Britain’s criminally stupid attitudes to race and immigration are beyond parody

Frankie Boyle in The Guardian

The anti-immigration election rhetoric is perverse – we fear the arrival of people that we have drawn here with the wealth we stole from them



‘Let’s not forget where coffee and tea come from: this mug is bitterly opposed to its own contents’


I sometimes wonder if satire has reached a nadir in Britain because British society has itself become a parody of itself. The Chipping Norton Set: the prime minister, a tabloid editor and a Roger Mellie-ish TV icon all conveniently living in the same little town and taking turns at being the centre of scandal, feels like a novel Martin Amis bashed out because his conservatory was leaking. Likewise there has been an element of tragic irony this week as the growing drumbeat of anti-immigration election rhetoric has been punctuated by the mass drowning of migrants.

The SNP’s growing popularity has prompted a little low-level press racism of the kilts-and-porridge variety, as an English electorate struggles with the idea that there will be Scottish people holding the reins of power for the first time since the last government. Nicola Sturgeon has been called “the most dangerous woman in Britain”, by someone who hasn’t met any other Scottish women. Of course, it’s difficult to explain to English people that we have always had their best interests at heart – if we hadn’t invented penicillin they would have all died in a Greek airport departure lounge. There have already been a couple of amusing moments in the campaign when leaders standing in front of union jacks expounding on the need for a £100bn missile system have taken time out to warn us about the dangers of nationalism. Personally, I think it might be invigorating to have a hung parliament where, before any law was passed, the government had to have an argument with a Scottish person.

“Gosh, you seem awfully good at this. Have you had some practice?”

“I’m not actually part of the Scottish negotiating team, I’m just here to take your drinks order …”

“Ah, right, could I have a cup of tea?”

“NO.”

Ed Miliband’s anti-immigration stance is odd: it’s hard to vote for a man who doesn’t have the confidence to defend his own existence. It seems that his main argument against immigrants is that his dad raised a befuddled fuckwit. Could you hand Labour’s “controls on immigration” mug to a guest? There’s nothing like jollying up a Macmillan Cancer Support coffee morning by making your neighbours feel like the pakoras were a little unwelcome. Let’s not forget where coffee and tea come from: this mug is bitterly opposed to its own contents. Unless you drink hot Tizer from a coffee cup, the drink inside that mug will be an immigrant. The logic of a receptacle for hot beverages provided by slavery and colonisation being anti-immigrant bears no more examination than a pair of homophobic Speedos.

Then there’s Ukip, like someone made a heavy-handed version of The Thick of It for ITV. They don’t want Britain to be ruled by foreigners – with the notable exception of the royal family. They want an Australian-style points system for immigration. Who knows what this will look like, but my suspicion is “being white” will be like catching the snitch in Quidditch. If we have become a self-satirising society, Ukip are just the broader end, the easy slapstick laughs. They even have a porn-star candidate. Of course, he isn’t the first MP to have filmed himself having sex. But he is the first to do so with an adult, whom he allowed to live.

Even our charity is essentially patronising. Give a man a fish and he can eat for a day. Give him a fishing rod and he can feed himself. Alternatively, don’t poison the fishing waters, abduct his great-grandparents into slavery, then turn up 400 years later on your gap year talking a lot of shite about fish.

In a further nod to satire, Comic Relief this year focused on Malawi and Uganda. I didn’t see any acknowledgement that Britain had been the colonial power in those countries. “Thanks for the gold, lads, thanks for the diamonds. We had a whip-round and got you a fishing rod.”

A lot of racism comes from projection. White Americans have a stereotype of black people being criminals purely because they can’t acknowledge that it was actually white people that stole them from Africa in the first place. Today, you have the spectacle of black men being gunned down by cops who, by way of mitigation, release footage to show that the victims were running away. This is what happens when you don’t understand or even acknowledge history. You end up in a situation where, when slavery is the elephant in the room in your relationship with African Americans, you think it’s OK to say that you killed one of them because he was trying to escape.

Britain is in a similar place with colonialism. We have streets named after slave owners. We profited from a vile crime and feel no shame. We fear the arrival of immigrants that we have drawn here with the wealth we stole from them. For much of the rest of the world we must be the focus of bitter amusement, characters in a satire we don’t understand. It is British people that don’t learn languages, or British history. Britain is the true scrounger, the true criminal.

Cameron and the Tories have reduced immigration to tens of thousands. NOT!

Tory failure to cap immigration is an opportunity for a policy rethink

The PM promised something he couldn't possibly deliver. Now he needs an honest conversation with the public

• 
• • Hugh Muir
  • theguardian.com, Friday 28 February 2014 10.41 GMT

Passengers board a bus for western Europe from Sofia, Bulgaria: 'Cameron's problem is EU migration, and he can’t do much about that'. Photograph: Vassil Donev/EPA

Is there anyone who wouldn't have paid good money to have been a fly on the wall in Downing Street over the past 24 hours? David Cameron doesn't seem to be a sweary type; he doesn't blowtorch underlings or kick the copying machines in the style of Gordon Brown – but there will have been ructions on receipt of those latest migration figures from the Office for National Statistics. Net migration up 30% in the past year when, after all the breast-beating, and from all the promises Cameron made to the electorate, it should have gone down.

