Merry Leftist Christmas: A Guide to Surviving the Holiday of Culture War Horror: Part Two

The Auntie: liberal, big fan of Biden, can’t shake a fundamental dislike of Dianne Abbott.

How on earth did we get here! Where did it all go wrong for this country?

Pack it up Jess Phillips, we get it! You like when you don’t have to develop your lexicon beyond ‘white privilege’, and you really LOVED the 2012 Olympics opening ceremony. Sorry to break it to you, but this country has been dystopian since… forever. In this nostalgia for some form of golden age, the right and soft left/centre have become bedfellows. This family member might not have experienced it, but the lived experience of migrants, refugees, people of colour, and the working class refute any claim that this country has recently lost something, some form of humanity or inherent goodness.

An example is the tragedy of Grenfell Tower, in 2017. The conditions that led to this crisis did not appear overnight. The highly flammable cladding placed on tower blocks like Grenfell Tower, began under the government of Tony Blair, also responsible for shifting the responsibility for fire inspection from the fire brigade to the local council, meaning fire brigades would no longer have to sign off buildings as fire safe. The local councils have since been starved of 40% of their funds, meaning less building control inspections, and tragically, the recommendations in the coroner’s report into the Lakanal House tower block fire in Southwark in 2009 not acted upon. It is impossible to ask how Grenfell happened without turning to the “bonfire of red tape” of the Thatcher’s government meaning that flame resistant cladding was no longer required from 1985. Grenfell tower was the tragic outcome of the point at which class and race inequality meet. It is absolutely right to draw attention to the role of austerity in creating the conditions for Grenfell Tower, but the tragedy was enabled further by privatisation of Labour governments, Margaret Thatcher’s deregulation, and decades-long neglect of the working class by local councils. This country has a history of bringing people of colour and the working class in proximity to premature death. To ask, “what has happened to this country?” is not only misguided, but an erasure of an ongoing struggle for certain populations, in the face of a political system that ignores such stark inequalities exist at all.

The violently racist policies of this government – whether it is making asylum routes to the UK “unviable”, pledging the construction of “megaprisons”, deportations (Windrush being only one example among many), or a ban on teachers teaching on “white privilege” or “critical race theory” – are only a logical continuation of polices that have been dripping in racism since the formation of this rainy fascist island.

Let’s return to the London Olympics ceremony – so loved by tweeters with #FBPE in their bios, Labour MPs who behave… well, like Labour MPs, and right-wingers all round – took place in the same year that Yarls Wood detention centre (opened by Tony Blair, kept in the hands of corporations by the Tories, infamous for being a centre of physical and emotional abuse for migrants and refugees) celebrated the Queen’s jubilee in such a way:

 

 

 

 Plenty of people in this country do not have the privilege of nostalgia for something lost, dystopia has never been something to imagine, it has been lived.

Thank God Trump lost, at last, we can get back to normal!

Being the leftist at the table is to be the cynic at the table. Yes, Joe Biden won, but the only victory here is that Trump lost. Aside from the unavoidable fact that Trump still won 74 million votes, “normal” as we know it, works only for the few, and is not something we should at all strive to maintain.

The best that Congress could pull together for the Americans facing growing death tolls, record unemployment, and no affordable healthcare in a pandemic, was $600. Please note that Nancy Pelosi, Democrat Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives was at one point claimed to be worth $120, with lowest estimates being $97 million. The Democrats serve capital as much as the Republicans do.  No better example could be the video taken just weeks after the election took place, of Kamala Harris, and Lindsey Graham, Trump ally, and supporter of claims that the election was rigged, fist bumping on the Senate floor. Edouard Louis writes, “for the ruling class, in general, politics is a question of aesthetics: a way of seeing themselves, of seeing the world, of constructing a personality.”

