Fighting Back Against National-Populism

Jon Bloomfield and David Edgar consider what the progressive Left can do to counter dangerous hard-right thinking on the great social issues of our era

Brexit showed the Right the potential for new cross-class coalitions in British politics.

Both Theresa May’s Government – with its appeal to ‘citizens of somewhere’ – and the Johnson Government with its ‘levelling up’ rhetoric – sought to cement this alliance.

The return to a brutal Thatcherism with the Truss-Kwarteng administration disrupted this agenda, but proved a short-lived interlude.

In their various ways Kemi Badenoch, Michael Gove and Suella Braverman are all signalling their wish to return to the national-populist ‘culture wars’ agenda. Like their counterparts in Europe and the US, the national-populists want to roll-back the advances that have been made in the past 50 years. 

As we have written previously in these pages, the likes of Spiked and Unherd are crucial propagandists in this battle. In particular, these two sites have mounted a consistent assault on progressivism on the major social and cultural issues of the day: climate justice, feminism and anti-racism.

In the run-up to the COP26 UN climate change summit in Glasgow last November, both sites ran material unremittingly hostile to the climate change agenda.

They each ram pieces by the same US author denying the existence of any problem. In Unherd, Michael Shellenberger blithely claimed that a global temperature rise of 3°C would be no big deal. Later, Shellenberger gave an interview to Spiked in which he maintained that “using gas and nuclear is really all that matters on climate change”.

Earlier this month, the lead story in Unherd was a piece by Thomas Fazi celebrating the arrival of the world’s eight billionth resident and critiquing the “degrowther” tendency, with its “unescapable Luddite, anti-industrial bias”.

At root, then, both the libertarian Spiked and the communitarian Unherd believe in unrestrained economic growth and see any movement that places limitations on that growth as a negative influence that undermines capitalism.

More recently, Spiked promoted an article titled ‘Why Rishi Sunak Should Snub COP27’. Heir to a productionist interpretation of Marxism that sees the unrestrained development of the forces of production as the way for “man to conquer nature”, Brendan O’Neill sees “environmentalism as the revenge of the aristocracy against modernity”. It’s unclear how the 3,500 scientists engaged in drafting the latest International Panel on Climate Change report relate to the aristocracy but O’Neill makes no attempt to address their findings. Instead, we are left with the crude economic reductionism of an old Trotskyist born again as a laisser-faire libertarian.  

A second key battleground is feminism. 

Unherd presents itself as a modern publication with plenty of female writers and, at times, recognises the women’s movement and sometimes uses its language. Yet, one of its main female staff writers, Mary Harrington, along with regular contributor Louise Perry, makes clear Unherd’s opposition to modern feminism.

Harrington’s essay ‘The Sexual Revolution Killed Feminism‘ asserts the standard right-wing trope that “feminism today is mainly driven by bourgeois white American women… and serves their class interests”.  This theory ignores the popular mobilisations around equal pay, girls’ education, free nursery care and available contraception that marked the 1970s women’s movement. 

Bewilderingly, Harrington argues that “modern feminism ended in the 1960s, killed by the twin technology shocks of contraception and abortion” and claims it has now “moved into a radical, individualistic bio-libertarianism”. This is an attempt to empty feminism of its substantive content as a collective movement created to address the structural inequalities and obstacles that women experience in their everyday lives.

Harrington doesn’t believe in patriarchy, which she caricatures as a belief in “an eternal conspiracy against women”. Instead of such “fairy tales”, she looks to the traditionalist thought of the American arch Republican campaigner Phyllis Schlafly and calls for “an older relational feminism that can make common cause with conservatives”. A clue as to its precise content comes in her piece ‘The Feminist Case Against Abortion’ and in the articles of Unherd’s Blue Labour-supporting columnist Paul Embery, with his call for Labour to make the return of the “family wage” a mainstay of its economic policy.. In other words, send women back into the home. 

The disdain for addressing the structural inequalities that shape women’s lives fits with the obsessive attacks on Black Lives Matter, and anti-racist movements more generally, that are a dominating presence within the Spiked/Unherd stable.

George Floyd’s murder at the hands of a white policeman in 2020 sparked the largest ever protests against racial injustice in the United States and across the world. It prompted society to discuss racism in ways it has not done for more than a generation. For many, it exposed the depths of racism within America and challenged others to consider the extent of racism in their own countries. Unherd and Spiked offer a different account: a constant diet of sniping which continues two years on.

For Unherd, Kat Rosenfeld argues that well-off communities with no black people started putting BLM signs on their lawns as a way to assuage white guilt – a claim echoed in Spiked. Apparently, the movement was unnecessary since, by the time of Floyd’s death, there was bi-partisan agreement in the US on the need to reform the police and respond to the unfair treatment of black people.  

More generally, both sites either deny or downgrade the extent of racial discrimination and inequalities. They shared the joy with which the right-wing commentariat greeted the Government’s Sewell Report by the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities. Established under the tutelage of Munira Mirza and chaired by black consultant Tony Sewell, it minimised the impact of racial discrimination in the UK in explaining disparities between different groups.

In Unherd, Matthew Goodwin complained that Labour Leader Keir Starmer had “rejected a nuanced report on racial and ethnic disparities and instead implied that Britain, and by extension the British people, are inherently racist”. In the Mail, he repeated the point, insisting that the Sewell report “dismantles the woke mob’s central claim that we are living a fundamentally racist society that needs to be deconstructed”; while Spiked’s effusive response to the report demonstrated the site’s newly-found attachment to communitarianism. 

So on three of the great social issues of our era – climate change, women’s inequalities and structural racism and discrimination – the editorial lines of Spiked and Unherd are marching in lockstep, deploying similar arguments and even phraseology, to minimise the issues or to deny that there’s any problem.

After the pre-meditated murder of 10 people by an 18-year-old white supremacist in Buffalo in May, activist Aysan Hirsi Ali wrote that America remains the land of opportunity for black people and that systemic racism is exaggerated: “Despite the fact that some racism does still persist, America remains the best country in the world to be black.” Really?

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Weaponising the Workers

Spiked/Unherd‘s battle against the new social movements is supplemented by an almost comical deference to the supposed virtues of an unchanging working class.

In a book review, O’Neill claims that “working-class univ