That was the battleground for the next election. Nothing else had the potential to address the Labour poll lead that has been so long out of reach. Cameron put all of his betting chips on what seemed to be the party's trump card: the "vote for us, we're tough on migration and tough on migrants" strategy. The bet was lost; the result not even close. Net migration has hit 212,000 and gone is the hope of bringing it below 100,000 before the general election. What do you give a dumb punter who has lost everything. Sympathy? He hardly deserves it.

Perhaps some advice, instead. The first thing to say is that he should stop taking silly positions. His problem here is EU migration. He can't do much about that. He shouldn't have given the impression that events outside his control were within it. He can't change the rules because his EU partners won't let him. And regardless of the chunterings from his backbenchers, he knows that to actually leave the EU – the only way to regain complete control – would be ruinous for Britain in terms of economics and world positioning. The path to irrelevance.

He acted as he did to show those backbenchers that he is a toughie, to draw the poison from the tabloids, and to head off Ukip. But over-promising has left him in a worse position with all three than he was in before, and with his credibility in tatters. He should get back to square one and fast.

He needs to start listening, as he should have from the outset, to the people who actually have to make his market-based capitalist system work. They are against his crude machinations on migration because they know how it affects their efforts to provide for Britain the economy he says he wants. He has, to use Geoffrey Howe's cricketing metaphor, been sending them out to the crease having sabotaged their bats.

Frustrated by his inability to deal with EU migration, Cameron will inevitably redouble efforts to rein in non-EU migration, which might be popular for a while, not least because it might also curb visible migration by non-white Commonweath types. But if he does opt for a rethink, he might use as a starting point advice from Mark Boleat, policy chair of the City of London Corporation. Writing yesterday in the London Evening Standard, Boleat said: "What is needed is a sensible, fact-based debate over what migrants bring to the capital, while also acknowledging their impact on communities and services. A row where only the loudest are heard fails this test … Policymakers should clamp down on those immigrants who come to Britain to take rather than contribute. But the overwhelming majority of immigrants come here to make a better life for themselves and their families through hard work, and in so doing are of huge benefit to Britain. Closing our borders or Swiss-style immigration quotas are not viable or sensible solutions." No hangwringing Guardianista is he; no authority more instinctively Conservative than the City of London Corporation.

The PM might opt to be brave. To take on the unreasoned, backward thinking populism we hear from Ukip and his right. To rein in his own election strategist Lynton Crosby who, from all we have seen in this and previous campaigns, appears to think that divisive manoeuvring on migration works like some form of electoral Viagra.

Cameron might decide to have a straightforward and honest conversation with the public. People flows and money flows are how the modern world works; there will be costs and benefits. We can rage against the dynamic or we can better adapt to it, thinking more about how we channel resources to those areas most affected, how we strike the balance between the needs of long-term residents and those newly arrived, and how we achieve balanced and harmonious communities.

This is hard, mainly because it means a break from the nostalgia that underpins the worst of our failings in this area. But there really is no going back to Britain as it was. It is hard but it is necessary, and the PM may observe one of life's ironies: with failure comes opportunity.

The real cultists are CEOs

The real cultists are not Maoists, they're CEOs

It is not only in religious or political circumstances where people are made to follow a leader unthinkingly

• 
• • Nick Cohen
  • The Observer, Saturday 30 November 2013 18.04 GMT

Fred Goodwin is portrayed as a tyrant in a new biography. Photograph: Murdo MacLeod for the Observer

The great leader's followers know he goes "absolutely mental" at the tiniest deviation from the party line. He screams his contempt for the offender in public so that all learn the price of heresy. Go beyond minor breaches of party discipline and raise serious doubts about the leader's "vision" of global domination and that's the end of you. "You're toast," he says, and his henchmen lead you away.

In private, his underlings mutter that the leader is a "sociopath" with "no capacity for compassion". Even though he terrifies them, their hatred of him is far from complete. When he relaxes, the great leader can be charming. His favour brings reward. The further you move up the hierarchy, the more blessings you receive, and the more you believe the leader's propagandists when they hail his "originality" and "rigour". History is vindicating the leader. His power is growing. The glorious day when the world recognises his greatness is coming.

I could be describing Stalin's Soviet Union or the "Church" of Scientology. With last week's allegations that Maoists in south London kept women as slaves, I could be going back into the lost world of Marxist-Leninism. The British Communist party demanded absolute intellectual conformity. Vanessa and Corin Redgrave's Workers Revolutionary party and the Socialist Workers party wanted absolute submission, including sexual submission from women. The UK Independence party meanwhile is looking like a right-wing version of a Marxist sect. Nigel Farage's cult of the personality allows no other politician to compete with the supreme leader and no Ukip official to talk back to him.

