It has taken decades of misgovernment to get the British public into a state of mind where a very significant minority – perhaps by the next general election even an effective majority – is susceptible to the far-right demagoguery of Nigel Farage and his Reform UK party. It is going to take a long time too, though hopefully nothing like that long, to turn back the tide.
A troubled mix of social liberalisation dating from the 1960s, economic decline from the 1970s, industrial vandalism in the 1980s and the waning of Christianity throughout the whole post-war period are the long-term factors that have placed the UK in real danger of a falling to a far-right government in 2029.
Some of these social and economic developments, such as social liberalisation, are welcome in themselves but when combined with others have contributed to a society unsure of its values and ripe for manipulation by unscrupulous politicians.
Together they have left millions of working people languishing in unemployment or poorly-paid, low-skilled jobs, or economically inactive, or with mental health problems, living in comparative poverty, without the decent public services they need or stable family backgrounds to mitigate their deprivation, or the inherited code of values to enable them to withstand the siren voices of those like Farage who would lead them astray.
The road to the Bell Hotel at Epping, now notorious for the large scale and sometimes violent demonstrations against the asylum seekers it houses, is paved with the sometimes good but sometimes misguided intentions of governments of the past six decades.
That road leads back to the liberalisation of Harold Wilson’s first and second governments in the 1960s, and the economic failure of his and James Callaghan’s administration of the 1970s, culminating in a bail-out from The International Monetary Fund and the winter of discontent in the 1970s.
The dogmatic economic policy of Margaret Thatcher’s shipyard, steelworks and pit closures of the 1980s, hitting places like Consett, Tyneside, Sunderland and the mining communities of Northumberland and Durham, far from repairing the damage, hugely exacerbated that failure. North East workers suffered while a small number of City of London capitalists, financiers and company bosses made fortunes.
Outdated and uncompetitive heavy industries may have needed closing. The scandal was that in North East England at least, few suitable alternatives were provided to keep workers in work and communities together. Nissan at Sunderland was a rare exception. No wonder 40 years after Thatcher more than 2.4mn British workers are economically inactive due to long-term sickness. It’s not just Covid that is to blame. The latest upward trend started in 2014 when there were 1.9mn.
Eddie George, Governor of the Bank of England, as long ago as the 1990s, caused outrage by saying unemployment in the North was an acceptable price to pay for controlling inflation in the South. This was not a Christian or, for secularists, a western, Kantian, philosophical way of treating everyone not as a means but as valuable as an end in him- or herself
Fourteen years of Tory austerity rubbed salt in the wounds between 2010 and 2024, devastating public services and leaving millions languishing on crime and drug-ridden estates, many failing to make the most of the education they needed to escape deprivation and creating second and third generation workless families.
The permissive society
Except in many cases these weren’t families at all, at least in the traditional sense. The social liberalisation of the Wilson years had made different models acceptable. The single-parent family, almost always fatherless and lacking a male role-model, is now commonplace.
Few of those who like to consider themselves on the moderate left of British politics – certainly not your author – opposed the liberal reforms and so-called permissive society of the Wilson years. We positively welcomed it when the nation was freed from the horror of the death penalty and would never wish to see it return; we greeted the introduction of no-fault divorce as relieving at least one unnecessary burden on couples at an already difficult time; we accepted if somewhat uneasily, abortion law reform as a compromise between the rights of mother and unborn child; we regarded the legalisation of homosexuality between adult males in private as a measure of justice for a significant minority of the population; we welcomed equal pay for women and are still waiting in frustration, as women remind us, for it to be fully implemented.
It is indicative of what Labour feared even that long ago from working-class voters in northern England in the face of this liberalisation that Richard Crossman, a leading member of Wilson’s cabinet, noted with evident relief in his diary that at the 1966 general election Sidney Silverman “has not been defeated in Nelson and Colne despite the part he played in getting capital punishment abolished.”* Harold Wilson, as a sincere Methodist, was personally opposed to both abortion and homosexuality law reform, according to Crossman.
