Drag Me to Hell – Why are we so right-wing?

 

Margaret Thatcher is known for many things – declaring war on trade unions, initiating the mass privatisation of publicly-owned utilities, selling off council houses, deregulating the City of London, cutting taxes on the rich, to name a few. But one thing she is not famous for is being on the Left.

Nonetheless, in 1982, she did something which, in today’s climate, would be seen as left-wing, even ‘far left’. She suspended arms sales to Israel. This was in response to the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, which was prompted by the fact that the Palestinian Liberation Organisation had relocated there.

Many civilians were killed and Thatcher’s government took immediate action. An invitation to Israel to attend the British Army Equipment Exhibition was withdrawn and arms sales were stopped. One Foreign Office memo stated, “It would be odd if we were now to conduct bilateral business with the Israelis as though nothing had happened”.

Contrast this with the current British government’s reaction to the genocidal Israeli attack on Gaza, which has already killed far more civilians than the Lebanon War did. In fact, the official number of dead – 30,000 – will be swelled by so far unreported deaths – those dying at home and missing because they are buried under rubble.

Atrocities definitely happened in the 1982 war, most famously in refugee camp massacres. But, as far as I’m aware, deaths from malnutrition did not occur, as they are now. Nor were starving people deliberately massacred by the Israel Defense Force.

Nonetheless, this time Britain is definitely conducting business as though nothing had happened. Arms sales continue, and indeed the “defense relationship” and “growing Israel-UK partnership” is celebrated by the IDF.

Virtually the only person in the UK Parliament to object to this state of affairs is a propagator of ‘far left’ ‘socialism’ who has been cast into out darkness on the patently ridiculous grounds that he enabled antisemitism to flourish when he was leader of the Labour party.

I doubt somehow though that Thatcher is turning in her grave.  She regarded her greatest victory as compelling the Labour party to renounce its mixed economy, social democratic ideology in favour of her right-wing, corporate friendly, anti-worker economic world-view. Something Corbyn, all too briefly, reversed.

The Ultimate Compliment

Present leader Sir Keir Starmer is the perfect compliment to Thatcher’s legacy.  Despite being elected on a promise of upholding Corbyn’s economic policy, he has jettisoned every element of it, leaving a husk of Thatcherite nostrums impeccably attuned to the political and economic establishment which has grown to such dominance in her wake.

For example, in throwing overboard a pledge to spend £28 billion a year on green energy projects, Starmer and de facto deputy Rachel Reeves consciously aped the language of the Cameron-Osborne government employed to justify austerity. They accused the government of “maxing out on the nation’s credit card”. The same mind-numbing phrase cropped up in Starmer’s response to the Budget.

Reeves has, in redoubtably conservative fashion, promised to balance the nation’s books, despite, somewhat hilariously, having her own Parliamentary credit card taken away in 2015 for over-spending on expenses.  She has also promised not to reintroduce a cap on bankers’ bonuses abolished by the Conservatives, as this would mar the charm offensive with the City of London that she and Starmer have methodically deployed over the last few years.

A Different Country

The question that should then be asked is how did British politics get so sclerotically right-wing, especially when, in terms of social attitudes, the diametrically opposite trend has occurred?

Last autumn, for example, the researchers behind British Social Attitudes Survey (BSA) proclaimed that Britain had undergone “a near revolution” in terms of social attitudes over the last four decades:

One clear theme emerges. On many social issues, such as sexual relations or whether women with young children should go out to work, there has been a long-run secular change trend towards a more liberal climate of opinion. In what might be thought a near-revolution in the country’s cultural outlook and social norms, Britain has increasingly come to believe that what people do in the bedroom, what kinds of family they live in, and how they combine family life and paid work should be up to them. The job of government is to respect and facilitate the decisions they make rather than try and take those decision[s] for them. 

In 1983, half of all respondents said that same sex relationships were “always wrong” compared to just 9% two years ago. Over three quarters of people support a woman’s right to have an abortion, compared to just 37% 40 years ago.

Other seismic changes can be found in attitudes toward premarital sex, having children outside wedlock, and gender roles in the workplace and the home. In 1987, for example, 48% agreed that ‘a man’s job is to earn money, a woman’s job is to look after the home and family’. Now only 9% of people do.  Britain “now looks and feels like a different country from 40 years ago”, the BSA says.

These are all welcome changes but in terms of politics, and the attitudes underpinning it, Britain doesn’t “feel like a different country from 40 years ago”. It feels like a worse country.

To go back to the example that introduced this article, in 1982 – when dinosaurian attitudes on social issues held sway – Margaret Thatcher could, with minimal opposition it seems, suspend arms sales to Israel. It is inconceivable that such a policy would be enacted today and if, by some miracle it was, it would be instantly accompanied by howls of antisemitism. 

