by Simon Elmer, Daily Sceptic:
The question that continues to confuse socialists almost to the same degree that it delights their political opponents is why the Left today – not only in the U.K. but across the West – continues to collaborate so willingly and unquestioningly with the authoritarian programmes and regulations of the emerging Global Biosecurity State. As the imminent implementation of Digital ID, Central Bank Digital Currency, Universal Basic Income, Environmental and Social Corporate Governance criteria (ESG), Pandemic Prevention, Preparedness and Response, Social Credit, Smart Cities, and all the other programmes of Agenda 2030 are demonstrating, the New World Order being forced upon us outside of any democratic process is capitalist in its economic infrastructure, fascist in its governmental, juridical and ideological superstructure and totalitarian in its aims. So why do those who, however mistakenly, self-identify as of the political Left continue to be its noisiest and blindest cheerleaders?
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If, by the Left, we mean in the U.K. the Labour Party and those trades unions, political organisations and pressure groups that advocate voting Labour every time there’s an election, then the U.K. Left has little or nothing socialist in its principles, politics or practices. For those of us who read its policies and oppose its actions in town halls and local authorities, Labour is irrefutably and even openly a party whose political philosophy is founded in the principles of neoliberalism. This is, perhaps, most demonstrably evident in its collusion in the marketisation of human needs such as housing and the financialisation of those markets by global capital. Moreover, anyone who has knocked around the Left as I have also knows that, whatever its so-called ‘Left-wing’ elements and organisations argue between elections, when it comes to supporting or opposing the policies and practices of Labour in government at municipal or local authority level, they all toe the party line, keep silent and vote Labour.
It has come as no surprise to me, therefore, that the U.K. Left, including not only Labourites but the wide diaspora of people who call themselves ‘Leftists’ and even ‘socialists’, have become fervent ideologues of the biosecurity state. But it’s not, as the followers of Friedrich Hayek argue, because of the inherent authoritarianism of socialism that leads it to impose a totalitarian social model at the first opportunity. There is (it can’t be repeated too often) little or nothing socialist – in the Labour Party nothing, in its affiliates and fellow travellers little – about the policies or practices of the U.K. Left. Even those small groups and independent organisations that are openly critical of Labour have adopted the U.K. Left’s almost universal support for biosecurity restrictions, remain indifferent to the immiseration and suffering of the U.K. working class they are causing, and steadfastly refused to join the millions of U.K. workers who protested against their imposition in the spring and summer of 2021. They instead uncritically accepted and adopted the Government and corporate media’s dismissal of those workers as ‘far-Right conspiracy theorists’.
Undoubtedly, the political naivety of the Left disposed it to welcome the imposition of the regulations and programmes of the biosecurity state in March 2020 as the triumph of the common good over government incompetence and ‘Right-wing’ greed. But that was nearly three years ago, and naivety has become bad-faith and denial in the face of the vast apparatus of global biosecurity that’s been constructed around, between and within us. That doesn’t mean, however, that the Left now regrets its collaboration, which of course continues today, or that it hasn’t obstinately confined its protests to the erasure of our rights and freedoms being enacted by the wave of new legislation introduced in 2022 on the back of 582 coronavirus-justified Statutory Instruments, without admitting any relationship between them. The betrayals and duplicities of the Left are legion, but many socialists are still asking how it came to this.
What all the Left shares – and the origin of its otherwise inexplicable collusion with the implementation of the U.K. biosecurity state – is a decades-long infiltration by the neoliberal ideologies of multiculturalism, political correctness, identity politics and, most recently, the orthodoxies of woke. In some organisations, the infiltration is marginal and exists, under the umbrella of ‘intersectionality’, in an uneasy and usually unexamined co-existence with the slogans – if not the practices – of socialism. In others, such as the Labour Party and its affiliates, what socialist principles they may once have had have been entirely replaced by the values and orthodoxies of these relatively new ideologies, which have manifested themselves in such youthful, energetic and well-funded movements as Momentum, Black Lives Matter, Extinction Rebellion, Just Stop Oil and now the masked-up, jacked-up advocates of the Global Biosecurity State. These are all (whatever they may say themselves) pro-capitalist movements, hostile to the working class – which they consistently and casually denounce as ‘racist’ – and directly if not openly opposed to socialism. It’s by their principles that the Left has operated for some time in the U.K. as in all the former neoliberal democracies of the West.
It can’t be long before we see a similar movement, funded by the same or even more powerful billionaires, formed to support the next stage in the U.K. biosecurity state. This includes the adoption of a Universal Basic Income for those impoverished by lockdown, spiralling inflation, rising energy prices and the mass digitalisation of white-collar jobs by the Fourth Industrial Revolution. And like its predecessors, this movement of the Covid-faithful will claim a position on the U.K. Left by criticising the Conservative Government’s response to this or the next ‘crisis’. In doing so, it will help create an even greater consensus among U.K. youth and ‘liberals’ in the middle-classes for increased online surveillance, stricter laws, harsher sentences, more intrusive technologies of public control and greater police powers to enforce them. As we saw most publicly in the counter demonstrations organised across Canada during the blockade against vaccine mandates in February 2022, the Left didn’t hesitate to align itself with the Government of Justin Trudeau and the riot police he deployed, denounced truckers as ‘white supremacists’ and every other insult in the woke handbook, while waving placards telling working men and women facing unemployment and destitution at the hands of the biosecurity state to ‘check their privilege’.
This largely middle-class, neoliberal Left, which today constitutes a homogeneous force of compliance across the biosecurity states of the West, did not suddenly become devotees of the restrictions and programmes imposed due to a justification of a major threat to public health that never existed. On the contrary, the Left is the Church in which these Covid-faithful have been raised, their guiding religion and cultic practices formed by the same radically conservative beliefs. To state again what should be obvious to all: no-platforming, cancel culture, misogyny disguised as trans-rights, policing of speech and opinion, and all the other symptoms of this woke ideology did not emerge from a politics of emancipation, class struggle or wealth distribution. They emerged from, and are advocates for, authoritarian practices of censorship, suppression of debate and punishment of non-compliance that are culturally inseparable from the technologies of surveillance and control developed by finance capitalism to police and protect its borders. These are not the borders between the nation states that finance capitalism straddles like a colossus and across which the Global Biosecurity State now controls our movements to a degree hitherto unimaginable to the children of multiculturalism. They are rather the borders between, on the one hand, the international corporations and offshore jurisdictions through which global capital flows, and on the other, scrutiny by and accountability to what remains of the public sector in those nation states.
