The Pitcairn Perspectives by Philip Spires - HTML preview

Are black faces being used to whitewash the Brexit debate? - lodged in articlesyouneed.com, 16 July 2016

Openly racist slogans are currently being made respectable by a procession of black faces parading through the media. I apologize, profusely, to anyone I may have angered by using colour as a badge of ethnicity, as an identifier of race. I, myself, am a sociologist and specialist in the media, so shouldn’t I be more than aware - downright self-conscious! - about using disrespectful, stereotypical, inaccurate and frankly abusive labels to make my point? Well, yes, except that it’s those very labels that form an integral part of the certainly unwritten and probably also unsaid arguments that are fuelling the Brexit debate, arguments that are, as a consequence of the identity of those promoting them, rendered palatable, even acceptable, when they should be judged the reactionary, even fascist pronouncements of white supremacists. Except, of course, these particular protagonists are not white, hence this attempt to illustrate how the unpalatable is being sold from behind a protecting veil, a disguise, of ethnicity.

We have all become used to how facts have been presented via the distorting mirrors of the Brexit debate. We know that our country does not contribute three hundred and fifty million pounds a week to the European Union. It is a blatant lie. The people who quote the figure, even distinguished politicians, know it’s a lie and yet they still use it, increasingly without challenge. Even government departments deny it, but they find themselves either gagged, unreported or dismissed as establishment Remainers by people who should and, in fact, do know better. Mere repetition seems to be the weapon that persuades us to accept this false message.

Another lie relates to the status of Turkey, with its eighty million people, who, we are told authoritatively, are en masse about to become full members of the Union and, within days, arrive in Hemel Hempstead and buy all the houses. We know that is utterly false. There is no prospect of Turkey joining the European Union in the near or even the distant future. How many times have we all been told the falsehood by people who ought to know better? But when was the last time you heard it said? And even more important, when was the last time you heard this challenged? Let us all try telling the truth to campaigners who quote it as fact and, somehow, obtain respectable media coverage for the truth.

Let’s note also how a migration figure of less than two hundred thousand a year suddenly became two hundred and fifty thousand, according to some fabrications, only then to be quoted as a town the size of Newcastle, which has almost three hundred thousand inhabitants. We may conclude that conveniently inflating numbers by sixty per cent is thus quite acceptable for those on that particular side of the argument. And this is just a selection of the lies that together form the now accepted and digested false consciousness that is Brexit. And it is still being peddled, deliberately and, I would argue, calculatedly by black faces.

The true message contained in these misleading arguments is that, really, the idea that Britain, usually not the United Kingdom, would be better unpolluted by these foreigners with their foreign ways, who have invaded our politics, economy and society. It is a euphemism for a specifically British, perhaps more specifically English form of white supremacism. And it’s an ideology that is being perpetrated by a procession of media and political figures who themselves hail from ethnic minorities. They do tend, it has to be said, to be members of one particular political party, but not exclusively so. A member of parliament, after all, needs to keep local electors happy and there are some elected representatives from Leave voting areas on both sides of the political divide who are covering their backs by pragmatically supporting ideas that they themselves find abhorrent. But whether they be born of West African, West Indian, Asian, African Asian or indeed Middle Eastern roots, it is this possession of black and ethnic minority identity that is effectively whitewashing the argument. How can it be racism when BAME people support it?

Now I have written about this elsewhere, so here is not the place to trawl through detail. Anyone so disposed can access the complete discussion in my book, “The Sale of Ideology: Marketing Political Ideas via the Techniques of Consumer Capitalism, an Analysis of Diverse Media” whose rather prolix title hides a deceptively simple and certainly easy read. In it I argue that, contrary to popular belief, the end of the Cold War was not an end to the battle of ideologies, but rather its beginning. The false dichotomy of a Capitalist West and a Communist East was merely a convenient way of labelling a post-World War Two scenario where professed allies were effectively still at war, competing over the ownership of Europe. And, since at the end of the War the European colonial powers effectively still controlled most of the world, the competition was immediately and permanently global. Both the United States and the Soviet Union had demanded that the defeated colonial powers divest themselves of their empires, and Churchill, on behalf of the defeated, accepted that inevitable reality at Potsdam and Yalta, not that he was given a choice. But both still-warring powers continued their competition to gather into their sphere the taken pieces as they were removed from the stalemate chessboard. What the Capitalist West had which the Communist East did not was, however, control of resources and, eventually, this was the crucial factor that always was going to deliver victory if those resources – chiefly markets, not commodities – could still be controlled politically.

But in the seventies and eighties, there was a distinct shift in both sides of the ideological debate. Capitalism, which previously had been associated with profit for specific nations in competition with other nations, suddenly appreciated the advantages of globalization. If resources were really the key that drove prosperity, then in order to secure those resources, ruling classes and capitalists from countries who owned those resources had to be co-opted into the global system. The powerful, in order to increase their power, had to learn to share their power across borders, but of course only with those who lived by the same accumulating assumptions as themselves. This brought the lie to the famous and much-parodied cartoon, in which the proud British, atop the economic pile, regarded themselves as both richer and superior to all other races. God, who was above the summit of the pyramid, worked His directing magic via the Queen and then the aristocracy. Even the white poor, at least those who deserved, were somewhere in the middle, much elevated above anything that walked on four legs, crawled or swam in the sea, certainly above anything dark skinned or non-Christian.

