Ideology
Egypt Under El-Sisi: A Nation on the Edge – review
In Egypt Under El-Sisi: A Nation on the Edge, Maged Mandour challenges simplistic views of the aftermath of the Egyptian revolution in 2011, when mass protests against the government forced then-president Ḥosnī Mubārak to step down. Mandour examines power shifts and the military’s consolidation of authority over the past decade of Abdel Fattah El-Sisi’s presidency, offering a nuanced intervention on post-revolutionary Egypt’s socio-political dynamics, writes Hesham Shafick.
Egypt Under El-Sisi: A Nation on the Edge. Maged Mandour. Bloomsbury. 2024.
It takes me by surprise that we have already passed the 13th anniversary of Egypt’s revolution on January 25th 2011. Many theories and scholarly prints have been produced that try to make sense of how things unfolded after that day. The rise and fall of a structural “revolutionary situation”, the interplay between key local power centres, changing global dynamics, the or simply the work of talented tricksters are some of the many explanations proffered. Notwithstanding their differences, they all have one thing in common: singling out an external villain, a counterrevolutionary force(s), which mustered enough authority to override a once hopeful revolution.
In Egypt Under El-Sisi: A Nation on the Edge, Maged Mandour refutes such a presumption of a dramatic distinction between victims and villains, revolutionaries and counterrevolutionaries. In doing so, he joins a cluster of critical thinkers, led by Gramscian political economists Brecht de Smet and Roberto Roccu, who stress the analytical necessity of understanding revolutions as “war(s) of positions” in which multiple actors exchange seats – be these ideologies, cultural codes, or political power – to formulate a new hegemonic, or “semi-hegemonic”, order. This reading paves the way for an understanding of the “post-revolution” collapse as a product of the revolutionary repertoire itself.
Mandour joins a cluster of critical thinkers […] who stress the analytical necessity of understanding revolutions as ‘war(s) of positions’ in which multiple actors exchange seats […] to formulate a new hegemonic, or ‘semi-hegemonic’, order.
In my own work, I took a cue from such thinking to co-author a series of articles that reconceived of the January 25th movement as a moment that brought together a working class motivated by their socioeconomic grievances, a middle class motivated by liberal aspirations, and a military elite motivated by their greed (see “A fascist history of the Egyptian revolution” I, II, & III). These were all temporarily assembled to push back against a malignantly growing police state. The first day of protests was thus selectively chosen to be the policy holiday – January 25th.
After three days of street fighting, the police were forced to retreat. And since then, Tahrir and other protest squares turned into physical assemblies of the three participating sections of society. But it did not take long for the middle class and military to override the working class. The workers’ demands were sidelined, even vilified, as “fractional” and “divisive”, facilitating a popularly backed military crackdown on factory protests. That was in the very early days of the revolution, a few months after the police retreat. Immersed in the utopian moment of overthrowing the police state, the middle class failed to observe the emergence of an even more dangerous armed regime, one which is far more powerful and, ironically because of their backing of the revolution, or more precisely its middle-class pillar, more popular.
Immersed in the utopian moment of overthrowing the police state, the middle class failed to observe the emergence of an even more dangerous armed regime
This re-conception of the post-revolution military regime – led by former minister of defence and head of military intelligence President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi – as a product of the revolutionary repertoire, rather than an independent counterforce, is, we argued, a game changer to analysts and activists alike. For if Sisi’s regime is a counterrevolutionary junta that overthrew the revolutionary movement by force, then the revolutionary response should be straightforward: keep pushing! It is therefore crucial to understand the nature of such a regime in relation to the revolution, not only to make sense of the startling concurrence of seemingly contradictory popular chants like “ya geshna enzel ehmina” [Oh our Army, rise and protect us] and “Yasqot Yasqot hom el ‘askar” [down, down with the military regime] in the same protest, but also to determine the strategies that can produce revolutionary outcomes in such a peculiar context.
Mandour does not focus on the January 25th revolution, but rather Sisi’s regime as a product of a prolonged of which January 25th and its ensuing coup regimes of 2011 and 2013 were mere symptoms.
It is from this lens that I welcomed Mandour’s account with excitement. Mandour does not focus on the January 25th revolution, but rather Sisi’s regime as a product of a prolonged of which January 25th and its ensuing coup regimes of 2011 and 2013 were mere symptoms. Passive revolution refers to an ongoing sociopolitical process where dominant elites keep maintaining their control through selective and temporary co-optations with variant classes, each of which eventually wind up pacified and sidelined. In this account, the revolution, the military regime, and their temporary coalition under Sisi’s rule, were a continuity of social reshuffles that attempted to constitute a political order in the vacuum created after the collapse . (For more on post-Nasser hegemonic vacuum, see Sarah Salem’s Anticolonial Afterlives in Egypt, reviewed here.)
