Rightification: A Theory

 

In May, in the midst of the concerted effort to deny disabled people who can’t dress themselves any means of support, work and pensions secretary Liz Kendall gave a fascinating glimpse into the mindset of Thatcherite Labour.

The cuts, were “crucial”, Kendall averred, “to fighting the rise in populist politics”

They really believe that by forcing through right-wing, necrophile Thatcherite policies they are holding the fort against Trump-esque barbarians when, in fact, they are causing not so much a drift to the Right as a raging stampede.

The disability cuts Labour wanted to implement are a perfect example. The ‘victory’ of PIP cuts being postponed (not shelved, they still might come back in a different form) hides the fact that the other major aspect of the cuts – reducing the weekly benefit of new claimants in the most severe Limited Capacity for Work-Related Activity group by nearly £50 a week from next year – was passed into law.

The cut is greater than the £30 a week one introduced by the Tories in 2016. It’s an interesting theory that you defeat the right by becoming more right-wing that it is.

Or rather was. Because caving in to the slavering dogs just whets their appetite. The proudly Thatcherite Centre for Policy Studies says Labour “must go further”, while Tory leader Kemi Badenoch warns that the “benefits bill” is a “ticking time bomb” which could “collapse the economy”.

Reform UK, meanwhile, wants to force 1 million plus people back into work, declaring that it is the party of “workers and strivers, not shirkers and skivers” (yes it actually rhymes, it sounds like some nightmarish poem written by a 70-year-old bloke with too much time on his hands).

But the truly scary thing that, to Labour’s Machiavellian strategists like Morgan McSweeney, this is a sign that everything is working perfectly. At the next election, Labour will claim it alone is sensible and moderate, while the alternatives send a shudder down the spine. I’m sure some will be seduced by this ploy (but not enough as Labour has alienated so many people that it is clearly toast).

By its action and inactions, and bovine right-wing impulses, Labour is causing this right-wing flood to happen.

Surely there is no-one more slavishly pro-Israel than this Labour government? Labour has increased weapons sales to Israel before exempting the F35 bomber from its cosmetic restrictions. It refuses to call the worst genocide of the century a genocide. It still undertakes (now privatised) daily spy flights over Gaza from an RAF base in Cyprus and places pensioners who oppose the mass killing under house arrest.

But meet Kemi Badenoch, who won’t utter a word of criticism of Israel, thinks the country is fighting “a proxy war on behalf of the UK” and has appointed as shadow foreign secretary a woman who believes UK aid should go to the Israeli Defence [sic] Force.

Or say hello to Nigel Farage who finds the Netanyahu/Trump Gaza Riveira plan for ethnic cleansing “appealing”, and frets that the UK is  not an ally of Israel anymore.

Rachel Reeves, absurdly, wants to deregulate finance again, allowing people to borrow for mortgages at more than four and a half times their income. This is despite the fact that the 2008 financial crisis was precipitated by exactly this kind of permissive environment (it’s easy to forget that we had our own home-grown banking crisis in 2007 caused by Gordon Brown’s light touch regulation before the American one spread across the globe the following year).

But who is going to oppose this desperation? Probably not Kemi Badenoch who regards Argentina’s chainsaw wielding ‘anarcho-capitalist’ President Javier Milei as the template for her imaginary government.

Nor Nigel Farage, the former stockbroker who wants to “keep the flame of Thatcherism alive” by reducing corporation tax to 15%.

Starmer is fruitlessly aping Reform UK’s rhetoric, justifying and amplifying its pseudo-fascist ‘solutions’ while still being markedly less popular with its supporters than his unmentionable socialist predecessor.

But when not emboldening Farage, Sir Kier is channelling the blessed Margaret by promoting the nightmare possibility of a “limited” nuclear war in Europe and appeasing Trump by promising to spend an extra £32 billion (!) every year on weapons, thus ensuring even harsher austerity than that of Cameron/Osborne.

The reaction from the opposition is not to advise caution but to chide that he is not “going far enough”, a phrase I predict we will hear with tiresome regularity in the run up to the next general election.

Reform UK, meanwhile, dreams of an  Musk-style DOGE in every council despite local government, post 2010, bearing the brunt of “the biggest and most sustained cuts in public spending since World War II”.

In their all-encompassing obsession with defeating the Left, the Labour party are fomenting, literally and figuratively, a right-wing arms race that will lead to disaster.

The irony is that I believe they believe that they will ultimately emerge victorious from this horror. The even greater irony is that the person they hate for nearly destroying ‘their’ party, succeeded by his mere presence is shifting the country slightly to the Left, while they – in government and on the back of a huge Parliamentary majority – are dragging it to the extreme Right even though most of its inhabitants don’t want to go there.

The new Left party cannot come soon enough.