There are now two organisations from which I am now withdrawing my ‘support’, for want of a better word. The RMT rail strikes and the protest group Enough Is Enough. Why, you might ask? RMT has a good case to argue. Railway workers, at least some of them, don’t earn very much and deserve to earn a lot more. Some railway workers, like drivers represented by ASLEF, do earn a lot of money. The median wage for a driver is £60,000 per annum so I find it hard to be supportive of their strike campaign, too, when many millions of other workers earn considerably less than that. No. It’s the politics that is starting to do my head in.
The RMT union, although not affiliated to any political party, is highly political. Not only does it support the hard left organised Enough Is Enough: it actively supported the hardest possible Brexit, something only passionately campaigned for by the extremes in British politics and not just the far right. But it’s not just the union itself: it’s the leaders, too.
RMT General Secretary Mick Lynch has had a good industrial action campaign with his union. He’s shrewd with his media dealings and seemingly authentic. It would be stretching it to suggest that he has wide public support, but he has, to an extent, won the propaganda war with the government, even though to date the union has not achieved anything. Lynch is closely involved with Enough Is Enough and so is one of his assistants, Eddie Dempsey, who has taken things a step further.
Speaking at a pro Brexit rally in 2019, Dempsey said: “People who turn up for Tommy Robinson demos are united by their hatred of the liberal left. And they are right to hate them.” But there’s more: “This liberal-left has captured the Labour Party and it talks to working-class people as if they are the scum of the Earth”.
Brendon O’Neill, editor of the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) ‘Spiked’ website, says this: “For years the liberal-left has looked upon working-class people as a dim, tabloid-infected throng – or as ‘low information’, to use PC parlance.” O’Neill is always banging on about ‘PC’ this and ‘woke’ that, just like the far right does. And to suggest, as he does, that the liberal-left, in which I include myself as a number, sneers at working class people is beyond stupid. Christ: I am working class. I came from a poor background, I have minimal qualifications, I live in an ex council house. Why would I described myself as a “dim, tabloid-infected”?
In his unashamedly smoke-blowing article, O’Neill makes it clear that Dempsey is the ultimate class hero. But which class, exactly?
In the RCP with O’Neill was one Claire Fox. The RCP supported the IRA and justified the Warrington bomb murders. She defended the right of people to download child porn. She has also drifted to the hard right of British politics, supporting Brexit and standing for Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party. I am not saying that Dempsey or his pal O’Neill are now on the far right of politics, but Fox is. Moreover, her politics in some areas isn’t far away from Dempsey. Just look at his comment about how Tommy Robinson’s supporters are right to hate the liberal-left. And he has form with anti-semitism, too, having described EU remainers as being “full of Soros” money. Look up any definition of liberal left and tell me who would say that, other than someone from the far right of politics. Which brings me to the horseshoe effect.
I have thought for many years that there is a fine line between the far right and the far left. Look at politics in a straight line and it would appear to be impossible to imagine leaving one extreme to join another. People move to the left, people more to the right. But the entire distance in one move? That’s some leap of faith, unless you were actually quite close to begin with.
Dempsey positions himself on the hard left, although Spiked seems to hate everyone, both left and right. Yet here he is explaining how it’s right for Tommy Robinson fans to hate liberals and to denounce anyone who opposed Brexit. And he’s close to Mick Lynch, the face of the RMT. Sorry, but that’s a step too far for me.
I’m not going to oppose the rail strikers, but I’m not supporting them, either. The RMT hasn’t denounced Dempsey for his dubious comments about EDL, immigration, Putin or Jew-baiting. I can’t support anyone like that. And given that Dempsey is a prominent figure in Enough Is Enough, along with various cranks like Zarah Sultana, I won’t be supporting them, either.
The far left and the far right have so much in common and I’m staying right here, to the left of centre, the liberal left so loathed by the hard left and hard right. You couldn’t put a cigarette paper between the politics of these extremes.
