The battle of our age

 

In my last post of 2024 I noted that the main political battles in many countries would be between on the one hand socially conservative right wing plutocratic populists and on the other centre or centre/left parties tentatively moving away from neoliberalism. The populists might be represented by what had once been a mainstream centre/right or right wing party or they could be represented by an insurgent party from the further right, but it really didn’t matter which it was, because their rhetoric and policies would be much the same. The last week in UK political discourse has been entirely consistent with that proposition.

Until November 2024 it was still possible to see right wing populism as an insurgency, as an entertaining interruption to the more sober business of conventional politics. At least that is how the mainstream media typically portrayed it. That was never the reality in the UK, the US and elsewhere, but with Trump about to enter the White House it is no longer even a story you can tell.

After Musk on 3rd January called Jess Phillips a “rape genocide apologist”, the Conservative leadership could have taken the high ground. They could (and of course should) have said that Musk’s comments about Phillips were both ludicrous and dangerous, exposing his lack of knowledge about the UK. They could also have said that we have had a national inquiry, and now what was needed was action. After all when in government the Conservatives had also turned down a request from Oldham councillors for a national inquiry.

In short, they could have said what Starmer said on 6th January, but before he said it. That would have turned the media debate into one between the Conservatives and Farage, where Farage would be parroting Musk. Clashes of this kind are just what the Conservatives need if they are to stem the rise in Reform. As this high ground is also the right ground, it is a debate that they could have won.

Instead the Conservatives followed Farage in refusing to condemn Musk’s remarks about Phillips and Starmer, and repeating his call for another national public inquiry. This is hardly surprising, as the Conservatives have followed a populist path since they chose Johnson as their leader, and also since Johnson they have shown no qualms in going for the Islamophobic vote.

For Farage, Musk and the Conservative party, anything that highlights the awful exploitation and criminality that happened in Oldham, Rotherham and elsewhere, and which was for far too long ignored by the authorities, is gold dust. Not only does it feed the old racist trope that some groups, in this case Mulsims or immigrants, are criminals and rapists, but it also allows them to show that concerns about racism can sometimes have negative effects. They know that individual stories selected to fit their racist agenda are for many voters more powerful than the statistics that say race, religion, or immigration is not the issue when it comes to men sexually exploiting women and girls. Of course anyone who supports the Trump administration, or who has as one of their five MPs someone who was sentenced for kicking his girlfriend and thinks Andrew Tate is an “important voice” for men is not really concerned about the victims in these cases. Their concern is to whip up Islamophobia, which is why they want yet another inquiry rather than actions based on previous inquiries.

On this there appears to be no difference between Musk/Farage and Badenoch/Jenrick/Philp. If anything, the latter group appears worse. Take the case of extreme far right leader Tommy Robinson (real name Stephen Yaxley-Lennon), who is in jail for 18 months for contempt of court. (A good summary of why he is in jail is here, HT Helen Lewis.) Farage has for some time distanced himself from Robinson, but Musk thinks he should be free. Badenoch refused to say whether she agreed with Musk or otherwise.

Musk’s interventions, and the right wing bandwagon that followed, are not just designed to stoke Islamophobia and anti-immigrant sentiment. They are also a classic example of how you turn reality on its head. Jess Phillips has done far more than most to help vulnerable women, and Keir Starmer made it easier to prosecute those that exploit them. But by attacking them personally, and suggesting the opposite, Musk and the political right play the mainstream media to hide that truth. Most of the mainstream media has done its usual ‘two sides’ thing, making Phillips and Starmer’s record on this issue ‘controversial’ in the eyes of most voters. The truth is lost to all but high information voters, and the strategy of distorting the truth is successful. The other thing the far right’s professed concern about male exploitation of women ends up achieving is retraumatizing the victims and putting the life of a female MP at greater risk.

As the UK’s political right has become more extreme and populist it has also increasingly aligned itself to Trump and a Republican party, who have been playing the US mainstream media in this way for years. As a result, we can expect to see this and similar tactics used more and more often in the UK. Of course the right wing press has often tried and sometimes succeeded in doing similar things, but in combination with Trump, Musk and others in the US they can become much more successful.

Increasingly the populist plutocratic right is an international project, and Trump’s victory gives its national representatives much more power. The UK is far from alone in having to contend with this kind of political interference. There is a danger that individual national governments that are not right wing populists may be too weak to combat this attack, particularly when resistance can result in economic retaliation from Trump in the form of tariffs. In addition, the uncertainty he creates will have other negative impacts on their economies, as it is doing currently in the UK.

Appeasement in the face of this onslaught just doesn’t work, but instead just assists those who want to see populist far right governments everywhere. If the first thought among policymakers outside the US is to avoid saying or doing anything that might annoy or upset Trump, then they have already lost. If there might be one silver lining to Musk's intervention, it would be to make Starmer realise that Trump is never going to helpful to the UK while Labour is in power, and pretending otherwise will just have domestic political costs. Given the strength of the threat, mainstream governments around the world need to cooperate and act together in planning resistance. With Musk that means using and enhancing the laws they already have to make social media platforms accountable. As I argued here, we should be prepared to stop the spread of disinformation via the media in the same way as we already stop other companies misselling their products. The new US government will fight very hard to prevent its social media companies being regulated, and to fight back other countries need to act together.

The fight against right wing plutocratic populism is not like previous post-warpolitical battles between the right and left, over how society should be organised to best serve its citizens. Instead it is a battle over whether politics addresses the real world problems voters face, or whether it is instead preoccupied with a fantasy world. A world where politicians make stuff up all the time, pretend problems are caused by convenient scapegoats to feed off the divisions that causes, and when these scapegoats don’t exist, as with climate change, they deny the problem even exists at all. The fight against right wing plutocratic populism is the battle of this age, and it would be foolish at this stage to bet on which side will win.

[1] The BBC, on this issue as before, has helped the far right, as Ian Dunt notes here. Another approach is possible, as Beth Rigby shows here, but unfortunately it’s the exception rather than the rule for the broadcast media. The moment the headline is something like ‘Starmer defends his record against attacks from Musk’ it has distorted the truth.