The New Nasty Party

Let’s try a thought experiment. A series of public controversies highlight racism against BAME people in the Conservative Party. A public inquiry is called, chaired by a well known conservative activist, who begins her investigations by joining the Conservative Party. The terms of reference make clear that the inquiry is not focused wholly on racism against black people, but into racism against black people ‘and other forms of racism’. The report while condemning use of epithets such as ‘nigger’ or ‘paki’ and acknowledging ‘unhappy incidents’ in the past (perhaps the Monday Club went too far… all that ‘Hang Mandela’ stuff… regrettable) maintains that the Conservative Party ‘is not overrun’ with racism against black people. At the launch of this report, a Black British Conservative MP is racially abused while the party leader stands by and does nothing. The activist chairing this inquiry is then awarded a peerage by the party leader, and later appointed Attorney General.

Imagine being a voter of BAME origin – or just someone concerned by racism – and watching all this. Would you feel that the inquiry report was credible and fair? Would you feel comfortable being involved in the Conservative Party: attending its meetings, delivering its leaflets, giving up energy and time to get it reelected? Would the Conservative Party feel like a safe place for you?

Would you vote for them again?

You have likely already guessed that I’m talking about the Chakrabarti report into anti-Semitism. My analogy with anti-BAME racism isn’t an entry into the open barter of victimhood, because of course both forms of racism are poisonous nonsense. Rather it’s to illustrate a point made by trade unionist Dave Prentis – that Labour is now the new nasty party. Some people will deny there’s even a problem, but to list all the ‘unhappy incidents’ is way beyond the scope of a blog post… which is why Dave Rich has written an excellent book on the subject. (I would also recommend the Home Affairs select committee inquiry report into anti-Semitism in the UK, particularly chapter 6, which examines a range of anti-Semitic incidents within the Labour Party, and the failure to address these by either Chakrabarti or the party leadership.)

Smart people saw this coming, years before Jeremy Corbyn became party leader. Journalists like Nick Cohen, Greg Palast and Oliver Kamm, academics like Alan Johnson, and the Harry’s Place and other blog writers, warned of dark undercurrents on the left. They were told that anti-Semitism and other such craziness was a marginal issue, that one shouldn’t focus on tiny political sects, which could never have an impact on mainstream politics. Well, Mr Corbyn is a living, walking rebuttal of that critique. As despairing Eustonite Damian Counsell put it: the straw men are in charge now, and everything’s on fire.

How did we get here exactly? Rich explains that in the 1960s ‘some on the left gave up on the revolutionary potential of the Western working class and looked overseas for radical inspiration. By this way of thinking, the bloc of post-colonial states (and the national liberation movements that were fighting for decolonisation elsewhere) held the promise that the part of the world then known as the Third World might supplant the Western proletariat as the global engine for revolutionary change.’

Put simply? It’s easier, if you’re a first world academic or public sector leftist, to project revolutionary hope onto distant peoples like the Palestinians: insurrection by outsource or proxy, rather than trying to convince the working class and minorities in your own country… who might argue back. It’s a long story (try as he might, Rich can’t help but lose us sometimes in the left’s wilderness of mirrors) but you can trace the current tolerance for Islamism back to the ramblings of tenured postmodernists.

In this ideology, Israel isn’t a lifeboat state and multicultural democracy but an outpost of Western colonialism, Zionist not a national liberation movement but international conspiracy. (The more sinister reading, of course, flips this around so that Britain and America are just imperial outposts of Tel Aviv.) The Jewish people don’t need recognition as oppressed minority or noble victims, because they have protective imperial apparatus on which to draw. Rich has then SWP activist John Rees explain that: ‘There are some religions that are overwhelmingly held by the poor and excluded and there are some religions that back up the establishment, the rich and the powerful.’ Guess which ethnic minority falls on the wrong side of the line here.

