Why Far Right Terrorism is on the Rise

And here we are again. Another day, another terror attack with one dead and eight others injured. Though, on this occasion it's definitely not Islamist-inspired. According to witnesses the man who rammed worshippers leaving Finsbury Park Mosque screamed "Kill me, kill me, I want to kill all Muslims". It's to the credit of the traumatised crowd that the suspect wasn't granted his wish and got carted off into police custody. As the legal process is now in train there is little that can be reported about him or his intentions, but there are points we can make about hate crime and political violence motivated by far right politics.

While incidences of Islamist terror are shocking, in another sense they aren't. For the last 16 years the press and politicians have talked up the possibility of attacks from this quarter to justify military action overseas and authoritarian legislation at home. It's part and parcel of measures that have the consequence of scaring, cowing, atomising large numbers of people. It is an approach utterly disinterested in dealing meaningfully with the roots of terror as it raises uncomfortable questions. And so we have a sensibility, a notion that as awful Islamist atrocities are they are also banal, or something to be expected. The state is prepped for it. Culture is prepped for it.

Unfortunately, it is possible we could be approaching a similar situation when it comes to far right terrorism. Permit me to quote this post on the murder of Jo Cox:

But you know what the really awful thing about this is? We should have seen it coming a mile off. In most of the advanced Western states, acts of political terror tend to be committed by two creeds of extremist. The Islamist, and the Neo-Nazi. The depths to which the debate around the referendum has plunged has seen Leave, and I'm singling out the Tory right and UKIP in particular, raid the BNP playbook and repeat their attack lines have contributed to a febrile atmosphere where migrants are terrified for their future, and a good many decent people share those fears too. But remember, it's definitely not racist to scaremonger about tens of millions of Turks coming here, about "rapist refugees", about people "with a different culture". This poisonous drivel is all about addressing "the very real concerns people have about immigration", not pandering to racism, whipping up hysteria and hate.

What happened to Jo is a violent culmination of a politics that has played out over decades. The finger should be pointed at every politician who has used immigration and race for their own selfish ends. Farage and Johnson are two well accustomed to the sewer, but all of the Leave campaign have been at it. They more than anyone are responsible for the present climate. But blaming them alone is too easy. The Conservative Party as a whole have played the immigration card repeatedly throughout its history, more recently the PM doing so by portraying Labour as the party of unmitigated immigration and open borders. And idiot Labour politicians calling for restrictions here and peddling stupid pledge mugs there have all done their bit in feeding the drip drip of toxicity. The media as well carry some of the can, especially those regular Daily Mail and Daily Express headlines that scream out as if ripped from Der St羹rmer. Their ceaseless diet of Islamophobia and refugee-bashing pollute our politics and ensure its eyes are dragged to the gutter instead of being fixed on the horizon. The press are windows onto the political world for millions of people, and they what they see is tinted with purposive misrepresentation and lies. They too are culpable for this mess.

In short, when you have a huge propaganda operation, of so-called intellectuals poisoning the waters, and politicians seizing upon race and religion to grub for headlines and votes, we should not be shocked that a small subset of people who gorge on these lies should feel compelled to act on them. Mostly, they are content shitposting racist memes on social media or forming their own internet cesspits well away from the mainstream. Others get involved in political activity and/or the "street activity" of the English Defence League and/or Britain First. And for some, well, terror is a viable option - at least if the number of racists and far right activists banged up for weapons or bomb making offences are anything to go by.

While true, this propaganda apparatus has operated for a long time, so why should the prospect of far right terror become more likely? One cannot offer an exhaustive explanation, especially in the space of a blog post, but there are two things worth looking at. Firstly, there is the role of gender or, to avoid essentialist explanations rooting masculinity in hormonal aggression, the practices and expectations that come with being a man. After all, it is not insignificant that all the jihadi attacks and far right terrorist incidences to have taken place in Western Europe and North America over the past 20 or so years have exclusively been carried out by men? For younger men, the tendency toward the dissolution of gendered privileges but without a congruent retreat of gendered expectations is background noise to all extremist politics. For instance, IS is viciously misogynistic for a reason. For young white men, the parallel processes help fuel the ugly underbelly of online gynophobia and gay hatred though, it should be stressed, this has an outright purchase on only a minority of young guys just as the IS message draws in very small numbers. The fraying of gendered tradition impacts on older men differently. For some, they and wider society has undergone a process of emasculation, they just know it and feel it. Women don't know their place, boys are screwing around with boys, and men's jobs have given way to women's jobs. As far as UKIP and organisations further right go, part of their appeal is gendered nostalgia, of a strong Britain when men were men and took pride in being in charge and providing for their families. Nowadays, everything is so permissive and effete. Britain's gone soft, but something surely has to be done about Muslims taking the piss and killing girls and mums at pop concerts.

This is where masculine impotence intersects with political realities. With the collapse of UKIP at the general election from nearly 13% in 2015 to just under two per cent this year, effectively the constitutional outlet for right wing, xenophobic politics has dried up. And with the rise of the left, the general political culture is much less congenial to nudge nudge race hate than was even the case last year. Not least as politics is polarising and the Tories have smothered the political space the far right can operate in. With them locked out of the system, with politics more hostile and seemingly unconcerned by their hobby horses, and a studied refusal by the mainstream to blame Muslims in general for the terroristic acts of extremists, so non-constitutional methods start looking more attractive, be it vandalism of mosques or Muslim-owned businesses, hate crime, or terrorism. Their imagined grievances boil over into frustration, and that can in turn spin off into the kinds of actions we've seen a dramatic rise in.

That is why I believe the possibility of far right terrorism grows, not because it's strong, but because it's weak and out of kilter with the real world. What can be done? Using what laws already exist to round up and charge far right hate preachers, like the execrable Tommy Robinson, is something of a start. But more authoritarianism is not the answer, and so politics has to be. It means politicians should not be allowed to get away with toxic politics, that far right voices who pepper the airwaves and newspaper columns with barely coded race hate should be denied their berths in the mainstream, and a more robust challenging of this politics, be it the fascism lite of UKIP or the dyed-in-wool drivel of Britain First, wherever it appears sound like good places to begin.

The Sun, Kelvin MacKenzie, and Tabloid Economics

Trolls sometimes get their comeuppance. While the bigoted and the dishonest continue to rant and rave from the platforms provided them by Britain's most poisonous media outfits, it seems one can go too far. That's if Kelvin MacKenzie's suspension from The Sun is anything to go by.

As far as I can tell, MacKenzie's done nothing qualitatively worse than your average Melanie Phillips or Rod Liddle nudge-nudge-racism piece. Readers will also recall his appalling attack on Channel Four News's Fatima Manji in the pages of the paper, and no action was forthcoming. Though to make a cheap jibe at Liverpool's expense given his and The Sun's previous here underlines an arrogance that comes with the belief of being untouchable. Anyhow, it is now a matter for the police. Which is just as well because it's not MacKenzie's unreadable boilerplate that interests me: it's his suspension.

Yes, who'd have thunk it? The most terrible enfant terrible of 1980s journalism, the man whose editorship powered the currant bun to its soaraway success and made tabloid reporting synonymous with scapegoating, jingoism, racism, smearing, and dumb-downed tittle-tattle. Yes, that Kelvin MacKenzie, hung out to dry by the paper he made. First things first, as large numbers of people have asked, why did MacKenzie's piece appear in the first place when his column must have gone through gates kept by sub editors, legal, and the editor's office? Surely it wouldn't have taken much to spike it? I'd wager that didn't happen because it's Kelvin MacKenzie. He's a legend and comes with as much swagger as he has history and status. The editorial office might prefer to have someone else take up his slot, but there's always Uncle Rupert to worry about. No longer as hands on as he was during MacKenzie's day, nevertheless senior hacks, senior legal, and senior executives have to work towards the fuhrer so everything's a-okay in case a call comes through from New York. MacKenzie got leeway, and arguably his comfortable berth in Friday's paper, because of his association with the Dirty Digger.

