In defence of Andy Newman

I’ve noticed before that Andy Newman’s heart was in the right place, but that his political instincts every now and again are awful, which must be why he has been trying to defend the indefensible, viz 6,000 pound cleaning bill Gordon Brown paid his brother, by imagining some “alternative realities that the Tory press could have been be outraged about”.

It didn’t go down well.

People who normally couldn’t agree on the colour of the sky were for one glorious moment united in their desire to tell Andy how wrong he was. One hundred and twentyfive comments later and none of them went “hang on, I think he might have a point”… When so many people of so many different political backgrounds say you’re wrong, even those with the firmest of opinions might start to wonder whether their critics might have a point.

But not Andy.

A followup post explained his reasoning more clearly: “there are some genuinely scandalous aspects to how the expenses system has been milked; but there is also a large part of media driven moral panic. Is anyone really that surprised that the most powerful political figure in Britain gets his house cleaned at public expense? Paying a cleaner is hardly “having your snout in the trough”. Spare me the moral outrage.” We should “make no mistake, people who are being whipped up to see all politicians as on the make will be cynical that any political change is possible, and retreat away from political engagement.”

And suddenly I understood why Andy is trying to defend the indefensible and why Dave Osler is warning about “the danger of depolitisation”. It’s fear. Fear of populism. As John Emerson has argued in an American context, there’s a deep and innate mistrust on the left of the political instincts of the people when left to their own devices, a feeling that anything other than appealing to them through well reasoned appeals to the intellect is dangerous. In America this is ingrained through collective memories of the Ku Klux Klan, Nixon voting hardhats and the like while in a British context populism is largely associated with Daily Mail campaigns against paedos, asylum seekers and benefit cheats as well as the BNP seduction of the “white working class”.

Which is why whenever a political issue suddenly inflames large sections of “the public” the first instinct of a lot of socialists is not to use it and encourage it, but to dampen it down. We’ve seen it with the mass protests against the War on Iraq which had a lot of the liberal left worrying about whether our leaders would be swayed by the uninformed mob. We’ve seen it with the Respect experiment and the handwringing about whether decent socialists should have anything to do with “communal policies”, we’ve seen it with the endless debates about whether the strike at the Lindsey oil refinery was a “racist strike”.

Too many socialists, like Dave and Andy, equate populist anger with rightwing anger and therefore are uncomfortable with it. Which is why they want to dampen rather than strengthen this anger. You would expect socialists, who after all strive to completely destroy the current capitalist system and replace it with our own, to be pleased when the apathy of too many voters, alienated from a “political system that grants workable majorities to governments actively endorsed by just one in five of the people they govern” as Dave has it, finally turns to anger even if that anger is not quite ideologically sound. But instead we get the demeaning spectacle of Andy Newman an dDave Osler actually trying to defend this corruption. All because they fear the very people they supposedly fight for.

We socialists have a choice when confronted with justified public anger like this. We can either engage it, like our predecessors did or dismiss it because it doesn’t fit our ideological prejudices. If we chose the latter we’ll never again be more than a boutique movement.