https://iclfi.org/pubs/wh/254/liberals
Once again, another summer where “Broken Britain” blows up in everyone’s face. In 2015, we had Corbyn-takes-over-Labour summer. Then it was Brexit summer (that lasted a few rounds). Then lockdown summer (a few of these, too) followed by cost-of-living-crisis summer. Now, while it was bad enough that Sir Keir Starmer got into No 10, we had hordes-of-racists-torching-asylum-centres-and-mosques summer.
The week of racist riots was a sinister warning of what lies ahead (see our call for trade union defence on page 11). In the end, mass anti-racist demonstrations coupled with a massive campaign of repression by the Labour government proved sufficient to quell the riots. But while some leftists are giving themselves high fives for having “won”, most know that nothing has been resolved and wonder how it got so bad and, crucially, what to do about it. And it is pretty obvious that a few liberal demonstrations will not solve the problem of the growth of the far right. So, to go forward, socialists must understand how the far right became such a powerful political force and draw lessons.
What have the liberals been saying? For some, the riots were a “mask off” moment. Maya Goodfellow, an academic, penned a piece in the Guardian titled “We keep hearing about ‘legitimate concerns’ over immigration. The truth is, there are none” (13 August). Rivkah Brown, a commentator at Novara Media, wrote a piece titled “We don’t need to ‘talk about immigration’” (14 August), arguing that concerns over it are fabricated and that, instead, we should talk about poverty and violence against women and a range of other serious issues.
The standard explanation in these milieus is that racist ideas are spread by fascists like Tommy Robinson or racist populists like Nigel Farage, then echoed by politicians, Tories or Labour, as well as the media, particularly the tabloid press. They argue that, together with poverty, this creates a climate where it is “ok” to hate foreigners, leading to the recent explosion. The solutions include pushing more people into politics and media who celebrate immigration, fact-based evidence, tackling poverty and emphasising working-class solidarity. Variations of this narrative are found from the Guardian all the way to Socialist Worker.
It is certainly true that politicians and the media have done their fair share of spreading racist poison. And yes, poverty has everything to do with the riots. But none of this explains why, as the left has been banging its head denouncing poverty, those at the receiving end of it are turning not to the left… but to the right. Left liberals should also reflect upon the fact that branding anyone concerned about immigration as “racist” hasn’t quite worked out. And at bottom, the view that the riots are centrally caused by Farage and the Murdoch press is not much more profound than those who blame disinformation on social media. In truth, the liberals cannot understand nor attack the root cause of these riots.
What they cannot comprehend is that decades of austerity and attacks on working people have been carried out not in the name of “rivers of blood” but in the name of liberal ideas. “Freedom of movement”, “democracy”, “inclusiveness”, “saving the planet”, and even “anti-racism” have been the war cries of the British ruling class, best embodied by Blairism and the European Union. Rather than opposing this, the forces supposed to fight for the working class and socialism embraced liberalism, sometimes even becoming its best defenders. This is how the far right emerged as the only political force challenging the globalised and liberal order, albeit from the right. The riots are but one manifestation of this process, which is unfolding throughout the Western world.
So long as the socialist movement remains in an alliance with liberalism, the far right is guaranteed steady growth. This is most obvious on the question of immigration, where the socialist movement is thoroughly imbued with liberal ideas. To understand this better, we must look more closely at the structure of the British economy.
Immigration and a rotting economy
Thatcher first presided over the reorganisation of the economy around the City of London. From then on, the British ruling class pursued a conscious policy of offshoring, first to destroy trade unions (like the NUM) and then simply because modernising old British industry costs more than buying cheap products from abroad. Impelled by the US victory in the Cold War and the beginning of globalisation, Tony Blair perfected this profound shift while giving it a social liberal veneer.
Back when the economy relied on industrial production, the capitalist class had some interest in maintaining a transport network and providing basic health care and education for the workforce. Now, most of these have withered away, with catastrophic consequences for all aspects of life, resulting in a rotting economy.
Since the 2008 crisis, the UK has had mediocre growth and stagnating productivity. Wages (once adjusted for inflation) are at roughly the same level as they were in 2007, a decade and a half which is costing the average worker some £11,000 yearly. One-fifth of the population (roughly 14 million people) lives in poverty, 30 per cent of UK children grow up in misery, and these numbers are rapidly increasing. Spending per school student is the same as it was 14 years ago, and there are over seven million cases on the NHS waiting list. All this and more can be traced to an economy organised around a giant Ponzi scheme.