Why hasn't MacKenzie's friendship with the proprietor got him off this time? Perhaps the suspension is for show, but equally it could be a consequence of moves within The Sun and News UK. Like most of Britain's newspapers, it's at something of a crossroads. Present daily circulation is around the 1.6m mark, having lost 1.4m readers since 2010. Yet since dropping Murdoch's pay wall, traffic to its family of websites has doubled. As of January this year, the paper is claiming around 25 million page views per month, putting it slightly ahead of The Mirror (though they dispute this) and trailing The Mail and the BBC. Online is obviously where the audiences are, and The Sun have tried all kinds of stratagems to get the punters in. It's invested heavily in Facebook, Snapchat and Instagram, and is trying to work out how to turn growing audience numbers into pound signs. After all, with The Mail's huge global audience of over 200m/month, that translates into ad revenue of £23m per quarter. Not a lot, really. Since The Sun came out from behind the wall, it's searching for other ways to make online pay - such as its dedicated betting platform and other paid-for services ancillary to normal newspapery content.

Emerging into a mature market, The Sun's strategy is an interesting one. Whether it turns a buck, however, remains to be seen, especially as profits in the internet age are overly dependent on cornering a market. For this strategy to be a success, The Sun is trying to carve its own niche. The Daily Mail model, which relies on piling up audiences for ad revenue, accomplishes this via notoriously voyeuristic celebrity coverage, and to a lesser extent providing hyper partisan right wing coverage and comment that brings in the "right old fascists" of which MacKenzie once opined, and outraged liberals and lefties aghast at their latest outrage. Those markets are more or less sewn up. The paper could provide a straight up copy, but it would lose. The second problem is The Sun needs to bring in young audiences to replace the oldies still buying physical copy. While it still casts around for a strategy that can capture them (as per above, their approach to social media is making a good fist of it), revenues depend on not upsetting the apple cart.

Which is what MacKenzie's column does. Everyone knows The Mail is an appalling outfit, but it's not dependent on the editorial line for the audiences generated by stalking celebrities. The Sun, which does not have that luxury, must chase younger internet users. As social attitudes surveys consistently show, the younger you are the more likely you are tolerant of racial/ethnic difference, immigrants, non-heterosexual sexualities, and so on. With a rising, more cosmopolitan generation The Sun cannot blast them with the halitosis of racism and hope to be a success.

As I said, the suspension might mean nothing beyond cynical damage limitation. MacKenzie could be returned to his inglorious perch and his comments long forgotten by the time he gets another invite onto Question Time and the like. But that the higher ups felt the need to do this when they might have shrugged it off is interesting, and only makes sense in the context of internet tabloid economics.

Ken Livingstone and Anti-Semitism, Again

"Ken Livingstone is a massive dickhead. It's high time he acted like a member of the Labour Party, not the Ken Livingstone Party. I and many thousands of activists, including plenty on the left, are fed up with his frequent foot-in-mouth moments that damage his own reputation, that of Labour's new leadership, and the standing of the party as a whole." That was me, just shy of a year ago and nothing has changed as anti-semitism in the Labour Party makes the headlines again.

Of course, anyone with a shred of honesty knows Labour isn't anti-semitic. It is not a safe space for racists to thrive, nor are Jewish members threatened or discriminated against by the party. That isn't to say the membership doesn't contain anti-semites. It has some of those. As well as racists of other persuasions, as well as your cretinous sexists and homophobes. That doesn't make the party institutionally racist, sexist or what have you. If anything, the party is institutionally anti-racist, anti-sexist, anti-homophobic. Views that are characterised as such will attract sanction and expulsion the party makes efforts to put people from these backgrounds forward. Labour does so not because it's enlightened, but because it has been pushed to do so by women, black and minority ethnicity, and LGBT members and their allies. Unfortunately, eternal vigilance is required because Labour represents a significant cross section of people numbering in the millions. If there are unpleasant views existent in wider society, they will be reproduced inside all of the parties that serve it. How progressive a party is depends on how the ingress of rancid views are dealt with.

That said, there is a sliver of political space, unfortunately, for "left" anti-semitism. As we saw last summer, it tends to come in naive/careless, hardened, and cynical varieties. The hardened kind is straight up racism that latches on to the language of radical critiques of Israel and Zionism to try and give their anti-semitism a leftist veneer. There are those who fake anti-semitism and, via social media, pose as supporters of the leadership as a means of discrediting-by-association. And there are careless folks who lazily lapse into tropes and language that is grotesquely offensive but just about skirt the fine line between critique and prejudice. For some, it's a genuine mistake, but for others who've been around the block they should know better.

Here lies Ken Livingstone. Yes, he has an excellent record as a campaigner against racism. Yes, five Jewish members of the party went to his hearing as character witnesses for the defence, including the sainted Walter Wolfgang. But time and again, when it comes to matters concerning Israel Ken goes straight up to the fine line and dances all along it. Why? The historical record doesn't support his contention that Hitler supported Zionism before "he went mad", and Ken knows full well that most Jewish people in Britain find the mentioning of Israel in one breath and the Nazis in the next upsetting and disrespectful. So, again, why? I don't believe Ken is anti-semitic, but when you're consistently provocative and unrepentant about it to the extent you damage yourself, the faction of the party you're aligned with to the point of aiding the leadership's opponents, and the standing of the Labour Party itself, it's easy to see why many people aren't so forgiving.

The National Constitutional Committee therefore were right to find Ken guilty of bringing the party into disrepute but wrong to to give him a slapped wrist. His behaviour should have made the ultimate sanction a foregone conclusion.

The Tories and the Special Relationship

Stoke-on-Trent might be the centre of the political universe, but that isn't to say tumultuous events don't take place outwith the gilded city limits. And while by-election fever and an altogether unpleasant illness have gripped me, Donald Trump marked his first week in the Oval Office by unleashing a hurricane-level shit storm. His "temporary" travel ban on people born in seven Muslim countries where Trump happens to have no business interests drew near unanimous condemnation. And yet he found backing from Boris Johnson in the Commons this afternoon. The foreign secretary said this isn't as bad as his pledges on the campaign trail and that means his bark is worse than his bite, and so we should be thankful. Just how we should thank racists for firebombing one Mosque as opposed to two, or the EDL for beating up an Asian kid instead of tearing up a town centre. May is no better. Her craven performance as the first overseas courtier to meet the new president was, remarkably, regarded as something of a coup across the official commentariat and established media. How fast things change. Dismissing Trump's travel ban merely as a "matter for the Americans" speaks for the moral vacuity at the heart of her project.

The right's counter argument invokes that misused and knackered old beast, the "special relationship". The Churchill bust is back, Trump went out of his way to woo "his Maggie", he promised the UK would be at "the front of the queue" for a trade deal post-Brexit, and he even allowed the Prime Minister to take his dainty hand and guide him down a wee incline. We must therefore seize this moment and stay as close to this well-disposed president as possible. To utter the slightest criticism puts his Anglophilia at risk. None of this should come as any surprise, the Tories are well practiced at sucking up to worse people than Trump. The legacy of appeasement runs deep.

The Tory understanding of the special relationship comes from the overdue sunset on the British empire. As anyone conversant with any half-decent analysis of global geopolitics will tell you, Churchill (himself half-American) worked to get the United States involved in the war against Nazi Germany and then to step up to the plate as the guardian of the liberal capitalist order. Exhausted, as Britain withdrew from its colonies the US became the anti-communist bulwark old Winston always wanted it to be. Never mind that it subverted democracies, destroyed popular movements, and installed and supported dictators wherever it saw fit, little Britain was there by its side, sharing intelligence and providing fig leafs. Britain may have its own bomb and advanced military capabilities, but in a world inhabited first by the Soviet Union, and now a resurgent China it only "punches above its weight" by virtue of its being the herald for United States interests. They can never really admit it, but the Tories know well this is the case. Hence why they weren't fans of Obama nor Hillary Clinton who, for their part, viewed the special relationship with some distaste. Why not hang around with interesting folks like Angela Merkel's Germany instead of a ceremonial hangover as obscure and puzzling as parliamentary protocols are to most normal people. It's also why the Tories had no problem with Blair getting his thing on with Dubya. He understood Britain's proper place, and that was in America's lap. And why almost every single Conservative MP happily walked through the lobby in support of the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq.

