The struggle isn't real
Beware the activists who see themselves as heroic
Amid the various leftwing meltdowns of recent years, it has become customary to refer to our times as “dark”. Even the New Statesman, which kept its head better than many similarly inclined publications, rebranded itself as providing “enlightened thinking in dark times”.
This was while much of the Europhile press was warning that Britain was about to descend into 1930s German fascism. It could happen here, as the Americans were inclined to say, even if the track record of leading Anglophone countries suggested it wouldn't. (I believe in track records, even if they don't always believe in me.)
Though the sun comes up and the world still spins, the catastrophic view of British politics has not disappeared. One key advocate is Byline Times, founded by Peter Jukes, a screenwriter who came into political writing covering the phone hacking trial.
I admire anyone who can make some success of a new publication, but I’ve always found the writing a bit loose and indulgent of contributors. Much like the New European, it’s more expressive than persuasive.
This is fine if you like that sort of thing, but every so often claims from such titles are too outlandish to ignore. One example was a recent Byline piece that accused the British government of pursuing an “ethnonationalist” project. According to Jukes and Byline editor Hardeep Matharu, the anti-immigrant Conservative grandee Enoch Powell is a particular inspiration.
The piece is a structural mess. It begins with a long explanation of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, draws a line to Powell’s anti-immigrant views, then meanders through Byline pet peeves such as Brexit, rejection of Channel migrants, and the “War on Woke”.
As George Orwell observed, language often reflects clarity of thought. The piece rambles because its points don’t add up to an ethnonationalist project. Rather, the government is pursuing policies Jukes and Matharu dislike, especially when it comes to immigration, and they want to sex up their complaint.
This is a phenomenon I’ve long observed in activists, of which campaigning journalists are a subset. It is not enough to say, for example, that you wish more than a third of MPs were female and you want policies to address that. You must argue there is a crisis of female representation which must be fixed immediately.
And so Britain’s current scepticism towards migration cannot be explained by the usual hesitancy towards outsiders, job insecurity, rising housing costs or other economic trouble. Instead it must be an imperial hangover, or some deep-seated desire to make Britain white again.
Making such a leap involves skirting over facts that damage your case. For example, the Byline piece conflates the nativist politics of Nigel Farage and the free market ideas behind Vote Leave. These two groups both backed Brexit, but for contradictory reasons. They do not like each other and often worked at cross purposes throughout the referendum. See Tim Shipman’s All Out War for details.
The more complicated story of Brexit is less appealing to campaigners as it forces them to grapple with the trade-offs of globalisation and the widespread desire for a more settled life. But it also casts them in a less glamorous role. Instead of being anti-imperial rebels fighting against ethnonationalism, they are just a faction that prefers migration and diversity more than the average Briton.
Most politics is not glamorous or heroic, just incremental trades between different flawed options. And if there is a great struggle of our times, it is likely to be about climate change or Chinese authoritarianism, not the specific outlook of the British government on asylum seekers.
I do not mind argy bargy in my politics. Polarisation is unhelpful when it overstates disagreement, but it is good when it clarifies what the disagreements is. The problem with hysterical overstatement is it serves only the former.