I’ve been trying to reflect on the march yesterday in London, orchestrated by Tommy Robinson and his ilk, in relation to the ideas of uniting the Kingdom, which seems to be a rerun of what occurred last September in London, where approximately 140,000 people had turned up to become Britain’s largest-ever far-right rally. By all accounts, this recent iteration resulted in a smaller turnout, possibly only as much as half of that. Now, does that suggest there are limitations to its growth, or that it might have reached its peak? Or does it reflect other developments elsewhere in relation to how we might begin to think about the mobilisation of the far right, the radical right and the extreme right? At the same time as this event was going on in London, there was a protest marking the Nakba, with pro-Palestinians numbering anything between 50 and 60,000, depending on who is providing the estimates. They ran at the same time, and arrests overall were limited on both sides.
The recent local elections resulted in Labour being absolutely thrashed across councils up and down the country, with most of the followers of Labour traditionally now moving to Independents or Greens. The shift to Reform was limited, which suggests that perhaps their numbers have peaked, although they succeeded in becoming council leaders across numerous sites and up to 1,000 councillors were elected. At the same time, 100 Independents were elected and many of these were from Muslim backgrounds, although the correlation is not exact. Many Muslims voted for Greens in far greater numbers than any analysis might have predicted in the past, although it’s clear that the 80% of traditional Labour voters from Muslim backgrounds has fallen to about 30%, with the split roughly equal between Independents and Greens, and this has been occurring ever since the war on Gaza, which came as a response to the events of October 7th.
Meanwhile, in Westminster, media commentators and a few outspoken MPs have called for the blood of Starmer, who is seen as ineffective and unable to take a firm line on anything. This dithering has caused him to face a costly leadership election campaign potentially down the line, with various candidates vying to replace him through progressive-left or centre-left alliances. There is a particular view that Labour’s time has not been entirely focused on the social welfare and economic development dynamics that one would have expected of them, given they were coming in after 14 years of Tory rule and with all of the inequities that were left behind by their reign. Rather, this more of the same flip-flopping between taking forward austerity-light measures and then doing an about-turn has led to the perception that Starmer is weak and possibly out of his depth. This also marks a particular characteristic of British politics in recent times, which is the need, often because journalists operating out of tiny bubbles want to maintain a certain psychodrama in relation to leadership, given the swift turnaround of Tory prime ministers in previous governments. In a sense, journalists get bored easily and want to create a story that may not necessarily be there. It’s also true that Westminster’s machinations are always entertaining, if nothing else, of course.
What does all this mean for today’s economy, society and politics? My work over the last three decades, along with my training in economics, means that I look at the nature of our economic indicators to understand what might be happening more broadly to underpin some of the more regional and local impacts. The economy is barely growing, with huge issues in relation to wage demands and high interest rates, with limited public investment still creating tensions for the bond markets, which need stability to remain less volatile. Government borrowing is still at record levels. The economy isn’t growing enough to pay for the debt, let alone the interest on the debt. The rise of the AI sector has meant that certain white-collar jobs will likely be phased out within the next two years, leading to particular crises for people who cannot pay their mortgages, which could have implications for the economy more generally in relation to savings and investments, with leakage leading to a contraction of investment by corporates and government, leading to real risks of depression, if not recession.
The fact of neoliberalism, globalisation and regional uneven economic development has resulted in a North-South divide that has continued to exacerbate in the light of ongoing investment in the South relative to the North, where a focus on the service sector economy has replaced any need for manufacturing whatsoever. At the same time, the retail economies of the Midlands and the North are barely holding together, with investment being extracted from city centres due to the limited purchasing power of consumers. What were supposed to be thriving heartbeats of local economies have turned into wastelands of retail. I often talk about how a huge Poundland in the centre of Birmingham, indeed on Corporation Street, an important landmark in Birmingham’s history in relation to trade and industry, is boarded up. An important analogy to bear in mind.
The inequalities in society have led to polarisation and division which are exaggerated and blown up by the far right, the radical right and the extreme right. The far right are people like Tommy Robinson, whose talk about immigration and Muslims is somehow the reason for all of their problems. The radical right, such as Reform, want to provide a perspective that suggests the problem is immigration more generally but also the need to maintain tighter borders while removing illegal migrants, all while straying away from any kind of direct ethno-nationalism, although they’re verging on it at all times. The extreme right are rare and they are heavily policed, surveilled and securitised, as they should be. The radical right and the far right, in the form of Farage and Robinson, are two sides of the same coin, one slightly more extreme than the other. And they are a growing part of society. Now, it would be wrong to present them all as raving racists, although clearly many are. But there is a great deal of disaffection and disenfranchisement at the heart of their mobilisation, for which they see no answers coming out of Westminster, and tuning into the likes of GB News for the less educated and the Spectator for the slightly better educated means that there is a certain element of society that has become illiberal, ill-educated and wholly motivated by a certain idea of an Englishness or a Britishness that is restricted in ethno-cultural terms, which are seen as ethno-religious increasingly as the far right adds Christian symbolism to go alongside ethno-nationalism.
And here the circle is complete: with a divided economy with unequal opportunities and with people left behind, both minorities and majorities, and an immigration system that is broken, ineffective and costly, with an illiberal intelligentsia concentrated in a London bubble that sees the rest of the world as a sideshow and certainly the rest of the country as a marker of something that hasn’t worked, we have a realpolitik that is dangerously poised. My prognosis is not good, and the likely leadership campaign for the Prime Minister position will result in a left-leaning premier in the form of Burnham, or someone similar, who will be pilloried by the media classes, which will be taken advantage of by the populist authoritarian types, whether on the ground through movements established by Robinson or in higher politics in the form of movements established by Farage—both disruptors, both arguably grifters. The reason for this is that nobody’s got any brave ideas, and academics are always good at determining truths after the fact. Partly that’s our job and partly also a restriction we face, as we are not soothsayers or oracles, nor should we be.
Elites have never fascinated me, because they are self-serving, competitive, dog-eat-dog, ruthless, never satisfied, always ambitious beyond their abilities, and wholly unscrupulous more often than not. I’m much more fascinated by everyday communities and realities and mobilisations that are ground-up, because such people have heart and commitment, and what they lack in formal education or scholarly insights they make up for in conviction and passion. It’s also fascinating from a social analysis point of view, as it speaks to possibilities for change, because elites reproduce the status quo more often than not, because that’s what the survival mechanism teaches them, but they do so in a way that reproduces it in their own light rather than through transformative change and development. People on the ground see change as the only way forward, and they are willing to put their lives on the line for it. This takes courage. And it’s through these mobilisations that real change is made. Resistance is not futile. Change is inevitable; the question is what direction it will take, and this is where local people have local power to make a difference that has global impacts.