The character of the special relationship May has planned for Britain post-Brexit will see America and Britain become even closer. Already we have one of the most open economies in the world. Open for businesses from anywhere to swoop in and make a killing on the property market, take advantage of our anti-worker legislation to lock millions into poorly paid, insecure employment, and snap up strategic industries without even a shrug of the government's shoulders. A trade deal with Trump's America would exacerbate the situation. As we export more than what we import from the US, because their economy is over six times the size of our own, and as we'll be desperate for a deal if May follows through with her wrexit promise, Britain is going to be in a weak negotiating position. And that means two things, because this was what the Americans were pressing for under the aborted TTIP negotiations under Trump's liberal hero predecessor. A diminution of food standards so the Americans can freely sell all kinds of hormone injected meat and dairy without labelling, and opening more of the state up to private capital - including the NHS. A handshake greased with the slick of billions of tax monies heading for the coffers of American insurance companies. All presided over by secret corporate courts in which businesses can sue the government if they take action that threatens profitable returns on investments. Talk about sovereignty. Talking about taking back control.

That isn't to say the special relationship is a fiction, it is real. American culture is global culture, and because of the shared language Britain binges on their cultural produce like no other. But it is not a one-way street. British cultural exports and talent find ready audiences over there as well. The numbers of British actors, directors and producers, and video game developers that participate in the shaping of how America sees itself is surprising. And that's without acknowledging the roots burrowed under the ocean bed that link the two nations to the point where an understanding of the national character of each is impossible without reference to the other. And like all relationships, there's some give and some take. When Obama came to London and said no special favours for the UK post-Brexit, that didn't scare leave-minded voters - it motivated them to say up yours, a bloody sod you then. It firmed up the Brexit camp because, despite the special relationship, the then president was totally uninterested in the give. When May has gone through years of the weekly humiliation of soft soaping, white washing, and spinning for Trump, when her appeasement starts costing Britain friends and trade, and when finally she goes cap in hand to the White House for a trade deal, May will be doing the giving and Trump the taking. And all in full public view. The special relationship is tilting toward appeasement, how long before it becomes supplication?

White Men Can't Grump

Writing about dicks last night, I may as well carry on doing so. Graun journo Simon Jenkins caused ripples in the social media pond yesterday after suggesting white (middle class) men are the new oppressed minority. Of all the groups making up the rich tapestry of British social life, Oxbridge pedigree caucasian blokes of a certain age are getting squeezed out of all the plum jobs in the media and politics. That's right, you can't move for black women editors, producers, columnists, panellists, cabinet ministers.

I suppose it's natural for old journalists to have a Status Quo moment. From rockin' all over the world one minute, the next it's like having your latest material dropped by Radio 1 for the Justin Biebers of politics.

The obvious point doesn't bear labouring. White men still hold the cards when it comes to wealth ownership and holding down the top jobs. The people who matter, the key establishment opinion formers are mostly white men. Both Houses of Parliament find an over-preponderance of the buggers and, as we say in Derbyshire, board and senior management positions are snided out with them. Jenkins is completely wrong, but we'll return to him in a moment.

Nevertheless, he has articulated a sentiment that has a wider currency. There are men and not a few women who share similar views. For a generation that knew more rigidly defined gender roles and seldom came across people from non-white backgrounds, the shift in British culture toward state-sponsored equality and the growing public presence of people other than white men can be a jarring experience for some. If everything else was fine and dandy, it probably wouldn't matter. Unfortunately, almost 40 years of market fundamentalism has seen deindustrialisation and the destruction of traditional "manly" jobs. Not only have they been replaced by occupations that appear as effete as they are bewildering to a whole layer of Britons, men increasingly have to compete as equals in the job market. There is still gendered special treatment and jobs for the boys, but that increasingly tends towards the top. The de facto sexual division of labour in working class and graduate jobs is dissolving.

The so-called GamerGate controversy, the vilification, stalking, and doxing of women and non-hetero, non-white men, for daring to employ the tools of cultural critique to video games paved the way for the diffuse current of hipster fascists and Neo-Nazis credited with powering Donald Trump to the White House. The screeching of a rising tide of YouTube-based man-babies found resonance with a wider audience discomfited by the upending of gender and race relations, and obliteration of the class-based social compacts that used to legitimate capital. It is also a clear factor in the surge of right wing populism here in Britain. There is a reason why Nigel Farage and UKIP tended to appeal to (white) men of a certain age.

There is something going on, and it requires a political response that strikes at the roots of this gender-based discontent. It might mean getting to grips with how the economy is structured and driving out the anxiety and radical uncertainty that is the lot of too many people. That is not pandering to or empathising with these sorts of concerns, but understanding them so they can be dealt with. I know it probably isn't as satisfying as writing something for The Graun attacking millions of people as bigots, but then again that's one reason why I'm not a liberal.

None of this excuses Simon Jenkins. His moans might carry some social currency, but he knows as well as anyone that it's all bollocks. I'm no groupie or even a regular reader of his musings, but he's capable of taking a dispassionate, analytical view of things. He's sneered at people who've shown less ignorance. This, I'm afraid, is little more than shit stirring from someone peripheral to the social media-powered age of comment. He is trolling the hip young gunslingers of now to pay him the dues his sagely ego thinks he deserves and, annoyingly, it worked. But for what? As Jenkins winds down into retirement, as attention moves quickly onto something else, he'll be remembered - if at all - for being a deeply stupid, dishonest man.

Race, Class, and Donald Trump

How did the unthinkable happen? If only a short blog post hours after the biggest upset in world politics since the Soviet Bloc went under could provide the answers. Hot takes rarely do. Usually we have to wait months - years for perspective to form, and see an event in its singular aspect. Unfortunately, we do not have the time, the people who are going to be at the sharp end of a Trump presidency don't have the time. We need to understand what has happened not because it's a jolly fun thing to do, though there will be plenty who build careers off the back of providing comment and analysis of this kind; we need to get to grips with it to stop it from happening again. Here are some very sketchy thoughts.

The knee jerk nonsense of sundry liberals, which is already trying to carve a space for itself as the received wisdom on matters Trump, is most unhelpful. That the centre could not hold because the majority of white voters, some 62% of the population, voted because racism is the wrong conclusion. Yes, it was white people, but to mangle a phrase from a different context, not all white people. It was the well-off white folks, the middle class (not in the traditional American sense of the term) and the vast legion of small business people who are the constituencies who tipped it. In other words, the beginning of wisdom about Trump's victory begins with taking race and class together, of doing a touch of maligned intersectional analysis.

Just so we're clear, racism is as American as Mom and McDonald's. All through the American Revolution's heroic phase and down to today, the division of labour has always been heavily racialised. All whites, regardless of poverty and destitution, could draw deep from ideological resources that justified and maintained slavery to create an imagined superiority, and one that has blighted generations of white Americans. Of course, the Jim Crow laws in the South institutionalised racist supremacy and though they're long gone, the regular killing of black men by mainly white police forces show it hasn't gone away. Not completely separate from this is racial segregation. Despite being the great melting pot, it's probably fair to say that post-imperial Britain, with all its problems and issues, has proven much more successful in integrating ethnic minorities than the land born entirely from immigration. However, segregation and the racialisation of work, like all over the advanced West, had started to dissolve. More advanced in the socially progressive, metropolitan coastal states, it had a long way to go elsewhere, but nevertheless showed the interior its future. For the majority of white America, evidence of integration's insidious creep was felt through immigration. Year after year, more Hispanics appeared waiting tables in their restaurants, tending their gardens, working in their hotels, their service stations, their supermarkets and malls. They were a visual reminder that white America is a group in relative decline.

