Consciousness of Sheep
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Perhaps the worst aspect of the contemporary self-identifying left is that for all their claims of solidarity with the working class, they deny the working class any agency at all. Instead, the working classes are seen as mindless, brutish fools, denied their own needs, dreams and aspirations. This is why, for example, the vote to leave the EU in 2016 had to be the result of lies painted on the side of buses and not such inconvenient truths such as that so far as living standards are concerned, EU membership simply hadn’t worked out for most people. As one Sunderland car worker famously retorted when David Cameron said that leaving the EU would be bad for the economy… “Aye, your economy.”
It isn’t as if the idea is new. The Morlocks in H.G. Wells’s Time Machine were a barely concealed representation of the Edwardian labouring classes. And Wells probably picked up the idea from the Nibelung dwarves in Wagner’s operas… In short, throughout the entire span of modern industrial civilisation, the intellectual class has treated the working classes in this way.
This is why the contemporary self-identifying left are unable to consider that there might be something more to the current widespread raising of British and, especially, English flags across Britain. Once again, it can only be mindless brutes being led astray by duplicitous politicians. And so, social media feeds are currently full of memes implying that raising the flags is imbecilic and, with the left’s usual lack of understanding of history, evidence of nazi sympathies.
The irony of the inevitable comparison with the supporters of the Austrian painter in the 1930s, is that, to the likely discomfort of the contemporary left, there are parallels with developments today… just not in the way the memes suggest. The first thing to note is that the living standards of ordinary Germans went on a roller-coaster ride in the interwar years. Immediately after the war, per-capita incomes fell by around ten percent as Germany’s rulers sought to force the working classes to pay for the war and the post-war reparations. By the mid-1920s, incomes were beginning to rise so that, by 1929, they were back to their 1913 level. Then came the Wall Street crash, whose repercussions reverberated around the world, and hit Germany particularly hard. By 1931, incomes were fifteen percent lower than they had been in 1929. And by the low point in 1932, incomes were back to nineteenth century levels, as, once again, the German elites loaded the cost of the depression onto the workers.
Insofar as history rhymes rather than repeats, Britain’s story is different in detail but has some interesting parallels. In the early-1980s, the British elites sought to make the working class pay for the crisis of the 1970s. Large swathes of Britain’s industrial regions were devastated, and standards of living for ordinary working people plummeted. From the second half of the 1980s though, things began to improve in a Britain awash with the income from North Sea oil and gas. By the mid-1990s, the economy was beginning to boom… although not quite quickly enough to prevent the Tory government from falling in 1997. Just two years later, North Sea production peaked, and the oil revenues that underpinned the boom began to dry up so that, when the crash came in 2008, Britain was particularly poorly placed to handle it. The only difference between Labour and the Tories going into the 2010 election was who was going to cut the most. And after the election, aided and abetted by the LibDems, the Tories sought to make the working classes pay for the crisis… no wonder they lost the Brexit referendum. Under Boris Johnson, things went from bad to worse with two years of ill-considered lock downs (which the left were enthusiastic about) followed by the extreme self-harm from the failed economic war on Russia. And once again, the – not inconsiderable – costs have been passed on to the working class.
The German left’s response in the early 1930s was all too familiar. The Social Democrats – the broad equivalent of the British Labour Party today, bought into the economic arguments of the ruling elites, thus offering no alternative, and even joining a coalition with the elitist parties to impose further hardship on the German working classes. Meanwhile, the German communists sloganeered meaningless causes abroad, while calling everyone they disagreed with “fascists.”
And so, during those key depression months, the German National Socialist and Workers’ Party appeared to be the only avenue to improve the lot of the working classes… which, briefly, they did. By 1936, per capita incomes were back at their 1929 level, and by 1939 were 28 percent higher. And the people happily waved flags. But of course, that “prosperity” was brought about by rearmament and the plundering of Austria and Czechoslovakia. Only in July 1943, with Hamburg in ruins, did the German working class begin to realise they’d been sold a pup.
It goes without saying that today’s Labour Party is a core part of the elitist Uni-party. Its inability to turn around the failing economy, its broken promises, and its attacks on pensioners and disabled people signalling to the broader working classes that there is no salvation coming from this direction. Meanwhile, the self-identifying left has made Palestine the hill on which they have chosen to die, while labelling anyone who actually talks about the regime’s attacks on the working classes as “far right” or “fascist.” So, no salvation in that direction either.
As John Michael Greer recently wrote of the US Democrat Party – although it applies to the broad left in the UK too:
“What the Democrats are refusing to deal with is that a substantial majority of Americans are bitterly unhappy with the results of what, until Trump’s rise, was a bipartisan policy consensus in American public life. They’re not flocking to Trump for no reason at all. They’re flocking to him because he’s the only figure in the political scene offering them an alternative to a state of affairs they find intolerable. Democrats who say, ‘Yes, I know people are unhappy, but…but…Trump!’ are missing the point; it’s not as though they’ve offered any other option to the millions who have been harmed and impoverished by the policies they prefer.”
In the UK, the two cheeks of the Uni-party have offered nothing but decline and destitution ever since Thatcher… Blair’s New Labour serving only to pull up the social mobility ladder behind an increasingly venal professional-managerial class. So that Reform UK’s promise to do things differently is currently winning people over in large numbers, even as the Tory and Labour parties are struggling to maintain double digit support in the polls. And more alarmingly, the left’s go-to demonising labels, “fascist,” “racist,” “moron,” etc., no longer have an effect. Most people today simply shrug and mutter, “you would say that wouldn’t you?” as they drape English and Union flags on lampposts across the land.
Whether the British left can construct an alternative to the one offered by Reform is doubtful. It is too heavily invested in telescopic sloganeering – Palestine being the number one issue while millions of the left’s working-class neighbours are eating out of food banks and shivering in the dark because of the cost of Net Zero and the proxy war on Russia – and championing minority causes which can never add up to the majority they need to obtain. And so, I fully expect to see Reform’s Nigel Farage installed as Prime Minister in 2029.
Therein lays a danger that most on the left have not even thought about. Because, far from being the “fascist” they claim, Farage is mostly a Thatcherite libertarian. More importantly, he is a safety valve for a regime that is way past its sell-by date. The elite hope being that a Farage government would do enough to placate the working class while restoring some semblance of economic growth. But that’s a problem, because Britain – and Europe in general – is now in economic freefall with no way back. And one thing worse than a Farage government is a Farage government that can’t deliver… because the 2035 general election is the real one to worry about for anyone genuinely concerned about the rise of fascism… or something worse!
As you made it to the end…
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