The official version

Citation

Rankin, A. (2000), "The official version", European Business Review, Vol. 12 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/ebr.2000.05412aab.003

The official version

Aidan Rankin

Aidan Rankin is Research Officer for the Argentina Programme at the London School of Economics. He is also a free-lance writer and journalist.

Keyword Politics

The Argentine film Historia Oficial ("The Official Version"), directed by Luis Puenzo, won two awards at Cannes in 1985. It is a modern morality tale, in which Alicia, a history teacher and mother, searches for the truth about her country and her own family, against a background of crumbling dictatorship and defeat in war. Her husband, a successful businessman and collaborator with the Generals, bitterly disappoints his anarchist parents who had raised him in a tradition of idealism, integrity and heroic failure. They accuse him of prostituting his principles and selling his soul. He retorts: "The Spanish Civil War is over - and you have lost!". I was strangely reminded of this statement recently when listening to Mr Blair address the Labour Party conference. "The class war is over", he told us, although he was less forthcoming about the victors and the vanquished. The class war is over, but now the "struggle for equality" revolves around race and sex. Class politics are but another of the forces of conservatism, a conservatism of the left like German Ostalgie or the sudden vogue for "industrial archaeology". We are all middle-class now. The working-class, like the aristocracy, exist only in unwelcome, residual form. This, it seems, is New Britain's official version. Who will question it?

Not human rights activists, it seems. Recently, as a result of a newspaper article I wrote on Pakistan's military coup, I attended a human rights conference at Guildford Cathedral, organised by an alliance of denominations to mark the Universal Declaration's 50th anniversary. We were treated to four fine speakers. Ann Clwyd, the Labour MP and redoubtable campaigner for the world's dispossessed, was the most effective opposition spokeswoman anyone could wish for, lambasting her party's record on Indonesia. Gary Streeter, Shadow Development Secretary and active Evangelical, rooted concern for human rights in Christian responsibility and love of one's fellow man (or woman, as he was meticulously careful to add). Baroness Nicholson, the region's MEP, spoke stirringly of social justice, minority rights and modestly of her own outstanding charitable work. She is a loss for the Tories and one of the Liberal Democrats' greatest gains. Bruce Kent, the nuclear disarmament campaigner, had the guts to condemn the bombing of Serbia and was applauded for his pains. All speakers opposed racism and war, all spoke of rights for women, all spoke of friendship among nations and a vaguely considered idea of social justice. Yet even in the context of right-based politics, the two words "working class" were absent from every speech.

That afternoon, there was a reversal of roles of a kind that would make our politics more amusing, were it to occur more often in the House of Commons. For in place of the local Conservative MP, I sat on a "Question and Answer" panel alongside parliamentary candidates from the Labour and Liberal Democrat parties. I was there as the co-founder of a Tory human rights group and as a so-called "specialist" on Latin American affairs. The audience were thoughtful, perceptive and genuinely concerned about the world's problems. They were, nonetheless, surprised when I criticised the consumer society, expressed doubts about globalisation and pointed out that Fidel Castro was not all bad, because he had built hospitals and schools for his people. I suspect that the Member for Guildford would have said different things, had he been there. Unlike the Labour candidate, a bright, articulate woman with a promising future in her party, I mentioned the British working class and spoke of it as a positive force - both as a collection of individuals and a series of distinctive communities.

I claim no special insights here. Being the only non-professional politician on the panel, I had the luxury of being able to say exactly what I wished. What was noticeable, however, was that some members of the audience cared deeply about far-off countries, and their displaced people in our midst, yet for their fellow countrymen displayed an open hostility and contempt. Unless they belonged to a minority group, the indigenous poor were not there to be helped but to be berated as "racist", "xenophobic", "backward-looking". They must be educated, proclaimed an earnest Quaker lady who had previously inveighed against immigration officials who lacked formal qualifications. She said the same thing about people in Africa and Asia, the so-called "Third World", but her tone was different. For Third World peoples, education was a "key to empowerment", for our own working class a means to repress beastliness. The spirit of missionary intolerance lives on, but now the savages are people of our own kind, not the colonised.

During my time at Survival International, which champions the threatened indigenous peoples of the world, I recall an occasion when a student volunteer proclaimed loftily that people in London's East End "don't take enough advantage of the multi-cultural society around them". When I suggested, half-jokingly, that we should think of the East End's population as an indigenous people too, the response of my left-wing colleagues combined bafflement and anger. Brainwashed with left-liberalism, they were incapable of realising the irony of their position. At the very same time as they campaigned for the rights of Amazonian Indians, and defended their occasional eruptions into violence, they refused to try to understand embattled cultures closer to home. Survival's literature frequently quotes a joint declaration by the Navajo, Sioux and Iroquois peoples, issued in 1978 and, unlike the famous speech of Chief Seattle, not a forgery:

Our roots are deep in the land where we live. We have a great love for our country, for our birthplace is here. The soil is rich from the bones of thousands of our generations. Each of us was created in these lands and it is our duty to take care of them, because from these lands will spring the future of our peoples. We will walk about with great respect for the Earth, for it is a very Sacred Place.

