If You Join ’Em, You Can’t Beat ‘Em
In the aftermath of local elections across the UK, which saw Nigel Farage’s Reform UK sweep the polls, while the traditional duopoly of the Conservative Party and Labour collapsed, it seems Starmer’s Labour Party, much like American Democrats, are hell-bent on learning the wrong lessons. Rather than challenge Farage’s right-wing populism - which seeks to direct the justified anger of falling standards of living to the scapegoat of undocumented (or, as they call them, “illegal”) immigrants — with a genuinely inspiring left-wing economic populism, which would seek to rectify these falling standards of living by addressing them at their root (namely spiralling wealth inequality), Starmer and the Labour Party seemed to have opted to try and out-xenophobe the Reform Party. Ahead of the unveiling of the Restoring Control over the Immigration System White Paper, Starmer gave a speech, where he echoes the infamously racist Conservative MP of the 60s and 70s, Enoch Powell. Echoing Powell’s notorious Rivers of Blood Speech where he declared that the white population of an increasingly multicultural Britain would find “themselves made strangers in their own country”, Starmer declared that without new rules to curb the “squalid chapter” of rising migration, Britain risks “becoming an island of strangers”. Asked about Powell, a Downing Street spokesperson said that Starmer would “reject in its entirety the previous speeches made by that individual” Adding that “The prime minister rejects those comparisons and absolutely stands behind the argument he was making that migrants make a massive contribution to our country, but migration needs to be controlled and needs to be fair.” Well, I’m sorry prime minister, but you can reject the comparison all you like, it still stands: these two speeches are incredibly resonant with each other, and mark a further rightward shift in the wake of Reform’s sweeping gains of 677 councillors and 2 mayors in the local elections, whilst Labour lost 187 councillors and lost a mayor to the Tories.
If this is the game plan heading in to the next General Election, a further creep towards the right, an acceding of ground to right-wing rhetoric and talking points (e.g. around welfare, gender identity, immigration etc.), and an attempt to out-right wing Nigel Farage, a man who literally asked Enoch Powell to run for his previous failed Party, UKIP, then we already know the result: Farage as PM. If the recent local election results weren’t enough proof of this, all we had to do was look over at the example of our neighbours across the pond during their presidential election a few months back. A lot of American liberals, were shocked by Trump’s overwhelming victory, and while I was disturbed, I wasn’t necessarily surprised. Libs love to pat themselves on the back when things seem to be going well, and to celebrate too early — and this is exactly what happened with the Harris-Walz campaign. When Biden finally revealed and admitted to us what the whole world could all clearly see with their eyes, namely that he was, due to his extraordinary age, absolutely unfit for his position as President, and should never have been allowed to initially lead the campaign against Trump in the run-up to the election, there was a lot of excitement surrounding Kamala Harris. Though not young, she was at least much fresher faced than Biden — and there was hope that the failures of the Biden administration could be left behind for a far more progressive Presidency, with a better face to communicate this progressive bent. Harris was a bog-standard liberal, and so close into the election cycle, this provided the Trump campaign very little time to gather info about their opponent. This excitement only increased with Harris’ pick of progressive Governor of Minnesota, Tim Walz, as Vice-President. It was really squaring up to be a great run, especially with the support of young people through trendy celebrity endorsements (Kamala is Brat anyone? Thanks Charli, yes the 60 year old genocide-enabler is so Brat…you really are “on the right side of history”). It was, admittedly, shaping up for an ’08 Obama style run…until the DNC.
