Clive Lewis For Norwich South
For those attempting to make sense of Trump’s victory and the rise of the far-right across Europe, look no further than the PM’s statement below.
“I’m determined to deliver growth, create wealth and put more money in people’s pockets. This can only be achieved by working in partnership with leading businesses like Blackrock, to capitalise on the UK’s position as a world-leading hub for investment.”
Whether you like it or not, the far-right has a set of familiar narratives. We can probably all recite, something like:
“The reason you’re in an overpriced, damp rental; your gran lives in squalor; your job is low paid/insecure, and your public services crumbling – is because elites declared war on workers, favoured immigrants and made your life more expensive with their ‘green crap’.”
“Vote for us and we will deport the immigrants, stop the elites, cut the green crap and declare war on woke, Britain will be great again.”
This is a story. It has a beginning, middle and end or sets the scene, explains why we are where we are and offers a solution. In other words, it has goodies, baddies and happy endings.
Labour’s story, just like the US Democrats, doesn’t make narrative sense.
Rather than explain how 40 years of atomising, neoliberal plunder, the selling-off of and destruction of our public services, the undermining of our democracy, and the hollowing out and selling off of our natural resources at the hands of companies like Blackrock and other profit-maximising corporations, billionaires & financial institutions, has led us here.
Instead, we refuse to give a credible explanation for how we got here other than ‘it was Tory chaos’. The problem is when the political and economic permacrisis continues, that won’t be a viable explanation. By refusing to identify the culprits for this state of affairs, we fail to make a convincing narrative that explains our predicament.
Instead, we become the defenders of the very elites/ the business-as-usual brigade – that the right claims we are.
Even though the far-right themselves are a core part of the very establishment that championed these policies.
We either develop a story as the agents of progressive change, identifying those responsible and pledging to fix it, or we make way for the likely inevitability of a far-right victory, just like in the US.