Facing the Unthinkable

How Did We Get Here?

Our children will ask us how exactly we got here, and as Late Britain slides towards a form of fascism, it would be worth anticipating the question. Britain is breaking apart, and as it breaks we see a new landscape emerge from the chaos.

Aditya Chakrabortty surveys the polling of Reform voters and finds them an incoherent angry bunch [The real Reform voters have been revealed – it’s a slapdash coalition Farage will struggle to hold together]. He writes the following sentences:

“Were an election called tomorrow, the favourite for No 10 would be Farage, whose immigration policies are in some ways more extreme than those of the BNP were. His party’s role model for government would be Donald Trump’s US: Elon Musk-style cuts to our public services and masked agents snatching families off the streets.”

“A few months ago, many in Westminster and across the country would have considered this a cautionary nightmare, a catastrophe that would unfold if Keir Starmer failed. But in the week of another red-on-red assault and after 150 opinion polls in a row topped by Farage’s Reform UK, it’s no longer a scare story. It’s the most likely prospect.”

A few months ago, or is that years? (it’s all a blur) such a statement would have been unthinkable.

But now, a Reform government is ‘the most likely prospect’. Poll after poll confirms it, as Chakrabortty notes. Meanwhile, the Labour government, on which so many hopes were placed only last year, is tanking in the polls. Despite all of the Machiavellian guile of the much-revered Morgan McSweeney the reality is that Keir Starmer is the most unpopular UK Prime Minister on record with a net satisfaction rating of -66% according to IPSOS. That’s worse even than Liz Truss, Sunak, Boris Johnson, Brown, Blair, John Major & Margaret Thatcher.

The government appears to have no ear for politics, no common touch, and no sense of why they are so beleaguered. They are more ideologically committed than anyone at first realised. This is not, as was first put out, a steady managerial approach with an eye on the polls. The New Statesman’s outgoing Political Editor, the esteemed Andrew Marr, wrote a remarkable valedictory piece in which he declared: “I thought Labour would fix everything. I was wrong.”

He wrote: “The postwar British political establishment is collapsing. The Conservatives threw themselves into a death spiral last year, though it had been a long time in the making. Now in government, Labour is heading in the same direction, corkscrewing downwards, touching 15 points in one recent poll and haemorrhaging votes in every direction.”

It’s an astonishing mea culpa from a seasoned journalist. He was not alone in glibly assuming that Labour’s grand return would mean a steadying of the ship. The press corps have lived so long inside the Westminster bubble, given favoured access amid the chumocracy, that they no longer can see the wood from the trees. Their very insider status, once their superpower, is now their kryptonite.

Labour have failed utterly to map out an alternative path to the one so enthusiastically and recklessly marked out by Farage and Co. They have been convinced that they needed to just be the anti-Corbyn party and have passed legislation that no-one in their right mind would have ever imagined a Labour government would pass. As IPSOS shows us, it’s going very very badly. So what do they do? More of the same, ever-reaching further to the right in a desperate effort to match and mimick Reform.

As Labour announces fresh crackdown on refugees, their approval falls to an all-time low.

Today the Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood, announced “reforms” that people seeking sanctuary, instead of being able to apply for indefinite leave to remain after five years they will now have to wait twenty years before they can apply for permanent settlement. Not only this but Mahmood announced that asylum seekers will have their valuable assets like jewellery seized and sold to pay for their accommodation costs.

This has aura and a memory that is unmistakable. Alison Thewliss, the former SNP MP said: “Many of the asylum seekers that I’ve met have lost almost everything they have - they certainly aren’t sitting on a hoard of jewels. This, along with the rest of this announcement, is absolutely disgusting behaviour and Labour should be ashamed.”

Carla Denyer, the Green MP for Bristol Central wrote: “This is a new low from a govt plumbing the depths of performative cruelty in hopes that the public won’t notice they have no answers to the real issues facing this country.”

To answer the question: How Did We Get Here? We have to go way back, because this descent didn’t come about overnight.

1. Othering
   Way back in April 1990 the then Tory MP for Chingford, Norman Tebbit initiated his ‘Cricket Test’, a test of Britishness by which Tebbit suggested that those immigrants who support their native countries rather than England at the sport of cricket are not significantly integrated into the United Kingdom. The othering of people with different cultural and racial backgrounds may seem minor but it has been an insidious part of right wing thinking for 50 years and more. It includes the othering and persecution of minorities for their sexuality or their lifestyle and - though it reaches back to Tebbit’s era - reached its zenith in the racism of the Brexit campaign.

2. Institutional Racism
   The Macpherson Report, published in 1999 following the murder of Stephen Lawrence, officially declared the Metropolitan Police institutionally racist. It defined institutional racism as the “collective failure of an organisation to provide an appropriate and professional service to people because of their colour, culture or ethnic origin”. The lack of prosecutions in the case, and the seeming impunity with which the British police force operates adds to an atmosphere of generalised racism and a feeling of a two-tier society.

3. Normalising Fascism

   In October 2009 the leader of the British National Party (BNP) Nick Griffin was invited onto BBC’s Question Time. He would later declare that he was the victim of a “lynch mob” audience drawn from a city that had been “ethnically cleansed” and was “no longer British”. The BNP called it the “biggest single recruitment night in the party’s history”. Nigel Farage has become an almost permanent fixture on Question Time, despite, for many years being unelected and unelectable.

   The slow normalising of the far right has given them legitimacy in the eyes of their followers. Language and behaviour once thought to be socially unacceptable has become commonplace as overt racism has been mainstreamed.

