The Labour Party is stuck firmly in the neoliberal trap Tony Blair willingly jumped into with economic and social policy. And there has been no indication I’ve seen that Sir Keir will end Britain’s foreign policy of going along with whatever government is in power in Washington, a trend that goes back to the Suez Crisis of 1956, when Britian and France teamed up with Israel to invade Egypt. The Eisenhower Administration had no problem in pulling the plug on Israel’s military blunders that went against US interests. So he pressured them to pull out. And Britain since then has tried to avoid being in such a position against the US since then, although it obviously has had differences with the US on lesser matters.
And Sir Keir’s party has been purging itself of left members like Jeremy Corbyn (1), who retained his parliamentary seat in the July 4 election by running as an independent.
But I was pleasantly surprised to get up this morning and see a report that Sir Keir, on his first week in office, did something that is obviously good and also obviously the kind of thing that needs to be done do counter rightwing politicians. He’s calling off the crackpot and illegal scheme concocted by the Tory government to exile any asylum-seekers coming to Britain to the African nation of Rwanda:
The two last remaining migrants who are detained and waiting to be sent to Rwanda will be bailed [i.e., not sent to Rwanda] in the coming days, the government has said.This kind of scheme is known as “outsourcing” the challenge of asylum-seekers. Except for relatively short term and emergency situations, this is simply not a practical approach. The EU recently set up a similarly flawed scheme with Tunesia. It’s both ugly and pathetic at the same time.
The home secretary's spokesperson also revealed that a further 218 migrants were released on bail from detention centres by the previous government during the election campaign.
They were due to be deported to the east-central African country as part of previous PM Rishi Sunak's policy to tackle illegal immigration.
On his first full day as prime minister, Sir Keir Starmer confirmed the Rwanda deportation scheme is "dead and buried".
At his first press conference since entering No 10, the Prime Minister told journalists the scheme has "never been a deterrent" as it would only deport "less than 1%" of small boat arrivals.
Scores of asylum seekers were taken into detention from late April, after Rishi Sunak said that flights would leave in the first weeks of July. [my emphasis] (2)
Narrow nationalism based on xenophobia, racism, and Islamophobia has been the rallying cry for the far right parties in Europe since forever. The far-right parties in Europe are surging, not because the center-left and center-right are “ignoring the problem” or because there are no practical and humane solutions that are compatible with international law. It’s because the center-right parties – and sometimes the center-left – are tried to counter the demagoguery by adopting it and trying to use that to pull votes from the far right.
That strategy has a resounding, spectacular failure. A failure, that is, if the point of the strategy was to counter the far right and defend liberal democratic institutions.
The French example
In France, that process over the last decade and a half has led to what is playing out in the election today, in which the far-right, xenophobic National Rally party (RN from its French initials) headed by Marine Le Pen was the largest party in the first round of parliamentary last weekend. And could well be the largest in the last round taking place today. Here’s a brief history of based on Wikipedia information of the final-round results for the tops three parties in parliamentary election since 2007.
2007: Union for a Popular Movement (UMP), Nicolas Sarkozy’s Gaullist party, 46%; Socialist Party (PS), 42%; Democratic Movement (MoDem), 0.5%. (Yes, a party called modem.)
2007: Union for a Popular Movement (UMP), Nicolas Sarkozy’s Gaullist party, 46%; Socialist Party (PS), 42%; Democratic Movement (MoDem), 0.5%. (Yes, a party called modem.)
2012: Socialist Party (PS), 41%; Union for a Popular Movement (UMP), 38%; National Rally (FN), 4%.
2017: Renaissance (Reform) (RE), Emmanuel Macron’s party, then called La République En Marche (LREM), 49%; The Republicans (LR), the new “liberal conservative” incarnation of Sarkozy’s right/center-right Gaullist party, 27%; National Rally (FN), 9%.
2022: La République En Marche (LREM), 39%; La France Insoumise (France Unbowed, LFI), the democratic-socialist party of Jean-Luc Mélenchon, 32%; National Rally party (RN), 17%.
Even with all the name changes of parties, the parties themselves sometimes form electoral alliances which are headed by one party, but smaller groupings may play a part. The above results show the lead party, not the formal name of the electoral alliance.
The first post-1989, aka, “the end of history,” elections in 1993 showed the following results by party:
28%: Rally for the Republic (RPR), the Gaullist party of Jacques Chirac
28%: Socialist Party (PS) headed by Pierre Bérégovoy.
26%: Union for French Democracy (UDF), the slightly-to-the-left-of-RPR conservative party of Valéry Giscard d'Estaing
6%: National Front (FN), headed by Jean-Marie Le Pen, the father of Marine Le Pen, the current leader of the party, which was renamed to National Rally (FN).
5%: Communist Party (PCI), led by Georges Marchais.
In 1981, the Socialist Party had won 49% and the Communist Party 7%, with a substantial Gaullist Party (RPR) and a conservative Union for French Democracy (UDF), whose successor party was MoDem) also in the race. For a decade or so, there were two relatively stable parties on the right (RPR and UDF) and two on the left (PS and PCF). But the slide toward neoliberal economic policies went forward in France, though at less an accelerated pace as in Britain.