In 1967, Mandour explains, Nasser not only lost his war with Israel on the Sinai Peninsula; he lost the package of ideological promises of Pan-Arabism, Arab-Socialism and postcolonialism that built his mandate. However, some of this regime’s structural legacies remained intact: military supremacy, a police-hijacked state, and a de-politicised middle class. Emptied of their ideological enablers, three social clusters found themselves in a power scramble, in which “soldiers, spies, and statesmen” – as Hazem Kandil eloquently puts it – would every now and then “solicit mass popular support” to leverage one of the three actors over the others (85).
Fast-forward to Egypt Under El-Sisi: the same actors remain at play, now producing a different type of regime. In 2013, Sisi rose to the fore with a promise to bring back the “unity” of the Egyptian middle class, popularly perceived to be disrupted by the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood in the aftermath of January revolution. Here, “unity” is conceived of as “sameness” and hence disrupted by the appearance of that was for so long forcefully kept at the margins, even officially abandoned from political participation – the Muslim Brotherhood (55). Utilising the popular frustration caused by this disruption, Sisi garnered the support of the middle class through a very simple promise: returning the national identity; in other words, getting rid of the Muslim Brotherhood.
The first post-coup regime was headed by middle-class technocrats with the military pulling strings behind the scenes.
The first post-coup regime was headed by middle-class technocrats with the military pulling strings behind the scenes. This arrangement was, however, far from stable. As Niccolo Machiavelli has stated: “there is nothing proportional between the armed and the unarmed; and it is not reasonable that he who is armed should yield obedience willingly to him who is unarmed.” Realising that, the military apparatus, spearheaded by Sisi himself, administrated a crackdown on its middle-class power-sharers, crushing contenders and allies alike. It did so through multiple means, articulately described in Egypt under El-Sisi, which fall under three mutually reinforcing policy categories – legalisation of repression, displays of bloodshed, and the military capture of the economy. Repressive laws were passed with a violent state crackdown on any public dissent. This facilitated further violence by granting it a legalised status. In turn, this dynamic granted the military both the legal and the armed control over the most lucrative markets within the Egyptian economy, which further enhanced the officers’ loyalty to the regime, facilitating further violence. Such a vicious cycle eventually led to the middle-class becoming, once again, sidelined; this time with no other significant regime actors at play, and hence no need for co-opting any social class whatsoever. The result was, Mandour describes, a first of its kind military dictatorship that feels no political obligation towards any other actor; neither security partners nor any social class – no spies, no statesmen, just soldiers.
Egypt Under El-Sisi claims to be a narrative of the rise of a military dictatorship and the demise of the traditional post-Nasserist liberal autocracy. But the book’s relevance goes far beyond that, especially to students of Gramsci and post-Marxist critical thought.
Egypt Under El-Sisi claims to be a narrative of the rise of a military dictatorship and the demise of the traditional post-Nasserist liberal autocracy. But the book’s relevance goes far beyond that, especially to students of Gramsci and post-Marxist critical thought. The book’s analysis of post-January 25th politics in Egypt points to an exceptional form of “passive revolution” which has no class of beneficiaries other than the military itself. Its structural arrangement looks like a product of a typical military coup, except that it is not. In fact, the regime outset, always relied on popular mobilisation, despite the absence of the mobilised class and its agenda from all aspects of policymaking.
That is the main question the book leaves us with, one that encourages further empirical research, but also conceptual enquiry into the possibility of a semi-hegemonic arrangement that lacks not only ideological underpinnings, but even structural foundations. No doubt, the starting point for such an analysis would be Gramsci’s “passive revolution”, but how could this revolution be possible without a class of beneficiaries? Perhaps the answer lies beyond the structural analysis Gramscian paradigms proffer, and one should rather look into superstructural instruments by which the masses could be deceived to recurrently act against their best interest.
This post gives the views of the author, and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, or of the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Image Credit: mehmet ali poyraz on Shutterstock.
‘Fighting the Enlightenment?’: What Do Danny Kruger’s New Conservatives Really Want?
Conservative MP Danny Kruger has been described as “one of parliament’s leading thinkers”. He was described that way by whoever wrote the dust jacket to his book Covenant: The New Politics of Home, Neighbourhood and Nation (Forum, 2023).