And this is why Libs were surprised — they thought it was in the bag, ignoring the glaringly obvious problems which became apparent at the DNC (Kamala conceding ground to Republicans on the boarder issue, saying she wanted the strongest and most lethal fighting force in the world, etc etc.) The approach of the Democrats this election was to win over this imagined character, this absolute fantasy, of the undecided voter, rather than consolidate their base, and offer the American people something to actually vote for. This projected undecided voter was, in the Democratic imagination, probably fairly well educated, and also fairly conservative in their politics — they wanted to see someone who could “sort out the immigration crisis”. So, the Democrats basically just decided to offer a diet-version of Trumpian Republicanism — a recipe for disaster, because nobody is ever going to vote for the diet-version of a policy when the other guy is offering the full-fat version. A Democratic candidate, I can promise you, is never going to be more harsh and cruel to immigrants than Donald Trump — and if the people you are imagining as undecided are voting based on who is going to be crueller to immigrants, its going to be Trump. Equally, Starmer is never going to be more cruel to immigrants than Farage, no matter how much he postures and threatens that he will be. Meanwhile, as I said, the Dems were not offering anything genuinely exciting to the American working class, traditionally their base, and as Bernie Sanders has rightly pointed out, they actually left them behind. What I mean here by “offering anything genuinely exciting to the American working class” are radical policies that would actually meaningfully increase the material standards of living for ordinary people — left wing economic populism. Housing, healthcare, welfare, wealth redistribution , the material conditions under which people live — these are the things that really matter to people at the end of the day, especially right now when the cost of living is so high.
And that’s the thing, what Trump and Farage and other xenophobic populists like them are saying to the working class is that the reason they are experiencing such a sharp fall in their material conditions is because of all the (undocumented) immigrants coming in to the country — these people, the xenophobes say, are flocking to Western developed countries to live cushy off the welfare system, and not giving anything back to our societies in the process, thereby burdening our welfare mechanisms. If they can be removed, then the material conditions of people will increase. This is simply lifeboat ethics. In his 1968 essay The Tragedy of the Commons, Garrett Hardin, a known racist, eugenicist, and white nationalist, advocated what he called “lifeboat ethics” — the belief that rich countries are lifeboats and that people from poor countries would, via immigration, exceed the carrying capacities of these lifeboats and drown us all. Hence, we should, he argued, not even provide aid to the poor countries to stop their population from growing, and “must openly deny the validity of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights” (something which the Conservative Party here in the UK literally tried to do, despite the fact Britain literally wrote the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and something which Farage’s Reform have also pledged to do in their manifesto). Pentti Linkola, another advocate of Lifeboat Ethics, and an out-right eco-fascist, infamously declared “When the lifeboat is full, those who hate life will try to load it with more people and sink the lot. Those who love and respect life will take the ship’s axe and sever the extra hands that cling to the side.” These are the kind of abhorrent sentiments we are facing.
Where centrists fail to address the justified anger in the fall of material conditions, Left and Right wing economic populists both recognise this anger, and channel it, though admittedly in different directions. Think of electoral politics as a game of rock-paper-scissors. The only thing that can beat right wing populism (Trump, Farage, Le Pen etc.) is not weak centrism (Harris/Biden, Starmer, Macron), but left wing economic populism (Sanders, Corbyn/the Green Party, the New Popular Front). Centrism is destined to lose to right wing economic populism — it is the paper to right wing economic populism’s scissors. The right wing economic populists point anger towards a scapegoat: the poorest in our societies, the stranger, the immigrant, the other, the person that doesn’t look like you (though also, as Trump did so successfully in 2016 and then again in 2024, the smarmy liberal elite, the professional managerial class, Clinton for instance). These are the people to blame for the fall in material conditions — says the right wing populist. The left wing economic populists, however, points the anger to where it should actually be directed: at the 1%, at billionaires. If we are looking for a group to blame for decline in material conditions, these are the more likely target, because billionaires have much more control over our material conditions and public resources than undocumented immigrants do. Immigrants certainly aren’t using up as much resources as right wing pundits would have us believe.
First of all, because these people have entered the country and do not have the paperwork to be here, they often have very strict restrictions around what welfare they are able to access within our societies, as well as what kind of work they are able to partake in. They don’t just wash up on our shores and get given a handout of a massive social house, a lambo, and the newest iphone. It just doesn’t happen like that — the lives of these people are extraordinarily difficult because they often fall through the cracks of the welfare state — without the right paperwork, they are not able to access the benefits that you and I have as citizens of this country, and the only difference between us and them, is that we have the paperwork, and they don’t.
