Andy Beckett, (writing in the Guardian) has rightly argued that the right has noticed that things can’t go on as they are. Thatcherite free market capitalism doesn’t work in a period of increasing climate crisis. Solutions are varied, but the ideas of the far and fascist right are clearly getting a hearing, something that can clearly be observed in the Tory party.
An issue he doesn’t touch on is what the response of moderate social democracy is to this. It sometimes seems that it’s being dragged along with the political lurch to the right. Starmerism, meanwhile, appears to be focusing on changing as little as possible. Even the Thatcherites know that won’t work. Keith Flett London
Sunak’s Ministerial reshuffle on 13th November saw the long overdue departure of Suella Braverman. At the same time GB News ‘presenter’ and occasional Tory MP Esther McVey was appointed Minister for Common Sense.
According to Robert Peston on X she will focus on all matters Woke and British Colonial History.
The Ministerial title is a dog whistle to the Common Sense group of Tory MPs led by Braverman Groupie Sir John Hayes.
As for British Colonial History McVey will be busy. As E P Thompson noted in Peculiarities of the English (1965) there is ‘so bloody much to oppose’. Or in McVey’s case support.
The Tory crisis has intensified, under the pressure of an 800,000 strong march for Palestine they tried to get banned. Suella Braverman has at last been sacked and Dave Cameron has returned to sit in the Lords and be Foreign Secretary
The Tories remain around 20% behind Labour in the polls and are badly split. Nadine Dorries resignation letter to Sunak was partly farcical but partly sharp in pointing to numerous Tory policy failures.
Braverman on the hard right of the Tories has called for Britain to withdraw from the European Convention on Human Rights. If the High Court blocks the Tories plan to send asylum seekers to Rwanda this week, Braverman and Co. will be pushing Sunak on this issue from the right.
In short the Tories are both split and in chaos
In 2005 Geoffrey Wheatcroft wrote a book arguing that the Tory Party had reached the end of its historic existence. As the years since 2010 have unfortunately demonstrated he was wrong. However in a recent Guardian article he returned to the point, arguably more persuasively.
The Tories as a party representing ruling class interests have been ‘shapeshifters’ pragmatically shifting positions and policies to fit the demands of the moment. So the Tories resisted demands for an extension to the vote with force at Peterloo in 1819 and in Parliament with the 1832 Reform Act. However in 1867 they passed a further Act extending the suffrage.
Likewise they were the party of the landed aristocracy but in 1846/7 repealed the Corn Laws because this was in the interest of the rising industrial manufacturing class. In much more recent times Tory leader Edward Heath took Britain into was is now the EU in the early 1970s. 50 years on the Tories are focused on Brexit and staying out of the EU.
The problem they have is that beyond making money for their mates and sometimes themselves they no longer have a coherent view of what ruling class politics which can also win elections is. There have been five Tory leaders since 2015 each seemingly more incompetent than the last.
Boris Johnson personifies the crisis. He was not a supporter of Brexit and notoriously only became so not out of some great principle or understanding of ruling class interests but because it served his personal ambition to be Prime Minister.
However I don’t agree with Wheatcroft that it is certain that the Tory Party is finished as an absolute certainty.
There are several factors which might see it survive in some form.
The first is Labour. Despite huge majorities in 1997 and 2001 Blair while tinkering with reforms determined that his real focus was illegal wars. Then in the financial crash of 2008 Gordon Brown decided that the key thing was to save the market economy and in doing so ushered in an era of austerity. Unsurprisingly Labour votes declined significantly and the Tories who had looked finished made a return
Starmer of course has his own variant on this. If the Tories are busy making themselves redundant then perhaps the way forward is to move Labour into that space. His own version of the Great Moving Right Show. So hapless are the Tories at the moment that this strategy might work, if probably only briefly. In the short term some at least would welcome a Government that was not the Tories even if policy differed only slightly.
The Tories however might shapeshift again and move themselves further to the right still, around the racist politics of Suella Braverman, Lee Anderson and others. Nigel Farage and the Reform Party while a minority have the capacity perhaps to mobilise votes around such a grouping. When one looks at Governments across Europe and beyond there is clearly a trend here too.
If the left don’t take advantage of the Tory chaos the hard and far right certainly will do
An earlier version of this post originally appeared in the Morning Star
One of several reasons why the Guardian should be regreting dispensing with the work of Steve Bell is that we will not get a chance to see in the paper/on-line his caricatures of David Cameron once Prime Minister now Foreign Secretary.
