Eamon Dyas

I recently watched a video on YouTube made by someone who attended the “Unite the Kingdom” rally on Saturday, 13 September. He claimed he attended not because he supported the cause but because he was curious about the people who were attending. His video was shot from within parts of the rally and it depicted the overwhelming majority as ordinary folk. There were indeed some “football hooligan” types present but they only constituting a small minority. There were also some Israeli flags and Irish tricolours on display amongst the sea of St. George and Union flags. 

It was the video maker’s first political rally and he described the experience as more like a pop concert than what he thought a political rally would be. As far as the footage goes of course I’ve no idea how accurate it is but it did show a small group of around fifty people with Israeli flags repeatedly and aggressively shouting “You can shove Palestine up your arse”. That was the only hate-filled aspect of the rally that the video showed. It struck me that the lack of police response to such hate-filled behaviour stands in marked contrast to what the police would do if the chant was directed at those currently committing genocide in Gaza. 

As far as I could see, although this demonstration was organised by the far right the sentiment that it tapped into wasn’t necessarily representative of a coherent far right position. In the vast majority of cases what seemed to “Unite the Kingdom” was not racism as such but the growing belief among the participants that established politics had been ignoring them for too long. But then again established politics, if by which we mean parliamentary electoral politics, by its nature is not equipped to reflect the concerns of the majority. It is not even designed to reflect the majority that vote let alone the majority of the electorate when that includes a significant component that do not use their vote.

In that situation parliament can only wholly reflect the thinking and concerns of the minority that has succeeded in getting their party into government. In the meantime, what happens the majority of ordinary folk trying to make sense of their daily lives? Normally those people have no interest in politics or only a fleeting interest. This has been called apathy by those with a stronger interest in politics. But it’s always been dangerous to dismiss apathy as somehow representative of ignorance and a permanent incapacity to engage in politics. This apathetic element will – and we now know do – engage in politics when they believe that decisions taken by central government negatively impacts on what they consider to be important to their own lives and that of their communities. 

Despite the Left’s traditional dismissal of a segment of such people as “lumpen proletariat” when it came to the majority of them the Left was considered better placed to offer them a political perspective that defied traditional politics. The Left held that position because it wasn’t purely focused on Parliament. Through its links with the trade unions and community groups it was better placed to keep its finger on society’s pulse and understand the emerging sentiments of the wider society. But it has long since lost that ability. It lost that ability because the society with which it had that relationship has changed and the Left has catastrophically failed to adjust to that change. 

The core reason for this is that it has lost the ability to operate to the basic fact that in order to improve society it was necessary to work with what society provided. What society previously provided as the means to bring about that improvement was an organised working class in the form of the trade union movement. As long as the trade union movement existed as an alternative power base it was the means by which the Left could operate on behalf of, and reflect, the society that existed beyond the reach of parliamentary politics. This was so because the working class, organised within the trade union movement, embraced those who voted for both sides of the parliamentary divide as well as those who never bothered to vote. What united them was their shared experience in the struggles of their daily lives. 

While the Left always sought to bring improvements to society those improvements were framed by, and reflected, the material needs of this actual functioning component of society. But with the world changing through deindustrialisation in the West, the diminution of the trade union movement and the demise of the Soviet Union the Left has failed to makes sense of itself and its relationship with the wider society. The gradual dissolution of a trade union movement with the capacity of operating as a power base for exerting extra-parliamentary pressure to bring about social change presented the Left with an existential challenge. 

The fact is that despite the dissolution of the trade union movement society and the working class still exist and if the Left was to continue to have any influence over it the first thing it needed to do was to adjust to this new reality in a way which acknowledged the fact that the working class primary now manifested itself no longer through the trade union movement (though such a manifestation still existed) but through the communities within which it lived its daily life. In other words, it needed to make a real effort at understanding what the main concerns of these working class communities were without viewing them through an ideological framework that was no longer capable of making useable sense of the situation.

However, instead of retaining its core perspective along lines that are grounded in the changed condition of the working class the Left has succumbed to the liberal strand that always existed within its political outlook. This in turn has meant that it no longer retains its historical link to society and as a result it has been compelled to search out alternative means by which its improving instincts can find expression. Unfortunately, that search did not radiate from the interests of the working class but instead has been guided by liberal impulses which have survived the loss of the Left’s real link to society. 

The result has been the adoption of causes like identity politics and transgenderism which demands that ordinary working class people abandon their understanding of the basic components of the communities within which they live and which gives their lives meaning. The negative impact of this has in turn been compounded by the Left’s advocacy of uncontrolled immigration – something that has led the Left to castigate those opposed to it as racist! 

These have been the battle lines that the Left has now constructed to redefine itself. However, in reconstructing itself along these battle lines and defining the enemy as those who express opinions on the other side of those battle lines the Left has ensured its increasing irrelevance to the people who now feel alienated from the political machinery which the Left has helped to create. 

Inevitably, this has resulted in a situation where the Left increasingly sees itself as an agency by which society is to be improved by the imposition of its new core values of identity politics, transgenderism and open immigration. But these “improvements” are not anchored to any real forces that exist within society. They exist purely within the spheres of human “feelings” and a sense of mistaken righteousness and are purely “cultural” in their appeal. Insofar as society itself has expressed its verdict on these “improvement” we can say that they are not seen as such by the vast majority. And yet such is the arrogance of the Left that it persists in its endeavours.

In the meantime, the Right – not being as sensitive to transient social and economic shifts to the same extent – has never abandoned what has proved to be a more resilient political sentiment (in the form of nationalism) and is free to give direction to the inevitable social reaction to the contempt which the political establishment has being expressing towards the ordinary electorate. Unfortunately, the Left, through its advocacy of policies that are just as contemptuous, is now lumped into the same camp and for that reason is incapable of understanding what the “Unite the Kingdom’ rally represents let alone providing leadership to the social forces which underpin it.