When Clement Met Margaret – the unholy alliance of the 1950s and the 1980s

It’s the worst of both worlds. A glance at 20^th century economic history indicates that the noxious right-wing consensus currently ruling the roost in this country is intent on the nightmarish combination of post-WW2 military Keynesianism (state spending on arms manufacturers) with 1920s/1980s austerity which shuffles the tax burden onto ordinary people and lets the rich get away with murder.

In order to appease Trump, Sir Kier Starmer has promised to spend an extra £32 billion a year on defence (taking spending on weapons to at least 3.5% of GDP) ostensibly on the absurd notion of protecting the country from Vladimir Putin menacing British streets. And absent any willingness to tax the billionaires, this can only come from renewed austerity and increased taxation on most people.

The image of post-war decades in this country (and Europe) is bathed in the sepia-tinted light of the birth of welfare states and health services. Out of the rubble of World War Two, Britain created the National Health Service and instituted a mass council house building programme, two things that clearly cost a lot of money. This can be designated social Keynesianism (state spending that benefits people).

However, this memory is selective. At the same time, after falling immediately after the Second World War, military spending hit 11.2% of GDP around the time of the Korean War in the early ’50s. It subsequently dropped but still remained comparatively high, holding steady at over 5% of the GDP in the 1970s.  This can be designated military Keynesianism (state spending on weapons). Hitler and later Ronald Reagan were quite taken with the concept.

Bear in mind that 5% of GDP is what Trump and Nato want military spending to be.

In truth, the post-war years saw the creation of both a welfare and a warfare state. “After the Second World War, Britons built not only a new Jerusalem but a new Sparta,” writes historian David Edgerton in The Rise and Fall of the British Nation. “Though no longer one of the greatest powers, in the 1950s the United Kingdom was militarized to an unprecedented peacetime degree.”

Into the 1960s and ’70s, he notes, the “warfare state” consumed more than the health or education budget.

Now we are told, in the midst of what is undeniably a much richer country, that we must choose warfare over welfare. Not we have a genuine welfare state nowadays anyway. After years of ever greater conditionality rules being attached to it, it is more properly classed a punishment state.

But what is interesting about the post-war years is not only that a balancing act between welfare and warfare was achieved but that it was done without imposing unbearable levels of taxation on ordinary people. The lower middle class enjoyed an effective tax rate far lower than today (before the increase in military spending hits), whilst large and essential ‘consumer’ items, such as houses, were much more affordable.

How was this possible, let alone actualised? The answer lies in three decades of robust economic growth (the best in the history of capitalism) which permitted rising public spending – part of which was diverted to military purposes – and the paying off of war debts. But this package, benign in certain respects, was enabled by much heavier taxation of the wealthy, encapsulated in the Beatles’ song ‘Taxman’, an embittered two and half minute whinge about paying 92.6% supertax. In fairness to its author, George Harrison objected to paying tax so governments could find new ways to bomb people and in that he was, at least partially, justified.

Socially speaking, however, the post-war years were a conscious repudiation of the policies of the 1920s and ’30s. As shown by Clara Mattei in The Capital Order in many countries, Britain and Italy for example, this involved swingeing cuts to public spending (that had risen in the aftermath of World War One), coupled with reducing direct taxation on the rich and increasing indirect taxation of consumption, especially duties on working class pleasures such as tobacco, beer and spirits. In Britain corporation tax, only created in 1920, was abolished four years later and would only return after 1945.

By then this economic cocktail was thoroughly discredited. It had contributed to and exacerbated the economic depression of the 1930s, laying the foundations for the worst conflict in human history, the Second World War.

But the dawn of the 1980s was long enough for amnesia to have set in. Thatcher in Britain and Reagan in America set about rehabilitating the economic prescriptions of the 1920s. Public spending was held down, mass privatisation inaugurated, and taxation precepts turned upside down. Direct, progressive, taxes on the rich were slashed while consumption taxes – regressive because everyone pays the same – were hiked. For example, corporation tax was 51% in 1981 and it is now at less than half that level (and recently has been even lower). VAT has gone in the opposite direction. It stood at 8% in 1979 and has since nearly trebled.

There is admittedly one significant difference. Whereas the austerity mongers of the 1920s were unconcerned about the effects of their policies on mass consumption, since the 1980s our political overlords have been far less complacent. A four-decades long house price boom, the huge expansion of personal debt, frequently low interest rates, and the introduction of tax credits have attempted to compensate for the fact that wages have not risen as they did in the post-war decades and in recent years have flatlined.