However, high immigration is an inseparable part of this economic model. During the 1990s, the net migration figures (those who arrived minus those who left every year) went from tens of thousands to over 100,000 in 1998. They rapidly increased throughout the Blair era and during the Tory years, reaching unprecedented levels. The last two years have seen a massive spike: 1.2 million people arrived in 2022 and roughly the same in 2023 (net figures are 764,000 and 685,000, with “illegal” immigrants being a tiny fraction).
The relationship between the rotting state of the economy and high immigration is most obvious when looking at the housing question. Property speculation — the housing bubble — is one of the critical drivers of the economy and how asset management firms make money. Gigantic sums are sunk in the property market with no productive outcome. Growth relies on increasing house prices, which requires keeping the housing stock lower than the demand. In this context, high immigration is useful to keep demand high and find new buyers. Last year, with net migration at nearly 700,000, only 231,100 houses were built. Meanwhile, in England and Wales, at least 250,000 residential properties are registered to people overseas, often in tax havens like Jersey, the Isle of Man, etc.
Property speculation is also one of the central reasons why productivity is so low. A society that grows in number but stagnates in productivity can only become poorer in every aspect, from wages to infrastructure and public revenues. The main way to increase productivity is through investment, such as building new facilities, buying modern machinery or improving training. For years, however, investment in the UK has remained low mainly because labour costs are so high. Not because workers are paid too much (far from it) but largely because of housing costs. Land is expensive, and the salary employers must pay their workers for them to have a roof over their heads is so high that investing abroad or parking your money in property is more profitable.
Thus, relying on a constant flow of migrant labour, often skilled and ready to work cheaply, becomes a substitute for actual investment. From Polish construction workers to Filipino nurses, having immigrant skilled workers trained abroad means you do not need to invest in training. Since migrant workers are most likely to accept worse conditions, this also drives down the need to modernise facilities and production processes. And their visas are often tied to their employers, with the threat of deportation hanging over their heads if they stir up trouble and engage in trade union action.
Crucially, this impacts wages. Liberals love to quote studies which supposedly prove that immigration has little impact on wages. Indeed, if you look at broad wage averages alongside immigration numbers, wages have not gone down (and in high-paid jobs, they have gone up). However, these same studies cannot avoid the fact that wages have stagnated, which means everyone is getting poorer. Second, an ever-increasing labour pool necessarily means lower wages. Just consider this: of almost 350,000 work visas issued last year, three-quarters went to health and care workers, who can be paid as little as £23,200 a year or £11.90 an hour. This impacts wages in those sectors and explains why they remain so low despite massive numbers resigning out of exhaustion. And this is also why the managers of the NHS and care homes “love” immigrants.
But the starkest expression of an economy organised around financial speculation is deindustrialisation. From the standpoint of City bankers, there is no use for large layers of the population and entire regions are left to rot. The economy is littered with armies of managers, solicitors, consultants, and countless parasitic agencies and “middlemen” who take a cut of whatever they can. A lot of what has been called “growth” consists of consortiums taking over state-owned sectors, racking up a profit, and handing them back to the state hollowed out and in debt (eg Thames Water, rail companies, etc. See also the letter on the right).
For millions, Blair’s “New Britain” meant minimum-wage jobs in warehouses and Tesco, with “flexible labour markets” meaning zero-hour contracts and agency jobs. What best symbolised this transformation was the European Union, with privatisation, union-busting and “flexible” workforce schemes being EU-mandated. Crucially, the 2004 EU extension to Eastern Europe led to an increase in migrant workers who could compete for back-breaking, low-wage jobs at an even cheaper rate — thus the stereotype of the Polish plumber.
These transformations have given immigration a different character. While before, the rulers used it to drive down the wages of factory workers, now it has become a major subcontracting effort to stave off the collapse of public services, artificially maintain UK universities and shore up the public deficit. Indeed, a large proportion of migrants are foreign students, with universities completely dependent on the exorbitant tuition fees they have to pay. Pumping out degrees of often dubious quality has become one of the UK’s main exports, maintaining a vast and parasitic university network. Furthermore, immigrants have to pay massive application fees; they use few public services and benefits while paying a lot of tax. This is a cash cow for the state, with the OBR estimating in March that higher-than-expected net migration would cut net borrowing by £7.4 billion in four years.
Anti-immigrant demagogues who say immigration is the cause of Britain’s problems are wrong. Parasitic finance capital is. But bringing ever-larger numbers of migrants into an economy which is rotting has nothing “progressive” about it. It only increases existing problems while creating fertile ground for anti-immigrant sentiment and pogromist violence. The central reason why the racist hysteria against refugees gets so much traction is because, banned from working, they are housed for free in devastated communities where millions can barely eat three meals a day or heat their flats. Those liberals who only celebrate immigration and label as “racist” any concern about it are only defending the status quo and pushing millions into the arms of racist demagogues.