As it is, the portrait of a tyrant comes from Iain Martin's biography of Fred Goodwin(one of the best books of the year, in my view). Like a communist general secretary or religious fanatic, he was enraged by the smallest breach with orthodoxy: not wearing the company tie; fitting a carpet in a Royal Bank of Scotland office that was not quite the right colour. The propagandists who praised his rigour and independence worked for Forbes magazine, the Pravda of corporate capitalism. Goodwin took RBS from being a sleepy Scottish bank to a global "player". So history did indeed seem to vindicate him – for a while.

With Britain hobbling in to 2014 like a battered beggar, we should accept that corporations can be as demented and dictatorial as any millenarian movement. People resist the comparison because businesses seem such modest enterprises. The godly persecuted heretics and apostates and the communists punished all dissent because they believed the kingdom of God or workers' paradise could be theirs if believers followed the one true course.

Businesses don't want Utopia. They just want to make money. Dennis Tourish, Britain's best academic authority on how hierarchies enforce obedience, has no problem with the comparison, however. His latest book, The Dark Side of Transformational Leadership,puts the Militant Tendency alongside Enron, the mass "revolutionary suicide" by Jim Jones's followers at Jonestown with the mass liquidation of Britain's wealth by the banks. The ends of an L Ron Hubbard or Fred Goodwin may be incompatible, he says, but the means are same.

In any case, the language of business has become ever more cultish. In the theory of "transformational leadership", which dominates the business schools, the CEO is a miracle worker. In Transformational Leadership, by Bernard Bass and Ronald Riggio, he is described, not by some gullible Forbes hack, but by two supposedly intelligent American academics. The transformational leader "inspires" his follower to "achieve extraordinary outcomes", they say. He "empowers them" to "exceed expected performance" and show ever greater "commitment to the organisation".

I don't see why anyone should find the comparison with fanatics so hard to accept and not only because the idea that CEOs can manufacture new and better subordinates matches Trotsky's belief that the revolution would create a "new man who raises himself to a new plane".

The nearest you are likely to come to experiencing life in a dictatorship is at work. Unless you are fortunate, you will discover that the management is the source of all ideas and all power. Executives will have privileges that bear no more relation to real achievement than the fat and ugly cult leader's expectation of sex. In 2012, the median pay for CEOs in the USA was $14.4m, the average salary for employees $45,230. In Britain, the High Pay Commission found that the average annual bonus for FTSE 300 directors had increased by 187% in 10 years even though the average year-end share price had gone down by 71%.

Above all, whether you are in the public or the private sector, John Lewis or Barclays Bank, you will learn that if you challenge authority you will lose the chance of promotion and if you challenge it in public, you will lose your job. To prosper in the workplace, as in the dictatorship, you must tell leaders what they want to hear.

Since the richest executives on the planet brought the west down, there has been an understandable interest in the psychology of corporate power. One experiment stays in my mind. Researchers divided volunteers into groups of three and gave one the title of "evaluator". Half an hour later, they gave each group a plate of biscuits. The evaluators grabbed more cookies and sprayed crumbs as they ate with their mouths open. After just 30 minutes, the conviction that they were managers produced greed and the belief that normal rules did not apply to them.

I do not doubt that, if required, the courts will deliver justice to the alleged victims of the Brixton Maoists. Justice is harder to find elsewhere. It is not merely that the banking scandals have not led to one prosecution. With the honourable exception of the coalition's push to protect NHS whistleblowers, there has been no interest in making public and private hierarchies less cultish. The left is not saying loudly enough that we need worker directors on all boards as a non-negotiable minimum. The right does not admit that the old way of doing business failed.

In these dismal circumstances, you must look after yourself. If you work in an organisation where you cannot challenge your superiors without fear of the consequences, get out. Stay and you will become a paranoid flatterer. You will suffer all the psychological consequences of living a frightened life in a playground run by strutting bullies. Dennis Tourish's words should be your prompt: the corruption of power may be bad, but the corruption of powerlessness is worse.

Countries are now being held to ransom by special-interest factions

Power is fragmenting. But what is the true cost to democracy?

Countries are now being held to ransom by special-interest factions – look at the Tea Party in the US or Ukip in Britain

• 
• • Will Hutton
  • The Observer, Sunday 25 August 2013

Supporters of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, wearing Guy Fawkes masks: 'The digital age, globalisation and higher levels of education have equipped more people to become insurgents or to form single-issue pressure groups.' Photograph: Will Oliver/AFP/Getty Images

Power is leaching from the centre, even as the complexities of national and international challenges multiply. It is the hallmark of our times. Whether political or religious leaders, CEOs or five-star generals – all are more constrained in what they can do.

This is a pattern across all societies. The digital age, globalisation and higher levels of education have equipped more people to become insurgents or to form single-issue pressure groups. It is a world where the opportunities to be a Julian Assange, Beppe Grillo, Osama bin Laden, George Soros or Nigel Farage grow by the day. Power is draining away from those in whom it is formally placed, but with no obvious substitute in sight.

