Author: Simon Hammond

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Only Joking?

The crisis of English government that has gathered pace since 2016, accelerating further in the context of the Covid pandemic, has frequently revolved around the predilections and vanities of three men: Boris Johnson, Michael Gove and Dominic Cummings. The three were bound together by the Vote Leave referendum campaign, but already belonged to the same intellectual and journalistic milieu, whose political implications appear increasingly stark. It is brash, disruptive, libertarian and disdainful of liberal-conservative establishment norms, including those of the legislature, judiciary and civil service. Media-savvy, it seizes on hot-button ‘cultural’ issues to distract from less spectacular (but usually more consequential) economic decisions being taken elsewhere. If this ideology has a basecamp from which to mount its assaults on the state, it is not – as was the case for Thatcherism – a post-war think tank, but a Georgian magazine: the Spectator.

In April of this year, commenting on how the government appeared to be stoking a new ‘culture war’ amidst the Covid emergency, the political editor of the Financial Times, Robert Shrimsley referred to the ‘Spectocracy’ that was driving it. Johnson, who was editor of the Spectator from 1999-2005 is clearly this faction’s totemic leader, but Cummings (who departed Downing in Street in November) held a position as online editor, which he resigned in 2006 shortly after insistently re-publishing a Danish cartoon of the Prophet Mohammad. Cummings was hired as Gove’s advisor the following year, but still occasionally uses the Spectator blog to issue his over-wrought meditations on the state of politics, while his wife, Mary Wakefield, has held a succession of senior editorial roles at the paper since Johnson’s tenure. 

Shrimsley was also referring to the role of libertarian provocateur Toby Young, an associate editor, who has refashioned himself as a free-speech campaigner and ‘Covid sceptic’ who seeks to challenge expert opinion on policies such as lockdown. He might equally have mentioned the magazine’s political editor, James Forsyth, whose wife, Allegra Stratton, has – with great media fanfare – recently been appointed Downing Street press secretary. At their wedding, Forsyth’s best man was none other than Rishi Sunak, now Chancellor of the Exchequer. The cultural front of this new conservatism has been pushed in alliance with the Daily Telegraph, with whom the Spectator has shared the same owners – Conrad Black and then the Barclay brothers – and many of the same columnists and editors since the 1980s. Johnson’s December 2019 electoral triumph, built solely on the promise to complete the Brexit process, represented a startling coup for a clique that had spent much of the previous two decades trolling and trivialising politics.

In 10,000 Not Out, David Butterfield, a young(ish) Cambridge classicist, author of books on Lucretius, Varro and A. E. Housman and regular Spectator contributor, offers a lovingly told history of the magazine, its key characters, controversies and fluctuating readership. As Butterfield underlines, the Brexit era is not the first time that careers have zigzagged between Westminster and the Spectator. Previous editors include a sitting Conservative MP (Iain Macleod, 1963-65) a future Conservative Chancellor (Nigel Lawson, 1965-70), and Margaret Thatcher’s official biographer, newly ennobled by Johnson (Charles Moore, 1984-1990), while among its mainstays have been such figures as Thatcher’s policy advisor, Ferdinand Mount. Johnson combined the editorship with a parliamentary seat, plus stints as deputy chairman of the Conservatives and as Shadow Arts Minister. His successor, Matthew D’Ancona, was closely involved with David Cameron’s efforts to shift his party to the centre, and remains chair of the Cameronite think tank, Bright Blue.

This level of intimacy between a political party and a publication would be significant enough. What’s stranger is that the Spectator has frequently been at pains to stress its ambivalence towards the Conservative Party. Every incoming editor appears to have felt compelled to make the same self-regarding declaration of independence and lofty intellectual aspiration, no matter how personally entangled with the party they may have been. Some (like Cummings) appear to have held the Tories in some contempt, while fraternising and gossiping with them for a living. Perhaps they doth protest too much, and this rhetoric of independent mindedness is simply how the establishment likes to present itself. On the other hand, there is something distinctive about this restless branch of conservatism, which is constantly on the verge of attacking the very institutions it claims to cherish. Since this is the culture that has shaped Britain’s latest political elite, Butterfield’s impressively researched if hagiographic book might be read as a kind of history of our unhappy present. 

The Spectator was founded in 1828 by Robert Rintoul, a Scottish journalist with Whig sympathies and a progressive Benthamite perspective on social reform. Rintoul deliberately revived the title of the famous but short-lived coffeehouse periodical, established by Joseph Addison and Richard Steele in 1711, and Rintoul’s descendants have occasionally muddied the waters surrounding its true origins (the Spectator blog is named ‘Coffee House’). Like the Economist, which became something of a sister when it was founded fifteen years later, its main political concern was to defend and extend free trade. Beyond this core liberal principle, Rintoul hoped that his paper would avoid political partisanship, and instead focus on offering a form of intellectualism and heterodoxy that its readers would revere and learn from.

Coinciding with the heyday of Victorian laissez-faire, the early decades of the Spectator placed it firmly on the side of political modernity. Despite its stated desire to remain a neutral spectator of politics, it was forced off the fence where key liberal objectives were at stake, offering whole-hearted support for the 1832 Reform Act, then (less popularly) opposing slavery and backing the North in the American Civil War. John Stuart Mill was a frequent and enthusiastic contributor, while Butterfield reports that ‘the paper’s admiration for Gladstone had risen almost to the point of idolatry by the mid-1880s’.

The Spectator first turned on the Liberal Party over the issue of Irish home rule, which cost it a considerable number of readers, whose loyalties were to party before newspaper. By the close of the nineteenth century, the paper could boast a famous litany of literary contributors – Thomas Hardy, Joseph Conrad, Rudyard Kipling, Arthur Conan Doyle – but its progressive credentials (both culturally and politically) were growing shaky. It wasn’t until the 1930s that the Spectator was firmly supportive of the Tories (a stance embedded in a vehement anti-socialism), by which point it had also undergone a brief flirtation with Mussolini.