Although the French party landscape has been scrambled in recent decades, there is still a substantial conservative bloc with a “Gaullist” component. “Gaullism” is often used to refer to mainstream nationalist tendencies within a pro-EU orientation, though historically Gaullism has also been thought to have an authoritarianism streak. (3)
But the radical right in France went from being a nuisance presence and a party for which grumpy authoritarians could vote as a protest, today’s National Rally is a major force. The left/center-left have a coherent electoral vehicle in France Unbowed (LFI). It was first founded in 2016, but is not organized as a national party in itself, but is composed of several different left parties. That results in a lack of ideological unity, but that in itself may be an advantage in elections, making it harder for opponents to nitpick quirky or fringe positions endorsed by one of the component parties.
And on the center-right, the fact that Macron’s party placed fourth in the first round on June 30 is not a hopeful sign for the Macron and his LREM, after coming in first in the final rounds in 2017 and 2022.
Meanwhile, Le Pen’s National Rally went from 4% in 2012 to 9% in 2017 to 17% in 2022, and then came in first in the June 30 first round is obviously a sign they are attracting support.
In terms of campaign strategy, the approach of the center-right parties of pandering to the hot-button issues of the far right is looking very much like a resounding failure in France!
Fighting for their own side is sometimes a hard concept for centrist parties
We have seen a similar process taking place in Italy, which today has Georgia Meloni of the “post”-fascist Brother of Italy (FdI) as Prime Minister, pushing a Orbanist proposal to drastically limiting the power of the parliament and the significance of parliamentary elections. Her government coalition partners include Matteo Salvini Lega (which once had and may still have a friendship pact with Putin’s United Russia party, along with Le Pen’s National Rally and the far-right “Freedom” Party of Austria), and the Forza Italia of the late Silvio Berlusconi.
That process in Italy was also a case of the center-right, who supposedly support liberal democracy, pandering to the more radical right and endorsing their far right positions rather than fighting them.
The British Conservative (Tory) Party did a wrecking job on the British economy under Margaret Thatcher. And Tony Blair’s New Labour policy largely endorsed the neoliberal economic policies on which Thatcher established as dominant.
Then came the Brexit drive, in which Nigel Farage and his UK Independence Party (UKIP) used the European Parliament elections to win a presence there. Unlike the winner-take-all electoral districts in Britain, the EU elections allocate EU parliamentary seats based on the parties’ percentage of votes. Once Farage and UKIP were able to use their EU seats to promote their Brexit position of Britain leaving the EU, the pro-EU Conservatives adopted the idea of supporting the holding of a national referendum of 2016, even though their official party policy opposed Brexit. Their thought was that the referendum would lose, and that would strengthen their own position on the EU.
But when the “Leave” option on the referendum won with a 52% margin, the Tories decided that instead of defending their own position of staying in the EU, they would jump on the Brexit bandwagon. The actual decision of leaving the EU had to be taken by Parliament. But instead of sticking with their own pro-Europe, pro-liberal-democracy, supposedly center-right position and staying in the EU, they capitulated for the far right and voted for Brexit.
Fast-forward to 2024, seemingly none of the great benefits they were supposed to reap from Brexit have happened. One of Tory leader Boris Johnson’s pro-Brexit talking points was that all that money that Britain had been paying to the EU could now go into the National Health Service, already badly hit by the neoliberal policies of both Tories and Labour. But since Brexit, the NHS has continued to deteriorate without the windfall of funding that Brexit was supposed to bring.
And, of course, xenophobia against immigrants and hysteria over refugees were a major talking point for Brexiteers. Farage in 2014 had proposed this:
Farage said his party supported a five-year ban on immigration to settle, alongside an Australian-style system of temporary work permits. He said he would go ahead with the ban even if it led to a fall in UK prosperity.He argued on BBC Radio 4's Today programme: "If you said to me do you want to see another five million people come to Britain, and if that happened we would all be slightly richer, I would say, do you know what, I would rather we were not slightly richer."I would rather we had communities that were rather more united and we had a situation where young unemployed British people had a realistic chance of getting a job, so yes I do think the social side of this matters more than the pure market economics." (4)
So it’s good to see Sir Keir at least pushing back on that aspect the far right’s demagoguery.
But the problem is not unique to European democracies. In the US, the Obama Administration tried to pander to the anti-immigrant positions, and the Biden Administration has done it even more so. Promoting the most dishonest and hot-butter agitation of the anti-democracy right is not a good approach to defending democracy. (Obligatory reminder in this election year: Trump’s anti-immigrant policies were and would be much worse.)
And we’re seeing that right now in Britain, France, Italy, and the US.
Notes:
(1) Ducourtieux, Cécile (2024): Keir Starmer accused of a 'purge' of Labour's left-wing candidates. Le Monde 07/05/2024. <https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2024/06/05/in-the-uk-the-left-wing-of-the-labour-party-accuses-keir-starmer-of-a-purge_6673798_4.html> (Accessed: 2024-07-07).
(2) Comerford, Ruth (2024): Last two migrants bound for Rwanda to be bailed, home secretary says BBC News 07/07/2024. <https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c880y4yz8yvo> (Accessed: 2024-07-07).
(3) Why everyone wants a bit of France's General de Gaulle. RFI 11/11/2020. <https://www.rfi.fr/en/france/20201111-why-nearly-everyone-wants-a-bit-of-general-de-gaulle-france-ww2-gaullism-heritage> (Accessed: 2024-07-07).
(4) Wintour, Patrick (2014): Nigel Farage: Ukip wants five-year ban on immigrants settling in UK. The Guardian 06/07/2024. <https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2014/jan/07/ukip-ban-immigrants-nigel-farage> (Accessed: 2024-07-07).
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