It is clear to any of us that are aware of the severity of the threat climate change poses, that the 2020 election would not be advantageous to the climate justice cause, no matter what happened. Biden is possibly most well-known for his role in the Obama administration. In 2018, Obama boasted “And by the way, American energy production, you wouldn’t always know it, but it went up every year I was president. And you know that whole suddenly America’s like the biggest oil producer … that was me, people.” Meanwhile, both Biden and Obama now often tweet (ground-breaking) warning of the dangers of climate change. Biden’s nominee for secretary of state is Antony Blinken, who intends to continue to funnel US military aid into the Israeli regime, and for diplomacy to be turned into deterrence. John Kerry will be special envoy for climate change – he believes in a free-market solution to climate change, and is a passionate defender of fossil fuel expansion. Avril Haines has been selected to direct national intelligence, which is logical considering her role as deputy CIA chief in the Obama administration, and her role in overseeing the drone strike programme that has come to (rightly) stain the legacy of the administration. Of course, it doesn’t matter who exactly heads these departments, when fundamentally, each cabinet department is designed to play a role in expanding the US Empire. What does it matter who oversees the military-industrial-complex, when the US military is a bigger polluter than more than 100 countries combined?

These are only two, among many worrying nominations. Any ‘progressive’ that can claim to have taken issue with Trump’s ideology must also be alarmed by Biden’s centrist, neoliberal rationality. When the stakes are as high as they are, our politics has to expand to be able to deal with ecological crisis, imperialism, and the capitalist state.

If the election of Trump may have brought any positive change, we may have hoped that people grew more aware of how race shapes our world. After all, we all spent months sharing social media posts about Black Lives Matter, yet the announcement that Joe Biden would hand out a further £300 million to police departments was met with little popular dissent, and for some, celebration. If normal is the constant cycle of black people killed at the hands of the police, politicians attempting faux shock and horror, and another handout to the carceral state, then we once again have it. Or what about the way that Americans voted out one alleged sexual predator, only to vote in another; simply because we are rarely given the choice to be able to opt out of patriarchal culture.

So, when we understand our ‘normal’ as a society built upon black death, exploitation of the working class, degradation of the environment, all for the sake of profit, why would we want to keep it? The democrats won’t let this vision go. When asked what she thought of polling that showed a majority of young people had little faith in a capitalist system, Nancy Pelosi told a student, “We’re capitalists, that’s just the way it is.” Similarly, so many of us first felt second-hand embarrassment, then despair at the video of Dianne Feinstein, senator for California, telling the young children attempting to garner support for a Green New Deal, “I've been doing this for 30 years. I know what I'm doing. You come in here, and you say it has to be my way or the highway. I don't respond to that.” The normal that we know now is undesirable, and unliveable. If the democrats don’t step up to what permanent, present, and future crises demand, then they leave open a gaping space for an emboldened, united far-right. Any pretence of normality is not only false, but will not last long at all. The best thing the left can do is build a vision of something new and better, strong enough to outlive the normal of today.

Well at least Corbyn’s gone: the adults are back in charge

*Sigh* leftists are used to being infantilised, but it doesn’t make it less tiresome, right? The project of the labour left since 2015 wasn’t faultless, and it was, at most, a mild social democratic vision, but we clung onto it, because it gave us hope.

The stakes are only getting higher, rising sea levels, deteriorating land, suffocating air, ‘proud boys’ embedded in every layer of our societal fabric, pandemics, carceral death-machines, and the growth of capital that is destroying humanity’s chances. All of this death and violence, and you still want us to be realistic, and to cower to what is ‘politically possible’? Free broadband, a four-day working week, a 2030 net zero carbon emissions target, hundreds of thousands of new council houses, and the scrapping of universal credit was and should be the bare minimum of our demands.

As you have probably observed, there is less to say for this statement, and that is simply for the reason that everything discussed thus far should be indicative that we must set our sights so much higher than Corbyn or the Labour Party. I always resist focusing upon Corbyn as a political figure, for reasons that he explains best himself, “There is no such thing as Corbynism, there is socialism.”

The Uncle: loves cops, regularly asks, ‘what has happened to this country?’, isn’t racist, BUT…

This isn’t America, there might be mild racism, but Brits are known for their friendliness!

Britain is exceptional to many other places, in the sense that its brand of racism is a complete denial that it exists at all, despite having a huge responsibility for creating it. The applause that Lawrence Fox received after stating he was sick of people claiming the UK is racist has remained on my mind since that episode of Question Time first aired.

