Caste Away

The British politico-media caste has taken leave of its collective senses. The uproar over the banning of Maccabi Tel Aviv away fans at Villa Park is notable not for the ridiculous arguments or patently false claims being made by those who want the ban over-turned, but by their shared assumption that they can get away with shitehawking the British public on a truly epic scale. It is a display of power that acts as a litmus test to identify those who identify with power. This free-for-all was triggered not by the ban itself but by the reaction of various rent-a-gob MPs, such as the Tory Nigel Huddleston who immediately interpreted the ban as a refusal to "guarantee the safety of Jewish people on our streets and in our sports grounds". This competitive anti-anti-semitism quickly escalated all the way to the Prime Minister, who as a football fan should really have known better. Keir Starmer's response - "We will not tolerate antisemitism on our streets" - effectively gave permission to the entirety of the caste to junk any attempt at factual analysis in favour of hyperventilating about the state of modern Britian with a blatant subtext that we've bowed to Muslims for too long, hence the demonisation of Ayoub Khan as terrorism-adjacent and demands for Zarah Zultana to be deported.

It seems otiose to point out that the inflaming of community tensions here is the direct result of the caste's behaviour, not the decision of the local council's Safety Advisory Group or the preferences of the West Midlands Police. The irony is that the reasonable fear of away fans running riot has transmogrified into a belief that Jews aren't safe on our streets precisely because the politico-media caste have been allowed to run riot. While there have been some sensible responses among sports journalists - pointing out that away fan bans are neither unusual nor unprecedented in the case of Maccabi Tel Aviv - it was notable that those whose career seems to have been a long drawn-out bleat about how much they despise the game of football were at the forefront of opposition to the ban, possibly because it allowed them to ride their other hobby horses about the pernicious left. Consider Barney Ronay's take in the Guardian, which was essentially a sneering dismissal of Ayoub Khan and Zack Polanksi (incidental reference to hypnosis and tits all present and correct) for what he saw as their hypocrisy in claiming that Birmingham is not a "no-go area".

In today's Observer, Philip Collins - standing in for Andrew Rawnsley as resident Blairite opinion-monger - takes a predictably more lofty view of the whole matter, seeing it in terms of Keir Starmer's continuing struggle to convince the country that he is the best person to be Prime Minister. Collins tries to position Starmer as the "quiet and reasonable" point of calm at the centre of the storm, hence he throws brickbats at both critics on the left and on the right. Like Ronay, Collins believes "there is every chance of a fight", noting Tommy Robinson parading around in a Maccabi shirt and asking who's up for it, but believes this simply requires robust policing. At no point does he stop to wonder whether the Prime Minister finding himself on the same side as a convicted football hooligan over the question of the ban might be cause for concern. Instead he claims "this drama is a parable of the conundrum facing Keir Starmer as a political figure. Caught between two factions who do not want to talk to one another, let alone be reconciled, he does not naturally assume the tone of assertive certainty that is the demand of the moment." His nostalgia for Blair's muscular centrism is palpable.

More absurdly, Collins sees Starmer as a victim of intolerance: "On one side stand the outraged on the left wing facing the outraged on the right wing. And there stands the prime minister in the middle, forced to play a game he would rather referee, no doubt shaking his head at the stupidity of it all." This image is hard to reconcile with Starmer's own words where he equated an operational decision by the West Midlands Police with tolerance for "antisemitism on our streets", thereby inflaming the situation and giving carte blanche to the rest of the politico-media caste to lose their shit. In reality, Collins, like the the rest of the Blairite hardcore, has little regard for Starmer, hence he introduces his column with faint praise: "A dispute involving football and the application of the law sounds as if it were designed to bring the best out of the prime minister. These are his private and his public passions. But the question of whether or not the supporters of Maccabi Tel Aviv should be permitted to travel to Birmingham to watch their club’s game against Aston Villa on 6 November also shows that the prime minister, struggling to stay calm and reasonable, might never escape the verdict that he is a man out of time."

One explanation for the general turn to hysteria by the caste is the recognition that the impending budget may prove a decisive moment for this administration: the last chance to set a coherent course for the next few years and crystallise in the electorate's hive-mind what this government is for. The major consequence of a bad reception may not be a setback to the personal ambitions of the Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, but a whispering campaign against Starmer. His over-reaction to the Maccabi ban suggests a man who knows he is on borrowed time and is flailing around to reassert his authority (that snub by Trump in Sharm El-Sheikh obviously hurt). It might appear an odd hill to die on, but Starmer reached high office through his reputation as a public philosemite as much as a europhile, and with the latter an embarrassment now, a "dispute involving football and the application of the law" may, as Collins surmised, have looked like an open goal. It may also have looked like an opportunity to eclipse the Home Secretary, who should really be leading on this matter.