Kruger leads the New Conservatives, one of the many factions chewing on the liver of the Conservative Party. He helped lead the right-wing “rebellion” against the government’s Rwanda bill, and could shape the fate of Rishi Sunak and what comes next. But what does Danny Kruger think, and what do his New Conservatives want?
In Covenant, Kruger argues that the UK has forgotten three pillars of society: Home, meaning family; Neighbourhood, meaning one’s local community; and Nation, meaning one’s country of residence. These bonds have been diluted (Kruger likes his metaphors faint) by material and ideological changes, resulting in general strife and decline.
Kruger describes this as a conflict between the (capital “O”) Order and the (capital “I”) Idea. The Order is the “traditional normative dispositions” which “reflect the truth of things”, while the Idea is “a religion of individual self-creation that unpicks the connecting fibres of society and ruins the person”: “In replacing the Order with the Idea we replace the centrality of relationships with the centrality of the self.”
What follows is a familiar attack on the excesses of liberalism. Kruger dislikes the word “woke” (“too trivial, too mocking for such a powerful and resourceful enemy”), but embraces the term “culture war”. What makes him novel in a UK context is to make this case in explicitly religious terms.
Fighting the Enlightenment
“The culture war”, Kruger writes, “is a religious conflict about the right gods to worship. […] It is a battle for the strongholds of society itself”. Here Kruger echoes US reactionary Pat Buchanan’s 1992 speech declaring “a cultural war for the soul of America”. (Buchanan rather tellingly painted the culture war as a successor to the Cold War against “godless” socialism – a point to keep in mind.)
As this suggests, Kruger is more reactionary than your typical Tory MP. He believes things started going wrong in the 18th century with the Enlightenment, the “exaggerated rationalism” of which was the first rebellion against the Order. This led to something worse: the Idea, which, “having killed liberalism from within, has animated its carcass with a different philosophy, and this zombified monster now rules instead”.
Here’s the first big problem. Kruger portrays this modern, post-Enlightenment Left as a surrogate religion – a cult of the individual, with the arrogance to believe humans are infallible. But if humans are fallible (as we surely are), how can he claim to know that the traditional Christian Order “represents the truth of things”?
Throughout the book, Kruger makes grand assertions like this – “We were born to worship: This is our essence, as primary as our existence” – without providing a shred of evidence to support them. He assumes what he needs to prove, and writes as if Christianity is outside the realm of man-made ideas.
You can’t really attack the “woke” Left for resembling a religion if you think the secular Enlightenment is the problem to begin with. Not, that is, unless you argue that modern Leftism is a false god, which would simply be a call to replace one set of pieties with another. Thus Kruger robs his critique of its potential sting, and fires an arrow directly into his own foot.
Second, Kruger fails to name his enemy except in abstract terms (“the Idea”). The book oddly has few if any quotes from the modern progressives it attacks, relying instead on second-hand accounts from the Left’s critics. He does quote some radical thinkers from the 20th century – Jean-Paul Sartre, Herbert Marcuse, Simone De Beauvoir – all of whom are long-dead, and whose influence he comically overstates. (Example: “Sartre’s essay was published in 1946. It was not until 2020 that his principles became an official doctrine.”)
In Kruger’s telling, the West was led astray by these writers, whose ideas transformed society and shaped our modern world. This is not so much bad history as a ‘Just-So Story’, and with about as much explanatory value. It’s Paradise Lost, with Sartre in the role of Lucifer.
Cardinal Sins
What are Kruger’s pieties? The MP for Devizes argues (at length) that “marriage is the safest and best place for sex”. He calls transgender rights “the latest attempt to attribute evil to creation”. He frets about new tech and AI, (or “robots”), asking: “Will the machines belong to the Order, or to the Idea?”
Then there’s this: “the dissolution of families also leads, just as naturally, to the great disaster that is impending in the West: the deliberate killing of the old, the ill and the disabled.” Kruger is referring to euthanasia, or assisted suicide, which he considers central to the progressive scheme:
“Death is the externality of the Idea. When we live for ourselves, others must die. If we think we are good and creation is bad, we end up killing people. Instead of a pleasure dome, we make a hecatomb, a mass sacrifice of human life to the gods of our culture. This is the deathworks.”
It’s curious that Kruger gets so animated about this. For one thing, euthanasia has been illegal in the UK since 1961. For another, Kruger writes that he feels “ashamed” of voting for Covid restrictions when the alternative would have been more deaths among the old and the infirm.
