The Demanding Political Task

Professor Simon Winlow, Professor Steve Hall and Dr James Treadwell write:

As racial tensions have erupted over the UK during the past week, it was telling that so many media commentators, politicians and leading academics were surprised. Anyone with at least one foot in the real world should know that frustration has been building for years. They should have been surprised that riots didn’t break out sooner.

In 2011, David Cameron, the then Prime Minister, condemned that summer’s riots as ‘criminality, pure and simple’. John Major, some years before, famously insisted that society should ‘condemn a little more and understand a little less’. Some academics, invoking the spirit of David Cameron, have suggested that these riots are the result of vulgar, unadorned racism and the only acceptable response is immediate condemnation alongside vocal support for the communities affected. It should strike us as rather odd that academics, allegedly comfortable with nuance and committed to revealing fundamental truths, should rush headlong to condemnation.

At the time, Major and Cameron were rightly criticised by left-leaning academics for their insipid moralism and their refusal to acknowledge the social problems that underpin outbreaks of serious lawlessness. Perhaps, in times of fear, cynicism and great cultural discord, fractious condemnation is an unavoidable feature of the public discourse. Certainly, it was predictable that in the Machiavellian work of democratic politics, our glorious leaders would ignore underlying issues and try to identify a path forward that accords with their interests. However, it still behoves academics to resist the clamour for knee-jerk judgement and submit themselves to the pains that inevitably accompany deep thinking. Pain distinguishes knowledge from mere calculation. At the moment, crude reductionism dominates popular discussion of the disorder. Hopefully, more thoughtful analyses rooted in painfully accumulated objective knowledge will soon break through.

Racism is obviously a huge problem. Every effort should be made to combat it. However, it is vital that we ask why racism is on the march now. Why is it taking its present form? Must we immediately adopt a Manichean approach and divide society into opposing factions of good and bad? Only when we develop a more nuanced understanding of the causes of racism today will we be in a position to do anything about it. In Rise of the Right (Policy Press, 2017), for example, we make the point that racism has changed enormously. The kinds of racism we’ve seen in the last few days aren’t an expression of the forms of supremacist thinking that emerged in the shadow of Western imperialism. Rather, the opposite is true. The racism we associate with the ‘far right’ today is in fact rooted in perceived inferiority. Clearly, those rioting throughout northern England’s deindustrialised zones believe themselves to be ill-used, ignored and at the back of every queue. Such changes are important and demand a considered political response.

Christianity survived for 2000 years on the back of the hope that nobody is irredeemable. Immediately condemning all rioters as irredeemable racists is not a strategy likely to inform a similarly durable political solution. When white men throw bricks at mosques, are we seeing an incurably racist segment of society emerge from the depths in a sudden eruption of bilious hatred? Or should we instead conclude that we are witnessing a clear indication of our own ideological failure? Things do not need to be this way. There does not need to be a fundamental opposition between white members of the working class and those who hail from any other ethnic group. In the recent past, some active members of the working class tried hard to forge a political economy on the principle of common interests, a politics that gives precedence to those things that are shared. The god one chooses to worship should not matter. One’s skin colour should not matter. For over four decades, we have been subjected to supposedly progressive politics that ignores common interests while foregrounding differences. This is not a progressive politics in the true sense. It divides society into mutually opposed sections. It accepts unforgiving competition as a natural feature of our socio-economic lives. It is a supposedly progressive politics that justifies and reproduces the competitive struggles that energise neoliberalism’s markets.

The ‘old left’s’ account of class interests was in many ways remarkably successful. Vertical class interests drew together horizontal cultural differences and accurately identified a shared enemy. That enemy was of course capital itself, or at least the elite class of owners, employers and investors who benefit most from the insecurity and hardship experienced by all workers, regardless of ethnic background. This version of the left altered the trajectory of history. It gave us the social democratic age which, while imperfect, at least significantly curtailed capitalism’s worst social effects. Now, the liberalised cultural left promotes the celebration of cultural differences and the organisation of separate cultural groups into what they hope can be a fair market competition. It is a supposedly progressive politics that is perfectly aligned with neoliberalism.

For a quarter of a century, we have been researching communities negatively affected by the UK’s regrettable adoption of neoliberalism. Together we have looked in great detail at the social and cultural effects of this pernicious ideology, which has reallocated money and resources from the multi-ethnic working class to the new elites who contribute almost nothing to the nation’s well-being. Communities have broken down. Living standards have plummeted. Security is non-existent and anxiety is ubiquitous. The working class is bereft of worthwhile political representation. They can’t identify anything positive on the horizon. These are crucial contexts that frame the outbreaks of lawlessness we’ve seen in the last few days. However, they are probabilistic contexts, not causes. Nor are they excuses.

When the political sphere offers only the continuity of a consensus that ensures further decline, when genuine political choices are denied to the majority, when fundamental issues are disavowed, and when true alternatives are quickly swept from the political stage, people turn their attention away from the mainstream and towards those at the margins who acknowledge decline and claim immediate change is necessary. Ordinary people weigh the claims made by those at the margins against their experience of reality. They ask themselves: does this diagnosis tally with my experience? Does it hold out the prospect of a renewal that seems to suit my interests? Frustrated individuals can be persuaded by the populist left or the populist right. However, after four decades of bland neoliberal centrism, ‘left’ and ‘right’ are for many people meaningless categories. But if our goal is to understand why we have seen the rise of extremism, it makes little sense to believe that people are taking to the streets because they have been exposed to inflammatory rhetoric on social media, or anywhere else. Of far more importance is the total absence of genuine politics throughout our hollowed-out democratic system. Nowhere in the political mainstream is there even an acknowledgement of decline. Huge numbers of people believe themselves invisible to our political elites. To ensure continuity and compliance, our mainstream political parties are simply not allowed to answer vital questions, such as why is my neighbourhood increasingly derelict? Why can’t I find a secure job? Why is it so difficult to find good affordable quality housing? Why, despite my best efforts, can’t I afford even a modest consumer lifestyle? The political mainstream insists decline is a myth and that what we have must continue. Only on the political margins do ordinary people find an acknowledgement of decline and draft blueprints for a new world. While extremism must be our focus, the failure of the political mainstream in precarious times must be our principal analytical context.

It is perhaps unavoidable that so many respond with hostility to the hostility of others. It is clear that the structural renewal we need will not eliminate racism and its insidious political activists overnight. But to fight our way clear of our present troubles we must change the fortunes of every constituency in our slowly disintegrating social order. Neoliberalism is finally drawing to a close, but the techno-feudal oligarchy threatening to replace neoliberalism could be decidedly worse. We need a new politics that ensures every single individual is equipped with what they need to build a satisfying life. We need massive public investment. Key utilities need to be taken into public hands and managed in the public interest. We need to address the climate crisis in a way that returns well-remunerated and socially productive jobs to the working class. We need to ensure that every individual can find good quality housing. We could go on listing the policies we need to turn things around, but the core message must be that we can’t go on tinkering at the edges and assuming everything will work out fine. It will not. Either we take on the demanding political task of building a genuinely inclusive society and economy, or we accept hostile fragmentation and watch nervously as many align themselves with their chosen groups in preparation for hostilities to come.