As Moisés Naím writes in The End of Power, there are three interrelated dynamics gnawing away at formal power structures – what he calls "the more revolution, the mobility revolution and the mentality revolution". There are more literate, educated people worldwide than ever before who refuse to be regimented and controlled as they once were. They are mobile, migrating and exchanging information to an unparalleled degree. Moreover, fewer will take anything for granted: they expect their voice to be heard, whether on the streets of Cairo, on social media in China or in anti-fracking protests in Sussex.

Naím is the first to concede that the dispersion of power is frequently a force for good. One obvious benefit is that autocracy is on the wane. In 1989, Freedom House reckoned that only 69 countries could be counted as democracies: today, the number has reached 117.

It is also good that the chances of mass war on a 20th-century scale are shrinking: in a world of declining power,, as US generals are relearning in Afghanistan, war is won differently today. It is the fast-moving insurgent who can capture hearts and minds or the terrorist cyberhacker who ends up ahead. But as Naím wryly remarks, the decay of power even undermines the insurgent terrorist groups themselves. He reports that 26 of 45 terrorist organisations dissolved, not from being beaten militarily, but from internal strife and challenge. Al-Qaida's greatest weakness is its own factionalisation, as will be the Taliban's.

It is this tendency to fragmentation and the chorus of often irrational voices insisting that their demands be met that most concerns Naím. It may be easier to establish a single-issue NGO, a religious movement or a political faction, but that does not mean that the consequence is necessarily always beneficial.

There is now certainly hyper-competition from new religious groups, or from blogs, tweets and websites trying to sway your opinion. But the consequences can be perverse. The rise of charismatic religion may challenge centralised, formerly powerful religious groupings that have lost their way, such as Catholicism, under increasing siege from the rise of Pentecostal churches in Africa and South America. But religious fundamentalism's grip on logic and rationality is even more tenuous.

Similarly, millions of blogs and tweets have forced news consumers to fall back on trusted, established sources, aiding media concentration rather than diminishing it.

But the "more, mobility and mentality revolutions" have their most obvious malign impact on politics in general and the political party in particular. Naím observes that parties are the engine room of democracies: they gather a constellation of interest groups around a common set of principles that offer a compass for government. Everywhere, political parties are succumbing to the rise of uncompromising single-issue pressure groups, lobbyists and funders, and the corresponding decline of supporters who want common values expressed. It is now not just parties but whole countries that are held to ransom by a faction or interest group holding a simplified but impossible view of the world – Naim's "terrible simplifiers".

One obvious example is the US Republican party, now in thrall to the Tea Party movement, which sees no value in compromise, but instead worships at the altar of an imagined US constitution that allegedly guarantees a nightwatchman state. Another example is the emergence of the Pirate party in Sweden and Germany. However, interestingly, Naím sees Britain as the laboratory that conclusively proves his point. The rise of Scottish and Welsh nationalism and Ukip, along with the hollowing out of both the Conservative and Labour parties, make the country increasingly hard to govern .

This must, in part, explain the collapse in Labour and Conservative party membership over the past 50 years and the consequent weakening of their capacity to create formal and informal coalitions of a broad set of interest groups around common values.

Ed Miliband's and Labour's failures predictably get the most attention from the press – identikit pieces about his lack of forcefulness, clarity and too much equivocation – as if a new leader could magically solve the problem, but with no understanding of the much wider context in which any political leader now operates.

The Tory party's problems, driven by similar forces, are arguably even more acute. At any other time, David Cameron would be seen as a classic mainstream Tory. Today, he is marginalised by as many as 200 backbenchers owing their position to constituency association selectorates, some of no more than 100 activists, in thrall to "terrible simplicities" on tax, Europe, immigration and welfare.

Any genuinely tough call – to put property taxation on 2013 rather than 1991 values, accept the need for immigration, cigarette packaging or even build the HS2 train line – is made incomparably harder or is simply off-limits because of the veto of a single-issue pressure group that a party is no longer strong enough to take on.

It is the decay of power. The centre fragments and power devolves to myriad new forces that often exercise their power with narrow obsessions in mind. Who now speaks for the whole? Who keeps a macro view, mediating competing interests and conflicts and has the courage to make decisions based on a strategic view of all our interests, not just sectional ones?

Parties have to fight back –arguing better, crystallising policies better, running primaries to select their candidates to widen their appeal – as does our democracy. Representative government was a great invention. It now has to be saved from the single-issue, monomaniac, simplifying, self-interested vandals – a much more interesting position for Mr Miliband to take than a belated "me too" conversion to a referendum on the EU.

The Government’s shameful scapegoating of immigrants

by Yasmin Alibhai Brown in The Independent

The Home Office is on a mission to intimidate Kipling’s “fluttered folk and wild” abroad and in the UK.