It may justifiably be pointed out that these changes in social attitudes did not just happen. According to journalist Ian Sinclair, reporting on the BSA survey curiously neglected mentioning the role of “groups like the Women’s Liberation Movement, Stonewall, the Gay Liberation Front and Outrage dealing with violence, threats and abuse in their struggle to win equal rights, changes in the law and shift public opinion.”

But there is no shortage of activist groups – on anti-austerity, public ownership, the rights of disabled claimants, inequality, and corporate taxation for example – trying to shift Britain’s economic policy and politics marginally to the Left. But in this case, barring minor victories on things like the municipalisation of bus services, they have just been banging their heads against a brick wall.

Why is this? Why did activists, admittedly after years of struggle, succeed in prising the door open on gender issues, gay rights, and sexual choice but in terms of politics and economics meet a defiant ‘No Pasaran!” from the elite?

1983 will never die!

I can’t give a definitive answer but one notable feature of British politics over the past four decades has been an innate conservatism in the worst sense of the word. Instead of taking on vested interests, it has opted to protect and preserve them.

In party political terms, we have one side fixated on a perpetual emulation of Thatcher’s epoch-changing 1983 victory facing off against the 1997 Reenactment Society. Rather than changing, as social attitudes obviously have, politics is frozen in aspic, like some endless rerun of Yes Minister (which for those who don’t know was a ‘comedic’ representation of the right-wing Public Choice Theory and obsessed with cutting government waste).

In 2008, our necrophile political system bailed out, with public money, a financial system that had imploded entirely due to its own inner workings. Not only was this an enormous transfer of wealth from poor to rich, it also rescued and further entrenched a sector of the economy that feeds off debt and thus loves conservative economics.  

Finance wants austerity because, as a result, wages are held down and people become even more susceptible to getting into debt and having to make interest payments. For the same reason, it has an aversion to trade unions. Finance is also a prime mover behind the privatisation of public assets, funding the Private Equity groups that often take over public services, like water or health, thus benefitting from the rising user fees that people are compelled to pay to gain access to basic services.

If ‘market failures’ exist and they aren’t being dealt with, you can bet that for some people, invariably extremely well-off, these aren’t failures at all but successes and the source of their wealth.

Hysterical Billionaires

And when the billionaires who run Britain’s mass media organisations ran into some turbulence after revelations of phone hacking, the obedient political class was on hold to limit the fall out. The initial enquiry into unlawful conduct by the newspapers, led by the judge Brian Leveson, was meant to be followed by a second part (‘Leveson 2’) that would have looked into “corporate governance issues”. But this was scrapped by Matt Hancock because of the “significant progress” that had apparently been made.

As a result, rather than clipping their wings, moguls like Rupert Murdoch were emboldened. His News UK launched the right-wing Talk TV station in 2022, emulating the hysterical Fox News in the US despite laws against broadcasting bias in the UK which didn’t seem to make much difference. The fact that Talk TV is soon to become a streaming only service does not denude from its intention to further lock British politics into a right-wing direction.

Its ‘rival’ GB News plays a similar role. The co-owner of the channel is hedge fund billionaire Sir Paul Marshall. In a previous incarnation he funded and edited the 2004 ‘Orange Book’, a collection of free market espousing essays by leading Liberal Democrats which set the tone for their role in the Cameron coalition after 2010.

Marshall, who has been outed for seeming endorsement of far right conspiracy theories, has previously lamented the fact that financiers like him ‘made out like bandits’ as a result of the government’s decade-long Quantitative Easing programme. But despite this honesty, he hasn’t been deterred from putting the money to effective use.

If you create a large coterie of billionaires, as our political system has, you shouldn’t be surprised when they use that enormous wealth to mould public opinion and protect their interests. 

Liberal and progressive opinion in this country has been profoundly shaped by the Whig theory of history, which is convinced that the British story exhibits a steady, if slow, progress towards more liberty and rights. However, the experience of the last 40 years does not bear this out. Progress and reaction can co-exist, each in their own separate sphere of influence. Reality, as opposed to the idealised narrative that exists in our heads, is frequently messy and may point in two contradictory directions at the same time.

 

 

Living in the Past – The Prison of Political Time Lags

Back in the 1960s, J.B. Priestley noted the widely unappreciated feature of time lags in society. There is an unerring tendency, he observed, to associate any era with “its newest and more original ideas”. But this is a mistake.  Very likely, only a few pioneers actually held these notions, while ordinary people – and self-styled intellectuals – remained steeped in mentalities that simply regurgitated insights from decades or even centuries before.

