Full Fat Politics

Conservative journalist Peter Hitchens once went on an epic rant against the rising popularity of skimmed milk in corporate coffee chains, but particularly the skinny cappuccinos sold by such franchises. Hitchens is right that the conflation of fat with weight gain has diverted attention away from sugar and its role in the obesity epidemic. He has done well to write about this subject in his column.

There is a great deal of confusion out there and advertising has taken full advantage. The trending support for healthy food - whether 'natural', 'organic' or even just 'low fat' - has been used to sell many of us barely edible garbage. Even 'low sugar' or 'zero sugar' is just a way of getting us to buy drinks loaded with vast doses of aspartame. Meanwhile the country gets fatter and suffers the results, as the collective anxiety about weight and diets intensifies.

Of course, the popular diets probably succeed in weight loss because they are effectively a form of self-imposed starvation. But this is also why so many people fail to eat well. They try to slim down by eating very little, and inevitably transgress later, only to feel awful about themselves. It's all about the super-ego. And I doubt many people are totally living healthy lifestyles (myself included) in terms of what they eat and how much exercise they ought to be doing (I write as the owner of a Fitbit watch).

Unfortunately, Blighty remains an island of ill-health and bad food. Yet British society continues to follow such celebrity chefs as Jamie Oliver and Nigella Lawson. Cooking programmes are a staple of the viewing diet. One wonders the extent to which people just tune in and never try out the recipes. Perhaps the cooking programmes are just vicarious. I can only speculate about this.

On the one hand, we are bombarded with celebrity-endorsed diets and newly branded 'healthy' food in supermarket isles; while culinary luddites demand that we get on the 'slow food' train and rely on local produce, on the other. It's a rather farcical situation. The fast food culture is just as worrying - and certainly guilty of sugar peddling! - and it leaves us with a political question. If we can't fix our food by personal choice, what do we need to do about at the level of the polis.

On that note, I will defer to the writing of others. I recommend reading Rachel Laudan's article on 'culinary modernism' from last year for a start. Nick Srenicek and Alex Williams have a great section on 'slow' and local food in their book Inventing the Future. These are just starting points for the critically minded.

A response to Peter Hitchens.

Well, it was a pleasant surprise to find my short piece on Peter Hitchens has drawn a response from the man himself. You can read his article below, and I’ll now proceed to respond accordingly.

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2014/12/left-wing-person-nearly-says-something-interesting.html

 

The main problem, as he sees it, with my observations is the implication that he yearns for a return to halcyon days, and of course these days never existed. To be fair, I was referring more so to the reactionary press in general when I wrote: ‘Fortunately, it is too late to turn back the clock on the progress achieved in our attitudes to sexuality, gender and race. The malaise of the reactionary press is really down to this harsh reality.’ In retrospect, I should’ve been sharper on this distinction and avoided the conflation.

On an ironic note, it was the socialist movement which emerged out of the despair of the loss of the non-industrial pre-capitalist world, and in that regard it was backward-looking, while at the same time pushing forwards to a better world. It’s perfectly clear to my side that it’s the future we’re fighting over, and that it requires historical perspective to see this era as transient.

I should make clear that the purpose of my article was to convey the reasons why Peter Hitchens stands out from the commentariat - a herd of independent minds if there ever was one. It wasn’t intending to rehash the standard critique of the Hitchens brand of traditionalist conservatism. He’s right on several key issues: the interventions in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria; civil liberties and free-speech. But it’s also the case that he’s wrong in much of his prognosis.

As Mr. Hitchens emphasises, in my article I observe: ‘the way he frames left-wing politics really comes from the position he takes on cultural and socio-moral issues. “It is because the left's ideas – by their nature – undermine conscience, self-restraint, deferred gratification, lifelong marriage and strong, indivisible families headed by authoritative fathers.”

Mr. Hitchens writes: ‘But he doesn’t say whether he accepts or rejects this, or even what he actually thinks about conscience (can he be against it?) or the other things I list as virtues undermined by the strong modern state.’

On conscience, I think moral values have a necessary role in any human community, as I’m a moral realist; but I wouldn’t say this is inherently ‘conservative’. We can still debate what constitutes right and wrong, though I will say that I do not know of any leftist who embraces moral relativism. It would be completely inconsistent as moral relativism cannot be expected to uphold any values, and certainly not egalitarian values.