The most prominent example of British racism can be found in our Prime Minister. From the moment Boris Johnson burst into the political scene, he has been rewarded for his unabashed racism, sexism and homophobia – remember “piccaninnies'' with “watermelon smiles”, “letterboxes”, “Blacks are at the other pole”, “tank-topped bumboys”, the list goes (painfully) on - whether that was with columns in the Telegraph, appearances on Have I Got News For You, or, the mild achievement of becoming Prime Minister with a huge majority. Johnson hails Winston Churchill as his hero. The British public also believe him to be ‘The Greatest Briton’, he even resides on our five-pound note. Churchill was also the man that suggested the slogan ‘Keep England White’, was quoted by the cabinet secretary to claim 'problems will arise if many coloured people settle here. Are we to saddle ourselves with colour problems in UK?”, meanwhile, orchestrating famines in Bengal, perpetrating massacres of anti-Nazi protestors in Greece, and assisting Zionism, using the phrase “I do not agree that the dog in a manger has the final right to the manger” to describe Palestinians. It is no coincidence that our prime minister admires this man so much, nor that for his government’s willingness to reproduce white supremacist logics, the British public handed him the biggest win for the Conservative party, since 1987.

Every electoral contest in the UK is dripping in racialised discourse. For example, in 2019, the Conservatives focus on increasing the number of police, building `mega-prisons”, and enforcing draconian border controls was effective simply because law and order narratives speak to the innocent white population that must be protected from the uncivilised, law-breaking others. The carceral state has proved the most effective way of reinforcing racist tropes in order to win elections. Sometimes more revealing is the absence of narratives. In 2019, the fact that 72 people, overwhelmingly people of colour, migrants, and refugees, burned alive in their homes was largely absent from the election build up. Similarly, the violence of the Windrush deportations – that have not to this day, been resolved – was avoided. Despite widespread condemnation for the Conservative’s treatment of Windrush citizens and their “hostile environment”, the Tories campaigned using promises such as the classic dog-whistle “an Australian points-based system” (i.e. we want our island to appear as white as Australia please and thank you), increasing NHS surcharges, and ending free movement. Anti-immigrant sentiment and often blatant racism has proved election-winning throughout this country’s history.

There are a million more examples we might refer to, whether they are statistics on poverty and unemployment, data on prison populations and police brutality, or deportations and ant-immigrant sentiment. The point is, to suggest that Britain isn’t racist is not only factually incorrect and ignorant, but it also reproduces white supremacy itself.

Yes Black Lives Matter, because all lives matter. Black Lives Matter is too confrontational, its proven to have stoked racial tensions!

This family member is simply veiling an anxiety that in valuing black lives in the way that we value white lives, the rewards that whiteness once promised will be eroded with a nostalgia for a time in which ‘racial tensions’ didn’t exist. In the place of racial tensions was the ability to enjoy their love for red post boxes, gravy, queuing, WW2, and colonial conquest in peace.

It is only possible to believe ‘racial tensions’ have been absent from this country until now as result of an erasure of struggles that have dated back to the colonial era. The history of white supremacy is the history of resistance to it. Yet, it is easier for people to believe that Black Lives Matter has led to this crisis of disorder and disruption, rather than the colonial violence inflicted on countless countries by our ancestors. Britain literally instigated ‘racial tensions’, not just on its own shores, but globally too, from Afghanistan to India, to Iraq and Palestine. The least we can do as a nation is to take responsibility and initiate reparations.

The reason that Black Lives Matter protests spread across the globe was precisely because the oppressive structures of white supremacy are everywhere, and always have been. For many people in this country, after Brexit, the Conservative win in 2019, Windrush – the list goes on - Black Lives Matter protests became about so much more than George Floyd’s death that summer. Black Lives Matter is confrontational, that is the whole point. You cannot negotiate with white supremacy, with the violence of policing and prisons, nor can you vote it out, reform it, or simply ask it to be nicer and friendlier in its acts of oppression. This is precisely why instead of activists enduring years of petitions that make little difference, protests that draw accusations of silencing and censoring history, and media smear campaigns, Edward Colston ended up in the River Avon.

Defund the Police? Who would catch the thieves? Who would protect us?