   As Daniel Trilling noted in the London Review of Books last year (This Times its Worse):

   “Islamophobic, anti-immigrant and anti-refugee sentiment has been a staple of Britain’s right-wing press for decades, but we are emerging from a period in which a Conservative government made right-wing populism a central part of its platform. The damage done on this front by the Johnson-Truss-Sunak government needs to be recognised. At each inflection point since 2019, the Conservatives and their media cheerleaders chose to double down on the populist rhetoric, painting their opponents as enemies who threatened the integrity of the nation. The Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 were treated as signs of an ‘alien’ culture that had taken over Britain’s cities. Demonstrations demanding a ceasefire in Gaza were smeared as ‘hate marches’ by Suella Braverman when she was home secretary.”

4. The Collapse of the Labour Party

   The policies announced by the Home Secretary this week would have been unimaginable a few years ago. The Labour Party, shifted to the right under Blair, has shifted so far to the right under Keir Starmer as to be unrecognisable.

   The much-longed-for Return of Labour has led many to realise that there is no alternative and that the two (former) major parties that dominated the entire post-war era are virtually indistinguishable from one another.

5. The Tabloid Press

   The tabloid press have waged a media war of racism for decades.

Pre-eminent among them must be The Sun, who in 2016 demanded that migrant children ‘show us your teeth’ alleging that people seeking safety were masquerading as children.

It’s not just the tabloids. The media is over-brimming with individual columnists and editors who peddle this stuff, people like Matt Goodwin, Douglas Murray, Jon Craig, Nigel Farage, Rupert Lowe, Robert Jenrick, Richard Tice, Lee Anderson, Ben Habib, Tommy Robinson, Laurence Fox, Carl Benjamin, Isabel Oakeshott, Allison Pearson, Douglas Carswell, Dan Wootton, Elon Musk, Iain Macwhirter, Neil Oliver, Kevin McKenna, Suella Braverman, Calvin Robinson are like a Fifth Column for the new right. It’s become all-encompassing.

6. Dehumanising People
   As I wrote back in the summer of events in Northern Ireland [Stochastic Violence From Moygashel to McArthur Park ]: “This fusion of bigotry, xenophobia and spectacle fascism is rudimentary, everyday now and spools across the Irish Sea and back and forth across the Atlantic. The far-right watches itself through Palantír and we watch their performative violence on the streets of America, in the debris of Gaza, and atop the pallets of County Tyrone. It is a global phenomenon with local manifestations.”

   

   Amnesty International described the bonfire, to be lit at Moygashel, outside Dungannon, as “a vile dehumanising act that fuels racism and hatred. Sinn Fein Assembly Member Colm Gildernew described it as “vile” and “deplorable.”

   Searchlight reports that: “It’s clear this involves the most extreme loyalists, who find support from fascists on the mainland – the British Democrats have been quick to boast of having activists in place at the recent violent Ballymena pogroms where migrant houses were also set ablaze.”

7. A Culture of Violence.

   Britain’s descent into fascism can be charted by the steady decline of media values. Only in August this year, Sky News called this by Chief Political Correspondent, ‘analysis’.

As the journalist Adam Bienkov noted at the time, this is the chief political correspondent for Sky News asking: ‘Is it time for the Government to drown innocent human beings for political advantage?’ and other questions now apparently deemed acceptable in the British media.

Mind you, this isn’t new. This is from the Sun when it was being edited by David Dinsmore, who has just been made Labour’s chief of communications.

8. The Surveillance State
   Woven into the repressive state policies under Starmer is a surveillance and control technology that would have received much more resistance had it been enacted by the Conservatives.
   Now, a compulsory digital ID card is to be brought foward which we are told would help “combat benefit fraud” and help “control illegal immigration”.

   It has its origins in Tony Blair’s government but was revived by the ‘Labour Together’ project, which produced a report BritCard: a progressive digital identity for Britain — Labour Together.
   Jim Killock, the executive director of Open Rights Group, said that: “Labour are at risk of creating a digital surveillance infrastructure that will change everyone’s daily lives and establish a pre-crime state where we constantly have to prove who we are as we go about our daily lives.”

9. Here Comes Nigel
   All of this context has emboldened the far-right who now speak openly about their five-year plan, which would include tearing up human rights laws and sending people to countries where they could be at risk of imprisonment, torture or death. In the summer, in a speech strangely live-streamed by the BBC, Farage confirmed women and children would be among those to be locked up on arrival, as he set out plans to build huge detention centres in military camps and charter five flights a day for deportations. About 600,000 asylum seekers could be deported in the first parliament of a Reform government, Farage suggested.

   He promised uniformed officers raiding Britain’s towns and cities, disappearing people off the street for rendition to countries they’ve never been to, with no recourse to legal protections, claiming that it’s what “normal countries do.”

   

   10.Hate and Misogyny
   
   Hyper-nationalism, hyper-machismo, overt racism, a language of, and deification of violence, and a hatred of the weak whilst masquerading as populism, all are present and correct in Brexit Britain.

   
   Most of this led by a bizarre coterie of men, among them: Bolsonaro in Brazil, Erdoğan in Turkey, Putin in Russia, Duterte in the Philippines, Farage here and of course Donald Trump. The extra element that Trump holds is what some have called “jouissance“ - a pleasure from perpetual stimulation.

   
   This is enflamed by the ‘culture wars’ stoked by the far-right to belatedly make-sense of their collapsing order.
   
   The fall from what were once-accepted standards of public discourse has not been sudden, but it has accelerated massively in the last few years. To resist the slide into fascism will require facing the truth of the situation and stopping the relentless appeasement of the forces who have carried us here.