As for deferred gratification, it was the liberalisation of credit which inverted this ‘deferral’ and left many people to spend first and work off the debt later. Of course, this wouldn’t be the case if the wage share of GDP for the working-class hadn’t been squeezed for the last 40 years. So this is not a monopoly of the middle-classes, but it has been turned on its head in recent decades. The picture is much more complex.

A great many people living on benefits, particularly those trying to raise children on benefits, practice forms of deferred gratification by effectively fasting. I know this because I come from a single-parent household, and I knew many others in similar circumstances, very often the lone parent will eat less and less to save up for Christmas. I don’t expect the Mail to portray this side of so-called ‘dependency culture’, but it’s revealing that they are so blind to it.

When it comes to monogamy, my own view is that it will outlast its competitors (particularly the fad of polyamory) due to its simplicity and mutuality. I don’t romanticise the institution of marriage, its clear strong relationships and families will be formed whether it exists or not.  I was somewhat sceptical of marriage equality because it was clearly a highly conservative proposal. Civil partnerships were the progressive innovation and offered a secular alternative free of a morally bankrupt and increasingly repressive state.

Understandably, Mr. Hitchens found fault with my dismissive remark: ‘He’s wrong on almost all cultural and social issues’. As I hadn’t set out to critique every one of the positions he’s ever taken I didn’t feel the need to go into specifics. But I’ll be forthright and specific here.

A perfect example of where Hitchens goes wrong: addiction. The claim that there is no objective basis for addiction is simply untrue. As medical professionals will tell you, the liver physically changes in the course of prolonged alcohol consumption and this can run alongside a psychological dependency on the drug’s effects. The answer is abstinence and therapy, but there is a very high recidivism rate. The denial of addiction is not only wrong, it is an unnecessary point to make.

The cases for/against the legalisation of drugs can be made without such a point. Likewise, it is possible to question the prevailing culture of hedonism without the presupposition that it is all a matter of ‘free-choice’ (a manifestly liberal point in itself). The only sensible hedonism was advocated and practiced by Epicurus. As long as it remains almost taboo to turn down a drink it will be likely for functioning alcoholics, let alone non-functioning ones, to emerge. But I doubt this will be put right by silly bans and regressive taxes.

To conclude, it’s only possible to rail against conventional wisdom once it has become convention. Mr. Hitchens is sincere in his wish to reorder society, but if he were to succeed he would not only make his work defunct, he would also provide the basis for it to be torn down all over again. That being said, I don’t see anything ‘radical’ in extolling fashionable hedonism.

Should anyone want to ask me a direct question, you can email me at: cainmosni@hotmail.co.uk

Why I respect Peter Hitchens.

Adversarial politics

Believe it or not, there are honourable conservative voices out there. By 'honourable', I really mean those few figures with integrity. You don't have to agree with someone to respect their point of view. This is easy to forget in a political discourse lacking worthy opponents of the Left.

The fulminating columnist Peter Hitchens is one such case of the honourable rightist. The particular strain of conservatism, to which he adheres, may be summarised as traditional, cultural or socio-moral conservatism. His targets include the Westminster consensus, not only the Labour Party, but the Conservative Party as well. He sees the country threatened from a left-wing cultural putsch against the vestiges of an organic social order. Yet it's clear that he is no friend of the current flavour of right-wing politics.

On an ABC panel with Dan Savage and Germaine Greer, Hitchens was asked what he thinks of Tony Abbott. He immediately laid into the Australian Prime Minister deeming him a 'fake conservative' for his neoliberal economic agenda, pseudo-moralism, and connections with Rupert Murdoch. He has dismissed UKIP as a 'dad's army party', unlike many of his associates in the right-wing press, seeing the party only as a means of annihilating the Conservative Party.

"I also yearn for a truly radical party," he once confessed to the BBC. In the same segment, Hitchens made clear what he really opposes: namely, the centre-ground of the Third Way and 'compassionate' Conservatism. He sees both forces as two sides of the same coin (and he's not wrong) routinely flipped every four or five years. In short, he wants to abolish the fakery of personality politics and return to adversarial politics.

When it comes to the economy Peter Hitchens has said that he is for a robustly social democratic model, which would include a safety-net and universal health-care. It would include what he describes as strong employment rights and social housing. He opposes the right to buy scheme which has wiped out so many council houses and inflated the housing market. On top of this, Hitchens has routinely criticised privatisation and the legacy of Thatcherism.