Yet the existential dilemma of liberalism versus Toryism has never entirely deserted the paper. The cultural world of its writers is unmistakeably that of a fading public-school and Oxbridge elite, whose access to political power has been routed via the Tory Party for the past century. But in addition to its early attachment to laissez-faire, its social values (not to mention the lifestyle choices of its leading lights) have been liberal and individualistic, to an often provocative degree.

The dilemma is constitutive of a certain strand of conservative liberalism, which is (somewhat paradoxically) nostalgic for the Victorian model of progress. Various means of squaring this circle have been sought, most powerfully the modernising neoliberalism of Hayek and Thatcher, which sought to reinvent and reimpose laissez-faire. Never sufficiently committed to economics to add much to that agenda, the Spectator has clung to a different strand of ‘classical liberalism’, the rhetorical acrobatics and innuendos of the gentleman’s club and the Oxford Union, which ultimately resolves in the self-serving free-speech activism that has become the contemporary Spectator’s greatest cause célèbre.    

The perpetual editorial declarations of political independence and liberal intellectualism continued after the War. Graham Greene, Kingsley Amis, Phillip Larkin, Iris Murdoch and Ted Hughes were all occasional contributors, though Butterfield notes that the paper never quite got modernism or anything that smelled of the avant-garde. Social liberalism continued to inform the policies it advocated, including opposition to the death penalty and support for legalisation of homosexuality. In 1958, Michael Foot wrote to say that ‘no journal in Britain has established a higher reputation than the Spectator for the persistent advocacy of a humane administration of the law or the reform of inhumane laws’. Nigel Lawson’s paper attacked Enoch Powell’s infamous 1968 ‘rivers of blood’ speech as ‘a nonsense and a dangerous nonsense’.

The distinctive Spectator tone of reactionary satire, later advanced in cruder form by the likes of James Delingpole and Rod Liddle, was apparent in 1968 via the pen of ‘Mercurius’, a pseudonymous academic who railed against student protesters, social science and expansion of higher education. It seems fairly clear, though never confirmed, that the author was Oxford historian Hugh Trevor-Roper. Beyond such fripperies, what’s surprising is how little of substance the Spectator contributed to the resurgence of the right over the subsequent decade, especially given the critical importance of other print media (Samuel Brittan and others at the Financial Times in particular) to the spread of Thatcherite ideas. Lawson briefly positioned the paper as pro-European, though this was swiftly reversed by his successor George Gale, under whom the Spectator’s financial position and profile slid.

As for the country, so for the Spectator, 1979 proved a turning point. Under the accomplished editorship of Alexander Chancellor (who professed never to have voted Tory), Moore (who described himself as an ‘independent Tory’) and then Nigel Lawson’s son Dominic, the magazine became more spirited and increasingly hedonistic. Sales rose, as did the quantity of provocative and racy content. Thatcherism provided the backdrop, but the sense one gets from the Spectator of the 1980s is of the old patriarchal establishment becoming drunk on the freedoms of the revived laissez-faire.

Yet to grasp the cultural roots of the present political crisis, and to some extent of Brexit, it’s the Blair era that deserves closest attention. Beyond its enthusiastic support for the Iraq War, the paper found it difficult to gain a political toehold with respect to Blairism. After all, London in the late 1990s was everything that rich and well-connected social liberals could ever have hoped for. Unable therefore to offer serious or substantial criticism of the New Labour government, the Spectator under Johnson began to take libertarian swipes at what he called the ‘ghastly treacly consensus of New Britain’. Young joined in 1999, and Liddle jumped ship from the BBC three years later.

Offence-giving became a mark of intellectual freedom and was steadily ratcheted up under Johnson. William Cash, son of the Eurosceptic MP of the same name, asserted that Hollywood was the fiefdom of a Jewish cabal. Taki, a far-right lifestyle columnist, wrote of New York Puerto Ricans that they were a ‘bunch of semi-savages’ and that ‘Britain is being mugged by black hoodlums’, before later praising the Wehrmacht. In 2004, a Spectator leader repeated the lie that ‘drunken fans’ were culpable for the Hillsborough football-stadium tragedy, whose memorable death toll (96) the paper could only put at ‘more than 50’.

Throughout this period, anti-European barbs were being tossed on a regular basis, in tandem with the rest of the conservative press. Given how few steady ideological positions the paper seems to hold, the persistence of anti-Europeanism – following Nigel Lawson’s brief effort in the 1960s to embrace European integration – has become one of its most significant political identifiers, at least since the 1992 Maastricht Treaty. Butterfield treats as obvious that a publication committed to ‘free trade’ would adopt this stance (which unsurprisingly resulted in support for ‘Leave’ in the 2016 referendum) but this is to underplay the nationalist undercurrents of both Brexit and the contemporary Spectator.

Much of the time, this Euroscepticism is too flippant and jingoistic to count as a credible policy vision. As with kitsch Brexiteer appeals to ‘Global Britain’, it is rooted in nostalgia for a 19th-century modernity when you could ‘say anything you like’, cultural hierarchies were explicit and government supposedly did as little as possible. Since Thatcher left office in 1990, what Brexitism has offered subsequent generations of conservatives is a way of going ‘meta’ on the establishment that spawned them, distancing themselves from orthodoxy and authority, in the name of some higher freedom. The squaring of the liberal-Tory circle ends up in adolescent efforts to cause offence for its own sake, but the political side-effects have turned out to be far more serious.

The identity of William Cash – son, not father – has been corrected. Thanks to the Sidecar reader who pointed this out.

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Nigeria’s Revolt

Since October, protests against Nigeria’s Special Anti-Robbery Squad have brought tens of thousands onto the streets and deluged Twitter with stories of police brutality, under the #EndSARS hashtag. But though this upheaval received widespread global coverage and international celebrity support, in the Western media it was largely cast as an African variant of Black Lives Matter. Few attempts were made to situate it within the broader history of Nigerian struggles against the corrupt ruling bloc and its kleptocratic economic order. Domestically, the protests have been variously characterized as an uprising, an insurrection, the start of a revolution, an outpouring of anarchic rage; but #EndSARS is a fragmentary resistance, not a singular movement, and its actors cannot be easily classified as a homogeneous group. With a second phase of mobilizations now underway amid a vicious crackdown by the Buhari government, how best to understand the movement, both its structural conditions and political character? How might it compare to previous struggles; and what of its prospects?