Some have called this privatised Keynesianism – a third kind of economic policy named after someone who died in 1946.

But the point is that, in conspicuous contrast to their predecessors of the 1920s, Thatcherism and Reaganism had the necessary stickiness. They stayed around. So much so that the current ‘Labour’ government in Britain is, in essential respects, Thatcherite. It is committed to deregulation, not increasing tax on the wealthy and keeping utilities like water and electricity in private hands. Any similarity to the Clement Attlee government of 1945-51 is purely rhetorical.

Except, though, in one respect. It is intent on repeating the trick of post-war military Keynesianism which, in addition to the creation of the NHS and nationalisation, the Attlee government eventually succumbed to, especially with Britain’s involvement in the Korean war in 1950. In response to this, defence spending doubled.

The post-war decision to increase weapons spending was not painless. It involved introducing charges for some NHS services which sparked a bitter controversy and much soul-searching about the meaning of democratic socialism.  But the conversion happened without sacrificing the core of the post-war settlement. The Conservatives – in power from 1951 – continued the huge council house building programme and the welfare state was expanded in the 1960s and ’70s.  Government policies tended towards increasing equality.

However, that was then. Thanks to the incredible shelf-life of Thatcherism, we don’t live in the same country anymore. As a result, something has to give – if you want to spend an extra £32 billion on the military, the money will have to be re-allocated from elsewhere and augmented from increasing taxation even more on moderate earners.

This process is already in the works.  In addition to slashing support for new claimants for disability benefit, the government is merging the Work Capability Assessment (for Universal Credit) into the assessment for Personal Independence Payments.  It is estimated that over 600,000 chronically ill and disabled people will lose their means of support as a result.

Plans to raise the state pension age to 70 are cut from the same cloth.

As socialist economist Michael Burke has said, “the funding for the war drive can only be generated by much harsher austerity, harsher even than in 2010.”

More and more, the decades following World War Two appear a unique aberration in the history of capitalism, precipitated by a uniquely destructive conflagration that was the deadliest in history.

Rather the norm is austerity, low taxation of the rich and corporations, unending hostility towards trade unions, and military aggressiveness.

Politically we are reverting to type too. The Second World War alliance against Nazism of a ‘communist’ country and western capitalist states only came about as a last resort after the latter had exhausted all other possibilities. Previously, and for years, British and French elites had wanted to enlist the Nazis as a “bulwark against Communism”, giving them a “free hand” to attack the Soviet Union. Even after the outbreak of the Second World War (during the seven-month “phoney war”), Britain and France still plotted an attack on the Soviets.

The preference for the far right has clear echoes today. Despite growing public disquiet at the genocide, the British government is still supporting the Fascist Israeli government and the West finds de facto support to Fascist thugs in Ukraine aligns with its geopolitical ambitions.

Is there an alternative to this witches’ brew? I want to explore those possibilities in a later post.

Expert Fascists: The Untold Story of the Spirit of Our Age

“History is a nightmare from which I am trying to escape,” someone said once. In the case of austerity, the nightmare has lasted for more than a century and the alarm isn’t about to jolt us into reality. “Outside, perhaps, of the less than three booming decades that followed World War II," Clara E Mattei notes soberingly in the introduction of her fine book The Capital Order, “austerity has been a mainstay of modern capitalism”.

Even the words are the same. In 1920, upholding the urgent need for countries to “pay their way” through spending cuts and individual abstinence, Lord Robert Chalmers, former permanent secretary at the Treasury, warned of the necessity of “painful” choices. In 2024, as an autumn budget featuring spending cuts of £1bn per department and tax rises looms, Sir Kier Starmer, PM of something called the ‘Labour’ party, has told us to steel ourselves for the “painful” decisions that must be made.

And just as in the 1920s, the promised sunlit uplands – the better times which this perpetual medicine is supposed to give way to – never appear. We must, says Starmer, “accept short-term pain for long-term good”. But we have been hearing that message for 14 years. Britain has been subject to austerity – of the fiscal kind – since 2010. And we (or the governing classes) are still making the same mistake. Maybe, as Mattei suggests, it’s not a mistake.

The Capital Order is about the origins of the creed of austerity. In the aftermath of the First World War, when the public wanted a “land fit for heroes” and the workers’ movement was on the march after decades of subservience, the wise, grey men in the shadows of power realised that something had to be done. The pressure of “excessive” demands on government had to be eased and workers, who were not only pressing for wage rises but questioning the immutability of the rule of capitalists over industry (‘the capital order’ of the book’s title), needed to know their place again.

