It is the sheer level of hate in our country that bothers me more than anything. For so many years, under the Labour government of 1997, our country was gradually healing itself. Things became more equal, millions were taken out of poverty, homelessness all but ended as were NHS waiting lists. Financially, especially for those people termed working class, things really did get better. The worldwide financial crash of 2008 started to change all that, David Cameron’s Tory government of 2010, in which some Lib Dems had jobs, started to reverse all the good things Labour achieved. In 2016, Cameron recklessly gambled the country’s future by calling a referendum on EU membership which he called purely to end, once and for all, divisions in the Tory party. That went well. Now we watch in horror as the post war consensus rams into the buffers.
Cameron’s government did what most Tory governments do. They imposed austerity on the country which affected more than anyone else poorer people. Living standards plummeted but when it was time for a general election, Cameron was not only re-elected he also won a narrow majority in parliament, having promised that referendum which he promptly called for 2016. Speaking of narrow majorities, Britain voted to set fire to itself and leave the EU. The reasons are many and varied, although I will argue that a significant number of people blamed the EU for the fact that they had been left behind in our country. They were wrong in blaming the EU but it is hard to argue with the notion that the government had let them down. That and the fear of Europeans coming here to work, of course. Foreigners were to blame for everything. It was a narrative far deeper than merely the lies of Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson, or the woefully limp campaign of the remain group, which was mainly Cameron, George Osborne and the wholly discredited former Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg. For years, no one had spoken of the value of European union and unity and not surprisingly large swathes of the country fell in behind them. If the right failed to give proper leadership to the remain group, Labour’s accidental leader, the hard left Jeremy Corbyn, a lifelong hard Brexiter, gave the very clear and totally accurate impression he would be more than happy to leave the EU whilst notionally pretending that he wouldn’t be.
Cameron left the stage having started the fire and he was succeeded as PM by Theresa May who was quickly found wanting and quickly shown to be out of her depth. Labour’s defeated leader Ed Miliband unwittingly chose to destroy the Labour Party by allowing hundreds of thousands of people who were not Labour members to elect the new leader and a number of his wrong-headed MPs decided to nominate someone they knew to be utterly useless to argue for a hard left position but obviously lose. That too went well as Jeremy Corbyn became leader and within a few years Labour was taken over lock, stock and barrel by the hard left.
May called a general election to strengthen her parliamentary majority and by running the worst campaign in this history of British politics managed somehow to lose her majority. In order to cling to power, she bribed the hardline DUP to support her government in exchange for a large wedge of taxpayers’ cash. For her at least that bit worked, but her weakness was soon exposed when she switched from the position of a remainer to a hardline Brexiter, caving in to the whims of the basket case right in the Tory party. The country was more divided than ever before. Dogwhistle politics became the norm, the ugly organ grinder of the Tory party told the monkey leader what to do and what to say. May had once described the Tories as being the “nasty party”. Under her dire leadership, it became that with knobs on.
Jeremy Corbyn’s version of Labour, a retreat to the 1980s Bennism, attracted hundreds of thousands of people to join and did far better at the 2017 election than anyone thought possible. Laughable as it might seem now, people really did see Corbyn as being the voice of “straight talking, honest politics”. No one does now. Corbyn, like the Tories, blamed migration for dragging down wages, and looks forward to a hard Brexit as much as Farage or Jacob Rees-Mogg, albeit for a different reason. Corbyn sees a collapse of capitalism as we know it and the imposition of hardline socialism in one country. In other words, an opportunity. And then there were the Jews.
If the Tories are wrapped up in islamophobia, then Labour is in an even bigger hole with anti-Semitism. Corbyn’s past and indeed current dalliances with some seriously unpleasant people have come home to roost. Whilst the comrades point to media witch hunts and the like and loons like George Galloway even come up with ludicrous conspiracy theories that somehow see the establishment trying to undermine Corbyn, the reality is that Corbyn’s tawdry past needs to be exposed if he seriously considers himself to be a future prime minister. And boy has it been. And in this area, Corbyn adds to the hate.
It’s the hate generated by politicians of all colours that has permeated through the land. The far left is caught up in the sewer of racism by way of anti-Semitism, the far right promotes fear and loathing. This is now a land where extremes prosper. A land where the likes of Nigel Farage, Boris Johnson and Tommy Robinson enjoy amazing levels of support on one side and Corbyn’s revolution is the only effective – I use the word effectively inadvisedly – alternative. And where you have extremes of left and right, they often meet somewhere so that you have the uncomfortable sight of former KKK leader David Duke and the BNP’s Nick Griffin offering public support to Corbyn over the issue of anti-Semitism.
Brexit divided – still divides – the country and I suspect will for many decades to come. It is too easy to blame our decision to raise the drawbridge to Europe for the mess our country is in but it is a huge driver, a catalyst. This was the genie David Cameron let out of the bottle and then buggered off when the going got tough. (See also Boris Johnson, David Davis, Nigel Farage, Gisela Stuart and the rest of the shysters who disappeared when the shit hit the fan.)
We will see the play out horribly in the months ahead. Nigel Farage and his shady pals from the hard right are touring the land to campaign for the hardest Brexit possible. Come the autumn, Boris Johnson will plotting to install a new prime minister who will be called Boris Johnson. And Tommy Robinson will soon be leading one of the biggest far right rallies since the days of Oswald Mosley (see picture above courtesy of the Times of Israel). All this is happening with a hard right US president in the White House and a former KGB thug in the Kremlin. We know there are already close links between Donald Trump and Farage, Trump and Vladimir Putin, Vladimir Putin with Farage’s far right associates. It doesn’t require a conspiracy theorist to have the deepest suspicions of what is happening in both our country and our world.
Weak leaders, of whom we have a glut in the UK, can lead to the rising up of extremes and that is what I see today. Donald Trump is our Brexit, extremism is on the ascent. Worst of all, I see no one at home or abroad who can stop it. People at or near the bottom are getting poorer and we know what happens when they get desperate. Someone who appears to have simple answers to the most complex of questions can seize the day. In our country and abroad, there are plenty of people who pretend to have the answers. They don’t. Blame the Jews, blame the Mexicans, blame the muslims, blame the blacks – blame everyone except themselves. And if we carry on down that road, I fear for the future, I really do.