The Special Anti-Robbery Squad was founded in 1992 under General Babangida’s military dictatorship. This was in the context of an upsurge in armed robbery, as Nigeria’s urban-slum populations soared under the impact of the structural-adjustment programmes imposed by the generals and IMF. The squad has long been notorious for extortion, extra-judicial killings, corruption and torture. It operates with impunity. Typical victims are young men between 15 and 35 from low-income backgrounds, but SARS also targets middle-class youth – online platforms abound with stories of abuse and demands to abolish the unit. Following a video of officers shooting a young man in Delta State on 3 October this year, the demand to #EndSARS went viral. The hashtag had been circulating for years, but it had never sparked the kind of explosion that followed. When another report surfaced of officers killing a twenty-year-old musician, protests in Rivers State garnered national attention. Encouraged by Nigerian celebrities – Afro-popstars Wizkid and footballer Odion Jude Ighalo, along with a host of online influencers – crowds began to assemble outside the state governor’s mansion in Lagos. From there, protests spread to smaller cities and rural towns, eventually spilling across the border into neighbouring West African countries, and eliciting solidarity actions in North America, Europe and Oceania.

In response, on 11 October the government announced that SARS would be dissolved and replaced by SWAT, a Special Weapons and Tactics unit. But this rebranding exercise did little to stem the discontent. Protests continued, undeterred when bands of thugs – widely believed to be sponsored by the government – began to create chaos with the aim of discrediting the movement. When that tactic failed, the Buhari regime sent in the Army. Twelve unarmed protesters were shot dead by the military in Lagos on 20 October in what has become known as the Lekki Tollgate massacre. Nationally, 38 were killed that night, with many more injured and arrested. The upshot was to trigger another round of street protests, in parallel with riots and vandalism across the country. Notably, rioters broke into the stores where foodstuffs supposedly intended for the population during the Covid crisis were being hoarded by the authorities – rice, garri, sugar, salt, noodles. Police stations and hospitals were torched. Military repression was stepped up. Protest organizers had their bank accounts frozen and passports invalidated.

Muhamma du Buhari, a former general, ran in the 2015 election as a ‘born-again democrat’, winning a second victory in 2019, but his repressive response to the protests instead recalls his years as Nigeria’s military dictator in the early 1980s. Aloof, rarely communicating with the public, his reaction has exposed the systemic entanglement of politicians and police – the former often reliant on the latter to harass opponents and crush dissent. When Buhari announced on 7 December that ‘any act of hooliganism hiding behind lawful peaceful protests will be dealt with decisively’, the Nigerian political scientist Jibrin Ibrahim responded with a more accurate characterization: ‘law enforcement will sponsor hooligans and deal with peaceful protesters.’

Though a product of Nigeria’s dysfunctional democracy and economic disparities, the movement’s form has in large part been determined by the country’s divided oppositional forces. Historically, it is striking for being the first nationwide popular mobilization with no trade-union involvement. Since the 1980s, the Nigerian Labour Congress (NLC) had been at the forefront of opposition and democracy movements, not least in protests against the ending of fuel subsidies. Between 1999 and 2007, it called six effective general strikes, with notable success in resisting deregulation and passing legislation through collective bargaining. When the Goodluck Jonathan regime attempted to cut fuel subsidies in 2012, the NLC called another nationwide walkout. By now however, there were clear signs that the trade-union movement had lost touch with civil society – particularly its younger politicized layers. The protests brought a wider swathe of radicalized youth to the street, opportunistically supported by opposition politicians like Buhari. But while the unions saw it as simply another strike, the youth saw it differently. They were not willing to let the NLC dictate the terms of their struggle. Many questioned the organization’s representational legitimacy, accusing it of taking bribes and collaborating with the authorities to end the protests prematurely. The result has been a split between organized labour and a new generation of dissidents, one that has yet to heal. When I spoke to various activists in Abuja, Lagos and Port Harcourt, they were unanimous in their distrust for the unions.

The backdrop for this previous wave of popular resistance, known as Occupy Nigeria, was the country’s long period of oil-led economic growth. The present one, by contrast, has unfolded during the dual crises of a global oil slump – hitting petro-dependent Nigeria with particular force – and the Covid-19 recession. Poverty and inequality have been progressively worsening since the return to electoral democracy in 1999. Unemployment and inflation are skyrocketing, while incomes are in decline. Forty per cent of Nigerians live below the poverty line. The public health and education systems are a shambles, while the elite typically seek medical treatment in London or Saudi Arabia and send their children to private schools abroad. The current conflagration is inseparable from the political-economic system of extreme inequality and violence that plagues Nigeria. In the words of radical lawyer Adesina Ogunlana, it is ‘a metaphor about everything wrong in Nigeria, and not just a unit of the Nigerian police’.

In this new conjuncture, the Buhari government’s own move to slash fuel subsidies and increase electricity tariffs, in September of this year, provoked a wave of anger: the inflationary effect of fuel-price rises on other goods has devastating consequences for workers and poor households. Yet the NLC dragged its feet, only announcing a general strike after an extended period of prevarication, when activists picketed its Abuja headquarters. In another novel development, the government initiated negotiations with the unions before the strike was scheduled to begin. No sooner had the NLC entered these talks than it declared its intention to halt industrial action and accept the subsidy cut in exchange for a few trivial concessions, including tax exemptions for minimum-wage workers. This was considered a historic betrayal: resisting fuel subsidies through social alliances has been the centrepiece of the unions’ resistance to neoliberalization for over three decades. #EndSARS – a movement without leaders, and which rejects negotiations with the authorities as a road to corruption – erupted a week later. The ossified labour movement was subsequently forced to change course: at the beginning of December the NLC reversed its line on electricity prices and declared that the strike was back on.  