Without drastic change and a remoulding of public opinion, the result would be ‘socialism’ or, in the worst nightmare of all, workers’ control and Bolshevism.

In Britain, the spirit of the age was trending in this catastrophic direction. Strikes were rampant and ‘reconstructionists’ from the elite, inspired by what had been possible during the war after laissez-faire had been discarded, were hatching plans for a free national health service and huge house-building programme (financed in part by local councils through non-profit making building guilds). It is fascinating to discover that the bulk of the reforming programme of the Attlee government after the Second World War was actually drafted in 1918-20 before being brutally scotched.

In Italy, as Mattei elucidates, things were even more serious. The workers’ movement was reaching the peak of its power – factories were seized and occupied during the long hot summer of 1920. The government stood by, helpless, and revolution seemed just a matter of time.

But at this point in both countries economists and bankers decisively entered the stage of history. On their advice, politicians implemented ruthless austerity. In Britain, savage spending cuts (the ‘Geddes Axe’) were forced through, and a policy of high interest rates, which caused a recession and mass unemployment, imposed in the face of protests. By 1922, wage levels were a third of what they had been in 1920, and 20% cuts in government spending were forced through. Confronted with the situation, workers went into survival mode and the strike wave evaporated.

The Italian ‘solution’ was even more extreme – Fascism. Mussolini marched on Rome and the supine Parliament granted full powers to his minister of finance, the liberal economist Alberto de Stefani, and his team of mainly non-Fascist advisors.  Free to follow their hearts’ desires, they implemented drastic reductions in welfare spending, abolished short-lived experiments in progressive taxation on the rich and corporations, and privatised state-run enterprises such as telecommunications. Coupled with Mussolini’s brutal physical destruction of the Left and workers’ organizations, the economy was pacified and profit-making made a safe endeavour again – though at the cost of wage levels, which sank like a stone, and political and economic freedom.

I must quibble here with the subtitle of the book – How Economists Invented Austerity and Paved the Way to Fascism. In Italy, they didn’t pave the way to Fascism; they were Fascism.

But regardless, what Mattei has done here is a wonderful example of historical revisionism (which is usually tainted by being associated with holocaust denial). It tells you things you very likely did not know and corrects the oversights of the historical ‘canon’ – a narrative which views the 1920s as a well-meaning period blind to the pain to come as a result of the Great Depression and the “low, dishonest decade” to follow. This book changes the way you view the past and thus the present.

Based on the experience of the last decade or so in Britain and Europe, most people tend to view austerity in terms of budget cuts and (regressive) tax rises. But, as Mattei points out, this is just one prong of the “austerity trinity”.

Fiscal austerity (1) is often accompanied by (2) monetary austerity which entails large rises in interest rates – the cost of holding debt – ostensibly to combat inflation but at the cost of driving the economy into recession. In the 1920s, this was known as the “dear money” policy – “the queen of all austerity policies in Britain” according to Mattei.  Dear Money was inaugurated in 1921 (when interest rates were raised to 7%) and lasted for more than a decade. It was still the official response to the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and predictably only made things worse. But the most brutal example of monetary austerity in the West took place at the beginning of the 1980s on both sides of the Atlantic, when interest rates were hiked to above 17%. The result was recession, mass unemployment (reaching 4 million for a decade in Britain), and the taming of organized labour. Again these results were not an unfortunate mistake. And the lady wasn’t for turning.

The last leg of austerity is (3) industrial austerity, which involves privatisation and crushing organized labour and the right to strike. Both, as Mattei details, were an integral part of Fascist austerity in 1920s’ Italy which literally destroyed (physically) the workers’ movement, enshrining a period of ‘industrial peace’. Industrial austerity was zealously resuscitated by Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s leading to a world-wide revolution in economic ‘common sense’, shaping the economic landscape we now take for granted. Nowadays in Europe, if you displease the economic overlords of the European Central Bank, you will be compelled to swallow the medicine of both fiscal and industrial austerity – budget cuts, privatisation, and laws against striking.

But if the economic history of the 20^th and 21^st century has, in the main, been one of austerity, the three horsemen of the austerity trinity have not always been paraded at the same time. Depending on the circumstances, different aspects have been stressed while others have been ignored – or in fact seriously transgressed.  This discordant record, dependent on the needs of the time as defined by technocrats shielded from democratic accountability, reveals – as we will see in part two – a lot about our current economic predicament.

