Source: The Guardian

With extremism on the rise in Britain, the use of toxic language over leaving the EU is dangerous folly.

Brexit, for the Tory right, was a national revolution: not simply a recalibration of Britain’s relationship with the EU but a blunt instrument to roll back progressive social norms. Those deemed to be critics or opponents were now enemies of the people, saboteurs, traitors, all splashed on newspaper front pages. A rising Labour left is portrayed as treacherous, in league with terrorists and foreign powers. For the hard right, in Britain and beyond, the left is an agent of the nation’s destruction because of its support for migrants and refugees, and opposition to anti-Muslim bigotry. Islamophobia is a respectable bigotry, fanned by national newspapers such as The Sun and The Times which are forced to publish corrections after publishing articles which twist the truth and whip up hatred, but by then the damage is already done.

A classic far-right trope has always been to portray opponents as betrayers of the nation. This week, it reached a zenith with the threatening Daily Express headline: “Ignore the will of the people at your peril”. Little wonder that the Labour MP for Wigan, Lisa Nandy, tweeted: “These front pages are not just disgraceful but downright dangerous. What the hell is happening to our democracy?” This while an alleged member of a banned neo-Nazi group has admitted to plotting to kill her friend and neighbouring Labour MP for West Lancashire, Rosie Cooper, with a knife. Jo Cox was murdered by a fascist terrorist almost exactly two years ago; the anti-Muslim terrorist Darren Osborne drove to London last year hoping to murder Jeremy Corbyn, and mowed down a group of Muslim worshippers, killing one; and four far-right plots were thwarted last year.

The profile of Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (or “Tommy Robinson”), who founded the English Defence League, flourishes despite, or perhaps because of, his being jailed last month for contempt of court. His growing far-right movement benefits from the promotion of bigotry by the media and political elite.

Today’s far right has many parents. The industrial era should not be glorified: many of the old jobs were dirty, unhealthy and often excluded women. But the disappearance of millions of secure manufacturing jobs under both the Tories and New Labour in favour of the service sector had far-reaching consequences. Much of the work that replaced them was not only lower paid and more insecure: it had less prestige. The old work often conferred a sense of pride. Well-paid, secure jobs for those who didn’t go to university disappeared, as did their communities based around mines, factories and docks. A sense of being ignored and abandoned set in. It nurtured grievances that waited to be fed upon.

The disappearance of secure jobs, stagnating living standards, the failure to build council housing, public services under strain: rather than being the consequences of an economic model rigged in favour of elites, these were blamed by politicians and the media elite on immigration. With the working class erased as a category – “we’re all middle class now” – and New Labour’s failure to fully reverse the social damage of Thatcherism, the demagogic deceit that politicians cared more about migrants, refugees and minorities than working-class people resonated with some who felt abandoned. Those who were struggling were encouraged to resent each other, rather than the elites. The diversity of many working-class communities was erased in favour of a besieged white working-class man, oppressed not because of his class, but because of his colour. And while immigration increased under New Labour, no positive case was made for it. The tabloids peddled vicious half-truths, myths and outright lies, while Blairite stalwarts such as David Blunkett spoke of schools being “swamped” by non-English-speaking migrants.

Enter Brexit. David Cameron argued for remain after spending years presenting immigration as a problem to be dealt with (“for too long, immigration has been too high”, he declared in 2011), and having set immigration targets he knew could not be met. Rather than engage with a referendum about our relationship with a trading bloc, some leave campaigners made the cynical decision to win by using toxic language about immigrants and refugees.Immigrants portrayed as potential rapists, murderers and terrorists; lies about Turkey joining the EU, leading to Turkish criminals flooding into Britain; Nigel Farage standing in front of a poster of mostly dark-skinned migrants with the headline: “Breaking point”. Millions of leave voters are not racists or bigots. The rhetoric of the leave campaign, however, gave renewed legitimacy to already deeply entrenched and systemic xenophobia and racism.

