When the statue honouring slave trader Edward Colston was toppled from its plinth in Bristol by a crowd of young people and thrown into the river, the new Labour leader Keir Starmer reacted by condemning the act as “completely wrong” in an LBC radio interview. He said: “It shouldn’t have been done in that way, [it was] completely wrong to pull a statue down like that.” Starmer also said that the statue shouldn’t have been there in the first place. The irony that the statue had been there since 1895 and had been declared a Grade II listed structure in 1977 without anyone in power seriously considering taking it down until the demonstrators took it upon themselves seemed to have escaped Starmer. True to its tradition, Starmer’s stance was immediately applauded by the Guardian as electorally astute and contrasted with the disastrous principled position that might have been taken by Starmer’s predecessor, Jeremy Corbyn. A few days later, in an article under the by-line of the Guardian’s political editor, Heather Stewart, with the title “Johnson’s ‘culture war’ trap seems designed for Corbyn, not Starmer” Stewart said:
“Johnson also has a particular sentimental attachment to Winston Churchill, on whom he wrote a biography and on whose likeness protesters daubed graffiti last week.
So for tactical, political and even personal reasons, this battle is one No 10 is very happy to rejoin – not least on a day when official data showed economic activity had fallen off a cliff.
The potential flaw in this approach is that Keir Starmer is not Jeremy Corbyn. Throughout recent days, Johnson has sought to draw a sharp dividing line, and put Labour on the other side of it – alongside the “thugs” disfiguring statues, and po-faced killjoys censoring the TV archives.
With Brexit in the most part resolved as an issue, Conservatives hope “culture war” issues such as these will serve a similar function, by severing the two parts of Labour’s electoral coalition – dividing its “red wall” voters from its liberal city strongholds.
Yet Starmer has so far not allowed himself to be corralled.”
Starmer’s attempt to appeal simultaneously to two different electoral constituencies with very different attitudes to the symbolism of the event is a reflection of the degree of misunderstanding by the establishment of the political significance of the extraordinary times we are living through. The desperate desire to recreate and re-empower the political centre ground and a false sense of national unity through triangulation between incompatible interpretations of what the nation is, or what it should be, is an expression of the comfortable view that there is nothing fundamentally wrong with contemporary capitalist society that tinkering at the edges couldn’t put right. Yet the upsurge of “populism”, so denounced by the political establishment, is a manifestation of fundamental popular discontent with the operation of economy and society which for some time now has been failing to deliver to people’s needs. The desire to “return to normal” has become a mantra in the media and amongst politicians in the pandemic. In this, the word “normal” expresses the comfortable view that it is the desired state where nothing is fundamentally wrong, not a view shared either by the young multi-ethnic and multi-cultural holders of precarious and low paid big city jobs who can’t afford a home and will probably soon struggle to buy food, or by the “left behind” of de-industrialised provincial towns. The “normal” for the establishment is a world free from both Covid-19 and from political manifestations of “populism” of which the tearing down of symbols celebrating imperialism and slavery is an unwarranted expression.
Starmer’s stance, so applauded by the Guardian, is likely to be seen by all sections of the public as opportunistic, lacking in principle and confirmation of the widely held view that politicians will do and say anything in order to win votes. They can’t therefore be trusted.
The Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, an entirely extra-parliamentary movement fighting in the streets and on social media, has achieved significant victories, perhaps none more so than the remarkable shift of public opinion on the issue. It has accomplished this over a very short period of time. According to a Harris/Hill TV poll published on 11 June, public support for the movement has more than doubled since 2016, when the movement started. In the recent poll, to the question “do you approve or disapprove of the protests that have happened since the death of George Floyd?” 57% expressed approval and 43% disapproval. An overwhelming 84 percent of respondents who are Democrats now say they have a favourable opinion of the BLM movement, a 30-point jump since 2016. Support among independents jumped to 55 percent from 21 percent four years ago. This shift in opinion, however, has been accompanied by a hardening of the political polarisation that had occurred with the rise of populist political reactions. The hard core of the Trump political base has become even more entrenched in its views and increasingly attracted to the politics of white supremacism. The younger, multi-ethnic, multiracial and largely urban population have become radicalised in their political views. Both these poles feel alienated from the system, albeit in different ways, creating a crisis for the political establishment. What the street politics of the Black Lives Matter movement has achieved, however, is that the middle ground in politics has decisively shifted towards the radical progressive end of the polarisation. Colin Kaepernick’s “taking the knee”, an act of defiance in 2016 in refusing to stand to attention to honour the flag and the national anthem in a protest with which the establishment was reluctant to identify in 2016 has now become de rigueur for centre-left and centre-right politicians and for all the sporting establishment. The irony of it is hard to escape.
It appears that extra-parliamentary and street politics has achieved a major shift of public opinion on a key issue that carries a cultural resonance way beyond the literal meaning of the slogan “Black Lives Matter”. A remarkable number of the assumptions of politics as normal have been shattered. These events raise several fundamental questions for imperialist nations and their politics, as well as for the meaning of the accepted concept of he generational divide in Britain over Brexit was widely pointed to and reflects the different positions on nationalism of the generations1
Identity and class politics in the BLM movement
On the political left, questions of ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation and the struggles of minority groups in general have often been referred to as identity politics and contrasted with class politics which relate mainly to the fundamental economic divide that exist in capitalist societies between workers and owners of capital. Identity politics are often described as “culture wars” in contrast with the materialism of economic struggles. The Guardian quote reproduced above refers to Johnson using the issue of Black Lives Matter as part of his “culture war”. His defence of the United Kingdom’s self-image as a great nation is interpreted as a cultural issue.