When it comes to work, they are unable, due to the lack of documentation, to legally be employed — meaning, they often have to turn to piecemeal and insecure work. That is not to mention that many undocumented immigrants enter the country through human trafficking, essentially becoming modern slaves, forced to work for the people that smuggled them in (the UK government believes at least 100,000 people currently live in modern slavery here in Britain). Though employing an undocumented immigrant is illegal, that does not mean that the work which undocumented immigrants partake in is necessarily criminal in nature — the agriculture of America, for instance, depends in a large part on this exact kind of labour. As the work they are doing is irregular, they do not have the same labour protections that a documented citizen might have — and therefore, their conditions might be worse and their pay usually is much lower than national minimum wage. This precariousness has led to the demonization of immigrants — the oft-repeated phrase, “they are coming over here and taking our jobs” is farcical not only because the work these people do is often work that documented citizens don’t want to do, but also seems to put a blame on the undocumented immigrant for cutting/deflating wages, when the blame actually should squarely fall on the employer who is willing to take advantage of the undocumented immigrant’s insecure status by paying them less money than the documented citizen.
Documented citizens have certain rights and assurances in society, and this often allows them to band together and mobilise to push for even better conditions and wages — through things like trade unions. Undocumented immigrants, however, due to the precariousness of their position in our societies, do not have the means to organise in such a way. If working people believe the reason their material conditions are decreasing and their real wages are falling is because of cheap undocumented labour, the solution then is not to blame those undocumented labourers (after all, it isn’t their fault they have no workers’ rights and so the employer can employ them and pay them less), but to speed up the process by which, where eligible, we “legalise” them and give them the documentation to work and/or become citizens. Then, with the rights provided to them, they can get involved in labour disputes with their fellow citizens to push for an increase in wages and a bettering of conditions. In response to this idea, somebody regurgitating right wing rhetoric might then point out that if these immigrants were made to be citizens, they would then have access to our welfare mechanisms, but at least now we would be certain that they would be contributing towards the upkeep of these mechanisms through the levers of taxation — they would pay their own way. In fact…they already are!
Despite low wages and poor conditions, undocumented immigrants are not, in fact, a drain on resources, but a benefit! Though typically unable to be officially employed, and therefore unable to legally pay tax on their incomes, undocumented immigrants are paying their way in the countries they have entered. Not only through their back-breaking labour, of course, but also by finding workarounds to make tax contributions. In 2010, $12 billion more was collected from Social Security payroll taxes of undocumented workers than were paid out in benefits. In America, tax returns often require you to provide a valid Social Security Number, which undocumented immigrants are not eligible to obtain. So, instead of giving up, undocumented immigrants are filing their tax returns using Individual Taxpayer Identification Numbers (ITIN). Though not initially intended for undocumented immigrants (ITINs were initially meant to allow for foreign nationals to pay taxes on the interest earned in a U.S. bank or investment account, or for the spouses of a work-authorized visa-holder to pay taxes on self-employment income), they are using them to legally file tax returns to the IRS, as they provide noncitizens without Social Security numbers a way to pay taxes on money earned in the US while not being technically employed by a U.S. employer. Conjoining this with sales taxes on goods, the American Immigration Council estimates that, in 2022 alone, households led by undocumented immigrants paid $75.6 billion in total taxes (roughly 4.5% of the US workforce was, at that time, undocumented)! Undocumented immigrants go out of their way to make these tax contributions, despite the fact they themselves receive little to no welfare benefits, in the hope that it will help them someday become citizens. Certain proposed immigration reform legislation like the “Gang of Eight” bill S.744, for instance, includes a provision for “good moral character” and the paying of taxes as requirements for obtaining legalization. If such a bill were to ever pass, a provable history of tax payment is a sign of good faith — an investment in the country, and a desire to be an upstanding, productive citizen within it.
Imagine the political spectrum plotted out on a graph, the two ends of the horizontal x-axis representing the left and the right, and the two ends of the vertical y-axis representing authoritarianism and libertarianism. The Overton Window is a small square around the centre of the graph over the origin that describes the range of views currently acceptable and tolerated by society, whilst excluding those that are considered radical or extreme. Its inventor, Joseph Overton, believed any political idea can be implemented even if it seems absolutely socially unacceptable at that moment — the only thing you need is the right strategy and enough time. For Overton, whether a political idea is feasible or not doesn’t depend on the beliefs of politicians, but rather on the range of socially acceptable ideas. Over time, the window can shrink or expand, occurring under the natural influence of public opinion and cultural change, or by premeditated manipulation. Politicians can manipulate the Overton Window to reduce ‘radical’ ideas, and maintain their own status quo.