A moral (and strategic) collapse

 

The collective West’s inability to respond to the deepening genocide in Gaza, now replete with mass executions and the deliberate killing of aid workers, is deeply troubling. It betrays a stunning moral degeneration that the British government, supported by His Majesty’s Loyal Opposition, cannot even propose stopping arms sales to the Israeli regime.

But this is not just a moral collapse, it is also a political and strategic one. This will not end well. Part of the West’s legitimacy, however much honoured in the breach, relied on projecting ‘soft power’ based on human rights and ‘a rules-based international order’. This is being shredded in real time. It is an insult to our intelligence to insist that Israel is merely trying to release the hostages as it blows up hospitals, universities, and apartment buildings and kills thousands of children.

It is frequently pointed out, with validity, that the US and Britain don’t support Israel because of the malign influence of the Israeli lobby, but because Israel is a strategic ally. It is the ‘unsinkable aircraft carrier’, in the description of ’80s secretary of state Alexander Haig, and a nuclear armed US surrogate in a vital region of the world. According to current president Joe Biden, if Israel didn’t exist, it would have to be invented by the US. Hence the mind boggling weapons sales (from mainly the US but also Britain and Germany).

But I can’t be the first to notice that unconditional support for Israel as it commits genocide in full view of the world is not a very clever strategy. Long-term, or even short-term, the result will not be a ‘Greater Israel’ but a moral, and subsequently physical, collapse of the Zionist project. Already, the normalisation agreement with Saudi Arabia – the Islamist but pro-Western power in the region – based on erasing Palestine from the map (as Netanyahu showed the UN), has been scuppered because of Gaza.

If Israel is left unhindered, more unbelievable Palestinian suffering will happen. But after that, all bets are off. According to the Israeli historian Ilan Pappé, “the more oppressive the eliminatory policies are (and it’s terrible to say but it’s true) the less they are able to be covered up as a ‘response’ or ‘retaliation’ and the more they are seen as a brutal genocide policy. Thus, it is less likely that the immunity that Israel enjoys today would continue in the future.”

“On the basis of sober professional examination,” he says. “I am stating that we are witnessing the end of the Zionist project, there’s no doubt about it.

In the past, the US was able to see Israel as a strategic ally but one that occasionally needed to be restrained. In 1957, threatening behind the scenes the withdrawal of aid and the imposition of sanctions, the US (in the person of Dwight Eisenhower) persuaded Israel to withdraw from the Sinai Peninsula it had occupied during the invasion of Egypt. In 1982, Reagan demanded, and got, a ceasefire after Israel had invaded Lebanon. Both these inhibiting actions were carried out by Republican presidents by the way.

But now, beyond bleating and transparent PR exercises, the US government appears powerless to do anything. Despite the presence of legions of strategists, it seems totally beholden to a regime that traces its ideological lineage back to Benito Mussolini, shoots 5 year old children with sniper bullets, and is unable to see the fatal long-term consequences of its actions.

Even if I was a thoroughly amoral Kissingerian national security strategist, I’d see the looming disaster ahead and rationally take steps to avert it.

But maybe the world isn’t rational anymore.

Flags and Fascism

If you want an indication of the madness into which British elite society has descended in the last few years, just consider its attitudes to two flags – the Ukrainian and the Palestinian.

Following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Ukrainian flag fluttered from public buildings across the land, alongside the Union Jack. It became almost treasonous – and a sign of a depraved fascistic mindset – not to unconditionally support Ukraine and the sending of whatever weapons it requested (including cluster bombs) for its fight against the indisputably evil Vladimir Putin.

Now, following the genocidal Israeli bombardment of Gaza, the completely opposite mentality reigns. Displaying the Palestinian flag is semi-illegal and a sign, according to our government and the ‘opposition’, of hate-filled venom and support for terrorism.

This is despite the fact that, in the words of British veteran Joe Glenton, the two cases, “they’re not exactly the same, but they are similar. There are people resisting an occupation.”

To explain the flagrant double standards, it’s easiest to look at Britain’s inveterate ‘how high’ Atlanticism, which means it automatically does whatever it thinks the US wants. But there are deeper, historical reasons – to do with Empire and who is considered worthy of support and who isn’t – onto which we should shine a light.

