Anyone of even the most vaguely progressive mind set must now ask themselves the question of what we do about this.
One approach is to console ourselves with some hopeful thinking. There are good grounds for believing that the recent MEP elections could represent the high point for the UKIP party. As soon as it starts to articulate policies it will lose support and some of its prominent members will quit with noisy splits. It also won’t be long before all those new members who came out of the woodwork generate a series of scandals and drag down their support.
There is also the age of their supporters to consider. The average age of those who I spoke to on the streets who were voting for them was well beyond retirement age. The average age of those supporting progressive parties was much lower. Any brand that relied on selling to such an ageing client group would worry itself sick about its future. The demographics indicate that the Brexit party that can only get weaker with time.
I don’t, however, remotely console myself with that kind of thinking. For a start I also happen to be over 60 and I’d rather like to see the far right fought off once again during my lifetime not afterwards. Then there is the fact that we don’t have the luxury of enough time to simply wait for the worst of the reaction to pass. It has to be fought and fought with the most effective tactics.
The prime reason for the reaction is fear of change. Since 2008 it has been increasingly obvious that something is wrong with the system and that it cannot continue on its present course. The distance between the lifestyles of the gambling bankers who put all our futures on risk and ordinary people trying to scrape a living on zero hours contracts in the neglected communities of former industrial towns has become extreme.
At the same time it has become obvious to many that we have run out of road on lifestyles that have been sustained by trashing the environment. The far right have a real hatred of climate science for a good reason. It does challenge their existing lifestyles. Scientific fact tells us that we can’t keep on creating more CO2 and indeed we have to lower the levels and rapidly. It also tells us that we can’t continue to produce, consume and throw away plastics that take generations to biodegrade and do endless harm as they do. The only safe conclusion anyone can draw who reads the science and tries to understand it is that we have to stop driving petrol cars and have to radically cut down on energy use in homes, schools, offices and factories.
Making such changes isn’t pain free and requires changes in lifestyles. I would argue that the implications for the kind of communities, economies and environments that we build are hugely positive and that we are going to have to move to a more collaborative, less pressured and more culturally rich lifestyles that aren’t so obsessed with the latest product. Yet for others the sense of being on the brink of huge changes feels like an equally huge threat and it make them deeply uneasy.
That is the real source of the far right’s strength. Change always produces enthusiasts who embrace it and make the most of it and others who fear it, resist it and try and make it go away.
The way we beat the far right is therefore to maximise the gains from the necessary changes and to minimise the losses. We have to make sure that our policies are every bit as radical as they need to be but that we don’t for one second forget the need to carry people with us and deal with any problems that come from extremely rapid and thoroughgoing change. We don’t apologise for facing up to the future and for trying to build a global society that can be sustainable on the only planet we are ever likely to have available to us. Yet we don’t allow ourselves to get so carried away with building a new world that we fail to be sensitive to the needs and the emotions of communities and individuals who are going through radical changes that aren’t always going to be easy or simple.
That means political maturity. We don’t simply write off and slag off whole sections of society like truck drivers and assume they are just going to be swept aside with the old fossil fuel economy. We have to listen to their concerns and work out which ones of them can legitimately be met or else measures that we badly need will get crushed by gilet jaune protestors blocking roads. We don’t simply write off farmers as cynical chemical guzzling exploiters of the land. We have to become the people who have the best ideas on how to help farmers sustain their businesses and their lifestyles whilst working the fields in new ways.
It is wrong to simply write off anyone who voted for Brexit or for Trump. We need to connect with more of them and bring politicians and political decision making closer to the electorate. I believe that in a global economy, a global society and a global environment we have to have international government but I also know that global governing mechanisms are always going to be remote and hard to influence. I therefore believe strong, powerful well-funded local government run by people that most electors can bump into down the shops, in the pub and at the school gates matters more than ever in a global world. Communities need to feel in contact with and reasonably in control of the representatives who speak for them. Neglect the hard daily grind of practical political support for those communities and don’t be surprised when they want to punish distant politicians. Labour and Conservative governments have both for over 30 years consistently centralised decision making and weakened local government. The distance that has created between the public and power has to be fixed.
To be clear I am not advocating moving one inch towards the thinking or the strategies of the far right. We don’t apologise for believing in the merits of freedoms of movement of people inside the EU or stop arguing that we should be doing more to help refugees. I think the way to beat them is to do the opposite and to be brave and positive in our thinking. If they outline an extremist agenda of reaction then we need to articulate an attractive vision of change. But what I am also suggesting is that we need to redouble our efforts to take the maximum number of people with us on a difficult journey.
I believe that the split in electorates right across the globe is not some temporary phenomena whereby voters are bored with centre ground politics. I think people know that centre ground politics failed in 2008 and is failing again in the face of the environmental crisis. One section of society is reacting to that by turning towards nationalists who are promising us everything can go back to the way it used to be and we can run our gas guzzling cars for ever whilst the giant factories are brought back from the dead by putting the US first, Britain first, or Russia first.
The better approach is to embrace the change and to be the first to be good at doing it. If we have to build a new sustainable society that puts less pressure on the environment lets work hard on being the first to also build a society that puts less pressure on the individual and lets communities gain in strength and in confidence as they adapt to a more attractive way of living.
Hope beats fear. Provided it is intelligent and realistic hope.