It is proud to be institutionally racist, very proud indeed. It has figures to show just how many bloody foreigners have been dealt with and what awaits the others. In June a new £3,000 bond was imposed on visitors from “high risk” nations in Asia and Africa; overseas students from those continents are actively discouraged from coming to our universities. Blatantly discriminatory rules have been instituted; international treaties and human rights legislation are neglected. The nation is dishonoured again by its keepers.

On Friday, on BBC News, Home Office bully boys were shown rounding up dark-skinned folk in specially targeted multiracial localities. In Southall in  west London, outraged Asian women defied them and objected volubly. Some were from Southall Black Sisters, a collective which, for years, has defended gender and minority rights. I recognised some  – grey-haired now, but still full of indignation and passion. In previous decades they demonstrated against virginity tests for Asian women, carried out to check if they were really brides-to-be. And again against the law which denied foreign-born wives legal status for years. And again when the National Front marched through Southall.

The scenes on TV reminded me of South Africa’s pass laws. I broke down and cried inconsolably. Before this latest official  persecution, Home Office vans were spotted in inner-city areas with nasty signs telling illegal migrants to go home. The messages subliminally warned all people of colour not to get too comfortable, to assume we were safe. We who came to stay jumped through hoops of fire to gain some acceptance. But now we know it can be withdrawn. Nasty vans were not sent to areas where Australians and white South Africans hang out. The  barrister  Geoffrey Robertson, his novelist wife Kathy Lette or MP Peter Hain were not made to feel uninvited and unwanted. When will our governments stop pissing on non-white migrants? Will they ever? My kids look like me – I fear for them too.

Ukip’s Nigel Farage, now presenting himself as Mr Nice Guy, has criticised these Home Office initiatives. More bizarrely still, the Tory strategist, Australian Lynton Crosby, has privately expressed his own doubts about the vans. This is the controversial political operator who, in his own country, and the UK has used immigration as an election doodlebug. I told him at a party how much I detested these campaigns and he listened, unmoved, blasé. So why the reservations now about the hardline Home Office tactics? Is it part of Crosby’s cunning plan to disable Ukip? Or have even these unreconstructed men sensed that a line has been crossed?

London has just tried to relive the glorious multiracial Olympics. Oh how our PM and his mates loved all that colour and pizzazz. And all the while his Government forces landlords, medical staff and schools to check passports and exclude those who can’t prove they belong. Immigration detention centres, run by private companies, treat inmates like vermin. Not many white faces in there. Western Europeans have always migrated and still do, as if that is their birthright. But the movement of people from elsewhere is a threat, a menace, even when millions are dispossessed by Western geopolitical games and economic interests.

In our times, we are not permitted to call racism by its name when debating immigration. That discourse is strictly regulated. Immigration is now allegedly completely decoupled from prejudices. Furthermore, it is claimed that Britons are not “allowed” to talk about immigration for fear of being branded “racist”. When did we not talk about the “problems of immigration”? Has there been a single year when known public individuals did not express “brave” views against migration or express xenophobia? Today neo-Powellite nationalists like David Goodhart are lauded as messiahs and the twinned Frank Field and Nicholas Soames regurgitate the messages of anti-immigration lobbyists with enviable access to the media. Britons who are fair and open-minded are appalled by the ceaseless hostility towards incomers. They daren’t speak out because of the overpowering pressure to follow the populist line. Trolls are out to get us too.

The Tories always use the race/immigration card. They don’t even pretend inclusion any more. Shawn Bailey, the Tory black “street” mascot in Downing Street has been dumped; Sayeeda Warsi is back in the ghetto. Meanwhile New Labour, even while encouraging immigration, did not defend it and instead assuaged small island protectionists. But the most culpable are the black and Asian MPs and peers, an unprecedented number now in power, soon to be joined by Doreen Lawrence. So far hardly any have spoken out about the Home Office travesties. Those Southall women had more guts. They could form a cross-party faction and expose the racist immigration policies. Together they would be strong enough to make an impact. But the MPs and peers sit tight, treacherously let the state repeat and exceed the iniquities of the past suffered by their own people, families, possibly themselves. I think I am going to cry again.

Home Office is now a tool for stirring up racial tension

Dave Garret in The Independent 01/08/2013

Over the last few weeks we’ve seen some very visible signs of the Government’s “hostile environment” crusade. There have been vans out on the streets with threatening slogans and, reportedly, non-white people being visibly stopped and searched.

The Home Office is responsible for community cohesion. Yet we are increasingly seeing what appears to be hostility towards non-white immigration, which will do nothing but incite racial tensions and divisions within otherwise rich and diverse communities.

This has to change. We urgently need a more balanced public debate on immigration, free of political agendas. Without it we risk eroding the very foundations of communities across the UK.

The Government has now made the Home Office, who are also responsible for community policing and safety, a highly visible, taxpayer-funded tool for stirring up racial tension and community unrest. The method and location of these stunts make it hard to believe that they are not targeted at non-white communities, but, whatever the truth, they are certainly perceived that way.