Perhaps the saddest and most sordid development here is the weaponisation of the Holocaust against Jewish people. Rich discusses Caryl Churchill’s play Seven Jewish Children: ‘Whatever the rights and wrongs of the argument over the play’s alleged anti-Semitism, everybody agreed on its main theme: that the psychological trauma of the Holocaust and anti-Semitism was playing out via Israeli violence and oppression towards the Palestinians.’ The Holocaust wasn’t a unique historical atrocity, but a schoolyard morality tale from which the Jews had, regrettably, failed to draw the correct lessons – a crappy piece of poetry, that activists recite in piping voices as they wag their fingers in the faces of Britain’s Jews.

Here’s a conundrum: how is it that professional activists, who have spent their lives campaigning against racism, ended up recycling racist tropes and targeting minorities? Dave Rich understands that ‘It is precisely because people on the left act as anti-fascists and anti-racists that they have such a problem recognising modern anti-Semitism.’ Activist sense of moral superiority defeats hope of self awareness: they are blinded by their own perceived virtue, and the left’s proud tradition of anti racism. The protests become shriller as this tradition recedes into memory, increasingly supplanted by ‘the left’s proud tradition of making life uncomfortable for Jews’. As Grossman writes in Life and Fate: ‘it was the revolutionary cause itself that freed people from morality in the name of morality’.

‘Ever since I was a child, I had been haunted by a passion for the absolute,’ says the SS narrator in Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones. ‘And if this radicalism was the radicalism of the abyss, and if the absolute turned out to be absolute evil, one still had to follow them to the end, with eyes wide open – of that at least I was utterly convinced.’ Dave Rich ends his brilliant book with a hope that the British left can rebuild its relationship with British Jews. But I’m not so sure. To repeat a famous line, the abyss tends to stare back at you until you fall right into it.

I, Max Dunbar

Here’s a question I’ve been pondering. Can you review a film you’ve never seen? Also: can you review a review of a film you’ve never seen? This is what I’m wondering as I read reviews of I, Daniel Blake, Ken Loach’s film about people on benefits. Liberals tend to like the movie. Or I think they like it. Lynn Enright, for the Pool, writes that, ‘My whole face was wet with crying. I tried to be discreet, but my body was shuddering as sobs clattered through it. I allowed the film to simply do its work on me, reducing me to tears, stoking a great sadness and sense of naïve uselessness.’ Jack Monroe, in the Guardian, had a similar reaction: ‘The woman beside me, a stranger, squeezed my forearm as I choked on guttural, involuntary sobs. I’m sorry, I whispered, sloping out to punch a wall in the corridor and cry into the blinding, unaware streets of west London. I looked mad. I am mad.’

Would I see this film based on this testimony? No. Undergoing such paroxysm of emotion does not appeal to me. I would rather open another bottle of red and watch The Good Wife until around 2020. I also admit to my preconceptions about Ken Loach as a celebrity activist and Jeremy Corbyn supporter and suspect that he’d rather lecture his audience than tell a story. I mean if you want to do a polemical welfare film then great, love it, but why not simply make a documentary, travel the UK talking to claimants, and cut out the fictional middleman? It would probably still win the Palme D’Or, probably still trigger outbursts of expressive emotion in liberal audiences – it would probably be a good piece of work.

As is, Loach’s film is not universally loved. Camilla Long tweeted (her review’s behind Times paywall) ‘Underwhelmed by I, Daniel Blake. Preachy and poorly made. A povvo safari for middle class people.’ Toby Young has a critical piece at the Mail – he’s not as witty as the fabulous Camilla Long so the article drags. Young complains that Ken Loach ‘has an absurdly romantic view of benefit claimants. Daniel is a model citizen. At no point do we see him drinking smoking, gambling, or even watching television.’ The point apparently being made is that Loach portrays claimants as being overly ‘deserving’ – when statistics prove, to Young’s satisfaction, that plenty of them are actually ‘undeserving’: he claims that a million people came off ESA prior to the introduction of work capacity tests and a further million were declared fit for work. Therefore: ‘the vast majority should never have been receiving disability benefit.’ QED!