Years ago on Question Time, Peter Hitchens savaged Iain Duncan Smith and called for the renationalisation of the railways. It's not the only case either. "I think there was a case for nationalising coal, made in the 1920s and accepted by many people for non-dogmatic reasons," he wrote in his column in October 2012. "I have always believed that the electric power grid should be nationalised. I think it should be renationalised  as a prelude to an enormous programme of nuclear power station building, without which we face an appalling energy crisis within 20 years."

In a Chat Politics interview Peter Hitchens was asked whether or not he thought it would be possible to build a right-wing alternative to the Conservative Party. He responded "Who says it'll be right-wing?" Of course, this kind of response is symptomatic of the very view he takes of the prime oscillation of UK politics between Labour and Conservative. He often eschews the label of 'right-wing' for himself, preferring the title of Burkean conservative. It's evident that he sees the left-to-right spectrum as a defunct measure of politics and yet he never strays away from bashing what he calls 'the Left'.

"The left's real interests are moral, cultural, sexual and social," he insists in one of his columns. "They lead to a powerful state. This not because they actively set out to achieve one." Not surprisingly, the way he frames left-wing politics really comes from the position he takes on cultural and socio-moral issues. "It is because the left's ideas – by their nature – undermine conscience, self-restraint, deferred gratification, lifelong marriage and strong, indivisible families headed by authoritative fathers."

As a former Trotskyite, Peter Hitchens remains within the bootprint of twentieth century leftism, bemoaning the cultural revolution of the 1960s, yearning for a revival of the traditions and social norms it killed. He's wrong on almost all cultural and social issues, but he's right that the problem, for people like him, isn't just the Left - it's Thatcherism too. Fortunately, it is too late to turn back the clock on the progress achieved in our attitudes to sexuality, gender and race. The malaise of the reactionary press is really down to this harsh reality.

How to understand UKIP.

Current standing

Last week, Roger Helmer of UKIP was trounced by the Conservative candidate at Newark. It seemed to go against everything the media has told us about the UKIP threat. Many had claimed the gains UKIP made in May would be transformed into a fourth party presence within Parliament. This was not a claim of the right-wing press, or at least not just the right-wing press, even the BBC and the liberal broadsheets succumbed to this message. In late May The Guardian reported a poll finding that 86% of those who voted for UKIP in the European elections said they would do so again in the 2015 General Election.[1]

The leap from 13 UKIP MEPs to 24 UKIP MEPs since 2009 set off the British media to announce their well-cooked conclusion: it’s a political earthquake. The results are interesting. Labour came in second at 25.4% to UKIP came out with 27.5% of the vote, translating to about 9.3% of the electorate. The Conservatives fell by 4%, Liberal Democrats by over 6% and the BNP by 7%. UKIP increased its vote by more than 10%. The Green Party lost a little under 1% and gained three seats beating the Lib Dems with nearly 8% of the vote. Voter turnout was around 33.8% for the European elections. It goes without saying that the fringe right-wing parties do better out of low turnout. It was predictable that the ruling parties would face a drop in support.

At the local elections, UKIP's vote fell from 22% to 17% and picked up 160 seats (but no councils) which was less than the Lib Dems who have been relegated politically toxic.[2] UKIP may have eaten into the votes of Conservative candidates enough for them to lose overall control of several councils, but not enough to gain control of any councils itself. The media has claimed the results are ‘disastrous’ for Labour even though the Party gained 330 council seats and a net gain of five councils.[3] The threat of UKIP is to establishment parties in its potential to divide the vote on sore issues like immigration. This matters as we’re about to go into an election. The Conservative Party have never fully recovered from the defeat inflicted on John Major, the worst since 1832, while Labour has still not filled the void leftover by Blairism.

Newark was not to be the first victory of the Farage Party. It should have been obvious from the beginning that the first seat in Parliament would not be offered to Roger Helmer with all of his obvious weak-spots. Helmer himself said that the absence of Farage hurt his chances in the by-election.[4] It may have been a shrewd move by Farage to let Helmer take the fall on this occasion. He made it clear he had no interest in putting himself forward. Perhaps he had already gauged UKIP had little chance. Better to focus on the European and local elections, so let someone else test the waters for the UK Parliament. But that’s not where it ends.