This leaderless, inchoate movement is also distinguished by its predominantly youthful composition, a product of the country’s generationally inflected politics. Nigeria has a young population – over 40 per cent are under 14 – but its gerontocratic political structures are dominated by figures from the pre-1999 dictatorships. Although youth campaigners won a legislative battle in 2019 to lower age limits for candidates contesting elections by five years, this reform was largely immaterial, as the cost of entering politics remains prohibitive for most young people. Among those under 34 years of age, 35 per cent are unemployed and a further 28 per cent are under-employed. Buhari has only exacerbated the alienation of this demographic, describing them as entitled, uneducated, lazy and uniquely disposed to crime. As Tarila Ebiede observed in the Washington Post, ‘tech-savvy’ twentysomethings are now pitted against the ‘clientelist or patronage driven oil economy’, whose dividends have failed to trickle down. The movement against SARS can thus be seen as, among other things, an unprecedented kick against the oil economy. Yet this picture of an old petro-establishment rattled by a green youthquake needs some qualification: the government-sponsored thugs are also drawn from this younger cohort, along with the militants (including armed gangs and religious cultists) in the Niger Delta. Their warm relationship with local politicians embeds them in the oil-fuelled patronage structures that have failed their fellow millennials, creating significant obstacles to youth solidarity.

Nigerian politics also remains profoundly patriarchal, but in this recent movement young women have taken their place on the front line, radicalized by earlier engagements and a recent feminist re-emergence. Activists like Aisha Yusufu, a leader of the 2014 #BringBackOurGirls campaign (aimed at rescuing the hostages of Boko Haram), and organizations like the 2020 Feminist Coalition, have rallied to the struggle against police brutality. The latter organized crowdfunding for medical and legal support, turning to bitcoins when their bank account was frozen.

As in earlier protests, immediate demands have been mixed with calls to deepen democracy, end corruption and improve social welfare. This programme has enabled it to transcend the traditional dividing-lines in Nigerian politics – religious, regional and ethnic (the country is almost evenly split between Christians and Muslims, as well as hosting over 250 ethnic groups with strongholds in different states). But in contrast to the NLC-led struggles, these myriad players have been brought into an avowedly ‘classless’ coalition. The historic fuel-subsidy protests adopted the language of the radical left, using social injustice as the crux around which systemic corruption and democratic deficits were discussed. At their heart was the conception of fuel subsidies as a meagre but essential form of social welfare, derived from the country’s vast petroleum resources. #EndSARS, on the other hand, was initiated by relatively well-off Lagos protesters and amplified by social-media celebrities, who have wished to restrict its demands to democratic reforms and a functional police force.

This latest movement has undoubtedly expanded the Nigerian youth’s sense of agency and political imagination, amid conditions of widespread poverty. Its minimum demands include re-training the police, releasing protesters and salary rises to end endemic corruption. The government is currently undertaking a police salary review, and judicial panels for victims of the squad have been established in most of the 36 Nigerian states. Yet it remains to be seen how far this will contribute towards building an effective left-democratic opposition. Those who tried to steer the movement towards social issues have been told to stick to the core message; some more experienced activists from the radical student movements of the 1980s and 1990s – taking on the military junta – have decided, or have been asked, to step back this time around. A cluster of organizations on the Nigerian left though have been mobilizing. Of note are the Take It Back network, which helped establish the African Action Congress (AAC) as a political party in 2018, and their united-front organization CORE (Coalition for Revolution). The radical journalist Omoyele Sowore, a student activist from the 1990s and founder of Sahara Reporters, the go-to site for the 2012 protests, was the AAC’s presidential candidate in the 2019 elections. He was arrested in a massive security operation mounted to suppress CORE’s #RevolutionNow protests of August 2019. Since then, the AAC has begun coordinating with community organizations across the country – supporting striking workers and citizens fighting inflated energy bills – as Baba Aye has reported for Africa Is a Country.

Given the widespread distrust of Nigeria’s state institutions, the organizations and campaigns clustered around the police reform movement will continue to operate mainly outside of party politics; but they may nonetheless have an influence on the elections in 2023. Here, the events of 2012 offer a precedent – and a warning. Both establishment parties in the 2015 election parroted the language of the streets, running on slogans of ‘change’ and ‘transition’. Buhari and his party, APC, benefited greatly from his positioning against subsidy cuts and corruption – his victory marked the first time an incumbent had been ousted by a presidential challenger. The 2023 elections will most likely see another two-party competition where the contenders adapt their messaging to an emboldened youth movement. The parties may try to recruit new members into their increasingly formalized bureaucratic machinery – without, of course, altering their core centrist-liberal ideologies. Nor will they relinquish their interest in maintaining a kleptocracy shored up by state institutions – the first-past-the-post parliamentary system as much as the Army and police – that descend directly from British colonialism. In the struggle to replace them with structures that are both equitable and accountable, ending SARS will be just a beginning.

Read on: Matthew Gandy’s map of financial insecurity and infrastructural collapse in Lagos. 

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Latin American Symptoms

Surveying the state of Latin America, as it reels under recession and pandemic, it’s useful to bear in mind that these are essentially extractivist economies, based on the export of cereals, vegetables, minerals, meat, fish, gas and oil. With cheap manual labour, they also produce second-rank manufacturing goods – and drugs. Such economies generate overblown service sectors, run-down peripheries and devastated hospitals and schools. The stick and the carrot are firmly in the hands of the exploiter classes, who, while native to the region, behave like foreign occupiers.

The centre of gravity of these ‘lands of the gospel’ has always lain elsewhere. Since the days of the Bourbon and Braganza monarchies, Latin America has imported and adapted its ideas, its systems of government, traditions, artistic forms and technologies. Just as the industrialization of the continent subordinated it to international chains of production, so its modernization was subject to the interests of the advanced-capitalist metropolis. In the words of the Brazilian thinker Sérgio Buarque de Holanda, we are exiles in our own lands.