In turn, those racist pundits who blame immigrants and claim they will drastically cut numbers have no answer to the problem. In the current economic structure, cutting immigration risks sinking the entire economy. Not only are immigrants vital for whole sectors, but a substantial cut in immigration would slash GDP growth and inevitably burst the housing bubble, provoking a flight of capital and, thus, the collapse of the entire pyramid scheme. This is why successive governments, despite promises, will not cut numbers and, instead, prefer to go after “illegal” migrants.
There is no solution to the immigration question, no “right numbers”, so long as the economy is organised around the giant parasite that is the City. The only progressive way forward lies in rooting out this cancer and reorganising the economy around a rational plan for reindustrialisation. Only the workers movement can carry this project forward. But for this, it must rid itself of all the liberals and Labourites who are the architects of the status quo.
The political function of liberals
What do we mean by liberals? This broad term encompasses the defenders of the post-Soviet, US-led order built on the EU, NATO and the UN, who defend liberal democracy, ideas of “human rights”, “international rule-based order”, the freedom of movement and capital, etc. Think of James O’Brien, almost any columnist in the Guardian, Blair and all Blairites, the Green Party, Lib Dems and even a wing of the Tories (eg Cameron).
For this country’s elite — the rentier capitalists, landowners and aristocrats, big bankers and hedge fund owners who plunder large swaths of the planet — liberalism has always been the preferred ideology to justify their entire social and economic model. After the Cold War, anti-communism ceded the way to an “enlightened” neo-liberalism based on European institutions and globalisation, which found many defenders among the middle classes.
The particular function of liberals is to give the workings of finance capital a “progressive” tinge and to present the status quo in a brighter light. The strength of liberalism lies in its capacity to absorb and neutralise the workers movement. Think of all the left-wing protest movements of the last three decades. While clashing with the status quo, all were based on liberal platitudes and led by spineless Labourites, thus explaining their impotence.
Now that the US-dominated liberal order is on the decline, there has been an increasing right-wing backlash against liberalism. Many far-right pundits, echoed by growing sections of the ruling class, see in liberal ideas and institutions a hindrance to austerity, continued support to Israel or the need for military rearmament. In turn, this provokes a heightened hysteria from liberal defenders, a dynamic at the source of the “culture wars”.
As for left-wing liberals, which is basically what most of the far left has become, they can denounce capitalism and finance capital and even speak of socialism. But what they are incapable of denouncing is how the ruling class has used multiculturalism, anti-racism and all sorts of liberal and “progressive” ideas to further the interests of finance capital. A good example of this trend would be the group around Novara Media or most of the Trotskyist left.
Faced with a growing right wing and in the name of “progressive” ideas, they end up in a political alliance with liberals and union bureaucrats and, in this way, with the ruling class itself. This is what has enabled the rise of the far right. Millions of working people are finding the left to be arrogant liberals lawyering for policies which have devastated their livelihood, and a socialist left that clings to these people, guilty by association. Thus, they are turning to right-wing demagogues who are the only politicians opposing the liberal order and seemingly willing to put up a fight against it. But let’s be concrete and look at recent history.
The left and the rise of the far right
As we described earlier, Tony Blair and “New Labour” best embodied the triumphant days of post-Soviet liberalism in Britain. Propelled by the 1990s boom, Blair pursued the economic model of Thatcherism with a social liberal twist. Privatisations, factory closures, European integration, increased immigration, and the bombing of Iraq were done side by side with legal advances for gays, so-called anti-racist policies and gender parity. Blair did not crush the trade unions but convinced its upper layers of the need to “modernise” (ie submit). Thus, despite the occasional spat (like over Iraq), the Blair/Brown government carried out catastrophic attacks with the tacit support of the leaders of the workers movement and with the left weak and disoriented.
David Cameron’s coalition with the Lib Dems did not represent a rupture with the Blair model but rather a continuity. European integration, coupled with high immigration numbers, went hand in hand with devastating austerity attacks. Once again, the leaders of the working class, tied to the Blairite tops, proved impotent to mount a real challenge to the government and basically sat on their hands while workers were being bled.
