By Jake Wilde
I’ve never been much of a joiner. At university the assorted political parties of the far left, or their front organisations posing as single issue groups, revolted me and none of the major political parties offered anything that interested me. In hindsight I think that’s because I was following a path that had more resonance in the United States than in the United Kingdom, where the anti-Stalinist left had embraced the principles of democracy, personal freedom and liberty more commonly associated with American conservatism. I hold a general view that the state has key role to play in delivering essential services to its citizens and can and should do things the market can’t and won’t, but that individuals need to have the freedom to operate economically outside of state control, and to have complete freedom of political thought. The problem I always had with Marxism was that the cobbler could never make a pair of shoes for his daughter, and the problem I always had with Leninism and Stalinism was the mass murder. In short, although I didn’t know it at the time, I was more of a neoconservative than anything else and in the late nineties there really wasn’t much interest in attracting the neocon vote.
When Tony Blair became the first Labour Prime Minister of my adulthood I was pleased but no more so than any other Labour voter. It never occurred to me to join the Labour Party as it still tolerated the kind of people we now call Corbynistas. When I started work and became a trade union representative I encountered these people every day, and they moved in the same sphere and held broadly the same views as those in the Socialist Party, the Socialist Workers Party, Respect and the Scottish Socialist Party. There was no obvious distinction between those of them who were members of the Labour Party or those who were in the fringe parties. Any differences between them seemed to be more about which personality cult they favoured.
The single event that prompted me to join the Labour Party was the 2003 military intervention in Iraq. Finally here was a political party actually prepared to fight fascism, rather than to pretend to do so in order to promote its own agenda. It’s often said that the far left have been at the forefront of the fight against fascism, sexism, racism and homophobia. This is nonsense. The far left have always hijacked those campaigns to use them for self-promotion, to swell the numbers seemingly prepared to foment revolution or simply to use those causes to rail against capitalism and The West. This is not an essay about Iraq, but I remain firmly of the view that the liberation of the Iraqi people ranks alongside the creation of the NHS and the introduction of the minimum wage in the pantheon of achievements by the Labour Party.
It strikes me that, in the same way that “Iraq” has become the standard retort to any defence of Blairism, “Syria” will be the single word used to define the Labour Party’s post-Iraq cowardice. Unlike Iraq, where military action would have taken place even without UK involvement, the military action against Assad did not occur solely because the UK did not participate, and precisely because of the attitude of the Labour Party, as directed by the then Corbyn–led Stop The War Coalition.
Thus where the liberation of Iraq led to democratic elections and a multicultural society (as reflected in today’s Iraqi army), the non-liberation of Syria has led to a fascist, torturing, murdering, sectarian dictator remaining in power. The Labour Party should take credit for the former and must take the blame for the latter. Jeremy Corbyn has far more blood on his hands than Tony Blair.
So with the reason for my joining Labour now treated with disgust, and the party under the far left’s control, I am back where I started. I was only ever what I’ll call a CBeebies Blairite – of a generation with young kids when Blair was at his height, and only needing a elementary understanding of what Blairism was in order to support it. I doubt that there will ever be a political party that fully represents my views but in that sense I am no different from those who share my viewpoint on the other side of the Atlantic, who must have found themselves looking at Trump and Clinton in the same way as I look at May and Corbyn. Nevertheless I regard myself as lucky to have been, for a short time in the mid 2000s, in the right place at the right time.
Why is any of this relevant in 2017, you may very well ask. I may be being overly self-centred, even by my standards, but I don’t think I was the only person who felt politically seasick during 2016. I’ve read countless articles about how everything has changed, how populations across the world are rejecting elites, about a revolt against liberalism. It’s seductive stuff because everyone, especially those who write political articles for a living, likes to think that they live in historic times. I just don’t think it’s true. No grand realignment has occurred, there has been no massive change in the way people think and Trump, Corbyn and Brexit are not reflections of a populist uprising.
Leo Strauss, one of the founders of neoconservative thought, was writing in the 1960s when he said “the crisis of the West consists in the West’s having become uncertain of its purpose” but his view equally applies today. In America liberals call Trump a sexist but then defend the burqa, while conservatives laud the importance of freedom to the human spirit but then forcefully deny it to those from different continents. The notion that what we call liberalism and conservatism are vastly different becomes a nonsense when contrasted to the world view held by Islamists, for example. Yet Obama can’t bring himself to confront Islamism and Trump is happy to consign moderate Muslims to their deaths. As a consequence no political leader in the US is entering 2017 with any credit or a clear vision about how to lead the world’s response to the threats to the unifying Western principles of democracy, freedom and liberty.
