Look out, the Left is seizing patriotic populism
The PM’S decision to drop the Brexit word is leaving the field wide open for a Labour resurgence
Sinn Féin’s shock success in the Irish election is a warning: the headwinds of a new Left-wing populism are blowing Britain’s way. In fact, the secret to Sinn Féin’s genius is a double warning: in a country where the economy is thriving, Corbynism clad in a shamrock-green rugby shirt can still top the polls.
Such an extraordinary turnaround is worth reflecting on: a party that was once a squalid political backwater for retiring terrorists has gone mainstream overnight. It has done so by channelling Left-wing patriotic populism: doorstep volunteers pledged to build 100,000 new homes while giving out Easter lily pendants. Seizing on the centenary celebrations of the fight for Irish independence, Sinn Féin framed modern indignities – like the elderly lying on hospital trolleys – as an insult to the ideals of egalitarian republicanism.
Their storming success is no aberration. In Poland, the governing
PIS party (although technically conservative) has dominated the country’s politics by splurging on welfare while shaking their fists at Brussels liberals. Spain’s Podemos is clogging town squares with rallies that roar for a war on bankers and invoke the insurgent spirit of the Madrileños who rebelled against Napoleon. They claim they are on a mission to “reclaim patriotism for progressive ends”.
In an intriguing twist, Rebecca Long-bailey has pilfered the concept of “progressive patriotism”. As clunky as the concept is, it hints that the intellectually vacant Labour contender may not necessarily be the ideological dead end her critics on the Left fear; the perverse reality is she is probably the only candidate who has an instinctive inkling of Labour’s true path to recovery, perhaps inspired by the dramas unfolding abroad.
Granted, since the election settled the Brexit question, the Left here has spent most of its time wallowing in the molasses of confected melancholy. But its shrewder thinkers are rushing to come up with a new Labour patriotism. Leftie magazine columns and local Labour meetings are already crackling with inspiration, drawing on everything from George Orwell’s “green fields” and “red letterboxes” to the lore of insurgent ancient Britannia.
The socialist history of Britain is being hastily rewritten to emphasise people rather than class, and to linger on the favourite patriotic pitstops of Leavers, from Chartism to the Civil War. In other words, the Left have already parked their academic tanks on the Eurosceptic liberation story.
Which is why the PM’S attempt to discreetly burn the Book of Brexit, banning the word in his speeches and trade briefings, is so dangerous. The Right should in theory be able to see off the Left’s downtrodden version of nationalism with reasonable ease. But only if it can breathe life into the legend of the British lion unleashing its potential. Not least by showing younger voters that throwing off the shackles of EU regulation in the sectors of the future, from biotech to AI, will give Britain a huge head start as the world teeters on the brink of a second industrial revolution. But how can the Government tell this confident tale of post-brexit Britain if the B-word is taboo? Not to mention the fact that a story without a beginning is quite the self-defeating challenge to the chaos of metropolitan post-modernism.
The Right is ceding ground on other crucial fronts. While it struggles to define the new bureaucratic enemy, now that the battle against Brussels apparatchiks has abated, academics on the Left are close to cracking a rival discourse. The latter are targeting what they wonkily refer to as “promarket corporatism”. The theories of panoptic thinkers like David Graeber and Martin Parker, who want the state, activists, NGOS and individuals to merge in a “collective resistance” against globalising managerialism should worry the Right. Not least because the number one target of this new school is the giant corporation – a leviathan that they argue feeds off the anarchy of free market economics.
At a time when the Left is tantalisingly close to defining its new elite enemy, the Right risks becoming too elusive on the same topic – fighting a cold war against Whitehall in the shadows and grinding down the metropolitan liberals who run the BBC with passive aggression, while not quite daring to confront their enemy.
Complacent Tories like to point out the low calibre of today’s Labour politicians. But the point is that much of the thinking is already being done for them in Left-leaning universities. There are also plenty of countries for Labour’s uncreative politicians to draw inspiration from. Their road to recovery will be tribally vicious, but it will involve less mental heavy lifting than many seem to think.
The opposite is true for the Right, which urgently needs to craft a vision for Britain’s place in the world and an economically credible blueprint for bankrolling modernisation without punishing wealth. When Boris Johnson announced his Isambardian infrastructure vision to a sceptical nation this week, it was hard to tell whether one could detect the first shudders of a Victorian revolution or the stalling of the Conservative mental machinery. Time will soon tell.