Downing Street sources, by which I mean real sources, not Dominic Cummings and Lee Cain spreading state propaganda anonymously, talk of a battle raging for Boris Johnson’s ear. Munira Mirza, formerly of the Spiked website, a successor organisation to the Revolutionary Communist party (RCP), is urging him to rebuild his shattered popularity by launching a “war on the woke”.
Go for the libtards, the PC, the leftists and the bleeding hearts, the head of the No 10 policy unit urges. Use tiny threats to Winston Churchill’s statues to whip up your supporters’ cultural fear and divert their attention from a country ravaged by disease and descending into a slump.
The presence of the ex-revolutionaries in a rightwing debate shows the distance from asinine far leftism to paranoid conservatism is nowhere near as great as the innocent imagine. It is no accident, as the old Marxists used to say, that former communists are now helping the Tory party make their enemies appear contemptible. Or that Claire Fox moved from the RCP to the BBC to the Brexit party and was joined, by my count, by three of her comrades in running for Nigel Farage in the 2019 European elections. Or that the American plutocratic right, in the form of the Koch brothers, now funds Spiked.
The modern right is closer to Bolshevism than Burke. In Poland and Hungary, it has revived the state’s control of the media, judiciary and civil service, last seen under Soviet occupation, and justified the power grab as an essential move in the fight against globalist liberal enemies. Trump has mobilised hatred of his woke enemies to keep his base in line and Johnson dallies with the tactic, as he dallies with everything else. Across the world, contempt has become a means to justify power and total contempt justifies total power.
Today’s rightwing contempt is familiar to anyone who looks at the history of the far left. The RCP was founded in 1978. Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov adopted the nom de guerre of “Lenin” as he led the Bolshevik revolution of 1917. Iosif Dzhugashvili called himself “Stalin” as he presided over one of the worst tyrannies in history. To match them, the RCP’s leader, Frank Furedi, called himself “Frank Richards” as he taught sociology students at Kent University, whose number included Mirza.
Back in the day, his party treated liberal opinion, the Labour party, the trade unions and other far left groups who compromised by advocating voting Labour to stop the Tories with a hatred that matched the hatred directed at them by today’s right. It despised the concept of human rights. It delighted Serbian war criminals by denying that they were ethnically cleansing Muslims during the Balkan wars of the early 1990s. Before anyone had thought about Putin or Trump, or read about £350m for the NHS on the side of a bus, the RCP was exploiting a post-truth world where genocide could be dismissed as fake news.
The orthodox communist position in the 20th century was that racism would end when the capitalist state was overthrown. Nothing worth having could be achieved without revolution. The idea persists after communism’s death. In 2020, the British Black Lives Matter movement declares that it wants to “dismantle imperialism, capitalism, white supremacy, patriarchy and the state structures that disproportionately harm black people”.
The RCP wanted all of that and anti-racists might have thought it was on their side. Yet it grew to despair of a working class that never paid it a blind bit of attention. When it failed to end imperialism and capitalism, it ditched revolutionary politics but kept the absolute contempt for liberalism, labourism and human rights. It did not move to the right in the manner of people who grow more conservative with age but as a cohesive unit. Party policy now allowed its members to begin a Gramscian march through institutions that previously would have ignored them.
A bewildering array of RCP successor organisations followed as party activists moved into broadcasting, journalism and science advocacy. Soon, you will be able to see them in action. Mirza is setting up Johnson’s hastily arranged race inequality commission and you do not need supernatural powers to know it will conclude that institutional racism is a “myth”.
Over the years, I have tried to keep my temper with nominally intelligent people who say the propagators of lies about the oppression of Bosnia’s Muslims at least have the guts to tell hard truths that others duck. I hear that they stand up for freedom of speech. I reply they defend it only when it is under attack from authoritarian “liberals” but ensure that the corporate loot keeps flowing by saying nothing about big business silencing whistleblowers. I hear Mirza praised for taking down Oxbridge-educated leftists and telling them their pat condemnations of “white privilege” grate with white working-class voters who have no privileges worth mentioning.
We should indeed worry as much about class as race. But it was not Mizra’s Downing Street policy unit, or the Johnson government, or the Brexit party, or the BBC’s Moral Maze or the Tory press, or any of the other institutions the RCP has marched through, which insisted that all poor children needed help this summer, regardless of their colour or creed but Marcus Rashford. The white working class is provoked by the new right to generate politically useful cultural rage but ignored when its families go hungry.
Johnson is not Trump. Nor is Britain one of the emerging dictatorships of eastern Europe. But before Covid-19, the government was threatening the BBC and Channel 4 News and hinting none too subtly that it wanted to take power from independent judges. As the jaw-dropping hopelessness of the Johnson maladministration becomes daily more apparent, the right will want to stifle critics again and, when it does, voices that learned their contempt for democratic controls on the far left will be screaming it on.
• Nick Cohen is an Observer columnist