. But nor can those on the left just complacently wait for the right to fall apart due to the pressures of their internal contradictions.
This has not worked in Trumpian America where, despite Trump’s unpopularity and escalating behaviour, there is no surge for the Democrats or alternative vision for the US.
Instead, the forces opposed to the reactionary right need to stand for something clear, positive and understandable. They need to understand the right-wing propaganda machine. They need to understand the voracious appetite of the right-wing ideological project to tear down the last vestiges of the social contract between government and citizens. There needs to be a concerted critique of this in everyday language and in primary colours – the way the right talks of things such as “cancel culture” and “virtue signalling”.
No more talk of neoliberalism but instead talking of crony capitalism and corrupt capitalism and memorable phrases and soundbites which can carry over the airwaves and social media.
From these standpoints, an alternative political vision needs articulation – which does not yearn to return to the Britain of the 1970s or appease Thatcherism and its legacy, or cower at taking on the vested interests who have gained from the great disruption and enclosure of the past few decades.
That is, of course, easier said than done. But the right’s economic project has failed, as will its “culture war” project. It needs a politics of transformation, even revolution, or more accurately counter-revolution. But these revolutionary times demand a politics of disruption, upheaval and daring to take on the dinosaurs who roam the earth and think their debased, dehumanising vision is the future. The stakes are that high: literally about the future and survival of humanity.