Despite the alleged scale of the threat posed by the Idea, Kruger’s proposals are incredibly weak: compulsory council work, insurance-based parental leave, and so on. On economics, Kruger writes that “a free market [...] depends on the proper moral orientation of businesspeople” – in other words, nice capitalists. If only we were to create a “more purposeful commercial sector”, Kruger writes, we could “realise the conservative vision of a low-tax, light-regulation economy”. Perhaps we could arrange for Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos et al to be visited by three ghosts…
There are other contradictions. Why, for example, does he not extend his argument about family, neighbourhood, and country to international communities like the European Union? Kruger was an active Leave campaigner and recently named Brexit as “the great standing achievement of our time in office”.
On the national question, Kruger again veers into dark fantasy. As he writes in the book: “The ‘enemy’ for Brexiteers was and is the anti-identity of globalism, the doctrine of international allegiance that has infected not just the EU but progressive elites across the world, and in the UK especially.”
At last year’s Tory conference, Kruger opined that “the penny is dropping among people in Westminster that the Government doesn’t run the government”. He went on to warn of a “huge movement” to create “a world government that will have power to dictate to national governments what they should do in anticipation of another pandemic.” This isn’t a modest plea for a return to “traditional values”. It’s the worldview of the radical Right, in its most internet-crazed conspiracy theory form.
Material Realities
Let’s bring Kruger down to earth. Before entering parliament, he was a senior fellow at the Legatum Institute, a pro-Brexit think tank run by the Legatum Group, the UAE-based investment firm behind GB News. The Legatum crowd has mastered the art of preaching national populism while being funded by millionaires based in Dubai. Anti-globalism is a funny business.
Kruger spoke at the launch of Legatum’s churchy Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC) project last year, which is led by self-help culture warrior Jordan Peterson. Kruger’s New Conservatives (a limited company) received £50,000 from Legatum in December.
And the hits keep coming. Since joining Parliament in 2019, Kruger has worked as a senior advisor to Boris Johnson – surely the embodiment of godless individualism, and not a great one for the sanctity of marriage. During the pandemic, Kruger defended Johnson aide Dominic Cummings (an “old friend”) over his breaking of lockdown rules, on the grounds that he was doing what was best for his family.
In the 2022 Tory leadership race, Kruger endorsed Suella Braverman to be Prime Minister. Last month, Kruger was one of only 11 MPs to follow through with their threat to vote against the government’s Rwanda bill – though not exactly on Christian grounds. As he explained, “It still allows for migrants’ lawyers to claim that their removal to Rwanda would breach their human rights”. Did I mention that Kruger describes his new covenant as “the politics of love”?
Kruger has warned that the Tories face “obliteration” in the next general election, which given the polls hardly counts as a prophecy. Whatever happens, he and his Legatum backers will be there to pick up the pieces and will continue their holy war against the Left.
Late Fascism: Race, Capitalism and the Politics of Crisis – review
In Late Fascism: Race, Capitalism and the Politics of Crisis, Alberto Toscano unpacks the rise of contemporary far-right movements that have emerged amid capitalist crises and appropriated liberal freedoms while perpetuating systemic forms of violence. According to Dimitri Vouros, Toscano’s penetrating, theoretically grounded analysis is an essential resource for understanding and confronting the resurgence of reactionary ideologies.
Late Fascism: Race, Capitalism and the Politics of Crisis. Alberto Toscano. Verso. 2023.
Observing the leftwing populism that emerged after the 2007 financial crash, a perceptive critical theorist may have predicted that this hope-inspiring movement would quickly be reintegrated into the neoliberal order. They might further have predicted that a counter-revolution would arise in the vacuum left by the failed leftist movement and as a reaction to continuing economic difficulties. Indeed, in the last decade the rise of the populist right has been both steady and near universal.
[Toscano] sets out to explain why the spectre of the extreme right is not merely haunting us, but gaining political purchase across the globe
In Late Fascism, Alberto Toscano, who has been instrumental in the resurgence of Marxist and materialist sociocultural analysis over the past twenty years, offers an important theory of fascism for our current historical juncture. He sets out to explain why the spectre of the extreme right is not merely haunting us, but gaining political purchase across the globe. The measured, lapidary style of Toscano’s argument, which draws on the 20th century’s “rich archives” of antifascist thought (155), most of it Marxist or marxisant, treats the deep, structural aspects of the political often ignored by other analyses. He does this by leaning on a style of literary-philosophical excavation and elucidation more often found in classical critical theory like that of Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin.
One of the marks of fascism is to amalgamate seemingly incompatible positions. Indeed, it is a complex phenomenon, “scavenging the ideological terrain for usable materials”, including many currents on the left (155). Toscano does not follow mainstream political theory in conflating fascism with totalitarianism, command economies, and brute force. He argues that late fascism is “disanalogous” with historical fascisms. Instead, he focuses on the implicit forms of violence and repression – colonial, racial, sexual, and gender-based – that inform late fascism. This kind of hidden violence becomes especially noticeable, and acute, when capitalism faces financial and other crises.