Uttered by Native Americans, such sentiments are laudable, an ideal blend of tribal consciousness and environmental friendliness. On European lips, they resemble at best the late nineteenth century volkisch mysticism, at worst the "blood and soil" ideology of Walther Darre, the Nazi Agriculture Minister and proto-Green, according to some. The ancient tribes of the Americas can talk about rootedness, sense of place and the uniqueness of their cultures. For Europeans, especially poorer Europeans, to do so is fascistic, since - to quote Mr Blair once more - "we are all internationalists now".

Britain's class war is far from over. It has merely been thrown into reverse. Nowhere is this antagonism more apparent than in the "anti-racist" movement. Watch any public protest against racism and you will see middle-class students and academics marching into areas of deprivation to clash with alienated working-class youth. Forget transitional corporations, forget the City, forget railway fat cats and other more obvious "enemies of the people". For the information rich, bien pensant left-wingers of New Britain, the real class enemy are the white urban poor, because they hold, or have the potential to hold, racist opinions. Such leftists make hollow concessions to socialism's working-class roots. They affect bad cockney accents, which fool no one, or dress in designer grunge which members of the real working class would be ashamed to wear. One new leftist of my acquaintance let his stockbroker father buy him a car, but made sure it was a red Ford Escort so that he could "identify with the masses". Naturally, he drove it to anti-racist protests, going to places in London he had never visited before and would have no reason ever to visit again. Ironically, this kind of left-wing protest is a form of co-operation with authority and not a rebellion against it. The state, after all, is "anti-racist", with a growing nationalised industry of bureaucrats to tackle existing discrimination and unearth it in new forms. Liberal journalists, social workers and worthy human rights activists alike regard "eliminating racism" as more important than abolishing poverty or repairing communities fractured by unemployment, drugs and family breakdown. In the official version of race relations, the line between sounding off in the pub about immigrants and a denial that the Holocaust ever happened is breaking down fast. We are losing the sense of proportion that once characterised us as a people.

"One Nation Toryism" was a phrase often on my lips in the Guildford Cathedral talk. This was intended first to draw a distinction between true conservatism and the dogmas of neo-liberal economics in which the present day Toryism is imprisoned. The second intention was to remind the audience that we are a nation of individual citizens with obligations towards each other that transcend loyalties to race, sex, religion (or lack thereof) and even, perhaps especially, class. When Disraeli defined "the betterment of the condition of the people" as the aim of Tory reform, his intention was to unite all sections of society in a common programme of betterment, to rise above class antagonisms by constructive engagement between classes, rather than by pretending that certain classes do not exist. So defined, One Nation Toryism is more than a conservative political doctrine. It offers a liberal vision of humanity, based on the value of the individual, his place in a wider national community and his obligation to other individuals within that community. One of those obligations is tolerance. By contrast, the "rights-based" culture of the middle class left promotes conflict between narrow interest groups and herds individuals into those groups whether they wish to belong to them or not. It is clear already that in the elections for a London mayor next year the contenders will address as "black voters", "gay voters" or "youth", rather than as Londoners those who share the inheritance of a great civic culture.

In The Authoritarian Personality, that seminal study of the right-wing mentality, Theodor Adorno and his Frankfurt School colleagues distinguish between the genuine conservative, who values tradition, and the pseudo-conservative, who combines intolerance with a sadistic taste for power. Adorno's work was published in 1948, in the aftermath of Holocaust and War. In today's "politically correct" age, an updated version is required, one which distinguishes the true liberal from the pseudo-liberal. For the true liberal believes in opportunities for individuals of all backgrounds, acknowledges enriching differences of temperament and culture, views political problems as complex and various and values freedom of speech and freedom of thought. He strives for an equitable society, not a perfect society. The pseudo-liberal, by contrast, sees individuals only as ciphers for wider social questions. When he sees a black man, he does not see a living, breathing fellow human being with needs, desires and fears of his own. He sees an "issue", a "problem" or a series of abstract "rights". When he sees a white working man, he sees an ignorant bigot and a probable racist, instead of a fellow citizen. In this sense, the pseudo-liberal is rather like Dr Benway, the medical villain in William Burroughs's Naked Lunch. This highly sinister old chap refuses to name the patient, but refers to him by his disease instead. The pseudo-liberal loathes the idea of an equitable society. He wants a socially engineered "equality" of everything except income. In his world, where the democratic and the demotic are wilfully confused, rock stars or football players are allowed to amass vast wealth because they represent the popular taste, but all hereditary privilege is by definition bad. The pseudo-liberal speaks eloquently of "multi-culturalism", by which he means a levelled-down, standardised culture where peoples who have forgotten their past are fooled by populist politicians and controlled by business Ålites. Pseudo-liberalism is more insidious, in its own way, than its ancestor Stalinism, its purported enemy fascism and its tactical ally, capitalism in the raw. Unlike the authoritarian movements of the past, it uses the language of inclusion, equality and even reconciliation, but never the individual and never the working class.

