Liberal Preferences

Chris Dillow, building on a post by David Allen Green, notes that UK politics is in crisis because "destabilizing forces have strengthened and stabilizing ones have weakened." What he means by this is that the tendency to rein in the extremes is no longer instinctive among the main parties (obviously stamping on herbivorous lefties is another matter). He gives a good example in the relative treatment of Enoch Powell after his Rivers of Blood speech (sacked by party leader Ted Heath) and Robert Jenrick after thoughtlessly hobnobbing with Fascist activists (not a hint of disciplinary action from Kemi Badenoch). Instead of negative feedback, we get positive feedback as bigotry is mainstreamed, urban myths are cast as legitimate concerns, and someone who incited racial hatred and advocated burning people to death is hailed as a political prisoner. Elsewhere, economic illiteracy is promoted by both politicians and the media because they believe the electorate is ignorant and can only be appealed to through crass simplifications such as the nation's "maxed-out credit card".

As Chris explains, "All I'm doing here is spelling out a few mechanisms in support of David Allen Green's recent attack on the complacent idea that 'unpleasant situations will resolve themselves' and that balance will be restored. For this to happen, there must be negative, stabilizing, feedback mechanisms. But our political-media class has weakened these, preferring to pander to racism. I'm not surprised that so many in this class choose barbarism over socialism. What is surprising is that they choose barbarism even over liberal democracy." So why do they make that latter choice? One place to seek an answer is the house journal of British liberalism, The Guardian. I would argue that its most typical columnist is John Harris, who can be characterised as a liberal pessimist in that he regularly chides "progressives" for not doing enough to resist racism or improve public services, but whose only solution is vapid symbolism and otherwise cultivating your garden. There are others who are more optimistic (Polly Toynbee) and more pessimistic (Rafael Behr), but Harris is representative because he tends to sway between those poles, like a depressed ruminant who spots a buttercup.

He certainly wasn't an advocate of Labour's shift to a more genuinely progressive politics under Jeremy Corbyn, though his attempts to parse the upswell of enthusiasm that gave rise to it between 2015 and 2019 are interesting precisely because of his need to welcome that progressive intent while dismissing the left as a viable vehicle for it. Thus during the leadership contest in 2015 he welcomed that Corbyn offered clarity, but by the time the 2017 general election came into view, he was dismissing a Corbyn-led Labour Party as deeply irrelevant. Immediately after the unexpectedly positive result for Labour, Corbyn was apparently chiming with the times. By 2019 Harris was fully on board with the hunt for antisemites, insisting that Labour's only hope was to ditch its fringe views and toxic culture, and even adopt his favoured panacea of localism for good measure (nothing fringe about that). Viewed rapidly like a flip book, what we see is a liberal, keen to avoid the charge of being an out-of-touch curmudgeon, frightened by the prospect of a government promising mild social democracy.

In his latest contribution to the discourse, Harris claims that while the far-right protests outside hotels housing asylum-seekers have been damp squibs, progressive forces are "so dumbfounded and confused by what is happening that they seem almost completely unable to respond". What he fails to acknowledge is that the left is not silent, it is merely marginalised by the media (the larger counter-demonstrations have been barely reported, and when they do appear in the Guardian it's as likely to be an opportunity for tone-policing). The real culprit here is the Labour government, which has provided rhetorical cover for street-level racism while simultaneously curtailing the rights of protest by anti-racists. And it is the media that explains how protests with minimal support on the street beyond the old Fascist right can dominate politics. Indeed, if you're looking for a "new right" you should start with the increasing derangement of newspaper columnists like Allison Pearson and Melanie Phillips, not with the latest neo-Nazi groupuscule to emerge from under a rock.

