Denis Macshane on a taxonomy of the New Right
The Little Black Book of the Populist Right by Jon Bloomfield and David Edgar – published by Byline Books
After outlining a mythical “post-war political settlement (of) a regulated, civilised capitalism with the welfare state and extensive public ownership” they seek “to show how national populists have exploited discontent with the turn towards neo-liberal economics.” The catch-all phrase “neo-liberal” is sprayed everywhere in the early part of this 140 page book as a kind of incantation which if used often enough will persuade all decent people of the good sense of the authors” dismay at current economic and social arrangements.
I cut my early political and trade union teeth in the same milieu – 1970s Birmingham – as Edgar and Bloomfield. It is utterly ahistorical to paint that era as a nirvana of post-1945 “civilised welfare state capitalism”. In-your-face poverty was visible in most Birmingham wards. Racism was rife with steel and print unions using the closed shop to exclude black or Asian immigrants from getting well-paid work. The response of the left then was to campaign ferociously against Europe as the avatar of post-national economics which gradually became known as globalisation. It was not “neo-liberalism” but plain old fashioned Manchester liberalism that Engels would have recognised.
The first European community was the 1950 European Coal and Steel Community which placed control of national steel and control industries under a supra-national High Authority with a parliamentary assembly (the forerunner of the European Parliament) and union representation on the board. I attended as a constituency delegate the Special Labour Party conference in 1972 on joining the EEC. It was a high mass of demagogic hate against Europe with right-wingers like Peter Shore combining with the reborn leftist upper class Viscount’s son, Tony Benn, outbidding the rising new young star of the left, Neil Kinnock, in denunciations of Europe.
The generation Bloomfield, Edgar and I come from should have the self-awareness to admit our 1970s leftism was badly out of tune with the people we assumed we were speaking for. We have more procedural democracy than ever before – more people can vote in more elections than in any era and there will be even more elections with the arrival of new Mayors as proposed by Angela Rayner. But the culture of democracy is growing weaker with the new right and their financial backers setting out to divide communities against each other to produce a fragmented Britain where populist nationalism and exclusion of “the other” are not challenged by a democratic culture that has lost self-confidence.
Bloomfield and Edgar have done an important job with their taxonomy of the new right and its spread through universities, think tanks and into the media. A decade’s worth of podcasts failed to stop Brexit or win any elections for Labour until 2024 by which time the Tories had auto-destructed and Labour had sidelined Corbynism. Now the far-right are warming up for a final assault on a Labour government with the help of the Owen Jones’s of the London elite media who still believe despite a century of experience that denigrating and destroying a reformist Labour government opens the door to a successful socialist administration.
This certainly matches my recollections. The warning to Owen Jones and Co about the foolishness of attacking a Labour Government is appropriate. Unless, of course, they are following the old, mad Leftists’ fantasy that The People will rise up and support their personal brand of lunacy.