Few of us, I suspect, who lived through that era and welcomed the liberalisation it brought, who railed at the racism of Tory front-bencher Enoch Powell and ridiculed the priggish Christianity of clean-up TV campaigner Mary Whitehouse, few who took such enjoyment from the new Private Eye and the satirical TV show That Was the Week That Was, would roll back those reforms now. But we did not, could not, foresee the unintended consequences, and now we and our successor generations have to cope with them.
Unintended consequences
The signs were there early on. The far-right backlash began even before the 1960s were over, and then as now it was immigration that sparked the revolt. In fact, it began even as Wilson was first taking office. In the 1964 general election a Tory populist won Smethwick in the West Midlands, a constituency with a high immigrant population for the time, following a highly racist campaign against a Labour candidate who was an Oxford don and seen as elitist. Labour was relieved to win the seat back 18 months later with a more popular candidate and the help of the Liberals, who stood down in their favour.
In April 1968 the Labour government revoked the right of the Kenya Asians to come to Britain; in 1972, the Tory government let the Uganda Asians in. In both cases, according to Workers Liberty, there was uproar in the working class against the incomers. When Powell made his inflammatory “rivers of blood” speech against immigration, and was sacked from the Tory front bench, the London dockers came out on strike and marched on a demonstration in defence of “free speech for Powell”.
There was a succession of far-right movements around that time and in the following decades – the National Front, the British National Party, the English Defence League, the UK Independence Party, Britain First, National Action, the Brexit Party and now Reform UK.
In 2016 the understandably and justifiably angry victims of these decades of misgovernment hit back in what they thought was the only way open to them – by backing Brexit. But even this disappointed them. So now, still frustrated by years of broken, if misplaced, promises to take back control of our borders, smash the gangs and send the immigrants back and offended by the woke inheritance of the permissive society, they are voting for a Farage party again, this time, notably, including electing a Reform UK county council in Durham.
What is to be done?
Far-right parties of the past have all ultimately failed (unless the Brexit referendum be counted a success). Reform UK poses the gravest threat yet because the fruits of the policies of the past six decades, whether social or economic, have rotted. The economy is stagnant and the joyous permissive society of the 1960s has turned into an angry and divided one over issues like identity politics, transgender rights and the removal of gay pride flags from Reform council buildings. Not to mention immigration.
It is up to us now to make sure Farage and his followers don’t succeed. But how? The solution lies in addressing the genuine economic grievances of working people – worklessness, crippled public services and the cost-of-living crisis. People’s anti-immigrant protests are largely though not wholly secondary symptoms of these discontents. Most people are not intrinsically racist, but they can be manipulated by demagogues. As the 18th century French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote: “The people is never corrupted, but it is often deceived, and on such occasions only does it seem to will what is bad.”**
Certainly, illegal immigration as well as economic grievances must be dealt with. While legal immigration is an economic boon, its comparatively tiny illegal counterpart is a convenient scapegoat for populists, a significant expense to taxpayers, a source of division in the population at large and dangerous and exploitative for the immigrants themselves. No one is pretending this will be quick or easy, but the government’s methodical approach of speeding up the handling of asylum claims, deporting unsuccessful claimants, tightening visa restrictions and working with our European neighbours to disrupt the people traffickers holds out the best hope so far.
Whatever the precise measures adopted, we must remember that no matter the decline in church attendance, we still claim to be a Christian country and should act with commensurate humanity. Refugees and asylum seekers must never be returned to danger. For all their protestations of traditional British values, Farage and the protesters outside The Bell do not seem to have the Parable of the Good Samaritan on their minds.
*The Crossman Diaries. By Richard Crossman (Condensed version). Edited By Anthony Howard. Published by Magnum Books. Page 194.
**Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The Social Contract, Book III, Chapter XVI