The problem that instinctive authoritarians face is that the moment you fail to impose your authority you can quickly find it dribbling away. Donald Trump may always chicken out (TACO), but he gets away with it, first because he is shameless in rewriting failure as success, and second because he enjoys continuing support among the right-leaning media for his policies (though that may not last). Starmer, in contrast, has already lost the public and is clearly on the cusp of losing the media. His refusal to define "Starmerism" means there is no natural constituency for him in the PLP; the 2024 landslide intake and the current state of the polls means there are many MPs who believe he is leading them to unemployment; and the doubts about the competence and nous of the Number 10 operation continue despite repeated reshuffles and reboots. All this raises the stakes and means that Starmer cannot now climb down over the Maccabi ban. The hysteria of the caste is a clear message that the Prime Minister must dance to their tune or face humiliation.

Save the Tories

The Guardian has decided that it must save the Conservative Party from decline, as if it were an endagered species. In order to do this, it must first ignore the party's recent history, and then construct a mythos about the nature of conservative politics that reaches back more than a century to Weimar Germany, of all places. To get the ball rolling, Polly Toynbee first argues that we need a healthy Conservative Party. But what she is effectively asking for is the preservation of Thatcherism, which remains the essence of contemporary Toryism: privatisation, deregulation and a disdain for welfare. She herself admits that the Conservative Party "has presided, especially since the 1980s, over capital supremacy at the expense of labour, sky-high inequality, public service degradation and me-first individualism." There is no route from the present moment that offers a return to the One Nation conservatism of Michael Heseltine, let alone Harold Macmillan. Invoking either is futile nostalgia. Invoking both, as she does, looks like delusion. What Toynbee really wants is the restoration of the post-Thatcher cartel - i.e. an ideological spectrum running from Blair to Cameron - hence she talks up the likes of David Gauke. 

Her current fears arise less from her desire for a "better brand of conservatism" than from her recognition of Starmer's failure to establish a popular "grownup" politics over the last 15 months. What she cannot acknowledge is that Kemi Badenoch is a symptom of the cartel's steady rightward shift since the 1990s, rather than some aberration peculiar to the Tories, and that this is linked to Starmer's failure to hegemonise her preferred centrism. Ironically, the one thing that would have buttressed the Tories would have been a Labour victory under Jeremy Corbyn in 2019, as that would have encouraged them to shift towards the centre-right space and present themselves as a safe alternative for both traditional conservative and liberal voters frightened by the Red Terror, even as they insisted that the people's will must be observed over Brexit. They cannot do that now because Labour under Starmer has occupied that space, and adopted the same stance on Brexit, thereby pushing Tory voters further right, hence the escalation in the rhetoric over migrants and the European Convention on Human Rights.

In another wisftul paean to the "moderate right", Zoe Williams, citing Daniel Ziblatt's research on the National People's Party of Weimar Germany, claims that "When the mainstream right loses its confidence, when it starts to chase the buzzwords and symbolic politics of the far right, it hands them the steering wheel." This is a misreading of the DNVP's history and the dynamics of the Weimar Republic. The Deutschnationale Volkspartei was formed by the merger of multiple nationalistic, monarchistic and reactionary parties in 1918 and was virulently antisemitic from the start. Socially, it was the party of landowners, industrialists and the Lutheran middle-classes. It was strongest in rural areas, particularly in Prussia and Pomerania. Politically, it took an ambivalent stance towards the Kapp putsch of 1920 and regularly called for the assassination of government ministers as "traitors". In other words, the DNVP was both consistently hostile to the Weimar Republic and had already adopted the central plank of what would become the Nazi programme before the NSDAP's foundation. It wasn't chasing the Nazis. If anything, it provided a readymade social and political environment in which the Nazis could thrive.