Refugee Action wants to see a more balanced debate about immigration, and believes the Home Office has a huge responsibility to avoid adding to its toxicity. At least in the interests of balance, we’d like some vans which say: “The NHS would collapse without foreign-born staff,” or “the Office of Budget Responsibility says that migration has a positive impact on the sustainability of public finances” or “without immigration Britain would be without tea”.

Dave Garratt is chief executive of Refugee Action

We need a Eurosceptic party of the centre left

I left Ukip, the party I founded, when it became a magnet for bigots. But what happened to left wing opposition to the EU?

• 
• • Alan Sked
  • guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 28 May 2013 09.00 BST

'There was a time when Labour was adamantly anti-EU. Gaitskell, Foot, Kinnock and even Blair opposed it' Photograph: Francois Lenoir/Reuters

The idea of reshaping the world, changing it for the better, is probably a natural, if not a divine one. However, the lure of progress can be deceptive. "Great enterprises" of the kind Charles de Gaulle in his memoirs famously associated with the role of France in the world, come regularly unstuck. The latest grand projet of the French rational mind, the EU, is now coming apart at the seams. Rather like the 18th-century "enlightened despotisms" inspired by the French philosophes, our contemporary bureaucratic autocracy now faces revolution. The peasants of Greece, Spain, Italy and elsewhere are revolting. Even the French peasants are displaying a worrying restlessness.

Progressivism everywhere has a long history of dreadful mistakes. Just look at Marxism. Today, both China and North Korea testify to its illusions as monuments to failed progressivism. So, however, is the EU. Built on progressive myths ("It has brought peace to Europe"; "it extends democracy"; "it creates prosperity"), it is now in relative economic, demographic and technological decline, lacks accountable or transparent structures of government, and is damning future generations to unemployment and despair. It is run by a self-serving, bureaucratic and political elite, is notoriously corrupt, and is admired only by politicians from the Middle East or Africa who bewail their own lack of unity, or by Americans who see its member nations as the colonies of 1776. Its policies are undemocratic – it has forced unelected, technocratic governments on both Italy and Greece – and do not work. Its single currency has brought penury to half a continent. Its present existential crisis has brought political chaos to Italy, Greece and Spain and threatens the same in France.

 Dr Alan Sked launches the UK Independence party in 1993. Photograph: STR News/Reuters

Here in Britain David Cameron's "progressive conservatism" is being challenged by Ukip, the party I founded 20 years ago and left in 1997 as it became a magnet for people whose vision of the future is the 1950s – a supposed golden age before the EEC, black people, Muslims and other immigrants, gays, lesbians and other products of the sexual revolution of the 1960s, desecrated this island Eden.

On the left, however, there has been no response to events in Europe. The Labour party seems intellectually paralysed in face of both the economic and political crises in Europe. The Lib Dems remain knee-jerk "good Europeans" with absolutely nothing to say. They are like the officer on the Titanic who, when warned of the iceberg, ordered "full steam ahead". The great Liberal party of Gladstone, Asquith and Lloyd George opposed European empires. Gladstone famously asked where on the map the Habsburgs had ever done any good? But today's Lib Dem pygmies give unquestioned support to our new Habsburg empire ruled from Brussels.

There was a time when Labour was adamantly anti-EU. Gaitskell, Foot, Kinnock and even Blair opposed it. But then Jacques Delors told the TUC that whereas they were impotent to defeat Thatcherism, he could and would overthrow it from Brussels. Almost overnight, Labour's patriotism disappeared and the party stood on its head. Brussels had managed to divide and rule Britain. The Welsh windbag, Kinnock, even became an EU commissioner and made a tax-free fortune doing nothing for the public interest but sacking whistleblowers in the corrupt EU bureaucracy. His must be the most pathetic career in postwar British politics. Blair and Mandelson, of course followed suit (although Blair failed to get an EU presidency) and – amazingly – this whole discredited clique still advocates that Britain join the euro.

An alternative, moderate party of the centre left should seek a new path for Britain. To avoid the trap of deluded, world-historical progressivism, it should remain firmly fixed on these objectives:

1. Direct, transparent, accountable democracy

2. Liberal values that protect the individual from discrimination on grounds of gender, race, sexual orientation, religion or political belief and uphold freedom of speech, freedom of the press and media, freedom of assembly, the right to a fair trial, and freedom from arbitrary arrest

3. A social policy which seeks to provide decent pensions, care, social housing, welfare benefits and full employment to all in need after a sound education that caters to everyone's talents (including those with disabilities).

4. A foreign policy that protects British national interests without thereby threatening those of others. This would involve withdrawing from the EU and negotiating free trade with our European friends and neighbours. Britain would not need to withdraw from Nato or the UN and would continue to seek peace in the Middle East and elsewhere. It would also continue to support the principle of giving overseas aid.

5. Domestically, the most radical changes, apart from ending an austerity aimed mainly at the poor, might be constitutional. It might be wise to federalise the UK and make the House of Lords an elected federal chamber. Perhaps an independent Britain could negotiate a confederation of the British Isles with the Irish Republic to help solve Ireland's problems.