This is only part of the story. The race anxiety vote theory doesn't stand up. None of this is new, it was the case in 2008 and 2012 when enough white people voted for Obama. If whites are essentially racist, why the variance over time, and why were plenty prepared to vote for the mixed race fella with the very non Anglo-Saxon name? Economics might have something to do with it too. Neoliberal economics and governance, the subordination of all to the demands of capital and the whims of the market ceaselessly undermine our senses of self-security. The lot of the majority, regardless of ethnicity and race, is to sell our bodies and our brains, and therefore our freedom for a set period every week in return for a wage or a salary. For too many of us, there's even uncertainty whether there will be work enough available to pay the bills. Doubling down on this way of being has been the great transition of the last four decades, where the memories of industrial capital echo around crumbling factories. Manufacturing jobs, Proper Jobs, have either disappeared, got themselves exported, or absorbed into manufacturing machinery. They are now replaced by office jobs, service jobs, caring jobs, of jobs that no longer make things and instead produce the intangible. Across the Western world, but particularly in America and Britain, governments have overseen and connived with the abandonment of millions by capital. These are the left behind, a strata of people with a skill set and a mind for another time, and they have been discarded. That is the unmissable, crucial context for Trump's victory in the rustbelt states.

Yet, as we have seen, while white workers of modest means did vote for Trump, fewer than half of them did. It was the better off. How then to explain this? It doesn't seem to make sense. In studies of voting behaviour concerned with economic voting, summed up by another Clinton in a happier time as "it's the economy, stupid", researchers typically distinguish between two sub-categories. There is 'pocket book voting' (behaviour conditioned by the prospective impacts on one's finances, and/or those of relatives and friends) and 'sociotropic voting', which is where a voter looks at the health of the wider economy over and above personal circumstances. All aspiring governments construct narratives that address the personal and the social, and they are emphasised and de-emphasised when expediency requires. In Trump's case, the pocket book was addressed by cutting taxes, and attacking higher health premiums for the better off to pay for Obamacare. The macro story was about restoring industry to the rustbelt by repatriating it from the Far East and Latin America, and curbing immigration to ensure the right (white) people got the jobs. As a pitch, on paper it seems something you might expect white working class voters to get on board with. And some of them did. But it was the white middle class who were proper beguiled. Why?

Generations of Marxists have talked about the petit bourgeois - small business people - as if caught between the fundamental forces of capitalism. On the one hand, big capital can out compete and always threatens to put the smallholder out of business, throwing them down into the wage-earning mass. On the other, ungrateful employees are always bellyaching about not having enough hours, wanting pay rises, having more time off, wanting more autonomy, and, through incompetence or, heaven forfend, strike action threaten the viability of the business. To occupy the position of the petit bourgeois is to surrender to the icy grip of permanent existential dread, of not having mastery over one's fate (despite the promise of being one's own boss), and feeling hemmed in and under siege in the market place and at work. Second, for privileged layers of white people, the managers and the professionals, they share a certain outlook with their small business counterparts. Their good fortune is a consequence of their talents and graft. The privileges accumulated, the good salaries, nice house, multiple cars, expensive holidays, and the million and one trappings of the good life are theirs By The Sweat Of Their Brows. And they too are anxious it could all get take away, either by economic crisis leading to redundancy and unemployment, or ever-encroaching taxes and health insurance premiums. For both these groups, their sources of status anxiety are bound up with the great intangibles of class dynamics and process, they are therefore very likely to respond sociotropically to economic policy. Trump's pledge to decent, secure, well-paid manly jobs, to get Motor City motoring again perversely had more of an impact on the non-working class segment of white America than the worker. By giving the impression of a return to stability for the worker, so too the more excitable petit bourgeois is swept up in enthusiasm.

There's no real excuse for us commentators and so-called professionals not to have seen a Trump victory coming. His platform is backward and deeply troubling, but his campaign team - and The Donald himself - understood that stability and security, served as it was in racist, anti-immigrant rhetoric might appeal to enough people. And so it proved. One of the reasons why Hillary Clinton's campaign didn't, despite just edging the popular vote, was because it stripped out emotion and values. Technocratic managerialism was the order of the day, just as it was for the failed Remain campaign, just as it was for Labour's failed 2015 election campaign. For the future, assuming a Trump presidency affords us the luxury of having one, there has to be a revolution in the Democrats. It needs a vision of the good life and not rely on how awful Trump's presidency is bound to be. It needs to challenge the nativism and racism, and win enough people back to a positive programme that understands insecurity and is sincere about tackling it. They need to construct their own American story around a credible, non-political establishment candidate. It has to fight shit values with good values, not pander to them. Unfortunately, though it's early days yet, shrieks of liberal despair across today's media aren't good. Some have not only learned nothing about Trump's shock victory, they don't want to learn anything. If the Democrats choose to listen to these people again, come 2020 there's going to be exactly the same outcome.

White Nationalism, Conspiracy, and Anti-Semitism

Our last Sociology Research Seminar Series session at the University of Derby saw Andrew Wilson present his recent conference paper, 'The Thematic Preoccupation Governing Meaning Construction on a White Nationalist Forum'. The focus of his research was the infamous hang out of assorted fascists, Nazis, and racial fantasists, Stormfront. Founded in its present incarnation in 1996, Stormfront is the hub for white supremacism/nationalism on the internet. For instance, between 1st April and 29th June this year, it received two million unique visitors and 3,246,612 page views. 51% of its audience are from the US, and ten per cent hail from the UK.

Andrew's previous experience researching apocalyptic cults, conspiracy theory, and fringe beliefs took him to Stormfront in the wake of last year's Paris attacks. He found that by post six (on a thread of thousands) about the incident a poster was already touting conspiracy theories by way of an explanation, which became the dominant discussion theme. What also attracted Andrew's attention was the convergence of this conspiracy mindset, which is a staple of the far right with a certain species of spirituality, or, as Charlotte Ward and David Voas put it, conspirituality. This is important because for the site's participants as their investment goes beyond the political (and certainly the party political). Their loyalties lie in a transnational ethnicism, a quasi-mystical attachment to a contested and variously understood ayranism which, for its part, is held down by sinister conspiracies.

The performance of conspiritual identity requires the adoption of certain regalia. Anyone who's been on Twitter for five minutes will know that overtly political people tend to fix their avatars or festoon them with ribbons. Stormfront is no different. Typical displays include knights, flags, wolves, Norse Gods, weapons, targets, and a pantheon of Nazis. Some were assembled in a manner akin to Dick Hebdige's celebrated notion of bricolage. What Andrew was interested in was whether there was a correspondence between contributors with certain avatars posting on particular topics via the process of discourse mapping. Picking the five most popular discussions - The Holocaust, National Socialism, September 11th, Illuminati, and Reading, which amounted to 28,808 posts at the time of the study, among the 50 most used words and terms were Jews, People, Germany, Nazism, and Holocaust. As there was a chance the result could have got skewed by extended but relatively neutral discussion of aspects of holocaust history, stripping the thread out of the combined results saw Hitler receive greater prominence. Performing a similar operation by discounting the National Socialism thread, Andrew found the terms 'People' and 'Jews' came top. No matter what was left in or taken out, Jews and Jewishness cropped up again and again. He then performed a Latent Dirichlet Allocation, which identifies word patterns, and found Jews were mostly associated with Holocaust, Nazism, and Conspiracy. In the rarefied world of far right conspirituality, anti-semitism remains the core attribute. At the same time, Andrew began to see patterns emerging, of avatars tending to be active across topics that shared common ground with their motif. Further investigation of these patterns would allow a researcher to identify the in and out groups, what terms and values are likely to repeat, what and who gets labelled friends and enemies, and how this work tries to glue together a collective identity.

Questions were then taken about the place of hatred in these conspiritualities - is being against something enough for these identities? The repeated use of avatars with repeated far right themes, which in turn are anchored by the discourses posters contribute to suggests it is necessary but insufficient. Andrew also noted that despite Europe's far right switching to Islamophobia as their public target of choice, there was little evidence Stormfront's contributors were concerned with Islamism, the Islamification of Europe, or other such nonsense: obsession with Jews and Jewish-controlled conspiracies remained the shared focus of paranoia and hate.