What Starmer is doing, and what Harris did in 2024, was accede ground to the right, thereby pushing the Overton Window further right. However, what Starmer and Harris fail to realise is that the centrist (neo)liberal democratic consensus upon which they stand, of which they are arbiters, is a consensus no more — the floor has come out from underneath them. In the summer of 1989, only a few months before the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the USSR, scholar Francis Fukuyama wrote an essay titled The End of History, wherein he predicted that, given Soviet communism’s seemingly inevitable demise and fascism’s seemingly permanent defeat in the 1930s, capitalism and liberal democracy will come out as the final form of human governance and the only viable political economic model for modern life (a belief which the eminent late scholar Mark Fisher dubbed ‘Capitalist Realism’). Fukuyama, following the dialectical idealism of Hegel, saw history as the progression of warring ideas for pre-eminence — hence, capitalism and liberal democracy’s victory over communism and fascism marked, for Fukuyama, the end of history.
However, Fukuyama has recently suggested a revision to his thesis: HISTORY 2! Numerous crises have placed increasing strain on the liberal democratic model — market and institutional failures make headlines seemingly daily, standards of living fall while costs of living rise, and the reality principle that capitalism, albeit imperfect, is able to provide for the vast majority of its subjects is increasingly losing currency. In our post-truth age, there is increasingly the sense that there is no consensus reality about anything — due to individualised targeted social media feeds, we are increasingly atomised and unable to agree on anything. Seemingly everything is up for debate or open to be contested, even really important shit like scientific fact regarding vaccines and climate change and the Earth being round. But this also means that people are no longer able to agree that capitalism is the only viable political economic model, because, in fact, they don’t think its viable at all: the vast majority of people, regardless of political leaning, are being shafted and are seeing their living standards fall in real time, while billionaires and corporations are making record profits.
Trump and Farage have capitalised on this (if you’ll excuse the pun) — they have sensed the wind change against the liberal consensus, and have decided to channel this justified anger towards the liberal elites (who are definitely in part responsible) and the scapegoat of undocumented immigrants, trans people, disabled people, etc etc. Why have Farage and Reform been so successful not just in last year’s General Election, but in this year’s local elections? Because they have jumped on the desperate desire for change amongst working class people who have been done over for 14 years by austerity. Meanwhile, Starmer and Labour virtue signalled that they were going to be a party of change after years of Tory austerity (lest we forget, their 2024 manifesto was literally titled “Change”), but then went about continuing the Conservative’s austerity measures, with Starmer and Chancellor Reeves both praising and comparing themselves to Margaret Thatcher.
We have moved past the end of history, and into the end of the end of history — history is back baby, and now we need to fight hard to get the right path: either fascism with Farage, or left wing economic populism, with politicians and parties that truly care about increasing our material conditions by addressing their root issues: primarily wealth inequality. If we let the next General Election be a competition between weak-willed, spineless Starmer and fierce, funny, fascist Farage, we know the way this will go. Labour is a party who have committed the equivalent of electoral suicide twice in less than a year: first, in their permitting of the incredibly unpopular genocide Israel is committing against the Palestinians, and their cruel cuts of disability personal independence payments as well as their insistence on the two child benefit cap.
Of course, Farage and Trump’s policies won’t actually help increase the standards of living or cut the cost of living, any more than Starmer and Harris’ diet-variants would — what is actually needed is a wealth tax to tackle increasing wealth inequality (the bottom 50% of the population owns less than 5% of the wealth in the UK, while the top 10% own 57%), and generally an agenda of left-wing economic populism to tackle the existential threat of the climate crisis.
If we want to end history again, but this time to have an ideology of the many not the few come out as victor, perhaps we would do well to listen to those who won history last time — for instance, arguably one of the founding fathers of neoliberalism, Milton Friedman, who stated:
“Only a crisis — actual or perceived — produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable.”
A decade ago, Mark Fisher pointed out that neoliberalism is dominant only by default. Now, that isn’t even the case: neoliberalism is not even dominant, and certainly not by default. The terrain, as Fisher argued then, is up for grabs, and it is even more so now: ‘it is now our task to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable.’