As well as developing the idea that reactionary ideologies emerge out of capitalist crisis, notably as the co-option of working-class movements by the right as soon as the opportunity arises, Toscano notes the role capitalist exchange relations play in the epistemological foundation of fascist-adjacent ideologies. Yet the most original thesis in the book is that the touted freedoms of liberalism and free-market capitalism are also appropriated by late fascism. In fact, late fascism is only nominally attached to liberal ideals such as “individual action” and “free speech”. Its claim to be on the side of the individual and their political agency is clearly false, its objective really being to reproduce prior forms of subjection and create new forms of subjugation. Jessica Whyte has also suggested a similar dissimulation in the neoliberal support for human rights.
The rapid rise of this ideology may also be tied to online culture, although Toscano avoids elaborating on the political ramifications of this development. Instead, he gives a historical outline of classical Marxist arguments against reactionary thought and movements. As the subtitle of his book indicates, understanding the ideology of the far right must include a theory of the systemic reproduction of colonialism, racism and sexism. Toscano writes, “Whoever is not willing to talk about anti-capitalism should also keep quiet about anti-fascism” (158). Yet understanding fascism as a tendency within capitalism that merely continues what critical theory calls “identity thinking” is part of a critical venture “inseparable from the collective forging of ways of living that can undo lethal romances of identity, hierarchy and domination that capitalist crisis throws up with grim regularity” (158).
Understanding the ideology of the far right must include a theory of the systemic reproduction of colonialism, racism and sexism
Four key ideas explain late fascism. Firstly, it “cannot be understood without the “fascisms before fascism” that accompanied the imperialist consolidation of a capitalist world-system”, namely, the political and economic domination of the world by Europe, peaking in the 18th and 19th centuries, made possible by the material exploitation of its various colonial strongholds. Secondly, it can only be understood “across axes of race, gender and sexuality”. Thirdly, it includes the “desire for ethnonational rebirth or revanche stoked by the imminence of a threat projected as civilizational, demographic and existential”. Lastly, it involves “the production of identifications and subjectivities, desires and forms of life, which do not simply demand obedience to despotic power but draw on a sui generis idea of freedom” (156-57). These four aspects of late fascism are developed in some detail with a breadth that will satisfy anyone interested in the history of antifascist thought and resistance.
Each chapter provides a different window onto the ideology of fascism and explains why understanding it is imperative. The first chapter looks at the temporally destabilising aspects of fascist ideology, with its archaisms, anachronisms, and wrong-headed projections of majestic, uncorrupted futures. The second focuses on the dynamics of capitalism and race, mainly how the Black liberation struggles of the 1960s provide a template for understanding the racial nature of capitalism, with its continuing repression of minorities and punitive carceral system. The third chapter provides an overview of how the populist right appropriates the classical liberal understanding of individual freedom and toleration for its own purposes. It inverts such individualism, supporting the dominant narrative of equality; namely, the freedom to accumulate property and social power (the latter being skewed along racial and sexual lines, ie, white, male or heteronormative).
The fourth chapter, the most difficult, looks at the political subterfuge manifested by the “real abstractions” within a totalised exchange society. The references to Alfred Sohn-Rethel and Henri Lefevbre are especially illuminating. These latter two authors argue that capitalist ideology views everyday social relations upside down, as first pointed out by Marx in his theory of commodity fetishism and alienation. The central point is that the ends of capital and profit are prioritised over labour, the labourer being merely a commodity on the market, and ensuring capital accumulation.
Toscano demonstrates how the ‘scavenger ideology’ of fascism, which draws on Romanticism, political decisionism, a fascination with technology, and even socialism, is a pressing danger.
The fifth chapter deals again with temporality but this time through the philosophical understanding of “repetition”. Toscano singles out and censures Martin Heiddeger’s fundamental ontology”, which is concerned with “being” and the naturalised historical subject, as leading to a reactionary, “counter-revolutionary” politics. Toscano demonstrates how the “scavenger ideology” of fascism, which draws on Romanticism, political decisionism, a fascination with technology, and even socialism, is a pressing danger. This danger is magnified by its ability “to weaponise a kind of structured incoherence in its political and temporal imaginaries, modulating them to enlist and energise different class fractions, thereby capturing, diverting and corrupting popular aspirations” (110).
