The nastification of British politics

This week, yet another UK- wide opinion poll put Nigel Farage’s hard right anti-immigrant fan club Reform UK ltd. in poll position in Westminster voting intention. The poll, by YouGov, gave the Faragistes 26%, Labour 25% and the Tories 21%.

This was shortly followed by another poll, this time carried out by Find Out Now, which gave Reform an even bigger lead, 29% to Labour’s 23% and 21% for the Tories. Translated into Commons seats this would see Farage as the next Prime Minister, giving Reform UK a narrow majority with 333 seats, while Labour would plummet to 88, losing 323 of their current MPs. The Tories would drop to fourth largest party with 68 seats and the LibDems on 78 seats.

However there are two grains of comfort we can take from these polls, firstly, and crucially, we are more than four years out from another Westminster general election, asking voters how they will vote in 2029 is hypothetical, and merely gives those questioned the opportunity to register a protest. God knows there is plenty to protest about when it comes to the policies of Starmer’s Labour party, aka the Conservanasty continuation party.

Assuming Starmer’s government goes to full term, and with such a large majority there’s every reason it will, by the time of the next Westminster general election Donald Trump’s term in office will have come to an end and the massive damage caused to ordinary working class communities by the policies of the billionaire enabling populist right which both he and Farage espouse will be starkly apparent. We can hope that by that time some of the allure of Reform UK will have worn off on UK voters currently considering voting for the nicotine stained chancer.

Secondly, as far as Scotland is concerned, Reform UK is markedly less successful in Scotland than it is in the rest of the UK, hardly surprising given its aggressively English nationalist positioning. Reform has no Scottish policies to speak of and Scotland scarcely registers in its concerns. Indeed, the rise of support for Reform UK is almost entirely a product of its increasing profile in the UK-wide British media which naturally floods Scotland too. Reform is an invasive species in Scottish politics, like a plant artificially growing in soil where it does not belong, but nourished and protected by external forces. The irony is that in Scotland Reform UK is all the things that it accuses immigrants and asylum seekers of being.

The main beneficiary in Scotland of the collapse in popularity of Labour is the SNP, which along with Plaid Cymru is the only political party left in the UK which still holds fast to the values and beliefs of social democracy. The results of the Find Out Now poll would give the SNP 43 seats.

For the rest, Labour and the Tories are in pull pursuit of Reform UK in the nastification of British politics. Labour has become the new nasty party, the Tories, the original nasty party, have become the vindictively chaotic party, and both are chasing after Reform UK, the morally repugnant sadistic party.

In an effort to head off the threat from Reform, we have seen the Labour party adopt ever more cruel and callous policies towards migrants and asylum seekers. Labour has started to publish videos inviting viewers to celebrate the demonisation of poor, vulnerable and desperate people, anti-migrant porn. The government plans to spend up to £392m on deporting undocumented migrants, enough money to train more than 10,000 new nurses.

This week the Starmer government announced that those who arrive in the UK by irregular means because all safe and legal avenues of getting to the UK have been closed off will be denied the right to apply for British citizenship. Trying to move to the right on immigration in order to head off Reform is chasing after the reflection of the moon in the sea, you’ll never catch up with it, and the chances are you’ll drown.

Labour, or the Tories for that matter, can never out-hardman Reform on immigration, all that happens is that Reform is emboldened and enabled and becomes even more established as a credible political force, demonstrably influencing the policies of the other parties and being seen to set the agenda. The tactic of trying to bash immigrants even harder in an attempt to appease the hard right always fails, because the hard right nurse imaginary grievances and racist conspiracy theories which can never be appeased.

All that happens in consequence is that the envelope of British politics is pushed more and more to the right and we all descend even further into the circus of far-right performative cruelty. The only winners are fascists. The British political establishment, aided and abetted by the right wing media and the BBC is epically failing every single moral and social test put before it. Labour, just like the Tories, is attempting to exploit the basest prejudices of uninformed voters for political expediency instead of trying to inform them. It will only succeed in pushing the issue of immigration and the far right’s supposed solution to it ever higher up the political agenda. It’s wrong-headed, immoral, and ultimately counter-productive.

You don’t pander to the far-right, that only grants it power and influence. You have to confront them head on and expose what their nostrums really mean for working class people of whatever ethnic background, sexuality, or gender. They mean suffering, they mean poverty, they mean deprivation, they mean the entrenchment of inequality and injustice. They mean the devastation of public services and the effective privatisation of the NHS. They mean abandoning future generations to the full force of climate change and the ripping up of the social, employment, consumer and environmental standards that all of us rely on in order to have a decent life. But hey! Trans people won’t be able to use the toilet.

The rich will get richer and public policy will descend into the moral bankruptcy of the compassion and humanity free zone of the comments sections of the right wing press, where empathy and understanding are alien concepts to be reviled and mocked.

It’s not too late for Scotland, we can still preserve decency and humanity in public life, but it has become increasingly obvious that there is no place for kindness and gentleness in a UK whose politics are defined by nastiness, cruelty, and exclusion. The SNP and the Scottish Greens and other pro-independence parties must start to shout from the rooftops about what the vile reality of the politics of the hard right really means for Scotland.

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