In the wider ideology of the hard Left, which swirls around Corbyn, a version of ‘identity politics’ has taken hold which speaks not of a shared struggle understood in class terms, as was old-style socialism, but of a hierarchy of victimhood which places all ‘white men’ in the most despised position, as the greatest inheritors of ‘privilege’.
By framing a ‘progressive’ movement in a way that largely ignores class to concentrate on gender and race, the new hard Left offers white men a role to play mainly in the perpetual utterance of a performative mea culpa. This vision is likely to be particularly unpopular with white working-class men with very little economic or educational privilege, who would once themselves have been natural Labour voters – and some may be flipped elsewhere, including towards ‘movements’ such as Tommy Robinson’s which offer up an alternative ‘identity politics’, with its own set of vociferous grievances.
Islamism, the hard Right and the hard Left are each distinct ideologies, operating in separate and often complex ways: even within each of those categories, there are manifold fractures and contradictions. It would be misleading to pretend that all three offer the same level of threat to wider UK society, certainly when one looks at the record of UK terrorist attacks in the last few years, the bulk of which were Islamist in origin.
But it would also be foolish to dismiss the possibility of intensifying violence at the extremes of the hard Right and the hard Left. In 2016, Thomas Mair, who was motivated by far-Right views, murdered Jo Cox, a Labour MP. Last June, a former spokesperson for the neo-Nazi group National Action, Jack Renshaw – who left the EDL early on, dissatisfied because it was not anti-semitic, racist or homophobic enough – admitted buying a replica sword with the intention of killing the Labour MP Rosie Cooper.
Nothing has reached that pitch yet from the hard Left, but the atmosphere remains highly and unpleasantly charged. The Labour MP Luciana Berger, who is Jewish, felt the need to attend this year’s party conference with a police escort. The group Labour Against Anti-Semitism said: “The atmosphere of bullying and intimidation towards Labour Jewish MPs is not coming from the far-Right but from a hard-Left membership.”
There are, however, certain similarities between the three groups that I have talked about. They are all active on social media, using it energetically in a way that prioritises fast reaction and emotion above reason, and are explicitly contemptuous of ‘mainstream media’ or MSM, while using it to garner more publicity. The slow and intricate processes of the judicial and legislative system do not interest them greatly.
They hunger for dramatic action that moves beyond talking and voting. While one naturally associates Choudary and Robinson with street protests, such events also excite the current Labour leadership: when feelings were running high over the Grenfell fire last year, John McDonnell memorably called for a million people to come out on the streets to protest against the Government (they didn’t).
Their style of speech is angry, declamatory, and persistently claiming the moral high ground while conceding none to others. On certain policies, the hard Right and hard Left unite, such as in their admiration for Assad and Putin. And the anti-semitic conspiracy theories that flow from banned Right-wing groups such as National Action, for example, uncannily mirror those of Al-Muhijaroun.
Where will the intensifying game of ‘British pinball’ take us? Its frame is being constructed in a Britain where the political system is in open disarray, and the population is already fractured by the national argument over Brexit. Those of us who grew up in Northern Ireland will know how quickly the Troubles grew out of a peaceful situation that was nonetheless riven with grievances.
I would hope that England would be insulated from such horrors by the absence of a long sectarian history, the activity of the intelligence services and by the innate mistrust of political extremes that has long seemed hardwired into wider English society – but we should never forget the grim possibility that extremist movements can start to interact violently, nor what ensues thereafter. Quite apart from any such scenario, even the non-violent interaction of Islamist fundamentalism, the hard Right and the hard Left is starting to damage the nature of our national conversation.
The tone of public debate is now one of permanent rancour: as it grows fiercer and more vituperative, many reasonable people are shrinking from open participation. It becomes harder, not easier, for British Muslims publicly to criticise aspects of Islamic fundamentalism, or for British Jews to criticise Israeli government policy – although they may do so privately – when those communities increasingly feel under broader attack from the Right or the Left. In such circumstances, voicing reservations about wrongs within the community is often seen as siding with the outsiders who are insulting the community: that is precisely what occurred over so many decades in Northern Ireland, with courageous exceptions.
This process could be clearly seen in action during the row over Boris Johnson’s article about the burqa. The Muslim journalist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, who has long publicly opposed the wearing of the veil, described how, when Boris Johnson made his remarks about “bank robbers” or “letterboxes” in reference to the burqa, a young Muslim student said to her: “So, are you for Boris or for the burqa? You can’t sit on the fence.”
Johnson’s essential view on the burqa was not the main point: many Muslim women also take the view that it is a ridiculous and unlikeable garment, and dislike it even more vociferously than he does. But Johnson’s mockery came as he was praised by Trump and Bannon – both of whom have made sweeping statements about Muslims – and in that heated atmosphere was interpreted by many as encouraging ridicule or worse of veiled Muslim women. Non-Muslim liberals who, ten years earlier, would themselves have attacked the burqa as a garment designed to oppress and erase women, now attacked Johnson for being ‘racist’ for mocking it.
Yet the fundamental point had not changed: only the climate of its reception had, to one clouded by emotion, hurt, suspicion and anger. To counteract the growing danger of political pinball, it will be a job to re-establish a new way of talking to each other. But this is the Britain that Choudary will re-enter. Wish us luck.
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SubscribeOrwell was not only of the left, he was in a sense of the extreme left. He imagined a future where people ate not in their own family kitchens, but in communal kitchens. So he was, in a sense, a nutter. He is like the perfect example of why people on the right should never stop conducting dialogues with people on the left. Someone like Orwell could have nutty ideas and still have the most brilliant insights about many things. Orwell’s perception of the corruption of language under a totalitarian regime, i.e. Newspeak, is particularly relevant to our time. James is right, and we don’t know what he would have thought about Syria or Brexit, but he definitely would not have approved of “racialized” for “non-white”, “gender” for “sex” or “cis-gendered male” for “biological male”. These are all part of the woke version of Newspeak.
Assuming, of course, that Orwell would even want to weigh in on 21st Century silliness, we do know what he thought on three very important topics.
*The English language.
*How to make a Proper Cup of Tea
*The right sort of pub to have in one’s neighborhood.
All else is irrelevant.