Universal human rights

In January 1941, when trying to get Congress to approve his lend-lease proposals, Franklin Roosevelt set out what would become war aims (even though it would be almost a year before the US entered WW2 and then explicitly because of Pearl Harbor). “Freedom,” he said “means the supremacy of human rights everywhere. Our support goes to those who struggle to gain those rights or to keep them.”

The speech formed the foundation of the famous Atlantic Charter (released in August 1941 still months before the US entered the war) whose third point emphasised self-determination to those deprived of it.

This set off a torrent of speculation that the right to self-determination should apply not only to those suffering under Nazi and Fascist tyranny but to the hundreds of millions of subjects of western empires across the world. Clearly they didn’t live under governments of their choosing. What about their freedom?

Winston Churchill, at that stage, in Orwell’s phrase “posing as a democrat”, went to great pains to make sure people didn’t lapse into error on this matter. The charter’s third point, he told the House of Commons, only pertained to the restoration of self-government to the states and nations of Europe “now under Nazi yoke”.

A lot of water has passed under the bridge since these words were uttered – including (often involuntary) decolonisation. But the attitude behind them, as shown by the black and white reactions to Gaza and Ukraine, has proved remarkably resilient.

Ukraine is an example of the unbearable sight of Europeans suffering from war crimes and human rights abuses. Gazans, clearly, don’t merit similar sympathy despite their plight being much worse. In fact, they are perpetrators, not really genuine victims at all. And to go back to the Churchillian distinction, you can’t restore self-determination to Palestinians because they’ve never actually enjoyed it – not under the British mandate, not under post-war Egyptian control, and certainly not under Israeli occupation since 1967.

People like us

This aliveness of this attitude can be seen in a myriad of ways. Ukrainian refugees are treated with the understanding due to people who we can, there but for fortune, imagine being. Refugees from the Middle East, by contrast, are seen as dangerous interlopers who we must keep out – either from Britain or continental Europe – by any means necessary. This ‘people like us’ mentality can even be discerned in something as apparently innocent as the inclusion of Israel and Australia in the Eurovision song contest.

In recent years, it has been common to suggest that post-Brexit Britain is in danger of “creeping fascism”. But the fascist temptation is, in my opinion, equally strong in both Britain and in the European Union from which it so tortuously parted company from just three years ago.  While pro-Palestinian demonstrations are denounced as “hate marchers” by Tory politicians in Britain, in Germany and France they are simply banned and Israeli Jews protesting against the slaughter are arrested.

Fascism is not Nazism

“Much against their will the British governing class have been forced into the anti-Hitler position,” George Orwell noted on the eve of the Second World War. These days, for the wealthy and powerful, the same impediments to realising your heart’s desire don’t exist. But I don’t want to suggest that a revitalised Nazism is the danger. The master race ideology, later annihilationist insanity, and the impulse to empire-build on the European continent, strictly limit its appeal. But classical Fascism – of the Italian vintage – is a different matter.

 

It’s little remembered that liberals, when forced in the 1920s to choose between Mussolini’s black-shirts and the workers’ movement they physically smashed, enthusiastically plumped for the former. And once in power, Mussolini’s economic policy, in its initial years, followed some eerily familiar patterns:

·        Fascism embraced austerity in the form of cuts to welfare spending and slimming down the civil service (reduced by 65,000 in 1923 alone). Just as in 21^st century Britain and Europe, austerity has been imposed for more than a decade with the exception of – just as with Mussolini – skyrocketing military spending.

·        Fascism increased VAT, a regressive tax because everyone – billionaire and disability claimant – pays the same. In Britain, VAT stood at 8% in 1979. Now it is 20%. Since 2008 around 80% of the member-states of the EU have increased their VAT rates. Mussolini also reduced tax on corporations. In Britain corporation tax stands at 25%. It was 51% in 1981. ‘Social Democrats’ in Europe have likewise sought to ‘stimulate’ growth through corporate tax cuts.

·        Fascism put technocrats in full charge of economic policy. In its first three years of power, liberal economist Alberto de Stefani, formerly of the Centre party, was granted “unprecedented  authority” as minister of finance. Today, the European Central Bank now oversees EU economic policy, ensuring the debt of member-states doesn’t rise above acceptable levels.  And the ECB and the European Commission have no compunction about imposing technocratic governors like Mario Draghi on recalcitrant countries. In non-EU Britain, the central bank – the Bank of England – is now ‘independent of political control’. In fact, a key neo-liberal reform across the world has been to remove economic decision-making from the hands of politicians and give it to unelected technocrats.

