Life always managed to elude me. I’d only ever find its tracks, the skin it sloughed off. By the time I had determined its location, it had already gone somewhere else.
Olga Tokarczuk, Flights
It feels like we are living in an ephemeral age in which everything is transient and fleeting.
Even the sharing of knowledge has become ephemeral. If a friend recommends a podcast I will try to listen to it whilst doing something else, my thoughts at best half-formed and half-remembered. My “to read” and “to watch” list only ever expands. So many pieces of writing sit idle and unread in tabs on my laptop that I now just open a new window entirely to avoid their guilt-inducing glare. I call it my ideational baggage.
To combat this sense of escaping, impermanent thoughts I’m trying to be more purposeful in returning to ideas to kick their tyres, make them stick around for a while and consider whether or not they are useful frameworks to help understand the world. Earlier this month I wrote about how Labour’s lack of ideology is inherently ideological:
Claims to be non-ideolgical and pragmatic are guilty of taking as read and accepting the current proposition or status quo, from which an apparently “non-ideological” conclusion, decision, or non-decision (ie the continuation of an inherently ideological status quo) follows.
Since then James Butler (who called the Prime Minister a “besuited void”) recently argued that it is less clear what exactly the Labour Party is for in the present moment than it has been over the entire course of the party’s existence.
This may sound quite existential and a bit Barthes: but when it comes to the pursuit of being non-ideological, the act of trying to mean nothing at all is itself a form of meaning.
Consider how this void has presented itself recently in the face of deeply distressing events and threats. In response to far-right marches, what does it mean when the Prime Minister says he is a “supporter of flags”, or when a Cabinet Minister is sent out on TV to respond they say that Tommy Robinson is tapping into a “sense of disquiet”?
What does it mean when the government appears to be taking on the far-right on the basis of Labour being a more effective administrator of racialised nationalism? The issue with mass deportations is apparently a lack of ‘grip’ and ‘delivery’: “Whilst Nigel Farage moans from the sidelines, Labour is getting on with the job”.
Consider, too, how Downing Street responded to Farage’s call for mass deportations, something which even last year would have been unthinkable:
Downing Street accused Farage of not being serious about his plans, but in a sign of how Reform has set the tone for public debate, the prime minister’s spokesperson refused to criticise his references to irregular migration as an “invasion” and a “scourge” or his prediction that Britain is “not far away from major civil disorder”.
This summer’s far-right protests were met with criticism of attacks on the police, just as last summer’s riots were met with a crackdown on law-breaking. There has been a studied, awkward silence on the prejudice that fuelled and underpins the violence.
Faced with far-right racists marching in our capital Ministers reminded me of the supply teachers we had for Maths in Year 8. Aware of a lack of capacity to say anything meaningful or exert any influence over the situation they are faced with, staring blankly into space and consoled only by the fact that it would be over soon and someone else would be taking over.
In the space of a few short months the national ‘conversation’ has gone from stopping small boat arrivals to mass deportations and now the scrapping of the rights and status of millions of people who have settled and built their lives here. At no point has this framing been challenged or opposed by the government - the people who are supposedly in power.
Where once the government was dancing to Nigel Farage’s tune now it’s more singing, dancing, sampling his songs and then warming up the crowd before making way for him to be the headliner on the main stage.
This is how the normalisation of the abhorrent happens before our eyes - the shifting of the Overton window overseen by the prevarication of men in suits who have outsourced their own mind, thoughts and voices and accidentally ended up echoing Enoch Powell, calling migration a “squalid chapter” which has caused “incalculable” damage to Britain.
Where do you think it leads if you accept the premiss that human beings represent an invasion or a scourge?
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We are now told that Keir Starmer will warm us up for Labour Party conference with a speech about British values and reclaiming the mantle of patriotism - no doubt tortured, turgid grimacing, and utterly devoid of meaning. Announcing the introduction of compulsory ID cards - something Tony Blair tried to do 20 years ago - is certainly an interesting strategy for a government to follow when faced with the charges of lacking any original ideas or sense of purpose whilst being run by Tony Blair’s acolytes and Peter Mandelson’s mates.
Jonathan Liew conjured an image of the Prime Minister as a man who has asked a focus group to choose his dinner and is now forced to eat the resultant meal. In my head that looks something like a nice pie, some custard, a bit of thin gruel and a chicken korma laid out on a St George’s flag table-cloth with a warm, flat beer. “This is not who we are as a country” he insits, as he asks to see the delivery driver’s papers.
When I worked next door to Starmer, McSweeney, Ovenden et al the maxim was that it was worth losing voters in urban centres to gain ex-Tory voters at a rate of at least two to one. Indeed, this transaction is the strategic imperative and electoral calculus of the entire Starmer project - a brutally efficient voter distribution which delivered a landslide majority and has under-pinned every strategic and political decision of the last five and a half years (more here on the value placed on ‘hero’ voters).
Now the government is losing support everywhere to everyone in every direction all at once, but more specifically to the Greens and Liberal Democrats at a rate of two voters for each voter lost to Reform. How do we quantify the cost now? Do we count it in lost votes or by other metrics - perhaps morality, dignity or the ability of Labour MPs to look at themselves in the mirror?
75% of Reform’s support comes from former Tory voters or non-voters - a fact that is unsurprising given the government has organised itself on the principle that Nigel Farage is correct. What cruelty must be inflicted or red line crossed to try to ‘regain the trust’ or gain the votes of people who want to see their neighbours deported?
This project is now failing on its own terms as a solely electoral project, leaving to one side any smug notions such as the basic principles of right and wrong or moderate social democracy. As I suggested in March, if the government echoes and reinforces Reform’s message and the terrain of our politics becomes a race to the bottom on migrant-bashing then: “people will vote for Reform - the ‘real thing’, not the semi-skimmed tribute act”.
The tropes and linguistic gymnastics of right-wing discourse dominating our politics and being adopted by centre-left parties is not a new phenomenon, either here in the UK or across Europe.
What is new, however, is the acknowledgement by the government in both word and deed as to how these desires are going to be sated: through increasingly dehumanising rhetoric; equivocation in the face of the far-right taking over our streets; the acceptance and therefore tacit endorsement of talk of round-ups and deportations and the creation of a permanently hostile environment for anyone deemed insufficiently British.
As Aditka Chakraborrty put it, the correct approach to prejudice is to focus on impact rather than intention: “however impeccably liberal Labour ministers might think themselves, they are in effect dabbling in the politics of hatred”.
The Prime Minister faces a restive Labour Party conference this coming week. The Parliamentary Labour Party is worried that their seats are already lost and that their moral compass has been discarded on welfare cuts, the two-child benefit cap and this pandering to the far-right.
In these circumstances, being ‘non-ideological’ has enabled Nigel Farage to not just control the national conversation but present himself as a better solution to whatever tribute act Labour presents itself as - less a government than a seat-warmer for Reform.