It will only get worse. The Tories’ Brexit strategy is, to put it mildly, bungled. The odds of a Brexit deal being negotiated to the satisfaction of the Tory hard Brexiteers are low. And what then? Another trope of the radical right is the “stab in the back” myth: the claim that traitors and saboteurs wrecked their sacred national project. Hysteria will be whipped up mercilessly by the rightwing media. And one of the chief beneficiaries will be an increasingly assertive and dangerous far right. There will be some voices who will point to this as further evidence that Brexit must simply be reversed, rather than a deal negotiated that reconciles a referendum result they did not want with the needs of Britain’s communities. But they spend all too little time understanding the factors that drove the referendum result – or how extreme rightwing elements will benefit if Stop Brexit aspirations are realised.

Were it not for Corbynism, the radical right would have a monopoly on resentment of the status quo, and would be even stronger. But the radical left has to better confront the expanding far right. When it mobilises on the streets, the left must do so in greater numbers. The left – from Labour to Momentum to the trade unions – must debate how it can more effectively organise in working-class communities. The far right is effectively using social media as a tool of radicalisation; the left needs a counter-strategy. There is an alarming lack of appreciation of just how dangerous this political moment is, or where we could be heading. The potential consequences should frighten us all.

Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist

Video: Tommy Robinson is not a free speech martyr

The nightmare of nuclear apocalypse hangs over humanity. It will one day become a reality, unless we stop it.

Source: The Guardian

That’s just one bomb, of course. What if 100 nuclear warheads with a much lower yield – 15 kilotons, say, the size of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima – were exchanged on the Indian subcontinent? Well, scientists have modelled this scenario, and the calamity extends far beyond the borders of India and Pakistan. As five megatons of black carbon instantly enter the atmosphere, temperatures will suddenly fall, rainfall will decline, the ozone layer will thin dramatically and the frost-free growing period for crops will shorten by between 10 and 40 days. According to the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, 2 billion people could starve in the aftermath. In a full east-west exchange billions would also die. Infrastructure would collapse. The survivors would, it is often said, envy the dead. They would suffer torturous protracted deaths from radiation; they would scrabble for food in irradiated soil; as healthcare systems implode, their illnesses and cancers would be untreated. For the diminishing minority who remained alive, it would be everyone for themselves in a struggle for survival in a ravaged hellscape.

Why inflict this horror on your imagination? It seems so abstract and distant, and yet, according to the Doomsday Clock of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, we are but two minutes from midnight. The US and Russia combined have around 2,000 nuclear weapons on a hair trigger, meaning they could be launched in minutes, leaving my scenarios just hours away.

There have been many close calls. In 1979, Zbigniew Brzezinski – President Carter’s national security adviser – was woken up at 3am to be told that 250 Soviet nuclear missiles were heading to the US. If the president were to retaliate, he would have between three and seven minutes to decide. An updated report came through: there were 2,200 missiles. Armageddon beckoned. But the reports were wrong. “Someone had mistakenly put military exercise tapes into the computer system,” as the former defence secretary Robert Gates put it. Consider today, with Donald Trump in the White House facing off against North Korea’s Kim Jong-un. A nuclear arsenal on a hair trigger under the control of a man whose Twitter feed is a never-ending temper tantrum is not exactly reassuring. Millions could perish in a nuclear conflagration in a matter of hours.

Which brings me to the noble but marginalised cause of nuclear disarmament. This Sunday marks 60 years since the first march to Aldermaston – where Britain’s nuclear bombs are produced – which spawned the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND). There is a certain paradox in the fact that a supporter of nuclear disarmament leads the Labour party, and yet the cause is barely on the nation’s political radar, even as Kim pledges to de-nuke the Korean peninsula. That’s because Labour’s leadership has made a strategic decision to accept party policy, which is to renew Trident.

Cards on the table: I’m a unilateralist but I’ve accepted Labour’s position. It depends how the question is phrased, but polling does not suggest any substantial public appetite for unilateral disarmament. Many unions are opposed. Such a policy would reopen a civil war with a Labour right that is already increasingly febrile. With the priority being to transform Britain with socialist policies, such a compromise seems sad but unavoidable. And yet the arguments for replacing Trident are based on utter delusion, the cost of acting on these delusions is grotesque, and we are rendered colossal hypocrites by lecturing the world about weapons of mass destruction while renewing our own. CND believes the lifetime cost will be at least £205bn. What would that money mean for an NHS that last year, the Red Cross said, faced a “humanitarian crisis”; for our struggling education system; and for eliminating the housing crisis?