The contours of white appeal

At the end of May there was a revealing and small controversy over the tweets of UKIP Harrow chairman Jeremy Zeid. London was notably invulnerable to UKIP and Zeid was one of the candidates to be defeated. In his tweets Zeid bemoaned the ‘absence’ of white faces in Ilford and went on to claim that London is being “ethnically cleansed” of white people.[5] He put the blame on the Labour Party. Perhaps Zeid imagines that New Labour’s immigration policy as a social engineering programme to flood the country with a new electorate to back whatever Labour wants. These are longstanding tropes of right-wing fantasy. Race-mixing with the aim of building socialism in one country. Alas, the Blairites had no such radical imagination.

During the debate held between Nick Clegg and Nigel Farage the veteran broadcaster David Dimbleby asked “Do you consider the social impact of unlimited EU immigration to be positive or has it caused a damaging element of cultural segregation?” Nigel Farage charged immigration with ‘increasing segregation’ and ‘fundamentally’ changing Britain's towns and cities. He went on to say “Worst of all, what it's done socially, it has left I'm afraid the white working-class, yes, I know educationally, many have not done as well as we would like, but it has left the white working-class effectively as an under-class. And that I think is a disaster for our society.” Here Farage targets those who identify as ‘white’ and ‘working-class’ in the audience.

‘White’ being the lowest common denominator there is. The appeal to white racial consciousness is to those who have nothing else to cling onto. In the vast swathes of the country reduced to wastelands by Thatcherism there are plenty of working-class people who feel marginalised. To advance a race-consciousness where class-consciousness is necessary holds obvious value for any reactionary party. The white race exists, if at all, definitely not in biological terms, it exists objectively as a formation of social control. Its shape is a multi-class formation. The problem is those external to its advantages, not the system in which we are all chained. In the words of Theodore W Allen, “The white race is the historically most general form of ‘class collaboration’.”[6]

In using such words Farage attempted to bind the ‘white working-class’ to his party as a party of ‘white’ men standing up for themselves. Anyone who defends immigration can then be conceived of as a traitor. Nick Clegg was the perfect candidate with the long list of broken promises behind him. It was clear who was going to win the debate from the outset. Clegg could not rely on the strength of liberal ideas to triumph over the nationalist reaction. He had already conceded too much ground to the opposition. He trapped in the liberal-nationalist dichotomy permitted by the media and reinforced by the BBC and apparatchiks like Dimbleby. The only kind of opposition which can be levelled against UKIP properly would have to be levelled against the Establishment as well. And that is why the liberals are so complacent.

Farage as an Ultra-Rightist

The lexicon of the Left has always had a plethora of useful phrases. Lenin coined ‘ultra-leftism’ to designate those leftists who reach beyond the Left and, ultimately, undermine left-wing aims. It follows that there is such a thing as ultra-rightism. In many ways the Westboro Baptist Church in the US embodied ultra-rightism. Many LGBT activists believed that the notorious placard ‘GOD HATES FAGS’ was more of a help to the cause than a hindrance. There was no pretence of civility with the Westboro bunch, which the rest of the Christian Right has tried hard to maintain. It's not hard to see how the zealotry of Fred Phelps and his flock has caused a lot of problems for American conservatives. Waving around placards, like ‘GOD LOVES DEAD SOLDIERS’, is hardly inspirational to the so-called ‘red states’.

Nigel Farage seems to occupy a similar space in UK politics. Certainly, the Conservative leadership understands the threat of UKIP in this framework. It threatens to undermine its electoral basis. As Paul Mason has highlighted, the Conservative Party is a social alliance between socially and economically liberal metropolitans and the socially conservative, anti-immigrant and anti-EU voters of the rural middle-classes.[7] Likewise, the Labour Party is rooted in an alliance between a liberal salariat in the cities and a working-class base.[8] In its nationalist appeal, UKIP challenges Labour where there remains, what Mason calls, “a residual white working-class culture”; all the while Farage threatens to convert socio-moral and hard Right conservatives from the Conservative Party.[9]

The UK Independence Party itself is a coalition of nationalists, libertarians, and paleoconservatives. It's not a straight fascist party like the BNP. UKIP has managed to gain greater respectability and coverage in mainstream affairs. Farage has been asked onto Question Time more often than any other politician in the last few years. The Party has drawn support from the reactionary press, explicitly in the case The Daily Express, from whence Farage plucked Patrick O'Flynn to stand as an MEP and UKIP’s Director of Communications. Ultra-right columnists such as Peter Hitchens and Simon Heffer have recommended UKIP to their readers as the necessary means to undermine the Conservative Party. In general the discourse surrounding certain issues has helped to maintain and spread a fervent base for a particular kind of anti-political populism.