It will be objected that Latin America has also been the world’s leading continent of revolt, that the working class succeeded in establishing advanced forms of organization here in the 20th century. Examples range from the forms of popular representation established by the COB (Central Obrera Boliviana) during the Bolivian revolution of 1952, or the creation of the PT (Workers’ Party) in Brazil during the 1980s, which mobilized the poor under the aegis of the working class. But on the whole, authoritarian and demagogic regimes – Perón in Argentina, Vargas in Brazil – have set the political tone, absorbing spasms of revolt into a retrogressive caudillismo. This was the local version of combined and uneven development.

In the past few years, this combination of rebellion and paralysis, advance and retreat, has undergone a vertiginous acceleration. Instability has become permanent. Take Bolivia. In October 2019, the country had its 190th coup d’état in 195 years of independence: the police mutinied, the military came out against Evo Morales, the elected president, and drove him into exile. (The police had also spearheaded the 2010 rebellion against Rafael Correa in Ecuador.)

An OAS investigation found no irregularities with the official count of Bolivia’s first-round election, which Morales won – only with the unofficial ‘quick count’. Yet not just Trump and Bolsonaro but the EU and OAS threw their weight behind the Bolivian coup. With the presidency occupied by an unelected figure of the far right, Bolivia endured a year of tumult until the October 2020 elections, decisively won by Luis Arce, the candidate of Morales’s movement, MAS.

The situation is not a complete return to Bolivia’s status quo ante, since Arce’s economic policies are closer to the Anglo-American ideal. Politically he is in a position to learn from the mistakes of Morales, who used the judicial machinery to override a plebiscite that had denied him the chance of a fourth term.

Meanwhile, Chile has opened a window onto the future – although the ruling bloc is trying to make sure it doesn’t open too wide. The first inklings came in October 2019, when students at Chile’s oldest state school, the Instituto Nacional, began vaulting the turnstiles in metro stations to protest against a 30-pesos increase in ticket prices. The student body has been changing: wealthy families have steadily withdrawn their offspring, preferring to ensconce themselves in the well-policed suburbs flanking the foothills of the Andes. But it wasn’t just about the 30 pesos. The fuse was lit and within a few weeks, Chile was ablaze.

October 2019 saw one of the largest demonstrations of all time in Latin America, with a million people in Santiago’s Plaza Italia, now rebaptised as Plaza Dignidad. Polite opinion said this was a typical Latin American uproar that would soon die down. But the popular forces organized a general strike that brought the country to a standstill, from one end to another. New forms of political organization flourished alongside – and despite – the traditional Socialist and Communist parties.

Chile’s President, Sebastián Piñera, is a scion of one of Latin America’s most extravagantly wealthy families. He responded to the uprising by ordering the police to fire rubber bullets at the insurgents’ faces. More than a hundred people suffered facial injuries, many were blinded; thousands were arrested. (Rubber bullets were developed by the security forces in the UK and used against protesters demanding British troops’ withdrawal from Northern Ireland in the 1970s. They were taken up by the IDF, aiming at the foreheads of the Palestinians, and have since been used globally – against the 2013 protesters in Brazil, the gilets jaunes in France and BLM demonstrators in the US.)

Rubber bullets did not kill the movement in Chile. In November 2019, the Congress ruled that a referendum should be held in April 2020 on drafting a new Constitution to replace the one imposed by Pinochet forty years before, which enshrined the neoliberal order. The move was supposed to halt the protests, yet by early 2020 the uprising was spreading again, with strikes across dozens of sectors, occupations, militant demonstrations, attacks on the rotten political establishment and confrontations with the police.

The pandemic offered Piñera the chance to delay the referendum till 25 October 2020, but he could not change the outcome when the vote finally took place. More than 5.8 million Chileans voted in favour of drafting a new Constitution; only 1.6 million voted against. A majority also voted that the Constituent Assembly, due to be elected on 11 April 2021, will be made up exclusively of delegates elected for that purpose – not recycled parliamentarians. The Assembly will be made up of 50% women, 50% men, and indigenous minorities, starting with the Mapuche, will have guaranteed representation. The candidates won’t need to run under the auspices of a political party: representatives of factory committees, neighbourhood groups, schools and trade unions will be able to stand.

That said, the election will use Chile’s disproportionate constituencies – favouring the rural regions, to the detriment of the cities – and the D’Hondt system of proportional vote allocation, which notoriously favours larger parties. The Constituent Assembly’s 155 members will have to agree any measures by a two-thirds majority, so a minority of 53 will have a veto. They have been instructed to focus on social security, education, healthcare and employment: the daily life of society, rather than what the Argentinian jurist Roberto Gargarella has called the ‘engine room’ of the political system. In addition, 648 people have been arrested for participating in the demonstrations against Piñera’s regime, and another 752 people have been convicted of damage to private property. The government refuses to pardon them and denies that they are political prisoners.

Nevertheless, though nothing is guaranteed, Chile’s uprising has produced results that go well beyond what has been achieved by formidable protest movements elsewhere, from the US to Algeria, Lebanon to France, Belarus to Nigeria.

While Chile advances towards an uncertain future and Bolivia reverts to a changed version of its recent past, Peru sinks into the present. No nation better expresses the volatility of Latin America. It last held a presidential election in 2016, and has had four presidents since then: Martín Vizcarra replaced a discredited Pedro Pablo Kuczynski in March 2018, and was impeached by a hostile Congress in November 2020; his successor, ultra-conservative Manuel Merino, lasted barely five days, amid popular uproar at Vizcarra’s ouster, and was replaced by Francisco Sagasti, a US-educated technocrat, before the month was out.

Peru’s political class has utterly dissociated itself from the Peruvian people, and the parties stand for virtually nothing except themselves. Congress has been occupied by charlatans and opportunists of every stripe, or by out-and-out crooks: mafia men, evangelical sects and robber barons.