Listen to Tony Blair’s former defence secretary Des Browne, who suggested that cyber attacks against Trident could render it obsolete. Or take former Tory defence secretary Michael Portillo, who said that Trident’s replacement was “a waste of money” and that “our independent nuclear deterrent is not independent and doesn’t constitute a deterrent”. Tony Blair himself said he could see “the common sense and practical argument” against Trident, that “the expense is huge, and the utility in a post-cold war world is less in terms of deterrent, and nonexistent in terms of military use”. So why throw all that money at it? Because in Blair’s own words it would be “too big a downgrading of our status as a nation”. All that wasted money for status alone.

There’s more wisdom from the Tory Crispin Blunt, when he was chairman of the Commons foreign affairs committee in 2016, who said: “At what point is it no longer value for money in the UK? In my judgment we have reached that point.” We fail to adequately tackle the actual threats facing Britain and leave our conventional forces under-resourced because of the Trident obsession.

Nearly a decade ago, Field Marshall Lord Bramall – former head of the armed forces – and two senior generals described nukes as “completely useless as a deterrent to the threats and scale of violence we currently face or are likely to face”.

Take terrorism, take cyber-attacks, take climate change: all pose grave, demonstrable threats to our security. Yet we are failing to invest in tackling them, while billions are thrown at weapons of mass destruction that do not keep us safe. Labour policy cannot shift until public opinion does decisively. As the cold war revived in the early 1980s, CND led mass national campaigns that began to shift opinion: the same is needed today to stop this madness (and it is madness).

There are other steps that can be taken in the meantime. Labour should be campaigning for Russia and the US to cease putting their arsenal on hair-trigger alert. They should exert moral pressure on other nations to sign up to the comprehensive test ban treaty.

Britain cannot disarm the world, but it can set an example. The nightmare of nuclear apocalypse hangs over humanity. It will one day become a reality, unless we stop it.

NEW BOOK
CND at 60: Britain’s most enduring mass movement

Source: The Guardian

This is one of the most sensational political upsets of our time. Theresa May – a wretched dishonest excuse of a politician, don’t pity her – launched a general election with the sole purpose of crushing opposition in Britain. It was brazen opportunism, a naked power grab: privately, I’m told, her team wanted the precious “bauble” of going down in history as the gravediggers of the British Labour party. Instead, she has destroyed herself. She is toast.

She has just usurped David Cameron as the “worst ever prime minister on their own terms” (before Cameron, it had been a title held by Lord North since the 18th century). Look at the political capital she had: the phenomenal polling lead, almost the entire support of the British press, the most effective electoral machine on Earth behind her. Her allies presented the Labour opposition as an amusing, eccentric joke that could be squashed like a fly that had already had its wings ripped off. They genuinely believed they could get a 180-seat majority. She will leave No 10 soon, disgraced, entering the history books filed under “hubris”.

But, before a false media narrative is set, let me put down a marker. Yes, the Tory campaign was a shambolic, insulting mess, notable only for its U-turns, a manifesto that swiftly disintegrated, robotically repeated mantras that achieved only ridicule. But don’t let media commentators – hostile to Labour’s vision – pretend that the May calamity is all down to self-inflicted Tory wounds.

This was the highest turnout since 1997, perhaps the biggest Labour percentage since the same year – far eclipsing Tony Blair’s total in 2005. Young and previous non-voters came out in astonishing numbers, and not because they thought, “Ooh, Theresa May doesn’t stick to her promises, does she?” Neither can we reduce this to a remainer revolt. The Lib Dems threw everything at the despondent remainer demographic, with paltry returns. Many Ukip voters flocked to the Labour party.