·        Fascism privatised state enterprises. Between 1922 and 1925, the fascist government implemented a “large-scale privatisation policy”, selling most of Italy’s state-owned telephone networks, for example. The aim was to balance the budget, a “core objective of fascist economic policy in its first phase”. Privatisation of utilities such as telephones and water was a signature policy of Thatcher in Britain and embraced by her successors. Since the 1980s, the privatisation mania has spread around the world, including to Europe.

·        Fascism was not initially anti-Semitic or at least no more so than other western ‘democracies’. It implemented policies of confiscating Jewish property and rounding up Jews as a result of its alliance with Nazi Germany but this attitude was not home-grown.  At first, being Jewish and Fascist was not some kind of hideous non-sequitur.  Fascism was, however, inherently racist towards non-white people from the get-go, employing poison gas on a wide scale in its 1936 invasion of Ethiopia, for example.

This indicates that elite liberalism of the kind represented by both Britain and the EU (which means liberties for the elite) is not, in principle, incompatible with Fascism. This is not to say everyone to the Right of Jeremy Corbyn is a Fascist itching to remove the mask, but many people will tolerate it if the only alternative is seen as worse  – for example some sort of socialism, which is regarded as far more inimical to freedom.

For instance, the election of the far-right Georgia Meloni in Italy – in her youth a member of a neo-Fascist party – was seen was by many as the trigger for a period of unbridled conflict with the EU. But it hasn’t turned out that way. Her “relatively conservative 2023 Budget law,” notes one assessment of Meloni’s first year in office, “quelled investors’ fears.” Maybe, in truth, if you are an investor (or a CEO, or someone of ‘high net worth’), there isn’t much to be afraid of.

The danger of Europeanism

Much-vaunted Europeanism is not an antidote to this. It can easily degenerate into the idea that we must protect our European culture and freedoms from outsiders, usually of a darker skin tone, who seek to destroy it. And, when all is said and done, the EU is a trading bloc for Europe. If you’re not lucky enough to live there – and the vast majority of the world’s population obviously aren’t – well, that’s tough luck.

Culture can easily serve as a synonym for the way race was used in decades gone by. For example, justifying the invasion of Abyssinia in 1936, Mussolini said he was putting an end to slavery in a “barbaric pseudo-state” and bringing the benefits of western civilisation. And slavery certainly existed under Haile Selassie. Naturally this civilising mission entailed wide-scale extermination of the native population.

Looking at the way the war on terror has been prosecuted in places like Iraq, Syria and Libya there are clear echoes in the way the immense cost to the indigenous populations of imposing allegedly morally superior regimes – or in the case of Libya no regime at all – is downplayed in a manner that simply wouldn’t happen if they were white and European.

All this is supremely relevant because the government our governments are giving carte blanche – and weapons – to, to bomb hospitals and commit ethnic cleansing is basically Fascist. In a letter to the New York Times in 1948, Albert Einstein and Hannah Arendt, among others, claimed that Tnat Haherut (the Freedom party) in the newly-created state of Israel was “closely akin in its organisation, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties”. Tnat Haherut was the forerunner of Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party. He is unquestionably “nationalist, genocidal, chauvinistic” and his coalition government, the most right-wing in the country’s history, contains out and out Fascists. One, Bezalel Smotrich, identifies as a “fascist homophobe”, lives in an illegal settlement, and denies that the Palestinian people even exist. Another, national security minister Ben-Gvir, was convicted in Israel of inciting racism and supporting a terrorist organisation.

Netanyahu’s government is, in classic fascist style, attacking the independence of the judiciary and is brutally cracking down on free speech among Israelis.

There are internal conflicts. The government contains a self-confessed “fascist homophobe” but the Israeli Defence Force, which is leading the attack on Gaza, proclaims a progressive attitude to LGBTQIA+ people unusual among the world’s militaries. But just as in the Ukraine, where the support for the Nazi Azov Battalion has gone hand in hand with allegedly advancing the rights of sexual minorities, these apparently intractable contradictions are not insurmountable.

Bringing it all Back Home

The classic ingredients of fascism – extra-parliamentary violence against the Left, cracking down on free speech, corporate-friendly economic policies, war preparation, and blatant racism – are already present in the UK and Europe, ready to be assembled into a coherent whole. Anyone who doesn’t the see connection between support for genocide abroad what happens domestically is engaging a fatal delusion.