Monday 5 March 2018

Potent But Toxic, Toxic But Potent

As snow and arthritis conspired to keep me worshipping in the basilica of my heart, I saw just how bad the Theresa May fanzines of Sunday morning television really were. The highlight was Michael Howard's provision of a tenor line to Nicky Morgan's Hallelujah Chorus in praise of May's speech on Friday.

Conservative Eurosceptics are a myth. No such person has sat in either House of Parliament since 2015's retirement of Sir Peter Tapsell, whose objections to the EU were substantially the same as Peter Shore's had been.

It pales into insignificance next to May's capitulation, which cannot have been anything else if Morgan supports it, but that Customs Union business was not Jeremy Corbyn's first offence. He initially appointed a Shadow Cabinet that was made up of people who ought to have been told in all frankness that they had just lost an election very heavily.

He allowed a free vote on Syria, and he whipped his front bench to abstain on Trident; if anything, it should have been a three-line whip on Syria, as on Iraq, and then a free vote on Trident. If Corbyn had done as much against a Labour council in Durham as I am very glad that he has done against a Labour council in Haringey, then the Teaching Assistants would have won.

Meanwhile, the liberal and right-wing media as having a high old time with the spectacle of "the Left at war" over gender self-identification. But that proposal itself has come from the Conservative Government.

As on the EU, Corbyn and May are both struggling with the parliamentary persistence of Tony Blair's potent but toxic, toxic but potent brew of the neoliberal economics that Thatcherism had become, of the Eurocommunist social policy that sought to enshrine in legislation the cultural changes that had wrought and been wrought by Thatcherism, and of the neoconservative foreign policy that a tiny but exceedingly well-connected section of American Trotskyism had produced.

Thatcherism could never have become anything other than neoliberalism, but the Conservative Right did not have to become Thatcherite, and much of it never did.

Throughout Margaret Thatcher's Premiership, whenever there was not a General Election on, the pages of The Spectator and of the Times, Telegraph, Mail and Express newspapers carried regular tirades against her Government by economic libertarians, by social conservatives, and by proponents of a foreign policy of realism, scepticism, self-interest, and so on. Since 1998, but especially since 2001, those last have arrived at a position that is practically indistinguishable from Corbyn's, so that many an article by Peter Oborne or Peter Hitchens would raise no eyebrows if it appeared in Counterfire or the Morning Star.

Few Western European Communists became Eurocommunists, and even fewer did so in Britain or within British Communism's sphere of influence on the Labour Left and in the trade unions. Very few Trotskyists indeed became neoconservatives even in the United States, and almost none did so anywhere else.

In Britain, those who never went down either road have been having a good century, working with all manner of others to elect and re-elect Ken Livingstone as Mayor of London, to organise the biggest demonstration in British history, to elect George Galloway at Bethnal Green and Bow (they were less prominent, but still there, at Bradford West), to organise the mass lobby that led to David Cameron's Commons defeat over Syria, to elect and re-elect Corbyn as Leader of the Labour Party, to deliver the votes that decided the EU referendum for Leave, and to give Corbyn's Labour the 10-point swing that deprived May of her overall majority.

Watch out for this year's Labour landslide at London's local elections, and then for the demonstrations against any State Visit by President Trump. The Morning Star and Counterfire crowds stand on the cusp of key staff position in both 10 and 11 Downing Street.

But in the parallel universe of the Palace of Westminster, legions of Labourites, and all Conservatives, remain as devoted as ever to neoliberalism, to Eurocommunism, to neoconservatism, and to their European Union. While Jeremy Corbyn has to placate that tendency, or seems to think that he does, Theresa May is entirely a figure of it. That was how she became Prime Minister. And that is how she remains Prime Minister.

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