Oswald Mosley, leader of the British fascists, in Birmingham with working class supporters

---

The left has got to get its act together

by PAUL HALAS

As if we needed it, the recent “Unite the Kingdom” march was a deeply alarming wake-up call for anyone opposed to fascism.

Labour MP Clive Lewes attempted to pour oil on the water by saying that many who joined it were making a general protest about the state of the nation today: the loss of our historic certainties, the loss of social cohesion, the uncertainties over jobs and housing and living standards, and weren’t, themselves, overtly racist. That ignores the fact that the march’s raison d’être was to protest against immigration and that a considerable portion of the crowd was very overtly racist. Hopefully those who didn’t have a bigoted agenda won’t make the same mistake again.

The alt-right part of the crowd, the Tommeh followers, plainly felt they were at liberty to spew venom. Who was going to stop them? While a few of them amused themselves by attacking police, it appears that some of the police were also in sympathy with them. There has always been a racist element in white British society, amongst all classes: the upper classes who considered themselves above everyone else; the middle classes who considered people of colour several notches below them; and the working class who first did the empire’s dirty work, and then were persuaded that the most recent arrivals in this country were taking their jobs… and womenfolk. The gradual opening up of society, more enlightened attitudes to gender and sexual orientation, and greater social mobility, spread to ideas about race as well. It was no longer the done thing to be a racist, at least not in polite society. The Bristol Bus Boycott of 1963, in which the Bristol Omnibus Company and the Transport and General Workers’ Union united to refuse employment to Black or Asian bus crews, seems utterly shocking to most of us now. Thankfully that’s in the distant past, despite the worst efforts of Yaxley Lennon and company.

---

Now racism is emboldened and coming out into the open again, often cloaked in concern about immigration, asylum seekers, and the idea that undeserving newcomers receive preferential treatment over “native Britons”. Of course not all the people who voice these worries are racists; many have just accepted them without due consideration, but plenty of them are. Pretending otherwise is a dangerous game. It should go without saying that the racists, the alt-right, are tapping into real concerns, and are making capital. It’s a groundswell; people are angry with what has happened to their Britain. What has happened to our Britain. We should all be angry.

We on the left recognise that equality, or the lack of it, has always been the biggest problem facing us. The imbalance between the haves and the have-nots. The establishment and the hoi polloi. The terrible inequality that’s been endemic in this country has spawned many movements to fight against it, including, most prominently, the Labour Party. And the establishment has always done its level best to destroy or water down those movements. Even just after World War Two, when the most socialist Labour Party the country ever saw brought in the Welfare State and built millions of homes, the establishment fought tooth and claw against it. The Labour Party was increasingly compromised by players who did their best to drag Labour back from its socialist excesses. The measures the party brought in, however, saw a constant reduction in levels of inequality through the governments of Attlee, Eden, Macmillan, Douglas-Home, Wilson, Heath and Callaghan… right until the eve of the Thatcher era. (This was despite a plot to stage a coup by senior establishment figures and military top brass in 1968, which Lord Mountbatten was allegedly deeply involved in, that ultimately failed to ignite. They viewed Wilson’s brand of socialism as de facto communism… but then they would.)

---

Throughout the 1970s inequality continued to decline, despite it being a time of great flux, and an ongoing test of strength between labour, with a small “l”, and the establishment. However, with Wilson’s decline and the ascent of Callaghan, Healey and Jenkins et al, the political centre had taken over the Labour Party and last rites were being read over Keynesian economics. Any readers of Wilkinson and Pickett’s seminal books on equality will know that from that point onwards inequality started to rise once more. And it hasn’t stopped.

Those marching to “Unite the Kingdom” have very likely been persuaded that the Seventies was a dreadful decade: power cuts, strikes, three-day week, British Leyland… But they would also recognise many of the things they’ve been missing date back to that time. A greater sense of community, more real jobs, houses that cost three times your annual income rather than ten, street parties, TV that everybody watched and related to, holidays enjoyed together, fewer people working multiple jobs and still not making ends meet. Okay, it wasn’t the Garden of Eden; there were plenty of bigots who weren’t shy about voicing their poison, and there was Enoch Powell, there was the National Front, there was the Angry Brigade, there was a great deal of discrimination towards anyone who wasn’t strictly heterosexual, and Wilson’s famous “white heat of technology” was still taking its time about materialising. The digital age was yet to come.