Four factors feed into the present crisis. First, Peru has still not settled accounts with the Fujimori dictatorship of the 1990s, an era of death squads, embezzlement and maximum corruption in party politics. Second, the boom in raw mineral exports, which sustained development in recent decades, never reached the poor with its proceeds and has now gone into a tailspin. Third, denunciations of corporate and political corruption have been instrumentalized to benefit the right – and the extreme right. Finally, the pandemic: Peru has had one of the world’s highest death rates per capita from coronavirus.

These four features can be found today in all Latin American countries, as can a fifth: deindustrialization. With factories closing, the working class has been fragmented and millions of its former members thrown into unemployment, precarity and abject poverty. From the point of view of the dominant classes, the best governments are undoubtedly authoritarian ones that can push through the dismantling of trade unions and reduce wages, to compete on the international market with China. Unemployment would be structural; any progressive projects definitively abandoned. In theory, a basic income would compensate for permanent unemployment. In practice, the economy would centre around agribusiness and mineral extraction, with most lacking regular work.

This is the social framework the Bolsonaro government has been trying to impose on Brazil. But here too, we find the same instability, advance and retreat, on the extreme right. Though he organized demonstrations calling for Congress to be shut down, Brazil’s President has given up the idea of a coup due to lack of support. His Senator son is being tried for embezzlement of public funds, a case that will be heard in the Supreme Court. At the height of the pandemic, Bolsonaro called for monthly cash-transfers of 40 dollars to the unemployed. Congress tripled the sum in an afternoon.

Instead of whipping up his horde of fanatics, Bolsonaro now doles out cash and sinecures to the swamp of old-school Congressmen and political-patronage networks known as the ‘Centre’. The candidates he backed in the October 2020 municipal elections fared badly. He has sabotaged attempts to develop a vaccine for the virus, which has already killed 170,000 Brazilians. He has enjoyed the enthusiastic support of finance capital, but that sector takes a dim view of the emergency-support programme. And Trump’s good will no longer counts.

At the heart of Latin America, spreading out across the Guianas, Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia and Brazil, there is the Amazon. The ‘lungs of the planet’, seen as an indispensable natural asset by those apprehensively watching the process of climate change and environmental breakdown. And greedily coveted by powerful states, giant pharmaceutical companies, big landowners and cattle ranchers, multinational corporations that plant and harvest myriad agricultural products; by well-intentioned NGOs and by those desperately fleeing the cities where no work is to be found, who act as the spearhead of capitalist incursion. For them too, the Amazon is still summed up in the words of John Donne to his mistress: ‘O my America! my new-found-land … How blest am I in this discovering thee!’

Translated by Max Stein

Read on: Mario Sergio Conti’s analysis of the Brazilian pandemic response; Roberto Schwarz on Bolsonaro’s neo-backwardness.

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Starmer’s War

The past few years in British politics have certainly been eventful. A series of blows distracted and divided the establishment and its opinion-makers, forcing them onto the defensive. After the financial crash and the Scottish referendum, the pace quickened with the 2015 election, Jeremy Corbyn’s victory as leader of a fast-expanding Labour Party, the shock of the Brexit result, three years of parliamentary crisis and two more elections. Now, with the backroom Brexiteers ousted from Downing Street and Starmer speeding up the purge of the Labour Party, the ruling bloc is back on the offensive. How far and fast it can proceed across the uneven terrain of pandemic, recession and Brexit remains to be seen. For the forces unleashed since 2008 are still in flux.

Take Labour. The balance of forces within the party confronted Corbyn with a huge problem from the start. At Westminster, the left within the Parliamentary Labour Party was the weakest it had ever been; a large rump of residue New Labour MPs still ruled the roost. To say that most of them loathed Corbyn would be an understatement. Two attempts to remove him failed miserably. Then came the 2017 election, which saw a Labour vote higher than the last two achieved by Blair, depriving May of her majority. Many party officials and MPs were hoping for a crushing Labour defeat. Their disappointment could be seen on their faces. The BBC and Guardian were equally distressed. How could this have happened? An informal agreement was reached. Everything possible must be done to make sure Corbyn was defeated. It was. He was.

I’ve argued before that Labour should have stuck to the line that the referendum result had to be respected, adding that since it was not of their making, the government that had called for it should implement it and that Labour would henceforth abstain on the issue. This would have been a coherent, readily understandable position. May would have pushed through a far softer Brexit than the one now on offer and the next general election would have been fought on other issues, with Labour able to build on its advances in 2017.

That this did not happen was due not just to establishment pressure but to divisions within the Labour Left. The weakest link turned out to be Corbyn’s supposedly loyal ally and Shadow Chancellor. But John McDonnell – hailed by the soft left as ‘the most radical politician of his generation’ (see Jeremy Gilbert in OpenDemocracy, Owen Jones in the Guardian, James Butler in the LRB) – had already shown his colours at the time of the Manchester bombing in the run-up to the 2017 election. Corbyn went with his political instincts, condemning the attacks while pointing out that they were not unconnected to Britain’s unending wars in the Middle East. McDonnell was scared that breaking the bipartisan taboo on foreign policy would see Labour crucified in the media, losing them swathes of support. Private and public polling proved the opposite – a majority of voters thought Corbyn was right. The media quickly buried the issue.

The same knee-jerk conformism saw McDonnell and Diane Abbott, Corbyn’s Shadow Home Secretary, join with the Labour right in dragging out the Brexit process, blocking bill after bill in the Commons. Abbott, half-jokingly, referred to Corbyn as ‘Ramsay McCorbyn’ for suggesting abstention on the May agreement. But it was never ‘Ramsay McDonnell’ for caving in to the well-funded Remainer lobby – led, of course, by Keir Starmer, whose appointment as Shadow Brexit Secretary was another sign of the weakness of the left. As a result, Labour had no real response when Boris Johnson took over as Tory leader in 2019. His speech outside 10 Downing Street was clear, coherent, determined. No more dilly-dallying. He would respect the will of the voters and take the UK out of the EU. Disastrously, Corbyn’s closest colleagues began playing around with notions of an unelected national-government coalition to stop Brexit. This was coupled with a Guardian–BBC barrage against Corbyn, insinuating he was an anti-Semite; what they really meant was that he supported Palestinian aspirations to statehood and opposed the US–UK neo-imperial wars in the Middle East.  More effective with the voters, a Tory social-media campaign targeted him as a traitor. It was a no-holds-barred blitz to finish Corbyn off. They’ve come close.