Harris's prescription in the face of an increasingly Fascist press, and a complacently centrist TV insisting on impartiality between truth and lies, is nostalgia, and specifically the symbolic power of Rock Against Racism. What he doesn't appreciate is that RAR and the Anti-Nazi League reflected a wider revolt against the political establishment in the late-70s and early-80s that notably roiled the Labour Party. What Harris wants is the free concerts, not Tony Benn bidding for the Deputy Leadership or Ken Livingstone defying the Thatcher government. His claim that "The prominence of Palestine flags at this year’s festivals proves that music’s radical edges have not been completely blunted" is an admission that he sees this radicalism (of the music note, not the people) as purely symbolic, otherwise he might wonder whether there was any connection between opposing genocidal racism abroad and defending migrants at home.

Chris Dillow's model of stablisation through negative feedback depends on authority. When Ted Heath sacked Enoch Powell he not only had the authority of his position as Conservative Party Leader, he was also the representative of an establishment that still commanded popular respect, despite the downward trend since the Suez crisis, not least because of its eventual resistance to Nazism (Heath himself had opposed appeasement in the 1930s). The establishment has lost a lot more respect since the 1980s, due to the secular failure of its preferred economic policies, the decay of the public realm, and because of specific scandals of trust, from Iraq to MPs' expenses. As the establishment's man, Keir Starmer has clearly failed in his goal of restoring the authority and gravitas of government after a decade and a half of disastrous Tory rule. Yet his political strategy, to occupy the centre-right of politics and marginalise both the far-right and the left, remains unchanged, largely because the Conservative Party has fallen apart in the face of Reform's rise, leaving the ground clear to Labour. He has the field, but the battle may already be lost.

Starmer's problem is that his centre-right offer acts as positive feedback to Reform, which encourages right-leaning voters to go for the full-fat version, while it alienates both centrists and soi disant progressives like John Harris because it fails to reflect their self-image as rational and virtuous. Who can provide the negative feedback to arrest the rightward drift of politics in such an environment? Harris may posture about that drift, but he has played his own part in it. Consider this classic of the legitimate concerns genre from a couple of weeks ago: "Just to be clear, the grim scenes that have materialised at those hotels are the signs not just of far-right activism and provocation, but broken policy. No one should underestimate how much the grooming gangs scandal has given many people a deep fear about the safety of women and girls, not least in places that have long felt ignored and neglected". The roots of the grooming scandal lay in the habitual contempt shown by the police and social services to working-class girls, not in the shortcomings of asylum policy.

The problem then is that liberals are not defending liberal democracy and are happy to accept the right's framing of social ills. One way of explaining this is to note that centrists, the largest component of the British politico-media class, aren't actually liberals, neither in the broader sense of defenders of civil liberties against authoritarianism, nor in the narrower sense of advocates of free markets (their's is a capitalism of managed markets and corporate graft). That broader sense is still prevalent in British society, but it has no real political articulation at present, and its more vigorous proponents regularly find themselves marginalised as extremists by the media and even criminalised by the state. At this point we have to ask if the UK is actually a liberal democracy in any meaningful sense. The classic definitions of the term usually focus on the mechanics: fair elections, an independent judiciary, the separation of powers etc. But the acid test is arguably equal protection under the law. This is, for example, why Israel cannot be considered a liberal democracy. 

In the UK we have not gone so far as to pass a basic law that guarantees superior rights for certain groups, and thus inferior rights for others, but that may well be on the cards should Reform get into government and withdraw us from the European Convention on Human Rights (both the government and media are already assessing Farage's mass-deportation promise in terms of achieavability rather than morality or civil rights). But this won't be a sudden lurch away from liberal democracy. The current government's unwillingness to secure the rights of trans people, and its proscription of Palestine Action on the flimsiest of pretexts, are clear indicators of the direction of travel. And before that, we can see a common thread of contempt for those who resist the politico-media consensus running backwards through the Labour antisemitism nonsense, via Brexit and the dismissal of the Iraq War protests, all the way to Thatcherism. British centrists chose barbarism over liberal democracy a long time ago.