---

Thatcher. One of her most famous sayings was “there’s no such thing as society”. It was her holy mission to make it so. A Labour Party that was such a pale shade of pink – virtually no red left at all – had lost the plot and people wanted change… and boy, they got it. The unions were emasculated, and heavy industry rolled back. The future was Monetarism. The credo of the market. The monetisation of everything; knowing the price of everything with no appreciation of value. What Thatcher showed, the lady from the lower middle-class background, was that no matter where you came from you could make it to the top, provided you were ruthless enough. It was the era of the city-boy, loads a’ money if you played your cards right, the spiv and the hedge fund bandit… greed was good. Away with the nanny state; everything would work better in private hands (and of course there was loads a’ money in that if you knew the right people); everything was for sale. Which precipitated the biggest transfer of public money into private hands this country had ever seen. You could now buy your own council house, but her much-vaunted claims of greater social mobility started to look a bit sick when further education was no longer free, so that those without the means were instantly at a disadvantage. The project to dismantle the NHS and the care sector, to privatise public services, was underway. We’ve been saddled with a revolting form of economic Darwinism ever since.

---

Okay, we know all that. But for those who are nostalgic for a more socially cohesive time, they should know who to point the finger at. Since then we’ve had New Labour, and Thatcher’s proudest achievement, Tony Blair (not to mention Gordon Brown’s cameo), but during the New Labour governments inequality continued to rise. Finding corporate solutions to social problems didn’t work in the long term… and Blair is a war criminal.

Cameron, May, Johnson, Truss (!), Sunak, Starmer; Amazon, Google, Apple, Tesla, Trump, Black Rock… Sky-high house prices, no rise in real incomes since 2008 unless you’re rich, creaking, exorbitant public transport, climate breakdown, choked roads, toxic rivers, gig economy, working multiple jobs and still needing food banks, freedom of speech under threat, mass homelessness, education blighted and the NHS being carved into bits… It’s no wonder people are taking to the streets, no matter that much of what they’ve bought into over the years is actually the root cause of their plight. How convenient to load it all onto “the boats”.

Aided and abetted by the American far right, the likes of Farage and Tommeh have been able to make hay. Straight out of the fascism playbook: tap into real discontent and use convenient scapegoats. The subject of migration is complex, and while much of it is caused by the geopolitical shit-show caused by the West, that shit-show has been the source of much of the West’s prosperity… although it’s a moot point that most of the people on the streets come from the groups that have seen the least benefit from it. Anyway, the far right isn’t particularly interested in our colonial legacy or the results of more recent West-led aggression, instability and exploitation. Who cares?

---

The groundswell of popular resentment has put Farage on the crest of a wave. The messaging is simple. Like Trump’s MAGA. First, “get Brexit done”, then “stop the boats”. No matter that Reform’s economic plans are complete gibberish, that it rubbishes the facts about climate change and champions the fossil fuel companies, that it wants to complete the job of putting all healthcare in private hands, that it aims to actually reduce taxation for the big corporations and the mega-rich (as if they pay their due anyway), that despite its pleas for freedom of speech it’ll muzzle any voices it disagrees with. It has torn nearly all the pages out of the Trump handbook and exploited people’s anger. Can its momentum be halted?

Labour has got it all wrong, and in truth has been hobbled by members intent on watering down its policies for nearly all its existence. The traitor Starmer abandoned the ten popular pledges he’d signed up to and kicked the Green New Deal into touch as soon as he became party leader. He and his team have turned the party into a pale imitation of past Conservative governments, probably in the belief that people’s only choices were it or the Tories. The landscape has changed, however. Labour is probably a completely spent force. In party political terms the alternatives to the neoliberal right are the Greens and the as yet unnamed Your Party. Wouldn’t it be great if Your Party became The United Party. At the moment its internecine struggles are Xan Polanski’s greatest recruiting weapon.

---

In truth Your Party and the Greens will probably have to work in tandem. Can Polanski makes all the right noises, and hopefully his policy ideas are the direction the Green Party will take. Trust has to be won, though. The suspicion lurks that maybe it won’t have changed that much, that many of the membership still merit being called The Waitrose Party. That they’ll want to water down the more radical policies Goldsmith is keen on. By the same token, Your Party will have to win trust. Let’s hope its inauspicious birth is a blip. It certainly has to be grass-roots led, rather than by unelected groups behind closed doors.

