Bloc Party

The report that the Republicans gained votes among ethnic minorities during the recent US Presidential election should remind us that the right are not oblivious to, or in denial about, demographic change. And, that whatever their reactionary instincts, they will attempt to shore up their support by accommodating that change. The most famous historic example of this is the way in which the political right appealed to women after female suffrage was finally achieved, fearing that the "gentler sex" would be attracted to socialism and less supportive of the military, by an emphasis on stability and security in the context of "family values". One reason why the Republicans shifted in recent decades to the "angry white dude" vote, with emblematic issues such as gun rights and the "culture war", is that religion and abortion have started to lose their valence as vote motivators for both men and women. Another reason is that the Republicans have been losing support among male voters and have been thrashing about for a response. In many ways, Donald Trump was an experiment, the results of which actually point to the potential to build on a growing conservative base among ethnic minorities.

In the case of Britain, the political prioritisation of antisemitism over other forms of discrimination and bigotry should be seen not simply as factional instrumentalism by the Labour right, but as evidence that the Jewish community has become more politically Conservative since the 1970s, with the inflexion point occuring a decade ago. This secular shift has meant that Jewish political and cultural concerns have steadily gained credibility with a centre-right media that still exhibits instinctive antisemitism on occasions, and there has been relatively little pushback against the more extreme manifestations of it, such as Melanie Phillips' hatred of Palestinians. Just as the Mail and the Telegraph have managed to set the political agenda for the BBC in recent years, so too the Jewish Chronicle now has a subsidiary role as a catalyst for the broadcast media's treatment of antisemitism and the acceptability of the Labour Party. The news that the Board of Deputies and the Jewish Labour Movement are now making explicit demands of Keir Starmer is less an indication of the community's relative strength, or of the Labour leader's sympathies, than evidence that they are only too well aware of the media leverage they now enjoy. 

One way of looking at the importance that the Labour right attaches to antisemitism is not just its utility as a stick with which to beat the left but as an apeing of rightwing attitudes. The history of the Labour right has essentially been the promotion of conservative policies, from austerity and wage restraint to immigration controls and higher defence spending, coupled with the limited amelioration of the consequent social ills. Antisemitism has become salient for the Labour right precisely because they believe Jews have moved politically towards the Tories. The obvious problem with "chasing conservative voters" in this fashion is that it doesn't work, which is why we've normally had Conservative governments over the last 100 years. For those in denial about the party's conflicted Brexit stance, the loss of the "red wall" of Northern and Midlands seats last year has been attributed to a combination of Jeremy Corbyn's personal unpopularity, a failure to pander to "legitimate concerns" over immigration, and an "extreme" manifesto, but the decline in Labour's vote long predated the previous leader and the turn left, while attempts to outbid the Tories on immigration, national security and punitive welfare have consistently failed over the years. 

As Jews have cleaved more strongly to the Conservative party, the Labour right have increasingly viewed them as swing voters, despite their negligible significance in all but a handful of constituencies, or even as a communal bloc vote that needs to be "won back", which is both patronising and inherently racist in its assumption that Jews vote as a unified community. Of course, the same patronisation is evident in talk of the "white working class" as a homogenous bloc. To a degree, this is part of the Labourist tradition, which long relied on votes aligning with sectarian and ethnic boundaries, but what is relatively new, dating from the New Labour years, is the almost complete disregard for those other dimensions of society - represented by groups such as the poor, the young and the old - that the party felt it had both an obligation to represent and a need to explictly target. This arises from an increasing focus on voters as bearers of "cultures" and "values", which is not just an anti-materialist (and inherently reactionary) perspective, but appears to reflect an acute sensitivity to contemporary sectarian and ethnic boundaries, however illusory they may be in reality.

Though antisemitism is more prevalent among Conservative party members, it is no longer definitional in the way that it was up until the 1960s. The historic role of the Jew - as the embodiment of the alien and the suspect - has now been inherited by the Muslim, while the asylum-seeker has absorbed much of the bigotry once aimed at the Irish and West Indians. The result is that Islamophobia and an intolerance towards refugees has become more respectable among both Conservative and Labour MPs, but it is only the former who can claim to be in harmony with their membership. Of course, being out of step with the members is a badge of honour for most of the PLP. This friction within the Labour party, which also manifests itself over trans and traveller rights, is not simply the latest cycle of the struggle between a predominantly leftwing membership and a predominantly rightwing apparatus. There is more going on here than a dispute over socialism versus revisionism. As a political vehicle built on the trade unions and affiliate societies, Labour is the ultimate bloc party. At heart this is a dispute over whether the party's future will be based on ethnic and cultural blocs, with the more conservative (notably the "native English") enjoying a privileged position in determining priorities, or whether it will remain a class-based party seeking common cause in a multi-ethnic and multi-cultural society. Is it a coalition of verticals or a horizontal?

In the US, the same secular evolution is paradoxically more antagonistic at a societal level, because of the country's history of slavery and genocide and its institutional bias against non-whites, but less antagonistic at the party political level, because party affiliation is looser and the constitution encourages broad (if deradicalised) coalitions. There's no membership to expel and consequently the media spends little time trying to badger party managers into disciplinary action. Instead the focus is on policy development, which in practice is bought or blocked by mega-donors. Radical challenges to this order are either marginalised through media blackouts or neutered by black propaganda with an emphasis on lurid conspiracy and character assassination. One of the more notable developments since 2015 has been the way that this traditional American style of anti-radicalism has seeped into British politics, with examples of conspiracism (chiefly, but not only, around Brexit) and blackballing (Corbyn, obviously). To call this McCarthyite isn't hyperbole. 

The Labour party leadership's current preference for values in place of policies and its ambition to build an Obama-like coalition of the undemanding is likely to prove fruitless, both because the electoral blocs it wishes to court are nowhere near as coherent and institutionally robust as they are in the US and because the few blocs that have disproportionate media clout, due to their alignment with the right on key issues, will push the party so far to the right as to be indistinguishable from the Tories. Making a martyr of Jeremy Corbyn doesn't just risk alienating the left, it risks alienating those groups that Corbyn and the left have traditionally championed, hence the increasing concerns expressed by Black and Asian party members at the perceived hierarchy of racism and bigotry displayed under the "new management". That Donald Trump managed to grow his vote among ethnic minorities and women was seen as a paradox by many, even an irony, but it simply proves that he was a pragmatist who was happy to take support from any quarter. In contrast, Keir Starmer seems set on a course that will inevitably narrow Labour's electoral coalition further. Following the vote-share high of 2017 and the setback of 2019 (for which Starmer's Brexit policy must shoulder a lot of blame), this looks self-defeating.