Based on a reading of the writings of the Italian Germanist and mythologist Furio Jesi, the sixth chapter deals with the far right’s version of the philosophy of religio mortis, a fascination with myth, sacrifice, and death, but updated for a technological (and now digital) era. Drawing on the idea of a “micropolitical antifascist struggle”, as found in the works of Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, and Michel Foucault, the last chapter deals with the ambivalent erotics of fascist ideology, arguing that the libidinal introjection of violence reinforces various forms of social power. Here, Toscano also draws on the feminism of Maria Antonietta Macciocchi, claiming that the Nazi “antipolitical politicization of women” (148) resonates with current modalities of “fascist feminism” that seek “to violently secure and affirm a normative, if not necessarily heteropatriarchal, figure of woman, and which invests desire and libido in its narratives about the imminent threat of the erasure of women and even feminism by ‘gender ideology’ and ‘transness’” (150).
Toscano’s archaeology of 20th-century antifascist theory is an essential springboard for understanding the current political moment. It is a boon for those thinkers and activists interested in human emancipation and the struggle for real, rather than merely abstract, freedom. It alerts them to the threat posed to such projects by that deeply prejudicial ideology that arises alongside capitalism in crisis – late fascism.
This post gives the views of the author, and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, or of the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Image credit: Alexandros Michailidis on Shutterstock.
‘Keir Starmer is Using Right-Wing Methods in Service of a Few Tamer Left-wing Hopes’
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Military commands include such phrases as ‘by the left, quick march!’ – and, as it happens, ‘by the right’ and ‘by the centre’ – but the left-footed starting point for progress onward is the better metaphor.
There was also the curious tradition in Ancient Egypt that one should only ever step into a haunted house with the left foot first which, in my view, is another apt metaphor for our day. When the politicians currently squatting in the desolate corridors of Whitehall have been evicted at the next election, those who inherit the mess will need to take care where they step. ‘Tread carefully, for you tread on my misdeeds’ will be a suitable adaptation of Yeats.
So how might, how should, an incoming government tread?
I have no clear conception of what Labour Party policy is on most major issues. This is, of course, a function of the immense care Keir Starmer has taken to offer not a single hostage to fortune before an election campaign.
The big lead over the Conservatives that Labour has for long now enjoyed owes itself to Labour not being the Conservatives, rather than to a quiver-full of brilliant and enticing policies that thrill the hearts of the EU-loving, Proportional-Representation-loving majority of Labour Party members and supporters – to whose wishes in these respects Starmer has firmly turned a Nelsonian blind eye.
The fact that neither of these urgently-desired and urgently-needed remedies is on offer from Starmer is a bad sign. It suggests that such spring cleaning as will occur in Whitehall and Downing Street will not include the principal rooms of the mansions of state, where the trash will be left undisturbed, projecting its bad smells and its resident rodents over the rest as usual.
Why? Because of a simple, but devastatingly, important fact about the wings of politics, which has come to hijack and pollute the dream of democracy and good government.
Could Isaac Levido Return the Conservatives to Power Again Against All the Odds?
With the Conservatives’ general election strategy in the hands of the ‘Wizard of Oz’, it’s likely to be one of the most vicious campaigns the UK has ever seen. Tom Scott reports
Tom Scott
Right-wing politics is an ideology, very well organised and single-minded, which puts the acquisition of power above all else in service to a single burning ideal: that apart from external defence and internal policing, government should be about protecting the interests of those with the talent, desire and opportunity to make money.
It is not about educating, providing healthcare, picking up those who fall at the wayside, encouraging the weak, or constraining the depredations of the strong. Rather the contrary. It is every man for himself.
Low tax and small government, the latter because of the former, is the recipe, and low tax is a sacred tenet because money belongs to he who makes it. When a right-wing government inherits a dispensation in which major public assets have been accumulated – utilities, a health service – it licks its lips: here is fruit ripe for the picking; even selling it cheap to friends brings in enough to cut taxes and ensure re-election.
Left-wing politics, by contrast, is a disorganisation of many ideologies.
It is a loose coalition of bien-pensants, of concerned, justice-motivated individuals and groups, internally fissiparous, distracted by the opposing pulls of righteous causes. It absorbs and dissipates itself in debates and disputes, in gestures and demonstrations, in a Babel of nostrums in which the various calls to be made on the public purse so far outrun what that purse can contain as themselves to be a source of friction.
Right-wingers form governments more often than left-wingers, especially in two-party First Past The Post (FPTP) settings, because they are better organised, more focused, clearer and simpler in their aims, and unburdened by too many principles. And they form governments more often even though they are in a perpetual minority.
