Labour: enemies of the people. By Tim Black at spiked.
Less than two years on from its landslide General Election victory, Labour is in crisis. It now regularly polls below 20 per cent, about 10 percentage points behind Reform UK. Labour leader Keir Starmer is, according to surveys, the most unpopular prime minister on record. …
The uprising:
The widespread loathing of Labour is already playing out electorally. It suffered devastating local-election defeats last year and again earlier this month, losing thousands of local councillors across England. …
The signs of Labour’s morbidity are everywhere. Football fans regularly fill the stadium air with chants alerting us to Starmer’s alleged onanism. Farmers have flooded the streets in protest against chancellor Rachel Reeves’ livelihood-destroying tax raid. And in towns and cities around the nation, anger and frustration over a broken, dangerous asylum system have frequently boiled over.
The delusional ruling class:
Labourites and their legion of media sympathisers are nothing if not delusional, however. They seem to think that the party’s problems boil down to the man at the top: Keir Starmer. Get rid of Starmer, the adenoidal robot, and replace him with someone possessing better ‘communication skills’ and, ideally, a pulse, then hey presto, Labour can reverse its fortunes. ‘The government can get on with delivering the delivery it promised to deliver’, say the Labourites ad infinitum.
But Labour’s crisis is not what its MPs, members and supporters think it is. This is a crisis not of leadership, but of the party as a whole. It doesn’t matter if its members shuffle the ministerial deck, swapping in Angela Rayner, Wes Streeting or Andy Burnham for the wretched Starmer. It doesn’t matter if one or another of these products of the Labour machine tacks ‘left’ or ‘right’.
Because this party is done. It is no longer capable, ideologically or organisationally, of speaking for vast swathes of Britain. It is a party whose disdain for the views, values and demands of the nation’s working-class heartlands runs through it like Brighton through a stick of rock. Indeed, it is a party that, having aggressively and stubbornly swum against the populist tide since Brexit, is now slowly but surely being swept away by it.
It has been a long time coming.
The history is interesting:
It wasn’t until the 1990s, under the leadership of Tony Blair, that Labour’s estrangement from — and turn against — the working class began in earnest. …
[Tony Blair and his allies] … effectively grabbed hold of this husk of a party and repurposed it for what they saw as the new post-ideological age. Elements of Labour’s older class-based ideology were watered down or jettisoned….
The face of globalist Britain
In 1997, Labour chancellor Gordon Brown outsourced control of monetary policy to the Bank of England, within his first 100 hours of entering No11. These were significant moves. Class-based politics had always centred on a contest over the economy. Blair and his friends effectively removed the economy from political debate. ‘New Labour is neither old left nor new right’, announced Blair in 1995. ‘We understand and welcome the new global market.’ …
Labor went globalist under Tony Blair, the first in the world:
New Labour was ‘globalist’ before the word was widely recognised. It dreamed of a world reshaped by the unrelenting forces of globalisation, a world of vanishing borders, in which goods, services and people moved ever more freely. A technocratic political universe in which those who knew best, the experts and the NGOs, were allowed to get on with administering the globalising society ‘free from short-term political manipulation’, as Brown once put it. A global order in which nation states were increasingly subordinate to the superior wisdom of transnational institutions, be it the EU or the WTO.
New Labour elevated an expert class, a credentialled class, a professional-managerial class, and decommissioned the working class. It empowered transnational actors and lawmakers in the service of global causes, such as the fight against global warming, and disenfranchised British citizens.
Immigration to defeat or replace the deplorables:
In New Labour’s eyes, all this globalisation was synonymous with ‘progress’. And vice versa: opposition to it was seen as backward and reactionary. This, in part, explains why New Labour politicised and weaponised immigration in particular. It didn’t just welcome 2.5 million incomers into the UK in little over a decade for economic reasons. It also did so for culture-war reasons.
Immigration was the means through which New Labour could give real moralistic content to its project of modernising Britain. The means through which it could transform the country into a globally oriented territory, open for business. The means through which it could realise its ideals of ‘diversity’ and ‘multiculturalism’ in place of older notions of nationhood. As Andrew Neather, a former special adviser to an early New Labour immigration minister, revealed in 2009, the government of the time was privately talking up the ‘social impacts’ of immigration. He claimed ministers wanted ‘to rub the right’s nose in diversity’.
All in on Globalism:
Identity politics and greenism were relentlessly pushed by New Labour. But the core New Labour mission was to plunge Britain into the globalised order, modernise it, change it, bring it bang up to date. …
New Labour promoted ‘progress’ over custom, global institutions over national integrity, ‘expertise’ over democracy, and new cultural values like ‘diversity’ over the cultural anchors that had oriented communities’ ways of life for decades.
The New Labour worldview resonated with Britain’s business owners, affluent middle classes more broadly, and above all with an ever-growing graduate class. They enjoyed the mobility of ‘globalism’, the economic benefits of access to cheap overseas labour, and the warm, fuzzy moralism of the ‘progressive’ culture war against the old, outdated and traditional — and especially against the people recast as ‘right-wing’, ‘closed-minded’ and ‘bigoted’.