Starmer was duly elected Labour leader by 56 per cent of a demoralized membership, on a promise to ‘unify the party’. Though he prefers to proceed by stealth, his strategy is transparent. Born in 1962 to a working-class family in South London, Starmer made his name as a barrister at the liberal Doughty Street Chambers and supposedly brought a human-rights background to his appointment under Brown as Director of Public Prosecutions. But the rights protected were mainly those of police and spies. Starmer ruled not to prosecute the police killers of Jean Charles de Menezes or Ian Tomlinson, or the MI5 and MI6 officers accused of torture in Bagram and elsewhere. Meanwhile he showed up during the all-night trials of those arrested in the 2011 London riots to praise the judges for their harsh sentencing. His office notoriously fast-tracked the extradition of Julian Assange, warning Swedish prosecutor Marianne Ny, ‘Don’t you dare get cold feet!!’

When he stepped down in 2013, Starmer was awarded a KCB for his efforts and offered the safe Labour seat of Holborn & St Pancras by Ed Miliband. He was part of the first failed attempt to oust Corbyn in July 2016, then stepped smoothly back into the Shadow Cabinet three months later to run the block-Brexit campaign that helped seal Labour’s fate. Once he’d won the leadership, he told members it was time to accept the Brexit result.

Starmer is not bothering to position himself with the voters. In a two-party system, he calculates that, sooner or later, exhaustion with the Tories means it will be his turn. Instead, he is trying to win the establishment’s favour – to prove he’ll be a safe pair of hands. This is why members of his claque – A Rawnsley and T Helm in the Observer, R Behr and P Toynbee in the Guardian, S Bush in the tabloidized New Statesman, which ran a typically tacky cover cartoon of its hero as a knight on a white horse – have been relentlessly parroting the same soundbites: ‘under new management’, ‘serious’, ‘professional’, ‘capable’, ‘competent’, ‘responsible’, ‘sober’. All qualities on display in October, when Starmer ran over a Deliveroo cyclist while reversing his SUV at a busy junction, en route to his tailor, and made off before the ambulance could arrive. (The Guardian tactfully downplayed the story. The right-wing press and local papers went big.)

Above all, being ‘serious’ means that only 110 per cent conformism to neo-imperial principles will do. The Tory-voting Jewish Board of Deputies – if not the hyper-corrupt, hard-right Netanyahu himself – was given veto power over Labour foreign policy. A cleansing of the party was called for and Starmer would be Cleanser-in-Chief. One of his first acts was to impose a second-rank Blairite apparatchik, David Evans, as general secretary – a yes man from the 1990s who’d made his money creaming ‘consultancy’ fees from Labour councils. Next came Rebecca Long-Bailey, Starmer’s rival for the leadership and grudgingly permitted a place in his Shadow Cabinet. To applause from the claque, she was sacked for retweeting a criticism of Israeli police techniques – a welcome sign, Rawnsley crowed in the Observer, that Starmer’s ‘unity’ would be on his own terms.

But the real feather in Starmer’s cap would be expelling Corbyn from the party. It was no secret that his office was mulling how best to use the report on anti-Semitism by the EHRC, a government-funded quango, against him. The report itself contained disappointingly little evidence. Instead, Evans was set in motion against Corbyn’s mild response to it, which condemned all anti-Semitism, highlighted the report’s finding that handling it in the party had improved under his watch, noted that opponents had over-stated its scale for political reasons and hoped that, though he didn’t accept all its findings, the report’s recommendations would be speedily implemented. For these innocuous sentiments, Evans suspended Corbyn from the party that same day (an NEC member later briefed that it was Starmer who made the decision).

A wave of outrage from local party branches was met by Evans with a ruling that motions in support of Corbyn would be out of order, along with any criticisms of the EHRC. His office duly suspended party members in Bristol West who were calling for Corbyn to be reinstated. Deputy leader Angela Rayner – who not so long ago was insisting on the BBC’s Newsnight that Corbyn had fought anti-Semitism and racism all his life – was now calling his comment ‘totally unacceptable’ and threatening that she was ready to suspend ‘thousands and thousands’. Labour-left MPs, constituency parties and members could at that point have resigned en masse, welcoming the freedom to challenge Starmer’s project from the left. They didn’t. Instead, Corbyn came under massive pressure from his closest allies to apologize – unity above all. He backed down, issuing a ‘clarification’.

On 17 November, a sub-committee of Labour’s National Executive, beyond Starmer’s control, reinstated Corbyn’s membership. Starmer angrily declared the next day that Corbyn would still be excluded from the Parliamentary Party and could not sit on the Labour benches. The upshot has been a further wave of protests from local parties – Liverpool, London, Edinburgh, Penrith, Newcastle, Bolton, Cardiff, Hastings, Hull, Carlisle. To date, a total of 80 constituency parties have defied the ban on discussing Corbyn’s suspension, passed motions of solidarity with him, or hit out at ‘diktats’ from Central Office about what party meetings could discuss. Among them are thirty constituency parties that nominated Starmer earlier this year. Fourteen National Executive Committee members have signed a letter criticizing the leader and union leaders – UNITE, the Communication Workers, the Fire Brigades – are debating withholding funds.