The NSDAP came to national prominence largely due to the platform offered it by the DNVP's push for a referendum on the Young (reparations) Plan in 1929. If there is a parallel between the DNVP and the UK Conservative Party it was in the way the former's push for a referendum divided the nation and consolidated the right around a more radical locus. But the parallel breaks down when you realise that even after the merger of 1918 the political right in Germany was still fragmented. As well as being antisemitic, the DNVP was anti-Catholic, with the result that conservative Catholics gravitated to the Centre Party in the Rhineland and the BVP in Bavaria. These two parties were also more supportive of the Weimar Republic, participating in numerous coalition governments. In summary, the "mainstream right" did not lose its confidence until 1933, and even then Franz von Papen (on the right of the Centre Party) imagined he was manipulating Hitler, not the other way round. The DNVP were Nazis avant la lettre in their extreme antisemitism, hostility to the Republic, and violent hatred of the SPD and KPD. The DNVP's voters switched decisively to the NSDAP in 1930.

Williams' German history is bad, but her British history isn't much better. "What happened to the old-school Conservatives, who treasure stability, conservation, the constitution, the pride of Britain on the world stage? What happened to the modernisers, who described the nation in terms of powerhouses, not powder kegs? Don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t wild about any of them either, but it’s absolutely striking how those worldviews – the one nation Tory, the Cameroonian Conservative – have been erased, in favour of relentless demonisation: of migrants, Muslims, benefit claimants and protesters." Like Toynbee, Williams seeks to invent a Tory who never existed. But whereas the former at least tries to locate this species in the distant past, the latter attempts to set up an opposition between the Cameronian party of 2015-19 and the Conservative Party of today, which requires a lot of forgetfulness. Would an old-school Conservative who treasured stability have risked the EU referendum? Was George Osborne a moderniser, his austerity wilfully misunderstood? Did Theresa May ever tell migrants to "go home"? Did Boris Johnson ever say anything disobliging about Muslims?

You might be wondering why the Guardian thinks the Conservatives should be saved, given that the Liberal Democrats are perfectly capable of offering a centre-right alternative that the paper would find congenial. Why not celebrate the eclipse of the Tories and go all-in on Ed Davey? The answer, I suspect, is that they recognise the risk that the Liberal Democrats could outflank Labour on the left, particularly over civil rights and a more humane attitude towards immigration. This would make it too obvious that Labour has become the actual conservative party of British politics: unwilling to gainsay the financial markets, instinctively authoritarian, and mawkishly patriotic. They need the Tories in play as well if they are to present themselves as the party of the nation. The analogy of society with a family hasn't really enjoyed a vogue since the days of George Orwell ("the wrong members in control"), possibly because Thatcher made the terms mutually exclusive, but it is useful here. If the left and the Greens are dismissed as foolish youth, and Labour and (to a lesser extent) the Lib Dems are the grownups, then Reform is your racist, raffish uncle and the Tories your racist, wealthy aunt. Starmer's backers in the press still want him to be the centrist dad of the nation, despite his utter unsuitability for the role, and will happily reinvent the Conservative Party if it helps to achieve that goal.

Our People

The Labour Party's history is one of a dialogue between rights and entitlements: what everyone should expect versus what organised labour should be entitled to. This reflects the party's origins both in the radical wing of the Liberal Party, with its desire to universalise liberties, and in the particularist approach of the trade union movement, which sought to further the interests of its members. Though the unions grudgingly adopted some of the universalist tactics and language of syndicalism, notably the general strike, its focus remained limited to the bread-and-butter of self-interest rather than social transformation. Thus the aim in 1926 was to restore miners' pay and hours, not to seize the means of production. As the labour movement was absorbed into capitalist society through parliamentarianism and what became known as "industrial relations" (i.e. collective bargaining), the two traditions were initially complementary, achieving a secular apotheosis in the institutions of the welfare state, notably the NHS. This was the synthesis of universalism and particularism captured in the resonant phrase "national insurance": available to all as a right but subject to conditionality and the contributory principle. 

Over the course of the second half of the twentieth century these two traditions increasingly came to be seen as being in conflict in the popular discourse. The rights of the individual were arrayed against the privileges of trade unions in the form of the closed shop and the inconvenience of strikes. The language of the original liberal revolution was revived as union leaders were cast as "barons" and the destruction of established norms was cast as "modernisation". This was all part of the neoliberal revolution, but it also reflected the growing tensions within the labour movement itself between younger workers demanding that the movement take industrial democracy seriously and a bureaucratic apparatus that increasingly accepted the hegemonic idea that British industry needed reform to free itself of "sclerosis". The triumph of Thatcherism settled this argument decisively in favour of the apparatus even as it undermined the labour movement through recession, repression and punitive legislation.