“It is precisely the ‘hard-headed and realistic’ who all too often exist in cages made out of largely discredited hypotheses,” said Priestley. “We must expect time lags of various lengths.”

Priestley was writing about scientific ideas, specifically concepts of time. Einstein, for example, started publishing about relativity at the start of the last century but, to all intents and purposes, for decades afterwards most people lived by intuitive notions of Newtonian physics. In all likelihood they still do.

But the concept of time lags can equally well be applied to politics. In fact paradoxically – as British politics now demonstrates – political cultures can become more ensconced in the past as the real past recedes into the distance.

The Brexit Right personifies this shying away from the painful realities of the present in favour of the (fictional) comforts of the past. In this dreamscape, the Second World War – in which Britain “stood alone” (not counting the Empire of course) safeguarding freedom against a totalitarian threat from Europe – is the rock around which everything else is arranged. It’s no accident that Nigel Farage urged everyone to see Dunkirk.

Less appreciated is that liberal and centrists are equally affected by nostalgia. But in this case the time frame is different. The defining period is the post-1992 era of the single market, ‘social Europe’ and the Blair-led Labour governments. This is seen as a time of expanding public spending, worker protections and a liberal attitude to social policy. Blotted out are the decidedly illiberal stances of both Labour and the EU to ‘illegal’ immigrants, sadistic policies towards the unemployed and the disabled and the imposition of austerity and privatisation.

Sometimes the two meet in a kind of paroxysm of denial. The Tories will, for example, regularly engage in the time-honoured trick of attacking the BBC for being biased and left-wing, prompting it to become even more accommodating to the Right in its news coverage. Liberal and centrists will impulsively leap to the BBC’s defence as a paragon of balanced reporting and civilised values.

The last time the BBC could be described as left-wing whilst maintaining a straight face was in the 1980s before Thatcher-appointee Marmaduke Hussey sacked Director-General Alastair Milne (Seamus’s father) in 1987. Even then, that reputation relied on little more than isolated outbursts of independence from government, which proved unacceptable. But the current surreal dance between conservatives and liberals manages to entirely erase the events of the intervening period. The appointment of the neoliberal John Birt as director-general, minute control over editorial content, outsourcing of programme-making, concerted moves towards more business-friendly coverage, reliance on establishment figures to interpret wars and financial crises, the courting of hard-right figures like Andrew Neil to anchor political reporting,  all that – the last 30 years in other words – simply doesn’t exist.

“The calendar is lying when it reads the present time”. It’s not 2022 at all, it’s still 1985.

However, it’s in the current post-Corbyn period that the wish to live in the past is being taken to new heights of absurdity. We are blessed with a Conservative government, still mesmerized by Thatcher’s epoch-changing landslide of 1983, ‘opposed’ in Parliament by the 1997 Re-enactment Society.

Thus we have the spectacle of Sir Keith Stalin calling for a “windfall tax” on oil and gas companies while Alexander Boris de Pfeffel ‘Pass the Port’ Johnson protests this would result in higher prices. They’re showing nothing but repeats on TV these days aren’t they?

There was such a thing a Windfall Tax, introduced by Tony Blair in 1997 to allegedly compensate the public for the fact that utilities such as gas and electricity were undervalued when privatised and the floated companies, like British Gas, were making “excess” profits. But that was more than three decades ago! The current excess profits of all participants – and they certainly are excessive, British Gas profits have nearly doubled in the past year – do not result from any initial undervaluation in the era of Roland Rat but from the way the system is set up to work. This is a natural monopoly, dominated by big energy supply corporations and a plethora of distribution companies with a business model that doesn’t work anymore, taking advantage of captive consumers whose freedom to choose between them is entirely hollow. The resultant profits are simply a form of disguised taxation. Except that the proceeds go to shareholders, not the government.

A windfall tax is an anachronistic and patently inadequate response to a crisis that calls for public ownership. But public ownership of utilities is one of the “sacred cows of Corbynism” ripe for slaughtering. It’s a dilemma for these ‘modernizers’ I know.

We live in a time of urgent problems. The climate emergency, capitalist failure, falling living standards, declining life expectancy, and food and fuel poverty all call for clear thinking, compassion and a willingness to discard the shibboleths of our Thatcherite political economy. In spite of this, or probably because of it, our politics is entrenching itself in the past.

How long will our political time lag last? Perhaps until it’s too late.

Johnson and Cameron: A Tale of Two Extremes

We are, we are told, suffering under the yoke of one of the most right-wing governments Britain has ever had. Before coming to power, Boris Johnson chewed over tactics with white supremacist Steve Bannon. Upon achieving it, he has suspended Parliament, appointed a Home Secretary who has registered her support for capital punishment and wants criminals to “literally feel terror” and dog-whistled to racists, the far right and empire nostalgists that he is on their side.