That the bien pensant professional should view the working class as "racists" at all is evidence of the collapse of "One Nation" values, or the very idea of a national conversation. For a start, working class communities are and have always been culturally diverse. The student who criticised "East Enders" for not being multi-cultural enough was blissfully unaware of the waves of immigration that have shaped the East Enders of today, although he was a student of political science. Second, it is the working class communities since the Second World War that have made multi-culturalism in Britain such a success. It is true that there has been prejudice, aberrant actions and on occasion monstrous events that have rightly horrified the nation. Yet the larger picture has been a tolerance, integration and creative mixing of cultures that is unprecedented in modern Europe. The spirit of pragmatic tolerance in working-class neighbourhoods occurs in spite of, not because of, the politically correct thought police. It occurs, often enough, because majority and minority populations find common ground in resisting officialdom, or in defending conservative values against the growing "liberal dictatorship".

A few years ago, the words "liberal dictatorship" would have smacked of journalistic hyperbole. Today, the main threat to freedom comes less from the authoritarian right (although it still exists) than from those who once most stridently opposed censorship of all kinds. It is not, as yet, a direct threat to my freedom, or to that of most readers of this journal. Those who are threatened most are the information poor, who lack access to media and politics, whose lives are ever-more dominated by the missionaries of political correctness: social services, the agencies of local government and now, increasingly, the police. A case in point is Mr George Staunton, a former dock worker and Second World War veteran from Liverpool. Mr Staunton, an 84-year old, was arrested in mid-1999 for daubing the slogans "Free Speech for England" and "Remember 1939-1945" on an abandoned building, below posters for the UK Independence Party which he had earlier put up. For this, he was charged with "racially aggravated" criminal damage, under laws passed by New Labour without much comment which increase the severity of sentencing whenever a racial motive can be perceived. That the wisdom of such laws has been so little questioned shows the parlous state to which British politics have sunk and the craven nature of our opposition parties. Be that as it may, Mr Staunton was saved from prosecution and probable imprisonment only because he was fortunate enough to have a solicitor who cared genuinely about civil rights and was willing to publicise the case at civic and national levels. How many more are less lucky? Such laws are framed by the middle class to trap the inarticulate and the poor of any race.

Mr Staunton's actions were eccentric, perhaps, but racially motivated they were clearly not. Throughout his ordeal, he protested his complete lack of racial prejudice, but failed to convince the Merseyside Police. His party, the UKIP, is neither racist nor xenophobic. It is opposed to British membership of the European Union and has members and supporters from ethnic minorities, many of whom are worried by the more genuine racism of continental politics. One would think from the propaganda of "anti-racists" (who are really racists in reverse) that British politics had produced a Haider, a Blocher or a Le Pen, when in reality no party of the extreme right or the extreme left has ever proved electorally competent. Most worrying of all is the idea that to remember the Second World War, or to advocate free speech is somehow an indication of racial prejudice. Such notions, born of insane pseudo-liberalism and a new form of Euro-fundamentalism, threaten our understanding of history and (as Mr Staunton writes) our birthright of freedom of speech.

At Survival International, I was made aware of the distinction between genocide, which is swift and bloody, and ethnocide, which is a war of cultural attrition, by which a people's identity is lost. I believe we might be witnessing a form of ethnocide within our working-class communities, affecting people of all racial and religious origins. It is ethnocide through "progressive education", which denies the value of historical memory, through the breakdown of family and community ties and through all forms of political correctness which stand in the way of critical thought. It is not just "anti-racism" that is disguised anti-working class propaganda. Much of the dislike of masculine values shown by the liberal Ålite is part of a wider hostility to working class culture. Firemen are "too macho", according to an official report. New Britain's opinion formers seem to celebrate homosexuality but perceive as a vice the comradeship of working men. Ethnocide is a process that severs a people from their past. It makes them malleable to commercialism or ripe for absorption in a larger, more remote political order.

Marx was wrong, a century and a half ago, when he told us that the workers have no country. Internationalism is the luxury of the rich, not the prerogative of the poor. The institutions of civil society and the symbols of nationhood are taken most seriously by those who lack economic power. The "official version" of politics tells us that global homogeneity and European political union are both inevitable. It tells us not to think in terms of shared values as a nation or people, but to combine an incoherent internationalism with the narrow group politics of race, sex, sexual orientation or age. It tells us that gross disparities of income are not inequality before, but equality redefined, for we have no class any more, only a "meritocracy". It tells us that anyone who questions the inevitable is reactionary, xenophobic or, worst of all, a cultural conservative. The task of thoughtful political campaigners today should be to prove that official version wrong, to show that we can be a nation of robust individuals once more.