Oaf and self styled journalist Harry Cole posted the below on his X account on Sunday evening. It has the hallmark of being inspired by far right current Home Secretary Braverman.
As E P Thompson noted of the nineteenth century Freeborn Englishman he claimed few rights but those he did claim included freedom of assembly and thought and the right to be left alone by the State.
The nineteenth century State understood certainly until the very end of the century that attacking such principles would not and did not end well.
In the present day a Government which has spent years cutting police numbers wants somehow to enforce vague new diktats on protest.
It also wants to control, although how this might be done is beyond sensible comprehension, what people do or do not say on protests. Its noticeable that there are those who obsess about this but never say a word about the mass slaughter of civilians in Gaza,for example
NEW laws drawn up to stop yobs climbing on statues, scaffolding and bus stops during protests.
THE law around fireworks, smoke bombs and flares tightened up.
THE threshold at which cops can ban marches and protests due to safety concerns lowered.
THE law on glorifying terrorists like Hamas is also to be tightened as cops say it is too vague to enforce currently.
Ministers are also looking at ways to restrict certain chants like “from the river to the sea” made at protests by working with organisers to set conditions for approving demonstrations.
Nov 11th protest, the moral equivalence agenda of right-wing MPs & media & Trumpism
On Saturday 11th November around 800,000 people marched in central London calling for a ceasefire in Gaza. There was no violence and a handful of arrests. As usual some claimed to be offended by placards and chants.
At the same time near the Cenotaph hundreds of far right and fascist thugs were attacking police on what Sunak had claimed bizarrely was a ‘sacred day’. There were over 100 arrests and the Met Police and the Mayor of London were clear where the issues were on Saturday.
That did not of course stop right-wing media and right-wing Tory MPs from wheeling out the moral equivalence agenda. Of course on one hand the police had been violently attacked and on the other hand huge numbers had marched peacefully but the two were the same.
Its Trumpism. The point stems from a racist and fascist protest in Charlottesville, US, in 2017. The protest was banned but a fascist drove a car into a crowd of anti-fascists killing one person. Trump, commenting condemned the ‘display of hatred, bigotry, and violence on many sides’.
One person who didn’t follow the moral equivalence line was Suella Braverman. In series of hate filled postings on X she made the briefest mention of the fascist violence and focused once again on the hundreds of thousands who had marched peacefully. It was of course another attack on operational policing. However Braverman clearly feels that fascist boot boys may be part of her political future. A warning. She is a very dangerous politician when it comes to democracy.
Oliver Stirling is persisting with his plan to sell part of Grange Farm to provide funds to keep the Grey Gables project afloat. The sum apparently required, £250,000 seems laughably small and could presumably be raised as a loan against the hotel. That however would not make good drama.
Instead class war has broken out. In a war you have to take sides and the Ambridge Socialist takes the side of the Grundys. It’s true that the barn Stirling wants to sell off is full of junk but there is also land involved which will impact Ed’s ability to earn a living. Further there are concerns that developers in particular Borchester Land could move in making life uncomfortable for the Grundys at best.
Stirling a sort of one nation Tory, who nevertheless is the only known Ambridge reader of the hard right Spectator, oversaw the illegal sacking of the workforce at Grey Gables prior to the bodged refurbishment.
The Grundys must be defended
Jazzer decides to remain a proletarian pig farm
There has been some good news in Ambridge this week. Hannah is staying so Jazzer does not need to become a class traitor and step up as pig unit manager
In Other News
The Guy Fawkes fireworks weren’t silent.
Ed is complaining about helping out with Grundy turkeys
Titchener still looms & Helen is making yet another ill advised decision
Revealed. Tory MP leading campaign to keep Braverman as Home Secretary
Sunak has sacked Suella Braverman although without her support he will end up being the next Tory leader to be purged after Johnson and Truss.
The Guardian has revealed that there are five small groups of far right Tory MPs backing Braverman, totalling around 50 in all.
The groups include
New Conservatives (Danny Kruger, Miriam Cates,30p Lee)
The Common Sense Group (Braverman Groupie John Hayes)
No Turning Back
European Research Group
Northern Research Group
The latter two groupuscules do their own research on the interwebs
The MPs involved here may well be racists and bigots but they are not fascists. They may well be content to encourage fascists though. The Times reported (11th November) that the MP leading the campaign to keep Braverman in post was Tory Deputy Chair Lee ‘30p’ Anderson.
