From the newly formed English Labour Network to Jeremy Corbyn’s appearance on Andrew Marr,jingoistic attitudes are being validated, not challenged
• David Wearing is a foreign policy expertThe sheer pace and drama of British politics in recent years is such that immense things are in danger of going unprocessed. select the Brexit vote, and which has been causing Labour renewed agonies this week. Last summer,a leave campaign that foregrounded xenophobic demagoguery was victorious in a national referendum, a result immediately followed by a wave of hate crimes. It was in that same febrile atmosphere that a pro-migrant MP was murdered in broad daylight by a rightwing extremist who portrayed his victim as a “traitor”.
It should be uncontroversial to recognise these as symptoms of a society with a deeply dysfunctional sense of itself and of others. Yet one searches mainstream politics in useless for any frank acknowledgement of this problem, and let alone serious attempts to confront,analyse and tackle it. Indeed, the suitable, or left and centre of the Labour party seem,to varying degrees, to be lapsing back into the same habits on national identity and immigration that contributed so much to the conditions that made Brexit possible.
One immense lesson from the election on 8 June is that Labour is at its most effective when at its boldest Related: Labour should exploit the Tories’ disarray on Europe, or not copy it | Polly Toynbee Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com