Hardly A Rightist Position

Underneath Owen Jones’s article calling for a new left-wing party, Ken Bell, who formerly blogged as The Exile, writes:

“Another set of initials, that’s what’s needed! I don’t think so, and that is why I joined UKIP last October. Opposition to the EU is hardly a rightist position. It was the Tories who took us in and the CBI who are now screaming that we should remain in. If something is good for the bosses then it is bad for the workers which is as good a reason as any to join UKIP, the only game in town at the moment. Most of my old mates from Oldham Labour days are now in the party as are quite a few old Communists. Come and join us.”

Contributors below the line on here, what make you of that? Is it still the UKIP line that the cuts do not go far enough, that they do not really exist at all, and that Maggie was the Great White Whale of Good Things in general and of Euroscepticism in particular? Riven between the Old Right and the New Right, each of which thinks of the party as its own and no one else’s, UKIP was unstable enough without this.

When Owen was on Question Time last 22nd November, he stated the left-wing case against the EU, which is the mainstream case everywhere else, and indeed here. But ssshh, no one must ever know. If the Question Time producers had known that Owen was going to hint at the existence of such a position, then they would never have let him on. Farage was not on, so he must have been on holiday that week.

Ken is as Old Left as you could possibly imagine; I had vaguely assumed that he was in the SLP, about which it says a great deal, and not in a good way, that he and many of his long-time associates are in UKIP instead. No ageing Marxism Today type he, although I expect that he did read it.

But I ask him, and everyone else, to consider that attendance to what were once the largely ignored and marginalised phenomena of environmentalism, feminism, Third World liberation movements, the influence of tendencies such as Black Power and Black Consciousness, and the use of homosexuality as a mark of individual and collective identity, has opened up the space for attendance to what are largely ignored and marginalised phenomena today.

For example, the indispensable role of the State in protecting against the market everything that conservatives seek to conserve is emphasised by the traditions deriving from disaffection with the events of 1688, 1776 and 1789. Those offer perennial critiques of individualism, capitalism, imperialism, militarism, bourgeois triumphalism, and the fallacy of inevitable historical progress. That was the soil in which were planted the trade union, the co-operative and mutual, the Radical Liberal, the Tory populist, the Guild Socialist, the Christian Socialist, the Social Catholic and Distributist, and the many other non-Marxist roots of the British, Irish and Commonwealth Labour Movements.

Variously, those roots have been embedded in, have been fed and watered by, and have grown into economic and wider patriotism locally and nationally, proud provincialism, worker-intellectualism, the maintenance of rural communities, the self-organisation of the rural working class, and a strong affinity with the recent historical reality of workers’ self-management and profit-sharing within a multinational state. That state included both culturally Christian and culturally Muslim places and peoples. It enjoyed vast global influence while resolutely pursuing peace and eschewing transnational military power blocs.

“Identity politics”, as if there could ever really be any other kind, have been, will be, should be, and are being appropriated, deployed, transformed and transcended by heterosexual males, by Christians, by the White British ethnic group, by those who identify specifically as English, and by people of mixed ethnic heritage. Perhaps an expression of the first, third and fourth of these, at least, is the accession of Ken and his comrades to UKIP? And what does that mean for UKIP?

The United Kingdom is uniquely well-placed to host these discussions, being the bridge between Europe and the English-speaking world, being the heart of the Commonwealth, being the home of the British Council and of the BBC, and being possessed of the world city. Our critique of Whiggery predates any Counterrevolutionary movement on the Continent, because it predates any Revolution there or in North America. Our non-Marxist Left is itself deeply rooted in the anti-Whig subcultures. Predating Marx, it long predates Gramsci in meeting and transcending numerous of his aspirations.

Such is the intellectual basis for the filling of a very British lack, namely that of anything to anchor the Left while engaging fully in the battle of ideas at every level of cultural life and of the education system; while refusing to consign or to confine demotic culture to “the enormous condescension of posterity; while co-ordinating broad-based and inclusive campaigns for human rights and civil liberties, for peace (including nuclear, radiological, chemical and biological disarmament, and including against the arms trade), for environmental responsibility, and for the defence and extension of jobs, services and amenities; and while acting as a friendly critic and a critical friend of, in British terms, the Labour Party.

At best, and it turns out also at worst, we have had to make do for at least 20 years with the SWP, “Workers” who have never so much as ironed a shirt or changed a light bulb in their lives. And that in a country in which fewer than one in four people identified as working-class this time last year, but, after a further 12 months of the present Government, three out a five do so now. This Parliament still has a year and a half of further such growth to go.