I’ve had this theory about politics for just about as long as I became interested in it. It goes like this. The extremes of left and right usually end up meeting. Allow me to quote this example from Wikipedia, which of course proves I am right:
‘In political science and popular discourse, the horseshoe theory asserts that the far-left and the far-right, rather than being at opposite and opposing ends of a linear political continuum, closely resemble one another, analogous to the way that the opposite ends of a horseshoe are close together.’
This theory has been disputed, not least by those on the far left and far right, and I do not pretend to be a political scientist. But allow me to advance the idea.
I first voted in the 1975 referendum on whether to join the EU, known back then as the Common Market. Those on the mainstream left and right in politics, which is to say the Labour Party and the Conservative Party, campaigned for the UK to join, but this was not the case with the extremes.
The fascist National Front and the 57 varieties of Trotskyism on the left campaigned for a no vote. But it was not just the hard left and right outside of the mainstream who opposed EU membership: so did extreme elements within both major parties.
I lived in the Bristol South East constituency whose MP was undergoing a transition from Westminster School, Oxbridge educated posh boy Anthony Wedgwood Benn to plain old Tony Benn. He was strongly opposed to the UK joining the EU for all the reasons later given by far right extremists like Nigel Farage, like making laws in Westminster and not in Brussels; essentially sovereignty. It was nonsense then as it was in the 2016 referendum and happily in 1975 the Great British Public saw through it.
Benn was so keen on rejecting EU membership, he happily shared platforms with hard right anti-immigrant Tory MP Enoch Powell. Indeed, Benn greatly admired Powell and said so frequently at public meetings I attended. Even as a young innocent, I struggled to understand how a self-styled advocate for working class people – Benn – could align himself so closely with a hardliner like Powell, who had done more than most to whip up anti-immigrant and xenophobic tendencies, but align himself he did. It would be like a pound shop version of Benn, say Jeremy Corbyn, praising and sharing a platform with Nigel Farage. But given that Corbyn has almost always been on the wrong side of history, who could say with total conviction that he wouldn’t have?
In my view, the current stand-off in Ukraine gives further credibility to the horseshoe theory. Last night, on an obscure far right TV station, far right gobshite Nigel Farage to all intents and purposes agreed with Russia’s president Putin, attacking the intention of Ukraine to join NATO. “I’ve thought for 30 years that the Nato policy of expanding ever eastwards was a huge strategic error,” he said. And throughout his appearance, he blurred the lines by interchanging NATO with the EU. Farage was parroting to the letter Putin’s line on Ukraine. To quote the journalist Carole Cadwalladr, “The mask is well and truly off.” But it is not just Farage from the far right which is lending tacit support to Russia, so is the British hard left.
Stop the War, known by its critics as Stop the West, is a long standing crank organisation run by and for the hard left. Along with the usual varieties of Trotskyism, its prominent members include former Labour Party leader and member Jeremy Corbyn, who after the Salisbury poisoning murders suggested Putin should be asked whether Russia was responsible when overwhelming evidence proved it was. And last week, Stop the West took sides and to no one’s surprise under the guise of seeking peace by negotiation – you know, like Chamberlain tried before World War two – they came down in favour of appeasement with Russia’s gangster state. Jeremy Corbyn and Nigel Farage together at last. Or was it again?
You will have to work out some of this stuff yourself given the state of Britain’s libel and slander laws and how the rich and powerful use them to silence alternative views. But once again, the extremes have met up at the end of the horseshoe, just like they did over the EU referendum and more recently the second referendum in 2016 where Britain voted to leave. Farage was not comparing the EU and NATO by accident. And few countries were happier with Brexit than Putin’s Russia.
The potential conflict in Ukraine has more to do with Putin’s desire to cause chaos and instability than anything else. I am no conspiracy theorist, yet I wonder why this might end. As Ms Cadwalladr said, “The mask is well and truly off.” Would it be too much to suggest that this applies to the far left every bit as much as the far right?
