There is no ‘Left’ in Britain

Review: The Searchers, Andy Beckett

I shall begin this review with three cultural artefacts. The first. In 2008, the President of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, addressed whomsoever was watching Channel 4’s Alternative Queen’s Speech. There was nothing wrong, in the political culture of 2008, for the President of such a country to be given a bully pulpit by Channel 4, the protests which would’ve been amplified 100xfold by social media took place in the grumbling broadsheet columns of “one-nation Tories.” There was a basic assumption that C4 was a bit of a ‘leftie’ station; and part of being a ‘leftie’ was open-mindedness in foreign affairs and, often performative, scepticism towards authority. While some people disagreed with the decision, there was no serious demand for Channel 4 to ‘apologise’ for daring to ‘platform’ this man; and it would’ve been counted the height of absurdity for, say, Gordon Brown, to “condemn” the decision.

A man who represented the mood behind Ahmadinejad Hour is the former editor of the Guardian Alan Rusbridger. For my second cultural artefact, I want to share with you Rusbridger’s view on social media censorship:

My third cultural artefact is a post from current Labour M.P Mark Tapp:

It is a general, world-historical, position of Meritocracy that ‘the Left’ is a reactionary force, nonetheless when we switch to a local definition, for convenience’s sake, we find that in 2008 there was such a thing as ‘the Left’ in Britain and it sometimes acted in ways different from ‘the Establishment.’ In 2025, there is nothing resembling ‘the Left’ as historically constituted in the U.K, what has replaced it is the political wing of the bureaucracy. The Searchers is a book by Guardian journalist Andy Beckett chronicling, through five individuals, what the British Left, which explicitly called itself such, was and documenting its journey into obscurity.

These individuals are Ken Livingstone, Jeremy Corbyn, Diane Abbot, John McDonnell and Tony Benn. The book proceeds in a compelling but straightforward fashion of taking a time period, introducing some general comments and then seeing what each person was up to. Ken Livingstone is perhaps the only British leftist I cannot help but admire and his life-story of rising from living with his parents in his 30s to great power, fame and sexual gluttony is a personally inspiring one. John McDonnell had a sense of humour. Abbot’s motivations are blamelessly Schmittian. Corbyn himself, the most prominent of the quad, comes across as motivated mainly by resentment of a grammar school education he would’ve been spared without access to fee-paying primary schools. It is to Mr. Beckett’s credit to note that Salvador Allende, the Trump of Corbyn’s political awakening, ‘came from a long line of doctors and freemasons.’

The Searchers decides to unite these figures around their shared involvement with Tony Benn, who is taken to be the godfather of the New Left and the last echo of the old. One unfortunate consequence of this frame is that it occludes the other Lion of the 21st century British Left: George Galloway. Unlike the quad, Galloway remains a decisive actor in British politics and is ultimately responsible for the formation of the Parliamentary bloc to which Mr. Corbyn is now appended as the token Frank. It was Galloway who, while the rest of the trio resigned themselves to antiquarianism in the 2000s, actively took the fight to Tony Blair at the ballot box, forcing the would-be British Obama Oona King from her pocket borough. A history of the Left in 21st century Britain without Galloway, judgment withheld, is incomplete. Tony Benn was the closest thing England had to a ‘developmentalist’ politician who, late in life, became sincerely convinced that Socialism was the best means of achieving normal, technocratic ends. The conversion was always plagued by the convert’s basically asymmetrical goals, Benn remained a Romantic bourgeois Republican rather than a Marxist and as late as the 1980s cited Singapore as a model. A deeply Scandinavian man: his vision of the country was a dirigiste commonwealth in which prosperous workers and Oxbridge technocrats would go home and read John Bunyan. In 1968, Benn set out a distinct vision of Socialism as the self-management of workers;

“With its claim that the rise of self-reliance was actually ‘a new expression of grass roots socialism’, which could make Labour stronger… The decline of deference, the struggles of the centralised postwar state in trying to solve Britain’s problems, even the growth of individualism: all these powerful ongoing trends did not mean the Left was doomed… Like prophetic counterculture thinkers… Benn saw that new technologies were helping to create what he called a ‘new citizen’. This person, Benn wrote, ‘dislikes being ordered around by anyone’. Instead, new citizens were part of ‘the do-it-yourself society that is now being born’ across the West. Yet these people were not… Individualists, he argued. Rather, they were a new, less biddable kind of collectivist: Banding together with others of like mind… [into] pressure groups or action groups… community associations…”

Although it failed in the economy, where workers were supposed to run their own cooperatives with only gentle funding from Whitehall, this vision has been far more influential than the Thatcherite scoffers understood. It is nothing more or less than the blueprint for ‘the Blob.’ By giving grants to activist groups, disguised as charities, or Potemkin local authorities, the Left could disguise central control as spontaneous ‘social change.’ We never had a Yugoslav economy but we did end up with Yugoslav politics and the Yugoslav results have been slowly accumulating over time. This worldview would provide sympathetic grounds for occasional alliance with the emerging ‘post-liberal’ Right, which saw the technocratic state and the individual as two aberrations from ‘organic’ communities revealed by spontaneous order. The first place in the country this model was put into practice was Livingstone’s GLC. Massive grants were given to black nationalists, LGBT groups and assorted people ‘in the community’ to engage in activism which City hall would then pretend it was merely ‘responding’ to. City Hall was the first place in the country to introduce DEI quotas for staff and to demand employers fill out ‘ethics’ forms on the composition of their departments. Far from New Labour ‘modernising’ a party hijacked by the far-left, many of the innovations accredited to Mandelson and Campbell (both Kinnock-era operators) were in fact born in Livingstone’s city hall. Huge amounts of money were spent on focus groups, a key obsession of New Labour with the insights funnelled into professionals from the world of advertising, television and P.R to produce glossy campaigns. It was hugely influential on British culture, as shown in the book’s treatment of the ‘GLC Festivals’, I shall simply quote the relevant passages:

“Moreover, Hollingsworthy and the GLC had another ambition for the festivals. They wanted them to give people an experience which contained an unusual degree of both freedom and equality… ‘You have to design it to give choices.’ But at the same time… the festivals had to avoid feeling ‘oppressive’ to anyone. In the polished corridors along which the council’s senior officers usually strode, there were now skinheads, Rastafarians and Londoners of all sorts.”

BRILLIANT. It is all there: the bullying poptimism married to political herd-think. Yeah, yeah, mate, c’mon mate, Gary Lineker and Oasis rock out for the Human Rights Act; yeah, yeah, yeah? Cream rocks against racism with an open fruit salad buffet. Cool Jamaicans and Funky Lesbians. The Dark Ages before Anime. This was the background frequency of culture in the capital city when the Britpoppers moved there as students and young professionals. The GLC Festival would provide the template for endless reiterations, the most prominent being the 2012 Olympics, in which ‘spontaneous conformity’ was the aesthetic. Be yourself, by fitting in. Of course, when the GLC ‘challenges’ Margaret Thatcher, she responds by simply shutting it down. Beckett’s lament that “the capital now had no central authority over Transport” was not supported by history, virtually all the serious infrastructure projects which made London feel ‘new’ by the millennium, the Jubilee Line, City airport, the Docklands – were completed in the period during which electoral politics had minimal impact on municipal life. This is a big difference between Zoomers and Britpoppers, when you think of what makes London ‘modern’, I imagine you think of the DLR; rather than Winston’s Samba class against Apartheid.