It is easy to become disillusioned. Wherever you look, identity politics is pushing equality politics to the sidelines. The individual has become more important than the collective. And even the collective is eroded by factionalism. What remains of the weave of integration, inclusion, and social solidarity is pulled apart by religious extremism.
In India, you can see this at work in Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s opening of a Hindu Temple at Ayodhya, the site of an ancient Muslim mosque destroyed by Hindu nationalists in 1992 and disputed ever since. The crowds cheering Modi stood on the shoulders of mobs who would happily deny Muslims, Sikhs, Christians and non-believers an equal place in Indian society.
It is a pattern replicated across the sub-continent. A nation once praised for its multiculturalism is seeing its politics dragged into sectarian divides. Modi doesn’t care. It’s what his politics is all about – the event at Ayodhya marked the unofficial opening of his election campaign.
In Israel, Netanyahu’s obliteration of Gaza serves the same purpose (in addition to keeping him out of prison). His political survival is rooted in a reliance on ultra-right factions in an increasingly polarised and intolerant society.
Trump’s bandwagon campaign for the Republican party nomination in America’s forthcoming presidential elections draws on the same polarisation and denigration. Wherever you look, fascism is making its way back, carefully hidden under neoliberalism’s cloak of ‘freedom’. This isn’t an accident, but a carefully orchestrated plan underpinning the new age of corporate feudalism.
Feudalism 2.0
The deregulation of global markets, pushed through from the days of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, has shoveled wealth into the pockets of an ever-narrower global elite. Protecting this wealth has become the only thing that matters to them.
Some of today’s over-rewarded feudal lords have ended up in Britain’s House of Lords. Many more are tucked away in corporate boardrooms and offshore dominions. This is where today’s accumulation of wealth and influence is found.
Divide and rule
The gap between the uber-rich and the rest is so wide that only a deeply divisive politics can sustain it. This is what today’s neoliberal ‘think tanks’, lobby groups and propaganda machines have been designed to deliver. It is what lies behind the demonisation of refugees, the denigration of public sector workers and the criminalisation of climate protestors.
In earlier feudal times, barons would send in bunches of hired ruffians to foment division and disagreement amongst the poor. Today they use GB News and social media to do the job. Moreover, as more and more neoliberal policies fail to deliver societal wellbeing, so the emphasis on ‘discreditation’ and division increases.
The National Trust found itself the target of ‘alt-right’ entryism amidst charges that its equality policies “betrayed British values”. The BBC faces sustained attacks from the same lobbyists, denouncing its “left-wing bias”, when the reality is that whole tiers of compliant Conservative management have been shoved into the BBC to drive it further to the right.
Apologists for an array of climate-denying and tax-evading interests have elbowed their way onto BBC panel discussions when they barely merit a place on a children’s merry-go-round. Most sinister of all, though, is the suppression in much of the media of any suggestion that what Netanyahu’s ultra-right government is doing in Gaza (and the West Bank) might be referred to as ‘war crimes’.
Even the assassination of unarmed Palestinian civilians, conspicuously carrying white flags, sees the BBC unable to describe this as the arbitrary killing sprees they amount to.
To hell in a handcart
Britain isn’t alone in facing this onslaught from the far-right. It’s kicking off everywhere. And in a year when an unprecedented number of countries will hold general elections, we have to do some hard thinking about what might avert the planet going to hell in a handcart. This includes addressing the alt-right’s appeal to disillusioned younger voters.
In America, Trump’s securing the Republican nomination for president would not, in itself, win him the election. But widespread disillusionment with the Biden administration could hand it to him. Joe Biden’s refusal to suspend arms supplies to Netanyahu, pretending that the real problem lies with the Houthis, could easily sink his own boats.
Biden isn’t alone. Progressive politics is in a crisis partly of its own making, with half-decent policies being sunk by half-thought-through delivery plans. The right leap onto such contradictions, particularly on efforts to avoid going over the climate precipice.
Climate physics dictates that carbon emissions and fossil fuel consumption must be radically cut. This must become our major challenge to the alt-right. Instead, the left often dances to alt-right absurdities.