However, what the current chapter of the Black Lives Matter movement has uniquely achieved is to show that racism is not a just a cultural phenomenon, a question of identity, but the product of a history of economic imperialism. The view of black people as near sub-human which allowed George Floyd to be murdered in cold blood by a white policeman without a hint of moral guilt has its cultural roots in the justification for slavery. It is deeply embedded in psyche of the United States . Slavery was the product of European imperialism and was a fundamental building block of the United States as a nation 2.. When Colin Kaepernick refused to honour the national anthem by taking the knee, it was represented as a protest against police violence and racism, but it was more than that. It was a protest against the self-image of the nation as symbolised by the flag and anthem. Kaepernick couldn’t identify with a nation built on slavery and, implicitly, a product of imperialism.
Kaepernick wasn’t of course the first athlete to make this kind of protest. His action harked back to the black fisted salute at the winners’ podium during the playing of the US national anthem at the 1968 Mexico Summer Olympics by Tommie Smith and John Carlos. What is new is the context in which it took place. It has been widely reported in the United States, not least by veterans of the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s and 70s, that the current BLM protests are qualitatively different from those of previous anti-racist movements. Whilst previous movements were essentially black movements with a sprinkling of liberal whites, BLM is ethnically and racially diverse and is primarily a movement of young people.
A recent article in the Times of San Diego makes the point:
There is one notable distinction between Black Lives Matter demonstrations and the Civil Rights Movement: its diversity. Young people showing up to BLM demonstrations are America’s most racially and ethnically diverse generation ever…
While many immigrants support Black Lives Matter, it is the children of immigrants born or raised in the United States — the second generation — that have a unique understanding of this country that allows them to much more easily grasp the plight, suffering and injustice of African Americans…
Some are Afro-descendants who confront the same racial animus as those who are Black and descendants from slaves in this country. Today, the colorism and internalized racism within ethnic communities, a product of colonization in their parents’ home countries, is being reckoned with in homes across America. Much work remains to address this internal divide but this generation is challenging old systems of beliefs that uphold white supremacy within their own communities.
The same could be said of the BLM movement in the United Kingdom. The toppling of the statue of Edward Colston by a crowd of ethnically diverse young people constituted a profound challenge to the widely accepted view of “what we are as a nation” and what “made Britain Great” which underlies the national political consensus, the veneration of the Union Jack and the Queen, and concept of the “national interest”.
The BLM movement has exposed how accepted national cultural values are underpinned by an inglorious history of economic exploitation and genocide of other peoples and other nations who, through the dynamics of global capitalism, have now become an inescapable constituent of the imperialist nation itself. They refuse and contest its self-image and in this they are largely supported by their indigenous contemporaries. This has effectively created an irresolvable crisis of national identity which is impervious to triangulation. Over a very short time, immigration and de-industrialisation have combined to destroy the possibility of the national consensus that the political establishment seeks. The struggle, in conditions of economic stagnation soon to be turned into an economic catastrophe by the pandemic, between a dying nationalist society and a nascent internationalist one which challenges imperialist history, albeit one that may yet be still born, does not allow room for triangulation. It requires a clear answer to the Pete Seeger question: “which side are you on?”.
The contrast between the dying society and the nascent one is conveyed once again in the generational and geographical divide that has been constantly present in the expression of populist feeling in recent elections in the UK and the US. The Harris/Hill TV poll on the view of the public on the BLM movement quoted previously displays this clearly in the generational distribution expressing approval or disapproval of the BLM protests after the death of George Floyd.
| Age range | Approve | Disapprove |
| 18-34 | 74% | 26% |
| 32-49 | 61% | 39% |
| 50-64 | 48% | 52% |
| 65+ | 43% | 57% |
If this is combined with the distribution by ethnicity,
| Ethnicity | Approve | Disapprove |
| Black | 84% | 16% |
| Hispanic | 66% | 34% |
| White | 50% | 50% |
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-MfqxUd1C8
it is possible to arrive at picture of the composition what I have called the new working class 3 and how it feels on this issue. It is likely that the bulk of the white people who approve of the BLM protests are young and that would leave a considerable majority of older white people significantly opposed to them.
The age and ethnic divide of responses mirror to a large extent that which had been evident in the age and ethnic support for Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump in the recent US primary races for the 2020 Presidential election.
The generational divide in Britain over Brexit was widely pointed to and also reflects the different positions on nationalism.
In subsequent blogposts I will be examining the implications of the BLM movement for the concepts of democracy, class and nation.
Alvaro de Miranda
Alvaro de Miranda is retired from the University of East London where he co-founded a Department of Innovation Studies. He came to the UK in 1958 aged 15 to join his parents who were exiles from the Salazar regime in Portugal. Having experienced fascism, he is particularly alarmed with the recent worldwide electoral rise of the far-right and has been following it comparatively in this blog.
19 July 2020
- This raises questions about the relationship between street and representative democracy politics which I will deal with in a subsequent blogpost.
- I I will be dealing with this issue in a subsequent blogpost.
- This concept is developed in an article I have written soon to be published in the forthcoming edition of the political journal Soundings.