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Amid global pressures centrist Labour may face far-right opposition [1]

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Date: 2023-05

The National Conservative (‘NatCon’) movement has recently gravitated from receiving an occasional mention in the mainstream press to a much wider national stage. This is in part thanks to the lucky coincidence of its three-day conference in London this week following immediately after some appalling local election results for Rishi Sunak and his Conservative government.

Despite a touted commitment to free speech, attempts were made to keep left-leaning media away from the meeting by banning openDemocracy, Byline Times and Novara Media. These failed when openDemocracy managed to enter the conference – free of charge, without a ticket, using little more than a plummy accent – to report on some of its wackier elements.

The meeting’s more serious aspects included an all-too-obvious attempt by the home secretary, Suella Braverman, to make a bid for the Tory leadership should Rishi Sunak lose the forthcoming general election.

But the core purpose of the conference was to promote the NatCons’ far-right vision of a strongly nationalist variant of neoliberal conservatism, including a Christian dimension that comes close to lending the movement an evangelical sense of mission.

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In its attitude to migration pressures and its core position on the central role of the state, the movement veers uncomfortably close to a fascist outlook. It believes it is, in its own words, “confronted by a rising China abroad and a powerful new Marxism at home”. In response it posits what it calls “an intellectually serious alternative to the excesses of purist libertarianism, and in stark opposition to political theories grounded in race”.

An earlier column discussed the possibility of the movement coming into its own as increasing migration pressures bring the migration/asylum issue into greater prominence. However, others would argue that, in parallel with the NatCons, a more significant political trend in the UK is the rise of a more inclusive and intrinsically cooperative centre-left outlook.

This is the argument from the US-based Progressive Policy Institute’s Project on Center Left Renewal, a “conversation with center-left parties in Europe and around the world”. Its purpose is to “exchange ideas, strategies and tactics for making centre-left parties more competitive and improve their governing performance”.

This is certainly different from the NatCon approach, though plenty of leftist analysts would see it as centrist, if not rightist, in its perspective. This comes across in the PPI’s positive attitude towards Keir Starmer’s Labour Party in the UK, where, it says, the party’s prospects are “looking up after a 13-year exile from government. Over the past two years, party leader Keir Starmer has methodically exorcised the dogmatic socialism that took possession of Labour under Jeremy Corbyn.”

The Institute’s project on renewal is led by Claire Ainsley, who served until recently as executive director for policy for Starmer. Writing recently in The Guardian, she pointed to Anthony Albanese’s Labor Party in Australia and the German Social Democrats as examples of progressive thinking, and argued in the UK context that Labour under Starmer is in a position to gain a parliamentary majority by “reconstituting the historical coalition between today’s working-class voters and liberal-leaning middle-class voters”.

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[1] Url: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/natcons-far-right-centrist-labour-party-global-crisis-showdown/

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