But nothing better embodies the treacherous alliance of the leaders of the working class and the left with the City of London than the issue of Brexit. For millions of working people, nothing symbolised the liberal era, the devastation it brought and the contempt of liberals for the destruction of working-class Britain like the EU, supported by practically the whole political establishment. Also, high immigration numbers in an impoverished economy were directly linked to the EU — and not just in the mouths of demagogues. Nigel Farage rapidly discovered a great potential in exploiting anger at the EU and the London elites, all couched in anti-immigrant and patriotic rhetoric. In this way, the EU and immigration became political footballs dominating British politics, forcing the Tories to react.
Meanwhile, Corbyn won the leadership of the Labour Party in a political earthquake, marking a break from the Blairite years. Propelled by huge discontent and facing a constant Blairite insurgency, Corbyn’s priority became keeping party unity. That meant campaigning for the EU despite his lifelong opposition to it. Thus, almost the entire left aligned itself behind Corbyn and, necessarily, behind “remain”. Even those left trade union leaders who did support Brexit were, at the same time, backing the leader of Labour’s “remain” campaign. The result was a terrible polarisation.
On the one hand, the bulk of the British ruling class, the London establishment, the Lib Dems, Labour and most of the Tory leadership — that is, almost anyone with any power — united behind the EU. The liberals launched a blackmail campaign, predicting the apocalypse if “leave” won and, with the help of the Labour left, mobilising immigrants and anti-racists to present the fight for the EU as the “progressive” and “pro-immigrant” option against the “racist” Brexiteers.
On the other hand, the Brexit camp tapped into the deep resentment of working-class communities with the ultra-effective slogan “Take back control”, which spoke to their frustrations while channelling them against immigration. As working-class communities faced a united front of almost the entire political and economic elite, many said “sod off”. And rightly so. For millions of working people, the Oxbridge opportunists of the “leave” campaign were closer to them than the Labour Party brass.
It was a huge betrayal that Corbyn and most of the left with him ended up supporting the “remain” camp. It sealed the alliance of the workers movement with finance capital and gave the right wing a monopoly over opposition to the EU. This further divided the white working class from its non-white component, as many black and brown workers and anti-racists, who were not full of love for the EU, felt compelled to support “remain” mainly due to the sheer racism of the “leave” campaign.
The liberals showed their true colours by whipping up hysteria against those areas which had voted “leave”. Suddenly, many “progressive” and “respectable” pro-EU figures were pouring out their hatred of “ignorant”, “bigoted”, and downright “stupid” working people who failed to listen.
In the end, Corbyn, refusing to draw any hard line against the Blairites, paralysed by his politics of conciliation, ended up running the 2019 election campaign as the candidate for a second referendum. (For more on Corbyn’s demise, see “Why is the left so weak and divided?”, WH no 252, Spring 2024.) It did not matter that Corbyn’s 2019 Manifesto promised the world and more. Millions of working-class voters saw in Johnson’s “Get Brexit done” what they had voted for and what was constantly denied to them by London liberals.
The Covid pandemic soon eclipsed Britain’s exit from the EU. And once again, the alliance of the left with liberals and the ruling class was on full display. The lockdowns, in Britain as elsewhere, proved disastrous for working people, with consequences still felt. A recent study by the Centre for Social Justice found that lockdowns “had a catastrophic effect on the nation’s social fabric” to the point that “the UK is in danger of sliding back into the ‘Two Nations’ of the Victorian era”, with an underclass of millions unable to get out of total deprivation. If you are looking for an underlying cause behind the racist riots, this is it.
But the most virulent defenders of Johnson’s lockdowns were found not on the right but among the left and liberals, who, in the name of “science” and “saving lives”, hysterically supported the locking up of the entire population. The whole leadership of the working class, rather than fighting the government and defending workers’ health and livelihoods, cancelled strikes and became transmission belts for government mandates. Again, the far right was left with a monopoly of opposition to the government. Mass demonstrations were organised in London, attracting not just tinfoil-hat conspiracy theorists but tens of thousands of ordinary working people sick of the economic and social consequences of lockdowns. At many of them, we were the only socialist group, with the entire left, from liberals to socialists, spitting on protesters as “fascists” who needed to be crushed.
Fast forward to the 2022-23 strike wave, which represented a tremendous opportunity to turn the tide and bring back the workers movement as a real force. Instead, the strike wave was dragged to defeat by the leaders of the trade unions. It is not a coincidence that “Enough is enough”, the slogan of the left campaign launched by Mick Lynch, Dave Ward and left Labour MPs in 2022, and then sabotaged by them as soon as it got enthusiastic support, became a rallying cry in the recent anti-immigrant protests and riots. The defeat of the strike wave weakened the workers movement while contributing to shifting society further to the right.