This was an interesting opener into work yet to be done, and Andrew raised a number of interesting questions. Particularly with regard to the status of the white nationalism on display on Stormfront. Because of the transnational understanding of race they operate with, the fusion of conspiratorial politics and pseudo-religion, and, of course, the far right's propensity to terrorism, perhaps it would be profitable it they were viewed as a species of extremism not dissimilar to Islamism.

Anti-Semitism and Labour, Again

Among Jeremy Corbyn's failings, according to The Times this morning, is the Labour Party becoming a "safe space" for anti-semites. Of course, it is not now nor has ever been a safe space for anti-semitism - as the recent expulsions testify. Yet this is the spin our increasingly partisan "paper of record" chooses to put on the release of the Home Affairs Select Committee report, Antisemitism in the UK.

On page six it says,

This report focuses to some extent on the Labour Party, because it has been the main source of recent allegations of antisemitism associated with political parties. It should be emphasised that the majority of antisemitic abuse and crime has historically been, and continues to be, committed by individuals associated with (or motivated by) far-right wing parties and political activity. Although there is little reliable or representative data on contemporary sources of antisemitism, CST figures suggest that around three-quarters of all politically-motivated antisemitic incidents come from far-right sources.

It also adds that while the other parties have their issues, it's concerning that anti-semitism should have reared its head in the party most historically associated with anti-racism and equality. What's going on?

As readers know, my view is Labour has an anti-semitism problem in so far as society at large has such a problem. It is not institutionally prejudiced and discriminatory toward Jewish people, but nor are we talking about a media invention without substance. Since Jeremy Corbyn emerged as a serious contender for the Labour leadership, the party has attracted fringe elements of the anti-war movement who explicitly identify as anti-Zionist as the flipside of being pro-Palestinian, some September 11th truth'er conspiracy theorists, and idiots for whom politics is a form of radical performance art. In addition, the heat of Labour's internal divisions has proved a useful foil for hardcore racists, among whom are those using Jeremy Corbyn as a fig leaf for their views, and trolls happy to fan the anti-semitic flames as long as it scorches the leadership and the wider party.

What I think the report gets right is critiquing the shortcomings of the Chakrabarti report which, rightly, found anti-semitism wasn't a systemic problem in the Labour Party (despite not running with an operational definition of what it actually is). And rightly it also criticises the cack handed way in which the leadership have undermined their exoneration by handing the report's author a berth in the House of Lords and now a position in the shadow cabinet. If you're going to make a deal about doing new politics, the first rule is to not look like the old politics. It is also right to criticise Ken Livingstone and Jackie Walker for their childish provocations - in both case it shows an appalling lack of judgement and zero awareness about how their behaviour reflects on the party and the political current they support. Or perhaps they did know and just don't care about their responsibility to the wider movement. Of course, what the report doesn't address is the factional uses to which all of this is being put. Indeed, this morning's BBC Breakfast, Andrea Leadsom's former cheerleader-in-chief Tim Loughton was doing just that.

In the party's defence, this reply has been posted to the Labour leader's Facebook page, responding to some of its points and making a number of important criticisms of the report. But does that make the select committee publication another addition to the ledger of smears and baseless claims? If only. Yes, it's damaging to Labour, and there are interests in portraying our party as a uniquely anti-semitic outfit that is not welcome to Jewish people. Context is everything. But that doesn't mean its findings can be swept under the carpet, which seems to be the stock response of some.

Understanding Jeremy Corbyn's Reshuffle

Groundhog Day. Forgive me if I'm mistaken, but hasn't Labour just gone through a ruinous and utterly unnecessary leadership contest that saw the party leader reconfirmed in his position? Please tell me the spectacle of sundry MPs appearing on Sunday politics television playing the unity card and positioning themselves as the paragons of such wasn't a half-remembered dream from a fortnight ago? I feel moved to ask these questions, because since Jeremy Corbyn began his shadow cabinet reshuffle, the bellyaching and briefing are back. And so, on Thursday, when it was clear he intended to appoint rather than allow a deeply antipathetic parliamentary party a total or partial veto over the shadow cabinet, the whingeing and picking apart began. Diane Abbott's appointment called forth a torrent of racist and sexist abuse, but minus the hand wringing from the usual suspects. The unexpected sacking and replacement of Rosie Winterton by Nick Brown has seen her defenestration treated as if the office was hers by divine right. And now mischief is being made because the so-called great offices of state, a detail that was never Something To Be Concerned About until Jeremy occupied the leader's office, are held by people occupying neighbouring London constituencies. Never mind that this is the most diverse shadow cabinet ever.

I'm sick and tired of this bullshit. The vast majority of the party is, and I imagine the public are fed up of seeing the latest manufactured row hog the headlines and bulletins. If people want soap opera, they have EastEnders. Thanks partly to the incessant backbiting, if they want politics they have the Tories - as dismal poll after dismal poll has made clear (and remember, the unreliability of the polls are because they overestimate Labour support).

There is a lot Jeremy has to do to get things rolling again, and his pronounced tendency of not listening to the sensible members of his team is, to put it euphemistically, entirely unhelpful to his own position as Labour leader. That said, while he's mostly received brickbats over his shadow cabinet choices I will, instead, offer plaudits. It shows that he's learning and what has to be done to manage the party after the leadership contest.

He's reasoned - correctly - that his strengthened mandate, the disappearance of a sliver of anti-Jez people, and the arrival of yet more new members can discipline recalcitrant MPs. It seems, at last, that most have recovered from constitutional cretinism and realised that constituency parties are the really sovereign bodies in their patch. That is, at least, if they wish to continue as Labour MPs. Jeremy should also drop Theresa May a discreet thank you note, for she has fortified his position too. Undoubtedly, there are things about her one nationism quite a few Labour MPs would find beguiling. Had she carried on with Dave's social liberalism, a superficially "centre left" Tory party might have seen its first direct recruits from the Labour benches since Reg Prentice crossed the floor in 1977. Yet her embrace of anti-immigrant politics and scapegoating is too much even for Labour MPs who understand those "genuine concerns about immigration". As for the LibDems, let's just say they ain't what they used to be. Hemmed in by the members and without an escape route to other parties, Jeremy knows he has more room for manoeuvre than previously - even with this lunch time's resignation of two junior whips. Hence the dispensing of shadow cabinet elections and promotion of key allies.

There's also precious little self-awareness on the PLP's part about all this. Why, as sceptics and proven opponents were they expecting Jez to reach out? True, all cabinets and shadow cabinets regardless of political colouration and level of government tend to reflect a balance of forces. Ability has to come second, unfortunately. But they've already suffered a comprehensive defeat in the party, and from the experience of last year Jeremy has learned that doling out portfolios to people who would undermine you isn't the best approach to managing matters. Some have returned anyway, and newbies have slotted in, including the much-hyped Keir Starmer in the Brexit brief. Therefore given their track record, and now the breaking of the boycott of the front bench, why from Jez's perspective should he award them a say over who goes in the top team?

It would also be bizarre if Jeremy didn't award the allies who stuck by him. After all, isn't that what leaders do? So the move of Diane Abbott up to the home secretary brief and promotion of Emily Thornberry to shadow foreign (incidentally, the first time a Labour shadow cabinet has seen an even gender split in the "great offices of state" as well as the elevation of a black woman to such a position) ensures that at the very top there's a unanimity of opinion. There will be no more Hilary Benn moments. And if you're going to make a stand on immigration and racism, it's probably best that your immediate team have your back. Diane Abbott, whatever one might think of her, is a consistent campaigner against racism as well as a frequent hate figure for the far right. On an issue as important as the growth in hate attacks, and a government determined to subordinate the health of British capitalism to the needs of the Tory party, you need a right hand woman prepared to make the uncompromising case against scapegoating and xenophobia.