Certainly, an independent Britain should be outward looking. As for the EU, there is no reason to assume automatically that it would survive a British exit. Other member states might prefer to choose democracy and independence. All Europe would be in a democratic flux. But let that democratic revolution start here.

Exit Europe from the left

Most Britons dislike the European Union. If trade unions don't articulate their concerns, the hard right will

• 
• • Bob Crow
  • The Guardian, Friday 17 May 2013 21.00 BST

A protest in Brussels. 'Millions of personal tragedies of lost homes, jobs, pensions and services are testament to the sick joke of 'social Europe'.' Photograph: Thierry Roge/Reuters

For years the electorate has overwhelmingly opposed Britain's membership of the European Union – particularly those who work for a living. Yet while movements in other countries that are critical of the EU are led by the left, in Britain they are dominated by the hard right, and working-class concerns are largely ignored.

This is particularly strange when you consider that the EU is largely a Tory neoliberal project. Not only did the Conservative prime minister Edward Heath take Britain into the common market in 1973, but Margaret Thatcher campaigned to stay in it in the 1975 referendum, and was one of the architects of the Single European Act – which gave us the single market, EU militarisation and eventually the struggling euro.

After the Tories dumped the born-again Eurosceptic Thatcher, John Major rammed through the Maastricht treaty and embarked on the disastrous privatisation of our railways using EU directives – a model now set to be rolled out across the continent.

Even now, the majority of David Cameron's Tories will campaign for staying in the EU if we do get the referendum the electorate so clearly wants. And most of the left seems to be lining up alongside them. My union stood in the last European elections under the No2EU-Yes to Democracy coalition, which set out to give working people a voice that had been denied them by the political establishment. We also set out to challenge the rancid politics of the racist British National party, yet the BNP received far more media coverage. Today it is Ukip that is enjoying the media spotlight. Its rightwing Thatcherite rhetoric and assorted cranky hobby horses are a gift to a political establishment that seeks to project a narrow agenda of continued EU membership.

But the reality is that Ukip supports the EU agenda of privatisation, cuts and austerity. Nigel Farage's only problem with this government's assault on our public services is that it doesn't go far enough. Ukip opposes the renationalisation of our rail network as much as any Eurocrat. Yet Ukip has filled the political vacuum created when the Labour party and parts of the trade union movement adopted the position of EU cheerleaders, believing in the myth of "social Europe".

Social EU legislation, which supposedly leads to better working conditions, has not saved one job and is riddled with opt-outs for employers to largely ignore any perceived benefits they may bring to workers. But it is making zero-hour contracts and agency-working the norm while undermining collective bargaining and full-time, secure employment. Meanwhile, 10,000 manufacturing jobs in the East Midlands still hang in the balance because EU law demanded that the crucial Thameslink contract go to Siemens in Germany rather than Bombardier in Derby.

Today, unemployment in the eurozone is at a record 12%. In the countries hit hardest by the "troika" of banks and bureaucrats, youth unemployment tops 60% and the millions of personal tragedies of lost homes, jobs, pensions and services are testament to the sick joke of "social Europe".

The raft of EU treaties are, as Tony Benn once said, nothing more than a cast-iron manifesto for capitalism that demands the chaos of the complete free movement of capital, goods, services and labour. It is clear that Greece, Spain, Cyprus and the rest need investment, not more austerity and savage cuts to essential public services, but, locked in the eurozone, the only option left is exactly that.

What's more, the EU sees the current crisis as an opportunity to speed up its privatisation drive. Mass unemployment and economic decline is a price worth paying in order to impose structural adjustment in favour of monopoly capitalism.

In Britain and across the EU, healthcare, education and every other public service face the same business model of privatisation and fragmentation. Indeed, the clause in the Health and Social Care Act demanding privatisation of every aspect of our NHS was defended by the Lib Dems on the basis of EU competition law.

But governments do not have to carry out such EU policies: they could carry out measures on behalf of those who elect them. That means having democratic control over capital flows, our borders and the future of our economy for the benefit of everyone.

The only rational course to take is to leave the EU so that elected governments regain the democratic power to decide matters on behalf of the people they serve.

History is where the great battles of public life are now being fought

From curriculum rows to Niall Ferguson's remarks on Keynes, our past is the fuel for debate about the future

• 
• • Tristram Hunt
  • The Observer, Sunday 12 May 2013

Historian Niall Ferguson: 'Part of a worryingly conservative consensus when it comes to framing our national past.' Photograph: Channel 4

The bullish Harvard historian Niall Ferguson cut an unfamiliar, almost meek figure last week. As reports of his ugly suggestion that John Maynard Keynes's homosexuality had made the great economist indifferent to the prospects of future generations surged across the blogosphere, Ferguson wisely went for a mea culpa.

So, in a cringeing piece for Harvard University's student magazine, the professor, who usually so enjoys confronting political correctness, denied he was homophobic or, indeed, racist and antisemitic for good measure.