What’s clear is that Starmer’s purge is neither competent, professional, lawyerly or sober, but ill-considered, clumsily executed and open to legal challenge. Corbyn’s suspension was leaked to the media before he was informed of it, issued without stating what rule he had broken, overturned by the NEC panel and then unilaterally reinstated, at PLP level, by the leader’s political intervention in an internal disciplinary process – contrary to the recommendations of the EHRC, which Starmer and Evans had insisted must be followed. Starmer has stumbled into a trap of his own making. Although the November 2020 NEC elections gave him a majority (21 of 39 members, up from 18), allowing him to select parliamentary candidates and prosecute his witch-hunt more freely, it will take a rule change and perhaps a conference vote (not due till September 2021) to establish the new disciplinary machinery the EHRC wants. Any moves against Corbyn under the old system would be illegitimate according to Starmer’s own pronouncements.

Meanwhile, many of those now being suspended for criticizing the leader’s factional warfare, supposedly waged in the name of anti-anti-Semitism, are Jewish themselves. They include the veteran Jewish Voice for Labour activist Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi and the socialist scholar Moshé Machover, founder of the Israeli group Matzpen, whom Evans’s office has accused of attending a Palestine solidarity demonstration. (Machover had been expelled in 2017, but was readmitted after an international outcry.) Starmer will soon have evicted more Jews from the Labour Party than any predecessor. The sign boards are already up: no non-Zionist Jews welcome. Yet Kenneth Stern, author of the controversial IHRA ‘working definition’ of anti-Semitism, has himself warned against using the definition to say that ‘anti-Zionist expressions are inherently anti-Semitic and must be suppressed’. The latest twist: two East London constituency parties have forbidden motions on a charity cycle ride to raise funds for Palestinian children, citing Evans’s orders.

At the start of 2020, many voted for Starmer in the half-hope that he would ‘avoid excesses’ but keep the bulk of the social-democratic programme established under Corbyn and McDonnell. But he has already ditched the ‘Ten Pledges’ of his leadership campaign, as he boasted in an October interview with Rawnsley and Helm in the Observer. Just like Blair and Brown, he offers no serious opposition to Conservative policies and sucks up to Washington. Then, it was Iraq and Afghanistan. Now, mutatis mutandis, it is China. In July Starmer met up with US Secretary of State Pompeo to reassure him that Labour was back on the rails. As proof, he told Pompeo that Britain needed to be harder on China, not just banning Huawei’s 5G technology but imposing sanctions on Chinese officials suspected of human-rights abuses. But these are different times. Politics are much more volatile than they were in the 90s and there are signs of opposition.

From a tiny acorn, etc., or will the current Labour membership rebellion fizzle out? A lot will depend on the actions of the Socialist Campaign Group of left-wing MPs. In mid-November, only 18 of the 34 SCG members signed a call for Corbyn’s suspension to be revoked. Some of them are advising Corbyn to grovel and grovel till he’s fully reinstated. That would be a mistake, for the aim of his enemies is to destroy his standing as an honest politician. It will weaken, not strengthen the left, inside or outside the Labour Party. There are three years left before the next general elections. An Independent Labour Party with even half a dozen MPs and a membership base of perhaps 50,000 – that number have left already since Starmer took over – could mark a real advance. New Labourism failed the test in Scotland. It has lost the North and will not succeed indefinitely in Wales. The Corbyn moment of 2017 is very unlikely to be repeated inside the Labour Party itself. It’s a broken mirror.

Corbyn himself carries on as before, zooming from one online conference to another, defending the Palestinian cause, opposing US foreign policy, insisting on nationalizing the utilities and reversing NHS privatizations. His newly announced Peace and Justice Project is a positive move; amid the winter gloom of Starmer and Covid, a sniff of spring. It is a multi-issue initiative, open to those inside and outside the Labour Party, in the UK and abroad; over 20,000 people have signed up already. There will be teething troubles, no doubt, but the creation of a new political platform and online movement is a step forward. Corbyn is a well-known fan of Shelley, and as a counter to the outpourings of well-known rodents – the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg as well as Rawnsley, Behr, etc. – who have joyfully climbed back onboard HMS Labour, the concluding words of Prometheus Unbound seem to be serving him well: ‘Neither to change, nor falter, nor repent.’

Read on: Tom Nairn’s classic anatomization of Labour’s Fabian head, soft-left heart and union brawn; Daniel Finn’s fine analysis of Labour’s Corbynist moment.

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Welcome to Sidecar

This is Sidecar, the NLR blog. Launching in December 2020, Sidecar aims to provide a space on the left for international interventions and debate. A buzzing and richly populated left-media landscape has emerged online in the past decade, but its main English-speaking forms have been largely monoglot in outlook and national in focus, treating culture as a subsidiary concern. By contrast, political writing on Sidecar will take the world, rather than the Anglosphere, as its primary frame. Culture in the widest sense – arts, ideas, mores – will have full standing. Translation of, and intellectual engagement with, interventions in languages other than English will be integral to its work. And while New Left Review appears bi-monthly, running articles of widely varied length, Sidecar will post several items a week, each no longer than 2,500 words and many a good deal shorter.

The criteria for publication on Sidecar will be saying something – about persons, processes, events, structures – that is not being said elsewhere, but deserves to be. Political contributions will avoid repeating judgements and tropes familiar on the left – which, even where well-founded, don’t need further iteration here. Taking culture seriously means treating it critically: sceptical, deflationary – where necessary demolitionary – treatment of intellectual fashion or commercial hype (and their typical interbreeding), combined with an adventurous, exploratory attitude towards the undiscovered and overlooked. Sidecar will share NLR’s core cultural interests – world cinema, literature, the visual arts – but also seek to diversify: reviewing different kinds of books, fiction in particular, and different forms of cultural production, as well as inviting critique of daily life. It will keep a sharp eye on the mediocracy of press and TV.

Shorter forms also allow for more protean modes of expression, with a wider range of registers and tones. Equally, there will be scope for more personal writing – drawing on lived experience, in the recognition that ideas are often born or take root there. Finally, Sidecar is conceived as a space for thought, where ideas can be realized and developed; to that end, it will also encourage critical exchange.