Where next for the unpleasant group of hard and far rightists noted above is something all anti-racists, socialists and democrats will need to keep a close eye on
Ahead of Saturday’s London demonstration (assemble Park Lane) calling for a genuine ceasefire in Gaza and support for Palestinians the Met Police have issued some thoughts. Some are about what,in their view, might be unlawful chants or placards. With over 1,000 Met officers suspended for a range of disciplinary reasons its difficult to think of an organisation less well qualified to pronounce on this. It is in fact the job of the CPS and the Courts not the Met.
They have also said they expect 100,000 to attend. This figure is likely to be quoted in media coverage after the demonstration
The London demonstration for a ceasefire in Gaza on 11th November was according to a police estimate, 300,000 strong. It was of course much larger. Some of those involved were also organisers for Stop the War demonstrations twenty years ago on Iraq. That included the largest ever in UK history when well over a million marched to Hyde Park. A figure of 800,000 has been mentioned and certainly it took hours for marchers to make their way down Park Lane to Victoria and Vauxhall Bridge Rd and eventually Nine Elms. Given the length of time it took for marchers to move from Hyde Park to Nine Elms- four to five hours in many cases-it may well have been larger.
It was and is difficult to argue about the size of the 2003 march as there are pictures of a huge crowd in the Park. When protests end elsewhere in central London it’s much more difficult to assess numbers. There were two stages on Saturday 11th November(after police eventually agreed at 8.30pm on the Friday evening) which made it particularly difficult,but also suggests that the police knew the march would be huge.
The State has had varying perspectives on assessing numbers on protests. Historians are still debating how many were at Peterloo in 1819 but the authorities were not counting. Their view was simply that it was too many.
The Chartist protest on Kennington Common on Monday 10th April 1848,the first to be photographed, saw a new and now familiar strategy deployed. Again historical debate about numbers continues. The papers suggested tens of thousands- the official view- while many Chartists reckoned around 100,000. The Chartist leader O’Connor suggested far larger numbers, an unhelpful perspective which still sometimes happens.
The Anti-Vietnam War protest in central London on 27th October 1968 had around 100,000 on it. The BBC reported 25,000 which was possibly a police figure. If it was the question was raised why 6,000 police officers were needed. 2,000 were deployed this Saturday.
In recent decades the Met Police have generally stopped estimating protest numbers. It’s not their job- knowing a rough size of course is, for crowd safety purposes only. On very large protests it’s hard to be sure of precise numbers. People leave and join on route and at the end before a rally starts.
Recently the police seem to have started estimating numbers again. There method of counting historically has been to assess how many marchers pass a particular point over a set period of time and then extrapolate. It is one way of doing it but as above it ignore the complexity of huge marches. Some sections are tightly packed, some not and so on
The purpose of reporting on numbers again is political of course and was a subset of the Suella Braverman Culture War department. The reality is that on Saturday 11th November Braverman lost this particular Culture War but the numbers game is continuing
The outrage that is Gaza will provoke further and possibly even bigger yet protests.
According to the Met Police the central London march calling for a ceasefire was ‘absolutely enormous’. A a later police estimate was 300,000. The march ended in Nine Elms on the south side of Vauxhall Bridge with two stages. That means, unlike the Stop the War march about Iraq twenty years ago, which ended in Hyde Park, its difficult to get an accurate impression.
Twenty years ago the focus was on central London and is still is rightly today. But things have changed. Not just a crumbling transport infrastructure which might make some think about a day trip to London (lest it last more than a day..)but also and perhaps particularly since the pandemic the UK is an entity is fracturing.
So on 11th November there were also large marches for Palestine in Belfast, Cardiff and Edinburgh. I was on the Cardiff march. Despite transport to London being fully booked it was the largest of the four Saturday marches that have taken place in the last month. It came after the Senedd, the Welsh Parliament, had passed a motion calling for a ceasefire in the week. One of the speakers on Saturday was the General Secretary of the Wales TUC.
Roots of a movement calling for peace in Palestine are being built in communities and workplaces far away from central London and official politics and media knows little and understands even less about it.
A movement being built not in London Head Offices (though they have a part) but from the bottom up