Of course, Ferguson is none of those things. He is a brilliant financial historian, albeit with a debilitating weakness for the bon mot. But Ferguson is also part of a worryingly conservative consensus when it comes to framing our national past.

For whether it is David Starkey on Question Time, in a frenzy of misogyny and self-righteousness, denouncing Harriet Harman and Shirley Williams for being well-connected, metropolitan members of the Labour movement, or the reactionary Dominic Sandbrook using the Daily Mail to condemn with Orwellian menace any critical interpretation of Mrs Thatcher's legacy, the historical right has Britain in its grip.

And it has so at a crucial time. The rise of Ukip, combined with David Cameron's political weakness, means that, even in the absence of an official "in or out" referendum on our place in Europe, it looks like we will be debating Britain's place in the world for some years to come. And we will do against the backdrop of Michael Gove's proposed new history curriculum which, for some of its virtues, threatens to make us less, not more, confident about our internationalist standing.

For as Ferguson has discovered to his cost, history enjoys a uniquely controversial place within British public life. "There is no part of the national curriculum so likely to prove an ideological battleground for contending armies as history," complained an embattled Michael Gove in a speech last week. "There may, for all I know, be rival Whig and Marxist schools fighting a war of interpretation in chemistry or food technology but their partisans don't tend to command much column space in the broadsheets."

Even if academic historians might not like it, politicians are right to involve themselves in the curriculum debate. The importance of history in the shaping of citizenship, developing national identity and exploring the ties that bind in our increasingly disparate, multicultural society demands a democratic input. The problem is that too many of the progressive partisans we need in this struggle are missing from the field.

How different it all was 50 years ago this summer when EP Thompson published The Making of the English Working Class , his seminal account of British social history during the Industrial Revolution. "I am seeking to rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the 'obsolete' hand loom weaver, the 'utopian' artist ... from the condescension of posterity," he wrote.

He did so in magisterial style, providing an intimate chronicle of the brutality inflicted on the English labouring classes as Britain rose to be the workshop of the world. Thompson focused on the human stories – the Staffordshire potters, the Manchester Chartists – to build an account of an emergent, proletarian identity. It was social history as a political project, seeking to lay out all the tensions and conflict that really lie behind our island story.

As his fellow Marxist Eric Hobsbawm put it, social history was "the organisational and ideological history of the labour movement". Uncovering the lost lives and experiences of the miner and mill worker was a way of contesting power in the present. And in the wake of Thompson and Hobsbawm's histories – as well as the work of Raphael Samuel, Asa Briggs and Christopher Hill – popular interpretations of the past shifted.

In theatre, television, radio and museums, a far more vernacular and democratic account of the British past started to flourish. If, today, we are as much concerned about downstairs as upstairs, about Downton Abbey's John Bates as much as the Earl of Grantham, it is thanks to this tradition of progressive social history.

It even influenced high politics. In the flickering gloom of the 1970s' three-day week, Tony Benn retreated to the House of Commons tearoom to read radical accounts of the English civil war. "I had no idea that the Levellers had called for universal manhood suffrage, equality between the sexes and the sovereignty of the people," he confided to his diary. Benn, the semi-detached Labour cabinet minister, felt able to place himself seamlessly within this historical lineage – lamenting how "the Levellers lost and Cromwell won, and Harold Wilson or Denis Healey is the Cromwell of our day, not me".

But despite recent histories by the likes of Emma Griffin on industrialising England orEdward Vallance on radical Britain, the place of the progressive past in contemporary debate has now been abandoned. So much of the left has mired itself in the discursive dead ends of postmodernism or decided to focus its efforts abroad on the crimes of our colonial past. In their absence, we are left with Starkey and Ferguson – and BBC2 about to air yet another series on the history of the Tudor court. How much information about Anne Boleyn can modern Britain really cope with?

This narrowing of the past comes against the backdrop of ever more state school pupils being denied appropriate time for history. While studying the past is protected in prep schools, GCSE exam entries show it is under ever greater pressure in more deprived parts of the country.

Then there is the question of what students will actually be learning. Michael Gove's proposed new syllabus has rightly been criticised by historian David Cannadine and others as too prescriptive, dismissive of age-specific learning and Anglocentric. While the education secretary's foregrounding of British history is right, experts are adamant this parochial path is not the way to do it. Indeed, cynics might wonder whether Gove – the arch Eurosceptic – is already marshalling his young troops for a referendum no vote.

For whether it is the long story of Britain's place in Europe, the 1930s failings of austerity economics, the cultural history of same-sex marriage or the legacy of Thatcherism, the progressive voice in historical debate needs some rocket boosters. Niall Ferguson's crime was not just foolishly to equate Keynes's homosexuality with selfishness. Rather, it was to deny the relevance of Keynes's entire political economy – and, in the process, help to forge a governing consensus that is proving disastrous for British living standards.

That is what we need an apology for.