BY REFUSING TO ENGAGE THE RIOTERS POLITICALLY STARMER IS LOSING

Putin depoliticises war, Starmer depoliticises mass immigration

by Alan Finlayson

The instinct of mainstream politicians and commentators is to ‘depoliticise’ far right and racist street politics - by calling it thuggery, explaining it as a kind of ‘mistake’ caused by disinformation etc. They don’t want to ‘dignify’ it by admitting it to the Court. They want to make it into a thing to ‘manage’ in a technical way: policing, media regulation etc.

I get why they think that. That used to work. But not now. Not really.

The ‘mainstream’ doesn’t understand it’s not the mainstream anymore. In digital culture, for many people, what politicians and official journalists say is a weird minority worldview that is on the way out: liberalism/wokism/‘the left’ etc. And being expelled from it feels to them like proof they must be right.

For over ten years an alternative political worldview has been growing. Reactionary Digital Politics: anti-equality, sees ‘race’ as a key organising principle of politics (and other ‘natural’ variations especially sex). It doesn’t want to win power in the liberal state but to destroy it.

It has supporters in high places such as on X (and some newspaper columnists) and has propelled ‘populists’ into parliaments. In this context, for actual/potential supporters, the ‘non-political’ moves of state liberalism in response to anti-Muslim race riots look weak.

The state says the rioters are beyond the pale but never actually refutes their politics. It just says it’s not-politics, as if that’s enough, leaving the ideological field of conflict to the Reactionaries thinking it has only to reinforce a norm - but it’s no longer a norm.

Meanwhile state liberalism also rejects those who do take up the ideological struggle against Reactionary Digital Politics, such as anti-racists, counter demonstrators, etc., because, of course, it’s fearful of that politics’ egalitarianism and extra-parliamentary orientation.

The point is, the situation didn’t start this weekend, the rioting is one part of a larger ideological bloc in formation and everything suggests the government has no serious analysis of what’s happened. Hence it relies on moral rhetorics of denunciation and on force.

At the moment what I see online is these riots being a big political success for Reactionary Digital Politics which represents the violence as ‘sad but inevitable’ and positions itself as the transgressive resistance against the liberal state that wants to harm children.

Knowing how to win elections is a key political skill. So is being expert in policy technicalities. But so too is knowing how to fight in the ideological, cultural and rhetorical theatre. It’s obvious to us who haunt reactionary online spaces that Labour is failing at the latter.

In politics it’s always later than you think, you need to know your enemies and sometimes those in high office need to be closer to the street and showing where they stand - politically.