But globalism failed even for people of the right class, because communist China didn’t play fair on trade (stealing IP and predatory pricing moved much of the world’s manufacturing to China) and because Islamists and communists don’t play fair on human rights (Islam is too often ruled by its fundamentalists, who insist on obeying the ways of seventh century Arabia, taking over the world via thuggery).
And of course globalism failed right off the bat for people of the wrong class:
But the New Labour worldview didn’t resonate with those for whom the Labour Party used to speak. Many among Britain’s working class and beyond experienced the New Labour era for what it was: a slow-motion political, economic and cultural assault on their ways of life, communities, traditions and values — a war on the very sense of who they are.
The fightback against globalism in the UK:
The populist pushback, fuelled by working-class marginalisation, was germinating during the 2000s. But at this stage, the pushback was quiet; the rebellion hidden. It can be glimpsed in the plummeting electoral turnout during New Labour’s 13-year tenure. …
Under Blair’s stewardship, New Labour instead provided representation for the credentialled graduate class. Its globalist, ‘progressive’ worldview was mirrored in its globalist, ‘progressive’ parliamentary intake and staff. ,,,
In the early 2010s, against the backdrop of the 2008 financial crisis, working-class estrangement from Labour deepened. But it had not yet acquired a clear means of political expression. The rate of non-voting remained high, but there was still little to vote for.
That began to change at the 2015 General Election … Many ticked the box for Nigel Farage’s UKIP, which won 12.5 per cent of the vote. …
UKIP’s breakthrough was nothing compared with what happened a year later. Cameron’s Tories finally gave the electorate the chance to vote, on 23 June, on the UK’s membership of the European Union. It was a referendum in which all the main political parties, Labour included, lined up on the side of the globalist EU. They were backed by large sections of the media, big business, the wider cultural establishment and even the then US president, Barack Obama. It was proof that the New Labour worldview — ‘progressive’, anti-tradition and anti-nation — had become the establishment worldview.
Class voting returned with a vengeance in the referendum. In defiance of political- and media-elite opinion, Leave won overall by 52 per cent to 48 per cent … It was a victory fuelled overwhelmingly by a populist, democratic demand for control – for control over nation, community and way of life. …
Leave voters … were precisely those looked down upon as outdated by New Labour. … Brexit was the fightback.
After 2017, Labour, with Keir Starmer serving as shadow Brexit secretary, had effectively set about trying to thwart Brexit. Its MPs, many of New Labour provenance, frequently joined in the wider media attack on working-class Leave voters. They painted them as fascists-in-waiting and dupes of malevolent actors. In response, those voters switched decisively to the Tories, delivering Boris Johnson’s government an 80-seat majority on 44 per cent of the vote. …
[Labour] won the 2024 General Election largely in spite of itself, on a tellingly low turnout of just 59.7 per cent. The extraordinary unpopularity of the Tories was Labour’s only real asset. It did not win back substantial working-class support, the base of the populist revolt. Many of those voters either stayed home or opted for Reform UK. Labour’s success rested, as it has for over a decade, on the affluent, ‘progressive’ middle class.
[Labour] is now a party so far removed from those it once represented that it can scarcely see them anymore…. It is a party of the posh and ‘progressive’. Of the pro-migrant and anti-Brexit. Of people who think the only thing the great unwashed want is a bit more welfare.
Over the past 20 or so months, Labour has exposed its social and intellectual exhaustion. Technocratic in style, globalist in aspiration, and culturally antagonistic towards the nation’s working-class heartlands, it has demonstrated time and again that it has no answers to the problems Britain now faces. It continues to double down on the green war against industry. It remains incapable, ideologically and logistically, of securing the nation’s borders. And, egged on by Britain’s cultural and media elites, it continues to posit rejoining the EU as the solution to all our woes.
Alongside all this, it continues to libel England’s working classes … as bigoted. Indeed, it continues to paint the largely working-class-backed Reform and the wider populist pushback as ‘far right’, proto-fascist or, in Keir Starmer’s recent words, the trailblazers of a ‘very dark path’.
It is this demonisation of the increasingly assertive populist opposition to Labour and the broader political class that is most revealing. Labour is disdaining people’s demands for national and cultural security. It is ignoring their calls for new industries and decent jobs rather than welfare dependency. It is dismissing their profoundly democratic desire for greater control over their lives and their nation. …
It’s nearly over:
Starmer’s Labour — or indeed Burnham’s or Streeting’s — is no longer the future. It is the last dying gasp of the party forged by Blair and his allies some 30-odd years ago. It was built in opposition to the interests, values and aspirations of the working classes. And now it is likely to be destroyed by them.
Britain led the world into capitalism, then the industrial revolution, and then globalism. Now it’s leading the escape from failed globalism. But what’s it going to do with the immigration hangover?
A reader asks:
Sovereign debt crisis –> welfare state can’t be funded .
Developed western countries are packed to the gunwhales with immigrant welfare dependents. How does that play out?