I’ve written before about my astonishment that French Prime Minister Manuel Valls seems to be the only senior Western politician prepared to recognise Islamism for what it is and challenge it but, crucially, attempt to preserve Western values while doing so. He knows that tolerating the apparently softer edges of Islamism, such as dress codes and segregation, fuels extremism, rather than assuages it and by normalising Islamist ideology and practice we accept it when we should be rejecting it. He also knows that the first victims of toleration of Islamism are Muslims, Muslims who would and should be at the forefront of opposition to Islamism. But politicians such as Trump make the critical mistake of lumping all Muslims in with Islamists, rather than acknowledging that Muslims are the Islamists’ first and most frequent targets. They then compound their error with precisely those Muslims who are looking to the West for help, by suppressing them, failing to give them safe refuge or ignoring their pleas for help in fighting back against Islamist (or other forms of) oppression. Western leaders need to learn that secular democrats who happen to be Muslim are vital in the war against Islamism. There’s no difference between Obama and Trump on this, albeit for different reasons.
That’s one of the reasons why I see the transition between the Obama and Trump administrations as little different to the handover from Bill Clinton to George W Bush. During the 2000 election campaign Bush had criticised Clinton, and by connection Al Gore, for being too interventionist: “If we don’t stop extending our troops all around the world in nation-building missions, then we’re going to have a serious problem coming down the road. And I’m going to prevent that.” This is precisely the objection Trump raised against Hillary Clinton’s foreign policy plans. And while Bill Clinton did intervene on occasion his failure to effectively deal with Islamism would prove to have devastating consequences. After an equally controversial election, demonstrations accompanied the 2001 inauguration, as there will be for Trump’s, and Bush also started his presidency by pushing through tax cuts and controversial environmental initiatives that some saw as being driven by his links to big business. If you set aside Donald Trump’s talent for courting publicity through manipulating media controversy, then there is little to separate him from the 2001 pre-9/11 version of George W Bush.
The Labour Party, in the manner of someone who hasn’t had a hangover for a while and is sat in the pub drinking like there’s no tomorrow, has forgotten just how electorally damaging left wing ideology is in this country. The British far left always turn to the comfort of religious scripture, interpreted for today’s world by the next round of Marxist prophets, and cast judgement upon those made impure by having to make real decisions that matter. That’s why their greenest bile is reserved for Labour governments. We should be thankful of the greatest check against extremism that this country possesses – the British electorate. The current leadership of the Labour Party are there simply because not many people are members of a political party and all of the far left wing ones have joined Labour. It’s no more complicated than that, and it has no meaning to anybody who is not a member of the Labour Party. It is only once the electorate start to hear what Labour now offers that the true horror of what has happened to the party dawns upon the general population. Lost deposits in by elections are not freak results, they are what happens when Corbyn’s version of the Labour Party meets the real world.
Voting in the EU referendum saw people across the UK discard their party political home and vote according to their instinctive sense of what the EU represented to them. None of the major political parties, not even the SNP, were able to deliver “their” voters to support their preferred outcome so it is understandable but incorrect to regard the outcome as a rejection of traditional politics. That the country should be split on their view, and most didn’t even have a view, of an organisation that none of the major political parties particularly liked to talk about surely shouldn’t be a surprise. The EU has been variously painted as a bogeyman or a sugar daddy, punishing small businesses with red tape that Whitehall would never impose, or protecting workers with legislation that Westminster would never have allowed. Neither is true but both are believed with equal religiosity by their proponents. In the end the electorate were forced to rely upon a personal interpretation of a binary question about what an unknown future held and yet people have the nerve to tell those who voted the other way that they were wrong to do so.
That’s why I think 2016 was no different to any other year. There was no populist revolt, no death of liberalism, and no rejection of elites. Trump is no more a fascist than Obama is a communist. Corbyn is less a threat to the establishment than he is a part of the establishment. Brexit was a consequence of slightly more people guessing that Leave was a better option than Remain. 2017 is more like 2001, with a two-term Democrat handing over to a Republican widely ridiculed by the left, a UK government untroubled by an incompetent and ideologically unpopular opposition, and our relationship with Europe still a mystery to pretty much everyone. So perhaps in a couple of years someone will come along who will make me a joiner again. They need not rush.
The Gerasites 