Indeed, the person who first came up with the idea of proroguing Parliament is a former Conservative special adviser, now Brexit party supporter, who convinced himself that ex-PM David Cameron was leading a “homesexualist movement” and infecting Britain with ‘cultural Marxism’ lifted straight out of the Frankfurt School.

So it’s plausible – for those of us who inhabit Planet Earth – to believe that Britain is now led by a hard right nationalist party that has brutally severed its ties (by expelling 22 MPs for example) with the saner, moderate, liberal conservatism that preceded it. Plausible, indeed believed in by many people, but not correct.

In fact, we are confronted by two extremes – undoubtedly different in certain ways – but united by a dogmatic, ideological conviction that the damage they inflict is justified and necessary.

It’s hard for people not of the Conservative persuasion – and not under the age of 60 – to understand how David Cameron upset traditional conservatives. Commitments to equal marriage, to disowning Section 28 and to prioritising more female and ethnic minority candidates, which appeared to successfully‘detoxify’ the Conservative brand, were anathema to many Conservative members who think wearing ties should be de rigueur and that Christianity should lie at the heart of public policy. Such people are economically Thatcherite but culturally traditionalist, which might appear contradictory, although not to them. They are also invariably anti-EU. Cameron was tolerated while he won elections and referendums, which all came to juddering halt in June 2016.

But all the while, and despite protestations from esteemed academics that he was a one-nation Conservative at heart, Cameron deepened Thatcherism. Austerity took public sector cuts to places Thatcher could only dream about, privatisation was driven as far as it could go and the NHS was starved of funding like never before while being opened up to the private sector. Anti-trade union laws were extended, while protection against unfair dismissal was diluted. And for the poor and disabled, Cameroonian Conservatism made the Thatcher era look positively compassionate by comparison. The Con/Lib Dem coalition government – followed by a year of ‘pure’ brand Cameron – left a trail of ruined lives, deaths, suicides, destitution, homelessness even self-immolation.

This was, by any fair assessment, an extreme and intensely ideological government but its leading lights presented themselves as centrists, modernisers and “liberal internationalists”. That they were taken seriously by large swathes of the media can be explained in part by the fact that their amplifiers had no personal experience of the depredations the Tories and Lib Dems inflicted. Those that did – though they number in the millions – were largely silent in public debate. Hence, Brexit, which was rooted in deprived areas hardest hit by austerity, appeared to many commentators to come out of the wild blue.

This political mind-set has been described, by Tariq Ali for example, as emanating from the ‘extreme or far centre’. Its manifestation certainly wasn’t limited to Britain. The EU imposed savage austerity on countries such as Ireland, Portugal, Greece and Italy and in order to get its way was quite prepared to overthrow governments and override the will of national Parliaments – in fact proroguing the House of Commons seems almost quaint by comparison. But neither this, nor the pursuing of secretive trade deals with the United States, has dented its reputation as a bastion of enlightened liberalism surrounded by populist sharks.

In Britain, the transition from David Cameron to Boris Johnson – in which the failures of the first flow inexorably into the predominance of the second – reveals several things. One is that the liberal conservatism Johnson is determined to expunge from the Tory party is very selective in the principles it is willing to stand up for. It is pro-EU and against overt bigotry. But, as shown by the voting records of Tory dissidents such as Dominic Grieve and Anna Soubry, strangely unmoved by the social callousness of the Cameron-Lib Dem government. Hence, contemporary liberal conservatism should not be mistaken for a rebirth of the Tory Wets of the 1980s. They – Ian Gilmour for example – would have been outraged, primarily, by Cameron’s inherently Thatcherite approach to social and economic policy and the human damage it inflicted. Unfortunately, they no longer exist.

Another is the strange sight of strict austerians reneging on their previous iron commitments to reducing public spending and controlling the deficit, obsessions which have defined politics for the past eight years. The chancellor, Sajid Javid, noted The Economist, “is a fan of Ayn Rand and hangs pictures of Margaret Thatcher his office. Yet on Mr Johnson’s instructions he announced an extra £13.8bn in election-friendly giveaways, paid for with extra borrowing.”

However, as highlighted by this blog last year, such flexibility is simply what happens when the Right realises that patience with austerity is at breaking point and the consequences of persevering with it are worse than performing an intellectual volte-face.

Undoubtedly Britain now has a ‘hard Right’ government under Boris Johnson. But it has already experienced one for the past eight years, although one whose sheen was that of modernising conservatism. Now some of the elite are getting a taste of the ruthlessness that Cameron routinely meted out to ordinary citizens. But don’t worry too much – they won’t starve.