I could argue this out for the rest of the day. I won’t do because I don’t want to get into the aggressive bitterness that characterises so much of the welfare debate (take a look at Long’s mentions if you don’t believe me) and nor do I want to spend hours going through the intricacies of UK benefits systems (you don’t want to know about applicable amounts and non-dependant charges and mandatory reconsiderations and discretionary housing payments, you really don’t). I also don’t want to repeat the horror stories about possible benefit related deaths (there are examples on the Ekklesia blog, which also challenges some of Young’s statistical claims).

I speak from experience here because for some years I worked in advocacy/public sector style jobs trying to help people out with their housing, benefits and many other issues. I loved this work, I was good at it, I would have done it for life, but unfortunately over the last six months my own mental health problems caught up with me. Eventually I just got tired of the panic attacks, the depressions, the sleeplessness and I walked. The day David Cameron resigned as prime minister, I was on the couch, my head buzzing with an increase of medication, and I felt nothing. It wasn’t a significant moment.

What pushed me over the edge? It certainly wasn’t the fault of my employers, good people who tried their best. I think the bureaucracy got me, that plus all the suffering I’ve seen, most of it completely avoidable. Result – unemployed and back in therapy. I have a birthday coming up. I’ll be 35. I’m not complaining, I’m a natural survivor, I am also lucky to have support from my partner and others, I am sure I will be back out there and earning again soon. However in my darker moments I think about all the people with long term mental health conditions I know, talented and disciplined men and women who ended up totally marginalised for life. Is that going to happen to me? I hope and believe not but who knows?

Welfare in the UK doesn’t work. Claimants aren’t winning – they get messed around with sanctions, crap placements and form filling, all of which takes time and energy away from the jobsearch. Frontline DWP staff aren’t winning – they have no discretion, they have to deal with claimants presenting complex life issues, and they take a lot of shit from claimants. The public is not winning, because more and more public money is wasted on job centres, Work Coaches, civil servants, the crap Universal Jobmatch system, tribunals, appeals, and the wider social costs of a dysfunctional welfare system. Even private contractors aren’t winning, because they incur reputational damage as focus for public dissatisfaction with the DWP. Even the politicians aren’t winning, because the economic crisis Brexit will bring makes political dreams of a pure free market Singapore state or noble workers united in physical labour look laughably naïve.

The Loach critique I enjoyed most was by Mark Littlewood, director of libertarian IEA thinktank. For Littlewood, Loach’s welfare state ‘does not get the money to where it is needed and is policed by people who are obsessed about their own status and what the rules are but not actually concerned about poverty.’ Littlewood praised the film as ‘an interesting analysis of the colossal failures of state bureaucracy and how that dehumanises both the providers of that service and the people on the receiving end.’ Maybe he was being contrarian, but I think Littlewood strikes a chord: UK welfare combines cruel Dickensian capitalism with all the sclerotic incompetence of the socialist command economy.

Benefits have been politicised to such an extent that we forget how simple it all is. In the best of all possible worlds, some people will be out of work. Either we help them out or we don’t. If we do want to help, let’s do it properly. If we can’t give people the training and health treatment they need, if we can’t make workplaces accessible to those with health problems and disabilities, if we can’t give frontline workers the power to make smart decisions, if we can’t give people autonomy and the control over their own lives, if we can’t help people to help themselves – then we might as well dismantle the welfare reform apparatus altogether and replace it with some kind of base income.

This is Vasily Grossman, writing about Chekhov:

Chekhov said, let’s put God – and all these grand progressive ideas – to one side. Let’s begin with man; let’s be kind and attentive to the individual man – whether he’s a bishop, a peasant, an industrial magnate, a convict in the Sakhalin Islands or a waiter in a restaurant. Let’s begin with respect, compassion and love for the individual – or we’ll never get anywhere.

He’s thinking about the Soviet Union. But I think we should remember Grossman’s words in free countries as well.