Social democracy unravelling

For many years we took it for granted that the public was to the left of the government, not any more. Since the beginning of the depression the British Social Attitudes survey has shown a clear right-ward shift in public opinion. According to this piece it has been driven by Labour supporters. 

According to the survey there has been a particular breakdown in social solidarity. In 2011 47% of Labour supporters agree with the statement “if benefits were not as generous people would learn to stand on their own feet”, up from 11% in 1987. Thirty-one percent of Labour supporters now think welfare recipients are “undeserving”. Twenty-seven percent of supporters think poverty is primarily about social injustice, down 14% from 1986, while 22% think it’s a matter of individual weakness, up 9%.

There is no one else to blame except the last Labour government. This is the end result of twenty plus years of triangulation, of the Labour party pointedly neglecting its base, but also trying to square the circle of achieving social democratic results through neo-liberal means.

The most concerning statistic is the one about the source of poverty. It means not only have people shifted to the right but they have lost the ability to rationally calculate their material interests. A majority of people support action to relieve child poverty yet a majority of children in poverty live in households that have work and poverty is supposed to be a personal failing. How does that make sense? 

Unemployment  figures have been well over two million for several years now. This is not a problem of strivers versus skivers (the recession was not caused by 2.5 million people suddenly deciding they couldn't be bothered). Long term unemployment (and underemployment) is a problem for everybody, the entire working class. It creates insecurity, helps suppress wages and overall effective demand.

The way out is not more sado-monetarism but ample jobs at a living wage. The recession is precisely notthe responsibility of the unemployed but the capitalist class.

This breakdown in class consciousness is why it’s not kicking off everywhere. Social struggles in Britainnow start from an even weaker basis than existed pre-2007. It will take years to turn political questions such as the above around, after all it took the Labour Party leadership nearly thirty years to convince the Labour voters they were more right wing than they realised.

On a much smaller level, I think this is why Left Unity is right to try to stop the 57 Varieties of Socialism from overwhelming the party before it’s even properly constituted. British politics has an excess of revolutionary socialist groups. They have sheltered for years under a giant social democracy. That social democracy is no more. If sectarianism could be indulged before it can be no longer.

You can prove anything with facts

The future of Reality-Lite politics in Britainis the issue of Multiculturalism/Immigration. The conservative demographic is declining in so many ways. Only the power structure in Britaintruly upholds the hegemony of bourgeois, white, Christian, heterosexual men any more. The ruling class is always searching for a popular connection. With the right issue, a touch of demagogy, a touch of mobilisation, soon the Sans Culottes will be marching to restore the monarchy; that's the theory of right-wing populism.

The Multiculturalism/Immigration is of course a means of smuggling racism into popular discourse. No one ever is racist, at least no one ever admits to it; but once the debate starts out comes the code words and the dog whistles. There is no practical way to win an argument as things presently stand because reality has been replaced by ‘legitimate concerns’. 

No doubt the Reality-Lite will grow in leaps and bounds with further published statistics from the 2011 census (notice how news stories now unquestioningly group statistics about religion with statistics about immigration). There was a net increase in the number of foreign-born residents in Englandand Walesbetween 2001 and 2011 of 2.9 million. Foreign born residents now make up almost one in eight of the population of Englandand Wales, around 7 million people by my reckoning. That’s probably enough to make the defensive white nationalists peal with anger, but is that really evidence of ‘uncontrolled immigration’ as it’s so often called?  

The number of people identifying themselves as Muslim has risen over the same period from around 3% to around 5%, compared to a fall of 4 million in the number of people identifying themselves as Christian. That’s a 2% increase relative to the overall population, 60% relative to the previous percentage. By my reckoning, if that trend continues, we’re looking at 8% by 2020, 12% by 2030, 18% by 2040. Even on their own deranged, racist terms, the anti-islamicisation crowd have nothing to worry about for at least fifty years. 

But that won’t stop them.  The basis for, what we will loosely call, progressive politics is growing. The working class is growing. That’s why the right, and the far right in particular, are so agitated right now. Britainis more and more becoming multiracial, multicultural and secular. At all times immigration is overwhelmingly linked to work. Immigrants are a crucial part of the working class. The demographic is changing in our favour.

To win the argument means returning it to reality, no pandering to ‘legitimate concerns’, calling out racism at all times and dealing in facts.