Does this make for a more effective team than the one we had previously? It's certainly more united, even if it is something of a baptism of fire for new MPs like Kate Osamor, Clive Lewis, and Angela Rayner. However, despite everything, even in its disunited state the party collectively won some impressive victories this last year. With government benches chafing after the purge of the Cameroons, abandonment of neoliberal orthodoxy, and what Brexit actually means the opportunities are there for Labour to claw back ground it lost over the summer. Provided, that is, they're not pissed up the wall by more internal disputes or egregious attacks of political miscalculation.

Jeremy Corbyn and the SWP

The Socialist Workers Party. Remember them? Famed, if that's the right word, for shameless opportunism, wrecking tactics, and poncing off movements they did little to build, they perhaps owned the worst reputation of any organisation on the far left. And that was before evidence of covering up a rape complaint, the hounding of one of the women concerned, and testimony of an abusive culture emerged. In short, anyone who remained a member of the SWP after all this came out must have a seriously twisted view of what socialist politics is about.

Since this news broke, different parts of the labour and radical movement have treated the SWP differently. Seeing as they still haven't openly and honestly accounted for their disgusting behaviour, I'm of the view of shunning them, actively avoiding them, and making it clear they're nothing but pariahs is the best way of dealing with them. Zero tolerance of sexual violence in our movement means zero tolerance of those who alibi and brush it under the carpet. Others believe in attacking SWP stalls, which in my opinion is self-indulgent and narcissistic. Nevertheless, the SWP have soldiered on trying to rebuild their battered reputation, which is a labour of Sisyphus every time a new recruit or contact Googles the party's history.

As a Leninist outfit, the SWP has long worked behind the scenes in a number of front groups. Set up an organisation dedicated to a particular issue, campaign, and draw people into the party by being the "best builders" of "the movement". One area the SWP have always placed much emphasis is anti-fascist and anti-racist work. Since the success of the Anti-Nazi League in the late 70s and its resurrection in the 90s, the transformation of the ANL into Unite Against Fascism in the early 00s, and foundation of Love Music Hate Racism and Stand Up to UKIP, this has been a fertile seam for party recruitment. And, to show fairness to the SWP's record, it has played an essential role in mobilising protests against the likes of the BNP, the English Defence League, and latterly the occasional real world manifestation of the Britain First Facebook group. That isn't to say there aren't problems with the various approaches to anti-fascism the SWP and its fronts employ, but that's a separate debate.

Fast forward to now. Obviously, in light of the Brexit vote and Theresa May's wrexit speech, the increase in reported hate crime since June, and the continuing exploitation of race and immigration by politicians of the right and the ostensible left, racism is all set to become more of a football. Therefore this weekend's Stand Up to Racism conference is timely and potentially important. The one problem, however, is despite having a steering committee staffed with the great and the good of the labour movement, its co-convenors are Weyman Bennett of the SWP and Sabby Dhalu, also of SWP UAF. In other words, these are the folks who do the organising, book the speakers, decide the format, and "suggest" the content while the "name" officers (here) front it up. Having been invited to speak, Owen Jones was one of several to turn SUTR down on account of the SWP's involvement. Reportedly, Jeremy Corbyn did the same thing on the same grounds.

And yet the Labour leader turned up anyway.

Disappointing isn't the right word. A phrase full of expletives would perhaps about cover it. And so much for upping his game. Perhaps Jeremy thought that it was important to speak at an anti-racist event by an organisation presided over by Diane Abbott because, well, not doing so might have been interpreted as a snub within days of her appointment. Perhaps he thought it was important to be seen speaking out against racism and bigotry, and this was a convenient platform to do so from. I don't know, and chances are you don't either. But from his point of view, it's so incredibly stupid and reckless.

Jeremy has a commanding bedrock of support in the party, but there is a tension between two broad wings within this base. There's the sweep of reluctant Corbynists, Labour lefties, and others who want to get on with the business of building a broad based movement with the potential of taking Labour to power. On the other, there's the wave of very enthusiastic Corbyn supporters who tend to be totally fresh to politics but unwavering in their loyalty to Jeremy because of the ideas he represents. Mixed in here too are a few old hands whose politics are principled but allergic to adapting them to the concrete situation. Whether he intended to or not, Jeremy today provided cover for the SWP. He affirmed them as a legitimate part of our movement. And for a chunk of his support, especially those who've encountered the SWP (and that would be a good proportion of his seasoned extra-parliamentary activist milieu), this is the sort of thing disconnect and distrust is made of. Especially given the vile nature of the allegations at the centre of the SWP's cover up. And this could serve to prise apart the coalition of the left his leadership rests on.

If the spiking of Clive Lewis's conference speech and his subsequent move from shadowing defence was the first crack in the Jez monolith, this could well be the second.

Correction 10/10: According to his staff, Jeremy was originally booked to do an event in Scotland that clashed with Saturday's conference was cancelled, and so apologies were sent accordingly. When this was cancelled he elected to speak at SUTR. He did not pull out and then go as suggested here. Nevertheless, the rest of the piece remains the case. He knows well who the SWP are, and he also knows what they've done

Labour and Anti-Semitism

Like cat piss on your carpet, the stench comes back regardless of what you do to it. I'm talking, in this instance, about the Labour Party and anti-semitism. Despite an inquiry that issued clear guidelines and repeat condemnation by Jeremy Corbyn, John McDonnell, Momentum, and everyone associated with the party's leadership, it will not go away. So what is going on? As I've said on occasion, if you have recurring phenomena then we're talking about social relationships, not something that can be put down to individual oddities. And, to note, just because it has become a factional football doesn't mean anti-semitism is not important or isn't happening. It is. Where then does Labour's issue with anti-semitism come from?

What the party isn't is institutionally anti-semitic, in the sense it structurally discriminates and disadvantages members from a Jewish background. In fact, the argument can be turned on its head and the case made it's institutionally anti-anti-semitic, in the same way it is also institutionally anti-sexist and anti-racist. Before anyone rolls their eyes and gets a letter from compliance for it, this isn't the same as saying sexism and racism aren't problems in the Labour Party. Rather it is the banal observation that because of work done by previous and current generations of women and BME comrades, formally the party is against chauvinism and racism. Members can and do have action taken against them for making these unwelcome views known and engaging in unacceptable behaviour. And the party tries to overcome the legacies of sexism and racism through the use of shortlists, diversity training, and so on. That said, because Labour is a mass party and not an ideologically pure sect, its membership has, to greater and lesser degrees, the tendency to reflect the attitudes and prejudices of the constituency it reflects. If you like, the institutionalisation of progressive attitudes and the activists that uphold them are in a ceaseless battle against what we might euphemistically term "unreconstructed" views constantly being fed into the party from its relationship with wider society.

However, this can explain why racism and sexism remain party problems but it does not account for anti-semitism. While there have been spikes of anti-semitism over the years, it hasn't had a mass base or following in British society since the 1930s. What is it about the Labour Party now that is attracting anti-semites in disproportionate numbers and to the Corbyn campaign in particular? I think it's down to a mix of naivete, stupidity, and in a number of cases, hardcore racism.

Dealing with the first, Jeremy Corbyn has a long record of anti-war activity. His 33 years in Parliament have seen him take up the cudgels against British foreign policy, whether it was popular or politic or not. Similarly, he has never hidden his criticisms of US and Israeli policies in the Middle East either. Unfortunately, this kind of stance often comes with a studied silence about the countries and organisations at the receiving end of Western bombs and, in some cases, de facto united fronts with outright supporters of these regimes/outfits. These characters can be most unsavoury. You could say that some folks who are especially active in anti-war work are a little care free when it comes to associating with people who, on the one issue of opposing such-and-such a conflict, there is a shared position. And so where opposition to the criminal policies of the Israeli state are concerned, you might find people in this milieu, especially those new to it, getting rather over-enthusiastic in their denunciation of Israel's actions. They might bang on about Zionists and Zionism, might shout off about "Zios", and make clumsy, inappropriate, and offensive comparisons between the Nazis and the Holocaust and Israel and the occupation. And they do it because too few within this milieu actively challenge it. So as Jeremy has risen to prominence, this sort of clumsiness has been imported into the Labour Party and become more visible than has hitherto been the case. Something I've been worried about for a while.

