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Good article.
A lot of attention has been given to Dempsey’s comments that Robinson supporters are “right to hate the liberal left”. In the same speech, he also said “too many in Labour” were “calculating” that they could rely on the votes of “ethnic minorities, in alliance with liberals”...
...to get into power, and that was why Labour had turned away from “the working class”. This explicitly frames “ethnic minorities” and “the working class” as two separate, and potentially conflicted, interest groups. It’s impossible to overstate how dangerous this notion is.
The defence of the comment about Robinson supporters usually given is that Dempsey was making the uncontroversial point that some sense of social grievance about neoliberalism was driving people towards the far right. But that’s simply not what he said.
Here’s how you make that point: “Decades of neoliberal policies have led to widespread social alienation and despair in working class communities, leading some members of our class to look for scapegoats by targeting migrants and ethnic minorities.”
“Tommy Robinson supporters are right to hate the liberal left” suggests there’s some sort of positive, progressive content to their “hatred” of “the liberal left”. Even if we narrow “the liberal left” down to mean “New Labour”, it’s clear that the far right’s hatred for them >
< is about New Labour being perceived (largely wrongly, in fact) as a cosmopolitan force that encouraged “mass migration”. Robinson fans aren’t denouncing New Labour for being too right-wing or failing to repeal anti-TU laws. They hate the “liberal left” for reactionary reasons.
And finally, here’s an article from my comrade and fellow rail worker and RMT activist Becky Crocker, looking at the implications of these politics for workers’ organising: theclarionmag.org/2019/04/13/the…