It cannot be stressed enough that the police turn up after a crime has been committed. The state relies on policing and prisons to relieve us of ever tackling the root of criminal activity. Crime is produced by the socio-economic conditions of capitalism; it inevitably produces surplus populations who have to turn to illegal activity to survive. These populations are overwhelmingly people of colour because capitalism and racism are inextricable from one another. In young people’s prisons in England and Wales, more than half of the inmates are from a black and minority ethnic background. Black people make up 15.6% of London’s population, yet 43% of stop and searches were of black people in 2018. Black and minority-ethnic people are more likely to lose the chance of a reduced sentence, too. At all levels, the criminal justice system is racist.

 It is a privilege to ask the police to protect us, instead of having to ask who will protect us from the police. Removing the police from public life will not make us less safe, because for so many, the friendly bobby on the beat is exactly what makes them unsafe. During the summer of 2020, anti-black violence was at the forefront of everyone’s mind, and so plenty of the day-to-day police brutality in the UK that largely goes unseen was being monitored much more closely. In one of the most shocking instances, after two black women (two sisters) were murdered in Wembley Park, the Met’s response was so disappointing that their mother had to organise her own search when they were first reported missing. Their mother, Mina Smallman recalled, "I knew instantly why they didn't care. They didn't care because they looked at my daughter's address and thought they knew who she was... A black woman who lives on a council estate." When the bodies of the sisters were found, police officers took photos of the scene, some which featured the officers themselves in what was allegedly a selfie, sharing it to a group chat that included members of the public. Smallman said in an interview: “If ever we needed an example of how toxic it has become, those police officers felt so safe, so untouchable, that they felt they could take photographs of dead black girls and send them on. “It speaks volumes of the ethos that runs through the Metropolitan police.”

In the past few years, “I can’t breathe” were also the words of Jimmy Mubenga, Rashan Charles, and Edson de Costa (all killed by either police officers or immigration officers in the UK), as well as George Floyd and Eric Garner in the U.S. There are many other names with equally harrowing stories, all of whom have lost their lives to the British policing and prisons. You don’t have to be fully on board with abolitionist thought to agree with one simple fact, put by Mariame Kaba, “cut the number of police in half and cut their budget in half. Fewer police officers equals fewer opportunities for them to brutalize and kill people.”

Whilst we’re on protection, if I had a leftist 101 handbook, I would make ‘THE POLICE PROTECT PRIVATE PROPERTY NOT, THE PEOPLE’ a whole chapter. Take a look at what is happening right now with the handling of HS2, a rail network that will destroy natural habitats, wipe out species, and destroy English countryside. Numerous reports have told of the “chilling” brutality that protestors are facing for attempting to stop the destruction of forests that are key to our eco-system. One black member of the HS2 Rebellion tried to hand food to those who had locked themselves to trees and fences, and was thrown to the floor, with four police officers restraining him, one with his knee on his head and back – all of this was caught on film. HS2 workers and police officers have been filmed repeatedly cutting the ropes of protestors, police have been reported to have sexually assaulted the protestors, and knocking some unconscious, with numerous activists left with broken bones. The UN was sent a report on the crackdown on environmental protests in the last 10 years, with the violence inflicted upon HS2 protestors and Extinction Rebellion making up a considerable amount of the evidence. It includes dozens of interviews, alleging 400 police cases that used shale fracking and unjustified offensive behaviour to thwart protesters against the HS2 railroad line. The report concludes that about 10% of allegations can constitute actual physical harm. Ecological breakdown, I all its manifestations, is the biggest threat humanity faces. It is this that we need protection from. It is best to give up the grip that the police have upon your imagination. As you defend their intentions, and insist upon their necessity, they remain in the pocket of the polluters and the state. A phrase that has seen a resurgence since the death of George Floyd is “kill the cop in your head”, after all, the systems that necessitate their existence are the same ones that may kill us all.

So, with that concludes this guide to surviving the Christmas period as a leftist in a world of “white-supremacist-capitalist-patriarchal values”. As we reach the New Year, remember to keep up your anger, and of course, your joy (especially the pleasure of winning the argument) in spite of it; in 2021 we’re going to need both.