If one were to make a stab at Starmer’s right-left positioning it might be this: from the point of view of one who is determined on getting into Downing Street and aims to operate the existing machinery of state mainly unchanged, his is a ruthlessly intelligent use of right-wing methods in service of a few of the tamer left-wing hopes – those that do not frighten too many in the electorate.
I would prefer any of Labour, Liberal Democrat, Green, True And Fair or Rejoin EU to form a government in Westminster rather than the Conservatives. But I would prefer even more to have Labour – the likely next government – understand that if what it is offering constitutionally is a matter of business as usual, but with our rosette on it, leaving open the door in four years’ time for another Conservative government – because the Tories do this ruthless-intelligent thing better.
If Labour is a party that cares about the people, the country, and the future of the young, it will do something bold with its honeymoon period – it will reform the electoral system, and it will, at the very least, rejoin the European Single Market.
These two moves would have the effect of liberating the UK from an eternal recurrence to minority one-party right-wing rule, which is what FPTP delivers, along with all the potential for the horrors seen in the current iteration of it. And it would deliver us from the accelerating economic decline that leaving the EU has precipitated.
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It is seriously weird to watch a country so wantonly harm itself and its people, condemning millions to poverty, undermining its businesses, shutting off the social and economic oxygen which had been the its life-support as a member of the EU, and making itself an international joke, as the UK has done with Brexit.
The need to reform and rejoin are two clear simple truths, which honest politicians genuinely concerned about the welfare of the people and our country would act upon.
Critics will immediately cry that they will be hard to do but both are just a matter of political will.
Both PR and the EU are well-known quantities – the UK has plenty of experience of both, because we use PR for almost every election except for Westminster, and we had half a century of EEC/EU membership which saved us from economic collapse in the 1970s and sustained us, broadened us, made us part of a great imaginative project – not without its problems, not a few of which we ourselves caused with the petty thumb-sucking attitudes of the Eurosceptics – until we threw away the pearl of great price that was our share in the endeavour of peace, progress and prosperity that the EU sets itself to be.
Allegedly, when the order ‘by the left, quick march’ was given to troops in times past, it signalled to the enemy that no quarter was to be given in the fighting to come. If the political groupings on the British left and centre-left, together constituting the majority in the country, were to unite at least temporarily and gird themselves for these reforms, giving no quarter to the bad old ways which have sunk our country to its present low –because they subject us too easily and often to that formidable steely-eyed minority right-wing – we would be on the way to a victory worth having.
A victory of national salvation.
‘In Fighting for the Cause of Refugees and Migrants, We Fight For Ourselves’
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If Trump wins next year's US Presidential Election, as Robert Kagan in The Washington Post both terrifiedly and terrifyingly says is now inevitable, will there be a flow of intellectuals and scientists out of the United States in a reverse of the flow of intellectuals and scientists from Europe into the US in the 1930s?
A flow of US refugees – genuine refugees, fleeing the collapse of their country into an illiberal, mean-spirited, even perhaps dangerous place for anyone not of the MAGA persuasion – is not inconceivable. Who with a sense of decency could stomach a situation of Donald Trump’s making?
The triumph of the US began in economic power before the Second World War and was sustained and enhanced after it by those refugees from European fascism. What will the world be like with wealth-powerful bullying states overshadowing it and bridling against each other – a Trumpian US; an irredentist, expansionist China; a world dominated by dictators?
This speculation invites analysis, given that the likelihood is that this is our future. But for present purposes let us focus on the word ‘refugees’ just used in this unexpected connection: ‘refugees from the US’. And let us consider that the refugee crises of recent years are as nothing – are as mere Sunday picnics – in comparison to the vast displacements of populations soon to be precipitated by climate change: a catastrophe of hundreds of millions of refugees, not mere millions, into regions unprepared and unwilling.
We have grown used to refugees from the crises in the Middle East and Ukraine, but the future’s refugees will be different, from different places, and far more numerous, than those we see today.
The Identity Trap: Race, Representation and the Rise of Conservative Diversity
Rishi Sunak is in the running to be Britain’s first prime minister of colour – but the debate around whether this will be a good thing for ethnic minorities has laid bare conflicting ideas about the ‘individual’ and the ‘collective’, writes Hardeep Matharu
Hardeep Matharu
In the far-right rhetoric of Victor Orbán, Geert Wilders and Suella Braverman, ‘immigrants’ are lumped together – whether they are refugees or migrants – in one unwelcome mass of moving populations seeking (in the case of refugees) safety or (in the case of migrants) opportunity. But as this distinction illustrates, refugees and migrants are not the same.
