KEIR STARMER’S offer of an unprecedented second state visit to US President Donald Trump came days after Scottish First Minister John Swinney called for political unity against the far right.
The British and Scottish government leaders pose related problems for anti-racists.
Swinney’s is familiar: if the radical anti-racist left lines up with Establishment politicians, we risk endorsing a discredited status quo, alienating working-class opinion and giving the far right a monopoly on an angry anti-system vote which grows and grows.
Just so did the “Trump — Brexit — Sound the Alarm” pro-EU lobby end by shattering Corbyn-era Labour’s working-class appeal (very evident in 2017) and delivering Boris Johnson a thumping Commons majority.
Starmer poses a further dilemma. The centrist politicians Swinney wants to rally are themselves fawning on the international idol of the far right, Trump. How do you draw a cordon sanitaire around the far right if the Establishment is already courting it?
Should we face a by-election in Runcorn & Helsby following Labour MP Mike Amesbury’s disgrace, what is the anti-racist pitch? Don’t vote for the immigrant-baiting, NHS privatising, Trump apologist Reform UK — instead vote for the immigrant-baiting, NHS-privatising, Trump apologist government?
This is not to say that Reform and Labour are equivalent — they aren’t. But an anti-racist movement which excuses an increasingly hard-right Establishment, in order to focus on an opposition party, lays itself open to charges of hypocrisy.
If the far right flourishes in embittered and disempowered communities, a successful anti-fascist movement must offer more convincing answers to these grievances than it does. It must be radically anti-Establishment.
These are practical questions given Starmer’s abasement before Trump. On what basis do we mobilise against Trump’s state visit?
As the socialist left, protesting at Britain’s subordination to the leading imperialist power? At our place in Nato, putting our military under ultimate US control? At our government’s appeasement of US corporations, dodging regulation of artificial intelligence or taxation of Big Tech because Musk Says No? At our shameful imitation of Trump’s mass deportations and collaboration with a US-backed genocide in Gaza?
Or will it mobilise under liberal leadership, protesting instead against Trump’s disruption of business as usual? His hints at withdrawing US troops from eastern Europe, his initiation of peace talks with Russia, the offence his America First mantra gives to Old World liberals clinging to postwar nostrums of transatlantic imperialist partnership?
Either is quite possible, as Swinney’s sneer that Nigel Farage is a Putin apologist shows. It’s a line of attack taken up in parts of the labour movement too, but a mistaken one.
It is not a reference to any political similarity between Farage and Putin, though the latter’s nationalism, conservatism and anti-woke posturing probably all appeal to Farage as they have done to European far-right leaders from Marine Le Pen to Matteo Salvini.
It is rather a bid to conflate opposition to the far right with loyalty to British foreign policy, to make the struggle against the far right a struggle to shore up, not bring down, the status quo.
Doing so carries grave risks at a time when the Establishment and far right are agreed on the need for militarism funded by welfare cuts. As we have seen in Italy, the far right has been only too happy to fall in with imperialist foreign policy in return for liberal endorsement of domestic racism and immigrant-bashing.
And it doesn’t work. It is “Trump — Brexit — Sound the Alarm” all over again, a textbook example of how to lose to an insurgent right by associating the left with defence of a hated Establishment.
Trump’s 2016-20 first term coincided in Britain with the left’s disorientation by liberalism following the EU referendum and ultimate defeat by the hard right. We cannot afford to make the same mistakes again.
