This week of Trump’s second state visit has revealed in stark terms both the moral collapse of post-Brexit UK – which sees no other role but to ingratiate itself with the tyrannical toddler – and the desiccated carcass that is the modern Labour party. The day after the Tommy Robinson/Elon Musk rally, Labour minister Peter Kyle refused to label it as far right, or even to criticise Musk for telling the assembled that ‘violence is going to come to you…you either fight back or you die’.
Somehow I doubt the same equanimity would be extended to someone who wasn’t a Trump- adjacent rightwing billionaire, keen to lecture us on free speech. We have seen over recent decades that successive British governments have seen their post-Empire role as that of a loyal lieutenant to America – in their fancy, the wise Greeks providing counsel to the uncultured Roman upstarts – but in practice it has proved to be a role more akin to that of East Germany to the Soviet Union: an unquestioning vassal state. Having turned their backs on rejoining the EU, and with Trump destroying what remains of American democracy on a daily basis, the British government now has nowhere left to turn. Desperate for trade deals, the supine Starmer prostrated himself at Trump’s feet earlier in the year, playing his one card – a second state visit – mere months into the four long years of Trump’s reign, hence the unedifying spectacle this week, with one American commentator stating that we were ‘on our bellies’ before Trump. With that card played, Starmer now has no more aces up his sleeve.
Looking back over the last decade or so, it is evident that there has been a concerted campaign by disparate forces – from Putin’s Russia to authoritarian minded American tech oligarchs and our own Farage – to undermine the West as we have known it, to overthrow democratic norms, stir up xenophobic and revanchist hate, and radicalise those left behind by decades of neoliberal failure, especially after the 2008 crash.
With ever fewer of our World War Two generation still with us – the people who fought bravely to smash fascism and safeguard our freedoms – we now see a phalanx of opportunistic rightwing voices relentlessly banging the drums of atavism and othering, propelled into the mainstream through a toxic combination of ‘social’ media and platforming by mainstream media such as the BBC, which saw ratings in giving Farage and other anti-EU voices season tickets to Question Time. At least that’s the more charitable explanation. Within a space of a few years, immigration went from around 5% importance in British social attitude surveys to the top, as the plethora of rightwing media and Farage appearances propelled it to the top of the agenda. We went from valuing our top table position in the European Union, to a supposed vassal state under the ‘jackboot of the EUSSR’.
The relentless, rightward march in recent decades of the Overton window of ‘acceptable’ or ‘broadcastable’ political discourse is now such that what were very moderate, centre left views a few decades ago, now sound like radical Marxism according to the parameters of acceptable discourse ordained by today’s Westminster and media bubble. The certainties of fifty years ago are gone and replaced by a landscape where broadcast media no longer seeks to separate right from wrong, fact from fiction, but merely to present a ‘balanced’ dialogue between the hard right, who have little regard for the truth, and those valiant progressive voices who seek to stem the slide into the abyss.
We have now reached the stage where racist, misogynistic and extreme bigoted views – we’re talking about removing the rights of women and black people in th USA to votex – are described as merely ‘conservative’ by the British media, rather than the repugnant ramblings of the fascistic far right. But then again, when the BBC and other outlets spent years platforming Nigel Farage (who reputedly sang Hitler Youth songs as a schoolboy) and striving to provide ‘balance’ between the far right and progressives, it is little wonder.
In a world where rumors are magnified a million fold thanks to social media, where algorithms relentlessly work to instill anger and drag people ever further down the rabbit hole, we now stand at the edge of the abyss. Must we be forced to relearn the lessons learned the hard way in the 1930s and 40s? Or will we come together to stand up against the authoritarian right, to educate people that the reason they are suffering is not because of immigration, but the inevitable result of over four decades of Thatcherite neoliberalism, which has seen a relentless transfer of wealth to the top, the stagnation of wages – especially after 2008 – and promotion of profit over people.
Image Credit: Igbofur, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