And now, these same trade union leaders, together with most liberals, have just put in office Sir Keir Starmer, a technocrat and anti-working-class North London barrister who will solve none of the problems of this country and only fuel the growth of reaction.
From the Blair era to Brexit, all the way to the pandemic and the sabotage of the strike wave, at every step of the great political events of the last two decades, the left and leaders of the working class pursued alliances with liberals and Blairites against the working class. The result has been an unprecedented weakening of the working-class movement, a total impotence of the socialist left, and a far right which enjoys the support of masses of impoverished and angry working-class people — leading to the racist outpouring of this summer.
The task of socialists: a split with liberals
The immediate threat of racist mobs targeting mosques, asylum centres and black or brown people needed to be met by mass united-front defence centred around the trade unions. The united front, even with liberals, is essential for the defence of minorities and to strengthen the unity of the working class and the oppressed.
That said, the broader struggle against the far right must be pursued in complete and irreconcilable political opposition to the London liberals and anyone in the labour movement who conciliates these people. The workers movement cannot win over working-class people attracted to Reform UK if it maintains unity with liberals. While fascism must be defeated on the street, Reform must be defeated politically by offering a working-class response to “Broken Britain” against the far right and the liberals. This is the problem with the tactic of Stand Up to Racism (SUTR) and the SWP, who go to Farage’s meetings to yell insults and disrupt them. Most working-class people think this is ridiculous (it is), and it only reinforces Farage’s appeal.
The socialist movement has no interest in supporting immigration quotas — as Galloway’s Workers Party does. This only further divides the working class between British and foreign-born. However, the socialist movement also has no interest in supporting the current high immigration policy. Workers concerned about immigration cannot be dismissed but, instead, must be brought to realise how the entire rotting economy is the result of the City of London. Those liberals who celebrate immigration, who defend the EU and the ECHR while hysterically calling any opponents of this “racist”, must be sharply exposed as stooges for the status quo.
And this is the broader political problem with SUTR and the SWP. Its slogans and politics are all geared towards those very liberals and act as a repellent for workers. Take its central slogan, “Refugees are welcome here”. This slogan appears to many working people as a straight-up defence of the status quo, as a liberal appeal and as an attack on them rather than on the ruling class.
Of course, the workers movement must defend refugees and oppose deportation. However, it matters how refugees are welcomed and for what purpose. Refugees must be welcomed in a way which strengthens working-class unity against the ruling class — whose entire economic system generates masses of refugees. Rather than doing this, “Refugees are welcome here” is mainly directed at the legitimate frustration felt by millions in devastated communities into which Whitehall bureaucrats send asylum seekers. At the same time, this call is perfectly acceptable to London liberals and even big capitalists — particularly when it means refugees from Ukraine or Hong Kong. The same goes for slogans like “open borders”. This literally amounts to demanding a more extreme version of the current immigration policies and is designed not to strengthen working-class unity against the rulers but to antagonise workers concerned about immigration.
What’s needed is a campaign demanding the mass unionisation of foreign workers (largely abandoned by the trade unions), together with the expropriation of the City and the reindustrialisation of Britain. A struggle to house refugees and workers on the monarchy’s land and properties registered in tax havens would do more to unite immigrants and white working-class communities than the liberal appeals of SUTR. However, this would surely alienate the liberals and trade union bureaucrats bankrolling SUTR.
Others, like the Socialist Party or Socialist Alternative, call to oppose racism and raise demands like “jobs, homes and services for all”, somewhat conscious that racist reaction is fuelled by poverty. They have called on the trade unions to organise a mass demonstration against racism. It would not be a bad thing for the trade union leaders to actually do something, for once. But, again, none of what they do seeks to break the movement from the liberals. They have simply been tailing them, as seen with their staunch support for Corbyn, the union bureaucracy or lockdowns.
And crucially, their agency is always the trade union bureaucracy and left Labourites, from Mick Lynch to Jeremy Corbyn, who are literally responsible for the disasters of the last years. Rather than putting demands on those people to expose them as obstacles in the struggle against the far right and dispel illusions in this lot, their entire perspective is always based on desperate hopes that these crusty Labourites could play a progressive role.
The question of the coming years is who will channel the immense anger bubbling at the bottom of “Broken Britain”? Will it be the far right targeting immigrants and Muslims? Or will it be the multiracial working class against the rulers and the establishment? The race is already on, and the left is losing it because it is indistinguishable from the liberals. The socialist movement must stand on its own two feet, which requires breaking with all shades of liberals and refusing unity with anyone who conciliates them. The clock is ticking.