This is where Emmanuel Macron came unstuck over the ‘gilets jaunes’ protests in France and why governments in Germany and the Netherlands face huge protests by farmers and motorists. Progressive politics has to put the alternatives in place first. Politically, it has to involve shifting subsidies from ‘bads’ to ‘goods’, on a colossal scale; no bad thing.
Germany’s use of its KfW development bank to launch its solar revolution offers a classic example of how such a shift can be made. Its ‘Energiewende’ programme used KfW to deliver zero-interest loans alongside building/improvement obligations that required a shift into clean energy and energy-efficiency improvements.
Politics, not money, is the central problem. According to the International Monetary Fund, from 2020–2022, explicit fossil fuel subsidies almost trebled from $0.5tn to $1.3tn. Britain is part of this, offering an array of oil and gas tax allowances to featherbed pollution, intervening only to throw cash at market failures (nuclear), and relying on a completely outdated energy pricing market. As a result, Britain fails to let the tumbling cost of renewables set the household price of energy. Big fossil fuel companies continue to call the shots and pocket extravagant proceeds.
The burden of the rich
The problem that bedevils British politics, and which blinds us to a different reality, is that it is the rich not the poor who are today’s unaffordable burden.
Britain’s privatised public services have become a welfare state for the wealthy. They guarantee that dividends run on time even when trains don’t, that shareholder payments flow freely while sewage treatment systems fail, and that NHS contracts ensure the profiteers get a bung long before patients get a bed.
That overturning this appears to be beyond Labour’s intellectual reach looks like being the achilles heel of any appeal to progressive young voters. It doesn’t go down well with the not-so-young either.
Any transformation path that gets us out of today’s mess requires a radical rethink of Treasury policies, not an adherence to outdated orthodoxies. John McDonnell understood what Rachel Reeves and Keir Starmer seem unable to grasp.
The middle of the road – and a better alternative
Nye Bevan famously said: “We know what happens to people who stay in the middle of the road. They get run down.”Labour should remember this before playing silly ‘triangulation’ games with the Tory right.
Faced with a staggering rise in Britain’s poverty and insecurity figures, what the right want is for Labour to become impaled on commitments to fiscal prudence and austerity. The alt-right would exploit the disillusionment that follows by nurturing social division, blaming immigrants and outsiders, and playing the poor off against the destitute.
What Britain needs is the opposite, a political coalition linking climate, class and community.
Labour could offer such an approach, beginning with a mandatory duty on banks and insurance companies to invest in policies that cut their carbon emissions by 10% per year, and delivering an economics that puts more back than we take out.
- Tax allowances (and public contracts) could be limited to those who pay all their taxes in the UK.
- The same could apply to an individual’s right to hold public office.
- Minimum, statutory, environmental duties should be a precondition of a company’s right to issue dividend and bonus payments.
- Entire public service sectors could be re-structured along the lines of Denmark’s not for profit energy system.
The right would go ballistic, but the kids (and the rest of us) would have something to vote for.
The challenge for Labour
Labour’s challenge is to embrace the radical and inclusive, not the reactionary. A helpful starting point would be to address the language it uses over the enduring conflict in Israel. Those turning out at mass rallies calling for a ceasefire are not the purveyors of hatred but advocates of a just and lasting peace. What they despair of is Labour’s inability to say that this will not, for the foreseeable future, be on Netanyahu’s agenda. This is what makes the suspension of arms sales a much more powerful call.
Instead, Labour appears locked into a struggle simply to put on Sunak’s shirt ten minutes before he does. It is not an edifying sight.
And nothing connects to the pro-peace rallies that continue and have a wider influence elsewhere. Italy has suspended arms sales to Israel, others caution against a new war with the Houthis. And a two-state solution is back on the international agenda, shifting the conversation from war-making to peacebuilding.
The alt-right will denounce all of this, since chasing blame and division is their only card. Today’s disillusioned youth deserve better and that is what the left must embrace. What’s missing is transformational leadership. And there’s the rub.
Labour promises, hedged with “as and when resources allow”, offer no safe space on the road to recovery. We shouldn’t need Nye Bevan to remind us of that. And feudalism didn’t end last time just because it got fed up. It had to be fought off and replaced. Plus ça change.
