Groucho Marxism

I recently returned from a long weekend visiting my family home in Devon. Driving back through the village where I grew up, I was surprised to see St. George’s Crosses painted on one of the village’s two zebra crossings. On the journey home through Somerset, Wiltshire, and Hampshire, seeing St. George’s Crosses and Union Flags flying everywhere, I started to wonder where this outpouring of patriotism was coming from. Was there a big sporting event on that I had failed to register? But the grim truth soon dawned on me. This was no outpouring of sporting patriotism: it was an outpouring of far-right nationalism. Suddenly the drive home started to seem much less enjoyable. This land I was driving through, which used to feel like home to me, now felt overtly hostile.

It turns out that the proliferation of flags I was witnessing is the result of an orchestrated campaign run by a group called Operation Raise the Colours. The aims of this group are not entirely clear as they don’t seem to seem to have a website, or any other online presence for that matter. No doubt they would claim that they were simply being patriotic by encouraging people to fly their country’s flag; and under other circumstances, that would make perfect sense. In fact if the England men’s football team ever makes it to a World Cup final, I will be tempted to get the red paint out and start painting zebra crossings myself. But the circumstances we find ourselves in now are a lot darker. It seems clear, in fact, that this campaign is directly linked to a recent protest outside a hotel housing asylum seekers in Epping.

Now protests outside hotels housing asylum seekers are nothing new. There have been many such protests at hotels all over the country, including at a hotel just down the road from where I live. But what makes the recent protest outside the Epping hotel particularly significant is that it succeeded in driving out the asylum seekers living there. Last week, a High Court judge granted a temporary injunction and said migrants at the site in Essex would need to be moved out by 12 September, and one of the reasons cited for this decision was disruption caused by the protests and concerns for the safety of the asylum seekers themselves. The message is clear: protesting outside hotels housing asylum seekers works. It’s no wonder the far-right felt emboldened to run its nationalistic flag campaign.

What should the left do in response to all this? It is tempting to say we should do all we can raise the alarm about how this is the next step on our seemingly inexorable slide into fascism. And it certainly feels like we are heading that way. In my 40+ years living in the UK I have never known the far right to be so brazenly self-confident as they are at this moment. But I think making a big issue out of these events would play into the hands of those orchestrating them, who are obviously doing it at least in part to try and provoke exactly such a response. Instead, I think we need to take a more nuanced approach which begins with understanding the root causes. As ever, these root causes lie in the material conditions people find themselves in.

I have often wondered why people bother giving up their spare time to protest about asylum seekers. You’d think they’d have better things to do! These protesters can’t all just be knuckle-dragging racists (although I’m sure some of them are). So I recently signed up to my local right-wing Facebook group to try and find out a bit more about what motivates them. What I found was quite revealing: far from being motivated by hatred of asylum seekers as people, these protesters mainly seem aggrieved by their perception that asylum seekers are getting a better deal than them and their fellow countrymen. Of course, that probably isn’t the case in reality, and I doubt many locals would willingly swap places with an asylum seeker given the chance; but still, this perception persists.

What these people are really protesting about, I think, is the fact that their lives are hard and only ever seem to be getting harder. But they cannot articulate their grievance in this way as they have internalized the bogus right-wing narrative that we are all ultimately responsible for our own fate. Instead, having internalized this narrative, they take matters into their own hands in the only way they know how: by attacking those they perceive to be getting an unfairly easy ride. To be clear, I am not in any way condoning the actions of these protesters – far from it. There can be no excuse for the kind of behaviour we have seen recently in Epping and elsewhere. But only by understanding the root causes of social issues will we ever be able to adequately address them.

So I think we on the left need to find a way to explain to those protesting about asylum seekers the real reason why their lives are so difficult. And that reason, of course, has nothing to do with asylum seekers: it is because they are living under neoliberal capitalism. In fact these are the people most adversely effected by living under this draconian, exploitative system. If there is a positive to take from these recent events it’s that the working class in this country is genuinely angry and is willing to take their anger out onto the streets. If we can somehow redirect this anger away from asylum seekers and towards the real enemy – the ruling class – then who knows what we might achieve.