With questions of industrial policy and property rights sidelined, the consequence was the Labour Party's greater emphasis on that liberal tradition of universalism. This translated not only into the extension of rights to previously disadvantaged communities - what would come to be known as "diversity" - but into full-throated support for European integration and a more robust promotion of human rights globally. But the particularist tradition was still part of Labour's DNA, only now reframed as the just desserts of the neoliberal monad: Worcester woman enjoying her ability to shop at Marks & Spencer's on a Sunday. The result, when Labour finally returned to government in 1997, was the peculiar mish-mash of "rights and responsibilities" that marked the party's rhetoric, together with the blithe trust in market forces and messianic approach to foreign relations embodied by Tony Blair. I don't need to enumerate the many disasters this gave rise to. The key point is that the once fruitful dialogue between rights and entitlements had by now curdled into a fractious contention between established rights and fluid responsibilities, often at the whim of the media.

The current Labour government lacks a theory of the economy, by which I mean it doesn't really know what or who the economy is for, beyond the unthinking credo of growth and its presumed material benefits for voters in the form of a profusion of goods. Consequently it has no idea how to stimulate or restrain economic activity, hence the uncertainty over green investment and missteps like the employer NIC hike, while its fiscal planning seems reactive only to market sentiment ("in office but not in power" pretty much sums up Rachel Reeves as Chancellor). Likewise, it has no theory of culture, hence its absurd attempts to monopolise patriotism, its MOR tastes in the arts, and its fogeyish attitude towards the young. But what it does have is a theory of governance and central to that is the belief that rights are conditional on right behaviour. Historically, even during the New Labour years, this was largely just rhetorical scolding, but it has started to take on a concrete form now. This is evident not only in the administration's preservation of the benefit sanctions regime introduced by the Conservative-Liberal coalition, and in its echoing of the press in treating asylum as a "golden ticket", but in its appetite for extending the state's coercive powers over protest.

The liberal tradition holds as a self-evident truth that only conservatives and reactionaries impede progress. The implication is that anything slightly to the left of them will help the arc of history bend towards justice. This is obviously not true, but it means that liberals can easily delude themselves into thinking that they are the defenders of rights even as they undermine them. The tradition emanating from the labour movement holds as a self-evident truth that the Labour Party exists to further the interests of "our people". The implication is that it is always worth voting for Labour, no matter how disappointing they may prove in office. This, rather than Peter Mandelson's claim that Labour supporters "have nowhere else to go", is the guiding light of the party's electoral strategists: get Labour into power and hope for the best. In combination, these two beliefs allow Labour politicians to convince themselves that, to coin a phrase, all voters are equal but some are more equal than others. But because of the party's factionalism, "our people" often means a very narrow segment of the population, which is how fictions like the "hero voters" of Morgan McSweeney's imagination can come to dominate political analysis. 

This also explains why Labour always appears happy to alienate its actual core vote, which it has been doing at a spectacular rate over the past year. There can be little doubt that the majority of people protesting over Gaza and the subsequent proscription of Palestine Action will have voted Labour in 2024, and also little doubt that the party's poor showing at less than 34% was not the product of "efficiency" as claimed but the result of disillusion since the purge of the left after 2019 and the steady jettisoning of Keir Starmer's pledges made during the leadership election. When you add in the reluctance to lift the two child benefit cap or introduce any sort of wealth tax since taking office, it almost seems like we're witnessing a perverse experiment in finding out how easily a political party's base can be discouraged from voting. In this light, the mood music about "reforming" the European Convention on Human Rights sounds like another attempt to woo a reactionary who isn't going to vote for the party anyway, but it also points to something fundamental in this government's worldview: that all rights are contingent because they are conditional to the needs of the moment, from avoiding inconvenient court challenges to reassuring the Board of Deputies of British Jews.

The contrast with the Labour Party's embrace of universalism in the 1990s is stark, and only made more ironic by this turn occuring under the leadership of a "human rights lawyer". Despite his many flaws, Blair never doubted that Labour had to apperal to the mass of voters rather than just "our people". And while he was guilty of ventriloquising their preferences over issues such as the Iraq War, he didn't present the British people in narrow and exclusionary terms but as part of a more dynamic global population seizing the neoliberal moment at "the end of history". But it's important to emphasise that the particularist turn does not mark the revived influence of organised labour in the party, or even a commitment to the bread-and-butter concerns of the already forgotten "everyday economy" or "securonomics" that Rachel Reeves once eulogised. Rather it reflects the steady absorption of the Labour Party by the security state and the adoption of its instinctive authoritarianism. "Our people" has come to mean the apparatus itself, not the rank and file.