Overlapping with this is an anti-establishment politics at its most basic and primitive: conspiracy theorists. If porn is the main contribution the internet has made to popular culture, opening mass audiences to the idiocies of conspiracy theorising comes in a close second. You can understand the cognitive basis for these views. The world is a complex scary mess with clear winners and losers, and can appear as if a shadowy elite has it all under their thumb. It's not. There is no one at the helm, and not even being the richest nation with the most powerful military the world has ever seen can impose its will at will on the world, or defy the head winds of global economic turbulence. Conspiracies then are comforting because there's a weird form of security knowing someone's in charge, and that you stand out from the herd because your keen brain has connected the dots and cut through the bullshit. After the September 11th attacks, the conspiranoid 9/11 Truth Movement were an identifiable anti-war trend that not only peddled nonsense about remote controlled airliners and buildings pre-packed with demolition charges, but fanned the flames of anti-semitic conspiracy theorising. It was a false flag operation run by Mossad, or Jewish employees were warned to stay away from the Twin Towers on the morning of the attack being two choice examples. The problem is this sort of thinking never disappeared. It scooped up gullible adherents here and there and continued to fester on email lists, forums, and Facebook groups. And so, just like the "careless" people this variegated bunch have also joined up and used their conspiranoia to make sense of Labour's faction fight. The links between some Labour MPs and Israel via Labour Friends of Israel are "proof" they are taking orders from Tel Aviv. Some are associated with very rich people, who happen to be Jewish, and, of course, because some sitting MPs helped save the banking system from collapse they're in the pay of the Rothschilds. These entirely unwelcome elements, again, aren't drawn to Jeremy because he's one of them, but rather in the terms of their anti-semitic conspiracy theology, it's him versus the Zionist lobby and therefore deserves their support.

These people are badly mistaken and seriously deluded, and I would say there are a portion of them who don't even realise they're being anti-semitic. But on those occasions it happens time and again, and despite it being pointed out to some of them carry on willy-nilly, then they have passed over into outright racism.

And this brings me to the third kind, those that really do have anti-semitic issues. It doesn't matter how they arrived at this perspective, the fact is they single out Jews and attribute all kinds of social problems to them. Classic scapegoating, classic racism. Wherever they are found they should be turfed out of the party, no ifs, no buts. However, while these people do undoubtedly exist, are there others at it? While anti-semitism in wider society is diminished, there are still enough people miles away from left wing politics with axes to grind. Grabbing a Momentum twibbon and using the furore around Labour anti-semitism to vent their bilge is easy enough to do. And then there are obvious troll accounts like this and this operated by folks unknown to keep those flames fanned. Imagine being an opponent of Jeremy Corbyn and cynically using racist abuse to "prove" his support is anti-semitic. Is that the mindset of someone you'd wish to be associated with? Do you think that sort of person should have a place in the Labour Party?

I am glad that most people in our movement have woken up to anti-semitism, and I hope wherever comrades find it a swift complaint to validation@labour.org.uk follows in short order. Anti-semitism is not just the socialism of fools, as August Bebel put it, but is the very antithesis of a politics founded on solidarity and collective action. It's in all our interests to be on our guard against it, and attack it wherever and whenever we can.

On Remain's Anger

Large numbers of people support a campaign scarred by racism, hate, and deliberate misinformation. Outraged opponents take to social media to make sweeping generalisations of those taken in. They're all thick. They're all bigoted. These people have fucked it up. I've heard it, you've heard it. Thing is, we've heard it all before.

In 2009, 900,000 people voted for the British National Party in the European elections. Nick Griffin and Andrew Brons, now both ex of that crumbling ruin of a parish, packed themselves off to Brussels for all the EU money they could trough. As I said then:

Morality is basic to socialist politics. But moralism is no basis for socialist analysis. The reasons why people vote for the BNP are complex and multi-faceted. In this respect this piece of excellent research commissioned for Channel Four is a good way in. Among the points about BNP voters' attitudes to race and immigration (which, unsurprisingly are more negative than the national average), there are a large minority for whom such concerns are secondary. But these concerns are not new. They have been part of the British political landscape for a long time, predating even the significant influx of Afro-Caribbean and Asian workers after the war.

But when you couple this with the relative lack of security they feel and their relatively low socio-economic status, scandalous media coverage of race and immigration, and the (correct) belief Labour and the other mainstream parties have abandoned working class aspirations, it's small wonder people are prepared to vote for a party that appears to speak to these concerns - whether they have the Mark of Cain or not.

Apart from the stuff about Labour and working class aspirations, the outpouring of Remain complaints, be it the two million-strong petition for a re-run, David Lammy's ridiculous bid to use Parliament to block Brexit, the frantic retweeting of Leave voters suffering "Bregret", and, of course, the name-calling, it is the 2009 bigot blame game writ large.

Of course, you can understand why people are pissed off. I was in a black mood yesterday, and apart from the lone Brexiter it was like someone had died in the office. I spoke to comrades whose reaction ranged from the angry to the despairing. As the economy tipped into the trash can and anecdotal evidence of increased racist behaviour (as predicted) is doing the rounds, there are millions of people horrified at where the country's going. Their venom and bitterness is entirely understandable and, sad to say, for some the shock has proven so large they may never recover. But every crisis has within it seeds of opportunity. And the most immediate is the huge outpouring of anger from millions with the scurrilous campaign Leave waged. Once the disappointment and London independence nonsense has died down, there are signs a wider politicisation is happening. There is a massive opportunity here for the Labour party and the labour movement to articulate this anger and draw hundreds of thousands into politics. It is possible that despite Thursday's awful setback, the future could belong to us.

The Culmination of Toxic Politics

I am heartbroken about Jo Cox. I feel for her kids and family, and share the deep sense of loss that has rocked many of our people to their cores. To have a comrade torn from us who was popular, smart, passionate, and driven to make the lives of our people better is just so wrenching, so shocking. In a world suffused with tragedy and sadness, nothing strikes as deeply when one of our own falls.

For this reason I'm angry. Very angry. Jo was singled out and attacked because she was a Labour person, for the politics she represented and the values she stood on. It was a political assassination during a politically charged referendum by a man who, apparently, shouted a political slogan as he pulled the trigger and is associated with the far right. This cannot be explained away by mental instability, as some are already doing. That's too convenient. It denies agency and scrubs out the political character of the crime. Let's not have any whitewashing: the attack on Jo was an act of political violence.

But you know what the really awful thing about this is? We should have seen it coming a mile off. In most of the advanced Western states, acts of political terror tend to be committed by two creeds of extremist. The Islamist, and the Neo-Nazi. The depths to which the debate around the referendum has plunged has seen Leave, and I'm singling out the Tory right and UKIP in particular, raid the BNP playbook and repeat their attack lines have contributed to a febrile atmosphere where migrants are terrified for their future, and a good many decent people share those fears too. But remember, it's definitely not racist to scaremonger about tens of millions of Turks coming here, about "rapist refugees", about people "with a different culture". This poisonous drivel is all about addressing "the very real concerns people have about immigration", not pandering to racism, whipping up hysteria and hate.

What happened to Jo is a violent culmination of a politics that has played out over decades. The finger should be pointed at every politician who has used immigration and race for their own selfish ends. Farage and Johnson are two well accustomed to the sewer, but all of the Leave campaign have been at it. They more than anyone are responsible for the present climate. But blaming them alone is too easy. The Conservative Party as a whole have played the immigration card repeatedly throughout its history, more recently the PM doing so by portraying Labour as the party of unmitigated immigration and open borders. And idiot Labour politicians calling for restrictions here and peddling stupid pledge mugs there have all done their bit in feeding the drip drip of toxicity. The media as well carry some of the can, especially those regular Daily Mail and Daily Express headlines that scream out as if ripped from Der St羹rmer. Their ceaseless diet of Islamophobia and refugee-bashing pollute our politics and ensure its eyes are dragged to the gutter instead of being fixed on the horizon. The press are windows onto the political world for millions of people, and they what they see is tinted with purposive misrepresention and lies. They too are culpable for this mess.