No: this was about millions inspired by a radical manifesto that promised to transform Britain, to attack injustices, and challenge the vested interests holding the country back. Don’t let them tell you otherwise. People believe the booming well-off should pay more, that we should invest that money in schools, hospitals, houses, police and public services, that all in work should have a genuine living wage, that young people should not be saddled with debt for aspiring to an education, that our utilities should be under the control of the people of this country. For years, many of us have argued that these policies – shunned, reviled even in the political and media elite – had the genuine support of millions. And today that argument was decisively vindicated and settled.

Don’t let them get away with the claim that, “Ah, this election just shows a better Labour leader could have won!” Risible rot. Do we really think that Corbyn’s previous challengers to the leadership – and this is nothing personal – would have inspired millions of otherwise politically disengaged and alienated people to come out and vote, and drive Labour to its highest percentage since the famous Blair landslide? If the same old stale, technocratic centrism had been offered, Labour would have faced an absolute drubbing, just like its European sister parties did.

Labour is now permanently transformed. Its policy programme is unchallengeable. It is now the party’s consensus. It cannot and will not be taken away. Those who claimed it could not win the support of millions were simply wrong. No, Labour didn’t win, but from where it started, that was never going to happen. That policy programme enabled the party to achieve one of the biggest shifts in support in British history – yes, eclipsing Tony Blair’s swing in 1997.

Social democracy is in crisis across the western world. British Labour is now one of the most successful centre-left parties, many of which have been reduced to pitiful rumps under rightwing leaderships. And indeed, other parties in Europe and the United States should learn lessons from this experience.

And what of our young? They have suffered disproportionately these past few years: student debt, a housing crisis, a lack of secure jobs, falling wages, cuts to social security – the list goes on. Young voters have been ignored, ridiculed, demonised even. They just don’t care about politics, it’s said, or they’re just too lazy. “Under-30s love Corbyn but they don’t care enough to get off their lazy arses to vote for him!” one unnamed Tory MP told the Huffington Post’s Owen Bennett. Those young voters did indeed get off their “lazy arses”, and they kicked several Tory MPs’ arses out of the House of Commons.

And then there’s the media onslaught. Even by the standards of our so-called free press – a stinking sewer at the best of times – its campaign against Corbyn and the Labour party was utterly nauseating. Smears of terrorism, extremism, you name it. They believed they could simply brainwash millions of Britons. But people in this country are cleverer than the press barons think, and millions rejected their bile.

But a note about Corbyn, and the leadership, too. I owe Corbyn, John McDonnell, Seumas Milne, his policy chief Andrew Fisher, and others, an unreserved, and heartfelt apology. I campaigned passionately for Corbyn the first time he stood, and I voted for him twice. A few weeks ago, a senior Labour MP denounced me as one of the chief gravediggers of the Labour party, and journalists have suggested I should be knighted by the Tory party for my efforts.

But I came to believe that, yes, indeed Labour was heading for a terrible defeat that would crush all the things I believed in. That’s what all the polling, byelections and the local elections seemed to say. I thought people had made their minds up about Corbyn, however unfairly, and their opinion just wouldn’t shift. I wasn’t a bit wrong, or slightly wrong, or mostly wrong, but totally wrong. Having one foot in the Labour movement and one in the mainstream media undoubtedly left me more susceptible to their groupthink. Never again. Corbyn stays and – if indeed the Tories are thrown into crisis as Brexit approaches – he has an undoubted chance of becoming prime minister, and a fine prime minister he would make too.

Now that I’ve said I’m wrong – perhaps one of the sweetest things I’ve had to write – so the rest of the mainstream commentariat, including in this newspaper, must confess they were wrong, too. They were wrong to vilify Corbyn supporters – from the day he stood – as delusional cultists. They were wrong to suggest Corbyn couldn’t mobilise young people and previous non-voters. They were wrong to suggest he couldn’t make inroads in Scotland. They were wrong to suggest a radical left programme was an automatic recipe for electoral catastrophe.

No, Labour hasn’t formed a government. But it is far closer than it has been for a very long time. The prospect of a socialist government that can build an economy run in the interests of working people – not the cartel of vested interests who have plunged us into repeated crisis – well, that may have been a prospect many of us thought would never happen in our lifetime. It is now much closer than it has ever been. So yes – to quote a much-ridiculed Jeremy Corbyn tweet: the real fight starts now.