We know, obviously, that the new British right defines itself not by what it stands for, but by what it opposes. Reform UK, along with the incipiently fascist street movements they’ve provided political cover for, rarely extend their campaigning beyond the marginalisation of certain demographics: most obviously migrants (and by implication all ethnic minorities), frequently the trans community, and any other peripheral groups they feel are cheating ‘ordinary working people’ out of an honest living.
Only very occasionally will they hit upon a more deserving target: the administrative state, the professional-managerial class, entrenched members of the political elite, and so on. But, lacking the means (or in many cases the inclination) to articulate the causes of, and construct alternatives to, the decades-long disintegration of civic life, they instead concern themselves with directing inchoate public anger towards the most vulnerable members of society. It is, in short, a political expression of hatred.
Yet when you pay close attention to how these emboldened extremists actually act and speak, especially under pressure, it becomes apparent that they reserve their most visceral hatred – and fear – for what they broadly refer to as ‘The Left’. It’s not always obvious to whom this tag refers, but it broadly encompasses those whose politics entails protecting minorities, as part of a larger project of transforming society rather than limply prosecuting symptoms.
At the recent Reform UK party conference, both Nigel Farage and Nadine Dorries reserved the most serious passages of their speeches for what the former called ‘the leftward drift’. As confidence in winning power grows, the demeanour of the right is becoming more explicitly anti-left. The battle to stigmatise and demonise the powerless has largely been won, and the implementation of policies to put this hatred into practice is assumed to be a foregone conclusion. Labour and the Tories, meanwhile, are treated as irrelevant jokes. Defeat of the liberal-capitalist establishment seems an inevitability – the only jeopardy for the right is the possibility of the left disrupting them.
A more intense version of this can be observed at the anti-migrant ‘hotel protests’ currently sweeping the country, a situation stoked by the right-wing press, and mobilised by Facebook, group chats, and shadier corners of the internet. Like the post-Southport-murder riots last summer, there’s a looming possibility of these protests snowballing into widespread pogromist violence.
These ‘protests’ are invariably documented – and often endorsed – by a cast of on-the-ground vloggers and livestreamers. In one such video, the anti-migrant contingent are happy to reel off the usual lines about ‘fighting-aged men’, ‘looking after our own’, ‘wanting what’s best for our country’ etc with a casual ease, but they are utterly incensed by the prospect of a ‘leftie’ infiltrating their gathering and asking even the mildest of questions about their motivations. As we’ve seen from large-scale far-right marches, it’s only when met with left-wing opposition that violence really flares up. They are otherwise wholly comfortable in the physical and discursive spaces that the political establishment has carved out for them.
It’s likely, then, that if the ambient threats of organised right-wing violence come to a head in this country, especially as Reform edges closer to nationwide power, the regrouping left will be the first to feel the full force of this latent rage.
While this danger for the left is very real, and very grave, there still lies within it a reason for motivation, if not outright optimism. Socialist organisers can take inspiration from how threatened the right is by their mere existence. Only socialist organising is capable of building the collective power to outflank the right on the street, while also building the intellectual and infrastructural means of solving the problems that plague our society – and, crucially, winning around the people having their political anxieties exploited and misdirected. The right, meanwhile, is inherently incapable of organising anything substantive: they only trade in astroturfing and rage. The right know this, consciously or not, and therein lies the fear.
It also speaks to the left still having a strength and presence in the eyes of its antagonists, in spite of its own self deprecation, defeatist melancholia and interminable infighting. After years of retreat, the left is finally regrouping. If it really was a political irrelevance, as Labour and the Tories are increasingly considered, it would not be spoken of in the doom-mongering tones coming from the mouths of the right.
The previous decade has also demonstrated that, when push comes to shove, the centre, on the brink of being annihilated by the right, will join the clampdown on leftist organising. This isn’t empty paranoia, just as the anticipation of violence is more than mere masochistic fantasy. Both are based on very recent history. We witnessed a similar – in hindsight tamer – phenomenon take place just half a decade ago. In 2019, British liberals were faced with the stark choice between a socialist government and a right-wing one – and more broadly, between preventing and enabling everything dangerous in British politics today. They chose the latter without hesitation. Then, as part of that electoral campaign, scores of left-wing activists were assaulted on the streets and on the doorsteps for their political views, their attackers incited into violence by right-wing hysteria and centrist acquiescence.
We can salvage motivation from this, too. It’s instructive of how our politics is constituted, how the antagonists of the left are aligned, and how the left should organise as a result. The right and the centre are but two interrelated fractions of capital: liberalism suffices in times of relative prosperity; in times of crisis it is necessarily supplanted by more authoritarian forms of governance. The far-right ascendancy is thus not a break from our current political settlement, but an intensification of it. We are seeing an instance of this play out before our eyes.
Again, this all goes to show that the contemporary right knows full well which forms of politics are capable of stopping them: not the soon-to-be-steamrolled inadequacies of Labour centrism, and certainly not the husk of the Tory party.
We shouldn’t be naive to the fact that the right is assuredly in the ascendency, while the left’s status can be described as nascent at best. Two things remain clear, however: firstly, that the socialist movement, however it’s eventually constituted, will face brutal opposition from the right; secondly, that this threat underlines the importance of not letting liberals anywhere near such a movement. As we shall soon hopefully see, the organised left can and must build itself on its own terms. Let the terror of the right be a proof of concept.
Disposable Everything 