The Flame of Thatcherism

As George Eaton has recorded in his blogging at the New Statesman, there have been signs since at least April 2014 that, UKIP are moving further leftwards on economic matters to seize the ground long abandoned by the Labour Party.[10] Even in the run-up to the European elections Farage had been critical of zero-hour contracts. George Eaton refers us to an article Farage penned in the Express and corporations who “refuse to accept any social obligation towards loyal employees”.[11][12]

On The Andrew Marr Show, Farage was asked about his convictions as an avowed Thatcherite and he distanced himself “Thatcherism was of its time, 40 years ago, to deal with a specific set of problems. For half the country it benefited them, for the other half it didn't.”[13] Farage confirmed that the flat tax of 31%, claiming that the policy had been ‘badly explained’, as people “thought we were going to put tax up for the low-paid”. The UKIP leader went as far as to assert a commitment to low-taxes, as an incentive, for minimum wage-earners: “What I can tell you for certain is that our biggest tax objective in the next manifesto will be no tax on the minimum wage. You've got to incentivise people to get off benefits and get back to work. That will obviously cost money.”[14]

The framework of these positions remains largely within the confines of conservative thought: ‘loyal’ employees, work not welfare, low taxes etc. The commitment to the 40% tax rate on high-incomes should not be mistaken as ‘progressive’, for it is a status quo commitment, it would still be a cut of 5%, and it is still a rate lower than it was in the Thatcher years.  In the past Farage has affirmed that the NHS should not be ring-fenced and, by implication, open to market forces and private companies.[15] He told Norman Smith not long ago that he wants to see Britain “getting better value for money” from the NHS. Farage has withdrawn from this position in his interview with Marr.

It is likely that the UKIP machine-men have taken notice of the criticisms against their laissez-faire tastes – for health-care privatisation, abolishing maternity leave and sick pay – in the traditional Labour press. The Daily Mirror ran pieces on UKIP’s stances in the run up to the European and local elections. It is a vulnerable point for the Party in its bid to expand into serious influence. The small amount of coverage that these positions gained in the press (compared with their stances on immigration and plentiful scandals) may have helped to harden Labour support in the local elections.

Despite the media claims of a UKIP ‘earthquake’ the Party leadership will be quietly aware of the need to chip away at the Labour base. There is widespread support for the nationalisation of energy companies, the renationalisation of the railways, and a ban on zero-hours contract. It wouldn’t be surprising if the bulk of this support was concentrated in the North and the Midlands. In the same quarters, there is strong nationalist opposition to immigration and European integration, as well as a popular disdain for political-correctness, benefits scrounging, and multiculturalism. The UKIP leadership may be looking to siphon off support for Labour where the Conservatives have had little chance of gaining any ground whatsoever.

The real question is whether UKIP will be able to capitalise on the modest gains it has made and hold itself together with these electoral manoeuvres. This is at the same time that the Party will be up against the Conservatives and Labour. The threat is there and it has yet to be really seen what this means for future British politics. It is evident that the need for a radical opposition in the UK and the absence of such an opposition is at a dire point. The only force which could take the wind out of UKIP would have to challenge the Conservatives on the cuts and oppose the European austerity regime.

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[1] http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2014/may/31/ukip-contest-seats-senior-tories-2015-general-election

[2] http://anotherangryvoice.blogspot.co.uk/2014/05/local-election-results-2014-aav.html?m=1

[3] Ibid.

[4] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/ukip/10881381/Newark-by-election-I-wish-box-office-Nigel-Farage-had-come-here-more-says-Ukips-Roger-Helmer.html

[5] http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/ukip-branch-chairman-london-is-being-ethnically-cleansed-of-white-people-9448154.html

[6] http://www.jeffreybperry.net/files/Perry.pdf

[7] http://blogs.channel4.com/paul-mason-blog/culture-war-crisis-mainstream-politics/831

[8] Ibid.

[9] Ibid.

[10] http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2014/04/how-ukip-turning-left-economy

[11] http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2014/04/how-ukip-turning-left-economy

[12] http://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/471010/We-ll-tackle-scandalous-zero-hour-contracts-says-Farage-in-pitch-for-working-class-vote

[13] http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2014/06/farage-tries-shed-his-thatcherite-skin

[14] http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2014/06/farage-tries-shed-his-thatcherite-skin

[15] http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2014/06/farage-tries-shed-his-thatcherite-skin