Nor should we forget that women MPs, and Labour MPs in particular routinely receive abuse, rape threats, and death threats and nothing, nothing is done about it. How does that inculcate a sense of respect and mutual recognition? How can it not lead to the conclusion that they are fair game for every sad inadequate, every racist axe grinder and misogynist who wish to do them harm? This is of a wider pattern of generalised dehumanisation, and it's women first who are the main butts of it. Here the finger can be jabbed at venal politicians cavalier with promises and duplicitous with the truth, a media that pulls the seemingly impossible trick of not holding them to account and encouraging cynicism toward them, and at social media companies indifferent to how their platforms are used to stalk, harass, and threaten.

Ultimately, our politics have become so poisonous because it has alienated and excluded ordinary folk. From the brutal crushing of working class politics in the 1980s to last year's ejection of the poor from the electoral rolls for narrow Tory party advantage, we have seen growing distances between representative and represented. And as that gap has widened, so the political vacuum has sucked in the hate and the swill that should otherwise be abhorred. Changing political culture is more than a job of condemning its most egregious abusers, but the difficult job of reversing the trends that have brought us where we are.

What is sad, so unutterably awful is that it's taken the death of a fine public servant and labour movement advocate for these sorts of question to be taken up beyond a narrow audience. If the memory of Jo is to mean anything beyond her tragedy, let it be a legacy of cleaned-up politics.

The Lexit Delusion

Dave and co were hoping a spot of economic determinism would see them through the EU referendum. Unfortunately for them, and all our people who stand to lose should Britain exit, this is proving not to be the case. Drawing deep from a poisoned well sunk by tabloid after politician after demagogue, Leave have doused the referendum campaign in xenophobic and anti-immigration toxicants. As my comrade Lawrence Shaw puts it:

EU referendum debate round-up of the last six months in case you missed it:

Immigration. Immigration. Immigration. Foreigners. Muslims. Immigration. Taking all "our" jobs. Immigration. Immigration. Two whole aisles of Polish food in Tesco's. Immigration. Country is too small. Immigration. Immigration. Foreigners. Immigration. Changing our culture. Immigration. Immigration. Immigrants. Asylum Seekers. They can do anything they want. Immigration. Immigration. Terrorists. Immigration.

And don't forget political correctness. I mean you're not even allowed to talk about immigration these days.

How has this come to pass? Unfortunately, it goes back to this blog's old warhorse: labour movement weakness. The reason why blue-on-blue dominates the airwaves and are hegemonic in their respective camps isn't because Jeremy Corbyn is rubbish at media, it's because - pound for pound - the social forces underpinning big business and finance are so much stronger, cohesive, and assertive. It's a political situation arrived at after the breaking of the labour movement in the 1980s, the promotion of economic and domestic policy designed to continually disperse the sorts of solidarities that underpin socialist politics, and the letting loose of free market fundamentalism across ever greater areas of social life have eroded relationships and replaced them with impersonal transactions. The election of Jeremy to the Labour leadership has shifted the terms of debate, arguably contributing to the government's litany of U-turns and defeats, but underneath the question remains whether a counter-movement to the further weakening of our constituency is occurring. Doubling the size of the party and getting another trade union aboard is but a baby step in the direction socialist politics must travel.

Because our movement is marginal, there was no chance of leading Remain or Leave on our terms. You just have to look at the grotesqueries of your John Manns and Kate Hoeys peddling unvarnished Farageisms, and the idiocy of Alistair Darling lining up with Osborne - again - promising to kneecap pensions and public services. Our people, at least nominally, doing the do on their terms. The question flowing from this is what would be best for our people and the rebuilding of our movement. Or, using the logic of lesser-evilism, what would be least worst.

Here, I think so-called "Lexit" comrades have been cavalier with the dangers pregnant in the situation. Okay, assuming Remain wins, little would change domestically. The Tory Party would carry on, albeit damaged and its government crippled for the foreseeable, and stagger along its path of collapsing membership. UKIP too, also on a downward spiral, would also carry on, albeit under reduced circumstances. The stock market and the pound rallies, and it's back to politics as normal in all its mendacity and beggar-thy-neighbouring. What an inspiring vision to rally around! Though it is worth noting one thing. A Remain vote in the minds of millions, whether they're for or against, is a climax of a culture war. The EU is not an internationalist utopia or anything approaching the sort, but nevertheless and no matter how mistaken they are it is perceived as a repository of hope, a modernity beyond Europe's tragic history of belligerent states, and is a symbol of cooperation across nationalities. It is also these same reasons that motivates opposition to the EU among kippers and the Tory hard right. To this technocratic futurity we find opposed Germanophobia, empire nostalgia, libertarian fantasy, insularity and, of course, the fear of Johnny Foreigner. We've recently peered down one wormhole, so lets go through another: Leave are pushing Britain toward a mini-America with gun controls.

Just think about it for a moment. If Leave wins, who wins? The most backward forces in British society do. The Europhobic Tory right, UKIP, and every two-bit racist outfit. The most socially useless, noncompetitive, and regressive elements of British capital. A strengthening of nationalism - and I'm not talking the fluffy civic kind pushed by the SNP - is likely. Increased hostility to migrant workers. More scapegoating. More blaming the EU for our failings because they presume to "punish" the UK for leaving. These are the self-same forces who cry foul about Osborne's kneecapping budget today, but will be the ones implementing it with relish tomorrow as they squeeze the cost of exiting out of the remaining social wage.

Some comrades of a more economistic bent think exit would destroy the Tories once and for all. We watched Amber Rudd smacking down Boris Johnson. We've seen Michael Gove rubbish his chancellor's claims about the economic dangers. The campaign has played out as an internal party feud with intervals staffed by the other mainstream parties. Yes, an exit would mean no more Dave and the thwarting of Osborne's ambitions, but would that necessarily mean the end of the Tories? Just because the Conservatives are the stupid party doesn't mean they're stupid. Remain Tory MPs are as likely to leave their party as Progress-types are Labour for as long as First-Past-the-Post rules the day. Yes, they might be pains in the arse for an incoming government headed by Johnson, Gove, IDS, and Farage, but the party is likely to limp on in much the same manner as it would after a Remain victory.

Oh, did I just mention Nigel Farage in the same breath? Yep. Because one lesser-spotted dynamic in play is what happens to UKIP in an exit scenario. With a Tory Party dominated by Leave and, in all likelihood, led by Johnson after a perfunctory leadership contest, there is a good proportion of UKIP members for whom the purple party is no longer required. How many would come back and how many voters would follow ex-Tories returning to the fold? I don't know, but far from weakening the Tories they could re-emerge from the chaos of the referendum campaign as a populist, self-consciously patriotic party. Stranger things have happened, and this is more likely than a Tory split fantasy.

And then there is a further, darker scenario. Everyone who pays attention to politics and the European Union know that whatever deal post-exit Britain is able to get, access to the single market will be contingent on accepting the free movement of labour. There is not one single member state that would countenance Britain having the rights of access without the responsibilities attending it. The promises Johnson et al make about immigration now are not worth the air drawn to utter them. Mass migration will continue, and then what? With the promises abandoned and politics seemingly unable to do anything about it, there opens a space for the kinds of forces who are presently marginal but have mass followings on the Continent. Leave the EU to become more like the EU?

The old politics are dying. The constituencies of the previous order are dissolving, but the same ugly politics are as pernicious as ever. Ultimately, this referendum is a choice between what we have now with its problems and opportunities, or a "crisis" trending toward the further empowerment of the hard right, of xenophobia, of nationalism and hate politics. There is no "left exit", only a step into the abyss.