Many refugees are anxious to return home when peace is restored; migrants are in quest of a new home. Does this distinction show up in the numbers on ‘immigration’, in the provisions made for them, in the way they are dealt with? No. They are all lumped into the category ‘immigration’ because would-be immigrants, when their numbers reach a critical mass, trouble native populations, which – everywhere in the world, when left to unreflective tribalist instincts – are naturally xenophobic if not downright racist.
The resurgence in recent years of far-right politics in Europe and the US is based on the exploitation of xenophobia as the tool of choice for gaining power. Once got, that power is used to roll-back democracy, civil liberties and the rule of law, aimed at reducing the state from a structure of governance on behalf of the people to a structure for wielding coercive power over the people. It is a familiar story to anyone who bothers to read history.
In the UK today, a desperate Conservative Party is flogging the immigration horse as hard as it can to try to save its skin – because it sees how the right elsewhere is gaining ground by means of the anti-immigration agenda. It has not yet finished delivering the state into private pockets and completing its agenda of creating a subject population unable to protest, strike, or expect decent public services. It wants to finish the job of asset-stripping the country for themselves and the masters behind them in the media and tax-havens and board rooms.
That the citizenry of the UK is not pouring onto the streets in protest at the screaming hypocrisy of a UK government stuffed out with the offspring of immigrants is testament to the dazement induced by the anti-immigrant rhetoric of these immigrant children. But what is worse is that the rhetoric is so effective in switching off thought on the part of so many.
For if they did pause to consider, just for a moment, what the individual units of ‘immigration’ actually are – ie: human beings; men, women, fathers, mothers, children – how could they persist in accepting the bemusement of their faculties? Readers of these words won’t need reminding, but here is the distinction between a refugee and a migrant, and what each is.
‘Asylum seeker’, ‘refugee’. What is such a person? A human being fleeing persecution, danger, death, struggle, terror, horror. A human being fleeing guns and bombs, prisons, torture, cruelty, murder. A human being traumatised, shaking with fear, desperate. A human being who has heard, who has emitted, screams and cries of pain and grief, who has run away from a nightmare. A human being in dire need of safety.
‘Migrant’ What is such a person? A human being quitting places of hunger, futurelessness, who wants a chance to make a life, for himself or herself and his and her children, who wants stability, opportunity, who wants a new life, who wants a job, a home, security, a chance to grow into something they feel they can be.
People leave places because they are pushed and because they are pulled. The refugees are pushed by danger, the migrant by sterility of opportunity. Both are pulled by places that are better, safer, far more promising. Their situation in either case is so bad where they are that they risk much, often everything, to reach better places. However unfamiliar the new place, the strange language, the uncertainty of their reception, it is better by far than the place they leave.
Their action takes immense courage, resolve and effort. They do what human beings have always done, from the moment that homo sapiens trekked out of Africa 60,000 years ago – indeed, from the moment that homo erectus trekked out of Africa two million years ago – to find better places to be.
And here is the clincher: immigrants add, they do not take away. Look at the US in the years 1880-1939 and ask whether the huge waves of immigration in those decades was a bad thing for it. Well, was it?
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In today’s UK there are 165,000 vacancies in the care industry – yet the politicians, to pander to ignorance and prejudice, bring down the shutters. Our NHS, our universities, our small business sector (99% of British businesses are small to medium-sized enterprises or SMEs), profit hugely from ‘incomers’. Germany and Australia need net immigration lest their economies stall; whereas the saner political parties in the former understand the problem, politicians in the latter play the same tattered card on both sides of the aisle. It is madness.
Among the solutions to the ‘problem’ of immigration are these: (a) educate the home population on the facts: immigrants add value; (b) invest in the countries that drive migrants outward because of the economic insufficiencies there, so that talent remains there and the impulse to leave is lessened.
And as to refugees and asylum seekers: chief among the solutions to this different problem are: (c) work to bring peace and stability to the regions that drive their terrified populations out; (d) be humane, be kind, welcome them when they stagger onto our shores, succour them.
Note always: migrants are those who explicitly seek to be immigrants. Not all refugees, indeed, perhaps not many of them, wish to be immigrants. Do not discriminate against either of them; discriminate between them and treat them accordingly – which with regard to both means decently.
It is essential to recognise, and not be fooled by, the use of the ‘immigration’ canard to blind us to the real agenda of the far-right. The far-right stir up hostility to an easily demonised ‘other’ as a mask for the rest of their wider and equally bad agenda. They are at present winning this nasty game. We must not let them. In fighting for the cause of refugees and migrants, we fight for ourselves.