This new analysis, however, raised the status of precisely those people who had previously been colonial subjects. Not only did their nations have the desired resources, but they were also the next generation’s markets, without which the expansion of globalised profitability would founder. Thus, their elevation began. The myth of British superiority had, of course, to be retained for sale to those who would find themselves relegated from their previously privileged positions, especially the white working-class British, but also the working-class white German and French, and, indeed, eventually the working-class white American. It was a transformation that suggested Marx’s original analysis of class formation eventually trumping ethnicity or nationality would prove correct.

Which is a good place to switch the argument to the other half of the ideological divide. Also, in the seventies and eighties, aware of the likelihood of defeat in the post-World War Two standoff, Communists and Marxists in general returned to the study of the original postulates of the philosophy of socialism. They concluded that Marx’s ideas had been corrupted by Lenin, who tricked supporters into believing that colonialism was the same as capitalism and by Mao, whose romanticised fish in the sea cast the rural poor as prime movers in revolution, in direct contradiction to Marx’s original analysis. Reinventing Marxism involved returning to the original text and re-discovering its arguments. Bill Warren’s Imperialism Pioneer of Capitalism was one of the products of this re-evaluation, a book whose very title parodied to nonsense Lenin’s justification of the Russian Revolution. Suddenly, Marxists declared they believed in the same things as capitalists, mass consumption, profit, industrialization and globalization. And they did so not because they had suddenly been converted to the ideology of the political right, but because these ideas were clearly stated by Marx as necessary stages that economies would have to live through in order to progress to socialism. Lenin’s by-pass always was the wrong road that led nowhere.

Thus, there arose, about thirty years ago with the fall of the Soviet Union, a clear consensus between political left and right that the only route forward was a shared route, despite the two ideological sides individually still believing that this single road was destined to lead to different places. “And what about China?” I hear the audience shout. Capitalism first, second and third, and then more capitalism was the essence of Deng Xiaoping’s transformation of the party ideology, a pattern which is still being successfully followed. They may be in a different car, but they are certainly travelling the same road and in the same direction, so there will be no head-on collisions.

We seem to have come a long way from racism and Brexit, but in fact we have reached the point of synthesis. Given this concordance of approach, if not end product, between left and right, the political ideology that became squeezed out of the Brexit debate was social democracy. Indeed, it is in danger of becoming squeezed out of the general mainstream of political debate. In the post-War years, it came to be seen as the traditional old order, the inevitably messy establishment of consensus behind more egalitarian, more communal solutions to economic management and societal organisation. For a generation after World War Two, social democracy delivered a peaceful, largely pain-free route to renewed prosperity, at least for those lucky enough to inhabit the developed world.

But this backyard was proving too restricting for Capitalists who had grander ambitions and bigger appetites. Resources first, markets second became priorities for inclusion into the club and certainly the latter’s potential was far greater than the now messy Old World. Social democracy however, still stressed equality, at least of opportunity, and, at least in popular parlance, the greater sharing of prosperity. These ideas were, of course, anathema to the newly motivated libertarians, who sought to elevate individual merit to the justification of privilege, encourages competition and the accumulation of personal wealth and thus effectively render the working classes of the Old World into the undeserving, unless they could prove themselves worthy. The ideology was sold to an eager public who had become so used to their status elevated by colonialism that they took it for granted and they lapped it up. Individualism had triumphed via an alliance of political left and right, with the communal, the societal and the shared being the vanquished. It’s what Marxists call false consciousness. It is a patronising standpoint, but, at least, it explains the world as we perceive it!

This is why social democratic parties throughout the world, having driven the post-war economic miracle, suddenly became unelectable. This is the reason why certain groups in Britain undermined the Labour party, why Thatcherite individuality could be described, mainly by those who opposed it, as pure Marxism. The consensus of Left and Right was based on the Left’s desire to allow the excesses of capitalism to define economic classes more distinctly, thereby promoting the conditions for revolution, and the Right’s belief in the ideology of individual freedom, leading to a libertarian utopia where merit would be rewarded. Same road, different destinations.

So, when it came to Brexit, both left and right looked at the essentially social democrat, post-war alliance of states and, for their own different reasons, opposed it. And they prevailed. But the tactic they employed, politically subtle, ideologically objectionable, was to reinvent that cartoon pyramid where Britishness was special, elevated by right, secure in its foundation, which of course was trampling on everyone else on the planet. Like many other assertions of the Brexiteers, it was a lie, but a persuasive one and, as it transpired, a successful one.

Sold in nineteenth century terms, however, with white races literally elevated above all others and with the British at their perceived rightful top, it would have been rightly dismissed as racist. The assumption that non-white, non-Christians were below the British in the natural order of creation had to be repackaged for a new era where many of the voters were themselves ethnic minorities, immigrants or of mixed race. And, except for minority religions and a small minority of others, the population was now not only non-Christian but also godless, so the summit of the pyramid could be left to disappear into an anonymous mist, the old god no longer saleable. So, who better to peddle the falsehoods generated by Brexit than members of those very groups who were to be elevated in the general order of things, at least ideologically? Who better to sell the lie than a coterie of black faces who can apparently deliver an apology for racism?

Here we reach our summary. I will not list the names. The faces have become familiar in recent times, when we have witnessed a procession of ethnic minority apologists for Brexit, willing to peddle lies in order to achieve a political victory of a deception, that the generality of working-class people will eventually benefit from an individuality that can only leave most of them vulnerable. The people who will suffer, of course, are all those people who once benefitted from the rise of social democracy, which was everyone. The people who gain are those who race along that one road towards imagined, different destinations, the Left seeking conflagration, the right individual merit that will extend only as far as the medal places.