On the bigger stage, public trust has to be won. Ever since Thatcher started the sale of council homes and encouraged us all to be entrepreneurs, the old demarcation between a left-wing working class and a right-leaning middle class has broken down. Increasingly left-wingers have been seen as middle-class do-gooders, out of touch with working people. University lecturers, social workers, intellectuals… a very effete bunch. While the Conservatives appealed to those with aspirations, those starting their own small businesses, and those who swallowed the guff about trickle-down economics. And many of those who were left behind were led to believe that others were to blame for their predicament, not realising it was the neoliberal system we’ve been lumbered with for forty-five years. Generations have grown up accepting neoliberalism as the norm. That it’s the world we live in, that any alternatives are pie in the sky.

---

Stage one: Get Together

The left has to get its act together. There has to be a united effort by everyone who doesn’t buy into the status quo neoliberalism that’s held sway for so many decades, and the most important group should be the young. Who’ve attended poorly funded schools with a robotic curriculum. Those whose further education has been a conveyor belt for the corporate world, and the others whose job prospects are both limited and limiting. Who are inheriting an economic and environmental dystopia.

To reach a mass consensus will involve a massive act of faith and much nose-holding probably. And it should be clear that Liberal Democrats and those who’ve stuck with the Labour Party thus far are unlikely to be part of the solution. The only way forward is a radical break from the neoliberal status quo that their parties embraced. The establishment had a major panic in the 2017 general election, and was en route to having another before Your Party started squabbling. Its reaction to that was immense relief. It shouldn’t be allowed to happen again. Get the real opposition to the right onside.

Stage two: Bust a Gut!

Bust a gut to make the left-wing opposition a populist one. Expose the far right’s lies and make left-wing political ideas appealing to the majority. Of course they’re transformative, but they must be seen to be so. We already know the idea of public ownership for transport, health, care and utilities is very popular; it must be trumpeted that only the left can deliver it. Only the left can save the NHS. Propose a different, more humane way of treating migrants and asylum seekers. Put more resources into processing claims, and stop dumping people in hotels. Humanise migrants, treat them as people. By all means play the blame game, but pin it on the real culprits. Tax the bloody rich, and when they still try to squirm out of it tax their assets. Reform tapped into resentment towards the political and economic status quo; it must be exposed that Farage and his ilk are amongst the worst examples of the privileged hypocrites their supporters are supposedly protesting against.

We’ve all been saying those things, but we need a mass, unified movement to shout them out loud. The unions should be playing a key part, and that should transcend the instances where self-interest works against the general good. What do people think about protecting the jobs of workers who produce and transport the deadly weapons enabling genocide? We should speak out in the workplace, in public, at surgeries, in schools and universities; we should be looking at getting at least some sections of the media onside. Are all newspaper and TV journalists quivering jellyfish? A few more Gary Linekers please. We need to be unapologetic about proposing a real alternative, because decades of fudges have been tried and have failed. We need to broadcast that we’re more than bleeding hearts and snowflakes, that levelling the playing field will bring benefits for most people… just not the ones who are psychopathically greedy. We need to get over our addiction for invading and destabilising other countries, to spend our resources on people rather than destruction. And resuscitating a Green New Deal might give the young and their offspring a more hopeful future.

The alternative is Nigel Farage, Tommeh, backed by the American far right and assorted Christian nutters, with Donald Trump and Elon Musk leading the prompting. (By the way, it would be interesting to find out who’s prompting them.) God help us if and when we have to clear up after them. Let us pray that can be avoided. In among all the slogans that are bandied to and fro, there’s just one worth preserving: for the many, not the few.

---

Paul Halas is a writer whose escape from 1970s hippiedom was the discovery that he could invent stories. He spent forty years contributing to various Disney magazines and books, as well as a variety of non-Disney comics, books, and animated films. His retirement from commercial writing coincided with Jeremy Corbyn becoming the Labour Party leader (he is a self-described Corbynista) and becoming a Labour activist between 2015 and 2020… only to quit the party in despair soon after its recapture by the right wing of the organisation following the 2019 electoral tragedy. He has now rediscovered his first love – writing funny stories – which is just as well, as the real world isn’t very funny at present.